Straight, No Chaser
Understanding Freedom through Money, Technology, Economics and Philosophy
Straight, No Chaser
Monthly Round Up 7: It's Tamagochi For Grown-Ups
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AI agents are starting to feel less like chatbots and more like little workers you have to raise. We talk about OpenClaw, Start9, and what it actually takes to run self-hosted AI on real-world hardware, from a Raspberry Pi to an old laptop that should have been retired years ago. The “grown-up Tamagotchi” idea sticks because these agents only become useful when you feed them context, tools, and boundaries and when you keep them away from anything that can wreck your life, like Bitcoin keys.
From there we push into the fun part: what happens when AI agents can pay. With Lightning Network primitives like L402, you can paywall API calls, charge per read for data, and let software procure services in real time with instant settlement. We connect that to a practical builder story: an agent that turns voice prompts into clean dev tickets, then gets packaged behind WhatsApp with Lightning payments so small teams can ship faster without hiring extra layers.
We also go straight at the uncomfortable topics: AI-driven layoffs, the split between people who use these tools well and people who never start, and the risk of outsourcing your thinking to centralised models. Then we zoom out to money and power: CBDCs pushed through “free” perks, stablecoin freezes as a warning, and why Bitcoin still matters as censorship-resistant, spendable money especially as war and energy shocks reshape incentives around the world.
If you get value from this kind of grounded Bitcoin and AI talk, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review. What’s one thing you want an AI agent to handle for you without giving up your sovereignty?
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Welcome And Monthly Roundup
SPEAKER_01That's what I'm saying. It's a grown-up damagotchi. That's what it is. It's Tamagotchis for grown-ups, bro. The same way when we were kids, you had to keep the thing alive, feed it, give it water. That's what you have to do with your agents if you want to. Because again, like I keep saying, we all thought that economic emancipation was the war that most of us were going to be fighting against.
SPEAKER_04Hey there, everybody. Welcome back to the Straight No Chaser Podcast. This is the show where we talk about human freedom through money, technology, economics, and philosophy. This is the next episode of the monthly roundup. It's a full house today, so we've got everybody on board. Ricky, Herman, Oaken, and myself. Conversation is a little bit on the AR side this time around. There's just so much been happening, and the enthusiasm coming through from the guys talking about what they're trying, testing, building, just discovering is quite incredible to hear. So we did spend a bit of time talking about uh AI stuff, but we also do talk about some Bitcoin news, stuff that's come up. Obviously, the Iran war has uh pops its head in every now and again into the conversation. But uh, as you guys have come to know and love, fantastic uh conversation, just all things uh Bitcoin and uh AI on this one. So lovely chat. Uh I know you guys will love it.
SPEAKER_01There's there's one, yeah, and then up here's here's another one running, but it looks like that actually, the terminal, and then I've got all the different ones, and then when I give it a command, this one tells all of them. I get like these are my tasks for the board, these are the reports they give me, and I can go through them, they can send to my telegram as well. I'm having fun, guys. Yeah, is this your open claw? Uh no, so I have one that is actually open claw that's running on the Dell laptop, and then the other one is uh an agent I built myself. Um it's it's way more fun to build them yourself. I mean, open claw is okay, you can you can still use some of the architecture, but there's there's other things you can do now. I'm doing those things.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Okay, I'm just saying you get every tech question from here on until the end of time.
SPEAKER_01Okay, now Ricky gets all of the ones for the hardware wallets. Please send those to Ricky.
SPEAKER_05That's fine. I'm happy with that. But I've got a question for you about start nine and the open LLMs on Start9. So I've played around a bit on my Start9 home server um with the like basic open LLMs that are there. Um but I haven't been able to find any yet that are like that you can connect to the internet. Um so like out the box, they're not like a super plug and play. Because for me personally, if I if a model's not connected to the internet, like that's not particularly useful. Like I need I need internet activity. So, like, what's your experience been like using those? The it's a free GPT or whatever it is on on the start nine.
SPEAKER_01So I'm not gonna lie to you, I haven't used free GPT um in maybe almost a year now on my start 9 server. Um, but also just because of space-wise, and I'm actually running the RAS like one like this. Oh my god, it's falling. Um, I'm running one of these slows. So this is actually a Raspberry Pi on the inside. Um, and then the rest of mine are like on actual full-on computers, like as a server. So I haven't run it in a while. I'll have to go test it out again. But as far as I knew, um, people were still using it pretty well. Uh now with that's going to be made a lot easier. Um, and everybody's like, yeah, but you guys have been talking about 040 for one. But I've been running O400 for six months, maybe longer, um, because it's in alpha, and most people don't want to, you know, uh waddle through the the the thing of having alpha software, even better than I'm gonna tell you that alpha software is pretty damn solid.
SPEAKER_04Um it's better than the internet connection. Yeah, I think they make internet different in uh Namibia than they do here in South Africa.
SPEAKER_05That's for sure. Um yeah, so so Oaken, what's the are are they gonna be doing something something with open flaw on um start nine?
SPEAKER_01Can you hear me? Because my internet is messing around. Yeah, yeah, you're breaking up pretty badly. Damn.
SPEAKER_05I don't know if you can hear me. Why why why not?
SPEAKER_01Why why why would this happen up?
SPEAKER_04When when did the uh Southern African development community um sort of uh break down? Like SEDEC. When it's not a yeah, it's not a free trade.
SPEAKER_05When was it ever functional?
SPEAKER_04Well, uh maybe uh internet's been disrupted because there's no more free trade zone. Oaken, you're uh crossing the border. He's gone, yeah. He's gone. And there he's gone, deported. How's it, Herman? How you doing? Uh can you hear us a lot and clearly?
SPEAKER_03No, I can hear you. Sorry, I'm gonna let um uh at least our internet down here is reliable.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's always always bragging about how elecca everything is down there.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, oh okay, we're back. Okay, okay, we're gonna know. So tell me when are we gonna see open flow on start nine?
Security Basics For Nodes And Wallets
SPEAKER_01Uh it's already there. Uh that's that's what I was trying to tell you. Um, so with 040, there's a lot of things that have changed, um, especially in these last few releases. So it's now on Alpha 20. Um, I'm still running Alpha 17 because the Raspberry Pi versions haven't come out. Also, Start 9 is is releasing RISC, uh RISC-5 versions uh of hardware. So you'll be able to run LLMs and things like that a lot better. Um, but yeah, so OpenClaw is on in the alpha registry of uh start nine uh 040 versions. Um so you can it's not a good idea. It's not a good idea. Is this Ricky? This is not a good idea. You should not give open claw access to your server that has your Bitcoin keys and everything. Like get another one, go buy a Raspberry Pi and put OpenClaw on there with your start nine or whatever. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
SPEAKER_05What do you think, Ann? Why do you think I've got my Bitcoin keys sitting on there? No, obviously not. I think uh who is not who's not using air gap hardware wallets? Who's doing that? Like, do you want to get drugged? Absolutely. I mean if you're not air gapping your hardware wallets, you're a cook. You're gonna get you're gonna get right.
SPEAKER_01If you're not building them yourself, are you really sure?
SPEAKER_05I got the coolest, I got the coolest thing uh the other day. So so you know when you buy a um Raspberry Pi board, especially the the Pi Zeros, you've got to buy them with pre-solded headers, or you've got to solder the header yourself. So for those that know the header is the thing that you use to connect an additional um piece of hardware to a uh a Raspberry Pi. So, like if you want an L C D hat that goes on top, you've got a screen, you know, with a with a keypad input. You've got these things called headers, and you've got to buy the board with these pre-sold, that almost like doubles the cost of the board because Raspberry Pi zero is the cheapest, cheapest album. Um so I got this kit the other day that allows you to hammer headers on. It's like a little acrylic plastic kit that holds them in place. You can hammer headers on. You can buy those headers for like 20 bucks. Um the kit is like 150 bucks. So now I'm buying boards without the headers on and the headers separately, and it basically like reduced my cost of those boards by half.
SPEAKER_01Sorry, you see everybody all hardware questions.
SPEAKER_05But no, totally. So, like run, build yourself a seat signer, do all of your stuff, you know. Air gap. So so if you're using your start nine at home, your bitcoin node, you're just using it for a node, you're not using it as a wallet, like you're not using it to store anything on. Like that's silly, don't do that. Uh, and then you can run all the all the AI models you want on it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, look, I'd always say get get another device. Also, hi Edman, nice to see you. Um get another device, bro. Like I said, the the I'm running when I started running OpenClaw, I put it on a Dell laptop that I've had since 2015. Okay, this thing only has eight gigabytes of RAM, it's got a terabyte of spinning hard hard disk. Like I it's actually dead. The computer itself, you switch it off and on, it doesn't really work. You need to go into the boot menu. Um, and it runs candy Linux. So I gave OpenClaw a computer with candy Linux at the root level, it's very fun to play with. And then I'm the other one I'm creating I'm building on my own, but that's more uh serious. But all I'm saying is if you're gonna play around with if you want to experiment, don't put this on your daily computer.
SPEAKER_05No, just don't get it Raspberry Pi or something. Those consumes many resources and your computer's not gonna work properly.
PicoClaw And Grown-Up Tamagotchi
SPEAKER_01Well, the the thing is also like it depends. When when I when I started with my open claw journey, the actual file that open claw is because that's all it is, it's just a bunch of markdown files, but the actual folder is like something like four megabytes or five megabytes, right? Now it's grown over time, like now it's like three gigabytes strong, 3.5. But that's because of the information you feed it, and like all of the loops and all of that stuff, and you know the tools, and but it's not a very big thing. So to get started, you can literally start on a Raspberry Pi Pico and install Pico Claw, right? Don't know it's like OpenClaw, but it's it's it's brought smaller down, and then you can grow that out. You can literally take that file and then move it and then grow it. Like if you think about like AI movies, like if you've seen WALL E, right? With a little machine that's walking around, WALL E. Yeah, you can build your own WALLY and train it to become Jarvis, but you can start with WALL-E, right? And that's the great thing here is like you can give your kids one. Is think about it like a grown-up Tamagochi. That's how I think about OpenClaw. It's a grown-up Tamagochi. That's the whole thing here.
SPEAKER_05So so this is a Raspberry Pi Zero with uh those are the headers I was talking about, those pins, right, that have hammered on there. So to just what you're saying is like this is the Pi Zero, which is bigger than a picker, right? Um, I'm not sure the onboard RAM or this thing, but it's got some RAM on it. So you say you could run a small model, open claw model on one of these. I think Okens frozen. Anyway, I'll take that as a yes. So Oakens, you're saying you can run it on a Pi Zero like this.
Using Agents To Capture Research
SPEAKER_01You can run a uh small yeah, there's they they literally they literally created a thing. Sorry, my internet keeps jumping off and on. Uh they literally created a thing called Pico Claw, it's open source. Go on GitHub, just type in P-I-C-O-Claw or nanoclaw. There's a lot of smaller ones that they've made so that you can run them. And and the thing about them is you're not supposed to run it like, oh, go and do my whole life. Like the Pico Claw, I think, was mainly made so you can run the stuff in your house. So, like if you have like lights and all of these things, you can have your small AI agent take care of all of the timings and all that on cron jobs and start teaching it that way and then move the file. So, yeah, you can't.
SPEAKER_05So, something something I did for my aunt uh and uncle last night, actually, is um I went on to GPT and ChatGPT has got like a scholar GPT, it's focused on Google Scholar. So people don't know this about me. I used to be a scientist, a research scientist. Um and I spent a lot of time researching. And so for me, like being able to build an open core instance that can scan all of the preprints of servers where papers get published to before they get published by a journal. Because the I don't know if people know this about the medical or the scientific industry, is that the the journals that publish scientific literature were captured by Ghilaine Maxwell's father, uh Robert Maxwell, who got given a Mossad estate funeral when he died, even though he was British. Um anyway, so the whole Epstein thing goes very deep, but but he is basically Epstein's father-in-law, uh Ghlaine Maxwell's father. And so he he captured the publishing industry, textbooks and and scientific literature publishing. So obviously we all live through COVID. We all know that most scientific literature that gets published goes like a series of gatekeepers, and like you don't really get to see the good stuff. The good stuff comes out on the preprint servers, and this is where the journal the people actually write the the papers, the scientists publish it there first, and then if it's really good, it gets taken down on the preprint server a few a few days later and never never to be seen again. So that's the juice, that's the good stuff that you really want. So what I'm gonna be doing, my first project on OpenClaw would be to scan those preprint servers, pick up a paper as soon as it's published, download that paper, and then build a knowledge base in there around around topics that are interesting to me. So for example, like um one of the things that feels that I'm interested in is like anti-cancer research, not anti-cancer, but like uh alternative treatments for cancer. Um, you know, things are like repurposed, repurposed tribes that have ever been out there, but Ivermetin, and then bedazole, medbendazol, these things have got like a very, very well known safety uh profile. Scientific profile is all very well known, they've been around for decades. So there's a bunch of stuff happening on the cancer research side. Um but obviously it gets shut down in the main journalist because the pharma controls it and and the Epc PDO class control it. So um this is where building your own open source models that can capture that data, put it in a data, in a knowledge base, and you can start sharing that stuff around and we can decentralize web science, as it were. Um this is super, super interesting to me. And like this is this requires big data, right? Because like the papers that get published and they're the data sets that go with them are massive. Um and we've trusted institutions to house that stuff for a long time, and obviously they've been scamming us for a long time about it. Um so like this, you know, it's a it's a brave new world when it comes to medical research here because you don't have to trust the priest class anymore on the stuff. You can actually go and verify it yourself, um, which for me is super super exciting. Yeah, the man.
SPEAKER_01Bro, you can go sorry, sorry, go grabin'. No, no, go grab.
SPEAKER_04No, Ricky, I was gonna say, like, thanks for mentioning that because just the other day I was reading uh a tweet somebody put out about the internet, the early days of the internet when it was still the whole DARPA project, and the first uh adopters were universities, uh, and they were using it to share information between universities. Fast forward 20 odd years later, and it's the most paywalled environment you'll ever find is access to journals. So now we've gone full circle, now we've got tech that can sort of jump between there and pull that stuff and get it back out to where the whole thing started in the first place.
SPEAKER_05And and this is where it gets super interesting on the monetization front, right? So, like let's say you run your own home server specifically for hosting scientific literature that gets taken down. So if someone posts it, it gets taken down by the powers that be. You keep posting it on your own server behind a VPN, whatever. And then you can build your own paywalls using Lightning model. So if someone wants to access that or the AI model wants to access that, you charge per read. I don't know if you guys ever gone to the scientific literature um research hole, but like it costs a fortune to get access to a journal because you don't get access to like per paper as some of them have those models, but it's super expensive. And obviously the authors get none of that money, it all goes to Maxwell publishing rest to the pedo class. So like there's a whole new business model here of like taking those preprints, storing them on your own on your own server, and then making them publicly available at a cost by lightning. You know, it's far, far cheaper. And that way you can pay for the server costs and all that. Now we can have this like decentralized knowledge and and you're gonna have this bifurcational society where like the real medicine and the real stuff that actually changes lives is available open source at a small cost to like you know keep the whole thing going. And then the epithene class is gonna keep trying to like constrain knowledge, etc. And then we know their model's gonna lose because it's so expensive and and uh you know paywalled. Um and obviously the jig is up now, and people realize that there's nefarious actors controlling all of this, but it's come to terms with it. I was having this conversation with my wife last night, actually. We're like previously when you hear a doctor has been had his medical license revoked, you're like, oh, he must be a shit doctor, he must have done something terrible. Now I hear that I'm like, oh, I want to speak to that doctor. He has forbidden knowledge, he's gonna cure my ills. Can we speak to that doctor? It's like a it's like a badge of pride. Um like Tom Noakes. Look what happened to Tom Nooks, like they're trying to vilify the guy, left, right, and center. Um he's the guy you want to talk to.
SPEAKER_03Did you see the did you see the white house um the white house meme that went wrong? Which one? Um they posted this week. They they posted a um they posted a photo of uh of a fighter jet pilot, um, like this whole top gun, top gun type vibe.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03Fighter pilot sits in the cockpit of the fighter plane, and then the caption reads um something like don't worry, the patriots are in control.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah, the patriots are in control.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, the patriots are in control. And then somebody went and replaced the fighter pilot face with Jeffrey Epstein's face and said, So don't worry, the pedos are in control, or something like that. Um apparently it went, apparently it went like super viral or something, and it obviously had the White House original writing on it and everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Totally. Totally. I mean it's pretty evident that the pedo's are in control at the moment.
SPEAKER_03I'll uh I'll share a link if I can find it again.
SPEAKER_05Gavin, I don't want to have a rehash of last month's uh episode, but it does it all roads do seem to lead to this.
L402 And Machine-To-Machine Payments
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's kind of uh it kind of is what it is. And I think it's because of this problem that we're actually talking um because we're all involved in uh sovereignty and freedom, and you know, Bitcoin is like probably one of the greatest breakthroughs in human invention. Uh, someone was talking about, you know, we had fire, we had the wheel, probably the printing press, then electricity, and then it's Bitcoin. I mean, it must rank in the top, easily the top 10 uh transformative technologies. Uh we just haven't seen its full potential yet. It's still super early. But uh just you know, talking about that, uh you mentioned uh something about um agents, AI agents in that. And I see Lightning Labs uh have just released a toolkit for uh agents to now use Lightning so they can procure services. Uh I'm sure there's probably other uh guys building their own things, but to have uh a bigger crowd like Lightning Labs released it is kind of cool. So people can build on that. So AI armed with Bitcoin. Um is this this the beginning?
The Ticketmaster 2000 Workflow
SPEAKER_01So so I have I have I have things to say on this. I like this topic. This is a nice topic. Um so yeah, 402, error code 402. Um actually they didn't just release it, this was released uh three years ago that Lightning Labs came out with what they call L402, which is Lightning 402 or Lightning uh Code 402. So the the 402 protocol basically is a payment uh um not requested, but payment expected almost, right? So, like with this code, you because of Lightning Network, we have instantaneous settlement, right, over time and space. So now you can literally the same way I send you an email and you receive it once I send it, basically, the same way that when I send you Lightning, right? You receive it when I send it. So now we can have that 402 code utilized with payments. But because it can be utilized for payments, what you now have the ability to do is you get like what Ricky said, you you can have AI agents tapping these codes on each other and literally making payments, almost like we would do with paywalls or whatever. So now you can paywall your API calls or your open source project uh viewership or anything via your AI agent, and your AI agent will collect that Bitcoin into its Bitcoin wallet, and you can then route it out in the way that you would want to. But what this means is now developers don't really need to go out and look for funding. If you build something that is amazing and there's an API call and people have to use it, like think about like what Jack Dorsey did with Stripe them, right? When he built his payment mechanism, everybody started using it and they paid him to utilize it. That's the same thing that every developer will now be able to do by building really great software and putting L402 there. You will be paid in Bitcoin for people utilizing your software or your service, which I think is amazing, um, especially for people in Africa, Southeast Asia, um, Latin America. People there's a lot of developers from these places, but they never have exposure to get you know proper funding, even just setting up a geezer. Page or something like that. It's an entire process where now I can literally say, hey, meet my AI agent Bender or Bob or whatever his name is and pay him to access what I built. Too long didn't read.
SPEAKER_05So I actually built a Bender agent recently. So it's called the Ticketmaster 2000. And the icon is Bender. And basically what it is, it's like a product, it's like a product owner agent. So like the product owner is basically expecting itself for developers to be able to build what you need them to build, right? It's like how do you take the requirements from like a stakeholder? So like it's say you own the business and you're like, I want a product to do XYZ. The product owner takes your requirements and writes them up into tickets so that developers can actually go and build it. So I built an AI agent that that does that, it functions as a developer, and it's all voice prompted. So you can just talk to it and be like, I want it to do this, and then it goes like a bunch of refinement process with you, ask you questions, refines, refines until you're happier with it and produces the ticket. So my next step now is to slap a lightning invoicing service on the front of that and a WhatsApp connection portal. So you can chat to it via WhatsApp voice voice notes on WhatsApp, and then it sends you back whether you have it as like a CSV file or a PDF or like a GitHub format, however you want to use it, whatever, whatever ticketing software using for managing your uh production pipeline. Um you can do it that way. Um so that's my that's my side project that I've been using personally myself for like writing tickets at work um because we didn't have to hire a product owner. So product owners hate this one weird trick to remove product owners. Um but now the next step is to make it available to enter via WhatsApp, um, and you can just uh pay in SAS, you know. I think the model will kind of be like you pay a small amount up front, almost like a deposit. That's because obviously AI has got to do some thinking and there's costs associated with that. And then um before you get your final output ticket, um, as you're downloadable, you pay the balance. I think that's probably the model work. Um and then it means anyone who's scaling up a development team, you can just use it like this. You don't have to hire a product owner, and that's gonna save you 60,000 Rand a month, probably in terms of salary. So it means that small teams can now like simplify that that process as well. Because most people don't know how to write tickets in a way that uh developers know how to read them. That's quite a skill.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, that's that's because developers are aliens, remember? Or or novel people are aliens, whichever way you want to say. But that brings up to each other. No, dude, like it's it's crazy. But um that why being able to translate from one to the other can make you a lot of money. But as you were saying this, uh, it reminded me of this video that I was watching uh a month ago on um like a couple of weeks ago, where this this guy asked AI, he was like, How much if I was an AI, how much would the API tokens for what I do cost the company versus what it would be if you were to do it, right? This was like it was astronomically stupid. Like the AI was even like it doesn't make sense to hire humans to do what AI can do for less than three bucks, right? You're getting paid thousands on thousands of brands, but it's like three bucks for the AI to do this all free if you do it the way I do, because I'm always doing the open source, free local model stuff.
SPEAKER_05Bro, other things all of this is going down, all yeah, but you have to self-host because if you don't, the Iranians bomb your data center and then you've got no AI left.
SPEAKER_01Hey, hey, you see, this is why you gotta just be good with all of the BRICS countries and chill out, like Namibia in South Africa, and nobody's sending bombs here right now. We're okay.
SPEAKER_05Man, I'm saying I'm seeing the like Mossad adjacent class in South Africa freaking out about South Africa and having like friendly relations with Iran. I'm like, yo, guys, the straight small moose are closed to some people. We've been on TV Iran, South Africa over here, like oil, and everyone around the world now is having to revert back to coal because they don't have oil. Yeah, so like South Africa is one of the biggest producers of coal, so like South Africa's actually played this once again, played this quite well. Some like the ANC is terrible at a lot of things, implementation, execution, they're really bad at. But foreign relations, maybe because they love talking and not doing, they're actually you know not bad at. Um, so like because you could look at this whole situation and be like, ah, they're on the side of team terror with Iran. Clearly, people who say that don't know anything about Iran's history and how they got to the point. Oh, Gavin, we discussed this last last month. They don't understand how Iran got to be the way they are. They're the way they are, spoiler alert, because America and Israel like just fucked with them so much until they ended up like this. Um but yeah, South Africa might as well be getting oil. So I think it worked out.
SPEAKER_04I just wanted to I just wanted to spin back onto what uh you were saying there, Oaken, about uh the cost of work being done, what the AR would charge versus the human. Uh, I think we've all heard about uh Jack Dorsey that has uh banned 40% of his workforce. Uh and he he he released uh an official statement where he said the company's actually not in trouble. In fact, we're doing just fine, we're doing better than ever, but we have now worked out that we are so much more efficient with the intelligence tools that we are building and implementing, we actually no longer need 40% of you guys. So, I mean, he was quite nice about it. He's given them a great severance package, but uh I mean, that was literally a real-world example on exactly what you were saying. How much will the AI do it versus the human?
SPEAKER_01But now, now what Dorsey did, because don't forget, it's not just that he fired over 40% of his stuff and made a very nice post on Twitter. What happened to his stock right after he did that? It increased, it went up, it didn't go down. And why did it go up? Because part of his statement, right, was that this was gonna happen anyway. So instead of letting it bleed out for the next three years and you're going to still have to look for work in three years, how about I give you money right now, give you a bonus, pay you out, and you go build whatever the hell you want to build. And if you look at some of the interviews of the people that left the company, a lot of them are really happy. They're like, yo, I can I now have seed funding to go and build what I want to actually build. Because what I've done here, I've actually done doing right, and a lot of people that are builders, they want to build and move on to the next product. They don't want to continuously build on the old thing that they've been, you know, building. So if you've I don't know if any of you have used Goose, Goose is like uh Claude or it's the one that that block built, right? This is why so many of the people got replaced. Also, what goose works so well that you know it's like I don't really need a lot of you anymore. Um, so you also have to understand the people using these tools effectively are not just saying it's not like PlayStation versus Xbox, where you buy one and that's that's you forever. No, no, no. This is I'm playing everything at the arcade that I can get my hands on. Open code, open claw, clawed but uh clawed code, anthropics, um, sorry, not anthropic, anti-gravity, um, all of them, all of them, all of them. We're we're using all of them. Why? Because there it you can build a lot better with all of these tools in unison than just trying to do it with one, you know. Um chat GPT has gone crazy. Like I don't, I haven't used them in a while. People are are literally pulling back, they're boycotting ChatGPT, but even beyond what happened with the Department of War in America, it's also a thing of their models are hallucinating more and more. It's it's just making shit up. And some other models are not doing that anymore. And we're getting even the open source ones, they're becoming way more like a lot better. I had I had one write me a script for uh um the evolution of the sovereign key, Ricky. I literally had a script written and then took that script, threw it into uh Gemini Notepad, had slides made for a presentation. And I was like, this is this is insane. Like I gave it a concept, I just said take my GitHub and do this, then took that and put it somewhere else, and now I have an entire you know 15-minute presentation that I can go through and it tells you the soundboard, the colors, all of that that needs to be done, how the voiceover should go, all of that, all done for free with open source tools. Okay, and then of course Gemini. But like, and and not but like it started all using a Quen 3 model that is free to use. You just go and you utilize it. So, what we're doing here is firstly, yes, the the cost of things like RAM and stuff is going up, but the fact that people are creating open source models that you can run on 2015 Gal laptops that have no more than eight gigabytes of RAM is mind-blowing. Right? It's insane, actually. It means that what we're doing is we're going to decrease the the cost of entry for anybody to utilize these tools to a point that it is literally free. Then how much you want to utilize it is what you're paying for. So now, if you if you finish with the free model, okay, if you really know you need not to run out of tokens, go pay that 20 US a month or 200 US a year to Claude, or you know, Codex is cheaper, or whichever one you want to use, and plug in your API keys and go forth and be married. That's the reality we live in. So I like what um what Grafton said from Vexel in his statement when he said we're not in a world where AI is going to take over, it already has. Now the question is, are you gonna learn how to utilize the hammer or are you going to pay somebody else to build the future that you're gonna live in?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, because you can still do it yourself. And all it so I okay, I'm sure it's been the same for you, but it is increased my productivity by 10x at least. Like, at least, like I'm so much more effective than I used to be. And so, like, this is this is what's happening, right? Like, it's people who are creative and learn how to use this stuff, but you can be productive like no one has ever seen before. You can do what 10 people would have done. And the more the more failure you get with it, the the you know, the better you get. And then the next step is figuring out okay, cool, how do I build microservices with this stuff that I can market globally and earn in Bitcoin for? No company, nothing, but you just a bitcoin wallet and a service, you know, like this this is like sovereign individual territory. And the other thing is like South Africa is so prime for this because the biggest input for AI is going to be energy, right? And so if you are a South African who's a bit older and you have your own house and you have your own solar, put your install your own solar because SCOM we had load shedding a few years ago, and now that's gone, now I just got all the surplus solar. You are in such a prime position to start renting out your surplus power to some enterprising individual who wants to host some computers at your house and consume your surplus power that you're producing. Um, and that's an arrangement individuals can come to between each other without the state having to get involved. Um the state can shake their fist at the sun. And like so, this is like a brave new world, and South Africa's prime for it. Um because we've got so much sun and people have developed so many, like put so much money into solo already. So it's it's gonna change things so dramatically, people have no idea.
SPEAKER_03Um did you see I just shared a link in the in the signal chat. Um I I think what's gonna happen more than anything else is gonna separate people into two different classes. I mean, we're only talking about like 16 16% of the population is chatting with the chatbot at all. And this is using the chatbot in its most simple I mean, this is like asking stupid questions like, you know, what what is the the circumference of the earth? Because they don't want to go search Google and do that research, they're asking it AI chatbot. That's that's 16% of the population. Yeah, there is less than one percent of the population uh that uses AI in any any significant advanced capacity. And that number that number is not going to shoot up by uh a factor of 10 within the next few years. I mean, and I I I I have a first first hand um firsthand experience of this with the the people that we employ in our project, which is they they represent the vast majority of people on the planet. Um you know, the four of us sitting here, we're we're in the we're we're at the top of the pyramid when it comes to um uh you know thinking, uh rational, rational thinking, um, questioning, um, education, experience, etc., etc. Um, and I I I kid you not, it is a challenge to get a person to open a browser window for the first time, uh, go to some free chatbot and start asking the most basic questions. And even the first time they do that, it's not like they go back the next time and get excited about it. It's a challenge to get them to do that the first 150 times. And then six months later, finally, they pick up the tool and uh it you see vast improvements. And we've seen improvements uh in critical areas with with people's uh skills, but it's the minority of the people that that we work with, the vast majority we're sitting here today. I still receive messages that that that clearly should have been just copy-pasted into ChatGPT's free chatbot version just to get rid of the spelling mistakes and the grammar. You know, and that's not that not even that is happening. And and just getting that to happen is a huge challenge. So this is fantastic for the people who are using these tools, and I'm I'm trying to use them as much as I can. Um but I it looks like it's going to separate people into a two different class structures, uh, the ones that sort of move uh rocket rocket boost themselves ahead in terms of productivity, productivity, etc. etc. And the rest of the people who you know wake up 10 years from now and go, shit, what happened? Um you know, I think I mean I think so. I just wanted to finish saying the the the the over 55 age group are still gonna be around in 10 years from now, they're gonna be over 65, and that's not gonna not gonna change.
SPEAKER_05It's gonna be it's gonna be probably three classes around. It's gonna be like the the class of people like you're describing now using this to be hyper productive and build the future that they want to see, and you can really like do a bunch of sovereign stuff with this you couldn't previously. Um then there's gonna be the people who don't use it um for a while, and then it's gonna be those who outsource their thinking to it completely. And I've seen this myself personally happen a lot. And I've also seen a recent study published of tracking people who are using Chat GPT to outsource their thinking and and what happens to their brain activity over time, and it makes them stupid because it's just people turn off that fat part of their brain where it's like I need to think about this naturally or whatever. It's just like AI, do it for me. Like you are one step closer to plugging in the matrix and just being like, you know, being a part of the brain. So like the the because I I see AI slot that people present all the time as their own work, and like they haven't bothered to like because you know chat GPT has got that cheesy way of cheesy, cheesy way of speaking or producing content. You can immediately see it's AI content, right?
SPEAKER_03Um well in in some in some cases that's better. I mean, like I I would rather I would rather receive an email from somebody that that works for us that uh uh reads like AI slop, but at the very least I can read what they're writing. Because if they don't if they don't send me an uh an AI slop email, they send me an email that there's so many spelling mistakes and the grammar is so bad that it takes me 10 minutes to try and figure out what it is they're trying to say. So it's not always it's not always it's it's not necessarily a bad thing for some people to outsource some of that thinking.
SPEAKER_02But it shits in shits out there, like you're putting a thing.
SPEAKER_01Like I'll give you an example, autocorrect, right? I am atrocious at spelling, mainly because of my dyslexia, but at the same time, like I don't even make an effort to spell. Why? Because it's autocorrect, it's going to correct it as long as I get in the ballpark of what the word's supposed to be like, I can, but that's not helping my spelling, right? It's it's it's it's it's not making it better just because uh I've found a shortcut. And that's I think what Ricky is also trying to say is we're gonna have that third class of people because of the way they outsource, when they hit the token limit, nothing's able to be done, right? Like with most developers, that's why the why the memes are going around. It's like, what are developers doing for those three to five hours when clone code won't give them tokens and they're just walking around aimlessly like fucking chickens because they forgot how to do normal changes in code. I also the other day I went and was like, let me change the wording over here. Where does it fall again in the code over here? Like you start dumbing yourself down, but you're also replacing that with another skill, right? It's the same thing that when the internet came up. I remember going through, we still have them Encyclopedia Britannicas, you know, to find information on like Roman scholars for like an actual school project and going through the dictionary to make sure how this word is dropped. Then I also remember us getting, you know, the internet and Google and all of the rest of the crazy stuff where all of that changed, where we could take our work, throw it into a plagiarism checker, make sure that we we pass by the plagiarism check and then hand in. That used to be done by hand. Now it's AI. As soon as you hit submit, it's already scoring and waiting averages to say, oh hell no, this is all you're crazy, and then sending off the report to somebody's WhatsApp. So we will move into a phase of there will be those that assimilate with the machines, right? Those that start at a distance are like, no, AI, bad, it's it's antichrist. And then those that literally are like, hold on, hold on, this is a tool, I'm gonna use it as a tool. But the ones that fully assimilate and are like, this is my brain, Claude is my brain, when the people on the other side start changing things, that's why again we do decentralized, you know, self-sovereign things, is when those in power have the power to change what you see, they will. They will change it. And the answers that you get and the way that it answers, if they have the ability to do that, they will do it. And that is why open source matters so much, because you can actually see what was changed, what's being you know, put in another rapper in another wrapper, you can see it. Sorry, yeah, my little rant.
SPEAKER_05No, no, it's it's because like look at Google, like how useless Google is as a search engine now, in terms of it trying to get real information, like it's broken. Like it, you know, they were they were still subtle about it a few years ago when they were trying to like rank things, you know. You can still scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the information you're after, but now like three, four pages deep, you're still not getting what you want. It's just like complete propaganda. Um, and you can't so it's but the internet search has kind of been broken because it's so dominated by Google, they've got the monopoly on it now. Like where'd you go to find decent stuff? So with AI, it's gonna be the same. If you're relying on a centralized model, like Claude is great, I've been using Claude recently, like it really is great compared to GPT, it's like way better. Um and GPT is like GPT is so ridiculous now. Like it's so like the rest are so tight, like it just lies all the time. Um, but this is where the open source stuff becomes so powerful. But the other thing that people don't realize about AI is that like it doesn't have all the knowledge, it doesn't know everything, it's got to go and research everything. That takes a lot of energy, especially for it to get it to go and read like a book. It takes a lot of tokens and a lot of power to do that. So like your own private models that you're running locally yourself, you've got to train them, teach them, and like spend a lot of time and effort on it. Um, and then it almost becomes like your your household, your butler, you know, your digital butler that has all this context. So, for example, you can get it to go and read all the David Icke you want, you know. You want it to know about the Anunnaki, you get it to go and read all the all the David Icke. You're gonna get a very, you know, your model is gonna be thinking very differently about things than if you would have trained it on, like, I don't know, Ronaldo Jose, for example. Like that's gonna tell you a very different, different story. So, yeah, that's the thing. You've got to actually spend the time and effort and resource, energy resource to like have your AI local models go and learn this stuff.
SPEAKER_01That's why I'm saying it's a grown-up Tamagotchi. That's what it is. It's damagotis for grown-ups, bro. The same way when we were kids, you had to keep the thing alive, feed it, give it water. That's what you have to do with your agents if you want to. Because again, like I keep saying, we all thought that economic emancipation was the war that most of us were going to be fighting against. That's not the war, the war is the is the rise of AI, right? Because what's happening now is people that were okay at doing something are way better at doing it now. If they just if you have a process, if you can write do a then b then c and d, and I want the result to be f, you are going to actually get that out. A lot of people that's impossible. I agree. The process of being able to write down do a then b then c then. D and if you do it in that order, you will get to F. For a lot of people, I agree with you. It's it's not for the majority of the world, that's not how they work, that's not how they do things, and it's still gonna be difficult. But at the same time, you have countries like look at China, who went the other way with open claw, and then the government was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, stop it, stop it. You can't do that, what you're doing. But for uh a country to be like, okay, we're going to give you guys computers, right? All of these schools are going to get computers, and then we're gonna put uh I think it's called EXO. EXO on the computers, which is where you can train uh large language models to what you actually want it, like an in-house type of model. And then they train these things on all of the coursework and the schoolwork of the schools, and each child and parent had access to it. So now, I'm a teacher, so now you you literally have an AI, a school AI, that the kids are prompting to find out about the schoolwork, the schedules, all of those things. That's a completely different way of using AI than telling people, hey, just go have fun. You know, here's some free tokens. And that's the other thing here. Are we looking at the rise of AI like some novelty joke game? Or are people really understanding that the world has changed? We don't live in the same world we did two years ago. It is completely different. Just in the last six months, what has changed is astronomical. Dude, it is real. What is happening to you just this month, this month alone, and we're not even at the 15th yet. It's crazy what anti-gravity computer has done, what Claude Code has done, all of these, it's insane. We don't live in that world anymore. So, firstly, even less than 16% of people understand that. Even the people using AI, of that 16%, maybe 10% of them are actually paying attention to the fact that all of this has changed. All of it, right? And you need to move with that knowledge, otherwise, yeah, it's it's it's gonna be a hell.
SPEAKER_04So I just want to add in there that you know, I I think this is the eternal problem that most people are not curious, and most people aren't gonna take the energy and the effort to try things. I mean, we're talking about Tamagotchi's, you know, when when desktop computers came out, people said the same thing. How many people went out there, bought a desktop computer, and tried stuff? So, I mean, I've been messing, I'm the least tech guy here out of the four of us sitting on this call. Um, but uh I'm pretty curious. So the AR thing comes out, someone tells talks to me about vibe coding, and now I'm trying to figure it out. And when I asked it to build me something, it built an absolute pile of shit. And I was like, oh, damn it. Okay. Um well, clearly this is not that easy. Um, okay, right. What did I do wrong? Go back and fix, go fix this. Hey, you've put a button there. I click the button, it does nothing. What's going on? Uh then you start learning. Well, there's a you know, um, a product requirement document that would help if you scoped that first. Oh, here's a functional specification document that will help. So you start going through this process, and I just think this is how humanity is. They're most people are gonna be employees their entire life. That's just the way it is. Not everybody's gonna be curious, most people are not teachable, and most people are gonna pay for convenience. They're just simply gonna take my hundred bucks and just deliver me a hot coffee in my lap here or whatever. You know, and I think it doesn't matter about the technology that comes along, people essentially remain the same.
SPEAKER_01Fully agree, and it's a good thing. I don't think that's a bad thing. That's why builders like us can get paid. Because if people want convenience, build them convenience. Like Gavin, like you're saying, excuse me, and Herman as well. The technology is not at a point where people are gonna be like, oh my god, yes, let me go learn terminal so I can run open claw and figure out what all these commands are. But the builders also understand that. That's why it's becoming easier. The same thing that Ricky just said, what he's built is voice activated. That is how it's going to work. Because most people don't have a computer, but they all have a smartphone or at least a cell phone of some kind. That is what's going to be built up now. We're going to be building experiences, not just apps, but experiences when you're like, hey, I need to know about my industry. There is an app for that, an experience for that that you speak to. It's an on your phone, you talk to it the same way you would, and it gives you back information by your voice, by your email, in text form, or by like a telegram message. Like I have mine doing, like it sends me reports every morning in dropdown file, and it comes through on Telegram in a voice note. All that can already be done using open source and free tools. So now what you're moving to is okay, what if I put some money behind this and integrations? It becomes a lot faster, a lot easier to actually scale something like that. So now here's the kicker. You don't even have to be me or Ricky to build this or anybody. You you could be the person that keeps calling himself the least technical person here, Gavin. If you continue iterating on that thing, and you're like, okay, maybe I should have explained it more along the Easter. Now you're getting a completely different output that you can iterate on as a base, which means everybody can build what's in their heads. And that's the opportunity here. Is if you can describe it the way that you see it up here, and if all it took was a description to bring it to reality, that is becoming so easy that most people don't even type code, they speak it. They're like, build this, do that, make this weather app more blue. Like that's what they're doing now. And I'm talking about serious, serious programmers. These guys are not sitting at desks like this anymore, they're on runs with their earphones on, speaking to the agent at home that's busy working.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, so so Gavin, just on the service that that I built, right? Like, so now I'm I'm solving a problem for myself because I was like, I need to hire a product manager to like get our tickets to the pipeline faster. Because like staying a ticket takes a long time, and you gotta think it through, and like it's it's it's a lot. Um and so then I built it for myself to solve the problem. But now I'm at the point where I'm like, okay, Gavin, you want to build something. So what you need is a chatbot on WhatsApp where you broadly describe this is a project I want, this is high level what I want it to do. Okay, and then the chatbot says, You cool, this we've got the we've created a context document for what we want, that's cool. But now let's talk about the individual components. Okay, what is this, what must this do? This component must do X, this must do Y. And then you talk, have a conversation with this thing, and at the end of the day, it gives you an output that you can drag and you can then upload that into like let's say Jira or Asana or Trailo or you know Notion or Mundate or Comma, whatever you're using for your project. And then you give that thing to Claude Code to build because Claude Code now has all the clear instruction, exactly. You've refined all the thoughts in your mind into like how does this actually translate into building something in a way that makes sense for a builder to build, and then it builds it for you. So you didn't have to sit and go through that process with Claude of like, okay, I'll build this. And it's like, okay, but how do you want to do your back end? How are you gonna host your back end? And you're like, what? You know, how are you gonna how what you know, how's your service gonna run it on railway, or you're gonna run it on like you know, different back end hosting? It takes care of all of that stuff for you. And the point is that all gets done in the planning phase rather than execution phase, because otherwise you waste a bunch of time and effort and tokens on building something, it doesn't work. Um so the it's how do you make the building process more intuitive for the average creator who knows nothing about tech? Instead of it's like people used to be able to ride horses very well to cover distance. If you couldn't ride a horse, you couldn't cover great distance, you were very constrained by that. Then we got cars, you had to learn how to drive a car. And now we have Ubers where you can sit and work on a totally different project while you're in an Uber to get somewhere else. And and you might know how to ride a horse, but that was a massive waste of your time learning to ride a horse, you know, so because it doesn't suit that purpose anymore. So like now AI has enabled us to be so much more productive on doing other things that you you need to change where you focus your time and effort on because those skills that you used to have are like actually obsolete now. Um like people have learned all these massive skills, like being a product owner, I used to be a product owner, that that skill is gone, that's obsolete. Like I built a product in it two weeks, not even a week, that made it obsolete. And I'm surely not the only person who's done this. Like it's not wasn't particularly hard. Um, so yeah, it's a brave, brave new world up there, but you can be so much more productive and ultimately freezing up to spend more time surfing.
SPEAKER_04Well, I would just like to announce I have now got four tools implemented in my business and are being used. And uh I've got a uh Google uh Android apps up in the Google Play Store. So um it just that that's yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, I've got area managers at work that understand the Google Play Store, download the app, and they can go do their work. So we make it easy for the guys. Yeah, you have to do that. But yeah, it's just the struggle. It's just the struggle.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. They weren't they weren't your first your first child. They weren't your first child also.
SPEAKER_05That they've always been our first child. We just found out about it recently. Actually, that's wow.
CBDCs, Tether, Programmable Control
SPEAKER_04So I did just uh uh this whole thing about uh people paying for convenience and and the dark side of that. Uh I picked up a news headline. India is now testing CBDCs, but they're going to do it with food coupons. Uh and that, my friend, is how they get you because they offer you free stuff. Use this toy, it comes with free stuff, and off you go. And I've always thought that's how CBDCs will be introduced. They're going to say, if you use this, we you won't be taxed on this portion if you use this tool. Or if you use this, you're not going to uh there's going to be a massive benefit, huge conveniences to using this little thing that they introduced and they roll it at you a little bit like Facebook did in the beginning. And I don't think they started off being the nefarious actors they may have turned into. They were college kids trying to pick up hot college girls. Um, but you know, they give you something free that is awesome, and you get used to it and you play with it, and then they give you a bit more, give you a bit more. And then the next thing you see, hey, I can't buy steak. What's going on? Why can't I buy my steak? Or uh I can't fill up my car and fuel because I've moved out of my 15-minute city or some crazy thing like that.
SPEAKER_05Did you see the ANC? Um, they went from handing out KFC buckets, you know, at election day to get people to vote and see now they're at like one loaf of bread per family. So they used they used food to try to entice people to vote, but they've stolen so much they can't even afford the bribe anymore.
SPEAKER_04Well, at least they're admitting there's at least they're admitting there's an inflation problem. If you've gone from one bucket of KFC per family, now it's one loaf of bread. I mean, that right there is telling you something's gone south.
SPEAKER_01I mean, but if you look at if you look at governments around the world, this this happens everywhere. It just happens in different forms, right? Like if you look even US, if you look at it, they're not giving out buckets of KFC, but hey, free healthcare over here, this over here, so that you guys can be complacent, this over here. Like, it's it's also a thing of of understanding that power sees where the gaps are, right? It's looking for where it can grab you. And if people are complacent, they're you know, it's okay, it's it's anyway gonna happen. So, what am I really going to change? I'm only one person. That thinking is why you get things like this to to to um actually propagate. And and I think that what's happening, even with the rise of things like AI and sovereign technologies like Bitcoin and BudChat and stuff like that, is people are waking up to the fact that, hey, convenience might cost me more than I'm willing to pay. They're starting to realize that slowly but surely, that convenience is gonna cost them more than what they're willing to pay. And if you look at CBDCs, everybody keeps talking about how great they are, but everybody, the biggest CBDC of all, right, Tether, keeps literally blocking people from using their money. Like they they keep freezing accounts and like just the other day, they froze what was it, another billion or something? What why would you use this? Like, what are you doing? Okay, the US is already putting sanctions on people. Now you're gonna use a company that is basically saying, hi, I'm with the US. If Trump says, yo, freeze that whole country's thing, and you're like, yeah, but we're like, who's gonna stop them? And this is the whole thing that people forget about what why we say Bitcoin, not crypto. These crypto companies have a head, they have somebody that can be pressured, they have boards of directors. There is a a really big problem there because they can change when pressured, and the pressure will come. I I mean, literally, last year I had the honor of sitting with the man that wrote uh confessions of a psych of an economic hitman. I sat with him. We had a con this man is the conversation we're having is telling me why you should not do CBDCs because he's talking about I used to come to them, you know, with with the briefcase, or the guys behind me with the gun. Like, which one you want to take? You want to take the money or you want to die? Now, this is going to get worse when that money I also control, uh, because I control the guy who runs the company, and this is where the risk of CBDCs come in, even if they're built in country on whose blockchain? Who controls the blockchain that it's being built on? Because it's not going to be the Namibian government blockchain who's gonna build that and maintain that.
SPEAKER_03So in the infrastructure, you're not looking for an invite to Lugano, are you?
SPEAKER_00Why? What happened to Lugano? Yes. Wait, what's happening? I'm lost. Please inform me.
SPEAKER_04I think it's the the Freedom Festival, isn't it? Oh no, that's in Oslo.
SPEAKER_03No, Lugano is the Lugano is plan plan B, sponsored by Tether.
SPEAKER_05It's the Tether festival.
SPEAKER_01Hey, I'm just talking the truth here, you know. Like that was literally money.
SPEAKER_04That was literally the very first item I jotted down from headlines in the last month was Tether has frozen 4.2 billion in USDT.
SPEAKER_03Uh well, someone someone has to say it, dude. And um everybody keeps everybody keeps saying that the guys running tether are are bitcoiners, and it's like, yeah, sure, maybe they are, but uh, that's quite sort of besides the point.
SPEAKER_05Maybe they were.
SPEAKER_01I mean, look, they're they're businessmen.
SPEAKER_03Even if they still are, um, you put a you put a gun to the head of a bitcoiner. Um I'm not sure that they're invincible.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And at the same point in time, like let's be honest, tether is a for-profit company. This is not an NGO, they're a for-profit company, and those are businessmen. They they saw a gap, they took it. I I can't hate on them for that, but the framing needs to stop, right? And they're not even the ones doing the framing, it's everybody else that's like, no, because tether's so bad and they do so much. Great, they sponsor other things, all of that. But let's be honest about what it is. Tether is, I don't think, is the uh Trojan horse that people are saying is going to bring Bitcoin to the masses. I don't think so. I think what it's doing is making the masses say, you see, tether's okay, so then Ethereum must also be okay, and also so Nana, why can it only be tether and bitcoin all of a sudden? You see, so now we're opening a conversation about all shit coins being legitimized because tether works in certain places, uh, what it's supposed to do, which is replace the US dollar with another US dollar. Um, just not understanding.
SPEAKER_05It's an extension of the US dollar, it's how the US dollar how they can extend their reach into the third world and export their inflation into the third world and expand control hedge mm.
SPEAKER_01And and with and with no with no uh uh uh oversight, they can they can just step away and say, but we don't own tether. So now responsibility is also gone on that one. Like, this is the so who who who who takes ownership of the problem when it's just up in the air, which is also the problem that I have with people giving too much autonomy to AI agents because AI, a computer, cannot stand trial. So when you so what are we doing here? Like, we all have to understand what is the goal?
SPEAKER_05When tether freezes funds, right? Who tells them to freeze those funds? So surely law enforcement comes and tells them freezes funds. Yeah, Donald comes and tells them freeze those funds. Do they get a court order? Does a does a judge sign off on a warrant to freeze those funds? No, when your friends are frozen in a bank, that needs to happen. So now you've got a system that's even worse than the incumbent system in terms of taking away women's autonomy and freedom and access to justice and law. And the board of directors is deciding. Yeah, if you're a little villager in Malawi that's using tether, and tether decides, let's say there's some mix-up, some nefarious mix-up, they confused you with Nicholas Maduro, and they freeze your funds, and you've been running a small business selling goats in Malawi and you've got ten thousand dollars, it's all you have, and they freeze it. Now you must go get hold of Paolo. Be like, please can you unfreeze my uh money, overlord? What are they talking about? Sovereignty bullshit. It's just an extension of the USD. It's worse, it's worse than that.
SPEAKER_01Look, look at it, look at it even worse. Look, go go further, right? Look at what happened in China, where they can switch off your money. They can literally say you can still earn money, but you can't spend it. You're because it's programmable money. I programmed it so that you can earn your money, but it can never be spent until we decide, you know, your your suspension is over, you've you you you've done good enough. Now do that with one country being able to have control over another country. Yeah, because the rails that were built are from the first country, and now somebody like Trump says, Hey, we don't like the way that your ambassador spoke at the UN. We're switching off your money.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01What then?
SPEAKER_02What the fuck then?
SPEAKER_05What happens is circle back to why they invaded, why they're bombing Iran. Iran is one of the few remaining non-Rothschild owned central banks in the world. In my opinion, this is what this is about. Like they've had they've had a list of all these countries they're gonna take down. Incidentally, all of the seven countries that were on that list were non-Rothschild owned banks, they've all been destroyed. Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya. The last one standing is Iran, right? And ultimately that's what this is about. Now imagine a world where Iran was dollarized and they all used tether, how easy they wouldn't have to drop any bombs. Because you know, basically the US Treasury was running financial operations to crash the real. They're running operations there to try to financial warfare is a real thing. Imagine how much easier it would have been for them if they were using tether. Like it would have been trivial, you know. Um so if people want to be sovereign, they need to have sovereign money that can't be fighted with. Um and obviously the US Empire is gonna flex its muscles wherever it can. So if you make yourself, if you provide them with that attack surface, they'll lose that attack surface against you. Uh the jury's still out as who's gonna win this war, who can outlast it. Obviously, Iran's taking massive shots at the moment. But so is the Gulf states, and so is America with their proxies, and so is Israel. So it remains to be seen if the Rothschilds manage to pull this one off. But ultimately, to me, this is what this is about. It's about destroying their sovereignty and independence and stalling a Rothschild controlled central bank.
Lightning Adoption Beyond The Charts
SPEAKER_04So I would like to just add my the winning party is Bitcoin, in my opinion. Um, I see a million US dollar transaction went through. Um, I'm sure there was a little bit of organizing behind the scenes just to make sure everything was fine. But voltage sent a one million US dollar lightning payment through, which I think is flipping phenomenal. Um, and I saw something on River recently, they said uh Lightning volume in terms of transactions has quadrupled in the last year. So and that's public channels.
SPEAKER_05No, we are. I mean, we have this conversation every time about private channels, right? Like, so I run a business that does cross-border payments. So Lightning, we use private channels. When voltage was like a million-dollar transaction, I was like, first time, guys.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a it's a public, it's the first public one, yeah.
SPEAKER_05The first public one that's been happening already. I mean, we yeah, like we haven't done a million-dollar transaction ourselves if we've done close to it, and repetitively we see it, so like that's and that's not private channels, like that's not broadcast to the world, and this is why people are like lightning's not being used. Guys, they have no idea what they're talking about. You won't even be used because it's private.
SPEAKER_01If you look, if you look at even the statistics for like uh how many, how many tor and I sorry, how many uh uh nodes, like lightning nodes, are reachable in Africa. No, you're not counting any Tor nodes on that. Those are all clear net nodes. I don't have any clear net nodes personally. All my nodes run over Tor. So make a unique sense. And it's going to change. There's now other ways that, of course, you don't only have to use Tor. There's uh because also Tor sometimes is down, the Tor network is you know, the bad weather, whatever. So there are other things coming, even with Start 9 with the new ones, they're coming with different ways that you'll literally have to install Tor if you want to use Tor. There's complete different structure there. But the whole point here is all of these heuristics, all this and these numbers and all of these graphs, they're not taking into account the whole of Asia, Southern A uh Southern America, and Africa that are not using anything but Tor nodes. Like, look at all of the all of those nodes that people keep seeing getting. Up in El Salvador, those start like those are all tour nodes. So you're not getting the real number of what's happening, you're only getting what can be counted on certain things. And as Ricky just uh said, you know, private channels are private channels. So and then you've got things like the liquid network where things are going in. Yeah, come on. Then you've got e cash. There's no way people actually know then what's going with the number. It's just a very well-educated guess and forgot about some stuff.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, if that. And and yeah, people are probably just seeing what the volume they're really seeing is money being moved between exchanges and their lighting channels. Really, you know, that's probably what they're seeing at best. So, like these things. So, what's going on?
SPEAKER_04Sorry, I uh yeah, I think to be fair, River did mention that uh a lot of this is estimation based on the nodes they can see, they have to try and extrapolate and see what's sort of going on. So um, yeah, uh to your point about the tour nodes and that. Uh, but guys, we're coming close up to time. Um uh last thoughts, last comment, uh quick round robin on that. Uh Haruman, you've been super quiet, dude. Um apart from posting interesting uh comments on the side chat, which I'll definitely put into the show notes. Um yeah, last thoughts, last parting comments. What are you what's on your mind?
SPEAKER_03Um yeah, I'm not sure who says lightning is not being used. I mean, I use it every single day, literally. Um I'm not uh not exaggerating. I I don't think a day goes by. I mean, if I'm if I'm not spending money that day, then maybe that's a day where I don't use lightning. But these days I I literally use lightning two or three times more often than I use um any type of fiat payment, whether that's cash or a bank card. Um so I'm not sure who who says that. Um but then again, I I guess that's uh still the exception rather than the norm. Um but it's definitely being used, and it's definitely being used uh more often. Um and it's become so easy um getting somebody onto a lightning wallet these days. Um so yeah, I mean, I don't know, it's definitely being used, that's all I can say.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it's only the BCH bros is still acting like lightning is not being used. Uh if I can still around, they won't die.
SPEAKER_00Oh no, but Vlad, Vlad's never going anywhere. Vlad's never going.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I see him. I like see him tweeting about lightning of the years, and I look at our and I look at our like dashboard of use for my business. I'm like, this guy has no idea what he's talking about.
SPEAKER_01But you also have to remember that a lot of these people are only using figures from the western side of the world, like they're looking at western figures, they're looking at is lightning being used in America? Why would it be used as much in America? You guys have all of these other systems tell me, think about whatever the things mean. Like they have so many ways of doing it, of getting each other paid, that they don't think about the rest of the world, which is again another factor of like speaking to people in Europe and America. A lot of the time they're in this bubble that what they experience is what the entire world experiences. That's just not the truth, that's not how we we live as human beings, and um, that's why I think they they they keep coming with the soul. Nobody's using lightning. No, nobody's using lightning around you. That's like a skill issue.
Why Spendable Bitcoin Still Matters
SPEAKER_03Can I add a final thought there actually uh on that topic? Um I I wasn't a call with um with somebody from a uh uh a major I I don't want to dox the person because that would not be appropriate, but I wasn't a call with a potential uh sponsor from a very, very large uh institution in the in the Bitcoin space, and you know, uh talking about um you know potential uh sponsorship and fundraising, and it was an American-based company. And we were talking about circular economies and we were talking about the Las Vegas conference last year, and I was saying how disappointing it was to travel all the way there, um, and then do like a little talk on some irrelevant side stage uh about Bitcoin being spent all around the world, and it's such a small part of the narrative at a conference like that. But I suspect that if you look at the number of uh uh uh if you look at the volume in terms of US dollars, it's probably the larger part of the world that uses Bitcoin as a store of value. But if you look at the volume in terms of human numbers, individual be individual people using Bitcoin, I think the medium of exchange use case is at least as big um as the store of value use case, just because of the number of people uh involved. And we were having this conversation, and um this person was incredibly dismissive uh of the idea that Bitcoin can be used as a medium of exchange. And the reason for that, uh it turns out, um, is because of the hubris around the idea that the US dollar will never, ever, ever, ever fail, and that all these people doing financial engineering like Michael Taylor and so on and so forth, they're just so much more clever than I am. And you know, they understand how to work the system and they understand how to build these financial tools that'll make the US dollar the first currency in the history of the world to never die, uh, the first fiat currency in any case in the history of the world to never die. And I just basically asked a simple question. I said, look, I'm sure that the people at your conferences in the US don't care about the use case right now, the medium of exchange use case right now. I totally get that. I understand it for them. It's a store of value, and that's totally fine, and that's the use case for them right now because they've got a you know very stable currency. Uh, but I'm sure that you can understand that at some point in the future they will care about the medium of exchange use case because the dollar won't last forever. Like I'm not saying it's gonna fail tomorrow. I'm not gonna say I'm not saying it's gonna fail in 10 years from now, maybe 20 years, maybe 50 years, fuck, maybe 100 years, I don't know. But the response from this person was just so revealing, the hubris around this idea that the dollar will never fail. And you cannot imagine that there are people who are very intelligent and very well connected and call themselves Bitcoiners and run massive companies in the Bitcoin space, who actually do think that the use case of Bitcoin is a store of value and that the medium of exchange layer will always come back down to dollars. They actually believe this, they actually think this. And it's just I'm I'm not intelligent enough to really be able to explain these things. But looking from my perspective, just what's happening with Iran and the desperation of the US Empire as they're lashing out all over the place, nothing they are doing makes sense. Um, it's like a desperate drunk person who's gotten himself into a fight that he can't win, and now he's just fucking smashing everyone all over the place, you know. And there's actually people who look at all of this and go, no, that's gonna be fine. The dollar will survive, everything will be fine. We'll have the dollar for eternity, forever and ever. It's never happened before with the fiat currency, but it's gonna happen with the dollar. Um, people people actually believe that. And I was kind of astonished to sit there in this conversation. We were we were on a call. Um, obviously, we didn't meet in person, uh, but I was I was astonished to sit there in this conversation and and actually hear this. I was like, I I I I can hardly believe I can hardly believe my my ears right now, but but that is what it is. It's it's it's pretty crazy.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I think you know, closing thoughts from here. Like I we haven't really spoken about World War III. That's kind of breaking out at the moment, uh, kind of a big deal. Um, I think to Herman's point, like the US Empire is is going turbo, it's going full turbo. It's trying to you know consolidate as much power as it can. Um, if you listen to Simon Dixon, which I recommend everyone does, um lot of insights, a smart dude, been saying stuff for a long time. Um, he's of the opinion that the American empire is being pushed back into a regional power, and uh this has all been engineered, this failure has been engineered so that America is going to fail on purpose against Iran and be really lose all its bases in the Middle East, lose its influence, get relegated back to a Western hemisphere in power. I don't know, remains to be seen. If you ask Tom Leongo, he's on the other side. Five D chess, trust the plan, everything's you know, Trump has got good people around him, and and they they try to destroy the city of London um and take back American sovereignty. That's Tom Laongo's perspective on this. Um, and then there's you know, if you listen to the guys, hyper-realist guys from the Duran, um, they kind of take everything at face value, what's going on, and they're more like this is a US Empire trying to maintain a Germany um and do the bidding of Israel. So, you know, where does the truth lie? I don't really know. Just listen to a bunch of sources to try to get an idea of what's going on. But from my perspective, this is the this is the US Empire doing US Empire things. Um there's that scene from Lockstar, two smoking barrels, where these two guys try to hold up Betty Jones um with a replica gun, and um he pulls out a reel, he's got his desert eagle, and goes, I don't know, I don't want to um say exactly what he said, but he's like, You thought you found a pussy and you found a horrible anyway. Go and watch the scene, it's great. But I think this is what's happening in your ad. Um I think they might have put off more than they can chew. Um so what I am bullish on is the amount of Bitcoin medium exchange use cases we're gonna see coming out of Europe because Europe is fucked. Sorry, Europe, but I think you are. Your energy source has been cut off. You have only the Americans left for energy, and they've quadrupled your price. And if if the Straits will movie stays close, America might say no energy for you, Europe, because we need it all for ourselves. Russia just said to America, Europe, we you guys are cut off, you can't buy no more gas from us. Qatar can't export any gas, Europe has no energy, and we're going, winter is coming. So the great thing about Europe um is that they have all this bitcoin development that's happened for a long time. There's a lot of you look at the amount of nodes in Germany. You you know, Adam and we we were together in Prague last night. You look at the amount of Bitcoiners in in Prague doing great stuff that are really advanced. They haven't had the use cases yet because they haven't needed it, because their currency has been relatively stable. But I think those days are ending for Europe. It's like I'm bullish on the cool bitcoin innovation that's gonna come out of Europe because of it and the medium of exchange stuff that's gonna come out of it, they're gonna be Africanized, um, where they have to use Bitcoin because the currency is gonna be in free fall. So I think the biggest loser of the opening salvo of World War III is definitely the Europeans. Um, so I'm interested to see what comes out of that.
SPEAKER_04Okay, closing thoughts.
SPEAKER_01Um, firstly, I'm happy that the internet stayed on this long, didn't fight me again. Um uh well, what I have to say is don't be despondent. Um, learn to pivot, learn to be that little kid that was, you know, all inquisitive and wanted to know about new things. Um, go into things with that type of energy because the future already looks very different than it did yesterday. Um, we don't know what's gonna happen with the war situation. Everybody can give opinions, but we have no clue. We didn't know a month ago that there was gonna be a war, and now there's a war, full scale. People are being bombed. Some of us have family in some of these places that can't leave because airports are closed. Um, we have business partners, friends. Um, so again, I think in closing, I just want to say everybody be safe. Um, learn to pick up new skills as you go because yeah, nothing, nothing that you thought was the same yesterday will be the same tomorrow. Technology is moving at a pace that nobody, nobody can see coming. And if you can at least for yourself, not all of it, you don't gotta go into token mode and try to read everything and run everything, but pick something that you want to do for the next 10 years, maybe, and find your way to be able to get there. Um, make a plan and uh have your loved ones and and build build stuff, build stuff, build stuff, whatever it is, speak to the AI, figure it out, ask it to prompt you so it can so you can tell it what you want. Like it's a professional interviewer, and in that way, it'll build up what you need. But please um take the opportunities that we do currently have while we have them and um elevate yourself, yeah, upskill yourself and live life.
SPEAKER_04Sweet man. Um, closing thoughts on my side. Uh I wish there was a month that would go by where I didn't have to mention bit chat, but uh unfortunately I find I have to mention it one more time. I mean, these guys are killing it today. Um so I mean, just a quick update on what they've done in the last month is they're now planning device to device installs. So, you know, you can sort of stand next to your mate, he can install off your device and you can just spread the word. So, I mean, I just love every month. There's something about BitChat that pops up that's super cool. Uh, do just want to shout out to um the Sparrow guys, uh Craig Raw. Uh they keep releasing cool stuff. They've just done a new release as well. Uh and you know, Sparrow Wallets is just one of the yeah, it's just it's top class product there. Once again, South African engineering at its best. Um, so well done to those guys. So that is amazing. Um yeah, uh, I mean, there's a bunch of other little news items. There was something about uh a product called uh Mostro that allows you to buy and sell uh peer-to-peer Bitcoin over Noster, which is flipping and selling. I mean, I just think that's incredible.
SPEAKER_01So uh the upside is that actually started as a joke. Monstro started as a joke that became a real thing. That's how crazy building is. You can literally just build it.
SPEAKER_04Well, that's amazing. So while bombs are dropping in one part of the world, everybody else is just getting on with things. So flipping awesome. Um uh VIP 110, I think, is maybe a whole episode on its own. Um, and and maybe next time we can sit and chat about that a bit because I think it goes in uh a million different directions. Uh, certainly not a topic for closing comments. So I just delete that out of my mouth. Maybe next time we talk a bit about BIP 10. Um, but anyway, boys, always a pleasure. Love seeing you guys. Uh, looking forward to if I don't see you in the next uh month, I will see you in a month's time. Have a lucky one. Cheers, guys. Thanks a lot, guys. Cheers.