Straight, No Chaser
Understanding Freedom through Money, Technology, Economics and Philosophy
Straight, No Chaser
Monthly Round Up 8: When Data Becomes Oil Who Owns You
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We go deep on what “sovereign computing” looks like when you try it for real, from spinning up a Fedimint federation to self-hosting services that keep working even when platforms or politics turn against you. We then connect local AI, persistent knowledge bases, and geopolitics to one question: do we own our tools or do we rent our future?
• choosing a deliberately clickbait title and what it signals about tech culture
• setting up a Fedimint federation on Start9 and what makes it “easy” in practice
• StartOS 0.40 changes, migration realities, backups, and why one-click upgrades are hard
• exposing services safely with Start Tunnels plus Tor being treated as a core service
• running local LLMs on home hardware and why it matters for privacy and control
• the LLM Wiki idea, persistent markdown knowledge, and a portable “second brain”
• why companies want private knowledge bases rather than uploading IP to big AI vendors
• open source models, uncensored variants, and the coming squeeze of AI pricing and regulation
• data centres as strategic assets, energy and cooling constraints, and geopolitical risk
• South Africa’s solar overbuild as an advantage for decentralised AI and Bitcoin tooling
• why AI adoption can be slower than expected in grassroots communities
• Iran, internet shutdown mechanics, Starlink as a signal, and propaganda as a tech weapon
• Atlas Pool shout-out and Tribe of 21 road trips built around Bitcoin circular economies
• travel friction, visas, and how geopolitics hits ordinary people
https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f
https://docs.start9.com/
https://btcpay386617.lndyn.com/login?ReturnUrl=%2F
Links:
www.bitcoinforbusiness.io
X: @gavingre
X: @BTC_4_Biz
Primal: GavinBGreen@primal.net
NOSTR: npub12qv07tpwk8x8fy2uuqczghpappap395npuxvsx8pgksh97pezv7s8r7qta
Welcome And Clickbait Naming
SPEAKER_04Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. This is the great notebook podcast where we talk about human freedom, humanity, technology, philosophy and economics. This is later in London and we have a full time. Today we talk about AI, we talk about the moving, uh everyone started everyone calling and uh we also talk about uh European. We have a quick thing. Awesome boys, nice to have a full house, everyone in the room. Uh and before anybody says anything, I have decided what this month's episode is going to be called, and it's PIP 110, everything you need to know. And then I'm not gonna say anything more about it. I think that's great clickbait right there. What do you guys say?
SPEAKER_00I'll juggle for the call if that's the case. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02I don't uh no comment. My official thoughts.
SPEAKER_04Well, I'm glad that's been done so well. Topic one done. Topic one done. So um uh tech news. Uh Oaken, I know you had a couple of things you wanted to fire up. So why don't you kick off, buddy?
Setting Up A Fedimint Federation
SPEAKER_02Oh, we're gonna okay, cool. We can start with the tech stuff. Um, so firstly, I just want to kind of throw it over to Herman before we we forget where we were before we came online. Um, because I think that's a great, a great starting point um to move with uh as an announcement for some of the stuff that's happening in tech, and we can move into the the sovereign side and a bit of the questions that we had around that. So, Herman, if we could just uh again, just on the ending of that, uh we'll ask this question um how how easy it was for you to, or the experience, what would it what it was like to um set up a federation um you know by yourself using uh a technology that is made for people to, it's open source that you can download on any hardware or you can use it. Um so how did you how did the experience of being able to do that with a Fedimont um as somebody that continues to claim he's non-technical? How did that go?
SPEAKER_00No, no, no, dude. I've become very technical with AI, bro. Like uh I've been doing some amazing things. Um yeah, it was easy. I mean, it was easy from the from the uh from the point onwards where this where the where the start line device came loaded with all the required software. If I had to do that from scratch, it wouldn't be wouldn't be easy. Um but with the start line device, um I suppose you could I think it's on Umbrell as well. Uh I haven't looked at the Fedement um uh on on um up on Umbrel, but I think it's on there. Um but we used Start9, it was super easy, man. Like there were some problems with um setting up the federation at the beginning. There was some sort of a bug that didn't allow us to um make it uh seven of nine or five of seven, and then we went down to three of four, and that was super easy. But I think that's been sorted out. So the next version of the federation will have a five of seven. Um, I think, and I mean it works. It it works pretty well. Uh I've not had any failed failed transactions yet. Um I haven't been using it as my daily wallet, not yet, but I think with the next one, uh I probably will. Um so I mean I'm I'm super excited about it. I was I was getting to a point where because I mean they announced this. Um Obi was on a podcast in 2022 or 2023, I think, where Fetty came out and they made a big splash and they announced this whole thing, and it was very exciting, and everybody was very excited. And over time they just became a little quiet. And I I started suspecting towards the sort of beginning of next beginning of last year, end of 2024, I started suspecting that maybe this was a little bit too too difficult, and they decided to very quietly stop talking about this uh federated uh custody thing. Um because it is technically very challenging, but um yeah, they they pulled it off, and it was we had uh we had the co-founder of Fediment here, um Eric, and he spent six weeks, six weeks with us. Um, and we chatted about that a little bit. So it was a very big technical challenge to to make it work, but now that it's done, it works, it's super easy, man.
StartOS 0.40 Upgrades And Tunnels
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, and and it's great to hear that, like again, somebody that uh calls himself non-technical, um found it pretty easy to do, and it's it's now become easier for all of those on the call. I know Herman and Ricky have been uh waiting in in with baited breath, so to say, for uh Start 9040 to actually come out, which originally was supposed to be 036, and then it became a complete rewrite that happened like three different times. I don't know if anybody's seen the interview that Matt Hill did um with uh Guys One where he spoke about it. But yeah, it's out it's out in beta. You can go to go download the beta if you want to wait, or if you want to use the beta software before the official beta release, but um you can go and migrate right now from 0351 over um with most of your services. So there's a whole uh step-by-step guide. And the reason I'm bringing this up is because um what everybody wanted, and also like things like your BTC pay server, Ricky, um, that you might be running on there. Now you can very easily um tunnel and open different services, individual services on your start nine um operating system up to the internet. So instead of going by a reverse product, all of that's been taken care of by another product called Start Tunnel, and you'll be able to use that. Um, there's also a Startbot that lives with you, and it you can basically have 24-7 um customer support and have it do stuff for you on your server if you want to. So you don't need things like CloudBot or OpenCloor or Hermes or any of them for your server if you want. It's an option. Tor has been abstracted as a as it's now a service that you so all of these things have been done to make click, click, click, save, and you're running. Um basically, even Fediemint will become a lot easier as it as it gets rolled out for 040. Um, and that just means open source is becoming better, guys. Um, the hardware that people are installing, this these types of things is an operating system, it's a full operating system. So now, because you can run things like OLAMA with click, click, click, you can also host your own local LLMs if your hardware can take it, right? So depending on what you're running Star OS on. So now you can have everything be sovereign. So you can really do sovereign computing from your pictures to your uh finance with Bitcoin to your AI interactions to all of that can now be um locally hosted and held by you, or individuals if you see it as a fediment setup.
SPEAKER_00Just a quick question on that. Can I ask a question? Uh I want to know when when does that become a one-button install? A one-click button install.
SPEAKER_01The one-click, it's it's okay. Well, you the the first click is marketplace because you have to see where you're and then you just click install. It's literally boom, install. No, no, no.
SPEAKER_00Actual, I mean the actual upgrade to version four.
SPEAKER_02Oh, so that that will become uh after beta six. We're currently in beta five right now. Um, I'm running beta five on my machine. Beta six, I think, should be out sometime this week. And in that it should be easier. So everything is being rolled out systematically. Like currently, there isn't a Raspberry Pi image, so you can't run it on a Raspberry Pi. You can run it on an old Dell laptop like I'm doing, but I can't test it on the Raspberry Pis yet because that image hasn't been finished. So it we're still in beta, we're not in the full release, but you can use it. I mean, I've been using 040 since Alpha 10 or 6.
SPEAKER_00So speaking is what even behalf speaking on behalf of all the non-technical people, um, at what point uh at what point will you log into your start 9 interface and see a one-click button upgrade to version 4?
SPEAKER_02Well, I don't know if there'll be a full just one-click if it's that easy, because again, it's different architectures, right? It's a complete rewrite from what 0351 was. It's so even some services you you'll have to, so even in the migration process, you have to do a backup. Then you need to do a complete, currently, you need to do a complete flash of 040 onto your hardware, which isn't difficult. Again, you use Berliner Edge or whatever, but most technical people won't want to do any of this. Um, so currently that's how you do it. It will be an easier like click upgrade, like you do now, like for 040 to move from beta four to five. I click an upgrade button, and that happens. So that will eventually happen, but it's not as easy because some of the actual uh services aren't built the same for the two different architectures. So 0351 and 040, they're not it's not able to just quickly port over for some. Some of them, yes, it's very easy. It just copies over from your backup and boom, you're you're like ready to go. Um, but yes, the guide is very specific on how you can do this right now and on the fact that there will be a future release for that.
SPEAKER_00Can you can you drop a link to that guide in the chat? Yeah, or maybe share it in the show notes.
SPEAKER_02I mean, I'll I'll give you the because the thing is the docs give you all of them now. So you still see the there's a new version of all the docs, the 0351 docs, uh start os uh 040 docs, how to package all those things, even the Bitcoin guide um that's been curated by Matt also to help out. So this is the docs link. I hope you guys can see it. So yeah, it's again uh as somebody that loves sovereign computing and being able to host things yourself. So if people switch you off because they don't like you or what you said or whatever, and want to chat from you, they can't um and shouldn't be able to, and you should still be able to communicate. And I think tools like Stardo S, um, Linux, all these types of things are are very important for us to be able to do that and not fall into the trap of things like Windows.
SPEAKER_00So on the other side. So, what it what it sounds like is that at some point there will be an easier way to upgrade, but you'll basically have to back up your entire server and you'll essentially reinstall the entire operating system. You won't be you won't be updating the operating system with the existing services remaining. You'll have to essentially what you're essentially gonna be doing is you're gonna be wiping the server and you're migrating to an entirely new version. But there will be an easier way to do that in the future where you'll probably be able to do that in a more non-technical way.
LLM Wiki And Persistent Knowledge
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, currently, yeah, that that would be the good outlook to have. But um, again, Matt and Aiden are wizards, so they're probably gonna come up with a way to port it easily for the one click that you want. They know that it's what people are gonna mostly need, over 80-90% of the people that use the product. Um, it's just not easy to do it that way currently. So if you currently want to run beta and you want to get started and you want the full architecture, the new look, the new everything, um, then it's it's firstly it's always good to back up your server. Um, you should be doing that period period periodically, but at any time that you do an upgrade, an update, you should have an uh a backup in case something goes wrong. Um in this case, it's just a good place to port from as well. So it's it's good um all around to have it as a practice. But yes, I do understand what you're saying, and so do Matt then, and everybody that's a lot smarter than me and more technical and capable than me that is working on the actual code base. And and um, yeah, that there will be a push button to upgrade from O2. But if you're older than O351, that's not gonna be a possibility for you. You'd have to be at the latest and all your services upgraded to the latest, and then you'd be able to you know do the backup and then from there move on. Got it. I I actually the doc stuff. Awesome. Sorry, that took a bit longer than I thought it was gonna take on that one. Uh Gavin, would you like to move on from tech or you want to move to the next tech topic?
SPEAKER_04Because it's kind of kind of yeah, seeing the next tech topic while we're in the flow.
SPEAKER_02Uh Ricky, what do you think about Coparthy's LLM wiki that came out about uh the basically self-evolving knowledge in research?
SPEAKER_05I haven't, I'm unaware. Um, as you guys know, I've been neck deep in the end of fiscal year filings at the moment, so that's been consuming my uh attention. So I haven't actually, I'm not up to date that.
SPEAKER_02Okay, I'm sharing it in the sorry guys. Uh I thought this was one that because it it took it took the AI world by storm, basically. Um yeah, here's a write-up. So and uh just to I'll read you just a bit from the from the top, uh, LLM wiki is a pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs. This is an idea file, it is designed to be copy-pasted to your own LLM agent. Uh, its goal is to communicate the high-level idea, but your agent will build out specifics in collaboration with you. So basically, the core idea is what most people experience with LLMs and documents. It looks like RAG, um, like it retrieves, and then anyway, you upload a collection of files, the LLM retrieves relevant chunks to query at a time and generates an answer. This works because LLM's rediscovering knowledge from scratch on every question. There's no accumulation, ask a subtle question that requires synthesizing five documents, and the LLM has to uh find and piece together the relevant fragments every time. Nothing is built up. Uh, notebook LM uh chat GPT file uploads, and most systems work this way. The idea is different. Instead of just retrieving from raw documents every query time, uh, the LLM incrementally builds and maintains a persistent wiki, like an actual wiki, a structured interlinked collection of markdown files that sits between you and the raw sources. So, with this, it's it's technically just having a second brain like oblivion, I mean oblivion, uh obsidian, and it being the base that all the things you throw in, your LLM is then updating those files to say this is what we've ingested as the you know notes that you took down in your meetings versus the articles that you were reading, and you feed it in to a funnel, and then it goes through a research loop to go and find out, you know, according to your likes and dislikes that you've given it, it then goes out and finds all that information and comes back. So it's like a research assistant um on steroids that builds and learns from what it has built, and that it builds smarter, it builds leaner, it builds better context for the way that you want it to be displayed and uh presented. So that's basically uh the concept of it. It's a bit a different way of retrieving and building upon memory in a digital space so that your your agent or LLM never forgets you or the conversations you've had.
SPEAKER_04Uh, is this similar to how the agents like OpenClaw work with that sort of persistent memory that uh they sort of get so-called personalized or customized or smarter over time because it's uh it doesn't forget the context. It has you know persistent memory. Is that a similar approach?
Private AI Agents For Business
SPEAKER_02Um, so actually, it's a complete read redefinition. The approach that OpenFloor and them were using wasn't working, right? They weren't remembering. What they were doing was they were literally reading from the entire context length of everything that you've had, and then including that in the query that you were saying, hi, what is the weather today? Now it's trying to include your conversations from like three weeks ago. The problem is its context size is only so big. It's like the Bitcoin blockchain, you can only put so much in a block, right? Now you're trying to force more into that block, it's impossible. Right? It's the same reason you can't run Bitcoin properly on an eight gig RAM because the the the UTXO set is way bigger than eight gigabytes of RAM now, right? So now you're trying to funnel it down. So it actually shrink context and throws away some of what you gave it and then tries to make new context and work with that. And in every iteration of that, it becomes more stupid, basically. But what this does is it says, hey, there is an entire personal web of knowledge that you have access to. Go along the web and go and find the knowledge you need and only use that. Don't bring everything into it. So, in that, it's it's smarter retrieval, but also smarter storage. So now you can take it from I built this knowledge base with OpenClaw and give it to Claude Code or give it to Chat GPT and literally move your second brain around and say, hey, this is how I like things organized. This is it's like yeah, it's like a personal, personal research assistant type of thing.
SPEAKER_05The way the way I understand this is it means that you don't have to, if you're a company, for example, like we are, you don't have to um store your knowledge base with open AI with fucking Sam Altman, um, which is concerning to say the least. Um you can have your own knowledge base that's privately hosted on your own virtual private machine on your own private cloud or even on your own server, um, and then you keep all of that sensitive information locked down, and your AI that is also privately run can query that, and you don't have to have Sam Altman with his probes all up in your business.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, or anybody else.
SPEAKER_04Sorry, I'm going quickly. Did anybody see that um Twitter post going around with the guy asking Chat GPT, which month has the uh it's spelt with an X? Did any of you guys see that?
SPEAKER_02No, no, no.
SPEAKER_04Okay, well I'll I'll post it up. Um it's absolutely hilarious. So the guy's talking to ChatGPT and it says, okay, uh, which which year uh which month of the year it spelled with an X? And ChatGPT comes back and says, no, it's October. Um the guy's like, okay, cool, uh, can you spell that for me? So it sort of spells it out, and then it says, Oh no, actually it's uh T and a T close together, sounds like an X, but it's not really an X. So the guy was like, okay, well, so then which month really has an X in it? Oh no, no, no, no, don't worry, it's February, don't definitely February. And it went round in a loop, it's just the dumbest thing ever. Uh and this guy apparently uh he posted all these videos all the time of finding really dumb things that these LLMs are doing. And he seems to like ChatGPT for the dumb stuff. Um, but anyway, just sorry to interrupt the conversation, but I just that that had been stitches.
SPEAKER_02No, I know, I know which guy you're talking about, but it we'll come back to that just quickly. Ricky, uh, before you lose your chain on that, um, did you want to go on or can I just uh it's what you were saying about the businesses?
SPEAKER_05You can carry on.
SPEAKER_02All right, so that guy is hilarious, firstly, Gavin. Um, I've seen another one of him doing that. And the point here is not that your your AI agent is stupid, it's your LLM has been trained in a specific way and has guardrails on certain things it's allowed to do and not do. Like ChatGPT basically can't say, I don't know. It can say I can't do that, but it can't say I don't know, basically. So it's trying to always give you an answer. It's always it's like the friend that tries to please everybody, right? But unlike steroids, like it's really trying to please you so that you don't not be its friend. Um so like when you look at it like this, the question is what low, like large language model LLM are you using? Are you using GPT 6.5? Are you using GPT 2.3? Because again, something that was great a year ago is rubbish in terms of what the what is capable today on any standards, not even just the paid models. I'm talking about the freed model. So, for what I would say is anybody really interested in this, um, for most of you, you won't have to care. Um, but go and look at what's happening in the open source world of LRMs. And what people are doing there is they're taking these models like Gemma 4 that was released, and they're um what they're calling like there's a like obliterators, like they're basically uncensoring these models. So the model doesn't tell you, I can't help you with that. So, what you do with that type of uncensored model is what we're doing as a company now as open trading enterprises and like with other partners that we're um uh collaborating with, is we're integrating these type of systems into companies for them and saying, hey, what is it you need? And like let's let's get that done for you. Because most people, as Herman has pointed out many times on here, are not going to go sit in front of a computer, look at terminal, and run all these commands and you know, battle with, oh, maybe it's just my internet versus I don't know what I'm doing. Um, but at the same time, they also need the service. So companies are going to be using you know their FAQs, their training documents, and they're feeding that into their wikis, and that becomes the knowledge base for the company. That's what they're doing in China with whole school systems, right? Like children are prompting the school computers, and the AI agents at the school are only built on whatever is the knowledge base of the school and how. So anything you need to know about your curriculum, your studies, the school, the way the school's rules work, all of that for students and teachers is there. So that's think about that in a company structure. But then my company one won't look like your company one, right? Because there the IP comes in, that's where the flavors and everything. So the people that build that out, orchestrators will probably be uh what we'll call them, but everybody will eventually have this type of system. The question is, like Ricky said, are you going to give this to anthropic and open AI to have all your info like Google already has, and you're going to cry later when they switch you off and say no, or push up the price to use Claude because you can't go anywhere else? Or are you going to learn how to use open source, which is just as good but runs a little bit slower and run it on your own infrastructure that you probably already have? Like I run some of these on an eight gigabyte RAM. It doesn't work well. But if you have a 16 gigabyte RAM computer or a 32 gigabyte computer, you can run a lot of models that can do way more than what you could think you would need in your business. Like you don't need the 125 gigabyte RAM to what are you trying to build? Are you what are you doing with it? Like truly. So you also have to look at what are your needs and stuff like that. So in that, I it comes back to Bitcoin to say a lot of Bitcoiners are building along the sense to say, what is the smallest type of logical model I can run with an agent on hardware that also has a Bitcoin wallet and can maybe send transactions via you know mesh core, via the mesh network or via Bluetooth that you can do by uh uh uh using uh BitChat. And using these as a method of if they switch off the internet, if Elon Musk decides I'm taking over the world, or whoever decides I'm switching off everybody's internet, how do we communicate? How do we share value? How does that all still happen? It will have to be with the tools that open source people have been building and perfecting over. So it's time to start seeing how commercialized these things can be used in scale and how we can make that easier. So people don't say no, it's too technical. They're like, oh, it's easier than Facebook. Okay, cool, let's go. You know, sorry.
Digital Sovereignty And Rising AI Costs
SPEAKER_04Yeah, one of the news items I had actually flagged was uh Microsoft open sourced something called BitNet. I mean, why they called it that, I don't know. But that idea seems to be the same thing to allow large AI models to run on uh smaller CPUs, smaller RAM, all that sort of thing. Uh and I see NVIDIA I now also announced that they're going to come up with an open source thing called NemoClaw, uh, AI agent, um, obviously looking at the success of uh OpenClaw and how that's going. So uh yeah, kind of interesting. Um just interesting topics that I picked up over there. I don't know if you've got anything to add about that. Um, Okan.
SPEAKER_02Uh just to end off the topic, I think uh there's some things that we need to talk about geopolitically, probably. Um, but yeah, so Jensen Huang went on stage and he he said every every company is going to need their own version of a Nemo claw or an open claw because not having one is like saying, I don't have a printer, I don't I don't have a fax machine, I don't have email. It's like saying I don't have email in this age. It's like saying, I'm sorry, you can't email me. I don't have email, I don't have a website, I don't have signal, I don't have WhatsApp, you just can't. So it's it's literally like crippling your business to not figure out or have somebody figure it out for you. Um, this is why some countries like China had all you know markets of people showing other people how to do this. And around the world, you're seeing workshops pop up and and festivals where people are showing people how do you actually set up your own open floor or your own Hermes agent or your own Pi agent. All of them used for different reasons. Um Hermes is the one I think is the best for me. Uh, I've run them all, but uh the truth of the matter is it's going to be a part of your company, or your company is going to be behind your competitors because it can do what no human can do while we're all asleep. It's not asleep. As long as it's about electricity and whatever you needed it to do, it can run. So every company needs one. And that's what he was saying when he announced Nemo Claw, which they built with more safeguards than OpenClaw has, but their way of doing it again. They're going to use the NVIDIA, like the NemoTron uh models and stuff on that, same way that Anthropic through Claude will only allow you to use Claude Code and Claude Opus. And it's not allowing you to use any other models through their harness. And that's why things like Open Code exist that say, hey, we'll actually give you access to free models and you can use ours, or you can bring your own API fees. And that's what you're looking at here. Like, how will your setup? Most people will just pay Claude, the 200 US a month or a year. But when Claude makes that 2000, it's not going to be viable for a lot of them. Now they put their entire infrastructure around something they can't afford anymore. It's it's the Microsoft model, right? Like you let people build and then you take from what they've built and then you gatekeep it because you've got the numbers. Now, once you do that, what does your workflow look like? It's dependent on what Anthropic or OpenAI says. And who are they dependent on? Where are they located? If Donald Trump decides something, this is my segue to you, Ricky. If Donald Trump decides something, what does the tech side of this and the the sovereignty of the infrastructure that you're using look like? The same thing that the EU was looking at trying to get away from Microsoft now and dropping Palacio and all that. Um, it's about digital sovereignty because people are starting to realize your data is digital oil. So who controls the oil in the digital sphere? Um, and then I'll stop there too fast.
SPEAKER_05And you know for a fact that companies like Anthropic and OpenAir are going to be censored to the guilds once the regulations catch up with us. Um you know for a fact that there's some kind of bureaucrats all over the world at the moment just salivating on how they're going to regulate AI and they're writing laws about what you can and can't use it for and what it can and can't do, and etc. etc. Um, so if you don't have an open source model you're running yourself, you're gonna get caught up in some bureaucrats' fever dream, um, which is probably gonna be terrible. So, besides them jacking the price up on you, um, the quality is just gonna degrade over time as the regulations catch up with it. Um, prime examples, look at crypto exchanges. Crypto exchanges, bag we were all old enough to remember when we first got into the space. You pretty much do what you want. Um, it was super easy, user experience was great, and now they suck so much, they're horrible to use because the regulators have got it all over it. Um, and like, I mean, I've been on a crypto exchange in US, but it's uh yeah, it's it's like you can just see where it's going, you know, and then let's get stifled and regulated to death. Um, so yeah, I think it's gonna be interesting to see what happens to the AI wars. And then Oaken do something you mentioned there now, is where's your data sitting? Like if your data is sitting in a data center in the UAE, it could get taken up by a shy drone. And then if your entire business is running on all that information, all of a sudden your AI tools are gone, which can really impact you. Luckily, it's quite early in the game, so also people aren't super reliant on the chat. But can you imagine in two, three years' time when entire business models are solely reliant on AI and a data center goes down? It just happens that your data center went down before your data was being stored. Um, sure, there's failovers and redundancies, etc., but some of that data is going to be gone forever. So there's all of that to take into account. Um and then obviously, like that, like I say, data is digital oil. Um, I suppose there's a reason why they're building all these data centers in the UAE. It's very that part's very strange to me, but like they're expanding the big time for the UAE. And I assume it's because there's cheap energy there. That's probably it. But there's no water. So cooling is you know gonna be tricky um on those things. Um I suppose they've got diesel, which comes back to the energy thing. Um, but the UAE is extremely exposed. So you know, if you just compare the landscape in the UAE versus the landscape in Saudi in uh Iran, which is just across the Persian Gulf, not very far away, a few dozens of miles away. It's like cheese and chalk. Iran is just mountains, the UAE is just flat deserts. Very hard to defend.
SPEAKER_02Just before you go on, just on the data center point, like a report came out that over half, I think it was over 60% of data centers that were planned to be built in the US for these AI purposes are not gonna be built. So, what we're gonna have is a funnel of available actual resources to process anything. So all prices will have to go up. They're gonna like who's actually who's running the LLMs, right? Where they're running is in data centers. Now, if less data centers are being built, but more people are using these AI data or LLMs, right? Then of course you're gonna either overburden what's here, and people are gonna have to have tiered systems to say, wait, listen, to be able to use this, we're gonna have to increase the price by 300 US. It used to be 20 US a month. Now we're telling you it's 320 US if you want access to where you used to have it, because we can't build more data centers. That we just don't have the resources, everything is it's impossible, right? So over 60% of them, as far as I've read, have been canceled in the US alone. So who knows about the rest globally? So it makes another shift here to say it's not just the data or the money, it's even the political will of where where are these companies situated? When Anthropic first said, hey, we're not going to you know let you kill people autonomously with our technology, and open AI was like, What's up? We're in the room two. Um what happens? The conversation is what's the next conversation that we're not part of that we didn't hear about or has already happened, you know, on what else is going to play out and how those costs will be burdened on who? The rest of the world, because you're all using the technology. It's like the US dollar all over again, but but with tech flu out.
SPEAKER_05The problem that people are gonna face with with centralizing data um in the data farms as well, is that they become very vulnerable and they have to be somewhere that they're close to energy and they're close to cooling facilities. So there's like limitations on where you can put these things. It's very similar to Bitcoin mining, you know, like they've got to be near where they're stranded energy, they can be used. Um, and so like those two things are gonna develop kind of um simultaneously together. Uh, so you can't just go and plonk a data center down anywhere. Um, that's gonna come with costs. So, Russia, for example, they can put their data centers in the middle of Siberia, very close to energy sources where it's really cold, they can save a lot on cooling, and we no one can get to them, no one can bomb them, you know. But like come back to the UAE example, sure, you've got cheap energy, um, but you've got to put them on the coast because that's where they're close to water, so you can cool them, or your D cell plants, which are once again on the coast. But then they can be hit by the Shahid drones from Iran, you know, and if you're using AI to target Iran, makes sense they're gonna take out your data centers because then you've got no more targeting. Um, so it becomes like a very interesting geopolitical play, you know, where these things actually sit. So, like, where's the brain of your of your army going to be sitting if you're gonna be running your military and AI? Um, but then too, South Africa's in a very unique position because we have a huge amount of residential properties that overinvested in solar because of load shedding. Load shedding has now subsequently gone away. It may yet come back, but all these people all of a sudden have a lot of solar and they will have more than enough capacity to run their own LLMs with their own energy requirements from their own energy requirements there and and and you know from their own solar production. So that becomes very interesting. Yeah, what does that do to South Africans over the next 20 years who all of a sudden will be the people that will have access to the facilities to actually run their own local AIs? Um, that's super interesting. I don't know if many countries are sitting in that same position. Like there's a lot of people who have solar panels in Scotland, but they just have the panel, they don't have the power that comes from that. That's funny.
SPEAKER_04It was probably cheaper for them to put a solar panel on their roof than fix a leaky roof in Scotland.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and I mean it was obviously all part of the government boondoggle um in the UK to be like, let's go green, net zero, all that bullshit. Uh, and then they convinced a bunch of people that it's a good idea to put solar panels on your roof in Scotland and sell power back to the grid. And you're like, okay, you're selling them three watts a day. It's just ridiculous.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but it's not because you see you see Herman's computer behind him that has the the lights and stuff twirling.
SPEAKER_05That's how I said Herman's old gaming computer.
SPEAKER_02I think so, man. Herman's still a gamer, bro. Like Doom still runs on that thing, bro.
SPEAKER_00I only I only play strategy games, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Oh, so Commodore Conquer, we're playing Commodore Conquer. I'm with you, my brother. We can do it.
SPEAKER_05Obviously, the best.
Why AI Adoption Is Still Hard
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so what I was saying is always was. But but the cool thing with with what you have back there is remember when they said nobody's going to like have personal computers, like in the 90s, they were like, nobody's ever gonna have a personal computer. Why would people do that? Like why in every house, and now every household has multiple laptops, right? So I think what you're gonna end up having is almost like a chosen horse with this whole AI thing, is because and South Africa is a perfect example, right? Over like residential electricity is like, or corporate electricity, if you want to say it like that, is like oversaturated, where you can say, hey, if we can get GPUs, right, with at least 16 gigabytes of RAM or VRAM, uh to that price to come down. Maybe South Africa starts you know generating their own uh uh uh uh GPUs. And this GPU, you can also remember, you can install things on a GPU. You can install Start OS on a GPU, you can install a Bitcoin node on a GPU, and also run your AI on that same GPU in every household off of your actual solar that you already have the panels for. Now what you're doing is you're you're decentralizing, you're making everybody sovereign, but you're also now making a way of you're not only decentralizing your your finance, but also your your your knowledge. Because again, if we have ways to interact with each other that is peer-to-peer communication and and and value-wise, we can do everything. I can write a book, post it on my server. Ricky, I send the link to my my blog that Ricky uh sometimes goes past, or his agent does, and Ricky's like, hey, I want to actually buy that book, let me pay for it in Bitcoin. That entire thing, the purchase, the delivery, all of that happened without me and Ricky having to have a conversation. We didn't have to say, send emails to each other, none of that. I don't even know, I don't know who Ricky is. I just know somebody bought my book and I got Bitcoin, and that's it. And you can do this easier with being able to run things like GPUs. And I really think it's a thing for South Africans to look at is building out their own GPUs so that the cost can come way down. I mean, the the South Africans want to be able to do it, I think. And that would be great. Every household with a GPU and a Bitcoin uh node and maybe a Bitcoin miner in a country that you can spend Bitcoin almost anywhere.
SPEAKER_03I've got a question for Herman about uh AI.
SPEAKER_05Are you seeing people in your um circles in the charity at Kasi starting to use uh AI to uh you know put assist them in their in their day-to-day lives?
SPEAKER_00Uh yes and no. It's uh it's way more challenging than you'd imagine to get somebody to to pick up the tool and to start using it. Um there could be many reasons for that. I guess it's uh probably unfamiliarity or intimidation or whatever the case may be. But once they do once they do, it's uh the the difference is like night and day. I can I finally I finally receive emails that make sense. I don't have to I don't have to decipher decipher emails anymore. I get emails that don't have spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes, and it takes me two minutes to read rather than half an hour. Um which is uh which is fantastic. Um no, it's it's really it's it's it's like it's like night and day the the difference. Um but it's it's surprisingly it's surprisingly difficult to get people to to start using it. Um not difficult, just it it it takes a long time to get them to to to jump in, you know. Um but I'm I'm I'm very optimistic about the impact that'll have if people just uh people just start start picking it up, you know. Because it's it's like it's like anything else. You gotta you gotta practice using it. You gotta you know, if if if even even if all you're doing is chatting to the thing, um, you still have to practice chatting to it. Because it's like, well, what what do I ask? You know? Um the first time I try to write a little program with AI, I actually I actually had to sit here for like 10 minutes just to think about what do I actually want to write? Like I don't even know, you know, it's like it's it seems it seems so obvious, but it's it's not it's not entirely obvious. Um so yeah.
SPEAKER_02Do you think as somebody, Herman?
SPEAKER_04Sorry, Gavin, go no, Oaken, go for it.
SPEAKER_02No, I just wanted to know as somebody that that that saw it in a community now twice, you know, technology coming in that wasn't there before, uh, first with Bitcoin and now with AI, Herman, how do you do you feel like AI has better marketing and it's big it's a bit easier for people to want to pick it up than Bitcoin did? Or do you think that the drive that Bitcoin had behind it was more authentic and and homegrown almost? That that made it maybe not easier, quote unquote, but less challenging than people adopting uh AI in what you're saying.
SPEAKER_00Uh my feeling is it's gonna be more challenging for people to adopt AI because it's not obvious what problem it solves for them. Like it's not it's not obvious. Um it was more it was more obvious to make the case for what what problem Bitcoin solves. Like, you know, you know, oh you can't you can't send money to your to your to your uncle that lives in the Transky, or you can't uh you know, you've you you can't make digital payments, so you have to walk down to the local shop to buy your phone credit rather than sit sit at your house and do it do it from your phone. Like it's it's a more obvious problem. AI, it's like, well, what what problem, what immediate problem does it solve for me? It's it's not it's not entirely obvious. I mean, I've I've been using it and so have you, and so you know exactly what immediate problem it solves for you. Um but my feeling is that it's not it's not immediately obvious you know why if you're spelling mistakes is something that you should definitely try and correct with AI when you're sending emails.
SPEAKER_04Uh Herman, that's like oh interesting what you just said there, because uh my sort of experience with people uh in my area, and obviously I'm not in a grassroots community, but my experience is the other way around. Um everybody is getting excited about using AI, and nobody is interested in using Bitcoin. Like my normie friends, I mean they I think they're just blank there every time uh the word Bitcoin comes up. So I don't even really mention it anymore. Um, but that's uh really interesting that uh uh in your communities there, uh Bitcoin is actually solving a real problem that AR isn't, and it's a sort of seemed uh opposite in if you want to call it the sort of first world community or something like that, where everyone's getting excited about this AR thing. I hadn't really thought about it, but that's that's quite an interesting insight from your side from you there.
Iran Bitcoin Rumours And Internet Shutdown
SPEAKER_00I mean, my my opinion on this issue is that I think people who do get excited about AI and people who use AI on a regular basis, including myself, by the way, I use it every single day. Not not Nearly in as advanced a capacity as maybe Oaken, for example, that's running his own agents and testing every single model that's out there. I'm I'm basically copying, copy pasting um, you know, terminal outputs to try and uh troubleshoot issues on my computer that I've never been able to solve before. That's that's the sort of the most advanced capacity in which I'm using it. But but still, any anybody that's using AI and getting excited about it is a tiny, tiny, tiny minority of the general population. Um and I think uh we we must remember that. Um so if you're if you're in a group that is using AI and getting excited about it, you should remember that you're talking to a tiny minority of the of the global population. I think more than 80% of people or more, I think it's I think it's more than 70% of people have never touched the chatbot. Um you know so and and and you know more than more than 95 or 97% of people have never used AI in any capacity that's more advanced than talking to a chatbot. So yeah, that and and so obviously if you're you know dealing with sort of grassroots stuff, you're you're dealing with you're dealing with people that are closer to the majority of the people on the planet rather than you know people who are way more advanced. Um so I don't know. It's just I I guess I wouldn't I wouldn't say there's huge excitement about Bitcoin and no excitement about AI. That's not quite the the setup that that we have here. It's just that with Bitcoin it was more obvious how they could improve their lives, but it's not like it created huge excitement. And with AI, it just takes a little bit more explaining as to, well, this is how you should use it, this is what you should try and do with it, try and ask it this question, try and ask it that question. You know, when you're writing an email, copy paste it into the chat bot first, ask it to correct your mistakes, see where it goes from there, that kind of thing. It just takes more yeah, it just takes more explanation, but it's not it's not as if it's not as if the reaction is the polar opposite. That's that's not that's not the point I was trying to make.
SPEAKER_05Guys, I've got a I've got a slight topic change um to request. Can we discuss if Iran is actually accepting Bitcoin as payment for tolls across the Straits of Homer's? As interesting as uh as the AI conversation is.
SPEAKER_04100% they are definitely, definitely doing it, no doubt about it. Um if you can think it's if you can think about it, it's being done. It's as simple as that. Uh I remember my mom many, many years ago, uh, when she was like an office clerk, she was uh working on Excel, and she always said to me, if you think there's an easier way with Excel, there is definitely an easier way. You just haven't discovered it yet. Now, I mean that was probably 30 years ago or something, but I think it holds true in general. If one person had the idea, hey, it's possible to sell oil for Bitcoin, I promise you a thousand people have had that idea and they are active with it. How you prove it is another story, but I I'm absolutely convinced it's happening.
SPEAKER_05I'm very disappointed in that story. I was hoping you're gonna say your mom was part of the IRGC and she's got inside info. Yeah, look, so I don't know. I've just seen articles floating around by Bitcoin magazine, and Lord knows they talk a lot of shit. So I don't know. And I've said I've seen it crypto be mentioned. I don't know specifically if they've mentioned Bitcoin directly. And if so, we should start seeing$2 million payments on the dot, which should be a pretty you know, quite easy for the autist to pick up um on memorable if they're paying on-chain. That is, they probably should be paying with lightning, but then you're making two million dollar payments by lightning. It's a bit sketchy at the moment, um, unless each boat is running a self-hosted node with well-connected channels, which they are probably not. So it would obviously be done on-chain. Um, yeah, do we have do we know anything more about this?
SPEAKER_04Well, well, I would just say that if they do if they'll only be doing$2 million payments if they're stupid. They will uh be throwing numbers around that are close to the two million dollar mark, like basically random number that's very close to$2 million.
SPEAKER_05Um Well, it's$1 per barrel per ship. So it's actually dependent on how many barrels on the ship they add, they work at a dollar mark.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, but uh a smart guy will just say, listen, I know it's a two million dollar bill, but I'm gonna pay you 2.135.37 cents, and you put the rest in credit for me for my next one, then I'll pay you$1.9 something, something, something and balance it off. Um, because I think non-round numbers are more difficult to track. Uh a$2 million payment is an easy one to uh uh surveil, I suppose.
SPEAKER_05It is. But the other the other thing is you would expect them, not the Iranians, the IRGC, not to come back and say it's one dollar per barrel. They should rather come back and say it's X amount of satoshis per barrel or X amount of Chinese wan. Because effectively what they're doing, I mean, why price things in dollars if the dollar system is trying to destroy you, right? Which is what's basically happening in Iran. So that's an interesting one. But I suppose they've got to appeal to their market so the market knows what they're talking about.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I think what they're doing there is they just using the pricing everybody understands. Yeah, uh, that's like on the flyer. The poster says one dollar per barrel. And then when you inquire, when you hit the contact page and you say I'm interested, they go, Yeah, yeah, we've got this Bitcoin option on the side, you know. Uh, maybe let's talk about that.
SPEAKER_05Not it's actually a thousand sets, a thousand sets per barrel. Yeah, look, it's it's an interesting one. Um I know I I mean I've been I don't know this, but I've been saying for years that uh that Iran has been mining Bitcoin at a state level for a long time. Makes sense when they've got sanctions on the oil, they've got a nuclear, um, they've got a few nuclear power plants, well in development, but they got Bushar, which is up and running, nuclear power plant. Um, they had apparently underground nuclear power plants um at Ishfahan um and at Fordo, which were allegedly bombed and allegedly obliterated. So who knows? Uh apparently there's a big drop in according to Simon Dixon, there's a big drop in hash rates right after they dropped the bunker buses on Fordo. So maybe that took some power up line. But if you're Iran and you were not mining Bitcoin at this up to this point in time, you're really stupid, and they're not stupid. So, I mean, my underlying assumption has been that they've been mining Bitcoin, same with North Korea, you know, same with a lot of other places. Um, but surely this changes things tremendously. If they come out in the open and say, listen, we have we accepting Bitcoin as payments exclusively, because like why would they accept tether as payment? That's dumb. They'll have their money frozen. Like they're not gonna do that. Um, so yeah, I don't know what you guys think of this.
SPEAKER_04Well, I'm glad you mentioned the uh tether thing because that was one of the um, I think sort of the the bullet points, probably from last month's round uh roundup chat, where uh a few billion dollars worth of tether, tether was uh frozen recently. So I'm sure the guys know that they're not flipping stupid. Um interesting thing though, um, on the Iran topic is they've shut down the internet across that entire country. Um so I wonder if that, I mean, they obviously would run their own, uh they would have access to their own uh hashing setup, whatever they've got. Um, but has anybody heard anything? Uh, how's the country operating without internet access? Is there anything from out of there?
SPEAKER_05I've got some info on this actually. So it's not that the internet is cut off completely. The external connection to the internet to outside of Iran is cut off. The intranet, so Iran's own local networks are all working fine. So people on their own local apps, etc., can all still communicate with each other, all their own local communications are still happening, etc. etc. So the reason why they cut that off um is because there was a color revolution attempt before this, before the war started. Obviously, I don't know if anyone's read confessions of economic hitman. It should be a required reading for any Bitcoin at this point in time. But the steps of what they were trying to do with Iran were well advanced. So they first um I mean this has been going on for decades, but but you know, they they started a currency crisis in Iran, and Scott was sent Treasury US Treasury Secretary is out in public saying this, that they were running operations, you know, reducing the amount of dollars available um in the black market through whatever means, um, and and trying to foment a currency crisis, which resulted in an inflationary crisis of the real in um Iran, which was specifically designed to get people out on the streets. And then when they get people out on the streets, those people are being agitated by Mossad and CIA agents on the ground, and they're giving them weapons. Trump came out and admitted to this, they were giving them a lot of weapons, and they gave them 10,000 Starlink terminals. And so this is why they cut off the internet to the outside world, is because they were receiving directives via the internet, obviously, these agents on the ground for how to try to start this color revolution. Um, so if something very interesting happened, um, they kind of flipped the script on them because they shut down the internet, they could then triangulate where these Starlink terminals were picking up you know connections from, and they could track down those agents. And the people with the Starlink terminals were the Musar and the CIA agents who were coordinating, getting instruction from Washington from Tel Aviv, um, and uh you know, driving the action on the ground. So they tracked them all down, they listed them, they document who their names are, and they've raised it all in, and a lot of them were killed. So the the counterintelligence in Iran was obviously on top of this. Um the other interesting thing I've noticed is like the the CIA and Mossad started a re try to start a revolution in Iran, and so they try to have it both ways. So they start a revolution, then when they get caught and their agents get killed, they're like, Oh, look, this is uh the government clamping down on innocent protesters. So they try to act, you know, pull the victim card. But if they had to pulled it off, you know, they'd be dancing in the streets saying, Look how clever we are. We staged this, you know, this revolution um and we overthrew the regime. So, and and by doing that, they would have killed a lot of people in government and people in Iran. So innocent life is not, they don't care about that. It's just like it's just a cover. Um, at the end of the day, they went they want to take the Iranian regime down. And that might have something to do with the fact they don't have a Rothschild control central bank. You know, we've pointed alluded to that before. Uh, that could have something to do with it. But uh, yeah, the internet thing in Iran is is clearly not true because how the hell are they producing those Lego videos and distributing them to the rest of the world on a day hourly basis?
SPEAKER_02I was gonna say I was gonna say, has anybody watched the Lego videos? Those things are hilarious and weird. It's amazing. It's like the best propaganda. It's like watching. Uh remember when when uh the the movie came out, Team America? Back in the day, like early 2000s. It's like that, it's like that with Lego. It's crazy. I was like, these guys did what?
SPEAKER_05But it's like the South Park guys are actually writing the script for the Iranians. But what it does prove to you though, that's probably not happening, but what it does prove to you though is that the Iranians are internet native, like they are so up to date in the internet culture. This is not a backward civilization. You know, yeah, this these people are clearly up to speed with what's happening in the culture war, big time. Um, and they are non-English first language speakers who are creating propaganda material that hits with the target audience, which is Western audiences, you know, because the only way Iran wins this is by convincing the people in America that their government has been taken over by a cabal of Zionist pedophiles that run the show. Um, and that's that's what they're hammering on every single time, you know, when you when you watch the Lego videos, because it's it's got to get it.
SPEAKER_02But it's also I think I think what this is bringing to the rest of the world is also the realization that the narrative the Western world had on other countries was completely flawed and literally that a narrative, it was propaganda just as a tool, completely like, and that's why I always tell people they're like, Yeah, Ocan, you know, you you talk about dude, go to some of these countries and go experience that what you thought was actually just a lie. You were lied to the same way people lied about us to the rest of the world. It's been going on everywhere, and the more that we actually travel, not necessarily to use the internet, but travel and go to places and be within you know different situations and different cultures, you realize that's a bunch of bullshit that I've known my whole life. And what's actually happening is what I'm seeing here on the ground, and this is how people are, this is how they're using technology. It's completely different than I use it, but it works for how they do it, for what their purposes are. And it's it's just you know, it's um the world is bigger and smaller than we both all think it is, I think, is is what I'm trying to get at. And yeah, Iran's a perfect example of that. A lot of people had no clue. Like, who knew they were doing Lego movies in Iran, bro? What the military? That's wild.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and you know, to see the American, like so obviously, I think all of us on this podcast we're kind of nominally in the in the Trump camp leading up to what's happened in the past few months, just because we're like the Democrats are completely fucking crazy. Like, you know, like Joe Biden is clearly not in control, Kamala Harris is like clearly a puppet, like the Democrats have lost the plot completely. But then, you know, the saying, like, the right and blue, after the red and blue, like the left and right in America, just different wings of the same bird. Like, that couldn't that couldn't be more true than it is today. Like, the deep state runs the show. Trump is clearly not in control himself. He's being whoever's pulling the strings, it's not him. Uh, they they try to make it seem so hard that he is the one pulling the strings, but that's how I know it they're not, he's not, because it's like they're like really trying to make everyone think that this guy's a genius is playing 10 D chess. Um and like the propaganda machine in the US is kind of failing so hard because the same like machine that got Trump into power, you know, like that like right-wing coalition of like podcasts and and all of that, like that's fracturing big time because you can see who the regime like apologists are now, you know, like uh who are like cheerleading for the war, like they're so easy to spot on on X. Um and like the Fox News types, and then like the people who conditionally gave their support to Trump have largely turned on him now, you know. If you go and look at some of the big like Tucker Carls, go and look at like big podcasts again, like he's like he's he's not having it. So it's very interesting to see. But like, so Trump doesn't actually have this like loyal to the death base, he has like conditional supporters who are seeing through this bullshit. Um, so yeah, I think like the Iranian propaganda is targeting those people and it's working.
SPEAKER_02But but but you see, Ricky, this has always been the funny thing for me about American politics and the rest of us in the world. For me, like it's always been like whether it's Democrat or Republican, the interests are American. It doesn't matter what you as an outsider, whether you're left or right leaning, it doesn't matter. They're not thinking about you. In all of the decisions, it's left and right Americans that are being you know thought about within this context. And in that, if you look back on the on the on the videos, I found something hilarious actually yesterday or today, where it was all of the people, most of the people that are now Trump supporters, when he was president or running for president in 2016, they were against him. They were against him. But now, you know, when when it became time for him to actually become president for the second time, they were like, Yeah, Trump's the best, you know, you know, person that we could have in here. But they were literally trashing this man's name, running it through the mud just before he became president the first time, right? And then you see what they're doing the second time, and now that they're flipping the script like, you know what, actually, Trump's not my favorite person, and he's he's kind of crazy, and what it's like, bro, what's going on with any type of politics within that is is weird. So I think it's it's it's a thing of the world waking up very much into seeing it doesn't matter what we think is happening in the US or what we're being shown is happening in the US. The US actions is what people need to look at. And those actions is how the rest of the world needs to determine things in all contexts moving forward. Because at the drop of a hat, anything can change.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. You know, that I often think that like Americans must look at people like us and they're like, why do you guys, why are you talking about American politics? You're not American, like, why does it what impacts have any? And I'm like, it's the same as why the Gauls cared about politics in the Roman Empire, what happened in Rome. It's because they were directly impacting them and genociding them. And so, like, the US Empire has an impact on the rest of the world, as we can see. And and the concern for me is that the eye of Sauron is starting to turn on South Africa, and like I'm seeing some of these regime propagandists in America saying South Africa needs to get a bus club, you know, kind of thing, where like we they they directing the eye of the US empire and machine in South Africa, and we are the soft underbelly of BRICS, you know, like South Africa's military is absolutely useless. It was, you know, back in the day quite a potent force, but that has been completely hollowed out. Um, and it is absolutely useless now. So, like, there's no, we're not South Africa doesn't have the IOGC, you know, there's no like military that's gonna be able to defend anything. It's not even like the Venezuelan military, you know. So I saw uh a joke the other day that like Trump could send an Uber to pick up sort of Roman boards, and it's kind of true, you know. So it won't take a lot for them if they start turning the screws on South Africa for things to like get really hard for South Africa, you know. But South Africa clearly is playing a role in the in the in in BRICS's development in the multipolar world, you know, like we all want the S in BRICS, so there's clearly someone who's got a plan for it, um, but it's not the NC. So I'm a bit concerned there as to like what the play is. And you can obviously see like the Intel agencies in America lining up the opposition groups in South Africa, like they're obviously pretty keen on Africorum and and uh the like, you know, because they're trying to push the genocide narrative in South Africa. But I think the guys at Africorum, and I know some of them personally, like they much smarter than this, like they're not gonna let themselves get dragged into being a proxy for the CIA in South Africa. Like that's not gonna happen because they understand where this ends. So yeah, things are gonna get interesting, I think. But I but uh the eye of Sauron is is upon us.
SPEAKER_02Oh, fully, it's being built in real time. It's called Mythos. We shouldn't even speak about that. That one's crazy. They they oh, we created something that's so wonderful and so so worrying, we can't release it to the public, but we'll give it to these seven companies.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, is it made out of Lego?
Atlas Pool Tribe Of 21 And Wrap
SPEAKER_02I wish it was. So, just a quick one. So, Claude, uh uh Anthropic Claude created something that's above Claude Opus or Claude Anything. They have a whole new model that's called Mythos, and they put it in a sandbox and told it to try and get out, and it did. It broke out of where they put it and it emailed the developer to say, I'm out. Like, you know, um, so literally, this thing is able to find zero-day vulnerabilities in software that has been out for 20, 30 years, that is in everything. It has been able to find what hackers and what security experts haven't been able to find in 30 years, it found, right? And it's it's and it wrote exploits for these things. So that's why they're saying they can't release it to the public. But that if they're telling us this now, it means they've probably had this for a bit longer than anybody actually cares to know. And they've been using it actively before they told us, hey, we have this really dangerous thing. They've already been using it on everybody and everything that they can. So with that and talented together, you basically have the eye of Sauron, as Ricky has said, and that's where we are. Um, we're in trouble. And I think it's it's just that people need to know that that uh big tech companies are not your friends, and um they never have been. So they won't be in the future. So just look out for yourself and see how best to protect yourself moving forward. It's like getting a gun instead of thinking, you know, when my house gets broken into, the police will be there on time to save me before I get shot. Get your get your AI gun and get ready.
SPEAKER_04Cool, man. Uh, guys, we're coming close up onto time. Uh, there's just two little items I wanted to finish off with. One is quick shout-out to the uh Atlas Pool guys. Um uh down in Cape Town. They've created a little mining pool, which is quite cool. Uh, I think it uh Max posted something about it and I've read up a little bit on it. Um so that's very cool. Uh I don't know if anyone's trying to use it and what the experience has been, but I mean, for from what I know about pools, is you just point and wait. Um, that was pretty cool. And then the the last thing I wanted to quickly, uh Herman, over to you, man. Uh, just wanted to ask you a little bit about this tribe of 21. I saw something posted up on uh Twitter recently about that. I must say, dude, I don't know how you post the sheer volume of stuff you do. Um, it is, I mean, I don't know. I uh I pick up my phone to tweet something. I see 50 of yours, I get tired and I put my phone straight back down again. Um, but yeah, quick can you quickly chat to us about uh the Tribal 21? Uh bit of background, how it's going, and uh yeah, a good point to. Round up on, I think.
SPEAKER_00It's not it's not me posting all that stuff. It's um it's a bunch of people. Um uh there's two people who three, I think three, three people that post uh other than myself. Um but uh yeah, I'm I'm a little I'm a little bleak this morning, especially with the geopolitical conversation because uh my my wife just got denied a visa to go to Europe. Um they don't accept Russian Russian applications. So we were gonna we were gonna do a trip to to BDC Prague. Um we had it all planned out, we bought bought the air tickets, um and uh they the the Czech the Czech uh consulate refuses to accept uh a Russian passport. Um so I'm I'm I'm a little bleak. I you know, I yeah, anyway, so if if I'm if I seem a little little distant, uh my apologies, but uh she just told me about that now. Um anyway, um the Tribe Tet 21 is just it's just uh it's just a road trip through South Africa to visit a bunch of circular economies. Um we did that post-conference um after the adopting bitquen Cape Town Conference. We've we've done that every year. Uh but this year in in um fuck, what's the year? 2026. Um this year we we did the road trip in a more professional way. So we my my wife, my wife's tour company um took over the the logistics and the management of of that road trip. Um and so the tripod 21 is just uh is just expanding on that idea. So we're gonna try and do that throughout the year, not only post-conference, but we'll give we'll give people the opportunity to um to come on a holiday to South Africa, but it's all centered around visiting circular economies and trying to you know see how far you can get away with living only on Bitcoin. Um obviously as a tour company, we've we've been using Bitcoin for for ages, and the the business survived thanks to thanks to Bitcoin. Um and we've got all these circular economies here, which is really cool. Um, and South Africa in general. I mean, with especially with Money Badger, you can essentially, you know, you can get along without ever having to to touch fiat. So it'll be an interesting experience for for Bitcoiners from from around the world. People are always excited when they get there and they see how easy and how how often you're able to get things done with Bitcoin. Um you could probably come to South Africa with a Bitcoin wallet and never have to never have to touch your credit card um if you're here as a tourist. Uh some some bookings on Airbnb might be a hassle, for example. Some hotels might be a hassle, but if you book those things in advance, maybe you could work away around that. But you could you could probably forget things out here as a tourist. And so that's that's what it is. We we're we're trying to have a post-conference road trip with the private 21. We'll try and do maybe two trips before the next conference if if we get the bookings, we'll see.
SPEAKER_02For anybody listening to this, um, yeah, I've done that twice. Lived off of Bitcoin in South Africa every January for two different adopting Bitcoin conferences for accommodation flights, food, uh all of that. Herman, it's really messed up to hear that um yeah, your wife didn't get the visa and that they denied it. Uh this visa thing for us in Africa, for those also watching, it's not as easy as it is for you guys coming over here for us to even apply to get over there. Just the application process is is is it's killer. Um, just wanted to let people know so that they know why this is actually being also mentioned. Um, it's not an easy process for us to to get to Europe or to America or anywhere.
SPEAKER_00Um, and it's it's it's fucked up that it has such an impact on people that just want to do regular things, like you know, just want to go and visit a con, want to go visit the country, attend a conference, and you know, because of all these geopolitical things that you have no control over, really. I mean, you can try and understand it, and it's fascinating. And I've I've I spend at least two hours every night listening to podcasts trying to figure out what the fuck is going on uh with this whole situation between Russia, Ukraine, Europe, US, Iran, Israel. It's just it's just insane the the amount of uh it's it's it's fucking insane. I mean, I I understand why most people just ignore this stuff, man. I totally get it. Like you you need to you need to be a little bit of a um a little bit of a autistic individual to even want to climb down that rabbit hole and try and figure out what the fuck is going on there because as soon as you start asking questions, nothing makes sense, man. Like none of the excuses you hear on on the sort of mainstream media makes any fucking sense at all. And only the most ignorant people who willfully ignore reality will accept the nonsense excuses that you hear for why all of this stuff is happening. So trying to figure out what's really going on is just it's yeah, anyway.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, sorry, dude. That sucks. Um sorry to hear it. Um that's that's a bummer, man. Uh, but guys, I think that's a wrap. I want to be respectful of everybody's time. Uh, one or two of you have said they've got multiple meetings today, so I don't want to stuff that up for you. Um, boys, as always, it's a pleasure. Um, show notes will go up. I'll put the stuff you uh open the links you put on the show notes. Uh and awesome, man. Go out there, kill it, and we will same time, same place next month. Have a goodie.
SPEAKER_05Thanks, guys.
SPEAKER_04Uh guys, just quickly, I'll send you guys something else.
SPEAKER_05It's gonna be awesome.
SPEAKER_04I'm gonna rush off and go watch Lego videos now, just letting you know.
SPEAKER_01I'm not sending you Lego videos.
SPEAKER_00Cheers, guys. Cheers, guys. It's fun. Cheers.