I got to the point with them where they told me I either pay their rates and do what they say or they shut me down.
And I told them, you, I'm just going to go make my own energy.
And that's what I did.
And so I've been doing that ever since.
And now today I co-founded and run Sovereign Hybrid Compute with an amazing team.
We build sovereign data infrastructure that runs on standard energy and Bitcoin Rails.
Hello and welcome to the Orange Pill Order, the podcast exploring Bitcoin's role in building real-world sovereignty, resilience and decentralized infrastructure.
I'm Thomas. I'm Caelan. And I'm Finn. Today we are going fully sovereign.
We're discussing off-grid Bitcoin mining, the productive use of stranded energy, hardened infrastructure designed to withstand grid disruptions and the development of independent compute systems beyond the reach of centralized technology giants.
Our guest is a true pioneer in the space, mining Bitcoin since 2017 while operating entirely off-grid and the co-founder of Sovereign Hybrid Compute.
He's embodied the principles of decentralization and self-reliance every single day.
Please, welcome to the show, Tarantula.
Thank you.
tarantula we have to ask just a little icebreaker how did your background in robotics and automation
first lead you into bitcoin and i mean eventually full off-grid mining back in 2017
so in 2017 i was you know i had been well seasoned in automation robotics logistics you know doing
IT contracting and other stuff before that. I found Bitcoin through some fiat and some
coinery that was going on on YouTube. And I got burned during the ICO phase, messing around a
little bit. And then I had a light bulb moment when I realized that the common denominator across
all of these platforms was Bitcoin. They didn't want anything else. That was all they wanted.
And that sent me down the rabbit hole about, you know, Bitcoin.
And so, like, by the end of the year, you know, I basically understood that this is the most elegant machine humanity has ever built.
And, well, my previous in the before times, my previous experience was basically teaching and working with machines to move things efficiently.
Right.
And so when I discovered Bitcoin, it clicked, you know, like I understood how that all that worked. And so I started moving energy into proof of work, essentially, from that point.
By the end of 2017, I had already started building an operation of my own in a shop that I had built in Kentucky.
And then I ended up getting into a fight with Duke Energy over rates.
They were making declarations to myself that they were the only power providers in the area, that they had the monopoly in the area with Tennessee Valley Authority.
and I was not happy about that. Being told that I can't do something or that they hold the monopoly
and that I don't have any options was unacceptable to myself. And so that's when I started dabbling in
alternative energy systems and creating my own power. I got to the point with them where they
told me I either pay their rates and do what they say or they shut me down. And I told them,
you i'm just gonna go make my own energy and that's what i did um and so i've been doing that
ever since and uh now today i co-founded and run sovereign hybrid compute with an amazing team we
build sovereign data infrastructure that runs on standard energy and bitcoin rails
yeah that's uh that's really awesome it's a powerful transition from the robotics engineering
into the Bitcoin infrastructure.
And I suppose today you're focused on monetizing
stranded energy sources and building sovereign data centers.
Can you give us and our viewers an explanation
on what that entails?
So there's multiple, it's a multiple faceted approach
when it comes to the data center side of things
and building them, right?
So we have a couple different things that we do. First of all is the energy hunt, right? You're constantly on the search for energy that's abandoned and or wasted, right?
And so we hunt out the energy and essentially at that point, once we find it, we deploy modular container systems that can show up and plug into whatever energy source we've found and start hashing immediately.
um the systems are now being built in a more of a hybrid manner so that we can utilize x part of
operations to offset y and z cost of operations on the other side of things and so it seems to
be working really well um the uh the approach in general overall uh currently for myself is
focused on flare gas from oil wells and abandoned wells is it's a it's abundant there's so much of
it that I really don't have to look. And I've established a name for myself in the industry,
and people know that I can execute and deploy. And so it's easier for me to just stick with the,
you know, the flare gas right now. Plus, the environmental impacts that it has is significant.
It's huge. And so that's another reason why I choose to stick with that. But I mean,
essentially, it's modular container systems that just go like war machines, you know,
So everything is battle hardened, so to speak, when it comes to the type of infrastructure it is.
Was that the same in the beginning?
Like, what was your first Bitcoin mining rig like?
What early struggles stood out?
And how did those experiences push you towards going completely off grid?
Okay, so what pushed me?
We covered what pushed me going completely off grid.
That was fighting with Duke Energy and everything.
But the early setups were like my first off-grid Bitcoin mining box.
That thing was so far out there in the Appalachian foothills that I couldn't get trucks out there really with trailers to drop this thing.
is I had to have Amish guys build this container out of wood
and bring it out there with mules
because I couldn't get tractor trailers or anything else out there
to move the infrastructure.
And we were bringing ATVs, four-wheel cycles,
to transport the ASICs from trucks out to the site
because it was so far out there off-grid.
um the uh i had r4s and then later s9s the r4s were hilarious because they they look like uh
they remind me of like old dvd players so they're just like flat like a blade server but they have
rotary fans in them um the uh yeah just putting things in weird places uh like even going as far
as duct taping rigs into the hvac system in the house and stuff uh having my neighbors asking me
why my garage sounds like a jet engine um i did um what do we call it a permaculture setup with
some people uh so like we did a greenhouse so just to see if the waste of heat would do you know be
helpful for growing food which it was um so some some experiments failed spectacularly
but every failure taught me how to engineer the next system better and so it you know it's been a
pretty wild ride but the the knowledge gained has been vast and and extremely valuable and so
worth the ride for sure yeah and i suppose what was the biggest lesson from those early days that
changed the way that you think about bitcoin and i suppose personal independence and sovereignty as a
home um so early lessons would be well the biggest lesson i'll say right out the gate was that
mining is is more fundamentally a thermodynamics problem
disguised as a computer problem.
So like every, everybody focuses on, you know,
hash boards and firmware and monitoring software and everything.
But the real battles is heat, airflow, clean power, cooling.
And so if you can manage those three or four things,
the rest of the operation is negligible when it comes to what's going to be required to get it and
keep it going and and so like having those basically nailed down and and knowing those
systems well you can keep your machines running for a long time you know but if you ignore those
things you'll burn money faster than a6 burn electricity that's for sure so well
But on a personal level, like going back to what you were just saying, what surprised you most about your first off-grid experiments?
The networking and ISP requirements.
So as we know, mining Bitcoin, you know, it involves data, moving data.
And this is the data for mining Bitcoin is surprisingly light.
in regards to the load, you know, for bandwidth, you know?
So the, the bandwidth and the load was light, but the work is heavy, you know?
And, and, and that,
that was something that when I first got into it, because I'm,
I am not a network engineer professionally by trade,
wasn't something that I thought about upfront.
And then as I started expanding operations and building things out,
I started reaching different bottlenecks and learning more.
And at first glance, I didn't really realize it.
But, you know, when you think about it, you got thousands of machines and you're able to do all this work and everything.
And you can run it on one gigabyte per month bandwidth and service is pretty impressive.
I didn't actually think about all that in the beginning.
and so that was probably the most surprising thing for me was like how much actual uh bandwidth
requirements are necessary to you know build out a sizable operation yeah that that is surprising
i would say like i mean i think i can't really think of much kind of more like power consuming
or like data centers, computer power,
then obviously Bitcoin mining.
And I suppose going back even further,
Trenchler mentioned like the difficulties
wasn't like the tracking software and everything.
It was the thermodynamics.
Yeah, exactly.
That's interesting.
I don't think that's spoken about enough.
No, I don't think people know that enough.
But I also, they, well, in El Salvador,
they use the thermal energy to power some of the miners out there
from the volcanoes.
Very interesting.
correct yeah yeah i mean how does your way of using stranded energy as you said like flare gas
and the old generators fit into your bigger bitcoin journey and i suppose your personal
vision for true sovereignty so these systems themselves are um the way that they're built
is important to me because, again, it brings me back to the environmental impacts. So, you know,
we're able to reuse and deploy things that just won't make it on grid anymore, right? And so that
to me is huge. You know, we reuse, we don't waste anything, and we recycle everything. And so,
like, to me, that's extremely valuable. You know, right now, we live in this throwaway waste society.
where if it's broke, they just toss it and replace it with something new instead of trying to fix it and redeploy.
And, well, that is a double-edged sword for myself because on one side,
it allows me to get equipment for relatively low cost and deploy,
which helps with maintaining sovereignty and everything from an operational standpoint and everything but on the other side that works because of that throwaway waste type mentality that we have out there
So if people started doing more things like myself,
then there would be less available hash rate in the marketplace for me to pick up for cheap.
So it's like, you know, pros and cons, right?
so yeah that is very interesting i think it's um well very good what you're doing especially
because i think a lot of that um just kind of oh if it's not good enough we'll chuck it away
it's a really fiat mindset i think we all need to get away from an escape really and as you said
like with the energy sources that wouldn't survive on grid the fact that he's able to turn that
into energy linking back to proof of work is like what stands out yeah yeah a lot more people need
to adopt this mindset yeah i was gonna say the exact same i mean i think the whole throwaway
mindset is completely opposing proof of work yeah i mean you you guys you asked me like basically
what makes it sovereign right and like true sovereignty means no middleman right no kyc
no centralized control over your compute or your money. And we're taking
essentially stranded energy, right? And turning it into hash power that's securing our network
while being paid directly in Bitcoin. And so that means the entire system from the energy
to the compute, to the payments runs outside the traditional financial rails and being able to do
it on recycled equipment and stuff that's otherwise going to be sent to scrap means
that we can create even more independence because we have even more equipment available
at our hands to be able to refurbish and bring out into the field for second life.
Like even if we run short in one place, we can still go back to market and get it in
another.
So it's best ops for sovereignty.
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, on the other hand, what challenges did you come up with when you went fully off grid?
But more importantly, how did they strengthen your belief in Bitcoin?
So the biggest challenges that I have seen in general are power generation.
Power generation out in the last mile is hard.
just in general um and because of that a lot of people get discouraged and spend a lot of time
and money on that side of things and and quite honestly if they don't do their homework before
they get started they're gonna fail um it's
it's the the generation is the lifeblood of your operation pretty much it's the heartbeat right
Now, aside from it being the most difficult thing to deal with, it is also the most powerful thing as well.
Because, I mean, what makes Bitcoin so formidable is that it's decentralization in nature, right?
We've had Christine Lagarde even admit that if one file is left unguarded, you know, unfound, if they were to try and black out the whole internet throughout the entire earth, that if one file survives, that it's over for them again.
They can't stop it.
And so the other route that, you know, they had from file is like, well, we have this electricity.
And so they can create these bottlenecks on grid and everything else.
And so by us building out this infrastructure the way that we're doing it in this last mile off grid stranded energy style deployments, we're not only decentralizing further the Bitcoin network as a whole from a software perspective, but now the physical infrastructure that is behind this network is being decentralized even further out into the world.
And so I think that that is absolutely beautiful because, I mean, you got decentralized money and, you know, your money is borderless and permissionless.
Well, shouldn't the infrastructure that supports it be that way as well?
I mean, if, you know, if off-grid mining is like what I like to think of as survival infrastructure, you know, we're facing terrors and tyranny, the likes of which this world has never seen before.
it and um you know because what this does decouples compute and money from fragile systems
like if if grids or fail financial rails lock people out off-grid compute will i verifiably
can guarantee you keep this running and then now you have energy becoming money and money
becomes infrastructure and that my friends is true resilience
i mean i think that approach to independence is exactly what the younger generation needs
they need to really embrace and adopt sovereignty completely
oh absolutely a hundred percent it's paramount to your survival if you don't want to end up
having to get the chip and uh eat the bugs yeah very true and i think um a lot of our generation
maybe because they were kind of brought up on the screens and like scrolling all the time is
they've got no patience so it's just kind of if it doesn't work or do something else it's just
kind of not really uh thinking long term and it's just kind of instant gratification
high time preference yeah but in addition like i suppose on the other side of the coin and i
suppose this is why we're here doing all these podcasts is i don't think there's enough awareness
around the issues like it's easy to say yeah we're being addicted there's all so many screens
in front of us but when you sort of trace the wire back in a sense it's the fact that there
isn't enough awareness regarding the issues with currencies with sovereignty oh it's by design
100 well yeah that's what i was going to touch on it there's a reason they don't teach you
how to balance checkbook and uh how you know how the money system works in school because if you
knew that you're going to graduate and go into this workforce and then essentially uh trade your
time which is the most precious asset in your life that you will ever know and the most scarce
if you are going to exit school and your primary education and then go to uni or whatever and into
a workforce where you trade that asset essentially for something that's printed from nothing,
which means they value you as nothing, essentially. How many people do you think would
graduate uni and then go into the workforce? None. They would be graduating and going straight into
how can I build a self-sufficient, you know, get me away from this fiat illusion,
imagination land world and into a world where actual real proof of work will yield me the
fruits of my labors versus, you know, some crazy, radical, ridiculous extortion theft
racket that is taxation without representation at large today.
And, you know, if people understood that and learned these things before graduation, economy? No, sir. That wouldn't be a thing that they could talk about today because it would just be absolutely trashed and destroyed because nobody, and I mean nobody, would want to participate in this system if they knew about it in any way, shape, or form properly before being just thrust into it.
and then forced under the threat of violence to participate otherwise yeah yeah disgusting
a lot of a lot more people need to adopt that mindset and realize the uh the whole design of
the education system and all of that is uh yeah definitely well it's working as intended but it's
yeah again we can't really speak on the truths however we promote our younger audience as i was
just saying before to do your own research come to your own conclusions but one thing i can guarantee
is that you'll come back to this space yeah definitely and also well i mean all three of us
we're learning a level economics which is all kensian which is uh i suppose that's the equivalent
of like high school economics yeah it makes you want to bang your head against the wall i bet
you have to listen to that geez we're proving our teacher wrong on the stuff he's teaching us
right in front of us and i bet he loves that maybe yeah so yeah it's uh it's interesting
education we love to describe education as a machine to make the perfect employees almost
yeah 100 like yeah as tom said like it's working as it sounds accurate but as you said tranchula
if we were taught how to balance a checkbook how the monetary system works what our government is
actually doing with the money then i think we'd be living in a completely different society and
again yeah centralized banking wouldn't exist yeah but that's why we're here that's why we're here
to teach the youth who are the future um and actually we're speaking at bitcoin ireland yeah
um and that will be again one of our steps to reach more people because we just really want
to get it out there especially to the youth because it's important they need to understand
that this is a broken system and we can actually change it more importantly yeah as you just
touched on there is a solution and it's what we're talking about here today yeah i mean i think the
speaker there is like 32 and we're still teenagers and if we can grow nice this is all going on there
is a solution yeah exactly you need to then anyone can pick up the pace that anyone can but that's
why you know that's why we're here i mean leading on to your work more specifically what inspired
you to launch sovereign hybrid compute and how does it grow out of your own bitcoin mining journey
to help others gain more freedom and sovereignty as a whole
sorry you were you were breaking up there a little bit could you repeat that
i apologize moving moving more onto your work specifically what inspired you to
hybrid compute and how does it go out your own mining journey to help others gain more freedom
and sovereignty as a whole i got you oh okay um i i guess it's more like um
have you ever been have you ever asked for a service from somewhere and then been denied and
not given any reason or or any uh explanation as to why you were denied any service and
been told that you're a criminal or treated like one or suspicious just because you had
you know uh tried to to do something like open up something as simple as a vm account with herzner
yeah so um that refusal of service and other things like it are along with my business partner
demi approaching me about it and explaining explaining some things to me um pushed me to
like really want to build sovereign hybrid compute um what sovereign hybrid compute is
basically the next evolution of off-grid infrastructure. Mining is the baseload, right?
Because Bitcoin gives guaranteed monetization of energy. And on top of that, we layer compute,
private storage, VPN, VPS infrastructure. We're working on deploying AI infrastructure for
workloads there. Everything should run on edge data centers powered by stranded energy and
paid in Bitcoin. Think of it as sovereign cloud compute infrastructure that you can build on and
then migrate your data back to your own home server, which is the goal. We want our clients
to become self-sufficient on their own. But on the interim, a lot of people, they're stuck dealing
with vendor lock-in and restrictions on disk space, like you deal with Azure, AWS, and these other
behemoths in the market out there. And with what we're doing, you know, we're building,
it gives people the ability to take control of their data again. And at any point, you know,
if they don't have the infrastructure themselves and they want to start doing that, they can with
us. And then when they're ready to become more personally responsible and host their own servers
at home and do that, they can then take that whatever they've built with us and migrate
it to their own equipment.
And so Sovereign Hybrid Compute takes traditional AWS-style data center opportunities and drives
it into the last mile in regards to edge infrastructure as well as giving so we not just giving resilience to this existing infrastructure in a new way but we also integrating Bitcoin Braille style payments for it and making it privacy oriented and focused
so now you can pay for your services with bitcoin whereas you cannot with any of these other
operators you can do so in a privacy oriented manner i don't care what you put in the you know
name location fields daffy duck uses my service you know it's fine with me and uh so at that point
daffy duck gets his service and pays me in bitcoin and i i don't have to worry about fraud
He can do what he needs to. And when he's done, take his work with him so he's not stuck. He can be sovereign, too. And so essentially, we are now supporting our Bitcoin ethos and fundamentals and bringing that into LPC compute, if that makes sense, and providing that to people at scale now.
yeah i think that's great definitely something that this space and the future will need so how
do you keep everything running so smoothly when the energy levels change and and why is that
important for the future of bitcoin so it's running smoothly all comes down to load balancing
it literally it's like that's the goal um so a little bit about that is like load balancing
and mining and compute my background behind all of it it fits very well together it fits together
very well um so mining is the flexible load right we can throttle it instantly and and change what
we need to and compute workloads are prioritized based on demand and energy when available like
so example is with the ASICs we can do responsive load data center building and then with the LPC
if the cost of operations gets to be too much if we decide we want to with the hybrid system
we can balance that out by utilizing revenue off of one side to offset the cost of
cost of operations on the other side. And so just like in a three phase power system,
you have to keep the load balanced to ensure things keep going. Well, financially sites,
they have to maintain balance as well. And with a hybrid type of compute deployment,
you can essentially manage these balances from a financial perspective, as well as from
an energy perspective when it comes to the site.
That's all interesting stuff.
And I suppose you intentionally avoid working with large public mining companies.
Why is that?
So I've been known to refuse public mining client companies in general because,
And this to me, it's personal. It's because centralization kills Bitcoin, you know, period.
The biggest threat to the network is massive industrial hash power consolidating into a few companies.
And we've already seen this happening with proxy pools, you know, at the pool level.
You know, I'd rather help a thousand small miners than one giant publicly traded operation because distributed hash power is the security for the network.
yeah all right sure i i don't like we do this to feed our families and to like ultimately make
ends meet right but at the end of the day this thing's bigger than ourselves and you know you
set your ego aside and you know like how much you have isn't what's important it's what you do with
what you have that's most important and so if like some of these larger pubcos were really serious
about the ethos of our network and saying that they're there to help and provide security,
they would distribute their hash rate amongst other pools and run the gambit differently.
But they don't.
They have contracts with other pools that we get this fee, you give us your hash rate,
you give us more hash rate, you get this fee, and it's all game.
And it gets political the higher up the ladder you go.
So it's like that with everything in this world.
but i mean if you understand you know what this network's all about and how to protect it
those are the things you do and there's things you don't do right yeah i mean for people who
might not know about mining or a younger generation a lot of this does sound pretty
complicated but i guess the fundamentals are still the same you want to escape centralization
you want to achieve sovereignty and proof of work just needs to be there put in your own research
to these things and you will find right exactly that's why bitcoiners should care about like
hybrid compute uh situations essentially i feel like more or so because right now like you see
how bitcoin operates right and a lot of these people out there these younger people are uh
normies uh individuals that don't understand what we uh see in regards to the patterns is that
like because we understand bitcoin we see the strength and the resilience there
you know we see the patterns in these other systems right like your um your internet now
runs on basically five corporations you know your data ai workloads communications literally all of
it like five companies whole world that's it right and this is a major problem when it comes to
you know bottlenecks and failure points you know when amazon us1 east has a hiccup we shouldn't lose
a third of the internet in the united states that that's just that's ridiculous it doesn't have to
be built that way anymore you know it like it never had to be built that way either it's just
that well if you know your history and you're willing to go down a few rabbit holes you'll see
that AWS and Google, these are very much DARPA-funded initiatives.
And so really, that's why they were built the way that they were.
It's more or less you're the product, essentially, in the end here,
under the way these things are built.
But hybrid compute lets us rebuild the internet on sovereign infrastructure.
Edge compute powered by Bitcoin Rails means censorship resistance.
And privacy at the physical layer now, which is not something that people have in large or at scale currently from what I'm aware of.
There's not many players out there trying to do anything about it that I know of.
So it's time.
From what we're seeing right now around the world and over the last decade, it's time.
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, it's such a failing system just around the entire world.
and well i'm glad we've escaped it and um well we're living in this bitcoin lifestyle every day
how do you well i mean we've already touched on this but how do you see the weakness in our current
energy grids governments and big tech and what role does off-grid mining play in that bigger picture
so like we're living through the end game right now in regards to the infrastructure and fiat
systems failing i mean it i will say this uh people drastically underestimate the length of
time that the fiat meat grinder can go on for like they can slow that grind down and just
make it a crawl and make it excruciatingly painful for a long period of time unfortunately because of
what's been created in regards to dependency and people's dependency on federal aid and everything
right or government aid um and so like we're gonna see more money printing grids are gonna
to continue to be fragile. They're, you know, they're all concerned about continued quarterly
growth and profits. And, and that comes at a cost, you know, these guys going to give themselves
raises at the same time too. That also means that money may not go where it needs to in regards to
infrastructure and everything, right? Big tech is hitting information and controls it. And,
And, well, building the systems that we're working on in our industry takes all that away, you know.
And so with edge compute powered by Bitcoin rails and everything else, it's going to provide an escape hatch, right?
Because it's like the first truly decentralized monetary network that now also is going to have, you know, compute that is also decentralized and distributed, offering individuals the right for sovereignty as well.
And considering this, you know, proof of work essentially anchors money to physics instead of politics, right?
And how this industry operates.
So I think that long term, you know, there's brighter days ahead. But in the short term, it's going to be a real interesting fight because, you know, these companies aren't going to want to let go of client share. They're not going to want to, you know, give people the ability to, you know, take control of their themselves, essentially their own digital sovereignty, data sovereignty and everything else.
And so it's going to be some very interesting times ahead, I'd say.
The other thing that I think people are a little overly optimistic about is, I guess it kind of falls in with the timeframe.
because that's going to be determinant upon individuals out there who haven't woken up yet,
who haven't started recognizing the patterns and seeing what exactly is going on in the world.
And they may feel like they understand or they may even understand the direction things are heading in,
but they are being pushed so hard and spread so thin,
And, you know, being forced to take other jobs and do all kinds of things that are outside their norm to make ends meet, that they feel discouraged and beaten down to the extent that they don't feel like they can learn anything new.
Like they don't have the time to learn something new. And, well, they're right now just getting by or making ends meet, but they can feel the pressure.
And I think that we're going to have to see more people experience the pressure and then run out of, let's say, burn rate in regards to cost of living to wake up and want to take control of themselves, stop being utilized as a product themselves at scale.
Because basically everybody's getting whored out by megacorps at a certain level.
And what do you do with that?
How do you combat that?
How do you, you know, take control again?
Well, you have to become more sovereign in regards to your data, infrastructure, the way you live your life.
You change gears from high time preference to low time preference.
And then, you know, change your perspective, your vantage point, and then, you know, reassess what's going on with yourself and then the rest of the world today and then try to push forward from that.
yeah i mean we've seen a similar sort of thing throughout all our guests i would say and how
bitcoin is kind of the idea but again it's trying to battle that centralized foundation in everything
i mean what what larger risk to bitcoin and personal freedom are you paying closest attention
to you right now um so for me as an as a person who does mining um i always considered a largest
threat to be a pool centralization and i've been screaming about it for years if you go look at my
profile. There's, you know, if there's regulatory pressure on miners or pools,
you know, that's a threat vector that concerns me. And, you know, cloud censorship creeping in
to AI and AI censorship now. And if those layers are already all centralized, right,
then the internet becomes the control grid, essentially. And Bitcoin and sovereign
infrastructure push back against that.
And that's why that's what I focus on building.
Because going
in any other direction right now
means that you're basically
committing yourself
to the 15-minute cities,
carbon credits, digital ID,
and eating the bugs
again We not going to eat the bugs I suppose it all just links back to like the control and centralization element like we being teenagers haven really seen the systems collapse we sort of just
been born into it so similarly to you we're also trying and are building a space which
will inevitably combat the forces of this centralized nature yeah oh yeah yeah being
born into the fourth turning uh nobody said that was going to be easy
but yet here you are welcome um but you know it's it's not all doom and gloom uh the uh
the systems that can save us are already being built and expanded upon and now it's just about
you know, making sure that the individual men and women out there like myself are leading by example
so that you guys, you know, stay on the right path. The ones who don't know yet get on the right path,
you know. It's important for women to act like women and, you know, be presentable and men to
stand up and be men and not, you know, bend the knee just because they see that that's what
everybody else is doing around them. And, you know, bring forward the proper, you know, moral
and principled living that, you know, this network shows us with its consistency and ability to
actually, you know, grow and prevail. It doesn't happen through living a life of random. It happens
through consistency and dedication to purpose and cause and having understanding and, you know,
the ability to love life and have a passion for what you're focused on and those around you,
right? And so that's the way forward, you know, build it and live it, right? Proof of work.
Yeah, I mean, touching off of that proof of work, and as you said previously, leading by example,
we're looking to and are in the process of developing our own online space in which people
can learn about the decentralized means of life yeah and very obviously different topics so we've
got again well obviously learning about bitcoin because that's the uh the opener and starter for
everyone but also decentralized health i think that's very important um we had an episode
So Bruce's health is wealth.
And it's, yeah, very, very true.
And again, for the future, for the Gen Z listeners who want to start their own Bitcoin journey,
what simple steps would you suggest that they learn, like real skills or should they try mining and begin building real sovereignty?
um well um i would say that this is a multifaceted type of uh question here i mean just
overall advice in general for like with with mining um just get your hands on an asic right
and start.
The principles are very much similar
all throughout the industry.
It's just getting your hands on it.
Ultimately, and this is a cover all,
learn real skills.
Just not soft skills
or else you're going to end up being
a very soft individual long-term.
It's going to hurt.
Life is hard.
If you don't have the skills
that are necessary to navigate it, that storm will eat you up.
And so learn real skills, electrical, plumbing, networking, thermodynamics.
I would say coding, but now probably that would be AI prompting.
You know, things that interact with the physical world, right?
Buy Bitcoin, think in decades, not months.
run a node like i said run the node run the miner experiment with mining things like just start
small right build things that can operate outside centralized systems you know like find you know
decentralized chats and other things that you know you can operate on your own with other peers that
do not require a third party um and just always remember low time preference wins every time
yeah definitely i mean yeah i think that's excellent guidance really i think you kind
of covered all bases there you you commented on ai do you think for a younger generation that
would be a threat or a tool or is that is there a balance within that so it depends on where it goes
um and i think it depends on the people see like i have heard speculation about ai being
And well, AI was previously developed for military intelligence, right?
And then it's been given to the public.
And so people can teach it basically and make it better.
And now what we're seeing, we're seeing here again.
Now we're seeing government stepping in to tell Anthropic and other AI giants what to do, right?
And I think that there could be a psyop where somebody creates something that causes, you know, some terrible thing to happen for a bunch of people.
And they'll say that they'll claim that they used AI to do it.
And then this will, you know, give probable cause for government to step in and say, oh, this can be used as a weapon now.
And so we're going to take control of it. And, you know, it's going to be only able to be used by these people under these circumstances. Or, you know, this is a, there will be versions of AI, they're only available to public use. And, you know, it's just, it's all going to be determined about how it's used and how people interact with it in general, I think. Right.
but working on building systems that give people the ability to do it themselves
guys like me eric case and and others are trying to take and you know put these tools you know
squarely back into the hands of people and so that they can be run in a more decentralized and
sovereign manner and people can get what they need out of it instead of them also getting
value extracted from them as they currently are,
as they are the product, you know, like I said before.
So the tools are out there to keep it moving forward
in ways that are most beneficial for everybody.
It's just, you know, the direction from how fast we get there from now,
I feel like it's going to be determined widely upon
how the current market's utilizing it.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
I mean, I think there's always that threat
that it kind of eliminates the proof of work side of things.
I mean, we were talking to TC, weren't we,
and how our younger generation can maybe become too dependent on it.
But again, as you say, it can enable people to gain sovereignty as well.
So I think there's two sides to that coin.
Yeah, and in addition, as what Mark was stated previously,
learning those applicable and real-world skills
is now more important than ever.
because like as i said coding was once such a sought-after position like if you could work a
computer you you easy career path and a lot of money involved there now too but with ai such as
you can do it pretty much just at the click of a few buttons yeah you can just talk to it now
and and like you you don't even have to be extremely proficient with a computer anymore
it's like yeah i feel bad for people coming out of college with debt for coding degrees
wrecked we see so many of our friends and peers going into university not knowing the truth behind
it all and how their jobs oh yeah it's sad to see honestly going back to the meat grinder thing as
well the fiat meat grinder not just with the monetary policies but with the education system
too like ai grows exponential rate it's only going to get better and by each time it will get
more better than last if that makes sense so a lot of these entry-level jobs which a lot of gen z
will be looking at post-graduation a lot of the the roles where you're sort of being a assistant
for lawyers bookkeepers all of it can be done by ai now yeah and it will just force a lot of people
into a position where they don't really have an income yeah so i'm just ultimately will be
reliant on the government yeah yeah that's terrible but it's like it's what they want
it's by design it's well designed yeah i mean how much can you truly trust it as well i mean
like you commented on tranchula the censorship from governments now on ai as well you basically
find out what they want you to find out yeah it's it's uh very interesting my experience using it
from when i first started till now it used to just tell me things and now it tells me things it's
it is i'll say that it just seems to be a little bit more careful about what it tells me
now i'm just like why are you being this way
i'm thinking somebody else is pulling your strings now homie i know what's going on here
caught on to like the hypotheticals like you could ask it certain questions but word it in a way
in which it looks like you weren't asking the question but now it's completely like nope can't
help you with that yeah but yeah but we would like to close with a question that consistently
gets asked on our channel
Tranchler, what is
a lesser known or entirely
unknown detail about your
work or your background
that even long time
followers probably don't
know? There's no pressure
No pressure at all
I didn't always have this
awesome amazing beard
It is
an incredible beard
It is incredible.
Yeah.
Just as a final, just before we wrap up,
why the name Tarantula?
It's something that I ended up acquiring in the before times
during an automation facility debacle.
There were some people afraid of cleaning out a case director
and they, well, I got there, there were some spider webs
and I was a little frustrated.
I said, you guys call yourself grown men.
and yet here you are, a little arachnid, got you scared to do your job,
sent them home, told them, you know, I get to take care of this myself now
because I can't rely on you two kids to do this work.
So sent them home and got back to my office later, putting tools away,
and I sit at my desk, and there's a picture of a tarantula telling me to go off
because I destroyed his house.
And I told individuals that this is not even the correct type of arachnid species
for what we're dealing with here, one.
Two, you guys would rather take the time to actually make a frigging meme here
and do this instead of actual work.
It just speaks more even to the fact that you're just a bunch of little boys
and not what I would call respectable men.
So from now on, that's Mr. Tarantula to y'all.
And I wouldn't answer the radio until they hit like that.
And then when I got into Bitcoin, you know, the name evolved.
It was not my Tarantula Bitcoin, then HODL Bitcoin Tarantula.
Then there was HODL Tarantula Bitcoin, and then it was just HODL Tarantula.
And now I just go by HT.
Yeah.
Well, Mr. Tarantula, thank you for the thoughtful and insightful conversation.
Where can listeners' thoughts work, learn more about Sovereign Hybrid Compute, or explore potential collaboration?
So you can find me on X at Hodl Tarantula, and you can check out SovereignHybridCompute.com.
There's also a link there in my profile.
to see what we're building.
If you're an energy producer,
a miner or a builder interested in the mission,
you understand what we're trying to do here.
Just appreciate off-grid,
battle-hardened, sovereign infrastructure in general.
Reach out.
The mission's simple.
Turn wasted energy into sovereign compute
and secure the Bitcoin network.
Proof of work is our law.
Listeners, follow the builders,
support independent infrastructure and remember true sovereignty begins with action look below
for all relevant links as well tarantula thank you for joining us stay sovereign stacks out and
keep hodling yeah brother thanks for having me