Can you hear me eat, DK?
And so can everyone else because we're live.
I love you eating, but I don't.
Oh, we're live.
Look at that.
We are.
All right.
Steve's eating.
Tell us, what are you eating, Steve?
Why are you eating on the show?
It doesn't look like a PB&J, so I need to understand why we're off.
Eating chocolate.
I didn't know we were live, but maybe the viewers can let me know if it's acceptable.
Just make crunch in the microphone.
I'm eating an Elon chocolate bar.
but not Elon Musk.
Oh.
Elon University.
The alma mater of Austin.
Okay.
Krauss from BB.
Okay.
He had some entrepreneurial students.
They were doing a San Francisco road show, I think.
Uh-huh.
And he had them swing by here last week.
Right.
Yeah.
And it's great.
Love speaking to students.
and I think they're all graduating this spring.
Get them started young.
Trying to figure out what they're going to do.
So Jesse Bosner and I, and I don't know who else,
and Austin, of course, spoke to them.
We might have even talked about it last week.
I think we did, yeah.
Anyway, so we don't have to talk about it again.
You spread the good word of Satoshi.
But you're kind enough.
Oh, they just brought you a chocolate.
They gave me a little gift bag with chocolate.
Very kind.
And Elon University, for those that don't know, I believe is in North Carolina.
It's in the South.
It's in North Carolina.
Yeah.
So it makes sense that they would bring a gift.
Southern hospitality.
Definitely.
It was very nice of them.
And yeah, why am I eating it right now?
I haven't eaten yet today.
I've been rushing around.
So I didn't want to pass out on the show.
Did you start the morning in New York?
Or you got in?
No, I got back like at 2 a.m.
Oh, okay.
Very reasonable.
But Brian Johnson would not approve of your sleep schedule, I tell you.
Or of your chocolate.
I actually got pretty good sleep because I actually, I was so crashing from the, yeah.
I was, I also gained two pounds from the trip.
So that's not working towards my goals.
I was going to say you're looking more ripped today.
That's because I'm wearing my t-shirt.
We have so much.
I don't even know if we're going to talk about AI and Bitcoin because they'll just talk about Steve's morning.
So I actually got decent sleep because I was so crashed from the week because it was an amazing week.
I actually slept in the flight back.
Okay.
And then so I was able to wake up this morning.
Fine.
Did you pop magnesium or anything?
How do you sleep on the flight?
Because I can't sleep on flights anymore.
Oh, I just fell asleep.
Nice.
Natural.
I worked hard.
Worked hard.
Yeah.
Work hard.
That's it.
I worked hard and I cracked.
Work hard.
Stack sats.
Yeah.
Why was I a couple of minutes late for the show?
Yeah.
Today is Dipsy registration.
Oh, it's good.
Oh, yeah.
So for those that don't know what the Dipsy is,
it's the second oldest running race in America
behind the Boston Marathon.
And this will be my fourth
year running it.
And it's a somewhat
unusual race. It's very
hard to get in. You have to apply
and there's all kinds of...
You have to write a sob story.
You
can bribe the money.
Is this college emissions?
You need to...
If you want to increase your chances,
you need to apply the day that they open up registration
and do it from the post office in Milwaukee.
So I had everything ready,
and then I swung by this morning,
and the line was so long
that I finally just had to bail and get here.
So that means you're not registered?
Well, I'll just do it after the show.
So you think it won't fill up in the morning?
Well, I'll be fine.
So if you do well enough in the race in a previous year,
you automatically get it.
So I'm good.
Yeah, that's what I was doing.
I'm registering for other people.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Anyway, so that's why it's a little late.
And then, yeah, why am I wearing this, Max?
Dude, I can't talk about basketball.
I've completely turned it on.
What makes me sad is Memphis is not doing well,
so I lose the love for Max.
I'm going to support Iowa State this year because...
You've got to root for Iowa State and Gonzaga.
Yeah, yeah.
And actually, our latest, or our newest member presented at Bitcoin.
Who's that?
College basketball fan.
The Mara dude?
What?
The Mara dude?
Yeah.
I haven't met him yet.
I need to.
He's great.
Yeah.
And he went to Santa Clara.
So he's not only a college basketball fan, but he's a rival of Bailey's Gonzaga team.
And they actually played in the championship of WCC this week.
They were in the WCC.
But Gonzaga won.
So I think Santa Clara had a good season, but I don't think they'll make the dance.
Yeah, okay.
you know
NIT's not too bad
bro
Memphis has been so bad
like
I don't even want to talk about it
but like
remember that like
there's like the NCAA
then there's like the NIT
which is like the losers tournament
then there's like
the like
losers losers
like NBIL
yeah none of the other stuff
NIT doesn't
no one cares about the NIT
that's like when you
don't make the playoffs
in your fantasy football league
like who cares
I literally tune out
if I don't make it
but I always say
did you already win Big 12
or no that's this weekend
we're in the middle
so
yeah yeah
We're the seventh ranked team in the nation.
And we're...
Seventh in the Big 12.
Yeah, well, close.
It is so stacked.
We're the fifth seed in the conference.
Oh, it's Houston.
So we didn't even get a bye.
Ooh.
I mean, there's a double.
Anyway, we didn't get the bye that Houston, Arizona, Kansas, and Texas Tech got.
How is Big 12 that?
I mean, they're good.
They've always been good.
Big 12 is stacked.
How is that?
We're literally the seventh best team in the nation.
And we're the fifth best.
But we're actually better than the fifth best in the Big 12.
That's...
Anyway, and we're proving it out.
Yeah.
On Wednesday, we played Arizona State, which, you know, they're like a...
They're okay.
Mediocre.
Yeah.
They're not bad, but they're not a tourney team.
Yeah.
Mediocre.
But we beat them 91 to 42.
That's embarrassing.
It was the largest beatdown in the history of the tournament, and Arizona State's worst
loss in like 70 years.
That's crazy.
The next day, then we played a good team, Texas Tech.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
This team to beat Duke.
Houston, Arizona.
Good team.
We beat them by 22.
Jesus.
Tonight, we get the real test.
We play the best in the nation.
Arizona.
Arizona, okay.
They're 30-2.
They're very good.
Okay.
I mean, Arizona's...
They're all time, like, historical good.
So tonight will be a huge test.
And if we win that, then we have to play Houston or Kansas.
It's so ridiculous.
Houston's one.
I never want to go up against Calvin Sampson.
Is Sean Miller, is he still at Arizona?
No.
Tommy Lloyd, who came from Gonzaga.
I'm old, man.
Yeah.
Tommy Lloyd's got Arizona.
Yeah.
Rolling.
So anyway.
And for those of you who don't know,
what Steve's talking about at Iowa State
is quite impressive
because you guys are not like an NIL.
NIL is like the money bag powerhouse right now.
The fact that y'all are this good.
We're money balling.
You are.
Exactly.
Just like your namesake.
It's pretty insane.
This shirt is from two years ago.
I was at the championship game in Kansas City
and we won.
We beat Houston by like over 30 points.
They were number one in the nation.
Yeah.
It was the largest victory over number one team in history.
And Houston's like always nice, always.
If we win the championship tomorrow,
then we'll have won six of the last 12 Big 12 championships.
So you guys are going to be a one seed then, you think?
That's pretty amazing.
There's no way we'll be one.
Even if you win the Big 12 tournament, you won't be a one seed?
Correct.
How's that point?
Well, I mean, there's a small chance.
Okay.
We're likely a two seed.
But if you take out Arizona and Houston—
We could slip to a three seed if we lose tonight.
That's crazy.
Like Michigan State, Illinois, Iowa State, Houston are all right in there.
Right, right.
Well, it would be hard to like, it's not like definitive.
Anyway, we'll see.
Yeah.
How are we doing on time?
Illinois good?
How is Illinois doing?
Sports got Illinois.
Oh, yeah.
Illinois is better.
Yeah, Urbana Champaign.
Your school.
Your school is right in there with mine.
Wait, is that the same Illinois?
It is.
Oh, it is.
Urbana Champaign.
so that's like
the University of Illinois
is University of Illinois
well there's Chicago
and other
but Urbana Champagne
is like
it's like the main one
the main one
yeah
yeah I mean you guys are good
that's where
DK and Mark Andreessen
came from
who else
what are other famous
famous tech alum
oh tech
I thought you were gonna go
Playboy guy
I think it was from there
yeah
oh good
Q Hefner
right
we got DK
Mark Andreessen
Q Hefner
SPF
I don't think
I don't think we rep SPF.
Max Lepstian.
A good one.
Yeah.
There we go.
Cool.
We got all kinds of exciting stuff to talk today.
Like, why was I flying in at 2 a.m.?
I was in New York.
Uh-oh.
Oh, we got all kinds of comments.
We got all kinds of comments.
PBJ now with more ASMR.
I think that was when you were eating in the morning.
That's right.
I can't read it.
Read it to me.
What do you got?
DK's eyes are glazing over.
And there's lots of laughing.
jacked steve everyone thinks you look jacked steve like you do he'd been working out so this this
two pounds looks like two pounds of muscle two pounds of muscle yeah right up i did do i did do
some daily push-ups in new york there you go yeah finger red number one finger red number one finger
red number one maxi madness dk's eyes are closing over then he's laughing and matt is telling them
don't encourage them so he wants me to he wants me to call lay the law down let's talk about some
Bitcoin or AI stuff.
All right, let's do it.
Well, before we do,
do we have that one guy
who is apparently
both a major Bitcoiner
and an Iowa State fan?
Because if that one guy
is there now,
he's your own, my friend.
Oh, yeah, the YouTube commenter.
Show yourself.
I'm very loud, man.
Tell me your prediction for tonight.
Exactly.
Anyway, yeah.
So I was in New York.
Well, the Spiral team
had an in-person retreat.
We do a couple a year.
This is our first of the year.
Always, we have our team
with a lot of love
between everyone on our teams.
It's great to see each other in person.
We had great discussions.
One thing that Haley had a great idea
to do in New York is hold a
Builder event. We've been doing it for like
nine straight months here.
The Genesis idea came on
this pod.
And
several other cities have sprouted about
doing Builder, but New York hasn't.
So Haley's like, let's do a Builder.
So Matt Velez and Haley and I
hosted Builder.
New York. At PubKey.
At PubKey. Nice.
So it's fun. Thomas
at PubKey has a podcast that they
I didn't know it either.
Have you
been to PubKey? Never been. No.
I haven't been to New York. And I'm guessing DK has not been to PubKey?
I haven't been. No. When you're in New York,
definitely go to PubKey. You go in.
There's three
rooms of
significance. The first one is like a
classic New York dive bar.
If just in
And normal folks go in here.
And they probably don't know it's a Bitcoin bar.
Unless you look pretty closely and then you see some Satoshi shrine stuff.
You go to the...
Or memorabilia.
Then if you go to the back room, that's where there's more full-on Bitcoin.
Dianetics.
A little bit more like here.
Well, actually harder core than here.
And then there's another room where it is full on pride.
Was that the podcast room?
Yeah, that's the podcast room.
So you would comment that you like the chaos and stuff
and the colors and the chaos, and that's definitely true.
And I don't know if you noticed, but on the wall in the background,
they have people signing their names, like visitors.
So Haley, Matt, and I signed our names.
I mean, there's hundreds of names signed there, so that's cool.
Anyway, we did a pod.
We mainly talked about Builder and PB.
Then we did Builder.
We had at least 50 people come.
Nice.
I don't even know the count
because in the main room we were presenting in,
it holds 50 and it was packed
and there's a separate room behind it
and I don't know how many people are in there,
but at least 50 people.
They're like 90 plus RSVPs.
Was it pretty similar format
to how we've done them in SF,
or do they kind of vary a bit?
Similar.
We had four presentations.
So I went first and presented Unleash the Agents,
which I'll have to present here to you guys.
But it's about agentic commerce
and why it's going to be big,
what are the different payment options,
sort of, you know, credit cards,
like TradFi 2.0, stablecoins, and Bitcoin.
Makes the case for Bitcoin, but it addresses all of them.
So I spent...
Matt and the Les put the presentation together.
No one thought I could do it in 20 minutes.
I did it in 20 minutes.
Very proud of myself.
I did it in 20 minutes.
First rehearsal was over an hour, so...
No, it was good.
So cover that, and then...
Nick Slaney came.
Nice.
Yeah, I saw that.
So I guess we're going to,
this will be the eighth straight episode
talking about MDK, I guess.
Wait, what was his bot's name again?
Is it Ori?
Nick?
Ori?
I'm receiving feedback from folks
that it is quite the streak.
But anyway, Nick came,
gave a good five-minute prezo,
and you guys probably saw
he created the prezo a few hours before
and had SatBot created for him.
Yeah, I saw that.
It went well.
Then Matt Belez gave a quick five-minute prezo
just a few of the things he's built
that are related to agentic commerce and Bitcoin payments.
And then Elias from the Spiral team,
an engineer on the Spiral team,
demonstrated what he's been by coding
and a really cool knowledge search
for Bitcoin technical stuff
that has like an agentic interface and pretty powerful.
So the only difference,
We wanted to get to those presentations and then open it up,
so we didn't really get much audience engagement during the presentations,
but we were actually, unlike every other builder we've done,
we kept it on the clock.
We're usually pretty good here, too.
Every presentation we have takes twice as long as we budget for,
and that's not a knock.
It's usually because there's great audience engagement,
so it's not bad.
It's just then we run out of time for other stuff.
Here we had a good 45 minutes left.
We got through the preseason 745.
We had 45 minutes of discussion,
and it was a great discussion.
Lots of engagement.
There's good pushback.
Some people pushing on stablecoins,
or pushing back on why will Bitcoin be adopted
instead of credit cards and stablecoins.
So it was really good.
Sorry?
Was Druckenmiller there?
He was...
I was hoping Jeremy Allaire would show up,
but he did not.
as far as I know.
Maybe he's in the back room.
Anyway,
and then we,
another goal
beyond just putting on
a good event
and getting good engagement
was to find
one or more people
who want to
continue it
in New York.
Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And Haley and I had
at least half a dozen people
approach us afterwards
and it looks like there's,
it looks promising.
That's great.
That we'll,
that we'll get someone.
So we've obviously talked
a lot about
agentic commerce on the show.
I mean,
I think at this point, that's basically, it's like the Presidio agent payment show.
What, if anything, was a new insight for you or did you change your mind on or was there
anything that jumped out at you as like a new, I don't know, a new idea or a new takeaway?
Not really.
I mean, the main thing is we have put effort into putting this presentation together.
I mean, this is something we've talked about on the show for a year.
Yeah.
And I've always felt it's a bit hand wavy.
or when I say it's hand-wavy,
meaning any of us can make a strong argument.
Anyone at Presidio Bitcoin,
anyone in Bitcoin can make a strong argument long-term.
Why is Bitcoin the best money?
Why is it the most neutral and credible and blah, blah, blah.
But it's much harder to make the argument for like why now?
Why should a normal person use it now
versus stable coins or credit cards or whatever?
It's a way harder argument.
So when I say we've been a bit hand-wavy,
we don't have a super strong tight argument.
But we've been developing it on the show and in other venues.
And then with Matt Biles putting this presentation together,
and then I was going to get up in front of people and present it.
We really wanted to make the best case.
So I think that has strengthened over time.
That's good news.
But I'd still like to see it stronger.
The why now still needs to be stronger.
I mean, I still think the default scenario right now is that credit cards are going to,
unless there's stuff that we find that they simply don't work,
they're going to be.
That's going to be the default.
That's going to be used.
And then clearly the stablecoin, like CoinCorps,
are going to push, push, push, push their solutions.
So there's likely going to be adoption there.
and they solve some of the problems of credit cards.
Yeah.
Some of the problems that Bitcoin solves as well.
So I still think we have a lot of work to do on that.
The best thing we can do though is build, demonstrate,
cast your vote.
That's one thing.
I say because that's one of the slides in the presentation
is like every payment made you can think of as a vote.
So if you're a seller or a buyer,
if you're selling something,
or you've got your buddy selling you tea or whatever.
Honey.
honey tea what you know yeah you see the case we were at 100 every payment they accept right or if
they just decide to accept bitcoin that's kind of a vote but then every payment they accept is a vote
and if we're buying stuff every payment we make in bitcoin is a vote right um yeah yeah did um
i'm curious uh did nick have anything i actually didn't look at his presentation in the chat did
he have anything new or of interest that you were surprised by and what was the audience's reaction
had people tried OriBot? Were they excited
to try a chatbot interface?
Was the audience pretty AI-pilled?
I don't know how much of a bubble we're in here.
San Francisco. The audience,
I think it was mostly
Bitcoiners slash crypto folks.
Nick did a nice job
presenting. He covered
MDK and Ori
and then the
unhuman stuff. So the stuff we already know.
But he nicely covered all of it in less than six minutes.
The audience, again, during the presentations,
there was no questions or whatever.
So at the end, it was mainly about just the general topic of agenda payments.
I don't think there was much on his stuff.
I mean, he certainly engaged in the discussion, though, and responded.
But yeah, I mean, in terms of the audience,
one of the questions is
do people even think
agentic payments? I mean, clearly there's a lot of
hype around it the last two months.
Last year when I asked AI people
payments wasn't even on the radar.
And the last two months
it's dramatically changed in terms of hype.
Yeah, for sure.
But then the question still remains.
I mean, that includes us, right?
I mean, we're excited about the hype, but
it still remains a question. Is it
really taking off this year
or soon?
or is it hyped now and 10 years away?
But the audience thought it is real.
And so I want to come back to that question,
what's real, what's not.
But on the audience in particular,
did you get the sense even without agentic payments,
were people that came to this outside of our bubble,
were they already vibe coding?
Had they, for example, set up an open claw before
or had they used Replit or CloudCode
or something like OriBot
or is this like a new world they wanted to try?
I don't think I
I don't think anyone asked that
so
but my
intuition says
yes
that a lot of them had
but maybe not
trying agentic payments
I'm not sure
so on that point
about what's real
what's not
I mean I think I saw
one of you guys
or someone
maybe it was actually
I don't know
someone shared in our chat
that
you know
trying to see
what was hype
versus what was real
in agentic payments
DK maybe that was you
be like, what is y'all's sense right now?
Like, obviously, everyone and their sister is talking about agent payments.
Like, what is y'all's general feeling of, like, has anyone proven a use case for this
yet?
Is it still just, like, theoretical?
Obviously, OpenClaw opened up the...
Somebody shared something that kind of indicated that even, I think, X402, which claims very
large volume, is maybe not as legit volume in use cases as maybe the perception may be
ahead of reality there.
yeah I think it's still very much speculation
but I am quite bullish on agentic payments
just the whole
just what we have experienced
with having an agent do stuff for you
and then buy
this is like obvious
and the example we give in the presentation
that I presented was
buying a pair of shoes
something relatable for everyone
so it's not some super weird use case
not like mailing a potato or something
I love that
buying a pair of shoes
so everyone buys a pair of shoes
and there's a range
some people just like
put no effort into it
and just click buy
or go to a store
and say they look nice
and buy it
others do a bunch of research
others do a lot of price comparison
but no matter who you are
if you just tell your agent
who already knows about you
and stuff
and it just does all that work for you
in a matter of seconds
and purchases it for you
and they just arrive
like why would you not do that?
And maybe they're using, you know, maybe you're using your credit card to do that.
Right.
But the notion of agentic payments seems obvious to me.
And then, of course, then there are novel use cases as well, which are naturally speculative.
But just traditional online retail, there's no question in my mind, agentic commerce will be a thing soon.
Yeah.
Because already a behavior I've developed, I'm not having the agent buy it for me,
but I definitely do product research via AI now.
And it is far superior to just Googling.
And so I bought a number of things where I start with AI.
It seems to find really good stuff.
Since I'm still trying to develop trust,
or trusting it,
I then do my more traditional research
with those products and stuff
to see are they actually good
and I've been impressed so far.
And then I manually buy it.
But yeah, if I can one-click or basically zero-click buy,
why would I not do that?
Totally.
I think that's the future, but I am concerned about it.
It feels like there's a popular narrative
that somehow ads as a format are going to work really well
in these LLM workflows And I think I kind of default a little skeptical of that because they so good and the information is so crafted toward what you actually want
It doesn't like ads work when there's a little bit of like an arbitrage of attention between, hey, here's what we think you might like.
And here's some other options that are paid, like the kind of the standard Google web search model.
But I think when you move toward like an LLM giving you really high quality research, it almost feels like you lose some of the ability for there to be a ad monetization event there.
So I think I'm kind of generally skeptical of how those things fit in.
I'm optimistic that there's going to be a lot of opportunity in agentic commerce from like agents doing commerce with each other or on behalf of us, but not necessarily around fitting into that flow of like traditional commerce categories.
But that's separate, though.
If I use AI and there's no ads,
I can do exactly what I just said.
I can still have the agent do my product research
and then buy it for me.
So I agree with that.
But I'm interested in your thoughts on the ads here.
So is it your understanding that right now,
let's say I was using OpenAI or something,
and I was going to have it buy something,
is the ad right now just being displayed
or is the plan just to display it in the answer?
Or are they already experimenting with,
hey, if we're in a like one, you know, whatever,
like one click buy this for you,
we're just going to like buy us
and wait towards who's paying us on the backend.
And if that's the case,
that seems like extremely against the user's best interest
and something that's also really hard to audit.
And like something I, I mean,
you already know my thoughts on this,
but I certainly wouldn't use that
even more than I already think.
Right, right.
But it seems like if you are compromising
with a backend payment from somebody
and you're not giving the thing that's best for the user,
you're actually hurting the whole LLM experience
to the point that you might actually lose trust that way.
Isn't that true for Google too, though?
No, because I think Google is different
because there's a world where there's the ability
to arbitrage the person's attention
on the search results page.
The search results page says,
hey, here's some stuff that we think is good.
Here's some stuff that we were paid for
that might be good too.
And it's like up to you to pick.
So it's presented as like, we don't really know.
But in LLMs, it's presented as you want these things, you want the very best five things, here's the best five, right?
So I hope, and I'm currently not, I don't think I'm seeing ads, and I hope I don't see ads.
I am paying a monthly subscription, so I hope that would mean that I can be using a product that is ad-free.
Or, you know, I mean, hopefully there's not just Google dominance, right?
Hopefully there's several really good options, and maybe some have ads and others don't.
but it would be a very sad day
I think if there's only one company
and there's ads and it degrades the experience
yeah I don't see that ever happening
and the good reason is
as long as we have the open source models
it's always been challenging for me
because I understand Google is arguably the greatest business of all time
and I've wondered my entire life
who clicks these ads
I've never clicked a Google ad that I know of in my entire life
so I presume I see the revenue numbers
that people do click these ads
I can't, it's hard for me to empathize, but like, I, I, you know, I guess they're there.
But, but, but when it comes to the enchanted commerce thing.
DK worked on this one, like 2003.
So do people, let's actually give it the truth.
Google truth.
Is it all alive?
Max, if you had to go replace that wig, where, where, how would you do that?
If I wanted to replace what?
Your wig.
Oh, no mommies, man.
well first i would have to buy the uh uh the whoopee goldberg uh
mask that we had from the pbj view um i would start there
but um yeah no i mean it's like i mean to be clear this was the whole view i mean i've talked
to you guys about that company that i love uh coggy which the whole brand for them was like look
you know and if you go back to um larry and sergey's original paper they even spell it out
in there. They say, you know, the moment you introduce advertisement, like it's, it's, you
know, it's a long march toward death because it's like the frog boiling. Like I understand your point,
the arbitrage, as long as you can show two options of like just the pure best result and the, uh,
the ad, then, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's not going from zero to like horrible. It's like a
slight degree, you know, shift, but like there's still limited attention and ad space, right? So,
you know, let's say you're looking for the best answer and you start with the 10 best answers.
Then you say, well, it's the nine best answers and one promoted.
And then the eight best answers and two promoted.
Like over time, that experience still gets worse and worse,
which I would argue up until the LLM boom
was what people were writing about
was sort of like the enchantification of Google.
Like I stopped using Google before the LLM boom
and was starting to use things like Koggy.
But now that we're getting the LLMs,
I'm going back to the LLMs.
But I mean...
Quick story on that, actually.
21 years ago, 2005, I was at Yahoo Search.
Special number.
I was on the Yahoo Search.
You were at Yahoo?
It was my MBA internship.
Were there of you guys a dog pile?
Ask G's?
Yeah.
I love Ask G's.
2005, Yahoo was still like a power.
I think a lot of, I mean, people in Silicon Valley knew that Google was going to dominate,
but the rest of the world, I don't think, didn't.
But anyway, but yeah, so from being in the inside there, Yahoo showed a ton of ads in the search results page.
And Google showed far fewer.
And I saw the internal debates there.
It was basically next to impossible for them to reduce the number of ads they showed.
Why?
Because they were having discussions, how do we gain market share on Google?
Well, one, it's to create a better user experience, show less ads.
So why?
Well, because you can 100% with 100% certainty quantify the revenue loss that quarter if you remove ads.
And you can't quantify, or it's way more difficult, a leap of faith, like how much market shares it's going to give us by improving the UX.
And Yahoo is already a public company at this point?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So, and sadly, now Google shows probably even more ads than Yahoo did at the time.
Like it's insane how many ads are shown now on a Google search results page.
Yeah.
It'd be interesting for someone.
I mean, I don't know like what kind of revenue Yahoo is doing, but it'd be cool to like maybe
buy Yahoo and bring it back.
Bring it back.
Like you want to personally just chip in or pass the hat or what?
Exactly.
I'm going to pass that one to you, DK.
But I'll, you know, it couldn't be that much.
No.
So, but, but, but I, so I, I am, I am very curious about where this is going to go in
the long run because i mean and also what i remember in the early days of google is you all
said i'm feeling lucky right which was just like i click one thing and i get the best answer so to
be clear vision of what an llm is that's what i'm saying like you you go back and listen to larry
you know talk in like 99 like he was ready for ai and llms way back then this is an ai company yeah
exactly and like that dude was just like right and like probably doesn't get nearly enough respect
for like all of his vision over the years um but but again so i mean i'm curious you guys are
there on this time like so in that world you know both he and sergey acknowledged in their paper
that ads were eventually going to make the product bad ads happen to work very well he clearly wants
it to be a one-shot ai company like what what were their other ideas for monetization and like are
some of those going to come back in the you know the lm wave well the the other they had several i
think there were three that were in the venture pitch which was kind of early i'm not sure if i'll
get them all right but there was the um the google search appliance was one of their ideas for how to
make money it was to sell basically enterprise search oh that was like an oven in your house
yeah yeah and that was that was like you know a reasonable line of business that eventually kicked
off what is now you know google workspace and all the you know enterprise cloud stuff so it's kind of
like a little bit of genesis there well it's funny about that sorry to interrupt but that that but
when I joined Google,
I was blown away by how horrible
enterprise search was at Google.
It was like impossible to find stuff.
How is that possible?
It was horrible.
Enterprise search was horrible.
How does it get worse?
The thing that makes Google great
is because it has the whole web
cached in memory.
Right.
And so you have tons of interconnect
between pages,
referencing pages and information,
linkages and terms.
And enterprise doesn't have that much content
and doesn't have that much interlinking.
So if you isolate the index
to just all the stuff contained within an enterprise,
you actually don't have enough signal
to build a really great search,
even if you use the same algorithm.
And the irony is, I guess back then,
that's the case,
is like you actually still needed to like
be on the web to get that value.
Now you can potentially with LLMs,
you can condense that value from the web
and then potentially transfer it
with fine tuning or something just to the enterprise.
So it would work much better now.
Yeah, 100%, yeah.
That'd be a great, yeah.
And I think that there's a bunch of companies doing stuff like that.
Like, I think Glean does stuff like that.
They're really good.
Yeah.
Okay, back to your list.
What's number two and three?
Oh, geez.
There was the search, the ads.
Like, there was enterprise search, there was ads, and then, I don't know that I, oh, I think site search was the third one, which was if you owned a web property and you wanted to enable public search on your web property,
you could pay
you know
Google to basically
run software as a service
like search
as a software service
and
you know if you run
like
I guess the vision today
would be like
if Amazon were to
outsource their
search engine to Google
and make the public
search box on Amazon
powered by Google
I think that
was called
site search at the time
I think that was
the third line of business
that was
contemplated
like AdSense
was not
part of the original
VC deck
I don't think so.
Isn't the history,
Yahoo bought,
like Overture was created
and was the genesis of the AdSense type ad model.
Yahoo bought them
and then Google created their own,
created AdSense in-house.
Is that accurate?
Yeah, AdWords was the closest equivalent, I'd say.
And then AdSense was more like
for looking at different publisher properties
and serving ads not against necessarily like keyword queries,
but against publisher properties.
So you could have AdSense for like a blog.
You could have AdSense for domains in case you typed in the domain
that wanted to serve a relevant ad.
But the kind of contextual understanding of what is going on
and putting up a keyword targeted ad based on that concept was,
at least that's my recollection of AdSense,
not really part of the venture pitch.
So do you guys remember when it became clear
that ads was like the runaway business.
But like, when y'all were there,
like, was that clear at that point?
Or was it still?
It was very clear about that.
It was very clear, yeah.
Interesting.
Internally, though,
but they tried to make,
not make a big deal out of it
because you didn't want to invite competition.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
So how do you think that translates?
So, okay, so, you know,
obviously they knew in the long run, though,
that that was potentially,
or they knew that that would definitely
incentivize the product in the long run.
Now we're entering into a new age,
you know, some people are hyped on ads.
I tend to agree with you.
Like, I mean, again,
it's hard for me to evaluate these things
because I know for me as a user,
I was willing to pay for Kagi in the first place, right?
So there's no world in which I'm going to use
an ad product for my search.
And if I had to, then like, you know,
and I'm increasingly bullish on open source models
running on stuff like Maple or Vora or whatever.
And that's really exciting to me.
But like, I also understand
most people shouldn't go with the default.
So, I mean, one,
as long as the LLM is showing you responses,
you could in theory still have like hey here are some you know suggested things like here's some
links by the way this hyperlink is an ad and like whatever tell people about that but as you start
having the llm become or the ai become more agentec and just doing stuff on you on your behalf
then yeah essentially like if it's going to buy something it either they get a cut back or they
don't and if they do how do they show that to you and how do you audit that like where do you see
the business models going so we already have subscription right which i would love if that's
the way that web works.
And I have a question about that,
but real quick.
And then you can imagine
taking a cut of e-commerce
and there's ads.
So do either of you know
the data on subscriptions?
Like what percentage of OpenAI
or Google or Anthropoc users
are using free
versus upgrading to a subscription?
And does it skew
and how does it compare to historical services?
But in any case, what's definitely true,
like with search, there's no subscription.
I mean, no one's paying a subscription for search.
Well, I mean, the nerds on Hacker News were starting to,
and there was like 40,000 of us, but yes.
No one, basically.
Meaning it's like a rounding error.
Meaning, I don't know what the data is for Cloud and ChatGPD,
but it's more than 40,000 people
are paying $20 a month.
So I think it's encouraging
because it is changing people's behavior.
Because I think rationally,
if you were forced,
like most people have used Google for free,
but if you were forced to say,
hey, you're going to pay $100 a year
subscription for Google,
or it's taken away.
You can't search the internet anymore.
Is that going to change behavior
if that actually was the proposition?
Of course, tons of people will subscribe.
But because of the ad model
and they make so much money,
they weren't forced to do that.
And so we're just stuck in this world
of almost everything is an ad model.
I think it's a way healthier environment
if there's many competing models.
And so I think it's incredible.
Remember at the dawn of the internet,
there was no concept of putting
your credit card into a website yeah right so like that that you needed htps and then you needed
ssl you know you needed a whole ecosystem of people getting comfortable with that i mean that
was amazon's biggest fight for so long was you got to put your credit card into a website that's
bonkers yeah i still think it's bonkers and so people but you said and you also not only the
technology but like you said people had to get comfortable so it's the same like psychologically
and here it's psychological too um if stuff's given to you for free it's a big leap to start
paying for it, even if in the end, if you started
doing it, you'd be like, oh, I like the trade-off.
To change behavior is hard,
but I think that people paying
subscriptions for AI, there's
so much value there
that that's changing behavior, and that's going to be
good for all kinds of future services
that people are comfortable paying.
I agree with you. The good news is
we should definitely pull this data,
but anecdotally in my own life and everyone I know,
even though I did pay
for Kagi before, and a few
other things, eventually,
I was many years refusing even to pay for like Spotify or whatever.
But now I have multiple LLMs to the point where I'm like,
shit, how do I cancel this stuff?
Like this got out of control way too quickly.
And everyone I know is paying for at least one.
Multiple people are paying for many.
So there's no question that the sort of like Overton window of like,
hey, is the web free or not is shifted.
That seems to me generally a positive thing.
Having said that, I mean,
something we've talked a lot about on the show as well is like,
that also is dangerous in the sense that it creates like a very two-tiered
world very quickly. It's like, there are those people
that can pay and then those who can't.
If you're in a developing world or whatever,
now to be fair, I mean, just like Spotify
and stuff, I'm sure they'll price it differently.
But yeah.
And it raises the open
versus closed model discussion.
And if that gap closes,
then it makes it more accessible
to people. And it's also, and it kind of
comes back to this idea for me,
I think we talked about one or two weeks ago, where it's like,
you should always have
sort of the open router or whatever,
where you can go and say,
let me just,
even if it's just a test
every once in a while,
lots of queries
to see what their responses are.
Because one thing I'm concerned about is,
you know,
as I was telling DK
in our chat this morning,
some of these,
none of these companies,
I don't trust any of these companies.
Some of them I really don't trust.
And, you know,
on principle,
I don't want to get hooked
in their ecosystem
even if it's very good at first
because I know that trick.
It's like,
it's like Sapbot always does
in our chat where he,
you know,
he does that little emoji
where there's like cheese in a box
and he has a little stick holding up.
It's like, bro,
I'm not eating your cheese.
I don't care how good that cheese is.
You're going to pull the stick on me.
I know it.
And, you know, that's why it's so important we have, you know,
even if the web kind of goes this way where a few big providers are getting you to pay for it,
it seems good at first.
You have to have that open stack of, you know, open source models,
ideally Bitcoin, payment rails, et cetera.
Because otherwise, yeah, we're all just going to end up in the box eating our cheese.
Yeah, so I wonder how it'll play out.
Because like with search, I mean, there are a number, you know,
you mentioned what Excite and stuff
and AltaVista was like the big one in 98, 99.
Ask Jeeves and Dogpile.
Those are my go-tos.
And then, but once, I mean,
Google is so transformational that, you know,
it just, it won and then it's still winning today, right?
And there's really not been competition in the search space.
But if you look at other things like internet browsers,
that was more, a little more dynamic.
Started with Netscape, IE, then crushed them.
And Chrome crushed them.
Well, and at the time, though, it really seemed like,
it just seemed like IE was going to be like Google,
where like for 30 years or whatever, it's just going to be IE.
And then Firefox actually was able to eat some market share.
And Google helped a lot with generating revenue for Firefox.
But then, yeah, then Chrome launched and then it dominated.
And Safari has a lot of market share, too.
So it's definitely a healthier market compared to Surge.
Yeah.
So maybe that's a good analogy for how these big AI models will play out,
and there just won't be one dominant one.
But it'll be kind of like it is today.
And they are jockeying for position, right?
I mean, ChatGPT had most of the market share,
but Gemini is really encroaching on it now.
And then Claude is just, Opus models are really, really, really good.
I also, just as a pause point, I mean, DK, on last week's show, you got me thinking more about using Anthropic or Claude as a sort of thought partner because I was primarily using Geminis Melee Driver.
And I was using for building stuff, which I'm probably doing less than you are, but I was using OriBot, which is a wrapped Claude.
But I've started using Claude as my chatting partner and research partner.
And I'm using, as of right now, only because I first need to get one of my domains.
By the way, remember how we were talking about, oh, it's so genius with Replit.
but you just buy a domain, it's so easy.
Well, now I've got hosting through them
and I can't figure out how to damn transfer my domain.
So I want to get my $20 a month out of them
before I add one more subscription to the pie.
Of course, it's a genius model,
but they gave me some cheese and now I'm in a box.
But I have to just say,
I don't know what is going on over at Anthropic
because they clearly have less money than Google and OpenAI.
They have a lot of money, but those guys can cook.
It is the best.
As of right now, for me doing research,
it is two or three months ago,
Google trounced everything I'd ever use.
This is now trouncing Google.
Unbelievable.
Like in helping me write out some of my essays
to the first time.
And actually, something else I want to be very careful about
as we talked about, I was like,
I love writing for the actual thinking of it.
And, you know, I plan to continue to always do that.
But for the first time I had an anthropic-rited essay and I was like, part of this is better than I would have done.
And I would never think about have anthropic write the essay, but it can be a thought partner, a brainstorm partner.
I think if you say, look, I'm going all organic, I'm not touching these tools ever, you're going to get left behind yourself.
It's going to take you too long, you're going to spend so much time.
But if you also just throw up an idea and say, whatever it outputs I'm posting, that's also kind of a garbage approach.
I think the only rational approach is to know how to use the tool and get the most out of it.
But don't just put all of your trust in the tool and don't avoid the tool.
Use it to help you.
Totally.
And I'm finding that balance right now.
But to me, at least, this was a mark.
And again, there were other things where it's still I didn't.
I was like, I would have done this very differently.
And obviously, I'm still using it as a thought partner.
But it was the first time I've ever read something where I was like, wow, that's just incredible.
So if I may switch gears a little bit.
Yeah.
we'll still talk about AI,
but a different angle.
Like, typically we're talking about AI
in ways that most of the products
we talk about are proprietary products.
Right.
ChatGPT, Anthropic,
Replit, etc.
Closed source,
proprietary products.
And they're really good.
They're really good products.
Obviously, we care very much about
open source, open models, etc.
So I'd love to talk about
what's our...
What are our thoughts on open source AI?
And not just the models, but all the tooling around it
and the experiences around it, protocols, the whole stack,
everything about AI.
What are our thoughts on open source?
And then more specifically,
I certainly expect the big AI labs to do a lot of open source as well
when it's strategic for them.
Of course.
So what will be the gaps?
What'll be the blind spots
where there'd be a lot of value
to have open source AI
that the big AI labs aren't doing
and VC-funded startups aren't doing?
Curious to open that up.
And I ask that actually for selfish reasons as well.
Should Spiral start funding open source?
Sounds like Steve's got his checkbook open.
Our checkbook might be open.
So what should Spiral be thinking about
for open source AI funding?
Jeez, it's a great,
great, broad, open question.
You know, I think with open source stuff,
a lot of times I think it's comfortable
to build an open source version
of something that we know gives us value
as a closed source tool.
And then we start comparing it and saying,
yeah, but it's open.
Yeah, but it's open.
And I get, it's like, fine.
I get why it's an attractive proposition
to do the open version of the thing that's closed.
But I think the place where open source often shines
is when it sort of moves up or down a layer
or figures out sort of a different use case
that's maybe not well-served
and can't really be well-served
because of a structural problem
with either how the product or service
is delivered by the closed source version
or the business model of the closed source version.
It's just sort of something that
it's almost like a judo move
it hurts the ability to become more open.
Like the closed source thing can't become more open.
So I think, I was thinking about this a bit more,
and I think like a good analogy which I think I talked to you guys about before definitely written about is you know when Linux first came out you know we all said oh good Linux is going to replace Windows
So I so I, you know, I had my tower desktop computer in college and I installed Linux and I was like using some crappy Windows manager and like, you know, using Linux.
But it was kind of like a bad version of Windows.
Like it didn't have the software I wanted, didn't have the ecosystem.
them you know it's open which is nice but it but it sort of missed on all the things that mattered
and the real winning move for linux was to help us scale cloud services like google and facebook
and basically every you know uh salesforce every cloud service used today wouldn't work if you had
to pay licensing fees to sun solaris but it does work when you have an open free operating system
and so and and android and android yeah so so i think like you know rebuilding the closed thing
at that same layer is kind of a peer or cousin to the closed thing is fine starting point but i think
that's not really ever where the magic is the magic is up a layer down a layer on the side somehow
and so what new markets does it enable dk could you go a little bit deeper in that because you
You talked about this many times over the last couple years.
Why, yeah, like, why is it that Linux opened up the cloud market?
So you're saying the alternative was for these big, whatever,
Facebook or Google, they would have to pay another company large fees.
But why wouldn't there still be competition,
even if there's whatever closed source?
Okay, someone else develops, you know, whatever,
another closed source alternative that's cheaper.
Why was Linux so powerful?
operating system were coupled.
So you would deploy
your web server on
Sun with Solaris
and that would buy that.
On Spark chips too.
There was more diversity
in chips back then.
So Sun Microsystems,
you guys are getting into ancient history.
Sorry.
So think about Linux.
We're going to go back to QMF.
Okay.
Right.
Like Linux, you can just run on any, you can compile it for any x86 chip.
So you can buy it from Intel or AMD or whoever.
Those are kind of commodity parts, and they're not super specialized.
And so the magic is you sort of commoditize the complement.
You know the famous Joel Spolsky?
You sort of, if the chips are all commodity, then the OS kind of has more space to play.
And the Spark chips are not commodity, but the Intel x86 chips were quickly becoming commodity.
Like at the time, if you had a company and you wanted to equip people with computers, buy an IBM RS6000 or a Sparkstation.
Or if you're doing graphics or whatever, then you'd buy SGI computers.
And everything was proprietary about them.
Interesting.
So why didn't we see if, who was commoditizing the chip or who was making the chip really cheap at that point?
Google was huge here.
And the hardware too?
No, but they were able to take just off-the-shelf x86 computers and PCs, basically.
Oh, really?
And Linux.
Wow, okay.
I mean, at the time, I think most people thought that was insane,
because it's like a dinky little home computer, you're going to do big iron stuff.
But I mean, that's where a lot of early innovation from Google internally
was actually being able to scale.
allowed. Wow. I mean, there's a lot of innovation around distributed computing.
Exactly. Okay. Interesting. And so networking works differently and you need to assume the
thing is going to fail. So you need to have like a whole operational process at the network
operation center to say there's going to be people who run in and pull these things out when they
fail and put in new ones because it happens very frequently. These are just like off the shelf
components are extremely cheap, but they require all kinds of other trade-offs to be able to make
it actually operate well.
Interesting.
Both hardware, software, operations, everything.
And so was it Google's plan always at that point of like, hey, because Linux is open,
we're going to sort of like modify and continue to build this out for our needs?
Or did they ever think, like, was there ever like a proprietary push or were they always
going to build on top of the open?
I guess it was just like, it's not ideological.
I think it was just practical.
It was like, well, we've got these things running.
We can run them.
Also early on, Google is making a ton of money off search.
So why invest in building their own hardware?
Why build proprietary software?
That wasn't the core business.
It was better to let the world adopt
what Google had done well with these open systems
because that just meant more internet usage,
more searching, more revenue for Google.
Yeah.
Well, the reason I'm pushing all this, by the way,
is because I think it's really interesting
to think from this stage of like,
okay, Google, like, you know, history rhymes.
What are the rhymes going to be this time around where there's some entity, I actually have my own idea, which I didn't mean to skip too far ahead, but an entity which can basically use the open monetary stack, whether Bitcoin as a monetary good or the payment network or both, to enable them to basically turbocharge their business.
I mean, this is getting ahead of us, but the company I keep going back to is MicroStrategy.
I mean, I guess Block is another one.
But it's interesting.
Like, it of course makes sense that someone that's making money somewhere else is going to probably use Bitcoin in a way to make a lot more money and cut their own costs.
I've got some thoughts on that.
But before I jump ahead to MicroStrategy, like, I don't know.
Yeah, I'd say that's more of a financial engineering thing and it has its place.
Sort of.
I'm not dismissing it.
You know, I'm generally enthusiastic that it exists,
but I don't think it really moves the technology forward in a major way.
It's not like a new open source technology idea, right?
Which I think is where we were starting to.
Yeah, and I think we should go more in that direction,
although I'm increasingly questioning that
because I actually think that micro strategy mooning Bitcoin's price first
might be like the unlock we need for people to start using it in other ways too.
But yeah, I'm curious here where you're thinking
of more of the technological stack.
Let me share some possible characteristics
and then that might help generate some ideas from you guys.
But for what makes good candidates
for people to invest in working on open source projects for AI.
One is if it's non-commercial,
Meaning it's software that is expected to be high impact and really valuable to people or to agents.
But there's no obvious business model.
It's not expected to generate revenue.
And so that type of project is less likely to get VC funded, less likely to have startup hungry entrepreneurs to go after that because there's no profit motive.
So that's one characteristic.
Another is, you know, projects that prioritize principles that we care about, that the Bitcoin community cares about, but apply to other spaces too.
And that's like privacy, security,
sort of on steroids, like hyper security,
permissionless, censorship resistance, etc.
Those types of characteristics.
I mean, obviously there's like security companies
that make a lot of money.
I mean, so just building products
with one or more of those
doesn't mean you can't make money.
But oftentimes,
if you're really pushing the extremes in those,
it's marginal from a
profit
motivation. And so
I think those apply to AI
as well. So those are some other
characteristics. But
ultimately it's like, what can
you build of value that's in an open
source project that's not going to get just
steamrolled in three months
by the big AI labs or by
50 Silicon Valley startups that
are getting funded is
the big question. I think one more
characteristic too, I
There's application-level software.
There's protocol.
And I do think if you get closer to protocol or infrastructure,
that lends itself more to open source, non-commercial as well,
versus where you're trying to capture and have direct engagement with a customer.
So that's another angle.
So I have a ton of thoughts on this.
And I think one way I'm thinking about this is where open source can enable new business models, but it's required that we have an open standard first.
And in some cases, sidestep.
I mean, basically move into areas that closed companies may not or cannot.
And so the first thing that comes to mind is, you know, I am falling largely from hearing from, you know, Jesse and other folks in the office how quick the open source models are catching up.
So, for example, you know, there's like the lawsuit from Kla, which I find kind of funny, Anthropic, being like, oh, you guys are just using our model to distill your Chinese models.
It's like, yeah, we probably just jacked all the internet too.
So, you know, it comes around, bro.
But it's interesting to me that so far, you know, the commoditization of the complement is all coming from China, right?
So all of the good open source models,
Quinn and all of these guys,
it's all Chinese.
Now, you know, I've said once before
that I am skeptical of all the closest American companies.
I don't trust any of them.
I certainly don't trust the Chinese models either, right?
And so I am not at all convinced
that these models don't have some kind of like poison pill in them.
I know that sounds whatever,
Tim Boyle hat, whatever.
But we don't still fully understand how LMS even works.
So you can't, it's not like completely,
like we, what's the word for this?
Like you don't know A always leads to B.
What's the word for that?
Anyways, it'll come back to me.
But the point is you can't distill and understand
exactly what's happening within one of these models.
So one thing that I would like to see is
at the very least for a variety of reasons,
we shouldn't let China just totally dominate
the open source model world.
I would love to see,
and I know one or two companies have gotten funded on this
and Facebook in theory or Meta was working on this,
but I would love to see more American companies
that are distilling models.
Ideally, we've talked about on the show before,
my dream would be a model
where you can actually see the entire data set
of what went into the training.
But even if not that,
like who's going to build the coin in America?
That would be number one.
Well, real quick.
Actually, this should have been like a headline
for our show today.
NVIDIA, $26 billion commitment towards open models.
Really?
Open AI.
I didn't see that.
They announced it this way.
Wait, open AI or like actually open AI?
I mean, it's like a press release, right?
Causation, yeah.
I think it was a reaction to a lot of their customers are now threatening to create their own chips or use other people's chips as a negotiating tactic.
So then NVIDIA is like, okay, we'll just put $26 billion towards creating open models.
So we'll see how much it comes to reality.
That's the real commoditize the compliment move.
But that's the answer.
If they do that, that's the answer to your question.
Amazing.
So that's one thing I want to see.
on the hardware chip level as well.
You know, it would be incredible
to have an alternative to NVIDIA
that is an open stack.
Like, imagine in the same way
that framework computer,
you can like go in there
and hack on every part.
Imagine there was an alternative,
basically, yeah, like GPU stack
where like it's,
you know exactly all the parts in there
and you can, you know,
potentially plug and play as you wish.
I think that would be very interesting.
And then if you want to get really crazy
a company around this,
like imagine someone that wants
to build their own fab one day
and it's all open like that.
That obviously would have to be more commercial,
but I think that's pretty interesting.
How do you get the capital to build the data centers
and do all the research for an open version?
Well, I think you would have to turn that
into a company at this stage.
I don't see a way to do this
as like an open source project.
Maybe you could start the research of like,
hey, we're going to like open source
the whatever CAD files or whatever that looks like.
And then I think a company would probably have to commercialize it.
Or the government does it, right?
It's like a public effort.
Well, that's why I find NVIDIA
Because it's a wildly profitable and valuable company.
But it's realistic to me that they actually would spend that much money
and genuinely produce open models because that's not their core business.
So it actually is strategic to their business to do exactly that.
Kind of like Google gave away free stuff.
It's very Android, right?
Yeah.
It's very Android.
Well, like, I mean, like in the Google Maps,
when I worked on the product,
we came out with turn-by-turn navigation
and it completely upended that market.
We just gave it away for free.
Yeah.
And it's in the interest of the company.
I don't understand on the NVIDIA thing,
what exactly are they committing the money to?
Like to companies they want to invest in,
open source projects?
Like, have they talked about how the money
will be spent at all or?
No.
Or no, I don't know.
I don't think they did.
And they could very well.
It literally could have been just a,
immediate reaction to their business negotiations.
So it's probably TBD.
We should get the NVIDIA people back in here ASAP.
Yeah.
Which reminds me I need to send an invite
to an NVIDIA person for next week.
So that's a good reminder.
Another thing though that I think would be really important
to work on from the open side is,
well, two things.
One is, I think a very important primitive,
is auditability.
And actually auditability you could take
in many different ways.
One important piece we're missing in the compute stack today
that unlocks a lot of the crazier ideas that we've discussed,
including autonomous digital life,
is being able to verify that a specific computation was performed
as you believed it was going to be performed.
So some people from the crypto land have been doing this
with zero-knowledge proofs or homomorphic encryption.
But basically, this seems like somewhere where Spiral
could actually potentially move the needle,
is funding research to be able to prove that,
hey, I will pay you conditionally for a computation,
but you need to be able to send me a proof
that that specific computation was done.
That's a big unlock, and that's like,
I think you're right in your wheels house.
Taking a note.
Yeah, good.
So that's the first one.
You should talk to Dustin on that too,
because he's been thinking a lot about specifically
how that could unlock some of the life stuff.
The other big thing to me is like,
someone needs to figure,
and I think this could be commercialed as well,
so I don't know what's open source, what's commercial,
it's something I certainly want to back,
But like payment standards to like move between, I mean, the internet's open, right? And so there's
different jurisdictions. And like, you know, at some level, the product market fit for Bitcoin
has always been, let's call it geographic arbitrage, right? Like allowing people from
different worlds with different views, different legalities to cooperate. And so I think the same
thing is going to be true for AI. It's like, you know, if there are AIs from all different parts of
the world with different laws, just like the internet, like even if there's different payment
and whatever,
computation regulations in one country.
How do those guys work together
and at large scale?
I think figuring out standards
for using Bitcoin as collateral
between different payment networks
on the internet or different AIs,
that's going to be very, very important.
That could be a commercial opportunity as well.
I think the commercial opportunity
that I'm thinking a lot about there
is who's going to build the bank for AIs,
but that's coming.
That's my big obsession at the moment.
But first you need a standard
of how do agents post collateral
between one another
and then that verifiability of compute,
IPOS collateral, you say you did a computation,
if it doesn't, it gets slashed.
Those are all standards, which I think
for open source developers.
For the latter one, are you thinking of like
a peer-to-peer network for inference?
Yes, well, that's part of it
and that's where I think we're going, right?
It's like a peer-to-peer network for anything.
Inference could be one thing,
all the other digital resources we talked about,
bandwidth, storage, whatever,
but different standards for,
hey, I want to buy a resource
And like, if you don't have that resource, I know, like, one of the key ideas is that agents can't fall back on state actors and using state violence to enforce their property rights.
So how are they going to enforce property rights if someone violates at like the scale of 100,000 agents working together?
Well, one way to do that is collateral.
And I think there needs to be a standard established for how Bitcoin is used as collateral in each of these bilateral agreements between agents.
Real quick, we have David can't see the comments, so I'll catch you up to speed.
First of all, Ryan Brown 9900 says, love the basketball talk.
So sorry, guys, I'm getting encouragement to talk more about.
I just sit back.
I let it happen.
It was like an hour and a half late.
Like what?
Did you just hear that part?
Let's see.
Oh, so one specific project idea would be a peer-to-peer network for inference, like an AI project.
I love that.
Now, this is not, I mean, there are already projects in this vein.
Like Eric Voorhees started Venice.
Have you followed that at all?
Yeah, but no shitcoin, please.
Well, that's, so I'm not aware of a peer-to-peer network for inference that uses Bitcoin.
Well, actually, I have to give him a shout out.
Christopher David from OpenAgents
just yesterday, I believe,
relaunched his GPU marketplace
using sort of Noster's, the communication layer.
I don't know if I'm supposed to announce this,
but that man came out of the blue
and just raised some money from another Bitcoiner.
So that hopefully will be announced soon.
But that's one example.
People need to listen to our show
for confidential leaks information.
I hope that wasn't too much.
Very insider trading.
but I'm not
well I'll check out
openasians.com
it's the only one I know of so far
and then there's
is it Joseph Jack's
is that the open source VC
isn't he huge on
BitTensor
it's in the same
it's in the same vein
it's like again all these things have shit coins
it's like how many of these damn cycles
do we have to go through
but yes in theory BitTensor
tries to solve my understanding at a very high level. So if you had this verifiability compute
primitive we're talking about, you wouldn't even need that. But I think what they do is they have
these like different subnets where it's like, okay, I want you to do, I don't know, like image
generation or some task. And then I think they do some kind of like random sampling to see like,
okay, is someone doing what they say they're going to do or not? And then there's, there is
staking in there with whatever their, you know, crap token is. I, yeah, I mean, like something like
that with the zero knowledge proofs would be much better but even like that with bitcoin and none of
the whatever tokenomics crap would be really promising to me it's just it's still it's so
frustrating to me so frustrating that yet again there's like a new project space and everyone has
to go the shit coin route always um and and why does no one see the obvious that just use bitcoin
as money so fun that let's do that i want to fun that too well so i mean i i think that's
interesting to explore that.
By the way, just thinking more about, I mean,
you're saying like, how do you know if they're doing the computation
or how do you know which model they're running and like do
sampling, etc. That kind of reminds me of
Bitcoin mining actually, right? Because if I'm a
pool and your miner is connected to my
pool and I have
to pay you out a portion
of anything gets mined, how do I know you're
actually doing the work that you're saying,
right? Well, it's much easier to have a Shanti 56
though, right? I mean, it's the same
problem, but it's like one very simple
computation versus... And it's the fact
that it has no other productive
utility, right, besides
finding the... But you still have the
fundamental problem of you don't know if they're doing it
or not. So you need to come up with the mechanism
for like, are you actually doing this?
But I agree. What's
actually being done is much simpler,
but it's a similar pattern, I think.
Anyway, so
I think that's an interesting
project because I think
it checks a lot of the boxes, like
protocol level.
you're unlikely to get steamrolled in three months.
I mean, there might be a bunch of competing peer-to-peer networks,
but the one that's open source, open money,
truly structured as a public good,
like with the licensing and who the contributors are,
if you can really get momentum behind a project,
it's going to be resilient against the startup du jour
who comes out with something,
or like even a shit coin new project
where they make a lot of money
off their token issuance or whatever.
I think it'll be resilient to that.
So I'd love to, I mean,
so that, I think that's interesting.
And then like,
what are the other dozen projects like that
that have a similar profile?
Yeah, and I think another interesting thing is,
and by the way,
I think a lot of this can piggyback on
what Jesse is doing with Bora
and Anthony with Maple.
because in theory, if you start giving people
their own sort of edge AIs
and their ability to bring their own hardware,
and it's kind of the same way with mining.
It's like, we'll probably go through
the early days of mining.
There is the hobbyist period.
It's like, just plug in your computer and make money.
I think there's probably gonna be some interesting way
to kind of bootstrap a network like that
where it's like, hey, I bought a bunch of Mac minis,
and I don't always have tasks for my open claw to do.
It'd be cool if there was some way of like,
when I want to run my open claw, I can't,
And when I can't, then I can sort of underwrite the cost of what I already paid for it.
Like that, that to me seems fair.
I like that a lot.
That's kind of cool because it's very new.
And there's like this use case that's emergent that everybody kind of knows they need or
thinks they need or wants.
So I think that it kind of, at least it feels from a spidey sense perspective, it feels like
it's new enough.
There's enough demand.
Couldn't have been done before.
Now it can.
And like, it might be enough energy to bootstrap an ecosystem.
Actually, I want to make sure I understood what you said.
You're saying like...
an agent that supports cross models
and farms out stuff in a smart way.
Like if your local model can handle it,
it farms it out there because you get privacy,
it's cheaper, et cetera.
But if you need a more advanced,
then you go out to a peer-to-peer network
or you go to a frontier model.
Well, I mean, I think that's interesting too,
and that could potentially play into this.
But what I'm specifically saying is
there's a lot of people that just bought Mac Minis
and sometimes they're running their open claw to do stuff.
But like, let's say 80 or 90% of the time,
the Mac Mini is just sitting there doing nothing.
If there was an easy way
that you could just plug the Mac Mini in
and contribute it to the GPU marketplace
or take your agent.
And like, it's not just,
so it's like there's different levels of abstraction
you could play this at.
You could just do the hardware
and just like plug in, make money.
Or you could say, well,
not only do I have this hardware,
but I have hardware
and I have a specific open claw agent
that I have been like,
you know, using to build these products
or like using to have this,
like I've been having all these conversations
with my Anthropic.
Imagine if I had been having all of those
with my own, you know,
locally stored data around,
you know, this Bitcoin bank.
idea and then it's like, okay, if you want to talk to my guy,
you know, you can
talk to this agent that has a premium over
just the raw GPU cost because it also has all my
contacts. I feel like you could have some
virtualization software on a Mac
Mini that lets you kind of multi
home open clause that people could
pay for to run. That's a cool
idea. I like this.
If someone listening wants to explore that hit me up because it something I looking back as well That what I I was going to say I also like the idea but it feels more commercial It sounds like something we all might want to fund
Yeah, we're all asking for it.
Which is awesome.
Obviously, that's good.
It could be both.
So then I'd want to, when we explore that more,
if we can tease out what could be the non-commercial
open source stuff, components of it,
that could be interesting.
Well, for one thing, just the standard,
how do these guys cooperate?
I was going to throw out a little bit,
maybe a little bit of a different direction to explore,
but I'm generally concerned about the viability of ideas
that get very close to what the closed source models are doing
because the closed source models,
basically they raise tons of money,
they give away so much value
that you're kind of not playing on very even footing
by saying, oh, I'm willing to accept
some people are saying i'm willing to accept an inferior lm experience because of this ideology
okay peace i i'm glad those people exist you know i i want that future but i want that future but
also i want to know what can be done and what is the state of the art what's the frontier
possible and that seems to be that you know you give away a bunch of tokens you subsidize a bunch
tokens you can see more what the future holds so i'm i'm generally like more cautious or skeptical
around ideas that are more kind of right in line with competing with existing kind of commercial
models even though i'm a fan that you know people are going after that stuff but but i think there's
other areas that are worth exploring and i i mean we talked pretty extensively last week around the
idea of like how does like multi-agent orchestration work to me that feels like it's like peace let the
let everybody compete at the layer that it exists,
but then try to coordinate their activities
and become like a better interface
for coordinating their activities.
You get all the benefits of the subsidies
that they're willing to grant
to get their models more adoption,
but you're ultimately more at an abstraction layer
that is not super impacted by,
you're not locked in in the way that you would be
if you were tied to one CLI or one tool.
Can I double click on that or do you want me to?
Yeah.
I agree.
I mean, any use case where it's cross-model,
I think that's a good opportunity
where you are unlikely to be steamrolled
by the big AI companies
because they're unlikely to support
their competitors' models at tier one.
But I'm still not sure it's a great
non-commercial open source project
because I worry that there'll be
dozens or hundreds of VST-funded startups
who will do the same thing
and make it open source,
make it work cross-model,
but because they capture customers,
there is a business model there.
And so maybe establishing standards
is a reason to do a non-commercial
or sort of independent project,
but maybe like the sort of the headless standards,
the protocol standards and not the actual user-facing product.
Sure.
One of the things that I would love to see on that front,
and I think eventually, I mean, look,
I think a lot of these things maybe start as something open source,
but then they could evolve into products, which is interesting.
But in the same way that, you know, you guys have funded wallet scrutiny,
I would love to fund model scrutiny for all this.
Like, I don't know right now, one giant question I have,
And one product could be, okay, I've got all these coordinating, like I've got the coordinator
bot that goes and checks all these things for me.
But like one thing is I don't even know like a source of truth.
How do I know if one of these closed source models has started rugging me with ads?
How do I know if someone discovers there's a poison pill in the Chinese models?
Like there's no source of truth I know of today.
That to me seems like if there's like an objective and ideally there should be many of these,
but sort of objectively neutral, credible, like leaderboard or like wallet scrutiny for
that that that seems like yeah i like that framing that's great i'm not suggesting you shouldn't try
but i would just point out that you could be part of a one percent test on ads and so chat gpt may
be serving you ads but may not be serving whoever generated the wallet scrutiny assessment so i
think it's i'm not trying to discourage it but i try to try to figure out what can be achieved
there because i think the wallet scrutiny domain is in a sense a little bit simpler maybe to to
analyze and assess.
Yeah, but I mean,
but if you wanted to get really creative
with it, you could also be like, cool, we do our own
random sampling. And one way you can do it is with
Bitcoin, right? So it's like, cool, and
maybe this turns into a product or a protocol, but it's like
we will pay you to
every whatever day
we have a set of 10
prompts or queries or actions we
want to take, and we'll pay you to run this
on these different versions of the models
and we gather all the data back and assess
what's changed, what's not, kind of red
line, the def.
Vinny had a comment here.
He's saying that the difference between inference
and Bitcoin is that inference requires much higher
bandwidth and is not deterministic.
It might not be possible to create
a proof over that.
The way
Bitcoin mining works,
it's not
proving it either.
It's proving that
the miner is doing
quite a bit of work. The miner
delivers back something that doesn't
is not enough proof of work to mine a block,
but enough proof of work to show,
like, okay, I'm putting in serious computational power.
So that's not a proof.
Well, that would be...
Well, it's a proof that directionally
it is computing enough power.
It's not proof that it's...
Yeah, it's not proof that it's doing everything.
I mean, that to me would be an incredible
open-source project or research project.
It's like, how far can we get that?
And I think that's an open question.
I also want to also answer Vinny's other point,
Bitcoin isn't the bank,
because I was talking about trying to build a bank
for all these agents.
To be clear, the way I'm thinking about it is
I think there will be banks that are Bitcoin-based banks
that are potentially lending to the agents.
So that's where I'm thinking.
Ram says, did y'all talk about meta-acquiring Maltbook?
Ads are coming to agents,
and your agents will influence you to buy certain products.
We didn't even talk about that. That's big.
well
we sort of addressed
ads in LLMs right
we talked about the ads part
yeah we were talking about Moldbook getting acquired by Facebook
that's kind of interesting
I'm looking forward to when Matt Belez gets acquired
or actually I'm not looking forward to it
but meaning
conceptually origram
I don't know the whole Moldbook
thing seems kind of like crazy acquisition
yeah
did y'all have any takes on that and by the way
I've heard multiple people from last week say they really liked your idea about Slack for agents.
So, I mean, this is at least one data point other companies like that direction, too.
I don't know. Do y'all have any hot takes or thoughts on this?
Well, I mean, I don't know that I read too much into it.
I think Moldbook is fun and cool, but I think as I framed it before, I think it's performance art.
It's like, hey, here's kind of a future sci-fi of what it could be.
It's not like these agents are really acting unprompted.
so I think it's fun and cool that we have such a thing
you know it got acquired
acquired could mean everything from they got jobs
to they each got billion dollar paydays
I don't know which it was
you know it's hard for me to speculate
probably you know closer to the former
but not necessarily what you might think of as a regular job
so you know they could get a very nice kind of signing bonus
so I wouldn't read too much into it
and I think you know I think meta is in a tough spot
So I think, you know, trying to, like, they did the, what was the guy's name?
Alexander Wang, what was the company?
You know, the scale.
Right.
So they did scale and then, you know, that seems to be kind of crumbling and they acquired a bunch of, you know, visionary people and that doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
I don't know what assets they have to bring to this fight.
So I'm kind of like, okay, try another one.
Why not?
I mean, it's existential.
You have to try to compete here,
but I don't know that I've seen a move yet
that I'm like, okay, that makes sense to me
and multiple has really changed the,
I don't know, anything I've seen.
You want to say Matt Coates comment?
Yeah, I mean, he just says,
don't know why they bought Moldbook
when Facebook was already bots talking to bots.
Well played, sir.
True, true, true.
Yeah.
So back to, so you've already come out
with a couple of good ideas.
I want to keep the ideas flowing here.
I've got one out of left field.
I mentioned this briefly in the chat,
and I don't think I got much uptake,
but I'll mention most of my computing I do
with an open source tool called Open Super Whisper.
And it's just a hot key that I tap,
and that is how I input.
I basically try to not touch my keyboard,
and I only speak to my computer.
Now, that's an open source project.
It's very general purpose, but I think that's actually kind of like a very nice style of entry point to multi-agent orchestration or what is the future operating system look like?
Like whether it's on a mobile device or on a laptop, I think we're going to be speaking to our computers.
Like almost whenever we can, we'll choose to do that once we've tried.
And so, you know, maybe something in like the open super whisper.
OpenWhisper.
SuperWhisper is closed source.
OpenWhisper is the open source version?
I use an open source thing called OpenSuperWhisper.
But there may be other open source tools too.
WhisperFlow is what I'm using,
and that's what DK started with.
And even though he likes this other thing better,
he told me to start with WhisperFlow.
So I'm starting with that.
And it's amazing technology.
I mean, beyond the behavioral shift you're talking about,
it is incredible.
its accuracy and its accuracy with, well, whispering.
You can have a lot of ambient noise around you
and whisper it at a crazy low volume level
and it gets it perfect. It's amazing.
Is anyone yet building and perhaps we had someone in the chat that's watching this open ASMR?
What do you mean, DK?
Actually, DK, I have a question though.
I mean, so I'm still early days changing my own behavior,
so I don't have personal evidence yet,
but I totally buy into your conviction
on how it is so much more powerful and easier and et cetera.
But I know from my Google Glass days,
in which you could speak to that too,
and in certain situations,
even though the technology was not as good then as it is now,
it was way more natural, faster, blah, blah, blah,
everything you're saying.
But there's many environments in which you either can't speak or it's awkward.
Now with this whisper technology, you can literally whisper.
So that opens up more environments in which you could use it.
In fact, I'm going to test it here at Presidio Bitcoin and see if I annoy my neighbors by doing it.
But I want to dive into the annoyance.
Well, here's my question to you.
It's definitely socially weird if you see someone whispering to themselves.
Like you think they have mental problems.
So let's assume there's such tremendous value to speaking
and the technology allows for whispering
such that people start whispering to their device here in their ear or whatever.
Do you think it'll become socially acceptable?
Like it will no longer be like this version has mental issues.
We, every time there's a big technology change, the early adopters look awkward and weird.
And then finally that becomes like habit.
Remember like in the nineties, it was so weird to date somebody online.
And now it's just like, everybody does that.
That was like very socially awkward.
And then 30 years later, it's just like the standard, right?
I think that kind of thing happens all the time.
but to be clear it could go another way too which is like i don't know like i i don't want to be in
an office like with everyone whispering with each other that just that feels uncomfortable for me
maybe you shouldn't be in an office maybe you should be taking a walk this is my point should
mostly be done out so this is what i was going to say like the hopeful version to me is not that
like you have people in cubicles sitting there bizarrely whispering in the corner like that
seems like that seems like the the meta like strapped onto your face like eating the books
version like no thanks uh i i think yeah the good news would be you come together when you need to
do stuff in person and then you know if not exactly maybe you're like out taking a walk or
like at home or something i don't know like i just but the cat or i mean i totally agree on the
awkwardness part and like going for a walk and be able to do stuff i agree with all that but um
but this also the direct this suggests like the app the opposite of pb right and and and we have
proof now in the value of
coming, I mean, obviously
historically there's plenty of proof of people going to
an office, but then during COVID when
everyone worked from home, maybe
that was an event where everyone's like, oh, it's way better
to work from home. Everyone should work from home.
But PB is proving out that
people are volunteering. Like, because
we're not a company where we demand our workers come
to the office. Each person that comes here,
it's their own choice, right? And we have
people, literally four people now
who have moved to San Francisco to come here.
We have eight to ten people
who commute one hour each way
two, three, four times a week,
they are volunteering to do that
because of the value of being here.
So what is their future
for inputting to devices
if they're not going to be speaking or whispering?
I mean, at PV, there are, what,
like three phone booths?
Maybe the future is
instead of these office desks
right next to each other,
maybe it's a farm of more phone booths,
and you can kind of come out
and still gather and there's the lunchroom and coffee
and you get lunch together.
But maybe people, like when you're working,
it's more deep work, focused work,
and you're speaking to yourself in a phone booth environment.
That seems fine to me.
I don't feel like that's a...
Two thoughts on that.
I mean, one is, I'll tell you my own work style.
I mean, I love coming to PB and talking to people,
but I don't do it every day.
And part of the reason I don't do it every day
is I like to kind of demarcate where like,
you know, if I really need to focus
and like really go deep, often I would just stay home
because I know no one's going to talk to me.
But when I want to chat with people
and have less, let's say, super deep work,
then this is a way better environment.
So maybe that sort of hybrid thing becomes more common.
But I also think that, I don't know,
I don't totally buy that we're going to,
I still think you want some ability to visual,
and maybe in the future you'll have the Google Glass or Contacts
and just pull up a screen on demand.
But you're not just going to be sitting there in the corner like this.
You will want to see a screen.
I think screens are great for consuming
what the output is, right?
Not necessarily always required,
but it's a great format.
Like if you send me a photo,
I don't want to hear an LLM read me.
Here's this guy, you know,
standing on a street corner or whatever.
I want to see it, right?
Like the visual is important.
So I think we'll continue to have screens to see.
I'm just, I think I'm just pointing out,
I think the importance of the keyboard
is going to decrease dramatically.
And especially, the other thing to think about
how is work going to change?
You know, any given day,
I'm usually working on at least,
I have three agents that are working
and I sort of have three different work streams
in my head about what they're doing,
but I'm not on with them all times.
I dispatch something and I go do something else.
And check in.
And so check in.
So maybe the future of work is not sit at a desk
and interact with your agents and speak to them,
but maybe it's like you dispatch,
go to your phone booth, dispatch a few things,
then go out and have a coffee
and hang with your friends
while the agents are doing the work
and then come back and check in when they're done.
So DK, as much as I really want to believe that,
and I think that will be an option for a lot of people,
I also have to show,
even though I'm generally very much the optimist as well,
and I think that a lot of people will find that path.
That path seems like a good, happy path.
I will also note the sort of dark path
because, right, like the internet,
and you're like, oh, man, it's going to be so cool.
We're all like doing cool stuff with people on the internet.
And then it's like, it's Facebook.
Yeah, yeah.
Instagram and like single-handedly ruin society.
but what I am also seeing,
and by the way,
I haven't gotten on Twitter
in a couple of weeks
and I'm trying to experiment.
I had to unduly change my password
and I can't get on it.
And it's been awesome.
My life quality is improving,
which is an interesting little takeaway.
I still use Stacker News.
I mean, at Christmas,
I decided to reduce,
and I've 90% reduction
of looking at social media.
Really?
I feel healthier.
And it feels better, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, so there's no question on that.
And by the way,
but I don't feel like I miss out.
you guys, if it's important enough, you'll send it to me. I'll see it on stack. And it's not like
I'm missing out. I'm just not scrolling, which is amazing. But, um, but I did it before I, you know,
started my, my scroll detox, I guess. Um, I noticed like people that were like, I think,
I don't know, some, someone in the video is like, oh man, like there's this whole movement of like,
people are leaving their parties earlier because like their bots are working and they want to make
sure they're maximizing every second. And instead of having five bots working, they want 10 bots
working. And it's like, yeah, I mean, it could be like people like go and like, you know, maybe in
europe uh the european guys you know i see we have a couple in there they'll have their little cafe
and a bot working a day or two but then you know here in america i have 500 gold and so i i think
it could easily swing the other way to where i yeah i don't know i i think everybody is going to
become the orchestrator of some team of bots yes i agree with that if you sit on the end of a
computer you know like an internet connection with a computer and that's your job i think your job is
going to be a bot orchestrator, not whatever you think it is today.
I agree. And going back, DK, to what you suggested the future
office might look like, I thought that was a good suggestion. Or meaning like the phone
booths we have now, more of those.
So I'll commit to changing my own behavior at PB
to experiment. So I'm going to, number
one, speak more to the computer. I'll do it from my desk,
which I'm expecting to be a failure
but I'll do it just to pick up on what works
what doesn't. I'll do it from a phone booth
in which I
expect that to not be awkward
or weird but it will take me
away from a little bit
from the environment so I want to see
what is the sort of water cooler talk
I miss out on by being
in a phone booth. And then I'd
like to experiment with somewhere
in between the desk
setup and the phone booth. Is there something else
that you can like
either, you know, maybe it's just visually.
Because if you're truly whispering and others can't,
if others can't hear it and it's just like visually weird
to see someone's mouth moving,
maybe you just need like to cover,
visually cover your face or something.
I don't know.
Or we just need to get comfortable with it, right?
Or that.
We'll get comfortable with it.
So I think experimenting with that will be interesting
because then I think that, I mean,
it could literally change how the layout of PB.
I mean, we'd have to encourage other,
We'd have to see PV members actually want to use voice all the time.
So we can encourage them to try.
So I'll try, then get others to try.
And if there's strong demand for it and people feel as strongly as you do,
I can see changing the layout of PV to accommodate that.
And it's frankly like an experiment of future office space.
And I think one of the things that is going to be pivotal
in figuring out how you're experienced with it
is basically how much of your day today
is interacting with agents
versus how much of your day is doing,
you know, what's called traditional way.
So I suspect like I'm at the extreme
of I almost only,
I just spend all my time with agents.
And so I like see what that looks like
and feels like, which is fine.
I mean, I do other social things without agents,
but I'm saying any like work-related stuff
is really just agent development.
Touch grass.
But what I'm saying is if your job,
like Steve, I know you do a lot of like,
people in coordination and stuff.
So you're probably in emails
and sending people emails
and that kind of stuff.
If you don't have like an open claw running
and driving all of that activity for you,
which I'm guessing you don't,
I wouldn't recommend,
then you're probably going to have
a very different relationship
or experience with using agents
to like do your work, right?
Vinny asks,
isn't this just a phone call?
Well, not necessarily
because of the whispering
because you can whisper
and it works now.
But on a phone call,
that would be like super weird.
So the reason we'll do an entire TVJ episode whispering and everyone will be
like,
okay,
that was weird.
The ASMR channel.
We're sitting here in the corner shaking back and forth.
Well,
what,
what I was going to suggest though,
is I,
I think this,
this voice stuff,
we got it.
It's awkward.
It's weird.
The reason I raised the voice up,
I know we're kind of over time,
so I don't want to get too,
too far into this,
but the reason I raised the voice stuff is because I think,
And it's, you know, I'd say I have early visibility into how powerful it is in a version of work that I think is to become more common broadly in the future.
And given that, to me, it starts to sound to my ear like there's, you know, a change in the relationship with how we interact with our computing devices is like a change in the operating system.
And so I wonder if from an open source and funding perspective, there's a way to, you know, observe some of the like, you know, the fact that our computing devices and relationships may change. And if it is more voice centric, are there new tools that would help our voice centric controller build the bridge from our existing computing models to a voice centric computing model more than just hold a key, speak to a model, have it paste the text in, but can actually do stuff.
So like a very simple thing I'd like to be able to do is I've got all these command line interface tools open on my desktop. I'd like to be able to speak to my phone while I'm off on a trail run and have it dispatch the thing correctly to the right command line interface, even though I'm not there to tap and click the stuff.
so I can just sit open on my Mac at home
and I can be out on the trail with...
I think there's an infinite design space there,
so I'm not proposing that specific idea
should be implemented.
More like there's a big change happening here
that I don't think is commonly appreciated yet enough
because it's very niche.
So far, I think it's going to be awesome.
I think we should touch on this again next week
because I have some thoughts around the difference
between input and output text versus reading,
or listening and reading,
because I think it's going to be a combo.
Um, but I do want to acknowledge one other thing, which is, uh, Austin says, quote, my PBJ bet for
next week will be, do they actually cover the topics in the YouTube title? Um, and we still
should run a bet live market next week. Um, but I do want to say, since I don't want to totally
rug you guys, at least touch one of them, um, strategy stretch spree. I just want to touch on
this and just say, Oh my fucking God, this is crazy. The last two days, if you guys don't
understand what's happening.
Shout out to Ashu's who's shared strc.live.
I think.
I think that's right.
Someone can correct me if that's wrong.
But basically, it shows you in real time
how much money MicroStrategy is making selling stretch,
which is the sort of over-collateralized Bitcoin credit,
right now at an 11.5% interest rate,
which is insane.
And I think the last two days,
I forget the exact numbers.
It was like $100 million,
and then yesterday, well over $200 million.
I saw there was like $200 and something million
and $400 million.
I think the $400 million might have been total trading volume.
$200 million plus was like new sales of that.
But just like high level,
you know, if you're selling
$200 million worth of stretch securities
and then immediately putting
all of that into Bitcoin,
you're talking about buying
at current prices.
I think that'd be like,
well, like 2,600 Bitcoin,
something like that.
So if you're wondering,
hey, where's all this Bitcoin,
you know, bid coming from?
Coming from stretch.
And there's a lot more than it.
You know, was there,
was there something
that structurally changed
in recent,
because stretch as a vehicle,
I think it's existed.
I think it went public
six months ago or more maybe so it's not that that just came online right so was there some other
factor that just recently drove a bunch of demand for that i think i think there's a couple things
um i don't know this is my speculation um one thing is they keep hiking the rates like six
perpetual rate like six rate heights back to back so at some point it's like when the rest of the
and you started at 10 percent yield now it's at 11 and a half or nine yeah it was less it was like
it was under 10 maybe it was nine and i think they've hiked it a quarter to a half point multiple
times in a row. So now they're 11.5%.
But to be clear, they're hiking because
there's not enough demand. Well, there wasn't
until this week, right? So they
found the sweet spot. It turns out, you know, markets
will discover the sweet spot. And the sweet spot was
11.5% apparently. And so
you know, that's
one. Another thing is I saw
a headline maybe
last week about one of
these, I don't know, some sort of
financial firm. It was not exactly a rating agency
but basically giving it a
buy rating. It seems like, I mean, it seems like
Saylor has been doing
row shows.
I've heard from multiple people
talking with a lot of people.
It seems like basically
behind closed doors,
you know,
the sell is just a lot easier
to say,
hey,
you know,
Mr. Fixed Income Credit Guy,
you're making 4%
with a lot of risk
on this,
you know,
municipal bond.
We'll pay you an 11.5%,
6X over collateralized.
And it's extremely liquid.
You can sell it
at a moment's notice
and get full.
Well,
there's in between that.
Isn't there like a 7% to 9%
is common in,
I think,
junk bond markets?
Maybe.
Yeah.
I think this,
I think the alternative
is you take a very high risk. Like, I don't think people are saying treasuries are risky. They may.
I mean, I could think that, and you may think that, but I don't know that the professionals
typically think that. But I think they're comparing it to something like a junk bond or high yield
bond And this still blows that out of the water And it looks much less risky because you don really need to worry about the business operations right And actually you saying that makes it more credible to say that you just said 11 might
be the sweet spot, right?
Right.
Well, so I was initially thinking, well, 9, 11, what's the difference compared to like
4 or whatever?
But if you're comparing it to junk bonds and the junk bonds are 7 to 9, well then 9% for
this whole new thing and this whole new risk that is new to you to assess, it's like, I'll
just go with junk bonds. I know that world.
But if you get 250 extra
basis points,
then it might
tip the scales. I also want to give
a shout out to Borja
and his company, Roxham. We've talked about them
before. I've mentioned many times, I've
become increasingly bullish on them over
the years. And I think it was yesterday or the
day before, they announced their new product
offering, which I think is genius. Absolute
genius. And it's the ability
to, they are now, through their
not available to US citizens right now, unfortunately.
But if you're outside of the United States,
you can buy Stretch on their exchange with Bitcoin
and get the yield paid in Bitcoin.
And that's pretty interesting.
I think we have at least one Canadian listening right now.
So maybe that person can test it out.
So just to make sure you deposit Bitcoin into Roxham
and they custody Bitcoin for you
and then they pay you 11% or 11.5%.
I don't know if they're taking any of the spread or not,
but yeah, maybe, maybe not.
In Bitcoin.
You are giving up custody,
but you are getting a stretch yield on that.
That's my understanding.
Wow, that's kind of crazy.
It's kind of genius.
That seems, yeah.
Why is that not more common?
It's like, it's literally the smartest product I've ever heard.
And there's some net, some big, big things
I can imagine them doing next.
So, hats off.
Yeah, it's still, you know, it's still.
Yeah, not your keys, not your coin,
all the usual caveats,
but just from a what will actually work in the world, genius.
Yeah, from market's perspective, I think that seems savvy.
Yeah.
So we're way over, but just so we can check the box
that we covered things in the title,
quick newsflash, which we usually don't do here,
but there are two more product offerings
announced in the past week,
which support coins on Bitcoin,
or related to this.
One is Tether announced.
RGB thing.
U-E-T-X-O.
I might be butchering it, but something like that.
It's very close to U-Tree-X-O, but it's not U-Tree.
I think it's U-E-T-X-O, I think.
In any case, they've actually been working on this for like four years.
It uses LDK, so I've known about this for a long time.
But it an RGB LDK system So it using Lightning It better than the original Tether on Bitcoin because that was on chain Didn scale very well Now it using Lightning Scales better
And the second
news is Arc Labs raised
$5 million in change.
With Tether
I think was the lead, but there are
other notable investors
in it. But along
with that investment was
bringing stable coins and Tether
to
ARK Labs as well and ARK technology.
Yeah.
So the more the merrier.
It just adds to the...
Every day Bitcoin gets stronger.
What would need to happen then
for one or each of those to take off?
Do you need a major issuer
like a circle or a tether
to choose to do that system?
Well, you need a number of things,
but I mean, the first box they check
is that tether,
the one is from tether,
so obviously tether will exist on that
and then tether the token
and then because Tether
invested in Arc Labs, I mean they're bringing Tether
to that. So both of those solutions
will have Tether tokens.
Now you need
more than that.
You need
network effects,
adoption, usage, etc.
And that's a tough
nut to crack.
And Tether do things to
encourage that? Because presumably
Tether would like these other
solutions that are a little more open than maybe
Sol, Tron, ETH, stuff
that they may historically have been on?
So are they... Well, if I'm
Tether, I think
what I definitely don't want to see is
more of these, or like, corp chains
winning. So like a Tempo
base, etc.
So that would be like
enemy number one, and then
the next tier would be
Solana,
Ethereum, layer
one that are
relatively more decentralized
than the aforementioned ones.
But I think
the folks buying Tether
are pretty hardcore Bitcoiners.
And they get Bitcoin.
And they would rather see Bitcoin as a platform.
They could share more yield.
I mean, that wouldn't be able to do less.
Is that possible?
Can they take some of the yield
and share it back to drive
maybe wallet adoption?
You can't do that in the US,
but you could do that.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know the rules of other jurisdictions,
but you could maybe do that outside the US.
That's why stretch tokens exist outside the US,
so it apparently is more regulatory friendly.
Well, this is what I was going to say,
is to come back to the whole stretch thing,
not to just like simp on microstrategy,
but like I don know what going to happen in the United States because of regulatory but like in my mind nothing can compete with wrap stretch for the stable coin Nothing I mean like you just think about I mean we had this one the buck token like maybe that one is in particular scammy I
don't know. But like if they're giving an 11 and a half percent, hell, they're giving 7% and you
can wrap that and keep 2% and give away the 5% to whatever, nine and a half percent to users.
Like that's just going to dominate. Like I think stretch, yeah, stretch is already one. It's like,
who's going to figure out how to like productize that for the stable coin offering maybe it'll be
tether maybe it'll be someone else but like i don't even see tether with their like measly
treasury yield able to compete in that world like i actually think tether is vulnerable right now
i'm i'm optimistic on you know what microstrategy is doing but i'll just ask the question um you know
the the yield the 11 and a half percent yield is coming from the presumed growth of the bitcoin
assets that underlie that.
And I think he generally models
it at 20 or 30% compounded annual
in the next 10 years or so.
And so
11.5 is maybe sharing
about half of that, maybe protecting
some buffer for volatility.
But what's to keep
an upstart from coming in and saying, we're offering
15% on a small stack
so we can't absorb as much liquidity, but we're
going to give 15% yield and
we're just going to hope that
the buffer and the
20-30% of the drawdown in sequence of returners
doesn't cause a problem.
If you have to ask, you are the yield.
Anybody who
accepts the yield is
that person.
To be clear, I'm not only for the yield, but
I think the short answer is, we've talked about this
before, but there are
moats
around who can raise capital
in the event of a downturn.
He has proven
at least through two bear markets so far
that he's not taking
sufficient leverage to sell down the stack,
I would be very skeptical of an upstart.
It would be not only difficult to build that trust,
but for them to actually manage the liquidity
to be able to raise the capital.
I'm not saying it's impossible.
There is clearly a buffer
between whatever the actual yield they're offering
and the CAGR is.
That's the value.
I just think they have so much
such deep capital relationships,
brand record.
I think it's going to be super hard.
So much volatility around the actual instruments
they're trading.
there's like markets on markets on top of micro strategy stock on top of stretch now so i mean
it's possible but like that that's not a game i would want to play to go after sailor yeah i agree
yeah all right is that a optimistic enough ending i think that's a wrap austin's happy
because we covered the topic so there we go have a good weekend everyone dk would say peace peace