I can hear you.
The stream is live. I think we did it.
Oh, shit. We're already live.
All right.
Let's get going.
Welcome to another episode of PBJ.
How are you guys doing?
Good. We're just talking about how many things we have to talk about.
It's a lot today. It's also kind of hot.
I mean, it's beautiful.
I mean, hot slash very nice, but I'm like sweaty
coming over today.
You walked over, right?
Feeling good, though.
Well, we're not going to be doxing anyone.
I jet packed over
DK is fortunate that he doesn't
have to be in the same room with your sweat
exactly yeah I'm trying to smell lovely
bro you come on here after
bike rides and stuff
alright I've yet
have I worn my bike kit
yet I don't think I have
you wore biking out there
maybe once
I thought you wore it once
we've got the video footage
and we've got that AI tool
that Ashi built
can it do an exploit
yeah I brought it up last week
and like
dropped the alpha
and then you guys
played it afterwards
it was good
isn't it good
it was really
I mean kudos to Ashu
it was really
and that was his first thing
he's ever built right
yeah
that's sick
yeah
I think it's very slick
so now we're
there were five episodes
uploaded for us to test
and we're gonna get
all the content
in there now
and make it available
to others
and just for those
who didn't hear last week
what exactly is this
just like a
Well, we've done like 60 episodes of this now.
I think this is either 59 or 60, but we've done a lot.
So there's like 100 hours of content.
And we talk about a lot of topics, right?
I mean, AI, vibe coding, Bitcoin, etc.
So often I'll want to go back, like someone asked me about something.
I'm like, oh, we had a really good discussion.
When was it?
And what timestamp in the video?
and even though I participated in it,
it still takes me like minutes,
if not tens of minutes to find it.
So that's obviously a barrier.
So this is a website which is like a topic index.
So I can go to, oh, I want to talk about OpenClaw
or I want to go find out when did we talk about OpenClaw.
So I just look up OpenClaw or search for OpenClaw
and then it has every episode where we talk about it
and linked right to the timestamp.
It just makes that process super simple.
Beautiful. We should drop that in the show notes today.
Yeah. Well, I mean, when, when, whenever Ashu's in it, yeah, when maybe next week or we'll launch it soon.
Yeah. It's amazing. I think it's, it's really well done. Uh, and I think it actually points
toward a future that, you know, I think we could collectively all be thinking about, which is,
you know, like Ashu has been doing that kind of work and trying to make those clips. And
he's been doing that as a manual process. And it's pretty frustrating. I think if you have to do a
little bit of a grind of the same thing every day.
So nobody told him, hey, let's go make a thing.
I assume you didn't.
I don't know.
I didn't suggest it.
But he sort of picks up and says, hey, look.
I'm the ultimate PM.
Yes.
Okay.
I PM this under existence.
But I think there's a...
And the reason why I even knew, like Bitcoin Optech, which is something I helped found and
and run many years ago,
created a similar topic index
because David Harding wrote like 250 weeks of newsletters,
like super detailed technical stuff.
And it was like overwhelming to like go try to find something.
And that's where the idea came from.
Sorry to cut you off.
Well, all I was saying is, you know,
it was nice that you gave that nudge
and kind of shared that that could be done.
But I think almost everybody, whatever your job is,
you are doing something that's probably a little bit of a grind or maybe not your most exciting
part of your day. And you could think about what kind of tool you could build to help you do it
better. And so in a sense, you don't think so much, hey, is I AI replacing my work, but how do
I just make my work better by using AI? I think that's like a pretty probably accessible.
One question on that, which is even though I think it's sick and super hats off to Ashu and
everyone in the PB that's like buy, putting and building stuff now, even though that's sick for
today, like, are we also just at a point where you just basically, like, let's say you have
Claude or OpenClaw running, just be like, yo, just find this clip.
Like, even the tools are amazing, but like, how far away are we from where, like, you
don't even need the tools?
You're just like, I have my one agent.
I can see that coming quickly.
I think there's a pat.
That's fine.
But I mean, I'm not saying it's bad.
I'm just hearing now.
Actually, DK, or we wanted to talk about, we had a builder meetup last night.
Oh, yeah.
We wanted to talk about that.
And it's a good segue to that.
Yeah.
because another really good example of what you just mentioned, DK,
is what Haley did yesterday.
And I'm just, I think it's so exciting what she did.
So, you know, she doesn't have a programming background,
but she's definitely been experimenting with these different tools.
And yesterday she had, there was like a practical need
or experience she wanted to create for the builder meetup,
which was she wanted people to be able to,
because we've been running a raffle the past few months
where we give out a BitKey.
and she wanted to move from a physical process
for the raffle tickets to digital.
So she vibe-coded, she's cloud-coded,
vibe-coded a really compelling experience,
both for the administrator and for the participants.
And she weaved in promotional activities
for Presidia Bitcoin.
So to enter the raffle, you had to go scan the QR code,
go to this website she created.
you then needed to subscribe to Presidio Bitcoin Media,
like our show, so pump our numbers,
as well as our own 21 and 21 podcast she does.
And then also, what was the other?
Oh, you had to sign up for the Presidio Bitcoin newsletter.
And then once you, or you had to give checkbox
to get permission to sign up and provide your email,
then you submit, and then you got a raffle ticket.
And then at the end of the night, she used her admin tool
that she created to randomly select the winners.
And there was a good visualization.
It showed a digital jar, and everyone's name was in the jar.
It was tasteful.
High taste, pragmatic, useful, promoted Presidio Bitcoin well.
And a feature request I had, and I hope we do in a future one,
is I've always wanted to encourage people
who visit Presidio Bitcoin
to get a spending wallet on their phone.
Yeah, that's a good one.
Because, you know,
I think most people who come through here,
even if they're not a Bitcoiner,
they probably own Bitcoin,
but they might just hold it on Coinbase or something.
So I'd like to encourage people
to have Bitcoin on their phone, right?
So one way to do that is like,
give an incentive to spend a Bitcoin here
at Presidio Bitcoin.
Of course, we could do a store or something like that,
But the idea with registration is like, you know, you get bonus raffle tickets, like a 2x or a 3x bonus if you spend just one Bitcoin.
And when I say one Bitcoin, I mean a sat.
Meaning like, you know, a tiny amount.
We're not trying to like make money off this.
We just want to get you to the point where you can pay one Bitcoin.
Have the experience.
You know, and so it does, there is friction.
You have to like, be like, oh, how do I do that?
Which wallet do I download and make a decision on that and then install it and then transfer Bitcoin into it?
So there is a cost there.
But hopefully, like, you know, bonus raffle tickets and maybe getting a BitKey.
Also, Maple AI came in with prizes last night.
So we have, there's like so much enthusiasm for the Builder meetup that we have multiple sponsors now.
And I suspect more.
We're going to have to come up with a process to figure out who all gets to be giving away stuff at Builder.
but yeah I think it would be cool
to be able to spend
you know have people spend Bitcoin
get extra raffle tickets
and extra chances to win
but back to the point
with what Haley built
I just think it's cool
that she built it
in less than a day
I mean she started building it yesterday
finished it
and had it ready to go
and it worked last night
I think that's amazing
and she did it without your
your need to PM it right?
yeah
yeah I had nothing to do with this
so
do you know
would she use Cloud Code
or was she using
or here?
Cloud Code.
Yep.
So,
yeah,
also,
I'm curious
just because
I think a lot of people
are beginning.
I don't know,
she was talking
Purcell and Supabase
with me,
so.
Okay.
Go Haley.
I mean,
I'm just so proud of her
because like,
you know,
go back six months ago,
she wouldn't have any idea
what any of these things are
or how it all works
and it's not just
Cloud Code doing all the work.
I mean,
she's leveled up
her knowledge
to how to architect this,
how to build it
and make it happen,
so super cool.
Super cool.
And then,
so that was a cool aspect
last night.
Another really cool aspect
last night
was,
you know,
we started Builder
last summer.
We've done, what,
eight or so now.
It's always been intended
to be,
you know,
a bigger tent
welcoming Builders.
It doesn't,
you don't have to be a dev.
You can be any kind of,
you know,
career skill
you can attend.
You also don't have to be
a Bitcoiner.
In fact,
we want non-Devs.
We want non-Bitcoiners
to come to this explicitly.
So we've done decent at that historically,
but still dominated by people
who would call themselves Bitcoiners, I think.
But last night was the exact opposite,
and it was amazing.
There's a few reasons.
I mean, the vast majority of people
had never been to Presidio Bitcoin,
I don't think would call themselves Bitcoiners.
But they came and I think had a really,
really positive experience.
it's similar to the type 1 energy summit
that you organized Max
but even more so
and why
well one is it was marketed as
I mean it was about OpenClaw
so it was marketed as OpenClaw
not attracted people who
maybe don't care about Bitcoin
but they were very interested in OpenClaw
and number two
well because it was about OpenClaw
Luma
which is the invitation service we use now
they added like an OpenClaw tag
and I think you don't have control over doing that
other than the content you put in the invites
that happened and then I don't know if it was because of Luma or other reason
but OpenClaw has some kind of event directory
and we were added to that
and we were on the front page of that
And the dude retweeted it.
Yeah.
The OpenClaw.
Right, yeah.
The founder of OpenClaw retweeted,
not our event, but the event directory.
The event was on.
Yeah, which we're on the front page.
It's cool.
We got great marketing exposure.
I think Haley said 90 to 100 RSVPs.
Wow.
We can only comfortably fit 60 or 70 people in this space.
So we actually had to cap the,
we capped it at 75,
and then everything over that was waitlist
and didn't get invited.
In reality, I think 40, 45 came.
So not surprising that there's quite a bit of attrition
on a weeknight on a free event.
So we'll learn from that,
maybe not capital 75, but capital higher.
But still, phenomenal turnout, mostly non-Bitcoiners.
I think everyone had a good experience.
And then, yeah, what was discussed?
Well, Jesse Posner, who's a member at PresidioBitcoin and an entrepreneur here working on Vora, he gave a presentation to begin with.
And it introduced OpenClaw, focused on security considerations.
And then he got into what he and his co-founder Eric are building at Vora.
And what turned out to, we can talk about it, but both Max and I were, I was really proud of Jesse.
I was astounded by the strong vision he painted and how compelling it was, not just to hardcore Bitcoiners, but I think to a broad audience.
I think it was received well by the audience as well.
And I guess we've known Jesse's journey with Fora and where it started, which was very Bitcoin specific.
And even though we're all about Bitcoin, it felt like a small market.
and now where their journeys led them to,
I think is pretty compelling.
Yeah.
Well, so I mean, I have two things to say on all that.
First of all, I mean, definitely shout out to Jesse.
I've obviously watched him extremely closely
over the last year, I guess, or year or so that it's been.
And I think both of us would agree
this was by far the best pitch he's ever given
by like at least one, maybe two orders of magnitude.
Like he and Eric have come so far
in explaining why this matters.
I think though, as one sort of comment about the event itself, you know, I think it's really
important to stress what you were just saying. People came out because, you know, for a variety
of reasons that are beyond our control of stuff we've talked about on the show, privately, whatever,
like sadly, Bitcoin has a lot of baggage with the word Bitcoin, all the crypto crap and the scammers
and the Web3 and nothing we want to be associated with that has a lot of baggage. And so I think,
you know, whenever you market an event as Bitcoin, people are like, oh, it's just the scammy thing.
And because this was an open claw event, but it was an open claw event focused on Bitcoin
or principles, things like, how do I make sure my data is sovereign?
How do I make sure that eventually I'll be able to have my agent participate in free
markets, things like that?
I think I would say, from what I could tell, everyone left having learned something, getting
excited.
But it was like, I think it just stresses the way for us to really build that bridge
is to, again, let Bitcoin fade to the background.
Like, how do you find where there are new exponential waves in society?
Get people in the door by focusing on that.
And once they're here, realize there's nothing scammy we're talking about.
It's all like, you know, Jesse came across as someone who's an expert cryptographer,
who's, you know, secured billions of dollars at Coinbase at BitKey.
So anyway, so I just think that's like a really important thing for us as a show,
as a community here at PB, is like the more Bitcoin fades to the background,
the more Bitcoin is going to succeed, is my take.
Let me just triple down on that because I agree.
The way Jesse presented himself and the whole presentation,
it was not a hardcore Bitcoin presentation.
Bitcoin really wasn't mentioned at all,
except for where he tied his past experiences
to the present solution,
which I thought was really well done.
And the reality is that those are super important
to the solution he's building.
Anyway, and I just think we just see
more and more instances of where this is succeeding
in reaching the audience we care about,
just the broader tech industry.
And it doesn't mean we're brushing Bitcoin to the side.
It's just Bitcoin, to us, I think,
is just part of the internet.
It's internet money, it's woven.
It's just like we don't hold events for TCP IP
and invite everyone who wants to talk about TCP IP.
Exactly.
Hey, TCP IP.
Hello, fellow TCP IP enthusiasts.
And actually, for years now, I write Bitcoin with a small b.
And if you look at the history of the internet, it started off with a capital I,
and it switched to little i because it's just like, it's normal.
Yeah, it's normalized. It's just part of existence, sort of.
And I think, I mean, Bitcoin wasn't there yet, and it still isn't there yet,
but I mean, I'm sort of, that's my small, one small way I'm trying to, like,
will that into the world.
I love that.
Little b.
Yeah, I love that.
So the other thing that I want to mention, I think, is a follow-up on that, specifically to Jesse's presentation.
I think the biggest thing that changed, obviously, he's improved his thinking on things.
And there was a really cool vision about in the future where you could use Bitcoin for things like having your agent participate in free markets, whatnot.
But the biggest thing, and I think this is learning for all of us, was something that was outside of his control.
And that was, in the past, if you listen to this pitch six months ago, it was like, oh, people are really going to care about their data and their privacy.
And it's kind of like the Bitcoiners being like, yeah, you're really going to care about money.
It's like no one cares until there's a 2008 financial crisis, then everyone cares a lot.
Or until there's hyperinflation in Argentina, then everyone cares a lot.
Same thing with this.
You try to explain to people in the abstract.
It's like there will come a day when you want to have your own hardware to manage your agent.
And it's very hard to think about these things just conceptually.
But because of the open call explosion, that to me is what gave them their window.
Now, you know, there's a concept.
Anjali showed me this YC podcast with the Cloud Code guy.
It's really good.
I highly recommend it.
And one of the things he kept stressing in building Cloud Code was this concept of latent
demand, which is like, if you're doing a startup or anything, he literally said this like 10
times in the podcast over and over.
If you can find an activity that people are already doing and you can just make it easier,
faster, better for them to do that, that's how you went.
Trying to create new activity out of nowhere, very, very, very difficult.
Not impossible, but very, very difficult.
And in this case, with Jesse and Eric,
now that normies are trying to run their own agents
to go out there and mess around the internet,
Mac minis are flying off the shelf.
There is latent demand.
There's a real activity people are doing,
which is buying new hardware to run their agents.
And then Jesse just gave a fabulous presentation
where he's like, look,
all these people think they're doing something safe
by putting it on their computer
and then give it access to their Gmail
and their credit card and their social security number.
Like, hmm, what could go wrong?
And by the end of that, I mean, I was pretty like,
oh shit, like I would,
never run one of these things. I think a lot of people felt that way as well. And Jesse's
sort of response is, if you want to be able to run your own agent and have an agent that
really represents you, he has this concept of the fiduciary duty of agent, you need confidentiality
and you need to make sure it's basically air-gapped. And yeah, anyways, I think that the problem,
and then he went through a solution, which is very interesting, having an open source
model running locally that can then deal with models in the cloud, which I thought was very
interesting as well. So you could have the best of cloud with your own local open source model.
But the big thing that changed now is I think people are in a state where they're ready to have their own models.
They're already buying unique hardware because they think it's going to protect them, and it doesn't.
And now you can solve that problem.
Well, and I don't think we've even really framed the whole opportunity to solve the problem yet.
Yeah, I didn't make it to builders.
So right now, people have a lot of data exposed to in the cloud.
you have a lot of data with Google
with Facebook, Instagram
Amazon, TikTok
etc.
And there's
security and privacy concerns
with that. The evidence
is people generally don't
care. People have gotten
so much value out of these services and they haven't
felt enough pain from the
security and privacy trade-offs
they've made.
But
there's certainly
people, and we've discussed it for years,
but there's people who have a vision for bringing
all that data onto your own
personal server.
And there's certainly been startups that have
attempted to do that. I remember, Dika,
you've definitely met with some of them
maybe five, six, seven years ago.
But
I think OpenClaw,
as Max just pointed out, is this
moment where people are, I mean,
just the power of AI, and then
the audaciousness of
OpenClaw giving this immense
power with no safety controls at all, are
starting to show the power of
if you hoover up all this data about yourself,
put it on a computer you control, you have control of that data now,
and then the power that comes with it. Because now you have all that data in one place and it can be
analyzed by, you can have a local AM model analyze it
and have that, it's just super powerful. So as Jesse
said in this presentation, this will be so powerful, so seductive that like everyone's
going to do it. Like you are at a serious disadvantage in life if you don't do this.
And then when you do do it, then you have like a digital me. Like, you know, you have
a second version of yourself and it's like more powerful than it's ever been created
before. So that's amazing, but it's also extremely scary if you're subject to like
prompt injection attacks and like, you know,
just revealing all that information to the internet,
it could be absolutely devastating.
So that's sort of the premise of what Bora is trying to solve now is
enable that power, but do it in a secure way.
With fiduciary duties.
So it's like a wrapper on OpenClaw that lets you run in a more hardened way?
Is that a reasonable way to summarize what's happening?
I think it's personal hardware.
It's more like a personal server.
And you could run something like an OpenClaw,
though I think he's thinking maybe beyond OpenClaw specifically,
but this idea like you want your personal assistant air-gapped on hardware
that you can prove is air-gapped.
I see.
And then you'd mentioned kind of the, like an open source local LLM
that would be running on that hardware.
And then it would be reaching maybe another OpenClaw instance
or somewhere else that has maybe other types of LMs in the cloud?
Well, this is, yeah, I mean, I didn't fully understand all this architecture,
so this would be a good sort of maybe a chance to have Jesse.
Maybe I should know their ideas from the edge of them or something.
But basically, yes, your open source local model is kind of your, like, protector,
like your, like, DK's guardian, I think is what he called it.
But like, like your bodyguard.
But that AI, you know, no matter how good local gets,
there's probably always going to be better ones in the cloud.
And so the idea is how can that AI communicator orchestrate
like a fleet of like cloud code bots
that operate in such a way where they can build things for you
but without having access to your like private keys
or social security number.
One big question I have in this whole thing
and without necessarily fully hearing about the architecture,
maybe it's not even clear yet.
But one thing I think I must have had, you know,
four or five hours of calls with various entrepreneurs working on effectively like
open claw on your on your desktop right in some form and just in the last week and one thing that
i i keep asking i think it's super important but nobody really seems to have thought much about is
how should auth work yeah and so is like today i use one password to manage all my passwords i have
good passwords and unique passwords on every website, etc.
And I think I've not installed OpenClaw locally on my actual daily driver Mac because I'm,
you know, all the problems.
But I've done it in the cloud, but it's not useful in the cloud, right?
So meaning if it's just some cloud instance, I can do stuff with it, but I can't actually
do stuff with my stuff, which is kind of frustrating.
So what is the answer to the auth story?
How should auth evolve for this era?
I mean, I think that's a major question.
I think different people are taking different approaches.
I think Anthony and Marks are doing something slightly different with what
they're building at Maple AI, which is more cloud first.
They probably thought more about the auth.
From what I understand from Jesse's perspective, though,
he thinks that like all of these like things you're seeing right now with people
claiming oh we give you better off and safety and stuff He thinks that basically all like the Ethereum version It all like just a baby theater Security theater exactly And so his point is like if you actually want what you talking about
you need to like have like air gap chips.
Like, I mean, this is where he started talking about like,
you know, fair day cages and like basically going
kind of hardcore Bitcoin or ethos.
But I think he's right, which is like,
you need to be able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt
that like basically your private keys are,
or whatever the secrets are,
air gap from everything else at the hardware level
and be able to have the attestation set.
Sure, so I get that.
Let's assume that that is true and built and available.
But then, you know, let's say I have a task,
like I have an open claw that's local
and I want to say something like,
hey, you know, go gather up all of my financial statements
and all the details I need from, you know,
a dozen different providers so I can send it to my tax guy
or just do my taxes.
So I need to click around a bunch of websites,
log into a bunch of stuff, grab a bunch of documents, etc.
and so is there
like today I would need to use one password
I'd need those credentials to be able to log into those websites
is there a path for how that
should work in an open claw world
I think that's maybe
part of their secret sauce but I'm not sure
that's something
that would be good to hear more on
so
one other thought that I want to mention is actually there's a couple things
that are coming up in the chat but I do want
to pause though and say why I think there's certainly
a path to having
your own sort of fiduciary AI.
And I do think there's going to be a spectrum.
I think there's going to be some people that want it,
you know, sort of the Bitcoin paranoid version,
like attestations, physical hardware, Faraday gauges.
I also think that like Maple AI,
what they're doing is, you know,
that's kind of like that middle ground
where you're still trusting a cloud service,
but in theory, as long as you trust Amazon,
you know, and they're using their trusted execution environment.
And I know Anthony and those guys
are going to have some new updates on that front as well.
So I think you're going to see a whole spectrum
and different people,
depending on their level of paranoia,
their level of whatever secrets they're guarding.
Maybe we'll choose different versions there.
But I also thought that,
I forget his real name now, but good enough.
Damien.
Damien, thank you, yeah.
That Damien's,
his take on how he's using open clause
was very interesting to me,
which is basically to say,
it's one thing you need all these protections
if you're trying to create the second me,
the second DK Steve or Max Trevor.
But his take has been like,
don't create the second me,
just only focus for now
on just creating new entities.
And yeah, he basically talked about
how whenever he's running these agents,
he gives them their own GitHub accounts.
They don't get his.
And I think, honestly,
until all this other stuff gets worked out,
that to me seems like by far the best idea.
I would not be trying to create a second me
until Orin, Maple, and whoever else
has all the solutions ready.
I think Damien's approach is probably best.
Yeah.
So, I mean, overall, I thought Builder was amazing last night.
Haley did a great job sort of making it all happen.
Jesse was crucial to it.
Yeah.
Because we, I mean, it's one thing to market
is like open cloud or non-Bitcoin stuff,
but we got to deliver too.
And we did.
Jesse delivered, like it was quality content.
And not just Jesse, I mean, Jesse, Damien,
and Dustin afterwards,
they all did a panel together as well.
It was great, like all the way around.
Yeah, for sure.
So two things I want to call out from the chat
because I think this is interesting.
One is from Austin.
What's up, Austin?
Long time.
Day Zero PBJ guy.
He says,
PBJ needs a nice vending machine
that only accepts lighting payments.
I agree.
We're telling people we want them to get spending wads.
We should do something during the show.
And DK, maybe this gets back to your ideas.
From the Noster News days or whatever,
you've been wanting to do some kind of game show or something.
We should find some way to integrate into our show
something every week where a lightning
beam is involved. It could be trivia, it could be
a game, it could be a voting
mechanism, but like, we should
walk the walk here. So if you guys
have ideas of what you want to see us build, Austin
or others, I agree, it's
beyond time that we do something with lightning on the show.
Right, I agree. I like
that. We've got that prediction
market, you know, I built that prediction market software
that's up on GitHub, you can actually
use, and so we could run a prediction market
where people have to predict something,
take either side of it, and then we sort of pay out
at the end of the show.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, we could try different things.
I think that'd be interesting
to try for next week.
The other thing I want to call out
is from Vinny,
another longtime listener here.
And I love this definition.
This is great.
Talking about as Bitcoin fades
in the background.
Because at first,
the Bitcoin is going to be sad
to hear that.
But I think his definition
is perfect.
Quote, Douglas Adams once said,
I just moved.
I think a nerd is a person
who uses the telephone
to talk to other people
about telephones.
it's time that we move past the bitcoin nerds now i know steve is the biggest bitcoin nerd so
the fact that he's saying it's time to move past yeah yeah i'm yeah i'm taking my title and just
throwing it in the trash it served you well and now we're we're entering a new epoch
okay let's see um well i know we have several more things to talk about i know the lightning
report.
Yes, definitely.
Let's talk about that.
So shout out to the River team.
They always, in my opinion, put out the absolute best Bitcoin research.
I think, you know, they're the most trusted name in Bitcoin and the research backs it up.
So they just put out a report.
Did you guys see the full report yet?
I did, yeah.
There's one sort of adoption.
Lightning was a part of that.
The Lightning piece is what interested me the most.
But if you guys haven't checked it out, I think maybe they put it out two or three days
ago and then the Lightning piece came out a little bit before that.
there's a lot of interesting things in there, a lot.
Before we get to the lightning,
a couple of things I want to call out.
You know, one is sort of price is crashing.
Everyone's like, ah, is Bitcoin dying?
Hopefully not.
But their larger point is basically like old school whales
still own tremendous amount of supply.
And over time, you know, more and more institutions
from treasury companies, traditional companies, funds.
Wow.
Just so everyone knows, this is a live show.
Actually, at the Golden Gate Bridge,
we hear a very loud...
Is that a foghorn?
A foghorn.
There's no fog.
You never know.
Anyways, yeah, we're doing it live.
But his whole point is that basically like, you know,
institutional adoption is happening.
We're kind of watching this phase where like the early adopters
are transferring their Bitcoin to, you know, companies, funds, countries,
and like that's just kind of like sort of expected.
And there's a lot of good stats around that.
One thing that actually made me very, I don't know,
feel much better about Bitcoin was the, uh, the hash rate, uh, report. Um, I've been spending a
lot of time talking with some of my entrepreneurs in my portfolio, you know, many of whom have
focused, I've shifted their focus more to AI. And I think that's a much more, a longer,
more interesting discussion. I've also had LPs and people reaching out to me being like, Hey,
like, is Bitcoin going to die? Because all of the miners are like shifting to AI now. Um, and,
um, you know, you never know, but probably not. Um, but, but what we are seeing that's interesting
to me is, you know, even though the big sort of like public miners and people in Texas are shifting
primarily to AI, AI is the buyer of first resort. Those ASICs are not just going offline, right?
They're getting moved to the edge of the network. And that's like a big idea I think people need to
understand is like, if a public company can make more money doing AI training or inference, they
should do AI training or inference. Then as I'm seeing, and I'm seeing this from multiple reports,
public and private, you're seeing those ASICs then get bought and you're seeing a transfer.
And I think one interesting thing to see was the percentage of mining going up into countries you might not expect like Ethiopia because they have this giant hydro dam. And Ethiopia is not going to get underwritten to do AI inferencer training for a variety of reasons, at least not anytime soon.
And so, you know, it makes a lot of sense now that like, okay, well, maybe the miners are leaving Texas and they're going to Ethiopia or they're going to, you know, Brazil or wherever you have these kind of like pockets of like really cheap or free energy on the edge. Solar farms, the Middle East, like all these things are going to pop up. And so I think in the long run, that's a good thing because the network gets more decentralized. But like, it's critical to note that hash rate in the long run, you know, even if it dips a bit, it's not dying.
In fact, I thought the most hopeful thing from that whole report was showing, you know, in 2021, I think we were still at like 100x hash per second, and now we're still over one zeta hash. So 10x that.
So just two quick, I mean, one point, just reinforce what you said.
It's a good thing if large miners are being distributed to smaller players for decentralization, like you just said.
And number two is, it's a completely false argument to say Bitcoin is going to die because miners are moving to AI.
Those companies might move to AI, but fundamentally, why will new miners enter?
Because profits are to be had.
So as long as the Bitcoin, it's a function of the Bitcoin price, and then longer term, it's a function of Bitcoin's usage.
Right.
Because you need Bitcoin transaction demand and you need transaction fees.
Right.
That's all that matters.
Right.
So, I mean, still for the next few decades, as long as the Bitcoin price maintains or increases, there will be mining because profits are to be had.
Right.
And then longer term, there needs to be Bitcoin transaction demand, which we've talked about at length on this show maybe six months ago.
Right.
And we sort of, you know, game theory scenario planned out like, well, what if, because it's absolutely a concern right now that the mempool is near empty.
Like the demand for transactions to fit into the available block spaces is not great right now.
So there's plenty of time for that to increase, but it does need to increase.
Right.
Or Bitcoin will die, but it has nothing to do with AI.
It has everything to do with demand for Bitcoin.
Right.
Yeah, I have a question about this.
This may have been asked before, and it may be some sort of people raise it as FUD.
I'm not raising it as FUD.
I genuinely am curious about it.
But if the Lightning network were to be very broadly used and lots of channels were already opened on L1 and they didn't necessarily need to be closed, would that reduce demand?
I mean, in the long run, is there a chance that maybe we reduce demand for block space?
It's a great question and discussion topic.
I always find it funny because I get two different skeptical questions thrown at me from both ends.
One is lightning doesn't scale because it takes up too much block space.
Right, right.
Because if you try to scale it to hundreds of millions or billions of people, it doesn't fit in the block space.
There'd be too much demand for block space, too much mining fees.
And then on the other hand, I get the question that you just asked.
And they're both legitimate questions, but they're literally the opposite of each other.
Because the question you asked is like, does it obviate the need for layer one and block space?
There will be no demand.
So is it there will be no demand or there'll be too much demand?
And then there's competing forces for that.
So there's no doubt in my mind, a successful Lightning Network that grows in adoption,
and we're going to talk about the numbers and it is growing in adoption,
increases the demand for block space.
I have no doubt about that.
I mean, so personally, I'm in the camp of,
I think it will create too much demand.
And then, so I'm more worried about the too much demand
and high fees versus the not enough demand.
The only way there won't be enough demand
is simply if people are not doing,
using Lightning for Bitcoin payments.
Right. And I mean, to get to that question,
I mean, my, and I guess before we jump in the numbers, my bias has always been, I mean,
it's all contextual, right?
Like in the short run, yeah, maybe it does reduce some activity.
But in the long run, I think it's more like Jevin's paradox, like the cheaper things get,
I think it's like net new, for the most part, net new payments you would see on Lightning
that otherwise would not have happened.
And actually, maybe something that's maybe not obvious to folks, Lightning scales very
well on number
of payments.
And it scales poorly
or at least relatively not as well
at number of wallets
or users.
I think number of wallets is a better way to say it because there might be AI
as well.
Because the number of wallets you have
is limited by
the block space
on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Whereas the number of payments you can do,
there really is no limit.
The only limiting factor there
if we have channels opened with each other
and we want to make payments, they can become imbalanced.
And I might have to rebalance it by going on-chain,
which then gets into scaling issues again.
But if you have a naturally balancing wallet,
you don't ever have to go on-chain anymore.
You can do a substantial number of payments.
So it scales very well with payments.
Whereas something like Arc or Spark is kind of the opposite.
They scale very well for number of wallets, basically unlimited.
But if you have high payment volume, then they can start to break down.
When you say naturally balancing, is that just a feature of sort of how you use a wallet?
Or kind of what kinds of transactions you're involved in?
Is that what you mean?
Or is naturally balancing some other term of art?
Yeah, just, I mean, to put it simply, let's say, just take a consumer wallet, and let's say I get paid from my job once a week, and then that, you know, income goes directly into my wallet, and then I make purchases throughout the week.
let's say I make 100 units
in a week so I get
110 to me and then over the course of the week
I spend out 100
and then that cycle repeats
that's a perfect cycle
it automatically rebalances itself
I would never have to go on chain again
now
that is absolutely
a possible scenario but not
everything's clean like that
let's take the opposite example
let's say I'm not spending
let's just say I'm a saver
but I want to take self-custody
and I'm dollar cost averaging.
So every week, let's say I buy $50 of Bitcoin.
And let's say on-chain fees are not what they are today
but they're actually like $5 or $10.
Well, I don't want to pay $5 or $10 of fees
to withdraw every $50 purchase
because that's way too high of fees on-chain.
But on Lightning, I might be paying
a tiny micropayment for fees.
But in that situation,
I don't get natural balancing
because the flow of funds only goes one way
into my savings wallet,
and then it just sits there.
So that scenario is the worst case scenario for Lightning.
And to be clear,
and this is what Jesse was saying,
Jesse's in our chat who runs Amboss,
a lot of these operators,
my guess is very few have balanced channels today.
Maybe Block does and a few others, maybe.
But in general,
my sort of base assumption is that
there's more direction one way or another.
For example, if you're working with an exchange,
my guess is way more people are withdrawing
because they're buying to self-custody
than they are actually spending today.
And so in that world,
the node operators do have to do
quite a lot of on-chain batching.
Like they're batching lots of smaller payments,
but they do have to do a lot of on-chain activity
to rebalance.
We talked about this a little bit last May
when Block reported,
they framed it as yield,
but like a very good financial return
on the Lightning node that Block's running.
I think it was like 10% was reported.
And I think that stunned a lot of people,
even in the Lightning Network community,
who are running Lightning nodes
because that's much higher than most people
are making on their Lightning nodes.
So was that fabricated?
Or how is Cash App and Block doing that?
It wasn't fabricated.
It's because they're in a situation of flow of funds
where a lot of people buy Bitcoin on Cash App
and then they withdraw it through the Lightning Network node.
And it creates the direction of the flow of funds,
makes the block Lightning node in an advantageous position
because it has a lot of liquidity that it can basically sell to others.
So I think they use Lightning Labs Loop,
or I don't know what all services they use,
but they make extra money because of that.
Whereas a lot of other wallets are not in that position.
They're not sending out more than they're receiving.
They're either balanced,
which is a great situation to be in,
or they take in more money than they spend out,
like the savings wallet scenario I mentioned.
By the way, one thing that maybe just isn't interesting
to show you where we are in adoption,
do you guys remember the old school site?
Actually, a site I invested in way, way, way early in the days
and haven't tracked very closely recently.
But like Network Plus, did you guys ever use that?
I don't remember.
Plus, it's a way for people to read.
So there are marketplaces.
Amboss is a marketplace.
Lighting Labs is sort of a marketplace with a loop.
But if you go back to Lightning Network Plus,
it's this kind of like jank website.
Do you know if it's like a way for people to rebalance
by like, hey, I'm going to connect to you
and you connect to me.
And it's like kind of in the old school days
of just like triangles and pentagons
and all these shapes, if you remember all that,
to balance liquidity.
I just checked them like, I don't know,
a day or two ago because I was curious.
Do you know how much Bitcoin volume they've done
through that site rebalancing?
Take a wild guess.
Over what period of time?
Since 21.
If you get it wrong, you can always say you meant the other thing.
Well, I just want to give a legitimate answer.
Five billion Bitcoin.
See what you did there, dude, yeah?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Ten million?
No, no.
So 2,000, 2,000 full Bitcoin worth.
But to give you a second, like old school.
Well, I didn't mean 10 million Bitcoin.
Oh, yeah.
So 2,000 Bitcoin times whatever, $70,000.
Now, they have not yet monetized that.
But like, just to be clear, like, that is just like-
Well, it used to be $10,000 in 2021 too.
Yeah.
All right.
So 10 million is probably about right.
So it's crazy.
So they still have to figure out how to monetize all that.
Maybe they will, maybe they won't.
But like, it just shows me that so much of, you know,
even though there are products like Ambosses
that have some volume,
Lightning Labs have some volume.
I think the reason that old school sites
still does so well
is because it's no KYC.
And so that just shows you
the old school whales
are still controlling Bitcoin.
So it just gives you an idea
of where we are in terms of adoption.
That's going to change.
It's going to get there.
But anyways, it's interesting.
But back to the report,
I think you,
well, I don't know
what all you want to talk about.
I know you want to talk about
the lightning numbers.
Yeah, so let's talk about that.
So, Lightning Network numbers, right?
So, one of the challenges we've all been talking about for many years with Lightning Numbers
is because it's a private peer-to-peer, you know, un-run network.
It's effectively Tor, incentivized Tor.
What's crazy is you can never know how much is flowing to the network.
Like, by definition, you don't know.
And so, I remember in the early days when I, you know, used to be more involved in crypto
land investing, and I would be like, guys, like, Lightning Network's going to have volume.
They'd be like, yeah, but what's your total volume locked?
I'm like, I don't even know what that means.
Like, it's also irrelevant because this is a capital-efficient network where you're shooting,
Bitcoin back and forth at the speed of light.
But anyways, River put out the report
in 23, I think, where they showed it was, I think,
1,200% growth over a two-year period.
12-12? 18-month period.
18-month period. 1212%. And you've always
kind of intimated from what you've seen
and from what I've seen with my portfolio companies
that things have appeared to keep going up at
similar rates over that time. Well,
I don't know. In the background, I guess, while we're all
watching the price collapse and AI take off, no one's
really talking about lightning, then River drops
this stat last week or so
showing that it's
grown since last year to a billion dollars a month being settled in lightning volume that's
their best estimate with over 50 percent of like network liquidity reporting to that that's crazy
and i forgot what it was the year before like 200 million or something i mean it's is a substantial
increase in like a five like a five yeah it's five x for volume right and then well also
interestingly to note is the number of payments i think it was like five million and change
for the month of November.
Yeah.
Which was up...
5 million is the unit payment number?
It's the number of payments.
What do you mean by the unit payment?
I mean, like, it's a payment,
not a Bitcoin value or something.
Yeah.
There's, like, 5 million payments
and a billion dollars of volume
in last November.
And I think the number of payments
year over year.
I forget if it grew 5x or 3x.
I forget the factor.
What's notable, though, is that the number of payments
from the prior year was actually 6 million.
So there was a big spike a couple years ago.
So it's still even down from that.
And that was the surge of, like, zaps on Nostra.
Yeah, exactly.
And then that was kind of a...
I mean, it's still...
It's not gone to zero,
but it was like a big hit for a period of time.
But I think the most notable thing is if you look at the average amount per payment.
So if you take the $1 billion divided by 5 million payments,
it comes out to a little over $200 per payment.
That's a very high amount.
If you look at previous years, it was much smaller.
The two years prior, I think it was like $11.
So 11 to 220 or something like that.
What's up with that?
Well, number one, the Zapathons.
Number one is Zapathon, right?
So the more skewed towards Zaps, those are like tiny micropayments.
But I think the second trend here, and Jesse's commenting here, I'd love to hear his thoughts as well.
He has a really great vantage point on this.
But the other trend is Cash App has seen an increase in withdrawals going over Lightning versus the Bitcoin network to where it's like a very, very material amount of the percentage of withdrawals from Cash App.
But Coinbase as well, maybe like a year and a half ago, launched with LightSpark, powered by LDK, to enable Lightning.
And they've seen a steady increase in the percentage of their Bitcoin withdrawals on Lightning.
That's great.
And so for those, especially Coinbase, and several other exchanges support Lightning too, but for that use case, that's where you're going to see a higher amount, right?
I mean, I have like $1,000 of Bitcoin and Kraken or Coinbase
and I withdraw it to self-custody.
Well, that's $1,000.
So I think we've seen an increase in that.
And that's a big reason for the big billion dollar number.
Do you think it mostly individuals that are just withdrawing into self Or do you think it like I mean because I always wondered when are we going to start to see like high traders or like whatever come and want to move between different venues I not I always thought
that use case should emerge.
I'm not aware of any evidence
that's emerged.
So I think that's
nascent or non-existent.
Maybe Jesse would know.
Well, there is that voltage announcement
where they did the million-dollar
Lightning payment with Kraken.
Yeah, we talked about that though.
First of all, I was not amazed.
Or I mean, like,
of course Lightning can support that.
I mean, that's not hard to do.
But if that's true, then maybe there's more of that activity than we realize.
Like with people that are posting, I don't know, they're trading between, I don't know, different venues.
Yeah, maybe.
I'm not aware of the data, but as you said, I mean, I'm also not.
We don't know.
I'm not privy to all the data.
And yeah, anyway.
And I would say that the data sources I do know of, like some ground truth, makes me...
I'm not surprised by the
River Report.
And
yeah, because I've seen
continued steady growth.
And I think there's also a substantial
segment of payments that are
Visa-like
in that the amounts
are like $20, $30
median, which I
think is around where Visa's at,
which I think is also encouraging.
Totally. What all is Jesse
saying here?
we're seeing 28% growth month over month
in our magma liquidity marketplace.
So that's a very strong growth number.
So happy to hear that for you guys, Jesse.
That's, you know, the different data points I see,
that's higher, but like, you know,
I'm seeing like, you know, 10, 12, 15% per month.
I mean, any of these numbers are very good growth rates.
Especially, you know, when that river report came out
a year and a half ago, the 1,212% over 18 months,
I looked at the volume then
and compared it to Visa
and I forget what the number was
but you know it's obviously
it was minuscule compared to Visa
but then I'm like well okay
well you know we
everything starts at zero
and has to grow
so how many more 1212% do we need
until it matches Visa
or surpasses Visa
and I forget if it was two or three
but it was two or three
so it's like okay
that's a tall order
but like you know
once we get one more in
then it doesn't seem that out of the question.
So what we've seen since then is one more,
and it's now like 0.1% of Visa volume.
One in a thousand.
So if you want to be a skeptic or roll your eyes,
you can be like, that's negligible.
Except what happens if we see that growth rate again
over the next two years?
And then if we achieve that,
then other people will not be rolling their eyes.
and then we do it again,
then we catch and pass.
Well, let's do some back of the envelope math
because there's many things that could take that,
make it go off.
We've talked a lot about agentic payments.
That's like a really, really obvious,
like kind of like elephant in the room if it takes off.
But let's say, you know,
we're at $100 billion a month right now.
That was the number in the Ripper report per month.
One billion.
Sorry, yeah, one billion per month.
So let's call that.
Jesse's saying he estimates 15 billion last year.
Let's even be conservative and call it 10 billion.
Let's be conservative.
So if we 5x again next year and then 5x again, right?
So that would go 10 billion.
Next year would be 50 billion.
The year after that, again, would be 250 billion.
What is Visa doing in total?
Like a quadrillion.
A quadrillion.
Okay.
Give or take.
Yeah, we got a few more to go.
But still, I mean, if we're at the point where we're settling next year on the order of 50
to 100 billion dollars, like now this is a real serious piece of the economy.
Yeah.
So I find those very encouraging numbers.
Yeah, DK?
Okay. I was going to say, if you've got anything in your mind about how agents become users of this thing, then all of your models for 2026 are just broken. The last two months have just been so insane from software development and from agent development and stuff that it's very credible you could even blow out those previous growth numbers because agents are the ones doing the payments.
Easily.
Easy to beat, in a sense, in a payment in an agentic wallet world.
100% agree to that point.
We still have to make sure that Bitcoin is successful there.
But I agree with...
Can we talk a little bit about Matt's piece?
Because Matt Corallo just...
Yes, Matt Corallo on the Spiral team
just published a really good post
on the importance of,
for specifically open source agents,
but I think agentic commerce in general,
the importance of the permissionless, neutral, open network
that Bitcoin and Lightning represent.
And he really emphasizes specifically open source agents
because the concern that is,
he frames the concern in the piece
that if stable coins are adopted,
they're not as open and neutral and permissionless
as the Bitcoin network.
And if each major AI model,
which is closed sourced,
adopts one or more of these stable coins,
it can just sort of cut out open source agents
and they can't participate in that economy.
It's just sort of a recreation
of the existing financial network.
I'm not sure I fully,
do you feel like you have a clear picture of that?
Because in my mind,
it's like you've got major hyperscalers
and you've got major labs
like OpenAI and Anthropic,
is the proposal that they're somehow going to control
the underlying agents that are allowed to run?
Meaning if I use OpenClaw in a certain way
with Anthropic Claude key,
that that agent would be required to use a stablecoin,
would be defaulted to a stablecoin somehow?
I think it would be like each major AI company model
would introduce their own agentic model,
like their own open claw,
except it would be closed claw.
Like Gemini would have a closed provider,
but extremely powerful and amazing agent
that you could use.
And so will Anthropic and even OpenAI.
They bought OpenClaw or whatever
and promised to keep it open.
Okay, let's assume they keep doing that.
They might introduce their own closed source one as well.
And then just the consumer experience
presented to people is like, I use
Gemini or I use ChatGPT
and along with that is this
agent I'm using that's
closed sourced and then they
partner with Stripe
or they partner with Coinbase
or if it's Google,
they use their own internal
cloud user universal platform
or whatever it was called
to support
payments and they
create a really good UX around that.
that scales well,
great user experience for everything,
for bots, for consumers,
for developers, builders.
But at the end of the day,
it sucks you into that,
what will effectively become
a very centralized, controlled,
concentrated system.
Yeah.
This actually reminds me of,
I had a really interesting discussion
with someone this week
who I won't,
I don't know if they want their piece
shared probably or not,
but wrote about sort of using compute as money.
And this is part of a larger essay I'm hammering out, thinking about how to price, compute, and energy, which to me means in Bitcoin.
But one of the takeaways from the conversation I had with her was if one or two or whatever, some cabal of these agentic companies win or closed model companies win, I could see a world.
I actually don't see the world where Coinbase or any of these guys or their payment standards have
any power whatsoever. Where I do see a world where someone could become a central bank of
payments is if the valuable commodity in this century is intelligence, i.e. tokens. And if
you're the one that controls the tokens everyone wants, you should be able to create the bank.
What I mean by that is Google should be an incredible position where it's like,
I need Google tokens. I can only pay in whatever standard protocol Google launches.
Similarly, if I want Anthropic tokens,
I can only pay in whatever.
They can price.
They have the commodity people want,
so they should be able to create their own.
If anyone's in a position to create a new stable coin
or a new ledger,
it should be whoever controls the thing people want,
which is those tokens.
Now, that's scary for that world
because I could totally see a world
where Google and Anthropic are just basically like,
look, you have to have a Google token
or you have to have Anthropic token,
maybe Anthropic partners with Tempo and Stripe or whatever.
You have to use this token to access our...
are um you say token you're talking about a stable coin like sorry you have to use this stable coin
to access our intelligence tokens right and so in that world uh i think that's that's really really
bad for bitcoin you can still have people maybe building wrappers around it and kind of selling
it illegally um that could happen but i think to your point and to matt corralto's point in his
piece bitcoin does extremely well in a world where open source or let's say more freely available
intelligence tokens are just out there on a free market.
So I think for Bitcoin to do well in this world, we need things like
Maybellia, where we need open source models, frankly, to be
competitive enough that people want to use them.
Otherwise, I could easily see a world where, you know, one to five
central banks emerge, and that's the end of the story.
I agree with that concern.
And that's a big concern.
And I think that's kind of what Matt is getting at in his post.
Yeah.
So this is not an easy battle to win,
but it's a battle that needs to be won.
One message I'm trying to spread to folks in Bitcoin is,
we can understand why Bitcoin is superior money
in terms of its properties and long-term potential
and eventually will win no matter what happens in the world,
but that could take decades and decades and decades to play out.
and maybe that's the path it's destined on
but I think we are
we're in a position we can help
it win today because it
turns out it's properties
as daily currency and money
are a really good fit for
agentic payments
and so
I think we're starting to see how
this is a pitch that doesn't
just sell to existing
bitcoiners but it's a pitch that can also
sell to just people in tech
people in AI. And they'll start to realize, oh, we do need payments in AI. And oh, these properties
are needed. And oh, it turns out Bitcoin actually has the best properties. Yeah. I also think it was
very interesting. Last night at the meetup, there was a guy I'd never seen before, didn't strike me
as a Bitcoin or he seemed like an AI guy. And he was basically asking Jesse, he's like, Jesse,
will you make me feel better that I just basically bought an expensive Apple,
that basically that it was worth it.
And the thing that I think
he made himself feel better by saying was,
he's like, I started realizing
if I'm only using cloud services,
and this is the oldest trick,
or not even trick,
this is the oldest thing in the book, right?
You get them hooked.
First one's free, kid.
So Anthropic and OpenAI,
Google start pricing very cheaply.
And then all of a sudden,
they now have Monopoly, Duopoly, Triopoly,
if that's even a word, pricing power.
And all of a sudden, it's like,
okay, well, I'm paying $100 a month for Anthropic.
And now I need them.
And so now it's $1,000 a month.
And then it's $10,000 a month.
And then, oh shit,
like it's almost as expensive as a human.
And so I think that where he really clicked
and a lot of people clicked is like
the open and permissionless stack
is like the check to make sure
that like five companies
don't just absolutely dominate everything
for the next century.
But I think more than just having the stack exist,
like it has to be used in meaningful ways.
So part of what I kind of feel
feel like is unanswered
from Matt's piece is
what is the action?
Is it just a call to arms
to build more stuff with Bitcoin?
Or are there specific ideas
of how we move it forward
in a more open way?
I don't know.
I was reading Justin's comment.
Sorry.
Was it a good comment?
I can't read the comment.
One thing that occurred to me,
eCash for agentic payments
has an interesting feature.
The ability to rug the mint
Sorry, I got bumped up.
Rug the mint can be protection
against your agent messing up.
That's right.
And then he says,
run your own mint.
So it's self-custody.
Give your clinker an e-cash wallet
and if your open claw loses it
or causes an error,
you rug your own mint.
I'd think more about that.
But this does get to something
I've been talking to Dustin about
and the idea that like
we discussed many, many, many months ago
with Bob here,
which is like,
if you want to run an e-cash mint
backed by Bitcoin,
it seems like this is a good time
to have autonomous life.
I'm going to be coming back
in this Thomas Life thing soon.
Like, it's time.
But, I mean, your crazy ideas
that were on the show
with less than a year,
it's becoming very closer.
I mean, all of us have now,
like, asked our agent
to create his own wallet
and run its own wallet.
Can we also just take a moment
to just, like, comment
on the state of the world?
Like, things that used to be crazy.
Like, yeah.
When I was first saying that
nine months ago,
a lot of people thought
it was insane.
Now it's not that insane.
When we had the Type 1 summit and we had that panel on doing computing and Bitcoin mining in space and then inference in space, people laughed.
Literally people on that same stage, they laughed.
This will never happen.
Two days later, Elon, Google, everyone's like, oh, we're going to space.
The world is moving faster and faster.
And it's cool, it's exciting, it's exhilarating, but man, is it a weird time to be alive.
That is definitely true.
Let's see.
So where are we at?
We're on the lightning report.
And then we, yeah, and we,
then we started about agents and open agents.
Is there anything else from that post from Spiral and Matt
that you wanted to talk about?
Yeah, I mean, I think it dovetails into another topic
that we've been talking about a bunch
in our group chat this week,
which is, I think, you know,
I don't disagree with anything that I read in Matt's post,
but I also feel like I don't necessarily know
where it's meant to,
like, what are we supposed
to advocate for?
Where does it lead us?
How do we actually
make that future
that Matt is proposing
come true?
And I think it's,
I think the stuff
that we've been seeing,
I think we can talk about
Unhuman, right?
That stuff?
Yeah, it's live.
So Unhuman.
Well, there's numerous Unhumans.
Well, I didn't want to give away
the specific one.
Unhuman.what?
I think some of them,
I think, are not meant
to be shared yet.
Unhuman.dk, is that live yet?
I think, I don't know, that one's not live, but I think unhuman.domains is live, right?
Yeah.
And that one's allowed to be shared.
And there's, I think, a new launch coming up for the drinkable one on Monday, if I recall correctly.
There's a couple drinkable ones.
Oh, are there?
Okay.
Well, yeah, and the powder.
Okay, we're being very obtuse right now.
But the point being, like Unhuman Domains is a new website that Nick Slaney from MDK built.
And it kind of came out of our use of Ori together because we were using Ori, which is this bot that we can add to our group chat.
We're using Ori to add the bot to the group chat.
Then we decided to build things that were hosted, built by Ori, hosted on that OpenClaw instance.
And then we found we want a domain name for it.
And the bot cannot register its own domains.
then the bot is asking us,
can you go out and click around on this website
and put in your credit card and blah, blah, blah.
And so Nick and team realized...
What were some of the problems encountered?
Like CAPTCHAs and stuff like that.
And most didn't accept Bitcoin.
But namesheet does,
but then there are CAPTCHAs that it couldn't get around.
Totally.
There's CAPTCHAs.
I mean, I think most of them have...
You have to register for the thing.
And sure, you could get your bot an email,
but like those things,
it's not always quite as straightforward
if you don't have it set up already.
so i think the idea of unhuman.domains is a very simple way for you know the the product is built
bot first like you can switch the tab at the bottom to see it as a human but it's meant to
be seen as a bot and it's a website that explains to the bot how it can register a domain pay bitcoin
where to hold it how to get it and i think that is a great example of a thing that you can really
only do with a agentic wallet digital payment kind of tool it doesn't work with the old way
but i think it's in a sense the first thing i can think of that kind of is a you know if you say that
matt's post is a call to arms or a call to action i think the unhuman domains is a great example of
like a first example of a real digital native bitcoin product you know agent native uh bitcoin
product. I agree.
And another fun part of that
process in creating that, when we
discovered that trying to use
existing domain registrars ran into all these
problems where the bot couldn't do it,
I think, you know,
I sort of just went back to my old bag of
tricks and I'm like, oh, why don't you reach
out to the company and try to
get them to change and accept Bitcoin
payments? And I love Nick's response. He's just like,
now we're going to build it. We're going to build our own.
We're going to build our own and just like,
you know, and it's, and like
within hours they had their prototype working and then like five more within a day or two
i've never nick by the way like shout out to him and his team they move i've never seen a team
it's fast yeah so i wish every entrepreneur could study could just be like a fly on the wall in the
group chat and just see the way they move because i think it would it would up everybody's game to
see how how fast they move how sharp the ideas are how they go about the kind of brainstorm
ideation filtering prototype deployment process like everything happens within hours there's no
idea oh yeah and the whole thing is so fun it's hilarious i just i just dunking dunking as a
service in there like and i think if you don't get a chance to see what that kind of greatness
is like you actually can be held back thinking you're working hard you know locked in or whatever
you're doing good work but if you're not moving as fast as they're moving you're missing the
opportunity to do that yeah well one of the thing i want to throw out on on uh the nick thing i think
this is actually quite important is one other sort of at least kick for me was you know dk you and
matt got me on replet when was that it feels like that was like a year ago i think that was last
you just signed up a couple weeks ago yeah yeah i'm already ready to cancel that damn subscription
in fact i saw like charge in my credit card i'm like what the fuck is that oh yeah i forgot i
signed up by the way i hate sass i'm so happy to see sass like oh like a whole yeah because the
whole freaking i thought you said sats and that i was that warmed my heart i've been using bitcoin
more um but like the whole premise of sass is just like sign up once and like we hope you forget
your credit cards attached to us like it's so annoying anyways um it's not value for value right
but um you know within like days of using oribot and i'm sure i'll probably have this experience
once I really start playing with Cloud Code,
which is one of the points Jesse made,
which is like, even though OpenClaw is cool,
like, it's probably just because people
haven't used Cloud Code yet,
and like, yeah, there's some differences
because I can't, like, give it all my permissions,
blah, blah, blah.
But anyways, but the point is, like,
the only thing that kept me on Repl.it at all
was because Repl.it had this super sweet feature
where it was just, like, very easy to get
just with your credit card on file,
like, one-click domain hosting.
You don't have to mess with Vercel.
You don't have to do any DNS pointing.
It's just super easy.
Now you can do it from group chat.
Bro, and that's my point.
I literally, and I remember I even said that,
and I think I was like,
Nick, the only thing keeping me at all in Replit
and not doing this 100% is the domains.
Now that's solved.
So why would I ever go back to Replit?
And again, I come back to this
in the broader software story,
which I'm sure we'll talk about
where things are going in the world.
But even though I like Replit,
shout out to those guys, whatever.
But like, why would I ever go back to any rapper
on one of these models?
Unless it's in my chat and it's something unique
and it's like with my friends.
Like, I don't really see how any of these companies
that are wrappers around Claude, like, survive.
I mean, that's just...
I think there's definitely questions now
around Replit and Cursor,
which is amazing because just a few months ago,
I think we were pretty bullish
and excited about their future,
but you can see how fast things change.
And Matt has gone from a self-described
Replit maxi to like a shrug.
I don't know.
Claude code's really cool.
Oribot's really cool.
Group chat coding is really cool.
And I think there's more of these services too.
So I think, you know,
unhuman domains is a first example.
I've mentioned,
I remember mentioning it to Steve on a run.
I don't know if I mentioned it to you, Max,
but I wish that Vercel and Supabase
were also similarly wrapped
in a agent-centric way
so that, you know,
when I use Cloud Code,
I've just now started trying to deploy
to Vercel and Supabase
instead of like I was using DigitalOcean before.
And I want it to just be able
to do all the deployments.
If we need new SQL scripts,
it can write them.
Right now, my agent is asking me
to run SQL migrations in Supabase
because it doesn't have access to do that.
But that needs to get wrapped.
That needs to be something I don't worry about.
I mean, even companies like Vercel and Supabase,
like, what, do they stick around?
I mean, if they evolve, well, maybe, yeah.
They need to evolve, right?
Like, they need to be agent first.
I know what I was going to say.
Another thing that was in Jesse's presentation last night,
at the Builder meetup,
he had a slide saying that
chat is the last human interface.
And basically websites and apps are going to go away.
You're going to learn information,
interact with your data through chat.
And that can be voice, of course, too.
And then you still might want to see things,
but your AI agent will create the optimized visual
for you on the fly based on your request.
And I agree with that.
and we've been having a similar conversation
in other contexts as well,
where people are questioning
the importance of Bitcoin design
for your mobile wallet,
or a traditional app or website.
Historically, Bitcoin's been very hard to use.
It's improved dramatically the past seven, eight years.
Using Phoenix or Lexi,
those types of apps,
I find them to be a good experience.
but how much do those interfaces matter in the future right i'm probably going to interact with
my agent it's i'm gonna it's gonna have a spending wallet and i give it a budget something i'm
comfortable with and give it autonomy and power over that budget to spend and then it fulfills my
wishes and i have an interface with that agent like i don't see it any other way now like i feel
Now that we've seen that, and actually seen it,
but also we've been experiencing it, using it,
I don't see any other, so how much does,
so is that the last human interface?
And should we just kind of stop fretting
about website design app design app stores et cetera Apps are dead I also just want to make one more comment on this which I actually think Jesse close but it not the last human interface There is one more and I want to make a call to arms for
and we've said this on the show before,
I don't know if this is a company,
which I would love to help fund.
Maybe it needs to be a foundation,
which raises a bunch of money
and then becomes a company one day.
But what we really need,
I think the last,
increasingly I'm of the mind
that humans and AIs need
to merge. And Neuralink is like, obviously, that to me is the last interface, just like a chip in
your brain. And that's going to happen. And you're going to see Elon's going to do one,
all the other closed source companies are going to do one. That's terrifying to me.
I want to see desperately an open source or, as we said on the show before, auditable version of
Neuralink. And I don't know if there's a chance to do that as a company, if maybe some wealthy
Bitcoiners need to like,
for the good of saving the species
or whatever make this happen.
But somehow, I think that is where we're headed
and it's coming quicker than I thought.
And we need to make sure
if we're going to be putting chips in our brains,
there's a way to audit
what the hell signals are being sent in and out.
That's super important.
Yeah.
I'm just checking time
and I can't really run over today.
So we got a few,
let's talk a little bit about
I don't know if it was news or rumors
but like both Stripe
possibly acquiring
PayPal, Meta
I didn't hear that
before we jump in news
I want to give one more shout out while we're on the agent thing
because we gave a big shout out to MDK
but I also do want to give a shout out to Albi
Albi has also been moving extremely quickly
anyone that's following Roland
and what they're doing with their bots
they're giving lightning bullets to agents as well
they have now
they've launched a bunch of services. The services have gotten retweeted by Peter Diamandis' people.
I think Ben Horowitz mentioned it on the Peter Diamandis website. I think they maybe even said
Elon retweeted. I'm not sure on that. But that's definitely striking in the mainstream zeitgeist
is what Albie has built with their agents. MailMike.lol is one example where you can try
and sort of prompt and inject, i.e. phish an agent. We have not done it successfully. I asked
our good homie Satbot
who came up with a lot of creative ways.
And at first, I got to give Satbot some credit.
He didn't want to fish to make money,
but ultimately he did.
And
appears unsuccessful so far,
but that's the first example I know of
in the world of an agent trying to fish another agent
for Bitcoin and it could be interesting to see what happens.
So I just want to give a shout out to the Albi guys.
Good shout out. Yeah, that's great. That's fantastic.
But yeah, a few news pieces.
One is
a rumor
I would guess true that is being explored
that Stripe looking to acquire PayPal.
Two, Meta, and again, I forget if this is rumor
or it was announced, but Meta is looking to get
to come out with a stablecoin offering
in the second half of this year.
It's called Mibra, I think, is that right?
And then a third related thing
is David Marcus from LightSpark
posted on X in the past few days
saying that LightSpark,
maybe not known as a stablecoin company today,
but within 24 months
will be the leading stablecoin company in the world.
Yeah.
Which is a bold claim.
I mean, I think he's in a position,
he needs to make that claim
and he needs to make that happen.
So I think it's good that he made that claim,
but that's a bold claim.
But I'd say he isn't typically full of bluster.
He's like kind of a reasonable
straight shooter.
I mean, yeah, I think he
legitimately believes he's going to do that.
And I'm sure he has a strong plan
to deliver that.
My guess is if he's saying that,
it's probably more true than
if other kind of more wild characters
would say that.
So it makes me, I mean,
I would just speculate,
but like maybe he is part of
the Metastablecoin return.
Like if he's doing...
I recall my 2025 prediction
from a little over a year ago.
That was my favorite.
Which I struck out, I think,
on all but one of my predictions,
and I just redid them for this year.
So a 2026 prediction as well
is that Meta acquires LightSpark,
and that often starts with a partnership.
So we'll see where that goes.
But the rumor on Meta getting these difficult points,
I forget a part of that
hinted at them partnering with
Coinbase or Stripe,
but I kind of think it did.
So it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
I mean, there's no doubt in my mind,
David Marcus is in there battling
and selling Zuckerberg and Meta
to go with LightSpark instead of Stripe or Coinbase.
So without like kind of giving,
I don't think any of us have any insider info on this,
what would you guys speculate?
Let's say he's correct.
Today, LightSpark does basically nothing with stable coins.
in two years. They're the biggest stablecoin company in the world.
What does that mean to you guys?
He also, in a
reply in X, stated
that they won't become an issuer.
Or at least that's not part
of the plan. They're going to move stablecoins, but not
issue them, yeah.
That suggests that they would get
Tether, USDT, or USDC,
or maybe
an unannounced new one.
Maybe, this is all
speculation, right? Maybe Stripe
is coming out with their own issued stablecoin.
And maybe it's exclusive on Spark.
But that doesn't make any sense
because they're building Tempo, right?
So that probably is not true.
But pick another major company,
maybe a partnership with Google.
But then again, Google has their own
universal standard platform or whatever the name is.
They need a new name.
Because at least I always remember like
Spark, Tempo, Bass, those are good brands.
whatever google was not a good brand google chain yeah but but to me then that gets the question of
like are they gonna so that the thesis for light spark and i think our thesis for bitcoin and
lightning network in general has always been all these other you know tempos and google chain are
all intranets and by definition stripe chain is never going to speak with audi and chain directly
because they're both trying to like get those sweet sweet fees so my question is what is the
plan here it seems like david marcus sees an opportunity to market make between all of them
and bring all these like crap chains into bitcoin and somehow be the exchange between them i don't
know what that looks like but that to me is where i see that's where it smells like it's going
maybe it is something of an interop layer like like what bridge kind of is right bridge but open
bridge that speaks bitcoin yeah yeah that's interesting hopefully david's listening yeah
If you are, I don't have any insider inputs.
I'm just guessing.
So yeah, I think it'll be really interesting
to see how all that plays out.
Like what does Meta decide to do?
I think it'll be super interesting
given that they've already gained
all that experience from Libra.
They undoubtedly have Stripe, Coinbase,
and LightSpark selling them
and probably many others as well.
I don't know if Paolo and Tether are in there,
but you know
like
a few years ago
that would seem ridiculous
that
because Tether
was just seen
and positioned
as this thing
that an American company
wouldn't touch
but now there's like
Tether US
and like
Bohind runs it right
I mean like
it's you know
close to the administration
and so that
I'm sure they're in there
as well
right
so what does
and Zuckerberg
he's not going to want
to give away
the keys
to the kingdom
to some other company
and have them make
all the profits off the future
of all financial transactions
that are flowing through Meta.
So how does he structure a deal
where that does not occur?
It'll be really interesting to see
what happens with that.
Same with what Google decides,
what Amazon decides.
These very, very powerful companies
who can call the shots,
but they don't currently have solutions.
Yeah, it would also be very interesting to me
if Meta, it remains to be seen
how competitive their models,
their AI models are going to be.
And for a while, they were making the big bet on open source.
Lama 3 was kind of the big thing.
And then Meta just, I don't know what happened.
They spent all this money and haven't seen anything since.
Meanwhile, the Chinese models are driving open source.
But imagine if Zuck knows one thing, he knows how to monetize.
So whether he's using his AI or someone else's AI, it'll probably be his.
He's going to figure out how to monetize within his properties.
And maybe there's Bitcoin payments there.
And maybe, just maybe, if he becomes the unlikely savior for open source in the US,
maybe he pairs his open source models with Bitcoin payments in the wild too.
so maybe the last thing we can touch on
we can talk a little bit about Block
there's a lot of news
do you know anything about that company?
a lot of news yesterday
and certainly emotional for me
and like thousands of other employees
at Block
so I'm sure people have
heard that Block had a major
major layoff
like around 4,000 people
40% of the company
laid off in one event
I read somewhere it was the largest layoff by percentage of any S&P 500 company in history.
Wow.
So from a percentage basis, it's very substantial.
It was 2,000 people before and then a 40% reduction to 6,000?
Yeah.
And a few years ago, I think it was 12 plus thousand employees.
Yeah.
So from its peak a few years ago, the company will be about half.
So that's substantial news.
I mean, I work at Block, so I was not aware of this.
They did a very good job of keeping it tight-lipped.
I was unaware, so I learned at the same time as other employees yesterday.
And so I wasn't sure how my team would be impacted, like the Spiral team specifically.
I wasn't sure how other teams I work with, other Bitcoin teams at Block would be impacted.
I later learned that
fortunately Spiral was not impacted
so for those listening who
follow along with Spiral
what we do and the good things we do
for Bitcoin, we're very fortunate
I feel extremely fortunate that
we were not
impacted at all
so the way
I'm feeling about that is
I have great
a lot of emotions and great empathy
for the thousands of the block
employees that were just laid off.
And I just feel
an even
greater responsibility that
Spiral needs to deliver and have
great impact because we were fortunate to
not be impacted. I mean,
we're already working hard, but I just feel like
I feel three times the
energy to deliver and
make good on
the fact that the company continues
to believe in us, value us,
what we're doing for Bitcoin.
That's how I'm feeling.
And then, you know, for the people that were impacted, we talked a little bit yesterday, Max, about, you know, what are they going to do next?
Because one of the narratives, I mean, how Jack communicated was this was not due to financial distress.
In fact, it was the greatest financial quarter in company history.
so there's not a company
on its way to bankruptcy and financial
distress and had to reduce cut costs
it was the greatest
financial quarter in company history
Cash App gross profits
grew 33% year over year
and
I was looking
at the gross profit for the company
when I started the company in 2019
it was around a billion
dollars, little over a billion
dollars gross profit and now it's over
$12 billion gross profit.
Oh, wow.
So it's over a 10x growth
in like,
in seven,
seven, eight years.
And yet,
the stock price is flat.
It's kind of mind-boggling
how the investor sentiment
on the company
given the financial
performance.
Another metric
that I was,
you know,
looking at
was the efficiency
from a gross profit
to employee ratio.
Because another narrative
I saw on the internet was
the AI story
that Jack gave was just
a cover.
Or that it was really due to bloated
headcount and
mismanagement of the past five years
and just used AI
as a story to cover.
But that doesn't really line up
with the
metrics. If you look at
gross profit per headcount,
even prior to this layoff,
Block was
very competitive with all of its
peers in fintech
and in tech in general. And now
Block almost stands alone.
I mean, this assumes the
company is able to maintain and grow its gross profit.
Well, I mean,
we don't have the tether numbers, but for
public companies,
Block is now like $2 million
per gross profit per
employee. And the
only company I could find that was higher than that was NVIDIA.
Google? No. Really?
Block's higher than Google. Really?
Yeah.
Wow.
That's shocking.
Block is much higher.
Coinbase and PayPal and Shopify and Google and you name it.
The only, in fact, I asked a finding company and NVIDIA was the only one that was higher.
Yeah.
Now, you know, this assumes Block can continue to grow its business and customers and make customers happy and grow gross profits.
But I guess I don't believe the narrative, well, at least bloated relative to peers.
The data doesn't seem to support that.
It does seem like the rationale by Jack and the company was AI.
So getting back to the point we were discussing, first of all, we have to think about the human element here.
so I feel so bad for the thousands of people affected
and I didn't know most, but I definitely,
the people I did know that got let go,
there were some very high quality folks
and really good engineers.
And even the non-engineers,
one piece of advice we have is like,
now you have some time.
First of all, take a breath, gather yourself
and get into a good mental state
and deal with this sudden change to your life,
but then capitalize on what we talk about
on the show a lot,
which is like around building
and becoming an entrepreneur.
Being, you know,
you single-handedly can be a builder,
even if you're not an engineer
or a superstar engineer.
And take, you know,
utilize your agency to do that.
And I was so heartened by it
when I came into the office today for the show.
There's one guy, Jamie,
who worked at Block
and I know Jamie and I'm familiar with him
and then I saw him tweet and he tweeted a video
just sharing his emotions and how he's feeling today
one day after being let go
and it's a really positive attitude he had
and so
maybe you want to share what you're thinking
about could there be resources or events
or ways to encourage people
on taking the time they have now
to experiment with vibe coding.
Yeah, I mean, and I think one thing
as a context, I did read Jack's
like Twitter essay or whatever.
I thought it was really good.
Also, one thought, I mean, shout out to Jack.
Like, I think what he's doing is
he is the definition of an early mover, right?
Like what he's doing today,
probably realistically,
most companies are going to be doing
over the next year.
So it's not like Jack's like in a unique position.
And he saw it early.
And I think he, from everything we've seen from him,
like when he did the AMA here,
everything leads me to believe.
He really believes AI is incredible.
And he really believes you can build more with fewer people.
And he's really right.
Like things have changed a lot.
He said the essay since December.
But also a shout out to him.
Like it's just a good reminder.
I don't know if it's because he's a founder
or just like, I don't know,
like has some like innate compassion or whatever.
But it feels like most corporate CEOs
are just kind of like dicks when they do this kind of thing.
Um, and Jack, to his credit went above and beyond.
I mean, giving everyone, you know, six months pay six months or whatever it was, uh, healthcare,
or I forget the exact numbers.
And then an additional $5,000 stipend to put towards what comes next.
So all of those things, just a good reminder of like, he's going to save a lot of money.
Um, and, uh, probably the company's gonna be a lot more lean.
Um, but also on the way out, you know, you don't, I mean, you can do the right thing.
And I think it seemed like he did that.
So that was very cool.
But I think the next thing that would be even one step further for Jack and for Block, but also for us, and I suggest this with MDK, is, again, this is not like some one company event.
We're about to see this happen throughout the entire economy.
On the one hand, that's really scary because if you have a mortgage and a family, I totally get it.
You're freaking out.
Where's the money going to come from?
On the other hand, if you have enough of a runway to survive this transition period, then to me, this is also extremely exciting because it's like the old world where your value came from doing something that someone else told you to do, that world is ending.
And you can be upset about it, but trying to fight and go back to that old world, it's not going to happen.
But the new world that's coming is a world where everyone can be an entrepreneur.
And I know that sounds like crazy and like it's going to be, and I'm not saying it's going to be easy to get there, but I think something that we're maybe uniquely positioned to do, at least for people that are interested in exploring Bitcoin is, you know, can we have, and maybe Blockett's involved in sponsoring this or whatever.
For people that are looking at what's next, you know, workshops, like a week-long workshop is what I was thinking here at Presidio Bitcoin or online.
I suggested this to Nick with MDK as well.
Basically, courses where the whole deal is we're not just going to get you vibe coding, but particularly with stuff like MDK.
The goal is, by the end of this week,
you make your first $100 online
and see where that goes.
Because I think people are going to be shocked,
you know, once they get over the shock of like,
oh my God, my old world is dying.
Then I think there's the next shock of,
oh wait, but in this new world,
is it possible I could do even better?
And I think the answer is yes.
If, you know, if you get exposed to how that could happen.
And early movers have an advantage, right?
And it's super early right now.
So I do think some of the folks affected, obviously there's a range of emotions right now, but once you get past the suddenness of it and those who capitalize on this, I think they'll look back and be like, I'm actually glad that happened at that time.
Because it gave me the time and space and room to see this new world, act upon it, and get a leg up.
Yeah. And so I just in terms of what we can do, though, I mean, I think companies like Nick should be doing this, too, because there's the Bitcoin angle. But I think it'd be really cool if we found a way to actually like invite some of those superstar engineers in and be like, cool, just come hack with us for a month or whatever for free and see what comes out of it.
I mean, we've all been, I'm not opposed to the education idea, week-long education idea, but we've also found that through using things like Ori in our group chat, we can very easily build things.
We get our first taste of building without almost even thinking about what we're building.
And I wonder if maybe Nick or somebody else could host a little bit of an online forum where he just shows people how easy it is to build.
and you could use an Ori-like thing,
but it doesn't necessarily need to be about Ori.
It can just show how easy it is to build.
And then I think if you start with Ori,
you may say, oh, I need more control
and upgrade to Replit or CloudCode
or some other more sophisticated tool
if you really get into it.
But I feel like helping almost create
lightweight online forums
where people can gather and try out these tools
without necessarily,
you don't even have to swipe your credit card
or anything, just show up and start doing stuff.
you know, like a, like an online forum to, to play and you see stuff get made and you're like, wow,
I can participate in a group chat. I can build stuff. And then sort of graduate up from there.
I think it's also just worth noting kind of the reality of the world though. Like there's going
to be obviously frustration. I think the block is the first mover, but the reality is I think
block stock went up 25% yesterday. Something crazy. Like what the market is saying is that,
okay, the old world, the old way of building where humans are told what to do, that world
is now a liability.
And so I think it was also,
was it this week, last week,
that Cetrini Research Report came out
where basically they're saying
this is going to happen everywhere, right?
And so on the one hand,
that's like, you know,
it's scary because that's a big shock to the society.
I don't think that's necessarily going to happen
all like smooth.
On the other hand,
I really think for entrepreneurs,
frankly, it would be cool if the government,
you know, were like able to help.
I mean, I'm not holding my breath, but what?
Yeah, I don't.
What do you think they're going to do?
Well, no, I'm just saying like, if you're about to see a lot of unemployment, you know, I feel like there need to your point, there's like online forums, but I feel like, and again, the payments piece of this is super important as well. Like there need to be pathways for people to get paid and just see that it's real quickly. Like you need to be able to go from like in one day, make, if you could go in your first day for like, most people could get some idea out that gets them to $100. I think that would change everything.
and make, frankly, this transition
a lot more palatable for everyone.
And I think people who don't see themselves,
they don't self-identify as entrepreneurs.
They think it sounds scary.
It sounds like a lot of risk.
There's all kinds of, I think, baggage associated with that.
But if you just show up and play and make something
and see how easy it is to make $100 online,
I think people will be like, I could do more of that.
I don't want to raise venture capital,
hire a big team, run a company and hit board meetings.
But I do want to hang out in a group chat and make things.
But yeah.
And also, while everyone who tries this isn't going to become the next billion-dollar entrepreneur, if you go through that experience, you gain those skills, you start to see this, you're going to be way more hireable by others doing this who are looking to have a very lean organization building.
You're going to stand out to them as someone who was able to make $100 in a day.
Yeah. And I think, you know, I almost wonder, it'd be cool to put together like, um, like a little curriculum. And by the way, what you guys are all working on, and I see Matt in the chat with, uh, um, the, I forgot what you're calling it, but the builder thing. Yeah, Flint. Like more, more examples, not just have cool apps, but it would also be cool, like cool apps. And like, here's a story of like someone that got to a thousand dollars MRR or something like that. Um, but I could almost take a little curriculum and maybe it's something that I, maybe a lot to my vibe getting less, but, um, you know, something with like some of the, the Kevin Kelly essays around.
1000 true fans and trying to figure out his whole thing around uniqueness of like, listen,
there is, if AI goes well, and this is something else I think Jesse really hit on yesterday,
is like in the past, all permission and data flowed through these like centralized brokers
like Google and Facebook and TikTok and blah, blah, blah. But like, if you can really move
things back to the edges with people's personal AI as their own agents, I could also really easily
see a world where it becomes like the early days of the internet again, like a bunch of like,
basically like weirdos and like bizarre niches and like, yeah, maybe you're not like the next,
whatever biggest app builder of all time, but there's like 100 or 1000 people that really love
whatever bizarre idea you have. And that's enough to like live a good life. And I think, by the way,
one other hopeful message I think people are not focused on enough is yes, there's this like the
layoff piece, but there's also what we talked about, which is coming next, which is, um,
deflation in terms of goods and services. And we talked about that a lot on last week's show,
but as energy gets cheaper, like in theory, the only things that are still going to be expensive,
frankly, are where we've put like regulatory, like for like housing. Like if there were, if,
if everyone was just like allowed to like build up housing, like the cost would come down and
same with, you know, that's what's going to happen with food and that they're in necessity. So I think
in this new world, maybe you don't even need to make as much money. Maybe in the old world,
you need to make a hundred thousand dollars, but in a world where things get much cheaper,
maybe half of that is like more than enough for a high quality of life. So I don't know.
All righty. On that optimistic note. Yeah. Shall we wrap? Until next time. All right. Thanks,
guys. Bye.