All right, and we're live. Welcome to another episode of PBJ, this time on a Wednesday.
On a Wednesday?
Isn't it? It's a Wednesday. March 18th. What's that all about?
TK doesn't even know what day it is. That's a good sign.
It means you're living life right, my friend.
We're just being polite because we know that a lot of our audience probably are March Madness fanatics.
Of course. Of course they are.
so we did not want to disrupt your Friday
college basketball
viewing
yeah we know you tune in for the Presidio Basketball Jam every week
so
here we are on PBJ
my tweet saying that
I always find it amusing
when people
who have never engaged
on a tweet of mine
finally engage on a tweet
what does it take to get someone to
like a tweet of mine
this one
a couple people come out of the woodwork and
be a first like
for one of my
contacts. You know who those sports fans are then?
Yeah. Probably people who
don't really care about Bitcoin and
or at least the
in the weeds Bitcoin.
But they do like college basketball.
So I like that. But we also actually have
other reasons. There's an event
that some of us are going to
Friday.
Sort of our
sibling
organization in the Bay Area,
Localhost, which is funded by
Mark and Wences, just like Presidio
Bitcoin. They're having their one year
anniversary, so we're going to go hang out
with them. And then
one of us, I think, might have
a trip or vacation or something.
I love how whenever Steve wants
to play it cool, he just stares
directly at me.
You're the only one in front of me.
I'm not going to say who it might be in this
room. Of the
two people at this table,
It's not me.
No, he's right.
I'm going to one of my very best friend's weddings.
So I'm pretty excited for that.
And you're just going to be out for one week, right?
No, just a couple days.
Just like in and out.
You'll be back in studio Friday.
But Iowa State literally plays at 11.50 a.m.
I knew it.
Friday.
Yeah.
Exactly when we normally do, PPJ.
So this worked out beautifully.
It worked out.
Thank you.
And I do have to say, you know,
I have not talked much about basketball
because this season has just been horrible for Memphis.
Just absolutely horrible.
The worst season in 60 years.
However, I want to say Penny Hardaway is coming back.
I saw that.
I'm happy.
But he's getting rid of the staff or something.
Yeah, it's one of those deals where it's always like
Throw everyone else under the bus.
And this is like the third time that's happened.
So it's always kind of shitty.
Although, you know what's interesting is
the basketball itself.
I really like the recruiting stuff.
And it's interesting, actually.
I believe it was Ryan Gentry, who's also in our field.
And one thing we bonded over is we both had, growing up,
and maybe still, subscriptions to premium message boards
for the rivals inside our recruiting info.
And recruiting, shockingly, something we bonded over,
it's very similar to VC.
It's the exact same thing, but you're building a team.
Is he a Longhorn?
Yeah, of course.
I mean, he's hooked up.
all day. They won last night. They did?
Yeah, they had a play-in game to get in the tournament.
Yeah. But anyways, but all that to
say, my hope here is
to me, the most interesting part of the season is
building the team. I think that's quite
a fascinating time.
I love Pinning. Pinning's been one of my favorite
people, players, my whole life.
I'm rooting for you. I hope you figure this out.
So, much love coming from here.
Awesome.
I know I've been
sitting patiently, quietly
here, letting the sports
taco but I was going to mention as
a listener to the show I'm hearing a lot
of ringing or something
sounds like FG's in that
I guess we'll have to close
we'll suffer the heat thanks for
telling us that
it's the lawnmower
apparently we didn't
we need to get
networked with the lawnmowers
so that they don't do well
we didn't tell them about the schedule change
so
they're getting ready
for March Madness
we're dealing with
this actually
this has a cost
and a benefit
we're gonna be
scorching hot right now
so you'll probably see us
like sweating
during the show
but it'll help
the allergies have been
awful
this week
I'm suffering
oxyman X is here
sauna with an X
is always a good thing
so
well
I mean
I guess it is a sauna
we could
should we pause
and head on over
and get it set up there
anyway
hopefully
closing the windows
will be less pollen, less sneezing.
So that's the benefit.
And no more lawn.
It's been, I mean, for those of you
who don't know the Bay Area,
it's extremely unusually hot right now.
Also, it's just like weird all around the world.
We've got like severe weather on the East Coast.
There's like a heat dome right now.
I think blizzard in the Midwest.
You know, scorching sun here in California.
Like, yeah, we're definitely accelerating
through some weird times.
The singularity is here on many fronts.
I thought Palm Springs is at 110,
highest ever recorded in March.
We're still in the 80s, maybe 90s, but regardless, now there's like, in my house, we constantly are going back and forth. I'm hot, and Roy, our beautiful, the CFO of Hivemind, our chief love officer, he gets really hot.
So we're a team, open the windows. Anjali's team, once a bug comes in, cheat about that.
So.
Oh my God.
I opened the windows too.
And this bug,
probably about 10,
11 inches long came into my house.
I don't know what it was.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
Is there a bug?
I didn't know there was a bug.
It was huge.
And it flew in.
It was on the wall.
It's kind of slow and dumb though.
I got a mop and like easily.
Usually I'm like,
I look like the idiot trying to like kill something inside the house or like
remove it.
I don't know.
But this thing was,
Easy.
Pray.
Team or move.
You can't be killing big, dumb things.
You have to sweetly carry them outside.
I'm actually, I usually carry things outside.
Handle it with the graciousness.
It was not possible.
It was very fragile.
So anyway.
By the way, before we even get into stuff, we already have questions.
So let's, we love audience engagement.
Jump in, yeah.
Leonardo, Leonardo asks, will Square really turn on Bitcoin payments for 4 million merchants?
the answer is
yes
I think they need to be eligible
somehow so it's like
I believe it's like some very large subset
of this
I don't even think it's supposed to be
announced yet but they
it came out though I saw it on Stacker News
yeah so I think
they enabled it for like a portion
of customers like a normal type of
rollout and those
customers got an email
and one of them was Matt on my team
who then posted it.
That's the way this got out?
That's my understanding.
So apparently Spiral
leaked this secret launch or something.
I don't know. But anyway.
That was with the alpha always.
Was this always the plan was you wanted to first
kind of trial it a little bit
with manual turn on and then with enough
acceptance and agreement
that this was good that it would kind of
get out to everybody?
Sorry, what?
Or like, why is it happening now?
Why didn't it happen last fall kind of thing?
Oh, yeah.
I think, yeah, when did the thing first come out
where you could, like a merchant could manually enable the Bitcoin?
November.
November, yeah.
That was November.
Okay.
And so is it happening now as a broader rollout
because that has proven to be a success?
I mean, I think there's a number of steps
and boxes that need to be checked.
And just so I understand what we're talking about,
It's just that the QR code that they show,
that will always accept Bitcoin.
And I, as the consumer,
will always have the choice to choose,
am I using the Bitcoin network,
whether I'm using dollars or not?
I believe there's,
I mean, everything I'm saying
is not firsthand knowledge.
We're just speculating.
No insider info.
I'm the guy that works at the company.
But the original rollout in November,
there's like a cash app pay QR code
and there's a separate like Bolt 11 Lightning QR code.
And so the customer either needs to know to ask for that
or the merchant needs to know to like redirect to this different UI.
I don't think that's changed yet at least.
I mean obviously there's hope that that becomes a cleaner user experience.
Maybe they've addressed that already.
I don't think so though.
So it's more just that the change here is that the seller doesn't have to actively opt into enabling Bitcoin payments.
Cool.
It'll automatically be enabled.
But I'll caveat this with, I mean, it's a nice win, but I don't think it's, it's just like one of many steps needed for success.
Because they still have to opt in to be put on BTC map.
so they don't automatically get opted into being shown on the map.
They don't automatically acquire awareness.
They meaning sellers.
They don't automatically become aware that this exists and is possible.
They don't automatically get sold on the idea of like,
oh, this is good for my business because I can save fees
and maybe increase my profit margins by double digit percent.
They don't automatically develop a plan
to create awareness for their customers
to pay over Lightning.
So all that still has to be done.
So like the Bitcoin merchant community
that Swyol started
and a lot of the initiatives that Square's doing
and like what all of the Bitcoin community
should be doing,
we still need to do it.
We still need to have advocacy, evangelism,
convince small merchants.
It's still going to be a grind.
So this is a nice, it's a nice win,
but it's just one of many things that has to happen.
Just so I understand this correctly though,
So, and I don't know if it's live already or when it will be live,
but let's say I go to any Square merchant.
They say, hey, check out here.
I see the Cash App QR code.
I can then pay from Cash App and use Bitcoin Lightning Rails.
Well, that's what I was saying.
It's two different flows.
So the answer is no, and I don't know when those will merge into one.
Maybe it's part of this launch.
Maybe it's in the future.
Maybe never.
I have no idea.
If it's not part of this launch, the idea would be,
I would still have to ask the merchant, hey, can you pull up a Lightning invoice?
Yeah.
Got it.
Yeah, that's way less cool.
But hopefully, sooner than later,
it's that merge experience.
And then the merchant doesn't need to be aware.
I assume the default would be
that everything's converted to dollars
because that's the most conservative play for the seller.
Because otherwise, you're putting on new...
I mean, you can't default to receiving Bitcoin
if the seller doesn't even know about it
or care about it or want that.
their accountant doesn't know or whatever. But again, I think without awareness and advocacy
by sellers, the ceiling for this is simply a very small group of passionate Bitcoiners
going to a store to pay in Bitcoin just because they think it's cool and because they want to
advocate for it. But that's a small tam. Yes, but I wouldn't underestimate. I mean,
obviously you see the vision where this is going, but I'll tell you, like, especially,
let's assume we get that like unified QR code where I, as the end customer can make the decision
unilaterally. The merchant doesn't even know. Like in that world, I mean, I'll tell you right now,
I mean, I go to Square merchants all the time, like literally every single day. And I will be
using Bitcoin a hundred percent of the time from Cash App, Bitcoin Rails, I'll be using dollars.
I don't want to like sell Bitcoin. I'll be using dollars. They'll get dollars. And then ideally,
I'm assuming they'll have some flow where it's like, yo, you just saved 3%. Want to know why?
Learn more or something like that. But even without that, I wouldn't underestimate,
even though we're a small group, we're like a rabid, passionate group. And I'm sure there'll
be some like kickbacks as well, like on both sides eventually. But like, even with no kickbacks,
everyone here at the office, I mean, that's whatever, 20, 30 people in this community,
they're going to be going out there doing it every single day. I think it could grow pretty quickly.
I think it removes a lot of friction, too. Like, I was just pitching a local merchant here about using Bitcoin. So, you know, I was purchasing something from him. He has a square terminal. I said, oh, I'd love to pay you in Bitcoin and then you can save 3% in fees. He's like, oh, yeah, I already do that Bitcoin thing. I was like, oh, great. And it turns out the Bitcoin thing he does is he takes his treasury and moves it, you know, some percentage into Bitcoin. But he doesn't have his terminal enabled.
So I think if it did become more of like a default,
it'd be, hey, I just paid you in Bitcoin.
It'd be like, oh, cool.
I didn't even know about that.
And then I'm like, hey, do you want a biddy?
And I think, in a sense, you know what I mean?
I'm not sure that would be my next line, but okay.
But hey, you kept an extra 3%.
Don't worry, it's just an itty.
We start them with the itty bitty, hook them,
and then they get the bitty.
Hook them horns, all right.
Yeah, I mean, I'll just say,
matter. I've had two merchant interactions in the last couple of weeks. And these are people that,
I mean, I never want to push anyone too hard. And like increasingly, you know, Deacon and I've
talked about this. Like I definitely, I want to, you know, put the seed out there. And when people
are ready, I want them to come to me, but you know, I don't want to be the guy that's like,
oh, hey man, where's your, so at my, at my farmer's market, there's my, my chocolate dealer
who's on Square. Super cool guy. I would say at this point, we're like, we're, we're friends. I
I mean, we chat about all kinds of things, whatever.
If there was anyone that I feel comfortable just as like,
hey, dude, turn it on, it's him.
And I've mentioned multiple times, he's interested.
He's not anti it.
He even told me, he's like,
oh, it's probably better to do it when the price is low.
It's better to buy when low than high.
I'm like, yep, all these things are true.
But every time I see him, I could tell last time he got nervous.
He was like, yeah, I'm feeling anxious.
I know I haven't turned it on yet.
And I was like, we could just do it right now.
He's like, yeah, but my wife, you know, she runs the register and she's not there.
But if I could just say, bro, can I pay you in Bitcoin?
I'd be like, of course.
So that friction of him having to convince his wife, go to a settings bar, and then it's
hot and we can do it now, but he's got customer.
She's never going to have him, but he's not anti it.
He would do it.
So that to me is a win as soon as this is possible.
My tea dealer, same thing.
She thought it was cool.
And she was here up in our office.
So she's not anti Bitcoin.
She knows we have brought lots of business to her because she does great tea for her.
our last time.
I'm an amazing lady.
And yeah,
and we're also homies.
Your dealer,
like how many,
how many people in your life
do you refer to as a dealer?
You've got a tea dealer,
your honey dealer.
I've got DK,
my meme dealer.
Ori,
Ori bot,
Satbot's your meme dealer.
Yeah,
Satbot's my meme dealer.
So maybe,
Matt Belez is my alpha dealer.
Maybe,
maybe,
maybe the Swear UI
needs to emphasize
like,
these payments received had no fees, right?
100%.
Because if you're a seller
and you don't even know that this has been enabled for you
and you don't even necessarily know
that customers are paying this way
if it's so seamless, right?
So you're just simply unaware.
But then if you can see,
if it's prominent in your UI that,
oh, these are zero fees.
Why are these?
Why are these zero fees?
Oh, it's because of this.
Oh, I should promote it.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, and if there's ways to encourage people.
Exactly.
And then every week I'll be like,
hey man, aren't you glad you made 3% more?
And I'll be like, yeah.
Yep.
Big comments.
So another thing we wanted to talk about today
and sort of segue from this is about Bitcoin branding.
So there's different things that I'm hoping to discuss.
And one actually is with Bitcoin merchants.
Like the Bitcoin merchant community,
they reported some experiences where they would go advocate to turn this on with sellers that use Square.
And I think it's a small proportion, but a very emotional small set were like vehemently opposed to Bitcoin.
They just had this like very instinctual hatred of Bitcoin, whether rational or not.
Probably not, but anyway, that's how they feel.
Right.
And so Bitcoin really, you know, they didn't, for them, it was a bad rant.
Yeah.
That they didn't want to be associated with.
Yeah.
A second experience that I brought up is that maybe move itty bitty into the screen.
I was about to say, Steve turned his back on this little creature.
So now we're going to bring it back?
Spirals on little itty bitty.
He says no.
Bring it back.
He says he was kicked off.
He's done.
He says no.
We've had itty-bitty on our set,
and I suggested we move him off our set,
and I'll explain why in a second.
He turns his back to you, Steve.
Yeah, as he should.
And then, Max, you've had some experiences recently.
One of our goals at PB on this show,
bridging the gap to Silicon Valley,
more engagement with tech and AI,
and bigger tent for Bitcoin.
and we've been experimenting with different approaches
on how to approach different segments of people.
And you've had some experiences where you felt like
people we want to engage with
and we think they'd benefit from that engagement
definitely get turned off from simply
seeing the venue name as Pursuit Bitcoin.
So all these different touch points.
And then I think we've even talked on the show
about some of our different approaches.
Obviously having the Type 1 Energy Summit here
AI hackathons here.
We've had a lot of positive experiences as well.
Super positive, yeah.
But let me start with this.
Why did I suggest we boot this little dude off our set?
I was scrolling through LinkedIn,
and we have a PresidioBitcoin has an account there.
We promote the show there.
LinkedIn, like Bitcoin Twitter
is not where we're going to attract tech people to this show.
And by the way, we've said this many times in the show, LinkedIn is where the alpha is, like straight up.
But LinkedIn is where like tech people.
Everyone's on LinkedIn.
Well, I mean, tech people are maybe on Twitter too, but they're unlikely to see like Bitcoiners tweets.
But on LinkedIn, they'll see stuff that I repost or any of us repost or whatever.
And the screenshot there, you know, this is super, super prominent.
and he is really cuddly
and I mean,
I'll speak glowingly
about this guy
in other contexts,
but it really depends
on the audience.
I mean, let me start
with like glow.
So I have seen
women and children
love this guy
in particular.
Like kids love it.
And so,
and even Square,
like sellers,
many sellers love it.
They put this up,
once they turn
Bitcoin payments on
with Square,
they put this on their counter and it's like a great conversation starter in their store.
And for a lot of sellers, it's not a turnoff. It's just a super lightweight way to start the
conversation about, oh, we accept Bitcoin. So there are many audiences where I think this is
like amazing. But when I'm scrolling through my LinkedIn and I see that picture and that's what
stands out beyond like the three of our faces, this stands out. And anyone who has this,
a lot of tech people, I'd say the majority of tech people are kind of
just turned off by that because they lump it in with Sam
you know, SPF and crypto and FTX and Web3 and all this like nonsense.
Yeah. All this like fraud and scammy behavior and like not adding value
to the world. And so that's where we get lumped in then.
And so I suspect there's a huge portion of people then who don't
wouldn't give our show a chance. But if they actually listen to the show
They realize we talk about AI and tech the majority of the time.
Bitcoin's just lightly interwoven into what we talk about.
And it's not like any of us have given up on Bitcoin.
We're as passionate about Bitcoin as we ever have been.
We're trying to reach a new audience.
And also, I mean, with AI in particular, it's such an acceleration movement.
Anyone has to get on that train.
We hopped on that train.
We're on that train.
And Bitcoin is part of that, too.
In any case, I just worry that this actually is a net negative in that context.
So that's why I'm suggesting we remove it, not because we don't like that little dude and not that we don't like Bitcoin.
So that's one example.
With the square sellers, Haley mentioned yesterday an idea of maybe instead of emphasizing, and this one's, I think, more controversial, but I think it's an interesting discussion.
Controversy.
Instead of emphasizing, like, hey, Mr. and Mrs. Merchant, enable Bitcoin, please.
Or do you know that Bitcoin was just enabled?
Instead, lightning.
Yeah.
So I'll tell you the why, but interestingly, I have been opposed to that up to date, or to date, despite having a team that works on Lightning.
We're huge Lightning fans.
We build Lightning infrastructure.
I think it's an amazing technology.
I just don't think Lightning needs to be at a consumer level.
It's just like plumbing that makes things work beautifully for people.
That's why I'm like, get it out of the UI.
get it out of the, we don't need that vocabulary
for other users and stuff
so that been my position it still my position however I do think this is an interesting proposition because you know Cash App also last fall launched dollars on Lightning So 60 million monthly users of Cash App they all have dollars
Oh, my God.
If Max is not aware of this.
What do you mean dollars on Lightning?
How do they do this?
Dude, don't you watch PBJ?
What do you mean, though?
So 60 million Cash App customers can pay Lightning invoices.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
So like they don't need to be a Bitcoiner.
They don't need to own Bitcoin.
Right.
But they can scan a Bolt 11 QR code.
Right.
Pay it.
No fees.
And everyone's happy.
Right.
So and like the seller and the customer don't need to hold or care about Bitcoin.
Right.
It just happens over the Bitcoin network.
Totally.
And the Lightning network.
Yep.
Which by the way is when I'm pitching the merchants in the first place, I'm not saying you should stack Bitcoin.
for the most cases.
I'm just saying,
and I would even say,
I love this framing of Lightning
because it gets rid of all the baggage.
I mean, also,
another thing to attest
would just be like,
turn on fee-free.
Literally, my pitch to them
is I'm going to pay you dollars,
you're going to get dollars,
we cut out the fees.
So it eliminates
any kind of preconceived notions.
Oh, Bitcoin's a Trump thing
or an Elon
or a conservative movement
or it's bad for the environment,
you know,
it takes up too much energy
or it's deflationary currency
you'll never wear.
whatever your concern might be, it just removes that.
Instead, you're presented with lightning technology,
which has little awareness and it's just sort of like,
it's just technology.
It doesn't have anything else baked into it.
So it's kind of just dispassionate.
It's like, oh, I love no fees.
And oh, lightning is this technology that enables it?
Great.
And people who have dollars or Bitcoin can pay?
Great.
I can receive whatever I want to receive.
Great.
So I think that's really, I mean, we're going to keep discussing that.
I think that's really an interesting angle.
And although I think the end point is still, the end end point is Bitcoin still.
But like as the pitch right now, I think that's compelling.
And then, yeah, let's talk about.
And the thing of that should be the pitch to merchants, to explain to merchants why they should enable this thing. Is that right?
Yeah, I mean, I think the right pitch that we have been promoting since November is save the fees, right?
And so that remains consistent.
That's the primary pitch.
But then sort of like, well, how do you, oh, yes, I want to save fees.
How?
And instead of saying, oh, enable Bitcoin.
Right.
Instead, enable Lightning Network.
which allows anyone with a Bitcoin wallet to pay,
any cash app customer to pay,
whether dollars or Bitcoin.
It's like Visa, but free.
And there's going to be more and more,
there's going to be more cash apps on this network.
Right.
Other, you know, banks, fintech companies, etc.
So that's the variation here that's being,
that Haley proposed.
That's cool.
And I told her that I initially thought I was going to hate on this idea, but I'm like, I actually, I like it.
I think it's a great idea.
Let's keep discussing that.
And then, well, let's talk about your experience with inviting people here.
But it's something we've talked about for months now.
PB is Presidio Bitcoin.
It's a little over one year old now, our home here.
It's been a resounding success.
It's a life changer.
Almost every dimension, huge success.
25, 21 out of 10.
This show is named Presidio Bitcoin Jam.
Obviously, it's a show that the three of us do,
but we're doing it.
This is not our business.
We make no money off of this.
We just do it to help Presidio Bitcoin,
help Bitcoin itself.
But we just talk about whatever we want to talk about.
which is mostly ai and a little bit of iowa state so um but but you know but the reality is what do
we spend a you know a majority of time talking about uh ai building entrepreneurs innovation
yep um and it's not surprising like uh we have been we either you know we're either angel
investors or venture capitalists uh like david started a number of companies before
me a little less so, but some.
E-board player.
But I'm always working on zero to one types of things.
So we're all like builders, early stage type of people,
independent of Bitcoin.
So it's no surprise that's where our passions lie.
Anyway, you know, I've jokingly said like,
oh, PBJ, you know, it's Presidio Builder Jam.
And then even PB, Presidio Builder.
And, you know, to date, that's just kind of, you know,
jokingly said.
but I do find
depending on the context
for my audience, I'll say Presidio
Bitcoin or I'll just shorten it
to PB or I'll say
Presidio Bitcoin Jam or I'll shorten it to PBJ
and if it's an audience where I think Bitcoin
might be a turn off but I actually
think they'd like our show or they'd like
coming here or they'd like the people here
or they'd like the discussions here
you know, by toning it
down and just giving the acronym
they just eliminate
a barrier for them to coming
And what we've found is I think 100% of people who come here.
Oh, yeah.
Once they're here.
So it's not like we're tricking people or like, ah, ha ha.
You rugged us.
You know, rugged us.
No, 100% of people love coming here.
Once they're here, love it.
Because it's freaking awesome.
Even if they wouldn't identify as a Bitcoiner.
Totally.
But yeah, it raises a good question about where does Bitcoin's brand have a place in the naming of PBJ, the show, etc.
Yeah, but maybe you can start with your story.
Yeah, I mean, I would give just a couple of points of feedback.
I think there are different people.
I mean, Bitcoin's been around 15 years, and so it has a lot of baggage, both good and bad.
Sadly, a lot of it bad.
I mean, in more traditional, let's say, tech circles, I have all my friends from college that are in tech are not necessarily into Bitcoin. Anjali and her friends are not into Bitcoin. And so it definitely, the first challenge I find is still association with crypto. And I've had people be like, why are you so vehemently, anti-passionately, just hatred of crypto? And it's because they have made our job of what we're trying to do to put peer-to-peer currency in an open payment network so much harder.
like just yesterday i you know whatever like not all the individuals on here are necessarily bad
or ever but like someone's seeing this vanity fair vogue photo shoot with all these crypto people and
there's the the early coinbase guy it's like god like why why and the worst part is it's like all
of the worst excesses of the financial system like satoshi would be rolling over in his grave
the whole point was to dinner disintermediate the graph and the insider trading and all that stuff
and it's just like and the worst part is these crypto people that have made so much money
launching these scam tokens.
Has any of them done anything besides Bitcoin, by the way?
I would say no.
But whatever.
But they keep launching them.
And now that that narrative is dying,
I've noticed two things.
A lot of those people will start calling,
oh, we're into Bitcoin again.
It's like, no, we don't want you, bro.
We don't want you.
Stay over there.
But they say Bitcoin,
and then they end up lumping us in with that group.
Or now they've started going,
and there's something else I know we're going to talk about,
too, open source AI.
You shared an open source AI meetup,
which we love open source. Silicon Valley loves open source. I think we should push more for open
source. But I looked at this open source AI and it's like literally all of the crypto grifters,
scammers, all of the VCs that have been pumping bags in what should be illegal activity over and
over and over. And it's like, no, please no more. Make it stop. Anyways, so it's just really
frustrating to me. And like, there are very few things that piss me off, but this really pisses
me off because I feel like I've been fighting this like uphill battle for five, six years.
At some point, I should have equanimity and accept. I can't control what other people do,
but like I don't want to be lumped in with crypto bros anymore.
I'm sick of it.
And anyways, it's made, I feel like my job
so much more difficult over the last several years
when I try and go and explain to my friends
who are in serious tech working in AI,
as soon as they hear the word Bitcoin,
not all of them,
the ones that have known me for years
and have seen my journey we've talked about,
they're more open to talking.
But, you know, immediately they just lump me in.
Like I forgot who I was with the other day,
but, you know, I was trying to explain,
hey, you know, you should come, you know,
talk with us about Bitcoin.
Like, oh man, that's that SBF.
thing. And I was like, bro, SPF has not only does he have nothing to do with Bitcoin, he went to jail
because he was saying that he was buying Bitcoin, but was not illegally. And anyways, it's just so
freaking frustrating. But that's a narrative problem. So specifically, the way that I've
combated this so far is, you know, when I threw the Type 1 Energy Summit, and we had a Type 1
follow up dinner, which was amazing. And by the way, some of the, you know, it was Chatham House,
I won't name who was all there. But let's say some of the absolute best investors in all of
technology, some of the absolute top of the top of the top of the, you know, whatever technology
pyramid, nothing to do with Bitcoin crypto. These people all came back, which means they had an
incredible experience at the type one summit. They realized there's nothing scammy going on here. In
fact, they like what we're doing here. They like our vision so much that they wanted to come back,
but they needed to have that first touch point. And the way I got them all in the door in the
first place was it had nothing to do with Bitcoin. It was doing an energy conference.
To me, Bitcoin is a ledger of kilowatt hours or joules.
It is an energy-backed currency.
We have nothing to do with cryptocurrency,
nothing to do with any tokens.
We are a ledger of joules,
and we're going to be talking about how a ledger of joules
and ledgers of intelligence with real tokens,
intelligence tokens, interact.
That's it.
That was extremely successful.
And then so much so those people now have trust
that we're not these scammy whatever crypto bros.
So they come back,
and we're going to keep building out from there.
That was so huge when you tell,
and yeah, I'm not going to name the person,
But people who have been top tech executives who wouldn't call themselves Bitcoiners,
the fact they came back again, I think is just a great data point.
Yeah, because the more we talk, they're like, oh, I love your worldview.
Everything in the history of humanity, every monetary good is in fact a proxy on energy.
Gold was a proxy on energy.
The dollar is a proxy on oil.
And then I'm like, Bitcoin is the purest proxy in that.
Well, what about blah, blah, blah?
It's like, we have nothing to do with any of them.
Like anyone that says Bitcoin and, you know, is in the excesses of finance, yeah, not interested.
We're here to create a fair energy backed ledger for the world.
Anyways.
Right.
Yeah.
I was going to say, I agree with all that sentiment.
I know I love hearing you amped up about it because I feel that same pain a lot.
But I love to hear kind of your version of it.
One thing I was going to.
Oh, go ahead.
Sorry.
I want to read a comment, but.
Yeah.
Sorry.
this is spicy
the Epstein files are connecting directly
to Spiral
and the majority of core does
I haven't seen it
have you seen it?
I haven't seen it either
Zipgun can elaborate
but I think like one of the emails
Matt Corolla
was in the
thread or something
maybe that's what he's referring to
I don't know
I can assure you
Spiral had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein
no one from Spiral
is on the island
or in the ledger
that's good
and by the way
we saw their hate
on Sailor right
he was like too autistic
to get compromised on
or something
dude that made me love
Michael Sailor so much more
like this man
is so autistic
he can't be bought
like literally
I was just like
let me buy up more
micro strategy
like this man
like god bless
but that's the point
like we want the autists
the people
you know what I love
about autists
and I know this
is
They don't lie.
They can't lie.
An autist can't lie.
If they see something is black,
they cannot call it white.
And God bless those people.
It's just, I'm so sick of the lie.
I mean, I'm sick of it.
Anyways, but Deke,
I wanted to hear what you wanted to say.
Now I lost it.
I'm loving your little Alex Jones.
I know, I feel like Alex Jones right now.
Should Bitcoin restart the same way
as Bitcoin went to BTC?
so I also don't understand what
maybe talking about the naming
Zipgun
so Zipgun if you can elaborate
we happy to discuss
I wanted to hear your point
so you also
and by the way
one last thing I wanted to add
so part of the reason
this came up recently is
you know Angelina and I
have been doing more
sort of dinners around AI
some open source focused stuff
I mean you guys know
like I'm extremely interested
in compute
I'm extremely interested
in you know a lot of these
sort of model companies
and things you can do with it
and I want for people to see
you know I've got this idea
that I've been working on
some of their friends around how do you price intelligence
and energy, which means I think eventually
the GPU marketplace and Bitcoin. There's a lot of stuff
we can talk about that. But in order for people
in the AI world to take me seriously,
it got really frustrating where I'd be like, oh, so what do you do?
It's like, well, now I invest
in energy and compute and energy
backed money, which is Bitcoin. Oh, crypto,
nah, just walk away. And it's
just very challenging to even get someone
in the door with that. So this was kind of
the starting point is there are so many
really intelligent people who
I believe would be just blown away
if they start to see Bitcoin the way we do
and start to see the potential
for Bitcoin and AI to interact.
But you can't even start that conversation
if their immediate thought is,
oh, you're one of these scammer SPF guys.
There's another group I want to talk about,
but DK, I interrupted you.
Sorry.
Okay, just a couple other points
on the Bitcoin branding label.
One is, I feel like a lot of
the Silicon Valley narrative,
let's call it more the frontier
Silicon Valley narrative. I think there's obviously the
Web3 and all the different, you know,
NFT stuff and crypto stuff that
has kind of poisoned the well a little bit.
But I think the current, let's call
it the topic du jour,
is Zcash
and sort of the privacy
nature of Zcash.
Isn't that old news by now?
I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I mean, yes,
it's, I mean, we even, we kind of
joked on that maybe six months ago, but I think
that is like, I try to
invite somebody to, what was it, one of the
hackathons, kind of a prominent
designer, I think you may recall.
And the feedback was, oh, I
think you should stop barking up that Bitcoin tree.
You need stuff that's, you know,
more privacy-oriented.
Or that uses zero-knowledge proofs or something.
I think that's a pat.
That'll, I think it's already
passed. But what I
thought you were going to say is stablecoins. And I don't think
that's going to, like, that's not a fad
that'll pass in two months. Because
stable coins aren't like a pump and dump.
Like Zcash, I think, you know,
Naval or whatever, they have a bunch of Zcash.
They want to pump their bags.
So they seize on this opportunity
that Bitcoin's not private enough or whatever.
It's not private and quantum resistant.
And here's one that is private and quantum resistant.
Buy my bags, please.
Buy my bags.
So I think that's why it'll just go.
But stable coins, you know,
it's a different type of bag people are trying to pump,
which is like, you know, there are businesses that will profit handsomely off stablecoins.
But I guess the better part of it is that at least the token itself doesn't pump.
They want to capture the yield.
Yeah, you're actually providing some utility, which is like, if people use your network, at least that's real usage.
And, yeah, exactly.
The reason I don't think it's fad is that it does provide real utility.
It's like, hey, privacy is important.
Yeah.
So I thought that's what you're going to say.
But I mean, certainly part of the engagement with AI and tech is around, you know, why not just use credit cards or credit cards 2.0 or the virtual debit card or whatever?
Why not use stable coins?
Why use Bitcoin versus those?
And, you know, I gave a presentation last week.
I mean, I talked about it in the last show because the last show was only a few days ago.
But, you know, it tried to tease out why Bitcoin.
And I think it's the best articulation to date that we've produced,
but I think it needs to get stronger still.
But anyway.
Yeah, so what's your take, Deke?
I mean, I think you had a good take in our chat,
which is maybe there's a way to focus more on open source
and we have an open payment network and an open identity system.
Like, yeah, I mean, how, if you could wave a magic wand,
would you change our approach to get more you know of um people from places like anthropic and
other you know serious companies interested yeah i think using something with some open source
framing can be helpful because it's at the core of what everything we touch or do or care about
right it has some open source component to it and bitcoin is open source money and there's other
people attempting to do open source monies that are not as credibly neutral as bitcoin but it
But definitely Bitcoin is a private money that's not a private company, right?
And I think, you know, how AI evolves.
I mean, I think it's a public money, but that's a great topic itself.
Which, to plug one show, if you guys never listened to my interview with Ben Ark from back in the day,
we go ad nauseum about this topic of Bitcoin is in fact a new form of political philosophy
because it is a commons which enables private property.
And it's extreme, like that to me is one of the biggest stories of Bitcoin is it's new.
It literally, we've never seen anything like this in history before.
It's elements of open source, elements of free market capitalism, but you need both.
I mean, I'm sure DK, you and I probably 100% agree on this particular topic.
But the reason I jumped on that is I've seen government or people who work for government
who are critics call Bitcoin private money and position it as like if it's not good for
the people.
The way they position it, it's private money
basically helping insiders
and not helping
the public good. Whereas public
money, like the US dollar,
is for the people, and
it's good for all people and doesn't have
these insiders.
That's how they flip it.
Exactly. Public private
redefined, we should go on that, but I do think one caveat
I should make in everything that I'm saying,
I'm not saying
by the way that bitcoin is a utopia and that there aren't scammy people involved in bitcoin
that there aren't insiders who do like none of this stuff is like completely obviously black and
white like there are of course you know people that will benefit more in the early days and this
is a much longer conversation but like i'm not saying oh anyone that touches bitcoin is good
anyone touches anything else is bad like there's always you know unsavory actors and save reactors
you mentioned insiders there are no insiders in bitcoin there may be insiders in how the fiat
whales. I still wouldn't call that an insider. Well, some people would. I mean, I understand
what you're saying, but like, yeah. But being an insider is kind of using inside information
and relationships to exploit and arbitrage, right? Yeah. But I think what I hear commonly from people
while I agree with you in principle is they say, oh, that's that thing where if you, you know,
whatever, you were either lucky or you were buying drugs on Silk Road in 20, you know, whatever,
14 or earlier, then you basically got huge bags and now you're like, whatever, like a
billionaire from this thing.
That doesn't seem fair.
I'm not saying that's correct, but that is a common narrative that I hear of the insider
piece.
I would just, yeah, I just caution using the term insider because it's, I think it implies
a little bit more of a shadowy super coder network.
You know, it suggests that we really have.
It's a public good.
it's open source, it's available for everybody to audit, but there's certainly people who are going
to take advantage of it with insider access to how the fiat
system wraps it. I think that's a fair question
to ask or concern to have.
Back at the topic of Bitcoin brand and stuff like that, I wanted to speak more
about a couple of recent experiences at Presidio Bitcoin.
I already spoke about Elon University students coming here
a few weeks ago.
Yesterday, students from
University of Chicago came here.
So it's so awesome to
engage young people
who are on the cusp of starting their own
careers and just seeing what's
on their mind and what are their questions, what are their hopes
and dreams, what are their concerns,
fears.
Chicago has a long history of
economics study, right?
I reckon. What does?
University of Chicago?
Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, exactly.
Chicago School of Economics for a reason.
Okay, so there's that.
Also, I learned this after speaking to the students,
but this group of students yesterday from the University of Chicago
were doing a one-year program on digital assets.
Okay?
So here's what I find astonishing from these two.
well I'm actually unsurprised
but sad about these two
experiences
they
like none of them
saw any value in Bitcoin
most had not studied
Bitcoin and that's
why when I
I already was sad and then when I learned that they're actually in the
digital assets program at the
top tier university
and apparently
students are like cream of the crop
like 1600 SAT
and they went to the elite
like high schools
and everything
and you know
America's brightest
and you know
our best opportunity
and like
they're studying digital assets
and they didn't
they don't even know
anything about Bitcoin
and the sophistication
of their questions
are like beginner questions
and I'm not
calling them out
on their dumb questions
they're completely reasonable
they good questions and reasonable questions if you just learning so they not dumb questions It just that it like wow they asking
They really don't know much about it.
Did they have a lot of depth on some other aspect of digital assets?
I don't know.
I didn't learn until after I spoke to them that they were in the digital assets program.
I just thought it was a...
I mean, it was a collection of students in terms of coming from different disciplines.
So it wasn't like this is the computer science group or economics.
It was a cross-discipline set of students, but the one bond tying them together that
I learned after the fact was that they're all taking this one-year digital assets program,
which I can only guess is cover stablecoins.
Stablecoins?
Okay.
So it's a stablecoin coin.
Because both groups of students, like one of the top of mind questions is compliance,
like money laundering.
How do you catch the bad guys?
And I think it's very notable.
Again, it's a very reasonable question.
It's a good discussion to have.
And public policy matters and catching criminals matters.
So it's not, again, not a dumb question.
It's just notable to me that that's top of mind for them.
And not like freedom, financial access, geopolitics,
like neutral money for the world
and like the immense power
the US has with the US dollar.
None of that is top of mind for them.
Well, to be clear,
that is not actually,
sadly, it's not at all surprising to me.
I'm going to give another shout out
mentioned in the show
maybe a year ago,
but Kreis' essay,
I guess now he's out publicly,
Jesse Meyer's essay,
Why the Yuppie Elite Dismissed Bitcoin.
It is so spot on.
If you haven't read this essay,
read this essay.
It's very simple.
The idea is there's an access
to grok Bitcoin.
You need to be intelligent access.
You need to be intelligent.
There's a lot of difficult ideas to grok.
But then there's another access, which is,
has the system benefit?
Do you trust the system?
And for people that went to the University of Chicago
or some of these elite schools,
the system works just fine for them.
And so the system is working really well.
People at Google.
Yes.
And so that is why they're not questioning
because they're like, well, I look around me
and me and my friends are all balling out.
What are you talking about, Steve?
Now, the thing that I do think should get those kids interested, like maybe they're never going to care about financial freedom for someone in, you know, whatever, India or something like that. But what should get them excited, and I think the real opportunity, and increasingly, I know I just have my Alex Jones rant, but I'm trying to be more equanimous and look at the world as it is and not just get angry, but like figure out this actual solution, is what these people do like is making money, getting more power and prestige. That's why they're at a school like that.
And so if we can come and say the real opportunity for the next GDP growth of the world is
agentic commerce online and agentic commerce is best served by Bitcoin.
And oh, by the way, you want to get NYC and you want to whatever, be the next guy on the
cover of this thing, do agentic commerce.
And this is the only way you can do that.
I think those kinds of solutions of what new markets, what new opportunities.
And I say this in a way that sounds very dismissive.
And I should probably say I don't mean to be dismissive.
it's very natural that people want to be part of something.
I do. We all do.
Part of something successful and something that is exciting
and growing and changing the world.
So I think the more we can focus on the new markets
this opens up, the better for people like that.
Yeah.
So I just,
these two experiences
I don't think are one-offs.
I think they are representative samples.
I think if we had
20 more university
sets of, or groups of
university students come here, we'd see the same thing. Which is why I'm not surprised, but sad.
And so it just makes me wonder, what will it take for students and their professors and the
academic environments to prioritize this or to be curious? So from an individual student
standpoint, what will it take for them to become curious and take the time to study and learn?
And then from an overall program standpoint, to prioritize it. Maybe it'll take Bitcoin becoming a trillion dollar asset class. Maybe it'll take there to be 500 million Bitcoin owners around the world. Maybe it'll take United States senators and the president to endorse it. Maybe it'll take major financial companies like BlackRock to produce products for it.
oh wait we already achieved all those so like what what steve's been practicing that little
monologue right there i was wondering where you were going with that 10 times 10 times last night
no but i mean like so it does make me what what what does it take does it have to reach 10 trillion
hundred trillion. I mean, I think undoubtedly if people
are paying Bitcoin for their AI agent
or for their coffee or whatever, if humans have a
daily touchpoint with Bitcoin, then all of a sudden they're going to care.
I still don't see why we have to get to that point. Let's say we live in a world where that never
occurs and it's only store of value, but it becomes
like the global reserve currency and what
most people in Bitcoin believe will occur,
at what point along the trajectory
to it is cemented
as the global reserve currency,
do people become,
smart people at universities
become curious? I don't know.
I mean, to me,
as I'm rethinking
this, the opportunity to reach people
like that today, I do think the agentic commerce
and tech disruption opportunity is interesting.
But frankly, it's the
sailor pitch. I think if you go to them and you
say, hey, kids, you see all the bond market out there? See what that's doing? What if I told you
you get 11.5%? They say, 11.5%. That's spicy. How do you do that? And you say, oh, you know,
there's this thing. It's, oh, crypto scan. And they see, like, honestly, what's going to happen,
I think, is over the next couple of years, the other is going to keep making all those payments.
He's going to continue. Like, if he continues to pay two to three X what everyone else in fixed
income can pay, then eventually they're going to start to say, how is he doing this? I disagree,
though because
for it to work
you have to believe
Bitcoin will continue
to appreciate
at least 11%
and like for it to work
the way strategy
thinks it'll appreciate
20 to 30%
it'll be no problem
paying off the stretch
and they'll profit
handsomely
so MSTR goes up
as well
that's probably
what we believe too
but if you're
but if you simply
don't even see the value
of Bitcoin
or get the point
or you're starting at zero
then you'll ask
how does it pay
I mean anytime
something offers
a lot of yield
you gotta be like
ask how does it
exactly
Yeah, but the way it does is you have to believe Bitcoin's going to appreciate.
Actually, DK has a good point.
A lot of people are going to be doing it.
I mean, Max and I had a talk with somebody who, you know, savvy individual came by PB,
and he was like, so how are you guys getting yield on your Bitcoin?
And we're just like, what?
No.
Yeah.
So I actually, I don't think that like students would be persuaded or anyone.
I mean, not just students.
I have a set of friends who don't believe in Bitcoin.
They love to make money, though.
So they're always chasing yields.
This one friend even was going to maybe take their stock and park it in Kraken.
Because apparently, you can now take traditional stock and put it in a crypto casino.
And you get 2% back or something.
So he is asking me if, like, I thought that was a scam.
And I'm like, well, out of all the crypto casinos, I like and trust Kraken, like Jesse Powell and Kraken probably the most.
But it's still a crypto casino.
And I'm like, well, I would deeply study what it means if they go under what happens to your stock certificates.
What kind of, like, U.S. protections are there for that?
If there's solid protections, maybe it's no risk.
But if there's not, it's like, I wouldn't do that for 2%, even just the hassle.
Anyway, I'm like, if you're willing to do this, why don't you put your money in, or some money in stretch?
And then we went through this whole, like, he doesn't believe in Bitcoin, and he's like, he just thinks it's a scam.
So, and if, yeah, I mean, it will, I would not call it a scam.
It will fail, though, if Bitcoin goes to zero long term.
Totally.
But in the meantime, I mean, yes, like the more Bitcoin price rises, which is a function ultimately of adoption.
So all the things we're excited about, that's all necessary.
But in the meantime, you know, all we talked about this last week, all of the buying.
I mean, one of the major bids on Bitcoin was, in fact, you know, several thousand a day coming from MicroStrategy from selling stretch.
So they sell whatever $200 million.
They just turn around, buy more Bitcoin with that, which, you know, and I understand for someone listening to this, like that sounds like a pyramid scheme.
And it's like, well, they all are.
So it's the dollar.
But as long as you believe Bitcoin's not going to zero,
as long as you believe in the long run,
the adoption grows over that,
then you're gonna be fine.
But I think my broader point is
for people at a place like the University of Chicago
or whatever, some of these elite schools
or people that want jobs in finance, right?
If people want jobs in finance,
maybe they don't get the gold bug narrative.
Maybe they don't question why the system
needs to have a neutral reserve currency,
all these things.
But if they see one product in the market
that is just like an economic black hole
and all of a sudden,
all private credit is just flooding
to this one instrument
that's paying two to three X
and they're like,
eventually, if it doesn't fail,
eventually they'll come and say,
huh, why is that?
Maybe, but Bitcoin's like,
it's hit two trillion,
it's close to,
I don't even know what it is,
but you know, it's close to two trillion
and that hasn't,
I mean, that's a notable achievement, right?
But that hasn't created curiosity.
In the popular conversation now
compared to what it may have been,
you know, five years ago or 10 years ago, right?
Like, so I'd say the conversation is making progress.
I definitely agree overall.
But in speaking to these students,
and again, I believe they're representative
of like general population of students,
that segment of people,
the conversation felt like
2013.
Level of awareness,
curiosity,
excitement, and
sophistication of questions.
Our AI conversation, too.
That was a little bit more advanced, but the questions
we were getting asked were like, what about ESG
and mining?
This stuff's been put for a decade.
Which is far more concerning than whether they're
Bitcoiners or not.
Yesterday's group of students,
it was exclusively about
Bitcoin. I said I'd be happy
answer questions about career, AI, whatever they want to,
but all their questions were about Bitcoin.
So we didn't get an AI, but I
there's a little bit of, I don't know, I gave
an Agenda Commerce example on one of my Bitcoin answers
and you could just see that they had no idea what I was talking about or that it was
kind of like total sci-fi. Really? So I get the sense
that their skill set, curiosity,
and time spent on AI tools
was probably similar to the other student group,
which that is even more,
that is very concerning.
Because maybe they don't invest in Bitcoin early enough
or they don't get it until 10 years too late or whatever,
but whatever.
But if they don't get on the AI train
and learn how to use these tools,
they are going to be suffering in the job market.
And like soon, like now,
when they graduate over the next few years.
That's crazy.
The number one piece of advice to students is get on the AI train and spend a lot of time on these tools to level up.
Are they not even using LLMs for their homework and stuff?
I don't know.
I mean, I didn't talk to them about AI.
That's shocking.
Only the previous group.
I think a lot of it, though, you've got to look at the incentives of a university professor who's probably highly influencing the kinds of things that they spend their time.
they don't the university professor doesn't get a lot of credit for finding stuff early or like
being early to new technology or really getting into the weeds of the details of it right they
sort of they're a little bit more historical or backward looking so i'm not here to defend that
position but i'm just saying i think that context is probably why it results in the way it does and
so i think there's a couple ways to think about how you fix that and it's mostly messages that
get shared outside of the core system so i think you know having a podcast is one way to share
messages outside of the kind of you know the hallowed halls of the university and then i think
also just encountering bitcoin in the real world is another big way to get people curious about it
and they might start like if they started seeing it in all of their favorite applications like you
They're using TikTok or they're buying a domain on human or something.
Then they start asking the professor, well, what about Bitcoin?
Then the professor kind of has to figure it out and come up with an answer.
So I almost feel like the ideas have to be incepted from outside the system and kind of work their way back because just of how the incentives of a traditional university work.
I want to mention something that I think ties into Nick a little bit and MDK and stuff we talked about with him.
All right.
There we go.
Nine straight episodes.
I know, but it's not just him specifically.
You know, remember we talked a few months ago
about this idea of can you enable,
you know, the kids in class,
like most kids, I think, sadly,
we would argue at school
are probably just wasting their time at this point.
But like the smart kids that maybe, you know,
are just sitting there
and they understand how Claude works
and they're making businesses,
but they can't register for a bank account or credit card
because they're 16.
Like, Bitcoin serves a real need for them.
I saw Anjali show me,
I don't remember who this was,
but someone had the idea for a school.
where they guaranteed you would make a million dollars
by the time you graduate,
which that sounds a little scammy.
And it was extremely expensive,
like clearly geared towards high-end tech people.
But the point is, I think there's something-
A million dollar tuition.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Buy my course, you'll make a million dollars,
but first pay me 10.
So, you know, whatever, dropping the specifics of that.
But I thought the idea was really cool
is like instead of wasting time
and a bunch of stuff that you're never actually going to use,
the idea was you get one-on-one coaching,
mentorship or whatever to like, all right, we're going to help you test, create business ideas,
test business ideas, learn to use the tools where you can go and build these businesses,
iterate quickly. And, you know, doing that as a young person, basically focusing on helping people
become entrepreneurs. And, you know, that's a super high touch expensive version. But I do think
this ties into our idea that we discussed with Nick, what things like Bitcoin, frankly,
AI is democratizing technology and able, which is like, you know, instead of again,
instead of just getting mad of like,
oh, it sucks that, you know,
these kids are paying huge tuition,
getting scammed and they're not learning.
It's like, okay, that's, the old world is dying.
Instead of getting angry and shaking our fist,
how do we instead get these kids,
align the incentives such that
maybe you don't go to school or you are in school,
you know, your goal is,
how do I build something that people actually use?
And then my quote unquote job stems from that.
I think you need some sort of credibility layer,
you know, in that some sort of brand.
Yeah. Um, because I, I, oh, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I think, I think to get people to transit, I think somebody, I've heard it quoted that, you know, to raise a kid with all the school and everything, it can be like 700 K to a million dollars. I don't know if that's, I don't know, you know, for like 20 years of, I don't know. Does that sound about right? Or?
Well, if you, if someone sends their kids to private schools, that's a lot.
So think about all those dollars that are going out that are probably mostly being wasted. And if you could take that as like seed capital for your startup that you start when you're 12 years old or something, you could just imagine an entirely different path, but it's just so different. People have to rethink all their prior assumptions about what is education? What does it mean to be educated?
So how would you do that? If you were trying to, for this sort of navigational or this transitional phase, navigate it with something that gets kids being more entrepreneurial, but also helps with that, whatever, the seal of acceptability.
I guess the kids would love it, but the parents would hate it. I think the main problem to solve is that parents say like, oh, this is a reasonable thing to do with your life instead of like, oh, you're going to go mess around with some AI and friends or something.
I just wanted to address before the comments scroll off the screen.
Let's see.
Deanna says, Steve, offer an online workshop to the school explaining all this.
But I'll say no to that.
And the reason why is there is ample content that people have created already.
So it's not like a lack of content.
And if Max were to do this or me or DK or whatever,
I'm sure we put together a thoughtful, good course or class or whatever, but so have others.
And that's not solving the problem.
I mean, to the uninitiated Bitcoin, one of the challenges to learn is that because there's no central authority, you don't know who to trust, what to believe.
You don't just go to like Bitcoin.com and like...
Bitcoin.com was in fact a scam.
It literally was telling people to not buy Bitcoin.
That's another shit.
So you don't know where to go.
So sure, some people might look at one of our content,
but anyway, there needs to be an alternative solution.
And let's see, then Jdube.
Jdube?
Oh, no, sorry, Jdube.
Jdube.
Says, I don't think anyone really wants to pay Bitcoin to strangers,
especially to bots.
And follows up with, you can pay strangers and bots with fiat
because it's a joke currency that isn't a good investment to hold.
So that is a very common sentiment, I think.
We've talked a little bit before on the show about it,
but I think it doesn't make sense to me.
Because if fiat is a joke currency,
if I'm selling something to someone,
why do I want to receive the joke currency
versus the better currency?
Well, to be fair, because you have to pay your whatever,
your suppliers the next day.
But think playing this out long term.
I mean, I'm not saying, obviously it doesn't, that's not the case today because people don't generally use Bitcoin to pay. I'm saying that if you hold the view that dollars are a joke currency and Bitcoin is something you want, then sellers, when they're selling something, want the currency that is more desirable.
Right.
And if I'm selling something,
so then I might offer an incentive
for you to pay me in the better currency,
or I might not sell you my product or service
if you don't pay me in the better currency.
So I do think that dynamic will play out over time.
But you need volatility in the meantime.
And I think something people have to remember is
Bitcoin, you know, you would never going to go
from like a thing dropped on the internet
to global reserve currency in one giant straight shot.
And so I think that, remember,
we're still in the store of value early phase
in my opinion, which is why I keep coming back
to the micro strategy thing is like,
people want stability,
they want yield. One day, everything you're saying
will happen, I believe, right?
But, I mean, that could be decades.
I agree, but it's not for the reasons stated there.
It's not because it's a joke.
I mean, the thinking there, or my interpretation
of that is like, Bitcoin's
better currency, so there's
no way I'm going to
pay in Bitcoin.
But that is, I think,
faulty long-term thinking because, yes, Bitcoin's a better currency,
so the seller is going to demand it.
Also, an agent or a bot may not have the ad rails to interact with.
But then also, it also implies in that view
that the spender holds both currencies.
So why are you holding a joke currency?
Hold it all in Bitcoin.
And again, this is not advice that everyone should have 100% of their assets in Bitcoin.
But in terms of a long-term view,
if you have joke currency and a solid currency,
why are you even holding the joke currency to spend it in?
If you only have the good currency,
it makes sense to only have the good currency,
and then you obviously have to spend on the good currency.
We've talked about this before.
I think that in addition to the volatility argument,
I think the thing that changes that is the tax law.
Right.
Once you're not taxed, then everything else is true.
I'm not describing the world today.
There's all these barriers.
We talk about them all the time.
We're going to get through all of them.
It takes a long time, though.
But just the theoretical discussion of it,
I don't buy this argument of, like,
no one's going to spend Bitcoin because it's a better currency.
It makes no sense.
I think the framing that I don't hear a lot of people say,
which I think Steve, you pointed out once,
is don't think about the starting point as who you're paying or whatever.
Think about the starting point as I have a certain amount of resources,
and that can be denominated in whatever format i want right like i can hold them as bitcoin i can
hold them as us dollars i can hold it as real estate or something but i have that that pile
and now i can just decide the allocations and i can convert to whatever i want in order to
pay something but in you know if you really zoom out and think about it as
a pool of resources instead of i have bitcoin or i have dollars then you can sort of choose the mix
and choose the payment mechanism that you need
based on what your seller is willing to exchange for.
One additional comment here from Deanna,
but they came to your space at PBJ,
so they obviously found it credible That a good point And so kudos to the students and their professors for even coming here
It does show
they spent their time. They could have, or they did
visit others, but I mean, they had to pick
like a few spots in the Bay Area to visit
and they chose here. So
absolute shout out for them
coming here and hopefully they took away
something that helps them.
They could have spent all their time at the Tempo
headquarters.
By the way, as you're mentioning that, what was this MPP?
I know we don't have it listed as a major topic, but did anybody look into that?
I think it's something like MCP for payments or a payment protocol for AI.
Yeah, it was announced this morning.
Tempo thing.
Stripe and Tempo announced it.
And it actually looks like pretty good news.
my first take and I
immediately reached out to
folks that are
working on tempo
because there's a, it's not
just stablecoins. There's like
a lightning template.
Really? And so
I'm like, oh,
well, Spiral isn't involved in that. Who worked
on that? So my understanding,
to David Marcus
and LightSpark's credit, they worked on it
and it does, I'm very
happy to see
that again, I need to do a deep dive study
so I might come back with some critique
but it appears to be Lightning
not Spark specific
so I like that it's Lightning
and of course I think
they're making, they have a Spark
implementation of their product, that's great
but the Spark is open, that's great
and it should work with other
Lightning implementations and other products
that support Lightning, so that is
amazing, and yeah, I've engaged
with folks
from Paradigm and Stripe and Tempo
and they seem enthusiastic about...
I asked them if it's going to be treated
as a tier one thing
versus stable points and stuff
and they didn't even think
that was a good framing of the question
because it sounds like
the governance of this...
There's not going to be a governance
where some things are prioritized over other solutions,
but it's more just like free market.
Like if the people integrating MPP,
if they include a lightning solution,
then it's going to work.
That's awesome.
It's more of an attitude of builders build,
and if people build it and integrate it and support it,
then it's going to be...
How does it interact?
Is it like a peer or an alternative to X402, L402,
or is it like integrated with it somehow?
Again, I mean, it just was announced this morning
and I have a few minutes of research on it.
But my understanding is that it's a competitor to X402.
Okay.
Well, a competitor to L402,
but if there is strong Lightning support,
then I mean, we're going to have to see like,
well, I mean, I think my early take is that supporting,
like as a Bitcoin advocate,
we should push continued advocate for L402,
but it appears like this is a nice alternative too
that should work with Bitcoin wallets.
That's amazing.
And there's, I'm sure, an opportunity to even bridge this.
Like if you have some bridge to L402,
I don't know if anyone's looked at that yet.
I guess my understanding of how it will work
and my hope is that, yeah, if there's like two services,
one supports L402 and the other supports MPP
with the Lightning extension or whatever,
and then we all have Lightning wallets,
or our agent has like an MDK wallet
that it could pay either of them totally fine
and it would work.
That's awesome.
And if so, great work to the LightSpark team
because I know that they've been one of the few
sort of organizations that has whatever some of these,
I don't know, relationships in the crypto world as well.
And to build that bridge is awesome.
And also, to everything we were saying,
it's like I've been very frustrated with crypto people,
but not all of them are necessarily bad actors.
Like Paradigm is full of really smart people.
I would love to see them come back
and start helping to contribute
with the Bitcoin Lightning ecosystem.
That would be awesome.
Maybe this is a first step.
Just reading some of the comments here.
What about paying in Bitcoin representation?
Idiots, that holds them big.
Yeah, I don't really understand that.
I'll just jump in while you're reading that.
Another shout out I was going to give
to the branding discussion.
I like the
you know we've talked before about the Flint community
and I feel like the Flint community
is a very nice balance
it doesn't have the word Bitcoin in it
it's not a Bitcoin centric
brand but it does
have some Bitcoin ethos
to it I think
mostly we removed
the word Bitcoin from the webpage
but like when you
when you're involved in the community
each instance is very intentional and
relatively subtle
So I feel like that's, it kind of hits a nice tone of like it's, it attracts the right people and it gets, you know, you don't have to sort of, you're not re-prosecuting, you know, the discussions that might be happening in public.
But it does so without a brand that really feels like it's pushing Bitcoin.
It's more of a builder type brand.
So, DK, two questions for you.
as you think about
with people that are, for example,
I know you talk with a lot of AI people.
If you were trying to get them interested
in what we were doing, you mentioned
a lot of these folks in Silicon Valley
in general like FOSS, free and open source software.
However, I think it's worth noting that
what does open source even mean anymore with LMS?
That's changing a lot.
What would be your dream event?
Let's say you're getting a lot of folks that you work with
and your others are in an investing life.
Like, how would you pitch them to even, I don't know, like if you were trying to get them to come to, you know, an event at PB or whatever and like learn about what we're doing, where would you even start? Would you use the word FOSS? Would you use a different open?
yeah i think it really depends a lot on the audience like you know steve was talking about
how like lightning makes sense in some contexts and not in others right so i i think it really
it always comes down to the the topic but i i don't think i don't think people are generally
or it comes down to the audience i don't think people are generally looking to learn more about
bitcoin in it unless they see something new that they can do with it right so i think the biggest
thing that i think would attract you know kind of a traditional builder or an ai builder is some of
the stuff that i think you know like what what ori is doing yeah you know is a mdk they're they're
showing how easy it is to build with bitcoin and then if some projects take off and people start
demanding it then i think more traditional builders were kind of agnostic to the how stuff
gets paid they're just like i want to build this cool tool or this new ai i think they'll be
attracted because people are demanding it, but I don't think it's necessarily super productive
to try to convince people to be interested. I'm always open to sharing and talking about it,
but I think most people just, they kind of have to come to it because something about it
piques their curiosity and just the pure store value idea is not probably enough.
Let me reframe that with the open source thing. For people that are interested traditionally in
open source software.
Do you think is FOSS,
like, hey, is that even still,
does FOSS even exist anymore?
Is that still worth using as a framework?
Is all software FOSS?
Yeah, exactly.
That was where I was hoping
we'd spend most of our time today,
and now we have 10 minutes left or whatever.
Maybe let's dive into that.
Start that discussion.
I think this will be a multi-episode,
ongoing discussion.
For the next year.
How does FOSS, free open source software,
how is AI going to impact that?
How is it already impacting it?
And does it change the value of it over time?
Where do we see that going?
I mean, I'll start,
but very curious to hear what your guys' views are.
I mean, the free part means that it's freely available,
but it doesn't necessarily mean free ink cost.
There's a lot of different licenses,
and you can get in debates about
what level of permissiveness is needed for software,
but the most permissive licenses like MIT and Apache 2,
it is free.
Free as in freedom, not free as in beer.
It's free as in freedom, and it's free as in beer, those.
But then other open source licenses are restrictive
in terms of how you can use it,
what you can use it for,
and they're often applied for a couple reasons.
One, if you want to ensure that any modification
is upstreamed into the main repo,
you might put a more copy left type license on it.
Or if your real goal is just publishing the code
for transparency reasons,
but you still want any real usage of it
from another business to pay you.
So if you actually,
if you want to use the software I wrote and published
for your business and you're making money,
let's have a business development arrangement, right?
So that's historically how this works
and what's involved.
But how does it change with AI?
I guess one, well,
so I'll start off with why I don't think
some things that won't change.
I mean, I still think it'll be very valuable for the world
for code that's produced to make it
available. And that's important for transparency and
audit reasons and reproducible builds.
And if it's proprietary and closed
and you can't see it, that's a scary world.
Even if humans aren't the ones
doing the review audits
in security,
but I'd want my bots.
I'd want my human team
or my bot team
or a combination of that team
to ensure any software
that I'm using
is high quality and secure.
And it obviously depends
on the application.
If it's a one-off,
disposable piece of software
that I'm doing for a to-do list
or whatever,
it doesn't need like
flight-level FAA kind of security.
or Bitcoin private keys or whatever.
But if it is super critical software,
then that's a must.
So I still think we want to encourage software to be open.
Plus there's another benefit of open software
is that you can build on the shoulders.
You can sit on the shoulders of others
and build even better things.
And everyone benefits from that.
So I think that still remains true.
So from that perspective,
I don't really see why it changes things.
But what does change is like, who's looking at the code?
Are humans still looking at the code?
Are agents?
How is the code used in Reduxes?
So how do we...
Like, do these licenses even make sense in this world?
Because like, if you have, isn't it GPL that if you use GPL, then you have to sort of also be GPL?
Yeah.
And so is there really any coding model that has no GPL software in its training data?
do you think that's true i don't think that's true no so then what if i find a gpl licensed
product and i say i like this product let's rebuild it with the same goals but don't use
any of the software i could do that prompt but presumably the training data is using the stuff
that kind of implies the gpl should propagate which probably doesn't actually end up happening
today. So I think even the concept
of all these
different open source licenses and styles
of use may get redefined
when most software is being written
by bots or
by agents.
So yeah, I
think the legal and licensing
aspect, I definitely agree,
will probably be disrupted, changed.
But what about the value?
That makes everything become
effectively MIT-ish, right?
Well, not if
not if I have
tons of software as closed source.
Sure.
Closed source is closed source.
Anything open source, you can almost argue
that you can use it.
I agree with that, but what about closed source?
Number one, is there
a shift in value, whether it be
increase or decrease, for the notion
of boss?
That's one question I have.
And then two, do we think
that more
proprietary closed software
will become open or the opposite?
Because you don't,
because you all of a sudden,
I've seen some people,
like a narrative start,
I think JB55 is saying like,
maybe he doesn't want to do
open source software now
because now it's so swift
to copy other people's work
and produce a competing,
a copy of the product
and quickly better
that maybe he doesn't even want
to do open source anymore.
So do we see a shift back towards
Close source.
And I also think, I mean, there's like even a deeper question of like, well, what actually
matters?
Like, where is the value accrued?
Where is the value created and where is accrued?
And like, to me, the most important thing of FOSS is the transparency, right?
And so one thing I would want to say is how do I utilize transparent services on the internet?
But one concern I have is like, you know, I don't even know if the code even really
matters.
I get JB55's point that like, you know, I do agree with him, at least in this current
stage it's trivial to copy an idea but i mean it's quite hard to maybe go from like 99 good to like
that extra je ne sais quoi that he has to make something really beautiful and maybe that's what
he wants to sort of defend i get that point but like dude if you're aji pill two years out jb55
is great but like what about when you know you know he he i am to him as he is to the whatever
claude uh you know whatever 10. take another oh go ahead no please i was just take another layer
of abstraction. Did you guys see the back
and forth between Chamath and Sailor?
No.
Oh, you didn't?
I'm off Twitter, bro. Somebody shared
it to me. Chamath
wrote some sort of essay.
I think DK shared it with us.
Or maybe I shared it with you.
So, effectively,
I kind of skimmed, but
Chamath wrote some essay basically about how
the future
value of companies, you know, you
kind of pay for discounted cash flow
for future value that you assume the company is going to capture and that the periods maybe i i
don't know all the details of what the essay said but maybe the periods you would assume today are
30 years of future cash flow and maybe we need to really shorten that to something like is it five
years or is it maybe there's no duration on that which really changes the valuations of public
markets the reason i point this out within the conversation is because that's like a one layer
of abstraction a way you know as a company instead of just a software project but i think there's
the kind of cousins of each other sort of somehow close relatives well and and this is something
that we've talked about on the show for a very long time you know when i put on my investor hat
and i'm not just uh out here alex jones ranting i actually think about like how to allocate capital
right it's like i think in the long run it's like okay you want to go uh and by the way like i want
everything i want deflation and all kinds of goods and services so that everyone wins like
Yeah, funds into everywhere, yeah.
That's a big part of my personal worldview
and what I want to see happen.
But when I do put on my capital allocation hat,
my question is, okay, well,
the value capture is going to go to where there's scarcity.
So in this coming world,
the only things that I've been able to come up with
that are scarce are the infrastructure running at all.
So if you've got, for now, the compute the energy,
although that obviously depreciates every time,
Bitcoin, which is digital capital,
assuming that doesn't get broken in some way, shape, or form,
the Lightning Network position,
because that's the position in the railroad network
and human attention,
or human and potentially bot attention,
whatever that ends up meaning.
But the last one, the human and bot...
What about the single railroad to space?
DK's an Elon Maxie.
I'm not going to address that.
I'm the Elon Maxie.
DK's not.
But for whatever reason,
he's not yet on the Elon train.
He'll get it.
No, no.
I like the space thing.
No, and every time you always go,
you always make a dig at the Elon.
No, no, no.
But I just like it.
We don't like it.
I like the space thing.
No, it's got space.
It's good.
Anyways, but my broader point is
when you look at those four things,
since attention is the one that all of software,
media, the internet, services,
everything is basically competing for that.
And by the way,
something else I think is worth talking about
is this idea of like,
you know, as like the basic stuff
is increasingly taken care of by robots and by AI.
So it's like, okay, food, water, shelter,
all that increasingly, you know,
there's deflation.
Everyone gets access to the basics.
That's awesome.
And maybe even as Elon says,
universal high income, that'd be awesome.
What do humans end up doing?
Well, you know, for better or for worse,
we, and I think there was a Chris Pike essay
I liked about this where he was just like,
you know, we didn't used to have pro sports teams.
And then we have more leisure time.
Now we have pro sports teams.
Now Steve is, you know, on here flexing his arms
in his Iowa State shirt.
That would not have been possible 100 years ago.
And so there will be all kinds of new,
like humans have an infinity of ways
that they can flex on each other,
which is not my favorite way of saying it,
but that's kind of what he was getting at.
or play with each other
or create new games, new sports, new status
competition. I'm not worried about that. That's where
humans are going to end up going and maybe the robots
make sure no one starves. Cool.
But in that world, that is so
hard, particularly where
we are today, to predict as an investor.
I would not want to be picking, well, this is what's
going to win the next status game
because the next status game is changing every single
day. So I would not want to be
betting on companies that I think
will win the human attention
or the machine attention economy because
I don't think there's any durable advantage there, and I think that's what
Chamath was getting at. So as an investor, I
want to own the energy infrastructure, the Bitcoin,
and the Lightning Network routing position, because those
are things that I see, okay, those are moats that no one's
going to erode. Yeah, and you read
Saylor's response, right?
He basically was like, well, if
you believe all these things about the public markets,
then you should be buying Bitcoin.
That was kind of his conclusion.
But Chamath
said it's not quantum resistant. Right, not
quantum resistant, so he's kind of on that FUD train now.
Did he also recommend Zcash?
I hear it's more private.
Getting back to AI's impact on open source,
I mean, another perspective for us to discuss
since we're at time in a future episode,
but I'll plant the seed in your guys' head
and anyone listening would love to hear your thoughts.
Like, does it change how Spiral thinks about open source,
the value we contribute?
Does it impact that?
Do we need to change course or do something differently?
And I brought up last week about we're thinking about an AI initiative
and what can we do for open source AI.
So can we apply the playbook we've used the past six plus seven years or so
in open source Bitcoin?
A, can we apply the same playbook to AI?
or what adjustments do we need to make to have success?
And then B, do we even need to revisit our playbook for Bitcoin?
So I think that's a really good question.
And I think also thinking about how far can we take the auditability
and where it is in.
Because right now, what kind of, I mean, it excites me and concerns me
is like, you know, one, you know, everyone has these amazing agents
and like I am now super clod pilled.
I love it.
But I don't know, like how do I know that clod's not going to get,
you know, poisoned over time?
I don't know that.
So it makes me increasingly bullish on things like what Jesse is working on with Bora, what Tony and Mark's working on with Maple and other, you know, other abilities to own your own sort of, I forgot the word he always uses, fiduciary AI, someone that's actually like working on your behalf.
That's super important.
But even a layer deeper, can we actually get enough?
Because no one really still knows how these LLMs even work.
Like you can't just be like, oh, I can point to exactly, you know, the right neuron for every action it takes that's firing.
You know, how far can we get into the interpretability of this compute to be able to say, actually, no, there's a poison pill in this model and it's not over here.
You know, open weights are a start.
Open data sets would be even better.
But like, I think we actually need fundamental breakthroughs in auditing how these digital brains are even operating to get this true.
You should know a week from today.
Is that so?
Because there's a company, a former OpenAI guy.
Do you know this company?
Yeah, I do.
One of my other friends is also an investor.
I'll be there.
I'm excited.
Okay, good, good.
So you mentioned or touched on sovereignty,
like what Vora is doing,
and maybe AI, maybe a little bit more privacy.
But that's one way.
Should the focal point be on sovereignty instead of FOSS?
And that doesn't mean it's not FOSS still,
but like are you optimizing for FOSS
or optimizing for sovereignty?
Is there a shift there
and does that actually change anything
if you flip it?
I think that's another thread
that I'd like to all think more about.
I'd love to discuss with you guys.
Good topic for next week.
On the next Presidio Sovereignty Jam.
Yeah!
PSJ.
That's a roll-off of the tongue plate as well.
Isn't there like a famous European football team
that PSJ or something?
I don't know.
PSJ.
if not
once we have more leisure time
there will be
oh my gosh
we need to level up our
sports in the show
exactly
DK we're gonna put you in charge
of that for next week
bye bye
alright guys
okay
bye bye
bye everyone
hold on