Chat_143 - Rise and Fall of BTC Treasuries and the Stablecoin Dilemma with Allen Farrington

[00:00:00] Speaker A: The whole M Nav trade, it has as much implied leverage on the way down as it does on the way up. I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that actually this is what triggers the next bear market, that there's so much leverage introduced via this mechanism that not only do a lot of the treasury companies themselves get wiped out, but this sell pressure is so severe that it impacts bitcoin as a whole. [00:00:43] Speaker B: All right, what is up guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else. You know, we've got Alan Farrington, my good friend and one of my favorite authors and we recently read a piece by him. I actually have another piece that I'm going to read that we talked about briefly in, in this show, but I actually haven't read it yet. But we'll have another piece by him coming up really soon. But he had a fantastic thesis on stablecoins not too long ago that I really liked and it was a good episode. So I will have the link down in the show notes so you can check it out. But we just have a fascinating conversation about capital markets, about investing and vc, where the market is going, also stablecoins and kind of the various layers of disruption and technological shift that we will be going through and what, what each of those layers look like and why. Stablecoins are actually an intuitively obvious part of the process. So we get into a lot of it. I think you guys are really going to enjoy this one. Real quick, a shout out to Leden for supporting the show and then also for just having like a really great and easy service if you want to get money out of your bitcoin without selling it. Bitcoin backed loans, there are barely any number of companies that I would actually trust with this, but that's why I'm a fan of ledn. They've gotten rid of all of their other stuff. They just want to do simple, reliable bitcoin backed loans. They do proof of reserves. They made it through a serious bear market. They have open books. Everything about it is about reliably and simply offering bitcoin backed loans so that you don't have to pay capital gains and you can get your fiat. And I actually did this with a bitcoin mining investment and it was one where selling the bitcoin made absolutely no sense. But keeping the bitcoin and paying an interest rate, the investment actually did make a lot of sense. So this is a really useful tool if you are trying to make an investment or something like that. But you just don't think it's going to beat Bitcoin. I've got a link in the show notes for Leden that's L E D N I O. Also check out PubKey app, that's P u B K Y app. And honestly the thing that I really want you to just kind of see and get a feel for is logging in with the pub key ring. So this is actually a stack of different tools and protocols built by synonym to re decentralize the web and also to be easy to work with so that other people can build with it. But the login experience is just like, oh, it's just amazing and I love it and this is how I want the web to work. But if you want to find more details about that, just go to the link down in the show notes. Then there is gitchroma code. They are making light for humans. I've gone down the rabbit hole very recently of red light and mitochondrial health. My wife and I already did a really interesting test, the results of which surprised me, which is what has gotten me down this for circadian rhythm and red light and blue light control and stuff. And this is what Get Chroma is about, right? Red light therapy, the blue light blockers so that every, all of us who are looking at our screens all the time. I've got my skylight which lets me go red when you know, I hit the right time of day. This has just made a much bigger difference than I had suspected. Git Chroma are actually offering a 10% discount to everybody who listens to Bitcoin Audible with code Bitcoin audible. And they actually have a bitcoiner specific website, the link of which is down in the show notes. And don't forget about discounts. Now I want to say something about the. The HRF has supported the show and of which I am immensely grateful for. But I just wanted to say something about the Oslo Freedom Forum because this is one of the things that they do that I like to promote on the show. But I actually went to the Oslo Freedom Forum only one time so far. It was just eye opening, honestly more than anything. And I had a conversation with a guy who was living under a very terrible regime actually forget the country now. And so his phone, all of his electronics had been quote unquote pwned just like completely and fully taken over and essentially made weapons to reach out to other device. Like he had to essentially destroy all of his electronics. So we had a wild conversation about like sovereignty and electronics and like the risk of centralization. And it just blew my mind that he was still there at the Oslo Freedom Forum, asking about what devices he could use to protect himself from this, what other people were doing, and how he could go back and still be a voice of dissent in that country. That's the kind of people at the OSLO Freedom Forum June 1st to 3rd of 2026. I have the link in the show notes and again, throw some support to the Human Rights Foundation. They also have a great newsletter that I talk about all the time, the Financial Freedom Report. And with that, let's get into today's show. This is Chat 143, the Rise and Fall of Bitcoin Treasuries and the Stablecoin Dilemma with my good friend Alan Farrington. Mr. Farrington always has interesting to say, interesting things to say. Have you done any writing recently? [00:06:08] Speaker A: Well, the vibe coding one was the. Was the most recent one. [00:06:11] Speaker B: Oh wait, that was an awesome. [00:06:12] Speaker A: I mean that's not like super serious though. That was. I've gotten to this habit. I don't know how you feel about this, but I've started to really like NOSTR as. I mean I like it in general, but specifically for I guess what you would just more classically think of as a blog. Right. Because most of the writing that I do is more refined essays. Not to say that that means they're good just to be clear. But as in the writing process is a lot more. A lot more goes into it and I typically put them on medium just because probably just have it frankly, like historically. Yeah, that was. That was the habit. I think they are easier to share though, like for if it's intended to reach a wider, you know, potentially more normie. Ish audience, that's definitely easier. Like they understand that. Whereas I've come around to really liking NOSTR for knowing it probably won't reach that many people and therefore I can write about way more weirdly niche things and not try that hard. And so yeah, so that was. That was the vibe coding one. [00:07:12] Speaker B: That's funny. No, actually that's a. That's a great. I've. I've kind of had this. I hadn't thought about it too hard, but that's actually been a pretty nice thing about Noer is. Is the like I like going through articles. I like being able to like kind of sort through it feels. It feels more open and I find myself saving a ton of stuff from. [00:07:37] Speaker A: No stupid. I tell you something else cool too, right? This has been a Bit of a cliche for a while now that all the early Nostra applications are just like Twitter rip offs and it's a not quite as good version of Twitter, but it's only for bitcoiners and you can zap. But even the zaps are kind of a larp. And as far as I can tell, at least people are always a bit anxious to point out. On the one hand, this is potentially a lot more powerful and I've even written about this, right, we maybe get into that. That was one of the more is a while ago now. But in terms of what we've actually released one of the more recent ish Axiom ones I did with Ryan and Dhruv that touched on Noster as like another, you know, be careful call. It's not like a layer of Bitcoin, but it's sure kind of in spirit. It's. It is very much aligned in terms of deliberately designed as a protocol and so on. And yeah, there's a lot of obvious, a lot of obvious overlap. So on the one hand, people are at pains to point that out that okay, all the existing instantiations of end user applications, yes, they're Twitter clones, but it's so much more powerful and you can do so much more with it. So that's. On the one hand, people are excited by that. They're like, okay, but what is anyone actually. But I think this is a really good example. So this again to be clear, not that my contribution to this is at all significant, but people using. So for example, I use Hablo when I do this, which I love. I think it's awesome. [00:09:08] Speaker B: I know there are a bunch of. [00:09:09] Speaker A: Others, but again, it's just like habit. It's the first one I used. I really like the interface and everything, but that I think is meaningfully different, that use case, which has really cool overlap with the social media use case in terms of the way that people interact with the content. But it's quite clearly different, right? Like Medium is not the same thing as Twitter, for example, or like Substack is not the same thing as Facebook. And so this I think is actually. It's subtle as far as I'm aware. Nobody's made that big a deal about it, but it is a nice example of extensibility, if you like. So I like that too. One other thing just mentioned by the way, because. Sorry, I'm reflecting on the way you asked the question. I. I have actually written something recently that hasn't been published yet, so it didn't occur to me. But this is a very, very long time in the works. It will be the next kind of proper research piece that Axiom publishes. I think it's maybe a couple of weeks away. I don't know when you'll publish this anyway, so it might be out by the time you do. But it's something I've co written with Harris Irfan and we've been working on this for a long, long time trying to get it right. And it's basically a. Well, the title is Bitcoin and Islamic Finance. So this is something, you know, that I'm interested in. I think you talked about this at various points over the years, but what Harris and I realized is that one, there aren't that many resources on this. So typically people will point to things that Harris has done or things that I have done, but which are like not actually that helpful as a reference. So like I gave a talk at Vault to Connie Badger a couple of years ago which is even that is like hard to find because in only exists on YouTube in a six hour long video and you need to give the timestamp and it's just not that helpful. Or they'll point to Bitcoin as Halal. Within Bitcoin is Venice, which is good. I mean that was obviously the first time I had thought about that at all. But it's like three pages long or something. It's not remotely comprehensive. And then similarly for Harris, he actually has a now legendary LinkedIn post which is like, I tease him about this all the time because I feel like that in and of itself is cringe. The fact that you. The fact that he or anybody has a LinkedIn post, that isn't ironic. Like it's an, it's an. It's the intended use of LinkedIn and it's playing into how cringe it is. I mean, it is very good. And that was a reference for, you know, that was very helpful for us then expanding into this piece. So. But anyway, there's, there's all these kind of disparate resources, but we recognize that there wasn't any one single resource that is valuable to point people to. And so we basically. This is a bit kind of arrogant in a way, which I'll own up to, I suppose. But we set out to write the comprehensive resource on this. So we want this to be effectively the canonical explanation of what the overlap is between Bitcoin and Islamic Finance. And so it's done. Now the only reason there's a slight question mark over the timing is the English Version which is I only speak English, I don't speak any other languages. But the English version was done about a month ago and now we're working through getting it translated into Arabic as well. Well, because we're going to do our best to pump it in in the Middle east, which I'm. I'm pretty excited about. I have no idea how that works. [00:12:23] Speaker B: Go for Persian as well. There's some really good LLMs. My brother. So my brother's married now to an Iranian and her. Most of her family still only speaks Persian but he actually has ongoing like really long conversations or whatever and they're in Iran so he's like never met them in person, but he has a lot of conversations with all of them and he just does it with this, this one. It's. There's not many resources out there, but it's an LLM that just converts from English to Persian and back and they go back and forth and they've had a conversation for a while and the big thing is that they have zero resources. There's like, there's like one Persian based bitcoiner and like that's it. And he has like a YouTube or whatever and like they all watch him or whatever. And like that's it. That's the only thing out there. Um, so I've been actually thinking really heavily, very seriously about that and making. Making use of it. I'll still need a human to. To check the work, but I've been shocked at what I can do with LLMs and like the, like there's a tool called 11 Labs. We're actually. I don't even think I've talked. This is officially the show now by the way. But I don't even think I even shared this with anybody. But um. But I'll go ahead and put it out there so that it kind of forces me to get off my ass and get the workflow right so that this is actually doable. But doing a Spanish version of the show that's actually in my voice, that's cool because of AI. And I think the tools are ready. It needs. Here's the thing is that if you just use my voice to train an LLM to. Excuse me, a TTS model and get it to read, it kind of. It still kind of sucks. The emphasis isn't quite right. The. The. It. Sometimes it will misread sentences and which obviously I will too, but it will be like when I get to the end of the sentence especially, especially you. You have really fun sentence structures sometimes because. And I Don't know. I don't know what it is. But like, I. I love the way that you write. It's. Gigi kind of does the same thing too. It's like, I won't get. It's not until I get to the end of the sentence that I'm like, oh, you actually meant it this way. And I'll literally have to stop it and delete it and go back and re record it. But then, then my structure is right and my emphasis is right. But the LLM or excuse me, the model doesn't really do that. [00:14:58] Speaker A: Right. [00:14:59] Speaker B: So sometimes it will just be. It would just read it in a bizarre way. And it's enough that, like, I feel like I have to go back and like, listen through and edit it because it'll be like, could Bitcoin's hash rate be in a bubble? Like, you know, like, you know, it's just like bizarre the way it, like words it, you know, and, and. But the thing about translation is that it uses your voice acting. So like, I will read a sentence and it will take my tone and meaning from. And it's not, because obviously it doesn't, like, know why, but it just takes the pattern of like the vocal ups and downs. [00:15:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:15:41] Speaker B: And translates it to the new language and it works. It actually sounds like I'm speaking Spanish, which is. [00:15:48] Speaker A: So I presume you don't speak Spanish though, right? [00:15:50] Speaker B: Do not. [00:15:51] Speaker A: Why you're doing this in the first place. [00:15:53] Speaker B: No. Ablo. Espen. [00:15:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Have you. Have you played this to somebody who does? [00:16:01] Speaker B: Yes. Yes. [00:16:02] Speaker A: Was it really funny for them? [00:16:05] Speaker B: It was. I mean, I mean, they were like, wow. I mean, that was kind of the. That was the kind of reaction. And I'm. I've got somebody that I've been speaking with, which he's probably like, where the hell's guy? Because I haven't talked to him in like two weeks. There's a problem is that one of the models that's actually really good is I'm having to use through a service and it can only do it in like 40 minute segments. And my show is never like, my shortest shows are 45 minutes. And so I need to get a. I've had to build a little workflow. I think I've got it. I think. I think I've got it right. I've just been trying to put it into a vibe coding app that I'm doing because I want to make it more complicated than it needs to be so that it's. It's nice and packaged and I like the way it looks and I like the way I drag and drop and press buttons. But to break up the show into basically like 30 minute segments, but specifically 30 minute segments that are at the end of a sentence or at a meaningful pause. And I cannot do that. I am not going to do that manually. Like the more manual this is, the less likely it's likely it's ever going to happen. I don't have time for shit. That's why I'm 30 minutes late for our show. And, and so I needed to break up automatically into sections that can easily be dropped back in and put back together by Johnny, by my producer without needing extra work. I have to have a transcription tool and an LLM to basically make sense of that. So that, But I think, again, I think I've got it. But it will need, it will need like a 3%, like clean this up or fix this. But I think all it needs is to clean up the translation and redo the audio and it won't need me. It won't need my attention. So I will need somebody who speaks Spanish, which is the person I'm talking to. I'm not 100, I'm not 100, but I'm like 95. This is gonna work. [00:18:00] Speaker A: Because I can imagine for, for him. He's like, wait a minute, what, but what did he say? I don't, I don't know if I did it right. [00:18:08] Speaker B: Did I edit it right? I don't, I don't know. I can't, I don't know. He's, he's stoked, but he's kind of in the same boat with me. Is that like we're putting. If the guy get to pick the translations or check the translations is wrong. Well, I guess we just published an episode where I have no idea what I'm saying. [00:18:26] Speaker A: Kind of like major cultural faux pas. Some schism in Spanish bitcoin. Wait a minute. [00:18:35] Speaker B: Edit it to be all socialists. It's just like. [00:18:40] Speaker A: No, I, I, I was meaning more. That is also a very funny direction it could go in. I was meaning entirely accidentally with, you know, with. No. What's a good way of characterizing that? That's like sabotage. Right. So I'm meaning more just, you know, because, because you don't speak Spanish. You're just, you're just trusting the tools. Yeah. That you end up like grossly offending somebody and then, and then we all wake up one day and it's like a whole thing on bitcoin Twitter that all just cancelled. Guy. [00:19:13] Speaker B: So hard Cancelled. Well. Well, I guess that, you know, I figured. I figured the way I'd go out was cancelled for something. For something that I said. So honestly, it'll be a little bit disappointing that I didn't really get to earn it if it's because of an LLM. But, you know, it. I guess. I guess it's destined to happen sooner or later. Oh, my God. Tell me about Axiom bcc. I haven't. Because you haven't been writing. I haven't really kept up with it. So what's been going on? How's repricing the world? [00:19:44] Speaker A: This is going to be a bit of a disappointing answer. Not a huge amount. We made a couple of investments lately. I guess we could talk about then, if you like. I don't know how familiar your audience will be with a lot of them, but things are just kind of chugging along. You might find this funny, actually. One interesting phenomenon we've noticed is that we haven't made as many in the past, call it six months or so. So, like the first half of this year, anywhere near as many as we expected to make. Because this is actually a really interesting kind of. This goes well beyond Axiom. This is, I think, a great reflection on not just the companies and not just our companies, but the ecosystem as a whole. And thinking around how bitcoin changes people almost. I don't want to get too carried away with the philosophical implications, but basically. [00:20:34] Speaker B: With you can this is Bitcoin audible? [00:20:37] Speaker A: Well, but just not yet, right? Maybe, maybe in 10, 15 minutes. With the price steadily going up, a lot of the companies that we expected to be raising, and hence us looking to invest in, literally just haven't. Because they keep most of their treasury in bitcoin. It varies based on, you know, the. [00:21:01] Speaker B: One they are getting extra investment. [00:21:03] Speaker A: Well, yeah, exactly. That's a good way to think about it, actually. Yeah, it varies exactly how much they do it, but almost every company does it to some extent. And you end up in this hilarious situation where we try to speak to them all every three months. And so we'll speak to them in, say, January and they'll be like, yeah, we've got 12 months of Runway left. And then we speak to them again in what do we. April. And they're like, yeah, now we've got 14 months of Runway left. And I was like, okay, cool. Well, every month that goes past, you get two months more Runway. And I can live with that. [00:21:36] Speaker B: All right. We're doing all right. [00:21:36] Speaker A: I'm not sure that that can go on Well, I mean, I guess if bitcoin just goes up forever, which some people think it will, then it can go on forever. It probably won't go on forever, I think. I don't think it will go up monotonically forever. So. But yeah, but that is actually, in all honesty, that's the main driver of why we haven't done as much. I mean we're still kind of, we're chugging away. You know, I mentioned like the, the piece with Harris has been getting that over the line has been my focus lately. Also. Your audience definitely won't find this interesting because even I don't find it interesting. But we're just always thinking about raising. It's not that I'm asking for pity or anything, but. Well, I guess I am for the following reason that almost everybody that we need to look to raise from doesn't really know that much about bitcoin. And so we have a lot of really stupid conversations when we're raising. So that's where I won the pity that I have to go through that. [00:22:36] Speaker B: Feel sorry for me as derived from. [00:22:39] Speaker A: The industry or anything. But yeah, we're just always raising. We're always trying to, we're always trying to suck more money into bitcoin. A lot of people are though. I feel a lot of people probably are in a similar position. The companies certainly are. So I definitely, I feel worse for them. [00:22:57] Speaker B: It's really funny though because I've talked about this like, because you get this idea from the fiat world that you have to encourage investment and you have to, you have to destroy people's savings. Yeah, yeah, they'll just go give it to Google or the S P 500 and a bunch of big ass corporations for no reason, which they will go and then complain about on Twitter because they don't trust them at all. But of course they have all of our retirements. Why wouldn't. Why wouldn't they? Yep. And this like just bonkers idea when like this is such a perfect example of the. I try to flip that analogy on its. Or that perspective on his head because when you invest in the money, you're actually investing in everything at once. It's the ultimate index of society. And bitcoin's such a perfect example is because people are investing in bitcoin. They're investing in all of these companies that you're investing in because they have bitcoin. And now their bitcoin literally gets them further. They're getting, if 10% of the economy goes into bitcoin of an of an external economy goes into bitcoin, then everybody who is saved, everybody who has capital to invest, has 10% more in Bitcoin specifically because everyone has invested in the whole ecosystem and that's their 10% share of the new investment. [00:24:19] Speaker A: I'd add two things to this by the way. So one, yes, it's the index or maybe three things actually is the index and this has two sub points but it's the index of everything, not just of the companies that happen to be the biggest at that point. And there's a reflexivity there too. Right. Because if you get big. [00:24:36] Speaker B: Oh yes, it's the index of everybody who holds bitcoin, period. Yeah, it's the index of bitcoiners or the bitcoin ecosystem. [00:24:44] Speaker A: It's an index without a Vanguard or a BlackRock or whoever that one take a cut. Two, I think a lot more insidiously have governance influence. [00:24:55] Speaker B: Take your voting list. [00:24:56] Speaker A: There's none of that. It's a far truer index when it functions properly. The other thing though is that I bet you were probably going to get to this anyway. So I'm very curious on your thoughts. I'll tee you up for an hour long rant for the rest of the episode. The impact on the companies themselves is really fascinating and the reason this is fresh in mind by the way, is that I'm contemplating writing about this next. So once we get the Islamic finance one wrapped up, I think this will be the next thing I want to move on to because I've just witnessed this in the past couple of months that the companies themselves are far, far more prudent than certainly the stereotype of early stage tech. Like everything we invest in is almost everything we invest in. If you abstract away from the bitcoin component, it's just like early stage super high growth tech. [00:25:46] Speaker B: Right. [00:25:46] Speaker A: But then when you add the bitcoin back in, it completely changes the picture in a number of, in a number of ways that it's difficult to even explain to someone who isn't familiar with this as, as almost more of like a psychological phenomenon than just a financial one. [00:25:59] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:25:59] Speaker A: And the main, the main way that that is, that that manifests is these companies obviously do invest but they're, you know, they're not like ETFs. We don't just give them money and they go buy bitcoin and then it goes up and then everyone's happy. That happens to a limited extent, but when they invest, their hurdle rate is bitcoin. So they will only make investments that they're you know, reasonably confident. You got to be careful about introducing too much certainty here because obviously it's fundamentally uncertain because it's entrepreneurship. But they're making a reasonable bet, or at least a bet that they're happy with, given their equity stakes in the company, that the investments they make will be higher returning than Bitcoin. And so the, the impact there is, they frankly just make better investments. [00:26:46] Speaker B: They don't waste. [00:26:47] Speaker A: It's almost true by definition, that they don't waste. Exactly. Yes. They don't make wasteful investments. And it's unfortunate that this happens in such a small segment, but obviously, we're so early, et cetera, et cetera, we'll be saying for the rest of our lives how early we are as it spreads and spreads and spreads. [00:27:03] Speaker B: Well, the beauty of that is that it means that there's a portion of the economy like this goes back to. The compounding idea is that when you are just getting 1%, 2%, 3% better every. Every year, every day, every, you know, whatever, like, whatever your time span is, and you're actually saving resources and you're actually putting the resources to a positive use that compounds so quickly. It takes a while to start to really compound. Like, it was a joke, actually. Hopefully. Was late for our dev meeting the other day, and I was like, all right, every. Every minute that you're late right now, you owe me two sats for the first minute, but every other minute you, you're late, we're going to double. And so, like, I just kept. Because Hope was like, off doing something, and. And it was like, I. I'll be, I'll be there in, in 15 minutes, 20 minutes. So we knew exactly how long it was going to be. And like, we were just. We had other things to cover, but I just kept, like, doing, like, it's 64, 256, 512, like, and we almost got up to like, 2,000 SATs. I was like, this is going to compound real serious you. But that same sort of thing happens, right? It's like a real slow start when you have companies that, like, not exactly sure where to put resources. Okay, we're just going to invest in this. We're going to hold on to our bitcoin as long as I can get our Runway, as much. As much as we can out of it. But then when they're just making, like, the most important decisions that actually do add to it, and then that makes them more capable to invest in somebody else or to, to get, again, get another Runway to. To the fact that for two years, when they thought they were going to have to ask again in six months, now their Runway is two years, because things are turning around better. Their. Their Bitcoin's paying them more. And that means that the people who thought they were going to have to do another round for them can now do a round for somebody else who's in the same mindset. And, like, slowly but surely, it's, you know, so early. You see the mitosis in the cells, and it's like the first couple things, it's like, real slow, and then it's just this explosion of everybody growing and splitting and, like, breaking off into all of their separate niches and subsects of the economy, and it just starts to eat into everything. And it's specifically against an economy that's destroying resources. This is one of the things that I'm actually writing now, finally. Um, and I've got myself a good system to actually force myself to do it, because I've been wanting to write a book for God knows how long and. But one of the sections isn't. And one of the things I've talked about on the show is the idea of if you water down, if you. If you just muddy up the. The money, like, it doesn't encourage investment, it just makes crappy investments. [00:29:54] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:29:55] Speaker B: Look viable. Yep. You know, like, if. If you're. If you have, like, a pristine glass of water that's just, like, perfect and that's. That's your money, well, then the only thing worth investing in is, like, water with minerals or electrolytes or, like a nice drink. Something better than pristine, clear, clean water. But if you explicitly say it's like, okay, well, let's make our water crappy. Let's put, like, literal. Just a little bit of poop and some mud and some maggots in the water. Well, now, like, yeah, you've gotten more investment, but that's just because now there's, like 10,000 companies investing in just kind of like tap water, you know, like, just. Because it's like, well, we just get the. The poop and the maggots out of it, and this is a totally worthwhile investment. You're the measurement, the thing that you're comparing to. And it's exactly why VCs can blow, like, companies that just get enormous amounts of investment just just absolutely eviscerate money, like, just destroy resources like crazy. And three or four years go by and they never produce anything. You know, this is actually something that blew my mind because I thought I. I Like to have like competition. Like, like I get like kind of amped up by feeling like there's somebody who's doing it better than me. It's like, so what are they? I get to see what they're doing wrong or think about how they're doing it. And with Pear Drive, I felt like there wasn't anybody to point to. And then I found this project called Space Drive, ironically, very similar name and it was actually really cool looking. They had a lot of the ideas of like things that I wanted to do and they wanted to have file sharing very, very easy in their tool. And it was really cool. I mean just, I was like, okay, this is, this is pretty dope, like to the point that I got really nervous at first. I was like, Jesus, am I, what am I doing? Am I an idiot here? You know, I don't know what I'm doing. And, and they had raised like four or five million dollars. They were like open source and like all this stuff. But then like they're simple networking, they're like peer to peer sharing. I could, I installed Space Drive on my Mac and I installed, I mean it looked gorgeous. It looks like a finished product and started on my Mac and my Linux and I couldn't get a file from one to the other and it's supposed to like auto connect over LAN and all this stuff. And it like showed up once and I saw it and then I like tried to click on it and it said error. And I like, like I was just so mad. I was so mad. And then they ran out of money. Yeah, they ran out of money. [00:32:27] Speaker A: Sounds about right. [00:32:29] Speaker B: They had like, they had like 10 devs and they've been working on this for years. And then like now it's just done. They just did like a, they had this roadmap and all this stuff and now they've got like a postmortem like sorry guys, we had to shut down and all this stuff. And I'm like, you never even, I never even moved a file. What is wrong with you? [00:32:47] Speaker A: Did you read the post mortem? What's in the post mortem? Besides we didn't make any money. Our, our, our key error was. [00:32:54] Speaker B: Our key error was that we spent a lot of money. And I think that's the other thing is that like they're not going to keep. I mean maybe they'll stick around and like kind of keep working on it. But it seemed like like the people were there because they were getting paid and like that's like a big thing, is that you need people who are working on the project, who will keep working on the project. They'll start when they're not getting paid and, and they'll keep working when they're not getting paid. [00:33:20] Speaker A: Maybe, maybe the, the window for that kind of thing is finally passed. That's what they would have done in 2017. You know that for sure? [00:33:27] Speaker B: Oh yeah. Oh yeah, 100%. But it's crazy how the VC culture changes so drastically when like the fiat landscape and like how people treat money, you know, like in the 80s, yeah, you had VC to start a company and build up a company and make a company. Right. You were competing and that was kind of the norm. And then sometime around the early 2000s, VC was get big enough to be bought by Google, you know, like. Like it just changed. [00:33:58] Speaker A: It's a pretty wild time to be, to be working in traditional vc. Just to be clear, I don't really count myself in that. I don't have any social or even much professional interaction with Silicon Valley is what I have people who typically describe it. But I can imagine that it's pretty wild in a way that maybe the people involved don't even really understand, purely because I don't know the exact numbers. You could probably make a decent guess though, at what proportion of people involved, even at relatively senior roles now have until the past year or two, never seen anything but easy money. And how are their heuristics of how to go about investing and what did even what risk to take? Yeah, to the extent that they bother philosophizing about it. Like, what is investing? What is the point of what we're doing? What proportion of people doing it professionally now are benchmarked to. Or I guess in some sense, like their, their heuristics are an outgrowth of. They're like an extrapolation of what worked from 2008 to 2022 or so. Like, it must be pretty disorienting. [00:35:12] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a. I mean, it's got to be like the real estate market, you know, like all the people were in it, you know, they couldn't even explain. They're just like flipping houses or they buy something and then sell it and then it's just worth more and it's like, great. You know, it's like. But why do you. Have you. Have you never even stopped to think about it? It's like when you just can't lose this housing, real estate just goes. Always goes up. No, no, it doesn't. There's something you gotta actually, you have to Have. Have some sort of a philosophical grounding, or you're gonna run into a wall at some point. [00:35:41] Speaker A: Because here's something really depressing to think about. You can completely imagine that there were a large number of people who had that philosophical grounding. And in. I don't know how long it takes, like, I don't know the exact politics of the workplace or whatever, but for the sake of argument, from 2008 until 2011 or 2012, these people were getting crushed because these idiots who were like, but money just grows on trees. There's always going to be more money. They were destroying them because there was always more money. So imagine how many people were driven out of their minds and into an early retirement because they did have principles. [00:36:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that's pretty wild. [00:36:25] Speaker A: I wonder if we now see them, like, all coming out the woodwork. You know, they're all. They're all grizzled. They've been, like, on a boat or living in a cabin in the woods or something for the past 15 years. They're like, I fucking knew it. [00:36:37] Speaker B: See, kids. Damn it. I told you that's how it was. Oh, Caris, your perspective with the people you talk to in kind of the capital markets and stuff. How's. How's the view or conversation around bitcoin changed? I'll give you one little anecdote actually on mine is they had a. There's like a little financial summit thing that was happening here, and I went to go present at it, but one of the guys involved with the organization was a bitcoiner, and they. They found out that, you know, Guy Swan's in the. The Raleigh area. And so he contacted me, but he asked the. The group that was going to be watching, expecting kind of like, we're not going to do that. Should we do a segment on bitcoin and have somebody come and kind of talk about it? And he said it was just kind of overwhelming. Like, oh, yeah, no, that's. That's probably a really good thing to cover. I'm excited. Like, it was just. It was not the response he expected, having been in bitcoin long enough to get the other response. So, yeah, kind of. [00:37:46] Speaker A: How. [00:37:47] Speaker B: How are you feeling? And what's. What do you see on your side of things? [00:37:50] Speaker A: I can definitely relate to that. I. I'm always in two minds about it because this is kind of going to the core of what I mentioned before about it being really painful, a lot of these conversations. The tone has definitely shifted in the past year, year and a half in a. In a Massively positive direction. So obviously we welcome that. I mean to maybe make it even more tangible. You know, there will be people like institutional investors who we're speaking to in the capacity of we're raising for ag. You know, I mentioned before, we're just always raising. Right? [00:38:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:38:24] Speaker A: So two years ago or three years ago when we started, they would not reply. Or if they did reply, it would be we don't do crypto. I didn't say crypto, I said bitcoin. But no, we don't do crypto or, or like, you know, you can imagine in the six months or so after ftx they're just like, you couldn't explain anything to anybody, completely pointless. And now they're, you know, they haven't fully come around. It'll probably be 10 plus years before they get to something you and I would be kind of happy having a natural conversation with. But they are much, much more positive. They're just more open to, they're much more inclined to take it seriously. The reason I say that is kind of, I'm split on it is that, and I do, even before I say this, I recognize how kind of this is very whiny of me. This is a very sort of privileged thing to say nonetheless, from my ivory tower. I dislike the reasons that they're, that they've changed their mind because I don't give a shit and I don't want to talk about them. So it's Trump Strategic Reserve, ETF's genius act. These are obviously positive developments in the scheme of things. I'm not saying that I dislike that these have happened. I just dislike that I have to talk about them and pretend to care because I just really don't care. Every now and then we do manage to speak to someone who either it'll depend on. There's quite a wide range of demographic of potential LPs for us. So it could just be like a high net worth bitcoiner who is actually into this kind of thing and then we can talk to them about something. I do care about. If you talk about like lightning or ark or whatever and that's cool. There's just no way like even, even the, even lightning, which I feel like you've had long enough to learn about, you know, to learn something about this, to like to know it exists, which a lot of them still don't like that it's just, it's painful, it's. We're, we're getting there, but it's, it's better than it used to be. But It's. It's never good enough for me. [00:40:28] Speaker B: Yeah, having to sell Bitcoin hurts, especially when you are certain it is going to be worth more in the future. But you can actually get access to the Fiat without selling it by using a Bitcoin backed loan. Maybe this is for an emergency, maybe this is for an investment that you think will do really well but it won't beat Bitcoin because it's monetizing or this is actually something that you know you'll get back but the timing just isn't right and you don't want to let Bitcoin go for that span. This is why LEDN was built. They let you borrow against your Bitcoin quickly and easily and Bitcoin is the ultimate collateral. There is no more perfect thing to use securely in this setup and something that you can verify with their proof of reserves that they do. There are no monthly payments if you don't want you pay it off at your pace. There's no penalties for early payment. There's no finder's fee. It is quick and simple to get your funds. I think their turnaround right now is like 12 hours. And I don't know why every Bitcoin company doesn't do this. Everybody who's at least holding Bitcoin for other people. But they do a proof of reserves so that you can confirm that your balance is there. And something that made me really happy recently is they just cut their Ethereum loans, they cut their yield product, they cut their non custody loans at lower rates. And so they now offer one simple hyper focus thing, custodied, secure easy bitcoin backed loans. Use someone with a good track record who's done over $10 billion in loans available in over a hundred countries. They do proof of reserves and they've made it through the toughest times in the market without having a single problem. There's no credit check, there's no hassle. It's simple. This is why Leden IO exists. Get the value of your Bitcoin without having to sell it. Remember to read up on how the collateral works. They're really good at reaching out and making sure that everything stays balanced. Remember that Bitcoin is volatile so do not overextend if you know how to use it. This could be a huge benefit to your bitcoin stack and give you optionality in accessing Fiat without it being that selling Bitcoin is your only option. I've been a very happy customer. Check them out. The link and details are in the Description, man. I feel that a lot is every time the regulation and stuff in particular, because I don't even really keep up with it. I'll hear about. And I know it's news. I know it's super relevant, and I should. And I try to force myself to. To be like, okay, the genius act passed or this thing. But then I'll. I'll randomly get into a conversation with people. I'll have like, kind of like bitcoin edge people that I think about like that. Like my coffee shop I go to all the time, the guy knows I'm a bitcoiner, and he'll randomly be like, hey, hey, how's that bitcoin? Bitcoin price looking good today, you know, And. And like, so we'll go back and forth just on some little things. But then he'd be like, oh, you seen it's about to get passed. And I was like, what are you talking about? What's getting passed? And he just. Any, like, bounce off these two. These two legislation things or whatever. It's like, oh, yeah, there's new regime or whatever. Everybody seems. Seems real happy with it. I'm sure. I'm sure something. I'm sure something will get fast. It'll be great. And he's like, yeah, man, bitcoin. And I'm like, I don't. I don't really know. I actually went and looked it up after he mentioned as like, is it. Is it like right now? Is something getting voted on? And I should probably tell it for the sake of people who listen to the show is you're like, well, guys should. Isn't that something that guys should know? Isn't that something he should actually check? I don't know. [00:44:15] Speaker A: No. I don't even know, like, what's. [00:44:18] Speaker B: I don't feel like it. I don't feel like it's important, you know, like, it's just gonna be. It's just. I don't know, it's just gonna be a thing. Bitcoin's gonna keep working. It's kind of how I think about it. Uh, what's your. Actually in the. In the realm of probably things that you don't like talking about, uh, what's your take on bitcoin treasuries? [00:44:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Pretty involved. Pretty involved. [00:44:40] Speaker B: Feels like the new fad. This. This time I have a couple of days. [00:44:44] Speaker A: I feel like there's. There isn't like a single such thing. I'm also. I'm a little wary about what exactly to say because there's some Relevance to companies we've invested in. But I don't know when it will be public and more than one, to be clear. So I do need to be a little bit careful. It's unfortunate if we did this again in like six months and I can give my whole spiel on it and reflect on what happened in the meantime. Do you know what I can try to do? This will be amusing, at least for me, if not for you and your audience. I can try to talk about it in a way that after the fact it will be obvious what I was talking about, even if I'm not being too specific right now. So I think the thing that you have to admit, no matter how distasteful you find it, I completely get that it's aesthetically displeasing, especially to people who've been involved for. Probably the longer you've been involved, the weirder you find this. You have to acknowledge that in a very similar way to ETFs, I think this was kind of inevitable. I think the only way this phenomenon could have been prevented is a combination of factors that are so unlikely as to basically be impossible. And that's why this was inevitable. So that would be that if regular large listed companies had copied Saylor, basically, if there had been more than one microstrategy, and in fact if there had been 10 to 100 microstrategies, that would kind of have closed off the avenue for this. Because basically what's happening is it's a result of capital controls. There's pools of capital all over the world for a variety of reasons that vary depending on the jurisdiction. That would buy Bitcoin if they could, but they can't. So they have to find some other avenue for it. They found it with MicroStrategy and then what, like four years or something passed with no real, not even competitor, but just imitation, I think. And given clearly there's massively more pent up demand for this and no regular company did anything about it. And that's the part that I think is, you know, I said it just the way I phrased it just there maybe makes it seem a bit more mysterious, but I think if you scratch surface a bit more, it's not mysterious at all because it even goes back to what we were talking about before. We were not explicitly, but just this idea of the way that currently public companies function on a fiat standard lends itself to this, that they don't really have any incentive other than don't get fired, keep getting the free index, source money, keep misallocating capital, just not so badly that you get fired, but crucially don't even really allocate it well either because that means taking a real risk and that's the crux of it. Right? Apparently in hindsight there was nobody other than Saylor at any scale. I mean there's like little ones here and there who dabble, but there's nobody other than Saylor at any scale who knew it was a good idea or was able to execute this superficially extremely risky thing, like career risky, let's say socially risky, but obviously given our understanding, not actually financially risky at all. So the fact of their existing, the capital controls, it creates a pent up demand and they're, I mean basically supply and demand. Right, that's what I'm getting at. There's the demand is created by the capital controls. The supply wasn't created at all other than buy Saylor and it was long enough that people worked out how to do it entirely from scratch. I think that's, that's kind of the novelty here that probably relevant post ETF as well because that gives a lot more kind of institutional credibility and validation of oh shit, there really is a lot of pent up demand for this. So if Apple isn't going to do it or whoever, then why not just start a new company to do it? Or why not buy an existing company that's kind of not doing anything and do that. So that's my kind of positive point that I think it's more or less inevitable really more as a function of fiat than Bitcoin. I kind of see this as having very little to do with, with Bitcoin itself. And that actually leads into my criticism that basically is the gist of the criticism that it's like not really even a bitcoin thing, this is a fiat thing. This is the problems with arbitrage. Yeah, yeah, exactly. [00:49:19] Speaker B: That's what it's always seemed like to me. Is it just an arbitrage opportunity? [00:49:22] Speaker A: It's arbitraging the slow motion collapse of fiat and the, you know, the, the opportunities that are in particular created by capital controls that are themselves designed to slow down the collapse of fiat. So from that perspective, inevitable. I don't really see the point of being that upset about it. Again, you can dislike it, you can think it's sort of aesthetically impure or whatever, which I would probably agree with, but it's still going to in exactly the same way as ETFs were always going to happen, this was also always going to happen. Maybe not necessarily in exactly this form, but certainly something like it. So that, I guess, is the positive. The negative, though, is that this is probably a lot less original. This is more in keeping with the general sentiment on bitcoin Twitter, I guess, other than the, you know, the paper bitcoin summer crowd. But most of which I think is ironic anyway. [00:50:14] Speaker B: But, oh well. [00:50:17] Speaker A: What I do worry about is it's basically the flip side of this virtually has nothing to do with bitcoin. Like the whole. We don't need to get into the details of this because I wouldn't even really hold myself up as an expert, but the whole MNAV trademark, it has as much implied leverage on the way down as it does on the way up. I won't pick on anybody in particular, but I think a lot of the ones that I'm even a little bit aware of, not necessarily knowing their entire workings, are very dangerously, to the point of incompetently run in the sense that they're. The classic critique here is they're just ETFs, but with way higher expense ratios. Some of them are actually leveraged ETFs with very poor financial management, such that they're probably going to go bust if, like, I have a lot of sympathy for the idea that actually this is what triggers the next bear market, that there's so much leverage introduced. [00:51:17] Speaker B: I really kind of think so too. [00:51:18] Speaker A: They feel like this mechanism that not only do a lot of the treasury companies themselves get wiped out, but this sell pressure is so severe that it impacts bitcoin as a whole. I have a lot of sympathy for that too. So you could maybe even tie these points together. I'm kind of thinking out loud at the moment, so I may regret this, I'm not sure. But these points are related, right? This is the flip side that the incentives are so bad in fiat that this actually seems like kind of a good idea, right? Like the desire to evade the capital controls and get hard asset exposure and outrun inflation and, you know, blah, blah, blah. Everything else that we talk about in every capital markets context, that's what drives. [00:51:57] Speaker B: To basically get debt at 4% and to buy an asset that's going to go up 30. [00:52:05] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. That, I think, is what's driving this. And I think that will end badly. And then the final point is that. And again, this is coming back to they really have that much to do with bitcoin. It seems like a lot of the people involved in these are only interested in the arbitrage and aren't really interested in the bitcoin component at all. And not that they would have to be because again, this is very similar to obviously BlackRock doesn't care about bitcoin and yet they have however many hundreds of billions in the etf. It's not that you would expect them to be, it's that it's just sort of unfortunate that they aren't because you could do much more interesting things if you were. And I think tying all of this together, this is the point I wanted to get to in terms of the criticism. I think where this is going to end up is once the M Nav trade unwinds and once it screws people on the way down, which may already be happening actually. Again, we don't need too much detail there, but in the past couple of weeks it's not looking great for this running any longer as it starts to come down and there's a lot of people who, where a lot of investors, either retail or probably institutional is going to be more relevant here just because they can buy more and exert more kind of organized pressure, are going to become very disillusioned with what was pitched to them as like, oh, this just goes up forever, right? Yeah, Bitcoin goes up forever, therefore this goes up forever. [00:53:28] Speaker B: And they won't be philosophically aligned, they don't, they don't care for any other reason. [00:53:31] Speaker A: It all be philosophically aligned. And they'll start to get very annoyed with this culmination of factors that, you know, all of which in their own right ways are just implying that it's badly running. And the interesting point I think it's going to get to is that ultimately the only real justification for an mnav, I wouldn't say above one, but like far above one, because you have the whole logic about, okay, if they can keep tapping the markets, then they can grow their bitcoin per share. [00:54:02] Speaker B: Refresh me on so the M nav. What's the significance of a measurement of one in the M nav? [00:54:14] Speaker A: Even that's not really clear. I mean the, the very simplistic argument would be as follows, that because these are basically just ETFs, right? If that's our outlook, right. They're basically just ETFs. They shouldn't be valued at more than the bitcoin in them, right? And so an m nav of one is like an ETF will always 100%. It's multiple of net Asset value is what the acronym stands for. Now that's a very, very simplistic argument. There's ways you can break that by saying okay, well if it's levered then obviously it's going to go up more than Bitcoin. I honestly off the top of my head don't know what the relevant algebra would be to get that back into what MNAV do you think is fair or whatever. I'm also relatively sympathetic to I guess to two arguments that are related to one another one is if you really buy into there's massive pent up demand constrained by capital controls that would be looking to get into this, you could make an argument like roughly along the following lines that there's going to be a second best investment opportunity which is probably something along the lines of the expected return of the index. Now the expected return of the index is going to be significantly less than the expected return of Bitcoin at least in the minds of the people doing this. And they could therefore argue that if you, you start with an NAV way above one, but you also have some expectation of like how long is bitcoin going to go up for? What's your target price in your intended holding period? 5 years, 10 years, whatever and basically just do a DCF to make this work. So you say that okay, yes I'm buying an MNAV of 3 or something. That sounds insane on paper but frankly I know I'm buying massively overvalued bitcoin but because I'm doing it from the starting point of not being able to buy Bitcoin directly, this will still be a better investment than my next best alternative because I'm baking in the is going to go to one but also Bitcoin itself is going to go up so much that it offsets that by. [00:56:15] Speaker B: More than my forex. So I'll lose 50% of the profit but it's on money that's not going to make that 50% in, in any other context, I mean you could do. [00:56:24] Speaker A: A whole episode on this which I wouldn't be the right person to talk about it. I just be clear as well. I don't even like really find this all that interesting. I find it kind of annoying and distracting. But I'm at least aware of the rough mechanics of it. Right. So with that as the saying, I think when the MNAV and by the M NAV trade basically what I mean is that any treasury company that has a very high M NAV can almost by definition there's like a few quirks in this but almost by definition they can issue equity on a value accretive basis to the existing investors on the basis that they then just go and buy bitcoin with it. So you can, you can virtually guarantee your bitcoin per share will go up. You should be very suspicious about this though, because it sounds like it's just a perpetual motion machine. [00:57:10] Speaker B: And if it sounds like one, it's probably not a good. [00:57:13] Speaker A: Well, it basically is one. Yeah. It's like it's only true at the exact moment you do it. You have no guarantee that this will work at any other moment you do it. So obviously if the price of bitcoin goes down, this doesn't make sense. And if you run out of buyers, this doesn't make sense either. So this is what this unwinding and people getting very disillusioned. That's what I mean by, you know, on the way up. This, the M Nav trade is great. Everybody's, you know, outperforming even Bitcoin by 100 times or whatever. But it's going to be way. It's going to be more brutal on the way down than it was exciting on the way up. And so with that in mind, I think that's even, that's not original. Like this is what everyone, I think, who's thought about this for more than five minutes has the conclusion that they have come to. They may be different when they think it's going to happen, but it's almost certainly going to happen at some point and it may be happening right now, as I mentioned before. So when that does finally happen and it's kind of irrefutable that nobody's going to be able to write it up again, I think the question then is how do you justify not even like an M Nav above one necessarily, but how do you justify the company even existing and having any expenses if they aren't getting a yield from the bitcoin, Right. If the assumption is that a hundred percent of their assets or as close as possible to 100% of their assets are in bitcoin, how do you justify this even being a company at all? And so this is the bit where like this will make a lot more sense in hindsight. What it is I'm really talking about, I can't say now, but that's the point we'll come to. And a lot of the people, this is why I'm wary of the people running these things who clearly don't know shit about bitcoin and are just doing it for the thrill of the, you know, the arbitrage of the M Nav cycle. [00:58:58] Speaker B: On the way up, they're real estate bros. And now they're just Bitcoin treasury bros. [00:59:03] Speaker A: They're going to be under severe pressure by their institutional, their disillusioned institutional investors to do something with the bitcoin and they're going to be like, what do you mean? I don't like literally what does that even mean? And then, and then they'll be fired. And then, and then, and then that you know what I'm really talking about, that I can't say now will be more obvious. [00:59:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's funny because there's actually another element to this and this is why I'm not so worried about like, everybody talks about like all these bitcoin treasury companies or whatever and then they say like, and then their strategy and they're, they're going to go under, do all this, they're going to fall victim to the same thing. And all I can think is like, well, they actually run a profit, they actually have a profitable business. And what's funny is I didn't put this whole picture together because this was confusing to me until I kind of found bitcoin and started wrapping my head around the bigger economic picture. In Fiat is this idea that you could have a profitable company that quote unquote wasn't growing fast enough. And if you weren't growing fast enough, you, you're dead. And that there's no way to just have to just have a profitable company that was like sustainable. And I'm like, how does that doesn't make any sense. Like that's what profit is, you know, like that, that's what, that's what it means to be profitable, is that you're sustainable. [01:00:30] Speaker A: Don't be so primitive. [01:00:32] Speaker B: And, and, and, and I was like, is this just how the economy has gone? That like, you know, because of tech and stuff, that if you're not growing 40% a year, 50% a year, you're dead in the water. But then it, it made me realize that no, this is about the money, this is about financing and kind of the nature of who gets resources because VC capital, like when, when you do have somebody that's growing, they're literally going to soak up 10x100x as many resources as actually makes sense to invest in them because of the nature of how the Fiat is going. And you're going to get, if Your profit's only 5%, your profit isn't keeping up with inflation. If you're not aggressively growing, then you literally are dead in the water because the, the cost and what you're, what you're fighting against, the tide is running against you faster than you can actually than your, than your margin on just staying where you are. And the thing is, is that if you have, if Bitcoin actually changes that and these deleveraging events actually helps a company that has a profit because it means that they can keep investing in their treasury. So if you have a 5% profit company like in the fiat world, you're, you're practically, then you're not growing at 30% a year and getting more users and, and getting Google interested in you and all of this stuff, then you're not really going anywhere. But if you have a bitcoin treasury and you have a 5% profit, then doesn't even matter if it crashes. And a whole bunch of these stupid Bitcoin treasury companies that don't have a prop, they don't do anything. They literally just, they, they sell a stock and they buy, they buy bitcoin with it when they deleverage and, and the price crashes and they have to sell everything. You're 5% profit means you still don't have to, you don't have to touch it. In fact you just get massively discounted bitcoin and you can just keep putting in your treasury and putting your Treasury. And so a profitable company that has a bitcoin treasury is not only just naturally sustainable, but they will benefit astronomically from the fact that unsustainable businesses are having to sell their Bitcoin. And it goes back to what should be the natural obvious conclusion is if you have a, if you have a profitable business, it survives because that's what, that's what profit's supposed to mean, you know. So anyway, it's just wild to think that again that's why strategy is different in my mind is leverage their Bitcoin directly, they just have profit. So. [01:03:05] Speaker A: Well, that's, that's why I made the distinction before when, when I was saying up that, that comparison that nobody copied strategy so people thought okay, well we'll just do one from scratch. And, and that's the leap that introduces the kind of nonsensical where, where it is purely arbitrage. It's not, it's not about, you know, sensible corporate finance or whatever. One other thing I can say there, which again is like, I can't say why I'm saying this, but maybe, hopefully it'll be obvious in hindsight is that another, what I think will be really healthy development of all of this, which it'll be interesting to see that. I can see there'd be kind of a race against time as to whether what I'm about to describe just happens naturally or whether it takes a collapse and a deleveraging of the. If you want to call them pure play treasury companies like pseudo ETFs, if it takes that to then trigger a change of heart. But something I'm looking forward to, and it seems like just a more natural thing to expect anyway, is companies becoming described as Bitcoin treasury companies. Basically like reclaiming the language, almost calling companies Bitcoin treasury companies because they're profitable and they have Bitcoin Treasuries. Right. And their profits are going towards buying Bitcoin for their Treasury. And so you could make the case. I mean, it would obviously vary massively from one real life example to another. But that. That ought to be considerably more highly valued than a pseudo etf because you can slap an MNAV on the Bitcoin if you want, but then you also have the value of the positive returns generating business that is contributing to growing that stack that you're valuing. And so I'm looking forward to that becoming more of the norm. That could be like five years away. I mean, I don't know how many. How many cycles and how many deleveragings or whatever we need to get through before people shift their mindset to that being normal and not what we're seeing now. [01:04:57] Speaker B: Who knows? Oh, man. Yeah. I don't know how you get rid of the. The. That leveraging mindset. Like it's such a culture thing. And what's funny is that the culture gets worse quick, but it gets better slow. [01:05:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:05:12] Speaker B: You know, like it's. It really. I think it's. It was in Douglas Murray, but it was a quote by somebody else. So it's a Douglas Murray quoting someone else, but it was. Everybody goes insane all at once and really quickly, but you regain your sanity slowly one at a time. [01:05:37] Speaker A: I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's very applicable. [01:05:40] Speaker B: Yeah. But the other two other two big things that I really wanted to talk to you about because partly this is one of the routes I'm going down was. And I haven't read it yet, actually, I had. I had it brought up. It's somewhere in my tabs over here, my 800 tabs. But your. Your piece on the thing on vibe coding. [01:05:59] Speaker A: Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. [01:06:00] Speaker B: And then also stable coins, because I actually really liked your. Did. Did you. Did you listen to the episode? [01:06:10] Speaker A: So I did this. This started laughing because I was assuming you were going to bring this up at some point that I was listening to this, and I really enjoyed it. I always enjoy listening to you reading me because I've done it so many times. I mean, I'm sure I've done it for everything that you've done, but that is now so many times that I find it far more natural to hear it in your voice rather than mine. But the reason I find this one so funny. I don't know how well you remembered it, but I teased you a bit on Twitter at the time because there's two things in this episode that were hilarious. One was that at one point you said something. It's not an exact quote, but something to the effect of like, okay, we're going to wrap up any minute now. And then you spoke for another hour. [01:06:54] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:06:56] Speaker A: Like, in summary, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. But then you just. [01:06:59] Speaker B: Somebody has made a meme of that. Actually, I've got it set. Saved on my computer somewhere. It's a meme of. I think in the meme, it's a picture of freaking. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Crazy consp. Oh, my God, why I'm brain farting so hard. The. The conspiracy guy. The. [01:07:19] Speaker A: Oh, from Always Sunny in Philadelphia. [01:07:21] Speaker B: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The podcast. [01:07:23] Speaker A: Oh, no, the. [01:07:23] Speaker B: The. [01:07:24] Speaker A: Wait, no, I don't. [01:07:25] Speaker B: The guy. The guy, he's. Oh, my God. What is wrong with me? What is wrong with my brain? [01:07:31] Speaker A: The. [01:07:31] Speaker B: The dude who's just always. All this stuff about Sandy Hook. He got sued. [01:07:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:07:38] Speaker B: Alex Jones. Oh, my God. But it's Alex Jones meme or whatever. It's this guy. It's like, all right, well, we're gonna be wrapping up. We got just a minute or two left. And then he's just like, I can't believe they just have a fear of everything. Like, it was like, two hours later. Oh, Jesus. That killed me. [01:07:53] Speaker A: So the other thing, though, right? So you say that, and then, like, 40 minutes later. This is probably my fault, because I think I. I don't remember exactly how this happened, but I think I just, like, zoned out for a minute or something. And. And then when I. When I started paying attention again, you were talking about some. Some guy who got a kidney transplant, and. And then he started liking the same kind of jam sandwiches as the guy, and I was like, how did I get there? What does this have to do with stable. [01:08:23] Speaker B: How did I get there? [01:08:26] Speaker A: So I don't know. You tell me. What does that have to do to. [01:08:29] Speaker B: I don't remember. I Don't remember. I'm sure I had something that was tangentially related to Stable Coins, and then there was something that is tangentially related to the thing that was tangentially related to stablecoins. And then about four or five layers down, and then he got a kidney and he started liking the same jam sandwiches as the other guy. Oh. [01:08:48] Speaker A: I mean, it was interesting. I. I didn't. I didn't have any complaints about the content. I was just a bit confused. [01:08:56] Speaker B: I can. I can see why. I can see why I confuse myself sometimes. So it's not. Not totally out of the expectation, but yeah. So the piece on Stable Coins, what was really interesting was like. Because this has been. My brother has actually dealt with this because. Is it Leden? I think Leaden had an option or has an option to pay out in Stablecoin, and. And he was trying to get money quickly. And his. He has. He's had, like, weird banking situations before, and he just, like, hates dealing with it. So he's like, maybe I can just get USDC real quick or whatever it was. And. No, it was definitely USDC because he had a tra. He had to move it on Ethereum, and so they paid him out and he got it, like, immediately. And he was like, okay, sweet. This is dope. Now what the heck do I do with it? And. And then he started, like, looking into it, and he's like, oh, my God, what is. What is happening right now? Like, I can't. I can't spend it until I get gas, which is, like, a whole other token that I have to buy into my wallet. And I can't. I literally can't buy gas with it because I have to have gas to buy it. And so he had to. So he literally had to buy it with, like, Bitcoin and, like, some sort of a swap thing to get it. And he'd buy. To buy, like, 100 bucks worth of Ethereum gas. And they, like, put it in the wallet. And he's like, trying to say. I remember he would, like, message me, like, 20 times that day. He's like, this is so. What is happening right now? Why do I have to do this? And again, he's like, you can't just take it out of the wallet. Like, I have money in the wallet. But. But he was like, why didn't I just have tether? Why didn't they use tether? [01:10:42] Speaker A: And. [01:10:42] Speaker B: And just going into all these issues. But it was such a perfect example of this, like, disjointed lack of interoperability between so many things in the space and why the lock in for one stable coin is so bad. And it's. And it's even like artificially bad, you know, like it almost seems like just in like a natural sense, it wouldn't be so grossly disconnected. But because these things are running on different chains with different wallets and all of this stuff. And then you've got that natural like trust lock in. It was like, well, somebody else is using tether. I'll just use tether. I can't send you tether. And have you any receive anything other than tether. And then all of the tools that use tether only you're going to work with tether and all of this stuff. And so you brought up in that, in the article, which I hadn't really thought about at length, was that when it works over lightning, lightning is naturally swapping. Like you're not actually, when you're moving like taproot assets and stuff is you're not actually sending the same asset on the other end as you're sending at the beginning. Which is exactly why like you can literally pay tether or USDT to pay a lightning invoice, like to pay a SATS invoice. Yep. Which essentially makes the idea of the exchange, like on an exchange of swapping between tether and sats and Bitcoin kind of redundant. [01:12:16] Speaker A: Yeah. There's an interesting point here that I'd. I don't think I say this explicitly. I haven't actually reread it in a. I honestly, listening to you is probably the last time I read it, but I don't think I was explicit about this, that there's a really good point to be made here. I think more about rhetoric than anything else, which is that for tabroot assets, this whole system of swapping at the edges has usually, to my knowledge at least, I'm open to being corrected about this, but this is. It's basically just my memory of how people have talked about this over the years. It's been presented as a kind of a clunky workaround to enable routing over lightning at all. Right. And I mean, I guess that's true. I don't put myself forward as kind of a technical expert on this or much of anything, but I think that's kind of unfortunate because it's kind of intrinsically negative. It's like, yeah, well, it sort of has to work that way. It's not ideal, but what choice do we have? We want it to be on lightning, but I think so this point I do make in the piece, it's the comparison that I don't think I drew that much attention to because that's coming to me now that in, what do you want to call it? Financial terms, I guess, as opposed to technical ones. This is amazing. This opens up possibilities for how to use this that are extremely important. And do you want to call it a trade off? I don't know. I mean, even that maybe seems a bit forced and artificial. There's separate issues, right? It's like, yes, technically it's a bit clunky, but exactly this point that you're seeing your brother actually experience directly that the dynamics of which is also, for what it's worth, is a technical issue. Right. So this stems from technically how these things work on Ethereum or Tron or whatever. The dynamics are such that everybody has to trust the same issuer. This is like a snapshot of the whole piece, basically, right? Everybody has to trust the same issuer. At which point, why do you even need a blockchain? It's just a larp. It's like decentralization theater. Shoving a blockchain into it, having the idea of. So picture this. Actually, this is something that your brother should have been asking or maybe was asking himself, right. If the person who sent him USDC and whoever he then wants to send it to. Right. They're all basically banking with Circle, right? So why does he need gas? Like, that's. I'm kind of reframing. I get the whole. There's a more. There's like the way that you articulated it is almost like a more emotional response to like, it's ridiculous that you need Ethereum like at all for anything ever. [01:14:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:14:51] Speaker A: But if you, if you drill at it a bit more and kind of pin down the technicalities of this, why. [01:14:56] Speaker B: Can'T you just send it to their Circle? [01:14:58] Speaker A: Yeah, why can't Circle just switch the entries on their database and no, you don't need gas and you don't need Ethereum and you don't need a blockchain and you're just banking with Circle. Like that makes a lot more sense or would make a lot more sense. But basically the reason they don't is that they get to be an illegal bank because regulators are scared or wowed or whatever. [01:15:20] Speaker B: Regulatory arbitrage. [01:15:22] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't really know what the politics. [01:15:23] Speaker B: Are there, but it's like it's running on Ethereum. [01:15:25] Speaker A: Like I feel a little bit conflicted because I don't want to be rooting for regulators Shutting things down. But equally, I don't want the lack of regulatory action to be misconstrued by crypto enthusiasts as demonstrating the efficacy of what they've built, because it's the exact opposite. It's like. It's because this is shit. They're not touching it because they're so confused by it. If you actually just ran a database and were an illegal bank, you'd all be in jail. So, anyway, and that's the interesting comparison to lightning, because although again, it's presented as this weird, clunky, technical workaround that has to be that way because of how lightning works, what you actually get, and I do make this point as well, I think much later down in the piece, what you actually end up with is something that is way more. It's not even like it basically is. It is an analogue to how Visa actually. Well, not just that credit card networks work, but maybe even more kind of provocatively, what one of the original points of more modern central banks were. So I don't know how far you want to go down that rabbit hole as well, but in the US at least. So this is maybe a little bit controversial because on Bitcoin Twitter, there's the whole meme of like, the creature from Jekyll island and so on, which is, you know, there's. There is some truth to. But it's not the entire truth. It's one of these things of, like, what's the. What's the Carlin saying? The. You know, you don't need conspiracy when interests align. I'm sure you're familiar. Yeah, yeah. So, yes, obviously, if you control the money supply, you do it whatever you want. And, you know, you can get as Bond villainy as you like about that interpretation of it, but if you actually look at what they said at the time when they were creating the Federal Reserve, one of the primary reasons to want to do it was to make the process of. What was it called? I'm blanking on it now. I think it was called check. Oh, I'm totally blanking on what the name of this process. Basically ensuring people could send checks across banks and receive the full amount at the other end. [01:17:26] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. [01:17:26] Speaker A: And there's an expression for this that I don't. No, I know what you're talking about, because we don't do it anymore anyway. [01:17:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:17:32] Speaker A: But basically what would happen before the Federal Reserve is that banks would do what's called clipping, which meant because in order to enact this transaction, they would have to take credit risks with each other. And they would have to price that in basically because this is what happens with fractional reserve when there is no central bank. And so the explicit mandate, or one of the explicit mandates of setting up the Federal Reserve was to enable check clearing at parent. And so I'm only introducing all of that. The historical rabbit hole maybe is a bit of a distraction in terms of then getting back to tabard assets, but one of the functions of central banking and the entire function of Visa and basically all payment networks that run on fiat is to enable the same thing that Taproot assets enables with the massive and amazing difference that actually there is no credit in between them. So if you think about the central bank solution to this is basically, well, we'll get rid of the credit risk by just printing money forever, so you don't need to worry about it because we'll always just print more money, which solves the immediate problem, but obviously causes much bigger problems down the line. The Ethereum solution is this gas shit show that your brother went through, which is way worse than the actual problem being solved, at least in my opinion. A lot of people don't seem to think that, but I think they will be forced to eventually. And then finally you get to the tabard asset solution is basically genius because it has the best of both, right? It has from the fiat on Visa or on central banking, it has actual clearance such that you can have independent counterparties at the other side and you don't need everybody to use the same bank. But then also from crypto, it has the advantage of tokens. And that's maybe the last point to touch on in terms of. I realize I'm jumping around all over in terms of the order I actually lay out the argument in the piece. But what I start off saying, which is hard for a lot of Bitcoiners to accept, but I think you just have to, if you want to be serious about this conversation. As stupid as a lot of it is, stablecoins are still better than fiat in some ways because fiat is even dumber. Right. [01:19:41] Speaker B: I actually think there's two or three major problems with fiat that stablecoins solve, which is kind of crazy. Like, it's. It's like stable coins are actually astronomically better from a debt perspective. [01:19:57] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, I say that. Yeah, they're all fully reserve banks. It's one bank. [01:20:02] Speaker B: They're fully reserved banks, which is a huge deal. You know, like. And they literally do not survive because it. Because that's literally. It's a whole job. Yeah. Is to Be a fully reserved unit for whatever. You know, like they literally tether literally has to have bonds equal to the banking system is 0% reserve. Like there's no, they don't have to have anything. They literally just invent debt out of thin air. And the fact of separating the payment system so that people's deposits don't have to be in a bank that's now just issuing hundreds of billions of dollars in debt backed by nothing like producing fractional reserve. It separates out people's deposits from the for payments, for normal payments and going day to day stuff into a stablecoin which literally guts the banks from being able to fractionally reserve over and over and over again into hundreds of billions and trillions and trillions of dollars. That's actually a big freaking deal that has nothing to do with whether or not, you know, somebody's going to put a credit score or a, you know, carbon rating on my payments. Because that's going to be there one way or the other. [01:21:08] Speaker A: Right. [01:21:08] Speaker B: You know, I don't know that that's, that is wild. And the fact that people dismiss that, I, I think that's a, that's a huge structural change to how debt and capital is managed in the banking system and to separate payments out of that so that people's day to day retail is not even attached to that thing anymore. That's wild. [01:21:29] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah. So you've got that one. You've got probably the more obvious one at least to like regular people who aren't economics nerds like us. You've just got the frictionlessness of sending and you've got to be careful there because you obviously can't. It's not really censorship resistant. It's like censorship minimized or something. It's considerably more frictionless than trying to. [01:21:56] Speaker B: Interact with passive censorship rather than active censorship. In a sense. [01:22:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I like that way of putting it. Yeah, that's helpful. [01:22:03] Speaker B: It's a reactive thing where they can still censor you if they find out you're doing something bad and they KYC or whatever. [01:22:11] Speaker A: But that's actually, that's really good. Yeah, you don't, you don't need to ask permission to use it in the first place, but they can still crack down on you. [01:22:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:22:21] Speaker A: Which is better, right? Because. Because with Fiat you have to ask permission. [01:22:24] Speaker B: KYC verification or censorship on the back end when something apparently goes wrong as opposed to on the front end. Like I can send you tether without a tether account or a KYC anything. You know, you just have. I just Send you your keys like, just like anything. [01:22:39] Speaker A: So, yeah, so, so it's is better than Fiat in both those respects, but it's significantly worse in this weirdness of everybody has to be one bank. And basically this is, this is a nice link to make actually. And this is diving back into. To what I do say in the piece that the, the ultimate reason for this, what ties all of this together, is that basically Ether isn't money. Right. None of the crypto shit is actually money. And so you can't actually settle with it. [01:23:08] Speaker B: Right. [01:23:09] Speaker A: So nobody even bothers. So it's literally just tether is like 80, 90% of the market and everybody's just going back and forth with Tether and paying eth for no real reason because it may as well just be a database. It basically is a database. It just also happens to have like a public mirroring on Ethereum, but it's only Tether's private database that matters. And so by moving it to Taproot Assets, you get all of the good things here. You, you still get some of the. [01:23:33] Speaker B: Bad things, because the bad things are inherent. Yeah, you're. [01:23:37] Speaker A: You, you kind of have to, you know, as a good bitcoiner, I then have to say, but you shouldn't do any of this because Fiat's evil. You should just use Bitcoin instead. [01:23:44] Speaker B: Also. It's a shitcoin. [01:23:46] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. That's kind of the, I think, is the silver lining of all of this. I've said this a couple of times. I think probably this essay was the first time I really spelled it out, but I have enjoyed teasing people about this on Twitter that. I mean, unless it just fails altogether, like there are reasons that Tapard assets could just not take off and not ever really be a thing. [01:24:02] Speaker B: Sure. [01:24:03] Speaker A: Besides that, I can't see how you could fail to be excited as an orange pilling mechanism. Right. Because if you get people actually using stablecoins as Taproot assets that are running over lightning, you can imagine if that really takes off enough, like, if it becomes a big enough thing, a lot of people doing it wouldn't even know that that's happening. Right. It's like, this is my bank, these are my dollars. Whatever I send them, the person claims they got them. And there's an obvious analog here. We talk about this kind of thing in Bitcoin all the time, even without the stablecoin angle to it, that the ultimate victory is when people don't even know they're using it. Right. People, for the most part, don't have any clue how normal banking works and how normal payments networks where they just press a button and they see their balance. They press a button, someone else gets their money, everybody's happy, will also win. When that happens with Bitcoin, you know, from a user's perspective, basically nothing's changed. But what's actually happening is it's writing over lightning. Then from that starting point, it's so much easier to orange pill them. It's literally you just like flick a switch, you like change a variable or something. You're like, oh, I actually want this to be Bitcoin now. Can you just send me bitcoin instead? [01:25:13] Speaker B: I was about to say, in any sort of Taproot assets wallet, you're already speaking lightning, you're already speaking. It's a key setup. Like every. Everything interacting with a tether taproot asset or any sort of stablecoin taproot asset would look identical to how they interact with Bitcoin. It would be getting them familiar. [01:25:31] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. [01:25:31] Speaker B: With all of the infrastructure, the interaction and the visibility and everything, the process, without having them to worry about or think about changing the monetary unit. [01:25:44] Speaker A: I mean, you've obviously been in the space for a very long time. Anyone's been in the space for about probably even more than two years or something. And at any point in that history as well, they know the unbelievable headache of trying to explain it to normies. Not just theoretically, but it gets even worse when you try to do it in real life. And arguably there have been improvements there. Amusingly, most of the improvements purists tend to dislike because basically you improve it by making it more centralized so that it's a better user experience. So like, obviously Wallet Satoshi is probably the first thing that comes to mind is like a major breakthrough in ux. But that is obviously, you know, is made it clearer in terms of the. Under the underlying functionality. So from that starting point of like even explaining something like, you know, like the classic thing with lightning liquidity where it's like, oh yeah, you actually there's interestingly similar to the gas thing, by the way. Like bitcoiners don't really like to admit this, but yeah, you can actually receive bitcoin until you have bitcoin. Like, wait, have you ever tried to explain this to a normie? [01:26:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:26:44] Speaker A: It's just so painful. So imagine going from that to like literally all you need to do to orange pill so. Or not even orange pill, but to like demonstrate bitcoin to show them it working is like, show me your Banking app. Cool. Press that button. [01:26:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:26:59] Speaker A: Now you're receiving bitcoin instead. You're welcome. Like, that's gonna be so amazing if or when that happens. So, yeah, I feel compelled to go through all that because I also feel compelled to give the classic bitcoin, it's all a shitcoin anyway. You shouldn't care. I think it depends on your perspective. I think there's an entirely valid perspective for caring about this. [01:27:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And I think the big thing too is that people who've gone down the rabbit hole, and especially from philosophical or economics perspective, like, when they're really interested in the idea, it's easy for them to just go down the rabbit hole. And then all of the things that they have to learn or do or associate with and the tools, what is an address and what's a key, that all just becomes like this process of making sense of what this new world is to them. And they forget that we've kind of reached the limit, at least in my thinking of kind of the orange pilling people into bitcoin. And now we're entering the, yeah, it's just got to work better zone because we found all the economics nerds, we found all the philosophical, you know, like, we got. We got like 90% of them. Okay. Like, we got like maybe a 10, 20% more gap to, to tack on for people who haven't heard about it. But otherwise we kind of got. Got the crew. But that means that there's like 10 things to tackle to get people from fiat to sovereign bitcoin. And everybody's like, well, you just have to do it all at once. The tool has to be ready to do all of these things. And it's very much like somebody who's used to snail mail and watching broadcast media and like everything in 1990s. And then being like, you should be sovereign, running your own website and you have, you have your own business and you're watching on Netflix, you're only watching streaming and you have torrents just in case streaming doesn't work. Like, it's like this whole. You're asking them to shift their entire ecosystem of how they think about money and payments and their apps and what they use and who they trust. Like, that that's only going to happen in pieces. That's going to happen in Lego blocks. [01:29:04] Speaker A: So that's a healthy perspective. Yeah, yeah. [01:29:07] Speaker B: And the first thing may literally just be getting them used to an address. What the hell is an address? [01:29:11] Speaker A: But like, even there, all that stuff took 20 years. And it's nowhere near as complicated as money. [01:29:16] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. And it's going to take 20 years. Like we're, we're in the, this thinking of like we're going to have a peer to peer streaming Netflix in 1995 and everybody has to build it right now. And it's, there's no center and there's no anything to it and we still don't have it in 2025. I think we're close to the technology to enable something like that, but we still don't have it. I do think that's where we're going. Two weeks. Two weeks. [01:29:43] Speaker A: But I say this, I said this like an hour ago. I don't even remember what the context was then. But we're just going to be saying we're so early for the rest of our life. [01:29:51] Speaker B: Forever. Yeah, like we haven't even had our Amazon moment really. And like, you know, we haven't kind of broken into. I really think it's going to be capital markets is collateral. [01:30:01] Speaker A: It's gonna be bitcoin transferring companies, isn't it? [01:30:03] Speaker B: Yeah, well, maybe, but I think it's gonna be bitcoin as collateral and starting to, starting to readjust the price of debt and getting like some sort of real interest rate. And I think that can run for 10, $20 trillion market before it starts to really have a dent in kind of the, the flip side of the coin that it's, you know, trying to be a, an opposite to. And it probably needs a bear market, at least one good bear market to kind of clean out all the trash. But when that's a 20 trillion dollar market, that's when I think it really starts to have kind of a stair step more gradual. Like you know, you work out, you work out the kinks and like that process that's just an astronomical market. And then everything else can piggyback on that because it's such a strong foundation. Is bitcoin as collateral for all the things that we do, like all the value and contracts and that makes a lot of sense, but it's just, it's going to take 30 years. It's going to take 30 years. It just is. And you know, and we're just way, way, way, way, way, way, way ahead of ourselves. The fact that we have lightning now is actually mind blowing. And, and I think it's, if you look at the history of like protocols and the Internet and stuff, like we're way, we're way ahead. Like we're moving way faster in my opinion than what a normal protocol would at this level. But in fact, we're kind of at the end of time here. Do you have a minute to talk about vibe coding? What do you do with coding? One minute. One minute. Three minutes. Three minutes. Five. Just five minutes. About. [01:31:39] Speaker A: See, I really can only give you one minute, I'm afraid. We should just do another episode about it. [01:31:45] Speaker B: But. We should just do another episode about it. [01:31:46] Speaker A: I'll give you a teaser now. Right? So, okay, that. That piece. But you haven't even read it yet, so I don't want to spoil it. [01:31:51] Speaker B: I haven't. I'll read it and then we'll do a show. [01:31:54] Speaker A: Okay. Do you want the teaser, though? [01:31:56] Speaker B: Give me a teaser. Give me a teaser. [01:31:58] Speaker A: So the teaser is basically that. This time is not different. Stop your whining. Not your whining. Stop one's whining. This is. This is not a conscious intelligence. Even the name AI really irks me. There's no hope of. Of reclaiming that. We have to call it that now, unfortunately. But I honestly think there's a bit of perverse neuro linguistic programming there that tricks people into thinking it is an actual conscious intelligence, and they just end up saying really stupid things about the economics of it. And my take is it's never different. This time is not different. This is a tool. Get over yourself. [01:32:45] Speaker B: It's photography and painting, man. It's photography and painting. It's a way to embed patterns. And most conversation is a. Is a series of patterns. You know, like. Like it just. There is the apparent intelligent. No, I totally. Okay. I'm going to love this piece. I'm going to like. [01:33:00] Speaker A: I think you will like it. Yeah. I mean, you started off. What we. What we were talking about at the very beginning of the recording was you actually using it rather than just sitting about shitting yourself at how no one's going to have a job anymore. So I think you're kind of dispositionally in the right camp anyway, so I've been pretty optimistic. [01:33:23] Speaker B: All of it. I. I think. I mean, it will obviously change jobs in. Change the job market in the same. [01:33:28] Speaker A: Way that it'll change jobs. It won't take jobs. [01:33:31] Speaker B: Computer used to be a job, being a computer. [01:33:34] Speaker A: I literally say that in the piece. [01:33:36] Speaker B: I love it. I love it, love it. Oh, man. I'm going to read it right now. Okay. [01:33:41] Speaker A: Are you gonna read it while we're recording? [01:33:43] Speaker B: Yes. Well. Well on that then. Well, that'll be our teaser for the next episode. We'll actually schedule this a little bit sooner and I'll Actually be ready and on top of my schedule. But is there anything else you wanted to point people to or last minute thoughts or anything? Because I know. [01:33:59] Speaker A: Oh no, we've. We've talked about everything I've been up to recently. You can read the stablecoin thing if you like. Well, listen to guy. Read the stable coins. Have they got any? You'll learn about kidneys as well. You'll learn all kinds of wonderful things. Vibe coding thing we've teased. Yeah, read it in your own time and then come back and hear our commentary later. Treasury. I mean, yeah, we kind of were contractually obliged to say something about treasury companies. Right. So. Well, I tell you what, maybe by the next time all my cryptic remarks will be more obvious what I was actually talking about. So we can try to time it that way as well. [01:34:31] Speaker B: That works. That works. And don't forget to follow I'll have your inpub so they can follow you in Noster and find your art. [01:34:36] Speaker A: You want me just read it and. [01:34:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, just go in pub, get. [01:34:41] Speaker A: It like tattooed here so I can. [01:34:43] Speaker B: Read it 1 7. Now where is it? I got you. Oh, I mean dude. It was good catching up. We have a wonderful day. [01:34:53] Speaker A: Thanks so much. [01:34:54] Speaker B: And I'll see you on Telegram. We'll chat. [01:34:56] Speaker A: All right. [01:34:57] Speaker B: And get something else scheduled. All right, let's do it later, dude. All right guys. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I will have the link in the show notes to both his episode. I'll have the read very soon that we talked about because I'm honestly just want to dive into it right now. I also have links to a handful of the other things that we discussed as well as to leaden IO for bitcoin backed loans. I have a link to river because that's where I've mostly been buying my bitcoin. I have a link to get Chroma to PubKey app and the things that synonym are building and obviously the HRF and their Oslo Freedom Forum so you can sign up if you want to go there. And their financial freedom report as well, which is the newsletter that I talk about on this show quite a bit is an excellent resource on top of a few other things. And also finally we are making some strides. I feel not like an so much an idiot that I'm talking about the website almost being done finally. I have hated that project. But we are getting to a point where I will happy to say that on bitcoinaudible.com we will soon have all of these resources much more navigable and easier to make sense of so that you can go to a website and find all of the different things that you need as well as all the other episodes of this show. So stay tuned for that. Stay tuned for another episode with Alan Farrington all About AI and with that we will close this one out. Thank you guys so much for listening. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or any podcast app that you use that makes a absolutely makes a big difference. Also, subscribe if you're new to the show and feel free to give me a shout out for what you want to hear if you've got a read that you want me to cover or a topic or a question you'd like me to answer, especially with all the drama going on. I'll do another stupid episode about filters if you want, but yeah, just let me know. It helps to get feedback and I really appreciate everybody who leaves comments and zaps on Noster and on Fountain and Stream sats. Literally guys, thank you so much. If you haven't checked out Fountain, actually I'll put a I'll put a link to Fountain in the show notes as well. All those good things. Great way to support the show and also to do so leave a review or just a rating. That's an easy way to do it that takes just a minute or two and makes a big difference and it costs nothing. So I appreciate you and I'll catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin. Audible I am Guy Swan. Until then, everybody take it easy. Guys. [01:37:43] Speaker A: Ram.