RABBIT HOLE RECAP #406: THE LAYOFFS CONTINUE

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It's got two secure enclaves it's got a full screen full keyboard here as you can see if you're watching if you can't watch just imagine something that looks like a blackberry it allows you to create private public key pairs offline in an arrogant fashion never have to connect the cold card queue to an internet device you can sign transactions and psbt's remotely in the most secure fashion if you're a bitcoin power user and you're looking for the best security go pick up a cold card queue you can go to coin kite.com find the cold card queue there i think you go to cold card.com as well use the code rhr for five percent off step up your security get a cold card queue this route was also brought to you by our good friends at stackwork if you're looking for a great way to make kyc free sats stackwork has bounties go to stackwork.ai find their bounties page and contribute to the bounties you can make bitcoin kyc free for completing the bounties if you're a developer looking to scoop up some easy sats go check out the bounties contribute to them and stack some sats stackwork.ai this rip was brought to you by our official electrolyte sponsor here at rhr salt of the earth you've been hearing matt and i talk about it quite a bit i drink multiple packets of it a day you got to stay hydrated that's why my face looks so good so i'm getting buff i'm able to get to the gym more because i'm hydrated matt he's looking incredible i'm sure you've all noticed it You want to know why? It's all to the earth, baby. Go to drinkssauté.com. Use the code RHR. You're going to get 15% off. I'm dead serious. It hasn't made my life way better. My wife, she's right behind me right now laughing, but she's laughing because she knows it's true. She drinks like seven a day. I drink a few a day, maybe seven a day too. Matt, I don't even want to tell you how much he's drinking. It's good. It keeps you hydrated. It keeps you alert. It keeps you ready to go. drink sauté.com at D-R-I-N-K-S-O-T-E dot com. Use the code RHR for 15% off any order. You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. You know, yeah. Just the two of us. No guests this week. Just get the two of us. Sup freaks. I liked having the guests. We should do that more often. Shout out Seth and Zach. I mean, looking at the list right now, we'll get to it, but I think we have to have Alex Karpon at some point. We can come and spin a book and bring us a lot of views. It'd be sick. It's like when I tell the freaks I'm listening to Sill Dispatch, I'm like, let me know who you want to hear on the show or whatever. They're like, you should have Elon Musk. It's like, okay, why don't you go ask him to be on the podcast and make that happen? And I would love to interview him. Be happy to. Same goes out to Karp. Elon, we're streaming on your platform right now. You should come on. Yeah, Karp would be, to people that aren't aware, that's the crazy CEO of Palantir. A lot of people don't know what Palantir is or that it exists or anything. We live in a little bubble that we realize they're the tip of the spear in terms of the dystopian world that we're rushing into. I mean, they have a ton of retail investors that love the stock. I don't even know. The people that love the stock know the stock. Yeah. But I was hanging out with some of our normie friends, all relatively successful young family types. And there was like eight adults and we were having a conversation and Palantir came up and the majority of them had no idea who Palantir was. But yeah, if you own the stock and you're up like 3,000%, you're definitely aware of who they are. they've got like a Tesla like retail investor base that is a rabid about the stock. They love it. Yeah, but it's different because the Tesla one is kind of cool. Like, because like the people own Teslas and they like love the product, the retail investors of Palantir don't love the product. They're not like using like the surveillance spy tools. Yeah, but it's a different breed. Like I, in a lot of ways, i mean i disagree with them all the time but i think in a lot of ways uh like the tesla shareholders are probably like more similar to like apple shareholders yeah or at least historically right apple has kind of grown into like this absolute juggernaut of the business but like in the earlier days of apple stock ownership it was very much you know i own five max and two iphones and i will die holding this apple stock because i love the product so much Yeah, Forrest Gump, one of those retail investors. There you go. Marty, the first order of business is I have a proposal for you. Okay. I think we should call our bet a wash on the Iran ceasefire. I think we really fucked up the terms. I think I technically won, didn't I? I mean, I'm happy to pay you. I don't think you'd feel good about the win. I definitely wouldn't feel good about taking your money in this situation. All right. I don't need the sats, but I want an asterisk. You want an asterisk? What, do you want me to make sure the website has an asterisk? Yeah, Marty. You're always going to have an asterisk there forever. I need an asterisk. That's all I need. I don't need the sats. I just need, like, hey. He was directionally correct. I mean, are we in a ceasefire right now? There have been bombs flying. I think technically in the international definition of a ceasefire, I think the ceasefire is still enacted even though bombs are flying. They just keep saying, they're like, he's like, he'll send out a tweet. he's like the ceasefire has been extended he's like and then also by the way like we blew a hole in the fusel like the engine room of the ship and took it over it's like okay yeah yeah you keep the sats i get an asterisk okay i mean i care more about the asterisk than the sats okay fine i give i give you i give you an asterisk on the website by the way freaks um i was talking to a freak and a good idea or an idea no i won't even endorse it as good an idea would be is if one of the freaks created a bot that when we bet something it posed to nostor a zap poll. Do you agree with Marty or Matt? And then you guys can bet with zaps basically against each other, but alongside our terms. And then when the bet is settled, then the bot would then pay out via zaps, whichever side won. But I don't want to endorse the idea or run it myself, but it's an idea. I'm just putting it out there. Just an idea. Not good or bad. It's an idea. The world is filled with ideas, many of which have not been executed on. It's an idea. It's an idea, not good or bad. What a week. What a week. All right. Been a good week for Bitcoin. Higher than we were last week, currently standing at 77,760 cuck bucks. one cup box and get you 1,286 sats. We're at $1.56 trillion market cap. We're looking at block height, 946,338, which means we are 1,182 blocks away from the next difficulty retarget estimated to be on May 2nd. So that would be next Thursday, next Friday, looking like a negative 4.3% adjustment as of right now. Blocks have been coming in at 10 minutes and 27 seconds on average. Clark's teeny weeny mempool has 2,426 transactions in it. If we go over to mempool.space we'll see that they have 59,812 transactions. Transactions pretty cheap right now. Two sas per v-byte if you want to get into the next block. What is CC? What is this pool? ocean ocean mine to block uh four blocks and what cc cc is the uh entity that's mining with ocean because you can if you if you find your own block in ocean and construct it yourself you can also name it yourself yeah pretty empty block just looking at the block mempool is so cool he can just go in I think a good place to start, Marty, is can you read the rabbit hole recap review that I put at the top of the list? Yes. I took a lot of umbrage to this rabbit hole recap. Odell and Marty talking AI and talking their book on Noster, etc. Gets annoying, but otherwise they offer good commentary. Okay. Do you know who wrote that? No. First of all, I mean, you said you took some umbrage. You don't think that is a pretty great review? I mean, it ends with a good one, but it's like a, what do you call that? It's like. Do we talk about AI and Noster too much? A backhanded compliment is what I would call it. I mean, when you find out who it was from, I think it was. Richard. As nice as he's going to, as nice as he's going to get. I'd take it as a big, big endorsement. Richard Greaser. No, Dick loves us. That's a Pleditor review of Rabbit or Recap. Oh, Pleditor. Yeah. I like it. Nice to see you listening. I'm glad you find the commentary interesting. Yeah. Apparently, we do a good job of pushing where? Do we talk about... I mean, our bags are not Nostra. We definitely pump 1031 bags a decent amount, but that's because we believe in the projects we invest in. And we try to disclaim whenever we're doing that. Okay. I don't pump Nostra for my bags. It's like Nostr will never make us rich. I mean, that idea, which is not good at that, we have one investment in Nostr. You just put out there is unique to Nostr. You can't really create that bot anywhere else. And we're definitely not bumping our bags when we talk about AI because we have some exposure at 1031, but we probably could have done a little bit better on that front. I don't know. I think the picks and shovels exposure that we have is pretty strong right now. I just like talking about AI. And I like talking about Bitcoin as freedom money. And the most interesting aspects of Bitcoin and freedom money recently have to, you know, tend to involve Nostra or AI. Yeah. But anyway, freaks, keep the feedback coming. And thanks for the shout, Pleditor. Appreciate you, Pleditor. Appreciate you, Soapminer. 21,221 sats code. RHR has been used 173 times for handmade tallow soap. That's impressive. There's a lot of dirty freaks out there. I'll have you guys know that I used the soap less than two hours ago. All right, let's get to the last. Wait, before we do that, Logan, pull up RHR.TV. Okay, scroll down. Do you like that? You like your asterisks? Yeah, I need the asterisks. That's perfect. There you go. Shipping live on air. Is there an explanation of the asterisks anywhere? You didn't ask for an explanation. You just said I want an asterisk. I don't want to crowd the page. You want me to put a summary of why the asterisks exist? yeah that's why asterisk you put an asterisk and then you have a little explanation at the bottom of the page this is like i'll have the clinker i'll have the clinker do something when you click the asterisk that tells you what it is how about that i like that all right on to the list we've talked about it many times in the last couple months including last week. The internet blackout in Iran is now on its 55th consecutive day. Its connectivity flatlines at 2% of ordinary levels after 1,296 hours. Restrictions of global network access continue to hinder online commerce, payment systems, and digitally dependent sectors of the economy. How long will this blackout persist? That's the question. I mean, it's wild. And to be clear here, Freaks, I've said in the past, but if you come in and out and don't join us week in, week out, this is the Iranian government cutting out external internet access for their people. It's not the U.S. government cutting out internet access for the country or the Israelis. It's the Iranian government. So the Iranian elites have access to the internet. And that's like that 2% baseline that you see here. Netblocks is a nonprofit that tracks this stuff. But the average person only has internal access to internet networks. So they can presumably communicate locally, but they can't communicate globally. And this is something we've seen time and time again when governments are feeling pressure, both externally and internally. One of the first things they do is they cut internet access for their people, and they keep it within a privileged set. And this is why this technology, whether that's Mesh or Nostr or even something like Starlink, in this situation, Starlink is very helpful. Obviously, if the U.S. government wants to cut off internet access somewhere, Elon is not going to let them use Starlink. But in this case, Elon's not aligned with the Iranians, so he provides access. is so important because you never know when you need it until you need it. And then oftentimes, you know, it's too late to deploy any kind of countermeasures. Yeah. What's the latest with the ceasefire? That's what I'm saying. There may have been some mines they made yesterday. Yeah, it's a ceasefire where you lay mines. That's the type of ceasefire we're in right now. And supposedly like the Iranians have seized some ships too. and Trump tweeted out again that he's, well, he tweeted social posts out again that we're going to blow up any, where the U.S. government's going to blow up any Iranian ships they see, even though, and then he like prefaced it by saying even though the U.S. government already blew up their entire Navy, so they have no ships. Big, big, big fog of war going on right now. A lot of doublespeak, a lot of fog of war. my focus my focus has been on the uh the cloud seeding technology that iran took out now it's raining for the first time in in many years i don't know if that's true at all but uh if true pretty crazy if true pretty crazy um i did not see that i mean i will say just while we're on the topic when we originally made the ceasefire bet and to be clear i saw a freak asking the bet the the bet terms was, will there be five days of ceasefire before, with no hostilities before April 21st? We specifically said no hostilities before April 21st. We made it 14 days ago. Because the whole reason it started was because we were saying how hard it is to make the wording for these things. And then I personally think we fucked up the wording. but that was before Trump did his own blockade which in their defense is actually kind of a clever tactic just doing the double blockade the Iranians blockading it and Trump blockading it but so there's another problem here I think a lot of the lines are blurred because you can justify that it's a ceasefire because there's minimal ground attacks while everything is just being like ship to ship. Yeah, well, there's actually, Logan, pull this up. This ties into like prediction markets and stuff like that. What we have here is a classic Oracle problem. The Oracle's telling us there's no ceasefire, but there are missiles flying. And this is a story. Yeah, this is great. But I'm not sure if you guys saw this, but Polymarket running into some Oracle problems as well. Buck Pearly quote tweeted it, but clicking on the tweet, he quote tweeted, somebody was betting on weather markets, on Polymarket in France, and he apparently knew where the sensors were. And so he would basically take a very low probability bet on an abnormally high temperature in France at particular sensors. And then he would go to the sensor, he went to the sensors, and he put a hairdryer on them. So the sensor was picking up. in the air temperature. I mean, it was even worse than that because it was just a single sensor. He figured out that it was a single sensor, I think, at the Paris airport. Charles de Guay's runaway perimeter. So yeah, I was aware of this because for better or for worse, I'm a lot of people's polymarket guy. So like six different people sent this one to me and I should have put it on the list. It's a good call out on that. But I mean, I think this highlights something a little even more nuanced and more interesting, which is the Oracle problem from like a technical engineering perspective is pretty much as close to impossible to solve as you get. Without me just straight up saying it's impossible to solve, but it's basically impossible to solve. now i think in practical terms you can you can mitigate it to a great degree and in this situation a perfect example of a mitigation would have been if it was like 20 different sensors that were being read like is it perfect no but like it's not just a single sensor that can get hair dried you do some kind of average and like drop the outliers or something like that in order to calculate it yeah we all know i'm a big dlc fan that was a one of the big topics of the dlc coverage back in the day was having multiple oracles maybe for the bitcoin price if you're going to do a dlc or prediction market based off the bitcoin price at a particular point in time in the future instead of depending on coinbase's api individually or kraken's api individually one of them could crap out and feed you bad data so the idea would be that you use three or four use kraken coinbase spit stamp, strike, and basically get a weighted average on the price between them. And if one's way off, you just discard it. The more interesting question, maybe not more interesting, but an interesting question for you, Marty, is this guy was arrested by the French police. Do you think he should have been arrested for it? No, don't hate the player, hate the game. What was he arrested for? You think that's going to be his criminal defense? Yeah, I don't know. Well, I could actually say if you're tampering with a weather device that is used for like, are the airplanes using it? I hope not. Landing and stuff. I mean, it was – supposedly it was on the perimeter fencing. He didn't trespass. He didn't trespass to do this is my understanding. He walked up with a hairdryer on an open sensor and ran it for a couple of minutes and they arrested him for it and made $35,000 on the relevant buy market. And then he was arrested for it. He did it like three or four times, didn't he? Before they caught him. Did you see Brad Hopp? He tampered with air. I think he did it twice. I think it was two times. Where I could see him being arrested and being justified is if the data being fed from that sensor outside of Polymarket was critical to the equivalent of their FAA operations and affected decisions made in air traffic control, then yeah. I mean, I doubt it. Because he, I mean, supposedly he only moved it like a couple degrees. Like if planes are going on the sky. No, I mean, it's Celsius, which is a lot in Fahrenheit. It was a couple Celsius. No, it was like three degrees Celsius. Yeah, so what is that? That's like six. Is it that much? What's the difference between 19 degrees Celsius and 22 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit? between 19 and 22 Celsius and Fahrenheit. 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit difference. That was not 15. It's like planes are falling out of the sky because you changed it from 66 degrees to 71 degrees. I mean, I think they have bigger problems. I'm not saying I'm saying like what could they charge him I don't know what they charged him next but I think they charged him with like market interference or something to that effect yeah don't hate the player hate the game you gotta solve your oracle problem better polymarket I mean yeah what was the what was the bet contract this is what Pledger is talking about when we get sidetracked with this stuff the oracle the or we're using this weather sensor this temperature sensor whatever it says at this point in time is what's going to resolve the bet the market i don't think you should be arrested for for manipulation there yeah if any like poly markets should be arrested for only using one sensor yeah but this is going to be a bigger problem i mean it is it is fun you say we're getting sidetracked, but I think this is going to be one of the big problem spaces at the intersection of Bitcoin and prediction markets is how do you solve this Oracle problem? Well, I just told you how to solve it. Like, you don't use one sensor. Like, you don't need DLCs. You don't need to over-fucking-think it. You just use 10 sensors or 20 sensors. Yeah. I agree. I mean, this guy basically... I mean, I doubt they'll ever run a temperature prediction market with one sensor gun. Like this was a bug bounty that got paid out basically No How long do you think he going to prison for In France does that get you life Yeah, right? It's like immigrant rapists, get lead free, and this guy's going to go to jail for 20 years. Current state of the world. Very smart. Could you imagine? I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when he was looking at these markets, and he looked over at his hair dryer. and then looked at the market and then looked at the hairdryer. So wait a second. I know where that sensor is. Yeah, I wonder how he got caught. He probably bragged about it to people. I mean, somebody, yeah. Somebody in France probably complained to Polymarket, like, hey, I'm here right now. It's only 66 degrees. Yeah, this temperature's off by five degrees. Something must be wrong. we'll get back to France believe it or not you don't have it on the list but I'm going to bring it up shortly here we already talked we already talked talked about them in the beginning we alluded to topics but you have Palantir is the technological republic manifesto which they published on on Twitter earlier this week why'd you include this I think it's some whitewashing, gaslighting, narrative building, what do you call it? I just checked back, by the way, on my terminal, and the clanker was like, I added the asterisks, but don't you want like a footnote somewhere explaining what it's for? Sorry. Why is Palantir writing manifestos? It's a big thing. American dynamism. This is how you attract the key capital. This feels like early PSYOP days right here, whatever this is. I feel like a lot of thought was put into this thing. Narrative for me. Narrative for me. Yeah. That's very clear. The big one is the draft. You're a fucking tech surveillance dystopia company. Why is your number six point that kids should go die in war? Yeah, especially when you're supposed to be building technology. Stay in your lane. That replaces soldiers, right? Yeah. Where is that part? Number six. Psychological politics is leading us astray. National service should be universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from all volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost. What are the IDF in South Korea? when other countries have mandatory mandatory Israel that's what I said the idea for Israel I don't know probably a bunch of them do like a bunch of the smaller ones don't some of the Nordic countries do I don't know maybe Finland maybe Finland I could be wrong which countries have mandatory service what is their terminology six universal duty mandatory national service ukraine at this point that's a good point we're a robot yeah well ukraine's the at war but i guess they did it kind of early israel south korea north korea singapore Iran, Turkey, Thailand, UAE, China, Myanmar, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, Greece, Cyprus, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, and Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Egypt, Eritrea, Algeria, Morocco, Niger, Tunisia, Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Mexico. I don't know if that doesn't sound right. maybe the clanker's going off a little bit yeah it sounds like the clanker's going off the deep end this is opus 4 7. let's just ask google i think google may be anyway it's a lot of countries what do we want to know i don't want to be on that list over 30 countries. Yeah, it's a lot of countries. Israel and South Korea are the most strict about it. I have some South Koreans in my life that really hate it. Tom Kim, pro golfer. Remember, he was on the cusp of getting exempted. You were friends with Tom Kim? No. It was a big sub-theme of one of the tournaments like if he won he would have been exempted from mandatory service in south korea and he did not win or make and then so they sent they sent him sent him to boot camp yeah yeah i actually don't know if he ultimately went but anyway i don't know why palantir is i mean it fits the evil villain mold pretty well but still like come on guys stay in your lane just do the silent dystopian don't tweet out national policy objectives you can do that behind closed doors with the corrupt politicians why are you tweeting it out publicly well don't worry they're partnering with the USDA for American farmers nothing nefarious is going to come out of this the second one probably wouldn't have called my eye except for the back-to-back nature like this is how we want to change the country uh with a bunch of horrible ideas and then also like oh by the way like we're gonna bury ourselves deep into the american food supply well yeah it's happening i mean i don't know if you have it on the list but like tinder and world coin combined oh i forgot to add that one That one's beautiful. It's all like this intersection of... What's the Tinder WorldCoin one? Did it pop up on your app or something? Yeah, yeah. My side Tinder. No, I saw tweets about it. Apparently, proof of human, the WorldCoin proof of human protocol, if you use it, and I guess OAuth... If you scan your eyeballs. If you scan your eyeballs with WorldCoin's tech, and then OAuth into Tinder, you're going to get like bonus profile points. I have no idea how the app works, but apparently... You get shown to more ladies if you do it. Yeah. Don't use the dating apps, freaks. That's... Get verified with an orb. Is that real? I think so. Or is that parody? Is that real? I'm not totally sure. I think that's probably real. It looks right. It's like a modern... Get verified with an orb. Modern app to sign. All right. That's not the real screenshot. I'm sure it's what it looks like, like close to what it looks like. You go, you scan your eyeballs with the orb. And then they say that's like the most elite KYC you can do. And then you can go, you get your, what, like 30 bucks or $20 worth of Sam Altman's pre-manned shit coin. And then you can get priority Tinder access. it's like the early days of social credit score stuff um or middle days i don't know what about zoom yeah it's don't bring that up yet but um tinder and zoom what is zoom using it for the same verification thing i guess yeah but tinder is like giving you more matches if you do it like what is zoom doing it's like letting me join a meeting or something So you know that if you're getting scammed by a North Korean from the Lazarus Group, you know that... They bought the credentials. They bought or compromised the credentials instead of not doing that, I guess. But back to the USDA. Let's not forget about this. Palantir is proud to partner with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to modernize services for American farmers, giving them the time and resources they need to secure our nation's breadbasket. Protecting America's farmland is protecting America itself. And this work gives USDA the visibility and speed needed to safeguard our food supply, said USDA chief information officer Sam Berry. Our farmers sustain this nation and modern tools help us support them. With greater precision, I look forward to working with Palantir as we continue serving the American farming community, which serves all of us every single day. All right, Logan, I'll pull up the tweet. This is where we go back to France. They're so fucking evil. This is what it's going to be used for. So apparently in France, they're flying drones over farmland because apparently they have forced vaccination campaigns on the cows in France now. And they're flying drones over farmland to find the unvaxxed cows and then showing up and forcing farmers to vaccinate their cows because they know they're not. That's fucked up. That is probably what the Palindir USDA partnership is going to end in. Yeah, and there's probably some like evil Monsanto partnership there too. Yeah. I mean, it is a fog of war, boiling frogs, whether it's the orb to get bonus Tinder points, the narrative framing that's going on about universal drafts, this partnership with the USDA. And they're all – it's all the same people. Like, they're all in like this... They're in like a group chat. That must be like the most fucking lit, dystopian group chat. Everybody's focused on the ceasefire, and they're laying mines. Release the USDA partnership, so we can force vaccination on the cows. It's all the Peter Thiel mafia. Yeah. Beware, freaks. Beware. We'll stay up to date on how these things progress. Oh, this was a big story. Did we cover it? I don't think we covered it when it came out. But for those who are unaware, we might have glossed over it. But I think it's important to go over it. A few weeks ago, what was it, two or three weeks ago, the DOJ announced that they were able to basically use some evidence from Signal in a court of law, but it wasn't because they got access to the messages. No, we didn't cover it. We forgot to cover it when it happened. Yeah. Apparently, the DOJ got access to messages that were sent between somebody they were charging with a crime and a counterpart, not through getting access to the app itself, but the notifications, the notification banners, and they were able to read the text by going back into Apple software. Supposedly there was an Apple bug that kept the notifications for 30 days on the iPhone. And even if you deleted Signal, it kept it there. And it wasn't Signal specific. Obviously, Signal is used for privacy and security reasons. So it's particularly glaring, but it was any app. Even if you uninstalled it, it was there for 30 days. Signal petitioned Apple to fix the bug and Apple did. So now if you have an iOS device, there's a patch available to update to fix that. Yeah. And if you're not already, just don't have like set your signal notification message to just receive message. Don't have the text and the message on that. Yeah. I mean, easier said than done. Like you should use the fucking thing, right? I use Signal for a shit ton of my comms, whether it's family or whether it's professional. We run 1031 using Signal. We run OpenSats using Signal. So I'm in there every day sending hundreds of messages. I like having the notifications. I don't think that's a real fix. You have the notifications, but it's like you don't have the bare message in the notification. I mean, it's completely useless. No, it's completely useless because it could be that annoying group chat you're in that's pinging you, or it could be something fucking important, and all you see is one new signal message. Not all signal messages are equal. Anyway, I just think if you're very serious about it, then maybe that's a tradeoff that you're willing to make. But ideally, this is the best solution. You should still be able to get rich notifications and you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy and security with them. Yeah, I agree. Shout out to everybody at Signal and Apple. Shout out to Apple for patching this bug. Pseudo Carlos is making us aware. If you want to make sure that you're running the iOS version that's patched, make sure you're on iOS version 26.4.2. On to the next one, U.S. Admiral Paparo took to Capitol Hill today, went a little viral in the Bitcoin community for saying that Bitcoin has incredible potential for national security. admitting that the U.S. military is running a Bitcoin node and running with the Jason Lowery thesis that Bitcoin is a power projection tool that the U.S. military needs to be on top of. I'll let you give your thoughts first. No, what are your thoughts? It's great to see. They're running a node. They're probably probing. Be careful. US military is running a node. They can connect to your node. Just be aware. Obviously, we've said it before. I think it's still rings true today. Bitcoin is a national security issue. I think it's a national security issue because I think financial security, financial sovereignty, financial strength is a national security issue. Whether or not bitcoin's proof of work mechanism can uh protect critical military infrastructure is something i find pretty far-fetched and hard to believe uh bitcoin's proof of work he said it uses what he uh reusable proof of work can you play the tape logan can you play the tape oh i have a i have tribal muted permanently strength as well another subject our competition with china isn't just about military strength it also includes monetary strength as well you know last year the chinese communist party's main monetary think tank published research on bitcoin as a strategic asset. You know, this came after President Trump moved to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Admiral, how does leadership in Bitcoin impact leverage resilience, deterrence for Indopecom against China, and do you think that a strategic Bitcoin reserve helps America compete against China? Senator, our research into Bitcoin is as a computer science tool. It's the combination of cryptography, a blockchain, and a proof of work. And Bitcoin shows incredible potential as a computer science tool that through the proof of work protocols actually imposes more cost than just the algorithmic securing of networks and our ability to operate. And Bitcoin is a reality. It is a valuable computer science tool as a power projection. And outside of the economic formulation of it, it has got really important computer science applications for cybersecurity. Thank you. What recommendations do you have for us here in Congress on how the U.S. can lead on Bitcoin competition? I have to go deeper on that with you for the record. And I can go deeper on that case, but Bitcoin is a reality. It is a peer-to-peer, zero-trust transfer of value. Anything that supports the all instruments of national power for the United States of America is to the good. You heard it here first on Capital Who. It's to the good. Bitcoin to the good. I mean, look, it's wild. It's wild that it's even a topic. So that part's cool. There's a lot of word vomit in his answer. Well, if we're talking about high leverage support within the government, like the military is saying Bitcoin's a thing, good. Yeah, Bitcoin's good. Bitcoin's good. Bitcoin's good. The word salad. Let's address that. It's obviously well-known in the space. Jason Lowery is sitting under him. And Soft War is a very popular book. It's a very hot rod topic within Bitcoin. There are people who read Soft War and think it's going to be a lot. They love it. And I had Jason Lowery on the podcast three or four years ago at this point. and we fought the whole time over the semantics of the Bitcoin proof-of-work system protecting critical computer infrastructure for the U.S. government and companies. And it just doesn't make any sense. You would like hash cash SHA-256. You create hashes. If you find a hash below the difficulty target, that allows you to add a block of transactions to the network. you get rewarded in Bitcoin for that. That's all those hashes can be used for. This idea that the computing power of the Bitcoin network can be used to protect critical systems is nonsensical. I can see the only way you can stretch that argument to make it make sense is that if you were to put a paywall in front of the system, that you had to pay first to get access to them. Well, you could make the argument, what we've said in the past, which is like, this is not the argument I think they're making. But that if you have like a honeypot wallet there, you can see if you're compromised because like the North Koreans will then just steal the money. And then you know the servers cover. But that's not the argument they're making. I mean, I think you nailed it on the head there that it's good. It's good when you hear politicians and bureaucrats say Bitcoin is good. I think that's good. The national security argument, I think Bitcoin is a national security issue. My argument for why it's a national security issue is threefold. It's first and foremost, a great way and an open way to block the expansion of Chinese currency dominance, particularly in the developing world. So as China is spreading in Africa and whatnot, Bitcoin acts as a stalwart against that expansion in a way that the dollar never really can. The second piece is it makes independent American citizens and the small businesses they run more resilient and robust if they're able to hold and use Bitcoin. It just makes the entire society more robust as a result. And the third piece is it incentivizes energy generation, which we see right now. Thank God we've had Bitcoin for the last 10 years because the US would be even more worse off right now in terms of energy production with the AI boom. I co-sign all that. Economic security is national security. You want resilience of your economy, particularly small businesses and individual Americans and energy is important. Where would we be if Bitcoin miners weren't there? We'd be so fucked. First and last resort, NERCOT and TVA, and on upstream well paths, where would we be? Probably in a worse spot. We would not be where we are. I'm bringing this back to AI it's an AI podcast now you can make the argument the AI industry would not be as robust as it is now because the Bitcoin miners didn't come in as pioneer species to build out that infrastructure that they're using but yeah the last thing I'll add to this and listen Jason Lowry it's obvious he's in the air he works under Admiral Paparo he's advising him on this stuff but the one thing I worry about if that narrative gets picked up. Anybody on the Hill, Bitcoin is national security. It is a national security risk. We should have hash power here. Individual citizens should be holding wallets that they secure in self-custody. We should be able to spend Bitcoin. We should be able to save Bitcoin without worrying about the government coming after us. But this idea that Bitcoin proof of work secures critical computer systems does not make any sense. Bitcoin proof of work does one thing. It produces hashes that will enable you to add blocks of transactions to the Bitcoin network. Jason Lowery is also another thing I push back a lot on him. If you deem Bitcoin critical military infrastructure and make it like a weapon, make it akin to a military-grade weapon, that could have some perverse negative. Yeah, tell me about that. that don't bode well for the individual American. I mean, a perfect example we've had, I mean, besides, you know, the early crypto wars with the export of encryption is, did you listen to the Dark Cash Jensen pod that made waves? Just clips or did you listen to the whole thing? Watch clips. I listened to, so Dark Cash is like Peter McCormick of AI. He's like the number one guy. Maybe I'm giving Peter too much credit. I'm giving Peter a little bit too much credit and Darkash too little. But he's the AI pod guy. And the Jensen pod was wild for multiple reasons. Jensen, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA. But it came up on the chip export control stuff. And Darkash kept repeating Anthropik's line that it's like exporting enriched uranium. and Jensen was fucking livid. He was like, no, they're chips. It's not enriched uranium. It's like, can we have a conversation here as adults? Every time you hit me with this psyop of calling it enriched uranium, you're doing us all a disservice. And obviously, someone like Darkesh clearly believes in AI, believes in innovation and seeing America. He's very America-focused, but specifically America and maybe less so humanity flourish as a result of AI. And he's parroting these narratives that are clearly designed to elicit a very emotional response that is usually a draconian government-led action. Yeah, we've seen it with Anthropic itself, with Mythos. We can't release this. It's too powerful. Yeah, he kept bringing it up over and over again in the episode. It was like a Mythos ad. But then it's like, did you see what happened with that Discord group that got access to Mythos and how they did it? And how did they do it? They guessed the URL. Right. It was like based on similar patterns of past releases or whatever, right? Yeah. And so apparently they were running wild with it, making websites and stuff. But point being is like Anthropa can't even secure this dangerous model properly during the URL scheme in a way that is not obvious. And they're going to push for these licensing and regulatory mode regimes and they can't even secure their own systems. yeah i mean we know everyone knows that anthropic is doing it mostly for publicity and then secondary for regulatory mode reasons they just don't want the competition and they're effective altruists i think they truly believe that they are the ethical arbiters of this technology and it needs to be them and nobody else i do i do think there is a a very strong belief there uh from that perspective Obviously they going to make a fuck ton of money too They just got value to what? 800 bill? I saw that on Hyperliquid, they were trading for over a trillion. I think that was OpenAI. No, Anthropic is on Hyperliquid now. Anthropic too. Interesting. Be aware. Anyway, Freaks, he calls it the Dark Cash Podcast. He was very creative with the name. Darkwesh. Is that really how you pronounce it? I think so, Darkwesh. Is it Darkwesh or Darkwesh? I don't know, but I'm glad you thought it was important enough to interrupt me. Go listen. It was probably going to be one of the better podcasts of the year. That's a good one to listen to. And also remember that Jensen is running one of the most valuable companies in the world, and he has to be very careful about how he speaks about these things while you're listening to it as well. You got to read between the lines a little bit. Yes. All right, next up on the list. Big news this morning. Tether released a blog post and a tweet announcing that they froze more than $344 million in USDT. Your extension makes this really confusing. The what? Your extension makes this really confusing in this context. They froze $344 million worth of Tether into wallets on the Tron blockchain in coordination with OFAC and U.S. law enforcement. And if you read the blog post, Tether is, you can tell they're trying to project like, hey, we're working with law enforcement. I think they cite they've worked with over 340 law enforcement agencies across the world. They've frozen, I mean, they're marketing this themselves. They've frozen more than $4.4 billion worth of tether in cooperation with these agencies. And I think this is the largest single freeze to date among two wallets. It is unclear who was in possession or who obviously weren't in possession of the wallets, who thought they had $344 million in these two addresses. There's much speculation that it has to do with the recent DeFi hacks, which are being attributed to the North Korean Lazarus Group. But as of right now, we don't know for sure who believed they controlled these wallets. I mean, I think if I was a gambling man, my bet would be North Korea, Iran, or Venezuela. would be, I mean, because that's significant size. Yeah. Yeah, this is something that Tether has boasted in the past. Historically and to this day, you know, the biggest risk of Tether is government enforcement. And so it makes sense to me that they would lean into compliance on that front to reduce the risk that the US government specifically will come in and shut down their business. This is exactly, and throw them in jail, this is exactly why Bitcoin exists. You don't have to trust a third party. And as people start to realize that, then you start to realize that real Bitcoin held in self-custody, used without permission, is true freedom money, and there's nothing else like it. Nothing else even comes close. No. And I mean, I think that's, we've said this, we've been talking about this risk for what, seven, eight years now. Like 400 weeks. Do you see on RHR.TV, I put a live tracker for how many weeks we've been gone? Yes, I did. We're at 399 weeks. That's pretty much how long we've been talking about this. I mean, in the early days, cruise missile risk was how I described it. And I think it's apt. Very provocative. And I think that's the one thing. I think more and more people are beginning to become aware with each new headline of, whether it's Tether or Circle, freezing stablecoin accounts that no matter what the U.S. government at the state level, at the federal level, says about the fact that they do not want a CBDC, there is a cbdc like system being erected in front of us in the form of stable coins functionally they are the exact same they can be the exact same architecturally they may be a bit different in this fact that in the sense that the central bank isn't issuing the currency it's not a federal reserve wallet it is a tether or circle wallet but the things that people worry about in a CBDC future of not being able to access your money, having your money frozen. If you try to buy certain goods, having your money frozen. If you say something online that the governments don't like, that is all functionally possible with stablecoin technology as it exists today. If you're worried about CBDCs and you're a fan of stablecoin, just be aware they're functionally the same thing and i think it's rather interesting to watch the um to have observed the people have been really cheerleading the stable coin economy over the last three or four years specifically saying it's where the signal is brian armstrong was tweeting out yesterday right before this announcement that stable coins are the best form of money ever invented um and there has obviously been a massive push here in the united states and throughout the world to normalize stablecoin usage and just be wary that it is what everybody warns about with CBDCs, just with a different wrapper. Yeah. I mean, I like to call them private bank digital currencies instead of central bank digital currencies. And it is interesting because it does kind of feel like a bit of a psyop that there's like a very strong guttural narrative against CBDCs. And then people feel like they've done their part by just being like, I'm anti CBDC. And then you see a lot of the mechanisms roll out through through corporate side channels, basically. A couple of things I will say is I don't use tether. I'm an American, I I don't really need access to US dollars outside of the banking system. I keep most of my family's net worth in Bitcoin, real Bitcoin, not that fake shit. But I am grateful that out of anyone who we could have running the largest private bank digital currency, the Tether guys have done a pretty good job of pushing back. It's hard to imagine a better steward in that type of situation. It is a central point of failure. and obviously they can be pressured and you do see it happen at scale. They have frozen more assets than anyone else, I believe, partially because of the success of Tether, right? They just have significantly more usage. But as you start to see other entrants enter the market, like Circle, like Sailor with STRC and what's backing it and whatnot, If I was going to go to the extreme, you can imagine a Palantir-enabled or partnered PBDC. I think that would be a significantly worse situation if you didn't have Tether pushing the limits in a lot of ways. So I am grateful for that. But ultimately, there's Bitcoin and then there's nothing else. It doesn't even fucking come close. and then there's shitcoin. Who said that? It was Meanwhile. The other thing, too. Warren Davidson said that when he was testifying. Yes, he did. There's Bitcoin and then there's shitcoin. Shout out to Warren Davidson. But that's the thing. Who knows what we'll come to find about who owns these wallets. Like Matt said, it will not be a surprise if it's North Korea, Iran, or Venezuela. It'll be marketed to the public. These are nefarious actors. Who knows? It could be the Mexican cartels, too. I'll put that one on the list. It was a nefarious actor. We had to do this. They were going to use it to buy nuclear bombs or to attack us. They're going to buy Nvidia chips with it, so we needed to stop them. Yeah, they're going to buy enriched uranium in the form of a GPU and attack our critical systems that aren't sufficiently protected by Bitcoin's reusable proof of work yet. So, yeah, it's going to start there. It's going to be wrapped in terrorism or saving the children, but it can be pointed in any direction in the future, whether you're talking bad about immigration policy or whatever it may be, and the government doesn't like that. Your stablecoin wallet has been frozen, assets seized. oh this is awesome too maybe maybe this is what they seized uh scammers offer crypto if you guys weren't aware apparently in the straighter moves we talked about it a few weeks ago the toll that was been erected by the irgc in the united states i don't know ceasefire i don't know what's going on with the straight and the toll It's on, it's off, it's on, it's off. The US controls it, Iran controls it. They're both working together. Who knows? But apparently some scammers took advantage of the confusion and the fog of war. And they posed as the toll collector and called many people operating these ships and said, all right, here's your toll, pay this much in Bitcoin or stable coins. And some actually did. And then they went to pass the straight-up news. And the IRGC sent some warning shots at them. they actually like they they they hit the boat didn't they i thought i i could be wrong but i heard warning shots isn't this the one where like the tape leaked of the like the crew being like what the fuck stop shooting yeah it's just i mean this is just a perfect example of 400 weeks into rabbit hole recap, our world is very much mixed in with just the world now. Like Bitcoin, greater crypto is just part of life. And things that we saw happening to people on Discord or in like the BitMEX live chat or whatever are now happening to oil tankers and the fucking straight of Hormuz. I will say the stakes seem higher. I mean, when people were getting scammed in the Polaniacs troll box when they were going on 100X leverage, they weren't getting fired at after. What was the term we used for it? It wasn't troll box, right? It was a specific term. Well, Polaniac's was known as the wood chipper. And then you would talk about Polaniac's wood chipper in the troll box. Wild, wild times. Yeah, I had to add that one to the list. It seemed important. Yeah. If you're listening from a tanker, don't make sure any requests are WorldCoin verified before you send. Yeah. make sure the toll collector has verified uh his his human identity and his credentials via the orb first before you uh pay the toll it is wild it is absurd what are your thoughts on all these scientists getting getting sketchy as fuck right did you read uh did you read the three body problem i didn't read it but i watched the first season of the show on Netflix. It's a bit of a Chinese psyop, but similar premise was in it. Similar premise was the scientists were disappearing. If the scientists are disappearing, it's bad news. Not saying it's aliens, but it's bad news. Yeah. David Wilcock, I mean, that one hit close to home because I'm a big fan of ancient aliens, as you know. He was a recurring, recurring, a scientist that was asked questions about ancient aliens on that show. He said, I'm not suicidal. I love life. Happy to be here. Apparently he committed suicide a couple days later. Did you see a body? I haven't seen it. More pictures of it. What's the bull scenario? The bull scenario here is that they've assembled a crack team of scientists that are doing like the Independence Day movie or something behind the scenes right now. Actually, that is the optimist. To safeguard America in the next decade. The optimist in me is like, they just need to be, people need to think they're dead in their underground bunker working on some. Yeah. They're doing like a superhero movie. Yeah. That's the, the bear case is pretty bad. I don't want to go. I mean, the one guy, the one guy was like missing for a year and they just found him his body in a burnt tesla 29 year old um i didn't see that one i mean it feels like it keeps happening there's a bunch i haven't been tracking it i just it keeps popping up yeah yeah it really does um we got some zaps here in the live chat the live chat is always is streamed to all compatible master clients including primal in your favorite app store um map 21 ride or die free zap 21 000 sats um he didn't say anything he just spoke with freedom money we have hawaii satoshi zapped 21 212 sats palindrome zap gotta zap the freedom bull to plow through all this fiat swamp love your cast and thank you for your relentless freedom tech efforts Thank you, sir. And then, oh, no, that's it. That's all we got over 21,000 sats. UTXO, the webmaster, zapped us $5.32 Canadian. Sats aren't going as far as they used to in Canada. No. The CAD isn't going as far as it used to in sats. You have a prediction here. I like this guy's, I just want to start, I like this guy's bio on Twitter, him following the crowd from the front. I like that one. So he's setting the narrative that the crowd follows. It's very interesting. I think it's kind of great. It's great that I send Marty the list. Not always, but today I sent it to him like six hours ahead of time, but he's reading it live on air. No, I'm not. I actually prepared. I came prepared. I was able. I came prepared. How did I have that France farmer drone scoring ready to go? Okay. That's true. Fair enough. I like this prediction. We won't have UBI. And I've looked at this guy's bio. I wanted to bring it up. That's why I brought it up first. We won't have UBI. We'll have UCI, Universal Credit Income, or whatever else it may be called. Assuming labor will cease to exist, governments will have to pay you money for you will fulfill the consumption side of the economic equation. While everyone believes that people get an equal paycheck similar to stimulus payments, I believe it will be akin to airdrops, where each person is credited based on their behavior, action, social score, etc. Too long, didn't read. Take the Chinese social credit system and combine it with UBI. Like literally less than a paragraph and he needs a TLDR because people have no attention span. Wait, so you said you read his bio. Do you know who he is? Because it makes it more interesting. No. He's the co-creator of Black Mirror. Is he? Yeah. so obviously black mirror like is a netflix series that tries to portray future scenarios but they take a lot from you know what we see today and then they extrapolate from it that's why a lot of it is very realistic and tends to happen um i mean i wholeheartedly co-signed his message here like this is exactly how it's playing out yeah because if you think about it like universal basic income or universal high income as elon thinks we need it's just not it's not tenable because you're gonna have to print so much money if you're looking for a way to restrain the velocity of money you would have to do it this way and basically decide who gets what portion of a disbursement at any given point in time you can't just give equal amounts Yeah, I mean, you brought up Elon. He had this tweet pinned for a bit. We didn't cover it. It's not pinned anymore. April 16th, seven days ago, universal high, this is Elon Musk, richest man in the world. universal high income, high income, all caps, via checks issued by the federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI robotics will produce goods and services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation. He's not retarded, so I think this is a deliberate lie. I mean, for starters, the concept of universal high income is retarded because if it's universal, it's not high income. You're getting the same as everyone else. Just that one little piece is incredibly retarded. Then the second piece is that if you print money and just send it to people, it's not going to cause inflation, is doubly retarded. I don't think he actually believes this. I think, and I have this further down the list, but Microsoft announced today that they are doing, they want to get rid of 7% of their employee base through buyouts, right? So they're offering basically resignation packages. This is something we've been tracking for a while. The non-YouTube headline of today's show is the layoffs continue. And unfortunately, I think I'm going to use that one at least seven more times over the next couple of years. But I mean, Microsoft is effectively laying off 7% of people with good severance, right? And they're making it quote unquote voluntary. Microsoft alone, I looked it up today, has about 230,000 employees. Wild. I would never been able to get, I knew it was a lot, but that's a shit ton. So 7% of that is 16,000 employees. So that's, we covered Block laying off 40% of their, I keep wanting to say population, of their employee base. That brought them from 10,000 to 6,000 employees. Microsoft in one swoop here is laying off 16,000 and they have another 93% to go. And so if you're rich and you have a lot of assets and they're appreciating right now and they're doing quite well, I think you've got to be very sensitive about revolt and people getting really scapegoating you and making you out to be the enemy. And I think this is his tactic is selling this fairy tale of universal high income yeah i'm not sure if you caught it but right before we went live and not too long after this announcement from microsoft meta came out uh 10 layoffs coming 8 000 members of their team they they only have 80 000 employees apparently wow they're lean operation over there meta compared to all these other guys what google's at 190 000 employees Yeah, I mean, the layoffs are going to continue. They're going to get worse. And particularly, it's this like, I saw someone framed it interestingly. I don't remember who it is, but like these big tech companies that emerged over the last 20, 30 years, like they created an immense amount of value to a level that we've never seen before. And specifically, their founders and executive team made unfathomable riches. I mean, Elon is insanely wealthy to a point where you can't even comprehend it. And I'm a free market guy, competition. The overwhelming majority of that wealth is merit-based. but they also part of the deal was they like brought along you know these 200,000 Microsoft employees that are paid quite well they have a good quality of living they're like almost like you have the you have you have the nobles so the comparison this guy made was you had these the nobles but then they had they they created this lord class underneath them that did quite well and supported them and everyone and everyone won together right and so if you enter a new world where you can have a trillion dollar company that's run by three people um that unspoken agreement just got fucking shattered and i think you end up in a lot of societal chaos as a result and i think it behooves people to discount behooves people that are in power and accumulating significant important amounts of wealth right now to just lie to the general public in that regard completely agree um but other side of the argument is ai being used as a facade excuse because these companies are bloated in the first place in the case microsoft i think you can make an argument easily 200 i mean over 200 000 people that's It's larger than most cities in the United States and arguably the world. Meta, it's well known. They spent, what, $80 billion on their VR experiment and went completely nowhere. They spent a ton of money on Llama to their credit. I think it's very admirable what they're trying to do with Llama with the open source bottles, but they're not. They decided they're not doing open source anymore, though. Did that not catch that? Well, take that back. But point being, it has not kept pace with other frontier models like ChatGBT and Claude. And so there's been a ton of capital misallocation within these companies. And you could see AI being used as the scapegoat to cut fat for highly unproductive teams. I mean, I think it's a mix and match, right? Like they finally have an excuse. Like Headcount used to be a vanity metric that actually helped the stock. And now they have a good excuse to get rid of it. And the stock goes up because they're AI focused and they're being more efficient. I will say, according to Claude, almost half of the Microsoft employees are in the engineering R&D department, which is historically less bloaty than like sales or marketing or whatnot. Like I, you know, I, it's hard to say that they didn't completely overhire with 230,000 employees. Like what are all those fucking people doing? And there's definitely some truth to that, but also it's quite impressive that over a hundred thousand of them are in engineering. But the second piece, I mean, too, is AI fully to blame here or not? I mean, I don't think, I think it's, Like you said, it's somewhere in the middle. I see John in the comments saying, Odell, your shirt is fucking filthy. My toddler made sure of that right before I came on air and I didn't change. So you're welcome. Did you see like the meta? I mean, you know how they are. He's like eight years and shit. He was like all over me. What was I going to say? Do you see the meta news? like they're like capturing all their keystrokes and everything they do in the organization right now for all the existing employees is a hundred percent training their robot slave replacements like they're just turning all these humans into numbers and data points and then they're going to decide what where it is like the absolutely easiest to cut and they're going to just grind it down to replace whatever they can with robots they're going to replace the robots yeah I trying to pull up another screenshot Logan pull up the first screenshot and then we pull up the second First screenshot is IGV which is the iShares Expanded Tech Software Sector ETF which is, I think, the most liquid, most traded software stock ETF offered by BlackRock. That was down 5.8% today on the news of these Microsoft meta cuts. And so the market is saying, okay, these software stocks are not looking good because AI is going to disrupt them. It's weird too because it's disrupting them at the same time that it's helping them in some regards be more efficient from a headcount perspective. But I think the market's also pricing in. Is AI going to be able to replace you in general? I think companies like Figma, Adobe, and others are probably more at risk than platforms like Meta or Microsoft. But pull up the second one. I think it was a big meme. I think it's the last six months of last year and the first quarter of this year is that Bitcoin was trading in tandem with this software stocks and this ETF specifically. Caveat, caveat. Do the one year, Logan, not the one month. well this is a screenshot and that was going to be my caveat is that it is a it is a different times it is a short timescale cherry picked in um cherry pick timescale one month but over the last month it does seem like bitcoin's beginning to break that correlation and just so we have it here at your request matt um the one year it looks better uh for the software stocks but i think uh Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't call a breakout yet on that one-year chart. No, but again, caveat, caveat, cherry-picked, short timescale. Something to look for is that correlation breaking. Are people beginning to realize that software stocks that may be negatively affected by AI progressing and taking away jobs and whole companies is different than what Bitcoin represents in terms of... Yeah. I mean, I think Jensen made a good point on that podcast that we mentioned earlier on this specific subject, which to his point, he was like, look, this is a massive, significant change to the status quo how businesses run and where value accrues. But there's no reason to believe that makers of good tools and useful tools won't significantly benefit you. It's the ones that fail to adapt and offer a shitty product that are just going to be completely outcompeted and obsoleted. And I mean, to that point, right? It's like, okay, like if one person is running 20 agents, like those are 20 potential users for you. your software stack just needs to serve them yeah speaking of agents the the price of these agents is getting out of control with uh claude's cocking of uh open claw you're finally feeling our pain i'm feeling it i'm feeling it you're in that little you're in that max bubble for a while bro It was great. It was great. All right, update. Not done the month yet, but we're tracking for 8 to 10x in cost. Yeah. Well, what will happen is now that you have price pressure, you're going to just learn how to be more efficient with these things and more cost effective. That's why free markets are awesome. The price pressure didn't exist because it was artificially subsidized. or artificially subsidized by these VC-backed companies. Yeah, agreed. We got to keep going on the list. I've got baseball game to get to here in a little bit. Nice. Next up, we've got open hardware for open money from OpenSats. New initiative. Is this new? No, it's just we're trying to do the – I talked about it in the past. All these charities that take 40% off the top have these beautiful decks that marketing teams work on that show how much impact they've made and progress they've made. And we never had anything like that because we run it 100% past there and are incredibly lean. But what we can do is we can do more impact reports. So we've been doing different topical impact reports on the different grants we've made and what significant improvements we've seen across the ecosystem as a result. And this one is focused on open hardware, specifically signing devices for, you know, securely holding and using Bitcoin in cold storage without corporate devices. And the BidX project, we've been big supporters of the BidX project. So the open source mining initiatives and the 256 foundation and what they're doing over there. So this impact report covers our open hardware work. Need the open hardware. Big supporter of all these projects. Shout out to BIDX. One of my favorites. One of my favorites in the space. They're making incredible progress. I would just say, freaks, I know you've heard me say it in the past. 501c3 deductible. If you want a tax deduction, you can get it. If you want to donate anonymously with Bitcoin, we'd love that too. Opensats.org. Every sat counts. Thank you for your support. If you're streaming, be podcasting 2.0. 5% of the sats that you stream or boost while listening are going to Opensats. Pretty cool. All right. On to the Financial Freedom Report story of the week out of Russia. I feel like we're hammering Russia the last month. We need to know. We have like six or seven stories we need to pick. Yeah, I mean, that's 100% my fault because I'm the one picking which story. But I mean, it's also like they're a quite big country and quite big economy. When it's just like some random small little country, I feel like it's less significant. So when I see the Russia stories, I tend to pick them. This week out of Russia, VPN and digital asset crackdown deepens digital and financial control. The Russian regime is once again escalating control over both internet access and digital assets. Officials have ordered more than 20 major companies, including banks, retailers, media outlets, to actively block users from accessing their platforms via virtual private networks or VPN services. to enforce the measures officials handed accessing their platforms via BPN, or excuse me, I just reread the wrong line there. To enforce the measures, officials handed companies a blacklist of prohibited VPNs along with instructions for detecting and blocking them. Firms have refused to comply, risk losing privileged regulatory status, including tax benefits, and mandatory pre-installation on devices sold in Russia. Simultaneously, Russia's central bank is pushing new rules requiring identity verification for digital asset traders using domestic platforms, which would make it harder for Russians to withdraw funds in self-custodial wallets without authoritarian state permission. Together, the measures tighten control over two of the last available avenues for digital and financial privacy in Russia. For more stories like this and others, go to financialfreedomreport.org and sign up for the newsletter, which is released every Thursday morning. Yeah, not good. VPNs, one of the last lines of defense for privacy and freedom in the digital age. And this is like a strong attack too, because if you don't comply, the privileged regulatory status, which includes pre-installation of devices, if you just get axed out of that distribution, that's pretty painful for a business. Yeah, I mean, to your point that I had a tendency of picking the Russia stories is they've been quite savvy with a lot of this stuff. I think in a lot of ways it shows that for a while we, I think, correctly saw what the CCP was doing and realized that in a lot of ways it was being adopted as a playbook by Western countries, including the United States. And I think in a lot of ways, Russia has been leading the way recently. In terms of like, in the CCP, it's a lot more, it's even more draconian. Like Russia's steps, you could much more likely see in a European or America, European country or America. I mean, if Palantir has their way, it's coming here. It's already here in one form or another. The farmers, they're starting with the farmers. Hey, if you don't get... If you don't jack up your cow, your heifer, with this mRNA vaccine, we're going to use the drones, we're going to find you, we're going to come, and we're going to shoot the cow up ourselves. They just vax the cow from the drone. They should. I mean, yeah, why complicate things? Why create the potential for kinetic reaction by the farmers when you can just... Yeah, those are like... The COVID kamikaze bomb, the COVID vax kamikaze bomb coming to account near you. Yeah, exactly. Vertical integration. Be aware. All right, before we get to the software update section, we got a zap from make no mistakes, 25,000 sats. Black Mirror is happening now. May as well get an agent so you have a digital friend during the collapse. Code RHR for $50. off www.makenomistakes.shop pulling up fountain where i checked yesterday and as of yesterday around this time we didn't have any but it looks like we got somebody to do it johnny stimulus 21 000 sats no no message thank you johnny anything and then we had there we go primal.net slash rhr our Nostra page where we post a video hashed and signed afterwards. So, you know, there's no deep fakes. A way slice beefsteak Josh said, y'all, a few beefsteak tickets remain. Get your shit together. That is on the 27th, four days from now in Vegas, immediately following Marty and I's event collaboration with PubKey, which by the way, hand up. I apologize to Thomas. He got Curtis Yarvin. It was a well-hyped addition to the show lineup. I'm sorry I doubted you, sir. But that's hotstyle.pubkey.com is our event. You won't be disappointed. It'll be a great time if you're in Vegas. And then right after that is Beast Steak. I know a lot of us are going straight from that event to Beast Steak. If you've never been to Beast Steak, it is going to be the single best event of the week. And then I'll just give another shout-out because they zap last week. NosVegas.Shakespeare.WTF is the day after, so that doesn't conflict. That's on the 28th. None of these things conflict. Go to all three. And then we have a zap from PentaSofia, 21,012 sats, grass-finished tallow-based skincare products at tallowhead.com. Use code RHR. Hell yeah. The zap cut off, but I assume the end said use code RHR. our charge yeah curtis curtis will be there we're working on some other big guests for the takeover too so may not be the last big headliner name of course yeah we're trying to think of what to ask him if you guys have any suggestions from in the chat what was it like radicalizing peter mccormick no peter peter's gonna join too yeah peter's gonna be there we can ask peter what's it like being a second tier dark cash uh he's blowing up dude he's big he's big now uh software section update we're going old school here i know the first one we should probably talk about a little bit but after that stop me because i gotta i gotta you got baseball just rip them eight minutes It's Nunchuck adds cold card HSM support for Bitcoin agents. The original Nunchuck agent compatibility fell through the cracks. I think they released that a few weeks ago. It looks like they're not only shipping it, but iterating it on it as well. Yeah, so this is awesome. Just real quick, cold card is very unique in the hardware signer space that you can connect it via USB and it has an HSM mode that will sign transactions based on a given rule set. So sign any transaction under $100, for instance, or sign any transaction that goes to this address or only sign 10 transactions a minute or something like that. And so this setup is ideal for having an agent hold and use large amounts of money where you don't want them to make a mistake or get compromised and lose all the funds that it's attached to. Pretty cool. I think this is pretty awesome. Go to Coinkite.com. Use code RHR. Best hardware wallet in the space. Yes. Mempool version 3.3 has been released with advanced Bitcoin features. I'm curious, what are the advanced Bitcoin features there? Support for sub 1, Sapper, V-Byte, and ephemeral dust, decimal fee, recommendations, taproot scripts, tree visualization, taproot witness, and annex annotation, sig hash icons, and highlighting, stale block comparisons, and visualizations. Good upgrade here, boys. And any ladies working at a memple on the open source project. Next up, Fetty enables Bitcoin payments to Indian UPI QR codes. It's pretty cool. Deep integration with payments tech that already exists. It's what you like to see. WISP version 1.0.0 officially launches on Google Play with major updates. We've been talking about this. Use WISP. It's awesome. Listen to my most recent civil dispatch with UTXO. Oh, no, I see why he zapped us in that way because you zapped him on this post and said $1.74 pennies. With the whole... The wallet. If you download from Google Play Store, it doesn't show Bitcoin anywhere. The zaps are just called Send Money and they're denominated in your local fiat. I love it. Q&A. Got it working on real hardware before Vegas, LFG. he's talking about. What is this project called again? This is their most recent, this is Foundation Devices' most recent hardware wallet. What do they call this? The Passport something. Products, Passport Prime. But it's more than just a Bitcoin-focused device. It's supposed to be, it's a secure device with a screen that offers app support where you can load other apps to it. And so in this case, Q&A, who is not a developer by any means, and his caveat is that this is very beta and that he completely vibed it, created a Noster signer so that you could plug it in and the way you sign into Noster and send posts or whatnot, or by approving it on the screen, which is something that I've been very excited about for a while. And yes, it's not for everyone. I think the average person, you can just keep it in the secure element on your phone and you're fine. You could even probably back it up to iCloud and you're fine. But people have different threat models. And if you're talking about like a nation state or a big company or something, having an account, it's incredibly cool if they can sign and authorize messages via at least cold-ish storage. Like look at Trump, for instance, right? Like you send out a malicious truth social post and you could start a war. So those types of users who are not like constantly interacting with people, they don't want to like like or zap or do a bunch of different authorizations all the time. They just want to like send posts and use it as like a publishing agent. This could be very useful for them. Yeah. I saw Owen Chemies from the Passport team last week in New York. This was, I got to hold the device in my hand. It was pretty cool. They have a lot of really robust features. Fold launches Bitcoin business program for employers. This is really cool to see. They piloted this with Steak and Shake. I'm sure many of you have heard, but if you didn't, Steak and Shake is offering $0.21 per hour bonuses in Bitcoin to their employees. Fold is running the back end for that. They were their pilot customer for this. And now they're opening it up to other businesses. So if you run a business and you want to incentivize your people to join your workforce, to join your business, you can offer them these Bitcoin rewards through Fold. And it looks like they've added more robust functionality in terms of being able to vest and things like that. So it's more feature rich. Did you ever reapply for the credit card? No, not yet. I haven't used it, but I saw them talking about it. They have a feature that's like a self-administered Bitcoin tax where you can just like every expense you make, just auto stacks like 5% or 8%, whatever percent you want in Bitcoin. And I saw someone saying their wife was complaining about it, which I just thought was hilarious. Like just imagine you give your wife a credit card and like every time she goes to like Bed Bath & Beyond, the higher her the higher her bill is the more sats get stacked it's a funny incentive it's a good way to speculative attack your credit card bills you know Strike keep shipping sponsor the show download the Strike app use code RHR for $500 off trading fees if you DCA you don't pay any last week expanded access to Strike main consumers saw massive minimum drops So for the lending product, they're dropping minimums in Maine specifically. The Bitcoin line of credit is now live for consumers in Texas and Colorado at a $5,000 minimum. And so they're expanding coverage of their lending products, especially Bitcoin collateralized loans and the line of credit that they have. Shipping at lightning speed. Use code RHR. Disclaimer. sponsor of the show and 1031 Portco. I had Ronan Miner was saying that politicians should have disclaimers of who's supporting them when they're talking about particular issues. They should be like the NASCAR drivers. They should show that's what they should wear. Yeah, they should. But he used us as an example of a company, an entity that does it right, the disclaimer. We disclose so often people get mad about it. This was cool to see. We talked about this, what, two or three months ago. Bitcoiners pay duty free with Bitcoin in Oslo Airport. Somebody was highlighting on Nostia on Twitter. I saw somebody using it this week. I'm looking at something different here. Oh, wait, no. That's in the tweet that's being, or the note that's being quote noted here was what I saw. but apparently every bitcoiner attending Oslo Freedom Forum by the Human Rights Foundation in June should do this. Pay your duty free goods at Oslo Airport Bitcoin. They're using BTC Pay Server. We still don't know who set it up, right? No, this guy did, Sandre, the guy who's being quoted. That's Sandre did? Yeah. Sorry if you can hear the children running in the background. You're good. It's wholesome. It's fine. um amazon exposed for secret price manipulation with walmart levis and more just evil corporation things it's not shocker uh i dig we did get called out of tftc for um for blowing up the walmart in-store price changing they have like the digital prices now and they're gonna change they're gonna have like surge pricing and somebody mandibles e-com sites like Amazon have been doing this for years and nobody's been complaining but that's true I'm sorry I haven't highlighted this on the internet but much easier to hide there it's happening everywhere now shop local yeah what's happening here though Amazon will monitor prices on Walmart Target Best Buy Home Depot in real time the second a competitor listed a product cheaper than Amazon they contact the brand directly and tell them to fix it. And the exact emails are now public. Amazon sent Levi's links to two Walmart listings with subject line styles of concern. They basically said the prices on Walmart are too low and we have a problem. The next day Levi's responded, I talked to Walmart and they had partnered with us to take easy khaki classic fit back up the ladder to SPP price, $29.99 immediately. So price collusion here. Lovely. Yeah, and sometimes they tell the sellers to deal with it. And they de-rank you on Amazon. So if you're trying to sell your goods on Amazon and Walmart, and Walmart's at a cheaper price, they'll make it so Amazon's algo doesn't serve you up to their users unless you bring that price back in line. Pretty standard price-fixing practices, but just at scale in a really big way. Props where props are due. the CEO of Xbox came out and announced they're lowering their subscription price. I thought that was interesting. Never seen a subscription price lowered before. Yeah, but they pulled all the new Call of Duty games out of it. This is a big sub-edline. Which, I mean, I don't have time to play games anymore anyway, but presumably that is one of the main drivers of the subscription and probably also one of the key costs. I was a Modern Warfare 2 guy. That was like my last big company. That was a long time ago. I know. We already talked about the last item on the list, which is Microsoft's first ever voluntary employee buyout. They're calling it early retirement, or is that like people on X being facetious? No, yeah, that's how they're framing it, right? Because it's like what Elon was doing with Doge where you send people an offer that's too good to be, you know, too good to refuse rather than picking and choosing who you fire. Yeah. Awesome. My guess is it's, it's the first piece, you know, and I think, look, I don't pretend to understand the pressure of running one of these super large pubcos with, you know, a small, a small city worth of people working underneath you. but I think you got to rip the band-aid off and just cut hard and fast and then you can always rehire. Well, that was the question I was going to pose. What's the game theory here? Is the deal going to be best now or is it going to get better? Like if you're an employee looking at this offer, do you take the money and run or do you wait? Do you think the pressure is going to increase? It probably gets worse. That's what I would think. Particularly if you take it, if you take the buyout now and just put it in stretch for your guaranteed 11.5%. You can still buy a pool. You can still buy a pool. Definitely a better deal to take it now than when everyone's getting fired. Yeah. All right. Well, I got to load up the car, get the baseball. This was a great one. I think we got back to basics here. I hope we made Pleditor proud. I think the cool part is we're already making him proud. So that warms my heart. All right. Be aware. The Agenda 2030 is still on the table. It's just I feel like the wrapping and the people behind the narrative have changed a bit. It's just got a new branding. And the fog of war is making it very easy to implement behind the scenes. Yeah. Keep your head on a swivel. Take care of your families and your friends. Stanable Stack Sets Peace and love, Freaks