transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:05] Sup freaks, this rep of RHR is brought to you by good friends at Strike. If you hold Bitcoin, you shouldn't have to sell it to access liquidity. Strike offers Bitcoin back loans with zero origination fees, zero early repayment fees, and zero liquidation fees. Your Bitcoin is securely held and returned within a business day after your loan is closed. A financial institution built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners, that's what Strike is building. We're doing it for you. I use it every day. Go download Strike at strike.me and use code RHR for $500 in fee-free Bitcoin stacking. Again, that's strike.me, use the code RHR. You're gonna get $500 in fee-free Bitcoin stacking. This episode, again, is sponsored by Strike. This rip of RHR was brought to you by our good friends at Coinkite. They produce the Cold Card Q, my favorite hardware wallet. 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 Aragat fashion. Never have to connect the Cold Card Q to an Internet device. You can sign transactions and PSPTs remotely in the most secure fashion. If you're a Bitcoin power user and you're looking for the best security, you'll pick up a Cold Card Q and go to coinkite.com. Find the Cold Card Q there. I think you go to coldcard.com as well. Use the code RHR for 5% off. Step up your security, get a Cold Card Q. This was also brought to you by our good friends at Stackwork. If you're looking for a great way to make KYC-free sets, 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 sets, go check out the bounties, contribute to them, and stack some sets. 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 up in a day. You gotta 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 wanna know why? Salt of the Earth, baby. Go to drinksauté.com, use the code RHR, and you're gonna get 15% off. I'm dead serious. It has 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. drinksauté.com, that's drinksote.com, use the code RHR for 15% off any order.

Speaker 2:
[03:03] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.

Speaker 3:
[03:07] When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

Speaker 4:
[03:15] 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.

Speaker 3:
[03:25] I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin.

Speaker 4:
[03:28] If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

Speaker 5:
[03:30] You probably should be, you probably should be.

Speaker 6:
[03:32] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[03:37] Just the two of us. No guests this week. Just get the two of us. Sup freaks.

Speaker 5:
[03:43] I like having, I like having the guests. We should do them more often. Shout out Seth and Zach.

Speaker 1:
[03:51] I mean, looking at the list right now, we'll get to it, but I think we have to have Alex Carbon at some point. We can come and spin a book and bring us a lot of views, it'll be sick.

Speaker 5:
[04:01] It's like when I say, 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? I would love to interview, be happy to. Same goes out to Karp.

Speaker 1:
[04:23] Elon, we're streaming on your platform right now. You should come on.

Speaker 5:
[04:30] 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.

Speaker 1:
[04:52] They have a ton of retail investors that love the stock.

Speaker 5:
[04:57] The people that love the stock know the stock. But I was hanging out with some of our normie friends, all relatively successful young family types. 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 percent, you're definitely aware of who they are.

Speaker 1:
[05:25] They've got like a Tesla-like retail investor base that is rabid about the stock.

Speaker 5:
[05:31] Yeah, but it's different because the Tesla one is cool because the people own Teslas and they love the product. The retail investors of Palantir don't love the product. They're not using the surveillance spy tools.

Speaker 2:
[05:45] Well, they are, they just don't know it.

Speaker 5:
[05:48] 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, 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 Macs and two iPhones and I will die holding this Apple stock because I love the product so much.

Speaker 1:
[06:21] Yeah, Farz Gump, one of those retail investors, you know.

Speaker 5:
[06:24] There you go. Well, Marty, the first order of business is I have a proposal for you.

Speaker 1:
[06:37] Okay.

Speaker 5:
[06:40] I think we should call our bet Awash on the Iran ceasefire. I think we really up the terms.

Speaker 1:
[06:53] I think I technically won, didn't I?

Speaker 5:
[06:55] 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.

Speaker 1:
[07:06] All right. I don't need the Sats, but I want an asterisk.

Speaker 5:
[07:11] You want an asterisk? What do you want me to make sure the website has an asterisk?

Speaker 1:
[07:16] Yeah, Marty.

Speaker 5:
[07:17] But then you're always going to have an asterisk there forever.

Speaker 1:
[07:22] I need an asterisk. That's all I need. I don't need the Sats. I just need a K. He was directionally correct.

Speaker 5:
[07:28] I mean, are we in a ceasefire right now?

Speaker 1:
[07:32] 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.

Speaker 5:
[07:42] They just keeps it. He'll send out a tweet. He's like, the ceasefire has been extended. He's like, and then also, by the way, we blew a hole in the engine room of the ship and took it over. It's like, okay.

Speaker 1:
[07:57] Yeah. You keep the Sats, I get an asterisk. Okay.

Speaker 5:
[08:04] I mean, I care more about the asterisk than the Sats. Okay. Fine. I give you an asterisk on the website. By the way, Freaks, I was talking to a Freak and a good idea or an idea, 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 Noster, a ZAP poll, do you agree with Marty or Matt? Then you guys can bet with ZAPs basically against each other, but alongside our terms. 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, just putting it out there.

Speaker 1:
[08:58] It's 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.

Speaker 3:
[09:16] All right.

Speaker 1:
[09:18] Been a good week for Bitcoin, higher than we were last week, currently standing at 77,760 cuck bucks, one cuck bucks and get you 1,286 sats. We're at $1.56 trillion market cap. We're looking at block 8, 946,338, which means we are 1,182 blocks away from the next difficulty retarget, estimated to be on May 2nd. 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 Teenie Weenie Mempool has 2,426 transactions in it. If we go over to mempool.space, we'll see that they have 59,812 transactions. Transaction is pretty cheap right now, 2 SaaS per V-Bite if you want to get into the next block. What is CC? What is this pool? Ocean. Ocean mind block, four blocks.

Speaker 5:
[10:25] What CC? CC is the entity that's mining with Ocean. Because if you find your own block in Ocean and construct it yourself, you can also name it yourself.

Speaker 1:
[10:36] Yeah. Pretty empty block. I'm just looking at the block. That pool is so cool. We can just go in.

Speaker 5:
[10:51] 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?

Speaker 1:
[10:59] Yes. I took a lot of umbrage to this. Rabbit Hole Recap, Odell, Marty talking AI and talking their book on Nostre, etc. Gets annoying, but otherwise, they offer good commentary. Okay.

Speaker 5:
[11:12] Do you know who wrote that?

Speaker 1:
[11:14] No.

Speaker 5:
[11:16] First of all, you said you took some umbrage. You don't think that is a pretty great review?

Speaker 1:
[11:22] It ends with a good one, but it's like a, what do you call that?

Speaker 5:
[11:26] Do we talk about AI and Nostre too much?

Speaker 1:
[11:29] Backhanded compliment is what I would call it.

Speaker 5:
[11:32] When you find out who it was from, I think it was Richard Greaser. As nice as he's going to get, I'll take it as a big endorsement.

Speaker 1:
[11:42] Richard Greaser?

Speaker 5:
[11:44] No, Dick loves us. That's a Pleditor review of Rabbit Hole Recap.

Speaker 1:
[11:48] Oh, Pleditor. Yeah. I like it. Nice to see you listening, Pleditor.

Speaker 5:
[11:53] I'm glad you find the commentary interesting.

Speaker 1:
[11:56] Yeah. Apparently, we do a good job of pushing wearers.

Speaker 5:
[12:00] Do we talk about 21,000? Our bags are not Nostre. We definitely pump 1031 bags, a decent amount, but that's because we believe in the projects we invest in.

Speaker 1:
[12:13] We try to disclaim whenever we're doing that.

Speaker 5:
[12:18] I don't pump Nostre for my bags. Nostre will never make us rich.

Speaker 1:
[12:23] I mean, that idea, we have one investment we just put out there is unique to Nostre. You can't really create that about anywhere else.

Speaker 5:
[12:32] We're definitely not pumping 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.

Speaker 1:
[12:42] I don't know. I think the picks and shovels exposure that we have is pretty strong right now.

Speaker 5:
[12:49] I just like talking about AI and I like talking about Bitcoin is free to money and the most interesting aspects of Bitcoin and freedom money recently have to tend to involve Nostra or AI. Yeah. But anyway, freaks, keep the feedback coming. Thanks for the shout, Pleditor.

Speaker 1:
[13:14] Appreciate you, Pleditor. Appreciate you, Soapminer. 21,221 sas code. RHR has been used 173 times for handmade tallow soap.

Speaker 5:
[13:22] That's impressive. There's a lot of dirty freaks out there.

Speaker 1:
[13:26] I'll have you guys know that I used the soap less than two hours ago. All right. Let's get to the last.

Speaker 5:
[13:35] Wait. Before we do that, Logan, pull up RHRTV. Okay, scroll down. You like that? You like your asterisks?

Speaker 1:
[13:51] Yeah, I need the asterisks. That's perfect.

Speaker 5:
[13:53] There you go. Shipping live on air.

Speaker 1:
[14:01] Is there an explanation of the asterisks anywhere?

Speaker 5:
[14:07] 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?

Speaker 1:
[14:20] Yeah, that's why you put in asterisks and then you have a little explanation at the bottom of the page.

Speaker 5:
[14:27] This is why the asterisks exist. I'll have the clanker do something when you click the asterisks, it tells you what it is. How about that?

Speaker 1:
[14:39] All right, on to the list. We've talked about it many times in the last couple of months, including last week. The Internet blackout in Iran is now on its 55th consecutive day. Its connectivity flatlines at 2 percent 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.

Speaker 5:
[15:10] I mean, it's wild. To be clear here, Freaks, I've said it 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 US government cutting out Internet access for the country or the Israelis. It's the Iranian government. The Iranian elites have access to the Internet. That's like that 2 percent baseline that you see here. Netblocks is a non-profit that tracks this stuff. But the average person only has internal access to Internet networks. They can presumably communicate locally, but they can't communicate globally. 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 privilege set. This is why this technology, whether that's Mesh or Noster, or even something like Starlink. In this situation, Starlink is very helpful. Obviously, if the US government wants to cut off Internet access somewhere, Elon is not going to let them use Starlink. But in this case, Elon is not aligned with the Iranians, so he provides access. It's so important because you never know when you need it until you need it. Then oftentimes, it's too late to deploy any kind of countermeasures.

Speaker 1:
[16:45] Yeah. What's the latest with the ceasefire? I know that there may have been some mines that made yesterday.

Speaker 5:
[16:57] Yeah. It's a ceasefire where you lay mines. That's the type of ceasefire we're in right now. Supposedly, the Iranians have seized some ships too. Trump tweeted out again that he's, well, he tweeted social posts out again that we're going to blow up anywhere the US government is going to blow up any Iranian ships they see. And then he prefaced it by saying even though the US government already blew up their entire Navy, so they have no ships. Big fog of war going on right now. A lot of double-speak, a lot of fog of war.

Speaker 1:
[17:36] My focus has been on the cloud seeding technology that Iran took out. Now it's raining for the first time in many years. I don't know if that's true at all, but if true, pretty crazy.

Speaker 5:
[17:47] If true, pretty crazy. 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 terms was, will there be five days of ceasefire before, with no hostilities, before April 21st? We specifically said no hostilities before we made it.

Speaker 1:
[18:19] We made it 14 days ago.

Speaker 5:
[18:20] Because the whole reason it started was because we were saying how hard it is to make the wording for these things. Then I personally think we've fucked up the wording. But that was before Trump did his own blockade, which in their defense is actually a clever tactic. Just do it in the double blockade, the Iranians blockading it and Trump blockading it. But I think a lot of the lines are blurred, right? Because you can justify that it's a ceasefire because there's minimal ground attacks while everything is just being like ship to ship.

Speaker 1:
[19:07] Yeah. Well, there's actually, look and pull this up, this ties into like prediction markets and stuff like that. What we have here is a classic oracle problem. The oracle is telling us there's no ceasefire, but there are missiles flying and this is a story.

Speaker 5:
[19:19] This is great.

Speaker 1:
[19:21] But I'm not sure if you guys saw this, but Polymarket running into some oracle problems as well. Buck Perley, quote tweeted, 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. He would basically take a very low probability bet on an abnormally high temperature in France at particular sensors. 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 the temperature in the air temperature.

Speaker 5:
[20:04] 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. 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 on a list, so good call out on that. But I think this highlights something a little even more nuanced and more interesting, which is the Oracle problem from 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 mitigate it to a great degree, and in this situation, a perfect example of a mitigation would have been if it was 20 different sensors that were being read. Is it perfect? No, but it's not just a single sensor that can get hair-dried. You do some kind of average and drop the outliers or something like that in order to calculate it.

Speaker 1:
[21:20] We all know I'm a big DLC fan. That was 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, even one of them could crap out and feed you bad data. The idea would be that you use three or four, use Kraken, Coinbase, Bitstamp, Strike and basically get a weighted average of the price between them. If one's way off, you just discard it.

Speaker 5:
[21:57] 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?

Speaker 1:
[22:09] No, don't hate the player, hate the game. What was he arrested for?

Speaker 5:
[22:14] Do you think that's going to be his criminal defense? Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[22:18] Well, I could actually say if you're tampering with a weather device that is used for like, are the airplanes using it to like?

Speaker 5:
[22:26] I hope not.

Speaker 1:
[22:28] Landing and so on.

Speaker 5:
[22:29] I mean, suppose he was on the perimeter fencing. 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 body market. And then he was arrested for it.

Speaker 1:
[22:48] He did it like three or four times, didn't he? Before they caught him.

Speaker 5:
[22:51] Did you see Brad Opp? He tampered with air. I think he did it twice. I think it was two times.

Speaker 1:
[22:58] Where I could see him being arrested, being justified is if the data being fed from that sensor outside a polymarket was critical to the equivalent of their FAA operations and affected decisions made in air traffic control, then yeah.

Speaker 5:
[23:17] I mean, I doubt it. Because he, I mean, supposedly he only moved it like a couple of degrees. Like if planes are falling out.

Speaker 1:
[23:24] No, I mean, it's Celsius, which is a lot in Fahrenheit.

Speaker 5:
[23:28] It was a couple Celsius.

Speaker 1:
[23:30] No, it was like three degrees Celsius.

Speaker 5:
[23:32] So what is that?

Speaker 1:
[23:34] That's like six.

Speaker 5:
[23:37] Is it that much?

Speaker 1:
[23:39] What's the difference between 19 degrees Celsius and 22 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit?

Speaker 5:
[23:46] Between 19 and 22 Celsius in Fahrenheit. 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit difference.

Speaker 1:
[24:00] That was wrong, not 15.

Speaker 5:
[24:02] It's like, that's not 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.

Speaker 1:
[24:15] I'm not saying, I'm saying like, what could they charge them? I don't know what they charged them with, but.

Speaker 5:
[24:22] I think they charged them with like a market interference or something to that effect.

Speaker 1:
[24:29] Yeah, don't hate the player, hate the game. You got to solve your oracle problem better, polymarket. I mean, yeah, what was the, what was the bet contract?

Speaker 5:
[24:41] This is what Pleaded was talking about when we get sidetracked of this stuff.

Speaker 1:
[24:45] The oracle, we're using this weather sensor, this temperature sensor, whenever it says at this point in time, is what's going to resolve the bet in the market. I don't think it should be arrested for manipulation there.

Speaker 5:
[25:00] Yeah, if any, like Polymarket should be arrested for only using one sensor.

Speaker 1:
[25:04] 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?

Speaker 5:
[25:21] 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 overfucking think it. You just use 10 sensors or 20 sensors.

Speaker 1:
[25:35] Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 5:
[25:37] I mean, this guy basically, I mean, I doubt they'll ever run a temperature prediction market with one sensor again. Like this was a $30,000 bug bounty that got paid out basically.

Speaker 1:
[25:55] How long do you think he's going to prison for? In France, does that get you life?

Speaker 5:
[26:00] Yeah, right. It's like immigrant rapists, like get lead free and this guy's going to go to jail for like 20 years. Current state of the world.

Speaker 1:
[26:11] 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 hairdryer, and then looked at the market, and then looked at the hairdryer. So wait a second. I know what that sensor is. Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[26:27] I wonder how he got caught. He probably bragged about it to people.

Speaker 1:
[26:35] Somebody in France probably complained to Polymarket like, hey, I'm here right now. It's only 66 degrees.

Speaker 5:
[26:39] Yeah. This temperature is off by five degrees. Something must be wrong.

Speaker 1:
[26:48] 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 about them in the beginning. We alluded to topics, but you have Palantir as the technological republic manifesto, which they published on Twitter earlier this week. Why did you include this? I think it's some whitewashing, gaslighting, narrative building.

Speaker 5:
[27:20] I just checked back, by the way, on my terminal and the clanker was like, I added the asterisks, but don't you want a footnote somewhere explaining what it's for? Why is Palantir writing manifestos?

Speaker 1:
[27:38] It's a big thing. American dynamism. This is how you attract the G-capital.

Speaker 5:
[27:44] This feels like early PsyOp days right here, whatever this is. I feel like a lot of thought was put into this thing.

Speaker 1:
[28:20] This 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? What other countries have mandatory?

Speaker 5:
[28:43] Israel.

Speaker 1:
[28:44] That's what I said, the IDF, Israel. No. Freaks out.

Speaker 5:
[28:51] I don't know. Probably a bunch of them do. Like a bunch of the smaller ones. Don't the Nord, some of the Nordic countries do?

Speaker 1:
[29:00] I don't know. Maybe Finland? Maybe Finland? I could be wrong.

Speaker 5:
[29:06] Which countries have mandatory service? What is their terminology? Universal duty, mandatory national service.

Speaker 1:
[29:18] Ukraine at this point. That's a good point. We're a robot.

Speaker 5:
[29:21] Yeah. Well, Ukraine is a out 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 Clanker is going off a little bit.

Speaker 1:
[30:00] Yeah, it sounds like Clanker is going off the deep end.

Speaker 5:
[30:04] This is Opus 47.

Speaker 1:
[30:10] Let's just ask Google. I think Google may be better.

Speaker 5:
[30:17] Anyway, it's a lot of countries. What do we want to know?

Speaker 1:
[30:20] I don't want to be on that list. Over 30 countries.

Speaker 5:
[30:23] I don't want to be. Yeah, it's a lot of countries.

Speaker 1:
[30:27] Israel and South Korea are like the most, I think 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.

Speaker 5:
[30:42] Your friends with Tom Kim?

Speaker 1:
[30:44] No. It was a big sub-theme. One of the tournaments, if he won, he would have been exempted from mandatory service in South Korea, and he did not win or make it.

Speaker 5:
[30:59] So they sent him to boot camp.

Speaker 3:
[31:03] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[31:06] I actually don't know if he ultimately went.

Speaker 5:
[31:10] Anyway, I don't know why Palantir is, it fits the evil villain mold pretty well. But still, come on guys, stay in your lane. Just do the silent dystopian. Don't tweet out national policy objectives. Like you can do that behind closed doors with the corrupt politicians. Like why are you tweeting it out publicly?

Speaker 1:
[31:39] Well, don't worry, they're partnering with the USDA for American farmers. Nothing nefarious is going to come out.

Speaker 5:
[31:45] The second one probably wouldn't have caught my eye except for the back to back nature. This is how we want to change the country with a bunch of horrible ideas and then also like, oh, by the way, we're going to bury ourselves deep into the American food supply.

Speaker 1:
[32:03] Well, yeah, it's happening. I mean, I don't know if you have it on the list, but Tinder and WorldCoin combined.

Speaker 5:
[32:08] I forgot to add that one.

Speaker 1:
[32:11] That one's brutal. It's all this intersection of-

Speaker 5:
[32:14] What's the Tinder WorldCoin one? Did it pop up on your app or something?

Speaker 1:
[32:19] 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-

Speaker 5:
[32:33] If you scan your eyeballs.

Speaker 1:
[32:35] If you scan your eyeballs with WorldCoin's tech and then OAuth into Tinder, you're going to get bonus profile points. I have no idea how the app works, but apparently-

Speaker 5:
[32:44] You get shown to more ladies if you do it.

Speaker 1:
[32:46] Yeah. Don't use the dating apps freaks. Get verified with an orb. Is that real? Is that parody? I'm not totally sure.

Speaker 5:
[32:59] I think that's probably real. It looks right. It's like a modern app design. If 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-mined shit coin, and then you can get priority Tinder access. It's like the early days of social credit score stuff, or middle days. I don't know if it's early days right now. What about Zoom?

Speaker 1:
[33:44] Don't bring that up yet, but Tinder and Zoom.

Speaker 5:
[33:48] What is Zoom using it for?

Speaker 1:
[33:50] The same verification thing, I guess.

Speaker 5:
[33:53] 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.

Speaker 1:
[34:00] So you know that you're, if you're getting scammed by a North Korean from the Lazarus group, you know that they bought the credentials.

Speaker 5:
[34:08] They bought or compromised the credentials instead of not doing that, I guess.

Speaker 1:
[34:17] But back to the USDA, let's not forget about this, protecting the center. Palantir is proud to partner with the US Department of Agriculture to modernize services for American farmers, giving them the time and resources they need to secure our nation's bread basket. Protecting America's farmland is protecting America itself. 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, now pull up the tweet. This is where we go back to France.

Speaker 5:
[34:59] They're so fucking evil.

Speaker 1:
[35:01] This is what it's going to be used for. Apparently in France, they're flying drones over farmland because apparently they have forced vaccination campaigns on the cows in France now. They're flying drones over farmland to find the unvaxxed cows and then showing up, enforcing farmers to vaccinate their cows because they know they're faxed.

Speaker 5:
[35:21] That's up.

Speaker 1:
[35:23] That is probably what the fat Palantir USDA partnership is going to end in.

Speaker 5:
[35:28] There's probably some evil Monsanto partnership there too.

Speaker 3:
[35:33] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[35:37] 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 of this partnership at the USDA.

Speaker 5:
[35:53] And they're 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.

Speaker 1:
[36:03] Everybody's focused on the ceasefire and they're laying mines, release the USDA partnership so we can force vaccination on the cows.

Speaker 5:
[36:12] It's all the Peter Thiel mafia.

Speaker 1:
[36:18] Be aware, freaks. Be aware. We'll stay up to date on how these things progress. 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. I think it's important to go over it. A few weeks ago, 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.

Speaker 5:
[36:56] We didn't cover it. We forgot to cover it when it happened.

Speaker 1:
[36:59] Yeah. Apparently, the DOJ got access to messages that were sent between somebody they were charging with a crime and in 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 app software.

Speaker 5:
[37:22] 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. 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. Now, if you have iOS device, there's a patch available to update to fix that.

Speaker 1:
[37:55] Yeah. If you're not already, just don't have set your signal notification message to just receive message. You don't have the text and the message on that.

Speaker 5:
[38:07] Yeah. I mean, easier said than done. You should use the fucking thing. 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 open sites using Signal. I'm in there every day sending hundreds of messages. I like having the notifications. I don't think that's a real fix.

Speaker 1:
[38:35] You have the notifications, but it's like you don't have the bare message in the notification.

Speaker 5:
[38:40] I mean, it's completely useless. No, it's completely useless because it's, 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 trade-off 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.

Speaker 1:
[39:14] 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, US Admiral, Admiral Paparo took to Capitol Hill today when a little viral in the Bitcoin community for saying that Bitcoin has incredible potential for national security. Admitting that the US military is running a Bitcoin node and running with the Jason Lowry thesis that Bitcoin is a power projection tool that the US military needs to be on top of. I'll let you give your thoughts first.

Speaker 5:
[40:07] Now, what are your thoughts?

Speaker 1:
[40:09] It's great to see. They're running a node. They're probably probing. Be careful, the US military is running a node. They can connect to your node. Just be aware. Obviously, we've said it before. I think it 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 protect critical military infrastructure is something I find pretty far-fetched and hard to believe. Bitcoin's proof of work. He said it uses reusable proof of work.

Speaker 5:
[40:54] Wait, can you play the tape? Logan, can you play the tape?

Speaker 1:
[41:04] Oh, I have Pribal muted, permanently.

Speaker 6:
[41:07] Strength as well. Another subject, our competition with China isn't just about military strength, it also includes monetary strength as well. Last year, the Chinese Communist Party's main monetary think tank published research on Bitcoin as a strategic asset. This came after President Trump moved to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Admiral, how does leadership in Bitcoin impact leverage, resilience, deterrence for Indo Paycom against China? And do you think that a strategic Bitcoin reserve helps America compete against China?

Speaker 2:
[41:42] 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.

Speaker 6:
[42:26] Thank you. What recommendations do you have for us here in Congress on how the US can lead on Bitcoin competition?

Speaker 2:
[42:36] You know, 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.

Speaker 1:
[43:03] You heard it here first on Capitol Hill.

Speaker 5:
[43:05] It's to the good. Bitcoin to the good. I mean, look, it's wild. It's wild as even the topic. So that part is cool. There's a lot of word vomit in his answer.

Speaker 1:
[43:24] Well, if we're talking about like high leverage support within the government, like the military is saying like Bitcoin is a thing, good.

Speaker 5:
[43:33] Yeah, Bitcoin is good.

Speaker 1:
[43:36] Bitcoin is good. The word salad. Let's address that. It's obviously well known in the space. Jason Lowry is sitting under him in Softwar. It was a very popular book. It's a very hot rod topic within Bitcoin. There are people who read Softwar and think they love it. They love it. And I had Jason Lowry 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 US government. You would like, Sha, Hashcash, Sha256, 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. The only way you could stretch an 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.

Speaker 5:
[45:02] 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 a honeypot wallet there, you can see if you're compromised because the North Koreans will then just steal the money. Then you know the server is covered. But that's not the argument they're making. I mean, I think you nailed it on the head there, that 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. 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. 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.

Speaker 1:
[46:37] I co-assign 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?

Speaker 5:
[46:53] We'd be so.

Speaker 1:
[46:54] First and last resort, Nercot and TVA, and on upstream well paths. Where will we be? Probably in a worse spot. We would not be where we are. Bringing this back to AI, it's an AI podcast now. You can make the argument that 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's well known. He works under Admiral Paparo. He was 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 Lowry is also another thing I push back a lot on him is if you deem Bitcoin critical military infrastructure and make it like a weapon, make it akin to like a military grade weapon that could have some perverse negative extra power that don't bode well for the individual American.

Speaker 5:
[48:36] I mean, a perfect example we've had, I mean, besides 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.

Speaker 1:
[49:00] Maybe I'm giving Peter too much credit.

Speaker 5:
[49:03] I'm giving Peter a little bit too much credit and Dark Cash too little. But he's the AI pod guy. 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 Dark Cash kept repeating Anthropix 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 siop of calling it enriched uranium, you're doing us all a disservice. And obviously, someone like Dark Cash clearly believes in AI, like 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.

Speaker 1:
[50:18] Yeah, we've seen it with Anthropic itself, with Methos. We can't release this. It's too powerful.

Speaker 5:
[50:25] Yeah, you can't bring it up over and over again in the episode. It was like, it was like a Methos ad.

Speaker 1:
[50:31] But then it's like, did you see what happened with that Discord group that got access to Methos and how they did it?

Speaker 5:
[50:39] How did they do it?

Speaker 1:
[50:41] They guess the URL.

Speaker 5:
[50:43] Right. It was like based on similar patterns of past releases or whatever, right?

Speaker 1:
[50:48] Yeah. Apparently, they were running wild with it, making websites and stuff. But point being is like Anthropic can't even secure this dangerous model properly during the URL scheme. In a way, it is non-obvious. They're going to push for these licensing in regulatory mode regimes, and they can't even secure their own systems. Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[51:21] I mean, everyone knows that Anthropic is doing it. Mostly for publicity and then secondary for regulatory mode reasons. They just don't want the competition.

Speaker 1:
[51:34] 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 think there is a very strong belief there from that perspective. Obviously, they're going to make a fuck ton of money, too. They just got value to, what, 800 bill.

Speaker 5:
[52:00] I saw that on Hyperliquid, they were trading for over a trillion.

Speaker 1:
[52:04] I think that was OpenAI.

Speaker 5:
[52:07] No, Anthropic is on Hyperliquid now.

Speaker 1:
[52:08] Anthropic, too. Interesting.

Speaker 5:
[52:12] Be aware. Anyway, Freaks, he calls it the Dark Cache Podcast. He was very creative with the name. But is that really how you pronounce it?

Speaker 1:
[52:24] I think it's Dark Cache. Is it Dark Cache or Dark Cache?

Speaker 5:
[52:28] I don't know, but I'm glad you thought it was important enough to interrupt me. Go listen to it. It was probably going to be one of the better podcasts of the year. That's a good one to listen to. 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 things while you're listening to it as well. You got to read between the lines a little bit.

Speaker 1:
[52:54] Yes. 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.

Speaker 5:
[53:09] Your extension makes this really confusing.

Speaker 1:
[53:13] The what?

Speaker 5:
[53:14] Your extension makes this really confusing in this context.

Speaker 1:
[53:17] They froze $344 million worth of Tether into wallets on the Tron blockchain, in coordination with OFAC and US law enforcement. If you read the blog post, Tether, 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. The marketing list themselves, they've frozen more than $4.4 billion worth of Tether in cooperation with these agencies. 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, but who thought they had $344 million in these two addresses. There's many, 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.

Speaker 5:
[54:20] I mean, I think if I was a gambling man, my bet would be North Korea, Iran, or Venezuela. I mean, because that's significant size.

Speaker 1:
[54:33] Yes.

Speaker 5:
[54:35] Yeah, this is something that Tether has boasted in the past. Historically and to this day, the biggest risk of Tether is government enforcement. 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 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 free to money, and there's nothing else like it. Nothing else even comes close.

Speaker 1:
[55:26] No. I mean, I think that's, we've said this. We've been talking about this risk for what? Seven, eight years now.

Speaker 5:
[55:36] Like 400 weeks. Do you see on rhr.tv, I put a live tracker for how many weeks we've been gone?

Speaker 1:
[55:42] Yes, I did.

Speaker 5:
[55:42] We're at 399 weeks. That's pretty much how long we've been talking about this.

Speaker 1:
[55:48] In the early days, cruise missile risk was how we described it. I think it's apt.

Speaker 5:
[55:52] Very provocative.

Speaker 1:
[55:57] I think more and more people are beginning to become aware with each new headline of whether it's Tether Circle, or freezing stable coin accounts that no matter what the US 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 the 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 a 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 stable coin technology as it exists today. If you're worried about CBDCs and you're a fan of stable coin, just be aware they're functionally the same thing. I think it's rather interesting 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. There has obviously been a massive push here in the United States and throughout the world to normalize stable coin usage and just be wary that it is what everybody warns about with CBDCs, just with a different wrapper.

Speaker 5:
[57:48] 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 sigh up that they get, 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 corporate side channels basically. A couple of things I will say is I don't use Tether. I'm an American. 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, in 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. 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. 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. Like it doesn't even come close.

Speaker 1:
[59:51] And then there's shit coin. Who said that? It was me. Well, the other thing too.

Speaker 5:
[59:59] Warren Davidson said that.

Speaker 1:
[60:02] Yes, he did. There's Bitcoin and then there's shit coin. Shout out to Warren Davidson. But that's the thing. Well, who knows what we'll come to find about who owns these while it's like Matt said, it will not be a surprise if it's North Korea, Iran or Venezuela. It will be marketed to the public. These are nefarious actors. Who knows? It could be the Mexican cartels too. That's a no. 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.

Speaker 5:
[60:35] They're going to buy NVIDIA chips with it, so we needed to stop them.

Speaker 1:
[60:37] 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. 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 it's 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. Asset seized. Oh, this is awesome too. Maybe this is what they seized. Scammers offer crypto safe pass.

Speaker 2:
[61:24] Strait of Hormuz.

Speaker 1:
[61:27] If you guys weren't aware, apparently in the Strait of Hormuz, we've talked about it a few weeks ago, the toll that has been erected by the IRGC in the United States. I don't know. Seized fire. I don't know what's going on with the Strait and the toll. It's on, it's off, it's on, it's off. 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. 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. Some actually did. Then they went to pass the Strait of Hormuz and the IRGC sent some warning shots at them.

Speaker 5:
[62:13] They hit the boat, didn't they?

Speaker 1:
[62:16] I thought I could be wrong, but I heard warning shots.

Speaker 5:
[62:20] Isn't this the one where like the tape leaked of the crew being like, what the fuck, stop shooting?

Speaker 1:
[62:27] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[62:31] 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 Strait of Hormuz.

Speaker 1:
[63:09] I will say the stakes seem higher. I mean, when people were getting, we're getting scammed in the Polaniacs Trollbox, they were going on 100x leverage. They weren't getting fired at after.

Speaker 5:
[63:24] What was the term we used for it? It wasn't Trollbox, right? It was a specific term.

Speaker 1:
[63:30] Well, Polaniacs was known as the wood chipper. And then you would talk about Polaniacs wood chipper in the Trollbox.

Speaker 5:
[63:39] 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 or WorldCoin verified before you send. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[63:57] Make sure the toll collector has verified his human identity and his credentials via the orb first before you pay the toll.

Speaker 3:
[64:08] It is wild.

Speaker 5:
[64:10] It is absurd.

Speaker 1:
[64:10] What are your thoughts on all these scientists getting?

Speaker 5:
[64:16] Right. Did you read The Three-Body Problem?

Speaker 1:
[64:20] I didn't read it, but I watched the first season of the show on Netflix.

Speaker 5:
[64:22] 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.

Speaker 6:
[64:40] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[64:42] 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 scientist that was asked questions about Ancient Aliens on that show. He said, I mean, he said, I'm not suicidal, I love life, I'm happy to be here. Apparently, he committed suicide a couple of days later.

Speaker 5:
[65:10] Did you see a body?

Speaker 1:
[65:12] I haven't seen it. More pictures of it.

Speaker 5:
[65:15] I guess, what's the bull scenario? The bull scenario here is that they've assembled a crack team of scientists that are doing the Independence Day movie or something, behind the scenes right now.

Speaker 1:
[65:27] Actually, that is the-

Speaker 5:
[65:28] To safeguard America in the next decade.

Speaker 1:
[65:31] The optimist in me is like they just need to be, people need to think they're dead and they're in an underground bunker working on some-

Speaker 5:
[65:37] Yeah. They're doing like a superhero movie.

Speaker 1:
[65:40] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[65:42] That's the- The bear case is pretty bad.

Speaker 1:
[65:45] I don't want to go to the bear case. The one guy was missing for a year and they just found him in his body in a burnt Tesla, a 29-year-old.

Speaker 5:
[65:57] I didn't see that one. I mean, it feels like it keeps happening. There's a bunch. I haven't been tracking. I just- It keeps popping up.

Speaker 1:
[66:04] Yeah. Yeah, it really does.

Speaker 5:
[66:08] We got some zaps here in the live chat. The live chat is always streamed to all compatible Nostra clients, including Primal in your favorite app store. Mav21, Rider Die Free, zapped 21,000 sets. He didn't say anything. He just spoke with Freedom Money. We have Hawaii Satoshi zapped 21,212 sets. Palantir zapped. Got to zap the Freedom Bull to plow through all this fiat shit swamp. Love your cast and thank you for relentless Freedom Tech efforts. Thank you, sir. Then that's it. That's all we got over 21,000 sets. UTXO the Webmasters zapped us $5.32 Canadian.

Speaker 1:
[66:56] Sats aren't going as far as they used to in Canada. But the CAD isn't going as far as it used to in Sats. You have a prediction here. I like this guy's bio on Twitter, him following the crowd from the front. I like that one. He's setting the narrative that the crowd follows. It's very interesting.

Speaker 5:
[67:21] I think it's great that I send Marty the list, not always, but today I sent it to him six hours ahead of time, but he's reading it live on air. I actually prepared.

Speaker 2:
[67:32] I came prepared.

Speaker 1:
[67:35] I came prepared. How did I have that France farmer drone ready to go?

Speaker 5:
[67:41] That's true. Fair enough.

Speaker 1:
[67:42] I like this prediction. We won't have UBI.

Speaker 5:
[67:44] Hand up apologies.

Speaker 1:
[67:46] I 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 equal paychecks similar to stimulus payments, I believe it will be akin to air drops. Reach person is credited based on their behavior, actions, social score, etc. Too long didn't read, take the Chinese social credit system and combine it with UBI.

Speaker 5:
[68:19] They literally less than a paragraph and you need to TLDR because people have no attention span. Wait, so you said you read his bio. Do you know who he is? Because it makes him more interesting.

Speaker 1:
[68:31] No.

Speaker 5:
[68:32] He's the co-creator of Black Mirror.

Speaker 1:
[68:35] Is he?

Speaker 5:
[68:36] Yeah. So obviously, Black Mirror is a Netflix series that tries to portray future scenarios. But they take a lot from what we see today, and then they extrapolate from it. That's why a lot of it is very realistic and tends to happen. I mean, I could wholeheartedly co-sign this message here. This is exactly how it's playing out.

Speaker 2:
[69:04] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[69:04] Because if you think about it, universal basic income or universal high income, as Elon thinks we need, it's just not tenable because you're going to 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.

Speaker 2:
[69:32] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[69:32] 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, this is Elon Musk, we're just man in the world. Universal high income, high income, all caps via checks issued by 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 want to get rid of 7 percent of their employee base through buyouts. 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. Unfortunately, I think I'm going to use that one at least seven more times over the next couple of years. But Microsoft is effectively laying off 7 percent of people with good severance. They're making it quote unquote voluntary. Microsoft alone, I looked it up today, has about 230,000 employees. Wild. I would never have been able to get, I knew it was a lot, but that's a shit ton. Seven percent of that is 16,000 employees. We covered Block laying off 40 percent 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 percent to go. 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. I think this is his tactic, is selling this fairy tale of universal high income.

Speaker 1:
[72:19] Yeah. I'm not sure if he caught it, but right before we went live and not too long after this announcement from Microsoft, Meta came out, 10 percent layoffs coming, 8,000 members of their team.

Speaker 5:
[72:32] They only have 80,000 employees.

Speaker 1:
[72:35] Apparently.

Speaker 5:
[72:36] Wow. They're a lean operation over there, Meta, compared to all these other guys. Well, 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 to 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, you know, had made unfathomable riches, right? I mean, Elon is insanely wealthy to a point where it's just you can't even comprehend it. And that's, you know, I'm a free-market guy, competition. There's, you know, 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 nobles. So the comparison this guy made was you had the nobles, but then they had, they created this lord class underneath them that did quite well. And so 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, 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 dis- behooves people that are in power and accumulating significant amounts of wealth right now to just lie to the general public in that regard.

Speaker 1:
[74:38] I completely agree. But other side of the argument is AI being used as a façade excuse because these companies are bloated in the first place. In the case of Microsoft, I think it can be an argument easily. I mean, over 200,000 people, that'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 Lama to their credit. I think it's very admirable what they're trying to do at Lama with the open-source bottles, but they're not.

Speaker 5:
[75:23] They decided they're not doing open-source anymore though. They did not catch that.

Speaker 1:
[75:27] Well, take that back. But point being is not kept pace with other frontier models like Chachi BT and Claude. 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.

Speaker 5:
[75:50] I think it's a mix and match. They finally have an excuse. Headcount used to be a vanity metric without 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 sales or marketing or whatnot. It's hard to say that they didn't completely over hire with 230,000 employees. What are all those people doing? There's definitely some truth to that, but also it's quite impressive that over 100,000 of them are in engineering. But the second piece, I mean, too, is AI fully to blame here or not? I mean, I think it's, like you said, somewhere in the middle, I see John in the comments saying, Odell, you're sure just 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, he's like eight years old and shit. He was like all over me. The, 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. It's a 100 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 where it is like the absolute 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.

Speaker 1:
[77:36] Yeah. I'm trying to pull up another screenshot. Logan, pull up the first screenshot, and then we'll pull up the second. First screenshot is IGV, which is the iShares Expanded Tech Software Sector ETF, which is, I think, the most liquid, mistreated software stock ETF offered by BlackRock. That was down 5.8 percent today on the news of these Microsoft and 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 is 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 out 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.

Speaker 5:
[78:52] Do the one year, Logan, not the one month.

Speaker 1:
[78:55] Well, this is a screenshot. That was going to be my caveat is that it is a different times. It is a short time scale cherry picked in the cherry picked timescale of one month. But over the last month, it does seem like Bitcoin is beginning to break that correlation. And just so we have it here, at your request, Matt, the one year, it looks better for the software stocks. But I think.

Speaker 5:
[79:26] Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't call it breakout. I wouldn't call it breakout yet on that one year chart.

Speaker 1:
[79:31] 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 Big Wind represents in terms of? Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[79:59] 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 and 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 here. It's the ones that fail to adapt and offer a shitty product that are just going to be completely outcompeted and obsolete. I mean, to that point, it's like, okay, if one person is running 20 agents, those are 20 potential users for you. Your software stack just needs to serve them.

Speaker 1:
[80:47] Yeah. Speaking of agents, the price of these agents is getting out of control with Claude's cucking of open-claw using the-

Speaker 5:
[81:00] You're finally feeling our pain.

Speaker 1:
[81:03] I'm feeling it.

Speaker 5:
[81:05] You're in that max bubble for a while, bro.

Speaker 1:
[81:08] It was great. It was great. Umia, all right. Update. Not done the month yet, but we're tracking for 8 to 10X in cost.

Speaker 5:
[81:20] 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 by these VC-backed companies.

Speaker 1:
[81:43] Yeah. Agreed. We got to keep going on the list. I've got baseball game to get to here in a little bit.

Speaker 5:
[81:50] Nice.

Speaker 1:
[81:52] Next up, we've got open hardware for open money from OpenSATS. New initiative. Is this new?

Speaker 5:
[81:59] No, it's just we're trying to do the, I talked about in the past, we're trying to do all these charities that take 40 percent 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. We never had anything like that because we run at 100 percent pass-through and are incredibly lean. But what we can do is we can do more impact reports. 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. This one is focused on open hardware, specifically signing devices for securely holding and using Bitcoin and cold storage without corporate devices. And the BIDax project, we've been big supporters of the BIDax 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.

Speaker 1:
[83:09] You have the open hardware, big supporter of all these projects, shown out the BIDax. One of my favorites, one of my favorites in the space. They're making incredible progress.

Speaker 5:
[83:20] I would just say, freaks, I know you've heard me say it in the past, 501C3 deductible if you want to tax deduction. You can get it if you want to donate anonymously with Bitcoin. We love that too. opensats.org. Every set counts. Thank you for your support.

Speaker 1:
[83:38] If you're streaming, be podcasting 2.0, 5 percent of the sets that you stream or boost while listening or go into Opensats. Pretty cool. All right. Onto 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.

Speaker 5:
[83:57] I mean, that's 100 percent my fault because I'm the one who got me picking which story. But I mean, it's also like they're 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.

Speaker 1:
[84:18] 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 VPN, 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 privilege, 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 and self-custodial wallets without authoritarian state permission. Together, the measure is tightening 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 privilege regulatory status, which includes pre-installation on devices, if you just get axed out of that distribution, that's pretty painful for business.

Speaker 5:
[86:04] 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. I think in a lot of ways Russia has been leading the way recently. In terms of the CCP, it's a lot more, it's even more draconian. Russia's steps you could much more likely see in a European or America, European country or America.

Speaker 1:
[86:51] I mean, if Palantir has their way, it's coming here. It's hard to hear in one form or another.

Speaker 5:
[86:56] The farmers, they're starting with the farmers.

Speaker 1:
[86:59] Hey, if you don't jack up your cow, your heifer with this 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.

Speaker 5:
[87:15] They just vax the cow from the drone.

Speaker 1:
[87:18] They should. I mean, yeah, why complicate things? Why create the potential for kinetic reaction by the farmers when you can just-

Speaker 5:
[87:27] Yeah, those are like-

Speaker 1:
[87:29] The COVID kamikaze bomb, the COVID vax kamikaze bomb coming to account near you.

Speaker 5:
[87:35] Yeah, exactly. Vertical integration.

Speaker 1:
[87:42] 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. We got RHR for $50 off. Go to www.makenonstakes.shop. Pulling up Fountain where I checked yesterday. 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 message. Thank you, Johnny.

Speaker 5:
[88:19] Then we had primal.net/rhr, our Nostra page where we post a video hashed and signed afterwards. You know there's no deep fakes. Away 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. Then right after that is Beefsteak. I know a lot of us are going straight from that event to Beefsteak. If you've never been to Beefsteak, it is going to be the single best event of the week. Then I'll just give another shout out because they zapped last week. Nasvegas.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. Then we have a zap from Penta Sophia, 21,012 Sats, Grashfinished Talo Base Skincare Products at tallohead.com. Use code RHR.

Speaker 1:
[89:46] Hell yeah.

Speaker 5:
[89:47] The zap cut off, but I assume the end said use code HR. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[89:53] Curtis will be there. We're working on some other big guests for the takeover too. So it may not be the last big headliner name.

Speaker 5:
[90:01] Curtis can be wild.

Speaker 1:
[90:03] Yeah. We're trying to think of what to ask him. If you guys have any suggestions, start them in the chat. What was it like radicalizing Peter McCormick?

Speaker 5:
[90:12] Peter's going to join too.

Speaker 1:
[90:14] Yeah, Peter's going to be there.

Speaker 5:
[90:16] We can ask Peter what's it like being a second tier Dark Cache?

Speaker 1:
[90:25] He's blowing up, dude. He's big. He's big now. 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. Cause I got to, I got to.

Speaker 5:
[90:37] You got a baseball, just rip them.

Speaker 1:
[90:39] Eight minutes. Nunchuk adds Cold Card HSM support for Bitcoin agents. The original Nunchuk agent compatibility fell to the cracks. I think they released that a few weeks ago, but it looks like they're not only shipping it, but iterating it on it as well.

Speaker 5:
[90:55] 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.

Speaker 1:
[91:41] Yes, Mempool version 3.3 has been released with advanced Bitcoin features. Now I'm curious, what are the advanced Bitcoin features there? Support for Sub1, Sapper, Vbyte and Ephemeral Dust, Decimal Fee, Recommendations, Taproot Scripts, Tree Visualization, Taproot Witness, and Annex Annotations, SigHash, Icons and Highlighting, Stale Block Comparisons, Visualize. There's a good upgrade here, boys. Any ladies working on a Mempool, on the open source project. Next up, Feddy 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.

Speaker 5:
[92:34] Use Wisp. It's awesome. Listen to my most recent sale of Dispatch with UTXO.

Speaker 1:
[92:43] Now, I see why he zapped us in that way, because you zapped him on this post and said $1.74 pennies.

Speaker 5:
[92:52] 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.

Speaker 1:
[92:59] I love it. Q&A. Got it working on real hardware before Vegas, LFG. He's talking about, what is this project called again?

Speaker 5:
[93:11] This is their most recent, this is Foundation Devices most recent hardware wallet. What are they called? This is 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. 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 Nostr signer so that you could plug it in. The way you sign into Nostr 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. Yes, it's not for everyone. The average person, you can just keep it in the secure element on your phone and you're fine. You can 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 coldish storage. Like look at Trump, for instance, right? 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.

Speaker 1:
[94:47] Yeah, I saw Owen Kemy's from the Passport team last week in New York. This was, I got to hold the device in my hand. It's pretty cool. I 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 21 cent per hour bonuses in Bitcoin to their employees. Fold was running the backend for that. They were their pilot customer for this. 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. It looks like they've added more robust functionality in terms of being able to best and things like that. So it's more feature rich.

Speaker 5:
[95:53] Did you ever reapply for the credit card?

Speaker 1:
[95:56] No, not yet.

Speaker 5:
[95:57] 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. I saw someone saying their wife was complaining about it. I just thought it was hilarious. Just imagine you give your wife a credit card, and every time she goes to bed bath and beyond, the higher her bill is, the more sats get stacked. It's just a funny incentive.

Speaker 1:
[96:32] It's a good way to speculative attack your credit card bills. 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, they expanded access to Strike. Main consumers saw massive minimum drops. 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. So they're expanding coverage of their lending products, especially Bitcoin collateralized loans and the line of credit that they have.

Speaker 5:
[97:18] Shipping at lightning speed, use code RHR.

Speaker 1:
[97:24] Disclaimer, sponsor of the show and 1031 Port Co. I had Ronan Miner was saying the politicians should have disclaimers of who's supporting them when they're talking about particular issues.

Speaker 5:
[97:37] They should be like the NASCAR drivers. They should show that's where they should live.

Speaker 1:
[97:41] Yeah, they should. But he used us as an example of a company that an entity that doesn't write the disclaimer.

Speaker 5:
[97:48] We disclose so often. We disclose so often people get mad about it.

Speaker 1:
[97:55] This is cool to see. We talked about this what, two or three months ago. Bitcoiners pay duty free with Bitcoin and Oslo Airport. Somebody was highlighting on Nostra and Twitter. I saw somebody using it this week. I'm looking at something different here. Wait, no. The tweet that's being quoted 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?

Speaker 5:
[98:36] No, this guy did, Sandre, the guy who's being quoted.

Speaker 1:
[98:39] That's Sandre, did?

Speaker 5:
[98:41] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[98:42] Sorry if you can hear the children running in the background.

Speaker 5:
[98:45] You're good. It's awesome.

Speaker 1:
[98:51] Amazon Exposed for Secret Price Manipulation with Walmart, Levi's and more.

Speaker 5:
[98:57] Just evil corporation things.

Speaker 1:
[98:59] It's not shocker. We did get called out of TFTC for blowing up the Walmart in-store price-changing. They have the digital prices now and they're going to change. They're going to have surge pricing and somebody's going to have mandibles. Ecom sites like Amazon have been doing this for years and nobody's been complaining. But I'm sorry I haven't highlighted this on the Internet, but it's much easier to hide there. It's happening everywhere now. It's shop local. What's happening here? Amazon will monitor prices on Walmart target best buy Home Depot in real-time. The second competitor listed a product cheaper than Amazon. They contact the brand directly and tell them to fix it. The exact emails are now public. Amazon sent Levi's links to two Walmart listings, 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.

Speaker 5:
[100:07] Yeah, and sometimes they tell the sellers to deal with it. They derank 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. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[100:35] Props for 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.

Speaker 5:
[100:47] Yeah, but they pulled all the new Call of Duty games out of it. This is a big sub-headline, 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, probably also one of the key costs.

Speaker 1:
[101:05] I was a Modern Warfare 2 guy. That was my last big-

Speaker 5:
[101:09] That was a long time ago.

Speaker 1:
[101:11] 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?

Speaker 5:
[101:29] No, yeah, that's how they're framing it, because it's like what Elon was doing with Doge, where you send people an offer that's too good to refuse, rather than picking and choosing a new fire.

Speaker 1:
[101:42] Yeah. Awesome.

Speaker 5:
[101:46] My guess is it's the first piece. I think, look, I don't pretend to understand the pressure of running one of these super large pubcows with a small city worth of people working underneath you. But I think you got to rip Band-Aid off and just cut hard and fast. And then you can always be higher.

Speaker 1:
[102:13] Well, that was the question I was going to post. 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?

Speaker 5:
[102:27] It probably gets worse.

Speaker 1:
[102:29] That's what I would think.

Speaker 5:
[102:31] Particularly if you take it, if you take the buyout now and just put it in stretch for your guaranteed 11.5 percent, I guess it's definitely a better deal.

Speaker 1:
[102:39] You can chill by the pool.

Speaker 5:
[102:41] Definitely a better deal to take it now than when everyone's getting fired.

Speaker 1:
[102:49] 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.

Speaker 5:
[102:57] I think the cool part is we're already making him proud, so that warms my heart.

Speaker 1:
[103:02] 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.

Speaker 4:
[103:24] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[103:25] Keep your head on the swivel. Take care of your families and your friends.

Speaker 1:
[103:31] Peace, love, freaks. Okay.