How AGI Might Break Crypto Forever... - Nic Carter

Nic Carter (Castle Island Ventures, prolific Bitcoin writer) joins on the same day he signed on as independent director at Robo Strategy. They cover his case that AGI has quietly arrived, the legendary CoreWeave angel investment that became his ticket into AI deep tech, the white-collar apocalypse hiding inside the K-shape, and where his odds sit on quantum breaking Bitcoin by 2035. Closes on the secretive Bitcoin Core dev scene, what a Satoshi coin heist actually looks like, and why he's still fighting the crypto war when most of his peers have rage-quit.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Yo, yo, yo. Hello, hello, Mr. Thread Guy. Mr. Nick Carter. It's an absolute pleasure, man. I appreciate you joining. Of course. What what should I call you? Um call me Michael. We can be first name basis. Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

I didn't know your name until just now.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Well, it's great to meet you, man, officially. By the way, congratulations on uh being received. Oh, yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm gonna be able to do that was sick. That was cool to see. Also, I know you are, or at least you claim to be semi-retired from the podcast circuit. Yeah. But I've lived I don't know if I've seen you on the bunch recently, so I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

I know. It's a very active retirement now, but I I am. This is a very rare exception for me.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

So I'll tell you what, Nick, I'm honored. Also, it's a it's a funny day, like I guess it's a special day that uh I wasn't planning on talking about robotics, but I I figure why not start there? I have the announcement up right here, RoboStrategy, which we've been talking about a bunch. Breaking Nick Carter has signed with RoboStrategy as an independent director. So yeah, congratulations on that. What does that mean? And maybe give us like a super quick high level on like what you've been doing over the last couple months here.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Yeah, so I'm somewhat limited in what I can say. Okay. Uh, unfortunately, but uh as you might imagine, it's a you know, it's a public company, so it's the first public company I'm on the board of. Independent director just means I'm on the board. It's my job to you know be a second pair of eyes on management, make sure everything's happening in an orderly fashion. I'm on a lot of boards already. This is the first public one. This is the first one that doesn't have anything to do with Castle Island. Uh, so this is a non-castle island position. But you know, in the course of my ordinary life, I'm on boards all the time. Reblist Strategy is a closed-end uh fund that holds stakes in robotics companies, uh, typically private. And uh, you know, they just listed, so it's a new entity. And uh the idea is uh it's simple, you know, it's uh ordinary retail investors can't really access private robotics uh firms uh at the moment. Uh I mean there are some public names, right? Tesla is doing a ton of robotics stuff, of course. So that's that's the concept. Um, you know, I I've known the mechanism capital guys, Andrew King, uh Mark uh Weinstein, uh, you know, really well for the last few years. And they asked me to join the board, and uh I thought it'd be a really fun new challenge, and you know, not a sector I've been that engaged in. I mean I've dons of AI stuff, but not a lot of robotics stuff, so I thought it'd be a great learning opportunity. Um, I'm not gonna claim to be robotics expert, you know, not my expertise, but uh you know, I th I thought it would be super fun. So here we go.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

What do you think about like okay, Kang obviously has a huge platform and people have been talking robotics, robotics, robotics for a while. There is there's now a way to get exposure, but generally speaking, there is not a very good way to get exposure to these things in public markets. What is your thought process on the general trend of companies just staying private forever and what happens to the evolution of that?

SPEAKER_01 3:14

I think it's really a huge shame, frankly. I mean, uh it really uh disadvantages retail investors. Yeah. You know, like companies used to go public early, yeah, like really early. Like some of the you know biggest tech companies that exist now, they offered public investors thousand X upside after being public. So it just doesn't happen anymore. And I think it's because from a regulatory perspective, it's much harder to be public. It's you know, you're just exposed to mu so much more litigation and harassment. Um, and it's just more expensive to be public, and so nobody wants to. And uh you get these horrible situations with, you know, like this these triple IPOs we have now, Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX. These are all multi-trillion, trillion plus. It's so free. It's so cooked. All of the appreciation is baked in. So, you know, the public is like a dumping ground for for for the for these names. It's really sad. And uh, I don't think that's how you know securities markets should be. I mean, it's like I understand that there's a lot of late-stage private equity and private capital that's available for these companies, but it shouldn't be like that. So hopefully that changes. But I think we just have to make it easier to be public.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

I had this thought on it, which is like I haven't thought about that much, but because all of these companies are staying private for so long, public wants exposure, these SPV type of vehicles start getting really hot, Robostrategy-esque. There's been a lot of anthropic sort of holding companies that have got super popular, and then eventually retail's like, fuck dad, I don't want to pay the you know, crazy MNF premium on these SPVs. We're just gonna buy like pre-IPO perps on hyperliquid. It's a little bit like a step forward, and then because everything is trading pre-IPO on hyperliquid or one of these perp platforms, the companies are like, well, all right, let's just go public earlier.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

Yeah, that's that's an interesting idea. I mean, I uh I would caution people with regards to the tokenized equity, you know, make sure you know where you're buying, right? Of course, like we saw what happened with the anthropic tokens that were that had to like a big dislocation, right? Um, but I do like that trend, actually. I mean, it's like people like use financial inclusion as a buzzword, but like, yeah, these SPVs were a nightmare, a huge nightmare. You know what I mean? You know, triple layer sps, the fee structure means it's you're just not getting the appreciation, and it just creates this like shadowy broker world, it's like hard to navigate and people get ripped off constantly. That's also that's only meant to be available for accredited, but no one checks. That's the truth of it, of course.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

Nobody checks out. That was always that never made a lot of sense to me, by the way. This accredited investor thing. It was always what it was first proposed to me as this scary credential that you have to get, and then I don't know, I invested in something way back, I just like told them I was accredited, and it was like, okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

Yeah, I've made probably 50 angel investments, give or take, and maybe more actually, and I've had to prove that I was accredited once and self-attested the rest every other time. So it's like a dirty secret, but it kind of still keeps retail out because people are scared, they don't want to, you know, break the rules, which I'm not encouraging anyone to break the rules, to be clear, but yeah, the system is like kind of corrupt and messed up and degenerating.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

I'm also not encouraging I just folded under zero pressure right there, so I'm not encouraging anybody else as well. Um, but okay, I I want to ask you about we'll get to the quantum stuff. I want to ask you about some AGI stuff, AI stuff, but what what are you spending most of your time doing right now? Like you have the fund, you're on the board of a quite a few companies now. Like, what are you how much of your time is spent thinking about crypto versus thinking about quantum versus thinking about AI, AGI versus like some of these other things?

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Yeah, I mean it's it's you know, my day job is still crypto. You know, we're still very actively deploying Castle Island. So it's still, you know, most of my time is like stable coins. It's just maybe not the sexiest thing to write about, uh, but that's you know, that's what I actually spend my time doing. And then, you know, in my free time, I am obsessed with AI, as I should hope everybody would be, you know, and not just like using AI and vibe coding like little things here and there, but like really pondering, you know, like where's the market go from here? Like what happens in to the broader economy, like are we in this permanent K-shaped AI world? Like, is the job apocalypse really happening? I mean, this is these are the things that I spend time obsessing about. Uh, but yeah, I mean, you know, most of my time, like, you know, Monday through Friday is is crypto. I mean, people think there's like no crypto deals to go. That's not true. There's plenty of deals. You know, it's just that maybe it's not as exciting. It doesn't grip people's attention. And then quantum is a subset of crypto. So I I bucket quantum under crypto.

SPEAKER_00 8:10

So on the AI thing, like where you know, where do you think it goes from here? You have this, you gotta have a uh interesting take on AGI existing right now. And Mark and Dreeson quotates you every day about it, which is fun to read. Can you like rehash that take a little bit, maybe from the perspective of where do you see the trend like going from here? How far we are into the J curve, like escape velocity.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Yeah, I think the reason people were unwilling to acknowledge that maybe AGI exists is because they thought that it would be this kind of seminal moment, like these letters would flash in the sky, like AGI achieved, and then we would have superintelligence, and maybe in the bad case we would have like a malevolent superintelligence, or in the good case we would have the singularity. People thought that would follow from AGI because they read too much like rationalist science fiction, in my opinion. And then, in my opinion, we got AGI in December of last year. That's that's when I that's AGI date. So that happened.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

And what was the cross move for you?

SPEAKER_01 9:11

It's like cloud code, yeah, like just like better models. And if you look at the data around um corporate adoption of AI, it just inflected specifically in the fall of last year, right? So I think that's AGI, you know, like basically this model is good enough to do most white-collar tasks, in my opinion. So we have AGI, we've had AGI, and the world is unchanged. And so I think people are disappointed by that, so they don't want to admit it. And then also I think people think AGI connotes that humans are like worthless now, or that like AGI means we have to imbue AI with morality or some kind of special moral status. I don't think that's true. I think we can just describe the intelligence, these models as yeah, it is generally intelligent across a huge variety of tasks without there being any moral, you know, or deep philosophical consequences to that label. So that's my view. We have AGI, it's not that interesting that we have it, but I think it's appropriate to say we have it.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

Are you underwhelmed by the oncoming of AGI? Like were you are you disappointed when you decided, okay, I'm gonna now call this thing AGI and it's not what I thought it was gonna look like three years ago?

SPEAKER_01 10:23

No, because I was never like one of those rationalists thinking, you know, like you read AI 2027, presumably. Yeah, of course. Uh you know, they thought, you know, the models are gonna take over and um I mean, maybe it could still happen. It's only 2026, so there's a year for this to play out. You have some time. So you know, like you have the Yudkowski and rationalists that think it's just gonna murder everyone, and then you have some other rationalists that are like, yeah, these are they're gonna bargain with nation states and seize power and deceive governments and you know, all these dystopian. I never really thought AI was gonna do that. I thought it was gonna be great. And I've been using LLM since before ChatGPT came out, right? Like, what were you using for ChatGPT? Like early like GBT2. Um there were interfaces. So like I was an investor in Core Weave, and they would always tell me, like, hey, like, this app is hammering our servers. And one of the first apps I used, which was an LLM app, was AI Dungeon. Did you ever hear about this?

SPEAKER_00 11:26

I don't know what that is.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

So it's like a text-based, it sounds quaint now. This is in 2019. It was a text-based video game where it's like you know, it was like playing Dungeons and Dragons. Uh, so you know, a scenario would present itself and you'd say, Yeah, like I'm, you know, whatever, I kill the elf or like you know, eat the mushroom. And then like stuff happens, and like I was like fascinated by this. I'm like, oh my god, this technology is incredible. Like, of course, now looking back on that, it's like, well, that's incredibly mundane.

SPEAKER_02 11:56

Fair.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

At the time, though, in 2019, I was like, this is the most incredible thing I've ever seen. So I'm very impressed with AI. I just never thought it would be the apocalypse. And I think reality is bearing that out.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Uh side note, but how why how did you become an early investor in Core Weave? You know, just thinker right there. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

It's been an insane, insane journey. Uh that was my first angel investment. But that was your first angel investment was core weave? First, first. At what vow? The first time they raised capital. So it's like that round was I think a 30 million post money. Um, yeah, so it's it's like completely insane. Uh ballistic. And uh through them I was just able to like see what what applications were getting popular. Uh, but yeah, how did I I met them because I was posting on Reddit about like proof of work because I was really obsessed with proof of work and Ethereum, and I was pro-ethereum staying on proof of work, and they started out mining Ethereum. So we had the same attitude in that debate. Through that, we became friends. Uh I became friends with uh with Brandon and Brian, and then when they when they raised, they never raised VC, they only raised from angels and family offices. And so I I had the chance to invest, and I uh a couple of years past, I'm like, this company's going out of business for sure, because Ethereum pivoted away from proof of work. Yeah. And so that for for a time it was like, well, okay, we have all these GPUs, like who are we gonna sell it to? And then AI inflected. Like, if Ethereum had waited another year, they would have been out of business. So the timing was just unbelievable that AI became a thing, right? As Ethereum did the proof of stake transition.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Wow. That TG, that's an incredible story. You know what's funny is like you're one of the you're definitely in the minority of people on the internet that's so close and I think has a understanding of AI that is not terrified of it, or kind of not panicking, but not I don't know, underwhelmed? Is that a fair take? Like, what what do you think of the Citrini article of K shape, but also like mass layoffs of everything AI induced deflation that's gonna fuck the economy because AI is too good?

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Yeah, no, I mean I would say I'm welmed. I'm adequately well. I'm well. I mean, I love AI. I talk to Claude for eight hours a day, right? I have been concerned about job loss because most of these white-collar jobs are fake, right? I mean, what do the 5,000 people who work at DocuSign do? What do they do every day? Yeah, they go into the office.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

What do they do? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

What are they doing? Yeah. I mean, even my job as a VC, I perceive it to be under threat. So yeah, I certainly think that, you know, I don't know, 30% of white-collar jobs are at risk imminently. And then I just don't understand the optimism around people like, well, we'll just retrain. Everyone will retrain. When has that ever worked? Have we ever retrained coal miners to be software engineers? No, that didn't happen. And people will say, well, you know, we're gonna create new jobs. What new jobs? We're talking about the automation of all cognitive tasks. So what's left? Like a massage therapist, uh theater actor? Like those are the only like a dog walker? Those are the only ones I can think of.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

And even actor is like, you know, AI video.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Hollywood actor is screwed. It has to be live performance, you know. So I I actually do somewhat align with this the citrini angle. I mean, is everyone gonna be supervising agents? Everyone, like customer service reps and you know, people that work in like retail store associates or accountants or junior uh lawyers, you know, paralegals. Like, are they all gonna supervise agents? I don't know. I find that hard to believe. So I think the displacement will be huge. I think the one gating factor is what Mark Andreessen talks about, which is regulation. So, like, probably all these highly politically engaged blocks, like doctors, lawyers, white-collar professionals, will just ask the government, you have to ban the use of AI in our profession.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

This is picking up a lot of steam, I feel like, by the way. Also, I know obviously you watch those commencement speeches where you know they they mention AI, the college graduation, everyone's booing. Like it's starting to really, I would imagine 2028, this is gonna be a huge political discussion over what do we do with AI. And like there'll be, you know, anti-AI candidates that will get a lot of traction amongst 100%.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

I mean, it'll be the biggest political movement. So, like, it all goes hand in hand, like this resurgent socialism that we see in response to like the capital-owning class doing exceptionally well, like that will also be intensified by this fear, you know, people that went to expensive schools and got nothing out of it, they wanted to be creatives or get white-collar jobs, that's not gonna exist. They will all go, my guess, hard left. So you get the socialist movement. Meanwhile, you have like very politically legible groups, you know, like white-collar elite urban professionals, they're going to their congressmen saying you have to stop this. Meanwhile, you have maybe it's the working class, they see the data center springing up in their town, they hate it. You know, the environmentalists hate it. So you get this big coalition of people that are incentivized and genuinely fearful of AI, so the diffusion will slow. So that might be the thing that that saves the jobs, even though it's not the most efficient outcome.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

I just uh you know, I understand the anti-AI rally. And I think you're like I I asked the chat yesterday on on in Twitch. I'm like, are you know, one to ten, how afraid of you are AI? And everyone's like, zero. And I think it's just like uh we live in a bubble where people hear they trade and they are so close to these things they understand it, most of the world does not. But I just kind of like scoff when I see banning of AI because it's like you you can't you can't do it. You can slow it and you can like abolish it in pockets and you can set up walls to slow it down, but at the end of the day, there's like a larger game here, at least in my head, you might think of it differently, like China USA race to superintelligence, and it's there's I don't know how do you how do you stop that as the overarching priority because like some group of people in Virginia, my hometown, which we'll talk about, are like upset about a data center build out.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

Oh, Virginia's ground zero for this stuff.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

You know, I'm from by the way, I'm from Aspirin, Virginia. It's the it's the it's the data center capital of the world. The whole for the last 10 years, the whole my whole hometown is just these massive data centers, and I didn't understand like what is happening here until relatively recently, last couple years, like, oh, that's what's happening here. But I we can talk about Virginia after.

SPEAKER_01 19:02

Well, does the water still flow out of the top?

SPEAKER_00 19:04

Or it looks good too. I I saw that clear, it's clear, man. I can call my mom, but it's clear, dude. The lights still turn on, everything works, like a little bit more expensive, but everything works.

SPEAKER_01 19:15

Yeah. I mean, Virginia is a great case study, though. 25% of Virginia's electricity is going to data centers, right? 25%. That's crazy. So that's the number one in the nation. The electricity prices went up a little bit, not a lot. I looked into recently, I was doing a state-by-state analysis. There was a big capacity auction in PJM, which is the ISO. And but it's mostly like Maryland that's upset about it because they don't get the economic benefit of the data centers, but they pay the price for the high the higher power prices, they're still exposed to it. With Virginia, in theory, if lots of data centers come in, you might pay lower property taxes. I want to try and explain this to people, but interesting. I don't know, they don't really seem to appreciate that. But if there are tons of data centers coming in, most likely they'll be covering the municipal services. Um, and so your property taxes in some jurisdictions are going down. But maybe people don't like that as a trade. Maybe it's not good enough.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

I mean, if you flatline, it feels like a reasonably fair trade.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Yeah, but uh electricity prices will go up for sure. They've gone up by about five percent, is what I saw in Virginia. So but mostly it's an inflation story rather than an AI story.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

You know, we did some I you know we did some covering on stream of like the Luddite era and like how that ended, and I mean they basically just like killed them all. Did they? Yeah, I mean, yeah, right? Like this is how it ended. Ended in the industrial revolution, they just it just they became too much of a problem, they just killed them all, basically. W where yeah, I don't know, what is the blow off the top on data center protest, build-outs, I mean, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

I think blue states just won't have data centers, basically. I mean, they kind of already don't, because they didn't want to build the grid improvements that meant the power was cheap. And the things that make power expensive are the same things that make it hard to build a data center, which is like tough permitting, like zoning laws that discourage big build-outs, very strong property rights, environmental NGOs are really well organized. So you already don't see that many data centers in blue states, and power is more expensive, typically. Uh not everywhere, not always, but generally speaking. So now you see like the top data center states are Virginia, which is a blue state. Yeah, maybe purple, maybe it's blue now.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

Yeah, it swings every once in a while.

SPEAKER_01 21:42

Um, it's a you know a five point blue state. Uh Texas, Iowa, believe it or not, uh, Nebraska, Nevada is a big data center state. Um, and so it's not always, but it's often red states where there's plenty of land, it's rural, there's big industrial. Lots available. There was until recently, you know, overcapacity of power, especially in Texas. You know, you had pockets of the state with tons and tons of cheap power. Uh so I think it'll just bifurcate, you know, that'll be like the pro-growth states and the degrowth states. And the data centers will just go in the pro-growth states. And you know, I think maybe people will still complain of the local local level, but I think that's just how it's gonna go.

SPEAKER_00 22:27

What happens to the US if in 2028 like socialism wins the election?

SPEAKER_01 22:34

I mean, I think you're gonna see this regardless, actually. You'll see certain loopholes get abolished. Like loopholes that I benefit from. I don't like to call them loopholes. I just, you know knowing the rule book. Quirks of the tax code that are advantageous for the likes of me. QSPS, the um carried interest, quote unquote loophole. I don't call it a loophole. I don't like the you know, negative the dispejative term.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

Let's ban that word from this combo, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:03

Maybe even short-term uh long-term capital gains gets hiked.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

So I think that's fucking brutal.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

Because you'll see like these three IPOs hit, and then you have hundreds of centimillionaires like come to exist instantly. I mean, it's like I mean, already we're seeing it with you know, this insane rally we're seeing in public equities. Like the people that own capital are doing tremendously well, and labor is not doing well. And this was very foreseeable. Like, what is the biggest expense for any corporation? It's labor. Okay, so the value of labor is declining, the earnings per share. We're seeing a massive EPS rally. So capital does great, labor does bad, white-collar labor, wage earning professions does even worse. I mean, that's that is that's just gonna cause problems no matter what, whether it's you know, Vance or Rubio or or AOC or Newsom. Uh, I think even in in the case of a Republican president, you'll see some attempt to like rebalance. Uh so I think I think you yeah, we're gonna get this no matter what.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

Before I ask you about quantum, it's your favorite topic ever, what do you think happens with AI, but then AI fueled like the market basically over rest of Trump admin? Like, do we just blow off into the most ridiculous bubble that the market's ever seen into 2028?

SPEAKER_01 24:29

I mean I'm like a big time bull. I would say I'm I'm an AI bull for sure. I know everybody is, but even when everybody said it was the CapEx bubble, I was bullish. Um, maybe it was self-serving because I own just tons of these AI data center stocks and neo cloud.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

What do you what do you like? AI data center stocks.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

I mean, I still own most of my core weave position from uh I don't know eight years ago. Yeah. I've been in that trade the whole time. Uh I've dealt with a lot of FUD, you know, I'll tell you that. Dealt with a lot of FUD. Uh my other biggest holdings right now, I'm these are not endorsements or inducements to buy, but I own all of the big data centers that are doing AI. So like Terra Wolf and Cypher, um, you know, those kinds of names. Iron. Um Iron had a good day today. What's that? I said Iron had a good day today. That they all did. Yeah. I mean, I I think I was one of the first people to copy trade Leo Ashenbrenner as well. Um I think I might have been the first person to like tweet about it. Like, I'm copy trading this man. And why? Because I really liked what he wrote, Situational Awareness. I thought it was incredible. Yeah, I think it's still the best thing that's been written about AI. And then he bought a ton of core weave, so I'm like, well, I fucking love this guy. He bought like $400 million of core weave right off the bat. I'm like, oh my god, this guy's incredible. And uh then he just kept on putting interesting names in his portfolio. I kept on buying them. So I owned like basically his portfolio. I disavow what he's done lately, is his latest.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

It's what the fuck was that, by the way? I don't know. I think he's shit coins in his port. What was that?

SPEAKER_01 26:16

I think he was tactically hedging during the Iran War, is my most generous interpretation. You know, I think I think all the puts and the hedges is it was an Iran thing.

SPEAKER_00 26:28

Yeah, that's the problem with the 13F, right? Is you're so delayed that you don't really you also can't with the the notional value of the options is weird, like you don't really Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

I mean you can't like you can't really copy trade someone by reading a 13F. But you can get good trade ideas, but yeah, there's like so much latency in there. It's like whatever, two, three months of work.

SPEAKER_00 26:46

Three months. It's like what am I what am I doing three months?

SPEAKER_01 26:49

He might be out of the position, and also you don't see a lot of synthetics and offshore and derivatives, so like if he's buy swaps or bit you know derivatives, yeah, yeah, you know, but bilateral like you don't see that, so you don't ever really know.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

I um okay, you went on the Del Phi podcast like four months ago, maybe it was a good one.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

And the Tommy is I remember too many like what what were the shoes? Oh yeah, blue scarpa. I was into that. Uh I yeah, I'm like the biggest customer of this.

SPEAKER_00 27:18

I've heard it, I heard. Um, and then the first thing he asked you on the podcast to level set was I think it was four months ago. Have you sold any Bitcoin? And you said no. Or four months after that, po that was pre-Google paper, I think. Pre-Google quantum paper. Have you sold any Bitcoin?

SPEAKER_01 27:35

No, still no.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

Okay, still not.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

I know this is like a there's a lot of rage quits happening, seeing rage quits on the TL. Some old timers, you know, some real old timers.

SPEAKER_00 27:45

Was your entry on Bitcoin? Like what I I don't know if I want to say. Okay, but it's like 2017 era, right? Isn't you started?

SPEAKER_01 27:53

Yeah, I mean I started posting on Twitter about it in 2017.

SPEAKER_00 27:57

Yeah. Um, the second question he asked you, just a level set, was I think uh this is pre-Google quanta paper, um, percent like percentage chance that quantum breaks Bitcoin encryption by 2035, and you said 70 to 80 percent.

SPEAKER_01 28:13

Oh yeah, that was a good guess. Probably a little bit higher than a little bit higher, yeah. I would say closer to 90. I'm pretty I'm pretty sure it'll happen.

SPEAKER_00 28:22

90 is high. I uh I know you love when people ask you what is quantum computing, so I'll skip that one, your favorite question, unfortunately. And I I do want to ask something I I I I think you had an opposite take on Delphi as you did on on Bankless, but you I wrote this one down. You you sort of like proposed on the Bankless podcast that quantum is a significant threat to the high performance chains like Solana. And I'm curious, like could you like walk us through a little bit what the risks are to like a Solana, but then really a hyperliquid, which I think would be the most nuclear thing that could happen to crypto at this stage?

SPEAKER_01 28:58

I don't know as much about how the infrastructure, the cryptographic like primitives of hyperliquid. Um, so I couldn't tell you there specifically. Cool. But Solana, so yeah, so Solana, you know, you know, basically every blockchain uses some variant of elliptic curves, right? Uh they were the unquestioned most efficient best way to do public key cryptography for the last 30 years. That was a golden age of cryptography. It's now a damn, it's unfortunate. So now we have to like go for all these kind of slightly less tested or much more inefficient schemes, and it's just a nightmare. There's gonna be all these competing standards, new cryptography that we don't trust, old hash-based cryptography that we do trust, but it's way too big and way too clunky. Yeah. So it's gonna be tricky for Solana because they're highly optimized around they have some like variant of elliptic curves. It's like E D something or other, a bunch of numbers. Uh so you know, they're optimized like the hardware level. Um, they also their whole comp you know, the whole concept of Solana is that there's a ton of throughput.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

And um, you know, they're super optimized around uh like their stack, and that's all gonna have to be rebuilt. It's all gonna have to be rebuilt. So it's not that they can't survive the transition, and they've actually been very proactive to their credit. To the Solana I see Solana leadership talking about it, they've been very proactive about it. They acknowledge the transition will happen. It's just gonna be a really annoying rebuild for them. And when it's all said and done, maybe they're using lattice-based cryptography. If I had to guess that's what they will do, but it's gonna be slower, so their throughput might go down, and that's kind of like the whole point of Solana, is a throughput, you know. So I think that's the issue, it's a performance degradation.

SPEAKER_00 30:52

This uh thank you for that. This might like offend you as a Bitcoin OG, but I didn't even real like I didn't fully even understand the Bitcoin developer ecosystem like it really even existed. I I had Hunter Beast on the stream who I know you've talked to him. Yeah, he's not. So I I I thoroughly enjoyed talking to him. I think I had him on maybe six months ago when he was pushing his BIP, and 360 was it?

SPEAKER_01 31:19

Yeah, 360, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:21

And yeah, I mean he's he's a he's a character, he's a good stream, he's a good like yearly stream guest for sure. And he was like the first time I had really been introduced to like the idea of Bitcoin core devs. And I heard you talking about on one of the pods that there's been two upgrades to Bitcoin in 10 years. Yeah. Like what exactly goes on in the Bitcoin, like what is the scene of the Bitcoin core dev community? Like, what's going on?

SPEAKER_01 31:46

Man, great question. Great question. I mean, I have to kind of restrain myself here because they've all been very mean to me lately. Yeah. Almost all the core devs. But I'll be charitable. Not a lot of major things happen. They kind of, you know, do tests and like incremental updates of you know, Bitcoin Core software itself and um stuff about networking and mempool policy, like I would say very incremental stuff. The major things that have happened the last 10 years are SegWit, of course, Lightning, and Taproot. Taproot, yes. And that was it, you know, Segwit in 2017, Taproot in 2021. And both of those were very hard to get through. Very hard. Even though they're sort of not that controversial. You know, back in the day we used to have soft works every six months and it was easy. It's kind of like how Ethereum does it. Now we don't even know who matters in Bitcoin Core. A lot of these guys retired because of Craig Wright, and they're being criticized and they're being sued by Craig Wright. So a lot of them retired, then some of them unretired, and they already tried to keep it really vague as far as who's in control, because they didn't want people yelling at them, and now it's very hard to tell who's in power, who has influence. So there are like, I don't know, 30 to 50 people that matter, but none of them want to self-identify. You know, they never want to say, I'm the guy who matters, because they don't want to be targeted, basically. So it's really tough. Like, even me as like a very long-time Bitcoiner who cares a lot about this, it's even hard for me to determine, you know, this guy matters.

SPEAKER_00 33:26

Is that like a pro of Bitcoin that they're not really supposed to be fucking with the code base and updates, and it's like better for Bitcoin if it's harder to push stuff through and figure out who's able to do what?

SPEAKER_01 33:39

To a certain degree, but it's certainly not good in a crisis situation, which I would argue. And this is true. Is not good in a if you want to be proactive and head off a future crisis where people disagree of the probabilities of the risk. That's where we are. You have to be proactive if you are like me and you think this is gonna happen in 10 years, you gotta do it now, but we don't have enough data to know for sure, for sure, you have to do it now. So the more uh you know, like sort of risk-averse guys could say, Well, I'm not seeing the data, I don't see a quantum computer imminently breaking Bitcoin. That's true. Yeah, yeah, no one sees that. But my perspective is, well, someone has to kind of be bold and proactive and take the reins and push through the upgrade no matter what, because we're not gonna get enough notice if we wait until but you can't Bitcoin core development philosophy doesn't you know permit boldness, really? So it's it's set up wrong for a situation like this.

SPEAKER_00 34:38

Okay, so let's uh I I'll skip all the like intricacies of how does quantum work? What does it mean? And I'm more curious on what it would take to get an upgrade through. It's like the question for you is is Michael Saylor, like, will Michael Saylor have to be the one to coordinate a Bitcoin update? And then who is even in a position to coordinate a Bitcoin update? Like, you have you know you've written a bunch of stuff, been very vocal on Twitter. Let's say everyone unanimously is like Nick Carter is right, this quantum thing is real, one of this set of updates is the thing that's gonna protect Bitcoin. We need to push this through. What happens after that? Like, how who takes the reins of this thing and and you know spearheads?

SPEAKER_01 35:23

It's a great question, honestly. Most people, most Bitcoin devs do agree that Bitcoin has to upgrade. So that's actually changed a lot in the last six months. Since I started talking about it to today, like base basically everyone agrees that something has to be done. Well, what they do not agree on is how we're gonna do it, which hash function, how soon we have to do it, do we do anything about Satoshi's coins or not? You know, so we don't agree on a lot of it, but the one thing we kind of do agree on, I would say, across the board is yeah, we probably have to upgrade eventually. How does it happen? I think in practice, if like five guys went on the Bitcoin mangling list, the ones that really matter, like Peter Bulla. Uh Greg Maxwell claims to not be involved, but I think people still trust him. But he got very upset with me when I when I wrote an article about him and I said he was influential. He was like, No, I'm retired. But see, this is like what I'm dealing with every day. Yeah, it's like guy who's his opinions matter, but he's retired.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

He's acting like he has nothing to do with it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:25

Do we count him or not? I don't know. Uh Adam Back, the chain code guys, you know, Morcos, the local host guys, the MIT DCI guys, the Blockstream guys. If they all posted on the mailing list and said, we need to do this, I think it could happen pretty quickly. We would have to agree on a hash function or uh sorry, a signature scheme. There's a lot of different trade-offs. And then like an upgrade approach. Um are we gonna deprecate elliptic curves immediately? Are we gonna have a parallel situation where they still run, but we have a new post-quantum scheme running? You know, so that those implementation details would have to be decided. But if you got the most important guys to all post, we need to do this. I think it'd come together pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

You know, one of the things you said in this interview that made me really think is I had never considered is like the remaining influential figures, the KOLs of Bitcoin, if you will, have made it this far by completely ignoring every problem Bitcoin has ever had. That's like how you made it this far. And if at any point you capitulate you're out and you're done, if at any point you you are panicking about Bitcoin FUD, you have not made it. And so the only ones that have gotten this far have been like, fuck that, doesn't matter. Um I'm ignoring it, and it's uniquely positioned for a black swan, the people that have influence amongst Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_01 37:54

Yeah, I mean I I'm agreeing with myself, but I completely It's a good take.

SPEAKER_00 37:58

It's a good I've never heard it.

SPEAKER_01 37:59

It's a good take. Yeah, the system is adaptive and it has is in this evolutionary way selected for the non-skeptics, you know, because if at any point you were swayed by FUD, you were out. You know, whether it's the energy FUD or I mean I say FUD, but whatever. Yeah. The energy FUD or the mining centralization FUD or the China Controls FUD or the corporate takeover FUD. If at any point you're swayed by that, you're out. So the only guys left are the guys that are like, no, everything's amazing. I call it Panglossianism. Um, it's just like we live in the best of all worlds, Bitcoin's great, nothing will bad will ever happen. We don't need to change it, we don't need to fight off altcoins. It's just perfect. And that's unfortunately not uh we're not well adapted to face imminent risks, since that's the average view.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

Another thought on it that is kind of scary as someone that has not just like I've like read to quantum flight, but I understand it, you know, it's super surface level compared to you, who probably surface level compared to like people working on this stuff. Maybe not. I didn't mean that as a shot.

SPEAKER_01 39:05

It sounded no no no that's true.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

It sounded a little like offensive when it came out of my mouth.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

There's levels to this.

SPEAKER_00 39:10

I didn't mean it as like a dick at all. I was just trying to try to make a point, but you meant you um you you said this that there would be no there would be no significant prior notice that like okay, we've cracked it. It's sort of similar to the AGI thing, which there wasn't this you know bottle service billboard of like we've achieved AGI. It's sort of just like it happens, and I would imagine the quantum thing would be like more secretive behind closed doors. I think you mentioned that you felt like that Google paper was our prior notice. Is it you think it was received that way from the general public?

SPEAKER_01 39:43

No, but if you read the Google paper, they say that in the paper. I mean, I can't expect everyone to read the Google paper, but it's actually pretty accessibly written. It was long. There was a part where they say you probably because of how these computers are built, it's more likely to be a threshold model with progress. So like one day it looks like the computer's worthless, the next day it can crack crap cryptography. Because basically, like once we figure out the scaling model and error correction, this is their assessment, we'll probably be able to scale it pretty quickly. That's implies we're not gonna get this gradual slope, and this is like a very seductive idea in the Bitcoin community. Why don't we just wait till like the computers are better, but not great, you know? We're probably not gonna get this gradual slope of like a hundred qubits, a thousand qubits, whatever. If actually we're at a thousand logical qubits, it's over. So, you know, six qubits, twelve qubits, thirty six, whatever. Yeah, we're probably not gonna get that. Also, these results are being censored. We're not getting the full scientific state of the art is not available to us, the general public. The US government knows, and China knows. We, you and I, do not know. You know, the Google paper was partly censored, right? They didn't share their full circuit.

SPEAKER_00 41:02

So you said this thing about the atomic bomb, which I I've been just like talking about all day, that 1939 they decided it's too dangerous to publish more secrets, and they obviously got there. That I is was wild to me. I'd never I'd never heard that before.

SPEAKER_01 41:19

Yeah, I mean we theoretically proved fission was possible in 39. The scientists were like, oh my god, we can't publish anything more. For two or three years they self-censored. Then the Manhattan Project started and they were explicitly censored. So we're in that pre-Manhattan Project period now. It will happen because if you have a quantum computer, you don't want to tell the world you have one. You want your enemy, your adversary, to keep publishing encrypted data that you can decrypt, right? You are not gonna want to tip your hand. So Q Day may happen, and we don't find out for five years or ten years, right? Whoa. When the US government developed the SR71, right, with the greatest fighter plane ever developed, did they publish a front page article in the newspaper saying, we have this plane and the flight envelope is 80,000 feet and it can fly a Mach 3.5 and it's made out of titanium and you know, does it spies on the Soviet Union? No. No. Like 10 people knew we had the plane while it's operational, right? For a decade, no one knew we had it. So we're not gonna go around advertising that we have a quantum computer. What's the point of a quantum computer? To spy on China. That's the main point of it. We're not gonna tell China that we have one, you know. China might be able to guess, they might infer. But we are not gonna tell them. So the government is not gonna give the Bitcoiners a heads up either. You know, one day, if we are not prepared, some of the coins will just start to move. That will be our warning. That'll be a pretty bad day if we're not ready.

SPEAKER_00 42:49

Also, you s I'm gonna misinterpret this, but you you uh because I don't fully understand how they work, but um Quantum computers could have already cracked the Satoshi coins and be in control of them right now, and you wouldn't know until they like published that. Like how does how does that work? So like it could have already happened in theory.

SPEAKER_01 43:09

It it could have.

SPEAKER_00 43:11

It probably didn't, yeah, yeah. But it could have.

SPEAKER_01 43:15

I mean, so this is this is how it's gonna go. I'll tell you how it's gonna go. Someone's gonna build a quantum computer. Hopefully, it's us, it's us, America, not China. It's probably gonna be either the US or China. Do we think France is gonna do it? They could, but they probably won't.

SPEAKER_00 43:29

They launched a billion-dollar fund, didn't they?

SPEAKER_01 43:31

Yeah, actually, I'm being mean to France. France actually has a lot of people. They're not doing it.

SPEAKER_00 43:37

You're good.

SPEAKER_01 43:38

The Europeans are surprisingly good at quantum, believe it or not. That's the one domain.

SPEAKER_00 43:42

They needed something, right?

SPEAKER_01 43:43

Yeah, yeah, they can have that. Yeah, probably it's a US based company or it's China. They will mine, recover, they will recover the Satoshi coins because the public the public keys are published, they're on the ledger, they can't be unpublished, they're out there on the Bitcoin node, right? Anybody can read them. There's 35,000 of them, right? Addresses with 50 Bitcoin each. So that those are the Satoshi coins. They said in 35,000 Coinbase, not Coinbase the company, but Coinbase the output type. Uh lots of 50 BTC each. You can if you have a sufficiently good quantum computer, you need a thousand logical qubits, give or take. You can reverse engineer the private key from all those public keys. Now you have a list of 35,000 private keys. With that, you can you know publish eventually when you whenever you want those transactions actually claiming the Bitcoin. But so you can do all the hard work, which might take months of recovering the keys. You know, maybe it's 10 minutes, maybe it's an hour, you go one by one, uh, of actually reverse engineering the private from the public. And then at a time of your choosing, you probably wait till you've done all of them, right? Then at a time you're choosing, you publish them all, and six blocks later, they're all in your wallets, a million coins.

SPEAKER_00 44:59

Holy fuck.

SPEAKER_01 45:00

So it it'll probably be like that. Now, who does it is the question. Is that the US government? Now I I wrote a substack saying I think the government should do this.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

It's could be IBM.

SPEAKER_01 45:11

It could be IBM. Maybe it's IBM at the government's request. Yes. You know, and they get to keep some of the coins and the rest of the coins go into trust, and maybe it's actually a good outcome, right? Because maybe Satoshi can go and claim back the coins if Satoshi emerges and provides proof that they mine them back in the day. Could happen.

SPEAKER_00 45:31

That would be kind of what's your percentage on that Satoshi reappears to like deal with the quantum stuff.

SPEAKER_01 45:38

It would be great. Now is the time, Satoshi, frankly. If you were gonna come back, now would be a very opportune time. Uh I don't know, like 1% or less, maybe. It's probably high. Yeah, I think Satoshi is deceased, unfortunately. But it would be good to have a system where maybe the government's holding them in trust, and on the off chance Satoshi comes back, they can claim their coins back because they deserve them.

SPEAKER_00 46:05

What is the commercial use case for quantum computers other than like stealing crypto?

SPEAKER_01 46:10

Yeah, so the number one uh commercial use case is Bitcoin, yeah, stealing the coins. That's number one, and I guess government number one in terms of like near-term monetization opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 46:22

That's brutal.

SPEAKER_01 46:23

Number two is code breaking, so selling uh selling code-breaking services to governments. So you look at all these quantum companies, their biggest revenue line item is just government services. So that's what they'll be doing. Aside from Bitcoin, for their first year or ten years, they'll just be breaking just breaking shit. Encrypted. Yeah, I mean, there's piles of this stuff, right? You gotta there's a lot of stuff to sift through. Uh, and then what people are excited about and why quantum computers even exist in the first place is physics simulation. Because the world is a quantum world. It's it's not a classical world, it's quantum. And to simulate particles, you need a quantum computer to do that. That's why Richard Feynman proposed a quantum computer in the first place, was to do physics simulation. With that, you can maybe do drug discovery, discover new molecules, material science. That's the exciting stuff. Uh so there'll be some of that too.

SPEAKER_00 47:22

What should the I guess I don't I don't know. What do you have bags in maybe? What are the public quantum companies? Like, how do you tell who is real and who is just like I know what is it, Martin Schrelly is like a pretty big quantum bearer of all these companies. Like what what are there any of them that you really like versus anything you really hate that you could talk about?

SPEAKER_01 47:40

We don't know yet which modality is gonna win, as in like there's a bunch of different ways to make a quantum computer. You have trapped ions and you have superconducting qubits, and you have neutral atoms. There's like half dozen different ways to make them. It's weird. They're made out of different kinds of stuff, and they all have different trade-offs. So kind of depending on which of those modalities you think will win, then you might buy companies in that sector. So I know that's not a good answer, but um the one that people are probably most excited about right now, I would say, is Continuum. Okay, which is uh they're spinning out of Honeywell, which is big defense companies. Okay, okay. So that'll be a really big IPO actually quite soon. IONQ, I would argue, is the market leader from among the existing public names. Um there's really good privates too. I think Q era is is a private um neutral atom company. I think they're good, but there's a lot at this point.

SPEAKER_00 48:37

And what is the what are you invested in that sparked all this controversy?

SPEAKER_01 48:41

We backed a crypto company called Project 11. Project 11, that's it. They are, I mean, they haven't fully announced their product suite, but effectively quantum custodian. It's like they will help you as a crypto user deal with this incredibly complex transition. Nice. So, like, what you know, what wallet do I use? Like, when do I switch over? When do I migrate? How do I migrate? Like, those are hard questions, and so that's what they're gonna help with.

SPEAKER_00 49:08

This might yeah, you might laugh at this one, but what do you think about Zcash and quantum resistant crypto? Quantum resistant ETH at some stage.

SPEAKER_01 49:17

Yeah, I mean, I've been saying like this was more valid before all the main ETH people quit and gave up on ETH. Like just bankless. I was actually checking in on like some of the big ETH heads that I used to fight with to see if they were still pro-ETH or if they'd rage quit. A lot of them have quit.

SPEAKER_00 49:35

It's like I'm you were bullposting ETH BTC on bankless.

SPEAKER_01 49:39

Yeah, so that was my thought. Was like, well, if Bitcoiners, if if investors start to care, you'll see it in the ETH BTC ratio. However, the confounding factor is that ETH is like having some kind of crisis, which I don't understand. So I guess it's not doing well. But maybe you'll see it in the Zeke BTC ratio, right? But I think you will. You'll see it somewhere. The longer Bitcoin puts it off, Bitcoin hasn't made any real progress in the last six months. Some of these other post-quantum coins will start to outperform, whether it's ETH or Zeke or maybe Solana will do it, you know. Well, uh Bitcoin will be the last one to do it.

SPEAKER_00 50:19

You know what's interesting about you, Nick, is that you are so deep in AI and you're so deep at quantum, and you spend most of your time investing in crypto. That is not what I would like. Most people that are deep enough in AI are like, you know, mythos is gonna destroy everybody, or most people that are deep enough in quantum is like quantum is gonna break Bitcoin. You have both, and you're like a crypto bull still, and you're OG, which most people are jaded as well. So you have like three verticals that should have wiped you out, but you are crypto, like, yeah, what is going on there? I mean, I'm a cry-yeah, what yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

SPEAKER_01 50:53

I'm like the last Japanese soldier after the movie. The last one, yeah. Like, I'm out in the jungle, it's 1970, like the war is still going on, I'm still fighting my crypto war.

SPEAKER_00 51:03

What like how why are you still a cryp such a crypto bull, knowing all of this domain expertise on these topics? Like, you should you probably should in theory, based off the peers, you should not be.

SPEAKER_01 51:13

I mean, I'm exposed to AI and quantum, so if they do great, yeah, I have like passive exposure, right? So, but I think like crypto is like my calling, you know, it's the thing that I'm good at. I don't think I would be particularly good as a standalone AI investor, certainly not quantum. Uh you know, I don't know enough to do deep tech investing like that. And uh I think I can move the needle in in uh crypto investing still, and I think there's plenty to do. Like there's a lot of fruitful businesses to back in the kind of fintech stablecoin space. It's just maybe they don't excite people that much, but we it's like real people that use this stuff and they benefit from it.

SPEAKER_00 51:52

So where where does crypto sit in the stack of like emerging technologies from this point? Because we you know, we obviously had like sort of the pre-AI hype, like god run of crypto, where it was if you wanted to be on the cutting edge, you just the money flowed into crypto. It was small, it was hot, it was new, it was innovative. It still is all of these things, but it's not the shiniest object in the room anymore. Like, where does it sit amongst AI, amongst quantum, amongst all of these other like emergent technologies?

SPEAKER_01 52:19

Well, I mean, it's certainly behind AI in terms of its impact on the world. That's fine. Fair we don't have to be the main character industry. We can be number two or three, whatever. It's certainly more important than quantum. So somewhere in between those two. But I mean, it's kind of funny that people are giving up on crypto. I get it. Like L1s haven't really done well, and meme coins. I guess no one trades meme coins anymore.

SPEAKER_00 52:43

No, not really. I mean a little bit, but not really. Like here there.

SPEAKER_01 52:46

Like the token game isn't as fun anymore. The liquidity isn't there, like the liquidity is now in quantum shitters or it's in AI names, like, but still, like it's weird because we've actually hit so many of these important um like milestones as an industry. Like, security, like tokenized securities are a thing now. Like, that's great. You know, it's all these tokenized equities. Stable coins, 300 billion of stable coins, people actually use them. You can actually use a stable coin with a card, that works. The infrastructure works really well. DeFi uh DeFi is gonna have a tough 12 months with with all the AI assisted hacks, but it when we get out the other side, it'll be probably incredibly super hardened.

SPEAKER_00 53:31

DeFi, right? DeFi 3.0 or something.

SPEAKER_01 53:34

We're gonna exploit a thousand or two thousand bugs, there'll be so many hacks, and then we get out the other side, it'll just be like impenetrable. So I mean, I I understand that some people are upset about the prospect of DeFi getting rogged incessantly by AI. But you know, like when I look at crypto, I think we've really achieved a hell of a lot. And it's actually, you know, pretty usable now. So I think you know, I think we should be kind of content.

SPEAKER_00 53:59

You know, the world's ironic, and like the irony behind crypto is that everything you could have ever wanted, um, you know, pro crypto admin and ETFs and all these financial vehicles and tokenized stock, everything you could have ever wanted for crypto is like happened, and the speculative part is sort of just like nuked.

SPEAKER_01 54:15

Yeah, because I guess we were speculating on those things happening, and maybe when they do happen, it's not as exciting. But yeah, I mean, like they're a mainstream crypto like Polymarket is a great example, like right behind you. Like, that is a mainstream consumer crypto product that everybody knows about. You know, I would say the web three dreams haven't happened as much.

SPEAKER_00 54:36

We don't read write own. Yeah, that was a miss.

SPEAKER_01 54:38

Read write own didn't work. That's okay. We'll take that on the chin.

SPEAKER_00 54:40

That was a m- good, it was a good attempt. Like, I respect the shot. It's a good book.

SPEAKER_01 54:44

An attempt was made, it's right on my shelf, right back there.

SPEAKER_00 54:47

I have one too. It's a good book.

SPEAKER_01 54:49

The web three thing, owning the internet or having a social media platform where you own your credentials. I think it should still happen, actually. I think it should still happen, but it didn't happen.

SPEAKER_00 55:00

I I liked it. I'll just say it. Like I I liked it. I thought it was a good attempt. Maybe it will, you know, the social file of this, maybe we'll get there uh at one point, maybe bring Racer back.

SPEAKER_01 55:10

I yeah, friend tech. You know, like I don't know if we need to tokenize our you know, other people's social media accounts or whatever, but it would be good if we owned our own like uh handle on a social media platform, right? Like we don't own anything on X. No, like we could be banned at a moment's notice, no recourse. That sucks. I don't like that model. So I do think we actually there's still a case for a Web3 model there.

SPEAKER_00 55:38

I that's crazy. You're the first person I've heard say it in a while. I agree. I'm not afraid to say it. Not proud of it, man enough to say it. I'll let you go top of the hour right now. I got like one or two more for you. Um I I wrote this one down. Chat asked this. Uh it's a good question, though. Crypto like was the play for all libertarians, but now it's super mature. Like, what industry do you think aligns with those values the most for up-and-coming talent? Is it still crypto?

SPEAKER_01 56:03

For a diet-in-the-wall libertarian.

SPEAKER_00 56:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:06

Yeah, I think there's tons of crypto stuff you can do. I would say like open source AI uh is attracting a lot of libertarians. Like, um, look at Eric Voorhees. He's like the most pure blood libertarian guy I know, right? Open source AI. You know, what are the big walled gardens of the future? It's anthropic and open AI. And I think it'd be really, really bad if they control everything. Or god forbid, some kind of like Chinese AI model. Open source self-hosted edge compute AI that you control yourself, that is very important. We need to have that, yeah, or we're gonna live in a bad, bad world.

SPEAKER_00 56:43

I mean, at what at some point here there's gonna be a black swan, is uh ChatGPT, like chat logs get leaked. Some like Ashley Madison situation, everyone's logs get leaked, and then everyone's running local AI after that, I would imagine.

SPEAKER_01 56:55

Yeah, I uh and cost as well. Like proprietary frontier AI is ten to a hundred times more expensive than the equivalent open source model self-hosted. Yeah, it's like it'll make sense for the enterprise as well. Like large firms will just have their compute cluster in the basement, and they're not gonna send everything to the base. Like, why it's not gonna it couldn't. I know everybody's acting like that's how it's gonna be, and we as a society are gonna pay massive rent to these guys and the tons of trillions. I don't think it'll be like that. I think we will get more of this move to the edge.

SPEAKER_00 57:30

Who wins if that happens? Like Apple locally.

SPEAKER_01 57:34

You mean if we get the like uh more self-hosted AI?

SPEAKER_00 57:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:38

I mean um the aggregators, you know. Um like um open router, uh, like a Venice. Like maybe it could be in line with Apple as well. Um, maybe we'll be able to miniaturize the models and and run them locally.

SPEAKER_00 57:54

Um Open Router, that's a sleeper. I like that.

SPEAKER_01 57:57

They're doing great.

SPEAKER_00 57:58

Dell, maybe someone said Dell?

SPEAKER_01 58:00

Yeah, yeah, that's uh that's an interesting idea.

SPEAKER_00 58:03

That's a fun trade idea. I uh okay, I'll let you go on this one. Nick Card, it's a pleasure. I'm happy we we got to do it. I'm a fan. Sometimes these articles you write a little bit long, but um I'm a big fan. I think you're doing some some great work. Uh where should people go if they like you, if they think you're right, if they want to support what you're doing, if they're especially if they're afraid of this quantum stuff, like where do you send people? What should they do? What do you recommend to people? I don't know, take it however as the worst sign-up question ever.

SPEAKER_01 58:29

Yeah, I mean normally I would say my ex, but actually like uh X is like messing me up right now because they gave me a hundred thousand followers for nothing. And just over the like I'm at I was at 400 and I'm at 500 for no reason. So I think it's a lot of bots, and so I think my ex is just like done for. And so my answer is Substack, please. Please follow me on Substack. No one reads my Substack, it's a problem. I don't trust X anymore. I want direct access to inbox. Okay, so follow me on Substack.

SPEAKER_00 59:02

Sick. Um Nick Corner, you're you're a fucking movie, dude. I'm happy you're out of retirement unofficially, and you're back on the circuit because you're you're box office, man.

SPEAKER_01 59:11

Yeah, thanks for having me, man. Of course, dude.

SPEAKER_00 59:12

Thanks for doing.

SPEAKER_01 59:13

Have a good one, brother. Peace. See ya. Bye bye.

SPEAKER_00 59:17

Um that was cinemas, huh?