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- [00:07]
Marty Bent
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All. All the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for bitcoin.
- [00:32]
Michael Foster
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be. Bitcoin. Twitter is truly gay now.
- [00:40]
Marty Bent
I don't know what's happening, man.
- [00:42]
Michael Foster
With.
- [00:44]
Marty Bent
With like the. I mean, you know, listen, bear markets are always, you know, a little. A little rainbow, right? But the. This, this one is just unbelievable. Like, there's no memes anymore. There was no memes on the pump. That's why we didn't have a proper pump. You know, I. I already found the laser eye to be a horrible rainbow meme. But. But, like, seriously, like, it was better than nothing. This. This year is just nothing. Like, you know, there's. People don't have fun anymore there. I think just a lot of people just. Just got bo. Bitcoin won. We won. That's it. Now it's just sort of like boring pipe. It's like the pipes, right? Plumbing, and now we just go sort of add more value to it, but not like we're no longer revolutionaries. The pension funds. When the pension funds are buying your asset, you're no longer revolutionary.
- [01:46]
Michael Foster
Does that mean we lost our way?
- [01:49]
Marty Bent
No, it's just that, you know, like, you can only be counterculture when you are counter to the culture, right? When the culture catches up with you, you're no longer counterculture. Doesn't matter how, like, how edgy you want to dress, you know, like how orange your tie is, or, you know, like, it doesn't matter. We're no longer counterculture. It really is that simple.
- [02:10]
Michael Foster
But has the broader culture gotten on board with bitcoin? I don't think so. I think we're in this weird period. Everybody's bored, and everybody's worried that nobody else is going to care about bitcoin.
- [02:19]
Marty Bent
I think it's because, okay, here's my unifying theory of markets. Right now. It's Richard maxing it, right? So the problem right now is that America just became absolutely, incredibly productive again. It's insanely productive. Like, I've never seen, like, Americans already are the only country in the world where people work, right? Like, no, seriously, like, People cannot comprehend the difference between even the laziest place in America versus the most productive place in, say, Europe or whatever, right? Americans work to begin with, right? And then now you have all these stars aligning of. You have, you know, hate it or like it. You have a president that's more business oriented, right? You have like, you know, like some enemies now, you know, like, ooh, China, ooh, Iran or whatever, right? So you can gather, you know, people to, to go on a common path, you know, you have Elon ripping it, right? I mean, the dude is like literally putting like, I don't know, 15,000 satellites a year or something in space or whatever it is. You know, by the way, the next close one is, I think Japan. And they put like, I don't know, like, you know, two, you know, like, it's. There's no. It's like the scale in which America is being productive now is just insane. So that, that essentially counters economically to the insane amount of money printing and economic retardation that the same country produces, you know, and then the rest of the world has no choice but to buy your debt, right? So you essentially, at least for now, for another year, whatever, as long as something doesn't break, you essentially countered the fiat disaster, at least in how people sort of feel it on the daily, right? And if the world is not ending economically, people are less interested in bitcoin.
- [04:32]
Michael Foster
It's a fact. I'm having so much fun. I know you are too.
- [04:37]
Marty Bent
It's so much fun. It's never been this great. You can just build shit, you know what I mean? All the code you didn't want to write. You can have the bots do it for you.
- [04:48]
Michael Foster
Well, that was the last time you were on. We were talking about what was your project that gave you access to LLMs? What the hell was it called? This is back in the chatbot era
- [04:59]
Marty Bent
of like, unleash chat.
- [05:01]
Michael Foster
Unleash chat. Like, to think of how far we've come since that is insane.
- [05:05]
Marty Bent
It's insane. You know, like, it's like you can't. Like you've been given a tool that makes you like be 10 to 100x more productive, like daily.
- [05:19]
Michael Foster
Yeah, right.
- [05:19]
Marty Bent
Like, how can you not be bullish?
- [05:23]
Michael Foster
Well, I mean, to that point. Thank you for your wiki project. I've been using that for my heart.
- [05:30]
Marty Bent
LLM Wiki. Yeah, it's a fun one. It's such a. I just keep on adding shit to it. It's just so useful.
- [05:41]
Michael Foster
So what is your stack like these days? How Are you using this stuff?
- [05:48]
Marty Bent
So I made this website learntoprompt.org that sort of like that. That's where I keep like my current stack sort of up to date publicly. So right now what I do is I have the security stack for LLM stuff with the agent bondage and chain and all that stuff. So essentially I sandbox the the LLMs on my systems and then I have a few other machines that they have a little bit more permission where you know, they can do stuff. I'm not into the self agentic stuff like Hermes or openclaw. I find that just costs me more time than it's worth really.
- [06:36]
Michael Foster
But I feel like as a non developer I find open claws way more intuitive to me.
- [06:42]
Marty Bent
Yeah, no, I just, I can't. They produce just too much junk that I end up having to fix. I think that's the main thing is like if you're technical enough you can be a lot faster than people who aren't with the agent coding agents. Right. But if you're not technical it's nice to have that extra layer of the agents that then go and talk to the other agents to make the shit for you.
- [07:11]
Michael Foster
Yeah, well that's actually another interesting thing about our setup. I tweeted out something about this yesterday that my whole form factor of how I interact with this stuff is purely voice the text. Like I don't type, I don't go on the AUD or Codex desktop or cli. But it's because we're using it to run TFTC and we actually don't code that much outside of like some presentations.
- [07:36]
Marty Bent
And I mean I've seen your tweets. Do your bots clearly understand like how to produce the graphics and how to do the stuff to push it out? I mean and it's clearly getting engagement. So like you know, you're doing something right but, but like you can't. For some marketing things it's kind of doable. As soon as you cross the line into there's people using it, the bots just can't be left alone. They'll break shit and then people lose money. Yeah. Right now they're still like a hammer for us. They're not like a computer yet, you know, so we just, we use them to bang things into shape and to do stuff and then we actually have to review the work. Are you guys, you know from, are
- [08:22]
Michael Foster
you using them for fuzz testing or building?
- [08:24]
Marty Bent
Yeah, I mean like we use them for cold reviews. We use them like, you know, we must have like 50 fucking websites, you know. So for that kind of stuff, it's fine. We use them to do a lot of web GUI stuff, so doesn't touch the hard stuff. We essentially pigeonhole them into things that we can review and we also don't expose to security concerns. It's just that they're not quite there yet. It is absolutely incredible. I mean like how much they can do. Especially like porting libraries, doing stuff like it's incredible, right? You just gotta review it because they will make absurd mistakes still. And that's fine. But like, you know, my gray beard now likes Kodaks, you know, was like once doc hacks was like, okay, you know, this is kind of usable, you know, of course within very sort of confined spaces. Like I was like, okay, holy fuck. You know, like that's. That's the toughest cold review I have ever had in my life is like dealing with him, right? So, and I, and I've heard this from other sort of like gray beard friends that like they're starting to sort of like take advantage of it. And these guys already are 100ers, right? So like now they're fucking thousand axers. Like it's insane. Absolutely insane. Even if it's just like to pair a program like, you know, they will ask like, you know, the bots to. To sort of like research some obscure shit that they only know already anyways, you know, and then the bot can comes with like, you know, confirmation, whatever. Like it's impressive, you know, this space in another 12, 18 months is going to be just like absurd.
- [10:22]
Michael Foster
That's what I was going to say. When do you think we cross that threshold where you don't worry about it
- [10:28]
Marty Bent
for the local stuff like DS4 flash on an M5 128 or on GB10. Nvidia Spark, right, is already like the escape hatch from the dystopia, right? So if tomorrow decided to say you're not allowed to use codecs or Claude code without something that we just can't cross the line. I can already do pretty much that level of code with DS4. The only problem is the speed. It's like fucking five times slower. And five times slower is a lot. But there is this convergence happening where you know, the people working in AI were sort of like ML academics and shitty dev. Shitty devs, right? Like the majority of the people in AI is like truly shitty devs, right? Like JavaScript people kind of thing, right? And a lot of the great devs are starting to take interest on this and they're starting to like optimize and make like the open source models useful. Like anterior is from the guy who invented Redis. Redis is like incredible. So you get a guy like that paying attention now. DS4 is impressive, right? So you get another thousand guys like him. Pay attention to the shit. We're going to move a lot faster too. It's always going to be behind Frontier because Frontier has $62 billion to spend in GB3000.
- [12:14]
Michael Foster
Do you think they'll always have the lead?
- [12:16]
Marty Bent
Oh yeah, absolutely. There is no, you know, there's, you can't, you know, they have the best researchers, right? Like they, they have like incredible people. They may suck at code, but they have the best people and they have all the money. Like, I mean this is the only thing that holds China back is the fact that they, they just don't have the computer. So they have to. China.
- [12:43]
Michael Foster
Oh, China. Okay.
- [12:44]
Marty Bent
Yeah. The only reason why China is being held back is because they don't have the compute. So you know, like, so that's why they're being so creative and they're also open sourcing everything so that, you know, our smart people go help them. It's very clever. But you know, they're gonna like this whole thing is just forcing them to spend all the money developing hardware. They already are moving like much faster and much better and making high end hardware, right? Like another max three years. They're going to have like, you know, like very comparable, you know, capabilities to make silicon.
- [13:33]
Michael Foster
Well, for those who are listening and are new to the show, since last time I recorded with mdk, we kind
- [13:41]
Marty Bent
of started right there.
- [13:42]
Michael Foster
He's a founder of Coinkite, which makes hardware. So this is actually the perfect person to speak to in disregards of supply chain. What's going on there? We're going to get to ARCA what you're building with this personal data haven. But to your point about hardware being a bottleneck now, what are you seeing? How is it affecting the supply chain for the hardware that you're building?
- [14:03]
Marty Bent
It's fine. I mean supply chains have fully normalized post Covid, which is great. And they also became a lot more resilient now too, right? I mean everybody learned a very hard lesson during COVID so it took a few years to truly, truly normalize. The main problem now is just memory is expensive. Most ics that do anything interesting, they will have some memory in them, right? So, you know, it costs more money. That's, that's the only problem. For example, for arca, you know, like it's like memory is going to be a big part of the cost. You know, there is no way around that anymore. Flash memory is what everybody needs that fast. Memory to put on stuff so that the bots can remember things.
- [15:00]
Michael Foster
Well, let's get into it. I mean, arca, it looks like you're looking to build a data haven, which is an old Internet idea. A place, jurisdiction or technical system built to keep data available and protected. ARCA borrows the useful part of that idea, makes it physical. A box you can choose in, a place you trust for the secrets that should not disappear. This seems pretty cool. Like trust in a box. I saw you in a. Who was going back and forth with you yesterday to figure out a catchphrase to describe arca?
- [15:34]
Marty Bent
There were a few people. It was a fun little thread. Yeah. This is kind of like. So cold card is sort of like how we got here, right? We needed a place to store the bitcoin seeds, operate them safely and do all that. A lot of lessons were learned. But the issue is that there's still all the other secrets. And even though we put a password manager on cold card queue, it's not enough. We're going towards a world now where the Internet is no longer free and protected from governments, right? So, you know, like you have uk, Canada, you know, Australia, and you know, Europe in general, even us. Like, everybody wants to regulate the Internet, everybody wants to like put back doors on things. So, you know, even though like things like icloud or other sort of like higher end cloud solutions, especially for consumers, they're very good, they're very safe, they're not safe from governments, they're not safe from back doors. So we needed a place to put stuff. You know, like you want to leave like backups of things, you want to have passwords, your more important passwords. You want to have like, you know, a letter to your family on how to. To handle inheritance of your bitcoin or your bank accounts, you need all that. Essentially. You need a place where you can put a lot of important stuff that is truly secure. It's like cold card, paranoid secure. And it's available. The availability part is a huge part of the problem because servers are not safe and seeds buried in the backyard are not available. So what we try to create is sort of like the solution for that problem. And I think we got it. This machine is very secure. It has some friction. So it's not like icloud or something like that. It has friction. That friction is important because that friction keeps things safe. So it doesn't compromise that security for some extra ux. And it's highly available. And how do you make a device be highly available and sort of solve some of the single point of failure problem, Right, because electronics die regardless or they can be cut, disconnected or whatever. So what we did with ARCA is we have it so that it can mirror itself into other ARCAs you control or other ARCAs you share. So you can play flag theory. Now you can have one ARCA in one country, another ARCA in another country and another ARCA in your mother's house. And because they're multi tenant, you can have them sync different users and essentially now if one ARCA gets taken out, you still have access to your data, right? And then you also have the ultimate backup, which is like you can back up the data of it physically, right? Encrypt it and put it somewhere. And the encryption key for the device is going to be bip 39 base. So you're going to have a seed which is super cool. And then with this device you're going to have services, right? You can have password manager, server. So we're still picking if it's going to be Bitwarden, if it's going to be like XC pass or whatever. So you could have a server for that. So you just point to that IP and bam, you have passwords in an actual secure place. You're going to have a place for your phone wallets to dump their seeds as backup. We're going to create a little protocol for that. You're going to have a place to store SSH keys, You're going to have a place for your agents to have access to some keys they can use. And sort of like that's the train there. We're just going to keep on adding things to make ourselves sovereign and less physically vulnerable.
- [20:29]
Michael Foster
I love this. Let's take a step back and obviously it's still being built out, but can you explain what you envision the UX if somebody buys an archaebox, get stolen to their house?
- [20:45]
Marty Bent
Yeah. So it has a touch screen on the front. So you go to your little place where you put your router, right? You plug this box in, it has redundant power supply so you can put like two power supplies on it. So in case you're away for a few months, even if one dies, still there. So anyway, so you plug it in, you plug into your network, it shows your qr. With that QR you start enroll process and then bam, you have access to essentially a vault solution, very simple, where you have a place to store passwords, you have a place to store secrets, you have a place to store seeds. And you can also set up like we do with cold card, you can set up decoy pins, you can do all the fun stuff. And then you go. And the cool thing is we're using Tor in a way that you have back access to it, so you can poke holes in any network so that the device can be available to you from other networks. We're also looking into making tailscale available to it too. And then you also have access that into your vlan and bam, it's on your network, you have access to it. There's going to be a web browser access to it. And we're making it as usual, like everything we do app less, no preparatory things and reproducibly built so that you don't have to trust us at all.
- [22:28]
Michael Foster
How long have you guys been working on this? I know it's been in the works, but how long?
- [22:33]
Marty Bent
So this is an interesting thing. It's like we've been wanting to make a secure network product device for some of our personal needs for years, right? But then we had a conversation about, I'm going to say, six months, a year ago, where it just sort of became clear, you know, what the product should look like and how it should be made. And then we let us simmer a little bit and then we're like, it's like we have product meeting. Like we have meetings every day. Like, not meetings, we have calls every day about stuff, products, things, and just review things, whatever, right? And like every fucking call, this thing just kept on coming back up to the call. Like it was just like, it's just back of the mind, you know what I mean? It's just because we kept on bumping into personal sort of like things in life where it's like, holy fuck, I wish I had that, I wish I had that, I wish I had that. And they're like, just, fuck it, let's build it. We're going to build it for ourselves. We'll make a founder's sort of edition run of it, limited run. And then if people like it enough, they can have it too. And then if enough people like it, we make another run. But we need this kind of dangerous technology, otherwise you can't exist anymore.
- [24:01]
Michael Foster
Yeah, I feel like this is going to be incredibly useful in the age of AI. Just thinking of where my agent runs and what it has access to. Obviously it's a media company. Nothing's too sensitive. Everything we do is already public in a way. It's a lot of podcast transcripts, access to Dropbox with all that stuff. Um, and basically Read only you YouTube API and other API, read only access. But sitting on a server in the cloud, it would make me feel much more comfortable if it was sitting on a server in my house.
- [24:37]
Marty Bent
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, you could. So I created this thing that. Well, I extended INV chain Extra. It's a repo on my. You can look at my stack of the learn to prompt thing. So what it does is injects keys from your key storage into the prompt. But you define which agent has access to what keys based on profiles. So theoretically you could do that. But what's really cool about ARCA is that we're taking this a step much further. So you can enroll new agent SSH keys. So essentially just going to give your agent an SSH key and with that SSH key, that agent can access the keys. Right. That it has access to, but also could use the ARCA as their SSH hop. Right. So they can use ARCA as their SSH agent essentially and then hop onto another box. It gets very interesting. It's a little bit more technical, but. We're going to make it good for AI agents. It's just too powerful. It's too useful because agents shouldn't have access to everything. The way that people use agents now is kind of scary. Very scary. And you know, we want to tame that universe with a little bit more, you know.
- [26:26]
Michael Foster
Yeah, it's a constant internal tension I feel, wanting to leverage the tools to the most of their abilities, but also trying to temper that with. With only giving it things that I'm comfortable to have access to in the cloud specifically.
- [26:44]
Marty Bent
Yep, yep. It's. It's like a brave new world, man. You know, it's. And. And I guess like the other big, big thing to me at least is that I really wanted a way to have a good deadman switch so when I expire, I can leave better. I already kind of have stuff like that, but it's not to the extent that I want. I want a more powerful way of doing that. So we're going to have a way for you to set a period of time and some conditions where if you don't check in a key that you left for your family somewhere, safe deposit box or whatever becomes valid, and then they can access the secrets on the arca and then they're going to have instructions there for them. They're going to have the whole nine yard right. And the cool thing is that the way ARCA was designed is so that you could even have hosting, sort of like companies host this box for you. They can stick it on a rack. Right. Even though the device is small, they can put on a rack shelf. Right. And then you have even more high availability. Right. But they don't have access to data. Everything is like encrypted tunneled, encrypted tunnel. It's very intense.
- [28:26]
Michael Foster
So like your bip39 key to get access to the data.
- [28:30]
Marty Bent
That's right. That's the ultimate break. Glass is going to be a bip 39 seed phrase for that user space. So you're going to have multiple users there that each user is essentially a tenant and that they can have. It's like, I mean, we had to build the fortitudes to go and port FreeBSD to the rock chip. So we had to port FreeBSD to a new chip, which was a lot
- [29:07]
Michael Foster
of work
- [29:10]
Marty Bent
and that was integral to the project. It's like, can we run FreeBSD on an embedded system that we like? And then we added thrust zone chips to do some of the heavy lifting of the security anti tamper stuff. It's like it's the kitchen sink of security things.
- [29:30]
Michael Foster
And there's a redundancy aspect to this too. You can save across multiple devices.
- [29:35]
Marty Bent
Yes. So we're going to probably sell this in bundles. People should have more than one. And then what they do is they just do a little dance. So they're going to point like they're going to say, hey, this other ARCA is my arca. And then there is a key exchange and then bam. The machines sync each other automagically across any network over Tor in a few tunnels there. So essentially you can't break the, the data in transit there and they only send each other encrypted data too. So the cool thing is you put one in your house, put in your mother's house, you put one in, I don't know, another country or hosting place. Right. And then they all just sync and you don't have to worry about data availability. Right?
- [30:30]
Michael Foster
Yeah. One goes down, you just fall back to the other.
- [30:34]
Marty Bent
That's right.
- [30:35]
Michael Foster
And are you doing two secure enclaves on this one too?
- [30:38]
Marty Bent
Yes. So we're adding the cold card stuff plus another trust zone there too. We have secure clocks so that it works. We have solder down battery there for the clock. We have active circuits there for that sort of measure. Tampering to the box itself. I think we even added an accelerometer in case somebody moves the box. It just kills the keys. It's pretty intense.
- [31:15]
Michael Foster
Yeah.
- [31:17]
Marty Bent
It's like how far can we go and still remain economically viable and simple enough so that it can be reproducibly built. Right, because that's the key. It has to be a trustless device. It has to cold card. Right. We don't want you to trust us. It's very important. We don't want to be the back door.
- [31:40]
Podcast Host/Announcer
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- [33:00]
Marty Bent
Yeah.
- [33:01]
Michael Foster
And I feel like what are, what are your thoughts on like the market for this? Okay. Because I feel like the market for stuff like this is expanding with AI tools. Specifically where previously getting deep into the weeds with a product that is involved like this was a mental headache for people. There's like a sort of a Mental barrier to entry. But now with the agents, you can essentially have them teach you how to use this stuff.
- [33:32]
Marty Bent
I mean, it's fairly easy. I mean, so I've, I've like now when I make projects, I tend to create also a skill file and that skill. And I use the wiki, right? So I just go wiki, you know, research this project into this new topic and then I go like wiki, create a skill file for agents to understand this project, right? And all of that takes five minutes. It's incredible. And then bam, you have a skill file for the agents to understand what the fuck they need to do. That sort of like that chasm has been crossed. It's practically instant to get the agents to understand things.
- [34:19]
Michael Foster
Could you envision this becoming like an agent first use case? Like people don't even.
- [34:23]
Marty Bent
Sure. I mean, like, you know, I'll probably have a couple boxes that are just for the agents. You know, it's fine. I think like the category for this is big, right? Because we never had access, like consumer access to secure computer, like network secure compute. That's the thing. You can't go to Best Buy and buy a box that's secure that you put in your network. There's many boxes that claim to be secure, but they have no security, right? You have your NAS devices, so if you want to back up your pictures to your local network or whatever. But those things are just sort of like a Linux box running on some average CPU and they have no security, no real security, right? And you know, and then on the other hand, like you might have some things that have some tpm, some form of like, just like hardware key, but it's all very mediocre, right? There is no cold card level security for your network, right? You can't buy that as a consumer. You'd have to go buy an enterprise HSM for, you know, $50,000 and then also know how to use it and how to program for it, right? So we're going to go nerd first. Like this is, this is a nerd bitcoin. I mean like bitcoiners get it. Like that's the main thing. It's like there's no, you know, if you can use a cold card, you can use this, right? And then slowly sort of like understand where in the design space we can make it so it's like more normie friendly. But you know, like we're making the products that we want to have. Like, you know, we're past that point where it's like there's It's. It's just not worth trying to, like, you know, go compete with, you know, I don't know, like, Dell, you know, like, you know, we want to make products that we need, you know, no compromise, you know, it's fun. We need it. And, you know, hopefully there is another, you know, 100,000 million people who needed to.
- [36:33]
Michael Foster
Well, I was gonna say we're gonna see ARCA boxes and Best Buy.
- [36:37]
Marty Bent
Yeah, I mean, like, it'll be great. The brand is great.
- [36:40]
Michael Foster
How'd you come up with a name? I love the name.
- [36:42]
Marty Bent
It's arca. I forgot where the word is from again. Just. I blinked it. But ARCA is that. It's like a box, a treasure box, historical treasure box where, you know, you keep, you know, the things that you need for the next sort of generation, right? There's the, you know, and then there is like the Noah's Ark as well, right? That's where the animals were. You have, like, many instances of that word being sort of like the variations of that word of like, essentially the. The secret safe space. You know, it's like, it's the protected thing that you carry on, right? And that's really what this box tried to do, is just carry on, right? Phones die, computers die, arcas will die. But because it's a data haven, and ideally they're synced, backed up, the information never dies. Right? We're really sort of trying to index for that.
- [37:49]
Michael Foster
When can we expect to get access to this?
- [37:53]
Marty Bent
Oh, hardware. So we already have prototype boxes and stuff. We started ordering K's tooling to make a production run. It's going to be steel, like it's a steel box. And we're sort of. We order now the. The production test board. So, I mean, you know, if. If stars align, we should be able to ship this year.
- [38:32]
Michael Foster
Oh, yeah.
- [38:36]
Marty Bent
Who knows?
- [38:36]
Michael Foster
A little. A little. A little Black Friday ARCA sale.
- [38:40]
Marty Bent
The problem is the margin of error is like three to four months, you know, so, you know, it could be very fast or it could be an extra three to four months, right? But it's moving. It's moving at a very fast pace. It's a lot of software to write, but, you know, it's like building for FreeBSD is pure delight.
- [39:04]
Michael Foster
Why is that?
- [39:05]
Marty Bent
Because, you know, it's the one true OS. It's the Unix. Linux is not Unix. It's like FreeBSD is the real thing. That's like the hardcore version of UNIX that survived the years. So when you make something very secure, like a network secure, Thing you normally use FreeBSD or NetBSD or OpenBSD, the monolithic system is very based. Very few people work on it. You know, like the, some. Some big entities normally help fund it. You know, there's like five guys that manage it. You know, it's. It's very intense. But yeah, it was, it had to be made.
- [39:57]
Michael Foster
I'm happy you're making it.
- [39:59]
Marty Bent
Yes, it's exciting. It actually it's like, it's a lot of fun and exciting.
- [40:04]
Michael Foster
You always come up with new and creative ways to have fun building this hardware.
- [40:09]
Marty Bent
Hardware is fun, man. Making stuff is awesome. It's like making things come into the real world. It's a lot of fun.
- [40:18]
Michael Foster
Well, that's what I mean to your point earlier about the US being hyper productive right now, that's been one of the more encouraging things to see is that this reinvigoration of industrial building outside of compute. But you have that whole Segundo Valley and I think Texas as well. A lot of companies focusing on physical infrastructure. It's good to see.
- [40:41]
Marty Bent
Yeah, it's fun.
- [40:48]
Michael Foster
Where do you think everything goes from here? Let's bring this back to AI and Bitcoin.
- [40:52]
Marty Bent
I mean this is the convergence right of sovereignty with AI. You don't need permission. I mean aside from the frontier bullshit. If you haven't had a prompt flag yet, you're not building anything interesting. But it's like you don't need permission from people who make things anymore. You just go and you make your own thing. You can produce a lot of the things that you need permission otherwise. And with Bitcoin you don't need permission to bank yourself or to, you know, were to exist. So these two things make it into a very. You're a dangerous man. You can be in a reason. The unreasonable man now have all the tools, you know.
- [41:36]
Michael Foster
Do you think they're going to continue to allow us to have access to these tools? I think the literally a podcast that's being published as we're, as we're talking here and we recorded yesterday with Kyle Olney talking about the Fable 5. What is it? Export controls.
- [41:53]
Marty Bent
I call it the, the Fumble five. I mean like entropic. Like you know those guys are assholes. Like, you know, like they're, they're, they're horrible. You know, like OpenAI too. They're just horrible. Like, you know, I guess sometimes it just takes horrible people to make great things. You know. The guy was asking to be regulated. Well now you got regulated. You know, it's like why do they. It's the same thing of, like, Coinbase and all those guys, you know, and Bitcoin, asking the God, please regulate us. Please regulate us, you know, because they want to do stupid shit and not go to jail. I get it. But, you know, how about just don't do stupid shit, you know, and don't get regulated? I know it's hard, you know, to. To forego your. Your $100 billion exit on retail, but it's. You know, it is what it is. I just. I'm still dumbfound that, like, Dario makes it, like, you have to be so bad to make Sam Altman look good. Like, holy. I mean, wow, you truly cross a whole other. Like, this is the orb guy. Remember? Like, world coin. You make world coin guy look good.
- [43:13]
Michael Foster
It's funny. Odell and I. Odell said the exact same thing on Monday. We were having a conversation. He's like, God damn it. Dario is making me, like, the world coin guy.
- [43:24]
Marty Bent
It's just so, so insane, right? But, you know, these guys are pushing Frontier, you know, because, like, you need that capital, right? And only psychopaths are going to get to that capital to do this. Like, there is very little else that can be done. I mean, look at Elon. I mean, Grox sucks, you know, like, it truly sucks, you know? And yet the guy, you know, has, like, infinite capital, right? So, you know, those guys are doing something. But it's all a shame. But on the good side, I mean, like, you know, open. Open models, as long as China keeps on pumping them out open, you know, they're gonna keep on catching up, right? And honestly, Fable is not that much better than Opus 4.8. It's not. Like, don't believe those tests. Those tests are designed for them to look good, right? It's marginally better. Claude. Code is unusable now for months. It just produces absolute trash. And, you know, like, we ran mitos. Like, a friend of ours has KYC for that crap. They ran mitos. They ran all that crap against, like, cold card, and all it was able to produce was, like, you know, this, like, extremely minor, sort of, you know, irrelevant bugs, really. It was just like, oh, you have this, you have that. But it's all, like, minor shit. It's like, stuff that a junior would spend the days looking for and find and be very proud of. But, like, you know, and then everything is high and critical, you know, like, you found the spelling. It's critical. It's amazing. You know, I think the main problem is that, like, they threw these models over atrocious code bases, right? Like just imagine the crap that Coca Cola runs. Like atrocious code, right? Like good people don't go work for Coca Cola as a technical person, right? Like maybe manufacturing, but like not at the. Whatever they do with code. So like when you go as Coca Cola and you get mitos to go after your code base, of course it's going to find some gaps. These guys are all using Microsoft crap. So anyways, it's pretty fascinating. It's all marketing, right? It's all pre IPO marketing.
- [45:59]
Michael Foster
Yeah. And then going back to Dario's just being very hateable. It's like the marketing being all this fear mongering and begging for regulation. It's just, it is dumbfounding how they're approaching this. Like, we're going to take all your jobs.
- [46:16]
Marty Bent
Why say that out loud? I mean, it's not true, but just don't say it out loud, right?
- [46:21]
Michael Foster
Why are you going back and forth on this? Do you think it's not true or do you think so?
- [46:25]
Marty Bent
I mean, just think about it this way, right? When you have technologies that flip a large part of society upside down, like the car, electricity, shipping, boats, just stuff like the Internet, it creates a lot of new jobs too. But I think the problem is this is the first time where the middle class gets truly fucked first, right? Because it's all the excel jockeys, the middle managers, the junior lawyers, all the juniors of any white collar job. I mean, I just look at from our side, the amount of money I save on just legal fees is insane. Insane because I go and I have the things like review contracts first, right? Because the thing is still smarter than I am about some of these contracts, right? So it's a packing order. Because when I have meetings with partners of a law firm, I'm the dumbest guy in the room on that topic, right? So if I get an edge and then I literally send the link of the chat review that I did to the lawyer, I'm not hiding from them. That's like, this is all AI shit, right? And guys like this, is this valid? And they're good. Oh, this is stupid. And that's smart, you know, like, and I encourage them. I'm like, I don't care. Guys just fucking use it, right? And you know, same for accounting, same for, you know, like contract review of like things you don't normally send to your lawyers, right? Like some lease or whatever, like some smaller stuff. And then there is like, you know, just research. I mean with the wiki, like the amount of research I can do now, very high quality research is insane. I don't know if you've tried yet. Agent Noise, it's essentially like a coding agent client that then makes it available on your white noise app, like chat app. Because then you can use the actual coding agents on your computer over chat, you know, and I made one for Wiki and you can just do, you know, I just go on my chat and say, hey, do a research on this or that. Right? It's fantastic. I mean, just research analysts essentially are going to have no jobs. You know, like, there is no reason to. It's just insane. And it's just the capacity that these models have or a mix of the models have to do research is just absurd. And we haven't even started.
- [49:20]
Michael Foster
We haven't even started.
- [49:22]
Marty Bent
We are the flat bottom part of the S curve. You know, it's. It hasn't started because we still haven't even had some decent breakthroughs, right? It's, it's going to be fun, man. But some jobs will be lost. On the other plus side, I mean, a lot of people are going to go back to being actually useful, right? Instead of Excel jockeying, go fucking build a house, go be a framer, Go do other stuff that's more useful. Pay is better too. A house framer makes more than a dude that has to spend the money buying a suit, going to a Wall street office on the back office. That's what people don't get. You know, a lot of those jobs, you see people wearing suits pay last. And being a framer. Yeah, I mean, and they're in the sun with their buddies, you know, like having a great fucking time. I mean, not for people that work in the Midwest in the winter, but, you know, it's just there is opportunity now for you to also build your companies on the side, you know, build things like, you know, you don't have to be a dev to build things, maybe to build the hard things, but you can still build a lot.
- [50:41]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Freaks. Look at me, I'm glowing. I've got like an angel's halo going around me. You know why that is?
- [50:45]
Michael Foster
Is I feel good.
- [50:46]
Podcast Host/Announcer
I feel taken care of.
- [50:47]
Michael Foster
I feel blessed, healthy, happy.
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Podcast Host/Announcer
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- [53:11]
Michael Foster
this is something we have a survey that we include when you sign up for the newsletter. And a lot of our Demo is from 35 to 55, my age and up. And it's one of the recurring themes of the surveys. I'm looking to learn more about AI, more specifically how to use it. What would your advice be to people who are looking at this? They're like, it's too late. It's passed me by. I can't get in. But I should probably try. Where do you start?
- [53:41]
Marty Bent
Well, it's just like Bitcoin is 60k, right? It's still very early. It's still very cheap. Go build something. It's like they have free accounts. They're still very capable. Just build stuff. That's it. Your imagination is your limit. I get anxiety now. Anxiety I never had before. I just stare at it. I have the power of a thousand suns, you know what I mean? At the fingertips. You know, every morning say, what should I build today? You know, like, what else can I build? Like, it's just, it's just there like a thousand suns. You can build the next. Whatever it is, you know, the next Uber for, you know, dog nails or whatever, like stupid shit that, like you find this to be a problem in your life, like you can just go and build it. You know, hosting's never been this cheap. You can get a, you can get like an MVP of anything out. Yeah, it's, you know, you are the limitation now. It's a whole different universe.
- [54:54]
Michael Foster
Yeah. Just like get over the paralysis and start playing with it.
- [54:57]
Marty Bent
Yeah. I mean, what's hard is like, you know, what do I tell my kids now? Right? Like it's, I still, you know, I still find that like hard stem to be like useful sort of like, you know, higher education sort of thing to go to. You know, you're interested in math, you're interested in physics, you're interested in like, you know, hardcore engineering. You know, those, those PhDs or whatever, they'll take you a long, like, long way. Like you're, you're. Because you're going to be, you're going to be the high end AI desk jockey. You know what I mean? You're going to be Tony Stark talking to the thing and designing together your space suit. The problem is everything else. Art is great, but monetizing art is a Problem. We need culture. We need culture and we need hard sciences, right? Everything else is like, literally a waste of time and space.
- [56:11]
Michael Foster
I mean, it may seem harsh, but
- [56:15]
Marty Bent
I mean, like, I know it's harsh, but it's like it's. I mean, think of the truth.
- [56:20]
Michael Foster
Back office excel jockey. I mean, I was that guy at one point as an analyst, and I hated it. I physically was revolted by the process of sitting in a cube under a fluorescent light, pulling data from Bloomberg and synthesizing it and writing about it.
- [56:37]
Marty Bent
But the thing is, you had imagination, right, Marty? So with your imagination, you saw a different future for yourself. And you pursue that and eating a lot of ramen, you sort of got somewhere. So I think that this future or this present really just favors those people. Now. 10x, right? If you have the drive, You can really fucking go. It's amazing. The problem is, for the people that don't, it's like, if you're an incredible linguist, you can do research on how to do better sort of understanding of, I don't know, machine learning or whatever. But the reality is that for the other, like, 90 people in your classroom, you know, they. I can come up with like, three new languages, you know, in three minutes, you know, and with, like, completely alien grammar.
- [57:41]
Michael Foster
Well, I think we discussed this last time. You're on. Because we brought up our kids and, like, what's their future going to be like? I think we got on the topic of agency. It's like, is there just a natural Pareto distribution of people who have it and people who don't? Or is there a way to sort of engender a mentality of.
- [58:00]
Marty Bent
I know, like, there is nothing wrong with, like, go be surf instructor. AI can't help with that.
- [58:06]
Michael Foster
No.
- [58:07]
Marty Bent
You know, a fantastic life, the prettiest babes.
- [58:10]
Michael Foster
How's it gonna say, some hot chicks,
- [58:13]
Marty Bent
the beautiful ladies, great coconut water, super healthy life, the happiest people. You can be part of the happiest people cohort. And then you can have your AI agents do your taxes, right? You can lower the cost of everything else around you. That's the other thing too, is that as we enter this age of abundance, it's like the cost of everything else also goes down, right? So you don't need to make as much to support yourself if you have responsibility and understand scarcity, some other things, but if you're handy, you don't have to hire people to come do shit in your house. Because you can go on ChatGPT and ask, how do I fix this? Take a Picture. I was trying to wire a gfi, well, plug, right? And I kept on getting it wrong, right? So then I just took a picture of chat cpt. Like, picture, picture, like, you know, tell me how to fix this. You know, it was a reasonable answer and I fixed it, right? Like it's like, you know, that would have been, you know, like 500 bucks visit from somebody, right? So I don't know, like, it's just, it's fascinating to be in a position now where you just have access to the power of a thousand suns from your phone.
- [59:53]
Michael Foster
You brought up abundance. Do you think we get ubi?
- [59:57]
Marty Bent
Yeah. The problem with ubi, aside from the economic retardation of it, is that it's a soul crushing. I think he ends humanity. Like, you know, animals need to do shit. Like, it's like I just tweeted recently about like, you know, there is no retirement in nature.
- [60:21]
Michael Foster
Yeah, I saw that tweet.
- [60:23]
Marty Bent
You know, like it's like animals don't retire. Like they don't stop getting bananas because otherwise they starve, right? So like once you stop doing stuff for resources, and it has to be stuff for resources, right? That's why I don't like full time philanthropy either. It's like you need to do stuff that has some sense of scarcity and some sense of market so you're plugged in into reality. So if you stop, you perish or your brain rots. It's just not good. Even if you're a guy who, I don't know, hits the gym with that spare time, it doesn't matter. You need that drive. You need a little bit of the competition for that banana, I think is very important. And if you, if you do ubi, you just crush the soul of all these people. Like, it's like they no longer have to do something.
- [61:23]
Michael Foster
I mean, you can argue that we already see the effects of that with the welfare state as it exists.
- [61:29]
Marty Bent
Oh yeah. I mean, it's like all those people in the little scooters, right? Like they're like gigantic. The Walmart people, you know, like the meme, you know, it's like you have these gigantic people in the little scooters, right? They don't even have to walk anymore. And it's just like a snowball of health and mental health, right? It's not good. And so I don't even think we have civil wars anymore in western countries because people are just fat and tired and just go in their basements, eat pizza and porn.
- [62:03]
Michael Foster
Well, it's like if the UK doesn't have a civil war after what was laid bare yesterday. I don't know.
- [62:08]
Marty Bent
They won't.
- [62:09]
Michael Foster
You don't think they will?
- [62:10]
Marty Bent
It's hard to explain like to a non American how balless society is like, dude, like most countries don't even have like proper self defense laws. Like you're not allowed to defend yourself properly in most countries. Like, you know, while in Indiana, you know, if a cop enters your house, you have the right of self defense. Like, you know, this is unimaginable to the mind outside of America. Right. And, and it's progressively getting worse. You know, one could argue that the second amendment really keeps that going. But anyways, it's, it's, it's like fascinating how, how like, you know, I, I don't think there's gonna be anything really. It doesn't go anywhere.
- [63:06]
Michael Foster
Well, in this country they're, they're gonna.
- [63:08]
Marty Bent
Yeah, that's where we are. We are there.
- [63:11]
Michael Foster
Like.
- [63:11]
Marty Bent
No, no, we're not gonna be. We are like, it's like, look at what happened in Covid.
- [63:18]
Michael Foster
Yeah.
- [63:19]
Marty Bent
You know, like Canada literally like closed everything. You know, truckers go to jail, you know, like all this stuff and people still think that, you know, truckers should be in jail. 70% of the population of Canada think that.
- [63:33]
Michael Foster
Yeah. It's insane. Well, like the UK too. Like it's so fucking disgusting how they rolled out the, the ID mandates.
- [63:41]
Marty Bent
I mean Australia is pretty dystopian, but at least they have some jail DNA there. Like the original Australian people. You know, it's very jail. You know, that was Prison island. Right. So at least you got a few like knucklehead sort of like DNA. But like the UK is just like soft hands, you know, like. And I bet like a lot of the freedom loving people just leave, right? You go to like remote places. A lot of like base British people that no longer spend most of the year in, in Britain. Right. I, I still have some faith in the Irish. You know, they, they still, they still like a little bit of, a little bit of like a nice fight. So who knows what happens there. But I think the rest of the UK is pretty, it's pretty gone.
- [64:36]
Michael Foster
There's still, there's still a generation or two of Irish that remember the last Civil War they had so.
- [64:41]
Marty Bent
That's right. I mean, you know, they had a nice late, late, what was it, the 80s, 90s?
- [64:47]
Michael Foster
80s 90s, yeah, I think so. Yeah.
- [64:49]
Marty Bent
You know, Sunday Bloody Sunday. Right? Yeah. I mean it's. I think that this is the biggest issue is just that like you no longer have critical mass in most western countries to pose a cultural pushback.
- [65:07]
Michael Foster
You think? So you want to reform Britain?
- [65:11]
Marty Bent
No, no, just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's like it's, it's gone. Like it really is like it's like Canada, it's gone, you know. Can you fix these countries? Sure. It's going to take two generations of like extremely based super self responsibility governments but they will never get elected and you need two solid generations of that to recoup what they did in 15 years. Yeah, it's just not worth it if I have to stare a young person in the eye and say go fix your country. No, fuck that. Go find a better place to live so it's not your mass.
- [65:53]
Michael Foster
Well if you, well if you run. There's nowhere else to explore on this world.
- [65:56]
Marty Bent
You know there is, there's plenty of places where people are free and things are good and you know, and people are more reasonable. I mean dude like one, I think 1 million Canadians moved to America in the last like 5 years. Like Canada has. If you remove all the, all the East Asians that came to Canada which was about 4 million people.
- [66:24]
Michael Foster
The immigration charts are astounding.
- [66:26]
Marty Bent
It's insane. Right? So but like you know Canada had 40 million people. It became 44 million people. And if you remove 1 million people of like you know, super productive middle class, upper middle class people who laugh. So engineer, like the top people, right? They all laughed. Like how many people are laughed to have the counter revolution of just ideas, right?
- [66:53]
Michael Foster
You have hope for an Albertan secession.
- [66:58]
Marty Bent
It's not gonna happen. I mean I love those boys. I would 100% move everything Canadian I have to there support. I think they should be a country. Canada should not be this big. Should be a few different countries would be better for everybody. But the problem is like half of Albertans like actually no. 70% of Albertans are full commie.
- [67:23]
Michael Foster
70%?
- [67:24]
Marty Bent
Yeah, full commie. Dude. Like like you go to the bigger cities that's like it's full commie. But that's what most people are, you know like you can't like you talk to a Calgarian like your average Calgary like it's full on like commies like you know. Yeah. Public schools. Yeah. Public you know like a public health care system. You know all this stuff, it's horrible, doesn't work, but it doesn't matter, right. People have too much fear of freedom.
- [67:54]
Michael Foster
Don't fear freedom freaks, you know and
- [67:57]
Marty Bent
you can have a, you can have totally a hybrid system at least. You know, like go drill baby, drill and pay for all the communism with like oil money.
- [68:08]
Michael Foster
Yeah, you could, but who's actually going to drill when you can?
- [68:12]
Marty Bent
Yeah, but that's the problem.
- [68:13]
Michael Foster
Take off the communist take.
- [68:14]
Marty Bent
That's right. It's not, not much you can do.
- [68:17]
Michael Foster
What do you think happens with bitcoin moving forward? Are we in a typical four year cycle right now?
- [68:24]
Marty Bent
Yeah, man, you know, it's, you know the, the oxygen was sucked out of it. You know I, I still think Sailor took it too far with the dilution of the common and he killed the vibe. And a lot of people who think
- [68:40]
Michael Foster
he's doing a good job. A lot of people think, no, no,
- [68:42]
Marty Bent
I mean, listen again, like you know, if I was in his position, which I wouldn't be because you know, I'm not, it's not my thing. But like, you know, it makes complete sense. You know, like he's, he's thinking long term. He wanted to stack the most amount of sats at the expense of anything else. Right. But I think killing like too many bitcoiners were overexposed to the common and that killed the vibe. I think we could have had a market that would have gone to 250 or more in that pump. But it didn't. So yeah, now we just wait for the cycle to restart, right? Yeah, but there is just too many other things that are going to give you multi X returns, which is what people want.
- [69:33]
Michael Foster
What are your thoughts on the state of bitcoin tech beyond the hardware you happy with?
- [69:39]
Marty Bent
Yeah, I mean it's not missing anything really. I mean, you know, exchanges work, you know, if you want to pay on chain works. If you want to stack sats on your code card works. You know, it's not hard to pass on a seed phrase to a family member. I think it's just. There's just too many sort of people who want to build something that came into bitcoin as the shitcoins were being sort of alienated the last cycle and people just find problems where they aren't. Listen, creating solutions for grandma to use bitcoin is retarded. You know, like be a good grandchild and hold the bitcoins for grandma, you know, like grandma doesn't need a harder wallet. Like it's. It's idiotic.
- [70:36]
Michael Foster
What do you think is most, what do you think is most needed right now? Payment stuff or.
- [70:42]
Marty Bent
I don't think we need anything. I think we just need time now. Yeah, we have everything we need, you know, I mean, I would love more kyc free exchanges and bullshit free stuff. Unfortunately, the interface layers are a pain in the ass, but everything works, right? So it's nice to be able to pay in bitcoin. So I love the fact that Block is going out there and pushing bitcoin retailers because that gives you a lot of privacy. But I think these things are going to be a doozy for most people because these are not the things that drive bitcoin. Bitcoin is a store of value, Right? We need a free medium of exchange out of it. But that's not what drives bitcoin, Right? Bitcoin doesn't give you miles when you buy Starbucks. You know what I mean? And also, you can't do a charge back. And also, people don't have money. It's just so fucking idiotic. It's like bitcoin is a medium of exchange for retail. It's stupid because retail doesn't have money. They need credit. You need credit cards, right? Like, people want to buy on 50 payments.
- [71:58]
Michael Foster
Yeah.
- [72:00]
Podcast Host/Announcer
People are lazy.
- [72:01]
Michael Foster
They don't want the freedom. They're afraid of it.
- [72:03]
Marty Bent
No, it's just that they, they, they. You know, you have two generations of people who. Who overextended themselves on credit, right? Like, because they were taught that, you know, money's free, it's okay. Bitcoin fixes all this. Just takes time.
- [72:18]
Michael Foster
Just takes time. That's been the fun thing to watch as people have gone crazy this cycle.
- [72:24]
Marty Bent
Absolutely batshit. Right.
- [72:25]
Michael Foster
People are going absolutely insane. And it's.
- [72:30]
Marty Bent
It's a weird vibe. It's a really weird vibe. It's like you got the people who are bored, the people who have no idea what they're talking about, you know, and it's like indeed converged into being the biggest voices of Twitter.
- [72:44]
Michael Foster
Yeah. That's why. I don't know. I think. But if you get beyond the noise and you look at like Kali and the other developers are doing with Cashew, you look at what's happening with the ARC protocols, it's moving, right? Yeah.
- [73:03]
Marty Bent
I mean, listen, we need, like, sovereign financial tools, right? Because people want the casino, people want credit, people want forex, people want hedges, people want those things. And eth still the place where you can get those things without kyc or without permission. Ish. But the stable coins work. I mean, they're great, right? I'd be a liar if I say that that's not useful. But it doesn't matter if that's on Onif Solana Tron or whatever fucking other shitcoin it is. And you know, there's people trying to bring that to bitcoin. I mean, it's like it's hard to know how much value is in that since there is. It's already working. I think this is one of the reasons why like Tether, for example, even though they're very base bitcoiners, they, you know, they do the volumes that they do in these other networks is because, you know, that's. It's cheaper to be in centralized networks.
- [74:08]
Michael Foster
Yeah, I mean, I know the arcade guys and their ARC protocol. It's cool Covenant stuff and I think stablecoins as well. So it'll be interesting to see if they can do it. Maybe that is what bitcoin needed, this VTXO model to enable all this ethereum like stuff on a second layer. But again, people are absolutely insane right now. Bitcoin, Twitter, everybody's bored, knife fighting each other. It's like everybody just take a step
- [74:35]
Marty Bent
back and oh my God, it's horrible.
- [74:38]
Michael Foster
2020, 2021. This is the first real bear market. You remember how bad things were in like 2015. Like, yeah, that's, that's where the sentiment is now in my mind. It's how low it was.
- [74:51]
Marty Bent
Yeah, I mean like I, I missed the, the wallet wars, you know, just like yelling at people on Twitter, just fighting each other over like the brand of secure element you have and shit like that now it's just like complete idiocracy, you know, like it's just there is nothing there to talk about, like to, to argue about, you know.
- [75:12]
Michael Foster
BIP110. Are you running?
- [75:14]
Marty Bent
Jesus Christ. No, it's like, you know, like I understand like why they hate, you know, the, the dick butts on chain. Like it makes sense, you know, like, but it's just, you know, nobody cares. You know, you have a small amount of people there that care and cares deeply about it and understand they care about it, but like the rest of the market doesn't give a fuck.
- [75:41]
Michael Foster
Right.
- [75:42]
Marty Bent
And it's the same for core too. You know, the core side is also like, you know, idiotic too. Like, you know, pushing stupid changes and sort of like, you know, working on stuff that doesn't matter. You know, it's just we arrive at a point where nothing needs to be changed and we're going to be fine. I'm still running Core 19. It works great.
- [76:01]
Michael Foster
Yeah. How much do we need? How much more do we need?
- [76:03]
Marty Bent
Exactly. Right. But it's very hard to explain to an engineer he should stop engineering. Right. We're fine. But normally the best way to solve all these problems is for people to just fork and then find out if they have a market with them or not.
- [76:21]
Michael Foster
Yeah.
- [76:22]
Marty Bent
You know, and then we enter this sort of like, complete, like, cancel culture sort of vibe now, too. It's so cute. Like, you know, like, you know, like, NVK doesn't like bip 10, cancel cold card, or like, oh, NVK doesn't like core. You know, like, it's just like, man, like, wow. Like, who cares? Nobody cares. My customers don't care. You know, like, it's just so weird.
- [76:53]
Michael Foster
It is.
- [76:54]
Marty Bent
Yeah.
- [76:55]
Michael Foster
I think there's something existential out there where people are like, I want to contribute. And that's not to say that again, like, when it comes to bip110, I think I very much align with your perspective on. It was like, yeah, I see. The dick bucks are dick butt arguments. I'd prefer there not to be. But it's like, are you gonna really fork and make all this?
- [77:14]
Marty Bent
There's a lot of good people on that side.
- [77:18]
Michael Foster
Like.
- [77:18]
Marty Bent
Like a lot of good people.
- [77:20]
Michael Foster
There are good people on both sides. Very good.
- [77:22]
Marty Bent
You know, like, it's same. Yeah, exactly. There's good people. Most people on both sides are good people. You know, the. The problem is, like, there is no technical solution for these two sides to meet. And there is also no technical solution for these people to diverge. They're stuck together and there's nothing they can do. You know, it's like, what an impasse, eh? And this is what bitcoin is about. You're stuck with your enemies and your friends. That's the whole fucking point of the system. Right?
- [77:58]
Michael Foster
And this will all pass if the price starts going back up. People will quickly forget about all this bullshit.
- [78:03]
Marty Bent
Oh, yeah. I mean, as soon as people are talking about Lambos again, right, it's like it goes away magically somehow. Everybody moves on. A lot of people are underwater from the more normie sort of bitcoin finance side. They're all underwater on MSTR because they bought MSTR post split. And then you have people on the other side sort of like on the more nerdy side, all underwater because we're bitcoiners. And. And we have one asset when the asset goes down. Wow. I am half as wealthy now. Oh, well, I have to wait four years.
- [78:47]
Michael Foster
Yeah, you have to. You have to embrace the poverty.
- [78:50]
Marty Bent
You know, like, it's really funny, right? Like, we've been in this. We've been in this for so long now. Like my wife just like completely does not give a fuck. It's just like, okay, whatever. It's like doesn't even like, does not register. It's like, can I do the things I need to do? Great. Thankfully, very grateful. I'm no longer in a position where it's like I have to cut back too much. But it truly is the reality of the bitcoin maxi sort of thing. And all the stocks I own are also fully, directionally aligned with bitcoin too. So it's like, well, bitcoin's that well now wait.
- [79:35]
Michael Foster
And it's four years isn't a long time. You know, you just wait, you get, you put your head down and get some work done. You bring your head back up and you party.
- [79:43]
Marty Bent
Yeah, it's, it's really funny. The other day I took the, I took the boys, I had to go to safe deposit box to get some documents and you know there's like some like tiny little bits of gold there, right? And so like I show the boys that. You see this, this is daddy's biggest mistake. So when I bought those pieces of gold, I allocated some to bitcoin and some to that. There is no comparison in the returns they each provided. I'm not going to dox the dates, but I kept it just so I could show to my children one day that this is a mistake. Do not fall for the shiny metal. It's kind of fascinating what world we live in that the magic Internet money was going to outpace the yellow Petroc.
- [80:45]
Michael Foster
Well, I think that's a very important context to bring up to. We're still only 17 years into this. It's still so early.
- [80:54]
Marty Bent
I mean what I find fascinating though is so gold had its 5,000 year run before that was salt, whatever. And FIAT was so smart. The level of intelligence that FIAT people had versus the poor gold bugs, it's incredible because Fiat managed to displace gold in just half a century, fully obliterate. The Fiat market is now what, 400, $500 trillion? I mean with the AI companies, it's probably a quadrillion now. I kind of lost track. They just keep on adding zeros. I don't know where the zeros come from, but they clearly come from somewhere. The number gets bigger. But let's go with 400 trillion, right? Or whatever. If gold is accounted in debt or not, gold's still only what, $20 trillion market or whatever.
- [81:54]
Michael Foster
What is gold? Let me check. Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is 4.3% of the gold market cap it coin's 1.3. So there's multiple.
- [82:09]
Marty Bent
Gold is still 103 now.
- [82:10]
Michael Foster
Yeah, it's around 30 trillion I guess.
- [82:12]
Marty Bent
33. So like gold managed to be 100x less than fiat. They're right. Do the math.
- [82:21]
Michael Foster
Right? Yeah.
- [82:24]
Marty Bent
How insane is it, right, that some people can just come meet in some island, right, and then go like fuck yeah, let's do this. Yeah bro, do it, send it. And it happened like pretty sort of also decentralized too, right. Like you had different emergences. Like, like Fiat emerged. Right. From different places too. There's no like one single like unifying conspiracy. And you know, it's like they did it, you know, like you gotta give it to them. They did it. And if you think they're gonna just let it go. Yeah.
- [83:03]
Michael Foster
Or an open air tax or debt slavery, you know.
- [83:06]
Marty Bent
Yeah, no, totally. That's what it is, right? We're all dead cow. Like we're all like tax cows, right?
- [83:12]
Michael Foster
Yeah.
- [83:13]
Marty Bent
So that they can, you know, go play the, the pony in the stock market. It's amazing.
- [83:18]
Michael Foster
I mean they can do tax councilors milking us. Giving our tax dollars to Somali immigrants, to Russian immigrants, to Indian immigrants who
- [83:27]
Marty Bent
are, I mean how else are. Are Ukrainians gonna buy yachts for their Monaco appearance for the Formula one, right? Like, I mean Marty, it's very expensive and it's very expensive to maintain too. That's what people don't get. It's like, you know, it's like 10% a year to maintain some of those things.
- [83:47]
Michael Foster
So you better get back to work if you're listening to this. Yeah.
- [83:51]
Marty Bent
Right. Those yachts of other people have are not going to pay for themselves.
- [83:55]
Michael Foster
The debt farmers need your tax dollars. Get back to being productive, please.
- [83:58]
Marty Bent
Yes. I mean it is insane right, that we don't have like a, like a salary tax, like an income tax revolt.
- [84:08]
Michael Foster
Yeah. I mean when you consider what it was originally supposed to be, what it is now and what the founding fathers.
- [84:14]
Marty Bent
So it's temporary.
- [84:16]
Michael Foster
It was temporary for the rich it was 1%. Now it's.
- [84:21]
Marty Bent
I mean I count on America. America is the only place on earth that I think has a chance of like revolting over some of this stuff. Like really like because you know, you guys are the only place on earth left that has proper anti tyranny on paper, you know, and you can kind of somewhat sort of navigate that still. I think there's about like three places in the world still left with like official two a sort of style, you know, Self defense. And not just self defense, the anti TYRANNY Defense.
- [84:57]
Michael Foster
The U.S. switzerland in there.
- [85:00]
Marty Bent
Yeah. I think like Czech Republic has something, but it's not that simple, you know. And I think none of them like really have anything written about you can like, you know, revolt against the tyrannical government. It's more just for like, you know, you know, shoot the invaders or something else.
- [85:16]
Michael Foster
Right.
- [85:16]
Marty Bent
It's not this overt.
- [85:18]
Michael Foster
Yeah. The problem I could see us running into is that the commies just define their, their opposition as tyrannical. Try to go after it.
- [85:30]
Marty Bent
Yeah.
- [85:30]
Michael Foster
I mean, you know, they're also not well equipped.
- [85:33]
Marty Bent
No, it's, it's interesting.
- [85:36]
Michael Foster
Right.
- [85:37]
Marty Bent
Like democracy does feel like it's in its last legs too, right. In terms of like. But, but my fear is that the next thing is going to be more commie.
- [85:47]
Michael Foster
Yeah. Well that's why we need bitcoin to win. We need open source to win.
- [85:52]
Marty Bent
Because you know the democracy is very, is very sort of like doable as the system for the next. No, for the next few years. As long as like they don't have central banking. Like democracy without central banking is very palatable. You know, they can't just like asymmetrically do their shit.
- [86:13]
Michael Foster
If you have a democratic republic.
- [86:15]
Marty Bent
Yeah.
- [86:15]
Michael Foster
Relatively distributed and you know like a true sort of, if you have a true restrictions on the expansion of the purse then yes.
- [86:25]
Marty Bent
But you know, when they invented this whole democracy thing, you know like you had to be a landowner. Right. So you can't just fuck it up and then move, you know, it was a draw to see who were going to be the politicians. Right. Because nobody wants to, you know, and, and you know like it was only people who, who were kind of like kind of aligned. Right. You know, it was like at that time was the same gender, same same DNA pool, whatever. Right. But the point being is that like some of the systems are just too efficient. Right. And when you have that level of efficiency it just means it keeps on flip flopping, which is terrible for business. Yeah, right. There is no consistency. It's like especially like you see in a parliamentary system in Canada kind of thing. It's like it's extremely efficient. So next time you have a different majority. It's just, they can just change everything. There is no like you know, the charter's joke Charter of rights. It's our constitution. It's all pathetic. Like it doesn't have any teeth. It has a literal non withstanding clause. Seriously, like everything notwithstanding.
- [87:38]
Michael Foster
Notwithstanding. If we change our minds, we can change it.
- [87:41]
Marty Bent
Yeah. That was Quebec's non negotiable for joining the the party. Who knows, maybe they separate. I still think that it was totally stolen. Was it 51 decided to stay. How convenient.
- [87:57]
Michael Foster
Yeah, it's. It's all rigged. The la. The La Mare race here in the US is definitely.
- [88:04]
Marty Bent
But the key is to not talk about politics.
- [88:06]
Michael Foster
That's true.
- [88:07]
Marty Bent
Just all this. Let's go build. Go, go harvest the. The power of 10 sons. You know on. On your. On your laptop. Go build stuff. Go ship stuff. They can't stop productivity. They try but they can't stop productivity.
- [88:22]
Michael Foster
Yeah.
- [88:23]
Marty Bent
You know, and if it's open source, they can't even tax that. It's incredible. Right? Like you can'.
- [88:31]
Michael Foster
No, and I love.
- [88:32]
Marty Bent
You'll figure it out. Don't worry. They're going to figure it out.
- [88:34]
Michael Foster
But no, they're not. I love this message. Get out there, build out, build tyranny. You have the ability to. You have the power of a thousand suns at the tip of your finger. But yeah, the. This was great. Where can people if they're interested about getting updates on ARCA specifically or should
- [88:52]
Marty Bent
I send them ARCA safes on Twitter arcasafes.com on coinkite.com yeah, follow. There is I think a subscription link there for you to put your email. We don't spam, but we'll let you know when it comes out. It's going to probably be limited quantities. So you know, if this, if this is a problem you have, I highly recommend you know, being attuned there because it will be likely limited quantities. The first batch.
- [89:25]
Michael Foster
How limited are we talking?
- [89:27]
Marty Bent
Don't know yet.
- [89:28]
Michael Foster
Okay.
- [89:31]
Marty Bent
We're gonna probably do the same sort of like a size build that we do with new products in general and then go from there. But it is a bigger device so it takes a little longer to produce. There's a lot more manual labor involved because it's a box. Self locking screws. The QA people are gonna love it. This one is dead. Wow. You're gonna have to drill it out. It's hard to convey to people like the nightmare that it is QA for security products.
- [90:14]
Michael Foster
You gotta do it right or don't do it at all.
- [90:16]
Marty Bent
That's right. So yeah, you can find it there. You can find me as MVQ on Twitter. Yeah.
- [90:23]
Michael Foster
Yeah. If you're looking for a good laugh trying to stay sane in the bear market, go follow MVK on Twitter. We're going to link to all this in the show notes and let's not wait over a year to do this again. I say this every time you come on. I feel like we're at like 18 months recording cadence now, but this is a good catch up.
- [90:43]
Marty Bent
Good stuff, Marty. Thanks for having me.
- [90:45]
Podcast Host/Announcer
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