from my mouth. What the fuck?
Why not?
Everybody has something there, a softie on. Everybody has something there, a hard-ass
on. That's how it works, I guess. I don't know. I don't know where to tell you.
Welcome to Game of Nodes, a weekly podcast from independent, validated teams.
Welcome to Game of Nodes, the perennially popular, perennially punctual validated podcast, coming
to you from three independent, validated teams this week.
Goodness knows, I have gotten out of the habit of doing the intro in a consistent and concise
format. How are we doing, fellas?
We're doing not so bad. The markets are looking good. It's always good for the vibe.
The vibes are accelerating.
Yeah. Trump's in. Fuck yeah.
Let's buy some shit. It's the end of the free world.
Elon's sorting out government efficiency. We're all going to be billionaires.
Yeah.
Fuck you.
Do you catch the acronym on that?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's Dose. Yeah, it's Dose.
It's where we are.
It's where we are. This is cool. It's going to be okay.
So I saw a thing. I think it was literally on r-forward slash low stakes conspiracy theories.
It's a subreddit, as the name suggests, devoted to low stakes conspiracy theories. Although
I think this one is potentially higher stakes because it affects all of us.
But anyway, the low stakes conspiracy theory was just like, oh yeah, well, you know, Elon
backs Trump, get Trump in. Elon gets the sort of everything out thing from Trump. He fucks
it deliberately because Elon's crazy, but he's not stupid. But he is crazy, but he's
not stupid. Important difference, important distinction.
Like the Unabomber guy. Crazy.
The Unabomber guy. Yeah, exactly. In a lot of ways. Elon Musk is like the Unabomber.
Examples of that. Is this either Elon or the Unabomber guy?
Yeah. I mean, if I had to pick one, I'd probably be the Unabomber rather than Elon. But that's
a whole other thing. Anyway, don't quote that on my trial. Anyway, the whole, the low stakes
conspiracy theory, I haven't been posting anything, least of all bombs. Anyway, the
low stakes conspiracy theory is this, which is Elon gets the position, influences enough
people to like, you know, fuck everything up, fucks up the economy. Amazing. Starts an
involuntary, starts a voluntary recession by via government policy. And to be honest,
like, just include just just keeps egging Trump on about the tariffs, right, which inevitably
will lead to inflation, probably a recession of some kind, potentially worse. And what
you typically see in recessions and depressions is that existing wealth concentrates, right?
So rich people get richer, like it's like a classic thing. And usually government stimulus
is do the same thing when they're kind of applied on a flat basis, because the money
accumulates into wealth accumulates, had people would have got some. And Elon very much stands
to benefit from that. So anyway, that's the low stakes conspiracy theory is the whole
thing is just a long scan to basically get the US government to at some point have to
respond to a recession they've created with quantitative easing in the next five years,
and accumulate like dilute other people's money and accumulate some into Papa Elon's
pocket. Papa Elon, they need no more cash.
I mean, he's pretty flush, right? But but like, maybe this is the thing, maybe maybe
that's what he wants you to think he's got enough. Why would he need more? Turns out he
needs more. Anyway,
Now, how can someone so fucking busy? Mind you, this guy's got like what 10 fucking kids?
He's got a few. How can he have, you know, a good deck of companies, like 10 fucking
kids whose names are hard to pronounce? And then now be working for a department of the
government. Where in the fuck is he going to find this time? Is this is this why such
a good candidate for it? Because he's efficiency?
Well, because I imagine he does everything relatively poorly and the things that he doesn't
do poorly, he's already delegated to people who are competent, right?
He's a toy here from Elon Musk, Department of Government Efficiency, the merch will be
fire with three.
Fucking insane, man.
What a fucking joke. Anyway. Yeah, I mean, he's also seems to spend like 95% of his time
just on Twitter, refreshing Twitter, tweeting. So the fact the idea that he's going to do
anything other than making noise is doubtful. But it does remind me a little bit of the
whole thing. And there's a classic book called classic book classic.
He was actually an academic textbook potentially, but it's a classic study mentioned on the
PODO before called Moral Maze's.
It was Aaron Schwartz's favorite book, which is another reason why it became a little bit
famous when he killed himself.
Sorry, good morning, whatever. And it's about essentially like how corporate organization
structures work themselves out, like what kind of things happen in them and what people
do all day, what people fucking do all day, right?
And this was the studies were done in like the 10 and the 70s, I think early 80s. And
one of the interesting things is a lot of people who are in the office don't actually
fucking do much all day, like, excellent, right? They didn't fucking do much all day.
They just kind of basically talk, they basically just do all the social stuff. And like that's
actually like, they read the paper, they talk about, you know, the stocks and shit, like
even people who are like bankers or whatever and have these like insane jobs where they
got to work 12 hours, like the actual amount of hours on the job is like four to five.
It's the same number of hours that somebody would do if they weren't 95, right? If not
less. It's just that there's more fluff around the job. And I kind of like look at somebody
like Elon and I think about that a little bit and I'm like, he spends a fucking a lot
of time on Twitter doing fuck all. But he probably is like, I'm the busiest fucking
guy in the universe. Well, you are on Twitter for your entire working day. And you probably
only look up from Twitter to shout at your PA. That's literally everything else. But
hey, fucking that's delegating, right? When you're rich as fuck, that's probably what
people do. I mean, plenty of people. They have a staff. They have a staff. They'll have
a he probably Elon probably has a bigger staff than Trump does because he's a richer
guy. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Easily. Yeah, I mean, maybe he's just got a really dribbly
ass and spends a lot of time on the dunny. What else are you going to do? Twitter? Yeah.
So he's got something to look at. Yeah. Um, fun story actually getting off topic. Um,
so while I was asleep last night, actually, uh, I don't know, sir, do you know about
the, um, the side project? It's like, um, ping dot pubs thing to do with Bitcoin staking.
No, not. Um, I don't know if it's, I've heard a couple of different things related to Bitcoin
staking, but I'm not sure if I'm, I know the ping dot pub one. It's called side project.
Oh, no, no, no. Oh, we, I think I talked about it, but I'm not involved in it. That's probably
a name that needs some revisiting. Yeah. That's not very good. I think it's like a placeholder,
uh, because it was their side project originally. Anyway, so while I was asleep last night,
there was a upgrade, uh, cause the network was halted, right? There was a, you know,
some problem that they were fixing and it was halted, needed an upgrade. Um, anyway,
so they, they did the upgrade, uh, while I was asleep, very, they just do them.
One brand, one of those and like, oh, we'll do one off it goes. Um, and it, uh, and the
little side process was upgraded as well. Anyway, I've been asleep, didn't upgrade.
Um, and yet I didn't miss any blocks at all. Even though the network kept chugging along.
Uh, just kept using the same binary. My node wasn't running, but when you look at the missed
blocks for the network, I didn't miss any blocks. How is that? Someone, someone posted
up like, you know, the, how, you know, you got the PV top addicts out there. Yeah. Who
have to post the PV top to show that they've, you know, got the little green fucking dot.
Uh, anyway, I had the little green dot. Do I have another node running somewhere or
they're upgrading? You might've just wasting my time. I don't fucking know. But anyway,
I found that was only during the stall while I was getting consensus or that was after
the chamber. No, no. And then like afterwards, like I upgraded about six hours later when
I woke up and, uh, still fine. Yeah. Still getting information from the RPC. I checked
the node. It's got, it's not jailed. So yeah, good question.
It's, it's tenor. Is that what it is? Yeah. It's a Cosmos SDK thing.
Is it? And, and what about, um, and the execution layer too?
Yeah. Yeah. The only thing it's just got a module and a, and a side car. I think for
the Bitcoin stuff, is it because you're using the new Cosmos station tool set that they
keep pumping in every freaking channel I'm in? Oh my fuck Cosmos station.
Well, they had the, I think they launched, uh, there's a, a monitoring thing, which just
looks like it's a Grafana structure is all it looks like.
There's a thing. Yeah. So it's like, it's, it's on a, it's on a Cosmos station domain
and it's fucking Grafana. It is Grafana. Like, but I was like, there's no stuff in there.
Yeah. They, so I guess they've made like an exporter of some description.
Yeah. I think so. Either Python or maybe a GoBase.export or something like that.
Yeah. I mean, they shared the code. Yes. I always haven't looked at it. Um, but I did
find it quite interesting that they were sort of getting a block by block representation.
I found pretty interesting.
Yeah. Because normally like, uh, Grafana and Prometheus stuff is bucketed. So I don't
know if they're getting the information from maybe like a different type of DB instead
of the standard Prometheus stuff, because you can pull information from tons of different
shit on Grafana, right? It's not, you know, just have to get it from, um, like a Prometheus.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Prometheus is like a time, time-based thing.
Uh, but you could still do it. Yeah. I guess the question is, would you show it block by
block? Like, would you do it block based? Yeah. I guess that's a good, that's good.
They're presenting the information block by block, which I found interesting. So that's
yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's not much in it. It's just basically fucking, right? And the
Judy in Grafana, but yeah, actually the, the alerting was pretty basic. I mean, it's not
so much the visualizations like that. We've done this before. It's the alerting. That's
really the alerting. So the alerting, the alerting is really the thing, but that tool, whatever
that tool, the other tool that I thought was way more interesting was the upgrade handler
tool. Did you take a look at that as a Cosmos station or as the, um, Cosmo via Cosmo advisor
replacement? That was actually really interesting. I started getting involved in that, um, and
read it a little bit. So it's basically like a Cosmo via, they do everything in Docker.
So it doesn't really work for us. Um, but it is a, is this Cosmos station? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Um, but it's a Docker manager. I think the name is like, it's not blast. It's something
like something like that. I don't know what the hell it is. I'll think of it. Something
I know. Um, but it is, it's basically a Docker manager. Um, it, it has, I think a local database
that might be in Postgres or something else. And also that can communicate with a centralized
database and that centralized database has a UI on it, like a webpage UI. And so what
it will do is it will pull, it will pull off chain, the open votes or things related to
an upgrade, um, and allow you to put in a URL for the actual binary or other types of things.
Right. That has, um, or the, the appropriate GitHub tag or commit. And then I think behind
the scenes, um, they must have something else that does the actual Docker, uh, creation
for that specific tag, right? It might have something that goes and just pulls it and
builds it. Um, but then you can see what nodes are staged. Um, you can cancel an upgrade.
You can, um, there was actually like a little cool UI around it. So I think they use that
to be able to manage across the fleet. Um, and it was, it was more than I thought it
was. So it replaces Cosmovisor. Because I guess in the Docker world, um, you really don't
have a good Cosmovisor replacement. The ones that we've actually seen, uh, people either
run manually, which is not really Cosmovisor replacement, or I have, we have seen, like
we work with a couple chains that actually build the Cosmovisor upgrade into the next
version of that binary. So like if we're on version nine, they'll publish version 10,
which we can run at any point because in that container is both nine and 10 with a version
of Cosmovisor that's waiting for the nine to 10 upgrade. And that's all it's waiting
for, uh, which actually isn't a bad, it's not a bad solution. It's just a matter of
like, you know, it's kind of a pain in the ass. Um, and it's very one by one. It can't
really, it's difficult to take that and like build that for it.
Also, I mean, I guess how, yeah, I guess that that's, yeah, cause we're the, the reason
you can, the reason you can't do it more seamlessly is because of the upgrade semantics in the
protocol of the way 10 minute works. Cause otherwise, if it was just a rolling upgrade,
you could just be like, fuck it, let Docker handle it.
They just let it go. Yeah. Yeah.
Which we get with the upgrade semantics of some other smart contract VMs, I guess.
Sure. And also like Ethereum and things like that, where you're really running a binary
before the hard fork, you're not, the binary itself isn't the hard fork, right? Um, so
yeah, you run a binary with the new version of the code ready to go. And then it hits
the point and then you basically, and then if you're not on it, you, you hash out, right?
But if you are, then it goes, um, or just actually that, that, that code has stuff in
there to say, this is the major version that we're on. And this is the code major version.
And once that code major version goes, it recognizes that the running binary does not
meet the code needs. And so therefore it stops is really what it does.
Yeah. It's in the, it's in the block metadata or something.
I don't know, or it might be something on chain calling might be, yeah.
Something like that.
Cause there are also, there are also hooks on there and Ethereum that operate in a slightly
different way. I'm not deeply versed in the internals of it. I just know that there can,
there is some way that it can indicate what, what, what, what essentially what, what we
would maybe call invariance in, um, cosmos like the correctness, essentially the correctness
around the version to use. One of the things is just straight up the version, right? That's
the same in cosmos. Yeah. The first invariant check is what version is the binary reporting
and that happens in Ethereum as well. It just operates in a slightly different way.
Um, and then they, they, I think in this one, they also, um, well, the, the one that we
were talking about, they also move like where the upgrade structure is, is set since usually
the, that cause that cosmopolizer, uh, upgrade file that would be part of the upgrades tree,
but that would not, that wasn't having a state to it in a Docker container. So I think they
move that into the config folder or something to where the upgrade JSON file is like whatever
the hell they do. They some, some rigmarole there. Um, but that cosmopolizer upgrade thing
is interesting. It'd be interesting to, through, I do, there's some parts of that, like, I
mean, the Docker piece of it, uh, we've thought about migrating to that and, but I don't really
hope there's any benefit to it the way that we're structured, but, um, but the, I,
I was a really ain't broke.
Like it's not broken. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I mean, from, from that perspective to have
a single pane of dashboard, which is we were talking about, that might be a ZabEx solution,
but we were talking about a way to see what is coming, what nodes are staged and then
have control over that from a central location. And we're just doing that through like ZabEx
and maybe some sort of Ansible automation of some sort, which is basically what they're
doing. They're just doing it in this, in this kind of structure. I, it just, it was difficult
to tell if they each node had, had a database like, I don't want to run that shit. Um, and
I call that kind of shit.
That's too much. Kind of shoehorning in like some fucking, um, like Docker as well. Like
I don't want to run. Yeah, agree. Yeah. Agreed. So there's, there's also like, um, you know,
for alternate solutions, there's, there's also the strange love, um, Cosmos dash operator
is like a Kubernetes based contraption they've built, uh, which it's got some good features
as well. I read the docs on that.
I don't think there's no upgrade. I mean, all that upgrade, I think is manually still
run though, right? There's no, there's no centralized management of, of that. It's
this container management, right?
There is centralized management of upgrades in those are. Yeah. So they had, they had
in their rows, hey, is the command and control is using, maybe using Kubernetes rolling restarts
or something like that. Right.
Not sure how it works, but if they had on their roadmap to do like auto upgrades and
I asked, um, Jack, example and about it, and he said that it had already been implemented
and that the docs were out of date. So, um, cool. But I wanted to, the reason I was asking
them is because I wanted to pick their brain about like, uh, how exactly they're getting
the, the binary, um, versions for their upgrades. Uh, and I never got to the bottom of that.
But apparently it's.
Hey, what do you mean? How do they get the binary versions?
Well, I mean, they're not in the governance, the binary versions aren't in governance. So
I just wanted to know where they were like scraping that information.
Well, it must be that the upgrade info.json option has optional fields and some chains
include that information and some don't.
Yeah. But if you're making a ubiquitous, uh, tool, they're either maintaining a DB somewhere
or they're getting it from somewhere.
Or if that's not content or, or it's automatic unless there's no upgrade info, um, specified
version in which case you just hold and wait for an input.
Well, I mean, it is, it is somewhat taboo in Cosmos to just use that, um, binary, uh,
direction from the, the info, like people don't like to do it and shunned for doing it.
So shunned shunned.
Say just for a reason, but yeah, I appreciate that a lot of people don't do it.
Uh, we know from a validator perspective, people are staunch, build your own fucking
binary guys. Yeah.
I mean, no one checks the code.
This is the seat. I know.
Well, so look, all right. Nobody checks the code. That's a very, that's what I believe
we in.
Like know what you're building in the beer one, or the very strong statement. And, uh,
I think I'm going to have to see your, uh, your field work on that. No, not nobody.
No, we agree. Can we agree that it's, it's less than 50%.
What I can say is having done a little bit of field work on whether or not anybody does
check the code, you would be surprised people do check the code.
I'm surprised.
As you said, you didn't bullshit in your fucking.
Exactly. Yeah. I'm a fucking good validator. I check everything.
Uh, well, actually what we found, um, was that overwhelmingly people put that it was
the expectation that they checked the code, but we're honest about the fact that they
didn't.
Yeah.
Anyway, the point is usurper is, uh, usurper is correct. It is less than 50%.
But I would say, I would say there's more, there is definitely more safety on a, on a
commit and that commit, which should be really part of a Cosmos SDK, um, governance proposal.
Like that field should be added. I don't know why it hasn't been changed, but that,
that is something that should be, I think part of that problem.
But for us to be able to build off a specific commit, I think that has a little bit more,
um, a little bit more safety to it than just a binary that could be hosted anywhere. And
that binary might be hosted on GitHub, which okay, I'm with you. There's verified builds
on there, but not always. Like we've seen them, I've seen them stored in Google cloud before.
We've seen them like the, I think the injective team does something similar to that or maybe
not injective. Somebody, one of these chains does, well, they put, they host them someplace
else. Um, and that I don't really like, like, I don't know, like, I mean, we don't use
binaries anyway, but if anything, if you're building automation around automatic upgrades
and you're using some such field, it should have a check to make sure that it's coming
from GitHub and the official repository.
I mean, or, or like, I mean, they could, they can even put a shot 256 in there as well. Like
there's lots of ways to be able to do some sort of binary matching to say that this hasn't been
tampered. Or I mean, I mean, isn't it, did Gatopia do this? Or there's somebody who did,
where you could actually call an endpoint on chain to get the hash of the version that's coming.
There was something on that. Like it was, it was maybe it was, maybe it was outside of
the cosmos. That does ring a bell, but I can't remember. Yeah, I don't remember what I was.
Like that idea, like why wouldn't that be, I mean, that seems like something that would be
good too. Like here's the commit hash that commit hashes could be part of governance,
which would be fine. Or, or that, or there's a shot that goes with that or something else
where you can do some verification, not that people would, but at least it's there, right?
Well, okay, right. I say, and let's, let's go with another hot take. Are having now
thought about it a lot, talk to a bunch of people, dug around in the guts of tendermen, dug
around in the guts of other consensus systems, found out how all this bullshit works on aptos
and to lesser extent on Ethereum enough that I could say something about it, although I still
don't know the full internals of it. I just do not think I do not, I already thought that it was
probably not the job evaluators to really check the code other than from a, so, so, so, I don't
think it's, I don't think it's the job evaluators to check the code. And if your network is relying
on that in the long term, you're probably not going to make it. That would be a, that's a strong
statement. I'm going to throw it out there. But I would, and I'm also going to back that up with
I was reading a paper this morning. Imagine anyway by Buddhist Louis Pie, I believe, and
Rough Garden. Very good, very good paper. An old friend of the podcast, Ben 2x4,
from Juno Swap had recommended a different paper by Buddhist, which essentially it shows that
the amount of economic security you need to secure a permissionless low trust blockchain scales
linearly with the value of the chain. So that presents some real fucking problems about ever
truly securing one of these things at scale. I obviously love it because I've been writing
paper or a couple of papers basically, intuiting that same theory from the other angle, right,
which is that number one, you don't even know how you're going to be attacked. But number two,
it's always going to be profitable to attack you past a certain point, but also your security only
works if you're profitable past a certain point. So it's kind of self fulfilling prophecy, right,
as an inherent failure, which is that either you're so valueless or so worthless as a blockchain,
like you look in the mirror and you're like, worthless. There's nobody will attack you,
or you're worth something or somebody will attack you. And there's always a way of doing that that's
not very expensive. Anyway, the point is that the reason the reason that even works is economic
security, right, this is what all these networks rely on. They rely on this idea that it's too
expensive to attack the chain, right. And so what Buddhist did is essentially prove that it's not
too expensive to attack the chain. And it follows on from, I want to say boom, like a very, very
long time ago, there was like somebody who just did like a straightforward like bit of economic
analysis where they said, well, you can always make money if you take over the entire chain. So
actually, you can just take over a proof state chain. It's just whether you've got enough cash,
that's it. That's it beginning your end done. And they're kind of right, right. But the
British thing that's different, right, is saying that, well, the reason it's not profitable to do
so is collapse of the asset, right, that's the that's the variable that matters, right.
Which again, this is a result we've all intuited, like all of us know this, we all know this, but
like somebody actually describing it with mathematical and economic rigorousness and going
like, here is a result with an equation that is provable. Yeah, is interesting. And so the
rough garden paper is like the computer science equivalent of the economics paper, it's got the
same co authors, right. And they basically say that look, okay, and the interesting about about
it is it has Tim rough gardens, one of the authors. Now, anybody who's listened to this podcast for
a very long time, where it's all two years, will know that we have multiple times recommended
the Tim rough garden lectures for anybody who wants to get a good idea of how these consensus
systems work under the hood, because Tim rough garden has his lecture notes from the series that
he used to teach on consensus systems live on YouTube, you just go watch it the whole course
where and one of the systems he looks at in a great deal of detail is tendermint, right.
As an example of what we you know, I think when we first started teaching that course, which I
think it was in 2019 or so, tendermint was like one of the kind of newest generation of consensus
systems. And also it has this lineage going all the way back to PBFT, which obviously has a rich
computer science heritage. So anyway, it's interesting, of course, that Tim rough garden,
who's very familiar with tendermint, is one of the co authors of this paper. So what you find
is there's this paper that has quite a focus actually on tendermint. And it essentially
describes like whether or not whether or not an attack on finality, right, is cheap or expensive.
And the property they say that is desirable in these systems that we've built these blockchains,
right, is that the blockchain be expensive to attack in the absence of collapse of the asset,
right, which stay abbreviated E double AC, right. That's the thing to kind of remember and take away.
But the point is that the majority of these blockchains, they argue you only get only don't
get attacked at the moment, because they are expensive, because of collapse, right, that
the whole thing will fall down if the attack is carried out successfully. It doesn't matter how
the attack is carried out successfully, they they really, really focus on kind of like a voting attack
followed by a double spend attack. But I guess I my focus is kind of governance attacks. And that
sort of thing or rewrites or validator set collusion and that kind of thing like mine's a bit more
woolly and kind of humanities degree, I suppose, in the sense of like the way I think about the
cybersecurity threat, I think about the cybersecurity threats people because that's what I always think
of. And then the way that they execute it is via computer science, right, they subvert a consensus
mechanism or a protocol isn't quite designed right or whatever. Anyway, so the end result of this
anyway is that they say, okay, well, there's actually a way you can design systems that are expensive
to attack in the absence of collapse. But yeah, so anyway, like that's basically it, that's the
beginning of it. There's this property of these blockchains that we all know about, because we
figured it out, we've seen it in the wild, and some people have come up with some papers that
kind of cover it. And it's cool. And thanks to Ben 2x4, for bringing them to my attention. And I've
been enjoying reading those. So what you're basically saying is I don't need to read the
upgrade code. Yes. So the point is, the point is that the only reason the blockchain is safe
is because the asset will collapse. That is actually the core fundamental reason why it's safe. And,
you know, if the asset collapses, it's because of a trust problem, right? And it's because somebody
violated the trust the protocol, right? Kind of like credit failure. It's like a bank run or a credit
failure or something like that, like credit we're being withdrawn. So anyway, TLDR, if you're a
validator, probably check the code. And there's an equation or two that might be used to justify that
position. So there you go. Right. There you go. And no, no left. No, no, it's like, no, it's like,
wait, I don't need to check this code. Do I even need to just because he's a bad planner?
No, it's interesting. He was talking about the Kubernetes thing, right? Do you reckon that
strange love is still running? Oh, yeah, they do. Because I mean, they can be running Kubernetes on
their own hardware, of course, but they're probably not running. No, it's all GCP. It's still all GCP.
Yeah, I think it's all GCP. Yeah, because I think what I talked to him, well, I guess it's been a
while. It was like earlier this year, but it was definitely all GCP still then. Yeah, so I think
it's all GCP. How old will be GCP? That is really expensive. It depends on exactly what they're
doing with that and the the expects of that. And also if they if they take on a certain number of
compute for two or three years, with a commitment, it's really not that bad. Like it starts to really
go down. It's really the shorter length commitments. Okay, to be fair, GCP, do you know
that is one way in which I've heard GCP is like so much better than AWS. Same thing. I mean,
they all they all are that way. But I mean, you like, we do like a few years. Yeah, yeah,
you have to pay it upfront. You have to commit though. Yeah, yeah, AWS you have to commit upfront.
Whereas so GCP, from my understanding of their billing model, right, you just keep running that
thing. And they start applying the discounts as if you committed to it. I have no idea. I believe
they use GCP. I was talking to somebody at conference last week that was saying that they
they'd move infrastructure for their company. They, sorry, they didn't run or own the company.
They were like a CTO there. Yeah, it was not their money. They have a board breathing down their neck
about saving money. And one of the things they had done was move to GCP because they said,
well, we still don't know what our allocation or whatever will be. But we know that if we end up
running it for longer, we will get these discounts. Now, I don't know their billing model in enough
detail to know if there's caveats or if you have to like, you know, tick a box somewhere or how
that actually threshes out. I can only report what I was told, but they said like, essentially,
they didn't have to think about how long they were provisioning a thing for, they just spun it up.
And at some point, they would get the they would get a discount. And it was not insubstantial.
And so I was like, interesting. Yeah. That's usually like 60 or 70%. Like it's substantial.
Discount. Discount. Like it goes down a lot.
You know, you have to you have to jump through a lot of things. Give them a case study and you
got to pay upfront. No, it's the same. Like they do discounts based on month to month with a
commitment and also pay upfront with a commitment, obviously pay upfront higher.
But like, I think the biggest thing is just the pay as you go, because it keeps getting higher,
higher, like all this on demand pricing is just getting insane. Like we use it for some like
databases and other types of stuff. And all that stuff is just getting really expensive for very
little when it comes to on demand. So that means they're really trying to force people into
into longer agreements. And now there's a whole services businesses that's built around like
trying to get, you know, club community cost down based off agreement strategy and those types of
things. We actually use one called Vantage that actually does a pretty good job, which is it just
it's a cloud service that hooks up into gets read only access to build details and then does analysis
on what you're spending and looks at a few, a few key indicators and says, Hey, put, you know,
do this plan, like, like if you're planning on keeping this around for six months or whatever,
just do this plan, you'll lower by 33%. So we do every once in a while, we, you know, we run those,
which is pretty interesting. There's a whole, you know, some strategy around that too. So
it does surprise me there. I mean, like we, yeah, it's, it's pro it's, it's still traumatic to talk
about how much we, we spent on AWS in the various years in the height of the cosmos years and whatever.
But like, we, we absolutely had, had we not been running around or had I not been running around
putting out fires here, there and everywhere with all of the cosmos drama and all the other
shit. Yeah. I mean, given that almost all of that other stuff that occupy 95% of my time,
actually wasn't bringing in much or any money. Really should have spent more time on putting
things like billing analysis in place for AWS account because could have saved probably thousands
of dollars. Yeah. There's so much, I mean, there's so much cash flow at that point though.
But I mean, right, like right now, even though, you know, prices are looking better, although
since we've been talking things are, we've got a little redway.
They got a ride. Yeah. Bitcoin is the game in that effect. Bitcoin isn't last at 94,000 for
that long. So it's, it's down 2% in the last hour. But I mean, every stake in profits, which they
should, to be honest, like these, some of these, I mean, mostly Bitcoin has been pretty crazy in
terms of percentage, but some of these other ones have been, have been pretty high percentages over
the last week or two, aptose included. And I think people just taking profits associated to that
so we don't have anything to sell. But you know, I mean, we, I thought of selling some aptose to
be honest at the price we've seen the last week, but then I also noticed that another one of those
black rock thingy, jiggies has, has expended, extended to aptose. And I thought, I think
there's probably more to come. Yeah. I saw there's a day or something, wasn't there? Or
something related to that? Last couple of days. Yeah. Maybe it was yesterday. I thought,
I mean, you know, it's like anything else, like, you know, there's a balance to be struck between
where we were in Juneau, where we restate almost everything and then lost almost everything.
You know, it's like, cool. You know, you've restaked everything. You didn't, you didn't
rug retail, but you know, now you have like 100,000 Juneau after all of the, after all of the,
what's it called, your commission and everything and all of the, all of the staking rewards for
three years and whatever it's like, cool, you got 100,000 Juneau, it's worth like
$5,000 or something like cool. Okay, whatever. There's a balance between that having 100,000
of something that's not worth it and anything. But it's not worth anything relative to its
historical peak and having like 510K of a token tucked away and being like, if it drops below
this price point, just sell it, just sell it so that you believe with something. I think that would
be there. Yeah, or the opposite, which is keep, keep 10% sitting around in case something goes
absolutely a***** and, and the rest of them you, you either sell off or you, you know,
as you think it's needed or pull commissions when you think it's needed.
And take profits like when you can, because I mean, obviously like trying to guess tops or
bottoms in this f*****g thing is ridiculously, yeah, fruitless, right? So it's better just to
DCA out. I mean, I think it just has to happen. And we've talked about it before as well. You have
to DCA out purely because the, the whole, the whole market is so based on novelty. Yeah.
Yeah. The only certainty really is almost that all of these tokens are going to go to zero. And
you know, I think the, the one thing all of us in the cosmos, not everybody, but I think most
people in the cosmos were a little bit blindsided by it was number one, the speed at which these
tokens can decorate. And number two, like the, I think everybody's mental model of like this
thing was $20 and now it's worth almost nothing meant that I think a lot of people didn't sell
at say $1 and realize, oh yeah, and realize what was to be fair, quite a healthy amount in sort of
like actual cash on the table. Like, you know, we could have, for us, we could have realized
like a year of runway or something. If we had sold at a reasonable time instead, didn't. And
you know, that's a mistake, but that's also fine. You know, we still, I think, you know,
came out okay overall, despite all of the shenanigans, which I know is not the case for some
people. So can't really complain, right? But yeah, and I think, I think I was, you know,
you get, you get a little starry eyed on some of that stuff and wanted to do well and blah,
blah, blah. And I totally agree. Like, I mean, Adam being at $42 or the hell it was and
Yeah, it dropped. Yeah, it was, it was down to 20 bucks. People like, why the fuck would I possibly
sell us at 20 bucks? Well, we've been at, we've been under $20 since, since January, April of 2022.
So two and a half years. And we're at five bucks, which is actually pretty good since it was down
to like, it was like 370 or something. Yeah, it was pretty brutal. Like it was, it was in a bad spot.
Like, it's one of those things, I know I've said it before on the pod open, like it is,
it is genuinely bizarre to think back to what the vibe was like in, in, when it was the end of
October. So just after the main net for Stargaz and Juno. That was good times. End of, end of October,
when there was Cosmoverse in Lisbon. Yeah, genuinely, I think back to that. I think back to the
conversations I had and the things I saw, people I talked to, and it just doesn't feel real. Like,
it just genuinely is baffling. For sure. Because you look at like where the, where Cosmoverse is
now, where there is, you know, most the OG tokens are not coming back. And, you know, we talked about
it before, like there's, there's not energy behind tendermen and IBC in some quarters, but like,
there's new projects, new ideas, blah, blah, blah, new opportunities. There's so many things, but like,
there isn't like, there isn't the energy, like it's that vibe. There's no vibe.
There's no strong vibe in the Cosmos anymore. Maybe that's just about the Cosmos and the
builders are still there somewhere. But, you know, we've seen a lot of validators that we knew exit
as well, or wind down or, you know, keep running nodes, but go back to day jobs and whatnot. And
I think that's probably true more or less across the board, like for builders as well as for validators
and other people. And it's kind of wild to think just how short in some ways that period was between
essentially October 21 to the wheels coming off him properly in May 22. It's like
almost exactly to the day, a six month with a peak in sort of March. I think I'm in Prop 16
caught the absolute tip. But that fall was coming a month later anyway.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But even this year, I mean, Adam's floated between $11 to
$14.19 this year in March, which was pretty high and a low of $370, something like that,
$390, $380. And now we're up to, so like it's down 100% this year, even in this year, which
actually in grand scheme of things has not been a bad year compared to at least last year.
So it's kind of wild to me that Adam was able to get back up to $15. Like that's, that's
a, yeah, yeah, the head of the sense of good spikes this year, $14. Yeah. It's sort of,
I guess, his name recognition, isn't it? To some extent, but like, yeah.
I don't remember why. Yeah. Not financial advice, but there are other,
there are other tokens out there that aren't getting that kind of positive price action.
I'm surprised by it because they've come along more recently.
Yeah. And Kudasabayas, who were buying Adam at $380 or even now at $506, like you got
steel nuts, man. About $380 to $5, I mean, you're $380 selling at $5. That's a hefty profit.
If you want to, you know what I mean? Like $370 or $380.
Adam is the top 4 to 500 coin, says Rahmur in the comments.
There you go.
Yeah. Wild times. But yeah, I think it'd be, I kind of think that like, okay,
it's not financial advice. I've got a good feeling about next spring to summer, right?
And that's not just because I went away on a wellness retreat and then came back with a new
live, laugh, love attitude. I didn't put crystal balls up. I didn't do crystal therapy or whatever
it is where you put a crystal ball inside you. It kind of just feels like, well,
this bear market's been a heck of a, it's been a minute. I don't know. I'm kind of low-key
interested to go back and see in the conferences in the spring, like what the energy is. Is it
just going to be more fucking KYC and stable coins? Because if so, fucking kill me.
Oh, it totally is. Come on. You got to believe. No, we've got to believe there will be something
more interesting. Come on. Have you heard about restaking? Oh, fuck restaking. If that's the
next hype cycle, then that's it. I'm out. I'm fucking done. Restaking is stupid. And it doesn't do,
if anything, I'm almost certain it makes all the problems that I was talking about earlier
worse, but I lack the mathematical or economic knowledge to be able to go and
where improve that. But I can intuit that it will be bad for stability. Fuck an A.
You don't lack an opinion though. Yeah.
Hey, man. Look, you know, strong opinions weekly held. That's what I say, isn't it?
About technical leadership. It's like our local Karen. Oh, man, I had a fucking heard of Karen
starting up yesterday when I was in the local, like, you know, Kmart.
Fucking hilarious. Side, just a side. Oh, what? A Karen. You know, like, it's like, you know,
your Walmart or whatever. It's like, you know, just a department, like a cheapest department store.
Yeah. And there was this fucking Karen, man. She started up giving like this poor dude
just the hardest time. I'm going to call the fucking head office and ask him about this. He's like,
hang your fuck. Go your hardest. He's like, that's our store.
Polish the other stores do this. He's like, okay, not this one. Not here. Yeah, not here.
I said, loudly. I said, look, Kelly, it's a fucking Karen.
She yelled at a Karen in the wild. Did I get yelled at? No, but she did fucking snarl at the guy.
Sweet. Karen's don't want any real conflict. They're like, I just want to pick on a fucking
dude whose job it is to listen to my bullshit. That's true. Yeah. So anyway, restaking,
there's a lot of that going on at the moment. We were talking about what we expect to see
at conferences in the spring. What do we recommend?
Will you be going to conferences in the spring? I think next year, I say that the end of every
year though, but I think I'm going to do a little bit more next year. I think we might
switch it up too. I think we might skip some ones that we've done in the past.
Yeah, man. Fuck the eighth whatever in Denver, in the Americas. Come up this way.
Come to Asia. Asia is later in the year. I'd be over there now if it weren't for the new fella.
Yeah. I think we might switch it up too. Maybe a little bit more ECC and DevCon and stuff.
I'm doing ECC. You are. You did that money thing again? Did you do that this year? You did, right?
I did money. Yeah, yeah. Saw artifact. It was fucking shit. It was cool.
They're emailing me. It's a home of the artifact crew. But it was all fintech,
you know, and it was no... Talk to artifact about it. See what they think. Because my vibe was like...
But I'll just be fair, I had a fucking three month old. I was so exhausted that it made...
I could have had a business opportunity fucking staring me in the face and I'd have been like,
huh? Who are you? What the fuck? But my general vibe was it was just there was nothing.
There was nothing there that really seemed to benefit from a networking perspective or even
kind of an awareness perspective. It was just like it was just being the ugly one at the party.
And there are people... My vibe with Money 2020 is it's people who work in or around financial
services and they get to go because it's a free jolly. Of course, right? But there's no...
I'm sure there are decision makers there. I'm sure there are people who are useful to connect with,
but it's not... You'd have to shoot a shotgun into a room of people to get a single bit of
buckshot and somebody that you actually wanted to hit. And it is also huge. It's huge and
incomprehensible as well. So it was good in the sense that obviously we had literally a client
with a side event. But we had a network that we operate on who had a side event and that made
it worth doing. But the main event was just a wash. There was a bit of stuff where it was just like,
oh, this is kind of interesting to see that they've obviously spent a million dollars on that stall.
There are a couple of blockchain networks there being like, we're the future of real-world assets
or whatever. And you're like, okay, cool. You just spent like two million dollars
to tell a bunch of middle managers at banks who are not in the space. That, cool.
I guess you guys must have a lot of money. But it wasn't like... Yeah, I would go to... I mean,
I think the best bet is to still go to blockchain dedicated stuff because it's just...
You're going to be in front of people. You don't have to have the same fucking conversation.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? That's the other thing I've been thinking like,
because I've done a bit of networking, a bit more networking, which I know I've been mentioning,
like a fucking boring guy on this recently. But again, a lot of that is more traditional fintech
stuff. And that's very hit and miss. It's all very, very long play stuff where you're just basically
trying... You're talking to people because at some point, you're going to talk to somebody who
has an interest in what you do and they'll mention you to somebody else who might be useful.
That's how all networking works. And you might be able to help them and they might be able to help
you. Cool. But it's going to be via one step of remove. But even in those situations, a huge amount
of time, you're trying to explain... I don't know. It's not like people don't understand what crypto
is and what you can do with it now. It's just that the use case that's going to allow you to work
together with somebody is still super fucking unclear. Sure. And so you get... Right. Okay.
In a nutshell, it is this. It's then a lot of scenarios, crypto is boring now. That's it.
Well, yeah. I'm guessing all those guys are talking stables and they're talking the same
shit we've been making fun of. Yeah, exactly. So you're kind of like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not only
do you work in crypto and they're like, yeah, yeah, stablecoins. Yeah, I know. And you go like,
oh, well, mainly we're on the infrastructure side and they go, yeah, okay, cool. So even fucking
nerdy or more boring, great, fucking amazing. Because we're going to go and get into infrastructure,
the least profitable bit of it. No, we're going to go and launch a stablecoin because that's
profitable. So you're kind of like in the, you know, in the traditional Vintech circles that
you're just like, they're like, cool, you have no knowledge that we care about because we're going
to pay somebody else for that consultancy. We'll pay one of the big four accounting consultancy firms
to find... I mean, it doesn't matter. Dread up an intern who can tell us what a theorem is, you know?
You're never going to run nodes for those teams anyway. Exactly. It's not like you're...
As an infrastructure provider, you're not doing anything for that. Unless... And you're not going
to be... Clearly, you don't want to get into the business of... Yeah. And the other sort of stuff
we do, which is all fun on the smart contract development side, like obviously, again, they're
going to go to McKinsey or whoever. Sure. Yeah. So you're just like, well, look, a lot of the way
this stuff works in the wild is like small businesses and small technology companies who
are providers and that's broadly covers all of us independent validators, right? But you can't...
Not only can you kind of not play at the big table, but also it's just not even the same.
You're not even in the same business, really. So you're kind of cross-purposes. Whereas if you
go to like an actual crypto conference where it's at least... You're just going to encounter
lots of people who understand, oh, yeah, fine. You can actually run a pretty big,
validated company on five people. Yeah, okay, fine. So that's credible. It's all about the
credibility of your work or whatever it might be. And it's just a very different vibe when people
understand how different the sector is, I suppose, in terms of what expectations around everything
are. Maybe it would be my... Yeah. The long and short bit anyway is that ETHCC isn't fucking can
and it's in the summer. It's going to be long. Oh, is it? Oh, man. Yes. It's in the French Riviera
in the middle of summer. It is also, crucially, the week before my holiday, which is also in
France to go watch the Tour de France and then go do some shit in France. So I'm like, this is great.
I get three weeks in France. Oh, this is pretty interesting, actually. So this is the last week
in June into the first of July in Cannes. Oh, yeah, baby. Maybe turn this into a family thing.
Yeah, that's why I'm literally... I'm going to go back to France up to
Lille to see the first two stages of the Tour de France and then maybe head back to the South of
France. It's going to be great. That's interesting. Yeah, I started putting some dates together
out in the shit for next year. See what the hell's going on. It could get some accommodation on the
go. I think there's another... From memory, there's another conference around that sort of time in
France as well, but I can't remember what it is. One's enough. One's enough, dear God.
Hey, look, look. Some of us really shout the bed on doing the right networking last year
and really need to get back on the BD in a big way and back on the horse.
Everything, everything is done. Speed 100 was zero. That's it. You might have noticed the theme.
I'm like, do you remember that? Do you remember when Charlie Sheen went mental in the early 2010s?
And he's like, I have one speed. Go. Fucking tiger blood. Exactly. That's the energy I'm going for.
All right. Did you say go or blow? Go. Epic winning. Do you remember? Do you remember the song?
Whatever it takes. There was the song where it was like, are you bipolar? I'm by winning.
Win here, win there, win, win everywhere, winner. Do you remember that? No. It was just like,
it was just his voice, auto-tube, basically, with all the insane stuff he said. And it was like,
awesome. I'll find a link for the show notes. I can't even remember who made it.
But I know I'm going to have it in my head all week if I listen to it again.
There's a shit little planning already for this conference in June of next year.
Yeah. I mean, I'm sorry.
What's the name of that conference? Oh, the CCC.
Where is it? France. France. I love this one. That's too far away.
Dude, everything's far away. What do you want? Come on.
That's every center of crypto. Other than me coming there and sleeping in a couch,
that is literally the only thing that's probably going to happen.
Welcome anytime. I got a lot of gardening that needs doing. You can help me.
I mean, this is fucking. Go cut that for me. You're tall.
We can start at Jay's.
It's those high branches.
Hey. Yeah.
You're tall. Go get those high branches.
Sit on my shoulders and get that high shit. You'd crush me. You're a fucking.
That's funny. Yeah.
I know there's so much in Asia. I mean, I understand. There's so much in EP this year,
both from SmartCon and also DevCon. And just there was so much there.
I saw a smarts with you from Hong Kong.
Yeah. Yeah. I was on Hong Kong.
It's just fucking.
It was just, there was like, and they're all like two weeks or three weeks spread across.
Like it's just too much. Like it was just too much. So I was going to go to one of them.
I went to none of them. And so maybe next year we'll see kind of where things rotate to.
It's a lot of investment to get out there, isn't it?
It's just not so much.
It's not so much time as well.
It's not that it's not so much the money. It's just the time. Like you're,
because you really are going for a week no matter what and then or more.
And it's just such a haul and time zones and everything else.
Also without like being a fucking killjoy as somebody who kind of relatively rigorously
tries to budget their carbon. I'm like, I basically get one set of long haul flights
every night, maybe four or five years. Like that's the most I can justify.
And it's like that's got to be on a family holiday or linked to a family holiday.
And so it has to be like, I don't know tough times.
When it's when it's a really fucking long way away, it is a bit of a
fucking what? I don't think your carbon out of the carbon matters anymore.
Yeah. I decided I don't eat. I don't eat meat basically other than pepperoni on pizza.
I don't own a car and I don't fly all for that reason. Like I'm not telling everybody.
Look, I don't, I don't fucking tell anybody else like you can't do this. You can't whatever.
But they come there. Look, dude, there's going to come a time when you're going to get asked
about it as an old man and you just be like, well, how much carbon did you save in 2024?
You old prick. Well, I'll just all of it, son. Hey, I've got soul.
All of it. Yeah. So I've had sort of since I bought this house. Yeah. But it doesn't matter.
Does it do anything? Yeah. Even in the UK, it's pretty substantial in terms of what it reduces.
You're well, it's the two things that are bigger, like obviously reducing the amount you take off
the grid and also insulation is the big thing here, right? Like solar's sexy, but just insulating
your house better, like replacing all the windows with double glazed or that shit. That's like big.
Right. You'd be better off with like a thousand little hydro turbines on the roof to catch the
fucking rain as it comes in. Yeah. So you should use some wind, little wind turbines some people
have that also ground source heat pumps are a thing. You don't have the room for that though,
right? Yeah. Do you draw straight down? You can do that stuff even on. So in the UK,
you own the ground under your house, like just on. So you can just drill. It's more of the cost.
The cost isn't worth it. It's ridiculous. Plus you got to get a crane in your backyard and shit
like you're never going to do it. I think the rigs that you need are actually like smaller
than you might think now, but yeah, it's still relatively un-economical for a small house.
The payback period is like long, is my understanding. We have just fuck loads of sunshine here.
Actually, Brisbane rains quite a lot of noticed. There's thunderstorms quite often. Last night,
on this beautiful day today. And by the way, I'm getting rid of chat by Rama saying,
can't drive or fly or drive a car because of carbon. Yeah, it has a bunch of guitars and
things behind it. Yeah, it's true. Rama's flaming you hard in the comments. Almost everything here
is like at the risk of sound like the fucking true hipster I am. Some of it's from before I was born.
It's all secondhand. Again, I try not to buy things that are not what's it called.
And I don't try and buy too much new shit. There's already the fucking rare earth metals
and a mobile phone, a bad enough. I don't necessarily need all that shit.
So, like I said, it's just my opinion, man. Whatever.
What's your carbon budget for your cloud services?
Well, we just try. Do you get a report from AWS monthly?
You do have reports of that.
So, actually, I do look into the CSR of the providers we use and try to use any providers
that have at least something in the column. But our business is strictly fucking no ethical
consumption of the capitalism. And the fact that we even run these blockchains is like a
massive fucking net negative. It's very, very hard to justify. And that's a fair point. And it's
one I don't think I can really... The only thing truly ethical response to the sector that we work
in would be to not fucking work in it. Well, yeah. I mean, you could work anywhere. You just have to
fucking sit at home in a bucket. No, but this one is especially useless.
You could literally only work in tree planting.
Tree planting is also a bad example because tree planting doesn't particularly help, but that's a
whole lot of things. Tools pressed out of dirt.
But in a very limited sense, what you could do is try and make money in blockchain, buy up
marginal farmland and take it out of production. That would be actually quite good.
Take farmland out of production?
Yeah, take marginal farmland out of production because it becomes a carbon sink.
In the UK, we're obviously like, we'd have a lot of land. And so we're very big on using
marginal somewhat unproductive farmland, like just bloody-mindedly finding a way of making
any money off of it. And it's mad because the property... You end up doing loads of farming
on land that's actually just not very suited for it. And it's why the highland clearances happened
and all that kind of shit, like the kind of mini genocide in Scotland and like the...
Would have been the early 19th century by landowners and all that kind of stuff because
they finally had a sheep that was hard enough to use on land that previously you couldn't
do anything with. And so they went, wow, bam, loads and loads of sheep. And then it just massively,
massively degrades the land because the land is basically not suitable for that anyway.
But these places, the effect of agriculture on them is disproportionately bad, basically.
It doesn't even make much money. So there's a lot of places in England where that is the case.
And it results in a big degradation in terms of not only biodiversity, but also it has a knock-on
effect on carbon and whatever as well. Because you get all these things like peat and whatnot,
any situation where you're like, this is a place where the land would just be doing its thing.
In general, it turns out those are the kind of places which are capturing carbon and kind of
trying to keep a lid on the thing. And if you're just like, no, I must fucking graze my five sheep,
this one kilometer of land, five sheep can do a lot of damage to even a wide area.
You're not making any money off of it. But that's a whole other, and that doesn't really,
that's like whatever, Matt. Hey, geez, we got deep there.
Yeah.
Fucking picking on five sheep.
My other half is also used to work in like a food supply chain stuff.
And now works in sustainability as well. So this is like just via osmosis. I've
heard a lot of random things. So end up with opinions because once or twice a year,
I'm like, hey, recommend me something that I should read to understand more about.
And you read a book and you're like, Jesus Christ. Oh my God.
To get pissed off at or feel bad about.
What else are we in natural earth that I don't know about that'll keep me up at night?
Here's one that really shitted me. Right. I read, so at the moment I'm reading the Master
in Commander series, right? And the descriptions of like the number of birds that there were and
shit. Like this is something I can't remember what book it was. I was reading like an old book
and it described like these big flocks of birds in Northern England. And I was like,
I was like, dude, fucking a big flock, like a hundred birds. Are you fucking kidding me?
I've never seen other than pigeons. I've never seen a hundred fucking birds together in one go
in the north of England ever. And I basically looked it up. So I didn't look it up. I got
given a book that I read on essentially biodiversity. And I was like, oh, shit. It's literally
since the Second World War. Like in Britain, like the bird populations just fucking collapsed
because of the way we do farming, essentially. And I was like, oh my God, like the insane
thing is literally in my lifetime, it's decreased massively. So like if I'd gone for a walk on a
Sunday as a kid, I just seem like way more birds and all that kind of stuff. And it's super bizarre.
Like the numbers are really fucking crazy. You know, citation needed a bit less so in other
places where they're more land, more wild spaces. It's really noticeable in France, actually. You
see so many more wild birds like in the mountains or by the sea or whatever. You're like, wow,
bigger country. It's a wine. It's the wine, the birds will pissed or people will pissed.
Where was the fucking topic? Fucking carbon. I was saying why I'm not gonna a pack. Yeah,
anywhere in Europe though. Yeah, yeah. Okay, we'll figure it out. We're gonna make it happen.
Yeah, I mean, like, we said this last year, although we I saw you last year that no,
yeah, I can't pass letter. No, last year. Yeah, 23. I haven't seen you 24. Right. But I did see no
on 24. So I mean, we're doing 50 50. So you fucking two months ago, Jackass, I saw you the
start of the year. Oh, yeah. No, you're right. It's both of you this year. That's right. Jesus.
I was thinking I was thinking conferences. I know we had pizza. That's because I was there.
No, I was thinking I was in my head. I was thinking just conferences. Like when you were in any of
these conferences, but obviously, yeah, yeah, it's a shame because I mean, to be fair, like for all
my complaint from like, this is what I mean about like, I fucking I like Denver, Denver's great.
I would I would absolutely come to eat Denver. If I wasn't, you know, beat myself up about a shit.
So you know, hey, what's it on your bike? Start an early fucking bicycle trip. See you in three
weeks. Just pay them back. All these airlines offer that you can go pay those carbon credits back.
That's all make believe shit. You can do that. It's a scam. I know it is. I know it's a scam.
I looked into it. It's a scam. Apple's doing the same thing. You can use that. You can do
it. They can do it. You can do it. No, it's bad. How many kilometers is it across the sea?
Could you keep you call? Obviously, you can't cycle. I'm not an idiot. I'm where there's
difference between land and sea. There is. I heard it here first. I get. Yeah, I have a friend
that sailed across the Atlantic. Oh, it sounds awful. Yeah. I watched a couple of guys who do
that and like, just just it just sounds. It just sounds it just sounds four weeks on this boat in
the middle of nowhere. Oh, although now they're basically using, I guess you can. I guess you
can use the traveling Starlink now. You pay a pretty high premium to be not overland because I
think there's a smaller number of how those satellites work over the middle of the Atlantic.
But now at least there's connectivity where in the past, you just have like a satellite phone
that might do like a small text like here and there, right? You can just say, I'm alive or I'm
dead. I'm fucked. But now actually get some pretty decent bandwidth. You have like a, you know,
you have probably a couple hundred megabit back and forth to be sitting there watching YouTube
all day. So maybe maybe it's better that way or worse. I don't know. Real-time streaming from the
middle of the Atlantic. I mean, that's something you can do the could you could be on a boat. I
mean, you could be on a boat and then just be on your bike on the boat. So it's like you're crossing
the Atlantic on your bike. You got to keep like a nine not 24 hour a day pace and just say,
I mean, I think what Ryan needs is finish reading the entire Mastering Commander series.
And then, yeah, and then immediately take to the sea. I fucking hate the ocean though.
This is all got a bit weird. I just fucking hate the ocean.
I like the beach. Fucking ocean though. Why do you hate the ocean? Too big. It's too much.
It's too much. Too overwhelming. It's got too big for its bees. Have you ever been sailing? Yeah.
Yeah. Not like, not, I would say nothing more than like 20 miles offshore, something like that,
20, 30 miles off, which is still pretty far, right? But to be like a thousand miles offshore,
that's a long way. That's a long way. I'll do it. Yeah, you do it. Just to get away from the screaming
baby. Yeah, if I didn't have to be so fucking connected, man, I'd live in a boat if I had the
money. I'd just go out there. There's a bunch of folks who do that. Like we just might do a
crossing or two a year or something like that. It's just like you hear about like they do videos of
it and everything else. There's a couple of guys I watch and then like, like I like that idea and
like, actually spend time watching those, those travels. But man, it's not something I think I
could do. I fucking love sailing. I used to race sail yachts over in WA. Yeah. Western Australia.
Yeah. When I lived over there, every, when the fuck did you live in Western Australia?
2010. Crazy. Yeah. Like racing boats or like, yeah, like racing yachts. Yeah. It's fucking sick.
Two days a week. Go out for twilight racing on Wednesday and like a ocean race on Saturdays.
Pretty good. I bet. There's a lot of chapters to Noel's life, aren't there?
Yeah. I didn't even know. I used to row as well. Like, you know, the fucking little,
little boats or the long arse wars, skulls. Yeah. I used to row. I used to row competition.
You know, back when I was fucking. I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, back before you became a
valedictor DJ and went to shit. Back before I fucking, you know, drank beer six days a week.
Can't, can't, can't, can't. Yeah. Fuck it. Just over and over. Well, anyway, if you see,
make it happen. Yeah. Game of nose. You just gotta get no out of the, out of the shit. There must
be, there must be some other conferences about happening, but I haven't looked up any others
apart from you. But probably we'll do a couple of those. I feel like there's a lot of the French
validators that don't like me that much and it's likely they'll be there. So there'll be a lot
of people that will be there, not just French validators. It's only that one anyway, isn't it?
It's like what I know. I can tell how many. It's only one I know of.
Nah, I just too far. It's funny. Don't speak the language. Come back to the US. Okay. It's
closer. Fuck that. How's it closer? I was just saying. I know. No, I want to go to Asia next
year. I don't want to go to that part of the world. So you're fucking expensive in America now, man.
It's just outrageous. I do want to drink my kids Asia, but I don't think it's going to be next
year. I think they have to be a little bit older. Hey, I'm going to drag the family to Tokyo and
maybe either that and China or a China trip or Tokyo or a big thing to do over there now.
Right? Go to Tokyo. Yeah. Well, I mean, we go all over the place, but I do want to do that.
I just don't think they're old enough. I think it'll become like I think in the last three years,
Americans are really like, it's good to Tokyo. Direct flights, baby. It's good to Japan. Makes a
big difference. Yeah. I noticed over in, there's this place called Naseko where I used to go snowboarding.
And then like, what is it? The epic pass added that mountain to the epic pass.
And then there were fucking Americans everywhere. Oh, is that like something with
places here in the US? No, it's Naseko. Yeah. Yeah. So the epic pass is like, it's an
all mountain pass like around the world. Yeah. So they added Japan and then next thing you know,
all these fucking. So yeah, it used to just be like Australians and fucking Japanese and a few
Europeans. And then like, there was just everywhere. You couldn't fucking throw a rock without hitting
an American. Just a bunch of people. And you can hear it, man. It just peaces your ears from down there.
Oh my God, look at this fucking fuck off. I can't understand anything. Yeah. Yeah.
Can't, wow, look at this fucking, you can go, you can eat at the convenience
state. It's just everything. And so like, it just completely ruined that fucking town for me.
Americans are awful travelers. They're fucking terrible travelers. They are. They look awkward.
They act awkward. They're shocked at fucking everything. Like, oh man, they are, they're
terrible. You know what? Do you know what is the worst fucking thing is when you go is when I go to
on campus and then because it's like dead center of London. And then I have to go to like a meeting
or something directly after and it's like the two nearest tube stations are like probably
either Houston or Tottenham Court. May, I guess you can go up to, you can go up to
thingy street as well by the American church, but like it doesn't take you anywhere. So not useful.
And like the number of times there is somebody in, I know you like ball caps you serve as I'm
sorry about this, but like a ball cap with like an American ship on the front. And then like that's
a bloke, right? And he's got sunglasses on. It's England. You don't have sunglasses. You don't
have fucking sunglasses in November, mate. And then his wife's there and they are standing fucking
side by side on the escalator on the underground. Do you not understand that was like number one
for my kids. Like if you do that, right, going to move the fuck over. Yeah, I don't care if you're
70 lady, I will push you down this escalator. This is the Piccadilly line. You learn if you live near
London that that is 33 meters down. Just where 33 meters to the bottom of this fucking hole. Like
wearing awkward shorts with a tucked in shirt, the whole, like the whole thing, right? High socks,
everything. Yeah, your short sleeve shirt, short sleeve shirt. It was a short sleeve,
shorts, hot shirt. Socks are almost touching the knees. Fuck it. No, he had to ride that ride that
left rail. He had chinos on. He had chinos on to be fair. How much is uptown?
It was one of those. I was just like, I was like, do you know what these guys look the same when I
used to come to London to see my aunt when I was like four years old, right? They're the worst.
And I was like, how, how is the outfit stayed the same for my entire life? Like that's, that's
over 30 years, right? It's still the same outfit at nearly the same tube stop where I used to go,
you know, with my aunt. And I see the same fucking guy standing on the left. I'm like,
crazy. This is where you walk. This is where you walk. This is where you walk. We're gonna have
to fucking kill this guy. There's like 15 people just going to push and push and push and push.
Yeah, fucking push him. I gotta learn. Welcome to earth. You gotta learn. That's why.
Yeah, Will Smith in Independence Day. I mean, that's why we said, we said drive on the,
on the Autobahn, like in Germany and, and even this was like 10 years ago. And I would,
I would still be scared because we'd be fucking hauling ass on the left and we have good left,
right lane management. Don't get me wrong. But the number of cars that would make bad decisions
in those situations was bad even then. And I hear it's even worse now. And that could be not
necessarily American driving, but you have all sorts of different folks on that that don't
understand or recognize the, the rules in those situations. You could fucking easy to get killed
in that situation. Yep. Right in that left rail. Just run that left rail, baby. Let's go.
Dear anyway. Yeah. Minor complaint. Anyway, sorry. There's, you know, Americans, Americans are
lovely people. They are. They travel horribly though. Like they really do. They like, that
totally makes sense. I don't know. They, you know, like whenever you go somewhere, somewhere in Europe
and to just bring everything back neatly to layer cake, because obviously everything is just layer
cake. You know, there's that scene where it has like the wannabe gangsters in like Amsterdam.
And they're just like, come on, Kev fucking come over here, mate. Have some X. Have some
equies. Let's fucking go. Yes, mate. And like the number of times you're just in Europe somewhere
and you just hear some variant of that. And you're just like, I'm not here. Just we love
the prey. Just we love prey in on France. Yeah. Oh man. Just shrink up into a little ball. Anyway,
has there been any fucking crypto news other than, you know, Trump won possibly the end of
Europe end of NATO, but crypto coins are up coins are up, baby. Live forever, baby.
Bitcoin at 90,000. Let's go fucking go sell before the inauguration when, when the economy tanks,
huh? That's gonna take a couple years. It's gonna take a couple years. That's the sound of optimism
that we like to hear. It'll take a little takes a little time for or brashness to turn into. Oh,
shit, that happened. Yeah, we'll see. No, news are up. We I think we did actually have an article
from our news researcher this week. Oh, there might be me sticking something in. Oh, is that you?
Oh, okay. Oh, this Vitalea city thing. I just thought this around like I would I can't remember
what linked me to this thing. It's like this. It's a city on a city. I know it's actually a city
technically, but I guess you know, it's a physical location. Yeah, it's on an island in the Caribbean.
It's in Honduras somewhere. It's in Honduras. That's what it was. So this thing, this thing was
like some sort of a little link in a show notes to a bunch of things. I looked at that today. I read
it for like half an hour trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I almost made an account.
I almost made an account because I like I want to see what these things are. But it is a it is a
what was the what's the tagline? I forget what the hell the tagline is, but it's a
it's a making that optional making that option. And of course it involves crypto. And I was like,
this is real 2021 vibes. It makes me excited. Maybe maybe there is a bull coming.
But that's only one property as part of the larger thing. But the larger thing I
think is you then I read that it was like on an island in the Caribbean that you could buy your spot.
The idea was that you it is a location in a city. Well, it's on a state of mind. It's
it's clearly a state of mind. But the idea was that they're building a new
a new life that has everything from governance to government to taxes,
VCs, transportation, healthcare across the whole board, energy creation, all this type of stuff,
where the friction to get things done is gone. And it's an entrepreneurial blah, blah, blah,
create a new way. Let's build a new government type of structure and a new way of doing that.
And it seemed like all it was doing was bringing like it was like a circus bringing the sounds
like it like just shenanigan after shenanigan. And one of those I think one of those not
then the whole thing of it was this idea that everybody can live to live forever.
Right. And so we're going we want to be able to allow without FDA approval and all this type
stuff we're going to find we're going to work hard to find the drugs everybody can live forever.
That's literally what it was. I think you're on mute. But yeah, so I think basically yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So because because not everything dies, like as we forget throw that throw that
old knowledge out. Everything dies. No way. All those cryptocurrencies that have died,
all the evidence, all the evidence. I don't know how the crypto thing. Well, crypto was a big piece
of it too. Because the one thing we know in crypto is that nothing's forever, dude, right?
Especially if you rug pull the retail investors and then invest the profits in an island nation
in the Caribbean. Yeah, there was. And it was like how to yes, it was and then you had a but it's
only like $359 a start. You could just do it. That's how you become a member. I think it was
a member to be able to do that. And there was like a bunch of things like VCs and all this kind of
stuff that but I did find an activity page where it showed like every single post. And it was like
over the last 10 years or something or the last couple of years, two years or whatever it was,
there's a bunch of posts. It was like the last 30 days, nothing. It was like it was dead. So
maybe it's already maybe it's already. I've just been flicking through the the guests for the
fireside chats and I have seen two people that I know to some degree. And somebody, one of them
is writing about how great it is. And so now I feel now I feel weird because this is like the
weird. You know, when you're like, you're like joking about a thing. And then you remember
that this is like, we are so, so adjacent to this that it's actually like taking the piss out of it.
You're a little bit like, am I taking the piss out of myself? Possibly? Yes. Yes. Are we all in
on this joke? Is it a joke? Is it performance art? I didn't know. I also love how actually I now
open this website. I didn't scroll down. This is amazing. There's a guy, Anna, like answering
questions at some kind of an event. And behind him, it says, what is your favorite part of the
startup city? Amazing startup city. That's what it was. Yeah. But the whole thing is like Vivaldi
or something. I forget the whole thing is called, but it's Vitalia. I swear this idea. I was reading
this. I fucking swear I had this idea, this same idea back in 1995 when I was on mushrooms. I fucking
swear I thought about this. You kick it out that you just knocked it on the head. No, not the death
part. Put the other part of like, why couldn't we have this thing that comes together and like get
rid of all this red tape and like just let it go and see what happens and blah, blah, blah. And like,
it was kind of the idea of like, I think when Microsoft had a, they were putting data centers
in containers and bearing with the bottom of the ocean or something like that. I was like, yeah,
let's do that. But like, let's make a city that has so much of shit like that. I fucking swear
this is the same idea. See, my mind is too tight. Like before I was free and now this looks silly
to me. Maybe we can't be death. Do we live forever? Dude, they fucking, they accept fear currency.
And they say they're the city of the future. It says the bottom of the page. Hey, you gotta,
we appreciate donations in fear. Well, no, I'm out. I'm out, man. Hey, you got to get there.
You could, baby steps to get there. You got to start with something.
They only accept, they only accept at least according to the bottom of the page,
ERC 20 or fear, which proves more than a fucking shadow of a doubt that Ethereum is the true
boomer coin. Oh, it totally is. It's literally fear or ERC 20 shitcoins. Like that's it. Those
are the two fucking, they're both in ETFs now. It's like using your pension. We accept, we will
conquer death using the contents of your pension, which is ERC 20 coins or fear currency.
How much do you know is it to live forever? Juno is infinitely worthless. That's
meaning it already lives forever. And most importantly, yet I ever got the else actually.
How much Juno is it to live forever? Dude, what's that quote about like nothing that's
truly useless can be truly beautiful because it has no purpose proves that that is bullshit.
Juno is useless and it is beautiful. I can't understand anybody who wants to live together
forever. That sounds like an awful, awful existence. Yeah, it's madness, isn't it?
It sounds awful. Like how many, how many gamer nodes episodes would it be? It'll just be forever.
I think people who want to live forever are people who maybe haven't got out enough and
certainly have not felt their lower back go beginning to go because they've had to pick
up a toddler too much. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, everybody on that site is single. There's no
doubt about that. That's what's 100%. Like that, you know, if you're paying $359 to be part of a
club in a make believe in a real location in a make believe land to allow, get rid of
governance or government approvals to be able to get to a point where you can live forever.
You are single. So, okay, right. All right. But we were just talking about events to go to next year.
Gamer nodes meet up. I'm just saying right there. Just saying for two months in January to February
2025, Vitalia opens its doors with our second pop up city, giving a two times larger community
than last time 1000 plus people to continue seeding permanent longevity biotech hub with
fresh talent co creators and new friends from around the world. This is the biotech podcast.
We should be there. Game of game of buy whatever anyway, but the point is like we
you know, we got a great biotech and we kind of know crypto from the beaches in Honduras. We're 50%
there. We're 50% that's what we're basically bioengineers. And for two months, we could be on a
beach and 20% in this market. But I'm just saying it technically as a conference, it's
expandable. $500. What could go wrong?