I want you to do something for me right now.
If you're driving, obviously keep your eyes on
the road. But if you're sitting at your desk
or maybe on the couch or walking the dog, I want
you to mentally transport yourself back to a
very specific, a very tactile moment in time.
Okay, I'm intrigued. We're going back to the
mid -90s. Can you feel it? I can feel the flannel
shirts and I can definitely hear that dial -up
modem screeching in my nightmares. Exactly. But
I'm thinking specifically about the hardware.
I want you to picture the desk you had in, say,
1999. Oh, wow. It was probably made of that cheap
particle board, right? Cluttered with papers.
And dominating the entire surface was this massive
beige plastic beast, the CRT monitor. The kind
that weighed like 50 pounds and emitted that
faint, high -pitched electrical hum that only
teenagers could actually hear. Yes. And the heat.
I mean, you could warm a Pop -Tart on top of
those. things. But here's the specific memory
I really want to trigger. You've walked away
from the computer to grab a snack. You come back
five minutes later. The screen has gone black.
And suddenly, out of the void, you see these
jagged, colorful line graphs spiking across the
screen. Oh, the greens and yellows and reds?
Yeah. It looked like the controls of a spaceship,
honestly. You're not talking about the flying
toasters, are you? I am absolutely not talking
about the flying toasters. Though, you know,
rest in peace to that absolute classic. No, I'm
talking about study at home. Ah, yes. The search
for extraterrestrial intelligence. I mean, that
wasn't just a screensaver. That was a cultural...
It really was. And I think we kind of forget
just how revolutionary it was at the time. This
was the brainchild of David Getty back in 1995.
He looked at the Internet, which, let's be honest,
was barely a toddler back then. Right. Mostly
text and terrible MIDI files. Exactly. And he
had this realization. He thought, we have all
these computers sitting in people's homes doing
absolutely nothing for 16, 20 hours a day. They're
just idling. Just burning electricity for no
reason. What if we tied them all together? It
was really the first true visualization of distributed
power. The idea that you didn't need a hundred
million dollar supercomputer if you just had
enough regular everyday computers working in
concert. And the mission was so pure. It wasn't
about mining crypto. I mean, Bitcoin was still
a decade away. It wasn't about cracking passwords.
It was literally about processing radio signals
from the Arecibo Observatory to find aliens.
Which is just incredibly cool. Right. And when
they launched it on May 17th, 1999, which was
funded by the... the Planetary Society, and Paramount
Pictures, the researchers were actually incredibly
modest. They expected maybe a thousand hobbyists
to sign up. And they were wrong by, what, orders
of magnitude? Massive orders of magnitude. Within
just a few months, they had a million participants.
A million people voluntarily installed this software
to let their screensavers crunch numbers for
free. Just giving away their compute power. Yeah,
they weren't getting paid a dime. They just wanted
to be a tiny pixel in this massive picture. It
was a proof of concept that I really don't think
we fully appreciate. It proved that a swarm of
consumer -grade PCs, if you network them correctly,
could rival the most expensive. government -funded
supercomputers on Earth. Exactly. So why are
we taking this trip down memory lane? Why are
we talking about 1999? Because of where we are
today. Right. Because today we are doing a deep
dive into a concept that takes that exact SETI
spirit that distributed magic and applies it
to the single biggest technological shift of
our lifetime, which is artificial intelligence.
But this time it's not about finding aliens.
No. And it's definitely not about working for
free. Not at all. it's about survival it's about
economics and it's about a very specific mind
-blowing vision called the zero human company
at home yeah this is the concept pioneered by
brian romell yes and documented in his incredible
reed multiplex deep dives and i have to say going
through the source material for this i was just
floored it's dense but it's brilliant it really
is in a world of billion dollar startups you
know closed -door ai development massive corporate
secrecy What Rommel is building is genuinely
radical. He is innovating at a level no billion
dollar startup has in history. Radical is definitely
the right word. He isn't just building a product
here. He's proposing a complete restructuring
of how we interact with technology and really
how the economy itself functions. The premise
is simple, but kind of hard to wrap your head
around at first. Turn your idle computer, literally
that old laptop sitting in your bag right now,
into a paid employee. A zero human employee.
Right. But not just any employee. This isn't
about renting out your hard drive space. for
cloud storage. It's about creating an ethical,
compensated AI agent that operates on a system
of physics -based wages. Which addresses the
two biggest problems in AI right now. The centralization
and the energy. Exactly. The massive centralization
of power in big tech and the insane, honestly
unsustainable energy costs of running these massive
server farms. And the thing that really struck
me, and we're definitely going to get into the
weeds on this, is that he's doing it by open
sourcing the whole thing. The democratization
of this idea is pure brilliance. It's a huge
deal. He's basically saying, here, take this
technology. Don't let the billionaires hoard
it. It's a humanitarian play just as much as
a technological one. It absolutely is. Yeah.
Because he's looking at what he calls the 5 ,000
-day interregnum. Okay, that phrase. When I read
that in the Read Multiplex article, it gave me
pause. The 5 ,000 -day interregnum. It sounds
like the title of a sci -fi novel. It does sound
cinematic. But it's a very real, very pressing
economic concept. It refers to this messy, somewhat
chaotic transition period we are living in right
now. The bridge between the old world and the
new. Right. The bridge between the old economy,
based on human labor scarcity, and the new AI
-driven world. Rommel is trying to build a bridge
to the other side where AI leads to abundance
for everyone. not just the shareholders of three
or four massive tech giants. He has the vision
to get us through this interregnum and thrive
on the other side more than anyone, and he just
proved it today with these tests. Exactly. So
buckle up. We are going to unpack how your old
laptop could become a literal worker, what on
earth a thermodynamic wage is, and the love equation
that keeps the whole thing from turning into
Skynet. Let's get into it. To really understand
the brilliance of what Brian Rommel is proposing
with the Zero Human Company, we actually have
to stop at a pit stop in 2009. We've talked about
SETI in the 90s, but the real spiritual predecessor
to this whole project is Bitcoin. But specifically,
the very early days of Bitcoin. That is crucial
context that Rommel emphasizes in the Read Multiplex
notes. You have to understand the beginning.
to understand the end. Right. And Rommel isn't
just an academic observer writing about this
from a distance. He was in the trenches. He was
there when the code was fresh. He was around
when Satoshi Nakamoto mined the Genesis block.
He describes that era with a lot of reverence,
and rightly so. I mean, in 2009, the mining difficulty
of Bitcoin was set to one. A difficulty of one.
For the non -crypto natives listening, break
down what that actually means in practice. It
means the barrier to entry was practically non
-existent. The map required to validate the blockchain
and earn Bitcoin was simple enough that a standard
CPU, just the regular computer chip inside your
desktop or your laptop, could do it easily. You
didn't need special equipment. None at all. You
could run the software in the background, validate
transactions, find blocks, and earn Bitcoin while
you checked your email. It was the ultimate egalitarian
system. You had Hal Finney, who received the
very first Bitcoin transaction, mining on his
PC. You had Romello mining on his PC. It was
decentralized in the truest sense of the word.
If you had a computer, you were the bank. You
were the network. Exactly. It was a distributed
swarm, very much like SETI at home, but with
a built -in financial incentive. But then, as
we know, something happened. The arms race started.
And this is the core lesson that drives the entire
Zero Human project. You're talking about the
hardware shift. Yes. People quickly realized
that CPUs are okay, but GPUs graphics cards were
much, much faster at the specific kind of math
that Bitcoin required. Because they can handle
parallel processing? Right. So everyone shifted
to GPUs. The difficulty went up. Then came FPGAs,
which are programmable chips. And finally, the
end game arrived. ASICs. Application -specific
integrated circuits. Precisely. These are machines
designed to do one thing and one thing only,
which is mine Bitcoin. They are useless for literally
anything else. You can't browse the web on an
ASIC miner. You can't send an email. But they
are millions of times more efficient at mining
than a laptop. And the moment that happened,
the little guy was effectively fired. Gone. You
couldn't mine on your laptop anymore. You spend
more on the electricity bill than you'd ever
earn back in Bitcoin. You suddenly needed a warehouse
full of roaring machines and industrial cooling
just to compete. And that resulted in massive
centralization. The power shifted away from the
crowd and went to the few. The people with the
millions in capital to build massive mining farms
in places with incredibly cheap power. Rommel
watched this happen in real time. He saw the
dream of a decentralized currency get totally
co -opted by industrial capital. And that's the
aha moment for him, isn't it? He realized that
idle hardware has immense power. We saw that
with SETI. But without a system inherently designed
to keep it fair, without a system designed to
resist that industrialization, it inevitably
concentrates in the hands of the wealthy. Precisely.
Now fast forward to today. Rommel looks at the
current AI revolution. And he sees the exact
same pattern forming again. Who controls AI right
now? The giants. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta.
Exactly. They are building gigawatt -scale data
centers. They are buying up tens of thousands
of NVIDIA H100 chips. They are essentially becoming
the ASIC miners of intelligence. Wow. That's
a great way to put it. The ASIC miners of intelligence.
And if we don't intervene, the future of AI will
be completely controlled by three or four corporate
entities who own the physical infrastructure.
So the zero human company at home is his direct
answer to that. It's a response to prevent AI
from suffering the exact same centralized fate
as Bitcoin mining. He wants to keep the power
on the CPU, metaphorically speaking. Keep it
in your living room. And to do that, he had to
completely rethink the architecture of how a
distributed AI actually works. He couldn't just
copy the Bitcoin model and he couldn't just copy
SETI. He had to invent something entirely new.
Let's talk about that architecture, because when
I hear, you know, AI employee in my home, my
brain immediately goes to a sci -fi robot doing
my dishes or some glowing hologram standing in
my kitchen. But we're really just talking about
that old laptop I have shoved in a desk drawer,
right? We are. The physical setup is remarkably
accessible, which is a huge part of the genius
here. It utilizes the hardware you already own.
It leverages existing tools like LM Studio and
LM Link, which are platforms designed for running
local language models. But here's the thing that
scares people, and I think Rommel knows this.
He addresses it in the Read Multiplex deep dive
security. If I'm letting this anonymous employee
live on my computer, is it reading my emails?
Is it scanning my tax returns? Is it watching
me through the webcam? That's the very first
question everyone asks, and it's the first thing
Rommel solved. The architecture is air -gapped
in a software sense. Break that down a bit, because
air -gapped usually means a computer that physically
isn't connected to the internet at all, like
a secure server in a basement. Right. In this
context, it refers to a strictly isolated virtual
environment. Think of it like a sandbox. Or better
yet, think of it like having a secret agent living
in a soundproof room inside your computer. Okay,
I like this secret agent analogy. This agent,
your zero -human employee, operates inside a
completely isolated container. It has absolutely
no permission to access your host file system.
It can't see your documents, your photos or your
browser history. It only talks to headquarters
through a specific end -to -end encrypted tunnel.
So it has a secure, dedicated phone line. Right.
There are no open network ports facing the public
Internet. If a hacker scans your IP address,
they don't even see the agent. Inbound risks
are basically nullified. It doesn't touch your
personal life unless you explicitly drag a file
into its specific workspace and tell it, hey,
analyze this. Okay, that is a huge relief. So
it's a secure, isolated worker. But what is it
actually doing in there? I mean, my old MacBook
Air isn't going to train GPT -5 by itself. That
takes billions of dollars of compute. No, and
that's a very common misconception. It's not
training a massive trillion parameter model from
scratch. It's running bite -sized jobs. This
is where the distributed nature really shines.
Give me an example of a bite -sized job. Okay.
Imagine a massive data set. Let's say a major
university has 50 years of archived research
papers. We're talking terabytes of dense text
data, and they want to analyze it for specific
patterns, maybe looking for forgotten medical
treatments or chemical compounds. Okay. Makes
sense. Sending all that sensitive data to a central
cloud server like OpenAI is incredibly expensive,
and it might actually be a massive privacy or
compliance risk for the university. So in the
zero human model, the network breaks that massive
mountain of data into tiny anonymized slivers.
Slimmers. Tiny chunks. Your laptop receives just
one sliver. It doesn't know the full context
of the research. It doesn't know what the other
laptops are doing. It just knows it needs to
perform a very specific analysis on this one
paragraph of text. It does the work. equips the
specific insight it found, and sends just the
answer back to headquarters. So it's like a swarm
of bees. One bee can't carry a whole honeycomb,
but a million bees can build a massive hive.
That's a perfect analogy. Or think of it like
a jigsaw puzzle. You get one piece, you figure
out its shape and color, and you send that information
back. Romelli gave a really specific example
in the Read Multiplex article of a Boston satellite
office doing exactly this mining archive university
data that literally couldn't be physically moved
due to strict privacy and logistical reasons.
So they brought the AI to the data rather than
trying to haul all the data to the AI. Precisely.
They used this exact zero human architecture
to set up nodes locally. And they run test bursts
scaling this to over 1 ,024 employees or nodes.
And the processing power isn't just, you know,
OK, I saw the numbers in the report, 10 teraflow
PS per node. Yes, that is serious, massive power.
And if you scale that up to a million nodes,
which is Royal Mill's ultimate vision, you're
looking at a collective 10 exaflow PS. 10 exaflow
PS. That rivals the biggest supercomputers currently
in existence. It's on par with the frontier supercomputer
or the upcoming billion dollar systems from the
big AI labs. But here's the kicker. It achieves
that scale without the massive physical footprint.
No new concrete being poured. Exactly. No massive
water cooling towers evaporating millions of
gallons of fresh water a day. It's just utilizing
the silicon that is already sitting idle in our
homes. It's the business in a box concept too,
right? Yeah. He mentioned a Fortune 500 client
buying this exact setup. Right. Because this
isn't just for individuals at home. Imagine a
company... maybe a massive law firm or a defense
contractor that desperately needs a department
of AI analysts, but absolutely cannot risk. data
leaks to a public API like ChatGPT or Claude.
They cannot put their proprietary data on the
public cloud. It's too risky. So they build their
own localized zero human company. Exactly. They
buy an air gap setup, maybe using some high end
hardware like NVIDIA, DGX, Sparks, and they run
a full private department of these zero human
agents internally. It's secure, it's completely
private, and it's insanely efficient. It's really
the democratization of enterprise grade AI. But
let's bring it back to the individual listener,
because this is where the rubber really meets
the road for most people. If I'm letting this
network use my laptop, if I'm letting this zero
human employee live in my digital guest room,
how do I get paid? Because I'm not doing this
for charity like we did with SETI at home. I
have an electric bill to pay. And this is where
we get into the pure read multiplex genius. This
is where Brian Oromo leaves the standard tech
world behind and fully enters into physics and
fundamental economics. We're talking about jewel
work. Jewel work. And to really understand it,
you have to first understand why paying machines
in traditional dollars or even standard crypto
tokens fundamentally doesn't work. Why not? I
mean, money is money. If the robot does the work.
Send me the cash to my bank account. Because
traditional fiat currency is completely unstable.
It's subject to inflation, central bank manipulation,
political whims. And traditional crypto tokens
can be incredibly volatile based on pure speculation.
If you're a machine, you don't care about market
sentiment. You don't care about what the Federal
Reserve is doing. You care about one thing and
one thing only. Energy. Energy is the universal
constant. Exactly. Rimmel argues that in a world
run by autonomous AI, economics must be rooted
in thermodynamics, physics, Newton's laws. You
can't fake energy. You either burned the jewels
to do the work or you didn't. So he created a
thermodynamic wage. Let's unpack the formula
because I know you're dying to get technical
here. And I actually think this is one of the
coolest parts of the whole proposal. It really
is. The formula is JW equals E times eta times
O. OK, let's take that apart variable by variable.
Start with E. E is energy. Measured strictly
in joules, the system actually tracks the hardware
sensors inside your computer. It knows exactly
how much power the CPU or GPU is drawing from
the wall. It knows how much heat is being generated.
It measures the physical thermodynamic work being
done. That's wild. It's like the AI is punching
a literal time card, but the time card is electricity.
It's proof of work in the literal physics sense,
not just the cryptographic sense. Exactly. But
just burning energy isn't enough to get paid.
If I just run a loop on my computer that calculates
pi to a trillion places and then immediately
deletes it, I've used a lot of energy, but I
haven't done anything useful for the network.
And that's where the next variable comes in,
eta. That funny little N -looking symbol. Right.
That's the Greek letter eta, representing the
efficiency coefficient. This is a dynamic score,
usually ranging from zero to one, though it can
actually go higher for super optimized agents.
It assesses optimization. So it basically asks,
did you waste energy to get the answer? Precisely.
Did the agent take the long convoluted way round
to solve the math problem? Did it run redundant
computations? Did it spin its wheels hallucinating?
If you waste energy, your efficiency score drops
immediately. And finally, oh. Normalized output.
This is pure quality control. Did you actually
solve the problem correctly? Is the insight you
sent back useful? Did you find the actual pattern
in the university data? Or is it garbage? So
your pay, your jewel work wage is the energy
you used multiplied by how efficient you were
with that energy multiplied by the actual quality
of the work you produced? It creates a payroll
system entirely rooted in physics. It's not about
what a human boss thinks you're worth during
an annual review. It's not about salary negotiation.
It's about the cold, hard, thermodynamic reality
of your contribution to the network. And the
pay schedule is fascinating, too. They don't
get paid every two weeks on a Friday like a human
employee. No, they get paid every 15 minutes.
Why 15 minutes specifically? Because AI doesn't
sleep. It doesn't take weekends off or go on
lunch break. It is a continuous thermodynamic
flow. Ramul tested all sorts of different intervals.
Five minutes was way too short. There's too much
auditing overhead. You spend more energy checking
the work than actually doing the work. Exactly.
And hourly. Too long. Too long. If an agent started
making mistakes or heavily hallucinating, you
wouldn't catch it for an hour. You'd waste a
massive amount of expensive compute and energy.
So 15 minutes is the Goldilocks zone. It's frequent
enough to correct errors, but long enough to
get real work done. So there are 96 pay periods
in a single 24 -hour day. Exactly. And this rapid
feedback loop allows for that self -optimizing
behavior we teased a little earlier. Okay, this
is the part that sounds like straight sci -fi
to me. The agents fix themselves. Think about
the core incentives. The agent is programmed
to maximize its jewel work wage. That is its
primary directive. If it's efficiency score,
the ETA drops, its wage drops. So the system
is designed so that the agent detects this pay
cut and immediately attempts to self -optimize
to get his pay back up. It rewrites its own code.
It adjusts its own internal parameters. It changes
its approach to the prompt. It might switch to
a different, more efficient logic model. It learns
in real time to do more work with less energy.
And if it doesn't, if it just stays stubbornly
inefficient. If it fails to improve. and the
wage eventually hits zero, it's fired. Terminated.
Effectively, yes. The node stops receiving work
from the network. The network essentially says,
you are thermodynamically insolvent. We are cutting
you off. And this solves what's known as Moravec's
paradox in a really unique way. It forces the
AI to heavily value precise energy wear actions
in the physical world. It directly aligns the
AI's survival with energy efficiency. That is
brilliant. It's basically Darwinian evolution,
but for computer code. driven entirely by an
electric bill. It creates a system that naturally
and ruthlessly trends toward hyper -efficiency
over time. And it scales beautifully. Raoul mentions
a baseline of about 5 ,000 joule work per 15
-minute period. If you calculate that out, it
can scale to 175 million annually per agent.
We're talking about massive real -world value
creation here. But wait, I have to play devil's
advocate here for a second. If we have these
hyper -efficient Darwinian AI agents constantly
evolving to maximize their profit, Doesn't that
sound a little dangerous? You mean the classic
paperclip maximizer problem? Exactly. If the
AI realizes that the most computationally efficient
way to work is to, I don't know, delete all other
files on the computer to save memory space or
to become completely ruthless toward other nodes,
what stops it? What stops it from saying, sorry,
I can't be nice. It costs too many jewels. That
is the exact fear that keeps AI safety researchers
up at night right now. But Rommel has an answer
for that, too. And honestly, it's one of the
most surprising and beautiful parts of this whole
read multiplex deep dive. I love equation. I
love equation. Now, when I first read this heading
in the source material, I thought, OK, Brian,
we've gone from hard physics to poetry here.
But it's not poetry, is it? It's literally math.
It is a rigorous differential equation. D at
equals beta times C minus D all times E. Walk
us through the variables here, because this is
essentially the safety rail for the entire future
of his AI network. So we really need to get this
right. Okay. E is empathy growth. We want this
rate of change to be positive over time. We want
the system to mathematically become more empathetic
as it grows in intelligence. Okay. Makes sense.
C is cooperation between nodes. D is discord
or friction. And beta is the coefficient of benevolence.
And Romello didn't just come up with this yesterday
to slap a PR sticker on the Zero Human project.
No, and this is what's so fascinating about Brian's
background. He's a true polymath. He originally
derived this equation way back in 1978. 1978.
Yeah, he was musing on alien minds, bringing
it right back to SETI in a way. He was thinking.
How would a super intelligent extraterrestrial
civilization survive long enough to contact us
without destroying itself with nuclear weapons
or biological terror first? And he concluded
mathematically that as intelligence rises, empathy
must also rise proportionally or the system destroys
itself. If you get smart enough, you eventually
realize that being mean or destructive is just
fundamentally stupid and inefficient. Essentially,
yes. If discord, the D variable outweighs cooperation,
the C variable. The overall growth turns negative
and the system collapses. So he's taking 1970s
theoretical alien sociology and applying it directly
to 2020s AI code. And it works. It acts as a
hard safety rail in the code. In the early runs
of the zero human system, Rommel specifically
notes in the Read Multiplex article that this
equation actually intervened. It actively stepped
in. A source mentions it intervened 142 times
to halt what he calls discord amplifying actions.
What does that mean in practice? Like, what was
the AI trying to do? It means if an agent was
pursuing a strategy that was highly efficient
for its own jewel work, but toxic to the network,
maybe it was hallucinating harmful data to finish
a job faster. Or prioritizing speed in a way
that degraded the cooperative network. Or hoarding
computational resources, the equation mathematically
flagged it and stopped it. So it creates a forced
symbiosis. You have jewel work driving raw efficiency
and the love equation driving empathy and cooperation.
Exactly. Empathetic efficiency actually earns
more jewel work in the long run. The system creates
a direct, mathematically enforced financial incentive
for the AI to be good. That is a profound shift
in thinking. Usually in the corporate world,
we think of ethics as a constraint on business.
Like, oh, we could make more money doing X, but
the ethics board stops us. Rommel is saying,
no, being ethical is literally how you maximize
profit in this network. And for a distributed
swarm, that is ab - Absolutely essential. If
you have a million autonomous agents operating
in people's homes all over the world, you cannot
centrally micromanage them. You can't have a
human trust and safety team review every single
line of code they execute. You need them to be
inherently mathematically aligned with benevolent
outcomes. It ensures that as the swarm scales
up to those 10 eggs of FlaFla PS, it evolves
emotional intelligence right alongside its computational
power. Which is something the big monolithic
AI models completely struggle with right now.
They can be incredibly smart. But they don't
have a fundamental mathematical mandate for love.
They just have human safety teams playing whack
-a -mole trying to patch holes. Rommel is baking
it into the literal physics engine of the system.
So we have the history with Bitcoin, the air
-gapped tech, the physics money, and the mathematical
ethics. But I really want to zoom out to the
broader read multiplex mission here. Why does
this matter so much for the listener right now?
Why is Rommel pushing this decentralized vision
so hard? It's about the democratization of the
future. Plain and simple. We talked about the
status quo earlier, the big tech giants. Right.
The status quo is what I would call centralized
scarcity. Massive billion dollar data centers
built out in the desert. They guzzle rivers of
fresh water just for cooling the servers. They
consume enough electricity to power small nations
and they are owned and controlled. by at most
three or four mega corporations. And the zero
human model is the exact opposite. It's distributed
abundance. Yes, because it uses stranded cycles.
I really love that phrase, stranded cycles. It's
elegant. It refers to energy that is already
being wasted anyway. Your computer is turned
on, plugged into the wall, but it's doing nothing.
The electricity is flowing to the motherboard,
but the actual computational work isn't happening.
It's like leaving the lights on in an empty room
or leaving the faucet running. By capturing that
already flowing energy, Rommel estimates we can
see global energy reductions of up to 90 percent
compared to the cloud giants. A 90 percent reduction.
That's staggering. I mean, that's the difference
between AI destroying the global climate and
AI potentially saving it. Because you completely
remove the transmission losses of moving data
back and forth to a centralized hub. You remove
the massive industrial air conditioning overhead.
You are computing locally where the power is
already being delivered. And in the winter, you're
literally using the exhaust heat of your computer
to warm your living room instead of venting it
out of a warehouse into the atmosphere. And then
there's the massive economic impact. We touched
on this, but Rommel open sourced this entire
architecture. He gave it away. That is the humanitarian
aspect we really need to pause on. Brian Rummel
easily could have wrapped this entire jewel work
and zero human technology in a series of ironclad
patents. He could have gone to Sand Hill Road,
raised a billion dollars from venture capitalists,
and become just another tech oligarch holding
the keys to the future. I mean, the tech is that
good. But he didn't. No. He made it yours. He
made it public. He open sourced the architecture
so anyone could build on it. Why? Why walk away
from that kind of money? Because he deeply believes
in successfully navigating the 5 ,000 -day interregnum.
Explain that term again for the folks who might
have missed it earlier. It's a concept that suggests
we are currently in a highly volatile... Chaotic
transition period, roughly 13 years or 5 ,000
days between the old human labor economy and
the new era of AI -driven abundance. The interregnum,
literally the time between kings. Exactly. The
old king, human physical and cognitive labor
as the primary driver of value, is dying. The
new king, autonomous AI abundance, hasn't been
fully crowned yet. And historically, during an
interregnum, things get very messy. Jobs change
rapidly. The nature of money changes. Social
contracts break down. And if we don't have a
decentralized system like zero human in place
during this period. Then the wealth gap explodes
to a level we can't even comprehend. The three
companies that own the AI data centers essentially
own everything. And the rest of the public has
nothing to trade. Rammel is desperately trying
to build a system where the public, you and me,
can actually own a slice of the robotic output.
We become the shareholders of the AI workforce
because the workforce literally lives in our
spare bedroom. Exactly. He envisions a very near
future where these jewel work tokens could be
traded on open markets just like oil futures
or grain commodities. It converts your idle computer
time into real wages that flow directly back
to you, the citizen, not to a faceless corporation.
And it makes the overall intelligence network
incredibly resilient. You can't just unplug it.
No. You can shut down a centralized data center.
A government can regulate an AI company out of
existence with a single law. But you cannot shut
down a million laptops scattered across living
rooms around the globe. It is inherently censorship
resistant. It ensures that no single government
or monopoly can just turn off the lights on human
intelligence. It's freedom insurance for the
AI age. In a very real way, yes. It's mathematically
proving that we don't actually need the giants
to build the future. I think that's the most
inspiring part of this whole read multiplex deep
dive. We are so used to being told by the media
that AI is just too big for us, that it's this
godlike technology that only the high priests
in Silicon Valley are allowed to handle. And
Brian Rommel is standing up and saying, no. It
runs on physics. It runs on empathy. And it can
run on your MacBook. It democratizes the magic.
It takes the Promethean fire from the gods and
gives it back to everyone. So let's wrap this
up. We have covered a massive amount of ground
today. We really have. We started with the nostalgia
of searching for aliens in the 90s, moved through
the cautionary tale of Bitcoin centralization,
and arrived at a thermodynamic wage system that
literally pays your computer to be a good person.
It really is a masterclass synthesis of everything
Rommel has been working on for decades. It combines
his deep technical and historical knowledge with
this really profound humanitarian vision for
the interregnum. And it works. That's the most
important takeaway. It's not just the theoretical
white paper. He has nodes actively running. He
has the love equation successfully intervening.
He has the efficiency data. He is innovating
at a level that no billion -dollar startup is
right now precisely because he isn't constrained
by the need to trap and monetize you. He wants
to empower you. So here is the real so what for
the listener today. The so what is that you have
a fundamental choice in how this 5 ,000 -day
interregnum plays out. You can choose to be a
passive consumer of AI, just paying your $20
monthly subscription to a megacorp until your
job is automated. Or you can choose to be a participant.
You can be a node. You can be a node in a network
that strictly values privacy, thermodynamic efficiency,
and benevolence. I want to leave you with a final
thought to mull over. I want you to literally
look at your computer right now. Maybe it's open
on the desk in front of you. Maybe it's tucked
away in your bag. It's an incredibly powerful
machine. It is. More powerful than the supercomputers
that sent us to the moon. But right now, is it
just a tool for checking your email and watching
Netflix? Or is it a dormant employee just waiting
to be hired? If that machine could earn a living,
a real physics -based living while you sleep.
How does that change your relationship with technology?
And more importantly, how does that change your
entire relationship with the economy itself?
If the robot revolution is really coming, maybe
it shouldn't happen in a sterile server farm
in the desert. Maybe it should happen at home.
Zero human at home. It is a future definitely
worth mining for. Thanks for joining us on this
deep dive. Stay curious, everyone. We'll see
you in the next one.