Anthropic vs. Hegseth: AI & Surveillance Warfare | Bitcoin Banter

Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of Bitcoin Banter. Tony couldn't be here, but I've got Greer as always, and our friend Adam Semecka has joined. Adam, thanks for being here.

Let's jump right in. So up first, this is from the Kobe AC letter, the odds of the US Pentagon banning Claude surged to almost 50% as Anthropic denies Defense Secretary Hegseth's final offer. So basically, my understanding is our friend Pete wanted to use Claude's technology to spy on Americans. And Anthropic remained adamant that their AI platform would not be used for surveillance of Americans or lethal military missions. So sort of a break from what big tech tends to do.

Adam, as a former military professional, as a veteran, I would love to hear your opinion on this first. um my my opinion is this looks to be like political theater um i think that this is just uh a face-saving measure for the ai industry and i say that because i don't have any doubt in my mind that the uh the department of justice or the sorry the department of war uh now uh has any obstacles in obtaining any of the information they need from any of these companies,

whether it is with or without their consent. So, you know, I think that this is really just a measure to share with the public that Anthropic is trying to protect, you know, publicly protect, you know, people's data. I really think that that is a false sense of security. I think that you should assume that every bit of data that you're giving Anthropic is getting fed straight through to the government. So I don't really even buy any of this, to be

honest. Obviously, it's a gross overreach by the government and an infraction on our rights as citizens. But I don't again, I don't even think that it matters at this point because it's really just for show, in my opinion. So you think that the backdoor conversations between Anthropic and the US government are, yeah, let's make it look like it's private. They're resisting, but really we're going to be collecting their data. Or like, are you, you have your tinfoil hat on about this

or? Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's probably where I would lean. I can't say for sure. Like I have any evidence that would strongly support that other than, you know, incentives. Um, but that's, that's typically how all the big tech companies work. Um, you know, they're essentially just, you know, whether it's Facebook or Google or Microsoft, whatever, you know, they're essentially all just arms of the government at some point, which you get once you get to a certain size.

Yeah. So, I mean, we have we have a very strong precedent of this happening, you know, and usually we're not made aware until much after after the fact of level of government involvement. We saw this during, you know, the COVID era where, you know, there was a lot of censorship happening and direct steering by the government in these large tech companies. And that's one of the reasons why Elon Musk says that he bought X, right, or Twitter at the time, was to kind of try to

prevent some of this from happening. Now, did that actually solve any of these problems? I don't know. I do say a lot of things on X that I definitely would not be able to say on any of the other major social platforms. So that's a good thing. But again, I don't think that it's worthwhile to believe that the government doesn't already have access to everything that they need with any of these major tech companies. Yeah. Greer, you agree? I think that's fair. And what a wild timeline.

So Anthropic is pushing back on the government and the government is clear that they want to use Anthropic's technology not only to mass surveil Americans, but have fully autonomous weapons. I mean, that statement alone should definitely give you a little bit of fear or pause. The government is looking for tools that will help it, you know, run its war machine without the use of human intervention. Just turn on Claudebot and let's start calling in the drone strikes.

Maybe you don't even have to call them anymore. Maybe they just automatically happen. I mean, just the absolute state of the world right now is just beyond comprehension. I think that, yeah, maybe you're sitting there thinking, oh, good, Anthropik's pushing back. But I think, Adam, you're right. The technology already exists. And this just tells us what they want to do with it.

you would you would think with their didn't they bump his uh budget the military budget to uh like one and a half trillion or something you think they could just i mean take out a few billion dollars and just spin up their own version of it to do whatever they want like i don't know why their their dependency uh would matter on on these sorts of tools but maybe michael it's because the government is incompetent they can't well fair fair all righty let's uh let's proceed here so

So Citi, third largest bank in the United States, just announced they're building infrastructure to integrate Bitcoin in traditional finance. Yay. Their head of digital asset custody said it plainly. We're making Bitcoin bankable. It's exactly the message we've been preaching, guys. We need Bitcoin bankable. You need a bank. You can't be your own. Greer. Yeah, this is inevitable, but it's the opposite of the Bitcoin mission. You know, Bitcoin is peer to peer electronic cash.

It's in the white paper. read the title if you don't read all nine pages. And I think that, you know, the opportunity here is for the individual not to be the last one to have any Bitcoin. The banks want it, the institutions want it, the asset managers want it, the countries want it. Everybody wants it except for Joe Schmo, the pleb who thinks it's too volatile. You know, it's really time to sack up, buy some Bitcoin.

It's a perfect time to do it. It's at, you know, 65,000, 50% below all time high. What are you waiting for. You know, everybody wants it except you. Well, I mean, that's, you know, don't let that be the reality. That's what I'd say. Yeah, it's going to be insane to me to imagine the number of people who are going to adopt Bitcoin, so to speak, and they're still going to have permissioned money. Like they're going to be in a marginally better position than someone adopting,

you know, CBDC stable coins, because yes, they get the benefit of the scarcity. Maybe it's, probably paper Bitcoin, but they still have to get permission to go use it, withdraw it, spend it, exchange it for anything else. So sad to see. Adam? That takes away the exact purpose of Bitcoin. So as you mentioned, it's not censorship resistant. You can't send it anywhere to anyone at any time without permission from somebody like you can do

with real Bitcoin. If somebody else was holding the keys, you can't use Bitcoin for what it was designed and intended for, for the purpose of why it even exists. So I totally agree with all that. I do think that there is some silver lining here. I think it is nice to see one of these, you know, big giants coming in and using the word Bitcoin. I don't know if you guys noticed that, but, you know, they actually said Bitcoin here. Yeah. So I think that that's worth celebrating.

They recognize that Bitcoin is the one thing that's not essentially captured by the venture capitalist empire.

But you have the crypto world, and it's all just a bunch of robbing from Peter to PayPal. It's a lot of what you see in the AI circle of investing. Everybody's just investing in each other. There's no net positive value, right?

It is a zero game Crypto you know all of this fiat stuff is a zero game Bitcoin I think they are recognizing is actually different because people are actually exiting into Bitcoin and not just using it as a mechanism to get more fiat, which is essentially what every other crypto, you know, the means to the end for every other crypto is just getting more dollars, right? So, So again, silver lining there.

I would also say it's also understandable that these large institutions would come to the inevitable conclusion that Bitcoin is important and valuable. And it will make them relevant longer than their competitor that is not using this technology and this freedom money. So everybody else that isn't getting on the Bitcoin train is going to be left behind. much faster. Absolutely. Yes, I think there's strong signal here. I agree. This was completely

inevitable. I'll be interested to see how it plays out, what their level of conviction is going into it. Unfortunately, I think these Bitcoin banks are going to become like the next iteration of the ETFs where people want, quote unquote, Bitcoin exposure. And then they're like, oh, I'm going to have the real asset. And so they have it at a bank. And hopefully, eventually, they just go on this journey and figure out, oh, I can just be my own bank. I don't need to trust

someone else. And that's kind of the whole point of it. But time will tell. We'll see. A lot of normies out there. All righty, guys. Up next, we've got some, I think, good news. El Salvador

is overhauling their Bitcoin learning program for their public education system. Greer, you had some interesting thoughts on this and on Bukele offline. I'd love to hear your take. Yeah, I think this is just a wonderful development we're seeing. They're teaching Bitcoin from the bottom up in this country. And Naibu Kelly gets a lot of criticism for acting like a dictator, but he has like a 95% approval rate. And I think in the US where we see democracy is a failure, it's the people you vote

for don't listen to the voters, no matter which side it is. And when you can kind of zoom out, you know, maybe a benevolent dictator or a king like figure is actually a better a better thing for society. And I think El Salvador is proving that it's a very safe place. There's prosperity. You know, they made Bitcoin legal tender. It's optional to use. And I think the improvements that they've been able to make, that's that's the real win here. Is life better under a dictator?

Well, if it's like Bukele, then the answer is obviously yes. I think that they get a ton of criticism that isn't deserved. But the prisoners that they've rounded up from these gangs, as far as I understand, they're doing a lot of the social infrastructure projects. They're building roads, they're cleaning up streets, they're actually making the country a nicer place to live. I mean, think about think about just that idea, using your incarcerated workforce

to make the country better. And it helps the people who were terrorized for so many, so many years. So, you know, I think this is a signal for any country that's looking to give its people more freedom, which let's be honest, there are not many. This is just a bright shining light, in my opinion. Yeah, I think that's a good take. And I remember Saifedean coming out and saying that he's grown sympathetic to the idea of monarchies. And maybe this is an example of how

that could possibly work as a form of governance. The thing for me is, I mean, you guys, you both know this about me, especially in our offline chats. Like I just have no faith in anyone who is put into a position of power, no matter what they say before they get there. I, what I, what I like about our preference of the Bitcoin way for a place like Panama is that there's not like a, they're trending in this direction of Bitcoin adoption. You can pay

for public services in Bitcoin. And there's not like a, a figurehead that could be taken out, voted out, whatever that suddenly that dissipates. It's not like a single person that the whole world knows about who's pushing and promoting Bitcoin. It's just becoming more embedded in their culture. And I think when that happens organically, I think it makes it a lot harder for the next politician to come along and undo it. And so that's always been my concern

with Bukele is first, could he go rogue? Absolutely. He's made a deal with the IMF. And second, could he be taken out and the next guy just does not care about Bitcoin? Those are good points. It kind of ties. Adam, what do you think? Obviously, I think this is awesome. It's, I mean, very clearly a good, healthy indicator for where their country is going and where their focus is and how they're investing into their future.

I want to give a shout out just because they have been really, they being El Salvador, maybe not necessarily the government, but Salvadorans have been really focused on Bitcoin education for a long time. So my shout out is for my first Bitcoin, also known as Meet Premier Bitcoin. I don't know if you guys have heard of it, but it's fully open source curriculum material. I don't know if it's associated officially with this or not. I think they were part of the first pass of like this.

So this is like 2.0 of their education. In another article I was reading, they were mentioned as like, I think big supporters are the first push for Bitcoin education in El Salvador. Yeah. So anyway, just a great organization. They open source everything. I've used their stuff to help teach Bitcoin classes. A lot of people around the world have used their material to teach Bitcoin to people all over. And they actually predate the El Salvador adoption of Bitcoin by one month.

So if anybody remembers, you know, September of 21, they made the big announcement. But the domain registration for My First Bitcoin is actually in August of the same year. Very cool. It looks like a beautiful book they've put together. I would love if I could get a copy of this in English, I'd be interested to look at it and share it with my kids. All righty.

Up next, we've got four days ago. So this is probably five or six days ago now. a company, ID Merit, left their database with 1 billion personal records open on the internet with no password. What is ID Merit? A big oops. A KYC verification company, one design and promise to keep your data safe. And of course, they failed. KYC, if you don't know, it stands for kill your customer. Greer, why don't you take this one? Yeah, I think there are like 240

million Americans that were caught up in this. And yeah, KYC is the illicit activity. This is a complete violation of your privacy. And the worst part is we're seeing more of this become mandatory. There's no way that this stuff is going to be free from hacking. And you've got to think that it's really malice. Some of it's ignorance or incompetence, but I think that they're really working against us. They want our data public. And I think remember back a few years ago, the

WEF had that famous, you'll own nothing and be happy. But there was another one that came out before, which was it's 2030. I have no privacy and I've never been happier. And that was such a weird thing to hear at the time because most of us were still asleep. But that's the future that they want. You know, there is no privacy. Everything you're doing is tracked. And the surveillance state is is just the norm. You know, how do we, how do we reject this and fight back?

I think those are the things we should be working on. Absolutely. Adam. So yeah, KYC is kill your customer. It's, I think it's important to understand what it really, you know, where it comes from KYC, you know, it actually stands for know your customer, of course,

from the bank secrecy act of 1970. If you don't know, essentially it's, It the process that you give your ID over to an institution that is regulated by the government They keep your info in a database which is going to inevitably get hacked or leaked or sold as we can clearly see by almost every case in existence. But the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, of course, started in 1970. It was really kind of... I lost him. Greer, why don't you take over? Yeah. I mean, I think Adam's talking about

when this originated. And I think the point is, you know, they want to be able to know who's transacting, who's doing what. And it depends on what the government wants at the time. You know, these things kinds of change. They change based on the administration, based on the political party. And the point is that you have a right to privacy, but it's really up to you to enforce it.

You have to protect what you do, how you browse, what kind of phone you're using, what kind of information you're sharing, and ultimately what kind of systems you want to be part of. I think that, you know, it's time to draw a line in the sand. These are things I will engage in. And these are things I won't engage in because I want to protect my privacy. To me, that's that's the real win here. That's how you prevent this. Yeah. Adam, our streaming platform thought what

you were saying was too stupid to continue. So I was just going to say someone really didn't want me to say what I was about to say. In that case, I don't know. I think we've covered this topic pretty well. Try not to KYC yourself, everyone. Stay safe out there. All righty. Adam, I saw you,

I think you might have quote tweeted this or one of these posts about Block. So Jack Dorsey's company Block is cutting 40% of their workforce because of AI. And of course, they saw a massive surge in their stock price. Very sad for the, I think it's like 4,000 people. I think it's a 10,000 person company. 4,000 people are going to lose their jobs. Go find Jack's tweet out there. I personally think he handled it very eloquently.

Obviously, people are going to disagree with the decision in many cases, but he explained why they're giving, I think, how many months of pay plus like one per month. Six months. Six months of pay. Plus one month per year of tenure. Okay, yeah. And then I think six months of health insurance, like maybe a $5,000 stipend or something to kind of get you on your feet. So I think they're handling it well.

the the real story though isn't how well jack handled it it's the fact that this is you know inevitable i mean i think this is coming especially for tech companies but we're going to see more and more of this over the years in my opinion and i know there are people who think the ai thing is completely hyped and overblown and it probably would have to be on some level because uh it's just you know it's like everyone's going to lose their job and i think there's still a world where

people are going to work but i suspect we're gonna we're gonna see a lot more of this adam What do you think? I think people tend to underestimate, you know, negative events or possibilities. Personally, I'm not very optimistic in like the job market as we know it. I agree, Michael. I think that there's still going to be a need for people to a degree. But I think that the way that our current world is structured is not really prepared for for this.

and I think this is really just the canary in the coal mine. I think this is the first of many of cases like this coming in probably the near future. This is really an indicator of what the market wants to see, right? The market wants to see a company dumping people and hiring robots. You know, that is the unfortunate truth. And it's obviously working. And my belief is, you know, So you mentioned I quote tweeted Jack's letter. I was very impressed with how he handled it.

From a business executive, a leader role, I thought that it was done very well. From an investment perspective, I thought that it was very smart. Um, but again, I think that this is really just an indication that, you know, what would actually just occurred here is, is really just a precedent, um, for what's going to happen in the near future.

Um, I think a lot of companies are going to follow suit. Um, and you know, I, I don't necessarily, I'm not necessarily saying, uh, that AI is going to kill everybody's jobs, but I think that people are going to look at this and they're going to see, Hey, this was what investors wanted, at least for this specific company. And more people are going to try it. That's what I do. Absolutely. Greer, I think you have a bit of a bleak outlook on some of what AI is going to bring.

Yeah, I think it's probably fair to have a bleak outlook. You know, people kind of couch it and they say, AI is not going to take your job. It's going to be the person that uses AI. And I honestly, I just don't even think that's correct. I think that we are seeing a total remake of the economy and it's built on efficiency. It's not built on knowledge.

You know, so many people are employed because they have expertise and that expertise has been flattened. You can become an expert in any subject if you give it, you know, several hours, several days or weeks. You can master a subject that before you might not even have had much experience in. And that's not true for everything. But I think that that's the real thing here. Having knowledge is no longer is no longer important when everyone has the same knowledge or has access to it.

So, you know, where does this go? I, you know, I don't know. It does look pretty dark. And, you know, this comes on the back of many other companies, Amazon laying off thousands and thousands of workers to improve with robots. And last year, the government's own job numbers were revised down by like a million jobs. So, I mean, everything that we're being told, in my opinion, is a lie. We're not told how bad the situation is. You can look at like the housing market, right?

There are more sellers than buyers ever. And there are more people who aren't able to afford their homes. So I think that, you know, while I wouldn't say a big crash is coming, I feel like it's more of like, you know, we're kind of going out with a whimper here. And I hate to see that. I think the answer is find something you love, get really good at it and become known for that. You know, we're living in an attention economy.

If you can get people or crowds attention, then you can find a way to survive. And unfortunately, I think we're headed into those times where it is going to be very hard for someone without the drive, without the ambition, without the skill to succeed. You know, other than that, you know, I know that AI cannot create more Bitcoin. So that's kind of my backup plan. If I have Bitcoin, then I think I'll be insulated from whatever's coming.

Absolutely. You'll probably be exchanging value with an AI and not even realize it.

All righty. Up next, Ledger is planning a $4 billion IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

So I'll give you my take first. If I were interested in investing in stocks, the last company on planet Earth I think I would invest in is ledger it's proprietary it's closed this is my opinion it's not financial advice i'm not telling anyone what to do it's closed source they support shit coins in every six months almost on schedule they have some sort of a data breach and by the way my my impression is moving forward that there

if if there's there are class action lawsuits anything like that you're going to get paid out in like xrp or something i just don't think there's any hope for you if you decide to uh, to use ledger. Um, the only advantage I've seen, and we've seen this a couple of times now, is there are parts of your body that you can hide a ledger device by virtue of its size.

And, uh, I don't think it sounds painful and I just don't think it's worth it. Uh, what do you think about ledger going, uh, going full fiat on the New York stock exchange? Where do you put the ledger? I'm curious, uh, you know, $4 billion in hardware wallets. I mean, This is crazy.

You know they they offer to store your seed for you on the cloud You know what what a joke What a security risk I don know I mean I with you I not in the stock market I 100 in Bitcoin So I guess have fun staying poor or like me having fun staying poor. But I just don't see how this one really shakes out. I think this is a money grab for the insiders. This is a typical IPO. You hype up the public. You think the stock's going up.

And I would not be surprised if the insiders dump as soon as this thing is live, like on day one in the afternoon. Yeah, I'll be honest. I had a ledger when I first took self-custody. I didn't understand like the difference between hardware wallets, the importance of open source early on in my journey. And a lot of people say, well, the reason it's the biggest brand is like it's just so easy to use. I honestly don't think it's easier to use on any of the air gap devices that I've used.

They're all the same. The screen's tiny. I mean, it's just I don't know. I don't know who's investing in the stock. Adam, are you? I think there's really two different subjects here. There's the business slash product, and then there's the IPO. The business slash product side is terrible. It is, like you said, it's closed source. They have mismanaged people's data persistently over the years, and they've just fumbled product release after product release.

I would not have any trust in their product at this point or in the future. In fact, maybe the most viral tweet I ever had, I had 2 million views. And I've been on X slash Twitter since 2009. And occasionally I put some work into what I do. occasionally I, you know, do some some prep work and research and spend hours on certain stuff that I put out there for people. But every once in a while, I just put something really stupid out that

I just like is on my mind. And I had a post literally just said never buy a Ledger hardware wallet. That's all I said. It got 2 million views. Yeah, I think it I think it might be my most viral post ever. But yeah, that's how I feel about it. Never, ever buy a Ledger hardware wallet. I think that you're shooting yourself in the foot and setting yourself up for failure if you do. There's really no good reason to buy a ledger over really anything else aside from the fact

that they have really good marketing. So going back to the IPO thing, I think it's a great idea for them. This is exit liquidity for their investors. They're going to get their paychecks on their side. This is great for them. But I would not find myself buying their stock ever. Just probably about as much as I'd be ever buying their hardware wallets, which I used to have a ledger, by the way, but not anymore. I've never had a ledger. I'm proud to be the only one in this

call. Good for you, man. My first was an air-gapped hardware wallet. Good for you. I'm an ADIQ club, man. I started, I didn't dabble in shit coins very long, but I dabbled in some shitty devices. So, uh, all righty up last we've got, according to river, major financial firms like

Fidelity bank of America, Morgan Stanley are recommending an allocation of roughly one to 5% of portfolios in Bitcoin. Of course they're shilling Bitcoin ETFs because that's where they can make their money. But it is cool to see like some of these big players who are saying, yeah, you should have some Bitcoin. And then of course, River put themselves over here up near a hundred percent allocation, which is awesome and funny. But yeah, this is Signal, guys. Here's what's

interesting. I'd love for one of you to comment on this. So we've got Citi talking about Bitcoin banking. We've got all of these major players saying, yeah, you should have some allocation to Bitcoin. I know someone who works for Bank of America who said that they had an internal presentation. Hopefully I'm not, hopefully I'm allowed to say this, an internal presentation, basically explaining just a year or two ago, why Bitcoin was a scam. You need to stay away from

this. Don't talk to clients about it, that kind of thing. And here we are with now recommended allocations up to 5%, which I think is a start, right? I mean, that's kind of where we all began, I suspect, when we got into Bitcoin. What do you guys think? What's the takeaway when you see a a chart like this? I think I think it'll be 5% recommendation this year, 10% next year, 15% the following. And eventually it'll be for the normie. It'll probably be 35 to 50% of their portfolio.

I mean, over the long term, Bitcoin is just going to outperform everything. And I think a lot of the reason they weren't able to recommend it is because of the previous administration choke point one, choke point two. Who knows? Maybe we'll be back there with the next administration. But I think for now, you know, we are going to see more people figure this out. And I think also there's market manipulation as we've been seeing, and maybe it'll go on forever also. But I think that you're not

going to be able to hold Bitcoin down forever. It's too scarce. It's too finite. Too many people know about it. Too many people with money want it. So, you know, I think for the normie, 5% is good. Yeah. Not financial advice, but I think over time that's going to go up towards 50. Absolutely. And if you are a normie looking at a Bitcoin allocation, just look into self-custody.

See if maybe you can just withdraw and extract something that you own from the financial system, because it's just not the same. Adam, what's your take? Well, on that note, self-custody, right? It's important to understand that a lot of these institutions are essentially using Bitcoin as some type of marketing for their own product, right? Hey, I love Bitcoin. Buy my IOU kind of thing. Right. Buy my ETF, buy my stock, you know, put Bitcoin, put your Bitcoin in our bank.

But really what you're doing is you're giving them your keys. And in which case you don't have any Bitcoin at all. It is their Bitcoin. So keep in mind, the only way to really get out of this with the most benefit possible is self-custody. That is very, very important. Well said. All righty. For everyone who tuned in, really appreciate you being here. Adam, thanks for joining kind of last minute. I know we threw this one to you this morning.

why don't you tell people where they can find you yeah i'm in i'm on x at adam simeca um so feel free to follow me over there i also uh have a pretty cool uh wallet if you want to follow that it's uh at manabitcoin awesome and uh yeah you'll get some spicy tweets from adam here or there so make sure you go give him a follow but guys thanks for being here we'll uh catch up again very soon thanks cheers guys hey there thank you for tuning into bitcoin banter wanted to take a quick minute

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