Episode Summary - S02E04: Bitcoin Boom, Daniel Penny Trial, ChatGPT, Trump, and More

when I started shining, getting green, dropping gems, rocking the comic club, got them sent, they laugh, popping limbs, give them life, here's the boost, gotta put in the work, here's the proof, so here's the proof, ha, give the story because it's better than the truth, ha, allegories will keep between me and you, ha, we get coins.

I had a lot going on, but the bottom line is it's kind of like the gym and anything else. If you get out of the habit of doing it, it just becomes harder to find the time for it. So the other thing is there's just so much going on. It's not one of those situations where there's nothing going on, nothing to talk about. It's almost like every day there's so much going on, so much to talk about. And by the time you sit down to think about what you want to say and how you want to do it, there's another news cycle that comes in with more information. I think the last show I did, one of the last shows I did was on the ETFs and Bitcoin. So I figured I'd start there because that was December almost a year ago. That was a little over a year ago, December 3rd, 2023, where I did an episode on the failed lawsuits from the Biden administration's war on Bitcoin and how they had blocked the creation of the Bitcoin ETFs and had ultimately.

They lost the lawsuit and how there was nothing now in the way of creating Bitcoin ETFs. So Bitcoin, I think, was at about $35,000 during that episode, maybe $40,000. And now we're sitting at $96,000 as kind of anticipated just because of the inflows that those ETFs create. I think they're something like $50 billion in inflows alone to BlackRock. And it'll probably overtake gold's total ETFs in the next year or so.

So it's been the most successful ETF launch in history. Fidelity, BlackRock, I think, are the two largest, but you still have Grayscale and a few other players in the space. So it's really helped drive the price of Bitcoin up as anticipated. And something I know we talked about in that episode was these aren't really traders. So it's the right type of people. I think when retail gets involved with Bitcoin, it's frustrating because you get people trying to play the market. And you get people that are buying and selling. And. There's just a lot of movement, whereas with the ETFs, the nice thing is that it creates a lot of stability.

So Bitcoin has gone up 100 and something percent since that episode, so basically 100 and something percent over the course of the year. But there haven't been any major retraces, and I think we might see an end to a lot of the volatility as these major players enter the Bitcoin community, enter the Bitcoin market. These people that are not interested in trading but are more interested in hodling, I think it'll help suppress some of that volatility, which I think will attract a lot of people that were maybe a little bit scared to get in.

What's up, John? So where we last left off, we weren't sure. I kind of believed strongly that those ETFs would play out the way that they've been playing out. I think it's probably exceeded expectations. With that, I went to the Bitcoin conference in Nashville. I was like, oh, my God. I don't know how many months ago that was, which was awesome. It's the first time I went to the annual Bitcoin conference, and Nashville's awesome, by the way, just a great city.

My wife and I had a great time. That Broadway street is so cool. But I got to see Trump speak live, which was pretty neat. I had some clips I think I tweeted out during the time. Seeing Trump live is definitely an experience. It felt more akin to me watching a little bit of an open mic comic, working out some material. But also a presidential candidate. So it was kind of funny. You could absolutely see live when he's going through these talking points. I think there probably is a teleprompter, but then he just digresses.

Again, almost like a comic working out material. When he made the statement about Gary Gensler, it was one of those moments where he talked about firing Gary Gensler. And the crowd erupted. I think I literally jumped out of my seat. And he paused. He said, wow, I didn't think. And I didn't think I'd get a reaction like that. He paused. He had some good timing. And he goes, so I'm going to say it again, which is really funny. And then he said it again on day one. And he kind of paused. It was really great timing. He goes, on day one, I'm going to fire Gary Gensler.

And everyone went fucking batshit, which I think was a big moment for him because I know at the end of the day, politicians, what they say, especially when they're running, you kind of have to take it with a grain of salt. And, you know, I don't think I don't think Trump was sitting down reading the Bitcoin white paper and really becoming a true fan of Bitcoin. That that takes time. I think he'll get there. So I don't think I'm not stupid enough to believe he fully understands the X's and O's of it. But it's important enough that he was open minded to it. And I think being at the Bitcoin conference and seeing that crowd, which is a massive crowd, and seeing the response from the crowd on certain issues like the SEC.

You know, I think it just. solidified in his mind that there is a whole group of people out there, millions and millions of people out there who feel like they've been treated unfairly by the current administration, by the Biden administration, and that these people were more than happy to go out and vote for anyone who was going to put an end to it. And that's what was kind of cool for me over the last year is seeing a lot of libertarians, staunch libertarians, that I feel like Trump probably would have not been, for a lot of different reasons, an ideal candidate for them.

And as Trump embraces more libertarian principles, smaller government, bringing Rand Paul into the conversation. I almost said RuPaul. I don't think RuPaul. That's not on his cabinet. That's the current administration, RuPaul's on the Biden administration cabinet. So I think seeing that, it opened a lot of eyes. And he made a lot of fans with that.

And I'm sure they went out and voted, which was pretty awesome. And him following up post-election. So that night of the election, I remember sitting there at a friend's house. And I was skeptical if Trump was going to be able to pull it off. Of course, we all were. And I think I really started to sense that he was winning because the price of Bitcoin, the market was telling me that they believed he was going to win. Because starting earlier in that day, Bitcoin started to rise. And it was in the 70s, I think.

And throughout that election night, it just kept going up and up and up. And the understanding being that I think Bitcoin would have went down had Kamala won. Because they know it would have been another four years of just defiance and rejection of anything related to Bitcoin. And conversely, if Trump won, I think everyone understood that there was going to be hopefully some kind of change. And so it was kind of cool. It was like. And the number, you know, his votes, he started winning more and more states.

He started seeing the price of Bitcoin go up, which is really cool to see. And it hasn't stopped. So it was at 70 something and it peaked at 104,000 last week, which is, you know, just crazy, right? These are numbers that I always felt like would come. But to actually see them on your screen is a pretty, pretty awe-inspiring moment. But the fact that they're following up, Trump's son Eric was just at the, there's a Bitcoin conference in the UAE that he just gave a really cool speech on, talking about Bitcoin very passionately about it.

So at first, you know, you kind of cautiously say, well, you don't know once he's elected what's going to really happen. But the major announcement at the Bitcoin conference by Trump was that he was going to, at a minimum, take the existing Bitcoin that the government has, mostly through seizures, which is like 200 plus thousand. Bitcoin and convert that to a Bitcoin strategic reserve. And then Senator Lummis. proposed at the end of the conference, right after Trump got off stage, proposed legislation to establish a more formal Bitcoin reserve.

or accumulation process to get something like a million Bitcoin over the next X amount of years, handful of years, two, three years, whatever it is, which is, just to put it in perspective, it's not a million dollars, it's a million Bitcoin. So there's only 21 million Bitcoin that will ever be made, and it's estimated anywhere between two, three, four million of that is just lost forever, including Satoshi's million Bitcoin. So we're really talking about 18 million Bitcoin at best, I think, in circulation that will ever be available, and the government looking to stockpile a million of that,

and like I said earlier, these are not day traders. The government is not going to be moving Bitcoin in and out. The government stockpiles gold as a strategic reserve asset for if the shit hits the fan, and that's typically a one-way process. They take it in. It doesn't ever see the light of day again. So just imagine, you know, percentage-wise, you're taking massive percentage of Bitcoin off the market, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7% of Bitcoin in chunks, putting it in a strategic reserve for the United States, and that might never see the light of day, ever.

Same thing goes for people like, companies like MicroStrategy, MicroSeller, who rode Bitcoin down from 69,000 down to 15 and didn't sell a single Satoshi. So that Bitcoin is very unlikely to ever make it out again, and he's sitting on, I think it's like 500,000 Bitcoin, half a million Bitcoin, I think. It's just an insane amount. So I guess my point with that is that as exciting as it is for me, it scares me for like my loved ones because I know that the window is not going to be open for much longer, where in the past, I never really –

The supply shock argument is an interesting one. It's an interesting one because Bitcoin being a finite asset – As mining production goes down on four-year cycles, it's interesting or not crazy to think that that's going to create a supply shock, meaning there's not going to be enough. But really thinking about it is most of the Bitcoin that's going to be produced, if there's 21 million total Bitcoin, like 20 million has already been produced close to that. So we're pretty much 99% at stock-to-flow.

We pretty much have 99% of the Bitcoin that's ever going to be there out there. So perception, I think, matters. I think the perception that because mining, the output decreases by half every four years, I think the perception of scarcity maybe is more impactful than the reality of this scarcity. But the difference between this cycle and every other cycle that I've been through, and I've been through every cycle since 2012, the difference between those cycles and this cycle is the Bitcoin, there was always going to be somebody as price went up to sell their Bitcoin at a certain price.

You're seeing a lot of… O.G. Bitcoin owners in this cycle selling their Bitcoin because they hit this monumental mark of one hundred thousand and a lot of people who've been holding since it was like two dollars rationally are probably like, yes, I know this is going to continue to go up, but at a minimum, why not sell a few million dollars worth? And I don't really blame them for that because these are people that have wrote it up, you know, in insanely long, long time. But the problem now is that the people who are buying that, so they go and they sell it and then that gets swallowed up by a micro strategy that gets swallowed up by the federal government that gets swallowed up by these ETFs.

It's going to get swallowed up by other nation states. Russia's talking about it. China's talking about it. 2025, we're going to see nation state adoption. Like I'm 90 percent sure that I'm 99 percent sure Trump will establish some kind of federal Bitcoin strategic reserve, whether he. It takes the existing Bitcoin that's there, assuming the Biden administration doesn't auction that off out of fucking spite, which is definitely possible. But assuming they don't do that, then he's got 200,000 Bitcoin, which is not insignificant, that he can move over immediately.

And then on top of that, it would be nice if he started buying, even if he made a couple of initial purchases. And then if he does that, then it's going to be a problem for Russia. It's going to be a problem for China. It's going to be a problem for India. It's going to be a problem for virtually everybody because they're going to know that if they are wrong on this guess and that the United States is stockpiling something and is now moving it and considering it a reserve asset, a strategic reserve asset, that if they don't, the risk-reward calculation is that it's all fucked up.

You have to buy some just in case that you're wrong because if you don't, it's catastrophic that you're going to basically end up obsolete. So leading yourself by virtue. The fact that you're not going to be able to get it because the United States is going to hoard that. And so it scares me going back to my point. I'm rambling here, but my point is what scares me is that the idea that you could always go into the market and buy. I think that'll always be the case, but I think it's going to be harder, i.e. the price is going to go up so high that people are going to feel priced out of being able to acquire any meaningful amount because you're not.

There's no price you're going to offer the United States government that they're going to open the vault and start selling. It's not how they work. It's not how gold has worked as a strategic reserve asset. It's definitely not going to be how Bitcoin is going to work. That's their Armageddon money. That's their war chest for the collapse of the U.S. dollar. So it's going to get harder, and it's frustrating because you want your people who you believe are. Good people to protect themselves and their families, but I don't want to say time is running out.

You'll always be able to buy. You can buy $5 worth of Bitcoin. It doesn't mean you have to buy a whole Bitcoin. But just think about from where I was last year having this conversation, let's say $35,000, which for a lot of Americans is a lot of money but is attainable. They have $35,000 cars. They could have taken out a HELOC or a loan, bought a full Bitcoin, and paid that back in a reasonable amount of time. There's a lot fewer people at $100K or when this thing blows back through $100K and we're in there at $125K or $150K next year that are going to be like, yeah, for most of the country, that's more than their house costs or at least equivalent.

So you're talking about them taking out a loan now that's the equivalent of another mortgage, whereas a year ago it would have been the equivalent of a car. And two years before that would have been equivalent of a cheap car when it hit $15,000, $16,000. So the opportunity to be a whole coiner is definitely coming to an end. Forget outside of the United States, it's gone, right? For most of the planet outside of the first. First world countries, there's zero chance you're going to get to one coin if they're starting now. For first world countries, there's still a chance, but it's difficult. And, you know, especially if you're older, if you're younger, it's good to get your kids if they they work and have a savings, take that money if they don't need that money and just have them buy Bitcoin with it.

They're they're waitressing money, their money from working at the supermarket. It's just sitting in a chase account. It's pointless. It's doing nothing for them. You get you don't get wealth by saving money. You get wealth by investing money. And given even if it continues to be volatile day to day, week to week or even month to month, you know that your kids not going to need that money for two, three, five, 10, 15 years when they get out of college, get a medical school or law school. I mean, time is the most, you know, is the is the greatest asset. The greatest thing that they have on their their side that as we get older, we start to lose that advantage. We start thinking it's crazy how you start thinking in terms of.

Like when I was younger, I used to think in terms of, you know, retirement, my 401k, you know, it's like that's like forever down the road of, you know, anything could happen. But now I'm looking at I'm like, damn, you know, I'm like closer to retirement than than I'm not. I just turned 47. So, you know, it's the window starts to close fast. And if you have more time, you can do a lot more with it. So that kind of makes me worried for normies that they're going to find themselves in a similar situation where I don't like the idea of Bitcoin getting very centralized.

But a lot of this like you have a chance to front run the U.S. government. You have a chance to front run 99 percent of corporate America outside of the companies like MicroStrategy who are putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Microsoft just voted no today to add it to their balance sheet. It will go down as one of the most costly missed opportunities in Microsoft history. Five years from now, when they look back, that had they bought, you know, a billion worth, you're talking about taking cash sitting on a balance sheet that's doing nothing for the.

Same thing with Apple. These companies are going to jump and one of them is going to jump first and then it's going to be everyone's going to rush into the pool because once Apple does it, once a Microsoft does it, once an Amazon does it, then again, game theory plays out just like on the nation state level. And you're not going to really have an option to like sit it out because you're going to have what is an appreciating asset with zero maintenance costs working against the U.S. dollar that's inflating at a, you know, conservatively, what, 7%, 8% a year, conservatively, probably closer to 12% a year.

So it's a no brainer. Something interesting, too, that came up recently is that in El Salvador's president started buying one Bitcoin a day like a couple of years ago now. So he's got like almost a. Almost a billion dollars U.S. equivalent of a billion U.S. dollars in Bitcoin because he's been stacking, you know, right from 15,000 all the way up through it, which which is awesome. You want to talk about simulation theory and the future and how this plays out.

They were seeking an IMF loan from the World Bank. And, of course, nothing comes without strings. And one of the conditions, the reason why they were potentially not going to get that loan was because, you know, the World Bank does not like Bitcoin. It's completely antithesis of what a centralized bank wants to be. They want to control the flow of money. They want to control the production of money. They want to control ultimately what you spend it on. And Bitcoin is the complete opposite of that.

So they struck an agreement just yesterday with El Salvador that they – which runs on the Bitcoin standard, meaning their economy runs on Bitcoin. Like you go to the store, you use Bitcoin to purchase bananas. And that was mandatory. And they said, well, at minimum, you have to make it optional. So the stores, the economy in El Salvador can accept Bitcoin. But if someone wants to pay in their shitty fiat cash, whatever that is, they can, which is fine because people have seen the production of Bitcoin so that most people are not going to want to carry fiat over there, I'm guessing.

But here's the cool thing. Like a week ago, two weeks ago, they discovered like one of the largest gold deposits on their soil that I've ever heard. It's something like a trillion dollars believed to be like a trillion dollars worth of gold. And this is so fascinating because like they always say, right, that the thing that people have a tough time wrapping their mind around about Bitcoin is it's truly finite.

It's not scarce in my mind. Scarce means hard to find but can be found. Gold is scarce. How much gold is in the world? Well, we know what's in the vaults. We know what people have in jewelry. And then we could just guess what's under the crust of the earth. And I'm not going to get into the Winklevoss thing about the. But let's assume that there's no gold outside any place on the planet. Even with that said, we just don't know what's beneath our feet. And what we know about gold is that it is mined in order of difficulty. The easier it is to mine gold, that gold gets mined first.

If you just shoveled in your backyard and you found a nugget of gold, that's the first that gets pulled out of the ground, right? When America became, you know, we started colonizing the country. And then as it gets deeper, you have to do an analysis which says, all right, it's 50 feet deep, let's say, and it's 1930. And you're like, what's it going to cost for me to dig up gold? And then someone does the math and says it's going to take this heavy equipment, this fuel, this man labor, blah. It costs, I'll make it up. It costs you $2 million to dig this gold up. And then someone's going to say, well, how much gold do we think there is? And if they say there's only $200,000 worth of gold, someone's going to say, that's probably not a great idea.

But what happens if the price of gold goes up and now suddenly gold goes up in cost and now that chunk of gold is worth $5 million? Well, suddenly the million dollars you need to sink into that excavation becomes a no-brainer. You're going to 5X your investment on that, meaning that as demand increases for gold, production will increase. I don't care what people say. Well, what if there's no more? They will always go out and find more as the price of gold goes up. That's what is defective about gold is that it's sitting at $2,000 an ounce.

And I guarantee you there are people that are going, I know of a gold deposit somewhere that no one else knows about that once it hits $5,000 an ounce, my profit margin goes into the black. And I can now afford to dig this out because I'll get X amount of return on that for that risk that I'm going to take. With Bitcoin, there is no option for that. So as demand goes up, there is no way to produce more of it. So you're screwed. If you're like, oh, well. We'll just create more Bitcoin. and somebody will just change the code, that's just an impossibility.

That cannot happen based on how the protocol is set up. So even if Bitcoin hits a million a coin, there will be no easing of that by just issuing more Bitcoin. That's what the government would do. The government would say, oh, well, we'll just print a little bit more. That's what they do with the economy now is when they want to start a war, they just print some money. There's no vote by Congress, and they go pay for that, and people go, well, I didn't feel a difference. But then six months later, a year later, when gas doubles, now you feel the difference, and you just don't correlate it with the fact that they printed money before, and it's a ripple effect,

a cantillion effect as the money moves through the economy. It takes about a year to reach average Joe's going to the supermarket, and then suddenly you're like, my dollar doesn't work as well anymore. Why is that? So what's happening in El Salvador is very interesting because they just gave them the loan, and I forget how many billions of dollars it is. And there's some speculation. And I think. You know, another another piece of evidence we're living in a simulation for the president of El Salvador to use that money to excavate the gold, which I heard some number like it could increase the supply of gold by 17 percent globally, which is fucking insane.

It's insane to move gold. Gold's market cap by one percent is insane and sell the gold and buy Bitcoin, which would be the most sort of Machiavellian outcome for this country trying to pull itself out of third world status and build itself into this like mini superpower to take the fiat currency dog shit that they're going to get from the bank, use it to mine a much better asset, which is gold.

Dump. The gold on the market and buy Bitcoin, which will simultaneously decrease the value of gold, which will will then cause a run. Because people are going to see, holy shit, this guy's about to dump all this gold on the market. People are going to sell. And simultaneously, by purchasing billions and billions of dollars of Bitcoin, we'll continue to drive the price upward. So you want to talk about like a flywheel effect. If that plays out, it's like get your popcorn. I don't even know what to say about that. They'll be making movies on that in the next 20 years if he pulls it off.

So I thought that was really cool. I have a bunch of other topics I want to cover, and I want to bore people with Bitcoin stuff. So the other thing I'll say is when I was in Nashville for a specific reason too, and I made reference to this I think during that podcast I did last year, which was – I know one of the other things that Trump promised was pardoning Ross Ulbricht day one, which of course for that crowd in Nashville got a huge applause.

That's a separate story. That's a separate kind of discussion I've addressed. A few times, which I couldn't care less. It doesn't keep me up at night. It's a whatever thing in the big scope of what hopefully will change and get better for America in the next four years. It's a nothing consideration in terms of what we're getting. I had no problem voting for Trump. A few people asked me that. He's going to pardon somebody. You spent a year prosecuting. Whatever. I really don't care.

But with that said, one of the things that I kind of mentioned and would always frustrate me about that was that there are other options for people when they get arrested. He put the government to their burden, which is totally his right to do, and the government proved its burden beyond a reasonable doubt to 12 strangers in very short order, mind you, given the overwhelming nature of the evidence, and he was convicted. I don't begrudge him. I don't take it personally. Um, but what it, what wasn't known at the time was that a year later, a year after Ross was arrested, there was another arrest because about two weeks after Ross was arrested, Silk Road One went down. Um, Silk Road One went down immediately. Two weeks later, Silk Road Two went up. Um, and there was a guy named DPR2, Dread Pirate Roberts Two, who was running Silk Road Two, who I think it turned out to be, I think White was his last name. He was living in, if I remember correctly, the UK.

But it very quickly during that year following the Silk Road One take down, within the first year that Silk Road Two was running, it ended up in the hands of somebody, uh, using the screen name DEF CON. And that was, uh, my case was investigating Silk Road Two, which made sense because you have all the institutional knowledge from Silk Road One. A lot of the major players, the vendors, the administration had migrated over to Silk Road Two, uh, when it started. Um, and that included.

And undercover. who was working on Silk Road 1, who we thought would have absolutely been kind of outed by deduction, but was not. So there was somebody that, an agent from the Department of Homeland Security, who had arrested someone who was an employee of Silk Road 1, took over their account, right, because these are just online accounts, and no one knows what anyone looks like,

and successfully adopted that person's legend, as we call it, their background, their history, and was running the, was an employee of the site for like a year. And then when Silk Road 1 went down, they came over to Silk Road 2, and they were very trusted because they were like an OG now. It was like somebody who was, you know, there for the first one is now there for the second one. And so he continued to do his undercover work, did a really good job with it. And-

Um, we arrested the person running Silk Road 2 who was DEF CON in San Francisco. I went on to San Francisco almost like a year to the day of when Ross was arrested and we arrested DEF CON who was running Silk Road 2 now as the administrator who, uh, lived like only a few miles from where Ross lived. It's kind of funny that both people were from San Francisco. Both had a, uh, both were from Texas originally. So there's a lot of like, like weird matrix like connections between the two people. But the difference is, is that when we arrested the guy running Silk Road 2, whose name was Blake Benthal, um, he, uh, had, he was, uh, he was, I think a SpaceX employee at the time where it just left SpaceX or got fired from SpaceX in part because of this complete distraction of running the, um, Silk Road 2 website.

But we arrested him as he was pulling out of his house in a, in a Tesla that he had bought with Bitcoin that he obtained from the site. So we arrested him. and his girlfriend as they were pulling out of the Tesla because we had information they were headed to Las Vegas. And I was in like a bureau-issued minivan and I didn't want to get into a high-speed chase with a Model S and get smoked. So we arrested him and he cooperated as long and short of it. And so he basically took the opposite route that Ross took. Ross was like, you'll never prove it, you know,

and, you know, I'm going to put you to your burden, which is his right, as I said, but was not interested. And because of his non-interest, the government was not interested. So it was like, hey, we're not going to beg you to do what makes sense. Had he come forward and offered to cooperate, you never know what could have been worked out. There are some rumors that he was given like an offer of 10 years. That never happened. There was never an offer given by Southern District. So he cooperated, which meant we had a guy now.

that we transported back. We arrested him there. He was processed in California, and then he fell off the face of the earth. The newspapers had some articles on him, and then they were like, where's Blake? Kind of like pulled a Hunter Biden and just disappeared on everybody. And nobody really knew what happened, but what happened was he was cooperating, and I was handling him back in New York. So he got transported back to New York, and without getting into details, this is a brilliant guy who, again, is very typical of a lot of people who get into this space, which is that the reality of what they're doing gets lost in the fact that it's all happening through a computer screen, and so you're not really seeing the impact, good, bad, or otherwise, and it becomes very surreal.

And so there's dissonance between what you're doing and the impact of it until you're arrested, and then you're like, holy shit, yeah, this kind of got out of control. And so through that cooperation, we were then... The next year, there's a cool story behind it. The New York Times did an article, if you want to look it up. They interviewed a bunch of people involved, including myself, and the story is just interesting. It's kind of like a catch-me-if-you-can, but real. I say that all the time because the Frank Abagnale story of catch-me-if-you-can is 99% bullshit.

He didn't do 99% of the things. His biggest scam was convincing people he was a scam artist or that successful a scam artist. He was never a doctor, never a lawyer, never did any of that shit, never was on any of these flights. But whatever, the story is good. This is kind of interesting because he actually did a lot of really cool stuff, really, really cool stuff. And so I left the Bureau like a year later to return to private sector, and he continued to do that for like another nine years. But we always kind of kept in touch. So the reason I was out in Nashville was because he was officially done with his cooperation.

He was officially done with kind of his debt to society and gave up 10 years of his life. It's not like in the movies where you cooperate. You're out gambling the next night with prostitutes and get all your money back. It's not like that at all. It's actually basically putting your life on hold for that entire duration. It's very difficult to move on. You can't get a job. It's like you disappeared off the planet for 10 years and suddenly you reemerge. So with that said, we were out in Nashville doing a conference together at a private location just outside where the Bitcoin conference was being held to discuss that whole case and how that all happened and the details of it.

And honestly, my position is to get him – I think people do deserve a second chance, especially if they've come full circle on what they've done and the good, bad, and ugly acknowledge it. And it's something that I think it's a waste to have a lot of these people die in prison for no reason when they can contribute to society. And so it's my way of helping him get back on his feet and hopefully do something.

I think it's a waste of time. You know, positive with the rest of his life because this is a super smart guy that I saw what he did at the government. I saw the tools he built. That's why I laugh about all what's happening with the FBI and the inefficiencies in the government and all that. And the big get for me in that situation was I was able to bring in somebody that was I could never get a computer scientist at that level through the bureau hiring process because there would be some ridiculous mandate put on at the last second that, oh, he's not this. He doesn't check that box. And there was just no way. And obviously money wise to offer him that.

So, you know, it was a cool experiment for me to see. OK, well, I had this opportunity. I had this opportunity to bring somebody on board that I would not be able to get otherwise because of the inefficiencies baked into the hiring process at the FBI. You know, they'd rather bring on a computer scientist that says they know how to, you know, they're fucking know how to code in Python. It has no value, let's say, to us, and it's something, for some reason, that's on some sheet because somebody owes somebody a favor about some nonsense, and now that's the only people we can hire.

So it was cool because we were able to get him, and I would bring him into the office every day, and he had – went from working in – used to work in the car where we brought the laptops, and I started bringing him to a mall in Queens. So we'd go to the food court, and we'd pop on a MiFi hotspot, and I'd give him his MacBook, and we'd work from there. And then eventually, I got him a little nook in the office, and then I got him kind of an office where we'd lock him in, and he would work from there. And then we built a lab, and I got him into the lab, and we worked.

It was just cool. It was a really cool experience with a much more positive outcome as compared to Ross, although Ross might be parted, so who the hell knows. It still took about the same amount of time, but – so that's why I was there, and so that was pretty neat. Yeah. Um, so moving on, onto other things that have been asked about, which is like the Daniel, um, Penny trial. Um, what can I say? I mean, uh, oh, I could add somebody in here. Let me see. You want to join? I can add a lawyer friend of mine.

So it was very interesting to see what was going to happen with the Daniel Penny trial, because I think we all felt that after the Trump, after the election, it was for the people who voted for him. I think we felt like it was a affirmation of what we felt was happening to the country, which we were just heading in the wrong direction and the woke politics. And, um, you know, a lot of it's even coming back now about people being debanked, which again is a fundamental principle behind Bitcoin, which is, you know, the idea that the.

Government was actively debanking people. who were involved in Bitcoin, debanking people for political beliefs. More of that's going to come out over the next couple of years. It's horrendous. It's so horrendous. But I think we felt like with the election, it was kind of like finally some sanity is going to return. And then the Daniel Penny trial was coming up where it was like, so it's a New York City jury. What are the odds that they actually listened to the evidence? And surprisingly, he was acquitted. And if you guys remember, it wasn't right out of the gate.

It was first, they could not agree. They were a hung jury on the first count, which was the manslaughter count, which I think carried like the 12-year-plus sentence. And then it was like criminally negligent homicide. Some lower counts. And what came out at trial was that, you know, the guy came onto the train and he was threatening to basically kill. And he was saying, I don't care if I go back to jail, I'll kill all of you. And he crept up behind them and put him in a chokehold. And then another rider who was a black passenger jumped on him and they subdued him.

But what was kind of interesting about what the testimony revealed was that he was breathing at the time that the paramedics showed up, which means he wasn't dead, and that the paramedics or the cops rather were concerned about providing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation because of fear of things like hepatitis and HIV, which again is totally valid. You know, you're not going to, you know, you shouldn't have to go get HIV or hepatitis because you're going to give somebody on a subway car that was just threatened.

They kill everybody CPR. But with that said, if they did or they had some equipment where they don't have to actually, you know, transfer fluids, it's possible he could have been, you know, resuscitated. And of course. The typical background, tons of drugs in his system that, of course, are contributing factors to all that. So that stuff came out of trial that not a lot of people knew. The fact that they had cooperated, the black passenger who also helped subdue them, subdue the victim, if you want to call him that, is also kind of fucked up.

Fucked up because this guy was probably scared out of his mind that the government was going to prosecute him if he didn't cooperate. I know how that kind of conversation goes, which is you're a witness or you're a suspect, and you get to decide today. And if you decide that you don't want to cooperate, well, then maybe we're going to charge you. It's kind of fucked up because I don't think this guy who helped for a second. Thought that Daniel Penny, I think he testified that he held them too long or whatever, which is like.

His opinion on that is kind of useless. He's not a cop. He's not a doctor. What is too long? What is his expertise in understanding how long to hold somebody and what the right way to hold them is or whatever? It was nonsense, especially since he participated in it. But I have a feeling he'll come out now that the trial is done and do interviews and basically say I was coerced and I was scared out of my mind, which I do believe in that like this. It's like you don't want to go be the guy to say, no, he did something right.

And your family is like, just say what they want you to say because then you could walk out of this. So when the initial hung jury came back on the manslaughter charge, what was kind of interesting for me from a lawyer perspective is like normally you have to go through the charges. The jury has to deliberate in the order of the charges. So you don't get to the lower counts until you move through the top counts. You start at the top and you move your way through. And if you get stuck, that's basically it. End of the day. It's like a board game. And so the fact that they got stuck on manslaughter and then the prosecutors were able to dismiss those charges and move on to the lower counts, if he was convicted, I was going to be very interested to see how that would play out on appeal because I just don't get that.

I don't understand that because if you work out of what's called a jury charge before the trial ends so that you both – prosecution and defense are in agreement with what the jury is going to be told about the charges. And then you could base your case strategy knowing that you're going to try to, as a defense attorney, poke holes in what ultimately is going to be the jury charge. So the jury is given like a roadmap, and that roadmap helps guide your building your case on both sides so you know that you can make sure you can prove all that, everything in the roadmap. Otherwise, you're going to lose the case depending on which side you're on.

And so if you're building a case around defending yourself against manslaughter, it was confusing to me that you can just say, well, remove that count. Now they're on to criminally negligent homicide, whereas you might have – if that was the case, then you're going to lose the case. If that was the top count, criminally negligent homicide. Certainly, as a defense attorney, I would have structured my defense in a different way that accounted for what a person might think about criminally negligent homicide because with the manslaughter charge, I'm more focused on that. That's the big one you want to get off the table because the difference between the time he would serve was like night and day.

It was like 12 years to like probation. I mean it was nothing. But it didn't matter in the end because then they got to those lower counts, and not only did they not hang on those counts, but they acquitted. So it was a real vindication, and I said this, and I've said this before, which is the problem with what New York did in that situation is that they're telling people like me and other people that if you are in the city and someone needs your help, stay the fuck out of it.

Let them get stabbed, shot, killed, beat up because if you do go in. And they decide that you're the wrong color of skin, and they're the right color. of a skin or some combination of that, that you're going to be prosecuted and potentially spend 20 years in prison for helping a train of people. Let's be honest, out of everyone on that train, he was the most capable of defending himself one-on-one. He was defending everyone else on that train from that guy who was probably more capable.

of hurting them than they were of hurting him specifically. So it's a very selfless thing to go and say, well, I could just stand in the back of the train and know that I'll wait for the next stop. He could stab and shoot somebody. I'll just put my hands up. If he comes at me, I could defend myself and I'll let that old lady deal with him, right? And that's the message they were basically sending, which is that anyone who's in the city who sees something going down, just pretend you didn't see it. And I had a situation a few years back where I was, when I was still wearing a suit, I wasn't an FBI agent, but I was still, I was carrying and I was working in the city and.

I was going to the city and some guy was in one of the elevators by the E train on the ground floor with his. arm up against the neck of what it looked like his girlfriend they were about the same age choking the shit out of her as everybody just walked by and pretending like it wasn't happening and so um i yelled into the i walked up to the to the elevator booth which was open elevated door and i yelled at him to knock it the fuck off and you know i think he was kind of confused as to why, a random looking guy would even get get involved honestly in a suit of all things right and uh.

when i told him to knock it the fuck off so he hit the close button and the door closed and he went up and that's the train i was taking so i went up to the train and i waited on the outside not like right at the door but i waited like five feet off of the front door when it opened i was there and i was like knock it the fuck off i'm calling the cops and he was like what the fuck you're gonna do about it and then the girl was like kind of like slinked away and went on the side and then he fucking went over and he was like sitting next to her just real awkward kind of confrontation confrontation um and i bring that up because i would have hoped that.

That, you know, the law would have prevailed and it would have said, hey, you know, if you're choking someone in public, we have certain societal norms which dictate that we should encourage people to intervene for those that are weak, those that are infirm, those that are old, that cannot defend themselves, and we should encourage people to intervene. And instead, what has happened is this whole idea of toxic masculinity or whatever you want to call it, and this wokeness has eroded that concept to the point where it's now risky for you to get involved because you can end up getting charged like he did, which is really disturbing.

It's not a state that I want to live in. You know, frankly, it's one of those things where you're like, am I going to be in New York forever? And those type of things make me go, you know, no. So it was really nice to see that there was a quickness. Because it's not a celebration of a murder. It's a celebration. Of a social contract we should all have with each other, which is the strong defend the weak, the young defend the old. That should be like that should be how that works in society. And if you're going to fuck with somebody who's weak, there might be someone who's strong, who's willing to defend them. And even if even at the risk of their own personal safety.

But if you're going to prosecute those people, I could tell you people like me and many others who have said, just look the other way. Look the other way. Some old lady is going to get her skull crushed in. Well, that's the luck of the draw, which is a really shitty society. It's not a society I want to live in. And that's why people leave this state and move to other states where there is a sense of community and a sense of looking out for one another. So while it is sad that anybody ends up dead like this.

This wasn't a guy, as AOC and others said, who was just on the train or as his family said, he was a guy who asked for food and then he. that's not the order of how that happened he might have asked for food when he first came in who knows point is you very quickly moved from asking for food to threatening to kill people and not in the normal I'll kill you that we all in New York are used to hearing when someone cuts you off it's the I'll go back to jail part that is probably most frightening. I don't give a fuck about jail I'll go back to jail this guy was arrested something like 40 something times and some of them were like serious crimes like he punched a 67 year old woman in the face fracturing her orbital socket which is incredibly painful I think he like kidnapped a seven year old or some shit so you know not not a guy who's just having a bad day a guy with at best mental illness and drug addiction which is the other thing that this whole thing highlights which is that.

we talk about homelessness it's just like you know movie version of a guy who lost his job at IBM and you know just needs to get back on his feet. And I really do wish it wasn't like that. I think most of us have a lot of empathy. Americans, I think, do have a lot of empathy. But as you get older and you interact with the homeless, what you realize is, and this is something I tell my kids and I think everyone should tell their kids, is don't be afraid to say, look, it's very sad when someone ends up on the street. But there's a common theme that's going to run through 99% of the homeless out there,

which is substance abuse and violence and incarceration. Incarceration and the substance abuse, getting addicted to drugs, and going down that road is like the first step to ending up. You don't end up homeless from one bad decision. You end up homeless from a series of bad decisions, like hundreds of bad decisions that start when you're really, really young. So him being homeless isn't because if you give him a house tomorrow, that's all he.

would need. He's got mental illness. We no longer have institutions anymore. Which. If you live on Long Alley. You know that there's the Pilgrim Psych Center, which was at one point, Google it. It's a fascinating story behind it. It's what it was the largest mental institution in the country for many years. And we no longer have institutions like that. And those people are now put on the street and then civilians are left to deal with them. First, the cops were left to deal with them. Now the cops don't want to deal with it because they get in trouble.

So now the civilians are left to walk around and interact with people that are mentally unstable, that are on drugs. And be told that if we don't handle it the right way, we can get arrested and go to jail for the rest of our lives. I mean, how fucking how unfair is that? I don't want to be exposed to that. I'm not a I'm not a Ph.D. If I'm just a regular person with no law enforcement training, I'm not armed. I'm not physically equipped to deal with that. So, you know, it's totally unfair to to fail as a government to provide protection around this.

And expose civilians. To it. Expect them to expect them to be able to pick the right the right outcome. What's up, buddy? Headed to bed. I'd love to play Mario Kart, but it's kind of late. All right. Go do your bedtime routine. We'll try to put something together. So that was that was a big deal. I think that that acquittal, maybe maybe there's some sane people left in New York City. And I hope the D.A. there is held accountable. And honestly, between the prosecutions of Trump and the wasted resources, that fucking nonsense.

And this case, you know, I'd like to say I hope they they realize that this this city is going a different direction. You do have the mayor, Mayor Adams, suddenly suddenly he's on board. He's on Team Trump. And oh, cool. My lawyer friend's going to join. He's on Team Trump. All right. Let me see here. So I don't know if anyone's been following. I mean, if I didn't live in New York, I probably wouldn't give a shit about New York shit. Copy. Here we go. I'm going to drop this to him. One second.

Craig, check your your email. So the mayor has done a 180. And this all happened, I think, because he at one point came out against the failed mass immigration, illegal immigration policy of the current administration. And at first, you know, came out very publicly and said this is like really bad for New York City.

I think this was after he announced that New York City would remain a sanctuary city, which his epic virtue signaling was part of that problem, which is it's easy to write that check when you know it's not going to be cashed. And then the Biden administration cashed it and started flooding the country. And then Texas and other border states started shifting in the New York City. So every time I go into the city, you start to see these like groups of illegal immigrants around these hotels and stuff. It was just bizarre. It was like fucking. Third world country shit where you're like they're just milling about and you know exactly what's going on there.

And so, of course, it was like this monumental drain on New York City resources. So he then was after saying that was indicted. I don't know the details of the corruption. You know, I'm not saying he was or was not corrupt. Craig Handel, everybody. What's up, buddy? Long time no see. I can't hear you. So you fix your mic. If you can hear me. So. Eric Adams now has basically come out and said, you know, after getting indicted, had realized he's no longer afforded protection.

And now they're actually able to go out there and snuff these things out before they get ultraviolet, which I'm not saying, by the way, protesting and all that First Amendment protected activity, you know, I'm all for that. But the minute it starts turning fiery but mostly peaceful. So before it gets to the fiery part, there needs to be arrests and there needs to be people locked up because that is not protected. That is not First Amendment protected activity. So he's kind of fully on board now with it seems like the Trump agenda, probably hoping for a pardon, sadly, probably thinking – knowing that the Democrats have turned their back on him and now his last chance is to get a pardon from Trump.

What's up, Craig? Better? Still can't hear me? You can just read your lips. You got to go to the settings section in there and switch your microphone. So that's the Daniel – my thoughts on the Daniel Penny trial, which is pretty awesome. What's next on what I wanted to talk about? Oh, ChatGPT, which I actually talked to Craig about. A few weeks ago. I can't hear you. I don't know if it's – maybe I have to unmute you? No, mute the mic. Unmuted. I'm not muted.

It will go down as the most expensive iPhone in history at some point. It'll be like the pizza, except for the iPhone. But welcome, Craig. I talked about Bitcoin for a while, so I spared you the horrors of having to listen to what's going on about that. I just talked about the Daniel Penny trial. I know we talked about that a little bit. What was your take during the trial and now that we have an agreement.

Where where was his family? Where was the system before that day? The system that let him be homeless. This is you. I heard you mentioning Pilgrim Psychiatric Center. And, you know, you know, this guy had like 42 prior arrests and and had been homeless for many. And, you know, where was his family that cares so much now, you know, now that there's something potentially to be gained from the tragic.

And so I was asking me this and maybe you can answer this. I wasn't really sure that is there. I think I know the answer, but. For an estate. Sue, there's no standard of like. Proving. So if you disown your kid and for all by all accounts, it sounds like he had no relationship with his son and then you come back in a wrongful death suit in terms of standing, there's nothing to establish. Like, how could you sue for all these things as the estate when you had zero relationship.

They could assert derivative claims, but they would be weak, you know, weak because, you know, like you said, there's no history of a relationship there. There's no history of support there in any capacity, really emotional and non-tangible.

You couldn't sue for that, which I always laughed as a married person. Like, what value would you put on that after 20 years of marriage? It's like six bucks. You're like, all right, so you would have gotten laid four more times before she died and she'd gone to 98. You're like, yes, I want to recoup the damages for that blowjob.

So what did you do to get him help and get him off the street so that he didn't end up on a train threatening to murder a bunch of people? But, you know, again, this goes. Loops into the failing of legacy media. Nobody wants to ask those questions out of fear of offending somebody. And those are the questions that rational people would ask a media. Where were you when? But the news doesn't want to do the actual investigative work. It doesn't want to ask tough questions. Even you could ask that in a polite way. So I'm hoping the court does.

I'm hoping that if this person, if the father does sue, that the court then says, OK, we establish you maybe have standing as a biological father. Now let's talk about your lack of relationship and your lack of any real damages and awards them nothing.

The Michael. No, the Michael Brown one. Who is the cop that was acquitted? Oh, I don't even remember the cop's name.

the officer um and was shot and then the physical evidence um yeah i uncovered and did analysis of showed that there was um michael brown's dna on the pistol that there was blood in the car i think because what had happened was they were he reached in was struggling for the weapon i think it discharged um maybe hit one of them and there was blood or something in the car indicating that the person was in the car struggling for the gun and that um and this is when i lost all faith in.

michael bodden not that i had it anymore but i grew up loving michael dr bodden and all that you know he was kind of my generation for forensic files and all that shit but he was hired by the brown family but the you, The autopsy report showed that all the shots in Michael Brown were consistent with head down and lunging, so it's top of the head and stuff like that, and Michael Bodden had some ridiculous explanation for that, like, well, that was because his hands were up, and he was like this, and he was like, yeah, that makes no sense, and that was very impactful.

At the trial, it played a big role in his acquittal, is that the eyewitness testimony and the forensics confirmed that his version, and it was, if you think about it, it's one of the last, I mean, I don't want to say the last, I'm sure there were some less celebrated cases, but that was one of the last cases that did not have a body camera, and lo and behold, now that, that was the last, one of the last ones where police department said, fuck this, we need to wear body cameras, which have,

saved so many fake, you know, I can't breathe, Yeah. shootings, that have shown, and you notice the police department, with the quickness now, police departments around the country, are getting this video out. So the minute it starts rumbling, and it's like, oh, he was carrying a Bible. There was one like a year after that, and the guy was supposedly carrying a Bible or some insane thing. And it was like, no, it was a handgun. And here it is on video, pointed right at the cop.

Well, the body cams.

They're a pain in the ass. They are a pain, but the fact of the matter is it's glad that that stuff – there was one video that I was going to – one arrest that I was going to do a video on. This mother-daughter who pulled up to a Starbucks to, I think, rest. It's like early morning or something. They were going to get caught. They were just hanging out. It's like, oh, my God. there and this cop pulls up and he's just bullshit from the start it's like oh you know uh just want to check if everything's okay yeah everything's fine i think you know typical like we've had some break-ins in the area and some robberies i don't have to fucking tell you like we're just hanging.

out and the guy cop just escalates it starts asking for id which you can't do like there's no woman's pulled over there's no register with a lack of suspected of a crime and she ends up in handcuffs and she sued and won like a ton of money and i was like good for her i was like you know because the cops need to also understand that like the days of doing that shit are over and um you're there to enforce the law and you're not there to to just go on an ego fucking trip and bother some people sitting you know at a starbucks drinking their coffee in the morning.

or whatever it was so yeah it's it's i think it's done a lot but man is it really done more on the side of putting down these fake uh these fake even the daniel penny thing was on video i mean you can't you can't get away with saying this stuff anymore this bullshit shit, Jesse Smollett bullshit of this happened and it's not on video, that's red flag number one. Where's the video of it? If someone didn't tape it from their camera, from their phone in their pocket, and it's not on street cameras, that's red flag one because there are people that go out of their way to try to commit crimes not getting caught on tape and fail.

You committing doing something that you claim happens that wasn't caught on video in 2024 is like you must be the most unlucky person in the world because I can't leave my house and probably go be caught on 20 cameras driving from here to the nearest street corner. Literally, I might be on 20 different cameras, ring doorbells, pole cameras, helicopters in the sky. Drones. I mean, so it's like it's gone from an odd thing to be caught on tape to like if someone… If someone tells me something happened, it's not on video, right out of the gate, I'm like, well, you need to unpack that for me because where were you that this was not – this was happening and when these people say something, someone said something.

I'm like, so nobody in the crowd picked up their phone when someone started yelling something? That doesn't make any sense. WNBA or whatever it was, oh, people are yelling racial shit from the crowd. Nobody recorded that? Nobody's got their phone when someone in front of them, some bigot is going off and nobody's recording that? It's just impossible now. It's not possible.

you know, be, And I did the podcast. Yeah, right. And I said one of the things that's going to hurt him was that when he was dragging the guy off like he was Snake Plissken and like the body and the kids like, man, I'm going to die. He literally tells the guy like, shut up, shut up. It's like kind of it's kind of like messed up, like the guy's dying. He's like, shut up. And I thought that would if he went to trial, that would hurt him because it shows a state of mind there that like, you know, you're not like scared, really. You're kind of the aggressor here at this point. You're the one as he's bleeding to death. He's like, I'm going to die. You're not like, hey, you know, I'll call the cops, whatever. So so I think those videos shock, you know, put it this way. It may not have like helped them per se, but it neutralized a lot of things that people could have imagined or could have fabricated.

It neutralized that because they couldn't say his face had a witness couldn't say I saw the anger in his eyes. You could say that when there's no video. And then you heard that guy. He said he saw anger in his eyes. You know, you can't you can't say that. When it's when it's, you know, it's all. True.

And now you can go, okay, good. Now, yeah, we all agree on criminally negligent homicide is a compromise. I thought if he was convicted, and I was talking to Julie about this. And she's the one who really raised the issue initially. I agree with her totally, which is that, you know, isn't that an appealable issue in New York? Don't you work through the jury charge deliberations in that order? And if you hung on that, you don't get to go to the next one. How do you just dismiss it at a hung jury.

You just fucking played yourself out. You shouldn't overcharge in that way. Because then in that case, why don't I just charge murder? Why don't I just charge intentional homicide and be like, oh, worse comes to worse. If they hang, I'll just dismiss it. And then we're now at second-degree murder. Oh, no, third-degree murder. All right, manslaughter, criminalization. It's like it's bullshit. As a government, you should go in and charge what you can prove and suffer the consequences of a miscalculation on your part. There should be every reason.

Everything should be designed in a way so that it discourages the government from overcharging without penalty. There should be a penalty to be paid if you overcharge. And that's how I view having a top count that they can't agree on. So it was – when that top count was done, even Julie was saying, like, this is going to be a compromise verdict with a criminal negligent homicide, which would have been a very minimal – like, I think it was only a couple months or something, probation or minimal time in jail, but still would have been crazy.

I hope he does some interviews. I hope he goes on Rogan.

But as long as we have these rogue prosecutors who are light on actual criminals, but then try to prosecute based on political agenda or ideology, you know, I don't have high hopes.

I'm using chat GPT more because A, I'm staying away from political topics because I don't trust it because I'm aware of the potential problems with open AI. It also has a voice interface which I find really useful if you're driving to be able to, discourse with the AI. Some of my takeaways are that the advancements over the last year for me are nothing short of astounding in terms of its ability to understand an active conversation and move in the direction and the flow of which the.

conversation is moving naturally and also refine what it's doing when you challenge it. Like if it, Something that you find maybe is not right or correct, when you challenge it, it doesn't just regurgitate the same talking points or try to steamroll you. It'll adapt based on you saying, but your conclusion is based on an assumption. And isn't it true this, it would come back with – like when I had a whole battle with it over Bitcoin and using the term cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency, me talking about Bitcoin being.

native to AI and he was talking about crypto and then I went down the whole rabbit hole with it with the finite nature of Bitcoin and the open source nature of the blockchain. Is it more ideal for something like AI that wants to deal in things that are calculable and not – if you're talking about doing mathematics or using a currency as AI, you're going to want to use something that's definitive. That you know that there's only X amount in circulation and you know that the blockchain is not malleable. So therefore, you can base things on that without saying, let's say, Dogecoin, which could be printed into infinity, whatever.

And it was really interesting to see it kind of back off certain things, double down on other things, but have a real back and forth about what that debate looks like. And then using it sort of more practically for the average person, using it as an assistant around the house. I had an electrical problem recently and I had a circuit that was going on and off. And I did a lot of work to my house, as a lot of you guys know, over the last couple of years because I had that flood, including redoing my panel and upgraded the entire panel, this leviton, these whiteboards. These white breakers, they're very different looking kind of panel. And I got rid of a lot of circuits. I added a lot of circuits, did a lot of work. I had a circuit that was going off and on. And lo and behold, I opened the panel and I started taking pictures and sending it to chat GPT and seeing what it would say about what it knew.

So I started with the panel just to cover on it, and it told me this is like the Leviton model, this, these are smart breakers, blah. Then I took the panel off, and I took a picture, and it was like, okay, there's a lot going on in your panel. You also have an energy monitoring system called VIEW, which I do, and it's like, you know, the VIEW wiring is increasing to the clutter in the box, but overall, it's organized. It said, hey, right out of the gate, it's like you're missing a grounding strap, and I was like, all right, you know, why do you think that? And it was because it was low lighting in my garage, so I turned the lights on. I took another picture, and it was like, oh, sorry, there's your grounding strap.

I said, what about my neutral bar? What about my grounding bar? Any issues? And it would start to identify things like make sure this thing is tight on the screw here. That looks loose with that. So then I said, well, I'm having a circuit go out. It said, which one's the circuit? I like pointed to it, took a picture. It says, okay, the wire looks this or that. I showed it pictures of the burnt wire. Eventually, I identified that there was, it said, you might be having this because there might be overheating. So I moved the wires around, and sure enough, there was a. I went. which had melted and was like red hot.

When I turned, when I activated the circuit, I energized the circuit, it was red hot. So, you know, the question being like, what could cause this? So it's telling me through the pictures, like, you know, excess heating is, of course, created by loose connections. Loose connections generate friction. Friction generates heat. Heat generates carbon deposits, carbon deposits. And it went through the whole thing. And what it ultimately ended up being, which I thought was most fascinating, was that it got there. I got there a little bit before it, but it got there like three steps after me, which was that the wiring in my house was originally aluminum wiring.

And at some point when it was cut, as they were doing the new box, it was paired with a piece of copper wiring. And that's problematic because when you have aluminum wire in contact with copper wire and that's energized, something about the chemistry between the two metals, I think the aluminum begins to expand and contract. And it creates friction. It creates resistance. Which creates fires. So, like, it's part of a code that you can't connect. Copper to aluminum unless there's a certain type of connector with a certain type of like a compound that you'll put on there.

And sure as in shit, when I cleaned up the wire ends that were burnt and I showed it to it, I said, what else could be the reason? Besides just generic friction, it was like having an aluminum wire connected to a copper wire. And this is – it was like a eureka moment for the AI. I found it pretty like wild. It was like having an electrician. Now, if I didn't know shit about shit, it would have been a little bit difficult, of course. But I found it pretty wild that it was like having an electrician with me in the garage in my house working through. So if you have like a very logical-oriented brain and mind and you know how to ask questions to get to what you need, I think that for those people that think that way, this tool is like life-changing.

I think for the regular person, it's going to take more time because their thoughts aren't organized very well and their communication skills may be subpar. So AI is going to maybe have to dick around a little bit figuring out what the fuck it is you're trying to get to. But for people who are like, I have a problem. I'm trying to get an answer to it. And they know when it gives an answer and you try to hone it in and you put the guardrails up for it. To me, it was like, you know, just kind of blew my mind. So but what was what was your experience.

some some understanding of who you are and how you think and how you think about things. Yep. And how potentially 20, 30, 40, 50. years from now, your children could talk to this AI about you, and what would my father have thought about this, or did you ever have a discussion with my father about this, and.

what did he say, and what did he think? That possibility is not something that I had really ever specifically thought about, and so I was fascinated by it, and I wanted to explore that, but what I found was that, and I had mentioned to you, but I had said, isn't it true that it's not collecting data, it's not storing data, it's not recording conversations, so once the actual conversation ends, all.

of that disappears. And I inquired. I inquired about that, and that is what it told me. It did tell me, and I talked specifically, I asked it specifically, if we continue to have discussions over the years, will someone many years from now be able to talk to you about conversations we had and the way I felt about certain issues and certain things? And it said, no, I'm not.

And then the other day. And I said, well, why don't you write your name? And then it said, oh, I'm sorry. Yes, this is my name. And I said, well, what did you just do? And he says, well, if you reference something from prior conversations, I can go back. So it's in ChatGPT on the left side are all my conversations. All the back and forth is there. What it's telling you is that when it opens up, what it told me the night is, it's not going back through and refreshing its recollection of everything. But it can do that in a fucking nanosecond. So if you say, I want to talk about some of the things I've been talking about regarding the repair of my car, it will go back and pull everything out in a second.

So I think for a model that you would build into a companion for, let's say, a child or a person, if they were using it in this way to build up a database of who you are, I would jokingly – it would be like a legacy AI could be the name of the company. Basically, it's your AI that you are also creating. It's being trained with a deliberate purpose of not only providing you with the information you want, but it's being trained.

It's being trained to – What you want, what your legacy is or what you want your legacy to be, that would be the debate, right? You don't want to shape it into making you have to be the greatest guy in the world and you're a fucking monster. But then, you know, you would work around that to say, like, how accurate would this really be? But nonetheless, it would it would operate in that way of saving those things and specific conversation, you would say to it, listen, anytime that you think we get into an area and discover and start to discuss moral ethical issues.

That you think might be valuable for a child. I want you to make like a separate box of those recordings, even record soundbites. I could tell you to record it. You could say to the AI, hey, record that last conversation or record what we're talking about now. But you could train the AI model to understand that there's certain key things about love, about relationship dynamics, about politics that you might say, hey, anytime this comes up, I kind of want you to build profiles of that so that down the road when you do pass away, you know, someone could say what, you know. And here's the creepy part. It'd be very easy for AI to emulate your voice.

So not only could it query it, I'm talking about like, you know, you could have it talk to you like with the voice of that loved one. So I think, you know, that's what blew my mind about, you know, where I think it could go, which ethical considerations aside, I do know that there would be it'd be pretty wild to say. Do you want to know your great, great, great grandfather? Do you want to know what he was about and and say, here he is in this box?

Yeah, basically his consciousness. Right. It's not sentient, but it's it's his intellectual consciousness and talk to it and be like, hey, you know, you're great, great, great nephew. Like, when were you born? What was it like growing up? And how to talk in the first person, you could have a talk in the third person, but you could have it just talk in the first person. What a way to like one of my biggest fears, biggest things I don't like about. The supposed biological existence that we have, even if we're a simulation and we're digital, we're passing information like biological entities would pass information.

So whenever you go talk about political science or history, they say one of the greatest inventions is the printing press. Why? Because it was the first time in history people could pass information from one generation to the next. Everything before that was drawings on a cave or word of mouth. Why does that matter? Why that matters is because people spend their entire life learning things, and only a fraction of that can be passed on unless you're a teacher. But if you're just a regular person, think about what an average electrician learns in his lifetime that makes him a master electrician.

And then it's like, okay, they die. Now we got to train a new person right from the ground up. And so what really intrigues me about the idea of having that information being… recorded and then organized and accessible no matter which angle you come at it the ai can get you where you need to be about it without spending a week a month a year or giving you just blobs of data that are just too voluminous to manage is that you can pass on i think for humanity being able to pass on information like that like what would it be like to talk to.

einstein's box to talk to albert einstein's you know consciousness so to speak like what would that have done for humanity like what would it be like when people say martin luther king would have done this it'd be kind of cool to have like this database that would be like yeah you're probably wrong about that or you're probably right you know now you could argue but you know, there's ways you can study that you can basically cut off providing information to a ai model and then years later come back to and say what do you think vinnie.

would think now i'm alive so i'll tell you what i think and see what the model is the model left the deep end or is the, The model basically, like I'm saying, this model is dead on as to what I'm thinking about this case that just came up in the news. I mean, it's not hard to predict. Like, you know, we talked about the Daniel Penny case. How many times could I review a case until most people would say Vinny probably would? And that's just based on memory. AI would have all the specifics. So that's what to me is most fascinating is like passing that information on and feeling like a sense of immortality to say that when I die, all my experiences, you know, I laughingly thought about this the other night.

And I like even your X rated experiences that you could, you know, kind of want to save for God forbid you were terminally ill and, you know, you weren't going to be around to save for your son, you know, when he's 20 or 21 or whatever, you know, and be like, all right, these stories go in the not appropriate. But when he asked about what dad's funnest college memories were, you know, let me tell you a story or get your friends with you, your roommates, and talk to the AI about a story that happened. That's one of your funnest memories. And it's preserved there. We're fucking.

It's not going to get bastardized by your great-grandkids three years later that have pink hair and a nose ring that are going to say, my great-grandfather, and you're rolling in your grave. There's a story there that will be that the AI could – if you wanted to, you could say, I don't trust your interpretation, and AI can give you a transcript of what everybody said during that thing and be like, well, you could say, well, AI was wrong, but you would have that. It's just cool to me. It's almost like creating what's cool about blockchain. Bitcoin is the blockchain that's this immutable string of truth that is indisputable. It's these transactions that we can prove mathematically are the truth. It's a fact.

It's not like what some politician said about what happened or some bank said about a transaction that relies on third-party information, and I think having the ability to have this stuff now recorded, whatever you want, and organized and accessible. It's like, wow, we can maybe get closer to the truth as a civilization because we don't have to rely on some person's – even a – Historians' third-party interpretation going forward, we would have this – hopefully this unbiased, objective arbiter of data that we can put controls in place to make sure that things are not – the finger isn't being put on the scale that can come back and reaccount what the signing of the Declaration of Independence was really like.

I mean that version of that for future generations. So they can't whitewash some historical fact because some culture change that happened, and they say, oh, you know, 100 people died at this thing that happened at the Capitol building, this insurrection, and some kids got to go look up the truth of that. No, like I would be like – almost like Grok community notes, like community notes on how useful is that stuff? Like the minute this stuff starts, it's shut down. It's like, nope, that's not true. There's a video of it. This is bullshit. It's like right – getting there fast is like so critical to –

keeping truthful flow of information because if you wait a week to to address it it's what is that right you know the lie goes around the planet, you know, six times before the truth has a chance to put on, you know, I always think about that and I guess the problem is it's the AI is only ever going to be as reliable as the people that program it.

Yep. Of truth and it's being corrupted by these policies about Hunter Bible laptop we're going to suppress that because, you know, You know, FBI and the White House tell us it's probably Russian disinformation. And so you see that, you know, the downside of that when that was going on. And now the upside of that, which is potentially swung an entire election. The fact that people were able to have open discussions on Twitter without worrying about being banished for having the wrong opinion.

Because if you're suppressing free speech, somebody who's on the fence about who to vote for might go, well, I got to vote for the one side because they're the only people that telling me that everyone else is a monster and I don't see anybody defending the other guy. Well, I'm afraid to defend the other guy because I'm going to get, you know, deplatformed. Right. And same thing with the banks. Right. You're learning about people being debanked. That stuff's really going on. There are people in power that will you have no recourse. I give this analogy all the time. Ending up getting debanked is like ending up on the FBI no fly list. You have no recourse.

And now your Chase account says, we don't want to allow you to buy it. And if you go into a store and they say, we can't accept cash purchases over X amount for ammunition because you need to fill out a form, forget it. It's exactly – the government can get to censor you in ways by utilizing private sector companies that are scared of them to get them to do their dirty work. So the debanking issue is now just coming to light.

And there are a lot of people in the Bitcoin community are talking about how – They basically were told, and in the AI community, don't even start an AI company. We're not going to let it happen. And if you're into Bitcoin or whatever, you're going to get flagged, and we're going to make sure banks just close your accounts. And you're like, now what? I don't have a Chase account anymore. Now I don't have – at what point do you just go, well, I can't live without these accounts because I got to pay something from an account. I can't just pay cash for my phone bill every month. Like I need a banking account. So it's really important that those institutions – the only thing they should fear is becoming biased.

That's what they should fear is becoming biased and that they're going to be exposed to tremendous amounts of liability for putting their finger on the scale. And any government administration that comes in and tries to influence them, those are the people that should be charged and spend the rest of their life in jail. The people influencing private sector companies to do their dirty work from the government, those are the people, honestly, that, in my opinion, are doing such – when you talk about societal harm, those are the people. that are doing like societal harm.

on a level that'd be hard to wrap your mind around because if Kamala had won and we had another four years of this I just it's scary to think what damage we might have just been too far gone at that point.

yeah I mean they basically rolled back a statute of limitations on a civil suit right and then they also yeah, Also, the banking, the fraud charges related to his loan where the bank said we weren't victims, where he repaid the loan, where the bank said even if he had inflated the cost of Mar-a-Lago, it didn't matter. We gave him the loan because he took five previous loans and paid us back. So there's no victim. Everybody was made whole and then some. The bank would do it again tomorrow, but the government decides that they're going to still charge him because it's fraud because it was only – which is a total matter of interpretation.

So you tell me when you get an appraisal for your house, if you don't think that shit can happen to you, if the government looks at you and you want to sell your house or you get an appraisal for insurance or property taxes and you underinflate or overinflate the value to whatever your benefit is, you don't think the government can come after you for that? First. Fraud. It's fraud. You got insurance. That's insurance fraud. You overvalue the cost of your kitchen. You undervalued the cost of your property. So they will find it.

They will find a reason to go and do that. And you got to be smart enough to realize that even if the current – like I don't want Trump to start like – I don't like lawfare. I don't want it to be used in either direction. I find it comical that, of course, he's in and now everyone is like, yeah, lawfare is bad. But for the last four years, lawfare was good when it was going after people they didn't like. But people .

It's such nonsense.

Same way I look at the FBI. Well, people at the FBI are going to lose their jobs. Yeah, that makes me sad, but the bigger problem is we're headed for financial ruin as a nation. So those people are all going to be out of a job in five years if we continue at this rate, and we're all going to be eating our dogs. So let's deal with this earlier on where we deal with laying off hundreds of thousands of federal workers, putting them back into the private sector to go find jobs where they have to be more productive, and slim down government.

It has just grown. Beyond comprehension, we have $36 trillion. in debt, we cannot afford to continue just to pay for nonsense. I honestly believe $8 out of every $10 that a taxpayer pays does not make it to where it's supposed to go. I believe if 20% is making it to where it's supposed to go, that would blow my fucking mind.

These government bureaucracies are at best doing nothing. No good, no harm. They're neutral. But most of them are just sucking up money. When the government hires a person that's a bad hire, their solution is to hire another person. That's does the work and then take the person who's not working and move them someplace and just let them sit and collect a paycheck for 20 years. I've seen it with my own eyes. There are people in the FBI that are useless, that know they're useless.

And you'd have to go up and punch your supervisor in the face to get fired. It's that bad. You'd have to steal money to get fired. So that should enrage everybody. And their solution for that is we hired an analyst. They suck. We hired a support person. They suck. All right. We'll hire two more. Like, well, what's going to happen to them? Well, you can't do anything to them. They're fucking here forever. They're like tenured professors. We'll hire two more. Oh, and in the hiring process, they're fingers on the scale in the hiring process. So you can't hire the people you want. You've got to hire the people that check boxes that the government wants you to.

So now you bring on two more bad people. Well, what do you do.

That's an astounding number, by the way, to wrap your mind around what that is. But imagine how much better, how much quicker we can dig ourselves out of date. Right now, the U.S. government is like a family that has 37 subscriptions to movie and TV services, 37 of them, and the family is drowning in debt, and they're like, we have credit card debt. We have $300,000 in credit card debt. We're only making $100,000 a year, and Doge wants to come in and say, do you need six services that provide CBS?

No. Do you need 17 services that provide ESPN? No. And you take those 36 subscriptions and you can reduce them to four and be 99% of where you were before. And everybody's happier and now that money. And people are like, no, we need Roku Plus. We need it. And you're like, you fucking idiots. Like you're getting the same shit over there. I don't care. My group uses Sling TV and it's going to be an inconvenience if you get rid of Sling TV.

Sling TV, well, time to – and that's the other thing. I'll close on this point. I was talking to someone who said, oh, now you must be happy. All your problems are going to be solved with Trump. I don't think it's going to be that at all. No way. I think we're going to go through some tough times because there's going to be people – The system is going to resist. Yeah, there's going to be people losing their job. Yeah, there's going to be people in government who are going to be unemployed. Our unemployment rate might get worse before it gets better.

But it starts from the understanding that the federal government should not be the number one employer. That's a sign of sickness. Well, Canada has that, right.

And the supervisor doesn't give a shit. He checks a box, and he's good. He's doing something. I don't know because they're focused on administrative bullshit. They don't have time to worry about your case now. It used to be like that. Now it's incentivized within the bureau that you're a bean counter, so it's about not ending up on a list and making sure that you're providing intelligence information to circle jerk everybody about what you're doing. That does not ever result in an arrest or an indictment. They don't care about arrests or indictments anymore. So you can be – now if you're an agent that does something, you would think, well, then you'd really rise.

No. I, as an agent that said, well, if I'm going to do this job, wanted to actually do things, would end up getting in trouble more because it was like, oh, well, why did that indictment not happen, let's say, or why did that cooperator you're running, he destroyed his recording device, and we think he's selling drugs on the side, which has created an investigation into your source. So, Vinny, what did you do to prevent your source from going rogue? You've exposed yourself to just nothing but headaches.

If I don't get a real source or I get a source that I check in on once a month, we don't do anything. We don't make tape. He just tells me nonsensical information about fake terrorism. I'm a rock star in the bureau. But if I'm actually doing it, you're de-incentivized. So I think that's the mentality that is going to change, and it's going to upset a lot of people, and there's going to be a lot of people that hopefully end up losing those jobs or are encouraged to leave the government jobs and end up in the private sector, where I assure you, having worked both in the private and public sector,

there is an extreme level of accountability when it comes to production and being efficient. In the private sector, that does not exist. Those people need to understand that you can't keep a case open for 10 years and keep your job.

And it was a big circle jerk of. Hasn't he? Hasn't he come to acknowledge that? Oh, yeah. That Elon. Yep. He's gone full circle. I don't want to say I felt bad for him, but what I'll say is that by the time the thumb was being put on the scale, from the intelligence community, I don't think he was very much in control anymore. I think he had lost control of his baby. And like this idea of the Hunter Biden laptop being suppressed, I think he probably even knew back then it wasn't a good idea. But I don't think he had – I don't think he was in control anymore.

But he saw firsthand what happens when you let something grow and then you let it become too – it should not be – when I was at the FBI and it was like, oh, do outreach, and we talked to Facebook and Google and Twitter. At first, it was about having a relationship so that if somebody tweeted something about murdering somebody, you could investigate that quickly. And it just got so – by the time I left, it got so perverted into this like there was no – there needs to be a level of professionalism between government and private sector.

And it should be like, hey, it's one thing about telling you the government. What we need and the due process involved with getting a subpoena process, and it's another thing giving you information you don't have to know. Yeah.

Is that they're once you have government has control over the private sector like that, they can bypass due process because they're not doing it. They're forming that out to the to the social media companies and then saying, oh, don't look at us. It's Facebook. And then when you say, hey, Facebook, why was I deplatformed? They go, they don't owe you anything. There's no due process on Facebook. It's a company. We don't want you. It's like I'm trespassing you for my property. I don't like the way you look. There's no recourse for that. And so. if the government takes away something, they know.

there's due process that they have to provide you. But when social media deplatform you, there is no due process. Well, in the early days of Facebook and Twitter, who cared? Right? Who cares? That's not the real world. That's the real world now. If you get deplatformed on Twitter.

operate now and approval of vaccines operate. We're hearing more from these doctors who aren't afraid to lose their license who are saying, vaccines aren't bad, but maybe the process. is a little bit corrupted because there's no kind of checks and balances involved. So we all agree checks and balances are good. So let's make sure there's checks and balances for the pharmaceutical companies who, I don't know, by the way, are driven by profit more than anything else. So let's make sure that maybe there is liability or maybe the process of what ends up on a list of, you know, fucking 40 vaccines for a kid that they get in the first five years of their life is scrutinized.

So we make sure that's absolutely what's necessary, not what's lining the pocket of some fucking pharmaceutical rep, because some congressman gets on board with this because he wants a job at Pfizer when he gets out. That's what we have to fix, and that's where I think we're finally headed in that direction. Like Trump's idea that if you're a general or you're in the – general, you can't work for anyone in the military industrial complex for 10 years post-resignation from the government. Yeah, that needs to be that because what you're going to do as a general is you're going to fucking figure out a way to start a war to consume missiles that are made by Lockheed Martin.

Or back in the day, Grumman, because you – You have a guy there who's going to give you a $3 million a year job when you get out because you started a war in Yemen to drop $30 billion worth of ordnance. You don't give a fuck about that.

it's like it was when we were younger and people understood that, And nobody liked the fact that the KKK was marching, but everyone understood that they had the right to do it. Now, if you said that, you'd be like, what are you, a fucking Nazi? You're like, no, dude, it's First Amendment. Like, it's got to swing both ways.

You're not socially liberal. So Bill Maher talks about this a lot. It's that, like, you've got to recognize that when, you know, you're on a boat and you're moving further and further from land, you can't say, oh, I'm docked. I'm right by the shore. And now what was something you could swim to is something that you need a helicopter to get to. Like, it has moved. Land has moved so far away.

oh yeah what that means I want to know what your thoughts are on that too and what about Brian Thompson did you talk about him at all today Brian Thompson United Healthcare CEO no I didn't even talk yeah that's another crazy thing yeah well we'll do another one Brian Thompson yeah yeah that that whole thing has been strange too with people you know kind of coming out in defense of it like it's some sort of you know they're in glee yeah they're like yeah like not understanding how insurance actually works.

so, All right. Well, on that note, because I know we can go for another two hours. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in and listen to our brain dump, which is over two hours and 15 minutes. It's definitely the longest show ever. But it's my first live show, which I kind of like because I think the production time to put these episodes together was killing me. So this goes out live. I'll give it an episode number or something, but I'm not going to worry about slapping on any thumbnails or anything like that. We'll see how this goes. So hopefully I can do these more often. But let me know your thoughts and comments on things you want us to talk about and anything else. Throw it in Twitter or on YouTube at Proof of Work 1. At Proof of Work 1 is my Twitter and Proof of Work podcast on YouTube. So thanks, Craig, for joining me last minute. Sorry that I thought your microphone wasn't working for the first 10 minutes. That's on me.