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On today’s episode, we discuss how collapsing national currencies—from Iran’s rial to Venezuela’s bolívar—are driving ordinary people into Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a last‑ditch store of value. Mark explains why institutional players like Vanguard and Morgan Stanley are finally recommending small crypto allocations, how ETF filings and FOMO are pushing Bitcoin higher, and why none of this should be confused with personalized investment advice. From there, the conversation moves to practical home tech: VPNs, Starlink, and why reliable local storage and good passwords still matter more than shiny gadgets when the internet goes dark. James and Mark also kick around Elon Musk’s AI and robotics ambitions—Grok, xAI, Optimus, and full self‑driving Teslas—debating whether a Unix‑like, tightly controlled “Apple‑style” stack will prove safer than a more open, Windows‑like ecosystem for autonomous vehicles. A creek‑flooding scenario near James’s house becomes a case study in what current self‑driving systems still miss, forcing humans to override software that cannot yet reliably interpret brown, moving water across a road. That leads into a broader discussion of how many edge cases engineers must sample before regulators will bless truly driverless cars, and why early adopters will inevitably be the ones whose mishaps teach the machines. Throughout, they keep circling back to a core theme: in both finance and transportation, new tech may be transformative, but ordinary users still have to live with the bugs, crashes, and unintended consequences of bleeding‑edge systems. Don't miss it!
By James WilkersonOn today’s episode, we discuss how collapsing national currencies—from Iran’s rial to Venezuela’s bolívar—are driving ordinary people into Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a last‑ditch store of value. Mark explains why institutional players like Vanguard and Morgan Stanley are finally recommending small crypto allocations, how ETF filings and FOMO are pushing Bitcoin higher, and why none of this should be confused with personalized investment advice. From there, the conversation moves to practical home tech: VPNs, Starlink, and why reliable local storage and good passwords still matter more than shiny gadgets when the internet goes dark. James and Mark also kick around Elon Musk’s AI and robotics ambitions—Grok, xAI, Optimus, and full self‑driving Teslas—debating whether a Unix‑like, tightly controlled “Apple‑style” stack will prove safer than a more open, Windows‑like ecosystem for autonomous vehicles. A creek‑flooding scenario near James’s house becomes a case study in what current self‑driving systems still miss, forcing humans to override software that cannot yet reliably interpret brown, moving water across a road. That leads into a broader discussion of how many edge cases engineers must sample before regulators will bless truly driverless cars, and why early adopters will inevitably be the ones whose mishaps teach the machines. Throughout, they keep circling back to a core theme: in both finance and transportation, new tech may be transformative, but ordinary users still have to live with the bugs, crashes, and unintended consequences of bleeding‑edge systems. Don't miss it!