What Bitcoin Did - The Real Bitcoin Revolution Is Grassroots | Rod Roudi

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

Rod Roudi gets into the convergence of Bitcoin, AI, energy, and freedom tech — and why grassroots adoption matters just as much as corporate treasury plays. From the rise of Bitcoin meetups and physical hubs like Bitcoin Park to the explosive growth of mining innovation, Rod makes the case that open-source tools and community-driven education are the foundations of Bitcoin’s future. We discuss how Bitcoin Park solo-mined a block against one-in-a-thousand odds, and why home-grown projects like BitAxe and miner-powered heating systems are reshaping the mining landscape. Rod also shares how he uses AI in his own workflows, what the future of education might look like for his kids, and why entrepreneurial grit will matter more than credentials in the age of automation. In this episode: - The rise of grassroots Bitcoin communities and meetups - Solo-mining a block live - Mining decentralisation - The convergence of Bitcoin, AI, and energy THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN RIVER ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY Follow: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Rod Roudi: https://x.com/bitkite Imagine IF: https://bitcoinpark.com/imagineif Bitcoin Park: https://bitcoinpark.com/

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mine, man. Thank you so much. How are things in Nashville? You've been busy. How are things in Nashville and in Austin? Yeah, both places are great. I mean, the mayor down in Austin, Parker Lewis, It's crushing it was Zapright and he's doing well. Austin's commute, man, you've been there. The density of developers, engineers, and entrepreneurs is absolutely insane, especially in the Bitcoin space. Like, I don't want to say they got Nashville on any stretch in the imagination, but in that particular area right now going there and just being around that high quality of folks,

especially the diversity of different industries from obviously AI, but in robotics to Bitcoin to a number of different areas. They got they got something special in that regard. I can obviously for anyone listening you took over the commons it's now Bitcoin Park Austin. Parker's obviously working on Zapp right now he's podcasting he's actually crushing that podcast it's really good. Dude killing it give a shout out to him on his podcast but I just I can never figure out who won in that deal whether whether Nashville won or Austin won. I think he did a very good chest move and my 4D chess move is going to make him, I'm going to get it to the point where he has to actually run for mayor of Austin.

I'm going to help build up the Bitcoin community with his help, with Will Cole's help and everybody's help, Ben Carmen, everybody. I mean, we've got a lit devs on Monday, Tuesdays with Paul Miller and Sahil, the Design Club meetup, we got the Austin Bitcoin Club meetup Wednesday and then BitDevs on Thursday. We're going to continue to support that community to the point where I'm like, all right, Parker, it's time to run for mayor. He's like, what do I mean? I'm like, no, no, it's like actual time to run for mayor and you're doing it.

And he'll be like, damn it. I'm bullish on the Bitcoin as becoming mayor. We need you as mayor of Nashville, Parker is mayor of Austin, Pete as mayor of Bedford. That's how we change the world. Pete, I think he's going to do it. I think he's going to actually run. I thought for a long time he was. So you've not been on the show as like a solo show before, but you had sort of a cameo

in that last episode he did on the old what Bitcoin did. And Pete was talking there like he was really going to run. And for a long time, I thought he was. But I've spoken to him recently. I had him on the show and obviously speak to him privately pretty regularly. And I think he's feeling pretty bearish on all. Like he's trying to make so much change and just coming up against obstacle after obstacle. Like I wouldn't be surprised if that is behind him now, the idea of actually running for mayor.

Yeah. I don't think it's, well, for me, speaking me personally, I don't think it's ever going to be in the cards for me. But I do think to the point of Bitcoiners getting to the point where they are so fed up, I think like a Pete or a Parker or somebody, let's just say, you know what, let me see if I can just throw my hat in the ring and be the change I want to see. Yeah. Well, he's kind of, I guess Pete's doing that in a different way.

He's just not doing it in the traditional, like, politician route. He's instead just trying to make change with hiring his private security guard, having his, his little army in Bedford. And I think he's doing some cool stuff. But honestly, the UK's a mess. It's, it was pretty strange hearing him talk. Because I obviously am from there, don't live there, and have a kind of detached relationship with it.

But he's pretty bad on the UK. Yeah. You just spent some of that, right? I did. Yeah. I like to provide the positives first before I ever throw any shade. I will say the UK, they got at least in Nashville in three ways. One, the tube is just the tap to pay on the tube is so easy, and you can get around.

It's really spread out, but at least you can get around. Two, their parks for the kids are just phenomenal. I mean, my kids were wearing out those parks, like, day and day out. And they're so different, too. I mean, like water parks to, like, what do you call them, the gliders and all this stuff. It was the kids who had a great time. And then three is just like the kids' museums and just the kids' activities around that. They were just phenomenal.

But it's just, you know, people just kind of zombieing around. I don't know. There's just, it was a weird vibe. We've definitely got you on culture too, though. Like an old building in Nashville is like 17 years old or something. Come on, come on. We've got you on the culture side. Yeah, for a number of reasons.

But, no, but I'll say this, Nashville is the best place, in my opinion. is to raise a family. It's just the community here is amazing. Our values are fantastic. You know, schooling is great. We've got great family here personally. And I couldn't think of a better place in the world to raise a family. Yeah, no, I like Nashville. I've said for a long time, if it was somewhere in the U.S. I was going to move it, it'd probably be Nashville. But like, you've also got an amazing Bitcoin community. And it's something I'm in Brisbane now, and we just don't have it. Like we've got, there's a, don't get me wrong, there's a great crew of Bitcoiners. They, they're like committed good Bitcoiners. They have a meetup every month. It's really

annoying because it just tends to fall whenever I'm away. So I go to like three a year. But I would love to have a more dedicated Bitcoin space in Brisbane. You've obviously built that in Nashville. Like, what are the challenges of building that? Yeah. So I'll, I'll say this. It wasn't like something Matt and I set out and like, well, we're going to build a. physical space. I mean, it kind of just happened to pan out the way it did. But to your point, it started with a meetup. We were just getting together. And for the audience here, if you have not been to a Bitcoin meetup, I would just Google or chat jeb, whatever it is, just local Bitcoin meetup, insert your city, and just make sure it's Bitcoin and not like crypto or altcoin or

treasury company or whatever it is. Now these days that people talk about, but I would just make sure it's Bitcoin focused and just go attend it. Even if it's like four or five people, you'll be so surprised to like make that one connection and be like, dang, this is freaking awesome. I'll never forget one quick story. We hosted our first meetup. This was like, I don't know, August of 21, I want to say.

And was it 21 or 22, I forget, but, and it was just at a brewery. 15, 20 people showed up. It was raining, but this one guy is, His name is Dr. Fomo. He's like, came out to me afterwards, and he's like, dude, I just need to tell you how thankful I am for you to organize this. I'm literally on just Bitcoin Twitter. And my wife thinks I'm crazy because all I, he's got miners running in the house.

He just talks to his internet friends about Bitcoin. He's like, I'm the only person in the Nashville metro area that cares about Bitcoin. And he's like, thankfully, there's other people like me. And then all of a sudden, and, you know, COVID did help for sure. But I would just say, like, there was just this gravitational force, which is Bitcoin, and it got people together. And so one of the things I think we did well, similar to Parker, who was a big inspiration, was just being consistent. To your point, the Brisbane made it up. I wonder if it's like the same Thursday of every month, and you just happen to be out of town.

But having a consistent such that you can potentially rearrange your schedule or plan around it, plan to be there, I would just make a point. But it's super hard. I mean, unless you got, like, so, and we'll probably talk about this later on, but we have a lot of members that are outside of Nashville and Austin that are like, hey, we should have a Bitcoin meet or a Bitcoin Park in Scottsdale or St. Pete or Dallas or Chicago, wherever that may be. I'm like two things. One, capital and two, you can't really manufacture a Bitcoin community. You got to start at the grassroots level. You got to start at the meetup. You got to start be consistent.

And more importantly, you got to enjoy organizing it. I see a lot of folks, rightfully, they get just drained because it's taxing on their family time. It gets taxing from their wallet. They're the ones picking up the bar tab a little bit or maybe, you know, paying a rental fee just to be at the place. So I have a whole list of tips. And that's like something we do at the grassroots Bitcoin where we organize meetup.

It's a meetup of meetup organizers where we exchange best practices such that we can empower these meetup organizers because I truly think meetup organizers are on this crazy, they're so crazy important in Bitcoin education and adoption globally. You may not think of it, even if you're an organizer of a 20-person meetup in your local community, but the trust that those individuals have in you, that they then extend into their networks, is beyond imagination, at least for me. And that's why I take, I know it's a Superman quote, but there's a lot, I take a lot of pride and, yeah, well,

is it like with great power comes great responsibility or something along those lines. But at the beginning of my meetups, I always say, we take a lot of pride and responsibility in making this the best Bitcoin experience. But even, Danny, you have such a huge megaphone, right? And especially with all the noise that's out there, it's imperative that we kind of do the work a bit

and distill in who are the best players to the best of our ability such that we can help educate, you know, you on a global audience and me on a local audience. Yeah, I think it's funny because, like, I don't know if you guys were first or Austin. I think Austin was first, right? Yeah, yeah. But there's now the park in Austin, Park in Nashville, Pubkey, which I absolutely adore. I've been to the space in Denver. That's a really cool spot.

The stuff that Tyler and Eric and that crew are doing there is very cool. And there's Presidio in San Francisco. Like there are these hubs popping up. over the US. We need to get them more global. I know someone's working on one in London right now, which is going to be pretty interesting. But like when everyone's just talking about treasury companies, and I'm guilty of this, like I've done a ton of shows on treasury companies, like, is it frustrating to you that people are kind of not talking about the grassroots Bitcoin adoption enough?

It does not bother me, but it gives us an opportunity to help change or combat the narratives that are out there. So again, I'm not really really. good on Twitter. I'm not really good on a number of things. But I look at this and I say, okay, it just feels, by the way, like 2017, the ICO boom. And it's just like whatever thing is being launched and saying this is the best thing since I'm like, whoever was in Bitcoin around 2017, 2018, I don't know. At least for me, it feels like that time frame. But I think this is actually a unique opportunity to help continue to differentiate and expand on the value of Bitcoin. Like, so for example, we're hosting a custody and treasury summit.

And I thought it was extremely important to include custody in treasury. Because whenever you have a treasury strategy and my definition of a treasury strategy is a business that holds Bitcoin and then uses Bitcoin. And it's for me, the Treasury strategy is wanting to learn ways on how folks are using Bitcoin on their balance sheet. For example, I'll say another story, Matt and I, we decided on day one we would only accept Bitcoin and we would only use Bitcoin. That was the wrong treasury strategy. Bitcoin was at like 45 some K and we were accepting Bitcoin, blah, blah, blah. I'm not BSing you, Danny.

We like literally the market top, and this is June of 2022, I believe. It just kept on going down and down. By December of 22, if I get my years right, the price of Bitcoin was like 15K. I'm like, our bills are fiat denominated. We cannot run a business like this. And so that was a major wake-up call. And by the way, that's also helped. I mean, I have the freaking battle scars to prove it.

But that's also helped with a durability and making this a sound business or more sound and resilient business versus like, all right, we started a Bitcoin business. And it went straight up to all hundreds, some thousand dollars when we look like geniuses. But that's where when people talk about treasury companies, I mean, I group them into like, okay, there's a financial engineering shell treasury company out there. That's a stock.

You're buying that stock to hopefully get more Bitcoin. More power to you. Best of luck. God bless. It's kind of what I say at, you know, our meetups, especially the new folks. I don't want to push them away or anything. I just say, hey, we talk about Bitcoin, the capital be the monetary network here. Also the Bitcoin, the lowercase be.

What we don't talk about is altcoins, NFTs, LFTs, crypto, shitcoins, shell treasury companies, you know, gold, whatever. That's another meetup, more power to you. But, you know, God bless. But here, because I take a lot of pride and responsibility and making this the best hour that you're going to spend in Bitcoin, this is what it's all about. So I'll be honest, it doesn't really bother me.

I think it's a really cool opportunity, especially for Bitcoin Park, awesome Bitcoin educators like yourself, sessions, others, to really double down to say, okay, here's the differentiation. Like, here's another quick thing. We're going to introduce a simple custody white paper as part of our custody and Treasury Summit. And it's not meant for, I mean, it's meant for our attendees, but it's meant for the

attendees customers and their grassroots network. They explain what are all the different ways to custody Bitcoin, from single sig to multi-sig to full custodian to insured custody? The nobs just, they're probably thinking like treasury company, they hold my Bitcoin. Why would I, what does custody even, how does that even come into the equation? And so again, I think there's a huge opportunity for all of us to leverage. Yeah, I think it's funny because I'm a Bitcoin treasury company. I'm obviously not doing any of the financialization, but I hold Bitcoin for the company.

Like I, when I invoice people, there's always an option to pay in Bitcoin. Surprisingly few people take that option. Interesting. But when you say that you ran this with Bitcoin only at first, price went down, that was a bad treasury decision. Obviously, price is way up from there. Do you still do that? Or have you changed a strategy?

Do you take some in Fiat? Well, it's not so much take. Like, if we, let's say it was 100% in Bitcoin. And by the way, we do, Zaprite makes it super easy. I'm not sure who you're using. Zapri is great. I use them. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it just makes it so easy. And honestly, the 4% premium on Fiat makes my life easier as well, because it's a slight way of just pushing them towards Bitcoin, but also on the, on the Fiat side, I, you know, don't get dinged on the 3%, 4% whatever it is on the credit card processing. But no, and I don't know if this is the right strategy. Honestly, that's why it's so selfish of me. I do all of these summits just so I can learn and bring all my friends together and whether

it's Nashville or Austin. So we're going to do one on custody and treasury. We're going to do one on Bitcoin payments. We're going to do one on grassroots. I mean, it's just this is all selfish to me. But on the Treasury side, it's a loose like 50, 50%. And I don't know if that's the right. It's still a work in progress where it's just, what's my cash balance, what's my Bitcoin

balance? It's not something I'm like actively managing because I got a million other things going on. It's one of those like once a month, once every couple months, I'm like looking at my Bitcoin balance, like seeing how that's working and looking at my Fiat balance and looking out two months, three months of AP and then saying, okay, Does this feel right in terms of runway, if you will? Because I do think there's a non-zero freaking chance. We see this for your business, Danny,

what if there was a massive 80% drawdown, right? Like, my, I have a responsibility to Jack, Andrew, Rob, Julie, and most, as important, my entire membership community to stay alive. Like, so I'm not a traitor. I'm a Bitcoinser that has humbly an amazing job, an amazing platform to build, and that needs to stay alive and it needs to continue to be durable. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack Bitcoin at the same time? Well, by mining Bitcoin with blockware, you can. New tax guidelines from the Big Beautiful bill allow American miners to write off 100% of the cost of their mining hardware in a single tax year.

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I know you did the telehash thing. I want to hear the story because all I ever saw was the clip of you guys actually finding that block. But I want to hear the story behind what happened there. So the telehash, so I'm co-founder of Bitcoin Park, but I also co-founded the 256 Foundation with my very good friend in Bitcoin, Econo Alchemist. That's a whole long story on how we started it. But it was basically us trolling and we memed it alive, which is basically we want to dismantle. until the proprietary Bitcoin mining empire.

Because there is one, like with Bitmain and MicroBT and all these centralized players from the pools and so on. And there's a massive opportunity. There's a massive community that wants to do this. And we want to play a small role in supporting it. So, me, ECO and I, now Scott, the founder of the BidX project, he's involved on our podcast called Pod 286.

We were just joking one day. We're like, you know those old school, telethons where they call in and donate money, we should do a telehash where noobs, home miners, or big pub cos could point us hash rate and donate us hash rate. How cool would that be? So like anything we do, we memed it and then we did it.

And so there's a, we did it at Bitcoin Park the day before the Nashville Energy and Mining Summit this past year. And, yeah, it was this past year. And, dude, We got, on average, it was like 800 pet a hash. Almost, we, we clipped one X a hash because of one from one big, a friend, minor. But, I mean, our chances were, one in a thousand, Danny.

One in a thousand. Who gave you the hash rate? Can you say, or were they keeping it private? No, Marshall Long from. Oh, what legend. Yeah. I like Marshall. Yeah.

And so he pointed us the hash rate. He was there. He was helping us out. him and John Stephanopoulos, we were running our own node. You know, we had the, it was just like we were, we were a self-sovereign minor, full stop. Eco's sitting there on his computer. I mean, you got to go look it up on, I don't know how you search Twitter well, but you got to go look for this video. But I'll try and put the clip in the bit in here.

Eco, when it pans to Eco, when we hit the block, you can see through his glasses, his realization that we hit a one out of a thousand chance to hit. hit a block. And so for those folks that don't understand the significance of this, on average, every 10 minutes, a Bitcoin block is mined. Okay. On January 3rd, 2009, when the first block was mined, 50 Bitcoin was the reward. Then every four years, there's a halving where the, the coin base reward is cut in half. And now we're at 3.125 Bitcoin in terms of the reward. Oh, my God. I can't believe I'm I'm, wait,

but yeah, 881 423 is the block height because I got a T-shirt right over there and it just skipped out of my head. But at Blockheight 881, 423, we at Bitcoin Park

solo mined a Bitcoin block on the Bitcoin blockchain live on our live stream. That's insane. I mean, the people in the audience were going nuts. We were going nuts. I thought they were

trolling me, Danny. I had just stepped out, to be honest with you, because, dude, I host these summits with like 150, 200 people each clip, you know, coming. So I had to go just to the FedEx to go get more landiered tags. I come back in. Scott's like, we did it. I'm like, cool, we did what? Nothing. We've been here for eight hours and nothing's happened. He goes like, brother, we have done it. I'm like, no, you're lying to me. And, uh, It was, Danny, it was one of the, you know, you're, you're tall. So you probably paid basketball in high school and you're probably a really good basketball player.

I'm from England. We don't play basketball. You're probably a good footballer. But I joke that, you know, in like six or seventh grade is probably when I peaked in sports. My Bitcoin career peaked at Blockheight 8-8-1, 4-2-3. Hitting that block, I mean, I mean, it's pretty cool working at Bitcoin Party. and all this stuff, but I don't know if I'll ever, ever get by it. Yeah, that's absolutely insane.

So, but you get, I don't know what it was at the time, I don't know what the price was, but around 300kane Bitcoin. No, it was some hundred thousand bucks. I mean, I think it was, yeah, north of 100,000 at the time. What did you do with that money? Just have a much of the party? No, no. I mean, it's so funny.

But, no, again, a responsibility, because we actually had an established foundation. So to kick it off, I got to give Foundry a lot of credit. They gave us 0.2 Bitcoin just as a seat. They're like, you know what? Eco, Rod, wait, you guys are going to go all these different projects. You're going to start in support like from Scott and so on. Okay, here's 0.2 Bitcoin. And they're like, I'm like, you know we're crazy and we're going to try to dismantle your own business as well

and make it more competitive, so there's not as much centralization in mining pools. They're like, do you, we want to support Bitcoin. So, all right, cool. That's cool. Mike Collier, Jay, Emily, Melissa, the entire Foundry team deserves a massive shoutout.

And then Heatbit, Albus, you know, shout out to you, man. He came in big time just to support us as well. And the list goes on HRF. And then we had, so we had a little bit of support. So Eco and Scott were getting the first grant and so on. And we had, we were literally announcing our projects, Danny. We had five projects that we wanted to fund.

And, uh, and we're like, okay, well, if we had a block, we literally probably can fund all of them, uh, which we funded four out of the five. And, uh, then we hit the block. Honestly, you know, it was so crazy because it was like, we were doing an eight hour telehash and almost every hour. I was like, guys, let's just quit this. It's no point. Like, we're not hitting this block.

One out of a thousand. Eco's like, no, we stick to the plan. We're doing this. And I'm just like, man, okay, whatever. And massive props to Rob Warren, Eco, Scott, just sticking through it. And all the people that were in the audience, it was just so rad. That's incredible. What's your take on?

I've got my bit ax wearing away here. What's your take on like the state of mining? Because like it is the most centralized thing in Bitcoin, I would argue. But the stuff that Square are doing or Block are doing is really interesting. So I think we're at the beginning of a really cool renaissance as it relates to Bitcoin mining. And I may go on a bit of a tangent here, but hear me out. So I think Bitcoin mining is on a, the path to dismantle the proprietary Bitcoin mining empire is happening in a number of different ways.

So at the Pleb or grassroots level, it's happening with a guy like Scott, open sourcing the Bitaxe project so you can build your own home miner and just with whatever, one, two, three, tarahash, just mine Bitcoin at home without your own electricity. The probability of you hitting a block is zero, basically, but you know what? Have two blocks been found by a bit, axe, or more in the last year, maybe? Exactly. So it can happen. And you know what?

If enough crazy people get involved or get a future bit or just, this is the, The best way to learn about Bitcoin, in my opinion, is just to mine Bitcoin. You're running a full node. You're learning about Bitcoin. You're learning about deposit addresses. You're learning about mining pools. You're learning about everything.

And you're just like, wait, how does this work? Wait, why is there a firmware? Wait, why is there a firmware that I can't really adjust? Or how does this make sense? And so you got folks like the Scots of the world. I mean, this Ember 1 that we're working on is going to be badass. And there's so many other things. I mean, just the density.

What's the number one? I've missed this. So it's one of the 256 foundation projects. It's like the next evolution in the bidax world. I mean, there's a number of other bit axes as well, which is just freaking awesome. You got to bring Eco on. Yeah, I don't want to listen to. Because he should go into each of the projects and really tell you the story because going to that, like the state of the Bitcoin mining industry still continue

to be very centralized. However, you got a guy like Jack Dorsey, and I got to give Jack a lot of credit here. You know, as a CEO of a now Fortune 500 company, for him to be like, you know what, Thomas Templeton and team, Max Guys, Genia, Perry, I mean, the list goes on with that entire Proto team.

I'm gonna give you the air coverage. I'm gonna give you the funding, and let's go and see if we can't build a better Bitcoin miner. And by the way, let's not go and make it the same form factor. Let's reinvent what this could be. And so they were kind enough, by the way, to invite me out to their launch event. And so I got to talk with the team. I got to go actually see the product live. I got to like lift it. I got to do all of it with Scott Nico. And one of the things that struck me was like over this one two year period of time in development, they're like,

look, we went out to the field. We went out to the field and talked to minors on what they cared about. They're like, dude, we have to scrap in almost an entire minor because the, the, the, the hashboard is just kaput. Or the fan just breaks or whatever. And so it was like, well, what if it wasn't, what if you could just replace the fan easily, just like take it out, pop it back in? That's the thing that resonated with me so much, because I've been out to see Gridless's site in Kenya. I've seen a couple of them. And the big issue they have there is like, the fans just get full of bugs and flies and that they grows. The ability just to like rip that out and replace it is a game changer for them.

And here's the other cool thing, not to just, you know, boost them up. They went out and talked to it. Like for me, I'd be too enterprising. I'd be like, okay, who are our customers? Who are our biggest customers? Oh, the enterprise customer, like Clean Spark, you know, Riot, Corps. The irons of the world. Irons of the world.

Let's just go talk to them. No, they brought some of those folks, but they brought like my boys from Choya, who are the West Texas miners. They brought the Wilson Mining brothers, you know, that are out in, you know, the sticks in Iowa. They brought out all of these folks. And then they brought like knuckleheads like us

that are the whole miners that have nothing to do like with their world. But they're like, we want you guys to battle test this. We want you to question this. We want you to question the firmware, the, the fleet management software that we've developed. And it was just so dang cool. So it was cool to see at the scale that they were building it out. It was cool to see the support for the grassroots Bitcoin home mining community across the board.

I mean, Jack was there. He was giddy about just seeing it live. I mean, you could tell, and you've been around him enough and his team, like, when he sees it live, I could just feel how proud he was of the team that they're at this moment in time. And this is just a milestone, man. Everyone's like, oh, it's only 14 joules per tarahash, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, by the way, Bitmean announced, I think it was like nine jewels per tarasch, but that's in 2026. They haven't shipped it.

Okay, that's one. Two, how often do those come off, even the rack and they're busted? Okay. How often are they, you know, DOA after three to six months? What's the cost of the downtime and the replacement cost? So what's your all-in cost, your investment in that? Or you get one that's basically super durable or more durable and it's more easily replaceable. So, you know, instead of 90% uptime or your KAPX needing to buy, I don't know, I don't, I have no idea if this is the right strategy, but do you buy 10 to 20% over your already allotment because you need to have those miners, you know, on the shelf?

Because you have 5% always every month that go down for fix. And you need to just be running. So you're ripping and replacing all the time. So I think bringing on Eco, because he can even be more full-throated than I am about this space, you know me, I'm Bill the Bridge, I'm glass half full, I couldn't be more bullish on where we're going on all the fronts in Bitcoin. There's the people that are working in this space, even the haters. I mean, like even these freaking shell treasury companies, bring it. Like, everybody across the board, you know, Bitcoin is anti-fractors. And the more and more people that have eyes on it, that attack it, that build on it, it benefits

Bitcoin. It just, it truly does in my opinion. I think one of the cool things as well is I've not seen this, this minor or anything, but I've heard that there's like an AI agent on board that will tell you that like parts are going to, are like going to be retired in, say, three months, like the fans wearing out, whatever it might be. Yeah. And that like integration of AI into these machines seems really cool, especially in terms of downtime.

Like you can have the replacements ready to go, rip something out, put it in. and like there's really really no downtime. I know you guys have been doing a lot of AI stuff in Austin. What's going on there? So, yeah, no, I mean, on the park side, we incorporate AI as much as we can in terms of our operations and our workflow. We've been hosting at the Austin meetup,

Tony and Justin, whenever they're in town, or when they've been in town, they've been hosting a weekly or biweekly AI meetup. And I want to do more of that, to be honest with you, Danny, because I do think there's a convergence happening between Bitcoin AI energy. And I want to always make sure

that there's a conversation happening within open source freedom tech. Because, you know, and I'm guilty of this as well. I like to experiment with all of the AI tools from even chat GBT to, you know, Claude and so on. And a lot of them are close source. and I'm still learning what are the tradeoffs in using these tools,

right, versus an open source LLM and the tools around that. So always having that kind of a lens of, and by the way, every single week it feels like there's something new or something being launched and I'm just like blown away by the productivity improvements, by what my simpleton brain can even imagine, what are the possibilities. I'm such the left side of the bell curve where I'm like,

oh, well, this is our static process. And I'm like, okay, blow that whole thing up. And now what if we just concentrated on building like, let me give Marty a huge shout out. Dude, have you seen his videos that he's been producing? Yeah, they're incredible. They're really cool. And opportunity cost is a very cool app that he's just completely vibe coded. Vib coded.

He got a small team together. He had an idea and he shipped it. I mean, how cool is that? And that's why. And I haven't read this post by. Alan Farrington, he just emailed me something along like P, P doom equals zero, which I assume means like, you know, like stop being a doomer.

It's not happening. Like be an optimist. Dude, the stuff that we're going to build with having Bitcoin as the, as the monetary network in the apps, the applications and the tooling that we, we create is going to be fundamentally so freaking amazing. And I do think it converges back onto Bitcoin. And then I think it conversions back onto energy, different energy sources. When everyone's like, oh, we need to focus on renewable.

Bitcoin's the most renewable energy source, like, demand out there. And it's going to push the boundaries across nuclear, fusion, all of them. It'll expose the crap renewables because it'll just say, that doesn't work compared to these other areas. We want to buy it all up. And we will be an economic actor within here. You want us to be the first buyer, the last buyer, whatever that may be. And so that's my long-winded way of saying I'm just so freaking bullish about all of these different areas and continuing to explore these areas. I definitely want to get into that convergence.

But before we do, I'm curious how you're using AI. Because I remember last time we were hanging out in Nashville, we went and played golf and we were just talking for a while. And you're like a productivity maxi. It's unreal. You've got about 18 assistants. You're doing a thousand things at once. Like, how are you using AI? Because for me, it's definitely changed the way I work.

I think it probably saves me at least half an employee, maybe a full employee in terms of what it will do for me. And if you go back even further, like a few years ago on what Bitcoin did, we were hiring people that would just not be relevant in the business today. Like we had a, she was amazing, but we had a lady who was doing all the transcriptions manually doing transcriptions for us. We had people pulling clips. There's now AI tools that pull clips. And they've gone from being really shitty to being actually pretty good. And there's probably no reason to have that person. And like, how are you using it?

Yeah. So I would say in our, the key is our systems, right? So it's not so much what's a role or what's a something we want to go out. We have basically each year or now this year as well as the years go forward. We have like probably three to four major goals that we want to go and accomplish. And then we go, okay, what are our systems to go and accomplish those goals? And then where can we incorporate any type of workflow such that the first answer is, is can an AI agent agent do this or could some tool?

So one, for any small business owner out there, what I would recommend is worked well for us. I've empowered the team, not annual, but monthly. You have an unlimited budget to go and spend $10, $20, even $100 a month on any new AI tool. You just have to use it and report back on how you're using it. So it's not an AI tool, but we use loom.com. religiously and we loom each other videos all the time on how we're using.

Why is that? I've not used that. So it's a screen recording tool that basically records your screen. So like, you know, before in other jobs, people would call me, hey, I need to grab you for 10 minutes and talk to you about this idea. Now, when you're like, I'm on the golf course with you, I want to enjoy that round. That's four, maybe whatever, five hours instead of worrying about calls that are coming in and so on. And so when somebody's like, hey, I need some help around.

I don't know, feedback on this creative, just before I send out this tweet, there's a new style, I wanted you to get your eyes on. Instead of sending me a static and a text or an email, it's a loom with their context, and this is not an AI tool, it's just more of a productivity tool, of their thought process on it.

Then I can comment within that video on exactly what I want to provide feedback to on, or I say, great job, ship it, and we're rocking and rolling. And so asynchronous communication is a big thing, thing and culturally here that I want to install at the park or continue to install and lead by example is because, dude, Dan, we got, I have four kids. I got a six-year-old, a five-year-old, a three-year-old, a two-year-old.

I coach, I think now two or three soccer teams. I, like, I'm volunteering as, like, the cross-country coach, and I'm volunteering. My daughter wants me to go and volunteer for, like, lunch line because it's our first year being, like, the cafeteria lunch. And I'm, like, auto, yes, into all of that stuff. So, but I don't want to take away from any of the work that I'm doing. So it's like, all right, if this is unknown, how do I conform my life such that I want to prioritize this while excelling and maximizing in these other areas?

So I just make sure to develop the tooling around that. I mean, there's no like secret to go on the AI side. There's no like, oh, this is the three tools, and they're not really AI tools, the three like tools that I was telling Jack this this morning. I'm like, if they went away, it would really hurt my productivity in general. One is whisper flow, the voice to text is unbelievable,

especially on the computer. Two is Raycast. It's like a spotlight on steroids. Just the clipboard history. Again, I'm the left side of the bell curve. I have so much of my clipboard history. That is so much easier just to search for and then paste in there.

And then 30. is that loom, which for our team, you know, Rob just welcomed the new baby girl and he's working different hours right now. But we're continuing to ship, especially for this Imagine F, which is now 25 days away. It's like, it's unbelievable. Voice the text is amazing unless you're trying to talk to Siri when it's fucking terrible. No, Siri's garbage. This is where, you know, this is me being. It's insane that Siri's actually got worse. So when I, when it did like this AI update, I was really excited for it.

I was like, this is what an iPhone needs. And it's got worse. It was better 10 years ago than it is today. Heads need to roll over there. And they will. Look, this is what's going to happen. They're going to acquire whisper flow. Like yesterday.

That's going to happen. And it's going to be integrated. And it's going to be the default. Okay. That's one. Two, they're going to acquire Raycast. Their spotlight still sucks. Raycast is the best.

So I could see them easily acquiring both of those. Elysian or whatever it was, acquired Loom. I'm glad they're like leaving Loom as a standalone product. But just those acquisitions make a ton of sense, and they have a huge balance sheet. So leverage your balance sheet. You're not innovating at the workforce level.

You're just not. Like, again, I'm a bit-oiner. I look at proof of work. I don't care credentials. I don't care. You've got a product roadmap. I don't care. I look at the product that is in right now that I'm using.

And I'm saying it is garbage. So it's just they, they just got it, I don't know, other than acquisition is the way. Yeah, they've fucked it big time. It's funny. Like you've obviously got four kids. You're a lunatic. I've got one under two. And like one of the things that I can't figure out is what the world looks like for them when

they're, you know, hitting adulthood. Because like obviously my daughter's two now. I actually think that's in some ways a better age to be than being sort of 12, 13. Because I think knowing what's going to happen in five years is literally impossible right now. At least there'll be some time for this to kind of mature before my daughters at the age where she has to worry about having a job. But how do you see that? How do you try and position this for your kids? So I think about this deeply and almost every single day.

I don't try, like before it was, okay, maybe learn computer science, which I should have doubled down on and I was just too lazy. and not smart, so I didn't do that. But, you know, oh, the safe route was go get an accounting degree or go get a, you know, X, Y, Z degree. Gone. Gone. Well, gone in the sense that it's not a core, like, when you just got to rethink education across the board, in my opinion.

Like these alpha schools and all these different schools, that's the area. I'm not like that crazy active parent that's like, hey, tell me what you're teaching my kids, but I'm slowly creeping there to be, like, all right, tell me about the... I think you'd be a nightmare to be a parent at this school. I'm just, I'm more interested in the tools that they're using to help with the education

process because I do think each kid learns differently. And I think we're at a unique time where we can create unique learning plans for each and tailor them for each individual kid. But going back to that, it's literally anything that is super creative, I just want to them to do one other area and i don't know if it's going to be right but being able to confidently dictate and enunciate your thoughts into a clear thoughtful sentence prompt engineering is going to be a must have so my ability to go into chat jbt or whatever and prompt it to do whatever you may say hey draw me a uh this uh cartoon but if my daughter is like draw me this elaborate blah blah blah and

ads like, you know, a million different adjectives and knows how to talk and make the AI dance, that's a superpower for her. So one thing we do, I drive her to school every single morning is we call the AI thing on my phone a question mark. And it's like, what's a question we want to ask our friend today? And she's like, why do birds hang on electric poles or whatever she asked? I was like, oh, great question. Okay.

And then she's just talking with the AI. And then you can see when she tenses up, she's like, I don't know what to ask. I'm like, you just asked me that question. Just go ahead and ask it into the phone. And so you could see her confidence slowly just build up over time. And then she gets a little bit better. I mean, she's not great at it,

but she's just getting a little bit better, a little bit better. Then all of a sudden, you know, over time, when I don't know at what age they introduce computers and all this other stuff, she'll be like, well, why am I typing into this? Why don't I just talk into this? By the way, why are we, you know, asking a search engine that's kind of static giving me the written form back? Why don't I talk to this?

Why isn't it talking back to me? And that's how I get my answer. And by the way, I can tell it to provide me the answer too. So there's just a number of different ways where I'm like, you know, everyone's like, oh, we shouldn't introduce AI in schools and all this other stuff. That's insane to me. It seems like that's like banning an abacus or a calculating. Imagine banning the internet and you're like, hey, man, I need you to do this by hand with a written pencil. That is not a real world use case, even in the slightest.

I don't care if you're in the Amazon. You're not calculating anything if you're stuck in the Amazon. Like, just not. And so I would just say that that's where being an active parent, you know, it gives, you know, especially if you're a curious parent, which I am very curious about a number of different things. You can be more involved with your kids and you don't have to, it's not like bringing the devices in there where they're, you know, it's a bunch of screen time. You can make it more conversational and more family oriented. One of the things that I am a little bit dumber on on AI is what it does to the internet. Because I've seen like a few reports and like the number, the like amount of new content going on the internet, the reports vary.

But it's like 40 to 75% of it is AI generated. Oh, yeah. And you see all like that absolute AI slop that ends up on Twitter and it's just. so uninteresting. Do you think it makes the internet an unusable place? Well, for me, it doesn't personally because... But maybe in the future is what I'm really thinking here. I don't think so. I mean, I think probably people made that same argument when the dot-com era was born. It's like when prodigy and AOL, they're like, wait a minute, why are they talking about this is the dumbest things? This is just a bunch of slop and crap on the internet. And we can't even search for it really well,

or it's disorganized or, you know, even the AI clipping, right? At the beginning, it was really crap. Now it's pretty good. I do think you need a human in the loop. And that's where I think there's two spectrums in terms of hiring, to be honest with you. It's one is, like if you're mediocre, you're dead, like just straight up. Go find something. You've got to be, like, gives you so much energy and that you strive to be the best at.

Because if you don't find that, you're pretty. DOA in any of these things because over time, an AI agent or something will just take your work. But if you're the best at AI clips, for example, you're like, yeah, I know how to make Riverside to whatever dance better than anybody else out there. And I'm so energized, but I'll always be at the forefront of this space. I'm going to go kill it. And you can literally write your own check because you're like, okay, for one clip for Danny, I could help him make an extra 50,000 bucks.

What does that mean for his business? If I did 10 of those, cool, or a hundred of those? Great. Would that justify a $100,000 contract with Danny? And then I could go do that with 10 other Danys? Maybe. I have no idea. But that's how I would be looking at it if I was an entrepreneur.

But going back to the kid's side, this is why I think a parent that's an entrepreneur is so valuable is because I think the days of just being like, okay, I'm going to go to school, I'm going to work really hard, I'm going to go get a job at Google, or I'm going to go get a job at this company. Those big tech companies, they're not, there's no safety net anymore. I think the safety net is going to be in the entrepreneurial journey, and I think it's going to, not force, but it's going to be an amazing renaissance of small business owners.

I think it's going to be, and by the way, does not even have to be in a podcast or to a techie or to an influencer, absolutely not. you could go and take over a tire shop. And by the way, I'm very bullish on these freaking tire companies, tangent, because like every month, one of my tires is flat. And I'm just like spending $200 every month fixing them. I'm like, another life. If any of my kids just want to go to a trade school,

I will be the first to support them and be like, okay, go be the best tire changer guy, whatever it may be. But I think there's AI tooling within that workflow. Just think about those archaic systems. and the archaic way they communicate with their customer base, and you're introducing just new novel ways of working with them, new novel ways of working with your employee base, new novel ways of just selling your product or services.

Man, it is so, like, it does not even scratch the surface of what the future unfolds. So to your point, I couldn't agree more, a 12-year-old or even a 16-year-old, maybe in college, I'd be a little bit more nervous, and I'd always have my head on a swivel, even at, 40 plus years old that I am, I have my head on a big time swivel. But like my six year old, my five year old, my three year old and my two year old,

I'm just always constantly looking at them and saying, okay, what are the things that they're passionate about and continue to support, whatever that may be. I am playing zero bias in that whole game. Yeah, I do think those kind of blue collar jobs are, they're going to be the ones that are last to go. And one of my friends recently moved career from being like a very traditional normal career to he was like, I'd not. enjoying it, fed up, I'm going to just become a plumber. And this wasn't because of AI, but that's a

genius move. Like, AI will replace the job he was doing. But there's right now, until we get really good robotics, it's not going to replace your plumber. So, so can I, okay, uh, agreed. And then let me tell you about the convergence on something like plumbing or H-back that I think could happen. So, uh, and I got to give Tyler Stevens a shout out his company. I love Tyler. Yeah, he's great. You got you should get him on the pod too. He's amazing. just think about what if your home heating system was powered by Bitcoin miners so you're monetizing it what if the service folks knew that and knew how to service it and created an incentive model with you such that you didn't even pay for your unit so a unit that i think i paid six grand to replace

or maybe even 10 grand to replace my unit bothered me to no end uh what if the guy was like tyler was like hey man, it's $0 for you today. But the rev share model is I take 80% of the SATs, and you take 20% or whatever it is until I make my 10 grand back. And then it flips back to 80, 20 and 20% is basically your my monthly service fee. And by the way, now I have an incentive to come out to your home and going back to Proto Fleet. Proto Fleet is their fleet management software. So I think there is some AI tooling.

got to be careful about like throwing around AI all the time. Like AI does not need to be in every single freaking application. There's so many applications where I'm like, disallow the AI, disallow you. You're just like, I do not need you in this application right now. But that's one where it could be proactive to sense like, oh, there's an irregularity with the fan speed. And we've, you know, looked at our entire data set and notice that there's a common issue with that type of the way the fan is acting that we think in the next 32 days that that fan

could go down. You may want to go look at it. So it's a yellow right now. And then it becomes a red 10 days. And it's like, holy smokes, let's go replace that. But imagine like Tyler then sees that data. All you care about is it's the winter. I want to freaking heat my home. Okay. The heat's got to be on. I don't need to call you up, you know, when it breaks and the heat, you know, I'm one or two days out of heat. And now Tyler has an incentive to make sure your home is functioning at like the high highest possible usage as possible. So there's a really amazing convergence between Bitcoin, AI, energy use, open source freedom tech tools. By the way, all of these tooling that Tyler and Xergy could be using are all in these open source home mining tools. So like open source firmware

to control the miner, there's on a number of different fronts there. Yeah, for anyone that doesn't know, Tyler's doing heating with using Bitcoin mining. And I think he's now got it up and running at the space. He's. He showed me his rig there when I was over there a few months ago. It's a very cool project. Guys, there's like hundreds of Tyler's out there. And we're going to discover, discover thousands of Tyler's out there. I truly believe it.

The more we can talk about it, the more we got great folks like you guys, you, Danny, doing the What Bitcoin did podcast, other podcasts out there that shine a light on all the cool stuff that's happening in Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. People would be like, wait a minute, I own a duplex in Western Mass. Hey, how do I do that with my place? I want to, I want to heat my, I don't, screw paying the electricity bill. I already, it's the sunk cost $400, $500 a month, whatever that may be. And by the way, I have tenants in there that it's all in part of the rent because my rent is tough to, you know, I got to provide extra incentives.

I might as well just put a home mining, heat it with home miners so that even if they jack it up, at least I'm getting the sats from it. Yeah. It's very cool. But so everything you've talked about here is that convergence between Bitcoin AI energy. And you're doing Imagine If now in Nashville. Is it less than a month to go, I think? 25 days. Tell everyone about this.

What's going on? Yeah. So imagine if has been this idea. I've been thinking a lot about. Honestly, I've been really fortunate. I'm not a podcaster, but I don't know. But you've got three podcasts or something. Yeah.

I don't know. Matt and you are the podcasters. And you guys are crushing it. But I've been very fortunate to do one with Eco, Pot 2.56, which is focused on Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. And then I do a monthly Bitcoin podcast with Kathy Wood, who's the founder, CEO and CIO at ArkInvest. And that's called Bitcoin Brainstorm. So she's been very kind for the last almost two years now.

She's been like, Rod, you create and curate the audience. We will produce and distribute it across our platform. platforms and I'd like to be there for the podcast. I was like, heck yeah, Kathy. Let's rock. Honestly, I thought she would just do one episode. She's busy, blah, blah, blah. Dude, she has not missed one episode with me.

It's been unbelievable. I mean, and I've had, like, our Bitcoin friends, they range the spectrum, right? You know, you know, I've brought Luke on. I've brought Rockstar on. I've brought, like, everybody on. Not did not bat one eye. It's like, let's rock. Let's talk about this.

Let's talk about that. And, you know, I've had Eric Hursman on, Harry on, Odell on, Mollers on, everyone. It's been so freaking cool. Anyways, so, and she's been like kind of intercepting this in me, and I've been thinking a lot about it, because especially on the AI side, but really on the energy side

because that's been a big focus at the park. And I want to always bring the conversation back to the importance of free and open source software because sometimes it gets lost in the entire conversation. Like, hey, we're talking about treasury companies, this like next cycle or we're talking about XYZ and it's like wait a minute guys close source proprietary highly regulated modes are not the way bitcoin succeeds long term for eight billion people let's continue to bring it back to make this attainable to run a full node and the importance of that to custody

your own bitcoin and to use bitcoin the way you want to use it and so with imagine if i wanted to bring you know between 300 or 500 folks that are from capital allocators to policymakers, to entrepreneurs, to energy producers, and personally invite them to come and experience this. And it's the, it's a summit of summits. And Kathy's in, Dr. Laffer's in, Adam Back's coming, O'Dell's coming. I mean, just go look at the speaker list. There's going to be a number of speakers are going to be featured. There's going to be a number of speakers we don't even announce. We just announce them, you know, post facto. And that's, I think, what makes the park pretty special in terms of the experiences we create at the park we have a no photos and no social media

policy for this one uh probably on the stage level we'll obviously have photos and video and we'll do video recording um but i think i'm cautiously optimistic that this will be a really special one and i hope this becomes like a more of like a based ted if you're into that ted and if you're if you know the all-in summit which i think those guys do a really really really good job. This one is more focused on the freedom tech side. So if you're interested in Bitcoin, AI, energy and open source freedom tech, consider signing up and getting a spot. I think it's really cool because there's a million Bitcoin conferences now. There's probably quite literally one every week all over the world. But a lot of them are kind of the same format.

I think if you run for like a year or two, have a load of hype and then end up dying down a little bit. Like with cheat code in Bedford, we try and do things a bit differently. We try and make that a really fun event. The football is a central part of it. So we normally have like one day of conference. We might actually go to two this year, but we'll see. And then there's the football date where everyone just drinks beer, hangs out, has a good time. And I think that is the day that everyone enjoys the most because really people want to go and see their favorite bitcoins and hang out and just chat.

What you've done is kind of lean into the other side where this is just going to be education like a very serious full day of. content. I think that's the way these events are going to actually survive. There's obviously the big Bitcoin conference, which you worked on back in the day, right? That's obviously, that's here to stay. That's absolutely crushing. They get an insane amount of people. But otherwise, I think you have to differentiate yourself in some way. And I think this is a really interesting idea. Yeah, I would break it down into two areas. Again, we have one, or I have kind of a mental model, which is, how do we make this the best Bitcoin experience? and best Bitcoin and Freedom Tech experience,

you'll ever experience, right, full stop. Even compared to other Bitcoin parking experiences, how do we continue to make this the best experience? There's three currencies, in my opinion, time, capital, and reputation. You're using arguably one of your most important currencies, which is your time to physically come to Bedford, to Nashville, to Austin, wherever.

And I do not sleep on that in the slightest or take that for granted. So I'm like, all right, how do we make this to one day or two days, the best possible experience. And I look at it into two kind of simple takeaways. One is there specific knowledge, and specific is the keyword,

specific knowledge that I otherwise would not have attained without being here physically, right? And so it's like, okay, how do I get the best conversation going with Kathy and Dr. Laffer? Oh, Bittstein, for example. We're going to announce him as a speaker. I put Bittstein and Adam back together. that, you know, Bisting's only met Adam two times in his life.

I'm like, are you serious? So we were doing some prep work and so on it. And I'm like, Bitsing, this, I think this is going to be one of the best just fireside chats ever because your curiosity and your deep understanding of the philosophy, economics, and technical aspects of Bitcoin and the way you can probe and get that out of a guy like Adam back on stage, I think that could just be magic. And so I'm trying to create all these different magical experiences, you know, such that people be like, okay, I just,

just that one panel was worth the price of admission, worth my time, and my reputation, I always want to be around all these folks. And the second one is networking. Like, is like getting, this is a weird thing, and it's probably not the best thing, but, but I'm going to do it until, you know, I can't do it anymore, which is we curate the audience, as well because there is a price tag.

Our summits are $500 per ticket. We've had the same price since we started it in 2023 NEMS all the way up until every single summit we've done and we've kept the price the same ticket. And there's only a finite number of tickets there. For Imagine If, it's a summit of summits, I think four of these summits. So again, I'm the left side of the bell curve.

I was like four times five minus one. That's $1,999. Great. That's the price of this ticket. And I'm like, all right, what does the value need to, like, how can we justify this value in the audience seat? And that's why I want to make sure that you're when you're investing that capital, that is the best possible experience. Now, with that said, 90 plus percent of our meetups and workshops are free and open to the public, too, which is just, I love that because you get any person, whether you're a college student or a retiree, grandparent, that wants to learn about custody, that wants to learn, like, hey, I heard about this thing called Noster. Can you tell me a little bit more about this? Or they just want to be around like-minded

people. And I think there's a responsibility, going back to your Brisbane meetup, going back to the meetups in Austin, going back, like, meetups in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I think there's a responsibility of bitcoins that have the means and have the desire and energy to start a meetup and just to be that signal amongst their community. because I do think, especially when you go down the YouTube rabbit holes, down the Twitter rabbit holes, you know, I like Trump's doing a lot of really good things in my opinion, one of which I completely disagree with, which is these meme coins and then just putting out that grift.

It's like, when people are like, well, if the president's doing, there's just a lot of different noise and different things going out there that as Bitcoiners, again, more power to you. You can do, do you and do whatever you think is best. If you think what's best for Bitcoin is educating the populace on how to use Bitcoin, how to save in Bitcoin, and all the great benefits of Bitcoin, then I think, playing a role in this, whether it's starting a conference, starting a meetup, being an educator, I think is massive. Well, I think it's very cool. I wish I could be there this year. I'm not going to be able to make it, unfortunately. But next year, I will 100% be there. Heck yeah, man. And I'm going to be in Nashville in October, so I'm excited.

We've got to try and play some golf again. We could absolutely do that, man. All right. Well, Rod, I really appreciate the time. And this has been a lot of fun. Dude, thank you so much, Danny. The pleasure was all mine.