The Conor Chepenik Podcast

What if the biggest problem with politics isn't the politicians, but the system that keeps producing them?I sat down with Shu Yang, the software developer behind Elections Simplified, to discuss how AI can help voters look past campaign ads, understand complicated ballot measures, inspect politicians' actual records, and follow campaign money.We also discuss why we constantly update our phones but rarely reconsider the rules governing our institutions, whether technology can make governments more transparent, and how Bitcoin might change the incentives for cooperation. We also explore what happens when powerful AI models run locally and how self-driving cars might change the world around us.Links:My X: https://x.com/ConorChepenikMy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorchepenik/Shu's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shupresents/Elections Simplified: https://electionssimplified.com/Chapters:00:00 Introduction: Meet Shu Yang00:40 Why Shu Built Elections Simplified02:09 Judge Politicians by Actions, Not Campaign Ads03:53 Verifying Records and Fighting Misinformation05:20 Making Ballot Measures Understandable07:32 Follow the Money: Campaign Finance and Super PACs10:39 How AI Handles Nearly 500,000 Records13:31 Funding, Privacy, and the Mission15:26 Can AI Improve Government Accountability?18:28 Why Your Local Vote Might Matter More Than You Think20:28 Lobbying, Incentives, and Political Power22:49 Trust in Institutions and the Future of Government25:17 Why Government Is Like Outdated Software29:39 Change the Rules, Change the Outcome30:20 Bitcoin, Fiat Money, and Better Incentives34:25 AI as a Creative Tool: Music and Building35:45 AI Fear, Media Narratives, and Independent Thinking39:28 Energy, Data Centers, and Human Flourishing40:53 AI Safety and the Case for Local Models44:28 Open vs. Closed AI: Autonomy and Hardware Limits47:09 AI, Liberty, and Real-World Risks48:16 Self-Driving Cars and the Future of Transportation50:34 Robotaxis and the Second-Order Effects of AI52:46 Where to Find Elections Simplified54:01 Musical Outro: Democracy.exe Needs an UpdateThis conversation includes personal perspectives and does not endorse candidates or parties. Verify voting information with your official state or local election office.

Israel Muñoz has been in Bitcoin since 2013/2014, when he and a business partner began experimenting with using Bitcoin as the back-end rail for international remittances. The first time he moved value across a border without a bank, permission slip, or intermediary was the moment the rabbit hole really opened.More than a decade later, Israel is the co-host of Build With Bitcoin and spends a lot of his time thinking about the businesses, capital, and infrastructure being built around Bitcoin.In this conversation, we get into how much Bitcoin has changed over the last decade, why actually using Bitcoin is so different from merely reading about it, and why better UX may matter more for adoption than making major changes to the base protocol. Then we get into one of my favorite parts of the conversation: incentives.Israel explains why he believes venture capital has drifted away from some of its original purpose, how easy money helped create a culture of raising capital, burning it, growing at all costs, and worrying about profitability later, and why Bitcoin-native founders may approach company building very differently.We discuss lean companies, profitability, Bitcoin on corporate balance sheets, reduced dependence on future equity rounds, and what happens when capital once again has a meaningful opportunity cost.From there, we explore what Israel sees as a powerful convergence between three technologies and resources that could define the next decade: Bitcoin, artificial intelligence, and energy.We also talk about Mita TechTalks, why getting Bitcoiners together in person still matters in an increasingly digital world, self-custody, collaborative custody, security tradeoffs, avoiding ideological dogma when protecting your Bitcoin, and the responsibility that comes with truly owning your money.Finally, I ask Israel the question I like asking every guest:If you could ask Satoshi Nakamoto one question, what would it be?His answer: Why 21 million?Stick around after the conversation for an original song inspired by the episode.Israel:X: https://x.com/isramunozpBuild With Bitcoin: https://buildwithbitcoin.xyzMita TechTalks X: https://x.com/MitaTechTalksSwan Vault:https://swan.com/vaultTIMESTAMPS0:00 Intro0:22 Israel’s Bitcoin rabbit hole4:02 How Bitcoin has changed in 10+ years6:42 Seeing Bitcoin’s value under capital controls9:19 Signal vs. noise in Bitcoin13:10 Bitcoin’s UX problem17:54 Can Bitcoin fix venture capital?20:08 How easy money changed VC23:01 Building profitable Bitcoin companies26:45 Bitcoin, AI & energy28:09 Energy creates abundance30:43 Why meeting Bitcoiners in person matters32:20 Mita TechTalks36:31 Self-custody and responsibility38:37 Collaborative custody40:18 Avoiding Bitcoin security dogma43:06 “It’s your money”43:58 What would you ask Satoshi?44:38 Why 21 million?45:59 Where to find Israel46:54 Original song inspired by the conversation

GMONEY joins The Conor Chepenik Podcast for a wide-ranging conversation on Bitcoin, soft war, self-custody, Nostr, AI, memes, tokenization, and why he believes humanity is living through a global Digital 1776.We discuss GMONEY’s path from Ron Paul, gold, and questioning the Federal Reserve into Bitcoin, his experience at the Las Vegas shooting, why he views Bitcoin as a peaceful power projection technology, and how self-custody gives individuals a new kind of authority in cyberspace. From there, we get into fiat incentives, the spiritual and moral dimensions of money, the role of memes in information warfare, Nostr and zaps as proof-of-real social media, AI as a deflationary force, stablecoins, Counterparty, tokenization, capital markets, Satoshi, and the peaceful opt-out path Bitcoin opens for the world.The episode ends with Digital 1776, a song inspired by the conversation.Follow GMONEY:X: https://x.com/GMONEYPEPETelegram: https://t.me/bullionbitcoinbsNostr: https://primal.net/p/nprofile1qqsqh73r2f3q9x7axf0my6pkv7v9ph3fgetm33dtxtlaccxlw862g2cjllrg6Rugpull Radio on Rumble: https://rumble.com/playlists/N6IFHf2pPm81776.love: https://oplanbtc.com/1776Follow Conor:X: https://x.com/ConorChepenikWebsite: https://www.binmucker.com/Time Codes:00:00:00 Intro00:00:12 Who is GMONEY? Ron Paul, gold, Bitcoin, and Rugpull Radio00:04:19 The Las Vegas shooting and GMONEY’s search for truth00:06:39 Bitcoin as a global Digital 177600:09:51 Why peaceful opt-out beats kinetic revolution00:13:44 Bitcoin, zero-sum fiat games, and win-win incentives00:23:47 Memes, media, and Bitcoin as the truth machine00:30:34 Nostr, zaps, proof-of-work social media, and the dead internet00:37:17 AI, open source, Bitcoin, and the coming deflationary bomb00:50:41 Trump, numerology, 1111, and Bitcoin’s strange coincidences01:00:33 Stablecoins, tokenization, Counterparty, and capital markets01:08:01 What would GMONEY ask Satoshi?01:10:43 Where to find GMONEY01:12:29 Digital 1776 song outro

Sean is my boy from Boston and a great fellow Bitcoiner. He's building Rythm.xyz, a last line of defense for Gmail and Outlook that whitelists known senders and lets strangers pay a Lightning micro-payment to land in your inbox marked as paid. No custody, no money transmitter risk, just LNURL and Cashu tokens doing God's work to bring sound money to the masses.We spend real time on the two filters missing from the internet: identity and cost. Without them, you get an infinite cat-and-mouse game with spammers, AI slop, and eventually a government ID attached to every click. With them, you get something closer to how physical mail works. Intent and honesty, because sending something costs something.From there we go into open-source AI versus proprietary frontier labs, why metered intelligence is the real dystopia, and Sean's ecosystem analogy for what fiat did to civilization. We close on agency. Jeff Booth, Ayn Rand, Satoshi, and why nobody is coming to save you.I hope you enjoy listening to this rip, as much as I enjoyed engaging in it.Timecodes:00:00:00 Intro and Sean's Bitcoin origin story00:03:01 Unlearning broken money00:05:56 Trojan horse for freedom00:09:00 Rhythm.xyz and the last line of defense for email00:17:28 Identity and cost, the two missing filters00:22:25 Panopticon, deepfakes, and paywalling attention00:35:54 Open source versus proprietary AI00:47:04 Metered intelligence and the Tesla JP Morgan parallel00:53:13 Diluting the calorie, the ecosystem analogy01:00:09 Agency, Ayn Rand, and the question for SatoshiCheck out Rhythm: https://rythm.xyz

Conor sits down with Alex B, Head of Ecosystem at Ark Labs, to talk about how Ark and Arkade are rethinking Bitcoin's off-chain architecture, why the term "layer two" is going to fade from the conversation, and where Bitcoin credit markets are headed.They get into the technical weeds on how Arkade uses a client-server model with co-signed spending conditions to move Bitcoin off chain without the liquidity and routing headaches that Lightning deals with. Alex explains how Arkade's scripting environment goes beyond simple payment channels, opening up more complex contracts, lending products, and multi-asset swaps, all while keeping unilateral exit to the base chain as a guarantee.The conversation shifts to stablecoins on Bitcoin, specifically why having USD liquidity native to Bitcoin infrastructure is the missing piece for a real credit market. Alex breaks down the difference between how USDC has found traction in international business settlements versus the organic ground-floor adoption Tether has seen in developing economies, and why Ark Labs is talking to smaller stablecoin issuers in different countries to plug into Arkade's platform.They also cover AI and developer tooling: how Alex's team is using agents internally for massive productivity gains, how their CEO vibe-coded an agent-to-agent payment platform running on Arkade, and why the developer experience for crypto integration needs to stop requiring engineers to become blockchain experts. Alex makes the case that agents are downstream of humans, not sentient, and that the real near-term use case is compute purchasing, not autonomous trading.The back half gets into Nostr's potential beyond social media, specifically as a communication and coordination layer for Arkade servers, distributed order books, and trading applications. Alex is honest that the social media use case hasn't pulled him in, but he sees Nostr's simplicity as a natural fit if a new generation of Bitcoin application companies actually materializes.They close on Satoshi, open source, and why Bitcoin is much bigger than any one person.Time codes:00:00:00 - Intro00:02:17 - How Ark and Arkade work technically, client-server model, co-signed spending conditions, comparison to Lightning's hub-and-spoke evolution00:05:49 - Off-chain contracts with operators, unilateral exit, reactive security model00:09:18 - Trade-offs: finality, batch settlement, mempool congestion risk for low-balance users00:13:19 - Ark as protocol vs. Arkade as implementation, why servers don't natively interoperate (Lightning bridges the gap)00:17:16 - Layer two abstraction, Muun Wallet UX as the gold standard00:18:34 - Tether investment, growing the team, Bitcoin credit markets as the underestimated narrative of the cycle00:22:55 - Why stablecoins on Bitcoin matter: USD liquidity for lending, onboarding asset providers, connecting siloed OTC desks into shared on-chain order books00:27:34 - Stablecoin nuance, on-ramp to Bitcoin, permissioned vs. sovereign trade-offs00:30:05 - AI and agents: downstream of humans, not sentient. 00:35:47 - Bitcoin's UTXO model as inherently more secure than Ethereum's account model, ByBit hack as case study00:38:13 - Model degradation during peak usage, deterministic vs. probabilistic code, context management pain00:44:59 - Bitcoin and AI both grounded in proof of work and energy consumption00:48:32 - Deterministic code is dead, the creativity explosion and productivity sink trade-off, ADHD and shiny object syndrome with LLMs00:53:39 - Nostr: not the social media clone, but distributed order books, coordination layers, bounty systems, censorship-resistant infrastructure01:00:38 - The Satoshi question: "Where does he store his private keys?"Where to find Alex and Ark Labs:https://arklabs.xyz https://arkadeos.com https://x.com/BergeAlex4 https://x.com/ArkLabsHQFollow Conor:https://x.com/ConorChepenik  / conorchepenik