Kevin and Yana had one job this week - to make an agenda. We failed miserably

Kevin admitted there’s a to do list somewhere, but he doesn’t know where it is. Yana bravely volunteered to be the organized one for the day, which in practice meant having a few random thoughts. So we did what any responsible podcast would do. We hit record and trusted the chaos.

This is what came out of Episode 4 of Eavesdrop.

The Bitcoin soft fork that wanted to ban monkey JPEGs

Yana just got back from the Plan B conference in Lugano. Everyone there was still talking about the failed Bitcoin soft fork (BIP 110), which tried to limit how much data can go into a block. In plain words, some developers wanted memes and NFTs off the Bitcoin blockchain.

We argued about whether it was a bad idea or just a badly sold one. Yana heard from plenty of people in Lugano who said they might have voted for it if someone had explained it properly. Kevin thinks the problem went deeper. We both agree that calling something spam because of its file size is about as scientific as judging a book by its page count.

A market indicator BlackRock doesn’t know about

Kevin shared something no analyst will tell you. For years, you could tell whether Bitcoin was up or down by looking at Tone Vays’ haircut. The bowl cut marked peak bear market.

Tone is bald now. The oracle is gone. We’re all trading blind.

Bitcoin maximalists vs crypto maximalists

Stablecoins, the GENIUS Act, and TradFi moving into crypto. Crypto maximalists see a bigger market. Bitcoin maximalists see dollar depository receipts wearing a hoodie. Kevin calls it dancing with the devil to get the capital you need so you never have to dance with the devil again.

Yana brought a question back from the conference. If everyone knows your wallet holds 100 bitcoin, is that really so different from owning SpaceX shares? Does Bitcoin lose value when it loses privacy?

Kevin’s answer includes the time he was the villain of the day on a stage in Amsterdam full of hardcore maximalists. It also includes one of our favorite lines of the episode: Theory is really easy when you have a lot of money.

Is something about to break?

Yana lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, so she has trust issues with any institution that calls itself permanent. Kevin sees the US dollar as a case of mutually assured destruction. On air, we accidentally renamed it “mutually enjoyed destruction.” We’re keeping that.

Substack, Instagram, and lost brain cells

Why Substack is growing so fast?

Meanwhile, Kevin recently opened Instagram for the first time. The algorithm showed him, in this order, 3 butts and a man kicking a dog. He scrolled for 4 seconds and felt dumber. There’s also a man at the airport who disappeared into TikTok and never came back, and a WALL-E reference that Yana completely missed because she grew up behind the Iron Curtain.

AI made us faster. So why are we more anxious?

Yana confesses she recently asked Claude to put her restorative habits in her calendar. Deep breath. Face massage. Ask someone for help. Kevin explains why AI productivity can feel like a treadmill that keeps speeding up, and admits he yells at his AI: “I said ONLY change this.”

The parking lot rule

Yana once worked at ArcelorMittal, and she still thinks about something Lakshmi Mittal said: you decide to buy a factory in 15 minutes, then spend 6 months arguing about the parking lot. Kevin has his own version: the 7-hour meeting about whether the water cooler goes on the 4th floor or the eighth. And the Netflix version, where you fall asleep holding the remote.

We finish with luxury beliefs, theory vs reality, and why you still need idealists in the room, even if someone has to poke holes in their ideas afterwards.

🎧 Listen to the full episode above. Then tell us in the comments: what’s the biggest decision you made in 15 minutes, and what’s the smallest thing you’ve argued about for months?

If you like conversations that run longer than a hook, subscribe. We promise to make an agenda next time. (We won’t.)

Welcome back to Eavesdrop, the show where the mic is on, and Kevin and I say things we probably shouldn’t.

This time we brought a whole deck of conspiracy theories about money and power. Kevin was fine going in. He said he wasn’t sure he’d be fine coming out.

We started strong. Kevin still remembers exactly where he was when Macron got slapped on a plane, the way other people remember the moon landing. Then he came up with his own cover story for when things get awkward. He’s a lizard person sent to slow down the missiles in Iran. He says it’s been going great.

After that it got serious, sort of. Are all wars bankers’ wars? Kevin thinks Trump’s strategy is to ask for something completely ridiculous like Greenland, wait while everyone tries to figure out why he’s such a moron, and then walk away with what he actually wanted. He rates it “well played, if it was a board game.” I disagree, and I brought Professor Jiang theory that the Iran war isn’t meant to be won, it’s meant to last.

I also dug up my own master’s thesis from 2003. In Finland. The topic was how governments use military force to fix their budget problems. Jeffrey Sacks inspired me back then, Apparently I’ve been in the conspiracy business for 23 years and didn’t know it.

Some other highlights.

Why is Bulgaria on the list and Saudi Arabia isn’t? Kevin answered in one word. Money.

Europe just finished its 22nd sanctions package against Russia. Thank God, because the first 21 worked so well. Number 23 is already in the works.

Kevin has thoughts on the EU bottle caps that won’t come off. He travels to other countries now, opens a bottle, and wonders what third world place doesn’t have this figured out yet.

There’s the story of 4 Navy SEALs with ray guns that froze Maduro’s 200 guards in place and made them sick. Kevin knows it’s nonsense. He still felt patriotic for about half a second, and he’s a little embarrassed about it. His advice is to buy dollars, because nobody wants the ray gun guys showing up.

I came up with my own conspiracy theory live on air, tech bros versus bankers in a fight over who gets to print money. Trademark pending.

Then we asked whether democracy was a scam from the start. Kevin voted for a benevolent kingdom, or maybe letting a machine pick who’s in charge. He also thinks if there were an interspecies Olympics for messing things up, humans would take gold every 4 years.

And we finished with “own nothing and be happy.” Our version is own debt and pretend to be happy. Kevin read that people in their 20s don’t want pets anymore, they want plants, because plants are easier. So now somebody is buying a ficus on a 6 month payment plan and it dies in week 6.

Next time we might bring a Gen Z guest on, disguise their voice like on those old investigative TV shows, and argue with them for an hour.

The mic is on. Come eavesdrop.

First things first. The show has a name now. It’s called Eavesdrop, and you can take that literally. Kevin and I talk the way we always do, someone leaves the mic on and you’re just listening in on a conversation you probably weren’t supposed to hear.

Kevin and I finally did it. We’ve been ranting about the world to each other for a few months and decided it was time to embarrass ourselves in public.

The plan was that Kevin takes the dark side and I take the light side. That lasted about 10 minutes. By the end I was the one predicting Hunger Games and begging him to say something nice.

Kevin joined from what looked like a bunker and immediately complained he didn’t have a cat to stroke. Very Dr. Evil. Then he told us his grandmother bought a generator for Y2K because planes were going to fall out of the sky. They didn’t. Grandma kept the generator.

We talked about the thing everyone is quietly doing now. Someone sends you an email written by AI, you ask AI to summarize it, then you ask AI to answer it. 2 grown adults, zero thoughts exchanged. Kevin admits he’s been part of this loop. I’m not saying I have.

I also made a public confession. I’m addicted to online courses. If I sign up for one more, please call social services. In my defense, the last one taught me to do my tax declaration in thirty minutes, so that one stays.

Halfway through, Kevin read a Trump tweet saying anyone who calls it “artificial intelligence” is an enemy of the state. So congratulations to us, we became enemies of the state on a live stream.

Then it got properly unhinged. Kevin once went on stage at Bitcoin Amsterdam and told a room full of Bitcoiners that Bitcoin isn’t a layer one. He survived, but it was Amsterdam, so nobody really remembers. We came up with a new theory of who created Bitcoin (a government side project that lost its funding, so some guy finished it on his own). It was the first lab leak. And we reviewed Europe’s energy strategy and concluded we’re diversification maximalists. We diversified ourselves right out of Russia, China and the US. For good.

The compliance people will enjoy the bit about why asking AI to polish your letter to the regulator might be the fastest way to confess everything you were trying to keep quiet.

Does it end on a positive note? Kind of. Kevin’s take is that AI is like a drill. Hand it to the wrong person and he puts a hole in his head. Hand it to the right one and he builds a house. The mic is still on.