Gun to each of your heads. Which three signing devices are you picking for a 2 of 3 today? Max opens with "three cold cards, only the old firmware though" and gets it out of his system, then answers properly: SeedSigner and two Passports. His reason for the short list is worth more than the list. "I've not tested any other bits out, and I only wanna say what I'm comfortable with using myself." Q goes Passport Prime, a Trezor Safe 7 and a Blockstream Jade Plus, with the same caveat on the two he has not handled in person. The part that actually matters is the same from both. Sparrow as the coordinator, and never all three from one manufacturer. https://ungovernable.network/shows/freedom-tech-friday/answering-your-questions/

"It always used to be Start9 until my laptop nearly set on fire. The battery warped. Actually it was at Black Coffee's house" Asked to pick one self hosting node and only one, Max goes Umbrel, and he knows it is not the cypherpunk answer. "I fucked around with Start9 a lot. I fucked around with a lot of other nodes over the years. And the only node that I've never had a problem on ever is Umbrel." He destroyed a Start9 node twice running a Monero node on it and had to rebuild from scratch both times. Same setup on Umbrel worked straight out of the box. Q's caveat: the licence still is not truly open source. As a product though, hard to fault. https://ungovernable.network/shows/freedom-tech-friday/answering-your-questions/

"Honestly, I've just been so bored with Bitcoin and crypto for, like, a year now. Not building on it. I freaking love Cake Wallet and all the things we're getting to do. But actually engaging with and learning about the space, it's boring." Q had just said the local AI scene feels like 2017 Bitcoin to him. Everyone out of the woodwork, tokens per second doubling, the excitement back. Seth's answer was "oh my god, yes", followed by an admission most people in his position would keep to themselves. Max,s pushback: the last eight or ten weeks have not been boring. Maybe not exciting in the right ways, but not boring. https://ungovernable.network/shows/freedom-tech-friday/answering-your-questions/

The actual prep that matters Lasting local friendships. People you can count on — and who can count on you. Small town > big city. Food and energy sovereignty https://ungovernable.network/shows/freedom-tech-friday/resilience-is-a-verb/

"I think I saw that if you do the lease to own, it's like $230 a month or something like that, which Claude Max is $200." The "I can't afford local AI" objection, answered with a direct monthly comparison to the bill you are already paying. A Mac Studio Ultra with 256GB is Seth's long term target for most people. And the gap is smaller than it looks anyway, because plenty of you were going to buy a MacBook Pro regardless. It is the difference between a base spec and a bumped one, not zero to a hundred. https://ungovernable.network/shows/freedom-tech-friday/is-ai-freedom-tech-part-ii/

Q: "I genuinely think in the next twelve months we're gonna have Opus 4.6 or slightly higher level intelligence available for mobile phones." Seth: "I don't think I would argue with that." The reasoning is densification. The 27B models that already match Opus 4.6 class need roughly 24 gigs to run, high end phones already carry twelve to sixteen, and a quantisation that dropped this week does nearly the same job in 12. It will not be as fast as hitting an API. Same intelligence though, running in the background on your phone, all the time, with no limit to hit. https://ungovernable.network/shows/freedom-tech-friday/answering-your-questions/

March 1967, Charles Manson walks out of prison. August 1969, the Tate LaBianca murders. In between: an illiterate two bit criminal with no training in pharmacology, psychology or persuasion builds a cult that will kill on command, with unlimited LSD, guns and a parole officer who drops every other parolee to look after him. Police come onto the ranch, get told there are guns trained on them, and let him go. Nobody claims they can prove a link but the odds of all of it being coincidence have better entropy than a ColdCard. https://ungovernable.network/shows/specials/mk-ungovernable-what-do-you-reckon/

The Clarity Act failed 49-50 on 15 September, eleven votes short of the sixty needed to end debate. Lummis had already warned that failure leaves no realistic chance this decade. Max is not mourning it, and the argument is worth hearing in full. Whatever passes, whatever they say, if they want to put someone in prison they'll find a way. A new act, a new emergency, or they plant evidence. Two days after the vote the CFTC sent its own crypto market rulemaking to the White House for review. It was sitting ready and waiting. This stuff is never going to be accepted by the powers that be, because it gives the individual more freedom. All of it is theater. https://ungovernable.network/shows/bitcoin-brief/breach-season-continues/

"They're not gonna do crypto, it seems, at all. Not Bitcoin, not Monero, nothing. I don't understand how they could fumble that." Signal is looking at replacing the phone number requirement with a one time payment of around five dollars. Seth's point is that the people most likely to want an account with no phone number attached are the exact people who will not hand over a card for it. Even if Signal cannot link the payment, the card company still knows. Q's read is that it is still a step forward. Signal knows you paid them, but not which account is yours, and they cannot see your messages either. Not perfect. Better than a phone number. Both of them land in the same place. Just take Lightning. It is low hanging fruit. https://ungovernable.network/shows/freedom-tech-friday/answering-your-questions/

"You get something you can run twenty four seven and not have to care about limits, not a five hour limit." The benefit of local AI that never shows up in a benchmark. "You don't have to do this stupid bursty work where you do a little burst work, you hit your five hour limit in one hour, and then you have to wait because everything that you're doing depends on that." Seth's point is that the shift is as much habit as hardware. Stop working in bursts. Leave it running while you sleep. https://ungovernable.network/shows/freedom-tech-friday/is-ai-freedom-tech-part-ii/

The part of covid that broke something permanently was not the fear. It was being told things that made no sense and watching people you respect accept them anyway. Wear it to your seat, take it off to eat. A piece of cloth will do it, you don't need a proper mask. There was no logic there. There was no sense outside control. Max is honest about what it left him with. He now treats most things as a threat until he can verify they are not. It is a decent stance and it is a miserable way to live. https://ungovernable.network/shows/specials/mk-ungovernable-what-do-you-reckon/

Operation Midnight Climax was a real CIA sub-project, run out of safe houses in New York and San Francisco. George Hunter White had prostitutes bring men up to the apartment and dose them with LSD without telling them. He sat in the next room behind a two way mirror and watched. He had a portable toilet installed in that room so he would not have to get up and stop drinking. That is not the speculative part of the episode. That is the documented part. https://ungovernable.network/shows/specials/mk-ungovernable-what-do-you-reckon/

1954. Lackland Air Force Base. A girl is taken from a car and killed. An airman named Jimmy Shaver is found nearby, dazed and covered in blood, insisting he remembers nothing. Then Louis Jolyon West, a psychiatrist tied to MK Ultra, is left alone with him in his cell. Shaver comes out with a full confession and a motive nobody ever corroborated. As soon as he is inside, he goes back to saying he did not do it, and he says that until the day he is executed. It is not "tell me what you remember". It is inserting memories. https://ungovernable.network/shows/specials/mk-ungovernable-what-do-you-reckon/