Host Paul Spain is joined by financial advisor Darcy Ungaro (Ungaro & Co.), as they explore the latest tech news, and take a closer look at the cryptocurrency landscape. Darcy shares insights from his experience as a financial advisor and discusses the balance between being your own bank and the risks involved with cryptocurrency. The conversation also covers crypto firm Ledger co-founder survives kidnapping, the emergence of open-source AI platform DeepSeek, making waves as a potential game-changer in the AI landscape but are there hidden dangers? Plus, we also delve into future of TikTok, Open AI’s Stargate Project and Trump’s pardoning of Silk Road’s creator Ross Ulbrich.

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Special thanks to our show partners: One NZ, 2degrees, Spark NZ, HP, and Gorilla Technology.

 

Episode Transcript (computer-generated)

Paul Spain:
Hey folks, greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain and great to have Darcy Ungaro joining us again on the New Zealand Tech podcast today. Darcy, how are you?

Darcy Ungaro:
I’m very good, Paul, how are you?

Paul Spain:
Great. Look an exciting one today. There’s some pretty gnarly stories and topics to delve into massive news. Wiping a trillion dollars or more off the US share market sort of values with DeepSeek’s are one on the artificial intelligence front and then range of other topics. But I’m also very keen to delve in with you as the investment man on what’s happening in the world of cryptocurrencies. We’ve just in last there was over the weekend actually news news broke around David Belland the, the co founder of, of Ledger who make these, you know, cold storage wallets for, you know, for crypto. There were 80 law enforcement officers on the, on the case and they were able to, to find, find him and he has survived. A little bit worse for Weir though I believe he lost at least a finger in the mix.

Paul Spain:
So. Yeah, and some other bits in there as well. Now before we delve into that, I should say a big thank you to our show partners, of course to One NZ, 2degrees, Spark, HP and Gorilla Technology for their fantastic support of the New Zealand Tech Podcast. But maybe we start on talking about the investment world and maybe just give listeners a bit of an overview of where you fit into the big wide world of tech and investment and so on.

Darcy Ungaro:
Yeah, it seems like increasingly technology and wealth, or especially new wealth, there seems to be this convergent convergence going on where if you understand some of the language, some of the trends, some of the things that are happening in the technology and the finance place and where they converge, specifically cryptocurrency, but also investing in traditional companies that are utilizing AI and other forms of technology. You can kind of get in when things are kind of unknown and people are still wondering if it’s legit or not. And so yeah, how I sit is that maybe I’m gullible, maybe I’m open minded, maybe I’m onto something, I don’t know. But with crypto in particular, I’ve been talking to my clients as a, as a financial advisor for probably over seven years now, just over seven years around at least being open to allocating a little bit of their wealth into crypto. So I’m probably not alone these days, but for quite a while I was one of, one of the weird ones that was actually for this sort of thing and feeling a lot more validated in this bull run, I’ll tell you that much. But it does go in cycles. So I am dreading the day where the price of bitcoin pulls back and the whole sector goes quiet for a few years and then I look like a Muppet again. So.

Darcy Ungaro:
Yeah, yeah, but that’s kind of my role is I talk to people, help them to develop strategies to get wealthy for the new world. And that means investing in managed funds using investment properties and then alternative investments like crypto and even precious metals.

Paul Spain:
It’s good, I think, to really consider the, the, the role of these things. And of course, technology changes everything and continues to do so. And I look back on varying scenarios where people have sort of suggested ways of investing or stocks and so on. And I certainly had my own dabbles and experiences with how things can work depending on where you jump in on trends and so on. But yeah, I think probably a key thing is that you take interest in securing your own future by getting involved in investment. It’s sort of my, you know, my take, even if it’s just dabbling with kind of toy money and so on in very small amounts and educating. And I think, you know, you’re quite a strong proponent of that as well. Right.

Paul Spain:
Of getting your feet wet with these things and getting involved even if you’re not into it. Yeah, Putting, putting in any real levels of investment and it’s education.

Darcy Ungaro:
Right. And you mentioned, well, maybe it was before we hit record the, I guess the benefits and the dangers of being your own bank. And I think with cryptocurrency, it’s one of those asset classes, unlike the other investments in your portfolio where you can take custody of it in a more direct fashion. And that’s why I think that that story with one of the Ledger co founders is so intriguing because Ledger is a cold wallet, which helps you to self custody your own Bitcoin. And I guess if someone knows that you’re into bitcoin or other types of crypto that have gone off lately, then yeah, I guess it does make you a bit of a target for bad actors. And I certainly don’t want to get my fingers mutilated. So thankfully though, I lost all my crypto in a boating accident just last summer, which is just amazing. So I don’t have to worry about this.

Paul Spain:
Well, interesting that you, that you mentioned that. I thought about this for a long time and it’s not like I had a million dollars or anything sort of sitting in crypto. But you know, I had a little bit of bitcoin there and when I saw that there were these crypto funds starting up that are actually really easy to get into through shares ease and so on, I thought, well, crypto fund isn’t perfect cause you’re gonna have some extra layers that you’re paying to somebody else. So there’s some level of downside to that. But I like that thought that it’s not on me to be my own bank. And so basically I cashed in my bitcoin or my fraction of a bitcoin as it was in my case. And I’ll see what happens as to whether, you know, whether it makes sense to put that into a. But the fact that you’ve got all these things you can get to through sharesies and other mechanisms, through the share market, you can get involved and that’s what’s gonna be gives you another option.

Paul Spain:
And I guess this plays into probably what we’ve talked about before. As more time goes on, there’s that potential ramp up where more people get involved in cryptocurrencies in varying ways as it becomes more mainstream. And for something like bitcoin where there’s a. Yeah, there’s a fixed amount of the asset, you know, unlike I guess most currencies, you know, you do expect that to more than likely keep growing over time. Although it can be pretty inconsistent and pretty volatile at times. Right.

Darcy Ungaro:
Like anything. Right. It’s always a rocky road before you get that takeoff. And I think if you’re interested in getting good performance like good returns with relatively speaking low risk, which might sound a little bit strange to people, but when you have a really, really tiny little bit of bitcoin or type of crypto, then you have the opportunity of getting a really, really good return. But you’re not sacrificing all of your wealth. Right. So if you cashed in your, your bitcoin and your waiting for the price to correct, for example, and then you put it back into one of these funds, the benefit of the using a fund like an exchange traded fund is that you’re not your own bank. You’re not going to get your fingers mangled by, by some French assassins.

Darcy Ungaro:
You are going to get the benefit though of number go up. And I think when we’re honest, a lot of people that are involved in bitcoin are actually interested in the number going up like the price appreciation more so than the other utility. The other things that it can do for you, like being your own bank is a really important Thing for a lot of people, especially on the, the libertarian spectrum, that, you know, independence from government and ability to actually custody your own wealth. I think that, well, that can only be done in a, in a self custody bitcoin wallet. However, we’re starting to hear more developments where there can be exchanges, like in kind exchanges. So if you were an investor in a bitcoin exchange traded fund, hopefully pretty soon both ways, maybe, I don’t know, you can exchange it for real bitcoin.

Paul Spain:
Right, right.

Darcy Ungaro:
And I think that that’s what will make a big difference because a lot of the concerns that people have with the gold ETF is a bit of an analogy is that there’s a lot of question marks around. Does the gold actually exist because it’s not allocated gold? Right. And so with bitcoin, is it just in one big pot and no one knows or is it at one specific address and you can actually withdraw your bitcoin out? That makes a big difference. And so, but yeah, but for I think 90% of people, an ETF to give them the benefit of price appreciation is all that they will ever benefit from, all that they’ll ever see the benefit from. But I think the more you get into it, the more you really appreciate these other qualities. That’s what I found anyway.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s, it’s an interesting, interesting aspect. And what are you seeing in terms of the trends for I guess, securing your bitcoin? We had the news earlier in the month around cryptopia, now this as I guess a cryptocurrency trading platform. But also people were leaving their cryptocurrency currency sort of stored on the exchange. What we heard, liquidators have successfully returned something like 400 million I think in New Zealand dollars in terms of value of cryptocurrency back to original account holders. Now they were hacked sort of six years ago and obviously they were able to actually return a reasonable chunk in part because the value of crypto has moved up over a period of sort of five, six years. Right. So there’s that aspect. But you know, we’ve certainly seen the sort of the dark side of crypto.

Paul Spain:
I saw a stat a while back and you might know the number better than I do, but it was the percentage of I think bitcoin that is considered lost. And I think it was somewhere between 10 and 20. 20%?

Darcy Ungaro:
Yes. I think it’s like 4, 4 to 5 mil is my recollection of that. But it’s massive. Right, so, and this is people that didn’t copy down their security passphrase. So when you’re, you’re, when you have your own digital wallet, you’re, you’re probably should back this up by just saying, hey, this is, this is kind of why it’s so important, right? If you have a wallet app installed on your phone, or you might use ledger or a cold wallet that you unplug from your device, you should have your passphrases, which is string of words, and that can back up your wallet if you lose the actual device that it’s sitting on. And so a lot of this lost Bitcoin is probably because of that, that they maybe had a device stolen or lost or damaged, and then their passphrases weren’t actually copied down or they were copied down, but they were discovered by somebody else or, and it’s not that hard to do like, like, you know, my boating accident. But if you think about how to rebuild, like, if you wanted to make sure that you’re doing things the best way, the gold standard way, you’d actually use a multi sig wallet, where your crypto wallet now is just one of a few keys. So you’d have three keys and two of them have to sign each time you transact.

Darcy Ungaro:
So it’s like having somebody else being forced to co sign with you at the bank before you send any money. And that has a lot of benefits because if somebody wants to abduct you and chop off your fingers, if you don’t give them your passphrases or your crypto, you genuinely don’t have it because there would be safety measures so that the other person wouldn’t sign on your behalf if you try to give them some money. So I think a lot of this stuff though, people learn the hard way. I know I’ve learned the hard way. I’ve lost money on Celsius, which isn’t exactly the same as cryptopia was, but that settled last year as well. So, you know, these things are quite tragic and a lot of people have lost a lot of money. But the good news is, is that eventually sometimes the money comes back. And for a lot of people that have been in this space, the people that are most, the people that are worse with crypto are the ones that sell too soon.

Darcy Ungaro:
Sorry, Paul, that’s you, isn’t it? So I just insulted you on your own podcast. Sorry, Ben. The people who, who you need to be fearful of are your is yourself, not other people. And I think the irony is with cryptopia, with even Ross Albret, who was recently Freed from, from prison, he was forced to hang on to his bitcoin during an entire cycle or more. Right. And that can actually be the best thing for us is to actually lose your wallet but then discover it later on and the price is you just add another couple of zeros behind it.

Paul Spain:
I solved my once, it was that it was actually at a reasonable price, but.

Darcy Ungaro:
Oh, good, good.

Paul Spain:
But you know, comparatively speaking, I’m just.

Darcy Ungaro:
Going to make you, make you regret it now. You’re going to go, you know, buy some right after the show.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, if it were to double today.

Darcy Ungaro:
Yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Look, there’s a lot more we can delve on, into, on this and, and maybe we’ll, you know, we’ll, we’ll look at some, you know, future episode and we can delve a bit more in. But yeah, I think it’s good to tap into these topics and then there’s non fungible tokens, NFTs we’ve spoken about in the past. They’ve, they’ve kind of been, you know, largely kind of come off the boil but you know, who knows what the future could hold on some of these other things that use the blockchain. I’d like to jump into DeepSeek because this is really sort of the big topic at the moment, hearing sort of left, right and centre from people that are very curious. DeepSeek, for those who haven’t seen the coverage, their, I guess you call them a ChatGPT competitor, their AI tool set, it’s been getting a lot of attention because it’s open source. It seems to be better, you know, on varying metrics than the other AI models that are out there cost a fraction of the other models for them to train it. It’s.

Paul Spain:
If you want to pay for certain aspects of it, it’s a fraction of the price. So yeah, by opening up and making available a platform. And it’s not as though what we had for AI the last couple of years hasn’t been pretty cost effective and capable and so on, but there haven’t been too many models that are open source that you can then take and do your own stuff with as well. But of course there’s a level of caution when it comes to these platforms. You’ve heard a bit about DeepSeek. What stands out for you? There’s obviously the investment aspect where we’ve seen was it over a trillion dollars sort of wiped off the US Stock Exchange, which yeah, for many they won’t feel too pleased about that one particularly and I know we have Listeners who invest in the likes of Nvidia, you know, who were, I think hit the hardest because that’s one of the other aspects of Deep seek. It doesn’t, you know, require the same sort of, you know, processing and, you know, that I think has some people sort of scratching their heads as, you know, how could deep seek be, you know, be so good? Does this make sense? Is it all true?

Darcy Ungaro:
The one thing that, that really jumped out at me at the beginning and I’m still scratching the surface. I downloaded the app this morning and I was starting to play around with it and the voice just feels different. It feels like you are talking to somebody else. And if you’ve been using Chat GPT or GROK on X for a while or Copilot, it has a certain, you know what it’s going to answer back and you know, its biases. And so when I was using.

Paul Spain:
So when you’re saying voice, you’re not talking about speaking to it, using it.

Darcy Ungaro:
No, sorry, just, just a tone.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I, I’ve used it, but I hadn’t noticed a voice.

Darcy Ungaro:
No, no, I have voices in my head. But this is something different, Paul. Those voices are still the same. But that was the, that’s the first thing that jumped up at me was, was moat. And I think if you’re investing in anything, you kind of want to consider what the moat is like if there’s a castle and it and there’s this body of water to stop the competitors from coming in and copying what you’re doing in technology. That must be so hard because especially if there’s any flavor of open source because you can copy and paste and then just modify it. But when Nvidia was kind of. And there’s been other allegations of like round tripping and stuff like that that Nvidia has been engaging in.

Darcy Ungaro:
And I think that when you are looking to invest in anything, you do kind of want to think what time frame will this company be popular for? Is, are we dealing with an apple here? Are we dealing with something that is going to pop real quick? And a lot of people have been calling this a bubble for a very long time, I think all of last year and just waiting for a pin to prick it. Is this the pin? I don’t know. But it’s interesting that they can do so much more with a fraction of the resource bootstrapping it and using chips that are older than what they thought because they see it seems like the incumbent is really good at perfecting what they do already. And then the People that are on the outside breaking in are really good at kind of building it from the ground up, which means that if there’s a blind spot or they’re going down a wrong path, then that’s a, that’s a massive risk that you never really know until there is a competitor that kind of pops up. And so in that sense, I kind of like what, what’s happening here. Rather than wait for things to go on much longer and then a bigger bubble to prick, a bigger correction to occur, it’s best that this happens right away so people can understand just how, I guess, fragile this growth really is, how easy it could change into becoming a ubiquitous sort of like, commodity like the Internet. AI could just be just. It’s just an ingredient.

Darcy Ungaro:
You can’t really control it or own it. It just is. And I think maybe that’s where things go and that’s why ultimately it’s a race to zero. I’m not suggesting that that’s true, but, but there’s a risk that that’s where this goes, is that it just keeps on deflating and it decentralizes. There’s just thousands of copycat versions of this now that it’s so cheap to produce. But there’s a whole bunch of other concerns which you alluded to before we hit record, that, that I think are things that I never thought about.

Paul Spain:
But yeah, so, you know, when, when we look at Feed, you know, feeding data into any sort of AI system, that’s. It’s really, really important to think about, well, who are you giving this data to? How’s it going to be stored? Is it secure if you’re sending it to the company directly? And of course, we know that there are some legal implications for data going to Chinese companies from a government legislative perspective, and data might be accessed by government and you would probably not. Now, that’s not just exclusive to China, but I think the, you know, there are some differences with, you know, the regime in China compared to democratic countries. But, you know, these are still things that we need to, that we need to consider regardless. But I think, you know, even more so when you’ve got more of an authoritarian regime and you’ve got particular legislation that is, you know, public. And of course, we’ve seen these varying pushbacks against the likes of TikTok. We’ve got, you know, Temu out there where I’ve been reasonably critical of in the media in the past, you know, their prior app to temu from their parent company, they had that app banned from, you know, from The Google Play Store at least and then hey, they reshaped it and they had another go and it got through and now that’s become a really big place for commerce and so there are considerable challenges there. And if we look at say the open source code and I think people will argue, well it’s open source, we can see what’s in there, it’s all good.

Paul Spain:
But of course most of us don’t have the time or even the expertise to look at open source code and work out whether it’s safe.

Darcy Ungaro:
Just put it into Deep SEQ and just say hey, is there anything wrong with this open source code that I need to worry about? I think it would be that honest.

Paul Spain:
There are platforms that will help you with that, but of course you’re talking about a reasonably large code base. So I’m sure there will be people that will look at, look at the open source, you know, code and you know, do their own sort of evaluations. But yeah, we have seen, we have seen issues in the past and you know, sometimes that is, you know, from entities and organisations that we would, you know, we would trust to do, to do good things. But there have been, you know, know there have been back doors, you know, put into, to, to well known platforms and, and, and duped people. So you know, we have to be, yeah, we have to be aware of that.

Darcy Ungaro:
Is, is that though, are we at risk of. I guess because there’s, there’s this thought that there’s good governments and bad governments, right? And China bad watch out for everything they put out there because they’re going to steal stuff from you and all that sort of stuff. And meanwhile we believe blindingly we just trust our own governments and assume that they would never do anything like that. But do you think that there’s, there’s a little bit of that going on where it probably no government is, is squeaky clean here. Are we too concerned about the Chinese? I’m playing devil’s advocate by the way. Yeah, but are we too concerned with it with a Chinese thing?

Paul Spain:
Look, it’s, it’s important to actually step back and to look at the bigger picture, I think. Yeah, you do have to recognise that governments are made up of people. People do some dumb things and there’s also a broad mix of ideologies and approaches that differing governments will take. And at any one time when you look at a government that’s in power, usually they’ve managed to get or combined with, in New Zealand with our system, the total government, when they got into power, a little bit over 50% that thought, hey, they’re gonna do the best job. And a fraction under 50% that thought, no, they’re not. Right. And then that changes under them once the government’s in place. And I think the latest I heard around our current government is ye.

Paul Spain:
If there was polling or if we had to vote today, we might well have a very different government. Right. So, yeah, there’s a lot of aspects that come into play there. And if you look back on sort of the stuff that Edward Snowden leaked and you know, in fact, it’s been suggested that he should be pardoned along with this other chap who’s recently sort of been pardoned as well. So, you know, yeah, Edward Snowden was, was able to reveal a lot of information that came through. You know, he’s now, what, Russia based. But if we look at some of those things he’d leaked, you know, one of them was that the United States nsa, National Security Agency, they, they were, yeah, were behind some, you know, pretty, pretty bad things. And you know, one thing that they got involved in was a backdoor in the RSA encryption which, you know, was an important mechanism and a trusted mechanism for data encryption, communications and so on.

Paul Spain:
So yeah, look, these things will happen and I think, good. You, you wouldn’t find a government in the, in the world that you could say squeaky clean. Everything that they’ve done is, is all perfect and, and, and above board. And you know, you, you usually, these things will come out, you know, over time, often sort of years and years later. You don’t necessarily sort of see it at the time. So yeah, there’s some wisdom to, to how we, how we approach these things and you do have to keep them in balance. And I think, you know, every individual, every organisation has to make their own calls. You know, for me, I’m, yeah, I’m pretty cautious about say, TikTok and Temu, and I think we’ve got them both blocked on our home network, but there are ways around it.

Paul Spain:
And look, you know, I’ve certainly been having a play with deepseek. So, you know, I’ve got the app on a device. I’ve, you know, I’ve created a login and have done some experimentation and yeah, looks, it looks pretty capable.

Darcy Ungaro:
What do you find that it can do that’s better than, say, ChatGPT?

Paul Spain:
I probably haven’t done enough there where I’ve done a direct comparison to be able to say, hey, this is a lot better. But it does seem to return, you know, when you when you use, you put a prompt and use it, it seems to be pretty snappy. The results seem to be pretty good. Sure. Don’t go and ask it around, you know, Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Darcy Ungaro:
So that. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
And so on. Like, you know, of course, naturally I was going to try these things out as one of the first thing I, you know, things I did and you get back a, you know, a. And appropriate sort of, can’t help you with that sort of sort of thing and its version of a response. So that in itself, you know, is somewhat understandable because of where it comes from. What is probably hard to know is could there be more sort of subtle underlying, you know, elements where you ask for information. And it is somewhat impacted by the different ideologies between say, you know, what is, what is acceptable to the Chinese Communist Party and what might be accepted in more, you know, democratic countries. And so you could find things subtly there over time that you don’t necessarily realize but that your content actually is a little bit, you know, tweaked in a, in a direction or another. So there are those sort of aspects.

Paul Spain:
But, you know, again, every platform will have its elements of those, those things based on, even if, you know, you, they’ve had this, is it correct, the Internet, you know, campaign where there have been, you know, complaints around. You ask an AI or you ask Google for sort of certain information, you know, who’s the best footballer in the world or this or that, and it veers towards, you know, the male sports person because that’s largely what would be found on the Internet. And so, you know, we’ve got to realize that AI platforms are drawing from the bulk of the information on the Internet. And then you may be dealing with particular things that they’ve built in. And that was, of course, an area where Google came a bit unstuck when they initially launched some things there and they tried to kind of tweak things in a direction without really considering how, how that might actually mess up some of some of the results. So really hard to get this stuff right. And just, you know, I think it’s important to be informed. It’s also important to experiment and to get a feel, you know, for some of these technologies and to make your own judgment calls.

Paul Spain:
But yeah, I think a lot of the commentary see, you know, at the moment is, hey, you be very careful what sort of data you put into this new platform. And you know, I certainly don’t know too much around, you know, the individuals involved in, in deep seat, but we’ve certainly you know, got, got some considerations there because of the jurisdiction under.

Darcy Ungaro:
And that’ll play out over time, right? Like over time that’ll either be apparent or not that there were some bad actors and information was being siphoned off. But it’s. That could take a while and the damage could actually be quite significant. So. Tick tock teemu. Deep sea. Yeah, but it’s. This seems to be what’s happening at the moment where the west is just being served up more and more humble pie by the east in terms of hey, anything you can do, we can do better.

Darcy Ungaro:
Even just driving in today, looking at all these SUVs and cars that I’ve never seen before, increasingly these are Chinese copies of really popular cars in every class there is. They’ve been studying and they’ve just been doing the work to figure out how can we rebuild it better. And you’re just seeing it everywhere and so a lot of American, you know, exceptionalism I guess you’d call it, or just the sense that their pride, that they, they produce excellent results all the time, that, that must be really hard seeing their enemy. Right. And, and you know, it’s, it’s silly but a lot of this is political, it’s nation state. There’s a lot of information war going on. And it’s hard to know when you’re just a pleb trying to make good decisions about security and investing and keeping our kids safe. It’s really hard to filter through the sometimes what feels like propaganda and what’s genuinely innocent.

Darcy Ungaro:
Good fun, right?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, oh yeah, it’s, it’s incredibly difficult and I think, you know, unless you have. And there are some significant downsides to when a country tells you who you can and can’t kind of deal with, buy products from, use their services and so on. But actually it can be really challenging to work out what are the appropriate calls. And look, I’m sure we will see New Zealand businesses that are leaning in on this technology in the same way we’ve seen people build an income stream off of TikTok. Right. There are definite pluses, especially when a technology comes through that is so disruptive because of its price point and its capabilities and so on compared to whatever else is out there. But possibly there’ll be some pain. As a flip side to that now a couple of other things just to touch on.

Paul Spain:
Oracle and Microsoft in the news is potentially in talks to take over TikTok. We will see how that actually plays out. But certainly suggestions there that Oracle has outbid Microsoft to acquire things. But There’s a bunch of unknowns there in terms of the information that’s been shared to date. And so these things obviously have some investment sort of implications as well. Is it Oracle, is it, is it with Larry Ellison? It’s not Oracle who’s actually going to have that ownership. What does the picture look like if that does go ahead? And there’s a few different ways that could play out. And then OpenAI, they’ve made their announcement of their Stargate project with Trump.

Paul Spain:
So that was kind of a big announcement there from Sam Altman, CEO at OpenAI and others that were there and talking about US$500 billion to build out this new artificial intelligence infrastructure, which is just mind blowing numbers in order to give capabilities to OpenAI. There’s a whole bunch of unknowns there. I see Musk sort of throwing stones at in terms of how much money they actually have at this point. Microsoft is sort of saying, well, we’ve got 80 billion to put in, but that’s into our own infrastructure, which of course is what OpenAI have used in the past is Azure for these things, but you’ve got Softbank in the mix there, Oracle and Nvidia. So between them there’s a fair bit of money that can be thrown around. And then the last piece of the puzzle I’m sort of curious around your thoughts is Trump pardoning the Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. Now, this was, I guess many referred to it as a drug marketplace because it was an online marketplace on the dark web. So, you know, there’s not too much on the dark web that’s, you know, in terms of things being sold that you would consider to be normal and legitimate.

Paul Spain:
Right. This is going to.

Darcy Ungaro:
Yeah, I don’t have a banner ad on there and neither does your business. So.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. So like, have you considered what does this mean and why might Trump be you know, helping this, I guess, illicit tech founder? Because, you know, he is a tech founder. It was just that his startup was not one that was a place for legal and legitimate things to take place.

Darcy Ungaro:
It’s hard to know whether or not his ideology happened before his business plan did, but his, and I’m referring to his libertarian bent and he has quite a strong one. And I, I also do for full disclosure. And so I can kind of understand the, just the excitement within the, say, libertarian or the, even the bitcoin community because there’s a big overlap there. Being really excited that he was freed because it kind of feels like it’s a battle won against the state’s influence, telling us what we should and shouldn’t put into our bodies. Right. So that was like, the underlying mission, I guess, is that, hey. Or his philosophy is that the government shouldn’t. If people want to inject with themselves with all sorts of illicit drugs, so be it.

Darcy Ungaro:
There’s going to be harm to that. And I personally don’t condone that, but of course, that’s. That’s their right. Meanwhile, if you’re going to make people put other types of medicine in their bodies, then that’s also wrong. And so I think when Trump got. Got voted in, there was a certain. There were certain elements in society that cheered. Even if they hated him as a person, they still cheered because it felt like there was a victory against the state that was encroaching.

Darcy Ungaro:
And so this is cool because he followed through on a promise that he made before. Now, obviously, he was trying to pander towards a group of people to get their vote. It worked, but he followed through. And if he follows through on this, then he might follow through on other things, like the strategic bitcoin reserve. Hopefully, he might follow through on, like, actually doing some pretty significant things. And so, like, I’m kind of torn because I know that you should follow the law, but in this instance, maybe the law was defunct, the war on drugs for, like, since Nixon, really, the war on drugs has been a failure by all accounts, really expensive. And a lot of people have lost years in prison for no. No real benefit, just retribution.

Darcy Ungaro:
And so seeing that makes one think maybe there’s going to be a new approach to this sort of thing. And maybe the actual cost on society will be reduced because of the incarceration cost. Yes, there’s harm on society because of drug use, but if you’re going to see freedom money reign, there has to be a free marketplace. And that’s what Silk Road was. It wasn’t selling the right things, for sure, but it was a free marketplace. The free market reigned. And the free market is very efficient. It’s the best that we have.

Darcy Ungaro:
And so, yeah, free market money belongs in the free market. And I think if he gets out and he starts, I guess, going on podcast tours, which he probably will, he’ll write books, he’ll. He’ll be a bigger voice now, which will add more momentum behind all of the philosophical drivers behind bitcoin, which. Which I’m quite fascinated by.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, okay.

Darcy Ungaro:
I have a few thoughts on that, but it’s still early days.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that sounds like quite a. Quite, quite a deep rabbit hole to go down so we will save that up for the future. Anything else that you want to sort of share before we sort of wrap up the episode?

Darcy Ungaro:
That’s a dangerous question to ask me, Paul. No, I think touched on some pretty cool things. Right?

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah, well, let’s leave it at that today. So thanks, everybody, for listening in and of course, a big thank you to our show partners, Gorrilla Technology, One NZ, HP, Spark and 2degrees. Really, really appreciate their. Their support for keeping us going over the years and their support here in 2025. So that’s fantastic. And look, I’m curious if you’ve got thoughts on some of these topics we’ve delved into. You may well not agree with some of our thoughts.

Paul Spain:
That’s not uncommon. So do feel free to get in touch and, yeah, you’ll find myself and NZ Tech podcast across the varying social media and streaming platforms. So do feel free to get in touch if you’ve been listening to the audio, of course, make sure you follow us on the. On video platforms such as YouTube. We stream from my profile, Paul Spain on LinkedIn. So if LinkedIn’s your thing, then follow me there. All right, well, that’s us for this week. We’ll catch you again on the next episode next week.

Paul Spain:
And thank you again, Darcy. Where do people track you down online if they’re looking for some help on the investment front and from a. A bit more of a techy perspective.

Darcy Ungaro:
So Ungerodarcy on X and LinkedIn, I’m probably. That’s probably the only place that I kind of contribute most regularly. Best place to connect with me is on LinkedIn, actually.

Paul Spain:
Great. Well, thank you, Darcy, and thanks everyone for listening in. We’ll catch you again next week. All right, see you.