Create, Own, Scale AI, & Bitcoin for the Solopreneur | Bitcoin 2026

Hello. Hi everyone. I'm Jordan Herbs, solopreneur and AI educator and this is create own scale AI and Bitcoin for solopreneurs. So let's just get this out of the way. We're Bitcoiners and we're probably familiar with this kind of cycle. They print money with this inflationary regime and then it leads to some kind of economic turmoil. It's an excuse to print more money. And this is why we Bitcoin because throughout all of this economic turbulence, Bitcoin continues to rise in value. And if you're measuring products or services against Bitcoin, your wealth is always going up. And so, Bitcoin is a very powerful tool in these times. But there's another very powerful tool that I don't believe many people really register as much, especially in the Bitcoin space, and that is the power to start your own business from scratch and start generating cash flow. So, a quick show of hands. Are any of you business owners, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, freelancers, and other people? We have a job, an employer. Uh, how many of you use AI in your daily work? There's probably even more hands that aren't going up for that. And I believe the future of all work, whether you're a business owner, whether you're an employee, is bring your own agent. Harnessing AI technology to coordinate labor on new scales never before possible. So, let's talk about this in terms of Bitcoin and sovereignty. As we know, when we're renting services, they're not ours. So, we keep our money in a bank, it's not our money. But when we own our keys, we own our coins. The same goes with running a platform for your business. Uh you're using Squarespace or Wix or something, and what about they don't what if they don't want to be your uh service provider anymore? Well, they can just cut you off at any time. But meanwhile, we can run our node. We can run BTC pay software from a Raspberry Pi in our house and start accepting payments or sending payments in a peer-to-peer global network uh that is completely decentralized and immune to this kind of financial transaction censorship. Uh take it a step further and now we can run open- source AI agents from our laptop. And if you have the right kind of laptop, you can even run local inference and you can run LLMs from the comfort of your own home. And we'll get into that more in just a little bit. So about 20 years ago, a book was published called The Sovereign Individual. And they they predicted the rise of a new economic actor in the digital information age. And this new type of economic actor would be able to transcend jurisdictions, governments, and states, and go where they're treated best. And this is because they can bring their wealth, they can bring their business, they can bring their livelihood. And we've been seeing that in the last decade with the rise of the soloreneur, one-man businesses, a creator for example, you have your YouTube channel, you generate attention, you have a product, you funnel that attention towards. And these solopreneurs are digital nomads. You can live anywhere, you can go anywhere. But how many solopreneurs are actually Bitcoiners? I don't know. But I believe this leads us to a new age where we are sovereign prneurs more than ever before. we can now be in control of our stacks, of our tech stacks, of our infrastructure. So, let's talk about what a soloreneur does from the ground up. Well, you pretty much do everything. You run your whole business. You are the marketing department, you are the the operations department, you're everything. And this is a lot. And a lot of times when you're building your business, you realize you're actually building yourself. You're developing yourself uh just as much as you're building your business. So in my experience in my in my latest iteration of being a soloreneur about a year and a half ago I started over. I said you know what aentic AI is so important I need to figure out what these AI agents are all about. So I started a YouTube channel just to share what I was learning and what I was learning was value to others. It turned into a school community the AI captain's academy where now people come and learn AI agents from the ground up learning the concepts and the foundational content. So, you're not really dependent on certain tools that might go extinct next week. Then, I was recently offered a full-time position as the head of user education at Venice, which is a privacy focused all-in-one AI company. And I took that job. And so, why would I mention that in a talk about solarreneurs? Well, that's because I believe we're heading into an age where the line between business owner and employee is going to be blurred and it's going to disappear. Because what's going to be important for anyone trying to make an income out there, especially digitally and even in the real world, is learning how to harness AI. I made this decision to go full-time from a place of power. I didn't need the job. I had my solopreneur business, but it offered me a situation that was optimal for me. I liked the idea. I liked focusing on just AI education and making content as opposed to marketing and operations and all the things required with running my own business. But what's key here is making these decisions from a place of power. Bitcoin gives us sovereignty over our money. AI gives us leverage over labor. We could call that production as well, but that sounded a little too communist for me. So, let's just call it labor. The goal is freedom. We want independence in this life. That's probably why we're also drawn to Bitcoin. We see the number go up amidst the economic turbulence in the world. We want to direct our life on our own terms, on our own time, and we don't want permission. We don't want to have to ask permission. We give ourselves the permission. We're sovereign individuals. So, if we zoom out a little bit and we look at this sovereignty stack, as I like to call it, as a soloreneur, we have our sovereign money at the ground floor and then we need to learn to harness machines in the middle. And then with those two building on top and simplifying the equation, we eventually create the formula for independence in our lives. So what is this machine leverage? Well, first off, it's not just software. We think of AI on our computer. You can buy a robot on Amazon for less than $1,000 right now. Give it an API key and teach it to do things in your house. Okay? Now, maybe they're not that good yet, but it's coming. So AI is not limited to software here. It this is machine technology here. machine intelligence. And when we are harnessing machine intelligence, we are no longer business people. We're no longer humans that are selling our labor or our time. We're selling our creativity. We are strategists now. We're selling our taste, our judgment, our direction, and our vision. We're really getting to experience the full the full spectrum of human creativity here because we no longer have to do the heavy lifting. And that leads us to our formula of the day. Create, own, scale as a soloreneur. So, if you have never started a business before or you've never been a soloreneur, here's a little bit of what the grind looks like. You build, you share, you sell. So, what are we building? Well, we're using AI to vibe code real products. With AI now, we can get so much done in so little time. We can iterate on concepts and ideas we have and we can just make progress faster than ever before. We can use AI to build networks. We can build AI to develop new skills both for ourselves and agentic skills and we can explore new ideas. And once again, most importantly, we can iterate as we go. Meanwhile, we want to share. As solopreneurs, we have a personal brand. This personal brand helps market your your product and also yourself for maybe that job offer that comes one day. We want to build in public to provide value to others. We want to be real and vulnerable in the age of AI slot, more important than ever. And we don't need to be experts. We just need to be two steps ahead of someone else that's trying to solve that same problem. Then we take those solutions that we discover through our problem solving and we create offers, high ticket offers that require our time. We c we charge more for those low ticket offers that scale with our audience. They don't cost as much, but then as your audience scales, you're making a lot more money from these lowtouch offers. Not quite passive income, but pretty close. So, this is a flywheel. When you do these things together, you have a spinning machine that starts making you more money, building your audience, and expands your own skills and your own knowledge and experience. This is create. But then as Bitcoiners, we want to own we want to own our stack. We don't want to rent everything. So in the the traditional traditional paradigm up until this point, we use a platform, Stripe, whatever site we use to host our website and we have our payment processor and they could just say no in between us and the client, in between us and our customer, there could just be a nope, cutting off service. But with Bitcoin and AI, we can now leverage a self-hosted infrastructure where we don't have to worry about the threat of being shut down and we can save money on the subscription fees. AI closes the technical gap. We've always imagined like the cyber funk vision, the cipher punk vision of self-hosting our own infrastructure. Well, now this is possible for everyone because we can run an AI agent on our node. So this is my Umbrell instance. I run a full Bitcoin node. I open up an agent in the terminal and I say, "Hey, I want a lightning address zapordiner.com. I don't want to use all the primal albi. I don't want another domain. I want my domain." It just sets it up for me. Then I don't know how to do these things. I didn't go to school for systems administration. It sets up everything I need to run the jordan herbs.com lightning address. And boom, now I have my lightning address at my own name. It took a couple hours. I don't have any experience. I'd never even run a lightning node before. >> Welcome to predict. The world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct, your prediction, your edge. Dual bits predict where everything is a market. >> Pretty cool, right? We can now own our infrastructure because AI allows us to control it and manage it. We don't have to be engineers anymore. We can actually use Bitcoin to a new level, which blows my mind the more and more I think about it and what this means for the world. So, self-custody your Bitcoin. run a node on a Raspberry Pi at your house and you can accept payments all over the world. One day, our laptops will even be powerful enough to run self-hosted intelligence, run these LLMs from your home. You don't even have to rent that. You don't even need the internet to use this intelligence. We're heading into an age of the sovereign prneur. And the more we can strive to own our full tech stacks, the more successful we're going to be in discovering freedom for our lives together. Bitcoin and AI allow us to own and control our full stack. So, finally, scale. We're owning our infrastructure as we create. How do we scale? Well, we're learning, building, sharing. We're attracting people to us. We're discovering the problems they need to solve. And we solve them for them. We productize that. We sell it. And then we save our money in Bitcoin, right? Obviously, we dollar cost average into Bitcoin. What happens every four years with Bitcoin? the number magically starts to go up a lot more than it was four years ago. This is a great opportunity to scale. So we can level up every four years by deploying that capital in a manner that fits your strategy. Whether you could you want to hire someone, you want to invest in GPUs or infrastructure. Maybe you want to quit your job and go all in on yourself. Every four years, you're given an opportunity here as long as you're strategically stacking your Bitcoin. And who knows, maybe within three or four cycles, you'll be tasting that freedom that was once such a distant dream. I know personally that's kind of how it works for me. It's taken several cycles, but you don't just stack the Bitcoin as a savings vehicle. You use Bitcoin cycles as a way to deploy, grow your business, develop yourself as a person. And ultimately, what we're left with is the magical wonders of compounding returns. Bitcoin is compounding returns over time in a fiat world at least. The more you learn to harness AI agents, the more that your capabilities of creation are going to rise with time. And then as you run your own business, you learn you learn how to run a business. That compounds over time as well. Imagine being able to start over tomorrow with full confidence. Like, okay, I lost my job. Uh, teaching AI is no longer in style. Fine, I'll start over. No problem. Because I know how to run a business, I know how to start it. I know how to provide value. I know how to host my own stack. With AI, the speed at which we can create, ship, and iterate approaches zero friction. So, it's up to you to learn what you want. And this is what we teach in the AI captain's academy. This is my my community. You're the strategist now. AI is the builder. You can do anything, but you have to know what you want. You have to be able to communicate your intentions. And that is the real challenge we face here as humans trying to achieve independence with our internet funny money and our AI technology as we create as we own our tech stacks and as we scale and see compounding results. So createownscale.com I've kind of working on a thesis here. I think there's something really fascinating about this time to be alive. You can check that out to contribute to the discussion. There's an open source GitHub repo. And tomorrow at 3:15 at the open source stage, I'll be hosting a workshop for actually using AI to run your Bitcoin infrastructure. Uh we're going to be doing that in action. So thank you and see you tomorrow. Every year, this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year, the stage gets bigger. Sound money center stage. So, where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville, July 2027.