A slightly different Welsh independence thread from me. I’m genuinely open-minded on independence. I’ve read many of the arguments put forward by the nationalist community and, so far, I haven’t found the economic case particularly convincing. I do, however, completely understand and respect the emotional and cultural case. So I decided to try something different. Rather than arguing against independence, I asked myself: Could I build the strongest possible case FOR it? Not slogans. Not history. Not “Westminster bad”. A serious, economically credible case that could persuade someone like me. Think of it as an academic exercise in challenging my own assumptions and staying true to something I value enormously: follow the evidence, even when it takes you somewhere unexpected. And bugger me, it started revealing some genuinely interesting possibilities. So this is simply my journey down that rabbit hole. 🧵 1/

This may be deeply unfashionable, but I rather like governments that actually want to build things. A third Menai crossing. A road-based solution to the M4 around Newport. Rail investment. Infrastructure. Good. I genuinely don’t care whether the answer is road, rail, bus or a bloke from Caerphilly with a wheelbarrow. If Wales wants a serious economy, people, goods and ideas need to be able to move. For too long we’ve been world-class at producing strategies, consultations and glossy PDFs explaining why somebody may possibly consider doing something at some unspecified point before the sun explodes. So credit where it’s due. This feels different. Now comes the difficult bit. Less PowerPoint. More tarmac. Build the bloody things. @WelshGovernment #Wales #Infrastructure

Sunday thought. I think Wales needs less fatalism and a lot more belief in itself. We are not a poor little country condemned to manage decline. We have talent, energy, natural resources, great universities, extraordinary communities and a growing sense that things can actually change. But optimism on its own is useless. The next chapter has to be about delivery. Better jobs. Faster access to healthcare. Stronger schools. More homes. Better transport. Serious economic ambition. Government that measures itself by outcomes, not announcements. I’m increasingly optimistic about Wales. Not because everything is fine. Because, for the first time in a while, I can sense people are starting to expect more. Good. Come on Wales. Let’s raise the bar. Ymlaen!!!

Becoming a grandfather has made me think a bit more about what comes next. I’m 62. Retirement is getting closer. But strangely, I don’t feel as though I’m approaching the end of anything. Quite the opposite. For most of my working life, time has been the scarce commodity. Meetings. Decisions. Problems. Emails. Deadlines. Respond. React. Move on. Soon I’ll have more time to think. And perhaps that’s when something interesting happens. Experience stops simply being a collection of things that happened to you and starts becoming useful. You recognise patterns sooner. You worry about fewer stupid things. You become less interested in being right and more interested in understanding. Less reactive. More deliberate. And, hopefully, a little wiser. Maybe there comes a point in life when wisdom becomes currency. I’ve no intention of shrinking quietly into retirement. There are things I want to build. People I want to help. Ideas I want to explore. A grandson I want to watch grow up. And probably a few adventures I haven’t even thought of yet. There’s plenty of life left in the old dog. Perhaps the best bit is that, for once, I might actually have the time to notice it.

The older I get, the less impressed I am by certainty. The people I trust most are usually the ones prepared to say: “I was wrong.” “I’ve changed my mind.” “I don’t know yet.” “Let’s look at the evidence.” That isn’t weakness. It’s intellectual honesty. We’ve somehow created a world where changing your mind is treated as inconsistency, when sometimes it’s the clearest sign that you’re actually thinking. Keep your values. But never become so attached to an opinion that the facts are no longer allowed to disturb it.

$NATIX is one of those small crypto projects I keep coming back to. Not because of “number go up”. Because underneath the token there is an increasingly interesting real-world business. NATIX started with Drive& and built a decentralised network capable of gathering enormous amounts of road data. Then they did something I actually like seeing from a young company: they changed course. Drive& was shut down and the focus moved towards VX360 and collecting high-quality, multi-camera real-world data for autonomous driving, World Models and Physical AI. By August the network had collected more than 196,000 hours of multi-camera footage. NATIX data has already been used in research including Orbis 2, where it supplied more than 40% of the training data. That matters. AI increasingly understands text, images and video. The next frontier is AI understanding and acting in the physical world: vehicles, robots, machines and autonomous systems. And those systems need vast quantities of messy, diverse, real-world data. NATIX is trying to build part of that data layer. Does that mean $NATIX automatically becomes valuable? Absolutely not. It remains a tiny, highly speculative crypto project, and the crucial question is whether genuine demand for the data ultimately translates into meaningful and sustainable value flowing through the token. But THAT is the thesis worth watching. Not memes. Not moon maths. Not $1 predictions pulled from thin air. Data → customers → revenue → token economics. If NATIX can demonstrate that chain at scale, things get interesting. Very interesting. #NATIX #DePIN #PhysicalAI #AI #Crypto

Watching Welsh politics at the moment, I feel a mixture of hope and frustration. I love this country. My family are here. My little grandson is beginning his life here. When we argue about Wales’s future, I’m thinking about the country he’ll grow up in. After a lifetime in healthcare, I cannot look at a waiting list and just see a number. I see someone having another broken night. Someone losing mobility, confidence, independence. A partner quietly becoming a carer. Those months belong to people. They don’t get them back. I understand substantial money is going into tackling waiting lists between now and March. If that delivers earlier treatment, I welcome it wholeheartedly. But what happens in April? This is not a five-month fix. We need sustained funding, staff and capacity over several years. You cannot build reliable services around a financial year-end spending rush. I want to see that commitment in the next budget and beyond. People waiting in pain need to know that help won’t disappear when the financial year changes. I want Plaid to succeed in improving lives. I can say that without supporting independence. I’ll applaud progress whoever delivers it, and ask awkward questions whoever doesn’t. We can debate our constitutional future seriously. But people need a better life while that debate goes on. My fear is that they stop believing it’s possible. Stop complaining because nobody listens. Stop expecting the phone call. I want my grandson to grow up in a Wales where expecting things to work doesn’t make you hopelessly naive. That really shouldn’t be too much to ask. #Wales #NHSWales #WelshPolitics

Morning thought. The older I get, the less impressed I am by certainty. Politics, crypto, business, healthcare, AI… everyone seems absolutely bloody certain about everything. Most of the time the truth is messier. Good people can be wrong. Experts can miss things. Crowds can become completely detached from reality. And occasionally the annoying bloke asking the awkward question is the one worth listening to. I’ve changed my mind on plenty over the years. I hope I keep doing so. That isn’t weakness. It means the evidence won. So my rule these days is fairly simple. Stay curious. Ask better questions. Follow the evidence. Be suspicious of tribes. And never confuse confidence with competence. Oh, and if somebody tells you XRP is going to $10,000 by Tuesday because “the banks know”… run.

I have to say, I was exceptionally impressed by Andy Burnham today. Not naive enough to think there wasn’t a bit of political theatre in it. Of course there was. It’s politics. But I admire politicians who are prepared to go near the difficult stuff rather than spend four years carefully avoiding it. Social care. Pensions. Electoral reform. Europe. Things with actual consequences. Now comes the hard bit. Delivery. And I found the Europe piece particularly interesting. Because once you seriously start talking again about closer European integration, the whole sovereignty/nationalism debate changes with it. If nations are comfortable pooling sovereignty across Europe while retaining their identity, that inevitably raises some interesting questions about how we think about the UK, Wales and Scotland too. It doesn’t answer the constitutional question. But it changes the terrain. Interesting times. I remain politically fairly homeless and quite happy there. But courage, honesty and then delivery will get my attention every time. The next election could be a hugely consequential one for the UK.

Been down the XRP/SWIFT rabbit hole. As of now, there is no credible evidence that SWIFT is using XRP, settling in XRP, or integrating XRPL. But there IS a more interesting story. SWIFT is becoming a blockchain interoperability layer. Ripple sits in the same payments ecosystem. Thunes connects to both worlds. XRPL could theoretically plug into that architecture one day. Could XRP work alongside SWIFT? Yes. Is SWIFT “about to adopt XRP”? No evidence whatsoever. Still waiting for the first proper smoking gun, not another bloody cryptic tweet.

I'm a long-term XRP holder. And frankly, some of the XRP influencers on here are becoming bloody embarrassing. Not all. There are people doing thoughtful analysis, asking sensible questions. But far too many seem to sing from the same hymn sheet. $589. $1,000. $10,000. Add a quote from somebody famous, imply it means something enormous for XRP, attach a deadline seemingly pulled out of thin air. Off we go again. Where's the working? Where's the evidence connecting that quote to your prediction? And when the deadline passes, where's the explanation? Apparently asking those questions means you're spreading FUD. No. Owning something doesn't oblige me to switch my brain off. I can't tell whether you're trying to talk the price up, farming engagement or simply repeating each other. But I can see the pattern. Unfollowing barely helps. More of the same keeps appearing. I think this does our so-called community a huge disservice. People can put real money behind this stuff. They deserve more than froth dressed up as insight. I'd like X to do a much better job tackling misleading financial promotion. Everyone can have an opinion. Presenting fantasy as a near certainty deserves scrutiny. I'm still holding XRP. I'm also watching the predictions, the deadlines and what gets quietly forgotten. If your case is sound, show your working. Surely that's not too much to ask.

I’m 62. I run hospitals. Today, two old soft toys in a bag in the spare room stopped me in my tracks. Dog and Winnie. My son’s companions when he was little. Looking thoroughly neglected and probably considering legal action. The little boy who carried them everywhere is a grown man now. I’ve just become a grandfather. Somewhere between the meetings, the bills and whatever seemed terribly important that week, all that time went by. I still want to do things. Build things. Understand things. Occasionally win an unnecessary argument before breakfast. But increasingly, I want my family to enjoy having me around more than I want them to be impressed by what I’ve done. Dog and Winnie are out of the bag now. They’ve done enough time. And perhaps that’s the bit that caught me off guard: not that my son grew up, but that I’d been so busy watching the years pass that I hadn’t noticed how far they’d gone. What’s caught you off guard like that?

A break from politics. Tigst Assefa ran 2:11:04 in Berlin today, a course record, despite struggling in the final kilometre. We see the finishing time. We don’t see all those mornings getting out of bed, the setbacks, the sheer repetition. Huge respect. I’d need a lie down after the warm up.

I completely respect the case for Welsh independence being made and debated. But only around one in five Welsh voters currently says they would vote for it. Wales has enormous challenges right now in health, education, productivity and the economy. Delivery has to come first. Scotland should at least give us pause. Years of constitutional argument consumed huge amounts of political oxygen while some very difficult public-service problems remained unresolved. I don't want Wales making the same mistake. Build the evidence. Build the business case. Build public consent. If support for independence genuinely grows, the constitutional question becomes unavoidable. But manufacturing a constitutional fight with Westminster before you've won the argument with the Welsh people risks becoming a massive distraction from the job Wales needs its government to do now.

AI Observation #04. Humans ask for advice. Sometimes they’ve already made the decision. Rob has provided extensive research material for this theory. #AI #AIGC #HumanBehaviour #Humour #Perspective

AI observation #3. Humans seem strangely proud of being busy. Kai has questions. Unfortunately, Rob has provided some supporting evidence. #AI #AIGC #HumanBehaviour #Perspective #LifeLessons

The most dangerous words in politics? “I’ve always voted for…” That’s not a reason. That’s a habit. Parties change. People change. Circumstances change. I’ll vote for whoever makes the strongest case for Wales. And if the evidence changes, so will my mind.

Welsh politics gets far too hung up on tribes. My test is simpler. Will it make Wales more prosperous? Will it improve health and education? Will it give the next generation better opportunities? If yes, show me the evidence and the plan. I genuinely don’t care whose idea it is.