Chat_122 - A Cypherpunk World for Everyone with Future Paul

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This was one of my early objections to Bitcoin is that, well, everything gets hacked eventually, right? Everything has some security flaw. So we're still looking for the security flaw, but we'll eventually find the security flaw in Bitcoin. But I didn't have that. That heuristic for the fact that bitcoin is secured at the edges, right? It's secured by each user's public private key pair. That's definitely. That's such a revolution and it needs to reach the rest of computing. [00:00:48] Speaker B: What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else you know. This episode is brought to you by Fold. Fold is my banking. It is my full on bitcoin integrated banking. And it is why I am able to be on a bitcoin standard. It is why I can very. I get sats back on literally everything that I do. And in Fold, I literally have 8 million SATs roughly from the last year and a half. I went back and actually figured out when it was that I withdrew last and it was June 2023. And in a year and a half I have 8 million SATs, which is about $8,000 right now in bitcoin saved up just from using gift cards, just from doing sats back with my debit card. And I did a video recently which I posted on socials, basically breaking down how I do it. And I use Fold and the bitcoin company and Strike. I use a combination of a few tools. Check that out. If you want like an easy savings and you want to just be constantly stacking, this is the best setup for me and I think it works remarkably well. But they also support the show. They have been longtime supporters of me. So I shout out to them, I really thank them for everything they've done and for having such a really awesome service. There's a referral in the show, notes you can get 20,000 sats, plus it sends me some sats. So check it out if you haven't. If you're in the US and you want bitcoin banking as opposed to some traditional crap. Kyc Fiat. Well, there you go. Fold's got it for you. I am actually. I'm wearing my Fold hat. That's funny. That was not on purpose. We have an awesome conversation today and it's actually funny there. I wanted to talk about Mutiny and some of the things that, you know, future Paul, Ben and Tony had put together and like, kind of the challenges with that. But we ended up, going down a bunch of different rabbit holes. And it was funny. Like so many of it's this Future Paul we had on the show, who is from Mutiny, and also has a really interesting background in how he got here and what he had been doing previously that kind of led him into tech and. Or led him into building tech, I guess is the better way to put it. But it is hilarious. This is often just true of bitcoiners in general, is how often we have so many of the similar problems and dynamics going on for what we see what we need to solve. And I really think there's. There's something. We're getting to this really interesting point where as we build more and more of this groundwork, we're going to be putting more and more of our tools together. And one project that they're working on I think is very much aligned with that and also aligned with a lot of other things that I think are super critical to be built and to simplify the ui. And he's got a really interesting perspective on it. So I don't want to go too far into it, obviously, because this is literally what we talk about for the next hour and 40 minutes. And there's just a lot to unpack with AI, with Nostr, with simplifying the UX, but keeping the public private key pair. Like, how do you find that mix, that balance between full cipher punk and anybody can use it. And I think what they're building is really interesting and I think he has a really good framing on what those problems are and how to solve them. And always, always a shout out and respect for somebody who can sit down and just build it. So, without further ado, let's get into our conversation with Future Paul. Building a cypherpunk world for everyone, dude. Future Paul, hello. Hello. Welcome to the show. Welcome to Bitcoin Audible, man. I tried to get Ben on the show, actually, and I talked to Tony. I did a couple of reads that he did. He had some really good blog posts about lightning and privacy and a bunch of stuff. And then Johnny and I were talking about you. You're trying to get somebody on the show around Mutiny who've been like, building these things. And I started looking a little bit more into you specifically, and I did not know that you had a background from Verge or whatever. So how about you just introduce yourself and then I want to dig into that because I'm really curious how you made that leap from kind of media to coding and all of that stuff. [00:05:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I remember I was learning to code exact. At the exact moment that Bitstein got banned from Twitter for telling a journalist to learn to code. It's like, I feel, like, amazing. I feel like I'm being erased right now. I'm a journalist learning to code. [00:05:38] Speaker B: That's hilarious. [00:05:40] Speaker A: I. I got a job a long. A very long time ago, working at. In gadget, so writing about consumer electronics. All fascinated with technology since I was a little kid. And then from Engadget, we started this. You know, we started this podcast, and then a bunch of us left Engadgets to start the Verge. And the podcast was kind of like a bit of a lifeboat that. That helped us carry a big audience to the Verge. And then I'm very. My 15 minutes of fame, where I quit. I quit the Internet for a year, and I wrote about that experience for the Verge. And. But after that. [00:06:23] Speaker B: Wait a second. I may have come across that at some point in my. In my readings. I don't think I. I might have to dig back into that, because if. If I did that, I had no idea that that was you. If. [00:06:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm the year without the Internet guy. Yeah, I did it about hitting 2012. [00:06:41] Speaker B: Oh, wow. Okay. [00:06:44] Speaker A: But obviously, that was a time of reflection, you know, and part. Part of what I decided then was I was kind of. I was kind of jealous of people who actually make things. I was writing about people who make things, and I was realizing I was jealous of the subject, which I think. I don't think that's true for every journalist. I think a lot of times when you see a journalist behaving really poorly, there's this aspect of word cell jealousy. And so I just decided that I. I should learn how to build things. And so I started learning to code. I. It's. Didn't not come intuitively to me, but slowly, over time, learned how to build to the point where I was able to get a job in tech. And then my second job was with Voltage, actually, because I, around the same time, got really into Bitcoin, So super lucky and blessed by that. Love the people there. And so I was able to start working in Bitcoin. And that's something I didn't even know going into, like, I want to learn to code. It's such a vague idea. You kind of need to have some sort of area of expertise to combine with the code, like some domain knowledge. And so Bitcoin was my domain knowledge, and coding was my skill. And so, yeah. And then from Voltage went and started Mutiny with Tony and Ben. That was A crazy and a great experience and learned a lot. But, you know, the moral of the story is that Mutiny does not no longer exist as a wallet that we recommend people use. So there's. There's a lot there. But, yeah, that's my general arc. And now there's another pivot and a lot more going on now. [00:08:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I want to. I want to get into that in just a second. But it's interesting that you said you brought up that you kind of had like a. A jealousy or a envy around getting something, like doing something solid, like, like actually building a thing, because that's actually, like, I kind of feel the same. I've. I've had a very similar arc or whatever, and it's specifically why I've just invested a lot of bitcoin and into developers to build a project that I have been wanting for, I don't know, 20 years, maybe 25 years, and I still just can't believe that it doesn't exist in, like, a simple form. But. And, you know, that's why I started the podcast. But then I kind of felt the same way after the podcast. Is that, like, I've still been doing stuff for. Doing the show and stuff for six years, but I still didn't like, I want to build something, you know, like, that's. That's what I do and other things. Like, I work with. I do woodworking and stuff, and I have a construction history and all that stuff. [00:09:39] Speaker A: So, yeah, I think there's something. I mean, there's a lot there and I've. I feel like. So I. So people know I'm just a long time bitcoin audible fanboy, especially when I was originally going down the rabbit hole. [00:09:55] Speaker B: Yes. [00:09:55] Speaker A: Because I, like, despite this title of writer, I'm basically illiterate and I can't read myself, so I need someone to read to me. [00:10:06] Speaker B: That's great, man. [00:10:07] Speaker A: So right when I was going down the bitcoin rabbit hole was when you were pumping out so much content, reading stuff gradually, then suddenly and. And all that kind of stuff, and some real foundational good series. So, yeah, so I'm really grateful to you and all that, but I've also kind of, you know, so now I picked up also some of your ethos, and I kind of, you know, I kind of see you as a bit of a technologist. Right. You see where things are going. And so I think that's part of where it comes from is like, if you spend this much time looking at technology, you kind of start to see. [00:10:43] Speaker B: Where the puck is going, the trajectory becomes more obvious. [00:10:47] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a. There's a little parabola that you can extrapolate. [00:10:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:10:51] Speaker A: And so if you don't see anybody building that, well, it's two. Two fold. If you don't see anybody building it, you. Well, somebody's got to do it. Maybe it'll be me. Or if you do see somebody start on the thing, it's like, ah, I had that idea and I'm too much of a. [00:11:08] Speaker B: How did I miss that? [00:11:09] Speaker A: How did I let that. I build it myself. So that's the truth. So. Yeah, so there's like those kind of those affirmations and also just, you know, the ability to kind of really, you know, sink into the work I do. I've always had this with writing and with coding. Like, do I like doing the work or do I like having had done the work? So, you know, there's a lot of frustration with development. That is not. It's not always the fun thing. It's not. It's all. It's not always a reward in itself, but it is very. A very good feeling that if I want a piece of technology to exist within a certain domain, I actually can just build it myself. [00:11:50] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, that's something you said. There is. Do I like doing the work or having done the work? Is there one of my favorite TED talks or whatever he says, oh, he got invited to do a TED Talk, and he was like, oh, I have always wanted to have done a TED Talk in the past. [00:12:08] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. [00:12:10] Speaker B: This cracked me up. Oh, man. So, like, I was super interested in Mutiny. I also knew the ambition, like, it was a very ambitious project to try to do that, especially as like a pwa. Like, I know there's a lot involved there, and I. I respect it even more after having tried to do our own project, which is arguably not as. It's just not as complex as what you guys undertook. So kind of give me the background on that and maybe the follow it up with the postmortem, so to speak. Is it like, why did it end up where it is and what. What basically led to the pivot? [00:12:52] Speaker A: Yeah. So, you know, first off, a bunch of us moved to Austin specifically for the bitcoin scene. And that has been one of the best payoffs of my life because I've met so many just wonderful people who are also in Austin specifically for the bitcoin scene. So it's a really wonderful group. And so that's kind of how I really got to know Tony and Ben. And we were at Pleb Lab together and I did a bunch of hackathons with Tony and at least one with Ben as well. So I knew that I could work really well with Tony. Like we could really, we could produce, we can make stuff. And so one of our hackathons was this private Lightning network wallet. So the idea is like, Tony had written all this great stuff on how to use lightning correctly privately. So I was like, well, what if we built that logic into an app? Wouldn't that be great? Now other people could do this without having to like memorize this whole essay and do all these, you know, jumping through all these hoops. So we made a working app during like one. It was less than 24 hour hackathon, so a great, A great success, a great vibe. And so then we were like, okay, well, let's, you know, make it look pretty. And I went to. What's that conference called? The one in Texas. I'll always forget the name of it that Gary does. [00:14:24] Speaker B: Bitblock Boom. [00:14:25] Speaker A: Yes. Bitblock boom. We set a deadline. Bitblock boom. I'm gonna bring a working wallet to this app. And so we hit that deadline. So I bought some random foreign currency at the store, just like a novelty to keep in my wallet using Mutiny, which was really exciting. So it was going really well. And then I remember Tony started looking at how to submit to app stores and basically was like they were treating him like he was on some sort of list. [00:15:01] Speaker B: Oh my God. [00:15:02] Speaker A: And he just could not create the developer account necessary to submit to the app Store. And it's like, it's not. It wasn't the end of the world. I'm sure we could have figured it out. And, you know, eventually we obviously did submit Mutiny to the App Store. So not. It wasn't like a real total barrier. It was just like a. A symptom of a problem. Right. It's like ultimately we're making something that's very cypher punk and then we're going to go ask Apple for permission to give it to people, you know. [00:15:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:15:32] Speaker A: And that didn't feel right. And so Tony had this idea is like, what if we built the wall like a lightning node in the browser? Which I think I'm guessing you're a little more technical. You have a more technical audience. Not everybody to this day, not every Mutiny user understands this. But the idea that you're not talking to a server that's running your lightning node for you, you're literally running the actual lightning node in the browser. And then we had you know, encrypted proxies to the actual lightning network that you know, allowed the browser to do that communication. And we had this encrypted storage so that we could back up the user data but we wouldn't ever be able to see it. So it was a wild tech idea. But Ben was joined us and we did a hackathon where we built this out and we proved it out through this, the bolt fun hackathon that was, you know, over, over a course of weeks. But it was so another like great success. [00:16:38] Speaker B: How much of a, how much bigger of a challenge was that to have the node in the browser? [00:16:47] Speaker A: Yeah, it's one of those things where like there's a, the core idea is actually relatively straightforward and it's all the like the edge gotchas that end up making it an endless project. So we built on ldk. So that's made with Rust, right? Rust compiles the webassembly. So that means it compiles to a language that can run on a web browser with a million caveats like okay, you can't be using this and this and this and this library that's expecting to run on a normal operating system has to all. So, you know, so out of the gate we're using LDK, BDK, the Compile WebAssembly. But we have to, you know, make modifications and forks because there's different things that actually don't run in a web browser. So there was a lot of that. And then there's also the browsers. The browsers are really interesting because they're kind of built, they have to be built in a. What's the right word? Antagonistic. That's not quite the word. Adversarial. Adversarial. [00:17:54] Speaker B: Adversarial, yeah. [00:17:56] Speaker A: Browsers are built in a way that they're actually adversarial with the website you're visiting because the browser basically has to assume that, that the website is malicious. So. Oh, this website all of a sudden starts using a lot of resources or storing long term storage onto the browser. Right. Well for us we're going to rely on this lightning state. Right. Lightning is basically a long log of events and it's basically I can steal your money if you can't keep track of state of a channel. That's not entirely true, but there's kind of a little bit of a vibe there. So we need a really good state. So we need every right to succeed. We always have to successfully store the state, the updated state of the lightning channel. Because as soon as one channel partner enlightening is wrong about the state, the other channel partner again, another adversary situation will typically force close the channels. Like, oh, okay, you don't know what's going on. Let's get out of this right now. Another similar scenario there was one of the challenges of the browser is that the way lightning nodes work is they gossip for information about the overall network. So when you're to create a route to another node, you're slowly accumulating information that may or may not be true about the current state of this graph. And then when you create a route or you create a bunch of routes potentially that you think might work through this graph and a bunch of them fail, and one of them works when you have a node in the browser, it's only on while the tab is open. So we have this thing, rapid gossip sync, where we would basically. And this is something that had existed as an idea, but I didn't. If I remember right, LDK's version of it wasn't super mature and not a lot of people had really relied on this, but it was make or break for us. So we basically had a node that would probe the lightning network and create a rapid gossip sync, kind of like a. A compressed version of the graph and then we'd sync that to the device. Yeah. So those are some examples. Obviously there's a lot more to it, but those are the kinds of things that we were dealing with by building the node in the browser. But we did, and it worked. And so you could open a channel using your web browser and send and receive money permissionlessly with no, no rugability on our. We. We had nothing that we could do to steal the money other than push a malicious update to the actual website itself, which, which was one of the things. One of the reasons we actually end up shipping the PWA or the. The app version. Right. Which was actually just built a wrapped version of the. The web version is we could kind of freeze a version of the app in time and deliver that to the device rather than you reload a new version of the app every time you visit the URL. [00:21:25] Speaker B: Gotcha, man. That's just. I'm honestly surprised it worked. [00:21:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:33] Speaker B: And like, I can see why, you know, like, it could. It makes sense that there would be like some sluggishness or whatever. But like, I literally used it, you know, and it was also one of the first times that I ever saw the power and just the incredible potential, which I know this is. It's just five, 10 years out to like really realize this, but the whole idea of using Noster as your basis for, like, the value of reviews or the value of, like, the web of trust. The web of trust. Because I remember when I think it was. Yeah, it was Mutiny. It was Mutiny. It was the first time that I used E Cash and connected to the Freedom one or whatever. And when I went to the list, it just showed me which ones my friends were using and, like, by default, because I immediately just went like, I don't know what any of this stuff. It was like, just. It was just a list. Like, I just wanted to try something, you know, And I was like, well, heck, which one do I use? But then I, like, noticed all the icons, and I was like, oh, this one's Odell and Preston Pish and, like, sessions. You. You know, like, I just. I just saw this list underneath it. I was just like, oh, my God. And it just clicked that, like. Like, this one's probably run by Ben and future Paul. Like, I. I don't know. But, you know, like, if. If there was one, like, it just made me realize how powerful that was. And. And it was just a kind of an epic moment for me, honestly, and realizing that you could do this entirely in the browser. You could, you know, plug these other tools into it. You could have Nostr be a web of trust. And it was like this glimpse into what ten years down the road might look like. [00:23:25] Speaker A: I'm so grateful to Nostr for this. It's like, it's this proving ground that kind of shows like, hey, when might not be. Yeah, like you said, we might not be here right now. We might not be ready. We. Maybe it was a bad idea to integrate all this stuff into Mutiny early on, but this is where it's got to go because it's just better, you know, the idea, like, I mean, I think about this, like, if I'm on Amazon, right, and I'm searching through, you know, there's so much, you know, basically SEO, spam, and sponsored things, man. If one person that I followed on Nostr had recommended some version of laundry detergent or whatever I'm looking for, you know, that signal is so much longer than I'd be like, oh, million spammy, you know, fake reviews or whatever. We also, you know, Nostr is this awesome, you know, portable social graph, right? So I've built. I've been building this social graph to pretend have Twitter with my Bitcoin friends, but in fact, I could just pay that person. That's actually a way to look up, because ultimately, you're not. And this is something I got really focused on and continue to be pretty focused on. And I think where Bitcoin UX has to go, I do not want to pay a long string of random numbers and characters. I'm trying to pay a person. And something we learned with Mutiny is like there's actually a lot of people who do not even know how to copy and paste. That's actually a bridge too far for a lot of people. [00:25:12] Speaker B: Oh my God. So that hurts my brain. [00:25:17] Speaker A: Yeah, me too. But I, you know, it make, it kind of makes sense. It's like, you know, when's the last time you copy and pasted an HTTP like bearer token, like a JWT token? You know, it's like, yeah, there are all these details exist under all the technology we use, but we don't. Most, you know, real things that actual normal people use do not expose these details. And, and so I'm very into like let's push hard on the absolute cypherpunk state of the art. Like I love a lot of these soft fork ideas for the potential that they offer for, for creating new layer twos and stuff. And then let's, I love Primal. Like let's just make something that just works and you actually don't even have to ever look at an invoice if you don't. You don't have to know what an invoice is. I just pay future Paul primal.net, you know, so many sats and that's all I cared about. And so I think the hard thing with Mutiny is a lot of times we ended up in that kind of really rough middle. Tony had an article he wrote recently that kind of, I think he put it pretty well this like high risk, low reward activities. So it's like Mutiny was always probably going to be pretty low reward because wallets have always been pretty hard to monetize. [00:26:38] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:26:39] Speaker A: But high risk because we're creating a self custodial tool. Things like, you know, channel closures exist. Like things like if people forget to write down their words, they've lost their money. All these kinds of rough edges that we either we'd have to deal with or they would be actually scraping the knees of our users. Both are tough. Those are, that's kind of the high risk aspect of it. And but it wasn't like we were building, you know, a billion dollar unicorn the next coinbase. You know, we were making a wallet for cypherpunk. So that's kind of where we ended up. And so that's where I'm very much kind of become kind of polarized literally on like kind of both. I love the cypherpunk, do it the absolute right way. And I love cheating to, to, to make the ux, you know, the, that people actually want. [00:27:33] Speaker B: I've just come to the point of thinking that there's no way to not have both and that if you don't have the entire kind of spectrum, then you actually don't solve the problem. Like, it's not simply self custody and sovereignty and all of these things aren't the only problems to achieving self custody and sovereignty. You know what I mean? Like, there's, there's a whole range of like knowledge and how to teach and how to like get people oriented into an environment and to understand and like learn how to use a technology. Like, it wasn't until touch screens that you even got most of people, most of the people on the Internet, you know, it wasn't until that interface made it simple for them to understand. But just for fun, because I thought it would be really cool to just show the power of the whole payment database, which I know I've talked about on the show and I think I talked about it when I was reading one of Tony's pieces actually, was that I just sent you 2100 sats on Noster and it took like six seconds. It's so awesome to just have that payment directory, have the id, the like, I know who you are on Nostr, you know, and it's just instantly. I can just throw you sats whenever I feel like it. [00:28:59] Speaker A: Well, and you, you, you had Milian from Primal on recently, right? I didn't, I did not listen to the episode, but I've heard his talks and hung out with him before. It's awesome guy, awesome team. And he really unlocked this idea. Like there's a lot going on in Nostr, but possibly the most powerful idea there is just this, the idea of your, the public private key pair that you're. That's your starting point. I, I always think about this with. Remember that whole thing where Biden tweeted out that he wasn't going to be president anymore and everybody was like, did he though? Exactly. Right. Who wrote this? Who published it? You know? Is Biden seen this yet? We don't know. Right. Cryptography is a way of. If Biden's actually securing his keys, that would, that should be, that should have been a message sign. We should have a public key for the President that the president is the only person that can sign that we're obviously into the era of deep fakes, Right. And I don't want to, like, I'm not like a liberal and like, crying about how. But, like, we have tools to fix this. You know, you sign a message that you approve of and you should be. A president should be signing a message if he's going to resign. On Twitter, that starting point, that kind of revolution. [00:30:27] Speaker B: Sorry, that was just. I just make a comment. How crazy was it that he sent a tweet and then we didn't hear from him for like two weeks? Yeah, like, just insane. But yes, sorry, from that starting point. [00:30:41] Speaker A: It'S insane and it sounds untenable. Yeah, I think. [00:30:45] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:45] Speaker A: And from that starting point, like, think of how Auth works in every. Almost every website that you interact with. Right. Is that you are trying to get them to allow you in, so they ask you to tell them a secret and then they allow you to access your data behind their wall. [00:31:10] Speaker B: Yeah, dude. [00:31:11] Speaker A: It's funny because I am using mostly Twitter right now. I'm not actually on noster a lot, but like, ideologically very noster a lot. I should be delegating to Twitter. The authority to do things. Right? [00:31:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:27] Speaker A: So the. The other way to do authentication is you send somebody a challenge and then they sign it. So they prove that's kind of how passkey works. And I feel like passkey is like halfway to what we actually want because ultimately you shouldn't have to go around on the web setting up a new username and password for everything. You have an. You could have a cryptographic identity you could sign challenges from, and then that could just be your identity. And then. But ultimately, I think that kind of leans into this thing of like, yeah, where is your data? Who actually owns your data? Twitter famously has like, super expensive API. And I was trying to. I really like this Max Baconi. He like, makes these really beautiful, surreal fantasy architecture out of AI And I'm like, I want to. I want to send somebody all my favorites. Right. But on Twitter, you can't search by search a profile for the things that you liked in that profile. Right. So they have this whole database and their user interface is not helping me use that database. It's a barrier to me actually using that database. [00:32:48] Speaker B: They want to keep you in the feed. They trap you behind, like, what's chronologically, like, what's. What's likely to keep you on the news cycle as opposed to something that. How you want to use it. They want to tell you how to use it, they want to guide you into that and it's crazy. Yeah, yeah. [00:33:06] Speaker A: So all, all this stuff ends up being very related of. Yeah, the, the, the incentives, you know, what, what kinds of apps are built? You know, can you use your own data, cross domains in interesting ways? Can you. Now we are making all these AI tools. This is something I'm very fascinated with, is like these micro apps. [00:33:28] Speaker B: Like, oh my God, I love it, I love it. They're my favorite thing. [00:33:32] Speaker A: If you could write a single prompt, right? Like, so maybe I'm not tech, I am technical enough, but let's say I'm not technical enough to write something that can communicate with the Twitter API and search Max's images for ones that I've liked. Right. Maybe that's not my skill set, but AI could do that so easy. You just like give it a link to the docs and you say in one sentence what you want and it will have that result for you, you know, so now we can do that. So now it's more valuable, it's more important. Maybe we didn't have the right incentives in place yet for these databases to become more accessible to the user or actually owned by the user, but I think these micro apps will starts that flywheel of. There's actually a really strong incentive. The more data I have locally that I control myself, the more I can bring to bear micro apps and my own tools to work with it, how I want to work. Because ultimately I want to use computers to accomplish the things that I want to accomplish. I don't want to use computers to accomplish the 70 different things that the 70 different services have decided are their priorities for me today. [00:34:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. 100%, dude, I freaking love. I have made so many little micro apps. I really wish I had more time to devote to them because I've got one that I've put together like a really good framework for. But it's the most complex micro app that I've. I've quote unquote built with an LLM because I haven't, I haven't built it. And what does it do? So it's tr. It's trying to make an interface for my micro apps. I'm trying to make it so that I can easily load up. I can basically drop a file into just a zone and then it takes that as the active file. And then all of my micro apps just run active file, like function. And then I can just make the functions inside of that and I can run, you know, AI, My, my whisper transcription. I can connect to Llama through it. I can Boot up FFMPEG and do anything I can convert to gif, you know, all of that stuff. And the only thing that I've gotten. It took me a long time to get this because it was a lot more involved than I thought. But it took me a long time just to get the copy function to work. That was the basic one. I was like, okay, just copy this and save it to a different place in the finder, the Explorer. But I finally got it to work and I built it as a pair app and then delivered it to my Linux machine from my Mac. Just know pair run and gave it the key and it connected peer to peer, booted it up and I ran the exact same thing on my Linux machine and it freaking worked. And I was so stoked and I literally have yet to get back to it to really, to really put things together because I ran into a problem with FFMPEG and I, it just, it just kept hitting a wall and so I haven't, haven't done it. But I'm, I want that one so bad. I might even actually hire a developer after. Paradrive seems to have a, a bit of a footing to actually make that into a real thing because I really want that app. [00:36:48] Speaker A: The hard thing about these micro apps is they are really hard to share because they become so bespoke and so specific to your use case. Almost the more functional and useful they are, the more specific. And that's kind of the upside. I'm kind of in this mode of just kind of collecting and finding and learning about how people are doing these things because I think of AI as kind of it's the industrial revolution for knowledge work. That's, you know, we've called it like the information age, right? As a sequel to the industrial age. So we kind of were already doing that, but this feels more like it. It feels more like a force multiplier of, you know, I was using a shovel at my email job and now I have like a tobacco and a bulldozer and an assembly line. And so yeah, the idea of, okay, I'm going to take this file, I'm going to drop it into handbrake and I'm going to convert it to a different format. Okay, now I'm going to load up a website and I'm going to get the transcription. Okay, now I'm going to take that transcription out, I'm going to put in a Claude and ask it to do. Even if I am using AI, the idea that I should be doing all that manual labor, that feels like that's it's unnecessary. Yeah, it doesn't really have to be like that. And that's where kind of, you know, the desktop paradigm is kind of hasn't really kept up with where we're going yet. So there is, there is this idea of like, I really like these guys. Was it AI today in AI, I believe is what it's called. These two Australian guys, I love great podcasts on AI and they talk about computer use being kind of the full self driving of AI. Like, you know, teaching an AI to use a computer is like the full self driving, but computer's a lot more malleable than driving on a road is. So over time, the full self driving of a computer use can actually just be called this API, call this API. It can be so much more simple. So I don't know, I see so much, there's so much potential, so much to be excited about in that world. [00:38:57] Speaker B: Thinking about it in the context of something you mentioned earlier, talking about how people don't know how to copy paste because they've, you know, we basically built tags and identifiers and stuff into URLs in order to basically deal with things that you would normally think of as having to or needing copy paste so that the experience doesn't need it. I've, I've thought since pretty early on that we'll probably get to a point where the operating system is actually using your apps for you and you don't actually have to like you said like calling APIs. Is that like basically where the technology is? It's just a matter of getting the tools in place because like, why do I have to boot up Ollama and pick which model is best and give it the, the file that I like if I know that I just like, this is my, this is my episode and I need a whisper transcription and I need a summary and all of this stuff. Give me like five examples or something like that. There's no reason that an AI tool optimized or trained on that couldn't just reach out to all of the different various tools on my computer and just execute those tasks. Like one of the examples that I've been using recently is something called AI Video Composer. It's an open source in Pinocchio or there's a Pinocchio implementation of it. And it's literally one of the tools that like from the very beginning I was like, this would be the most magical tool. And it's basically AI handbrake, essentially, you know, a handbrake, you're saying is basically just an interface slapped on top of FFmpeg. [00:40:40] Speaker A: Sure. [00:40:40] Speaker B: Yeah. I think it's Quinn. I think it's one of the coding optimized AIs. And you just give it a bunch of files and then you tell it what to do, and then it writes an FFMPEG commands and executes it and then just gives you the result. So your interface is just, here's some files and you just explain in plain English like what you want it to do, and then it will just give you the result. And it's, it's wild. It's so cool. [00:41:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I feel like we're in this era right now. You ever see that comic? And it's like, there's. The guy in the first panel is like, I had AI help me write my, my resume. And it's like, dear sir, Madame, please, I would like a job. You know, it's like, it's long because it's written by AI. And then the next panel is like, I had AI summarize this guy's resume and it's like, I would like a job. You know, so the input is I would like a job. The output is I would like a job. And there's this middle stage where the AI has to create all this fluff just to deal with kind of the expected ux. So I think we're, we're going to be in this middle stage right now where AI will create tools to, to handle the UX for us that we are tired of clicking on ourselves. And then eventually that complexity will actually collapse down. It will be calling the API directly. It'll be calling instead of clicking on handbrake. For me, it will be writing the F of Impact script. You know, obviously it already does that, but that in lots of other cases, like, I mean, one of my hard UI problems is booking tennis just, just because the. It's just random when then there's new slots available at my tennis court. And so I of course want AI to solve this for me. And it just involves a lot of clicking around on a browser. Well, that should be an API. Why isn't that an API? Well, you have to like authenticate and, you know, lock down an API and how are you going to send the money and things like that. Right. Yeah. What if you had Noster and Lightning, my pub key, you know, and, and the AI could just easily, you know, write that or handle that itself. [00:42:50] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, something you mentioned with Mutiny that I think is, I really think it was timing more than anything because like, so much of the network and infrastructure isn't there. But I mean just using the, the web of trust and having like NOSTR integrated was such a huge thing that like part, part of me still like looks at all of my other stuff and I was like, I can't believe that NOSTR isn't implemented in these things because of how, how obvious it was when I saw it. You know, a great example is actually Nunchuck. I freaking love Nunchuck. It is my main like on Chain Wallet and I love multisig and I love the collaborative multisig and all of that stuff. However, the messaging and the accounts are all closed. They're. They're all to none specific to Nunchuck. So I can't like message somebody outside of Nunchuck or. And I have to create a new account with Nunchuck which, which is, they've, you know, it's encrypted and it's like direct and I can make an account without even using an email and all this stuff. I can just sign with my key. So they, they've done a huge amount of optimization and tried to make it secure in cypherpunk and all that good stuff. But it remains that I had to make a new account for Nunchuck and if I was just my NOSTR id, I could immediately message people, you know, we could immediately share. I could be like, here's a transaction, I need you to sign this because you're one of three keys or one of five keys or something. And like that experience would go so far because it just, just eliminates so much complexity from. And I think it makes sovereignty something that is increasingly has a good UX as opposed to the nightmare that it typically is in the current environment. But so many things have to be in place for years. You know, it's like there was a great graphical user interface and even touchscreen devices that had very similar to Apple 10 years before the Mac and you know, six years before the iPhone. But it's like timing. It's timing is everything else there are the people ready for it, is the infrastructure ready for it? And it's just not. I think Noster is still too small. That benefit is basically not the benefit that it could be because of how small the network is. [00:45:16] Speaker A: You know the other thing, Noster has this problem. It has exposed the public private key as. And so it's like how would you sign in connect your NOSTR account? Like what is your UX of that? And that's one of the things. So you know, Mutiny, we pivoted to we're doing this thing called Open Secret and part of it is this idea with Mutiny. Mutiny you ended up with a public private key pair. We would generate the private key and would ask you to Write down the 12 words. And now you have an in pub for using nostr. Or you can paste in your insec, which that's terrifying, but you could do it. But those were possible. Right. But you either have to know what's going on so you can paste in your insec or you have to at least have the personal responsibility, write down 12 words. Both of them are a step pretty far beyond a normie ux. And so what we're doing with Open Secret is this idea of a normie ux. So you log in with email and password or oauth like connect your Google account, connect your GitHub account, that kind of thing. It's like, it's, it sucks because it is totally normal, normal ux. I wish it was just, you know, pasted your insect or whatever or if passkey worked like an insect did somehow. But this, this is where people are at. So that's what the UX we have. And then you start talking to a secure enclave. And so we as open secret can't see your data. We don't see you get a private key and a public key key pair, but it's in a secure enclave so we can't see it. The dev that you logged into their app, they can't see your data, they don't control your data. So it has, it's kind of a mix of that world of you because you get this normal ux but you end up with a key pair and you know, the enclave can sign things. It's kind of ends up being a bit of this blend of both worlds. I feel like if we had this, I'm part of why we built it. It's like it'd been nice to have this with Mutiny. It would have kind of increased our tam because now the sign up flow is what people expect. But we still get all the kind of the superpowers that you get by having like a cryptographic key pair. Yeah. [00:48:03] Speaker B: And you could still have the other as an option basically. Cypherpunk option default. Like normie flow. [00:48:10] Speaker A: Yeah. I think it ends up being potentially like the right stepping stone to the whole cypherpunk option. Because ideally, yeah, this is built, built into your operating system and it can just sign a challenge for you. Right. And now you're, you're offed. But until we have that I want your. Basically you, your face ID Apple auth thing to just to do it. And now you're. Now you're in. [00:48:38] Speaker B: So tell me more about this. What is this? So open, open secret. And does this have anything to do with like where Mutiny pivoted or like the project? What is this exactly? Give me some more details. [00:48:51] Speaker A: This is what the company Mutiny is doing now which is creating this. And it's useful I think for bitcoin devs who are like people are making wallets and things like that. But it's basically it's like think of like Supabase or Firebase or kind of one of these typical backends where it has user account management and login and storage. Right. But what if we did it in a way that was like provably a private both from us and from the developer? [00:49:24] Speaker B: Okay. [00:49:25] Speaker A: So it's kind of taking the advantages of what people make like local first apps or whatever. And now there's a cloud backup, but still has the same properties of only the user can actually see what's in that cloud backup. [00:49:42] Speaker B: Interesting. [00:49:44] Speaker A: I don't know how familiar you are with like secure enclaves and stuff. There's a lot to it. [00:49:49] Speaker B: I mean, iffy. I mean like, like in a, in a general like kind of a vague sense, like not in probably like technical details of how it operates, what it does or why it exists. Yes. Give me like a workflow or, excuse me, user flow for how this is how this operates and how the relationship between the user and the service or whatever is with this tool. And is this something you intend to use for Nostr? Is this kind of like your target or is it just basically any and all private key pair concepts? [00:50:27] Speaker A: Yeah, right now like ECDSA and Schnorr. So I would like there to be a Nostr client. So from the user perspective you'd open up your Noster client and you'd say like sign in with your email and password or Google or Apple or Passkey or whatever. Any normal auth that you're used to, you'd sign in and now you just start using the app. So the app would feel like a normal app to you. And how it would work from the dev perspective is the. The client would communicate with the open secret backend once it's off to the open secret backend. So once the, once the user logs in, that client can communicate to the back end, but the dev doesn't have to see any of that user's data. Right. So that you know this kind of, kind of How a lot of nostril apps are kind of developed. It's kind of a thick client. Right. But how it works technically is that by using a secure enclave it's kind of like code is law a little bit is how Tony has been putting which I think is good. It's like we wrote the server and we deployed it to AWS nitro to this secure enclave. And that means that we can prove that the thing that's running is this code that we're showing you. [00:51:52] Speaker B: Okay, cool. [00:51:54] Speaker A: As you can see, we're not exfiltrating anything. We're not leaking the private key. You could only do what is in the code at the start. And also we can prove that we can't see into the running memory. So we have a proof of which code is running and that we can't see into it. And so that means it's obviously if you're cypherpunk and you can secure your own secret and encrypt things yourself, do that. But if you need this normal UX but you want these advantages of, of of encryption you can make an app that as a dev you know that you don't have any lie like any personal data liability. You're not actually storing personal data. The user is storing data encrypted. And then we basically that that enclave works as like a gatekeeper and it basically. But to use normal UX normal login it's like Google OAuth. It'll just like ask Google did this person log in? Like that's how OAuth already works, right? Is a server is asking did this person log in. The difference is that like a traditional sign in method that a normal developer uses, they could pretend to be any of their users and see all the each user's data. So user data is this huge honeypot that the developer has access to all of. With this the user could sign in with Google but only the secure enclave is what is going to decide whether or not that user is signed in successfully. So it becomes a matter between them and like their Google or their email password, you know, pair. I know there's a lot of information here so it can be a little hard to pick up on, but that's kind of the idea. [00:53:48] Speaker B: Does it basically just communicate like it's not even. It wouldn't even need like Noster Wallet connect or anything like that. It would just be typical like your normal like Web Request or WebSocket, right? [00:54:01] Speaker A: I guess, yeah. We do some stuff to encrypt the communication from the client to the Enclave. But yeah, it's just, it's. I made a react SDK so it's just. Yeah, it's just in a website and doing all this cryptography and communication with the Enclave and because I, I mean, you know, I love Pablo. I've tried to play with. Was it Noster? What's the auth? [00:54:29] Speaker B: Insect bunker. [00:54:30] Speaker A: Yeah, insect bunker. [00:54:31] Speaker B: I've done the same thing. I've wanted that to work so bad and it. [00:54:35] Speaker A: There was just always something a little off on. It just didn't, didn't quirk. It didn't seem to work how you expected because ultimately I just want. I don't want to write down my email and password even. I just want my device to like, you know, log me in with bit warden or my face ID or whatever. So it just needs to be actual normal auth. At least that's what our, our thought was. And then how much of the cypherpunk good stuff can we give that person the ability to sign messages with the users in a public or private key, things like that, and store data for that user encrypted to that user's key? That's something we had with Mutiny, which was awesome. We could run a server in the cloud that to the server just looks like gibberish because it was all encrypted by Mutiny locally with that user's private key. [00:55:28] Speaker B: If you want to save in better money and you want 20,000 sats for free, right now it's about 20 bucks at $100,000 of Bitcoin. Check out fold. Every time I swipe this card, I get 0.5%. Sometimes one, sometimes even one and a half percent. I can get two, three, five, even 10% on gift cards with major merchants. Between the roundups, the gift cards, the auto stacking, the sats back on every single swipe fold literally does all of the work for me. And it is denominated in bitcoin. And I have more savings due just by using this card than like 90% of the United States normal consumer. I've got a referral link for you right here. Shout out to Fold for sponsoring my work and honestly being the most important service for my being on a bitcoin standard. Man, dude, God, that could be absolutely huge for ux. Like just simplifying the interaction, you know, like onboarding is far and away the big thing for getting people to understand because they don't understand the relationship to that technology like you're trying to explain to a normie. Public private key pair setups you know, I mean, you're right. Like they're going to expect email, they're going to expect login with Google, login with Apple. And I actually really like login with Apple even though I'm not, I have my issues with it for multiple reasons. But when I can go try out an app and do something and it lets me log in with Apple, I basically do because I'm so sick of creating new accounts. [00:57:04] Speaker A: Yes. You know, isn't that a relief? [00:57:06] Speaker B: Like, and, and then I don't have to think about it too. Like I, I've getting, I've gotten to where like I've now have like such a big mix of stuff that I have to go to my key pass and make a fake thing for it and then just say in the username, just log in with Apple, you know, because like I'll forget what it is and I'll try like 10 different things and be like it was login with Apple the whole freaking time. [00:57:28] Speaker A: But yeah, I love they, yeah, they make the fake email address for you Apple. [00:57:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that I did that manually for years. [00:57:36] Speaker A: People don't know what's necessarily what's happening. I think what, you know, we as cypherbunks know there's something really special about local first apps. Right. Someone has decided they're not going to collect your data. They want to store it locally in the browser. The thing is that one, a lot of people don't understand what it means for something to be in the browser because all of their experiences on the web are talking to storing data in the server. Right. So we would always have. It was hard to explain with Mutiny that your data is in the browser. What does that mean? Like it's in this actual specific instance of, you know, if you clear your, all your browser history and cookies and data and all that, you also delete your wallet. [00:58:22] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:58:24] Speaker A: But the other thing with local first is that cross device sync. Right. So something that we're starting to see with some of our early devs that are trying out the platform is you could start with a local first app. You don't even have to create an account, but it's already writing stuff encrypted to the backend and as soon as the do add a sign in method kind of upgrades that account and now they can sign in on another device and all the same data that they've been using is there. So like there are some local first AI chat apps that exist that for the sake of privacy, but we were able to make one called Maple that Has the synced chat history, you know, so your, your chat history goes wherever you want to sign in, just like you would expect on a normal, like, you know, like Chachi PT or. Or Claude. So we, we have this. Yeah, we get the exact normal ux, but like, this is. It's serious. It's encrypted all the way through to the gpu, so nobody in that entire chain could even see your chat. [00:59:35] Speaker B: Wow. Wow. That's crazy. I don't even know how you'd go about that. That Seems cryptography is a real. [00:59:43] Speaker A: Is a real special thing. There's such a thing called homomorphic encryption. It's not that, but it's. It's basically these kinds of ideas of, of memory that is sort of encrypted from the system. Like there's a virtual machine running inside of a system. It. That virtual machine's memory is encrypted from the parent system. [01:00:06] Speaker B: Oh, whoa. That's crazy. [01:00:09] Speaker A: That's. That's kind of my. Like, computers are weird, man. Right? Well, yeah. One of my favorite phrases, I use this all the time, is cryptography turns problems into key management problems. So it's like you don't end up with zero problems afterwards, but. [01:00:30] Speaker B: But you have all key management problems. [01:00:34] Speaker A: But you solve a lot of problems. There's some really beautiful, beautiful things that you're capable of doing. I mean, being able to prove that you're you by signing things and able to encrypt things, because you are the only person who knows this secret number is so powerful. And you get that if you know how to secure a private key. [01:00:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:00:57] Speaker A: So we should be teaching this in middle school and in high school, like started middle school, but then kindergarten. However, you know, I want this to become very intuitive to people. I know I was really into technology for a long time, and it was very hard for me to wrap my head around the idea, the difference between signing and encrypting. Right. [01:01:20] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:01:20] Speaker A: And we've been in Bitcoin long enough that I think we're starting. Hopefully we have this intuition for these things, but I. Most people don't have an intuition for either thing. [01:01:31] Speaker B: Yeah, dude, that's. That's unbelievably true. I mean, I think most people don't even have an intuition for basic cryptography anyway. But then to try to distinguish that difference, that's why, like, a bunch of people are like, oh, you shouldn't call them hardware wallets. You should call them signing devices. I'd be like, that is not like, okay, accurate. Accurate. Yes, Like I get that, but you have confused everyone except hardcore bitcoiners. Everyone you know. But you mentioned specifically about AI and that is a topic that I have been super fascinated with and it's something that I spend tons of time just exploring. And is this relevant? Is this the same project? Is this attached to a. The same project or something? You said you were going somewhere with a project with AI. I was curious what that is. [01:02:24] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Open Secret is our like Backend as a service for devs product that we have not yet launched but is you can reach out to us. We're trying to work with devs early on to make sure that what we're about to ship is the right thing. To prove it out, we built this thing called Maple. [01:02:47] Speaker B: Oh my God. [01:02:48] Speaker A: To prove that our stack works to ourselves. So you normie off Encrypted, Backend encrypted all the way to the gpu AI prompting. [01:02:58] Speaker B: You're intending to have this something that people can use for a Nostr client. This might actually be the way to make it so that Nostr actually. With what with the tool that we're building. Open Secret might actually be the answer to make. Because we're trying to integrate Nostr but like I know there's going to be. We're trying to leave an option without it essentially because. Because I know that it's going to be inaccessible to a lot of people and I don't. The app doesn't need Nostr, so to speak. It's just there's a lot of great things that you can do with it. [01:03:32] Speaker A: Right? [01:03:33] Speaker B: We should talk. We should talk. I'm going to have an. We're going to have an alpha really, really soon. But anyway, let's keep that, keep that in the back of your mind. [01:03:44] Speaker A: That's the dream. If a dev has something and there's powers that are unlocked by having a private key or at least storing things in a key value database. But encrypted. But especially if there's a reason to have a private key that can sign things, then I think. But they want to stick with the normal ux. They don't want to have to teach their users how to write down 12 words or something like that, then I think this could potentially be the solution. A solution for that. It's the best one I know of yet. [01:04:18] Speaker B: Hell yeah. [01:04:19] Speaker A: And again, the operating system should do this. You shouldn't have to teach your user anything for them to be capable of securing 12 words and signing messages. But that's the state of things. So we need to find workarounds until we build our own operating system. [01:04:38] Speaker B: So how does this connect to the AI thing? [01:04:41] Speaker A: We had the AI idea. We knew that you can do encrypted AI to the GPU and main thing is that. But it's just a proof of concept to use our SDK and then we ended up actually adding AI to our SDK. So if devs want a way to, for the their users to speak privately with AI as part of the app, that's part of the SDK. That's not like the primary thing of it. But yeah, so it's called, it's Try Maple AI. People can sign up for the wait list. We'll ship this as like a product that people can pay for it if they want like super private AI. But yeah, the main reason was just to make sure that we built something that works. [01:05:20] Speaker B: Yeah. So what you're saying is that you're basically demonstrating with Open Secret, with the setup that you've built that you can provide a service to someone where you cannot see what is happening to the service. So like unleash chat or Venice AI or these like AI things you can basically say you're doing that we are running Open Secret. You can know without a shadow of a doubt that we cannot read your conversations, we cannot read the documents that you are uploading and executing with our LLM, you know, that sort of thing. So that you can essentially securely provide this in a, in a way that doesn't have, you know, chat GPT as it previous head of the NSA on the board. And there's a ton of people who are extremely not happy about the, the potential trade offs and the risks of AI as these giant honeypots is that you can actually solve this at a technical level improve that you've done so, so that you can still get the benefit of somebody else's massive GPU without having to pay for $23,000 for an H100. [01:06:30] Speaker A: Yes. So one I think you're describing it better than I've done so far. So yes, thank you for that. But yeah, that's the. Yeah. Someone could sign up for Try Maple using their email password or Google Oauth and we will not be able to see any of their chats or any of their storage. We can track how many chats they've done so that we can build them and that's it. And so we've designed it. I mean Tony, let's be clear, Tony's the actual mastermind of this privacy type stuff. [01:07:04] Speaker B: All credit goes to Future Paul. [01:07:06] Speaker A: I can add a drop shadow to a button. So that's, you know, if you see any good drop shadows, that's who to give credit to. But yeah, Tony has this incredibly smooth, great adversarial mindset and has thought through this stack. And you know the point, we don't even trust SSL termination into the enclave. We in. We do Diffie Hellman encryption for all our comms all the way to the enclave. So we just, we wanted to be so, so certain that this is. And the cool thing with AWS is like there's this kind of chain of attestation that starts with like one of their public keys and there's kind of something signed. Something signed something. Something signed something. This chain of documents that kind of go back to this kind of. This one, you know, root of trust. So ultimately you are trusting. You're not full trusting Amazon, but there's an aspect of you're kind of hoping that Amazon is not actively, you know, working to break this. And so again, this is not where I'm going to store my life savings. But I do think it's a, it's a good stepping stone. [01:08:15] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, considering the fact that like every single time one of these stupid companies gets hacked, your username and password is a freaking text file. Like, talk about a leap forward in the right direction. It's so unbelievable. I just can't even believe some of the times, like the. What was the one that happened recently? And like that was literally, I was like, it's 2020, 2024, man. What is wrong with you people? Like, there's a plethora of open source software. What is your IT team even doing? I just. God, it's awful. [01:08:52] Speaker A: Should at leave have an AI review your code for any security vulnerabilities. [01:08:57] Speaker B: Right, right. That shit's. This shit's free and it's better. Just. I can't, I can't. It hurts me so much sometimes. [01:09:04] Speaker A: I'm actually asking Perplexity about this right now. There's. There was this guy that wrote this book who wrote a book about Google being a data honey pot. What's it called? [01:09:21] Speaker B: This sounds like a book I would love. [01:09:24] Speaker A: So that Perplexity. [01:09:25] Speaker B: And bringing up perplexity too. [01:09:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. Book. Okay. [01:09:29] Speaker B: It's hard to how it's so much better than Perplexity is so much better than Google. Like Google is unusable now. I can't find anything that I look for like that I'm trying to find. I even know where it is. I even know where it is. I know like which profile shared it cannot find shit. I just. Unbelievably annoying. The Internet has truly gotten worse. [01:09:52] Speaker A: I showed perplexity to my parents. We were. We went. We went to the RV hall of Fame and my mom was complaining to me that she couldn't find the floor plan for this RV she was looking at. She's like, I Googled the exact model number and you know, floor plan and Google. We both know in our minds what Google showed. Just a bunch of, you know, ad spam, basically. So perplexity, one shot. It's like the image of the floor plan was that. That was the first result. [01:10:23] Speaker B: Love it. Love it. You know, there's one. One other thing is if. Which I found really interesting. I'm pretty sure it's perplexity that I did this with. But do you remember, like, the COVID anything about details about the COVID of the book or like, like what color it is? Like, there's. There's so many, like, seemingly arbitrary things that like, I remember I searched for a. A song once that I knew it rhymed with something and so I made up words that it was like, you know, went to the asparagus and dropped it in my pan, you know, like. Like I just did something like that because it was the right. I knew it was the right syllables, but I had no idea what the. What the actual words were. And it freaking caught it. And I was like, oh my God, that's great. Because you can go super abstract to the context because of how the embeddings work. And I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure perplexity, if you describe parts of what it looks like, perplexity actually picks up on that. Because I'm not sure if that's strictly conversation or if it actually has like kind of Florence to indexing of certain things or not like, if it's actually got an image description index at the exact same time. [01:11:41] Speaker A: I don't. Do not know the details, but I have noticed something similar where there's lots of times where perplexity I'll like, hey, can you remember this thing that's like this. It. It's text response has no idea what I'm talking about. But one of the images is what I'm looking for. And the image won't even have. It won't be hyperlinked to anything. It won't have any metadata. So I still have to do more work. So I'm sure they need to do more work on actually bringing this all together. But yeah, they are Doing something magical with images that's beyond just their text thinking. [01:12:13] Speaker B: And the combination of all those things is wild. Did you find the book, though? [01:12:18] Speaker A: Okay, okay, here's my problem. Can you find the book where he writes about how Google won't work in the future because it's a data honeypot? We should build things more like bitcoin. He also says that. So this is why I have to be really careful recommending this book. He also thinks Craig Wright is satoshi. So this book is incredibly insightful. Peppered with dream sequences where he talks idiocy to just. To Craig Wright. Big satoshi, dude. [01:12:49] Speaker B: I've never read a book that's not. That's not. That's not true. I've read plenty of books where I just thought it was like pure gold through the whole thing. But 90% of the time I like, deeply agree with something. I mean, deeply, deeply disagree with something in some book or I feel like there's like some huge piece that's being missed. But this sounds like. Truly sounds right up my alley. I hope, I hope. [01:13:17] Speaker A: Professional life. Life after Google. [01:13:22] Speaker B: You got it. Okay. George Gilder, Life after Google. [01:13:27] Speaker A: Life after Google. The fall of big data and the rise of the blockchain economy. So you could already see he's going to get some things. [01:13:35] Speaker B: Blockchain. [01:13:36] Speaker A: I heard something, yeah, something. I heard some nice aphorism about failure the other day. It's like failure is how we, like, learn how to succeed, basically. So, like, you know, don't shoot for the stars. Put dream sequences in your book where Craig Wright Satoshi. And you might also say some true things. You know, man, don't be, don't try to be safe. But yeah, I think he just really, he put it very well in this book of this idea. Idea that like, everything is going to be secured by that a company with a huge honeypot of data like Google is going to win the security arms race forever. [01:14:19] Speaker B: Oh, wow. And just bought it. [01:14:21] Speaker A: Right? And we know as bitcoiners because I remember this was one of my early objections to Bitcoin is that, well, everything gets hacked eventually, right? Everything has some security flaw. So we're still looking for the security flaw, but we'll eventually find the security flaw in Bitcoin. But I didn't have that heuristic for the fact that bitcoin is secured at the edges, right? [01:14:49] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:14:50] Speaker A: It's secured by each user's public private key pair. And that's such a revolution. And it needs to reach the rest. [01:14:59] Speaker B: Of computing and the fact that it can mold and migrate and that there's multiple layers to the cryptography and things, you know, like. Like we don't even see public keys anymore, really. Like, we're. We're looking at hashes of things rather than the keys themselves. And like, it's interesting because like, really the quote unquote hacking of Bitcoin is more about how do you trick the protocol? And that seems like something that's easier to. Not easier. Well, no, yeah. Easier is kind of the word. Even though it's not easy is that it's. There's. There's more nuance and there's a greater longevity. And getting a protocol to be formalized or like to. To sustain it, I guess, is maybe the term because it's not like one and done. You know, it can slowly morph and like change even at the edges, because, like, there's so many things that we can change about the client for without changing consensus. You know what I mean? And not. Probably not the best explanation, but yeah. [01:16:16] Speaker A: There'S something too, that having that ability. I mean, I think that's what, you know, ultimately really good protocol design comes down to is you only want to define the sort of the minimum so that you end up with like, maximum flexibility at the edges, but total agreeability, like in the. In the center, where everything has to meet up. [01:16:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it was. It's one of the cipher punks. I can't remember. Or maybe one of the early Internet guys. Like, oh, God, what was. Was that. Was this from the. The networking style book? [01:16:58] Speaker A: That sounds familiar. [01:16:59] Speaker B: I can't remember the. But it was. We were trying to design something where everyone could agree on the rules. And essentially that meant we were trying to create something with almost no rules. There's absolutely as few rules as possible. And like, that's. That's really kind of the beauty of it is the number of things that like. Like, that's really what Bitcoin is. Is. Okay. How do we create something that has hard rules with as little rules as possible so that it. It still has this space for innovation, for. For moving forward, and at the same time, this incredible longevity and immutability at. At some core set of function. [01:17:45] Speaker A: I'm curious where you are on. On some of the soft fork stuff. [01:17:49] Speaker B: As it relates to this, you know, so. And this is perfect, Perfect thing to get into because I'm not like pushing for something in the sense that I think there's some sort of emergency or we have to have something or Bitcoin is doomed or, you know, anything like that. But I do like Covenants as a primitive. Like, I perfectly understand and completely agree with the idea of, like, we should not arbitrarily add stuff and that there are always like, more consequences than we can think than we can think of. And everybody's like, well, they'll. Spammers will figure out how to use it for something. But I also can't really see how CTV or like Covenants in general even relate to the spam problem because it doesn't really change. Doesn't change anything about signatures or anything, you know, like, that's Taproot and Segwit. These are specific changes to how you treat signatures and how you make a signature and all of that stuff. So it makes sense that that would actually be kind of relevant to that problem. And there may be something that creeps up of how it can be used in that way. But Covenants is a much like, I could see how a potential problem could arise, but it's not a. In my mind, it's not a spam problem and. But I love it as a primitive. I think it's actually a really core primitive that I wish Bitcoin had because we have the ability to lock it to a certain script, we have the ability to lock it for a certain period of time. We should also, I think, naturally have a period or have a system where we can lock it to what, to the next output, you know, so that we don't have to. You don't have to execute the transaction to the next output in order to just know where it's going to go. And especially for Layer two things, I don't think there's a holy grail of Layer two models or designs right now that utilize Covenants. There's a lot of interesting, like, really, really interesting things that you can do with it. But I just think that Primitive is super critical to it because it can be updated. It's essentially what Lightning is trying to do in kind of a real hacky way, you know. So I'm for Covenants in general. I like CTV because it has the lowest profile, like the smallest attack surface, I guess you could say. And I wish we could get it, but I also don't think, like, I don't think Bitcoin is doomed or that we're not going to get sovereignty for everybody without it. I don't know. I don't think there's a limit to human innovation. And, you know, it took the Internet 30 years, 35 years to finally figure out how to create genuine digital money. And in 35 years on top of Bitcoin, we have no idea. So that's kind of my take. [01:20:49] Speaker A: I like so many of the software ideas and I'm not super technical in this arena. I go to bit devs and just ask a lot of questions, but I don't like the false urgency. It's like, okay, we're going to have nation state adoption so we better get all our soft forks in right now. I really like the. I don't want to misquote him, so please forgive me, but Pierre has this thing on ossification. It's like you would have to hard fork Bitcoin to have true ossification. You'd have to change Bitcoin to make Bitcoin unchangeable so you never get, you know, perfect unchangeability. And I don't think that's the goal. You know, one of the things that happened with Mutiny is that we built Mutiny at a time when the most popular Lightning wallet, at least among our friends, was Moon with two U's. And that was basically doing like two on chain transactions to make a Lightning transaction. So Lightning was the ux. That was nice, but there was so much room on chain that let's just spam the chains, whatever. Yeah, it's not a problem. And you know, it was actually, it was so much nicer than any experience anybody had had with Lightning up till that point without running their own node that it was great and it's a beautiful app and really well done. So that was like our context. It's like, well, if we just open a channel per user, like we're going to be, you know, saving the user and the chain so much. But that. And then ordinals happened and so we went from like a, you know, zero fee environment to crazy fees to the point where, and this is a problem with Lightning, I think, you know, lightning works. But Lightning is complicated to work and I think my ideal layer two is a little less complicated. Complicated with the actual logic it needs to execute. So that. Because like what would happen with Lightning is, is if two, two partners and channels have a disagreement about what the current fee rate should be, they'll close again. It's adversarial. So they'll close the channel. And so you'd have these crazy spikes and fee rates and two different node implementations would disagree on what the fee would need to be to get out of this channel. So someone would force close. So we had like lots of dumb force closes of Mutiny users channels because of this fee rate spike. So I love lightning, but lightning has not proved itself super resilient to, you know, these problems where you have, you know, tons of fees, especially when you have high fee volatility. And also, you know, lightning right as it is right now, it scales the throughput of transactions between two people, but it doesn't necessarily scale the number of people who can own a utxo. I don't really have real specific thoughts on various soft forks, but I really am hopeful in the long term that we will get things. I would even be for great script restoration. Let's fill in the gaps of bitcoin's programmability. Like the obvious. This is actually. We have lots of little programmable things that of ways to lock bitcoin. Let's just flush it out. A lot of the pushback right now is this fear of the unknown. They don't know the implications of this. It sounds crazy and complicated, but it's so much simpler and less complicated than the other major soft forks that have happened while I've been in Bitcoin, Segwit and Taproot. Those are huge. Adding a few opcodes so that people optionally, at their own discretion, can encumber Bitcoin in slightly different ways. If that could lead to the kind of scaling that we would like to see of both the simplicity of the layer 2 and the increased throughput, I think that'd be wonderful. At the same time, I don't want to ever put like urgency on it because ultimately you want to have the problem to. It needs to be a bit of a hair on fire problem to, to probably define the right solution. I don't want like a lot of premature optimization. I think covenants, we already have the problem. We already know that it's hard to secure a bitcoin and having, you know, new ways to lock up bitcoin. It's even like a personal safety issue for people. We see these like $5 or $10 wrench attacks, $10 wrench covenants. Covenants can, can help with that like right now. So I feel like we're already seeing the pain that that could exist. You know, right now most of us can still afford a utxo. But as that stops being true, I really hope the community comes together and becomes more tolerant of the idea of having a few more opcodes. [01:26:02] Speaker B: Yeah. And you know, I think that's also. You bring up a really great point too is that we kind of equate all of. I mean just the idea of doing a soft work in general obviously carries its risk no matter what the soft work is. But the idea of the, the degree of risk and where that risk lies in just adding opcodes versus fundamentally changing the signature, fundamentally changing how data is measured in the block itself. And what kind of risks could be associated with that? Like, like you said, Segwit and Taproot, even if we did the great scripting, script restoration, none of those are really, they do not pose the set of risks that Segwit and Taproot did. I don't think collectively it doesn't because you literally, I mean technically you could use all of these opcodes now. It's just none of the other nodes would recognize it and all you do is expose your bitcoin to the fact that it's not actually locked. So basically for anybody who would use these opcodes, they just put their bitcoin at risk. [01:27:16] Speaker A: Right. The risk is at the edges, which. [01:27:18] Speaker B: The risk is at the edges. [01:27:19] Speaker A: Yeah, we like. And I think one of the things that's really hard and it's very hard to explain a non technical bitcoiner that the distinction between adding an opcode and adding Segwit or Taproot and these non technical bitcoiners who do not like the idea of doing any sort of soft fork are highly non incentivized to even learn any of the technical details of what's being on offer or to learn the technical distinction between a hefty soft fork and like a tiny little opcode soft fork. So, you know, there's, there's some challenge there, but ultimately, yeah, I really like thinking of bitcoin as a thing that we do and that we're responsible for. It's not like a system that we're coming to, it's a system that's basically composed of us. And so I'm optimistic that we'll find a way through this. But I do think it's, it's, it's going to be important in the future because basically the alternative is that we at this, from now on we scale with custodians. [01:28:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:28:27] Speaker A: And we basically end up with something between like ten thousand and a million custodians. I don't quite know the actual number, but you know, some somewhere in that very loose frame and, and maybe that's fine, but that's. I, I'd hope that we would give it a shot to see how much further we can scale self custody. [01:28:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. I think it's a really interesting balance, I guess, but one of the recent episodes that I did just Doing a rant on this was like, I really think that the conclusion, so to speak, or the way forward is to not think of this as like time sensitive. You know, we don't, this is not like, oh, we gotta do it right now. And the more you do that, I think the more people are going to dig in their heels and be like, don't touch it, you know, F off and it's going to seem like a push to do something reckless the more you treat it like it's an emergency. And I don't, and I agree with you, I don't think it is, but I think it's build the actual solution. Like Liquid has opcat, Liquid has a lot of these tools that we're actually talking about wanting and. Or we could fork Liquid and put all of those scripts back in and then just prove that the thing works, prove that you can make lightning that much better on top of that network and take the time and it may literally by itself get adoption because of that. And you can still plug it into lightning by bridging. You know, one of the things that's. [01:30:16] Speaker A: Important we need to figure out, we need to somehow learn how to be fair minded as bitcoiners is that you either have a random solo dev, maybe with grants, pushing an obscure idea and trying their best, but it's very hard to prove out. I mean, think of how many years, how much manpower took to build lightning. Right? It's very hard for a solo dev to really come all the way through with this amazing full featured solution and experiment that uses their solution. Right. Or you have companies who are going to be monetarily incentivized for their soft fork, their pet soft fork, funding this experimentation. And I think we need to not, oh, you like that soft fork because you have financial incentives. Like yeah, that's how a lot of capitalism works is that you like things that line up with your financial incentives. So it doesn't mean obviously, oh, we must give them their soft fork because they have money on the line. But I don't think that should be a reason to dismiss it out of hand because I don't think you're going to get good experiments that prove out an idea, whether or not it's part of it. [01:31:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:31:37] Speaker A: Unless there's some typically VC funding, there's some agenda going on, unless a bunch. [01:31:44] Speaker B: Of rich bitcoiners, and that's part of the thing too, is bitcoin core. I think a lot of people are a little bit disenfranchised with bitcoin Core, but they're, there's like no consensus on like who else to trust, I guess is the term or the way to word it is. Okay, but what is the client that we would do other than Bitcoin core, you know, and there's so many different versions now and there's so many different problems and just making sure that your client doesn't even just execute something differently because it's written in a different code base or something. So many nuances with current bitcoin core. [01:32:28] Speaker A: Devs would disagree that bitcoin core is very risk averse. Right? [01:32:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:32:34] Speaker A: I think probably the open question is how risk averse can the entire bitcoin ecosystem be for the next hundred years? Can we be 100% risk averse this whole time? You know, is there or something less, what percent of risk is, will actually be necessary to take on, you know, to maintain Bitcoin? You know, maybe it's zero. That would be cool if it was zero. Every risky thing that had to happen in bitcoin has already happened and we're good. But maybe that's not the case. And so if that's not the case, we should be trying really hard to figure out when it's not the case so that we're ready to, hey, I just have to take a calculated risk right here because it's existential to me if I don't. [01:33:25] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:33:28] Speaker A: I think people who are, you know, you know, high achievers, who have taken risks in their lives understand that that is, that's, you know, that's part of life. But can be harder for, you know, a large group of people to, to internalize that. Usually the risk, you know, comes from a leader. [01:33:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And it will absolutely be a, it'll be a proof of work sort of situation. Like it, it, there's going to be an uphill battle no matter what you do. And I feel like it needs to be a huge upfront risk to actually push to getting one of these things out. And I, and I think it will take, and I hope, I hope we get there. I suspect we will just because like, I know my patients will run it if, like, if I see something that I really, really want built. And I mean that's, that's exactly why I have a project of my own now. Is that like, I just got to a point where I was just so frustrated that somebody else wasn't doing it. Like, I cannot see that we wouldn't collectively slowly get to that point where it's just like, I want this. I know we can do this and somebody will get an idea that's got some sort of a trigger, something that simplifies lightning so well or that, you know, has some set of benefits. Like there will be a holy grail of channel factories that work with, you know, 50 people very easily and non interactively. Somebody will figure that out and it will just be obvious, I think and, and it'll happen. It's just time and work. [01:35:04] Speaker A: Yeah. People are investing in Ark. People are investing in opcat. There's lots of potentials there already. And yeah. How sad would it be if a bunch of bitcoiners never wanted to spend their bitcoin to improve the. They noticed situations that they didn't like. But like, oh, I don't want to spend my bitcoin. I don't want to be short bitcoin and spend it. [01:35:26] Speaker B: It's a great meme, but everybody knows it's. [01:35:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:35:32] Speaker B: Oh man. Like I actually feel like we could go, we could keep running on this, but Because I still wanted to tap in. You said you had a Christmas break here and you're going to work into a bunch of projects. Maybe give me the short rundown before we, before we close this out on like what the projects you wanted to work on were. [01:35:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I. This is actually something that comes for almost every dev at some point where they kind of decide that they need their own. An alternative to like Notion slash, Obsidian slash Rome slash. That's. Dude, that's a white whale for me. [01:36:06] Speaker B: Yes. You just, you just, you just, you just listed out like the last three. [01:36:12] Speaker A: Years of my life, I had this happen to me. I had this moment in time where I had the perfect note taking setup for. I was a writer. I'd use Notational Velocity on the Mac. It stored all my files in a folder of plain text documents which were in Dropbox. So I knew they were backed up. And then Simple Note was the syncing service. And so I worked with an app on my phone that had a similar UX to Notational Velocity. I had perfect sync real time and it was perfectly backed up and it was a folder plain text document so I could use any editor I wanted. And then Simple Note kind of died. Notational Velocity became abandoned. Where. And so I just like, I was like, never again. Because I'd had, you know, I'd had other notes taking setups that had kind of died too. So I resisted Obsidian for a long time. But now I'm on Obsidian. But now that's where I am. [01:37:17] Speaker B: That's where I am. [01:37:19] Speaker A: And I do a Lot of personal. When I'm out on the, on the go, I send note to self on signal a lot. So I think my ideal setup is write notes to self in an app I make that is this stream of new information and then I make another app that's kind of like Obsidian that kind of ingests that stream and I can use it in various ways. So that's kind of, that's kind of the dream. But yeah, a lot of this ends up being like trying to get the, get the files on my side of the fence rather than on behind someone else's user interface. [01:37:56] Speaker B: Dude, we need to talk so bad. We need to talk so bad. This is totally in the lineup. And that's one of the things is that I feel like devs and like people building or whatever constantly are reinventing the wheel or doing work that somebody else is already doing, you know, over again. And I don't want to, I don't want to redo work. I just want to use the thing that somebody else made that works. But yeah, we need to absolutely talk about Open Secret. And then if you're serious about like playing around with the whole Obsidian thing, we are trying to solve in as simple a way to use it for devs. What I mean, as simple as possible. We are trying to solve the. Get the same information across multiple devices, easy backup, easy access to a drive and download from everybody at once if they're all online and just you know, your main quote unquote hub, your backup hub. [01:38:55] Speaker A: If you, if this is multi user or one user across devices, this would. [01:39:00] Speaker B: Be one user across devices but then also multi user as an option. Like you can share it with other people too. Like I could easily just give you a key and you paste it in or a QR code or whatever and then you can download something from me and all of my devices. [01:39:15] Speaker A: Are you replacing like Notion or Google Docs? Like what. What is the normie way of doing what you want? [01:39:21] Speaker B: Lower, lower layer. Like just basically it. It's a Dropbox without necessarily needing Dropbox. And what we intend to do is basically create one single use apps on top of it. Because plugging into it's really, really easy if you want to build a notion or you want to build a simple note taking app that just organizes stuff like one of the ones that I've been talking about and I know this will be involved just because there's a lot of different pieces, but one of the ones is a AI that just like I just record voice memos and that's all that happens because one of the things that we want to do is have it so that as soon as something is saved to a folder that there's actually a set of functions that you can run on the folder itself. So as soon as something shows up, a process is run on it. And so like the idea is that like if I had a voice memo app that literally had nothing but a record button, that was it. And I. And so when I'm walking around day to day, I record and then whenever it has a connection, it just uploads to this thing and then it transcribes and then basically organizes it based on like what it is. It's like, okay, well is this a journal entry and. Or is this a to do item? Do I just go to my to do list? But the, you know, the app itself is very. It has very little going on. It's just the back end that is doing. It's the foundation that's like running a bunch of stuff for you. [01:40:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, yes, we absolutely should talk more because I align with that so much and that's. I've been trying to kind of come up with some of these funny things to tweet. It's like energy too cheap to. This is a recent tweet of mine. I'm sorry if you already read it, but energy too cheap to meter and apps too cheap to monetize. If it's going to take a device or a team of devs a year to build something, then you have to have a business model. If it takes a 9 year old 30 minutes to make this voice memo app that like you talk to a dinosaur or whatever, but the back end is so well established and already, you know, set up for them basically that you don't have to monetize. You could just be a free fun. Think of like back to that Google. Like if you search on Google, Guillermo Roach, I think is how you say it. The CEO of Vercel had this tweet about this a while back. It's like there are certain apps that are easier to prompt than to Google for. So it's like, you know, if you go on Google, I have done that JSON visualizer or something that your fourth link, heuristically you got to skip at least a few of the top ones. Maybe your fourth link will be a JSON visualizer, but they'll also have like a bunch of weird ads on it and it would have maybe just been faster to prompt Claude to make that as an artifact or something. [01:42:31] Speaker B: Yeah, that's hilarious. [01:42:33] Speaker A: So it's so exciting because if that. I think a really good model going forward is like, think about what Photoshop is, or at least what Photoshop was before it was a subscription. But even now, when it is a very expensive subscription. The files, they're your files. You bring them to the app and the app provides you value. You can do things using the app on your files and you pay a lot of money for it because it has so advanced features that it does to them. But they are not trying to hide your files behind their. Their ui. [01:43:13] Speaker B: Yeah, Notion was probably the most like, I really liked Notion. I paid for Notion and I used it for a long time. Especially like I, I do what you do. I send myself messages. Like all of my articles are in Telegram channels, which I finally switched over to Keat because Keat has thumbnails now for links. So I can send it that way. But I like being able to scroll through just a long list of everything that I've posted recently. And I do that with normal. A bunch of different rooms and conversations and stuff. But I used to do it in Notion and I have these huge spreadsheets of links that I saved for all sorts of things. I tagged them very quickly every time I saved one and then when I exported them and I was trying to move them to something else or I can't remember exactly what I was trying to do with it because I hadn't decided to leave Notion yet. I was getting close, but all of the links turned into Notion links that linked back to their web presence. So the links, they literally took what I pasted in and changed it so that I couldn't get to it anymore. And I was like, you son of a bitch. This is years, years links. Every single day I do this religiously to save this. And now it's all Notion co slash, like the hash of whatever the location it is. And if Notion goes down, it's gone. And I don't, I haven't even to this day, I haven't gone back and sorted through it because I don't know what to do with it. I just have like all of these quote unquote backups that don't have the actual links. And I was furious. Like, I was so mad. And this. I switched to Roam and Logsec and Obsidian. I've moved and I have since moved entirely to Markdown Notes because I don't ever want to be trapped in what I'm doing again. But I. God, I was so cannot believe it. I cannot believe it. [01:45:17] Speaker A: Yeah, we Want to become unruggable. I mean, I think, you know, that's, I, I originally got into bitcoin because I was into the idea of decentralization. You know, I was writing about technology and it would always, I was always like more conservative than my co hosts on the Vergecast. But so there'd be some problem with technology and they'd complain about the big companies and how we should regulate them and I'd be just like, let them merge together and become more idiotic so they can fail and open source will solve these problems ourselves. [01:45:49] Speaker B: Exactly. [01:45:51] Speaker A: Bitcoin has been accelerated. Total acceleration. I worked at a blog that was owned by aol. I know what goes on in these companies, but I really want to become unruggable. Bitcoin finally gave me a taste of what that's like. And so I'm, you know, pretty addicted to that as much as possible. But at the same time I still have to be productive. [01:46:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:46:17] Speaker A: So like, you know, I tried graphene OS a little bit but like hey, this, you know, this was a while back, but it was a little too hard for me so I was doing less, I was becoming less effectual. So you know, I had, I switched back to iOS. So I still want really good UX. So I really hope that we can get to the point where the unruggable stuff, there are reasons it's not a absolute rule of of physics that self custodial stuff has to be worse ux. Like think of the UX of moving some bitcoin versus the UX of your bank account being frozen because you live in Canada. You know, it's like, hey, one of them is custodial. Should have better. No, actually had worse UX turn. There's all these little things like what you're talking about. Like imagine if you're listening to a podcast and then you write a note to yourself while listening to the podcast about something you heard on that podcast. Right? [01:47:12] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:47:12] Speaker A: Well, if we built computers around people, those two events should be correlated. And so now there's a podcast timestamp that's associated with the little note I just took. And it's not trapped, you know, like, you know, Kindle highlights kill me because it's great ux. But it's in Amazon server. There's exactly like your notion hashes. So there are so many ways that we can interconnect our digital lives and it's just because of kind of almost an accident of history of how everything's been built that we have to be this glue between all of these disparate services. But it just doesn't have to be that way. The computers could be helpful. I think computers should help us use computers, because I don't think the goal is not to use more computer. [01:48:05] Speaker B: No, it's not. [01:48:06] Speaker A: The goal is to. [01:48:07] Speaker B: It's the means to an end. [01:48:09] Speaker A: You know, serve God, love each other. Yeah. Save some money, have some babies, what. You know, whatever we're actually trying to accomplish in life and not, like, click more things. [01:48:22] Speaker B: That's great. That's fantastic. In fact, actually, that's where I want to end it. [01:48:28] Speaker A: That. [01:48:28] Speaker B: That's exactly right. The goal is not to click more things. The goal is. Is to be more productive, to make life better. So, dude, thank you for coming on. We, a hundred thousand percent need to stay in touch. I. I should have something. Hope literally thinks I'll have the UI in my hand before Christmas. Like, it may be. It may even be today. I haven't talked. I haven't talked today to Hope, so I will let you know. And also, I would absolutely love to be. If there's like a. A secret newsletter updates for Open Secret or anything, please add me and we'll. We'll move forward there, because I would love to utilize that. Okay. I think it may very well be something that plugs in very perfectly with what we're trying to do to kind of put the Noster complexity in the background when we finally get to that stage of it. So. [01:49:28] Speaker A: Awesome. [01:49:30] Speaker B: Thank you for. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for having a conversation. It's good to meet you. Love this. And, Chad, we should definitely do this again sometime. Tell everybody where they can find you and follow and all that good stuff. [01:49:42] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm Future Paul on X, and that's probably. It's probably the best, best spot. [01:49:49] Speaker B: All right. [01:49:50] Speaker A: Sorry, I'm on Noster, but I don't check very often. [01:49:53] Speaker B: Yeah. All right, well, you got zap. You got a zap, so go. Go check that. [01:49:58] Speaker A: Hey, I appreciate it. It's much appreciated. [01:50:01] Speaker B: 100. All right, man. Thank you. And that wraps it up. I hope you really enjoyed that conversation. We are absolutely gonna have to stay in touch because there's a lot. I think these pieces, the things, the separate projects that we're working on, so many of the things that other people are building. Like, we're getting to this really, really interesting spot where we can start Lego pieces, piecing these things together. And, man, the combination of the various tools and networks that we have now to utilize. I know I've said this a lot on the show and I geek out about it really hard. But there's going to be this confluence of where everything starts to come together and it becomes easier and easier to plug into the peer to peer stuff, to plug into Nostr and to utilize that to set up a Noster account like with Open Secret and, and have people able to utilize that and able to sign to have a totally different experience and actually own your world again. It really is happening piece by piece. We're going to get to this point where you can start plugging into them so easy that the speed at which you can build an app or you can build a tool that will solve this problem or perform this task, I think that iteration time will be cut down so low that this will just basically get away from itself. We will. We're getting close to that point in the S curve where things just start to blow up. Maybe I'm naive and like overly optimistic, but I don't know, it feels that way. I and, and maybe I've just been that much more connected to all the tools that everybody's building. But I don't know. I don't know. Can't help but say I'm excited. A huge shout out to Future Paul. Awesome conversation and really had a good time. Definitely need to catch up and stay in touch. Don't forget to check out Future Paul on I'll have the link to Nostr as well as Twitter, but as said, he's more active on Twitter still, so definitely check it out. Check out all the other links for services. I have referrals for basically all the major services that I use and tools and companies and products that I really like and that I have constantly recommended to people or that people have asked about. And so I've just made them very conveniently down in the thing. If you're looking to buy bitcoin, I've got referral to the places that I buy bitcoin. If you're looking to get sats back, you want to play a bitcoin game, you want to use a multi sig service that is, I think is trustworthy. That's what I've. That's what I've got down in the list. So if you're looking for any of those things, just check out the description sponsors or no. I will have my recommendations for kind of the handful of tools that I think are most valuable right there in the show notes. So check them out. And with that, thank you so much for listening, thank you for subscribing, thank you for sharing this out with all your friends because this show basically survives on word of mouth and the love of bitcoin and decentralized open source tech. And we'll be here. We will be here. I am Guy Swan. This is Bitcoin Audible. And until next time, everybody. Take it easy, guys.