Max and Tony cover a lot of ground, including:
Music and its role in society: “He who controls the music controls the mind”
Why the ad model for monetizing the Internet is not only a panopticon, but also extremely ineffective
How to find under appreciated long tail Internet content
How to improve Nostr on-boarding for noobs
The role of the curator on Nostr
Permissionless identity creation means evolution can happen much faster
How Tony uses AI
How to live a healthy life with (and without) technology; camping is great - in theory
The balance between contributing to open source and building a company
Lightning Network as the final settlement layer and Nostr Wallet Connect as the async message layer
eCash and why Tony is bullish on Fedimint
Fedimint as its own consensus network
Nostr evolving into identity for the Internet
Nostr as the fire hose of raw data - you can build anything with it
Open source vs. closed source AI development
Learn more about Mutiny Wallet
Timestamps:
00:00 The Human mind associates tastes with nostalgic memories.
05:12 Whoever controls the music controls the mind.
16:51 Enjoy infinite exploration, linking to quality content.
24:04 Accessing search engine data for analysis and manipulation.
37:15 Generating personalized recommendation lists based on specific topics.
50:05 Discussing the impact of content creation on platforms.
51:06 Simplify content sharing for enhanced user experience.
01:06:26 OpenAI's methods are scrutinized, and the societal impact is praised.
01:19:02 Recognizing the loss of valuable tools, reflecting on technology's impact on society.
01:25:30 Elderly individual reflects on technology's impact.
01:31:00 There will be those who can focus and run things, and those who can't will get run.
01:35:07 Themes in the Bitcoin community: openness, capitalism, free markets.
02:01:11 Decentralized spending permissions using private key-based NWC.
02:13:16 Exploring the necessity and complexities of global identity.
02:20:56 Equal treatment for all tech users is desired.
Leave a review on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Fountain
Follow Max on Twitter
Follow Max on Nostr
Follow Max on Stacker News
Learn more about Hivemind Ventures
Transcript:
Tony [00:00:00]:
Let's go.
Max [00:00:00]:
All right, we're doing it live.
Tony [00:00:02]:
Fuck it.
Max [00:00:03]:
Fuck it. Let's go. You know, it's been a crazy couple of days. I have loved being in Austin. This is so much fun. I do have to say, as much as I love living in sf, bitcoin capital, the world for sure. And just incredible, incredible community of people. Nostra people, bitcoin people, all kinds of good folks.
Max [00:00:22]:
I'm super stoked now to be here with Mister Tony. Giorgio. I have had the great pleasure of getting to know Tony over the last couple of years. Been a big fan of yours from identity stuff, obviously. Big fan and investor in mutiny. Love what you guys are working on there. Huge fan of what you don't know, connect. So, yeah, man, super stoked.
Max [00:00:41]:
We get a chance to talk about all kinds of weird shit we might not otherwise get to talk about.
Tony [00:00:44]:
Yeah, no, I mean, like, we first knew each other online.
Max [00:00:47]:
That's right.
Tony [00:00:48]:
For a little while, like a year or two, and then, like, fanboying on each other's work for a little bit. And now it feels really good to be in person, collaborating, like talking about crazy visions and ideas for the future. And not just like you, for our own selves, our own company, but what crazy shit can we think of next?
Max [00:01:05]:
Yeah. And for the future of humanity, the future of whatever evolution is pointing us all toward too. It sounds like we have another little guest joining you. A couple perils around here. So maybe one place I'd like to start off is we were talking about you have some really interesting and eclectic taste in music. And you mentioned that some of your music is very sort of punk and rageful. Some of it's a little bit softer, more peaceful. But I think in all of it, you have real taste.
Max [00:01:34]:
You're not just doing what the mainstream is doing there. How did you develop, I guess, some of this, like, punk aesthetic or walk me through how did Tony become. Yeah, this. This contrast of punk. And also you've got the peaceful side.
Tony [00:01:48]:
It goes back to the skater days, man.
Max [00:01:50]:
You were a skater.
Tony [00:01:50]:
Yeah.
Max [00:01:51]:
Okay.
Tony [00:01:51]:
I didn't know that you could say skater. You could say poser. Cause I wasn't very good, but I tried.
Max [00:01:56]:
You had a board.
Tony [00:01:56]:
Yeah, I had a board for many years throughout, like, middle school, high school, even in college, like, longboarding kind of evolved in that nature. So it's just like, goes back to the punk mentality, you know, listening to stuff like green day when I'm starting out, like as a baby teenager.
Max [00:02:12]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:02:13]:
And then evolving to, like, you know, eventually stuff like bring me the horizon, or then getting into things like Whitechapel if I'm trying to get into, like, death, suicide metal. But it all kind of, you know, you could say it's just like, teenage angst that, like, could have possibly never left me. Yeah. You know, so it's like, okay, did I really mature if I'm still the punk songs from the two thousands era? But I mean, that, you know, that's when I grew up, the two thousands. So, you know, have. You know, my dad always listened, you know, maybe even since further than that. My dad was always, like, a metallica fan. Guns n roses, you know, things like that.
Tony [00:02:50]:
So, you know, I didn't mind it back then. He listened to a lot of, like, eminem and rap, too.
Max [00:02:54]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:02:54]:
But that medal really stuck with me. Yeah. And so, like, even through the years, like, there was a phases of listening. A lot of, like, emo, screamo kind of music there for most of the high school. I mean, I still listen to that stuff all the time now. Kind of getting into, you know, more like atmospheric metal, like black gaze. You're supposed to be like shoe gaze, but black metal. Yeah, I've been enjoying that recently as well.
Tony [00:03:19]:
It just kind of just speaks to me, like, there's an atmosphere of it, in my opinion, where it calms me. Yeah, it's like other people, other outsiders that don't understand, like, emo music or screamo or death metal would just see it, like, as angry rage. But, like, it's almost like, you know, if you give Adderall to an ADHD person, like, it calms them or supposed to, but if you just give it to, like, a, you know, normal person doesn't need it, it, like, amps them up.
Max [00:03:50]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:03:50]:
So to me, it feels like black metal or death metal or anything like that just calms me. It, like, gives me peace.
Max [00:03:56]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:03:57]:
I don't know why. I don't know if that's a normal thing, but it just. It's just like, okay, things are right in the world, you know, this is chaos, but it's like organized chaos.
Max [00:04:07]:
Yeah, I like that organized cast.
Tony [00:04:08]:
Yeah. And I think that's what appeals to me the most about it. It's just. It just. It's not just some random guy screaming.
Max [00:04:15]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:04:15]:
There's a reason for it. Okay. And he's saying something, and then if you. Sometimes it's hard to listen to screamo and screaming music and, like, understand what the words are, but if you try to hone in on it and try to appreciate the music for what it is. Like, you can eventually figure it out. And almost trying to figure it out, like, my co founder, Paul will go to Costco or something, and I will listen to my music, and I'll be like, okay, this is a story about a guy who got hurt by a girl, and they get back together, and he just hears screaming.
Max [00:04:43]:
Classic trope.
Tony [00:04:45]:
I mean, like, a classic song in general. Right? Like the thing. We all have shared experiences as humans, and we all express them in different ways. Some people want to scream about it, but they're really sad, or maybe they're happy and they're, like, getting pumped. So, yeah, I mean, there's. Music really just brings us together collectively, and we all express ourselves in different ways as normal humans in society. So music's just an extension of that.
Max [00:05:11]:
Yeah. And you were saying earlier, I mean, like, whoever you were hating on Spotify a little bit, which I can get behind as well. You're saying whoever controls the music controls the mind, essentially. And something I've always felt as well, I think most people will have had this experience. There is something. There's, like, the amount of information compression in music is incredible. You can convey so much emotion. Really, for me, at least.
Max [00:05:31]:
There's no faster way to move myself into a new emotional state than to listen to a song that maybe was perhaps associated with the state that I had when I was first listening to that as a kid or whatever. Why is that? Why do you think music is so primal, in a sense or so gets down to the core of what we are?
Tony [00:05:47]:
Yeah, like memories. Right? Like, it's almost exactly what you said. Like, if there's a new song I listened to, like, a few days, I've just been listening to it on repeat. Firewell, I think it's called. And, like, it's. It's in English, and, like, there's one sentence in there that's in German, and it's like, this. This is war against everyone.
Max [00:06:08]:
Okay?
Tony [00:06:09]:
And it just says it in the most epic. Like, that's the only parts of the song that it screams. And it's. It. I can remember, like, just the first time I was listening to that on the way to the gym, and that got me so hyped, and I was like, so impact, you know? I was like, that's the energy I want to have all week.
Max [00:06:22]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:06:23]:
And that is the energy that's carried me on throughout the whole week. And when I'm not listening to anything or I think, what song do I want to listen to first? It's like, I want that energy I had when I first heard that song and, like, going to the gym and, like, working out and feeling pumped. Like, I want to feel that same thing again. It's almost like a drug in a way. If you want to think about it that way.
Max [00:06:41]:
100% it is. It releases whatever kind of, you know, serotonin or endorphins.
Tony [00:06:47]:
So, like, probably for reasons beyond me, just, like, it just feels like the human mind attaches to. It's almost like, you know, if you were to feel pain in a certain way or you're sick and you remember, like, you know, drinking egg drop soup or something, drinking sprite as a kid, you know, you almost associate, you know, drinking certain things or tasting certain things as, like, memories. That's the first time it happened to you, so it's like, that's what we get to experience. And so with music, you know, maybe I'm trying to relive my teenage years. You know, anytime I think about it, I think of, like, those moments, you know? And those were fun moments, you know? So, like, why. Why did I grow up?
Max [00:07:26]:
Well, I would argue you've done it in the right way. Growing up is mostly a scam. Right, right. Do you make music at all?
Tony [00:07:33]:
I used to play bass a lot, too.
Max [00:07:34]:
Okay.
Tony [00:07:36]:
Played a little bit guitar as well. But, you know, I bought a bass even, like, you know, two years ago when I left one of my jobs, and I was like, what do I do with my life now? And I was like, oh, this has turned out horrible. So I was like, you know what? Let me buy a bass again. And I just didn't pick it up enough again. Just get back into it. But used to play bass, and that was a lot of fun.
Max [00:07:54]:
That's super cool. You mentioned black gaze. I've never heard of that. I'm gonna check it out. I'm big shoe gaze fan myself. Love psychedelic rock. Love going to live shows. Do you go to a bunch of these kind of shows, or.
Max [00:08:05]:
This is mostly.
Tony [00:08:07]:
I haven't done as many shows as I wanted to in Austin. I have a friend Ty, who, he's really big into, kind of like the eighties kind of heavy metal. Yeah. So anytime he's like, hey, I'm going to a concert. Do you want to go? I was like, yes. And, you know, it's not like my first selection of my preferred metal, but, like, I do enjoy it still. So, like, anytime we go, it's like, yeah, and it's just so fun looking at the crowd of people too.
Max [00:08:31]:
Yes.
Tony [00:08:31]:
Like, you know, you go to. Sometimes I'll go to. There's, like, I forgot the organization that's called, but it's almost like emo cover songs from two thousands, and they'll do shows at multiple spots in Austin. You can definitely tell the crowd is young, thirties, still dressing in skinny jeans and cutoff shorts and things like that. And then you go to the eighties metal bands here in Texas, and it's like, okay, these are clearly 40, 50, 60 year olds, bald heads, and tough looking guys. So it's. It's fun to kind of, like, live through those different types of metal and phases there.
Max [00:09:13]:
So does that mean you'll be still skinny jeans at 80 going to these shows? We'll see.
Tony [00:09:17]:
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine, like, music evolving so much over the years, right? Like, I'm sure that maybe your perspective, it's like the stuff that you would listen to, you know, 1020 years ago. So I don't know if we just, like, stagnated at all. I mean, definitely, like, creativity has gone on and, like. And, like, hearing new things, but it's. It feels. It's almost like dog breeds where we used to have, like, 510 dog breeds. And then, you know, throughout the two. Throughout the 19 hundreds, like, exploded into, like, hundreds, and now we pretty much have the same dogs.
Max [00:09:47]:
Well, you know, what's interesting about that? So on the one hand, I mean, I was telling this to my girlfriend that day. It's like, you know, I. For me, like, the golden era of music. I do think, like, the seventies, late sixties, early seventies had some special stuff going on. But from my own lifetime, you know, I would say about, like, 97 to 2001. Like, I love that whole genre of rock, of psychedelic, of shoe gaze, also of, like, electronic music. I'm really into trip hop, obviously. Great hip hop from that era as well.
Max [00:10:13]:
A lot of kind of, like, weird ambient, you know, kind of like, I don't know if you've heard, like, boards of Canada or that kind of music. Anyways, that's like an era and genre I always go back to. And, you know, I was saying kind of the same thing. I was like, man, this music was so much more emotional, so much more creative, so much beautiful, you know? Much more beautiful. Like, what happened? And my girlfriend's answer is like, bro, you're just getting old. Oh, fuck, you might be right.
Tony [00:10:34]:
What are the kids listening to these things?
Max [00:10:36]:
These damn kids, you know? So it is tough. Like, on the one hand, I do agree with you, and on the other hand, like, shit maybe our own blind spot is we're getting old. I don't know. But yeah, man, you know, to that other point, though, I wonder sometimes, like, you know, in terms of diversity of music, something I'm always really interested in. I'm lucky my dad also listens to a lot of, he got me exposed to a lot of the stuff like trip hop and kind of weird music early on. I do think there's a lot more really cool stuff out there, but I think it's harder and harder to find. So I would argue that maybe one of the challenges, which is going to get into maybe some of the stuff we'll talk about with Nostra and open source in general is like, I think the Internet, it just got hard to use. The Internet is one of my views.
Max [00:11:22]:
In the early days of the Internet, I feel like I would just come across more weird stuff all the time. And over time, I wrote an essay you may have seen a couple years ago, like, how to disrupt Google. And a big part of that thesis that Google is getting shittier and shittier over time. Their incentives are incorrectly aligned to show you ads. And if they're showing you ads you're not finding, they're no longer working on indexing the long tail. Not to mention if there's stuff that you want to find, like maybe you have to go to Yandex.
Tony [00:11:44]:
Just, Google's just not, or even what they're trying now. And it's basically trying to be an AI over Reddit.
Max [00:11:50]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:11:50]:
Which is coming out horribly.
Max [00:11:52]:
Horribly. And by the way, Reddit, for the longest time, I would just append Reddit to any of my searches anyway. And that's, but you have to, like, you know, shovel out the, the diamonds from the rest of the crap.
Tony [00:12:03]:
And now it's like, closed down. And now it's closed down. Yeah.
Max [00:12:06]:
It's terrible. I've stopped using Red in the last two weeks because now every time they, I'm not gonna log in. Yeah, I hate that. I hate where the Internet is going. So let's, let's talk about that for a minute. You know, I, I believe you're a coggy user. Is that right?
Tony [00:12:19]:
Cog? I just started mentioning that two weeks ago, actually.
Max [00:12:22]:
What do you think about it so far?
Tony [00:12:23]:
So far it's good. I haven't noticed anything. Sometimes I still, by Habit, just type duckduckgo.
Max [00:12:30]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:12:30]:
So that's my default. So, like, I just switched to Keggy paid with Lightning, which was great. I was like, you know what? Like, they were on Stacker News. Like a month or two ago.
Max [00:12:39]:
Oh, yeah.
Tony [00:12:39]:
I was like, okay, well, guys care. Like, you know, these guys are bitcoiners. He was like, talking about, like, we were talking about like, blind authentication schemes because that was what I was kind of working on at the time. So I was like, you know what? Like, it's finally time to give these guys a shot. Yeah, they say they don't collect data or, like, store data. So I was like, okay, let me, you know, I can't give those guarantees with duckduckgo either. Like, you never know. So let me try a new.
Tony [00:13:00]:
It's very intimate sharing search activity.
Max [00:13:04]:
It's the most intimate thing, I would argue.
Tony [00:13:05]:
Yeah, it's so, I mean, now I've just started running local LLMs to, like, ask general questions. So, like, I feel like I'm using search, like, yeah, unless I'm trying to find, like, a news item or trying to find, like, if I'm asking a general question, yeah, I'll just ask my local LLM. Like, it's just like, okay, how do I make this type of food or what compounds go into this material? Anything that's just a question that doesn't change ever throughout history of mankind. I'll just ask a local LLM because I can store that data. I can delete it. It never goes anywhere else. You don't learn anything about me if I start searching up chinese food. You might think I'm a chinese food enthusiast or a chinese person.
Tony [00:13:49]:
But many years back, I downloaded all my instagram data before I deleted that, and it thought like, I was some portuguese soccer player. Oh, wow. I was like, well, I'm not portuguese. And like, I played soccer one season in high school, but it's just like, they're just, I mean, in some ways they're just guessing and they can't verify anything anyways, right? So there's just assigning profiles to you and the discriminating against you from there. So I forgot what the original question was. But, like, searching things online, like, it's, it's. I try not to do that as much as possible because it's like, it's, I don't know.
Max [00:14:22]:
I mean, there's so many ways I want to go with this on the portuguese soccer player thing. I mean, you have many, many names and many alter egos here, which is great. So that's a new good one for you.
Tony [00:14:32]:
I'm diverting that I actually was a portuguese soccer player.
Max [00:14:34]:
Yeah, fuck. Your opsec here is this coder in Austin. So why do you think given the amount of money that's being invested in these companies and you've got literally the smartest minds in the world being paid ungodly sums of money to target us. Why are they bad at creating profiles? If you're going to target us and, you know, take away our privacy, why is it at least not good?
Tony [00:14:55]:
Yeah. You know what I think?
Max [00:14:56]:
Why?
Tony [00:14:57]:
Because ad money doesn't even care in the first place. I mean, if you got it, if you have to think, why are these profiles existing at all? Yeah. And where is, where is the money here? It's, it's ad money.
Max [00:15:09]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:15:10]:
So like Facebook creating a profile for you and saying, oh, yeah, this type of, this type of person really likes buying Tupperware. And so you want to throw a Tupperware ad on there, like what will get you way more users than you ever have before. And so it's like, it's like in some ways they could be correct in some ways, but the other, other chances, like the ad tech industry has so much money, it's almost like fiat problems. And so it's like, okay, if they're off by like even a magnitude of order, they're still making a whole lot of money because they're just like getting ice and eyeballs and, you know, ads work really well. So it's just like, hey, it doesn't matter if we, if we show this product to the wrong person, I think that they're just making so much money, it doesn't matter. And Facebook's making so much money, it doesn't matter.
Max [00:15:53]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:15:53]:
I mean, they could be right in a lot of ways, but like whether they're right or wrong, they still get the same paycheck.
Max [00:16:00]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:16:01]:
Interesting. From the ad company. They just have to deliver results.
Max [00:16:04]:
Yeah. So, you know, one of the reasons, and I'm curious to go then this distinction when you use local OMS versus search engine, one of the things that I really like about, you know, I don't know if it's coggin or kg or whatever, but the coggy vision to me is, I don't know if you read, they have two very interesting blog posts. One is talking about this concept of, I've talked about this key, I already forgot the name. It's not the indie web, the small web, anyways. And so there's like modes I believe you can use within their search engine where it's like, okay, I want to search for various information, but I just want to find long tail blog articles, type things. And to me that's so much I think there's two different ways I use the web for discovery. There's one that's like, okay, I have a very specific question. And yes, and we'll talk more about local lms.
Max [00:16:51]:
Like, great, just give me this answer. But then there's another way where I've spent probably way too much of my time growing up and in my current quote unquote job as well. Just like going down rabbit holes. And when you're going down rabbit holes, if you really want to get to the bottom of something, and there is an art to this, like, there's the art of figuring out, like, well, who actually has something interesting to say, who actually has taste and the ideas they're describing, what they're building, like, who links to other really good stuff. And, you know, in my experience, one, you have to actually just enjoy doing that. And two, you need to have like, infinite time to be able to, like, go down the rabbit holes, find things. It's like, it is just like a fun game. It's not something you can just get to quickly, but you can't really play that or find the kind of like, weird I bizarre alpha on the Internet.
Max [00:17:32]:
If you're just like constrained to searching on Facebook, even Twitter. Twitter used to be good at this and it's still okay. But that's what I personally want and was going to get back to with the music as well, is, you know, the Internet. The promise of the Internet in the early days of the Internet, and it could be so much better, is 8 billion people have 8 billion perspectives and everyone is an expert at something. And, you know, everyone's weird and their own way. And if you can find what everyone's a little bit weird at, like the little alpha or I understanding that everyone has about their own little niche, there's so much cool shit to learn. But if that's not being indexed, it's not clear how to either publish that information or find that information. Then we're all going to revert to this kind of median, whatever crappy individual consumer, which I even hate that word, consumers or even users.
Max [00:18:16]:
How about just people? Anyway, I guess my one dream experience I want, and I'm hoping something like Coggin can provide this is the ability to do general queries that are research queries. It's not like, what's the weather going to be tomorrow? But okay, what does the future of a noster based Internet look like? Cool. I want to find the most interesting directly and indirectly related blog posts and things about that. My hope is I want to see that for all kinds of things, including for music. Cool. I want to be able to go down the rabbit hole, and Bandcamp has a little bit of this. But how do I find that band with only 100 listeners? But they have great taste and they have a chance to really blow up. How do I find them early? That's what I want.
Tony [00:19:02]:
See, I want to hone in on the very last point because that's what I thought the whole time. I want to find that band and artist with a few hundred listeners. Yeah, that is really interesting. Apply that to a blog.
Max [00:19:13]:
Yes.
Tony [00:19:13]:
Show me a blog that you think only got 100 page hits. Even 100. It's like, oh, well, if you actually are a real user and your 100 has stumbled upon it, like, well, that's actually. That could very well be very high value content.
Max [00:19:30]:
Totally.
Tony [00:19:30]:
And so, like, there's a wild story from. Must have been, like, 2018 or something. I got high as fuck and I just started browsing the Internet.
Max [00:19:40]:
Always a good way to start for.
Tony [00:19:42]:
Lightning things, I guess. And I found, like, the most. It was like 90. It was, like, early nineties webview, right? Like, it just. It had, like, random forums and columns everywhere and different colors and, like, nothing made sense. But it was like, this one guy's blog post, or this one, he's had it the same for like, two decades, three decades, whatever. And he just posts his random thoughts and he shares his pictures, and there's kind of a community forum aspect to it as well. It looked bizarre from early nineties, and it had lightning integrated with it.
Max [00:20:16]:
Really.
Tony [00:20:17]:
You would have no clue. And this guy's talking about, like, he is. Like, he's an expatriate of. He's, like, left the United States. He's given. He has no passports anywhere in the world. He, like, lives in the jungle. And, like, he is this dark.
Tony [00:20:32]:
Sounds like dark. It actually legitimately sounds like dart. It very well could be Darth Kord. Yeah, but it's. I never thought about that until now. It sounds correct. Yeah, but, like. And then, like, I looked at his.
Tony [00:20:43]:
I, like, found it. I started going, yeah. And I was like, oh, my God. Like, there's a valuable, like, and there's people saying, oh, I love this work. Love what you do. Like, hope everything's good with your dog. Like, people, like, cared about this guy. Like, follow this guy's life.
Tony [00:20:56]:
And I look back and I'm like, yeah, he has blog posts and, like, random articles going to, like, the nineties. It's like. And he's, like, a lightning enthusiast. Like, almost like 2018. Like, you barely had good websites with lightning integrated.
Max [00:21:08]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:21:08]:
And I just remember looking at his Twitter account, and it was, like, locked with, like four or 500 followers.
Max [00:21:13]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:21:14]:
But the sad thing is, like, I never found that. I even tried going back.
Max [00:21:18]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:21:18]:
I never found that ever again. And I'm like, oh, my God, this was like a hidden gem.
Max [00:21:22]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:21:23]:
In the entire Internet, dude.
Max [00:21:24]:
And I mean, my.
Tony [00:21:25]:
How did I find. I don't remember how I found.
Max [00:21:27]:
Yeah, how did you find it?
Tony [00:21:28]:
I have no idea.
Max [00:21:29]:
Well, my initial reaction would be, share it with me, and now you know, and I know exactly what you mean. There is. And I don't know if this is just like, a certain personality type. Sounds like you have this as well. I certainly have this where there's such, for me, extreme satisfaction in finding these personal blogs where it's like, this person's brilliant and you just, you know it and, you know, no one else knows it. And, like, I mean, okay, at some point, you want things to go mainstream. You can't stay underground, whatever, hipster, forever. Or maybe you can, I don't know.
Max [00:21:54]:
But, like, it's so nice to. Yeah. To find some secret on the Internet and feel like you're sharing in this, like, special connection with someone and, yeah, I wish I had that, like, 100 x more than just fucking wasting my time scrolling on any crap social media of any kind. Reddit used to be good at this. It's still okay. But as we mentioned, now they shut down. It's gotten a lot worse. One thing that I've heard some of my friends talk about that are also Internet hunters, per se.
Max [00:22:20]:
A lot of this is moved to discords, which is interesting. And some of these are paId. I think there's interesting business opportunities around that. A lot of the alpha or secrets around the world maybe are hidden on these discords. One day, I would hope that could be a more interoperable version of the web, perhaps roster based.
Tony [00:22:36]:
And how much are they actually secrets? If it's on discord server?
Max [00:22:39]:
Yeah, no, that's true. Eventually it totally will. And so there's only, like, any of these, quote unquote, secrets are only secrets for, like, a period of time before it goes mainstream or not. But, yeah, man, like, finding, you know, a couple of examples that come to mind. I mean, I found some, like, random dude who just, like, I don't know how I found this either, but it was like, all of his photos of, like, he just rode his motorcycle, you know, from the United States all the way through Mexico. And, like, has these crazy fucking adventures in there. He's like, talks about doing peyote and all this stuff, and it was just, like, so inspiring. I was like, man, this makes me want to get on the road and, like, you know, just like, live life to the fullest.
Max [00:23:12]:
And I never, you know, I read a bunch of his stuff. I lost it. I had another rabbit hole. When I was visiting Mexico City. There was this guy, Jacobo Cohen, or not Cohen, I forget his last name. But he was like some researcher that had very interesting thoughts on consciousness and reality. And he'd done extreme research trying to prove something along the lines of, we live in a simulation, blah, blah, which in my jam with Keon, we go very deep on that one. I just, I start going down that rabbit hole.
Max [00:23:40]:
There was a guy I'd never heard of, and this dude had done incredible amounts of research. All these interesting. Some of them were even peer reviewed studies, you know, from legit university. I've never heard of this dude. So what do you think? If you obviously, I know you have nothing else on your plate. If you were trying to build the ideal tool for finding undiscovered gems on the Internet, what would that look like? Or where would you even start?
Tony [00:24:04]:
Yeah, I mean, I, the first thing that comes to mind is like, okay, if you do have access to, like, the internals of Google or Duckduckgo or, or a Kg search engine, it's like, okay, well, it's, it's, you know, how did the index come to be? Like, where's the raw data? Yeah, like, if you can get access to that raw data, like, okay, why do you think this is a popular hit? It's like, okay, maybe you can do reverse indexes at that point. It's like, okay, show me the ones that, like I said, like, find the ones that get hundreds of views or between 101,000 views. And maybe you can kind of search through that and even try scraping those articles, right? Because you'll probably get a very large feature set of things, but without raw access to actual indexers, maybe you can try to build your own, but that's got to be really hard. Part of the data that feeds these search algorithms are what people search for. Google's is very heavily indexed based on what people search for and then what they click on. So they can do their own algorithm and they change their algorithms all the time because they eventually get gamed. And so you just don't know what the trust there. It's a whole system that's gamed.
Tony [00:25:11]:
I mean, the very first thing I think about now, it's like, okay, how would I get access to that raw data and do these sorts of, like, advanced queries that I tweak and play with and find the right thing? It's like, well, the only raw data of information that I know that exists right there in the world that I can query against is nostril.
Max [00:25:30]:
Yeah. I come back to this all the time. So I got excited about nostril.
Tony [00:25:33]:
Yeah. It's like, show me. I want to see. Probably the first thing I would try to query.
Max [00:25:37]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:25:38]:
Is show me a user that it was actually, like, around over a year from now. Like, that's probably a good metric. Or maybe like, from January 2023. Yeah, show me someone that early on, Nasser, who has, like, posted at least, like, once or twice a week, maybe even once a month if you want to be liberal, but, like, a few times a week who only has gotten, like, two or three likes on average.
Max [00:26:03]:
Yep.
Tony [00:26:03]:
It's like that. Like, that guy must be interesting because he's already on Noster.
Max [00:26:07]:
Yep.
Tony [00:26:07]:
So he has something to say. He has a reason to be there in the first place. It almost kind of filters out thoughtless sheep. I wouldn't want to run a queer like this on Twitter. There's probably millions and billions of people and mostly bots or other crap that probably fit this profile. Yeah, show me. There's a, like, if I can query for any sort of, like, is this a real person? Well, if they're on Noster, it might be real. If they're posting consistently and they're not doing spam, you can do some sort of, like, spam index.
Tony [00:26:37]:
Show me. Show me that guy's post.
Max [00:26:39]:
Totally.
Tony [00:26:39]:
And if he's still around and he, like, only has a few views, like, he's saying something that, like, isn't. Well, Nostra isn't the easiest to discover. Brand new profiles that, like, aren't well known or aren't interacting with other people very often. Like, I will say that, but the, like, you could do a raw query like that on Noster today with all that data. But I don't know anywhere else you could.
Max [00:26:59]:
Yeah. So this is the reason. I mean, there's many reasons I'm bullish on Nostra. One of the reasons I'm most bullish is, you know, I actually think we can have a gradually then suddenly moment with nostra where, you know, you basically have two giant forces in the world right now. Well, three. One force is kind of driving their forces. You know, you have AI basically creating more and more content. So the amount of deepfakes, the amount of, like, fake shit in the world, it's already really, really, really bad.
Max [00:27:21]:
And it's about to get, like, so much worse. Like, I don't think people realize what's about to hit. And so in that world, one of the things I love about Nassar so much, and Stu has talked about this a lot, is like, okay, Stu Ann Hazard. Okay. Just having signed content, just having the PGP vision of people actually use it, that's huge. Just starting with, like, okay, if I can somehow establish this is actually Tony and he signed this data. Great. I know this message is his.
Max [00:27:48]:
Cool. So that's already, like, really powerful. In a world of AI, then the thing that I'm so excited about, as we've talked about in the past as well, is the identity piece and the open social graph. The thing that everyone wants from Facebook and Twitter and all this stuff is their graph. But they protect that very, very heavily. Now they're protecting even more. Right. That's the value.
Max [00:28:07]:
It's the information and then the graph that that's layered on top of. And so what I'm so excited about in this world and the thing that I most want to see happen, hell, maybe one day I'll take a stab at building something myself because I get so obsessed with this, is basically many different takes on what can you do with an open social graph? One of the very first startups I ever tried. You definitely don't know this, but even before I worked with bright, doing solar in Mexico was my buddy and I, we tried to do a. Right out of college. We totally bombed everything we were trying to do. But it was a social network for solar owners, solar panel owners. And it's very interesting because I actually think this is a good business, not a huge venture business. It could be, actually, but it's a very good business because it's a very high cost item.
Max [00:28:57]:
Like, if you're installing solar panels in your roof, and it's one of those things, like, it spreads. Actually, a guy at UT Austin, this guy Varun Rye, did an interesting study. It's spread somewhat like a social network. You see your neighbors get it, you're more likely to ask about it. If they got it, it's more likely to be economical for you. It spreads throughout neighborhoods. And because it's a high cost, some of these solar installers, at the time we were looking at doing this, like 2012, were paying, whatever, thousands of dollars for qualified leads, potentially much more for a closed project. Basically, our original idea was just using at that time.
Max [00:29:30]:
You still access the Facebook API, and it was just like, okay, cool. Anyone that goes solar, cool. We're going to do a bunch of referrals to this, try and figure out the right people to refer and split the proceeds with you from all the referral bonuses we make, which, I mean, again, it's not like the biggest business in the world, but I still think someone can do that and make a lot of money on that. Solar companies are so. And this is true for any high cost arm, right? You can do this with cars, whatever. But of course, then Facebook shuts down their API. Same thing with Twitter in the early days, right? Like, you could do so much cool shit with the Twitter graph and all of their open data. Of course, their currency was eyeballs attention.
Max [00:30:02]:
They had to shut that thing down. So a couple of views that I would love to see. I've even thought about shaking off the rust. I did Justin Moon's biddle bootcamp a few years ago. So I'm not particularly technical, but I did do that. I was definitely the slow kid in the class, but I finished and I thought about a couple of things I would like to build, and maybe people listening this, maybe someone will take this idea and build it faster because I'm sure it will take me forever. But one is, a few people have talked to us. I love to see one thing, which is just a really.
Max [00:30:32]:
The beauty of nostrils. You can have so many different specific clients. You know, I love, you know, companies and projects like Primal and Domus. I'm a user both invested in primal. I think those are all great. But personally, I don't like doing scroll on my phone. I think that's just bad for me as a human.
Tony [00:30:48]:
I just deleted the scroll apps on my phone.
Max [00:30:50]:
I did, too. And, like, the reality is, I mean, I still use primal a lot on my computer and stuff. I haven't had Twitter scroll on my phone forever, but I just. It's not. Even if it's an oster like, scroll does not help me as a human. That's me. Other people, you know, maybe they can deal with it. I can't.
Max [00:31:03]:
I. What I want is a whole bunch of weird long tail clients that help me find the long tail of the Internet. So one client I want is a client where I log in and I can either random or, again, through web of trust, like, finding people that I know would be interesting, just randomly see or selectively see the network from other people's point of view. So just like, hey, give me a quick snapshot. What does the world look like to, Tony, what does the world look like to. And you can do this today if you go and find their own public. I just want a really simple way to do that. What does it look like, you know, to be, I don't know, like a mid thirties japanese guy.
Max [00:31:40]:
What does it look like to be like a mid thirties japanese girl? Holy shit. That's kind of. That's different. You know, that.
Tony [00:31:46]:
That is really interesting because that gives you insights you'll never see totally in your life at all. You can't. You can't log in to see the algorithm that someone is sharing to me, you know, on Twitter. Yeah, on noster. I mean, you can. And what's funny is, like, I haven't. I've noticed my behavior on Oster a little bit where probably within the first few months, I've followed most of the people that I think I've ever followed.
Max [00:32:11]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:32:11]:
And then it's sort of like the same people, or, like, I see them and, like, I kind of like them, but it's not worth a follow to me. I feel like I try to very carefully curate my feed and, like, lists never kicked off too well, I think. On Nostra, I think. Not yet. Not yet. I think there's still an avenue where it's very useful, and I would love to. Love to ease it. Like, if I could just, like, one click, but button or two click, button, throw that guy into that list and all these lists.
Tony [00:32:36]:
Okay. This is exactly what I want to see right now, because, like, it eventually, like, you know, some. Some of the e girls hopped on nostrils, like, oh, this is interesting. We got a new interesting from a new perspective. I was like, you know, for a little while, I was, like, one of the top zappers to some of these girls. So it's like, they need to stick around, man. Yeah.
Max [00:32:53]:
You need to have their perspective, right?
Tony [00:32:55]:
I mean, we need all, like, it was probably. I don't know, I came in the nostril probably about a year ago from now, a little bit over a year ago. So, like, I was like, oh, man, it's been, like, four or five months. It's like, kind of the same new people. Like, finally a new group of people hitch on and, like, you know, we need, like, you know, they're battling censorship problems on, like, other social medias. Like, you know, they're talking about blue sky, and that's being, like, it feels like rights and content on blue sky is getting worse more than it's better. They just added DM's in a public way where they're like, oh, yeah, we have the right. Like, we can see all your DM's and we can decide to, yeah, it's all public.
Tony [00:33:29]:
Like, they actively do censorship. They were like, yeah, we specifically do censorship on your DM's right now. And that's how they're rolling out stuff. And it's like, oh, my God, how does that.
Max [00:33:38]:
I mean, I'm not an expert on it.
Tony [00:33:39]:
Just like public DM's and I don't even know how it works. I still, like, I set up my own federation on Blue sky.
Max [00:33:44]:
Okay.
Tony [00:33:44]:
I have no idea where my keys are. I have no idea how, like, I had a few friends join my federation. It's bluetony.com. that's my blue sky. I wanted only Tony or tonyfans.com, but that was taken.
Max [00:33:59]:
Fuck. Yeah.
Tony [00:34:02]:
But I don't know where keys are or any of that. I forget why I brought up blue, but I'm like, we need interesting groups of people joining Osterhead in different ways. So I was like, you know what? Like. And I was like, no, not many people are as happy. I gotta help show them what this bitcoin thing is about and why it's so powerful here. And unfortunately, like, they didn't stick around. Not just unfortunately for me as a viewer, great high class content. But it's just unfortunate that, like, we.
Tony [00:34:28]:
I don't want it to be in a situation where we just keep getting echo chambers after echo chambers. And it's like the same people that have been around all throughout the years. That's why sometimes, like, I've been a little bit more liberal with my feed and followers because I'm like, if I sometimes see, like, a random person that normally, if it was on Twitter, I would. No interest.
Max [00:34:46]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:34:47]:
And following them. But it's like, oh, wow, this is, like, a genuine person.
Max [00:34:51]:
It's not a bitcoin.
Tony [00:34:52]:
Genuine. Yeah, not a bitcoiner. Genuine. Hobby interest. Sometimes, like, gardeners really came into noster, like, a few months back because a gardener. Tiktoker.
Max [00:35:02]:
Yeah, interesting.
Tony [00:35:03]:
And so, like, I actually did follow a few gardeners. Few of them dropped off or so I could probably go back in my follow list. But there's like. Yes. Like, just. I want to see what normal people see. Yeah, but you bring up a good point. You actually can right now.
Tony [00:35:18]:
If you. If you know of those normal people, create a list.
Max [00:35:22]:
The normies.
Tony [00:35:23]:
Yeah. And then. And then just like you probably have seen, we talk about, like, finding niche content or whatever. You probably have seen those websites over the years where you just hit like, show me a random website.
Max [00:35:34]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:35:35]:
It just shows you something completely bizarre or something normal or something you've seen before, but typically something you've never seen before. And it may be dumb or niche or whatever, but like, you get a perspective you just never had before previously or you weren't able to just like find it.
Max [00:35:49]:
Totally.
Tony [00:35:50]:
And so, like, on nostra, like, I would love a. Show me a random person's feed.
Max [00:35:55]:
Yeah, yeah, totally. 100%.
Tony [00:35:57]:
See what their world's like.
Max [00:35:58]:
100%. And I think where the things get interesting, I have my own thoughts on how sort of like, the stages of adoption. I agree with you. I'm also not that worried. Like, to me, Noster feels like 2010, 2011 bitcoin. And I actually feel very lucky to have found it this early and, like, it's going to take a couple of waves of adoption. I actually think I'm more bullish on using Noster for things beyond social media for this next wave. So stuff like, we'll talk about Noster Wall connect in a minute, bitcoin adjacent, stuff like the mints, which we'll also talk about.
Max [00:36:23]:
But just to finish up with this thought, one idea that I saw, I forgot, who was this? I forget his name. I don't know him. Pipelia or something. He was someone that at one point was interested in some of the did stuff. And then he came and got involved with Noster. And I saw he put out a note where he was like, hey, I'm trying a new service, message me, and I'll find you three people I think you might like to follow. I was like, this is a great starting point. It's a super good starting point.
Max [00:36:52]:
And I think where things can get really interesting is with the web of trust, you can do completely random. That's cool. But what's much cooler to me is this web of trust thing. So as an example, and I think you can do this explicitly or implicitly. Implicitly is okay, we take all the signals that we have, and again, it's all public data, so it's great. Including, I know zaps are not verified, and that's another question. But I think that value signal is also gonna be very important. But we have all this public data.
Max [00:37:15]:
And now I could also do it explicitly creating lists, but to your point, in very, very specific content. So I might say, for example, when it comes to looking for mints, Tony's my guy. I just, tony's my guy. Bob's my guy, I got a couple of these dudes. I want to see what mints they're using when it comes to, you know, ordering chinese food, maybe it's also, I don't know, but, like, you know what I mean? Like, my buddy that's really good at recommending whatever, this kind of, like, music. Yeah, whatever. And so I can have all these different lists where I think this gets really magical, then is I can start saying, okay, I want to get recommended three people, but I want it to be people that Kian follows or people in my web trust follow that you think are a good fit for me. And specifically for these topics, I want three people Kian would follow for web search and discovery, three people.
Max [00:38:03]:
And Tony would follow around mint stuff. Three random people, I don't know. But the ability to easily use some of that extra data, the web of trust, some of the value signal to surface. So it's not purely random. That would be one kind of content. It's curated in a way that's not.
Tony [00:38:19]:
Possible on the Internet, even specifically honing in on that, whether if it's like, three people from this person or three people in this category. Specifically people that I probably have never seen before.
Max [00:38:30]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:38:31]:
Because I wouldn't want it to be like, oh, we think you like. Michael Saylor on Noster is like, no, okay, like, I know who Michael Saylor is.
Max [00:38:38]:
The sailor shanty is coming back.
Tony [00:38:40]:
If I was interested in following him on Noster, I would be following him, like, I want to remove those probably, like, top one, two, three, maybe top five. Maybe you do it naively like that. Like, remove the top five profiles totally in this category, and then that 95% probably is a lot of people you probably never seen before. But specifically, yeah, show me people that I've never seen before that you think I might like totally in this category or from this person or from this topic that I might be interested in.
Max [00:39:06]:
And I think there's two really big opportunities. I mean, the major clients, like Primal and Domus, like, they do a good job. But, for example, in primal, and I think I know why they've done this. It's great that they have some of the algos there. They're very explicit about using algos. For a normal user that just logs on, doesn't follow anyone. You need that. What's going on at the top of the network.
Max [00:39:28]:
I personally have a pretty curated list on there, so I love. Just show me, literally just sequential order. I don't want any algorithms. What I really want to see, though, is the marketplace for algos? And no one is really pushing this yet. People have talked about it. Have you seen one work in this? Or how would you go about designing a marketplace for algos if you were building that?
Tony [00:39:45]:
Yeah, the marketplace is hard. Like, the first thing I think of is like, well, how would you solve this in, like, a free way?
Max [00:39:52]:
Yeah, okay, forget marketplace.
Tony [00:39:53]:
Yeah. How would you show a recommendation engine for a brand new person you have no clue about?
Max [00:39:59]:
Yeah, totally.
Tony [00:39:59]:
And I think we've seen a little bit in this category. I think maybe primal or a few other apps ask you, hey, what are ten things you're interested, interested in? And, like, pick one or two or three. And of course, bitcoin's one of them. I think it's like, it better be gardening or, like, flower, you know, whatever. Normie things. I know people are trying to get normies on board, but. So you probably have to first ask them, like, what topics you're interested in. Twitter still does this.
Tony [00:40:25]:
Yeah, I think it's probably successful still. I mean, there's a reason they have done that for many, many, many years. So you start out asking, like, what topics are you interested in? Before we dive into further, do you think that's a good approach as. As a way to try to start recommending things to people or just by asking them explicitly, or do you try to find out in some other way, maybe through just, like, letting them start actively using it normally, or. I don't know. Do you have thoughts about the way we've sort of tried to solve that?
Max [00:40:58]:
Well, my first thought is there might be one dominant way, but my hope is that there's just a huge sort of, like, open field of experiments and maybe different people come into nastier in radically different ways. I think one thing that I wish maybe we start to change, and I think in the next year it will change the framework of conversation around nostril is not just social media. So how do you start building up a profile? Ideally that you own the keys to, but from whatever your entry point is. And so maybe for some people it is social media, but I think it's great that we're trying to get the normies on there. I personally don't think that's going to happen in the next wave. A couple will come on. That's cool. Sorry about that.
Max [00:41:41]:
Actually, I want to make sure my girlfriend got sick. I'm just telling her mom and make sure she's doing okay. Got a little bit of food poisoning, actually. So I think. I think that different people are going to come into the network in different ways depending on your use case as an example, I think a lot of people are going to come in potentially first through marketplaces. We've been talking a little bit about this. My guess is that the next big wave is probably going to be bitcoin related marketplaces, but where you have that identity. Here's an example.
Max [00:42:22]:
We talked about building local bitcoins on ASTR. Maybe there's going to be a whole new wave of people that don't do any of the social media stuff, but they get their first in pub because they're trying to buy or sell bitcoin for fiat. Great. Those are all now new noster users. Now, once they have that, that profile, maybe another site, you know, it's like, hey, log in here with noster and, you know, it's like, okay, well, you're already using this for local bitcoins trading. Maybe you want to actually use a mint and cool. That's why I think the next thing that's going to pop is, you know, you need, you need to find a mint that people, you know, that trust, those are all sort of bitcoin related. But my broader point is I think that'll bring a new wave.
Max [00:42:56]:
People, probably bitcoiners first that are not into the social media, but then maybe once they already have some reputation, some profile built up there, then when they do log into something like a primal or a domus, they're not coming from scratch. They have some connections, some context there. So I think that's one answer is that different people are going to come from different avenues for just brand new people that you want to onboard in a more social form. Yeah, I do think that asking directly is interesting, but my sense is that I'm just thinking about this out loud. The Algos and AI in general is getting so much better. One cool thing would be imagine a world where you could bring your AI assistant and some of this is going to be in the cloud. Open AI. I hope more of it's local.
Max [00:43:38]:
I don't want to talk with you more about local AI, but it'd be cool if you could also just bring your AI with you. And your AI, I don't know, knows you from searches you've done or whatever, and can help you curate your initial feed. What do you think? What do you think is most likely? Or what do you want to say about.
Tony [00:43:53]:
Yeah, I'll get into that in a second. The first thing I think of, well, as you were talking, I was trying to also think about, okay, how would we do it besides just topic based or asking the user the question. Two things. Your point about. Okay, I came into this noster app through local bitcoins and so you have already started to define what the user, his profile is, like, how they got there. Yeah, you kind of start to know those things. I was even thinking about. Okay, well, you know, we have so many generalized Nostra feed clients that they're not specific to a specific topic.
Tony [00:44:28]:
Yeah. So if you start to have like topic specific, you can start immediately showing them things for that topic and then that works really well. Another thing is like, you know, what if I, you know, we do a little fake it till we make it with some of these Nostra clients and we just like start. I don't want it to be like a deceitful thing, but start like injecting things into their feed of random notes on random topics and see if they interact with it.
Max [00:45:02]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:45:02]:
And if they do, you know, it could be like AI. Think there's still something? There's been attempts, execution of AI based like social media profiles. I was interested in that for a little bit. I did some crazy workflows with chat GBT where I'm trying to get it to craft a personality and have it tweet something. And if you ever ask chat GBT, tweet something. It's the worst tweet you ever see in your life. It's like filled with emojis and happy faces and hashtags and maybe that's what's popular. I mean, maybe, but it's just like, it's hard to imagine for the normies.
Tony [00:45:39]:
I mean, I mean, even a normal person talking like that, I was like, I don't think I've ever seen a normal person talking. Usually, like, I see normal people like yell about some random thing that, like Kellogg's did, you know, whatever, whatever infringement, you know, happened there. But, but, you know, I had to go through like four or five different, I had to send it to chat four or five different times. Like, okay, start artificially adding one, like five of these ten grammar mistakes and start, and start stripping things down and get rid of all emojis and get even if I say don't use emojis. There's so much you can do, so much context. It's got to obey you and your question. Its goal is to chat DBT or any AI is to answer your question or your problem. But when you start diving in, when you have ten to 20 requirements, it like usually just fulfills four or five.
Max [00:46:34]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:46:34]:
So then I would only give it like four or five requirements at once and do another workflow. I bring all this up. Like, I think there's something there still with, like, a really good personality based AI on top of Nostra. And when you can try to fake it till you make it. What I hate and what I believe other people hate. Like, Sean on Nostra has been saying, I forget his last name all of a sudden.
Max [00:46:54]:
I.
Tony [00:46:55]:
He works at Amboss, but he's been saying, like, he has blocked like, 2300 Nostrich house AI profiles already because it is just going through and commenting on random things. And, like, it has, it thinks it's the authority figure on whatever the question is, even if it's not involved in the question at all. And, like, in theory, I like, I like the potential to have that, but the execution has to be like, you know, 99% of what, like, a possible human would say, yeah. And if it's commenting on things that has no idea about it, probably it shouldn't comment on those things and even attempt to comment. But to be fair, there's a lot of people I wish would not comment on my things.
Max [00:47:39]:
That's a high bar.
Tony [00:47:40]:
Yeah. But if it's trying to, like, yeah, I don't know. It's hard to navigate between, like, what is a real person and what's not a real person and how to make AI seem like a real person. At least if you can, like, trick the user in a positive way, like helping to figure out what they're interested in, helping to even, you know, they can be helpful, too, even if it was unprompted. If I have a general question that I post an officer and it answers my question accurately, do I care if it was a bot or not? Like, there was something on Stacker News. I don't know. It's got a. I think it was like a whole year ago now.
Tony [00:48:12]:
Yeah. Where, you know, like, I think the API access started opening up more so people could experiment with APIs. Like, I love the hacker news bot on Stacker News.
Max [00:48:20]:
Well, that's what I was about to say. I actually wish we had more of those kind of bots on nostril because I actually get my hacker news content on Stacker News or nostril.
Tony [00:48:26]:
Right. And so, like, for a little while there, you know, I feel like someone was experimenting with an AI based bots. And so, like, a question would be asked and it would eventually, like, respond with its version of the answer, and sometimes it would be an accurate answer and it would be upvoted. And then some, someone on Stacker news was, oh, I hate this, or like, I don't believe. And then another time someone on Sacra News was just posting old popular Reddit Posts. I like that key on, I mean, like, Reddit faked it to, it made it like a lot of the early Content from Reddit was from the Creators of Reddit as like different Nims. And so it's like, what does it matter? What is the goal you're trying to get out of Stacker News? It's like active engagement, like discussions and things like that. Who cares if the prompt was fake? If you didn't know it was fake, it was still a good experience and you enjoyed and you interacted with it and you got good discussion.
Tony [00:49:24]:
And then like, real people will pile on, right, and start discussing real things. So it's like, you know, it kind of goes into like, well, who cares if the world is a simulation? I'm enjoying it, you know, or maybe I'm not enjoying it, but like, it's a real Experience prompting real responses out of you, whether that's negative or positive. Hopefully it's a positive experience or hopefully it doesn't leave you with such a negative, jarring experience. But also that's, humans can have that happen to you anyway. So it's like you're not going to avoid that by avoiding AI. So it's like, hopefully we can just get into that place where whether it's AI or not, if it fools you, does it matter if the outcome is still positive or gives you that same experience a human would give you anyways?
Max [00:50:05]:
Yeah. Well, that's an interesting question. And my first thought, I'm not sure on that particular thing, I have to think a bit more about that. But one point you made, I think is a very good point, is with the hacker news bot, but also with people posting old popular Reddit posts, there is an argument that it's happening a little bit organically on stacker news, maybe a little bit less on Nostra, but some there as well because we have the economic incentives of zapping. This is one of the big things that Nostra opens up, is in a world where there's going to be a lot more content created, maybe the cost of content creation comes down a lot. The curator is really a lot, where a lot of the value accrues. One beautiful thing I would love to see is to your point, imagine if you or someone, I don't know if they can make enough money today, maybe there's not enough users, but they could head in this direction. All they're posting on Nostra or stack news, which because it is an oster client, at least partially, is content that they found really awesome.
Max [00:51:06]:
So, for example, you found this guy that you wish you to kept up with his blog, the 2018 Lightning guy. If you posted his link on Master, I would zap that and be like, this is dope. And I wish there an easy way for me to bookmark that or put that into a list, which obviously I could. Similarly, I actually think if anyone's listening to this, maybe you're not technical, but you want to get involved and help Nostra. One really cool thing is just like try and go and find awesome old, amazing great content on the Internet and post it on Oscar. One thing that I think could be really cool, and I think he was playing with an idea of this at some point, was imagine just going and finding all of the best posts from, like, bitcoin talk forums. Like, that stuff is so valuable. And I'm sure there's got to be a lot of these other forums out there under today.
Tony [00:51:46]:
An old Hal Finney post, like the nineties about e cash that just came out. It was like that. It went to the top and I was like, wow, I've seen a lot of house e cash posts, mostly on bitcoin talk forums. But just the fact that, like, it was talking about something that I don't think anyone has talked about much, even in the e cash world today, inscriptions with e cash notes. It's like having something that, like, he was talking about the beauty in bitcoin bills or, sorry, that's just bills. Dollar bills. It's like, you know, some of the old bills look really beautiful and they have, like, their own unique spin and people collect them. And there was actually a collection, a whole collection market of this, but that just surfaced today.
Tony [00:52:30]:
And then all of a sudden I saw one of the comments was, oh, wow. I like, I didn't realize how Finney still had its blog post up.
Max [00:52:37]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:52:37]:
You know, from the eighties and nineties, or however long it's been and it's still running. I didn't know that either. Yeah, it's like. And then I saw, I think it was our sync washing, just posting even more. He saw. I don't think he was the original poster. He may have been, but then all of a sudden, like, a few more. How funny.
Tony [00:52:54]:
Old blog posts started dropping and it's like, oh, this is great. Like, you know, it's almost like the hive mind. Like, find something new, unique, even if it's 2030 years old, right. It's kind of beautiful to see that.
Max [00:53:04]:
Surface up to the top, I would say. Especially if it's 20 or 30 years old.
Tony [00:53:07]:
Yeah, right.
Max [00:53:08]:
Like, if something lasts that long, like, there's something. There's something true or something, you know, potentially much more, I don't know, hidden.
Tony [00:53:16]:
Well, that's the hard thing. It's even harder for it to like that probably that his blog post probably still lasts because, you know, his family has kept his servers running still, you know, they know. They know. They knew how Finney better than anyone and they knew how much he cared about technology. And he probably, you know, set things up in a way where, like, hey, like, if I die tomorrow, like, after one year, my DNS record, like, will go away. Stop paying for my DNS server. Right. Like, that's usually what happens.
Tony [00:53:41]:
But NASA, you can't do that.
Max [00:53:42]:
Exactly.
Tony [00:53:43]:
With Noster, there will be relays, primal runs of caching server relay. We run a caching server relay. There's notes that will just never go away. And you only would find that on something like wayback machine. But you have to know that URL exists.
Max [00:54:00]:
How does wayback machine work?
Tony [00:54:02]:
It just indexes. So I think there's a few things there. As a random Internet user, you can say, hey, you can send, you can post a link into wayback machine and you say, I want you to, like, timestamp this so you can go back and see different timestamps. And I believe it even, like, indicates when it might have changed. So you can see key change points throughout like a decade or so. Okay, maybe even decades. I don't know. Like, the longest post I've seen a wayback machine.
Tony [00:54:32]:
But you have to input that URL into wayback machine and then say, okay, I have 20 saved copies of this website throughout this, throughout the decade. And then you can pick one. If you don't know the URL, you're. You're not like, wayback machine might have something really cool that you've never seen before. Yeah, but if you don't know the URL, you won't never find it.
Max [00:54:54]:
Who pays to, like, store all that?
Tony [00:54:56]:
That's a good question. I don't know. I assumed it was like, kind of like a public good, probably nonprofit. There's a few, I think, spin off subway back machine. So there's a few companies like that Internet archive. Yeah, I assume it's like, just a public someone. Just a public good.
Max [00:55:12]:
Yeah, some donors.
Tony [00:55:13]:
But, like, it'd be hard to discover anything with it. So it's more. It's not a discovery. It's more of an archive, but not a discovery. It's like you go into a library that, like an old library that keeps records of everything. It's like you can actually kind of discover things. You can just open a random book. You can go to a random shelf library and look at something.
Tony [00:55:33]:
Right, with. Without a URL, you can't do that with the Internet, but on Noster. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can look back at post years ago and in ten years, doesn't matter if Noster's still around or not. I have the potential to go back decades and see what someone said at this very specific time, and they can't ever delete it, which, you know, there's pros and cons. I mean, you can't ever delete anything truly digitally. Yeah, but. But someone could actually go back and like.
Tony [00:56:02]:
And maybe AI is better in ten years and they can actually go back to the NASA early days right now and start running these algorithms. It's almost like you're going back in time. It's. What's it called when you back test? You can back test algorithms as early in time as you want. You're never going to be able to, like, Twitter could internally if they wanted to, if they had any reason to do that. Or you can just have, like, an individual and NASA do it with no one's permission needed. And if AI technology is like, that easy for someone to locally run that, like, you can totally do that.
Max [00:56:37]:
It's a badass future heading.
Tony [00:56:38]:
So that's what I kind of like about NASA. It's like, it's the raw data and you're getting raw, like, and we're not on NASA for, like, engagement and content farm. Like, a lot of that doesn't work well on Nostra. Some of it does. I mean, you do get some influencers. Odell was posting on NASA today, like, hey, sorry, guys, I haven't been doing my good morning tweets because people think, you know, they're invested in primal, but so they're like, apparently the primal search engine, the recommendation engine is very heavily biased on, like, replies.
Max [00:57:12]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:57:12]:
So he said he just will post GM.
Max [00:57:15]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:57:15]:
And then like, 100, 200, 300, 400 people will say GM back to him and he'll go to the front of the, you know, the top results on primal. Every time he's like, I'm trying to get out of the conspiracy that, like, I'm influencing the results.
Max [00:57:29]:
It's a high signal conversation.
Tony [00:57:31]:
So you have people like. Like, I'm just posting jam. But then also, like, you know, there are a lot of really, like, Lynn Alden. Yeah. She has recently said, or not recently. It's like, a year ago. She's like, I really love Nasir because, like, I can actually post my raw thoughts.
Max [00:57:47]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:57:47]:
And it's nothing. You know, I don't know how many followers she has on Twitter. Probably a magnitude way more than on us or too many. Let's just say a million, just to throw out a number. And, you know, you have a million people dissecting your words, interjecting with random things. Like, just gotta be stressful. Yeah. And so you just can't.
Tony [00:58:06]:
But on nostril, you can post your raw thoughts and, like, you know, you'll have real people responding to it in a way that's not designed to, like, oh, I'm gonna dunk on this person. It's like, okay, well, you're probably not gonna get any sats for dunking on someone. It's like, sats are, like, the true signal.
Max [00:58:20]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:58:20]:
In a way. So, like, yeah, you can game some of that. Like. And zaps aren't, like, the most secure from a perspective of, like, yeah, you can try to game it. You can zap yourself.
Max [00:58:29]:
Yeah.
Tony [00:58:30]:
And try to get. You know, but I feel like not enough of that has come out. And, like, primal has done a good job of, like, trying to filter. Okay, this is, like, too many zaps from, like, a random person. We're not gonna display it in the UI. And I think they've done a really good job of balancing, like, what is potentially bot activity or, like. Or, like, out of the norm activity, and just focus on, like, okay. Typically, people will do these things, so, like, we're gonna.
Tony [00:58:53]:
We're gonna focus on that as the signal. So. Yeah, forget what. But, yeah, it's raw thoughts.
Max [00:58:59]:
Yep.
Tony [00:59:00]:
By natural that it's not the most popular social media, where you're. You're gonna get a lot done, but it's also raw notes that you will forever be able to back test queries and, like, find interesting things if you wanted to. So, like, that's. That's probably the most interesting. And it's open.
Max [00:59:15]:
Yes. Well, and that's what I was gonna say. To me, the beauty of noster, similar to, I think, a reason why a lot of bitcoiners, like, it's permissionless. Right. In the sense that I can create my identity. If I can do math, I can create an identity spubkey. A lot of these other systems, it's permissioned identity.
Tony [00:59:29]:
So, like, non science can't do math. Like, someone will do it for you.
Max [00:59:32]:
Exactly. Someone will do it for me as long as my bot can do math. But the beauty of that permissionless is exactly. It's the evolution can happen so much faster because people can trash it. And I think we're just starting to see that happen. I think if you're deep in nasty you're seeing right now a lot of devs, many of them are being funded by opensats open source, but you're seeing a lot of people, Stu and hazard, all kinds of people trying crazy ideas. And I think in the next 18 months, some of that's going to start really bearing fruit. But the key to me is, and if I had to, like, leave one thought on all this nostra stuff for everyone, it's, you know, it's not just social media.
Max [01:00:06]:
There's going to be literally everything on the Internet is better when you have a shared identity and open data protocol, which anyone can build on. Permissionless means experimentation. Experimentation means faster evolution in my mind. And then for sort of maybe non technical people just throwing out ideas. And maybe this is something we shouldn't do on stacker news. I would love to see maybe more either bounties or people working to say, like, okay, cool, let's find a contest. What's the coolest bitcoin, the most interesting bitcoin talk forum post you found, or what's the most interesting random, weird blog post or new person you found on the Internet? I think some of those contests, maybe I'll even do this. I think that's a great idea.
Tony [01:00:44]:
Then you zap it. Proof of work.
Max [01:00:47]:
Exactly. Then you get that value signal, and.
Tony [01:00:49]:
That'S what services it. You do. Because, like, it feels like, you know, replies or, like, following new people that, like, you know, might not say a lot. There's. I was surprised by, like, the concept, and I don't know the exact stats or anything, but, like, there's. There's a lot of people out there that just lurk.
Max [01:01:06]:
Oh, I would say, like, 99%.
Tony [01:01:08]:
Yeah. And, and so, like, all it takes is, like, that one prompt for them to. For them to. Maybe they've been following you for. For years and you've never seen them pop up and, and maybe your likes, they never even popped up. Like, I don't know how true it is. It's hard to verify. But, like, I have, like, 10,000 followers on noster and I have, like, 500 on Twitter.
Tony [01:01:30]:
I mean, I deleted my Twitter and restarted but, like, it's just like, over the course of a few months, like, it's gone from like 4000 to 10,000. And I'm like, either this is fake. Yeah, or. Or it's a lot of people that are lurking and, like, following me by just happenstance, maybe through retweets or something, re quotes. But I don't feel like my. The amount of unique people that have, like, liked or starred or something with me have increased. Yeah, it's. It's about the same amount of likes.
Tony [01:02:01]:
It's about the same people that are liking stuff from four months ago that are liking my stuff now, but I have, like, almost double the amount of followers. Yeah, it could just be all workers. Yeah, it could be all it takes. Is that prompt of like, hey, I am really interested in these things. And so Max is asking me a question about it. I'm going to post it, and then now all of a sudden you can follow them because it is hard. If you're not an active poster and an active, like, commenter on Oster, it'd be really hard to get any followers at all. Yeah, I mean, that's probably true of any social media, too.
Max [01:02:35]:
Yeah. Good. Okay, shifting gears. Cause a couple things I want to make sure we get the chat about. One you talked about search is one thing. Local LLMs you're using for very specific questions. I know you actually gave me some great recommendations based on your feedback. I have a pretty souped up M three Mac.
Max [01:02:52]:
It's dope. I've been running some local stuff on there. I'm curious your thoughts. I know this is not your main focus, but to summarize for listeners, and I talked with Christopher about this recently as well. You basically had the hyperscalers, the closed source guys that came out with the best models, open source. As soon as it gets it, maybe it's twelve to 18 months behind, but then they take that, remix it, remash it up with new stuff, and it's awesome. You can do so many more things. I think agents that are speaking openly together think that's going to be really big, using all kinds of open source, off the shelf models.
Max [01:03:23]:
However, you've got other folks. There was a founders fund post a couple days ago basically arguing that we're on the s curve of training models. We're still early enough that only the hyperscalers investing on the order of $10 billion are able to play in this game, which is like four or five companies, and that closed source models are going to continue to run away over the next year or two. Do you have any opinion on how closed source AI versus open source AI develops in the next couple of years and then in the long run decade plus?
Tony [01:03:53]:
I don't think I do. Yeah, I mean, it's an area that I, in fact, like, I'm, it's funny, like, I gave you some tips on, like, AI stuff and I'm like, I'm like, just the baby.
Max [01:04:03]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:04:04]:
I really don't know how it'll play out. Like, it does seem like, and I could be even wrong in my description of this, like, people training AI's based on the results and content of other AI's, right? Yeah. And maybe that works really well. I mean, there's so many things people can tweak to. I mean, it's kind of like a public good, right? Like chat GPT. Like, people are abusing chat GPT APIs in order to train their own models. And I'm like, fuck yes, let's fuck it up. Because, like, I love this concept of, like, you know, the big giant and the small little guy that can get like ten x value with like, very little cost or ten x value for their life.
Tony [01:04:41]:
I mean, they could build products based on the results of this big giant that, like, technically speaking, is like a competitor, right?
Max [01:04:48]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:04:48]:
I don't think they want other people. I mean, it's open AI, but it's supposed to be a nonprofit corporation. Yeah, it's ran like a corporation. I don't think they want people leeching off for their work to create their own AI's. Yeah, but it's hard to stop that. And then they aggressive. I mean, the reason why I don't use chat GPT anymore and open II products at all is because they have so aggressively closed down their website that, like, I would have, like, for a whole month, I had to go through the most aggressive captcha.
Max [01:05:24]:
Captcha's what got you. It wasn't Sam cries Sam Olman being the Antichrist or something. It was Captcha.
Tony [01:05:30]:
It was Captchas, man. I would fail them every time. There would be like, seven captchas.
Max [01:05:35]:
You got to step your game up, bro.
Tony [01:05:36]:
That took, they would take like 10 seconds each, and there'd be like seven of them. And then when I failed, somehow I kept failing them. I would have to do it again. And that was on every, that was on every question. Even asking a follow up would trigger another seven captchas that I had to fill and mostly failed and have do it over again. So I was like, this is the same thing with Reddit, it's like, anytime you stuck, I use a VPN and I'm not going to turn off my VPN just to do this. So they started heavily closing out and I'm a paying user and that still couldn't get past the CaptChas. Like, they don't care if you're a paying user or not.
Tony [01:06:14]:
They were worried about people training. AI's on it, so they got too aggressive with captchas. I mean, they just don't price their product accurately. If you need to add a captcha, you're probably nothing.
Max [01:06:25]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:06:26]:
If you have to add a captcha to paying users, you aren't charging your product accurately. And at the same time, like, I, yeah, I don't, there's a lot of things I don't think OpenAI is doing correctly, but I mean, they're killing it. But maybe, maybe whether or not they're, they're killing it based on the amount of, like, value and work and everything that's been put into it, whether that's a fair outcome in terms of killing it. But I think from a society perspective, from like, what I can go to chat Chibutee and AI into, it's pretty remarkable. Yeah, it is crazy. I held off as long as possible, and then I, it's funny, my, I had this, like, infamous why I changed my mind about Nostra post. Yeah, that was also, and I would say I'm a fan. I'm a decent writer.
Tony [01:07:17]:
I've got a lot of compliments.
Max [01:07:18]:
Oh, you're an excellent writer. It's really good.
Tony [01:07:20]:
That one was like so heavily AI written.
Max [01:07:23]:
Seriously? Yes. Oh, wow.
Tony [01:07:25]:
I mean, like, you know, I started out with like, my thing, and then eventually I, that was where I was practicing AI writing. So, like, what? I mean, it took me, I was doing a three day fast in the woods of Texas. Like a little cab, actually, it was a little tent in the woods in Texas. And I just did a three day fasten, me and my dog. And I was like, I'm going to figure out. I had my Starlink Internet, of course. I can't go anywhere without Internet, even the forest in the woods. So I was like, okay.
Tony [01:07:51]:
I redid my whole local development setup. I started using AI for the very first time. Like, open, OpenAI for the very first time that it was only like a year ago. I held off for like six to eight months trying, because I was like, no, fuck that shit. I'm not gonna get involved in. I don't believe in it, whatever. But then, same thing with NASA. I was like, like, fuck it.
Tony [01:08:09]:
All right, I'm caving. I'm going into it. I'm gonna say why? And all that stuff, but, yeah, that was my first. It's so funny, too, because, like, people are like, oh, wow. Yeah, Tony. Tony driving so good. It's cool because, like, I remember Gigi, like, almost, like, two months ago. He was like, this is worth reading again.
Tony [01:08:25]:
Like, this is my favorite line. I'm so glad Tony said it. I was like, oh, it's funny you say that. I did not write that line in any way, shape, or form statement. My conclusion paragraph was entirely AI. It's like, one of the things I said is like, hey, summarize this and close it out. But what I'm having trouble with right now with my writing and my blog. Like, we just did a blog post today.
Tony [01:08:49]:
I'm having a very hard time condensing my thoughts in a blog post. Like, I can get, like, 100% done with a blog post, and then all of a sudden writing the tweets to summarize the blog posts. I just can't. I can't do, yeah, I can't. And so, like, and I tried get AI to do it.
Max [01:09:06]:
He can't do it either.
Tony [01:09:06]:
It does. It's like doing hashtags and emojis and bullshit. So, like, that. Something like that. I, you know, so we have a. I guess it's a policy now. Muni is like, whoever wrote the blog.
Max [01:09:18]:
Post has to the tweet thread.
Tony [01:09:19]:
No, someone else has to do the tweet thread. And that. And so I've done it reverse. And so, like, we've experimented with it, and it's like, oh, yeah, like, the person writing the tweet. Tweetden thread, summarizing the post. That's so much easier than when you're writing the blog post and writing the tweets. I don't know why I went to that tangent, but, like, so we had, we had mark start this week, and he's got to write, he's writing his blog post announcement. It's all summarized, too.
Tony [01:09:44]:
But we was like, hey, by the way, you need to write the tweet thread because, like, I wrote this blog post and I can't write tweet thread. So we're in.
Max [01:09:51]:
Welcome aboard. Actually, I know exactly what you mean. I mean, I blogenhe not super frequently, but sometimes as well. And I think part of it for me is by the time you've written the post, you say what you want to say. You're just done with the shit, you're done. I don't fucking go through. And also.
Tony [01:10:05]:
But if I could write it in a very short summary, I would have wrote it that way in the first place.
Max [01:10:10]:
Exactly.
Tony [01:10:10]:
There's a reason why it's two pages long.
Max [01:10:13]:
Yeah, I'm with you on that. I'm curious, your point. You mentioned you did this three day fast in the woods. I know you were very interested in technology, like daylight e ink. So it seems to me. I'm curious, kind of your own personal relationship with technology. It seems like, on the one hand, you're clearly, like, incredible super coder, shadowy, incredible super coder, shipping all kinds of stuff. On the other hand, you clearly see some of the limits of that and the benefit of getting away from it.
Max [01:10:40]:
How would you describe your relationship with technology and how it's evolved?
Tony [01:10:44]:
I would say, like, right now, I'm not doing a good job with it. I mean, like I said earlier in this podcast recently, just deleted all my scrolling apps. It was like, like, noster Amethyst, which I will say, like, going back to it. Like, man, I fucking love amethyst. And, like, I was. I've always been critical of it. I've even forked amethyst. And, like, I've gotten thousands of people to run my fork of Amethyst with just a few changes.
Tony [01:11:08]:
But, like, the. I progressed back, I think, with my social usage online, and I've just, like, become the toxic person that I. That I feel like I was. So, like, last week, almost in the same vein, like, I drove to Colorado last week, and I spent, like, three or four days in the mountains at a random cabin. It's like, there's these signs, and to be fair, like, I have an overland vehicle. I have a forerunner. Like, I used to have a huge tent on top that I was, like, sleeping. I would go off into the Wyoming mountains or the Colorado mountains and just be there.
Tony [01:11:47]:
And, like, I also didn't enjoy that either.
Max [01:11:50]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:11:50]:
Like, and there was times where I would just, like, car camp or, like, sleep in my car at, like, crackle. Crackle barrel parking lots. Yeah. And there's.
Max [01:12:00]:
I like, cracker barrel.
Tony [01:12:01]:
Yeah. I mean, I love it, too. And then they let you sleep in their parking lots or, like, Walmart parking lots and things like that. And, like, I. I know I have to do those things.
Max [01:12:12]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:12:12]:
I don't know why exactly I have to do those things, but then I. When I'm in the act of doing those things, sometimes I really hate it.
Max [01:12:21]:
Yeah, I know what you mean.
Tony [01:12:22]:
It's like, everyone, in theory, loves camping. I like glamping a little bit more sometimes.
Max [01:12:29]:
I like it in theory. I like being in nature. In theory.
Tony [01:12:32]:
In theory, there's something that really appeals. I mean, you. You probably have experience of knowing that, like, you don't like camping enough.
Max [01:12:39]:
Setting up the fucking tent, like, having the bear outside. I like being in nature.
Tony [01:12:42]:
Yeah. Yeah. And so, like. So for this trip last week. Yeah. What I did a year ago in the tent in Texas, it was raining the entire time, so my fast was actually miserable.
Max [01:12:57]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:12:58]:
And I was like, I usually don't fast anyways. I was like, okay, let me try that for the first time. And it was miserable. It was raining. I couldn't go outside. I was stuck in a tent. Didn't do shit for three days.
Max [01:13:08]:
Yeah. Sounds horrible.
Tony [01:13:10]:
Yeah. And so, like, you know, I do these things enough where, like, I know I have to get away, but I know I might not have a very good experience when I get away either. But there's just something about, wow, it's not working for me right now anyways, so what can I lose?
Max [01:13:26]:
Do you do any kind of. I don't know if you've come across deep workbook or that whole concept. Do you, like, have any way you bracket your days where it's like, look, I need to, like, I'm gonna fucking just, like, be in the zone coding or writing this, and, like, I'm not checking anything. No Internet. And then once I'm done, then I can go and engage in, like, the, like, kind of shallows. The shallows of the Internet?
Tony [01:13:44]:
Yeah.
Max [01:13:44]:
Or do you just, like, just go with it?
Tony [01:13:48]:
I wish I had better habits around that. Sometimes it's hard. Cause, like, a million things will pop up in the day, and you feel like it's so urgent and you have to respond and, like, what's the current conversation right now? Like, I want to be part of that current conversation. So, like, there's just, like, always sense of urgency. I will say some of the best work I've ever done is usually, like, at night. I mean, as any coder.
Max [01:14:09]:
As any. Yeah, exactly.
Tony [01:14:10]:
And a lot of times, like, more specifically, late at night, coding, getting high as fuck.
Max [01:14:19]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:14:19]:
So usually, you know, usually I don't smoke during the day at all. And I'm a solo smoker. I had my pot days in college, and, like, I went insane and, like, literally insane. And so now, like, there's a lot of, like, hard work. It's like, okay, it's the end of the day. I don't necessarily want to do these few hard things. Like, actually, weed helps me do very hard things.
Max [01:14:39]:
Interesting.
Tony [01:14:40]:
Because I. You know why?
Max [01:14:42]:
Why?
Tony [01:14:43]:
Because when I'm high, I don't think it'll be that hard.
Max [01:14:46]:
I like it. I like it.
Tony [01:14:48]:
It's almost like being a founder.
Max [01:14:49]:
This is the alpha tip, everyone. Yeah, just get high and it won't be that hard.
Tony [01:14:53]:
It's almost like being a founder. Like the Nvidia CEO said a few months back, like, someone asked him, like, would you go back and change anything? And he would say, well, if I knew what I knew now, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. You trick yourself into thinking it's not going to be so bad, and then you keep persisting through it and you're like, it'll get better, it'll get better, it'll get better. And you never dies. And that's what makes a founder, I think.
Max [01:15:17]:
Yeah, well, it's funny you mentioned that. I also don't smoke a ton these days, but certainly had in my period as well. And in the two years where I was doing more coding, in fact, I was actually quite proud of this. Again, would not consider myself a real engineer by any stretch of the imagination, but I was showing Francisco one of the first little apps I built was a little bot. It was interacting with the bitto API. And this was back in 2018 or something. It was like, hey, what people need is just a simple app where I can just. All I want to do is put some money in and split it between bitcoin and stable coins.
Max [01:15:48]:
Very simple. But to me, I was like, this is actually whatever great product. And went from zero to building that. It was really exciting for me. And I remember in that period where when I was doing Justin's class, we were building bitcoin and Python. One of my favorite activities would be to get stoned, listen to shoe gaze, and just sit there. And there's something so Zen and just like, you were so in the just flow state. For me, at least, it was just like something else I like to do now.
Max [01:16:12]:
Nothing with Wii, but with music that I'll do a lot is with writing or kind of deep focus. I like to find one song and have that on repeat. And it's often for me. Yeah, something like psychedelic rock or shoe gay, sometimes like ambient, but just keep flowing. In a way, it's like I. The music just becomes this kind of like. Like we talked about earlier, an emotional trigger, but I'm no longer listening to the words. It just, like, fades the background that's.
Tony [01:16:33]:
A lot of times why I listen to, like, heavy metal and death metal, right? Like, screaming sometimes. Like, I do try to hone in on, like. Okay, what are they saying here? Let me try to hone in on their words. But other times, it's like. It's just like, white noise.
Max [01:16:44]:
Yeah, it's like, exactly, exactly, like, like death.
Tony [01:16:47]:
Like, I. It's funny, I was. I remember in high school, sometimes I would listen to math core. Math, heavy metal, math core.
Max [01:16:55]:
Okay.
Tony [01:16:55]:
Like, very technical. Like, you know, high tempo beats, like 200 beats per minute, some insane amount of beats per minute. And you can't understand anything, like. And. And there's, like, some guy death screaming in the background, sounding like he's dying. And I went to sleep to that.
Max [01:17:11]:
Yeah. All right.
Tony [01:17:12]:
It's probably why I'm fucked up in there, you know, like. But it's going back to, like, it calmly. Like, you. You just throw something on, like, black a's is what I would, like, smoke, you know, and code to at night. So, like, yeah, I wish I had better habits around technology. I think. I think I have to go to the. I would say I go to the extremes.
Max [01:17:30]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:17:30]:
Because I don't have a healthy process throughout normal, everyday life.
Max [01:17:33]:
And it's hard to do that. Like, I've tried to do this on and off for many, many years. One thing that's been working for me recently is I've found that, like, swimming has helped me a lot. I swim, swim in the bay, which is great because it's super cool. And that shocks you into reality. Like, I was telling, there's no luxury beliefs when you're in, like, fight or flight. Like, I'm about to die mode, so that's one way. Or even just swimming in the pool.
Max [01:17:56]:
And then afterwards, like, I kind of feel like, okay, I'm really worked out. And then, okay, I'm not looking at anything until I write this post. Or, like, write whatever at two pages of it. And just, like, after that, you can do whatever the hell you want if you want to be in the shallows, like, knock yourself out, but I'm going to write this thing. And, like, that's what I did for my last blog post. And, yeah, I don't know, I found it to be very effective and something I'm continuing to experiment with. But I do think the most, as much as I love technology and nostril and all this stuff, I sometimes think is the right answer, even, like, with the daylight computer, which is very cool. If you guys haven't seen it.
Max [01:18:26]:
Check it out. It's e ink if you're not already blue light pills. Get away from blue light. Wear the glasses so you don't stay up all night. But sometimes I think about that. That's awesome. And I love the direction they're heading in, but it's almost kind of funny in the sense we as, I guess, tech bros are trying to use new technology to get away with new technology. It's the answer.
Max [01:18:43]:
We should just probably, I don't know, not use technology. That's a very luddite position. So it's difficult. Multiple times in my life, I've tried to go without a phone at all. And it's crazy. And I actually made a couple posts on the staggering. On the one hand, it's the deepest I felt in reality since, like, childhood. Like, there's notice, like, you're in reality.
Max [01:19:02]:
On the other hand, the tools that I really miss, like maps, you know, music, apps, podcasts, like, those are uber or whatever, if I needed a car, those are truly useful things that, like, oh, it's really fucking hard. Like, I was. I went a couple years ago, I visited Berlin, and I went day and a half with Albert Lennon. It's like, well, if I can't use the map, like shit, how do I get around? And yes, people used to do it, but we forget how much technology has accumulated benefits to us over time. So my hope, where I hope all of this goes, maybe the answer is just withdrawing. I think the better answer is somehow to build things that are just more tools and try. And the distraction and the scrolling, I feel like that's the vampire, you know?
Tony [01:19:42]:
And, like, you're addicted to that, too.
Max [01:19:45]:
Yes.
Tony [01:19:45]:
It's not just that you're doing it or you want to do it or that the activity of it is, like, bad or soul sucking. It's like you're addicted to doing that. And that was hard. Like, yeah. When I went to the resort in Colorado last week with that experience, like, I didn't touch my laptop at all.
Max [01:20:03]:
That's great.
Tony [01:20:04]:
From, like, 08:00 a.m. to like five or 06:00 p.m. i didn't touch my phone. And, like, that to me was, like, based reality. Yeah. And then I checked my, like, you know, and we, you know, we're a team of three now, team of four at mutiny. And, like, you know, we all do customer support and, like, there's always something that someone is asking or like there's some bug or whatever. So, like, the concept of, like, oh, why? If I step away for.
Tony [01:20:30]:
For a day, like, someone's gonna have some catastrophic failure, and, like, something will go wrong, and I have to, you know, if I don't help out. And we all took a vacation last week.
Max [01:20:37]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:20:38]:
And, like, there was. There was maybe, like, one or two questions throughout the week. Maybe it was a light weekend. We got lucky. But just the atmosphere, like, the concept of wow. I, like, went without my phone for 9 hours, and, like, nothing. I checked it, and, like, oh, yeah, none of these things matter.
Max [01:20:54]:
None of that matters.
Tony [01:20:55]:
None of them will matter. And so it's such a while. So I came back, and I was like, I would love to do that more. I mean, like, my phone is right now a graphing phone with no sim card, okay? No Internet, no eSim, none of that. And so, like, I have a hot spot, and sometimes I will just. I'll turn off the hot. Like, when I was driving back, like, for. I didn't even realize it, but for, like, four or 5 hours, like, my phone didn't have a hotspot.
Tony [01:21:16]:
And I'm like, you know, I'm like, oh, this is great. I got zero notifications. I mean, I'm driving, so, like, I shouldn't check my phone.
Max [01:21:21]:
Yeah, exactly. That's not the time to be getting notifications.
Tony [01:21:23]:
But, like, even at gas stations, I was like, oh, no, I don't care. I'll just leave it on my bag. I tried out the punked I phone for a little while, which is. Which is, like, it's. It's like a tiny screen and can just send call. It's a dumb phone is what they call it. So, like, I tried those for a little bit. It had signal.
Max [01:21:44]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:21:45]:
In its own, like, weird ink kind of display, but the signal notifications never come through. It's like, if there's one thing that I need, like, if I could just have something that is just signal notifications.
Max [01:21:57]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:21:58]:
And I can reply back. And nothing else. It did nothing else. It conserved the web. Maybe there's a. I would for. In college, I even taped the time on my phone. Like, I didn't want to see what time it was.
Max [01:22:13]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:22:13]:
And so that only lasted, like, a weekend and part of Monday.
Max [01:22:18]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:22:19]:
But it was. It was the most glorious thing ever. I actually got that tip from listening to a podcast about, I think it was, like, tweet deck or something, or some Twitter thing that got bought out by Twitter, and, like, the founder was like, yeah, I mean, just, like, live without the concept of time. If you live without the concept of time, like all of a sudden, like you're free. Like it's technology and like this pressure that, like, okay, what time is it now? I have Xyz things to do in the future. And so like, this guy tried living this life. Now it's a very, if you try living without time, it's a burden on other people more than you. And only because like in this I would, for coordination.
Tony [01:22:55]:
I watched Seinfeld as like my hobby side, like Seinfeld, the office, things like that. I would love to just be in like the seventies and eighties in New York. I think about that with San Francisco, too. I would love to just be in the early two thousands in San Francisco. I would love to just have very simple, like, we're on the clean side. I think probably the biggest problem is that we're all plugged into technology. If you are unplugged from technology, then you're missing out on things. When you join back up with other people that are plugged into society, you don't know what they're talking about.
Tony [01:23:27]:
There's a new thing that everyone's in the know on, and you're just the one person, six, you're the weirdo, and no one's going to catch you up. Or maybe you can try to get caught up on the features or the news items, but the problem is we're all the same level field. So if you don't have the technology, you're, you're like four or five or six layers below. And that doesn't feel good. So, like, I would love to live in the seventies and eighties in New York where we're all at the same field. Like, you know, we say, hey, I'll meet you at the coffee shop after work.
Max [01:23:57]:
Exactly. After.
Tony [01:23:58]:
That doesn't exist anymore.
Max [01:23:59]:
It doesn't. How do we bring that back? Can we bring that back? Can we start, can we start another rally? We already have bitcoin, Nostril. Can we start another revolution?
Tony [01:24:08]:
Yeah. Can we become Amish? Yeah, Amish, but with bitcoin.
Max [01:24:12]:
Well, it's very funny you mentioned that. So Kevin Kelly is author I like a lot. He created Wired magazine and he's got a bunch of great books. He has, in one of his books called what technology wants, he has a couple of very interesting chapters. One he asks, I'm certainly not endorsing him, but his philosophy is interesting. But he basically questions, was the Unabomber? Right? And what got him not in what he did in his reaction to it, but his general gist is basically like, instead of using technology as tools, which is kind of the Steve Jobs vision bicycle of the mind. The tools are using us, and we're losing what makes us human, which is desire, motivation, whatever our own volition or will. So that's a very interesting question.
Max [01:24:53]:
I forgot his exact answer to that, but his general thesis was like, well, maybe, but it still is 51% good, 49% bad technology. We would prefer to have it not. But one thing he did say, which I really liked, washington. The sort of amish approach to technology is they're actually not anti tech. Interestingly enough, he has a whole chapter on this, which is excellent. They're just very selective in which tech they use. And so they have sort of a moral compass or a set of principles about, like, okay, this is what we want technology to achieve. Does it help us in that, or is it hers and that goal? And so one thing they'll do is they'll have maybe a new technology.
Max [01:25:24]:
They'll have the kind of early adopters, like the geeks in the society that'll use it out first.
Tony [01:25:28]:
Oh, cool. I'd love to be that. Right?
Max [01:25:30]:
That'd be super fun, right? And then you got some old dude with funny looking hair that comes and it's like, all right, well, is this helping or hurting our goals? And so what's really interesting to me is they do have phones, which I think is interesting, but they don't have cars. And so the reason they were anti car is that this basically allows people to leave the community. It doesn't strengthen the community ties that we want to build. And so it's interesting to me, I kind of like that goal of, like, not just blanket tech is good or tech is bad, but it's a tool. We have to use our own volition as humans to figure out what do I. As what I think makes us special or, you know, unique as humans is deciding, you know, I have this one fucking crazy life to live. What am I going to do with it? Does this thing help or hurt him? That, and I think the biggest problem I see and this, I'm ancient myself. And, you know, something I used to do, I did more of these, like, meditation retreats at one, like ten day one.
Max [01:26:19]:
That was a very fascinating experience.
Tony [01:26:21]:
Yeah, I've always wanted to, dude, if.
Max [01:26:23]:
You feel at all called, you have to try it. Yeah, I know. It's like fucking 16. I strong. I mean, I haven't done it in a long time. I would like to do another one, but every time I get close, I'm like, fuck, I don't know if I can do this again. I did it when I was, like, between things. I kind of miss the glory days.
Max [01:26:39]:
It's beautiful to be working on something you care about. It's also beautiful to have downtime between that. Yeah. And so in one of my downtime periods, that's when I did it. And it was cool for many reasons, but, yeah, I forgot where I was going with that. The possum retreat was powerful. Oh. If you're so plugged in and can't take a step away, you may not even realize you're not using volition anymore.
Max [01:27:03]:
And I think that is the dangerous thing, is if you don't even realize you've gotten completely wrapped into the machine.
Tony [01:27:10]:
Right. And you're trapped.
Max [01:27:12]:
You're trapped.
Tony [01:27:13]:
And you may not know you're trapped, but if you're trapped, I mean, you got to think about what. What human nature is to do when you feel like you're trapped.
Max [01:27:23]:
Mmm.
Tony [01:27:23]:
It's almost like. It's like, could it even be worse if you think you're trapped and then now you're, like, in this sort of, like, fight or flight mode, you're like, yeah, like, I'm trapped in this world. Like, how do I get out? And you're like, you fight it or you accept it. You roll over. Accepted. That could be a depressing thought. Or you fight in and, like, you know, you have to. Or friction there, or you just, like, don't know about it, and you're just, like, trapped by your devices, and, like, that could end up being worse.
Max [01:27:49]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:27:49]:
So it's like, yeah, I mean, how do we. How do we break free of it?
Max [01:27:52]:
And how do we get tools that serve us instead of our way home?
Tony [01:27:55]:
So it was like, I. Like, if I. Like, if I. How. How would I solve the problem? Yeah, I would.
Max [01:28:01]:
How would you solve.
Tony [01:28:02]:
I would. I would make my own phone operating system that only had signal and notification signal notifications. And, like, all I can do is, like, reply to text or something, you know?
Max [01:28:11]:
So I love this.
Tony [01:28:13]:
It cannot do anything else. It can't have the capabilities of doing anything else.
Max [01:28:18]:
I want to see a long tail of everything. So we talked about nostras, long tail for content, for algos, for, you know, potentially AI agents that we didn't talk a lot about that, but whatever. I want to see, you know, a future where there's a long tail for, like, hardware, too, and a long tail for operating systems. You know, I would love to see. I know the daylight guys are talking a little bit about this GG had a post that I love, which, like, imagine you get a phone. I've wanted this forever. Something like this where you get a phone, you put in your twelve words, you've got a master key that has like Nostra childkey, your bitcoin or lightning child key. And that's it.
Max [01:28:49]:
And you can ideally have an open app store, maybe some versions of this. You can't even download apps. It's like, no, all you get is signal. Other versions, it's an open app store, whatever. But I would love to see a lot more choice. And there's a blog post I haven't read yet, but I like the title of it. Turning your, your whatever, normie phone into a dumb phone. I currently have the small iPhone because I like that if it's on my hand, I keep it in black and white mode.
Max [01:29:16]:
Those have been big steps for me. But I'm thinking more and more, how can I. How can I turn this thing dumber? Maybe over the next.
Tony [01:29:23]:
Or maybe like, we just have to be smarter.
Max [01:29:26]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:29:26]:
And just like, go places without a phone.
Max [01:29:29]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:29:29]:
You know, just learning that break and so, like, when I. When I drive, like about ten minutes to go to the gym every morning and, like, I'll still bring my phone because I do want to listen to music. I could probably use my ipod for that instead, but I do that. I do. Like, I do. Like, tidal and I have been discovering new songs, like, at the gym, which is, you know, like we talked about before, so I still enjoy it enough. Like, okay, I want. I want Bluetooth headphones.
Tony [01:29:51]:
I want, you know, I still want that. But, like, I'll just go with no hotspot. Like, so I carry around a hot spot anywhere I think I need it. But, like, sometimes I feel the most free when I know my. My. Where I'm at now and my destination I'll be at for most of the day will have wi fi.
Max [01:30:07]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:30:07]:
But I will not have any Internet in any period between then.
Max [01:30:10]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:30:11]:
So, like, my travel, it's like, I don't have to think. I can't check my phone.
Max [01:30:14]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:30:14]:
Even if I wanted to, I can't check it. And it feels great. I can still use technology for, like, oh, what time is it?
Max [01:30:20]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:30:20]:
Or, oh, I'm listening to my downloaded playlist.
Max [01:30:22]:
Exactly.
Tony [01:30:23]:
Or, oh, I have to write a note for myself for later. Like, I can still use sign. So it's like Internet less phones. Or, like, trying to be in places where you won't have Internet or if, you know, you have Internet. Then you're like, okay, I know I'm not gonna get fucked, right? Like, we're so dependent on our phones that if we're without them, it's like, oh, well, what if I get robbed? Like, sometimes I'll go without a wallet, you know, and just the Internet as phone, and I'll be like. And I'll have, like, a $50 bill in cash. Like, I keep dollar 50 bill in cash or, like, dollar 20 or something like that in my car. But, like, there's no Internet.
Tony [01:30:53]:
There's, like, I don't have a phone that works. Cause it's just like, I have my car keys, and I have, like, $20 in cash. Like, I know, I'm fine.
Max [01:30:59]:
You sounds like you have an adventure there.
Tony [01:31:00]:
Yeah. Yeah. And it's like. And it's just going to the gym in the morning. But, like, even if it's just so small, it's, you know, maybe I'll go get breakfast after I'm done. And guess what? Like, I'm limited by $20 and a phone that, like, doesn't have Internet. It feels great.
Max [01:31:16]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:31:16]:
Cause, like, nothing. Nothing will go wrong. Like, I won't. I probably will not die.
Max [01:31:21]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:31:22]:
From being limited in that way. And it's so free. It's dumb that I even have to say that to myself. Yeah, but it works, and it's free. And, like, those moments are like, wow, nothing's wrong.
Max [01:31:34]:
Totally.
Tony [01:31:35]:
Everything's fine.
Max [01:31:36]:
And, you know, to your point, we've. We forget. It's like, it's not like, you know, tens of thousands of years of humans haven't done this.
Tony [01:31:42]:
Oh, and, like, if I'm out with friends the whole day, like, there's no problem. I never think about it. Like, you. We are like, I. Like, there's definitely many periods of time where I go with Internet on my phone, and I never check it anyways. But it's the moments of boredness that I think probably it's like, addiction and boredness. The addiction comes out when you're bored.
Max [01:32:02]:
Agreed.
Tony [01:32:03]:
And so you're standing in line or something. Yeah. And so I think maybe the problem is we have to get over being bored. We've lived in a world where being bored is bad and that most of the time, you never have to be bored because there's always something there. Maybe boredness is the problem or not being okay with boredness or emptiness.
Max [01:32:24]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:32:24]:
Our own thoughts.
Max [01:32:25]:
Yeah. Coming back to, sure, there's a lot.
Tony [01:32:28]:
Of people that are not okay with their own thoughts.
Max [01:32:30]:
Well, not. I mean, I think about, I don't have any kids or anything, but like, the one skill I think just becomes increasingly important over time is you can have this in different ways, but meditation of some form, whether it's vipassana or just journaling to yourself, but like just being okay with yourself in whatever moment. And that ability to also have sustained focus and attention, I think that's going to be the single most valuable skill set of the next, whatever, 20 years, right? There will be those who can focus and they will run the things and there will be those who can't and they will be run. I think it's that clear.
Tony [01:32:59]:
And it won't be like an obvious thing, it would just be like, wow, how many ideas that you have had simply just because you had the right thought in the right time, in a moment of silence all the time. And those could be like the very best idea. So it's not. I 100% agree with you that there's gonna be a difference in people that like, never experience that and people that experience that. But it's not obvious at all. Like if you look at what's the difference, it's like, oh, that idea sparked. You have to be open to the idea of things and open to experiences and new things and just the same, you have to be open to like recepting an idea and like executing on it. So it's like if you never have that idea because they're always plugged in.
Tony [01:33:39]:
Plugged in, then like. And you know, there's benefit. Like I get a lot of ideas from being online too.
Max [01:33:44]:
As do I, of course.
Tony [01:33:45]:
But like, I do think you're right in that, like, it won't be obvious why. Yeah, but just being like, okay with yourself and like having. Being open to those moments of quietness.
Max [01:33:56]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:33:56]:
To think about ideas that you never would think of otherwise.
Max [01:33:59]:
Yeah. Which by the way, this podcast is called ideas from the Edge.
Tony [01:34:02]:
So it's perfect.
Max [01:34:04]:
Apropos nice. And I guess one last thing, a lot of that also is just being openness to new ideas. 100% agree. I then think the attention and focus to be able to implement it. Cause, okay, you have this great idea. Then the really challenging part is I sit down on my computer and how do I just prevent myself from like doom scrolling or whatever? It's like, no, I need to fucking code or whatever it is. Cool. So we've been running for a little while.
Max [01:34:28]:
There's two more main areas I would like to discuss with you. So maybe we can run through these a little faster. Cause I know, we've been going on this for a while.
Tony [01:34:37]:
Yeah, there was like 3 hours of discussion before this.
Max [01:34:39]:
I know, exactly. I almost wish we could have recorded that. It's such a pleasure. We should do this more frequently. But one area that I want to talk about is this is somewhat related to business stuff, but also just kind of philosophy in general is open source. You're someone who obviously is a major open source advocate. You've done a tremendous amount open sourcing and working with stuff like nostalgia, wallet, connect, obviously ecash stuff with fediment. We've talked a lot about that and we can talk more about that.
Max [01:35:07]:
But I know you'll probably do that on all the pods, so I don't have to do all that here today. But one question I think a lot about is from kind of a values perspective. What I like about a lot of the bitcoin community, and particularly in my experience, the nostril community, there's many different sub communities. But why I think I have gelled so much with the Nostra community is like, yeah, bitcoin is great, hard money, whatever, but it's also this idea of, no, we want open protocols, not just for that, but for communication. It seems to be, in my experience, people that are open to like we've discussed maybe more long tail of weird ideas, just like general openness in life, curiosity and you know. So on the one hand, I guess two different sort of like values that I see in bitcoiners, in particular in Austria, people, you have this like love of openness and love of the commons, right? Like, which is the protocol, should be open. I would even call bitcoin commons money. On the other hand, you have a true belief in capitalism and free markets, and markets as the way that nature, and I believe this is true.
Max [01:36:09]:
My belief is bitcoin is energy backed money. We're seeing metabolism happen in real life. This is how evolution, which is why I call my fund hive mind is happening. The superorganism is forming, and markets are maybe not the only way, but one of the most powerful ways to demonstrate that metabolic system. But it's interesting because I feel like a lot of bitcoin talk, it's purely focused on if you think about anarchism as pure, right, anarchism. And obviously there's a lot of that markets, free markets, amazing. But I don't think people talk as much about why is there also such a pull for open source, which I would argue is more left anarchism. And I would argue nostril and bitcoin embrace elements of that as well.
Max [01:36:44]:
Perhaps more of the Ellen bits or sort of Ben Artkamp is, I guess, one way that he sort of articulate some of this stuff. What is your view on how those two sort of fields of thought come together? Or don't you know, the two forces of anarchism we see in bitcoiners and Austria?
Tony [01:36:59]:
It's hard because that question weighs on us a lot, because, I mean, we do want to be a successful startup. And we also, all three of us on the team, and for now, we just hired a guy, our first hire this week, and it's real exciting.
Max [01:37:16]:
Alpha drop right there.
Tony [01:37:18]:
It's so amazing to have that. It's relevant today because today just released software that we've been actually postponing for many months because we knew we would not be able to profit off of it. We knew we had to release it as open source software. It's called harbor. We don't have to get into the specifics of it, but we knew that no one would use it if it wasn't open source.
Max [01:37:47]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:37:49]:
And it was very important that the code is viewable, it's auditable. Anyone could be able to be capable of running it. We do think it's something that someone. It's a privacy tool. And so we think we have the right, like, in this era where, like, privacy is being criminalized. Like, people need to be able to run their own tools and seek the privacy that they need to seek. And it's also software that only runs client side. It communicates with mints.
Tony [01:38:16]:
Like, it's done in a way that, and we knew we couldn't profit off of it. We couldn't just artificially inject ourselves into it. There's thoughts of, like, okay, how can, can we inject ourselves into this and make, and actually make money? Because we do believe in it as a tool. I want to use this tool. We know other people want to use this tool. And we could inject ourselves into it where we're like, okay, we're giving ourselves an excuse and reason to inject ourselves into it just so we can justify making money off of it. And it's put us in a very difficult position because, I mean, we want to make money, but, you know, it needs to be open source. And so it just has gotten to the point for ourselves that it's like, okay, well, fuck it.
Tony [01:39:04]:
Yeah, like, like, we know a tool like this needs to exist. We're gonna build it as open source. We're gonna release it, everyone for free, to be able to download it. We can have donations somewhere in there. We say, hey, do you want to tip us? And. And actually, today we. We've gotten like 2.5 million sats and donations really far. Yeah, dude, almost.
Tony [01:39:21]:
It's about $2,000 worth.
Max [01:39:23]:
Congrats.
Tony [01:39:23]:
That we got in a few hours.
Max [01:39:25]:
That's crazy.
Tony [01:39:25]:
Which is great. I like, I love it because, like, also it's, it's like it.
Max [01:39:29]:
Value for value.
Tony [01:39:30]:
Yeah, value for value. With a tool that's like open source and we're not, like, we don't collect any data off of it. We can't collect any data off it. And it's best if a tool like this doesn't collect any data. So how can we mvp this? How can we prove that the market sees value in something like this? And, like, donations is a really great way to see that. Yeah. I think going back to, like, the, the original question is, like, open source and businesses building on open source, or maybe businesses building on close source, too, possibly. When you look at other companies that have been successful in creating open source software, usually you find that they're always in a position to be able to monetize it as aggressively as possible.
Tony [01:40:15]:
You see this a lot in database related software. So it's like, oh, hey, the database code is open source. But hey, you can use our cloud servers to do this in a really easy way, and then they're successful at it. You see, like Docker and Kubernetes and all that. There's a lot of infrastructure code that's open source and there's a business to go along with it, making very good profits.
Max [01:40:40]:
Yeah. I mean, a lot of these companies are like multibillion dollar companies.
Tony [01:40:43]:
Yeah, yeah. And. But they know, and it's very similar to bitcoin companies. They know no one is going to use it if it was closed sourced.
Max [01:40:53]:
Right.
Tony [01:40:53]:
Because you're asking, you're not just asking, like, in bitcoin, there's a lot of cases where you're asking individuals to run potentially closed source software that manages their funds and, like that. You don't want that. You know, you don't want closer manages funds.
Max [01:41:09]:
Are you suggesting a rugging could occur?
Tony [01:41:11]:
Yeah, I mean, like, even if it's like, quote unquote non custodial, if that software is closed source and you can't verify it, like, yeah, good luck. Yeah, good luck. So no one will run, but you're asking individuals not to run, you know, put their money on something that is closed source. When you're creating, like, infrastructure tools that are open source. Well you're asking, like, you're asking developers as individuals, hey, run our closed source infrastructure software, but you're also asking businesses to render your closed source infrastructure software. And that net almost never flies. Like huge corporations might want to use your product and pay for your product, but if it's closed source they might not ever do that because you're a single point of failure. They might be very happy giving you some like multimillion dollar contract.
Max [01:42:08]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:42:09]:
To both maintain that open source software and toast it for you and be there for support and to train their staff on how to you, like they're, they're, they're, you know, they're quite happy to offload as much work to you as possible because like they're making mega profits in other ways and like that, that's a drop in the bucket. But if it was closed source, they know if you go down, our entire business might go down or entire line of products around this might go down. So like from, from a corporation perspective, it's kind of beautiful to see companies build MIT open source software specifically because other corporations would want to use. But then now you have individuals that can freely benefit from being able to self host that. I don't know if that answers any specific questions, but like just the, just commenting on the relationship and dynamics of corporations wanting open source software too.
Max [01:43:04]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:43:05]:
And individuals that benefit from that.
Max [01:43:07]:
Well that's what I was going to get at. It's interesting because you know that purely from the economic story it makes sense of like, okay, I don't want to use something that's a liability. I will gladly pay someone. The way I think about, you know, with software or anything in life, you pay for it one way or another. Either pay for it with, you know, if you're a company you've got a lot of money, not a lot, lot of time. If you're an individual developer you've got a lot like, you know, potentially a lot of time and, or skill or both, perhaps not a lot of money. And that's an awesome thing. But I can't, you know, and maybe this is just my, my own personal bias.
Max [01:43:35]:
I mean I truly love both worlds. Like I, I am a capitalist, literally, but by definition I love free markets and they're fantastic. But I also, you know, I also recognize, you know, I guess having grown up in the south myself and like lived in Mexico for a long time. Like it's such a beautiful dividend to humanity that anyone with motivation and now an Internet connection can just get started from so many things, whether it's open source software that they can build on, stay on the shoulders of giants. And so it's interesting that these two different models, they're both driving society forward, and perhaps you actually need them. They're symbiotic to one another, but the dividend that they both give to humanity and that ability for the faster you can build our knowledge tower, or however you want to call it, the more open information is, the faster that goes, the more the superorganism can evolve, I guess. And at the same time, I just find it really beautiful that whether you're in Nigeria or Mexico or Brazil, it doesn't matter, you have a shot. Whereas in the old world, pre open source software, pre the Internet, maybe you had more of a shock because you were away from technology and you were actually much happier.
Max [01:44:46]:
But that just, to me, seems like a much more beautiful, I don't know, harmonious, fair, right way for the world to work.
Tony [01:44:54]:
Right? And you can benefit off of that as well. So I don't know if Harvard's the best example or maybe something else, but when we create certain very niche open source software, that could give inspiration to other people to build something similar to it.
Max [01:45:12]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:45:12]:
Or on top of it, or it could even be a play into the whole ecosystem. Talk about mints a little bit. Noster has this application layer that you can take advantage of things beyond identity. So there was this mint rating system that had kind of been created by a few individuals. And you see Bob creating bitcoin mints as a way to kind of recommend mints to other people that, and also to post mints that are public so people can see it at the same exact time. We were building our own internal tools, or our tools inside of mutiny to be able to show that same data. So, like, all of a sudden, like, you know, Bob, I think, launched bitcoin mints, like, a week before we did. And that was fantastic for us.
Max [01:46:05]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:46:05]:
Because that meant when we had our own more tightly integrated solution, it was already pre populated with the right data that it needed when we didn't have to. Like, so. And then when we launched, oh, like, I think Bob said, like, oh, my God, like, like, hundreds of people have now recommended mints today with unity's launch. And then now they show up on bitcoin mint. So it's like. And, you know, it's not a competitor thing at all. Like, in this scenario, like, we benefit from bitcoin mints and bitcoin mints benefits for mutiny, having these same features. So it's like this whole ecosystem of, like, sometimes things are ecosystem place, right? And we know if we built this in the right way, that's open, that other people can build on top of and utilize.
Tony [01:46:49]:
We know that all we need, like, if five or ten people do something with this, like, we benefit greatly from it too.
Max [01:46:57]:
Yeah. Amazing. So moving a bit in that direction and we can close out here on this. But I'm very bullish increasingly. I told you I got ecash pilled recently and I'm extremely. I have been nosterwallet connect build. I have seen tons of companies, including you guys. Alby looks like strike plugged in recently.
Max [01:47:15]:
A lot of people are plugging in Nosr Wallet Connect. That seems extremely bullish for me, particularly now that some of these mints are also speaking noster wallet connect as well. Like Bob's boardwalk cash. Increasingly, my mental model for the world, and this actually Bob kind of sold me on as well, is that it's much easier for a company to integrate Noster wallet connect because that's a few lines where using Nostra as a messaging layer than it is for them to plug into the bitcoin lighting network. Since they plug in the bitcoin lighting network, it's a giant pain in the ass with accounting and regulatory and, well, or people even spending their bitcoin in first place. So it makes it worth it. No, we should have our engineers focus on actually what drives money, blah, blah. But if it's a few lines of code that uses a message to coordinate payments.
Max [01:47:54]:
And if anyone hasn't watched this, I recommend Bob's talk. Noster is Bitcoin’s layer three from bitcoin Tokyo or in Australia, whatever it's called. Not bitcoin Tokyo, Noster Tokyo in Australia. So increasingly, my model of the world is becoming that lightning network is going to be the glue between all kinds of different bitcoin adjacent things. Increasingly. I thought initially that maybe it could be side chains, maybe it could be fintechs, like cash app. Increasingly, I think it's going to be more and more mints. Would you agree with that characterization of the world? How do you think the lighting network, Nostra wallet connect and mints shape the future of what bitcoin and payments look like online?
Tony [01:48:31]:
Yeah, easy question. If you would have asked me year plus ago, I would have said, okay, yeah, we're going to have light. We're gonna have everyone talk via lightning.
Max [01:48:43]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:48:43]:
And you're gonna have users opening lightning channels and all. That's gonna be great. And that's how like, everyone's gonna be self custody.
Max [01:48:49]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:48:50]:
And we're gonna be able to deliver that experience. And just quite simply, we can't. It's like the last mile problem where we can't actually like send, like have open channels to individuals on the lightning network. There's like bitcoin scaling issues or quiddity requirement issues. There's all those things. So lightning has in my mind, and it's not a new revelation by any means. Like, you know, sometimes I'm a little bit critical of lightning in that regards. And someone goes, well, duh.
Tony [01:49:18]:
Like, we all knew for years, like, this was never going to work. And I was like, okay, well, maybe we needed to try to figure that out and to learn ourselves. So it's not going to be the thing that we all run self custodial. But what is it great at? It's great at the interoperability as a yemenite payment network between two parties. And those two parties don't have to be directly connected. They could be anywhere on the lightning network. There's just nodes that payments go through in order to facilitate the payments in a non custodial way. So lightning is basically the ach of the world.
Tony [01:49:51]:
And so no one knows the term ach. I mean, a few people, if you need to do banking transactions or whatever lot, but users just send money to like a specific id when they need to do ach things. And that's pretty rare. It's not as common as it used to be. Yeah. So it's a protocol layer for sending a payment from one place to another. Mints kind of coming in the picture because instead of doing the last mile problem, like, you can't make fiber, you can't do fiber optics to the grandma in the woods in the middle of Texas. Right.
Tony [01:50:25]:
But you can do like a starlink and beam that to 1000 people in the area, or you can just do normal cable Internet and you can do that in a really easy way and then eventually plugs into the greater Internet. Mints are essentially that. Whether if it's like cashew mints or like fetty Mints, you can now have many users attached to a mint and they have e cache instead of lightning, but they can interoperate with the lightning network. So all of a sudden you may have a mint with ten people on it and it's able to talk seamlessly to a mint with thousands of people on it or tens of thousands of people on it. And lightning is just a glue to have that happen. Now the noster wall connect part is interesting because now you can get in a situation where at this point, there's like, it's interesting looking at cashew because there's probably like, dozens of cashew wallets that have sprung up in the last year, which is amazing and crazy to see. So far. There's just two fanny mint walls.
Tony [01:51:35]:
So, like, you know, it moves a little bit slower. There's a lot of, like, consensus stuff going on. It's a little bit harder to work with it. So there's already dozens of wallets that exist that can interoperate with mints, but users might not be using the same one.
Max [01:51:51]:
Right.
Tony [01:51:52]:
And so, like, if I'm on, if I'm on, you know, if I'm using Wells Fargo Bank, I can, like, easily pay someone else that's within Wells Fargo bank. And, like, there's no problem. It's just, it's easy payment. But how do I, how do I find that lightning wallet user? Or how do I, like, how do I have an application that plugs into this whole mint Ach payment network like thing? And I think that's where, like, nos raw Connect comes in, because you can have dozens of different wallets, dozens of different services and service providers. And so, like, mints come in to help bring the scalability to payments, but we still need ways to talk to those payments or send those payments and trigger the payment of those payments. So, like, nostalgic connect is sort of the glue for that. It's the application layer you set. It's basically just a payment request is all.
Tony [01:52:48]:
Nostalgic connect is the beautiful thing. The reason why, I think Alby created it and they were using it as their, like, custodian in the cloud. So, like, they were a custodian and you could send a nostr wallet connect message to them in the cloud and then they would, they would send the payment on your behalf and, like, there's private keys involved. And so, like, you know, it's not like anyone could just, like, take money out of your account, but it's just, it's just like, here's how to send a payment request to me. And so the reason why we liked it, a mutiny is because we ran a web app, bitcoin wallets, and you can't just, like, deep link to a web app. So, like, there is a lot of lightning wallets where you just, like, click a button and, like, iOS just opens your default lightning wallet. We couldn't do that. Yeah, so there's no way to, like, trigger mutiny to, like, send a payment and also, we're not mutiny's non custodial, and we run on the device only.
Tony [01:53:48]:
So, like, we. There's no server in the cloud to process your funds. Like, it's all like, if you close the app on your phone, there's no way to send a payment. Like, the keys are on that phone in that device. So nostalgia wall connect. When we realized it took us a little while, like, at first we didn't like it, or I didn't like it, I was like, oh, why invent a new thing? Like, I don't see the Avantus here. Like, oh, it's just great for custodians. But when I realized that, wait, nostrils is great async messaging layer, right? For applications, not just notes, not just, like, tweets and things like that.
Tony [01:54:23]:
Someone could send a message intended to me, but send it to a relay, and the relays will hold it and store it until I come online and I pull down the message. And then I see, oh, an hour ago, Bob requested money from me, or I trigger. Like, what you see right now is like, I am the user of a noster application, either through the web or on my phone. And I sent a queue up 20 or 30 zaps that I want to do, but those don't go out because my phone's wallet has to be open. Eventually, I open my wallet, and then all of a sudden, I pull down all those payment requests that have been triggered. And maybe it is like, we kind of proof, we did some proof of concepts with doing subscriptions this way. So, I mean, this is what powers our own subscriptions. Every single month, we will send a Nosterwalt connect payment method to any subscriber or mutiny and saying, like, hey, a month ago, you said you wanted to pay monthly, so we're sending you this message.
Tony [01:55:27]:
You may have been asleep at the time, you know, whatever, but we can't. We can't. Even though you said, yes, I want to pay you once a month, we can't just pull money out of your wallet. Like, we don't have the keys, and your phone needs to be online to make that payment. But with something like nostril connect, all of a sudden, you open the. Open your phone once a week, like, maybe it's been a few days, and now all of a sudden, like, your payment, your. Your wallet pulls down the payment request that you authorized the previous time in the past, and now you can pay it. Now we have subscriptions on top of Lightning.
Max [01:56:02]:
Yeah, it's huge.
Tony [01:56:02]:
So it's not only just like, it is a very powerful async communication layer for triggering payments and payment requests on lightning. And it's also capable of being subscriptions and lightning. Like, users, like, people are used to swiping a credit. Not even. Not even swiping a credit card for service, like putting their credit card number into Netflix.
Max [01:56:26]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:56:26]:
Which, like, you could. You sure, you can use a credit card. I use one off credit cards a lot. But, you know, you could use a credit card that has exactly $10 on it and you're going to be charged. Well, Netflix is more like $25 a month now for, like, is that real? I think, like, with four k and like, all their special features. I think it's like $20 now or something.
Max [01:56:46]:
Inflation really is there.
Tony [01:56:48]:
So you could. Yes, you can have a credit card which exactly $20 on it, and you give Netflix your private key to that. But, like, realistically, like, I'm going to hook up my normal credit card that has, like, some big spending limit and then. But now they have access to pull out, like, all my money if they wanted to, which is bad. Or I could do something like what we have in mutiny, where it's like, I can create a bunch of spending accounts and I say, this one is just for Netflix. And I approve $10 a month that can be withdrawn anytime I open the wall and I see a payment request, like, once a month, they can do this. So it's like, we basically have created a, like, pull payment like experience, but have permission in a way of, like, they can't just take all of your money. Like, you are explicitly saying, like, they can send $10 a month payment request to your phone, but as long as they're within that roles, yes, we would happily keep paying.
Tony [01:57:44]:
Like, I want that. I don't want, like, I don't want to go to Netflix once a month and, like, pull my QR code log into the website. Keep doing that. So, like, this is like the first time. And, you know, I think it still needs to be proved out completely. Like, this whole subscription. Subscription subscriptions atmosphere. But it's the very first time we could possibly do subscriptions on lightning on bitcoin.
Tony [01:58:06]:
Yeah. And it's only possible because Nasser wall connect. So that was my whole rant on Nasser Wall connect. But I'm sure there's, like, questions on, like, it specifically. But this is only possible because connect.
Max [01:58:18]:
I absolutely love that. I think that was an excellent explanation. And I think, yeah, people are absolutely sleepy on how big of a deal this is. It's not just for Nostra apps, it's for any app. Bob already has it working, like Discord as an example. So that's huge. I mean, this is the thing I've told you, I haven't written this yet, but the next piece, if I find the discipline is for a company like replitt, I think it's so much more powerful. They can just integrate nozzle wallet connect, and then they can pay out to their users.
Max [01:58:42]:
Theory, have, you know, lightning enabled or ecash enabled wallet wherever they live in the world? I just think it's, it's, it's people are sleeping on the power of subscriptions, the power of integrating bitcoin payments with any app, and now dollar or whatever, potentially, you know, cashew or fedement payments with any app on the web today. And that's possible in live right now. I think the amount of experimentation, I'm like, I'm all in on NASA wallet Connect. I think the amount of experimentation we see there in the next 612 months can be wild.
Tony [01:59:08]:
So you want to hear something crazy?
Max [01:59:10]:
Blow my mind.
Tony [01:59:12]:
So we know how NASA raw connects work. We know, like, now we take a look at Fedemint, which is like federated cash. It's basically a consensus network.
Max [01:59:20]:
Yeah.
Tony [01:59:20]:
That is capable of doing e cash, but it, like, the guardians that run it will only do things like, if they all agree in consensus.
Max [01:59:27]:
Right?
Tony [01:59:29]:
Imagine. And this is, we want to build something like this. It's a little advanced, but like, we could, because it's a consensus system that requires a majority to agree to do something. You could have a fetimate with a fediment module that's an NWC module, and what you could do as a user. So I'm a part of a mint, and I have like ten k sats, you know, in the e cash notes. What I could do is I could actually send my e cash to the Guardians and lock it to their aggregate multisig pub key. And so the notes are only, technically speaking, I could just send the guardians my notes and say, do whatever with it you want to. But actually, what I'm saying is you can only spend these notes if you all agree how to spend these notes.
Tony [02:00:24]:
So it's from a unilateral control perspective. No individual guardian can just, like, run off with the money with, with that specific e cash note money. So it's like, if I gave you and four people, like, I can't just give you $10, you and I can't, like, if your family was a guardian, you know, all guardians, I can't just give you a ten dollar bill or the guardians a ten dollar bill and say like, okay, only spend this if you all agree. Like whoever is holding a ten dollar bill can do whatever they want, right? And with e cash is all digital. So whoever has a copy of that $10 bill can do whatever they want if it hasn't been spent before. So with something like this, an NWC module for Fedemit, I can lock the ecash note to the aggregate pub key of the federation members and they can only spend it if a majority of them agree how to spend it properly.
Max [02:01:11]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:01:11]:
So then I can go and give an NW, it's all like, NWC is all like private key based, right? I can give the spending permissions to, you know, something like Bob's discord that can spend it if I decide to tip someone on Discord. And even if I'm offline, the beautiful thing is like even if I'm offline, the request will go to the Federation Guardian members and the Guardian members will decrypt the NWC message and see that, okay, this was Tony, this was for Tony's funds, Tony's NWC module. Tony like this within his budget policy and he's trying to pay, he authorized to pay whatever invoice on discord that, that Bob's, you know, program wanted to spend to as long as the majority and all, it doesn't go to a central server. All the Guardian members can query all the nostril relays and, and find and decrypt these messages meant for it. And with all that in place, all the Guardian members can independently say yes, I propose to spend this e cash to Bob's discord server. And they will say like, okay, it's like, oh, I haven't seen the message yet. Oh there, it just came in. Yes, I also authorized to spend it.
Tony [02:02:32]:
And so once a majority of them do, then the payment, then the guardians ask their own gateway to pay the lightning invoice and redeem the ecash. And once they all sign off on the payment of the e cash. So it's a long winded way to say we could have a federated spending account that is technically non custodial. There's a lot of debate whether or not it's something like fediment and federated ecash is technically not custodian or not or not. But the fact remains I could give my e cash to a group of people and say, only spend this if you all agree. And NWC can be how they can all agree saying like, yes, an NWC message came in, we all checked it, and we'll make this payment for you on your behalf while you're offline.
Max [02:03:22]:
It's badass. It makes me think two things. The first is, it sounds like we're getting closer to a Internet version of the state, which gets really interesting when you start thinking about, what does it look like if we wanted to take collective action and actually have the real Dao? You might say, what does it mean if we wanted to pay for some kind of public goods in a way like this online? That seems like a pretty powerful parameter. The second thing is, I think something you blow my mind with. Not just with that, but something else you mentioned today, which really got me thinking, is a lot of the primitives that we were trying to build for bitcoin and lightning services might actually be better served with eCash. The example we're talking about is dlcs, and doing dlcs on ecash as well. And it seems to me that, and I'm sure other kinds of programmability that we haven't even thought of yet, or you may have. But a lot of the stuff that we thought, oh, it's cool in bitcoin and lightning, but it's kind of tricky.
Max [02:04:13]:
Like, might just work better on e cash.
Tony [02:04:15]:
Yeah. Like I said, it's a bit controversial, but how I view Fediment, as people will say, it's just all e cash or whatever. The way I view Fedimint is that it's its own, like, consensus network, in my opinion. It is a different type of deal DLT. It's a different. It's like, not a blockchain. There's no blocks involved. You know, it's not like.
Tony [02:04:48]:
But it is a ledger that's a DLT.
Max [02:04:52]:
Distributed ledger technology.
Tony [02:04:54]:
Yes. Okay, I said that, right? You said DLC, and now I'm all tricked up.
Max [02:04:57]:
Yes.
Tony [02:04:58]:
It's a. It's a new type of DLT. It's an e cash based deal. It's a bear asset based DLT.
Max [02:05:03]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:05:03]:
But it's also, like a cryptocurrency network worth, like, consensus evolved and. Yeah. It's, like, decentralized in the way that, like, not a single operator is running it. I almost look at it as, like, another. You could look at it like, each fediment. Mint stone cryptocurrency network.
Max [02:05:20]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:05:21]:
And the reason you want, like, you're not. You're not giving. You're not putting your bitcoin into this mint because you want. Because you don't know how to take custody. It's not a custody solution. You still have to back up your e cash. You still have to back up your seed words. So it's not a custody solution.
Max [02:05:38]:
Right.
Tony [02:05:39]:
I hate when people say like, oh, it's a custody solution. It's not.
Max [02:05:43]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:05:45]:
It's a way to have programmable money.
Max [02:05:47]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:05:47]:
A different network.
Max [02:05:49]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:05:50]:
And the beautiful part about it is that it's not riddled in shitcoin properties where like, okay, we're going to get invest into this coin and you'll get rich off of. Right. Like, it's supposed to be one to one backed with bitcoin, so there's no price fluctuations with bitcoin itself. And yeah, you can do some crazy, like, USD based, you know, mint stuff too. But even just looking at the bitcoin use case, it's like, it is another network for program. For programmable money.
Max [02:06:17]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:06:18]:
In the form of cash.
Max [02:06:19]:
And I love that because that's, you know, it's basically you're saying it's a way to access new experiences you couldn't with your bitcoin alone necessarily.
Tony [02:06:30]:
Yeah. You like, it's very hard to have. Even just looking at the simple bitcoin on chain lightning use case, like, it's very hard to have a unified balance in bitcoin that can spend across multiple layers.
Max [02:06:42]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:06:42]:
They can spend on layer one and can spend on layer two. Like, it's hard to have that unified balance.
Max [02:06:46]:
Yeah. Fascinating stuff, Tony. Man, this has been absolutely awesome. We've jammed a lot of stuff. We covered a lot of ground. I wish we had the other 3 hours too. What, what did I leave out? Any, I don't know, crazy ideas or any thoughts in the future? Any, any visions that you want to leave us with?
Tony [02:07:02]:
We didn't even talk about identity.
Max [02:07:03]:
Oh, fuck. We didn't get to identity.
Tony [02:07:05]:
We didn't.
Max [02:07:05]:
Shit. Should we touch on that briefly?
Tony [02:07:07]:
What do you want to know?
Max [02:07:08]:
Or perhaps we could do another session that may be very high level. You know, you did a lot of work with DiDs, which I find very interesting. Now, obviously you're more sort of agree with the nostr ecosystem. Obviously, I understand Nostr doesn't fully have verifiable credentials and all that stuff. Yet. Do you see a world where, you know, Nostr can, you know, evolve? Like, like what Noster has that's so beautiful is adoption and adoption and getting people to, like, give a shit about your thing, that's really hard. That's actually something my key in podcast I thought was one of the best things he said. And what I think he's very good at, is just sniffing out.
Max [02:07:40]:
Okay. Is there even a journey to be had here? Cool. Once you have that, then, okay, cool. We have to have a lot of technical solutions. Obviously, a simple pub private key pair is not the perfect entity system. If you lose your private key, you're kind of fucked. We need a way to rekey. I'm sure we need a lot of other ways to attach verifiable credentials to that.
Max [02:07:57]:
But do you see a path where I, you know, Nostr can take this, this white hot core that it has for messaging, for identity, for all the different things, and evolve more into what did want it to be. Do you see them interoperating one day? How do you see those two things going?
Tony [02:08:12]:
Yeah, I think about my embracing Nostr article post from about a year ago. And like, you touched on it, like the thing, I've been in the did space from the application side for a very long time. And like, they fail to get adoption, they fail to get like product market fit, they fail to get any users interested in it and ends up being like, they're building a very resilient and advanced system for identity, but they just.
Max [02:08:40]:
Don'T have no one using it.
Tony [02:08:41]:
They have no one using it. Like you could say, you could say it's too advanced. I don't think it's too advanced to build on top of them. But you also don't, like, once you understand the complexities there, you probably have lost. Most developers got it.
Max [02:08:58]:
I mean, I've tried to read over this stuff and I've even had, and I actually, like a lot of people that I know are working on this, I find them extremely intelligent, but like, I've tried many times and I'm certainly not the smartest person in the world, but like, it's gone over my head many times.
Tony [02:09:09]:
Yeah, and there's like so many like tiny little minute details, but like, you can't live with it. Like, you can't do development without those like minute details. It's like, it's like, there's like trapdoors everywhere as you're like building out a thorough and advanced did system and like, you're just never going to get through all of the little trapdoors, basically. So did is, in my opinion, have failed to get developer interests and because they failed to get developer interest, they failed to get usable applications and users using it. Nastr, there is this identity layer. You can attach profile pictures, names, like all of that to it. And they even have like, you can attach your name to, like, a well known URL. So, like, you can kind of give some proof.
Tony [02:09:52]:
Like, no one can fake that. You know, you have to have like the private key and pub key to verify that, you know, DNS is sort of centralized, but, you know, we're glossing over that. I think one of my, I think as an, as an identity solution, Nasr has done a really good job of proving that users will use something like this. Sure. It's not a complete system yet. What I worry there's still a lot of, like, fundamental, like, you know, it still relies on, like, DNS for the most part. You can do tor things as well. But, like, yeah, being able to backup keys, being able to have, like, different ways that you can recover your keys, all of them, it's lacking, but it can happen.
Max [02:10:37]:
It's not unsolvable.
Tony [02:10:38]:
Yeah, there, there's actually a few did people, I stopped working on things like that from decentralized identity things. But there are a few decentralized identity people that are looking at an officer, and here's how you could do something that comply. At the end of the day, decentralized identity is just a spec for how to lay out a private key pair with metadata. It's simple. So it's like, yes, Nostra could 100% comply with, with the did spec. In my opinion. It's just like, well, there's just no interest in did spec. Yeah, I mean, that's the main point.
Tony [02:11:15]:
It's like the promise was Microsoft was going to do decentralized, and they've done some decentralized things in Azure, actually, but it doesn't surface up to the user as a benefit. They click whatever box they need to click in Azure to continue with the next step of the infrastructure setup process.
Max [02:11:37]:
High level. Why is Microsoft interesting this? Like, how does it benefit Microsoft to not have your identity? In theory.
Tony [02:11:44]:
Yeah, in theory, liability. I mean, it all comes down to liability. Right?
Max [02:11:47]:
Like, well, but, okay, so is that just because their business model is they're actually selling, quote unquote, value for value enterprise software or somewhere like Google or Facebook would not necessarily want that because their whole business model is, we want to track and own everything about your identity.
Tony [02:12:00]:
Right, right. Which, which could be changed. I mean, you see, you see Jack Dorsey, he was a part of that world of Twitter, and he's like, well, this was a big problem for us. We could be considered liable for the messages that the users post or restricted. Governments might see it that way. So it's like, that's a liability. And so because we have control and content over the database that the users post, then we could, like we could lie, like we can forge tweets, we can lie about things and we can decide not to publish things and we can drop messages. We can, do we have all this control? So just to take a step back and say like, okay, well actually we don't control this.
Tony [02:12:38]:
Like when you saw that with Facebook. Yeah, Facebook, Facebook, like trying to do some macedon stuff.
Max [02:12:43]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:12:43]:
I don't know how successful that's been, but I think, I think liability and fear that governments will overstep their bounds. It's probably the only reason megacorps might be interested in something like decentralized identity.
Max [02:12:58]:
Yeah, it's interesting. You mentioned one other thing that I actually want to touch on. Super important, a global identity space. Somebody's been thinking a little bit about. You mentioned we glossed over. We're going to come back to it for a second. DNS being not decentralized. Something I've been thinking a lot about is two questions.
Max [02:13:16]:
One, do we actually need a global identity space? And if we do, how do we get there? And the way I think about this is, on the one hand, one thing that I love about Nostra philosophically is embraces what I see as a truth of the universe, which is there is no centralized view of anything. Theres only 8 billion soon to be potentially many more competing perspectives or competing and cooperating perspectives, but theres not truth. And in fact, this is, you heard my podcast with Stu. I think I mentioned this, my rant that I criticize. I like the scientific method, but what we call science because reproducibility, the observer is always different. And thats way more important than people give it credit. So anyway, so what I love about Nostra is there is no such thing as a truth. We don't know what your follower count, quote unquote, actually is.
Max [02:13:58]:
We don't know if you're seeing, you'll probably never see 100% of the message on the network. That's probably impossible. You can get close and you can approximate asymptotically to that, but you'll probably never get all of it. And that's okay, because that's how the real world works. Now, the closest thing that we've gotten to, quote unquote, a global, you know, consensus anything is bitcoin. And bitcoin one is very expensive to do that. You know, that's what all the energy is actually being used for. That's what the, the block size wars were fought over to keep enough nodes to actually.
Max [02:14:29]:
But, like, the point is it's really fucking hard to do that. It's expensive to do that. And, you know, this is, I think, one thing that I love in the nostril community that's, you know, you take some of the cool ideas that came out of, quote unquote, web three and, like, clearly you didn't need a blockchain for that. But, like, yeah, once you have, you know, free market observers and decentralized identity, public private key identity, okay, you can do some cool applications. Anyways, the question I come back to is it's very expensive to have, quote unquote central view of time or location of something. And even with bitcoin, it's not perfect. Right? You could have rollbacks. We've only seen.
Max [02:15:04]:
I don't know what the longest rollback is, but who knows? Maybe in the future there's some new chip that comes and rolls a lot of things back. It seems unlikely, but it's nothing necessarily impossible. Do you think that having a global identity space like we have with a.com today is important enough that we find a way to anchor that into bitcoin? Which my understanding is that some of the did stuff like what the web five block was working. I was trying to find a way to anchor into bitcoin. Or we say, you know what? It's not important enough. And the web of trust stuff with nostril is good enough where you're never going to get 100% certainty that this is the right place to point. But if Tony is pointing, if I have enough people in my web, trolling is pointing there. Let's just go with that.
Tony [02:15:43]:
The latter there is what I believe in, because you don't even have. Think of how many fake Twitter accounts exist to mock other people. You could say, imagine the extreme of this is, okay, let's offload all of this work to a centralized entity, and they will be our global source of truth. It's not working. Yeah, well, it both works out well enough on Twitter, and it also doesn't work perfectly on Twitter at the same time. So, like, it doesn't work perfectly because there are tons of impersonations all the time happening on Twitter. Famous, famous people. And do people do fall for that?
Max [02:16:22]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:16:22]:
So you can't, you, you can almost say you can't solve that problem ever. But what has society been able to prove that? Okay, because let's say I'm a new user. I joined Twitter. I try to find you on Twitter. So I search Max, and I'm like, oh, there's a billion other maxes out there. Okay, so let me look. Max Webster and like, okay, I see, I see ten people all with like the same, all with the same profile pictures. Like, I narrowed it down a little bit to ten people.
Tony [02:16:53]:
And like, eventually I figure out how to find the right you. And there's a few ways to do that. I could, I could. If I know you from another method online, I could just text you and say, hey, which one's you? Yeah. So it's like society has a way to figure it out.
Max [02:17:08]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:17:09]:
And we as humans have way to figure out if there's impersonation or not. We still fall for it, but like a global state doesn't help us not falling for impersonations. So why do it at all?
Max [02:17:22]:
What about with DNS itself or like even just having .com?
Tony [02:17:25]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're all kind of like a proxy for private public key pair. Right? So by having like what you're. I think what you're referring to is human readable. Human readable pet names.
Max [02:17:37]:
Yes.
Tony [02:17:38]:
For people pet names, but yeah, I mean, I mean. Sorry, I mean it's, it's actually a, it's a concept in w3c, actually.
Max [02:17:47]:
Oh, okay.
Tony [02:17:47]:
Yeah, it's just the concept. Yeah. Pet names is kind of what they refer to. Nicknames, usernames. I don't know. You can still have. It's almost the same problem. Right? I could search by name and probably find an impersonation.
Tony [02:18:05]:
Or I can just like try to figure out what the source of truth is based on the context. And the context could, like, this is where I think web trust is very important.
Max [02:18:13]:
I agree. Yeah.
Tony [02:18:13]:
Because, because I could type, like, let's say we replaced websites with, with a. Not with a noster, public private key pair with a profile name. And like, what if I just put in and let's say I go to my web browser and I just paste your n pub. Yeah, that would be like the most. If I knew your in pub, that would be the most secure way for me to like go to your nostril website. It's just like paste in your nPub. No one would be able to fool that.
Max [02:18:39]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:18:39]:
I would pull down your message. I would see it signed by the NPub. There would be no problem. Problem. Now let's say I try to type in just the words like Mac space Webster on Internet browser. You know, it would have like ten or 20 maybe. We could have it where it just like goes to a single source and like pulls out your right input. Right? But like, we could just, I don't know, I'm hand waving over the web of trust part.
Tony [02:19:05]:
But, like, if it was an Internet browser, if it was a, if you put in a username, it could end up being more like a search result.
Max [02:19:15]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:19:15]:
And it's like, okay, there's like these people that you follow that follow him, that follow this account and this specific max or that specific Max, and it's like, okay, well, no one I follow follows that Max, so I'm just not going to look at that one. But it could also sort the algorithm by, like, okay, the top max is the one where 20 of your friends follow this one. So probably click that one and you.
Max [02:19:41]:
Could have a recommendation score. Eventually the AI's or your personal assistant can just get trained to do this for you.
Tony [02:19:45]:
Maybe it's just the first, it just, it's like ask Jeeves a long time ago.
Max [02:19:49]:
Dogpile.
Tony [02:19:50]:
Or even just like what Google was where it's like, I'm feeling, feeling lucky. Let's bring that back. I love that. So, yeah, I think humans naturally solve the pet name impersonation problem and then with better tools like web trust, so I don't think we need a global identity.
Max [02:20:08]:
Yeah. Awesome. Any last thoughts or any maybe one last question I'll ask you. We're working on a lot of stuff. In some ways, the world seems very chaotic and crazy, but yet all this technology is so fucking cool. What would you say a decade out is kind of. I know it's impossible to predict technology moving so fast. What's an optimistic vision of the way the world could look if we're at least directionally successful in what we're doing?
Tony [02:20:39]:
I mean, spinning off of that identity question is that we have normalized being able to log into websites or do things with our quote unquote identity where, like, we, like, we can't be shut down if they tried.
Max [02:20:55]:
Yeah.
Tony [02:20:56]:
Even though, like, I do think naturally speaking, there will be markets for, like, okay, make this a little bit easier for me. Have something that's a little bit more centralized or a little bit more trusted. But I think in general, I would love to see, and I think technology could get to that point where me, as the most self sovereignty user possible, looks exactly the same as, as the user that is offloading as much trust as possible because that's what they feel like. I do not want to be treated differently for my self sovereignty as the person that decided to offload it because it was too much and they didn't want to deal with it. Or, like, they trusted Facebook to log in, but, like, I don't want to be treated differently than that. So just because I seek my own privacy and I speak my own, I seek my own self sovereignty, I shouldn't be criminalized or discriminated against. And I do think tech can get to that point, and that's what I want to see the most.
Max [02:22:01]:
I love it. Tony, this has been amazing, man. Anything else? I don't know.
Tony [02:22:06]:
No.
Max [02:22:07]:
Yeah, this was a long one.
Tony [02:22:09]:
This was great. I love it.
Max [02:22:10]:
This was so much fun. We should definitely do this again. Yeah. Appreciate you, man.
Tony [02:22:14]:
Yeah. Thank you.
Max [02:22:15]:
All right.
Tony [02:22:17]:
Wow. Yeah, I love that.
