Yeah, all kinds of stuff happens.
Alright, so I'll pack this away and we'll see how it goes.
Okay.
It's a little bit...
We'll be fine. We'll be fine.
Yeah.
Yeah, we'll be fine. We're usually fine.
Okay.
Alright.
No disasters, yeah.
No catastrophic losses, yeah.
I sometimes, again, have to dig into the mics and recover on device,
like if some cable breaks or whatever, but it usually works.
I want to point out something.
Like we had some conversations the last couple of days,
delightful conversations.
And we, you know, like with everything from like skateboarding to metaphysics and so on.
Like we'll, we'll hit, I think we'll hit a lot of these topics.
Yeah.
But you mentioned something that kind of has been stuck in my mind ever since.
Is that, there's no such thing as the ship.
No, maybe we'll get to that as well.
No, no, no, that was as you could tell.
It wasn't, that, that wasn't as impressive to me as you thought you would be.
But you mentioned that two people really impressed you in terms of their humility.
And it was M. C. Escher.
Yeah.
And George Carlin, the comedian.
Yeah.
Like he...
Yeah, talking to me about that.
Like why, what, what has you, why those two names and, and what,
why are those people special to you?
So I actually went to see Escher exhibition in Florence.
Yeah.
Which was incredible.
Yeah.
And I actually didn't know he was a, he did wood cutting and life on the sea.
I think a lot of people don't know that.
It was just kind of nailed me because I was, it made it so many times harder to do.
Yeah.
And, and impressive.
And afterwards I think I just went online and I read everything I possibly could about.
Escher.
Like everything.
And, and during that, there's actually a really good website I comment with.
It was cool, but it had a lot of stuff.
Yeah.
And one of them is that he, he didn't know why he was so obsessed with doing wood cutting
or lifeography.
But every day he woke up so thankful and blessed that that's what he wanted to do.
So he, he understood that, you know, there's something outside of him that,
that, that blessed him with this need and that he wasn't just pure self-determination.
Yeah.
And I think a lot of people in the world today really think that they are the, the total of
their decisions.
They're fully self-determined.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think that one of the things that comes out of those, when you see people that are
down and out or homeless and things, those people see, those people was, you made bad decisions.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I guess for me, and it's also part of, I guess, my identity as well.
But yeah, for me that just, this is like the, one of the highest marks of a human.
Yeah.
Yeah, to understand that you didn't make everything happen in your life.
But you should be thankful when it's good.
Yeah.
And George Carlin was definitely thankful for the life you've been given.
Yeah.
Or, you know, being given might not be the right thing.
Yeah, so I think those are the last few people that I saw doing that.
Yeah.
And when I saw it, I just remember that instantly because I do know, it just means a lot to see
people.
There are people like that.
Yeah.
No, I think, I think the, the best people realized that like also like the, the people were still
talking about like someone like whatever, and Marcus Aurelius and those kind of people.
Yeah.
Like, and they will often point out that, you know, jobs interestingly enough was one of
these people as well.
I know, I know you don't think too highly of him, but he would, he would often point out
that, I'm willing to do it wrong.
You, you, like, remember that like you're using a language that you didn't invent, for example.
Like the English language, like you had nothing to do with it.
Like, and, and like all those, all those kinds of things.
Like he would, he would point it out over and over again that there is a lot of things that
you didn't create and that, that you have to, like the right, or the right attitude for
that is, uh, thankfulness.
And I think that's, um, something that we as a society have kind of lost in some sense.
Like in, in, uh, especially like in the, in the postmodern era, right?
Like it's, it's, it's all everything that came before is evil and like white man evil
and like, you know, like Western civilization evil and so on.
And, uh, like the thankfulness is gone in some sense.
Yeah.
And, and so I appreciate when people kind of take the opposite route and bring that back.
And, and, um, I mean, I definitely had my own journey of,
finding a renewed appreciation for tradition, for example.
>> Yeah, me too.
>> For traditional values and it's on.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> Yeah, yeah, no, I imagine.
So, yeah, I feel like also in the summer
and engineering context that's in part what's happening as well
because the early internet pioneers,
they had very radical ideas about how networking
should be structured, for example.
You know, like the end to end principle,
all those kind of things.
And like, how can you build a decentralized network
that doesn't instantly turn evil, you know?
And I feel like we're in the business now
in part of trying to re-vivify that tradition
and kind of like, how can we build systems?
And how can we build networks that don't turn evil instantly?
You know, like that's kind of one of the things.
And one thing I wanna point out is
you come from the design side.
And yesterday I tried to talk to everyone on the ship.
>> Yeah.
>> And your name must have come up, I don't know,
like half a dozen, two dozen times.
Like everyone was very happy that you, you know,
jumped in and made lots of their projects more appealing
from the UI, UX side and so on.
From the storytelling side and so on.
And so talk to me about that, like how come you ended up
in that area and how come you ended
and developed in Sovereign Engineering
in the first place, like both of these basically.
>> So how we ended up with designer.
>> Yeah.
Guess.
>> My first kind of love was chefing.
>> Chefing?
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah, you were a chef, there's some, there's some.
>> Yeah, for some time.
>> There's some, there's some big concept.
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I started when I was 13.
It was actually because of health.
I was eating something and I was like,
what the hell was in this?
Yeah.
And then my reaction to that was like,
I want to know what's in my food.
So I'm going to make it for scratch.
>> Interesting.
>> So that helped you develop paste, I assume.
>> Yeah, it helped me.
Presentation was a big thing.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah.
>> And I asked my mom how to cook an omelette,
then I cooked omelette for three months.
>> Yeah, exactly.
>> In a way imaginable.
>> It's a hard skill to master,
as any French chef will tell you.
(laughing)
So yeah, I don't know if it's clear.
>> But I think an aspect of that was like really,
like design, like thinking about how the food
is going to fit together and look for them.
I was going to taste together.
>> Yeah.
>> It's not that far off.
>> Yeah.
>> I'm sure like it's an absolute connection,
but that was my first kind of creative outlet, I think.
>> Yeah.
>> And then,
I was actually, so I was into computers.
I thought they were amazing.
I was into the internet.
I remember asking my mom that I could have the internet.
She was like, what the hell would you do the internet for?
(laughing)
But I don't know where I picked it up,
I'd read it somewhere, you know, before everyone had it.
And now she became the biggest internet user ever.
And so yeah, I was into early internet, early computers.
So I decided not to go to the last two years in school,
in my country, you do your A-leveled in school.
I decided to go to college,
which is a bit of a lesser grade by men.
I could do computers.
>> Yeah.
>> And during that, all I did was break out and strike
over the bag with everyone then.
>> One more commonality.
>> Yeah, but I literally want to just like switch between
screens when the teachers say.
>> When did you start, when the version did you start on?
>> I actually started on the first version.
>> So I hated it because I didn't understand
there was recoil.
>> But that was because there was, so one point O.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay, yeah, because there was zero point seven beta
and like there was some conversion.
>> Oh no, I didn't know about that.
>> Might have been that, I'm not sure.
Because it started as a half-life.
>> I was a half-life.
>> So that was still when it was a half-life mod, right?
And yeah, yeah, yeah, because I remember the first version
you had the sideload, like you had to actually run scripts
in the console to make it work.
>> Oh, maybe not.
>> The weapons would stay, no, that was pre-1.0.
There was in the beta days.
>> I think it was in 1.7.
>> And the weapons would remain on the ground,
between rounds.
So if you would die with an op somewhere.
>> Yeah, you know, and you respawn,
you could run to the spot in the ground.
>> Oh wow.
>> Like that was very, very early days
because I was playing.
>> I was thinking it would be 1.0.
>> I was playing a half-life test match
before I was playing console.
>> Oh, I was too, yeah.
>> Half-life was, yeah, blew my mind when I came.
I thought it was incredible, like you've always loved that game.
- Fantastic.
- Yeah, so it's a hard one.
- It brings back memories.
So you were doing that in college.
- Yes.
- Because the computers were networked, right?
- Yeah, yeah.
- Alrighty.
- Yeah, exactly.
When everyone stopped playing across it, I was like, "I'm sad."
So I just started playing online, so it's just me carrying on.
I think everyone actually got to do their work.
- Yeah, I see.
- But then the first interesting thing came up.
It was a website module, which I found interesting for some reason.
I'm not sure why.
It was just, you know, to make a website was basically the program for that module.
- Okay, I see.
- And just at the very same time, I found out about Macromedia Flash.
- Nice.
- And, yeah, just went on to advance studios.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, two advance, it must have been two advance here.
Two advance studios website.
- I don't know about that.
- Oh, they were like the kings of Flash back in the day.
- Okay.
- Like they had just had flagship websites.
People would wait for them to update their own website.
- I remember these websites, so I probably know some of their work, but I don't know the studio behind them.
I know there was one or two individuals that were really, really good.
- That's really kind of fun.
- Okay.
But it was the website where you would like wait like for five minutes to load, and there was like awesome loading bar progress animations.
- Oh, like everything was animated there.
- Yeah.
- Sounds like it was, I mean.
- Yeah, it was a multimedia experience.
- Yeah, yeah.
- For sure.
- I think it must have been that when I saw that, one of my friends showed me, oh, blew me away, and I was like, I wanted to make websites.
- Yeah, I see.
- Yeah.
- But my website, making very much started in animation, and like a lot of very like heavy kind of graphical stuff.
- Yeah.
- As opposed to like later, just very static.
- Yeah, sure, sure.
- So you know all about like, keyframes and...
- Yeah, and I figured it out for myself, because I've always been quite old to a didactical to my sort of benefit, but also sometimes not beneficial.
- Yeah.
- So by figuring out how to do logical things on flash for myself, helped really like gave me a good foundation of logically how to do things, rather than just knowing.
- Yeah.
- I think sometimes if you figure things out, you can learn like a more foundational grasp of it, because you used your own mind to work out rather than someone else's information.
But yeah, I think that that's what made me the designer am, and I see other designers that were flash designers that we got to start with, and you can always tell.
- Mm-hmm.
- But with the...
- Yeah.
- With the vibe coding or whatever.
- Yeah.
- You can read...
- Designers can do that again, I think.
- Yeah, without using flash.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Flash was very dynamic.
- Yeah.
- Like there was also lots of people were doing games in flash, right?
Like there were a lot of...
- Like...
- Now a quasi-famous.
- Yeah, that's nice to make the game.
- But famous flash games, because it was dynamic and programmable enough that you could actually build games in it.
- Yeah, Newgrounds or something.
- Yeah, Newgrounds got big on flash and so on, and it's still around as far as I know.
- Yeah.
- Or like at least an archived version of it or something.
- Yeah, they even had series, flash series.
- Yeah.
- Like...
- Oh, what's it called? The guy with the rusty spoon.
- Oh.
- That's salad fingers?
- Yeah.
- That was it?
- Yeah, I think that started with flash series, so you actually watched it in flash.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was back in the very weird internet days.
- Yeah.
- Like...
- Yeah, almost all of the internet was very weird.
It was only weirdos.
- Yeah.
- I don't actually remember a lot of it.
I think that might have been traumatized.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's how the brain works.
There's some things to it traumatic.
It just really, you know.
- Oh.
- Put it somewhere where you don't...
- Yeah.
- Where you can't access it easily.
- Totally.
There's a couple of things where I'm not even going to mention the websites, because I don't...
- Yeah, no, let's not.
- ...even the name is just horrible.
- That's not...
- The Clank Run will auto link stuff.
Like, what's not risky?
- Oh, yes.
- All right, so you came from the flash side.
And explain that some more what you just said at the end there.
- Yeah.
- That now thanks to my coding and not having to write, you know, CSRS and JavaScript and everything else by hand.
- Yeah.
- As a designer, you can go back to the flash days in some sense, or back to this way of doing it.
Like, like, put some more meat on that bone.
- Yeah.
- I think that, I think, mainly, you can do some unreasonable things, because normally you'd have...
As a designer, you'd have a fun guy doing the implementation.
- Yeah.
- And if I gave them my ideas, like...
- Yeah, it would just be cost prohibitive.
Like, it would be way too expensive to do.
- Yeah, and I don't think that...
...that do them as well as I could.
So like, I've like, yeah, yeah, yeah, because you implement it once you once you remove design and implementation the guy who implements it doesn't have the
I for the design and we'll get some of the details wrong. Yeah, I'm not in my life for quite a while. Yeah.
Quite a while. Yeah. Ever since
Since the models it only stopped very recently now we have models that are good enough where you can actually as a designer prompt them and
It will just work and you can iterate until you're happy from the same perspective, right? Yeah a couple of times it might literally
Make a banger straight away. Yeah, but not often it's not like consistent. Yeah, but like it's really like polishing a stone
Yeah, absolutely as a diamond. Yeah, and like I think a lot of people will give up. Yeah sooner than I do
Yeah, I'll just keep on going until it's a diamond. Absolutely at the end. Yeah
Yeah, like so it's not always easy. Yeah, but I mean it's incredibly easy and
That's that's what that's what I've wrote about this recently like the last the last I don't know
18 months or so have been the bane of my existence because I'm just I developed an allergy
For LLM slop. I mean for you as a as a design. I must be the same for me. It's mostly brighting like like words words
and and paragraphs are something I really care about hey, hey, I know it is and it's just like
It happens
And the frequent like it started happening like 18 months ago
So maybe a little longer than that but now absolutely like no one writes anymore
It's all just it's all just like vibe slop like clouds like writer whatever article about the thing
I just did and and
The polishing is completely absent like it's just it's just one shot and because people aren't writers and they don't know anything about
Sentence structures or words or paragraphs or whatever. They'll just read through it once or glance at it once and it's like oh
It's great. It's just like hit post, you know, and it's just everything slop. I hate it so much
It will just get worse
outside of like social
Like lost to social media and things that like are you talking about particular places where this happens like and
like yeah mainstream blog posts of
Companies also. Oh really all kinds of things all kinds of stuff and maybe maybe
They write the first paragraph themselves or so maybe also the second
But then it's just like it's let's say it's a three-page thing
The rest is all slop. Yeah, and so then once I hit the slot by can immediately tell and I just like you know, I
I'm gonna throw up in my mouth and close the tap close the tap
That's just what's what's gonna happen. Yeah, so you must have had a similar experience also on the design side
Right because it's just like you can immediately tell if there's an M-slop for design as well. Yeah, there's funnily enough to think that
there's actually, you know, Claude OpenClaw, sorry and
I mean, whoever have their own design. Yes. Yeah, absolutely instantly see yeah some of them really like the pittles
Yeah, you know some of them really like the border. They like the color of their own website. Yeah, like I think
Yeah, but OpenClaw website often looks like all their websites that they make yeah, but like they have this weird
penchant for
Extremely small text. Yeah. Yeah, and I've talked to some people and they say I'll excuse they come guys. I was like I'm not sure that's the direct reason
No, like they can't see it or they or they can read it themselves rather. Yeah
Think about human needing to read it. Yeah. Yeah, that's the issue right? All the lambs aren't humans and so they have a hard time. Yeah
Understanding like really truly properly understanding what they produce. That's also why the arrows that they make are so peculiar, you know, yeah
Like they don't have our
Well, you know my favorite guy John Vervaeke would say they don't have our salient slatscape like they don't they don't understand how it is
To be a human what it means to be a human and what we care about and that's kind of the it's my issue with the
LLM slop stuff and that's that relates to what you said about polishing
polishing the stone is
It's all done without care. Yeah, like my criticism on the LLM slop is not that you used
That you used an LLM to do your things. I use LLM's as well to do my things
But if you do something you I assume you're doing it with care. Yeah, and you're producing like where you're spending
Way more time creating the artifact then it takes me to consume it
Yeah, and that's like that's that's the imbalance with where I'm very unhappy about it
The boy was just like it for some people won't take them like 10 seconds to write the blog post or create the app
or create the UI or whatever it is.
And like the 10 seconds of care versus me needing like,
you know, 45 minutes to decipher it.
Or like I'm not gonna spend the time,
but if you would want to decipher it,
that's the amount of time you would need.
- Yeah, I think it's kind of funny
because I imagine there's more content
and less people were actually reading it.
So like I think that's probably a massive portion
of stuff being created completely uselessly.
Like it's not needed and I was gonna read it,
and you know, I need to take no time to do it.
- Yeah, yeah.
- But yeah, I agree with you there.
I think it reminded me of one of my first eureka moments
as a child who I actually also was into drawing.
So, and I remember learning very young
that if I take more time drawing it,
the outcome is better.
(laughing)
It sounds silly, but I was just young.
And I was like, it was my first like experimentation.
I was like, oh, if you take more time,
you can't expect things to look good or be good.
- Yeah, there's a correlation there.
- There's a time in that.
(laughing)
So I think the same with this.
It's amazing that I can, you know,
create the design of a website
and update an existing development
or a new website in like a week.
- Yeah.
- But yeah, like the more--
- But you need to do the polishing, right?
- Yeah, like that's the issue.
It's like you have to go through hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of iterations.
It's like you tweak a little thing there
and then you do it again
and then it doesn't match with the other thing you did before
until you have to tweak it again.
And that's kind of, yeah.
- Yeah, I tried to say like handcrafted with AI.
'Cause I think, I get worried that some people think
that bottom wasn't me, it was the AI.
It's like, no, I really like go into every detail.
- Yeah.
- And I'm in it for me.
- Yeah.
- And all of the animation and the states
and all these things.
- Yeah.
- And so I'm not gonna lie, sometimes it will do something
magical, just like, you know, a little piece of it
or do something in a way that I didn't expect it to be
but it's actually an interesting new direction.
- Yeah.
- You know.
- Yeah, to me it's like someone made the comparison
to it being like power tools, you know?
- Yeah.
- You say you're wood carving.
And the fact that you're using power tools,
it might be offensive to some, you know,
very classical, everything done by hand would cover.
- Yeah.
- But if you, you know, whatever, like you take drift wood
or what have you and make awesome artwork out of it
and you use power tools for it, so be it.
There's still lots of love and there's still lots of skill
and lots of taste involved, you know?
And that's actually something I wanted to talk with you
about, like the, because you mentioned it on the,
I think it was on the ship.
I don't know, the days all blurred together
but then our visual cortex is so predominant.
Actually our, and it's again,
where Vervaeke would point this out.
Like it's interesting that we talk about taste
when it comes to deciding whether something
is really good or not.
Like the metaphors we use are so interesting.
- Yeah, yeah.
- It's like, it's very good to be with eating, right?
- Exactly, and also like eating and like tasting
and smelling are very close together.
And like to have a nose for something is another metaphor,
you know, that shows you how close together
these things are.
And so, so.
- That one seems more like knowledge
or information rather than visual things
or food having a nose or something.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Yeah, essentially.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, no, there's definitely a difference.
There's definitely a difference.
- But it's more intuitive in some sense, I think, you know?
Like it's more having a taste for something.
It's also, it speaks directly to when you taste something,
you're in direct contact with it.
And the thing becomes a part of you.
- Yeah, okay, yeah.
- So it's not one way, it's two ways, you know?
- Yeah, it's like.
- And with side, like there is more distance,
the contact is not as direct.
- Yeah.
- And, you know, like, like, that, you know, I mean,
it's a similar thing, a similar idea.
Like if you stare in the abyss,
the abyss was there back into you.
Like this stuff will happen too.
But with taste, it's very obvious that,
the stuff that you're tasting becomes a part of you.
And also your taste will develop,
and suddenly you can develop a taste for things
and have a more refined taste that something,
- That's a quiet taste.
- And a quiet taste, something that would repose you,
or would repose you.
some people you can suddenly start to differentiate and so on and so forth.
So yeah, I think, again, I've been thinking a lot about these types of
metaphors and so on because kind of what I think on the
Sovereign Engineering side, in part what I see happening is that the people that
are attracted by it, they have a taste for freedom in some sense. They have
tasted it somehow somewhere, oftentimes through the negative, through being
the banked or the platformed, those kind of things. And I feel like on the
internet side at least, like the classical internet, the legacy internet,
has completely lost this. So to me it's a lot of, let's maybe,
either let's wait a little bit. Okay, sorry. That's the downside of having
microphones on, like noise will just happen. But how do you think about that
in terms of, because you talk to me about kind of the human brain is so
focused on sight, on the sense of sight. Yeah, light really. And also our
information is really light, right? Because it's the easiest, most
programmable, so programmable, propagandizable. Yeah. I'd say, I don't know what
you'd call it, like, yeah, receptor. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why we've watched TVs
and all day long. And that's why you've got big TV adverts. And it's just like,
they haven't figured out how to attack our factory system. Yeah, yeah. And maybe
it wouldn't even be worthwhile. Yeah. But it does, it does make us very much
focused on that. And I think we've lost completely lost our fact ability to use
our factory system. Yeah, yeah, I absolutely agree. I mean, it's, and I think, I think,
like, you know, if you've got a dog, you understand, like you try to, you sometimes
anthropomorphize them, so you just see them as their eyes and that's how they're
doing it. But they're not good like, you know, I saw, yeah. And like, so many things
are very much, you know, using smell. And we come from that too. But I think in
this modern kind of way we experience life and where it's when we need to
experience it, you know, you just you lose those. Oh, absolutely. They become
on sharp. You have absolutely. Because an I very much for a period became very
much focused on that. I like so my personal experience is that it can be
really interesting and important. But yeah, I think mostly it's because the
easiest way to program or get to people is through light. So yeah, yeah, yeah, it's
yeah. I mean, it's interesting how different the senses are because nothing
will transport you back to childhood, but like the smell of your house. Exactly.
Yeah. Powerful with that. Yeah. And like a photo of the house won't do it won't do
the same thing. But if you actually enter and smell smell the smell that you're
instantly back. So there is a massive difference in the way of how it
registers in the brain. Yeah, like that's for sure. Yeah, how crazy is that?
Yeah, I mean, we're living in very interesting times because there is also
the people that just try to leave the modern world behind in some sense. You
know, go to the jungle, stop wearing perfume, stop wearing the other end. Like
we'll only put anything on their skin that they can also eat, you know, like
those kind of things. Yeah. And all the senses will quite soon come back. Like
like you will develop a very different smell and taste for people. Yeah. And I
mean, they run these experiments as well, right? I think there was a TV show in
ones where like like a dating TV show where the contestants won't even see
each other. But they would just like they would get a t-shirt that the guy wore
for half a day. Yeah. And they would smell it. And that would be the matchmaking.
Yeah. And it's amazing how well it works. Like biology has figured out a lot of
things. It's way smart. That's the thing about biology. It's way it's way smarter
and way more wise than we ever will be. And I think it's true for language as
well. Like there's more wisdom embedded in language than in any single person. Yeah.
My favorite quote that kind of sums up has always been if the brain was so
simple that we could understand it, we'd be so simple that we couldn't. Yeah. There you
go. Or like Alan Watts would say the light doesn't know itself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Or the thing I can't punch itself. Yeah. Yeah. Those kind of things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
No, that's how it goes. And that's also
So why every, why every, and I think that relates to your expertise, like every, there is, there is no touching without being touched.
Yeah.
And like it's always two ways.
And so if you present something visually, for example, yeah, it also does something to you.
The way you do it.
Like if you, if you sculpt the work, the work also does something to you.
There is no, there is no creation without also being created.
Absolutely.
You know, like you can't create anything without transforming yourself, basically, in some way, shape or form.
And I think that's also something like this, this perspective is something that we've lost in general, where it's just, I don't know.
Like if you talk to marketing people, for example, they don't see it that way.
I would say, by and large, I don't want to be unfair to the, some of the stellar marketing people that do exist.
But, but, but in general, you know, it's, it's, it's thought about one way, it's thought about.
It's, yeah.
Yeah, I don't know.
No, no, I always saw myself as, I'm communicating something and a food design is a communication tool.
Yeah.
Not just way to make something easy to use.
And when I was working in retail trade, and I very much like, felt like, you know, why do people interact with it like a million people?
Yeah.
And I mean, like it's communicating my ethics, my methods, why think that I, especially if I'm trying to do something in a more ethical way or whatever is communicating, whatever I'm, as a designer thinking and how I'm implementing it.
Yeah, I mean, all these signs communication, right? You had this one quote about the shapes and symbols or something like that.
Remind me of it again.
Signs and symbols.
Yeah.
Oh, is it signs and symbols rule the world, not what words, no laws.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah.
And if you just look around, you know, that it's immediately obvious.
It's like, you know, something stupid, like the whatever, like the ear stop sign or a non smoking sign and like those kinds of things.
Signs are very clearly the level above language.
Yeah.
That's why we use them also, right?
It's like you don't need to translate it in like every language of the world.
It's like there's one universal sign that everyone understands and in the best case, intuitively understands.
Yeah.
I think, uh, I think at least in my experience before I like thought out that more, I think there's so many things in life that have meaning and encoded meaning.
We think of random like it might even be just the way a fence is ornamented.
Yeah.
You don't realize that the symbol in it had a reason to be there.
It has a history.
And I think we think a lot more things are arbitrary than they are.
And it again is just losing our connection to the past and our history and the the provenance of what we are.
And we're using all those things like you said earlier with language, I didn't make English, you know, but we're using it.
So we are imbued in it.
So we should really understand it too.
Yeah.
I think there's a vested interest in us not doing that, obviously.
But it's also a propaganda move, right?
Like one of the things that authoritarian regimes often try to do.
It's like play around with the language and play around with the meaning of words and like change the meaning of words and so on.
It doesn't usually work very well, but it's to a degree it does.
But as to me, that's always when my alarm bells go off, if someone tries to be play loose with the language, you know, and just, you know, whatever.
Like there's lots of these like in war times when you talk about collateral damage, you know.
No, it's like killing civilians slaughter civilians.
That's why it's a euphemism or a disfemism.
Yeah.
The euphemism or the people for some reason think mostly use that in like a in new endo context.
So lost lost the understanding of the word euphemism.
Yeah.
It just means to make something sound better than it is.
Yeah.
And they do that all the time.
Yeah.
Like you.
Yeah.
Yeah, it triggered me so hard that I brought a whole whole whole piece once, which was about the words we use in Bitcoin.
And it was when the language started to shift and the legislators came up with the language of like an unhosted wallet and unhosted.
And they would repeat that over and over again, like an unhosted wallet and how dangerous it is to have an unhosted wallet and so on.
And like I was furious because it's also it's also ingenious.
like they sat together in the room.
to like 20 people and brainstorm this and they came up with that and they realized oh wow that's
genius that's good let's go with that and I was man I'm still furious because it's it's
and well it shouldn't be hosted period it's like and I I was so angry I would talk with people and
the example I use for example oh look at all these children running around look at all these
unwrapped children you know it's the same thing it's a terrible thing to say but it makes clear
like of what they are doing you know it's like oh no look look these unwrapped children you know
like it's it's it's completely insane to me that those are the tricks that they are playing yeah
when they talk about unhosted wallets and so on and and if you're uninformed and if you don't have
any idea about what the wallet is what bitcoin represents what like how the system works and so on
then you just you just completely glance over it and you let it slide and it's just like and you're
okay with the term and you might adopt the term and so on and I think that's yeah well I think
that's is one of the oldest in art kind of times tool to to change the world to like bad actors
benefit like I think a lot of it started with the lawyers manipulating words yeah for people to
sign things they're not realized that they've just granted like a corporation the same as the
rights of a human yeah things like this so I think it's always been there that tool and it's quite
it could be quite a surreptitious tool you could do very like there's not people there you can just
slowly you know absolutely let the information out before and before you know people are talking
like that and that's it but then they also have legal legal kind of ability to use it I imagine
they were doing that so they could use it later in some way like a self-hosted wallet things like
this absolutely absolutely yeah yeah because they're making it much more specific to hosting and
then they can say well you got hosting something that was illegal exactly exactly yeah yeah yeah
running an unhosted wallet is it like that's that's the next step after that and so and it's yeah well
anyway but it's yeah I mean it's just sad to me that very few people care about these things also
care about the language that's why also on on Wednesday I brought up and to be fair on the
not-for-signed there's some people that really do care about the language for example like like
with the with the stuff that we are trying to do I think language is extremely important and I would
like on Wednesday I would point out the difference between a server and the relay and like if you're
talking about the server like who is the server serving you know like who's being served is the
server serving itself and is it like a is it like a client-server relationship or is it a master
slave relationship you know yeah those kind of things and there's a reason why we use all these
words and we use all these analogies and and on the not-so-side for example you don't have an
osser account like a constant for example we'll talk about that as well yeah and because there is
no account you only have an account if there is an accountant and he does he does that accounting if
there is a list and you can't be crossed off the list yeah you know like and that's where the word
account comes from it comes from the accounting site and someone is doing the accounting and it
comes from that of course and like your debts can be forgiven or you can be platformed or whatever
you have yeah and on the not-so-side we are in a completely different system where you don't have
an account you have a key you have a key and you're key with your key you can create a profile and
it's very very different it's a very different system and so the words we use actually do matter
yeah because if they paint if you use the wrong words you have to move wrong mental picture then
you will also build the systems in the wrong way and use them in the wrong way yeah that's
interesting because sometimes that's hard for me as a designer because yeah but knowing that
you'll be in mind for about what's causing so if that's the case then it's a different kind of challenge
to onboard people to this better way of talking about things not necessarily you should use
the existing way because that's easier for people to understand yeah which is always a design challenge
normally we lay into what they already do but like what you're saying now maybe realize why
actually it had a lot of challenges in that area with Nostr and just do the stuff with the design
of how do you think about the the hard problem of onboarding or like even holding keys and
having people manage keys and those kind of things like from a design perspective from an
onboarding and UX perspective yeah a lot of designers have like strong opinions on that right so I'd be
curious to to hear yours
They haven't really had the opportunity to tackle that problem,
like I should, or maybe I just haven't taken the time.
But in some sense, you already did, right?
Like you've been working on Archipelago for a very long time now.
And this has to come up on the Archipelago side as well,
where you run a self-sarbor node.
You have to be in charge, which means you also...
You're not babysitting the user to such a degree
that it would feel like he has a Facebook page or whatever.
Yeah.
So that actually takes what I was going to say in a different way.
I guess I'd call someone that's installed in Archipelago,
like a high-intent user.
I've got a lot of intent on this while they're doing it.
It's not just a casual thing.
I see.
So when you've got a high-intent platform,
so any user that's going to likely have a lot of intent
and time to play with this, it's not just a website link
they went to frivolously.
Then it's a less of a problem.
But then it's kind of an indirect tool now.
Like some people would say, how do we make the login analogy
with Nostr or something like that, or the account analogy?
But for me, it's about grabbing the user's attention
and doing something that makes them interested
and committed to whatever this thing is.
That's what I've been trying to do.
Yeah.
I think that's more powerful.
You know, like...
Answering the question of like, why should they care?
Yeah.
Because if someone cares, the obstacle is not the issue.
And I think when you make it something like that,
like what I've tried to do as sort of an engineer in this time,
I think it's the kind of
bi-directional thing you were talking about.
The reason that engages the person is because
it's obvious the person you made it cared.
Right?
Yeah.
I think that's really the fundamental layer
that gives you that
gives you that attention with them.
You could probably make an interest in an analogy,
you know, on the street.
Like if you're looking for a restaurant,
or maybe a bar.
If there's one that's just very self-effacing, nothing's happening.
Like less interest, but there's one thing that's happening
looks like someone took time to detail.
Yeah.
It's a design in the evening,
yeah, during a week for people, you know,
yeah, and you're more interested in going there.
Yeah.
You're going to look around a bit more.
Yeah.
But yeah, that's not...
That's nowhere near what I thought I would be the answer.
But they think again, you need to think like,
laterally and do some like,
you know, the shower effect kind of work or
what have you to kind of find the answers.
Because I don't think it's right in front of you.
Yeah.
No, that's such a good point.
It's also in terms of
there were two really good points in there
and kind of the high-intend user.
I think that's how the world already works to a large degree.
Like again, going back to like power tools.
Like if you get a certain type of machine
that's like really big and dangerous,
you're like, not everyone is going to get that machine.
No.
Like it will...
There's a lot of trust put in the user
that they can figure it out
and they will not hurt themselves immediately and so on.
It's like they'll...
You're the kind of guy that gets like
whatever like an overpowered like saw or whatever, you know?
Like you're not a normal guy to begin with.
Yeah.
And you'll know how to handle it.
And you'll...
You know, there's going to be a little bit of instruction,
a little bit of things to figure out and you'll figure it out.
Yeah.
And so I feel like we are able to do all that already as a society.
That's kind of...
That's been my criticism from the get-go on the Bitcoin South custody
and also not the key management side.
Yeah.
It's like...
If you...
If you get a sharp kitchen knife,
you better learn how to handle a sharp kitchen knife.
If you get a car, you better learn how to drive the car.
You can kill yourself and you can kill others.
Very easily.
Yeah.
If you get a firearm, you better learn to...
With a thing or two about how firearms work
and how to avoid shooting yourself in the foot
and how to store them safely,
especially if you have kids in the house and so on.
And all those kind of things.
Like as...
Human civilization, we figure these things out.
Yeah.
Why can't we figure out key management in a similar way?
You know?
Because it's to me, that's what we are talking about.
It's on the level of having a car or having a firearm.
And in terms of autonomy and in terms of self-protection.
That's the level we're talking about.
Like the cars are interesting.
because if shit hits the fan you can jump into the car and you can just go
east unless you're here you know like it won't do you good but in general if
you're on the mainland if you're not stuck on an island you can jump into the
car and you're gone you're very very high agency you're you're you're very
yeah your optionality is very high if you have a car yeah it's a good analogy
with firearms you have self-defense you know like it's it's it's if that's why
in Texas like people don't fuck around you know like everyone everyone in Texas
is like armed to that teeth and and it's a very polite society right and and so
to me Bitcoin represents especially Bitcoin but to some degree in Austria
as well like everything that has to do everything that bases its whole being
on cryptographic keys the cryptographic keys have this level of importance if
shit hits the fan you can put the 12 words in your head if you want to and
you can leave the country you know that's that's what we're talking about and I
mean on the other side of course it's its identity it's on crypto communication
it's all those kind of things which also are incredibly important it's your
online life basically yes if you base your online life on Nostr you can take
your life with you if you base your financial life from Bitcoin you can take
your wealth and all your financial infrastructure with you yeah and no one
can take it away from you that's what we're talking about and people are
whining about oh it's so hard to write down 12 words or whatever or to use a
hardware wallet or a skis like all of them which have to get out of it yeah
back to what you said back to what you said you have to you have to get people
wrap people's attention and and and in the end make them care like make them
curious and enough and then like yeah help them understand why they should care
right and that's kind of the the challenge at hand I think from from the
design perspective to a large degree or also also from the engineering perspective
it's like I don't know like they blend together I think we also have to remember
that we are sort of unfucking this thing so along with that comes you're
really trying people have done this really badly it's programmed in us and
I care for our account information emails logins services is so low yeah so
throw away that you know this is going to be a challenge yeah and it's the
challenge isn't because Nostr is bad or these things are bad it's just this is
decades of programming yes we have to undo it and go in the wrong way that we
need yet to be needed to fight and sometimes it just will take that first
person doesn't it and then he shows as a friend and then it's viral just like
anything else was in the only internet yeah early internet like you were saying
earlier there's a lot more in 10 and there was you know it was you know that
virality can come to to Nostr that I remember people learning how to do
things on the internet yeah taking time yeah yeah writing down URLs from the
backs of magazines exactly yeah so yeah I think I think sometimes we're
very I mean it's great to talk about all these things but yeah sometimes it
seems like we're worried it's not gonna work or we're worried we're doing it
wrong I'm worrying is to creative but I think we forget the the low time frame
yeah forget we forget the exact time we're talking it so like you know
frantically but like this is a long-term project it's gonna take a long time
absolutely absolutely yeah and that's kind of why yeah the the larger goal of
the cohorts is to get the right people involved that either explicitly or
intuitively understand this and to you know like assemble a loose group of
people that can work together for long periods of time to actually solve some of
these issues that's kind of the idea behind that in that's the very high
intent yeah yeah you need you need you need high agency people otherwise
nothing would happen but but but because like in in a normal context we often
talk about high bandwidth interaction and cross-pollination of ideas and all
those kind of things and all of that is true but that's like one one level of
analysis when it comes to to what we're trying to do here the very long-term
thing is that we actually want to solve all the issues that we are facing right
now in the current iteration of the internet which is in part due to
centralized infrastructure in other part to to centralized services
and to service their turning evil and all those kinds of things.
And also having a, like you said, you know, like a population of internet users
that is just very bad path.
Yeah, in some sense, very low agency path.
And you must know about the concept of a citizen, like the citizen of the internet.
And we also used to have on the early internet days the concept of the Natikat.
I'm not sure if that might have been a German thing.
It might have been a German thing.
Now that I think about it.
But it's like an etiquette. It's like an etiquette.
Like how to behave. I'll have to look at that.
I think that's basically how to be polite online.
You know, like those kind of things.
That's the thing.
And it is very much gone.
Like some of those things are still around where like it's, you can never know.
There's like some name law or whatever.
I don't know the name of the law.
But you can never tell if someone is being legit or sarcastic online.
Like sarcasm doesn't transfer.
Yeah.
And so you always have to indicate sarcasm explicitly basically.
And so the rules online are definitely different than they are in meat space.
Yeah.
But yeah, I feel kind of that's the challenge at hand.
One of them is technical.
And to me the technical design and technical implementation to me are very much welded together.
Yeah.
Like they kind of have to be.
And I think from it, the social change follows.
I think to me it's technology first.
Social change after.
Birth Control Pill is a great example.
Internal combustion engine is a great example.
Printing press is a great example.
Smartphones are a great example.
Looks like this would have never happened to someone sitting at a beach.
Yeah.
Most of you, she missed the pirate boat.
Like the pirate boat is shipping by and she's just staring into the phone here.
Same thing.
Everyone's staring at the phone.
But 90 that she was reported to cast less about the pirate boat.
She saw it because of the way we interact.
Yeah.
I think everything is less interesting.
Selfies.
Very self-esteem tank.
Very self-centered society.
That's pretty much it.
So what's the way out?
The way out.
Yeah.
What's the way out of the tunnel?
The way out, sorry.
What's the way out of the current situation?
What is the current situation?
The self-centered society and the techno monopolies that we have to live with right
now.
And kind of the very, you know, like you can't.
You can't even talk about suicide or abortion on like Facebook for about being the platform,
for example.
What's the way out of the world?
It's funny how close that is to like the 1984 thing.
But I think when it's even in front of us, we can't see it.
Like all these YouTubers that are proactively censoring themselves and talk about it.
Yeah.
And we have new names for like PDF files.
Yeah.
Like all this stuff.
Like it's happening.
I think because it's not happening in the way it happened.
We were serving on the film version of a 1984.
Yeah.
You can't see it.
But the chilling effect is definitely real, especially on the YouTube side, you know,
like you'll bleep themselves.
Because you get demonetized instantly, right?
Yeah.
And that's the line you have to skate around basically.
Yeah, do you think kind of speaking to the little time preference idea you just mentioned
before, do you think we're on the right path on an ostracide or do you think something
that's more different is needed?
I think I see Bitcoin as a child of, not still as a child of Bitcoin and then so it's
just FIPS is like a child of not standing.
And I think I'm seeing like, for me, I always saw Bitcoin as the foundation.
And a lot of people see Bitcoin as the end layer, right?
Because it's just the start of this new thing.
Yeah.
It's not just the money.
It's not like, which a lot of people think it is.
Yeah.
I think Bitcoin is the layer where, like you say, what's the solution?
I think Bitcoin was the solution.
And we're going to see it slowly creating.
Yeah.
For me, Bitcoin is a seed and it's just a sapling at the moment.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But you want to see the whole tree.
Yeah.
But it's just going to take time.
And for me, I think Bitcoin's greatest gift will be all the things that come out of it.
I mean, you're preaching to the first one.
Yeah.
Of course.
I'm out of there.
I have a similar mental image and I love what's currently happening on lots of the
the master project and so on that lots of OTS is used,
like open time stamping, where you anchor
into the Bitcoin chain to create a proof of existence.
And from that, you can build up reputation systems
that are very hard to cheat and like those kinds of things.
So yeah, it's definitely happening.
And I think I'm very, very optimistic.
I think we just, again, it's not only a marathon,
it's like an ultra marathon, not a sprint.
- But yeah, that's my answer.
It's already happening.
It was already initiated.
- Awesome.
- But it's not necessarily just gonna be the body.
- Yeah.
- But like, I guess that's why Bitcoin for me
is also divine, is because like,
I think we, because we're such high timeframe society now,
like, like capitalist realism is like,
capitalism is so ingrained that zombie apocalypse
seems more likely than changing to a different system.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, and on the time preference side,
I mean, it's like from quality profit
to quality profit, right?
Like that's basically the timeframe.
- Yeah.
- If we wanna be generous, if we talk about
the TikTok generation, it's like 10 seconds to 10 seconds.
Or whatever the duration is, I don't even know.
Probably last to that.
- Once now.
- Really? Two at once?
- Yeah, one.
- Oh my God.
- Oh my Lord, they describe it, let's green.
Oh my God, it's gonna be a,
it's all an operating system very soon.
(laughing)
Anyway, no, I actually think the kids are gonna be all right.
- Jonathan mentioned this yesterday on the board as well.
But in a different context,
he mentioned that he's glad that,
you know, the next generation of people
are picking up sovereign tech
and are being good stewards to it.
So yeah, that was lovely to hear from someone like him
who has been here for ages.
- Yeah, that is what we're saying,
happening slowly in motion.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Epigenex.
- Yeah.
- People say the funny thing for me is like,
you can't force things on your kids.
But like you can see, it's not forcing now
that you've got these children and people
and not stir people like that's who they are
that don't have to force it.
It's just like how they live their life.
- It's a way of life, yeah.
- Which is, it's just gonna be normal.
- Yeah.
- Like that's how things work.
- Yeah.
- They've got to fight the oligarchs' children.
- Yeah, sure.
- Because you can have probably been
10 times more psychopathic.
Never met a real planet than ever.
Like, who knows what they're up against.
- We're heading into interesting times, that's for sure.
But yeah, you mentioned the divine aspect of kind of,
and maybe also the divine timing of Bitcoin appearing.
- That's the big one with that one.
- And you're not alone with that kind of line of thinking
and that type of commentary.
So I didn't say any of that stuff out loud.
(laughing)
When it all started appearing.
And so yeah, there's a lot of,
or more than you would think,
more people than you would think on the Bitcoin side
that would say something like that.
- What makes you say that Bitcoin is divine
or has some divinity in it?
- That's so hard to describe.
- Yay, an affable.
Describe the affable for me, please.
- I guess like you could see
like divine information,
like convergence or something,
or you know, like I guess divinity comes from the,
the old divinity is having a vision or what have you.
And I think we have a lot of problems
regarding Bitcoin, is it a religion, is it a cult,
is it, why is it?
But like maybe it's this new paradigm thing
because you know, paradigms have to start.
There was no religion and then there was.
Yeah, like this is another paradigm.
So if it's our best analogy,
I think for me it's my best analogy and it's a feeling
of what is happening.
- Like going from utter nihilism to absolutely hope
like during Bitcoin was just like the craziest thing ever.
Like I was the biggest.
- Crazy personal transformation.
- Yeah, I think it saved my life literally,
along with some other things.
So yeah, it does almost feel like intervention, you know, in my life.
Like, yeah, you're not alone with saying that.
Like, not a lot.
Yeah.
And it gives me a look.
I guess it gives me a purpose and a focus and it does make my life better.
My life just gets better and better.
Yeah, you're like, you're like, you're like, you're like,
you're like, I'm a Sovereign Engineering.
Yeah, I had the best, you know, time here to.
It felt like this is the time that I should come and, you know, I don't know.
Just maybe it's the way maybe it's how it changed my outlook and my perspective.
Yeah.
It feels like, you know, it's divine.
Yeah.
Maybe divinity is just, you know, having purpose, feeling happy, being free.
Yeah.
All those things.
I would, I would, I think a lot of people that study the stuff would agree with that statement.
It's basically once you have.
Like the question is, what goal should you pursue?
Like in every five minutes, it's like, what should you do next, basically?
You know, like and we are goal oriented action oriented beings.
So the question becomes what in the hierarchies of goals that you want to pursue in your life,
like, how should you orient yourself so that you best achieve these goals?
The problem with nihilism is like, if you don't have any goals, then you you you you you have no orientation and you're completely lost.
You lost it high C and you don't know which way to turn and which way to go and what to do and so on.
And everything is meaningless.
Yeah.
And the divinity comes in like once you realize there is something at the very top.
Yeah.
That you can't talk about that.
You can't describe that you can't explain.
But the drives everything and then also by definition drives you.
Like that's the thing you should pursue forever, basically.
With the with the with the maximum intensity without falling apart.
Yeah.
Keeping keeping self preservation in mind.
But even then, you know, like that's why that's why I in the religious domain,
like also self-sacrifice is an option, you know, like that goal is so important
that people will literally sacrifice themselves for that and so on.
And I think I think.
I mean, we talked about this briefly in the past, but to me why Bitcoin is so interesting is because it is.
No, no, no, no. Sorry.
This will be this will be weird to to to people.
This is going to be a weird thing to say.
But I'll say it anyway.
And it's a real thing.
It's a real artifact.
Yeah.
Even though you can't touch it.
But as a computer scientist, I can I can say and I can see like it's as real as it gets.
Yeah.
In the computer science domain, it's as like if something is made out of zeros and ones,
Bitcoin is as real as it gets.
It doesn't get more real than that.
That's our paradigm.
And it is a massive paradigm shift because we never had anything exist out of zeros
and ones that like completely reshapes the world and actually has physical existence
in the world and Bitcoin does have physical existence in the world.
And it's not limited either.
No, it's not exactly exactly, which is again like a, you know, a divine idea in some sense,
like it it has a beginning, but it doesn't have an end not necessarily.
And it's to me, there's still the bridge between the purely informational digital realm,
like the realm of ideas, basically, to the real electrons and atoms physical
reality that we find ourselves in,
Bitcoin was able to build that bridge.
Yeah.
And and so to me, it's the realest thing that exists because it's like,
like, like all this, we could be again, like this could be a dream or a simulation
or whatever and so on.
But but you do the math on Bitcoin and you look at the zeros and ones and you look
at the, you know, like the block header and so on and you like you understand how the
system works.
There is
proofable realness embedded in Bitcoin and that's what makes it to me real.
Yeah.
But the bridge I spoke about, that's what I like
just like you, like I was I self identified as an atheist for I don't know, like two
decades or something.
Now I don't know, like a like, no, no, I legit like I don't have labels except for
Bitcoin.
No, but
the fluffy concepts in the cloud of like, you know, like a spirit of something.
And again, like my opening talk of Sovereign Engineering was like building
something in the spirit of Bitcoin, like that tells you that tells you something
about where I'm at.
But but Bitcoin has a spirit and this is spiritual
entity defined in code, you know, like you can change the Bitcoin code and so on
and so forth.
But through the proof of work bridge and the consensus mechanism bridge that builds up
over time and all those kinds of things, it has physical existence.
And then that was my way, not necessarily out of nihilism.
I wasn't I wasn't
as heavily on the nihilism road as you've been.
But it was definitely my way out of atheism, interestingly enough.
It was like, oh, I get it now.
Like, there can be--
I don't know.
There is a higher instance.
And I'm not necessarily talking about God yet.
We briefly talked about this a couple of days ago, I think,
just talking about how a city, for example, can have a certain--
we often say a charm or something, like a charm to a city.
Or the example I always bring up is
like the Chicago Bulls have their own mind.
Even if everyone changes, every player changes,
the coach changes, everyone changes,
it's still the Chicago Bulls.
It has this identity.
And that's what helped me on the Bitcoin side.
Bitcoin showed this very, very clearly.
Bitcoin wants to be a thing.
It's a thing.
It's very hard to describe and define the thing.
It has physical existence.
But there's a spiritual side to Bitcoin.
Technically, I mean, the software code that's running.
It's not a chair.
Like it's-- it's zero than once.
But there is the physical instantiation of Bitcoin.
And they are somehow linked together.
And that was kind of--
I had a very big aha moment and some realizations.
And that kind of opened me up to more religious thoughts.
And even though I hate the world, but more spiritual thinking.
And those kind of things.
I think we all agree to hate that one.
And we haven't got that one.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't know.
I realize there was a lot.
I hope there wasn't all gibberish.
So--
No, no.
Yeah.
And the fact that it's still happening and it's still ongoing.
Like Bitcoin still has this effect on people.
Yeah.
It's insanely interesting to me.
Like people keep having this spiritual transformations
because of the fucking orange coin.
And I still don't know what to make of it.
Like I have no idea kind of feel like what it all means.
And--
For me, it just feels like a theorem almost,
like when I think about it sometimes.
Like this whole aura is like--
It's very surreal.
--a book or a film.
Yeah.
You know, anonymous guy who creates this thing,
perfect timing.
Yeah.
And then, you know, in my head when you say that,
I just-- I see almost like an animation
because I think very visually.
But I just see all these people just suddenly
with the mycelium of Bitcoin just kind of kind of pop.
And then becoming like, you know, reborn.
Yeah.
You know, new person.
Yeah.
There's slow.
Yeah.
But maybe like ultimately that's what it is.
Have you read "Snow Crash" by any chance?
No.
It's a great science fiction book.
The line you mentioned before, like just like 10,
15 minutes ago.
Like, is it a religion or is it like, what is it?
It's a line from "Snow Crash."
And it's basically like there's--
"Snow Crash" it's a computer virus.
And it has this effect on people.
So it's--
It's some of the earlier--
I read it because of Bitcoin.
So it's got recommended by some early Bitcoiners to me.
And it's a fantastic book.
It's a fantastic book.
Highly recommend.
Yeah.
[LAUGHS]
So yeah, we're living in very weird times.
And yeah, I do remain very hopeful though.
Like what we saw on just the last 18 months alone.
Like, I talked about it the 18 months of, you know,
LLLAM Slop and the negative sides of it.
Yeah.
But on the positive side, like for us, for Sovereign Engineering,
vibe coding is just like it's such a superpower.
It's so--
It's such a godsend, really.
Because the whole point of the program
is to build prototypes so that we have something in hand
that we can discuss ideas and iterate from there and so on.
And building a working prototype without a vibe coding,
pre-vibe coding was really hard.
Yeah, I took some people about--
Sovins pre-vibe coding.
It was-- it was-- it's still painful now.
It's still very intense now.
But pre-vibe coding, it was like-- it was torture.
It was pure torture.
[LAUGHTER]
And I'm speaking from experience.
Like, I showed-- I showed the demo that we fried it.
Like, I'm-- like, I'm--
you know, I try to walk the walk as well,
not only talk to talk.
And it was legit torture.
Now, like, you can just tell the clankers, you know,
like, use this, use this to deploy an end side, whatever,
you know, like, can we make it work on FIPS and hit Enter?
Yeah.
And just like, watch the clanker do its thing
for a couple of minutes, and it just works.
Which, again, I think, like, for me,
we're talking about all these things falling into place.
That feels like a big piece of falling into place.
Yeah.
But what we're trying to do to unlock, you know, change things.
Yeah.
And we normalise it so quickly though, because like, so many people probably just forgotten
what it was like already, right?
It's become the new normal quite quickly.
Yeah.
But yeah, that's just one of those other things for me.
It just feels like all these, it feels like, you know, the pressure got so hard in the
one earth or the universe.
They had to burst out the other side.
And Bitcoin was that burst.
Like, if just, this is enough.
And it feels like, you know, just, everything's aligning in this weird way.
Maybe that happens because we're all aligning, I don't know.
With Bitcoin, I feel I am aligned with it, I think.
Yeah, I agree.
That's why I'm almost like in that spiritual way.
Yeah.
Like, I'm calibrated with this.
Yeah, yeah, isn't that strange?
Isn't that strange?
How that works, right?
And it's, I love the saying, you know, like, you can't change Bitcoin, but Bitcoin changes
you.
Yeah.
And that's, I see, I've observed that happening for like the last 10 years, 10 years plus.
And, and again, to me, because I, in the beginning, I thought it might be like an early phenomenon.
Yeah.
And the fact that it's still happening and it keeps on happening gives me a lot of hope
because it actually does realign people.
And more importantly, like it, it realigns values.
It realigns your value system.
Yeah.
I think that's also why it's so disorienting sometimes.
And so a lot of people are so repulsed by it.
Like if you're, if your value system is the polar opposite of the Bitcoin value system,
you'll be repulsed by it.
You'll hate it.
I don't imagine.
No, you'll hate it.
And, and for me, for example, like I, I never cared about money at all.
I didn't know, like, or about whatever the economy or like, and anything economics.
I had no idea I didn't care about it at all.
Yeah.
I did the second Bitcoin came out.
I didn't know about it.
But for me, I started caring about money and got obsessed with it.
Outside of Bitcoin, the very same time.
Really?
Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah.
And then I found Bitcoin later.
Interesting.
Okay.
So you had a money phase.
So you, you, you had a sense.
Yeah.
And kind of making money?
I, I know I was obsessed with how money works, why, how the hell did this happen?
This is correct.
So you learned about the fiat system, the Bitcoin?
Like before you, before you, before you discovered Bitcoin.
No, the same type.
Yeah.
But the same time Bitcoin was released.
Okay.
2008.
Yeah.
Just suddenly you was.
Okay.
So there was the big financial crisis and everything went to share the news.
I was really pissed off.
And you started digging.
Yeah.
I saw people like hate just be showing how the banks are literally.
Allowing the cartels to loan the money through the tele window.
Yeah.
Even the instructions and, yeah.
And I think there's this guy outside.
Special.
HSBC and no one fucking cares.
No one cared.
Like no one.
They built special windows.
So the boxes fit through them exactly the size of maximum capacity.
Yeah.
And let's not do it as theirs again.
Yeah.
But yeah, I just, no one cared.
It really pissed me off.
Yeah.
And then I got obsessed with that.
That's the way I ended up in working in finance.
Interesting.
I saw Bitcoin and then I tried to get in Bitcoin and then I worked in finance.
But I was trying to do good in finance.
Yeah.
I see.
Change the system from the inside.
It doesn't work.
Yeah.
I would agree with that.
Absolutely.
That's right.
You got very angry.
Oh, wow.
That's quite a, that's quite a thing.
Quite a career.
You got behind you.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
Now, now for me it's interesting because like I think I mentioned a couple of days ago,
like I was on the, I was living in the Star Trek universe.
I was like, okay, we're close.
It seems on the physics side, we're close to figuring out fusion.
So let's just figure out fusion.
We'll have limitless energy.
We are doing well on kind of the nanophysics and so on side.
Yeah.
Let's figure out replicators.
And once we have, once we have limitless energy plus replicators, why would we need
money?
Yeah.
You know, like you just, you have a little microwave kind of thing or whatever and you
press about and anything comes out.
Yeah.
Why would you need money?
Like that's where, that's where my economic understanding was.
Yeah.
I think the word, sorry.
No, go ahead.
Go ahead.
I think the word money is just the wrong way.
You know, lee one.
Because it's not the thing, it's not the thing you didn't have in your hand.
Like it's so much bigger than that.
Yeah, I mean, when, when, when, it's like a glue.
So like, why would you have money from now?
That's why, that's why, what could you do without it?
It's the blood of society.
Yeah.
And you would still need it even if you would have cold fusion and replicators.
Like I can tell all the Sunfrik fans that much.
The Sunfrik universe would still need money.
Yeah, now I watch these things. I'm like, "What's it?"
That's stupid.
And the way I think about it now, to me,
in the economy, money, price signals, price signals,
are attention tokens in some sense.
It's like, what should be produced, what to pay attention to?
If there's a shortage, price shoots up.
You don't need to know anything else.
You don't need to know why the shortage happens.
Nothing.
You just need to look at the price and there is way more profit to be made
when the price shoots up.
So the shortage will be solved.
Because entrepreneurial types will come in and try to make more of it and so on.
And then you'll find an equilibrium again and so on.
That's one aspect of money.
That you would still need if you have replicators.
Because the question of what to replicate still exists.
You don't have infinite time.
So what to replicate is still, as long as time still exists,
you need some form of money.
YouTube shows this very clearly.
The money inside YouTube is attention.
It's watch time and it's attention.
And it's literally the money.
It's literally how everything is measured.
And you need to have some price signal in an economy,
in a complex system, to coordinate consumption and production.
YouTube has the two.
You have limitless supply, basically.
You still need money.
You still need some type of money to answer the question of like,
what should I present you next, for example.
Like all those kinds of things.
And so I obviously changed my mind on a lot of things and had to burn my old self to the ground once.
I started aligning with Bitcoin.
Now I really care about money, but only in the sense of capital M money.
What money is and how it should work and what is a healthy money and what isn't.
And in the same sense, I care about Bitcoin in a capital B Bitcoin kind of sense.
I care about, again, if I'm getting wiped for whatever reason, I don't care.
If my wake up and my sad balance, my family would care.
My wife would care.
But that's not what I'm doing this stuff.
I really care about capital B Bitcoin and being along for the ride mostly, I guess.
And kind of trying to do what I can to be a midwife to some of the ideas at least.
I think I've been around the coin long enough to have a lot of exposure to a lot of the different ideas.
And I developed the taste to come back to that metaphor of what has a chance of working and what doesn't.
And so that's what gives me a lot of joy on the Sovereign Engineering side.
Being on the forefront and seeing what people come up with and having discussions around the various projects and ideas and prototypes and so on and so forth.
But yeah, you were knocked out on the boat yesterday.
I went around interviewing everyone.
I'll ask the same question to you now. Looking back at the last six weeks, what were your highlights?
Like anything goes in terms of projects or stuff that happens.
I had a bit of a wow, this is real moment.
So obviously, it brings a slightly different perspective from design and very user focused, a very smallest interaction focused and what even like a mundane thing.
It kind of does.
And a big thing, I've tried a lot of different things with our capella go.
All the things have been tried in different ways.
Some of them didn't work. Some of the better hours.
But one big thing is just having it on your phone because we're phone centric.
So if you've got a node, you need access from your phone.
I didn't really think that the existing apps are very good.
Like I love Zeus, but like Zeus isn't working for me.
It won't connect to my node. I'm not sure why.
So I've made a companion app. And I was like, oh, and then we need to use a VPN.
What VPN we use? How do we make this all completely frictionless and not the model where you need to download the app you don't know about to be able to make it work?
And I implemented FIPS.
And it didn't matter if I was on Wi-Fi or on the 5D, scanned the thing with my mobile app.
It connects to my node. And it was just incredibly fast.
It was the craziest thing I've ever seen. I think it was faster than on the local area network on my laptop.
And then I went away from it and different...
and on 5G, like, you know,
earlier the physical space between doesn't really matter.
Yeah, and it was still fast.
And I was just showing this to everyone.
I was just like...
You don't understand.
You don't understand when you're witnessing.
Yeah, at one point I was like,
"I thought it wasn't real."
So, it's like, it's got wrong.
Am I hallucinating?
Yeah. And then I showed it to
one of the guys,
I was like the fifth, sixth person.
I was like, I'm showing to them,
but they all know this.
He just goes, "Yeah, fifth is fast."
So, yeah, I think, yeah,
"FIPS." I didn't get my "FIPS" thing last time
when it was such a big thing.
And then I came here and it's been quite a theme.
So, it's an obvious one, but like,
that really...
I thought about your talk,
and I thought about the cypher punks in the 90s or 80s,
or whenever that cover was.
And then I felt like we were in the new version of that.
Now, we had a big, big feeling.
And again, not a head feeling, like a body.
But it goes up and down.
I just go up and down between nihilism and amakay.
And now it's between absolute, like, total faith.
Hope to maybe it might work.
So, it's like the high, higher.
That's just how it goes.
There was also a reoccurring theme yesterday on the board
when I talked to everyone.
It's like, you know, Sovereign Engineering is great,
but it has like very high highs and very low lows.
Yeah.
It's like, extreme highs and extreme lows.
Yeah, that's how it goes.
So, what's next for you?
What comes after Sovereign Engineering?
Do you know already?
We're tomorrow is going to be our last day.
So, archipelago, just keep on doing it.
I don't even have to think about money to make it work.
It's just the thing I was working on as well.
I believe in trying it anyway.
It's not like this is going to fix everything.
It's just, I want to make it.
But since I've dedicated myself to Bitcoin,
and again, it wasn't my variable that made that determination,
I wasn't able to make it for myself.
It happened when it had no other options.
Bitcoin was the only path.
It was the only viable path.
And ever since I've done that, you know,
everything's just got better and better.
I work on the things I want to work on things, you know,
that I didn't make up.
This is my dream to work at London's stock exchange or something like that.
And I'm getting more exposure in the community that
it wasn't, I don't think this community allows you in like super easy
into their hearts and so it was mine.
Like, not because they don't want you,
but like I think you need to do some pre-for work.
I'm not surprised at all.
Like a bunch of, you know, highly skeptical,
highly paranoid people, you know.
Like everyone you don't know is a spook.
You know, those kind of mindsets.
And then just, you know, I mean, to me what's awesome is that
we have such varied backgrounds in Sovereign Engineering.
People come from all over the place.
But everyone kind of like to end up that type of person,
you just, you went through a lot of shit, you know.
And it was like everyone, you know, had their various rock pools
along their path.
And so I think the skepticism and the,
you know, like the in-group dynamic that forms it comes from a,
from lots of trauma, you know.
And from a good place as well, like people want to be protective.
But yeah, no, I mean, I'm going to give you the same small piece of advice
that I gave you the very first time I think we spoke.
You'll have to push Archipelago out into the open.
Yeah, yeah.
Like you really have to do it.
The stone is very polished.
Yeah.
The stone is very, very polished.
It's just a new way of life for me.
Yeah, yeah.
You'll have to let, you'll have to let people look at the,
marvel at the diamond you have been polishing for like many, many, many months.
Yeah.
Thanks.
So yeah, really like seriously good job on Archipelago.
Thank you.
It's really, really good.
And I'm glad that, you know, like,
FIPS was one small puzzle piece that made one thing like working better and so on.
And that's just what gives me a lot of joy that lots of the things that came out of
Sovereign Engineering.
It, like the whole goal is to build these little puzzle pieces that just make,
with stuff, everything worked better.
Like from itself, summer and perspective.
Yeah.
And it's, I'm really glad that it's working.
Yeah.
For me, this was the place I needed to go to make Archipelago the best it possibly could be.
I don't think any work.
else would provide me with that information.
- It's enough to do that.
- Just to provide people, like, who, together, like,
archipelago, I can do it right outside the design.
But yeah, in the answer to your question, just Bitcoin.
And get more Bitcoin work, more Bitcoin design,
helping people on open-source projects make the more diamond-looking.
- Awesome.
So all the deaths that might be hearing that, like,
the two and a half that are left, yeah, they should reach out to you.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Awesome.
- It's a pleasure to help in whatever way I can on people's projects.
- Awesome, awesome.
All the Clankers will put everything in the show notes.
I won't do shit, man.
It's such a godsend as well.
Like, that's what I want to do more of, is, like, just produce very real artifacts.
And, like, the Clankers can derive some stuff from that.
But, you know, like, this recording is not that I'm generated.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Like, similar, I think, similar about my writing and my apps as well.
It's like, it really has to come from a very pure place.
And if you do some Clankering around that, like, that's perfectly fine.
- Clankering around the edges.
- Yeah, exactly.
Clankering around the edges.
But the human soul has to produce the artifact.
- Yeah.
- That's kind of, it has to be the driving force.
Like, if we put the Clankers in charge, we're going to be in hell very soon.
- We have to be the higher power.
- Absolutely.
Absolutely.
- And the last words before we press stop.
- No.
- So I'm pretty done.
(laughing)
- I'm happy to continue as well.
- I just had one comment earlier from earlier.
It was just about how Bitcoin changes people when you've seen it.
- Let's do one more walk to the snare some back.
- Are you up for it?
- Yeah.
- Yeah?
- No?
- I don't want to...
- I just reminded because I wanted to say it.
But the most fascinating thing for me about that part is that how I've seen people transformed
by it that are not technical or not a developer, not even a money person.
And also their transformation is very spiritual looking as well.
Like, the blow is my mind.
It's real.
It's not like a trick.
- Yeah.
- Like, that's crazy to me.
I think there's an essence of Bitcoin we can't see.
But just...
- I think the universe is telling us to turn around and remain in the shade.
(laughing)
- But yeah, that was a bit of a comment.
- A while chainsaw appears.
We're not going to head down that path.
But yeah, to me it's also fascinating that it has been an entry point to a lot of people
who are rediscovering more traditional facets of their own culture
and becoming more religious and returning to Christianity, for example,
and those types of things.
Or wherever you're coming from, lots of people I interface with,
you can't have a Christian background.
- Given things.
- And it's a second look as well.
- Yeah.
And yeah, it's interesting because I think what you said is very right.
It's a real phenomenon.
Those people aren't faking it. They don't sign up to an orthodox church,
just for whatever.
But it's a broader phenomenon.
This is happening outside of Bitcoin as well.
And some people talk about it points to what you mentioned before
with just the pressure got too high.
It's something I had to burst through.
And so there is the concept of the re-emergence of the sacred, basically.
And to me, Bitcoin definitely is a sacred artifact.
It really is.
It's just like of utmost importance.
And lots of people I agree, I think that's in part what the spam wars are over
because graffiti is a form of defiling something.
And so the sacred artifact gets defiled with spam.
And that's why people are religious about it.
They really are religious about it.
As they should be, I think.
That's kind of...
I don't know.
What's also interesting to me is that a lot of people talk about these things,
they don't see Bitcoin at all.
And definitely not this is a spiritual artifact.
And so, yeah, I think this will happen eventually.
The bridge between the conversations about the re-emergence of the sacred
and kind of...
Like with sacred money, that's how I see it.
And money is actually important.
It's just like having sacred texts and sacred language.
There's some languages that are sacred in the sense of, you know,
there are some verses and some lines and so on that are sacred.
They are being chanted, for example,
and have been chanted for thousands of years and so on and so forth.
And people understand how important language is.
Again, like the logos, you know, the logos are sacred.
Christianity. It is like in the beginning there was the word, you know, it's like
people have an intuitive understanding how important languages they don't have
an intuitive understanding of how important money is. And it's on a similar
level and the Bible will tell you like only Golden Silver everything else is
shitcoin. It will literally tell you, you know, but you know Bible was written
pre-Bitcoins, so we'll have to, you know, doing a man or something. But yeah, it's
all the denominations that came out of the first religion. Yeah, yeah, we'll see
we'll see what happens with all that. Like I just in the interest of my sanity I
stepped away from this a little bit like took my foot off the gas because I just
I still have to operate in the normal life basically, you know, like in the real
world to some degree. Not be too embarrassing when I, you know, go out with
my wife or something. Yeah, so those kinds of things. I've already been like I hear
one. But it's still it's still happening. And like it I would be actually
interested to hear from people that where this kind of alignment and this
transformation was rather recent, you know, like for me it's just a long time
ago. Like eight years ago, you know, where I had like I was reborn in some sense.
And but I know I know that it's still going on. Like people reach out to me
sometimes and I hear from people that yeah, I got lost a few times during it as
well. But initially I was reborn perfectly. But I was led astray. That's how it works.
So I'm here. Yeah, you see the light but you can't stare into it. You'll turn
blind. That's just how it goes. All right, let's keep it there. Yeah. Big hug.
There was great. Yeah, there was great. I'll have to find the stop button. We didn't hit
skateboarding. I'm surprised. Oh, yeah. But maybe maybe we'll manage next time.
Maybe we'll manage next time. Yeah, I don't think anyone's done that yet.
Skateboard in the big frame. We'll do it. We'll do it. All right, that looks good.
Yeah, 90 minutes on the spot.