All right, because if I switch them on at the same time, then I don't have to.
But I always do this as well, like one snap.
Because if something fucks up and I have to dig in and manually edit the stuff, then
the finger snap helps to synchronize things.
All right, that looks good.
Oh, it doesn't matter.
All right, all that looks good.
So yeah, we're live.
And if everything works, then, you know, lots of stuff is going to happen once I hit save.
And then it's, you know, the nice thing about the podcasting 2.0 spec is that you can just...
Right now, the models are advanced enough that you can just go like, okay, this is the XML
script that should be produced.
Build me a script that does everything automatically, do the value splits and everything.
And it just, it kind of works.
Wow.
So...
Yeah, that's a big thing I want to...
Talking to Spence, because one of our nights we recorded at a venue who is...
They're on Noster.
Yeah.
It's Maggie Mays.
But one of Spencer's ideas was have every venue has an N-Pub.
Because when you start the live stream, you start the event from the N-Pub, signs the initial
event.
Okay, okay.
The venue starts the live stream.
Not the artist.
Yeah, yeah.
He wants to have the venue start the...
Have their own N-Pub, have their own kind of environment where they can showcase their different
artists and stuff like that.
Yeah, that's an interesting problem because it's not obvious always what the right mapping
is from the real world onto cryptographic identities, onto N-Pub's, because if you have a venue, if
you have a night where like 10 different artists play or something, it doesn't make sense to
start a live stream as the artist or something like that.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it's cool that all this stuff is happening.
Tell me more about like your relationship to the decentralized music people and, you know,
Spencer and all the folks that are doing awesome stuff now with saps and boosts and
Noster and live streams and podcasting 2.0 and so on.
So, um, yeah.
So before I left Austin, I had tried to orange pill a lot of the musicians, um, that things
were, had just kind of started happening with, uh, with value for value and, uh, but every
musician that I talked to would be like, you can't make money selling music.
You can only make money selling merch.
Yeah.
And they had been so black or selling concert tickets, right?
Yeah.
But they're not as, they're not, they're not big enough.
Also in Austin, it's pay to play.
Yeah.
Let's, let's probably turn around and walk the other way because otherwise we'll just
be huffing and puffing because it goes up and down.
Okay.
Um, they, Austin is a pay to play, uh, environment.
So you have to basically pay the club money for them to put you on the schedule and then you
try and sell enough tickets to cover that.
And then sometimes they'll do drink splits and things.
Um, the, um, the, the musicians were very, very disillusioned with the idea that they could
ever make money playing music.
Interesting.
Like pop the music itself.
And, and did this change with the first kind of live concert, uh, sapping experiments and
so on?
No, not at all.
And, uh, Adam Curry and, uh, open mic, they did a, they did a big event, um, a couple of
years ago.
Um, but like no, no traction whatsoever.
So I talked to like all the people from when I was growing up, all, all my friends have
punk rock labels.
They own all their own music and I was just like, just, just do it, just publish it.
Like, let's do this.
And I, I haven't been able to get any traction whatsoever.
And with your punk rock friends, they, they managed to monetize that because most of the
money flows to the labels.
Yeah.
Is that how it works?
And is that still true today in the days of Spotify streaming and all this kind of stuff?
Uh, no, it's, that's all, that's all gone off the window.
Okay.
Yeah.
So what would your advice be now to, or what is your advice now to up and coming musicians
to monetize?
Um, I, I would say that that value for value is definitely the way.
I think that they, they should be able to publish all their stuff.
Now that we've got splits, the label has an incentive, the musicians have an incentive.
Do you know Joe Martin by any chance?
Yeah.
I've met him.
Um, because he really leaned into that.
Yeah.
And it, it seems to really work for him.
Yeah.
And I, I, I was cheering him on massively once I, I saw that he's serious about it.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
And so it seems to work for some people.
It seems to work.
If you embrace it fully, it kind of seems to work.
Yeah.
Um, but obviously, you know, like you, you're not gonna compete with going viral on Spotify
or something like that.
Yeah.
But I know too little about the music world to, to be useful.
I know just enough to not be very useful too.
But, but I also like, I'm, I'm very connected with open mic and like, we really, really want
to get this going.
And I think so open mics got the venue side.
Um, and then like, there's the value for value musicians.
Um, and then like the stuff we were talking about with Spencer, we really want to have
like 30 venues across the country, across the U S that are set up to do this.
And then we can, we could even do like, you go to your local, like I go to Maggie Mays
and Austin, we see two, two bands on the screen from other locations.
And then our band gets up and then they get to see that band at their location.
And we can coordinate these like value for value concerts.
Yeah.
I think part of the, part of the issue is that, um, people are not really willing to spend money
on this stuff.
Like very few people, it's the same dynamic always.
Yeah.
How many people give to a good cause?
How many people are donating?
How many people are sapping?
How many people are boosting podcasts and so on?
It's like somewhere around, like if you want to be generous, it's like 4%.
Right.
Listen, it's somewhere in between zero and 4%.
Well, I mean, that's where we got the, we have to do the, you know, shaming.
Yeah.
And I think that's, that's definitely something.
I talked about this in the past and I still, I still have a hard time verbalizing what I
kind of have in mind in the sense of there's lots of free to free to play games.
Yeah.
Where if you spend money on the game, it's almost like a donation to the game because
it doesn't give you any benefit from a gameplay perspective whatsoever.
But your avatar might glow.
Yeah.
You know, it's just like, it's just social signaling.
It's just like, look how much money I have.
And I will show off my skin or I will show off whatever, you know?
Yeah.
Those kinds of things.
And they make like millions and millions of dollars with this stuff.
Yeah.
And we still don't do anything like that on the Noster and podcasting 2.0 side.
I mean, that's not fair.
Adam Curry knows this and he's really good at, that's why he always goes on about, you
have to include the people that actually give in the loop.
Yeah.
That's why his listeners aren't the listeners, they're producers.
Yeah.
And he shouts everyone out.
Like that's incredibly important.
And I think people that really lean into Patreon and so on, they know that as well because
they will list all their Patreons and so on.
Yeah.
And it's a small thing because you don't have a skin that anyone thinks and so on.
And if you support a book and you are actually printed in the book, if you support a movie
and you are actually in the credits.
Yeah.
Like that's a bigger thing that people, yeah, that one would guess, I would say.
So there's still lots of things we can do, especially on the Noster side.
I mean, we don't do a lot of social signaling on the Noster side, but we do have a social network.
It's kind of, you know, ironic that we don't lean into that more.
Yeah.
But yeah, I think that's right.
I think the, you know, social shaming and on the positive side social signaling.
Yeah.
Can definitely go a long way.
But tell me more about how you got into that world.
You told me that you come from the music world and then you switched to computer science
and turned yourself from a musician into a sysadmin.
Yeah.
And then you, so you always stayed close to music, I guess.
I did.
Yeah.
But tell me, tell me how you, how you kind of, what was your first contact with podcasting
2.0 and this kind of crowd?
Well, before that, I'm like with the, with the punk rock scene, everything was always DIY.
Like you made your own shirts, you made your own merch.
Yeah.
You did your own shows.
You organized everything.
You bought a keg of beer.
You charged a dollar for a beer from the keg.
Like totally like, that's not, you know, that's not legal.
But they, they, they, they, the whole punk rock ethos was that you go around the system.
And you do it yourself.
So.
Not asking for permission is part of the punk rock.
Yeah.
Let's go down there.
That's a, that's the best path to walk.
And we'll be out of the noise hopefully soon into different noise.
Yeah.
So.
So that appealed to you, the, the not asking for permission.
Yeah.
It appealed to me at the time.
And then I would say, I got distracted by, by life.
By marrying and having kids.
Yeah.
That's what happens.
Yeah.
And so, so the re-entrance, I guess I, like I, I learned about Bitcoin.
I did a industrial mining in Texas, um, in 2017, 2018, set up pretty large scale Bitcoin mining
operations before, before that became like the new thing.
Yeah.
Okay.
Um, and at the time I was very into Monero mining as well.
Um, so I don't know how to, basically lots of CPUs.
Who did you work with, uh, on the, on the large scale industrial side, if I may ask if you can
talk about that.
Yeah.
It was a company called Amsis.
Um, so they were a managed service provider in the Houston area.
And they had a lot of, uh, friends who did various investments.
So we started with mining, uh, then we set up, uh, crypto hedge fund.
Um, but the, uh, Oh, I mean, basically we, we.
That sounds terrible.
That's two words.
Yeah.
Oh, I know.
I know.
It ended up being, we were all cash and shorting Bitcoin.
Um, so not, not very good.
It was a bad time.
The same with the miners.
Um, they had spent millions on S9s and within 18 months they were selling them for scrap metal.
Yeah.
That's how it goes.
Yeah.
So you moved on from that.
So I, yeah, I moved on from that.
Um, that's interesting.
I don't, I think my, my clearest memory is really getting involved with, uh, ungovernable misfits and the mesh to Dell.
Um, when I wanted to move, move out of Austin, I contacted a friend in Pennsylvania and just kind of asked him, what's, what's it like up there?
Um, so I would say it was just, uh, they were kind of, I had, I wasn't even really aware of no agenda at the time.
And, um, but that was a podcast that I listened to and you know, you, you boost and they read out the boosts.
Um, and, and you kind of, you feel like you're more involved in it.
Um, so I, Adam Carey manages to run his old, his whole operation on boosts.
Yeah.
So that tells you something.
I mean, he's very industrious.
He has like five podcasts or whatever.
And he's really good at it, obviously.
Yeah.
Being the grandfather and everything.
And being the guy behind podcasting 2.0.
Like he knows what he's doing, but, um, okay.
So you, that was your first contact then with, um, via no agenda was your first contact with,
then podcasting 2.0 people basically.
Yeah.
For official, I didn't know what podcasting 2.0 until like, I was already boosting podcasts from my friends.
And then I learned about Adam Curry and podcasting 2.0.
What did you use in terms of, uh, when you say you were already boosting, what did you use?
I, um, it must've been fountain.
All right.
Yeah.
I'm not sure when, when Oscar and Mary came out with that.
Um, yeah, I would have to look it up as well.
A couple of years ago, probably.
Yeah.
Um, 2018, 19 or so.
Something like that.
That sounds about right.
But, um, but, but, but, uh, on, from what we were talking about earlier, I, the, the fountain, uh, subscriptions, I think are really amazing.
And kind of like you said, like I subscribe to several podcasts and they always read out the, the supporters, the monthly supporters, um, free cities.
Um, he's, um, Avi Burr is great.
He's like one of my favorite people.
Yeah.
In the world.
Yeah.
Um, we, we, we've talked about a lot of this stuff.
I've been on his podcast before.
Yeah.
I think the, the subscription bit is just kind of automating, automating the, the boosting.
I think that's also, Substack got two things very right.
Like removing the friction in terms of giving back.
And on the creator side using email as a distribution channel, using protocol as a distribution channel.
Yeah.
I think ever since they kind of fucked up, but we went in the wrong direction, but that's the, I think that's, that there was the main appeal.
And I think that's something that's still the main appeal of everything we are trying to do is like you on the creator side, you can't be rug pulled.
And I think what we still have to get better at from the consumer side, so to speak, is removing the friction when it comes to, to giving back.
But subscriptions obviously do that.
It's just very hard to do them with Bitcoin.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
Out of, out of, out of principle.
All right.
Okay.
So that was your first touch point.
And, and, um, then obviously you got more involved.
Tell me more about that.
Everything I do is very, very layered.
And like, I, I try and keep a, uh, 50,000 foot view of what's going on.
So before I moved to Pennsylvania, I was already interested in circular economies.
Um, and so that was like six years ago.
Uh, so I, I invested in a.
By circular economies, you mean traditional circular economies?
Well, I mean, Bitcoin, I mean, yeah, inspired by Bitcoin beach and things like that.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Um, and then also, um, with COVID and then we had this huge snowpocalypse in Austin.
I got very concerned with food security.
So that's one of the principal reasons I moved to Lancaster was to be near the Amish.
You know, if, if shit hits the fan, they're going to keep laying eggs.
They're going to keep making, you know, growing, growing lettuce.
Yeah.
Not nothing.
Yeah.
We have that in common.
You, you are, you are already like 15 steps ahead, but I told you, you know, one of my goals
is to orange pill the Amish.
Yeah.
And, and you're already on your way.
That was already actually talking.
Yeah.
That is my stated, like, like as, as crazy as it sounded, I'm like, I'm here to orange pill the Amish.
Oh, it's not crazy at all.
It's the right.
It's the right group of people.
Yeah.
Orange pill.
So the, the first year I would talk to all the vendors, talked about Bitcoin that didn't
go anywhere.
So the second year I was in Lancaster, I rented a farmer's market stall and I just, uh, set
up a tent, a table and put up lots of Bitcoin signs.
And literally all I was doing is talking to people about Bitcoin and people would come
up and like, what are you trying to sell?
And I was like, freedom.
So that was, that was interesting.
Uh, and I've got, uh, I'm on my GitHub.
I've got, uh, instructions on how to do it because it's, it's really fun.
It's not expensive at all.
It costs, you know, $20, $30 in almost any city to have a farmer's market stall.
Okay.
And then you just, so it was just promoting our, our meetup.
Um, we had a sound money or a hard money guy who would bring blocks of copper and, and blocks
of silver.
And so that was really, I mean, something people could pick up and touch.
Yeah.
You know, that was really good.
I guess that would be more appealing to the Amish probably, right?
Yeah.
Just physical old school hard, like gold silver.
Yeah.
Things you can actually touch and see.
Um, but you also mentioned they don't know, by your experience, they don't know too much
about money and hard money in the first place.
You mentioned they save in dollars mostly.
They do.
They save in dollars.
Uh, they, the, the, the most I've gotten through with them is talking about inflation
because they don't, they, they're, they're not economists.
So you, you, you making them aware of it.
Well, it's a good book to kind of get them more interested.
Yeah.
Like, okay, someone is stealing from me and I didn't know.
Yep.
Yeah.
Because I think they, I mean, they're the reason why I'm saying they're the right people
to orange pill is like, because they are, they are ahead of the curve when it comes
to, um, reducing the risks of being rug pulled.
Yeah.
And that's their whole objective.
Yeah.
They're, they're, they, they want to be able to be completely rug pull proof.
Um, so they've got, uh, solar, they'd use batteries.
Um, and then, so, so that was the second year that really when cashew came out was when
I realized that there, this could actually work.
Um, so my dream is to have printed cashew certificates that can be traded around at the
market and then at the end of the day, they can take their horse and buggy drive to the,
to the Bitcoin bank drive through, which they actually do drive.
They have, they, they park at target, you know, and hook up their horses and go buy their toilet paper.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
That there's a dedicated parking spots for the Amish for, uh, you know, horse and carriage.
Yeah.
So the, the bank can tear the seal on the, the cashew note, scan it, give them a receipt.
Um, and then also now Fetty Mint has a stability pools and things like that.
So I, I think it's, it's, it's feasible now.
I think there's a, there's a path forward.
Definitely more feasible than, I don't know, like eight years ago.
Yeah.
Lots of, lots of, lots of developments in that direction that to make kind of that.
That, I mean, to, to give the current banking infrastructure, it's, it's amazing that a credit card works in an airplane.
Yeah.
You know, like those kinds of things.
And if you really dig in and understand how it works, it's not a surprise that it works because there's certain trust assumptions and so on.
Yeah.
We need to provide the same user experience.
And that's of course where Cashew and federated eCash and those kinds of things come in.
It's interesting that you bring up eCash in that context because it kind of, you can, you can make stuff physical in some sense.
Like you said, you print out eCash on, on a piece of paper and it's actually the thing.
It's actually the money.
Yeah.
And that kind of like for, because to, to, to quote unquote, believe in Bitcoin that it actually has value and it's a thing.
And so you really need to deeply understand it.
Yeah.
I don't think there is another way.
Yeah.
And if you have something that you can touch and that, you know, you lose it and it's gone and you redeem it and you have the money in your account and all those kinds of things.
I think for many groups of people that can really work.
Yeah.
And of course, you know, like it's different trust assumptions, different trade offs and so on.
Again, no solutions, only trade offs.
Yeah.
Well, my, my friend, Brian, that I showed you the magic internet math card, his new slogan is Bitcoin doesn't need more believers.
Bitcoin needs more understanders.
Oh, that's a good one.
Yeah.
But it's, it's hard.
What's your, I mean, by you trying to educate truly non-technical people, what, what's, what is, what are some things that surprised you?
Um, I would say mostly just the complete lack of interest and kind of head in the sand.
Like don't want to know, like I'm happy with how people are very comfortable with the status quo.
Hmm.
And even people like the Amish, like they're like my dollars are dollars.
I've got them under my bed.
Yeah.
Like I've trade them at the market.
They didn't even raise their prices very much at all.
When like all through COVID and everything, the prices may stayed almost exactly the same.
Well, I guess because they don't, yeah, they don't need to have an interest in money really because they are not very reliant on money in some sense.
Yeah.
Like in their own communities, money probably doesn't even, it's not as big as a factor as for other people.
Another fascinating thing about the Amish is if, if you buy something, they, um, they always do like, they'll pay you a little bit, but then you'll, they'll give you a gift as well.
All right.
So there's like a, they're, they're, they're, you know, so they're partly a gift economy.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
I didn't know that at all.
I think we talked about gift economies in the past, uh, uh, here and the, the, what I think is, is awesome.
It's the most insulting thing you can do is give exactly the same gift back.
Yeah.
You know, it has its own kind of rules and its own kind of, um, yeah, kind of economic realities.
It's like, you have to gift something of more or less equal value, but it has to be very different.
Right.
You know?
Yeah.
There is this, these peculiar rules that, that emerge in a gift economy, but yeah, no, I mean, I, I, I hope it's going to happen.
I think, I think Bitcoin is the right technology for the Amish. That's for sure.
Yeah.
Well, and then obviously the, the next, you know, rug pull pain point is the internet connection.
Oh yeah, that's where the mesh networks come from.
Yep.
So that's, that's basically, I mean, that's what we are trying to do here, um, right now in the, in the current cohort is to figure out how can we re-architect some parts of the internet and lean into mesh networks more to just be resilient and just have, you know, like local networks and internets and so on where, um, you can still do commerce and you can still have access to services.
Yeah.
Just like modern services, like document processing and just, you know, tools that you will need for collaboration and so on.
Absolutely.
So yeah.
Tell me, tell me more about Archipelago and the current project you're working on and how, how that came together.
Like, first of all, how came it, how, how did it come together?
What was the need for it?
And how, how ended, how come that you ended up working on that?
Oh man.
Long story.
We have time.
Yeah, yeah.
We have time.
The path is long.
So, so my first introduction was when I was invited into the, what's called the Meshtadel, which is the idea is that we have citadels all over the world.
And then those are kind of meshed together.
And I, I thought I really, I, people ask me, what does it mean?
Like on podcasts and stuff.
And I, I, when I first joined, I thought it was literally like about the alternative internet.
And it may be that it's also about just the communities connecting together in a mesh kind of way.
But ultimately it's about resilience.
Um, any node can be taken out and, you know, either you set up two, two new nodes where those nodes were, or you route around the failure.
Nothing happens to the overall system.
Yeah.
Like that's the idea.
That's very much like Bitcoin works.
If my Bitcoin node goes down, it doesn't matter.
It maybe matters to me a little bit, but overall it doesn't matter.
Yeah.
To contrast that to, you know, one AWS node going down or, uh, one cloud flare node going down, like half the internet grinds to a standstill as we've seen in the last, you know, 18 months or so.
Yeah.
So very, very different approach, very different approach from a network architecture point of view.
So how come you got in touch?
Like, like, uh, who, who invited you to that?
Who invited you to the master though?
So ironically, so that was a guy I met right after I left Austin, I met a guy in Austin who goes by Polycarp Nakamoto.
And he was, uh, really, he was doing a lot of boots on the ground work, educating people about data capture and, um, uh, helping people install graphene phones and Linux laptops.
Um, but as soon as I, he invited me into the channel, there was like all these people who I already knew.
Yeah.
So it was like instantly, I was like, Oh, this is where everybody is.
Um, so that's an incredible group of people.
Uh, we do the, the, the Lake Satoshi meet, uh, every summer in Michigan.
The Michigan group is really, really strong.
There's some like, uh, rev hodl.
Um, but it was kind of funny because, uh, the, the first time I went, well, I don't, I won't talk about that.
It's just, it was really incredible meeting these people in person.
Um, and yeah, I think this is, that's not optional.
Yeah.
Because part of, part of the mesh network, uh, idea, right.
Is like, you need to have a community to have a mesh network.
Yep.
And, uh, lots of things rely on trust, even though we're in the world of cryptographic proof, all those kinds of things.
But just to, to know that this cryptographic identity you're dealing with is actually the person that you want to interact with.
You need to meet in person.
You need to, you need to build these connections in some way, shape or form over long periods of time.
And, you know, also validate in person.
Yeah.
Otherwise you never know, are you dealing with a spook or not or what have you.
Yeah.
And that's why PGP signing parties are a thing, obviously.
Yeah.
Right.
Like it's, it's, you need to have like, how paranoid do you want to be?
And depending on your level of paranoia, you definitely want to meet the people in person as well.
Yeah.
And I think it's also like, if you just want to loosely collaborate on all those kinds of things, there is no better way than spending time in person and meeting.
I mean, it's the whole reason why we do so many engineering.
Yeah.
It's bringing people together in person, having this high bandwidth interaction and high bandwidth communication, really get to know each other, really get to know where people are coming from.
And then you can just like move towards the goal in a way more efficient way.
Yeah.
And with less, you know, maybe with a little less cynicism and a little less paranoia, hopefully.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's awesome that you're meeting in person.
And it's awesome that this, this, as far as I know, this is happening kind of all over.
It's happening right now all over the world where people have similar ideas.
And part of the deal is you need to meet in person and form these strong bonds and strong communities.
Otherwise.
Yeah.
The whole idea just falls apart.
If everyone is just a, you know, like hyper paranoid individual that doesn't want to collaborate with anyone, then you're not going to get very far.
Exactly.
Like that's kind of, it's an issue.
All right.
So you're trying to measure now.
So how did the project emerge from that?
Um, hmm.
Because other projects that are similar already exist, right?
Like there's the start nines, there's the up rolls, there's all these kinds of things.
What made you, what made you create one more project?
Well, again, boots on the ground is really where you start to see what the problems people are facing are.
So one of the things we have a group of techs in Austin who will go, uh, take a company and convert them over to next cloud, bring them Linux laptops training.
Um, which incidentally, I think if people are wondering where to make money off of this stuff, that's, that's where it's consulting, it's education, it's, um, managed services.
That's the redhead business, business model, basically, right?
It's like you, all the, all the software is open source.
Yeah.
And you could do it yourself.
But what you can sell is basically support and white glove, set up service and all those other things.
Yeah.
One of the things Polly always says is like, Linux is free if you don't value your time.
Exactly.
And that's, everyone who ever set up anything from scratch knows that this is true.
Yeah.
So, um, so even things like, uh, just setting up next cloud, um, it, it takes, it's not easy, uh, but you end up putting, you need a big server.
Yeah.
So it's not really something, even though start nine has that capability, they don't, it's not, it's not ready for a big company to do.
Yeah.
Um, and then the same thing, um, if you want to, uh, say run your entire restaurant off of, uh, a node, it's very, very possible.
All the tools are there, but you, it's, you need something a bit more than a start nine or an umbral.
Um, so, so we came up with this idea to create a new node that was scalable from a, a simple desktop node, like a start nine, but all the way up to having, having it basically be modular.
So you can add storage to it.
You can, uh, you can make it as big or as small as it needs to be.
So that's, that's, that's, that's already trending towards a mesh network idea where you have.
Exactly.
Basically that's, that's, that's one way to get modularity.
Yeah.
To spin up a second node and it still feels like everything is running on one node.
Yep.
Yeah, I see.
And then as well, if you, um, I had a, uh, a friend, so back to the, the Bitcoin mining days, um, I'm still friends with all those guys in Houston.
And, uh, one of the guys had a bunch of shops and he was having trouble with the credit card companies because they were wanting to charge him 20% on top because he was in a, uh, challenged industry, let's say.
Um, so my proposal was like, well, you've got these shops all over Houston.
What if we put a node in every shop, put an antenna up and then all of the shops are actually talking to each other over, over some kind of mesh network.
Um, what kind of antenna are you thinking when you're proposing something like that?
Uh, initially just, um, like there's some pretty radical, uh, Laura antennas that, that increase the range and reliability of them.
Um, the, what was the antenna that you, that you had now in the node that you showed off?
Uh, just a little, just a little, nothing special.
But what was the name again?
Uh, that we're using the, so those are mesh core.
All right.
Yeah.
And the main reason we're doing that is, um, uh, Zaza noticed that in the, in London mesh core is like super popular.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, that's, that's part of the problem, right?
It's like, you need to use the stuff that everyone else is using in the mesh environment.
You have like, you know, obviously very strong network effects by definition.
So, and how did that go with, uh, with, with the antenna idea?
I mean, they're all still ideas.
Yeah.
But, but, but again, like, like we need community deployments.
So that would have been a project in Houston.
Um, Austin's already covered with mesh tastic.
So there's a lot we can do there.
But, um, now with, in London, we've got locations, uh, a few locations around London that we could
start putting up nodes and towers and nodes and antennas.
Um, so the, the, so our new idea is basically that we, and, and this is another thing I talked
about it with the guys at the meetup last night, like Madura is a perfect place to do this.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Um, and then there's a lot of other things we can do.
Like, um, I want to design an edge device that kind of handles some of the alternative traffic as well.
Um, but on the edge device, you can add in BLE radar and, uh, Ray Hunter.
So you can actually like, if you're in the, if you're, if you have your, uh, a property out in the middle of nowhere,
you can have, you've got your node running on your TV and it can say like Bluetooth connection that I've never seen before.
Okay.
So Ray Hunter basically just scans what is around you.
Well, yeah.
Ray Hunter is, uh, for cell signals and, uh, what was it BLE?
Uh, my brain.
Yeah.
BLE is the Bluetooth.
Yeah.
So having those two, you can kind of see if, if there's anybody strange in your neighborhood.
All right.
Um, I mean, part of the challenge is to actually get a mesh network up and running, right?
Like what's your, what's your thoughts around that in terms of like, um, what, what I think, let's, let's, let's take Pitchat as an example.
Yeah.
I think what makes Pitchat work is that everyone has a cell phone already.
Yeah.
And basically you're meeting people where they're at.
And, uh, of course, you know, like only people that are in extreme environments events or are enthusiasts are using it right now.
So if the internet is sketch, is, is, gets shut down by, you know, the government or whatever, then you can use that as a fallback that will still work if you're in close proximity and so on and you're participating in a protest or what have you.
And, and so I think, um, by the way, that's also, I think what all people are, but really right.
It's like meeting people where they're at.
It's like, you, you, you roll out a new thing and no one needs to install anything.
It's like, you just, you open your WhatsApp or your signal or your telegram or whatever you use to chat with people.
And suddenly you're chatting with an AI chatbot that is really capable, you know, like it's, it's literally meeting people where they're at.
And in the mesh network world, I think what can really work is to, um, have something like archipelago, have something like combined with a hardware node.
Yeah.
That people want to get because it's awesome.
Yeah.
And, and I think it's perfectly fine.
If you, if you use the regular internet for a lot of the functionality, because it's, it's still, you know, like if you're out in somewhere alone in a rural area, you're not going to connect to a mesh network instantly.
Right.
Like that's basically impossible.
Right.
But if this proliferates and if it spreads, if the hardware basically spreads enough, then you can always use it as a fallback and second layer.
Like that's, that's one approach.
Right.
And the second one would be to get into close knit communities and build kind of local first networks where it's just like, okay, this is what we're going to do.
And from this point on, like, you know, we have our, whatever internal bullet imports and so on, and they don't even rely on internet infrastructure.
Yep.
Is that kind of, did I get the, did I get the big picture, right?
Absolutely.
And then, and then on top of that, we can set up a long haul projects.
So like our goal is to get Austin to Nashville.
Yeah.
So that's like its own project.
It's got to connect these communities.
Yeah.
It's got, it's got a cost to it, but it's totally doable.
How would you connect them?
What's your, what's your best guess in terms of how this could work?
Um, it depends on if you go completely legit or if you go, uh, the anarchist route.
So my, my favorite way is, is obviously we've been talking about balloons.
Um, well, one guy has been talking about balloons.
Well, cover doors, wants to, to put balloons everywhere to just put toll gates on them, basically.
So, so let's quickly segue into the next thing I discovered, which was, uh, I started traveling between all the Bitcoin communities in the US.
And then I traveled all around the Bitcoin communities in Europe.
And then back in the US the following year, I started hooking up more with the freedom communities and the homesteaders who are, who don't care about Bitcoin.
They use the gold back, you know, the little floppy gold dollar bill things.
Um, but they don't care about Bitcoin, but they care about absolutely everything else we're doing.
Yeah.
So I've all of the verbiage for archipelago is about sovereignty, about data sovereignty.
Don't mention the B word.
Yeah.
But it, but fundamentally like Bitcoin is, is the mesh network that is global and that syncs with every block.
Hmm.
So we want to anchor it into that in some way.
Um, and so you give them a node, the node, you know, now they're, they're, we have to make it easy enough so that, uh, like one of the examples I used last night is like, I mean, how many fathers know that their daughters are running around with these phones, sharing all their data, uploading all their pictures to Apple and to Google.
And they would really like for them to be able to have it saved locally, but they had, don't have the technological ability to do it.
Yeah.
So we need something easy enough that you, you either buy or boot a node at your house.
You can do device attestation.
So you plug in your graphene phone, uh, you're plugging a pixel phone.
It flashes it to graphene.
You create a profile for your daughter and then most of her apps can still run.
There might be one or two that you're just like you, like I'm, I'm the dad, you're not going to use this app, but you can use this one and this one.
Um, and, and now all of, all of their stuff that you're, you're able to at least mitigate a large amount of the, the data leakage and the metadata leakage and stuff.
So that's part of the vision to really build a node that basically, I mean, there's the uncle Jim concept, right?
Where you just, you have something that other people can use.
Yeah.
And, um, again, like different trust assumptions.
You, you, you, you, you, you are the dad in charge, as you say.
Yeah.
Well, I want to turn uncle Jim into archipelago community nodes.
Yeah.
So you've got four people in the neighborhood running Fediment guardians.
You've got one decent sized server.
That's like in, at either someone's house.
Um, whoever has a really good connection, like fiber connection or something.
And then you now, and then you're also running a private Nostra relay.
That's only available to the people who are invited into the community.
And once we have that, you can start, you find a, um, a 12 year old comes and mows your yard.
And he's like, he really has a lot of motivation, wants to earn money.
You can invite him into the community and then you can have a community job board where all
he has to do is like check his phone in the morning and see if there's any jobs he wants
to do.
And then he can agree to do the job.
So now you've got a signed, uh, event.
Um, and then the other thing, if he, if he say he, he agrees to do three jobs, but he
doesn't show up, whoever invited him into the community is, is, you know, who invited him
into the community.
So you instantly have kind of a web of trust aspect.
Yeah.
So he can call him up and he can say, Hey man, it looks like you've been, uh, agreeing
to do jobs and you're never showing up.
What's wrong?
And you go, Oh, you don't understand how it works.
You need a bit more education.
Oh, you're nervous.
Call me up.
If you're nervous, like I'll help you out.
Well, I'll go over there together with you.
I'll introduce him.
So he's level zero.
Um, and as he does different jobs, he's able to increase his ranking inside the community.
And then he turns 15.
He's able to do deliveries on a scooter.
He turned 16.
He's able to do deliveries by car.
He turns 18.
He joins the ride sharing network.
And now he's able to drive people around the whole time.
He's building reputation inside the private community.
Now, when he's 18, he can go out onto the real Noster.
Okay.
But he, but the community has his reputation.
That's where his reputation is stored.
So they run their own instance of like grapevine or something like that, or, or, uh, Relater.
And so the community serves your reputation.
So now he wants to go traveling.
So he says, I'm going to Madeira for two weeks.
I have a, uh, 400 euro budget.
Does anyone have a place to stay?
Now in Madeira, somebody with an apartment is running an agent that's looking for these anonymous blobs on Noster that only show the information that needs to be shown.
So you respond to the kid, you say, I've got a, I've got a couch for 300.
Is that all right?
Yeah.
The kid goes, Oh, that's amazing.
They, they negotiate the price.
He, uh, puts the Bitcoin in escrow.
He shows up in Madeira.
They scan QR codes, hand him the keys.
And now he's checked in.
You can also have a collateral or, or a way of like making sure that he doesn't trash the place.
So when he checks out, you scan another QR code, his deposit goes back to the, goes back to the kid.
Um, but this, this all came, I w I was trying to, I had a bad experience with, uh, I don't want to name any names, but another Bitcoin, uh, house sharing company.
Yeah.
So I was like, this is so, there's no web of trust.
It's not Noster enabled.
They did what they could at the time, but we need to take this to the next level.
Yeah.
I mean, that's, that's basically the, the reputation and trust part is what makes something like an Uber and something like an Airbnb and those kinds of things work.
Yeah.
Because you've got a trusted third party who keeps all the reputation.
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
That's the, that's the downside.
It's all, it's all centralized.
And there is a single point of failure in terms of, um, coordinating the whole thing and in terms of keeping their reputation and so on.
Yeah.
Um, but what's interesting is that this stuff really works.
Yeah.
And you know, like not too long ago, the go to wisdom of the day was, uh, don't meet anyone online.
Everyone online is, you know, like a criminal and a pedophile and so on.
Um, and definitely don't jump into strangers' cars.
Which I learned from the, the early nineties was not the case.
I, I had real friends on IRC.
I flew to Oslo, stayed with my friend, hung out for two weeks.
Like, like it was the, the, it was so liberating.
So early on, you learned that the going wisdom as the, at the time was misguided.
Yes.
But we had built up a, we had built up trust.
We had been, we had been helping.
I saw this guy helping people for five years before I went and visited them.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, it was the same for me.
I come from the gaming side, basically.
Yeah.
I grew up with LAN parties and, and that was the thing, uh, you know, I did for like forever.
Way over a decade.
And I was very, very young when like, I wasn't even big enough to carry the machines.
Wow.
So I was very, very young when I got into the LAN party business.
And that was, um, someone in the cohort just mentioned two days ago, like who here remembers IPX, SPX.
And I was like, yeah, yeah.
First games I played were running on IPX, SPX and not TCP/IP.
You know, like, like there was a different kind of protocol war going on back in that day.
Absolutely.
And just, just getting computers to talk to each other, even if they are in the same room was really hard.
Yeah.
But yeah, I had a similar experience in the sense that, that obviously then later on switched to online.
Later on switched to online gaming and so on.
And I met many people that I met online.
And you built, again, like it's the same thing.
It's like what you sketched out in the, in the hypothetical thought experiment where you start with mowing lawns.
And then you turn 16 and 18 and so on.
Yeah.
Like I played tournaments and was in clans with people that I haven't seen ever.
And I knew them for like six, seven, eight years.
Did you ever go to QuakeCon?
Probably not.
No, not QuakeCon.
Oh my God.
That was the best.
I went for years.
I took my kids there.
It was incredible.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Awesome.
No, I wish.
I mean, you know, like I, as a European, it was different, I guess.
Yeah.
And I mean, I'm sure there was stigma in the US as well and all those kinds of things, but
at least there were events, you know, like in, in, in Europe, there was for a long time,
there was almost nothing.
And, um, yeah, I, I also, I was too young at the time.
So the first events I went to were like really big LAN parties, like a thousand people LAN parties
and so on.
That was the, the, the biggest stuff back in the day.
And, um, e-sports didn't really exist yet in, except for, you know, South Korea.
Yeah.
I watched them develop at QuakeCon.
Um, cause that was another, it was a thousand person LAN party.
Yeah.
Um, but then they, they ended up having like, I think around when Quake three arena came out,
they started like doing more e-sports type of stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, Quake three was like very high skill ceiling.
So very, very good for, for e-sports.
Yeah.
Just like chess, you know, like you can get, get infinitely good at it.
And, um, yeah, later on, I, I, uh, I went to some bigger tournaments than, uh, for Walker
three and, uh, especially CS.
So Counter Strike was something I played a lot.
And so I went to some majors with some friends, but just to watch, never to play.
Yeah.
What was the first one?
Was it Wolfenstein you're saying?
Or what did you say?
Yeah.
That's like, I mean, I, the first games we played were, it, um, it was the, the big printer
cables, like the serial port printer cables.
Uh-huh.
And it was like one-on-one car racing games or like basically Pong, you know?
Yeah.
Like that was, it was pre 3D games.
Yep.
And, and so the first games, um, that we played were the first 3D games that came out.
It was Wolfenstein and Duke Nukem.
Oh yeah.
And so on.
Yep.
Duke Nukem.
I played a lot.
So.
Good.
Me too.
That was, that was great.
So yeah, I grew up on that.
So that, that was my childhood or part of my childhood.
Well, my youngest who's 25, he, he grew up on, uh, on all those games, like from a very
young age and then even my oldest daughter, um, she could barely sit up, but I put a joystick
with, um, suction cups to a folding chair and she could play, and she could play doom.
I remember the suction cup joysticks.
I remember her at some point, I was like, be careful, you could die.
And she was like, no, it's okay.
I can just hit space bar.
And I was like, no, no, you really can die.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
So that, that was kind of the, my, my first touch point with networks was trying to get
computers to talk to each other.
So, you know, I can play with my friends basically.
Yep.
And, um, that's in part why I'm just eternally optimistic when it comes to this stuff, because
I still remember how hard it was to set up a network.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Your network card will have an IRQ conflict with your sound card and like nothing would
work or you would touch the, the network card in the back with like the, you would actually
build token ring networks basically.
Absolutely.
Physically.
And if you walk over a carpet and then go to the computer and touch the network card in
the wrong way, just the static electricity would fry everything.
Yeah.
And it's like, you know, $10,000 mistake.
So, and now it's, you know, like your phone connects automatically to the wifi that you walk
by and all those kinds of things.
Well, that's a, uh, funny.
You just reminded me that, um, I can't remember which protocol, but there's one that actually
can run over, uh, barbed wire.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Obviously not very fast, but, but back in the day, it was like, uh, it would go so far
over just straight up barbed wire.
Nice.
That's awesome.
So I, to me, the whole mesh network thing is basically, we are back again in the early
days.
Yeah.
And we just have to make it work.
Yeah.
And we'll just have to figure it out.
Yep.
And, and we did, I mean, that, that's always been my passion is connecting things that were
never meant to be connected together.
So it's like having, having this abstraction layer.
Yeah.
It's funny.
Cause it's also, also high level.
Is that also true?
Like with music and technology?
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
It's, it's like something that's always been part of me.
And I looked at my LinkedIn profile and like after 10 years of just like never looking at
it.
And I was literally saying the same things, including like, I want to be on the bleeding edge
of stuff.
And as soon as stuff gets easy, I want people to be using it.
Like I I'm done.
Like my job is done.
It loses, it loses the appeal for you.
Yeah.
But then, then other people can pick it up.
And I say, I have a morbid fascination with breaking things.
Yeah.
We're still definitely in the breaking things phase.
I mean, yesterday during the workshop, we set up FIPS, right?
Yeah.
And to me, it's amazing that the stuff already works.
Like it's such a new project and it's quite an ingenious idea.
To me, Noster is still new.
Like it's, it's, for me, it's fascinating to talk to the people that come to software engineering.
And it's like always without fail, half the people will be like, yeah, I actually discovered
Noster before I discovered Bitcoin.
I was amazed by that.
And I'm like, what the fuck?
Yeah.
What the fuck?
What's going on?
Yeah.
And Noster has only been around for a couple of years now.
And we have actually people that joined Noster and found it fascinating for some reason.
And then got orange pulled after that.
Yeah.
Their first contact with Bitcoin was via Noster.
And to me, that's just fascinating.
And I think it will continue to happen with the communities also.
You talked about with the homesteading community, for example.
Yeah.
Where they will discover something like maybe a home server mesh network thing.
And then they'll figure out, okay, that actually uses Noster for certain things.
Exactly.
And then they figured out, oh, those sets that we've been sending around that makes everything
work, that's actually Bitcoin.
Yeah.
So.
Precisely.
Yeah.
And talk to me more about the homesteading community.
And basically, how did you start rubbing up against them and what's the current status?
Okay.
Perfect.
So through a good friend of mine at The Bugle, I met a guy who runs Liberty Under Attack books.
So it's a book publisher, an anarchist book publisher in the United States.
That's a nice tagline.
Anarchist book publisher.
Or agorist, let's say.
But so I met him and so he's got, he's, this was the end of my Bitcoin maximalism day.
Okay.
So after I started meeting the homesteading communities, I really, like, they were dealing
with a whole different set of problems that I was just always like, oh, Bitcoin fixes this.
You know, for my second cycle was the maximalist cycle.
So my third cycle.
Total preaching mode.
Yeah.
The third cycle was more like, okay, wait, Bitcoin doesn't actually, you can't live in
a Bitcoin.
You can't eat Bitcoin.
So, so Rayo2 has something called the Republic of Paznia, which immediately I was like, I know
what PAZ is permanent autonomous zone.
Okay.
Um, so that, so, uh, that kind of, so where did it go from there?
So he started inviting me to some of the, the, the different, um, organization meetups type
of things.
Um, so I went to mid fest in Oklahoma and it was really, really eyeopening.
Um, they were all using gold box or Monero or trading among themselves.
Um, I learned what all the second realm ideas were.
I learned that like, as a libertarian, I was missing all of this other literature out there
about agorism, crypto anarchism, that kind of thing, which is really crazy.
Cause when I went into the university, like my number one reason that I went to the university
that I did is cause I could get a Vax VMS account and at like 16 years old, it's a mainframe.
Okay.
But basically it was the, it was the first iteration of the internet.
Okay.
Was all the colleges connected together.
Um, that was in 90, 90.
Um, so I really like, if, if things had been different, I would have been on all the, the,
the cryptography mailing lists and stuff like that.
So you were very close.
I was very, very close, but just to distract.
I mean, I was, but I'm, and now I appreciate that.
I, I am, I'm a generalist, um, a randomness, randomist.
I, I see everything fitting together.
Like I always just, I can't not see how all this could fit together and work.
Yeah.
Um, and if I had focused on cryptography, I would have just, you know.
Yeah.
You probably would have worked for the government.
Yeah.
Who knows?
But I, yeah, no, I, I appreciate that about you that I feel like we have, um,
there's very few people that let me rephrase that.
We have a lot of specialists.
Yes.
We do have a lot of specialists.
Yeah.
I appreciate the specialists as well.
Oh, absolutely.
Let's go up here.
We'll be huffing and puffing, but it's worth the view.
Um, and you, you definitely need the specialists, but, but I, I, I feel like lots of the specialists
to get just lost in the weeds.
Yeah.
And they fail to see the big picture and a side effect of that is also that people just
burn out completely because it's like, they have been so close to one subject matter for
so long and they don't see the overall progress.
And it's like, Oh, it's, I've been working on this for 10 years and it still doesn't work.
And it's all bullshit.
And they'll just, you know, leave everything behind and build a shed in the woods and start
writing a manifesto.
Yeah.
That's just like, exactly.
That's also not the solution.
Like the, you know, you have to zoom out from time to time and actually marvel at the fact,
like, where did we come from?
Where are we now?
What is actually working?
It's that why, that's why I encourage everyone in Madeira to actually use wallets, maybe even
wallets that they haven't used before and just go out, have dinner, buy a coffee.
Yeah.
You know, rent a car, go to a supermarket that accepts Bitcoin and just pay.
Yeah.
You can pay with any cash wallet, any lightning wallet.
It's all native.
It all works.
Absolutely.
Sells instantly.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
Like 10 years ago.
That was like, no one would have believed it when you told them, like in a couple of
years, this is going to happen.
Absolutely.
I told you we were huffing and puffing.
This is beautiful.
Yeah.
It's worth the view.
And you know, there's only like five people listening to this and they know that the audio
quality is dog shit.
good, good.
Oh man.
My friend, I told my friend in Switzerland that you only had 10 listeners and she said, well,
I'm going to make it 11.
I don't know.
But for me, those things are time capsules.
Absolutely.
I just like, I try to record as much as I can.
And sometimes it takes me months to push the things out.
I'll try to get better at that.
I'm just listening back to what I recorded with Arjen like six months ago.
Yeah.
And with Pablo a couple of months ago.
It's amazing what happened in a couple of months.
Yeah.
So I'm, I'm a, I'm a bit woo woo and I do believe that speaking things makes them real.
Oh, you're talking to the guy that has like 700 tweets about the incidences.
There you go.
At least.
So.
And then also, I think that like, I don't know if you're, if you've seen a path to Bitcoin.
No.
But he talks about.
Is that a movie or?
It's a podcast.
Yeah.
He talks about Karl Popper, falsifiability, David Deutsch and the multi-universe theory.
Yeah.
And how Bitcoin is basically, I was completely against the multi-universe theory.
But then I, I heard it in a different way that the longest chain wins.
Yeah.
So, so the other multiverses are just dying off.
Yeah.
Cause they're there.
They don't work.
Yeah.
And so when you add Bitcoin as our universal source of truth, we are bringing all the universes
into one.
And I think podcasts are the same thing.
Like we are, we are searching for truth.
We are recording our truth.
We change it over time, but we're not hiding away thinking our own thoughts.
Yeah.
We're putting them out there.
Yeah.
And as people listen, this is what makes this reality.
I guess what you're saying is, um, like what you're describing is the essence of dialogue.
Like you, you need to, you need to explore also the crazy and the wrong thoughts, but over
long enough periods of time, all this stuff will fall away and kind of the truth will crystallize.
Yeah.
Um, uh, you know, like if you, if you actually continue the dialogue and dialogue is allowed
to continue, like, again, I bring him up every single time I talk.
John Rebecca is my favorite guy.
And, and he, he, he came to the same conclusion that he will like his way of phrasing that after
like, you know, listening to a hundred hours of lectures of him is like the, the universe
itself is dialogical.
Yeah.
And it's a very esoteric thought, but it's, it's funny that you bring this up because I
see this coming up now on the Bitcoin side, the esoteric physics ideas with exactly what
you talked about, especially when it comes to the nature of time and kind of the, the
there, there, there are interesting similarities in terms of quantum physics and how Bitcoin
works with like, um, what is it?
Like basically you, you have multiple possibilities and then it collapses into only one and you
can't undo that easily.
Yes.
Like it's the same idea.
Basically you can have a reorg one or two blocks deep, which also in quantum systems, you
can have reorg, so to speak.
Like you can have delayed choice quantum erase experiments and so on.
But as the system gets bigger and there's more stuff built up on top of it, that comes
exponentially harder.
It's the same thing in Bitcoin, right?
It's like, it's an, and out of that, the error of time emerges and out of that causality
emerges and so on.
But if you just look at one Bitcoin block or at one unit of time or at one kind of phase
change in the system, that's not necessarily causal yet.
You know, like causality and time is something that emerges and so on.
Like, I mean, I obviously I wrote about this way back with Bitcoin is time and so on.
Yeah.
And now this is coming back to the, to the forefront and people are, are like rediscovering that
and talking about it and, and actually taking it more seriously.
I'm still not sure if I should take it seriously.
Like I, I, I was like almost like hyper manic when I wrote all this stuff.
And, and I was like, Oh, that's exactly, that's how the universe works.
And that's like all, all of that and everything hangs together and so on.
Now with a little bit of distance, I'm like, there's definitely interesting similarities,
but I have no idea how the universe works.
You've inspired lots of, lots of thought on this subject.
I mean, like falsibility, falsifiability, like things are really only true until they're
falsified.
And then once they're falsified, they're never true again.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's, and it's also falsifiability is interesting because if you cannot falsify
something, it's, it's almost not worth investigating basically.
Yeah.
It's like, it's like, it's like if, if any, if any answer goes and you can't make any value
judgment or a truth judgment about, about it with any experiment whatsoever, then it's
like, what are we even talking about?
You know, like we're talking about Narnia or, or what have you, you know, like it's the
rules of Narnia.
It's like, okay, all those kinds of things.
But yeah, I just wanted to show you this spot.
So that's a, that one of my goals in Madera is like, you see, you see the, the house all
the way up in the cliff.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
I want to, I want to, I want to get to know the person who owns it out and that house
has coffee at the, at the window and just look down like a couple of hundred meters.
And there's a nice, maybe we can make it with this cord.
Um, like a little bit further out or maybe it's even up, up there.
I'm not sure.
There's a glass floor lookout spot.
Wow.
It's amazing.
It's the highest cliff in Europe.
And it's like 380 meters or something.
It's like, it goes straight down.
Like you'll, it's very weird.
It's almost like you're in an airplane and looking down.
So yeah, it's, it's, it's very nice.
What do you say?
We, we make our way back more about it.
Yeah.
We'll see how long, how much we still have in us.
Well, the, the real thing that I would like to talk about and I brought.
All right.
The warmup is over now.
The warmup's over.
Let's get into it.
The warmup with, uh, Mr. Fox.
And when I was trying to come up with an alternative to Airbnb and the other Bitcoin based one.
Yeah.
I realized that there's, there's something wrong with posting what you have for sale.
Inherently you're giving away privacy.
Um, if, if I say that I'm renting my couch out and I haven't registered with my local school in Lancaster, then I'm breaking their law.
Hmm.
So all they would have to do is go look at everyone in, in Lancaster.
Who's got a house posted and they do this.
They do this with Airbnb.
That's how they come and they find you.
And they say, you haven't registered your property.
You're not paying your taxes.
Hmm.
They can just, cause we're broadcasting what we have for sale.
So basically.
What did, what did Silk Road do?
Okay.
Yeah.
I see.
So, so what you're, what you're saying is basically in some circumstances, you should be careful what you broadcast about.
And it's not only what I think is important to point out always is like, it's not only about breaking existing laws.
It's just like, okay, let's say you're in the U S and the administration changes.
Absolutely.
And what you posted a month ago is now illegal or those kinds of things, you know, and, and so you want to be careful about what you advertise to the world is what you're saying.
But what this, yes.
But what this made me think about is like, I, like my daughter goes onto Facebook marketplace to look for a lamp and she ends up buying a rug and a chair because she's just bombarded with all these things that are making her want them.
If she was able to say, put out a blob on Noster that says, I'm looking for a lamp in a general location.
Ah, so you want to reverse it.
I want to reverse it.
Okay.
So, and then anybody who's selling a lamp, an antique shop, whatever, they can run an agent that's looking for these encrypted blobs on Noster that fit within their parameters.
So they might, if, if their lamps are $500, they're not going to respond to my daughter who's looking for a $30 lamp.
Yeah, I see.
But everybody who is, has a lamp for sale, they could say, anybody in the area looking for lamps between $10 and $50, give me a notification.
And then she's already posted what her budget is for the lamp to say $30, then they come back and they say, oh, I've got a lamp for $20 and a picture of the lamp.
And then she says, that looks amazing.
And then they can negotiate the price, sign a message between both of them.
Now the lamp seller can reveal their address.
She reveals her end pub.
They can have a chat.
They can say, I'll meet you tomorrow.
And then if she doesn't like the lamp, you know, that you break the contract, the escrow goes back to her.
If she does like the lamp, she scans a QR code and the money goes to the lamp seller.
I see.
So that's a, that's a similar idea with lots of the handshakes, so to speak, that we have in the encrypted communication and mesh network world, where basically the sender, the sender only reveals information after the handshake completed successfully.
The same idea, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
No, I got it.
So flip the whole, we want to demand based economy, like where I say I'm going, I'm coming to Madeira for three weeks.
I have a 800 euro budget for a place to stay.
Yeah.
Salespeople will hate it, by the way.
I know.
They always try to sell you things that you don't need.
I know.
Yeah, exactly.
But it just, it flips the whole thing around and I think it makes it a lot more human.
I mean, I'm looking for a dozen eggs.
You might get three people respond to your ask and then you pick one that's closer to you or more reputable.
I want to play devil's advocate for a second.
Please, please.
Because you mentioned before that also you're a, I hadn't heard this word before, so if I butcher it, I'm sorry, but a random mist or something.
Oh, yeah.
I got that from, that's what Zaza says.
But I, like, I really like that because part of the, like, to be devil's advocate against your ideas, like sometimes you don't even really know what you're looking for.
Sure.
And browsing really helps.
Yeah.
And then you'll find something even better, even though it wasn't a thing that you wanted.
Like, going to a library, this often happens.
Absolutely.
You're looking for a book.
Yep.
And you want, you're that focused on this particular book.
And then you go to the library and, like, you're browsing through the section and then you find three other books that are way more interesting.
Absolutely.
On the topic.
And my wake up thought this morning was about art.
I mean, like, you can't say, I'm looking for art.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I want this piece exactly.
Yeah.
I want it to speak to me.
Yeah.
But you might say, I'm looking for someone to make me a piece the size to go in my lounge or something like that.
So there, there is a place for it, but, but ultimately with art, you want to be able to browse.
Um, and, uh, yeah, so, so I, I completely, I think there needs to be both.
And we've got the plebeian market conduit.
I mean, we got them all to use compatible protocols.
Yeah.
So you can go browse.
And now like if, if, if somebody wants to put up a site for like handmade clothing, they can go filter all of those items that are for sale and they can just show you handmade clothing.
Yeah.
And that can be, now you can go out to, you know, more normies and stuff like that and say like, oh, look, it's a female friendly shopping site for clothes.
I think that's always kind of the, uh, uh, the same idea in some sense that what we have right now is if you want to get handmade stuff, you go to Etsy or something.
Yeah.
So everything, what you're describing already exists, but it's all in siloed, centralized platforms.
And if you look, people put the same thing on Etsy, eBay, then they have to manage inventory.
Exactly.
Yeah.
That was my big thing with the sellers.
It was like, if you guys don't make a common protocol, then we're going to be back to the same thing where I'm going to plebeian market.
Yeah.
I'm going to conduit.
I'm posting the same thing multiple times.
And I think on Nostar, this is currently emerging, not on the marketplace side yet, because I think it's still way too small.
Yeah.
Like you just mentioned, you know, like there's plebeian market and there's like two, two other, there's shopster and so on.
Shopster, yeah.
And, and, and like, that's, it's literally like three people working on this stuff.
Yeah.
Basically, you know what I mean?
It's very, very, very small and, and, and just the markets themselves are very small.
Yeah.
And that's basically where Nostar was like, I don't know, like three and a half years ago or so.
And now we see it emerging that we have an ecosystem of clients and they have their own quirky view on the whole Nostar ecosystem.
Right?
Yeah.
Like some clients only focus on certain relays.
Yeah.
Some clients only focus on long form.
Some clients only focus on like even certain types of kind one notes, you know, and so on and so forth.
And, uh, so your vision is that the same will happen on their marketplace side between buyers and sellers.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's interesting.
How does it hang together with, um, Archipelago if at all?
Um, um, I'm not sure.
Not sure.
Yeah.
Because I'm sure it can.
What I'm thinking is like, if you, if you provide node infrastructure to, for example, homesteading communities, you can run, you know, like your local market on the same infrastructure, basically.
Yes.
In some sense.
And then you have to, of course, come in person and pick it up or whatever.
But that's, that's definitely something I can see emerging where you just have your, um, your local community and you have your local bullet import and your local communication infrastructure, all those kinds of things.
And there might be a little, you know, market stall.
Yeah.
Embedded in that as well, where people can advertise.
Well, that, yeah, there, there, there definitely will be an inside of the community version of it.
But, um, but no, this was, this is all new.
So I'm just like talking to people and flushing it out.
No, that's awesome.
I mean, that's also the, again, like that's the whole idea of sovereign engineering is to get these ideas out there and talk about them and just brainstorm how this could work.
So if you were a grocery store, like every 12 pack of beer you sell, you could put out a blob that you're looking for a 12 pack of beer and then you're building up enough inventory that it's worth somebody going and grabbing the things and bringing them to you.
I see.
Yeah.
No, it's definitely interesting ideas, but just purely an ask, ask based economy.
Yeah.
I think, like you said, I think we definitely need both and both approaches are useful, but in terms of flipping things around to me, it was always interesting that that's exactly what Noster does.
Yeah.
It flips the whole communication infrastructure, broadcasting infrastructure around in the sense that you don't have to rely on a Twitter.
Yeah.
You don't have to rely on any server.
It's just like the notes, like the kind one notes or whatever, they speak, the signed information speaks for itself because it's cryptographically signed.
Yep.
And that enables you to flip everything around.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, with the building blocks we have now, especially around, you know, how easy it is now to build webs of trust and with the pre-existing webs of trust, you can definitely do interesting things.
I would be curious to hear a little bit more about Archipelago in terms of what's the, what can it currently do?
What's the vision?
How can people, you know, check it out and use it?
And like, what's the current state and what's, what do you have in store for the next six to 12 months?
Yeah.
Oh, and also talk to me about the South by Southwest, South by Southwest launch.
Yeah.
So the, so the, the, the main piece we're working on now is the, I don't know if you saw it.
I brought the 13 inch framework laptop then, but put it, put that in a nice case, plug your TV into it and you can start using it as a dashboard for your house.
So you've got, um, and you mentioned that that's already lined up.
Like the framework people are working with you, right?
Yeah.
No, I mean right now we're just buying stuff from them, but I've, I've reached out there.
It seemed hard to get to.
Okay.
But, um, but I think it's the right hardware to put this thing on.
Yeah.
I love the framework idea of just having modularized upgradeable stuff that doesn't automatically break after two years.
Yeah.
So like, like if, like we have, we'll have a nice case for it.
So yeah, three years down the road, you just take that motherboard output in a new motherboard.
Um, but the basic unit plugs into the TV.
Um, we've got a companion app that literally like controls the archipelago, or you can use a, we've got a little wireless gamepad keyboard that works with it.
Um, and our first major partner is Indie Hub.
So what you'll be able to do is plug in archipelago, watch movies on day one.
Um, it'll also run all the normal services that you would get off the start nine or an umbral.
How did the movie thing come together?
Because that's not, that's not any like regular movies.
What kind of movies are we talking?
Oh, they're independent films.
It's all about independent films.
So, um, Avi Burra puts his finding home on there.
Um, Alana's got dirty coin on there.
Uh, thank God for Bitcoin is on there.
Like it's, it's, it's, it's Bitcoiner related content.
Yeah.
But, um, ultimately it will be as a director or producer, you log into Indie Hub and you can upload your movie there.
You can go in anytime, change how much you're charging for it.
Yeah.
So you could say like, I just launched this.
It's going to be free for two weeks and then it's going to be 21,000 sats for the next six months.
And then every six months it cuts in half.
You know, you can do all that as a, as the producer or director.
Um, and then, so how did that, uh, so I met, I met Zach at, uh, Las Vegas last year.
Um, and we just have been talking over time and it's interesting cause he's, he comes from a film background.
So he was really interested in like, how do we protect the cap table and the investors and all this kind of stuff.
But what he has come to, as he spent more time with us, uh, maybe we radicalized them a little bit, but now he's ready for it to be a completely open platform and decentralized, fully decentralized.
So you could upload any content you want, um, people can flag content based on your web of trust.
You might trust certain people or, or you just, you stick with like, like a Nostra, you've got fire hose.
Yeah.
Same thing.
Like, yeah.
Um, but then when I watch a movie, I download it to my node and then everyone else who watches it starts torrenting it from the people who have, who have watched it and they get paid.
Um, as the data provider.
So the distribution mechanism is a plain old torrents basically.
Yep.
Um, with more sophisticated things on top.
Yep.
Yeah.
No, that's really cool.
I'm still, um, I mean, that's, it seems to be a recurring theme in all the cohorts that, um, there is out of 21 people, there's always at least one person that wants to make torrents great again.
Nice.
I love torrents.
Because it's, it's fantastic technology and it works really well.
It's just, uh, yeah, I, um, in some sense pirate bay got a lot of things right.
Uh, they obviously were up against, you know, like an incredibly powerful enemy, so to speak.
Oh yeah.
And, and, um, but what I mean with, what they got right is very decentralized, very censorship resistant, very hard to take, take down.
I mean, all the founders were in jail for a while.
Pirate Bay was up all the way through.
Yeah.
So that tells you something.
Um, and also they had baked in reputation.
They had baked in, you know, like social comments and so on and all those kinds of things.
And there's all kinds of stuff from pirate Bay, but there was a way to use it without having, you know, like Trojan spyware on your computer at all times.
You know, like it's, it's the, the kind of reputation and social part and, and kind of web of trust part, very primitive web of trust part really worked.
Yeah.
And it's, to me, it's just amazing that we see this now on Nostar and my feed in Nostar, I very, very rarely see stuff that I don't like.
Yeah.
Like most outrageous, like war or porn or whatever.
It's like, it's all filtered out.
Yeah.
And the same for like SAP store, for example, you'll have to talk to me about that as well, but just to finish the train.
Yeah.
SAP store is my main app store.
It has been for almost a year now.
Same.
It works.
If it's, if it's not on that store, I don't get it.
Exactly.
And, and, and that just shows you it works fairly well.
Yeah.
Like my phone didn't get wrecked once.
Yeah.
And I kind of, I know what I'm doing.
I know the people that I'm installing stuff from and so on.
And we're at a point now where SAP store also supports, um, Git installs just like, uh, Optaneum does.
And so I don't have a use for any other app store anymore.
Absolutely.
I know I'm a, you know, like I'm an outlier.
Yeah.
Well aware, but it's just amazing that how far we've come.
And I saw on the archipelago node, uh, very similar to umbrella and start nine, right?
You have an, an app store as well.
Right.
Like talk to me more about that.
And what's your, what's your thoughts on that?
Yeah.
Our, our goal for the app store is it to be exactly like that store.
So that, um, anything you install on your node, it, it talks to your web of trust.
You've got different people, I mean, attributing to it.
And, um, and that's where you get your apps from.
And, uh, one, one of the main criticisms of, of SAP store, uh, for the longest time now was that it basically, they were, um, very restrictive in terms of the, the sources and, uh, like who can put apps into SAP store and so on.
Yeah.
Um, they made some bigger steps towards, um, making that more open.
Like, uh, you're selecting your own relay and, and, um, basically very similar to like package managers where you can have community sources and you just point your thing to a community server and then you can install all kinds of stuff.
So, um, is, is that in the works for your system as well?
Something, something along those lines?
Yeah.
And as well, I would like it to be distributed.
And I think, um, if you, if you don't want to pay like 50 sats to download an app, I mean, there might be stuff for free that somebody wants to host and wants to promote you running, but I think it should be able to be, uh, monetized.
Yeah.
You, you, you, you mentioned before with the, the, the music question that value for value is the way to go.
And I think that's definitely true for this stuff as well.
I don't really believe in paywalls and making stuff artificially restricted.
Yeah.
But what I do believe in and SAP store actually does as well.
It's like, if you used it, if you really liked it, make it extremely easy to give back.
Yeah.
Like if I find an app that's incredibly useful for me, like I'm happy to pay whatever, you know, 20 bucks, 50 bucks.
Absolutely.
And, and just like, you know, like one click and, oh my God, thank you for building this.
I always wanted to have something like that.
Yeah.
And, and you know, like I'm a small fish that I think the reason why value for value works is, let me, let me tell a little story.
I convinced, um, a German friend of mine, he did a film about Bitcoin as well to go full on value for value.
He wanted to put stuff behind the paywall and so on.
Yeah.
And I talked to him for like weeks and, and finally convinced him to just, just get it all out in the open and make the ask really prevalent.
It's like, you know, like it costs a lot to produce this film.
Yep.
Um, if you enjoyed it, please give back.
And many people did.
But the, the reason I think why value for value works is because if you have a thousand people giving back, one person out of the thousand will give a lot.
Yeah.
And that's, it's like a, a beyond Pareto distribution.
Yep.
Absolutely.
And that, that's exactly what happened to him.
I don't know how many people gave back.
I, I assume it, it was like a close to a thousand or something like that, like the ballpark.
But there was one guy who gave like 1.5 Bitfuck.
Wow.
And that's like, it paid for the whole film.
Yeah.
Paid for everything.
He probably made more than if he would have put it behind some weird paywall or whatever.
Yeah.
Because no one would watch it, you know?
Yeah.
Like if you add friction to getting your stuff out there, then it will just stay behind the paywall.
Yeah.
That's, that's.
Well, I think that's the beautiful thing about Indie Hub is now that we've got taste, we whitelist end pubs as, as tastemakers, people who really know movies.
So you can look at their recommendations.
But also the whole thing is I mentioned the directors log in or the producers to upload their movie.
But we also have the whole funding cycle built in.
So the same thing, like we, we tie in with Angor, you know, the, the month, the movie is funded on Angor and you've got the whole flywheel.
Yeah.
And people, if they like a movie, they might like, they want to invest in that director's next movie.
Yeah.
No, that's awesome.
That's awesome.
And that's, I feel like that's happening all over the place.
Like we're, I mean, we're a niche of a niche, right?
Oh yeah.
Totally.
But like open collective and those kinds of things, it's, it's the same idea where you have like nonprofits and other entities that just like everything is completely out in the open and you can give and you can see where the money flows and so on.
Very similar idea to, you know, SAP splits and having just transparent splits for, you know, like, I mean, one cool thing on the podcasting 2.0 side is the streaming money side, right?
Yeah.
And just have transparent SAP splits and just, you know, stream by the minute, stream sets by the minute.
Yeah.
And yeah, we actually have someone working on doing the same for data transfers and for APIs, like, you know, nano sets, streaming nano sets by the millisecond basically.
Well, and the, and the chunking blossom server.
Yeah.
I mean, that requires, you know, like fancy stuff.
Uh, uh, I know nothing about it, but Spillman channels, right?
Yeah.
Like all these kinds of things where if you, if you go down to these like millisat and microsat amounts, like lightning breaks down, it doesn't work at all.
Yeah.
You have to use different things, but it's cool to see all this emerging and who knows where we are in five years from now, right?
Like all this stuff might work beautifully.
Yeah.
It's still amazing to me that with the podcasting 2.0 movement, there's lots of podcasts that are value enabled.
Yeah.
There's lots of money flowing through the system.
Oh yeah.
I wouldn't have guessed that when it started happening because it was like a hack on top of a hack.
Oh, you know, like it was, yeah.
Just key sending sets to node IDs and the whole shebang.
And now, now we're getting somewhere, you know, like this stuff is really working.
Well, web of trust is, um, I, I only reached, so now that I'm more into the algorithm and stuff like that, um, people were writing about web of trust in the seventies.
Yeah.
Like this was the only thing missing and it's been missing forever.
Yeah.
And like real web of trust.
To be fair.
I think actually that's one of the killer features of Noster.
Yeah.
Yep.
Because PGP signing parties.
Yep.
Never caught on.
Yep.
I was there.
I mean, I would, I mean, the whole P I was, I lived through the whole PGP fiasco and everything.
And then nobody used it.
Yeah.
And then at my last job, which was, uh, international finance, we were using PGP.
Interesting.
Yeah.
That was after the financial crisis and all that.
Why, why were you using PGP?
Um, it's, it's been, it's been, uh, standard, uh, when you're, uh, sharing sensitive information.
Interesting.
I didn't know that.
You request their pub key, you sign it and then you send them the packet.
And then you know that they're the only person who can decrypt it.
Okay.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
I'm surprised.
Yeah.
The Fiat world keeps surprising.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
It just, I mean, it just takes a long while for this stuff to be understood and, but it still
sucks.
It's still absolutely sucks.
I mean, compare that now with what we have right now, like white noise, MLS.
Pika, all those kinds of things are great examples where, um, we are basically at a point
now where I can use Noster to look up my contacts.
Yeah.
That's very easy.
Like that part is basically soft.
Yeah.
You know, like I just, it's, it, it doesn't matter.
I want to call Justin.
It's very easy.
Like I, I, I, I have him already in my web of trust.
I look him up and so on.
And then we use something else to do a handshake, like exactly like MLS.
Like that's what you, the flow you basically described from the, the financial people that
using PGP, we're doing the same thing.
Just like, like 30 years more modern.
Yeah.
And then you actually have a signal level, signal level encryption standard and you use Noster,
your Noster web of trust to do the handshake.
Exactly.
The same for phone calls and video calls and all those kinds of things.
Yep.
Like that's, that's starting to work now.
Yeah.
Like the, the, the underlying technology that makes white noise work, MLS and again, like
just to build PECA on top of that.
It really works.
Yeah.
It's, it really works.
It's the right approach.
And yes, it's all still alpha basically, you know, like expect rough edges.
Oh yeah.
But in a couple of years from now, this will just basically be the default as far as I'm
concerned.
Noster clicked for me right away after having grown up with PGP.
And it was just like, oh my God, this is like, everyone stopped using PGP cause it was just
too hard.
And also just for regular stuff on, on the mesh network and, and, and node world, you know,
like I have a setup already where I, um, I mean, I keep going on about this.
I have multiple machines and they all use sync thing to synchronize certain folders between
each other.
And it's so incredibly useful.
And just like on, in the node world, like every, we saw this by the way.
Uh, Marty, Marty Malmi, he showed off a Noster VPN.
Yeah.
And it's the same idea, right?
Like every device has an Nop.
Yep.
And so it's very easy to connect devices because you just connect to an Nop.
Yeah.
And you just scan a QR code or you just, you know, like it's, it's, it's how we find each
other on Noster is how the devices find each other in this network.
Exactly.
And then you can build your own VPN and all your devices tunnel through the same exit node.
Yep.
And of course you can invite your friends to that as well.
And so on.
And I think that's the right idea.
Yeah.
And you're for Archipelago, for example, as well, you know, like it's a no brainer that the devices,
I think for you it's, um, uh, DIDs, right?
So we generate from 24 words, we generate the DID and the NPUB and the Bitcoin address.
Yeah.
So you have, but we're just playing with stuff, but that's the current model.
Yeah.
You have a cryptographic identity and from the base of the cryptographic identity, you can derive
more identities and so on.
Yeah.
And if you need to do file sharing, if you want to install apps from other devices, if
you do whatever, you know, that's, that's the, that's the lookup part.
That's, that's how you, that's how you find each other.
And there's even a button like discover nodes on Noster.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And I think, I think that's the right approach.
I think that's the right, the right level of abstraction.
And yeah, you can do a lot of like with the primitives we have now, you just can't
do a lot of stuff.
Yeah.
So, so that's.
Yeah.
And I think back to the marketplace, the encrypted state machines that, that Jesus worked on
are, I mean, that is like, that's that piece.
Yeah.
I mean, it's you, I can ship packages.
I can pick up riders on a ride share app.
I can sell things online.
Like it all wraps up in the encrypted state machines.
Yeah.
I have to look into that some more.
I mean, Jesus is always cooking up new things.
When he, when he, when he came up with Context VM.
It took me like a week to wrap my head around it.
But it's really cool that the, that the project is, is flourishing from, from what I can tell.
Absolutely.
And it's a similar idea where it's just like, you know, you, you, you need to tap into some
external compute or you need to tap into some external database or those kinds of things.
You just have a very simple protocol that can make all that work.
And you use Noster as the lookup and coordination layer and all those kinds of things.
Yeah.
That's really cool.
So our archipelago.
So, um, the, the initial idea is that you've got archipelago home, which is the base one I said, but then we've got community, uh, additions.
So when you install it, it's like a choose your own adventure thing.
It's like, what are you trying to do?
Are you trying to run a business?
Are you trying to run a web store?
Are you trying, is this just for your home for sovereign, for sovereign, uh, identity and all that.
Um, but then also I want to do one, uh, archipelago auto, which basically either you're on a scooter, you're in a car, you bring the node with you.
Interesting.
It's got built in mesh networks.
So.
Starlink got the same idea, right?
For people with boats.
Yeah.
Campers.
But you, you drive around.
I mean, you, you're pinging all the other people in your area.
Um, you can choose whether to share your location.
So if you're coming to pick somebody up, you turn on location sharing.
Now they can see that you're almost there.
Um, also like we could be like, like mesh network is not super fast, but like at some point, like I could be like, Oh, I'm, I'm driving from Austin to Kansas city.
I could pick up data.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Take a four terabyte.
I was just about to say, depending on the size of the data, that's still the fastest way.
Yeah.
Sneakernet.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
I mean, uh, yeah, you obviously have a, have a grand, uh, vision, vision for this thing.
Uh, but let me, let me ask you something else entirely.
Yeah.
How, how come you're here at some of engineering and how were the first three days for you?
Oh, wow.
How come I'm here?
Um, like what made you sign up?
It's always, it's still weird to me that people are actually coming.
Yeah.
Like there's nothing in it for you except for meeting people basically.
So, um, this is when y'all announced hardware and alternative internet, this was the piece that I knew we could do, but nobody had really focused it on it in kind of the right ways.
And I was like, I, I'm not a programmer, but I want to be in the middle of this.
I want to be helping to steer it.
But then ultimately I want to be able to fund projects.
I want to, I, I need routes, routester for private AI.
Yeah.
Like I want to support routester.
I want to integrate it into archipelago and I want to encourage everybody who's working on freedom tech to take this open approach, openness and interoperability first.
And so, um, so like with, uh, with ridester and drivester and the, a guy in Manchester that's working on trotter.
We have to work on our naming, by the way.
Yeah, I know.
But they, but they were, they, they weren't using the same primitives.
Yeah.
So they were inoperability.
There was an inter, there was no interoperability.
So I showed them the A to B protocol that I wrote with Jesus.
They both were, with AI, they were both able to refactor their packages.
Ah, nice.
Like within a day.
Yeah, that's awesome.
And then they were interoperable.
That's awesome.
That's a big benefit.
It's, it's, uh, you know, AI if used in the right way and used carefully.
It's a, it's an, an absolute blessing for the stuff we're doing.
Yeah.
And then the guy in the UK that's doing trotter.
I mean, he wants all the services, a locksmith ride sharing, like all these to run on Noster.
And it's all using the same protocols.
Now the encrypted state machines, you can make requests, you get, uh, responses, you make agreements and you get work done.
Awesome.
Yeah, no, that's, uh, so, so the hardware and network part is in your opinion still lacking.
And that's why you signed up and you were like, okay, I want to, I want to meet other crazy machine.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I, and I, and I try and fund projects as much as I can.
I mean, I'm like, this needs to happen.
Like who can do it?
Like, and so that's how I got Jesus.
Um, and the same with the, with the, like, I can't make payable torrents, but there are people here who can.
Yeah.
So, yeah, absolutely.
And how, how was it for you the first couple of days?
Did you know what you got yourself into beforehand?
No, I honestly didn't even read the handbook until the night before.
Um, and it, it, I would say it's been the one of the, it's been probably the most, I mean, I literally said to my wife, this was like, this has been the most incredible experience I've ever had in my life.
Um, it's also been, some of the most, I know, some of the most exhausting mentally, physically, socially, um, it's, it's just constant overwhelm.
Yes.
Um, and, and I, for me as well.
Yeah.
Okay.
Good.
Yeah.
No, it's my, it's, it's the seventh cohort.
So it's obviously my seventh cohort.
Yeah.
And it's still like, that's why I mentioned on the first day, every single time sovereign engineering happens, I'm very, very close to burnout always.
Yeah.
And it is because exactly because of that, because you're just, your brain is just in a constant overload.
Yeah.
Because for, for, for some reason there's, you know, like there's people are coming and they are all, they're all on fire and they all have like a million ideas and they're all amazing people.
You know, it's, it's, it's like, again, I, I just have to, the, the caliber of people that are here, every single cohort, it's just amazing.
Yeah.
Like I mentioned, like we have Marky mommy here and the stuff he's working on.
I, half of the things I can't comprehend.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And it's, yeah, it's just, and out of these kinds of demos and out of these kinds of very technical things, I think the exhausting part is because of the mix of people, it kind of goes up and down the stack and you go from very big picture to nitty gritty details all the time.
Yeah.
Like 25 times in an hour.
Yeah.
And you do it like, you know, 10 hours a day.
High frequency.
And so, so it is very exhausting.
That's why, you know, like we, we try to make room for breaks and for days off.
No, it's really fabulous.
And, and so I, I moved to Lancaster kind of thinking, Oh, I'm just going to chill out.
You know, I've got my, my Bitcoin stack, et cetera, et cetera.
And, but I, I thrive on this.
You wanted to retire basically is what you're saying.
I thought I wanted to retire.
Join, join the Amish and retire.
Yeah.
Live a peaceful life.
But I, I can't do it.
Like immediately I was like driving to other meetups and then I would be flying to check on the ranch in Oklahoma, the beef ranch.
And then I'm like, okay, this is, I give up.
It turns out retirement is very boring.
It is.
Like people need to do stuff.
Yeah.
That's just, you know, like not only can you just do things, you also, you should just do things.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
So what's your, what's your goal for, for, for these three weeks?
What do you kind of best case, what, what should emerge from this cohort?
What's your dream tech, dream things that should come out of here?
Yeah.
I want a clear direction on the next steps for the alternate internet.
Like, like what are practical things?
So I mentioned joining the Agris communities, like they're totally into all the same things.
Like everybody needs alternative means of communication and data transmission.
They're also really.
Whether they know it or not.
Yeah.
Well, these guys know it.
I mean, so like we've got the PASNIA department of technology.
I'm the head of the PASNIA department of transportation.
Right.
Um, but we, we, this is, this, this, we, we need to have a clear direction so people can
start focusing money, time, energy into things that we've kind of flushed out that we're like,
this is, this looks like the path forward for now.
And then get something.
And then get something so we can actually in small communities.
So Madeira, you've got a community server in Madeira.
You've got Fetty guardians.
You've got people using ride share apps over Bitcoin.
Um, this is the perfect place to do it.
And that's what I talked to Mr. Fox about.
All right.
For four fricking hours last night.
Awesome.
Yeah, no, I think it's, it's definitely, you know, like there, there are certain hotspots
in the world where it, where the things you're sketching out can actually work.
Absolutely.
Because you have the right mix of people.
It's small enough.
It's like you have existing communities already that you can tap into and, and all these kinds
of things, but then immediately bringing in remote communities, like say like, well, how
do we, how do we get like beef from the cattle ranch into the city?
How do we coordinate between these, these three meetups?
Because once you coordinate between three Bitcoin meetups that if one, if the next one
over is coordinating between three Bitcoin meetups, you've got the whole mesh.
Yeah.
It's, yeah, it's not going to be an easy task and it's going to take a little while, but
that's why I was so excited to talk to you because you're on the forefront and my, like
I have very high hopes for the homesteading and other adjacent communities.
Yeah.
Like Bitcoin adjacent communities, whether they know they are Bitcoin adjacent or not.
Absolutely.
And there is, you know, like the, we are definitely part of the counter movement and there is a
global counter movement, kind of, you know, moving back to the farms, grow your own food.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
And becoming more resilient across the stack.
And that means not only food, but also health.
Yeah.
Also, I mean, you know, there's a reason why we do lots of these things outside and go on
walks and so on.
It's just like if you, like Odell goes on on the CO2 counter, right?
Yeah.
It's like if you're just in a meeting room all day and all the windows are closed and everything,
it's just not good for you.
It's not good for the brain.
It's not good for you and all this kind of stuff.
So I'm very hopeful that this will just continue to happen.
And these communities will also, you know, in some sense integrate and learn from each other.
And I think the Bitcoiners can definitely learn a lot from the communities you talked about.
And vice versa as well.
You know, like I think the Amish can learn a thing or two from.
Yeah.
Well, they don't know about inflation.
I mean, like some Amish kid, they don't teach them an inflation.
Yeah.
No, that's.
Yeah.
Here's to hope.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I think that's a nice bit to end on because I'm all out of steam.
I told you at about 90 minutes, just walking in the sun and talking will do me in.
I think we're even over 90 minutes.
This is amazing.
Thank you so much.
Awesome.
We always end on a hug.
Sweaty hug this time.
All right.
So that was fantastic.
And I'll put all the links, you know, everywhere and so on.
And people can.
Beautiful.
Learn more about your things and look deeper into it.
And to me, yeah, it's just fantastic that, you know, like people, people like you are showing up and sovereign engineering continues to happen.
I mean, truly, thank you for having me.
I don't feel worthy.
And I, my wife told me that's an insult to you guys.
So thank you for, thank you for considering me worthy.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Thanks for coming.
And yeah, we'll keep, we'll keep doing what we're doing.
And we'll see what comes out of it.
Awesome.
All right.
Almost like one, one hour, 42 minutes.
Nice.
So 90 minutes is my, is my, the spot where, where my brain gives up usually.
All right.
All done.
Perfect.
Wow.
It's good.
Right.
That was fun.
It was great to get to know you guys.
Yeah.