there we go now we're now we're good a little snap i'll just hand you this i don't know i'm
just gonna clip it so i don't have to hold it but yeah no walking today so it's gonna be an
outside sitting and yeah what happened what ended your walking career i i i built my whole
professional life around walking and i broke my ankle a couple days ago basically so
no uh change of plans i rock pulled myself walking is still very good for you and healthy but let's
see if we can get the brain juices flowing even if we're sitting
so what should we talk about nostr you have an awesome nostr t-shirt by the way oh thank you
this is the lightning store the no effects ripoff are we just being nostalgic about the old internet
yeah i've been thinking about that yes i think no i think what we're nostalgic for
is what we thought where we thought the internet was going what we thought we had yeah what we
thought we had i've been i've been trying to trace my interest in technology and i used to read the
tech magazines back the day and i just had this sense of of where things were going and it was
it was it was very optimistic and uh i was very excited about it i loved desktop uis and things
like that it's like where did i get all this love for all these things that now are kind of frustrating
in for me and it's like well i think they just stopped delivering on those promises like when
you had a good mac os 9 desktop ui you had this whole interface that was very in harmony
and a similar ui kind of for everything a similar use aesthetic even microsoft outlook on mac os 9
looked like a mac os 9 out everything drag and dropped onto each other yeah and then we built
the web browser which is kind of really it's an operating system inside of an operating system
and everything looks like a like a billboard ad on the side of the road yeah and everything behaves
kind of differently and then the business model is really for things to not talk to each other
maybe if you're lucky you can pay to unlock communication across your internet apps
and and so people who fell in love with the computers when they were this kind of you know
unified personal thing i think at least for me find you know the current state of things kind of
kind of frustrating do you think we have a chance of building our way out of the digital gulags
i think yes i think more than ever i think we just have to we actually just have to build it
i do think there's it's a mindset shift of uh this is done for me versus it turns out i kind of have
to do this for myself you know i i've hit this flip with my friends recently where all the best meals i
have are cooked by my friends like i have several friends who can do a better ribeye than the best
steakhouse i've been to in austin texas yeah so you know we need to become yeah we need to make
home-cooked meals of apps out of love for one another and that's i think how we can get better
software we we landed on this already in in one of those conversations where it's like the the whole
web switched from an active thing that you have to explore actively and you have to put some work in
but depending on what kind of work you put in you'll get you'll you'll get results like you'll
get something out of it and the more work you would put in the more you would get out of it and so on
to it's completely being flipped now with just like passive stuff with with tiktok being the epitome of
passivity where it's just like please entertain me you know like put like you're not you don't even
want to think for yourself anymore it's just like please do everything including the thinking for me
and just entertain me and it's just like passively scrolling through things and you know feeding the
slot machines for the next dopamine hit and so on so so it's it's in part like what i enjoy so much
about nostr is because it's so raw still and still so it requires active involvement um and the same for
bitcoin as well i mean it's it's like to to actually use bitcoin in a self-serving way you you actually
actually need to be actively involved and but that also means that you can actively shoot yourself
in the foot and i think this this i think that's that's something that out of necessity has to be
true going forward as well it's like you you if you want to empower users like it's there's always the
same comparisons right like the the if you have a sharp kitchen knife you can cut yourself you can
stab someone else yes if you if you want to if you teach someone to to defend themselves if you give
if you teach someone how to use a gun they can harm themselves very easily as well and i think i think
that's that's kind of what we're up against like but then when you get like a like a knife at a
restaurant that's like somehow made out of cardboard it folds on the first slice it's like oh i've been
saved from myself and from harming others but also i can't slice the steak anymore so personally i think
like paper straws are a great indication of the downfall of western civilization well they're illegal
now good good good sorry that you still have to suffer under this yeah no but that's it's it's it's
what i'm trying to say i think is like it's unavoidable if you want to have a powerful tool it's also
going to be a dangerous tool and you need to learn how to wield it and i think if we if we want to
build the next iteration of the internet with the next kind of tool sets and so on you need to
you we need to be okay with people getting wrecked and doing kind of dangerous borderline dangerous
stuff i feel like the last time society was okay with this was with the car like i feel like if
somebody introduced the car today it would be completely illegal yeah you can kill people yeah you
need you need like you need like like a five-year car like a pilot's license basically to drive you
around yeah because otherwise it's just it's much too dangerous yeah yeah that's a good point i think
i i hope when that we can kind of you know again like build our way out of it because i think also if
the if the if the tools exist and are accessible then they will be picked up by those that are brave enough
to explore the new world yeah yeah bravery and also you know it's personal responsibility i i talk
about this i do the austin bitcoin design club in austin with with saw hill and um every time i like
introduce the meetup it's just like bitcoin is something we do it's on us so you know if you're on a
shit coin a vc is paid for nice ux if you want nice ux and bitcoin you could take responsibility
on yourself to either make it yourself or just give really good feedback to the people who are building
and so you know i think nostr you're very much more obviously yeah it's like it's the nostr will
only be what diehards you know build it to be but i think this will also like already nostr clients
are way better than they used to be oh wow we're getting rock pulled all the time now it really
starts to rain we'll have to a canopy somewhere hop hop in somewhere should we should we slowly make
our way to somewhere where we won't get completely wet so is that a hospital we can get we can go up
there you could use a it's a it's a hospice or maybe we'll find a tree that that holds the water
better we'll see we'll figure it out the analogy i always use is uh somebody could give you a really
good exercise program they could even drive you to the gym but if you don't do the the lat pulldowns
using your own muscles you're not gonna you're not gonna gain strength so if the problem was that
somebody else is making the apps for you and they had bad a bad teleology they had bad ends in mind for
you uh it's not gonna be fixed necessarily by somebody else oh boy no that's really bad
where do you want to go i don't know is there can we sit just back at the restaurant
give me a second to think about it
oh wait wait under there under there there is a
i might have to stand
there we go that's better already there was like a 10 second shower
you and pablo haven't been rained out yet
nope not yet
i feel like it's been raining like
awesome it's the first
yeah let's go there let's just stand there yeah out there that's good okay
yeah i mean i keep bringing it back to responsibility a lot as well
in i mean freedom requires responsibility in the sense that no one can
completely handhold you through being free like that's the
the the other side of the freedom coin is responsibility itself
so oh that really hurt oh my lord
all right we're gonna make it
let's stay here for a little while
but yeah you were saying that you have to do the workout yourself and i i always i always break it down to the essentials it's like i mean
again we landed on all those memes in the bitcoin world with
not your keys not your coins which means if you're not in control of the private keys
it's actually not your money and if push comes to shove
then you'll feel that like someone else will take your money period
right and i feel like you can get a lot of the upside
of bitcoin like sailor right you can get a lot of the upside of bitcoin
without holding your own keys yeah
it works until it doesn't but it works still doesn't and also to get
the whole upside you have to take personal responsibility
and i think on the nostril side for example it relates a lot to
to kind of expressiveness in some sense
where it's like if you want to it's i always try to compare it to
i mean in in my mind we're talking about
freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and those kind of things the freedoms that we cherish
in meat space um where actually in meat space you you can prevent someone
like just by using sheer force to go somewhere somewhere like you can lock someone in a box and
so on or you can you know like uh shoot a grenade at an existing assembly and so on and so so the
freedom has to be granted politically in some sense like if there is a political structure if there
is other people around they can mess with your freedom of assembly in meat space they can also mess
with your freedom of speech and those kind of things yeah i never loved the public square analogy like
that does not seem like this perfect i used to live near union square and there would always be these
random protests and people giving speeches and stuff like that that was not the that's not the ideal of
human speech oh i agree i agree i agree but but it's it's the way i see it with um like now moving to
cyberspace it's cash in meat space cash gives you freedom of transactions in in that sense and it is
absolutely necessary for a society to work like you if you would need to know everything about absolutely
everyone you make economic transactions with then the society can scale like i'm convinced that society
without cash can scale meaningfully basically you need just like you need free speech to figure things
out and to figure out how to course correct society you need the free flow of money to to figure
certain things out and so on and um to actually have meaningful price signals emerge and and so on
and so forth like it's it plays a big part in distributed cognition in in cyberspace up until very recently i feel
like we had no way of guaranteeing those freedoms like you you uh in in the sense of like we had no
cash in cyberspace pre-bitcoin it just didn't exist at all and and in terms of freedom of assembly i i
think we we were able to do certain things now it's just i feel like it's it's it's it's going to be
easier and it's going to be more streamlined going forward where you just want to you know like even
temporarily open up a speaker's corner and invite people in uh and have something to say then you can't
just do that and it's not politically but cryptographically enforced i do think we lost
something the early internet people made their own websites and so there was like obviously there
weren't that many of them maybe in the millions but people were self-expressing to like a certain
extent and understand they were the publisher and then these platforms came along that did so much of
the work for you and even people like myself i probably published a lot more on twitter than
on my personal website i still even know how to make a personal website so i feel like we we actually
never lost the ability to self-publish now the the net the distribution and the network effects of
these social networks that's something we didn't have early on but at least the ability to self-publish we
really never lost we just were too lazy to keep at it or the i guess the rewards were somewhat minimal
yeah yeah yeah i guess the cost benefits didn't make sense you self-published yeah right yeah your
your your blog posts your when you counted to the number 21 right yeah you self-published and you found
distribution for that yeah but my main distribution channel was twitter i guess like i i don't think
anyone would have stumbled upon my stuff without already an existing twitter kind of space and by
that i don't mean twitter spaces i mean just uh
i had something that i could plug in to and it was just the existing bitcoin twitter community which i was
like deeply embedded in and i i had a very very small following in the beginning like when i was
even like when i started writing already but there was still like i immediately had a couple hundred
people that would read whatever anyone writes about bitcoin period because that's like back in the day
that was like maybe you know like no one wrote about bitcoin basically and so i i think i think that's
what the early internet there in my mind the early internet lacked it it it desperately lacked identity
and they lacked distribution and i think that's what you get now for free and i hope that we can
take all the good parts of the old internet so to speak and revive them in in in some sense of
re-explore them i think it's still very under explored and it relates to to the expression that i i
wanted to bring up it's like your your self-expression online is so limited in some sense because you are
currently bound to all the platforms and it's just like you know like it has to be exactly this form
every every fucking page looks the same and so there's very few exceptions there's very few
platforms that allow any kind of meaningful personalization and those kind of things and so
i i i mean i kind of i hope that we can bring some of that back i still you know remember the days of
geocities and myspace and winem skins that's that's kind of the examples i always bring up because it
was just fucking cool to to have like it's yeah and i wonder how much we if if people have the tools right
now like it's always going to be a small percentage that are the creators like anybody can upload to
youtube how many people actually upload to youtube it's it's definitely going to be a small percentage
but the you you see a lot more creativity on youtube than you saw on the broad broadcast television yeah
yeah that's fair yeah i mean that's uh the the medium is very unconstrained in that sense you're not
bound to like 10 minutes outbites that the the uh the the actual transmission bandwidth so to speak
is not scarce anymore it's like you can you can upload like 20 hour long youtube videos every single
day and and if no one watches them no one watches them the the thing that's cars nowadays of course is
attention so so distribution and attention which is kind of you know like uh uh has its own problems
i mean i i worry about that with
no i go on x a lot for design inspo and to see other uh like technical people like what are people
what are people vibe coding today what are people um what are solo entrepreneurs like making 50k a month
with that i could have done and just in a weekend but they did it instead and so i i there's a lot
there's a lot there and i feel like a lot of times i spend a lot of my time on the internet gathering
and i'm even i try to make better tools for i mostly use obsidian to store knowledge that i think i'm
going to use later but i'm mostly just storing yeah and i really that attention thing like i'm really i
almost want to like and i'm always prompting ai's i also want to like prompt myself when i log into the
computer yeah like what are you going to try to get done because you're like i'm sitting down you know
so like it's bad for my body and you know i'm like i'm getting all this blue light you know i'm taking on
a lot of risks health wise and mental health wise to be at a computer so what am i going to try to get out of
it uh i almost i almost kind of wish i had like a in info calories like you've consumed 3000 info
calories so you should write an essay you need to burn off these info calories like build something
write something be creative i mean a lot of people like me who like to create these personal knowledge
systems it's just end up with just the personal it's just like it's just it's just end up with all
this data and they're not using it for anything uh so i think ultimately yeah wait ultimately i want
you're talking about that kind of brain off thing like there's there's this ux design book called don't
make me think so it's very much the ux
uh so i'm always wary when people say bitcoin needs better ux because what do you mean by that
because the normie ux developer has a business model in mind so they have it ends in mind they
know what they want the users of their app to be doing yeah so they have a plan for you
do you have what is your plan yeah and are you using maybe maybe that's kind of part of the problem
right like the whole don't make me think design philosophy and the whole principle you know maybe
we want to build things that actually makes people think yeah yeah i've been thinking about this in
terms of you know one of the problems we had with mutiny was we made a pretty easy ux like your first
receive yeah would actually open a lightning channel yeah we just kind of call it fees network
fees or something like that right well a lightning channel can close and that can cost you money too
yeah and so we made it so easy to end up with a lightning channel that a lot of people ended up
with lightning channels that didn't know what that was yeah so they didn't know what they had signed up
for um and i'm sure obviously i'm sure there's a million examples in the normie world of like we've
done things that we didn't really know the implications of you know people are always
scandalized finding out what their personal data is used for so yeah that i i'm kind of thinking even
in terms of bitcoin ux like i think the next if i made something like mutiny again i would want to make
the part where you end up with a lightning channel if i decide that that's what you want
i decide to offer that as an option i'd want to make that weird like jarring somehow so that you
don't flow through it you know we we there are a lot of ux patterns that we're used to like if i keep
on pushing the button on the bottom right of the screen and it's not red i think it'll let me go on
with my day yeah and and so yeah i i want to like think more about like user interfaces that that um
jar people because they uh i think this is something that they should be mindful
during i think games some games are great at that where you just like you you uh especially some of
the older games where like it's actually mistakes are actually costly and you actually die and you have to
start from scratch again and replay the last 20 minutes right those kind of things where where
mistakes are actually costly you know that'd be great yeah like uh you know what's what's the one
you know you're scrolling or eula and it makes you scroll all the way to the bottom before you can
click the okay button you like time how fast they scroll and if they scroll faster than humans can read
you take them back to the total start of the flow just like you you lost the life better not mess up
yeah forcing the user to be careful i mean again like all this is yeah me kind of trying to decide
what the user should accomplish and how the user should be i think ultimately the goal for software
i mean you know the early you know some of the earliest software distribution is is you'd print a
magazine that had a basic program in it and be like one or two pages and so a kid would sit there
and patiently type in a program and now they would have some very minimal game and then they could just
start modifying it and that's you know i listened to like software developer podcasts and that's
very common either they were like hacking their uh texas instrument calculator or they were like you
yeah writing like basic um you know at least the old timers and so the idea that you that was like
what personal computing was originally there was very little distributed software this was a platform
for you to write programs into and i i if i think i think ai could really um potentially unlock that for
people where if you sat down at the computer and you knew what you wanted to do you actually thought
about what am i trying to accomplish you might be able to prompt an ai to build that tool for you to
do exactly what you wanted and so now you define the teleology you define the purpose of this tool and so
you can keep it aligned to what you want and you can't it's very hard to rug pull you wrote it yourself
you have the code right there you're running it on your own data and it's a total reversal of how
most of us use computers right now but i think we're like weirdly incredibly close to that being
yeah i agree i mean i you you showed me just last week like how far along all the vibe coding stuff
is and and i i really feel like putting cursor ai into autopilot really changed my mind on a lot of
those things because i was actually able to produce something meaning meaningful in like 20 minutes
and something that i you know always wanted to have built for the last 10 months or so and no one ever
sat down and built it and now i can just prompt it myself like into existence but i think it's you you
you actually have to know the hard part now it seems to me is to actually figure out what you want
yeah and also kind of collectively speaking so so to speak it's like what do we actually want
as a like how should the next iteration of the internet look like what what do we want to get out
of nostr how should you know the bitcoin wallets of the future actually operate and look like like how
easy should things be how and again like to to towards the the the kind of uh the reason why
we're standing here and talking to each other is like there are no perfect solutions so you have to
find the right trade-offs you have to be okay with people shooting themselves in the foot for example
it's like either you babysit people like almost completely or they are powerful enough
to shoot themselves in the foot and also like shoot others in the foot potentially like
depending on what we're talking about no but it's an unsolvable problem it's like with with like for
example um the it came up today with like policing content on nostr and those kind of things and it's
like where do you draw the line who can do the policing and what is kind of okay content and what
isn't it it it largely depends on your worldview what is okay and what isn't and also where do you
where do you draw the line when it comes to policing like do you police all text content all image content
all video content all audio content do you police do you police the namespace itself you know i mean
there's plenty of offensive twitter handles for example right which i mean you've been talking uh i
listened to this podcast uh and you've been talking a lot about like there is no global
but that's even there is no global is kind of a a globalist it's an absolutist it's an absolutist
it's well it's like um i mean think about that policing like i i think i find nostr is the best i want
to start using nostr for instance for like personal knowledge management tools right yeah so that's
obviously something i'm very interested in i could spin up a relay i could start blasting events to it
storing things that i find interesting storing my notes on there i have a blossom server store my memes
and media and things like that on there that's solving something for me and it's not i'm not i'm not
me and by not intending it to be global it can be global enough for me it can i can make it highly
available yeah yeah yeah no but that's not what we mean i know it's but like i think something's
there's something similar when you start to try to start thinking about like content policing very
subjectively oh my god it it doesn't uh it doesn't only solve the problem for you it solves the problem
for you and future you and that's a big that's a big thing because you're actually like everyone who
ever wrote code knows like you're not one person you're two people you're there's you and there's like
the guy who wrote the code two weeks ago and you have no idea what you did and how it works and
like and good luck figuring it out it's a different guy and so that's what i what i like i i jumped
through like 15 different kind of note-taking and knowledge systems already and the the they they
all worked for me at the time but they never worked for future me and and the reason why i like
nostril so much is because it is is future proof just like bitcoin is future proof i know bitcoin will
be there for me period right like it will be there for future me and so so by building that in a in a
like local first way that it it works for you on your local relay for your machine but that also means
it works for your machines and for like whatever will come next like you'll be able to export the
data and you'll be able to have it interoperable and those kind of things right like one of the things
that nostril as it just the network explores the possibility space has iterated on amazingly is
the relay technology so yeah it's more efficient people are making these relays to handle you know
thousands of users with millions of notes and so i love i always love that in technology when i could
take a something off the shelf that has just been hardened by incredible amounts of like sqlite
it's just been hardened by abuse over the years and i could just use it in the happiest of happy
paths for a solo user i love i love how i i think that's another reason why i'm bullish on this like
solo prompted software for solo use is that you your software doesn't have to be nearly as complex when
it's trying to serve i would say very specific use i i wouldn't say that's necessarily necessarily so
let's try to sit down again because my my my foot is swelling and i there's only so much pain i can
take it's like you know i i i only run one lightning no it's not like three anymore because there's only
so much pain i can take no but i think we'll have this the way i see it evolving now i mean again like
we have the you know kitchen sink uh nostril clients like amethyst that try to do everything and
it's on it that's perfectly fine as well like don't get me wrong i'm a fan but i i still think
we'll have very specialized tools just like in a unix world where like there's one tool and it has
existed for like 25 years and it does one thing and it does it better than any other tool and so you
just use that i i do that already on the nostril site for example to update my metadata and so on
um i'll go to metadata to the metadata client then i just set all the fields and do all the things
i don't use a regular client i love that yeah yeah the smaller and paulo was talking about this
sec you know when we think of nostril uh proposals when the more atomic they are you know the much
more tractable and in in the more uh composable they end up being i know you're a big like files maxi
yeah so i think of like the files abstraction has lasted so long i i think it you know in some
sense it underserves the modern world kids these days don't know what files are anymore no no they
don't the tick tock generation has no idea but but like meanwhile like every you know the web is all
about apis um and so you have bespoke weird data formats or probably several per company and then you
communicate if you're lucky you get to communicate with it with an api and so the yeah i'm so hopeful
that in nostril can slowly just be like a bit of a type system like here is a standardized way
um to publish something there's so so so much upside to that and it's a chicken and egg thing
like you know a lot more people will find nostril useful if there's a lot of stuff on it and a lot
more you know there'll be a lot more stuff on it if a lot of people are using it but i'm i'm very
i i you know i'm old enough that i've been through like several cycles with you know i've i've been
rug pulled by multiple note-taking solutions uh like you know amazon just shut off the ability or
i think they're going to the shut off the ability to download the uh file version of a oh the cable
so you can't jailbreak yeah uh you can't strip the drm yeah you can't you can't use the thing that
you theoretically possess as you wish to use it that's that's what it means and i uh there's a
i have readwise yeah which can amazon doesn't make an api for my book highlights
so but readwise has a browser extension and it loads up a website on amazon that is a list of my
highlights it scrapes them and turns them into a their own version of highlights a version of
highlights and then i can access the api so i feel like i'm like exfiltrate i feel like i'm like a
super hacker trying to get out my own data and i just painstakingly generated over years and years
and years and years that's kind of that's why i mentioned the digital gulags you know like you
are oh yes you're you're total an iphone user i'm i mean so many nested digital gulags
gulag within gulags the russian nested dolls of gulags you're in the center yeah it's weird
readwise is great by the way in in the the way it it's it's a really good reader it's a really
good reader app like it does highlights really well uh hint hint pablo fix highlighter and it it
does the text to speech really well and it does also does this cool something i wanted to make
myself is like a spaced repetition for my highlights yeah oh i want again talking about how do i actually
make value out of all these things i'm collecting you know it also it integrates nicely with with uh it
it has auto summarization and this ghost reader the like gpt system that you can
ask questions on your stuff and also on the stuff you read and so but as great as all that is that
should have been like two prompts probably two different apps that i prompted yeah that should
have been you know if i had my highlights as my own notes i can make the space repetition
yeah like a prompt and yeah that's uh so like i'm like i and i feel like i just rolled the dice
and i happen to end up with readwise yeah yeah i'm lucky that somebody did it right yeah and they
have an api i'm lucky but for most things in my life i i don't i don't i'm there i'm getting snake
eyes but but they still have the same problem like everyone else because they are in charge they have
to host all the data they need to be in business they can go out of business and if they go out of
business everything is gone it does and so that's it's just that i can't it's not it's not tenable
especially the older i get yeah more of these cycles i've been through yeah the more more times
i've been rugged by the exactly exactly exactly it's like the the rug pulls must continue until
morale improves yeah but that's why i always bring up the you know crazy computer science professors that
have the same static html page for the last 35 years that runs on a toaster somewhere because they they
it's like one html file it's self-contained it never goes down you can put it somewhere else and
it's it's there again like they know what they're doing uh like just by by experience and understanding
this stuff and and so on and and i feel like the that that's why i became a file maxi like my whole
compute setup is built around the file systems and i just synchronize everything using sync thing
and like my books and my audio books and my music and absolutely everything like my my downloads my memes
my photos everything is synced with my swarm and i just have certain folders that are the root folders
for for like whatever like my my audio books that are and and i always have i have like a three-tiered
system i have the deep big archive that holds everything that's like terabytes of raid servers
and so on i have the working memory so to speak that's large enough to be on laptops and good phones and
then i have like the you know just mobile like where i drag and i'll drag and drop in like three
audio books that i'm gonna listen to for the next month or whatever and or the books i just want to
read that i have like the mobile folders and everything is set up that way it works beautifully because the
files are actually self-contained and i i try to use apps that um basically like my my audio book app
for example the audio book player that i use it will store every single note and bookmark that i
make in in separate files and it will have a position file like position dot that which means
like there's gonna be no conflict between the things and it just updates across the swarm and if
i use a different phone to continue to listen to the audiobook it's just everything is already there
it's very nostr style yeah would you do you even need to nostrify what would the upside be if this
was on nostr so what i would love to have is plug nostr into existing things like that already especially
for uh app configuration and those kind of things when i get a new phone i have to set up most of the
things from scratch i just want to log log in with my nostr identity basically and then it knows what to
do that's kind of it would be the best case i mean we we have this across you know like again like
if you if you're in the apple ecosystem you get a new iphone you log in and it's the same as the
old iphone just upgraded hardware if you're if you use a modern browser like you usually use browser
sync and so on and so all your extensions are synchronized all your bookmarks are synchronized
all those kind of things and and those are but those are all like they're their own siloed systems
and and and that's i think where where nostr can be very beneficial where it's like you can do the
same thing but in a non-siloed way i guess that's kind of how i feel with the the files a little bit
like they they somehow end up like i want to like kind of link things up a bit somehow make these cross
references between things like you know the audio book highlight i want that to be highlighted in the
kindle version and vice versa you know or i'd like to be able to make notes that like reference a
specific scene in a movie i feel like there's a lot of i feel like there's a lot of things that we
would have as personal knowledge tools if all of our things weren't built so siloed and drm'd and
stuff i feel like there's so much to explore there and maybe this is just me just loving
the idea of collecting data more than maybe i would actually use this very little but i think there is
an obvious need for that there's a reason why clips took off so massively for example both for podcasts
and also for just everything you know it's just all the platforms kind of had to build
clipping into their systems because the people they they wanted to they did this anyway you know
one thing about so in the olden days it was very common as a reader to keep a commonplace book you would
read a book and you'd have a book next to the book where you would write your thoughts on the book
as it happened um jonathan edwards has this like bible that's like think of a one page of the bible
as the top left corner so like one quarter of the page and then three blank pages yeah where he could
put notes so for every page of the bible he could write just tons and tons of notes and he also had an
indexing system for his like he had a notebook about like observations of nature and just like a
miscellaneous one and like a sermon notes so he had the kind of interlinking system but i just think
you know if if part of the problem you said what do we want to do what are we trying to get out of this
and i think with the personal knowledge stuff it's like i'm i'm taking in information to reflect on it on
how i can better act in the world and to better understand the world so even if i'm watching like
netflix slop with like lindsey lohan in it if i had a an important thing if i did some noticing and some
important uh insight i i want to pause it clip it like maybe voice prompt a very short essay about
or something and then i could resume you know like sometimes like if you're watching something
with a friend or something like maybe pause the movie like oh yeah let me explain this part to you
um i do that by the way i do that i have like uh my current workflow it evolved over the last 10
years massively but but again coming back to the note taking knowledge graph apps and so on so i use
standard notes a lot i i use it so much that it has trouble syncing because i have so much stuff in
there um so um it works reasonably well still but i'll i think i'll have to file a bug report soon
but i i start my day with a blank notes of the day note every day no matter what and it's just like a
bullet point list that is check box formed so it i'll put some to do's there i'll put random thoughts
there and i i have ways to annotate it and so on and i have ways to categorize it and and and but if i
have an inside reading something i'll note it down and i always have some device with me that's linked
up to standard notes to to this file and that's also why i like standard notes because you can you
can automatically like it syncs to the file system like every single note is like a you know whatever
markdown file and so on but uh so i'm not trapped in standard notes forever i know that
i'm already not but but it's it's it's so so i have the same need and i'll do this also when i
watch the movie you know i'll i'll note the name of the movie and i'll i'll note the inside and maybe
later i'll come back to it and make something out of it like you know wait and it's maybe this is such
a small quality life improvement but like why yeah why don't my digital devices know i'm watching this
movie i'm at this spot in the movie here's a frame grab from it and so what i like to take a quick
note i have the context of like whatever else i was doing packaged along and i feel like that should
be just so easy to do now and you you alluded to it when you were talking about um you know like the
old mac systems where everything kind of looked the same everything was integrated and so on
and so so what what you are describing i'm already doing but i'm doing i'm doing lots of things
manually like i posted a bunch of movie screens i just i just use vlc or whatever to go exactly to
where i was like i have my ways to do this rather quickly and then i'll just i'll just i'll just put it
in my file system and then i'll take my phone or whatever and it syncs you know with my with my
folder where i put my things and i'll post it out on noster but but we could do this in a way more
beautiful way where you just have a and always on working space you know like a very intelligent
dropbox where you can just put stuff in and and just if you want blast it out and that was kind of
the idea for highlighter as well for example like you know like it's and again coming back to readwise
reader you you have potentially so much stuff in there that's that's not it's not necessarily like
super private like highlights are not necessarily super private margin notes might be and so on but
if you want to publish it you could decide to publish it it might be useful to other people
and then you have suddenly uh uh you know like what i call swarm highlights where you can just
what does my my network think about this passage of the book what are the margin notes that people
publish those kind of things one one of the things that i i one of the apps i've always wanted to make
is called family bible and you make a tiny little social network with your family centered around the
bible so my family is all over the country and uh we all attend different churches so that means we're
having a different passage explained to us on any given sunday right i take a lot of notes at church
so i have and you know the pastor's always jumping around through verses so i have references a
commentary basically on tons of stuff and then all of us if we have a personal devotional time are
reading the bible separately and highlighting it separately and having thoughts about it and it's
not something you'd really want to publish broadly yeah but it's something you'd love to be able to
because it's a way of you'd love to share yeah and you're increasing serendipity among each other
yeah uh i i love that and it's like yeah because you know why do we do these social things ideal
ideally it's so that we can feel more present with each other when we're not physically present
you know if you if you go online and that makes you feel isolated and shitty
uh then something's wrong yeah and so but if you can go online and it like you spot a reminder of
why you should call that person or it makes you just you know remember them fondly or think of them
uh you know that's that's a win that's something that uh technology also another thing i thought
about earlier this is a bit of a tangent but i feel like you know you're talking about the manual process
you could already do this but it has a manual process i think one of the best indicators of when
we're using a computer well is that we're getting computers to do computer work for us yeah it's like of
all the things that it would be nice if a computer did it would be nice if it did some of my computer work
for me yeah because that is almost always a pure win i'm sure that there are trade-offs i'm sure but
uh if if something can be automated it should be automated basically yes yes and uh and ultimately
because ultimately the goal the end is not being on the computer yes i have an end in mind and if i can
get it done with less time on the computer that's just yes that's that's that's also i think that's
it's it's very interesting observing that in the in the wider noster culture basically there's lots
of people that are like trying to be outside as much as they can trying to make the apps and the
things that they build as like least addictive as they can be those kind of things um i i think
i think we've kind of lost the plot when it comes to technology or by we i mean like you know the
current iteration of silicon valley and and the the whole tech crowd where it's just like the name
of the game is making everyone as addicted as possible and it relates to the attention piece
that we talked about because if you have to you know use attention as your monetization proxy then
you need to maximize addiction to drive profits that's what you need to do so technology actually
doesn't serve us anymore like the the modern silicon valley technology most of the time doesn't serve
it's users it's it's the users are working for the platforms to maximize the profits and so on so
it's all kind of you know like lopsided but but um i i i i like where it's going with the with
the nostra crowd where it's you know like people um uh you know like actually touching grass and uh
being in the water and actually being outside that's also why i you know like i i wanted to
have these conversations not centered around screens and not sitting together and staring
into laptops and and sitting in in like a closed room like i i just i think we also to think about
things properly you have to be outside and like yeah find inspiration from nature and the other things
to figure out how we could how we could steer this into a more sensible also more human-centered
direction yeah i think we really go
astray when we're doing something that we have a hard time
analogizing to the real world like uh it's potentially a sign of but but there is also
there's also novel things that are kind of that we don't have in the real world and and you you
mentioned previously like you want to share it with your family for example the family bible idea
and so it's not necessarily public but it's also not like super private uh in it like not only for
you and and i think we like the whole internet evolved in that direction um where um like
group chats are the biggest thing on the internet basically right now i love group chats so so like i
don't know what the estimates are so i'm gonna pull a number out my ass but it's like 80 of the
the internet is like happening in group chats basically when compared to more open things like
you know twitter and and facebook public pages and so on so most people are hiding in like whatsapp
signal telegram private chats basically hiding quote unquote like they're not actually hiding it's just
like i want to share this but i only share with my i only want to share with my group of people
that's i think why why bitcoin twitter and now also nostor feels so nice because it's yes you're
publishing it globally but you also know it will only be seen by those people like no one else is
gonna care so it kind of is like a group chat a little bit it also isn't like for for for from
from a pure like technical privacy standpoint and so on but still like the the group chat issue is
always how private is a group chat if there's like more than five people in it you'll always have
a mole you know like someone is going to take a screenshot and just send it into a bigger group or
whatever so so so so you don't have any strong privacy assumptions in group chats in the first
place and so so so but we don't have that the reason why i bring this up is we we kind of have that
it's like if you're sitting at a bar and you're having a conversation or like right here we're sitting
in the park we're having a conversation we it it looks and feels as if we are alone but there might
be a guy like behind the bush listening to everything we say and in the bar the same thing
i'll join too but but in in a bar like that's why my my go-to joke for bitcoin twitter was always
like because people people got always so butthurt about like whatever drama and so on and they don't
realize that it's like okay this is it's not only like a meeting room or like a sports club where
people hang out and it's also a bar you know where it's also a playground like some people might be like
drunk right now you're arguing with them on twitter and getting upset and the guy might be out of his
mind high you know or he might be 14 like you don't know you know and and so so we don't i don't think we
have we have some things that we can compare with some meatspace things like again bars and and parks and
so on that we that where we can draw comparisons but it's still strictly novel and i think the main issue
with online discourse is that we unless you grew up on the internet we we lack good
instincts and heuristics of how to deal with people and let's just one one one more thing
then i'll stop the rant but there's people like jordan peterson who is completely butthurt about
online anonymity i think he's very misguided about this and and there's people that are better with
dealing with online trolls and toxicity for example like call it whatever you want but it's like
in real life we're really good with that because if the town drunk comes up to you and tells you
that you're an asshole or whatever or a liar you're you're not going to be upset it's the town drunk
the the difference with twitter is or with online environments is there might be a hundred town
drunks coming to you and just saying whatever outrageous stuff yeah i don't i don't quite know what
i think about the public timelines i i feel like something i've noticed about myself is that i'm way
better at loving people in the abstract than loving gg loving a person you know like um and so i think
there's something how do you mean that you'll have to explain it the concept of people i'd be much more
likely to do something for civilization rather than like if my brother asked me to go run an errand for
him i'd be like right like oh really okay interesting and i you know i i don't know if it's it there's
something about maybe it's just kind of this tech mindset that i've been in of kind of thinking of
people as kind of like just kind of the abstract people just the term people i i remember somebody
pointing this out about and you can you could hear it um when obama would say the word folks
you'd hear it in his speeches like he had he always had two terms for people there's like a big bucket of
undifferentiated people that i i may be able to pretend to care about but i don't necessarily really
care about and then there's like you know your wife your kids your family or somebody you know even if
they're a stranger that you have a actual personal moment with and you help them or you talk to them
or and those are two different things and i feel like when the group chat says small i'm dealing with
like i know these guys i'm talking to them specifically with their in mind that like uh we were talking
earlier uh before the pod about like theory of mind like i have a theory of mind how all these guys
are going to react i'm i'm trying to make all of them laugh or all of them think i'm racist or whatever
i'm trying to do in this group chat if it's small enough and when you get to a certain size
you're talking about your you have to compress it into an abstraction but but then also like it's very
uh you'll have high coherence in small groups and the coherence dissipates the larger the group gets
automatically uh so sort of stuff uh like like the the the the theory of mind that you have
of the group like the the the you don't have a literal group think anymore you can't like once
there's a couple hundred people have you seen that that that graph that shows like the liberals um
think more about like the plight of the like the remote person oh there's a it's really there's a
oh shoot i wish i could think of the proper nouns for this but but yeah so it's like basically the
conservative tendency is to think a lot more about your family and immediate friends and stuff like
that and you'll see it's you see it clustered in this chart right around the center people closest to
me are the people i think most about yeah and i care most about whereas the liberal
on this chart thinks the most and cares the most about like animal welfare yeah yeah in africa yeah
people far away from them i think that's kind of this idea and i think i personally just have actually
have that tendency okay so you you you care more about society or like the state of the internet
than abstract person rather than the person right next to me that actually okay interesting and so i
feel like that's something that i struggle with online of yeah the socializing online is um
kind of colored by that yeah yeah yeah i i still i mean a lot of the things that we we just went
through i think i feel like it's all related to web of trust but we don't have a good understanding yet
how a web of trust actually works in some sense because i mean some of the things that the people that
are working on this already ran into is like it's very hard to put it into one score for example it's
it's like it's like a it's like a it's multiple vectors basically you know it's like a it's because
lucky it's yeah yeah if we're lucky but it's like because it's also and i think pablo and i we talked
about this this this briefly but it's like it's you know like you have this uh i i keep i i always feel
bad when i repeat exactly the same things but i just i i
to make it through the rain and everything else but it's it's you are not one person and you're
kind of in in the middle of the overlap of multiple groups so your identity is not self-assigned first
and foremost it's like other people will tell you who you are that's why you also lose your identity
when you're in social isolation you go completely insane and everything else but it's like let's say
i'm a bitcoiner i'm also you know a skateboarder i'm also an austrian i'm also you know like a guy
who is on australia and so on and and so if i like i trust my group of bitcoin friends for example
with various things but especially on the bitcoin side or bitcoin adjacent things you know like i don't
trust them with on absolutely everything and that's just how it works that's how every web of trust
works and we don't have great ways to model this in in in cyberspace in meat space that becomes natural
it's like if you need help with i don't know like your gun you go to your gun nut friend you know
and you'll whatever he says what is wrong with your gun you'll trust him if you need help how to prepare
meat you'll go to your butcher or to whatever butcher friend or to your to your friend who is an awesome
cook or chef or whatever and so on if you need help with a computer and you need trustworthy input in
that department you'll go to someone who knows there like even if you disagree with him about like
almost everything else and so on and and so so that's i think it relates to the to the to the
group chat dynamic that's why for example you're you're and i'm sure that's true for everyone but
you're in multiple groups with the same people and it happens all the time and it's like we we're not
going to bring up sports or whatever in this group it's about this thing yeah this group is about this
thing with these people and there's a big overlap with with the people in it and so on yeah also you
said yeah you're not the same person with different people also you're not the same person over time
not at all i know that's also another like social insecurity of mine is tend to take the absolute
last the tail the tail last five minutes of interaction oh i think i i saw the hint of a frown
in the last five minutes this person clearly wants to write me out of their life they're just trying to
find a good opportunity to escape doesn't the bible uh talk about forgiveness uh yes well that you
know i i wrote a bunch of uh not nearly as successful as your writing but i wrote a bunch of essays on
trust and uh one of them was this idea of repeat games so you you could design a trust system where as
soon as somebody makes a mistake you just like write them off they're dead to you yeah it doesn't work
long but you there's not yeah you get the best if you have some yeah tit for tat that's actually the
best some a little bit of forgiveness yeah you're like hey i'm gonna assume that was a mistake yeah
um and and they actually i feel like they more capable like the bigger forgiveness budget that you can
muster yourself yeah you actually there's so much upside to it yeah uh no i think they ran actually like
they ran simulations and studies and all kinds of things on that and it's like turns out tit for
that tit for tat is actually the best strategy and for repeat interaction it's like it's it's literally
like what society has been saying all the time it's like three strikes and you're out basically if you
if you repeat the game with known participants and so on if you fool me three times then it's like
you're then you're off the table like there's it's going to be very hard to recover from that but but
just if you if you if you move to a new city for example it's like the best strategy is tit for that i'm
gonna trust you i'm gonna be open-minded and if you if you fuck me i'm gonna retaliate but then i'm
gonna be open-minded again basically i'm gonna be forgiving again this whole kind of a tangent but
the mission moving to new city i feel like something that we could maybe try to learn from nature is you
know it was much more common historically for people to be born in one town live in that town and die in
that town yeah and uh especially i think maybe before my generation but especially my generation
has moved all over the us and my family specifically we've come all moved away from where our parents
and i my brother's doing some genealogy i kind of have like a history of that like you know like
you know not too many generations ago a lot of my ancestors were in europe and then they like for
whatever original religious persecution moved to a different country in europe and then like this
isn't working out so they come to the u.s and then they moved around in the u.s and so i'm sure i'm
you know like bitadels bitcoiners talk about citadels and i do think there's something there's a yearning
for what if we were truly established and what would that mean to have a good enough space that my kids not
only want to stay here because they have a free house or whatever but they want to stay here because
this is where they think they'll thrive and create something like a multi-generational because i think
a lot of the the idea of yourself as an atomic individual bopping around and just completely
unmoored is not very human and we kind of represent ourselves and act like that online a lot but i don't
think that's actually very in line with who we're actually designed to be and i know i'm discovering
that more of that yearning myself in the meat space of wanting like what would it take for me to find a
place that i thought i would thrive and i thought my kids would thrive and we're going to build we're
going to build a town called millersville or whatever it is uh i i i i find that yearning
um and and this idea that it's so common for young people to think that they kind of have to invent
their purpose it's a tall order especially at the age of 18 yeah and um i think some people are
going to have weird ideas and need to go invent their purpose but i don't think that hasn't been
the norm for all it also usually doesn't work right it's like you you it's um just like you can't you
know self-identify and just make anything up you can't really you you don't define your purpose you you
if you're lucky you find your purpose but it's it's it's always something that finds you and that pulls you
and that you find really interesting for some reason you can't you can't choose what you find
interesting you you really can't you can you can the the only thing you can do is like if you really
want to pick something up if you want to learn how to i don't know like play the violin or play
chess or whatever you can maneuver yourself in situations where you're surrounded by people that
do that all the time but where does the impulse come from like where why why are you interested
in doing that in the first place you know it's like it's it's because and i i say this out of
personal experience like i didn't choose to burn down my old life and my my my existing career to
go like all into bitcoin and go full-time into the insanity of that all like it really really really
pulled me and and similar to to to the last stuff now it's like it's it's it really pulls me because
i see so much potential in it i can't help but be interested in it it's it's it's it's and uh you know
i i disagree with parker heavily i don't think it's a distraction i think it's essential to have
like an identity layer that is actually permissionless on the internet to have
self-sovereign self-sovereignty in cyberspace to have something that allows for maximum agency it's
like because the alternative is like you'll you'll choose your gulag is the alternative
which is not a great alternative and and i i really like what you what you what you said about the
the the time aspect that the multi-generational aspect that's on i feel like as a society we lost
all of that like we we had you know like the indigenous people had like they based their
decisions on in part like how will this affect our family seven generations down the line we don't do
anything like that but i think especially in cyberspace with the stuff that we're building now i feel like
we should you know like it's i i feel like we kind of do like bitcoin is very low time preference
also from an engineering perspective you know emission stops in the year 2140 so that tells you
something about the time preference of the whole system already and so whatever you build but i think
also on the industrial side like whatever it whatever you build like will my grandkids be able to use that
just as just as we design it just as we architect it right now because the fucking unix tools for
example to come back to that yeah they build it that way i still use you know grapple whatever that
like some guy is cooked programming language yeah i i think that's something beautiful and i think that's
part of it it's like by building tools with your grandchildren in mind that is potentially something
that they can stick around for it's like if you are an atomic economic unit and the things that you make
are just in service of a one specific company what what part of that company are you passing on to
your kids unless you have like stock options but even then like what is what is it for them to do what
is it for them to carry on like what part of the job um is it is is it is the is there to work on
because we're not going to finish it we're just trying to go in the right direction like we're we're
trying to lay a foundation of a cathedral and i'm hoping my grandchild is really great at stained
glass when the time when the time comes yeah i think i i i you you you touched on it uh briefly but i
think the i mean we we cite the sovereign individual thesis a lot because i think the book got a lot of
things right when it comes to the inversion of power that cryptography brings with it uh like i i
mentioned it briefly today i think where it's like the the the superpower that cryptography
gives you is that you have a shield that force cannot break like if you encrypt something and you
know what you're doing like even if the us and china and russia would collude to try to brute force your
thing they can't like that's very very powerful the second thing is that there is no barrier to
entry anyone can use it it's just math basically so i always bring up the the thought experiment which
is way more than a thought experiment like i i know people that actually did it and for some of my keys
i did this myself where you actually you can you can lock yourself in the bathroom where you where you
have high assurances of privacy flip a coin a couple times and you come out with a working bitcoin
private key which means a working way to receive bitcoin like you basically you come out with a
bitcoin wallet so to speak you know and so so so those two things the permission less nature of it just
being math and the force inversion basically that that like you you basically have a thing that no
amount of violence in the world can break open that's what that's what affords you all the you know
all the it affords yourself sovereignty in cyberspace but i think where a lot of
a lot of uh think boys turned the wrong way it's like that doesn't mean that you're you're gonna be
the the so the sovereign individual thesis doesn't mean that you're completely self-sufficient about
absolutely everything you're not an atomized thing bumping around in the void you will always be
embedded in a social fabric to get anything done like or to stay sane even to have an identity even and
you'll always be dependent on outside factors even if it's just the environment you know it's and you
you hope also that people would be dependent on you yes you want to be of service right like in
the best case it's like you you want to do something useful with your life everyone who ever tried to
retire probably knows this it's like you you're hanging out on the beach and sipping margaritas for
two weeks and it's like what are you gonna do it's like you'll be depressed instantly but but
the reason why i bring all this up is because you even in a sovereign individual environment so to
speak it's like you're still gonna need social connection you're still gonna need reputation
all those kind of things all the all the things that that we're working on on the nostra side
because you need a functioning social structure to make anything work really like i mean the austrians
know this is like you know i pencil what do you need to create a pencil from scratch the no single
person can ever create a pencil from scratch and and and i think what we are kind of
hoping to do with the next iteration of the internet is like break open that silos and let
the whole thing self-organize as opposed to like you know like three gigantic platforms dictate how
the whole thing works i think that's kind of the underlying ethos and i think it's not it's not a self
organization like a borg consciousness no it's more like a jungle self-organizing yeah yeah i think
there's a like a i think there's a real low role for leadership that i think i think bitcoiners are
naturally contrarian and anti-authoritarian and a lot of them have been burned by specific bad leaders
but if you think of like why do we have the good things that we have it's mostly because one
one individual thought really hard about something worked really hard on something pushed really
hard and then you know sometimes you could just push it off the shore and it works you know sometimes
you have to sometimes you need a captain on the ship you know i i think i think humans naturally crave
leadership and authority and it doesn't that doesn't mean by decree it's different than
because i said so like fiat i love when jimmy song says like fiat is latin for because yeah yeah
it's different than because i said it looks let there be light there's an earned form of leadership
where you defer to someone who's put in the work and it has risked something and is pushing hard for
something and we don't always have to defer to everybody all the time but i think we should be on the
lookout for uh for leaders and interesting it's interesting that you say that i'm not sure if i
agree it's in the in the sense of i know that the human like all humans like leaders and especially
charismatic leaders and so on like everyone kind of tries to find someone to to lead the way and and
kind of you know steer the ship and those kind of things but i when i when i wanna when i hope
i and it's it's it's it's fascinating to me that you're saying this because what what christianity
shows like as a christian you're saying this it's like i i'm in some sense yes christians are following
jesus yes but in in my mind and maybe i'm very wrong about it but it's it's like it's the right story
it's the right story to tell it's like it's it's not even yes it's the right person to follow but
it's it's it's in in my in my mind it's even bigger than that it's like it's like what what is the
vision you know like what is the vision what is the what is something that is worth aiming at and
that's what i want to figure out for i think that's the that's the peterson
heresy fair enough fair enough oh we found an archetype fair enough where jesus says i am
the way yeah yeah i am the truth i am the life but that's the but that's you said you just said i
don't and and i mean everyone who who who uh you know knows a little bit about this stuff knows this
but it's the early followers of of jesus of nazareth were uh um the followers of the way
and he said he was the way and the embodiment of the way so to speak and and and so so in the taoist
tradition that there is only the way you know there is like the uh and and i i feel like that
bringing it back to cyberspace and to the current iteration of the internet i feel like we lost the way
massively and i'm not sure if a person can bring it back i don't think elon is gonna save us i don't
think doge is gonna save us i don't think trump is gonna save us i think what we we have to ask ourselves
the really hard questions is like what should the internet be i i well yes we should ask ourselves
that question we should discuss amongst ourselves i think the thing is you know that this podcast is
no solutions only trade us right we're humans we're not none of us so if we don't have a person
none of us is going to be the jesus of the internet i hope not but what you i'm sure you've been involved
in things that are a design by committee versus designed by an individual a sahil
big one designer talks about this is the throat to choke you don't end up with an inspired design that
considers trade-offs when you when you are designed by committee you're settling for something that
doesn't piss anybody off yeah leader is able to to push for something that is going to make 20 of
the people really sad no great art was ever done by a committee yes yeah yes and i think we need a
little bit more of that art i see i see i see yeah that kind of makes sense now i i definitely agree that
um i don't know that's another balance to strike i feel like there are some systems that really
thrive on not putting too much weight on a single individual um again like i i pablo mentioned this
briefly like i'm i'm a huge believer in distributed cognition that's why i think like having these
conversations is super important having the having the the constant dialogue about this stuff is super
important because no single person is going to figure everything out it's just like there's going
to be a little nugget of insight here a little nugget of of insight there and like uh uh again
we're coining new terms and phrases as we move along because we're trying to think through those things and
we are i'm still convinced like we're missing most of the vocabulary to meaningfully talk about
this stuff and like uh like pablo and i we we already talked about like the the the um the data being
bearer and it's like uh um we landed on a different term just like yesterday which was uh
self-sufficient data or something like that now i'm blanking on the term again self-verifying
self-verifying where where it's just like if you have the data you have everything you need
where it comes from there there is no authority yeah it removes the authority from the equation
and then when i talked with with kelly like we landed on on a blinded custodian you know like it's
there's a difference between a custodian a regular custodian and the blinded custodian
there's a big difference and so we're figuring out all these all these terms and and we're doing
it by you know like participating in this distributed cognition i think saps is a great example for
example as well saps are not payments they can be payments but they are not exclusively payments
saps are also not tips i think and i think it was fantastic of will to not call them tips like i i you
uh you know i had a little bit of a say in that because i was like if you call them tips you're
only gonna get tips and it's just gonna be like you're exhibiting some leadership yeah no no
you know the thing with cheeses is that he ends up on the cross that's uh that's uh no no
fuck that not at all and and um like i i didn't come up with saps i didn't uh you know like not at
all i know the leader doesn't come up with everything no no but don't try to bully me into becoming a
leader of anything i i try to remove myself the the goal of this experiment by the way is to to to
to end it and potentially i think what we can do in uh these leaderless maloos is find people that we
tend to agree who have been have great track records like in bitcoin i love uh like uh bitstein
and piero shark oh fantastic what a track fantastic they started talking again uh by the way as well
like broadcasting yes that's great yes that's great to hear yeah yeah but reorg so many early
called shots yeah and i you know i love that so like people who have a long track record of being
right yeah um that you like have a good vibe about uh and that are speaking you know since i think are
are people that you you can like because yes one person can't make all the decisions but also as an
individual i am under indexed on all the knowledge i need to make the right decision for myself a lot
of times so i i'm hopefully looking to people that i view as wise as quality yes yes yes yes and i was
just about to say i feel like we have way too many leaders and way too few wise people and i i i so not
want to want to be a leader i can see myself smoking a pipe on the porch having a gray beard and trying
to you know just uh you know talk to the youngsters of of what they might not have considered you know
like we we have very few old people with experience that have seen that know
shit and and they're they're completely excluded from these conversations where and and verveke
always always asks us like where do you go for wisdom in today's day and age because people where
do you go for information where do you go for knowledge and where do you go for wisdom the
information is easy it's like you go to google chat computer whatever where do you go for knowledge
like it used to be the library all those kind of things and so where do you go for wisdom everyone
draws a blank there is no place to go for wisdom so i i don't think we need need leaders necessarily
like in the sense of oh we're gonna dictate like how this needs to be done but but i i i i think we
need i wise people i think when you even when you said that i it's uh the weather disagrees it starts
raining again so so god is angry with my me not stepping up oh yeah thanks
should we should we try to make the same move sure let's try you up to it let's try i'll see i can i
can walk again a little bit maybe with crutches and everything up easier than the stairs yeah let's
take the stairs but yeah no i think i just you know bitcoin as a leaderless system i think it's just
allergic to i don't think so at all i think bitcoin had a leader you know satoshi nakamoto and then he
left and then when i showed up to bitcoin uh it had a technically it had a a peter willa
that's an awesome peter willa meme it's like rough consensus like it's a scooby-doo meme where it's like
rips off the face that the bad guy is hiding under and it's like now we'll finally know
who we are consensus yeah i guess you have a point so you i think that's the thing is is there
that's my current belief is that there isn't such a thing as a leaderless system
people might not know uh exactly who it's like you know we all knew that uh joe biden wasn't
president we didn't necessarily knew know who was but i don't think anybody really thought that
there was some sort of like rough consensus going on at the white house yeah fair enough i mean it's
i don't know i again like i don't i don't i don't have the answers my best i can do right now is to
talk about stuff and i think i think i hope that we'll just figure it out along the way and my again
my main worry is that we're just going to repeat the mistakes of the past
and that's kind of like also what i mean by that's usually what the old wise guy is for you know
he's been around and he saw the things and he had the wisdom passed down from you know his granddad and
so on and so he knows what not to do he doesn't know what to do right but he at least knows what not
to do and i find in my life that i usually don't listen to the guy who tells me what not to do
and i do it but then i realize he was right yeah and so i recover from that mistake a lot quicker
with a lot sharper understanding of what just happened because my new mistake that i otherwise
you'd be lost probably yeah yeah so i mean i know that for you know i've been a christian my
whole life i read the bible i've got a million sermons you know i have so much wisdom from god
buried several layers deep under like a folder of tiktoks
in my brain and so when i make a mistake and i feel the pain of that mistake
i can it kind of reinforces the wisdom that i receive from the bible and also kind of like
prompts me okay let's go back what was the bible say what was the specifics of that passage what else
could we like really lock in this learning that is one of the most frustrating things getting older
making the same mistake over and over it's bad enough to do it one time but making the same mistake
a bunch of times that's really that's really yeah i like the saying let's make new mistakes you know
like that's that's way better do you prompt the bible at all uh i um i kind of use it first i'll
use a ai for search of the bible okay what was the passage all right what's diverse that mentions this
and that okay if i'm like i can't remember the exact text because i as far as i'm aware people
build systems where you actually can talk to the bible basically in some sense and respond in some way
i mean i just there is so the they um there's a a thinking in christianity of of being what's called a
confessional church which is a church that is modeling its theology on like the old confessions of
faith like i believe in god the father son you know like the those kind of uh the idea that there
has been a corpus of um theological truths that have been derived from scripture over the history
and that i build on those and so i don't just uh go to the bible without any context or help so i have
i have like two thousands of two thousand years of historical good teaching on the layers build up
on that yeah yeah and so uh i wouldn't trust the ai to like mix those carefully chosen words written
like hundreds or thousands of years ago into like a new sentence no i wouldn't trust the precision
all right so be careful with bible flop yeah don't be careful with javascript
slop no it's not as dangerous there's no confessional javascript yet
no i just i just i just i i was assuming that you would because i i see you prompting
you know almost everything now uh you're a prompt expert in my book you showed me the ways
of cursor and all that stuff so i love the i love the sensation of moving quickly and i think
a lot of it is this based on like what am i really bringing to the table here it's the intent like the
why and the how or not the how the why and the what yeah i'm deciding what should happen and why it
should be happening i was never the world's greatest coder yeah it's always shipping some bugs so now i
can ship the ai's bugs and i can move like 10 times faster so i love it for that um but you know
it's interesting you know you know that thing with like when you see an article in the newspaper on a
topic that you actually know a lot about and you see how many mistakes it makes and we forget that then
you turn the page yeah all of the articles are probably that mistakey i know for instance with like
creative writing because i used to you know write uh professionally like write essays and stuff like
that ai can't come close to uh what i would like out of an essay it is so far from inspired in that
sense yeah yeah i actually think i think code ends up being ai is really good at code because it's such a
small subset of language yeah it's actually it's it's impressive how good it is at language but it's
so far from the level we use language at yeah we'll see how all that evolves like i keep being impressed
um and like i mentioned like i i i read all the ai books back in the day and was a big like
you know part of the singularity crowd basically and just like we're gonna hit the knee of the curve
anytime now i feel like we're all we're very close to the knee of the curve now with just um
the way that the llms work and still improve and there is no tapering off in terms of improvements
really again like verveki has great arguments about why ai won't reach like sagi status anytime soon
unless we decide to embody it and like actually give actually put uh the llms into robots and let them
learn by experience as an embodied thing in the real world and all those kind of things like he has long
long chains of arguments around it but it's still it's still very impressive to me what the
things can do and it's especially impressive on the coding side because you can single prompt your
way to glory into something that like basically works and i agree on the writing side like when
it comes to creative writing they're not great and you can most of the time spot still spot when
if something is generated or not like it always has kind of the same feel to it in some way and uh i mean
you know like they are not truly agentic yet because they're not self-motivated and thus they are not
inspiring to use your words you know like they can't inspire they they can't even inspire themselves
yeah well there's a lot of there's a lot of thinking on like where where new information comes
from and i kind of have a theory that like if you you could think of if you think of the universe as a
closed system humans are accessing a lot of the universe and therefore are discovering more about it
and then we learn new information that is at least new to our corpus of texts and discoveries
and stuff like that and then that's what we feed into the ai so it's possible that the embodied ai
will have access to to such a broad something more like you know the actual universe so therefore
so much more information but i don't think that a closed system can invent new
information well well i think we'll find out well uh someone is gonna you know some crazy chinese or
russian guy is gonna is gonna try and put these things into a dog robot i have to admit i've been
very underestimating the the reach of ai as much as i love it right now uh i mean ai has been
the wildest shift in technology i've experienced in my life and i was paying very much attention
when we went online and when uh the um the web 2.0 era and the iphone era i was paying very close
attention for several a couple of those i was a technology journalist and i've never felt something
that especially probably because my profession is coding and it's that's the profession most impacted
by this it's wild that like a year ago i was handwriting code yeah it's like it's like a year ago
i was a like it was a different era as a shovel digger yeah and now there exists like you know bulldozers
yeah sandwich said it well today where it's like if you know what you're doing you basically have
200 like very capable coding peons under you you know that just can like if you divvy up the tasks
correctly and if you know what you want to do and build the right kind of um system for the agents
they will just build all the things and what would have taken you a team of 20 people in six months you
can do solo in like an hour and what i love about this is a part of it is exposing what are humans
actually for yeah i feel like we're in a constant discovery process like turns out you know the
there's a famous do you know the john john henry story no this is like an old american folk tale of
john henry he's like basically the world's greatest um steel driving man so he's hammering rail ties
and then they came out with a machine that could hammer rail ties so they put in the machine
against john henry and john henry went as fast as he could and he beat the machine but then he dies
and so it's like it's like the swan song of the steel driving man
and so it's like we you know we put our identity in the one
it's the it's the german fairy tale version of a happy ending you know
he beats the machine then he burns alive or something like that
yeah so that's the you know we're always you know i i think i feel the same
i strongly disagree about with tucker that we shouldn't let the ai take over like truck driving
for instance because the truck driver that is not who that guy is that guy that guy has an incredible
that guy is responsible for carrying millions of dollars worth of goods around he can wake up in
the morning he's he could be upstanding pillar of a society but he's gone on the road all the time
and so um you know if somebody finds all you know absolutely just loves being in a truck all the time
i'm sure we you know they could find i mean we saw that with horses right it's like everyone had to
ride horses for transportation and now it's like if you really want to ride horses and it's your thing
yeah you can i think we'll still need good training data of what good try driving actually looks like
yeah i think i think we'll you know i'd say with code we need we need luddites who hate ai
to write really great code in new programming languages so that we can trade ai yeah we need a
trading set of of carefully thought through information yeah we'll see i think i'll link
to i'll have to send it to you um again very can makes a great argument about
like he has a theory of mind i would say where
he may he makes a great argument like what would be missing like why why why is ai not wise right now
like if we if we could have silicon sages then he would be in favor of having them like if we could
build ai that is as wise as as jesus or as laute or like pick your you know as buddha you know um
then that would be fantastic like you have your own personal jesus in your pocket basically that that
will never mislead you and will always have right have will always point you into into the right
direction you'll have a wise sage at your side but he has great arguments of like why we can't
have that yet and what is still missing until we reach that point and kind of we have to make a
decision as a society if we would want to have that for example because it's it's not going to be
all sunshines and sunshine and rainbows think of two
counterfactuals for why that could exist i think of the conscience and uh the um the muse i think we
have reference to two things that are you know you do not build up a conscience by like going through
like the utilitarian arguments until you derive morality like conscience i think is something that's
built into a human i think it's god given and then the muse you creative people have been visited by
yeah something yeah over the ages that leads them to do something new and i don't i don't think it's
just derived from their collection of experiences necessarily i think that's something there's something
more to it yeah yeah i don't have an answer to that at all like i'm not sure if the muse will
visit you know claude sonnet hasn't yet
but we'll see we'll find it out all right i think i'll need to lie down now okay my foot is swollen
my brain is fried we it was a walking thing after all because we got rained on and we had to walk twice
at least 40 steps into this conversation and yeah no i i i feel like we we we there were like
five things that i wanted to hit on with you and we we kind of didn't it's maybe maybe let's end on
that i i i want to i want to i want to pick your brain a little bit like purely on the current
nostril development side so um you've been you've been working on hypernode for a little while now it
was an experiment of the of the first cohort and came out of that and i was super excited about it
because i was like okay we're gonna we're gonna bring back the good parts of the old internet in
some way um what are your current thoughts about it and i i think it evolved like the last time you
showed it off just just last week uh there was lots of new thought in there so what's your let's
end on the intention what's your intention for for the project is it's it's it's really twofold it's
it's it's geo cities the just the pure personal expression and then it's micro app development
so you know before we had the web there was hyper card and that was a very easy to use
gooey drag and drop way to make like an app for the mac like mist was originally written as a hyper card
so you can make these interactive applications with very minimal scripting and so you know right now
the way we make software for the web is we're piling a ton of shit on top of each other to to make it
happen and everything's kind of written from scratch right like in some sense it's like the way i i read
it what you were saying is like you'll have the vision for hyper node would be to have predefined
elements that work out of the box just like html forms for example or those those elements right
or hyperlinks yeah um and but that are like highly composable and also customizable and styleable
right did i get this right somehow in some sense yeah yeah i think i think so so yeah it's like it's
basically if you have um it's a good example if you have the intent to make an app uh and you have
you already we already have a win we already gave you a back in for free yeah so you have nostr as your
back end so now what do you want to do with the app well you you have to decide what should the app do
and you also have a user database uh a social graph login everything built in you have these dvms
you can have all these compute built in yeah so what i think we could have is kind of a standardized set
of elements just like you know the the web got you links to link to other hypertext documents
and forms with buttons to post yeah information to a server yeah that was basically what the web and
you could express ebay and google yeah and yahoo and like basically most of the web 1.0 that we know
was you know fairly javascript free and you could express really great apps so if you had elements
that represented like here's a profile here's a zap button you know the things that we already use
nostr for let's make a hypermedia representation of them that you can import into your app so yeah i think
of it as kind of like an easy way to make a nostr app um also and hopefully and this is where it gets
harder and why i think it's going to take some iteration hopefully a way to express an interface
for a novel nip so i have a new thing that i want to add to nostr but there's no clients that support
it yet and so i can express the interface for that as a hypernote and publish that hypernote and now
clients that support hypernote have at least a placeholder ui for it before they want to integrate
it themselves or maybe they never need to or want to um and so in the long run i mean you know i
really want to make an operating system so if this becomes a good way to define applications and i and
the operating system is built around like a personal relay you know then you're making little apps you
know you sit down on your computer you decide what you want to do you pray about it and you build a
little app that does the thing and that's a that would be a good day um you know what we have now
we have so many layers of legacy i mean literally the easiest way to make an app for your phone
is to use this thing called react native yeah which is like a using react which is an abstraction upon
top of javascript and this thing called jsx which is a version it's kind of like the dom but it's not
the dom and then you run a javascript runtime and then that's orchestrating swift ui components
which is all pretty still kind of based on objective c and then the actual operating system is written
in c you know there we have so much so many layers of complexity in our current tech stack and a lot of
that is incidental to it being written by like trillion dollar companies and when when we need
to work in the small we actually can't afford to have that much complexity we can't maintain that much
complexity so i hope that we can find simpler more direct ways to do things and i hope hypernote
could be a part a part of that and also maybe it will just be like a resurrection of adobe flash
oh my lord i remember these days let's let's maybe not bring everything back let's be selective
but yeah no i'm i'm super excited about it i i like where where stuff is going just in general i i feel
a lot of the things are currently converging i think the building blocks that we already have are
are being understood by more and more people so that has me uh quite optimistic as well and i mean
the the um you know the llms in particular like it's what's so amazing to me is that you can actually
you know like today like i i did nothing else for the last couple days now it's just like you can just
prompt the thing to hey use pablo's ndk use like the new vertex dvm that came out last like last week to
calculate a web of trust core and so on and it will grab all the info from github and docs and
whatever and it will throw it together and it will work so that sure as hell is gonna accelerate things
as well like accelerate um you know things on our side for building freedom tech for sure as well and
i appreciate this podcast this that this attempt to share some of this wisdom and so that we don't
have to make the same mistakes we'll have to land on wisdom first uh sure that would be nice but
vendors can be choosers
no but it's like that that's why like i i really appreciate the conversation because i i knew that
you were going through the early days of the internet very very closely like you were very close to all of
that it's very apparent by just you know like the listening to you speak and and watching what you
put out and so on and i i feel like our kind of um generation and the people like even older than us
we're we aren't dead old yet but i think we learned a lot by living through the early iterations of the
internet yeah and and sawing the platforms rise and fall and and and again like everyone everyone has the
same story like it's it's it's it's not the first knowledge system that you use you know like it's
probably the tenth and yeah and so i hope that we can explain this properly and like pass this on to
the young guns the early 20 somethings that are building this stuff if i could be so bold as to
give some assigned reading for something i wrote back when i was at the verge you know google glass came
out it really creeped people yeah they called them the glass holes the glass holes yeah and so i
always loved the idea of wearable computing because i grew up reading wired magazine which would profile
like the mit wearable compute lab and stuff and so i ended up writing a piece for the verge about um
wearable computing and the history of wearable computing and it was this idea of
hyper personal compute that we really lost track of and we can't we're we we at least are smart enough
that we don't trust facebook and google with things so we actually can't allow computers to reach this
like level of to even enter up basically yeah we can't use computers how they were used in the personal
computer era because we're so dependent on these really scary foreign aggressive antagonistic
forces yeah we'll fix that too blinded compute will fix that like serial knowledge compute will fix that
i talked with kelly about this that's that's gonna that's gonna be a thing as well and like
that already like it already works not even like in theory it really already works and and so you can do any compute
in a blinded manner where you then then you don't have to trust facebook or google there's nothing they
can gleam from it so it's gonna lead to i think very pure marketplaces of compute and also of storage
and so on and well i think we'll see this integrated in nostril with dbms and all the other things but
it's like it's still a little bit of prompting to do prompting and praying prompting and praying
what we'll have to do to bring all that about absolutely all right that was lovely i'll give
you a hug and then we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna see if we can make it out alive out of this
park all right thanks so much for that that was fantastic so i'll do one more snap before we turn
it off just to make sure in case i i don't know i want to cut something in the middle that's still
beeping okay let's turn it off