BTC Sessions - 4 CRITICAL Flaws in Cloud Services: Sovereign Computing with Matt Hill – Mentor Sessions Ep.001

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Are you trusting Big Tech with your data? In this premiere episode of Mentor Sessions, we sit down with Matt Hill, CEO of Start9, to uncover the hidden dangers of cloud computing. Matt breaks down The Four Critical Flaws and explains why the cloud is a ticking time bomb for your digital life. Discover how sovereign computing offers a way out, empowering you to reclaim control with self-hosted, privacy-focused solutions. From the convenience trap to the future of open-source tech, this conversation is a wake-up call for anyone online today.Handsome Host: ⁠Gary Lee Mahmoud - x.com/GaryLeeNYCSmart Host: Nathan Fitzsimmons - x.com/theBTCmentorTimestamps: • 00:00 – Intro: Meet Matt Hill & Start9 • 02:14 – What is Sovereign Computing? • 15:23 – The Four Flaws of Cloud Computing Unveiled • 47:35 – Start9’s Solution: Own Your Server • 59:38 – Top Tools to Start With (Vaultwarden, Nextcloud)Connect with Matt Hill: • Twitter/X: @_MattHill_ • LinkedIn: Matt HillExplore Start9: • Website: start9.com • Twitter/X: @start9labs • Community Forum: community.start9.com • Private Support: start9.me (Access code required)FREE Bitcoin Book Giveaway:New to Bitcoin? Grab a free copy of Magic Internet Money by Jesse Berger! CLICK THE LINK:https://bitcoinmentororange.com/magic-internet-money Don’t have enough time to learn Bitcoin Self-Custody? Get Personalized, Expert guidance at Bitcoin Mentor. Check out https://bitcoinmentor.io/ Subscribe to Mentor Sessions:Don’t miss an episode—hit that subscribe button and follow us: • BTC Sessions: https://x.com/BTCsessions • Nathan: https://x.com/theBTCmentor• Gary: https://x.com/GaryLeeNYC BITCOIN WELL is the quickest and easiest way to get Bitcoin directly into self custody. They also offer non-KYC sells and bill payments. Transparent 1% spread, no additional fees and no withdrawal fees. Check them out today!https://qrco.de/bfiDC6Mine Bitcoin like a pro! 🚀 BLOCKWARE offers rigs, hosting, and a Marketplace to buy miners instantly or sell anytime. No long-term commitment, total flexibility. Start mining today! 🌟 #Bitcoin #Mining https://qrco.de/bfiD4ZBOOK private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted.https://bitcoinmentor.io/#CloudComputing #DigitalSovereignty #Privacy #Start9 #Cybersecurity #Bitcoin #BitcoinEducation

Hey all, today on Mentor Sessions, we were joined by Matt Hill, the CEO of Start 9, a company that developed self-hosted privacy-focused server solutions. He talked about sovereign computing, laid out the four problems of cloud computing, and offered solutions for you to take back control of your personal data and privacy. Awesome. Good morning, Matt. Thank you so much for joining us today. I want to dive, like, right into it. So the last time we spoke, we actually talked a lot about sovereign computing and disintermediation. And I wanted to kind of expand on that and give that to people who might not be aware. So even just to kind of kick things off, could you give us an idea of like what is sovereign computing? What are you guys talking about there at Start 9 when you bring this concept up? Sure.

So I'm not sure if there is a dictionary definition of sovereign computing. I haven't actually looked that up. But the way we think about it is computing in a way that does not require the trust, involvement, permission of any trusted third parties or untrusted third parties, third parties of any kind. Third parties in computing or any kind of network fall into two categories that is custodians and intermediaries, right? Those are the two ways that a third party can be involved in any interaction or trade between individuals. And so when we say sovereign computing, we mean both non-custodial and non-intermediated or disintermediated.

And but not taking away from any of the things that you could otherwise do with your computers today. So people have a level of, and rightfully so, have a level of expectation about what they can do on a computer and on a network, namely cloud computing, the ability to sync information across devices. they expect, you know, instant availability of their data. They expect to be able to communicate with anyone, anywhere, at any time, with, you know, maximal convenience. But the way that this is done today, by and large, is through both custodians and intermediaries. And so we call that, broadly speaking, cloud computing.

That is the dominant computing paradigm on Earth today. and we uphold sovereign computing, which affords the same degree of user experience and features, but does not in any way, shape, or form involve intermediaries or custodians, leaving the user a totally independent sovereign entity within the digital world. Now, how we do that, I can get into more details, but that is the overarching definition and goal of sovereign computing. Beautiful. I do want to kind of expand upon that a little, too, because even like,

My first instinct is that usually whenever we're talking about something that might be moving away from these cloud services, disintermediation, it usually means that there's quite a bit of a tradeoff in terms of experience or convenience, right? But I think that's kind of at the heart of what you guys are trying to capture. Absolutely. That is our battleground is convenience because many, many different products and industries have proven time and again that the general population will always choose convenience and security over independence. and freedom, whether that's in the political sphere or the technological sphere, convenience is king. It needs to be easy. It needs to be featureful.

And to date, sovereign computing required an enormous amount of technical expertise to accomplish. It has always been possible. In fact, it was easier back in the day before all the intermediaries and cloud services came along. Yeah, well, it was easier in the sense that it was the only way to do. There was nothing to compare it to. You either had the technical chops to participate or you didn't. So maybe it wasn't easier, but it was more common.

Yep. Okay. Amongst the people who were per capita, amongst the people who were actually using computers on the early internet, almost all of them were using it in a totally sovereign way. Whereas today, per capita, the vast majority are using it in a totally non-sovereign, intermediated and custodial way to the point where those who are not are negligible blips on the radar. There's like a handful of people on earth who are legitimately using the internet in a sovereign way. And we are just trying to reverse that trend and not only just because we think it's cool or fun, but because we think it's of the utmost necessity for the prosperity and sustainability of the digital humans in the information age and in the digital realm. We think that the current model is not only unsustainable.

sustainable and inefficient and of which it is both, it is also dangerous. There is a severe potential consequence to the manner in which we are using information and computer systems in the world today. And so we view this as a necessity. I forgot your original question. No, we're just going like, what is software computing kind of going to lay, get a lay of the land. Oh, it's about U.X. Yeah, about your experience. So our battle. Matt, I forgot the original question, too, but your answer is sound fantastic. So I'm on. board. Sometimes I just talk. Beautiful.

Battleground is convenience for sure. And so what was lacking, okay, the reason why it was so, why it is so inconvenient to be a sovereign in the digital realm is twofold. One is that it relies on the availability, existence and availability of open source software. Okay. So closed source software, one, not only can't be trusted, but two, is always paid for. It's always hosted by a third party, therefore intermediated, usually custodied, and always paid for either in the form of data or direct monetary compensation like monthly subscriptions. So closed source software has no business in the sovereign computing paradigm. It just doesn't belong. It doesn't connect at all. So one is that open source software, by and large, is not as good as closed source software, okay?

At least- Why would that be just because there's no profit? Yeah, okay. Funding. Okay. So, you know, Google has billions of dollars to throw at market researchers, product designers and engineers to build these optimal, wonderful user experiences and beautiful user interfaces. Wait, money makes sense. things better?

Money makes things more convenient and more beautiful at times, but better depends on the timeline, right? I think that they're creating a horrific future for humanity, so in fact, it's much, much worse. But money gets things done, right? Money gets things done. And so they're able to produce these really beautiful, high-quality user experiences. And then the massive trade-off, of course, is your freedom.

but they are able to create great tradeoff. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Well, for a long time, it was misunderstood. It was hidden. People didn't realize that was the tradeoff. And more and more, they are realizing that and they are looking for alternatives.

So here's what's, so here's what happened is that the open source world in a way enables the closed source world because all these closed source products are still at some layer relying on open source libraries. So open source is both beloved by the Googles and Microsofts and apples of the world because they get to use it for free and ride on the backs of people who are doing this as a passion project or relying on charitable donations. And they get to use it and then incorporate it into their closed source products. So in the way, open source enables closed source. But on the other side of the equation, closed source then outruns open source in practical usage, in product. design and applications that people can actually effectively use with convenience. Well, here's one reason why we're very optimistic is because we believe that there is diminishing returns in how much Google can supersede the user experience of an open source

alternative, okay? Because it's like there's only so good a messaging app can get. Yeah, I was going to say, at some point you kind of reach the end, right? Yeah. It's just an asymptotic, right, limiting function where it can only get so good. They're, you know, in the early days of messaging applications, nobody knew what the correct user interface or user experience was. And so Google and Apple and all them put billions of dollars over multiple decades of work into creating the perfect messaging app, right? And it expressed itself, in my opinion, in the form of like telegram as being like the great closed

source intermediated custodial messaging app. But now that it exists, the open source world has minimal challenge, reverse engineering that, especially the user interface and user experience, because those aren't even code. Those are just right in front of your face. And so I view in this odd kind of serendipitous or ironic way that everything that the closed source tech giants have been doing over the last couple decades was just the R&D department for the open source world, right? All those billions of dollars, I'm like, thanks, guys. We didn't have that money.

You did. You did all the research and design work for us. Now we're just going to build the same fucking thing that you built, but we're going to build it in open source and give it away for free and destroy your entire business model. And so that is where we're going now. The tide is turning. They have no more advantage anymore. Their money is worthless at this point because they have nothing left to throw it at.

There's only so good a messaging app can get. No, I completely agree. I'm curious on it. I'm going to give Gary, I apologize. I'll jump in a minute. You know me. I love to hog the mic. I'm learning.

Do you think this kind of like open library to close source to open source was a necessary path? Like it almost had to evolve in this sort of way. It was always going to maybe play out that kind of way. I mean, sure, historical determinism. I don't know, man. I don't know how rigged the universe is. I just know that this is the way it went down, and I understand why it went down this way.

It was because a few very smart people in the early days of personal computing and even more so in the birth of the internet understood that this was too much for the average person, right? that the average person was never going to learn enough and gain the skills necessary to be an independent in the computing networked world. And so what they did is they said, well, there's a business opportunity there. There's something that everyone wants, but no one knows how to do. So we'll just do it for them and sell it. And I'm like, that's fine. That's not an immoral thing to do.

Okay, like, let me turn off my messaging stuff. That's not an immoral thing to do. It was a very rational thing for them to do, right? What Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did was very rational and fine. It just had this inherent consequence that I'm not even sure they understood it at the outset, right? Which is that when you imbue any system, any corporation, government, or organization of any kind with sufficient control or power over systems that are important to people's lives, no matter how benevolent. benevolent and well-intended, the founders were eventually as that system experiences turnover in personnel and as it is subjected to powers that are greater than itself, namely the sovereign state,

that it is inevitable. It is a perfectly understood equation that that system will eventually be corrupted and used as a form of control. and control can be expressed in the form of extortion, right, by charging fees that are by artificial price inflation, surveillance, ultimately limiting the freedom of the people who use it. And that is what has happened. So I don't know if it was necessary to go down, but it did, and I get why it did, but it's also run its course, in my opinion. It has reached its logical conclusion of high cost, invasion of privacy, censorship, and ultimately very insecure, because when you have these massive intermediaries and custodians, they are obvious and pretty, to be honest, easy targets for hackers ranging from individuals to other corporations to

nation states. They're just, they just, they're in defense. At a certain level, computer systems are indefensible unless it's Bitcoin. And the reason that that one is defensible is because of proof of work. But any other database can be hacked because there's an individual with the keys to that database. And all you have to do is socially engineer that individual. And that's pretty easy to do because humans are not, you know. Surprisingly easy from what I've read.

They can be had in a lot of ways from threats to blackmail to bribery. Man, it seems like an unbelievably familiar story. especially being Bitcoiners too, that like, okay, the founders had good intentions, but as long as there's a centralized kind of control and there is some power to taking advantage of it, it's just a matter of time until the whole thing gets corrupted. Gary, I'm curious kind of like where you're at, what you're thinking right now. Did you want to throw a question to Matt? Yeah. Let me approach this as if I'm an idiot, which I am. You said it's really important in long term to have this be decentralized, this intermediary, open source. You also said that people are going to go towards convenience. It's just that's what we do. Like, this is convenient, I'll do it, whatever. You already touched on why some of these issues are important long term. A centralized database, anything can be corrupted.

People can be gotten to. You can get into it. But the normal person says, you know, this is more or less convenient for me. And you're talking 5, 10, 20, 30 years down the road. I'm not worrying that far in the future. I get to see pictures of my kids and do stuff and share it. Why is it so important long term? I'm not saying I disagree with you.

But for the people at home. Why is it so important long term to kind of move away from this? Yeah, fantastic. So I had touched on it, but let me elaborate a little bit more on kind of the fundamental problems, the irreconcilable, irreparable problems with cloud computing, okay? Because there is no way to solve them within the paradigm of the intermediated custodial cloud computing paradigm. So one is this invasion of privacy.

Okay. So when you are conducting business through a third party, that third party is a trusted entity. And again, over time, when people are in those types of positions, it's invariably going to be used in ways that you might disagree with. Okay. So as it stands, the business model around cloud computing is largely data mining. It is to under, that's where the incentive points to. It is to understand as much as possible about your users. so that you can better advertise to them, so that you can create better user experiences. And that was kind of where it started. And now there's even this added incentive from the state to surveil users. They are being coerced into doing this. And I think that, you know, there's a lot of people, good, smart people that I've known in my life, who take the stance of like, I don't care if Google was reading my emails. I don't care if they have my photos.

I have nothing to hide. I'm a good person. I'm not a wanted individual. And that's their fundamental stance. And to a degree, when the stakes are low, that's not the worst stance to have. But it implies a degree of misunderstanding about how history evolves, right? How political systems can evolve. Like you're not a wanted person and everything you're saying and your text messages and all the things you're liking on social media are not going to get you in trouble today.

For now. But you don't know what's going to happen what change in political regime may take place that then puts you on a radar for the things you used to say when they were okay to say it. Okay. So privacy is to a degree in insurance policy against political changes. in the future. You don't know what might be held against you eventually. So that's number one. Number two is they underestimate the vulnerability of these servers. People say, I don't care if Google has my photos. And I'm like, okay, but do you care if some random hacker from Russia has your photos? And they go, well, sure, but Google's not going to give it to them. I'm like,

why do you think Google servers aren't going to get hacked? Because they're storing everyone's photos, that is one hell of a server to crack. And all it takes to do that is to find the right people at Google who have the keys and then to socially engineer them, get the keys, and then leak everything. And when that happens, and as it already has in many cases, they don't just get your photos. People are using these platforms for sort of comprehensive life needs. Your contacts are there. Your documents are there. And when you get that amount of information about an individual, you can use it against them, right? Imagine if Google photos gets hacked. And there's a few people in the world who are just like, no big deal. But there's going to be quite a few people who might

have some photos up there that they don't want everyone to see, right? Even if they were perfectly legal and wonderful. And it was just something you were sending your husband, right? It wasn't intended for anyone else's eyes. Well, if someone gets a hold of that photo and they also have your entire email and contact list, they can send you a ransomware email trivially and just says, hey, check out this photo. If you don't send us X amount of Bitcoin in the next 24 hours, this is going to hit every single person in your life and the internet at large. We're just going to leak it to everyone.

And we haven't seen a lot of that yet, but it's coming. That is within our future and driven by AI can actually be done very cost effectively, right? And everyone can send those emails out to anyone. You could inspect every photo, find anything that is deemed to be racy in any way, shape, or form, and then email that person threatening to ransomware it to their entire social network unless they pay Bitcoin. And that's a few keystrokes if you've programmed the program properly. So I just view this type of stuff as inevitable. And that's number one.

That's literally only the first issue is this invasion of privacy, the fact that your data and information is sitting on public cloud servers that are protected by some guy at a bar with the keys to the kingdom. Okay. Yeah. That's number one. Number two is censorship. So, and we've seen more and more of this as well.

When everyone is communicating through these third party custodial intermediated platforms, these platforms have enormous power to create the narrative, right? To determine what is true and what is not true. And this is less commonly done in the way that most people imagine through direct censorship and deplatforming. That is not the way that censorship takes place in the modern world. The way that it takes place in the modern world is through algorithmic amplification and deamplification or shadow banning of certain content, okay, where nobody even realizes that

it's happening. Like somebody could be totally shadow banned and only suspect that they are. There's no real way to kind of prove it. but it's not even the shadow banning that is the primary means, right? Like outright deplatforming somebody is stupid at this point because it actually brings attention to the person who's being deplatformed, right? You're actually better off as the state censorship apparatus to just amplify the shit out of the messages that you want to be heard and just let the other ones just kind of like fall by the wayside

and seem like no big deal or even more so just make them seem clownish or conspiracy theory-esque, Right. No social approval. The main message, you don't even need to silence the other one because it's inherently silenced through the amplification of the primary message. But then on top of that, they do the algorithmic suppression. It doesn't get the same reach. And it's super effective and really, really easy to do.

Like they've mastered this. And so any platform, I'm not just talking about like social media, right? Just any kind of platform where you are going through the intermediary, you're agreeing to terms and conditions. and you never read those terms and conditions. And what they say in every case is our way or the fucking highway. You do what we say. It's our platform.

It's our world. It's our data. And we're going to do whatever we want with it. We're going to amplify it. We're going to deamplify it. We're going to suppress it. We're going to hide it. We're going to kick you off if you violate our terms in any way.

And you click OK. And you're just handing over your voice effectively to these platforms. And it has and can and has been continuously used against all of us. in ways we don't even fully realize or comprehend. So that's number two. All right, guys, if you're new to Bitcoin, we've got something special for you. We're giving away copies of magic internet money by Jesse Berger, a must-read comprehensive introduction to Bitcoin.

It's our gift to help kickstart your learning journey. Just scan the QR code or click the link in the description down below to grab your copy now. And people are waking up to this. Number three is outright cost. just economic inefficiency of brokers and middlemen, right? Like in any deal, a middleman takes a cut. So it is always less economically efficient and more costly to work through someone

than to deal directly with the person that you're trying to trade with. And they are middlemen, right? Like for all the good that it might be doing at the moment, like X is a gigantic middleman in between all of, the news and human interaction, middlemen got to get paid. And so they're going to get paid in one of two ways when it comes to software. Software that is not charged directly like it used to be. Like you buy the CD-ROM and install it and it was like a one-time cost. That doesn't exist. It worked when it shipped. It was great. That doesn't exist anymore. So there's two ways that the cloud

monetizes its users. One is through data mining and the monetization of that data, primarily to the sale of advertisers, but also to the sale of the state. Make no mistake, these platforms are making a fortune on selling information to the FBI. So that's number one. And that one, people are gradually becoming more and more not okay with, right? As evidenced by them electing political officials to create laws to then force companies to give you the choice of whether or not your data can be mined, which is why now when you open up an app, it says like, hey,

can we collect your data and like everyone on earth hits no. And so what this means in, you know, downstream of that is that these companies can no longer effectively monetize data like they could 10 years ago. And it's drying up pretty quickly, right? They are still finding ways to monetize, but it's just not what it used to be. Yeah. And so the only way that they can then backfill those revenues is the only other option for making money in the cloud is monthly subscriptions. These like $5 a month for tier one and $10 for

tier two. And they're becoming increasingly desperate because their cost centers are growing. The regulatory costs are growing. Cyber security costs are off the charts these days because they're so much pressure from the political sphere, the regulatory and political sphere, to protect data that they're paying a fortune to do it. And so they have to make money. These companies are all going to go bankrupt if they don't. And so my prediction has been, and it has been playing out and it will continue to play out, is that the free tiers that everyone loves, you know, where you used to just see an advertisement here and there and get your data mind, they're just going away. They're just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking to the point where the free tier is basically just like a trial

day, right? Like nothing works after that day. It's just they're getting less featureful and shorter in time length. And the paid tiers are just getting steeper and steeper to the point where, especially if you're a business, you're paying out the ass for software at this point. Your monthly software costs as a business are a serious and growing cost center for CFOs to deal with. And we're addressing this as well as a company. It's something that will be coming later this year. We're going to be catering to businesses in order to help save them money and take back their sovereignty as businesses. So that's number three.

This is cost. It's getting out of control and it's going to get even more out of control. People are going to be shocked at how excessive. expensive their phones are in the future from every single app on the phone charging them $5, $10 a month. It's going to add up. And then the last one is something that I touched on earlier that almost nobody thinks about is just the counterparty risk of everyone storing all their data on a couple centralized servers, which is, you know, these servers become targets.

And we haven't seen a whole lot of like full-scale cyber warfare yet. it's still a relatively new addition to the human human society like these large scale critical digital infrastructure is still relatively new you're only talking about like 20 30 years and when a global war breaks out it will largely be fought in that realm and people are going to be shocked just like in world war two how many bridges got blown up people are going to be shocked to see how many servers get hacked and blown up in a global cyber war. They're going to be shocked to realize how insecure these things really are and how easily they can be attacked. And if your information is on that server, just like if your house was in that city, you're not even being targeted.

You are not the target. But the city gets blown up nonetheless. So you are collateral damage. your civilian collateral damage if you keep your information on the thing that is being attacked. Generally speaking, if a city is under siege or being bombarded, you should probably get out. And so that is our messaging to people is get out of these servers, get your information off of them, or at minimum, stop doubling down on it sooner rather than later so that when they do get hacked, you are not as impacted as everybody else, that you are relatively secure. those are the four none of those can be solved within the cloud computing paradigm itself they are inherent to it and therefore we view the paradigm as a whole as completely unsustainable and doomed it's dead it barely lasted the night to be honest it's only been here for 20 years yeah look in the context of history and the history of personal computing in general it's like this is a blip in the radar this is going to be something that we look back on in a hundred years and just go how silly was that stupid mistake where we thought that everyone could just pile their information

onto a few central servers and conduct all of their commerce and information and interactions and personal data through those servers and get away with it. It was just a stupid, silly mistake in the history of humanity. So we could possibly go wrong. Yeah, yeah, go for it. I don't want to take your fire here. Everything you said, it makes sense to me. And I'm coming at this from kind of a libertarian and cap philosophical type. So all you're saying to me is like, yeah, this is great. I agree with it. It makes complete sense.

But the first one, I did have a question. I knew a follow-up question as well, but I might leave the follow-up to Nate. The first one you mentioned was privacy. What do you say to somebody, including somebody like myself, who is almost black-pilled to a degree for those who know what that means, where it feels like hopeless. It's like, okay, sometimes my dad and I will talk about my finance because he's, you know, he wants to be sure his grandkids are going to be okay.

And I'll say, okay, sometimes I say, Dad, turn your phone off. I'm turning my phone off. It's going to another room and talk up at this because I don't want what we talk about to be picked up. But then I think to myself, it's the United States federal government. If they want to know something about me, they're going to find it. There's no way I can actually hide this. You know, there's satellites in the air.

If they want to, they can track me walking out of my house. So at the end of the day, this is all just a matter of like, how far are you willing to go to try to protect yourself and to what degree is it hopeless anyway? Do you have any thoughts on that? Of course. The scenario that you just laid out implies that you are a important target of the U.S. government. Like as an individual, as an individual, okay? If you are on the FBI's top 10 list, there's nothing you can do. Run and hide. Okay. If you are a wanted, targeted criminal or enemy of the state, even if you're not a criminal, run and hide, right? Do the best you can to hunker down and get out of the country or whatever you got to do. There's no way. way for you to exist in this country and conduct your life if that's the list that you are on. How many people are on that list who are listening to this podcast? Zero. Zero. No, you're unimportant. I don't even fucking matter. And I'm building the technology and they have to be able to

take them out and they haven't figured it out yet. I'm not even on the radar. I'm literally not even on the fucking list. Everyone thinks they're on a list. You're not. You're, you're unimportant, right? It's a sense of vanity that is untrue. Okay. You really, really have to be a threat. Okay. Matt, my mom says I'm pretty darn important. And also very handsome. I'm just saying. And funny, too.

Yeah. It's all the things. Yeah. So for everyone else, okay, like Bitcoiners have this tendency and I love it because it's like, you know, if you shoot for the for the stars, you land on the moon type of thing. Sure. Bitcoiners is like perfection or death. Yeah.

If all the governments combined could possibly hurt. hurt me, it's somehow inadequate. Failing to take into account the real threat model of your life, okay? So, you know, is your home defensible against a thousand, a battalion, right? It's like, no. But does that bother you when you go to sleep at night? No, because you're like, there is no battalion coming to my home. Like, you'd have to be delusional to think that that is the case. And so it's the same thing with the cyber realm. It's actually very easy. to be private, really private, like invisible and secure in the cyber realm with minimal effort. At least that's what we are striving for, right? Like that is the whole point

of our existence is to make a reasonable degree of privacy and security available to everyone. Not if you're on the FBI's top 10 list. You can't help you. Nobody can help. Right. But if you are just a normal person with a normal threat model, then you're going to be just fine. And that's our goal. Is security for the average person, even if you are not, even if you are on a list, you'll probably still be okay. You just can't be on that list. You can't be on the, right? But even a more benign list, yeah, you're going to be fine. Because most of, you know, the way that our technology works does not involve intermediaries or custodians. So it would require actual good old fashioned detective work in law enforcement. I mean, they would have to come like serve a warrant and take your

server, right? Like if you're, say like you're on a- Do we still do the warrant thing? I thought that was passee now. It would just come and take. No, warrants are absolutely necessary for a personal server in your home. So when you, when you put your data onto a third-party server, like when you upload a document to Google Drive, for example, or if you just text message someone using iMessage falls under what's called the third party doctrine that says the second you agree to custody your data with a third party, it is no longer protected by the Fourth Amendment. It is not protected by the right to unreasonable searches and seizures. So they are allowed to, law enforcement is allowed to anyone, to go to Google and just say, give us his data.

They don't need a warrant, nothing, because you gave it up. You relinquished. It's like the private thing. By giving it to Google, you basically said it's not my property. It's their property. So Google has, it's their property literally. Just because you said the text doesn't make it your text. It's their text.

You gave it to them in the terms and conditions. And so it's not protected. Right. But if it's on your server, if you're using a phone to upload a file encrypted over the, you know, over an internet overlay like Tor, a private encrypted internet overlay to a server in your home where it is then stored and then accessed from your other phones and laptops, that is 100% your property. It cannot be searched or seized without a warrant. Not in this country, not if they want to abide by the law and the Constitution, which again, they don't always have to. But again, we're not talking about that level of attack vector. Sure.

That's top 10 stuff, right? Like a normal person, you're not just going to have the FBI raid your home and take a server with no warrant. You know, this is not going to happen. So it's safe. It is your information. It's your data. What we are trying to do effectively is just bring the analog world that existed where privacy was the default, where property was respected in terms of law enforcement and make it possible in the digital realm,

which is, to be honest, obvious. It's like it must end that way. Otherwise, we've given it up. We've lost the progress that humanity made for thousands of years towards these constitutionally defended Democratic republics, You know, and which throughout all the human history, though there have been downfalls and blips in the radar, has been a progression ultimately towards increasing individual rights and freedoms. And I don't think that's going to stop. We're just experiencing a little bit of a blip, a downfall right now because the technology outran our understanding of the technology. And that's not going to last for very long.

We are going to catch back up. We've now, we're starting to understand the mistake that we made. And computer systems that Start 9 enables are the solution, Bitcoin and, you know, other decentralized, self-hosted, non-custodial, disintermediated systems. That's how we win. That's, and I don't just mean we, the free people, I just mean the human race. Like, this is necessary for our own survival. No, I completely agree.

And I'm even reminded, too, of the idea, like, because one of the things that we're talking about with the convenience tradeoffs at the beginning is that we've also, I'm hoping that we're the resurgence in a culture that is privacy-minded, where your first instinct is like, yeah, I have privacy, not like, oh, I don't need it. It's fine. I'll trade it off. That I feel like at some point along the way we just got too complacent, right, and started going, well, like, I have nothing to hide. And I feel like that maybe even was, I feel like the guard of like the Iraq war and kind of that kind of terrorism scare in the U.S. took a lot of what would have been more privacy or conscientious conservatives or libertarians at the time and got them very

comfortable with kind of handing over, going through the TSA and getting the full. pat down. It's like, no, no, that's what I do as a good person. Like, it shifted the ethical vibe to it. Well, in that one of it was just obfuscated, right? Like, people didn't understand that it wasn't private. They actually thought they were being private. Okay, take Snapchat, like early days Snapchat. Yeah, yeah. For example, okay. People thought that they were taking nudes of themselves and they'd be gone. And that the person they were sending it to would like see it for a second, then it would be gone. And that it was like a message between person A to person B and then it was delete.

If they had understood the truth of that interaction, which in the analog world would have been the following, I take a Polaroid of myself. I hand it to some Snapchat employee, not in an envelope. I just am like, here it is. There I am. Go show it to this other person. But first, photocopy it and put it in your records. So photocopy the Polaroid, put it in your permanent records, and then go show it to this other person for a few seconds, and then take it away. Matt, this sounds pretty hot.

In a person, yeah, some people might really be into that. But the vast majority of the people who were using that platform in that manner would never have used it had they understood that that was the reality taking place. And so it's really just we just didn't understand the technology. I agree. I would have assumed it was encrypted. I was actually quite shocked to say it wasn't at least in the envelope. Come on, no envelope. every single picture ever taken on a Snapchat app

is sitting in a Snapchat database unencrypted visible to everyone. How many people are sweating balls right now hearing that information? I don't know, but they should be. I don't know if they are. They absolutely should be. The other thing that stood out with me too, I was curious, and I might be getting the name wrong, but if you're familiar with, I think it's Kevin Mitnick and his work,

I think it was human hacking was his book or social engineering. Oh, just beautiful that I found these stories. of these basically hackers getting into different databases and buildings and information. And it was always through people. The person was always the weak point. It was dumpster diving. It was getting the same logo as the company that comes in and cleans. I heard one story.

I'll never forget it because I thought it was brilliant. It's that he needed the key, the UBee key. You needed the information off that to get in. And only did to see every morning he checked the weather in the location and waited for a snowstorm. And as soon as he had a snowstorm, he bet that the guy wouldn't drive into work that day. And he called security to go like, hey, I can't come in. Can you go to my office and read off the UBee key for me? And that was it.

That's all he needed to get the information. Security went, oh, yeah, totally. Went in and read everything to that. So the social vulnerabilities is the people there, too. And the other thing that I was thinking about... Computer systems are fairly secure. Yes, it's exactly it. Encryption works.

Encryption works. You know, it's people. Yeah. It's always people that tend to be the vulnerability. Even with when I'm having conversations about Bitcoin, they will say, like, well, I don't want a single point to failure. And if you can sign a transaction in any way, you're the single point of failure. That's always there.

There's nothing I can do about that. otherwise multi-s you're not exactly but even then if you can still collect them extreme

exactly nothing is perfectly secure you're just making it harder and harder you're the only thing I guess would be perfectly secure

is you can't move it you burnt the keys of time locks have fun yeah well that doesn't help much it doesn't help you much either

it looks to spite nobody's yeah nobody's stealing my big one I fucking lit it on fire fuck you jokes on you

and the oh the other thing that stood out to me too was the um social consensus as well too is that absolutely you're going to have people that are collecting all this aggregate data so they can look at one if they're able to affect and two how to move social consensus they will use there's it's it's too valuable to be able to steer the herd towards one thing or another that it won't be used to try and i think manipulate people at large if it's not already being done so we agree perfect Nothing else on that. So Matt, and I'm sorry to jump in, but, you know, if you want to follow up on this, in what ways can people do affirmative steps to better secure themselves in this regard?

And how can start nine make money off of it? Great. Yeah. So there's varying degrees of action that people can take, right? It really depends on how protected they want to be against the four things that I listed. that will invariably affect their lives. Perfection is unattainable, but something is better than nothing

and a lot is better than something. So the various tiers that somebody can take is to one, opt for encrypted applications whenever possible, things that are at least advertised as. It's very hard to prove when you're not actually compiling and running the code yourself, you really can't prove that it's not a trap, right? Like Signal, for example, is one of my favorite examples of things that everyone rushes towards.

But it's like, you don't really know what code is running on your phone. You don't really know what code is running on the server. They publish their code. It's open source. But because you didn't compile it yourself, the code that is published for you to view might have nothing to do with the code that's actually compiled and running on your phone and server. Yeah. Oh.

This is a giant fucking net from the NSA. You know what I mean? You have no way of knowing what code is running on your phone or on their server. Wow. Because you didn't compile it yourself and you're not running it on your own server. Is it better than nothing? Maybe. Might be worse.

You know what I mean? Because you have a false sense of security. Yeah. But it's a net because so the fundamental principle in, I don't even want to say cybersecurity, the fundamental principle in cyber surveillance, okay, is bad guys hide, good guys don't. It's the fundamental principle that is used and adhered to by the surveillance agencies. Is anyone who is trying to hide is a person of interest.

And anyone who's just using iMessage and writing on Facebook is not. And so in a way, you're almost better off hiding in plain sight than trying to use platforms and failing. So if you're going to try to hide, you better succeed. or else you are on that more benign list, we'll call it, right? You're still not being targeted. You're just being watched. C rate, C rate. Yeah, you're being mass surveilled along with all the other people who are trying to hide.

And so things like Tor, where you're using Tor to visit a normal website, right, and therefore including what's called an exit node. So there's different types of nodes in the Tor network. And in order to use Tor to visit Facebook.com, you have to go through an exit node. And there's just, I don't know about proof, but it's pretty well understood in the privacy community that using an exit node is a highly compromised thing. And you're totally identified and that it's a gigantic net from the NSA. So if you're using Tor to visit a normal website, you're actually better off just visiting that website without Tor because now you're being watched. it hide you from the website.

So if your goal is to be anonymous from the site that you're visiting, it works. But if your goal is to hide the fact that you're visiting that site from the state, it's not going to work. So it really depends on who you're trying to hide from, right? Depends on who you're trying to be private. I got to read my watch my porn. Right? Correct me if I'm wrong. But my understanding was basically like it's, if not impossible, it's damn near impossible to hide within the geographical region that you're in.

So like you're in the U.S. and you're try to hide from the NSA. You're kind of just screwed and whatever kind of local infrastructure for each place that you're in. Is that relatively correct? I don't think geography has much to do with it. Really? Okay. Yeah. That's a good question. I have to think about that a little bit more. But, you know, you try to hide. If you fail, it was worse than if you didn't try to hide at all. And again, try to hide is probably the wrong phrasing here. It's like preserve your privacy. You try to preserve your privacy and you didn't do it perfectly. You would have been better off not trying to do it at all in many cases. So maybe it's better than nothing. I don't know. In my world, if you want to do anything to be private and secure from these third-party surveillance, censorship, the inevitable hacks and you want to save some money, right? Like if you want to escape all four of the problems with cloud computing, you can't use the cloud.

Signal is the cloud, right? You're still just using a third party custodian and intermediary. Signal is a custodian and an intermediary. You can't beat politics with politics. You can't beat the cloud with the cloud. You need to get out of the cloud if you want to be saved from its downfalls. So that means running your own server, period. there is no other way to do it.

You have to run your own server, right? Because if you want to do cloud computing, I should say, right? Like you can just not use computers, or you could use computers that aren't connected to a network. That's great. But if you want to use the internet, you want the benefits of cloud computing, which are huge and wonderful and highly, you know, their gift to humanity is wonderful what cloud computing enables in terms of productivity and convenience. then you have to run your own server. There is no other option. And it's always been that way, or always been that way.

It's only been around for 20 years, but it's always been the case. All right, guys. Now, a quick brief message from this episode's sponsors. Bitcoin Well is the best place to be buying and selling Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. And now with Bitcoin Well Infinite, it's also the best place to be making large buys at their OTC desk of over $50,000. Their white glove service gives you fast transactions, no slippage, and the lowest fees. You can scan the QR code on the screen or simply head to Bitcoinwell.com slash BTC sessions to sign up today. And you can share your own personalized referral link to earn commissions.

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Go run your own server. Have at it. Go run your own server. You know, find some open source software to. to download and compile and then install it to the server, configure it, set it up on a network interface, set it up on Tor, you know, trust the root certificate authority and blah, blah, blah, it's just like it was a non-starter. So if the only solution is to run your own server, that self-hosts open source software,

and you don't even know what the hell I just said, then you're hopeless. You're stuck. You're imprisoned. You're bound to this. There's no way out for you. And so that's what we set out to do, is to provide a way for a normal person to own and operate effectively and in perpetuity. And I use those words, you know, with intention because there are similar products out there that enable you to run a personal server, but not effectively and not in perpetuity. Like their essential value proposition is like, we can get you up and running with a personal.

personal server in like 30 seconds and it's super cool and fun and you're up and running and then they're like and then you're on your own. Yeah. You don't wait to update and maintain. There still is a lack of understanding in the general population of what it means to run a personal server. It's like running a farm. You don't just set it up and throw the cows in there and then they milk themselves and

clean up after themselves. It isn't how it works. Running a personal server is a, it's an endeavor and it's never ending, right? There's always software updates. There's always power outages. There's always internet outages. There's always problems with servers. They're very, very difficult to own and operate.

And the people who are capable of doing it are called Linux systems administrators. In some case, DevOps engineers. They make a ton of money. They're highly valued at companies. And they still fucking go down from time to time. So it's a really hard thing to do. And so what we set out to do was to build a tool set that enabled a normal non-technical person to own and operate effectively and in perpetuity a personal server and to on that personal

server install and use effectively open source software as opposed to SaaS products that are custodial and intermediated in nature. It's a big undertaking. In fact, there are so many people in the Linux world who have systems administration skills who don't even take us seriously yet. Really? Yeah, because their stance is like, it's kind of vain, in fact. They're like, you can't automate what I do. You can't make it such that what I do, this Joe Schmo could do too. There's this sense of like, and rightfully so, because they were correct five years ago.

But we have done it, right? We haven't completed the job yet. There's still a long way to go. But what we have done, I am very proud of. and we know how to do the rest. We actually, at this point, feel like we have solved the problem. There's just more building that needs to be done. But we actually know now how to create a server with an operating system.

When I say create the tools to help people do this effectively, what I'm referring to is start OS. I'm referring to an operating system that is purpose built to embody the entire Linux systems, administration skill set and experience into a graphical interface that a normal person can make sense of and competently use. Again, a crazy thing to say five, ten years ago, and we've done it. It works. It's not complete. It's not perfect. I still don't advertise it as grandma-friendly. We advertise it as computer literate friendly and IKEA friendly. So these are my two things. Okay. To use StartOS effectively, you must be computer literate.

And the way that I define computer literacy is do you feel comfortable going into the settings menu of your Mac, Windows, iOS, or Android device, and making changes? I thought you were going to say terminal. Just settings menu. Can you go into the settings menu and make changes to your system and feel confident in doing so? That's computer literacy in my world and how I define it as it relates to start OS. Number two is can you put together IKEA furniture? In essence, what I'm asking is can you follow directions? Can you put the materials on the table that it says to put on the table? And then step one, connect this bar to that part.

Step two, do this. If you can do those two things, if you're computer literate and you can put together basic IKEA furniture, you can fully and effectively own and operate your own personal server that runs StartOS. And then on top of it, we know you're still going to be nervous because it's totally foreign. It's not IKEA furniture. And it's not the settings menu of your iOS device. Those are the skill sets that we require, but this still is different. And so you're going to have questions.

You're going to be nervous. You're going to make mistakes. Which is why we are so hell-bent, adamant on providing the best customer support in the world. Period. Name a company. Name an industry. We provide better customer support than they do. Our customer support is instantaneous, one-on-one. Hold your hand, answer your questions, that level of competency and engagement. And we know that we need to do that. Otherwise, even the people who have the skill and the desire to do this, many of them will still fall off simply because of emotional stress of trying to do something and not knowing if they're doing it right. They want that. They want their handheld. They want. to know. You guys know this. This is your business. Right. So we take it very, very seriously and we're very good at it. And that's our product offering as a company is we make a free and open source operating system that anyone can download for free and flash onto a computer that they own, which means we don't get a dime. They could buy a device from us that's plug and play with StartOS pre-installed.

Comes in a nice box. You plug it in. Just works. It's super cool, super easy. So effectively, we're selling convenience when it comes to hardware. Full disclosure, I have that right over there. Awesome. So yeah, we're selling convenience when it comes to our hardware sales. And for the people who have a computer and have the competency to download and flash StartOS on their own, effectively take the DIY approach, we sell support if they want it. At present, that means a $300 one-time fee for a lifetime membership to our private community support server. that is staffed at present 18 hours a day by one of our technical experts who is on call

to help you with any questions you have one-on-one. And we think $300 for a lifetime membership to something like that. Lifetime access to a technical expert in the very product that you're attempting to use is one hell of a deal. And that's how we make money. We either sell convenience. Oh, by the way, if you buy a server from us, it comes with that membership to the server. It's not an add-on product.

So I briefly want to touch on it. I do want to be respectful for your time as well too, Matt, but one, I want to get, even if we could just lightly touch on it, you're unbelievably passionate about this sort of stuff. And I actually don't know if there's anything of where that came from in terms of like how you found yourself in this position, fired up and ready to go on sovereign computing. And then number two, I wanted to cover if there was anything, someone's just getting started. They've got maybe startOS flash on a device and they're getting to work here. Where should they begin? What are some like high ROI things from the community marketplace that'd be worth checking out? So my passion is part of my personality.

So everything I've ever done has been with passion, whether it's athletics or some business or whether I'm just working for somebody else. I somewhere or some point decided that it was passionate perfection or bust or death, you know, I just like, I live my life very aggressively, intensely, passionately, but it is absolutely in degrees. It's very hard for me to get passionate about something I don't care about, right? So if my personality, which is hyper-intensive, hyper-focused, hyper-passionate and intense, aligns with something that I think is really good, and that suits my skill set as well, like something I feel competent in, then you get an endless source of energy and and relentless

effort. And so it's not something I say. People who know me the best often feel very challenged by me. I am extremely demanding of other people. I'm also very understanding. But it is passion and perfection or death at Start 9. And so that's what the team is all about. I've filtered for that quality.

Also competency, skill experience. Right. The must-haves. But beyond that, primarily we look for people who believe that what we're doing is important and who feel that they can contribute and deserve to contribute to its success. You know, this aligns for me from every angle. It is the technology. I'm enamored by it.

It's fascinating to me, Bitcoin and decentralized network systems. Encryption also, right? These technologies fascinate me. Skill set-wise, I'm a developer by trade. So I code. I love coding. I don't get to do as much of it at Start 9 as I used to or as I used to in my life before Start 9, but I still go on my headphone binges for hours on end.

And it's like painting. I just get lost in it. So I enjoy the work. And then politically speaking, right, like from a, from a philosophic principle and political layer, obviously I'm a, you know, crypto anarchist, libertarian, you know, I shouldn't even say crypto anarchist, basically an anarchist. I understand why government exists in certain circumstances. It fills the void where technology falls short.

And so I'm not literally and fundamentally and absolutely. against any form of government. I just think that it should be appropriate for a given society at a given scale. And then eventually fade away because technology will eventually afford all the things that government has been traditionally needed to provide. And so, yeah, for me, it hits every angle. It's politically, philosophically, economically, skill. So I love what I do. and that's why you see the way that I am. Secondly, you asked about kind of what somebody could do very practically once they have a server. So that was my prerequisite.

It's like you want to do anything at all. Get yourself a server. There's no other way around it. Get a server. And there are competitors to start OS, right? There are other ways to run a personal server and you should try them. You absolutely should try them. Do your own research.

I obviously advocate for the thing that we build because we think we're building it right. But once you have that, once you have it set up, which is a few minutes of time, you know, most people install Bitcoin and start syncing it. I mean, that's the fun one. It's, you know, join the network, run a node, have a voice, right? It's your citizenship on the network. It also provides, you know, a degree of self-reliance. You're not using somebody else's node. You can validate your own inbound transactions.

You can broadcast transactions without asking for permission. So there's a lot of practical reasons to run a node. and then there's also this kind of like, you know, just joining the network. Participating. Having a voice, if there's a fork, the software that you choose to run will make a difference insofar as you are actually using your node. It will actually make a difference in the fork war. So there's a lot of reasons to run a node and it's very fashionable and it's very fun.

But, you know, on even to be honest, more practical note, the first thing that I recommend for people to install is Vault, Warden, which is the open source version of Bitwarden. I shouldn't say. Bitwarden's also open source. Vault Warden is just skinnier and designed for single usage as opposed to catering to a million customers. It's a password manager. When it comes to cybersecurity,

there is no higher leverage action that you can take to secure your digital world than to use a password manager. If you're not using a password manager, you are fundamentally insecure. There's no way that you are using the internet securely without a password manager because it means you're either using the same password

for all of your websites or some tiny variation thereof, which is basically the same thing as using the same password. Or you are like have them all written down on a piece of paper or something like that and maybe that's kind of secure, but that's just kind of an analog password manager. You are using a password manager at that point,

which is not a good one. So you need to use a password manager. It's the number one most important thing you can do for your cybersecurity life. And then if you're going to use a password manager, you should use your own password manager, as opposed to subscribing to some SaaS product like LastPass or One Pass, where you are literally dumping your encrypted passwords onto somebody else's server. Not only are you relying on their uptime and benevolence to terms and conditions, again, right? They can cut you off. you're probably also paying them.

And they get hacked. They have been hacked. Last pass got hacked twice in the last three years. And both times had to put out a broad announcement to their entire user base that was like, oh, turns out we weren't using as many like iterations for the encryption as we should have. And so these can all be brute forced. So you need to go change all your passwords immediately because there's a good chance they've been leaked. And this is a huge revelation for people because they're,

thought they were doing like the most important thing they could do for their cybersecurity and it turns out that they leaked all their passwords by entrusting them to a third party and a lot of people showed up to start nine thereafter and was like we want to run our own password manager now on our own server all still fully encrypted meaning even if somebody like physically stole your server which they're not going to do because they don't know that it's there and they don't know what it has on it and they wouldn't know how to crack it anyway but they're all still fully encrypted so even if the server got stolen nobody gets your passwords um so anyway that's the number one thing. It's also really easy. It's a really easy first thing to do. So it gives people the confidence to then want to do more. You don't want to start with the hardest thing. You don't want to start with, unfortunately people do do this, but you don't want to start with like L&D. Or you don't want to start with like a lightning node right out of the gate because it's complicated. And to be honest, beta software and still has a long way to go. And so people get frustrated not because StartOS fell short.

or because they didn't have the knowledge or will to do it, but because they're dealing with software that just isn't ready for the population yet. Just early days. It's on its way. So go easy on yourself and install some things that are well established, tried and true. Like NextCloud, for instance, is probably the most featureful, largest, coolest service on our marketplace or probably in the whole world as far as open source is concerned. NextCloud might be the darling of the open source software world on Earth.

And on StartOS, it's super easy to install, super easy to use, and we'll get a lot easier with the next version of StartOS, which is entering public beta this month. Nice. Because it introduces very, very simple clear net support so that you don't have to host your next cloud server on a Tor URL or only from your local. area network. You can actually host your next cloud server on any domain that you control. So, you know, if you have a domain through GoDaddy or NameChief or whatever, you can now put your next cloud server at, you know, nextcloud.midomain.com. And anywhere in the world, you can hop on

your computer or phone and go to that domain and it will be your personal NextCloud instance. You can tell friends and family about it. You can do video chat through it and replace Zoom. You can do all your appointment scheduling on it and replace calendally. You can do all your calendaring on it and replace Google Calendar. You can do all your file storage and sharing and replace Google Drive and ICloud. I mean,

it's everything. If there was one service that you were going to install on your server and leverage to the Gills, it's NextCloud. It's incredible. Very cool. Amazing. Thank you, Matt. Gary, any parting thoughts or last questions for you, my friend? I'm blown away. I'm just

sitting here, it's like an hour opportunity to learn. So thank you. Thank you for your knowledge and your passion. It's great. I figured you were just sitting there sweating going like shit. I wasn't supposed to use the same password everywhere. Well, no, I'm thinking like, you know, I have like password. You know, I have like password. I've like password. I've like password one on my phone. Like is that I, oh, I was under the assumption that that's just like it just stays on my phone and it doesn't go anywhere. Maybe I'm wrong about that. Well, can you access that password from a different device? I've never tried. I don't think so, but who knows? I don't know. I know what I'm doing here. Gary's got some homework to do. You're not alone. You're not alone, but we're here to help.

The team is extremely knowledgeable, not only to answer questions, but to do practical troubleshooting. And our community is fantastic as well. We have people in the community who just help now. They're not employees. They're not paid. We are creating a very helpful community. If you guys are not on our private support server, you should get on there. I'll get you a code. Beauty. That would be absolutely one.

And with that, Matt, too. I consider you, you know, like, get in there. Friends. Friends, get in there and tinker around. With that, too, Matt, where should people go to find you? Where can they check out your stuff? Which should they see? I mean, start nine.com is going to have all the links and information that you need.

But, you know, we're on Twitter at Start9 Labs. We are no longer on Telegram because of the spam and scam problem, which is why we moved our community to a private support server. That private support server is located at start9.me. And if you go there, it will ask you for a code, an access code, because the server is gated strictly to keep out the spam and scammers. We created a safe place for our community to engage. engage healthily and productively.

And you can get a code by purchasing one. You can get a code by buying a server, which comes with one. Or you can get a code if you're awesome and good friends with me. Perfect. So, you know, get in there. We have a wonderful community. And we also have a free community forum at community.com. It is not live.

It's not like you ask a question and get a response. There's not a group text. It is a forum where you can post a question or make a comment. And then we address it at least once a day. So it's more asynchronous, but still very, very useful. And it's a good knowledge base, too, to go there and just kind of look at questions that other people have asked because it's very likely that you have the same one. And yeah, that's it.

Beautiful. Appreciate it, man. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks for sitting down and chatting with us. pleasure. We'll talk to you soon.