TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #239: Sphinx Chat, encrypted chat over LN, banking the unbanked, and rearchitecting the Internet with Paul Itoi

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

Join Marty as he sits down with Paul Itoi, co-founder of Stakwork and Sphinx Chat, to discuss: - Sphinx chat - Content monetization without ads - Encrypted chat over the Lightning Network - Paying anons around the world - Banking the unbanked - Rearchitecting the Internet using BTC/LN - How BTC/LN can help parents unschool their kids - Bringing back grazing cattle via Sphinx - Training personal AIs - much more Check out Stakwork Check out Sphinx Chat Delly's Article Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app. Lend at Hodl Hodl is a new non-custodial bitcoin backed lending platform, that allows peer to peer lending and borrowing between users, globally, anonymously & on your own terms. Create you offers & set your own terms on lend.hodlhodl.com Compass Mining. Compass wants to democratize bitcoins hashrate and give everyone the ability to strengthen the network while mining bitcoin profitably. Thanks to Compass, it’s never been easier to mine bitcoin. Check them out at compassmining.io Braiins. Braiins are leaders in the mining industry; running Slush Pool, creating firmware to make miners more profitable (Braiins OS+), and building out Stratum V2 to help further decentralize mining and make Bitcoin more robust. Check out their mining profitability calculator.

What is up, freaks? It's your boy, Marty Bent, here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt, second rip of the day. I'm posting this right away. I just recorded with Paula Toy, one of the co-founders of Sphinx Chat. I'm sure if you've been listening to this podcast, you've been hearing me talk about Sphinx Chat a lot. It is, again, one of my favorite apps that's natively built on Bitcoin, particularly the Lightning Network. It allows you to send messages over the Lightning Network fully end-to-end encrypted, stored and sent from hardware that you control. On top of that, it's helping us monetize TFTC with the value-for-value model. I hope you liked the episode with Alex Epstein that we dropped earlier today.

And I never like to do two episodes in one day. But, I mean, the conversation that we just had is just, it's too fucking bullish. It's too mind-melting. I need to get into the hands of the freaks as soon as possible. really funny that i'm gonna do some ad reads uh in front of this episode but i think what paul is building will help us get away i'm actually pretty certain it's gonna help us get away from ad reads i i wouldn't be surprised if 2022 uh is the year that tftc goes completely ad free across the board thanks to people like paul thanks to paul specifically and the team at sphinx for for

what they're building i'm finally pronouncing it right this episode is brought to you by good friends it's a motherfucking cash app cash apps helping you stack that sense that's receive that sell sats we're saying sat sat sat sat sats because sats are the standard there's 100 million sats in one bitcoin you don't have to buy a whole bitcoin you can stack sats you can buy as little as one cuck buck worth of sats on the cash app currently that's going to get you like 1600 sats you're getting less sats for your cuck buck every day now it seems you can dca in the sats you can set it forget it set a set amount that you buy daily weekly bi-weekly on the cash app now they just announced you can send sats to cash app users using cash tags for free so you can just send

bitcoin to people on cash app automatically now pretty dope just put in their cash tag the amount of bitcoin you want to send them up to a certain limit as dictated by the app and you send it to them all right use the code stacking sats if you haven't downloaded the cash app yet that's s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s you're going to get ten dollars and ten dollars you're going to go to our good friends at owls lacrosse that's owls lacrosse owls lacrosse this rip was also brought to you by our good friends at brains brains b-r-a-i-i-n-s.com go check them out they've been doing incredible things uh in the bitcoin space for quite some time they're the team behind slush pool uh they bought uh the remaining minority stake of slush pool from slush the

founder of slush pool last summer it was announced earlier this year jan and pavel are the two co-founders they've been on this episode this episode they've been on tales from the crypt before episode 99 uh edward evenson edward evenson has been on the podcast uh as well actually i think jan and pavel were number 73 and edward evenson was number 199 uh we're talking about how they operate the pool how they're basically building services for miners on top of that which is manifested it most famously and most aggressively and in brains os plus their their firmware that they offer miners that they can download makes the miners more efficient and enables them to stack more stacks okay stack more sats all right brain they have also been

big staunch bitcoin supporters throughout their whole history and never mined bcash or any of the other shit forks they've they've discovered amp lead and patched it for miners uh they're building stratum v2 which will help distribute the mining pool layer they're just doing incredible things all around go check them out they have a mining profitability calculator if you're a miner and you want to see how profitable your rig has the potential to be at a certain cost of electricity, they have that tool for you. Go to brains.com, B-R-A-I-I-N-S dot C-O-M, and check them out. Shout out to the Brains team for supporting the show.

Also, another team coming to us from the Eastern European area, Hodl Hodl. Hodl Hodl has their LEND program, or LEND platform, excuse me, which is now available to U.S. citizens, okay? and it's available they're able to do this because it's non-custodial so there's you're never giving up custody you put your bitcoin up as collateral in a multi-sig escrow you always hold one key uh and you you can always track to make sure that bitcoin's not being rehypothecated they can't move it without uh without the the escrow service without hodl hodl or um it's just stuck

in that multi-sig all right so you put your bitcoin up as collateral you don't sell it you get some liquidity in the form of stable coins and then you go spend them however you see fit and cash them out for dollars in the traditional system on top of that if you have stable coins you can put them up and get uh get yield on that all right this is a platform where individuals meet anonymously around the world you come to the lend.hodlhodl.com their platform you come to an agreement with a counterparty you put bitcoin up as collateral and you get liquidity it's pretty beautiful leveraging the native properties of bitcoin hodl hodl is an incredible company len.hodlhodl.com is the is the product that is available to u.s citizens again no kyc no aml

you have control you can enter this anonymously it's pretty beautiful go check them out and then go check out our friends at compass mining compass mining is basically allowing individuals the plebs to to get into the mining game all right you they're taking away all the obscurity all the pain and the the work of trying to get a miner and then plug it in at a competitive electricity price right so they're helping you source miners you pick which miner model you want you buy that miner they get it for you and then you pick which hosting uh service or excuse me hosting facility you want it to to be hosted at they have very transparent electricity costs they're very competitive electricity costs and you basically buy the miner they source it for you

they plug it in at the facility that you pick and then they plug it in you start stacking sats via mining they're helping to distribute mining and get more individuals involved and again they're taking away all the pain involved with that process so go to compass mining c-o-m-p-a-s-s-m-i-n-i-n-g.com to check all this out tell them tftc sent you big things going on freaks big things going on things things are happening i'm very extremely bullish right now and after this chat with paul i can see the light at the end of the tunnel we can we can get away from this digital panopticon and we can create this value for value economy and it's going to happen on bitcoin you don't need shit coins you don't need other tokens you don't need other blockchains it's going to happen

in a layered fashion on top of bitcoin it is happening right now it's incredible this blew my mind enjoy it you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free let me talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here for a very very special episode i'm extremely excited to be sitting down with the gentleman

i'm sitting down with to talk about one of my favorite apps in the bitcoin space which is sphinx chat sphinx chat i think i'm pronouncing it right i'm sitting down with the founder co-founder of sphinx paul a toy paul welcome to the podcast hey thanks for having me marty you know saying like i i stopped from uh from gushing over you in the app before i hit record because i want to make sure uh it hits the airwaves and the freaks that may be unaware of what's going on understand just how much i love the product that you've built and what it's enabled me to do as a content creator in terms of monetizing my content and then engaging with the audience uh that that listens to this podcast and it's just been incredible uh using the app for

the last geez feels like five six months from us now every day i use it every day i love it music to our ears and of course we've got a team of people working on this so i feel a little guilty about being the lone voice here but sometimes that's the easiest way to explain something but we have an amazing team from design all the way down to coding that i just feel lucky to be working with every day seriously i know people say that a lot but i really do wake up every day feeling like that i mean well you guys are on the cutting edge right it feels like the cutting edge at least we're leveraging bitcoin and more particularly the lighting network to to change the way contents monetize and beyond that the way teams communicate and and so before we jump into everything we can

do with the apps that you're building like how did it come to be what drove you to to sort of produce this this particular product well you know how you get keyed up on a topic or just start to look um i was previously running an app that taught people how to do keto back before it was pretty accepted so we used to never talk about it i would never tell anyone what i was working on because you're always embarrassed to bring it up because you're someone pumping a fad diet right and in that space back in 2015 2016 if you were a physician or a coach or nutritionist or dietitian and you recommended it to someone you could get you lose your license people got sued look at tim dokes look at a lot of these people patricia daily so i started looking at how do you actually

communicate with someone and also pay them because these people need to get paid for their advice and their services without necessarily doxing either party because i might not want to share that i'm paying for this and the person getting paid might not want to share and so that's what had me looking for a solution like this way back then um and when i saw the lightning white paper um it was really a i didn't get it at first it took a long time to understand and reading other people were writing about lightning and found that whoa this could do it and that was several years ago so it's been a long process so yeah well the app is very well fleshed out and has gone beyond your original vision and really touch something that i'm passionate about obviously it's just

podcasting and and helping to preserve the decentralized nature of podcasting which many would consider for the last bastion of of hope for for the ability to have decentralized non-censorable content on the web yeah i feel like i mean we i don't know if you remember but i think um you know I met Ketaminer from Nautil, those guys, Laurent and Ketaminer, when I first started exploring this whole thing. And they started talking about your podcast. And that's actually, I found your podcast a while ago. And so one of our first thoughts was, how can we use this for micropayments for podcasting? But it took a long time. And it took Adam and Dave at Podcasting 2.0 to get the index together. And that's a key piece to this whole thing, too. But I actually think that audio and

specific specifically podcasting um because it's kind of underdeveloped there's no community around podcasts you can't really i can listen to your show and i could have strong thoughts about it in my car but how do i connect with the other listeners right it's not something you can really do today um and so that's why we built the tribes and we built all the stuff around it as well because it's not just providing support but also creating that group that you can talk to the people that are part of your listener base and get a two-way communication going and more importantly getting them meeting each other and talking to each other yeah no actually right before we hopped in not right before about an hour before um we we hopped on the air here i threw in our

tribe our tftc tribe like does anybody have any questions and lo and behold the only person with a question is is the pro basketball player he's just brought into the tribe deli um we'll get to his question um eventually but it's just incredible like the the direct connection i have my audience now at least the audience that's uh consuming the tales from the crypt content via the sphinx chat uh it's it's it's great it does feel like a like an exclusive club and seeing people like adam curry in there uh now we have uh delhi uh from the cleveland cavaliers hopping in asking questions using this app and leveraging bitcoin it's it's beautiful to see and he gets it and um and in the show notes it'd be great to put a link to his bitcoin 101 write-up

he did which um you know he sent it to me and i thought okay he's pro basketball player how is he gonna have time to write a good write-up on bitcoin which has been done many times right and i share that one more often than anything else it does a great job of covering the topic for someone completely new so we should definitely promote that and share that out because he he must have put a ton of work into it and it's fantastic yeah it's great i mean bitcoin is just starting to touch everything and bringing in people from all walks of life it's feels like it's happening feels like it's happening and i know it's great and i should explain a little bit i mean i'm sure people have heard you talk about it which i appreciate and we appreciate on the team that

you've been really leading the charge on building a community around your podcast and talking about sphinx chat and getting it right because when i explain this to people i went to a lightning i think the fomo lightning meetup in new york two years ago and i went there and wanted to talk about chat like how do you chat over lightning and it went over like crickets people just looked at me like i was crazy um and one other guy was working on it and uh to see it come this far it's just great so um and the guys at lightning labs and others who have worked so hard on the layer one and then layer two what we're doing is just using the protocol that they built and basically putting text into a payment protocol so anyone who's using sphinx out there if you're wondering

we don't do a great job explaining this stuff yet every bit of content is encrypted on your phone with a private key and so before it ever leaves your device it's being encrypted secondly it's not going through a centralized server you're moving things over the lightning network so it is peer-to-peer and then third the protocol itself because it's lightning you're talking over a payment protocol so you're not trying to tack on payments to a speech protocol or a text protocol which is why the i would argue the internet's broken you're taking a payment protocol and adapting it for talking to each other and it just increases the privacy set and use cases for lightning so i think it really does go hand in hand it's insane when you think

about it it's like you're using bitcoin to text message people and to to use bitcoin the way it's supposed to be used to to send value to others who are providing value for you in some way or another it's i don't think people grasp the the gravity and the magnitude of how innovative this is and how it can change many things just beyond podcasting uh in general like so hypothetically like with this messaging protocol built on lightning you can create very unique apps that sort of or that make it so it like doesn't it's too costly to spam like yeah i think on preston pish's podcast i was on a few weeks ago i mentioned sphinx and described that and then was like if you were to apply this to other social media because like the example i use like when he

tweeted out that i was going to be on his podcast literally my notifications just got flooded with with twitter bots and yeah like the ability with messaging over lightning and training that inherently natively in new apps you can sort of make it so that that type of activity is too costly correct yeah absolutely i mean because everything can require a payment then you can require we do something in the tribe where every time i post to your tribe i'm actually paying a couple sats to just post the message which you could set to zero if you want but i think you also have the right to set it to earn from interactions from people in your tribe but then also what's happening in the background you can set an amount that's a deposit for every

post so if you have a new user who comes in and just writes a spammy post you're taking say a 50 sat or 100 sat deposit for that post and if you you have 12 hours as the admin or 24 or whatever you want to set to delete that post and if you do the person doesn't get their deposit back so you can scale one of the problems with all of these things like twitter or telegram or any of the groups is that as the group size grows, the admin chores grow with the spam because you get bigger, you attract spammers, you attract bots. Now the admin is going, hey, this is great, but the headwind is I have to delete all these bad actors. So if the system itself can allow people in, keep in mind it's pseudonymously, right? You don't know who these people are, they're coming

in, but the system itself prevents these pseudonymous people from acting poorly. So you can build a financial incentive into the chat itself to prevent the bad actors yeah that's another incredible thing like everybody is most people have a nickname don't use a real name i don't know who most people are in our tribe which is a really cool thing as well and you can set we added this recently you can set a different nickname for every tribe you join really yeah that's pretty so that's great and and we're just trying to increase the privacy everywhere we can and it's not going to be perfect day one but um we're on that path right and you can see what the goal is by just putting it all the pieces out there and getting the ball rolling

but also hopefully getting more and more people involved in the development process but back to that tribe thing for a second i don't think that most people play this out until i talk to talk about this topic at length but if you think about these the whole concept of freedom to assemble right you're doing more and more things are happening online and so now you can get together in a tribe like this but they've always been limited by that spam issue the bigger you get the more you attract and the more linearly this this sort of anti-spam efforts have to be but if you remove that and you kind of have the system itself take care of it how big can these groups get i don't know if there's necessarily a limit to the size of the groups

that and then again going back to i'm sorry i don't know why i got a little distracted i sure you can hear this slack notification in the background i've turned off slack on my desktop and my phone i've turned my phone off and everything it's still feeding the notification so sorry for that confusion but on top of that like due to the incentives baked in with the staking and the power that the admins have to to deflect spam like the quality of conversation can improve significantly i really think it can we just need to get more people in now and now that we've did a big release on monday of the system anyone with a node and with a channel can now support the uncle jim model where you can bring other people onto your node

so you could run your own node on a raspberry pi and then you could support in theory thousands of people on board them onto your node and then if they decide they get a pub key they get to spend they can join tribes they can do whatever anyone else can do on the system but they don't necessarily have to have a channel day one they're basically sharing your channel and your infrastructure and then if they then want to go off and do it on their own they can take their pub key with them and install it on their own node and move on so we need to make that process easier and more private but the whole idea is to get people experiencing it without necessarily having to set up a server themselves and open a channel so any podcaster out there could get a node get a channel and then

onboard their audience and build their tribe without necessarily having every single one of those people do it themselves so that's a huge change so we call it uncle jim or multi-tenant or whatever you're going to call it and um that's uh that's uh going to be a big um a big change in how we can bring people on because right now the people who have tried to join we have nodes every now and then on our web page and now umbral my node and raspberry pi blitz and noddle all support i think noddle doesn't have it out quite yet but the first three all support sphinx installs as part of the home node setup which we're really stoked about awesome yeah that's that's uh that's massive especially if it becomes like a go-to for these node node softwares uh node in a

box node stack in a box if you will they start including this just to be massive for onboarding the ability for me to just onboard users via my node is pretty massive and so what else went into this refactor that's what you've reached out earlier this week or last week like yeah we're about to finish this refactor it's a good time to talk so how how do you plan on getting the message out there and how can i help getting this in more hands like for listening to this right now download the sphinx chat yeah we're now in the app store you can download the apk from our website if you're on android we have mac desktop is also approved in the mac app store we have windows and linux so all that's available so any device you can use some people are having trouble on graphene

but if you're a graphene user give it a try adam's using graphene it says it works fine so it might be a settings issue there but pretty much any device you can actually use sphinx and it's completely synchronized just like imessage or any of the other chat apps so when you get a new message on your phone you're seeing it in your desktop and you mentioned slack before we use you can create private tribes so our development team we have a channel or a tribe on desktop that's hooked up to github it can be hooked up to any of the continuous integration tools exactly like slack so we completely stopped using slack internally and we can even do zoom features if you look at the top you'll see that phone icon you can do audio video screen share right from

within a tribe or within any chat and that opens a jitsi call which is an open source open source version of zoom yeah so it's not just for tribes and podcasts it's actually for internal communication slack whatever it is and you could have a contractor there and actually pay them through the tribe itself pretty wild right so i could work with a developer where normally they'd have to dox themselves to get paid but you can say i'll just send you some stats right in the tribe this is if you're not grasping the magnitude of this i know I don't know how you, what in your background made you sort of recognize this? Because, you know, we have not talked about this.

I think we have tweeted a couple of times. We've tried to get enough users. In tech, you have the whole concept of minimum viable product, right? So we have minimum viable beta, which is the fewest number of people to get you good feedback. But you don't want a ton of people on a product that's half-baked. And so we've been approaching this as there is just a ton to do here before this is even barely tolerable. And I'd say we're at the barely tolerable phase and just minimize the pain across people. But you need enough people to get their feedback. i mean from obviously big fan of bitcoin i think somebody's been podcasting for almost four years now and seeing the transition to a sort of siloed uh platform model that's been replicated or been

brought to market by youtube and and itunes and other stuff like that um no spotify trying to take podcasters like i think it's important to to keep it open and so like that's what drew me initially because uh escuado from from the noddle team he's actually been talking about he's he tried to get me to set up my podcast on here like last year and honestly i just didn't have time and at that point like it was not gonna lie just like too confusing to to figure out how to navigate the app um but after speaking with adam curry for a little bit and talking to him about podcasting 2.0 and not understanding how easy it was to connect that i believe that's a way to help me out there too it's like all right it actually probably makes more sense for you to do this now

so i think it was like august or september of last year we we linked up um tftc for the first time and beyond that like so before we even like put the podcast in it just the fact that you're chatting over lightning and under like knowing that it was end-to-end encrypted like once i confirm that was like using the the app to chat with the square to i believe maybe yourself even like in the early days um when my initials initial sphinx um node i was like is this encrypted and are we using lightning and like once it's like that it's like you can't stop this like it's ridiculous like that just the chat aspect alone blew my mind it was like this is the way it needs to happen and i feel like and this i think at first may not have been widely accepted but

lightning adoption is hard right when you want to adopt a new technology there's the whole thing of frequency and breadth right so you have to have a reason to use it frequently and for me being in this space i do not really use lightning that often to buy things like i'm not generating lightning invoices i'm not buying stickers that often i just don't do it that much if i were into gaming i might be doing it more but so i looked at the you know our whole team did but we looked at this as communications everyone communicates right and people increasingly will want to communicate using infrastructure that they control you want you don't want to get kicked i mean look at parlor i mean you don't want to build an audience on someone else's platform

right and then you also want to be able to get paid and now we've seen what visa and everyone did to pornhub and all these different companies they got deplatformed for payments and some way less controversial than pornhub but they get kicked off these payment platforms so you have not only your community platform but how you even make money literally getting your bank transfer done um and you realize that you're vulnerable the whole way down so having the ability to just own your own stack be your own bank be your own community manager be your own payment rails this is where i think i think i hope especially bitcoiners will get to that hyper bitcoinization the adoption of bitcoin as a reserve currency certainly isn't guaranteed but

that's going very well right that's happening you can just see the pieces falling into place and in this future world are you really going to go back and use visa and all these different tools necessarily to do day-to-day things i i think that um the adoption of bitcoin will affect the entire stack up and down well not just tech but everything right and i think you mentioned it earlier in this conversation like the internet arguably is is designed improperly at least at the the payments layer right and like what you're building very very acutely highlights like just how bork the payments layer of the internet is and what it can be if something like lightning were widespread like again like it can be the new base layer for the communications protocol the

world the internet and the fact that it's peer-to-peer like i'm running my node and receiving all these messages receiving all these sats that are being streamed to me as people are listening to tftc on this app i can go to great american mining and say hey guys let's get off slack let's get on sphinx we can communicate here using bitcoin just completely bitcoinize our whole company it's it's wild to think about and like you said the the store value narrative is certainly extremely bullish and extremely interesting and innovative all in and of itself but like there's so much more to this there's so so so much more to this and it's gonna you know it's gonna disrupt much more than money and nothing at least to me makes that more evident than than using sphinx

and again i use it every day and listen well i i can give you a specific example where let's say that you were trying to do this on patreon so someone would have to support you If you're trying to go ad-free and get rid of any self-censorship that comes with it, right? And it always comes with some, right? You just, even if it's in the back of your mind, you have to just, it just gets ingrained into all content if it's advertiser-driven. And I used to be in advertising, so I'm saying that from some experience on the other side. But there's an example. I mean, Sphinx comes out of Stackwork, right?

So we have people stack work is a micro task marketplace where and this is the original thing that we spun out things from the project itself comes out of this company is how we pay our bills. So we have people all over the place where we don't know their identity and they log into a website and they do small tasks, basically training, you know, image labeling, anything that, you know, artificial intelligence needs to basically train models is a typical type of batch of tasks that we would do. so if you have a self-driving car you have to drive boxes around all the stop signs and all the cars that's what our type of user would work on and our customer would pay us fiat to do that then we buy bitcoin put those in the channels and pay sats to people around the world to do those tasks so if you have a mobile phone and a login you can actually turn your time directly into sats it's pretty wild it's a different on-ramp right and we want to see that grow because that'll just give us more money to invest in things like sphinx but then i have a sphinx user who

had no idea what bitcoin is someone heard elizabeth stark from lightning labs talk about stack work and a relative said hey you should go on this website and earn bitcoin or earn sats and this person just started doing tasks and didn't even know what bitcoin was really heard the word didn't know what it was didn't know what a stat was didn't know what that was related to bitcoin started earning the task then we enabled the ability to get paid from stack work directly to sphinx so sphinx can log you into stack work you do tasks then you get paid it key sends the stats over to your sphinx wallet then that user got into bitcoin and is listening to your podcast using Sphinx and some of the money they earn

from the tasks they do is going back to you. The circular economy begins to close. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, it's insane. But you could never, you would, I mean, but even if someone were listening to your podcast in Turkey or in Syria or wherever, right? How are they going to support your content

in that value for value model that Adam talks about, right? there's no rail that gets you the value that they want to send you no and then again like going back to the circuit like this is this is the only rail again and that's the so that's one thing again like people very highly focused on the store value narrative and bitcoin the token but they don't they often overlook the the power of the network side of things whether it be at the protocol level level or now at the lightning level the network is the network aspect of of this of bitcoin is just as revolutionary if not more than the scarce digital token aspect of it because that network allows you to send and do things with

that scarce digital token that that was never possible with any other type of asset in human history up to this point and i think that's an important distinction i think that there's maybe a segmentation of people in the space right now but there's people who really see and get layer one right and bitcoin is an investment and it's digital gold and i'm investing for the future and that's i think critical right without that nothing else here works right so unless people value this the layer one is vulnerable right miners wouldn't mind the whole thing falls apart unless people value this but then layer two is more about well let's say that people interact there's friction interacting with layer one for sure and it's not about buying coffee or anything like that but

if you think about that stack worker in indonesia or turkey or wherever they are they're not on an exchange and they're not in a mode where they have extra income where they're looking to buy an investable asset right they're looking to earn i need to supplement my income and better my life right now i have extra time i have a phone let me increase my my earnings so what they're doing through lightning is this is kind of the lindy is i look at lindy's layer one right and jenny is the real potential for lightning is just to spread the value of the asset or spread the people who value the asset increase that number so it's that stark saying of number of people go up right instead of just number go up but you can't have you can't have

the people going up without the people appreciating the layer one yeah you need both you really do right and this links everybody together we're all on the same team here right i don't think that layer two makes layer one any less important or distraction and the last thing we ever want to do as app developers on the layer one and layer two protocol is risk anything right we don't want anything we're doing to screw up anything below it and this is the i think the correct approach of bitcoin is that you are doing a layered approach to scaling right that's how we do it yeah our app is not going to break lightning right and lightning's not hopefully not going to break layer one this is how you you build it in a safe and sane way sorry that was a long ramble

No, no need to apologize. Like I like to say, there's an order of operations to this and it feels like the store of value, that part of that operation is being cemented and it's ingrained in the psyche of the masses. like bitcoin is a scarce digital asset that's here to stay and bitcoin users people building businesses on it and and propagating the message have successfully completed that like it is a foregone conclusion that yes bitcoin is a store value asset it's a very good store value asset now the next thing is like leveraging the network and the layered approach to to hyper energizing that asset and getting it into more hands and i love that user story you shared for somebody who didn't even realize they were they were accumulating sats uh just doing a mechanical turk-like um process and job remotely and just accumulating sats in the background

unbeknownst to them like that is pretty massive like when you have people literally tripping into sats and into bitcoin i think that's a good sign isn't that amazing i love it and then we had a you know i'm not proud of this part but we had a problem with um just opening channels for a while technical issues with getting people paid right so we ended up holding on the sats for probably 10 15 days there was probably a month and a half period where we were having kind of intermittent issues just getting um payments out to people and so that that was bad on us but one interesting side effect was that we noticed it happened to coincide with this whole um bull run in the beginning or i don't remember exactly what month it was but whenever it started for the first time

we saw kind of balances growing even though payments were working and i messaged some users through the system said hey um are you having any issues withdrawing like well i kind of leave them here because when i take them out then i spend them but when i leave it there the price is going up so now you have an earner who was new to bitcoin who earned bitcoin they felt the investment of their time so they value this thing because they encapsulated their time in this in satoshi's then they see the value externally as denominated in fiat going up now they have this kind of time preference shift where they're saying well i'm going to spend other stuff i'm not going to buy that thing because the asset price is going up. Now you have a saver. That's an amazing

progression, I think. And if we were to repeat that across millions of people, then that's how people go from just survival to wealth accumulation, right? So you have to see it and feel it though, right? To trust it that you can be a participant in that. And it's not for other people it's like whoa i just did it it might only be ten dollars or twenty dollars worth but i think it's the recognition that's important yeah it adds up over time and just let me check the stats on our our tribe real quick if i can um i think we have something like 150 people in our tribe it's been going for we have 160 wow more than i more than i was uh expecting we have 160 people in our tribe just from those 160 people listening to the podcast sending messages

sending boost i'll just say it here for whatever we've made 1,173,582 satoshis so there's like 160 people let's say so like today how much is that it's like almost a thousand bucks right or more than that now um or 600 bucks 600 some odd bucks uh like that and like all right do you are 100 every is every person of that 160 listening to every episode and streaming sets probably not so we probably have a small fraction of that and just thinking like our podcast we get 500 000 downloads a month just first time i've ever said that publicly amazing wow that's huge yeah imagine if that listener base transition to only consuming the podcast and the value for value model like that well that takes it to a whole nother level that that's

amazing and let's decide to do this now that we have the ability to onboard people we can give you invites that you can give out every day so that you can grow this because it's not what's limiting the growth of this tribe is not you know the number of people that you're reaching obviously right a half million people is unbelievable so get the two percent the three percent your inner circle the people who are really the diehard that whole thousand true fans concept let's get this tribe to a thousand true fans using these invites and then just see what the tribe comes up with you notice that phone icon at the top you could have a clubhouse style audio room in here the same way that you do in clubhouse right just being able to turn on a call

invite people in we need to really work on the interface for that right but the technology's here right now to do that it's insane without the spying you can do it without the agora and enjoy vc forks of your audio files yeah so um i think that's huge and what happened i mean clubhouse is great i mean i've only installed the app and i i noticed the whole dark pattern where you have to connect your contacts in order to invite anyone and i bailed out pretty quick but um so i actually haven't experienced this i can't really speak to it but um i think the concept is amazing um one of the guys who work with jim talks about asynchronous audio versus synchronous audio right so podcasting is async and you should also have synchronous and uh it's just different ways

to interact with people online but if you add this payment element to it then you don't have to rely on a centralized server like clubhouse where you could get a million followers and get kicked off for saying the wrong thing which in a live conversation that is going to happen right and people these days will come after you but i actually think that going back to that young person doing stack work and on sphinx if if they have the ability to experience the internet without kind of the the google and facebook surveillance surveillance capitalism what is that person like if you're a teenager growing up without feeling big brother will you have more freedom of thought will you have a different way of looking at the world that

we can't even picture because we did experience this i think it's an interesting experiment experiment out there i think it's a very important one too right like we need like i say time and time again on this podcast like we have two directions we can go down and go into the digital panopticon where we can fight for freedom in the digital age which is an uphill battle at this point but the technology is here sphinx is an incredible example of that like it is possible it's just getting the message out there and getting it in more people's hands well we don't even talk about this experiment we're running but you might based on what you just said you might think this is kind of cool but we have um built um what we're calling just a prototype of

something called the stack phone and all we do is take um an android a low-end android phone and we put a modified version of android on it that the only thing it allows us to do is brick the phone so from remotely we can send a signal to the phone that requires a password but what that allows us to do is put sphinx on the phone bookmark stack work on a browser and give them a login to stack work and we buy the phone we buy the sim card and we can give that package to a new stack worker and they can start doing tasks right away in earning and then they get paid but because the phone and the sim are in our name they can if they were to try to say walk away over the phone which no one's done is uh we can just break the phone as a backup right but what

that person does and what we've seen so far is that a lot of people can't afford smartphones in these countries so we just take it for granted that you know every person above 10 years old in this country seems to have a smartphone but if we were to say hey there's all these people are sharing a phone or don't have access to a phone can we give them a phone and then on that phone They don't have, you know, iMessage or Facebook Messenger installed or anything like that. They have employment through StackWork. So they just sit on the phone, do some tasks, make some money that pays for the SIM card. It pays for the phone over around eight weeks.

They can basically half of what they earn goes to paying off the phone. But then through Sphinx, they have banking. They have a wallet. They have a way to store sats that they've earned. And then they have basics of social media. they can also message and they can join tribes and they can do things so you have like employment a phone basic banking right transfer of value and the ability to message and assemble online and we don't know who they are the phone company doesn't know who they are the bank

doesn't know who they are they're completely off the grid person what do you think about that trying trying to comprehend it all it's like again freaks if you don't understand the gravity of what's going on the magnitude of how massive of a shift this is like rewind and start listening like this is insane yeah that's the that's what i want i want to see phones where we're actually distributing phones and we just have the basic stack that i just went through, but they don't have a Gmail account. They don't have a face. They can get one if they want, right? But they're not starting their digital life. And I'm picturing a teenager, 14, 18, 19, I don't know, right? But just starting off, there are not job opportunities. We hear

horrible stories from people who just are in really, really tough situations. And I would argue due to lack of good policies you have limited job opportunities in a lot of places right so just because you were born somewhere you have limited opportunities to earn no matter how motivated you are the system is pretty stacked against a lot of people out there and so if we were to be able to do this right we're taking money from companies here in the U.S. turning in Bitcoin, they get tasks completed in return. But then what we're doing is turning that into sats and floating them around the world. And some of those go to paying for phones and paying for service. But the people who are there who are using them don't necessarily appreciate at that

moment. But what they're really doing is coming into the digital world without leaving footprints anywhere. And they never bought Bitcoin on chain. So we jokingly call that like the immaculate conception because you're born into lightning on a channel that we open and we push sats there is no on-chain footprint so that's someone who can do the entire circular economy that's someone who could pay you sats for listening to this podcast but does not have a kyc on-chain transaction i think that will be the future i think that will be the majority of new adopters right you're blowing my mind following that kind of pattern and what does that do for the privacy set out there right i think it's just uh i think it's really interesting so so you have

an ability for people to make money a bank to hold their money a place in which they can access a new internet communicate with others a phone all in one spot this is ridiculous this is like and this is like like a lot of like bitcoin adoption wet dream like this place is totally to like the oh like this is like something you can throw in the face of everybody like oh she's like a rich tech bro technology of the west it's like no this is actually enabling people in very precarious situations around the world to bootstrap uh a job and an amount of money that that allows them to get freedom in their own lives

in places where they can't do that in their local economy and just join this digital economy contribute and they can break free it's ridiculous isn't that crazy and I think it's

I think it has the potential this is what I mean about just going all over the place and this is why I feel like something this is going to sound far afield but this is why I think something like Starlink is so important that's why I've been playing with it

oh yeah because you know if you're if you're a starlink for those who aren't familiar it's a low orbit satellite constellation from um it's a separate company but owned by elon and um it's fast i mean 100 megs a second to this two and a half foot in diameter little coffee table looking dish that i was running off of a car battery um then you have a big wi-fi antenna now in theory I you know let's say this spreads I could be on an island in Indonesia that is experiencing real climate warming for whatever reason right but your area is getting to be inhospitable to your existence if you have this alternative and the ability to work remotely right truly remotely it just has that interesting thing if you can provide

of optionality to people who are otherwise stuck in a physical location and a victim to whatever happens to be happening in the locale, whether it's weather or government or wherever it is, or unrest, right? This happens. So having this kind of ability to communicate and earn using the Bitcoin and lightning rails is really fascinating to me. I think that is wild. I mean, we could end up not having a SIM card and not having a phone company pretty easily.

so um yeah i i feel like uh this is the kind of these are the kind of pieces that if you look at what we as a group are doing we're not inventing any of the hard stuff really right i mean i'm not trying to minimize what what our team does but we didn't write the lightning protocol we didn't write bitcoin we didn't create bitcoin we didn't figure out how all this stuff works but it's just if you can combine things in an interesting way and to me just personally what would be interesting is this whole concept of more people being involved i think that is good for bitcoin it's massive for bitcoin and more importantly it's good for those people right which is why we're doing this in the first

place i would hope at least like yeah it's cool uh participating in the price appreciation of the token but again this is about freedom in the digital age and this is providing freedom to people all over the world and the the sphinx plus starlink picture that you you shared in the tftc tribe is just incredibly scenic you got like a railroad behind it with some mountains in the background uh and it just really highlights like how stuff can access people in remote areas like you just described and oh it'll change real estate pricing think about how many people would love to live a half hour further out right but you need to be able to work it's a game changer yeah for here and i think more importantly abroad but i think for here it's going to be a huge game changer

And I, I live up in the mountains and, you know, have two teenage boys now as of a couple of days ago who love to hunt and fish and get out there. So for me to have Starlink, I would, I was on a eight day backpack elk hunting trip with my youngest son last year. And every 24 hours would have to drive two hours to go on a dirt road to find a tiny bit of signal to check in. It was so frustrating. But yeah, that's the kind of thing that this thing completely is a game changer. so it's still geofence and there's all kinds of details so don't run out and buy them if you don't do research but it's uh i think the potential is there to do do some massive stuff yeah and i mean the early data that i've seen the the speed is pretty impressive yeah it's crazy it's crazy but i really think that you could end up not having a verizon bill not having home comcast how interesting is that so it's i mean big things are afoot man they are right and the other thing too is like you can do this you can bootstrap your way to to making this reality possible right

because it's just the native properties of the sphinx app and in the way especially with podcasts and like in building out podcasting 2.0 like if like we could i think we already are siphoning off some sats to the development fund correct yeah you're parsing off sats automatically so every minute some goes to you some goes to the podcast index and you can send some sats to the app developer you can send sats to people who promote your podcast when i make a clip um of your podcast and your tribe when someone listens to it i get a couple sats per minute for promoting a certain area of your podcast yeah program it is programmable money right i mean but it is it's you don't need a token right to do it you know you don't have to create something new

right so if we want to just go with the simplest solution i haven't found anything that lightning can't do um that everyone seems to want to do out there but it's always just so attempting to make your own money to do it right and it's uncanny how often that's the right answer and i've looked at it and when i first got it so how do we do this oh you can make your own money that sounds fun and then but if you play it out a little bit you go oh wait a minute it ends up where it ended up right so yeah you don't have the network effect that bitcoin has you need to leverage that network effect for you're thinking about spinning up your own token and the likelihood of it amassing the network effect that bitcoin has is is highly unlikely it's very low very low

likelihood and but this is where we need developers right we need people um i think bitcoin in layer one and layer two has been has has had limited opportunities for developers to get involved it takes a special kind of person to do protocol dev right as you know right i mean think about my brain doesn't work that way no agreed but again like i think the potential that is shown and going back to what you said earlier you're not making that you're not making that many lightning payments you don't actually use lightning that much it's again i told ryan gentry this when he was on the podcast a few months ago like i think what you guys are doing is found a perfect product market fit for lightning that made sense like enabling and

enhancing distributed content production and distribution while helping the creators monetize is like massive yeah and ryan's been instrumental i think in connecting the dots with all the people in this space kind of behind the scenes um putting these things together right and desiree too and all and there's just so many great people in the space that have been working hard to do this. Um, but I, I mean, just to, we were talking about sort of international impact, but there's also, I feel like, um, here in the U S lightning can fund and do so many things that are centralized now. And one thing that's near and dear to my heart, having started with this whole keto thing is affecting how food is produced and distributed. So, um, it, things

don't things like food health care they don't scale well right i mean you try to turn over responsibility of education let's say to an institution how does that turn out you know so that's how we ended up homeschooling right you just look at it and go well it's so convenient to hand this off to someone else to do for you but then the incentives aren't aligned so you end up with, I think, a bad outcome, I mean, a terrible outcome. And then likewise, hey, let me just entrust someone at the USDA or wherever to come up with the dietary guidelines. Then what do you end up with? Bad incentives. You get bad advice, right? They're talking about how to sell crops, not necessarily how to make you healthier. And so if you look at podcasts and the idea of the

free exchange of ideas and being able to kind of cut through the crap and get to the truth on these things through peer-to-peer conversations and free flow of ideas then all of those things the institutions have been skating by telling people just garbage gets harder and harder to do because you have this escape valve you can go into a tribe and listen to what is fake about our money and then the next thing you're going to go is wow if i've been fooled by money this whole time what have i been hearing about food and then the next one you're so much more primed to question it and say all right i've been tricked once maybe i'm being a trick twice and then if you go down the line you realize wow we've gotten fat for no reason we have had people steal our time in the

form of inflation we have had people call education which it isn't i mean it's indoctrination it really is and then you live your whole life and at the end it would be horrible to look back and go oh my god i was fooled the entire time right i was that i was that person in the cave watching the shadows on the wall i wasn't actually participating in life i mean it's not funny it's so tragic think about that i mean i think about it every day in terms of just i was following the whole dietary guidelines or whatever and gained 50 pounds 50 pounds make sure you have seven servings of bread a day all right right and i mean i worked i work a company a fitness company bought one of the companies i co-founded right so i was working for a gym

and gained 50 pounds and then the ceo looked at me he goes hey you know i sell exercise but it has nothing to do with exercise it's 90 plus percent what you eat right and how you eat how much you eat that's like one thing i've i go back and forth like being in the northeast philadelphia new york new jersey area a lot of bread a lot of italian food up here and i succumb to my vices or have in the past but i've been very good like i got up to like 220 at one point i'm back down like 190 but like it is really easy to let yourself go and like the combination of intermittent fasting and basically no carb i i succumb again every once in a while but usually just eggs and bacon and steak you can't lose and i'm not and i'm not religious about that i mean i do i had a

beer last night right outside of the ski team race so but as long as you have the knowledge of how the body works um you can you can fix unbelievable things i mean i was prescribed um i mean they said i was type pre pre-diabetic i had high blood pressure medication i mean it was just crazy and i looked at it and went there's got to be a different way to do this did my own research with the help of family members who were into this for sports reasons i mean he was an iron man athlete using this to increase his performance and um and within three months dropped 50 pounds it was crazy i dropped so much weight i got detained in the moscow airport my passport photo did not look a thing like me it was terrible so to explain to them no i've

been working out oh they they just were just absolutely not they were like this is not you it was crazy so that's when i realized wow this is pretty cool so but that feeling of wow i've been following bad advice for so long um you can't get back those years of your life where you felt like crap you look like crap you feel like crap you sit down on a plane your pants are too tight it's just awful you know it's awful and uh and then and then something like bad advice around education you're you know you don't get those years back where i had my kids in a standard school for a couple years and we were volunteering in the school realizing they're not just not doing a good job they're actually doing permanent damage here right and i had a sphinx epiphany

while you're describing that experience you get like this whole movement towards pods and homeschooling you pay the teachers they are sphinx like if you wanted to do like remote learning and you just get like a really good teacher as a tribe you can fit however many students into that tribe do a jitsi call and stream sats to the teacher the better teachers get paid more it's ridiculous and that teacher could be anywhere right right and that's exactly what we did we we don't you know homeschool is not sitting with your in this maybe a tangent but it's not sitting at home across the kitchen table teaching a kid math like that that's the worst version i believe of homeschool right it's like trying to recreate a bad model at home by yourself is not good

so we you want kids to be around other kids and so we got together I think it was 14 to 16 kids and all the parents were into just an experiment and started a micro school we rented the garage of the local science museum that was walking distance from our house we hired two grad students to help be the coaches it was literally a couple hundred dollars a month for kids so the cost was not crazy we're not talking like private school tuition and it was nine o'clock to three o'clock you can drop your kids off you can be there with them um i did rocket launching i did archery we did fishing outings all that stuff and it was great people loved it um so that's kind of the i think the bottoms up version of schooling that's working for your look you wanted to do one

for your particular worldview right it could be religion-based it could be just attitude it could be whatever right um you can have dozens of those in every neighborhood and i think it would be such an improvement on what's happening today and it's not something where you have to be able to have one parent not working or something like that the whole point was you can drop your kids off not the whole time that's not the idea but it was much more of a co-op style situation than you know sitting at home one-on-one with your kid which I think is impractical and undesirable in a lot of ways so so I do think if I were to dream lightning enables this type of thing right where you're working outside of a traditional organization you might pop into a town and be

able to do this the same kind of co-op thing with food where you want to and we've actually been working on this is you actually pay someone to raise a cow for you via lightning so instead of buying beef and literally i think this is on keto miner has a napkin with notes from our first call from i think two and a half years ago and this is just the bullet points of what we're trying to do in that call but yeah so pay someone and i think there's some twitter bitcoiners out there working on this i can't remember his handle but um i'm dying to find out how they're doing it but instead of buying beef why don't you pay x sats per day for someone to raise your cow this this is the way freaks is and you're speaking to someone who actually just bought a cattle like and is having

somebody raise raise it for me are you doing that are you serious yeah i didn't know that how can you talk about how it works or is it it was that family friend bought a farm um and in like a farm area north north of philadelphia and they said hey we're inheriting some cattle you want to buy one i was like yeah they're like all right it gets slaughtered in two years but we'll raise it and take care of it oh you're doing it you're absolutely doing it so we looked into the tax implications of it if you were to buy it just you know with someone not a family member but buying off the market and so here in utah the way it works is that instead of paying as a product and i believe there's regulatory benefits as well so instead of saying i am buying beef

which is under what the usda you're actually paying someone to raise your animal so it's it's more falling under boarding an animal than a service instead of buying a regulated product and i think that's different in every state you should actually i think wyoming recently did some announcements around this too but if we had more people um and i think i don't know him but i follow uh a lot of what i think bitstein writes about this is just um being able to get back to ruminants and the whole grasslands and the root depth i mean there's a whole you know savory institute stuff going on there but um these are the i mean step by step i don't i don't think these are too far-fetched i mean i sound like probably a crazy person talking about

these things but if you multiply each individual you doing it me doing it five people who listen is doing this and you have a way for people to make money by raising these animals in a humane and environmentally friendly way these cow burps are not going to kill the environment right you're actually sequestering it by doing it on grass the right way you're not using hormones you're not doing all this stuff um the downstream benefits are so huge for everyone including maybe accepting the pharma companies right right now i mean lightning that network's already proven that you can feed animals remotely and raise animals remotely with the uh the polio feed right yeah yeah that's so true yeah i love it i want a tribe where everyone the ranchers are running the tribe

everyone who has the cows in there you can ask questions he posts pictures or she posts pictures to the true the tribe you see how your cow's doing and you just feel more connected to your food right and we go in and we buy these packages of shrink-wrapped meat and you're so disconnected from the reality of what you're doing again you institutionalize something and it creates the wrong incentive so now they're just trying to raise that meat in whatever country it's the to do so it's ridiculous you're blowing my mind in so many topics here paul but we need to do it i'm just trying to say it to uh get people to work on these various things and we're working on some of them the the hard part has been done on the protocols and is being done and then now

comes kind of the fun part the number of people back to the developer things who can interact with this layer is fun like building a bot to daily transfer my hay feed to the rancher is something that whereas can that same developer jump in on the lightning protocol probably far fewer right still needed but not as many it becomes a much bigger funnel the higher up we go so schooling food um you know this all gets back to that fourth turning episode i really liked i think you did a little while ago is just it's very interesting that institutions become less effective and need to be reset and you could go in and me personally I'm not going to go in and get try to fix my local laws to do something I'm not going to run for office that's not really

my personality and I don't think that I could impact I don't feel like it's likely that I could fix this system that exists in my lifetime or my kid's lifetime and so what you can do is build a parallel system and we've been doing that everyone in this space has been doing it with money but the same thing can be applied to all these other needs that we have and i would argue that health is kind of fundamental to being able to have the brain space to understand something like bitcoin if you're in fight or flight mode you have bad food bad sleep you're not really um receptive to to looking at something as deeply as you need to look into like bitcoin to really get it right because you're in the surface mode oh i'm just surviving i can't listen

to why you know bitcoin's not killing the environment i don't like you gotta go two layers deep and i'm only willing to go one right um so i think all this stuff is tied together back to just the human brain's ability to to learn and and be open to these things and leverage tools right like so that's like our brains still haven't completely uh adapted to the fact that we have these new tools and what they can do and how we can build on them like the wheel obviously very famous example as soon as we got the wheel look at everything we have from farming technology to cars to dollies that enable enable us to to move very heavy things like the internet obviously publishing media social media now lightning and

bitcoin it's like a different tool that we're still just getting like we're still the monkeys in the beginning of 2001 a space odyssey like gathered around the big slab not understanding what it is and i think maybe the shift we're going to see from all this technology that we've really applied so far has been to make our life easier right washing machine i don't wash the clothes anymore air conditioner i don't get hot or cold anymore you know car i don't drive you know i don't walk i just drive right and so but linking it back to health the application of technology for that sole purpose is i would argue set us back health-wise right so what we what to me would be interesting in this whole little example of the cow would be how do you use something so

new like lightning to actually bring us back to the way it was done better before where you shake the hand of the person who's giving you your beef that person is less likely to screw you over right and so using technology to kind of re-stitch the ties of people together how many people know their neighbors how many people rely on their neighbors it's rare these days um and so my wife and i talk about this all the time but food is i think a medium with the payment rails of something like lightning that could get you back to this kind of barter hey you brought me over honey i got tomatoes right i got this cow i got this i mean those are the kind of excuses right it's the petri dish of interactions that get you to reconnect with people around you i think

it's of course i think it's very unnatural to be living in close proximity to all these people physically that you know nothing about it's kind of unsettling yeah no i agree and that's why i mean i don't know any i know my neighbors directly i live in a small town that it's predominantly a summer town i think outside of summer there's only 5 000 people middle summer is probably like 40 to 50 000 and so it's very sparse down here in the off seasons i'm lucky to know my direct neighbors and we talk almost every day i'm happy my parent are you surfing down there too is that right did i see posts every now and then about that yeah water's a little too chilly now um it's probably like 40 degrees which is a little too cold for my liking

but i'll probably get back in the water next month um at the latest yeah if you're if you're wearing the seven mil it gets a lot less fun or people if you see people putting vaseline on their face before they get in the water that's usually time to take a break yeah it's it should start warming up within the next month and i only have a three two on me down here right now um so that's not nearly as thick enough yeah that is or that is not gonna do it not gonna do it that's an ice cream headache in the making yeah but yeah does that help cover things a little bit i know we don't talk about sinks that much but now we're ready to get people on board and you know i just want to say thanks to you and and matt for everything you guys have done to help get the

word out there i mean i think our uh just we're gonna i would love to work with you on a growing the tribes and then b um finding new ways to interact right so these tribes need your involvement right you people are there to hear your thoughts right and to and to provide feedback as well on on what show ideas might happen or connections so um if we can help brainstorm those ideas and build the functionality in i think uh i think it could be very fun yeah no i've got some ideas i mean what john carvalho is doing with his new podcast with the biz so we're doing um like a community paywall or crowdsource paywall i think that's a very interesting topic or i love it i love what he's doing he told me about that a while ago i actually

recorded something with him i don't know if he's actually going to release it but uh i think that was the first time i was ever recorded so um but yeah i i love it's the cambrian explosion right everyone should come up with different models and let's see what works yeah um and then again one thing i do want to touch on before we wrap up here is ai training training your own ai you were talking about that on the noddle call that we were on months ago yeah what did you think about that should i talk about that for a second then uh get your thoughts on it i mean i'm i'm a big proponent of this so well i was just like off off the bat off the top of my head like i remember what really excited me about it was just the privacy nature of it right you're training it

you're not being trained by it yeah that that's exactly and and i use this example of there's a tension between myself and probably other people feel this way where i use gmail i i use um stuff right i used to use slack i'll use imessage right um i have a calendar um i have a wallet right buy things and i'm always i'm not really so psyched on tying all those things together and each one of those companies uses an algorithm to try to to you know filter out from my interactions and learn about me right and they probably know all kinds of stuff about my behavior based on my usage of that calendar let's say or that email but I'm not going to stitch it together and I personally won't use something like Alexa or something like that but each one of those has

a slice of my behavior and they're trying to do the best they can with what they can see about me but what if you turn this around and this is what I really would love to see like Nautil do with the hardware that they have would be to have and there's this idea that ai is so hard it's got to be run by google no you can run it on anything these days if you have a pre-trained model so what if you had your own assistant that's kind of a merger of siri and jarvis right that you want it to know everything about what you're doing so it can help you so it knows that i have a calendar appointment at the dentist at 3 p.m so it is able to help me with maps and with payments and with moving things around knowing when i need to leave that stuff it might need i might want to know

weather if i'm going on a road trip but all of those things are siloed right now because i use different services for them but what if we go from all of our identities being on these cloud providers to it being on our own node and that node you want to know everything about what you're doing so it can do a better job of helping you i think that's worth a lot of thought and exploration because i think that could actually make a huge difference in everyday life no i agree yeah and paul the way you're approaching all this is number one mind-blowing and i'm just like incredibly thankful that we have a mind like yours focusing on this stuff and pushing the edge because it it makes the vision that i believe we need to bring into fruition

tangible to me it helps us get away from this digital panopticon and your the products that you're building and the vision that you have on how to keep iterating and building on the moving forward again makes it tangible i can see the light i can see the light at the end of the tunnel you're you're flashing that light which is insane we got a long way to go man right so yeah and i'd say if anyone out there wants to help out um reach out directly through our site stackwork stackwork.com email support at stackwork.com or hit us up on sphinx if you're out there so um we're definitely looking for help on that front and anyone out there who works one of these companies i'll plug our our service right is uh we we are definitely looking for more tasks

on stack work and uh we have a good track record to show how how we do it and um people are very happy with how that works yes and to end it to show respect to the tribe and delhi specifically the only tribe member to ask a question i think you've answered this but just so we check the box here sure uh here's i mean i'm sure you can see the question you're in the tribe as well after bitcoiner is which group of creators uh slash people does paul think will be next to move to sphinx most surprising use case for sphinx that you've that you haven't thought of previously um yeah that second one i would definitely say would be um the food when even though i i would it's the furthest out there right where um building peer-to-peer food on lightning

has got to happen so that's out there and then um what was the first one again i got i love talking about food so much i get distracted after bitcoiners which types of people do you think will move to sphinx it's going to be the creator economy and if you're following that whole movement of people who make a living off of any type of content creation or basically an individual probably was called the gig economy but is becoming more inclusive to basically people money you're earning money off of their ideas and self-expression whether that's art or music we're working on a soundcloud version of sphinx right now paying as you listen to music there's a tribe actually of a great dj who's spinning out i mean i'm listening to it as i'm working

so i'm streaming sats working on sphinx listening to a dj who's streaming on sphinx it's crazy so he's distributing his tracks over a podcast format it's awesome so soundcloud and then we're also going to be working on um print and video next so all those will be coming out freaks if any of your builders you think you can help contribute to these efforts please please do so um this is again imperative technology as we move forward in the digital age and paul i can't thank you enough it's just again my mind is blown i think this is going to be one of our most popular episodes to date by far just again the the possibilities that have been highlighted here alone have my mind blown well we have you to thank for a lot of it so i appreciate it man well let's keep crushing

we have a lot of work to do like you said no moping freaks build we have the tools paul thank you i will link to everything we talked about and i'll see you in the tribe awesome thanks marty all right have a great day peace and love freaks