TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #287: EmbassyOS v0.3.0, building out the independent stack, and philosophy with Matt Hill

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

Join Marty as he sits down with Matt Hill, co-founder of Start9 Labs, to discuss: - EmbassyOS v0.3.0 - Lessons learned from v0.1.0 and v0.2.0 - Focusing on onboarding younger people - Personal AI - Philosophy - Nihilism v. Optimism - much more Follow Matt on Twitter - https://twitter.com/_MattHill_ Check out Start9 Labs - https://start9.com/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Cash App Unchained Capital Braiins - Daniel's thread Compass Mining

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this rip of Tales from the Crypt. Had the pleasure of sitting back down with co-founder of Start9Labs, Matt Hill, to dive into the latest iteration of their Embassy OS. We're at version 3. I've been testing out the version 3 beta. I've been very happy with it. I'm very excited to see Start9Labs build out this suite. I'm not going to go too much into detail because we go into a lot of detail in the episode. I'm very excited that this company exists and that they're pushing self-sovereign computing into the world.

I'm very happy to start building out my embassy suite and personalize it for my daily needs. This report was brought to you by our good friends at the motherfucking Cash App. Cash App's here to make stacking stats easy for you. It's very easy to stack stats via the Cash App. You can DCA in the stats. You can buy on impulse. So you can set price targets that you want to initiate a buy and make it very easy.

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bitcoin mining pool in existence been around since 2010 has mined over 1.25 million bitcoins since uh it launched and stayed true to bitcoin throughout the whole time slush ball had a major update earlier this summer uh and then so that's brains is behind that and then they're behind brains os plus firmware auto tuning firmware which helps you stack more sats with your hash If you have an ASIC that is compatible, excuse me, a little burp there, that has the ability to have Brains OS Plus firmware downloaded on it and you're not using that, another burp coming, excuse me, you're leaving sats on the table. Okay, so if you have an ASIC, it's compatible with Brains OS Plus firmware and you're not using it, you are leaving sats on the table. Make sure you download that firmware if it's available. also the brains team just launched uh insights.brains.com i-n-s-i-g-t-i-n-s-i-g-h-t-s

dot brains.com uh this is a product uh that was born uh from frustration of daniel frumps at brains who during the last halving he was sitting there he was like oh i'm gonna like wait for block 630 000 to go i'm just gonna see like what's going on in the mining industry he had like a bunch of tabs open dozens of tabs looking for very particular stats on the mining industry and different metrics and that and it was getting his browser all slow and it was getting his computer all hot and it was getting him all frustrated he said you know what i need to consolidate all this information and the brains team has done that via their insights product so again go check that out at insights.brains.com enjoy this rip with matt hill and enjoy your life freaks you

I only got one. Tiki. You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts. 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. We have sovereignty in a box here. Is this what this is? Is this all it takes to be a sovereign individual these days is an embassy? You still have to do some thinking on your own. That's true.

Freaks, I'm sitting down with Matt Hill, founder of Start9Labs. Second time on the podcast, Matt. also co-founder also co-founder yes i just want to make sure they're shut up but uh what's going on we had a little pre-interview discussion i'm a little not spooked out but i just finished up a conversation with whitney webb and it's always like oh god after i speak with her i'm like we need to work we need to work we need to work to protect ourselves against an existential dread that seems to be creeping into every aspect of our lives and i'm very happy that you are here a little over an hour after we finish recording

to give me hope that we can break free from the madness of this world. We definitely feel the same, and it's why we work as hard as we do. The attitude in the Start9 office, and we also have remote members of the company, is very urgent. When this came about, we didn't know exactly what we wanted to do. We knew we wanted it to be in Bitcoin. But once we understood the nature of this problem and set out to solve it, it has been a bit of a race. It feels like a race.

We work all day and all night in order to fight back against what is this seemingly never-ending centralization force of technology. Yeah. And so how would you dissect the state of the world right now? You're in a race, you're racing to build out, uh, start nine labs and the embassy products. Are you getting more anxious as time goes on? Uh, I have my good days and my bad. I oscillate a little bit. Some days I'm more pessimistic about the direction of the world and the future. And other days I'm more optimistic. And, uh, you know, that off that also ties into just kind of how much progress we're making, like when our technology is working really well and we're making great progress. And I'm like, okay, we can win this. We can do this. But it's not easy,

right? We're not putting some new app on a piece of hardware. We're trying to invent a new computing paradigm that can service the needs of a decentralized future and a sovereign individual, because right now your computers and the internet are not accommodative to that future. In fact, it's racing in the opposite direction. So we need a new internet. We need a new computing paradigm. And those are very bold statements, but it is possible.

Yeah, yeah. Hit me with many bold statements already right before we hit record. We're not going up against other individuals building sovereign stacks in a box. We're going up against the Apples, the Googles, the Amazons of the world. We have pretty big Goliaths that we need to go after.

Yeah, that's right. The good news is, is that they're not doing themselves any favors either. You know, these things, these centralized systems don't last. Things fall apart. The center does not hold. They're sort of laying the groundwork of their own demise in real time. However, it's not enough to say, well, that's not going to work in the long run. What happens between now and the long run right how much darkness um i don't know if you're familiar with the foundation series you know acclaimed sci-fi series um personally i don't think it's the best sci-fi ever written i do appreciate the series but you know one thing that i i really enjoy about that series is the the overarching goal of harry selden in the early books which is

to shorten the darkness there's nothing that can stop the collapse but the goal is to minimize the destruction and shorten the darkness. And to do that, you have to build a parallel system alongside the collapsing system in real time. And these things don't happen overnight. A lot of people talk about collapse. Like it's like one day, everything's fine. And the next day there's rubble on the ground. And that's not what the collapse of society looks like. It's a gradual decay. And we're right in the middle of it. The building is halfway down right now. We are in the middle of a multi-decade, possibly multi-century collapse. And we are in a race now to build the parallel system like bitcoin did for the financial system but we need

a parallel alternative computing model for earth and we need to do it now before it collapses too much and too many people get hurt yeah that's another another thing that whitney and i were talking about like people are going to get hurt like literally physically hurt people are going to die as this system collapses and i go i'm pretty convinced that there's a control demolition on their way i think the powers that be whoever they are whoever's got control of the most powerful and impactful institutions of our time i think they recognize that the center does not hold and their systems are collapsing and they're racing as well to build a new system that that we can all transition into that they still control um so you have maybe almost like three systems

going in parallel, the one that's crumbling, the one they want to usher us into, and the one built by sovereign individuals that tries to get away from the incumbent system and the new system, the institutional powers they're trying to build. I completely agree. I also think that there's another group that isn't trying to build anything at all, and they're jumping ship. So a lot of the confusion that we perceive from the, you know, those in power today is because some are trying to build a new system and maintain multi-generational control going forward. And others are trying to grab as much money off the floor as they can before the gig is up. And so they actually disagree with each other. And then there's computing factions about who's going to control.

And so I actually, on my optimistic days, look at this and I'm like, oh, this is great. They're all fighting each other for scraps and control and and we can sort of sneak through the back door and offer a completely uh you know novel alternative that they at least today have not taken very seriously yeah they're starting to they're i think i think they're really starting too right it's actually i'm writing a piece for the american mind and the i guess the prompt that they gave me is how to protect bitcoin from regulation and that that i sort of had this aha moment where while writing the piece that he empowers to be of somewhat ignored bitcoin specifically treated as like yeah it's nothing to worry not nothing to worry about nothing to

worry about but now they're like oh this is something that's here maybe we can't kill it so we have to regulate it and that's what we're seeing with the infrastructure bill with the onerous laws that are getting thrust into that that are specific to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies at large and then you're seeing more focus from the super national unelected bureaucrats like the people at the financial action task force to begin attempting to find ways to thrust their regulations onto the bitcoin network particularly as they revolve around kyc aml data collection and taxes and taxes as well yes yeah it's you know the the tactic is actually quite effective i don't want to call it brilliant but it is effective in that it's not this outright

bitcoin is illegal stance it's just this we're just going to make it increasingly difficult for you, right? The on-ramps, the off-ramps, the taxation, the regulation, the repercussions for violating the, you know, whatever arbitrary set of rules come down the pipeline. It's just going to make it so that most people are just like, eh, that's too inconvenient to do, right? And you're seeing that even with like the vaccine and mask mandate stuff around the world today too. It's not like, it's not just some outright rule of like, you go to jail if you don't, it's just, life is just going to get harder and harder and harder and that works it wears on people right you just eventually get grind down to to around you know what used to be a needle point is now a dull you

know a dime yeah there you go thank you it's just uh and it works and it doesn't work as well on everybody right like we're gonna fight tooth and nail until there's nothing left but um hopefully it doesn't get to that point i agree and how do we help prevent it from getting to that point is helping again, another, I'm happy that we're having these two conversations back to back because we can draw on each of them. Uh, having people recognize that they're being manipulated psychologically, uh, so that the powers that be that want to usher us into the system that they're designing, uh, are able to do so successfully. They're, they're creating psychological trauma to wear people down, to dull their emotions, to dull their, uh, ability to think

logically um so that they will surrender and and just walk into the panopticon freely um which is as much building is extremely important is the most important thing i would argue just as important as educating people like hey you are being manipulated uh these people are using tactics that have been public for for decades to get you in a state of uh hysteria or extreme worry that will that will make you more impressionable and more docile if you will yeah weakening morale over time through steady propaganda and increasing red tape and sludge is a very effective okay like you can win wars by demoralizing the enemy by constantly dropping leaflets from the planes that say, you know, while you're fighting this war, your significant other

is at home, you know, dating the enemy. It's like, it just, you know, it's BS, but if you see it every day, you just start to wonder what you're fighting for and is it even worth the fight anymore? And so again, these are the really bad days for me, which it sounds like you're having a little bit of one of those after your conversation this morning. But on the brighter days i i'm more in line with the sovereign individual thesis and and roadmap where it's like these things are just going to they can't compete right this is a totally foreign unforeseen technology that is sweeping the world by storm right now then they cannot fight it they can pretend they can but it's all a bluff it's all a front they know the gigs up and this thing's just

going to wipe the table with them right and by this thing i don't just mean bitcoin i mean decentralized open technology right and and that is where we kind of step in here is it's we're rounding out the bitcoin story bitcoin cannot be the lone hero fighting the entire army alone right we need to round out the decentralized future with technology in general right the the internet as is and the server client architecture as is is not conducive to a viable future for Bitcoin. Bitcoin cannot live on a centralized internet, not as Bitcoin anyway. No. If there's one node running on one server controlled by one entity, it's not really Bitcoin anymore. The code is the same, but it doesn't accomplish the same goals. No, it doesn't have

the same censorship resistant assurances that are provided when you're running in a more distributed fashion. And consensus rules could be changed more easily. And, you know, it's just a surveillance tool at that point. Bitcoin in the hands of a few people on a few servers, which again, it's not going to happen, but just, it is sort of a, you know, status wet dream. It's maybe not as much with Taproot anymore, but this like giant public open ledger of every transaction on earth, man, if you can just pin identities to those things, it's perfect. You know, you can, yes. This is why we need as many people running nodes as possible. Freaks go run your node if not already and i guess so we've had you on the show before we've talked about the sovereign stack

i don't want to repeat yeah it let's uh we can repeat because i think it's an important message and it's one that should be drilled into people's head like you need to start building a self-sovereign stack bitcoin just being a part of that bitcoin is a tool you need to use that tool and then you probably need to use it with other types of things so let's um explain the suite of tools that you're providing users uh that are buying the embassy straight out of the box what what do we have and why do we have these particular tools um yeah so what's what's really cool and also unique about the embassy is that it doesn't come with any software pre-installed it actually has no opinions about what you should do with your own personal server we we have a

marketplace um that again is not like pre-coded hard-coded uh you know um lines that then fetch containers from docker hub or something like that like we have a marketplace that we ourselves host binaries on and then we have a marketplace ecosystem where anyone in the world after this next release will be able to spin up a marketplace such that even start nine is not a central point of contact or failure for your ability to discover, obtain, download, install software onto your server. So that's a huge difference.

Is that almost like a BitTorrent within the embassy ecosystem? No, it won't torrent. You'll just download, but anyone can spin up a marketplace. So yeah, effectively, it's going to do the same thing. You can get this software from anyone running an instance of the marketplace that conforms to the protocol spec, and so we are

already aware of multiple individuals who will be spinning up, we'll call it, you know, competing or alternative marketplaces to Start9 within the next few weeks. We don't expect them to be widely used, like Start9 is going to be the default one, and it'll be very easy for users to switch over to these other ones, but as long as we are, you know, sending the proper binaries that are signed by the developers that you trust and we don't violate that promise, then people won't have a reason to switch away from our marketplace unless we are refusing to host something that someone wants to run. So let's say there's some note-taking app that you're just intent on running, like you and your wife keep a grocery list and you don't want Google to know what groceries you're going

to buy. So you have your own self-sovereign grocery list server running at home that you access over Tor, okay? And Start9's like, we don't really like that software. We think it's crap. We've tested it. It doesn't work well. So we're not going to put it on our marketplace because we want users to come to our marketplace and feel like what they get there is going to work and work well and that it's been packaged properly. But there's some other marketplaces like, I love that app. And I think anyone should be able to run this piece of crap software if they want to. And so they host it. You switch it to their marketplace, download it, install it on your embassy and it'll run just fine. So start nine really cannot stop you from running anything

you want to run on your server and sky's the limit, right? So we designed this, I should say redesigned this. So part of the reason I'm here today and wanted you to play with this is because we are now entering the third version of embassy OS. So V1 was launched in February of 2020. It had a marketplace. There was only three services on it. It was Bitcoin, Bitwarden, and Cups, which is our own P2P Tor-based instant messenger for direct messaging.

Since then, it expanded greatly. We launched version 2, 0.2.0, in I believe it was September or October of 2020, so about seven months later. And that was a complete rewrite of V1, right? We learned a bunch with V1, and then we wrote V2, and it's been in the wild now for over a year

and it has performed admirably and embassy owners are very happy with the experience and we rewrote that operating system. We actually took everything we learned from V2 and we wrote it from scratch. It's not some simple iteration. We designed a new OS using all the hard lessons we learned over two years of trying to build,

turn grandma into a sysadmin. And O3O is here. It's almost here. it's it's on that you right here have it um and it works but it's still in beta um it we you know we're counting in weeks um as soon as we feel confident enough that all the bugs have been fleshed out we will release it to the general public so what are the main lessons from version one and version two uh that you took into version three and sort of reworked cool yeah uh modularity scalability, transparency into the systems themselves, the services themselves. So

modularity is absolutely key when it comes to something like this. You cannot build a fragile system, okay? So if, for instance, embassy came pre-installed with a bunch of services, and anytime you wanted to update any of those services or add a new one, you had to update your operating system, this is not just inconvenient. It's actually a vulnerability because basically basically anything can be snuck into any of those services. You have no choice, right? So there's a bug in LND that is going to, you're going to lose money if you don't update LND, right? But to update LND, you have to update every single service on your server. And one of those has its own bug that you don't want. It's like now you're caught between a rock and a hard place. Your whole system is

fragile, right? It's a fragile system because it's not modular. It has to be generalized and modular such that you, the individual, choose what you want to run, run only what you want to run, and and then can update those things individually. Second, scalability, just performance. The thing needs to be designed to be able to handle the kind of compute and storage that these services need at scale and running 25 of them in parallel, right?

So we actually removed the entire section of the code base that was written in Haskell, not because Haskell is horribly non-performant, it's just that it's not as performant as Rust, right? So we took the entire section of EmbassyOS that was written in Haskell, and we replaced it with Rust. And then we took the entire Rust section and rewrote it to be better.

And so the entire back end of MBC OS is written in Rust, and the entire front end is a TypeScript Angular application that serves through the browser. Yeah. Rust is considered like the creme de la creme of programming languages these days. It's definitely the hot kid on the block, yeah. Rust is super performant.

It's strongly typed. It is in vogue, right? There's just a lot of people wanting to learn it who do know it. We happen to have an excellent Rust developer. I mean, Aiden McClelland is the primary architect of EmbassyOS, and in particular, EmbassyOS 030. It's his baby, you know, the entire back-end portion of the operating system, and he's an incredible, incredible developer and thinker.

And so, yeah, Rust was an obvious choice for us. We had the guy, it's the language, and it accomplishes all the goals that we needed it to accomplish. And so it's more modular. It's more scalable. Transparency. And transparency is less. So it's not just transparency.

It's granular control, right? We needed to empower the user more. There was too much that was happening by magic, too much that was obfuscated, which is kind of like the goal. It should just feel like magic, right? But it needs to feel like magic, but you can stop the thing, right?

Like in the early days of elevators, I heard this anecdote one time and it always stuck with me, is that when people were terrified to take elevators back when they were being invented, they realized that, but just putting an emergency stop button on the elevator made people suddenly feel comfortable taking them, right? Even if it didn't do anything, it was just the presence of the button gave the person a feeling of control. Obviously, it does do something, as does everything we build into our system, but it will just work by magic, but all the introspection is there for you, right?

So one of the biggest features that we're proud of, totally unique to our system too, by the way, and one of the hardest things to do as a sysadmin, as a DevOps engineer maintaining servers and server-side software, is to monitor the health of the services running on your system, right? For whether they're running out of memory, whether the network interface goes down, maybe there's just a bug and the thing isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing. And the only way that you would know this is if you built, wrote some scripts that would, you know, perform, you know, chronological, you know, cron jobs against the service saying, are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? And if anything's ever not okay, it would alert you or something like that. Well, that's a really hard thing to do. Or as the original Kasa node did, and you had to like actually ping it yourself.

You had to like manually go in there and be like, are you okay? Is everything working fine? And even then it couldn't give you a precise answer. It would just sort of generally be like, I think everything's okay. So what we did with O3O is service developers, we call them, so let me be clear about this. Service developers are people who write the things that run on Embassy, Bitcoin. So Bitcoin Core, right, runs, you know, at least one Bitcoin implementation and the one that we currently offer on Embassy, on our marketplace. They are service developers.

They built an app slash service that can run on a server, okay? We also have this new thing that is being invented, which is a package developer. This is the person who takes the service like Bitcoin Core and packages it for EmbassyOS. And in the early days, this was really easy because we were basically just like taking whatever Doctrine container was available for Bitcoin Core and like telling the command line, run that thing. But that in no way solves the problem that we're trying to solve, which is to turn an average person into a sysadmin. because it only works if everything is working and everything is perfect. But if you want to configure it, oh, well go ahead and SSH in, hop into the bitcoin.com file, change this value, but don't put a string in, make sure it's a number. Otherwise the whole system will crash.

And now that it's running, if your RPC interface goes down or your P2P interface goes down, you're kind of screwed and nobody's there to help you. It's almost like a lie. It's like, oh, you're a sysadmin now. But if anything goes wrong or you want to do anything to it, you're sort of shit out of luck. Yeah. And we're like, that's not the, you can't, that won't scale to average people, only hobbyists and, you know, early adopters and tech nerds will ever do something like that. Um, so we wanted, uh, to, to make this service more usable by an average person. And to do that, you have to have a translation layer. So you have like Bitcoin core is the service that's running, right? And then you have the user. How does the user interact

with Bitcoin Core when they have no idea how to do that. Well, there's a new kind of developer now. The person who packaged Bitcoin Core for EmbassyOS uses our own configuration system and domain specific language to translate between human and Bitcoin Core such that the human is doing things that feel very normal, like editing something in a settings menu. And there's these really fancy, colorful health checks that fill the dashboard. So you view your Bitcoin service and it's like, you know my p2p interface check mark it's looking good rpc interface check mark looking good you know i'm uh 75 synced that's not great if you want to do these other things and so it's all there for you and you didn't need to understand how to do that that's what i was

gonna ask you guys you you mentioned rpc as that's that's what i envisioned like you guys start nine embassy team is creating a library that that calls on these rpc calls or creates a UI on top of them that makes it easy for you guys to interact or users to interact with? So EmbassyOS offers a generalized API, right? So it has an API interface that says, okay, if you're a package developer, if you're somebody who wants to package up Bitcoin or L&D or Sea Lightning or a non-Bitcoin service, a note-taking app, whatever it is, you are going to decide the user experience. You're like, all right, someone who's using this service is going to want to edit the .conf file, the Bitcoin.conf file. EmbassyOS has an API for that. So you would, as the package

developer, say, I want to give the user granular access to the Bitcoin.conf file. I want it to be validated. I want numbers to be validated as numbers, strings to be validated as strings. And I want, you know, dependence of Bitcoin to be aware of Bitcoin so that if Bitcoin is not done syncing, LND will actually be unhappy and say, well, I'm not going to quite work either. And then things that depend on L&D, like SphinxChat or something like that, will actually say, well, I'm still waiting on Bitcoin to sync because L&D told me that it's not quite there yet. So it's this transitive health monitoring and dependency management system that is kind of the essence of being a sysadmin. When you go train to be a systems administrator for server-side software, you are learning how to install services, install and manage dependencies, perform health checks, configure these things. There's kind of this standard set of things that you need to know how to do, and all of them are difficult and complex.

And so what we did is we took all of those things and built tools, a software development kit and generalized API so that anyone who's packaging these services can take advantage of these tools to then dilute the experience down to familiar buttons on an interface that really anyone can do and it won't let you screw it up because it has these protections built in.

So you can envision a world in which you have different MSC users offering different marketplaces with different user experiences for different, for the same app. For the same service. For the same service. Yes. Like I could get Bitcoin from your marketplace or Bitcoin from his marketplace and the experience might be different, right? Nothing can tamper with the underlying service. Bitcoin is still Bitcoin. The consensus rules still apply, but how you experience Bitcoin could be different. For For example, services can be packaged up with any number of interfaces

and they're arbitrary in nature. So for instance, I could package up Bitcoin Core and add a user interface to it, right? So if you get Bitcoin Core from my marketplace, there'll be a launch button in the UI that'll launch a node dashboard that'll give you all sorts of statistics and information about your node.

Whereas a different instance of Bitcoin might not offer that. Yeah, so you can work on the Bitcoin Core GUI the core developers don't want to exactly yeah yeah we could slap a gui onto bitcoin core and offer it as a user interface on the on the bitcoin service on embassy now we don't have the time to do that right now but anyone on earth is welcome to do this right so the bitcoin core wrapper we call them wrappers in our github repository right but the wrapper uh is is an open source mit thing so it's like anyone can go in there and just be like i'm going to improve bitcoin's experience

on embassy add a user interface pr it in and suddenly everyone on earth will have access to of this interface this is incredibly fascinating incredibly bullish i can't stop i don't i'll take this the wrong way but i can't stop thinking like myspace what myspace was you're able to go and just get like different html css templates that would allow you to create your profile and make it look away have an aesthetic and maybe other people's hat as well um but you could tweak it a little bit and it seems like so you're basically creating the ability to let different aesthetics to people with different aesthetic preferences sort of find find their their way to use bitcoin core their way to use cups their way to use any of these things let's

say for instance uh there's a common um command that someone would want to run on the bitcoin cli like a re-sync blockchain, okay? So you want to like re-sync from a particular block height, right? And you want to do this because, you know, whatever. You want to capture some funds in a wallet. Maybe you're running a pruned node and because you don't have full archival,

if you want to add an old wallet, you have to go re-sync from the height that that wallet was first, where that UTXO first showed up. So to do that in the normal world, you would have to, you know, get on the command line, ssh into your box get on the command line go to bitcoin cli run the command etc and you just lost

like 99 population but as a service developer or i should say sorry a package developer for embassy os you can say a lot of people are going to want to do this so embassy os offers an api for actions they're called actions and developers can define actions an action would be resync blockchain and it can take any arbitrary input so resync blockchain for instance would take a block height at which you would like to begin the resync. So to a totally non-technical person, now, they don't need to know anything about SSH, nothing about the command line, nothing.

They just go into their Bitcoin page, click actions, and it lists all the available actions. And one of them is resync blockchain. So they click that. It says, what height would you like to resync from? You enter the height, you hit enter, and it's done. And the whole system now flips back into like a sinking state.

L&D suddenly is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm not happy. So it goes pause, and it just does all of this, right? It's actually hard to communicate the sort of complexity and sophistication of EmbassyOS. Like, there has never been an operating system that gives a user this kind of power and non-technical control over self-hosted software without third parties, without trusting any third parties. Start9 is not involved in this transaction at all, ever. Well, that's what I wanted to get into because you'll commonly hear when people talk about like,

all right, we need to distribute as much as we can. We need to leverage as much open source software as we can. We need to get these technologies in the hands of individuals. The biggest knock you'll hear is like, it's just too hard. Like grandma's never going to be able to do it. And it seems like you guys are getting to a point

where it's really not that hard. Like, do you think it'll be like, is grandma going to be able to run her own self-sovereign stack in the next five, 10 years? Yeah. I was going to say not on O3O, right? The new operating system that we're putting out right now is not grandma ready. It is, it's also not super techie hobbyist, uh, limited. It's the next rung of people, right? Um, it really expands the number of people who can do this seamlessly by an order of magnitude. And we know how we get to the next rung of people and then the next rung. And by the time grandma's even thinking about running a personal server or a cluster of personal servers that are all communicating with each

other and governing the hardware in your home, it will be ready for her, right? We're not ready for them and they're not ready for us yet. But as the desire to have this sort of independence, we don't even talk about sovereignty as much anymore. We talk about computing independence, right? When you pick up your phone and you do anything at all, you are essentially raising your hand and asking permission to do everything that you're doing. You want to send me a message, ask Telegram for permission first. And you don't experience that, right? You don't have to actually type them a message saying, can I send Matt a message? But the server is, you know, it is permissioned with every single request. And that's just a very childlike existence. It's a very

dependent existence that you can't do ordinary things without constantly asking permission or paying the toll. And so as more and more people want that kind of power and independence, it sort of expands outward from Bitcoiners. It's sort of where it started, right? Now, there's people who may have talked about this for a long time, but Bitcoiners were the first ones that like really did it aside from total deaths, right? Like just, you know, people have been running their own servers for decades, but it didn't actually creep into any kind of meaningful movement until Bitcoin. And now it's emanating out from Bitcoin into, you know, anarchists and libertarian circles, and then outward to people who just like freedom and then outward to,

and it's going to continue to emanate outward. And so the technology needs to be ready for those groups when it hits there, because when the next group is ready, they're going to get online and say, how do I run a personal server? How do I self-host? And we need to make sure that we are there waiting for them with open arms, not just with the technology, but with the support network, the documentation, right? Like this is, this isn't just a piece of tech. It's a whole ecosystem of support. Um, and that's really hard to scale, really hard to scale, but we know how to do it. How do we do it? How do we scale support?

Yeah. So, well, first of all, you can't limit it to Start9, right? So, like, Start9 is literally not going to be able to do one-on-one tech support with every single person who calls in and asks questions. And that's not because the product isn't working and they're having a problem. It's because they want to understand. There's a hunger for knowledge about this. I can't tell you how many times we get hit up on email, on Telegram, or me personally, and members of our team. and they're just like, so tell me about self-hosting.

Tell me about Bitcoin. How does Lightning work? And we're just like, we can't do this, right? Like they come to us because it's running on our device. But we're like, we cannot educate everyone on everything about sovereignty, self-hosting and digital independence. And so we are leaning very heavily and we'll increasingly be supporting those who do.

We are going to scale by being benefactors of open source and educational individuals, organizations, um through our sales right so we we have plans to grow a movement not just a company well that's extremely encouraging because that's exactly what we need is a movement yeah we've talked about this before we need to relearn unlearn and then learn a new ways to interact with technologies that that we interact with on a daily basis we're transitioning into a digital age most people like we're already we are in the digital age but we're in the very early stages and one can make a very strong argument very convincing argument and one that i think

is becoming undeniable that we have fucked up on the design of of the internet particularly the uh the the client server relationship that you were describing earlier um yeah and and you know i look i think about this a lot actually um because you say fuck up right and yeah it's true but why um i actually don't blame anyone for what happened with their limits it yeah it was hard like it is unreasonable to expect uh an individual and just an ordinary joe to be able to do systems administration it's just freaking hard right and even the early days doing client administration was hard. Like, the early computers were only accessible to geeks and hobbyists, right? It wasn't until Windows and, you know, Apple came along that personal computers became accessible

to non-technical individuals. Because what did they do? They put a graphical user interface on top of the command line interface so that people could point, click, and use objects to navigate the computer. It was a simple but brilliant insight, and they pulled it off. They did a great job, but server administration was even harder and it was profitable to not offer the graphical user interface for that. So they were like, you know what? We'll just give you these clients. We'll run the servers.

And this is how we got into the mess that we're in is because the servers is where all the money is at. It's where all the power is at. It's where the control is at, right? Your phone is just a remote control, right? The saying it's a server is just someone else's computer, right? But I think it is more visceral to say your computer is just a remote control. It's the same concept, but it's sort of like no longer feels like yours, right?

You open up your phone, it's a remote control. Every button you push is just operating a computer somewhere else, unless you're using your calculator with Wi-Fi off, right? But you can't do much. It gets really dumb if you turn off the internet. That's got like an invisible transmission line right to Apple's headquarters that they could cut you off at any. and so uh and so we had to basically repeat history right in the positive sense like we

had to go do what those early tech giants did for clients for personal computers and we have to do it now for personal servers and it's such a it's such a thing to let slide by to say something like that like oh they're creating a graphical user interface for a personal server that doesn't ring as some huge thing but neither did creating a graphical user interface for a personal computer at the time for two reasons. One is because nobody knew what the hell they even wanted a personal computer for. Great. You slapped a graphical user interface on this hunk of metal that nobody wants or needs. Now you have four of them probably, or more, right? You have personal computers in your pocket, on your wrist, in your home, whatever. And nobody even saw the reason for

having one for a family, right? And we say the same thing today. It's a graphical user interface for a personal server. No big deal. Until you recognize how big of a problem centralized non-personal servers have become in the world, the bigger the problem, right? The bigger the solution. We think that this is not the, but one of the biggest problems facing humanity's future right now is the centralized nature of digital communications and data. It is a massive threat, existential threat to our future. And the only way to solve it is to shatter centralized servers into a billion pieces and give one to every person and put it in their homes and if you do that if you even get close to that now you don't even need the isps because you can start to mesh around them

you actually build a new internet brick by brick piece by piece in a very organic grassroots way others who have talked about building a new internet are always talking about software right always yeah it's always just some like all right everyone download this software and we'll have like some new internet. And I'm like, but you haven't actually solved the problem. And you have a network effect problem. Nobody is going to do this unless everyone does it. Nobody wants to join your social network unless everyone's on your social network, chicken and egg, classic networking problem, right? We don't have that problem. Because there's benefits as an individual to running this. You have personal selfish benefit for running this device on your own. You don't

give a shit if anyone else in the world has one. So if we can provide that selfish personal benefit to each individual, but then in any given geographic region, if critical mass is reached, it's just a software download and boom, you're meshed. You can mesh with this? Not yet. Eventually. EmbassyOS is built for this future. It's not the future yet, right? You have to build incrementally. You're getting there. But we are building with this vision in mind. And it's not just meshing. It's not just a new internet, right? What we are building in mind with is the IoT future too well you were mentioning this before we hit record that's just what i was about to ask you like the iot world that we're growing into right now is very scary but there is

and so because of that scary picture that's painted with the centralized architecture of the current world of iot that's being built out many people just throw iot out uh with the bath water because it's like uh this is bad it's one step too far and therefore iot is bad but you're envisioning a future in which you design the internet of things and how you would like to interact with it and you do it in a self-sovereign fashion um correct yeah you you know the anti you know uh centralized surveillance um picture has always been to go to the woods right abandon technology and just go live in the woods and there is some you know uh what do we call it like ideal there that is that is attractive even to me on some days i'm just like the woods it

is um but then it feels like going backwards we need to go to the stars not the woods right completely we're not going back we're going forward so how do we move forward without the without the dystopian flavor um it's not by abandoning technology it's by implementing decentralized self-sovereign technology. And that's just not easy because it's a new idea, right? It wasn't even a strong idea until the internet started to come about, but it wasn't really implemented in a scalable, useful way until Bitcoin. Bitcoin kind of pierced the shield, right? It really did put a hole in the system. And it showed us how ideologically, if not technically, because it is both, but it also showed us the rhetoric that's needed.

It showed us the passion that's needed. It showed us the principles at stake to build sustainable, scalable, decentralized systems. And so you brought up IoT. I think I went on a slight tangent there, but let's talk about IoT for a second, okay? because, you know, a lot of people think about the, you know, decentralized internet and that wouldn't that be cool, but it's got to be, everyone's got to have a server. Okay, great. That's a huge vision and we're pursuing it. What a lot of people don't think about is they've given up on IoT, right? They assume I get an Alexa or I get a security camera from Nest, which is now

owned by Google, I think. And I plug this thing in and I've literally just granted a backdoor to my house, right? Like I am now physically compromised. This isn't about Google's reading your emails or you can be censored by whatsapp anymore this is like they're in my home they're controlling the locks on my doors now are you a person of interest does it matter most people most days no right but that's not the point the point is that you're you're planting seeds of dystopia you're planting seeds of total suffering okay with this stuff and it'll hit different people at different times as political regimes change and the winds change and so don't dig a hole if you don't want to fall in it eventually right so um the way that we do this is not by not

uh using iot devices it's by instead of so internet of things so these are internet connected devices what that means to a person today is that they're connecting to a third-party server but you can be internet connected to your own server it's still the internet if you use the word broadly enough right it's a network of connected devices across time and space and you can have your own things within your own siloed network. Yes. And that siloed network can communicate with other networks in an anonymous encrypted way, right? There are internet protocols such as Tor, but it's not the only one that exists that facilitate server to server communication without breaking anonymity. You can even communicate over lightning, right? Yeah. So

it's not for lack of software. What's needed here is a hardware revolution backed by an operating system that can accommodate open source self-hosted software. The actual biggest missing ingredient was the operating system, right? The hardware exists. That's a Raspberry Pi. By the way, we're getting off the Raspberry Pi. EmbassyOS is now a fork of Ubuntu. So it's 64-bit. We will be building it for x86, which means in due time, not too far, you will be able to run an embassy on your old laptop your old desktop rock pro 64 a raspberry pi embassy os will run on basically any computer that can accommodate the the you know ram and memory and storage needs of the services that run on embassy os so sort of a side note right but that's what was missing the hardware

exists there's plenty of things in this world that can serve as servers your client macbook your client linux your windows machine can be servers we don't use them as servers we use them as clients to connect to servers, but they can also be a server if they have the proper operating system installed on them. So then you have the services. They exist. The world of open source self-hosted software is rich and growing by the year. It's incredible what is out there, right? There are Google G Suite alternatives, right? Next Cloud, password managers, all the things that you can get on our marketplace. They all exist. And oftentimes they're built by developers working for free or on charitable donations because they're passionate

about what they're building and they want everyone to use it. So these things exist and they're good and they're going to get better once they start getting more funding, which is, again, part of our mission is to make sure that the application layer of the decentralized internet is properly funded. Now, we can't do it all, but we can encourage and contribute and make sure that those avenues exist to obtain funding. What was missing was the middle piece. What connects the open source software services to the commodity hardware that is available down the street? We needed an operating system that could bridge the gap for non-technical individuals, because nobody's going to install Ubuntu, hit the command line, and install those services

on their MacBook. They're just not going to do it. We've proven that they're not going to do it from 20 years of experience, more than that, 30, 40. They're not going to do it. So we invented the missing piece. We're not the only ones thinking about this gradually kind of moving in this direction, but we are the ones who have the architecture for it, the team capable of doing it and the strategy to make it work for sure. Thank you. I guess that's the first thing I'll say then. Well, thank me in 10 years. Well, you can't see right now, but cars, um, cars putting comments from the YouTube live stream up on, uh, and it's just embassy users. My embassy service been running flawlessly i've seen at least four or five comments like i love embassy and i

think that's one thing let's turn this back to like a bitcoiner context why would you use embassy and i think just a combination of bitcoin core and cups alone just for like sending addresses to receive or send bitcoin from somebody else is probably a number one use case if you want to preserve privacy um in terms of like keeping your addresses safe or something like that's one simple use case that bitcoiners should want to buy and use this service for yeah um password management is another big one um self-hosting your own password manager server is kind of a you know we'll call it a secure internet security 101 right like if you're not using a password manager to anyone listening start using a password manager even if it is a hosted solution it is still better

than memorizing your passwords or using some sort of like simple algorithm where you determine different passwords for different websites. That shit is not secure. You're going to get hacked eventually. It's a matter of time. Use a password manager. But if you really want to go the full, the whole nine, use your own password manager running on your own server out of your own home over Tor. And, oh, I can't do that. It's super hard. No, it's a button. You plug it into the wall, you push a button and it works, right? My wife uses her own self-hosted password manager over Tor from the Firefox browser. And it feels exactly like she's using some hosted solution over ClearNet. It has no difference. It takes 30 seconds to set up and you're done. So that's one

data storage. So we offer a service called File Browser. And it's just Dropbox, right? It's just Dropbox, except all the data is being stored on a device in your home, accessed from you by anywhere in the world in total privacy. You can create shareable links for friends and family. You can even grant Uncle Jim access. So a lot of the services that run on EmbassyOS are Uncle Jim-able, right like you can be your family's server and they can create accounts on these things and you can create permissions and permission to access right so um everything from btc pay server to file browser um one of the biggest ones recently for us has been matrix so matrix is the cups killer right so we wrote cups just because i think aiden was bored one night and wrote a p2p messenger

that works over Tor that installed on the embassy. But Matrix is incredible, right? Fully featured chat application. So do you have like an Elements client? Yeah. Client, excuse me? No, so Elements, you would use their desktop client, their web client, or their mobile client.

And all of those clients at the sign-in screen allow you to use your own server. Okay. Yeah. Okay, so you would... You use their clients, but Element is also a web app. So there's nothing except time that has prevented us from actually putting element onto the marketplace as well, such that you would be using your own element website to communicate to your own matrix server from your server.

But the clients are really good. I use the element client for Android. Yeah, Laser HODL got me on the element client. It's very good. I haven't been using it as much, but that's like the one thing, too. Do you see EmbassyOS making it easier for individuals like myself, who's addicted to Telegram, addicted to Twitter DMs, you see it making it easier to transition and use these applications, these self-sovereign applications, more easily? that is the that is the point that is the essence of everything that we're trying to do is get you off of third-party services and on to the sovereign you know world of independent computing

as seamlessly as possible and for as many people as possible and you know it's not perfect but it is it is shockingly good like you will be surprised when you set that up at what it does everyone gives us that response because they think we're full of shit until they plug it in and start using it and then they go i did it i'm running my own self-hosted matrix server with friends and family talking to other people over their matrix server on a and it's like not only is it unstoppable nobody even knows that it's happening it's invisible it's not like oh that we see them we can't stop them nobody even knows you're doing this it's completely on the dark net all of it and it's i don't think i can describe how liberating of a feeling it is like i've had

it a few times in my life downloading my own bitcoin node and actually accessing addresses and producing addresses via my own node once you extend that beyond bitcoin use cases to chat apps file sharing like how would you describe like the the way it doesn't feel like you're walking around naked anymore in front of a world that's continuously just taking all of your data. There's two feelings that I will identify here because I've thought about this specifically before. The first is a feeling that you have as a child that most people can relate to as a kid of having some sort of like secret box with your precious things in it, right? So it's probably under your bed or in the closet and it's some trinket or a ring or whatever it is.

And it's like, it's yours. And you sort of feel good that it's there and you try to hide it. And your parents know where it is, of course, but like you, it's this feeling of property of it's mine. It's not permissioned in any way. I don't have to pay for it. It can't be taken from me. It's hidden. It's secure. It's mine. I think a lot of people feel this way about their Bitcoin when it's finally safe somewhere, right? When you really get happy with your setup and I'm not sure anyone is fully happy with their setup, but it's a never-ending, you know, you keep trying. But every time you take that next step

towards getting it safe, it's like, yeah, it's just mine and it's there and it's precious, okay? So that's one feeling. And the second feeling here, oh, crap, I blanked on it. Wouldn't have to come back to it. I got too into that one and I blanked on the second one. The feds are going to come get me. Yeah, that's the, is it?

Well, I'll riff on it a little bit. Hate it when that happens. Can you discuss operational considerations, liveliness, network disruptions, diversity, backups, etc.? This is from 03Jan09 in the YouTube comments. Yeah, that is the essence of sort of what we do differently is that we consider those things. We're not naively building a product that looks good and feels good

until things start to go wrong and then it falls apart and you're on your own that's not what we are doing i mean it's the primary differentiator from us and anyone else who's attempting something similar um so what were the what was the list one was liveness liveness uh network disruptions diversity backups etc yeah so liveness and network disruptions sort of go hand in hand because a network disruption would would affect liveness of the device so the point of a server right the the single biggest difference between a server and a client is that the server is supposed to run all the time. It's a background process. Okay. So that even when you're sleeping and your phone is off, someone can still send you a message because it's stored somewhere and then the client can

sync later. So liveness, right? Network reliability is absolutely essential. Now, currently you have two ways of accessing your embassy at any given time. You can talk to it over Tor using its V3 URL from anywhere in the world using any browser that supports Tor. So either Tor browser or like Brave in a Tor tab or Firefox, you can actually configure to resolve onion URLs as well. Since Tor browser is just a fork of Firefox. And that's our recommended way and it's what I do. So anywhere in the world, you can access your embassy over Tor. Now, every single service that you install on your embassy also gets a unique Tor URL. Some of them are used for visiting in the browser like a web GUI. Others are for P2P and federated interfaces, right? So like Bitcoin RPC, Bitcoin

P2P, those are not GUIs that you visit in the browser. They're just things that, you know, the service is using to communicate with other servers of its kind. And those all get unique, newly created, never before seen Tor URLs. The problem with this is that Tor itself is not the most reliable network. And it can go down, right? It can be disrupted. It can be attacked, not free of cost. So it doesn't happen all the time. But there have been times when the Tor network has been disrupted and it can disrupt your experience. It can cause you to not be able to reach your embassy interfaces, and it can cause, say, your Bitcoin core node to not be able to communicate with its peers. This is an inherent problem with Tor. And the way that we build around this into

the future is by implementing alternative internet protocols. So rather than just relying on Tor, when you install services, they will also receive like an I2P address where it's reaching the same service, the same API, but over a different network interface. And we can just proliferate these network interfaces over time, including to Clearnet, right? What we call clearnet.com. That's coming next year. So we already have plans in the works now for making it such that you can run your embassy and every service that you install on the embassy on your own domain name. Obviously that involves the legacy internet a little bit more because now you're involving the DNS servers to resolve those names to the IP, but it's not like you're giving away the

information right it's still it's like a small chip in the in the armor to accomplish a huge gain in usability to actually be able to use the clear net to talk to the server in your home and so that's coming next year and will be a huge deal for a lot of people who want privacy and independence but are willing to but are not like on the edge of paranoid yeah right um and that's going to be great for a lot of people they're able to to come a little closer to the middle of the spectrum it's not even to the middle it's like one step away from perfect right um which tor i wouldn't call it perfect but it gets dang close the problem is reliability so to answer your question today uh most days most cases i've been running this for almost two years now

it works great tor does work fine um and we're about to make it a lot better because um spoiler and we are now publishing our our roadmap incrementally so what's coming in 031 is already published uh on our project board on github so people can see it and what's coming in 031 is the ability to turn your embassy uh not turn it into but to enable it to be a tor relay node so we are about to flood the tor network with more relay nodes which will dramatically improve the viability of tor itself and you won't have to do this it'll be a toggle and in order to do it you're going to have to set up like port forwarding on your router so it's like for those who want to give back and contribute to the Tor network and experience the benefits of it. Because if you are

a Tor relay, the Tor network will prioritize your traffic. I didn't realize that. Yeah. It'll actually be faster for you if you do this, but it's not grandma, right? You're going to have to like go into your router and change a setting. It's not rocket science either. And you'll be a Tor relay node. Yes. Yeah. Not necessarily an exit node either, right? No, no. Yeah. Don't use exit nodes. Don't use Tor if you're visiting a clear net website. It's not worth it. It's worse than using Chrome because it's a net, right? I can't say that every piece of traffic that goes through a Tor exit node is monitored,

but you should assume that it is. I think we can safely assume that it is. Yeah, I don't use Tor unless I'm visiting a Tor website, and it's fine. Well, I think this is important for people to understand, right? Because I think people just assume that you use Tor, you can go access clear net sites, and it gives you more privacy

if it has to go through that exit node. yeah i think it's worse because because it's a net right the i forget the name of the firm but again these little things stick with me over the years it was an israeli cyber security firm i think it was in uh i want to say zero to one peter teal's book i don't remember which book it was in but the thesis of this company was bad guys hide good guys don't this is the underpinning of their entire business model and using that essential thesis they were able to you know more effectively catch the quote bad guys by never looking in the clear places for them they're like if you're doing something bad or illegal you are not doing it on a dot-com website using your facebook profile

so they didn't even look there like literally that's the safest place to go do something because nobody is looking there they're only looking at the people who are trying to hide so if you're gonna and again trying to hide does not mean you're doing something bad right it just means you want privacy more and more these days it's not like we're not catering to criminals we're catering to people who have dignity and don't like being watched with everything that they do that's an important point to to drill home is like and i obviously we've discussed this in the past matt and i talk about all the time matt odell and i talk about all the time on rabbit hole recap like privacy has just been it's been given this negative connotation

which is so insane so insane in our day and age like if you had nothing to hide then you shouldn't be worried like that is the status quo mainstream thought when it comes to privacy which is right privacy is an insurance policy insurance policy against what against the future against change of regime change of policies right if what you're doing today i got nothing to hide i'm not doing anything wrong but what if what you're doing today is wrong in 20 years because the wrong group gets into power. It's an insurance policy against the future, not the present. Yeah. Right. Maybe you don't need privacy today, but what are you going to need tomorrow? Do you know? No. So you better take precaution today. Why put stuff out there? Now, if you're posting on social media, it's not

supposed to be private. I do find it funny how a lot of people always talk about privacy and then mention like Facebook in certain ways. Now, Facebook's looking at DMs and all that stuff, too. So but this idea of like I'm posting publicly, it's like it's not private. I'm like, what? It's not, you're posting publicly. It's a social media public forum. Right. But that doesn't mean that the clicks that you do, right? Like what is private and what is public needs to be very clear. It's important that when you are using a social media website, if the profiles you're looking at are being tracked, that I would consider an invasion of privacy because I have not said, I want someone to look at this. It's only when I make a public post that I'm saying,

i want someone to look at this but of course they're tracking everything and that's where the privacy with concerns with things like facebook come up is because they're doing things they're tracking things that they're not that is not apparent well a and it's scary too well this is not social media but like google just became the world just became aware that they've been handing over search uh history to the fbi uh they have shocked i mean shouldn't be shocked but like i shouldn't be shocked but the fbi is giving google code or a list of searches that anytime somebody searches a certain phrase send us their ip send us their information it's fucked yeah you know what else too um i also want to come back to that comment that you brought

up because i think he was asking about redundancy too which is another huge aspect of being a systems administrator um but let me let me address something else real quick it's not just privacy right it's very easy for us as a company to you know like we're trying to bootstrap a movement here right we're doing it through the the vehicle of a company and we have a group of people and we need to like build products and deliver technology and whatever so um part of that strategy is to convince people why they need this thing right and we're not going to sit there and just scare tactic the hell out of people into using, using it. The world's doing that for us. We don't really need to reiterate that as much, but something we bring up that not a lot of people think about

is that the, the objective of the tech giants over the last 40 years, right? Yeah. About 40 years has been to control the pipes, right? It's been to get as much control to, to be the middleman, to make sure that every last thing that you do flows through them, right? And they gave it away for free to accomplish that goal. It's a free app. It's this, it's this, it's this. Why? It's because they're trying to control the middle, right? They're trying to be the ultimate middleman. What happens when you actually achieve that goal and you are the middleman that everyone depends on for everything that you need? It's no longer free. They're just going to squeeze and squeeze, and there's nothing you can do about it. If your life depends on your ability to make phone calls,

send text messages, do email, social media, all of it, which it does. Most of our lives depend on the ability to use the cloud, the ability to use the internet in this custodial manner. Well, when you have a dependent, a dependency in your life, expect whoever controls access to that dependency to extort you at some point. And what they've been doing so far is taking the data and monetizing the data, right? And that was enough, right? To justify these massive valuations and huge companies and get rich. But guess what? People are starting to be more and more concerned about their privacy. All the way to even pressuring lawmakers into creating laws that prohibit tech giants from collecting data without asking you. And when they ask you, you say no. So what's

happening here our thesis is that the the ability to monetize big data like at scale and in the way that they've been doing it is is going to start getting hurt they're not going to be able to make as much money off of taking your data so what are they going to do they're going to take your money fuck the data they'll just start charging yeah expect to get nickeled and dimed on every app that's on your phone to the point of it being a massive monthly expense you already see it with like streaming services, people who have Hulu and Netflix and they're all 10 bucks a piece, but it adds up when you have eight, right? Well, if every app on your phone, and there's probably 40, right? If you're an average person, you have 40 to 50 apps on your phone. If every one of them

was charging you $10 a month, that's going to be a serious impact. So we're going to start to see that. I think we're going to start to see, I mean, the Apple updates that sort of force the issue, right? Say, hey, if you don't want to use apps to collect your data, hit this button. I think anybody I believe they had to present a notification in one of their

latest updates to present that data. I would say most people said, nope, don't track me. Absolutely. Which means a whole revenue stream is drying up and they're going to have to supplement it from somewhere. They're going to lash out with subscriptions. Subscriptions. They're going to lash out with subscription

models you're gonna you're gonna pay for everything pay as you go everything um and unless unless you're running your own open source self-hosted software services that you access from anywhere in the world in total privacy then it's free for life and there's nothing anyone can do about it's not free because somebody said it's free and is collecting your data it's free because it's inherently free yeah and it seems like we're hitting an inflection point in terms of open source services that make this vision of the future built on free and open source software very tangible i mean obviously you have bitcoin uh you mentioned cups that you guys created and elements you have mastodon up there um you've got the distributed google suite you've got jitsy

now you're getting the video and jitsy's not up there yet but that is something we're going yeah but it's like an open source technology like the suite that enables the the data transfer and different mediums whether it be text audio visual are coming to market and it's just a matter of do we have an inflection point of talent focused on those open source suites uh that that allows us to build this out quickly and maybe there's no better forcing function than apple giving everybody that notification that says, don't track me. And things are just going to get expensive. And we're like, all right, let's build the free version.

It's coming from everywhere. The pressure is coming from all directions, right? The incumbent systems are violating privacy. They're going to start extorting on the subscription front. The free and open source developers have always been developing out of passion. But now that passion is increasing because the world is attacking, right? So you're only going to see a more and more stronger desire to contribute to this alternative future as the centralized world continues to express its inadequacies. And secondly, funding helps.

So Bitcoin has actually done a lot, I think, for open source development because a lot of people are just putting their middle fingers up at their jobs now. They're just like, you know what, this might not last forever and whatever, but I don't need to work right now. I'm going to go build a passion project. I'm going to go work on something I care about rather than just paying the bills because Bitcoin has afforded me this opportunity. And then lastly, the usability of the services is huge. So nobody wants to see all their hard work on their passion project sit and collect dust in the garage, right? Like nobody wants to build some open source note-taking app and then just have nobody in the world use it except techies who know how to follow or read me on GitHub. So something like Embassy actually dramatically increases the distribution channels of these software services, right?

Because we take File Browser, for instance, or we have one called PhotoView, right? So PhotoView is like Google Photos. It allows you to index photos into albums. It has facial recognition so that it can automatically put people where they belong. It has multi-user accounts. It has shareable links. It's just a cool photo application. You can do editing and all that stuff in it, right?

We didn't build PhotoView. We didn't build any of the things that were on Embassy. We contacted the developer of PhotoView, and we said, hey, we built this distribution mechanism such that anyone on Earth will be able to run your photo software, but it needs to be packaged up for our operating system. It needs to be wrapped with all this metadata stuff. and like two days later he was just like here it is because he wants people to use his stuff right and so what this does is it actually opens up this huge sort of like i'll call it joint marketing opportunity between us and the the software developers the service developers because nobody wants to see their stuff rotten in the in a garage they want to see it used and we are giving

them that ability we are the outlet of open source software increased distribution leads to increased fulfillment leads to higher potential for production right yeah it's a beautiful feedback loop yeah and maybe this was the missing piece this operating system operating yes the operating system and the the sort of surrounding support system for the operating system because if we just put that out in the world and we're just like see ya then then people would be a lot you know more timid to try to learn it and figure it out. People who run embassies and who are in our chat groups and who are part of the community really have found a place. We are there. The team is in the chat groups. We're growing all the time. You're actually getting the help you need because

while the product just works, you still have questions, concerns. What if I do this? Am I in trouble. What if I do that? We're here to help, right? We're constantly making more and more YouTube videos. We're making more and more documentation. We're scaling the support network because that is necessary. It has to be packaged in a nice box, right? As much as I hate that, kind of, it's like I acknowledge the truth of that situation. Like you cannot introduce a radical new technology if it's not packaged in a beautiful box. You're just cutting off a portion of the population that will not trust anything unless it's packaged nicely. Right. It's so interesting so we package it nicely it's great no big deal it's beautiful i can't wait to plug we're gonna

plug this in after we record here inside and get loaded up i guess that's uh a good segue and like i mean i know we described in the the first episode recorded but what happens i plug this in how do we get onboarded how long does it take i believe it's 15 minutes last time you were here uh it's probably five minutes yeah so you'll you'll plug that in um it will immediately serve itself up on your local area network. So you plug it into both power and router. It'll serve itself up on your local area network as embassy.local. So you'll open up your computer and type in embassy.local. And that will present what we call the setup wizard. It's like a three step, you know, set up your embassy process. The result of which, so it's a, you know, it's not

like give us your private information. There's no us. The setup is happening between your computer and your embassy, period. You could turn off your internet, okay? And so at the end of that setup process is going to be a Tor v3 URL and a unique .local URL. So no longer embassy.local. That only exists. Embassy.local only exists for the tiny window of time during setup. Once it's set up, now that thing will serve itself on your LAN at a unique address, and it'll serve itself on Tor at a unique address so when you're home you use the lan address because it's lightning fast you're cutting tor out of the equation altogether and when you're on the go you use tor because it's accessible from anywhere in the world without compromise um so that's it the result of the

setup it's less than five minutes creates two websites or one website that's accessible over two network interfaces um and then you go in and shop you hit the marketplace and shop for things that you want to install, click install, off and running. It feels like using an iPhone, right? Like we are not so proud to acknowledge the hard work, brilliant work that has been done by the tech giants over the last 40 years. Like they really nailed it, okay? Like the fact that grandma can use email is remarkable okay they took this super technical thing and they boiled it down to something that a child can understand and we are riding on that we consider apple and google our r&d department cut right like they are they are pumping billions of dollars millions and

billions of dollars over the decades into ux and ui design research doing these focus groups ab testing right they've shown us exactly what works so we designed embassy os we just copied them we took exactly what their interfaces look like we just made it for ourselves and um and except instead of uh using a personal computer those interfaces are designed to use a personal server real quick i want to visit the redundancy thing i don't want to forget about that guy's question redundancy yes so you know what happened where's your data right the data is living on that hard drive right there right that's a two terabyte ssd and that's where all embassy os data lives both the operating system data and the data for all the services and so if your house burns down

bye-bye data okay it's gone um and that's not okay it's not okay because this is important stuff right it could even have private keys on it it could have passwords on it so backups are essential And so the way that you do backups using Embassy OS 030, so we actually improved the backup story from the O2X series, is you have two options. And the one that we recommend is backups over the local area network to another device. So either your MacBook, your Windows machine, your Linux machine, could be a desktop, laptop, could be even just a network-attached storage device,

a NAS that you just have in your home for storing data. and you go in and you do a shared folder. So you would actually like go into your MacBook, you'd right-click the folder and you'd be like share, right? And now that folder is now an accessible network interface on the LAN. You plug in the address and the password into Embassy and click backup and it'll back it up

to this device in your home. And if you wanted to, you could actually take a external hard drive, like an HDD, plug it into your MacBook, select that as the shared folder, and then it would create a backup to the HDD. you unplug that and go put it in a safe somewhere. Okay, so it's very manual.

You actually have to like create a backup. You have to push the button to create a backup. You could also just plug a drive directly in to the embassy. But there's a caveat. The Raspberry Pi 4 doesn't provide sufficient power to power two SSDs or an HDD and an SSD. So you can't plug in two drives into that embassy. It just won't.

So you wouldn't be able to back it up, essentially. You have to get like a powered hub. You have to get like an alternative source of power and then you can plug in multiple drives and then you could just do that. You plug in a HDD, click backup, and it'll back it up to that drive. So you have two options for backing up. Both are manual. However, your embassy is not down during the process. You click backup and you can go continue to do things. And it just cycles through and backs up every single piece of service on your embassy. So you can go do something else. You can continue to use it, whatever.

So as we move forward, the backup story will improve dramatically. And part of this, sort of the holy grail of the server infrastructure that we're going for here is actual multiple synced embassies around the world. So you, for instance, would have like an embassy here and you'd have one, you know, your parents place somewhere and you'd have one on the other side of the world at a friend's house. And they would all be aware of each other because you would give each one the address of the other in the credentials and they would actually act as a personal server cluster, creating backups to each other on a continuous basis. Hell yeah. Yeah. So that's where it gets really convenient. You don't even have to think about it anymore because if one

goes down, the other one picks up the slack and the data's in three different places. And say like you don't have three geographic regions and you don't want to buy three embassies. You don't need to because somebody else could be running an embassy and they have a four terabyte SSD and they're barely using any of it. They can actually store encrypted backups of other embassy users and do it for sats, right? So this is a data storage protocol that would leverage micropayments to enable people to monetize excess storage space, right?

This has been talked about a lot. It's what Chia wants to be. It's been talked about a lot. It's actually a really hard problem to solve because you need to be able to verify that the person is in fact doing their job. So you have to utilize some pretty advanced cryptography to basically ask all the people

who are supposed to be storing whatever portion of your data they're storing that they actually have that exact portion that you sent them and that they're supposed to have. So it's this constant proof of, you know, proof that they're doing their job in exchange for sats. And you need to have enough redundancy

so that if someone becomes malicious, your data doesn't go missing. It's a very hard problem that we personally are not just going to solve in total, But embassy acts as a perfect platform for something like that and perfect use case, right? It's the need is there. And so we will either be building, contributing to building or funding the building partially, at least, of that protocol. It's like part of our mission.

Hell yeah. I love that. And even if you, so if you're storing a backup and other embassy users SSD with extra space, it's encrypted, right? So that even if it's on their server, they can't read the data or access the data. And they need your key to unlock that. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. And they don't even know who you are.

No. It's a completely anonymous data sharing network. This is... Again, theory. That's not built. No. Today, the backup story is this, back it up on your LAN. The next incremental step that we take for backups is to schedule automatic backups.

However, if you're doing an automatic backup to your laptop and it's scheduled for 3 p.m. every day, but you are gone with your laptop and it's not connected to the LAN, it's going to fail. Now, that doesn't mean the embassy explodes. It just means that you'll receive a notification that says backup attempt failed, could not reach target backup device. But who says it needs to be on your LAN?

So the next step after automated backups to something on the LAN would be automated backups to a remote server of your choosing including another person's embassy this wouldn't be for sats it wouldn't be a paid for thing it would be like a buddy system like i have an embassy and you have an embassy yeah of course man here's my address and your unique credentials for my address which only gives you the ability to do one thing with my device which is in store encrypted backup once a day at this time whatever and then i do it for you and that way if either of us goes down you have my data and i have yours Yeah, and this doesn't seem like too much of a leap of a user experience.

People are automatically backing their iPhones up to the Apple Cloud all the time. Yeah. No, the big thing to keep in mind here is that everything I'm talking about can be, it can come across as like a lot, and it can feel technical and challenging. And it's only once you get into the user interface that you're like, huh, this really makes sense. There's a big button that says create backup, and then it tells you exactly what to do and then you click backup and then it works and it

all of it is transparent and smooth and fast and it just works it's a very pleasurable experience hell yeah so let's paint the picture of a world in which embassy os succeeds to a degree that would make us extremely happy what what is was an individual a group of individuals the city is the state's uh day-to-day life look like what is our interaction with the digital world how does it change is the change even noticeable ideally at full scale it would feel like today but without all the pitfalls and dangers and breaches of privacy and possibilities for extortion like there's nothing wrong with the computing experience today can it get better of course, and it will get better either in a centralized way or a decentralized way, but

the computing experience will improve and it will expand to include IoT, right? Your home is going to be extremely intelligent. Everything is going to be connected to the internet. Things that you didn't think even should be connected to the internet will be because everything is, it's just going to be a virtual reality where everything has a chip in it. It's all, your digital home exists, you know? And that is going to happen. There's nothing that's going to stop the smart home iot robot future from happening so our goal is to make sure that those robots are serving individuals not being rented by individuals to serve the needs of uh corporate and governmental entities like that's our goal is to give individuals direct sovereign control over the

robots that will and and systems that will govern their physical lives um physical and digital lives And so we're at the very early stages of this. But if I were to imagine the future, project, and then, you know, you are using a mobile device that is connecting to one or more of your private servers over one or more various network interfaces, right? internet overlay networks that are private, onion routed, end-to-end encrypted, talking to your own personal servers, which are then networked over P2P or federated networks. Something like Matrix is federated. Something like Bitcoin is P2P, right? That are talking to other servers, again, over encrypted overlay networks, probably bypassing ISPs because it's actually doing mesh routing hops around other people's servers all around the world. And I can control the

devices in my home. Even when I'm not home, I can open up my phone and, you know, watch video footage from my home or tell my, you know, chef robot to begin cooking dinner or something like that. And it's that feeling of as a child having that box and that feeling of as an adult being competent and in control and not at the mercy of others to take care of your needs. And it'll all be technology right this is not the woods future i imagine a future of where technology is is our savior not our destroyer well i'm happy you brought up the woods analogy and i think this is like the perfect happy medium and this is something again uh the whole metaverse meme blowing up triggered me pretty uh pretty aggressively because it seems like this

weird form of nihilistic escapism where people just want to ignore the problems in our world and escape into this digital VR world where they can make a perfect world that the natural world isn't providing them. That's one extreme. The other extreme is the one where the mountain men just go back to using wood burn fires to heat our homes and use no technology. And what you're describing seems like the most optimistic future that we can have where you combine the two. You hypercharge the physical world, meat space, with the technology that we've been given. You don't have to escape into a full-on digital world. You can blend meat space and the digital world to give you the best quality of life that you could have in meat space.

Absolutely. Yeah. When I talk about the robot future and smart homes and everyone will do whatever they want to do. You'll just be able to do it easier, right? Like if you want to go live in the woods, you can live in the woods, but wouldn't you like to live in the woods with like a drone that's patrolling the perimeter and, you know, a grill that cooks the best food you've ever had by thinking it at the grill, you know, without Google being involved. It's like implement technology to whatever extent you want to. The point is that the technology that you implement should be yours in like the grittiest sense of property right it should not be permissioned should not be rentals it's like when you buy a hammer it's yours right you go to you

go to the hardware store you buy a hammer you go home and that hammer just belongs to you it's not like that with our technology a hammer is technology i'm talking about digital technology right like that's not yours well it's not not only yours but you don't build the framework by which it's lever it's used to right you're given these cookie cutter digital houses or here's how you use this technology like if you're just given the facilities to build your own framework i think that's much preferable right like you can build customizable yeah sure where these out-of-the-box frameworks handed to us by the tech giants governments intelligence apparatus uh is that framework's constructed in a way to force you to operate and act in a certain way which is

not sovereignty it's not freedom it's not living life right to the best of your abilities yeah because say because defaults matter right like the the the pathways matter just as much as the the technology itself right how you use it matters as much as what it is and so for instance if you buy a MacBook, assuming there is no hardware level of vulnerability, like assuming Apple is not literally on the motherboard in your home, right? Like there's not some backdoor built-in, which there might be, but let's assume for a second that the hardware itself is safe, okay? Maybe that's a bad assumption, but let's do it. It means that you could use that computer in a very personal, private way. It's possible. But that computer comes pre-installed with a bunch of

software that has default settings and those default settings are to share things, right? So it's like defaults matter. It's not just about the technology. It's about how you instruct people to use it. So that's why we talk about what we're doing is not just a product thing. It's an educational thing too. It's a user experience thing. We have to give people technology that is not very opinionated, right? But if it's not opinionated at all, then you don't know what to do. It's just a blank page, right? It's writer's block. I don't even know what to write about. I need a prompt. Give me some guidance. And so finding that delicate balance between nothing and we're going to tell you exactly how you're going to use this thing is really important.

And we always err on the side of blank slate, knowing that it produces a less than perfect experience, but, you know, makes it such that we don't start falling into the trap of using defaults against users, right? Like, it's really important to us that we build this system not according to the don't be evil philosophy, but according to the can't be evil philosophy. And that's all about design decisions. it's not about how you treat the product and technology after it's built it's about how you built it and so as we make these decisions uh in our daily meetings and we figure out how we're going to design things the question that always comes up is how could we take advantage of this in the future to fuck people for money and we take every measure possible to not build it that way Yeah, that's extremely important, admirable.

And I guess my next question with that in mind is, how do you see users, new users, raw users, getting up to speed with these particular design frameworks and leveraging them? That's another popular trope in the Bitcoin space is a knock against Bitcoin's private public key management. It will never be a thing. Similarly with this sovereign tech stack, like, oh, it's too hard. You can't give people a blank slate. That was Steve Jobs' thing. People don't know what they want. You have to put it in front of them.

And it seems like you're trying to balance those two things. It is hard. In terms of the will people do it, will people take on at least a minimal degree of responsibility in this world to obtain values such as privacy and independence? We know they will take on some degree of discomfort or responsibility. The question is how much, right? What is the line? And here's what we have come up with. We think that the open source, self-hosted, decentralized computing paradigm that we imagine for humanity's future will require one thing that the current system does not.

One thing and one thing only. And we're still looking for ways to get around that, too. But currently, all we've been able to come up with is you cannot forget your password. You can't lose your password, your passphrase, your mnemonic, whatever it is. there's you're responsible for one fucking thing just don't forget it bury it somewhere do whatever you got to do beyond that we can actually replicate the current system we can make it look feel and act just like the current convenient beautiful centralized system in in terms of experience we can replicate that experience but without all the bullshit eventually that's the

other thing too like i mean it's a little and a lot to ask at the same point the oh my god if i lose my password i'm fucked is a big feeling out there but there's a degree of personal responsibility that needs to be reintroduced to the world at least i'm under the uh the strong belief that humanity needs to begin taking more extreme ownership individuals that make up humanity need to exert more extreme ownership over their lives how do we make that cool that's like one thing I try to figure out how to do with the messaging and this new, and the newsletter and this podcast and everything that we do at TFTC is like, how do we message that self-sovereignty school that you should want to hold your private keys that you should want to run your own node

that you should want a self-sovereign stack to, uh, interact with when you're sharing data, um, about yourself, personal data. It's, it's a hard sell, um, because convenience is really valuable. People value convenience almost above everything. And that's partly out of naivety. They don't realize how bad things can get. But something I've been hitting on more and more, and again, I mentioned this earlier, is that we don't talk about sovereignty as much. We don't talk about privacy as much anymore, just internally even. What we talk about more these days is independence, right? First of all, it's a term that doesn't trigger as much emotion, right? You say the word sovereignty and it just comes with a lot of baggage, it's accurate, but, but depending

on who you're talking to, they can just be like, well, that's not for me. I'm like, okay. But I get it. You know, there's, there's political and connotations. Um, and then privacy is not strong enough. It's like, well, I'm not doing anything wrong. I don't, you know, or it doesn't sound as valuable. It's just, it's, it's, you can sell privacy, uh, but it doesn't sell as well as, as we think independence does. And the reason for that is because nobody wants to think of themselves as a dependent, right?

Children are dependents, right? Even when you fill out your taxes, how many dependents do you have? Are you a dependent or are you an adult, right? Are you a child or are you an adult? So you can almost use this as like a, like if you don't take care of your own keys, if you don't memorize your own password,

you're a digital child, right? Mommy and daddy are going to store your password for you and they're going to either let you have it or not. and like who wants to be a child are you a child right so you can almost kind of like you know politely politely ridicule somebody for just wanting to be a child grow up bully people into the self into the sovereign stack grow up take control of your stuff yeah well that's the other thing you see this another big theme in the last two years obviously with the economic Like lockdowns, people turning away from public schools

toward homeschooling, homeschooling pods and different ways of educating children. I want to live in a world where kids as young as eight-year-olds, as soon as you're able to use a computer, you're learning how to build a sovereign stack at that age. That's what we need to get to, in my mind. I got my son in there right now. He's almost two.

I hope by the time he's 10, he's plugging in computers uh downloading msc os and building his own stack that i don't know about um and with with little uh instruction from myself or or navigation help from me do we get there oh yeah yeah no this this makes that a lot easier right so asking an eight-year-old to you know root their their macbook and you know start downloading docker containers and running them and you know setting up a tor network interface and accessing it from a you know configured firefox browser it's it's too much but when you talk about building a sovereign stack i know you're not just talking about you know running self-hosted software you're talking about

the the stack of life right like taking control of your food and you know and your physical protection and your security systems and your digital privacy and all of it's the the building a sovereign an individual uh and we want that for our children i do i just had my first child congratulations thank you and and uh i think about her a lot as we're building this stuff what kind of future do i want to create for her and what kind of person do i want her to be and um that informs a lot of our technology this thought of just wanting my daughter to be a completely free person free freedom right we're talking about really fundamental basic stuff here um and and we can use technology to do that we can use technology to lower the barrier to

entry right that's really what we're doing right it conceptually someone we're just like what does start nine do without telling me what start nine does right with any details of the business at all I would say we're lowering the barrier to entry and shortening the darkness, right? Like making sovereign digital technology accessible to people in order to provide an off-ramp from the collapsing system to minimize the damage and darkness that will result from its demise. That's what we're out to do. Yeah. That's a heavy mission. It's fun, though, too.

I shouldn't say fun. it's it's invigorating yes we you wake up excited to go to work every day i would imagine i do i don't come home is the problem i work from home a lot but like yeah i uh i i work too much i do as well my way you can go ask my wife she'll tell you the same thing but again it's worth it number one uh and number two i think we were talking earlier like i'm having a black pill day a bad day but it's true i think i really like the way you frame it by we're shortening the darkness i think my problem and like what makes gives me a sense of existential dread is i always thought that we could avoid the darkness right we can if we could front run if we get bitcoin as many hands

as possible if we can make as many people aware of how fucked up the world is as quickly as possible we can avoid it we can we can fix society's problems from falling into a dark place But I think we are at a point where we do have to resign ourselves. You just have to let the process of decay and entropy of these incumbent systems play their course. And that will come with a bit of darkness. And I really like the framing of shortening that. Accepting, number one, that it is coming and it is upon us. And with that acceptance, working to shorten it to as short a period as possible.

which I think is a really good framing as opposed to making the binary, we fix it and prevent it or we just go into complete shit. Yep. Yeah, and maybe you are right. Maybe we can avoid it. I personally don't.

I think we're already in it. Yeah, well, it depends on how you define darkness, how dark is dark need to be before you call it dark. I don't know. But this is not, it's not beautiful out right now, right? It's cloudy at best and storming at worst already, but it's a race. This is where the passion comes from. It's why I'm so passionate about what we're doing is because I see a ticking clock, right?

And again, it's not an overnight thing. It's not like one day it's fine, the next day it's not. As we've seen, it's deteriorating in real time. But we have to build alternative parallel systems as soon as possible so that those who want to exit can exit. We have to build the off-ramps, right? Because you're in a crowded theater that's burning down. Get people out as fast as possible, right? And that's through technology and education.

It's how you do that. And direct assistance, actually helping out, right? Being welcoming to people who want, even if they don't understand exactly what's going on, right? Sometimes that's through willful ignorance and sometimes it's just through ignorance. Sometimes it's naivety. Sometimes they don't understand how evil some people are.

Yeah, the banality of evil. I mean, you can make a very strong argument that a majority of people today are engaged in a somewhat banal form of evil and they don't even realize it. Yeah. So, um, yeah, I think in my mind, my personal experiences, I think I pivoted from avoid the darkness to shorten the darkness, um, in 2012. Why 2012? Ron Paul. Okay. What, uh, what did Ron, what did uncle Ron say? Well, it's what he, it's what he didn't accomplish. He didn't when the uh yeah i at that time had never felt more connected to a real movement in my life and i was young it's not like i had a ton of years to have ever been connected to anything but i was like this is real right i was at those rallies i like the ron paul 2012 revolution was real like

it was it was an intellectual movement it was backed by by logic it was backed by fact it wasn't just a bunch of empty rhetoric. He had a plan that would have worked over many, many, many decades. He was crushing the debates still. He was crushing the debates. He was rallying thousands, tens of thousands of people who was chanting end the Fed. I mean, it was like a real movement and I was all over it. And I was like, you can't stop something like this. I was like, this thing has wheels and momentum and there's no way he doesn't get the nomination. And then I watched how they dealt with him and i think that's proper wording because he was dealt with like a child is dealt with okay like i it was the most powerful social movement i had ever seen was basically flicked

off the table through a very simple tactic of uh obscurity they basically just pretended like he didn't exist yeah in the media and then he didn't exist they had the polls where like he would be like first and they put him like in third position on the screen so people like the name yeah in first you have Mitt Romney and in third you have Michelle Bachman. Who's in second? You just didn't say his name. And I was like, there's no way that can work. People are not idiots. And then it just worked. It worked beautifully. They just ignored his existence and he failed to exist. And at that moment, I realized how powerful the incumbent system was, how much power media has over perception like i had read about propaganda i had read about sort of the way that the state

you know um manages consciousness but i had never experienced it so intimately and now we're seeing it again in many different facets but in one in particular but but it's like so i i switched from well you can't you can't beat politics with politics you cannot beat that system at its own game it's really good at it you need something wholly other and at the time i had not discovered Bitcoin, right? This was 2012. I was using excess money from my paychecks to buy gold because Ron Paul, you know, I learned about sound money and I didn't know anything about Bitcoin at the time. And so I was out there buying gold and silver, you know, trying to, I had this thesis that the monetary system, I had all the, you know, the understanding of it. But I wasn't a dev at

the time. I was a late in life programmer. I hit it hard when I did, and now I'm quite good and been doing it for seven years. But at the time I wasn't, I didn't know how to code and I hadn't discovered Bitcoin. I was pretty depressed. Like there was a couple of years that went by there where I was just like, it's over. The darkness is coming. There's no way out. And then I found the angle. I was like, I found Bitcoin. I found coding, which I took to and love. And I was just like, oh, this is, this is the underbelly. Like this is where they're vulnerable. And it's going to be a long story. I remember talking to, you know, some, some friends of mine who were getting me into coding and Bitcoin 2015 is when I started really, you know, seeing both. And they were

talking about this as just like, oh, this thing's just going to like come in and just like crush the financial system. And it's going to be over in like, you know, like five years, we'll be on a Bitcoin standard. And I was like, this sounds like a 70 year war. 70. It sounds like a 70 year war. This sounds like a multi-generational task. Now, that doesn't mean that there won't be hiatuses, that there won't be moments of, you know, the eye of the storm being calm and feelings of battles. There will be battles that will be short-lived. But I think to actually overturn the system that is currently in existence is going to

take multiple generations. And the reason I say that is not because of the technology. it's not because of the the protocols and systems that are in place it's because of the minds you cannot change the mind of a 50 year old person 60 year old person seven year old person you can't change the mind of a 25 year old person anymore you have to get them young yeah right this is about the children and i it's so cliche to say that but now that i have one it like is really starting to hit home it's like we cannot create the world that we want to exist without two generations of children at least no i completely agree it was lenin who i think pioneered that

statement give me two generations of children and i'll give you a nation of communists yeah hey give me two generations of children i'll give you a nation of sovereign individuals it won't be a nation though anymore it'll just be sovereign individuals and but you do need those multi-generations i agree i agree and if you think like bitcoin is a multi-century potentially millennia age project where it's going to extend itself and be around far longer than we are on this planet yeah i mean it's almost selfish to to want everything out of the box from bitcoin for our generation right i think there's no way you could yes it would be incredible and that's like my biggest beef with bitcoin's lazy critics and even some bitcoiners as well is that it's not

immediate exchange unit of account it's got volatility it's like you're not going to get that out of the box nor are you going to win out of the box it's going to take work it's going to take building and it's going to take time like and you just as a bitcoin or as an individual out there maybe listening to this podcast or wanting to usher in a bitcoin standard you have to resign yourself to the possibility that it doesn't happen till after you're gone and that's okay yeah it is there's a there's a little bit of a sadness to it there's a little bit of a sadness to me when i think about that um but it did change when i had my daughter it wasn't as sad it was i don't know different emotion i know i i can't articulate it either but i know the emotion you're

just trying to describe i tear up at the thought of her and her children being free because it's not even about me anymore. I is so much lower time preference than that. And I couldn't viscerally experience that until I had a kid. A lot of people talk about how having kids changes your life and, and it is for everyone and in some similar ways and some different ways. But for me, it wasn't about the schedule and the waking up at night. That was easily predictable. Maybe not by everybody, but I saw that coming, right? That didn't affect my life at all. What it changed was I was already a low time preference thinker, right? When I was six years old, I was buying Power Rangers that I never took out of the box because I thought they might be collectibles one day. Like I've always

been an investor and a low time preference thinker, right? And I understand that things take a long time. Big, good things do not happen overnight. They take a very long time to build or else they're not big good things if they can happen overnight then you're talking about something else um and uh and that you know i was okay with that even when we embarked on start nine the not so humble mission of reinventing the internet and personal computing for the sovereign era i understood that that was not going to be a five to ten year thing and i told our seed round investors the same thing i said if you're expecting an exit in five years we're not the investment for you. It has nothing to do with what we're considering right now. We need the

money to build the future. If we build the future, more money will happen as a consequence, not as a goal. The goal is to build the future we want, right? And so that's what you're investing in. And if you think that that will result in a return, then great. But if not, then don't invest because we're never going to prioritize quarterly profits over the vision of my granddaughter's future. So I'm even more okay with it now because not only am I on board, but I have this child now that gives me this perspective and this emotion that I didn't have before, but we're backed by people who are supporting that same vision. I don't just mean our investors. I mean, every member of the company are the people who have bought into our vision and our community. Our community

is awesome well they're not just users of our product they are like passionate supporters who became that way not because of me talking on a podcast like this but because they got it and then it worked and then they had questions and then we helped and then we were building trust right but making it such that if you ever stop trusting us you'll be just fine yeah we're building the the exit routes along the way i mean we've got some of the start line community in the comments here um look at this this is the way uh no it's it's gonna take time freaks one day at a time one embassy at a time like just one person at a time one mind at a time one child at a time like it's gonna take time but it's gonna be so fucking worth it but you know

what's what's good about that acknowledgement that sort of and maybe i'm wrong okay but this is how I've accepted this. And I'm a, I'm a runner. I, you know, I was shorter distance when I was young and then I pivoted to half marathon, which is my main event now. And I do it competitively and I do it seriously. And one of the things that I had to teach my athletes, cause I was also a coach for seven years and T and really ingrain in myself is settle in. It's a long race, right? Even the half mile is a long race. Like you've got to be strategic. You don't just come out firing. We laugh at people who go out sprinting the first 100 meters of a marathon because we know what's going to happen, right? I'm excited, and the crowd who also doesn't understand might be like, look at that guy.

Wow, they're amazing. They're unsustainable, right? Mile 23, their hands are on their knees. They're taking a little break. And we have some opinions about others who are partially trying to do what we're doing. and we very much view it as that sprinter in the first half mile of the marathon yeah this is a long race and the foundation matters it has to be solid secure uh scalable uh we have now rewritten from scratch our operating system three times in two years and it's not uh some simple fork

of an os that we added a script to to install things it's an operating system like it is a is a massive piece of software it's massive um so anyway i just i say that only to to drive the point home that like it's very easy to pretend to be doing something important in the bitcoin crypto sovereignty space right now because everyone's looking at the marketing material everyone is listening to the rhetoric there are very few things that are of substance that are scalable that are viable and it's really hard to tell the difference for somebody unless you really know how to do your own research or you have people that you trust that can do the research and ultimately it just takes time just takes time bad things crumble good things you know

don't yeah things with staying power will be here through time no it's the thing it's like it's like a fractal type thing like what you just described you can apply it to bitcoin or shit coins they apply to the bitcoin self-sovereign stacks um you can apply it to like high time preference society versus the low time preference society put forth by ron paul um it's going to take time that's that's the other thing too like the the nature of believing in low time preference not only that but implementing into your life is being okay with seeing the sprinters of the world run past you and having the confidence and the confidence and the patience

to understand like, hey, they made that decision. I'm making another strategic decision that's going to help me miles down the road. We'll see you at mile 10. Yeah. What mile are we at right now? We'll see. You know, I don't know. That's a great question.

yeah four four i don't know we're a quarter of the way you know i look it's been a it's been over a decade yeah if you start with bitcoin which i think you can go back a little further but um maybe even to some of the experimentation in the 90s with you know pgp and all that and hash cash and like it was but those were you know we didn't really start until bitcoin bitcoin was the first viable like means of defense so if you started there yeah I mean maybe a quarter at best yeah it's crazy thing we're 13 no I mean 13 years past the white paper almost 13 years past the launch that's a lot of time it's over a decade almost a decade and a half into this which is crazy to think and we're

still doing a base layer protocol development that will not see application viable application usage for years potentially yeah right that's a of tie preference yeah i'm just i think we're still building out the capabilities of the thing let alone the the application of those capabilities right like what taproot affords won't be fully realized for years yeah that's gonna take it's gonna take time exert some patience freaks uh we were talking about ron paul i want to go back to ron paul because i have a friend shout out jr he's a mass hole he swears that

in his particular county they just like didn't count Ron Paul votes like he personally went door to door and asked who they voted his neighbors

who they voted for in his county they said they had like zero votes for Ron Paul and he went door to door and asked people and had like

at least dozens of people say I voted for him he's a hero and he he will be remembered as an American hero I certainly agree with that but I think

the election meddling stuff it's real it's real yeah like yeah i don't have that personal proof but it would shock me if it wasn't the wikileaks email you can go to the wikileaks uh clinton dump they proved that the dnc and her versus bernie like they were actively manipulating those elections and the platforms you know when it comes to stuff like that i guess the reason why i almost dismissively i'm just like yeah that wouldn't surprise me sure it makes sense but it's like i actually so for a while there i got really into like trying to figure out the truth like what's really going on here you know and i realized it is a losing game because i don't can't trust any of the information right sure wiki leaks comes out with some stuff and maybe

you can trust that because it was a leak and sure but it's not the whole picture it's it's a slice of what's happening you to understand the whole picture you really have to go down the like deep dark conspiracy theory rabbit hole and and then it's and here's the thing that's very dark you want to talk about darkness i know and i don't even use that term as like derogatory to call somebody a conspiracy theorist what i do is i almost feel a little bit of pity i'm like why are you doing this like let's say you go down this hole and you come to all these conclusions that may or may not be true right what what is different like have you how have you contributed right? Like is your, are you happier? Have you benefited yourself, anyone in your life or society

at all? Like what was the benefit? Now I'm not saying don't educate yourself. What I'm saying is, is I don't need to know the gritty truth of everything. I can literally from a bird's eye view, look out at the world and be like, fucked. I don't need to know exactly what's wrong with it. Right. Cause I know the essence of what's wrong with it. And the essence of what's wrong with it is the outsourcing of judgment, the outsourcing of thinking, the utilization of tools and technology for purposes of control, manipulation, the corruption at the highest levels of the world. I know all that's true. I don't care who did what. The solution is the same for me. Build the alternative system that sets incentives properly such that those types of people and

systems do not emerge from the protocol. What we have today is exactly what the incentives point to. Right. You could have gone back in time and been like, here's the rule set. Here's the consensus rules we laid down for society. Here's what it's going to produce. Done. Fascism. It ends there. That's it. Right. That's the end of the road. It was never going to go anywhere but there. It just needed time. So what you have to do is build a different system with a different set of incentives and you know where it leads. It leads to the sovereign individual. And so. Yeah. And so I'm just like, let's just build that shit. Yeah. I'm sick of worrying about who did what and why and everything let's just build it well somebody who's uh been a a chronic warrior

went deep into those dark places i've been there too that's why i know not to go there it's do not yeah i mean you can go go explore but always know it's like the uh no one to hang up the phone and be like all right i've seen enough like let's go build something there and like there's only so much complaining i do a lot of it and uh uh attempting to shake people awake that you can do before you drive yourself crazy like this is much more fulfilling it's much more potent and effective as well more importantly um i hope yeah i mean look it's the same reason i don't uh i don't think about the origin of space and time in the universe anymore i went there right i i did that when i was you know younger and still do from time to time depending on if i

ingest anything that helps with that process but like um that's not part of my daily operating system. Yeah. Because again, it's the same thing as the conspiracy theory conclusions. It's like, what are you going to do differently? Right? Like you're in the simulation. There's nothing much you can do. So, so I'm just like, I don't care. I don't care. And I'm a philosopher. And my philosophy is I don't care because I'm going to wake up tomorrow and I still have the choice to either do something and believe that my life has purpose and build and gain fulfillment from sharing those experiences with loved ones, or I'm going to wake up the next day and be piss poor, sad and, you know, whatever. And it's like, I, I don't, I just choose the former. I

just choose it. I have no proof that it's the right choice. Right. It just feels good. Yeah. Like it's not, it's not hedonism either. It's not just, it feels good. I'm going to do whatever feels good. It's like, consider the alternative. Here's your life. What are you going to do with it are you going to spend your entire life seeking you know the the the truth of metaphysics and the truth of you know conspiracy in government or are you going to spend it building cool shit that makes us that makes your life and the lives of others better yeah well that that's funny said hedonism right because like the other if you go down that dark place and you come to the conclusion that all this stuff is happening there's nothing i can do about it the default would be like all

i'm just going to be a hedonistic it if they're not they're not playing by the rules i'm not either i'm going to go do drugs party but that's not that doesn't work right yeah and the other side is knowledge would accept it and live a more fulfilling life of virtue then that uplifts everybody and doesn't have this sort of nihilistic screw it they're doing it we should do it too type of mentality yeah i don't i don't converse with nihilists they're out there man sure and they're good people they're good intelligent people but they're not helping yeah what are you how could you be a nihilist though and how could well if if everything is shit and everything's gonna be shit and you're a speck on the edge of

the universe that doesn't matter and your life has no purpose and government's corrupt and unbeatable then i mean how could you be anything but yeah so my and it's not even that any of that stuff is untrue it's that it's not part of my consciousness fuck all that truth that's not what i think about i just choose to believe that that life is is meaningful and has great purpose and that humans are capable and good and that building is worthwhile and i build and i enjoy it right yeah now we're gonna get deep into a philosophical you choose to believe that but i think is there argument to be made that's inherent well both properties are inherent to us descent to an extent right they're both true it's what what schrodinger's view of the world right are you

going to nihilist or so i um i was raised i was raised jewish i am not a practicing uh religious person now i am a fairly spiritual person very common thing for people to say it's unique to everybody i get it it's very cliche whatever but something that has stuck with me from uh when i was younger is my rabbi at the time had given a speech and he said something that caught my ear and i made him write it down for me afterwards because i wanted to have it and so he on the same piece of paper wrote two things one said i am but ashes and dust and the underneath it it said for me the universe was created total opposites okay that everything exists not for humanity for you that the whole universe was a conspiracy to create you and your life in this moment in time

and space and the other end of that spectrum is you're just on the edge of the universe and there's nothing and he goes these are both true and he ripped it in half and gave you both sides of it i love that i love they're both true it's not either or so stop trying to figure out which one it is and get on with your life yeah we're never going to understand that mystery that mystery is beyond our comprehension it's like an ant trying to understand a human it's never going to happen well and i think there's an aspect too like understanding that we are comparatively relatively just dust in this universe empowers you to recognize that oh i am special in the fact that i have consciousness and i've been giving me a miracle the the ability and

the facilities to go try and do something even though i'm a speck of dust like you can have from that speck of dust and that profound impact on the world you know what invigorates me is the thought of so stars are just these you know massive furnaces right and they're just producing uh you know the higher elements and then supernova and they just blow it all over and you end up with solar systems and galaxies right so you have this this process and if you follow that process through the creation you know the formation of these bodies of mass and then you know gases and then some spark of life happens somehow, which we don't fully understand yet,

and single-celled organisms evolve into humans. What that means is that the entire universe is this massively complex blast furnaces that ultimately are resulting in conscious life. And the highest conscious life that we are aware of is humans. So by that logic, humans are... We're not dust against the stars. we're what the stars conspired to create like the universe like did everything it could to make us

right and that is just like to to talk about humans like when's the last time you heard the phrase human nature used as a positivism it's been a while nobody uses that phrase positively if somebody says that's human nature they are literally making a derogatory statement yeah because you should try to control. Yeah. Don't do human nature. But based on the explanation that I just gave human nature is, is the most glorious thing in the universe because it is what the universe is, has set out to create. Right. Yeah. It's the, um, I forget who said it, but it's like the quote, like, uh, humans are universe's recognition of itself or something like that. Like the product it's like, it's, it's attempt to see itself. And I know we're getting, we're

getting off. We're getting cosmic. It's been a while since we've gotten cosmic on this podcast. This is, that was a phrase that we used often in the beginning of the show, but I'm happy that we're getting cosmic here, Matt. You know why I'm happy about this is because it is necessary to round out the narrative of what's happening right now with this, because you cannot underestimate the effect that low self-esteem has on a populace's ability to defend itself. Okay. So the whole, the whole like climate change narrative okay let's talk about i don't want to talk about climate change i want to talk about what psychological effects that has on people that are often overlooked or underestimated which is that if you tell children from a very young age

when they are susceptible to and they're building out their their self-esteem and their their consciousness and you tell them we are destroying our planet we are these evil things that produce pollution. Look how horrible that factory is. It's destroying the planet. Nature is beautiful. Humans are ugly. What you are doing is you are implanting the seeds of low self-esteem into individuals and you hammer this narrative home. And so what happens is you don't even necessarily think about it on a daily basis, but there's this underlying feeling that you're not really worthy of glory. You're not really worthy of being free and living the kind of life that is appropriate for a human being because you don't really deserve it why because of original sin

you're just a dirty human and you're just you're killing everything around you and your nature sucks and you have to try to control it and it is insidious what that does to the resolve of a people especially in a crisis you deserve to die yeah so guess what we just surrender we just lay down arms and we just take what's coming to us because it's been it's been coming and i think that this is a very important and missing piece largely missing not everyone but a missing piece of this entire bitcoin digital self-sovereignty you know libertarian based movement of human rights is that you have to believe that humans deserve rights and so convincing people that they are the the product of a conspiracy of a cosmic conspiracy of the stars to create us not to

destroy us that we outshine the stars is important because it gives you the feeling that you deserve this bright future yeah yeah it's i mean that was he's kind of beautifully beautifully put cars pumping fists over here in the corner no it's and that maybe that's like the the thing that's darkest right now is that you have a society that's self-loathing to a degree and to an extent people are so self-loathing that they they lash out against the other and they're they they think that humans are inherently evil and there are some humans that are even more evil if they act a certain way um and they need to control their nature um to to get into line with with what they deem is is virtuous uh we're seeing

it obviously with all the covid shit with vaccines and all that stuff um and even even more micro like the kyle rittenhouse shit earlier this week aaron rogers last week pick a black lives matter colin kaepernick like all these little inconsequential i don't want to call them inconsequential but uh probably better labeled as distractions getting us away from ancillary narratives that are yeah they're meaningful though in terms of their effect yeah it's this dulling effect that we were talking about at the beginning this like wear them down effect it's you can just break the morale of an individual or of a people of a movement by just by just making it dull it's been it's bane it's just you know um and we've seen it

it's an old story actually yeah it's the oldest story in the book divide and conquer yeah divide and conquer divide and conquer and that's like again another thread that i was pulling on whitney earlier this morning is like how do we get people out of that or into the mindset of understanding that they're being actively divided and conquered uh against each other um it's it goes back a little bit so so educating on the nature of the problem is important okay educating on the nature of the solution is also important, but the undertone of any real movement is moral in nature, okay? You cannot win a battle unless you feel that you are fighting for a righteous cause, and we're missing that a little bit. We're still arguing up here. We're talking about politics and

economics and sort of utilitarian solutions and, you know, sound money creates, and that's all important, but do you deserve all of this? Why do you, why should you care? Are you willing to fight for it are you willing to persevere through through challenge because it's not going to be an overnight victory and those who were expecting this to be a a clean swipe are in for a very rude awakening when the incumbent system is willing to blow the house up rather than let somebody else have it yeah right and that is a terrifying thought but it can it it's not insurmountable No. And this leads me to the phrase, and I've never really thought about it this way, but you have to win hearts and minds. Like you win the minds by explaining the economic theory behind Bitcoin and how it works.

And you win the mind by basically creating a logical string of thoughts that says, all right, this makes sense. Winning the hearts, that's a whole other thing, right? Like how do you win somebody's fire to move forward and to focus that fire on certain things? What Bitcoin has done well over the past 13 years is win the minds of people who had the heart. Yes. Okay. I would certainly agree with that. They weren't lacking the heart.

That's kind of the point. That's why they took to it. That's why they understood it, right? It wasn't a lucky investment. It was a recognition of something real and necessary. And so, but now we're entering the next rung and their hearts aren't there. Yeah, we have to light the fire in their hearts. I don't even know if it's the hearts aren't there.

It's the understanding of, it's the deeper aspects of philosophy are missing, right? Even if they understand some of the economic principles at stake, it's the emotional complex. It's the years of beratement by the education system and by society at large and media as there's constantly degrading humanity, constantly enforcing this idea that we are dirty and ugly and need to be controlled and oh my god if freedom happened everyone would just like kill each other there's a movie called the purge and it's like one night a year there's no laws and everyone murders each other and i'm like that is the worst image of humanity and it's a complete fucking lie it is a complete lie people aren't like that people just want to barbecue and hang

out with their friends everyone all around the world that's all they want is to just be left alone and be able to pursue their passions and build things and have fun with loved ones nobody wants to murder anyone the only reason except sociopaths right there's like a couple extremely rare people who are just evil people and guess who's feeding you the lies that's what i'm saying is that it's it's it's it's the incentives of the system promoted the worst of humanity into positions of power and there's nothing you can do to replace that like every election cycle is just like, let's put that person in that person. I'm like, they're both sociopaths. They're just pitching a different narrative, but it's the same type of person.

And so to fix that, you have to go deeper than politics. You have to fix the moral outlook of humanity, of an individual's life, of the sanctity of that life, that it should have dignity and you need to give it teeth, right? The libertarian movement has been largely impotent because it lacks teeth. It has always lacked teeth, right? I hate going to, I shouldn't say I hate. I experience a degree of disappointment every time I'm at a libertarian party or gathering or meetup because it's just a lot of talk. Yeah, libertarians, larpertarians. It's just a lot. And I'm the realist libertarian and that person's not a real libertarian. And it doesn't doesn't matter nobody's doing anything right a movement has to have teeth and in this

world teeth is control over information this is an information war so you want to fight back you have to take back the information and the channels of communication and the data right this is about bitcoin is is you know largely viable because it is pure information right we've taken money and made it information it's not physical in nature um but that was just the like the stab that broke open the gateway right but if we want to win the future we have to take back the informational uh infrastructure of this planet yeah wow you're making things very clear right now matt i mean i think like this philosophical approach and again and again that's one thing me personally and many other bitcoiners but focus on like focus on the

economic basics and the technical basics like bitcoin works from an economic perspective because it is sound money uh and it's it's got all those properties it's technological innovation because it enables this distributed system that works you can audit it yeah but why do we want this we want this because we deserve it as humans we are good we are not a scourge on this earth we deserve to flourish and have a high quality of life and that's underlying everything that most bitcoiners are focusing on yes and that's but not talking about that much i do hear it um but it's not the main onboarding process for new people it's largely absent from the the welcome message the welcome party it doesn't go straight to humanity humans are glorious i mean it's it's

about the economics which again is attractive to some people who already sort of have that understanding but it's also attractive to people who don't have that understanding and see a quick buck right it's the weak hands and the you know speculative shit coiners and it's it's like we don't want a proliferation of that and in order to to fight back against that it needs to be uh ideological in nature right there needs to be this and and i think this partly comes out in what has become come to be known as sort of toxic maximalism right this idea that like we're we're fighting an ideal on an ideological front um but the ideology is still living at the upper echelons of philosophy. So from a philosophic pyramid, right, you have metaphysics,

epistemology, ethics, politics, right? And we're fighting at the political level. Politics and economics are sort of intertwined, two sides of the same coin, right? So we're fighting at the political level. And sometimes we get down to the moral level, right? But it really actually needs to go deeper right i i like i hate to say this but we have to be having epistemological and metaphysical debates we need to be talking about like is reality perceivable by by a human being right like or is it all just a subjective projection of your own imagination it's like that debate has to happen in bitcoin conversations because the second somebody says well there is no there's no way a human being a human mind can perceive reality accurately what you've done

is you've you've taken away our our teeth agency yeah it's like well then what you're all just everything's faded you can't discover anything for yourself you're a weak pathetic little thing that needs to be told what to do it leads to the same politics so you have to fight this on every level of philosophy um and and it gets tough because these layers like any layers of a system a foundation of a home you start getting into the foundation of a home and you risk the whole thing collapsing you can really fuck with people yeah right like you can shake their world up that's why i always just i i've always found my my biggest uh philosophical underpinnings are anchored in cogito ergo su like i think therefore i am like yeah i think that's like if i can think

yeah it's thinking perception i don't know me like if i could think we can have conversations we can understand each other yeah have a back and forth you're thinking you're reacting to my thoughts i think there is a reality and i've had people come to me and say well but you don't even know i exist you could be talking to me right now and you know you are having this experience but it's like totally in your head and i go so i don't give a shit if you're right imaginary person i'm talking to like i don't care yeah because it it has no like what am i going to do let's say it's true can i do i have access to this thing if you're inside of a system and if you can't tell You cannot control the system, you're in the system.

So accept your reality, whether it's real or not, who cares, right? So this is kind of what I was saying before. It's like, I don't think about this stuff on a daily basis. I enjoy these types of conversations because you revisit it and you get new insights over time, but to make it part of your existence on a daily basis is very disruptive.

And to come to the wrong conclusion is nihilistic. It results in this apathy, this sense of just like, well, we can't know anything for real and reality is not even real anyway own respect so why do anything so um i have these talks a lot but here's why i talked about kids earlier is ultimately see i was pretty aggressive uh for years when it came to like engaging in these types of debates with people right like trying to like convince somebody that they're good oh you're you're good no i'm evil like human nature is evil and i'm not exempt from that no

you're great and reality is here believe it or not i i used to have a lot of those and what i realize that it was, it was a completely losing battle because these foundations are so integral to the, to the brain, like without the assistance of, of psychedelics or something that allows you to sort of like dig deeper and do some rewiring, you can't rewire the brain. It's not a matter of just, I used to believe this. And now I believe this because everything that exists on top of those has, it's like building infrastructure. Again, it's like you build an entire economy on top of one idea or assumption. If you change that assumption, the entire economy collapses. It's the same thing with a human brain. So I focus on the kids. I'm sorry, but the adult

population is not who this is for. Those of us who get it and want to build it need to be doing everything that we can, but the dominant portion of our efforts when it comes to philosophic discussion right the socratic type of just the you know discussing ideas and pursuing knowledge it has to be had with kids not adults yeah agreed and we have to get get to them early this is like it was like get to the kids early i was like uh like get to the kids early yes it's a very strange thing to say yeah but like someone's trying to get to him i mean i mean the And the dominant power structure has gotten to them. Particularly if you send your kids to public school,

it dominates the framework by which they view the world. And they're being taught. They're not really being taught. They're being indoctrinated at these indoctrination camps, as some people like to refer to them now. My wife was a public school teacher for four years and a private school teacher for three before leaving the profession altogether.

um so i'm actually quite i was a high school track coach for seven years in my off time just because i love track and i love teenagers and coaching them and i i love kids they're awesome and um we like have a very inside track on on it plus i went through that system yeah i did as well with the public school till high school yeah it is it is uh broken yeah or or extremely effective depending on what you want it to do, right? Like it's actually not broken at all if you're a statist trying to beat human beings into subservient factory workers,

but it is a complete failure of what humanity deserves if you believe that we are creative good beings with unlimited potential, so. Yeah, no, I mean, now I'm getting angry. Now you factor in like the forced masking of children at these impressible ages, like how does that, that's what we're up against right now. um they're getting to the kids and so my wife my wife left the education system when this happened

because yeah in in large part there was many considerations that we talked about together but in large part because she couldn't stand being this authority figure in a classroom that was making kids you know sit behind plexiglass wearing masks staying six feet apart or sitting in silence in a gymnasium and and she was just like she's like this is eerie it's like it's like it's not just sad it's like it feels we're in a movie or some shit like that it feels sick it is sick it is sick it's and and i feel really bad for the kids right now um and it's not just masks right i just there's so much confusion if you say like you're a 16 year old right now right at that time in your life when you are starving for meaning and understanding people

talk about teenagers being you know reckless blah blah it's because they're not getting what they need okay it's their way of crying just like a baby cries when you don't give it milk you don't give a teenager philosophy it's going to scream at you because you're not giving it a reason for life like what what is my purpose what am i doing here those are when those questions start to arise and we're depriving them of that and saying shut up and do your homework and it's fucking evil it is it is this meat factory that is taking what is supposed to be in my mind the most glorious thing in the universe and turning it into like and trying to like pound it into a slug right it's that you know what um man when i was little did you ever see watch the little mermaid yeah do you

know when at the end ursula takes her father and turns him into the like well the like little brown or gray worm thing she has the emotion of that that you have this like glorious entity that she worships and everyone looks up to he's like the the ideal of of a man he's he's he's benevolent he's powerful he's capable and he's reduced to this hideous little thing under the control of a incompetent nasty person and it's like to me that is the essence of tragedy it's like you take the greatest and you make it into nothing what's greater than the potential that a child has to grow into something right if if humans are the greatest thing since the stars then a child is the greatest of us is the greatest of us because it has the most potential

and to take that and pound it into submission is an affront against pound it into like a faceless yeah it's drone it is it is a literally their mask they're putting mask over the face so like you don't like have the ability to to recognize another individual you're all you're just like a faceless mask and and i i i bury all that and i put it into my work yeah i code faster because you can't just undo this shit you cannot elect a different person you cannot lobby your politicians to get some claws out of some bill that's going to pass you cannot win by playing their game the only way that you can change the future is to build an alternative system that has better incentives and that takes decades so settle in settle in freaks

settle in and come to terms with that it's okay have some kids too definitely have some kids i highly recommend have some kids car we were talking about that earlier kids um let's end it there let's go plug this in let's go get one step closer to the future matt as an incredible conversation i enjoyed it thank you for having me i'm very happy with where this went um is there anywhere we should point the freaks before we leave here yeah just check out our website if you're interested in learning more start9.com humans are worth it

you're a good person you're meant to be on this planet you're meant to do great things live your life like that peace and love freaks