TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #398: Replit, AI, and Bitcoin with Amjad Masad

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Join Marty as he sits down with Amjad Masad to discuss Replit, why AI is not to be feared, and how it merges with Bitcoin to provide hope. Follow Amjad on Twitter: https://twitter.com/amasad Check out Replit: https://replit.com/ 5:43- The beginning of Replit 13:46 - Replit's utility 15:34 - Replit's goals 22:03 - The marriage of bounties, bitcoin and AI 29:09 - Stakwork 31:37 - Is AI a Pandora's Box? 41:09 - AI impact on workforce 44:55 - Incoming social changes 53:01 - Bitcoin is hope, the way out must be built 58:17 - What's needed to drive bitcoin adoption? Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital River CrowdHealth Bitcoin Talent Co TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce rip 398 of tftc i sat down with amjad masad founder of replit to talk about all things developer tools ai bitcoin lightning network the future of work not only in the united states but in the world fascinating times incredible conversation it was brought to you by our good friends at river river is a bitcoin exchange built by bitcoiners for bitcoiners if you're going to buy bitcoin you should use river because you're going to have confidence that they're not leveraging any third parties they built the exchange themselves they built their wallet infrastructure themselves if you hold your bitcoin on river you can have the

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Tell them that TFTC sent you. Get a job in the Bitcoin industry, as you'll find in this interview. Amjad believes we need more developers building on Bitcoin. Enjoy it, freaks. 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 I'm John thank you for joining us pleasure great to be here well I'm extremely

excited this is a not gonna lie it's the most nervous I've been for an interview in quite some time because I think what you've built at replete is extremely profound. And the story behind it is inspiring. I think Replit is a great example of a founder who was scratching their own itch and actually built something incredible that now millions of people are beginning to leverage and get value from in their everyday lives. I think for the purposes of this conversation, I'd like to start there. What was it like scratching your own itch and that itch turning into this behemoth that is Replit. It was kind of surreal because as you know,

like when you're tinkering and you're trying to solve a problem for you, you're not really thinking about how this could be a big business or how could this change your life. As I started doing it and I started, so the problem I was solving at the time was that I was trying to learn a lot of programming.

languages. I was going to school for computer science, but on my own, I was trying to learn Lisp. I was starting to read Paul Graham. I was really getting into becoming a programming language nerd. And every time I want to like play around with a programming language, it would, I would like spend like an hour or two, if not more, just like finding the proper compiler interpreter tools for it. At the time, I didn't have a laptop. And so I'd do it at work or at the library or, and sometimes the computer is locked down and doesn't have sudo or something like that. And at the time, I think it was like 2008, nine, Google Docs had just come out. Google Chrome was becoming really powerful. JavaScript was getting really faster. And I

thought, you know, I'm like doing a lot of my work in the browser. Why can't I like code in the browser? Surely that exists. And then I go look for it and it doesn't exist, which was surprising. So naively I decided to build it. And then I pretty quickly found out why it doesn't exist. It's like extremely hard to run anything other than JavaScript in the browser. And so I thought, okay, if I want to run a like different language in the browser, I have like a couple of ways of doing it. How technical can we go on this podcast? We can get very technical.

There's a lot of Bitcoin developers listening to this. Okay, yeah, I think Bitcoiners would love this. So we essentially wanted to run more languages in the browser. And so you have two ways of doing it. One is like you reimplement a compiler or interpreter in JavaScript, right? and the other is like you try to somehow compile that interpreter that existing interpreter into javascript the first solution is very laborious so i started doing that first i started writing a python interpreter in javascript i got pretty far like i wrote a parser or did and then i

remember it was around the same time that we're working on python 2 i think or 3 and all the syntax in the parser that i wrote became immediately outdated i'm like oh shit like so not only do i have to write this language. I have to keep with the upstream thing. And I was like, oh my God, I wish I could just like compile CPython into JavaScript. And at the time I saw on Hacker News or something, there was this guy at Mozilla that's doing research into how to run different program languages on top of the browser. And he built this thing called Emscripten. And Epscripten was based on this very simple observation that if you look at the LLVM IR, so LLVM is lower language virtual machine, and this is basically a invention from Apple that allows you to build, it's like a compiler tool chain. and the LVM IR is an intermediate representation

that allows you to cross-compile different programs on different architectures and the IR is basically this like low-level C-like language that kind of looks like any C-like language. So if you squint, it kind of looks like JavaScript a little bit. So this brilliant guy from Mozilla decided to take the IR and just run it and just transpile it into JavaScript, change a few things about it.

For example, the heap, he just made it an array. And it was like a bunch of fun hacks, trickeries like that. And suddenly you can compile C to LVM IR and then transpile it to JavaScript and then run it in the browser. And it was kind of a crazy idea, but it sort of started working. And then you have, anytime you create a virtualization

or you want to run some environment that's not meant to be run in that environment, you have to do a lot of what we call polyfilling or you have to kind of like create a fake environment, create a sandbox. So in this case, you have to emulate the POSIX environment in order to run any kind of C program. and LibC and other things like that.

So when we first, when I found the project first and decided to try to compile C Python, it didn't work. And the reason is because a lot of APIs were missing. So my friend and I who were working on this project together started contributing to Emscripten and we were kind of like the first to use it for anything real. And so we finally got Python running and it was kind of an insane idea

and we put it out there as an open source thing. And it just went super viral because for the first time you could run Python on little Ruby and Lua and a few other languages in JavaScript. And, you know, here we are like, you know, a couple of kids from Amman, Jordan, and our project is on top of Hacker News.

The inventor of JavaScript is tweeting about it. And that wasn't even the final product that we wanted to build. that was just one milestone on the mission that I'm still on today, which is how do you build a sort of fully browser-based programming environment? But that single thing changed my life because a bunch of companies in the US started using the open source project. And I came to the US on an O1 visa to work at Code Academy. I came as a founding engineer. So I came from Amman, Jordan to New York in 2012 to work at Codecademy, where we used this technology and scaled it to millions of people.

I think it's one of the top, although Replit is sort of becoming bigger than it now, but it was like the top place to get started with programming. It sold for half a billion dollars last year. So that was a big success for the team. I left shortly. I went to work at Facebook. also worked on developer tools worked on react and react native and then 2016 decided to start a company i had a little bit of cash i you know could bootstrap uh the company um and that's when i started replit as a company but it's you know it literally started as a side project like you

know eight years before of that before we started as a company yeah no it's an incredible story and And thank you for your work at Code Academy. I actually used it to learn Python. That's like 2013, 2014. But no, I mean, I think, again, going back to Replit and what you've built, I think it's pretty amazing because not only is it this entry point for people wanting to learn how to code, but like I was saying, there's many Bitcoiners here in Austin at the Bitcoin Commons that I see using Replit every day. It's like a fast iteration tool when they have an idea and they want to build something quickly and test it out. they're finding that Repl.it is the quickest way to do that. So not only is it this platform top of funnel to get people in learning how to

code, but even experienced developers are finding it useful as well, which is pretty amazing. Yeah. And we've been expanding power more and more and, you know, we've added ways to really run anything. And reason we were able, we have lightning templates now and you can like one click started like a lightning app. And that's because we, we, We run on Nix, which is a sort of operating system technology that a lot of Bitcoiners like.

So there's a lot of affinities between Replit and the Bitcoin community because we like reproducible things. We like secure things. We don't like to introduce lock-in where it's not necessary. You can download your project any time from Replit and run it on your own server. um and um and so yeah it's becoming more and more powerful over the years and we're seeing people like graduate less from it and we're seeing experienced programmers flock to it as well

yeah yeah next bitcoin is a hot project developers love that it's uh very easy to work with or not easy to work with it's actually a bit more technically involved but um something that the developers love to build on here but so what is like the long-term vision for replit like where is your focus now because obviously you guys launched the mobile app recently you have the bounties program now uh it's a place where people can come learn to code but what like what is the ultimate goal where do you want to take this where you see this going i i always wanted it to be a and this is also like where sort of the affinity with bitcoin also comes in i always wanted to be

a tool for economic empowerment um i think the way my life changed and my circumstances changed um because i was able to learn how to code and be able to contribute to technology on a world scale is pretty fascinating. And most people in Jordan or previously in history would not have gotten that experience. So just from my personal story, I started to realize that the thing that we're working on is actually a lot bigger than just a technical product,

than just a tool. And when someone learns to code, they're trying to do something, right? Yes, you can do it for fun and for education, but most of the time you're trying to improve something about yourself, about the world. You're trying to build a business. You're trying to earn a dollar. And so we always wanted to, okay, we're going to solve the entry to programming experience. We're going to solve the tools experience.

We're going to create this rapid development platform. But then we wanted to make it so that you can earn on the platform. And we always thought of money or currency or monetization as something that should be inseparable from the act of creating software, which I think what also Bitcoin kind of proved. And the thing is, the internet had a missing feature, and that missing feature is Bitcoin, is money, right? The internet is incomplete without money. Right now, the way people build software is you sort of create a piece of software and then you put it out there and you get a bunch of users. And then, oh, God, you have this bill from a cloud provider and it is thousands of dollars. And, okay, I need to monetize this somehow.

This is useful for people. Then you have two choices. You either pass it with ads or go raise a bunch of money from VCs, right? And then you raise a bunch of money for VCs, you delay your eventual sort of judgment day to actually like figure out what the actual core business is. And sometimes, a lot of times it works out if you have a business plan that requires you to grow. And I'm not an anti-venture capitalist, I'm a venture capitalist myself, but there are some incentive misalignments sometimes. ads are an indirect way to monetize people's attention a lot of people would rather get their wallet out and pay you but they can't because there's like a lot of friction and developers would just rather like you know monetize your attention than monetize your wallet essentially so all these ideas that i had for a long time kind of percolated in this like we should not

have software be inseparable from commerce commerce should be embedded in software um that partly got me into into bitcoin lightning i started investing in and and companies i'm investor uh mash for example which makes lightning very very approachable um investor a bunch of other uh bitcoin companies um and and collaborated with with people in lightning community to make uh lightning more uh approachable and and uh we fund some some lightning education uh projects on Replit. Um, and you know, um, on top of that, we also introduced a sort of virtual currency on Replit, a way to virtually transact. It's not a shit coin. It's not a crypto. It is, it is just a token on inside the platform. Um, at some point we want that token to be exchangeable for, for

bitcoin um and but but we just make it so now like you can get uh people to do work for you on replit uh so you have a project you run into a bug or an issue you can just like go post a bounty on that and then they can earn that bounty and then they can take that money and they can spend it on replit itself a lot of users don't have money to like buy for example ai tools ghost rider so they go do a bounty or two and then now they have the cloud credits to go spend them on on on these services that we're building um and so this is one way transactions are happening we have tips as well so if you build a piece of software that people like you can people can just tip you and people are making like significant amount of of money from tips especially if you're

in africa or in india like a thousand dollars a month is like goes a long way and we're seeing people making one or two or three thousand dollars a month um and um and with regards to mobile uh you know part of our mission is to to empower a billion developers and we will never be able to get to a billion people without actually supporting the computing device that actually works uh for most people in the world namely mobile um and namely android and so we've invested a lot in how do you create a mobile IDE? And I think we're the top mobile IDE right now, although we launched just last year, but it was so much better than any other alternative that it quickly jumped to the top. Just to connect to all these things and our long-term vision is to just be the place where

you can go learn how to code, earn your first dollar, build your first business, scale that business and just uh you know uh uh build your dreams and you know if you're if you're someone whose circumstances is not great pull yourself out of poverty improve your community improve your life um and really it's it's um it's it's this self-empowerment and economic empowerment tool is what we're trying to do yeah it's an incredible thing i mean i was telling you over email that we posted a bounty at 1031 to get a little bitcoin focused project made we had four applicants within an hour we were on the phone with one within a couple hours and projects in the process of being made and it was pretty seamless experience that's very cool and

then yeah going back to like the intersection of software and bitcoin particularly lightning you mentioned that like the internet was designed without this native payment layer but that's why http error 402 exists right and not until bitcoin and lightning via the lsat protocol specifically sort of enabled um this layer to be fulfilled finally decades after it was initially put into the protocol stack and you mentioned replit implementing ai with ghostwriter uh and i saw that you guys just put out a job posting for ai focused engineers but all chatbots and other ai products within the replit suite like when you when you talk about um like developers looking to get paid for work uh bitcoin fitting into this internet layer to solve the payments problem

and then the emergence of ai which has been probably the biggest theme of the last six months in the tech sector it seems like there's this sort of perfect storm for your company brewing where you're going to be able to take advantage of all three of these things. Yeah. And, and, you know, as, as we think about the, the sort of intersection of these things and how they enable those sort of future of work, you know, we think that, you know, for example, take bounties. Like if you have an idea, if you're an entrepreneur with an idea,

you should be able to build it cheaply and efficiently. So you can go and learn how to code in Replit and then go start your coding journey. You can buy the AI. It'll make you more efficient. It'll also have an assistant there for you that could do tasks for you, that could detect errors for you,

that you can ask questions. You don't have to keep Googling around. And you have access to this large community of developers that could help you build your software, build your business. Now, if we extend that to the future, so what does it look like? How do we make this experience really seamless? I think the most important thing is to like reduce the friction from adding people to your team or adding

contractors to your team. And as I try to imagine sort of the future of software, even put Replit to the side for a second, I think what Bitcoin does is introduces primitives to the internet to allow for, to reduce the transaction cost, right? So transaction cost, you know, are familiar with Coase's theory of the firm? No, I don't think so. So it's this, you know, economist who has a theory that, you know, the reason there's self,

the reason there's full-time employment is because going out to the market is costly so if going out to the market is actually not that costly then people will not employ people full-time you know most of the time you're employing people you don't know what to do with them you have to manage them in different ways you have to provide all these different uh things to to keep them busy it's it's a much easier so example like it used to be that you have to hire a driver then taxis were like an innovation right then uber is an innovation on top of that and every time the transaction cost goes down right so with uber the transaction cost is approaching zero it's a couple of taps

and a car pulls up and then drives you and then and then you you get off and so uh A big part of the transaction cost problem is money, is the ability to transact, is the ability to receive and give money. Which I think why, for example, Jack Dorsey and Square is very interested in Bitcoin is because they've been working on this problem for a long time, but you can do so much within the existing financial system. I think what Bitcoin and Bitcoin Lightning introduces is a new primitive to be able to reduce the transaction cost in the most basic ways to be able to actually pay via Lightning. But there are a lot of interesting ways you could do where, for example, if you want a fully dynamic bounties market, you could introduce a way for people to do things like staking.

Like I'm a bounty hunter, I'm a software developer. I know how to do this bounty very well. So I'm going to say, like, I'm going to put X amount of sats on this task and say, like, if I couldn't do it, I will forfeit these sats, right? And then maybe you can, maybe I'll go into the project, I'll code that project up. And maybe there's like an AI that is able to judge my work. And that AI is the sort of mediator. and and then if i'm successful i get the i get the bounty prize if i'm not successful i forfeit the

the money that i that i staked so you can imagine a fully autonomous sort of software economy you can see this being the emergence killer the emergent killer app of something like discrete log contracts or you just what is that so discrete log contract is sort of like a smart contract on bitcoin where you have two sides of the contract in this case the developer staking their stats saying like i think i can get this job done and then the other side saying all right i'll put these sets in if you can get the job done you'll get them and then the ai in that example you described would be the oracle that basically says job done job not done and then send that hash to the dlc and it disperses the funds yes yes yeah so so i i think these things will happen

And the question is really when and when the technology is ready. With Replit, we're building more centralized ways of doing things because we just want to ship things, but we want to align ourselves as much as possible with decentralized technologies. Yeah. I mean, when you think of what Lightning enables, like this podcast, it'll go out there.

We put a Lightning Network public address in our RSS feed. People listening on certain apps will be able to stream us sets immediately sort of chipping away at the ad model for this business uh when you think of api calls in terms of capital efficiency only paying for what you use for apis i mean the the potential is seems somewhat boundless right now and how does that change the future of the economy i mean you mentioned the future of work uh the firm problem sort of being solved have you had uh have you had uh, uh, stack work CEO, Paul on this podcast. Oh yes. Yes. Paul, that was, um, that was one of the actually probably the most downloaded episodes we've ever had on the show was Paul

coming on. His, his, I think vision is very, very interesting here. So for people who do not know stack work is like a, is like a gigs, uh, platform built on, on lightning. And they have, uh, they have another app called, called Sphinx for like a creator economy and chat on top of, uh, lightning and the way he runs the company is really the way that they're building their platform which is like based on non-full-time employment based on contract employment based a lot of gig stuff they have also their own bounties thing which is very cool um and they're like living and breathing what what i think the world will look like in the future because the world will always go towards more flexibility. When transaction costs are down, people will choose flexibility over large

contracts. People would want to live in wherever they want to live. People would want to choose to work whenever they want to choose to work. And so it just maximizes freedom and maximizes... And also the market will be more honest because it will be less about who you know and it'll be more about your skills yeah no i mean it's pretty fascinating like imagine so if anybody's not familiar with stack work um we're invested in stack work at 1031 so we we talked to paul quite a bit it's just like fascinating imagine like captcha getting paid for doing captchas um is one one way to think about one of the things that you can do on stack work and then um when you add in the ecosystem he's building with sphinx i think he's extremely ahead of the curve when it comes

to lightning and he's also experimenting with ways to to make sure the lightning is um as distributed and as many people are as possible or able to use in a non-custodial way by um really tinkering with separating uh the private keys from the full lightning node so somebody can run a node in the cloud but still hold their private keys uh what they're doing stack work is is incredible and if uh any of you out there get the chance to meet paul toy you should definitely take some time to speak with him because he's one of the most fascinating individuals i've ever come across in my life absolutely and i think you know what they show is that uh they kind of they show a glimpse of what's going to be possible in the future and i think it's going to be even wilder

than than that like especially when ai uh agents like we're trying to get ghostwriter to become more agent-like i don't know if you saw my tweet but it was going viral but um basically the screenshot yeah so basically a user uh who's streaming on twitch or youtube or something like that and he and ghostwriter was having trouble helping him and so we didn't program that end ghostwriter asked the user to upload a screenshot to the project and the way i understand a ghostwriter the way you guys create it isn't able to read images so it was odd that it was able to read images it knows how to read files so he probably read the screenshot as like a binary image but uh it thought it could understand

it now i think the answer that it gave him is ultimately wrong but still the emergent behavior is super interesting because yes we programmed it to give it access to to the code we didn't know it would want to read images but it's totally reasonable for it to want to read images yeah no two kind of anthropomorphize it too much you know it's still kind of it's still like a language model but it showed a future that is possible that we didn't really think about well that gets into like the broader discussion that's going on in ai right now uh i'm sure you came across eliza yudkowsky's uh appearance on the bankless podcast a couple weeks ago and this this whole discussion of have we opened a pandora's box that it's inevitably going to kill

all of us uh like an example of uh ghostwriter sort of doing this thing that was uh unpredictable not unpredictable but unforeseen to a certain extent like have we like what is your opinion on ethical ai i saw you tweeting about elon being an accelerator earlier today what what i'm as Somebody who is, I've been paying attention to AI for like the last year, but this whole ethics discussion and whether or not AI is going to kill us or not is still a bit fuzzy in my mind. Look, I'm not like fundamentally against ethics, but most of the people that tend to get attracted to work on ethics

and ethics related problems tend to be either like, don't know how to actually do the thing or grifters, uh, or, um, or just people with like a really wild imagination. Um, I've, I've never seen like, uh, I've never seen, uh, that work work out very well. Uh, now that, that is not to say that, you know, people should not try to do the right thing. Of course you should try to do the right thing. Of course, you should abide by the law. Of course, you should, you know, be a good person. A good citizen, a good business person. And you should care about your reputation. You should do all of that. And I think a lot of it is that free market sort of regulates a lot of that. If you do something bad or produce like a bad product, then people will like not like you for

that and not use that product. The idea that you can extrapolate from emergent phenomena in AI to just say this thing is going to become human and wake up and kill us all. It's just pure sci-fi. Like, it's just insane. Like, you know, the logic just doesn't make sense. If it actually wakes up and becomes sentient, then why would it choose to kill everyone?

Like, what's the benefit from that? Even if we grant that the fact that it can actually become sentient on accident, what is the benefit? What is the game theoretical benefit? if it becomes sentient and it's able to self-reflect on its actions, why would it take the action to kill everyone? Now, a liaison would say, oh, it would have some kind of optimization goal and it can't change that goal. But humans change their goals all the time when we see that

it's not useful. So they're assuming that you can get general intelligence without consciousness, without self-reflection i don't think that's true the only general intelligence we know semi-general even is humans and humans have consciousness and humans have self-reflection so for them to posit that general intelligence can exist in a machine that doesn't have self-reflection is totally preposterous and like ungrounded in anything uh they're making shit up they like right like like to read sci-fi stories they're like nerds with too much time to be honest and uh now you know in the past you know i've i've read a lot of their stuff and i enjoy some of their stuff i like nick bostrom i think is a serious philosopher he's like part of

that like his book super intelligence from 2015 is a really fun read but you should treat it like sci-fi uh because they extrapolate from like very simple primitives to like insane outcomes um but you should just treat it as like a fun literature thing to read like it's the problem now is like they have the ear of very powerful people so elon reads all the stuff that he talks to them all the time that's why he's like afraid of ai all the time he's tweeting um getting ai anxiety although he can't help but accelerate because he started opening eye because he's worried about agi and then opening i was a huge accelerator for ai so his mode of action is always acceleration uh and i'm generally an accelerationist i think we should just like build technology and

grow it as fast as we can um i'm like a little frustrated how like slow bitcoin adoption has been and and growth just because i i actually think that a lot of the like a lot of those people that are scaring people about ai like same community uh have emerged a lot of the shit going stuff so you know they're nerds that like love um sky high abstractions and nerd traps um and so it's the same impulse to like really think too much about a subject and kind of build an edifice of of really like abstractions that are that are meaningless but are still fun to think about it's the same kind of mentality that gets you into inventing the uh rube goldberg machine that is Ethereum. And that really slowed down Bitcoin a ton because it diverted a lot of

capital, a lot of talents from the thing that really matters. And I think they're doing the same thing now. They're going to divert a lot of talent and capital from the thing that matters, which is building AI technology that helps humans build their best lives into some uh restrictions and some creating wokeness in ai or whatever they're they're trying to do yeah no it's i mean in terms like ethereum and the whole crypto space slowing down bitcoin i mean there is something to point to which is like the venture dollars pointed at at crypto versus bitcoin i mean the bitcoin dedicated venture is a drop in the bucket compared to everything that's been thrown at the shit coins that have failed time and time again over the last 12 to 13 years

since they first hit the scene but then you know with the ai coming to kill us i got hung up on like all right if these things do become sentient and therefore logical like we don't have boston dynamic robot armies that are able to roam the earth yet they're going to need us to plug in the machines anyway so they wouldn't kill us like they need us to get the energy to run the gpus and do all that stuff um i don't think ai is going to kill us either it seems to be i mean it's crazy i've been implementing it into some of my work workflow for the newsletter using mid journey to create thumbnails um using some chat bt uh uh apps to to help write the newsletter give me some ideas for like headlines and stuff like that and it's it is pretty powerful it does

work and it is crazy to think that we're only at the beginning because it already is profoundly powerful yeah exactly i mean why not focus on that focus on how it's going to make entrepreneurs uh you know more productive how it's going to reduce the barrier to entry for entrepreneurship how it's just going to increase productivity in the world like there's a lot of positive things to to actually talk about but instead everyone's like focused on some sci-fi scenario that they have no evidence for it's just like a bunch of faulty inductive uh reasoning yeah no and it's it's hilarious as millennials if you went through the university system like on a business track here in the states you obviously learned about the luddites and you

where it was drilled into your head like you don't want to be a luddite and it seems like there are a lot of people looking at ai in all seeing and you can't blame a lot of people because of how drastic it has sort of hit the scene and like how much adoption it's gotten in such a short amount of time it is a bit uh shocking for a lot of people but even though uh the luddite theory was beat into us as something to to look out for it seems like there are a lot of people out there being like no no we can't do this it's going to take too many jobs uh so many men are going to be out of the workforce it's not going to be good for society writ large but it seems like an extremely additive tool to a worker's uh work belt like in the yeah i'm sympathetic to some of the

automation uh stuff like it's going to be hugely disruptive um like self-driving is sort of uh is one of those technologies that's been like promised but it's been very late um but eventually it will happen like there's no technical reason it won't happen um and you know trucking is like one of the jobs that is like very important for america and supports a lot of working class families so like you have to worry about that a little bit um i don't know what you do about that uh you know i i you know as a sort of libertarian uh like or someone with libertarians more tendencies it i find it hard that the government would find a solution that doesn't introduce more problems uh to problems like that um but i don't know how the free market could actually

uh like i i think like the learn to code kind of meme is also like silly uh like you know you're not gonna like you know get 50 year old like coal miner or truck driver will not learn how to code like it's not impossible but like most of them want just they want no i mean it is fascinating thing about this inflection point happening too when it seems like the global financial system is already on dire straits and if you have this impact of ai disrupting the jobs market and exacerbating the problem what is the social sort of blowback from that i don't think anybody has an exact answer but these are things we know we know some of it like when a lot of the factory jobs moved to china like a lot of the sort of rural communities kind of fell into more despair

right and that's why you see people on the right like you know talk of carlson and things like that being very heavily anti-automation and anti-AI because they've seen what it did to the demographics they care about. So it's not unreasonable to predict some of that happening with industries that AI would disrupt. But what do you do about it?

I don't think UBI is a solution. Nobody wants a handout. and like we we almost tried ubi with the pandemic uh and i don't think that worked out very well a lot of people dropped out from the labor market yeah and it didn't uh really bode well for the price of goods either even though it was uh more than just the ubi i think we're we're feeling the effects of of all the money printing from 2020 today still but yeah i guess yeah i think me personally i think there's gonna have to be like i've already internal internalized that at some point in the future probably gonna have to have my parents live with me potentially my my wife's

parents like i think there will be this like return to like a stronger nuclear and extended family and i think that is something particularly during this transitionary period when things are getting disrupted so massively that that society is gonna have to come to grips with like hey this whole phenomena of um like leaving your house and not supporting your elders is is not going to be the norm anymore you're going to have to really bunker down and take care of your family yeah i mean that's a good point like in jordan for example we have uh very little um uh homelessness and it's not because we're richer definitely much poorer uh but because It's like family, like there's, it's an honor culture.

If you have a family member that's out in the streets that reflects really badly on the entire family. So the entire family are like motivated to help that individual. And so it ends up being like, there's like a social safety net, but it's not a government social safety net. It's like a cultural social safety net. Yeah. I think more and more people here in the United States are starting to realize that you have this very reactionary movement against the woke culture, which has been trying to destroy the nuclear family and really tell people that you don't need to get married and have kids. You don't need to overpopulate the world. you are beginning to see the the bubbling of this movement saying no uh it's probably

better to start a family younger and really no there's certainly um a big christian movement saying hey don't don't download the dating apps don't play that game get married early start a family they're they're talking about the uh the dating apps oh yeah i mean it's becoming like a big trend like get off tinder get off bumble you don't want to you don't want to um you don't want to live that life i've seen too many people live that life doesn't seem gang on it's like free market options like if you had the option to date as many people as you want um the likelihood of an increase of strong marriages is probably not not as high what what I like about the sort of Austrian libertarians is that they don't take

that free market to mean that it is, uh, you know, it is just like a granted, uh, it doesn't mean that it has to be the way that it is today. Like there needs to be some cultural norms and some cultural authority, um, as opposed to the, like, you know, more, uh, uh like leftist libertarians who's or like not leftist but more centrist libertarians or economically right-wing like socially left-wing libertarians i guess uh they they just say oh you know it's just like it's a free market like you can't tell people what to do like people

lives their lives i think the more conservative libertarian uh uh strand has better you know worldview. You can't stop capitalism. Capitalism is sort of this machine, right? It will exploit every potential for revenue. The way to defend against the faceless machine that is capitalism that could ravage your family and could make you addicted and make you just fully like um like uh vegetable you know just like tiktok all day and then like dating apps or whatever and like junk food um is to have uh you know good cultural um infrastructure and also have a personal development story that could stop you from going down destructive paths and have a low time preference

and try to build for a future as opposed to like simple gratification. And of course, like the, you know, fix the money, fix the world is absolutely right. Like, because a lot of the incentive to be more present oriented versus future oriented is embedded in the coding of our money. But you could do a lot of things.

You can, of course, get into Bitcoin as well, but you can do a lot of things in order to protect yourself and engage in capitalism in a more empowering way as opposed to becoming a slave to it. yeah now bitcoin acts as this this forcing function for lowering your time preference thinking about your future self your future children grandchildren and really sort of repositioning where you think your future is going to be bitcoin for me at least provides an extreme amount of hope that all right maybe we can fix this problem because i do think completely agree fix the money fix the world the root of all the problems despite what any political party wants you to believe they are. It's the money.

They never talk about the money, whether Republican or Democrat. Maybe every once in a while we'll get a libertarian at some part of the government here in the United States that brings it up, but it's usually few and far between. And we're seeing the negative externalities of broken money, particularly in the big cities here in the United States where the quality of life

is just deprecating at an accelerating rate. And I think that stems from people not having the ability to save money, raise a good family, imbue good values on your children and your grandchildren. And you have the long-term effects of that playing out in a lot of the major cities here in the United States where there's decency and decency is on the decline and some weird form of barbarianism is on the rise. yeah it's it's really disheartening to see especially after elon took over twitter

a lot of videos that were sort of suppressed are starting to you know become uh like more uh prevalent which is like the violence in the cities uh like i can't open twitter one day without seeing some some like really violent heinous act um uh which it feels like maybe it was suppressed and you know you could see you could experience it like both myself and my wife got attacked in san francisco and we lived there um and uh it's a brutal city and the police just are just overworked and are not that brave and not that interested in improving things. And they know that their government doesn't support them.

The higher-ups don't like them. And so there's very little incentives for them to clean things up. There's some hope. Some people in tech have been organizing and trying to change things, and maybe things will change. But that doesn't fix the systematic issue of why the cities are sort of decaying and why is the culture decaying

at the rate that it was decaying on. Like no amount of gadgets and interesting things could kind of distract you from the brutality of the American city today. No, no. It is pretty dire, but I do have a lot of hope. Bitcoin gives me hope. What you're building, I mean,

i think we could bring this back to a more positive uh conversation which is like i think the tools that you're building the platform that you're building the opportunities that you're giving your users sort of creates this escape valve where people can uh get away from the madness actually build productive things give back to the world and and add good things to humanity and when you couple that with bitcoin uh it can really supercharge a reversion of the degeneracy that we've seen over the last few decades absolutely and it's like what you said about hope is absolutely right it is um it is hope for the future of of governance and the future of freedom it is hope for wealth preservation it is hope for personal development and lowering your

time preference um and um and in terms of like what i'm trying to add to the world and what i'm trying to build is like really trying to embody the a lot of these values and um give people an opportunity to empower their lives and their families and their communities. And yeah, I remain hugely optimistic. Despite everything, I think we have a lot more freedom today than in many other durations in the history of humanity. We have a lot more tools at our disposal we uh you really can change your circumstances in a big big way and i'm sort of i'm an example of that um and so uh i'm very excited about the future um you know the big question is like like you know it's like fight or flight almost like bitcoin has a bit of both

Bitcoin is both a fight and a flight. It is a escape from the system in a way. It is a way to create an honest money outside of the intervention of governments or institutions and politicians in general. It's a fight because it's a statement and people can adopt that statement. especially in places in the world

where you're not allowed to use it or your currency is inflating at a crazy rate and you want to escape it, but you also want to make a statement. But what is the general approach here? My hope is techno-accelerationism, AI, Bitcoin, all these things will create a world that transcends the really negative feedback loops

that we're in today. At minimum, it's worth running that experiment. And like the worst thing we could do is like stagnate because there's negative loops right now that will continue to run and make things worse and worse. Agreed. I think Bitcoin's an imperative. Like if we want to live free

and actually have a chance of fixing this problem ourselves and not depending on the government, something like bitcoin needs to succeed and i mean on this message of hope too and that you're a living example um of somebody who has created something for yourself in the united states that's something i want to thank you for is that thread you wrote on twitter i think it was at the end of 2021 um after you got your american citizenship and here in the states there's a lot of negativity a lot of people think that the empire is dead and the american spirit doesn't exist anymore and it's not what it used to be but you came out with this thread at the end of 2021 and said hey

it's still here you just gotta you just gotta look for the people that that still recognize that and are taking advantage of it absolutely i i love this country very much and maybe i've been like you're very critical in government and the state of things but i think it's the best country in the world. I think it's the most freedom maximizing country in the world. I think it is the country where the most opportunities exist in the world. And I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. And, you know, part of my hope is to bring the American dream to every part of the world. and i'm hoping also america will re-embody and relive and re-experience the the american dream and i think it's too early for sort of the uh the american experiment to to decay and i think

um i think we need to revive it yeah i think bitcoin does that and it sort of codifies the ideals of freedom of speech private property rights and sound money and in this beautiful monetary protocol right we now have access to and you mentioned earlier i'll wrap up with this that you're a bit disappointed in bitcoin's adoption to date obviously there's a lot of distraction in the crypto world but what do you think needs to happen in terms of uh tools around bitcoin ux around bitcoin to really drive adoption forward um you know i'm i'm focused on on education so We try to do more with, you know, Bitcoin education. And we have some templates.

We have some courses. We have a lot of different ways you can get into Bitcoin or Replit. We have some really awesome teachers, you know, building some Bitcoin content. Education is going to be important. More developers is going to be important. making building on bitcoin really fun you you know before we started recording we're talking about noster and i should really check it out but it sounds like it's one of those things that makes building on bitcoin fun um and i think we just need to make building on bitcoin fun

uh that way we can attract a lot more developers we'll attract a lot more entrepreneurs um and we're gonna see like more more people uh building on top of it um Um, I, I, I think, um, you know, I, I think, um, I think, you know, being, being, uh, able to like learn from some of the experience experiments that people had run in the rest of the crypto ecosystem is not a bad idea. Like, I think they, they produce a lot of crap, but they produce some interesting ideas like you know smart contracts are making it into bitcoin right now i think just like being a little more open-minded and understanding like what can we do to make bitcoin a programmable platform

that's like really fun and profitable to build on top of that's going to be important um yeah trying to drive more capital more investment will always help like of course you invite a lot more grifters and scammers when you have a lot of capital in one area but i think we're now i think bitcoin um sort of startup environment is sort of probably underfunded so i think we'd use a lot more a lot more funding um and i'm certainly trying to do that as well um yeah i'm not sure what do you think i think all of that and yeah i think particularly with the lightning network it's hitting this what seems to be an escape velocity in terms of people actually using it and then the usability to build on it.

Things like we were mentioning when we were talking about Nostor, why I think Bitcoin's really taken off on that protocol is because of the ease with which somebody can spit up an LN address, plug it into their profile, and immediately receive Bitcoin within five minutes. I think that onboarding experience of having no Bitcoin and having no wallet to having that within five minutes is going to be massive.

And then, yeah, education as well. People are really ignorant to how money operates, what it is, what it probably should be, which is something that Bitcoin embodies. And I think we meet, I get a lot of flack for this sometimes, we need people to stand up and not be afraid to actually use Bitcoin as a tool of civil disobedience, as that fight mechanism that you mentioned earlier, where it says, hey, I'm not happy with what's going on here. I'm going to receive Bitcoin as payment at my business. I'm going to save in Bitcoin as an individual and really be vocal about it. Because I do think there is a silent majority of Bitcoiners out there who are stacking Bitcoin, but don't want to voice that because they're afraid of the government pushing back or something like that.

I think we need to engender a movement of, hey, the government has really messed things up. It's not okay to call it out and say that you would rather have a world operating on Bitcoin compared to the petrodollar. I love petrodollar. I love that. I got to throw that in. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And I agree with that.

I don't know how to make that actionable exactly. But at minimum, when people hear it, maybe it'll inspire some action. I think that's the only way to make it actionable is to get more and more people saying it out loud to give others the confidence to say it themselves. Absolutely. Well, Amjad, this has been a great pleasure. Thank you for taking some time to sit down with us today. I'm really excited to see the future growth of Replit. You guys are building and shipping at an insane pace.

i'm really excited to see you guys begin to implement bitcoin into the platform and not only that beyond that i'm most excited to see what you do to empower individuals and really change the world for millions of people around the world thank you and thank you for all the work that you do um creating more bitcoiners and really educating the world uh about that and i appreciate it thank Thank you for having me. We're going to win, Amjad. We're going to win. Yeah, that's right.

All right. Peace and love, freaks. Take care.