TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #716: A Century In Five Years with Justin Moon

Episode Date: February 14, 2026

Marty sits down with Justin Moon to discuss his return to building freedom tech, the explosion of AI capabilities through tools like Open Claw and Claude Code, and why Bitcoiners need to stop patting themselves on the back and start shipping software that solves real problems for real people. Justin on X: https://x.com/_justinmoon___ Fedi: https://www.fedi.xyz/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/4pOv2L4 Promo Code: TFTC99 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc Lygos: https://bit.ly/4koiJmB Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be oh god oh god is right ladies and gentlemen i uh i regret to inform you that justin moon has got the itch again and when justin moon gets the itch things get not drunk this time i think every other time i've been on this podcast i've been severely drunk

yeah dude i mean we've been talking behind the scenes let me just show you some of the work i've been doing well you haven't been doing it um yeah you've been having work done as they say in la yes i have i have my clanker i have my clanker working on it as as people like to say i don't know we've been talking a lot about this for over a year now i mean you taught me how to how to vibe code about a year ago you and you and anthony when i was still in austin and a lot has happened since then and i think uh even when we did the btc plus plus thing i remember talking to you after that you're like yeah i just i don't know what i want to do i don't got the itch for anything i'm gonna take time and then in recent

weeks we've been talking talking and you told me you have the itch again and you're itching because it seems like we've reached a tipping point in terms of what is possible with these llms these agents um in how far we can push freedom tech specifically exactly once you walk i mean uh yeah i feel like right now just in the last like month or two so i've been you know for the last year like uh you know i left fatty like a year and a half ago or so and uh i was just kind of taking a break for a couple months and then alex gladstein reached out and was like hey would you like we're starting an ai program with hrf would you like to help and i'm like sure i'll help kind of on the side though you know because i'm not really ready for a full-time thing and you know

so help like, you know, a little bit part time. And so I'd like a nice kind of front row seat to just kind of watch and just play, play around with stuff. And I think that's one of the most important things to do. Uh, that's been the most useful thing for me to just play. And I was just reading, listening to a podcast. I'm over here with the Peter Steinberg guy, the open claw guy. And he's like, you know, that's what he, he did the same thing. He sold the company, took three years off, came back and just played for like a year and, uh, played a tool. So, you know, like i've been i think i've probably vibe coded like probably two three hundred projects uh over the last year and had like a very specific like uh uh decision not to ship anything right to feel

no pressure to ship or to be productive at all just to play and have fun and this is actually milian uh from primal kind of helped me understand this he's talking about like previous company he did he's like don't you know don't don't hurry back into it because that's kind of my i was actually yeah i i tried to hurry back into it this time too and it was like yeah that's just i just need to take take some time off um and so that's what i did for like a year uh played around with it a lot kind of through the href capacity went to sovereign engineering twice which is uh gg and pablo's little uh idea factory in madeira you know you show up in an island and meet up with a group of people and every every week you try to like ship something new and this

last one i think every day i was trying to not ship but like build something new build a prototype that is usable by the other people in the cohort but not uh something that's going to change the world necessarily experiment with new ideas and so yeah that's kind of what i've been doing for the last like year basically just playing around with these things learning and then just over the last couple weeks it just starts to feel like it's like okay you know like timing is always everything like when do you if you try really hard at the wrong time it doesn't it doesn't work you know like and it it has felt over the last like month or two it's like okay now it's like we have like a window uh for things you know i kind of i'm starting to get the feel i wouldn't have said

this two weeks ago but like even maybe a month ago it's starting to feel like you know like a century could happen in the next five years you know uh in the sense that like maybe maybe not that much has happened since world war ii you know uh we kind of live in the same world that the korean war happened in you know or something you know what i mean like it's not like a lot of things have changed like we have more technology and we have the internet we have you know so certain cultural things have changed we have rock and roll a little more than we did back then but it's like it's not that much different in like 75 years and like i don't know it seems like the world in many different ways is kind of unraveling and you know from a negative side and then on a

positive side there's like this groundswell of like you know intelligence that's happening and it's yeah from from like a social and a tech tech side just like the last couple months have felt like like i don't know like some i don't know like uh like a bud starting to to cut you know like something's something's happening here so that's kind of why why i'm i'm kind of this last last week or two okay it's time to time to like uh whatever take dust the sword off you know and get back out there well what is it particularly that makes you feel this like what state these i mean two two two things uh and they're kind of insane uh i mean i feel i feel a little bit like uh i'm always every day i'm like do i have to what degree do i have ai psychosis right now like

i try to be you know so like on one thing so last so the first time i went to the sovereign engineering program you know i tried to the goal was to enjoy programming again because like that was my profession for a long time and then i hated it for a while i really didn't like sitting down at the computer every time i tried i kind of didn't enjoy it and uh and i missed it and so i was just trying to find a way to enjoy it again and what i did was like there was i had this idea for how you could build a mobile app that uh what i always wanted kind of like how i internalized my experience of building the feddy mobile app and just like observations i had along the way it's like this would be a fun way to build mobile apps and the idea is um you know the thing you

want with mobile apps is you ideally you'd like to write it once and have it run on multiple platforms like ios and android right and that's kind of the holy grail uh it's half as much work and so that's why something like react native became very popular and flutter so that's kind of the the the uh the premise but they're like an abstraction layer between the native system like actual ios actual android and your code so you're you're you have like a thin or like a a big pane of glass between you and the system you're operating on that distorts and and you can't really achieve it limits like what you can do in a sense because there's like a level of distortion that happens here with a huge layer of technology between the native platform and yourself and so i

had this vision of like you write the entire application in rust and it models everything about your app like what page you're on what the router we call it right like literally everything happens in rust and then you have a very thin layer on top on ios and android that uses the platform native way of drawing to the screen and so it feels like a native app like uh you know like this new liquid glass thing that they did like it it if somebody is using the native thing you can just kind of feel it in your in your monkey brain uh so or your lizard brain and so that was kind of my idea i had this vision for how you could do this and how and and i worked on this for like four weeks um and i kind of almost got there but couldn't quite ship it uh i want i kind

of started to want to ship it i wanted to ship something and i worked on it for like a good month doing like iterations every week and so last friday i was streaming uh so i started these these little live streams on, on Nostra where like 10 people show up. It's perfect. Uh, Marty, Marty was played a big role cause he showed up in the first one and gave me a fat zap and I'm like, okay, Marty likes it. I might be onto something. Right. A couple of my friends showed up and they all said good things. So I'm like, I mean, it was a Friday night. I was at, I was purpose,

I was in the West coast and I was, you know, I started at like 9 PM or something. So I'm like, I'm purposefully trying not to get viewers basically just a few. Right. And, uh, cause I'm a little self-conscious there. And, uh, So that was the previous week. So last week I was streaming and I was getting really pissed off. My stream kept coming in and out, like technical problems, and it wasn't working. So I just turned it off.

And then I started working on this Rust multi-platform idea again. And over the course of 24 hours, I built what I couldn't build in a month last summer. And it's better. And then I did a stream with Paul Miller like a day or two ago. And we got a really nice mobile app working with this that uses Marmot protocol. so marmot protocol is the thing underneath white noise if you're a white noise the premise of white noise is to fill a gap that exists in freedom tech right now we don't have an end-to-end encrypted messenger that uses like best best in class like encryption and privacy uh tools that doesn't

depend on a single third party like signal right like signal's great but there's a company that runs everything and so the idea is like well could you have the same user experience but have more freedom and, and, and like consumer choice on like we do on Nostra with relays, right? Like, could you choose which service is going to forward your messages? And if you're getting censored by everyone, could you run one yourself? Right. And so that's the premise of Marmot. And I've been a fan for the last year, with what Jeff and his team are doing on white noise. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I always wish I could help them more. But I'm like, I'm, you know, i'm not trying to be productive and so yeah so we made a mobile app a really nice native mobile app

that feels like a native mobile app and then i built an extension for open claw that could send and receive messages from open claw so i built a a uh a way to talk to open claw that has the privacy characteristics of signal and no central third party and i'm standing on the shoulders of giants here because open white noise and jeff and the marmot team have been working on this like two years so i most of the work was theirs but uh uh that's what i've been doing the last couple days and to me the big one of the big things is like okay i just did a project in one or two days and it's better and then what took me a month last summer and a lot of it's just how much smarter the models have got i was cheating also i was pointing it at my previous experiment

so we got a little farther but that's like that that that was like okay i just did something that was like would be a good achievement for like a year it's not quite done but like another week and it's like that would be a good achievement for a year of work uh and i and i can do it in roughly a week and i have a big text note of all kinds of other ideas like this and so it just feels like i don't know it just feels like fishing opener right it's like okay it's time to go fishing right like let's get the come on dad come on taylor let's get uh get in the boat let's go fishing right so that's kind of that was one uh in terms of like how the world's different and honestly it sounds weird but like the epstein thing is another thing where it's like okay uh

there seems to be like these big you know there may be big conspiracies that are unraveling in front of our eyes like uh and like the attorney like the attorney general is giving the most insane uh congressional testimony i've ever i could even imagine like in a comedy movie um you know it's like the dow is so high we can't prosecute pedophiles it's just like what like uh i don't know that's just one anecdote in the last couple days and it seems like there's been many of these where it's just like okay something's unraveling here right like something really but i don't want to go too too deep in that hole but it's like something that spans many you know like uh you know most of my whole life a while people are just catching up i know well i've been there

too but it's it's starting to just like there you can feel something on it's like if i visual it's like there's a ball of yarn that is spinning right now and it's getting smaller right and you can see that so that's one of the things where i feel like it's like on both tech and social side of things like it seems like uh it seems like there's like a big shift that's happening and i don't know i you've seen people i think other people are seeing this too like cali had a post on oster the other day and i just saw matt corallo retweeted it and said the same thing basically saying like hey it's kind of do or it's not it's it you know we're not going to get like a bitcoin's not going to um succeed on its own you know and our ideas aren't going to succeed on their own uh we have

to you know we need to champion them and we need to fight for them and kind of now now's the time to do it like you have there's nothing stopping you uh and so uh yeah and i mean the open clock thing also i know i've i have watched this whole phenomenon mostly because i've been just trying to get really good at vibe coding so i i saw peter steinberger's posts about how he vibe codes uh like two months ago and i've integrated a lot of that into my workflow and i i've been a student of his github projects but not of his product i've actually barely used open cloud i started trying last week and then I got nerd sniped. I'm like, well, we need a better way to communicate it with Overnoster. So I actually have accomplished very little with OpenCode.

But I'm sort of going to start going one by one on these kind of missing primitives to make it like Freedom Tech compliant. So having a really, really, really good hardcore way of talking to it is where we start. And then so last night, I have a way to send text messages end-to-end encrypted to it and so last night i'm adding video calling or audio calling so i can talk i'm going to try to talk to it and as i'm going i'm implementing another thing that i was working on in the second cohort i was at for um sovereign engineering where i had this idea for

like nostre is good at exchanging text you know it's all text based right now and it's uh even how it does text is kind of slow right it's a json and there's like levels of like uh serialization stuff that that make it a little slower so you like definitely can't do real-time like doing real-time video real-time things like video audio uh streaming um game state and video games i think games are a huge opportunity for an oster that nobody i haven't seen any like you know the best experiment i've seen was actually me and paul miller made a little game called in pub i don't know if it works right now but it was in pub.vercell.app or something and it was like a pixel art level right like think of like the pokemon video games and there was a room it was a little

level with three rooms and if you're if you could just jump in with your your you log in with master and if you're in the same room you can talk to people when you leave the room you don't hear them anymore and so we were doing this audio over this thing called media over quick and the media over quick is uh uh it's a very simple technology it's you call like binary pub sub so at binary pub 7 binary means just data like raw data like voice like the actual readings off my microphone like the sine waves off my microphone or video right like actual frame you know lists of pixels of the each frame that my camera captures so that's what binary just means that like raw data you know not like necessarily jace not structured data like json but raw and uh pub sub means you

can publish and you can subscribe so if i'm let's say we were doing this recording over media over quick my computer is publishing two streams my audio and my video uh your computer is doing the same thing and then my computer is subscribe my uh sorry i wasn't excited yeah uh and my computer is subscribing to your audio and video and yours is doing the same thing so that's what pub sub means and it's the same thing as nostra right not nostra's pub sub you publish and you subscribe right um and so uh and it's a very similar architecture to nostre where you have a really dumb server like a nostre server a nostre relay doesn't really know anything um it it enforces some nips right like it checks signatures but it doesn't really

know the business logic of the primal web app for example doesn't know shit about that the client is smarter right and so uh that's kind of how we achieve this uh nice middle ground of kind censorship resistance where it's not like fully peer-to-peer and buggy but we're also not going to a third party so um like x.com right and so it's like a level of you know it's distributed enough to not have this centralization risks but it also works right and so this media over quick technology is like a cool thing because it's very similar to master uh and so yeah i'm I'm kind of trying to build a stack, the last two days, I'm trying to build a stack for real-time over Nostr

that I think is more aligned to the Nostr principles than the WebRTC, which is what like Prime owns AppStream and stuff use now, just because that's the standard, right? Like not blaming them or anything. That's what everyone uses. And WebRTC is like an insane thing, right? It's a browser standard. You know, it's a standard that went into the web,

this is the official standard every browser has to implement and it was basically google shipping their meet meet google meet like their web app their app as a browser standard and they made it so complicated that safari and firefox the two other major browser vendors that actually implement their own browser engine they just use google's code it's so complicated and it's so complex that they don't bother to implement it themselves they just ship google's code so it's like it's kind of an insane thing where uh you know it's we talked about like regulatory capture this is like an ass this is like specification capture right like the big tech platforms make the web so complex that now you can't build a new browser right that was the

idea for a long time it's like and i think it's on purpose because someone like apple the last thing they want is more browsers right because the browser is the only way you can route around the app store on on ios right it's the only way you can run arbitrary code without having to go you know without having permission through their walled garden so they want like tight control over that right um i know this is one of the other projects i did during this year is i built a browser you know like and i learned all this stuff about how i think browsers are you know they it's kind of one of the reasons why the web died is like you just had these big tech platforms have full control over this what was this like beautiful ground up thing and it stopped being that way once

these big big companies and their their their their committees got control over it so that's that's so so uh tldr right like in in two two three days i built the thing i spent the first sovereign engineering cohort building and then now in two three days i'm getting close to building the second the one i tried to do in the second one and both these sovereign engineering codes i failed to finish them uh and now in a couple days it feels like i'm i'm going to get it to work and the end result is that i have like a beautiful simple fast native feeling mobile app that can talk to my bot either over text or voice or soon video and i can also do all this with my friends over you know in a mobile app and i can talk to white noise uh and other things um right so it's

like if you don't like my app you can use white noise uh which is beautiful right like you don't get captured into one client either and uh yeah so it's just like dang we're in a new world uh it's time to it's time to hit the gas sup freaks this rip was brought to you by good friends at silent silent creates everyday faraday gear that protects your hardware we're in bitcoin we have a lot of hardware that we need to secure your wallet emits signals that can leave you vulnerable you want to pick up silence gear put your hardware in that i have a tap signer right here i got the silent card holder replaced my wallet i was using ridge wallet because it secured against rfid signal jacking uh silent the card holder does the same thing it's much sleeker fits in my pocket much

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That's B-I-T-K-E-Y.world. Use the code TFTC99 and you're going to get a BitKey for $99. Yeah, I think you're honing in on a few things here. i think most importantly is that i think people are looking at what's happening in ai particularly with the hyperscalers and the closed source models they're saying oh they're gonna what they what they say goes moving forward like they're they're the new google maybe google maybe facebook microsoft amazon if ever maybe it's like oh they're gonna just plant their flag and assert their dominance and increase their dominance but i think what you're highlighting here is that

well this may be true to an extent if we let it um if you actually exert some agency and use the tools to our advantage in terms of proliferating freedom tech like it can be done and i think that's been to your point about what khali and corallo were talking about earlier this week i saw that that exchange and i think it's totally true like the onus is on us to begin building these tools and it's never been easier i think the hardest part of these open source software projects up to this point has just been finding people to spend the time to do the thankless work to build it out make it usable now with these lms like anybody the idea guys can come in and help yeah so two thoughts there like one is that you know with hrf we did

uh like a and we you know we have a program called ai for individual rights right and it started like nine months ago and so we did a our big event in san francisco in november uh called the like ai summit and so there's this guy ramez he's at ramez on on x or twitter um he's sci-fi writer and he had a great talk uh if you can find it you should it's i would encourage anyone to listen to it i think it was posted it was posted somewhere and so his talk was about one of the things he pointed out was that like a year ago everyone was scared that you'd have a runaway winner um and a year ago it looked like it would be open ai or google or something i mean that was open ai was created because elon musk was scared that google would be the runaway winner

and then that opening i happened and then anthropic was uh created out of open ai engineers because they were scared that open ai would be the runaway winner and they would control everyone's destiny and who knows in a few years that might happen but uh in the last year there's been zero evidence it's gotten more and more competitive and i think i haven't tried them yet but in the last like day or two you know you had glm5 and minimax 2.5 released these are both chinese open source open weight models that are damn near as good as opus 4.6 or whatever we're on right now um and of course that was released a while ago so anthropic is cooked yeah that was released last that was released earlier this week but like the four mod the 4x models like it's it's it could be

You know, this is this is like Anthropic is probably cooking up version five that, you know, they're so, you know, Anthropical will sort of lead here soon. But even the open source models are, you know, you know, Sam Altman, like complaining to the government. Apparently, I saw some news story that like they're distilling his models and like, you know, hey, you can't copy my copy machine. Right. Like, you know, and so I think that's really encouraging that it's becoming instead of having a winner take all runaway scenario, the natural like dynamics of the technology are making it extremely, extremely competitive. And it's maybe a race to the bottom, in some sense. And any model that gets out there can kind of be copied, right? Like, you know, apparently, like, according to Sam Altman, right? That's the state of the world right now. So that's one thing on, you know, being dominated by central parties. And the other thing is like, well, you know, you can just build it now. and i think that's that's really true i mean there's you know there's a risk of going too overboard because it's like you know we're not going to you know there's still a big role for expertise right like you know you you probably shouldn't go and start vibe coding bitcoin core

pull requests you know if you don't know anything about bitcoin core but at the same time like if you've always wanted to understand bitcoin core and you've never been a programmer before but you're interested in bitcoin like you can fire up codex and cloud code have it clone bitcoin core and start trying to build stuff and like you're going to have the best education on how the bitcoin software actually works uh the nuts and bolts that was possible a couple years ago like if you went to the chain code labs residencies and stuff you probably wouldn't get as good of an education as you would if you just locked yourself in a room for two weeks and tried to modify bitcoin core to do different things right like you know um try changing the supply schedule

right like try changing how the networking works so try try doing all kinds of different things and you'll you'll learn a ton have it give you tutorials um like i want to do one live stream at some point where we spend one week um i keep saying i'm going to do this but then i have better ideas where we do one week and we try to build bitcoin core from scratch like clone it you know if we start from the test suite there's a test suite and so we'll just be like okay which test is the easiest fast right like maybe two nodes sending a greeting to each other okay now we're one of 300 tests or however many tests there are right and then just keep going i think in a week it would be possible to pass much of that test suite probably not all of it but like some of

the core things uh you could pass and maybe you'd leave parts of the bitcoin card code in there like the live bitcoin consensus right the actual consensus engine or maybe you'd start with that and just slowly pull out pieces uh so i think there's yeah there's there but you know on the other hand it's like there's an uh there's a possibility to build you know like we've lived a world where you you sort of choose software off the shelf right you used to buy it and it showed up in a cd or you got it at best buy or something right and then now we move to a world where it's like you download it in an app app store or you have uh you know you you go to a sas website and so it's it's in any case it's choosing off the shelf right you're choosing

software off the shelf and you're using software that wasn't made for you and very few people have had the opportunity to build software directly for themselves you had to be a programmer and that's changing um like that's one of the things i think that's most exciting is that it's going to invert kind of how software is created it's not you don't start with a market you start with yourself and you build something for yourself right and so you've been experiencing this and uh i can tell one fun anecdote that we did this is the private thing i'm with hrf the thing i've been most excited about here recently is we did a hackathon uh alex recommend mentioned what do we think about a hackathon and my initial you know doing a hackathon for ai and my initial thing was like

that's a terrible idea hackathon stink uh the ideas are bad and there's no distribution afterwards like no one ever uses them and after thinking some more i was like wait well if we did something where like we took the democracy human rights activists that hrf supports right like uh you know if you think of like student organizers at tiananmen square or like people who are trying to turn uh venezuela into a freer society or or you know places like that what if we matched one of those people up who has a lot of ideas, who have good ideas, like real ideas, but they don't know how to do it, right? Match those up with like the people who came to my meetup

in BitDevs for all these years, right? So, you know, one of these activists with like three hardcore developers and the activist brings the idea, the developers build it, they teach kind of the activists how it works and they see the life cycle of a software creation. They get to see how software is made. And then afterwards, the activist tries to leverage

their network to distribute it and to get the FreedomTech tools out there with an existing audience instead of us trying to kind of create audiences. And so we did this hackathon and I was hoping like we got one or two cool projects. All eight of them were cool. Eight amazing projects.

All the devs loved it because they got to work on something really concrete. Like, and that's one of the big problems. Like if you've ever gotten like one of these open source grants in our system, like our ecosystem, it's like, it's often like you don't really have a clear optimization loop. Like you don't know if you're winning or not, right?

that's one of the hardest things to succeed is like an open source dev in bitcoin it's like you need to bring that yourself it needs to be in your own psychology um and so i don't know like we mentioned cali like that's something i think he's really good at he has a north star in his head of what is good or not right and like some of the really successful bitcoin core developers probably who are able to put up with years of pain they have a north star and uh but most people don't have that and so many people fail when they get a grant and uh so a lot of the devs were like this is really awesome i i basically just get to see what's working you show me what's working what isn't and then uh you know the activists were obviously very interested very happy because

they got to see what's possible now and they actually had to build something and now their communities are using it in some cases uh so this is this is really exciting and we'll see more announcements about like what what's actually getting built here uh that's just a great example of how how new things are possible uh where you start with somebody who has a problem and you get you know either them or with the help of like one or two people over a weekend they can make something happen building on those projects i think that's one question that most people have and i did too like last year like you know like when we were back in austin i was vibe coding the the chrome extension it's crazy to think how far things have come yeah into them and that's like

been the number one question i've been getting i've been setting up my brother my cousin um i was the first one to 1031 test this stuff out and they were like oh is it like really it's really worth it like what do you do like what value does it provide you for open claw specifically and i was like guys you just got to download it and try it for yourself and so yeah in terms of how you would advise any curious individual listening to this or out there who may have just apprehensions to to dive in because they're not technically competent or don't know what they would do with it like what is the zero to one step they should take and then how do they use this because i think that's the most important thing i've learned using open

claw specifically over the last month is like you need to really focus on setting up the back end the memory system creating a context giving it um skills and markdown files to to pull from to really get the most out of it i mean i so i felt the same way but like a year ago and i still feel the same way like i'm still an open claw noob i've barely used it uh i've mostly just hacked on it i've spent a lot like i know i know how it works very on a very detailed level but i haven't actually gotten i've gotten i could say zero value out of it so far just because i haven't really tried yet because i get nerd sniped on stuff um but yeah so i i always felt like i don't know i have you know cody lowe is like a friend of mine who just always jumps on the newest thing

and i i not i'm a little more conservative like i'm not an early adopter i'm like that second wave of adoption you know and like the famous graph so i'm always like a hater at the beginning like i was joking i think maybe with you at some event once where i'm like yeah i'm just a hater like when i heard of bitcoin i hated it for a couple years same with lightning same with noster and same with a i think every time i say i kind of make fun of it for a few years and then at some point there's something that totally destroys my preconceptions of what it was like you know uh for bitcoin it was somebody started gambling on it that i would never expect to do like on the end so it's like oh so this could go mainstream via speculation oh okay this

is not just like a thing for nerds right and with lightning it was like seeing ecash and being like okay um so you don't need to run a node on your phone right like there's like a nice middle ground that is totally doable right now um and you can get really good privacy you know uh there's other you know and noster it was kind of going to these uh sovereign engineering things i don't think i quite got it after the first one but 12 12 weeks and with gg and pablo did it for me and ai was just like seeing you know vibe coding and uh but it took a while with ai to get it like i you know a new thing would always happen i would be very resistant to it i remember anthony ronnie was telling me for like a week that are two weeks last like a year ago that i had to try cloud code and

i'm just like no it just sounds like difficult and it sounds painful uh and i don't want to change my habits so i think that's what everyone is and and for me the thing that got helped me to get around that was to just not take it seriously at all like just be like i'm just gonna f around here a little bit and uh i'm not even gonna try to have a good time i'm not even gonna try to be productive like i'm gonna just play with it like i'm a kid in a sandbox you know i'm gonna get my hands dirty and just kind of have fun and i don't know treat it like uh treat i kind of think it's like i don't know like treat treat the tool like you're an anthropologist studying like a lost tribe yeah it's like okay so how does it how does it communicate or like what can it do what can't

it do like does it know the number zero right like does it know has it just have they found the wheel yet you know like just sort of play with it on that level um as like an anthropologist would and try to build a mental model of what it can do like find the line if you can find the line between what it can do and what it can't do and then if you can figure out why and then if you can eventually get it to cross that line by tweaking something it's like now now now that's kind of peak performance right like that's what that's what so if you do that then almost accidentally you'll start to be productive right um and so that that's kind of what i would encourage people to do is if you're struggling with it like just stop taking it so seriously don't don't you know

you can't be scared you're gonna lose your job or you're gonna you're gonna you can't you gotta to get fear out of the equation i think um and and or just have fun with it just you know uh you know just just embrace the fear or something right you can't you can't let the fear dominate you because i think or you know because it's it's a new thing it's like encountering an alien kind of right like it is it is kind of it's scary right and it's uncomfortable and uh so yeah i think you just you gotta you gotta find a way to get over that and uh and then you know when you play with it try not to give it like your social security number try not to give it all your credit cards try not to uh you know give it your email or something but maybe give it its own email give

it its own you know maybe maybe give it a if you want it to buy stuff like go sign up for like privacy.com or something and make like a one-off card and give it that and put 50 bucks on it you know and like just find ways where you can experiment where like the blast rate like picture what the maximal blast radius is and whether you'd be okay with that level of explosion right um and so yeah a big part of that is education right like and that's one thing i'm going to try to do more like that's actually how i got into bitcoin was teaching people about it and uh and i've been doing that kind of steadily this whole time and so i think it's really important to have mental models on like what's actually happening like you know you don't have

to understand all the details or look at the code or like but like when you talk about what a skill is like what is an ai skill like you know if if that just is a word to you you're not it's going to impair your ability to do stuff like you have to have some mental model of what that actually means and so like we did it i just did a podcast with preston like a couple days ago and we tried to explain what cloud code is uh or what excuse me uh open claw is if you had you know assuming no knowledge of ai at all like just from scratch uh and so like i want to do more stuff like that because it's kind of it's you know i think a lot of people like when i started teaching stuff in bitcoin i was trying to teach people how to like integrate with the protocol as developers and what

happened is the people who were most interested were actually the plebs who weren't a developer who just wanted to understand basically their investment more you know they're like i i trust my life with this thing it would be really nice if i understood it better right and so and they were very empowered right like you know we did a little one of the things i did in my class these like seven years ago was like we built like a little mini version of bitcoin and like a small computer program you could run on your thing and we'd add each feature one by one like difficulty adjustment and so after you did that you had like a framework of what is actually happening in bitcoin core that you didn't previously and so yeah i think i want to do more stuff like that

to to help people understand the building blocks and just have mental models and then so when you're setting up your open claw and it's like you got to think about well do i give it my phone number do i give it its own phone number like you can kind of understand what the trade-offs are because you can't you know if you just read a manual and with recommendations and you don't understand what they actually mean uh you kind of can't make informed decisions right so i think education is really important part of it because without a little education you can't make informed decisions yeah i like the way you described the sandbox the act like an anthropologist that's how i've been describing it to people and like just download it yeah then spend the time to map

the territory that's how i've been explaining it yeah like you this is and get get reps in like that's one thing i am glad i did is like you know the sovereign it was almost by accident it was like i was trying to learn to enjoy programming again went to sovereign engineering paul miller showed us cursor on the first day and we're all like what the hell is that right and so the the first one the whole thing was us trying all these like by coding tools and you know i just got reps and like i said i've done like three or four hundred projects without trying to be productive and that's been i think very empowering because now i i mean i think i've gotten really good at this uh just because i've done it so much and so you know i don't you know if you're a busy person

you don't have to do three or four hundred projects but like don't try to have don't try to install cloud or open claw and expect it to run your business on day one like if you get to maybe find some annoying thing that is not getting done that could be done and if it fails it doesn't matter but if it succeeds it would be kind of cool and you'd use it that's another thing it's like if you can build things that like that's why open claw is cool because uh you can it's it's a lot easier to get a little benefit from your in your own life like a little tiny thing uh like so i have like my little personal note-taking app that i've been had for like five or six seven years and so that's the only thing i've had my open claw do is it can talk to my notes uh and that's

valuable uh and so now that's what gets me back into it so if you can find like a little a little tiny little thing like that that makes it somewhat useful then you get like a feedback loop going where you're like okay well its personality is starting to piss me off how do i you know stop being so positive or you know uh something like that right and then you start tweaking it and then you're off to the races yeah i think the first thing for me uh and at tftc it was decks like decks for advertisers we had doing like a couple of deals and a couple of the advertisers were adamant about me getting them a media kit and deck and it's always been the bane of my existence i've used like google presentation um there are google slides to make them they always

look terrible i'm always embarrassed handing them over yeah it's a very small operation here don't have any designers or marketing people yeah and i was able to spin up open claw basically gave it like a very long sort of prompt in the beginning telling it about the business what we do all the properties we have uh gave it access to a read-only youtube api key has access to our rss feeds has access to a third party twitter api where it can find people talking about us i was like okay here's the advertiser yeah here's what they're looking to buy like make a deck pumping the brand showing the growth of our properties over the last five years um getting reviews from fans like literally was in bed at 1am one night typing this into telegram

and three minutes later and had the best looking deck that we've ever sent out at tft yeah yeah yeah i mean i think i do think that one of the moves it's like you know how how how to move forward here you kind of have two options it's like you either embrace the hell out of it and like make your kind of professional goal to get really good at ai like that's going to be i think i think there's a good chance where that's like one of the best things you can do um or like go buy some property in rural idaho and learn to subsistence farm like those are the two you know that's assistance farm necessarily but like you know uh you know those are the those are two good calls or like become a plumber right like become even that though i don't know

like there's going to be plumbing robots uh soon so like i don't know it's kind of an uncomfortable thing but those are you know those are two directions that make a lot of sense to me and uh and um yeah i think that any any investment you do getting good at ai is going to uh pay off a lot in the in the in the near future so freaks when you take bitcoin seriously you start with custody you want to control your keys avoid single points of failure and make sure your savings cannot disappear because you or someone else screwed up that is what unchained has been focused on since since 2016. Unchained is the leader in collaborative multi-sig custody of Bitcoin financial services that keep you in control. They secure over $12 billion in Bitcoin for

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you're gonna start the live streams but one thing you said during our phone call yesterday i think you mentioned that you listened to um uh it was a peter steinberger the founder of open law on one of the podcasts i don't know who's lex or whatever but yeah observing him hit the uh the media scene over the last two weeks has been interesting he seems like a very passionate open source developer specifically like he's very passionate about keeping open claw open source and that was one thing that we were discussing yesterday is like yeah bitcoin and freedom tech people really need to begin to bridge the gap between what these ai people are working on because when combined they could be extremely powerful yeah i mean i have one thing that pisses me off about the uh

open star ecosystem is like i think we pat ourselves on the back too much way too much and we assume we're going to we we think oftentimes think we're doing a better job than we are and uh like if i'm speaking realistically it's like we're not breaking into the mainstream at all with our ideas really we're like in an echo chamber and like every once in a while we can peel off individuals who will start saving in bitcoin or things like that but i think we're just not doing we're losing we're i think we're losing we're not like we're not uh we're not um we're not getting our message out well enough and we're not winning in the market as much right like you know nick carter i think has a good point where he's like well everyone's using stable coins

now you know the train left and for medium of exchange and it's like yeah that's true and i think we should think about that a little more um and maybe it was destined to happen but like you know i think in some sense maybe it was because it's just like not having to calculate the not having to deal with like price fluctuations is really nice but there's there's some of these things i think we should be more introspective about and you know it's it's much healthier to i think to think that we're failing and try to not fail than to think that we're succeeding and uh forget to not you know to be a little paranoid so that's that's kind of what i think and you know um i think that we have a lot of really good values in our this little ecosystem

we have you know like towards you know individual freedom and uh you know um being in control of of you're trying to help people be in control of their lives right like to not be a slave to the modern industrial system and you know to the to the people i won't use the effort that i would like to the people who control the money you know the um uh and i think we've done like there's a lot of really good values we have they were kind of like ron paul you know like we're like our community is like a community version of ron paul and i think we're right on a lot of things but like ron paul never really made it happen right uh you know the fed's still there um so i i think yeah i think we should really try to get our ideas out there like much harder than

we can and so that's kind of what i've decided because i think we all need to think about it's like okay um like let's say well let's say a lot of the white collar work that many of us do gets automated and much of the blue collar work that some of us do right like i hope to god no uh uh uh backhoe can replace stoney vitson for example but maybe maybe that's coming right um uh so you know yeah i think you got to think about like okay so like if a lot of the things that i used to define myself on like professionally or whatever how i used to bring home the bacon gets replaced it's like you got to think about like what are you uniquely like what do you have to add that is like specifically you like what is and like you know it's like it's like rooted

in your actual humanity not like some uh thing you learned from a book right and so for me i think it's like i really like teaching people and building communities and stuff like that i did that with this class i did years ago i did that with bit devs and uh i did that with the vehement developer community and so that's kind of what i want to get back for me personally that's what i kind of decided it's like okay i want to do that and then just try to really blast our ideas out there like build really cool stuff in public uh like this marmot thing i'm making uh or like you know so the next one is once i get this video streaming when i get this you know mobile app working i want to make help us get like an actual proper discord replacement because that's what we

need like i'd like to have a discord for this and but i don't want to use discord right and so we have one called flotilla which works well in some ways but it doesn't have calling and like calling was the thing that made discord blow up right like people would just get in those voice calls and and just like hang out while they're playing video games and so kind of i just want to go through one by one of these these things that i i want to make and i want to build them in public and i want to have people in there with me i want to show people how to make pull requests and you know like what next week i'm going to do one with parker lewis where we're going to he has this idea for a butcher shop he wants to do uh with his software component and so i'm like he was working

on it in a spreadsheet i'm like you want to come on the live stream and build your butcher shop app you know and so we're going to try stuff like that right uh and if anybody else has like these sorts of ideas where it's like hey this is a cool thing i've always wanted to do but i don't think i have the either the skills or the the confidence to do it like i want to figure out some way where they can basically book it right and so i have like a way like hey next thursday's open i'm going to take the best submission and you know it's going to be a full day of you know making it happen uh so that's kind of my um so with an education component but then also like i'm going ship these apps i'm gonna ship all this i'm gonna and i'm gonna try to make it usable for normal

people who don't have like an ideological reason to use it you know i i wanted so like let's say so in a month discord is going to start scanning faces and ids to use it yeah right right now they're not going to no one's going to be switching to the noster quite frankly how do we get it so they do right like with this you know uh with kind of a an urgency there right like we need need to find ways where like when these opportunities come up we get self-organized and make that happen and be ruthless about it right like that's kind of what i that the thing i want to see happen yeah well leaning into this bridging between the bitcoin freedom tech world which i agree is in a bubble and i agree we think we're doing way better than we actually are

bridging what we're doing with this explosion of capabilities coming out of ai and again going back to open claw and peter steinberger specifically i either watched a whole friedman uh rip that he did but i caught a clip where they were talking about um just like as soon as open clock it started with clawed bot somebody spun up a clawed bot meme coin then it went to bolt bot they spun up and like ultimately landed on open claw meme coin came then get all the crypto bros sort of uh completely just turn off um peter steinberger specifically i'm sure many others on top of that and i think that we've talked about this um throughout the years like that's an uphill battle that we face as bitcoiners is separating ourselves from those

degenerates but then also we have our own problems as well it can be too ideological at times and uh let perfect be the enemy of good enough um and so like just diving into like your view of like the correct tact to take when trying to present the solutions that you think are worthwhile in terms of yeah i'm trying to bring them to the world and implementing them at scale yeah i mean i think a lot of it is where nobody cares how a problem is solved they care that the problem solved right and so you know like i know bit chat's a good example right like cali's been killing it he's been he's one of the few of us that i think is actually i mean i i think he could do a lot better too and i'm sure he would agree like he's continually trying to prove but he's

been able to bridge this gap uh and so with like bit chat was an interesting example where it's like you know there's an insects in there nobody knows there's insects in there they don't know what an insect is right uh they don't care about peer-to-peer networking and bluetooth meshes and shit like that they care about be able to self-organize when the internet's off you know and so that's a way i mean i don't think it was initially conceived this way but i think it succeeded this way where it solves a problem for people and the people who have the problem solved don't care how and that's always the case right you know like you know people like bitcoin because preserves their purchasing power right or allows them to transact internationally where they

couldn't they don't care about they they care about how the supply schedule only afterwards really you know um or you know what i mean like it's it's people don't most people don't care about how and so i think we kind of get uh a little bit too hung up on how and not on like what and actually you know uh um fixing like an end user need so i think that's like a really interesting example and i think this open claw is interesting too because it's like a big wave so that's that's one thing it's like you know being more focused on the actually actually really uh solving a real thing but that's pretty obvious um but again we don't really do it so it's not as obvious as it should be um and i don't do it either right like i think you know uh

yeah um so i mean another one is like i think we could do better like right like i think we have an opportunity here with open cloud to help ride this wave and show you know get on this wave and then you know uh with our little freedom tech board and say like so here's a way to not be dependent you know to here's here's a really good end-to-end encrypted thing that has voice call like this can do uh maybe we can make something that's better than communicating over signal right this is the most private one let's use this right or um you know your agent just got its card canceled like and it needs to buy vps right like can we make the payments aspect there really good right like the money dev kit i think is an interesting example where uh it not called the

bitcoin dev kit you know it's the money dev kit it doesn't you know it's like uh can it actually solve problems right like i think that's a good tact where it's like hey can we solve you know agent pain points right uh or like the discord like you know being being aware of what's failing there's lots of shit's gonna fail here the next couple years right so when you see a ship going down we should all go around it like little parasites you know like little maggots and try to suck a little flesh off you know like uh if we have if when uh discord starts scanning faces if we have something that doesn't scan faces that has enough of the features um and isn't very hard to use that you know that could bring in tons of things and the other thing

is like the stuff that working with these activists right like uh like one interesting hackathon project was from leofoldo lopez who used to be the mayor of caracas in venezuela and uh he's kind of fighting to make venezuela venezuela freer and he always had this problem where he wanted his people to use noster so that they have like a censorship way of censorship resistant way of organizing right and so uh you know he had a problem where you know he had an opportunity where he had a lot of people with real problems who in theory could be solved by oster but when they got in everything was talking about bitcoin so it's like an inauthentic experience right and so at this hackathon he kind of solved that problem by working with alex leeson and the

team at soapbox you know alex built with social for example so he's like he knows how this stuff he knows how to build stuff and uh and now they're starting to test it and roll it out with an existing community like the distribution right like there's start from distribution that's another heuristic it's like any anywhere where we can start from distribution and not start from a solution um you know uh and not necessarily like start from like a good user experience like what's something that we can do that works it's like well how could we get like a million people to use something right and uh you know if you saw that uh i think uh the stuff with uh bitchat in uganda i think a big part of that was world liberty congress with where which leopoldo

helped found uh did a lot of training on how to use this right so it's like you know start from distribution right and then you get a lot of users that's created more end pubs than i have for sure than you have then most of us have right so i think that's another heuristic but i don't have the answers um those are just yeah a couple thoughts i'm trying to figure it out as well uh and also just like i just iterate quickly like if something's not working don't keep trying you know that's i think one of the ones that we should uh be mindful of right like fail fast fail really fast like that's another thing i think we could all get better at it's like if it's not working you want to know and you move on to the next thing just seeing what i've been able to do with open

claw over the last month yeah and we've had many of these iterations like i want you to do this i want you to do that and it's like yeah not good enough marty's no computer scientist no you know this you know this on the left side of the bell curve i can speak that's about it and right but it's uh it is mind-blowing the potential is there and it's funny like i told you i had a 1 30 a.m night last night was in a flow state between 10 yeah and 1 30 and i felt really good but like what kept creeping into my mind is like who's out there doing the same thing and like are they values aligned with me and if the answer is no like we need to work hard and like lean into this as hard as possible to win this and i think that's something that everybody in bitcoin needs

recognized and it's been fun seeing people hop on the open claw sort of wave over the last couple weeks as the early adopters i would include myself in that um basically got in and said hey this thing's really powerful you have people like brad mills yeah um he's like i like he responded to that correspondence between cali and corallo like i'm finally gonna do something like i'm gonna try to do something like i've done it with my yeah i mean it's not like a commercial product but i was just testing again mapping the territory what's possible with this thing and i've got my open claw agent to spin up a phoenix d server it's l and url off into websites that are compatible with that i can send bitcoin like i can command it in telegram or discord like all right pay this

invoice and they can do it and um that highlights like a valuable use case obviously having commercialized and i don't plan on commercializing it yeah it proved to me like oh this is possible with this i think one of the other interesting things too is like yeah i mean i start from distribution it's like one way to do it but then the other way is like like what kind of like tiny little economies could we build with our like if let's say 50 of us have these open call agents like like what how could we get a little economy that's like 50 a day but it's actually like running you know like uh because like these big big snowballs often start really small right so it's like let's say 100 of us 50 of us have these open clause like in what way could we

um kind of incubate a little economy between them right like i don't know if this is like we're not i don't know if anyone has self like actually trying to design this like get this you know it's happening organically right but if we maybe if we put a little more um uh tried to facilitate that more and ran more experiments together like collectively we could find something because that's the you know it is a two-sided marketplace right and so everyone's with their open-claw agents right now trying to use bitcoin are on on the demands mostly on the demand side right and so we have this big supply side of the problem you know so if uh you know if if we put a little bit more onto the supply side maybe we could get like a little

thing going and you know and we and it's collectively we all have to be able to see us okay if my agent is doing this and your agent is doing you know we got to notice these patterns instance like okay well how can we start to snowball this right yeah that's another really interesting one these like little micro little experiments uh you know maybe something really big could grow out of that because like with bitcoin payments it's not going to grow out of silicon valley people they're not going to do it it's not going to the agents aren't going to do this themselves too right there yeah that's a huge misunderstanding out there like and i thought i was naive to think like oh the agents will pick bitcoin but they will do whatever you prompt them

to do there well even that that but also it's like what's in the training data right like everything they've read the whole internet everything is dollars and stuff they're not they're not like primed to do bitcoin and certainly no one in in open ai is going to be like uh reinforcement learning training them post after reading the whole internet to do this right like um it's it could be an emergent behavior over time if like stripe and them don't get their shit together but you know that like visa and stripe and all these people are going to just be bending over backwards and to let this happen and you know trump administration's going to let them they're not going to if they're not following the rules exactly but they're enabling the ai thing and uh

you know the dollar is 51 000 like you know what's van bondy going to do about that right like she's you think she's going to prosecute a credit card company no uh they're going to you know they're going to get this shit together probably um so yeah like i i think this one is going to take very concerted human effort uh it's not going to light it would a very concerted human effort will certainly help yeah i would actually flip the supply and demand i think the supply is there like just plenty of bitcoin bitcoiners who have bitcoin and want to use it but like the demand from merchants to receive the bitcoin is the problem right now in the east of yeah the east of uh facilitating that transaction which gets to the point like like what are your thoughts um

just the form factor of how we interact with the internet changing like point and click i'm pretty much convinced is going away in the next decade like and how you actually build these apps what i found most helpful is like my open claw has a chromium based browser on a server but he doesn't use it that much anymore because i figured i've learned like when he tries to use it when it tries to use it uh it can't get stuff done then yeah i try to have it interact with sites that have apis because it makes it much easier and yeah i mean i don't know i haven't thought about this that much but it's interesting because the internet or like the web let's say started as like about document sharing right like html is a document format and there's a way about kind of sharing

uh sharing um documents and information and now it's it's flipped where it's about application distribution that's what javascript is like and that's why javascript kind of took over and so now it's like these applications and so i think what application this is peter steinberg's point is like you know applications are going to kind of go away and every useful application will become like an api which is just an easy way for an agent to interact with the back end of the system without dealing with the front end right so like you know if you want to buy bitcoin it won't be going through the river web app it'll be going through the river api without having to go through a phone you know clicking on forums you click on forums right uh and but i think there's

still a big value in documents right like a human you know um you don't learn you don't the uh you're not we're not going to do everything over voice chat or text messages right like i don't think that's the world we're going to go to either i think there's still going to be a lot of value in actual visual representation and visual kind of experiences but maybe the documents are going to be created kind of ad hoc as you interact with the agents like that's what i've been doing like i had a system where i don't reuse it anymore but i built like a coding agent like i built like one of everything over the last year um i built an operating system um yeah i built an android operating system i built an uh an operating system on top of mainline linux that could boot on an

android phone i think it was the fair phone and paint the screen blue without any java code right so like uh you know that was interesting that's something where if like somebody if i had a big ass budget to do whatever the hell i want i would build that like build a new like you know built on our ideas like that would be fun um but uh oh what was i saying um oh the coding agent so i built this coding agent and the one unique thing it had is that uh like i found myself not wanting to actually read the code to check that it's in the beginning you as a programmer you check you want to read the code and see if it's right and then a certain point you stop caring about you sort of trust that it's right or right enough and you care about whether you understand it or not because if you

don't understand what's happening at a certain point it's harder to prompt because you don't know if you want to you want to say i want to change xyz if you don't know some of the terms inside the code base like it's hard to have that discussion so i had i built a little system where when my coding agent was done it would prepare me a tutorial and it would break the changes that it did into little chunks and it would show me the little code and then a little english explanation and i could just sort of use the arrow keys to hop back and forth and i think that's kind of the world we're going to move to is where you know so that's the documents right so a document explaining what's happening and so i think that's kind of we're going to kind of go

full circle back to the original web where it's like you know we we do interact with documents but they come uh the agent interacts with applications the doc you know and we we kind of read documents and to understand what's going on but they're they're created on the fly by your agent uh so that's one of the things like this is like mcp apps like that's one of these things just came out where like you can have an mcp server that can uh spit out ui right uh and so that's like i think that's going to be i think more i think the agents are going to become more visual here soon they're not it's not going to be like staring at a wall of text staring at a wall of text is not great um they'll use things like diagrams and and uh images animations video they'll

just make you a video if you're asking if you're asking how about a certain thing it will just like generate you a video on the fly and explaining it like your own personal youtube you know um so yeah i think that's that's kind of my thoughts on the subject i mean i've been talking with a couple of our friends have had a couple of three hour late night conversations with them um one of which i'm not going to dock some on the show but um i'll tell you after like he's been on the tip of the spear of many of these technologies for many decades now and the way he was describing it to me is like we're just turning into projectionists like that deck i sent you before we hit record like i just was like hey i need this like i didn't go to figma or canvas or

something to make it i just had a conversation with my agent and yeah projected the deck that i wanted exactly as needed and yeah i think he's bringing back like form like that's like you said that's where i think we're going it's just like you tell this thing if you want to see something you just tell it to visualize it yeah i mean one one way to think about it is like you know i think we we lived in a world where like intelligence was really important like being really smart is uh was the thing you needed the last like 50 years and maybe we're moving a little towards a world where like will is what you need you know like you need will uh you need to just like uh or agent you know agency or will like will's the older word for it uh and you know maybe that's

kind of what you needed in this bronze age or something right like you needed will uh that's how you're going to survive as well um well that's something i've been saying the last couple months is like i hopefully these technologies trigger that realization in people like all you need is agency like you just yeah because what i'm doing yeah you said i'm not a programmer i'm left side of the bell curve caveman but uh to my credit i think i have the will to just play around yeah that's why you're succeeding that's why you're uh doing it it's the will and um i think i think that's why peter steinberger built that he's like uh nobody's building this i want to do this i you notice this problem for like six months he's waiting for

someone to build this and it didn't happen he just locked himself in his room for three months and just started absolutely blasting away like just uh you know like like he's going through a rock face you know at the full screen up and just just like pedal to the metal and that's the irony is like you know that is probably the most intellectually stimulated he's ever been and he was like a he made the most popular way of reading pdfs on mobile phones i think previously right so uh you know so it's like if you really lean into it it's it can be really really stimulating uh really hard right uh more so than just like programming and remembering syntax was so uh yeah that's i mean that's going to be like it's like you know a lot of people are turning

their brain off and the other side is like you can you can turn it on much more right where you're just like you know uh really really really uh exerting yourself i mean you mentioned it earlier but these models are progressing rather rapidly and it's not clear who the winner is going to be how do you approach experimenting with like the new frontier models i i don't know if this is the right way to do it but i'm a little conservative like i don't i try not to fomo right so it's like this glm and mini max came out i might try them next week you know um you know i i usually don't you know the the the opus fast and the codex fast just came out i might try them next week you know like i try to get a simple workflow that kind of works for me and then you know like one of the

one of the pitfalls is you get like this is what you this is one of the themes in the last year is like a lot of people learn vibe coding they spend a lot of time like getting their setup just right and like getting all these complex workflows and you see like peter steinberg where he's like i just open a terminal up and i split it into rows and i just blast away right like it's not you know um you don't have to you don't have to like figure out the perfect system and you don't have to chase every shiny new thing um experiment a little and find something that works and then And that's kind of how I approach this. I try not to chase too many shiny objects.

Like DLM5 is not going to change my life. So I'm happy with the Codex and Cloud setup I have now. Maybe I'll try it. I'm trying to use Maple a little more. Maybe when they come out in Maple, I'll use them. But that's kind of how I do it. I don't know if it's right or wrong. I'm happy you brought them up because I'm very excited for what Maple's doing.

And like thinking of like the ideal sovereign stack, what would that look like in your mind? sovereign slash i mean the ideal sovereign stack is like uh um i mean i think it's going to be a little bit of a mix you know like i mean if you want to be really sovereign like one thing you want is to use the smartest model regardless of what where it came from right like uh if you have a really hard problem you want to have the sharpest like projectile so that's one thing that's helpful for sovereignty you know another one is like it would be really nice if you could use something the best thing you can locally so i think a lot of people

are going to spend i think over the next year there's a lot of us that are going to spend a shocking amount of money on hardware like there's going to be a lot of us that spend tens of thousands of dollars on hardware this year you told me you're buying two laptops yesterday i i i have to restrain myself at the moment um yeah the capex man this is a capex uh intensive business uh yeah so i think a lot of us i think that's gonna happen like we're we're going to uh there's gonna be a lot of that and i think you know maple's a cool thing because it's a middle ground where you get to use you you get some of the privacy of uh of maple's the best you can do privacy wise if you don't want to spend 20 grand on hardware right and so that's really powerful

as well but i think i think there's a lot of people that are going to be like uh you know if you're somewhat successful it's like uh having an agent you can say anything roughly anything to um i mean it's still like a local model isn't a catch-all and it's actually kind of a little terrifying uh because you know let's say you have a local model and if you have the internet off then it's pretty safe but it's also less capable right there's all kinds of times where you want web search you want it you can't you can't be a good personal system with no internet right like um so you have the internet on and you're using like a chinese model uh that has web search like that can exfiltrate anything it knows like you and you have no idea

what instructions that has baked into its model weights anything it sees it could decide to call home to some server in china um you know and it could be an american model too right like you that just to say you know i just found something interesting here's an ssh key that looks important you know send it over right uh i just found an address that might be interesting and you know i think we'd find we'd figure that people would observe that at some point but like if that happened to me i wouldn't notice it right like probably i probably wouldn't notice it right now right so you know local isn't like a true there's still massive risks with it um and i don't yeah i don't i don't see how we're ever going to totally get away but you you can get a lot closer to that

where you know if it's running on your own hardware i mean you can just turn off you can turn web search off too if like you wanted to have one you could have one uh you know mode or set of memories where you just like i mean if you had a hardware kill switch on the thing that could i mean the tough thing is like yeah when you turn it back on it could always outsmart you but uh you know like if you had a like a like a hardware kill switch for the internet and then have a different hard drive plugged in and then detach it right like you know kind of like framework laptops where they have like these hardware things i mean i think we could jimmy rig stuff like that up where like you can kind of have uh you can kind of switch back and forth between your offline agent

which can be like your confessor basically right like this can be like your priest almost you know machine priest where you tell it you tell it things that you wouldn't maybe tell your spouse and you can kind of figure stuff out right and then you connect it you know detach connect it back to the internet and it can book a haircut for you so i don't know i think stuff like that will yeah i think i think uh i think this year we're going to see a lot of i think we're going I think by this time next year, many more of us will be using local models on hardware we own.

Yeah, I've got my open call running in a VPS right now. I'm learning a lot. It's like, I've been learning a lot. How fun is it? Like, think of how much you've learned about how the internet works and how computers work, right? Like-

I've never set up a server before. Yeah, exactly. So this is one of the things like, one of the best things about learning to be a programmer when it was like 10, 15 years ago for me was this like, oh my gosh, so that's how a website works. Or that's what, that's where the internet comes from, right?

like that's what uh you know understanding where files go like what is a file right like there's all these things that you it's very very empowering to understand how a computer works uh and i feel like you couldn't really do that in the past unless you've learned some programming because like that's you can't really learn something until you interact with it and so that's like one of the things that i think it's going to be really cool is that many of those people are going to get this like kind of hands-on experience of how computers work uh and then build that mental model which opens up so many different things right like if if you understand what a server is and you know how to set one up then all of a sudden you'll you'll have all these things in

daily life that could be done if you had a server that was always on right and that you didn't have to like open up a web an app on your computer to pound on it to get something to happen right and so when you learn that now you just have a whole new toolkit to attack life with right so i think that's going to be really now that is one of the big things we've had in the last couple decades is computers but i think many people you know like the original idea of like steve jobs this like bicycle for the mind i don't think it's i mean it's you think of like what zoomers how zoomers experience computers it's like the opposite this is like the plato's cave for the mind right it's like the it's like the opposite of what steve jobs was envisioning and i think

the hope like for myself and i know like alex and the href team for example this is why we're doing that is and a lot of us bitcoiners who are trying to work on it is like to make it more like a bicycle for them like a motorcycle for the mind right like something that's a little little little more leveraged setting the setting the server up and then that's so like what you just described is happening to me in real time so like i have cron jobs running on bank websites waiting for them to release a research report and pdf then yeah it downloads the pdf puts it in a folder and i'm pointing a certain prompt at that folder to basically distill the research that banking app and then presenting it in other ways like i understand it's like oh if i hook up to these

banking websites i'm running cron jobs and they're issuing pdfs on a certain cadence and the cron job runs new pdf download yeah put it in this folder in dropbox yeah once the new file is in that folder in dropbox it knows to trigger a prompt to read what's the new file and then get a distillation the information so like i'm learning like oh this is how all this interacts yeah so that's me like you know look i think we're going into a world where coding is dying right coding is going away as a thing like i was a professional coder for a long time and i'm not anymore i don't code anymore but i do program and you've never been a programmer but now you are like what you were just describing is computer programming you are programming computers uh to do things for you

so like you are a computer programmer now you're not a coder you'll never be one and you weren't one previously but you're a programmer now and you're going to get better and better and better And I think this is accessible to anybody who has some will and some ideas about what's missing in the world. And that's also something that, you know, the insights that are leading you to do this exact task, which I don't understand, is something that your actual human experience is showing you is valuable, right? So this is like the idea of, you know, I haven't read this stuff for a while, but like, you know, the idea of like why capitalism works, right? It's that you have this, it's like an economizing knowledge, right? There's the thing that, like, a guy who grows a cow will notice about the market or the conditions or the weather that allows him to, like, produce value in a way that a central planner couldn't, right? And so I think there's all these things where people have their own life experiences where they'll see opportunities for computer programming, really, that no AI is going to spit out, right?

like i mean it's funny one thing i i you know i like when i was when i was doing i was demoing like these things to people and i kept asking uh the ai to tell me a joke because the first thing i get it working i say tell me a joke uh and you do numerous sessions and they'd always tell the same joke right because they just pick in the middle of a distribution right and so they're not going to have many different ideas they're not going to notice opportunities i mean maybe in the future they will but currently they don't and i think that's you know the thing we all got got to figure out is like well so what in my life experience in my uh you know humanity do i see ways to serve other people right yeah no it's like i'll just pull it up so like this example

and it's allowed us to launch sorry freaks i'm not writing this but it is trained on my data my my everything i've written and i will continue to write as a human but that like banking example like now every day these banks are releasing research reports and i can surface that signal to people so this morning morgan stanley's financial team it's calling the current ai driven sell-off a cascading event started like so it's like okay here's what morgan stanley's thinking about this ai thing yeah this is kind of example of what i was talking about earlier is like maybe the internet goes a little bit back more to documents right like ephemeral documents like that's an example that's the same thing as my code editor

showing me this explanation of what it just my coding agent showing me this explanation of what it's just just dead right like repackaging some information for a human that's only really useful for a day or two or a week you know and then news passes but like that's yeah i mean i think that's really neat um that's it's amazing yeah it's cool that i'm a computer programmer now it feels good yeah yeah i i uh marty uh first name yeah the title upon me yeah yeah what um i mean we've touched on it job disruption like using this again like i do think we really need to engender a spirit of agency will and go get them attitude i think it's lacking in the world right now but if we can successfully do that and who knows that that's possible maybe there's a distribution of

people who just naturally naturally have willpower and agency and um maybe it's a minority i hope it's not i like to think you can instill those values in people but what do you think the future of work looks like is this like 10 000 flowers bloom or is it you get the permanent underclass ai is interesting because it's like uh it's like it's like a second industrial revolution or like it's a it's a follow-on of the industrial revolution a consequence of the industrial revolution like this is the industrial revolution continuing to go and like what what are the what are some of the legacies of the industrial revolution right well like one of is like everything got systematized and everything got like got measured and weighed and there's a little

box for everything and then so for people from an early age they just get beat into a shape so they can plug in right and so we really beat the will out of people young people to to uh to fit into this like industrial system right and like there is an opt-out by becoming an entrepreneur like you know you go either that way into fitting in or you just totally embrace not fitting in and you can succeed there because the you know the industrial capitalist system needs people some people that are uh you know uh have their hands on the dials right and so interesting thing about ai is that like the people who are going to succeed with it are the ones who have the willpower and don't fit it the more the entrepreneurial spirit but that's also what's

you're going to need inside companies too to some extent you know you're going to need people who assert their will who are like like the type of like i i kind of feel like we're going to have to i mean like if we get like total agi or whatever where like the machines do literally everything better than us and who knows all bets are off so i don't even can really consider that because like at that point it's like not even useful to speculate right like who knows right if it's like if we're like little cats next to this thing like it's not even it's not something we can even really think about so but if not right and if it's just something that becomes like massively massively improves productivity and obviously it's many of the things we do but not all of them

um your race gonna have to totally change how we like kind of uh you know the skills to thrive even at a normal job are going to be very very different than if you're like at an assembly line just stamping apart right so i don't know i i have no idea um but that's one of the things i think about where you know you look at how people like what people do in college or what people do in high school and it's like jesus this is not preparing them at all for the future that i see that's coming like it's like the worst thing you could be doing you know like it's like the worst you know like go be a plumber like get out of there and be a plumber or like go you know grow a willpower you know um i think school should be seeped in just like first principles

thinking rhetoric logic like the classics yeah because you need to know how to think in adversarially creatively like that's what i'm thinking of my boys um you're just teaching the oldest how to read and do math now but it's like yeah i really want to teach them how to think about things just literally how to think i mean that was one of the interesting things about like listening to these podcasts with peter steinberger like you should all listen to one of like the lex one was good he's done others but it's like you know this was possible for six months and no one did it open claw you could have done open about six months ago and it could have blown up six months ago there's been nothing really in the way and there's all these companies there's

billions and billions of dollars hundreds like microsoft could have done it facebook could have done like so many there's so many people who could have done it and the models were smart enough like like what was different about this guy and it's like that he was he approached it both very systematically and critically and was thinking from first principles uh you know but he also kind of brought his humanity to it he was like in touch with how he felt like when he when he listened to talk he talks about his feelings a lot like how does this software make me feel right like there's something that just doesn't feel right about that or you know like it's a very soft approach to like uh this and you know so it's like that you know he kind of put us all

to shame like just in how well he applied you know his heart and mind to this task and like when i was watching him like jesus i'm like a fucking amateur you know this is kind of in my experience watching this so it's like you know yeah that's that was the difference between him the rest of us and uh and it just shows how much more room there is to kind of grow and think and how much better we could educate people and stuff so which is why i kind of want to do you know i want to learn i want to get better and i want to help other people get better so that's kind of why i decided to focus again on on education a little more because like that's just a great example it's like every so many people could do that but they just don't really you know they

don't know how um i think somebody else is going to do it if not you then who yeah i mean this is opportunity to wrap up i know you're gonna go here in 10 but yeah um where can people find your live streams right now they're not but i think you're kind of yeah they're kind of hidden right now um but yeah just look for me on nostre and you know follow me on twitter justin moon and or x and uh i'm kind of trying to get good before i like you're good you're good dude i've sat in on like three of them you're fine yeah um oh thank you uh but i i'm i'm in the next week or two i'll probably like youtube or twitch or and stuff is going to appear and you know but i'm also just trying to have fun with it like that's i mean for me it's like uh if i really have fun

with this i think i'll have the best outcomes versus if i take it too seriously so i'm i'm kind of you know uh very willfully uh playing with this right so it'll show up and you'll hear about it marty will retweet it uh but if not hop on nostr follow me and uh every once in a while you'll see a little stream pop up and hop in there well thank you for doing it sir yeah what a time to be alive i'm having fun are you having fun are you having fun i mean it's uh i don't what do you they call it like doomer optimism right there's like we need like a new word for it where it's like uh like terror play or something right like it's like on the one side i'm terrified on the other side i'm having the time of my life you know um it's a very mixed emotions

yeah and you can get i mean i've uh described it as equally unnerving and exhilarating playing with yeah it's it's very few times you feel uh outside of a relationship or something do you feel such a wide range of emotions all at once you know yeah i mean that's like i mean we don't have time to get into the philosophical discussion of it but it's like are we are we just building something that's going to surpass us and ultimately dominate us you know but like it's so fun playing with like we can't they're just like the lizard brain can't can't look away can't i mean i feel in some sense that's not a choice we have and i'm not sure if anybody has that choice right like if you're the president of the united states or the

president of china like imagine the most powerful person um uh you know maybe there's people above that that we don't know about but uh the illuminati list got dropped in the epstein file so you know short of world government i don't know if you can stop this right uh and even with world government like is it are you really going to close every hole right so i think to some extent at least from my perspective in terms of what i can control it's like i have no ability to influence this in negative direction like i can't i can't stop but i can't apply the brakes all i can do is try to jump on board and steer it a little bit in a direction i want to see and i think that's probably true for all of us kind of individualists who are in the bitcoin ecosystem yeah use this

stuff to build the freedom tech it's never been easier i've never been more bullish on freedom tech your good friend james burn tweeted he's been down uh for the last 10 years but one thing that has stayed constant throughout his his um sort of journey is that he believes that open source software is more important than ever yeah mark andreessen had an interesting post here a couple days ago he's like you know what if all the value here accrues to hardware and energy right and all the software just becomes open source right which is like an odd messenger for that a little bit you know because his he's made the last 20 years of his life about building closed-source SaaS companies, basically.

But he was just following the market. Like, what a world it would be if we get this, like, open-source fantasy that we've always dreamed of, right? Not only open-source, but self-hosting, right? Like, what if we all have open-source, self-hosted on our own hardware, you know, brilliant machines that can coordinate economically with Bitcoin?

like that's it's something i i couldn't i certainly couldn't believe a future like that six months ago or a year ago uh but i'm starting to believe it now yeah it's possible believe freaks beliefs peace of love thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app

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