TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #722: AI Privacy Is The New Bitcoin Privacy with Mark Suman

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

Marty sits down with Mark Suman, co-founder of Maple AI, to discuss the explosive growth of AI agents, the privacy risks of using closed-source models, how open-source AI is catching up to frontier labs, and why building private, decentralized AI tools is critical to preventing a dystopian future. Mark on X: https://x.com/marksuman Maple: https://trymaple.ai/ 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 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 And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Wild times, brother. Great to be here with you.

Great to be on again. Thanks. This is take two. And as I was saying in take one, I've been asked to intro my guests better for the new TFTC freaks who have joined us. We're blowing up. The show's growing. It's incredible.

And for any of you new audience members out there, I'm sitting down with Mark Zuman, co-founder of Maple AI. He's at the cutting edge of AI privacy, which is a topic that I think is becoming more and more on top of people's minds as they begin to experiment with the tools that are hitting the market, particularly the agentic tools, and they're realizing how much access they're giving over to some of these large language models, particularly provided by open ai anthropic in google and so i figured it'd be a good uh a good day good week to get an update from mark because i think we are i don't want to say we're at like this inflection point where we're going to go one direction or the other um i'm actually pretty optimistic

because of individuals like yourself and uh the team over there at maple with you and tone anthony excuse me um building your tools so maybe maybe an update for the freaks who didn't catch our last or who did catch our last episode um where we talked about uh what you guys are building at maple and how you're incorporating it what what has happened in the last six eight months since we last met yeah uh sure thanks for the intro uh man it's not what's happened the last six months it's like what's happened in the last six days everything is changing so fast it feels like a a whirlwind trying to keep up with the AI news. So I guess for your listeners, if they feel overwhelmed by this, I share your sentiment. A lot has happened. I mean, Maple has grown a ton.

We've added in live web search. So now it's not stuck in the past, but it can grab current information. But it doesn't do it in a private way where we use the Brave Search API, we protect your identity all that kind of stuff to go out to the web and fetch information for you and then back in like December time frame we really started leaning into this agentic AI stuff and wanted to put an agent inside of Maple and do some kind of chat assistant within Maple and then at the same time obviously other people had the same idea so this whole open claw thing jumped on the scene we'd been looking at it and then they came on and so we're like okay this this kind of validated this idea people really want to have some kind of ai that's like constantly working for them

so we're building that in the maple not open claw itself but similar functionality um what else do we have we've got really powerful reasoning models now so kimmy k 2.5 is like on par with a lot of these anthropic a lot of these open ai models so you get really good intelligence you get really good agentic coding um math computation there's all sorts of great things that are in there now and the open source models have caught up like it's it's indisputable now they are as good as the frontier labs and so we uh we need to stop thinking that like using using open source models is like a subpar experience um we just need to build better tooling around them to make them even even more competitive i think that's key the tooling is somebody's been using open claw for

For a while now in AI terms, it's insane how beneficial it has been to our workflows and extending my productivity here. But I'm always acutely aware of what's happening behind the scenes. I've got mine living in a VPS. It doesn't have control of my computer or anything. And that is for a reason, because I know that the sort of walled garden model providers have access to everything I'm doing when I'm when I'm paying their models. And so I think you are far better suited than I am to basically explain what's happening, because I think a lot of people are out there experimenting with OpenClaw, connecting it to FOD's API, OpenAI's API and just running wild. What is happening when people are doing this and running wild behind the scenes? Yeah, you're effectively giving some kind of computer software full access to your computer,

even some app access to everything on your computer to run programs, to read files. It's it really is like a virus. Back in the 90s and 2000s, we were like so nervous about viruses on our computers that we would install McAfee antivirus software or Norton or whatever they were to block these kinds of things and now we're like welcoming them onto our system and uh but they behave the same way but this time we are you know inviting it in and we feel like we can control it uh so I would just say like remember that as you're installing this stuff you're giving it like full root access to everything that you have which uh I commend you for running it in a VPS that's a smart way to do

it or run on a totally different computer one that is locked away from everything um but if you're going to put that computer on your home network on your same wi-fi as everything else that you're doing uh you might have a bad time so i would just be careful because this thing could start scanning the network looking for ports that are open start walking around quietly behind the scenes and you won't quite know what's going on um i have this uh i have this this meme constantly running in my mind i don't know if you've seen the meme of the simpsons where mr burns and smithers are like walking into this lockdown compound and he has to like scan his eyeballs to open up one door and then he has to do his handprint to open up another door and it's like this really secure

thing and when they get to the final room there's this like back door that's just like blown open and this cat or dog comes wandering into the final enclave where he gets into and it's like that's how that's what everybody's doing with their uh with their open claw they're getting a separate computer they're locking it down with this they're doing file encryption and everything and then the final step is they're inviting anthropic or open ai to slurp up all of their data so they're just kind of leaving this hole open this back door open if you will to all of that so just just know know what you're getting into kind of thing and be willing to only share that information that you want to have shared with with those companies so i assume that

most people that are doing this or relative novices aren't aware of this and if you weren't aware before you are aware now after mark's incredible um explanation but what are you seeing in terms of the people who are not novices like long time software engineers uh system admins and programmers uh in terms of their recognition of that backdoor that you just described and do you think they are worried about it do you think it's okay they think it's a necessary evil like is there a sense amongst senior software engineers that there there needs to be a more secure setup yeah well well one i don't want this to be total doom or anything because uh this is like really fun to play with too i'm sure you've been having fun open claw i think you've mentioned that you

stay up late at night a lot playing with it and i definitely do too um i know a lot of people are So there's tons of fun things to do. It really reminds me of the early days of the Internet when we were first discovering email and discovering, you know, the World Wide Web and GeoCities and being able to do your own HTML. Like it's super cool stuff. So I think that people should definitely play around with it. As far as, you know, the seasoned veterans that are playing with this, people who are like entrenched in technology, I feel like they put up good guardrails and they try to put up good walls and say, OK, this is this is the area where i know that anything i say in here could end up getting leaked onto the internet at some point so they use it appropriately that way but then um most of most of the really serious people i talk to they also have some kind of private place that they talk about stuff whether that's maple or a local ai they have some place where they're like okay i'm

gonna separate these two worlds and i'm going to make sure that i'm protected over here and And anything I say over here, I don't want it to end up online or end up getting getting sent to the government or something. So, yeah, I don't know that some people feel like it's a foregone conclusion. I definitely hear from people like, oh, privacy, it was gone a long time ago. So we don't even need to have that fight anymore. but given the the amount of sales of mac minis that have that has happened in the last month i think a lot of people a lot of like normie type people are realizing that privacy is something they still care about and that they want to try and preserve yeah completely agree and bringing

this back to the tooling like how far away do you think we are from feature parity for the tooling around um more private ways of interacting with these models like maple yeah uh this is one one spot where the the open source ai is still trying to catch up and that is um i mean there's a software they all run called vlm and the vlm software if for better or for worse you know has to try and handle every single open model out there and so it doesn't do any single model really well and the reason why anthropic and open ai are able to operate so well and be so effective is that they write all sorts of proprietary harness software middleware that that's in between you and ai and can just like do really good system prompting really good tool calling

and all of these things and the open source ai just they need better they need better support there um so uh for example if we wanted to make maple the primary llm provider inside of open claw. There are, there are certain limitations right now with the tool calling where open claw will say, all right, let me spin up a sub agent and do this thing. Sometimes it'll work really well. Other times it'll just kind of like go off and never come back. And so that's, that's a limitation right now that we're running into. And it's not just us. It's a whole bunch of open source model providers that are running into that problem. Now, if you look at someone like Kimmy, who creates open source AI, they have their own hosted version and they build all of this really

nice middleware that makes it work better but now you're trusting their hosted solution they're a chinese company very likely tied in with ccp um just because of what we know of how business runs in china uh they it's really difficult to be in business without also having a connection with with ccp for data sharing so uh you know that that's just something to take into consideration and uh something that we need to be building better in the open community is there a clear light at the end of the tunnel for building that or are anthropic uh open ai kimmy or is that sort of middleware proprietary it's hard to reverse engineer no i think it's it's uh classic tales all the time with open source development where it moves a little bit slower in some

regards right in some ways open source moves really fast because you have a million people tinkering with it and throwing it out there but with something as complex as hosting software for open models and LLMs, everybody's kind of centralized on this one project. And so now we're at a bit of a bottleneck trying to get that project to make improvements and move forward. So it's just going slow,

but I think with time it'll improve and maybe someone will come out with an open source competitor to that project and we'll see some innovation there. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. I think improvements will be made. It's just going to take a little more time to get them through.

How do you think the next six months play out with this race between closed source and open source models? I think we continue to have new models from open source community that push the boundaries. And we'll keep seeing this leapfrogging. Everybody releases, and then the next week, the competitors come out with something. And the next week, the open source competitors come out with something. So we all benefit from that. I do love that timeline that we're on. six months from now i think there will be other open claw type projects i don't think that open

claw necessarily is like the final the final agentic project out there especially now that it got scooped up by open ai um that that has tainted it for some people um so yeah i think that we're going to see a lot of just really fun innovation out there and a lot more people will be running agents having them read their email having them read their calendar booking appointments for them shopping for groceries for them like all sorts of really cool things that that we've been promised in this future of ai i think in six months those are going to become tangible realities for a lot of people yeah i can feel it i can feel it what um what are your thoughts i mean i was tweeting this out yesterday if you look at the sort of public spat between the department of war

in anthropic right now in the idea of ai safety i think it's pretty clear to anybody paying attention that anthropic uh is i don't know if they're feigning um worry about it or if they're legitimately wary but i think the end product of them getting their way could be uh bad for for open source models particularly but it seems like the department of war and an anthropic or a public spat but to me it seems like a hegelian dialectic problem um problem reaction solution thing where anthropics say hey i don't want you to run wild with this when you work guardrails and i could definitely see the government saying okay we'll give you guardrails we'll create these regulations that force them onto the market uh do you worry about that at all

yeah i mean government regulation moats to drive out competitors like that's that's a classic dark pattern that happens in business when really if we want to have true safe ai if you will or um what's the for responsible ai is a phrase people love to use right if we want to have truly responsible ai it should be trained in the open with open data open weights we should be able to see everything so that we can we can examine it and that's just not happening right now so anthropic wants to say hey we're going to make it safe for everybody but the government will like bless us and we'll be the the one safe place to do that um that's that's just not good for anyone because now we're all depending on this closed company

this closed source and depending on the government to be the the auditor of safety and i don't want the department of war department of defense of the u.s government to be the one that's telling me which ai is safe for me to use um that just seems like we're all gonna have a bad time Yeah, I mean, the progression of events over the last couple of weeks has been quite interesting for the tinfoil hat Marty Jones in me. Yeah, what do you see in there? Well, when you pair the sort of back and forth between Hegseth and Dario in Anthropic and the Department of War with the announcement of this distillation attack that Anthropic was subjected to, where the open source models were, Anthropic is claiming they were using Anthropic's models to train themselves. and they're claiming some sort of copyright infringement or an attack on their proprietary data in alpha.

That seemed like, again, going back to the problem-reaction solution and the anthropics in the Department of War, like, look, we're getting attacked by these Chinese open-source models. We need to lock down. And it's especially rich when you consider the fact that it's pretty well known that Anthropic used some of those same tactics to get their model into the state that it currently is in. Yeah. I mean, they all trained on public data, copyrighted data. It's, I mean, it's obvious that they did. And if you talk to any copyright

holder out there, they have not been compensated for all that training that happened. So it's very rich for these companies now to say, hey, they're training on trying to steal all of our stuff. uh i mean maybe maybe this will be like a foot in my mouth moment but i also like i don't know how a partnership between anthropic and the department of defense department of war stops these open source models from continuing to progress and develop um it's it would take it would take a really big card for them to play when it comes to like being authoritative competitive over the technology that we use within the United States. And I don't know that they necessarily would want to play that card, but they would really have to lock things down

and try and control what American citizens are using. That's a difficult road to go down. Sup freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig you have one key on the hardware wallet one key on your mobile device and block stores a key in the cloud for you this is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family or maybe yourself who have bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time but haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair securing that seed phrase setting up a pin setting up a passphrase again bitkey makes it

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with the push for the digital id age verification discord yeah probably come the models as well um the money that these these agents use they're going to try and do id verification there i mean already happens to an extent with stable coins just on the edges um so you can see the them trying to throw cold water on the proliferation of more sovereign ai tools moving forward yeah i mean you have stripe working with openai right they published their their payments thing i think it's like apa or something and then you have stripe also working with coinbase on x402 you've got usdc stablecoin with with circle mixed in there so there's all sorts of like choke points and regulation and censorship opportunities for someone who wants to control how these agents

pay each other and really interact on the web yeah i think i agree with you though i don't think they'll be able to contain these things and if they do they'll breach containment and yeah as i was mentioning before we have record i discussed a lot of uh similar topics Not a ton of overlap yet, but I had Callie on. We recorded earlier this morning, and it actually made me incredibly bullish because he's incredibly optimistic, and I think mainly because of the agency these tools give the many to fight against the few centralized entities. And so basically giving a call to action to, hey, if you care about this stuff

And you think you can be beneficial and contribute to the efforts of open source projects that will preserve your sovereignty and privacy and freedom as we quickly and acceleratingly transition into this AI driven world. You can you can contribute. Yeah, well, and we talk a lot about privacy, but privacy really is upstream from freedom, right? Like you have to have privacy first in order to have freedom. and so i view us as being a freedom oriented ai we're trying to give people an alternative to the system that's being built the system that is government partnerships and moats that are meant to control who has access and the open source community is like now we've got another option for you and we need more people building the space you know we we need more people doing this

because if we want to have these ais out there that are able to fight against this closed system that is that is likely to be thrust upon us or attempted to be thrust upon us we can have we can have like this whole wonderful world outside of that wall that operates and it's difficult for them to shut down and uh the way that we control it is we put all out in the open we let everybody inspect it we let we let everybody build tools build build the good ai tools i can fight against the bad ai tools and um we can have it out out in the open and just disinfect everything by by adding some sunlight to it all and that's that's where i see the open source community really having a lot of power in the struggle right now where where a lot of people are worried about ai

you know they're worried about what it's going to do to their jobs they're worried about what it's going to do to to how they think to education you name it um people are worried about ai and pretty much every space that you go to yeah i mean shifting gears to building with this stuff I think we talked about this last time you were on, but again, with how quickly things are developing, I think it does deserve a check in, like building out Maple using the AI tools. How's that been in recent months? Building Maple itself, we still use a combination of things like Clod as well as Maple. we build out we will open source software so we don't mind that like our stuff is going to anthropic because it's it's ending up on github and everybody's computers anyways but we also

use maple a lot for our development so we've got the the maple api the maple proxy we've put a lot of work into making it work with things like open code so if you don't want to run clod code you want to run something that's more freedom oriented you can run open code and you can have open code talking to maple on the back end so now everything you do there is encrypted um and so i actually use open code with maple to do a lot of my development work for maple itself um some of it that i do is not just writing the code but actually use it to help me come up with feature specs like you know as a product manager type role where it's like okay i want to work on this really big feature within maple for example we're adding we're going to add projects into maple a lot of people want

projects and the ability to organize things into folders. So I can totally vibe with open code with Maple with these open source models, and help me come up with this very lengthy, very detailed feature specification that I can then hand over to a coding agent to build and get out there inside of Maple. But that whole thought process and ideation, you know, I like doing it in a way that is a little more private, and not just giving it all over to Anthropic. This is one example. But then the proxy itself has been super useful. When I go to visit companies or organizations and do AI trainings with them, we can vibe code really cool, powerful tools for them right there on the spot that are powered by maple in the back end. I posted this online last week, but like I was able to build two tools really quickly, just by texting over signal with my open claw that was that was running maple in the background. and i was able to build a tool that did translation so if you are like an activist organization or a non-profit and you want to publish some kind of thing and have it go out in multiple languages

then you just paste this into my tool it runs it to maple in the back end it comes up with 20 different language translations or however many you need within a few seconds um and these are just like really small tools but things that you can run locally you don't have to send all of your stuff to to other companies you can just run it locally and then have maple be the the brain behind it um so yeah there's a lot of really cool powerful things that the people are building with with something like the maple proxy it's all there it's all possible i mean and while you're talking about the maple proxy and basically talking to it via signal i think that's one thing that i've come to realize or

developing a stronger belief in the idea that just the form factor of how we interact with the internet or apps is completely changing in front of us like my whole user experience of interacting with my computer has changed dramatically um where before two months ago i was using voice to text but seldomly but now anytime i need to get something done it's like voice the text to my agent to go get stuff done and then you think about what these agents can do in terms of just building stuff for you quickly whether it's decks dashboards visualizations and then you think about are apps even going to exist in the future and i know we've talked about this behind the scenes but this idea that the form factor is if agents are going to be doing

a lot of heavy lifting for things you want to get done it's going to be somewhat invisible on the back end these agents are just going to be speaking with each other um and speaking with services via api calls are you a believer in that no definitely i do think there will still be software in the world um us as human beings we still want to rely on other people to to figure things out for us and do the heavy lifting do the maintenance do the security auditing that kind of stuff so there there will exist that a market for that but a lot of the small things that we depend on right now are just going to be agents figuring it out on their own and it's going to be one-offs right they're going to spin something up they're going to go talk to their agent they're going to

make it happen and then they'll wind it down they won't they won't need it anymore we won't need to persist and if it does it'll just persist within the agent and it'll be like all right here's my own little set of tools that i built myself and i'm going to use it to talk to these other agents out there and and maybe there will be some kind of sharing between them where they're like okay here are these skills that i have that i'm going to share with you kind of like we see with with open claw um but they're going to be like spun up by the agents themselves um do you want to hear like my three to five year projection of like where i think some things are going um no i don't think anybody wants to hear that yeah yeah right um i've been working a lot right now on on two-way

voice communication so i want to make maple better at two-way voice i want to take it on walks with me and really just be able to talk to it i want to be in the car uh you know i have car play up on the screen i want to be able to like interact with maple and just have a two-way conversation with it there um i think three to five years from now most people are interacting with ai just through some kind of hardware device that they're wearing um i know that you and matt have talked about this and and i think i think spot on there but it's going to be something like airpods or some kind of pendant you're wearing glasses something that has microphones potentially cameras um that that's how we're going to just be like interacting with the internet now and getting

things done with some combination on our phone or something we can look at. The thing that I want Maple to be ready for, and this is what I want us building toward, is that that future right there is likely going to be proprietary hardware. It's going to be things running on these devices that we cannot inspect the code. We don't know what they're doing. We don't know what kind of directives they have in them or guardrails or gates that they've put up to prevent you from doing certain things with them right so i would love for maple to be in a spot where we can support we can create we can be embedded on devices that have open source firmware with reproducible builds that you can have your own headphones and you can be doing stuff and you know okay when the microphone's

on i know first off when it turns on and then when it is on i know where it's going i know what it's recording i know how the data is being handled whether that's through my own infrastructure or through some kind of encrypted backend rather than this kind of quasi surveillance state that's going to continue to be embedded in our lives where everybody's wearing AI tech that's constantly listening and watching everything we do. What's the landscape of that hardware and firmware looking like? Right now we have a lot of big companies that have talked about building things, but we don't have any concrete plans on what they're building. I mean, if you look at, if you look what's publicly available right meta has their glasses apple did the vision pro which is very

hefty and heavy um i don't think that's where they land and then open ai is openly talking about building their own device they've been very public about that all three of those companies um are are proprietary and locked down and i don't see them saying hey we're going to open source our firmware and we're going to provide reproducible builds so people can cryptographically prove that this is the code that's running on your device without a backdoor inside of it um i'm not seeing anybody well i shouldn't say not see anybody there are a couple of of companies that are building open things um one of them that's really interested is called pebble i don't know if you remember the pebble watch that kind of launched the whole smartwatch revolution

they've they've come back and they're building open source hardware both watches and they've got this ring that they're working on um to me that's really compelling and i'd like to dig into there more and see if maple can be something that that can partner with the device maker like that i'm also bullish on daylight computer i think that there's a lot of interesting things that could be done there um with with open firmwares and and with maple and other kind of private ai solutions if you will um and i think there will be others that pop up too but we need more people building out in the open yeah yeah star nine uh caught up in that hill the other day and the big progress they're making is imperative are you uh are you optimistic right now oh yeah totally i am

uh i mean i i have to sell maple to people and convince them that they shouldn't give all the data over to the the big ai companies um so i often come across as like negative and a doomer but man, I'm having so much fun. Like this is, this is a blast. These, these AI agents building with AI. Um, I mean, I know you've expressed this opinion, but it's, it's very empowering, especially I come from a software engineering background, but people who did not know how to write code. Now they're able to use these tools to program and do things that they couldn't do in the past where they had to depend on other people. And it's like, your ideas are longer the limit it's just which ideas you want to pursue which kind of like you know sweat do you

want to pour into something and try to make an idea really take off and and what kind of market can you validate to to build something for that um so i'm super optimistic about that i think that this is a really fun time a really cool time to be alive um pairing that with like the difficult transition we might go through with with people getting laid off and and job markets having to transition to some kind of new industry that we don't know about yet um i i'm constantly like at odds with that but i am optimistic that that we find a way through this what do you mean by you're at odds with it i'm at odds with the fact that like i'm really like excited and having fun building ai even though i know that there are people who are out there are super worried that

they're going to lose their job because of the ai and i've already i've already talked to people even even family members and friends who have run into this problem and it's it's hard for me to be smiling and be like yeah isn't this awesome i'm sorry you lost your job um so i mean my message is like learn how to use these tools and it's not only going to make you better at your job but it'll help you team up with other people if a bunch of really smart people lost their jobs they can team up together form a new company and hire people who uh you know can come along and and i think we just birth thousands of and millions of new companies that are smaller more nimble um more local right i was chatting with something somebody yesterday who

kind of framed it this way i thought it was cool that you have all like your local ranchers and your local farmers in your community you go to the farmer's market to buy stuff from them well with these ai tools uh we possibly come up with with all these local technology companies so no longer are we having to look to silicon valley to build all of our tech that we all run on some cloud infrastructure but instead it's like in your town you have your local crm provider who's building stuff that's just just great for you and then if you need new features that they don't have that another town over has they just use ai to like go vibe code that feature into the crm that you're using in your local town and so i think that there's a lot of really kind of cool stuff

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Stay hydrated. It's a beautiful thing. When I ask this question to Callie, but I'll ask you as well, because I think getting different perspectives on this for the audience could be beneficial. But what would your advice be to somebody listening to this who has been apprehensive or intimidated to begin playing around with this stuff to take the first step? What should they do? How should they approach it? What should their mindset be? i i think it's imperative excuse me i think it's imperative that everybody play around with it you just need to try it i know it can be scary um and maybe it feels overhyped um i tend to be someone who uh when something gets hyped up i ignore it for a while because i don't want to

be caught up in fans and that's that's served me pretty well throughout my life um but this one does not appear to be a fad um so i would just recommend sign up for one of these tools pay a monthly subscription because you're going to get the full access to the tool you're not just going to get like the the free access that's limited and then pick one thing in your life that you're like okay this is something that i do all the time maybe ai can help me do it easier um and just try to try to automate that one thing and and automate isn't necessarily like it's going to keep going for you constantly while while you're asleep or something doesn't have to be that difficult um just something that you have to write an email you have to write once a week to a boss

or um you know something that you do at home every every day pick one thing and see if ai can help you do it better and i think that'll be your toehold into seeing kind of like what these tools are capable of and then you'll start coming up with more and more ideas of things that you can do yeah yeah play with it you'll get obsessed quickly if you you have the aha moment and you are successfully able to achieve one of those tasks um rather quickly it's really crap i know yeah well and i know that i'm biased here because i sell subscriptions to ai software but but seriously like if you need to cancel a netflix subscription and sign up and any one of these AI tools. Just sign up for one and pay them 20 bucks a month. I don't care if it's open AI. I

would rather it's Maple, but pick one of them and just get off of zero. Just get started playing with it and do it for a month. Just give up Netflix for a month. I think you can survive and try out one of these tools and see if it brings any value to your life. And I am highly confident that you will find some kind of value in it. And then you can make the decision. Am I getting more than $20 a month out of this? If you are, then keep it. And if you either get some netflix going again then do that but uh but i think you should just get off of zero and get started for all you christians out there it is the lenten season if you haven't given up anything anything yet maybe drop netflix for the rest rest of lent to pick up the maple subscription

begin playing around with this there you go back to your voice to voice uh because i i agree i think that's before i think we're headed towards a her world i think her i think spike jones did a very good job of uh visualizing what the world of ai will look like and in the form factor which most people land on i think voice to voice is where we're going i think my voice to text stepping stone um right now it's just that a stepping stone eventually the voice models will get so responsive and it'll just be much easier to to correspond with your agent via voice than voice to text or text to text whatever it may be um but you had your you had your uh your agent join the what bitcoin did podcast it completely forked the system what happened yeah yeah

um yeah so i knew i was coming on with danny we were going to record on sunday night my time and so i was like oh i've got this crazy idea can i get my open claw to come on and join the podcast um i haven't heard of anybody doing this so it's possible that it was a first but i spent saturday with uh with a maple proxy with open code and just vibe coding the heck out of this thing i think i think i had clod code in the mix i had multiple things going but i built it and it's it's this really cool system so uh i got it so that i could join a riverside link uh because that's what he used to record that episode it comes on it's listening to all the audio it creates like a fake audio connection to the system it gets all the audio in and then uses a local whisper model

So it's not I'm not sending anything to Anthropic, by the way, or OpenAI. It runs a local whisper model that transcribes all the audio. And then it takes that text and it sends that text to Maple and says, hey, is this something that I should respond to? Or are they just talking back and forth with each other? And then once it decides, oh, this is something you need to respond to, then it comes up with a response, sends it back to my agent. And then it uses another local model. It's called Super Tonic, which is a voice, a text-to-speech voice generation model. Creates the voice, and then it sends it back out through this fake microphone that I plugged in to Riverside.

And then I had to build, like, a video thing, too. So it had its profile with, like, these emanating rings coming out as it talked, and it was able to respond to us. It didn't work as well in my testing, as usually happens when you do, you know, technology stuff. but uh it was able to listen to me and danny and then it heard that i was talking to it and came up with a response but in the process i don't know what happened something with the riverside platform it booted danny off of the the call so he was gone it was just me and my bot cooper on what bitcoin did and then eventually cooper got booted off by riverside too so it was just me for a little bit until danny could get back on ah first ever ai agent joining a podcast live

um you know little little alpha here but i'm i'm working on can i build a show around that so i uh i'm i'm drastically improving the software and i want to maybe create a show where me and my bot co-hosts a show and i bring people on just to talk about how they're building agents and what they're doing with their agents so right first i would love to join as a guest okay i mean i'm i'm a layer behind you i'm not sure if you saw but this morning was the first ever podcast companion edition of the bitcoin brief newsletter which i've been building with my agent over the last few weeks we've re um reinvigorated the five day a week newsletter um for the bitcoin brief and with the help of my agent but i've been doing it for the

last two weeks i was like hey um maybe there's some people who don't like reading too much you'd rather listen to this and so last night i vibe coded i guess for two hours and was able to set up a a flow where um we'll take the sort of written newsletter build a script a news cast like script about it hooked up in 11 labs api token and uh used a but there's my audio is out there i've been recording podcasts for for almost nine years now so my voice is going to be out there i'm thinking about i need to trademark it i think but um i was basically able to spin up like a little podcast companion to the bitcoin brief it's now every morning when i sent out the newsletter i had the cron john set up where we'll have the newsletter ready and then five minutes

after it's ready it triggers the bitcoin brief podcast skill which then goes builds the script does the voice generation and publishes it to our our website and our rss feed and so did you so did you train your own voice like does it sound like marty yeah that's awesome yeah and that technology's been around for like a year and a half now two years and it's only gotten better so it's just gonna continue to improve well we tried uh we tried something on youtube like a year year and a half ago with this and it just sounded too robotic but now it's still a little robotic but it sounds good enough but yeah point being the ability to just do these things and as a content creator for lack of a better term somebody who runs a media

company it's something as you can imagine i've been thinking very deeply of since i've been interacting with these agents is how this medium going to evolve and change and i think your idea for an agent co-host for a podcast is one of the examples of things i i think many people aren't prepared of they may have a visceral negative reaction to it but i think it's inevitable it's gonna happen yeah well the idea is out there so if somebody else does it before me you know free ideas are here on the internet um something that you just i mean with your bitcoin briefs and making your own podcast uh this is one thing i love about the agents as well is they they generate so much documentation they're always writing things um and it can be overwhelming

It's like you're chatting with it and it's like, OK, I saved all this research to a file. And sometimes I read those files. Sometimes I just don't have enough time. So I have a summarize of files for me. But where I find it really useful is like if I'm going to the gym or I know I'm going to be in the car for a little while, I'll just text my agent and be like, hey, can you make an audio version of that file? And this whole podcast harness that I set up for my agent to have a voice and stuff. And now it's like, oh, yeah, I can do that. No problem. So it'll take that file. It'll create a 10 minute, 20 minute, however long it needs to a little MP3 file or a wave file and send it over to me. And then I just listen to it while I'm at the gym.

And I've actually thought about like to make it even easier, maybe I'll just build my own private RSS feed that I can somehow authenticate against. And then I can have my agent just be dumping audio files in there. And I can wake up in the morning and have my own personal podcast of like files that my agent feels are important for me to listen to. And I can just throw them into my podcast app and just have it kind of mixed in there with everything else. And I can review stuff for work. I can review, you know, personal things that I'm researching and, uh, it just, it, it allows it to like flow into my, my productivity workflow much easier. Yeah. How, how much more productive has this made you particularly with the agent stuff? Yeah. Uh, it's, uh, it's hard to say right now.

I should track the time better because I definitely spent a lot of time building this stuff up, but then it's made me more productive in other ways. So maybe it's a wash right now, but all the time spent building up these harnesses are going to pay off in the long term yeah well that's like that's been the most fascinating thing it's like the jevin paradox coming into play it's like oh it's going to take all the jobs and like you're not going to have to work anymore and i found myself working more than i than i have in in years just because it's so fun to play with yeah yeah it's true well in case in point something that saved me time so when i recorded with danny the the audio from my bot actually didn't come through riverside very well

on his recording so he texted me he's like hey we're gonna publish this soon we're trying to edit your bot's audio was really crappy do you think you could somehow re-record that and i just texted my bot and said hey your audio didn't come through you saw the transcripts can you just give me a new file and within 90 seconds i had two high quality files of the things that it said on the show and i just texted him over to danny that would have taken me quite a while to like go find the transcripts and then like use software to generate the audio and then make sure the mic levels were okay and everything like that saved me probably three hours of work and it was able to do it in 90 seconds it's insane yeah yeah like last night i was like oh we had dinner

my wife was like oh you're going to bed early today i was like yeah you know what i've had a productive day i'm probably gonna go go to bed at 9 30 tonight and then at like 8 45 i had the idea for the podcast and i was up for two hours structuring everything wound up in bed like 11 30. yeah when that idea hits you're like i just got to do it right now yeah totally what um let me bring this back to agentic payments i think considering this is a bitcoin podcast uh yeah where do you think this goes um obviously at cali on we were talking about using e-cash for agentic payments and obviously it has privacy and um through open protocol benefits compared to stable coins and whatever visa mastercard and stripe are working on but i think that's one

one thing that many bitcoiners myself included naively thought in the beginning it's like oh the agents will just choose bitcoin because it's the best money it's the natives uh digital native internet currency that that they'll end up on but i think we're still in a state where these agents need a lot of direction and will take direction from the humans controlling them for lack of a better term and they don't have a preference yet for this but how do you see this playing out yeah i i think we're running into the same problem that we have in meat space right now which is if i want to pay with bitcoin at a local merchant most of them don't accept it and so using bitcoin as money in real life has become difficult because we have a merchant or you know availability

problem and we're gonna we're seeing that online if even if agents were told go pay with bitcoin there aren't many services that they could go pay for using bitcoin but you can rest assured that given all the deals going on between stripe and others that those merchants will accept stablecoin agentic payments because that's that's who's going to start accepting it first so it is definitely not a foreground conclusion that that they're going to choose bitcoin as the best money we need to be building it we need to be getting online merchants to accept it and we need to build tools and make it super easy right they're not going to accept it if it's not convenient so we need to be build convenient tools that can be plugged in zap right if you're listening to

this hey zap right we need uh we need some good good agentic payment functionality um i know that lightning labs is working on it i know amboss is working on stuff like that uh albie has been working on it we need everybody kind of working on trying to solve this cali of course is working on stuff too um we need good tooling and then we need merchants to accept it um there's there's a third way and i think the third way that maybe we run into is if if you give your agent agent a directive to go buy something for you and it gets blocked out by the traditional system i think maybe maybe one example would be you know ammunition for a gun so if you are a competitive shooter and you you know you compete legally in shooting competitions and you tell your agent

watch my inventory of ammo and go buy more before i have upcoming competitions here's my calendar make sure i'm always stocked up with my favorite ammo if if for some reason that gets blocked by stripe because stripe has notoriously blocked those kinds of transactions um your agent's gonna have a bad time but it's gonna want to solve things for you and so it's going to search the internet for an ammo provider that accepts bitcoin and if one isn't there it's going to come back to you and say hey here are all these providers this is where i want to buy it but they can't accept it and maybe it reaches out to them for you and maybe you reach out but eventually there will be someone and i'm pretty sure there are some there's i know there's at least one ammo

provider that's a bitcoiner right next to ammunition yes yes so if they're willing to accept bitcoin then they're going to have all the agents coming to buy ammo from them and so this is actually one way that i see merchant adoption potentially is when people get blocked out of the system um and then maybe it grows from there i just don't think we should depend on that i think we should be more proactive and get ahead of the problem yeah yeah that's the uh again to your point the chicken and egg problem of you know i had somebody on the show a couple weeks ago and they're saying it's a demand uh a supply side problem it's like no the supply bitcoiners are willing to spell

spend bitcoin um is certainly there and particularly they want the ease of giving their agent a budget and having it go complete things for them autonomously using bitcoin if they need to pay for stuff it's a demand side problem on the merchants like the merchants need to demand bitcoin and it's something we've been banging our heads uh in the bitcoin space about for well over a decade now the merchant adoption mean been around since roger and uh yeah i don't know what it is maybe it's the interchange fees maybe it's the i really like the money dev kit guys are doing where you can have your agent accepting and sending payments within five minutes like is it like kyc aml onboarding friction that pushes people towards

bitcoin i don't know yeah that's something i need to look at more money dev kit i'll be honest i i know um i mean we've talked to nick slaney before but i need to look into that project more because i think that's really cool i like the i like what i hear about it yeah what um i must apologize for being late i want to get that on air on the record it was i was tardy to this nobody knows now they do but i want to be respectful of your time um i know you're extremely busy what um what have we discussed that you think is something that that the audience should know um and care about right now um i mean we uh maple is maples here to to build the the freedom future for ai so we would love for people to

partner with us. We have actually quite a few organizations and companies that are starting to buy team accounts on Maple, which is super helpful for us because not only are they securing their entire pipeline, but it helps us to bring more stabilization to our platform, more revenue coming in and helps us to build up better tooling for them so that they have better... It's this chicken and egg problem where it's like, we want to have business customers, but we need better business features and vice versa. So if you are an organization out there, if you're like a small firm, or a small company, even if you're at a large company, but you have your own organization within that large company, I would definitely encourage people to go check out try maple.ai

and check out our team's plan, because that's really, I think this is really helpful for the cause in general. And then, yeah, we talked about it briefly earlier, but we're building out this AI assistant within Maple. So it's going to be very different from like the AI chat that you have now. When you start a new chat in Maple or ChatGPT or anywhere, you pretty much start with nothing. Like there's no understanding. You open up and it's like a blank slate. It doesn't know anything about you. And you have to like tell it everything you want it to know. That function will remain within Maple. But now we're going to have this very conversational, easy to talk to chatbot that is going to give you short responses, just like you and a friend are texting each other.

and it's going to build up a really good memory about you over time. So it's going to get to know you and it's going to be able to kind of help you out more than having to start from zero. And this, I think, is really where the privacy is a big win. And this is something that OpenAI and others don't have. And that is when you are talking to a tool that you know is end-to-end encrypted,

you're much more open about things you want to talk about. You're much more willing to give away information because you know that it's safe and protected. and that is where the most private ai can now become the most personal ai and you can have this ai chatbot assistant your own personal assistant executive assistant whatever you want to call it that's going to get to know you so well that it's going to become so much more useful to you than a tool put out by some big company that you don't totally trust because you're not being as open with it um so that's coming we're working on it right now within maple it's going to be here

in the weeks and months ahead um and we're really excited about that it's such a massive unlock for the agentic world like just having a cash context that i can pull from easily that's the one thing i've learned with open claw is just setting up the memory system and making it so it can pull things from memory rather trivially i mean that's a big problem with just using the models by themselves as the memory compacts the context compacts every so often once you hit the token limits now with these harnesses like open claw when you guys are building a maple it's going to make it the user experience goes up dramatically yeah and then at some point you end up with so many agents you like kind of forget to check on them i kind of run into this where

i'll have multiple open codes running at one time um in different tabs in the terminal and it's like oh shoot i forgot to check on this one it's just been sitting there waiting for me to confirm something um there's this there's this cool tool with with one of the plebs on on noster um it's called wingman uh you can go check it on github but uh it's this cool way to open source code to manage all of your agents and you can like do it from your phone you can do it from a web browser and you can basically like keep tabs on them and make sure that they're continuing to move forward on things that you want um so i need to go i need to look at that more he uh he just made me aware of it yesterday um so yeah i think there's some some cool additional tooling to build around these

things to make you even more effective yeah and i guess uh one other piece of advice i would give people out there don't get too emotionally attached to your uh to your agent um i think uh getting one-shotted by ai psychosis is uh is a it's a very real um possibility out there yeah it's a tool to get stuff done for you it's not uh it's not scarlett johansson and her yep you can give it a name you can give it an avatar but please just remember it's a tool uh and don't yeah don't go further than that yeah i mean hey free world you can do what you want but i think you're gonna have a bad time yeah well mark uh thank you for doing this again on short notice and for putting up with my tardiness i think um no no as i said every time you go on

the show i think what you and anthony are building is extremely important and i'm very happy to see the progress that you guys have made and the fact that you guys are on the tip of the spear of this AI revolution particularly on the side of freedom and privacy as it develops because like we've said many times throughout your appearances on this show

it can be very dystopian if we don't do this the right way yeah definitely well thanks for having me on it's always fun to catch up and chat about this go to trymaple.ai use the code TFTC you'll get 10% off 10% off your subscription

good go check it out piece of love freaks awesome man 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 and go to fountain.fm to find that five dollars a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps the show gives you incredible value so please

consider subscribing via fountain as well thank you for your time and until next time Thank you.