TECH015: OpenClaw and Self-Sovereign AI w/ Alex Gladstein and Justin Moon (Tech Podcast)

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20:01Alex Gladstein:Plus, if you ever get stuck, they've got award-winning 24-7 customer support. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing... Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash WSB. Go to shopify.com slash WSB. That's shopify.com slash WSB. All right, back to the show. I want to pause here and really foot stomp why this is such a big deal. So you're about to see commercials coming out at the Super Bowl from Claude basically banging OpenAI over the head because they recently said that they're going to start doing advertisements in their service.

20:48Alex Gladstein:Let's just like really pull on this thread and go deeper. If you're OpenAI and you have an advertiser that's doing really well with you because they've got a high margin product and you're able to convert on that, OpenAI could potentially, and I'm not saying they're going to do this, but there's an incentive for them to do this. where they start blindly inserting in the header things that could potentially steer the user to wanting said product that's being advertised. And you would have no idea that that's in the header. And this just goes to the whole point of why we're having this conversation, which is local AI is going to be very important for you to see the world clearly because you won't know that you're being very indirectly, subliminally steered in a certain direction because you have no idea what's going into that header.

21:38Justin Moon:Yeah. Like the AI experience will get steered by something. Do you want it to be an advertiser? Do you want it to be a big tech company? Do you want it to be another government? Or do you want it to be you, right? Like we want it to be you.

21:48Alex Gladstein:Alex, do you have anything to add on that particular point? Because I mean, this is really why you're so passionate about running local AI, right? Well, let's let Justin finish the context. Sorry. Yeah. And then, and then I have my piece and I think it'll help pull things together.

22:06Justin Moon:Okay. Keep going, Justin. Yeah. Yeah. So we think about it from like a Bitcoin point of view, like the Bitcoiners, we understand scarcity. That's like one mental model that the Bitcoiners really get. And so you think you apply that to AI, it's like, what's scarce, right? In the training, it's like the debt, you need data, you need energy, you need computers, right? In inference, when you actually run it, it's context. Context is a scarce thing. That conversation, the longer great gets, the more confused the AI will get. And at a certain point, you run out of context, and you just have to start over.

22:32Justin Moon:And that's called compaction. And it makes everything worse, right? So that's the big engineering battle. And it's traditional engineering. It has nothing to do with AI, really. Traditional software engineering, the last year, we've all been trying to figure out how to get better at managing this. And that is what has led to good AI agents now that we didn't have a year ago. It's a big part of it, right? The models got smarter, but the context engineering also got way smarter. So I want to discuss next what an agent is, right? An agent is like, so now we're getting close to OpenClaw. OpenClaw is an agent, right?

22:57Justin Moon:So an agent to me is like a marriage between these new and old computer programs, right? The old stuff is like, you know, how you control your desktop computer or how you run a browser, stuff like that. And the new one is an LLM, which can generate text that's like really smart and in some sense has the entire, all the intelligence of the internet baked in, right? So an agent, how is it a marriage between these new and old things? An agent is the thing that makes requests to an LLM. So like the ChatGPT website in this definition would be an agent. plot code, which is like a desktop or terminal program you can run that will write code for you or replet.

23:30Justin Moon:Those are agents, right? So it's something that makes a bunch of requests to some AI and also has the ability to use what we call tools. A tool is like you can do something. All an OLM can do is spit out text. It can't do anything in the world. So the question was, how do you make something that can only spit out text control a browser or do a web search, right? How can it be a web search? And so what we did is we invented this idea called a tool. What a tool is, is you put in the system prompt, you tell it there's a special marker that means I want you to search this on the web, right? So think of this, it's like a sentence that says search this in capitals.

24:05Justin Moon:And then there's like a question. And then it ends search this in capitals as well. So if the AI responds with that to your question, if the LLM sends that back, search this question, search this agent will say, Oh, I know that that's a marker, special marker, I got to do something special with that. I'm not going to show that to the user. I'm going to go fire up Google and do a web search, and then I'm going to send it back to the LLM. So this is what an agent does. In the system prompt, you teach us tools that the agent software itself will intercept and do special things like search the web, control the browser, send a message on Telegram, and all the other things that OpenClaw does.

24:40Justin Moon:That's called a tool. And so once we had that, you had, this is the way of augmenting an LLM to be able to do stuff in the real world. So maybe you heard of MCP. MCP was something like a year ago that blew up because it was a way to publish a bunch of these tools and share them. So they basically like, you know, in the beginning, ChatGPT tried to dictate what tools you could use, right? They said, now we have our tool and you can only use this one, right? And everyone's like, screw that. We want to do any one we want. And so MCP was invented as a way to share tools. And so the user can choose which one they want.

25:08Justin Moon:And the problem with it, it was like, if you ever heard of like just-in-case learning versus just-in-time learning, like just-in-case learning is like getting a college degree to solve a problem. Just-in-time learning is like, you have a problem and then you go to YouTube and learn how to solve that problem and you solve it. And so like a year ago, we were doing just in case prompting with MCP. We'd say, here's how to do 10 ,000 commandments just in case you need them. And then the first round of conversation, the AI is already kind of confused because you should have told it way too much, right?

25:36Justin Moon:And so now a thing called skills, which I'll talk about next, is more like just in case prompting. You say, here's a bunch of manuals you can use if you need them. They're over on that shelf over there. Don't read them yet, but you can see the titles and when you should use them on the bindings, right? That's kind of the difference between MCP is like, that was like just a case prompting and a skill is like just in time prompting. And so this was like kind of a revolution in context engineering because you could expose many more things to an LLM without overloading its context window.

26:05Alex Gladstein:That was extremely helpful for me personally, because I've seen both MCPs and I've seen skills and I know there's so many, there's so many, if you feel overwhelmed by

26:13Justin Moon:all the jargon like there's just so much there's so much it's kind of like in the matrix when they

26:18Alex Gladstein:plug the different things into neo's head right yeah what skill do you want and you're going to

26:22Justin Moon:have a freaking library yeah yeah very similar so yeah let me let me tell you more about what a skill is so now skills are like this is a foundational thing that open claw is built on so an mcp was like here's 50 different things you can do you got to figure out how to use them now you got to figure out when to use them like it was asking a lot of the llm to kind of map to figure out the user's intent and like when to do stuff. Skills are based on the insight. It's a mapping from a user intent to an action. When user wants X, you do this, right? So you only see that at the beginning of the system prompt.

26:55Justin Moon:And when the user declares the system, the intent, you go and look up the manual and figure out how to do that, right? And so what is the manual? The manual, this is a skill. A skill is a skill kind of like an analog to an app right now. The closest thing to the old word, it's like an app. The skill is a folder. So it's a very traditional thing, a folder. You've seen many folders on your computer with two types of content. One is text files containing prompts, you know, just a plain English description of like, hey, when the user wants to book a flight, you know, first you open the browser, then you log in and the user has to enter their password.

27:25Justin Moon:You need to wait for that and then go to kayak.com. And so it's a prompt, but it's not only a prompt because sometimes if you give it an open-ended task like that, it won't be able to do that. But parts of this are better done by like a traditional programming technique, like a computer program. That's the second thing that goes in a skill folder. You could have playgrounds, right? So you could have a program that can specifically open Kayak.com and can specifically find where to put the credit card information and can specifically, you know, do a bunch of the things, the actual steps that are involved in booking a flight can control the little Chrome browser, for example, and do all these things.

27:58Justin Moon:And the prompt would say, hey, they prefer aisle seats to window seats, right? They'll have a bunch of preferences like that. It's like a compact manual that maps a user intent to an action and leverages prompting, which is the new type of computer and like a simple computer program, which is kind of like the old type. So to me, it's kind of like a marriage. It's a good marriage between these two. And that's why it's so powerful is because it allows these LLMs to more effectively use a computer to accomplish what the user wants.

28:24Alex Gladstein:It's more efficient. It's faster. It's not bloated. Your context window probably won't fill up nearly as fast.

28:31Justin Moon:It fills up once the user wants it, wants it to, but not before. So it's much more efficient. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's kind of like one thing here is that we figured out a hierarchy for these types of things, right? So like in CloudBot, it saves a bunch of memories, but it doesn't look at the memory until they might be relevant, right? So it builds sort of like file system hierarchies to only expose what the user needs, but to allow it to be discoverable for other things they need in the future, right? That's been a big thing in context engineering. We've been adding hierarchy for all these things we used to just dump in there just in case, right?

29:02Justin Moon:Okay, so I want to, the next one is one more and then it'll be open class. So vibe coding. What is vibe coding? So this has been a really big thing. We've just had like the one year anniversary of this. Happy birthday, vibe coding. Happy birthday, vibe coding. Yeah. So normally when you write computer programs, it's like a very, very, you have to really, you have to have the blinders on. You have to really look. And if you get one semicolon, you're typing text into a file doing really logical operations. And it's like very, very focused anal, you know? And so vibe coding is like the complete opposite where you put your feed on the desk and you're like, hey, computer, build me a movie player app that can download it from my Dropbox.

29:39Justin Moon:And you just watch it do it. Right. And so this became sort of possible a year ago. And it's become very effective in the last three months, like very effective. Yeah. And so let's just talk about like what is actually happening there. What happens is you say, hey, why don't you write a program to something like blog code or replet. Right. And then it might come back like a normal chat, GPT conversation, ask you some clarifying questions, try to clarify your intent a little bit. And then it will go into a loop, right? A loop just is a programming We're trying to do something over and over again, right?

30:04Justin Moon:And so we'll do a bunch of these tool calls. It will do a tool call to do web search, to search something you might've said. Then it will do recent files in the existing thing. Then it will write a file. Then it will edit a file. And at the end, once it thinks it's working, it will do a tool call to run the program. And then you can interact with it. And at the very end, and it might try to do some tool call to test it manually itself. So it's just doing a loop, doing these tools over and over again and skills and stuff like that until it judges, hey, I think I accomplished the thing. And then loops have a termination condition.

30:31Justin Moon:You do it until there's some condition. And in Vibe Coding and Coding Agents, that condition is a response from the LLM that doesn't have a tool call in it. So every one is just a bunch of these little things with a special marker to do something special. And at the end, it's just a text message. And that's just displayed to the user and the loop exits. And if you're lucky, you have a working app that does exactly what you wanted. A year ago, you often didn't, but now you often do.

30:54Alex Gladstein:And so the agents are like, some of the agents update you along the way. They're like showing you, oh, we did this, cross that off, this off. and it could be quite transparent. So it's exactly what he's saying there. You can see how it's working.

31:06Justin Moon:And you can steer it along the way if it's going on the right direction. You say, I want blue, not purple, right? So you can control it a lot. And this is something now, if you go on Replit, for example, you can have a pretty good time with zero technical understanding. And I encourage everyone to do it because it will give like a different lens. It gives you a lens in the width. That's what the future is. Is Replit like co-work, like Claude's co-work? Kind of. So Replit, it's a website that you can go to and you can ask it to build an app. And it's very good at building an app. It's also very good at posting it on the web or like getting it onto your phone if it's a mobile app.

31:38Justin Moon:So it's a 10-year-old company that was where they were dedicated to make it easy to learn to program. I actually used to do interviews on this platform like 10 years ago. And they were early to seeing this live coding trend because, hey, this solves the mission of the company. So you're about to explain how OpenClaw works, right, Justin?

31:53Alex Gladstein:Yeah, OpenClaw. I think this is a good time for me to interject some of the social impact of what Justin has just described. And then I'll sort of end with something I just saw Oping Flaw do. And then you can explain how that works. Because I think we've covered a lot of ground and I think we're ready for this now. I love that. So, okay. So a lot of people, including me and Pablo, five years ago, if you had asked us about AI, zoom out, way outside of learning how it works, just impact on the world. We would have thought that it would be inherently repressive with regard to civil liberties and personal freedom.

32:23Alex Gladstein:There was an old, you know, I'll paraphrase Peter Thiel, about seven or eight years ago, he said something like Bitcoin is decentralizing, AI is centralizing. If you want to frame it ideologically, Bitcoin is libertarian and AI is communist. And, you know, a lot of people, including me, really believe that. We thought it would be very pernicious towards human rights in the hands of states as they vacuum up everybody's information and build a more efficient surveillance and control machine. And a lot of that is true. Part of the program we've launched, the Human Rights Foundation, where we brought Justin on to help us, is going to be exposing how dictators are using and abusing AI.

32:55Alex Gladstein:But what we didn't see coming until, you know, in the last 18 months was, 24 months was, how can AI supercharge individuals asymmetrically in the same way that encryption or Bitcoin could certainly help dictators, but it helps individuals way more? I mean, dictators already control vast communication networks, banking systems, massive data centers. They already have ways to exploit money and inspire people to control armies and big companies. And they have huge numbers of talented people to do their bidding. But individuals in resistance groups and innovators don't. So Bide coding changes this, right?

33:24Alex Gladstein:So now individuals have access to enormous cutting edge computing power and unbelievably intelligent personal assistants that are already saving them huge amounts of time and resources. I mean, just very simply, the fact that you can talk to a computer and make it do things for you is revolutionary. And this is increasing exponentially. So again, one year ago, Vibe Coding was invented. Nine months ago, a non-technical person could Vibe Code a website decently. I don't know if they could deploy it, maybe through Replet, but like a little shaky, but like they could do it. Today, a non-technical person can stand up an agent that can autonomously conduct work and perform tasks in the company without human oversight.

33:58Alex Gladstein:And tomorrow, like we don't know, right? So six months ago, a lot of elite developers, including a lot of the ones that Justin and I know, looks down upon Vibe Coding and they thought it was very ineffective and a bad work ethic, et cetera, et cetera. I did a retreat with some of these people, amazing elite developers in the beginning of December. And a bunch of them were like, nope, don't want that. All of them have changed their minds as of today, right? It's really crazy. So Per Papi, the former head of AI at Tesla, who invented Vibe coding more or less, said about a month ago that, or he said that in November, he was manually doing 80 % of his code work and using Vibe coding essentially for 20%.

34:33Alex Gladstein:And as of a few weeks ago, that switched to now he's vibe coding 80 % to 20 % annual. So, you know, the agents are capable of massively automating a lot of human work and it makes it possible to really super scale individuals and small organizations. So, you know, where we started with the activists doing some basic trainings and workshops, that's now blossomed into like multi-day hackathons and bespoke trainings. And we can basically give people superpowers. And, you know, the way I like to look at like what's available for the activists today, and this lines up pretty much with what Justin has said so far, and I'm getting close to finishing here, is you have your chatbot, just in terms of terminology.

35:10Alex Gladstein:Okay, everybody knows they have their chatbot, go to chat GPT or Claude or whatever. Then you have what I would call creator mode, which is like Claude code. It can do a lot more than just spit text out, as Justin was describing. It can use tools, skills. Then you have a personal agent. So these are three kind of options that are out there now. We're about to explain how OpenClaw actually works, but the social impact of it is really important. me. Essentially what I've seen with OpenClaw, so like yesterday, what we did is to a group of 20 people from different industries, Pablo and I did a 40 minute session where we did some background and we did some pretty amazing things with CloudCode.

35:43Alex Gladstein:And then we used his own OpenClaw that he set up. And basically like from my phone, I can go into Telegram and I can message him. And I left it, I just left it a two minute voice note with an incredibly complex task to do. And like three minutes later, it responded, like it gave me this thing. And it was just like the most instinct data rich website thing that was actually quite useful. I mean, to be very clear, we asked it to create a doable, scalable, manipulatable, circular, global, spherical map that shows exactly how much civil liberties and free speech and democracy funding every single country in the world gets broken down by who gives it and then like sorted.

36:21Alex Gladstein:So you could like rank them. Hold on. You sent this request over like a phone line? Over telegram from the phone. I was just like, yo, and I had a speaker and other people were listening in the room and I just said, I want you to do all these things. And then a couple of minutes later, it gives us this like freaking incredible visual project. And what is showing me is the following. And this is the kind of where I'll conclude is that workflow for creators is going to change. So basically, the way it works to this point is like, if you're an executive, or you're a creative person, you have a meeting and you have a cool idea, you really want to do something.

36:52Alex Gladstein:Well, what do you do? Well, you normally like talk to your executive assistant or your product team or your program team, depending on what kind of organization you work with. And you have a meeting and you describe what you want. And then they go talk to the creative team because they're not designers or engineers, or they go talk to engineers. And then those people talk to web people. And then maybe they come back to you a few weeks later with some proposals. Hey, do you like this one better or this one? And there's just so much human time and effort there. Now, what you're going to be able to do this year is like the creative, like the founder person can literally describe exactly what they want.

37:23Alex Gladstein:They could say, I want it to look like liquid glass on iPhone or I want it to kind of look like this movie vibes or they can literally like the dream can come out of the head so specifically. And then they can take like off of a voice and they can speak it into existence and they take that and give it to the creative team. And then there's no more like, well, do you like this color or that? No, no, no. They have a really specific idea of the vision. So this is going to become, in my opinion, like a skill like surfing or like sculpting. And it's like, are you going to be decent at it? Or are you going to be like Michelangelo?

37:51Alex Gladstein:and we'll see. But I think it's going to be so amazing for creators, people who have big dreams and visions, because they can like really quickly get them to like a really good, really good blueprint of what they want. And then their colleagues, their alliances or teams can finish the rest. And that's, I think, one of the biggest social impacts of what Justin is describing. So maybe Justin, now we turn to you and figure out how I can like talk to Telegram and have it do stuff, something like that.

38:16Justin Moon:Yeah. So transition from biocoding to open claw or like chat, it started with like the chat gpt interface and it became kind of a vibe coding agents right and now it's like the personal assistant is we're just starting to enter that where you know we've had a good coding agent for about a year we've just started to get good personal assistance and that's what open clause it's kind of the first actually useful personal assistant and so to transition though i want to make a note that like i actually met peter steinberger i think his name is the guy who created it from a blog post about how he vibe coded and when i read it was called shipping at inference scale and it like blew my mind i'm like oh my god i'm a complete amateur what this guy is doing is unreal.

38:51Justin Moon:And I think OpenClaw is largely a story of he was like the world's best vibe coder. This guy figured out how to vibe code. And that's actually what created OpenClaw. Like the real thing that unlocked it was that he was able to use these vibe coding tools so effectively. So I'll get to that. But so what is the user experience, right? It's a personal assistant that you can chat with on any messenger you like, Signal, Telegram, Nostr. Like the last when I did a live stream, we used, there's an existing Nostra thing that wasn't very good. And I built a new one using Marmot, right? So, but you can add and do whatever the heck.

39:23Justin Moon:Email, any emails, email, anything you want. And if it doesn't exist, you can make it. So the ingestion can be, talking to this can be from anywhere. The agent has its own computer. It gets a computer and it totally controls it. It can be a desktop, like a little Mac mini. It can be a virtual, it can be something in the cloud. It can be on your laptop, although don't probably do that in general. Be very careful with this. Do not try this. You have information security skills. Like I'm still scared of it. And I'm like an expert almost like, and then it can totally control that computer, right? So you can talk to it anywhere you want.

39:52Justin Moon:It has its own computer and it totally controls that computer. And basically the premise is what if you gave the agent its own computer and gave it skills and tools to control literally anything about that computer that the user wants to. And it got to a certain point now where the developers don't even have to invent the skill anymore. Now, if it's missing something, if there's something after want it to be able to control that it can't do, you just say, hey, now make, it has recursive self-improvement now. You can make a skill that allows me to pilot this weird app that nobody else uses, right?

40:20Justin Moon:And so it's basically vibe coding internally to make a personal skill.

40:23Alex Gladstein:Or if you could color this in, you can also buy, you know, a free market of skills. So Pablo was showing me that what he's building, he's building a, I mean, not a competitor to OpenClaw, but like something like an alternative that's more for a different use case. But the idea is that when he wants stuff done, his agent can go hire the Adnoster and Bitcoin, can hire like an expert in cashing, for example, that Kale has like worked with so that it knows Kung Fu, right? So like he can hire that one and then, or hire one that's really good at designing liquid glass apps for iOS, for example. So we can go out and hire these and then like do it.

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44:26Alex Gladstein:This is a paid advertisement. All right, back to the show. Real fast because we have a huge Bitcoin audience here. When you look at how these AIs are going to want to transact with each other, for me, it's become super obvious that they're going to want Bitcoin because that's the only form of payment that they can't be rugged on. So if they're managing their own wallet and you look at all the different ways that they could be paid, anything that touches human rails or has the capacity for a human to be like, I think I'm going to liquidate this account that it's using. I think the AIs are going to deeply understand that risk and never want to denominate their exchange in such a thing.

45:04Alex Gladstein:I think for sure that's where we go, but it's just worth noting now that, for example, I saw the founder of Umbral today. He was just posting that like he had his open claw on Umbral just book his debt for him. And yeah, he like gave it his credit card. He gave it his credit card and his billing address. So it does work with fiat, but like, I think you're right that like over the coming years, it'll be way easier for these things to work with a digitally native currency. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

45:28Justin Moon:I almost think it's going to happen the opposite way where it's like, they'll just use dollars because that's what's in the training data. And that's what everyone accepts by default, right? They'll use fiat. Right. And then they'll try to do something where they can't. And they'll be like, I can't. Is there another option? Oh, I can just use a Bitcoin. Oh, I can get the Bitcoin skill. I think it'll come more from trial and error where it's like, dang, it's like they keep asking me for all this stuff and I've got to check emails and my owner has the email and I can't get in there. So it's like, let me just create a Bitcoin wallet, right?

45:52Justin Moon:I think it'll kind of happen that way from the ground up just based on failure with the fiat. Right. It's like a person

45:57Alex Gladstein:in Nigeria and the credit card's not working. Well, why don't I try something else? Let me see. Oh, there's this Bitcoin skill. Oh, let me learn that really quickly. Oh, okay. It works now. Like it's going to do that. Okay.

46:07Justin Moon:Let me get to the continue the open clock. So like, yes. So I talked about the user experience, right? It's a personal system that you can message however you want. It has its own computer and that computer can be whatever you as the user want. You have the freedom to choose. And so it completely blew up in popularity. So to give a sense, GitHub is like the collaboration platform for open source software. There's something called a like or like a favorite on GitHub. You can like favorite a post or a project. You say, I like this one, right? a star it's called the github star github or bitcoin has 80 000 github stars that's a really popular project open claw and it's 15 years old open claw is like six weeks or seven weeks old and it has 160 000 stars so it's double as popular as bitcoin in like six or seven weeks linux is like 200 000 so it's almost cut up to linux which is like the most famous open source project that exists so that just gives you an indication of like is that the fastest moving uh oh yeah like yeah they show there's graphs where you can find where they show all these other like super fast moving projects that look like a hockey stick and compared to those open claws like a vertical line it's just insane like wow there's no x dimension for the adoption it's really cool so that's to give you the listeners a sense of how popular it got and so it's because the user experience was really good like this is what everyone's wanted it's like a relatively self-sovereign personal assistant but if i want to kind of ask some questions about like why did it happen now and give my takes on it what enabled this like and this is in a sense of like where are we now?

47:29Justin Moon:Like the first thing you think is, oh, finally the AI's got smarter now. I kind of disagree. Like I kind of think that if we had ClaudeBot, like when Claude4 came out, this is May 22 of last year, I kind of think it could have gone viral at the same time. Wouldn't have been able to do everything. But I think that some of the previous models from six or nine months ago maybe could have done this. I'm not sure I want to do some testing on it. But I don't actually think that actually when it comes down to running the assistant, we needed the models that we have today. So one big one with context engineering, we got a lot better at this just in time prompting instead of just-in-case prompting.

47:58Justin Moon:And that's traditional software engineering. So this was human software engineering. But I think, to me, the biggest one was that this one guy basically vibe-coded a massive bridge. Like, Peter Steinberger's GitHub is insane. The average developer does, like, maybe 10 GitHub contributions. That's like an action on GitHub a day. This guy does, like, 1 ,000 a day. He's just absolutely ripping it. He's operating at a much higher level than the rest of us. And many of us are trying to catch up. He has, like, 50 projects on his GitHub that composed this bridge between a traditional computer and an agent.

48:30Justin Moon:So stuff like managing Google Calendar, managing Gmail, making tweets, communicating over Telegram, communicating over like Apple Messenger. He made all these little command line tools, little basic tools that were optimized for an agentic user, not a human user. Like no human would want to use a COI tool to manage their calendar. But since all of them are all text-based, right? It's all based on text. They are really good at making these little COI tools. And so eventually it got to this kind of recursive improvement where the tool buy puts itself. I mean, also it's like the labs couldn't do it because it was reckless.

48:59Justin Moon:Like you needed like a cowboy base. You needed an open source cowboy. He didn't care. Like very, I don't know if this guy's a Bitcoiner, but he would fit right in. Yeah, he would.

49:08Alex Gladstein:Like Satoshi. Yeah.

49:09Justin Moon:The open source this thing. No big thing would ever do this. And also he's kind of a hero because he didn't, you know, he could have raised the VC money and all these things. You know, no, I'm already successful. I'm just going to leave this for the people. Right. You know, so there are a lot of these technical things like making skills, skills for missing interaction on text engineering. Amazing. And it has so much

49:25Alex Gladstein:pressure on the large corporations because the users are now going to want the choice of using whatever input they want. Whereas before they wanted to corral you in their theme. Like they wouldn't have wanted you to use Signal to talk to Anthropics' new product. They'd want you to use their own. Right. And now it's like, well, what are we going to do? Begin to try that. They're probably going to have to offer ways for people to use any input they want. So this is pretty, pretty seismic. And I just would also So just note that from a human rights perspective, maybe we can conclude a little bit of this with this part, Justin, like I'm not Doomer on the, yes, of course these things are risky and evasive, but like the cool part is you can hook up Signal and Maple and do OpenClaw like that.

50:04Alex Gladstein:Like you can use privacy protecting AI agents and you can use privacy protecting messengers. And there are some serious innovations happening on that now by some of our friends and people in our community who are making, you know, what are going to essentially be full stack personal agents where maybe three to six months, some of them are already like very alpha, but like you can experiment with them, but like, you'll be able to go in your signal and how to do stuff and have like the whole supply chain be encrypted. And I'm so bullish on that. So that's what Ahrefs really going to be focusing on this year from a investment point of view, like supporting the infrastructure is going to be building those tools.

50:39Alex Gladstein:And then the rest of what we're doing is going to be just the super scaling and education.

50:43Justin Moon:Yeah. Yeah. Let's like go into those in a little more detail. I just want to kind of summarize first. Yeah, go ahead. So if you like think of Open Cloud as like a story, and it is a story, that's why it went so viral. Like the story is just as much as the tool, I think in a sense, it's like a story of like what one individual can do with the help of iCoding, with AI development, right? The one guy, it was basically, and then eventually he got far enough where a big open source, voluntary open source community arose around it. And this is like exactly what we Bitcoiners participate in. This is what Nostra is.

51:12Justin Moon:And so it's very inspiring to see what one person can do. And to me, OpenClaw is more of like an idea than an actual product. Like it shows us the idea of what if an agent has its own computer and you can talk to it however you want. I'm going to build my own OpenClaw. I'm not going to use OpenClaw. I'm just going to vibe code my own and I'm going to use some of the pieces they have. And all my friends are going to do the same thing. And you're going to see this big renaissance of stuff that can't be controlled that is customized to what the user wants. And so for my takeaway, it's like, I want to teach more people about AI.

51:40Justin Moon:And also that like, this is why I'm proud to work on the HRF, like AI for individual rights program. Like we're fighting to make sure that more of this type of stuff can happen, that AI remains user controlled and that people can thrive in an AI world. So yeah, I transitioned out to Alex just to hear a little more about, you know, maybe share a little more about, you know, how the program started and what we've done and what we want to do.

52:00Alex Gladstein:Well, yeah, again, the moment was fortunate about 13 months ago when we were presented with the opportunity to do this by a generous supporter. And anyone listening, you can just do things. You can support people like us and have us do really cool things. So thank you to everybody who supported us, including you, Preston, for helping us today. Just even having this conversation is going to spark a lot of thoughts, I think. But yeah, created the world's first AI for individual rights program. Every other human rights group either hates AI or they're going to try to, you know, really focus on research.

52:30Alex Gladstein:And it's just they're not going to do anything. and you know what? Like we wanted to do it differently and most of our effort is going to be focused on how to make this tool a mechanism for personal liberation, period. We are going to do, again, some research and investigations into how dictators are abusing it. That's very important. You know, we do feel like that will start to get crowded with other people. What I don't see anyone else doing for sure is like in the same way that we've been pioneers of educating dissidents and activists and resistance groups on Bitcoin, well, we're going to do the same thing these open source privacy protecting AI tools.

53:04Alex Gladstein:Because in the same way that Bitcoin helps them become unstoppable, AI is going to help them 10x or 100x what they can do. And we need that right now. Right now is the moment for us to push freedom forward. So that's what the program's designed around. We're going to do events that bring people together, as Justin was describing, like bringing together talented developers with activists. I mean, both of them were thrilled. The event went so well. The first one, we're going to do two more this year, at least. we're doing one in nashville at bitman park in may dr rod we're going to do one at pubkey in dc in september so we're going to cook with these and the developers were like thrilled because it's like something so inspiring to work on as opposed to just like the standard hackathon and the activists are like this is awesome i get like five of the smartest people in the world to like help me do what i want to do like everybody's like you know let me chime in here a little bit so like

53:49Justin Moon:they had this idea you know so hrf one thing i mean my friend's still out every once in a while give me crap about like how do you work for an NGO and I'm like I don't know man I don't know Alex it's true we are non-governmental I'm not I'm not and I'm like well Alex brought me and my friends are these freedom tech developers the ideological freedom tech developers and we met these like physical freedom fighters who actually fight for freedom in authoritarian regimes and over the years I would meet these people and they were like some of the most courageous inspiring people I've ever met and I was like man I wish I could help them but it was always a little distant because it's like I'd be like okay use my wallet you know use my I can teach you how to use bitcoin right?

54:22Justin Moon:It remains a friendship, a social thing. But then when wide coding happened, what wide coding means is the cost of software production going kind of to zero. That's what it means. A year ago, you needed to be ChatGBT to build an agent. Then Peter Steinberger could build one himself and Pablo. And now the tools themselves can recursively self-improve, right? The cost is going down, down, down, down, down. So the opportunity is like, okay, what if we could put activists and developers together and have them actually try to solve problems, right? Usually the ideas are bad and there's no distribution of the product at the end.

54:52Justin Moon:But the activist collaboration fixes both of these. The activists bring a real problem. Like, hey, how do we make a leaderboard of which LLMs respect human rights? And how do we distribute it? Okay, the guy's got a massive academic following and is very respected and works at Harvard. But, you know, like this is what all the projects were like, right? It was very empowering from the activist point of view because they got to do something useful. And they also got to see how software is created, right? So a lot of these people have been around HRF, talked to these developers, but I don't think they actually understood where it comes from.

55:19Justin Moon:and they got to see for a day where it comes from. And from the developer interview, we're empowering because we're like, man, we've been working on these abstract problems all the time. And now I get to make a tool that can help find corruption in a big data dump of documents from Rattrip. It's very nice to work on like a concrete problem and then apply the skills you knew previously from your work with Freedom Tax. It was a big success. It was a very surprising success for me. And I'm really looking forward to doing more of these.

55:41Alex Gladstein:And just, you know, the TLDR, what are we doing? I mean, two main things. Again, we're going to be bringing people together at all kinds of interesting events. We'll have a big Freedom Tech Day at the Freedom Forum where we're going to have quite a bit of ad coding for activism. And then the second thing will be grants. I mean, you know, we want both the activists to apply to our AI fund to seek help to build the things they need. Then we also want really talented developers working in essentially, you know, things like open code or open claw or Mable, like open source sovereignty and or privacy improving infrastructure.

56:15Alex Gladstein:We want to aggressively support that. So people should get in touch with us. And, you know, we really, really want to beef that up. And, you know, even small investments can go a really long way right now. The virality is here. Like, again, the guy from OpenClaw, when he released it, it was ClaudeBot. It's not like he had raised$30 million of venture capital, but did it out of his house. And it's like, we can do that. I don't know if you want to mention, like, briefly, just what, like, Kalei came out with today or yesterday, the Claude. Our friends are coming up with amazing stuff. Callie, another pretty famous Bitcoiner who has just done incredible things historically as far as writing code.

56:52Alex Gladstein:He made a turnkey claw bot that he just released on his website, right? That makes all of it super easy. A person can just, you know, go to the website that he just stood up. And I can only imagine how quickly a guy that's as talented as he is in writing software was able to engineer something like this and put it out there. No, and it still has, it's got a ways to go on the security side, but like, you know, he knows that he's a privacy maximalist and he's going to work on that. You know, again, where we are today is like, so the activists at least is we want people to use something like Maple for their basics or what their one-on-ones are.

57:29Alex Gladstein:Like you should just not be using other chat. It's like, it'll get 95 cents on the dollar, at least of the big corporate model, then you could be encrypted. Let's move there. Let's move from text message to signal. the next three to six months, we're going to be able to move your creator mode, you know, your basically your cloud code type things. And I think we're going to be able to move your agent as well into a similar environment. So that's like the hope and the dream right now is that now, like in the next three to six months, people who really value privacy and sovereignty, you know, will have access to extremely powerful tools that reflect their values, but then can also 10x to 100x their work.

58:04Alex Gladstein:And that's very exciting. Guys, we have to keep this conversation going. Honestly, you guys are on the tip of the spear. It's a military term. You're on the tip of the spear of everything that's happening. I need a lot coming from you.

58:16Justin Moon:Thank you, Preston. No, I really mean it.

58:18Alex Gladstein:In the conversation I had with Pablo and Trey, I was like, guys, you got to come back and keep us updated with this. Because I honestly think that this claw bot thing, and it's interesting because Sam Altman literally said the same thing. And coming from a guy that's one of the biggest in the AI space - No, he said it's here to stay. It's here to stay. That caught my attention. And I think that this is something that is going to be massive for individuals. It's the wild, wild West right now. And for all intents and purposes, from a privacy security, people losing, you know, their bank accounts and email addresses and things like that.

58:54Alex Gladstein:I think it's the wild, wild West right now. But in a year from now, I can only imagine what this. I mean, it's a new era of personal computing. You know, we're just these commentary, like the creator of OpenClaw really just opened a new, tore a new hole in what's possible. And now we're moving into that world.

59:12Justin Moon:Let me give one analogy. Personal agents at this stage really remind me of eCash, which I worked on through Fetiment and Callie worked on through Cashew. Because it's like, there's an obvious trade-off, big security trade-off right up front. It's like, hey, you trust another guy, random guy with your bank. And so it's kind of crazy. You give an AI agent its own computer and let it do whatever the heck it wants. So it's like a big upfront trade-off that's a little reckless. But then you get this flowering of all kinds of hobbyists and people who are kind of understand the risk, understand the trade-offs.

59:43Justin Moon:That's what we're trying to communicate. Don't just recklessly do this if you don't understand what's kind of going on. That's why I tried to explain so much of these ideas to you, because you need to equip yourself with some of these basic things in order to make these decisions. But when you have this flowering of a big group of very motivated people in the open source ecosystem, that's when you can have really magical things happen. And that's what happened with eCash and Cashew, and that's what's happening with these personal self-sovereign AI agents?

1:00:08Alex Gladstein:You have all these people talking like, AI is coming, it's going to take all of our jobs. The other side of the coin that I think I really want to impress on a person listening to this, the tools we're talking about also give a person the ability to 100X or 1 ,000X their capacity and their ability to do things. And so these two forces really come down to what is your perspective? Is your perspective, this is too hard and complicated? Well, AI is probably going to eat your lunch. Or are you sitting there saying, hey, this is my moment. Yeah. Like, what can you do with this? What can I do? This could be a great example.

1:00:48Alex Gladstein:I'm here with a really well-known Cuban activist. I'm thinking to myself, right now there's no Bitcoin wallet really perfect for her needs. And no one's really going to build that she's going to build it like within the next year she'll be able to speak to a computer and it'll open source it'll take some stuff from bit check which is very important given that cuba doesn't have great internet it'll take some stuff from like some very popular open source lightning libraries it'll just build what she needs and it'll look awesome and it'll be exactly what she needs and she could just do it in a few weeks or a few days or a few hours depending on how how much she wants to put into it i mean it's where you're going to see the blossoming of so many interesting little personalized tools that can radically expand people's potential.

1:01:30Alex Gladstein:And it's just such an exciting moment to your original point, Preston. And yeah, we'll come back and, you know, we're making a mini documentary right now, the current six months that we're living on that we're going to play on the main stage of the House of Freedom Forum. It's going to start January 1. It's going to end June 1. We're going to play it on June 2. And at the bottom third, you're just going to see the days go by and you're going to see like the headlines and you're going to see interviews and work and it's going to be so brave to me what happens on June 2 when we show this thing. The speed is just face melting at what is going on here.

1:01:59Alex Gladstein:So honor and a pleasure as always. Hey, that event and also the one in Nashville in May, I am very interested in going to the one. Let's go. Yeah. So we'll put links to that in the show notes. Yeah. May 8 to 10 for the Bitcoin Park hackathon part two, AI hack for freedom. And then And it's June 1 to 3 for the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway. Amazing. Oslofreedomforum.com. Check it out. Amazing.

1:02:23Justin Moon:I have one thing to plug here at the end. Yeah. So I started doing some live streaming on Nostra to try to share what I've learned over the last year. And for next week, I'm going to try to vibe, go to CoinFullNode. That's what I'm going to try to do. So I'm going to be live streaming on Nostra all week. And I'll be going to injure myself severely in this process. And I wish me luck.

1:02:39Alex Gladstein:Good luck. Okay. So we end the shows now with a song. And we need you guys to select either one of you, what your favorite artist is or song. Like if there's a specific song you like, I want it to be like that. And then the song is going to recap everything we just talked about in a fun song-like way. So do either of you have a very strong preference for a specific song, artist, genre? Go ahead and speak up. Justin, you fire.

1:03:08Justin Moon:I don't have, I can't think of a specific song, but I would go with the sea shanty, sea shanty song style. would be fun.

1:03:15Alex Gladstein:Sea Shanty songs. I don't even know what that is, but I'm about to find out.

1:03:20Justin Moon:It's like the sailors. I could send you one afterwards. Oh, like the sailors sing about how they're getting out the door and they're going to get into trouble and you know. It's great.

1:03:29Alex Gladstein:Wow. I love how diverse these song selections are. The last one I think was a Beatles song or something like that. So, all right, guys, thank you so much for making time. We're going to have links to all of that in the show notes. Enjoy your C. Shanti's song on the close out here. Thank you. Hold her rope and hold her steady Through the fog we sail when ready Open club and see They can't hold what they can't see Yeah. Uh-huh. Okay. Okay. Okay. Uh-huh. Flip the ship, now we dip, dip, sliding on the bass. Vibe the code double time, never leaving any trace.

1:04:30Justin Moon:Sovereign, sovereign, sovereign running on my own. Pie on the counter, AI picking up the phone. Build it in a night, yeah, the coffee wasn't cold.

1:04:38Alex Gladstein:160 ,000 stars, that's a story being told. But I don't slow down. Now I keep it moving, keep it spinning, keep the sound

1:04:46Justin Moon:Bouncing off the walls and the ceiling and the floor Open source the recipe, then I'm cooking up some more Feel it in your chest when the baseline drops Once we start this wave, we don't ever stop Open close, open see

1:05:04Alex Gladstein:They can't hold what they can't see Open C Open C This the code that set us free This the code that set us free One more time This the code that set us free Okay, okay, okay Let me break it down slow

1:05:26Justin Moon:One developer changed the whole flow Then we speed it back up

1:05:30Alex Gladstein:Like we never hit the brakes signal buzzing telegram Humming making sovereign states Access to this and hackers builders

1:06:01Alex Gladstein:We'll be right back.

1:06:06See They can't hold What they can't see Open Close Open See

1:06:18Alex Gladstein:It's the code that set us free It's the code that set us free It's the code that set us free Used to think The future wasn't ours Now we hold the The key to sovereign power Mmm, yeah, let that sit Now we build it, now we share it Got a whole new world and we declawed in Open claw, yeah we calling Open sea, never stalling Open claw, walls are falling Open sea, new day dawning, old day dawn

1:07:04Alex Gladstein:Open glow, open sea They can't hold what they can't see Open glow, open sea This the code that set us free This the code that set us free This the code that set us free

1:07:30Alex Gladstein:It's the code that set us free.

1:07:35Alex Gladstein:It's the code that set us free.

1:07:38Justin Moon:The C is ours now.

1:07:40Alex Gladstein:Thanks for listening to TIP. Follow Infinite Tech on your favorite podcast app and visit theinvestorspodcast.com for show notes and educational resources. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not provide financial, investment, tax or legal advice. The content is impersonal and does not consider your objectives, financial situation or needs. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principle and past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Listeners should do their own research and consult a qualified professional before making any financial decisions.

1:08:11Alex Gladstein:Nothing on this show is a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any security or other financial product. Hosts, guests and the Investors Podcast Network may hold positions in securities discussed and may change those positions at any time without notice. References to any third-party products, services or advertisers do not constitute endorsements and the Investors Podcast Network is not responsible for any claims made by them. Copyright by the Investors Podcast Network. All rights reserved.