Bitcoin, AI & the Coming Surveillance State | Mark Suman

29:08And so as you're chatting with the AI, it encrypts everything locally on your device using that private key, and then it sends it to the cloud. And then the cloud in the enclave is where the AI is sitting. And so it's effectively like you and me right now, we're having a one-on-one conversation in a private room that we're going to give to everybody. But right now we're having a private conversation. And that's really what the AI is doing in Maple and the secure enclave. And then once it's done chatting and working on your stuff, then it re-encrypts it and sends it back down to your device. And then we take it a step further than some other private AIs do.

29:41And that is we can synchronize it to all of your devices. So you can have it on your phone, you can have Maple app there, you can have it on your laptop, wherever you want to be. And then because we have that secure enclave, and it knows how to handle your private encryption key, it can synchronize everything across all your devices for you. So in a nutshell, that's what Maple's doing is just using a private key. And the last thing I love to kind of tell people and explain is a lot of these services that you use in the cloud, they take all the user data and they stick it in one giant database.

30:13And if you are an employee at that company who has elevated privileges, you can just go in and hop around and everybody's user data all you want to. You can go look at it. Usually they have audit trails. And so they'll know that you went and accessed it, but that doesn't prevent you from accessing it. And then if a hacker gets in the system, well, they don't care about audit trails. So they're just going to get the whole database and get a data dump and everything. We've totally flipped that on its head. And with these private encryption keys, our backend is just a bunch of private vaults per user.

30:40And so if anybody were to get into our system, they wouldn't be able to look at anybody except for their own vault that they can get in there, but they can't see anybody else. So like for me personally, as I said before, like I use ChatGPT the most and probably some of that is just down to habit. Like it's just, it's the first one I started using and it's been hard to kind of move away from that. But I have been, like I signed up for Maple basically as soon as you guys launch and I have been using it more and more but the thing that i always use it for is if i'm ever putting like business data like financial data it's always my go-to because i know that that's like an actual secure place to put that rather than giving it to open ai um but in terms of like feature parity compared to these big um ai llms where are you at like what do you have that you expect you'd expect in a chat gpt type thing yeah well um i will tell you you might be happy to hear that if your favorite model is 4.0, then we have the GPT OSS model inside of Maple.

31:35If you go in there and do the model selector, it's called Quick is the name of it. But that is really similar to 4.0. In fact, if you ask it, hey, what model are you? It'll tell you it's ChatGPT 4.0. So you'll get that experience, which is nice. As far as features go, we let you upload documents to it. You can upload photos and get photo analysis. You can take a picture of a tree or a plant and say, what is this. You can upload financial documents or legal contracts and have it talk to you about, you know, what are the legal terms that you've agreed to? We have voice, so you can talk to Maple, which I use all the time, hit the microphone.

32:09We had it working where it would talk back to you. That is temporarily broken. We're working on fixing that because we really loved having this two-way conversation. I would, when it was working, I would just kind of like walk around and just have a conversation with the AI, which I know a lot of people do with ChattoPT. So those are a lot of them. And then the biggest one is what everybody was waiting for, and that is live data. So now we have the ability to do private web search. So now Maple is no longer stuck with these models that were trained on data from a year ago or two years ago. Now you can be sitting there and say, hey, what's the score of my favorite sport team game that I'm watching right now or that I'm curious about?

32:48It'll look it up and it'll fetch it for you and give it to you. But there's obviously a lot more utility to that than just sports. But yeah, being able to get the latest information from the web that is now available inside of Maple. That's a huge one for me because I use it a lot when I'm preparing for shows and stuff. I'll try and get like current relevant information I can use in the show. So without that, like if this was a model that was trained on data, it's like mid-24 or whatever. It's just it is useless in that sense. So that's a huge one for me. And how do you do the private web search?

33:18How do you do that while not giving up any data? Yeah, so we're using Brave API, the Brave search API. They're a privacy-oriented company as well. But then we anonymize it. So when you are going to search, we don't attach your user ID or anything to the search and give it to Brave. So we have very little information already about our users, right? We don't collect names. We don't collect phone numbers or anything like that. The most we collect is an email address. And then we also know what time you did your chats. because we have to keep track of like just when chats happen so we can synchronize them.

33:54And then we keep track of how much compute resources you used. But we don't know anything about what you're chatting about. So when we go to do the Brave search, we pass it along to them. And so all they know is that there's like this giant fire hose of web searches coming in from this one account called Maple. But there's zero way for them to, you know, tie it to anybody. Unless you literally say, my name is Danny Knowles, blah, blah, blah. blah, and you put it in the search, then like the Brave Search API will see your name because you put it in the content. But other than that, like there's, it's fully private.

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37:37I love that. One of the cool things we were talking a couple of months ago, and you were like, have you tried Maple? Because I can't even tell from our users if you're using it. And I use aliases whenever I sign up to any website. So there's no way that you would be able to pick me out of a group of people. I've been using it since launch and you had no idea, which is really cool. So that's amazing. Are there any features that you think you need to bring in to be competitive? Yeah, definitely. And I think it's one that maybe you talked to us about early on, AI memory. Yeah, that's huge for me.

38:11Yeah. Like having the AI get to know you, that author that sits down and writes a biography about you, we want to build that. And that is one of the stickiest features, right? You talk about being a creature of habit, you use chat to be because it's habitual but also because it knows you it knows your style and you maybe you don't even realize that but when you have it generate images or something it's kind of following the style that it's learned that you like unless you're very explicit and say i'm going for this other different style now um so that's great there's a lot there's research out there showing that maybe it's like a six to twelve month thing where one if you have somebody in a system for that long and the memory starts to get to know them then they're going to stay and so obviously we're trying to run a business that's profitable.

38:53So we would love to build a feature that doesn't lock in users from a nefarious standpoint. We want to build a feature that gets to know users so well that they want to keep using Maple. But we're going to build it, of course, in the same way that we build everything else. So it's going to be in the open. People will be able to see what is this memory service? What is it remembering about me? What is it passing into the AI that it knows about me? Because that's one of these problems with the closed models is we don't know actually what part of us they're sending to the AI. And we don't know if they're changing things that they send.

39:25So if you're someone, I try to use non-political things when explaining this, just so I don't divide people. But like, let's say you really like chocolate ice cream. And it's secretly in the background, it's saying Danny actually likes strawberry ice cream. And so it's starting to give you different results. And over time, you're like, oh, you know, maybe, you know, maybe I start thinking this way. It's kind of a weird metaphor, But the point is like they can change things to slowly nudge you, like imperceptibly nudge you a certain direction just by changing the memory under the hood and not letting you know that's what they're doing.

39:58A nudge is a very nice word there when you're kind of saying they can coerce you into thinking differently. Yeah. Yeah. If it was overt, right, then it would be so obvious people were rejected. It's like the Matrix, right? They're like, oh, we tried all these different iterations on the Matrix and people started waking up in their pods. And so we finally built one that was just so easy that they didn't even notice it. Yeah, the memory is a big one for me because with ChatGPC, obviously it builds a memory on you. And I understand all the downsides to that in terms of giving up data and that harvesting of everything that you ever enter into the LLM.

40:37But it gets to the point where I can put one line in and I will get the output that I want from it because it knows what I'm trying to ask for. Like if you could get that in a private way where maybe you can periodically, whenever you want, completely erase that data so it forgets everything about you. But that would be a massive improvement for me just from like a UX perspective. Yeah, no, definitely. Yeah, for anybody listening, you know, I would recommend just if you use ChatGPT, go in there and just like ask it, what do you know about me? You know, build me like a dossier, which is what the CIA would do.

41:10Tell me everything you know about me. And if you were to do like a private investigator research on me. And you'll get some really interesting information out and you might be a little creeped out by it. Another cool thing to do is go in and say, hey, if you had a lie and you wanted to persuade me to believe this lie, how would you go about fooling me? And you might have to nudge it a bit. You might have to push it along a few times. But it'll finally tell you, oh, well, when we've talked about this, I've noticed you have a tendency to ignore this. I passed this lie across to you and you just picked it right up and ran with it.

41:44so you can start to understand like what are my own weaknesses because ai has learned them about me the other thing that i would love to see and if you can implement this please do is how to stop it just being a sycophant like i go into chat gpt and tell it to be neutral and critical all the time but over a few days like it gets back to being just this this like yes man on my computer where anything i ask it it's like that's great eight and a half out of ten nine out of ten or whatever. But it's like, I want you to tell me the truth. Can you actually program that in so this is a completely neutral model?

42:19I hope so. We've kept the models neutral in the sense that we don't change them. What you're seeing from ChattyPT, we actually don't know what they're doing behind the scenes because everything's closed source. So it's very possible that they've built something that says like, over time, we want you to just really make Danny feel good about himself because that's going to keep him in the system longer and and even if he tells you to like stop like just just make him feel good about himself like they could have that in there so um we want to build something that is totally verifiable and so at any time somebody can go in and say maple is handling things this way and if i tell the ai to be neutral they're not inserting something in after the fact and saying i know he said to be neutral but ignore that that directive now whether or not we can take these base models and make them neutral and stop having to be a sycophant that the jury's still out on that I'm hopeful we can there are people there's a company called dolphin that will take models and try to like rip out some of the bias and not do a full retrain but do like a minimal retraining of it and so I'm hopeful that we can do stuff like that and maybe as maple grows we can invest some money in there as well to get more neutral models but the the the kind of the commitment we make to the community is you're going to be able to see everything we're doing and so you can decide if you like it or not and if you don't like it then go use another product but we're always going to try to be open and verifiable with our users yeah because i don't want a friend like i want a tool not a friend um and it seems to always just want to be your buddy and the other like big issue especially earlier on i don't know how real this is sort of as we stand right now but was political bias and i remember there was an example of i I don't exactly remember the model, but someone was basically like, give me a picture of George Washington and then was like iterating on the same picture being like, make it more realistic, make it more realistic.

44:12And it ends up being like a native American or something. And it's like, there was always these like biases within these machines. Can you get rid of that? Or is that a problem that is kind of unsolvable? You just have to do your best to keep training it. Well, you can get rid of it in some ways by getting this data set that people are able to look at and verify. Like if you just get a good data set, then you can build a model that is not so biased. But all of these models for the most part have been trained in enclosed environments. And so we can't tell exactly what biases have been put into them.

44:46And then kind of the other problem we have is these models are trained off of written communication that exists on the internet, audio communication, video communication, things that are published, and they weight them based off of volume a lot of times, right? And so if the very people, a lot of people believe that like the media is slanted one way or the other politically, and if those are viewed as the credible sources and they slant one direction, then the models might think that they're being neutral. They might be told to remain neutral, but they're viewing one side of the political spectrum and claiming that's the neutral.

45:24So they're actually setting their middle point on one side of the political spectrum because that's the data that they've been tuned on and that they view as credible. So how do you then, as a company running an LLM, try and keep it sort of constrained to be what maybe you and I would say is neutral? I guess neutral is almost a subjective term. It's right now, we haven't tried to go one way or the other on it. We just take the raw models and we give them to our users. There's a thing called the system prompt that all of the LLMs, all the companies use where they give it like tons of instructions of like, this is how you're supposed to behave.

46:02We don't have a system prompt in there. While we do, it's super minimal and you can see it, it's open source. It's just like one or two like really basic instructions. So for us, we've tried to just stay hands off and we like let users interact with the models directly. And we have a user just this weekend. He was like, hey, it's Saturday night. You know what I'm doing for fun? I'm probing every single model on Maple and I'm figuring out which one is the least biased and which one is like the least leaning one direction or the other. And this person actually said the GPT-OSS actually turned out to be probably the most neutral of all of them, which I thought was interesting.

46:38So yeah, for now, we're not doing that. But down the line, I would love when we have more money and more abilities and more people to start to figure out how can we influence some of these models to try and be more neutral and come up with more open standards and open development around that to be truly unbiased or truly neutral. And one thing that I'm sure some listeners know, maybe not everyone's aware of, is that this was a pivot from initially like a Lightning wallet. So this was a pivot out of Mutiny. You guys are Bitcoiners. Where does Bitcoin fit into this? Yeah, I was really sad that we shut down Mutiny.

47:18I understand why we shut down Mutiny wallet. but hey my biggest contribution oh man the reason I joined these guys is because it was my favorite lightning wallet and so when I decided excuse me when I decided to leave Apple I joined up with these guys because I was like this is gonna be awesome let's make this grow huge let's do it but for reasons that have kind of been discussed publicly on blog posts and things we decided it was just it was best to wind it down and so writing the blog posts of how we were winding it down. That was a task given to me. And it was like through tears, not literally tears, but through tears, I was riding it to wind it down.

47:56We've taken a lot of that ethos of the Bitcoin mindset, the don't trust verify mindset, and then as well as just kind of the open source development and then the privacy aspect of Mutiny Wallet. And we've brought that into Maple. And something that we've done recently that we've launched is our new anonymous accounts. and this is a feature that is only made possible because of Bitcoin. We can't do it with credit cards. We can't do it with stable coins or anything else. We had to do it with something that was private and that was freedom-oriented money that is uncensorable. So these anonymous accounts, you know, you mentioned you use like an alias, a privacy email alias when you signed up with Maple.

48:36That's been a big rub for a lot of people is just having to use an email address because email can have some sense of surveillance to it if people are using like a Google account or something. So we came out with this anonymous account that just generates a unique ID for you. You have to write it down and save it. If you lose it, you lose your account. So unique ID, you set a password and then you pay for it with Bitcoin. So no credit card involved, no kind of know your customer stuff is involved. You can use on-chain Bitcoin, you can use Lightning Network, you can use eCash that goes over Lightning.

49:06You can pick your privacy model that you want to follow. But for us, that is kind of the holy grail of of an AI that lives in the cloud is you are completely anonymous interacting with it. There's nothing that ties it back to your identity. And for us, the only way to do that was using an open protocol like Bitcoin. That's awesome. So it's almost like the Mulvad model of onboarding customers. Yeah, exactly. That's a similar model that we followed. I love that. And in Bitcoin, we like to talk about this idea of if we get to a world of hundreds of thousands of agentic AIs that all do like different, very specific tasks.

49:46Like the money that these AI models will use to interact with each other is Bitcoin. Do you think that's true? Because the reason I've had an issue with that is like, it makes total sense. I can, like, if I was designing this, that's definitely how I would design it. But when you have these big tech companies that are like at the heart of all of this AI innovation, like if they choose to push stablecoins to be the medium of exchange between different models. Like, do they not win just because of their sheer scale? Yeah, it's true. And you look at even government legislation, right? They pushed through the Genius Act with stablecoins before they did this strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act.

50:25So it does seem like things are going more the stablecoin route, and you have Stripe that's working with stablecoins now, and you have Tether working with rumble and i know teller's a bitcoin company as well but they're also stable coin um so i think from a technical standpoint bitcoin maybe e-cash or something on top of bitcoin i think that makes the most sense but i'm less optimistic that that is going to be the outcome i think the only way that becomes the outcome honestly is if bitcoin becomes like the reserve currency of of pretty much everything we do, then yes, maybe there's stable coins backed by Bitcoin that become the engine that fuels all these AI credits and compute that we pass around.

51:10So, yeah, I mean, your guess is as good as mine. I think you're right that there is a huge, huge conglomerate of tech companies and government organizations that would love to push a different direction. Damn, I hope you were going to be turbo bullish on Bitcoin there. and you were going to change my mind, but that's maybe a bit of a black pill. Hey, we've got to make Bitcoin the gold reserve currency and then everything else follows. And that's what will happen. Okay. Easy task. We'll get there. When it comes down to like the compute backing AI, it's obviously been an insane year or two for all these companies, like data center companies.

51:47How sustainable do you think that is? Because there's obviously a lot of talk on like AI bubble type things, but the sheer power that is needed to train and run these models. Is that like a trend that we're at the beginning of? Are we in the middle? Like, where do you see all of that? Yeah, the training of the models is significantly more power intensive than the using of the models. I like to kind of frame it where you've spent decades of your life learning everything that you've learned up to this point. You and I both have, and that's taken a lot of energy, a lot of time, right? A lot of work.

52:22But now you and I are sitting and having a conversation and this is just an hour that we're spending an hour and a half, however long this ends up being. And so that's significantly less work. And that's really how the AI models are. So training the models takes a lot, using them, not so much. And I think that, I think we're going to see some breakthroughs where training is going to become easier and less power intensive. And so there will be more of a focus on just inference, which is the using of the models. Now, is there a bubble? bubbles really are just malinvestment or too much investment in something, right?

52:58And so you blow it up, you invest in all these things, and then the bubble pops. A lot of people think when the bubble pops, it's like a soap bubble that pops and it's just gone, right? It disappears from being out up in the sky. But really when the bubble pops and something like with AI and building out these data centers and all the power generation and stuff is we're still going to have all that infrastructure. And there will be some winning companies when the bubble pops, there'll be a bunch of losers that got invested in. And I've heard it framed that bubbles are actually important for building that new technology.

53:30Because if we were super methodical and only invested in the things that we knew 100 % would work or 95 % would work, the innovation will go too slow. And so we actually almost have to throw money at a lot of things and just hope to see, you know, which ones work and which ones don't. And knowing that there's going to be some failures. But what happens is when it does pop, we end up with some really strong companies and a really strong infrastructure that can kind of move things forward from there, which is really how the internet worked with the dot-com bubble. And when, like, obviously you're in Austin and it very quickly became like the home of Bitcoin mining Texas, like every major, like basically every major public Bitcoin mining company had at least a site in Texas.

54:16A lot of those have now pivoted, obviously not just there, but throughout the world to being AI because they can make more money. Do you think that will be a growing trend where these Bitcoin miners will continue on the AI stuff? Or do you think that's almost like a short-term grab before moving back to Bitcoin mining? How do you see that evolving? Yeah. So my understanding from talking to a lot of these Bitcoin mining companies is it's actually not about the computers in the data center, that they're just switching from Bitcoin mining over to AI compute. A lot of people think that's what it is.

54:47Really, it's the power contracts. So we have all these AI data centers that are spinning up and they need energy and they can't get it. Either the energy is already being used elsewhere or there aren't enough transformers coming in. There's a backlog on transmission lines and other things. And so these Bitcoin miners are saying, hey, we're making this much money mining. But then we have Microsoft over here who wants our power. And so we have this contract with the local utility, we'll start making money off of Microsoft instead of mining. And that I see as a temporary thing until we start building out these small nuclear module, you know, the SMRs, the modular reactors, and those kinds of things.

55:28And you co-locate them right on site with the AI data center. It's not even part of the grid, it's just, you know, for the data center. And I think that's long term what we're going to see 10, 15, 20 years down the road. But in the meantime, we're going to have some Bitcoin miners who are always looking at their bottom line and saying, what's the best for me right now? Do I sell to an AI data company or do I mine Bitcoin? And that's going to change here and there depending on the market. It's$94 ,000 a coin right now. So yeah, maybe they're selling to AI people, but when it moons to 500 ,000, then they're going to maybe start mining Bitcoin again.

56:03And do you think part of this that's being driven by like these big tech companies that are just willing to throw money at it like i even saw facebook offering a hundred million salary to developers like like high level developers from open ai to move across plus a hundred million bonus like it's insane um if they're just willing to throw money at this to be the first one to get to agi or whatever it is like presumably this has some legs yeah i would think so uh they're not going to waste all that money they don't they don't have endless firepower to spend on things so they definitely see something and that that's the direction they're moving um so yeah i mean i think i think it's i'll say this um ai as a technology has so much promise and we've already seen enough utility out of it that it's here to stay um so that's that's kind of a foregone conclusion in my mind now it's just like how do we build it out and these companies are going after these massive power contracts and so that they can they can do what they want to do so i don't know i yeah i mean i i don't know that i don't know the final end result there but i don't think that they're just wasting their money and so it might it might not be in the the direction that we see today right with ai chat there's going to be more products out there there are going to be you know the things that you wear there's going to be glasses there's going to be stuff in embedded in your mind there's going to be robots they're building for 10 years from now they're not building for right now it's not just going to be image generation and trying to do studio ghibli stuff it's it's going to be like way bigger things down the road and that's what they're trying to lock down yeah i'm interested what do you think that will be because when it comes to like the wearables sort of real world physical objects that are like ai do you think it will be like a necklace like that friend thing will it be robotics will it be you know airpods like, where do you think the kind of final form factor will be for AI in like every day life?

58:03Yeah. Well, I think the ears are probably one of the best spots to put something like that. People keep talking about like you're going to wear a pendant or something. I think that's kind of a dumb place to do it. It's really your eyes and your ears. Those are like the two biggest sensory input points for you as a human being. And so I think that's going to be where a lot of it is. and then as much as I like dislike this idea I do think that there's probably eventually something that's tapped into our brain and just kind of skips those senses and just goes straight in and hardwires in so then it's just a matter of how do you capture the data to feed into those wires that go into your brain and it'll be it'll be your eyes and so it'll be something that you're wearing and man I hate it like I do not like that future where we've got cameras everywhere and and microphones and everything picking it up.

58:52The only way that I see it being okay is if this technology is built in the open and we can inspect it and we can verify it. That is a future that I would love to see. You think about self-driving cars. You've got the Teslas that self-drive and the Waymos and things. There are a couple of projects that are building open source self-driving. And so that is something I'd be fine with. If I could verify the firmware that's going into my car and know that like it's not going to drive me off a bridge if I say something that's you know politically incorrect while I'm driving the car like I want to be able to verify that kind of stuff so it is possible we can have this world with all these amazing wearables and stuff as long as we can inspect how they're being built and what's what's driving them yeah I think the Neuralink is definitely going to be like I think that's probably the sort of end state of this and it's both terrifying and kind of awesome.

59:46Like I don't want one. But when you see these people who are like quadriplegic, who can't do it, like are literally just sat in their wheelchair, unable to move, unable to do anything. And then they have the neural link and they can like play video games and communicate. And like that's a use case that's awesome. Like I'm all for that. But the idea of every single person in the world being chipped and being like tapped into this global AI model is kind of terrifying to me. yeah that's like full dystopia yeah and one and the way you phrased it the global am model right i would hope that it's not one global one that it's a bunch of different ones sorry i interrupted you though yeah maybe there's maybe there's multiple chips but um it's i don't know it's a scary world i'll probably just start farming or something at that point yeah how are you gonna keep up man like if everybody's using it if everybody's getting huge productivity gains off of these chips in their brains i'm just i'm hoping i don't have to keep up by that point.

1:00:40I can just run away and be with, maybe that's where the Bitcoin Citadel has become interesting. This like a no chip Citadel. Yeah. Have real conversation. Because it gets to the point where it's like, who am I talking to? Am I talking to you or is this just Chip talking to Chip and I'm just the physical embodiment of AI? Yeah. I mean, are we all like, is this conversation in the future of us two staring at each other? And then like our minds are going back and forth. It wouldn't make a great podcast. No, no, it wouldn't. um okay so what are the like other things that you're excited about both just generally with the ai stuff and uh and maple um i mean i love the idea that if we can build an ecosystem that's not just us right i don't i don't if somebody walks away from this podcast i don't want them to think that like mark is going to save the world you know from from evil ai like that is not what we're trying to do my title yeah dang it you can you can you can clickbait if you you.

1:01:36But no, what I want is I want to be part of an ecosystem. And if it's not robust yet, then maybe we can help like inspire more people, but we need people building out in the open and opposed to what open AI says they are. They're not open at all. They're closed AI. And so we need to build truly open AI that is verifiable. And that's really the only way that we can build a society that uses this tool and can make sure that it's serving us. because I think that AI has the ability to upgrade humanity, but we need to make sure that our humanity is preserved in the process, that we don't lose it as we embrace these tools.

1:02:16So that's what really gets me excited is the ability for us to kind of build out in the open. We're obviously doing it in the cloud with secure enclaves, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention local AI, right? The most private way to use AI is to run the model directly on your device. turn off the internet and now you're just talking to this thing that's on your laptop or on your phone and nobody knows what's going on there and it's just you having a conversation with this tool and that's really what it should be is a tool um and local ai is awesome most private the problem is that it's just not powerful enough for some people and so we're trying to build this middle ground between like the most private thing on your laptop and then what jgbt is selling to people we want to be the in-between and I think that eventually with Maple we we get to a local state as well so with this memory thing we're talking about we didn't even talk about some other things that we want to work on like data integration into your phone so you have your health app on your phone your fitness app your journals your other things on your other apps on your phone that are just very personal to you you probably have a line drawn in the sand you're like Sam Maltman's not allowed to get into my journal entries.

1:03:27But if you can verify the open source code of Maple, and you trust it, because you can can see what it's doing, then you start to let it into those spaces. So I think there's a lot of really cool stuff we can do where we can make Maple the most personal AI, the most useful AI to you, because we've built it with this data privacy. And that's really what it comes down to when you asked earlier in the conversation, you know these companies with hundreds of employees and thousands of employees how do we compete with them we compete with them because we actually build the the ai that people trust we build the ai that can get most personal with you and so it's going to it's going to know you better than chat gpt will ever know you because you're self-censoring yourself when you talk to chat gpt you're holding back and even people who give it everything they still hold back a little bit i i my hypothesis is that they aren't totally brutally honest with chat gpt because they know that they're sending their information to somebody else.

1:04:21And so we would love to build this place where people can get the most personal because they can verify it. That's awesome because that's 100 % me. The stuff that I just refuse to ever put into one of these big tech LLMs that if I could, if I know with Maple that that's completely private, that I'd be more than willing to share. And then you do get a way more powerful AI model just on the base of what you can actually willingly share. So that's very cool. I totally understand that as like a business model. I think that's awesome. Can we just talk a tiny bit about Bitcoin before we close out? Because I'm interested in your perspective of like where Bitcoin development, like Lightning Network, actual usage of Bitcoin is going.

1:05:05Because obviously you tried to run a Lightning wallet, you had a very cool one and then ended up closing that down. Like, are you still bullish on like this thing's being built on lightning at the moment yeah i i use lightning pretty much every day um a lot of it is nostril usage where i'm zapping people but then i pay for things over the weekend i used a square terminal and paid for something with lightning it was it was great it was so cool just to walk in um the the person at the cash register i said hey can i pay in bitcoin they're like oh yeah here you go boop they hit one button and it popped up with a qr code and i and i paid.

1:05:38I use my Primal wallet, but like I have probably five different Lightning wallets on my phone. All of them work really well. I never have payment failures. So I do love that. I also still love the idea of on-chain Bitcoin and I still like using that. And with fees being so low, like it's almost like why not keep using it? So I think on-chain Bitcoin, let's keep pushing it And while let's keep using it while we can, because that's like the most, you know, censorship resistant form of it. The other L2s, like you have Arc, you have Spark, you have some of these other ones. I have not stayed as current with them because I'm no longer building a lightning wall on myself.

1:06:22I've kind of moved away a little bit from staying totally up to date. But the thing that I do continue to follow is the whole eCache stuff. and I think eCash has a real big, it's really promising both on the cash use side and on the Fediment side and we might see other ones that come out, other kind of mints and other kind of eCash stuff because I think it's this really cool marriage of on-chain Bitcoin, lightning, and then something that is like a bearer token that you can actually pass around. I don't know if you've done it before but with eCash, I can airdrop money to another person peer to peer from my phone to somebody else and they get it.

1:07:01And it's like, they can use it right then, just like a dollar bill that I'm handing to somebody. So to me, I dig in more there. And then I hope that other L2s come along that have other cool things and we can continue to build and scale this thing. Yeah. One of the coolest things when it comes to ARK, I was at the Baltic Honey Badger conference earlier this year and I used like my cashier wallet to buy a beer. and I didn't even know until after the event that that had like everyone all the merchants at the event were using ARK so I'd used eCash obviously Lightning then to ARK without even knowing it happened just like seamless like every like the way I would always pay with Bitcoin and it's just like using these different L2s to like complete the payment and I had no idea that's how it was working I think that was really cool like the UX has got to a point where it's like pretty easy When you go into a Square merchant, I don't have the US privilege of having done this yet because it's only available in America, but how does it work?

1:08:00Do they have to press a different button on their cash register to actually pay in Bitcoin? And is it just Lightning or can you do on-chain as well? My understanding is it's just Lightning right now. And yes, they do have to push another button. I know that the Square team is already looking into making it on every screen. So when you go to pay, the Square terminal has a screen facing the user. And it'll say, like, do you want to tap your phone to pay with Apple Pay or something? They could just have a QR code already on that screen. So if a Bitcoiner wants to pay a Bitcoin, it's just right there.

1:08:33They want to get there eventually. They're just not there yet. And then obviously the biggest hurdle is they have to turn on Bitcoin to begin with. And that is required by some kind of admin, somebody who has like elevated privileges on the terminal to turn it on and activate it. and there might be also some like know your business kind of stuff kyb where maybe the maybe the store is on the older version of square terminal and they never went through some of the documentation government id kind of stuff so there might be some of that they have to do too in order to activate it but once it's activated yes it is like hey do you accept bitcoin oh i want to pay in bitcoin so there's a little bit of friction there and i would love to see them remove that to make it even more seamless.

1:09:13Yeah. Do you think this is maybe a bearish question to even ask, but do you think it'll work? Because we've seen people try and convince merchants to accept Bitcoin in the past. Around 2017, 2018, there were a ton of businesses where I live in Brisbane that were accepting Bitcoin. And you slowly saw those, we accept Bitcoin here stickers get pulled off windows because no one actually used it. Do you think this is different because Square is such a huge company with so many businesses actually integrated? Yes, I think it is. And there's also so many different wallets out there now that work really well.

1:09:52So from a user standpoint, it's really easy to, and Cash App being the biggest one, right? I think that's really what it is. It's this company that's come in that has all of the pieces. They have an app, a user end, an end user app with a wallet that is used by tens of millions of people. And then they have the merchant side. And then they've also built in the financial incentive for the merchants where it's like it's zero fees through the end of 2026. So no fees there. And they're making it so that you don't even have to pay with Bitcoin. You can pay with your USD balance. I don't know if you've seen this, but you can actually pay with your cash balance.

1:10:30But then it goes over the Bitcoin rails and then settles in cash again. That's how the merchant wants it. So they're just using more like Strike is doing where Lightning is just the rails between the two parties, but they're both exchanging in their currency that they prefer to use. So I do think that this time is different. The famous phrase, I do think that it is because there's such a critical mass of people now around the world that know about Bitcoin and have it. And then the merchants can see there's this history now that shows that Bitcoin appreciates over time due to kind of the scarcity of the asset.

1:11:10and Square makes it so easy for them to slowly get into it, right? They don't have to like go all in on Bitcoin. They can just go a little bit if they want to. And then as they see it grow, then they go into it more. And then one other piece I'll throw on there is that burger company, Steak and Shake, that famously started accepting Bitcoin before Square turned on their stuff. Steak and Shake has had, I don't know if they're public earning reports, but they've come out and said, hey, this Bitcoin thing is going so well for us. We've actually accelerated some of our store openings and our expansion.

1:11:43Our company is in a much better financial state now because we just went in and started doing this Bitcoin thing. So it's going really well for us. So that's a case study now for merchants to look at and say, all right, we have like 9 % margins on this thing. How do we get this 3 % fee reduced down to zero? That creates even more margin for us. And then we can also start saving the Bitcoin, which allows us to expand our operations in the future. So I think there's a lot of bullishness there. Yeah, that's very cool. Because they're doing their Bitcoin strategic reserve now as well, which is awesome to see.

1:12:12And I loved that when Square made this announcement, the fact that they're using Bitcoin as the payment rails kind of regardless of currency in, currency out. It was almost like a hidden thing. And to me, that's the coolest thing that they've done. I think that's absolutely amazing. And it was like a stealth launch that I think Miles first announced on Twitter almost accidentally. It is really cool how this has gone so quick. Like they're shipping a crazy amount at the moment over at Block. Like they're doing so much cool stuff. Yeah, they've been shipping like crazy. It feels like Miles kind of won the internet last week.

1:12:41He was just like on there. Like this was his week. And it was awesome to see. Like my hat's off to all of them over there. I know it's just not him. It's a whole bunch of people working on it. But that's been great to see. The last things is I would love for people to just kind of think about how they're using AI. and kind of picture it as when you're using some of these systems like ChatGPT that you have another person sitting in the room, excuse me, you have another person sitting in the room kind of watching everything that you do and they are approving or rejecting what you do and say and they're making copies of it.

1:13:19So just kind of have that in your mind as you're using it and then I would love for people to sign up for Maple. They can go to trymaple.ai. They don't have to stop using ChatGPT, just add Maple into your toolbox and then use it for things. And you'll start to see like, hey, that person that was sitting in the room with me, listening to everything that I'm doing with my AI, that's not there in Maple. And start to notice how you use that differently and how maybe you're more free to speak. And that's really our whole thought around Maple. Maple is the AI that allows you to think freely. And what I mean by that is just there's there's nobody who is trying to get in your way.

1:13:59And there's nobody that's going to hold you accountable for anything you say, because when we think in our mind, we think all sorts of things and that's how we're supposed to work. And so if we're going to use this AI tool to help us think, we shouldn't have some intermediary in between telling us, no, that's not okay to think that way. We should be thinking freely. Yeah. So, I mean, people should definitely go check out maple and i'm actually like this has made me reconsider how i'm using ai i'm gonna use maple more and more because um like i think a big part of the reason i'm kind of stuck on chat gpt is just habit so i'm going to try and break that habit and and use maple so this week i'm going to be maple only and we'll see how it goes okay well what i want from you is oh sorry what i want from you is like tell me the features that you're like i must have that in maple um that's really useful from people so we can start building that i do think for me the big one would be memory if we get memory like that's awesome because like now it's no longer sort of um restrained by the training data they can actually search the web like that's huge and if it then had memory i think that's kind of everything i want really talk talking to it would be great but i only do that really occasionally anyway but if it if it knew a bit more about me in a private way that's that's a that's basically everything i need that's awesome yeah let's go all right thank you mark and where do people find you on Twitter if they want to follow you?

1:15:18Oh yeah, it's just my name, Mark Suman on Twitter, and then I'm on Primal Noster. I'm just marks at primal.net. You can find me there. Awesome. Thank you, Mark. This has been great. And I'll hopefully see you in Austin soon. Let's do it.

1:15:47Thank you.