ESCAPING THE ALGORITHM WITH NOSTR - PabloF7Z (Bitcoin Talk on THE Bitcoin Podcast)

I don't see the window of opportunity of modifying where culture goes as being too long. Like I honestly think we have a few years, like four, five, maybe 10 years, but we don't have a whole lifetime of, oh, well, if Bitcoin doesn't work now, whatever, maybe we'll hyper Bitcoin, whatever that means in 15 or 20 years. I think these technologies, this culture, because at the end of the day, this culture, if they are going to find a footing, it has to happen relatively soon, not in 20 years.

And we just need to continue on boarding a few users here and there. No, we need to basically unlock the productive capacity. That's why also why I don't shield Bitcoin and NOSR to anybody that listens. I think we need to focus on the people that have the most impact, the people that matter the most, which is the productive people. Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast.

The Bitcoin time chain is 837-685 and the value of one Bitcoin is shockingly still one Bitcoin. Today's episode is Bitcoin talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else comes up. Today, that guest is Pablo F7Z, a badass open source developer who is now building a shitload of different things on NOSR. We talk about Bitcoin a bit, but focus mainly on NOSR, free speech, confrontational truth, and the power of optionality.

If you are already using NOSR, you're going to love this episode because Pablo breaks down a ton of incredible things being built on the protocol, many of which he's building himself. And if you haven't tried NOSR yet or you tried it like a year ago and didn't like it because it felt clunky, I hope this episode is the push you need to give it a shot or try it again. You have a chance to be an early adopter of an open protocol for communication and meet some pretty incredible people on the way.

You can find some links in the show notes to get started on NOSR. Before we dive in, I'm pleased to announce a new partner for the Bitcoin podcast, Cloaked Wireless, a privacy and security focused 5G wireless service built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners, providing the nation's best protection against sim swap attacks, which are quite obviously on the rise.

Use promo code WALKER for 25% off the first month of your eSIM or physical sim plan, pay in fiat or Bitcoin, and keep yourself safe from sim swap attacks. One shout out to my long time sponsor, Bitbox, go to bitbox.swiss slash walker and use the promo code WALKER for 5% off the fully open source. Bitbox 02 Bitcoin only hardware wallet.

If you'd rather watch this show than listen, head to the show notes for links to YouTube and rumble, but if you're like me and you just prefer to listen, I highly recommend you check out fountain.fm. Not only can you send Bitcoin to your favorite podcasters to give value for value, but you can earn Bitcoin just for listening to this show. And if you're already listening to the Bitcoin podcast on fountain, consider giving the show a boost or creating a clip of something you found interesting.

It really helps further people discover the show. Finally, if you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast, hit me up on social media or through the website, bitcoinpodcast.net. But further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Pablo F7Z. Now we're golden.

You know, I realized too that I haven't live streamed any of these shows and I realized I'm I feel like I'm kind of larking in a sense because I really should be like live streaming these for no stir. And so, you know, I need to I need to get my shit figured out, but this is this is still my, let's say, side job hobby in addition to my fiat job. So I'm like, but I need to get on top of it. But thank you for the live stream. The live stream is a different format. It changes. It changes what is.

So I don't know. I think there's a place for live streams. There's a place for just just one because I think the value of the live stream is is that the chat basically, you know, make it more right. So I think that's a good alternative, but yeah, I think there's a place for both. I just saw you had you were with Odell and Fiat job on on Citadel. Was that yesterday? That was two days ago. I think or two days ago.

Okay. Yeah. Cause I just saw that and I was I was on Odell's or Odell's or your page and it looked like he had uploaded that full file to Noster like the the the link where the file location was was actually on primal. Is that is that the case or like cause it was like a two hour dispatch? It could be. Maybe maybe I just kind of just it differently. I don't know.

I mean, I mean the file could be on could be on primal for people that have like the I forgot what million calls it like a verified account. No, no, no, I think it's primal plus or something like that. You get I think it's like 10 gigabytes of storage or something like that. So it could perfectly be on stored on the on the primal content, but it's not it's not a Noster. I mean, the file itself is regardless of whether it's on a private server. It's it's not it's not hosted on a Noster relay.

Yeah. It was like I think about that, you know, seen from Zoolander where it's like the files are in the computer, you know, and it's like, no, the files are not in the relay, you know, so I wanted a chance to talk to you today because I, you know, you and I, I think the first time we met was unconfiscatable. Was that 2022 maybe? Is that sound right? It could be. Yeah, it sounds, it sounds alright. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. And at that point, Noster was not even on my radar.

I think it wasn't for most people. It may have been on your radar already, but that was I think it was it was about the time if it was May 2022, that's exactly the month that I tried Noster for the first time. So probably I think it was like, I want to say like February 2022 was it was earlier. I remember I was happy to get out of the Midwest and over to Vegas for some sunshine at that time. But I don't know. I was at the moment I go to and goes to Skateball.

I was in shock because it was my first time in Vegas. I mean, my first, only and last time in Vegas and I was in shock at how disgusting that play was. You know, I've got to say, I have a sweet spot for Vegas because and it's not like I'm a huge gambler or anything. But what I like about Vegas is it does not try to be anything. It's not like it's fully self aware in as much as a city, a location can be like we know why you people are coming here. We know what you're here to do.

It's to be degenerates. But Carl and I, we'd actually, we lived out there to try it out. I feel believed for a couple of months last year. And the nice thing about Vegas is you can, you can, you know, we live like 20 minutes from the strip and you can go to the strip and literally do anything you want 24, 7, 365. But you can also drive like 20 minutes and be in these beautiful national or state parks. Yeah. Feel like you're on this alien planet completely away from any other human beings.

So there is, there is some balance there between nature and complete urban degeneracy. So you know, I have a soft spot for Vegas. I, I, um, before ever being to Vegas, uh, many, many years ago, I, I considered moving to Vegas because I was living in Boston. Um, and I wanted to go to a place with more climbing and Boston has basically no climbing whatsoever. Um, and Vegas has really sick, uh, triathrock climbing very, very close to the city.

So it was one of the places that I was considering because of what you, what you mentioned. Uh, no, what shocked me about Vegas was like the, um, the slot machines with the people just reduced like completely stripped out of their humanity and reduced to pushing a bottom until some like lights light up. Uh, and I, I could not believe my eyes when I saw that, that people will. But when you totally walk into that kind of lifestyle, it's so weird.

The slot machines are one of the most depressing things to watch. I mean, you see these like old grandmas and grandpas like spending their, you know, social security checks at these slot machines and just mindlessly, like you said, just pushing that button, pushing that button.

And if I may, I, I, it's kind of a, a fair analogy for the way that people interact with most social media these days where it's just this mindless, repetitive, scrolling, liking, scrolling, liking, just without, without ever really engaging their brains very deeply and just kind of, you know, you were just being fed these bright lights and, you know, shiny things and, you know, and in the case of Vegas, they're taking your money, but in the case

of social media centralized platforms, I guess they're taking your data, which is a perfect transition to no stir. Ah, we tied it all together. Vegas to no stir. But so for, for those who, for those who don't know you, I'd like to start out with just a very basic question, which is who are you and how did you get here today to be building like 27 different micro apps on no stir and a now full time no stir dev? Um, well, I mean, I'm a developer.

I've been, I've been writing code like open source code since, since forever. I started writing, uh, like my first open source project I launched when I was 11. Um, and I started working on it. I started working on it because, um, because I had read a book about C programming and I was using Linux at the time and there were no good email clients for Linux and, and I fear, okay, I'm obviously, I just learned how to code.

So obviously I'm not going to be able to write, um, a graphical user interface email client for Linux, but I wonder why I'm not going to be able to do it. So my goal was to find what was the roadblock, like what was going to stop me and it's just nothing stopped me. I, I, I implemented both three. So I was able to fetch emails. Um, I implemented this place and then I implemented SMTP. Uh, um, so I could send emails and, and it, I don't know. It felt like such a cool experience.

I ended up doing that, working on that email client for, for five years, uh, for five or six, six years. I stopped when I was 17. I stopped, uh, because I ran out of, well, I mean, I didn't run out of funds. I completely ran out of money and Argentina when I was 17, Argentina went to total shit. Uh, so I had to move by myself to, to Spain, uh, and I started need, I needed real money. So I could not pursue, uh, working on these projects as a, as a hobby.

I was getting some funding, like, uh, people were donating some money. Um, but it's funny. I have, um, the, the website for that email client is still alive. Um, and I was asking for money via bank wires. Um, and I had to dox all my information so people could send me like my address, my full name, like all that information. And, and I was also asking for money on PayPal. So on my website, I had, you can send me money via PayPal and I had a link to the PayPal like account.

My account got banned from PayPal. Then I was asking for people for money to send me, to send me like cash on envelopes. Uh, then I found out that that was illegal. It's really funny because I, I was kind of feeling the problem that Bitcoin solves. Um, but yeah, it's really funny that that's, that thing is still there and it's still like such good proof of the problem that like for all the people that say, Oh, Bitcoin is such a stupid scam. What's the point?

All like this, this was a very, very organic problem that I was having. Bitcoin, I mean, this was way before Bitcoin existed, but Bitcoin would have, would have fixed this, this issue. It is so funny because, and first of all, it's just incredible that you were building open source solutions at the ripe young age of 11. That's just insane. Um, I was, I don't know, like setting things on fire in my backyard, uh, at age 11. So clearly you were operating on a different frequency than I was.

But I think that that is such a great point about, about Bitcoin. And I think it's, it's one of those things where so many people in the so-called developed world or the, you know, the Western world, especially have that attitude of, well, why would you need it? What, who, who would possibly need this?

And it's like, if you step just like a toe outside of your Western bubble where finance, the financial system, relatively speaking is pretty stable and you can, you know, for the most part, I mean, it's not always easy. It's gotten somewhat easier, but you can send fiat around. Uh, and you don't necessarily need to worry about your currency getting devalued overnight by 50% or more.

They just, they, they can't possibly see that there is a whole world of people out there who still have the same problems that you were dealing with back then with just trying to, uh, trying to receive money from either local or international sources. Like, and it's, it is a great use. I mean, Bitcoin would have been very useful to you back then. Oh my God. So if I can ask, when did you, uh, when did you discover Bitcoin? I mean, I, you know, at what point in your life?

And when did you start kind of, because you've developed on Bitcoin as well. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I started, I saw Bitcoin a bunch of times here and there. I was always super busy. I've always been like very, very busy. Um, and, and I never had any time to, to look at Bitcoin until 2017. Uh, it always sounded like such a stupid scam. Um, like all the promises that it makes sound so unlikely that it is as if I were to tell you, Oh, I found a way for humans to fly without any assistance.

It's like, I don't have to look into it. That sounds retarded. I will not spend five minutes looking into your technique of how to move your arms. I know that that's physically impossible. Um, Bitcoin sounded always sounded like that to me until 2017. And yeah, in 2017, uh, a friend of mine, uh, showed me that he was trading light coin and all the shit coins. I was like, Bitcoin is still around. That's insane.

I mean, I saw Bitcoin in 2011 on slash dot and like all these places and, and hacker news and these places. And I was again, I didn't even look at it. Um, and yeah, in 2017, I, I looked at the, uh, not Bitcoin per se, but I was a little bit closer because I started not trading shit coins because that from the get go trading shit coins or trading Bitcoin felt like, okay, this is, this is, uh, it's a zero sum game. I know I'm not going to be as good as others.

I don't care about trading as much as others. Uh, so it's a, it's a game that I know that if I play, I will lose. So I never even got started. Um, there is a really good book by a Bassett golden called the deep.

Um, and the idea of the, of the book is that it's really important to, to play at whatever you're doing to, to do your best, but it's also really important to recognize when you should quit and if you're going to lose at something, the sooner you realize that that's not the game for you, the better. Uh, so yeah, kind of applying that.

Um, but what I knew the word I did have an edge was on, on software development and stuff like that and understanding, um, speed in systems and, uh, high frequency trading and a shit, not high frequency trading, but high frequency trades. Um, I had worked, um, like 15 years ago at, um, at Merrill Lynch, uh, doing, um, the messaging system for, for, for the traders to execute trades.

So I understand like how that system, like how speed works and like all, all these different concepts, how, how they work the, um, the cost of, of renting rack space. So having servers on the floor at NASDAQ, how expensive that is, the buildings that are right across the street from night from the stock exchange, how, how expensive those buildings are because you get faster access to the data.

Um, so I knew I, I, that's where I had an edge and that's the edge that, that got me into, into crypto scamming, I guess. And yeah, I wrote basically like a platform for just for myself. I, I didn't like most people that actually make money, they, you don't sell these platforms to other people. You exploited yourself. So I wrote a platform that was doing arbitrage across a bunch of exchanges and I did that for like a year and a half. That was like my only source of income.

I was not working for anyone. I was just putting on my, my own capital, but I was getting massive return on investment. And, uh, but yeah, well, once, once that, once that, that, that, that, that, that, that that part died, I was like, okay, now what is Bitcoin? Um, now you can start really digging deep into it. Now I can understand what the fuck this PTC, ETC, ETH and all these stupid tickers mean and yeah, that, but I had, I had read about, uh, I had read Mrs. like I read human action in 2006.

Uh, I've been to Austrian economics before the, the financial crisis, the 2008 financial crisis has very much into, into Austrian economics because I mean, I'm from Argentina, like this kind of stuff interests me because I, I understand the pain.

Yeah. I mean, and again, it's a, it's one of those things at the, let's say the Austrian economics level where so many people in the Western world may not understand the real ramifications of what those theories mean and what, uh, well, I should say, you know, what the actual practice that we do in basically all of the world is with regard to, uh, essentially in hyperinflationary fiat monetary technology, which is just a, a very poor base layer to,

to build humanity off of, I think as we've seen, it has a lot of long-term effects that are starting to, uh, to bear very rotten fruit and that's becoming clearer to people. But I appreciate the background because I think it's, well, first of all, it's, it's fascinating. I could probably ask a lot more questions about this arbitrage, uh, development you did because that sounds quite, uh, quite interesting. But, but you've now shifted. Technically it was a lot of fun. I can imagine.

I can imagine. It was, is it more, was it more fun than building on Noster right now? It's very different. Uh, as I was working on that, I knew that that was like very short-term thinking because I, like people that do this kind of thing, they rationalize thinking, Oh, I'm bringing, I'm bringing certain to, to the market. I'm bringing more efficient prices. And that's all bullshit. It's full, full, full bullshit. Uh, so I knew that that was bullshit.

I didn't lie to myself thinking that I was thinking, okay, I, I, I am just making a lot of money doing this thing. I know I'm giving nothing to society. Um, but I, yeah, it's, it's like, okay.

Like this is going to be good for me in, you know, exclusively in terms of, in terms of, uh, certainty of having, like having, like to me growing up, I, when I'm, when I moved to Spain, when I was 17, I was literally like, I mean, not as poor as you can be, but like to the point of, of not having enough food to, to, to eat, uh, and eating food in, in, in like rotten food, because I like, I literally had no, no food.

I would buy pasta at the, uh, the beginning of the month and just eat pasta, uh, all the time. And sometimes it would like go bad. Like if I had tomato sauce or something like that, it would go bad. Um, and, and to me having some monetary stability, having, having savings, uh, was like super important. So I, yeah, back to your question. Now, I mean, building a Noster is a whole lot more fun because, um, it's obviously not as profitable whatsoever.

Um, but, um, but, uh, but yeah, it's, it's fulfilling in, it's fulfilling in, uh, I mean, I think that, uh, that the stuff that we're working on on Noster has huge, huge ramifications. Um, I think we can beat a really bad bullet. Um, and, and hey, if I can, if I can be of help, um, changing, changing where the world is going, um, man, I'm going to do it. Well, I, I love that.

No, it folks, like you give me so much hope for the future and optimism for the future because I see the passion that you have and also the ability that you have. And like, you know, it doesn't matter how much, uh, if I dropped everything and started studying and, and you know, learning, uh, all these programs, like I'm, I'm never going to reach that level that you have been able to achieve over, you know, decades of hard, hard work at this.

And so for those of us who are in that camp, it's like, okay, we find different ways that we can perhaps contribute to this to help spread the word, but I'm so grateful for the people who actually do the building because without you guys, we wouldn't have anything to spread the word about and spreading the word about Nostra is, is really fun because I think it's in many ways, it's, it's easier than it's easier to, to offer people the purple

pill than the orange pill of Bitcoin, I think in many ways. Cause social like money is something very few people understand. And even the people who understand money admit how little they understand, but social media is something that everybody, you know, moat the vast majority of people in this world these days use in one capacity or another. It's something that's very tangible and familiar to them.

And so to say, you know, and obviously Nostra has the potential for so much more than just social media, but that's what we're seeing as the initial manifestation of this open protocol is kind of building what people know, what they're familiar with, what's going to bring them on board as, as users of this protocol, which is social media. And it's something that's fun. It's interactive, you know, it's, it's pro social. And I think that that's kind of a beautiful thing.

And you, to, to go to the very like basics of Nostra, can you say just kind of in your own words, you know, notes, notes, there is notes and other stuff transmitted by relays, but how do you describe it to people when you're talking to somebody about Nostra for the first time? What do you say to them to say, you know, this is what Nostra is and here's why you should be excited about it. Here's why it's special. I mean, it depends largely on whom I, I speaking to or with.

So yeah, I, I tend not to do a lot of advocacy in that sense. I've done it with, with Bitcoin. When I first started to understand Bitcoin, I, I, I did it with Bitcoin and I was, you know, like the typical Bitcoiner who can't stop talking about Bitcoin, who starts getting shunned by, by his friends because he like won't talk about anything else. Or now that we're talking about popcorn, have you heard of Bitcoin? Yeah. So yeah, I don't do a lot of advocacy in that sense.

There is like a very, like I do, I love stoicism and there is this probably very incorrect quote, that the, the, the, the message stands from Seneca that says that the, the, the philosopher doesn't talk about philosophy. The philosopher lives a life of philosophy and the people who are ready to listen, pay attention and might ask questions, something along, along those lines. And I don't know, to me, I have a lot of ideas about, about Nostra.

I have a lot of ideas about how everything fits together. Every time I've tried to, to articulate them, I, I realized that I, that I cannot paint the whole picture that I have in my head of how everything comes together. So my, my, my, my speech is my code, basically, which I'm starting to understand. I'm starting to realize, I mean, I'm not starting to realize, I've realized that it's not enough. It's maybe 40%. It's making the product, making the projects, open sourcing them and all that.

But also painting a picture of how, like the, so for example, Wiki Freedia, it's like a, maybe you've seen it, it's, it's like a Wikipedia style that I built on Nostra. And I've realized when I, when I launched that, I realized that I thought the, the, the, the project itself spoke by itself. But then I realized, describing it to people that the full picture, and particularly the most important part of the picture was not revealed, just by using it.

It would take, like, it would take some investment in time for people using the project to realize the implications. But the implication, so for example, for Wiki Freedia, it's a good example because it's very self-contained. So in Wiki Freedia, there is no canonical entry for the truth. Not because of any philosophical reason, although that too, not for any philosophical reason, but because you cannot have a canonical version of the truth in a decentralized protocol.

There is no entry for whatever, philosophy or whatever, second world war that everybody subscribes to, right, whereas in Wikipedia, when you go to Wikipedia, you go to wikipedia.com slash yem slash whatever Nostra or internet. And what's there is what the people have agreed that is the truth of what the internet is or whatever entry you're looking at. But that is by definition, people need to agree that that's, so, so what you must remove is all the edges of that truth, right?

You need to remove all the stuff that people cannot agree on. So if you go to ivermectin, for example, you're going to see a bunch of stuff and maybe you'll see links to conspiracy theories about ivermectin as just as an example. Whereas if you walker, you do some tests with ivermectin during COVID and you arrive to certain conclusions, you can publish that and people can subscribe to what you're saying or they can refute what you're saying, but they cannot change what you are saying, right?

So even though it's just, oh, it's Wikipedia and Nostra, whatever, great. The implications are much, much wider than that. It's not truth by democracy anymore. It's confrontational truths. And I think you can arrive to certain truths that you would not be able to arrive if you were to go via a consensus by majority or consensus on any kind of way. So I completely forgot what the question was.

No, I love that tangent because I think that that idea of, what did you say, confrontational truth, I think was the phrase you used. I think that that's really an important idea because especially, like the internet is such an incredible tool.

It is so amazing that we have these things in our pockets that have basically the whole history or someone's version of the history of the world and all of the information we could possibly use with so many apps on them that can do specific things that provide us with really these tools that people a couple of generations ago could not even have dreamed of.

Maybe a couple of really future forward dreamers were getting close, but for the most part, we're not so great at predicting the future except some brilliant science fiction authors who do a decent job sometimes. But this idea of confrontational truth being different from what we have now on most of the, on honestly, most of the internet and certainly on places like Wikipedia, where you have to have that consensus truth, that version that it is agreed upon.

Again, by just a group of people, we're not saying that these people somehow have a better handle on the truth than anyone else. They're just the ones who have become Wikipedia moderators and now have a position of power that they can exert where they say, we're not going to add this, we're going to delete that footnote right there because we don't want to be spreading conspiracy theories about Ivermectin in this example.

And I think that idea of confrontational truth gets back to such a deeper kind of philosophical need, which is the need for people to reach their own conclusions, to do your own research, to take in multiple sources and often confrontational conflicting sources and be able to arrive at a conclusion that is entirely your own, that is unique to you because you haven't just been spoon fed, here's the bullet point summary from Wikipedia and now this is what I believe

to because Wikipedia said so or because chat GPT said so within their wall garden of their algorithm responses. And so it's this beautiful thing of an encouragement for people to digest information from multiple sources that may often be in conflict and to reach their own conclusions based on that. It's giving people the information, it's showing them what to think about, not what to think to put it a different way.

And I think that's such an important and powerful thing that has very much become lost in the spoon fed information generation that we live in right now. Absolutely, yeah. To me, when I hear bit coiners say, do your own research, which I agree with, it feels like a very, I mean, there is simply there is no better, no better path, but do your own research is a little bit hand waving away the problem because you like, okay, do your own research. Great.

On the first point, people are just not used to like the vast majority of people, you tell them that and the only thing they can think is I'm going to go to Google and I'm going to search bit coin, right? And you're going to end up in three websites talking about the bit coin price and some stupid bullshit. So it's a really hard problem because it's a muscle that we've lost in the last 30, 40, 50 years. We started losing it. It started degrading.

And when you mentioned chat, I have a lot of concerns about not like the fucking AI's are you going to kill us on all this, or we're not going to have jobs and all those stupid things. My main concern is that people have with the internet, with Google in particular, or with like what we can call Google as a whole, people have offloaded memory into the internet. So you don't have to recall a bunch of stupid facts and you can go to Wikipedia and Wikipedia will tell you everything you need to know.

And I would post that it will give you a trivia. Basically it's not going to give you knowledge. It's probably not even going to give you information. It gives you trivia. And I think we are at the point where people are going to start offloading not just their memory but now with chat GPT, they're thinking. And what's interesting is that chat GPT by design, like the way LLMs work is they give you the mediocre, like they give you the mid-width meme, like the red smack in the middle.

And especially like the chat GPT models, if you go with something more like NVK's Unleashed or something like that, the model is trying to be, the skewing be reduced. For the most part, the vast, vast majority of people are going to be using these models to offload their thinking into a mediocre, mediocre-ty producing machine. So we've lost the capacity to memorize, to remember things. And memorizing things, it sounds retarded.

It sounds like, why do I need to memorize these things at school and stuff like that? But you don't know what you don't know, right? So memorizing is kind of important. Memories are the ingredients of thoughts, right? So if we also flowed thinking into these machines that produce mediocrity, it's just a flattening of human creativity, which I don't know.

I keep thinking that we, people that are able to think, and especially like praxeological style think from first principles, in 10, 20 years, we're going to be like a different species from the absolute vast majority of the world that goes down this path. And I think this is one of the things that Noster can have as a byproduct. Like playing it out the whole way, I think this could be one of the byproducts of Noster dominating the internet. That's why I'm so excited to work on these things.

And sometimes I see all these things and I feel a lot of pressure. And then I have literal breakdowns and then she hacks me and he's like, dude, chill, it's going to be okay. But I have such a strong sense of urgency to fix these problems. And I think maybe if I didn't have kids, I would not have this sense of urgency like burning so much. But I don't know, I feel like, I've said this a couple of times, but I feel like culture is in flux for the past.

I think since, I don't know if it's causality or causality. Yeah, you got it. But like about the time of when Obama was president, I don't care about politics. I think all politics are shit. And politics needs to be downstream from economics and not vice versa. But around like 2015, 2014, it's like culture was on stasis and now it's in flux. And it's been in flux for quite a few years.

And I think all the deep platforming and all the censoring on the main social networks is just a byproduct of culture being in flux. And we are going to reach a new stasis, a new point of equilibrium in culture, which could take a really long time to go out of equilibrium again. So I see this huge opportunity for freedom technologies to be the point where culture finds its new equilibrium.

Like the meme of CVDCs and all these things on one path, the dark, scary path or Nostra and Bitcoin and freedom technologies and schooling on the other path. I see this very real. And I don't see the window of opportunity of modifying where culture goes as being too long.

Like I honestly think we have a few years, like four or five, maybe 10 years, but we don't have a whole lifetime of, oh, well, if Bitcoin doesn't work now, whatever, maybe we'll try, like, we'll hyper-Bitcoin, whatever that means in 15 or 20 years. I think these technologies, this culture, because at the end of the day, this culture, if they are going to find a footing, it has to happen relatively soon, not in 20 years. And we just need to continue onboarding a few users here and there.

You know, we need to basically unlock the productive capacity. That's why also why I don't shield Bitcoin and Nostra to anybody that listens. I think we need to focus on the people that have the most impact, the people that matter the most, which is the productive people.

And in that sense, I'm very friendly with, I'm really good friends with Alex Vetsky, and in that sense, I agree with his point of view that it's not that we need to bring anybody, anyone on board is bring the people that matter the most, and it's not a one-to-one. There are many, many differences. All right, that was a really long run. Sorry. No, no, that, you know what, this is an open forum for long grants, and I loved it.

And there's quite a bit to unpack there, but I'm just going to start with the very end because, you know, what with my millennial brain memory, I probably can't even go back too much farther. You know, I've already offloaded some of that. But I think I've talked with Vetsky about this too, and, you know, this idea that, and recently talked with NVK also about the idea that Bitcoin is for everyone is kind of misstated.

Bitcoin is for anyone, anyone who wants to learn, anyone who has the capacity to learn, anyone who is productive and wants to find a way to store the fruits of their labor in a way that will shield them from all of the external forces that are trying to devalue the fruits of their labor. And I think as it relates, you know, kind of this, the urgency, I feel that more acutely now that I've had a son as well.

It's like things, you know, I cared about these things before, but now it's like, oh, fuck, it's not just about me. It's not just about Carla. It's about our son who will live on long after we are here and his children and what kind of world do we want to leave them? And the path that we're on right now, because I would agree that there is a, we are in flux right now, and there's opportunities for those two different paths to take control.

There's right now it's undecided, I think, which direction humanity ends up going in, but it's ultimately going to be influenced by the people who have the greatest influence. And I think that right now in our culture, we see that, you know, some of the most productive and influential people are also, let's say productive and influential in the sphere of social media. And that is where their messages are disseminated. That's where their influence comes from is their reach online.

And so through that lens, I think Nostra is so, so very important to being able to change those tides because right now these walled gardens that most people are operating in, they don't realize that that garden can just be filled with cement and shut off and they will never be allowed back in there again. And I think that it's a good strategy to try and, you know, again, everyone's free to do whatever the fuck they want.

I'm not going to tell you how to live your life, but one of the most productive things that we can do if we're trying to, you know, hashtag grow Nostra is to bring over the people who have influence, who then will, because of their influence, will bring their, you know, the followers that they have with them. They will, and, you know, you saw that at a huge scale when someone like Jack started using Nostra. Like we have very clear evidence of this massive influx of users when Snowden got on.

Same thing. It's that spark that says, well, this is a person I really respect and admire and value their opinion. They're trying this new thing. I'm going to try it too. And so with that said, I think that what you are, what you're building right now with Highlighter is really cool and sort of fills a bit of that need.

And I'd like to kind of switch to talk a little bit more about Highlighter because I remember when you first released it some months ago and I was trying it, you know, I uploaded some articles to there and then, and it's, I think you had based it on Gigi's purple text orange highlights that kind of gave you the spark for the idea, right? And now I have to admit, I had not used it in a couple of months. It's with a baby.

It's been a busy time, you know, and I went back on there recently and I was like, oh, shit, this looks so fucking good. This looks amazing. And now you've got this whole subscription thing that's being built out for creators. You've got, it seems to me as though Highlighter is coalescing around a one stop shop for creators, influencer, whatever you want to call it. But you know, for anyone who wants to have a place they can send people to digest their content and to also support them.

And I know right now, you know, you've got the articles, you've got video capabilities on their notes, but then I saw that you also have, you know, coming soon live stream, coming soon podcast. So can you tell me, can, can you first of all, can you give an overview of what Highlighter is for anyone who is not familiar Highlighter.com for anyone listening and where it is now and where you plan to take it.

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Please do not feel the need to just trust me when you go to bitbox.swiss slash Walker and use promo code Walker. Not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support this fucking podcast. So thank you. I mean, you captured it exquisitely well better than I could have said it, but that is exactly the idea.

And the idea that I have in mind is just like you said, is that the people that have more social capital in the same way that Michael Saylor comes into Bitcoin and he has a disproportionate effect because he has a lot of financial capital. He has a very large effect on the price of Bitcoin and a lot of things of what Bitcoin means.

The same thing happens with creators and people that have social capital, like just like you said, Jack and Snowden were when they arrived, each one of them was the highest user count growth in a single day was when they joined and published about it on Twitter and other mediums. So I have the exact same idea. And so yeah, highlighter.com, the idea is to be a place where creators can come.

They can bring people that want to follow them and they need to have the tools that are required for them to interact with their community. So there is a sense of community when you subscribe to someone, you can participate in the chat, you can participate in the private forums for this person. You can access, if they choose, they can publish content that is exclusive for the paid members of the community.

I have some ambivalence whether that makes sense, but I know it's an important part for many people. So I put the option and creators can choose to use it or not.

But yeah, the idea is this has been a need that people have been experiencing for really, I mean, for the past four, five, six years when sub-stack started growing, when patrons started growing, when locals.com and Rumble and all these sites that a few people got banned from YouTube, a few people got banned from Medium and Twitter and these places. So they've created a platform because it's very much a platform still.

Like it's a platform, like all these things are a platform, but with the promise, hey, we won't ban you. Wink, wink, probably. But it's such a bad proposition, right? Because you're running away from a platform because they do ban people and you're going into a different one where it's still a company, it's still operated, it's a legal business that still operates within the framework of the state.

So they can very easily, like push off a bot, Rumble, for example, you cannot access Rumble on Brazil. The whole country is banned from using Rumble because one judge in Brazil said, hey, this content, one creator in this platform is not legit, so the whole platform is banned. And there is a concept in literature, the Chekhov's gun, where if you introduce a gun in a story, the gun will be used.

If there is a button that you can push and block and ban people, the button will be pushed at some point. It's just if it can't be done, it will be done. It's like Fiat, the basement. If it can't be done, it will be done and it can't be done. So my idea with highlighter is not to create just a place that is censorship resistant on all these things because the vast majority of people, they don't really care about censorship resistant, most people don't care about that.

It's just a better product for creators. I need a better product, not just because of the censorship resistance. I think because of the censorship resistance, there is something really cool that happens where currently creators, they need to have different, like they have to have a funnel, so they must participate in different platforms. Like they need to go to Instagram or to Medium.com because or Twitter, because that's where people are.

So you go to Twitter.com or you go to Medium.com and you publish your content there because you get top of the funnel, you get more eyes on your content. But you can't really monetize well via those mediums. You need to take those visitors away from the platform into a new platform, mind you, where you can run your business. Hopefully they won't ban you, probably they won't. They will take whatever 10, 15% cut from your revenue.

You still are subject to maybe an algorithm that will say whether, like, regardless of the fact that someone followed you or subscribed to you, maybe they won't get the stuff that you want to show them. So it's interesting because when you go into people like Tom Woods or Ben Settle or people that do their business online, what they pitch is forget about social media because it's a game that is totally rigged. You won't own your audience, so just follow on having a mailing list. And why?

The reason is that if you have the email address of someone, you can always send them an email. Maybe she sends you to spam. I'm guessing Alex Jones ends up in spam or promotions very often. But it's like a more direct connection with the audience, whereas you get a Twitter follower, maybe you publish something, maybe they'll see it, maybe you get shadow banned and they don't. So you never know. I think Nostar is like the email part where you have a direct relationship.

It is way more direct than email because again, email is still a super centralized protocol, extremely centralized protocol. And at the same time, why do people don't default to using email because you lose the viral possibilities? You cannot go viral on email. People don't do forwarding of emails in a viral way. Oh, this email is amazing. I'm going to send it to all my contacts, like the people don't do that anymore. They don't do it anymore. So in Nostar, you can have both.

You can have the direct relationship and you can have the virality part. You can publish something to your audience and they can share it. They can like it. They can repost it and they can share it with all their followers. So I think it's the best of both worlds. I think there's a massive, massive opportunity there. And yeah, I mean, I don't know if you have any questions before.

No, no, I was just going to say, I think that that's a really excellent point about the comparison with email, but without the obviously email is a protocol, but has become incredibly centralized with massive gatekeepers who basically control all of it. You could still run your own emails, but nobody does. You can't. It's really hard. It's really hard. Yeah, it's just not going to happen. I used to run my email servers for many, many, many years.

And I think I gave up like maybe 20 or 15 years ago, I just gave up. It's a lot of work for you to have your own email and not end up in spam most of the time. Right. Right. And it's a great analogy that you're able to get the direct connection of email where you are actually, I'm sending this to you. You're going to get it.

It doesn't, the algorithm, there's not an algorithm to say, well, we don't really like what was said there, so we're just not going to really show that to anyone at any large scale. And so you're never going to be seen. You're going to be siloed. You're going to be knee capped, basically. But you have that direct, but you can still go viral because that is one of the incredible things that social media did, like the advent of the retweet, basically, that said, I like this.

I want to share this with my network. And all these people in my network may not have any crossover with the person who originally shared its network, but now they do because now I've retweeted out. That simple action was basically the advent of true virality, was the retweet, the repost. That's what made virality possible. And it's really, I mean, it's a brilliant thing. And it shows, without the algorithmic bias, the cream really rises to the top even more.

Because you're not, again, things may go viral on Twitter, on X these days, not because it's the best content, but because it pushes the right little buttons and the algorithm liked the way that it was framed.

And so it's diminished the signal that the retweet used to provide, I think, by adding in so much algorithmic bias to that and also various tiers of, okay, well, if you're a Twitter premium member, you're going to get a greater chance at virality than if you're just an unverified person on Twitter. There's so many different levels there that with Nostra, you're able to cut that out.

And again, I've said this before, but I think it's a fairly decent point that on Nostra, value is the algorithm, at least right now. We'll see algorithms come in, right? That people can voluntarily opt into. But right now, value is the algorithm. What people find valuable is what gets shared and boosted out to more people.

It's also what directly accrues value through Zapps, which is kind of this beautiful thing and it's such a more high signal activity than you see on any other platform right now. And I think that that's just mind-blowingly beautiful to see in action. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And with regards to the algorithm, the way I see it is, of course, I mean, I wrote a few algorithms for discovering notes and content discovery, which is basically what an algorithm does for social media.

And the thing is that when you don't have one predominant algorithm that everybody, like literally billions of people are under the influence, there are no economics to try to optimize for that algorithm, right? So when you, like I've spoken with content creators about this and that you have, like these people, they become experts at the TikTok algorithm and they become experts at the Twitter algorithm.

And they produce the same content, but they modify the content like the same video and they change small things. And man, I got into detail with people with millions of followers on TikTok and the level of detail that they go to on, OK, for the TikTok video, we need to have a bottle on the background, like that level of detail. That's, they become experts to that degree. And it's the same thing that happened with SEO.

We have so much bullshit on the internet because there are, there is a very strong financial incentive to become an expert at SEO. The point of SEO is not to make better, more informative websites or to seek truth or in anyway, it's just to run better. So you don't focus on the value of the hue that the human will perceive. You focus on what's the score that the algorithm of Google is going to give you for this content, right?

So you end up like, if you have a KPI, if you have a key performance indicator, you're going to gain the KPI. That's what humans do all the time, constantly. We always do that, right? So the fact that in Nostra, we have this bucket of data and you will have one algorithm for these people and one algorithm for these people and you end up with hundreds, thousands of algorithms. None of them has enough economic incentive to be, attempt to be gamed.

So the algorithm that I wrote can be gamed probably in like easily. It could be gamed. But if there is not enough economic momentum behind that algorithm, there is no incentive to try and gain that algorithm. So at the end, you must focus on, well, fuck it. Let's just produce content that is valuable to the person and may the chip fall where they may, right?

And I think we, you see the effects of that on Nostra and I love reading the notes from people who are doing, maybe it's a couple posts after their introduction note or something and they've started to actually go around and interact a bit more on Nostra. And the experience pretty much, I mean, basically the experience everyone seems to have is, oh, wow, this is such a different vibe than any other social media platform I've used.

And of course, because, you know, it's not a platform, it's a protocol, but yet, you know, it's so much different than any other social media I've used. There's just a different energy here. There's a different vibe here. There's, I think there's also, there's a lot more positivity in general because rage-baiting people, which the algorithms like on these other platforms, it doesn't work on Nostra.

People don't want, you know, feel that, you know, people like to share happy things more than they like to share sad or angry things, right? But on centralized platforms, they're incentivized to produce content that gets people angry or, you know, frustrated because that's what people go to town on their keyboards on and get pissed off about. And then it goes viral for all the wrong reasons because it's just like this rage-bait porn that is a vicious cycle. But on Nostra, you don't have that.

And so you also don't, as you said, because there's no economic incentive to game the algorithm because there is not one algorithm. I think there will be innumerable algorithms that are developed on Nostra that people can opt into freely. But you have no idea what your audience and what other people are opting into. So what are you going to do? What are you left with? Well, then I should just be myself and try to create things that I think are valuable.

I mean, wow, what an incredible concept, just being authentic and trying to create value. And that's so beautiful, though. And I think Nostra is what? It's like, I was checking on Primal just before this, I think it was around 775,000 NPUBs that are alleged to be out there and how many of those are active versus dead ones. Who knows? But it's still so very small relative to these platforms, very, very tiny.

But there is such a rich, rich, let's say, a rich spread of content of all different types because instead of trying to game some algorithm, people are just posting what they like, what excites them, what they're into, what they're passionate about. And it turns out that resonates with other people.

And like hashtags are actually somewhat useful again because hashtags really just became, I mean, they used to be a very useful thing on Twitter, but now it's like, if you go to the Bitcoin hashtag on Twitter, you'll literally just like the top five things are just obviously posts that are complete spam that a bunch of bots have re-upped and they got picked up by the algorithm and it's garbage. You can't actually find any signal there.

On Nooster, you can go to any number of little hashtags and find this cool little niche of people that are actually posting about what that hashtag is about, not just trying to game the algorithm somehow with what hashtag is trending for the day. And that's incredible. And it gives people this sense that, oh, wow, social media is working again.

It seems somehow productive to spend your time on there and to engage on there because you can actually find things of value versus just finding whatever rage bait the algorithm fed you to get you pissed off and keep you doom scrolling through the app. It's a beautiful thing to see in action. And I look forward to seeing how that starts to scale because again, we are at a very small scale still relative to these, I mean, relative to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever.

But it's heartening to see that. It gives me hope. Yeah, oh man, it gives me hope too. So much. I started, I saw a post from someone that I think she's new to Nooster, but she's super active. I forgot her name, it's Laessarin or something like that. But she's like a super cool account. I love following her. And she published something saying like people with a lot of followers, they forgot what it's like to not have followers or something like that. And I thought, oh, that's a fantastic idea.

And I just created a new account. It's Pablo and I said, okay, from this account, I'm only going to publish about climbing. It's not about going to be my developer account or the account where I'm publishing all the time. It's my account for my climbing persona. And that accounts about climbing. So it's a different profile picture. Instead of Pablo, as I said, it's just Pablo. And yeah, I started just publishing a few notes here and there.

And then I just started having like some organic conversations and I started posting, I think on my first post, I mentioned that I have this goal of climbing. I used to climb really hard. Like four or five years ago, I was climbing 8A, which is like, it's really, really high. It's like, I mean, it's pretty good. And from where I am now, like from my conditioning right now, I cannot climb 8A, not even close. Maybe I could climb like 6C or 7A or something like that.

And I figured that if I train diligently a lot, maybe in two years, I'll be able to climb back to 2A. And I just started talking about this and mentioning my plan and just I'm sharing pictures with my training and shit like that. And it was amazing, man. It's really weird because that account has like 100 followers. It's, you know, like it doesn't have rich. But I feel seen like one of the things that I noticed that on day two of using that account, I felt seen. I felt that people were engaging.

It's not from my main account that has a lot of followers and whenever I publish something, it gets a bunch of reposts and all this. You know, it's like a very small account, but the experience of having a small account compared to any of the other social networks where you have to have like a game plan to have followers and to know people just engage with the stuff that you're saying. It's such a, and what you're saying is I actually, it's kind of a joke, but I published from that account.

I published the people in Nostra are very kind, but because of Nostra, then we use the concept of kind. It means something. So it was kind of like tongue in cheek. But it's very true. And the people were engaging in a very nice, in a very nice way. Most people thought that it was, it was like, like an imposter account that I was an imposter of myself and I started getting DMs on, like DMs on telegram asking me, yo, somebody's impersonating you again. But no, it's my real account.

They're just talking about climbing nonstop. I don't know what their game plan is. Yeah. But friends of mine that like friends, like physical friends of mine were like, no, dude, that's, that those are your shoes. He's real. But yeah, it's such a different, but Shishi has this, he has said this many, many times, which I think it's a really, it captures it very well that people don't want, like they don't want to look at a crush car.

Like you see a crush car and you don't feel like, oh man, that was amazing. I'm going to sap the crush car. This was like, right? But you still look because there is something about your humanity that is really hard to not look at something tragic that has happened as an accident or whatever it might be. And all the algorithms end up optimizing for that, right? They end up optimizing.

And I think that's why the, the face, like you go to YouTube and all the thumbnails have these people with like really stupid faces. And I think it's exactly, yeah, exactly like that. And I think it's exactly that is, it's not that you like it. It's just like it, it triggers something very, very primal in you, something like what, what is going on? Why does person looking like that, right?

And it's not that the, the, the people that produce the video like doing that phase is that the algorithm ended up feeding them, ended up directing them in, in this, in this direction. And now they, they've changed their behavior to accommodate to what the algorithm likes. Which, which is something that interests me quite a bit because like you and me, we've escaped Fiat, right? We've, even if you have a Fiat job. We, we don't think in Fiat terms.

We don't feel like we, in the matrix terms, we, we are outside the matrix, right? Like we can see it. We can see for, for what it is. Even if you still need to, whatever, buy things with Fiat, whatever. Like you can understand that game and you choose not to play it or you choose to, to play it in a different way. With Nostra is kind of the same. We see the algorithm. We see what's behind this manipulation of the algorithms. We can see all that stuff and we opt out. Perfect.

But the problem is that the vast majority of people that surround us in real life are still plugged in into that system, right? So even if we withdraw ourselves from that system, we are still affected by that system because the people that surround us still behave under the influence of Fiat, under the influence of these social media algorithms. So our escape is not complete, really. Our escape is very, very partial. And like this is something that I've learned from Francis.

He's a good friend, Francis Poulio. And he told me, dude, I am going to optimize my life to be only surrounded by Bitcoiners. And in that sense, it's a way to even try to reduce your exposure to these perverse systems into your life, which is all that matters. It's all you have control over. But I don't know, this leaking of those perverse incentives and perverse systems is something that kind of, it makes me think. Like, where am I still exposed to these systems? Now, it's such a good point.

And I like the car crash analogy as well, because I mean, that is basically the summarized experience on centralized platforms. They're showing you as many car crashes as they can because they know you'll look. And sometimes those car crashes also make you really not just sad or disgusted, but really angry. And that's even better. A really anger inducing car crash. That's the crème de la crème. That's what they're going. Yeah, that's the pinnacle of that experience. And so it is a great point.

You find yourself, if you're using something like Twitter, you can very quickly get into a weird headspace with that. Or find yourself feeling a little bit agitated for kind of no apparent reason. Once you step out of yourself for a second and say, wait, wait, wait, what am I even doing here? What did I just look at for the last 15 minutes? What was this? I don't really remember any of it, actually.

But somehow I just feel a little bit anxious or angry or whatever and have this desire to tell a bunch of people to fuck off. And then you spend this time on Nostra. And you're like, wow, look at all these cool things being built. Oh, that's a nice picture of a flower. Oh, so and so is doing something with their kids. That's nice. It's this non-toxic experience that is, I think, so much better for us mentally.

And that's one of the things I hope because I agree, something you said earlier that I think not enough of us fully grok, but is a really good point is that the majority of people don't actually give a shit about censorship resistance. Like, they really, they honestly don't really care about it. That angle is not what's going to bring them over to start using Nostra.

It's not because most of them, even if they understand, well, yeah, this is a problem and yeah, I believe in free speech and yet, but I'm not getting censored. And you can tell them that, well, you know, they'll come for you one day too. And they're like, yeah, okay, sure. They don't care. They really don't care.

What I think is actually attractive to people is, oh, this is something that feels more real, feels genuinely organic, feels not contrived to make me angry or sad or just to stick in this app for a while. Like on Nostra, it's like you keep scrolling because you keep finding things that are valuable on, on Twitter, on, I mean, I don't use Facebook anymore, but, you know, wherever else you're doing it, I don't use Tik Tok either.

But if I did, and from what I understand, I mean, that is literally designed to just keep you, to keep you inside. It is literally designed to pull you in and, and not get out. It's designed to make you take a two hour, you know, shit on the toilet because you didn't realize you were still just scrolling to talk this entire time. And on Nostra, it's like, oh, no, I'm still scrolling because I'm still finding valuable things on here. And that's like, that's a beautiful thing.

It's still too orsonish on it, but it's filled with love. Yeah, but they're productive hours though, you know, and you take a great shit at the end of it. But another thing that I think is, is really interesting is I've, you've even seen a lot of pushback from, from Bitcoiners, maybe not as much now more coming around to it, but a lot of Bitcoiners who are, you know, on Bitcoin Twitter, especially like a year ago, a lot pushed back very forcefully saying, oh, well, Nostra is just a distraction.

You know, Nostra is a shit coin. Like, no, Nostra is this, Nostra is that. It won't be around in a year. It's still here. And it's better than ever. The experience is better than ever across many more clients. So, you know, obviously demonstrably wrong on that. But I found that to be so weird because Bitcoiners are this subsection of, of people that you think should get what Nostra is all about faster than anyone.

And we have seen that as very much the case, but we've also seen people like, for example, like Roya comes to mind who found Nostra and through Nostra found Bitcoin and, and was able to jump over the whole shitcoining thing and just went straight to Bitcoin only. Like what an amazing pipeline and like, you know, a great person to have on Nostra as well. And I'm curious what your, what your thought is on just like the, the kind of reluctance by some Bitcoiners, it seems to, to embrace Nostra.

Like, is it because they're still just stuck? Like they have, maybe they have a big audience, for example. And they're like, well, I don't want, you know, like you said earlier, you don't want to start from scratch. Or is it something else? Is it like, is it just the scam rate, you know, signals going up and say, well, anything that's new now besides Bitcoin is a scam.

And so I'm just not even going to look at it, even though it's using Bitcoin, like in a very real way on the lightning network, which also apparently doesn't work, but like it works every time I use it. So I'm curious of your thoughts on that.

Before delving into, into that part, since you mentioned Roya, Roya, so, so I met Roya when in, in Nostrica, so in March last year, and it was kind of like the nail in the coffin of me working for a Bitcoin company and saying, fuck it, I need to go all in on Nostra. It was, it was, I was roommates with her during Nostrica. So we were staying in the same Airbnb.

And I'm here listening to her talking about she's, she's from Iran and, and she always thought, oh, Bitcoin is like this stupid investment thing, which is what 99.9999% of people think Bitcoin is like this fucking ticker. And seeing her find Nostra because it was valuable to her. And then finding Bitcoin very, very close after finding Nostra and talking to her about what it is and why it's different, like all those things.

It was, okay, Nostra is going to orange peel more people that all the other efforts we've been doing in the past 12, 13, 14 years combined. Easy, like very, very easy. Because like what you were saying at the beginning of the conversation is that the, the, the barrier to clear, to try something new, a social network, it's so much lower than parting with money.

Like you worked whatever time and you had this hundred bucks and your first action during Bitcoin is, oh, I need to spend my money to buy this stupid scam money. It's, it's such a, it's such a much higher barrier to clear, much higher bar to clear to buy Bitcoin than to, oh fuck. I'm going to try this thing. Oh man, I got a sub. What the hell is this? So, so with that out of the way, so thank you, Roya. And I love you. With that out of the way, I think there are many different reasons.

I'm, I'm a bit this, I mean, a bit, a lot, this solution with, with Bitcoiners. I think a lot of Bitcoiners, it's, it's just a lot of Bitcoiners, especially early on, they, they arrived to Bitcoin in, in, in some way. But I think there is a, currently there's a lot of Bitcoiners that are into Bitcoin, but they could have easily be into a different cult because Bitcoin does have like a bit of culty vibes, like, like most things, anything that has, oh, we're going to have a conference around it.

It has kind of culty vibes. And I think a lot of people just stumbled on the Bitcoin cult, but they don't understand really what, what Bitcoin is. They think, oh, I'm going to run a node and that's going to be like, I have all these flags of, okay, I have a lightning channel, I have a node and I coin join. And great. But if you don't know what the hell any of that means and why you're doing these things and you don't even know how to use your node, it's, it's very superficial, right?

So I think part of the vibe of Bitcoin is being, uh, disgusted by all the scams that pretend to be Bitcoin and anything that is new for the people that are, uh, very dogmatic is a scam. It doesn't matter what it is. It's a scam. Everything is a scam. Everything about Bitcoin is a scam, even nails or even keys or even laptops or whatever. Everything is a scam. So no, sorry, scam. I think some people fall in that bucket. The very, uh, the, the, the, the, yeah, some people fall in the bucket.

There's a bunch of people that fall in the, in the other side of the, of the nostrils, skeptics, skeptics bucket, which is no stories, very different to Bitcoin. Very, very different. There is no consensus. There is no global. There is no agreement on anything. And that's by design. So I've heard a bunch of people like Shinobi, for example, he, he is skeptical about Nostar from what I've heard on, on a rabbit hole recap, mainly because, um, it, it doesn't scale.

And it's just Bitcoin scales in a very different way to, sorry, Nostar scales in a very different way to Bitcoin because they're very different animals. They're trying to be different things. Uh, Nostar, like one of the typical arguments from more technical people is that you are not going to be able to have a global search or global feed of everything that has been said on, on, on Nostar in the same way that you can do on Twitter. Mind you, the global Twitter feed, it's, it's not global.

It's Twitter global. Uh, it's when you search on Twitter, you're not going to see what happened on TikTok. You're not going to see what happened, uh, in, in your neighbor's house. You're not going to see what happened like in top of Mount Everest. Like you're going to see what happened on Twitter. Uh, so global is a scam. There is no global. The only global is within a system. Um, and it's just so happens that in the, in Nostar, there is no Nostar global Nostar. There is just a bunch of relays.

Um, so I think a lot of people just have this different, uh, expectation of what a, a social network should be. Um, but if you do away with the idea that there can be a global on anything, then I, I think you, you will, people will try, will, will see or they can see it in, in a different lens. Um, but yeah, global is a scam on everything in life. It doesn't exist. No, no, I, I, I like that.

And I appreciate the two sides of the context there because, you know, I, and to any, uh, internet coiners listening to this who are not yet on Nostar, give it a try. And if you tried it, maybe like right after Jack and Snowden got on and said, this is crap and it doesn't work, just try it again. Try, try Damos, try Primal, um, try any, try Snort, try Iris, try Amethyst, uh, try, try any of these.

Um, perhaps the easiest one for you to get going on if you are, are feeling like the onboarding experience is difficult. Primal has done a very good job with that onboarding experience for mobile. I've got to give them a lot of credit and a million on his team because that it's, it's really nice. It's really clean and we'll probably feel more familiar to you fellow Bitcoiner. So give Nostar a try again.

And on the topic of clients, actually, I, I'd love to just know, what do you use as your daily driver? Do you use a couple of different clients? Like, do you have a preferred client, uh, on, on mobile and then you're using something totally different on web or are you using Primal across all? What do you, what do you, what's your stack look like? Oh man, I use a lot of clients all the time.

Um, because that's cool thing is that each client gives you a slightly different perspective on things, even within like the micro blogging style clients. So on my phone, I use a Primal, Nostar, uh, and Deimos. They're like my three clients that at any point I'll, I'll open, maybe I'll like literally open Primal. And right after opening Primal, I'll open Nostar. And then maybe an hour later I'll open Deimos. Um, they're, they're very different, right?

Even if the look is kind of similar, they are different things. Um, and then on, on my, on my computer, uh, yeah, my computer also use a lot of different clients. Uh, I cycle through, um, Nostrude, I love Nostrude is amazing. Uh, I use Coracle a lot, uh, and I use Primal a lot. Um, yeah, I would say those are my three main micro blogging clients. I use also use, uh, sub stream, especially for like rabbit hole recap and things like that.

Um, but yeah, man, I also use like a bunch of other clients, common line clients and, and, and she liked that. Um, yeah. I'm curious also outside of kind of micro blogging clients, what are you, uh, maybe it's something, let's say outside of things that you're building that you've seen other people building. And I know you're, cause you're building a lot between, uh, between Wikipedia and highlighter. Um, and you know, you built Zap life a while ago, which is just a really cool thing.

And you've built probably a dozen other things that maybe I haven't even heard of, but outside of what you're building, uh, what are you most, uh, like most excited about? Like I heard about a blossom recently. Uh, I think I saw maybe it was Gigi post about it, but what are, what is really exciting to you in the Noster ecosystem right now outside of micro blogging clients? Uh, it's a hard question because it's, yeah, it's, it's all this stuff that I'm working on. I know.

I don't like working on, um, well then tell me what, then tell me what you're working on that you're most excited about. I like, um, so I wrote shipyard, uh, a while ago and shipyard is like, uh, it's a right only, uh, client. Um, so the experience is very different because it is a micro blogging client, but you only publish from there. Um, but you don't have a feed basically. So it's, it's, it's like a client without a feed.

Um, but it's very cool because I can, I can just go there and I can write and then if I don't feel like publishing it, I'll, I'll save it as a draft and maybe I'll come back later to it or like I can schedule, um, my posts from there. So I, I very often, um, go there. If I'm thinking about something and I want to express it, I'll go there because the, the tagline of the client is, um, uh, a sanctuary for, for folks writing or something like that.

And the idea is like, it's, it's like, I can go there and it's like, this is a writing space, you know, it's not for just a quick thought is to think a little bit deeper, not trying to be long form because it doesn't publish on form. Um, although I'm thinking about maybe changing it to be, uh, kind agnostic. So it could do long form. Um, but, um, but yeah. So she paired is one that I, I, I like a lot.

Uh, a lot of people use it, but, but again, because it's not a client that you can, you don't link to it, right? You don't say, oh, go and read this thing that I wrote. Sheeper. Um, it has quite some usage. Um, but, uh, but yeah, it's more like a productivity tool. I don't know. I, uh, productivity tools, so I'll see it very short. I hate productivity tools. Um, but, um, but yeah, I, I like that client. Um, I like highlighter.

It's, um, I think it's going to be really useful once I'm, I move it further along. Uh, but yeah, the idea is that you can go there and you will see a feed of, um, of, ideas, um, like the, the stuff that you care, that's why it's called highlighter because it highlights the stuff that you're interested in. Right. So, um, if you subscribe to, to content creators, it's going to, you're going to see a feed of all the stuff that they are publishing.

If you pay for something you'll see on the feed, you'll see like the paid content. You can also see the paid content on, on any other client as well. Um, but it also shows you a feed of people that you are following that have highlighted something and it can be on a book. It can be on a website. It can be on, on Nostar itself.

Um, so there is like this really cool app that I loved, um, that allows you to import your highlights from Kindle, um, and then you can, you can like, you can have like this collection of all the stuff that you've been reading and have them all together. Um, yeah, I, I, I want to, I, I, I love that, that idea. So I want to bring that into, into Nostar. So the highlighter is, is that so there's a need for highlights.

Um, those, yeah, those are two, the Wiki-free the, um, but that's also something that I wrote. So I mean, it's, it's a selection bias, right? Like I, I write the stuff that I'm interested in. No, but that's the beautiful thing, right? Is that you have this ability to, you know, like you want something where you have an idea based on a tool that used to exist and you're like, Oh, you know what? Why don't I just do that on Nostar? Like wow.

And, and you just can't and nobody can stop you and it, and it's, it's, it's a beautiful thing. I'm actually curious to just to dig into highlighter a little bit more because, so you've got the, again, like the article publishing, you've got the ability, like you can upload a link for anyone that doesn't know of you. So go to highlight your.com if you're listening to this and you can like drop in a link. You can, you know, basically turn that into a, a Nostar, a note on Nostar, right?

But you can, you also have coming up here. You've already got the ability to upload video there. You've got the coming soon under live stream and podcast. So, you know, going forward, anything that's published through highlighter is going to, depending on the kind, right, is going to display on whatever clients support that, right?

It's, so it's in addition to being a kind of a repository, it's also a publishing tool and of course a discovery tool as well for people who just want to go there and follow their creators. Is that a fair kind of overview in that way? It is. Um, to me, the most important part, um, was that I, I don't want because I'm seeing this more and more, uh, lately. Um, it's something that I think we need to call out when we see it.

Um, and I, I'm always unsure whether to name names, but there are a few Nostar clients that they pretend to be a Nostar, but you can't create a client. Like you are not, you're writing to a database that they own and you are locking yourself into the database, right? It's just a side, it's just another silo. It just happens to look like it's a Nostar client, right? Um, and yeah, again, I don't, I don't want to name any names, but they're very popular ones.

Um, and, and I think it's a problem because the, the idea, like, I think we're not, we were Nostar shines. Nostar is not better. Like sub stream, well, sub stream might be better than Twitch, uh, but Primal with all the work that million has done and all the work that the, the Primal team has done, Primal is not better than Twitter. It cannot be better than Twitter because Twitter has network effects. So what's the best client?

What's the best network is the network that has the people that you want to interact with. Right. So Twitter is a million times better than Primal. Twitter is a million times better than Deimos and Snort and any client. Um, YouTube is better than Flare. YouTube, uh, patron is better than the highlighter. Substack is better than highlighter. So I don't think any of these clients will end up being at, from a more, um, broader perspective, one to one can beat the incumbents, right?

That's why they're incumbent. How many, how many companies have tried to do this from Facebook? How many companies have tried to dethrone Reddit hundreds and hundreds and thousands of completely failed experiments. So other than going head to head with, with Reddit or Twitter or whatever is the way to go. I think where we shine, the, the stuff that we have that they don't is the interoperability.

So to me, the stuff that I work on and the stuff that I get excited and the stuff that I will like promote, if you will, um, is the stuff that retains the interpretable elements. So while building highlighter, instead of just saying, Oh, fuck it. I'm just going to put everything on my database and all these suckers can, I'm going to capture all this audience and they're going to be highlighted creators. Um, no, I want to build this in a way where they are Nostar creators.

It's Nostar content and highlighters, a client that leverages this network. There is one more client. So as I was working on everything I built from the neeps to how data is done, everything, I was thinking, Amethyst, which is the main Android client, Amethyst doesn't have a backend. It doesn't have a server. It doesn't, it doesn't have a bunch of things that are required to make something like this work.

I want users from Amethyst to be able to subscribe, to interact, to publish their content, to do all the things that a creator or a subscriber to creator can do from Amethyst. And I also don't want highlighter to be the only place where creators can create their stuff on Nostar. I don't want to recreate one more fucking silo on top of Nostar. So, I am very, highlighter is one more client right now because I wrote all these neeps, I wrote all these specs publicly, of course.

There is already for what, like the main neep, there is already one more client. It's just for something else, but there is already one more client doing subscription payments. Highlighter is just one more client. So to me that was fundamental because highlighter by itself is not going to be thrown patron. It's just not going to happen. So yeah, I forgot why I started ranting about this. It's just, yeah.

No, no, no, I like it because I think that's a really important point is that each of these clients, each of these implementations by themselves is not where, even though they may be really nice and really clean and improving all the time to take primal as the example you gave by themselves, they're not going to dethrone the incumbents, but that's not where Nostar's strength is.

Nostar's strength is in the fact that you can use and choose from dozens of different clients, dozens of different experiences. You can use them all interchangeably on a daily basis as you clearly just called up before.

And that's where the power is because it's like a, it's like a choose your own adventure for people because, you know, on the current silo platforms, like what you do on YouTube is different from what you do on Twitter is different from what you do on Instagram is different from what you do on Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. Right. On Nostar, you can still have that different clients for different purposes, but the difference being that your audience is still your audience across all of them.

You're not siloing the people that you're trying to reach and having to have a different strategy for how you build up your, your, your following in each one of these silos. You just do what you do. And however you want to interact with Nostar, what you are creating gets out in front of the people who follow you, who want to see it and who you want to be seen by. And that's the power.

The power is not in, you know, one individual client becoming a super app because it's, it's still not going to be, you know, as good as something like Twitter, you know, it just, it's just not entirely possible, but all of these put together. And this is that idea of micro apps, right? That Fiat Jaffas talked about, that you have talked about a lot.

Uh, Jack, I mean, many people have talked about a lot, but I, and I, I didn't, when I was first getting on Nostar, I didn't quite get what was meant by that. I now very much do, I think, and it's just this that we're talking about. It's that you can, you don't need to build the everything app and have that be the way that, that this new protocol wins. In fact, that's probably counterproductive to Nostar winning. What you need is just optionality. You need optionality.

So if you're listening to this and you are not on Nostar yet, I'll link a bunch of different clients that you can try out. And the key thing to remember is that once you create your account and keep your private key safe, please, uh, you can use any of these interchangeably and your followers will still be your followers. You'll see all of the things you've posted across all of them and you don't need to worry about, okay, I've, well, I've posted this on Twitter.

Now I need to go, uh, you know, create a banner image and post this on YouTube and add a bunch of timestamps. Now I need to go make a image of this and put this on, uh, Instagram. No, no, no, you just create a note and send it and it goes everywhere and it's seen by everyone who follows you. And that, that is like a crazy concept. And back to your earlier point about like there's no true global Nostar seems to be about as close as you can get though.

You know, it still may not be a true global and depending on what relays you are, but it's at least, it's at least close because the, the silos are of a different nature there. And you also, again, you can't get kicked out of those silos and you can't be blacklisted by, I mean, China tried, right? But people are still using Nostar in China. Like they may have kicked Domus out, but people are still using Nostar over there.

Uh, so unless they want to, you know, really shut down, uh, shut down internet access over there, it's people are going to keep using it. And that's a beautiful thing. It's a powerful thing. Yeah. To me, the way I've been thinking about it lately is that I think with Nostar, um, the, what's happening and what will end up happening is that we'll end up with a localized internet.

Um, it's like when we start for like a suspicious, when we started exploring with the idea that I can communicate with people in China. And instantly it's, it's complexity from a computer science, science terms is 01 is, is the same distance from us talking as if I'm sending a message to my wife in, in, in, in the, uh, in the hallway. Um, uh, or to someone in China, it's the same distance, right?

Um, and, and we explore like we, we felt this globalized, we instant communication with absolutely everybody. And I think what's happening now is that we end up fragmenting in communities, uh, which are like, um, it's like a local community is the people like you and me are friends. We've probably seen each other in real life, like three or four times in different points in the world, but whatever there's a bit con conference, we, we, we ended up coalescing.

We ended up hanging out and it's like, oh, fuck Walker, how are you doing? Um, um, yeah. And, and in the same way it's like, it's like it extends your, your, your, your humanity. It extends your social layer to the people that you, that you're around, uh, in a very organic way. Um, I think no sir is going to, to help a lot with that.

Um, and part with regards to the microapps thing that you were mentioning before is that when you have a super app, um, that has billions and billions of users like Twitter or Facebook, the app has to work for everybody. Like in the same way, like the same experience must work across all boundaries, across all cultures, right? So for on one side, you like these companies, when they are working on their products, they, they must, um, they must find whatever works for most people.

So you end up with a pretty mediocre product. That's why the internet kind of looks the same. No matter what you're using, you, you, it's kind of everything looks the same, feels the same. You open any app, you immediately know how to use it because it's the same as the other app you were using before. It's just accessing a different database, but it's kind of the same thing. Um, and it like, it flattens the, the culture a little bit, right?

Like everybody, because we interact with these fucking products all day. It's like everybody in the world is interacting with the same fucking products all day. We see the same fucking buttons and we didn't know how to like, it's, everything is the same. Um, so I think when you go to an app that doesn't need to capture every single use case under the sun, it can just be like this very specific niche client that maybe appeals total addressable market of a thousand people.

It can go really wild and it can go very long tail and be very strange, but maybe a thousand people will absolutely love that experience. But it's not the network itself doesn't need to be constrained to a thousand people. The network itself is Noster. They can still interact with the broad Noster ecosystem, but from a different perspective, from a different point of view.

Um, and it's, it's really hard to convey how much these different experiences, the, the, the look on the field and the UX of a product changes your behavior. But I see it all the time because I use so many different clients. I noticed that I act different when I'm using client A or client B or client C is the same content, but I act different. It's insane. It's absolutely crazy, man.

Um, and to me, that's, that's what excites me so much is like this broadening of the human experience because we will end up with really different products. And we can still have very tight, um, experiences when using these different products when moving from one experience to a different experience, uh, because Noster allows that. Um, so yeah, like you were saying earlier that you're hopeful. I, I am, man, I am so incredibly hopeful. I think, I think we got it.

Like I think there's a lot of work to be done, but I think we got it. Uh, I think we have the right energy. We have the right builders. I'm, I'm very, very, very, very hopeful to of where we're going, what we're doing. Um, and I think the implications are really hard to grasp. Like I am very bullshit, very bullshit on the, uh, very bullish on the, on the, on, on where we're going. Uh, and the, the downstream effects, the secondary and third order effects of the stuff we're working on.

Um, but I don't think I, I, even in my wildest dreams where it's, it's going to be, it's going to exceed that. Well, you know, I am very bullshit on it as well. Uh, and, uh, you know, that's a, uh, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm that's a, that's a wonderful note to wrap up on here. Uh, notes, no pun intended. Um, I'll, I'll link to, uh, to, you know, your, uh, to your end pub and to highlighter.com.

Is any other, uh, sites you want to send people to that I should throw in the show notes? No, my, my, my end pub is, is all you need. It's, uh, that's, that's the cool part that, uh, there doesn't need to be a hard coding anymore to, to anything. Um, there's, there's been a lot of, um, attempts at having a namespace. Uh, and I always say that namespace are always belief systems.

The, the only, uh, namespace is math, uh, and, and, and by several presentation of, of math, it doesn't need to be, uh, queried in any way. It's just a fucking long number. Um, and like, because if you have a user names or, or stuff like that, that is within one system, right? Even, even within the fiat system or DNS or, or whatever, it's, it's, it's a name within a system. So my end pub is all you need. Um, yeah. Anyone that wants to find me can find me with my end pub. Beautiful.

Well, and, uh, a lovely note to end on. I want to thank you, Pablo, because, you know, uh, like your time at Bitcoin is scarce, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for sharing your scarce time on this one. This was, uh, an illuminating chat, really enjoyed it. And, uh, it was great to see you again, looking forward to doing it in person again, hopefully soon. Me too, man. Me too. I'm very excited. Thank you for, for having me here. I, I appreciate you a lot Walker.

So I'm, I'm very happy we, we got to the least. And the feeling is very mutual, my friend. And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. If you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast, head to Bitcoin podcast.net or hit me up on social media on noster. Head to primal.net slash Walker and on Twitter search for at Walker America or at TIT coin podcast.

You can also watch the video version of this show on X or on YouTube by going to YouTube.com slash at Walker America or rumble by searching for at Walker America. Bitcoin is scarce. There will only ever be 21 million, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.