Freedom Tech vs the Surveillance State: White Noise, Bitcoin & Nostr | Jeff G

Summary

THE Bitcoin Podcast

Episode: Freedom Tech vs. the Surveillance State: White Noise, Bitcoin & Nostr | Jeff G

Host: Walker America
Guest: Jeff G (White Noise, Marmot Protocol)
Date: December 30, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this rich and urgent episode, Walker America sits down with Jeff G, lead builder on White Noise and the Marmot Protocol, to explore the battle between "Freedom Tech" and the ever-expanding surveillance state. They discuss the philosophies, technologies, and human stakes behind Bitcoin, Nostr, decentralized protocols, and the critical place of privacy in an increasingly controlled digital era.

This is a wide-ranging conversation, moving from technical deep-dives—how White Noise is pushing the envelope in encrypted messaging—to the societal threats posed by digital identity mandates, government overreach, and the normalization of surveillance. The duo also explores the global context, with Jeff sharing insights from the Africa Bitcoin Conference and the unique challenges facing builders and users under authoritarian regimes.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Emerging Freedom Tech Landscape

• The notion of "Freedom Tech" is at the heart of the episode: technology aiming to protect individual privacy, resist censorship, and empower users—particularly vital in regions under authoritarian rule.
• Both guests stress that technological innovation is driven by real, on-the-ground needs—local contexts in Africa, for example, generate different solutions than those in the West. ([09:42])

Quote:
“People talk about freedom tech—literally what it is. You’re like helping people that, for them, this could be a life-or-death situation.” — Jeff G [00:45], [33:23]

2. The Risks of Centralization and Surveillance

• Both speakers bemoan the centralization of internet infrastructure, which, while efficient, creates massive vulnerabilities and points of control (e.g., AWS outages, Cloudflare bugs). ([05:18])
• Governments increasingly seek to tie digital financial access, social media identity, and even message content to verified real-world identities (through ID requirements, CBDCs, and social credit systems).

Quote:
“We are now in an arms race and we're on the losing side by default... you must play their game by their rules. As soon as people stop doing that, then yeah, they get scared for good reason. Unless we just say no, we will end up like China...” — Jeff G [00:00], [43:26]

3. The African Perspective

• Fresh from the Africa Bitcoin Conference, Jeff recounts how African Bitcoiners have to build for unreliable infrastructure, authoritarian governments, and unique local languages and needs. ([08:25])
• Solutions like Machankura (Bitcoin over feature phones) exemplify context-driven innovation unlikely to come from the U.S. or Europe. ([09:42-10:21])

4. White Noise & Marmot: Innovations in Decentralized, Encrypted Messaging

White Noise:

• An encrypted messaging app, comparable in UX aims to Signal but distinctly decentralized and built not to leak metadata (“no one in the middle has any chance of understanding what's in that conversation”). ([12:52])
• Unlike even Signal, White Noise aspires to not disclose who is talking to whom, or when.

Marmot Protocol:

• The protocol undergirding White Noise, combining MLS (Messaging Layer Security) with Nostr’s identity and delivery systems to enable forward secrecy, post-compromise security, and efficient group messaging. ([16:12])

Quote:
“In a few months, [we've] got fully end-to-end encrypted messaging running over a fully decentralized network...taking something like Signal…but without all the metadata potentially getting linked to you, without any reliance on [centralized infra] like AWS.” — Jeff G [14:50]

Nostr’s Role:

• Nostr’s identity system is likened to the human "web of trust", messy but resilient (“the closest thing to what we do naturally as humans”). Identity is cryptographically guaranteed, yet not used for actual message encryption within Marmot—limiting compromise risk. ([25:21-27:45])
• “We’re not using your Nostr keys to do any of the encryption, which is really important.” — Jeff G [27:08]

Security & Threat Models:

• Even the best encryption can be defeated by physical device compromise (e.g., border checks, spyware like Pegasus), which both guests emphasize is a different threat model.
• Marmot/White Noise are undergoing intensive third-party security audits. ([41:05])

Notifications & Privacy

• Notification delivery is a major vector for metadata leaks; White Noise’s system, inspired by Signal’s approach, seeks to minimize this risk by passing blank notifications to Apple/Google via an almost stateless intermediary. ([36:33])

5. Global Overreach: ID Mandates, Surveillance, and the Erosion of Free Speech

• The “Panopticon” of state surveillance is discussed with urgency: social media tied to your legal ID, integration with CBDCs, tightening government control. ([43:08])
• LLMs (AI) make it easier for states to mine vast troves of private data.

Quote:
“We are living through this insane shift from everything is physical...to now it's all digital and it's actually just plug into the back door of Google's servers...Now we have, LLMs that are incredibly good at parsing huge amounts of data.” — Jeff G [43:30]

• The risk is not theoretical: governments already debank dissidents and shut down digital communications rather than resorting to overt jailings. ([59:19])
• Most ordinary citizens, especially in the West, are dangerously indifferent or even supportive of these controls, believing “it’s just the price we must pay.” Countermeasures depend on a minority who appreciate privacy and resist. ([46:59], [48:06])

6. Black Pills and White Pills: Realism and Optimism in the Face of Overreach

• The mood oscillates between deep concern and practical optimism (“black pill, white pill”).
• The silver lining: privacy tech, Bitcoin, and Nostr are all improving. Solutions like Pay Join, silent payments, and robust protocol-level privacy consistently advance, often under the regulatory radar. ([63:33])

Quote:
"People underestimate their power...it really has to start with private conversations that then spill over into public discourse." — Jeff G [66:00]

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7. The Future of Nostr and Broader Protocols

• Nostr’s truest success lies in becoming the invisible layer beneath many different applications—not a “Twitter clone”, but a protocol like TCP/IP or SMTP.
• Most users (e.g., of Bitchat, Divine, White Noise) “won't even know they're on Nostr—and that’s the way it should be.” ([68:22])

Quote:
“We need to get out of this trap of thinking that we have to be building Nostr specific things. A handful of curious people will realize that, like, hey wait, what’s this thing built on?...when people talk about Freedom Tech, that’s literally what it is.” — Jeff G [70:33]

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Notable Moments, Quotes & Timestamps

• [00:00] — “They don't actually have to throw you in jail anymore. They just turn off all your money...We are now in an arms race and we're on the losing side by default for sure.”
• [08:25] — Jeff returns from Africa Bitcoin Conference, highlighting the local constraints and ingenuity.
• [12:52] — Jeff introduces White Noise and (at [16:12]) the Marmot Protocol.
• [25:21] — In-depth discussion of Nostr’s human-centric identity framework.
• [33:53] — Product roadmap: White Noise is rapidly maturing; major focus on privacy-preserving notifications.
• [43:26] — On digital IDs/measures: “We are now in an arms race...You must play their game by their rules. As soon as people stop doing that, then yeah, they get scared for good reason. Unless we just say no, we will end up like China...”
• [59:19] — Summarizing state power: “They don't actually have to throw you in jail anymore. They just turn off all your money and all your access...They can stop you from standing on a street corner but to debank you is trivial.”
• [68:22] — Growth of Nostr: “A lot of the uses of NOSTR don't look like NOSTR anymore and you can't tell it's nostr...and that's the way it should be, right?”

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Timestamps: Important Segments

• 00:00–02:00 — Framing the arms race with the surveillance state; control via debanking
• 08:25–11:48 — Africa Bitcoin Conference: unique local challenges
• 12:46–20:00 — Deep-dive on White Noise and the Marmot Protocol
• 25:21–29:58 — Real-world and technical challenges: Nostr identity; forward secrecy
• 33:53–38:15 — Product development philosophy and privacy-preserving notifications
• 43:08–50:51 — Panoptic surveillance, societal sleepwalking, and state overreach
• 59:19–63:33 — The centrality of monetary control; Western indifference; WhatsApp’s paradoxical privacy benefit
• 68:17–73:41 — The invisible protocol layer: why Nostr’s “Twitter clone” era is done; focus on user value
• 77:28–82:30 — Technical frontiers: mesh, radio, local-first protocols; ultimate resilience

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Tone & Style

Blunt, technically-detailed, and impassioned with a dash of dark humor; both speakers balance cynicism about the state and optimism about what builders and rebels can achieve. Expletives and irreverence serve to underline urgency and personal stakes.

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Conclusion & Closing Notes

This episode offers a compelling vision for a future in which technology serves human freedom, not centralized power. Jeff G and Walker America underscore the importance of keeping “the door open” for privacy and agency—emphasizing the urgency for action now, especially as surveillance grows and many citizens remain either apathetic or complicit.

The message: Freedom Tech must stay not just available, but easy, invisible, and everywhere—whether users know what’s under the hood or not.

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Further Resources

• White Noise website & downloads (TestFlight, Zap Store, GitHub)
• [Marmot Protocol documentation & collaboration contact: Jeff G]
• [Nostr resources and clients]
• [Africa Bitcoin Conference]
• For in-depth security/practical advice: turn on "lockdown mode" on Apple devices, consider Graphene OS for Android, and always consider your threat model!

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Listen. Build. Resist. Stay Free.

Transcript

[A]

They don't actually have to throw you in jail anymore. They just turn off all your money. We are now in an arms race and we're on the losing side by default for sure. You do not have as much money as them. We do not have as much resources as them. We might be ideologically correct and morally have the high ground, but like, since when did that mean you won? You must play their game by their rules. As soon as people stop doing that, then yeah, they get scared for good reason. Unless we just say no, we will end up like China where China shit works and it's really cheap and pretty effective and efficient and all the rest. But like, don't step out of line. We need to get out of this trap of thinking that we have to be building nostr specific things. A handful of curious people will realize that, like, hey wait, what's this thing built on? And like, how can I'm seeing all this other content from other places and how are people paying me? Bitcoin. This is crazy. When people talk about freedom tech like that's, that's literally what it is. You're like helping people that for them this could be a life or death situation.

[B]

Foreign. Plebs. My name is Walker and this is the bitcoin podcast. Bitcoin continues to make new blocks every 10 minutes and the value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. If you are listening to this right now, remember you're still early. This episode is brought to you by Blockware. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack bitcoin at the same time? Well, with blockware you can now new US tax rules let miners write off 100% of their mining hardware in a single year. So earn bitcoin daily while saving big come tax season. Get started at mining.blockwaresolutions.com Titcoin use the code Titcoin to get $100 off your first miner when using the blockware marketplace. This is not tax advice so go speak to the team at Blockware to Learn more. That's mining.blockwaresolutions.com Head to the show notes for links to find the show on centralized social media platforms and on Noster or just go directly to bitcoin podcast.net you'll find it all there and kind reminder that you can support this show by becoming a paid subscriber on Fountain or don't. Bitcoin doesn't care, but I sure do appreciate it. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk. This is all kind of, like, still very much emerging. I'm always very pleasantly surprised when things work out as they should. It's like, oh, okay. Sick. Like, we're totally wild.

[A]

I mean, it is kind of wild. Yeah, yeah. You're, like, looking at stuff. You're like, oh, yeah. It just. The message just arrives. Oh, cool. Okay.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[A]

The thing decrypted properly. Wow. Okay.

[B]

Wow. Look at that. We are. We are doing this without the need for YouTube or rumble. You know, Rumble is not too bad. At least they, like, run all of their own servers and have a. I would say a more favorable attitude towards free speech.

[A]

People saying things.

[B]

Yeah, but you know, towards, like, just saying stuff.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Problem being, of course, that it's still like, well, there's still a throat to choke there, you know? And, like, that's where I think. I hope that we see more live streaming services kind of pop up in and around Noster because it is such, like. It's such a massive culture, generally. Just like streamer culture. I didn't even know that until I started kind of like, looking into some of this stuff, and it's like, holy.

[A]

It's wild.

[B]

It's just insane. And people just watch them just like. I don't know, just like, hang out all day.

[A]

I'm like, like, it's television.

[B]

Serious about bitcoin?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. Like, I worked at a startup that did video streaming. It was like an API for video streaming. So, you know, other platforms would use their products or whatever. And just the amount of tech that goes into transcoding on the fly, being able to do live streams of really, really low latency. They specialized in TV broadcast type things. And so it was like, latency of under two seconds is what they were aiming for. And to get that is just insane. It's like, how do we even have the tech to do this? You can beam something across the world in just a handful of seconds right after it happened, and it can show up on someone's screen. Like, insane.

[B]

It is just wild, like, and I think it's got to be. I feel like we're probably of this. We're really interesting, like, age group where we're not full digital natives, like, we. We remember. Well, I'm actually not sure of exactly how old you are, but I'm.

[A]

I'm guessing you grew up with it basically. Yeah, yeah, we grew up with it. It sort of like, came about while we were kids, and it was like, oh, it's a thing now.

[B]

Yeah, it's like, like, you know, we remember, like, know there was a time before WI Fi. Kids. You won't believe it. You know, like you, you know, there, there. It's crazy.

[A]

You know what that sound sounds like too? You know what that sounds.

[B]

That sound is seared into our brains, right? The dial up. I mean, totally. But then there's this whole new generation where it's like they, this, this is just the air they breathe. It's the water they swim in. This is all totally normal. I mean the idea of buffering, like anything buffering is just like.

[A]

What do you mean? What does that, what does that even mean?

[B]

I don't even know what that word is. Is that an insult? Is that a racial slur? It feels like it is. Like, it's wild. Like, just like works really well. It's also though, like a lot of it works so well because so much of the infrastructure is so centralized, right? Like, because you've got massive AWS instances all over the place. And then you see what happens when, you know, what was it one of the aw East.

[A]

It's always east one. It's always us east one.

[B]

Is that. Yeah. And like half the Internet seemingly was just not working right.

[A]

Or Cloudflare, that's another one. Like I saw on the Cloudflare thing was literally somebody just wrote a bug. Like it was just a memory overflow issue, standard run of the mill software bug. And actually, no, it wasn't. It was an unwrap. It was in Rust and there's this method that calls unwrap and it sort of opens up this object that you get back from most methods. But they always say one of the very first things you learn when you're learning Rust is like, don't use unwrap in production. You're only allowed to use it in tests and things like that because if, if it fails, it just errors and crashes the whole program. And somebody did this in production on Cloudflare and the thing just, it started up again and it was a crash, startup crash, startup crash. And so like, until they found that they weren't able to like turn the thing back on, basically. Hilarious software. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. And in the meantime, like shit breaks. Like, like potentially very vital infrastructure shit breaks, right? And it's like, oops, sorry, like fat fingered that one. You know, Like.

[A]

I mean that's basically it though, right? Like that's, you know, when you think about that, like we have built this crazy, you know, started out as decentralized network and it's slowly become more and more centralized and it's you know, in the past, when we had something that was so infrastructure mission critical, we had, like, proper protocols and, like, people that were, you know, looking at this, and they were very careful about how they changed. Like, think about nuclear power plants, right? They have, like, big notebooks full of, like, this is what happens if error code four sets off. And, like, these are the four or five things you're supposed to do next. And, like, no one cares. They're just like, I don't know, merge. It looks good. Code's good. Let's go. Yeah. And then the Internet falls off.

[B]

It is just kind of nuts.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. And I've just rated myself on. On nostr.

[A]

Boom. Nice.

[B]

Look at that. How refreshing, man. Jeff, I'm. I'm stoked we're. We're doing this right now. And hello to everybody who has already joined on Noster. What I love about live streaming, these things on Nosterks. This was never meant to be a live streaming show, but then Zaptot Stream came about, and I thought, well, neat. I could just live stream this. Just.

[A]

Why not?

[B]

Why not just do it? But it's amazing. Thank you to Manny O. And thank you to Brian, who just sent zaps. That's just awesome. It does not get old. It doesn't matter. I give a lot of grief for one Zaps, but as a fun joke. But a zap of any amount is still worth more than just a, like.

[A]

Right? That's totally true.

[B]

It's a beautiful thing that we're able to do here. So it's great to be doing this beautiful thing with you here, man. It's.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

We saw each other in Lugano, and we were like, we. We need to rip a fucking pod together.

[A]

We need to do a podcast. Yeah. We've been trying to do it for a while, and I feel like it's just been, like, ships passing in the night. We see each other every. You know, couple of conferences, and it's like, bro, we got to do the thing. Yeah, we got to do the thing. Okay.

[B]

And then we're doing it.

[A]

Life. Life intervenes.

[B]

Well, you've been building, right? You've been doing a lot of building. You've been busy. You just got. You just got back from. Just got back from Africa, right?

[A]

Yeah, from the Africa Bitcoin Conference down in Mauritius. And I say it's my first time to Africa. And technically, yes, Mauritius is Africa, but it's like 2000km off the coast of Southern Africa out in the Indian Ocean, so it doesn't really feel like my idea of what Africa should be like.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

But it's amazing. Like, it's tropical paradise, that's for sure.

[B]

I saw some pictures. I think that BTC sessions and Gladstone Post and I was like, dear Lord, this is insanely beautiful. Yeah, I've heard also very high signal conference.

[A]

Yeah, very high signal conference. Yeah, very interesting. Very different. You know, just being able to hang out with a bunch of the African bitcoiners that, I mean, they've just got to build stuff in such a completely different way, you know, because of lack of Internet or lack of electricity in some cases, certainly the lack of like, coordinated governments that make any sense whatsoever. And there's just, you know, there's a ton of countries and a ton of languages. It's like 54 countries in 42 languages. And like a large portion of those are dictatorships or authoritarians. So, like, they've got a different problem set than we have. And so it's really cool to be able to hang out with builders there and see what they're doing and like, understand how they've gotten around all these weird constraints and stuff like that. So, yeah, it was a really good conference.

[B]

Well, you see so many just really novel solutions, whether it be around bitcoin or whatever. But, you know, I'm more aware of this stuff on the bitcoin side. Just like even like. Like Machankura is one great example, which is just like, not even something I would have thought of or anyone in the US would have thought of because.

[A]

Right.

[B]

We don't have an issue where most, you know, people have a lot of feature phones but still want to be able to interact with money in that way. Like, it's just incredible. Like you. And it just goes to show, it's like people developing novel solutions for their individual problems, their local problems, and creating stuff that is just like. That's not going to be created in the usa.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Because there's no need for it. Nobody needs that product in the usa. Or, you know, maybe they will in the future. I don't know if we go back to future now. No.

[A]

You know, and like, everything stops working. Yeah.

[B]

All right. I'm curious too. Was. Was there a pretty large focus on Noster and just general, like, let's say decentralized communication protocol stuff there, or was it. Was it still. I mean, heavily. Mostly bitcoin.

[A]

It was quite a lot of bitcoin, but to be honest, there was a lot of focus on both just communications in general and very specifically how to do private communications and how to do communication safely. It was really cool. We had a couple of the engineers from the White Noise team gave a talk at the BTRUST dev day, which was just before the conference started. Max gave a really great talk on the main stage about what we're doing with Marmot and everything. I talked to a ton of people that were needing to build encrypted communications and encrypted messaging into whatever their products were. And so it wasn't like, hey, we're doing this as the product. It was like, hey, this is a part of our product and we need some way to do it. And the thing looks like this is going to be perfect. I think Nostr was not new to anybody there. The most new people were to. It was like, oh, I didn't realize you could do all these other things with it. But everybody knew about it. Everybody knew what it was and, you know, kind of what its general purpose was.

[B]

They knew about the notes. Maybe they just didn't know about the other stuff yet.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

And they knew that all of it was transmitted by relays, though, regardless.

[A]

Yeah, they did know about the relays. That's.

[B]

That's good. So there. There's a bunch of things I want to get into with you, Jeff, and I think maybe a good spot to start is actually just to talk about. To talk about White Noise, to talk about Marmot, and then to kind of weave that into some of these. These larger themes. It just seems like it's kind of serendipitous, or maybe it's not serendipity at all. Maybe it's just a forcing function. But like, all these incredible things that folks like you and a lot of people building on. Noster and Bitcoin builders, Freedom Tech builders in general, are building right now at a time where it's like, oh, yeah, actually we really need that, like, right this second. That's really convenient. Okay. You know, again, but it's kind of like Africa, where it's like, these are the problems that are coming up and builders are building solutions that are going to address them. So can we. Can we start out by. By saying maybe just what is white noise? And then that can kind of lead us into a little bit of, like, talking about Marmot.

[A]

Sure, absolutely. Um, it's actually, this would be an interesting one. Cause I usually do it the other way around, but let's start it this way.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

So White Noise is the messaging app that we are building that hopefully will feel just as easy to use and responsive and just generally amazing as an app. Like Signal. Right. Um, Signal's a great product. It's been around for, I don't know, 10 or 15 years at this point. It's a very mature product. Like, there's no kind of gotchas, you know, exactly what you're getting. Like, I talk to my friends, they get the messages, I get their messages back. It works. We are still very early. I mean, it's like incredibly early innings with White Noise. But it's really encouraging that we've been able to, in a few months, get fully end in encrypted messaging running over a fully decentralized network. Um, you know, they're like the guys who created the Signal protocol in the first place, you know, said publicly multiple times that, like, there will never be decentralized and encrypted messaging because it's just a problem that's, you know, really hard. You know, you, you can't be sure of who's getting the messages when you can't trust, you know, how you're delivering these messages. And if that's the case, then the whole thing falls apart in their mind. Now, I have heard them sort of retract that a little bit recently, but I, you know, I think that it's. It has been a bit of a. Not a holy grail, but like a very difficult problem in the kind of cryptography circles for a long time of like, how do we take something like this, where you and I have a conversation going, but no one in the middle has any chance of understanding what's in that conversation? How do you do that over not only servers in the middle, but like, servers you don't control and you have no idea who does control them. And in a way that's resilient to the fact that one or more of those servers in the middle could fall over at any point and disappear. Yeah. So White Noise has been basically that. Right. Like we're trying to get to the point where we've got an app that's. Everybody's good at Signal. We can do video calls, audio calls, media, everything. It's fully encrypted and it doesn't leak any metadata about who's talking to who or when.

[B]

Which sounds pretty great. At a time when, if there is metadata available, it can and will be associated with you. And I feel like, especially with. As more and more systems incorporate, let's just say, AI, to use the blanket term, it's like the aggregation and, and kind of like combination of all these different data sets becomes much easier.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It becomes much more trivial. I Think and like that's, that's not a good thing for just the average person who maybe just doesn't want every aspect of their life looped in with every other aspect. Right. Like, we, we have privacy is something that we should strive for. I think that you can't really have true free speech, actually, unless you also have privacy. Like, speaking publicly freely is one thing, but you need to be able to speak privately freely as well. And that's, that's a huge thing. And so I'm, I'm, I want to get into a bunch more things kind of on that tangent, but maybe now we can just say, okay, that's the stage for White Noise, basically, signal, but with all that capabilities, with all those, those amazing features, but without all the metadata potentially getting linked to you, without any, any reliance on like AWS east, for example, which signal went down for a while. We were talking about that outage earlier. Like, that's another thing. What is Marmot?

[A]

So Marmot is the protocol that White Noise is built on top of. Right. And I guess a good way to think about this for the kind of less technical folks, a protocol is just a set of instructions, right? It just says do the thing this way so that it works in both places, right? So if I do it this way and you do it this way, we know that our two things are going to be able to work together. So, you know, some obvious protocols that people will know. Tcpip, that's how the Internet works. It's how computers talk to each other. SMTP is email. It's just a very simple thing that says, you know, the format of the data looks like this and then I can read it on the other computer. So Marmot is kind of a mashup. And I'd say most protocols at this point are mashups of a bunch of other protocols. And the two things that we are combining is something called mls, messaging layer security and nostr. Obviously MLS is sort of an evolution of the Signal protocol. So the signal protocol for people that don't know was the sort of thing that all of encrypted messaging is now kind of built on, except for Telegram, which isn't encrypted in the first place. But the signal protocol was the first double ratchet algorithm. As the first thing that said, okay, you've got forward secrecy and post compromise security for messages. So if any single key leaks on a message, the attacker only gets that one message. By the next message, there's a new key and they don't have it anymore. And so it's sort of a self healing, encrypted messaging system. And it was a really big evolution at the time. When that came out, it was a big deal. And WhatsApp started using it and Facebook messenger started using it. And basically almost everybody is using some version of the signal protocol at this point. What MLS tried to do was basically fix the one Achilles heel of the signal protocol, which was that it starts to get very inefficient with big groups. So if you have a really big group of people, you basically can't use the signal protocol because it just becomes too slow and too complicated. So MLS, they started working on this kind of in probably 2017, 2018, a bunch of like gigabrain cryptographers, people working at, you know, Cisco, people working in academia. And it went on and on and on because it was an Internet standard, you know, itf, the Internet Engineering Task Force project. And those things are very bureaucratic and they move very slowly, but they do a lot of work on them and they do a ton of auditing on them and they get lots and lots of people to be extremely excruciatingly detail oriented about the whole thing. And so you end up in the end with something that is pretty well thought through, pretty well tested, and, you know, has been audited, you know, up and down, left and right for all the security and, you know, features like that. So by the time this became an actual, okay, we've released this, which happened in July 2023, it was like a pretty solid thing. And its main feature is it helps you figure out a shared key between all the people in a group, and it helps you distribute the keys within a group in a way that allows you to set up this thing called a tree, a ratchet tree of all the keys you would need to talk to other people in the group. So that's one half of what we worked on with Marmot. The other half was how do we use Nostr's identity system, Nostr's delivery system relays, and MLS's encryption and encryption and authentication. How do we put those two things together such that we get all the features of MLS through NOSTR public relays, but also in a way that uses nostr's identity. Because MLS fundamentally just cares about getting a shared key and sharing those keys around. It doesn't care, it doesn't have an opinion about where the identity of the person comes from or who vouches for an identity, or how are you going to deliver the messages in the end. And funny enough, NOSTR does those two things very very well.

[B]

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[A]

A handful of times. A handful of times.

[B]

Yeah, just a handful. So maybe just kind of working backwards there. The identity piece is really interesting and I think kind of important because obviously for anybody who's used Signal and probably most people who are listening to this will have or you've at least heard of it, you know that one of the difficulties is usually like if you don't actually have any prior communication with a person like you, you need to basically exchange your, your signal. Your signal signal username through another channel, right? You need to do it through some other channel. And then of course like okay, well has that channel been compromised with somebody? Is it actually some. You know, there's so many different, I feel issues that come up when you talk about, well, how do I actually know that this person is the person that I'm meaning to communicate with. Like really, if for and for most people, maybe it's not, maybe it's not an issue, right? Nobody's trying to like man in the middle attack your, your other communication. But that's not to say that it can't be. And so yeah, I mean I've seen a lot of, I feel like there was a lot of, I don't know if it's FUD or if it's justified criticism from some people building other distributed identity systems when Noster was first kind of coming to prominence saying like, well, Noster's actually doesn't really, like this isn't actually solving for this. It's not actually a good identity system, but you guys are using it. And obviously there's like the web of trust layer there from the social kind of the, the social graph is that all just kind of baked in it? And do you think that Noster is actually like Is this the best way that you can do this? I mean, presumably it is because you guys are doing it, but I'd love your perspective on that. Just, like, are there drawbacks to it or have some of those just kind of, like, been solved? Where are you at with that?

[A]

Yeah, so I actually think Nostr's identity system is probably the closest system that I've seen on the Internet or in a digital realm. The closest thing to, like, what we do naturally as humans. You know, I think most of the criticism that comes from people that want to build some gigantic block, blockchain of digital identity with whatever, all these crazy systems of name spacing and stuff like that, that's an engineer's solution to a problem. That is not an engineering realm. Humans are messy. We just don't function perfectly like computers. And there's no way that you're going to be able to build an identity system in the digital world that doesn't sort of account and leave space for some of that messiness. Right. So I actually think Nostra's kind of perfect in the sense that it's pretty simple. It's just this, like, one public key thing. Yeah. Okay. You've got to look after it. Don't lose your private key. Things get weird when that happens. But again, there's actually ways to, you know, recover from that using normal human social interactions that we've used for 100,000 years. And yeah, the web of trust thing is, I think it's an underutilized part of Noster still. We all know it's a big deal. We all know it's like, you know, going to be a massive part about how all this works. It's just literally like, we haven't gotten there yet. But that's exactly how White Noise is using Identity and how the Marmot Protocol sort of uses identity here is, you know, we're not using your Nostr keys to do any of the encryption, which is really important because if you were to lose your Nostr keys, you know, if your inset got leaked or whatever, we wanted to have a situation where that doesn't mean anybody gets access to any of your groups that you had in White Noise or in any other Marmot Protocol app. Right. And right now that's the case. They won't even know what groups you're in because all that stuff was on your phone or on your computer. And without being on your device, they don't get access to anything. And so that's like the main benefit of, like, we embed the identity in There. And it's cryptographically guaranteed by the way, that MLS works, but it's sort of your Nostr pub key is buried inside of an envelope and that envelope is like, you know, the MLS wrapper. And so we know who you are for sure, but we, you know, if your key were to leak, it actually is not a security issue at all for the group or for, you know, your communication with other people.

[B]

So that's super interesting. I actually did not understand that part yet because that's kind of, it's kind of huge. And I think that's one of the things that people rightly worry about with Noster is like, when it comes to social media style Nostr clients, it's like, yes, somebody could, could be basically posting from your, your end pub if they were able to compromise your insect somehow. They could be posting from your end pub pretending to be you. But you're saying in, in this case, the way you guys have it architected, that all of the, like, everything is done and encrypted locally. It's like, it's device specific in that sense. And so basically, even if the worst should happen, you should somehow get your insect burned. That doesn't mean that you are exposed to any of that risk that would come from, you know, with all these other social protocols, like there would be that, that problem there, right? Like somebody else can post on your behalf, can send DMS on your behalf, like all of that. This is a step outside of that existing architecture, correct?

[A]

Exactly, exactly. And I mean that's an important, like one of the most important things that I kind of set out to do when I started looking at the whole, you know, messaging thing was like, we all know Nipple four is terrible. You know, it shares all the metadata with everybody in the network publicly. NIP 17 was an attempt to sort of fix the metadata problem, but it didn't fix the forward secrecy or post compromise security, which is if my key leaks, can the attacker continue to read stuff into the future or go back into the past and read all my past messages? So Nip17 doesn't attempt to solve that at all. It just says, hey, we're going to hide metadata. That's the step we care about right now. What we get with Marmot protocol is full forward secrecy, post compromise security. And because it's end to end encrypted, like you said, it's bound basically to the device and client, you know, the app on the device that is, that you're using. And so it is still susceptible to things like Pegasus. So if you're talking about like high end, you know, mercenary spyware, like, that's still an issue if your device gets compromised. If you get stopped at a border and somehow they make you unlock your device, like they're going to be able to get to whatever they want to at that point. But that's of kind, kind of the same with Signal or any other app like this, right? It's end in encrypted. Doesn't mean it's totally impervious. It just means you're dealing with a slightly different threat model.

[B]

Yeah, I mean that's, that's the thing. It's like we're talking about defenses in cyberspace versus if you are physically compromised. And I think borders are just like that. That is, in my opinion, like the highest, highest risk scenario because you basically surrender all rights at the border, whether you realize it or not. Like they can just put you in a box as long as they, like they can hold you there. Yeah, as long as they want. They can take your devices. It's a good idea to cross a border with multiple devices if you're so inclined. Some decoy devices, I would recommend decoy devices.

[A]

But also as soon as they see multiple devices, they're like, ooh, this person's interesting. Let's see what they have.

[B]

Okay, that's true too.

[A]

That's like, it's a trade off.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, it's, it's true. Sorry, that's, that's my work phone and the other one is my, you know, organizing illicit activities phone. Don't worry.

[A]

Right, exactly.

[B]

Yeah, but, but it's like, yeah, if they, if, if they. And I've heard there's a lot of different tech out there too, with like, they can physically clone your device very, very quickly if they have the physical device, like they essentially, you know, like put it in a box and they clone it. They strip everything off it and then they have an exact replica of, of your entire system, which is like terrifying, but, but again, like that comes back to, okay, you know, don't use face ID when you're crossing a border because then they'll be able to unlock your device without you having to give them a password. Right. Like, simple things like that can at least add another layer of protection, Right. Depending on how long they want to keep you in that box. Right?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, all of this stuff comes down to what's your adversary like, what's your situation. Right. Most people, certainly in the west, are not in the position where they are against State Level actors, you know, they don't have to worry about getting Pegasus on phone. Those things cost the governments that use them a lot of money. They have a very limited number of people they can go out and attack with them because that's just how the licensing works. And it's not easy to get that onto somebody's phone necessarily. Right. Like you're usually trying to use a, you know, a zero day exploit, something that can cost millions of dollars, and you want to keep it in your back pocket as long as possible because once it's out in the open, it's not a zero day anymore. Everybody has seen it and knows what it does. So I think most people really don't have to worry about these things end to end. Encrypted messaging with a passcode or a pin to unlock the app is a huge miles ahead of Telegram or a lot of other systems you could use that are not really encrypted at all. I think for most people, this is already overkill by a long shot. Now if you are a activist working in Africa under an authoritarian regime, these things start to become really important, right? And like you said, like, when you cross borders, you probably wipe your phone completely. You want to have distress pins that you can punch in when they ask you at the border. And it can like nuke all the chats in your app. Like, maybe it doesn't delete the app, but it just either hides all the chats or, you know, maybe it does delete all of them, who knows? But you have to have options when you're in that situation. And kind of back to white noise. Like I've, I started building white noise when I went to the first, the first time I went to the Oslo Freedom Forum a couple of years ago. HRF's like main event of the year. And I just sat there for two days, like bawling my eyes out, like listening to these stories of these activists and, you know, people from, you know, really horrific situations. And it was like, like, we can do something about this with technology. And like when people talk about freedom tech, like that's, that's literally what it is. You're like helping people that, you know, for them this could be a life or death situation. Which is fun, but also totally terrifying because now that thing is like half built. I'm like, oh God, oh no. We better do this really, really well. Right?

[B]

So, so, so speaking of half built, can you give us kind of an update for where you are at right now with the, with the app and then where you Plan to go, like, just generally, what's the broad roadmap?

[A]

Yeah. So, I mean, I think. I mean, this time last year, I mean, maybe it's more like October of last year. Up until then, I really wasn't sure that this whole Marmot protocol thing was going to work at all. We were still very much trying to research how we were going to fit Nostr and MLS together. Were we even going to be able to get this to do anything on a consistent basis? And about last October, I sort of hit the point where it was like, oh, no, it goes, it's going to happen. I had done enough tests at that point, had played around with stuff enough at that point to kind of know, yeah, we can get a really well working system here. Then I built a kind of prototype version of the app ahead of Oslo, the Freedom Forum this year, and we did a bunch of user testing with that prototype app. While we were in Oslo, we talked to about 20 different people and some of them were bitcoiners, some of them were activists, some of them were just interested public. But we had a kind of script, we walked them through and we had them use the app a whole bunch and tell us about their situation. And then we compiled all of that into this big research report and went, okay, from all those learnings, what do we need to do now? And the answer was basically throw the app away and start fresh and start from a point of view of trying to address some of these, like, really big pieces at the beginning. So right now, the app is. It works. I would call it beta software, early beta software. You know, some of the cool things it can do, that signal still can't is you can run multiple accounts on the same device, so you can sign in with as many in pubs as you want and then have conversations with people from any of those at any point while you're using the app, which I don't think there's any other encrypted messenger out there that allows you to do that yet. We've got things like images in chats now, reactions, replies. The cool thing about the way white noise works is it's actually just a Nostr event inside the chat. And so when you're sending these encrypted messages, you know, back and forth, all you're doing is sending Nostr events, which, you know, we've already got a whole slew of nostr events. So when you want to do a reaction, you know, you use the right kind and you send a Noster event when you want to reply, you do the exact same thing. And so we kind of already have access to whatever we want to show in the chat. It's just a matter of like, you know, designing the little thing to make it look right. So that's kind of where we're at. Yeah, that's kind of where we're at. Like one thing that we've been working on a bunch over the last month or so was to sort of figure out how we were going to do notifications in a really privacy preserving way. Because that's the other place where you potentially leak a lot of metadata is how do you get a notification to somebody's device? And there was a study there recently that one of the team came across and we were sharing around and it's basically like a review of all these major messengers that are out there and how they do notifications and how badly they are leaking information all over the place. In the worst case, it's like they send all of your message content in plain text to Apple or Google because then they're exactly like, there's tons of stuff like this, right? You know, lots of the notification servers can see who are all the members of the group and like when they're talking to each other and like, you know, they can very quickly form a pretty clear picture of what's going on. Signal again is probably the best of the best in this area. They do a lot of stuff to like blind who's sending what, make sure that you can't see, you know, who's in each of the groups. When they send a notification to Apple and Google, it's blank. It's basically just a notification to say, hey device, wake up and download the stuff from the server. And so we ended up with kind of a variant of what they're doing, but more suited to like how Noster relays work. And so we will have to run a notification server that's just a. You can't get around that if you're going to get notifications from Apple or Google. But the notification server we run will be basically stateless. It will have almost no database. It will just take in a list of encrypted tokens, it'll decrypt the tokens and it'll send it to Apple and Google again, blank. So that, you know, this notification server doesn't know who's in the group. The notification server doesn't really have an idea of what the message was. It just knows, hey, somebody told me to notify these people. I just turn around and hand the notifications over. To Apple and Google and they do it. So that's kind of a, that was a big question mark in my mind. So I'm super happy that we figured out a way to do that.

[B]

Well, nice a question for you. Just as it relates to Apple versus, you know, Google Android. Do you just like, personally, do you have a preference there? Because I know some people like are like, oh, you know, don't use Apple. Apple's, Apple's crap. It's all, you know, whatever. You should use a graphene OS on, you know, your stripped down pixel or whatever. And that's the only way other people are like, well, if you use that, you're actually opening yourself to all these other vulnerabilities. Like you should just use Apple. It is the most secure. Where do you fall on this from like an actual device security standpoint?

[A]

So I think both can be pretty secure. I think if you're gonna be on Android, you should probably be on graphene. That said, you know, I think the kind of Pixel with the stock Android without any, you know, like not the Samsung flavor or whatever, you know, the device flavor is. I probably would never buy anything from you know, like Huawei or Zomi or whatever. They are like the straight up Chinese. Like to me those are just like straight spy tech. I mean they have to have something in them. Apple and Google. Okay, probably, probably, maybe do. I think Apple is quite good, especially if you turn on lockdown mode. If you turn lockdown mode on your phone, it's quite secure. And I've talked to some people who do a lot of really deep research in this area and that's effectively where my opinion comes from is like people who are working in this all day, every day trying to find how did Pegasus get onto this person's phone and they work out what those zero days are. I know that they're constantly feeding data back to Apple and Google about, hey, this is a bug, this is a hole, this is things. And they're pretty positive. They're like, these guys take it seriously. They do actually respond to us. They want to know more and they very quickly will patch some of these things. So again, it's a little bit of a knowing what your situation is and what you need and then you know, doing simple things like lockdown mode. It doesn't really actually cause that much of a pain to use the device. Like, you know, some stuff does stop working or starts to work a bit weirdly, but for the most part like you just go on using the phone and, and you just know, okay, It's a whole lot safer this way. Okay.

[B]

Somebody had just asked kind of generally in the discussion, Noster chat as well about like sim swapping. Is that at all a vulnerability for, for somebody who's using white noise? If somebody does get SIM swapped?

[A]

I mean, we don't need your SIM for anything.

[B]

I was gonna say just making sure somebody had asked, but okay, yeah, there's, there's no. So again, because again, we're talking about the local device here. So even if, like we're not talking about you needing to do two FA with your, you know, your phone number, you know, for it.

[A]

Exactly, exactly.

[B]

The SIM swap usually gets you, right?

[A]

Yes, exactly. The SIM swap usually is to catch that SMS coming in from, you know, the two FA thing. So I don't think there would be any issue there at all. I guess one other thing that I'll say is that we are in the midst of a security audit on the whole stack. So the security auditors first started looking at the design of the Marmot protocol, just the specs that we've written. They're now looking at mdk, which is our rust implementation of the, of the whole protocol. And that's the implementation that we use in white noise. And so they're slowly kind of stepping their way down into the application and you know, they haven't really surprised me with anything that they found, but there's definitely a lot of little small details and I mean they're going over with a fine tooth comb. Like I get a couple of signal messages a day being like, explain and I'm like, oh, okay. Very fine grained. All right, let's go into this. But it's really good because that's good what you want those guys to do. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[B]

They're still communicating with you on signal though. They're not using white noise yet for correct. Maybe that's correct.

[A]

And I will say the white noise. The white noise team doesn't even use white noise for stuff because we haven't gotten those notifications done yet. Um, that's like the one piece that's sort of blocking us because otherwise you just have to keep opening the app to see if there's anything new.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. No, I mean it's, it's super interesting. I want to, I do want to come back more to kind of like some of the technical stuff, but I, for a little while I want to just, I want to zoom out a tiny bit because again we talked about how this, this all seems to be. Builders are building freedom Tech at a time when we really need freedom.

[A]

Tech.

[B]

Right. I'm very grateful for it because I look around right now and I see whether it's all of these new social media age requirements. You know, you submit an ID to prove you're over 16 and if you're under 16, we won't let you on. But I don't know why you would submit an ID if you're under 16. Of course, because they're not going to let you on. So there's no reason for anyone under 16 to send their ID. So it's really just a way to tie your ID to your social media accounts, which will then be of course tied to the CBDCs they roll out, which will then be tied to their larger social credit system, which will just, you know, create this totalitarian Panopticon, which is absolutely fucking terrifying.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What are you most concerned about on that front? Like, is that from just like a, a personal level? Like what is the most kind of glaringly horrific abuse of kind of the, the free and open Internet that you're seeing right now?

[A]

Christ, where to begin?

[B]

Sorry. That's a big one, dude.

[A]

Yeah, it is, but it's, it is really top of mind for me right now. And it's, and it's terrifying. I mean, all of these things, all of these things are kind of the same thing, right? In a lot of ways. Like, you know, we have a society now and a political system that isn't really effective at doing anything real. They look at problems that, you know, society faces and they treat symptoms rather than trying to go what's maybe the root cause of this problem? You know, and so they're, they're ideas and their solutions are always going to be let's just put more control. If we only had a little more control, then we'd be able to fix the problem for good. Which we're going in the wrong direction, basically. You know, we've seen this before. This movie's played out many times over history. We go 80 or 100 years and we forget it and we do it again. And right now we're living through this insane shift from everything is physical. Where it's at, there's actually real costs to go and do surveillance to. Now it's all digital and it's actually just plug into the back door of Google's servers, right into the, into the pipe that's coming into one of their major data centers and you get everything and you can just watch everything. And it used to be even that was kind of okay. Because the amount of data coming through was so enormous that no one could sift through it. Right? But now we have a solution to that problem. You know, we have these, you know, LLMs that are incredibly good at, like, parsing huge amounts of data and like, trying to make some sense of it or just at least being able to point a human in the direction of like, oh, it's probably over there, you know, go look there. So I think we're sitting at this juncture and I think the thing that makes me most frightened is that, like, it's a race now. Like, we are now in an arms race and we're on the losing side by default for sure. We do not have as much money as them. We do not have as much resources as them. You know, we might be ideologically correct and morally have the high ground, but, like, since when did that mean you won? You know, so, you know, I think all of those things are problems, right? Like, the chat control stuff here in Europe, the digital ID stuff is being rolled out all over the place. All of these quote unquote hate speech laws, you know, like total bullshit. Like, you know, when I was growing up, it was like the thing that people called out in America was that landmark case where the Jewish attorney from the ACLU defended the Nazis rights to march through a town. And you're like, you know, that's like a symbol of America to me, basically. I'm like, if anything, like, no other country in the world would that happen. And I think America's lost that, to be honest. Like, I don't think that would not happen today. There would be people screaming and, you know, there'd be a lot of name calling and there would be people calling for heads on Twitter. And like, you know, that's just how it would play out now. So, yeah, I don't know, like, it's a. It's hard not to be blackpilled by all this. And I think the only way that, like, I just try to not be black pilled is like, I just have to work harder and faster to like, do the thing. And we need to get more people involved in doing the thing because unless. Unless we just say no, we will end up like China where, you know, works and it's really, you know, cheap and pretty effective and efficient and all the rest. But, like, don't step out of line, you know, like, and. And I, you know, I don't want that. I don't want a world like that.

[B]

I was talking to a German friend the other day and I was Just remarking on the fact that, that video surveillance systems have gotten so incredibly, so incredibly good. And all of the data that they're able to parse now with the help of these LLMs as well, it's like, it's, it's mind blowing. Like it's terrifying. And, and he said, I like this guy a lot. He's a good guy and a good friend. But he was like, well, you know, Volca, it's just a price we must pay. And I, and I was just like, no, no, we don't, no, no, I don't agree. Like, but that's how a lot of people, a lot of very good, well intentioned people think. Like, and, and that's the problem is that with those good, well intentioned people thinking that that makes it way easier for the people who are not well intentioned, who do want to just exert greater and greater control over the individual citizens, that makes their job way easier because there's, there's actually very little real resistance to a lot of this stuff, which is. Right, that's what's troubling to me is like, it's just sleepwalking into totalitarianism.

[A]

Not only, not only is there not resistance to it, but like people are actively doing it for them. They're like, here's this nice doorbell camera, put it on your house. And somewhere in the fine print it's like we could do whatever we want with the video. And it's like, yeah, people are like, this is great, let's put this technology here. This is great. Let me share everything about my life on the Internet all the time with my like address and like everything else in public. And you know, you're just like, like, okay, I understand, I understand how we got here, but at the same time it's like you're just bringing it on yourself. And again, some of the things that people always go back and forth about, like, oh, you know, we need these systems of control because if we didn't, then like the capitalists destroy everything. Or you know, if, like, if you don't like it, like you should go somewhere else. And it's like, but I can't, bro. You won't let us leave. Like, this is not a system that you can like opt in or out of. Like, if you allowed me to opt out, I would happily do that, but I can't. You are telling me that I will go to jail if I don't pay the taxes and I don't follow your laws, but you also aren't allowing me to have any sort of say into how that stuff happens. We're well beyond the point of having a representative government, I think in any of the major Western countries. Certainly Europe has probably never had a real representative government. It's a bunch of unelected bureaucrats that just decide whatever they want and then force all of the member countries to implement the laws. America's a little behind that, but like, I don't know, I'm not, not so bullish on that either.

[B]

That's, I mean, this whole Saga with the EU levying this whatever, 120, 140 million dollar fine against X and Elon Musk, the number's not even important, you.

[A]

Know, it's, it's just, it's chump change to them. They don't care. They love that. You know what it is, that sort of thing actually is regulatory capture. They love it because no one else can afford those fines except for them. So they're like, keep it coming. Like we'll pay a billion dollars every single year because it's less than we'd pay in taxes to you guys.

[B]

Well, funnily enough, I did see that EU collects more in fine revenue than they do in tax revenue from companies, which is hilarious. But like this, this whole thing, at least this saga, I think the very positive thing that has come out of it is just a lot of these, these EU bureaucrats basically outing themselves for the closeted totalitarian fetishists they are. Because that's what this comes down to is it's always done under the guise of safety or compliance or whatever else. But it's control. It's all about control. And Elon is. For better or worse, the guy is a much more productive human being than these EU bureaucrats. Right? He may. Has plenty of faults, like we all.

[A]

Do, like all humans, but like, like.

[B]

All humans, but at least he's actually building like cool, like reusable rockets, man, cool. Just, just like really, really amazing science fiction stuff. But like, for this saga in particular, it's just very clear that when you do see people who are very supportive of the EU's measures, it's, it's all, I mean, it's just like a lot of class warfare being used to justify surveillance crackdowns and free speech crackdowns under the guise of, well, we can't let these billionaires run amok with this. And it's like, it's all very clever positioning really, because it's, you're trying to say, like, well, come on, do you think the billionaires should be in Charge of this. Like, we need to get them under check and we need to also know your name and address and have that associated with your account. And it's for your safety. It's actually for the kids safety. This is really all just about protecting the kids always. Because you can't just ask the parents to be good parents and take away their phones. No, no, no. You have to actually just subject everyone.

[A]

Or don't even take away their phones. Just teach them how to like, navigate the world. Right, like, as we always did, you know, like, you know, I kind of have to put this a little bit on the millennials, unfortunately, because, like, I think, you know, Gen X was raised without parents. Basically. You know, those are the eight year olds on the subway in New York when they were kids. And I think the flip was, you know, they ended up kind of being overprotective. And the millennials had this like, you know, gold star for everything mentality. And like, everything must be perfectly fair and like, yes, perfect. Yay. We're all, we're all great. And it's just not true. Like, it's just not true. People are different, amazingly enough. And, and I think that's, there is a lot of like, you know, millennials kind of grew up in this like, very protected space. And because of that, they're not very resilient to like, you know, from the west at least there's still plenty of places in the world where that's not the case. But, you know, I think America and Europe, that's certainly the case. And they've just gotten this kind of delusional mentality that like, it's, you know, all we have to do is make sure that the bad people don't have the things and like, we can stop them if we just have enough toys, if we just have enough control, we'll be able to fix it. And it's just like, no, this is not how the world works. Like, you're never going to be able to stop something. Like, here's another random example. You're never going to, to be able to beat drugs with a war on drugs. Like, people will find a way to use them no matter what. There's just no way around it. So, like, why don't you spend the money and the time on like, educating people, telling people about the dangers, giving them a clear picture of like, what are they actually risking versus not. Because once you do that, people can kind of make it an educated guess for themselves. And like, you know, like, yeah, some people are going to die. Some people are going to get addicted, that's, like, par for the course. But having a war where you destroy entire governments, entire countries, entire, like, civilizations because you can't get your coke problem under, you know, under control in New York City, like, that doesn't make any sense.

[B]

It's, you know, an example of just government trying to overregulate or trying to put in as many guardrails as possible, and it's still just failing miserably. That I always think of is in the uk, where it's like, they don't have guns, right? There's no guns, but somehow people still kill people, right? They kill people with vans and they kill people with knives. And, like, well, they're not going to get rid of vans, so. But they. They. Like, I've. There's a huge spat of different EU politicians and people campaigning for, we should blunt all the knives. You just shouldn't be able to buy a knife with a sharp tip on it. Like, because. And then if we just get rid of the tip on the knife, then people stop stabbing people and saying, like, well, they'll just slash them. Then. What are you? Like, are you stupid?

[A]

Like, have you ever seen a kid? They'll sit down on the ground and, like, sharpen the rock for, like, 20 hours if they have to. They're like, look, I've made a knife from a rock. And you're like, yeah, let's blunt the knives. I'm sure that'll fix the problem.

[B]

Yeah, well, we clearly just need to get rid of rocks, too. We just need to get rid of anything sharp so nobody can hurt themselves. Because a specific, like, it's just. It's insane. It's insane. But, like, that's. Yeah, that's when I think when you have a group or it's not even. We can't even put it all on. On millennials, you know, but because, like, the boomers are just as bad.

[A]

Plenty of boomers. Yeah, there's plenty of boomers.

[B]

I think it's overall just. Do you have a mentality that government is the solution to your problems or the cause of most of them? And that's kind of like the demarcation is like, do you think that if you give the government more power, they'll be able to fix stuff? Or if you give the government more power, they'll make stuff worse? I'm of the camp and I believe you are as well, and probably most people listen to this, that the more power you give the government, the worse off you are. Like, the government is best. Which Governs least. But so many people just honestly believe. It's like if I just vote harder and give the government more power and my colored team is in power especially, that's extra.

[A]

That's an important one. Yeah.

[B]

Then everything will be okay and there won't be bad people. And even, and the bad people is actually, it's actually just the fault of white supremacy that bad people even exist at all. That's a whole different story. You know, but like, like all of it is just so absurdist. It's like you, you have to really try hard not to think deeply to believe any of this. But the problem is that thinking deeply takes a lot of energy. Right. Like a lot of brain power.

[A]

It's funny because you don't even necessarily have to think deeply. You just have to look at some like basic things and like not allow the over complication that they try to sell you to sink in. Right. You know, like economics, like economics is not complicated. It's just like people transacting, you know, in a situation where both people feel like they're better off at the end of the transaction, otherwise they wouldn't do it. And so it's really not that hard, you know, like if you just let that happen, it's going to happen and it's going to work. But if you start to put moral arguments on top of everything and you start to put a bunch of rules and regulations on top of everything, then all of a sudden that picture becomes a lot murkier and you're like, I don't actually know what's happening here and people can't figure it out. And then they have to think about like, okay, maybe since I can't figure this out, I'll just listen to what Powell has to say this month and he'll tell me what to do with all my money. It is wild because people just, yeah, they do have to do a bit of thinking. But I actually wouldn't say that it's actually the harder part of thinking. It's actually just the not believing the bullshit that they've been fed and then just going, yeah, based on my own common sense and my own experience of the world, like that's probably the right answer. You know, like you get by a long ways on that.

[B]

It's, it's true. But, and again, you would think that more people would do this. I, I find that generally it's easier just to maintain the status quo for most people. And the status quo is being told what to do. The status quo is not thinking for yourself. Inertia is very real. You know, this. This totalitarian object wants in motion. State. It wants to stay in motion, right? And. And this is what I. I come back to all the time, is that this is why privacy tools are so important. This is why communication protocols are so important. This is why separate money, separated from state. Bitcoin is so important. It's because for this totalitarian Panopticon to continue spreading its tentacles across the world and across each nation, it requires. It requires that you do not have privacy. If you have privacy in a totalitarian system, then that totalitarian system is undermined because you can speak about how shitty it is privately with other people. They're like, yeah, this is shitty. We should overthrow this.

[A]

We should do something about this.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, we should. We should do something about. We should drag our dictator out on the street. And, you know, Ceausescu, him, like, Romania style, you know, like, that's what we should do, because we're sick of this. You also, you can't have any sort of true free speech in the public sector either, because, again, then people can speak about the things they were speaking about privately in public, and even more people hear them. You also need to have control of the money because you, like, that's. First and foremost, you need to be able to cut people off from the money. And that's gotten so easy to do in the digital age. It was a lot harder when everything was just cash, a lot harder. Now it is trivial. I mean, truly trivial. You can. If you can cut off an entire nation from the banking rails, then cutting off a single individual is, again, trivially easy to debank somebody. Right.

[A]

And that was one of the things so important. Yeah, at the Africa Bitcoin conference, that was one of the main themes that I kept hearing repeated over and over and over again. It's like, they don't actually have to throw you in jail anymore. They just turn off all your money. Like, they just turn off all your money and they turn off all your access to your, you know, way that you speak publicly, which is all social media now. So, like, yeah, they can stop you from, like, standing on a street corner on a box. You know, you could still do that, but, like, eventually the police will come and get you if a large enough crowd, you know, shows up. But they can. It's trivial for them. They just go, nope, X is gone and your bank account's gone. And now what are you gonna do? Like, you can't tell anybody about it, and you don't have any money to do anything about it. So, like, that's. I think that's actually one of the most. One of the most used and most effective tools of any authoritarian government right now is just that total control of the money. I mean, and the communication. Like, you think about Venezuela, like, WhatsApp is banned. If you have WhatsApp on your phone, you go to jail. X is banned in Venezuela. And so those are pretty much the most primary means of communication. Like, we've got our public square type of thing, and we have the group chat that most of the world uses most. WhatsApp is by far the biggest messenger out there, and it's now fully illegal in Venezuela. Has been for a good while.

[B]

It's always crazy that WhatsApp is the biggest, because I just think WhatsApp sucks.

[A]

Like, it does suck, but, man, it works for a lot of people and it's been around for a long time.

[B]

And I know.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I don't like it either.

[B]

Facebook of messaging apps, you know, like, it's like, I don't know. But, yeah, but it's a great tool still, right? For a lot of people all over the world.

[A]

It does the thing. Yeah, it does the thing. And to be honest, if you think about it, we were actually having a conversation about this last week. If you had to pick, what was the single most important thing that gave the single most important win for privacy in the 2010s, what was it? It was probably when WhatsApp turned on encrypted messaging for every one of its users, by default, it just went overnight click. Everybody's using end to end to end encrypted messaging now. Now you can argue whether or not Zuckerberg's got a, you know, set of keys for the door in the back. But, you know, like, there is at least a minimal level of actual encryption that is based on the signal protocol that is in WhatsApp.

[B]

It's better than nothing, right?

[A]

Way better than nothing.

[B]

Better than nothing.

[A]

It's miles better than Telegram. Like, I know, you know, you know I know. Pavel Durov likes to talk about how it's the most secure messenger and they've got the best encryption and stuff. It's just not true. Like, it's 100% not true. Um, by default, it's just plain text. It's just going to their servers, is readable by anybody in their team. Uh, it's. If you want to turn on secret messages in Telegram, both people have to be online at the same time. What? Like, who does that? And it buried like, four Layers, deep in menus. So there's, it's, it's. No one uses it. And so I think it's really disingenuous that he goes on, on these podcasts and talks about, like, how it's so encrypted and, you know, it's the safest thing out there. It's like total fucking bullshit. WhatsApp is way safer than Telegram.

[B]

So, I mean, that, that is interesting because he, he definitely touts that.

[A]

Right? Harps on it. Harps on it.

[B]

But for sure, I mean, the vast, vast, vast majority of Telegram users don't have.

[A]

99.9% probably are totally unencrypted. Yeah. And like, this is the reason why Telegram groups are so fast and they work so well. And you know, you can have 200,000 or a million people in a group. It works because it's just plain text. Using the Internet, like, it's, there's nothing encrypted about it. There's no keys, there's, there's nothing. So it's. Yeah, of course it's fast. Like there's a reason.

[B]

So we've, we've been, that we've been maybe black pilling a little bit here, but I think it's important to, to black pill a little bit so that we can appreciate the white pill. But I do want to know, okay, what are you, like, what is, what is your white pill right now? I mean, obviously what, what you're building, is there other stuff that you're looking at outside of white noise that other people are building or that you've just heard about recently or that you're really excited about that you're like, wow, this is like, fuck, yeah, this is a step in the right direction.

[A]

So, yeah, I said earlier, like, I do feel like this is a bit of an arms race at the moment. And it really does feel like the major Western governments are cracking down on privacy. In specific, you know, they want to know, they want to have your identity tied to all of your online activity. They want to make sure that they have some way to see as much of it as possible. And it's really important that we actually stand up and fix that right now. You know, like, make sure that we carve out, you know, even if it's not for everybody, even if not everybody's going to get on board with it. We need to keep the option and keep the door open, because it's a door that once it's closed, it's going to be almost impossible to get back open again. So you Know, to me, obviously, what we're working on, I'm super bullish on. We can't build it fast enough. Like, I'm doing everything I possibly can trying to find people to help us in the team and contribute and things like that. We'll get there. I think another thing that I'm just really excited about is I feel like Nostr is maturing a lot. We're seeing, like, you know, encrypted file sharing coming around and we're seeing, you know, lots of these projects that are aimed towards not just the social media use case. You know, I think Odell is like, spot on. Like, I think we used the social media thing to bootstrap the network in a way that was really unique and gave us a lot of, you know, Runway to then do a lot of other stuff. And yeah, all this other stuff is hard and takes time, but we're doing it and it's happening. And like, I'm seeing these apps coming out that's just like, okay, cool. We've now got encrypted calling, we've now got messaging, We've now got like encrypted Dropbox that runs on Nostr and is, like fully backed up. So we will have the tools for people that need them and want to use them. I think the other thing that I'm pretty bullish on is there's a lot of. I mean, the coinjoin stuff has sort of gone a little bit quiet, I think partially because of certain legal action that was being taken by the American government. But there's still so much privacy stuff happening in Bitcoin. That's so cool. Like silent payments. There's a bunch of things that are happening around that to make silent payments work well for normal users and be more adopted. I think things like Pay Join are also super important. And I think again, like, we're going to see a bunch of these just all of a sudden they're going to be everywhere in all the wallets and it's just going to be the default. You're not going to have to think about it. You don't have to, like, stress about worrying how this thing functions and works. You'll just be able to give people your silent payment address and it'll just work and no one will be able to look and see where those coins went or what address they went to or anything. So it's a lot of these little things like that that I think keeps me hopeful. And again, we don't have to fix this for the entire planet. We have to fix this for the people that care about it. And we have to stop thinking that like we have to comply with everything they say. That's the other piece is that, you know, you see your Bitcoiners all the time like getting, you know, kind of freaked out, like, oh, well, how am I going to like account for all the taxes on my lightning zaps? And you're like, like, bro, really, this is like peer to peer electronic money. We don't have to talk to anybody about it. Right? So, you know, I just think it's like one of those things of you have to let go of the mindset of you must play their game by their rules. There they are completely dependent on that being the system and that being the case. And as soon as people stop doing that, then yeah, they get scared for good reason. Like I just saw five minutes ago, like the, you know, President Bulgaria stepped down or Prime Minister or whatever he is because the entire country just flooded the streets and they were like, no, this is not okay. Like you, you must leave now or everything's getting burned down. And he, he left, he like was like, okay, I mean, I have to resign. That's it. End of story. So, you know, I think people underestimate their power. But it really has to start with like we were saying before, private conversations that then spill over into public discourse. And then the public discourse gets hot enough where it's like, no, we're not going to take this anymore, you know, we're not going to listen to Nancy Pelosi about her insider trading, you know, for any longer. We're going to make this stop.

[B]

I say amen to that. I mean, this is one of the reasons that I'm just still remain so bullish on Nostr broadly even just in the narrow social media implementation that we're seeing. A lot of, of a lot of the uptick with today is just it seems, and I'd love your opinion on this, we've kind of plot in terms of like NOSTR user growth. It's slowed down, right? There hasn't been like massive influxes.

[A]

I don't know about that. Here's the cool thing.

[B]

You probably see better data than that. You tell me.

[A]

Here's the cool thing. A lot of the uses of NOSTR don't look like NOSTR anymore and you can't tell it's nostr. And so think about bitchat. There's a shitload of NOSTR users that don't know they're using Nostr. And that's the way it should be, right. It's a protocol. People don't go around being like, oh, I'm using TCPIP today. I am using SMTP today. No, you're just like, I'm on the Internet, I sent an email. Like, you don't think about those terms. And you know, everybody that uses Bitchat is a Nostr user. And I think that is more and more the way we're going to go. Like, and we need to get out of this trap of thinking that we have to be building Nostr specific things. Like, like, we are building tools that provide value to users. That's it. You know, and like, hopefully those users are our customers, right? Because if they're just users and your customers someone else, then we're just redoing the same thing that we had before. But, you know, there's going to be plenty of products where people have zero idea they're using Nostr. And like, you know, Rabble's Divine app as well. Like, this is another example. You know, instantaneously, all 10,000 test flight, you know, coupons were gone like three hours, wild bang. And then he had immediately in his DMs, all the old, like, mega influencers from vine were like, bro, I can't believe you're bringing this back. I can't wait. You know, they're like freaking out because they loved it. And to them, they don't give a shit about Nostr. They have no idea what it is. But a handful of curious people will realize that, like, hey, wait, what's this thing built on? And like, how can I'm seeing all this other content from other places? And how are people paying me? Bitcoin? This is crazy. And then Rabble will just be like, yeah, you can have your key now. You're now yourself, sovereign. See you later. So again, I actually think that the network is growing really fast. We just don't have the tools in place to see it. So that's actually another project I'm working on. A little bit of a side quest is like getting a bunch of Nostr data dumped into a very large analytics database and building a dashboard so that we can see some of this stuff. And some of it's just tricky because it's like, how do you measure Bitch at users? They're all technically ephemeral, they don't have profiles, but they are publishing good events and they are using the thing. So.

[B]

And I appreciate you calling that out there. Jack had a note on Nostr. Of course, a week or two ago, Nostr wins if it stops Trying to be a Twitter clone and starts being the invisible layer underneath apps you actually want to use. Like bitch for location based messaging, Divine for entertainment, White noise for private messaging, Zap stream. Hey. Oh, what we're on right now for streaming. Shakespeare for vibe coding, et cetera. He went on to say, it wins by unbounding into or unbundling into 50 different apps that all talk to each other rather than one giant app corp that traps you. It's all about the ecosystem. I mean, safe to say you're. You're in agreement with that position.

[A]

Very. Yeah, yeah, Strongly in agreement with that position. Again, like, it's, you know, engineers fall into this trap all the time. It's like, I want to build something cool because I want to build something cool versus I want to fix a problem for someone. And I think we need to just keep focusing on fixing problems and watching what users are doing with things and adjusting accordingly to whatever that is.

[B]

No, I definitely agree with that. And it is cool to see. I mean, seeing the response to Divine was really cool because it was just, I think, more. More intense than anyone thought. I mean, especially. Even Rabble thought he was kind of.

[A]

Like, oh, Rabble was shocked.

[B]

Yeah. Wow. Wow. Like, but that's awesome.

[A]

That's great.

[B]

Like, it's. It's striking a nerve and it's Bri. And I also like the focus that it's like filtering out the AI slop, I think is really cool. Making things that are human centric experiences and finding out that, hey, people. Yep. People still want that.

[A]

People resonate. Yeah.

[B]

They want the, you know, just the, the real, the authentic, the. The personality driven, the human driven, versus just so much more generative sloth. Like people are already tiring of it, you know, which is like, okay, bullish on humanity. Then that. That's the case, right?

[A]

Yeah. 100. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that, like the response to Divine, you know, I remember Rabble showing me like a very early version of this and like telling me about it months ago, and I was like, this is really cool. Like, I remember Divine and or vine and it was a big deal. Like, people really loved it just because the format was so fun. And. And I remember I was in the car with him somewhere, going somewhere, and I was just like, this is going to be cool, but, like, it'll probably take, you know, it'll probably be niche, whatever. And then it came out and it was just like, oh, wow. Okay. What? Yeah, yeah, I don't think. I mean, I lived through the whole vine era and thought it was really cool. I still don't think I had any idea how much certain people like really were into it. It was like a cult thing.

[B]

I, I loved using vine and it was, it was, it's interesting because you remember too, vine came around and only after vine did Instagram add video to the app.

[A]

Yep, yep.

[B]

And like that, that was a definitive. They've realized, oh, there's been a massive response to this. You need to get on this. And now you look at, I mean short form video is everywhere. That's that, that's the thing. Everywhere you go is short form video. Vine was just like short form video on steroids. It was like, you know, like seven seconds or whatever, like ultra short form forum. But I also like love that because it made you be even more, you.

[A]

Know, even more creative.

[B]

Concise and creative. And yeah, it's so, it's, it's cool that that's coming back. And again, this is the thing where to your point, people are going to use that without any idea what, you know, noster means. What? Like they're not going to know that it's notes and other stuff transmitted by realize they're not even going to know that it is the thing that is behind all of this. They're just, they're coming for the experience. So I guess a broader question is because I think you've got kind of, you've got two sides of like what NOSTR enables. One is it enables truly superior experiences because of the interconnectedness, because of the ability to create this ecosystem of applications that can all still speak the common language of the NOSTR protocol. The other side is the censorship resistant, like you know, being able to give the, the middle finger to the totalitarian fetishizers like that, that's amazing too. But realistically, the people who are going to come for the anti censorship, anti totalitarian freedom tech, that's minuscule compared to the people who are going to come for hey, sick new video app. Like, that's just the reality. But like that's kind of the Trojan horse too, right?

[A]

Of course.

[B]

You get more and more people making this protocol bigger, more resilient and then it's all still interconnected if and when they need it for that fuck totalitarianism side of things, which is like kind of, kind of. It's just, it's like the sly roundabout way for Bitcoin. Like it's a similar thing here you're bootstrapping with fun stuff so that the freedom tech kind of slides in unbeknownst to the to the would be totalitarians out there, which is just. It's kind of beautiful to watch.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, it is. It really is that, right? Like I said before, we don't have to save everyone or make everyone do the thing in the, in the exact right way. Right. We just have to keep that option open. And, you know, if it's only a small percentage of people, fine. For that small percentage, it really, really mattered. And so, you know, I think that to me is like full success on the Nostr side. Like, if loads of people are using it, they don't have any idea what NOSTR is. Super. I don't care if, you know, we stop seeing, you know, AWS US east one go down and half the Internet turns off. Even better if people are actually able to like topple, you know, authoritarian governments in Africa and like do it safely because of tools we've built, like icing on the cake, you know, we've like fully won. It doesn't matter. You know, like Europe can put in chat control all they want. Like, we don't care. You know, like, fundamentally we have a GitHub repo and we have no servers. So they can ask us to do things, but we just will not do them because we don't, we can't. We're like literally, look, there's the code here. Why don't you fork it and you can add your client side scanning nonsense to it, see if people want to use it.

[B]

I think that's. This is the right attitude. Jeff is like, fuck you guys. Look, we can't even do anything if we want to. So like, you know what, what do you want? There's not, there's nothing you can do, right? Like you, you need to make the tech so that it can't be stopped. And that's the beauty of Nostra is that there is no single throat to choke. It's a protocol. Like, it's. There's, you know, nobody is in charge of it and what people build on top of it is predominantly open source, which is great because that means anyone else can pick that up and run with it. And that means that it just becomes a game of like super intense whack. A mole for any would be totalitarians who want to crack down on it. Like you're just not going to be able to do it it. And the second, you know, so that an analogy I made very early on in getting on Noster was it's. It's the hydra, right? You cut off one head, doesn't matter, two more pop up in its place. And that Hydra is open source, baby. Like it is an open source mythological creature and you cannot kill it. And that is amazing.

[A]

Do you know what's even cooler? I was talking to somebody recently about some local first type stuff that a lot of folks are working on with Noster things. You know, Will from Thomas is, is doing a version of this with Note Deck where he's got a relay running in the app. Effectively you can imagine in a place like whatever Central African country, they can easily just turn off the Internet. But then you've got something like Bluetooth mesh or long distance radio. You've got relays that are in each device so that you're basically running locally until you get Internet somewhere. Whether it's from a satellite or whatever, it sinks down really fast and then can send all the things that you had sent while you were offline. And you end up with this, this extremely resilient network, not only to people actually turning off relays, but the relays are everywhere then. And the relays move around. Basically everyone is a relay then. And so it's like that's the world I'm most interested in seeing is us getting away from this. Like, okay, yeah, we got fiber optic cables that are really fast and that's really cool. And unfortunately Elon's the only guy with satellites right now. But, but Elon having satellites is still better than the NSA having all the cables and Google being everything. So I want us to go in a world where we've got radio and we've got Bluetooth and we've got WI fi mesh and we've got all these different options for how we connect to each other and how we do things like that online. We're still a really long way from that by the way. And the government is not going to let radio spectrum out of their hands anytime soon. But you know, these are things that, you know, squad goals, like we got some work to do but like, I think we can be pushing in that direction constantly.

[B]

Yeah, it is amazing. And all these things ultimately come down to a more fundamentally peer to peer experience.

[A]

Right?

[B]

It's, it's remove, it's removing middlemen in, in kind of all of these different situations, whether it be money with Bitcoin or I mean like radio people, people really, I think like think about radio as this antiquated thing. If we talk about, you know, like HF radio even, but it's like man, the works and it's incredible like.

[A]

And well, you can forget that there's realize, yeah, they forget that there's like 17 radio antennas in their phone. Like there are. Everything is radio. Basically everything is radio. And. And this is why. Yeah, this is why it's so highly regulated, is because it's so unbelievably powerful. You know, you can knock planes out of the sky with it. So, you know, it is some of these things that we discovered a long time ago, like, they are still very, very powerful. You know, we are just using them in, in wild ways now. And unfortunately, we don't have direct access to them as normal citizens. So again, you know, I love the, the little mesh tastics and things like that where they're starting to play with some of these, you know, shorter distance, you know, mesh networks and radio signals that way. I would love to see us get ultra long wave stuff where we're able to bounce bitcoin transactions off the stratosphere and stuff and have them received somewhere else. I know that NVK plays with that stuff and does it on a normal basis, but I think it's still a bit of a party trick. I would love to see all that stuff become a little bit more normal and normalized.

[B]

I wrote a white paper for that a couple of years ago, actually, that I haven't published specifically about using HF radio waves and bouncing them off the ionosphere and using that to create basically a bitcoin doomsday network that would always allow you to propagate transactions even in the event that, like, you know, you didn't have any other Internet. You didn't have Internet connectivity because everybody's like, well, what happens if the Internet goes out? And it's like, well, you'd have this.

[A]

Use radio.

[B]

Yeah, you'd need a certain. Basically, then your question becomes physical security of those sites. If you're actually, you know, worried about that. But that's a. That's like, again, just different problems. Yeah. Maybe I need to unearth that.

[A]

Unearth that, get it out and send it to nvk. He'll spot check it for you.

[B]

Yeah, I had actually talked to him about it as I was writing it at this time. And it was like, let's do it. And then, you know, and then life comes at you.

[A]

And then life comes at you.

[B]

You know what? I'm gonna have to unearth this. I'm gonna, I'm gonna pop this.

[A]

I'm gonna wait, and if I don't see it in the next, like, week or two, I'm gonna start bothering you every day.

[B]

Good, good. I need to, I need to Go revisit it public shaving. See how I did with it. I'm pretty sure I was just about done with it too. I just didn't actually publish it. So I'm going to have to, I'm going have to pick this thing up, do it. You can say, yeah, I want to be conscious of your time here. One thing I just maybe like, last thing to kind of wrap up on a little bit. Vibe coding and Shakespeare. I know you just recently gave, gave a talk where you were just vibe coding live and like building an app based on user or people's requests from the audience. Can you talk about that a little bit? And just like for folks maybe who don't know what Shakespeare is, like, it's. It's really cool. I talked to Derek about this recently too. Like, it's just, it's awesome, right?

[A]

Yeah, it's amazing. So, yeah, Shakespeare is Alex Gleason's AI tool. If you're familiar with something like lovable or Replit, it's really similar. It allows you just to go in and start vibing, trying to one shot, basically an app. The thing is that it's highly tuned for Noster apps and so it knows all the nips and knows how to go read all the nips. It knows how to look at other Noster products. It knows how to set up nostr login with, you know, put in your insec here or use an extension or, you know, use a remote signer. So it's got all these like, you know, shortcuts and things built into it. And it, it knows a lot about things like, I mean, everything from Cashew Wallets to Lightning Wallets to zaps like everything's in there. The other really cool thing, which is, I don't think many people have talked about this, but Alex figured out a way to basically build a virtual file system in the browser. When you do stuff with Shakespeare, it's actually creating a git repository locally in the browser and doing everything in an actual file system rather than just trying to spin something up. When you're done with it, you can actually just git clone and take it somewhere and put it on GitHub if you want and run your app wherever you'd like. So it's a really approachable, easy to use tool. But at the same time, there's actually a pathway for more advanced people to break the thing out and actually go build on it in a real way. But to be honest, most people have pretty good ideas and they can get Shakespeare to pop it out Pretty fast. You can go in there and be like, I want to have a thing that kind of looks like primal, but instead of being normal posts, I want it to be video only. And it will almost certainly do it well. And yeah, like the, the Africa Bitcoin conference, they gave me a workshop slot and I had a bunch of time and it's kind of a mixed thing. You don't know who's going to be at what technical level. So I was like, we're just going to wing this and we're going to start from the point of just like somebody give me an idea. And somebody was like, you know, Uber eats for Uber Eats on Noster. That's it. That's literally what I typed in. And it pretty much one shot at the thing immediately. Now, funny scenario when you scroll down and you're like seeing these things that look like restaurants and then there's like a picture of boobs and you're like, oh God, Nostr. Thank you. No blur hashes obviously, but you know, this is Nostr still. So it was really cool and it was a good jumping off point to just give people this, you know, a bit more context around like. Yeah, there's lots of different models and lots of different ways of using AI. And you know, a lot of the models that are in Shakespeare, available in Shakespeare are open source models. You know, they might not be quite as advanced as something like you know, Claude Opus 4. 5, but they're free. There's not a company behind them taking all the data for the most part. And so I think that's another area where I think we really need to put a lot more energy and focus. And you know, this is very much not Nostr specific but it's a bad, bad world that we end up in if we've got three or four gigantic AI companies and that's it. And that's basically what we're, you know, at right now. Like we are perpetuating this centralized Internet because to run these things well you need, you know, football field sized data centers running at full capacity and you know, it's cost, cost prohibitive for most, most things. And most companies, most people.

[B]

No, it's, I, I've been meaning to play around with, with Shakespeare a little bit more because I am not a developer but it's like I, I do like to vibe so you know, give it some simple stuff.

[A]

It will, it will do a really good job. Like it is like shockingly good at this point. Um, like how, how fast it does it and like how it you know, you get to see the feedback in real time. Like, it's a split screen. So it's like you can see it thinking and sort of talking through all of its changes. And then you just see this. You know, the browser page just keeps updating and you're like, oh, okay, there's a header. Okay, cool. Now it's a sidebar. And like, okay, now I can see the actual content of the app. And, you know, it just, you know, appears before your eyes. It's, like, really, really fun to see.

[B]

It's wild. I can finally make a Footster Noster client specifically for Derek. You know, it's time. This is really. It's really just for Derek, you know, but, you know, I'll. I'll. I think it is time. It's. It's time for.

[A]

That could literally be your next, like, podcast episode. Just instead of doing a podcast episode, just live stream you building Footster with Shakespeare.

[B]

It would be.

[A]

Be. It would be amazing.

[B]

Honestly, I'm super into that. I'm going to have to bring Derek on forward or he's going to feel left out. He doesn't want. He never wants to miss out on the feet, you know? You know, Derek never wants to miss out on the feet, man. But. Okay, Jeff, this has been a blast. Do you want anything else? You want to close out with anything else? We. We, you know, we didn't get into, like, super technical stuff with white noise, but I think it's. It's more important for people to like, especially because you guys are still building this out for people to get the context behind it and to understand why this is so important right now. Now why we need more of tools like this. Maybe like, your. Your beta is still open, right? I'm on the test flight. It's. It's. Still. Have some thoughts?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you go to Whitenoise Chat, that's the website and that's got the download links for everything. We're on Zap Store for Android. We're on. Like, you can just get the Android builds off of GitHub as well. And then we're in test flight on. On iOS. We'll probably try to just stay in test flight until we get to a point where we're sort of like running out of spots because it's just. The review process is just way easier to get through on test flight. And yeah, I think our next pieces that are going into the app now are notifications. We're doing a bit of a re. Architect of some of the ways we pass data around. It's an interesting way the app is built. It's definitely a little non standard, but yeah. Notifications. We'll have audio messages really soon. We'll probably have a bunch more like privacy and security features before too long. And the goal really is to have sort of a 1.0 before Oslo in May of next year. So at that point I hope we can say credibly with a straight face that like this is ready for light activism. You know, like if you're in real danger, please. Not yet quite. But like, you know, we'd love more people to try this out that aren't deep in the nostr world, deep in the, you know, crypto world like we want. When I say crypto, I don't mean like shitcoins, I mean cryptography. Yeah, yeah, Just make sure that's clear to everybody.

[B]

I got you.

[A]

Exactly. I hate it. But yeah, like, you know, I hope the app is going to be very soon to the point where, you know, you can do the basic stuff indistinguishable from the way it works in Signal. It won't have all the bells and whistles and it won't have video calls quite yet. But again, hopefully by mid next year we will also have video calls and things.

[B]

That's amazing. I'm very grateful that you are building this out. How many, how many people are now contributing to the development out of Gear os?

[A]

Oh, gosh. Kind of like very regular people. I'd say it's probably seven or so engineers and maybe three other people, like designers, some people that help on the marketing side and stuff like that. So yeah, it's probably like around 10.

[B]

Dang, that's awesome. That's. Yeah, it's really cool.

[A]

Great. It's great. Really, really helpful.

[B]

Anything else you want to leave for? Did we cover. Cover things pretty well. We're gonna have to do this again, especially as you guys are rolling out more features. Anything else though that we didn't cover that? Damn it, Walker, you should have asked me about this.

[A]

No, the only other thing I'd say is like the Marmot protocol. One of the other really cool things about the way we've done this is Marmot is an open protocol. Right? Like we want other apps to be using Marmot to build secure messaging. Right. And so we already know like we've got bitcoin wallets that are going to use it to do multi sig coordination so you can talk to the other people in your wallet in the app with, you know, Marmot based messaging. We also. There's like a bunch of really weird, interesting use cases that people are using it for. But like, fundamentally, I'd love to see people be able to create groups across White noise and Primal, or White noise and Domus, or White noise and Amethyst, and that this just becomes kind of the de facto way that we do secure messaging on both Nostr and in Bitcoin. So I would say like, anybody that's got a project out there where that might be interesting or applicable, like, reach out to me. I would love to talk you through it and like help you figure out whether or not it makes sense and also, you know, help you implement it if it comes down to that.

[B]

I love it, man. It's people helping people resist totalitarian overreach.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

It's all we can do, right? One, one step at a time.

[A]

Well, dude, exactly.

[B]

Jeff, this was a pleasure. Thank you for coming on here. Appreciate you sharing your scarce time. Thank you to everybody who joined and watched this on the Noster Only live stream. I appreciate each and every one of you and I appreciate the zaps that is always appreciated, even if they are one sat. But there were some larger than one sat. So thank you guys for those those much appreciated. Jeff, thank you for building Freedom Tech. It is awesome. Looking forward to seeing what happens next.

[A]

Thank you, man. It's always fun to hang out.

[B]

Cheers. And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. Find me on [e-mail] walker and this [e-mail] on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram at titcoin Podcast. Head to the Show Notes to grab sponsor links. Head to substack.com walkeramerican to get episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.