The Last Trade E015: Bitcoin + NOSTR + AI: Utility Beyond Digital Gold with Max Webster

What you're telling me is that music is about to stop, and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of bodarous extras ever assembled in the history of doubtless 1974198792972 thousand. Whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we sell, hey, I say when we sell. All right. And we're live really excited for this episode, gentlemen. We're joined by Max Webster from Hivemind Ventures. And a really excited for this episode because it's going to be a bit of a different conversation to date. This is episode 15. We've had a lot of institutional investors, allocators, other venture fund. Types on the show, but we've really been focusing in on Bitcoin, the asset and how it will fit into your portfolio, how it should fit into your portfolio with the digital gold thesis. And we've hinted at it in many episodes since we launched in May. But I think everybody on this call truly believes that that is just the surface layer of what Bitcoin has to offer the world and again. We brought Max on this week because he's on the cutting edge of where Bitcoin is really becoming a meeting of exchange in the digital age, becoming the payments layer of the Internet. And so with that monologue, Max, I'll throw it to you to introduce yourself. Tell us how you got to where you are today and and what you're doing in Hide by Adventures. Yeah, I mean very high level. I first read about Bitcoin in 2011 when I was a student university. And, you know, grew up, I would say, with a more nontraditional sort of out there, parents who question a lot of things and has to die. So I thought it was a really cool idea. But yeah, frankly, I thought I had very little chance of working. So I didn't buy any, which I had and kind of forgot about it for many years. My other big obsession was with energy. And I think that's maybe one of these sort of unique perspectives I brought to this space. I also really just enjoy like finding exponential curves or finding you know where the cost of something is falling very rapidly and so. As I was graduating from university around 20/11/2012, I became pretty obsessed with the cost of solar falling off of a Cliff and for every doubling of cumulative capacity employee as all the levelized cost of energy was coming down, I thought like 20% turns out was more like 40%. And so I got really excited about that, jumped in the energy industry, you know, did a couple of things, startups totally bombed. Then moved down to Mexico in early 2015 as the first hire startup called Bright, which was Yc's first investment in solar in Mexico. I was down there for almost five years. We're now, you know, the largest residential solar company in Mexico. While I was down in Mexico I got two kind of Eureka moments that got me read I guess acquainted with Bitcoin. The first was I started seeing Bitcoin as energy backed money and this was my big thesis and I was very interested in crypto. I started reading in 2016 about some of these Ethereum projects for like decentralized energy trading. Thought that was cool. Eventually it hit me though that Bitcoin is essentially like a Ledger of energy and I think this is one of the things I I take slightly different than the most people. My hero is Buckminster Fuller, he called for energy backed money. Tesla did forded all these people and so when I started. Seeing, you know, thinking about that the university energy, that the currency of the energy is calories. And wherever you choose to demarcate it, Bitcoin is the purest form I've ever had on that. That started to help me separate the signal from the noise and realize I think it's going to be Bitcoin. I also, around that time in 2017, read the lightning white paper. And you know, watch Lola and some of these guys talk about what could happen scaling from that. And you know, I had some familiarity with how the Internet scale with the OSI model. And so I started thinking, I think that a lot of these other crypto projects are piloting interesting ideas. But maybe this is kind of like a little bit like the web van moment, like this is not the right rails to do it on or it's, you know, a little too early adoption wise. It's probably going to happen at higher level of abstraction on Bitcoin. But at that time, I was certainly not smart enough to be participating in Lightning network development. It was super hard to run a node. So I just kind of. I kept in the back of my head. Meanwhile, while I was living in Mexico, I saw that, you know, a bunch of my friends, you know, their parents were literally just like storing in USD under the mattress because they didn't have access to, you know, you know, bank accounts in the United States. And half of the country was unbanked. I had friends from Argentina and Venezuela going through hyperinflation. And so for them it was a lot easier to explain Bitcoin. And that kind of helped me realize that, you know, in emerging markets this was going to be probably more of a fit earlier on. So that all got me really excited about Bitcoin. Did some work with Bitzo and the big exchange in Mexico around payments with Bitcoin in 2018. Quickly realized it could never scale on layer one. Kind of became re, I guess, committed to the Lighting Network is like this is our best chance of scaling and making Bitcoin actually useful? And so around that time, I went back to San Francisco. I worked at a different venture fund, version 1 Ventures, for about a year and a half there I did all of our sort of climate energy stuff, as well as our crypto projects. And I tried to go with a pretty open mind. We invested in all of the big Ethereum projects, Uniswap, Open Nexus, all this stuff. And I, and I really did try and you know, say, well, maybe there's a chance some of these other networks will be interesting for other kinds of computation. Basically became very jaded with that. When I would ask all the other entrepreneurs, you know, all of them, I'd say I asked one question like do you run a full node for your ecosystem? You know, it was basically told by all of them that they were exactly 0 full nodes being run other than by Infura or Alchemy. And so that's why I started realizing. I started feeling Michael Burry and Big Short and I was like, I don't think any of this is real. So I knew I had to come back to Bitcoin, and I knew that what was interesting to me was Bitcoin becoming interesting as the currency of the Internet and the currency of the world. And so in about two years ago, I started hiding my ventures and the thesis was essentially that the Lightning Network is what's gonna make Bitcoin useful. And so Fund one was very focused on Lightning Network infrastructure we invested in. A number of companies, almost 40, almost exclusively Lighting network companies. Lighting Labs, River Light Spark, a whole bunch of early ones. Open source projects like Ellen Betts, a whole bunch of that haven't been announced yet. And then over time I started realizing that it wasn't just going to be infrastructure, but as we move into Lighting Network application phase that the things that were most interesting for lighting Network in addition to cross-border payments, which is I think pretty pretty clear was going to be around Gnoster and around AIS using lighting for payments. And those are two like really, radically new areas where lighting network applications can thrive. And so today I kind of think as I move into my sort of next fund is we're moving into the lighting network or Bitcoin application phase. And I think that my sort of protocol stack that I'm investing on is Bitcoin is the decentralized monetary network, Lightning as the decentralized payments network and Noster as the decentralized data network. And those three things together, we'll be able to build all the ideas that you saw on crypto and many, many more. And the decentralized A I steps can be a bit part of that and I'm sure we'll talk a lot about that today as well. Yeah, one thing that I may embarrass Max a little here, but Max, when we met a little over two years ago, that was what really stuck out when you were coming out of the transition from the crypto and web and UNISWAP and I hadn't. I don't think I've have met somebody that has gone through that kind of like. I don't know if it's trial by fire because we've all been there. We have stories about first going to crypto, but also like really investing in being like full in it and taking that step back and being honest with themselves, like, wait, maybe this isn't the right thing. And then also having that lens, we're chatting before the the pod with your, I don't know what you call them if it's a cohost or if it if it's official with the David King, but similarly coming from the Silicon Valley background. It's not a it's it's not always a given, but it's a nice heuristic in my mind when you see folks coming from the quote UN quote legacy world because there's like institutional, like tribal baked in standards built into whether it's Tradfi or the Googles of the world. And then they come in and find their way into Bitcoin that it always was like, OK, this guy's on to something. So it's been awesome to see the past two years and navigating that and then going to the very edges, which I think of like Nostra at the very edge of like all of this, but. I think everybody that's looked at it would agree there's a lot happening there that ties into Bitcoin, so it's also to have you on the show. Thank you. Really appreciate it. And yeah, I'd be kind of all you guys, so excited to be here. I'm I'm curious actually just want to jump in there if like what was it like like what was that, that journey for you? Like when you realize that Eunice Swap wasn't the thing. Like was there? Was it you just kind of woke up one day and it was clear or? Were there a couple touch points or like what was your experience like there? Yeah, well, I mean, I think I, you know, I should be clear in this and that prior to quote UN quote, investing professionally in those ecosystems, you know, I was already on the path to becoming a Bitcoin. Like I mentioned, you know, I read about Bitcoin 2011 and did some pretty serious investigations in 2016 and 2017 and I wasn't 100% sold, right. Like I still thought other projects like at the time Monero was pretty interesting and some other things. And so I really did try and keep an open mind. And so I thought, you know, there are a lot of really smart people and funds frankly that are investing these other ecosystems. You know, maybe I'm really missing something. And so I went in, I would say with more of a Bitcoin lens to begin with, but open minded enough to say. What am I missing? And to be frank, I mean, you know, just asking all those questions, literally finding that no one's running nodes, it's getting more difficult to run nodes. Like I think the way I described to people is like very simple. Like I guess one of the middle models of crystallized from you is if you think about, you know, two curves, right? There's the rate of like the size of your blockchain growing, right, that has a certain steepness. And then there's a cost of consumer hardware to run a full node. And that's the bandwidth, the storage, all that. That is a certain steepness. And if this one is steeper than this one, I E if your blockchain is growing way faster, then it's getting cheaper and easier to run a node, then it has to centralize. It's just a question of when. And so I kept like formalizing that thought process over my year and a half, like trying to like see where I was wrong and no one could tell me I was wrong. I looked into all the D5 stuff. I tried to understand where is the actual coming from. I just couldn't identify it. And you know, I I really thought, well maybe I'm missing something. And then after a while, you know, I will say this, it definitely gave me a certain degree of confidence where like you know, I'm seeing and not saying I don't respect these guys. These are all fantastic funds that are incredible in many ways. But you know, you're looking at these funds you used to idealize like A16Z or? Things of Quay, like investing in FDX and stuff and you start thinking, well wait a second, you know, maybe maybe a lot of people aren't thinking from first principles. Truly, if you do that, then there's huge alpha and you know, fuck it, I'm gonna do, you know, I'm gonna do it on my own and see what happens. So. Yeah, it's so interesting how there's this, this misconception among alt coiners and the broader crypto world that Bitcoin maximalists haven't looked into alt coins enough. Like that's the assumption on that side of things is they'll they'll get to altcoins because you know there's so much excitement here and they just don't know about it. They're still on version one with the boring Bitcoin and and then you are are proof positive that it's actually the the the other way. There's a There's a hero's journey of you start with Bitcoin, you go into the wilderness and you end up coming back. Oops, sorry. Go for mine. No, I was gonna say I think, I think this conversation like this, what we're talking about right now, really reminds me of my favorite blog post of all time about Bitcoin, which is Gwern's 2012 post Bitcoin is Worse, is Better. And I think to give the audience like a better of understanding about what we're meant by that, I think you began to touch on it with how. These systems, if they're going to be successful, need to be sufficiently distributed at the end of the day. Like what in your mind gives you confidence that Bitcoin at the base layer has that sufficient distribution, whether it be full nodes, hash rate, private key ownership? It's full nodes. Yeah, but full nodes and hash, right? I think, you know, again might be. And again I'm not saying there aren't other things that shouldn't have different degrees of centralization or decentralization. Like I'm, we'll talk a lot about this, but that's why I'm so excited about master. I do think they're interesting things. Like I do think the idea of a quote UN quote decks, a decentralized marketplace is absolutely fascinating. I just don't think that needs to be on a blockchain. I think it can be done perfectly well with Noster. I think decentralized social media is amazing, again, doesn't need a blockchain. So I really like a lot of those ideas and was very much looking for something like Noster that would say the only thing that really, really needs. Because if you think about it like to have sufficient decentralization of the base layer, I think if I did choose one thing, it's the nodes and then the hash, right? And so to run a whole bunch of nodes, I mean, it's very expensive to be able to audit that whole system and have some form of global state. And so I think something like the base economic unit, the money is probably the only thing you really need that for. If you're just doing communication, you need some way to sign a private message. Have enough different nodes out there, enough different servers or relays saying yes, this data exists, yes, it was signed on private key, but you don't need everyone to agree on the exact same global state for that. So anyway, so that was kind of always in the back of my head, but with Bitcoin at that base layer, you do need radical decentralization. And I think you guys are way deeper than this than I am. But the history of money and it's pretty clear that it always gets debased and you need to fight the fight to keep that one layer decentralized, truly, and I think. Number of nodes, making sure that you know, I remember the 2017 block wars, making sure it's super easy for anyone that wants to run a node to be able to run a node whether they're in, you know, Ecuador or the United States. It needs to be cheap enough, easy enough, that's super important. And then the amount of hash going up, like whenever people are concerned about Bitcoin, like look if if my thesis is right and this is just energy backed money, then you know as long as hash rate continues to go up over time, I'm not concerned. It's funny you bring that up because those two I think nobody would dispute. But the one that I think is like directly one to one is private keys and nodes. Because I think if you have infinite number of nodes in the private key sit between Coinbase and and name the other one, it doesn't really matter the number of nodes because the private keys in a similar. I think those are the that's the one that doesn't get talked about a lot. And I'm curious, do you have any thoughts on like private key ownership? You know, I haven't thought. Distribution really, right? Like outside of a core contingent of, you know, institutions holding a large subset of the private keys. Well, I definitely think more people holding private keys is definitely a better thing. What would the argument be? I haven't really thought about this one too much. Why would that be as important as nodes auditing the Ledger itself? So in my mind that if you have let's say 10 nodes auditing the network. In 10 separate large entities holding the keys, you want it to grow in proportion because if you have an infinite number of nodes. So we get the centralization there and decentralization of hash, but you end up with let's call it 5 entities holding the majority of the keys. So I think about it similar like what you mentioned, digital gold In my mind like kind of started to go to this anchor point of like one of the big and it's almost cute to say it's not the only thing but the big difference between Bitcoin and gold is multi seg. Because you're able to not have this centralization of the asset because if we break down like from a first principle level of where gold failed it centralized with banks and they were able to start mucking with the supply of the the claims on the gold. And so that's where I like anchor to this like keys and stuff we work on it on ramps. I'm obviously like talking my book but it's also like an important thing. I don't think a lot of folks talk about is like the key ownership and they it's. It's about getting as many out in the network almost to the edges similar to nodes in the sense that you want to like especially from like I don't know if they're they're the most appropriate is tyranny. But like you want it, you want to have that cost of violence as far and distributed to go and take possession of the asset. And if it was centralized within 510, even 100 identifiable institutions. Or entities. It gets a lot easier to basically Co opt the asset independent of how many nodes are out there. Yeah, I think that's a very fair point. I think, yeah, I mean, in general, more people holding more keys also is good for less volatility, which has happened over time. I think that's gonna keep happening as well. So, yeah, I mean, I certainly say that's another important point. Yeah, luckily the data here is in our favor too. Hash rates going up full node. Owners are going up and then Bitcoin held off exchanges is going up as well. There's been a complete exodus. Not a complete exodus, but a material exodus off of exchanges last two years. That's sort of the beauty of Bitcoin has its antifragile system. I mean, the antifragility works at the protocol layer, but then the social layer. People see an FTX to sell CSA block 5, blow up and they go, oh wow, like, maybe my Bitcoin isn't safe on this exchange. I should get it. Into keys that I that I actually possess. So I mean, the old adage that everything's good for Bitcoin, even if it's an exchange blow up, seems to be playing out. In real shot. And one thing I would add on here, just sort of my realist point of view this, I think it's amazing and I tell everyone like owning your own keys is an incredible, you know, step in the journey for a lot of people. But, but I do think that there will always be you know, various forms of centralized institutions, right, Like there could be multi saying there would also just be like you know, single, you know. Custodians, and I think that on Bitcoin Center, if if they do start to hold that, ideally with a lot more transparency and they go under, well then they go under it and people learn overtime which ones are much more trustworthy, which ones are not. I do think it's important for everyone to kind of evaluate and where they are in their journey like because if you do hold your own private keys, right, like a lot of people I know have just lost those too. I think that that's a really real risk. But I think for me the most important thing is that it should be very easy to move between yourself and a custodian, should be very easy for everyone. To be transparent, what they hold, what they don't hold. And then from there I guess over time it probably becomes easier for people to hold their own. But I think interoperability and transparency are probably the things I most value there. Yeah, auditability is important from the market just going back to reputation based. So then you mention about the crypto, I think there's a high form of alpha that's just looking at crypto firms that had quote UN quote traction and then. And then you just like literally put, you just insert sats into it. That was the one that they sold shoes that had like. Like the one that always comes to mind is the step, the step in thing. Remember like step in in 2021, it was the thing you got like tokens and it turned into like people just trading it. But it was like to incentivize going and working out. It's like that's kind of interesting, like if you can like gamify that, but you don't need an alt coin. But yeah, there's so many. Like what do you call them? Accelerometers in them, right? To count how many steps you were taking, and then you were paid tokens based on how many steps you were taking every day, which is such a bizarre distribution mechanism, but it got a lot of hype. Totally. I actually joke with people and like you say that kind of tongue in cheek. And as do I. But also just like truthfully, I love to like go like look at the multicoin portfolio, see what gets traction. Just like, OK, imagine this, but done without a shit coin, right? Like just imagine this done with money. And I think, for example, This is why I was so excited to see Nostra. I do think, you know, we want decentralized messaging to be able to build those marketplaces. But again, there's no reason you need a blockchain for that. So three of the things I'm most bullsh on and in fact I've just invested in one of these and you know. Continually hunting for other ones are decentralized markets for bandwidth, storage and compute. These are all great ideas, don't need their own token, and for many reasons like having your own token. Obviously there's many reasons why it's a bad idea, but one is just you don't have liquidity. If I get paid with Helium, what the hell am I supposed to do with this helium token? If I get paid with Sats, well over time there's more and more exchanges. I can get that into whatever my local currency is or. Recently just trade that for goods and services. But like, yeah, I'm super bullish on a lot of those quote UN quote crypto ideas and that's why I said it's kind of like I saw 20-17 and you know the the years after that, it's kind of like the web band moment, like online grocery delivery, really good idea. Infrastructure wasn't there yet, and this is maybe a little bit scammier and more, you know, dangerous man, yeah. So Max, let's like let's slow that one down and play it out a little bit of like okay, so why don't you need file coin, you know like so or whatever the other set of storage on your computer being used and and by decentralized, like a WS, decentralized a WS instance basically and you get paid for lending, for renting out your storage space. That's basically the model, right? And then so then they've created these tokens like File, Coin and others that are variants of the same idea to be the currency that you're paid out in. So why don't you need that to be baked into the system? And then how do Sats replace that? I think there's two different ways you can look at this. One is you can just like have a very sort of like simple business file and like I'm sure you guys have heard value for value, which to me is really funny because it's like it's like such an obvious idea. It's like ways. Like, you mean like I do something valuable and you pay me something valuable? Like it's almost like so obscenely simple. Like, of course that's what the economy should be, right? And so if you take this idea that Bitcoin is the best money, it's energy backed money and you're producing some kind of valuable work, well that has some caloric value and you're gonna pay me in that. Now there's two models I can see working with this model. Number one is I just pay you for the service you provide and in that world the reason Bitcoin is so much better and it gets keeps getting better with every month over time is frankly liquid. Right. I can pay you out in sats and now and I know for a fact because I've invested in many of these companies, companies like Neutron pay pouch, ibex, bit knob, all these different companies that are kind of like lightning to Fiat rails around the world. You can cash that out to your local currency or cash that out for goods and services, right. If I pay you in helium token, what the hell are you supposed to do with the helium token? Where can you trade that? Like where can you get, you know, goods and services that and again, I'm not saying we're perfect there with Bitcoin yet. Actually think something like Taro probably offer U.S. dollars on top of it is going to help us a lot in the short run. But as a monetary network, Bitcoin and lightning continues to grow and gain more and more interoperability. Another way of saying that is Bitcoin and lightning to me are the Internet of value. All these other, you know, quote UN quote, cryptocurrencies are intranets. They're not interoperable. And so I'm always going to bet all day, every day on the network that's open, interoperable and keeps growing, right. And and that's Bitcoin of lightning in my mind. So that's the first reason. The one thing that I will say that I'm open to where this is going to go is I do think you know what Helium and some of these other things try to do was essentially give people equity, right. So not just pay you in cash, which I think cash can work just fine. But you know say hey, if you have earlier ownership in this network, perhaps it's more valuable. And I am interested to see how people are going to do and maybe this will come with Taro or something, but the ability to basically give you like Sats flows over time. I think if you think about what equity is, it's just a claim on future cash flows. And so if there's some way that you can get a bigger claim by being earlier on future Sats flows, Bitcoin flow into the network, I think that's pretty interesting. And so I'm curious how people are gonna experiment with that. Yeah, yeah, one thing. You said the value for value and I think. When we go through that, I think it's probably helpful to explain why there's a problem and you can probably do it better than than anybody. But it's just like breaking down from 1st principles like how fundamentally the Internet was it. It it's relatively new, it's 20, you know consumer Internet, let's call it 2000s, maybe even 95. So you have 20 to 3025 to 30 years. But then we look at like the status of Facebook, Twitter and and the way things were were made and people assume like this is what will always be if you can help break down like where things. Fell apart there because I think that actually helps. And then as we start thinking about value for value NOSTER and some of the stuff that is is being created because I think of it similarly with like venture and just like capital formation in today's world, it's like the value for value isn't actually going to the most valuable. It's there's this like latency in the signal because of all the muckiness and that's similar to like what we see in the Internet today. Do you want to break that down and then we can riff post that? I don't want to hijack Marty's, but you signal the value for value and there's a lot there. Yeah. I mean, so I mean, I think one way of looking again, value for value, right. It's just like to me, it's just, it's an exchange of like it's proof of work. You do work and I give you this digital proof of work, IE energy, potential energy for your actual energy or your active energy, kinetic energy. And so I think that the way I think about Bitcoin and lightening is it's, you know, it's a currency for the Internet. And when the Internet was formed there, you know these various HTTP error codes. Most people have seen like 404 errors as an example page not found. But if you go to 402, right, that was the error for payment not received. So it's not like these are new ideas. People were really curious and planning for currency. The Internet, it just wasn't a solved technological problem of how to do it yet. And I the reason my fun, for example, is called hive mind is I think humanity is at this just really exciting evolutionary point. We're about to enter the next stage of human evolution. And that next stage is if you think about how, like how evolution flows or how everything in the universe flows, there's this idea of like holons, right? Like things are parts and then they're holes. So holes become parts of new holes all the way up and all the way down. This is true from, you know, molecule, our cells and molecules and organs, organ systems and bodies and ecosystems, the planet all the way up and all the way down. And So what I think we're about to do, we're living through this crazy time where you know, historically we've had nation states which I think in like you know, a couple, 100 years are going to look kind of like a little silly. I'm not saying they're going to totally die. And I think it's it's kind of like the Catholic Church used to have a lot more power of the world still around but much less so it's probably what's gonna happen nation states. But yeah I think our kids, kids are gonna be like it's kind of weird like why is it that, you know, just cuz I was born on like the wrong side. You were born in Mexico and I was born in Brownsville, TX. We couldn't do like you know projects together and exchange value together like that. That's just like just seems really weird when you think about that from future generations perspectives. And so I think that you know we started by laying the best version of the Internet that we could. And when I say laying that actually mean like the physical infrastructure of the cables and then obviously all the services that came on top of that without having native currency for the Internet. And kind of trying to like make this like kind of Frankenstein system work with all of our legacy Fiat currencies and payment networks that we're just never meant for the for the Internet, right. Like, I mean if you have, you know an ACH transfer that takes you five days to clear or a wire that takes a couple of days and $15 like like everything else on the Internet allows information to spread, to spread at the speed of light. And so money just can't, can't match that right now. So you have this just just bizarre mismatch of information wanting to be free and being free but not being able to develop business models around that because the monetary and payment networks don't work with it, right. And So what I think is going to happen next is we've kind of laid this first version of all of the neurons that are connecting humanity into a hive mind. And I think we're actually in a bit of a turning .1 model of the hive mind is more I guess if like a Chinese type model where it's very top down state controlled and and that's pretty, pretty scary in my mind. Another version of the high mind is a very decentralized sort of markets driven high mind where it's it's self emergence, it's self forming. And that's what I think Bitcoin represents, that's what I think lightning represents, that's what I think Nostra represents. And so I think the next big phase is, you know, Bitcoin as a currency on the Internet is great. And I think we're going to see a lot of really cool business models emerge with just using, you know, Lightning payments, for example, companies like Stacker News and Investor. And there's a lot of cool stuff happening with those kinds of sites. But then I think the even the phase beyond that is we start thinking, well, if we now have this new currency and payments network for the Internet, why don't we build an Internet itself that's more in that shape or form. And that's what I think Nostra is. We can talk about the architecture of that, but a more decentralized version of the Internet. And then I think the far version even beyond Nostra is an idea that Drew Bansal's talked a lot about, which is that eventually we're going to use these new primitives to actually go back and probably relay new physical infrastructure itself that's more in line with a decentralized Internet and a decentralized payment system. And so like actually having packets themselves need to have payments associated with them. I think that's going to come in the far future, but I think that's the direction that we're moving in. We're going to have one sort of like, you know, energy exchange system or as he calls it, metabolic system. And that's what the new Organism is composed of, all of us as individual organisms within it. Yeah, we're getting Cosmic here. So no, I completely agree with everything you just said, because I've seen it play out in real time. Like podcasting 2.0 Perfect example. RSS sends out our podcast. We can put a lightning network. Address in there, people can scream of sats, boost of sats as they listen. Obviously Nostra notes and other stuff transferred over relays. That's what Nostra stands for. For anybody who's wondering what we're talking about, I think we'll dive deeper into Nostra. But I think to really set the tone for the rest of the conversation, let's let's let's like build it up where particularly around the Lightning Network. So we're 5 1/2 years after the Lightning Network launched in March of 2018. It launched too much fanfare. However, there are many out there who think for some reason or another that Lightning has not been successful. So I think, Max, I'm curious, just starting at Lightning five years in, like, where is it and why do people have these misconceptions? And then obviously we've mentioned NOSTER and Podcasting 2.0, and you mentioned AI earlier. Where is it now? And then how? What are you seeing in terms of it being integrated into these other open protocols? Yeah. So I think the first thing I would say that is like obviously, you know, I would love to see this go even faster. I like who wouldn't like I wish everyone was using Lightning Wall and I can't say that you know we're anywhere near that. We have a ways to go. If you think about, you know, I don't know what the the most recent numbers are, but I've seen estimates somewhere in the order of like 2-3 hundred million people ish that have interacted with Bitcoin in some way. I'm assuming that includes 20 days. Maybe you guys have better date on that, but let's call it in that like low hundreds of 1,000,000 that's around 97 Internet level penetration. And so I think kind of my big bet is that from 97 to 2007 is when you saw Google and Facebook and Twitter. I guess Twitter came around a little later than that, but that's when you saw a huge wave of all of these big successful Internet companies first form Amazon. And I think we're about, I think we're living through that right now literally as we speak. And so as I think about my fund as an investor, right, like you know one of the tricky things is timing like I'm pretty confident in where all this direction is going to head trying to time the wave is tricky making sure that companies are well enough capitalized be able to ride it. But I think that, you know, my last two years was very heavily focused on infrastructure, right. And we've come such a long way. I don't think people realize now. Like if anyone wants to understand how easy Lightning is to use, I would say download cash app, buy Bitcoin, go to El Salvador and like pay for a lot of things instantly for free from cash app. That's a wild statement. A US publicly traded company's payment app is my wallet in El Salvador right now. Not theoretical, right? So that's one crazy example. An even better example, because I think that some of the nation state adoption stuff is cool but honestly happened faster in some ways than I thought it would, is using it again as the currency of the Internet. And so I would say the two most interesting projects for anyone to get an idea of what's happening here Albee get albee.com. And on Albee you can basically download a Chrome extension which is your lightning wallet and use that for all kinds of experiences on the Internet. One would be Stacker dot news, which is like Reddit but you upload with Bitcoin and there's a lot of interesting implications around surfacing value and information and all kinds of other things. But again, that just works, right? Like, there's no questions around theory. I load up $20 worth of Sats, gotta come on 100,000 Sats, and I go and ZAP articles instantly I see it leave my wallet and go to someone else's wallet instantly, real time for free. That's a real experience. So I think the last two or three years were kind of about laying the initial infrastructure. Another way that I sometimes think about this is like we're kind of like, I think the Lightning Network. I think, I don't think people have seen it like this, but it's kind of like we're laying the next railroad track. And I true truly believe, you know the like the Vanderbilts and Morgans, like really big industrialists are going to be those that can kind of take advantage of frankly and capitalize on laying the track correctly owning you know the some of the Grand Centrals that are sitting there routing. And I think those companies, probably a lot of them already exist. I think companies like River, Neutron, Pay Pouch Block, Ibex, you know, Bitknob, and a lot of them are going to be in different sort of zones. Like that infrastructure is pretty developed right now. So then I think the next thing we're missing is the actual application base. Stacker news is 1 incredible example, But you know that that was a little bit ahead of its time. That's because Ken's not only an application developer but a protocol developer as well. But now you're starting to see the libraries, for example, Albee's libraries, Breeze's libraries are getting good enough that a JavaScript level developer can come in and start to build applications with lighting. And that's when things start to get really interesting, because once the developers can build new experiences, that's going to bring on way more users because they can go out and build specific apps for their users. And I do think the two areas, the three areas I'm most bullish on are international payments. That's already happening. That's a bit of a slog, but it's gonna keep happening. Companies like Strike, all the companies I mentioned are focused there, but the two areas that I'm most excited about are when you look at investment waves, what is brand new, not trying to like tag on the old activity with the new substrate but literally build up a new activity in a new substrate. And so I think Nostra based applications where you natively ZAP any piece of content or can natively conduct payments in any kind of Nostra and I'll talk about that means next or whatever you want that's going to be huge. And then the A I is paying each other, which I know sounds very scifi and crazy. But you know, the TLDR there is like you're about to live in a world with, you know, if we have billions of humans, I think trillions of artificial intelligences and JP Morgan is not banking them, right? Like this is not going to happen. And so the ability for AI is to be able to interact with each other and other Internet services at the speed of light, like information can happen. That just can't happen with the old payment rails. So that's why I'm so focused on on Noster and AI use cases right now, cuz even that's where we see the brand new novel concepts that take the infrastructure from lighting that's already built and just like bring it into the mainstream. Yeah, This is something, Marty. This is something Marty and I talked about a lot. It's like we try to pontificate or figure out, is it the Aster that goes up or the utility And it feels like it's and it's what's exciting about what we're talking about. It happens in levels at the same time. Where you're referencing and there's stuff like Vita and others that are building like this native app that can be used in real applications. The example that always anchor to just because they're annoying I think for everybody. It's like Robo calls from spam and if you can set up a way that they can ping a server to figure out if it is spam or not and you have it a fractional amount of sats that are paid. And it just becomes a better experience for somebody to download that figure out how to top up the wallet and you you, you know, you mentioned AI and these other utilities or other projects that can be used. And and at the same time that you're downloading this application, you're referencing Sats or you're seeing this like token and the price is appreciating and they're happening in parallel and they kind of just like meet in the middle as at least that's how I started to think about it the past 12 months as seeing all this like crazy things that can just be built. Inherently better because now you have a token that's native the Internet versus having this like clunky version of buying credits or figuring out how it can programmatically interact with an application that's that's newer or form fit for like where we're at today. 100% agreement and maybe it would be helpful if you guys are good with this name. We can do a deep dive on Noster and why Lightning will thrive there and then AI. Cute. Cute. Before before we do that, one of the things that I wanted to reference or just like tie it back because I think we're so far down there. I hold that it makes sense to us, but that it's like it's anchoring back to like where why there's a problem like you reference yield in the same way that we talk about like yields a problem in the sense of there's the joke. We'll probably give it to Phil Geiger is like if you if you don't know where the yields coming from, it's coming from you, you are the yield. Yeah, we know in the same way like if you're getting the service, it's your attention is the yield, like you were giving it, you're providing it. And when the Internet came about, when you think about Google Adwords and Facebook, all that infrastructure costs. And so that's where the Internet was built, based on ads. And you see all this crazy, just like. It's just like I just keep waiting here. This where like tumor it just like looks nasty because it doesn't make sense. You don't know how it came about but somebody's subsidizing that and you are via your attention in these other formats and so and we can go down the other use cases. But I think that's an important aspect because I was listening to one of the pods you did with David and I knew there was a lot here inherently just cuz he knew the Internet was messed up. But then one about Google and the highlighter and it really like hit me. That Google's whole job is to crawl and surface, quote, UN quote, valuable information on the web. But it isn't because of that inherent, latent like between the the value and then the value that's on the Internet. So you get shit at the top and that's via like blogs and pot and like all the stuff that's there. So what's people paid or what's gone versus what do people find the most interesting or the most valuable? And the second you can highlight or input some proof of work tied to what somebody really is willing to give away to your point on the high line, you start to surface the best information and it rearchitects what's actually happening in people and that can go across all mediums. It doesn't have to be a blog post. It can be a how to. It can be music. And so anyway, I just think of it, it's like an interesting aspect to like break down, like where how information isn't actually coming in the right direction, value isn't going there. And so that inherently has to be fixed if we want it to be the most efficient And then that's where Noster and these things like come about or at least that's our I believe our thesis on the on this totally. And I would just say two quick reactions that I mean I'm sure you've read this Gigi's piece is really good on this about he kind of goes into into great detail about why a credit based monetary system doesn't work for the Internet and why attention became the pseudocurrency and you know, very high level. I would recommend everyone to read it. It's an excellent piece. But like if you're using Stripe, you have whatever the 2.9% fee plus 25% transaction fee like you just can't do micro transactions and without micro transactions it limits the types of business models that you can pay for. And so if your subscriptions work, and they work in a lot of cases, but it limits the creative ability of developers and entrepreneurs to test. And So what has emerged is like, people want easy, frictionless things. But as you said, nothing's free, right? Like, they have real server cost. And so in order to pay for that, yeah, attention has become the default pseudocurrency. You know, Facebook is quote, UN quote free, but how free is it really if it, you know, warps your mind and sucks your time? And and I think it's just like one thing that I hope Bitcoin helps solve, is like attention is the most valuable thing everyone has. Full stop. And to give it away for free is just it's wild to me. I don't even like these like micro pay things. I know some people like this like, oh, you know, you you give your attention, you get paid a couple of sats. Like, I think your attention is like so much more viable. Like your attention is like is it's more valuable than Bitcoin. Like attention is the only thing that really matters at the end of the day. And so my hope is that Bitcoin is a much, is a much better, better money for the Internet. So we can come up with new business models that are much fairer and save your attention. So that's where I hope we're at it. Yeah, I think it all comes down to centralization versus decentralization. Like AWS and Netflix are great examples. They're inefficient models. To send all the data to a major server, it has to get fed back. But then ultimately, there's also just like the the natural censorship that can come with it. And so there's a lot like that ends up when you have just inefficient, like systems of architecture set up. And this would tie in all that, yeah, one thing. Oops, sorry. Did you wanna? Say no, no, go ahead. One thing that I wanted to just also add on there is even before we jump into Nostrin AI, you were kind of talking about this a little bit. One of my big obsessions and one of the things I've been kind of spear phishing for as a VC for the last year and a half is this idea of how to create a better algorithm for indexing information. And so I put out this piece about a year and a half ago called or maybe it was a year ago now, I don't know, but it called it How to Disrupt Google. And the thesis of the piece is very simple. Google came about in the early days of the Internet when they basically they started by backlinking. They had this concept of Pagerank, which is basically trying to say if a piece of information links to another piece of information, if you can borrow from that first piece of information's reputation, then you can better index what's valuable and what's not. And so the way they kind of bootstrap that to the best of my understanding hearing this from DK, is they basically just start with stanford.edu. If you link back to stanford.edu is like okay. This must be legit. And they kind of grew out from there. And that's worked for a while and obviously it was a big breakthrough. That's why Google beat out Yahoo and all these other worse indexed information repositories. But even, you know, prior to me really getting into Noster, I've been noticing for years that Google is just becoming, like really terrible, right? Like anytime I Google something, I'm getting SEO crap. It's not like real information. And So what I noticed myself doing was inputting whatever it is I wanted to search for plus Reddit at the end of. Time. I do that too. Well, it turns out we're not alone. Like as I was going down this rabbit hole last summer, I found there's a Hacker News article, I think it's the 11th most uploaded Oracle Hacker news ever. And basically like all the nerds do this like literally all of us and or they add Reddit or Stack Overflow or whatever form because you want real human information. And so I started reading different people's takes on this and I think some people had some really good ideas, but they were missing the Bitcoin piece. But my big take away was what if we could do something like value rank or market rank, right, which you basically can take information. And now that we have the only things that are scarce, human attention institutions. And once we have Satoshi's, we can now associate information. Satoshi's together, that's a brand new human construct, a brand new fundamental construct. And with that we can build much better indexing, you know, systems. And it's not coincidental, just, you know, as Bitcoin came about, as the financial system was in ruins and collapsing, I think that this ability to associate information with scarce value is coming about just as LL M's are about to increase the amount of like information out there by orders and orders and orders of magnets. I don't think that's coincidental. And so that's like one of the big ideas that I'm spending a lot. I have been spending a lot of time investing in different companies, taking different approaches to that. Yeah, that is so interesting because the big theme here that you're hitting on is that the micro transaction currency that has been possible to have on the Internet is attention. And that's And then your ad payouts happen. You know when you 1000 people have seen something for you know, scrolling past the page for a fraction of a second and that's what has been possible. But one for one it's not the best system. And then two machines don't give a shit about you know what ad is on a page. They they want the value and and I think. I mean I guess we'll get into that a little bit more with a I stuff here. But you know that mega trend is just right there under the surface of like if the Internet as we know it is based on on add on eyeballs and attentions and attention you know from eyeballs. But that's not how it's going to be when when machines are trying to find valuable information in Exchange. You know what they need with other machines or or resources in the physical world, and now there's an Internet Internet native currency that can travel at the speed of light and can be fractionalized, you know, to to 2.1 quadrillion sats and probably even beyond there. In order to satisfy every single possible use case of a fractionalized you know machines needs and and when you put it in those terms which I think you've done a great job of like that end state becomes so clear. I think we struggle to see like how is you know how is the Internet going to be different 510 years from now. But if you think about that that 30 plus year time frame it, it's almost easier to see you know what? End state things move towards, in that sense at least. And ladies and gentlemen, Jesse has been Noster BTC AI pilled in 25 minutes. I mean it's provide is providing a good segue into Noster because the sort of value indexing that you just explained Max is is beginning to materialize on Noster via Zaps and you can find trending topics or notes. That surface because people have sent Sats to that particular post and so that's used as an index to say, hey, there's probably some signal here people are parting ways with Bitcoin to give a give a nod of approval or acceptance to a particular post. And so with that jumping off point, we brought up Nasr a lot. But the help. The audience, who may be a bit ignorant to what Gnoster is and what it's trying to achieve, what is it? How does it work and how does Bitcoin fit into it? Yeah, so I think Gnoster is very simple, and because it's so simple, that's why I'm so excited about it. So it's nodes and other stuff transmitted by Relay, which of course created by, you know, a shadowy super coder like Satoshi that's someone of a pseudonym via job. And I think that's a great sign, right? It wasn't like some corporations like that and it was a little bit even tongue in cheek with the name, which I like. But the the concept behind it is really simple, which is that our current Internet works on a client server model. And what that means is I have my client i.e., I have like whatever the Twitter app on my phone or Instagram or whatever it is, and I send a message, I'm sending that message from my client, my phone to their server. And that's a server controlled by a company, Facebook or whoever. Then another client, another your friend that wants to see your post, makes a call. Their phone does to the Facebook server saying give me this message right now in the early days of Twitter background, whatever it was 2011, 2012, 2013, a lot of people may remember the Twitter API was open. And because it was open, you had all these really cool experiences that were built on top of it. Developers could basically take all that data, all that rich data from Twitter that had a huge social graph and all kinds of people using it, and then they could build their own experiences, things like Tweetdeck or whatever it is. Then around that time, I know that basically they realized, well, shit, the only business model that we see right now, or at least the ones that a lot of people in the company were pushing for it was attention right? Ads. And if the eyeballs to your point, Jesse, that was the currency's eyeballs. If the eyeballs are going to tweet back instead of Twitter, well now all of a sudden we don't have a business model, right? And so they basically closed down the API and the third party development basically stopped or they didn't totally close all the API, but it was no longer open. And permissions. And you know, obviously Jack's spoken a lot about this and you know, he and others there seemed to have been pushing a lot more for it as a protocol. But it was a business and you know, that's just the the nature of the incentives and where it was at that time. What Noster then proposes is, is there a way that we can basically rebuild every application on the web so that the data is always permissionlessly available to build whatever experience you want on top of that? Oh by the way, can we have a shared identity and social graph between all those different apps? Now one approach to doing something like this would be to build a completely either a completely peer-to-peer system or a system where you kind of like Bitcoin, everyone has a shared global state and this is where all the web 3 crypto token projects tried to do. The problem is that's extremely expensive for everyone to agree on a shared global state, you know, that's why you have all this hash rate with mining, adding a new block every 10 minutes and still you don't know if it's really quote UN quote the truth of the world until many minutes later. And we can go on a whole rabbit hole of just. By the way, there is no such thing as global state or truth anyway. So that's that's like impossible to achieve. But peer-to-peer or you know something where you have a global state that everyone agrees on, is very difficult to scale and basically hasn't scaled. Projects like Urban have tried to do this also. There's a lot of reasons that's very difficult too. So what Fiat Jaffe realized though is that maybe there's a middle ground. And the middle ground is we can still have effectively a client server model. But instead of having one server controlled by a company, what if we have any arbitrary number of servers basically on marketplace for servers And it really is not exactly a server, but you can think of it like that. So the way Nobster works is it says OK, you know from any of my applications, my identity is a public key, so it actually uses the same ECDSA Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm that Bitcoin uses. So my my my identity in Noster is literally just a Bitcoin public key. It doesn't have any Bitcoin, but it's kind of interesting because that gives you a lot of cool properties and from that I can sign any message with my private key and people can know what the 100% certainty until ECDSA gets broken that whoever owns that public key signed that message. But instead of sending that to Twitter server or Facebook server, I send it to 15 different servers and maybe some of those are in the US and some are in Singapore and some are in El Salvador and some are in Nigeria. And it's pretty distributed. And so because of that you have all these different messages you can think of it use like have this giant global data pool. And with this giant global data pool anyone can then go and access those messages and build whatever experience they want on top of it. And there's just like this allows for so, so many things. Like I I don't think, I don't think anyone realizes how big of a deal in Austria is yet. In fact, I think it's what's going to bring Bitcoin mainstream. But what people have been focused on today is primarily social media. And so today you've got, you know, these various clients like Domus, Primal, Amethyst, all these different clients that basically take all that data that's published, all these different relays and then surface that as essentially a Twitter like experience. Now there's two key differences between the Twitter experience that you had on the centralized app and in Nostra. One of those key experiences is that you can port your identity and social graph with you. So as an example, I created my private key that I currently use on Nostra in Doms. I then exported that, put it in my LB wallet extension. I was able to go and log on with Primal online or now on my phone with the same identity, I have the exact same followers and followers. That's very, very powerful, right? That's the first, like, mind blown, aha moment. The second thing that we've seen is, and this didn't have to happen, but because all the Noster developers were lightning developers, we've seen what are called Zaps. And this is like what I was talking about, Stacker news. The same concept where you upload a piece of content. Zaps are natively integrated into most of these apps as well. And So what that means is all of a sudden now, you know, unlike with Twitter, where all I can do is pay with attention or hearts, now I can actually pay with value. And so there's so many other things this is going to open and we can talk more about this. But like, the Google indexing idea is going to work much, much, much better than I had even originally imagined in an old web world. I thought in the old web world that you would need to build a new form like Reddit, which is, you know, stagger news. Or you would use something like Albion, drop Satoshi's on the old web and create what I call the Satoshi depth layer. But in this new Nostra world, because zaps are natively integrated, you have not only the value graph, which is who's at 2:00, but you have a social graph and a persistent social graph. So, you know, oh, this person. Like for example, if a random account spins up and zaps, you know, a study saying smoking is good for you, well, maybe that's like Marlboro or something. You shouldn't give him a whole lot of trust. But if Jack Dorsey zaps something, OK, that's interesting. Even if he's apps a lot less because he's reputation. So there's a lot more you can do with that. But this is all just kind of phase one in social media. The next phase is where things get really crazy. I don't think this is what people have realized fully yet. Any application that you can imagine on your phone or on the web is strictly better as an Oscar app, full stop. And the reason is because if you can take that identity and graph with you to that app, you can now not only reduce friction like sign in, but you can have brand new product experiences that were not possible before. So first it was social media, but then you're starting to see music apps. Wave Lake is integrated. Gnoster, it's an app where you can listen to music. Stemster is doing really cool stuff where you can build like tracks from the ground up like you can lay down a beat, someone can wrap on top of it, remix it all happening over Gnoster. You're going to then see you know good reads could get rebuild there, LinkedIn, whatever you want. And the crazy thing is then imagine you could build a new experience where you say, you know, it could be a hiring app or a dating app or just whatever, a friend app, whatever you say, recommend to me the 10 people I should meet based on what they listen to on Spotify, who follows them on Twitter and what books they've reviewed. Pretty interesting. And you can't do that in the old web. So those are some of the kinds of new product experiences that I'm waiting for. And the last thing I just went throughout and I'm going on a bit of a monologue. But I think this is like very important is marketplaces. And I think people are going to be blown away with how big of a deal marketplaces are on Oscar. Because if you think about what is a marketplace, all it is is it's text, it's a bid and an ask. That's when. And so if I can publish my bid and my ask to multiple relays, all of a sudden what's going to happen there? I think is you're going to get a shared back in a shared order book or shared liquidity pool. And so if you for example, imagine local bitcoins, there are companies that are playing with this idea. You do everything you know instead of 1 company that's oh by the way, easy to shut down. You can send your bid and ask to buy and sell Bitcoin to 15 or 20 different servers in 15 or 20 different countries and lots of front ends can pop up to be, you know the easy way people interact with that all of a sudden that shared protocol level marketplace is going to destroy any company. Like imagine if all of a sudden finance, Kraken and everyone else shares the same order book but Coinbase doesn't. Coinbase is going to get trounced and that I think that's the world we ran it for, for all marketplace. Like when you describe it that way, it's going to force like company's hands to actually participate in the network. And I and I think you really highlighted the benefits on the user side, but likewise on the company side, it's crazy because if you can actually build a good client, a good front end, produce a good service for Nostra users, you can bootstrap a user base much quicker than any of the incumbent tech firms out there. The amount of time it took Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. The bootstrap a user base is significantly diminished on Oscar if you're providing a good service. Yeah, it's network, it's network effects, the protocol instead of the app which 100% like. Imagine if you build some super weird niche music app like or even like. I remember like the feature Doms put in for like left-handed users. Twitter's never going to put a left-handed feature on there because there's not that many left-handed users. People don't care about it, but like the people that are left-handed love it. So now if I wanted to do just I could even do my own super weird left-handed music app. And maybe there's only 1000 people in the world that like it, but you know all the people that already have access to the old Twitter apps or the old sorry Nostra apps for Twitter. And then the Nostra Marketplace is whatever all of those users, I inherit all of them potentially to log into my new weird app. And if I happen to bring on, you know, 10 new people just for my left-handed weird long tail music app, they can now log into any of the other Gnoster apps. Like once you understand the Super network effects that are spinning here, I think this is the new web. Like, I think the old web is like, I think Gnoster eats the web. Max, can you pull on more of you said a very bold statement. It sounds correct, but just like help us understand me understand like it basically creates a better app than anything else if it's interoperable. Well, like how did that in practice? Like, would it play out? Or I guess in theory, how would it play out? Well, first of all, there's just less friction, right? So imagine you don't have to create a special account to log into Spotify, or you don't have to log into Facebook, cuz you haven't used Facebook in 25 years or whatever it is. And so just the login experience, you have one universal login for everything and you control it. It's not dependent on a centralized company which may go under or get bought and change hands and like whatever. So that's the first just like super obvious way and then you can start to build really cool kind of weird experiences on top of it, right? So again, the example I give of like, imagine if you're trying to hire someone or you had a dating app or something, you said I want a recommendation. But based across these ten different apps, music, books, work experience follows. That's an experience that cannot be built in today's world. And so and then not to mention you have the payments baked in, how crazy is it going to be when you start to see some of these, like, you know, influencer types or whatever, start realizing, wait, I can like post my music here and just get paid directly and I can make way more than I can make on YouTube. Like, this is a value for value for podcasting idea on steroids. So there's just like, I think if I had to like, sum it up in one idea, permissionless development allows for like all kinds of like, it's a Cambrian explosion of creativity. We don't even know what the big apps are going to be. And that's what excites me as a venture capitalist is we've no idea. I mean the ones I'm coming up with are cool, but like I'm sure there's people like Pablo are going to come up with things that are 100 X cooler than I could ever imagine. And so the point is now you've unleashed the global creativity of anyone that can code. And by the way, it's, you know, the the Noster protocol. I think it's like a JSON BLOB with 7 fields. It's like super basic. So almost anyone, if they know JavaScript, they can get on there and start playing around and experimenting. As you lower the barrier to experimenting, the like number of weird experiments that can get run is just going to be wild. Yeah, I think music will end up and I know you're on. There's like music will be the Canary in one of the Canaries in the coal mine because it's been so messed up for so long. And I remember Marty and I were chatting with Michael in the Wavelake team and it's just like inherently you knew there was something a better way. You just didn't know what. And it was basically getting out of the getting rid of the middleman was a part of that. And it feels like there's there's definitely like one of the first use cases would be here. Yeah, and for listeners too, like so Wavelake there. Essentially a music player with Lightning Network baked into it do pure value for value. As Max mentioned, they're hooked in a Noster as well. So like to play you through the user experience on the artist side, like historically, as Michael mentioned, they've gotten the shit end of the stick when it comes to dealing with their labels and their distributors of their music and then the streaming platforms like Spotify. Now what we're seeing is this robust environment. Now a noster, different clients, music clients popping up and all an artist has to do is put their Lightning Network address in and they can get paid directly by their listeners as they're listening to the music. They can put a pay wall and say, hey, if you want to listen to this song, pay a cent worth of Bitcoin, then it gets really interesting too. Like all these artists, they have bands, they have producers. The managers like you can literally get granular. So granular that you can put not only your lightning address and as an artist, but your band mates, your producer, your manager on a person on basis and automatically distribute revenues to them as they're coming in. Which is pretty pretty insane to think. And the Max, I think we could tie Lightning Network, Gnoster and. AI into one theme here, building on something that Pablo built, who you mentioned earlier, which is data vending machines. And this is, in my mind, one of the most exciting things going on in Bitcoin, AI and Noster, and the intersection of the three is this idea of data vending machines, the ability to essentially tap into a market of AI agents that'll do tasks for you Well before jumping in there. I think the music thing where there's like good examples is we're the music industry from like an actual utility. You have like, and I'll mess up in some of this, but it's just like you had the not a track. What's the spinning? Yeah, yeah, you had a vinyl and then you went to like whatever, a track, cassette, CD. And then when it went into digital form, like, how do we consume music? You have like these different formats, whether it's like touring or you just go and buy it directly via Apple, or you just pay for Spotify. And so it's starting to take these different forms of the Internet and it's still broken. Like it's still the. I mean, I think musicians probably have to get the Waveleg guys on because they'd be able to explain this better than us. But it's just like it's been fucked for for a long time, not just, you know, 20 years. It's been even before that when it comes to the labels and the ownership and the distribution and who owns the rights. And so it's still like that, but now you start moving that further and further the edges of like the value to it. So I think we can you start just it sounds so crazy when we talk about it because it seems so far off, but but in the past 10 to 20 years that whole industry has completely changed. Totally. And yeah, before we dive in the eyes, I just want to comment on the music stuff as well, because I think this is, this is really important to me on many fronts. 1 Some of you guys may know I I make my own music as well. I rap. And so one of the big challenges that musicians want is not just getting paid. Like my buddy and I, we put out, we release under a couple of her names and one is AI, interestingly enough. And you know we put it out there and somehow we started getting a lot of people listening in France. I'm gonna say a lot of like 10s of people. Like we have a huge following everything, but we have no way of contacting these people. We have no idea who they are, how they found us. They listen to us every month, which is super cool. But Spotify is not sharing that information with us, right? So in this world, it's not just the payments. But it's also by having a platform where we can have that relationship with our audience and be able to message them that would be like extremely valuable to us and for every musician out there. So I think there's a lot of ways this is going to suddenly change. I also think the music industry is right for some pretty major business model disruptions. I was talking this weekend with my buddy who is a music fan obviously, but also like a more traditional hedge fund guys. I would not say he's as open on some of these crazy ideas like Gnoster, but you know, I forget the exact numbers, but something like. You know, movies are obviously worth some multiple of the total music market right now, and esports and gaming is maybe like an order magnitude more. It was a lot more. But his general point, I was like, look like music is still very important to lots of people. For me, it's certainly the most important medium. A lot of people have strong emotional connection to it. The old business model just got rocked by Napster and the Spotify model kind of worked. But these guys still aren't profitable. So, like, no one's really figured out a sustainable way for artists to thrive yet, and yet they're producing this thing for society, which I think many people would argue music is one of the. Those fundamental, I don't know, like pieces of humanity. And we would love to see a long tale of really good artists continue to thrive. And so I think we're gonna see with Noster because again, it's open, you're gonna see all kinds of new experiments around business models. So one of them is the ZAP splits for sure. But also, Waverly recently launched this demo with Adam Curry's new podcast where he is the DJ. I mean, obviously he was the original VJ for MTV as well, which is kind of cool, coming first full circle where he's quote UN quote licensing these songs. And so anyone that zaps the songs while he's playing them, you know, he takes a cut for being the curator. And then obviously then you could have Zaps all the way back down for whoever worked on that, on that track. And I think it's also going to create this, like really interesting business model around being a curator. I think part of my big thing around this disrupting Google. Is human curation. Finding the quote UN quote weights of what a model should be is something that I think humans are going to be sort of the best at still for a very long time. And I think that allowing you know people to curate books and music and all this stuff, it's going to create a big sort of new job opportunity there. I think we're just scratching the surface of that. So I'm I'm pretty bullish. Oh, and by the way, with Stemster, you know, wave like is dope because it's just like taking music and you know. Opening up new business model Stemster. They're doing even crazier stuff because they're actually using. People are building tracks on Stemster, right? So I share a file and it's just a beat and I share it openly. But then that beat and the way it's released, I forget it's MIT license or some kind of open copyright. Anyone can use it, remix it, and soon they'll add in zaps. So you add in a beat, 10 different people wrapped on it. You now have a marketplace for which of those tractions are blowing up the most, and you get paid for all of them, right? Like these are brand new concepts that just did not exist before and it's as well, this is such an exciting conversation because like I think about one of the big things in in venture and in Bitcoin is like the thing that most it gets lost on people is user experience. And what is gonna change somebody's user experience or not user experience but user behavior in what they do and you reference like humans and curation. And it was like when Marty, when I got really excited wave like because I remember during COVID, it's like the one thing that people will depart their money for when you go to like a restaurant or they did it on YouTube is you put your cash app and you would send them dollars via it because there's some like deep meaning there. And so it's like of course they pay for this at any form because they're just tied to it and it doesn't matter if they have to like download a crazy application they will do it to get the value to them. And then something else that I've never heard, but you mentioned about like humans and curation and it's like always gonna be there no matter what AI or programmatic. And it's like a business is the highest form and that just hit me in curation like you're curating these individuals and you're going out to the market to produce value. And so that's like the micro or like a subset of that. Totally. And by the way, there's something I think a lot about as an investor as well. There's a lot of factors you want to look for in a good entrepreneur and the biggest thing is just timing the way of right which that that's tricky to do. But you know part of what I ask is this person super smart? Are they in the right place at the right time or I think that it's close enough to the right time they can last, you know for for the way to hit. But then in my opinion the truly great companies right like the ones that last for decades, Apple being the greatest example of this ever and it comes down to taste. It's always taste you want. Like the the best investments are people with the best taste. Full stop, yeah, and pause. Well, that's, well, that's. The other thing too, now thinking about this as well like particularly with Gnoster, like what is this gonna do in terms of like unlocking people with good taste that maybe weren't able to surface their taste in in the incumbent system. Like. In terms of like human capital being unlocked via this network topography, like it's it's gonna be insane. You're gonna have anons on Noster that are just tastemakers, and maybe they weren't comfortable doing that in the incumbent system because they have to tie their identity to it to some form or another A. 100% and and you know and a lot and like yeah it's gonna unleash you. People from all over the world can do this and like a lot of like you know taste that. That's how it's happened around the Internet like. A lot of you know, modern taste came from weird you know, corners of Tumblr, probably 4 Chan at first, or weird tumble, you know corners of Reddit. And then they went mainstream and like yeah, this is gonna accelerate all of that. And by the way, someone else I saw like an investor about had some pretty good ideas. You know, one of his big ideas is that the meme economy still has not been well monetized, like people that are able to make good memes. There's a huge opportunity around that. I'm not sure what it is yet, but if you're an entrepreneur working on that and you think you have a way to help the great meme monitor makers monetize, I'm very interested. That's why Fiat's such as travesty, because everybody always thinks it's like this dogmatic or whatever. It's like, it's the old Peter Teal quote of like we were promised flying cars and we got the 240 characters. It's like you have these 80,000 or now it's probably 180,000 employees at Google. They could be doing taste making. They could be doing like what they really want to be doing, but it's just like the golden handcuffs and all the other things that you know are from that. So yeah, we're just like, we're just on the the edges of seeing what that all will look like. Totally. Yeah. And that I mean, I guess we can talk about a I now too like because that's great. Like we're talking about human experiences here. And this is when Cody Cody Lowe first explained what was going on with a I and L 402. So Lightning 402 specification that Lightning Labs dropped years ago. Formerly LSAT, but the the wall. Industry came after them for running with that, so it got rebranded L402. What we're talking about is just like humans interacting and sending Bitcoin to each other over these networks. But once you begin to grok what's going on at the intersection of the Lightning Network, in AI particularly, that's where things get really heavy, because especially for the audience listening to this one of the. Concepts in their mind is total addressable market. Like the total addressable market is moving beyond humanity and into this machine world with AI which is literally unfathomable. We don't know the end state of the impact that AI will have and how much activity will be going on in aggregate A decade from now, two decades from now, century from now. But it's become pretty clear to me and I'm pretty sure the others sitting here. On this show right now that the AI, like you said earlier, is not going to have a bank account with JP Morgan. They're gonna want the native currency of the Internet. And so, yeah, Max, like how are you viewing this intersection and the potential opportunity that lays before everybody? Well, I mean, look, there's so much to say here and so I'll give maybe a little overview, but happy to go into any of the areas you want. I put out a piece on my blog. Or an essay hivemind dot BC/AI where I kind of go into everything in more detail, high level. I think again we're at a turning point. I think we're at a turning point in many different areas AI And when we say I, there's a lot of different, you know, things that can mean large language models are getting most of the attention today. And you can think of that as just like a way to compress all of the world's information and like, get information out of it faster than you can, for example, with the Google search. And then obviously do in a way that's chainable with other a eyes and but you know, again it's like in some ways I think it's both under height and overhyped. Overhyped. And then I think this has very little to do with like consciousness or like you know, whatever like super intelligence. I'm very skeptical of a lot of those things. I keep an open mind, but I do think it's a very powerful tool. And it's a powerful tool that can, for the right users, amplify their own intelligence by orders of magnitude. So for you know, really good software engineers are already becoming 10X or 100X engineers for that and it'll probably be thousand X engineers. Same is going to be true for whatever it is you're good at. Like you're going to have a personal assistant that can amplify your own intelligence and abilities quite a lot. But I I personally am just, I don't really buy into all of this like AGI stuff very much, although I'm happy to talk more about that if you guys want. But the term, sorry. I was just like, oh, that's interesting that I would, I would have thought that you would subscribe to that AGI, you know, super intelligence, Nick Bostrom, School of thought. But no. Interesting. No, I mean, I I read all of that back in the day. Like I read Super Intelligence back in 2014. I remember at the time I was terrified. That messed me up at the time. Yeah, I know exactly. Literally, I couldn't sleep for a week and and like, I have a bit of a weird, you know? Taking all this and that, I, you know, in 2018 I was kind of deciding do I go all in on AI or Bitcoin at the time. And now it's kind of coming back around. But a lot of my roommates, you know, I'm here in San Francisco, they were all, you know, at open line your news at Google or Define. And so I've kind of had like a, you know, observer seat just listening to them. And you know, look to be clear, all these people are way smarter than I am. So like I take this with a giant grain of salt. I'm just kind of going my own intuition, but I think that. Well, I think first of all one of the the people that I really respect the most, like there's few, there's a few thinkers that are really shaking. Buckminster Fuller is 1, Kevin Kelly is another. I think Kevin Kelly is just like generally almost always right, or at least on those topics. I've seen him and he is this basically he's a lot of interesting concepts. But one of them is that, you know, if I had to summarize, he's like more, you know, he's not utopian. He calls it Protopia, which is that we can make progress without being perfect, like whenever we have a big new technological breakthrough. It it opens up lots of new possibilities and it also opens up lots of new bad things too of course it's it's just like the Internet allows for all kinds of incredible collaboration and it allows for really fucked up things too and like that's just that's technology it's a tool But his general kind of like just which I don't know why I just like intuitively agree with is that over the long arc it's you know a tiny percentage when even if it's only 1% quote UN quote good and and I think one way you can define good is by if you think about like. If you think about the universe as like an evolutionary force, and I think humanity is kind of just an arbitrary piece of all of this, but like if you think that there was a force that existed or some point of energy that then expanded into all that is now. What it appears from my vantage point that the universe, quote UN quote, wants is novelty. And more options, right? Like if you're a single point of infinitely intense energy or something that's like kind of boring. But the more you expand out and the more possibilities are open, the more different kinds of ways you can be yourself interacting with yourself or the more kinds of movies you can watch. And I think that's kind of what's happening. I think what he calls the technium, which is the technological force. I would just call it the. The life force behind everything, of which both humanity and technology are both parts. It's pointing in a direction of more options, more choices, more possibilities, which I think on a compounding long time scale is generally good. Now, one of the points he makes with AI, which I think is really important that I agree with, is that. You know, a lot of the AGI folks, first of all, they're they have this concept that there's one thing that is intelligence and that humans are, quote UN quote, generally intelligent. And I just completely disagree with that. There's no such thing as general intelligence, and humans are not the top of the food chain either. Like, if you think about it, first of all, what does it mean to be generally intelligent, right? Evolutionarily speaking, everything that's alive and here today and thriving. Is kind of equal like I saw, instead of having like an evolutionary like ladder, a better way of describing evolution is like a disk that as it spreads out in time, if it's still here, it's just as evolved as we are. It's gone down a different pathway. So fungi and bacteria and cockroaches and alligators and all these things have been around a really long time and we all have different kind of types of intelligence. And I'm not saying there's not something particularly interesting about humans, clearly there is. But like. You know, squirrels, to the example he used, they have this remarkable ability to remember where exactly where they buried thousands of different acorns for many, many years. Humans can't do that. Is that not intelligence? It's a form of intelligence, right. And so I think this is one of the big things I just take. You know, major issue with is like I know people that are extremely intelligent, you know, like on tests, right. Like they, you know one guy knows an alternate for the US national math team, incredibly intelligent, way more analytically smart than I will ever be able to sniff. But I wouldn't say he's necessarily socially adapt as much and that's a different kind of intelligence, right. So I I just think there's many different kinds of intelligences and I I think it's going to go much more like evolution where there's going to be ecosystems of different intelligences both cooperating and competing. And the big heartbeat of life goes on and anyway so that's why I'm skeptical of AGI. But yeah I think what's much more like so but I do think we're at a turning point. One option is we have these centralized top down companies that I am kind of afraid of. I'm not afraid of the AGI take off. I am afraid of. You know, imagine the Chinese government or opening eye or someone, even if they have good intentions becoming so powerful and deciding, no, actually we know it's best for all the other humans and we're going to use this new superpower because it is a very powerful tool to you know restrict people from experimenting and trying things. And I think that's really dangerous and that that's my kind of fear. On the other end of the spectrum, you have a world where you say look you know the kind of like E ack led a rip camp. But I'm not saying I'm all the way there. Like, obviously, like they're, I don't know, like. Nothing is completely black and white. But but I'm generally in the camp of, you know, the human mind is marvelous, but it's a subset of evolutionary intelligence. And the best way to, like, guard against something really bad happening is let evolution run its course, let you know competing artificial intelligences evolve along with the Super powerful ones you're thinking of and blah blah. And that's kind of the the, the mode that I'm looking for is a more decentralized community of a IS that work in tandem with each other. And with humans. And together, we build this decentralized hive mind with, call it, 8 billion human minds, 8 trillion artificial minds or more. And we're using something like Gnoster as our open protocol for communication and something like Bitcoin and lightning as our open protocols for commerce. And that's the direction I see adding. Yeah, that's a more optimistic. I forget exactly how biology frames this. But I think he said like this decade or the century is going to be you know, a story of of a I and and China centralizing a I versus Bitcoin and libertarian values in the West decentralized in a decentralized approach. And what you're presenting there is really the decentralized version of super intelligence in the future and. That's a much more optimistic one than the dystopian top down authoritarian you know Chinese dream that that you know they will be heading towards and hopefully you know the free market capitalist nature of a decentralized version can beat out that top down authoritarian style. Because if it doesn't then it then it is the dystopian dark future. But you know, I think that the history of of how communism lost to free markets might play out again over this century too. I took a very left barbell approach to this one morning. I was like thinking about all this and freaking out cuz I think Marty attacks me. He's like, I just went down this deep dark rabbit hole on on AGI and it was like, well, if if Bitcoin fixes this, if Bitcoin's money, somebody has to plug in the computers. Like they need fuel so and you that's how you keep everyone honest in that world where you have infinite number of money as like in in the proxy for today's world is like the military industrial complex where you print these dollars and you take them from other individuals and that's how you power you know this like you know dictator slash kind of like overarching form of government versus in this world that we're talking about like if you need to power. Whatever there's nefarious or positive, like you need a form of money that cannot be printed and they need to consume it to be able to function to do whatever's needed. That is like the the balancing act in that whole world. And if you don't have that, then we're basically not in a good spot. But if you have this unit that is it's equally or is equally as possible distributed that you can't print more of it, that starts to weigh the checks and balance on like what? How you can impose that. Yeah, and. Kind of goes back to what I was saying in the very beginning which for me Bitcoin like forget crypto. Forget what everything we think we know about money. Like if Bitcoin is just a Ledger of energy, it's an energy backed money and energy is the currency of the universe. And you know we just look at evolution and how it's played out like again, the hole on thing, holes become parts of a new hole, which become parts of a new hole. We're just getting, we're laying the the neural, you know, whatever, like. Infrastructure for that next whole and my guess is energy is still going to be the currency of that because it's the currency of everything. And I think I mean this is you know Drew gave that excellent talk at the last Picline conference. I think he's just he's just like crack like this is a new Organism forming with metabolism and Bitcoin is going to be the sort of digital representation of energy in that metabolism so. That's right. I do think it's maybe worth just mentioning sort of like some of the really cool stuff that can that can happen. Like Marty, you brought up the Dvn's. I don't know if you guys wanna dive into that. Yeah, no, I think. Just. Running off of what we just discussed like and I completely since Michael we had that discussion, I've completely backed away from the AGI domerism. I'm not gonna be a Luddite about AI. I think it's here, It's gonna happen, and it's good for humanity. But with that being said, like the intersection of Bitcoin and AI, there's many ways in which it's materializing like going back to the energy, the L402 payment required, pay walls that you can put in front of these API token calls. Like that is actually like a step function improvement in how these AI companies can monetize. They know that they can ping their GPUs, present their end users. With responses and do that profitably because they can get the money up front with lightning. But then that's just the tip of the iceberg. That's just a mechanism to to guarantee that there's going to be a payment. You're going to be able to pay your electricity bill at the end of the day. But once you get into things like data vending machines, that's when things get really heady, when you can actually like enter a market as an end user for competing Ai's that will do tasks for you. Totally. And I think it's worth noting, there's a couple of big opportunities I see for Bitcoin and Ai's. I think the DVM stuff falls kind of under the agent sort of area. And I'm, I'm looking very close to that. But even taking a step back before we dive in that I think maybe one thing that's important for listeners to understand is the way that quote UN quote AI works is very different than the way that other software has worked historically and the last big like let's say enterprise software wave. You had you know X amount of money invested to create this new software product and then you had effectively 0 marginal cost of distribution. It's not the way AI works because the way AI works is essentially what you're doing is you're taking all of this data and you're you know using math. You don't fully understand exactly how it all works. But to compress that into what's called a model and you're basically using these Gpu's graphics processing units to do these matrix multiplications that. Take the data and train the model. That's, that's what opening eye and enthropic. And all these companies, Google have spent, you know, billions of dollars training these really big and complex models. But then it's not like you just have this model and anyone can use it for free, right? So there's the training phase of that. Then there's there's there's really two more phases. 1 is fine tuning it with your own data, which also, you know, requires either electricity or humans doing that. When you talk more about that, Bitcoin's interesting for both, but then you have what's called inference. Inference is OK, I actually want to run the model. And so if I want to run the model, like every time you ask ChatGPT a question for anyone that's used the ChatGPT interface. And if you haven't done it yet, anyone that's listening to this, I'd definitely recommend you do it because it is pretty mindful. It's a very cool technology, but every time that's that's happening, Open AI is running a GPU on their end, and that answer doesn't already exist. They have to run the GPU. That's interesting because every time you run the GPU, that's real world computation and electricity, which has real world costs, right? And so when I do that, you know, I don't know the exact numbers, but I've heard on the order of two to $0.10 per inference, let's say that's expensive. And so if you have a computer with an API that's calling or, they're calling your API rather to do a whole bunch of inferences on your GPU. The cost of that can run up super fast and it's not 0 marginal cost distribution. It's like oh shit like I just spent $1,000,000 you know using all these GP U's. Oh by the way there's a major GPU shortage. This is why NVIDIA stock has just gone to the moon over the last couple of months for anyone that's that's that's following along and this is one of the reasons opening eye you know Sam Allman's come out and discuss multiple times that they they just they straight up hey don't have enough GP U's to be able to do all the inference that people are asking right now. Now a second problem which it's unclear to me if this is actually a problem for them or not. I've seen anecdotal evidence that suggested this, but we'll see is in a credit based monetary system. There's a trick there, which is if you're doing calls with Visa or MasterCard. As Gigi discussed in the article we mentioned, with credit based money you can have chargebacks and so. If you're some random on the Internet, they're not just going to front you a bunch of credit to use their GPU. Well, first of all, if you're random on the Internet, chances are you're born in a country where you don't even have access to a credit card anyway, and so you have no way of using the system. And even if you do, you know they're going to be like, what is this random whatever, Turkish credit card or something. And you may or may not get credit. I know at least one instance of someone who's got a pretty reputable person whose car has been denied over and over. I don't know if that's a problem at scale or not, but it it could be, and it's currently limiting their total addressable market. And part of that is if you were able to, instead of doing a credit based monetary system where you could charge up 100,000 or $1,000,000 worth of GPU cycles instead, if you send a bearer asset i.e. Bitcoin, and even if it's denominated as U.S. dollars with Taro something in the future, that's totally fine. But if you're sending real Bitcoin as the underlying. And that can't be clawed back. Well, then you can do You can increase the total addressable size of your market radically, because now you know your profit margin's already baked in and guaranteed. So if it costs you $0.02 an inference, and you're charging three cents an inference, then your cost and your profit is all locked in. So I think that that's a really important concept both for the big companies and the decentralized AI. But I think if that's one of the key concepts, everyone first of all just has to understand is that there is no 0 marginal cost of distribution here. Yeah. And then to like throw an anecdote on top of that example, I mean, Cody Lowe, who we mentioned earlier is the head of developer support at Fetty. Which is a company building in the Bitcoin space and one of the modules that they're going to put in their app is Ln chat which essentially allows you to get access to open a eyes chat GB T after paying a lightning network invoice and he he launched like the the prototype for that called Matador and didn't even market it really just put it on some like obscure dev. Forums and put it out on Twitter and he went to bed one night and woke up and realized he had $2000 worth of charges on his open A I account. It didn't matter to him, he had $2200 worth of Bitcoin. So he made a little bit of money. But he said the most fascinating thing that he found from from launching this and running this was he was getting DM's from developers and Nigeria and the Philippines were saying thank you for launching this. I've been watching. People in the West use these models and I haven't been able to because I don't have a bank account. And so to Max this point, there like just this one developer hacking around on a prototype for just to prove that this could actually be a use case, opened up ChatGPT to markets that previously did not have access to it. And we've already Don't you need it? Don't you need a token for that? Yeah, that's called Sats. That bring it whole circle. You need to bring it all, certainly. You need Sats and you need the the AI API token as well. It is. It is an interesting point because like when we when we've been talking about all of this stuff like a question that keeps coming in my head is who's going to do that? Like who's really going to, you know, we can't even figure out how to use the Internet as it is. Like, you know, switching to Nostra is going to be really hard for the average person, but but there's a solution right there. There's the answers. It's it's entrepreneurial endeavors to like, create workarounds that that help people get things that they want, even if it doesn't feel like you're using Gnoster. Like it feels like you're just using the web. Yeah, it's just gonna be a better experience. Exactly. I mean, this is my thesis is a fun, right? Is like. How to make like my dream world is like, the average person didn't even know what the word noster means, or even necessarily Bitcoin. Like, they're just like, hey, I have an app that I make money on and it's open and it's cool and that's it. And so when you say, you know, it's it's hard for the average person to come, Dude, we're so early in all this. And so that difficulty is our alpha. Like, that's like what I see my fun doing is like, how do I now invest in the companies that solve those problems? Yeah, just obvious, Gates. It was something that I remember in early days and helping people hold their keys and unchain and getting the devices. They get so angry, like you're making them go through that process. And I likened it back to like the 90s and the alpha. There was setting up the modem and the router and you got access to the World Wide Web. And in this version it's like you're actually securing an asset. You can put like value around that. If you secure it, you're gonna have it in the future. It's gonna accrue. In the same way here, it's just gonna look a little foreign and clunky for the early adopters. And if you invest in you're allocating your building in the space, you're gonna get outsized returns and then in the future state it's just gonna be like, you know, obvious, gated all the way and it's just like water flowing and down the stream. It's not. It's gonna be natural state of things. Yeah, everybody's gonna be like, oh, it was easy. It was always gonna be this way. Yeah, we like Google and Facebook, like, yeah. No, but I mean. And I think to I mean we're definitely tapping into like why Bitcoin is uniquely suited to serve this simple use case of ping, paying a pay wall and then getting access to an API token. But like where it gets really heavy going back to data vending machines and AI agents particularly like this is really highlights why Bitcoin, particularly over the lighting network, is uniquely suited to serve the AI agent use case is because. AI agents, you want them to complete a task, they go out on the Internet and they do it. And when I think of this use case particularly and how Bitcoin fits into it via the Lightning Network, for anybody listening who's not familiar with like the technical aspects of it, like Lightning Network has what are called like macaroon permissions. So you can essentially inject permissions into how Bitcoin is sent and received. Over the lightning network and what we're going to be able to do, what you can already do but is very nation right now we'll get more mature moving forward is you can use these Macroom permissions and then give these a I agents like allowances and say hey go out and book me a ticket back to Austin between these dates. Between these prices, you load up the wallet and then eventually when all the airlines adopt Bitcoin and accept it, it'll be able to go out and use the Bitcoin it has as an allowance to go complete that task for you. And when you think about the amount of time that's going to unlock for individuals, that's insane, number one. But then #2, like, you're going to give that AI an allowance and it's going to go out and spend it, and it can spend it with another AI agent. Like, if it can't complete the task, it's like, all right, I know that you may be able to complete the task. Here's the Bitcoin to go do it. And when you think about the insane market dynamics that can evolve from that? It's hard to even think about. It's hard to even fathom. Yeah, I know Max you talked about this previously on like Your Dream and it's I think like when we breakdown like basically managing your own Gpu's from a data privacy perspective and then ingesting the data you're allowing from your personal just kind of ecosystem of applications that you use sending an agent to go complete task or be able to manage all of that. And that goes from a micro example of an individual, but then to like businesses. In the data that they have that's unique to them to wrap around a model, it's just on forecastable the amount of like efficiency that will come from that. Well, so yes, 100%. And I think the other thing that it allows for so efficiency, data privacy, all those things are great and they will be big. But I think the really big opportunity here is gonna come from the long tail. And what I mean by that is, and so going back to the data vending machine, Pablo came up with this construct where? I can send out a job request to the Nostra network for anything and anyone can come and fill that request for me or compete to fill that request for me. It's basically it's just a way of bringing markets to completing any task. And so if you want to call something closer to AGI, it's this. It's taking any task. Deconstructing it to its constituent parts, farming each of those parts out to an open free market, IE Gnoster, and then paying that. And you know, I think it's going to end up being Bitcoin. And so to give you guys an idea of like what this could be, right, So the first thing that he was doing with the data vending machine. Was he has this really cool app called highlighter.com. And highlighter.com is kind of like if you guys were a Rap Genius back in the day. I was pretty big on that side and basically is like a crowd source annotation for rap songs. Then they raised a whole bunch from Andreessen and try to do everything and then you know it never really went anywhere. But I think noster, you know, with highlighter.com, it's really cool because you can basically have. Any text or book or whatever PDF's and you can annotate them and people can see this in pub, this identity. Max highlighted this and then you can start to build cool experiences around. You know, this is going back to my Noster suite. You can have like a social network based on I want to meet everyone in my community or in my in San Francisco or in Austin that highlighted this particular document. Anyone that highlighted the GG document about money, probably someone that I'd like to talk with. Cool, so you can build all those cool experiences around. So one of the things that Pablo then wanted to do was, OK, well, I want to. I'd be able to bring audio into highlighter, right? And so instead of just doing this for text, could we do this for podcasts? But obviously podcasts are in voice. It's audio format. And so his first idea for the dating the new machine was what if I could just drop a link to a YouTube video or a podcast like this one we're doing right now, and you could basically have the entire Gnoster network compete to run models to do transcription for me. And so someone could run like Whisper or whatever open source model or closed source, like whatever they want. Or they can have a human do it right, but that's probably not going to be cost competitive. But try and create these different podcast transcriptions for me so you can have like an open market for podcast transcription. They can have different prices, They can have reputation that builds up over time. So as your reputation goes up, maybe you can increase your prices, blah blah blah. And then you can like have your bot or agent set parameters around how much reputation matters to you, how much cost all these different things. But then what's really crazy? Because of the way this works, everything in Nostra is just a kind, or it's just like an event you can chain with other events. And so then you can start to have all kinds of, well, you can have very specialized versions of what we just talked about chained together with other really, really interesting events. So the first example he gave was OK podcast transcription. You know, maybe Open AI has a pretty good podcast transcriber. But what if I want to get super specific and I want to have a Bitcoin podcast only transcriber? Because there's Bitcoin vocabulary that the open AI model just may not know about. And so this is what I was talking about, fine tuning. You take a model off the shelf and then you basically, you know, wrap your own data into that or the data that you're interested in. And so then you can literally have someone that says, hey, I'll run the generic podcast Transcriber for this cost, and it's pretty good. But then you could have someone that says, actually I only do Bitcoin podcasts. So if I hear a term like The Happening, I know like what that means and how to transcribe it, whereas the generic model might not. But then you could then have someone else that comes and says, yeah, that's really great, but you know what? I want to have a model that only transcribes podcasts for the last trade and that's it. That's it. But we, because we've trained only on listening to you guys, to Michael and Marty and Jesse talking, like we know exactly what phrases they like to use. And so we're just the best in the world. No one can beat us at transcribing the last trade. And in the current world that just like there's no way open it would ever do that. It doesn't make any economic sense. But if it's a giant free market, this is exactly what happened with the Internet, with Amazon, when they said, OK, you know, books. In a bookstore, you can't have these weird niche long tail books because it doesn't make economic sense in Barnes and Noble. But you can On the Internet, same thing's going to happen here. You can have all this weird long tail niche kinds of models that maybe the only 10 people in the world will ever use, but whatever, you're still making money off of it and you're running the computer at your house. Who cares? So I see, first of all, that's like the first big area this is going to unlock is like the long tail niche, but very interesting or successful models. Then you start to chain those together and this is where stuff gets wild. Today, one of the biggest kind of darlings of Silicon Valley is Lane Chain. Lane chain started as an open source framework for cheating various data sources and bots or agents together. Lane chain, after they got, you know, like whatever 10s of thousands of stars. Benchmark invested very quickly. A week later, Sequoia dumped another 20 plus mill or something crazy in there and they're off to the races. But lane chain is a way to string data and agents together. But it's very top down, right? What Dbm's are promising is you can now do kind of what they're doing, but you can do it in a completely open and interchangeable way and obviously with Lightning payments. So you could say as an example, OK, I want to post this podcast link today. Now I want a couple of things done. Number one, I want it transcribed, then I want it summarized, then I want it translated to Spanish and I want someone to create a logo for my site based on this, right? And so you can literally have all these different jobs done each by different agents, some sequentially, some not, depending on. Like if one job is required to be done before the other and anyone can compete for it. And you can do it the first week and then week two. Maybe a better model comes for the stable diffusion to create the logo, and you can keep the other three models the same but set that model out. Basically what this is doing, it's bringing free markets to the world of Labor, and increasing labor is going to be done by Ai's. And maybe some of it's still going to be human tasks too. That's fine. Humans can be in there too, but it's just going to be super wild and very cool, yeah. It's kind of mind blowing. It is mind blowing. When you think about it, this is very satisfied, but yeah. No, but I think. To bring it back to like our audience like who we're speaking to. I think the reason we brought Max on is to highlight like this part of the Bitcoin and kind of like Bitcoin is beginning to leak out of the bubble that it's been confined to for the 1st 15 years of its existence. And really fine product market fit at the medium of exchange level with these other open systems and I I think in the context of. The high net worth individuals and institutions that are looking at Bitcoin, I don't think any have really dug this deep into what Bitcoin can offer. They think of it again as digital gold, this inert asset that'll sit in a wallet and a crew value overtime. But I think it's really important I've said this in the past, but I think this episode really reinforces it, is that the distributed network and the layers being built on top of it enable things that were literally impossible. 15 years ago until Bitcoin launched. And that when you're trying to value Bitcoin and put a total addressable market on it, like again what Max just described, I don't even think we can fathom what the total addressable market is. At the end of the day because we don't even know the type of UK use cases that are going to be enabled by AI, we can't, we literally can't think of them And and just to bring it to your to your audience on all of that, right, like I mean obviously I think there's you know if you're thinking about this from an investor perspective, there will be Google size companies that are built out of this no doubt, right. Like, think about it like if you have the opportunity, you know, even if you just wanted to train the really big model out there, right, to compete with opening eye, I think one big seeker right now is, you know, there's this whole concept of hallucination, which is sometimes the models just like makes it up, which to be fair so to humans. But like, you know, it's going to be very hard to go from like 80 or 90% reliability to 100% reliability. And the big reason for that is because what does a model train on? It's train on the Internet, right. And like, you know, there's a lot of great stuff on Reddit. There's also a lot of crap and how do you distinguish, you know, what's good and what's not. So I think a secret that the Nostrian Lightning community has is we have this market rank or value rank concept. So I'm pretty bullish on big models, finding some way to incorporate marketing to basically create the best foundation models in the future. So that's one thing. I think it's going to be very useful for fine tuning. This is something that stack work has kind of done like, hey, I want you to say like which of these options is better? Like not just image labeling, but like which poem do you like more or whatever? And you can pay people's ads to do that. I think that's going to be very interesting. So there's going to be all kinds of interesting investment opportunities. That's what I spend, you know basically full times trying to find what are the 1000 or 10,000 accidents or opportunities. On the other hand, the very simple TLDR for anyone is just buy Bitcoin and hold it. Why Obviously not investment advice, blah blah, don't see me blah blah. But but I mean the the general gist there is like you know, to your point about total addressable market already like I I think what people are going to be shocked about is Bitcoin. It really does have no top. I know that's somewhat of a cliche now, but if you think about Bitcoin is GDP, coin and all. Bitcoin is, is a representation of the total economic pie for the planet, which is what I think it is. And which is another way of saying the the potential energy of the human species or human plus whatever species we collaborate with, that's all Bitcoin is. It's just a representation of that potential energy pie, OK? And we're about to take whatever the global economy is today, and we're going to open it up to 6 billion additional people that are pretty much cut off from it. We're going to open up all kinds of new micro payment use cases, which we haven't even dreamed of. And oh, by the way, the 8 billion humans that are using this, they'll be like one one thousandth of the total number of Ai's that are out there doing stuff with economic activity and doing IoT payments and whatever else. Like whoever has the single, like anytime you see an exponential curve and you see someone making a really bullish prediction, like I've never once seen it be like, oh, they were too bullish, right? If you go over A10 plus year time rising and even like 10% of the stuff that I'm talking about comes true, then the total global GDP is going to be so many orders of magnitude bigger than we can imagine. Like. And that's going to accrue to Bitcoin because it's the, it's the, you know, the representation of that potential energy, so. Max, but Larry Fink said it's digital gold. It's it 10 trillion is the Max. It's it's the literal Max. The other thing that I think is important is, is not only where like investable opportunities, but it's also where like disruption will happen because we've seen this and people be displaced when the past, you know 20 years since the Internet. It's just recognizing earnestly, at least giving enough of you know. Inkling, like to look into music, telco, all the things that we know essentially will this will touch. So you can start preparing or at least knowing that you're the model that you've lived in the past 20 years will look very different than the next 20 years. And so, yeah, I think that's an important function of all of this because the world's going to change faster than we could ever expect. It is. If I had to leave one additional message on that like obviously you know bullish long Bitcoin, that's cool. But I think that all the like fear and stuff that I hear and it's easy like believe me like through COVID and being in a sad like believe me I I've got on my own like fear and doom cycles and it's very easy to do that. I think it's it's frustrating and sad or whatever. But like man, like anyone that's really afraid of you know a guy run away and all this stuff happening. Like, I just think it's, man, it's such a lack of imagination. Like the future is going to change and it's going to be exciting. And like, you know, look, at the end of the day, nothing is guaranteed. Like all of us, we're not going to be here forever. So, like, enjoy it. Like, I think that, you know, there there's obviously ways to profit, but it's just going to be like, this is going to be quite an adventure, right? Like you'll be able to tell your grandkids you live through a transition bigger than the industrial revolution, probably on scale. The agricultural revolution. Like this is, I don't know, like I wouldn't want to be alive any other time. This is awesome. So I'm I'm pretty excited. I don't know. You don't seem too excited. No, I mean, this is like considering the macro backdrop right now, very contentious election season here in the United States. Obviously, there's war that's broken out different parts of the world. And I'll be the first to admit, I'm very easily pulled into the dumerism that exists out there. But I think. Having this conversation like and just extremely optimistic, it's all right there in front of us. We can build our way out of the strength that many people find themselves in today with the combination Bitcoin, open communications protocols, artificial intelligence. It's all right there. Yeah. I was just saying, Marty, like you've probably been the closest to this industry for the longest and have you seen like the past, let's call it, 18 to 24 months more building? Like actual, just things go in market than you've ever. It's just insane for the price action and the the sentiment in the market. It's just been insane to watch. No. And I think it's a bit ironic too, because I think technically speaking, this is the longest bear market that we've seen. I think it's only 490 days now at this point. And I got in 2013 and 2015. Comparing this bear market to 2015, I mean 2015, I mean, I was pretty plugged in back then. People thought Bitcoin was going to die. They were convinced. Everybody had exited Bitcoin Twitter. Nobody was talking about it like you had to go to bitcointalk.org or the dev mailing list to see anybody who's still excited about it. And again, it's ironic because this bear markets longer, but there's never been a more bullish fundamental landscape within Bitcoin than there is today. What's going on? I've said this. Well, on episodes in the past, but like the inflection points that were hitting on multiple points, whether it be custody at the protocol level or building at the lightning level. Like like Max mentioned earlier, like the dev kits are all hitting a point of maturation where it's easy for anybody to plug in at Lightning to their businesses, their services. The implementation diversity that exists out there is pretty robust. The amount of eyes that are on the code bases is larger than it's ever been. And then true companies providing actual value and utility through individuals like the the landscape of the the industry has never been more robust which is? Again, ironic that we're suffering through the longest bear market of all time. But again, as Max has mentioned many times where the alpha lies, like being able to recognize and see through the noise of people saying that Bitcoin can't scale, can't do these things, is is where the alpha is because we see it every day. It's happening whether you realize it or not. One question I would like to ask you because I do want to say like obviously I'm very optimistic, but but I am also a realist. And like I do think one of the things that I think can help things just really pop in the next 12 months. And I'm curious, you're always taking this like obviously like happening goes off the price runs like that's probably going to get a lot of more interest. It's probably a good thing, but I will say that you know this kind of bottoms up adoption of like actually using SAS and being able to get in and out of sass, your local currency in emerging markets. I think that that to me can be a pretty clear path forward. I think for some of the older more legacy for example tech companies like you know, I've chatted a lot with Cody as well and I sponsored this last hackathon like following all that pretty closely. I mean the engineers love it. They want to do it. A lot of like compliance people are just like dude, we don't want to deal with. It's just it's a pain in the ass. Like, it's cool, but like, we just don't want to deal with it. And I do wonder if getting easy interoperability with dollars, at least in the short term, I don't know if that's going to come through tomorrow. I don't know if it's going to come through better interactions from river and strike and blah, blah, blah. I do feel like that would probably just make it a lot easier for some of the legacy tech companies to interact. And so on the one hand, I think if that happens maybe it runs the next 12 months, not not price, but just adoption. On the other hand, it could just go all bottoms up from places like emerging markets and like the US is later to adopt just because you know they see it happening somewhere else since okay we need to change our tune. I'm curious if you guys have opinions on that. I I I just have to say it on the record because I already get in trouble enough behind the scenes. I fundamentally don't believe any of the adoption happens without the top down and capital coming in because the price is the the ultimate arbiter of it. And liquidity matters, right? So like a billion people having a dollar in an emerging market versus one person putting $10 billion enhances the liquidity profile and making it useful as money from just swinging around in different directions. And it's very widely unpopular because it's always the nice thing to talk about of, you know the quote UN quote, I think it's a sigh out. But the term global S like emerging markets and. Weird, But this idea of that, it's like Bitcoin should be for everybody, but it's also our refocus, like in this part of the market, at least specifically. I'll speak for myself. It's because the reality is like we and I forget where we were talking about it. It may have been the last pot. Yeah. With Brian that we haven't figured out like this silver bullet or this way to explain everything we're talking about here and how you wrap it up into like why Bitcoin is an asset that an institution should plug a billion dollars into or 10 billion or whatever the percentages and why they need it. And that's where like we're focused on there is cuz it's seeing that and it's also where I don't like it, but it just is what it is like this ETF is that signal to the market that like you go there and then everybody benefit benefits from it, the whole 8 billion or whatever number of people on the planet. Yeah. And I'll take the middle of the road answer, which I think it's gonna happen from both ends at the same time. It's going back to what we said earlier like going back to the example of Cody basically launching that product and opening up that AI market to people who. Previously didn't have access to it. That's gonna continue happening and that's and again, that's a really exciting part. Like, I think the UX around Bitcoin products, particularly over the Lighting Network, has improved significantly over the last couple years, and there's going to be use cases that people really want to leverage that will only be possible if you have Bitcoin and are able to pay for it. But the. The example, sorry just that is like if the money increases then the awareness goes so 10X the number of people build the utility, but if like the utility increases but the price doesn't then they don't actually use it because the utilities there but you still need like the value to be flowing through the system. The great That's why I think, I think it happening from both ends at the same time. Like is jet fuel for it. And to clarify, I mean I I totally hear what you're saying on like I hear both what you're saying bottoms up, adoptions plugging to be pretty fast. But like you need the real capital come in to to make the transition complete and probably disper it. But I guess my bigger question is specifically, and this is what I'm still running into and seeing more and more as a lot of these at least U.S. companies being like we love the Instant Payment Network at least at this stage in our life. Like we don't want to put in the extra time and hassle to figure out how to deal with the compliance of accepting. How do we get this into dollars? And I'm curious if you guys think that like some easy access in and out of dollars is no critical next? Yeah, I think we more need more strike like API's where somebody wants to pay a Bitcoin invoice they can pay dollars from their account directly and then vice versa if somebody. Wants to cater to customers want to pay in Bitcoin but they want to take on that that risk of holding it on their balance sheet and immediately convert it to dollars. That'll be that'll be big and then it'll be interesting to see like if that that where he is driven more by the exposure to Bitcoin directly or in the volatility or just a regulatory risk about around interacting with it at all. If it's the former, it'll be interesting to see like. If stablecoins on Tarot fine product market kit fit, excuse me, or something like stable Sats, stability pools within Fediments are able to to fulfill that need, yeah, I do see it and obviously historically has been a big problem. It's going to be a problem for a bit. But I would just say like again, everything we've been discussing here like it's their loss, it's going to happen eventually. You're going to adopt Bitcoin in some form or another. It's just a matter of. When you do that, then at that's where you throw it back on them and like, hey, do you want to be an innovator? Do you actually want to like move the world forward like you're going to move first or or wait because you're worried about what the government's going to say We need more maverick builders out there. Just say fuck it then. I I I do believe it's a bit contrarian and people don't like when I say, but I think if we build fast enough and make it so useful in a timely manner and just people. Begin using it like the regulatory and compliance stuff will figure itself out in the end here. Literally like I think about a podcasting 2.0. Like people are streaming me 8 sats a minute every minute of every day. They vary between 8 and 100 sats every minute. Like the accounting like that I'm just going to at the end of the day I'll do like a monthly aggregate of the Sats have been streamed to my node and then like pick the highest price of the month and then pay. Income tax on that, but I think eventually at scale it's going to be so all-encompassing that it's going to be impossible for for compliance to catch you up and you're just figured out on the back end and Tony the builders out there a bit apprehensive. Like I would just say stop being a pussy. And you know with the plan, like it's happening, you can get it now or get it later. Yeah. And I guess I have to weigh in too since since we we had two opinions there and I I'm pretty much towards the the Michael camp of you know I I think these are kind of independent things that are going in parallel. And for example, like if there was no having and if you also said all right first world people, nobody else will be allowed to buy any more Bitcoin or adopt anymore. Beyond what's, you know, mined every day so that you can have the price go sideways. So then you sort of like freeze Bitcoin in terms of its value as digital gold, but then? Then the utility would start to catch up like and and that's like a slow exponential curve. I think I like it very early in an exponential curve such that, you know, the 6 billion people in the world that are cut off from banking or really I guess it's probably 3 billion. But the 6 billion you referred to earlier of, you know, aren't really plugged into the Internet as we know. It can become plugged into the Internet as we know it and can be productive and grow the value of Bitcoin. Because of their productivity, using Bitcoin as their unit of account there and and then that productivity would turn into the the growth of Bitcoin, Bitcoin's value, even if, you know, the West wasn't plowing money into it. But that that would take a long time. I think that's a decade plus to really see the measurable effect, I think. But luckily we have the having and we have. And we have the Fiat currencies be eroding every year and and 3300 billion dollars, $300 trillion in bonds that are going to just be lit on fire over the next decade as we have to print more money to pay down the sovereign debt such that Bitcoin becomes the best asset, the the fastest horse for this decade. And and I think that is the 99%, maybe it's 95%. Of where the the value will be coming from for Bitcoin holders this decade. And then I think all of the the long tail, all of the growth will be coming long term from the GDP growth that comes from this sort of system. But first, it's about onboarding all of the world's capital, or as much of it as as wants to be in a good store value asset. I think it's going to happen much quicker. I think I recorded with Matthew Mazing just yesterday to go over the Q 2/20/23 monetary base update and he had just a stunning set, which is like the compound annual growth rate of the global money supply, physical cash over the last 50 years is 13% and rising. And so that's like a having a doubling of the physical amount of cash in the world every 5.7 years, so 5 1/2. And so that that number is only rising. And when you consider the state of the banking sector here in the US and the debt situation that everybody's facing globally, it's hard not to imagine that that's going to continue. And when you like say that like the the money supply is going to double by 2028 potentially even sooner if they turn the money printer on more aggressively when the Fed needs to step in next time, like I don't think people understand how quickly this is happening I. Was just gonna say people don't even use cash anymore. That was the status shared this morning. It's not true though, if you like. No, no, I was talking about Target with Target earnings that like one out of every $20 this past earnings was like out of just like being shoplifted, like people just stealing from stores. Yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm pretty bullish especially after this conversation. Happy to. Happy to help start the fire. Well, thank you, Max. It's getting dark here. The sun's about to fall where I'm at, Obviously I'm on the back deck, Last back deck episode of the season here. I'll be back in Austin next week. But before we wrap up here, any closing thoughts? Start to Michael and Jesse first, then we can end it with Max. I'm sorry, Yeah, this is a head spinning conversation that that, you know, put me into my own head quite a bit. So you know, might be the kind of thing I have to listen back to again to to to think through all this stuff more. So thanks to Max for bringing a ton of information and excitement and and a lens that I think, you know, I'm a digital gold guy. I think that's. What's so exciting about Bitcoin And and I I think that's exciting enough for my lifetime. You know, so I don't even spend much time thinking about all of this other utility stuff and and and Max points out that this is, this is this is Promethean fire really that you know Bitcoin is granted this gift to the to the world. To the world of machines. Really the the world the digital age as we know it and. What we can build with that is going to be incredible to watch unfold over the next few decades. Yeah, you can't say it better than Jesse, but they echo those sentiments. And then Max, if you this was one of the first going into the AI topic, but would love in the back with us letting us know other folks that are deep in this space as we think about other guests to have on. And then just feel very fortunate like all the stuff we've been thinking about talking about behind the scenes and to get to be able to discuss it in a forum where other individuals can start to pull on these threads. It was rewarding to see Jesse kind of noodling on some of the thoughts you shared Max and thinking through it. And so I think that this will be a good kind of entry point for folks when they've been hearing about Noster or how AI plays in and Bitcoin and AR and Inoperable as a good entry point to that. And then ideally we can continue to to pull on the different angles. Totally, Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you guys for having me. This was a lot of fun. I mean, I also very much appreciate you hearing your takes on some of the macro stuff. And and look, I still think capital going into Bitcoin, like that's huge. I like the good news is, like you said, all this is happening in parallel and so you know. It's really all a lot of the. For a lot of this conversation, I kept thinking about how you're talking about fat protocols. That concept from Union Square Ventures that was really about Ethereum, but it was really about Bitcoin at the end of the day, yes. And that This is why just holding a slice of the Bitcoin supply. Is such an incredible asymmetric difference from the Internet revolution because you couldn't hold the slice of the Internet, and here you can just hold the underlying asset and get to participate in the growth of all of this utility that happens on top of it. Totally. I couldn't say it better, in fact. Even though I've only formerly been in VC for the last, you know, whatever, it was two years of my fund and two years before that. I followed all this landscape very closely for a long time. And in the early 2010, I actually followed USB very closely. And you know, I'm still friends with a lot of those guys there. My last fun, we Co invested with them a lot. And I kind of think in many ways like my fun thesis is, I'm just kind of looking back and using the USB playbook. Again, but this time with Bitcoin, Lightning and Noster. And so I think they call things right back in the 20 tens and I think they got a little distracted with some of the Ethereum stuff, although they are, all of them are on Noster at least looking at pretty closely, which is cool cool. But yeah, like, literally all the stuff they were investing and I'm kind of. I'm kind of cribbing their place a little bit so but but yeah, but thank you guys and this was a lot of fun. The last two things I would just mention if people want to learn more about this stuff. And Jesse, you mentioned you want to go back and just listen to some of this stuff again on my website Hideline dot VC. I have all my writings on there so I've gone in pretty great detail about a lot of these topics and I'm always open. You can also find me on Noster. Obviously go to noster dot band and just type in Max or primal. And type in maxpanel.net I believe. The other thing I would just say is for people that are really interested in the AI stuff specifically one cool project I meant to mention earlier, but I'm, I'm really excited about this is actually my last I guess announced investment is GPU Topia that that's the brand they're going to market with. They literally just announced this yesterday, but next week you if you download Albee. And you have, you know, their lightning wallet. You can rent out any spare GPU capacity that you have. Now this is going to be, I think people are going to be pretty wild by what all this looks like because right now as I mentioned the reason NVIDIA just went to the moon is there are there are just not enough GPUs in the world, full stop. And so, and not to mention some people wanted GPU access for inference that maybe they want uncensored inference or whatever, not, you know, fine-tuned by opening app. And so this is one of the short term ideas I would encourage everyone to check out and just play with cuz I think it's gonna blow a lot of people's minds as you look at the number of GPUs that were produced by NVIDIA. I forget the exact numbers, but it's some multiple. That is all of the new end chips that Apple has put out in their iPads, their Macbooks and their iPhones. And so the concept here is in the future, the way the Apple end chips work. Is they can basically that they're going to be much better for machine learning that people realize for. Some of this inference stuff is like, imagine a world where you can just click a button and say make money and just rent out your GPU or your Apple MM2 or whatever you have when you're not using it and just start earning Sats for free. I think this is going to be a really big idea, and if anyone's interested in the AI, stuff like this is the one to watch in the next couple weeks. Yeah. If you drop it, send us the e-mail on the thread we're in, we can drop it in the show notes along with your blog. Yeah, Exciting times. Gentlemen. Max, thank you for joining us. I'm pretty bullish. This will end in a lot of fun. See everybody next week. See you.