Citadel Dispatch

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Hodlbod brings a unique perspective, bridging the old and the new, with a focus on a healthier relationship between users and the digital world.

Hodlbod on Nostr: https://primal.net/p/nprofile1qqsf03c2gsmx5ef4c9zmxvlew04gdh7u94afnknp33qvv3c94kvwxgsm3u0w6
His Book: https://building-nostr.coracle.social
Coracle: https://coracle.social
Flotilla: https://flotilla.social/
His other apps: https://stuff.coracle.social

EPISODE: 170
BLOCK: 907160
PRICE: 858 sats per dollar

(00:00:01) Tesla's Bitcoin Holdings and Opportunity Costs

(00:01:11) Happy Bitcoin Friday

(00:03:01) Guest Introduction: Hodlbod

(00:04:20) Challenges of Streaming and Notifications

(00:06:30) Decentralized Technology and Social Media

(00:10:04) Push Notifications and Privacy Concerns

(00:15:00) Reforming Technology and Social Media

(00:20:00) Decentralization and Political Dynamics

(00:25:00) Nostr's Adoption and Future Prospects

(00:33:00) Nostr's Unique Protocol and Challenges

(00:40:00) AI's Role in Development and Vibe Coding

(00:50:00) Micro Apps vs. Holistic Experiences on Nostr

(01:00:00) Social Media Addiction and User Experience

(01:10:00) Group Chats and Community Building

(01:20:00) Signal's Influence and Privacy Concerns

(01:30:00) Monetization and Sustainability on Nostr

(01:50:00) Nostr's Development and Future Directions

(02:00:00) Book Release: Building Nostr

Video: https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqsghxj9ep3j8j2tu6mtj04x2j93wx3xaxud5spf0g0r2xaqzkxkwlcu62r3j

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[00:00:02] Unknown:

And speaking of Bitcoin, Tesla disclosing in its earnings this week that its digital asset holdings are currently worth about 1 and a quarter billion dollars that's up sharply from a year ago. A new piece on cmbc.com   looks at the money they left on the table though after they sold, three quarters of their holdings in '22.   You can check out the full story on cnbc.com.   I did peek at that, and I think if they had held everything, it wouldn't be 1 and a quarter billion. It'd be worth about 5. Oh, they could use that. Yes. They could use that.  

[00:01:08] ODELL:

Happy Bitcoin Friday, freaks.   It's your host, Odell, here for another civil dispatch,   the interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech   discussion.   That intro was CNBC,   I believe   today, talking about how Tesla fumbled the bag on their Bitcoin treasury.   I think that's an interesting theme to watch,   not whether or not companies will actually start stacking Sats,   but the opportunity cost they've had from not doing it. I think CNBC is probably one step away from realizing   that, yeah, Tesla probably shouldn't have sold   their Bitcoin, but,   any company that didn't acquire any Bitcoin,   actually had even bigger opportunity cost loss than Tesla. At least Tesla stacks some Bitcoin. Anyway, Freaks, our show today has absolutely nothing to do with that, but it just seemed   like an interesting time stamp in the world   of Bitcoin.  

Dispatch is funded by our audience. We have no ads or sponsors.   We are powered by viewers like you sending Bitcoin   to the show.   The two easiest ways to do that is through Zaps on Noster,   where you can find the show at primal.net/citadel,   or through podcasting two point o apps like Fountain Podcasts, which you can find in your favorite app store. The largest Zap on Fountain   last episode   was from Stimmy   forty HPW.   He sent 21,000 sats, said great to hear from Kauffman. While Spectre was a game changer in 2020, Keeper looks like a solid tool for today's new coiners. And the largest Zap on Noster was from ride or die freak, map 21 with 10,000 sets. Thank you, freaks, for supporting your show supporting the show. All relevant links are at silldispatch.com.   Anyway,   I have Huddlbot here, good friend, return guest.  

He's heavily focused on Noster   specifically.   He's got two projects, Flotilla and Coracle,   that he maintains. How's it going, Huddlbot?  

[00:03:15] Hodlbod:

I'm doing well. Thanks for having me, Matt.  

[00:03:18] ODELL:

Pleasure is all mine.   We have ZapStream working. I see Pseudo Carlos, ride or die freak, asking, is it working?   The attacker is asleep today   and is not attacking the stream.  

[00:03:33] Hodlbod:

I'm not worth DDoSing, I guess. Oh, well.  

[00:03:35] ODELL:

I was starting it was starting to go to my head that the DDoSes were only happening during my shows.   Well, we have a lot to talk about. I also see we have legends are sleepy in the YouTube comments. The show streams out to,   YouTube. You can search dispatch there. It streams out to Noster at   civildispatch.com/stream,   and it streams out   to x under the 1031 account,   1031 funds.  

[00:04:07] Hodlbod:

Yeah. Shout out to Sir Sleepy with,   like, 80 to 90% of the energy,   in this, in this livestream.  

[00:04:15] ODELL:

Yeah. We got well, they'll they'll they'll   they'll cycle in. We still don't have a calendar function on Nasr. The whole streaming situation,   which I, like,   just jumped in with two feet, like, two years ago,   has really been inching along. Like, we need to have   I I think it's, you know,   a a Bitcoin integrated freedom focused type Twitch   experience   is a   maybe not a low hanging fruit because it requires a lot of infrastructure, and it's it's actually quite difficult to pull off,   but could be a major use case for Nostr.  

[00:04:51] Hodlbod:

Yeah. Well, on that note,   nostrilcal.com   is   a a recent addition to the ecosystem.   I don't I can't necessarily endorse it. I haven't audited the code. I'm immediately skeptical because it's written with, MKStack,   but   I I tried coded. It looks pretty good so far. I think,   the vibe code was the bootstrap, and the guy's putting in some some real effort. So Yeah. So MKStack is Gleeson's project. Gleeson is,  

[00:05:20] ODELL:

has been a guest on the show before, which makes it easy to vibe code master projects.   I mean, look. I think that's one piece.   We really need, like, app integration. Right? Like, so if you go live   or you have a live show coming,   the apps that people use should be notifying them ahead of time. So I don't have to send out just kind one post letting people know that the show is live.   So it's a little bit more of a   a lift, I think. I mean, this is good. It's obviously just   nice step improvement. But, like, in Primal, for instance,   you'd have no idea we're live right now, and that's something we wanna change in the near future.  

But it needs to be integrated. And some apps have led the way on that. I I really like Nasjira's integration,   where it has, like, a nice live bar on the top similar to what you'd expect on, like, an x or something. It says that your friends are live.   Fountain has a pretty good integration,   and they're all using the same, like, open HLS spec. So even if you   are streaming to ZapStream servers, it still shows up in the other apps or someone else's servers or something like that. Yeah. That's getting there.  

[00:06:32] Hodlbod:

Notifications are tricky. I I worked on notifications for a couple weeks, recently,   and,   they're a lot harder to do a 100%   than it seems like. You know?   There's   there's all kinds of different solutions. Like, Pokey on Android is one of the best known ones, and they   run I think the way they work is they do it without a server. Right? They run the Android app in the background.   But Android and iOS both have these really restrictive,   permissions   that only allow you to have   maybe, like, ten minute latency notifications.   So immediate notifications aren't reliable,   without a server. And then, of course, servers   are cryptographically   tied to a given app,   on both platforms,   not necessarily on web,   but,   so you you have to run a specific server for your specific app,   in order to get push notifications that way. And then, of course,   because keys are   in the custody of the user,   your push server can't actually always get all the content that it needs to in order to notify the user. Like, public broadcast social media is is easy because it's all public.  

But, you know, I've been working on communities   that have access controls enforced by the relay.   And if I want push notifications from those, I have to find a way to, like,   give the push server access   to   the relay, the community relay.   And I can either do that. There's, like, three ways to do that. You can   I'm just jumping straight in with both feet here. I love it. But it's interesting it's an interesting problem. And it it, like, presents a real problem for Nostril development in general because,   everything is decoupled. Right?   The because the server doesn't own the user's identity,   it can't act on behalf of the user anymore. And so now we have to come up with all these, like, weird,   workarounds in order to use conventional,   like, legacy   architectures.  

So, you know, you can do it three ways. You can ask the relay, hey. Could you, like, replicate all your data to my push server? Or you could have the push server,   like, get an invite code and ask   the,   the the relay for permissions. So the relay itself actually has access,   which is the one I'm using currently.   But the the problem with that is if you give the relay access, now anyone or the the push server access. Now anyone who goes through the push push server can exfiltrate data that the push server has access to. So, that's a problem. And then, of course, like, the obvious one is share your key with the push server, which is   sort of insane.  

I   like, you wouldn't wanna store your key on a server even if, like, the server was there for signing stuff.   You could share, like, a bunker URL so you could you could revoke the access. But,   you know, I I think, like,   that's probably the the only way you can really do it is have the server act on behalf of the user,   at least to do it in a robust way. But in order to do that, you need to build a delegate bunkers   so that   they're, so that they're,   you know, locked down.  

[00:09:45] ODELL:

But and I made a pull pull request for that a while ago, and no one was interested. So, anyway, there's, like, our two minute sketch of, it's hard to do push notifications securely, particularly if you want especially if you want privacy involved because a lot of times, it just it becomes the push server is the man in the middle,   that that sits in between.   We have SoapMiner's app 21,000 sats. Thank you, SoapMiner, for your ongoing support. Best soap in the business.   Nice. My whole family loves it. I use it as well. It's great.   Supposedly,   he's gotten so much organic   exposure that he's backlogged by two weeks right now. I saw a a Nostra note about this yesterday.  

Fantastic.  

[00:10:27] Hodlbod:

That's exactly what we like to see. You you inspire me, SoapMiner. You you almost make me wanna hang up my Nostra dev hat and go, like, make soap or or, like, carve wood or something like that.  

[00:10:38] ODELL:

I mean, it seems like so far, like, that's the single best business model in Nostra,   the random artisans we are graced with.   And I also just thought it was funny that as we were having that conversation about security, we saw Sir Sleepy join the chat and said, I just raw dogged my unsec into the ZapStream iOS test flight. Pray for me.   I mean, on the notifications   piece,   I actually wasn't talking about push notifications.   I'm a little bit of a weird beast. Like, Citadel Dispatch would have way more listeners and way more viewers,   if I wasn't just constantly trying to kneecap myself   for, like, principal reasons.  

And one of the things is, like, I tried I told all my listener like, I had a huge following on x. I told all of them to delete their x.   I told everyone to, like, stop using YouTube.   I'm like,   like, the YouTube growth has basically   completely stalled.   I don't I don't,   I don't do the clickbait   on you for the YouTube Algo. I don't do, like, the open face bullshit.   I don't do ad monetization, so the Algo hates me.   And one of the things I've told people for years, and I continue by it, is don't enable push notifications. I think push notifications   are   are a horrible addictive thing.  

And, actually, I've been heavily involved in primal development, and it was one of the things we wrestled with for a while. Like, we were very   late to the push notification game, and we only ultimately did it because we had so many users asking for it. Like, people just expected and want it.   But, anyway, this was long winded. My point was, I actually think maybe, you know, some people might want push notifications that will obviously get more people into the live streams that they don't know it's about to be live. Their phone vibrates, tells them we're live.   But at at the minimum, like, what we really need is, like, if you're already scrolling in the app, if you're already in the app,   like, it should be obvious that we're live right now. Like, there should be a little badge around us setting saying we're live. Like, on the top of your feed, it should say, like, Odell and Hotlobot are live, that kind of thing.  

And that's much easier to implement. You're already in the app.   You're already connecting to relays and in primal's case, the caching server.  

[00:13:00] Hodlbod:

Yeah. Totally. I'm I'm with you on the,   just kill all the engagement stuff.   You know, like, on my podcast, my my cohost Jordan, will say, you know, like us on Apple Podcasts and stuff. Yeah. And I'll just follow-up with, like, don't like us on Apple Podcasts.  

[00:13:16] ODELL:

Yeah. It's a weird it's it's a weird back and forth. But on that note, by the way,   still dispatch is available in all favorite podcast apps. So feel free to subscribe.   Take your friend's phone. Click the subscribe button on your friend's phone. Maybe we'll get a dose of knowledge there.   Share with them. The name of, Huddlebod's podcast, because he's not gonna show it himself, is thank God for Nostr. You can search in your favorite podcast app and press the subscribe button.   But, yeah, I hate that too. But that that's one of the ones that, like, I   I mean, Peter got mad at me once I went on what Bitcoin did, and I   said the line to subscribe to dispatch, like, five times.  

Because at least podcasting is, like, a little bit more it's like open system.   You know? It's a little bit less predatory.   Yeah.   Alright. Sounds good.   I think it's funny that,   it is ironic with Noster   that it's being bootstrapped by people that tend to kind of hate social media.   I'm   like, what's your opinion on you know what I mean? It's like,   like, people that think that that social media is one of the main social media addiction specifically is, like, one of the main issues of our time.   And meanwhile, we're trying to bootstrap a social protocol as an interesting dynamic.  

[00:14:38] Hodlbod:

Yeah. I constantly am trying to figure out,   my opinion on that. I'm I,   was trying to   form a defense, unapologetic   for just the Internet in general,   and I had a hard time doing that.   I like the Internet. I grew up on, you know, like, Monty Python fan forums and   writing HTML and whatever.   But,   you know, the Internet,   it's like, okay. Well, it, you know, helps with, communication and and, like, people talking to each other and information and and trade and all this stuff. And it's like, yeah. But are all those unqualified goods?   Not really.  

Like, just because people are trading doesn't mean that the the thing that it that   it that, accommodates that doesn't have negative externalities,   and the Internet has an insane number of negative externalities.   And I'm a huge hypocrite because I'm a podcaster and a developer, and I write social media and spend way too much time on social media. But,   you know, ideologically,   it's hard to make an actual, like, watertight case for that stuff. And I think, like, the way I've made peace with it is the best thing we can do   is I like to call it reforming technology.  

We're reforming social media.   Social media is a drug addict who sleeps in the, in the gutter.   And we're like, hey. Like, buddy, maybe you could, you know, sleep inside tonight or maybe not snort a bunch of cocaine.   So, like,   that doesn't make him a, a good person or a, high functioning member of society, but it's better better than just being completely down and out. So, like,   at the very least, we can make social media not as predatory. And and I think the only way forward to doing that is to align it with users. Right? Right now it's aligned with platforms   and b to b business models that are based on   advertising and, you know, modernity and consumer culture and,   like, the slide from art to entertainment to addiction.  

And,   orienting it around users doesn't automatically fix that because   people are also terrible in a lot of ways, but,   at least they have souls. At least they have self interest,   whereas, like, you know,   big Internet platforms don't they don't have souls. I'm not, like, anti capitalist. Pablo told me I was anti capitalist this week, so now I have to, be explicit. I mean, we have too many commies on Nasr. We need,  

[00:17:04] ODELL:

people should make money and be sustainable. You can just do it in an ethical way. It's just more difficult.  

[00:17:09] Hodlbod:

Yeah. And as a person other than as a machine.  

[00:17:12] ODELL:

I,   I mean, I like to look at, like   we live in a digital world now,   and I'd we should be able to have a healthier experience with our digital tools.   And there's not many people focused on that because of broken incentives. The incentives   lead you down quite dystopian paths, and those are the paths of least resistance, and that's why we've gone down those paths.   But there's a lot to explore to make it a healthier experience.   I mean and if I just wanna go, like, objectively   net, like, where the Internet has truly improved my life, most of my closest friends I've met through the Internet.   I mean, we wouldn't be friends you wouldn't be on the show if it wasn't for the Internet.  

So we got that going for us.   But, yeah, there's   there's a lot of negative externalities that exist.  

[00:18:07] Hodlbod:

Yeah. And it's,   I'm probably gonna get skewered for appealing to the experts for this too, but, like, you know, there's so many people who've been thinking about these problems   for thirty years.   You know, the original Cypherpunks and and,   and we're over here on Nostril, like, inventing it all from scratch.   There are some people who have, like, you know, a decade of background in in Bitcoin.   We got Ravel and Jack who've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. But, you know, I've been,   I wanna go to a DWeb,   conference.  

Do you know DWebCamp?   No. Plugging it for a few years. But it's, it's a bunch of leftists who go camping together and talk about decentralized technology.   And,   it's just so interesting to me that it's these far left commies who   have been talking about this problem for twenty years.   And now all of a sudden,   all of us, like,   I I don't even know what to call us, but, Bitcoiners,   are are talking about it now. And I wanna, like, build those bridges, but it's so hard to go into those spaces because they're you know, first thing, they're like, here's a code of conduct.   You know, we we're gonna do a land use   acknowledgement,   and then we'll we'll get started. And,   you know, I feel like I've been emotionally abused already by the by the time anything starts.  



[00:19:28] ODELL:

Yeah. I mean, I do think it's funny.   Like, a lot of that type of   freedom   tech,   decentralized tech stuff has been dominated by   politically left people.   And,   I mean, I saw recently, like, we've had in Bitcoin, we've had, like, this whole, like, knots versus Bitcoin core debate, and, like, the Bitcoin core devs are captured, and people are concerned about incentives.   And then, like, went viral because of some influencers that, oh, now the Tor devs are also woke and captured.   Look. I love the Tor project,   but the Tor project predates   any concerns about what captured devs in Bitcoin. Like, that has always been the case. There, you go into one of their video calls. It's like all blue haired hippies.  

I'm very grateful Tor exists, but that has just been the reality of the situation. Until Bitcoin happened, you didn't really have,   like, more libertarian   leaning kind of developer type of focus   in a lot of these projects.   Bitcoin has been more of the exception, and then Nasr kind of inherited that, particularly since the creator, Fiat Jaffe,   is an alleged far right,   influencer.   I mean, there was a fucking horrible article that doxed him and called him a far right influencer. I don't actually   I love Fiat Jeff. I think he's he's he's a great   great contribution to society, but it is an interesting dynamic.  

And I think what they miss   is, as a result, a lot of these technologies   aren't actually resistant   to governments   because they feel like governments can be benevolent.   So they automatically have in their threat models   a flaw. It's like a single vulnerability flaw in their threat models. Tor can if if the US government stops giving the blessing to Tor, Tor will not exist.   It just won't. It was never set up to withstand The US Government.   What's cool about Bitcoin   is that it can withstand governments.   What can be cool with Monster is for the same reason, that it can be built to be robust in that type of situation.   And that's when you actually have strong technical foundations that can   can stand the test of time without trusted third parties.  



[00:21:51] Hodlbod:

Yeah. I already mentioned the word reformation, but, I I also feel like, we're in the midst of a renaissance   of decentralized technology as well. You know? I I read that book, Crypto, that was written in early two thousands about the early cryptographers,   Diffie and Hellman and,   Shamir and,   Adleman and all those guys.   You know, asymmetric cryptography has been around for fifty   years. And in the nineties, you had Phil Zimmerman,   like, suing the US government,   because of PGP. And he he, like, ignored   so many laws and regulations,   with PGP, just completely phoning it in as far as compliance goes.  

And then   I feel like the mantle got taken up by the leftists for twenty years, and Yeah. No meaningful progress was made other than, you know, of this very small core of people who are working on Bitcoin.   And now now, like, with,   we have we we've recovered that ethic,   even if we're not as smart as, you know,   80 or or, you know, Zimmerman or whoever.   At least, like,   we've recovered those values, which is  

[00:23:03] ODELL:

Yeah. That is that's an interesting point because, like, the original cyberpunks were definitely not leftists.   Mhmm. It happened after that movement.  

[00:23:10] Hodlbod:

Well, I don't know. There there is there is a lot of, like, Berkeley in the early   Fair enough. Like, cryptographers. Like, they were all out of Berkeley. They were all hanging out with, like, big children of known communists and stuff. So,   I mean, I think I think there is something that aligns leftism with   decentralization,   at least in theory, because it's like the whole purpose of socialism   is is, you know, what they call justice. It's a distributive and participatory   justice where, like, everyone is is everything's equitable and everyone's the same. And so, like, decentralization,   even just distributed technology,   like, meshes well with that,   but they don't recognize   that government,   cannot actually guarantee equity.  

And if it does, you end up with, like Soviet Russia.   But they have they think about it more than people on the right. You know? They think about it more than than capitalists.   So I think there's something to learn there, but it's hard to spit out the bones at the same time. Well, one of the beauties of dispatch is I do not plan these episodes at all. So,  

[00:24:15] ODELL:

I will tell you that twenty minutes in, I did not expect us to be at this point of the conversation.  

[00:24:21] Hodlbod:

I've been thinking about this a lot. Like, I read a great book recently called,   Tools for Conviviality by Ivanovich.   And,   he's I I don't he's like a Christian he's a South American Christian socialist. I don't even know what that means.   But he does borrow some of these definitions of justice and applies them to,   you know, contextualization   of of technology   in in ways that support human flourishing rather than degrade it. And I I really like what he says. And then he's like, oh, you know, and we also have to make sure that people can't ruin the the, environment through,   being using too much energy.  

And and he's like, you know, birth control, it's the, it's the ideal convivial   tool.   So, like, he completely loses me in certain places, but he's got some amazing insights.  

[00:25:13] ODELL:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I will say that at this point, it's weird. It's and probably as part of the social media effect,   and, like, the influencer effect, but,   it does feel like   it's harder to interact with people that you disagree with on some things.   It's like everyone wants to go in their echo chamber, but, like, I I think one of the beauties of the human experience is,   like, you can disagree with someone on certain things, agree with them on other things, debate the actual issues, and improve.   But that has been lost in a lot of ways,   in modern society, which is a shame.  

We I see sir sleepy zapped us 25,000 zaps. Highest zap of the day. Thank you, sir.   Appreciate you. He said he zapped from Cash App, and it worked, and he seems surprised.   But that's the cool part about open protocols.   I don't know where to go from so let's just pull it back for a second.   Nostra you've been building on Nostra for a while.   It feels like every other day now, I see doom and gloom posts about not the state of Nostra adoption.   How do you feel about   like, are we spinning our wheels?   Is Nostra dead? Is it over?   Should people still focus on it?  



[00:26:35] Hodlbod:

Yeah. Yeah. Nostra's dead. I think it's time to time to pack it up. No. I think there's,   like,   well, you know, I always go back to the thing that I said when I got into this space, three and a half years ago, like, before I really got on board with Noester, which is, like, solving social media is a ten year problem with a 0% chance of success.   And,   I think our our odds have only improved.   You know,   I think Nostra   is a,   it's a particular kind of community. You know, social media is really weird because it's intended to be a static   technological system   that is an environment for any kind of community.  

And that's not a coherent idea because people are complex   and technology   is static. And that's why everyone's   frustrated with technology.   And, like, we're using AI to just to just push people off more instead of actually solve their problems in a lot of cases.   It's it's super annoying. And I you know, Nostril,   If it's just a forum for Bitcoiners   and that's all it ever is,   like, that's fine. Maybe it's not worth all the millions of dollars that import have been poured into grants and stuff like that. But,   you know, it it used to be I read this book called Design for Community. I read a lot because I have a lot of questions.  

You keep snickering at how much I read, but,  

[00:28:01] ODELL:

No. I'm also reading the live chat. It's not just you.   I love reading. People should read. Read freaks.  

[00:28:07] Hodlbod:

Read weird stuff too.   But it was written in 02/2006, and it was it was by a guy who designs web forums for a living. And he was like, here's all the ways that you can design your forums so that it, you know, benefits people. And that was right before social media completely flattened the entire   world.   And,   you know, it was just it was just interesting to me to see a guy putting so much effort into building bespoke   software for   communities.   It was like, there are these certain affordances and a certain aesthetic and stuff that meshes with the purpose of the community and the kind of people who are in it. And then Facebook and its giant blue steamroller   just   show up and flatten,   what, three and a half billion people into a single little box. More than that. Yeah. It's crazy. And, like, Nostra is an awesome solution to that because,   like, a, right now, it's it's kinda monoculture   in a lot of ways, and so it's like, it's okay. We can build the we can build the protocol that works for us as Bitcoiners.  

Our values are reflected in the technology that gets created. But at the same time, because it's a protocol, you can have different clients with different   affordances and aesthetics and everything   that fit,   different people in different communities. So, like, when people come in from a different community, like, the Japanese developers are a good example. They have different   all the air reply stuff. It's like you you don't need,   reply trees or or thread building if you're, if you're in Japan and using Noister. So the more of these, like,   bespoke use cases come in and this is, like, another,   thing that I'm not sure about. I'm building, like, community software, but,   like, I don't think a single software platform can be customized to to fit every community. And I think that's part of the mistake.  

Anyway,   Yeah.   Nostra is,   it's great, small,   and   it's also the only protocol that I'm aware of that actually,   solves the   decoupling   of identity and storage.   Right? Like, all these other   protocols   either own your identity   or they   are have, like, permission storage. Like, pub key, it gets the closest. Right? Because it's got cryptographic identity, but then none of the data is signed.   So your home server can just drop you whenever.  

[00:30:30] ODELL:

So, like, close Are you relying on your home server for the social graph too?  

[00:30:37] Hodlbod:

I   yeah. I mean, definitely to store it. I think the social graph is built based on the the keys. So if you if you, like, keep a backup of your home server, then   you can restore it.   But the the data is authenticated   based on   the server's authority, which is derived from the key on the DHT pointing to the home server. Right? And so you have this kinda, like you have this provenance of authority that has to be traced. And that's how legacy systems work. It's like, you don't know something's real unless the guy who gave it to you told you it's real. Yeah. If you use if you use Facebook, like, it's Zuckerberg telling you that it's real. He's doing the verification, and you're just trusting him. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so, like, I think the the way I like to say it that, is,   probably terrible because no one ever understands what I mean is, but Notar aligns the network topology with the social top with with the social graph.  

So, you know, it creates this this, like, neutral   layer of relays that are run by people, you know, with interests and and policies and stuff,   and then a a different social graph sits on top of that. And so it's really conducive to the uncle Jim model because uncle Jim is based on organic connections between people,   not on some systematic,   you know,   binary tree of   of perfect distribution of computational resources. Like, computational resources are aligned to fit people. And, like, the place that I learned this concept is a friend of mine used to work at Twitter, and he told me how, like, all the caching stuff works over there.   You know, if a regular person tweets, it just, like, it it goes to the inboxes of the three people that follow them.  

And so it's only copied   maybe twice.   But if someone super famous   tweets, it goes to an outbox. Just one outbox. There's one copy and the outbox is, like, six machines   that are super beefy and just do nothing but serve that person's content.   And so you've got this, like,   this self healing system of caching nodes   that rearranges itself based on,   how many people are following who and how many how many times that person tweets in a given amount of time.   And it's all centrally controlled and orchestrated, but I think we can get the same kind of thing with the Nostra architecture. We just need,   to figure out the right kinds of, like, incentives and affordances to help the network to self organize in that way.  



[00:33:04] ODELL:

I have a quick question for you. Are you a rider dog freak? Like, are you a long time listener of serial dispatch and RHR?  

[00:33:10] Hodlbod:

Yeah. You guys are the reason that I'm in, Nostril at all. I love it.  

[00:33:14] ODELL:

Well, I got that going for me at least.   I,   you know, I'm the creator of the Uncle Jim term. Oh, you are? Nice. Congratulations. Why I asked. You're you're so random article is gonna be very long. Just a whole bunch of little, like, phrases and co I was literally just drunk on rabbit hole recap, and I was I was, like, trying to explain the concept of, like, running a node for friends and family.   And at that point, like, it was pre lightning. It was it was supposed to be a self custody   You know, you're not holding custody of someone's funds.   You're just, like, running an electrum server for them. And I was sitting there drunk, and I didn't wanna dox an uncle. So I don't have an uncle named Jim. And that was, like, the first name I could come up with,   that wasn't,   that that that wasn't doxing one of my real uncles.  

And then all of a sudden, like, it's just entered the vernacular. It's crazy. Like, I read an article about the uncle Jim model the other day.   Just memes just spread like wildfire. Kinda crazy. It's, yeah, it's perfect. It's a provocative,   metaphor. It's concrete. Yeah, man. I I think you're very good at that. Stay humble, stacks out. Thank you, sir. Dozen things that you say repeatedly. It's, it's I went on there are about a dozen. I went on Mallor's show, which has, like, all newcomers. He's, like, fucking huge on the newcomer top of funnel, Bitcoiner train.   And I said stay on the stacks ass, and, like, the live chat was just like, this guy just speak like, just repeats influencer takes. You know? He doesn't have any original takes or whatever. And I was like, that's kinda cool. Like, I'm down to just fade into the background,   let the myth be bigger.  

Okay. Anyway, I got I got completely sidetracked there on uncle Jim,   but we were talking about something important there.   Yeah, to me, like, Nasr as a protocol is incredibly, incredibly   unique.   And there's just I haven't seen anything else like it.   I don't think it competes with Blue Sky.   I mean, I don't think Blue Sky offers a reasonable alternative for it. I don't think it solves the core of the   problem. I do think it's   hard for people to wrap their head around the lack of, like, guaranteed data availability.   Even though in practice,   you can have, like, j b fifty five wake up one morning and just press delete on his relay, and pretty much nothing of value was lost.  

And I think I think people struggle with that aspect a lot. But to me, it's more that's more of a feature than a bug. That is just simple. It kind of   just relies on, like,   basic   kind of incentive structures that people will save things that they deem important.   And it should be interesting, I think. I I think there's been a lot of focus on censorship resistance, which, by the way, is another thing. Like, we don't have guaranteed data availability, and we also don't have guaranteed censorship resistance.   But I think in practice, like, if Kanye comes on to Noster   and says a bunch of anti Semitic shit, like, every one of those notes will be saved by, like, thousands of people because it's fucking Kanye   saying, like, provocative shit.  

But there's no way to prove that. Like, I you can't, like, mathematically prove that will happen.   But, anyway, there's a lot of focus on censorship resistance,   but I think that actual aspect of verifiability.   Right? Like, as we start to see more AI stuff, as we see more deep fake stuff   I mean, like, a Trump true social post can completely change the world.   There can be real ramifications   there,   and there's no way for us to verify if he actually sent it or not, which is just insane when you start to think about it.  

[00:36:56] Hodlbod:

Which happened, right, with, like, crypto reserve kind of stuff?   Like, someone some, like,  

[00:37:02] ODELL:

Ripple staffer was tweeting for him. Right? Yeah. I believe and then I think he got   just like, he   as he's now on Trump shit list.   I mean, the bigger one was,   during the ETF stuff,   Gary Gensler's Twitter account or the SEC's Twitter account got hacked.   And the market moved, like, 20%   on news of ETFs being approved, and it wasn't a real tweet.   Or it was. I came out of his account. I mean, Nasr doesn't necessarily fix that yet because you could get your insight compromised.   But, presumably, like, if Elon wanted to troll the world,   he could literally just post a tweet from   the prime minister of India's account. Like, he could just post a tweet from Modi's account. No one would fucking know.  



[00:37:50] Hodlbod:

Kinda crazy. But that hasn't happened. But you'd be burning so much so much,   reputation.  

[00:37:57] ODELL:

Well, we can't I mean, it depends what the tweet is. We can't verify   that it happened either. Like, you could easily say and I'm not saying that he would do this, but I am using Elon as an example because   it's a private company,   and   I'm almost positive that it's run like a small business. You know? Like, there's probably not that many, like, user access control systems. Like, there's probably a few people that have a lot of control there. But, like, they could easily just say, like, oh, like, you got hacked. Like, there's no way we can verify. Like, after the fact,   you're just trusting them when they when they say, like, oh, that wasn't the case. Like, how do we know the SEC account actually got hacked? Yeah. And he says it's been them. Like, with activists. You know?  



[00:38:38] Hodlbod:

It's not the same thing because it's not an insider, but they they disappear. Someone takes over their account and starts phishing other activists. It's, pretty gross.  

[00:38:47] ODELL:

Yeah. No. There's a lot of implications there about lack of verifiability, and it's crazy how much of the world relies on these just,   just flawed   flawed platforms that are just not prepared really for a world that moves so fast, that is so reliant on   on on digital comms and digital identity. And then on the opposite side, like, I also think it's hilarious that, like, you said,   millions of dollars of grant money has gone into Nasr.   Like, really,   there's hasn't been that much money that has gone into Nasr.   I'm grateful for the money that has come in specifically through OpenSats because I spend so much time and dedicate so much of my time for OpenSats,   in a charitable way as a volunteer.  

But if you look at the grand scheme of things, it's just a drop in the bucket. And on the VC side, it's fucking hilarious. Like, peep I mean,   people say,   oh, like, the VCs are co opting Nasr. Like, there is no money. There's very little money going into Nasr. And then you compare it to something like the DIDS project,   right,   where they're, like, spending years and years and, like,   hundreds of millions of dollar. I don't know how much money, like, Microsoft and Block and all those guys spent on Dids.   And where are we? They're just nonexistent.   We just ship it live on Oster.  

Like, it really does put it all into perspective.  

[00:40:13] Hodlbod:

Why is it you know, the the rest of the world just assiduously   avoids talking about Nostril? Is it is it political or because they think we're technically dumb or, like, because we don't have any money or what is it?  

[00:40:23] ODELL:

Because, yeah, like, money does not correlate with impact for sure. I think what I mean, I think part of it is that we're a little bit irrelevant still. We don't have marketing budgets.   I will say that I know for a fact on x, you get you get shadow banned and deranked if you post about Nasr.   It's like you you see it right away if you put   the the words Nostr or links to no Nostr websites on there. I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, there's a lot of focus on Elon specifically for me because I loved   Twitter, and that was my platform. And Twitter had a lot of issues before Elon took it over too.   But it was the only social media I used. But, really, the big enemy is is Zuck.  

The only thing stopping his user base from growing is more kids getting born. He's, like, basically, like, hit the population cap.   And   and they're definitely doing, like, shady things about external linking and stuff like that.   There's very little doubt in my mind. I mean, I don't have exact proof on that, but that's probably part of it. And then there's this other thing that   it's like anyone on Nasr who's, like   not I mean, I'm not gonna say anyone, but, like, there is a lot of pushback on Nasr about   bringing in more it's like, there's a lot of infighting about how you bring in new users,   which is interesting. And I think it goes back to   the point I made earlier with   it's being bootstrapped   by people   that think social media addiction is a problem.  

And   they're, like, battling there's, like, internal battles   within them within themselves,   not even just, like, among the community, like, within themselves   about   the right way of doing things   or, like, like, where the line should be drawn.   I mean, like, we've brought   on Primal, like, specifically, we've tried to focus on bringing in new users and get more exposure and make the   onboarding experience,   you know, less frictionful and easier to use.   And then, like, you bring on, like, a big account or whatever,   and then there's, like, a bunch of people in the comments like, oh, Primal's not a real Nostra app. It's like, oh, that's great. Like, that's the first thing they need to say is, like, just get confused about what is a real Nostra app. And then, yeah, then, I mean, that's just, I think, more of a philosophical question than anything about what is a real Nostra app.  

So it's interesting.   I do think it'll probably get better over time   in terms of external exposure, but it's gonna be more of a   hand to hand kind of   I guess, the way networks always expanded in the past before we had, like, major socials, which is like friends telling friends and onboarding them kinda thing.  

[00:43:20] Hodlbod:

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, like, you know, speaking for myself, there's probably well, there's definitely a lot of self sabotage,   whether it's whether it whatever source there it is. But, you know, if you get successful, now all of a sudden you're very responsible.   Right? Like, you become a target for media attacks.   You have to, like, comply with stuff or, you know, do reports or or actually read terms of services for app stores or whatever.   And, that's that stuff is not very fun.   And, you know, like, I've been trying to do a bunch of use usability testing,   but I just keep finding,   excuses to not do it.  

I I I gotta I I already know the problems. I gotta fix the problems first, and you end up at it's it's the developer first mindset. Right? Like, developers Yep. Like a program. They like to build stuff, and so they just do. And if you don't have any, like, product people or designers in the room to hold them,   accountable,   then they're just gonna, like, play with stuff forever. And I think, like,   that's still okay. Like,   for a long time, was   it was it was great that there was all the experimentation.   It's still great that there's a lot of experimentation, but I think I am like, I'm seeing a shift towards actual products. And I think it's probably like MKStack makes it easy to just,   like, poop something out.  

So there's there's more stuff that's covering use cases that that people are scratching their own itch. So I think that's, like, a sign of maturity. But,  

[00:44:44] ODELL:

you know, there are more Why don't you say what you mean there? What is your opinion on vibe coding?  

[00:44:50] Hodlbod:

I wrote a pooping out products. I wrote a a blog post a while ago called, AI is anti human.  

[00:44:57] ODELL:

Interesting.  

[00:44:58] Hodlbod:

And, like, I I still I use it sometimes,   but,   like, wholesale, like oh, man. There's so many weird things   to say about it. But wholesale, like, throwing things together, it's legacy code generation. Like, I love,   vibe coding for building marketing sites. I did I did that earlier today. I was like, build me a marketing site,   and it just, like, it pooped it out. And,   that's what it was, but I'm gonna publish it because I didn't have to build a marketing site. Right. So, like, that's great. And to the extent that that is enough, that's fine.   And, like, Gleason really raises the ceiling on what Vibe Coding is able to do in the Nostra ecosystem by giving it some tools that are decent.  

But, you know, like, I I did some experiments where I I wrote the same app,   twice in one day.   It took me four hours to write it with with the with MK Stack, and it didn't work at all. And then it took me three hours to write it by hand, and it worked   well. This is landlever.coracle.social.   It's a nip 29, like, relay management kinda client.   And,   you know, that's I'm I'm an experienced developer. So,   what what I do think AI is good for is for people who are not,   like, spending all their time working on a single piece of software.   If you've got, like, a Saturday morning and you wanna see something done and you don't know any programming languages,   like, throw something together, vibe it. And if it works for you, that's great.  

Don't expect to turn it into a project   or a a product.   I I know some people are and, like, I'm I'm impressed by what what Derek has done specifically. He's been doing some good stuff and sticking to it.   But putting putting code out there, it it becomes a job. There's, like, responsibility attached to it.  

[00:46:49] ODELL:

Well, I think that I mean, so the way I look at it,   at least from, like, the Nasr   bix Bitcoin side   and we'll see. I mean, it's still early. I don't pretend like   I can   comprehend all the ramifications   of where we're going next.   But,   one piece,   like, I think it could be very valuable for iterating fast   and experimenting with things.   But then if you find something   that actually has   some fit that actually people are in demand of and want to use,   at that point, like, you have to sit down and get professional with it and make a stable app. And one of the things I think that Nostra specifically is missing a lot   is stability,   is reliability,   is robustness on the app side.  

That's what people expect. Like, if if if people come in and   things are breaking and things they'll just walk away. They just leave. And one of the things that's really frustrating is, and   frustrating   is, and we saw this with the early Bitcoin community, is if you onboard   them too early   and then they leave, I think it's   way harder to get them back   than if they've never touched it in the first place. It's, like, almost like people are relatively open to trying that first touch experience.   But when the first touch is bad, that second touch is way harder to get than the first touch, which is a crazy phenomenon. And that part worries me a bit with having unstable apps out there, nonreliable apps, too complicated types of things for new users.   And then the second piece is I think there might be something there about   I would and to the first piece, I think one of the an interesting recent case study is BitChat   by Dorsey. It's like so he vibed that in, like, two days.  

He said a weekend. It could have been, like, a billionaire weekend, like, four days. I don't know. But he he said a weekend.   And then he put it out there, and then there was, like, this   there was people loved it. People got very excited about it. And then Cali jumped on board, and now there's, like, a bunch of different contributors to that project that are focused on making it, like, stable and fleshing it out and, like, actual like, a proper project.   So I think that's a perfect example of the first piece, like, iterating quick, seeing what sticks.   And then the second piece, which is a little bit more out there but could be kinda interesting,   is maybe it changes how   like, the crazy tech bro thing that you hear all the time is, like, it's the end of the app. Like, we're only gonna use agents.  

Like, you're just your   app stores are just walking zombies. They're never gonna exist anymore. People are gonna go into their agent, and they're gonna tell them what they want at any given time. And if they need an app like interface, the agent will make it for them on the fly.   And I'm not sold on whether or not that's gonna be the case. You know? It's way more likely it'll be the case for something like booking flights. Like, I need to go to Paris, and then I wanna connect through Zurich or whatever, and you just tell it and it just fucking books your flights for you   than for, like, full on social experiences or   group chats and stuff like that.  

But if it is going to be the case, it open protocols really supercharge it. Like, the fact that you don't need Nasr API permission, that you don't need Bitcoin API permission,   allows you to kind of enter that world   in a way that the closed systems would just never allow.   You you know and getting x API access is   is not only friction full, but expensive,   or   Stripe access or something like that. But you don't need that with Bitcoin and Nasr, so that could be interesting.  

[00:50:23] Hodlbod:

Yeah. And I think, like, you know, I talked to the future Paul about this, but, that's one of the exciting things about AI is it makes   development more accessible   to more people.   You know, like, if you go to a small business and be like, what what process is taking you, like, ten hours a week and wasting your time and money? And if you could vibe code something,   to just, like, fix it for that one person and not productize it, that opens up an entirely new category of software.   I mean, that's making professional development cheaper, but, you know, regular people can also go and,   you know, they can book their flight or or they can take an existing piece of software and be like, I really wish this button was over here. And they can just make that happen. And, like, no one else has to use that to be valuable because they spent 12¢ on it.  

I think that is fantastic. And, like, I I wanna be clear too that I'm not belittling any of the really smart people who are working on this and and excited about it on.   But I'm, I'm kind of a curmudgeon, so I I just try to, like,   you know, take the hype down as much as possible whenever I can. So I just I just see that as that's kind of, like, my my job, my role that I have self assigned is,   is to well, okay. So, like, you know, in 02/2012,   I worked or, yeah, '13.   I worked at a three d printing company. You know? And everyone was like, three d printing is the future. We're gonna throw away all our CNCs.  

[00:51:46] ODELL:

Factories are dead. Everyone's gonna produce things at home. Everyone's, like, generating these ultra light organic  

[00:51:53] Hodlbod:

lattice structures.   And, yeah, like, some of that exists. My local mechanic shop has two three d printers, and they just use it to,   you know, to to build little, like, manifolds and stuff and and stick pieces of exhaust together. It's fantastic,   but it did not completely   replace   manufacturing. It only revolutionized it.   So, I think AI is the same same thing. It it's only going to revolutionize   development.   It's not going to replace development. And I I don't think we're all gonna be, you know, AI jockeys either. I think it's, it's a lot more nuanced, and no one understands exactly what it's gonna look like. Yeah. I mean, it's still very early. We got a zap from silent dot links, zapped 42,000  

[00:52:32] ODELL:

sets. Great service.   I use and depend on it.   If we were on stream during the global   Starlink outage yesterday, I would have had to switch to my Silent Dot Link hotspot.   It's my only backup Internet.   I,   I mean, so on the nonster side of that,   I'm kind of interested   it's it's tangentially related to   VibeCoding   in that   there's a couple different visions for Noster, or maybe they're all the same vision, but   I question the order of operations.   Your two main projects, Coriculum, Flotilla, are, like, these bigger projects that are, like, focused on their specific use cases.   Coriculum, like, a more social use case. Flotilla, like, a more group chat, just Discord like experience.  

The the dream of Nostr that people have had since the beginning or since very early on has been this idea of, like, micro apps and other stuff and all this,   you know,   other things you can do. Right? Like Airbnb on Oster or whatever.   Maybe that's not micro enough. Like flapping ostrich, like games where you can just sign in and   do you think adoption happens   in the bootstrap phase? Do you think that happens from micro apps, or do you think that happens from,   you know, some of these bigger apps that are, like, more   like, these heavier apps that are more focused on some kind of holistic experience?  



[00:54:10] Hodlbod:

Well, I talked to a time traveler the other day, so I I can definitely tell you with certainty.   Now I I have no idea. It's, I I there's a lot of things about Nostra that are, like, huge gambles.   It's like, well, this seems like it should work, but no one's tried it. So   I guess we'll give it a shot and see what happens.   But I I tend to be more on the side of, like,   a single really high quality user experience is gonna be the on ramp for the majority of people. I mean, you already see this with primal. Right? Like, it's not,   I I don't know. Zap Zap Zap Fest Stream is like a that's actually pretty good, but it's also a a long project and it's been maintained and everything.  

But   to get people in the door, there has to be, like, a a value proposition that they can understand.   And most of is not   it like, it's it's a, it's a solution looking for a problem. And all of us know what the problem is, but most people aren't really, like,   up on decentralization   and the problems with the Internet enough to be looking for a particular solution. Whenever I tell my friends I I'm thinking about this stuff, they're like, well, I'm sure glad someone is.   That's about the the sum total   that I get   with, with my regular non techie friends.  

And, yeah. So I think, like, I I like in a lot of ways what Will is doing with Nostra DB and and NoteDeck and stuff.   And, I mean, if that can come together in just a super performance,   customizable,   polished, multi platform tool, that will be super cool because it'll be the   the the tweet deck that everyone misses,   plus a whole bunch more.   Like, it hasn't really   materialized yet.   But, yeah, I think, like, branding and marketing and design are all big parts of this process. And then   the the micro apps solidify the network effect. Right?   The network effect is normally,   what is it like?  

N,   minus one. I can't remember. But it's like the number of relationships between the people in the ecosystem.   But if the ecosystem includes apps,   then you get to multiply that by how many different apps a given person uses. And   that's, like, that's a much deeper moat than even big tech companies can build.  

[00:56:34] ODELL:

Yeah. Because, I mean, none of them would do that after the fact because they like their walled gardens.   So the fact that we're starting from that point   means that if any single app gets very successful, they're still part of the greater open Nostra ecosystem.   It's not like a decision that is made after success,   which I think is a key point there.   Yeah. I mean, I do think about like, I I I   don't think people are gonna come for censorship resistance   unless censorship gets   way worse again. I mean, it was pretty bad for a while. It's still pretty bad in lots of parts of the world.   But as long as it's like a frog boiling situation, people tend to not.  

And what was the phenomenon we saw? It's like a rich person gets deplatformed, and then they create their own social network. Yeah. Yeah. Or they buy one,   which, you know, we've seen you know, we see Trump with True Social.   I mean, I think Kanye bought Parler at one point.   Elon obviously bought x.   So   they either, like, buy one or create one, and then they don't solve the problem. They're just the new god,   instead of   someone else. And I'm even seeing true social for a while was was not paywall blocked, and was not login blocked, but now they're starting to login blocked   because they know everyone needs to read Trump's posts.  

So if you force them to log in, then they might actually sign up for the platform.  

[00:58:02] Hodlbod:

Trump has the best business models. Mint your own cryptocurrency,   create your own paywall, the   social network. Stakes.  

[00:58:09] ODELL:

Yeah. And we're gonna run Trump's stakes.   I,   so   I don't think they're gonna come for censorship resistance.   Maybe at some point, they come for verifiability,   but probably not. I think   most people are cool with   Zuckerberg telling them when something's AI generated or fake or whatever. Like, those centralized platforms will just have to have better UX in terms of they they they will have to make that part of their product offering. It's like, oh, this is fake news, and this isn't. And that's not an easy problem to solve, but they will attempt to, and they'll probably do decent about it. I think the way, like, we get, you know, a 100,000,000 people using Nasr, 200,000,000   it's like, it has the app has to be better experience.  

Like, it just has to be   and and easier said than done. Like, I don't know what necessarily means a better experience, and that also   was one of the issues when you like, a lot of the builders, like I said, are,   in social media denial or I don't know what we are. But,   like, they wanna use less social media, not more. But it just needs to be a better app. Like,   good content, good videos, everything needs to be really reliable. It just needs to work really well, and then then people get all the other benefits   as a side effect. And a lot of times, they don't even realize until afterwards.  

And I don't think a micro app can necessarily   do that.   But maybe maybe they could. You know? And and then maybe the question is, like, what is the definition of a micro app? You know? Maybe, actually, the first big app isn't a social app,   but not a micro app,   you know, like, Polymarket or something,   but on Oster.  

[00:59:56] Hodlbod:

I don't know what what the the thing would be, but, you know, I heard overheard, like, a college student the other day talking about how they had gray scaled their phone and,   like, turned off images and all this stuff.   I think there's a lot of appetite for social media that respects users.  

[01:00:11] ODELL:

Do you gray scale your phone?  

[01:00:13] Hodlbod:

I don't.  

[01:00:14] ODELL:

I'm just I'm just immune. My phone auto gray scales at sunset.  

[01:00:18] Hodlbod:

That's a good idea.   It's pretty cool. I have an I have, like, a an alarm set to put my phone down in the evening.   But, yeah, it does, like, suck up your life, and people people are smart. People recognize that, and they want better.   So,   social media that leans into that,   but someone has to own the narrative. You know? Like,   the entire ecosystem of Nostra, I mean, someone could maybe co opt it. Like, you know, nostra.com   is getting better.   But   It was pretty bad for a while. Own the Nostra narrative. You have to have your own brand, and you have to shield that as its own thing because no one like you're saying, no one cares about the protocol.   Protocols are not a selling point. So  

[01:01:03] ODELL:

I mean, I I I'll say, like,   I have noticed that issue as well.   Because if you shield Nostra to someone, you're just throwing them to the wolves. There's, like the chances that they actually get to an app   when you just say you should try out Nostr   is, like, 5%.   So I personally   have been been I'll just say, like, oh, you should download Primal and check out Primal.   And, yes, do I have a financial interest in Primal as an investor?   Yes. I do.   But I also just think it's right now, like,   the cleanest onboarding experience for a new user. And   if there was one that beats Primal at that, like, I will show that app instead.  

But as soon as you do that, like, people are like, oh, he's playing favorites. He's doing this. He's doing that. And it's like it's a whole   it's a whole quagmire, and it's something to do with open protocols. I mean, I see the same thing on the Bitcoin side.   Right? It's like I guess it's a little bit better now because there's so much Bitcoin education out there. If you say you should check out Bitcoin,   they could probably figure out their way. But it's way more helpful to tell someone,   download this app,   use this tool, set it up this way, and just kinda guide them, at least in the beginning. And then, ultimately, then they can go and use it however they want in the future after that. Yeah. I I have a responsible disclosure to make too. It's not it's that I am not paid to promote primal at all.  



[01:02:37] Hodlbod:

But is my friend. So,   take that as you will. No. But I think, like,  

[01:02:43] ODELL:

the friend thing you joke, but the friend thing is actually   at least for me, and that's definitely not true for a lot of people. Like, a lot of people, like, you give them, like, $50 and a brownie, and they'll show your product.   But for me, the friend issue is a way bigger issue about talking about these kind of things publicly,   because it just sucks   talking   specifically negatively   about friends   on air.  

[01:03:08] Hodlbod:

I I don't mind doing it. I I've, I've Fair enough. I'm old plenty of times, and Milian has forgiven me. That's why we're that's why we're able to be friends. There you go. Hi, man.   But, yeah, I think, like,   the problem like, social media itself as a selling point is kind of a bizarre thing because every   and I kinda wonder, like, it are we a bunch of millennials making the making, social media for millennials,   in the millennial   era?   You know,   younger kids,   they they have different platforms, first of all, like, that I've never used. I I've I've, like, used TikTok once,   and got disgusted and threw my phone across the room.  

But,   but younger people also, like, have have grown up in this ecosystem, and they're either, like, very highly captured by it and addicted to it, or they've already opted out.   And,   you know, it's like the AI thing. We can't really anticipate   what is coming next.   We just keep, like, building these things based on conventions that we already   have seen. But it takes an insane amount of creativity and, like, understanding of actual people in order to create a product that is compelling,   not only to differentiate from a market that exists, but also to to appeal to a new kind of person.   You know? Like, the the market that is opening up is huge   and,   completely unpredictable.  

So,   and I I like again, do you I'm a hypocrite. I do a terrible job of this, but we should just, like, spend a lot of time with people,   understanding what their problems are and,   understanding what their what their, like, philosophy on digital media is,   because it is certainly not.   I I wish I had Twitter back.  

[01:04:55] ODELL:

Yeah.   Well, I got a few things here. First of all,   have you seen this base app by,   by, Coinbase?  

[01:05:09] Hodlbod:

I've heard Tel. I haven't looked yet. So it's like Web three,  

[01:05:13] ODELL:

quote, unquote, competitor, Nostr,   like,   decentralized social  

[01:05:19] Hodlbod:

And there's one run by Coinbase.  

[01:05:21] ODELL:

Yeah. It's run by Coinbase.   It's,   got shitcoin trading built in. It's got social games built in, which I think   if Nasr is gonna be successful, it has to be a key piece is more social game type. I think they're viral. People like games. Games are fun.   It's got social games. It's got Shitcoin trading in the eye. I said Shitcoin trading. Shitcoin wallet. It has Zaps, but they use USDC.   But, anyway, you were mentioning earlier, you're like, oh, did we waste all this money on Nasr?   It came out forty five minutes ago or it looks like an hour and ten minutes ago.   BaseApp just sent out its first round of weekly rewards.  

They sent out $28,000,000   worth of USDC   to,   2,800   creators. Each got $10,000   worth of USDC.   So that's what we're up against.   Just a lot of money sloshing around. I mean, that's more money that's ever been spent on any kind of Nasr development by far. Just sent out as zaps to just get people in. That's crazy.   Which is fucking insane. On the TikTok thing yeah. Also, never used TikTok. Only time I've seen I've, like, seen TikToks that get cross posted.   But I don't know. Like, are we just   so old now too? Like, is TikTok old news? Like, are there there's probably all these apps that are   becoming viral that we don't even know about that the kids are using these days.  



[01:06:48] Hodlbod:

Yeah. I think so. My kids don't have phones, so, they can't See,  

[01:06:52] ODELL:

this is what I'm talking about, though. Like, my kid, I do no screen time. Like,   my kid's younger than yours,   but they're not he's not gonna get phones. I'm gonna try and, you know, push him away from social media as much as possible.   Like, part of the reason I deleted my Twitter account was because, like, how was I supposed to, like, tell him not to use this shit if I was,   like, a celebrity on x?   And I didn't know if I'd have the self control to do it if, like, I went to, like, 500,000 followers or 600,000   followers or something. So I just I'm a big leader of things and just pulled the fucking plug.  

But it's like, how are we trying   to bootstrap this thing   when you won't even let your kids have a phone? Like, how's like, it's just such a weird dichotomy.  

[01:07:35] Hodlbod:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's like, I think, social media had a different   different marketing scheme   early on that is completely different from what we have now. Like,   we are such an entertainment economy. The the games thing you mentioned is crazy too. Because, like, you know, you go on Netflix on a Friday night. You're like, I wanna watch a movie, and it's like, hey. Do you wanna, like, watch a playable?   I'm like, I don't know what that is, man. What is a playable?   It's a game. Like, Netflix has a game now. It's a Interesting. It just doesn't even make any sense to me. But,   you know, like, you think about Myspace   or,   or, you know, those old ones, just like forums, really. Forums and bulletin boards and stuff were a really early kind of social   network.  

And,   like, the Internet was the original Noester.   You could create your own space and talk about a particular thing or access control it and have authentication and stuff like that. I think that's what Noester is able to deliver in a way that's more user centric.   And people have to have the the appetite to have that. Like,   I definitely would like to just hang out on a forum with my six friends who like Monty Python.   But   and I think, like, a lot of people But isn't that just a group chat? Well, yeah. Exactly. Like, people are going to the cozy web. Right? Yeah.   These, you know, private servers and group chats and stuff like that.  

And,   that's because they know the people there,   and they don't have to like,   you know, there's no global.   The the idea that you have to be able to interface with everyone in the whole world,   at at the drop of a hat for any reason is, like,   it it's at best an illusion. You know?   You have to interface with a thousand people in the world at the drop of a hat.   And, And, yeah, like, connections come up, but they come up organically because you're talking about the same thing or in the same location or whatever.  

[01:09:32] ODELL:

And the the scaling have, like, a friend of friend in comment.  

[01:09:36] Hodlbod:

Yeah. Exactly. Like, the the scaling of social media is an illusion.   Social doesn't scale. Dunbar's number is, like, a thing.   And so working within those constraints   seems   well, it seems not only healthy, but valuable.   Right? Like, the value   that is created   on social networks at scale   where there's only fake engagement is all captured by the platforms. And so Right. You know, what's the point of driving engagement or monetizing or whatever,   if all it is is just the extension of the crypto casino like what base has?   I don't know. Yeah. I, I'm I'm   opting out of social media and skeptical of it, but I, like, I think that's that's what I need, and that's what a lot of people say they need. So   why not give people what they need? You know?  



[01:10:29] ODELL:

I mean, so on that note,   I mean, first of all, like, maybe we should all create base accounts and get $10,000   and then zap it around.   I wonder I   you probably have to do KYC for the USDC. Like, they're not just sending $10,000   in USDC to people without a Coinbase account.   I don't know. Anyway,   I   mean, on that note, two things. First of all god. I'm getting a call.   I,   social games, I think, are really interesting, and I just wanted to   to pinpoint on that.   I think   I think they can scale in a healthier way than, like, a global feed.   Like, you can have a billion people   using the same social game   with the same leaderboard, and it doesn't have a lot of the same negative externalities   that maybe a, like, a Twitter style app does.  

And Gnoster could   be very interesting there because you could have multiple games from different people. They could all use the same social graph type of leaderboard situation, and they don't have to all work together.   I think the biggest problem there is   the incentive for gaming in general has been walled gardens historically.   And recently with the the mobile games all suck. They're just fucking horrible. They're, like, super predatory   ad   bullshit. My dad is a sucker for   that's the other thing. Marty thinks, like,   it's like kids these days. Like, my dad's   quite old.  

Like, he's addicted to Words with Friends on his iPad, and, like, he'll just buy whatever like, all the slop that comes out of China. Like, he just like, he's just a sucker. He just clicks all the fucking ads.   Like, they a lot of them, like, the older generation have even more unhealthy   situation with technology.   Maybe it's like, you gotta, like, get him away from the iPad. He's, like, completely addicted to it. Yeah. Which is I'm, like, so sanguine about young people. Like,  

[01:12:41] Hodlbod:

the old people are are so   they don't have the the immune immune system  

[01:12:47] ODELL:

for digital technology. Like, young people, they're they're pretty prepared to, like, grapple with it. It's like when the conquistadors came over and got everyone sick. It's like that there's no immune system.   That's actually a really good metaphor.   I,   but then to the group chat thing, I mean, this is something you've been very focused on since the very beginning. I remember one of the first times we met,   you said my goal is   to get my church group off of Facebook,   which is actually something that I've been thinking about a lot recently because my wife and I   haven't had Facebook for over a decade,   but we wanna homeschool our kids,   and all the homeschool groups are on Facebook.  



[01:13:29] Hodlbod:

Yep. And  

[01:13:32] ODELL:

I, you know, I do a lot of things for my children   that are were that are worse than joining Facebook. Like, if we have to do that, then we're gonna have to fucking do that, I think.   But, hopefully, we don't. And I think Nasr could be a key aspect here. And, I mean so Flotilla specifically, I think, birthed out of this concept.   How do you think about that?  

[01:13:52] Hodlbod:

Yeah. I mean yeah. My my goal has always been to help my church community out.   I completely   did not understand the problem, and I keep learning new things, which is why I haven't actually,   onboarded anyone.   You know, I started with, like, replacing Twitter, but turns out that's not actually that good for community.   So the the chat app kinda like Slack sort of thing, I did that because,   there there's a precedent for it. Like, my community has a Slack channel that they would like to use. And what I'm learning now is, like,   you know, what what is what are people's need for   for privacy and security?  

Right. And then also what is their perceived need for it? Like, if you can say something is encrypted,   people are all over it.   But if you're just saying but if you say self hosted, like, people, a, don't know what that means, and, b, don't really wanna bother with it. Yeah. And so, like, Flotilla leaned into   the relays   as groups kinda thing. And I think it's a still really, like, promising architecture for a lot of different kinds of groups,   if you have the right, like, trust and security trade offs,   especially for ones that are, like, read only or or, like, public public read or something like that.  

But So  

[01:15:11] ODELL:

that's that's like a uncle Jim on steroids. Right? It's like one church member is running   a relay that only and does it authenticate? Like, it's only  

[01:15:20] Hodlbod:

a white listed group of users can access that relay? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So you got one technical guy or, you know, even a service,  

[01:15:28] ODELL:

that could be okay as well. Like, vault it could be, like, voltage or whatever. It's like a couple clicks, host on AWS.  

[01:15:35] Hodlbod:

Yeah. And at least your data is not getting sucked in by a giant machine that has standardized it and knows how to deal with it. So,   I I think that's, like, that's promising, but   I am glad that Jeff took the bullet for the rest of us and started working on white noise because,   that   that   like, adopting MLS and having a really robust,   scalable, encrypted   group solution   is not something that can happen overnight. Like, MLS has been going since, like, what, 2017 or something like that. Yeah. So it's a it's a pretty old project,   and adapting it to is not trivial.  

And,   you know, he's he's just doing it. Like,   I I'm really glad that he did that. He invited me to work on it, like, a year ago. And I was like, no. No. I have a different different approach I wanna try. And so we went our separate ways, but,   I think MLS is is really promising for certain group types. But,   you know, trust trust in a digital setting is, like, it's so fraught because anyone can exfiltrate data, especially if it's signed, but even if it's not. And,   you know, there's all these, like, affordances that are not natural   to human experience. So, like, the other day, I couldn't log in to Strava. I was gonna go for a run.  

At the same time, I lost my earbuds.   And I value my earbuds way more than I value logging into Strava.   But the the Strava problem was way more frustrating because I had no recourse. There was nothing I could do about it. It was just like,   it doesn't work, and there's no good alternative.  

[01:17:10] ODELL:

Whereas Wait. You lost the device? Was is that the phone tracking you, or is it, like, a wrist  

[01:17:16] Hodlbod:

device or something? Or It's a it's an app on my phone.  

[01:17:20] ODELL:

You know the Strava leak. Right?   Yeah. Yeah. It's And they, like, found all the   all the all the secret military bases or whatever because, like, they're just running circles  

[01:17:31] Hodlbod:

around the Yeah. It's Fitbit. The running data was public. And I guess Fitbit, started posting people's sexual activity to Facebook.  

[01:17:40] ODELL:

I mean, it's a good case study on, like, what   not to do on Oster.  

[01:17:45] Hodlbod:

Yeah. But I lost I lost my earbuds at the same time, and that was not frustrating at all because I was like, I can just buy new earbuds or or, like, you'll find them. Like, I know they're physically in my house somewhere,   so they'll they'll appear. Like, physical affordances   are so much more hospitable to   humans than digital ones.   Interesting. You know, you see this with, like, Hexa inviting the journalist,   to his, bomb the Houthis,   chat group.  

[01:18:11] ODELL:

Right.  

[01:18:12] Hodlbod:

It's not just old people. Like, no one is really well adapted to digital media.   There's always gonna be some amount of Wait. What's the takeaway from him actually inviting the wrong person to his group chat? Oh, he, like, he didn't understand. Like, he didn't go to the guy's house and knock on the door and be like, like, hey. Do you wanna come to my, like Well, he, like, invited the wrong Steve. Like, it was kind of a UX failure. Right? Exactly. Exactly. Like, UX is always gonna be there, and even a perfect UX is gonna be misunderstood and misused a lot of the time. And, like, yeah, it's true in the physical world. You do the wrong thing sometimes. But  

[01:18:45] ODELL:

we have an intuition for the for the physical world that, you know If you invite the wrong person into a room to have a meeting, like, you see the wrong person. Right. You're just, like, you're not supposed to be here. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.  

[01:18:56] Hodlbod:

And, you know, it solves the impersonation because you have a really high,   high granularity sort of signals for who a given person is. It's not like, oh, wrong Steve. You know? So and and you can reconcile that in two ways. Right? You can lean more into the physical world that has all these things already,   or you can try to virtualize everything   and put your brain in a in a in a context   where the simulation   works well enough that you can intuit it.   But that's, like, that's way out and also dystopian.  

[01:19:30] ODELL:

I see   see Jevi in YouTube saying Bluetooth earbuds are cooking your brain.   Yeah.   It's something I wrestle with. I mean, I literally have one in my ear right now.   I think,   one is probably better than two, but I'm not a doctor.  

[01:19:48] Hodlbod:

I'll only get kids around one side of my head.  

[01:19:51] ODELL:

I I try not to use them that often. I will say that I tried wired buds.   Toddlers   and wired buds is   pretty dangerous from your ear for physical perspective. Like, they just rip those things. They just grab that cord.   So the the convenience, I think, is pretty high. But, hopefully, it's not   destroying me.   I I say, Jebby, honestly, one is better than two is probably legit. I've never worn I never wear two.   So I got that going for me.   I, I mean, I wanna I wanna hone in on the signal metaphor because signal is a product that has completely changed my life. It's something that I rely on heavily.   It kinda goes back to our earlier conversation where,   the threat model doesn't involve a hostile US government. Like, literally, we would just not have access to signal tomorrow if the US government decided we couldn't have access to it.  

It is centralized,   but makes a very interesting trade off balance between convenience and security. It's pretty pretty damn secure and pretty damn private.   But, ultimately,   you know,   a lot of the privacy assumptions   revolve around who you're communicating with, who's in your group chat, what their security is like. Phones are   relatively easy to compromise by sophisticated actors. They can compromise them that way.   And the UX, though, but the UX is they've they've really nailed down the UX, and they made it a lot better.   I always give the story, like,   my 90 year old grandmother, I'm not gonna dox her exact age,   she uses signal, and it's because it's the only way she gets baby pictures.  

I've got I've onboarded practically my entire   extended family to signal because it's the only way they get baby pictures, and we have group chats. We have one group chat with my wife's family and one group chat with my family. There's, like, a little bit of overlap in between, and, like, that's basically, like, our baby social media. It's like they just get photos dropped in there.   With all that said, even all the great strides they've made   first of all, you have two issues. You have on one side, you have the hard course   that are like,   this is not secure enough. This is all the issues I just said, not centralized blah blah,   trade off model. They don't like it. It uses phone numbers. Oh, but they the other person can't see the phone number. It doesn't matter. It uses phone numbers. Like, I won't use it.  

And then the second piece is just the friction of installing another app, convincing someone to finally install the other app. And I use baby photos as an example because it's a very high threshold.   It's it's it's something that people really desire. Family really desires baby photos, so you can get them on the app that way.   Work related stuff.   It's like, if, like, you want $10.31 to invest in your company,   like, you're probably communicating with me through signal. Like, you can try through email or whatever, but there's a soft incentive there that, like, I'm way more likely to respond.   So,   like, OpenSets and ten thirty one, like, 99%   of my communications, personal work, everything are through signal, and, also, I'm just a big deleter. So, like, I just deleted my Twitter and Telegram. You can no longer DM me there.  

So if you wanna communicate with me, like, that's what you gotta do.   I also don't have a phone number. So, like, you can't even, like, just do a regular text.   So maybe I'm an extreme. But, anyway, all of that said,   it's only got a 100,000,000 users.   Right? WhatsApp is, like, three to 5,000,000,000   or something like that on WhatsApp.   Signal only has a 100,000,000 users,   but where I'm going with that is it still has   transformed the way   I am able to operate my life.   Is still a huge net positive for me and plenty of other people.   And maybe this focus   on a billion users on Nostr is misguided. Maybe we'll get there eventually.  

But something can be really transformative even if it's, quote, unquote, only a 100,000,000 people or only 50,000,000 people. Right?  

[01:24:06] Hodlbod:

Yeah.   Yeah. I totally agree with that. I mean, like, you know, talking   from the perspective of, like, the Christian ethic,   the I the the guy who saved us saved everyone. Right? He died on the cross and saved everyone, but we're called to to be servants. And a servant,   like, does a bunch of menial labor for someone who never thanks him.   And   that's meaningful on its own. And so, like,   once you lose sight of the people that you're actually serving   when you're doing something,   whether you're building tech or doing something financial or or   whatever, then you just cut yourself off from the meaning of doing it. And, like, yeah. So scale doesn't matter because   whether you are able to affect the lives of x billion people, those people are still people, and they have certain problems. And there are ways for those problems to get solved.  

So, like, success is not eating the entire world.   Anyway, like so, like, the problem with signal   is,   like, it doesn't scale, and I was just talking against scale, but I mean a different kind of scale. Yeah. Like, it once you have, like, eight people in a chat group Oh, it's horrible. It's horrible. Yeah. And I I started a chat group a signal group for my church because I I was like, forget it. I'm just gonna solve this problem, put everyone on signal. And it was great until all the guys in the church, all 30 of the guys in the church were in the chat group, and now no one uses it because you don't wanna, like, broadcast every thought that you have to the entire,   group. And so, like, partitioning digital space is super important   to be like, let's sidebar over here and, like, figure out the logistics for this thing that the two of us only care about,   without losing the context of the greater group or, like, the access controls that are associated with it. So I I think that's the place   really to go   is like, Signal could do that. They could they could link chat groups, but it would break the metaphor so thoroughly that I think it would not be well received.  



[01:26:10] ODELL:

Do you think do you are you a Telegram user?  

[01:26:13] Hodlbod:

I I I use Telegram,   for one conversation.  

[01:26:17] ODELL:

So I have a bunch of issues with Telegram, like, in terms of, like,   technical decisions and I mean, I think it's basically spyware.   But UX wise and particularly around big groups,   I think they do a pretty good job. Like, I'm curious on your opinion. Like, the whole like,   they have, like, rooms and then there's sub chat rooms and there's all the different   UX tricks they do to handle big groups. But, like, big groups is a hard thing to solve, and I don't know what like, yeah. Big groups is probably, like,   over 20 people.  



[01:26:52] Hodlbod:

Yeah. And I think WhatsApp does a good job too.  

[01:26:55] ODELL:

I'm too They do a similar thing. Right? Like, they have, like, sub groups and  

[01:27:00] Hodlbod:

stuff? Yeah. I think so. I need to, like, actually study those platforms because I think you're right. I think they do a good job with those things. But I'm too old, and I don't know how to use Telegram. I can never find any of the any of the buttons. But, yeah, I I think, They've added a lot of shit to it over the years.   Yeah. But, yeah, I think that's that is a better approach,   what they what those guys are doing.  

[01:27:21] ODELL:

Yeah. I mean,   I my relationship with WhatsApp   is that I install so Telegram, I deleted.   I recently installed it again and created a burner account because I was teaching, like, a 200 person virtual class,   for the plan b business school, and the q and a was in there.   And when I did that   first of   all, used my first burner phone number I used to try and sign up had already been signed up for Telegram, so I just, like, wasted $5.   And I created another one, got signed up, immediately banned from the platform.   Like, I have, like,   a bunch of flags or whatever, and then I had, like, emails   email support. Like, they finally, like, unlocked my account. I used it for a day and deleted. But they had the interesting group structure there in their in the plan b business school. They had, like, all these different subgroups.  

But then my relationship with WhatsApp is, like, I usually just install it   when I'm, like, traveling abroad in places that rely on, like, a 100% WhatsApp economy. It's insane. Yeah. And that's also super malicious because if you don't give them access to your contact list, which I always refuse access to, it's almost an unusable app. So I'm definitely guilty   and on that front too. And I think that goes to, like, the earlier thread that has just been,   you know, incessant through this entire conversation, which is, like, we're trying to build alternatives, but we don't really know   how the things that we're building against work   because we're not using them.  

And I don't know how we cross that chasm. Maybe it's maybe it's new people are coming in that   don't have that principal stance or don't have that out of touchness   that actually make that change.   But, anyway, my WhatsApp story was,   I actually did reinstall it for   a month or two,   about five months ago, six months ago because,   one of my   friend's wives got cancer, and the support group was on WhatsApp. And if you wanted to, like, help support you, how to join WhatsApp. And they had this whole interesting group structure with, like, admins   and, quote, unquote, like, privacy   settings where you could, like,   who can view phone numbers, who couldn't view phone numbers, who could access which group, who could access the funding group, and this and that. And it was, like, very, very, very in-depth.  

But then I just, you know, I   like, we paid for a babysitter for a little bit, and I just got out of the WhatsApp group.   But, yeah, I don't know where I was going with that. I just it's it's they're trying to solve a lot of these problems, and they're trying to solve them in a super centralized way.   And for a lot of people, that is fine, I think.   So maybe   and I'm just thinking out loud, like,   maybe the end result of, like, the first, quote, unquote, killer app for Nostril or the first thing that has, like, real product market fit is maybe it's more centralized   than   the hardcores   in the community   would like to see.  

But if at the end of the day, you have an NSAC and there's actual Noster events being published,   like, that's probably fine. It's still better than the alternative.  

[01:30:42] Hodlbod:

Yeah. It gives you a lot of of advantages. I do think that encrypted groups can do almost anything that server supported ones can do. Like, MLS has has all these extensions for, you know, different logic for groups. And, like, Nostra gives you, different, content types. Right? You can put anything into a Nostra group.   And and then MLS gives you access controls. And so you might be able to detach from the relays   and just have, like, very few compromises apart from, you know, the push notifications thing we were talking about earlier.   But, you know, I I also think, like,   all these social media options that we talk about   are sort of a shelling point for what we think social media is.  

One that, you know, a lot of people like,   that is very different is Skoool, s k o o l,   and it's like a learning platform.   And they have tons of features that are really   strongly oriented at, like, gamifying and monetizing,   communities that are oriented at,   like, courses,   course material kind of stuff.   And it it's just it it's instructive to see,   you know, that kind of thing is never gonna have a billion users,   but they can have a 100,000,000 users and really solve their problem well. So there's a lot of room for  

[01:32:01] ODELL:

for solutions. And looks like they have payments built in too. Yeah. Yeah.  

[01:32:06] Hodlbod:

And and payments is part of the gamification, I think, too. So,  

[01:32:10] ODELL:

like, what do you mean by that? Platform.  

[01:32:13] Hodlbod:

It's like, you know, you have to pay to join, but then you get paid out for promoting stuff and and, it's like a pyramid scheme.   Yeah. Yeah. It's a little bit like a pyramid pyramid scheme.  

[01:32:23] ODELL:

Well, they work. They're viral.  

[01:32:26] Hodlbod:

But, yeah, like, if someone wants to do   a a, education focused,   group chat client, it would look totally different from, like, a family or or church sort of thing. So there's a lot of room for for different things. But,   I mean,   that   that WhatsApp use case of,   of being the thing that can handle any use case,   it's obviously attractive   and would be awesome if we could  

[01:32:54] ODELL:

achieve something like that. Well, let's pull it back. Like, how do you get   how do we get your church group to not use Facebook?  

[01:33:04] Hodlbod:

Well, they they,   we don't really use Facebook. Everyone hates Facebook.  

[01:33:08] ODELL:

Okay. So what do you use? You use a Slack channel?  

[01:33:11] Hodlbod:

Some some of them use a Slack channel, and then we have a signal group. And my pastor sends an email once a week. It's so disjunctive.   Yeah. Yeah. Other people send him an email, and then he sends the email to everyone else.   It's, yeah, it's,   it very centralized,   but it works fine.   And so   yeah. Like, I I think   I think the value of a social media platform would be to create spaces where there's   opportunity for for informal conversation,   where it's like, I wanna tell everyone something, but I don't want it to be an announcement.   I just wanna be like, hey. We're having a barbecue   this weekend. Not, hey. 200 people. Do you wanna come to my house?  

Yeah. These are, like, really different media.   And   so yeah. Like, the ephemerality of conversation is important, partitioning of spaces and and members,   and, like, having different groups or subgroups   based on access. So, like, you know, the deacons should be able to talk about stuff without sharing it with everyone else. And, like, you don't need that in the same   platform. You could just use the signal group for that, and they probably have something like that.   So, like, disjunctive is okay,   because that's how life is.  

[01:34:28] ODELL:

Yeah.  

[01:34:30] Hodlbod:

We have these different media to support   different relationships,   and maybe the media don't serve those relationships well in every case.   But a diverse ecosystem is like   it I I you know, engineers always wanna, like, distill everything down to the single perfect solution.   But and this is something that I think Nostra recognizes in its design,   and it's great. Like,   the repo says, don't do the same thing in multiple ways. Right? But   do a whole bunch of different things. And it's okay if there are multiple ways of doing something,   because it it breaks down the network effect, but maybe those cater to different use cases.  

And so having a multiplicity   of ways to communicate   is, like, it's really not   that bad. It's it's it's more human.   Collapsing everything down to a single thing is a great way to,   to objectify   and harvest,  

[01:35:27] ODELL:

data. You know? Well, let's, like, drill into this for a second. Right? Because   so at the very basic level of Nasr, we have, like, different types of posts, different types of events,   where, like, kind one is the most used. Right? It's got the Lindy. It's the short text note   type of Twitter style kind of post.   And then, I mean, there's so many kinds I can't keep track of. But,   from a developer sense, it's ideal if   photos are something different than videos or different from,   calendar events. And why is that? It's because if you're building your app, you wanna be able to, like, easily   programmatically   determine what type of thing is what type of thing and show the user appropriately how that, you know when they wanna see those things, if they wanna see TikTok style videos, like, they you should be able to easily do that in an app.  

But at this point of Nostra adoption,   it really breaks the very limited network effect we have.   And we kinda saw that with Olas by Pablo,   which had a secondary issue of it just he seemed I don't know if he's gonna refocus on it, but he seems like he kinda got distracted and wanted to do something else. But it was posting as a different kind. And so, like, if you were using Primal or Domus, you didn't see it.   You just those posts, you didn't see. But if you put a photo in a kind one note, you knew for a fact that, like, every major Nostra app would see it.   What are your thoughts on that? Like, what are your thoughts on   should we be separating all these things? Is it maybe an order of operations thing? Should we be separating them later?  

I saw another example of that with,   Lucas.   This Nostra developer created Plebs dot app,   and   it's sort of, like, a video app focused on videos, and he had he was using a specific kind or whatever.   And   from someone who's optimistic about Nasr, like, I respect that.   But I but he asked me as someone who posts, you know, a prolific amount of video content to Nasr, and I was like, yeah. I'm just gonna keep posting kind one. Like, I there's already the like,   the network effect is already fucking tiny.   Like, I'm just gonna post an m p four link in a short note.  

[01:37:51] Hodlbod:

Yeah. I I flipped on this   recently, and, I don't know. I might flip again. But, you know, kind ones are this sort of,   broadcast   area where you can publicize everything, and they're widely supported and stuff. But I think, you know, the it's okay to have network partitioning. That's   a feature on Noester rather than a than a bug. There is no global view, and there is no global   content type,   that represents everything. And there are different apps. And for the same reason that onboarding is better served by an app that can, like, own a narrative and stuff, I think content types are better served by a given app. So, like, Olas should just do kind twenties and not make kind ones or try to hijack the Twitter use case with its stuff. Like, that's parasitic, and and,   if it was just kind 20, you wouldn't get, like, duplicates. You gotta, like, deal with all these technical problems if you try to bridge over to this other kind.  



[01:38:48] ODELL:

Would you think it that's all true, but don't you think it creates an adoption friction point?  

[01:38:54] Hodlbod:

I think it creates a a friction point for adoption of apps, but not for users.   Like, it   if you're posting a kind 20 and it shows up in a kind one client,   then it's just not going to be treated correctly. Not like It's just an image.   Yeah. But and I think, like, kind one People post images on Twitter. Like, what they post articles and images on Twitter. And in this case, like, maybe Olaf should have been a kind one client. That'll be the images. Because, like, yeah, you can put links in stuff, and it's just embedded content. There's not enough of a reason to be like, an image is a whole different thing. I think there could be if you really were optimizing for that.   But if you want it to be highly visible, then use kind ones. If you don't,   then don't. But, like, you know, there are certain things that don't fit in kind ones. Like, long form blog posts have markdown and kind ones Right. That makes sense to me. It you just get a broken experience, and you're hijacking this thing that's used for a different idiom.  

So yeah. I mean, it takes a ton of judgment.  

[01:39:57] ODELL:

And you can always have a kind one   that is publicizing  

[01:40:02] Hodlbod:

a different kind. Like, you can do a short form that's like, look. I have this long form note. I have this blog post. And I think that's a great that's a great pattern because people do that already. Like, I made a made a video on YouTube, and I'm gonna cross post it to Twitter. And that's actually how people already use it. And so and, like, walled gardens exist for a reason. Right? They have these different content types, and they also have different demographics.   It it would be nice to be able to   microblog on any microblogging client.  

But   to a certain extent, like, I don't really want my microblogging stuff to show up on my actual blog,   in a single stream or something like that. So,   yeah. I don't know. It's a it's a really hard design space, but I think,   people   it's okay   to split things up a little bit. It's not gonna kill   the community because the community exists in kind ones. Right?   So if you're on kind if you're on a kind 20 client, it's okay if you get less content that's additive   rather than,   splitting the actual social graph.   Unless someone exclusively uses kind 20   to post, but I don't think anyone does that. Right?  



[01:41:09] ODELL:

I mean, they did for a while. They were like, there was I think Derek might have been one of the people behind. It was, like, three hundred sixty five days of   of Olas or whatever. And he's like, I never saw any of those photos, and now no one's ever gonna see them probably.   Or maybe they would and then meanwhile, they could have just posted   an image file and to kind one,   and, you know, their friends would have seen it. I mean, I think that's the goal of posting a photo in the first place is your friends see it.   It's just an interesting like, I agree.  

At scale, it makes complete sense to me.   But you have a bit of a chicken and the egg issue.   And as a both a user and someone focused on building out the protocol,   on the user side,   I'm a kind one maxi.  

[01:41:55] Hodlbod:

Well, there's also another thing where it's like, if if you can only get kind twenties in a kind 20 client, then you're gonna be incentivized to go and use that client. So it it put users to   actually use multiple clients   rather than just stay in Amethyst or something like that. And, like, super clients, I I think super clients are great. Korgle kind of is one,   where   content types,   and renders them or attempts to render them. Do you render kind twenties?  

[01:42:21] ODELL:

Yeah.   Nice.  

[01:42:23] Hodlbod:

And so if someone cross post a kind 20 to a kind one, now I've got duplicates.   And the That's an issue. How do you deal with that? Well, I don't. Like, trying to deduplicate those, that's a recipe for insanity because you're you're like, there's a combinatorial   number of ways that, like, notes can quote each other. Right. And trying to, like, manage that in software is,   is terrible. So avoiding the problem in the first place, you know, it comes with a cost. There are lots of costs to decentralization.   And,   but, you know, I think the the interesting thing is discovering what the benefits are,   to these, like, partitioning effects. Like,   I I think they can be good for us.  

They're not just like,   yeah. I mean, it's, like, it's the global view thing. There is no global view. It's totally   a a,   an illusion. And so   navigating as a person There is no global. With even with different identities too. Because, like, you know, right now, a lot of people just are one pub key on Nostr, but you might want to log in to Olas with a different pub key than into your client client,   to purposely   split your identity because  

[01:43:33] ODELL:

you don't wanna be bombarding all of your, like, all of your followers who like Bitcoin with, pictures of your food. You know? That's exactly what I was saying, like cooking stuff. It seems like that's the example that's constantly thrown around. Okay. I mean, yeah, that all makes sense to me. I mean, that's I think one of the superpowers of Nasr is the   you can just instantly permission permissionlessly   spin up new identities.   And maybe we should be leaning into that more, but I also think that's probably another piece of, like,   where are we in the adoption cycle. It does kind   of fracture the network effect even further again,   but maybe it doesn't.  

I don't know. I mean, I will say as   one of the, quote, unquote, large larger end pubs   on Nasr,   when I was on Twitter,   I was strictly would only post about Bitcoin   because I'm kind of antisocial media, and I that's   I was using it because I was interested in Bitcoin, and I wanna interact with the Bitcoin community.   And when in the bootstrapping phase of Nasr, I've tried to be more of a person,   because people are like, there's too much Bitcoin content. So it's like,   I have like, I have I try and post, like, OPSEC friendly dad photos, you know, without, like, showing the like, I would never if I if I was still at Twitter, I would never be posting photos of my kid.   And I try and strike a balance to bootstrap that network effect. I don't know. I'm kinda ranting here. The Testimony guide. It is a it is a community. Nostra is a community.  



[01:45:08] Hodlbod:

Yeah. You are behaving differently because more, like, you're lending more of yourself to the people on it, which is I think it's great. It's okay. It's okay even if it gets in the way of scaling.   But I think we're still gonna scale past it.  

[01:45:24] ODELL:

Yeah. Yeah. But I'm saying that's probably the, that's the opposite thing. Like, if Nasr already scaled, I'd only be talking about Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And so your behavioral change, and you'll split yourself into different pub keys, and,  

[01:45:33] Hodlbod:

you'll find your your people elsewhere.  

[01:45:36] ODELL:

I might be yeah. It'd be like a different pub key that was, like, talking about dad things or whatever. Yeah. Completely in, like, a permissioned way. Like,  

[01:45:44] Hodlbod:

you know, I I would not wanna broadcast to the entire world the details of my personal life   Right. Even though I do,   accidentally,   or inadvertently.   But, you know, the the whole circles idea is kinda cool.   And, yeah, Jeff has done a couple of relays that only let people you follow read your posts.   Yeah. But, I think MLS can make that work too. So   and I know people have been talking about that. So I I think that'll be, you know, Google plus and Google  

[01:46:18] ODELL:

You're muted. I can't hear you now. You just cut your engine.  

[01:46:22] Hodlbod:

Unplugged my mic accidentally.   That'll do it. But, yeah, Google plus, it was a it was a good idea, and, Google killed it. So we don't really get to see what the,   what that would've looked like at scale.  

[01:46:35] ODELL:

But maybe we could try it again. Yeah. They did had they had some interesting ideas there. That's where you get that's what you mean by circles. Right? Yeah.   It's interesting that they have, like,   such a monopoly on email, and they were never able to   bring it over to social in any kind of way. I mean, in a lot of ways, Gmail is a social media client.   Just a really horrible one.   I want to I have two more topics that I'd like to hit even though we're   it's been a long it's been a long conversation.   The first big one is your thoughts on monetization,   and I'll bring it back   because I think this is a big issue   on Nasr right now   is that we don't have sustainable,   profitable   projects.  

They all are kind of like, there's all these one off grants. Like, obviously, OpenSets has been a key part of it. Some people are just working for free. A lot of people are just working for free. Some people are trying to rely on donations like Zaps, but it's just, like, not scaling.   I think Signal is an interesting example here again,   on, like, financial sustainability. And what most people don't realize about Signal Signal is it started as TechSecure,   and RedPhone,   and it was actually acquired by Twitter.   When you're, like, think about, like, open source projects, like, a lot of roads lead back to Jack, but it was acquired by Twitter. He was gonna implement   encrypted DMs. Never fucking happened.  

But power to him, he he   as part of the deal, they open sourced   TextSecure and Redphone and made it independent of Twitter.   And then   WhatsApp sold to Facebook   and signed a deal with the devil,   and they shook hands with Zuck. And Zuck said, we'll never monetize user information, and then they did. And then Brian Acton of WhatsApp   ceded Signal Foundation with $50,000,000,   and they've been running as, you know,   a well polished, sustainable nonprofit   ever since that's focused on a single project. I don't think that is a thing that can happen for many projects. Like, that's not   that's not,   like, a realistic outcome. There was a lot of things that happened there that made that a reality.  

So, I mean, how do you think about   how do you think about monetization sustainability in an ethical way on Nostra?  

[01:49:06] Hodlbod:

Yeah.   I that's a great question. I I'm not a good business guy, but,   I mean, I cases.   Yeah.   I I think, you know, it's definitely hard, and I, it makes me kinda sad to see people try to monetize because they're just it's not the volume right now. The the willingness to pay for cut for customers, for just consumers to pay for anything,   but especially social media is so low.   Usually, like, most like, 70% of the economic activity on the Internet is b to b because when you are a business, you're buying something. You're buying it so you can make more money.   So it's consumers that, like, ultimately pay because there's so many more consumers than there are businesses.  

But the amount and willingness to pay is, like, is so low.   And I I think there are good open source business models. Like, one is, you know, Red Hat supports,   you know, charges for support. I think that's a great way to do it. Charging for aligned hosting as well. So, like, if you pay for a server, then,   you know, the the owner is is less likely to just kick you off at a moment's notice. And so having hosted relays is an okay way to do things for, like, you know, like, a a community relay especially.   And because Nostra assigned data, you can back everything up and restore without,   you know, even if you do get the And not trust the host. Yeah.  

Yeah. Yeah.   But   yeah. Dude, the economic stuff I mean, we already see this with most, social media companies. They just had a super hard time making any money. Twitter took a long time to make any money, and it was through advertising that they survived. So They sold out their users. Yeah. Their users are literally data cap.   I think one thing that does help us on this is that no one has to scale,   because scaling is what's crazy expensive. You know? Signaling signal   signal servers are the cost center. Twitter servers are the cost center.   And,   you know, a developer is relatively cheap. If you got a couple developers,   you pay them, like, 30,000,   a month. Like, that's that's cheap for a business.  

And so you only have to scale to,   like, yeah, a 100,000 users or something like that. Like, really, really small levels in order to survive.   I would love to see  

[01:51:32] ODELL:

that Like, little profitable small businesses basically. Yeah. Exactly. They're making, like, a million dollars profit a year, $500,000   profit a year, and they cover their expenses with a little bit of juice leftover.  

[01:51:44] Hodlbod:

Yeah.   I don't know how realistic that is, but with a with a protocol that realigns   incentives towards the user,   I think users   will appreciate that, and they'll be much more willing to pay for a product that isn't already   taking advantage of them in multiple other ways.  

[01:52:06] ODELL:

There's a couple of pieces there. First of all,   historically, users have been very hesitant to pay for things on the Internet.   But we've seen   x move to   at least a paid plus model that users have seemed to be adopting at least a little bit. I mean, their main business model is still   very much advertising.   And,   and the AI tools,   a lot of the I mean, they have real costs associated with them, but people seem to be willing to pay actually a significant sum for a lot of these AI tools. I mean, people are paying for ChatGPT, and ChatGPT still harvest all your data.   But they're paying, you know, $30.50,   a $100 a month sometimes for these sometimes more than that for these tools.  

So that's an interesting   trend to watch. Like, maybe I mean and these are big companies. Like, if the big tech companies start transitioning people to paying for stuff,   then maybe we can ride that wave.   On the piece about hosting being the most obvious business model, it is. But the problem with that too is it's the part that has the most cost and also the most liability.   Like, I think Master Build has built, like, a little nice little   sustainable small business.   But, I mean, I know firsthand from the primal side, like, the amount of, like, CSEM scanning and stuff that you have to do is insane. Like, it's a business that is not an ideal business to be in.  

[01:53:37] Hodlbod:

I don't know. It's gonna be a struggle. It's interesting to speculate whether encryption is gonna help with that or hurt. Like, if you're hosting a bunch of encrypted stuff on your encrypted   media or encrypted groups onto your server,   like,   are you liable for that and according to whom?   You know, you don't know what it is, so you can't really do much under American   United States law. I think that's that's,   okay.   But it might be   very difficult for people under different,   jurisdictions.   And, like, you know,   are we are we doing the right thing? Are we helping people that way? Like, I strongly believe that   if there are some bad actors out there,   doing illegal things, that is an acceptable cost of freedom for everyone else.  

But it's it's like, you you there is no perfect solution.   And, but, yeah, I think protecting service providers from liability is is a good way to go.  

[01:54:37] ODELL:

Yeah. I mean, I think encryption does help. And I've I mean, we this is the fight that signal's been fighting for a while. And,   I mean, you're very right. Like, America's the best jurisdiction to be in in that regard.   But, also, they have an amazing front person. Like, Meredith Whitaker,   speaks to it way better than I could ever speak to it.   And she came from big tech, which is fascinating. Her story in general is actually really interesting.  

[01:55:05] Hodlbod:

But, yeah, all roads keep going back to signal, by the way, and just on how I think about a lot of these things if it's not obvious. Yeah. It's very static. Like like you're saying, it's like a it's a very special project. It doesn't happen very often. And I think the truth the same is true of Nostril. Not not quite, obviously, at the same scale, but,   Nostril is a pretty special thing. And it can't just be replicated,   architecturally,   and get the same sort of, like,   natural social growth.  

[01:55:33] ODELL:

Yeah. I mean, the organic viral developer community is something   that I've only seen in,   Nasr and Bitcoin   and Cashew.   It's very, very rare. It's not something you can just create out of thin air. Like, base will not have a   viral open source,   and it doesn't matter how much money they throw at it. They might be able to buy off the content creators,   but it's really hard to get organic,   like, developer interest in these kind of things. Sorry to interrupt. Did do you know how threads is doing? Because threads I mean, that was what? A year and a half ago? I think people use it. They use it? Uh-huh. They signed up every Instagram user. I don't know. I've been out of sight of the Facebook ecosystem   for so fucking long.  

Like, the crazy thing about threads is, like,   Zuck and to people that aren't aware, threads is,   Instagram's   ex competitor   or Facebook's ex competitor. He just signed up every all Facebook users or at least all Instagram users automatically at or   Instagram users   automatically, or threads users.   It was like when they dropped the YouTube album on iPhones, and they're like he was like, we have, like, the second most users of any app,   the day after launch. He just added everyone automatically.  

[01:56:49] Hodlbod:

But I assume people use it. I don't fucking know. Yeah. Per Perplexity tells me that they have a 115,000,000  

[01:56:56] ODELL:

daily active users and a million new daily sign ups. And that But, like, also, like, that's completely trusted. Like, we're just trusting Facebook to tell us. And and perplexity.  

[01:57:06] Hodlbod:

Yeah.  

[01:57:07] ODELL:

Like, that's the other thing. Like, user numbers   people get obsessed with Nasr user numbers because we can actually make   independent estimates because the whole system is is pretty open.   But,  

[01:57:22] Hodlbod:

like, there's like, user numbers are just so fake across the board. Like, no one really knows Oh, yeah. They have what really user numbers are. And, like, it's shocking how so many of these big tech platforms just blatantly lie about user numbers, engagement,   about, like, even ad spend to ad partners.   Like, there's bunch of instances where they just defraud other businesses   because there's no accountability or transparency.  

[01:57:49] ODELL:

It's insane. I, yeah. I mean, anyone who's ever paid for, like, Facebook ads or x ads, they'll tell you the same thing. Like, it tells you, like, a 100,000 people, like, interacted with this thing, and then you get no real   you get, like, no real engagement out of it. Yeah. There's some So something doesn't connect. That, was spending a $100,000,000  

[01:58:09] Hodlbod:

on on advertising every year, and they were just like, let's see what happens if we just don't spend any money on advertising. And their sales   did not change at all. Yeah. It was all organic. Yeah. It's insane.  

[01:58:25] ODELL:

Okay. Last topic for you before we wrap. You just published a book. You self published a book on Nostril, building on Nostril, building out Nostril.   What is it? Why did you do it? Why should we care? Should we read it?  

[01:58:39] Hodlbod:

Yes. You should read it.   Yeah. It's called Building Noister.   I've been   reading a lot, been doing my podcast, talking to interesting people for a few years, and there's a book that I really want to read,   which is, like, okay. Well, how do you fix the Internet, and what's what's the Internet for? Just like a lot of the stuff we've been talking about now. Unfortunately   well, I tried to write that book. I got 10,000 words in, and I gave up because I don't have the answers still.   So I wrote this book instead, which is just all the stuff that I've learned about NoSTer and what makes it special.   You know,   what sets it apart from all these other protocols,   how to think about developing on it because   there's a lot of really weird choices   that are not conventional. Like, an example is,   you know, like, DIDS.  

People always show up to Noister and they're like, why are we not using DIDS?   Let's use let's use DIDS.   And it's like, that's a pretty conventional   idea in the decentralized,   tech space, but a lot of this stuff comes from,   you know, the leftists who, have, like, a flawed mental model for thinking about it all. And, you know, another example is, namespace qualified,   names. So, like, social.coracledot,   you know,   kind one or, you know, whatever, note or tweet or whatever. Yeah. And,   instead of kinds, which are just numeric.   And what numeric gets you is,   you don't have conflicts,   because they're and you don't have semantics,   and therefore, you don't no one owns the namespace. Because if I do, like, if everyone has to adopt social .coracle's namespace,   like, I get to make the make the call. And and you see this. It's it's, like, it's meaningless, but it's a human bias,   to to put assign ownership   to things.  

So there's just, like, a bunch of stuff like that in Noester that is not intuitive. It's not how I would have done it. A lot of it's very ugly,   but   there are huge lessons to be learned from how it's set up, and it's really interesting. And it also forces   developers to take on a different sort of paradigm when developing no store applications.   You know, if you hijack existing kinds because things are sort of similar or your hard code relays or whatever, and relay selection is a big deal for keeping things decentralized.   So I just wanted to, like, share   what I've learned about Nostril development since I started,   so that   people who have not yet learned these lessons have the opportunity to,   and also to,   you know, feed it into the LLMs to make them, make better software as well. And it's it's it's  

[02:01:23] ODELL:

specifically  

[02:01:24] Hodlbod:

developer focused. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very developer focused. It's not, like, ultra technical or in the weeds,   but you definitely have to have a mental model for, you know, developing software in order to understand a lot of what it is. It's also kinda philosophical. Like, I talk a lot about different kinds of communities and  

[02:01:43] ODELL:

and, I make a lot of It could be helpful to non developers as well, you think?  

[02:01:48] Hodlbod:

Yeah. I think so. I mean, you you're do you count yourself as the as a developer? No.   You understand Noister better than,   some developers do. So,   you could read it, and you should read it. I think Derek Ross,   is excited to read it. I'm technically curious.   Yeah. There you go. Technically curious. That's good enough, I think. It's written in human language. It's not there's not a lot of code in the book.  

[02:02:13] ODELL:

Okay. I'll definitely check it out. And you released it for free. I'll put the link   in the show notes, Freaks. Yes. It's at building-nostril.coracle.social.   I'll I'll put the link in the show notes.   That's a perfect example, by the way, where a namespace would be very helpful,   with a shorter domain. But,   Freaks, if you enjoy if you enjoy the book or if you enjoy this conversation, make sure,   use that, PaddleBot, and Oster.   Show your support. It's a true value for value endeavor,   releasing the book out for free. It is cool. Like, I I think that's an interesting   scaling layer for open knowledge and open   source software is the rise of AIs is that that kind of stuff does get fed into   the different LLMs,   while a lot of the closed stuff doesn't, even though they're all dealing with, like, copyright rules and   manually scanning books and shit,   stealing news articles,   which is a whole different quagmire. But Yeah.  

It's kinda interesting. It it could scale this whole movement a lot more.   HuddlBot, this was fantastic. I actually thoroughly enjoyed the conversation.   I entered it pretty tired,   and we just blew through two hours without me even really thinking about it. I had a lot of fun with it.  

[02:03:40] Hodlbod:

Awesome. Glad to hear it. I enjoyed it too. It's always a pleasure talking to you. You are you're a great host, great interviewer.  

[02:03:47] ODELL:

Very sharp. I appreciate it. Well, thank thank you for saying that because I don't always agree with you,   or agree with that. Do you have any final thoughts to the audience before we wrap? Yeah.  

[02:03:58] Hodlbod:

Go read my book, but first, go read, Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.   Technology is   a environment in which living things exist,   and it's a complex system,   and   there are negative externalities.   And the relationship between   technology and people is really complicated, and that's the best book that I've read for,   understanding   what the heck is going on.   It was written in, I think, 1963.   So pretty old, but   really, really interesting, enjoyable.   Yeah. So I would just everything I can do is is point people towards,   that kind of stuff.  

Philip Sheldrake is also good. Yvonne Illich,   just read more, I guess.  

[02:04:46] ODELL:

Read more, Freaks.   Words of wisdom right there. Stop doom scrolling and read more.   Halabod, this is great. Freaks, thank you for joining us in the live chat. Thank you for supporting the show. All the relevant links are at silldispatch.com.   Share with your friends and family.   Hit the subscribe button or don't,   on your favorite platform.   You do you.   I have Cali joining,   on Wednesday.   Next Wednesday, Callie's joining. Sixteen hundred UTC.   Join us live. I'm sure it'll be a banger.   Always is.   HuddleBot,   I enjoyed this, and you have a fascinating perspective. We'll do this more often?  

[02:05:29] Hodlbod:

Sounds good.  

[02:05:31] ODELL:

Awesome.   Love you all. Stay on the Stack Sights.