Miljan is the Founder and CEO of Primal. Bitcoin is an open protocol for money, nostr is an open protocol for speech, Primal brings the power of both into an easy to use interface for everyone.
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Miljan on Nostr: https://primal.net/miljan
EPISODE: 180
BLOCK: 917284
PRICE: 842 sats per dollar
(00:00) Ten31 retreat
(01:02) Retreat impressions and collaboration
(01:32) How many bitcoiners
(03:01) Estimating self custody users and real audience sizes
(05:09) Stalled growth and focusing Primal on Bitcoiners
(06:07) Curated "Getting Started" invite packs
(09:14) Solving empty feeds: recommendations vs. decentralization
(12:02) Improving follow discovery
(14:53) Retention over onboarding: first-touch UX matters
(16:11) Empowering users with tools, not surveillance models
(18:08) Aligning incentives: Primal’s user-paid model
(19:42) Live streaming on Nostr: open spec meets clean UI
(22:20) Not competing with TikTok: high-signal over dopamine
(25:06) Platform risk for streamers and Nostr’s modular freedom
(28:05) Unified chat, zaps, and the magic of interoperable apps
(29:25) Nostr’s organic growth
(31:06) Creators’ final destination
(34:50) AI in social: open models, features, and roadmap thoughts
(41:05) Deepfakes, authenticity, and signed content value
(46:02) Keys, key-rotation, and building resilient identity tools
(49:28) Practical key management: tradeoffs from phone to multisig
(53:12) Closing thoughts
more info on the show: https://citadeldispatch.com
learn more about me: https://odell.xyz
[00:00:01]
Unknown:
What is up, freaks? Changing up a little bit this week. We are currently at our annual ten thirty one retreat. We do this every year. We bring all the founders of of the different companies in the ten thirty one portfolio, and, we throw a closed doors event for about three days where everyone enjoys each other's company, collaborates, gets to know each other better. And I have our good friend, Millian, here, CEO of Primal, founder. How's it going, sir? Sup, freaks? I'm going great. I hope the audio quality is not too horrible. I think it'll be decent.
But we figured it was still worth it to have a chat. 100%. So what do you wanna talk about? I don't know. Primal, maybe? Fair enough. Oh, first first, I would like what do you think of the retreat? This is your third year. Right? This is my third year here. Very high quality, high signal event. Seems that the events are getting better by the year. The the level of signal is increasing, so that's good. And it's just good to, hang out with everybody, you know, informally, shoot the shit, brainstorm. A lot of good things come out of it usually. We had we had an open discussion that I led today about how many Bitcoiners there are in the world and how we can increase that amount.
I thought you had some unique thoughts on it. How do you think about it? Well, first, we had some kind of trouble defining what a Bitcoiner is. Right? And depending depending on how you do that, you come up with vastly different numbers. Mhmm. So, you know, on the one extreme, you can count everybody who has a Coinbase account or who has, like, some money in a Bitcoin ETF. And that seems to be in the tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, like, seem to be kind of one extreme. And the other extreme is the one you set up with at least 1 BTC in self custody. Well, I like that because it's objective.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is like and, But you're still a Bitcoiner if you have less than one Bitcoin itself. 100%. 100%. But it's a night it's an interesting thought process to go through. Totally. This is kind of having significant wealth, let's say, in Bitcoin and savings. Right? And with everybody here, you know, we we're all basically guessing. So every company that's here has their own numbers, and we can kind of extrapolate from there. But it's, it's really hard to make these estimates. And, like, if you define a Bitcoiner as somebody who has any amount in self custody Okay. Let's say, seems from the conversation today that we're probably looking at way less than a million people.
Probably Any amount of Bitcoin in self custody? Well, okay. Any, like, meaning non dust amount. Like, more than a million sats. Let's say more more than a million sats. If if you have a thousand bucks in Bitcoin Yeah. That can kind of you can start considering that some there to be some savings. Right? And, the numbers in they're not as bullish as the numbers you'd hear a lot of times, you know, mentioned in in this context. People like to talk about millions of users, tens of millions of users. The the the current cohort of Bitcoiners is still pretty small, which I guess is, and you can take an optimistic point of view, which is a there's a lot of growth still ahead. But, yeah, like, how many pit people even tune into Bitcoin podcasts?
I think it's in the hundreds of thousands. It's probably like a 100,000. Yeah. It's not in millions. How many how big is Bitcoin Twitter? It's like a 150,000. That's probably correct. How big is Nostra in terms of active users? 70,000. Probably about half that. My my estimate is that Nostra is about half of Bitcoin Twitter, but it's the better. It's the better It's the better half. It's the better half. And there are fewer, you know, paper Bitcoin summer people in Nasr. There are some, but, like, there are way more of those types of guys on, on Bitcoin Twitter, I think. But, yeah, lots of, growth.
But, I mean, the real question is, like, I I mean, I don't think we came up to, like, a good actionable solution on how to grow the pie. I'd I I've never been more bullish on Bitcoin, but in terms of new people coming in and using Bitcoin, I feel like we've stalled out a little bit. I agree. And I think about that a lot in the context of Primal. So even though Primal is a Nostril client with a Bitcoin wallet kinda built in, Nostr itself is still, very much a kind of social network for Bitcoiners, which, which is fine by me. At Primal, we wanna focus on making it amazing for Bitcoiners.
And, of course, everyone is welcome. It's just that there's we get we have a lot of Bitcoin content already. And if you're a Bitcoiner, you're more likely to stay if if you sign up. So I think we we can do a lot, to make both Nasr and Primal much nicer for Bitcoiners. And one of the things that I would love to do, in in an upcoming release of Primal is make it possible to get onboarded to to onboard new Bitcoiners and and kinda new coiners in a way that gets them gets them up to speed with some basic content. So so whoever is onboarding can recommend people to follow, articles to read, videos to watch, etcetera. Stuff that already exists in Master, but do that in such a way that it's very nice and smooth and seamless, you know, kind of get onboarded using this invite code. Getting started pack. Getting start. Look. Let's say Bitcoin one on one in terms of follows and content.
And then if we can nail that UX, that can scale to any subject. Right? Right. Because eventually, I think Nostra gets everyone. And at this early stage, it's all about which groups are interested in this this type of stuff. And so how but how do you think that looks? Is that like the user is creating, like, a custom getting started pack, and then they get, like, a link or something that they share? Or Yeah. So, for example, any user should be able to create this, invite pack that contains suggested follows, and suggested content for any topic.
And, people who get that invite code, or invite link can, you know, get really nice UX where they can opt in or out of these recommended, you know, follows and content. And in theory, get up to speed pretty quickly with any subject area. And then you leave it in the hands of the content creator or whoever's creating this invite to curate whatever they think is interesting and relevant for that subject area. That way, it's not primal deciding what everybody should read when it comes to Bitcoin. But subject area experts are people who are trusted either by their friends or by their audience. Just providing great UX for them to get onboarded and get started with a certain topic. I think that would be that would be really nice to have. Like, I you you know, we always need to go back and think, okay. Why why would anybody be on us? Why would anybody be on primal? Like, what's in it, like, for the user?
And this could be give given that is a very diverse, very kind of, capable protocol for all different content types, like social feeds, long form textual content, long form video content, etcetera. I think this type of feature set is well suited for Nostra. So, yeah, this this could be a nice, addition to both Nostra and Primal. No. I like that. I mean, I would I would I would use it all the time. I mean, when I onboard someone and I've onboarded way too many people, I'm just dropping them so many links. Yeah. Right? So So instead, this would just be one link. Yeah. And it would just, like, send them off to the races.
Usually, it's overwhelming both for the person Yeah. You don't wanna give them too much recommendations to. And I like it kinda solves the I mean, Primal's gotten a lot of shit, for, like, how we were handling, follows in the beginning, like, in terms of, like, recommending people to follow people and and, you know, and peep you know, everyone has an opinion on on who you recommend and who you don't recommend, whatnot. And there's no perfect solution there. I do think if you join Nasr and you have no recommended follows, you're actually in a horrible situation. I mean, I've I've seen this firsthand. I've onboarded someone to to Amethyst, for instance, and they just get greeted with a blank feed, and they have no idea who to follow.
So there's a middle ground somewhere there, and it's probably giving the users the ability when they invite someone to give them a a custom curated experience. So, I mean, the content piece is cool. Right? Give them podcasts, give them articles. But I think the follow-up piece is almost can be almost as important, if not more important. Because if I'm bringing a new Bitcoiner into the space, it's incredibly powerful for me to be like, these 60 people, like, I intimately trust, and I think they will guide you. And then the next, you know, year, two years while they're using Primal, they're able to constantly engage with those people. Yeah. I agree.
You know, we started off with basically no follow lists, like, onboarding people and giving them no feed almost. So that's that's bad. And then literally troubleshooted someone today. One of our founders where he was like, look. Like, when I open Primal, I have an empty feed. And I checked, and he had zero follows. He was following zero people. So, of course, he had an empty feed because it defaulted to latest, and he had he wasn't following anybody. So there was nothing there. And as soon as I had him I had him follow me and a couple other people, the feed populated. But, yep, for a little bit there, he was just like, what's going on? Like, why is this broken?
Yeah. And the recommended follows the way we do them now are problematic in a couple of different ways. Like, they solve that problem of empty feeds and stuff like that. So at least that's not it's not terrible. But the two big problems are well, number one, primal decides who are who the accounts are to follow in all these categories, and that's not ideal. Centralized. Yeah. And it also doesn't scale well, period. Yeah. And, you know, it really should be more sophisticated than that, and we're kinda working on that. You should be able to just based on interest and categories. Well, right now, it is interest based. Right? It is. And we you kinda select your interests in primal, and then we tell you, oh, based on your interest, we we are, you know, recommending these 261 follows. Do you wanna see them or just go next? People go next.
They don't even usually, like, read what we said. So so people, you know, end up in the states of why am I following these people? I never, I never wanted that. And that's the second problem. Right? So the first problem is primal decides who to follow, and second problem is people actual users get surprised that they're following people, and that's not what they're expecting. So I think as we get more competent at creating kind of high signal feeds, we can we can fine tune this experience where, you know, we don't need to auto follow anyone for for the new users. We can let them discover, you know, follow packs that are created by just about any What what is it right now? Right now, it's it's like guided opt in. Right? Or no?
It's a yeah. You can say it's a guided opt in. So you when you onboard on primal currently, you have to select at least one category of people in merchant. You're like forced interest categories. Exactly. You exactly. So you have to So select Bitcoin. Just select Bitcoin. We say, here are the 65 people we recommend. Right. And we don't even show the list. We say we, just to not clutter the UI, we say, you know, we're going to recommend 61 followers. Do you want to see them? And then if you say yes, you can go and edit and And choose. And those and that. But it's still, like, it's still softening. Are just clicking through that? Yeah. People And they're like, oh, I I auto follow this. That's right. So I think what happens is people go through the onboarding process. They say, I I I'm interested in these five categories.
Then the next screen tells them you're gonna follow 80 people. Right. They don't read that. They go next next next, and they get a feed, which is kind of latest posts by those accounts, which is not even a That's not a great feed. Yeah. But it's better than nothing. And They at least see activity. Yeah. There's some stuff going on. Activity begets activity. Right? It's true. You don't wanna, like, be onboarded to a ghost town. I think that's one of the weakest aspects of Monster in general. This whole, UX of getting onboarded and the first run user experience and the time And then they leave. And then people leave. And and and I've noticed it's easier to onboard someone fresh than someone who had bad taste in their mouth. Like, once once they have the first touch point, if that first touch point isn't a good first touch point, they're gone. Like, they'll come back in two years or something. Yeah. Yep.
We don't get too many chances to make that first impression. Yeah. And that's something that needs to be fixed. And, like, people think we have an onboarding problem in Oster. I don't think that's the case. We have a churn problem. We have Right. There's no retention. One percent of people stay. Right. I, okay. I mean, I'd look. I'm I'm pretty excited about the, like, getting started packs. I think in general, like, if we give power users more tools and then see how they use them and then you iterate from there, it's just like a great trade off balance. It's it it it accomplishes a bunch of things. It doesn't introduce new centralization because you're actually just giving the power you're giving the users the tools to to to do as they please.
Yeah. And just in general in my life, like, this was something I mean, I was just we hosted a major conference at Belmont University in Nashville, two weeks ago, and we had a nostril panel with me and Derek and Sean, which I put on the feed so some of you freaks might have listened to it. And one of the conversations I had, one of the topics we talked about was, like, children and social media. And because we're all parents. Yeah. Derek is a little bit ahead of me and Sean, But A little behind me. Yeah. A little behind you. But we're all parents. Right? And it's something I think about all the time. It's like, what is the healthy experience with social media? And a lot of times, I just get black people. I'm like, there's no healthy experience with social media. But I think the answer is somewhere it's it's it's at a place where you give parents tools and then, you know, let them be good parents. Yeah. Right? And and have faith that parents will practice responsibility and be good parents, but to give them the tools.
And so as we're building out primal, my thought is, is is is to basically empower users. Give them the tools and let them take responsibility over their lives, but make those tools as powerful as possible and as as as granular as possible and configurable as possible so that they can really curate how they experience, you know, the digital global square. Yeah. It also helps to have, you know, product builders' interests aligned with those of the users, which is not the case in in any of the legacy media systems. So you basically have no no chance there.
Like, we are cattle to be milked. You know? It's just a data surveillance plan for that model. And now with AI, it's even more so. And Noster potentially gives us a way to turn that around because, we have kind of, payments built into the network and potentially different ways to monetize. As you know, Primal currently monetizes directly from the users. Right. We have the premium tier for for premium users and also the pro tier for creators and professionals. And the only time we ever make money is if our users are satisfied. Right. We don't sell ads. We're not Yeah. Surveilling users and selling that data.
Yeah. I, okay. Let's talk about let's talk about the live streaming that we just added because, I mean, the freaks know that I'm I was very excited about it. I mean, the irony of this whole thing is we're just doing this audio only. By the way, freaks, we have we have a beautiful view, but we're doing an audio only non live dispatch. But dispatch historically has been a live show. And by the way, for I got the inspiration. Gigi and Pablo have an awesome podcast, that's just like them walking through the streets of Madera with a phone. And I think it's amazing. Like, the audio quality is kinda questionable, but, the content's great, and the conversations are interesting.
So I might do this more often. Especially when I'm traveling, I'll probably do this more often. So, hopefully, the audio quality isn't isn't too horrible. But, anyway, live streaming. I'm super excited about the live streaming. I think I think we hit we hit Bitcoin here. I was gonna say hit gold, but I think we hit Bitcoin here. It feels good. It just feels right. How are you thinking about live streaming in Primal? It does feel good. So the the live streaming feature in Primal Apps was released a few weeks ago. And, of course, it's, it's based on the open spec that was created years ago by, Kieran and others, and was available on ZapStream for a long time.
And it was kinda one of those magical moments in Noster. Actually, it got me a little by surprise. Like, I didn't know that so many of our users didn't either think that was possible or got surprised Right. Where we launched the player and they were like, oh, look. Monster is amazing. I can see ZapStream on Primal. Yeah. Where it is kind of pretty wild that that this open spec exists, that anyone can create a stream without permission and broadcast the NoStar event that any NoStar client can decide to present to their users in any way they wish. And, so every anybody can create a stream, to the extent that they can broadcast it. Any app can pull pull it up. Any app can decide how to show that UI.
We maybe innovated a little bit in terms of UI. You know, like, we just like to implement clean UIs that are made it pretty. Yeah. Exactly. Made it pretty. Made it work. And, we wanted to definitely give a lot of, real estate, to to live zaps and top zaps and so forth. It's all about the zaps. It's all about the zaps. You know, if we're talking about turning this around in terms of the way that the Internet is being monetized, well, we need to lean into stuff like this. Yeah. And like Gigi said, you know, you don't need to harvest the eyeballs of a billion people to create something great. I completely agree with that. And the way we do things in primal is kind of, we're we're trying to make that a reality to the extent that, you know, we can, within our user base anyway.
And hopefully, at some point in the future, we end up, with a much more high signal content on Nostr. Like, Nostr can't really compete with the with the TikToks of the world. Right. I mean, theoretically, it can, but we're not gonna create a better TikTok than TikTok, nor should we try. It's a race to the bottom. It's a race to the bottom. Experience. Exactly. It's like really catering to the lowest common denominator, kind of plugging into your reptilian brains and creating slot machines for the mind is the best way to monetize attention on the Internet. And there are all kinds of problems with that that we don't even need to get into now. Everybody understands that. It's kind of interesting that, actually, that that topic is not controversial in the mainstream at all. It's relatively recent. Yeah. People are kind of looking at, you know, legacy social media almost in the similar kind of way that that they look at junk food. Or drugs. Or drugs or whatever. It's sort of like It's almost like a heroin addiction.
Yeah. And it that's my design. People talk about, like, opioids are horrible, but it's it's millions of users of opioids. Like, billions of people use Facebook products. Like, the only thing stopping Facebook from growing is human population. Like, they need more babies born. They've saturated the globe, and addicted them to their algorithms. It's incredible how successful they've been at this. Yeah. So the only way to monetize the Internet, you know, since the beginning now has been advertising. And the best way to milk as much revenue and profits as you can is to kind of do what we said just previously with catering to the lowest common denominator.
And, we get the situation that we get today. But then I think, like we said, you know, things might be turning around in terms of people waking up to this and, you know, saying, I don't wanna scroll through my doom feeds Yeah. For the same reason that I don't wanna eat junk food. You know? Right. I respect myself, so I'm I don't wanna do this. So I think in some ways, Nostra can provide an alternative to this. And I'm interested in that. So where does live streaming pop into this? I mean, live stream is just one content type. I think on Nostr, we will have all of the content types out there. Live streaming is a very interesting content type, and live streaming on Oster pretty much assumes that you can, you know, zap. You can send micropayments from your Oster client. I mean, I think one of the coolest parts is so so for better or for worse, and, like, obviously, I'm a streamer.
Both rabbit hole recap and still dispatch are primarily Not today, but most most most days you're a streamer. Days a streamer. And, also, fortunately and I, you know, I think this is one of my superpowers is, like, my, family doesn't rely on income for my streams, to to pay the rent and survive. Right? Yep. But a lot of people do. And so they're using YouTube is the big one, obviously. Rumble is is getting quite large. Then you have Twitch. You have Kik. Like, there's there's huge billion dollar businesses built off the back of the streamers. They're all built on the ad model, and they can all deplatform you at will. Like, literally at any point and from almost all streamers, there's diversification in platforms, and a lot of them will stream to multiple platforms. But it's like one platform is their bread and butter. Like, that's their platform. Like, their Twitch streamer, like, that's their fucking platform.
And they can get deplatformed at will. And what's cool about this is well, right now, like, Primal doesn't offer streaming as a service, like, on the streamer side. I, you know, I I think people should expect that that will happen in the future, but it it doesn't currently right now. But for the sake of this conversation, what's super interesting to me is you have your Nasr account. You have your your end pub. That is completely separate from Primal, the app. Right? You can generate that offline even if you want to. You can generate it in a different app. You can generate it wherever you want. That's attached to your social graph, so who you follow and who follows you. Completely independent of Primal, completely independent of any other app.
And then you can choose your streaming provider, or you can even self host. Kieran has something called ZapStream Core that people can it's a little bit early still, but he's iterating and improving it. But, like, you can you can self host the streaming solution yourself and stream out to Nasr in a standardized way, or you can use something like ZapStream. I expect other streaming providers to pop up, including Primal. And so you separate the pieces. You're separating all the pieces. So if if for some reason Primal turns evil and decides you're no longer gonna stream with them, they can't stop your followers from following you, and they can't stop you from streaming. And and you literally have zero friction of switching to another streaming provider or self hosting yourself.
Like, people are sleeping on that. That's incredibly, incredibly powerful. And then, of course, then you put Bitcoin payments built into it. You give users choice of how they want to view it. I think NasJure does a really good job of how they do video viewing. Like, you can literally just download any app you want that supports this. Watch it, how you have the same exact chat. The chats aren't bifurcated. They're not separated. You have the same zaps. It's, like, the coolest fucking thing. Like, it to me, it blows my mind. Like, I mean, I'm, like, sitting there live, and I'm, like, it's all coming together. You know? It totally is. And this this point is kind of maybe underappreciated. And Nasr is unique in this regard. Yeah. There is no competing network with these, characteristics, and these are very important kind of fundamental characteristics, of self sovereign identity Yep.
And also the ability to stand up any parts of the any part of the infrastructure. But on top of that, evidence that all different kinds of infrastructure are are being stood up by a bunch of different actors. It's the it's not only that this is possible, it's actually happening. Right. So the ecosystem around Noster is growing without any central planning or coordination. You can't manufacture that. No. No amount of money. People have are trying have tried. There are conspiracy theories that, like, Odell is manufacturing it. Like, Odell is going with the water. Like like, the water is flowing, and I witnessed the river be born.
And I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm going along I'm going along for the ride. Like, that that's crazy. Like, to me, like, I just people do not like, you can have you can have, like, a $100,000,000 in a Sheitcoin pre mine, and you try and manufacture this and you cannot manufacture a top down. Many such cases Yeah. And has failed every time. It's very, very interesting. You can't kind of pay for for kind of grassroots uprising, which is kind of what we're, seeing here in Oster. And even though, you know, we've been, doing this for a few years now and we've encountered many users and content creators, And it's true, you know, that beyond this initial cohort of users in Oster who are very aligned with these values, it's true that the rest of the world doesn't really care that much about self sovereignty in terms of users, but creators care. Right. It's their livelihood. It's their livelihood, and many of them have been burnt multiple times. They know exactly where their lines are. And even if it's not a money thing, like Yeah. For me, it's not a money thing, but it's like a time thing. Like, I'm putting my time into this, and, like, you're just gonna rug me. Yeah. You can go fuck yourself. Yeah.
So that's very encouraging because the the creators do care about this. And we have, I think, on Oster, we have, something very valuable and unique to offer. And to the extent that we can build out the network in terms of the tools and the experience for end users and stuff like that, which is still a grind, but we're getting better at this. I think we're very soon gonna be at the place where they can, you know, shield this to their users with a straight face. You know? Come follow me here, and things are going to work Right. Etcetera.
And what what some think as their kind of backup account, you know, in case they get, you know Deep platform somewhere else. Elsewhere. I think what actually ends up being is their final destination on the Internet. Well, let's talk about sovereign. Let let let's talk about this idea of, like, the backup account because I have heard this many times. I'm not a backup time type of guy. I'm a I mean, you should back up and check your backups for, like, all your things to work. That kind of backup. Yeah. But, like, I'm, like, more, like I go all in on things. Right? You just found me in a poker game. I made my money back by going all in. Humble brag. I mean, to humble brag. Like, I made my money back. I didn't say I made money. I'm I, like, barely got up. But, anyway, I'm like, I'll I get I get it. Right? I get it. It's like, okay. Set up you know, download Primal in favorite app store. Set it up. Like, you have this backup just in case, you know, YouTube fucks you or Facebook fucks you or TikTok, whatever.
And you have it, and you can rely on it. And no matter what, that's the source of truth. And, like, that's true. All of that is true. It's it's factually correct, but I'm offended by the by the narrative. I'm offended by the narrative because it feels like, it feels like Noster's the mistress. You know? It feels like you have a relationship you have a relationship with YouTube, and you have kids with YouTube. And, like, there's a lot of things going well over there, but you still love Noster. You know? You still love Noster, but unless it's convenient for you, you're not gonna come to it. So I'm curious, like, how, like, how do you think about it? Because that's how I think about it, and it it it kinda grinds me. I'm also offended by it. And and the thing is, it can be presented that way to content creators who are new to this. And that's why I said it's not really it it can start as kinda being your backup as a content creator, but what it actually is is your final destination on the Internet. I like that. Yeah.
Or alternative, like, the source of truth. Yeah. Like, instead of the backup, it's the first. Yeah. Like, you can still post to Twitter, Twitch, wherever. Yeah. But the source of truth, the thing that's actually signed that can't be taken away from you is Noster. Yes. And then you cross post it everywhere else. But if I wanna make sure it's not a deep fake, I'm gonna actually go and check Noster. I wanna make sure that they're not trying to stop you from posting something. I'm gonna go check Noster. Yeah. And I think that is something that more and more creators, resonate with.
We just need to build better tools and keep onboarding. Yeah. I mean, I think the number one thing was, like, having a stable app. And Yeah. Humbly, like, we're just getting there. Totally. Like, it's it was just a grind. I still think it's janky. I'm It's a little bit janky. I'm referring to primal to be, specific, but it's better than it's been, you know, previously. Massive progress. Yeah. And you you don't need to squint to see, you know, before long, we'll match and exceed, the top quality consumer reps. Yeah. We have to exceed. Yeah. It can't just be there should be no trade offs on UX.
I, so the other topic I wanted to cover, is, AI, and I wanna cover it from two sides. The first is AI slop and deep fakes. And then the second piece is UX and AI and how users experience primal. I mean and I'll I'll use the freaks know that I basically didn't use any other social media except for Twitter and then x, for the last ten plus years. Like, I deleted my Facebook, deleted my LinkedIn, never had a TikTok, Deleted my Telegram. Big deleter. I'm a big deleter over here, guys. And X is doing a really Elon's doing a really good job of mixing AI with Grok into the user experience.
He's obviously like, there's no privacy involved. He's surveilling the fuck out of you. He's still selling ads, using your data. There's a bunch of bad aspects to it. But from where you know what happens, behind the scenes, and all of this is open source. And, also, it's forever too. Like like, if you there was one of our founders here, I think, like, nailed it on the head. It's like, you're, like, uploading your soul Mhmm. To these people's proprietary clouds, and then, like, you don't know what they're gonna use it for in ten years. Right? Like, there's no agency there. But that being said, the UX of x is, like, intimately interconnected with Grok now.
And then the other piece is there's a ton of AI slop on the platform, and it's just getting started. Like, it's gonna get way worse. Yep. And there's gonna be tons of deep fakes. There's gonna be so many fucking deep fakes. So, I mean, how do you think about AI and primal going forward on both those facets? And, I mean, you can answer in your order or whatever. Well, first of all, I agree that, they're they build great UX Yeah. On x, around these capabilities, and we need something like that on Oster. And on Oster, we have the opportunity to provide an open alternative to their kind of closed everything app.
So on Oster, we have the the opportunity to deploy open source models that are working on open data that's available on the public relay network. But, yeah, those capabilities are necessary. They're not on on our immediate road map, but this is something we wanna get into at some point in the future. I think they're useful tools that users rightfully expect. And, you know, if we're building free FreedomTech, I think we can provide a credible open alternative to all of these closed systems. The open source models are getting better and better, and they they still lag the top, you know, closed systems. It remains to be seen how that plays out.
You know, there are new updates every few weeks, you know, and the the I think it probably gets closer. I think it gets that's what I think. But I see how much Because there's big gains that are happening. Right? I see a lot of GPU power being deployed by the top players, and we just don't know. Well, that's a different thing between open models versus proprietary models because there are open models that are quite GPU intensive, and then you need someone to actually host the model and run the GPUs. Right? And then there's ones that are less GPU intensive, and you can self host them, and those are significantly worse. Yeah. Right? But the ones that are GPU like like, compute intensive but open, well, it'll probably get closer because the the way I'm thinking about it is kind of like ASIC development to Bitcoin.
But we're talking about software, not hardware, but it, like, it'll plateau at a point. Like, they're making massive gains, like GROC two to GROC three to GROC four or whatever chat g p chat GPT has, like, the worst naming scheme. But whatever their naming scheme is, has massive improvements. And so the open ones are naturally lagging behind. Yep. But when those improvements become more incremental, right, like the difference between the iPhone 16 and the iPhone 17 is way different than the iPhone nine to 10 or whatever. I don't know. Like, I think I think we get closer, and it doesn't have to be the best.
Right? Like, when we were talking about the follows, like, you could I could totally imagine like, we're close relatively close for efficient open models to parse the the primal Nostra dataset, like all Nostra notes ever, you know, in the caching server from certain users or whatever, and then be like, you know, just give me, like, a prompt. Like, what are you interested in? And just make you a recommended follow list. Right? Yes. Stuff like that. All kinds of things that can be done with this. Yeah. I mean, Elon announced, AI prompt based feeds Yeah. Which, is The right direction. I think that makes sense. Right? To me. Let's see how how they work. And, and, you know, like, there's some great work being done there. Definitely. Right. Like, you just show me this content.
We just need to like I said, the opportunity here is and the long term opportunity, I think, is to provide an open alternative to all of this dystopia tech base. Right. And to do it in a way that's where the creator's interests are aligned with those of their users. So that's kind of how we're, you know, positioning Primal. Yeah. And I'm kinda excited for that battle. So what are you thinking about that all makes sense to me. What are you thinking about, like, deep fakes and slot bots? The AI slot right now is relatively easy to spot. Yeah. It's not going to be. That's right. I mean, I haven't thought deeply about this, honestly.
For sure, we're gonna very quickly get to the point where it's much harder to spot. I think in that context, authenticity, like verifiable authenticity becomes more important. So content that's actually signed by the, you know, by the user that I follow that's verifiable actually becomes more valuable. Beyond that, I mean I think that's sneaky one of the most powerful parts of Nostra. Yeah. Like, everyone wants to talk about censorship resistance, permissionlessness. The verifiability Yeah. Is gonna become a big I think it's gonna become a big thing. And I think the incentives the way the incentive's set up, it's it'd be better for humanity if big tech follows along with it and tries to copy it, but I think it's I think it's actually quite unlikely.
Like, I think it's need to offer a credible alternative that does that, and, some subset of creators will gravitate towards that. Some subset of users will. Those who like to live free. And, you know, we'll see it remains to be seen how much gravity we can generate around this network. I'm optimistic. In any case, it will be the type of the the type of people that I wanna hang out with. That's true. The rider dies. I I mean, like, you think about it. It's like right now, today, it's like, our HR dispatch is posted to YouTube podcast feeds x Noster.
The only place you know that it hasn't been altered in the middle by the the aforementioned parties like YouTube. I mean, we we have two different hosts, but, like, the podcast host, of our RSS feeds, x. Like, the only place you know it hasn't been altered is if you view it in a Nasr app Yeah. That is is validating signatures and making sure that this is hashed and signed and unchanged. Yeah. And that's gonna I mean, that is super important to me because, like, at the end of the day, I have a lot of shitty opinions. You might not agree with them, but they're my shitty opinions.
Like, I don't you should be disagreeing with my actual views. You shouldn't be disagreeing with deepfakes of me because you can make me say whatever the fuck you wanna make me say with deepfakes. Like, there's enough there's a there's enough content out there that you you you have that ability today. And people are sleeping on this, and I think I think it will be a big driver of content creators because I think it naturally drives you crazy. Like, it's from a point of this is my time commitment, and this is my connection with other people. And you're stepping in the middle of it, and you're breaking it. Right?
You're you're you're it's a violation. You're you're violating my trust with people I'm trying to connect with. I agree with all of that. And to get down to the fundamentals, If we are to escape this kind of digital dystopia, we need two elements. We need everyone to hold their keys and sign their contact with their keys. Yep. And we need different actors to stand up every part of the infrastructure. Both of those things need to be kind of conditions need to be met for a resilient network to exist. And we only see evidence of this happening in Auster. Early days, but Auster has no competitors in this regard. There are some networks out there where people hold their own keys. Not too many. I think Farcaster is the only one, actually.
So good. There's probably a couple other ones that we just aren't aware of. Probably. Means they're too small. Or, like, base Coinbase. I think they have keys. Right? Yeah. That's kind of part of the same network. Is it a forecaster? I'm not even sure, to be quite honest with you. But there is no idea. Forecasters on Ethereum and bases on Coinbase's Ethereum layer two base. But, anyway, it doesn't work. Doing. So my point is even in the cases where people hold their keys in other networks, there's zero evidence that anyone's standing up any infrastructure. Right.
That's only happening on Austin. And both of those conditions need to be met for a network to be resilient and sovereign. Okay. One more topic, and then we're gonna get back to our people. You you mentioned holding keys. So constantly first of all, we're Bitcoiners first. That's how we met. That's been my life for way too long, both a good way and a bad way. Holding keys is hard for people, and people freak out about my nostril key gets compromised, and then my social identity is compromised. Obviously, it's still very early days. We're not, like, promising things. But what like, how do you think about that problem? How do we mitigate that? There's it's it's a problem that ultimately comes down to personal responsibility, so there's no, quote, unquote, solution.
But how do we solve that problem? So I'd say two things. So this whole scenario and the feature, the ability to do key rotation and kinda recover your, Nostra identity in these situations, That's something that needs to be still figured out on Nostra, and I'm very optimistic that we can figure out figure this out. But on the other hand, it's kind of important for people to understand the the value of holding your key and the repercussions of losing it that, you know, it's not a simple event when you lose a key. Let's say, when some money is on the line, when you're securing your, Bitcoin, I think for the society to move in this direction, there needs to be an increased awareness of the importance of, holding your keys.
And I can already see or hear many people saying, ah, that's never gonna happen and blah blah blah. I think it's gonna happen, and I think it's not that hard. And I've heard you make the analogy of, you know, if you can drive a car, you can you have the ability to, you know, self host self custody Bitcoin and your own online identity. I think it's a great analogy because, it's a powerful technology that you're using that if used incorrectly can have very extreme consequences, let's say, with car driving. But it's important enough that most people, have figured this out and are able to do it without any issues. So, especially when we kind of build slightly better tools to to enable this. I don't think the solution is to hide this from the user, by the way. Right. I'm not I'm not into this.
People need to understand, what the keys are and why they're holding them, and I don't think that's hard to understand. And you can kind of see this optimistic view of the future where people are self sovereign, both in terms of their own identity and speech as well as their wealth and transactions. And maybe there isn't some sort of future where only the minority of sovereign individuals do this. Fine. I mean, we are here to build the tools, and people can decide to use them if they want to. Yeah. I mean, I think what people don't first of all, I think we can be creative about different tools we can give users to have different trust models.
I think there's probably something there with webs of trust. I really think, like, you you could even imagine, like, type in, like, a Noster multisig type of scenario Yeah. Where where you have users that you trust or maybe you're an organization and it's it's multiple people who are holding, you know, fragments of a key or whatnot. So there's something there. And then the other piece that I would just add to people is, like, if if your solution is that, like, a centralized tech company is giving you a username and password, like, we can already do this on Nostr today. Like, there might pass I I don't actually I do not think this is the best path for primal, but other people may do this, is, like, they could literally just custody your NSEC for you, your private key for you, and give you the typical username password flow.
And if you get your account compromised or locked out or you lose your password or whatever, then you contact support just like you contact x support. Like, the same exact setup that x is currently using, you can do on Nostr today in a very straightforward centralized infrastructure. I don't think that's the solution, but any most people that are arguing that the current state of Nasr where you have these single private keys that are controlling everything, use that as the counterargument where they're like, oh, like, username password with with Twitter or Facebook or whatever is better. Like, you we can literally do that today. So that's to me is like a it's a apples and orange bullshit argument.
But I I think I think we can provide solutions to people. I think there'll be interesting hardware things, like and it depends on what the user is. Like, if you are just an average user, like, having it on the secure element of your phone backed up into iCloud is probably a great trade off model. Like, Apple is not gonna try and compromise you. The NSA is not in your threat model. Everything will be fine. It'll actually probably work more seamlessly than big tech right now. But if you are, you know, the president of a country, you know, like, maybe you have a hardware might be a little higher. Yeah. You have a hardware solution. Yes. You know? You you have a hardware solution where maybe you have multiple keys and and and there needs to be a threshold signature to to make it happen, and everything is kept offline, and it's a whole forty five minute process to send a post because you're the fucking president of a country, and that's that's what the stakes are. Right? That that that would that's what matters.
And the cool part is that's all completely separate from the protocol. Like, we don't need to have any consensus on any of that. These can all be tools that are built right on top. Right? That's a great point. I mean, the custodial, scenario was supported from day one. You might have implemented that easily, and there have been, clients who have done that. Right. So it's all upside from there. You know, you can, you know, have people holding their keys, and then you can have multisig setups, and you have have hardware, involved.
All of this is on the table, and it can be built. Yeah. And, specifically, like, the multisig piece is interesting to any of you freaks that are listening or developers. Like, check out the Froster project. They're they're working on they're using Frost, to do multisig on. It's quite compelling, really interesting to me. I I think there's different things that can be done there to make it very user friendly as well. Anyway, Millian, this is a great shot. I'm glad we did it. Hopefully, the freaks find it helpful. Please give me your feedback. If I get no feedback, I'm gonna do more things like this.
So we're gonna default to yes. Emilio, final thoughts before we get back to everybody. Oh, final thoughts. Yeah. Keep holding your keys. Keep, posting those notes. Keep onboarding your friends and family. Help us grow the network. And on our side, we're gonna keep, building the tools. That is a guarantee. I love it. Freaks, if you haven't already, download Primal in your favorite app store or go to primal.net. We'd love to have you, and any feedback is appreciated. It's a grind. It's a long grind. But Milian and his team are best in the business and mission focused.
Thanks for having me. Cheers, sir. Fun chat. Please stay humble, Stack Sats.
What is up, freaks? Changing up a little bit this week. We are currently at our annual ten thirty one retreat. We do this every year. We bring all the founders of of the different companies in the ten thirty one portfolio, and, we throw a closed doors event for about three days where everyone enjoys each other's company, collaborates, gets to know each other better. And I have our good friend, Millian, here, CEO of Primal, founder. How's it going, sir? Sup, freaks? I'm going great. I hope the audio quality is not too horrible. I think it'll be decent.
But we figured it was still worth it to have a chat. 100%. So what do you wanna talk about? I don't know. Primal, maybe? Fair enough. Oh, first first, I would like what do you think of the retreat? This is your third year. Right? This is my third year here. Very high quality, high signal event. Seems that the events are getting better by the year. The the level of signal is increasing, so that's good. And it's just good to, hang out with everybody, you know, informally, shoot the shit, brainstorm. A lot of good things come out of it usually. We had we had an open discussion that I led today about how many Bitcoiners there are in the world and how we can increase that amount.
I thought you had some unique thoughts on it. How do you think about it? Well, first, we had some kind of trouble defining what a Bitcoiner is. Right? And depending depending on how you do that, you come up with vastly different numbers. Mhmm. So, you know, on the one extreme, you can count everybody who has a Coinbase account or who has, like, some money in a Bitcoin ETF. And that seems to be in the tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, like, seem to be kind of one extreme. And the other extreme is the one you set up with at least 1 BTC in self custody. Well, I like that because it's objective.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is like and, But you're still a Bitcoiner if you have less than one Bitcoin itself. 100%. 100%. But it's a night it's an interesting thought process to go through. Totally. This is kind of having significant wealth, let's say, in Bitcoin and savings. Right? And with everybody here, you know, we we're all basically guessing. So every company that's here has their own numbers, and we can kind of extrapolate from there. But it's, it's really hard to make these estimates. And, like, if you define a Bitcoiner as somebody who has any amount in self custody Okay. Let's say, seems from the conversation today that we're probably looking at way less than a million people.
Probably Any amount of Bitcoin in self custody? Well, okay. Any, like, meaning non dust amount. Like, more than a million sats. Let's say more more than a million sats. If if you have a thousand bucks in Bitcoin Yeah. That can kind of you can start considering that some there to be some savings. Right? And, the numbers in they're not as bullish as the numbers you'd hear a lot of times, you know, mentioned in in this context. People like to talk about millions of users, tens of millions of users. The the the current cohort of Bitcoiners is still pretty small, which I guess is, and you can take an optimistic point of view, which is a there's a lot of growth still ahead. But, yeah, like, how many pit people even tune into Bitcoin podcasts?
I think it's in the hundreds of thousands. It's probably like a 100,000. Yeah. It's not in millions. How many how big is Bitcoin Twitter? It's like a 150,000. That's probably correct. How big is Nostra in terms of active users? 70,000. Probably about half that. My my estimate is that Nostra is about half of Bitcoin Twitter, but it's the better. It's the better It's the better half. It's the better half. And there are fewer, you know, paper Bitcoin summer people in Nasr. There are some, but, like, there are way more of those types of guys on, on Bitcoin Twitter, I think. But, yeah, lots of, growth.
But, I mean, the real question is, like, I I mean, I don't think we came up to, like, a good actionable solution on how to grow the pie. I'd I I've never been more bullish on Bitcoin, but in terms of new people coming in and using Bitcoin, I feel like we've stalled out a little bit. I agree. And I think about that a lot in the context of Primal. So even though Primal is a Nostril client with a Bitcoin wallet kinda built in, Nostr itself is still, very much a kind of social network for Bitcoiners, which, which is fine by me. At Primal, we wanna focus on making it amazing for Bitcoiners.
And, of course, everyone is welcome. It's just that there's we get we have a lot of Bitcoin content already. And if you're a Bitcoiner, you're more likely to stay if if you sign up. So I think we we can do a lot, to make both Nasr and Primal much nicer for Bitcoiners. And one of the things that I would love to do, in in an upcoming release of Primal is make it possible to get onboarded to to onboard new Bitcoiners and and kinda new coiners in a way that gets them gets them up to speed with some basic content. So so whoever is onboarding can recommend people to follow, articles to read, videos to watch, etcetera. Stuff that already exists in Master, but do that in such a way that it's very nice and smooth and seamless, you know, kind of get onboarded using this invite code. Getting started pack. Getting start. Look. Let's say Bitcoin one on one in terms of follows and content.
And then if we can nail that UX, that can scale to any subject. Right? Right. Because eventually, I think Nostra gets everyone. And at this early stage, it's all about which groups are interested in this this type of stuff. And so how but how do you think that looks? Is that like the user is creating, like, a custom getting started pack, and then they get, like, a link or something that they share? Or Yeah. So, for example, any user should be able to create this, invite pack that contains suggested follows, and suggested content for any topic.
And, people who get that invite code, or invite link can, you know, get really nice UX where they can opt in or out of these recommended, you know, follows and content. And in theory, get up to speed pretty quickly with any subject area. And then you leave it in the hands of the content creator or whoever's creating this invite to curate whatever they think is interesting and relevant for that subject area. That way, it's not primal deciding what everybody should read when it comes to Bitcoin. But subject area experts are people who are trusted either by their friends or by their audience. Just providing great UX for them to get onboarded and get started with a certain topic. I think that would be that would be really nice to have. Like, I you you know, we always need to go back and think, okay. Why why would anybody be on us? Why would anybody be on primal? Like, what's in it, like, for the user?
And this could be give given that is a very diverse, very kind of, capable protocol for all different content types, like social feeds, long form textual content, long form video content, etcetera. I think this type of feature set is well suited for Nostra. So, yeah, this this could be a nice, addition to both Nostra and Primal. No. I like that. I mean, I would I would I would use it all the time. I mean, when I onboard someone and I've onboarded way too many people, I'm just dropping them so many links. Yeah. Right? So So instead, this would just be one link. Yeah. And it would just, like, send them off to the races.
Usually, it's overwhelming both for the person Yeah. You don't wanna give them too much recommendations to. And I like it kinda solves the I mean, Primal's gotten a lot of shit, for, like, how we were handling, follows in the beginning, like, in terms of, like, recommending people to follow people and and, you know, and peep you know, everyone has an opinion on on who you recommend and who you don't recommend, whatnot. And there's no perfect solution there. I do think if you join Nasr and you have no recommended follows, you're actually in a horrible situation. I mean, I've I've seen this firsthand. I've onboarded someone to to Amethyst, for instance, and they just get greeted with a blank feed, and they have no idea who to follow.
So there's a middle ground somewhere there, and it's probably giving the users the ability when they invite someone to give them a a custom curated experience. So, I mean, the content piece is cool. Right? Give them podcasts, give them articles. But I think the follow-up piece is almost can be almost as important, if not more important. Because if I'm bringing a new Bitcoiner into the space, it's incredibly powerful for me to be like, these 60 people, like, I intimately trust, and I think they will guide you. And then the next, you know, year, two years while they're using Primal, they're able to constantly engage with those people. Yeah. I agree.
You know, we started off with basically no follow lists, like, onboarding people and giving them no feed almost. So that's that's bad. And then literally troubleshooted someone today. One of our founders where he was like, look. Like, when I open Primal, I have an empty feed. And I checked, and he had zero follows. He was following zero people. So, of course, he had an empty feed because it defaulted to latest, and he had he wasn't following anybody. So there was nothing there. And as soon as I had him I had him follow me and a couple other people, the feed populated. But, yep, for a little bit there, he was just like, what's going on? Like, why is this broken?
Yeah. And the recommended follows the way we do them now are problematic in a couple of different ways. Like, they solve that problem of empty feeds and stuff like that. So at least that's not it's not terrible. But the two big problems are well, number one, primal decides who are who the accounts are to follow in all these categories, and that's not ideal. Centralized. Yeah. And it also doesn't scale well, period. Yeah. And, you know, it really should be more sophisticated than that, and we're kinda working on that. You should be able to just based on interest and categories. Well, right now, it is interest based. Right? It is. And we you kinda select your interests in primal, and then we tell you, oh, based on your interest, we we are, you know, recommending these 261 follows. Do you wanna see them or just go next? People go next.
They don't even usually, like, read what we said. So so people, you know, end up in the states of why am I following these people? I never, I never wanted that. And that's the second problem. Right? So the first problem is primal decides who to follow, and second problem is people actual users get surprised that they're following people, and that's not what they're expecting. So I think as we get more competent at creating kind of high signal feeds, we can we can fine tune this experience where, you know, we don't need to auto follow anyone for for the new users. We can let them discover, you know, follow packs that are created by just about any What what is it right now? Right now, it's it's like guided opt in. Right? Or no?
It's a yeah. You can say it's a guided opt in. So you when you onboard on primal currently, you have to select at least one category of people in merchant. You're like forced interest categories. Exactly. You exactly. So you have to So select Bitcoin. Just select Bitcoin. We say, here are the 65 people we recommend. Right. And we don't even show the list. We say we, just to not clutter the UI, we say, you know, we're going to recommend 61 followers. Do you want to see them? And then if you say yes, you can go and edit and And choose. And those and that. But it's still, like, it's still softening. Are just clicking through that? Yeah. People And they're like, oh, I I auto follow this. That's right. So I think what happens is people go through the onboarding process. They say, I I I'm interested in these five categories.
Then the next screen tells them you're gonna follow 80 people. Right. They don't read that. They go next next next, and they get a feed, which is kind of latest posts by those accounts, which is not even a That's not a great feed. Yeah. But it's better than nothing. And They at least see activity. Yeah. There's some stuff going on. Activity begets activity. Right? It's true. You don't wanna, like, be onboarded to a ghost town. I think that's one of the weakest aspects of Monster in general. This whole, UX of getting onboarded and the first run user experience and the time And then they leave. And then people leave. And and and I've noticed it's easier to onboard someone fresh than someone who had bad taste in their mouth. Like, once once they have the first touch point, if that first touch point isn't a good first touch point, they're gone. Like, they'll come back in two years or something. Yeah. Yep.
We don't get too many chances to make that first impression. Yeah. And that's something that needs to be fixed. And, like, people think we have an onboarding problem in Oster. I don't think that's the case. We have a churn problem. We have Right. There's no retention. One percent of people stay. Right. I, okay. I mean, I'd look. I'm I'm pretty excited about the, like, getting started packs. I think in general, like, if we give power users more tools and then see how they use them and then you iterate from there, it's just like a great trade off balance. It's it it it accomplishes a bunch of things. It doesn't introduce new centralization because you're actually just giving the power you're giving the users the tools to to to do as they please.
Yeah. And just in general in my life, like, this was something I mean, I was just we hosted a major conference at Belmont University in Nashville, two weeks ago, and we had a nostril panel with me and Derek and Sean, which I put on the feed so some of you freaks might have listened to it. And one of the conversations I had, one of the topics we talked about was, like, children and social media. And because we're all parents. Yeah. Derek is a little bit ahead of me and Sean, But A little behind me. Yeah. A little behind you. But we're all parents. Right? And it's something I think about all the time. It's like, what is the healthy experience with social media? And a lot of times, I just get black people. I'm like, there's no healthy experience with social media. But I think the answer is somewhere it's it's it's at a place where you give parents tools and then, you know, let them be good parents. Yeah. Right? And and have faith that parents will practice responsibility and be good parents, but to give them the tools.
And so as we're building out primal, my thought is, is is is to basically empower users. Give them the tools and let them take responsibility over their lives, but make those tools as powerful as possible and as as as granular as possible and configurable as possible so that they can really curate how they experience, you know, the digital global square. Yeah. It also helps to have, you know, product builders' interests aligned with those of the users, which is not the case in in any of the legacy media systems. So you basically have no no chance there.
Like, we are cattle to be milked. You know? It's just a data surveillance plan for that model. And now with AI, it's even more so. And Noster potentially gives us a way to turn that around because, we have kind of, payments built into the network and potentially different ways to monetize. As you know, Primal currently monetizes directly from the users. Right. We have the premium tier for for premium users and also the pro tier for creators and professionals. And the only time we ever make money is if our users are satisfied. Right. We don't sell ads. We're not Yeah. Surveilling users and selling that data.
Yeah. I, okay. Let's talk about let's talk about the live streaming that we just added because, I mean, the freaks know that I'm I was very excited about it. I mean, the irony of this whole thing is we're just doing this audio only. By the way, freaks, we have we have a beautiful view, but we're doing an audio only non live dispatch. But dispatch historically has been a live show. And by the way, for I got the inspiration. Gigi and Pablo have an awesome podcast, that's just like them walking through the streets of Madera with a phone. And I think it's amazing. Like, the audio quality is kinda questionable, but, the content's great, and the conversations are interesting.
So I might do this more often. Especially when I'm traveling, I'll probably do this more often. So, hopefully, the audio quality isn't isn't too horrible. But, anyway, live streaming. I'm super excited about the live streaming. I think I think we hit we hit Bitcoin here. I was gonna say hit gold, but I think we hit Bitcoin here. It feels good. It just feels right. How are you thinking about live streaming in Primal? It does feel good. So the the live streaming feature in Primal Apps was released a few weeks ago. And, of course, it's, it's based on the open spec that was created years ago by, Kieran and others, and was available on ZapStream for a long time.
And it was kinda one of those magical moments in Noster. Actually, it got me a little by surprise. Like, I didn't know that so many of our users didn't either think that was possible or got surprised Right. Where we launched the player and they were like, oh, look. Monster is amazing. I can see ZapStream on Primal. Yeah. Where it is kind of pretty wild that that this open spec exists, that anyone can create a stream without permission and broadcast the NoStar event that any NoStar client can decide to present to their users in any way they wish. And, so every anybody can create a stream, to the extent that they can broadcast it. Any app can pull pull it up. Any app can decide how to show that UI.
We maybe innovated a little bit in terms of UI. You know, like, we just like to implement clean UIs that are made it pretty. Yeah. Exactly. Made it pretty. Made it work. And, we wanted to definitely give a lot of, real estate, to to live zaps and top zaps and so forth. It's all about the zaps. It's all about the zaps. You know, if we're talking about turning this around in terms of the way that the Internet is being monetized, well, we need to lean into stuff like this. Yeah. And like Gigi said, you know, you don't need to harvest the eyeballs of a billion people to create something great. I completely agree with that. And the way we do things in primal is kind of, we're we're trying to make that a reality to the extent that, you know, we can, within our user base anyway.
And hopefully, at some point in the future, we end up, with a much more high signal content on Nostr. Like, Nostr can't really compete with the with the TikToks of the world. Right. I mean, theoretically, it can, but we're not gonna create a better TikTok than TikTok, nor should we try. It's a race to the bottom. It's a race to the bottom. Experience. Exactly. It's like really catering to the lowest common denominator, kind of plugging into your reptilian brains and creating slot machines for the mind is the best way to monetize attention on the Internet. And there are all kinds of problems with that that we don't even need to get into now. Everybody understands that. It's kind of interesting that, actually, that that topic is not controversial in the mainstream at all. It's relatively recent. Yeah. People are kind of looking at, you know, legacy social media almost in the similar kind of way that that they look at junk food. Or drugs. Or drugs or whatever. It's sort of like It's almost like a heroin addiction.
Yeah. And it that's my design. People talk about, like, opioids are horrible, but it's it's millions of users of opioids. Like, billions of people use Facebook products. Like, the only thing stopping Facebook from growing is human population. Like, they need more babies born. They've saturated the globe, and addicted them to their algorithms. It's incredible how successful they've been at this. Yeah. So the only way to monetize the Internet, you know, since the beginning now has been advertising. And the best way to milk as much revenue and profits as you can is to kind of do what we said just previously with catering to the lowest common denominator.
And, we get the situation that we get today. But then I think, like we said, you know, things might be turning around in terms of people waking up to this and, you know, saying, I don't wanna scroll through my doom feeds Yeah. For the same reason that I don't wanna eat junk food. You know? Right. I respect myself, so I'm I don't wanna do this. So I think in some ways, Nostra can provide an alternative to this. And I'm interested in that. So where does live streaming pop into this? I mean, live stream is just one content type. I think on Nostr, we will have all of the content types out there. Live streaming is a very interesting content type, and live streaming on Oster pretty much assumes that you can, you know, zap. You can send micropayments from your Oster client. I mean, I think one of the coolest parts is so so for better or for worse, and, like, obviously, I'm a streamer.
Both rabbit hole recap and still dispatch are primarily Not today, but most most most days you're a streamer. Days a streamer. And, also, fortunately and I, you know, I think this is one of my superpowers is, like, my, family doesn't rely on income for my streams, to to pay the rent and survive. Right? Yep. But a lot of people do. And so they're using YouTube is the big one, obviously. Rumble is is getting quite large. Then you have Twitch. You have Kik. Like, there's there's huge billion dollar businesses built off the back of the streamers. They're all built on the ad model, and they can all deplatform you at will. Like, literally at any point and from almost all streamers, there's diversification in platforms, and a lot of them will stream to multiple platforms. But it's like one platform is their bread and butter. Like, that's their platform. Like, their Twitch streamer, like, that's their fucking platform.
And they can get deplatformed at will. And what's cool about this is well, right now, like, Primal doesn't offer streaming as a service, like, on the streamer side. I, you know, I I think people should expect that that will happen in the future, but it it doesn't currently right now. But for the sake of this conversation, what's super interesting to me is you have your Nasr account. You have your your end pub. That is completely separate from Primal, the app. Right? You can generate that offline even if you want to. You can generate it in a different app. You can generate it wherever you want. That's attached to your social graph, so who you follow and who follows you. Completely independent of Primal, completely independent of any other app.
And then you can choose your streaming provider, or you can even self host. Kieran has something called ZapStream Core that people can it's a little bit early still, but he's iterating and improving it. But, like, you can you can self host the streaming solution yourself and stream out to Nasr in a standardized way, or you can use something like ZapStream. I expect other streaming providers to pop up, including Primal. And so you separate the pieces. You're separating all the pieces. So if if for some reason Primal turns evil and decides you're no longer gonna stream with them, they can't stop your followers from following you, and they can't stop you from streaming. And and you literally have zero friction of switching to another streaming provider or self hosting yourself.
Like, people are sleeping on that. That's incredibly, incredibly powerful. And then, of course, then you put Bitcoin payments built into it. You give users choice of how they want to view it. I think NasJure does a really good job of how they do video viewing. Like, you can literally just download any app you want that supports this. Watch it, how you have the same exact chat. The chats aren't bifurcated. They're not separated. You have the same zaps. It's, like, the coolest fucking thing. Like, it to me, it blows my mind. Like, I mean, I'm, like, sitting there live, and I'm, like, it's all coming together. You know? It totally is. And this this point is kind of maybe underappreciated. And Nasr is unique in this regard. Yeah. There is no competing network with these, characteristics, and these are very important kind of fundamental characteristics, of self sovereign identity Yep.
And also the ability to stand up any parts of the any part of the infrastructure. But on top of that, evidence that all different kinds of infrastructure are are being stood up by a bunch of different actors. It's the it's not only that this is possible, it's actually happening. Right. So the ecosystem around Noster is growing without any central planning or coordination. You can't manufacture that. No. No amount of money. People have are trying have tried. There are conspiracy theories that, like, Odell is manufacturing it. Like, Odell is going with the water. Like like, the water is flowing, and I witnessed the river be born.
And I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm going along I'm going along for the ride. Like, that that's crazy. Like, to me, like, I just people do not like, you can have you can have, like, a $100,000,000 in a Sheitcoin pre mine, and you try and manufacture this and you cannot manufacture a top down. Many such cases Yeah. And has failed every time. It's very, very interesting. You can't kind of pay for for kind of grassroots uprising, which is kind of what we're, seeing here in Oster. And even though, you know, we've been, doing this for a few years now and we've encountered many users and content creators, And it's true, you know, that beyond this initial cohort of users in Oster who are very aligned with these values, it's true that the rest of the world doesn't really care that much about self sovereignty in terms of users, but creators care. Right. It's their livelihood. It's their livelihood, and many of them have been burnt multiple times. They know exactly where their lines are. And even if it's not a money thing, like Yeah. For me, it's not a money thing, but it's like a time thing. Like, I'm putting my time into this, and, like, you're just gonna rug me. Yeah. You can go fuck yourself. Yeah.
So that's very encouraging because the the creators do care about this. And we have, I think, on Oster, we have, something very valuable and unique to offer. And to the extent that we can build out the network in terms of the tools and the experience for end users and stuff like that, which is still a grind, but we're getting better at this. I think we're very soon gonna be at the place where they can, you know, shield this to their users with a straight face. You know? Come follow me here, and things are going to work Right. Etcetera.
And what what some think as their kind of backup account, you know, in case they get, you know Deep platform somewhere else. Elsewhere. I think what actually ends up being is their final destination on the Internet. Well, let's talk about sovereign. Let let let's talk about this idea of, like, the backup account because I have heard this many times. I'm not a backup time type of guy. I'm a I mean, you should back up and check your backups for, like, all your things to work. That kind of backup. Yeah. But, like, I'm, like, more, like I go all in on things. Right? You just found me in a poker game. I made my money back by going all in. Humble brag. I mean, to humble brag. Like, I made my money back. I didn't say I made money. I'm I, like, barely got up. But, anyway, I'm like, I'll I get I get it. Right? I get it. It's like, okay. Set up you know, download Primal in favorite app store. Set it up. Like, you have this backup just in case, you know, YouTube fucks you or Facebook fucks you or TikTok, whatever.
And you have it, and you can rely on it. And no matter what, that's the source of truth. And, like, that's true. All of that is true. It's it's factually correct, but I'm offended by the by the narrative. I'm offended by the narrative because it feels like, it feels like Noster's the mistress. You know? It feels like you have a relationship you have a relationship with YouTube, and you have kids with YouTube. And, like, there's a lot of things going well over there, but you still love Noster. You know? You still love Noster, but unless it's convenient for you, you're not gonna come to it. So I'm curious, like, how, like, how do you think about it? Because that's how I think about it, and it it it kinda grinds me. I'm also offended by it. And and the thing is, it can be presented that way to content creators who are new to this. And that's why I said it's not really it it can start as kinda being your backup as a content creator, but what it actually is is your final destination on the Internet. I like that. Yeah.
Or alternative, like, the source of truth. Yeah. Like, instead of the backup, it's the first. Yeah. Like, you can still post to Twitter, Twitch, wherever. Yeah. But the source of truth, the thing that's actually signed that can't be taken away from you is Noster. Yes. And then you cross post it everywhere else. But if I wanna make sure it's not a deep fake, I'm gonna actually go and check Noster. I wanna make sure that they're not trying to stop you from posting something. I'm gonna go check Noster. Yeah. And I think that is something that more and more creators, resonate with.
We just need to build better tools and keep onboarding. Yeah. I mean, I think the number one thing was, like, having a stable app. And Yeah. Humbly, like, we're just getting there. Totally. Like, it's it was just a grind. I still think it's janky. I'm It's a little bit janky. I'm referring to primal to be, specific, but it's better than it's been, you know, previously. Massive progress. Yeah. And you you don't need to squint to see, you know, before long, we'll match and exceed, the top quality consumer reps. Yeah. We have to exceed. Yeah. It can't just be there should be no trade offs on UX.
I, so the other topic I wanted to cover, is, AI, and I wanna cover it from two sides. The first is AI slop and deep fakes. And then the second piece is UX and AI and how users experience primal. I mean and I'll I'll use the freaks know that I basically didn't use any other social media except for Twitter and then x, for the last ten plus years. Like, I deleted my Facebook, deleted my LinkedIn, never had a TikTok, Deleted my Telegram. Big deleter. I'm a big deleter over here, guys. And X is doing a really Elon's doing a really good job of mixing AI with Grok into the user experience.
He's obviously like, there's no privacy involved. He's surveilling the fuck out of you. He's still selling ads, using your data. There's a bunch of bad aspects to it. But from where you know what happens, behind the scenes, and all of this is open source. And, also, it's forever too. Like like, if you there was one of our founders here, I think, like, nailed it on the head. It's like, you're, like, uploading your soul Mhmm. To these people's proprietary clouds, and then, like, you don't know what they're gonna use it for in ten years. Right? Like, there's no agency there. But that being said, the UX of x is, like, intimately interconnected with Grok now.
And then the other piece is there's a ton of AI slop on the platform, and it's just getting started. Like, it's gonna get way worse. Yep. And there's gonna be tons of deep fakes. There's gonna be so many fucking deep fakes. So, I mean, how do you think about AI and primal going forward on both those facets? And, I mean, you can answer in your order or whatever. Well, first of all, I agree that, they're they build great UX Yeah. On x, around these capabilities, and we need something like that on Oster. And on Oster, we have the opportunity to provide an open alternative to their kind of closed everything app.
So on Oster, we have the the opportunity to deploy open source models that are working on open data that's available on the public relay network. But, yeah, those capabilities are necessary. They're not on on our immediate road map, but this is something we wanna get into at some point in the future. I think they're useful tools that users rightfully expect. And, you know, if we're building free FreedomTech, I think we can provide a credible open alternative to all of these closed systems. The open source models are getting better and better, and they they still lag the top, you know, closed systems. It remains to be seen how that plays out.
You know, there are new updates every few weeks, you know, and the the I think it probably gets closer. I think it gets that's what I think. But I see how much Because there's big gains that are happening. Right? I see a lot of GPU power being deployed by the top players, and we just don't know. Well, that's a different thing between open models versus proprietary models because there are open models that are quite GPU intensive, and then you need someone to actually host the model and run the GPUs. Right? And then there's ones that are less GPU intensive, and you can self host them, and those are significantly worse. Yeah. Right? But the ones that are GPU like like, compute intensive but open, well, it'll probably get closer because the the way I'm thinking about it is kind of like ASIC development to Bitcoin.
But we're talking about software, not hardware, but it, like, it'll plateau at a point. Like, they're making massive gains, like GROC two to GROC three to GROC four or whatever chat g p chat GPT has, like, the worst naming scheme. But whatever their naming scheme is, has massive improvements. And so the open ones are naturally lagging behind. Yep. But when those improvements become more incremental, right, like the difference between the iPhone 16 and the iPhone 17 is way different than the iPhone nine to 10 or whatever. I don't know. Like, I think I think we get closer, and it doesn't have to be the best.
Right? Like, when we were talking about the follows, like, you could I could totally imagine like, we're close relatively close for efficient open models to parse the the primal Nostra dataset, like all Nostra notes ever, you know, in the caching server from certain users or whatever, and then be like, you know, just give me, like, a prompt. Like, what are you interested in? And just make you a recommended follow list. Right? Yes. Stuff like that. All kinds of things that can be done with this. Yeah. I mean, Elon announced, AI prompt based feeds Yeah. Which, is The right direction. I think that makes sense. Right? To me. Let's see how how they work. And, and, you know, like, there's some great work being done there. Definitely. Right. Like, you just show me this content.
We just need to like I said, the opportunity here is and the long term opportunity, I think, is to provide an open alternative to all of this dystopia tech base. Right. And to do it in a way that's where the creator's interests are aligned with those of their users. So that's kind of how we're, you know, positioning Primal. Yeah. And I'm kinda excited for that battle. So what are you thinking about that all makes sense to me. What are you thinking about, like, deep fakes and slot bots? The AI slot right now is relatively easy to spot. Yeah. It's not going to be. That's right. I mean, I haven't thought deeply about this, honestly.
For sure, we're gonna very quickly get to the point where it's much harder to spot. I think in that context, authenticity, like verifiable authenticity becomes more important. So content that's actually signed by the, you know, by the user that I follow that's verifiable actually becomes more valuable. Beyond that, I mean I think that's sneaky one of the most powerful parts of Nostra. Yeah. Like, everyone wants to talk about censorship resistance, permissionlessness. The verifiability Yeah. Is gonna become a big I think it's gonna become a big thing. And I think the incentives the way the incentive's set up, it's it'd be better for humanity if big tech follows along with it and tries to copy it, but I think it's I think it's actually quite unlikely.
Like, I think it's need to offer a credible alternative that does that, and, some subset of creators will gravitate towards that. Some subset of users will. Those who like to live free. And, you know, we'll see it remains to be seen how much gravity we can generate around this network. I'm optimistic. In any case, it will be the type of the the type of people that I wanna hang out with. That's true. The rider dies. I I mean, like, you think about it. It's like right now, today, it's like, our HR dispatch is posted to YouTube podcast feeds x Noster.
The only place you know that it hasn't been altered in the middle by the the aforementioned parties like YouTube. I mean, we we have two different hosts, but, like, the podcast host, of our RSS feeds, x. Like, the only place you know it hasn't been altered is if you view it in a Nasr app Yeah. That is is validating signatures and making sure that this is hashed and signed and unchanged. Yeah. And that's gonna I mean, that is super important to me because, like, at the end of the day, I have a lot of shitty opinions. You might not agree with them, but they're my shitty opinions.
Like, I don't you should be disagreeing with my actual views. You shouldn't be disagreeing with deepfakes of me because you can make me say whatever the fuck you wanna make me say with deepfakes. Like, there's enough there's a there's enough content out there that you you you have that ability today. And people are sleeping on this, and I think I think it will be a big driver of content creators because I think it naturally drives you crazy. Like, it's from a point of this is my time commitment, and this is my connection with other people. And you're stepping in the middle of it, and you're breaking it. Right?
You're you're you're it's a violation. You're you're violating my trust with people I'm trying to connect with. I agree with all of that. And to get down to the fundamentals, If we are to escape this kind of digital dystopia, we need two elements. We need everyone to hold their keys and sign their contact with their keys. Yep. And we need different actors to stand up every part of the infrastructure. Both of those things need to be kind of conditions need to be met for a resilient network to exist. And we only see evidence of this happening in Auster. Early days, but Auster has no competitors in this regard. There are some networks out there where people hold their own keys. Not too many. I think Farcaster is the only one, actually.
So good. There's probably a couple other ones that we just aren't aware of. Probably. Means they're too small. Or, like, base Coinbase. I think they have keys. Right? Yeah. That's kind of part of the same network. Is it a forecaster? I'm not even sure, to be quite honest with you. But there is no idea. Forecasters on Ethereum and bases on Coinbase's Ethereum layer two base. But, anyway, it doesn't work. Doing. So my point is even in the cases where people hold their keys in other networks, there's zero evidence that anyone's standing up any infrastructure. Right.
That's only happening on Austin. And both of those conditions need to be met for a network to be resilient and sovereign. Okay. One more topic, and then we're gonna get back to our people. You you mentioned holding keys. So constantly first of all, we're Bitcoiners first. That's how we met. That's been my life for way too long, both a good way and a bad way. Holding keys is hard for people, and people freak out about my nostril key gets compromised, and then my social identity is compromised. Obviously, it's still very early days. We're not, like, promising things. But what like, how do you think about that problem? How do we mitigate that? There's it's it's a problem that ultimately comes down to personal responsibility, so there's no, quote, unquote, solution.
But how do we solve that problem? So I'd say two things. So this whole scenario and the feature, the ability to do key rotation and kinda recover your, Nostra identity in these situations, That's something that needs to be still figured out on Nostra, and I'm very optimistic that we can figure out figure this out. But on the other hand, it's kind of important for people to understand the the value of holding your key and the repercussions of losing it that, you know, it's not a simple event when you lose a key. Let's say, when some money is on the line, when you're securing your, Bitcoin, I think for the society to move in this direction, there needs to be an increased awareness of the importance of, holding your keys.
And I can already see or hear many people saying, ah, that's never gonna happen and blah blah blah. I think it's gonna happen, and I think it's not that hard. And I've heard you make the analogy of, you know, if you can drive a car, you can you have the ability to, you know, self host self custody Bitcoin and your own online identity. I think it's a great analogy because, it's a powerful technology that you're using that if used incorrectly can have very extreme consequences, let's say, with car driving. But it's important enough that most people, have figured this out and are able to do it without any issues. So, especially when we kind of build slightly better tools to to enable this. I don't think the solution is to hide this from the user, by the way. Right. I'm not I'm not into this.
People need to understand, what the keys are and why they're holding them, and I don't think that's hard to understand. And you can kind of see this optimistic view of the future where people are self sovereign, both in terms of their own identity and speech as well as their wealth and transactions. And maybe there isn't some sort of future where only the minority of sovereign individuals do this. Fine. I mean, we are here to build the tools, and people can decide to use them if they want to. Yeah. I mean, I think what people don't first of all, I think we can be creative about different tools we can give users to have different trust models.
I think there's probably something there with webs of trust. I really think, like, you you could even imagine, like, type in, like, a Noster multisig type of scenario Yeah. Where where you have users that you trust or maybe you're an organization and it's it's multiple people who are holding, you know, fragments of a key or whatnot. So there's something there. And then the other piece that I would just add to people is, like, if if your solution is that, like, a centralized tech company is giving you a username and password, like, we can already do this on Nostr today. Like, there might pass I I don't actually I do not think this is the best path for primal, but other people may do this, is, like, they could literally just custody your NSEC for you, your private key for you, and give you the typical username password flow.
And if you get your account compromised or locked out or you lose your password or whatever, then you contact support just like you contact x support. Like, the same exact setup that x is currently using, you can do on Nostr today in a very straightforward centralized infrastructure. I don't think that's the solution, but any most people that are arguing that the current state of Nasr where you have these single private keys that are controlling everything, use that as the counterargument where they're like, oh, like, username password with with Twitter or Facebook or whatever is better. Like, you we can literally do that today. So that's to me is like a it's a apples and orange bullshit argument.
But I I think I think we can provide solutions to people. I think there'll be interesting hardware things, like and it depends on what the user is. Like, if you are just an average user, like, having it on the secure element of your phone backed up into iCloud is probably a great trade off model. Like, Apple is not gonna try and compromise you. The NSA is not in your threat model. Everything will be fine. It'll actually probably work more seamlessly than big tech right now. But if you are, you know, the president of a country, you know, like, maybe you have a hardware might be a little higher. Yeah. You have a hardware solution. Yes. You know? You you have a hardware solution where maybe you have multiple keys and and and there needs to be a threshold signature to to make it happen, and everything is kept offline, and it's a whole forty five minute process to send a post because you're the fucking president of a country, and that's that's what the stakes are. Right? That that that would that's what matters.
And the cool part is that's all completely separate from the protocol. Like, we don't need to have any consensus on any of that. These can all be tools that are built right on top. Right? That's a great point. I mean, the custodial, scenario was supported from day one. You might have implemented that easily, and there have been, clients who have done that. Right. So it's all upside from there. You know, you can, you know, have people holding their keys, and then you can have multisig setups, and you have have hardware, involved.
All of this is on the table, and it can be built. Yeah. And, specifically, like, the multisig piece is interesting to any of you freaks that are listening or developers. Like, check out the Froster project. They're they're working on they're using Frost, to do multisig on. It's quite compelling, really interesting to me. I I think there's different things that can be done there to make it very user friendly as well. Anyway, Millian, this is a great shot. I'm glad we did it. Hopefully, the freaks find it helpful. Please give me your feedback. If I get no feedback, I'm gonna do more things like this.
So we're gonna default to yes. Emilio, final thoughts before we get back to everybody. Oh, final thoughts. Yeah. Keep holding your keys. Keep, posting those notes. Keep onboarding your friends and family. Help us grow the network. And on our side, we're gonna keep, building the tools. That is a guarantee. I love it. Freaks, if you haven't already, download Primal in your favorite app store or go to primal.net. We'd love to have you, and any feedback is appreciated. It's a grind. It's a long grind. But Milian and his team are best in the business and mission focused.
Thanks for having me. Cheers, sir. Fun chat. Please stay humble, Stack Sats.
Ten31 retreat
Retreat impressions and collaboration
How many bitcoiners
Estimating self custody users and real audience sizes
Stalled growth and focusing Primal on Bitcoiners
Curated "Getting Started" invite packs
Solving empty feeds: recommendations vs. decentralization
Improving follow discovery
Retention over onboarding: first-touch UX matters
Empowering users with tools, not surveillance models
Aligning incentives: Primal’s user-paid model
Live streaming on Nostr: open spec meets clean UI
Not competing with TikTok: high-signal over dopamine
Platform risk for streamers and Nostr’s modular freedom
Unified chat, zaps, and the magic of interoperable apps
Nostr’s organic growth
Creators’ final destination
AI in social: open models, features, and roadmap thoughts
Deepfakes, authenticity, and signed content value
Keys, key-rotation, and building resilient identity tools
Practical key management: tradeoffs from phone to multisig
Closing thoughts
