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Mark, welcome to the podcast.
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Hi there, thanks.
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So we were just talking before recording, and it was already a podcast.
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And I’m like, damn, we’re getting some good stuff in here.
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So you teed up my first question brilliantly, and it’s a great place to start.
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Why is digital censorship important?
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And even if you’re someone that thinks that your digital habits are of no interest to someone
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whatsoever, why is it still also important for that person?
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Yeah, I mean, I think about certain freedoms that people enjoy in their life.
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And depending on the country that you live in, you might have things that are codified in the legal structure of the country.
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Or other ones might just be within your community.
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But we all have this human right to be able to speak freely, to be able to express ourselves freely, to congregate and choose who we want to associate with.
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And that has spread online.
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And as it’s moved online, you have this push and pull between governments and borderless communication with people.
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You know, you and I live in totally different countries, but here we are having a conversation together, right?
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You are bound by the rules of the jurisdiction that you live in.
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I’m bound by my jurisdiction.
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Yet, we also kind of are bound by this larger global internet that we’re on.
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And so digital censorship is this weird thing where local governments try to step in and pull back what people can say and do, even though really we kind of live outside of them in a lot of ways.
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And so I don’t know if it’s this old way of doing things that’s trying to hold on to the power and authority that it has while it’s losing grip.
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but most people don’t really
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think about it on their daily lives. They just go about doing what they do
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and they think, well, I don’t have anything to say
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that’s going to run afoul of the government and so I don’t need
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to have really protection for my digital life
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but it’s really when you need it that
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you wish you had it and so we need people out there kind of building
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tools and building ways for us to protect those freedoms so that we don’t one day need the
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freedoms and and they aren’t there anymore and the tools aren’t there for it not sure if that
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answers your question but no no completely big one to start with oh absolutely mark and it’s very
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exciting to get to spend an hour with you and talk through what does that mean um so was there a
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a personal experience in your life where this subject became important for you
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yeah uh there’s not like a single instance where i suddenly was censored or i was being held back
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but what it is is i i’ve done a few different startups than early employee at a few different
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companies and i was able to kind of see inside of how the cloud works right we all talk about the
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cloud we put our data in the cloud we we have these apps and everybody kind of knows that phrase
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but a lot of people don’t really understand what it means and so it was it was one of the company
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i was i was at is we were doing online backup software where people could back up their computers
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and all of their photos all of their documents everything that they had could be backup to our
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servers and it’s it’s secure right we have these we have this um you log in with your password
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it copies all your files over using what they say quote military grade encryption
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but ultimately what ends up is this large database of files of other people’s computers
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in this huge cloud infrastructure at this company and then me as a trusted employee of the company
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i would i was one of the engineers but sometimes i had to help do support so i would be able to
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go in and see people’s files because they would ask me to help them get their photos back because
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their hard drive had a crash. And it was in that moment where I started looking around and seeing,
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I can actually see all this data. I shouldn’t be looking at someone’s birthday photos or their
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family vacation photos or something that they did. This is not mine. This feels invasive.
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And it was this light bulb moment of, if I can see this, everybody else at the company that has
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the same privilege I do can see this. That means that if there’s a court order, which we have this
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all the time where a local court or a government will come to us and say, we need these files for
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this investigation that we’re doing. Suddenly, all these files that we thought were just private,
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I took a photo of my kid’s birthday party. I thought that was private. But really,
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as soon as I snapped that photo, it was automatically copied from my phone to someone
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else’s computer called the cloud. And it became available for hundreds to maybe thousands of
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people and then others down the line that I didn’t know existed that would get access to that photo.
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And so that was just, it reframed the way that I looked at the internet. And then there are so
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many points at which censorship can come in. Governments could step in, companies could step in,
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and you create these gates where people can shut the gate on you. And yeah, that was kind of
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a moment that I just kind of had an awakening for that. But then also kind of tangential to that
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is when blogs really started to become a big thing. Everybody was writing their blogs,
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whether they were family ones or they were company ones. And I remember I had a friend who had spent
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years by that point, a couple of years really curating their family blog.
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and they had it all hosted in Google
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and they lost access to their Google account for some reason.
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And there was no warning.
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They didn’t know why.
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They just couldn’t log in,
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but it wasn’t because they didn’t have the right password.
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Google had basically frozen their account
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and suddenly all of these memories
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that they had written about
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and all of the photos that they had posted
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were just shut out and they couldn’t access it.
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It had been taken offline
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and they were given no reason why.
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Um, and it was, to me, that was just a moment where it didn’t affect me personally, but it
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affected a dear friend that I had.
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And I just saw like how powerless we are to some of these companies.
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When we give them all of the data, it really becomes their data.
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It’s not our data anymore.
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And they have total control, whether it’s accidental or intentional to just turn it
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off whenever they want to.
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Yeah.
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And it doesn’t almost matter if there’s some kind of nefarious angle to some dissidents
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somewhere has got an opinion that someone doesn’t like how we’re going to try and throttle that
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issue okay we’re going to go to these three companies one of them is their bank one of them
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is the one that has all of their data by their phone and the other one is you know who knows
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it could just be any old person at home that for some reason their account just doesn’t open
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um wow okay and what i love mark is how what brings us to today is the sum of every decision
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we’ve made thus far, this very present moment.
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And the experiences that we collect along the way
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sometimes don’t really make sense.
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But in hindsight, you can patch them together and go,
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ah, this is actually now the direction I should go in.
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And I feel like that’s obviously what you’re doing.
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But so those were some pain points.
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What has been inspired as a result
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of going through those issues you saw?
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well i every time i i start working on something whether it is a personal project or a job that i
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take at a company or now i’ve started a company i’ve always wanted to i’ve wanted to provide for
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my family like first and foremost i have a family and i want to provide for them like that’s that’s
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what i do but i also want to do that in a way that i feel like i’m giving back to society and
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I’m doing something for the world, whether that is the large W world where I’m actually
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making an impact globally, or that is the world around me or the world of a few people.
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And so one of the companies I worked at was an education startup where we were trying
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to make software that allowed students to learn better and professors to teach better
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to their students and leverage technology in ways that made their lives easier.
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And I’ve worked on apps where kids could, if they had a speech impediment and they, you know, they grew up with a stutter or they grew up not being able to say there are correctly, they could use our iPad app that we had and work with a therapist and gain gain that skill to be able to speak more eloquently, but also have more confidence in their life as they are interacting with friends and their peers in school.
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so I’ve always tried to to use and build technology that helps people in their lives
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not just helping them to make money but really like truly trying to empower people
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and trying to give people more confidence give people you know some some extra value in their
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life so that’s really kind of I feel like what I took from that very first job that I had
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where I started to understand how how the whole cloud works and how technology works and like
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What can we do that’s good with this technology rather than just how can I make the most money?
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How can I get somebody addicted to a game and just make this game that just like drives it up the charts?
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And you mentioned, I think before we started recording, you know, how can I play to an algorithm?
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Right. I don’t want to just be playing this algorithm game.
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I really want to be building something that that brings people actual value and joy in their lives.
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yeah and the context there being um you asked me before we started recording who my core audience
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is as part of this podcast and i explained that it was changing but mainly because i had changed
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and essentially had realized that chasing the algorithm by hammering youtube in particular
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was not something that i wanted to go and do and and now that i stepped back from that and really
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want to spend my time and attention on Nostra. What’s interesting is how my Nostra experience
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has improved. Just every time I log in, I’m seeing more high quality content and getting better
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feedback from the accounts that I’ve started spending more time inputting energy into. So
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this is very, very strange process where like, instead of turning up on someone else’s digital
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real estate, where you are essentially rent seeking until they don’t want you any longer,
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you’re actually you’re building a ecosystem of uh connections where you have put capital
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essentially into what you get back um and that’s a big big shift so it’s it’s fun to see how
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how other people are also doing that and nost is where we we came across each other and
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how we’ve even organized this this podcast which i think is such a cool thing to have
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been able to do because everyone’s like oh nostr no one uses it you know nothing’s going on there
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it’s like well actually that’s not true um so so maybe i’ll give you a simple question now mark
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which is like why are you using nostr yeah uh i i got on nostr the same way that a lot of people
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did a few years ago jack dorsey put out a tweet about it and that’s when i heard about it and i
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like, oh my goodness, you have private public key pairs that are used for your online communication.
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And when you create a message, it is signed with your private key. And now it can be sent around
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the world. And everybody knows that that message you just wrote is really from your private key.
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And that’s something that you said. And it just clicked for me. I was like, that is how we should
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be doing things. When I have a Twitter account, X, or Facebook or Instagram, people, we kind of
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think it’s the same way, right? We sign in with a username and a password. But really, that’s just
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granting us permission to go say something on someone else’s computer in the cloud. Whereas
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with Noster, it is a way for me to create a piece of content and then say, this is from me.
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and then all I have to do is just broadcast that out and I can copy it to a whole bunch of people’s
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computers but it’s something that I know I’m sharing publicly and it was it’s the subtle
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difference to I think to a lot of people who don’t really like know about private key public
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key cryptography it’s a it’s a very odd difference but it has such a profound effect especially
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when you bring in this whole AI thing that we’re dealing with now, where pretty much any video
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that’s posted online, the first thing people ask is, is this real, right? Grok, is this real? Is
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this true? Is this fake? Is this AI? And so now we have this tool, we can start to show, well, yeah,
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maybe you can’t prove that this video is real, but I can prove that it was spoken from me,
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or I have access to my private key.
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I know that it’s coming from me
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and everybody else knows that it’s coming from me.
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So that way, if you’re on Twitter,
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Elon or some employee there could just go in
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and just say anything on my behalf.
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And now the burden is on me to prove
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that that wasn’t me who said that.
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And it could be very damaging information
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that is supposedly said from my account.
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And so I just love knowing that with Noster,
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I can do things and have authenticity with it.
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And I guess I would kind of ask you maybe
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if I could ask you a question.
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No, no, please Mark, anything.
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Yeah, I think a lot of us,
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our interface with Noster is a Twitter-like app,
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an X-like experience.
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Curious how you view Noster,
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if you think that that’s really going to continue
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to be the main interface,
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or if you see other ways that you think Nostr really continues to grow
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and people maybe experience Nostr through different interfaces Just curious what your thoughts are there Great question To dovetail on the back of kind of what you were saying was
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I just never fully understood how much heavy lifting a Facebook and Instagram
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or Twitter was doing for me until I started using Noster.
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And so I was like, oh, I want to put a video up.
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How do I do that?
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So, oh, you can’t.
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You need to host it yourself.
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oh okay well how do i do that oh okay here’s nostr.build okay cool sign up boom upload your
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own video okay then you can release it onto the nostr network you’re like oh my god so hang on
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all this information i’ve ever put on a traditional social media platform is somewhere
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being stored by them where the the user experience has been incentivized to be as easy and as simple
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as possible to get you to use it but at what cost and well the cost is quite simple you’re
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batting on someone else’s digital real estate that if you misbehave in a way they don’t like
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or you say something you shouldn’t say or their advertising partners are like we don’t like this
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guy over here because they’re saying things about stuff that we don’t want to have talked about
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well they’re gone right and this whole idea of freedom of reach is not the same as freedom of
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speech and so you can go on and say what you like but literally no one’s going to see it because
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it’ll get buried and you can search for accounts and they you find them eventually but like then
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they’re not the algorithm is not being coached to show them to anyone and so so my my nostre
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experience is is so different it really couldn’t be it’s almost like a complete opposite um and
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when i get a bit spiritual these days i’m like that’s that’s so healthy right it’s this
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centralization versus decentralization.
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It’s the pendulum swinging back in a different direction.
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And like, I use Primal all the time.
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And what’s interesting about that experience
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is how much better it’s got
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versus when I first started using it.
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And for example, you’ve got to use Nostradot build,
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you upload some video or some content,
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you’re actually doing that yourself,
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you’re seeing, oh, that’s how that actually
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gets pieced together.
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The process of it improving, I think, is interesting because initially you don’t follow anyone.
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So, OK, well, hang on.
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How do I find any information on this fucking thing?
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And actually, even finding accounts can still be quite difficult, right?
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I had Scott Deedles on the podcast recently, and I just typed in his name.
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Couldn’t find him.
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Had him on the pod.
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He said, oh, I’m on Noster.
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Searched Lantern Bitcoin.
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Found that and found his account.
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But it’s still not working as well as it could.
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but the point is I see the information that’s posted by the accounts that I follow
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that’s it yes you could do some trending stuff that you know a client might show you such as
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as primal and they have different qualifications for like what actually should make the trending
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page in terms of the popularity of a post but at the end of the day it’s just a chronological
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timeline of the people that I follow you know interesting and there are people that I start
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following that post all this stuff I don’t like get rid of them but there’s essentially there’s
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been a proof of work involved in curating my NOSTA experience. And that’s been a fascinating
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process. So, I mean, have you been similar like that, Mark? Like, because I feel like I created
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a key pair, logged in, I was like, this is garbage, I’m not going to go near this thing.
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And then I did it again. And then a client had slightly improved, and I tried a different client.
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And then I just really started to think about why it was important. And it’s like headwinds
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versus tailwinds. And the headwinds for NOSTA is like the UX is not great. There’s not enough users
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on that. There’s information that you need to get that’s actually elsewhere. And therefore,
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you have to go and find it. But then the tailwinds are like censorship is getting more and more rife.
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And what’s authentic? That’s such a great word that you use. It’s like, I don’t want to get
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information that’s not authentic. That’s a complete waste of my time. So I’m actually
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willing to accept the cost of a ux experience that isn’t as good as elsewhere in exchange for
0:18:55
better value basically um yeah has your nostril experience improved over time yeah no it’s
0:19:03
definitely improved and i still i still use it like a twitter product a twitter competitor um
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and like you were saying when i first got on there it just it continued to remind me of all
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the data that we’re giving over to other people as you start to piece together these pieces these
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things right like nostr.build i remember going on there and being like how do i upload a photo
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and then as soon as i go to upload this photo to nostr.build i think well wait a minute are they
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gonna have the location data of this photo that i’m uploading because i don’t know this guy that’s
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running nostr.build yeah um and i’m about to transmit this thing over to him i don’t know
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the answer to that i’ve never checked i wouldn’t know uh they i believe they scrub the a lot of
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these services scrub out. I know Primal specifically will get rid of your location data when you upload
0:19:51
it. But no, it’s good to think about these things, right? And we usually don’t, especially on
0:19:57
something like Instagram. They actually promote keeping your location data because they want to
0:20:02
show where you were so that all your friends can see where you were at that moment. This is a really
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funny phenomenon. I don’t know if you have children or how old they are, but my kids will share their
0:20:14
location with their friends. It’s like this new thing that they all do. And they’ll be like,
0:20:18
oh, I see where my friends all are right now. And they know where I am. And to me, one, I don’t want
0:20:24
my kids sharing where the location is, but they do it. And then two, it creates like this anxiety
0:20:30
that they have where now not only do they feel like, you know, if you would go to school on a
0:20:36
Monday, and everybody’s talking about this party that they went to, and you didn’t go to the party,
0:20:40
you feel bad, right? Well, now the kid is sitting at home on their phone and they see that all their
0:20:47
friends are at one location together at some party and they are not with them. And then they
0:20:51
start to see all the photos come up on Instagram that they’re not at, you know? And so now they’re
0:20:56
just feeling down in that moment. And then they still have to go to school and interact with all
0:21:00
these people and feel down again. And so there are all these ways that technology has kind of
0:21:05
created these, these abilities for us to like have anxiety, have depression, have these weird
0:21:10
social interactions. And maybe there’s another side to that that we come out and we’re all better
0:21:16
for it because we figured out how to use it. I feel like that was kind of a tangent to what I was
0:21:20
talking about, but there is all this data that we’re just giving out to different systems.
0:21:25
And when I got on Noster, it continued to be this moment where I realized, okay,
0:21:29
it’s a reminder, I’m giving away this data. I’m giving away this information.
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Who is this person running it? What can they do with it? Do I want to be giving it to them?
0:21:36
So it helped me kind of start to sanitize my technology use a little bit more.
0:21:42
With Noster, you know, I got on right away.
0:21:44
I was really excited about it.
0:21:46
I used it a lot for the first few months.
0:21:49
And then I kind of took a break for a little bit because, like you said, it was just kind of this wild, wild west.
0:21:56
This is back in like early 2023 now.
0:21:59
And I took a break and then I came back like six months later and it’s like, oh, hey, this thing is still on.
0:22:04
People are still posting.
0:22:04
and I could see the difference between using Twitter and using Noster and just like the feed
0:22:14
I was getting. The stuff on X, no matter how hard you try, becomes very politicized, at least in my
0:22:20
world where I am in the United States. It’s constantly trying to shove things into your feed
0:22:26
that feel divisive, that make you feel bad afterwards when you’re done. And I didn’t want
0:22:32
to see that i still use x because i do it for work and you know i do it for industry news especially
0:22:38
with ai moving so fast but when i’m when i’m really wanting to take a moment to just kind of
0:22:44
like interact with the internet i go to i go to nostr i go to primal i get on there because i feel
0:22:50
like that’s where a lot of more high quality content is or high quality discussion um and
0:22:55
and i really enjoy that whereas when i feel like i when i’m on x i feel like i am just being kind
0:23:01
of shoved around inside of an algorithm constantly that’s been my experience at least and and how you
0:23:06
feel is so important because there’s there’s i’ve been making content for like five years now in
0:23:13
different different guises worked a few different businesses had a different podcast of my own and
0:23:18
i’m now creating this one and so i’ve toyed around with lots of these different platforms and just
0:23:24
There’s no doubt that I feel more relaxed as a Nostia user.
0:23:29
And that’s because you’re not being psychologically played in the same way that the legacy status quo social media platforms have begun to do in order to keep your attention because they make money from your eyeballs.
0:23:45
What would be fun about Nostia, for example, is if you did take a break for six months and then you log back in, you’re like, oh, hey, guys, took six months off.
0:23:52
all the same people would still be there and you wouldn’t get fed an algorithm um when you come
0:23:58
back so i think it’s like it’s kind of like you get to keep your work in like a truer capital
0:24:04
accumulation sense um i want to answer your question more directly that you brought up
0:24:10
earlier about do i just use it as a twitter like experience thus far yes but i’m interested in
0:24:17
early stage equity investing and startups. And I’ve seen some pitch decks for other stuff that
0:24:24
is really interesting. For example, one was around medical records. And it was a problem that just
0:24:31
resonated straight away where it’s like, it’s so goddamn annoying when you go into a practitioner’s
0:24:37
office, and it might be a chiropractor or an osteopath or whoever it is you’re going to get
0:24:41
treatment from. Like, so here’s a piece of paper. What have you done in your life? You’re like,
0:24:46
I’m 37 years old now, mate.
0:24:48
What do you want to know?
0:24:48
When I threw myself down a mountain as a 19-year-old on a pair of skis
0:24:52
or when I had a motorbike accident or when I was sick two days ago?
0:24:55
Do you know what I mean?
0:24:56
And so the concept that they were highlighting was with a Nostra key pair,
0:25:01
you could – it’s like it’s got the potential to better manage
0:25:05
the blend of secrecy and privacy.
0:25:09
And so I want to selectively withhold some information from the world
0:25:13
and that I’m going to keep.
0:25:15
But for this chiropractor, great. You can see my medical history. Here it is. And having that controlled by the user rather than some either third party private business that is a honeypot for hackers or a government that, heaven forbid, might weaponize it in some kind of political sense.
0:25:32
that was a cool concept and i also saw some stuff around insurance policies i think really what it
0:25:40
boils down to in terms of like the non-twitter like experience that you could have on nostr is
0:25:45
the idea of a digital identity and it’s not oh hey guys by the way we’re the european union
0:25:52
and because we feel like it everyone’s got to have this digital id and it’s going to be connected to
0:25:57
this cbdc that we’re about to roll out and yeah like we’re the good guys right so you know we’re
0:26:02
going to make it really easy for you to use and anyone that doesn’t like it well we’re all going
0:26:07
to start you know we’re going to start taxing them more highly we’re going to take away anyone’s
0:26:11
financial services licenses that want to do things that are free and open source and you know it’s
0:26:17
crazy world that we live in today that the the ability for for censorship is just so high it’s
0:26:24
wouldn’t it be interesting if this information was all in the hands of the user and that’s what
0:26:29
i think gnostic can become yes well we went through this worldwide event five or six years ago
0:26:35
where we learned what governments can do if they have information about us right and information
0:26:41
that seemed harmless at the time suddenly it’s like well you need to have this little piece of
0:26:47
paper that shows that you were injected with something in order to go eat at a restaurant
0:26:53
that you’ve eaten that for 10 years in your life, right?
0:26:56
To go get a coffee.
0:26:58
And I mean, this is the constant conversation
0:27:02
with privacy discussions of like,
0:27:04
I don’t have anything to hide, right?
0:27:06
Why do I need to care about privacy?
0:27:08
I have nothing, I’m not doing anything bad.
0:27:10
I’m not a criminal.
0:27:11
I’m just a normal guy.
0:27:12
I’m just a normal guy, yeah.
0:27:13
But it’s like you said,
0:27:14
that saying of being able to selectively
0:27:16
reveal yourself to the world.
0:27:18
That’s really what we all deserve as human beings.
0:27:21
And every single person does it.
0:27:22
even if they don’t realize they’re doing it. But we are inside our house, we close our door.
0:27:29
We maybe close the windows or pull the drapes. There are all sorts of reasons why we want to
0:27:34
shut ourselves off at certain moments. And we’re not doing any bad things. But then we step outside
0:27:41
and we selectively reveal ourselves. What do we do before we step outside? We usually get dressed.
0:27:46
maybe we do our hair uh you know if we have makeup we do our makeup we we make ourselves
0:27:52
presentable to the world and we do that intentionally and that all comes back to to
0:27:58
privacy really and so you talk about these medical records and that’s a cool concept to be able to
0:28:04
have control over that and and cryptic cryptographically own your own medical history
0:28:09
with your nostril key pair i think that’s really cool um and i don’t know if you’ve ever tried to
0:28:15
get medical records from a practitioner that you went to in the past, but it’s like very difficult
0:28:19
to get your data back from them. If you know, if you show up to a new medical office, like you said,
0:28:26
they give you that piece of paper you need to fill out. If you were like, hey, I actually did all
0:28:30
this at the previous place. Can I just like go copy that and bring it over here? That process is
0:28:34
like almost non-existent to do. It’s going to take you probably weeks to get information from your
0:28:41
previous person. And then it’s not in the same format that it needs to be to give to the new
0:28:44
person so i think it’s that’s a that’s an interesting concept to be able to use nostr
0:28:48
to say no this is my data these are my health records i’ve collected them all and here i’m
0:28:53
going to now transmit them to you but only selectively transmit the stuff that i want to
0:28:58
i think that’s a really cool use for this this technology and really comes comes back to like
0:29:04
people in nostr love to say that this is a new way of building the internet
0:29:09
I do think that’s possible. I think that the legacy internet still plays a part in that somehow.
0:29:17
I haven quite figured this out but I do think that Nostra becomes this really important layer infused on the internet of this digital identity that kind of turns everything on its head If we really kind of extrapolate it out long term and see like where could this all go What if we rebuilt the internet where all of us have this cryptographic identity that we control
0:29:36
How does this behave differently? And you can’t really control the flow of information.
0:29:41
I think it’s a really, really fascinating topic to go down and you can pull almost any technology
0:29:47
that’s online and say, what if we infuse Nostra into that? How does that change?
0:29:52
and things start to look a little different.
0:29:54
And I think probably for the better,
0:29:57
if we can have really good data security, right?
0:30:00
You got to keep track of your Nostra keys.
0:30:02
You can’t lose them.
0:30:03
We have to find ways to let people rotate into a new key
0:30:05
and say, this is me on the new key.
0:30:08
I think there’s stuff to still solve there,
0:30:10
but a lot of promising things that can come out of it.
0:30:14
Yeah, just on the key management of your NSEC specifically,
0:30:20
this is something that’s come up a little bit
0:30:22
where it’s like okay i was just playing around right and i was signing up for clients left right
0:30:28
and center with an insect that i had and i don’t know where those businesses even are today right
0:30:33
and will that create headache for me in the future i don’t know the same problem pretty much applies
0:30:40
to every early nos to use it because we were all kind of doing the same thing but yeah um a piece of
0:30:46
good advice it was corn delorean shout out to to that man that you know have an nsec that you just
0:30:52
play with and have one that you’re using every day and the one you use every day you keep very
0:30:56
very private and the other one you can more liberally sign into things to like give them a
0:31:00
test and see what it’s like um mark and and i think this is actually kind of what my podcast
0:31:07
trajectory is all about so much in common with someone like yourself who’s clearly done a bunch
0:31:12
of stuff in their life that I a find interesting but b we’re on Nostra hanging out and and immediately
0:31:18
you’ve got stuff that you you completely align with and I think that’s so valuable um I don’t
0:31:23
want to go the whole way through the podcast and not talk about Maple and so let’s spend a bit of
0:31:29
time like hammering that out because um you’re building a business take me to the starting point
0:31:34
like why did you decide to start why did you decide to start Maple yeah well um most recently
0:31:42
before Maple, I was at Apple and I’d been there for about six years. I was a software engineer over
0:31:47
there and I was working on a project for the company and it dealt with AI, machine learning,
0:31:55
and then Apple does care very much about privacy. It’s their public statement that they make. It’s
0:32:01
the public persona that they put on, but it’s something that they actually do care very much
0:32:06
about internally. So our project, we had this ability to be invasive with our users and with
0:32:15
our customers. And we could learn a lot of information about them through this tool that
0:32:19
I was building. Or we could choose to do it with a privacy way and say, let’s throw away all the
0:32:27
data we don’t need, or let’s not even collect the data in the first place. Because really,
0:32:31
we only want to get this one piece of information. And that one piece of information does not need to
0:32:37
be tied to anybody’s identity. And from talking to friends who work at other big tech companies,
0:32:44
that conversation just wouldn’t have been had. They would have gathered the information and they
0:32:50
would have stuck it on a database just in case, right? Oh, we might need this in the future.
0:32:54
There might be a way to monetize it in the future. But when I got on this project, within just the
0:32:59
first few weeks, I was on a phone call with a privacy lawyer, an internal privacy lawyer at
0:33:05
Apple saying, all right, here’s this project you’re working on. Talk to me, describe the project to me.
0:33:10
So I walked through everything we were working on. They said, okay, here are all the data points
0:33:14
that you will likely be collecting along the way. And we don’t want you to collect this like 90% of
0:33:20
it. And if you do, you have to like explain why and be very intentional about it. So I just,
0:33:27
I love that. I love that aspect of it. It makes your work very difficult because now you are
0:33:33
having to go through technical hurdles. We had to build brand new technology that wasn’t,
0:33:38
we couldn’t pull stuff off the shelf and use to help us create this because that stuff off the
0:33:42
shelf was not, it was collecting too much data. So we had to build new tools. So I saw kind of
0:33:49
this way that things can be done there. But coming from a bunch of startups, I started to get this
0:33:56
itch like hey i feel like there’s something that can be done outside of apple um i was i was getting
0:34:02
on nostr i was doing a lot of stuff um i was also i’ve been a bitcoiner for a long time and so i saw
0:34:08
like hey there might be something to build in bitcoin space so um really you know you and i
0:34:14
connected here over in nostr i actually connected with my co-founder over in austr as well
0:34:19
he happened to be here locally in austin and so i would go to local austin meetups and we would go
0:34:26
to bit devs and other meetups together cool and so i kind of knew him through there i knew him
0:34:30
through a lot of podcasts but ultimately i reached out to him over in austin and said hey i would love
0:34:34
to i’d love to work together with you so we teamed up and as a lot of startups do you kind of pivot
0:34:41
around um so he and a couple other guys were working on mutiny wallet at the time which was
0:34:47
a lightning wallet that you can host in your web browser on your phone. Self-sovereign, privacy,
0:34:52
lightning, which I thought was really cool. So I teamed up with them to work on that.
0:34:57
But very quickly, we realized it’s difficult to monetize something like a self-custodial lightning
0:35:05
wallet on your phone. And there are people working on that kind of tech and I applaud them and I hope
0:35:10
that they are very successful. But we decided that just wasn’t quite the thing for us. But we had this
0:35:16
really strong privacy technology. I had my privacy background from Apple. They had built this really
0:35:21
cool thing for a privacy wallet for Bitcoin. And we started to talk to a lot of different developers
0:35:27
and say, okay, what tools do you need? We have this really cool privacy platform that we can build
0:35:32
and enhance. And time and time again, in these conversations, people kept saying,
0:35:37
I use ChatGPT every day, and I hate the fact that I’m giving away my information to this other
0:35:41
company? Can you make a private version of chat GPT? So after about 10 of these calls that we had,
0:35:48
and pretty much every single one said the same thing, we said, let’s build this. Nobody’s
0:35:52
building it, right? There were some tools out there that are kind of privacy with AI, but it’s
0:35:58
more like just trust us that we’re not keeping track of your data, but really we could be behind
0:36:02
the scenes. We said, let’s build it in the way that that mutiny was built. Let’s have end-to-end
0:36:08
encryption. Let’s have total privacy. You have your own private key. The only difference,
0:36:13
instead of you having a private key that you have to write down and lock in your safe or something,
0:36:18
we use confidential computing. We use hardware encryption in the cloud that does all the private
0:36:26
cryptography for you. And it’s a bit of a newer technology. It’s kind of foreign to a lot of
0:36:32
people because they’re not in the space that we’re in. But it really gives you this cryptographic
0:36:39
guarantee that the code running on those servers is the same code that we have published on GitHub.
0:36:45
So anybody can go on GitHub, they can see, okay, this is how Maple runs. And there’s no spot in
0:36:49
there where Maple is taking a copy of what I say to the AI and saving it anywhere. It’s not making
0:36:55
a duplicate anywhere that they can then sell to advertisers or they can use to train a future
0:37:00
model that’s not happening and then with this secure enclave and confidential computing they
0:37:05
can say okay that code that is in github that is what’s running on the servers i have this
0:37:10
cryptographic guarantee and when you log into maple and use it there’s like this little like
0:37:14
check mark this little lock icon and you can click on that and you can see like all the
0:37:19
attestations all verifications that show that those there’s a there’s a match between the code
0:37:24
and we really wanted to go the full length to let people know this is this is secure this is private
0:37:31
you can chat in here we’re effectively pulling an ai into a room with you and closing the door
0:37:36
and it’s just you two we don’t want to know what you’re talking about um so that’s that’s kind of
0:37:41
how i got here um and started working on maple and and yeah i mean we can talk more about it but
0:37:46
that’s that’s where it all yeah amazing um i have been using maple almost exclusively for
0:37:53
two weeks, something like that.
0:37:57
It’s interesting because AI is just something that
0:38:00
this current suite of AI products is a better way of saying it
0:38:07
has really been such an extraordinary success from a kind of user traction perspective
0:38:12
that my wife and I are now actively using an AI of some form
0:38:18
every single day. For example, a Google search,
0:38:21
gone completely gone right you’re no longer like browsing websites looking for information that you
0:38:27
need you’re going to an ai you’re asking a specific thing and some of them are different like for
0:38:33
example i had an experience recently where i was trying to figure something out and i used
0:38:36
the same prompt but into five different products and i got five different answers and then you could
0:38:41
bit take the best bits out of those five and whatever but i still hadn’t asked the important
0:38:46
the question was like, what are these guys doing with my information? Now, if the information you’re
0:38:51
sharing is like, okay, example from yesterday is one of my part of my vision, my self image,
0:38:59
my future self is physical health. And I’d like to be in the top 10% of men my age in physical
0:39:08
health. Like, what does that actually look like? Okay, well, you got to be able to sprint this
0:39:12
fast, you’re going to jump this high, you got to be a body mass index of this much.
0:39:16
Cool. Okay. Do I care if ChatGPT has that information? Not really. But some things like
0:39:24
I’ve been storing in Google Sheets, for example, is like very sensitive financial information that
0:39:31
it’s a spreadsheet. It’s kind of safe, isn’t it? And you’ve gone from having an Excel file on your
0:39:35
hard drive to then in the cloud. And what if you want to de-Google yourself? That’s a whole other
0:39:41
conversation in itself. To then like, well, maybe you’re going to start having these more financial
0:39:46
conversations with an AI, you’re not even going to have a spreadsheet because you don’t need to run
0:39:49
the formulas. You’re just going to ask it. Here’s the information. Tell me what the answer is and
0:39:53
it’ll do it. So it’s a big, big subject. This, um, and just resonates a lot. It’s like, okay,
0:40:00
if I’m going to be using this tool every single day, who the hell keeps the information that I’m
0:40:05
putting into it? And what does it mean if they do or don’t, um, to, to, to ask a specific question
0:40:11
though, Mark. So I, as I was using Maple, so teach me a bit more about how it’s actually built,
0:40:18
because it was telling me that actually the underlying infrastructure is Alibaba.
0:40:23
And it is a, it wasn’t called Maple. I was like, aren’t you called Maple? And it’s like, no.
0:40:29
So how have you managed to kind of pull things together? And, and how does that enable the
0:40:35
privacy. Yeah. So that’s something that we want to work on for 2026 is making Maple more self-aware.
0:40:44
So the way that we built it is we wanted to have the entire stack be verifiable end-to-end. And
0:40:50
verifiable means you can inspect the code, you can see what’s going on, but then also on the AI
0:40:56
side itself, on the models. So if people aren’t totally familiar with how AI works, it’s really
0:41:02
this thing called an LLM. It’s a large language model. And they are trained by different
0:41:08
organizations, different companies. So you have Meta that has trained one called Llama.
0:41:13
You have OpenAI, which does their chat GPT models. And they made an open source one called GPT OSS.
0:41:20
Then you have DeepSeek, which a lot of people have heard that word now, but that is a company
0:41:25
out of China. And then you have Alibaba that’s done some. So there’s Quinn, there’s Kimmy.
0:41:32
Kimmy is made by a company called Moonshot.
0:41:34
So you have a bunch of different ones.
0:41:36
And the open models, and that’s really what we use to kind of quickly answer your question.
0:41:40
We’re running open source models.
0:41:42
So we have open source code paired with these open source models.
0:41:45
So you can kind of inspect how they behave and see kind of some of the biases and how they’ve weighted certain data.
0:41:53
And we wanted to run those to make it so that everything throughout the process could be inspected by people.
0:41:59
there are still certain parts of that training that is not you’re not able to inspect yet but
0:42:06
we’re always kind of looking at how how are these models trained and how can we find ways to make
0:42:10
them more verifiable and inspect them i mean there are people working on solving that problem
0:42:15
but but that’s that’s why you know it told you it was alibaba other people will be chatting with
0:42:20
with our the llama model within our app and i’ll say oh i am meta you know i belong you know to
0:42:25
Facebook. So that is a bit jarring to people. And so we’re working on improving that to where
0:42:31
Maple has this system prompt where it knows who it is and it knows that it’s using these models
0:42:35
so it can better respond to people. But really that’s what you’re seeing is, is we are trying
0:42:41
to do, we’re trying to do the least amount of things possible to be in between you and this
0:42:46
model. We want you to be able to have just this tool because ultimately what is the most private
0:42:52
way to use AI. It’s really the most private way is to run it on your local device, run it on your
0:42:56
laptop, run it on your phone. But these models are so large. And to get the true power out of them,
0:43:02
you have to have not only one GPU that’s really large, you have to have multiple GPUs that are
0:43:08
running on cloud servers that are chained together to be able to run the full model. And none of us
0:43:14
have that in our house. And we wouldn’t want to have that in our house because it’s super expensive.
0:43:17
It’s extremely loud. It has high power requirements. You have to get an electrician in
0:43:22
to like put new wiring into a room just for you to run that.
0:43:27
And so if we run local AI,
0:43:29
we’re never going to get that kind of power out of the model
0:43:31
that we are able to download and run on our device.
0:43:33
So we’re trying to pull in the privacy that you have at home
0:43:38
running local AI and like bring the cloud to you into your house
0:43:42
and doing that in the best way possible.
0:43:45
So that’s why you got that, you know, that prompt and that experience
0:43:48
is that we are really just trying to bring this large server into your house and then
0:43:55
just kind of get out of the way and let you talk to it from there.
0:43:58
Well, and it’s, oh, what a cool conversation. I didn’t mind that the response was, it was
0:44:05
like oh I was built by Alibaba and my name is whatever I didn mind that at all um what was what what i liked was actually learning that so okay well that interesting i don mind if it built by
0:44:17
them um my then next question was like okay well what happens to the information that i put in and
0:44:22
that’s we can go there in a sec i guess but um shout out to mike hardcastle mike’s been on the
0:44:28
podcast in the past and we um we were having a conversation recently on nostra about uh you know
0:44:35
building your own AI because I’m like oh you know I’d love to build it’s like I really want to and
0:44:41
there’s a few years ago there’s guys that were creators content creators that and there’s even
0:44:46
a book called this I think um your second brain something along those lines it’s like okay I need
0:44:52
a way to catch ideas I need a way to curate tasks I need a way to organize my calendar and they were
0:44:59
use like a software like notion or something and they were building these these big systems where
0:45:05
like you know every single highlight in a kindle would end up in you know somewhere somewhere it
0:45:10
was it was just tracking all of the activity that you did on a weekly basis um i never built it and
0:45:18
i wasn’t disciplined enough to actually use it properly and i fell off all the different like
0:45:22
processes i tried to build for myself um but with ai you could do it much more effectively it’s like
0:45:29
okay, well, this is the image I’m working towards.
0:45:31
These are all the parameters I’m looking for.
0:45:33
For example, in an investment decision,
0:45:34
you have an idea, I wanna start this business,
0:45:36
or I wanna build this product.
0:45:38
Okay, into your AI, this is the idea.
0:45:41
How does it match up to the self image I’m working towards?
0:45:44
And there’s just the speed of iteration
0:45:47
for good idea, bad idea is now 10 times faster
0:45:49
than what it used to be, for example.
0:45:51
Okay, but I don’t really wanna share that
0:45:53
with someone that I don’t know.
0:45:55
And so where’s that information gone?
0:45:59
yeah i mean anything resonate from that then mark because it’s like yeah definitely there’s so many
0:46:04
directions you can go in right yeah the second brain concept really resonates with me a lot
0:46:09
one of my friends introduced that concept to me a little while ago and i i like it a lot and
0:46:16
the piece that’s missing as we come into the ai world is having that ai brain that helps you
0:46:21
sift through all this data that you’re collecting if you truly want to live the second brain lifestyle
0:46:26
like you said every piece of data that you interact with as much as possible is being
0:46:30
captured into some repository somewhere on your device and then synchronized to your devices
0:46:36
somehow and who touches that data along the way as it’s being synchronized that’s something you’re
0:46:41
always wondering but then also if you want to start to get insights into it right because
0:46:45
ultimately that’s why you gather this data is to understand understand more about yourself
0:46:50
understand how you’re achieving your goals how can you set new goals to help you like see something
0:46:56
beyond yourself that you didn’t know that you could become. And AI has the ability to help you
0:47:01
out with that. But really the AIs that are powerful enough that most people interact with
0:47:07
are ChatGPT or Claude or Grok and now Gemini with Google. And it’s like, okay, you spent all this
0:47:14
time building up data security around this data you’re collecting. And then for the last mile,
0:47:19
for the part where you actually try to talk with an AI, you’re just giving it all away in that last
0:47:24
moment. And so we’ve built Maple to actually be that brain for the second brain concept where that
0:47:31
AI brain, you can, right now it’s like a manual process where you copy and paste stuff into Maple
0:47:36
and say, okay, I’m having a chat about this right now. I want to go down this topic, go down this
0:47:40
rabbit hole. But Maple also has an API on it. And so developers who want to can take their software
0:47:48
and they can interact with Maple programmatically through the API.
0:47:53
And we structure the API to talk the same language that OpenAI talks.
0:47:58
And so if there are apps out there that know how to talk to OpenAI,
0:48:01
well, with just like two lines of code,
0:48:04
they can switch over to using Maple’s API.
0:48:05
And now all of that data that is going to an AI provider is now encrypted.
0:48:11
It’s private.
0:48:12
It’s not going to OpenAI servers anymore.
0:48:14
it’s going to this encrypted backend that maple is running on and is end-to-end encrypted and so
0:48:21
you just get infinite better data privacy immediately but you still have these ai smarts
0:48:27
you have this ai brain that’s able to interact with your data awesome yeah because the the
0:48:32
the economics of the business are interesting aren’t they because what you’re pointing out is
0:48:37
that to you could build your llm in your garage and it’s going to cost you a lot of money to build
0:48:43
it might be a pain in the ass to actually operate and manage.
0:48:47
And the results actually might not be that good
0:48:50
because how much information have you actually built into it?
0:48:53
Whereas the sweet spot seems to be outsourcing
0:48:58
that kind of hardware side of the business,
0:49:01
paying a subscription to someone like Maple.
0:49:04
And that’s a really interesting set of kind of economic facts
0:49:08
that I think a good business case.
0:49:10
And for example, a self-custodial lightning wallet, like what you mentioned, you guys with Mutiny were trying to build, but that is niche, niche, niche, niche, niche. Whereas like an everyday AI second brain that’s private, different ballgame entirely in terms of like, oh, okay, well, yeah, there’s a lot more people to sell that to. So how does Maple make money?
0:49:32
yeah so we do monthly subscriptions that’s really our bread and butter um and so we we people can
0:49:40
pay monthly with credit card or we have an annual payment they can pay with bitcoin um we made
0:49:46
bitcoin annual only because it’s very difficult to do reoccurring subscriptions with bitcoin right
0:49:52
now and we don’t want to be chasing people every month and saying hey can you please renew your
0:49:57
bitcoin payment can you send another one whereas credit cards you just kind of set it and then it’s
0:50:02
just on automatic and you can keep using maple and you don’t have to think about the payment
0:50:05
portion of it anymore and that’s really that there’s that friction right getting somebody to
0:50:10
pay you money for something is a friction point and with bitcoin the way that it’s designed which
0:50:16
is amazing is you you have control over your payments i can’t authorize a company to come
0:50:22
into my bitcoin wallet and take money out of it and so that’s that’s by design so yeah that’s
0:50:28
That’s really the way we’ve set it up is Bitcoin payments are an annual payment.
0:50:31
You get a 10% discount for doing that, or you can pay a month to month credit card.
0:50:37
And then at that point, we don’t really have any other financial incentives.
0:50:42
We don’t monetize your data in some way.
0:50:44
And that’s kind of this world that we’ve lived in for the last 20 years is every single cloud
0:50:49
service that we use, it’s either given to us for free or it’s given to us at a discount.
0:50:54
We just don’t realize it’s a discount, right?
0:50:56
Maybe we’re paying a monthly subscription service for something, but what we don’t realize is that that subscription price has been lowered because the company is actually taking all that data that we’ve sent them and finding other ways to make money, whether it’s selling advertising or improving their product or selling data share agreements with governments.
0:51:16
That is being monetized in another way.
0:51:19
with maple we’re going back to the old school way when email first came out people were selling
0:51:25
email services where i would sign up i would get an email address and i would pay you five dollars
0:51:30
a month ten dollars a month twenty dollars a month however much i needed to pay for you to
0:51:34
run my email for me and that was it they didn’t do anything else at the time they hadn’t invented
0:51:39
all these fancy monetization models yet and we’re going back to that when you sign up for maple and
0:51:44
you pay us 20 bucks a month to use the pro account. That’s it. Like we give you a service.
0:51:50
It’s always on. You can do it on your phone. You can do it on your computer. We synchronize it
0:51:54
between the devices and we don’t have access to your data. So we can’t monetize it. We don’t even
0:52:00
want to monetize it, but we can’t because it’s not there for us to look at. So that’s, that’s
0:52:06
the business model for Maple. We have personal accounts you can do. We have like the pro account.
0:52:11
We have a max account for people who just need a lot more usage.
0:52:15
And then we have a team account for small businesses, working professionals who have people that they want to work with together.
0:52:22
So we have quite a few business accounts on there.
0:52:25
These are people who are at legal offices, lawyers or accountants, financial professionals.
0:52:30
We have therapists, medical professionals who are using it.
0:52:33
People who have a lot of really confidential information that they deal with in the real world.
0:52:39
and they simply cannot upload it to chat GPT.
0:52:43
It would break their agreements with their clients.
0:52:47
And so we provide them a tool that allows them
0:52:49
to maintain that confidentiality with their client,
0:52:52
but also get the wonderful technology
0:52:56
and the productivity that can come
0:52:58
from using something like AI.
0:53:01
Mark, we’re bumping up on it now.
0:53:03
So I’ve got one more question for you.
0:53:04
And this is a truly selfish one,
0:53:06
just as a Maple user.
0:53:07
is so when i’ve got my history of conversations is are each conversation into interplaying with
0:53:16
each other so does maple understand if i start a new conversation everything else i’ve said to
0:53:21
previous conversations are added into the new one if that makes sense or not because it’s
0:53:27
interesting how they build on each other yeah at the time no um each each one is independent of
0:53:34
itself. That is one of our big main focus points right now of 2026 is we want to bring a stronger
0:53:43
sense of memory into Maple. And so there will start to be this interplay between them. We’re
0:53:49
trying to do it in a way that kind of preserves what people expect. Some people want to have an
0:53:55
island. Each chat is its own thing and doesn’t know about the other. Other people want to have
0:54:00
them all know about each other so we are going to start building building different concepts within
0:54:05
the app where you can say okay i’m chatting here and they’re all going to know about each other
0:54:09
or this is one that i just want to be totally by itself i don’t want it to know about anything else
0:54:13
um we’re starting to play with that but we are going to we’re bringing memory into maple and
0:54:18
it’s going to become even even smarter and more intelligent about who you are and you don’t have
0:54:23
to start from zero start from scratch every single time cool yeah it just you notice how different
0:54:29
products behave differently and that was just something that I’ve noticed with some of the
0:54:33
others that I’ve used it does straight away and said well actually is that useful so in some ways
0:54:39
it’s just if I know how it works I can use it how it prefers if that makes sense so I’m actually
0:54:44
agnostic as to which I prefer I think well Mark listen so an hour has gone by it’s been awesome
0:54:50
to to speak with you and thank you for sharing everything about your journey and I’m I’m very
0:54:54
excited for you i think maple’s it’s it’s solving a problem that’s very obvious one but also like i
0:55:02
don’t see anyone else doing it so in the the current ai hype cycle like what a brilliant
0:55:09
space to be batting in because it’s like well this is our very very clear proposition and please sign
0:55:15
up which i’ve done and i’ve loved it so well done on the progress and um is there anything you’d like
0:55:20
to close out with that you haven’t covered or equally how can people reach out if they want
0:55:24
to get in touch? Sure. Well, I have to say the website, you know, go to try maple.ai, go, go
0:55:30
sign up for a free account. You don’t have to pay to use it. You can sign up for free and use it
0:55:33
every single day if you want to. Um, but, uh, I’ll kind of bookend the conversation back to digital
0:55:39
censorship, um, real briefly. Um, I, I wrote a long form piece about this. Uh, I call it
0:55:45
subconscious censorship, but what we are doing as we talk to chat GPT and some of these other
0:55:51
products is we’re creating this vulnerability for ourselves where we’re giving them all this
0:55:56
really rich information about us. And it’s not just like things that we are interested in.
0:56:02
You know, that’s how the old internet was. We would just say, oh, I like these movies. I like
0:56:05
this music. Now we are giving them over our entire thought process. This is how I, Mark,
0:56:12
think in my daily life and how I reason through things. And we’re creating this ability for other
0:56:18
companies to insert things into the the response we get from the ai and they could insert things or
0:56:26
they could remove things but they start to learn the way that we think and so they can start to
0:56:31
kind of move us in a certain direction if you will nudge us in a certain direction through the output
0:56:38
that we get from the ai and we won’t really be able to perceive it and i’m not saying that they’re
0:56:42
doing this but this is a very real vulnerability that we’re kind of setting ourselves up for
0:56:46
and maple is trying to to solve for this as well aside from just giving people privacy we want to
0:56:53
give people a room where they are free to think they can chat with an ai and know that nobody is
0:56:58
tampering with with the output that i’m getting um it’s just me and i’m able to to kind of be free
0:57:05
to to talk how i want to and to reason how i want to and really just kind of think the way that i
0:57:10
think um so if you would love to check it out it’s called the free thought manifesto the website is
0:57:15
aiwithconfidence.org. That’s where I’m starting to post some long form writings there. It’s also
0:57:21
on Nostra. You can just go to my Nostra account, marks at primal.net. And you can see I posted
0:57:28
there as a long form article on Nostra as well. But yeah, follow me on X at Mark Suman,
0:57:34
marks at primal.net, and then go check out trimaple.ai. Awesome. Well, thank you so much
0:57:41
for joining today a closing thought that just resonates so strongly as you talk through the
0:57:46
the point of privacy just going back to what you mentioned about the fact that you know you wake up
0:57:51
you brush your teeth the curtains are still closed you walk downstairs you might open the
0:57:55
the the blind at the backyard so you’ve got your backyard open eventually you’ve like had a coffee
0:58:01
and you got the kids dressed you know and you’ve walked out the front door yeah that is a private
0:58:05
start to your day that the world doesn’t need to see that and you haven’t shown it to anyone so
0:58:11
how you behave digitally is is just the same in many ways it’s like an idea which then is a word
0:58:18
that’s then an action and it’s this whole concept of like the freedom of speech being on a spectrum
0:58:24
essentially it’s like okay well on the one end it’s like oh this is police we’ve got to police
0:58:28
this hate speech it’s like well you either believe in letting people say what they want and thinking
0:58:32
what they want or you don’t and so the the the ability to have an ai tool that gives you privacy
0:58:40
incredibly important thing in this world. So I really wish you all the very best building that.
0:58:45
And thank you for your time today, Mark. Thank you. I appreciate it. Nice chatting.
0:58:50
Thank you.