Wild times, brother. Great to be here with you. Great to be on again. Thanks.
This is take two. And as I was saying in take one, I've been asked to intro my guests better for
the new TFTC freaks who have joined us. We're blowing up. The show's growing. It's incredible.
Any of you new audience members out there, I'm sitting down with Mark Zuman, co-founder
of Maple AI. He's at the cutting edge of AI privacy, which is a topic that I think is becoming
more and more on top of people's minds to begin to experiment with the tools that are hitting the
market, particularly the agentic tools. And they're realizing how much access they're giving over to
some of these large language models, particularly provided by OpenAI Anthropic and Google. And so
So I figured it'd be a good day, a good week to get an update from Mark
because I think we are, I don't want to say we're at this inflection point
where we're going to go one direction or the other.
I'm actually pretty optimistic because of individuals like yourself
and the team over there at Maple with you and Anthony, excuse me,
building your tools.
So maybe an update for the freaks who didn't catch our last,
or who did catch our last episode where we talked about what you guys are building at Maple and how
you're incorporating it. What has happened in the last six, eight months since we last met?
Yeah, sure. Thanks for the intro. Man, it's not what's happened in the last six months. It's like
what's happened in the last six days. Everything is changing so fast. It feels like a whirlwind
trying to keep up with the AI news. So I guess for your listeners, if they feel overwhelmed by this,
Like I share your sentiment.
A lot has happened.
I mean, Maple has grown a ton.
We've added in live web search.
So now it's not stuck in the past, but it can grab current information.
But it doesn't do it like in a private way where we use the Brave Search API.
We protect your identity, all that kind of stuff to go out to the web and fetch information for you.
And then back in like December timeframe, we really started leaning into this agentic AI stuff and wanted to put an agent inside of Maple and do some kind of chat assistant within Maple.
And then at the same time, obviously other people had the same idea.
So this whole open claw thing jumped on the scene.
We'd been looking at it and then they came on.
And so we're like, okay, this kind of validated this idea.
People really want to have some kind of AI that's like constantly working for them.
So we're building that in the Maple, not OpenClaw itself, but similar functionality.
What else do we have?
We've got really powerful reasoning models now.
So Kimi K 2.5 is on par with a lot of these anthropic, a lot of these open AI models.
So you get really good intelligence.
You get really good agentic coding, math computation.
There's all sorts of great things that are in there now.
And the open source models have caught up.
It's indisputable now.
They are as good as the frontier labs.
And so we need to stop thinking that using open source models is like a subpar experience.
We just need to build better tooling around them to make them even more competitive.
I think that's key. The tooling is somebody who's been using OpenClaw for a while now in AI terms.
It's insane how beneficial it has been to our workflows and extending my productivity here.
but I'm always acutely aware of what's happening behind the scenes.
I've got mine living in a VPS.
It doesn't have control of my computer or anything.
And that is for a reason.
It's because I know that the sort of walled garden model providers
have access to everything I'm doing when I'm pinging their models.
And so I think you are far better suited than I am to basically explain what's happening
because I think a lot of people are out there experimenting with OpenClaw,
connecting it to Baud's API, OpenAI's API, and just running wild.
What is happening when people are doing this and running wild behind the scenes?
Yeah, you're effectively giving some kind of computer software full access to your computer.
You're giving some app access to everything on your computer to run programs, to read files.
It really is like a virus.
Back in the 90s and 2000s, we were like so nervous about viruses on our computers that we would install McAfee antivirus software or Norton or whatever they were to block these kinds of things.
And now we're like welcoming them onto our system.
And but they behave the same way.
But this time we are, you know, inviting it in and we feel like we can control it.
So I would just say, like, remember that as you're installing the stuff, you're giving it like full root access to everything that you have.
which I commend you for running it in a VPS.
That's a smart way to do it
or run on a totally different computer,
one that is locked away from everything.
But if you're going to put that computer
on your home network,
on your same Wi-Fi
as everything else that you're doing,
you might have a bad time.
So I would just be careful
because this thing could start
scanning the network,
looking for ports that are open,
start walking around quietly behind the scenes
and you won't quite know what's going on.
I have this meme constantly running in my mind.
I don't know if you've seen the meme of The Simpsons where Mr. Burns and Smithers are like walking into this lockdown compound and he has to like scan his eyeballs to open up one door.
And then he has to do his handprint to open up another door.
And it's like this really secure thing.
And when they get to the final room, there is this like back door that's just like blown open.
And this cat or dog comes wandering into the final enclave where he gets into.
And it's like that's how that's what everybody's doing with their with their open claw.
They're getting a separate computer.
They're locking it down with this.
or doing file encryption and everything.
And then the final step is they're inviting Anthropic or OpenAI
to slurp up all of their data.
So they're just kind of leaving this whole open, this backdoor open,
if you will, to all of that.
So just know what you're getting into kind of thing
and be willing to only share that information
that you want to have shared with those companies.
So I assume that most people that are doing this
or relative novices aren't aware of this.
And if you weren't aware before, you are aware now after Mark's incredible explanation.
But what are you seeing in terms of the people who are not novices, like longtime software engineers, system admins and programmers in terms of their recognition of that backdoor they just described?
And do you think they are worried about it?
Do you think it's OK?
They think it's a necessary evil.
like is there a sense amongst senior software engineers that there there needs to be a more
secure setup yeah well well one i don't want this to be total doom or anything because uh this is
like really fun to play with too i'm sure you've been having fun open claw i think you've mentioned
that you stay up late at night a lot playing with it and i definitely do too um i know a lot of
people are so there's there's tons of fun things to do it really reminds me of the early days of
the internet when we were first discovering email and discovering, you know, the worldwide
web and geo cities and being able to do your own HTML, like it's super cool stuff.
So I think that people should definitely play around with it.
As far as, you know, the seasoned veterans that are playing with this, people who are
like entrenched in technology, I feel like they put up good guardrails and they try to
put up good walls and say, okay, this is, this is the area where I know that anything
I say in here could end up getting leaked onto the internet at some point. So they use it
appropriately that way. But then most of the really serious people I talk to, they also have
some kind of private place that they talk about stuff, whether that's Maple or a local AI.
They have some place where they're like, okay, I'm going to separate these two worlds and I'm
going to make sure that I'm protected over here. And anything I say over here, I don't want it to
end up online or end up getting sent to the government or something. So yeah, I don't know
that some people feel like it's a foregone conclusion. I definitely hear from people like,
oh, privacy, it was gone a long time ago. So we don't even need to have that fight anymore.
But given the amount of sales of Mac minis that has happened in the last month, I think a lot of
people, a lot of like normie type people are realizing that privacy is something they still
care about and that they want to try and preserve. Yeah, completely agree. And bringing this back to
tooling, like how far away do you think we are from feature parity for the tooling around
more private ways of interacting with these models like Maple?
Yeah, this is one spot where the open source AI is still trying to catch up. And that is
I mean, there's a software that they all run called VLM and the VLM software, for better or for worse, you know, has to try and handle every single open model out there.
And so it doesn't do any single model really well.
And the reason why Anthropic and OpenAI are able to operate so well and be so effective is that they write all sorts of proprietary harness software, middleware that's in between you and AI and can just like do really good system prompting, really good tool calling and all of these things.
and the open source AI, they need better support there.
So for example, if we wanted to make Maple the primary LLM provider inside of OpenClaw,
there are certain limitations right now with the tool calling where OpenClaw will say,
all right, let me spin up a subagent and do this thing.
Sometimes it'll work really well.
Other times it'll just kind of like go off and never come back.
And so that's a limitation right now that we're running into.
And it's not just us. It's a whole bunch of open source model providers that are running into that problem.
Now, if you look at someone like Kimmy, who creates open source AI, they have their own hosted version and they build all of this really nice middleware that makes it work better.
But now you're trusting their hosted solution.
They're a Chinese company, very likely tied in with CCP just because of what we know of how business runs in China.
it's really difficult to be in business without also having a connection with CCP for data sharing.
So that's just something to take into consideration
and something that we need to be building better in the open community.
Is there a clear light at the end of the tunnel for building that?
Or are Anthropic, OpenAI, Kimmy, or is that sort of middleware proprietary
and it's hard to reverse engineer.
No, I think it's classic tales all the time
with open source development
where it moves a little bit slower
in some regards, right?
In some ways, open source moves really fast
because you have a million people
tinkering with it and throwing it out there.
But with something as complex
as hosting software for open models and LLMs,
everybody's kind of centralized on this one project.
And so now we're at a bit of a bottleneck
trying to get that project to make improvements
and move forward.
So it's just going slow, but I think with time it'll improve and maybe someone will come out with an open source competitor to that project and we'll see some innovation there.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel.
I think improvements will be made.
It's just going to take a little more time to get them through.
How do you think the next six months play out with this race between both source and open source models?
I think we continue to have new models from open source community that push the boundaries.
And we'll keep seeing this leapfrogging.
Everybody releases.
And then the next week, the competitors come out with something.
And the next week, the open source competitors come out with something.
So we all benefit from that.
I do love that timeline that we're on.
Six months from now, I think there will be other OpenClaw-type projects.
I don't think that OpenClaw necessarily is the final agentic project out there,
especially now that it got scooped up by open AI, um, that, that has tainted it for some people.
Um, so yeah, I think that we're going to see a lot of just really fun innovation out there
and a lot more people will be running agents, having them read their email, having them
rank, read their calendar, booking appointments for them, um, shopping for groceries for them,
like all sorts of really cool things that, that, that we've been promised in this future of AI.
I think in six months, those are going to become tangible realities for a lot of people.
Yeah, I can feel it. I can feel it. What are your thoughts? I mean, I was tweeting this out
yesterday. If you look at the sort of public spat between the Department of War and Anthropic right
now in the idea of AI safety, I think it's pretty clear to anybody paying attention that Anthropic
is, I don't know if they're feigning
worry about it or if they're legitimately
wary, but I think the end product of
them getting their way could be bad
for open source models particularly.
But it seems like the Department of War
and Anthropic are in a public spat, but to me it seems like a Hegelian
dialectic problem
reaction solution thing where Anthropic is like hey I don want you to run wild with this We more guardrails And I could definitely see the government saying OK we give you guardrails We create these regulations that force them onto the market
Do you worry about that at all?
Yeah, I mean, government regulation moats to drive out competitors like that's that's a classic dark pattern that happens in business.
when really, if we want to have true, safe AI, if you will, or what's the for responsible AI is a
phrase people love to use, right? If we want to have truly responsible AI, it should be trained
in the open with open data, open weights, we should be able to see everything so that we can
we can examine it. And that's just not happening right now. So Anthropic wants to say,
hey, we're going to make it safe for everybody. But the government will like bless us and we'll
be the one safe place to do that.
That's just not good for anyone because now we're all depending on this closed
company, this closed source, and depending on the government to be
the auditor of safety.
And I don't want the Department of War, Department of Defense of the U.S.
government to be the one that's telling me which AI is safe for me to use.
That just seems like we're all going to have a bad time.
Yeah.
I mean, the progression of events over the last couple weeks has been
quite interesting for the tinfoil hat
Marty Jones and me
what do you see in there?
when you pair the sort of back and forth between
Hegseth and Dario in Anthropic
and the Department of War with the announcement of this distillation attack
that Anthropic was subjected to where the open source models were
Anthropic is claiming they were using
Anthropics models to train themselves
and they're claiming some sort of
copyright infringement
or an attack on their
proprietary data
in Alpha.
That
seemed like, again, going back to the problem
reaction solution, I think Anthropics and the
Department of War, like, look, we're getting attacked by these
Chinese open source models.
We need to lock down.
And
it's especially
rich when you consider the fact that it's pretty well known that Anthropic
used some of those same tactics to get their model
into the state that it currently is in.
Yeah. I mean, they all trained on public data, copyrighted data.
I mean, it's obvious that they did. And if you talk to any copyright holder out there,
they have not been compensated for all that training that happened.
And so it's very rich for these companies now to say, hey, they're training on trying to steal all of our stuff.
I mean, maybe this will be like a foot in my mouth moment.
But I also like I don't know how a partnership between Anthropic and the Department of Defense Department of War stops these open source models from continuing to progress and develop.
it's it would take it would take a really big card for them to play when it comes to like being
authoritative over the technology that we use within the United States and I don't know that
they necessarily would want to play that card but they would really have to lock things down
and try and control what American citizens are using that's that's a that's a difficult road to
go down. Yeah, well, then you pair it too. If they push for the digital ID, aid verification,
just for children, they'll probably come the models as well. The money that these agents use,
they're going to try and do ID verification there. I mean, it already happens to an extent
with stable coins just on the edges. They can see them trying to throw cold water on
the proliferation of more sovereign AI tools moving forward. Yeah, I mean, you have Stripe
working with open AI, right?
They publish their payments thing.
I think it's like APA or something.
And then you have Stripe
also working with Coinbase on X402.
You've got USDC stable coin
with Circle mixed in there.
So there's all sorts of like choke points
and regulation and censorship opportunities
for someone who wants to control
how these agents pay each other
and really interact on the web.
Yeah, I think I agree with you though.
I don't think they'll be able to
contain these things and if they do, they'll breach containment.
And yeah, as I was mentioning before, we had record, I discussed
a lot of similar topics, not a ton of overlap yet, but I had Kali on.
We recorded earlier this morning and it actually made me incredibly bullish
because he's incredibly optimistic and I think mainly because of the agency.
these tools give the many to fight against the few centralized entities.
And so basically giving a call to action to,
hey, if you care about this stuff and you think you can be beneficial
and contribute to the efforts of open source projects
that will preserve your sovereignty and privacy and freedom
as we quickly and acceleratingly transition into this AI-driven world,
you can contribute.
yeah well and we talk a lot about privacy but privacy really is upstream from freedom right
like you have to have privacy first in order to have freedom and so i view us as being a freedom
oriented ai we're trying to give people an alternative to the system that's being built
the system that is government partnerships and moats that are meant to control who has access
and the open source community is like no we've got another option for you and we need more people
building this space. You know, we need more people doing this because if we want to have
these AIs out there that are able to fight against this closed system that is likely to be thrust
upon us or attempted to be thrust upon us, we can have like this whole wonderful world outside of
that wall that operates and it's difficult for them to shut down. And the way that we control it
is we put it all out in the open. We let everybody inspect it. We let everybody build tools, build
build the good AI tools. I can fight against the bad AI tools and we can have it out, out in the
open and just disinfect everything by, by adding some sunlight to it all. And that's, that's where
I see the open source community really having a lot of power in the struggle right now where,
where a lot of people are worried about AI, you know, they're worried about what it's going to do
to their jobs or worried about what it's going to do to, to how they think, to education, you name
people are worried about AI in pretty much every space that you go to.
Yeah. I mean, shifting gears to building with this stuff.
I think we talked about this last time you were on, but again,
with how quickly things are developing, I think it
does deserve a check-in, like building out Maple
using the AI tools. How's that been in recent months?
Building Maple itself, we still use a combination of
things like Claude as well as Maple. We build out, we build open source software. So we don't mind
that like our stuff is going to Anthropic because it's ending up on GitHub and everybody's
computers anyways. But we also use Maple a lot for our development. So we've got the Maple API,
the Maple proxy. We've put a lot of work into making it work with things like open code. So if
you don't want to run Claude code, you want to run something that's more freedom oriented, you can
run open code and you can have open code talking to maple on the back end so now everything you do
there is is encrypted um and so i actually use open code with maple to do a lot of my development
work for maple itself um some of it that i do is is not just writing the code but actually use it
to help me come up with feature specs like you know as a product manager type role where it's
like okay i want to work on this really big feature within maple for example we're adding
we're going to add projects into maple a lot of people want projects and the ability to organize
things into folders. So I can totally vibe with open code, with Maple, with these open source
models and help me come up with this very lengthy, very detailed feature specification
that I can then hand over to a coding agent to build and get out there inside of Maple.
But that whole thought process and ideation, you know, I like doing it in a way that is a little
more private and not just giving it all over to Anthropic. That's just one example. But then
the proxy itself has been super useful when I go to visit companies or organizations and do
AI trainings with them. We can vibe code really cool, powerful tools for them right there on the
spot that are powered by Maple in the backend. I posted this online last week, but I was able to
build two tools really quickly just by texting over Signal with my open claw that was running
Maple in the background. And I was able to build a tool that did translation. So if you are like an
activist organization or a non-profit and you want to publish some kind of thing and have it
go out in multiple languages then you just paste this into my tool it runs it to maple in the back
end it comes up with 20 different language translations or however many you need within
a few seconds um and these are just like really small tools but things that you can run locally
you don't have to send all of your stuff to to other companies you can just run it locally and
then have maple be the the brain behind it um so yeah there's a lot of really cool powerful things
that people are building with something like the Maple Proxy.
It's all there. It's all possible.
While you're talking about the Maple Proxy and
basically talking to it via signal, I think that's one thing that I've come to
realize are developing a stronger belief
in the idea that just the form factor of how
we interact with the internet or apps is completely changing in front
of us. Like my whole user experience of interacting with my computer has changed dramatically.
Where before, two months ago, I was using voice to text, but seldomly, but now anytime
I need to get something done, it's like voice to text to my agent to go get stuff done.
And then you think about what these agents can do in terms of just building stuff for
you quickly, whether it's decks, dashboards, visualizations.
And then you think about are apps even going to exist in the future?
And I know we've talked about this behind the scenes, but this idea that the form factor
is if agents are going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting for things you want to get done,
it's going to be somewhat invisible in the back end.
These agents are just going to be speaking with each other and speaking with services
via API calls.
Are you a believer in that?
No, definitely. I do think there will still be software in the world. Us as human beings, we still want to rely on other people to figure things out for us and do the heavy lifting, do the maintenance, do the security auditing, that kind of stuff. So there will exist that market for that. But a lot of the small things that we depend on right now are just going to be agents figuring it out on their own. And it's going to be one offs, right? They're going to spin something up. They're going to go talk to their agent, they're going to make it happen. And then they'll wind it down. They won't, they won't need it anymore.
won't need to persist. And if it does, it'll just persist within the agent and it'll be like,
all right, here's my own little set of tools that I built myself. And I'm going to use it to talk to
these other agents out there. And maybe there will be some kind of sharing between them where
they're like, okay, here are these skills that I have that I'm going to share with you, kind of
like we see with OpenClaw. But they're going to be like spun up by the agents themselves.
Do you want to hear like my three to five year projection of like where I think some things are
going. Um, no, I don't think anybody wants to hear that. Yeah. All right. Um, I've been working
a lot right now on, on two-way voice communication. So I want to make maple better at two-way voice.
I want to take it on walks with me and really just be able to talk to it. I want to be in the car.
Uh, you know, I have car play up on the screen. I want to be able to like interact with maple and
just have a two-way conversation with it there. Um, I think three to five years from now, most
people are interacting with AI just through some kind of hardware device that they're wearing. Um,
I know that you and Matt have talked about this and I think spot on there, but it's going to be something like AirPods or some kind of pendant you're wearing, glasses, something that has microphones, potentially cameras.
That's how we're going to just be like interacting with the Internet now and getting things done with some combination on our phone or something we can look at.
the thing that I want Maple to be ready for, and this is what I want us building toward,
is that that future right there is likely going to be proprietary hardware. It's going to be
things running on these devices that we cannot inspect the code. We don't know what they're
doing. We don't know what kind of directives they have in them or guardrails or gates that they've
put up to prevent you from doing certain things with them. So I would love for Maple to be in a
spot where we can support, we can create, we can be embedded on devices that have open source
firmware with reproducible builds that you can have your own headphones and you can be doing
stuff and you know, okay, when the microphone's on, I know first off when it turns on. And then
when it is on, I know where it's going. I know what it's recording. I know how the data is being
handled, whether that's through my own infrastructure or through some kind of encrypted backend,
rather than this kind of quasi surveillance state
that's going to continue to be embedded in our lives
where everybody wearing AI tech that constantly listening and watching everything we do What the landscape of that hardware and firmware look like
Right now, we have a lot of big companies that have talked about building things,
but we don't have any concrete plans on what they're building.
I mean, if you look at what's publicly available, right?
Meta has their glasses.
Apple did the Vision Pro, which is very hefty and heavy.
I don't think that's where they land.
And then OpenAI is openly talking about building their own device.
They've been very public about that.
All three of those companies are proprietary and locked down.
And I don't see them saying, hey, we're going to open source our firmware and we're going to provide reproducible builds so people can cryptographically prove that this is the code that's running on your device without a backdoor inside of it.
I'm not seeing anybody. Well, I shouldn't say not see anybody. There are a couple of companies that
are building open things. One of them that's really interested is called Pebble. I don't know
if you remember the Pebble watch that kind of launched the whole smartwatch revolution.
They've come back and they're building open source hardware, both watches, and they've got this ring
that they're working on. To me, that's really compelling. And I'd like to dig into there more
and see if Maple can be something that can partner with the device maker like that.
I'm also bullish on Daylight Computer.
I think that there's a lot of interesting things
that could be done there
with open firmwares and
with Maple and other
private AI
solutions, if you will.
I think there will be others that pop up too, but
we need more people building out in the open.
Yeah.
Yeah, Star9
caught up in battle.
The progress they're making
is imperative.
Are you optimistic
right now? Oh, yeah, totally. I am. I mean, I have to sell Maple to people and convince them
that they shouldn't give all their data over to the big AI companies. So I often come across as
negative and a doomer. But man, I'm having so much fun. This is a blast. These AI agents
building with AI. I mean, I know you've expressed this opinion, but it's very empowering,
especially I come from a software engineering background but people who did not know how to
write code now they're able to use these tools to program and do things that they couldn't do in the
past where they had to depend on other people and it's like your ideas are no longer the limit it's
just which ideas you want to pursue which kind of like you know sweat do you want to pour into
something and try to make an idea really take off and and what kind of market can you validate to
to build something for that. Um, so I'm super optimistic about that. I think that this is a
really fun time, a really cool time to be alive. Um, pairing that with like the difficult transition
we might go through with, with people getting laid off and, and job markets having to transition
to some kind of new industry that we don't know about yet. Um, I I'm constantly like at odds with
that. But I am optimistic that, that we find a way through this. What do you mean by you're
at odds with it? I'm at odds with the fact that like, I'm really like excited and having fun
building AI, even though I know that there are people who are out there are super worried that
they're going to lose their job because of the AI. And I've already, I've already talked to people,
even, even family members and friends who have run into this problem. And it's, it's hard for
me to be smiling and be like, yeah, isn't this awesome? I'm sorry you lost your job. So
So I mean, my message is like, learn how to use these tools.
And it's not only going to make you better at your job, but it'll help you team up with
other people.
If a bunch of really smart people lost their jobs, they can team up together, form a new
company and hire people who can come along.
And I think we just birthed thousands of and millions of new companies that are smaller,
more nimble, more local.
right um i was chatting with something somebody yesterday who kind of framed it this way i thought
it was cool that you have all like your local ranchers and your local farmers in your community
you go to the farmer's market to buy stuff from them well with these ai tools uh we possibly
come up with with all these local technology companies so no longer are we having to look
to silicon valley to build all of our tech that we all run on some cloud infrastructure but instead
It's like in your town, you have your local CRM provider who's building stuff that's just great for you.
And then if you need new features that they don't have that another town over has, they just use AI to go vibe code that feature into the CRM that you're using in your local town.
So I think that there's a lot of really kind of cool stuff that can come out of it.
And we more decentralized technology down to the local level.
yeah when i asked this question to cali but i'll see you as well because i think
getting different perspectives on this for for the audience it could be beneficial but like what
would your advice be to somebody listening to this who has been apprehensive or um intimidated
to begin playing around with this stuff to to take the first step like what should they do
how should they approach it what should their mindset be
I think it's imperative, excuse me. I think it's imperative that everybody play around with it.
You just need to try it. I know it can be scary. Um, and maybe it feels overhyped. Um, I tend to
be someone who, uh, when something gets hyped up, I ignore it for a while because I don't want to
be caught up in fans. And that's, that's served me pretty well throughout my life. Um, but this one
does not appear to be a fad. Um, so I would just recommend sign up for one of these tools,
pay a monthly subscription because you're going to get the full access to the tool. You're not
just going to get like the, the free access that's limited. And then pick one thing in your life that
you're like, okay, this is something that I do all the time. Maybe AI can help me do it easier.
Um, and just try to try to automate that one thing and automate isn't necessarily like it's
going to keep going for you constantly while, while you're asleep or something. It doesn't
have to be that difficult. Um, just something that you have to write an email you have to write
once a week to a boss or, you know, something that you do at home every day, pick one thing
and see if AI can help you do it better. And I think that'll be your toehold in the scene,
kind of like what these tools are capable of. And then you'll start coming up with more and
more ideas of things that you can do. Yeah. Yeah. Play with it. You'll get obsessed quickly if you
have the aha moment and you are successfully able to achieve one of those tasks. Rather,
it's really crap i knew yeah well and i know that i'm biased here because i sell subscriptions to ai
software but but seriously like if you need to cancel a netflix subscription and sign up and any
one of these ai tools just sign up for one and pay them 20 bucks a month i don't care if it's open ai
i would rather it's maple but but pick one of them and just get off of zero just get started playing
with it um and do it for a month you know just give up netflix for a month i think you can survive
and try out one of these tools and see if it brings any value to your life and I am highly
confident that you will find some kind of value in it and then you can make the decision am I
getting more than $20 a month out of this if you are then keep it and if you need to get some
Netflix going again then do that but but I think you should just get off of zero and get started
for all you Christians out there it is the Lenten season if you haven't given up anything
anything yet. Maybe drop Netflix for the rest of Lent and pick up a Maple subscription. We can
swing around with this. There you go. Back to your voice-to-voice, because I agree. I think that's
the point. I think we're headed towards a Her world. I think Her, I think Spike Jones did a very
good job of visualizing what the world of AI will look like in the form factor, which most people
land on i think voice to voice is where we're going i think my voice to text stepping stone
right now it's just that a stepping stone eventually the voice models will get so responsive
and it'll just be much easier to to correspond with your agent via voice than voice to text or
text to text whatever it may be but you had your you had your uh your agent join the what bitcoin
into podcast completely for the system what happened yeah yeah um yeah so i knew i was coming
on with danny we were going to record on sunday night my time and so i was like oh i've got this
crazy idea can i get my open claw to come on and join the podcast um i haven't heard of anybody
doing this so it's possible that it was a first but i spent saturday with uh with a maple proxy
with open code and just vibe coding the heck out of this thing i think i think i had cloud code in
the mix. I had multiple things going, but I built it and it's, it's this really cool system. So,
uh, I got it so that it could join a Riverside link. Uh, cause that's what he used to record
that episode. It comes on, it's listening to all the audio. It creates like a fake audio connection
to the system. It gets all the audio in and then uses a local whisper model. So it's not,
I'm not sending anything to Anthropic by the way, or, or open AI. It runs a local whisper model that
transcribes all the audio. And then it takes that text and it sends that text to Maple.
and says, hey, is this something that I should respond to?
Or are they just talking back and forth with each other?
And then once it decides, oh, this is something you need to respond to,
then it comes up with a response, sends it back to my agent.
And then it uses another local model.
It's called Supertonic, which is a text-to-speech voice generation model.
Creates the voice, and then it sends it back out through this fake microphone
that it plugged into Riverside.
And then I had it build like a video thing too.
So it had its profile with like these emanating rings coming out as it talked.
And it was able to respond to us.
It didn't work as well in my testing as usually happens when you do, you know, AI or technology stuff.
But it was able to listen to me and Danny.
And then it heard that I was talking to it and came up with a response.
But in the process, I don't know what happened.
Something with the Riverside platform.
It booted Danny off of the call.
So he was gone.
It was just me and my bot, Cooper, on what Bitcoin did.
And then eventually, Cooper got booted off by Riverside, too.
So it was just me for a little bit until Danny could get back on.
First ever AI agent joining a podcast live in Riverside.
I think so.
You know, little alpha here, but I'm working on can I build a show around that?
So I'm drastically improving the software.
and I want to maybe create a show where me and my bot co-host a show and I bring people on
just to talk about how they're building agents and what they're doing with their agents.
Right.
So you're here first.
I would love to join as a guest.
Okay.
I mean, I'm a liar behind you.
I'm not sure if you saw, but this morning was the first ever podcast companion edition
of the Bitcoin Brief newsletter, which I've been building with my agent over the last few weeks.
We've reinvigorated the five-day-a-week newsletter for the Bitcoin Brief and with the help of my agent.
But I've been doing it for the last two weeks.
I was like, hey, maybe there's some people who don't like reading too much and you'd rather listen to this.
And so last night I bi-coded, I guess, for two hours and was able to set up a flow where we'll take the sort of written newsletter, build a script, a newscast-like script about it, hooked up an 11 labs API token and used a – my audio is out there.
I've been recording podcasts for almost nine years now.
So my voice is going to be out there.
I'm thinking about, I need to trademark it, I think.
But I was basically able to spin up like a little podcast companion to the Bitcoin Brief.
And so now every morning when I send out the newsletter, I had the Kron John set up where we'll have the newsletter ready.
And then five minutes after it's ready, it triggers the Bitcoin Brief podcast skill, which then builds the script, does the voice generation, and publishes it.
to our website or RSS feed.
And so did you so did you train your own voice?
Like, does it sound like Marty?
Yeah, that's awesome.
Yeah.
And that technology has been around for like a year and a half now, two years,
and it's only gotten better.
So it's going to continue to improve.
Well, we tried we tried something on YouTube like a year,
year and a half ago with this, and it just sounded too robotic.
But now it's still a little robotic, but it sounds good enough.
But yeah, point being the ability to just do these things
And as a content creator, for lack of a better term, somebody who runs a media company, it's something, as you can imagine, I've been thinking very deeply of since I've been interacting with these agents is how is this medium going to evolve and change.
And I think your idea for an agent co-host for a podcast is one of the examples of things I think many people aren't prepared of.
They may have a visceral negative reaction to it, but I think it's inevitable.
It's going to happen.
Yeah.
Well, and the idea is out there. So if somebody else does it before me, you know,
free ideas are here on the internet. Um, so something that you just, I mean,
with your, with your Bitcoin briefs and making your own podcast, uh,
this is one thing I love about the agents as well is they,
they generate so much documentation They always writing things Um and it can be overwhelming It like you chatting with it and it like okay I saved all those research to a file And sometimes I read those files Sometimes I just don have enough time So I haven summarized the files for me
but where I find it really useful is like, if I'm going to the gym or I know I'm going to be in the
car for a little while, I'll just text my agent and be like, Hey, can you make an audio version
of that file? And this whole podcast harness that I set up, um, for my agent to have a voice and
stuff. And now it's like, Oh yeah, I can do that. No problem. So it'll take that file. It'll create
a 10 minute, 20 minute, however long it needs to a little MP3 file or a wave file and send it over
to me. And then I just listened to it while I'm at the gym. And I've actually thought about like,
to make it even easier, maybe I'll just build my own private RSS feed, um, that I can somehow
authenticate against. And then I can have my agent just be dumping audio files in there.
And I can wake up in the morning and have my own personal podcast of like files that my,
my agent feels are important for me to listen to. And I can just throw them into my podcast app and
just have it kind of mixed in there with everything else. And I can review stuff for work. I can
review, you know, personal things that I'm researching and, uh, it just, it, it allows
it to like flow into my, my productivity workflow much easier. Yeah. How, how much more productive
has this made you particularly with the agent stuff? Yeah. Uh, it's, uh, it's hard to say right
now. I should track the time better because I definitely spent a lot of time building this stuff
up, but then it's made me more productive in other ways. So maybe it's a wash right now,
but all the time spent building up these harnesses are going to pay off on the longterm.
Yeah. Well, that's like, that's been the most fascinating thing. It's like the Jevin paradox
coming into play. It's like, Oh, it's going to take all the jobs and like, you're not going to
have to work anymore. And I found myself working more than I, than I have in years just because
it's so fun to play with. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Well, in case in point, something that saved me
time. So when I recorded with Danny, the audio from my bot actually didn't come through Riverside
very well on his recording. So he texted me. He's like, Hey, we're going to publish this soon.
We're trying to edit your bots. Audio was really crappy. Do you think you could somehow rerecord
that? And I just texted my bot and said, Hey, your audio didn't come through. You saw the
transcripts. Can you just give me a new file? And within 90 seconds, I had two high quality files
of the things that it said on the show. And I just texted him over to Danny. That would have taken me
quite a while to like go find the transcripts and then like use software to generate the audio and
then make sure the mic levels were okay and everything like that saved me probably three
hours of work and it was able to do it in 90 seconds it's insane yeah yeah like last night
i was like ah we had dinner my wife was like ah you're going to bed early tonight i was like yeah
you know what i've had a productive day i'm probably gonna go go to bed at 9 30 tonight
and then at like 8.45 I had the idea for the podcast
and I was up for two hours structuring everything.
Wound up in bed like at 11.30.
Yeah, when that idea hits you're like I just got to do it right now.
Totally.
Let me bring this back to Agentic Payments
considering this is a Bitcoin podcast.
Yeah.
Where do you think this goes?
Obviously I had Caleon.
We were talking about using eCash for Agentic Payments
And obviously it has privacy and open protocol benefits compared to stable coins and whatever Visa, MasterCard and Stripe are working on.
But I think that's one thing that many Bitcoiners myself included naively thought in the beginning.
It's like, oh, the agents will just choose Bitcoin because it's the best money.
It's the digital native internet currency that they'll end up on.
But I think we're still in a state where these agents need a lot of direction and will take direction from the humans controlling them, for lack of a better term.
And they don't have a preference yet for this.
But how do you see this playing out?
Yeah, I think we're running into the same problem that we have in meat space right now, which is if I want to pay with Bitcoin at a local merchant, most of them don't accept it.
And so using Bitcoin as money in real life has become difficult because we have a merchant availability problem.
And we're seeing that online.
Even if agents were told go pay with Bitcoin, there aren't many services that they could go pay for using Bitcoin.
But you can rest assured that given all the deals going on between Stripe and others, that those merchants will accept stablecoin agentic payments.
because that's who's going to start accepting it first.
So it is definitely not a foregone conclusion
that they're going to choose Bitcoin as the best money.
We need to be building it.
We need to be getting online merchants to accept it.
And we need to build tools that make it super easy, right?
They're not going to accept it if it's not convenient.
So we need to build convenient tools that can be plugged in.
ZapRite, if you're listening to this,
hey, ZapRite, we need some good agentic payment functionality
I know that Lightning Labs is working on it.
I know Amboss is working on stuff like that.
Albie has been working on it.
We need everybody kind of working on trying to solve this.
Callie, of course, is working on stuff too.
We need good tooling and then we need merchants to accept it.
There's a third way.
And I think the third way that maybe we run into is if you give your agent a directive to go buy something for you
and it gets blocked out by the traditional system.
I think maybe one example would be ammunition for a gun.
So if you are a competitive shooter
and you compete legally in shooting competitions
and you tell your agent,
watch my inventory of ammo
and go buy more before I have upcoming competitions.
Here's my calendar.
Make sure I'm always stocked up with my favorite ammo.
If for some reason that gets blocked by Stripe
because Stripe has notoriously blocked
those kinds of transactions,
your agent's going to have a bad time but it's going to want to solve things for you
and so it's going to search the internet for an ammo provider that accepts bitcoin and if one
isn't there it's going to come back to you and say hey here are all these providers this is where
i want to buy it but they can't accept it and maybe it reaches out to them for you and maybe
you reach out but eventually there will be someone and i'm pretty sure there are some there's i know
there's at least one ammo provider that's a bitcoiner right next ammunition yes yes so if
they're willing to accept bitcoin then they're going to have all the agents coming to buy ammo
from them and so this is actually one way that i see merchant adoption potentially is when people
get blocked out of the system um and then maybe it grows from there i just don't think we should
depend on that i think we should be more proactive and get ahead of the problem yeah yeah that's the
again to your point the chicken and egg problem of you know i had somebody on the show a couple
weeks ago and they're saying it's a demand supply side problem. It's like, no, the supply
of Bitcoiners are willing to spend Bitcoin is certainly there. And particularly they want the
ease of giving their agent a budget and having it go complete things for them autonomously using
Bitcoin if they need to pay for stuff. It's a demand side problem on the merchants. Like the
merchants need to demand Bitcoin and it's something we've been banging our heads in the Bitcoin space
about for well over a decade now. Merchant adoption has been around since Roger Ver.
I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the interchange fees. I really like what the Money Dev Kit guys
are doing, where you can have your agent accepting and sending payments within five minutes.
Is it a KYC AML onboarding friction that pushes people towards Bitcoin? I don't know.
Yeah, that's something I need to look at more, Money Dev Kit. I'll be honest.
I know, I mean, we've talked to Nick Slaney before, but I need to look into that project more because I think that's really cool.
I like what I hear about it.
I must apologize for being late.
I want to get that on air, on the record.
I was tardy to this recording.
Nobody knows.
Now they do.
But I want to be respectful of your time.
I know you're extremely busy.
What have we discussed that you think is something that the audience should know and care about right now?
I mean, Maple is here to build the freedom future for AI.
So we would love for people to partner with us.
We have actually quite a few organizations and companies that are starting to buy team accounts on Maple, which is super helpful for us because not only are they securing their entire pipeline, but it helps us to bring more stabilization to our platform, more revenue coming in and helps us to build up better tooling for them so that they have better.
It's this chicken and egg problem where it's like we want to have business customers, but we need better business features and vice versa.
so if you are an organization out there if you're like a small firm or a small company even if you
had a large company but you have your own organization within that large company i would
definitely encourage people to go check out try maple.ai and check out our team's plan because
that that's really um i think this is really helpful for the cause in general and then um yeah
we talked about it briefly earlier but we're building out this ai ai assistant within maple
so it's going to be very different from like the ai chat that you have now when you start a new chat
in maple or chat to pd or anywhere you pretty much start with nothing like there's there's no
understanding you open up and it's like a blank slate it doesn't know anything about you and you
have to like tell it everything you want it to know that function will remain within maple but
now we're going to have this very conversational easy to talk to chat bot that is going to give
you short responses just like you and a friend are texting each other and it's going to build up a
really good memory about you over time. So it's going to get to know you and it's going to be
able to kind of help you out more than having to start from zero. And this I think is really where
the privacy is like, is a big win. And this is something that open AI and others don't have.
And that is when you are talking to a tool that you know is end to end encrypted,
you're much more open about things you want to talk about. You're much more willing to give away
information because you know that it's safe and protected. And that is where the most private AI
can now become the most personal AI.
And you can have this AI chatbot assistant,
your own personal assistant, executive assistant,
whatever you want to call it,
that's going to get to know you so well
that it's going to become so much more useful to you
than a tool put out by some big company
that you don't totally trust
because you're not being as open with it.
So that's coming.
We're working on it right now within Maple.
It's going to be here in the weeks and months ahead.
And we're really excited about that.
It's such a massive unlock for the agentic world.
Just having cache context that I can pull from easily.
That's the one thing I've learned with OpenClaw,
is just setting up the memory system and making it so it can pull things from memory rather trivially.
I mean, that's a big problem with just using the models by themselves
as the memory compacts, the context compacts every so often.
Once you hit the token limits, now with these harnesses like OpenClaw,
when you guys are building a Maple, it's going to make it,
the user experience goes up dramatically.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
And then at some point you end up with so many agents, you like kind of forget to check on them.
I kind of run into this where I'll have multiple open codes running at one time in different tabs in the terminal.
And it's like, oh, shoot, I forgot to check on this one.
It's just sitting there waiting for me to confirm something.
There's this cool tool with one of the plebs on Noster.
It's called Wingman.
You can go check it on GitHub.
But it's this cool way to open source code to manage all of your agents.
And you can like do it from your phone.
you can do it from a web browser and you can basically like keep tabs on them and make sure
that they're continuing to move forward on things that you want um so i need to go i need to go look
at that more he uh he just made me aware of it yesterday um so yeah i think there's some some
cool additional tooling to build around these things to make you even more effective yeah and
i guess uh one other piece of advice i would give to people out there don't get too emotionally
attached to your agent. I think getting one-shotted by AI psychosis is a very real possibility
out there. It's a tool to get stuff done for you. It's not Scarlett Johansson and her.
Yep. You can give it a name. You can give it an avatar, but please just remember it's a tool
and don't go further than that.
I mean, hey, free world, you can do what you want,
but I think you're going to have a bad time.
Yeah.
Well, Mark, thank you for doing this again on short notice
and for putting out with my tardiness.
I think, no, no, as I said, every time you come on the show,
I think what you and Anthony are building is extremely important
and I'm very happy to see the progress that you guys have made
and the fact that you guys are on the tip of the spear of...
um this ai revolution briefly on the the side of freedom and privacy as it develops because uh
like we've said many times throughout your appearances on this show i think it could be
very dystopian if we don't do this the right way yeah definitely well thanks for having me on it's
always fun to catch up and chat about this go to trimaple.ai use the code tftc you'll get it'll
you'll get 10% off your subscription.
Go check it out.
Peace and love, freaks.
Awesome, man.