The Case for a New internet | Curtis Yarvin & Jake Brukhman, Urbit

Transcript

imagine you want to make a phone call to an ens address imagine you want to send an email to a Bitcoin address okay how do you do that the you there's a lot of reasons you could want us send an email to a Bitcoin address I'll bet you know everyone in crypto has had a feeling of like oh I see this address out on the blockchain like how can I do a reverse lookup and send an email to him and the answer is you can't but imagine what an IP address would cost if you needed to own an IP address to use the internet and then multiply that by 4 billion hey everyone we all know blockchain is changing the world but who's actually driving it I'm excited to invite you to the sixth edition of Meridian a web 3 conference hosted by the Stellar development foundation in

London from October 15th through 17th get early bird tickets at meridian. stellar.org with code blockworks pod special thanks to Stellar for sponsoring us now let's get into today's episode let's face it building on crowded l1s or expensive l2s is just not going to unlock the next generation of applications super containers offers dedicated customizable app spaces running on supra's 500 ktps layer one blockchain giving you complete control over gas tokens and fees get notified when super containers are ready for Builders at super.com containers hey everyone Jason here

before we dive into today's episode I wanted to tell you about your wallet's new best friend Harpy Harpy guards your digital assets 24/7 blocking sketchy transactions before they even happen but that's not the best part it's totally free secure your wallet for free at Harpy doio ire Link in the description now let's get into today's episode all right everyone welcome back uh to Empire we have Curtis yarvin who Curtis I struggled to write a description for you going into this episode um but you know there's a there's a lot of ways to describe you I think we'll end up pulling out your description over over the course of this

episode you're one of the you're you're the founder of herbit among many other things an author a writer a uh a thinker I would say uh someone who's been um not maybe directly involved in politics but I think a lot of your ideas have led to a lot of the current ideas in today's politics um and then we have Jake Brookman who's been on the show before um founder of coin fund uh one of the longest running maybe the longest running crypto fund one one of them at least so Jake Curtis welcome to the show and and we're urbit investors obviously and urbit investors so yeah so we're talking our books we're talking our books we we're carrying our bags our bags appear as imaginary mes around our shoulders a big shill Fest yeah exactly

so um yeah I mean the context for this episode everyone was I uh I I went down a herbit rabbit hole several months ago from this had met with this guy Brian who runs course one and he was talking to me about herbit and Jake is really into herbit and then Curtis is the founder of herbit and actually left herbit um left herbit walked away after maybe 15 or 16 or 17 years of building it and recently came back I think uh which is we're gonna pull out so I wanted to do this episode so maybe Curtis actually the best place to start I'd love to hear you tell me not about herbit but like just how the internet has evolved because a lot of a lot of crypto companies have been around for I

don't know five six seven years internet's kind of look the same for the last five six seven years but you've been building herbit for 20 plus years so how has the internet evolved over the last 20 or so years well you know we have to go 20 20 I mean you know we have to go back to you know the early internet and in some ways the best way to think of the Internet is just as the blockchain of the 90s right it was this like sort of magical I mean I first used the internet in like 1988 so I remember the late 80s internet which was by far the best internet and I'm only sure I'm sure the mid 80s internet was even better and you know so one of the things that I say about social networks about networks of all

kinds is that the quality of network can only decline compare if you remember Clubhouse in May 2020 to clubhouse in November 2020 right you know you had this rapid quality breed where in May of 2020 you're in a little room um talking with Mark andrees and um by November 2020 you're in a little room with um anti-semitic black nationalists right you know um not to knock anti-semitic black nationalists but it's not really what people come to a network for and so unless you're another anti-semitic black nationalist that's pretty much it right

so so I think that watching that kind of pattern and and on the internet that pattern has a name and we call it Eternal September and so you know in some ways basically urbit is in two very different senses One Technical and one social you know an attempt to kind of restore the lost kingdom of the internet of the 80s which sort of basically compares to uh you know the internet now you know it's like you know Athens except the Persians the Persians sacked it I guess the Persians did sack Athens actually but then it came back but um anyway so if you look at the internet of the

80s there are two essential things that stand out about it one is that you know Computing is completely personal everything is sort of there there shared services but the thing is there's a certain amount of semide decentralization there are no sort of meaning well there's some meaningful centralized structures but there isn't really a centralized power structure um and it's also a very high quality society and so you know it's like I was talking with um a co-worker the other day who unfortunately is my age uh you know I've long felt that aging should be recognized as a disease you know so we have this shared disease so we're like

bonding in this support group and we're talking about uset and uset was the society was the internet is a BAS basically a social framework you know that developed in the mid 80s and kind of flourished until the early 90s the term Eternal September uh it was called September because basically if you were on uset you were like a very nerdy college student or you worked at a technology company and there were not nearly so many technology employees as there are now and so it was a somewhat you know cool little insular Community very nerdy sort of had a default ideology of a kind of light libertarianism that you can of see behind a lot of like you know basically the ideology of like Elon Musk and

probably Mark Zuckerberg is pretty much the standard ideology of the early internet and and it was a very high quality Community anyway I was talking to my old friend about you know what news groups were you on man you know back in the day and he's like well like maybe like wreck bicycl Tech uh you know and I was like well I was sort of more of a talk do bizarre kind of guy but Rec bicycles Tech okay let's compare that to I can't even imagine like a literary group on [ __ ] Reddit but but uh you know let's compare Reddit bicycles to rec bicycles Tech and he's just like these are orders of magnitude of quality this is like a completely different thing this is like you know uh the the you know difference between a truffle

and artificial truffle flavoring I don't know you know more than that you know and and so like basically the one community on the internet that has anything like uset quality it's like kind of midwe uset would be Hacker News right you know Hacker News is just has landed like a good some threads are better than others most like General stuff is stupid but it's landed like a solid like 10 IQ points below uset which is pretty strong and so you know basically we on uset you know me as a teenager then on uset sort of saw this as basically this is obviously the future of humanity us it had decentralized governance it was governed by what was called you know sort of your

uset feed which shared articles in a kind of structured peer-to-peer you know topology was not automatically structured it was manually structured it was actually descended from uset actually predated the internet because it used to use uucp which actually involved computers calling each other on modems and so still in early uset you would see these bang path signatures which were literally the path of modem call hops that your [ __ ] had to take to get to Point point a from to point B from point A right so very Ancient Ancient early mid 80s St Trek nerd kind of you know thing not to say that I would be interesting to compare the Star

Trek discourse actually of the early internet to to uh to that of Reddit but basically the only thing like it now is Reddit really Reddit sucks Reddit has total centralized Administration combined with many local dictators who often EX ceed the authorities and their Zeal and um it has long since you know the really the event that marked this sort of you know change in eras from the old internet ethos which did flow into the Reddit ethos um you know to the present was basically the Reddit um the great Reddit Crackdown where Reddit had these like openly racist groups like Aron town

right you know and like at first it was like in the old Reddit it was considered completely normal that this like insane [ __ ] would be part of Reddit and that would be like protected as like a sacred cow by the Reddit Administration and then sort of the vibe shifted very rapidly in the direction where now people can barely believe that like a serious company would allow that right and so you know that's just um that's kind of you know one kind of disgusting indicator species as it were of like freedom of speech just because you know the first thing that that dies when your your water of freedom of speech becomes polluted is like the like slimy urethra infesting catfish you know doesn't mean

that you're still not witnessing an e an ecological disaster right and and so you know that you know when you look at what's been lost from uset to Reddit okay you see the whole loss of like a high quality content producing Community you see that there was ugc uh user generated content on uset of a quality that's only been seen very sporadically Kora had that for a while and now Kora you know has basically turned into you know expert sex change as we used to call it like it's very very hard to maintain that high quality it boils off very quickly lacking sort of an adequate

structure to contain it but the thing is you know from you know the perspective of a social ual fabric that was amazing and then from the perspective of a technical fabric okay we on in that age thought we had it solved because really Unix and the internet they're both very very beautiful systems they were competing against horrid European things that were just stal and bureaucratic like x.500 you know who raise your hand if you remember x.500 OSI networking stack you know like all this just bureaucratic European you know garbage basically lost American you know Technologies you know written by like romantic technology Rogues with like Gandalf beards like you

know one and and it was all going great and we had Unix in the internet and Unix is you know really a very beautiful system and so one way to describe sort of what herbit is is basically it's the whole stack from Network through operating system designed as a single thing it doesn't pretend that they're separate but to go back to basically what was lost in the demise of the internet we all thought that the internet as a peer-to-peer system would survive so I was in an ITF meeting in like 1998 just kind of hanging in I really contributing and it was a meeting for um instant messaging and presence it was a meeting to describe the protocol

that would later become known as xmpp but xmpp is somewhat later than this it's basically an X mppp is an internet social protocol intended to mimic SMTP which is used for sending mail and it was assumed by all of us at the time that basically the future internet would be based on protocols and the idea is that instant messaging uh you know social group chats whatever would obviously work the way email does and obviously the aols were like a thing of the past and eventually it was was a matter of time I remember the first time I actually got IP packets to flow into my house was insane it was like previously I just terminal in a

server right but now that like there was an IP address in my house right it was amazing right you know and and the the so obviously everyone is going to have their own address their own host on this network right right right and you know when you want to talk to me I'll have you know Port 372 or whatever which is whatever they xmpp Port is and you'll xmpp a message to me and we'll do that instead of using signal right so that was the world that we imagine and if you know basically a few years later a young lad named Mark Zuckerberg had an interesting idea uh that I guess others had had which is that uh what if we just

faked it what if we just put everyone on a big ass Mainframe and called it a social network and used the network word network pretty liberally to mean you know I somehow imagine you know really like a social network is not what Facebook is but imagine that movie if they'd called it the social database right you know because that's actually what Facebook is it's not a social network it's a social database right and so you know like you know you you feel kind of cool if you're a node on a social network you know but if you're a row in a a social database not not as cool not as cool not as cool not so cool

but that's what you actually are and so there's a sort of element of mendacity in it and if you look at why that happened it basically ran into this fundamental problem which is that running your own independent internet node um do you remember you guys remember the year um of the uh of the Linux desktop what year was that exactly Jake right you right you know the year of the Linux that's stop right right we always the you know like like it's like your your uh you know your cousin's band which is always a bit to get big right you know and and next year's the year next year's the year Year's the year next year's the

year right you know and so you know there was this basically and and kind of failure to realize in a way that what you were looking at I mean Unix is great way but Unix is also an operating system that is basically designed for a mid1 1970s mini computer and so it has all kinds of like mid 1970s minicomputer assumptions like pretty deeply baked into it like the idea that you have two kinds of storage one fast and and transient and one slow and durable okay yeah it's kind of a general principle of machines but you can kind of abstract over that in a lot of ways uh we regret the the fall of

Intel optane which was a single Hardware you know thing that did both and you're just like it has certain attractions for like resetting the state of the system and something something but would you really like build a computer that way like you know look at how hard your iPhone tries to pretend that there's only a single level of storage it sort of wants to pretend that you know apps actually don't have an off State but it's like a leaky abstraction and so you can sort of tell when the app has been shut down or hasn't been shut down like and and like actually your I mean your iPhone is running basically Unix you know and you know so billions of dollars have gone into that uh mostly kind of solve the problem uh but that's only a

client yeah but wow now you're running a server okay so basically this xmpp vision of mine that I talked about earlier you're running a server well man my man that's a job right that's a profession like it's it's like being a pilot it's like basically the problem was sort of the year of the Linux desktop and still more like the year of the Linux server was that it was just basically like what we believed in in the 90s was that basically everyone have would have like a personal helicopter and like you know it's like okay but like you know you know like there's a Elites always have this thing where they just like totally fail to understand like

normal people you know and and there was definitely some of that going on in our vision of of the early uset and so as this kind of can I can I actually ask a question on that to to actually yeah what so okay do you think that there was a what I'm hearing from you is we actually had this beautiful internet we had this beautiful internet and it was the forums and it was uset and things like that and then uh early 2000s happen and we start to centralize okay maybe you say Curtis Curtis is saying I'll let you talk I'll let you talk the original internet was essentially decentralized and then it got like centralized yeah exactly and then by the

way I was I was literally zero when this was happening so I was not even an idea when some of this was happening so I just want to throw that out there uh but it's from what I've read and talk to people like you so anyways um actually not to get into age I feel like that's a sensitive subject these days if you're saying it's a disease but I say the same for the Nixon Administration but go on there you go okay so back to this 94 you have Netscape whatever 2004 you have Facebook like there's all there's like moments in time that start to be these like centralizing properties of the internet and my question for you is you know you're saying networks as they age they get worse um and it I'm I'm it's in my head I'm like nodding yes definitely

no different than how Soho House gets worse as you as it scales and adds members right like any anything kind of gets worse as it scales um or most things get worse as they scale in quality but they make up for that in quantity and bringing more things into the network and the ability to make money and hire people and become these big organizations um do you think that there was a way for the internet to develop without having the centralizing forces or did this need to happen to basically hit scale it needed to happen because of basically in my view and I think this has yet to be proved it needed to happen because basically of

fundamental defects in the architecture that only became clear at scale okay and so for example when we look at the fundamental defect of uset uset was excellent early on because it relied on a selection effect it basically it's like I say the 13th principle of of Burning Man is is radical exclusion because what makes Burning Man Burning Man is that it's hard to get to Burning Man and it's a shitty place to be and all of those things and that turns away people who would Pro be much more likely to come if Burning Man was held in a more salubrious Place such as for example Fort Lauderdale and the thing is basically when you know Nets when AOL came on to and was literally Gateway AOL

users were literally Gateway into uset uh we were aware of the existence of AOL and other low lower forms of life but we we didn't expect them to be showing up in our shopping malls right you know and then one day there they were right you know and and this exactly the same thing would happen if you basically sort of put a teleportation Gateway between um Burning Man and Fort Lauderdale right and so you know you had this intrinsic Excellence that actually came out of a selection effect the selection effect had no way to be enforced as the system grew it was not designed to be enforced nobody knew they needed it right people didn't understand that you know they don't understand that radical exclusion

is the most important thing about burning man right you know I I believe actually burning man they say radical inclusion but you know no no I I know you're yeah I know you're saying I read a Blog I read a blog post their diversity numbers are not strong let me put it that way you know I read a blog post from 92 or 9 I think it was written in '92 or 93 and it was talking about the normies and how they were flooding our good our good things like the forums and I'm it brought me back to 2022 and number go up in crypto and all the OG crypto people bitching about the normies coming in it's like I think they might have they might have said newbies at that time um but you know so much internet culture comes out of uset newbie is an internet

word for example uh you know is a used net word so so you have the fundamental flaw that basically and so a system that's going to basically be able to survive that has to have extraordinary quality control control mechanisms that it doesn't need early in its life to basically sustain its quality as the newbies flood in and uset didn't have that and so it you it perished you know it's basically like the you know it just it had social norms that were enforced socially and generally not by force and then suddenly it entered in a world where like janies as they say on forchan were very necessary I mean for Chan's n

old totally different story uh and a very interesting one but uh you know so that happened and then basically on the system software side you basically could not simplify the Unix internet stack enough to give people their own servers you just couldn't and you still can't and so it basically ran into fundamental scalability issues that were the result of choices taken very early on and when you know it didn't have these kinds of size and quality scaling problems it was easier to overlook these challenges but once they hit it was kind of too late in a way and so you know the sort of the the centralized Web 2.0 um you know

ecology that develops there is very similar to you know after the fall of the Roman Empire the sort of manorial system develops where you know when order and civility were imposed by by the hard hand of Rome you know you could live independently but like once that kind of fell apart you needed a protector so you know everyone sort of huddles together around you know the the manner of some strongman who then you know forces him to uh them to uh to till his content Fields you know and and so we get into these like massive and you know increasingly cynical content Farms quality is very very hard to control and it just naturally has this very ugly

people want to live in a society that feels like you know Facebook is a very effectively run system but it really feels like you know a caricature of a monarchy like socially in some ways all of these things do you know they remind of of like writing of like about like the L austr Hungarian Empire everywhere you have these like ineffectual secret police you know it's like when Twitter started to being you know being um you know enforced on in like 2014 2015 again around the same time you know sort of turn I talked about with Reddit it's like suddenly you'd gone from like you know a digital Republic to like a digital Republic with like mysterious

you know midnight disappearances right you know and you know that feeling because you all remember basically sort of Twitter before the stuff was a problem and there was sort of a weird set of like forces that came up together that basically made our society sort of take this transition from a basically non censorious Society with exceptions to a basically censorious society and that's not just a matter of rules that's a matter of how people think right you know like you could never imagine anything like Reddit today saying just like oh yeah we can't delete our racist groups you know to which basically spread racism right you know uh because

Free Speech right it's absurd right no no different than not these were not crypto racist groups these were not race science groups these were just racist groups right you know and the racism is even in the name right and so like basically that's a deep social change that is like you know it's just a different kind of society I mean they have they have pros and cons you know all societies have their Mar it's crazy how quickly that change happens like it's a like you know it's like a peasant or a surf in the you mentioned like the manorial system after the Roman Empire like 20 years into the you know you know maybe the year 500 you could never Envision what it was like in 400 Rome right sure sure sure sure sure I mean you know um you know like yeah like we

live in so so the internet today it's it's sort of like a digital kind of third world country in away they are like these like bubbles of security like if you're in South Pao you sort of travel or you know at least you if you and I as like you know Americans are in sou Pao we travel between one you know security bubble or another and they have like Airport your security on the edges like I was in southp I had to get into like this like sports club and it was like I was interviewing for a passport it was amazing right and you know and and so like and that's sort of what's become of our old free and open internet and again to sort of Trace that to like the technical choice of you know this this operating system is going to

basically emulate a 1970s Mainframe like virtually in the B of AWS or whatever like it's a long range thing but you can kind of see why if you're not rethinking the fundamental basis of your software infrastructure since literally when I was born right you know I don't know like are you gonna make it you know and so that's that's kind of the seed for the seed for herbit way back you know you know 20 um 20 plus years ago for me was just like realizing that like we just had the.com crash right give put everyone in a very depressed state of mood because the

future was happening and then it wasn't right we were ordering our groceries over the internet in the year 2000 right but not in the year 2001 yeah and the the uh sometimes you just too early you know and so essentially you know the idea that this whole staff needed to be sort of replaced by someone who had worked at a lot of layers of of system stack and worked in Industry been uh I'm sort of a you know the first thing on my resume is that I'm a defro grad student basically so I did computer science I wanted to be a computer scientist so I was just like why should I not why should I not take on this problem it was pre- blockchain actually and so the original herbit had a like it

was essentially a blockchain like it was like basically mempool only I was just like well you know if transactions are more like real estate transactions and they're slow and expensive you know your double spending problem is a lot easier to solve with just more relaxed cistica should have invented the blockchain but I didn't um in case anyone is is wondering still haven't figured out how who Satoshi is so I mean we could be I I think I think it's I think I think it's Nick Zabo um and that's that's my feeling cin yeah okay so then so I am I would be never mind um uh okay uh Jake let me pick on you just because I've been Curtis and I've

been sorry I've been monologuing you're you're getting Jake you're getting a nice front row seat here though um okay Jake take us into so Curtis nice summary of the last 40 years I guess prehistory of urbit basically of of the internet um when I someone first explained herbit to me I said I I was confused about how crypto and herbit interact right it's like is this okay part of this is on ethereum but it's not but is it like is this competing with crypto or it's intertwined with crypto and I I guess just um how do you what why are you excited about herbit Jake well that that's been actually like an evolving so that that idea of like how does urbit interact with blockchains has been sort

of an evolving story over the years so well I first learned about Urban in 2016 I got connected to Curtis and Theon team as they were starting to go to market and sell their first uh digital assets publicly you know we were talking to a lot of teams doing that that's actually when we bought our first um assets on the network and like at that moment like my mental model for urbit was like this is a decentralized network for kind of like virtual machines or like personal computers or something like that and it really um had little to do in a way with digital assets or digital currency or like you know immutable blockchains or

you know those kinds of Concepts and it was I we saw it more as a decentralized network and you know we were that if I can if I can butd in Jake because I think that's that's a very interesting and essential confusion and it's sort of one thing that I'm trying to make clear it of course is exactly that but it's two things in a way it's like basically my my original question sort of or the hard question for a person working on system software is like okay I have this idea for a programming language you know like how do I sell my programming language for example do I put it on little floppy discs and take out an ad and bite

magazine and like in the back and like mail people the floppy discs no I don't think that really works right you know and so I could put it up on GitHub and ask people to donate to me you could get a little traction with that maybe right you know and so it's kind of a uh it was sort of or an operating system that's even worse because like cost billions of dollars to develop an operating system you know so you know what's you know like like one of the last experiences I had in Academia was I came to Berkeley in 1990 in the fall of 92 to start grad school and was 19 years old and very wet behind the ears and I

just thought of I have to apply to school again but you know Academia is a fundamentally sort of political in the kind of internal structure sense world and one of the things I wanted to go to Berkeley for many reasons but one of them was of course BSD Unix this great tradition of like you know uh the the the leadership of Unix and I was surprised to find that at Berkeley the BSD people actually had very low status because what they were doing was not really very researchy what had high status was this guy um and the group that I wanted to be part of was this guy John osterhout who did TCL if you remember that early uh scripting language very cool thing but he also was doing the Sprite project which was a

project to be you know was kind of a locally decentralized operating system concept and it was intended to basically be like something that like BSD would be done in a lab and then people would actually use and so he had armies of grad students making his like completely from scratch kernel like you know system call compatible with BSD Unix but it just wasn't enough it was too different you know nobody nobody would start using it and you realized that basically it was no longer possible to build system software that in Academia that people would use at least in this at least in the full operating system sense so you'd basically like one of the things that I

thought would be cool about operating systems is basically doing something that wasn't just some kind of you know academic onanism you know to say oh I could publish this paper but actually would like run code that people could use but you couldn't even do that in Academia right and and so the question of basically you know if you connect the question of uh of herbit you know the the sort of Unix herbit is Unix plus the internet you really see kind of both sides of this because my idea was basically what about if you build a new network operating system that is this whole stack of network and operating system you layer it of course on

existing Hardware on the existing internet and then you basically you know the network protocol is the full stack in a sense and given that it's the full stack and given that it has an address space which is let's say the same size as ipv4 address space um you can basically fund the system by the development of the system by selling addresses on the network right so in a way Curtis you were kind of pioneering the idea of digital assets as like a value capture mechanism for decentralized what's actually yeah what's actually really funny though um I

sort of chose a bad angle as a way to do this but I was thinking about this system in 2005 or so and I'd also been studying you know Austrian economics and you know Austrian economics basically has a theory of how mon monetary assets uh acquire value like for example you know the fundamental work of Carl minger for example is the question of why is gold so overvalued compared to its commodity usage because if you look at it as a commodity it looks like a very weird commodity right and um misus came up with this kind of lewood Von misus came up with this kind of game theoretic you know theory of how gold expands in value which relies critically on H it

having initial trade value to begin with and I basically thought about that and I was like no it doesn't need to have initial value if you have a commodity with a limited Supply it can actually go through monetary standardization all on its own which is obviously related to the question of building this basically like limited address space and I came actually to the point this is the first time I've talked about this actually I came actually to the point where basically I was like wow this is a really interesting monetary phenomenon and I actually filed a provisional patent on a um very stupid centralized version of Bitcoin and um I because I

was just like basically if you build a digital asset with a limited Supply it can appreciate like surely right and um you know and I was writing about this principle on you know my blog in like 20072 2008 and guess who was on my blog roll in 20072 2008 well that's right Nick Zabo ni Zabo so you know unfortunately going there yeah yeah right right right right right so so so I got to retrieve that patent from the patent office it turns out to be actually really difficult with a provisional patent like I like hire a patent lawyer to like get this out but I think it would be obviously has no legal meaning whatsoever but I think it would

be a nice uh PR toy but I really should have invented the blockchain I mean the blockchain is like the magic thing there right and so if you basically imagine the the and I had the motive the propensity and the opportunity to invent the blockchain and I [ __ ] missed it right you know and and so so but she didn't um so if you basically you think you think ni just weird tangent you think Nick Zabo is Satoshi um someone suggested this interesting idea that is Nick and his wife and his wife is like a very shy retiring CS grad student C++ programmer or former CS grad student C++ programmer uh Bitcoin core is of course written in

C++ and you know then that would also allow Nick not to be lying when he like very cleverly says like it wasn't me in a way that kind of leaves open the idea that maybe it was him and someone else um you know and so that's my closest Theory but like I just the vibe is I don't know like you know I don't interesting by the way if anyone wants a good blog uh I don't think Nick writes anymore but unenumerated was Nick's Nick's blog back in the day yeah yeah and actually some of my political ideas also came from Nick because I was basically writing about political philosophy at some point very early on in my blog career in 2007 I was still commenting on other blogs and Nick and I have this comment exchange where I'm

like describing my ideas and I'm like and he's like that's exactly what Charles the first thought and I was like wow it sounds like I should check out more I should learn more about what Charles the first thought you know the uh you know uh so so so uh yeah there's a lot of rabbit holes out there uh Jason and they're they go very deep but yeah that's anyway prehistory prehistory let's Mo let's move forward okay so this is this is the reason Jason why like I would say you know herbit is actually kind of like the original web 3 project because all of the original ideas and ingredients of what we think of like web 3 today self- Sovereign data

like digital assets being except the blockchain and smart contracts but smart cont smart contracts were actually a pretty common idea in the cipher Punk world before that the real catalyzing genius idea was the blockchain and and and and like no question about it but yeah so it's like basically I was so two things one you know to sort of separate the two and this kind of becomes critical wait wait before we get into separating the two Curtis can you I have a smaller brain than you two so you need to explain herbit because there's a lot of listeners who are at this point saying this Curtis guy sounds pretty smart but I still don't really understand what herbit is so tell me what tell me what let me tell you what herbit is let me tell you what herbit is

and then and then d down again and then dumb it down again here is what herb it is from you know do you know the film Margin Call it's such a great and there's this great Jeremy irons's Cameo he's playing basically dick fold and and there's some kid presenting this complicated Quant Theory to him and he's he's like speak to me to a small child right I am him here I am him from the perspective of um the um the small child or the gold retriever um who is probably a big part of your audience I'm sure you've done done the network for this they usually split out dogs into a separate cross tab so you have golden retrievers and like the Shih

Tzu you know um the in any case herbit is two things herbit is decentralized identity and a decentralized computer and so let's basically split those apart in the right way and in the way that you basically get if you're like onboarding onto urbit in the year 2032 so the first thing that you get in urbit is your decentralized identity um currently um well the um old management um allowed a spammer or a squatter to pick up urbit do eth but we

countered by acquiring urbit box which is a really cool domain that I like because it's both an ens and a DNS domain um you must know the dotbox people Jake uh you know and and and so we're we're we're back we're back in the saddle there so as a decentralized identity you are not yet but you will shortly be able to see it my name is is soram so that's a name uh I'm trying to Stamp Out the use of the word urbit ID um which sounds very nerdy that's my name my name is orgame Ty and actually in these Social Circles what we find is these names stick very well people remember them they sound like names in a foreign language or names on an alien planet so a name and a name you don't a name is

algorithmically generated name is yes let me explain you know sort of the mechanics behind what a name is so what a name is actually is exactly the same thing as an IP address you could translate sorn which is my name into an IP address and it would be something like 18746 712 okay that's the same number of bytes for your golden retrievers out there a bite is eight bits and a bit is a one or a zero and so that's a 32bit address bace which means that there are 2 to the 32nd that is four billion of these names out there and um what we do is we simply

map every bite to a syllable and we sort of use a different pattern of syllables so it sounds sort of you know malifu like I probably put as much energy into designing that namespace is like tolken did into designing Elvish or something maybe not Elvish but like one of the lesser lesser middlee languages uh orcish perhaps and it so it sounds it sounds like a language you've never heard before it sounds like alien but it has that four syllable length is very common to human names you'll basically meet people on the network and you'll find them calling them like Sor hey Sor what's up you know and and and so it sort of works socially as a human identifier it's also impersonal which is

really nice if you've ever gone on to like Wikipedia and saw seen some like interesting you know debate about like bicycles between like you know pink queer ape and you know like you know wilderbeast dong you know you're just like you know like I I like you're just like wow you guys seem really smart I really like the illusion that you weren't 15 you know I see you are 15 or were 15 at some point but now can't change your stupid handle like this is just embarrassing and so it's like on herbit sort of everyone's wearing a suit from that perspective also and and I was just talking with Dan Romero from from farcaster which is an amazing amazing piece of work um about this basically

you know he has to deal he has he has human he has handles right you know ens has handles and because ens has handles it has a squatting problem and which I personally feel myself the victim of you know uh if you have. eth uh come to me give give it up you know we can still be friends uh and uh nothing will happen um and um the the the um and and so you have a squatting problem you have this situation where because of the squatting problems names have to be basically you don't actually own your name you own the right to re renew your name you have to renew the thing like paying your godamn property taxes uh with an urbit name with irbit

Planet as it were I'll go through that you buy it once uh you're done and you know before before the blockchain you basically kept this information as like a private you know chain of keys or whatever but you know turning that into an nft when nfts became a thing when ethereum became a thing was fairly trivial probably could have done it with Bitcoin ordinals in some sense I don't know I don't have strong opinions on blockchain Wars except that I wish someone would just win and get it over with but the um you know so from the perspective of crypto and there's even you know like uh you know even the idea of generating an image from this was

something that we did 10 years ago and so you'll see these herbit sigils that are sort of our version of board Apes except they're abstract and beautiful and not like horrendously dated in so three years ago right you know and so all of that you know if you go to my like Twitter handle for example is Sarto that's s o r r EEG well it's right on the screen in front of you and um you know you'll see my sigil and um it's rather beautiful and geometric and you know like because irvid has always had very strong design It's like because of my old Co co-founder G and there's like a strong design hey everyone Jason here just wanted to take a quick break to talk about something exciting in the world of

blockchain the Stellar development foundation is hosting their sixth annual Meridian conference this October 15th through 17th in London it's a 3-day event where the brightest Minds in web 3 come together to discuss everything from tokenization to defi if you're a developer Builder policy maker or business leader looking to make an impact in transforming Global Systems through blockchain this is your chance to join the conversation you'll get to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future of this space head over to meridian. stellar.org and use the code blockworks pod for early bird pricing now let's get back to

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virtual machine um is is it fair to say this is like combining AWS and iOS together in one thing uh I don't know what the I I I don't know about the iOS but you're basically you know essentially On Target so you know this and this is something that's uh you know with the new uh you know I posted a long Twitter article uh which is some know only is the effort post and uh you know in the effort post I basically describe in my uh you know on good old Twitter um or X I'm not call it uh you know I basically describe sort of the future user interface that I want to build which is a little different for example from the onboarding flow sayun there's

no independent onboarding flow today it's all run by hosting Services there's no like so you go to urban.org and it's just basically a documentation site um in the new urban.org has produced by the New urbit Foundation uh bb.org is actually your central login site so what you have is you have a when you when you just for like the simplest web flow no metamask no Hardware wallet no anything like that urbit is a so you know let's sort of move forward in the golden retriever mode so we're going to kind of go golden retriever for crypto people right you know so actually it's a very smart golden retriever but like you know hopefully this is accessible to

normal crypto people so soric Nam is basically both an identity and an address it's an identity if you remember you know it's it's a blockchain identity it's an nft uh it's a wallet and we'll get into that uh shortly and um but it's also a service address and so let's go back to the thing that we were talking about earlier where um I described Unix in the internet as basically a single integrated system and it's sort of all done through these like standard Reserve ports now imagine you know there's a lot lot of minor differences between urbit and ens and you know I basically you know can make a number of arguments

about why urbit is sort of in some ways a better bet than ens one being that you know we're an ens address too but the most important one is imagine you want to make a phone call to an enss address imagine you want to send an email to a Bitcoin address okay how do you do that there's a lot of reasons you could want us to send an email to a Bitcoin address I'll bet you know everyone in crypto has had a feeling of like oh I see this address out on the blockchain like how can I do a reverse lookup and send an email to him and the answer is you can't and you can't because that is not a service endpoint there is no way of standardizing basically a service

endpoint for that what would that even mean right to say okay you can make a phone call to we and S address well there has to be some message endpoint that you're talking to that message endpoint has to Define some protocol by which you talk to it and then what implements the protocol on operating system and you're basically all the way to needing irbit right and so you know you can you can sort of abstract that and like open that up and you say well it could be any operating system that implements well this this protocol sweet yeah but usually it's a lot easier to just have a monopoly you know and and the and so that's sort of one of the reasons

why like you know this marriage of decentralized identity and decentralized Computing that is urbit is so like qualitatively more powerful than like anything that isn't shaped like that fundamentally if you're basically trying to assess the present value of a future network you're multiplying four numbers one of them is the time discount of money one of them is the value of this system if it becomes a global standard basically remember you know metaps law the value of a network is the size of it Square basically both operating systems and networks have this kind of network

effect so something that is both an operating system and a network is kind of metaps law squared right and so so it's very difficult to catch the leader basically and the um then the question is okay what is the value if it succeeds um I don't know um like imagine the internet if you had you know one of the funny things you I love doing this with AI you can go and ask your AI to say compare the policies of Aaron the internet uh IP allocation uh infrastructure with the economic theories of Carl Marx and it will come back and Claude will actually figure out that and say well you know they both

believe that assets should be assign um you know uh according to need and so that's the way IP address blocks are given out you don't own your IP address you rent one in some V or you have it assigned in some vague sense the result is you have you know they basically Tre get treated like rented cars or rented mules right there some of them are like tarnished in various Ways by having been used by spammers right this's this whole it's this giant [ __ ] show but imagine what an IP address would cost if you needed to own an IP address to use the internet and then then multiply that by four billion right so the thing is um you you have um um that's that gives you you know that's like um you know you know the three commas Club in in the

show silic Valley right you know that's four commas right okay and then you take your four commas and you multiply them by two probabilities one is the probability that the world needs something like this and this is not just a bunch of [ __ ] and the other is the probability that that thing will be this thing and you arrive at uh you know some kind of hypothetical uh present evaluation by doing that very simple math right so so you know when you basically look at you know let's go back to the experience that basically you should have getting into urban so urbit is an identity and it's also a brain wallet so brain wallets have a bad name in crypto brain wallets have not

successfully caught on in crypto for basically because um the product has been shitty and the two kinds of shitty brain wallets instantly when I say brain wallet anyone with a brain watching this any golden retriever or even a more intelligent dog such as Doberman he's that and are just like wow brain wallet suck what a shitty you know uh 2015 idea okay this is true on the other hand when we look at basically the two things that have been done with brain wallets number one it's like you come up with a pass phrase or a passw and we uh feed that into a key generator and use it as your wallet okay wow that's like a recipe for like your password's getting cracked and

their whole crack databases of I myself you know have like you know um half a Bitcoin or something in blockchain.info right you know it's been sitting there for quite quite some time uh you know uh nobody's gonna guess my past phrase uh but you know yeah that's a terrible idea other terrible idea is basically remember your Ledger word list all right great you're like building you know you're remembering that's a 256bit number right so you're remembering a 256-bit number that's like Memory Palace stuff you're like yes you know behind the bust of Caesar there is an orange and a paintbrush right you know and and you can do it you can do it right I can do it you can do it you can do it but

it's like it's this like athletic you know intellectual feat but if you basically say you know number one you've got a way of encoding a 32 bit number in a way that sounds like Sur nto which is easy to remember and fits in your head really easily okay take that 32-bit number use it as ass salt take a a now um um a 64bit number such as SAR n sarbeck tarx uh you know that's something of a size that you can remember we call that a master ticket that's something short enough to remember especially if you

basically use do what say signal does and have you re-enter it occasionally I also use mine for all my web passwords and um you know I'll salt that with a website and put that in and it becomes something that is never going to fall out of your head barring like a really traumatic brain injury I mean that's you know that's a problem with brain wallets right the brain is a single point of failure but the thing is do you really care at a certain point right and you can also like you know stick the key in an envelope with your lawyer or whatever something something something we have all we have like a three Shard solution that also is good for larger pools of assets fundamentally though if I remember surg nve and then another phrase that's twice as long 64

bits I can concatenate that into a 96-bit feed seed I can then put that seed through a key uh lengthener that takes about a second to run on a like a normal computer that gives me my 256bit seed which is actually secure uh you know and then you're basically just like comparing the time like you're not using any human generated stuff so classic password cracking doesn't work and to find my 64-bit key you're searching a 64-bit space and basically one search per second so the universe is going to outlive you right you know and so by basically doing that you have

something that's very easy to remember that you can basically just use routinely you can walk around the world with like hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin in your head and it's actually easy and usable and then when you go to .org and log in you're just like Sur Sur nanp my secret now of course that requires very intense anti- troying Security on urban.org because you're literally typing your crypto seed into it yeah you could use a ledger you can use a ledger that's fine but like this is a path that is basically just like to the ordinary user I'm just like I have this name it's uh my own and I can take it anywhere and it comes with this stupid password I have to remember

okay so you know all all that's different is that my login name and password were generated for me and are these strange things that I have to either remember putting a card in my wallet or purse so like not too crazy there and you've achieved just by doing that and paying a few bucks you know which should be the price of a planet now like you've achiev this very significant level you've achieved the first step toward digital sovereignty so you log in then at .org and what do you see well because that's being used as crypto seed you're going to see a wallet and um you know you're in your wallet there you have Bitcoin you know

um what's your herbit Jake uh you have a planet I I I'm a Ranter Tapper oh you have a Vanity Planet I hate that I hate it when people do that all right but you know if I wna if I want to it's against the spirit right I could have done that did I you know and and wa wait wait explain what what did Jake do Jake because Jake actually hacked the syllables to come up with something that sounds meaningful and as some people do I you know and I need to see what mine is I don't even know well I actually I actually have like a terrible memory in general and so when I see like urbit IDs I often get like confused between them which is why I did that yeah yeah you should spend more time in herbit but um the but so

should I but in any case the the I was really I didn't use the system at all for five years I just wanted to like have my like I don't even remember how to log into my herbit honestly tell me how go it's no no that's the problem when I came back I had to have someone help me and like if they hadn't been there to hold my hand I would have given up at least literally on the website where is the butt like or did I download yeah no [ __ ] that you know like don't worry about it right it's good it's you know there's a little bit Jason frankly there's maybe a little bit of radical exclusion going on here right you know actually I'm I'm serious like the quality of the urbit community is extremely high it's very different from any other crypto Community it's like

much more artsy for example they're girls um and they're not just their's decoration which is really weird it's all like the uh the Red Scare podcast listeners yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's all kind of intertwined with that scene right you know so so so yeah so basically being weird as [ __ ] keeps people out but you know it's not the most sustainable or most excellent way to do that right and so you get in there and you basically see you've got a wallet because you know that's a seed and from the seed that's how you generate your key literally from that seed from the secret and the name if I want to send Bitcoin to from s ntov to Rancher Tapper uh it's right there bang um we're looking at more newer um you know as we upgrade the aouth contract

the urbit contracts we're looking at some of these newer uh erc's like token bound accounts and stuff uh which seem to make a lot of sense for probably going to be an ERC 1155 token there's all this great new fangled stuff that was developed when while I wasn't looking I love it and and so you're basically so you've got this decentralized identity it's a web three identity through basically being resolved to ens work in progress uh it's also a web 2 identity and this is what's really important about this kind of new direction that we're taking at the new uh you know a reformed urbit Foundation is we're

basically saying you know decentralized Computing is hard decentralized Computing is hard it's a long slow it takes you know a lot a lot of time it has we have very dedicated it's sort of an interesting mix of like a company and an open source project basically at present like you know some entity runs out of money or something and like people aren't being paid but they don't stop being part of the project they don't stop coming to the like meetings you know like you know there's clearly this like independent organism which is just like sponsored by these companies um rather you know than being it's like you don't hire Linus tooro right you sponsor L Lor Vols like

you know and and like the idea that you could hire Lor Vols has been extremely insulting to Lor vaults for about 20 years right you know and and the the uh is like well we can let you maybe work like halftime on Linux like no no no that's not the vibe right you know and and so you know you have that's you know that is like I think one of the most successful things about the project is that it's sort of really living in that sense which is which is truly you know uh very nice to see as the original I se I se new apps joining like there's like Unis swop is now it means that it means that when you come back people are like oh are you coming back to be like the dictator of this thing again like well excuse me

like you know do you even know the [ __ ] you're talking about you know okay before before going anyway anyway getting back getting getting getting we can go into urbit politics later but let me finish I I was finishing my answer there so essentially separating the decentralized computer from the decentralized identity yeah is the most important thing that we're doing now because basically one of the key Assets in the sort of the value of the decentralized identity is that it comes with decentralized Computing and they're bound together in this way where you know you could create an app that lets you use ens endpoints to make you make a phone call to an N endpoint but

that app would be useless unless you could basically require that everyone using ens basically put themselves on that map otherwise you could call an ens number but you could only call your friends who are on the same app so there's a real chicken and egg problem with not stand like making that connection is extremely hard right and it requires a sort of integrated system where the namespace and the software stack are all kind of tied together in this sense and the question of what it makes of you know means to make a phone call to Sur namto like you know is always going to be clear right so essentially you have this decentralized identity which one of whose big

assets is that it has this decentralized operating system coming along after it on the other hand building an operating system is hard it takes time you know you always have to rewrite it one more time or maybe two more times than you think you're going to it really and most of all rushing it makes it take more time it's like f lente as the Italian say make ha slowly is the essential principle of doing that and so someone compared basically trying to drive even with the state that Urban is in and is remarkable as as hundreds of daily users like you know thousands of monthly users right people really use this network it actually exists and it is based on completely alien software

technology so alien that zero is true and one is false yeah which was actually a decision that not one of my better decisions actually but fine right and so the thing is it it's amazing that it works but to say that it works well enough that everyone should be on it tomorrow is another question and so the right way to think about it is you log into your wallet and you're basically one of the things that you can do with that wallet you have various you know ways of using the wallet etc etc etc and then one of the things is you can pop up your own private computer attached to that wallet and that is really cool right it is really cool number one it is really cool number two that private computer okay even though that's an

offchain computer obviously it is an offchain computer with an onchain address but this offchain computer in the future this is going to take some time to come about but one of the things that I want to do is basically use a technology that's called secure enclaves or confidential Computing that's a technology that actually exist signal uses it for example in their back end and actually run your private computer in a hosting service that basically can't even see what's inside it and this is technically possible Right Now using features that are on Intel and AMD this is the this is that you have a blog post we can called the hundred-year computer too the 100e computer Jake I'm going to

pull I'm gonna pull Jake hold on I'm gonna pull Jake into this conversation too because I think um I just want to get your understanding so Jake you allocate capital for a living and you are trying to make a return on your money and obviously you get excited by the technology because you're a technologist and a developer and all that kind of stuff but you're also an investor why is this interesting from The Venture and from the Investor's seat not from the technologist seat because operating systems and um Computing I mean it's just like so big right like like operating systems are very sticky um what Curtis is proposing has a lot of like again like core tenets of web 3 baked in

like when when you ask me like what is sort of the basic uh primitive of web 3 it's it's self- Sovereign data and what urbit computers sort of do is that they allow uh the users to kind of pull in their data and have it locally essentially and then apps become more like functions of the data the apps become stateless your data doesn't get pulled into the cloud and owned by somebody else there are more like functionalities that you apply like in the context of your own computer so that Paradigm Shift could be really big go ahead Curtis yeah yeah yeah yeah that's exactly right and and let's talk

in a little more detail it's like okay this is a good you know when you look at the identity product on its own especially once you basically say well this is not only a web 3 identity this is also a web two identity because one of the things we're going to build is just log in with urbit just urbit SSO you know the same way you log in with Google to all of these sites you can log in with urbit and that enables that's more for new things than for old things that enables people to use you know backend technologies that exist that scale that work really well that work for 500 users or 500 million users basically using urbit names as identities and from the perspective of

urbit as a social network anywhere you're using your urbit name is herbit ideally it should be only herbit names and ideally it should only be visible to other people with herbit names because that keeps the sort of the tightness of the network that keeps it feeling more like U you know Soho house and uh you know less like the tenderloin but you know the the um in any case the because that keeping that those all those quality metrics up is really really important but in any case basically so you're just like okay number one and the other thing that's going on by the way some people are working on this is actually using herbit names is ipv4 addresses like tail scale but for urbit that's a really cool

project that uh some friends are working on right and so this is a cool decentralized identity space it's competitive decentralized identity space it's I believe the best brain wallet that exists right now it's who who's your biggest competitor Curtis like when you close your when you're thinking about a competitor like what comes to mind uh I I mean you know there are certain like kind of urbit spin-off and like faction you know projects like there was one that was called ukar and is now called Kino there's something called plunder right you know umbrell umbrell I don't know so there's no like like there's no

like mainstream like crypto thing or's there's nothing really compr no one's approaching this in the way that you're approaching other than than than than people wonderful people I'm sure who've decided that they would um you know rather be um you know outside the church than in it um and um you know yeah maybe they have fun with the wild beasts I don't know you know the uh um yeah I mean there's definitely so so so the meme you know people realize much more now that something like this is needed yeah and I me I mean when I was trying to sell pitch this stuff in like 2013 2014 it was just like you had to just go in there and talk fast like the idea like I mean even I was look at this

tweet so I was prepping for this podcast and ended up obviously scrolling Twitter like I do and getting sidetracked and this is the tweet that came up as I was scrolling Google is useless Wikipedia is useless social media is useless three popups before accessing a site pay walls I realized that I use internet less than before except to stream a movie once in a while to get directions from Google Maps and get real news on Twitter and it was a quote tweet of this guy Shan McCarthy who said I've been on the internet since 99 it's never been this bad Google's useless once findable information is deleted or buried and it's a threat about why the internet sucks you know when I when I when I hear been on the internet since 1999 and it's never been that bad I mean man you know like I there's this great line there's

this great line of the Marquee to T Ron who said that you know uh no one who did not live before the French Revolution can ever experience the full sweetness of life I'm like 1999 I'm like Jesus Christ he was all over long before 1999 okay so tell me why you yeah tell me why you uh yeah go ahead go ahead let me finish Jake's point in a way I want to kind of you know elaborate you know he's he's basically right and I want to elaborate and expand on that so we basically take the world where you know we are making urbit names as a basically did form you know something that's real and competitive and basically works now

and then has this freight train of like oh by the way we have our own operating system coming along behind it but I'm really delinking the development of that operating system from like oh my God this operating system feature is going to like you know Drive users in like three months right that has taken out shot in the head and completely gone right and it has to be developed on the time frame of an operating system like an operating system treated I mean what's going on and you know like the stuff that I wanted to do in grad school where I was like I want really want to do Innovative CS research in a way that people were actually use it if you're out there if you're out there dear

Empire podcast listeners like and you're like yes that is what I want to do great we are actually doing that at Urban um but we are not pinning our shortcut product right on it and and so like but but yeah that's that's what it's there for actually what's crazy is that there are people on the project whose first programming language was was Hoon the uh herbit functional programming language and that's just a completely wild thing to me um and uh the the in any case so suddenly in this very good wallet decentralized identity thing which you know you can use to like post on you should be able to use to post on forecaster once it supports that um etc

etc suddenly this window pops up and you have your own personal server in there and this personal server is run in such a way that nobody can censor it I mean in theory you can look inside a virtual machine if it's not inside a secure Enclave but that's not something really hosting services like to do anyway there's kind of some barriers there just because it's a weird janky thing peeking into a a VM of any kind even a deterministic functional VM like this one because it's a very different thing in that sense for AWS um it's symbolically deterministic which your Linux image is certainly not but um the you're um and so what do you do in there well as Jake said right now

there's this bizarre situation where your personal data which is very personal to you and you know may involve some things that you might not even want your wife knowing is all scattered around the internet are those shots fired Jak Jake man I was I was looking for guilty Expressions you know when I said I don't Jake I don't know anything and I don't suspect anything okay let's be clear right you know and and um um the um you know uh you know I mean herbit is you know we're all about clean living right you know and the uh we're Mormons actually and the in any case so you have all of your data scattered around these

things it can't interoperate can't connect to each other you've got [ __ ] password aggregator sites up the Wazoo and everybody you know Who develops software instead of like shipping it on little floppy discs like we used to do they run it on their own computers and the DAT your data comes to them and I'm like you know what if we ship the code instead What If instead of shipping our data to your computer so you can like munch on it and get your horrible fluids all over it like what if you ship your code to me and dead right you know to my computer where I can run it by myself without you right you know um you know it seems like a fairly obvious idea it's

like there's this early uh you know Far Side uh cartoon which really incorporates the evidence of uh it really defines the experience of selling new technology because it's one of his caveman cartoons and you know the caveman is in like the cave town or whatever and there's all these people walking around and there's like dead animals like they have dead animals like slung across their shoulder like a cheetah a monkey you know something disgusting unmentionable right and the caveman who's selling is standing on a stump and he's holding up a hand axe basically and he's like with this new knife you need to only wear the skins of these animals

the and and you know like the idea that basically your data should all be on one place and there should be a bunch of different code that you choose what what code operates on your data like you know it just feels like unattainable and like revolutionary like people are going to live in like Zeppelins on on Mount Everest or something right you know but remember from the start of the podcast like this is the way we expected to live in the future that is now right you know uh you know there's this uh old um exactly um brilliant and that's amazing the the the um and and think I remember that cartoon from 30 years ago or something you know so uh I got a few details wrong I guess

but it's pretty close and um in any case the uh so we're going to create a fashion Revolution and the fashion is going to be that you have your own data on your own computer and it's actually yours and then you run these apps that operate on them right so I know it's wild it's just wild this is crazy it's like Quantum Computing on mars or something here you know and and so the way that's going to happen though is sort of the interesting question so because you don't leap from here to there you go smoothly from here to there and here are basically several paths realistic paths for the future not forward-looking statements obviously we're not we're not we're not selling securities here gentlemen but but the um

the um um I can keep going um the can you keep going after 3:30 I can keep going but I'm I'm going to be at four all right cool great he's got he's got to talk to his Pearl officer um but [Music] um again that smile I just don't know um and and you know like he's very deep very deep Waters this this Jake fellow like you know and and um in any case uh we're um so yeah so One path is basically the urbit native path in the urbit native path one of the things we're going to be doing is is we're basically um you know first of all we're

like okay you can build an ordinary web 2 app and basically log into that with herbit using extremely well recognized old [ __ ] Technologies all right great um what you'd really like though is to basically for that not to be one of these Web Two traps and it's already not a trap because you're using herbit identities for your names in this uh social network which is actually a social datab um I'm still remembering the social database movie like someone someone should make that right social network to the social database right uh you know and I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg's life now is far weirder than it's just you know

less documented than what went on in that movie it was a good movie though you got to admit it was a good movie it was a good movie and it really got the Silicon Valley Vibe like pretty pretty pretty much right in a lot of ways I mean the show was still amazing but um in any case what you really want to do as an app developer is you want to say okay I'm building an application and you know the sort of let's say your application is kind of the you know Premier application that I want to see which is like let's rebuild uset let's rebuild uset and let's do some kind of Rome zedon thing excuse me two obvious ideas right as I as an app developer one of build this

decentralized app in the most possible decentralized excellent way goes without saying however uh the risk that I take if I basically step into the decentralized world is I know I'm going to see all kinds of decentralization challenges at many levels of scale and what I really don't want and what in fact has happened very distinctly with urbit and one of the reasons why you know it's in the uh trough of the gardener or just emerging I would say from the trough of the gardener hype cycle is that like you're really don't want the growth of your basically Community app whatever it is to be gated on technical factors most people forget that almost

that almost killed Twitter if you remember the fail well it did kill frster you know these were centralized services but these people just their Engineers were just U you know remedial I guess and frer was basically killed by that and Twitter was almost killed by it and so you want to be able to scale up socially and let that take whatever speed it takes and let your and let your technical scaling to decentralization lag behind that as necessary because decentralization tends to be more of a long-term goal and so not only can you build what we call captive apps where it's just a web two app your web 2 app can actually appear

uh you know within your wallet right you know you can basically so so it's sort of it's logically part of your herbit anyway and it feels like part of your herbit even though it's just a web 2 app somewhere and then you say not only does this web two app somewhere use herbit names as its user IDs but it actually allows you to leave the centralized app and go into a decentralized version and actually migrate from the central thing onto your own urbit ship a ship is what we call your personal server so if you don't want to basically go in the water like now to basically use urbit at all you have to launch your own personal

server okay in the future that's basically something that you do only when you want a personal server actually like the flagship applications can also work in centralized mode and then when they really need to decentralize if basically like you know somebody's running a service and you know the boot is coming down on its neck for some reason you're just like shut it down everybody goes off to their own hole and the network just has to deal with decentralization challenges now but the centralization challenges are over so actually having that smooth scaling and this is a fairly ambitious technical project uh but it's you know well within our powers uh I mean just you know no offense to the engineers who were at on

working on herbit when I left but the ones who were there when I came back are better generally speaking um and and there's been a good evolutionary process there and so like it's well within our power and um so the um that's the kind of urbit native way there's another way that says hey actually you know there's four billion of these addresses that's quite a lot so let's say I'm running a centralized Social Service um you know maybe one that rhymes with [ __ ] and I want I basically get some of this nice decentralization sauce I'm going to basically just get a whole bunch of herbit names and assign them to people

and sort of gradually internally convert my social database into a social network where I go from your identity within the service your like you know um um Facebook profile or whatever goes from being a row a completely static dead row in a database to being this kind of living thing which is an herbit uh state which is greatly helped by the fact that we're symbolically deterministic so it's really more like a data structure than like like an AWS image is almost like a living thing like even if it's frozen it's like you know like a frozen hamster you know and and so we're sort of more like a plant than an animal in some ways I guess I would say just due to that being a single level store that's not a

1970s Mainframe and so you basically can actually migrate to these herbit identities from an existing service in this way that's the second way to do it the third way to do it which is kind of the most fun way is the basically adversarial interoperability way where you basically say well you know what what these Services have actually often is that they have um they have uh they have apis and they actually have two kinds of apis they have documented public apis um which used to be better and now socer are generally being turned off but there's also when they have a client

that runs on on your phone there's actually a protocol that that client uses to talk to the server and the thing is on the internet you know why they say on the internet nobody knows you're a dog on the internet nobody knows you're not a phone and well they kind of can they can kind of spoof things there's a little bit of War right but the thing is you know what's really good for implementing undocumented protocols a personal server and so you have this kind of YouTube DLS type type kind of war against these the internal interfaces of this thing where you're basically like Facebook doesn't want me to write a Facebook client but you know I have a Facebook client on my phone which is speaking this protocol

and like you know some of these protocols they go to pretty extreme Lanes to offis skate them they'll change the protocol you know your phone app gets an update your urbit server gets an update the phone app you know update is on by Facebook they're is signed byy old ing you know and but that enables you to talk to this service and so you basically kind of take control just by having a general purpose computer that can you know basically speak these protocols um you basically take control of your own State remotely despite the fact that the service is trying to prevent you from doing that and and so that's adversarial

interoperability like one of my one of my like you know sort of ridiculous Unthinkable internet reform propositions uh you know is like I seriously think that nobody should be using undocumented protocols on the free and open internet because undocumented Protocols are a sort of way to like tie the client and server together in this sort of you know way that is basically what antitrust law was designed to prevent and so you know to the extent that essentially what you're going to see is that now the motivation for decentralization is actually super clear it's the motivation for

decentralization is that sooner or later any centralized app is essentially going to become a government agency and so you see just all of these ways when you centralize you know you sort of centralize and like uh everybody still there yes yes you centralize right and you basically think that you have you're like oh we could just fake this we could be a social database rather than a social network wow wouldn't it be so much easier if we could provide all of the services of a social network by basically faking it until we make it and you do

that and then you discover that by faking it you've incurred a debt and that debt is your cheating in a sense and that cheating is going to catch up with you and it's catching up with you in the form of like oh actually I found out why we didn't want to be centralized when we're centralized we basically have to be a government agency so you know if you're like Strava or something if you're like you know there's a lot of things where you know okay there's certain requirements you have to comp comply with like it doesn't really mean anything it's not that hard etc etc etc but for a social network that really starts to like change the

really very nature of what you're doing in a way that sort of becomes uh increasingly hostile and so what you're going to see is that basically what's going to you know pave the very very uh bump path to um to to to give me one second here what's going to pave the very bumpy path to decentralization is this sort of incentive to sort of pave the road toward your own server and once the road toward your own server is paved like all kinds of things are going to start flowing down that road does that make sense it makes sense okay now I'm going

to that I'm going to pull us out of the weeds of herbit and try to bring actually a different aspect into this which is this is going to be a very long-winded question for you Curtis and I'm sorry Jake for not involving you really much at all in this conversation but hopefully you've enjoyed it um uh I've read a lot of your blog I've read a lot of uh the the mous mold bug or whatever it was you called you know unqualified reservations and I would describe a lot of that as I think some your words not mine in some of this and my words not yours in some of this is uh kind of a belief in like Victorian era social sensibilities and neoreactionary I think is your word which is kind of

libertarianism combined with uh like monarch monarchism and I think it's fair to say you would believe that the government should be run like a tech company like ruthless hierarchy effective execution and that feels at odds with some of the herbit ideals well yeah that's that's because because really the only thing that I believe in is basically um sort of realistic political science so you know the leading School of realistic political science in the 20th century is sometimes called the Italian school or the Italian elitist school um the great uh figure in that school really the you

know unknown Darwin of political science in her time was a guy named Gan mosa whose book the uh it's really called elements of political science but somebody translated into English as theory of the ruling class that dates about to 1900 the best you know introduction to the Italian School of political science is a book called The Maki of Ellens by James Burnham that's from 1940 and so you know this is a very like and and maky Val himself is very very maligned in sort of just the same way he's just like let's do political science in terms of reality rather than flowery abstractions and so for example you know one of my like so so when you

basically look at doing it sort of building structures that way what you see is that democracy aristocracy and monarchy are both three they're three forms of power they're three ways of organizing a power structure and in any system you always you know it is certainly always true that like sovereignty is conserved like power is conserved like one of the most you know Elementary mistakes of kind of both libertarianism and communism which are not as far from each other as most people think is that there's this sort of attempt to like eliminate the state or make sort of a kind of automatic you know state in some sense and that can never be done there is never you know even as we see it let's take it into

like you know blockchain World basically you know ethereum of course famously tried to implement the idea of Lawrence Le leig that you know code is Law and that it found itself in you know as a result of the very first da which was simply called the da it found itself in a basically Civil War over legitimacy and it turned out that ethereum was the rule of men and not the rule of law after all actually was the rule of falic and that was perfectly fine and um if you bet on ethereum classic I don't know the numbers but um boy did you pick the wrong horse you you know and so actually it really is the rule of men all the way down there's no code that tells you that

Bitcoin is the real Bitcoin and Bitcoin Satoshi vision is not the real Bitcoin um if you remember Bitcoin Satoshi Vision you remember that one yeah you remember that bsv baby bsv all the way right you know and and and like and so actually you know when you look at the force that makes BTC legitimate in bsv you know an abortion you basically say whatever it is it's not code and so you basically can't eliminate that sort of element of of kind of power in a way but you know different kinds of political problems and situations call for different Power structures in general so to take an

example that goes slightly closer to let's forget you know uh let's totally forget the world of like Normie real world politics and just keep it in blockchain politics because we see all these things in blockchain politics uh you know Dows and like governance rights or whatever are like a huge thing and someone's like you know oh you're creating a new token it should have governance rights I'm like what are governance rights worth like why you know well people love it people love it they'll buy the coin because they can vote in your like on your like propositions and I'm like dude this is the most tarted thing I've ever heard like imagine the like Chipotle was instead of you know um selling securities as a proper Corporation does um you know was sold blockchain tokens

or whatever and if you bought Chipotle tokens not only did you get a share of the Chipotle treasury but you got the vote on what was the next burrito flavor like this is the most [ __ ] way to run a burrito restaurant than than sounds kind sounds kind of great to me I got some ideas for a good burrito but fine you every that's the thing is it sounds great right the thing is actually what what D dictates if the restaurant actually works is like you know that's just not the way to run problem is if I'm running that I am an an angry man running that company because yeah you're a sad a sad a sad little man you're not even running that company right you know the the um it's like a clown train to nowhere I mean you know uh you know

Athenian democracy killed Socrates it came up with the Sicilian Expedition right you know this problem goes a long way back and it's like much more serious than just like you know like corn and cheese burritos or whatever wa so okay wait so go going back so so let me go let me go sorry I was in the mid let me go slightly forward so this is a good example of in the blockchain space where kind of my ideas differ from mainstream ideas I'm like what if basically instead of having say you have something like the ethereum foundation which is some kind of [ __ ] up governance right and what if instead of basically when you have these like foundations and whatever instead of doing you know something like

Athenian democracy in which basically people vote on on like they get in the arena and they vote on like should we ban Socrates or whatever right you know um and you basically govern imagine doing moderation basically through like token democracy like you would literally have like blockchain votes like should we ban socres right you know you would you would be you would be just totally repeating that [ __ ] show so instead here's what you could do you can have token holders instead of direct democracy which is found very rarely in the real world and doesn't work very well you could try representative democracy and so the token holders could elect for example a small group of people who could be known as the you

know the cord or The Horde or maybe maybe the board right you know and then you would elect this board and then um that's it i' have the idea boom Galaxy brain and then basically the board the board could pick one person who would run the whole company um would be known as like the Deo or maybe the F the CEO right you know and like they would be like a king except that they would be like fully in charge they would have what the military which has done this for quite some time calls unity of command but also if they [ __ ] up the whole system they would be responsible to this court the board that's it board and then the board can be reelected by

the shareholders right so you have like two degrees of buffering against this chaotic force of turbulent democracy of which our Founders were so distrustful and you have something that runs with the efficiency of a Silicon Valley company because it's actually shaped like a Silicon Valley company it's actually shaped like you know I mean my simple answer to the monarchy question is basically anything that works is made by a monarchy like this computer made by a monarchy actually this computer was designed by a monarchy apple and made by made by another monarchy China right you know and like imagine the California Department of Transportation is doing the same thing so I agree with you tech companies any anything good has been built anything good in the private sector has been built by a monarchy

there's no like Democratic company like it is like great people so now now imagine if if ethereum was run this way if vitalic of ethereum and you know he looks like Augustus you know he's got this really strong like visceral like the young Octavian maybe they've aged a little differently he could bulk up a little bit I mean he could you canot lose weight I saw a picture of vitalic on steroids that someone made with AI he looked amazing actually so you should really yeah no no I we should you know vitalic if you're out there right I will I will Coach you I mean not in physical training but but you know if if you basically imagine him deploying the resources of the ethereum foundation

not in the sort of the best thing you can do is sort of and actually running like an actual top down company running as as though he was Steve Jobs right you know he would be the most powerful person in the world today like Russia and Ukraine would be coming to him to like you know settle settle the war you know right you know and and like because like like they do to a CEO out there today indeed and and and so like that is just a much more effective organization like there's hardly anything that can be done well by this like we're going to pass resolutions thing and so actually what I call I call that um an optimal autonomous organization or oo and it's a pattern you'll find it in a blog post

about it you know somewhere somewhere somewhere it's a pattern that I think actually more crypto projects should basically follow because it generates much more efficient use of resources than the classic Dao direct democracy structure um so you know when you try to apply that to the real world you have some interesting issues like you know what if the CEO can just like arrest his board and have them shot you know which really kind of [ __ ] with the model a little bit right um and so you know the full like real now we're getting into serious like politics nerdery but what's really neat about the blockchain is that it's one of the only exceptions to like this rule of like sovereignty so

actually like my because actually The Sovereign is not sovereign over the blockchain or at least has a lot of work to do to become sovereign over the blockchain so let's imagine you know to sort of answer your governance question okay okay we've we've realized how you know how much better ethereum would work if like you know Pope King vitalic was like elected by the ethereum board or something now imagine you've got a real world organization like for example a country like so El Salvador who's uh you know CEO have you been to Salvador Jake have you uh I have not been to El Salvador yeah it's the it's the mecca

you know for a certain kind of thinker you know and and um really nice weather actually s Salvador is actually high altitude but the the you'd be surprised but um on the other hand I went to an event on the coast there and I got three I got two intestinal infections in three days and I think that's CU I swim in the ocean though um it wasn't green and anyway the the but great country you know really recovering country uh you know El Salvador and you imagine basically the maximum leader El Hefe right you know of course he's a young man but you know one day he'll be old he wants to like sustain his legacy and he wants to do it on the blockchain so what he does is he says

okay I'm GNA basically mint board nfts and instead of having my board be elected in some ways I'm going to have them be completely unaccountable and irresponsible and whoever has the nft gets to be on the board and if you're going to die or whatever choose or you know quit choose a successor and make sure that person is anonymous as well so you basically just have these nfts floating out there that no one can find and control because actually nobody knows who they are they don't know who each other is and when it's time to select the next leader they come together and basically make that choice

and the rest of the day they sort of live their normal lives um and uh you know and I think that's a way of basically producing the ideal system of government which is what I call an accountable monarchy as opposed to an unaccountable dictator right you know we're all conditioned to oppose unaccountable dictators and so an accountable monarchy with basically aort get a brain tumor he could go insane you know and like you know could certainly get old he could go scile there has to be a board out there that can do basically regime transitions but if that board gets involved in see what we call corporate governance is not corporate governance it's actually corporate

accountability and there are plenty of corporations that don't have it Mark Zuckerberg controls his own board he's got special magic voting shares right right so you can imagine living without accountability the idea of a sovereign that can like shoot people like without accountability is a little questionable I think rightly in our modern era so you basically do want to have you want the efficiency of a monarchy with this sort of system of accountability you really don't want the accountability engine to be corrupted by power so it shouldn't be governing itself just like the board is micromanaging a Company the company right so it's not governance it's accountability right and and I we just went through this ourselves that the you

know the urbit foundation because that's basically why why I'm here is that the board basically decided to make a change you know from an accountability standpoint they did their jobs and um and and so like that's actually like my ideal way of constructing an organization I'd like to see more crypto projects you know work that way and I think you know we're still thinking about the details but it's clear that basically there's democracy deficit in urbit people want more democracy and we're going to give it to them yeah I tend to agree with you on the private side I TBD on the public side I need to think about that more I have a call in a in three minutes that I can't be late

for I think there is a part two at some point to this um because there yeah there's all these things there's like you know Curtis I really want to get your take on like um you know there's this huge decentralization of media happening like proliferation of podcast and substacks and Tucker on X and Elon buying Twitter and open sourcing part of the algorithm and I'm curious like how there's all this stuff so let's talk more about this sort of information space how you recreate the Lost Civilization of uset you know and um you know get back get back to the dream so we'll call this we'll call this a part one with with Curtis Jake if you want to join us again you're welcome too sorry I'm I'm a camera hog no this is this is

always always fascinating I'm happy to give kind of more of the investor view at some point on urbit I've done a a number of podcasts yeah yeah yeah well anyways Curtis Jake thank you guys for the time um and appreciate it and yeah just congrats on doing anything for 20 years is Quite a feat so congrats tot it's easier with a fiveyear vacation all right uh thank you so much guys hey everyone big thanks for watching today's episode wanted to just quickly remind you about the Stellar development foundation's sixth annual Meridian conference this October 15th through 17th in London this is an incredible opportunity to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future of this space head over to meridian.

stellar.org and use the code blockworks pod for early bird pricing [Music]