Urbit for Idiots | Galen Wolfe-Pauly, Tlon Corporation

[00:00] Hello, I'm Natasha Hoskins. I'm Dina Burke. And this is Boys Club. Wait, is it just Boys Club? It's just Boys Club. The Boys Club podcast? No. [00:12] Just boy stuff. [00:13] Hi. [00:14] Hey. [00:15] you [00:16] Um... [00:17] Do you know what's Boys Club? [00:19] you [00:20] Boys Club is a... [00:23] Community first. [00:25] Nice. [00:27] Media... [00:28] Co. Organization. [00:31] That is thinking... [00:33] and talking about [00:35] The new internet. The new internet, which is very apropos. [00:40] For the interview that you're about to listen to, listener. [00:45] I was on my deathbed. [00:48] Like, ill. [00:50] Couldn't make it. And I'm really sad because... [00:53] I have listened to it. I've edited it. And it is great. It's a great listen. And I have... [01:01] You guys did a great job explaining, but I have more questions. So who was on the podcast? Sure, yeah. We had Galen Wolf-Pauly, who is the co-founder, I believe, of the Tlon Podcast. [01:12] Corporation? Man, that sounds like the future. Tlon. T-L-O-N. [01:16] Corporation. Okay, so Talon is working on Erbit, right? [01:20] Mm-hmm. [01:22] My understanding is that Plon is building a lot of the product side, productizing front user experience, I suppose. Consumer layer stuff.

[01:35] Yeah. Yeah. [01:36] So, [01:37] Think about... [01:38] Lens protocol. [01:40] or, uh, [01:42] um, [01:43] Farcaster. Okay. We're in decentralized social. Mm-hmm. [01:47] D sock is what I'm hearing it. Oh, I don't love it. But I'm seeing that on Twitter. D sock. [01:54] Um, [01:56] So it's essentially social media. And... [01:58] And then we have... [02:00] cryptocurrencies, right? Like, whatever. That's... Let's call it Bitcoin. What is that? [02:09] Okay, so like a decentralized money. But like, I think let's just stay in the world of... [02:14] Lens and Forecaster. So they're decentralizing social media. They're like, okay, appreciating that having... [02:21] the [02:22] the sort of [02:23] There being some centralized authority in... [02:28] where we're spending all of our waking hours online, maybe isn't the best model. So my understanding of Erbit is like, [02:37] It's not only decentralized social media. Like, that's, like, part of it. But it's, like, the whole... [02:42] It's like decentralizing your computer, basically. [02:45] Yes. It's much deeper. It's like that social media, decentralized social media is the top layer. Then you have like decentralized money. Urbitt's like, we're going to go – [02:56] We're going to dig into the foundation of this whole thing. This is what I think I understand, and I should call Galen and ask.

[03:05] But what I understand... [03:07] About... [03:09] The internet. [03:10] is that you build a website... [03:13] And that website like has to be... [03:16] like hosted on a server somewhere. Yeah. [03:20] Like the... [03:22] infrastructure of it, the nuts and bolts, the ones and zeros, [03:26] is on a server. [03:27] Uh-huh. [03:28] And my understanding is that Urbit... [03:32] is... [03:34] has, is its own server that you can run as a software and, [03:40] And then you can build things on it and... [03:44] The server is your own personal Erbit, but it's not hardware, which is I'm confused about this. That would be a follow up question. Yeah. [03:52] Anyway, I think like zooming out of the details of it, which we're doing an excellent job with. Please zoom out as quickly as possible. Yeah. [04:03] What we're interested in is, like, the future of the internet. Internet culture, internet innovation. And, like, these people are really doing that. Truly, they're doing the work. They're taking the values that... [04:17] web 3 has of ownership and decentralization and they're like giving you the toolbox to like go do that on your own if you want to and what i really liked about it is that he is the nicest guy really like generous and kind i was like listening to it just being like this person really cares and wants people to understand and also understands that it's hard to understand so i

[04:42] I think that that's really special. So I'd love to have him on again. And I hope you all enjoy... [04:49] So listen. [04:51] One more thing. Please. We are changing the format of the podcast. Oh, my gosh. Correct. We are just doing – we're splitting the podcast out into two super podcasts. We're doing interview – [05:03] And then we're doing, Natasha and I are doing [05:06] Talking about what's happening in Boys Club. [05:08] What's happening in Boys Club and our feelings check-in is being split out into a separate podcast. The reason why we're doing it [05:14] is because... [05:16] The... [05:17] interviews have a shelf life that can remain. You can listen to it in a month, a lot of them, or two months, and it really still makes sense. And you can learn. If you're digging into something, you could go back to it. And when you have it all compiled together, there's also a lot of stuff that [05:36] It does have a shelf life of what we're talking about. Yeah. So we're splitting it out, trying it. [05:41] Please give us some feedback. Please let us know what you think. [05:45] About anything. Okay, let's get into it. [05:55] On today's show, we have Galen Wolf-Pauly, who is the co-founder of the Tlon Corporation, which is working on Erbit. [06:03] I'm calling this episode Erbit for Idiots. So if you're new to Erbit, like I am, and I was as of like the past three weeks, you're in a

[06:15] Perfect place. [06:16] Welcome to the world of Urbit. Welcome to the show, Galen. Thanks for having me. Thanks for helping us generate Urbit for Idiots because it's something that's desperately needed. So yeah, this is great. [06:27] Okay, so let me ground you by telling you about my Erbit journey so far. [06:32] So I, and if you don't, you have no idea what Urbit is, I'm saying this word and it's like not registering, that's totally fine. We're going to care for you here. So don't be concerned. I came across Urbit. [06:45] A couple weeks ago, [06:48] Zora... [06:49] which we love, I think was at your Urbit assembly. [06:54] Yeah. [06:55] Conference. [06:57] And they wrote about it in the magazine. And Balaji was there and Riva Tez was there, a bunch of like smartest internet people. And I was like, okay, what's happening here? And then as soon as you, I had the word urban in my head and then I started seeing it everywhere. [07:11] where it was like, okay, all the cool internet people [07:14] are thinking about Urbit, are writing about Urbit, are posting about it in some way. I saw Paki McCormick yesterday put up an Urbit thing. So I'm like, [07:22] As is the boys' go play, we're super curious and need to, must know more. So that's sort of where I am. I will say that I tried to... [07:33] by a planet. I tried to enter Urbit. [07:38] Yeah. [07:39] I bought a planet. [07:40] I was not able to get through the steps through [07:43] to like hosting the plan. Okay. So anyway, I'll pause there. I can help you with that. Great, great, great. So I would love like just starting off,

[07:52] What is Erbit? [07:54] Good starting place. So... [07:57] First of all, actually, that as like precursor. Okay, there are all these people who are kind of into this thing. What is this thing? Okay, that's actually not bad. I'll take that. The fact that then you go from, okay, what is this thing? And you can't answer it. Not ideal, but let's see if we can remedy that. Yeah. [08:14] The concise answer to what is Erbit that I think is too technical, and then we can use that as like jumping off point, is... [08:20] that Urbit is a complete stack for personal computing in the cloud, and a network between the nodes that run that stack. [08:28] So [08:30] To make that actually make sense, it might actually be easiest to just give the like, why would you build that? And what does it actually mean? Great. To get us to whatever it actually is and what it does for people. [08:44] So I'm looking at a screen, you're looking at a screen. [08:47] I imagine on your screen, like on my screen, we're looking at browser tabs and maybe some desktop apps. [08:54] all of which connect to services. [08:57] Like they all depend on some cloud service somewhere. And right now we basically go to our software, right? We connect to the company and the company decides how the software runs because they control the server. [09:08] Thank you. [09:09] So my take... [09:11] many years ago, including some other weirdos who've slowly snowballed into a larger band of weirdos, thought, "You know what? This doesn't make sense. Why can't I just install software on something that I run,

[09:22] So instead of like I go to Discord, I install Discord as an app, [09:26] And if for some reason I don't like Discord anymore and I want to use Slack, well, I just install Slack and it uses the same data because it's running on a computer that I control. [09:34] So Urbit is like the technology that would make that possible, where like we run our own software, our software is directly interoperable, we can compose it however we like, and because cloud software is such a like... [09:46] part of our lives. It's like how the world is knit together. Our bet is basically like, [09:52] Yeah, of course people have to control their own servers. That's like where our lives are now. And so inverting that relationship is like very, very necessary. [10:01] Think of Erbit, though, as the precursor. Erbit is like Linux or, I don't know, it's infrastructure. And now we're trying to build the interfaces for it, the actual things that you would use and touch. And that's what we work on at Talon. That's what I care about. [10:18] I see. [10:19] Okay. Does that help? I mean, I'm at like... [10:23] We're somewhere. I'm at like 35, 40%. That's pretty nice. That's a start. [10:32] I don't know what Linux is. And I know, like, I also am, like, a little bit nervous coming into this conversation with you because I feel like it's going to reveal that I don't know a lot about what a computer is and how it works. So I feel a little exposed myself in this conversation as well. That is okay. No, no, no. That's completely okay. So I started, like, doing some posting about Urban in the Boys Club Discord. And...

[10:54] started crowdsourcing some questions. Yeah. [10:58] Got a sense for like where people are and like what they understand about Urbit and what they, or if they're brand new to it. A real range of people who have like, oh, I've been tracking this project since 2017 or, or, or I have, I've watched now the video explainer on what Urbit is and I still have literally no idea what it is. But I will say one thing that unites everyone that's in boys club and probably everyone that's listening is that, [11:18] We understand... [11:20] decentralization and sort of the values that [11:24] that brings, we fully get crypto. [11:27] And [11:28] I think that, so I think we can sort of like lean into those areas with that as a grounding. In crypto, everybody relies on... [11:37] Sort of like Telegram and Discord, right? Mm-hmm. [11:40] But Telegram and Discord actually also rely on companies. [11:44] Because someone's got to keep that stuff running, right? Yes. [11:48] so you guys have a discord and actually like if discord the company decides you know what [11:53] These memes, they're not working for us. You guys got to go. It's over for you. There's not a lot you're going to be able to do. [12:00] So the deplatforming argument, I actually don't think is that interesting, but it's indicative of the fact that like all your data is there, like your whole community's history is there. Like this whole thing, like it's actually, it's there and you, you know, you want to hang on to it. So one of the first things that we've built is just... [12:16] basic communications tools for like group chat and group notes and group link sharing, so that you can start a community where everyone's running their own Erbit node, meaning that you actually have all of that content on something that totally belongs to you, you actually basically own it with a private key, and it can, you know, conceivably last forever.

[12:34] So you have total ownership over your communication tooling. [12:37] in a totally decentralized way, you're not relying on any third party, any company, [12:42] And not only is it yours, but you can potentially customize it. You could write software for it. You can install software from other people on the network who are building software for it. So if you guys want to like track all your assets or all your events or like, [12:53] build other things that make the DAO actually [12:56] more functional as a community, you can do that. Can you do that on Discord? Well, only as much as Discord will let you. [13:03] So how's that? Does that make sense? Yeah, totally shocking. So – [13:07] I think that I definitely understand it at the level of sort of like social media and communication. [13:14] owning my [13:16] sort of home on the internet and the data that I'm generating and being able to potentially port that to different areas or just keep it for myself and build other things on top of it that I need. [13:30] decide what it is. So understanding it on that level. [13:35] But it seems like there's sort of this deeper... [13:39] Linux hardware, something about an operating system level, which [13:45] That's quite hard for me to understand. [13:48] You don't have to think about it too much, I think. It's like... [13:51] You could just, or you can... [13:54] It's sort of like, let's say you start with, hey, I would love to have a communication tool that I own. It could last forever. And it's like the unfortunate reality is once you start asking, well, how do I actually do that? What do I need for that? Our answer is, well, you need a totally different piece of system software. Like you need this whole system that will let you do that. And like, that's what Urban is.

[14:16] And Urban is just sort of like, I wish no one ever had to know what, in the same way that you don't know what Linux is, but Linux is the operating system that every server needs. [14:25] Every application you use, even what we're using to communicate right now, like Linux is powering the internet. [14:30] No one cares about it. So ideally, Urbit powers the next world of the decentralized user-owned internet. But no one should care about Urbit. People should care about their interfaces to it. Got it. Okay. So... [14:43] One of the questions that we got from the community was, is it a computer? [14:49] Like, is Urban a computer? And I guess in some ways... [14:53] It is. [14:54] The answer is yes to that. Yeah, this one... [14:57] It always confuses people because it's not hardware necessarily. Right. It is technically like a virtual computer. So yes, it can compute any function. It's a virtual machine, like technically. So yeah, it's a computer. You can install any software on it. You can run anything on it, but it's not a piece of hardware. You can, people do... [15:16] So we're just doing voice, but people now actually are building Erbit hardware. So you can go buy like this thing that this company called Native Planet makes, and they'll just ship you this piece of Erbit that has Erbit running on it, and it is a piece of hardware. Yeah. [15:26] But Urbit itself is just software. It's not a computer in the sense of like your laptop or your desktop. [15:32] Okay. And what are people using it for right now? [15:36] Yeah, so mostly... So if you think of Erbit, I do think like... [15:39] We had this revolution in computing in the '70s, where computers used to be these big-- [15:45] They're like size of a room. It's a mainframe. It's this piece of industrial equipment like a bank uses. And then we went from that to like PCs that sit on our desk in the 80s.

[15:54] Think of Erbit like [15:56] If you're like a Windows or a PC person, right, your Urbit is like the tower that you bought. And then what we're working on is the equivalent of like Windows for anyone who is old enough to remember all this weird era of computing. [16:09] So the sort of Windows-like system that we've built, which I think of as like the OS for Urbit, it's called Landscape. That's like what Twan builds. [16:16] - Okay. [16:17] The first thing we built there are very much like group communication tools. So two things called groups and talk that allow you to basically... [16:23] in some ways build the equivalent of a DAO and stay connected chatting and sharing notes and stuff like that. [16:29] And then the community has built all these other weird little experimental applications because you can build any app that then interoperates with those existing applications on top of Verbit. [16:38] So most people are, yeah, building secret societies, communities. It's a community sort of toolkit at this point. [16:44] Okay, so there's all this cool infrastructure stuff that you guys – [16:47] are building [16:49] and is sort of like necessary in order to have this like [16:52] top layer that's fully decentralized and in the user's control. [16:56] But... [16:57] Ultimately, you want that infrastructure layer to be abstracted away. Like that's not something that like... [17:03] Devs will play around with that and... [17:06] have some fun there. But like, [17:08] most of [17:09] I'm curious if you think that ideally, probably most of your users are not thinking about that or engaging on that. [17:15] level with Urbit in any way. They're sort of at this top level of [17:19] Communication and messaging. Is that right? [17:21] Yeah, you have both, right? Like, idea is to create a system that's really efficient for a developer. So Urbit, I think, for a developer, actually, is super powerful, because it lets me build software.

[17:32] And then just send a link to a friend and my friend installs that software directly. They run it themselves. I never have to put a server online. I'm not like configuring a stack. There's a lot that we make much simpler in terms of just the experience of building software. It's pretty cooperative with a lot of what's going on in Web3 and crypto broadly. [17:49] But yeah, in any system, you can think of it even like in the world of iOS, like there are a lot more iPhone users than there are like iOS devs. And so yeah, certainly like if we're not... [18:00] building stuff that's really useful to a user, [18:03] the platform is not interesting. It doesn't matter. So our focus is like build that toolkit and, [18:09] get people, you know, validate that it's useful for people and, you know, build all the infrastructure necessary to actually, you know, [18:16] you know, like land it with communities. [18:19] And I guess the bet is really like, [18:21] I'm not a big, I kind of hate social media. [18:25] Actually, maybe to be fair, I deeply, I just like have nothing to do with social media. [18:31] But I do care a lot about staying connected to people digitally. So the bed is sort of like, hey, [18:36] communities of all different shapes and sizes and varieties like need tools to stay connected that they can trust. And maybe the future of like social networking is actually just kind of like social computing. [18:47] ways that we can stay connected, that we can just trust and rely on are more simple, straightforward, more similar to like a signal than like a TikTok. Although I think those things are going to like coexist for a long time. [18:58] So one thing [18:59] sort of trade-off that you're making coming into the Urbit universe.

[19:04] is that you're coming into a space which is [19:08] much quieter. [19:10] Right. Like it's it's your own thing. Right. And you're. [19:14] you get to decide who you're inviting in and you get to decide like it's fully on your terms. [19:19] Um, [19:20] And so I think for a lot of people, [19:23] who are interested in privacy and who are... [19:29] like [19:30] Yeah, not... [19:32] not doing the twice a day TikTok posts, that would be really attractive to them. I get that. I think when I'm thinking about Boys Club and our community, I think [19:43] Though... [19:44] Discord isn't a channel for [19:46] discoverability. I do think that like it is important for us to try and [19:50] reach new people. And so I'm curious, like if there's any sort of larger web that [19:57] is being built. [19:59] Yeah, so... [20:01] One of the things that we... So over the past year, we've been building a version of Landscape, this little sort of proto-OS and toolkit for Urbit, that we felt like was good enough that we could actually ask people to use it, which was definitely not true year before that. So we released that... [20:22] a month ago or something like that, like six weeks ago. And the next step is actually to fix a lot of the inviting onboarding and discoverability. Yeah. You definitely want people like,

[20:34] I should be able to just send you a link, get you onboarded, like send that to any of my friends, do that via a text message. Like the level barrier to entry and convenience needs to be on par with anything that we're already using. Yeah, we get people often are like, like you're like, I couldn't figure out the barrier to entry is like horrifically bad. [20:53] hard. It's wild. It's wild. Yeah, it's terrible. Not intentional. Wish that was fixed. We're working on it. But yeah, anyway, to your point, you want all those connections to be seamless to build and that your motivation for building them on Urban is because you feel excited about the [21:10] Owning something, being able to customize it, making your own and so on. Okay, so why are you doing this? Like you're clearly a smart, successful dude. Like you can work on... [21:21] a number of different projects. Why are you getting up every day and working on this [21:27] from the outside looking in, it looks like, [21:30] Very challenging project to try and figure out how to figure out scale, adoption, onboarding, making that like, there's a lot of knots that you need to be thinking about and untangling every day. Like, why are you doing it? [21:43] Such a good question. No one's ever asked me that. I don't think I even asked myself that question. Maybe I should be asking myself that question. [21:52] Um, so let's see, why do I do this? I grew up in the age of the early internet and like with computers as a kid. And, um, yeah, computers were in the, like in the nineties were these incredible open ended tools. Like it felt like this tool because of its breadth of flexibility, it's like something that you could very casually use as like a vehicle for exploring things very creatively, both like making things, connecting to people, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,

[22:22] And I think that's pretty much gone almost, or it's like very nearly gone. And it's an accident that it's gone. The reason that it went away is just because as this technical accident, which is that the only way to build a piece of network software was to basically build a company and then lock everybody into technology. [22:39] the servers that you're running. We live in this world of like computers are like TVs, where we're sort of like, you just are, every app is trying to keep your attention all the time. [22:49] And that feels to me like, [22:52] both a missed opportunity [22:54] And [22:55] Yeah, there's like a potential to... [22:57] give people genuine tools that they can use to do unexpected things in a networked world. And I think it's otherwise basically impossible. I think there's interesting stuff in crypto and Web3 broadly. [23:10] But some of the problems that are solved by protocols and blockchains [23:13] Like, it's not quite enough. You still need a place that is like where you run your computer, run all of your applications, and it's kind of like the thing that is the locus of your... [23:23] digital life. [23:24] Um, [23:26] And I think that, yeah, like network computing has just become-- it connects everything for us. [23:31] And it feels like the potential for what it could do for the world is actually... [23:36] we're like only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Like we've barely gotten started. And the way that you let people explore what's possible with it is to give them real control over their computing. Um, [23:48] I don't even think about it's not a, this is like the most fun, I'm having great time. Like that's an incredibly hard problem, but it's super fun and interesting. Like, and I think potentially very impactful.

[23:58] Yeah. [23:59] It seems like there's this [24:02] kind of dystopian thing that you're trying to avoid. [24:06] And, yeah. [24:07] that there's sort of a world... [24:10] Um, [24:11] I mean, I guess you sort of alluded to it where we're sort of like the algorithm is designed to keep us looking at opening Twitter every two seconds and opening TikTok and all these things. Yeah. [24:22] is that [24:24] Does that resonate with you? Is that kind of like what you're working against? Do you feel like that is a big part of what is galvanizing the community currently? [24:33] Yeah, that's a good question. [24:35] I think I'm more of a, like, I love looking at TikTok. Like, I don't, I'm not a purist about stuff. Like there's, the stuff is funny. Like it's fine. There's all kinds of, certainly like internet culture stuff [24:47] Like as is created by these platforms, like there's a lot of actual like hilarious value there and interesting things that happen. Totally. [24:54] For me, it's more just this optimistic excitement around what happens when [25:01] you give people new ways of communicating and staying connected. [25:06] So I expect these things to operate in parallel, right? Like, yeah, there's one take on Erbit where you're like, oh no, Erbit, everyone must use Erbit or there must be a sort of an Erbit world. And I'm like, yeah, [25:17] No, I just think if you think about where does my family stay connected or where does my company actually get stuff done in a way where we... [25:26] don't feel like it's going to disappear. Like you just want to use infrastructure that you can customize, that you can own.

[25:31] And I think that occupies like [25:33] That takes over quite a lot of tools that we already use, but it doesn't replace the whole world. Although I think it'll be... [25:41] It'll feel really good, basically. Yeah. Yeah. [25:45] Maybe one analogy would be like, I feel like we live in an internet world of fast food. [25:50] And like, I'm not, I'll eat fast food sometimes, but I also like that I can go and cook and like, sort of like, hey, like, [25:56] We're like the Whole Foods alternative. Like you don't have to come here all the time, but like it might be good to have or something like that. Okay. Okay. Like a little balance. [26:04] I have a dumb question, which is like, [26:07] Can I send an email in or like, is that possible? [26:12] Certainly, technically, we could implement it so you could be sending email to and from Urban Nodes. We don't do that today. [26:18] Urbit's very much like, [26:20] each application is kind of like a protocol. Okay. And so the chat protocol within Urbit talks to other Urbit nodes. [26:28] You had hinted at something offline. So like you could make it such that say those protocols also call out to like Bastodon or they implement Lens as like the identity protocol. Like Urbic can sort of fold those things in and I expect that it will over time. But like we don't we don't really do that today. [26:45] Okay, and that... [26:47] Brings me to our next question, which is like, what's its relationship to crypto? [26:51] My journey was I went to, I can't remember, like ended up on some website where it was like, buy your planet. [26:57] And I bought my planet in ETH. [27:00] And so I was like, oh, okay, am I in...

[27:04] Am I in Ethereum land? But I suspect that I'm not. [27:08] So I'm curious how you would describe, and I've actually listened to you on podcast talking about, [27:14] a lot about Bitcoin, or maybe it wasn't you, but it was a colleague. And so I'm curious, like, how you relate to the crypto world, but also, like, technically and... [27:25] Practically. - Yeah. Yeah, so very practically versus simple. [27:28] Every [27:30] Like think of Urbit as a system, a program, whatever, it's just a piece of software. To boot that software, [27:36] you need an ID. [27:38] And an ID is basically an NFT. [27:42] There's a finite number of those NFTs that are distributed in a decentralized way. [27:46] And that's basically just so like you don't have a network full of bots and spammers. We have kind of like a slightly different take on identity than like ENS. So if you think of ENS like a username, an urban ID is more like a phone number. It's just like a synthetic name and yet like a little visual identity that doesn't leak any bits about you, right? It doesn't have your name associated with it. You don't customize it, but it's like a network address, if that makes sense. Okay. Maybe kind of. Well, I understand ENS. [28:16] is that you go to ENS... [28:19] You pull up EtherScan and you can get any transaction that that [28:23] Address is done. [28:24] Urban ID, there's more privacy built into it. Is that what you're saying? [28:28] Yeah, it's just every urban idea, like my urban idea is Ravno Reptile. [28:32] That doesn't include my name at all. It doesn't, it's not like...

[28:35] Galen 420 or whatever, like .urbit. And so as a naming convention, they're different. [28:46] that Rav Moorapdile is still just an NFT, [28:49] Oh, it's just like a random name is what you're saying. Yes. It's not. Okay. Okay. I understand. You're not customizing it and it's not necessarily about the data. It's just about like. [28:58] it is its own standalone thing. [29:00] Yeah, like it doesn't, you can use it then in different, same way you would use your phone number, right? Like I can tell someone my name is Mark and just give them my phone number and they don't know anything about me. [29:08] If that makes sense. [29:11] Anyway, you use that NFT to boot a node, and then that node is what runs all of your applications, moves data back and forth and so on. It's like the right to run a node. So all of that is on Ethereum. The identity system is on Ethereum. It's all deployed to Ethereum. You can go by address space on OpenSea, whatever. [29:28] Um, [29:29] we use Ethereum for identity. [29:33] We overlap with crypto in that [29:36] when you think about like, where do I run a DAP? Like most decentralized apps, right, are just like these little browser-based things. [29:44] Urbit is conceivably actually probably like a better platform for that because your Urbit can store information about you. It can talk to other Urbit IDs. It can be this like powerful, you know, computing environment. So the example I often give is like, [30:00] I go to Uniswap and all I can do is like submit a trade basically. Like Uniswap on Urbit could be, I see my trading history. I can talk to my counterparties. I can like run bots that actually do algorithmic trading on my behalf. It can be this like fully featured trading interface because I'm just running that program myself. And there's not a company that has like the liability of running it for me. Okay.

[30:23] So I think we're like a natural complement to blockchains and protocols, basically. [30:29] Is Urbit [30:30] The dark web. [30:32] I hope not. It's not right. No, well, it's actually very technically not. So we don't do anything to mask your IP address. We're not like Tor. And I don't need a different browser to get to. No, no. Yeah. So when I run, I mean, I have Erbit just running, or I'm accessing Landscape, our like interface for Erbit through just like browser tabs and the iOS app. Like it's a. [30:55] Okay. You wouldn't even, that's why I'm like, no one needs to know about her, but just, but it is there in the background. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. And so it just, in terms of like users and acquisition and. [31:05] and scale and adoption, like you're at Thalon Corporation, like much more focused on like, what are these... [31:13] essentially daps. [31:14] that we can build to like, [31:16] actual use cases for real people. Right, yeah. So over the past, like the beginning... [31:22] I mean, yeah, I've been working on this project for a long time. The first, like, six years were very much like, we were just like five people just trying to see if we can even get the system to work. [31:33] And then probably two years ago, [31:36] we started thinking much more in terms of like, okay, can we, can we start to build interfaces that we actually like, like that we're going to be able to depend on ourselves as our team and our community. Um, [31:47] And that... [31:49] was a rocky start, but over the last year or so, it started to be like, "Okay, this is pretty good. We like this, and this seems extensible in an interesting way."

[31:57] Yeah, we had never really thought too much. We had a very organic growth in the sort of developer and like technical community of people who like... [32:05] Yeah, like really excited about this thing. I mean, Irvett solves lots of technical problems that are difficult to solve. And so seeing that take off [32:14] it felt like, oh, we have this glut of like developers and tech people who want to build stuff. But the most important thing is how can we actually bring people on here and like validate its usability? [32:22] That's the only thing I really care about, anyway. So, yeah, over the last year or so, it got to the point of like, okay, this is good. We use this every day. We don't use Slack. We don't use Discord. We don't use Telegram. We use Landscape, which feels great. And just now, we're starting to actually... [32:35] hand onboard communities and start to kind of like make sure that onboarding funnel is working and sort of like refine the last pieces of landscape to be able to like in earnest, like bring it out to the world. [32:44] I feel smarter about Irvait. I appreciate it. I feel like we talk a lot at Boys Club about... [32:52] like being a community for people who are interested in the new internet and building the new internet and like, you guys are like literally doing it. So yeah. [32:58] We're trying. Happy to answer any other questions. We are actually now starting to like, [33:03] work directly with communities that are interested. So you can go to Tuan.io and like apply and we'll, you know, start working directly with you if it's interesting. I can send some stuff your way. [33:15] Cool. Thank you so much for coming. [33:17] Thanks for having me. It was fun.

[33:25] Hi. Hi. So we're keeping draft tweets. [33:29] We're keeping draft tweets here. [33:31] I'm sorry. [33:32] I'm not quite sure why, but... [33:35] Um, I just feel like they're fun. It is. I don't know. It's kind of the most fun part of the podcast for us personally. I don't know if other people like it or not. Yeah. Honestly, who's to say no one's ever told me they like them. [33:47] Do you have something? Yeah, I do. Um... [33:52] Okay. [33:53] This one was drafted... [33:56] It comes from a... [34:00] The truth. I had a moment where I... [34:04] This tweet came out of a moment where it was like that. It was like fully like... [34:08] Wow, this is what it is. Okay, okay. What is it? [34:12] Do you ever go to a different grocery store than your usual just to feel something? [34:19] Oh, that's so sad. It makes me sad. [34:25] That's what I feel. Why? I don't like going to a grocery store. That's not my own grocery store. It's not. It's like an unpleasant. Okay. Let me ask you. Do you ever go to a different grocery store than usual just to feel something? I think you should try it. I think you should try it. Because I did it. And I was like, okay, I'm feeling something. I felt something. [34:44] I recommend it. If you haven't done it. If you need to feel alive. Yeah. [34:48] I actually didn't even really feel that. I just felt something that was different and unexpected. And so that was kind of nice.

[34:56] Wow, I love that for you. Yeah. Okay, I don't really have a draft tweet, even though I said we should do draft tweets. Okay. But I do have... [35:04] a tweet that did numbers and... [35:07] You just want to brag about it? I really want to brag about it because I don't get engagement often. Yeah, yeah. If I don't tweet about Boys Club, it's usually not... [35:18] Engaged. Can I give you can I give you some recommendation? [35:21] Sure. Let's hear it. You should try engaging more in other people's stuff. [35:25] I do. I engage with others. Oh, like commenting. Commenting. Yeah. Commenting. I think that might help you. [35:32] Okay. I'm not, like, trying to grow my Twitter following just for the record. I'm not being strategic about it. I mean, I probably should be, but, like... [35:40] It makes me sad when people don't like my tweets. Oh. I mean, sad is too strong a word, but I'm like, I want to feel known and seen here. Anyway, I tweeted this while we were... [35:51] in California. And I said, I'm not stupid enough to think my life would be perfect if I lived in California, but I'm also not, not stupid. And there was a lot of conversation. You hit a nerve there. I hit a nerve for, you know, January, California. Yeah. We're all feeling it. We are. Okay, guys, if you like this podcast, please like and subscribe and tell your friends and share it and post about it and text your friends and call them even say, Hey, I have a podcast for you. I'll [36:21] Give us five stars. [36:24] If you feel like it. That always helps, yeah. I actually have no idea what helps the algorithm. None. Not a clue. When it comes to podcasts. I mean, we launched a second podcast thinking that that would help not knowing if it would. Just guessing. No clue. No clue. Just shipping it. But I have a sense that rating a podcast is...

[36:45] liking it on, I don't know really what that means. I suppose, I guess, I don't know. I think it's just rating. Rating and reviewing. We don't even know what that CTA is. Rate, review, and follow it and subscribe. I think subscribe is another thing. Yeah. Like you could subscribe. I know for sure you can subscribe on Spotify. So that's the call to action. And then also, if you aren't already getting our newsletter, really recommend it. Link in show notes. [37:08] Link in show notes.