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

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? There's a lot of reasons you could want 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 them? 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.

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Yeah. So we're talking our books, we're talking our books, we're carrying our bags, our bags appear as imaginary mercies around our shoulders.

Big shill fest. Yeah, exactly. So, um, yeah, I mean, the context for this episode, everyone, was I, uh, I went down an urbit rabbit hole several months ago from this. I had met with this guy Brian who runs Chorus One, and he was talking to me about urbit, and Jake is really into urbit, and then Curtis is the founder of Urbit and actually left Urbit, left Urbit, walked away after maybe 15 or 16 or 17 years of building it and recently came back, I think, which is we're going to 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 Urbit, 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, 5, 6, 7 years. The internet's kind of looked the same for the last 5, 6, 7 years, but You've been building Urbit for 20+ years. So how has the internet evolved over the last 20 or so years?

Well, you know, we have to go 2020. 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 a 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 talking with Marc Andreessen, and by November 2020 you're in a little room with antisemitic Black nationalists, right? You know, not to knock antisemitic Black nationalists, but it's not really what people come to a network for. And so, unless you're another antisemitic Black nationalist, and that's pretty much it. Right, so I think that watching that kind of pattern, 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 the internet now, it's like Athens except the Persians sacked it. I guess the Persians did sack Athens actually, but then it came back. But anyway, so if you look at the internet of the '80s, there are two essential things that stand out about it. One is that computing is completely completely personal. Everything is sort of— there's shared services, but the thing is there's a certain amount of semi-decentralization. There are no sort of meaning— well, there's some meaningful centralized structures, but there isn't really a centralized power structure. And it's also a very high-quality society. And so it's like I was talking with a coworker the other day who unfortunately is my age. I've long felt Aging should be recognized as a disease. So we have this shared disease. So we're bonding in the support group and we're talking about Usenet. And Usenet was the society, was the internet as basically a social framework that developed in the mid-'80s and flourished until the early '90s. The term Eternal September, it was called September because basically if you were on Usenet, you were 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 kind 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, you know, what newsgroups were you on, man, you know, back in the day? And he's like, well, like maybe like rec.bicycles.tech, uh, you know. And I was like, well, I was sort of more of a Talk.Bizarre kind of guy, but rec.bicycles.tech, okay, let's compare that to— I can't even imagine like a literary group on fucking 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 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 Usenet quality— it's like kind of midway Usenet— 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 Usenet, which is pretty strong. And so, basically, we on Usenet, me as a teenager then on Usenet, sort of saw this as basically, this is obviously the future of humanity. Usenet had decentralized governance. It was governed by what was called, sort of your Usenet feed, which shared articles in a kind of structured peer-to-peer topology. It was not automatically structured, it was manually structured. It was actually descended from Usenet actually predated the internet because it used to use UUCP, which actually involved computers calling each other on modems. And so still in early Usenet, you would see these bang path signatures, which were literally the path of modem call hops that your shit had to take to get to point A from— to point B from point A, right? So very ancient, ancient, early, mid-'80s Star Trek nerd kind of, you know, thing. Not to say that I would be interested 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 exceed the authorities in 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 r/Coontown, right? You know, and like at first it was like in the old Reddit it was considered completely normal that this like insane shit 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, 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 ecological disaster, right? And so, you know, that, you know, when you look at what's been lost from Usenet to Reddit, okay, you see the whole loss of like a high-quality content-producing community. You see that there was UGC, user-generated content on Usenet of a quality that's only been seen very sporadically. Quora had that for a while, and now Quora, 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 fabric That was amazing. And then from the perspective of a technical fabric, okay, we 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 stale and bureaucratic like X.500. Raise your hand if you remember X.500, OSI networking stack, 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 and the internet. And Unix is, you know, really a very beautiful system. And so one way to describe sort of what Urbit is, is basically it's the whole stack from network through true 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.

Hmm.

So I was in an IETF meeting in like 1998, just kind of hanging out, not really contributing, and it was a meeting for 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. So it's basically, and XMPP 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, you know, social group chats, whatever, would obviously work the way email does. Obviously, the AOLs were like a thing of the past. Eventually, it was a matter of time. I remember the first time I actually got IP packets to flow into my house. It was insane. It was like previously I just terminal into a server, right? But now, there was an IP address in my house, right? It was amazing, right? So obviously, everyone is going to have their own address, their own host on this network, "Right, right, right. And when you wanna talk to me, I'll have port 372 or whatever, which is whatever the XMPP port is, and you'll XMPP a message to me, and we'll do that instead of using Signal." So that was the world that we imagined, and basically a few years later, a young lad named Mark Zuckerberg had an interesting idea that I guess others had had, which is that, 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 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 feel kind of cool if you're a node on a social network, you know, but if you're a row in a social database, not as cool, not as cool, not so cool, but that's what you actually are. And so there's this 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 know, right, you know, the year of the Linux desktop, right, right. We always do, you know, like, like it's like your, uh, you know, your cousin's band, which is always about to get big, right, you know. And, and next year's the year, next year's the year, here's the year, next '86 years the year, right? You know, and so, you know, there was this basically an, an kind of failure to realize in a way that what you were looking at— I mean, Unix is great in a way, but Unix is also an operating system that is basically designed for a mid-1970s minicomputer. 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 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 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, you 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, you're— I mean, your iPhone is running basically Unix, you know, and, you know, so billions of dollars have gone into that, 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 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 would have like a personal helicopter. And like, you know, it's like, okay, but like, you know, like, 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 there was definitely some of that going on in our vision of the early Usenet. And so as this kind of—

oh wait, can I actually ask a question on that to actually Yeah. 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 Usenet and things like that. And then early 2000s happened and we start to centralize a lot of it happened.

Yeah. Okay. Maybe you can say—

Curtis is saying that the—

I'll let you talk. I'll let you talk.

The original internet was essentially decentralized. And then it got like, it was decentralized.

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. But it's from what I've read and talked to people like you. So anyways, 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 can 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 started 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. And 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, anything kind of gets worse as it scales. 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 these 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 Usenet, Usenet was excellent early on because it relied on a selection effect. It basically— it's like I say, the 13th principle of Burning Man 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 probably 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 gatewayed into Usenet. Uh, we were aware of the existence of AOL and other lower forms of life, but we didn't expect them to be be showing up in our shopping malls, right? And then one day there they were, right? And this exactly the same thing would happen if you basically sort of put a teleportation gateway between Burning Man and Fort Lauderdale, right? And so 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 believe actually at Burning Man they say radical inclusion, but you know, um, no, no, I know, I know, yeah, I know what you're saying.

I read a blog, I read a blog.

Their diversity numbers are not strong, let me put it that way.

You know, I wrote a blog post from '92 or '90, I think it was written in '92 or '93, and it was talking about the normies and how they were flooding are good, are good things like the forums. And 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, well, they might have, they might have said newbies at that time. Um, but, you know, so much internet culture comes out of Usenet. Newbie is an internet word, for example, uh, you know, is a Usenet 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 mechanisms that it doesn't need early in its life to basically sustain its quality as the newbies flood in. And Usenet didn't have that, and so 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, you it entered in a world where like jannies, as they say on 4chan, were very necessary. I mean, 4chan's a, no, 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 centralized Web 2.0, 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 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 manor of some strongman who then forces them to till his content fields. And so we get into these massive and 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— 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, but like the late Austro-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 mysterious midnight disappearances, right? And that feeling, because you all remember basically sort of Twitter before this stuff was a problem, and there was sort of a weird set of 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 different than—

these were not, you know, these were not crypto racist groups, these were not race science groups, these are 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, societies have their merits.

It's crazy how quickly that change happens. Like, it's a, you like, you know, it's like a peasant or a serf in the— you mentioned the, 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 like, it's sort of like a digital kind of third world country in a way. There are like these like bubbles of security. Like if you're in São Paulo, you sort of travel, or, you know, at least you— if you and I as like, you know, Americans are in São Paulo, we travel between one, you know, security bubble and another. And they have like airport-tier security on the edges. Like I was in São Paulo and I had to get into like this like sports club, and it was like I was interviewing for a passport. It It was amazing, right?

Yeah.

And, 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 is— this operating system is going to basically emulate a 1970s mainframe like virtually in the bowels 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 Urbit way back, you know, you know, 20, um, 20-plus years ago for me was just like realizing that like we just had the dot-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, and the, the, uh, sometimes you're 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 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 defrocked 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 Urbit had, uh, 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 heuristic means. I probably should have invented the blockchain, but I didn't. In case anyone is wondering, I still haven't figured out how—

who Satoshi is. I mean, we could be.

I think it's— I think it's— I think it's— I think— I think it's Nick Szabo. And that's, that's my feeling. So it's not Curtis Yarvin.

Yeah.

Okay. So, okay.

So then take us—

so I would be a— never mind.

Okay, Jake, let me pick on you just because I've been with Curtis and I've been—

sorry, I've been monologuing.

You're getting a— Jake, you're getting a nice front row seat here, though. Okay, Jake, take us into— so Curtis did a nice summary of the last 40 years, I guess.

That's the prehistory of Urbit, basically, of the internet.

When I— someone first explained Urbit to me, I said I was confused about how crypto and Urbit 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 guess just how do you— what— why are you excited about Urbit, Jake?

Well, 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 Urbit in 2016. I got connected to Curtis and the Tlon team as they were starting to go to market and sell their first digital assets publicly. You know, we were talking to a lot of teams doing that. That's actually when we bought our first 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 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— we saw it more as a decentralized network. And, you know, we were—

if I can, if I can butt 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 disks and take out an ad in Byte magazine and like in the back and like mail people the floppy disks? 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 it's like costs 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 I was 19 years old and very wet behind the ears, and I just thought of, oh, I have to apply to school again. But 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 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 and the group that I wanted to be part of. Was this guy John Osterhout, who did TCL, if you remember that early 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 academic onanism to say, oh, I could publish this paper, but actually would run code that people could use. But you couldn't even do that in academia. And so the question of basically, if you connect the question of of Urbit, you know, the sort of Unix— Urbit 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 data.

What's funny, 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 monetary assets acquire value. Like, for example, you know, the fundamental work of Carl Menger, 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 Mises came up with this kind of— Ludwig von Mises came up with this kind of game theoretic, you know, theory of how gold expands in value, which relies critically on 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 very stupid centralized version of Bitcoin. And I would— because I was just like, basically, if you build a digital asset with a limited supply, it can appreciate like arbitrarily, right? And, you know, and I was writing about this principle on, you know, my blog. In 2007, 2008. And guess who was on my blog roll in 2007, 2008? Oh, that's right, Nick Szabo. Nick Szabo. So, unfortunately— I didn't know we were going there. Yeah. Yeah, right, right, right, right, right. So, I got to retrieve that patent from the patent office. It turns out to be actually really difficult with a provisional patent. I have to hire a patent lawyer to get this out, but I think it would be— it obviously has no legal meaning whatsoever, but I think it would be a nice 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— and I had the motive, the propensity, and the opportunity to invent the blockchain, and I fucking missed it, right? You know, and so, so, but Satoshi didn't. So if you basically—

just a weird tangent— you think Nick Szabo 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 I thought. And I was like, wow, it sounds like I should check out more. Well, I should learn more about what Charles I 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 very— they go very deep. But yeah, that's anyway, prehistory, prehistory. Let's move, let's move forward.

Okay.

So this is, this is the reason, Jason, why, like I would say, you know, Urbit is actually kind of like the original Web3 project because all of the original ideas and ingredients of what we think of like Web3 today, self-sovereign data, like digital assets being—

Except the blockchain and smart contracts. But smart contracts were actually a pretty common idea in the cypherpunk world before that. The real catalyzing genius idea was the blockchain. 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.

Before we get into separating the two, Curtis, can you explain? I have a smaller brain than you two, so you need to explain Urbit, 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 Urbit is. So tell me what— tell me what Urbit is.

Let me tell you what Urbit is. Let me tell you what Urbit is.

And then, and then dumb it down again. And then dumb it down again.

Here is what Urbit is from, you know, do you know the film Margin Call? It's such a great—

yeah, yeah, yeah.

And there's this great Jeremy Irons cameo. He's playing basically Dick Fuld. Yeah. And there's some kid presenting this complicated quant theory to him. And he's like, "Speak to me as if to a small child." Yeah. Right?

I am him here.

I am him. From the perspective of the small child or the golden retriever, who is probably a big part of your audience. I'm sure you've done the network for this. They usually split out dogs into a separate crosstab. So you have golden retrievers and then like the Shih Tzu, you know? Um, um, the— in any case, Urbit is two things. Urbit 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. Currently, well, the old management allowed a spammer or a squatter to pick up urbit.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. You must know the.box people, Jake. And so 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 Saurabh Namtaif. So that's a name. I'm trying to stamp out the use of the word Urbit ID, which sounds very nerdy. That's my name. My name is Saurabh Namtaif. 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 is algorithmically generated by—

A 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 Surak Namtive, which is my name, into an IP address and it would be something like 187.4.67.12. Okay, that's the same number of bytes. For you golden retrievers out there, a byte is 8 bits and a bit is a 1 or a 0. And so that's a 32-bit address space, which means that there are 2 to the 32nd, that is 4 billion of these names out there. And, um, what we do is we simply map every byte to a syllable. And we sort of use a different pattern of syllables so it sounds sort of, you know, mellifluous. Like, I probably put as much energy into designing that namespace as like Tolkien did into designing Elvish or something. Maybe not Elvish, but like one of the lesser, lesser Middle-earth languages, uh, Orcish perhaps. And it's so— it sounds, it sounds like a language you've never heard before. It sounds like alien, but it has that 4-syllable length is very common to human names. You'll basically meet people on the network and you'll find them calling them like, "Zorek, hey Zorek, 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 so on, seen some like interesting, you know, debate about like bicycles between like, you know, Pink Queer Ape and, you know, like, you know, wildabeastdong. 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 that 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 Urbit, sort of everyone's wearing a suit from that perspective also. And, and I was just talking with, uh, Dan Romero from, from Farcaster, which is amazing, amazing piece of work. About this, basically, you know, he has to deal, 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, if you have urba.eth, come to me, give it up, you know, we can still be friends and nothing will happen. And the, 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 renew your name. You have to renew the thing, like paying your goddamn property taxes. Uh, with an Urbit name, with Urbit 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 chain of keys or whatever. But 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, you know, so from the perspective of crypto, And there's even, like, even the idea of generating an image from this was something that we did 10 years ago. And so you'll see these Urbet sigils that are sort of our version of Bored Apes, except they're abstract and beautiful and not horrendously dated and so 3 years ago, right? And so all of that, if you go to my Twitter handle, for example, is @sorignamtov, that's S-O-R-R-E-G, well, it's right on there. On the screen in front of you. And you'll see my sigil, and it's rather beautiful and geometric. And, you know, like, 'cause Urvid has always had very strong design. There's like, because of my old co-founder, Galen, there's like a strong design background.

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 6th annual Meridian Conference conference this October 15th through 17th in London. It's a 3-day event where the brightest minds in Web3 come together to discuss everything from tokenization to DeFi. If you're a developer, builder, policymaker, 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 BLOCKWORKSPOD for early bird pricing. Now let's get back to 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 in crypto. That's where Supercontainers come in, offering a completely new solution that transforms your development control. Imagine dedicated, customizable app spaces running on Supra's 500 kTPS Layer 1 blockchain. You get complete control over gas tokens and fees with the freedom to use your own token, create local fee markets, or even go gasless. Scale on demand and build with better customization than appchains, all at a fraction of the cost. Plus, with MultiVM compatibility, you can easily deploy your EVM, Move, and SVM smart contracts. It's time to rescue your projects from the costs, complexities, and fragmentation of traditional solutions. Get notified when Supercontainers are ready for builders at super.com/containers. Everyone wanted to take a quick break to talk about your crypto security. I am excited to tell you more about Harpy, designed to keep your wallet safe 24/7. Harpy is the most advanced wallet security tool. It monitors for risk blocks detected threats, and recovers your stolen assets all in real time. Picture this: you're browsing late at night and accidentally approve a shady transaction, and it's too late to cancel it. I know, I've been there before. Well, now Harpy's got your back. It jumps in, intercepts that transaction, and takes your assets away to a vault that you control, all completely free. It works with all the major wallets on Ethereum, Base, Polygon, and Arbitrum. Head over to harpy.io/empire and set up your free protection today. That's harpy.io/empire. I promise you that your future self will thank you. Now let's get back to today's episode. Your guys' website is actually very nicely designed. I will say, not even the— and the whole portal and app, I signed up and created. I honestly forget if it's a galaxy or a planet or a thing. I forget, which we'll get into in a second. But let me ask a very dumb— let me— I like analogies, so Would you say that Urbit lets you launch a computer and a server under a virtual machine? Um, 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 some know only as the Effort Post. And, you know, in the Effort Post, I basically describe in my, you know, on good old Twitter, or X as some now call it, 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. Say there's no independent onboarding flow today. It's all run by hosting services. There's no like So you go to urbit.org and it's just basically a documentation site. In the new urbit.org, as produced by the new Urbit Foundation, urbit.org is actually your central login site. So what you have is you have a, when you, just for like the simplest web flow, no MetaMask, no hardware wallet, no anything like that, Irving 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 Suric Namtive is basically both an identity and an address. It's an identity, if you remember, you know, it's a blockchain identity, it's an NFT, it's a wallet, and we'll get into that 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 and the internet as basically a single integrated system, and it's sort of all done through these like standard reserved ports. Now imagine, you know, there's a lot of minor differences between urbit and ENS, and, you know, I basically You know, can make a number of arguments about why, uh, 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 ENS 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 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 them? 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 any 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? An 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 can say, well, it could be any operating system that implements, well, this, this protocol suite. 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 4 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, Metcalfe's Law, the value of a network is the size of its 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 Metcalfe's Law squared. Right. And so, so it's very difficult to catch the leader, basically. And then the question is, okay, what is the value if it succeeds? I don't know. 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 ARIN, the internet IP allocation infrastructure, with the economic theories of Karl 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 assigned, 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 way, or you have it assigned in some vague sense. The result is you have, you know, they basically get treated like rented cars. Are rented mules, right? There, some of them are like tarnished in various ways by having been used by spammers, right? This is all, it's this giant shit show. 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, right? So the thing is, um, 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 Silicon Valley, right? You know, that's four commas. Right? Okay. And then you take your 4 commas and you multiply them by 2 probabilities. One is the probability that the world needs something like this and this is not just a bunch of bullshit. And the other is the probability that that thing will be this thing. And you arrive at, uh, you know, uh, some kind of hypothetical, uh, present valuation 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 Urbit. 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 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 hears that and are just like, wow, brain wallets 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 passphrase or a password and we'll, uh, feed that into a key generator and use it as your wallet. Okay, wow, that's like a recipe for like your passwords getting cracked, and there are whole cracked databases of them. 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 passphrase, 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 256-bit 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 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 just 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 Surig Namtive, which is easy to remember and fits in your head really easily. Okay, take that 32-bit number, use it as a salt. Takes a, uh, now, um, um, a 64-bit number such as Surig Namtive Sarbek Tarniks. 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 our— we have like a 3-shard solution that also is good for larger pools of assets. Fundamentally though, if I remember, Surig Namtive, 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 lengthener that takes about a second to run on it, like a normal computer. That gives me my 256-bit 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 at 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 urbit.org and log in, you're just like, yeah, Surak Nandpive, my secret. Now, of course, that requires very intense anti-trojaning security on urbit.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 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 or put in 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 achieved this very significant level. You've achieved the first step toward digital sovereignty. So you log in then at urbit.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 Urbit, Jake? Uh, you have a planet.

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 want to, if I want to, it's against the spirit, right? I could have done that. Did I?

You know, and, and what did Jake do?

Jake, because Jake actually hacked the syllables to come up with something that sounds meaningful.

Nice, Jake.

As some people do. I, you know, and I need to see what mine is.

I don't know.

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 Urbit. But, um, the— but so should I. But in any case, the— I was really— I didn't use the system at all for 5 years. I just wanted to like, uh, have my like—

I don't even remember how to log into my Urbit, honestly. Tell me how it works.

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.

But literally, I'm on the website, where's the button?

Like, or did I download No, fuck that. You know, like, don't worry about it. It's good. It's, you know, there's a little bit of Jason, frankly, there's maybe a little bit of radical exclusion going on here. Right. You know, actually, I'm serious. Like, the quality of the URBIC community is extremely high. It's very different from any other crypto community. It's like much more artsy, for example. They're girls and they're not just there as decoration, which is really all like 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 shit 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 a 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 Surugnanpav to Ranter Tapper, uh, it's right there. Bang. We're looking at more newer, you know, as we upgrade the Azimuth contract, the Urbic contracts, we're looking at some of these newer ERCs like token-bound accounts and stuff, which seem to make a lot of sense for probably going to be an ERC-1155 token. There's all this great newfangled 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 Web3 identity through basically being resolved to ENS, work in progress. It's also a Web2 identity, and this is what's really important about this kind of new direction that we're taking at the new, you know, reformed Urban 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 Torvalds, right? You sponsored Linus Torvalds, like, you know. And, and like, the idea that you could hire Linus Torvalds has been extremely insulting to Linus Torvalds for about 20 years, right? You know. And, and the, the, uh, is like, well, we can let you maybe work like half time on Linux. Like, no, no, no, that's not survive, right? You know, and, and so, you know, you have that, 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.

Yeah, I see, I see new apps joining, like there's like Uniswap is now.

Of course 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 what the fuck you're talking about? You know, okay, wait, before, before going anyway, anyway, getting back, getting, getting, getting, we can go into urban politics later, but let me finish. I was finishing my answer there. So essentially separating the decentralized computing from the decentralized identity 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 ENS 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 any 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 Saurabh Namtaive, 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 "fisti in lente," as the Italians say. Make haste slowly is the essential principle of doing that. And so someone compared basically trying to drive, even with the state that Urbit is in, and it's remarkable, 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 a completely alien software technology. So alien that 0 is true and 1 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'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, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then one of the things is you can pop up your own private computer attached to that wallet. And that is really cool. It is really cool. Number one, it is really cool. Number two, that private computer, Okay, even though that's an off-chain computer, obviously it is an off-chain computer with an on-chain address, but this off-chain 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 exists. Signal uses it, for example, in their backend, 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.

So this is the— this is the— you have a blog post called The 100-Year Computer too. And the 100-Year Computer.

Jake. Yeah, I'm going to pull—

I'm going to pull—

hold on.

I'm going to pull Jake into this conversation too, because I think 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—

because operating systems and computing, I mean, it's just like so big, right? Like, like operating systems are very sticky. What Curtis is proposing has a lot of, like, again, like, core tenets of Web3 baked in. Like, when you ask me, like, what is sort of the basic primitive of Web3, it's, it's self-sovereign data. And what Urbit computers sort of do is that they allow 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. They're 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 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 Web3 identity, it's also a Web2 identity. Because one of the things we're going to build is just login 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 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 Urbit. Ideally, it should be only Urbit names, and ideally, it should only be visible to other people with Urbit names. Because that keeps the sort of the tightness of the network, that keeps it feeling more like, you know, Soho House and, you know, less like the Tenderloin. But, you know, the, the— 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 urbit names as IPv4 addresses like Tailscale, but for urbit. That's a really cool project that 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'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 spinoff and like faction, you know, projects. Like, there was one that was called, uh, Ukbar, and is now called Keynode.

Oh yeah, yeah.

There's something called Plunder, right? You know, Umbrel. Umbrel. I don't know.

So there's no, like, like, there's no, like, mainstream, like, crypto thing?

No, there's nothing. There's nothing really comparable. No one's approaching this in the way that you're approaching other 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 have fun with the wild beasts. I don't know. Yeah, the, 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 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. I saw 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. 3 pop-ups before accessing a site. Paywalls. I realize that I use internet less than before except to stream a movie once in a while, to get directions from Google Maps, to get real news on Twitter. And it was a quote tweet of this guy Sean 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 thread about why the internet sucks.

You know, 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 Marquis de Talleyrand who said that, you know, no one who did not live before the French Revolution can ever experience the the full sweetness of life. I'm like, 1999? I'm like, Jesus Christ, it was all over long before 1999.

Okay, so tell me why you— yeah, tell me why you— right, uh, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

Let me finish Jake's point in a way. Yeah, yeah, 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 Urban 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 3 months, right? That has taken out, shot in the head and completely gone, right? And it has to be developed on the timeframe 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 in You're like, yes, that is what I want to do. Great. We are actually doing that at Urbit, but we are not pinning our short-term product strategy on it. And so like, but yeah, that's what it's there for. Actually, what's crazy is that there are people on the project whose first programming language was Hoon, the Urbit's functional programming language. And that's just the completely wild thing to me. The, the— in any case, so suddenly in this very good wallet, just decentralized identity thing, which, you know, you can use to like post on— you should be able to use to post on Farcaster 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 anyway. There's kind of some barriers there just because it's a weird janky thing peeking into a VM of any kind, even a deterministic functional VM like this one, because it's a very different thing in that sense from 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 at Jake?

Jake, man, you know, I was looking for guilty expressions, you know, when I said that.

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 the, um, you know, uh, you know, I mean, Urban 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 fucking password aggregator sites up the wazoo. And everybody, you know, who develops software, instead of like shipping it on little floppy disks 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 instead, 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, Farside cartoon, which really incorporates the evidence of— it really defines the experience of selling new technology because it's one of his caveman cartoons. And the caveman is in the cave town or whatever, and there's all these people walking around, and there's dead animals. They have dead animals slung across their shoulder, like a cheetah, a monkey, 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 only wear the skins of these animals. And, um, the, uh, 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 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 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, you know, there's this old— exactly, brilliant. And that's amazing.

The, the, the—

and, and I think I remember that cartoon from 30 years ago or something, you know, so I got a few details wrong, I guess, but it's pretty close. And in any case, so we're gonna create a fashion revolution, and the fashion is gonna 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 so the way that's going to happen though is sort of the interesting question. 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, the—

can you keep going after 3:30?

I can keep going, but I'm, I'm gonna be out at 4.

All right, cool, great.

He's got, he's got to talk to his parole officer. Um, but, 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, um, 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 we're basically, um, you know, first of all, we're like, okay, you can build an ordinary Web2 app and basically log into that with Urbit using extremely well-recognized old fucking technologies. All right, great. Um, what you'd really like though is to basically for that not to be one of these Web2 traps. And it's already not a trap because you're using urban identities for your names in this social network, which is actually a social database. I'm still remembering the social database movie, like someone should make that, right? Social Network 2: The Social Database, right? 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 Usenet. Let's rebuild Usenet and let's do some kind of Roam, Zettelkasten thing. Excuse me, two obvious ideas, right? I, as an app developer, wanna build this decentralized app in the most possible decentralized, excellent way. Goes without saying. However, the risk that I take if I basically step into the decentralized world is I know I'm gonna 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 trough of the Gartner, or just emerging, I would say, from the trough of the Gartner hype cycle, is that like you 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 whale. It did kill Friendster. These were centralized services, but these people just, their engineers were just remedial, I guess. And Friendster was basically killed by that, and Twitter was almost killed by it. And so you wanna be able to scale up socially and let that take whatever speed it takes, 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 Web2 app, your Web2 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 Urbit anyway, and it feels like part of your Urbit even though it's just a Web2 app somewhere app somewhere. And then you say, not only does this Web2 app somewhere use Urbit 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, it basically like, you know, somebody is 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, but it's, you know, well within our powers. I mean, just, you know, no offense to the engineers who were working on Urbit when I left, but the ones who were there when I came back are better, generally speaking. And there's been a good evolutionary process there. And so like, it's well within our power. And so the— that's the kind of Urbit native way. There's another way that says, hey, actually, you know, there's 4 billion of these addresses. That's quite a lot. So let's say I'm running a centralized social service, you know, maybe one that runs with Shitter, and I want to basically get some of this nice decentralization sauce. I'm going to basically just get a whole bunch of Urbit 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, you're like, you know, 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 Urbit 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 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 urban 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, they have, they have APIs and they actually have two kinds of APIs. They have documented public APIs, which used to be better and now sockered or generally being turned off. But there's also, when they have a client that runs 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 how 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 DL 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, some of these protocols, they go to pretty extreme lengths to obfuscate them, They'll change the protocol. You know, your phone app gets an update, your server gets an update. The phone app, you know, update is signed by Facebook. Their personal server update is signed by like some 16-year-old kid in Bulgaria, you know. And but that enables you to talk to the service. And so you basically kind of take control just by having a general purpose computer that can, you know, basically speak these protocols. You basically take control of your own state remotely despite the fact that the service is trying to prevent you from doing that. And so that's adversarial interoperability. Like, one of my, one of my, like, you know, sort of ridiculous, unthinkable internet reform propositions, 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, everybody still there?

Yes, 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 you're 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 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 bumpy path to— 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— I'm going to pull us out of the weeds of Urbit 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. I've read a lot of your blog. I've read a lot of the Dementious 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 neo-reactionary, 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 Erbit ideas.

Well, yeah, that's, that's because, that's because really the only thing that I believe in is basically, um, a 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. The great figure in that school, really the, you know, unknown Darwin of political science in our time, is a guy named Gaetano Mosca, whose book, the, uh, it's really called Elements of Political Science, but somebody translated it 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 Machiavellians by James Burnham. That's from 1940. And so, you know, this is a very like— and Machiavelli 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— there are three forms of power. There are 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 Lessig that, you know, code is law. And then it found itself in, you know, as a result of the very first DAO, which was simply called the DAO. 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, it was the rule of Vitalik. And that was perfectly fine. And if you bet on Ethereum Classic, I don't know the numbers, but boy, did you pick the wrong horse, 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. If you remember Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, you remember that one?

Yeah.

BSV, baby.

You remember that? BSV, baby. BSV all the way, right? You know, and like, and so actually, you know, when you look at the force that makes BTC legitimate and 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 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, 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. DAOs and governance rights or whatever are a huge thing. And someone's like, oh, you're creating a new token, it should have governance rights. I'm like, what are governance rights worth? Like, why? Well, people love it, people love it. They'll buy the coin 'cause they can vote on your propositions. And I'm like, dude, this is the most retarded thing I've ever heard. Imagine that Chipotle was, instead of selling securities as a proposition, 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 to vote on what was the next burrito flavor. Like, this is the most retarded way to run a burrito restaurant.

That 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 dictates if the restaurant actually works is like You know, that's just not the way to run a company.

The problem is if I'm running that company, I am an angry man running that company.

Yeah, you're a sad, a sad, a sad little man, right? 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.

Wait, so, okay, wait, so going back to the original—

Let me go, let me go, sorry, I was in the middle. Let me go slightly forward. Sure, sure. 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 fucked 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— 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 Socrates, right? I— you know, you would be— you would be just totally repeating that shit 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 Chord or the Horde or maybe the Board, right? You know, and then you would elect this Board and then that's it. I've got the idea. Boom, galaxy brain. And then basically the board, the board could pick one person who would run the whole company, um, who 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 fuck up the whole system, they would be responsible to 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 made by a monarchy. Like, this computer made by a monarchy. Actually, this computer was designed by a monarchy, Apple, and made by another— made by another monarchy, China, right? You know, and like, then 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, if Ethereum was run this way. If Vitalik—

I agree, I think that's one of the—

CEO 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 know, he could not lose weight.

I saw a picture of Vitalik on steroids that someone made with AI. He looked amazing, actually.

So he should really— yeah, no, no, we should— you know, Vitalik, 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, uh, and actually running it 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 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 gonna pass resolutions thing. And so actually, what I call— I call that, um, an optimal autonomous organization, or OAO. And it's a pattern you'll find 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. 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 fucked with the model a little bit, right? 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 this rule of sovereignty. So actually, 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, to sort of answer your governance question, okay, we've realized how much better Ethereum would work if you know, Pope King Vitalik was like elected by the Ethereum board or something. Now imagine you've got a real-world organization, like for example, a country like, say, El Salvador, who's, uh, you know, CEO. Have you been to El 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, um, Really nice weather actually. San 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 3— I got 2 intestinal infections in 3 days. And I think that's because I swam 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 Jefe, right? Of course, he's a young man, but one day he'll be old. He wants to sustain his legacy and he wants to do it on the blockchain. So what he does is he says, "Okay, I'm going to 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 gonna 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 a board— get a brain tumor, he could go insane. And he'd certainly get old. He could go senile. 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. 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's fucked. Right? So it's not governance, it's accountability. Right? And, and I, we just went through this ourselves at the, you know, the Urban 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, 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 a 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, in 3 minutes that I can't be late for. I think there is a part 2 at some point to this because there's— yeah, there's all these things. There's like, you know, Curtis, I really want to get your take on like, you know, there's this huge decentralization of media happening, like proliferation of podcasts and Substacks and Tucker on X and Elon buying Twitter and open sourcing part of the algorithm. And I'm curious like how Orbit—

yeah, let's go.

There's all this stuff.

So let's talk more about this sort of information space, how you recreate the lost civilization of Usenet. you know, and, you know, get back, get back to the dream.

So we'll call this a part one with Curtis. Jake, if you want to join us again, you're welcome to.

Sorry, I'm a camera hog.

No, this is always fascinating. I'm happy to give kind of more of the investor view at some point on Urbit. I've done a number of podcasts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, anyways, Curtis and Jake, thank you guys for the time and appreciate it. Yeah, just congrats on doing anything for 20 years is quite a feat. So congrats.

It's easier with a 5-year vacation. All right. 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 6th Annual Meridian Conference this October 15th through 17th in London. This is an incredible opportunity to network with the forward thinkers makers who are defining the future of this space. Head over to meridian.stellar.org and use the code BLOCKWORKSPOD for early bird pricing.