Mark Suman & Tony Ronning: AI That Won't Share Your Data
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/how-ai-is-building-the-future-open-secret-journey
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/how-ai-is-building-the-future-open-secret-journey-transcript
Published: 2026-09-13
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
========================================================================

[0:07] Intro clip: You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All. All the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

[0:31] Marty Bent: If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

[0:34] Anthony Ronning: Probably should be. Probably should be.

[0:36] Marty Bent: Ah, gentlemen. I said I got a context switch for this conversation. I was taking a pee right before I came in here in Anthony, the unveiling of the real name.

[0:46] Anthony Ronning: Yeah.

[0:46] Marty Bent: So you ready for this conversation? I was like, I was actually just taking a piss thing. And this is like the biggest context which I've had to make in one day for a conversation talking about natalism, the future of humanity, and getting the birth rate back up to privacy. Nitro enclaves. Not neutrino enclaves, nitro enclaves. I'm sorry for that slip up.

[1:09] Mark Suman: Right. And nitro is just one brand of enclave. But yeah, that's what we're using.

[1:12] Anthony Ronning: I mean, security and privacy. I mean, that's needed for the new humanity going forward.

[1:17] Marty Bent: We actually did, especially with AI, we did touch on that topic, which was privacy to transact too. Like outside the purview of the surveillance

[1:25] Mark Suman: state is important, but we need to white pill the world if people are going to want to reproduce. Right?

[1:31] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:31] Mark Suman: If it's all doom and gloom, no privacy in the future, why do you want to bring kids into this world?

[1:35] Marty Bent: Exactly. That was a very white pill podcast. Like, we're not going to doom and gloom. It's easy to doom and gloom. It's too easy these days.

[1:41] Mark Suman: Yeah.

[1:42] Marty Bent: It felt like you were falling down the doom loop for a little bit there.

[1:44] Mark Suman: Yeah.

[1:44] Anthony Ronning: So doomed.

[1:46] Marty Bent: You were, you were, you were doomer there for a while.

[1:48] Anthony Ronning: Yeah.

[1:48] Marty Bent: You got a fresh haircut, you're losing weight.

[1:51] Anthony Ronning: New positive outlook on life.

[1:53] Marty Bent: Is it? Is that true? Is that.

[1:54] Anthony Ronning: I do think so. I mean, you know, who knows what's gonna happen? But like, I don't know, the last six months, I mean, since the pivot, since everything like unfolded, like the last six, eight months has just been like, okay, what can I control in my life? And then just focus on what I can control and make that the best as possible. Like even startups and everything like that. Like, there's only so much you can actually control. There's like a Million different things happening at once and you're trying to find your niche in the startup space, in the economy, but who knows if you'll get it right? But like everything else in life or everything you do, building up to that just has to be like honed in and like, okay, I can make positive impacts here and there and then just make those impacts and just, you know, a little bit, Just hope things work out.

[2:38] Marty Bent: Yeah, no, it's been fun and I don't know gratifying is the right word because I don't know why it has been gratifying to watch you transform. Like the group that you guys have to track your calories and make sure that you're losing weight. That's been inspiring, I think. Is the word not gratifying?

[2:55] Anthony Ronning: Yeah, dude. There's a tweet that lives rent free in my head for like the last five months. It's just been like the tweets around. All the developers I know are getting buffed as fuck because of the AI coming in the future. It's like, okay, what, what can we do? And we're just going to have to be strong, man. Right. Like this, this AI is just going to take over. Right. So we better, everyone, everyone better get

[3:19] Marty Bent: buff, bulk up, take your creatine, eat

[3:22] Mark Suman: your protein, learn how to fix like a leaky pipe in your house.

[3:26] Marty Bent: I need to get better hard skills. My wife thinks I'm a pussy because when it comes to that she's like, yeah, oh, you can't change that. I'm getting better.

[3:34] Mark Suman: Well, use AI to teach you. Right?

[3:36] Marty Bent: You can do it.

[3:37] Mark Suman: Yeah.

[3:37] Marty Bent: What are you guys thoughts on Grok 3? Did you watch the live stream last?

[3:40] Mark Suman: Yeah, I watched the livestream. It was great. I mean, they obviously took the best benchmarks that they could find and said we are better than the others. Like you're going to be selective about that. I like that they, I like how they open source the old model. So Grok 2 is going to be open source. I think that's a decent way to try and like give back to the community. And then they're doing their own kind of deep research feature that ChatGPT has. So you'll be able to use GROK to do like full on industry analysis and stuff like that. So I think that's cool. Yeah, but really the hardware part of it is very fascinating. Like building out. I don't know. Did you watch it at all?

[4:15] Marty Bent: I did catch. I was in and out. But the hardware part of the Q and A section where they describe the Memphis facility. How quickly they build it.

[4:23] Mark Suman: And yeah, it was like 122 days or something. They build out from like start to finish. Impressive.

[4:29] Marty Bent: No, and it was funny. Somebody's been in the bitcoin mining space for six years. I was like, how do they pull all that energy that quickly? And I mean they explain it. They set up generators outside the facility and I guess they're still waiting for connection interconnect to the substations in the grid. But that is a creative way to solve that problem. They applied off grid bitcoin mining solutions to this large cluster that they built.

[4:59] Anthony Ronning: How many bitcoin miners are pivoting to AI tennis centers too?

[5:03] Marty Bent: I think it's more of a. I think it's more of a narrative than an actual. Something like core Scientific definitely has diversified and is building on infrastructure for core weave.

[5:14] Mark Suman: You've got iron that says they're doing it. I don't know the specifics.

[5:18] Marty Bent: Yeah, but it is, they market themselves as. It is a different competency. I mean the. Just on the network side, the GPUs need to be connected. And Elon and the XAI team were describing last night they had to put the Tesla batteries in the factory too, because the modulation of the energy pool. And I was thinking this idea of the mullet miner I think makes a lot of sense because that ramping up and down of the GPUs for training and inference, like one would think, like, oh, they can participate in demand response, but like they need to do that when they need to do that.

[6:18] Mark Suman: Yeah, it seemed like it was more of a stopgap while they wait for the utility to catch up. Yeah, I mean it's kind of like what you were just saying about your personal life where, you know, they, they looked at the situation, said we need this outcome. What can we control and what's out of our control? So they knew they couldn't build a building from scratch. They knew that all the other people said 18 to 24 months to give them what they need. So they said, all right, go find an existing building, let's bring in generators, let's bring in the batteries. And it kind of went problem to problem. And said, let's solve what we can and just do it for now until we can get something better. That was really interesting way to approach it.

[6:50] Marty Bent: I know Elon's a very controversial figure, but I think it's impossible to deny that is very impressive that he's doing all this shit at once.

[7:00] Mark Suman: Yeah.

[7:01] Marty Bent: And they're going to 1.25 gigs for their next gigawatts.

[7:05] Mark Suman: For their next. Yeah, he was trying to quote Back to the Future. What? Couldn't remember 1.21 gigawatts. Yeah, that's the Back to the Future line. That's what they're aiming for.

[7:13] Marty Bent: It is insane. And that's. I mean we're going to get to open secret, but I want the world to get to know you guys better because that's again, being here in the commons, being able to observe. Building on the topic of AI, I don't know if you know this but like I use you as a reference point, not explicitly but I say like I'm talking to a lot of teams out there and like some developers are walking around talking to Whispers, feeding things the cursor and really I'm the sum developers.

[7:42] Mark Suman: Yeah, yeah.

[7:44] Marty Bent: Why don't you explain that like workflow that you've been iterating on, man?

[7:47] Anthony Ronning: And it's. I used to be like anti AI, like in the early days. I'm like, oh, it's not going to replace my job, it's not going to help me out. It's got to be outputting crap code. Like I can do way better. That was like you know, a year or two ago for me at this point. But like it has just gotten so good now. I mean I'm using it all basically. I'm using Cursor with Claude, I'm using Perplexity for some just online searches. I'm using 01 Pro from OpenAI for some of their more like in depth, thorough analysis. And then there's deep research that just came out and then I'm using that to just like, you know, gather.

[10:39] Marty Bent: A prompt.

[10:40] Anthony Ronning: Yeah.

[10:40] Marty Bent: So you're a professional prompting.

[10:42] Anthony Ronning: I, you know, it's, it's sad to say but like that's probably what it is now.

[10:47] Marty Bent: So. Freaks. Do you have a credit card? Are you getting cash back or airline points or points for some other service? Guess what? Those are shitcoins you want to be stacking Bitcoin. That's some groundbreaking news for you. The team at FOLD has finally released the Bitcoin rewards credit card. They have a wait List gonna be distributing the cards later this year. So you wanna get on the wait list full plus members are gonna get unlimited 2% bitcoin back on this credit card. If you get on the wait list, they're up to $200,000 in prizes. They're gonna be given out, so get on it as quickly as possible.

[12:43] Anthony Ronning: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a push and pull with, with both of those terminologies. Like, you know, some jobs are going to get cut and then some jobs are going to get, you know, some new jobs in the process and then at the same time the productivity. So I think it's like the combination of them all. I mean, you can't have new jobs without jobs being taken away. Like, I mean, sure there's going to be unemployed people in the world that could fill those spots, but they're also probably not filling those spots in the first place. So I think like new jobs are going to be created and people are going to shift out of old roles into new ones and then also like it's going to Change the, you know, jobs don't even necessarily have to be lost, they're just redefined.

[13:34] Mark Suman: Right.

[14:47] Mark Suman: what someone does and we'll just make more things. Like, right, there'll just be more companies, more people, more industries, building more stuff because we have these tools.

[14:57] Marty Bent: Yeah. And I could see, I think the jury is out and the data is yet to be collected. But you could see worldwide leads a better quality of life where people are actually working on things that are interesting. They don't have to do that low level yeoman work. Let the AI do that and you can think creatively and build Products that you would never have had the time to sit down and build from scratch.

[15:23] Anthony Ronning: Not just that, but a little bit on the context switching, but also the resistance to doing hard things. Right. We all have a task that are like, oh, it's going to be so hard. I don't want to start it yet. Almost like writer's block a little bit. But when I have a thought about, you know, a new feature we need to build and I'm like, oh, that's gonna be so hard. Like I don't even wanna think about that right now. I'll just like use voice. Use like a voice AI assistant tool to just like communicate my thoughts and like my worries and like what I think needs to happen.

[16:48] Marty Bent: It's pretty fascinating. Can you give an example of what you would deem to be a high quality prompt to get the results that you're looking for?

[16:57] Anthony Ronning: There's actually a mass, so we've known a lot of AI models to be very chat like so chatgpt

[17:08] Marty Bent: some of

[20:08] Marty Bent: So simple, broad, I need this more specific, implemented in this way important context and then additional context about the taste and flavor.

[20:21] Anthony Ronning: Yeah, basically.

[20:22] Mark Suman: Interesting.

[20:23] Marty Bent: It's fascinating. I need to get better at prompting. It's crazy. Most of my prompting happens in mid journey when I'm making thumbnails.

[20:29] Anthony Ronning: You can even. Sometimes I will get cursor to help me write my prompt that I'll give to the reasoning model because I'll be like, this is what I want. But I need you to gather the research, gather the relevant code and give me the prompt back. So it's called meta prompting where you actually get another AI to write your prompt for another AI. And it's great.

[20:54] Mark Suman: Crazy.

[20:54] Marty Bent: And eventually you'll have agents to just transfer those prompts, right?

[20:58] Anthony Ronning: Yeah, the whole MCP protocol that's coming out like this new agent based world is going to be really interesting this year where you have agents that are specialized in specific parts of the code or specific tools that you need. So that way you don't have one generalized AI trying to do everything. You have like, hey, you're an AI that's only good for code reviews or you're an AI that's good for like running linters and commands on the computer that you may need to run to assist with the programming and stuff. Or searching the web too.

[21:31] Mark Suman: Yeah, One nice little hack too is if you get deep into a conversation, into a chat with an AI, you can just ask it, hey, what's a prompt that like give me the prompt to get back to the spot or give me a prompt to do this again in the future. And I'll be like, oh, tell me to do it this way in the future. If you want to get this kind of output. So, like, for example, my day always starts with me going into AI. I have a prompt to say, like, I want to prioritize my tasks for the day. And then I say, I'm just going to ramble to you.

[22:30] Anthony Ronning: I think that's key to what you said about the executive assistant. Like, actually talk to the LLM. Like, you're having, like, you're actually paying for an executive assistant to do this, and you want them to get it right without you having to go back to them later to fix all the things. Like, it's not like, treat the AI like human because, like, they might take over the world someday. Like, treat them like a human because, like, if you want the job done, if you want a human to get the job done right, you have to give them all this information. You know, we have a friend who, like, started outsourcing their executive assistant tasks to, like, some person in India or something.

[23:23] Marty Bent: That's one thing I need to get better at is particularly I had not played with the voice to executive assistant AI.

[23:31] Mark Suman: Yeah, well. And you don't even have to use the fancy stuff like ChatGPT. I just. So here's my little shill from Maple, right? So, you know, I just go in and iOS has that little microphone button that just uses the device to do speech to text. And so that's what I do with Maple. So I'm in the text box, I hit the Microphone button and then I just talk and it transcribes it right into Maple as text. Way better than me typing it. And I give it more details than if I were typing it. Right. Yeah, I can just ramble on. And so I feel like that's just really effective. And the thing that I love about doing it in Maple and not doing a chatgpt is I can get very personal. I can say anything I want to and know that it's private and encrypted to the gpu.

[24:07] Marty Bent: Yeah. Providing a good segue. But before we get to open Secret Maple, I guess this is the segue to how has this accelerated your ability to build out this product suite?

[24:21] Mark Suman: Yeah, I mean, on the business side, this is my first time being a founder of a company, right. I've been an early employee at multiple startups and so I've seen kind of close. Sometimes I was in the room, sometimes I was in the room when these big decisions are being made. And so now as something comes across my email or my desk, whatever, I can just go into AI and be like, all right, this is happening. This is our cap table or this is whatever, like, help me figure out this next step. And it used to be you go onto Google and search and you get some Investopedia blog post, right?

[25:11] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[25:11] Anthony Ronning: On the development side, it's insane. Instead of having contractors, I mean right now I'm the only dev, so it's just us two now at this point at Open Secret and I'm doing all things from front end to deployments, I have everything on my plate and I don't feel overwhelmed. It's just like I just send things off. I work on a lot of different features at the same time and just send them off and have the AI do it. So it's like the zero to one right now for like building apps or even proof of concepts are great too, where it's just I'm about to have to make a new landing page for a new branding, right? And it's like I haven't done a landing page ever, but it's like, hey, I could probably get AI to do that. We don't have to hire a contractor, pay them like 5 to 10k for a month's worth of work to do our landing page. It's like, okay, I could probably do that.

[26:01] Mark Suman: Yeah. And like we love to talk about that phrase, zero to one for a startup. And it's like with AI, you're not starting from zero anymore. 9 to one. Like really, it's all this knowledge base just like encapsulated. You just have to know how to ask it the right questions, give it your context and then you can leverage that. I mean, we've talked about how we've been like projecting what would our hiring needs be for the next few years if we want to raise some money, like how much money do we need to raise? And with AI, like both of us are able to do more jobs than we would have been able to do previously with the number of hours we have in a day.

[26:59] Marty Bent: Yeah, it's so equally exciting and a bit not scary, but just like there's a great unknown out there that's just being explored. Uncharted territory. Yeah, it's been, again, like I said, it's been fun to watch YouTube, particularly because I think out of everybody there's like we were at that event, you were there in, in October and there was a whole, whole track on AI and how to implement it into your business flow. And we had like a one on one and this was what, four or five months ago? And it seems like just the landscape, I think.

[27:35] Mark Suman: How much has come out since October? Yeah, yeah, it's true. Well, okay, one industry that I think is totally screwed is in industry research. Like the people who would go out and do all this research and assimilate into report and sell it for like $1,000 just this morning. So we have these stats that we share from 2023. Here's how many data breaches happened in the US how many companies were affected, how much money it cost it was like $14 billion in 2023 for data breaches. And then it's like, well, the report I read hasn't updated yet for 2024. So I just went into ChatGPT. I formulated this really nice prompt.

[28:33] Marty Bent: Yeah, it's again, incredibly bullish. Yeah, that's what we're, we're trying to get smarter on implementing it here at tftc and we've done it in many ways. But like, that's one thing I really want to focus on. Moving forward is like research. Like how can we pull up interesting stats about bitcoin, about markets, about that. And I was. Perplexity just launched a deep research product last night actually. And I was playing around with it. I was like, oh shit, this is really cool. Sup freaks? The rules of the game have changed. The first 30 days of the Trump administration have ushered in a massive shift in bitcoin policy.

[30:41] Anthony Ronning: Yeah, yeah, I could start a little bit with that and some of the problems we had in the mark's take it over from the new direction. But yeah, we were building out Mutiny I think for over two years now or maybe a year and a half before we shut it down, but not a long lifetime for a wallet. But I think we saw really early on everyone, there's a lot of bitcoin developers out there and we all kind of gravitate towards wallets and stuff like that because it's an interesting problem to solve. Plus you can get a lot of users, you can get a lot of people using your apps and loving it and making payments all over the world.

[32:08] Marty Bent: It's.

[32:08] Anthony Ronning: There's still so many problems with it and there's still so many ways where people lose money. You know, it's not even, it's not even just like bugs or anything that like we could solve. It's just like there's so many gotchas in Lightning that.

[32:19] Marty Bent: Liquidity issues, mainly liquidity issues.

[32:22] Anthony Ronning: There's you know, locked up funds, there's like forced channel closures, there's like, you know, fee rates and you know, we, when we launched, we launched immediately into like, you know, ordinals fervor. And so it was just like, it was just like hell from Day one to be like day one launch to be honest. I mean building it out, everything was fun and great and we had thousands of users using us and sometimes like a thousand users a day using Muni Wallet, which is crazy. 99% of time, just like unmaintainable. It's just like we can't go further. I don't think we can go further. And yeah, there was some doom and gloom about it at all.

[36:13] Mark Suman: Yeah, no, definitely. And then also focusing on the UX aspect of it. There's kind of this meme within the bitcoin development community of we aren't going to win because we have like privacy, right? We're not going to win by selling users on privacy. The next hundred million users, the next billion users aren't going to be like, oh this is really private, let me use it. We're going to win by just making the most like the easiest to use product. You know, something that's just really simple, they can get in and they can have maybe some self sovereignty. So that's the approach we've taken is how do we take this like scary onboarding process of here's a private key, make sure you write it down, stick it in your safe, don't lose it because if you lose it, you're going to lose access to all your funds.

[37:14] Marty Bent: Yeah, and this is. I think you're both in here. Like three weeks ago, when we were having this conversation about nitro enclaves, it was the day after you released Maple, and I was testing Maple, and I remember because you guys were using the Llama model. People were asking me after I tweeted out, I just bought an annual Maple subscription. You should check it out too. People were immediately prompting it, like, who do you send your data to? And Llama, because it was made by Meta, it just had the rote sort of doc script in it. Like, it goes back to Facebook. And somebody asked me, why is it going back to Facebook?

[38:35] Mark Suman: Yeah, definitely.

[38:36] Marty Bent: Driven by these enclaves.

[38:37] Mark Suman: Yeah. So, like in the 90s, we all got our AOL CD and we loaded it in and we were just going to websites and they were all just clear, plain text. And that was okay because we weren't sending username and passwords. We were just, like, pulling up a webpage that was already public. But then when we started doing banking or eBay or PayPal, that kind of stuff, it's like, okay, we need to get this little lock icon and secure our communications. But then if you look at, like, look. Look at Snowden for an example. You know what, what Edward Snowden exposed was that, yeah, your data is, you know, in transit, is safe and encrypted, but once it lands there, it's just in this big honey pot of a database.

[41:07] Marty Bent: AI come to rescue. I mean, that's, I mean, another big meme when it comes to verifying the code. It's like, all right, you get the PGP signature, like download like a PGP app on your computer and try to verify it. And I've done hand up. I think I PGP verified some Bitcoin software once in my life because it's just too hard to do.

[41:32] Anthony Ronning: Not only that, but even going back to the SHIFT and encryption and the SHIFT in cloud services and stuff like that, just the fact that there are ways where you can have specific code, push it to a server inside of its secure enclave and then actually. And then from there, once it's running, it's basically impenetrable at that point. It's like in the enclave it's running. You can actually verify that's running. It's a huge plus. You have no idea what code is running in the cloud today.

[42:05] Marty Bent: Yeah. So let's explain it on 5 to the audience listening in. Compared to. Let's explain. I mean, you sort of alluded to it with the text is encrypted in transit, but once it gets to the server, it's not encrypted. Let's elaborate on that model a bit. How it's been susceptible to nefarious actors or companies that secure that data, selling it. And then when did the introduction of these secure enclaves happen? Where are they available and how does it change that interaction between end user and their data on these databases in the cloud?

[42:46] Mark Suman: Yeah, so I'll talk maybe like the consumer app perspective. And then if you want to go into the enclave stuff, you can. But all of these apps that we have on our phones in our pocket are just, they're kind of leaking data constantly, Right. They're sending data into the cloud, it's being stored in a database. And we are just trusting these developers, you know, these, these companies to not do anything bad with the data. And maybe they're totally benevolent. Right. But we don't know the 30 people that work there, the 50 people that work there, we don't know what they want to do with the data, who their third parties are that they're inviting in to look at the data.

[43:44] Anthony Ronning: Right.

[45:56] Anthony Ronning: Yeah, it's like the whole point of, I think we can get that same level of usability where the developer is, they're going to be using some auth service, maybe auth0 or something, for their user login. So they're going to be using Supabase for their database and everything. They're going to use all these tools and services and APIs available anyways. It's like, let's just match their level of developer experience and we'll provide the same things. Except like whenever a user's logging in all of these auth services online, they always have this mode where you can impersonate a user and then at that point you just see exactly what the user sees. And for some of it, God mode.

[46:39] Mark Suman: Yeah, exactly.

[46:40] Anthony Ronning: God mode like Twitter has that every auth service that exists, every major company that exists has something like this. And for one, sure, you can probably catch bugs easier that way if you see everything the user sees and you can run into their bug easily or something, there are some improvements there where you can make it better. But it's basically free game for every developer and every company that has users logging in. So we're specifically targeting app developers first is because we can provide their users the better security while using the same level of tooling and APIs that they need. It's just like Mark said, the encryption happens by default.

[47:43] Marty Bent: So let's dive more into the technical details, where the secure element comes in, how the user interacts with that, and how the app developer is able to interact with that. And then maybe the cloud provider too.

[47:56] Anthony Ronning: Yeah, to just introduce the concept of secure enclaves. We all have these secure elements on our phones for once. That's the easy example whenever you're on iPhone on iOS and it pops up, that little face ID thing is because that's actually built into the hardware. Whatever you're trying to access or whatever passwords or, or data you're accessing, it's actually protected by the secure element on the phone. So this is why Apple has always taken. And you would know Apple more than me, so correct me if I'm wrong, he's ex Apple. But they have taken the stance on privacy and security and making that easily accessible by users.

[52:17] Mark Suman: Yeah. There's that concept of a canary that people will put on their websites to say, you know, I'm being. I am not being, you know, investigated by the US Government. And then if that canary ever disappears, you know, that they are being investigated. Well, it's a kind of a similar concept here where, you know, that we have not inserted a backdoor into the code because there's that verified badge, and that the software actually talks to the server. If we were to insert a backdoor, run new code, or someone in the supply chain inserted one and ran different code, not only would the verified badge go away, so the canary, you know, dies, but the software just won't even talk to the back end anymore.

[53:24] Marty Bent: Yeah. And then how does this change the relationship for the app developer and their user's data? Like you mentioned, you may want God Mode to be able to find bugs. Some people want the data to be able to sell it to third parties. Is there, does this create a new variable for app developers that makes them seriously think like, do I want to use this more secure, more private way because I don't have access to this stuff? I guess another way to frame it is the security and privacy improvements and the abdication of that liability that you described earlier marks like, like a big enough sell for app developers to begin implementing this.

[54:13] Mark Suman: Yeah. So when you're doing a pivot or when you're doing any kind of startup, you talk to a bunch of users. Right. And you just put your idea out there and you get feedback on it. So I think since the beginning until now, we've probably talked to 20 or 30 different developers and early on especially we ran into, it's probably split 50, 50. Half of them were like, hell yeah, I want to like have stronger privacy and security. The other half were like, no part of our business model is taking this user data and selling it. Or they work in an environment like education, for example, where the institution needs access to all the data.

[55:13] Anthony Ronning: I think it's a big enough market for people who want to secure their users data. And I think there's many developers out there and then users of these apps that are like, I do want more private way to do things. And so it's like we're always, I think the hope is like we can appeal to them, but I don't think we're gonna appeal to everyone building these apps. But at the very least like I want to build it in a way where it feels like they're using any other third party service out there so that maybe developers don't need to care. Like developers that aren't going into it with like, oh yeah, I'm gonna sell all this.

[56:22] Mark Suman: And there's a middle ground to it also where you still can aggregate data in your backend if you want to. So there's, there's this concept, I ran into it a lot of Apple, but there's, there's like industry standards around this where there's different levels of personal information, right? Pii, Personally identifiable information. And so the higher the level then, you know, the more secure it needs to maintain. So like the, the base level of personal information is like maybe an email address or something. Whereas you get higher, it's like their weight, their height, you know, what kind of medications they take. So, so if you're building an app, yeah, maybe there are parts that you want to have personalized but then you need to aggregate information across all your users so you can build kind of a nice social, cohesive app.

[57:28] Anthony Ronning: Yeah, that or make it like user explicit. Right. Like you know, we want to have like some modes where you can like maybe share some data with like another friend or something or like maybe you have an invite code and they can access like certain resources of yours and read only mode or you know, things like that. So it's like, you know, we do want this like explicit user based consent too where it's like hey, the user is opting to share with developers and like our you know, hardware attested code is like, you know, enforcing that. So if the user said no, then it's like no, we're not gonna like share this data with you.

[58:19] Marty Bent: But now I've got, now I got my mind racing like building like this advertising model or. Yeah, building on that model too. Like if maybe companies can still monetize user data, but they just have to have the user participate in the act of sharing of that data and the person who's buying that data from the company, basically you send a message to all the users like, hey, this company is interested in, in purchasing your data. And you just use the Lightning network. It's like if you opt into this, you'll get 500 sets, whatever, or 10 bucks if you're willing to share this data. And they're going to use it to target you with ads for products they think you may like.

[59:01] Mark Suman: Maybe because in that model it really is your data. Right. And so now you are being as a user, you can sell your data and get compensated for it. Yeah, I think that's cool.

[59:12] Marty Bent: No, I think we were discussing this again when you guys were last in here, the day after you guys launched Maple really feels, and again going with the sort of parallels that this has with HTTP and HTTPs, I feel like we're at the beginning stages where it should be recognized that this should be the standard way to do data collection. And we were talking about it that day. In here you had the US Government when China hacked all the telecom companies actively send a warning out like, shit, they're in the telecom databases, they have all your plain text messages that you've been sending. Please use end to end encrypted apps

[59:53] Mark Suman: like Signal, hide your kids, hide your WhatsApp. Yeah, all that. Yeah.

[59:56] Anthony Ronning: And that's after many years of the US government saying stay away from these apps. They explicitly said don't use end to

[1:00:03] Mark Suman: end encryption because they're only for criminals. That's what they love to say. But now it's like, oh, okay, now it's for everybody. Yeah.

[1:00:09] Marty Bent: And anything like HIPAA compliance, it feels like that's an area where it would be incredibly necessary to have that. And obviously financial data.

[1:00:19] Anthony Ronning: Financial apps, yeah, I would say the biggest apps that we've seen in this. So confidential computing, the secure enclaves, as far as the servers go, have been a concept for, I don't know, like six, seven years maybe. And when we've explored this market, we've seen so many of these secure enclave apps building these platforms, building for specifically fintech, healthcare, financial data, things like that. And when we were wanting to build on some of these platforms too to do things, it's just not easily user accessible or developer accessible. It's like they're targeting multibillion dollar companies that are targeting enterprises for this stuff. And, and I think that's a top that we can achieve at some point and get all the compliances and prove that we're doing things in a secure way as well.

[1:02:58] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:04:17] Anthony Ronning: Yeah, and you said every AI developer on accident, but every app developer. Yeah, not just so talking about secure enclaves, more like Apple's raw, theirs, AWS has their, Google, Cloud has theirs, intel has theirs, amd, all these major hardware companies have theirs. Nvidia has an enclave offering to their GPUs as well. Not all GPUs, we use the H1 hundreds, but you can actually insert models, AI models into the enclave of a GPU and have that all verified and encrypted all the way to the GPU. So right now if you're using OpenAI, you're using Claude, you're using any of these, they're seeing all your data. And Claude has recently came out with their industry report about how people are using their AI.

[1:08:27] Marty Bent: Yeah. And again going back to standard like we were talking about earlier, just like the conversations you have the data you want to be like we were talking about like planning your day, like what should I prioritize? But you think there's people putting financials and business plans into these models unaware of the fact that it's just completely exposed on the back end and you

[1:08:48] Anthony Ronning: don't know what kind of response you're going to get. They can always put any artificial response

[1:08:53] Marty Bent: to you no matter what and they could take the information and do with it what they will. And like so it's like from, from a fiduciary perspective. Again, going back to why I'm really excited about what you guys are building because you could see it being a standard where this intersection of AI specifically is like if you're running a business and you're using AI as a tool like a 1031, if we're using it to do industry analysis or company balance sheet analysis. Imagine if we don't do this because we don't feel comfortable with it yet. But put. But a company's like we're trying to do some analysis on a deck that was sent to us or some financials to figure out whether or not we should invest or how to help the company.

[1:09:46] Mark Suman: Yeah. And I mean that's one possible scenario, right. Is that they might act on it. I think the more realistic thing that'll happen is one of your competitors will now benefit from that information because ChatGPT is going to train on the information you gave it. Right. So ChatGPT knows 1031 is investing in bitcoin companies. They're doing startups, they have this portfolio and then a competitor comes along and Says, hey, I'm doing analysis on this thing. Six months later, where ChatGPT is now trained with your data. And even though it doesn't tell this competitor, hey, 1031 is making these moves, it will be able to give them a better answer that is that understands industry better because you helped it be smarter.

[1:13:02] Marty Bent: Yeah. Not only that you're not logging or tracking, but that you can't even do

[1:13:05] Mark Suman: it it if you wanted to.

[1:13:07] Marty Bent: Right?

[1:13:07] Mark Suman: Yeah. Well, I don't want to knock on my door at 3am from some government agency saying, hey, you have these users in your database. Hand it over. It's like, well, I don't have the keys. Like you have to go knock on their door, go do your police work and go track them down and get it.

[1:13:20] Marty Bent: Well, this is a good segue to like end user ux. How do you make it so an end user is handling private key information in a secure way? And how do you handle backups, like giving the power of access to data in the cloud to the user.

[1:13:38] Mark Suman: Yeah. So all sorts of apps can be built on OpenSecret. Right. You could build an AI app like we built. We have no problem. If somebody wants to come in and build a competitor to us, that's fine. We're building the platform. So you can build that. You could build a Bitcoin wallet app. Right. You could build a journal app, you could build all sorts of things. Each one has its own risk profile associated with it. So if you're building a Bitcoin app that is meant to buy coffee on a daily basis and you're only people are going to be putting 50 bucks in the wallet, then maybe you're okay with them just logging in with Google and that's it.

[1:14:56] Anthony Ronning: Yeah, and so it's like you're not,

[1:14:58] Marty Bent: it's not like an end user is writing down a seed phrase to recover,

[1:15:02] Anthony Ronning: but they, but they still can. Yeah, especially within a model where it is, yeah, let's say it is lower stakes and it is just like, you know, you're backing up your, you're just using it for just a normal note taking app or you're using it for a bitcoin wallet for hot funds. There is still that option where like you can request that the enclave gives you the seed phrase through an encrypted channel still verified by the enclave, but you can request that it pulls down and they can get a copy of that seed phrase. So they can still do backups just fine. But it's not like one of those scenarios where you know, upon launching the app, the first thing they have to do is write down 12 words and then repeat the 12 words back to them.

[1:18:48] Mark Suman: Well, and that's from the user perspective of how to back up your data. We also don't want developers to feel like they're locked into our platform. So, one, our server code is open source and then they can download a copy of all their data, all the user data, but it's encrypted so they can protect themselves should we go away at some point. So they can have like daily or hourly or however many backups they want to make. They can be the incremental backups and just have this kind of encrypted data store to sit in there and safe storage. And then they can have the open source code also downloaded so they can have kind of like a warm spare ready to go.

[1:20:44] Marty Bent: And over time, within the app, the AI will develop context for particular users in that data vault and be able to give better answers. Yeah, in a private way.

[1:20:53] Mark Suman: Yeah.

[1:20:54] Anthony Ronning: It's already pretty scary when you go and ask open AI, like, oh, what do you, what do you know about me? You know, I, I have a friend that's before.

[1:21:01] Mark Suman: Oh, you can have it like Bill of Dossier, as if the CIA were coming after you. You're like, bill, a dossier what you know about me? And it'll like, spit out a lot of private information.

[1:21:09] Anthony Ronning: Yeah. Damn scary. And that's all, like, information that they're keeping and they're tracking and they're building user profiles based on your request. So it's like, like they're not just training AI models on your data, but they're actively storing it. So an employee, if they pulled up someone's user profile, they'd be like, oh, this is the kind of user. I have a friend who, he's just using Perplexity and he's just asking a very normal request like, oh, hey, these are the ingredients I have at my house. Create a recipe for me. And it's like creating a recipe for it. And then it ends. He's asking questions like, oh, just, I ran out of this ingredient.

[1:22:44] Marty Bent: That's insane.

[1:22:46] Anthony Ronning: Yeah, because think about your day. Think about the things you're interested in. If you just think of a couple things, like oh yeah, there's a lot of people that are interested in this, but who's interested in farming and Bitcoin and I don't know, anti seat oil is actually probably all of us. Right.

[1:23:03] Mark Suman: But yeah, but if you think about it, the more apps that use ChatGPT, then suddenly you'll be on another app and that app will now know a lot about you that you gave to this other app that you were trusting thinking that like, oh, this app developer, I really know them. But what you gave them went into ChatGPT's database and now some other random app that you logged into that maybe you were just trying out is like, oh, I know all this really cool stuff about you now. So it's. You're just kind of like creating this giant honeypot of your own personal information.

[1:23:32] Anthony Ronning: Yeah.

[1:23:33] Marty Bent: And like the open AIs of the world would frame that as making your life easier. Wherever you go, the AI knows exactly what you want.

[1:23:41] Anthony Ronning: And a lot of this stemmed from ad tracking, ad tech. This is almost like the root of the very beginning of the problem. It's like so much money went into ad tech for creating incentivizing.

[1:23:53] Marty Bent: Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you could build an experience, an inter app experience, if enough developers adopt the Open Secret platform where you could have a similar experience but have the assurance that only you have access to that data.

[1:24:08] Anthony Ronning: Yeah, that would be something like later in the future. But the idea that a user could have a Open Secret profile and they can log into multiple apps on their Open Secret profile, and then from there you can get into almost like a Google Accounts experience, like a Google sign in experience, where it's like, oh, this wants access to your Google Drive. Do you want to give this app access to your Google Drive? Like things like that, where at least now we can make it more secure. It's like, okay, the user gave access to this other app's drive, you know, for this specific purpose, and still without giving that developer the raw access to their data.

[1:25:27] Marty Bent: your personal contacts with you to all

[1:25:30] Anthony Ronning: these apps, which kind of stems into the whole, like, decentralized identity scheme too, where it's like, it's your data, you own it, and you're giving explicit permission to these apps to use it in a almost like data sharing kind of way, like a data standardization way where, you know, you have the same playlist. Why does it matter that it's on Spotify or Apple or whatever? What if you just want to log into like a, you know, title now? Oh, I log in the title now. All my. My playlists aren't here. You know, like, if you just had a central location for all your playlists, then you can log into one of these apps and still have it.

[1:26:04] Marty Bent: Well, correct me if I'm wrong, too. Now I'm visualizing this. You could set up a way where, like an app, front end and back end, essentially just creating like, a function, and you bring the different inputs and variables to that function, and the app at the end of the day will know that an output has been produced, but may not know the values of the independent variables that you brought the context to.

[1:26:28] Mark Suman: I mean, that's kind of like enclaves in a nutshell right there. The way that I love to explain it to people is if you've made it this far in the episode and you still don't understand what the hell an enclave is, the way that I like to look at it, it's like this transparent box where you shove a bunch of code in there and then you lock it and you can look inside the box and see the code that's in there. You can't touch it, you can't do anything. It's there. But then the data that passes through, you can't see. There's some kind of privacy glass where you can't see the data coming in.

[1:27:47] Marty Bent: It bullish.

[1:27:50] Mark Suman: Yeah, let's make it the standard. Yeah, let's do it.

[1:27:53] Marty Bent: What is the reaction from the launch of Maple AI, particularly not from end users, but from app developers seeing that as an example of something that can be built in the wild?

[1:28:04] Mark Suman: Yeah, I mean, we've got just, we have a few more developers that have jumped into our discord to start chatting with us and some of them are very active, really excited. And Maple has just been this awesome tool to hand them and like, it's a light bulb moment. It's an interesting concept that a lot of developers kind of, they can grok when you first tell it to them, but then they go use Maple. And like you said, it feels like a normal app. It doesn't feel like this really clunky thing where I had to do a lot of work to get it to work. I just sign in, Boom.

[1:29:23] Anthony Ronning: Yeah. And that's why we built Maple too, to like dog food it too. We had a lot of developers, even, you know, when we were talking to everyone just like, okay, cool, I want to use this right now. It's like, well, we're still trying to figure out what developers need and so we know we're building the right thing, like the product market fit and the product validation is very important too. So it's like that's why we started out building Maple, making sure our platform can do everything that we wanted to do as app devs, because we're app devs at the end of the day. Well, I am.

[1:29:53] Mark Suman: I was. Not anymore. Yeah.

[1:29:56] Anthony Ronning: But yeah, we just wanted to verify that. And now we're getting pretty close to being able to turn on production for Open Secret itself. We already have some builders that are ready to launch with us, so we're pretty excited about that. So in, you know, a few weeks to a month, it should be live in production for app devs to get onboarded by us until we turn on the self service part.

[1:30:22] Marty Bent: Hell yeah.

[1:31:18] Marty Bent: Yeah, well, I know it's been a long year for you guys and again, it's been fun. I know not always at times for you guys, but watching from the corner of the commons, if you guys have iterated and shipped and gotten to this point as you've gotten ripped and it's been, it's been fun to watch them. I'm so pumped for you guys because it feels like launch of Maple, getting this developer sort of fervor around at least a small amount of fervor around it. And again, I think I'm an idiot. I don't build apps. But conceptually, to me, the progression of the web towards more private and the what you guys are building just makes sense to me intuitively that this should be a standard, particularly, I mean, you know, we've been covering it on rabbit hole recap for seven years now.

[1:32:26] Mark Suman: Yeah.

[1:32:27] Anthony Ronning: And instead of our like, you know, we were building out all the infrastructure at Mutiny and then trying to make a great, great app user experience as well at the same time. The front end app, it's a lot to do both at the same time. And then how much is one app going to reach, user wise? At least at the end of the day we do want users to have better data protection and better data guarantee. So it's like at the end of the day we can reach many app developers building for many end users. And I think we can make a bigger impact on the world this way too.

[1:32:56] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:32:56] Mark Suman: And it feels like a paradox, but a more open Internet needs to have strong privacy, so we as individuals need to be able to lock things down in order for us to feel more free to communicate online.

[1:33:07] Marty Bent: Yeah, completely agree. Keep crushing it, gentlemen. Go check out Maple AI. Try Maple AI.

[1:33:13] Mark Suman: Yep.

[1:33:14] Marty Bent: What's Open Secret's main website?

[1:33:15] Mark Suman: OpenSecret. Cloud.

[1:33:17] Marty Bent: Cloud, yeah, cloud. I knew that was all that was available. It plays.

[1:33:22] Mark Suman: Gentlemen, you can find us on Twitter, X noster around all the places.

[1:33:26] Marty Bent: All right, keep crushing it, gentlemen.

[1:33:28] Mark Suman: Thanks, Marty.

[1:33:29] Marty Bent: Peace and love. Okay,