Transcript: Mark Suman: You Gave AI Full Access to Your Computer

Intro clip [0:07] 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.

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

Mark Suman [0:34] Probably should be.

Marty Bent [0:35] Probably should be. Wild times, brother. Great to be here with you.

Mark Suman [0:39] Great to be on again. Thanks.

Marty Bent [0:41] This is take two, and as I was saying, in take one, I've been asked to intro my guests better for the new. The new TFTC freaks who have joined us. We're blowing up. The show's growing. It's incredible. For any of you new audience members out there, I'm sitting down with Mark Suman, co founder of Maple AI. He's at the cutting edge of AI privacy, which is a topic that I think is becoming more and more on top of people's minds as they begin to experiment with the tools that are hitting the market, particularly the agentic tools, and they're realizing how much access they're giving over to some of these large language models, particularly provided by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

Marty Bent ⋮ And so I figured it'd be a good day, good week to get an update from Mark, because I think we are. I don't want to say we're at this inflection point where we're going to go one direction or the other. I'm actually pretty optimistic because of individuals like yourself and the team over there at Maple with you and Anthony. Excuse me. Building your tools. So maybe, maybe an update for the freaks who didn't catch our last or who did catch our last episode where we talked about what you guys are building at Maple and how you're incorporating it. What. What has happened in the last six, eight months since we last met.

Mark Suman [2:06] Yeah, sure. Thanks for the intro, man. It's not what's happened the last six months. It's like what's happened in the last six days. Everything is changing so fast, it feels like a whirlwind trying to keep up with the AI news. So I guess for your listeners, if they feel overwhelmed by this, I share your sentiment. A lot has happened. I mean, Maple has grown a ton. We've added in live web search. So now it's not stuck in the past, but it can grab current Information, but it doesn't do it like, it does it in a private way where we use the Brave Search API, we protect your identity, all that kind of stuff to go out to the web and fetch information for you.

Mark Suman ⋮ And then back in like December time frame, we really started leaning into this agentic AI stuff and wanted to put an agent inside of MAPLE and do some kind of chat assistant within Maple. And then at the same time, obviously other people had the same idea. So this whole OpenCL thing jumped on the scene. We'd been looking at it and then they came on and so we're like, okay, this, this kind of validated this idea. People really want to have some kind of AI that's like constantly working for them. So we're building that in the maple. Not Open Claw itself, but similar functionality. What else do we have?

Mark Suman ⋮ We've got really powerful reasoning models now. 5 is like on par with a lot of these anthropic, a lot of these OpenAI models. So you get really good intelligence, you get really good agent coding, math computation. There's all sorts of great things that are in there now. And the open source models have caught up. Like it's, it's indisputable now. They are as good as the Frontier Labs. And so we, we need to stop thinking that like, using, using open source models is like a subpar experience. We just need to build better tooling around them to make them even, even more competitive.

Marty Bent [3:56] I think that's key. The tooling is somebody's been using OpenClaw for a while now. In AI terms, it's insane how beneficial it has been to our workflows and extending my productivity here. But I'm always acutely aware of what's happening behind the scenes. I've got mine living in a vps. It doesn't have control of my computer or anything. That is for a reason, because I know that the sort of walled garden model providers have access to everything I'm doing when I'm paying their models. And so I think you are far better suited than I am to basically explain what's happening, because I think a lot of people are out there experimenting with Open Claw, connecting it to Claude's API, OpenAI's API and just running wild. What is happening when people are doing this and running wild behind the scenes?

Mark Suman [4:53] Yeah, you're effectively giving some kind of touch computer software full access to your computer, you're even some app access to everything on your computer to run programs, to read files. It really is like a virus. Back in the 90s and 2000s, we were, like, so nervous about viruses on our computers that we would install McAfee antivirus software, or Norton or whatever they were to block these kinds of things. And now we're, like, welcoming them onto our system and. But they behave the same way. But this time we are inviting it in and we feel like we can control it. So I would just say, like, remember that as you're installing this stuff, you're giving it, like, full root access to everything that you have, which I commend you for running it in a vps.

Mark Suman ⋮ That's a smart way to do it. Or run on a totally different computer, one that is locked away from everything. But if you're going to put that computer on your home network, on your same WI fi as everything else that you're doing, you might have a bad time. So I would just be careful because this thing could start scanning the network looking for ports that are open. Start walking around quietly behind the scenes, and you won't quite know what's going on. I have this. This meme constantly running in my mind. I don't know if you've seen the meme of The Simpsons where Mr. Burns and Smithers are, like, walking into this lockdown compound and he has to, like, scan his eyeballs to open up one door, and then he has to do his handprint to open up another door.

Mark Suman ⋮ And it's like this really secure thing. And when they get to the final room, there's this, like, back door that's just, like, blown open. And this cat or dog comes wandering into the final enclave where he gets into. And it's like, that's how. That's what everybody's doing with their. With their open claw. They're getting a separate computer. They're locking it down with this. They're doing file encryption and everything. And then the final step is they're inviting anthropic or open AI to slurp up all of their data. So they're just kind of leaving this whole open this back door open, if you will, to all of that.

Mark Suman ⋮ So just, just know. Know what you're getting into kind of thing and be willing to only share that information that you want to have shared with, with those companies.

Marty Bent [7:00] So I. I assume that most people that are doing this are relative novices aren't aware of this. And if you weren't aware before, you are aware now after Mark's incredible explanation. But what are you seeing in terms of the people who are not novices, like, long time Software engineers, system admins and programmers in terms of their recognition of that backdoor that you just described. And do you think they are worried about it? Do you think it's okay? They think it's a necessary evil. Is there a sense amongst senior software engineers that there needs to be a more secure setup?

Mark Suman [7:43] Yeah, well, one, I don't want this to be total doom or anything because this is like really fun to play with too. I'm sure you've been having fun. Openclaw. I think you've mentioned that you stay up late at night a lot playing with it. And I definitely do too. I know a lot of people are. So there's tons of fun things to do. It really reminds me of the early days of the Internet when we were first discovering email and discovering the World Wide Web and geocities and being able to do your own HTML. It's super cool stuff. So I think people should definitely play around with it.

Mark Suman ⋮ As far as, you know, the, the seasoned veterans that are playing with us, people who are like entrenched in technology, I feel like they put up good guardrails and they try to put up good walls and say, okay, this is, this is the area where I know that anything I say in here could end up getting leaked onto the Internet at some point. So they use it appropriately that way. But then most, most of the really serious people I talk to, they also have some kind of private place that they talk about stuff, whether that's Maple or a local AI. They have someplace where they're like, okay, I'm going to separate these two worlds and I'm going to make sure that I'm protected over here and anything I say over here, I don't want it to end up online or end up getting sent to the government or something.

Mark Suman ⋮ So, yeah, I don't know that some people feel like it's a foregone conclusion. I definitely hear from people like, oh, privacy, it was gone a long time ago, so we don't even need to have that fight anymore. But given the amount of sales of Mac Minis that that has happened in the last month, I think a lot of people, a lot of like normie type people are realizing that privacy is something they still care about and that they want to try and preserve.

Marty Bent [9:26] Yeah, completely agree. And bringing this back to tooling, like, how far away do you think we are from feature parody for the tooling around more private ways of interacting with these models like Maple?

Mark Suman [9:40] Yeah, this is one spot where the open source AI is still trying to catch up and that is, I mean, there's a software that they all run called vlm and the VLM software, for better or for worse, has to try and handle every single open model out there. And so it doesn't do any single model really well. And the reason why Anthropic and OpenAI are able to operate so well and be so effective that they write all sorts of proprietary harness software middleware that, that's in between you and the AI and can just like do really good system prompting, really good tool calling and all of these things.

Mark Suman ⋮ And the open source AI just, they need better, they need, need better support there. So for example, if we wanted to make Maple the primary LLM provider inside of openclaw, there are, there are certain limitations right now with the tool calling where openclaw will say, all right, let me spin up a sub agent and do this thing. Sometimes it'll work really well, other times it'll just kind of like go off and never come back. And so that's, that's a limitation right now that we're running into. And it's not just us, it's, it's a whole bunch of open source model providers that are running into that problem.

Mark Suman ⋮ Now if you look at someone like Kimmy who creates open source AI, they have their own hosted version and they build all of this really nice middleware that makes it work better, but now you're trusting their hosted solution. They're a Chinese company, very likely tied in with ccp just because of what we know of how business runs in China. It's really difficult to be in business without also having a connection with CCP for data sharing. So, you know, that's just something to take into consideration and something that we need to be building better in the open community.

Marty Bent [11:23] Is there a clear light at the end of the tunnel for building that? Or are Anthropic OpenAI Kimi or is that sort of middleware proprietary? It's hard to reverse engineer.

Mark Suman [11:39] No, I think it's classic tales all the time with open source development where it moves a little bit slower in some regards, right? In some ways open source moves really fast because you have a million people tinkering with it and throwing it out there. But with something as complex as hosting software for open models and LLMs, everybody's kind of centralized on this one project and so now we're at a bit of a bottleneck trying to get that project to make improvements and move forward. So it's just going slow, but I think with time it'll improve and Maybe someone will come out with an open source competitor to that project and we'll see some innovation there. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. I think improvements will be made. It's just going to take a little more time to get them through.

Marty Bent [12:25] How, how do you think the next six months play out with this race between closed source and open source models?

Mark Suman [12:34] I think we continue to have new models from open source community that, that push the boundaries and we'll keep seeing this leapfrogging. Everybody will release, everybody releases. And then like the next week the competitors come out with something and the next week the open source competitors come out with something. So we all benefit from that. I do love that, that timeline that we're on six months from now. I think there will be other Open Claw type projects. I don't think that Open Claw necessarily is like the final, the final agentic project out there, especially now that it got scooped up by OpenAI, that, that has tainted it for some people.

Mark Suman ⋮ So yeah, I think that we're going to see a lot of just really fun innovation out there and a lot more people will be running agents, having them read their email, having them read their calendar, booking appointments for them, shopping for groceries for them, like all sorts of really cool things that we've been promised in this future of AI. I think in six months those are going to become tangible realities for a lot of people.

Marty Bent [13:34] Yeah, I can feel it. I can feel it. What are your thoughts? I mean, I was tweeting this out yesterday. If you look at the sort of public spat between the Department of War and Anthropic right now in the idea of AI safety, I think it's pretty clear to anybody paying attention that Anthropic is. I don't know if they're feigning worry about it or if they're legitimately worried, but I think the end product of them getting their way could be bad for open source models particularly. But it seems like the Department of War and Anthropic or Republic spat, but to me it seems like a Hegelian dialectic problem, problem reaction, solution thing where Anthropic say, hey, I don't want you to run wild with this. We need more guardrails. And I could definitely see the government saying, okay, we'll give you guardrails. We'll create these regulations that force them onto the market. Do you worry about that at all?

Mark Suman [14:33] Yeah, I mean government regulation moats to drive out competitors, like that's, that's a classic dark pattern that happens in business when really if we want to have true safe AI, if you will, or what's the for Responsible AI is a phrase people love to use. Right. If we want to have truly responsible AI, it should be trained in the open with open data, open weights. We should be able to see everything so that we can, we can examine it. And that's just not happening right now. So Anthropic wants to say, hey, we're going to make it safe for everybody, but the government will like bless us and we'll be the, the one safe place to do that.

Mark Suman ⋮ That's, that's just not good for anyone because now we're all depending on this closed company, this closed source, and depending on the government to be the auditor of safety. And I don't want the Department of War, Department of Defense of the US Government to be the one that's telling me which AI is safe for me to use. That just seems like we're all going to have a bad time.

Marty Bent [15:33] Yeah, I mean the, the progression of events over the last couple weeks has been quite interesting. For the tinfoil hat Marty Jones in me and you.

Mark Suman [15:45] Yeah. What do you see in there?

Marty Bent [15:47] Well, when you pair the, the sort of back and forth between Hegseth and Dario in Anthropic and the Department of War with the announcement of this distillation attack that Anthropic was subjected to, where the open source models were. Anthropic is claiming they were using Anthropic's models to train themselves and they're claiming some sort of copyright infringement or an attack on their proprietary data and Alpha, that seem like again, going back to the problem reaction solution and the anthropic setting of the Department of War. Like look, we're getting attacked by these Chinese open source models we need to lock down. And it's especially, especially rich when you consider the fact that it's pretty well known that Anthropic use some of those same tactics to, to get their model into the state that it currently is in.

Mark Suman [16:47] Yeah, I mean they all trained on public data, copyrighted data. It's, I mean it's, it's obvious that they did. And if you talk to any copyright holder out there, they have not been compensated for all that training that happened. So it's very rich for these companies now to say, hey, they're training on trying to steal all of our stuff. I mean, maybe, maybe this will be like a foot in my mouth moment. But I also like, I don't know how a partnership between Anthropic and the Department of Defense Department of War stops these open source models from continuing to progress and develop. It's. It would take, it would take a really big card for them to play when it comes to like being authoritative over the technology that we use within the United States.

Mark Suman ⋮ And I don't know that they necessarily would want to play that card, but they would really have to lock things down and try and control what American citizens are using. That's, that's a, that's a difficult road to go down.

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Marty Bent [19:01] secured against RFID signal jacking. Silent. The cardholder does the same thing. It's much sleeker, fits in my pocket much easier. I also have the Faraday phone sleeve which you can put a hardware wallet in. We're actually using it for our keys at the house too. There's been a lot of robberies. They have essential Faraday slings, Faraday backpacks. It's a bitcoin company. They're running on a bitcoin standard. They Have a Bitcoin treasury. They accept Bitcoin via strike. com patented technology, special operations approved. It has free shipping as well. So go check it out. Yeah, well then pair it too. With the push for the digital ID age verification discord, children will probably come the models as well.

Marty Bent ⋮ The money that these, these agents use, they're going to try and do ID verification there. I mean it already happens to an extent with stablecoins just on the edges. So you can see the them trying to throw cold water on the proliferation of more sovereign AI tools moving forward.

Mark Suman [20:01] Yeah, I mean you have stripe working with OpenAI, right? They publish their payments thing. I think it's like APA or something. And then you have Stripe also working with Coinbase on X402. You've got USDC stablecoin with circle mixed in there. So there's all sorts of choke points and regulation and censorship opportunities for someone who wants to control how these agents pay each other and really interact on the web.

Marty Bent [20:29] Yeah, I think I agree with you though. I don't think they'll be able to contain these things and if they do, they'll breach containment. And as I was mentioning before we hit record, I discussed a lot of similar topics. Not a ton of overlap yet, but I had Cali on we recorded earlier this morning and it actually made me incredibly bullish because he's incredibly optimistic and I think mainly because of the agency. These tools give the many to fight against the few centralized entities and so basically giving a call to action to hey, if you care about this stuff and you think you can be beneficial and contribute to the efforts of open source projects that will preserve your sovereignty and privacy and freedom as we quickly and acceleratingly transition into this AI driven world, you can contribute.

Mark Suman [21:29] Yeah, well, and we talk a lot about privacy, but privacy really is upstream from freedom, right? Like you have to have privacy first in order to have freedom. And so I view us as being a freedom oriented AI. We're trying to give people an alternative to the system that's being built, the system that is government partnerships and moats that are meant to control who has access. And the open source community is like, no, we've got another option for you. And we need more people building this space. You know, we, we need more people doing this because if we want to have these AIs out there that are able to fight against this closed system that is, that is likely to be thrust upon us or attempted to be thrust upon us.

Mark Suman ⋮ We can have, we can have like this whole wonderful world outside of that wall that operates and is difficult for them to sh. And the way that we control it is we put it all out in the open, we let everybody inspect it, we let everybody build tools, build the good AI tools. I can fight against the bad AI tools and we can have it out in the open and just disinfect everything by adding some sunlight to it all. And that's where I see the open source community really having a lot of power in the struggle right now, where a lot of people are worried about AI, they're worried about what it's going to do to their jobs, they're worried about what it's going to do to, to how they think, to education, you name it.

Mark Suman ⋮ People are worried about AI in pretty much every space that you go to.

Marty Bent [22:56] Yeah, I mean, shifting gears to building with this stuff. I think we talked about this last time you were on, but again, with how quickly things are developing, I think it does deserve a check in. Like building out Maple using the AI tools. How's that been in recent months,

Mark Suman [23:18] building Maple itself, We still use a combination of things like Claude as well as Maple. We build out, we build open source software. So we don't mind that like our stuff is going to anthropic because it's, it's ending up on GitHub and everybody's computers anyways. But we also use Maple a lot for our development. So we've got the Maple API, the Maple proxy. We've put a lot of work into making it work with things like open code. So if you don't want to run cloud code, you want to run something that's more freedom oriented. You can run open code and you can have open code talking to Maple on the backend.

Mark Suman ⋮ So now everything you do there is encrypted. And so I actually use open code with Maple to do a lot of my development work for Maple itself. Some of it that I do is not just writing the code, but actually use it to help me come up with feature specs, like, you know, as a product manager type role, where it's like, okay, I want to work on this really big feature within Maple. For example, we're adding, we're going to add projects into Maple. A lot of people want projects and the ability to organize things into folders. So I can totally vibe with open code with Maple with these open source models and help me come up with this Very lengthy, very detailed feature specification that I can then hand over to a coding agent to build and get out there inside of Maple.

Mark Suman ⋮ But that whole thought process and ideation, you know, I like doing it in a way that is a little more private and not just giving it all over to anthropic. This is one example. But then the proxy itself has been super useful. When I go to visit companies or organizations and do AI trainings with them, we can vibe code really cool, powerful tools for them right there on the spot that are powered by Maple in the back end. I posted this online last week. But like I was able to build two tools really quickly just by texting over signal with. With my openclaw that was.

Mark Suman ⋮ That was running Maple in the background. And I was able to build a tool that did translation. So if you are like an activist organization or a nonprofit and you want to publish some kind of thing and have it go out in multiple languages, then you just paste this into my tool, it runs it to Maple in the back end and comes up with 20 different language translations, or however many you need within a few seconds. And these are just like really small tools, but things that you can run locally. You don't have to send all of your stuff to other companies. You can just run it locally and then have Maple be the brain behind it.

Mark Suman ⋮ So, yeah, there's a lot of really cool, powerful things that people are building with something like the Maple proxy.

Marty Bent [25:47] It's all there, it's all possible. While you're talking about the Maple proxy and basically talking to it via signal, I think that's one thing that I've come to realize or developing a stronger belief in the idea that just the form factor of how we interact with the Internet or apps is completely changing in front of us. Like, my whole user experience of interacting with my computer has changed dramatically. Where before two months ago I was using voice to text, but seldomly, but now anytime I need to get something done, it's like voice to text to my agent to go get stuff done. And then you think about what these agents can do in terms of just building stuff for you quickly, whether it's decks, dashboards, visualizations.

Marty Bent ⋮ And then you think about, are apps even going to exist in the future? And I know we've talked about this behind the scenes, but this idea that the form factor is if agents are going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting for things you want to get done, going to be somewhat invisible on the back end. These agents are just going to be speaking with each Other and speaking with services via API calls. Are you a believer in that?

Mark Suman [27:04] No, definitely. I do think there will still be software in the world. Us as human beings, we still want to rely on other people to figure things out for us and do the heavy lifting, do the maintenance, do the security, auditing, that kind of stuff. So there, there will exist that, a market for that. But a lot of the small things that we depend on right now are just going to be agents figuring it out on their own and it's going to be one offs, right. They're going to spin something up, they're going to go talk to their agent, they're going to make it happen and then they'll wind it down.

Mark Suman ⋮ They won't, they won't need it anymore, won't need to persist. And if it does, it'll just persist within the agent and it'll be like, all right, here's my own little set of tools that I built myself and I'm going to use it to talk to these other agents out there and, and maybe there will be some kind of sharing between them where they're like, okay, here are these skills that I have that I'm going to share with you. Kind of like we see with, with open claw. But they're going to be like spun up by the agents themselves. Do you want to hear like my, my three to five year projection of like where I think some things are going?

Marty Bent [28:04] No, I don't think anybody wants to hear that.

Mark Suman [28:06] Yeah, right. I've been working a lot right now on, on two way voice communication. So I want to make Maple better at two way voice. I want to take it on walks with me and really just be able to talk to it. I want to be in the car, you know, I have CarPlay up on the screen. I want to be able to like interact with Maple and just have a two way conversation with it there. I think three to five years from now, most people are interacting with AI just through some kind of hardware device that they're wearing. I know that you and Matt have talked about this and I think, I think spot on there, but it's going to be something like AirPods or some kind of pendant.

Mark Suman ⋮ You're wearing glasses, something that has microphones, potentially cameras. That's how we're going to just be like interacting with the Internet now and getting things done with some combination on our phone where something we can look at. The thing that I want Maple to be ready for and this is what I want us building toward, is that that future right there. Is likely going to be proprietary hardware. It's going to be things running on these devices that we cannot inspect the code. We don't know what they're doing, we don't know what kind of directives they have in them or guardrails or gates that they've put up to to prevent you from doing certain things with them.

Mark Suman ⋮ Right. So I would love for Maple to be in a spot where we can support, we can create, we can be embedded on devices that have open source firmware with reproducible builds that you can have your own headphones and you can be doing stuff. And you know, okay, when the microphone's on, I know first off when it turns on and then when it is on, I know where it's going, I know what it's recording, I know how the data is being, Whether that's through my own infrastructure or through some kind of encrypted backend rather than this kind of quasi surveillance state that's going to continue to be embedded in our lives where everybody's wearing AI tech that's constantly listening and watching everything we do.

Marty Bent [29:55] What's the landscape of that hardware and firmware look like

Mark Suman [30:01] right now? We have a lot of big companies that have talked about building things, but we don't have any concrete plans on what they're building. I mean, if you look at, you look at what's publicly available, right? Meta has their glasses. Apple did the Vision Pro, which is very hefty and heavy. I don't think that's where they land. And then OpenAI is openly talking about building their own device. They've been very public about that. All three of those companies are proprietary and locked down. And I don't see them saying, hey, we're going to open source our firmware and we're going to provide reproducible builds so people can cryptographically prove that this is the code that's running on your device without a backdoor inside of it.

Mark Suman ⋮ I'm not seeing anybody. Well, I shouldn't say not see anybody. There are a couple of companies that are building open things. One of them that's really interested is called Pebble. I don't know if you remember the Pebble Watch that kind of launched the whole smartwatch revolution. They've come back and they're building open source hardware, both watches, and they've got this ring that they're working on. To me, that's really compelling and I'd like to dig into there more and see if Maple can be something that can partner with the device. Maker like that. I'm also bullish on Daylight Computer. I think that there's a lot of interesting things that could be done there with open firmwares and with Maple and other kind of private AI solutions, if you will.

Mark Suman ⋮ And I think there will be others that pop up too. But we need more people building out in the open.

Marty Bent [31:34] Yeah, yeah. Start 9 caught up in battle. You know, there's progress they're making is imperative. Are you, are you optimistic right now?

Mark Suman [31:46] Oh, yeah, totally, I am. I mean, I, I have to sell Maple to people and convince them that they shouldn't give all their data over to the, the big AI companies. So I often come across as like, negative and a doomer. But, man, I'm having so much fun. Like, this is, this is a blast. These, these AI agents building with AI. I mean, I know you've expressed this opinion, but it's, it's very empowering. Especially I come from a software engineering background, but people who did not know how to write code, now they're able to use these tools to program and do things that they couldn't do in the past where they had to depend on other people.

Mark Suman ⋮ And it's like your ideas are no longer the limit. It's just which ideas you want to pursue. Which kind of like, you know, sweat do you want to pour into something and trying to make an idea really take off and, and what kind of market can you validate to, to build something for that? So I'm super optimistic about that. I think that this is a really fun time, a really cool time to be alive. Pairing that with, like, the difficult transition we might go through with, with people getting laid off and job markets having to transition to some kind of new industry that we don't know about yet.

Mark Suman ⋮ I'm constantly at odds with that, but I am optimistic that we find a way through this.

Marty Bent [33:07] What do you mean by you're at odds with it?

Mark Suman [33:09] I'm at odds with the fact that I'm really excited and having fun building AI, even though I know that there are people who are out there are super worried that they're going to lose their job because of the AI. And I've already talked to people, even family members and friends who have run into this problem. And it's, it's hard for me to be smiling and be like, yeah, isn't this awesome? I'm sorry you lost your job. So, I mean, my message is like, learn how to use these tools. And it's not only going to make you better at your job, but it'll help you team up with other people.

Mark Suman ⋮ If a bunch of really smart people lost their jobs, they can team up together, form a new company and hire people who you know can come along. And I think we just birthed thousands of and millions of new companies that are smaller, more nimble, more local. Right. I was chatting with something, somebody yesterday who kind of framed it this way. I thought it was cool that you have all like your local ranchers and your local farmers in your community. You go to the farmer's market to buy stuff from them. Well, with these AI tools we possibly come up with with all these local technology companies.

Mark Suman ⋮ So no longer are we having to look to Silicon Valley to build all of our tech that we all run on some cloud infrastructure. But instead it's like in your town you have your local CRM provider who's building stuff that's just great for you. And then if you need new features that they don't have that another town over has, they just use AI to go vicode that feature into the CRM that you're using in your local town. So I think that there's a lot of really kind of cool stuff that can come out of it and we more decentralized technology down to the local level.

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Marty Bent [35:59] It's so delicious. So my pink lemonade electrolyte mix. It's pink Himalayan salt. There's no sugar. It's way better than element liquid iv. I went through a. A big electrolyte kick testing them all out, and I let. Landed on this, settled on this. Been drinking it pretty consistently every day for two years now. It is my favorite. This is the pink lemonade. They have orange here, as you can see. This one's ripped. I had this on the train ride back from New York last night. I'm always stocked up with these things. They also have creatine packets. Very convenient, particularly if you're traveling and you like to work out. You like, get those brain juices flowing. They have these creatine packets as well.

Marty Bent [36:39] They're about to launch a bunch more flavors. Lemon, lime, watermelon, and. And a few others as well. So go check it out. Go to drink sotE-R-I-N k s o-t e.com use the code TFTC for 15 off. Seriously, game changer in our house. My wife drinks it, I drink it. Our boys drink it. Stay hydrated. It's a beautiful thing when I asked this question to Cali, but I'll ask you as well, because I think getting different perspectives on this for. For the audience could be beneficial. But, like, what would your advice be to somebody listening to this who has been apprehensive or intimidated to begin playing around with this stuff to. To take the first step, like, what should they do? How should they approach it? What should their mindset be?

Mark Suman [37:29] I. I think it's imperative. Excuse me. I think it's imperative that everybody play around with it. You just need to try it. I know it can be scary and maybe it feels overhyped. I tend to be someone who, when something gets hyped up, I ignore it for a while because I don't want to be caught up in fads. And that's. That served me pretty well throughout my life. But this one does not appear to be a fad. So I would just recommend sign up for one of these tools, pay a monthly subscription, because you're going to get the full access to the tool. You're not Just going to get like the free access that's limited.

Mark Suman ⋮ And then pick one thing in your life that you're like, okay, this is something that I do all the time. Maybe AI can help me do it easier and just try to automate that one thing. And automate isn't necessarily like it's going to keep going for you constantly while you're asleep or something. It doesn't have to be that difficult. Just something that you have to write an email you have to write once a week to a boss or, you know, something that you do at home every, every day. Pick one thing and see if AI can help you do it better. And I think that'll be your toehold into seeing kind of like what these tools are capable of.

Mark Suman ⋮ And then you'll start coming up with more and more ideas of things that you can do.

Marty Bent [38:43] Yeah, yeah, play with it. You'll get obsessed quickly if you. You have the aha moment and you are successfully able to achieve one of those tasks rather quickly. It's really crap.

Mark Suman [38:57] Yeah. And I know that I'm biased here because I sell subscriptions to AI software, but. But seriously, like if you need to cancel a Netflix subscription and sign up and any one of these AI tools, just sign up for one and pay them 20 bucks a month. I don't care if it's open AI, I would rather it's maple. But. But pick one of them and just get off of zero. Just get started playing with it and do it for a month. You know, just give up Netflix for a month. I think you can survive and try out one of these tools and see if it brings any value to your life.

Mark Suman ⋮ And I am highly confident that you will find some kind of value in it. And then you can make the decision, am I getting more than $20 a month out of this? If you are, then keep it. And if you need to get Netflix going again, then do that. But I think you should just get off of zero and get started.

Marty Bent [39:44] For all you Christians out there, it is the Lenten season. If you haven't given up anything, anything yet, you could drop Netflix for the rest of Len to pick up a maple subscription. We can toing around with this.

Mark Suman [39:56] There you go.

Marty Bent [39:58] Back to your voice to voice because I agree. I think that's the four. I think we're headed towards a her world. I think her. I think Spike Jones did a very good job of visualizing what the world of AI will look like in the form factor, which most people land on. I think Voice to Voice is where we're going. I think my voice to text stepping stone right now is just that, a stepping stone. Eventually the voice models will get so responsive and it'll just be much easier to. To correspond with your agent via voice than voice the text, or text to text, whatever it may be. But you had your. You had your. Your agent join the what Bitcoin did podcast. It completely bought the system. What happened?

Mark Suman [40:45] Yeah, y. Yeah. So I knew I was coming on with Danny. We were going to record on Sunday night, my time, and so I was like, oh, I've got this crazy idea. Can I get my openclaw to come on and join the podcast? I haven't heard of anybody doing this, so it's possible that it was a first. But I spent Saturday with a Maple proxy with open code and just vibe coding the heck out of this thing. I think I had Claude code in the mix, had multiple things going on, but I built it and it's this really cool system. So I got it so that it could join a Riverside link because that's what he used to record that episode.

Mark Suman ⋮ It comes on, it's listening to all the audio. It creates like a fake audio connection to the system. It gets all the audio in and then uses a local whisper model. So I'm not sending anything to Anthropic, by the Way, or OpenAI. It runs a local whisper model that transcribes all the audio and then it takes that text and it sends that text to Maple and says, hey, is this something that I should respond to? Or are they just talking back and forth with each other? And then once it decides, oh, this is something you need to respond to, then it comes up with a response, sends it back to my agent, and then it uses another local model.

Mark Suman ⋮ It's called Supertonic, which is a voice. A text to speech voice generation model. Creates the voice and then it sends it back out through this fake microphone that I plugged into Riverside. And then I had to build like a video thing too. So it had. It had its profile with like these emanating rings coming out as it talked and it was able to respond to us. It didn't work as well in my testing as usually happens when you do, you know, AI or technology stuff. But it was able to listen to me and Danny and then it heard that I was talking to it and came up with a response.

Mark Suman ⋮ But in the process, I don't know what happened. Something with the Riverside platform, it booted Danny off of the call, so he was gone. It was just me and my bot Cooper on what bitcoin did. And then eventually Cooper got booted off by Riverside too. So. And it was just me for a little bit until Danny could get back on.

Marty Bent [42:46] First ever AI agent joining a podcast live in,

Mark Suman [42:51] you know, little, little Alpha here. But I'm, I'm working on, can I build a show around that? So I, I'm, I'm drastically improving the software and I want to maybe create a show where me and my bot co host a show and I bring people on just to talk about how they're building agents and what they're doing with their agents. Right. I'm here to hear first.

Marty Bent [43:11] I would love to join as a guest.

Mark Suman [43:12] Okay.

Marty Bent [43:13] I mean, I'm a layer behind it. I'm not sure if you saw, but this morning was the first ever podcast companion edition of the bitcoin brief newsletter which I've been building with my agent. Over the last few weeks. We've reacted sort of reinvigorated the five day a week newsletter for the bitcoin brief and with the help of my agent, but I've been doing it for the last two weeks. I was like, hey, maybe there's some people who don't like reading too much, they'd rather listen to this. And so last night I vibe coded, I guess for two hours and was able to set up a flow where we'll take the sort of written newsletter, build a script, a news cast like script about it, hooked up in 11 labs API token and used a.

Marty Bent ⋮ There's my audio is out there. I've been, I've been recording podcasts for, for almost nine years now. So my voice is going to be out there. I'm thinking about, I need to trademark it, I think, but was basically able to spin up like a little podcast companion to the bitcoin brief. And so now every morning when I send out the newsletter, I had the cron John set up where we'll have the newsletter ready and then five minutes after it's ready, it triggers the bitcoin brief podcast skill which then goes, builds the script, does the voice generation and publishes it to our website and our RSS feed.

Mark Suman [44:41] So did you train your own voice? Like, does it sound like Marty?

Marty Bent [44:44] Yeah.

Mark Suman [44:45] That's awesome. Yeah. And that technology has been around for like a year and a half now. Two years, and it's only gotten better, continue to improve?

Marty Bent [44:53] Well, we tried, we tried something on YouTube like a year, year and a half ago with this and it just sounded too robotic. But now it's still a little robotic, but it sounds Good enough. But yeah, point being the ability to just do these things. And as a content creator, for lack of a better term, somebody who runs a media company, it's something, as you can imagine, I've been thinking very deeply of since I've been interacting with these agents, is how's this medium going to evolve and change? And I think your idea for an agent co host for a podcast is one of the examples of things I think many people aren't prepared of. They may have a visceral negative reaction to it, but I think it's inevitable it's going to happen.

Mark Suman [45:35] Yeah, well, and the idea is out there. So if somebody else does it before me, free ideas are here on the Internet, something that you just with your bitcoin breeze and making your own podcast. This is one thing I love about the agents as well, is they generate so much documentation. They're always writing things, and it can be overwhelming. It's like you're chatting with it and it's like, oh, okay, I saved all those research to a file, and sometimes I read those files. Sometimes I just don't have enough time. So I have it summarize the files for me. But where I find it really useful is like, if I'm going to the gym or I know I'm gonna be in the car for a little while, I'll just text my agent and be like, hey, can you make an audio version of that file?

Mark Suman ⋮ And this whole podcast harness that I set up for my agent to have a voice and stuff, and now it's like, oh, yeah, I can do that, no problem. So it'll take that file, it'll create a 10 minute, 20 minute, however long it needs to a little MP3 file or a wav file and send it over to me. And then I just listen to it while I'm at the gym. And I've actually thought about, like, to make it even easier, maybe I'll just build my own private RSS feed that I can somehow authenticate against. And then I can have my agent just be dumping audio files in there.

Mark Suman ⋮ And I can wake up in the morning and have my own personal podcast of, like, files that my, my agent feels are important for me to listen to. And I can just throw them into my podcast app and just have it kind of mixed in there with everything else. And I can review stuff for work. I can review, you know, personal things that, that I'm researching. And it just, it, it allows it to, like, flow into my, my productivity workflow. Much easier.

Marty Bent [47:03] Yeah. How, how much More productive has this made you, particularly with the agent stuff?

Mark Suman [47:09] Yeah, it's hard to say right now. I should track the time better because I definitely spent a lot of time building this stuff up, but then it's made me more productive in other ways. So maybe it's a wash right now, but all the time spent building up these harnesses are going to pay off in the long term.

Marty Bent [47:27] Yeah, well, that's like, that's been the most fascinating thing. It's like the Jevin Paradox coming into play. It's like, oh, it's going to take all the jobs and like you're not going to have to work anymore. And I found myself working more than I have and in years just because it's so fun to play with.

Mark Suman [47:42] Yeah, yeah, it's true. Well, and case in point, something that saved me time. So when I recorded with Danny, the, the audio from my bot actually didn't come through Riverside very well on his recording. So he texted me, he's like, hey, we're, we're going to publish this soon. We're trying to edit. Your bot's audio was really crappy. Do you think you could somehow re record that? And I just texted my bot and said, hey, your audio didn't come through. Do you saw the transcripts? Can you just give me a new file? And within 90 seconds I had two high quality files of the things that it said on the show and I just texted them over to Danny. That would have taken me quite a while to like go find the transcripts and then like use software to generate the audio and then make sure the mic levels were okay and everything. Like that saved me probably three hours of work and it was able to do it in 90 seconds.

Marty Bent [48:27] It's insane. Yeah, yeah. Like last night I was like, we had dinner, my wife was like, oh, you're going to bed early tonight. I was like, yeah, you know what, I've had a productive day. I'm probably going to go go to bed at 9:30 tonight. And then at like 8:45 I had the idea for the podcast and I was up for two hours structuring everything. Wound up in bed like at 11:30.

Mark Suman [48:48] Yeah. When that idea hits, you're like, I just got to do it right now. Totally.

Marty Bent [48:52] What? Let me bring this back to Agentic payments. I think considering this is a bitcoin podcast, where do you think this goes? Obviously I had Cali on. We were talking about using Ecash for Agentic payments and obviously it has privacy and through open protocol benefits compared to stablecoins. And whatever Visa, MasterCard and Stripe are working on. But I think that's one, one thing that many bitcoiners, myself included, naively thought in the beginning is like, oh, the agents will just choose Bitcoin because it's the best money. It's the digital native Internet currency that they'll end up on. But I think we're still in a state where these agents need a lot of direction and will take direction from the humans controlling them, for lack of a better term. And they don't have a preference yet for this. But how do you see this playing out?

Mark Suman [49:51] Yeah, I think we're running into the same problem that we have in meatspace right now, which is if I want to pay with Bitcoin at a local merchant, most of them don't accept it. And so using Bitcoin as money in real life has become difficult because we have a merchant availability problem. And we're seeing that online. Even if agents were told, go pay with Bitcoin, there aren't many services that they could go pay for using Bitcoin. But you can rest assured that given all the deals going on between Stripe and others, that those merchants will accept stablecoin agentic payments, because that's, that's who's going to start accepting it first.

Mark Suman ⋮ So it is definitely not a foregone conclusion that, that they're going to choose Bitcoin as the best money. We need to be building it. We need to be getting online merchants to accept it, and we need to build tools that make it super easy, right? They're not going to accept it if it's not convenient. So we need to be build convenient tools that can be plugged in. Zap. Right. If you're listening to this, hey, Zap. Right. We need, we need some good agentic payment functionality. I know that Lightning Labs is working on it. I know Amboss is working on stuff like that. Albi has been working on it.

Mark Suman ⋮ We need everybody kind of working on trying to solve this. Cali, of course, is. Is working on stuff too. We need good tooling, and then we need merchants to accept it. There's, there's a third way. And I think the third way that maybe we run into is if, if you give your agent a directive to go buy something for you and it gets blocked out by the traditional system, I think maybe, maybe one example would be, you know, ammunition for a gun. So if you are a competitive shooter and you, you, you know, you compete legally in shooting competitions and you tell your agent, watch my inventory of Ammo and go buy More before I have upcoming competitions.

Mark Suman ⋮ Here's my calendar. Make sure I'm always stocked up with my favorite ammo. If for some reason that gets blocked by Stripe, because Stripe has notoriously blocked those kinds of transactions, your agent's gonna have a bad time, but it's gonna want to solve things for you. And so it's going to search the Internet for an ammo provider that accepts Bitcoin and if one isn't there, it's gonna come back to you and say, hey, here are all these providers. This is where I wanna buy it, but they can't accept it. And maybe it reaches out to them for you and maybe you reach out, but eventually there will be someone.

Mark Suman ⋮ And I'm pretty sure there are some. I know there's at least one ammo provider that's a bitcoiner.

Marty Bent [52:19] Phoenix ammunition.

Mark Suman [52:20] Yes. So if they're willing to accept Bitcoin, then they're going to have all the agents coming to buy ammo from them. And so this is actually one way that I see merchant adoption potentially is when people get blocked out of the system and then maybe it grows from there. I just don't think we should depend on that. I think we should be more proactive and get ahead of the problem.

Marty Bent [52:42] Yeah, that's the. Again, to your point, the chicken and egg problem of. I had somebody on the show a couple weeks ago and they're saying it's a demand, a supply side problem. It's like, no, the supply of bitcoiners are willing to spend bitcoin is certainly there and particularly they want the ease of giving their agent a budget and having it go complete things for them autonomously using Bitcoin. If they need to pay for stuff, it's a demand side problem on the merchants. The merchants need to demand Bitcoin and something we've been banging our heads in the bitcoin space about for well over a decade now. The merchant adoption meme has been around since Roger and yeah, I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the interchange fees, maybe it's the. I really like what the money dev Kit guys are doing where you can have your agent accepting and sending payments within five minutes. Like, is it a KYC AML onboarding friction that pushes people towards bitcoin? I don't know.

Mark Suman [53:42] Yeah, that's something I need to look at more money Dev Kit. I, I'll be honest, I. I know, I mean we've talked to Nick Slaney before, but I need to look into that project more because I think that's really cool. I like the. I like what I hear about it.

Marty Bent [53:56] What. I must apologize for being late. I want to get that on air. On the record was. I was tardy to this. To this.

Mark Suman [54:03] Nobody knows now they do.

Marty Bent [54:05] But I want to be respectful of your time. I know you're extremely busy. What. What have we discussed that you think is something that the audience should know and care about right now?

Mark Suman [54:21] I mean, we. Maple is. Maple is here to. To build the freedom future for AI. So we would love for people to partner with us. We have actually quite a few organizations and companies that are starting to buy team accounts on Maple, which is super helpful for us because not only are they securing their entire pipeline, but it helps us to bring more stabilization to our platform, you know, more revenue coming in and helps us to build up better tooling for them so that they have better. It's this chicken and egg problem where it's like we want to have business customers, but we need better business features and vice versa.

Mark Suman ⋮ So if you are an organization out there, if you're like a small firm or a small company, even if you're at a large company, but you have your own organization within that large company, I would definitely encourage people to go check out Trimaple AI and check out our team's plan, because that's really. I think this is really helpful for the cause in general. And then, yeah, we talked about it briefly earlier, but we're building out this AI assistant within Maple. So it's going to be very different from the AI chat that you have now. When you start a new chat in Maple or ChatGPT or anywhere, you pretty much start with nothing.

Mark Suman ⋮ There's no understanding. You open up and it's like a blank slate. It doesn't know anything about you and you have to, like, tell it everything you want it to know. That function will remain within Maple. But now we're going to have this very conversational, easy to talk to chatbot that is going to give you short responses just like you and a friend are texting each other. And it's going to build up really good memory about you over time. So it's going to get to know you and it's going to be able to kind of help you out more than having to start from zero. And this, I think, is really where the privacy is, like, is a big win.

Mark Suman ⋮ And this is something that OpenAI and others don't have. And that is when you are talking to a tool that you know is End to end, encrypted. You're much more open about things you want to talk about. You're much more willing to give away information because you know that it's safe and protected. And that is where the most private AI can now become the most personal AI. And you can have this AI, chatbot, assistant, your own personal assistant, executive assistant, whatever you want to call it, that's going to get to know you so well that it's going to become so much more useful to you than a tool put out by some big company that you don't totally trust because you're not being as open with it.

Mark Suman ⋮ So that's coming. We're working on it right now within Maple. It's going to be here in the weeks and months ahead, and we're really excited about that.

Marty Bent [56:49] It's such a massive unlock for the agentic world. Like just having a cache context that I can pull from easily. That's the one thing I've learned with OpenCloud is just setting up the memory system and making it so it can pull things from memory rather trivially. I mean, that's the big problem with just using the models by themselves is the memory compacts, the context compacts. Every so often, once you hit the token limits. Now with these harnesses like openclaw, when you guys are building a Maple, it's going to make it. The user experience goes up dramatically.

Mark Suman [57:22] Yeah. And then at some point, you end up with so many agents, you, like, kind of forget to check on them. I kind of run into this where I'll have multiple open codes running at one time in different tabs in the terminal. And it's like, oh, shoot, I forgot to check on this one. It's just been sitting there waiting for me to confirm something. There's this cool tool with one of the plebs on Nostr. It's called Wingman. You can go check it on GitHub, but it's this cool way to open source code to manage all of your agents. And you can do it from your phone, you can do it from a web browser, and you can basically keep tabs on them and make sure that they're continuing to move forward on things that you want.

Mark Suman ⋮ Um, so I need to go. I need to go look at that more. He. He just made me aware of it yesterday. Um, so, yeah, I think there's some, some cool additional tooling to build around these things to make you even more effective.

Marty Bent [58:09] Yeah. And I guess one other piece of advice I would give to people out there don't get too emotionally attached to your. To your agent. Um, I think getting one shotted by AI psychosis is a. Is a. Is a very real possibility out there.

Mark Suman [58:28] Yeah.

Marty Bent [58:28] It's a tool to get stuff done for you. It's not a. It's not Scarlett Johansson and her.

Mark Suman [58:35] Yep. You can give it a name, you can give it an avatar, but please, just remember it's a tool and don't. Yeah, don't go further than that.

Marty Bent [58:43] Yeah.

Mark Suman [58:44] I mean, hey, free world. You can do what you want, but I think you're gonna have a bad time.

Marty Bent [58:49] Yeah. Well, Mark, thank you for doing this again on short notice and for putting up with my tardiness. I think. No, no. As I said, every time you come on the show, I think what you and Anthony are building is extremely important. And I'm very happy to see the progress that you guys have made and the fact that you guys are on the tip of the spear of this AI revolution, particularly on the side of freedom and privacy as it develops. Because like we've said many times throughout your appearances on this show could be very dystopian if we don't do this the right way.

Mark Suman [59:27] Yeah, definitely. Well, thanks for having me on. It's always fun to catch up and chat about this.

Marty Bent [59:31] Go to try Maple AI. Use the code TFTC. You'll get, you'll get, you'll get, you'll

Mark Suman [59:36] get some percent off, 10% off your subscription.

Marty Bent [59:39] Go check it out. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that $5 a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time.

Marty Bent [1:00:34] Okay?