Mark Suman: You Gave AI Full Access to Your Computer Transcript — TFTC Article: https://www.tftc.io/mark-zuman-maple-ai-privacy-agents-bitcoin Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/mark-zuman-maple-ai-privacy-agents-bitcoin-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] Mark Suman: Probably should be. [0:35] Marty Bent: Probably should be. Wild times, brother. Great to be here with you. [0:39] Mark Suman: Great to be on again. Thanks. [0:41] Marty Bent: 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. [2:06] Mark Suman: 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. [3:56] Marty Bent: 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? [4:53] Mark Suman: 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. [7:00] Marty Bent: 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? [7:43] Mark Suman: 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. [9:26] Marty Bent: 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? [9:40] Mark Suman: 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. [11:23] Marty Bent: 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. [11:39] Mark Suman: 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. [12:25] Marty Bent: How, how do you think the next six months play out with this race between closed source and open source models? [12:34] Mark Suman: 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. [13:34] Marty Bent: 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? [14:33] Mark Suman: 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. [15:33] Marty Bent: 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. [15:45] Mark Suman: Yeah. What do you see in there? [15:47] Marty Bent: 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. [16:47] Mark Suman: 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. [17:48] Marty Bent: Sup freaks? This rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multisig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device, and block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family or maybe yourself who have bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time but haven't taken a step to self custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up a passphrase. Again, BitKey makes it easy to use, hard to lose. It's the easiest zero to one step, your first step to self custody. 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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. [20:01] Mark Suman: 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. [20:29] Marty Bent: 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. [21:29] Mark Suman: 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. [22:56] Marty Bent: 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, [23:18] Mark Suman: 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. [25:47] Marty Bent: 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. [27:04] Mark Suman: 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. [28:04] Marty Bent: No, I don't think anybody wants to hear that. [28:06] Mark Suman: 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. [29:55] Marty Bent: What's the landscape of that hardware and firmware look like [30:01] Mark Suman: 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. [31:34] Marty Bent: 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? [31:46] Mark Suman: 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. [33:07] Marty Bent: What do you mean by you're at odds with it? [33:09] Mark Suman: 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. 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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? [37:29] Mark Suman: 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. [38:43] Marty Bent: 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. [38:57] Mark Suman: 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. [39:44] Marty Bent: 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. [39:56] Mark Suman: There you go. [39:58] Marty Bent: 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? [40:45] Mark Suman: 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. [42:46] Marty Bent: First ever AI agent joining a podcast live in, [42:51] Mark Suman: 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. [43:11] Marty Bent: I would love to join as a guest. [43:12] Mark Suman: Okay. [43:13] Marty Bent: 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. [44:41] Mark Suman: So did you train your own voice? Like, does it sound like Marty? [44:44] Marty Bent: Yeah. [44:45] Mark Suman: 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? [44:53] Marty Bent: 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. [45:35] Mark Suman: 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? [47:03] Marty Bent: Yeah. How, how much More productive has this made you, particularly with the agent stuff? [47:09] Mark Suman: 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. [47:27] Marty Bent: 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. [47:42] Mark Suman: 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. [48:27] Marty Bent: 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. [48:48] Mark Suman: Yeah. When that idea hits, you're like, I just got to do it right now. Totally. [48:52] Marty Bent: 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? [49:51] Mark Suman: 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. [52:19] Marty Bent: Phoenix ammunition. [52:20] Mark Suman: 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. [52:42] Marty Bent: 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. [53:42] Mark Suman: 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. [53:56] Marty Bent: 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. [54:03] Mark Suman: Nobody knows now they do. [54:05] Marty Bent: 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? [54:21] Mark Suman: 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. [56:49] Marty Bent: 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. [57:22] Mark Suman: 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. [58:09] Marty Bent: 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. [58:28] Mark Suman: Yeah. [58:28] Marty Bent: It's a tool to get stuff done for you. It's not a. It's not Scarlett Johansson and her. [58:35] Mark Suman: 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. [58:43] Marty Bent: Yeah. [58:44] Mark Suman: I mean, hey, free world. You can do what you want, but I think you're gonna have a bad time. [58:49] Marty Bent: 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. [59:27] Mark Suman: Yeah, definitely. Well, thanks for having me on. It's always fun to catch up and chat about this. [59:31] Marty Bent: Go to try Maple AI. Use the code TFTC. You'll get, you'll get, you'll get, you'll [59:36] Mark Suman: get some percent off, 10% off your subscription. [59:39] Marty Bent: 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. [1:00:34] Marty Bent: Okay?