[00:02:19] Lyle Pratt: And, you know, we even had ways for them to monetize that content. We would let them, you know, include their own absence AdWords API key so that, you know, any downloads or visitors on those pages, you know, would, would earn them the money. And you know, we grew. Myself and Noah Hayes is actually one of my co-founders at Vida.

[00:02:37] Lyle Pratt: We drew that to get to about a million and a half unique visitors a month. Hold on, hold on. What age website? What age were you at? This? This is VG Pro. What age were you when you did this? Yeah, I guess I was in college. Noah was a college roommate, you know, so been kind of tinkering with websites and you know, building stuff like that for, for quite a long time.

[00:02:58] Lyle Pratt: I guess. Long story short, with that, you know, we sold that, Noah moved out to the Bay Area and did more startup. I completed a couple of master’s degrees at school and ended up moving to Texas. And then, then we get to the, the part where I decided to, to start Better voice. Yeah. And in fact, it started as a completely different company with a completely different idea that we ended up pivoting away from , as you often do when you’re, you know, attempting to provide value to the marketplace, which is, you know, what a startup is.

[00:03:26] Lyle Pratt: You know, funda. But with better voice, it was when Twilio, you know, the Twilio APIs, I don’t know if you know what Twilio is. Yeah, I’ve, I’ve heard of it. They’d explain it because I, I, yeah, I can’t remember what did, they were sort of one of the first products that let you programmatically control phone calls and send messages, you know, and construct, you know, voice IVRs, which are like voice phone menus, you know, and things like that.

[00:03:53] Lyle Pratt: They got started and I guess originally at. 2008, 2009. Mm-hmm. , so I was sort of hype, been tinkering with their, with their APIs. And I guess long story short, we built one of the first online only sort of exclusively online small business phone systems. And we built it originally on top of Twilio’s API.

[00:04:14] Lyle Pratt: And at the time, you know, there were, there was a ton of new businesses coming out to sort of serve small and medium sized businesses with these sort of internet. Phone systems and we got a lot of interest from sort of smaller and regional players that had, that were serving regional, you know, business clients and they wanted to be able to offer their service online and, you know, offer these slick user interfaces and mobile apps and stuff for interacting with your phone system.

[00:04:42] Lyle Pratt: And so we got into essentially doing white label stuff under bv. So we would power, you know, some other person’s business with our platform. Mm. But we quickly sort of figured out. Twilio’s API. Twilio’s pricing was too expensive, you know, to scale sort of a white label, more wholesale ish business. So what we did is we ended up cloning Twilio’s voice and messaging API functionality on top of an open source stack and.

[00:05:12] Lyle Pratt: It was definitely a get your hands dirty and in the VOIP and telecom world, you know, with, with SIP and, and all the rest of the VOIP protocols. But it ended up working out really great cause in 2016, the largest wholesale telecom provider in the United States called Intelli at the time they were a public company on the nasdaq.

[00:05:31] Lyle Pratt: They acquired our company for our, our API stack. So essentially they wanted to be able to compete with, with Twilio in that space as it was growing massively. Mm-hmm. , you know, Twilio ipo, you know, was a huge I p o I guess. Long story short with that was that Twilio ended up becoming Intel, one of Intel’s biggest customers, you know, so I ended up getting to work a lot with Twilio and, and allow in, in that industry over the five years that I worked for them after they acquired better.

[00:06:01] Preston Pysh: So you had mentioned very quickly there SIP, which for people that aren’t familiar with that terminology, it’s session initiation protocol. Yeah. This is a, a signaling protocol used for initiating, maintaining and terminating communication sessions that include voice video messaging. A protocol.

[00:06:22] Lyle Pratt: Right.

[00:06:22] Preston Pysh: So here you are very early in your career getting experience working around a protocol. I’m curious for sipp, this protocol, how long had that protocol existed before a lot of this VOIP calling took place? Was it years? Decades before?

[00:06:39] Lyle Pratt: Yeah, years before. But you know, it got popular as VO got popular. Mm.

[00:06:44] Lyle Pratt: and SIP is essentially, you know, the most widely used, critical call for hand delay, voice and video and messaging worldwide. You know, if you, if you make a phone call from your at and t cell phone mm-hmm. and, you know, call like a Verizon cell phone, at some point that call is hitting, you know, a sip net, a SIP powered network, and that protocol is being used to sort of connect you to the person on the other side.

[00:07:10] Lyle Pratt: It’s very similar to http. It just has, you know, specific messages for setting up and tearing down, you know, phone calls and, and video calls and things like that. So, in fact, you know, some of the listeners might be familiar with HTTP 402, which is the, the payment required error code. And HTT P, they has the exact same one except 402 payment require.

[00:07:35] Lyle Pratt: So back in the day when VOIP was new, a lot of people had these ideas about, you know, how, how SIP was going to be used to sort of, you know, open up the communication, the market and expand the communication market. And all these infrastructure providers were just going to sort of accept traffic amongst one another, you know, and, and prices would fall, which they did slowly over time, just not nearly as quickly as people, as people thought.

[00:08:01] Lyle Pratt: So the designers of these protocols, both SIP and HTTP, you know, envisioned a world where digital payments were going to be a thing. It’s just that nobody really expected it to take so long, you know, for it to happen. And even when Bitcoin came out, It wasn’t very useful for, you know, taking payments directly to serve HTTP requests or, or, or initiate phone calls or settle phone calls in real time because it was too slow.

[00:08:29] Lyle Pratt: So, fast forward in 2018 when, you know, the lightning never became real, you know, the first node instances were available for people to, to. Suddenly that future, that world was possible. And for me at the time, I was working inside of Intel on a big fraud and spa problem. Mm-hmm. So, you know, people may not be familiar with this, but you know, that company did billions and billions of call, minutes of call volume every month.

[00:08:59] Lyle Pratt: And so you can imagine that Sean and Sam is a giant problem, you know, for them and for the industry as a whole. And you know, we. We were doing all sorts of things. You know, we were collecting data and training machine learning models and, you know, trying to spot this fraud and spam quickly so that we could cut it off before it did 2 million in damages, you know, overnight, you know?

[00:09:20] Lyle Pratt: Wow. We would wake up and there would be, you know, that level of fraud and spam that had been run through the network that, you know, essentially the company was on the hook for.

[00:09:28] Lyle Pratt: So at the time I was working on that and the Lightning Network was sort of becoming real. And a light bulb sort of just went off in my head, Hey, you know, we can actually settle and build this and charge for it in real time.

[00:09:43] Lyle Pratt: And if we just did that, all of this salmon fraud and abuse, or at least most of it would disappear, it would become uneconomical. But we could guarantee that every minute to traverse our, our network was paid for in real time without any risk. Hmm. , you know, at that time. It’s sort of, I don’t know. It’s, it’s what led to me creating Vida and sort of getting into what I’m doing now, but it was sort of interesting to think like, how, how would the white landscape and the telecommunications landscape and the internet evolved, how would it evolved differently if we would’ve had the ability to, to do these real-time payments?

[00:10:20] Lyle Pratt: You know, from the beginning. It’s, it’s very, it’s very interest.

[00:10:24] Preston Pysh: So Lyle, this is around 2017, that the summer of 2017 when there was the fork. Now we have the ability to, to do lightning. Were you a coiner prior to that?

[00:10:38] Lyle Pratt: Yeah, so I mean, I’ve been a coiner. I guess I would, I would call myself Aer since about 2014 now.

[00:10:45] Lyle Pratt: I started doing a little bit of mining and getting interested in it after it didn’t completely die from the Mt. GOs. You know, crash and, and craziness. It was sort of like, okay, well if it didn’t die after that, then it’s not going to die. So I started sort of paying more attention to it and getting more interested.

[00:11:01] Lyle Pratt: So it’d been a, been a Bitcoin for a while. Have owned Bitcoin for a while, you know, I guess I’ve probably really, really got interested in it after reading, say Dean’s book. Mm-hmm. , I’m an undergraduate degree in economics and I’ve always sort of been you. A gold guy. My grandfather was like a big, a big gold bug, you know, so I, I sort of had the seeds, you know, planted in my mind already.

[00:11:25] Lyle Pratt: But yeah, I guess when the, when the Lightning network became real, it sort of overlapped, you know, with, with the industry that I was in and, you know, it sort of set up, set a light bulb off in my brain where it says, where I’m like, Hey, I can, I can contribute to this, you know, I can, I can use my skills and knowledge in the space.

[00:11:45] Lyle Pratt: To, you know, help bitcoin to help the Bitcoin community. So that was definitely sort of a driving force in me deciding, you know, to sort of go down this path to begin with was just, you know, my loves for Bitcoin, basically.

[00:11:59] Preston Pysh: I don’t mean to backtrack a whole bunch here, but I, I love asking this question to people that have founded a bit a successful business, have sold a successful business.

[00:12:09] Preston Pysh: When you look back at better voice, what were the number 1, 2, 3 things you learned from that experience?

[00:12:16] Preston Pysh: Like just retrospect, like that you hold core to who you are as an entrepreneur? What was, what does the thing that you learned?

[00:12:25] Lyle Pratt: Yeah. I think probably the most important thing is just realizing that, you know, you can, you can really.

[00:12:33] Lyle Pratt: You know, believe in something and, and believe that you’re going to be able to do something or that you haven’t all figured out. And in reality, you don’t. , you know, it’s this classic, you know, this classic startup story of. You know, of a pivot, you know, a startup pivot. Yeah. Where you, you know, you go into something and you’re just sure that you have it all figured out, and that if everything’s going to fall in place, you know, and one Domino’s going to fall after another and you’re going to be off to the races.

[00:13:00] Lyle Pratt: But in, in reality, you know, providing value at scale is difficult. You know, and there’s a lot of competition out there. And that’s, I. What I’m doing today and, and how I’m approaching media today. You know, I don’t have this assumption that I have it all figured out, but what I do know is, you know, 10 years from now, the landscape of the world is going to be very different.

[00:13:24] Lyle Pratt: And if lightning is the defacto settlement rails for, you know, online value, which I personally believe will be because it makes the most sense. Then, you know, there’s going to be an entire market available to pro provide to provide value for at the time. And so I don’t know exactly the path, you know, to get there, but I do know that it’s going to be necessary and there’s going to need to be experts in the field and there’s going to need to be people providing resources and infrastructure and tule for that field.

[00:13:57] Lyle Pratt: I guess to boil it down, you know, keep the big picture insight. Have a big thesis that you’re working toward, and don’t get caught up in, you know, the details and, you know, get discouraged when one pass fails. Just move on to the next one. You know, try something else. So I want to talk about

[00:14:15] Preston Pysh: Vida because I, I’m on this platform, I’m on your mobile.

[00:14:20] Lyle Pratt: I saw Jack Dorsey was on it.

[00:14:22] Preston Pysh: I saw some other people were on. I was like, what is this? What’s he building? And so I downloaded it and this is just, this is really neat stuff. So I’m just going to hold up my phone.

[00:14:33] Lyle Pratt: I got all this shadow stuff here, but if people could actually see that would, I just held up

[00:14:38] Preston Pysh: on the screen, it says message, message me, and it says, request a.

[00:14:43] Lyle Pratt: and I have a rate set. I personally selected this rate for the message, the

[00:14:48] Preston Pysh: text message, and for calls per minute. And so if anybody wants to call me or text me, they can download this app and then they can, if they really want to talk to me, they can pay the rate that I set. And you can set your rate as high or as low as as you think your time is.

[00:15:08] Preston Pysh: And it’s all over lightning. So if somebody talks to me for a minute and 30 seconds, that per minute rate is just immediately, it’s being streamed, the money is being streamed as that call is happening. And same for the text messages. And you never give up your number unless during the call you want to give the person your number and you never give up your, your number for the text message either, which I think.

[00:15:35] Preston Pysh: you know, for people that are really guarding against their time and are, you know, have gatekeepers or whatever, whatever it is, it’s just, it’s kind of mind blowing to think that you can do all of this over an app and a completely decentralized money and literally stream the money.

[00:15:52] Lyle Pratt: So yeah, that’s, that’s the app.

[00:15:54] Preston Pysh: But I think your vision, I suspect your vision is even more than what I just described. So talk us through what your vision is for.

[00:16:03] Lyle Pratt: So maybe, maybe it would help for us to sort of step back and, you know, think about how things used to be when , you know, when, when phone calls were expensive, , you know, back in the day when you made a, a long distance phone call, you didn’t actually cost, you know, your money.

[00:16:18] Lyle Pratt: And so you, you kind of, you know, chose when you were going to do them. And funnily enough, it, it, Sam wasn’t a thing, right? Your phone didn’t constantly. With these fake phone calls, you know, trying to sell you insurance for your, the car you don’t even own anymore. , you know, because it was uneconomical and you know, back then the, the telecom companies sort of reaped, you know, the, the cost and the profits, you know, from, from that cost.

[00:16:46] Lyle Pratt: But if you sort of think about it, like why did the spam not exist? It didn’t exist because there was economic disincentive, there was costs associated with. But today, now that we have lightning and now that we can beam value directly to, you know, to an individual directly over the internet, why should a network provider, you know, sit in the middle of that value flow?

[00:17:09] Lyle Pratt: Why shouldn’t an individual be able to set their own rate for their time and attention? Because, you know, fundamentally, your, your time and attention is a scarce economic. There’s only so much of it, right? And depending on who you are, the demand for your scarce economic good, your time and attention, you know, can be higher or lower.

[00:17:31] Lyle Pratt: And so just fundamentally sort of from an economic standpoint, the only way to allocate a scarce economic good to a market is the A price, right? The price is what allows the market to function and allows the good to sort of be distributed to the demand in the. So, you know, the, the concept of Vida is very simple, and that is to give individuals the ability to set a price on, on their time and attention.

[00:17:58] Lyle Pratt: Today that looks like, you know, phone calls and messages and live streams. Tomorrow, maybe it looks a little different. Maybe there’s other thing, other ways that we let you. You know, price, other things that we let you price. But yeah, you know, your description’s great. Basically if somebody wants to get in touch with you, they pay your rate.

[00:18:17] Lyle Pratt: They either send you a message or, or talk to you on the phone. Maybe they’re watching a live stream, you know, maybe you’re doing some sort of educational live stream or maybe you want to, you know, do some sort of ama, but you’re in total control over the price and that lets you sort of have a nod to turn to.

[00:18:34] Lyle Pratt: Either increase or decrease the amount of contact that you’re getting, because if you’re getting too much, what do you do? You just raise your price until, you know, you hit market equilibrium for the value of the time and the the amount of it that you’re willing to, you know, provide to the market at large.

[00:18:49] Lyle Pratt: You know, and there’s, there’s other sort of instances of paid communication. You know, Vida’s not the first to do it by any means. I mean, you know, you can think of there are services. Like, I don’t know, only fans perhaps is a, is a, is an example of one or intro.com. You know, there are other expert networks, you know, where consultants charge, you know, by the minute for their time and lawyers charge by the minute for their time.

[00:19:12] Lyle Pratt: But there’s not really a standard that makes it easy for anyone to do that about anything. And so, you know, Vida is starting with this consumer product where we let people set a price for their time, for phone calls, messages, and live streams. But ultimately the vision is that the entire telecom network is going to work under this principle where you have individuals at the other end of, you know, some communication network.

[00:19:38] Lyle Pratt: Better setting a price to be able to contact them. And all these networks are going to talk to each other and the value’s going to flow through as the communication happens because it just makes sense. You know, that’s the way telecom networks sort of work today.

[00:19:55] Lyle Pratt: It’s just that the value is settled like 90 days later and you know, that’s why the, that’s why fraud exists.

[00:20:02] Lyle Pratt: It’s. You know, somebody could text us to some phone system or somebody can pump a bunch of traffic through a network without ever having to pay for it because there’s a settlement delay. So, you know, we’re starting with this consumer app, but our vision is to provide value to, to, you know, the entire telecommunication space.

[00:20:22] Preston Pysh: So Lyle, you’re, I mean, you’re an expert in spam. You’re an expert in how to defend against those types of things. You have a quote you said, as you remove central authorities and sign up barriers, spam will become worse, not better. Walk us through why, and as I’m saying that we’re, there’s a lot of people in our space in particular that’s looking at the world and saying, We’re kind of reaching peak centralization and we’re going to start swinging more towards a decentralized world.

[00:20:53] Preston Pysh: So your quote is, is a little unnerving as you’re saying it’s going to get worse as we move to a decentralized world. But walk us through what you’re thinking here.

[00:21:03] Lyle Pratt: Well, I guess think about Twitter. So if we all know that spam and bots and things like that exist on Twitter, and Twitter is a centralized entity and they can exert whatever power, you know, and whatever filters they want on the spam and bot problem, except is still exists, right?

[00:21:22] Lyle Pratt: There’s still utterly failing. Another example would be, you know, Gmail, for me at least, my spam that’s making it through Gmail’s filters is getting worse lately. I don’t know what it is, but I’m definitely getting, you know, more of, love it. So here we have these centralized platforms that have total control over what is actually reaching your inbox.

[00:21:41] Lyle Pratt: You know, what is actually reaching your, in your, your high eyeballs. And yet they’re failing. So, you know, if we sort of just extrapolate a little bit and think about a decentralized set of infrastructure or a decentralized social network where there is no centralized control or ability to filter spam.

[00:21:59] Lyle Pratt: Where there are no barriers, you know, or verifications, you know, or anything like that, where the only thing you need, for example, with us, you know, is to, to, to spin up a key pair, you know, and start sending messages. So, you know, the problem is going to definitely get worse because the ability to actually do centralized filtering just isn’t there, you know?

[00:22:25] Lyle Pratt: And we’re already seeing. Nostr node operators, Nostr relay operators. You know, think about ways that they could prevent Sam. Maybe it’s through pub key whitelist, or maybe it’s by, you know, paying to be able to access a relay. You know, there’s talk at doing proof of work attached to master messages, you know, so there’s all these sort of.

[00:22:48] Lyle Pratt: You know, possible solutions for this problem, but my, my opinion is that they’re all sort of futile in the end because ultimately the value of your time and attention is not zero. It’s significant, right? It’s, it’s significantly valuable. It’s what the entire online economy runs on the, it runs on advertising to try to get your attention, to try to get you to buy something, you know, to try to get you to take economic action.

[00:23:17] Lyle Pratt: Works in the advertiser’s favor, and this is the same thing that drives the spammers and pots, right? So there is this essentially a honey pot out there, which is our time and attention. And as long as that value is is not zero, but the cost to actually reach you as zero spam is going to continue to be a battle.

[00:23:39] Lyle Pratt: You know, I’m, I’m a little bit skeptical of things like proof of work, using proof of work, share for messages and things like that because it, it ultimately is going to come down to who is actually. You know, performing the work, is it the relay operators? Mm-hmm. , you know, are, are there going to be an Oscar clients that actually perform some sort of crypto port before sending the messages?

[00:23:59] Lyle Pratt: But unfortunately, you know, those are still decentralized individuals or relay operators. That are extending this proof of work, and they’re going to be battling, you know, centralized spammers and bots who have figured out, you know, some way to capture some portion a, a user base’s attention, you know, because ultimately it’s profitable.

[00:24:21] Lyle Pratt: That’s why they do it over and over again. When, when you

[00:24:24] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Allowing you think of proof of work, doesn’t, doesn’t a SAT just represent proof of work as a digital unit?

[00:24:30] Lyle Pratt: Yeah. I mean, a SAT is, you know, recycled proofy. You know, and it’s just as good of a filter, you know? I just think that individuals should be able to set a price for their time, and it shouldn’t be left to relay operators or other sort of middlemen like you as an individual should be in control of what it takes to actually send you a message.

[00:24:54] Lyle Pratt: You know, unless you’re already following someone or unless somebody’s already in your contact list.

[00:25:00] Preston Pysh: Do you already have some other connection where I have trouble wrapping my head around this? From a direct message, like, if I’m going to send you a dm, it makes all the sense in the world that, that how to assign a cost to that, where it gets tricky for me.

[00:25:13] Preston Pysh: On Nostr, we had a, a whole episode on Nostr two, two episodes ago. So if, if you’re just hearing about this for the first time, this is decentralized social media. It’s basically Twitter in a decentralized environment. You guys can listen to that podcast if you want to learn. As I’m looking at at Nostr and I’m using it, there’s not much spam there right now, but I can only imagine what that could potentially look like in six months from now.

[00:25:36] Preston Pysh: How could I u utilize a proof of work cost to somebody that’s putting in comments? Would it be whatever client I’m using? I’m using dais, right? So if I’m using the DAM client, I can set a. A bounty that if somebody wants to reply to one of my comments, they ha they’ve gotta post five SATs. Is that how this would work?

[00:25:58] Lyle Pratt: Or, you know? For, for proof of work specifically, you know, there’s, there’s lots of different ideas. One is that, you know, perhaps clients would only show messages that pass some sort of threshold. So you could imagine that working either for like real, you know, proof of work, electricity, or, you know, via some sort of SAT threshold.

[00:26:18] Lyle Pratt: So, you know, maybe the relay could attest that X SATs was sent to actually, you know, submit this message to the relay. Anybody’s clients that, you know, had some threshold, they would only see posts, you know, that passed that threshold. So, you know, that’s, that’s one idea. I think a lot of it is still sort of up in the air and I’m by no means an an expert on what is, what has gained the most traction in the nostril community.

[00:26:44] Lyle Pratt: But, you know, I do ultimately think that. You know, running infrastructure isn’t going to be free. Running relays isn’t going to be free. If we want to offer a, a good experience to users at large, then you know there’s going, it’s going to involve somebody putting up money , you know, to actually run and operate free infrastructure and, you know, They’re going to have to recoup costs and they’re going to want to discourage spam just like anyone else.

[00:27:11] Lyle Pratt: And you know, in my opinion, we should keep it simple and rely on payments , you know, use the Lightning Network and funnel liquidity into the Lightning Network as we perform our, you know, social addictions, , you know, on yeah, online.

[00:27:26] Preston Pysh: Yeah, I’m just trying to think through it. I w I wish I was smarter on it. Or if, if somebody out there is listening and you got a good source on some of these monetization to demonstrate proof of work in order to cut back on the spam, I’d love to, to see what you got.

[00:27:41] Preston Pysh: Share it in the comments of, of the Twitter release of this episode, or whatever they’d be. How does, how does some of this happen at scale? Like, I know, I know you’re talking about the relay, so explain a, explain a relay, an Nostr relay, and I know we’re going heavy in an Nostr right now, but I think it’s, it’s representative of a decentralized way to share and to guard against people’s time in the future.

[00:28:07] Lyle Pratt: Because right now social media is is, like you said, it’s zero cost and everybody using that is literally getting nothing.

[00:28:15] Preston Pysh: They’re, I mean, they’re just getting bombarded with spam. I, my god, my account is borderline unusable at this point because of the spam. But when you do this at scale in a decentralized kind of way, do you see the relays as kind of the belly wicket, or do you see it more at the user level?

[00:28:32] Lyle Pratt: So perhaps, you know, we should, we should step back a few years and let and think about email. You know, email used to be a lot more decentralized. Than it is today. You know, you used to be able to run your own email server pretty easily and you know, you could actually still communicate with people. You know, you, your, your email server wouldn’t get blacklisted.

[00:28:56] Preston Pysh: You know, you wouldn’t get an undated with spam. But slowly, you know, that problem has gotten worse and worse. And if we sort of look at what happened, People that you know, have an email have moved to sort of these centralized email providers. You know, one example would be Google and Gmail, you know, Yahoo.

[00:29:16] Preston Pysh: Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to reliably run an email server anymore. And what, what is the reasons for that? What drove that to happen? The answer is spam. Spam drove it to happen. And, you know, these big centralized entities have implemented all these sorts of blacklists, you know, across the ecosystem.

[00:29:37] Preston Pysh: And they only accept, you know, email if you have these certificates and or if you’re, you know, this known ip. And you know, just to boil it down, spam has sort of centralized. And so if we sort of take that example that already sort of happened and think about Nostr. Well, you know, today you can run an Nostr relay very easily, just like you used to be able to run an email server and, you know, anybody can connect to it.

[00:30:03] Preston Pysh: Clo Fortunately, clients since sort of choose, you know, which relays they’re, they’re going to connect to. But unfortunately, bots and spammers can do the same. . And so I think that, you know, we are going to see a world where users migrate to relays that are better managing Sam and if we leave it, you know, just to sort of relay operators to, to implement their own mechanisms and things like that, unfortunately that’s going to potentially be a centralizing force in, in the Nostr ecosystem because you know, some are going to be better at it than others.

[00:30:40] Preston Pysh: But you know, if we could come up with some standards about how to manage it such that all relays sort of have access to the same technologies, perhaps that is some form of future work. Perhaps, hopefully that is some form of, you know, SAT’s, payment or lightning payment, then we won’t ever have the problem at all.

[00:30:57] Preston Pysh: We won’t have these centralized pressures on the, the, the e succinct and we won’t end up captured like, like email. You know, I, I sort of agree with you, you mentioned this earlier, but you know, paying Satoshi is reusing Bitcoin’s proof of work that already happened. You know, there are some technical downsides to like, you know, one would be that sending satoshi over the lighting network will require some, some liquidity.

[00:31:22] Preston Pysh: Somebody has to have liquidity somewhere. So that’s sort of a prerequisite. If you’re going to make all nore messages, you know, require sat payment, that could be a downside. Whereas something like raw proof of work, you know, actually, you know, spinning compute cycles doesn’t, doesn’t have that prerequisite, you know, so there’s, there’s lots of pluses and minuses.

[00:31:42] Preston Pysh: I’m, I’m following it closely and you know, I think the community is going to take the problem seriously as the problem gets worse. Mm-hmm. . I think that, you know, the right decisions will be made and will will be able to dodge the bullet of, of becoming, you know, email 2.0 in, in reference to. The Lightning Network, transforming Communications networks.

[00:32:05] Preston Pysh: You have this quote, you say, if lightning becomes the defacto real time settlement network, then global tele running on lightning be behind the scenes is ineVidable. It just makes too much sense. Is there anything beyond what we’re talking about there with the decentralized social media that you find this also to be true?

[00:32:23] Lyle Pratt: Yeah, so the global telecom market, I mean, I mean, it’s a giant market that has tons of moving parts and players, and you know, I, I don’t think that it will look exactly like it does today. I think it’ll be, it’ll be more open, it’ll have more transparent pricing. It’ll be more decentralized and less dependent on huge monolithic carriers.

[00:32:47] Lyle Pratt: But what I think some people don’t quite understand is that the communication experiences that were all sort of condition. To, to, to like, and, and that we’re used to today. They can’t all be enabled and solved with, you know, strict peer-to-peer flows. Individuals and businesses are going to have to provide infrastructure very similar to, you know, the way individuals are providing no relays.

[00:33:14] Lyle Pratt: You know, the Nostr experience couldn’t happen if it was strict peer-to-peer. If there wasn’t the, if there weren’t these, these relays in the middle, you know, providing the functionality that they provide. And, you know, if you think about it, it’s, it’s kind of like email, you know, the, the original PS C N network, the public Switch Tookum network.

[00:33:34] Lyle Pratt: It didn’t start centralized back when the, you know, the telephone was invented. It started. You know, very competitive and it was a, it was a land grab and it became centralized over time due to misaligned incentives and due to the inability to actually have value traverse these networks as they were used.

[00:33:54] Lyle Pratt: And it also became centralized due to, due to customer demands. You know, customers wanted to be able to call anywhere, you know, and longer, further places away, you know, without as much cost. I think fundamentally, you know, the Lightning Network is going to sort of change the landscape of telecom, and because we can now transmit value in real time, these telecom networks are going to adopt the technology because it fundamentally does two things.

[00:34:22] Lyle Pratt: It lets them expand their customer base. It lets them reach a wider base of customers with zero settlement. Whereas today they’re very, very restrictive about who they let into their networks, who they let access their networks because of this huge amount of fraud and settlement risk.

[00:34:43] Preston Pysh: From a business standpoint, I’m curious if you’re working on AVida API that they could then harness and use that makes it much more turnkey for them.

[00:34:52] Preston Pysh: Is that part of the business plan?

[00:34:54] Lyle Pratt: Absolutely. So, you know, we actually built our API first. Yeah. So, you know, we do have a full featured API behind the scenes that, you know, you can use to, to, to make these phone calls or send these messages or host these live streams. In fact, a a Vida account can be used to paywall any sip destination today, so, wow.

[00:35:16] Lyle Pratt: You know, to, to use a, you know, example of like a, a call center, let’s say in the Philippines or something like that. Yeah. Maybe somebody, you know, there’s a whole call center providing customer support about, you know, some software or something like, Technically as of today, they could paywall the entire call center or a assist destination with a Vida account.

[00:35:35] Lyle Pratt: So, you know, the, a API does exist. We haven’t really productized it well yet, but our entire, you know, all of our consumer apps are,

are built on top of our API.

[00:35:45] Lyle Pratt: So, you know, we do think that the, you know, the longer term and bigger vision, our API is going to be an integral part of. And providing services, you know, to these enterprises is going to be an integral part of that.

[00:35:57] Lyle Pratt: In fact, we’re already talking to a telecom in, in Mexico that has a, you know, a concession. They can issue Mexican phone numbers, Mexican D IDs is what they call them, and. You know, they have, they have direct access into tele mix. Termin calls all over the Latin America, and, you know, they’re very interested in using our API to use the Lightning Network to accept international traffic and, and route it into Central America with zero settlement risk.

[00:36:24] Lyle Pratt: So, , you know, it’s already becoming a reality. You know, a lot of our time has been spent on these stints on building these consumer apps. But you know, the bigger vision is, again, to provide value to the entire telecommunication space and do more showing, rather than telling about how the Lightning Network, you know, can be used to just.

[00:36:43] Lyle Pratt: Improve the industry.

[00:36:44] Preston Pysh: Do, do you find that maybe it, it’s a little bit slower for the, these companies and these service providers to pick up on it simply because the cost that’s being actually paid for this spam is at the user’s level and it’s being paid with their time, or is there other costs here that would make it much more enticing for them to start rolling this into their, into their service?

[00:37:08] Lyle Pratt: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think you, you know, you, you touched on a very important point and the incentives in the telecom industry are misaligned for stopping Sam, because you know, if you are, if you are a wholesale operator, you know, what metrics are you looking at? You want. Total, you know, minutes passing to your network to go up.

[00:37:28] Lyle Pratt: You want that number to go up. Right. So what is Sam? It makes that number go up. Yeah, right. So the, you know, the government there, there’s a lot of sort of push in enacting, you know, new rules. There’s something called stir shaken, just kind of like SSL for to phone calls so that they can trace the source and destination calls try to cut down on.

[00:37:47] Lyle Pratt: So there’s a big, you know, there’s a big battle going on, but the truth is that a lot of telecom providers don’t have any incentive to actually stop it. But let’s pause and consider, you know, what would it be like if all of the downstream subscribers set a price for their time? Exactly. And, and the, and what if the, the network providers can actually take some portion for facilitating.

[00:38:14] Lyle Pratt: you know, the phone call. That’s right. That in and of itself would flip the incentives. It would incentivize the, the telecom operators to only give you calls that you’re actually going to answer. Right? Because that’s the only way that they got paid. So I, I think, you know, there’s a, there’s a lot of reasons to give individuals the power to set their price because it realigns the incentives of all sorts of things.

[00:38:39] Lyle Pratt: The telco network. You know, the advertising space, the advertising and marketing space. You know, think about the incentives right now. If you are a platform owner, like, like Facebook, you know, they are incentivized to put as many advertisements in front of you as possible because they are monetizing your attention.

[00:38:59] Lyle Pratt: They are monetizing your eyeballs, and you get nothing for it, right? You get to use their, their product. You know, perhaps that’s so. But you’re not reaping any of the rewards for the value of your time. And you know, they even know, you know, whose time is worth more. They have a, you know, they, they even provide APIs to make it easier to target ads at, at specific people because, you know, companies know that some people Snyder’s worth more than others.

[00:39:27] Lyle Pratt: So if we could just put individuals in charge of their own prices, we would change the incentive structure for. Pretty much everything online because, you know, the incentives would be to give you things that you, that you actually want. Because otherwise, you know, why would I, why would I waste money? Why would I waste capital showing you an advertisement that you’re not interested in?

[00:39:50] Lyle Pratt: Why would I waste money calling you and, you know, talking to you if you’re not going to listen to me and you’re not interested in what I’m, you know what I’m saying?

[00:39:59] Preston Pysh: It’s so, it’s so bad.

[00:40:00] Lyle Pratt: I mean, I just, I just got a message for Twitter Blue that they’re raising the price now to $11 and I think the ads, I think the ads are like 10 x what they were before Elon came in.

[00:40:13] Preston Pysh: The ads are, are insane, right? And they’re , they’re charging a fee for this and the, it’s not any better. The spam is, is just as bad if not.

[00:40:24] Lyle Pratt: So yeah, Elon’s, Elon’s gotta recoup about 30 billion in over overpaid it’s crazy overpaid socks. , you kind of run into an issue with like, if people were going to set their price, you kind of like,

[00:40:36] Preston Pysh: I’m thinking of it from like the phone company.

[00:40:38] Preston Pysh: Like, let’s say the phone Verizon or at and t’s like pay an extra five or $20 a month to have reduced spam to your. So I might be paying for that service, but may maybe my neighbor isn’t willing to pay the five to $20 for that service. It’s something that they would have to apply across all the lines collectively.

[00:40:59] Preston Pysh: Right. For that to really, cause I mean, it doesn’t require much if you put a 5 cent, 1 cent, or if we’re talking stats, right? You put a really small bounty on connecting the call. You’re going to stop the spam immediately because they’re trying to do it at scale and you run outta money real fast trying to, trying to pay those, those fees at scale.

[00:41:21] Preston Pysh: But you have to have everybody on board.

[00:41:23] Lyle Pratt: And I think that’s where it’s the, it gets tricky for these service providers. I’m, as I’m assuming that’s correct.

[00:41:29] Preston Pysh: Logic, or, or do you think you could do it individually where if, if I’m paying $5 a month, then I’m going to have be protected from these spam?

[00:41:37] Lyle Pratt: Yeah, there’s, you know, there’s various ways to do it and Verizon and at and t do have, you know, extra services you can pay, you know, to enable some sort of spam blocking.

[00:41:48] Lyle Pratt: But unfortunately, you know, if you’re, if you’re going to try to approach it through heuristics, you know, you’re going to essentially loit access to, to someone. And the way, the way they do it today is that they require that you send your calls into the network. This may be a little bit of a tangent, but they require that you send your calls into the network with a special certificate so that they can know that you’re a legitimate person and not a, not a scammer, but unfortunately.

[00:42:15] Preston Pysh: So it’s like a blue badge. It’s like gets. It’s like the Twitter verification or something. Okay.

[00:42:19] Lyle Pratt: It is kind of like a Twitter verification, unfortunately. You know, the, the organization that’s responsible for granting those certificates, it’s like a big racket. , yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it’s essentially a tax on the entire ecosystem, so, you know, what does it mean?

[00:42:32] Lyle Pratt: It means that, You know, it, it prevents people from making calls that could be, and it lumps them in with all of the bad actors, you know, kind of like operating your own email server, you know, and, and that being impossible. But what you’re saying is, is, is true. Like if, if we were to use SATs and if you were to set a rate for your time, and I were to set a rate for my.

[00:42:55] Lyle Pratt: You know, what would the experience be like for somebody that hasn’t opted into this before? Yeah. You know, would they have to, you know, top up some wallet? You know, perhaps that wallet is controlled by their carrier. I don’t know. There’s quite a few options. Would they have to link some wallet to an account?

[00:43:11] Lyle Pratt: You know, perhaps. But ultimately they’re not going to be able to call you unless they sort of opt in, you know, by funding a balance somewhere. So that is a problem. And Leo, we’re thinking very hard about that too. Like how do we pay while your normal cell phone number, you know, your actual cell phone number without having to give you a new one?

[00:43:30] Lyle Pratt: Dennis Paywall only. So how do we pay while your normal cell phone number, but let your doctor’s, you know, office calls come through. You know, only paywall, the stammers. Yeah. It’s a, it’s a difficult problem, you know, there’s not very easy answers. That’s why we haven’t, you know, started with that , with that version of the product.

[00:43:48] Lyle Pratt: But, you know, we are thinking about it a lot and we actually are looking forward to, to, you know, giving Vida users a real fund numbers that can be called, you know, from just normal, normal cell phones that are, that are pay.

[00:44:02] Preston Pysh: There was a person online that wanted to ask you, which what I thought was a great question about decentralization.

[00:44:08] Preston Pysh: They said, if 90% of nodes are l and d, how do we keep the protocol decentralized, permissionless, because that’s Lightning Labs and they’re a company and they need to have profits and they need to demonstrate to their shareholder. What are your thoughts around that? Such being such a high number?

[00:44:26] Lyle Pratt: I think about it pretty simply.

[00:44:27] Lyle Pratt: I mean, I think that Lightning Labs has achieved the, the market share that they have through l and d by offering a good product. And you know, l and d got a lot of adoption when they released Key Sound early. I don’t know if folks remember this, but you know, l and d was one of the fair was the first.

[00:44:47] Lyle Pratt: Lightning node that could do key send payments, which is essentially invoice list payments. This was before a M P came out, but it was, you know, you could send value directly from one node to another instantly without having to go through a typical lightning invoice process. So that would be an example of, you know, they released a feature that the community really liked and it drove adoption on l and.

[00:45:10] Lyle Pratt: And, you know, they’ve continued to do that. Now, could it be a future problem that the, the, the lighting nodes that people are running are too centralized? You know, we just saw a few weeks ago there was a problem that arose from it. There was a bug and l and d and it took down a good portion of the nodes out there.

[00:45:27] Lyle Pratt: So it’s definitely not optimal. But I’m not super doomy about it, you know, over the, over the long term. Mainly I think that, you know, the lightning ecosystem is still very young. There’s still plenty of opportunity for, you know, any other node implementation to, to gain traction. It’s not, you know, there’s not a ton of switching costs.

[00:45:49] Lyle Pratt: you know, for swapping over to a different node implementation? Not, not a ton. There are some for sure, if you have a lot of, you know, liquidity routing into a node, it can be sort of a pain to migrate that, you know, those channels and liquidity and the people that have open channels to you over to a different one.

[00:46:03] Lyle Pratt: But it’s not a huge deal breaker. So I think that over time, you know, competitive forces and market forces and economic actors in the space are going to make rational decisions, you know, that are in their best interests. You know, I suppose are there, you know, do doomy scenarios where the entire Lightning Network is centralized because everybody’s running l and d I, I mean, I guess I’m just skeptical that it’s going to turn into a really big problem.

[00:46:35] Lyle Pratt: I think odds are that, you know, at Claire or Sea Lightning could come out with a, a new feature. That drives a lot of adoption and the whole thing shifts, you know, seemingly overnight. We could look up a, a year from now and it, and it’d be a completely different, different story. We’ll just have to see you.

[00:46:54] Preston Pysh: You enjoyed Jiu-Jitsu. I’m curious, I’m curious what parallels you see between Bitcoin being an entrepreneur and jiu-jitsu.

[00:47:06] Lyle Pratt: Proof of work, , as with as with most day, most things in life, you know, most of the good ones come out of hard work, you know, that’s true for, for Bitcoin. That’s true for building a company, and that’s true for Jiujitsu or any other martial art.

[00:47:22] Lyle Pratt: I grew up doing, doing various martial arts, you know, traditional martial arts. I have a, you know, martial degree in ishin karate, and, you know, grew up doing ha, pito and TaeKwonDo, all this stuff. But, let’s see. I found Jiujitsu back in, I guess it was about 2015 was when I first started training Jiujitsu For those out there, I trained at Gracie Barra.

[00:47:45] Lyle Pratt: I have a second two Shri purple belts. But you know, the first time I was out there on the mats, I mean, I, I considered myself. Yeah, pretty good. You know, at martial arts, Ableton, you know, handle myself perhaps, you know, had more bloody noses than most people, you know, in the world. But I just felt like a kid on those, on those jiujitsu mats.

[00:48:06] Lyle Pratt: Mats with like a blue belt, you know, with some other kid, you know? It was just making me feel worthless. This totally, you know, powerless. Mm-hmm. . And when you experience something like that, whether it’s in business, you know, or anything else, you. At least for me, like I wanted to get better , but I wanted to not, you know, not feel powerless and, and learn, you know, how to, to sort of thrive in this environment and.

[00:48:32] Lyle Pratt: Yeah, I guess the rest is history. I have been sort of accumulating injuries. cause me to pump the brakes a little bit. I, I got sevens for in my hand here from jiu-jitsu injury. I just had my meniscus repaired last month. I’ve got, you know, neck disc issues. So , I guess if I had some advice, I would say, you know, treat your injuries seriously.

[00:48:55] Lyle Pratt: You know, treat your body with respect and, you know, don’t have a big egotistical attitude about, you know, taking breaks and, you know, keeping your, your health in mind.

[00:49:04] Preston Pysh: So you said a comment earlier. I, I would suspect you would, you would agree with this, but I’m curious if you would, you said earlier about your, what you learned in entrepreneurship is, is you have this idea of like where you think you’re going to go, but then until you like, sense your environment and you sense where you can create value or, or add value.

[00:49:23] Lyle Pratt: You have to be able to move with that environment. Right. I would imagine in martial arts it’s, so much of it is you can go in there with a plan, but you have to be very dynamic. You have to see what your opponent’s doing in order to dynamically adjust. I would think that there’s a parallel there as well.

[00:49:40] Lyle Pratt: Any others that you can think of? Sure, yeah. I, I mean, I think you make a, you know, you make a great. It requires focus, it requires sort of a focus to goal in mind. Yeah. Now what are you trying to get to, right? Mm-hmm. , if you, if you don’t have sort of a, a big picture that you’re trying to get to or a goal in mind, then when these obstacles, you know, Get placed in front of you and Yeah, or a path just stops.

[00:50:05] Lyle Pratt: You know, you can’t go further on this path and need to change course. If you don’t have somewhere that you’re going, you’re going to start going backwards. You know, you’re going to start doing the same thing, or you’re going to start doing the wrong things, that’re going to take you away from your objectives. And you know, jisu the same way you have an opponent.

[00:50:19] Lyle Pratt: That, you know, has a, a very clear goal. , you know, they’re trying to choke you out. You know, they’re trying to submit you, and, you know, fortunately, when you’re on those mats, you have, you know, one goal as well, which is to do the same to the other person, or for, at least at the minimum, you know, prevent getting choked out.

[00:50:37] Lyle Pratt: You know, I, I like to joke. You know, it’s really hard to be stressed, you know, about anything when you’re on those jiu-jitsu mats because you only have one thing on your mind, and that is, you know, preventing, preventing lights out. So , , you know, in business. And similar, you know, you need this big goal in mind that you can continually work towards so that when an obstacle comes in, you just, you know, keep looking in the future and, you know, go around it.

[00:51:00] Lyle Pratt: It’s until you get there, don’t lose sight of the thing that’s, that’s actually creating value. Absolut. Lyle, I would think that for you when you’re looking at Bitcoin specifically, it would be much easier to tolerate the price volatility because you’re looking at the tech and you’re seeing how it can be applied and how it can achieve a network effect because of the benefit that that it gives back to all these people that are having their, their time robbed from.

[00:51:31] Preston Pysh: What else? If you could just, because there’s a lot of people that, that listen to this show that are investors. They’re looking at it from an investing lens. They’re, they’re maybe, maybe they’re a technician and they’re looking at the price chart and they’re saying it’s down hard and it’s, it’s a lot easier, I think, for a person like that to lose sight of what’s actually happening behind the scenes and what’s being built.

[00:51:54] Lyle Pratt: Yeah, yeah. What are your thoughts on that? The Lightning Network. Let’s just start there. Since we’ve been talking about it quite a bit, there’s nothing, there’s nothing out there like the Lightning Network, you know? No other token can reach its scale, you know? It’s, it’s actually impossible for anything else, you know, to reach lightning scale because a uq, you simply cannot scale to what the world needs on a layer one.

[00:52:21] Lyle Pratt: You know, you have to have this layer two architecture that actually introduces a lot of complexity and complication, you know, into deploying it. But fortunately, Bitcoiners, you know, like to do things. And we’ve taken the hard path of building the Lightning network like it should be, so that we can, you know, reach the scale that the world is going to need.

[00:52:40] Lyle Pratt: You know, so if you are a, you know, you’re somebody that’s interested in Bitcoin and you’re scared of the price, you know, like, oh, well, you know, maybe this was two loops after all. I can assure you that, that it’s not because the world needs the ability to instantly settle value and the lighting network is literally the only way to do it at scale.

[00:53:01] Lyle Pratt: With fees. With fees that are basically nothing. Yeah. With with fees that are basically nothing, you know, at least today, but always will be. You know, even if fees increased, they will always be more competitive. They will always out. You know, some other layer one, you know, style solution. So in, in my opinion, you know, the reason why like I’m building Vida and building a company that you know is sort of hitching, its, you know, its wagon to the Lightning network is because I do believe that, you know, the world is going to be using lightning in a much bigger capacity over time because it makes sense you.

[00:53:38] Lyle Pratt: I happen to, you know, think that I understand it perhaps a little earlier, but eventually, you know much more people are going to understand it, much more. People in the telecom space and the social networking space and the, you know, money transfer space everyone’s knowing to get it eventually. And you know, bitcoin’s still going to be around and it’s still going to be growing and people are still going to be.

[00:53:59] Preston Pysh: Lyle, I really enjoyed this. Learned a ton from you have been learning a ton from you for years now, following your feed.

[00:54:07] Lyle Pratt: Same , same to you.

[00:54:10] Preston Pysh: Give people a handoff to the app, to anything else you want to highlight. And then also your Twitter account.

[00:54:16] Lyle Pratt: Yeah. On Twitter. I’m at Lyle, my name, you know, I guess you can find me on Vida. vida.page/lylepratt if you want to reach out and talk to me.

[00:54:26] Lyle Pratt: I’m a 20 cents a minute or

a message away. , we can get direct access. Yeah, but you know, give me a follow. Would love to talk, you know, again, Preston, thank you so much for inviting me on the show. Huge fan. You know, probably listen to every episode and have for a long time and cheers to all the other listeners out there like me.

[00:54:46] Preston Pysh: Thanks Lyle. This was awesome. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that.

[00:55:09] Preston Pysh: And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

[00:55:21] Outro: Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only.

[00:55:29] Outro: Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.