The bottom line and what the future that we're building towards is a person, wherever they are in the world, Mexico City, Moldova, East LA, they should be able to do a day's worth of clean mapping, going around and mapping hazards, mapping potholes, validating other people's reports, and be able to put food on the family table. The great beauty and, really, the majesty of blockchain is, in many ways, it's the one slice of cyberspace that is most public because the blockchain can't ever cancel you. Public because the blockchain can't ever cancel you. Blockchain isn't just a safeguard against that. It's the only meaningful opportunity for political resistance.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Josh. Big fan of the the show, everything that you've done, your advocacy over the years. And in a nutshell, Clean App is a platform. It when you gave the introduction, I wanted to cut in and say, but wait, there's more. It's a platform, not just a mobile app, for ingesting problems. And our back end leverages blockchain incentives and AI advances to come up with solutions. So problems in the municipal sense, like, in the civic tech sense, potholes, cracks in the sidewalk, your trash not getting picked up. But also in the digital realm, you're using a new AI app, and you notice that it has a fatal bug. You can shake the app to submit feedback, the Google the Google UI for for eliciting feedback. But when you do that, oftentimes, the feedback just disappears. You have no idea if your voice is heard, or now you can use Clean App. And Clean App is a public feedback layer. You can think of it as the digital town square and a public notice board in that digital town square.

Yeah. It's been around since 2013. I got the idea after reading the Bitcoin white paper, and I was really blown away by the genius of the white paper. But I thought it would be a Ponzi that doing hashing computational puzzles to earn block rewards by itself was insufficient. There needed to be a material basis of value. Right? So, like, a very materialist account of value creation. I'm not unique in this, of course. There are lots of people who ask a similar question. Yeah. But what is Bitcoin backed by? And back then, I thought, well, what if instead of proof of work, we had something like mapping potholes, mapping everyday hazards, what now is known as proof of physical work. And so I came up with this idea of Clean App that would give Blockchain rewards for doing the socially useful work. The very first token that we were gonna use as our reward token was none other than BTC. Very naive, but it is what it is. And then, of course, pursued the project in the decade since through various channels, public awareness raising campaigns, working with organizations like World Cleanup Day, large international organizations to put this technology on the global radar. And then now with the advances in AI doing the next iteration of our platform, we've had earlier versions that failed or got stuck for various reasons. But now with the latest advances in AI and blockchain, we think that we are the time is finally right to have this technology mature, and we're really, really excited for everybody to try. So the

Yeah. Thanks for asking. The the current state of the app is glorious and magical. We have a mobile app where you take a photo. It opens the camera. Privacy preserving. You don't need to put your email address. You automatically get an Ethereum an Ethereum address, an Ethereum private key. It opens the camera, and you take a photo of anything that you subjectively think is a problem. If you hold the shutter button, you can add annotations. You don't need to Mhmm. But you can. Within twenty seconds, our AI analyzes that issue. So if it's a pothole, it is able to gauge the severity, cluster it with similar objects, do a web search to see who the responsible or interested party might be, and automatically sends a report to them. So if you're at the University of Toronto and you see an overflowing trash bin or quite literally a dumpster fire or a crack in the wall that can injure somebody, you take a photo and literally live within twenty seconds, you see the analysis and you get the peace of mind that it goes to responsible parties. That's the current status. And this is the magical the magical flow that we've been building towards over this decade plus. And the great thing and why I'm so why I'm so excited about this is you and I know that the technology is only gonna get better, smarter, and faster from now on. And so at this point, it's all about dialing in the incentives to make sure the incentives are right on the reporter side, on the validator side, on the responder side so that we incentivize really good social behavior and kind of minimize the abuses. You know, a teenager taking over a trash can just to mine some blockchain tokens. Yeah. And, Guizin, could could you speak about what kind of the incentives

Yeah. Absolutely. So right now, we do not have a main net token. We have a test net token called kitten. The reason why kitten is because since birth, kittens learn to bury their shit. They're very they're very clean animals. And so you mine these kittens for submitting reports. You can also validate other people's reports. So you are that University of Toronto student walking by, and you get a notification. Hey. Somebody else has submitted a report. Can you verify it? If you verify somebody else's report intentionally or accidentally, you can just stumble on a condition that somebody has already reported. You get a multiplier. You get two x the re the rewards. So that's the supply of the tokens. The demand for the tokens is really interesting. So this data that people are generating is extremely valuable, valuable to the campus, valuable to other AI companies, valuable to mapping companies. And so we offer these data pipelines. You can subscribe to this data. A company or a municipality can pay to access this data. We take 50% of that revenue, and we buy our own tokens on the open market, generating a demand for the tokens. The bottom line and what the future that we're building towards is a person wherever they are in the world, Mexico City, Moldova, East LA, they should be able to do a day's worth of clean mapping, going around and mapping hazards, mapping potholes, validating other people's reports, and be able to put food on the family table. If we do that, we have succeeded. Anything short of that, and it's an unsustainable gimmick.

Yeah. It's a great question. So, yes, at first blush, it may appear like an x to earn, like a Karen to earn, or a feedback to earn kind of platform, but but it goes it goes a little bit bigger than that. And I think a lot of the inspiration for this, we draw directly from Ethereum. So I mentioned the app opens directly to camera, and it's not just a mobile app interface. So you can submit clean up reports on x. You can just say, hey. CleanApp this bug or cleanApp this issue. And our back end will ingest what you're complaining about, what you're caring about, and process it as a CleanApp report. So the idea there is it's not just for municipal brick and mortar hazards. It's not just civic tech. You can use it, and people are using it in lots of different ways. Right? We were at DefConnect in Buenos Aires, the inaugural Ethereum World's Fair. And we had a Defcon improvement proposal where we were sharing with the community, this is a universal feedback tool. And so people were using it to map a Wi Fi outage in this pavilion or this booth having environmental pollution, plastic pellets that were leaking out into the into the environment and into the water stream, or this booth using not sustainable packaging, too much plastic, plastic bags within And so the idea there is just like YouTube, just like Ethereum's infinite garden, we enable the tool to be used however people see fit. You don't limit to to one particular use case, You don't limit to to one particular use case. And the idea there is I know it's gonna it it might sound like nails on a chalkboard, but the market will decide what the right what the right and and most most valuable uses will be for this technology. And then in terms of in terms of, you know, this this replacing the, quote, unquote, public sector, I think it it complements it. So to use an example, right, is there something like this in the analog world? Well, yeah, you can think of services like 911 in The US or 311 and their equivalents the world over. Right? 311 to submit municipal type reports, 911 to dial in emergencies. So, yes, these exist, but and there's been a ton of studies on this. 911 services, first responder services are under are under threat. There are a ton of outages, not just in The US, but globally. I've had instances where I've called 911 with bona fide emergencies, and I've had to be on hold for, you know, hours at a time. And so the idea of a tool that can serve this feedback function, I think, is very, very compelling. It doesn't replace it. It's not a threat to any sector, public or private. It it helps everybody. And one last one last example of the sorts of bugs that we we're able to surface in the digital world. So it's not just, again, brick and mortar. We've got bugs that we have discovered with Clean App in the biggest, most tech forward companies in the world. We've uncovered a bug in Google in Google Ads, for instance. We've uncovered a fatal bug in the Google bug hunting protocol. And so these are everyday people who are using Clean App to surface extremely valuable information, valuable to whom? Well, to Google and all of Google's users and dot dot dot Google's competitors.

It's the same. It opens the camera. And so you take a photo of a Google Ads dashboard on your laptop, or you can upload a screenshot. The more context you provide, the better. So you can circle it. You can add annotations, the better the analysis. But, no, the the interface is absolutely the same. So it opens the camera, snap a photo. If our AI can infer what the issue is, then then we're off to the races. And the theory here is the more AI that goes into production, the higher the need for these human signals. So we're positioned as an as an AI infrastructure. We're squarely positioned as the h in RLHF, reinforced learning with human feedback. We're we're as humanistic as it comes. As a as a team, as a protocol, we exist to put the human in this feedback loop. Our theory is that humans will always be needed, and and this is a very, very strong bulwark against kind of AI encroachment and the the construction of these machine gods that are gonna run us like puppets. Right.

Yeah. I mean, it's it's so a few more bona fides, I think, that are really, really important to your audience, to anybody just joining. A 100% open source are everything back end, front end, fully privacy preserving, and available everywhere globally. I think these attributes are really, really important. They differentiate us from a lot of other projects that talk the talk but don't really walk the walk. And so going back to New York as an example, you mentioned the the incoming Mamdani administration. Right? Like any large city, New York has right? Like like, shit happens. Like, problems happen. New York has the world's largest waste processing infrastructure from any city globally by every metric, by raw tonnage, number of just just by every metric, the budget, number of employees in the waste sector, and so forth. Nevertheless, New York has massive, like, sanitary issues, like rats, the famous New York rats, foot long rats that go and eat those pizza wedges and slices that are ripped open from plastic bags. And so problem, solution, problem, solution. Right now, the solution in New York is that businesses have to put their trash in bins. You can't just throw your trash in plastic bags so the rats rip them apart and then go on and and spread rabies or the Black Death in Brooklyn next year. However, the issue is enforcement. Well, how do you police that? If there's a local pizza shop that isn't using their bin or a local construction company that continues to dump their waste? Right? Classic abuse of the commons, tragedy of the commons. Well, you can introduce Skynet, add more surveillance cameras, Palantir technologies, add satellite monitoring, and allow the Mamdani administration to be, right, a a a Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist surveillance state that's gonna send an instant penalty to the people that are that are doing this, or you can have a decentralized grassroots reporting system where it doesn't really matter, right, who's reporting this. You just take a photo. You submit this report because you don't want rats in your neighborhood. You don't want your kids to be, right, going to bed afraid that they're gonna be, you know, like, eaten eaten by by rats. And so and so our approach is all about decentralizing these these inputs, decentralizing the analysis, and sending this is this is very important, not just to the city of New York sanitation department or to the NYPD, but sending to local service providers who might be able to go much faster to those plastic bags and actually put them in a bin or clean them up or take them to a organic waste disposal facility instead of it ending up in a landfill somewhere. So similar to what you said, you know, 2017 projects, like ETH bounties, for instance, a lot of early, like, consensus projects incidentally in Brooklyn and those those areas We're thinking about this, but the technology was not there. The blockchain technology wasn't there. The AI technologies weren't there. And we're finally at that point nearly ten years later where it's not just possible. It's live, and it's really magical. It's it it really is a a a a a super, super, super neat, super fun user experience. I'd love to then hear

Yeah. Great question. The the short answer is is everybody. So from from property operators, like, you have a property coop in, let's say, Buenos Aires, and you wanna have visibility into problem areas, you can use Clean App and have your community submit reports about the broken staircase, about the trash that's not getting cleaned up, and so forth. We're pitching the Burning Man organization. So Burning Man has its annual, not just festival, pop up city of pop up cities. Right? A pop up country in the Nevada Desert. Their tolerances for what they call MOOP, matter out of place, are extremely tight. In order to get their federal license renewed, at the end of the festival, you can't have more than you can't have litter in more than one square foot of land per acre, which means that as the partygoers take their exodus and leave the playa, there's a core group of cleaners who stay behind and clean the entire desert. And by Burning Man, we're not talking about just the annual festival in Nevada, but, of course, pop up affiliates the world over. Love burn in Costa Rica festivals in Europe, really, the world over. And so the current approach is still very much centralized. You have a central in Burning Man parlance. It's called a MOOP map. A centralized map where all of the hot spots are mapped by a relatively centralized cadre of cleaners, and they do an incredible work. This is not to undermine their efforts. Quite the opposite. Our thesis is that if we decentralize and if we expand those signals so that anybody can add their data points, what ends up what ends up being created is a much more accurate, much more robust MOOC map, not just for the Nevada desert, but, of course, globally. And so this is very much a, you know, all power to the to the local movement, all about decentralizing all the things and believing that the more the easier we make it to submit this this feedback, the more people will do that. And not just easier, of course, but the more rewarding. And so property operators, private sector, Trump Tower, to co ops, pop up villages, festivals. And then in the digital realm, from start ups, so we've got a an accepted deal by Y Combinator, where Y Combinator companies can get a year of clean up for free at the enterprise tier all the way to Google, I mentioned, all the way to a, you know, a a a small startup that's just getting started that wants to get an audit, that wants to see, you know, our what are people saying about my product, about my app? And that's what

Yeah. And and, I mean, I I I got started sort of as a as a thinker, as a yeah. Just as in my my first my first chapter in my professional life was as a theorist. I was a I was a law professor. I had twelve years analyzing Soviet approaches to international law, Russian approaches to international law. And so I've I've got a lot of experience with, you know, very loaded terms like socialism and communism and so on. At the same time, I'm a little bit I'm a little bit allergic to them. That's why I left academia, a huge part of why I left academia. Because I was seeing that, you know, oftentimes, those those terms, especially in that part of the world, intellectually speaking, oftentimes were just like quicksand. People got trapped in those in those theoretical debates. And so when you when you talk about municipal socialism, I I hear you, and it sounds very similar or related, I would say, related to the ideas that Vitalik has been pushing for years with things like CityCoins. And you've mentioned a couple of, a couple of similar projects that are moving in that direction. And I'd I would love to kind of double click a bit more on this maybe, like, even much more, like, radical technology layer, which is, like, the the publicity, like, municipal publicness or municipal publicity layer. Like, what does it mean for a municipality to be actually public? Right? Not necessarily socialist, not necessarily, you know, like, progressive, whatever that means. But what would it look like for a city like New York to be even more pro bono, pro bono publico? And so here, I think about in very concrete, tangible things like, okay, well, if I want to know how much waste New York City produces or how many potholes there are in New York City right now, how many injuries from cracks in the sidewalks. The great irony slash tragedy is the best resource for that data isn't some NYC domain. The best resource is actually Google, just empirically speaking. So if I wanna learn about air quality in this neighborhood in Brooklyn where my kids are gonna be growing up, chances are the best dataset is Google, and the best pipelines are Google pipelines. And that's the challenge and the opportunity for all of us as public minded people. Okay. Well, those Google services are valuable. We use Google Maps. We use Google Air Quality, etcetera, etcetera. But they're centralized. They're fragile. They're captureable. Yes. Right? Profit maximizing. So the incentives might be completely different from our incentives as as citizens. And so the question is, how can we create these pipelines that are robust, that are doing even more than these private pipelines, than these public sector pipelines? And that's that's where Clean App is is positioned and how we're positioning ourselves.

throttled, and rate limited,

Yeah. And and the great beauty and and and, really, the majesty of blockchain is, in many ways, it's it's the one slice of cyberspace that is most public because the blockchain can't ever cancel you. Yeah. You can get you can get your your address tagged on, lord, those how many how many hit lists. Yeah. No lists, but you can always whip up an an alt identity. And so I I'm very glad that you brought this up, Josh, because I think what what you're hitting at is one of the most important attributes of blockchain and one of the most under theorized, the public nature of blockchain. And so I had a blog a few years ago called how public are global public blockchains, where I was exploring some of these some of these themes. And and the reason I say it's an an under theorized is, you know, so Vitatic put out a blog maybe a year ago trying to talk about, like, the public nature of blockchains as well. And so often, like you say, this the there's a seduction to kind of conflate public with public sector or public state owned or state affiliated infrastructure, and then the private as this this kind of opposite, this this polar opposite. And that binary doesn't really fit blockchain at all, which is so fascinating Because what you have with with with blockchain is it is public by its essence and must become progressively more public in my understanding and in in my definition, must offer more and more public benefit, public goods, or perish. To use an academic saying, a catchphrase, in academia, there's a saying, publish or perish. An academic has to continue publishing or their career goes nowhere. In blockchain, it's public or perish. You have to, as a blockchain community, offer more and more and more public goods. Otherwise, you are going to be captured eventually. And so there's this great, great set of paradoxes and ironies in blockchain where let's look at Bitcoin discourse. Bitcoin is, according to thinkers like Eric Cason as an example, the ultimate public good. It's public money for the next millennium, and there are good principled arguments for why that's so. But then when you get into, okay. Well, let's explore that further. Like, what else public minded or pro bono stuff can be done on public? Oftentimes, it's like nails on a chalkboard. It was like, okay. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Call me. You're going too far. That's not what we mean by public. And the same exact thing with Ethereum. Right? Ethereum, the infinite garden, the uncensorable permissionless substrate, the world computer, is being used for all sorts of public minded stuff, not just money, not just finance. Right? They're medical researchers that are publishing hashes of cancer data, clinical data on Ethereum. Why? Because they have found that it is the best way to coordinate diverse groups of cancer researchers globally, for example. That's not a financial use case. That's not a civic use case. That's just an awesome everybody wins use case. And Ethereum has to support and expand that operating envelope, lest it be captured as this financial infrastructure. And I really wish more Ethereum's, more blockchain people would make peace with it. And I I applaud you, Josh, and your entire project because no. Really. In in the whole space, I I would say you're in the real avant garde. Like, you're in the bleeding edge of thinking around this design envelope, and it's grossly undertheorized with, I would say, the biggest gains, much, much more bullish than even the most radical DeFi bull could imagine in this in this pocket of of cyberspace, in in exploring what this new approach to public goods funding, public coordination, publicity would look like. And in our humble contribution with Clean App, right, thinking about what this public notice board like, in the old school analog sense, you go to an old town in Europe, you go to a little village in in Argentina. You'll see that public notice board, death notices, legal notices, an advertisement for a used scooter, the local bake sale, everything mashed together on this little public notice board that's been around forever. And what we're doing with Clean App is that exact idea on chain.

Yeah. And and and that that third space you're absolutely right. And that third space is, a, actually intellectually honest, and, b, offers the, like, the pathway to actual economic emancipation sort of political emancipation because and and they're, of course, related. You can't have, like, a a a liberation theology or political program if it's premised on faulty like, like, a a faulty premise. And so this when when the critic or the diehard libertarian crypto bro has this approach of public versus private as though it's these really, like, simplistic boxes. They're missing that third space, which is where the action really is. Example with waste management. Public sector, quote, unquote, progressive folks will say, look, waste management is a classic public good. We pay taxes to literally take care of your shit. Theory. In practice, we basically have a duopoly in The US with two private sector publicly traded companies, Waste Management and Republic Services, that have privatized and monopolized this quintessential public good, public sector service. And so that public private Yeah. Divide is just empirically false when you look at, like, basic, right, provision of services. Same exact thing, right, with construction. Same exact thing with digital services. Right? How many how many cities are now running on Microsoft Azure cloud or Google cloud Yeah. As opposed to running their own their own digital services. And so I think that third space that you're describing, the civic, is is is a huge opportunity. And not just opportunity, a huge responsibility. Because unless all of us take more action, we are gonna see more and more privatization, more and more monopolization, more and more exploitation in the sector because this set of relations, what you're calling the civic space, citizen civic interactions, drum roll, peer to peer interactions. Right? When you collapse the institution, we're really talking about people coordinating with people are the last great untapped data source for the big techs. That's why they're moving so aggressively into this space. And blockchain isn't just a isn't just a safeguard against that. It's the only meaningful opportunity for political resistance.

Completely. And and let's let's let's call a spade a spade. Let's put some hot takes into the ether. Look. The mainstream crypto DeFi political project is an intellectual dead end. Just point blank. The mainstream crypto libertarian theology is a political dead end because it fetishizes finance and fails to understand how finance exists as a social coordination layer that has to give much more than financial spoils to the body politic. It's just an intellectual dead end. It it it can't it can't, by definition, exist in a non captured state. And so what we're seeing right now and, again, you you have been on the on the front lines in ex in exploring this and exposing this and advocating these sites of resistance. So you know this better than anybody in the space. We take a zoo like, we zoom out. We take a look at where crypto is right now. It is thoroughly, utterly, completely captured. Wall Street buying our bags and crypto libertarian bros all too willing to bend over and sell the truly emancipatory spirit of crypto for near term gains by and large as a rule. Yes. Of course, there are highly principled exceptions. There are people from the hardcore libertarian or Austrian Austrian camp that are still, like, clinging on and trying to fight that good fight on pure principle grounds. But by and large, it's a completely captured political project. And the open question here is whether these financially self motivated, self interested, self proclaimed rational actors as a whole are gonna be smart enough to figure out that they've been captured, and their near term gains are basically nothing amount to nothing because they have sold their bags, their bags of emancipatory ether, for worthless inflation bucks? That's the open question right now. My thesis, my investment thesis, my investment in the intellectual sense is that the community, the blockchain community, is spunky and eccentric and weird enough intellectually to understand that, yeah, this whole capture thing isn't the ticket. Yes. It's making everybody in the in group fabulously rich, but the trade offs in the long term really aren't worth it. That's my gamble that among this heterogeneous, eccentric, weird cohort, right, that we're all in, enough people realize, you know what? Let's let's go back to the beginning. Let's rethink what we're actually doing here, and and let's come up with different ways of doing coordination, value creation. Let's come up with different narratives. And, thankfully, all the signs are there. Right? Like, our community say what you will. Right? To to the to the hilt, but our our community brings the heat when it comes to when it comes to deep thinking. We got some really, really radical, courageous thinkers in the space, and I'm always bullish, radical courage, and sort of, like, intellectual honesty. And so I'm overall on on on some, very, very optimistic about the direction of the space. But in the words of of doctor Martin Luther King Junior, only when it is dark outside can we truly see the stars. And right now, it is very, very, very dark in in in terms of crypto capture. I would say all time lows, to be honest. I think we are the most captured we've ever been. Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you so much. It's been a it's been a great conversation, and I've I've personally been looking forward to it for years. Thank you for having me on. We'll have to do it again. To learn more about Cleanapp, the domain is cleanappio. I mentioned earlier, the code is a 100% open source. So GitHub clean app I o x clean app, c l e a n a p p. And the invitation to to your community is don't trust, verify. So please check out the app and send some clean app reports, and you'll you'll be delighted. What you'll find will surprise you in a good way. Thanks so much, Boris.