Hello and welcome to Rounding the Earth.
It is Monday.
Let's see, the 8th, May the 8th, 5th to 8th, 8th to Mayo.
Oh, goodness, that's going to be recorded for all the
posterity now.
But I'm here today with my friend, Gabe, and we're going
to talk about practical matters of keeping your
information private.
And Gabe is of the People's Republic of Libre Solutions
Network.
Do I have that right?
Hello, yes, just the Libre Solutions Network.
Just Libre Solutions Network.
You say Libre instead of Libre.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know how much of that is just
people's preference, but I have that angle going for it.
Because it's supposed to be for free software, Libre
software, Libre freedom, rather than gratis.
Got it, OK.
So what are we talking about today?
We're talking about practical encryption.
And this is not, we're not getting into complicated
details here.
Where are we?
Not necessarily the implementation of it.
I don't know how to teach a cryptography class yet, maybe,
but maybe eventually.
OK, so this is something that mom and pop can watch and learn
a little bit from.
That's the hope.
OK, good.
Well, I'm going to let you get us started.
Where are we going today?
Well, most people will encounter encryption in two
ways.
The first way would be on your websites, where people
remember seeing the green padlock on your browser, and it
says, this site is secure.
They've been slowly trying to tone that notification down,
because all that guarantee means is that you have a
direct connection that is secure to a server.
For instance, anyone behind Cloudflare, they have access
to those keys, and they can do whatever they want with it.
So it's not a guarantee of perfect security and privacy,
but it at least gives you something.
That was why there was such a big push to put HTTPS on as
many websites as possible.
Now, the second way people encounter this is even
something like WhatsApp will advertise that it has end to
end encryption, which means that the service you're using
is encrypting the content before you send it to the
server, it's stored on there, and then, say, sent to your
contacts or however you're sending it out.
Those are the two major ways people see it up close.
OK.
So when I'm connected with a server that has that little
green notification and everything is safe, now there
is a certain level of security that I can probably trust.
It would take at least a professional to then intercept
my data, as in somebody who knows how to get into that
server or who has control of that server.
So the odds are I'm not safe from an intelligence agency
snooping on my information exchange with that server,
with packets going back and forth.
But I probably am safe from 99% of the public, or 99.9%,
probably.
But I'm probably already safe from those people, aren't I?
That's a good point.
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to this is that
there's also time.
Encryption basically just makes it x much harder, so much
harder that it would take thousands or millions of years
to decode the transmission.
Whereas if you don't use encryption at all, you just
have to be careful that it's not stored, which is its own
problem.
But then that's where end-to-end encryption actually
does protect you in that case, because there are data
breaches all the time.
I know on haveibidnpone.net or.com, I forget which one it
is, the Fitbit site, they get hacked all the time.
And so it's like if you have your accounts, all your
information is done with them.
Any information that is not end-to-end encrypted is
basically up for grabs whenever there's a data breach.
Interesting.
I wrote an article.
I'm going to bring this up in a few moments, so I'm going to
go find about it.
Excuse me, I'm going to go find it so that I can pull this
up, but I actually thought about this back in 2021.
I kind of wondered to myself, are we getting past the era of
big data if everybody starts to worry about their privacy?
With data like Fitbit specifically, for instance, or
is it possible that there is some sort of solution that
comes after it?
I'm going to go ahead and bring this up because I was able to
find it easily enough.
This was one of my first Bitcoin wars articles, and I
was thinking about this problem.
We want big data in the sense that we want there to be pools
of data from which we can learn and make useful for
healthcare.
If we all pull our data, if we had a device on us that knew
what medications we were taking, what foods we were
eating, and how often we were getting physical activity, then
we would have a very good sense of how it is those things
affect our body for the most part.
But the problem is, do we want one person or a very small
group of people or a corporation having all of that
data about everybody?
Do we trust them to make good use of the data and not use it
to maximize profitability in their relationship with us as
opposed to maximize our health?
I wanted people to be able to control their own data and only
share their private key with people or not share their
private key, but unlock that data with their private key to
some subset of people so that that subset of people could run
a study, for instance, and you could still be anonymized while
doing it to a degree or to whatever degree that you choose.
You could share some sort of subset of your data.
So this is a problem that I've been thinking about.
So I'm going to I kind of want to set the stage there because
we're going in, we are moving into that era, right?
Like, can we do this in a decentralized way?
Is that where you're going?
I mean, at the risk of deviating a little out of the way,
speaking of having the information and not just giving
it into one big monolith, one of the way that Braves ad system
was supposed to work was that since you're using their
browser, your browser sees all the websites you visit.
And so the Brave browser would request ads based off what you
browse, and that's actually a very different model than how it
works with a lot of these big ad networks, because the idea was
let the user level deal with the information.
And again, at the risk of an even further deviation,
that's something I think AI models will have an interesting
role to play, because then you can have your own locally
trained model that gives the insights, because that's what
we want.
We want the insights to go all the way up to whatever
the public infrastructure is to gain advantage out of those
things.
And that's a really handy thing.
In my opinion, what makes encryption really important
is when you want something to be private.
You don't want insights to be gleaned from your private
communications.
You don't want people having control over what can be said
when you're interacting with people you know and trust.
And so I make a distinction myself between what I call
private systems, which is intuitive there.
But then I also call things broadcast systems.
So like, for instance, Twitter, social media, YouTube,
or even a website, if you're throwing something in the public,
a lot of encryption is kind of unnecessary.
Even HTTPS, the purpose of it really is to say this site is
actually that site.
It's not necessarily so that other things can be done.
But there are other networks like I2P and Tor,
if you do want that anonymization while browsing.
Yeah, and it feels more and more to me
like this is becoming important on a level of not just freedom
of speech, but freedom of thought.
Right, right.
And when you talk about private communications,
we're not talking about somebody standing up
in the public square and making a declaration as to what they
believe or some philosophical statement
that they want the whole world to think about necessarily.
We're even talking about what it is that you tell your buddy
Bob, right?
We're getting to a level that is almost as private
as your interpersonal thoughts, not quite the same level,
not until somebody says, oh, I'm going
to try to implant chips in people's brains.
God forbid we ever get there.
Yeah, I mean, brain transparency is terrifying.
But I'm focused a little bit on what
can we do on the hardware level to bring some of that back?
How can we get some of that privacy back?
And I do think something as simple
as like I mentioned in a previous show
about how people should have their own digital
infrastructure.
And then if you run your own VPN for your family,
the same way companies run their own internal network.
Let's slow down for a second.
Let's keep this at the level which mom and pop can glean
more information.
VPN.
Yes.
So there are virtual private networks,
which most people know of VPNs in this case,
that there's NordVPN, where you connect to,
and it connects you to the rest of the internet.
But you can use the same technology
to run a private network just within machines you control
or with people you know.
And those resources, because VPNs themselves are encrypted,
will use that encryption to protect whatever you want.
So say you have your own internal online library
or online chat services with just people in your trust
network.
Having an internal private network will do that.
And VPNs allow you to do it over the internet
as opposed to having to say run your own cables
between everyone's houses.
So I'm at home.
Let's say that I contract with you as my VPN provider.
And I want to find out what's on ESPN.
And maybe I probably shouldn't do this.
But let's say that I'm going to ESPN porn, sports porn.
I don't want anyone to know that I'm searching sports porn.
Then what I do is I send that request through you.
And then you send the request to the website
so that anybody who sees that transmission going on
doesn't see me to ESPN sports porn.
They see this one central server to ESPN sports porn.
And then you communicate with me directly privately.
OK, but do you know what it is that I'm surfing?
That, I mean, anyone who has access
to a layer of your internet infrastructure
will be able to see some of that.
Because I know it's, for instance,
easy for your provider to know what websites you're visiting
because you have DNS queries.
Now, you can encrypt DNS queries.
There's DNS over HTTPS.
So how that would effectively work
is that if the person providing your network infrastructure
knows, say, oh, this guy is connected to this IP,
they can do a reverse lookup.
And so depending on the level of effort,
there are ways to investigate these kinds of questions,
which is why I will say it is a matter of trust.
Unless we have what I would almost consider the gold
standard of some kind of absolutely neutral public
infrastructure, there will always
be a trust component at play.
Now, you say a public infrastructure.
Already, that's a big, yeah, neutral, right, yeah.
I'm not sure that I think of that exists.
But the Bitcoin network solution where
you have multiple validators, is there
the possibility of decentralizing
that level of trust to a network so that you don't
have one point of failure?
I mean, the thing that stands out to me
is there is a project called Helium that
tries to tokenize connectivity.
So for instance, whether it's devices using something
as simple as a 5G data connection for a cell phone
in the area, what it allows is that people are incentivized
to run data through the system.
The challenge I see with many of these different things
is that making the network more complex
does not necessarily make it more private.
And there are a ton of different considerations
to be made when it comes to, if we do this change,
how does that affect these other considerations?
How does it impact privacy?
How does it impact autonomy and these kind of controls?
I do think at the lowest level, you
want to have as few intermediaries as possible.
So if there was, say, one giant token-based way
of distributing internet in that way,
if the providers themselves aren't colluding against you,
that's probably a perfectly valid way of doing it.
Personally, one of the things I think
Bitcoin has over other attempts at tokenizing resources
is it at least has 10 years of history to say, hey,
we've done it, and nothing crazy has gone wrong.
I think it would be hard to convince people
to switch all their internet to, say, Helium, which may not
have the same track record behind it, so to speak.
Right.
Before people do that, it would require a multi-year history
of people being able to say, well, this thing has never
been hacked.
To whatever degree Bitcoin has been hacked,
it's always been through somebody interfacing with it
in a poor way or in a vulnerable way,
not the system itself being hacked.
But is there anybody making an attempt
to start building that track record?
Are you saying that people are using this Helium system
right now?
Is it building a track record?
I would say it is, though I haven't watched it too closely.
I mean, it's operational.
I knew a guy who was running one of their,
they call them gateways to mine the Helium currency.
And it does look like an interesting project.
Now, some people kind of want to do things
without changing the infrastructure too much.
There's Loki Net.
There's Urbit, I think is a similar type of project,
where there are a lot of things where it's like,
we can either build on top of the internet as it exists,
or we do something completely new.
And I don't know how effective the completely new options
will be, because then it just introduces
a lot of complexity that people aren't used to thinking about.
OK, let's return for a moment back to end-to-end encryption.
So I'm a fan of the Signal app.
And I don't know how many other similar apps there are.
It's the kind of system where you probably
don't want too many, because you want people
to be on the same app in order to have this end-to-end
encryption.
What's the other one that you mentioned?
Well, there's a Matrix.
WhatsApp does it as well, though they're run by Facebook,
so not everybody trusts WhatsApp for themselves.
But then both Matrix and XMPP run end-to-end encryption
through different methods, but it's the same idea.
The advantage with both Matrix and XMPP
is you have your own client, whatever you want.
Telegram does support end-to-end encryption.
You just have to turn it on.
And that's kind of its problem.
It's not there by default. And I believe
Telegram also rules their own, which cryptographers will
complain is not the best way of doing it.
You should use some kind of industry standard
instead of just hoping your engineers can figure it out.
I mean, maybe they can.
I'm not knocking them, but it's a complicated work,
that's for sure.
Right, and already you have sort of a conflict of interest
there in terms of them wanting to figure it out.
Right, and to me, one of the things
that I find interesting right now is that there
are all these different services, whether it's Nostr,
whether it's Matrix, whether it's XMPP,
whether it's the Fediverse, you've got all these different
open protocols, you know, anybody can set up their own server
and get connected with them.
The challenge is when there's interoperability there,
you know, say somebody on Nostr can talk to somebody on XMPP,
that goes through a bridge.
And the bridge kind of breaks whatever standard encryption
everyone using on one system that doesn't exist on the other.
And it would be nice if there were plugins that say,
if you have two people on different systems using
the same end-to-end encryption, there
should be a way to intermediate that.
OK, here's one of the worries that I
have with some encryption going through other people's systems
is that encryption, like you could say, OK,
there are numbers being chosen at random.
There's random number generation that happens,
and most are all encryption processes, right?
You have to start with some sort of a number that
is being pushed through this complicated mathematical
algorithm that spits out another number.
But a number that's being chosen, there's a seed.
And with something like, with a lot of systems,
you have sort of a system of looping back and reusing a seed
to then churn through again.
So it only really matters the very first time
you choose a number.
Often.
But how are random numbers?
A lot of people don't know this necessarily,
but random numbers are not random.
A computer can't do that.
A computer has to start at one place
when it applies some sort of a randomization algorithm.
And because of that, there have been
hacks on some systems that seemed otherwise
mathematically impenetrable.
So where does that problem occur in the system,
and how can we avoid that?
Well, a lot of that's in the hardware itself.
The CPU, a lot of it is very opaque to most people.
Your CPU really is a black box, whether it's in your phone
or whether it's in your computer.
Nobody's got to open it up and, with a little magnifying lens,
take a look, hey, what's going on there?
It's a very complicated task, which
is why I do think the concept of free and open source hardware
is going to be probably a big goldmine over the next 10
years, because a lot of people are asking those very
questions.
When there is a piece of hardware,
whether it's a CPU or even a modem,
those are the big ones that make people nervous these days,
because the modem itself can forward information along.
And that makes encryption useless,
which is what they're doing.
And I believe it's either the UK or the EU, where they're like,
oh, we want client-side scanning.
We're not going to break your encryption,
but we just want to check all the images on your device
against a table of hashes we have to prosecute people over.
And that does make encryption useless.
There's no point to run encryption
if you're going to let the government or other entities
scan everyone's devices proactively.
This makes me think back to the movie Gremlins, which
it was a childhood movie for me.
I don't know.
Did you ever see the movie Gremlins?
Yes, yes.
And I haven't watched it in so long
that I can't remember the situation.
But there was somebody in the small town who already
knew what Gremlins were.
He was like a veteran or something like that.
And I can't remember if it was like Vietnam or Japan.
But he was like, there's Gremlins in the watches.
There's Gremlins everywhere.
And so I guess that's sort of an analogy for how it is
that people can think about hardware.
You really don't know who set up the hardware for you
or who might have put some.
There was a rumor just like three, four years ago
about there being like rice-sized grain computer
chips that nobody knew what they did.
You open up hardware, and there was this thing that wasn't
supposed to be there.
And some of that is probably nonsense.
But some of it is a very real concern
that somewhere in a supply chain process, where all these pieces
are coming from different places being manufactured
around the world, and they're coming to one place
and then being put together.
And how do you know that somebody doesn't
have something writing on the system
or at the final production level something extra getting
added to it?
It would take a great feat of engineering,
but that doesn't mean that it's impossible.
Right.
And that really is scary because I
know somebody I follow who is a friend of mine.
He basically wrote a blog post about how
he's giving up.
He thinks all of technology is unsavable.
He wants to go totally analog because
of these very concerns, which are real concerns.
There's no validity to that.
I just think there's a lot of opportunity
to fix it as time goes on.
Yeah, I like to maintain the optimist's perspective.
I do think that it's very possible that we
see a world in which we make use of computer resources
for some fraction of what it is that we want to use them for.
We identify the utilities in our life or to society
that we need computers for, but we otherwise give them
up for a lot of things.
There's a movie.
I can't remember if it's the movie or the television show.
There's a television show called Firefly from something
like 20 years ago.
And there's a movie associated with it called Serenity.
And in one of the two, I think it
is the movie, there's a scene that cuts to one
of the character's childhoods.
The character is a doctor.
He's like top notch, award winning type of,
he was clearly a high academic mind growing up
and a very responsible person.
And you have this scene in childhood
where he's maybe 14 years old and his father gives him
a dedicated source box.
And he's so happy because what he wants
is to make it to an elite university
because he wants to be a doctor.
And he's just one of those people who has his dream already
when he's 14.
So he's mapping it out and he's working hard toward it.
And it's never explained to you what a dedicated source box is.
But you kind of get the sense that he's
talking about the internet.
This is a future in which people have figured out, OK,
we have this internet thing, but it's a really terrible idea
to put this in the hands of most children.
And I could see that.
I could see a future in which maybe 90%, 95%, 99%
of what we do on the internet, we just decide,
not going to do that anymore.
It's too dangerous.
One, it's too dangerous to have boxes all over our house
where children can surf porn, where children can figure out
how to surf porn.
And it is true that some huge proportion of internet traffic
is porn.
And I think that a lot of people underestimate the poison
that that likely is to all of society.
We probably don't even know.
We probably couldn't even spot the little influences.
It's probably kind of like chaos theory,
like a butterfly flaps its wings.
And suddenly, there's chaos on the other side of the Earth.
I think that that's probably more likely
to be a correct analogy for people surfing porn at home.
And that's the butterfly flapping its wings.
But then does that have an effect on what
bills get passed in Congress?
I bet it does.
Everything that happens in society
is downstream of something.
It's downstream of human behaviors.
So I could see a future in which we
dodge a lot of the worst uses of technology.
And then we're not even worried anymore
about people intercepting our communications.
We don't necessarily have to communicate to thousands
of people at a time.
There isn't much need.
Most knowledge can get passed through the grapevine.
And conversations in real life where people get together
in order to have conversations.
So what do we do on the internet that's really necessary?
Well, I mean, a lot of it's been trained into us.
The companies that wanted to profit off collecting,
marketing based off, and now training
AIs based off people's information.
There was a real drive to get you, hey, hand this out.
Facebook would introduce a cool new feature.
Oh, you checked in at this location.
Tell everyone what you think about it.
There was a lot of incentivization and pushing
or nudging, I guess we would say,
to nudge people into giving out as much as possible.
And I do think a big part of it, though,
is when you create these micro celebrities,
whether it's the biggest YouTuber, the biggest
Twitch streamer, it presents a lifestyle.
First of all, not everybody can do.
Not everybody can become the top Twitch streamer, whatever.
But all the imitations of it, all the people trying,
now I wish everybody the best of luck
would try that kind of thing out.
But then people don't necessarily
realize that, hey, there's only so many tickets to that ride.
And then they're still giving the same information.
And that's a trade off.
And I want people to think about this.
When thinking about what, if we move toward a future where
we tear down a lot of what the internet is because of security,
and I think that we might, I think perhaps even we should,
I think that computing is awesome.
There is high utility that we want
to figure out how not to give up.
And then we want to figure out how it is we
want to organize society.
But what we're talking about, like an internet star,
and I look around, we've probably
got a few dozen live watchers.
And maybe 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 people
will see this video at some point in time.
We're not internet celebrities starting here.
But what does happen is you wind up
with parasocial relationships.
And one of the points that I've made in a lot of my articles
is these parasocial relationships,
this is where societal steering is happening to a large degree.
You have somebody who becomes good at generating
parasocial relationships.
They're good at talking directly to the camera.
They're good at all the little things that go on.
They have a look that fits whatever it is they're selling.
And suddenly you have massive nudging going on,
nudging too many people at once.
And so it becomes profitable to corrupt the system
through one individual.
And I think a big part of that, too,
though, is that there is a real fragmentation in culture
right now.
I just saw somebody post about the trust in the media
is highly partisan.
People will trust certain outlets
and they won't trust others.
And this is creating this effect where
there's no one common fabric.
And I think whatever the power structure is,
it wants to herd everyone back onto a single fabric,
whereas anyone who justifiably doesn't trust this process is,
oh, no, I just want my own little island of coherence.
And they don't want to be assimilated
into this greater context that really isn't
serving anybody's interests.
And the only way I see that being solved
is if there is a new common fabric that does suit people
without being overtly tyrannical or other problematic features.
Yeah, it seems like we had, because of mass communication,
we entered an era in which fabric of society
meant accepting one common truth.
And I actually don't think that that needs to happen.
I actually think fabric of society
can be one common set of general manners.
The way it is that you're not going to aggress on somebody
or treat somebody, but that otherwise there
is no particular need for a common set of beliefs,
like whether or not you or I both have the same view on
whether or not.
Viruses are real.
I know.
Or that the CIA murdered John F. Kennedy
or that the moon landing was faked or whatever.
And I could pick out these things that
are within the realms of speculation or hidden
information that some people denigrate as conspiracy theory
or something like that.
Suddenly, you have truths where if you even
begin to discuss them or question them,
you have an automatic stigma associated.
And I think that that's one big problem right there.
But even just the attempt to have one common truth,
why is it that everybody needs to believe that same thing
in order to go about their daily lives?
They don't, honestly.
To me, it's an interesting thing because you're
right that the conversations that people are almost
being pushed to have are combative inherently
because you're forcing everybody to discuss this issue when
people with different perspectives will have,
honestly, different shorthands for things.
I've been called on many times when
I say a particular phrase, there's
a ton of ideas associated with that.
When I say we only have one timeline,
I'm actually not just asserting the fact
that, oh, there's only one trend through history.
I'm also talking about the idea that we can't go back
and test every different hypothetical situation
throughout history because as far as I know,
we only have one timeline.
And that shorthand creates the Tower of Babel effect
where people are talking different languages
because they all have different shorthand based off what
subcultures they're a part of.
And like you say, when you force everybody
into this one giant vat of soup, basically,
to have those conversations, they
will become combative because they'll fight for dominance
in that system.
And so how do you deescalate that so that nobody
has to fight?
Right, and a lot of that shorthand is actually
in group testing.
There is a cost associated with it, right?
There's a cost of in-group testing and validation of,
that's a form of sort of public-private key,
in a sense, linguistically.
And if you're going to be in my sphere,
you have to pass this test.
But if everybody's at the Tower of Babel,
then everybody is in each other's sphere.
And suddenly, they're all up in each other's faces.
And you've created this situation
where the weight of all of that becomes perhaps more
than the walls can bear.
And it all comes crashing down.
So you know what?
I didn't know that we were going to get
this level of philosophical about this.
But I actually think that getting
this level of philosophical is where the technology
conversation actually needs to be.
Because we do have a certain number of problems
that we probably simply cannot solve, right?
You have a friend who's just like, I give up.
Yeah.
And I get that.
I never want to be the fatalist.
And I don't believe in the fatalistic future.
I am an optimist.
I do think that these problems are going to come to a head.
And it might be an ugly head.
But that they will come to a head,
and then humanity will get past them.
But I think that it is more likely than not
that we think through what things we can tolerate and live
with and give people asymmetric power advantages, right?
What you never want with a Tower of Babel,
whether or not it collapses, is one person
listening to everyone or one person influencing everyone.
Right.
And to me, to get back to somebody just being
fatalistic about this stuff, I am
a big fan of incremental progress.
I don't have the power to completely re-engineer society,
nor do I want it.
But I do think there's a lot people can do in their own lives,
take step by step.
Oh, I want this to be a little different.
You make that change.
Just because some problems are unsolvable,
it doesn't mean that problems aren't worth solving.
Right.
And even something like Bitcoin, which somebody might say,
well, that's not an incremental step.
That's a monumental step.
Oh, but it involves the incremental step of some number
of hundreds of millions or billions of people
learning that system one by one.
And even if it seems impossible at the very beginning,
oh, you're never going to get everybody to relearn money.
But you know what?
Reality has a funny way of getting people
to do things for their own benefit one step at a time.
When they see it done, when it becomes more ordinary,
when it becomes normalized, and normalization,
well, that's a psychological word
that could be used for things that are improvements
or that are bad.
And maybe I'm wrong about Bitcoin.
Maybe it is something that would also
have to be trashed in order for us to get back
to something ordinary.
But I think that because of what it is, it doesn't need to be.
It doesn't have the problems that we're
talking about right now.
Though I suppose it could have the hardware problem.
I personally have been very concerned of the hardware
side when it comes to Bitcoin.
I mentioned on the other show that I am probably
closer to the big blocker side of the spectrum
just because I think hardware incentives are
very difficult to align.
I'll have to think that one through.
Maybe we'll have a private discussion one day.
Static block size or variable, possibly growing block
size for the blockchain.
It's a challenging conversation.
It's one that I do not feel like I
have a solid enough grasp on to want to have a firm opinion.
Well, I try not to be super dogmatic about things.
I'm not doing myself.
It's the kind of thing that if I was
a core different Bitcoin developer,
I would certainly have stronger feelings about it.
And the thing that I think is important for people to realize
is kind of like what you said where we don't all
need to have the same tune when it comes to different issues.
My personal preference is that we don't all
have to use the same system.
Some people like to use Matrix.
Some people like to use XMPP.
And I think as long as it suits them, that's perfectly fine.
I just think in the dream state, it
would be nice if there was a way to bridge those things
without sacrificing privacy, though there will always
be trade-offs.
Yeah, agreed.
Agreed.
So now I'm in a place of deep thought.
You've brought me to this point where I feel like, oh,
I may have hours of thinking before I
want to come back and ask the next set of questions.
So have we talked about the things
that you wanted to come talk about today?
Or is there another topic that we can just move on?
Yes, actually.
OK.
Let's look at that then, because you've
got me on a path of deep thought where
I want to come back and finish this conversation another day.
But go ahead.
Since you're stronger in the math space,
I'd be curious on your thoughts or even thoughts
you've come across regarding this.
Because right now, the US cybersecurity bill,
something went down the pipe.
And they want every aspect of the federal government
to implement post-quantum encryption.
And I was like, OK, this is interesting.
So if quantum computers are becoming online and encryption.
Wait, wait.
Stop and roll back.
Who wants everyone to adopt post-quantum encryption?
It was some Biden administration proposal.
I don't know if it was a bill or an executive order or something,
but there was something put through
that they want the entire federal government to do.
They want the entire federal government to roll it out.
And to me, this is almost a terrifying signal.
Oh, shoot.
They've broken it already, which I don't know.
Maybe that's not accurate.
But the thing is, I did a bit of a deep dive on, OK,
are there open source post-quantum implementations
available right now?
They exist, but they're slim and not maybe production ready yet.
OK.
I wanted to make that.
Let's stop here and define quantum encryption
and post-quantum encryption.
Right.
So post-quantum is a different set of algorithms
because I don't know much about the cryptography side of this,
which is what I wanted to ask you.
But my understanding is that as quantum computers
gain more qubits and can run these different algorithms that
have already been written for them,
there is the capability to not only break encryption moving
forward, but also break everything
that was encrypted in the past.
When Langley stores everyone's communication through the NSA,
suddenly all of that can be broken retroactively
if this is such a game changer.
OK.
So I think this is actually a giant Psyop.
Let's talk about this for a second.
There are people out there who go, oh, quantum computers
are going to break all of encryption, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah.
And it frustrates me.
I bite my tongue every time I see this conversation.
I want to dive into it.
I reach out online like this person does not
know what quantum computing is.
OK.
Quantum computing is not going to ever break
elliptical cryptography.
And whatever it is the Biden administration is announcing
is probably a giant boondoggle.
And or it is a matter of the intelligence agencies
getting their claws on all of the government
to have all of the information swept into them.
That's what I would suspect.
And I'll explain why.
Within a quantum computer, within a system,
sure, having these quantum states
and seeking wave convergence when
you're locking onto an answer to a difficult math problem,
OK, yeah, within this system there
are things that you can do that you couldn't have
done without that system.
But that has nothing whatsoever to do
with breaking encryption systems as they are today.
And here's why.
No matter what that wave function is doing,
you still have to test a key over here
on this computer that is outside of that system.
And that can only happen discreetly,
as in one set of packets gets sent, answer gets sent back,
did or did not break.
It's still a brute force thing, no matter what is going on
in this quantum computer.
Right?
Imagine simply that you have a quantum brain.
In fact, go a step further.
Go as many steps further as you can.
You have a god brain or something like that.
However you want to define it, but it doesn't mean whatever
it is you can do in that amazing brain, that doesn't mean
that you can enter keys into a computer any faster.
And literally, it's actually a physically, mathematically
limiting problem.
I wrote an article maybe December or January,
monkeys on typewriters.
OK, yes.
And maybe I'll go find that one, because it relates
to what we're talking about.
There is still the physical limitation
of how much energy gets used in that process
and how much time that process will take.
So elliptical curve, elliptical cryptography,
which is where we are right now, that's not ever
going to be hacked unless it is within the quantum computer
itself.
Now, maybe we get into simulation theory
or something like that, but simulation theory
is just like a useless exercise.
I mean, it's a fun exercise to think through.
But whatever it is, it's still the case
that within this simulation, we have no reason
to believe that each piece of it contains
super knowledge of other pieces that are in a separate place.
The reason why I bring it up, because I notice right now
that there's a really useful trend that I think actually
helps.
They're trying to push people onto past keys, where
you use, say, a UB key, which is just a hardware device that you
plug in.
It signs.
It's like a Bitcoin hardware wallet,
where it does the challenge and response for the encryption.
I think that's a really good point.
A Bitcoin hardware wallet is like it.
Well, yeah.
That's a more general thing.
You've got a physical device.
You plug it into a computer.
It has your keys on it for you, because memorizing
36-digit strings of letters and numbers
isn't what most of us do with our spare time.
And I think it's an excellent idea,
because you take the concept of an air gap, a computer that's
not connected to the internet, but then you just
strip out all the parts that you just want for key management.
You really just need it to be able to plug in and say,
hi, I'm the key signer, whatever.
And then you go on your merry way.
Well, I was curious about quantum,
post-quantum encryption, because I
don't have the math background to know how big of a game
changer it was or might not have been.
And would that mean we just simply need longer keys?
Would that mean we do need some kind of post-quantum hardware
device that has a different mechanism?
So if it is just merely the encryption itself being sound,
that's almost a reassurance.
It's amazing watching this.
And this is a good lesson for anybody
who might be out there thinking this problem through.
I don't know if what I said was understandable
to a large audience, but I think so.
It is actually a relatively simple thing to think about.
It doesn't matter what fancy computation is going on
on the quantum computer.
There is still a limitation of how many packets of information
getting sent back and forth.
And that excess computation speed
does not actually speed up those packets at all.
So in a brute forcing process, it doesn't change anything.
And there's no information from the encrypted machine.
These are your secrets, tight fist.
These are the secrets.
This is the quantum computer over here.
Whatever is being processed in the quantum computer
really actually has nothing to do with the machine that's
holding your secrets.
The quantum computer knows nothing more
about the cryptography algorithm or your key or anything else.
Whatever it's computing has nothing
to do with whether or not you can send packets back and forth
to test different passwords.
And you don't get any new information.
There's no new information.
If I test a key, some random key to try to break into your vault,
and I just get a signal back, success or failure,
it's like, how do you process that to compute anything?
There's no information.
It's zero information exchanged.
It's just how fast you can test.
I'd also put out, have you heard of a rainbow table?
What's a rainbow table?
So a rainbow table is something.
So when somebody hacks a site, whether they hack Facebook
and they get their database and they hack some other site,
they get their database, they'll have the passwords
and their hashes.
And what that means is that the hashes
are a way of the site protecting your password.
Because if that site gets hacked and it's your password,
then they can log into all the other websites
with your password.
So the industry standard is that you hash it
so that it's not your password.
It's just another random string based off
these kind of encryption methods.
The problem with this, though, is
that there are pre-computed hashes put
in these rainbow tables, which are, OK, this is the hash.
Here is the answer.
And you have this huge table of that.
And this is the seed problem we were discussing earlier.
Right.
I'm going there.
And so the problem, I think, that quantum computers
will present is that they may be faster at generating
these tables.
I don't know.
And that's the threat mechanism that intuitively
makes the most sense to me based off
how I understand they work, which is not very solid,
I will admit.
OK.
So it does present a challenge for this still just
seems like a problem of collecting hash information.
Right.
That's still not internal to a quantum computer.
But is a quantum computer going to be able to?
Now, I still think that hash information is still
just the same thing as getting the packet back
that says success or failure.
But if the hashes are applied to everybody in the same way,
then you can eventually collect a lot of information
that may tell you how you're going to proceed with the hash.
So I'll think about that.
The thing that I find interesting about this
is that when we're talking about quantum computing,
your average hacker on the internet
is not going to have those kind of resources even anytime soon.
This is nation state level stuff.
And so when it comes to quantum computing,
I think the aspect of it that is most interesting
is how it will play into geopolitical events.
Because say, even they may not be able to break encryption.
But if they can use techniques like that to discover patterns,
that's a very valuable tool in this kind
of global cyber warfare game, which is one of the disasters
they plan on.
They have signaled that they will use
to try to gain more control.
And so I'm personally very worried
that they will try to say that the internet is basically
a battleground.
And like you said, how there's a healthy way people
can withdraw from the internet and find their own healthy
balance with what they can have a healthy life with.
I feel like there's also the turbo opposite, where
the plan is basically is that they
will want to have complete control because it's now
a strategic resource.
And having people sucked into the matrix
is one of those strategic resources
in the greater geopolitical games.
Right.
And this is where fifth generation warfare
is taking place.
And it keeps people from having the same levels of local trust
outside of it once they leave.
You leave the internet, you have a different idea
as to who your friends and enemies are.
Even worse, you have the, we'll insert Matthias Desmond here,
even though I'm not a fan of his theory on the whole,
but I'm a fan of thinking about free-floating anxiety
and free-floating stresses.
You come away thinking there are enemies out there,
but you don't even know who they are.
And I think this keeps people from gathering in groups
locally.
It keeps people from walking to the local pub, necessarily,
and being able to have a conversation with people
because you now have to be more guarded
about your conversations, just whatever
it is you might think about the world than you used to have
to be.
Yeah.
People have taken their interactions from the matrix
and they have, it is the Tower of Babel, like we said.
They have created their own language
with which to test anyone entering their bubble.
Yeah, and I feel that on a real, when
I talk to anyone who is significantly older than me,
there is a real disconnect where I'm like,
we did not live in the same world growing up.
I don't believe I grew up in the same world as, say,
my grandparents.
It is really night and day.
And I used to wonder how much, whether it's accelerating
or not, like whether, say, someone my grandchildren's age
kind of, you know, in eventuality.
And I don't think it's slowed down currently, honestly.
I do think I may be as out of touch
with the state of reality for my grandchildren
as I, you know, grandparents would be for me.
Hmm.
You know, I didn't know where this conversation would go
or what it would make me think about.
But I am thinking about the possibility of the whole world
rebelling by saying we're going to use computers
to do fewer things.
We're going to define what those things are.
And maybe the definitions of those things
are where we don't have to worry about the more
significant problems of, you know,
a chip being inserted somewhere in the supply chain
that automatically leeches, you know,
asymmetrically gathers information
for, you know, one giant actor.
Of course, there are only a few places in the world
where, like, ASICs are even built, right?
There's only a few places, I mean, technically,
there's only a few places in the world
where computer chips are made.
You have to have clean floor.
You're handling a lot of chemicals.
These are toxic chemicals.
You've got to be able to ventilate in a responsible way.
So, you know, maybe there are just a few dozen factories
in the world that even make computer chips.
And the number that make these ASIC processors
that are used for just hashing, like,
would be used to generate the Bitcoin network.
I don't even know what the number is.
Is it two?
Is it three?
Certainly not many, that's for sure.
Yeah, and this is where you could
have the possibility of somebody inserting something in there.
And maybe they can.
This is something we're thinking through.
You know, we started this conversation
with, like, end-to-end encryption
and just, like, how do we protect our information
from chats?
But that's where the exploration gets us,
where we have to think on a hardware level.
So I'm going to rewind the conversation then.
My hope is that we are able to make use of mass pools of data.
But my worry is that the way that we have gone currently
is that that data is dramatically centralized.
And we don't even know the degree to centralization,
right?
I mean, we do know that there are probably
10 to 20 corporations out there who
have massive pools of data.
Maybe it's like a power law distribution.
You know, who knows who has the most data?
If it's Apple or Facebook or Google, probably Google,
I would think.
But whoever has, like, the greatest amount of data,
or actually, it's probably the government.
I don't know why I said Google.
That makes no sense.
It's probably the US government.
Well, yeah.
So we have these massive pools of data.
And that should worry people.
It should.
Worry people, because it gives a very small people
a high degree of control about what's going on.
Or possibly the internet warfare era that we're seeing,
where just everything is like bullets and sharp knives going
back and forth.
Maybe that's actually the necessary defense
that your second, third, or fourth corporation
on the totem pole would have to play in order
to not have an asymmetric, like a winner-take-all advantage
over that system.
Is there necessary sort of like a combat of the mind,
like death by a trillion or quadrillion cuts, right,
effect going on with the internet
on the psyche of the average person making use of it
because of this?
So where am I going with this?
Well, I think they absolutely benefit from the control side
of it.
And in a geopolitical game, it may be seen as a fair trade.
Oh, we get to keep our way of life.
And sorry, we have to do this to you.
But the other side of it is on top of the way you said,
like, oh, it would be nice if we had a different way of managing
the data.
I would argue if we were truly using this data for something
to actually help people as opposed
to wage these kind of control war games,
I believe the data itself, we would have different data
being collected.
For instance, a lot of these Fitbit trackers, they're neat.
But I don't know how comprehensive
that is for actually building healthier and happier people.
As far as I can tell, your heart rate
is really just a good proxy for your emotional state,
which having that on a good segment of the population
as you roll out these mass fear campaigns
would be a really effective information to have,
especially in real time as you're doing it.
Whereas I think if there was this more holistic approach
to people voluntarily choosing what's shared
and there being more information on how it's being used
and techniques to use it properly,
things would go very differently.
And an example of this is I think
this is, again, where I think AI models may actually
have a real legitimate use because a lot of things
are individualized.
If you're training data to work with, say,
somebody's ability to run faster, as a silly example here,
I can see a scenario where the data that's
like every other runner throughout history
can only help you so much because you're
a different being than all those other runners.
And so a model that's trained to suit you
would be something, first of all, you'd
want to keep very private because that's
very sensitive information.
But if you're going down that road,
you would still have insights to share
to the wider community.
But that's something you want control of,
not something you want imposed on people.
And suddenly there are these individual models
that are just a representation of you
to this terrifying system.
Interesting.
Have you ever seen that, do you know who Hussein Bolt is?
Yes.
There's an article that somebody wrote a few years ago
saying that if you looked at running performance
under a certain model, and we can see the records getting
better and better, like rate of running the 100 meter dash
or 200 or 400 meter dash has been going up,
historically, the fastest runner in the world.
And then if you plotted that as a certain function,
and you get limiting returns, we're
never going to see any human, at least as we define humans,
run a 200 meter dash in five seconds.
It's going to be getting better than 20 seconds is real
difficult, real difficult.
But that Hussein Bolt already was faster
than the models predicted any human would ever be.
Wow.
Which was really, really fascinating, right?
You have such an outlier case.
And then somebody studied who was it
who would set these records over the years.
One of the things that they noticed
was it was generally a younger brother in a large family.
And I can't remember where Hussein Bolt is,
but my fuzzy memory is that he was like the seventh child.
He had all these older siblings growing up in Jamaica.
And in the neighborhood, I'm sure you've
got your 20 kids who get together and play soccer
or run around and do whatever it is that they're doing.
And so when you have the youngest one,
in order to even participate, they're having to run faster.
From the age of like three, that kid
is having to exercise and learn a different level of movement
that almost any other human will ever even think about.
And they're putting their whole heart into it
because that three-year-old wants to be
with his older brothers.
It's a good feeling, right?
And so you know what?
I think that we are likely going to find.
I think that we could almost skip to the end.
We're likely going to find that 99.99% of the information
that we pass back and forth on the internet
is completely useless at best.
So I think that you're going down the right path exploring
this.
But it may be that for something like possible drug
interactions, we did once upon a time
find out that the bark of the chinchona tree in Peru
or South America, several places in South America,
now they've got huge fields of them in India
where they make medicines out of them.
But that the bark of this one tree
would help with malaria or things
that cause similar symptoms, fever, such things,
that you can grind it up, maybe take it like a tea
or something like that.
And that would help people maybe just prevent deaths, period,
at times, right?
What is it that we do when we like there are a lot of things
that we can explore in the world?
Can we grind up this plant, that plant?
Will it help us avoid certain illnesses that are just,
you know, mosquitoes are going to be there?
I actually think that it's almost
folly to even think about trying to make the mosquitoes extinct
because with the technology that they're
using to try to do that, gene drive editing,
well, that's the same technology that
steers toward being able to edit human beings.
And then suddenly, you've got asymmetric control over whether
or not people even live or die.
And that's a real scary proposition.
But if we were to just nuke most of the information
on the internet and go back to thinking about, hey,
we do like transmission of data, right?
Maybe we should only do it when there is,
when we have good control over the level of information
that we're sharing, like as in everything from my end,
from my Fitbit, whatever it is, that not to even be made
by anybody that we would pass our key to,
or to have good control over how it's made.
And it could be so simple too, right?
Kind of like thinking of a Raspberry Pi versus a computer,
it may be checkable that this is tampered with.
If it's that simple.
I'm a big fan of keeping things simple that way,
especially in the hardware domain.
Because smartphones are such a fantastic example
where this has gone wrong.
Because you have all these devices that are made useless.
The moment their battery that is really difficult to replace
goes kaput.
Yes, there are ways to repair and replace them.
And where possible, I recommend doing it.
But the challenge is there is a ton of waste involved
with these what I call Omni devices.
Really, in my opinion, a smartphone really
should just be a touchscreen that acts as a remote
for your other devices.
To me, that is the optimal use of that interface.
Because a lot of people are used to that.
And it does seem to actually help in a lot of scenarios.
But the problem is when you pack on a big computer,
you pack on all these surveillance devices,
the GPS, the recording, the microphone.
All of those could be external.
We don't need devices that do everything.
I think part of this model of how
we get into a better balance with technology
involves disintermediating the devices themselves.
Now, I get that people prefer things to be wireless.
But it is entirely possible to build almost like they're
wireless mice and keyboards.
You could add different things to that protocol.
And then you could keep that private
by having some sort of encryption mechanism
on those signals itself.
So it could still be personal.
It could still be convenient.
But suddenly, your microphone isn't
built into every one of your devices.
Your TV's spying on you.
Your toaster's spying on you.
You know, whatever.
Let's go back to single use appliances, single use devices,
and just take the lessons we've learned on how
to make them more convenient.
NFC tags are actually really interesting things
on their own.
They're just a little microchip RFID thing
that you can attach as a sticker to something.
And it says, you can assign whatever arbitrary data
you want to it.
But then anything that can read it, figure out what it is.
So a really simple example of how this could be leveraged
that way is, say you have this television in a room.
And if you've ever used Chromecast,
you can put whatever video is on your phone on the television.
And with these kind of NFC tags, you
could have the TV itself say, oh, I'm this TV.
This is my address.
You tap your what I would call remote instead
of a smartphone.
You would tap your remote to it and then say, OK,
play this video now.
And that doesn't need all this crazy spyware and tracking.
And even honestly, some of the software overhead
that exists with many of these devices,
because you build things for a purpose.
And then like you say, it's easier
to verify it for that purpose instead of, oh,
we've got this device that does everything,
and we need to verify it against x, y, and z now.
And for those people out there who are not yet
afraid that their TV is spying on them,
I have this to say.
Today it's your TV, but your toaster, that's vicious.
Your toaster handles your food.
It also has a really bad attitude.
You're not used to checking.
You're not used to talking with your toaster.
But something out there will bite you in a different way
that you might not even be thinking about right now
with your information.
And the big example of that is everybody talking about
the thermostats being turned down,
because the region is like, oh, we need the electricity.
We need to save on the climate.
When you hand control over by building back doors
into systems, that is what will happen.
They will use them to their benefit rather than the user's
benefit.
And you don't even know that they're
going to use it to save climate change.
That sounds like one of those things where you're getting
a 0.1% advantage.
A lot of people don't even know that the vast majority
of all the carbon that's produced
is produced by governments and militaries.
I shouldn't say vast majority, but the strict majority.
Whatever they're doing in your home with your thermostat,
that's not what it's about.
No.
They are more likely, probably, to maximize their own profit
level by futzing with your thermostat
by then, like if they need excess factory production,
if they need some sort of load balancing
in the electrical grid.
That is much more likely what they
will use that information for.
So yeah, you are giving up.
You are letting someone maximize their profits off of you
when you share your data.
That's the way people should think about it.
Or that's one of the ways.
Knowing your thoughts is also another.
And that's a big reason why I do try to push the,
hey, it is good to be on even moderately more secure
platforms.
Because the WHO put out this document about how they called
it dark analytics, where they were looking at people's
private chats on some of these platforms where it's easier.
For instance, your text messages are not
end-to-end encrypted in most cases.
And they were using that as analytics
as they were manipulating people with fear.
And it's not going to be limited to that campaign.
I can guarantee it.
Yeah, even worse, Signal recently
stopped being a platform for SMS texting.
Yes.
Which forced people like me, I had
to figure out exactly what I was going to do about this.
I had 20-something thousand messages
that then I had to figure out what app I
was going to give access to.
And you don't have time to go through your 20-something
thousand past messages and think about what information you
want to add vulnerability to in order to ever again use
SMS texting.
And when I started using Signal, I
never imagined that they would force me to make that decision.
And so what can I do?
Now, do I just not have the opportunity ever again
to use SMS texting?
Otherwise, I don't even know what thoughts I'm
spilling out to a new app.
That's awful.
Right.
And that's another challenge is that I
find the open source community is
kind of this almost dirty secret to a lot of people,
where because everybody is used to the big tech platforms,
there are options out there.
But somebody will say, oh, but they're not perfect.
And to be honest, they're not.
There are a lot of holes in many places.
But I think the most important, whether it's hardware,
whether it's software, is that mindset of can we verify it?
Is it built in a way that's verifiable,
whether it's the hardware, whether it's the software?
And is it working to our benefit?
Is it my device?
Can I repair it?
Can I change what processes it's running?
All those questions can only be done under these kind
of more open models.
Because honestly, I'm sure there are very excellent products
that promise a lot of security.
But I would never trust a company
to put my data over their business model.
That just doesn't make sense to me.
Why would they do that?
Right.
When it comes down to pure incentives, yeah.
The person on the other side has no relationship with you
other than their business model.
Has somebody developed anything like a simple aphorism
or a simple way to think about where to identify
your points of vulnerability?
I have not seen that laid out in a comprehensive way.
Because you generally have to make a lot of assumptions.
Like, oh, do you have a smartphone?
Oh, what smartphone do you have?
That would be a useful tool.
Though I will say, if that type of tool was created,
people would be staggered at how much is given away
by very innocuous things.
I mean, God forbid you pull in the privacy policies
of a bunch of different major services.
That'll be a real interesting question.
So OK, I'm going to throw out an invention that I imagined
a number of years ago.
And I've since lost interest in even thinking about whether or not
I would actually ever want to try to pursue this.
But somebody out there has the capability that I do not.
And so I'm going to throw it out there in this chat right now.
When thinking about centralization,
and when thinking about a moment like the plandemonium,
like all this chaos we've been in for the last three plus
years, I think about the ability to be
able to pass electronic communications around,
make sure that they get to where we want them to go
without a centralized system or hub or something like that.
And I imagine something like a BlackBerry.
Imagine that you had a little device.
You could type into it.
You have a little screen maybe.
Maybe I type you a message and I hit go.
But I don't want this to go through my Wi-Fi
and onto the internet.
Instead, what I want is for there to be like a mesh network.
What I want is for this to be encrypted.
Then my neighbor has one of these two.
That's probably the first jump point,
that my device communicates with my neighbor's device.
And my neighbor's device sends a ping back and says, got it.
And suddenly, this message is it's looking for you.
It's jumping through other people's phones
until it reaches you.
I shouldn't say phone.
I think of this as another device.
It's not a phone.
This is only on a system that is entirely distinct from any
networks that exist.
Could that be made and marketed and used?
What would it take?
Personally, that is how the darknets
work on top of the internet, whether it's Tor or I2P.
And really implementing it on the hardware layer
would be a very valuable thing to do.
I don't think it's impossible.
I think it's a matter of it catching on.
And Meshtastic does try to do that,
though like any considered meshnet in that way,
it does require you to have the people around you, which
is what brings this to the local picture.
It really doesn't matter so much that if people halfway
across the world think it's a great idea,
if you can actually build it with the people around you,
you could probably make at least Meshtastic work.
But building these other networks,
whether it's Tor, whether it's I2P,
whether it's there's this other interesting one.
FreeNet is another and LokiNet.
There's tons of them now.
I think there's a lot of opportunity and possibilities.
It's just we can't ignore hardware for much longer.
And I'll admit that is probably the root of this discussion,
is that it's nice to talk about protocols.
It's nice about what things can be done gradually,
which I encourage, though hardware itself
is very important.
And I hope that as people start to care about this,
the market incentives to produce verifiable hardware
will start to align themselves in a better direction.
It seems like an almost impossible problem to solve,
though, when I hear about the difficulties
that engineers had going from 10 nanometer chips to 7 nanometer
chips to 5 to 4.
These are such extraordinary leaps because the level you're
trying to pack so many resistors into a computer chip, right?
The level of there is a physical limitation, right?
I mean, obviously, at some point, you've just got
you're at the atomic level.
But already, you have enough interaction
at that type of level that it's difficult to get smaller
than 4 nanometer chips.
When I think about that, I actually
think this makes me optimistic that we
can learn to evaluate hardware, right?
Because you can't hide anything, right?
There's only so much physical matter
that comes in a box that we call a computer, right?
There's only so much physical matter in there.
That can be checked.
At the very least, you can probably
get a sense of where it's made or what it's designed to do.
So this is not an impossible problem to solve.
But I will say this.
I do believe that we may be leaving
the era of mass electronics and just sort of spamming our way
to the electronic world.
It may be that people come to understand that it's
fine to have less internet communications,
fine to have fewer packets of information,
and that as we move toward cryptocurrency systems,
we're probably going to be spending money every time we
send a packet of information anyway, maybe
a small amount of money.
But that may be a good limiter for us,
may be a good idea to go ahead and accept that,
because it's going to keep us.
It'll be the automatic medicine for the system, in a sense.
But it will keep us from just sending
so much useless information over the internet,
and especially allowing for the mass levels
of asymmetric control, the matrix system that is built.
And I actually wonder if there is some sort of a,
I don't know what this whole plan to Monumura is about.
There is some grand plan.
Some people think that they have it figured out.
The more I see, the more hypotheses I have,
the more questions, the more models I have for what's
actually going on.
But it's very possible that it simply
breaks down into less information,
less communication over the internet,
and people having to sort that out locally.
So I kind of hope so.
I think we'll eventually reach that stage one way or another.
I think that there is a path that doesn't require
us to give up computing.
I don't think that that's necessary.
Maybe I'm wrong.
But I don't think that's necessary to reach privacy
again and to reach health again.
But we need to continue to have these conversations.
And we need to continue to figure out
what can be done and what can't, and test those models,
see what works.
Yeah, lots of open questions there.
Well, anything else before we wrap things up?
That's all I have.
I mean, I would say on top of there's
two sides of the coin, there's keeping it local.
Though I will say the fact that humanity across the whole world
can communicate, I do think that is a very valuable thing.
And like you said, there's a difference
between the mass redundant information.
Useless might be a little harsh.
But I'll say redundant.
And then, but the ability to talk across the world
and say, hey, my government's doing this,
and I don't really like it.
And it happened because of x, y, and z.
That's really important information for people
to send halfway across the world.
And I would argue, while the local is vital and essential
and the building block of what makes a lot of this
worth doing, the other side of it
is that I don't want people to forget that there is a whole
other world out there.
And we do need to keep those lines of communication open.
And we want the benefits of global resources.
There are things that do not exist where I live in Texas.
There is not a mine for them.
There is not a way to grow them from the ground for some things
that can be grown.
There are things that we simply won't
be able to have from the rest of the world.
And maybe this is what we call the spice.
Using the Dune universe, the Dune-iverse,
the spice of the world is connectivity.
Can we have that without the drawbacks?
And we need global communication in order
for that to take place.
So lots of things that we want to keep and lots of things
that we want to get rid of.
And we've got to design the system.
And thanks so much for joining us for a conversation.
We went into a lot of weeds here.
So I hope that whether or not you followed all of this,
including my, I don't know, thinking out loud a moment
or two, because these are difficult topics,
hopefully you learned something from today.
Hopefully it made you think about what
it is that might be done or what the problems are.
Hopefully this is educational.
Thanks for joining us, Gabe.
Thanks a lot.
I had a great time.
And we're going to be back tomorrow
for another roundtable discussion.
And Gabe may be joining us for that one too.
But we're going to, actually, I'm not going to announce it yet.
We're going to move to the out there now.
But we'll be here tomorrow.
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