Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDe-mUxR7P0
[Laughter] [Music] uh like we're gonna just sit here and talk for a long time huh yeah we were started right now we already started it has begun yes [Laughter] what was your question though i was gonna ask you know like what if something comes up you know like like what you know you need to like pee or something oh you can totally do that yeah we'll just pause and not just run out that happens don't sweat it all right i want you to be comfortable have you ever done a podcast before first time really first time um so tell me how where signal came from what was the impetus what was how did it get started it's a long story so we have time we have plenty of time uh okay well you know i think ultimately what we're trying to do with signal is stop mass surveillance to bring some normality to the internet and to explore a different way of developing technology that might ultimately serve all of us better we should tell people maybe people just tuning in signal is an app that is uh explain how it works and what what it does i use it it's uh it's a messaging app it's a messaging app yeah yeah but fundamentally it's just a messaging yes explain lofty aspirations yeah uh yeah it's a messaging app um but it's uh somewhat different from the way the rest of technology works because um it uh is encrypted so um you know uh if typically you know if you want to send somebody a message uh i think most people's expectation is that when they write a message and they you know press send that the people who can see that message are the person who wrote the message and the intended recipient but that's not actually the case there's you know tons of people who are in between who are monitoring these things who are collecting data information and signal's different because we've designed it so that we don't have access to
that information so when you send an sms that is the least secure of all messages so if you have an android phone and you use a standard messaging app and you send a message to one of your friends that is the least of all when it comes to when it comes to security right that's uh yeah it's a low bar that's that's the low bar and then iphone what is the signal oh sorry there you go yeah so iphones use imessage which is slightly more secure but it gets uploaded to the cloud and it's a part of their icloud service so it goes to some servers and then goes to the other person it's encrypted along the way but it's still it can be intercepted yeah i mean okay so there's uh like jeff bezos's situation uh yeah like trying to face the situation exactly yeah there's like fundamentally there's two ways to think about uh security one is like computer security uh this idea that will somehow make computers secure we'll put information on the computers and then we'll prevent other people from accessing those computers and that is like a losing strategy that people have been losing for 30 years you know you information ends up on a computer somewhere and it ends up compromised in the end the other way to think about security is information security where you secure the information itself that you don't have to worry about the security of the computers you could have some computers in the cloud somewhere information is flowing through them and people can compromise compromise those things and it doesn't really matter because the information itself is encrypted um and so you know things like sms um you know the imessage cloud backups um most other messengers facebook messenger all the stuff you know um they're relying on this computer security model um and that uh ends up disappointing people in the end and so you why did you guys create it like
what what was unsatisfactory about the other options that were available well because the way the internet works today is like insane uh you know that uh you know fundamentally i feel like private communication is important because i think that change happens in private everything that is fundamentally decent today started out as something that was a socially unacceptable idea at the time you look at things like you know obvious things that abolition of slavery legalization of marijuana legalization of same-sex marriage uh even you know constructing the declaration of independence those are all things that required a space for people to process ideas outside the context of everyday life and um those spaces don't exist on the internet today and i think it's kind of crazy the way the internet works today you know that like if you imagined you know every moment that you were talking to somebody in real life there was somebody there just with a clipboard a stranger taking notes about what you said that would change the character of your conversations and i think that in some ways like we're living through a shortage of brave or bold or courageous ideas in part because people don't have the space to process what's happening in their lives outside of the context of everyday interactions you know that's a really good way to put it because you got to give people a chance to think things through but if you do that publicly they're not going to they're going to sort of like like basically what you see on twitter you know if you stray from what is considered to be the acceptable norm or the current ideology or whatever whatever you're supposed to whatever opinions you're supposed to have on a certain subject you get attacked ruthlessly so so you see
a lot of self-censorship and you also see a lot of virtue signaling where people sort of pretend that they espouse a certain series of ideas because that'll get them some you know some social cred yeah exactly i think that communication in those environments is performative you know you're either performing for an angry mob you're performing for advertisers you're performing for you know the governments that are watching yeah and i think also the ideas that make it through are kind of tainted as a result you know that like uh did you watch any of the like the online hearing stuff that was happening over coveted uh you know where like uh city councils and stuff were having their hearings online no i did not uh it was kind of interesting to me because it's like um you know they can't meet in person so they're doing it online and uh that means that the public comment period was also online you know and so it used to be that like you know if you go to city council meeting uh they have a period of public comment where you know people could just stand up and say what do you think you know and like ordinarily it's like oh you gotta go to city hall you gotta like wait in line you gotta sit there you know but then when it's on zoom it's just sort of like anyone can just show up at the zoo you know they just dial in and they're just like here's what i think you know and uh you know it was kind of interesting because particularly uh when a lot of the police brutality still was happening in los angeles i was i was watching those city council hearings and you know people were just like you know you know they were just calling to be like [ __ ] you i yield the rest of my time [ __ ] you you know like it was just like uh really brutal and uh not undeservingly so and uh you know what was interesting to me was just watching the the politicians basically you know uh who just had to sit there
and just they were just like fake it you know and it was just like you know you get three minutes and then there's someone else to get you know they're just like okay and now we'll hear from you know like and you know watching that you sort of realize that it's like um to be a politician you have to just sort of fundamentally not really care what people think of you you know uh you have to fundamentally uh just be comfortable sitting you know and having people yell at you you know for three minutes in three minute increments for an hour or whatever you know and so it seems like what we've sort of done is like bred these people who are willing to do that you know and in some ways that's like a useful characteristic but in other ways that's the characteristic of a psychopath you know yes yes and i think you know what we're seeing is that that also extends outside of those environments that like to do anything ambitious today requires that you just are comfortable with that kind of um feedback like trump's tweets if you watch you know if you look at twitter and look at any of trump's tweets when he tweets watch what people say it's ruthless they go crazy they go so hard on him so i'm assuming he doesn't read them i'm assuming he just or maybe he does and just doesn't say anything but he knows he doesn't go back and forth with people at least no but and i'm i i think you know trump is perfectly capable of just not caring you know there's like people you know grazing is just like yo whatever what you know i'm the best they don't you know yeah and like that's um you know that's politics but i think you know the danger is when that uh you know to do anything ambitious you know outside of politics or whatever you know requires that you're capable of just not caring you know what people think or whatever because everything is happening in public i think you made a really good point in
that change comes from people discussing things privately because you have to it's a you have to be able to take a chance you have to be daring and you have to be able to confide in people and you have to be able to say hey um this is not right and we're going to do something about it if you do that publicly the powers that be that do not want change in any way shape or form they'll they'll come down on you i mean this is essentially what edward snowden was warning everyone about when he decided to go public with all this nsa information he was saying look we this is not what we signed up for you like someone's constantly monitoring your emails constantly listening to phone calls like this is not this mass surveillance thing it's very bad for just the culture of free expression just our ability to have ideas and to be able to share them back and forth and vet them out it's very bad yeah yeah i mean i think when you look at the the history of that kind of surveillance there are a few interesting inflection points you know like at the beginning of um you know the internet as we know it in like the early to mid 90s um there were these like dod efforts to do mass surveillance you know um and um they were sort of open about what they were doing uh and you know one of them was this program called total information awareness uh and uh it was they were trying to start this office i think called the total awareness office or something within the dod and the idea was like they're just going to like collect information uh on all americans and everyone's communication and just stockpile it into these uh databases and then they would use that to you know mine those things for information uh it was sort of like you know their
their uh effort to get in on this at the beginning of the information age uh and you know it was ridiculous you know it's like they called it total information awareness they had a logo that was like um you know the pyramid with the eye on top of it oh yeah this is this is like the pyramid with the eye like casting a beam on the earth that bit of latin there means knowledge is power oh wow and interesting this program was actually started by uh john poindexter of all people who was involved in the iran contra stuff i think really yeah yeah and he like went to jail for a second and then was pardoned or something but uh so anyway you know they're like they're so [ __ ] up these people are in charge of anything i know but what's also i just kind of comical is that like they were like this is what we're going to do you know how crazy this is like this this is our plan you know and people were like uh i don't think so you know like what year was this this is like early mid 90s look at this authentication biometric data face fingerprints gate iris your gate so they're going to identify people based on the way they walk i guess your gate is that specific um then automated virtual data repositories privacy and security this is fascinating because if you look at i mean obviously no one thought of cell phones back then exactly right so this is like kind of amateurish right so it's like they're like this is what we're going to do you know and people are like ah i don't think even like congress is like ah guys i don't think we can like approve this you know like you need a better logo you know i can't for sure but it's just this whole flow chart is that what this would be what do you what do you call something like this what is this called flowchart i guess sort of designed to dazzle you yeah it's like baffling to figure out what it is like first of
all what are all those little color tubes those little ones those little cylinders these are data silos oh that's the universal they're all different colors there's purple ones what's in the purple data well that's prince that's where gate lives yeah it's all prince's information but so okay so that you know this this stuff all sort of got shut down right yeah like they're like okay we can't do this you know uh and then instead what ended up happening was like data naturally accumulated in different places you know that um you know like back then if you had been you know what they were trying to do is be like our proposal is that everyone carry a government mandated tracking device at all times like what do you guys think you know it'll make us safer you know and people are like no i don't think so you know but instead everyone ended up just carrying cell phones at all times which are tracking your location and reporting them into centralized repositories that government has access to you know and so uh you know this this sort of like oblique surveillance infrastructure ended up emerging and that was what you know people sort of knew about but you know we didn't really know and that's what uh snowden um revealed was like uh you know instead we don't have this instead it's like all of that all of those things are happening naturally you know your you know gate detection fingerprint you know like all this stuff is happening naturally it's ending up in these places and then you know governments are just going to those places and getting the information uh and then i think you know the next inflection point was really uh cambridge analytica um you know that was the moment where i think people were like explain that to people please uh chem analytica was um a uh a firm that was doing um like big data um using big data in order to um forecast and manipulate um people's
opinions uh and in particular they uh were involved in the 2016 election uh and it was sort of you know so it's like you know what stone revealed was prism which was um the the cooperation between the government and these places where data was naturally accumulating like facebook google et cetera and the phone company and uh cambridge analytica i think was the moment that people were like oh there's like also sort of like a private version of prison you know that's like not just governments but like the data is out there and other people who are motivated are using that against us you know um and i so i think you know in the beginning was sort of like oh this could be scary and then it was like um oh but you know we're just using these services and then people like oh wait the government is you know uh using the data that we're uh you know sending to these services and then people were like oh wait like anybody can use the data against us and they're like oh [ __ ] you know it's like i think things went from like um i don't really have anything to hide like wait a second these people can predict and influence how i'm going to vote based on what kind of genes i bought you know uh and you know and then you know sort of where we are today where it's like i think people are also beginning to realize that the companies themselves that are doing this kind of data collection are are also not necessarily acting in our best interests yeah for sure there there's just two there's also this weird thing that's happening with these companies that are gathering the data whether it's facebook or google or i don't think they ever set out to be what they are they started out like facebook for example we were talking about it before it was really just sort of like a social networking thing and this was in the early days it was a
business i don't think anybody ever thought it was going to be something that influences world elections in a staggering way like especially in other parts of the world you know where facebook becomes the sort of de facto messaging app on your phone when you get it i mean it has had massive impact on on politics on shaping culture on on i mean even genocide has been connected to facebook in in certain certain countries you know it's it's weird that this thing that is in i don't know how many different language facebook how many different languages does facebook operate under all of them i mean that this was just a social app it was from harvard right they were just connecting students together wasn't that initially what the the first iteration of it was yeah okay i mean i think you can say like no one anticipated that these things would be the significant um but i also think that there's you know i think ultimately like what we end up seeing again and again is that like bad business models produce bad technology you know that like the point you know what we were talking about before like the point you know mark zuckerberg did not create facebook because of his deep love of like social interactions like he did not have some like deep sense of like wanting to connect people and connect the world that's not his passion you know jeff bezos did not start amazon because of his deep love of books uh you know these companies are oriented around um profit you know they're they're trying to make money and and they you know they're they're subject to external demands as a result they have to like grow infinitely you know um which is insane but that's the expectation and you know so what we end up seeing is that uh the technology is not necessarily in our best interest because that's not what it was designed for to
begin with that is insane that companies are expected to grow infinitely yeah i mean they're literally expo what is your expectation to take over everything to have all the money and then one day and then more you know if yeah if we extrapolate we we anticipate we will have all the money there will be no other money if you keep going that's what has to happen how can you just grow infinitely that's bizarre yeah and that's why i mean you know the i think you know the silicon valley obsession with china is yeah you know big part of that where people they're just like well that's a lot of people there yes that's a lot of people that just keep growing yeah there was a fantastic uh thing that i was reading this morning god i wish i could remember what the source of it was but it was uh they were they're essentially talking about how strange it is that there are so many people that are so anti-human trafficking they're so pro-human rights they're so anti-slavery they're so all the the powerful values that we ascribe that we we we think of when we think of western civilization we think of all these beautiful values but then almost all of them rely on some form of slavery to get their electronics oh yeah and it was just uh eight grams of cobalt in your pocket over there yeah mined by actual child slaves someone had to stick us like literally they're they're getting it out of the ground digging into the dirt to get it out of the ground we were talking about on the podcast they were like is there a way that this could that is there a future that you could foresee where you could buy a phone that is guilt-free like if i buy a pair of shoes like i bought a pair of boots from my friend uh jocko's company he's got a company called origin they make handmade boots and like it's made in a factory in maine you can see a tour of the factory these guys are
stitching these things together and it's a real quality boot and i'm like i like that i could buy this i know where it came from i know i could i could see a video of the guys making it like this is a thing that i could feel like i am giving them money they're giving me a product like there's a this is a nice exchange it feels good i don't feel like that with a phone with a phone i have this like bizarre disconnect i try to pretend that i'm not buying something that's made in a factory where there's a [ __ ] net around it because so many people jump to their deaths that instead of trying to make things better and say we just we're going to put nets up catch these [ __ ] put them back to work yeah is there is it possible we could one that we would all get together and say hey enough of this [ __ ] will you make us a goddamn phone that doesn't make me feel like i'm supporting slavery yeah i mean i think you know you're asking me you know too much i think you're asking i think that's the same as asking like will civilization ever decide that it wants to that we collectively want to have like a sustain and sustainable way of living yeah um sane and sustainable and i hope the answer is yes i think a lot of us do you do right i do you don't want to buy a slave phone right yeah i mean i but okay so you know i feel like it's difficult to have this conversation having a conversation about capitalism right because like ultimately you know what we're talking about is like externalities that the prices of things don't incorporate their true cost uh you know that like you know we're destroying the planet for plastic trinkets and reality television uh you know like well we could have we could have the full conversation if you'd like let's let's start with phones though let's start with because when most people know the actual the the the
from the origin of the materials like how they're coming how they're getting out of the ground how they're getting into your phone how they're getting constructed how they're getting manufactured and and assembled by these poor people when most people hear about it they they they don't like it it makes them very uncomfortable but they just sort of go la la la they just plug their ears and keep going and buy the latest iphone 12 because it's it's cool it's new what would they do instead well if there was an option so like if you have a car that you know is being made by slaves or a car that's being made in detroit by union workers wouldn't you choose the car as long as they're both of equal quality i think a lot of people would feel good about their choice if they could buy something that well no these people are they're given a very good wage they have health insurance and they're taken care of they have a pension plan there's always good things that we would like to to have ourselves these workers get so you should probably buy that car why isn't there an option like that for a phone we looked at this thing called a fair phone yeah we're going over it you can't even [ __ ] buy in america like now america's no options for fair they only have them in like holland and a couple other european countries yeah i mean i i think uh yeah maybe it's good to you know start with the question of phones i i think if you really examined like most of the things in your everyday life um there is an apocalyptic aspect to them yes i mean even you know even agriculture you know it's just you know the sugar you put in your cup you know it's like i've been to the sugar beet harvest you know it's apocalyptic you know it's like uh you know so i think there's just like an aspect of civilization that we don't usually see or think about i don't know and it's a non-conscious
i mean not non-conscious but i mean conscious capitalism would be the idea that you are willing you want to make a profit but you only want to make a profit if everything works like the idea of me buying my shoes from origin like knowing okay these are the guys that make it this is how they make it i got this a good this makes me feel good i like this if there was that with everything like if you if you buy a home from a a guy who you know built the home like this is the man this is the con this is the the chief construction guy these are the carpenters this is the architect oh okay i get it this all makes sense yeah i mean and i think that's the image that a lot of uh companies try to project yeah i mean uh like you know even apple will say you know it's like designed by apple in california sure designed and i think that's the same as like the architect and the builders that you know you know but those materials are coming from somewhere that's true the wood is coming from somewhere yeah and uh you know it's not just wood there's like petrochemicals like you know that's that whole supply chain is uh apocalyptic and you're never gonna meet all those people um and so i you know i think sure they're i think it's you know it's difficult to be in that market like if you want to be in in the market of conscious capitalism or whatever because it's a market for lemons that it's because it's so easy to just put a green logo on whatever it is that you're creating uh and no one will ever see the back of the supply chain that's a sad statement about humans you know that where this is how i mean this is how we always do things if you've let us if you leave us alone if there's a way you know i mean privacy is so important when it comes to
communication with individuals and this is why you created signal but when you can sort of hide all the various elements that are involved in all these different process all these different things that we buy and use and then you know as you said they're apocalyptic which is a great way of describing it if you're i mean you're at the ground watching these kids pull coltan uh the ground in africa i mean you'd probably feel really sick about your cell phone yeah and um yeah but i don't think i think it's a little more complicated than to say that just like humans um are terrible or whatever no i don't think humans are terrible i think humans are great but i think if you put humans together and you give them this diffusion of responsibility that comes from a corporation and then you give them a mandate you have to make as much money as possible every single year and then you have shareholders and you have all all these different factors that will allow them to say well i just work for the company you know i'm not i'm not it's not my call you know i'm i just you know you got the guy carving up a stake saying listen i'm so sorry if we have to use slaves but look apple's worth five trillion dollars we've done a great job for our shareholders yeah yeah at the end of the line yeah follow all the way down to the beginning and you literally have slaves yeah i fundamentally agree and i think that that's um you know that's anytime you end up in a situation where um like most people do not have the agency that they would need in order to direct their life that they would the way that they would want you know direct their life so that we're living in a scene a sustainable way um that i yeah i think is a problem uh and i think that's the situation where now you know and honestly i feel like you know the stuff that we were talking
about before of you know people um you know sort of being mean online um is a reflection of that you know that um that's the power that people that's the only power power that people have you know it's like you know like you know the only thing that if the only thing you can do is call someone a name you're going to call them a name you know right and i think that it's like yeah it's unfortunate um but i think it is also unfortunate that most people have a little agency and control over the way that the world works that that's all they have to do and i guess you would say also that the people that do have power that are running these corporations don't take into account what it would be like to be the person at the bottom of the line to be the person that is there's no there's no discussion there's no like board meetings like hey guys what are we doing about slavery i'm sure that i'm sure that they do talk about that honestly but they've done nothing ah they've probably done something or they've probably done what they think of something but i think it's um even you know even the ceo of a company is someone who's just doing their job at the end of the day you know that they can't they don't have ultimate control and agency over how it is that a company performs because they are accountable to their shareholders that are accountable to the board right you know that it's like i think there is a tendency for people to look at what's happening particularly with technology today and think that it's the fault of the people um you know like the the leaders of these companies you know and you know like um i think it goes both ways you know uh slavo zijak um always talks about um when you look at the old political speeches um you know if you look at the fascist
leaders um you know they would give a speech and when there was a moment of applause um they would just sort of stand there and accept the applause because in their ideology uh they were responsible for the thing that people were applauding you know and if you watch the old communist leaders you know like when stalin would give a speech and he would say something there would be a moment of applause he would also applaud uh because in their ideology of historical materialism they were just agents of history they were just the tools of the inevitable uh it wasn't them you know they had just sort of been chosen as the agents of this thing that was an inevitable process and so they were applauding history you know and sometimes when i see like the ceos of tech companies give speeches and people applaud i kind of feel like they should also be applauding that it's not them you know that right technology has its own agency its own force that they're the tools of in a way that's a very interesting way of looking at it yeah they are the tools of it and at this point if we look at where we are in 2020 in this it seems inevitable it seems like there's just this unstoppable amount of momentum behind innovation and behind just the process of creating newer better technology and constantly putting it out and then dealing with the demand for that newer better technology and then competing with all the other people that are also putting out newer better and technologies and then yeah yeah look what we're doing and we're we are helping the demise of human beings because i feel and i've said this multiple times and i'm gonna say it again i think that we are the electronic caterpillar that will give way to the butterfly we are we don't know what we're doing we are putting together something that's going to take over
we're putting together some ultimate being some symbiotic connection between humans and and technology or literally an artificial version of life not even artificial a version of life constructed with silicone and wires and and things that we're making we're if we keep going the way we're going we're going to come up with a technology that is going to be ex machina it's going to it's going to pass the turing test and it's going to literally be something that's better than what we are a better version of a human being i think we're a ways away yeah we're a ways away but what how many ways 50 years the moment that i can put my hand under the like automatic sink thing and have the soap come out without like waving around you know like then i'll be worried you know but like that's simplistic sir how dare you well here's a good example you know the turing test is the turing test is if uh someone sat down with like an ex machina remember that the the jet was one of my all-time favorite movies where the coder is brought in to talk to the the woman he falls in love with the robot lady and she passes the turing test because he's he's in love with her i mean he really can't differentiate in his mind that is a woman that's not a robot who was it alan turing was the the gentleman's name alan turner alan turing that came up with the turing test you know he he was a gay man in england in the 1950s when it was illegal to be gay and they killed himself chemically castrated him because of that and he wound up killing himself that's only 70 years ago oh yeah yeah this is [ __ ] insane i mean just think that this this man back then was thinking there is going to be a time where we will have some kind of an a creation where we we imitate life the current life that we're
aware of where we're going to make a version of it that's going to be in this indistinguishable from the versions that are biological and that very guy by whatever twisted ideas of what human beings should or shouldn't do whatever expectations of culture at the time is forced to be chemically castrated winds up committing suicide just by the hand of humans [ __ ] strange man like really strange i mean uh worse than strange i mean that's oh yes horrible but i mean but so bizarre that this is the guy that comes up with the test of of like how do we know when something is like when it passes when you have an artificial person that passes for a person and then what kind of rights do we give this prayer what is this like what what what is it like if it has emotions what if it cries are you allowed to kick it you know like what do you do like that's but i made it i turned it on i could [ __ ] torture it but you can't it's screaming it's it's in agony don't do that yeah i mean i you know i don't think about this stuff that often but it is you know it's an empirical test right so it's like um it's a way to avoid having to define what consciousness is right which is kind of strange we're conscious beings and we don't actually really even know what that means right and so instead we have this empirical test where it's just sort of like well if you can't tell the difference um you know without being able to see it then uh then we'll just call that you know i think that is really a lot closer than we think i think that's i think that's 50 years i think that if everything goes well i think i'm going to be 103 year old man on my dying bed being taken care of by robots and i'm going to feel real [ __ ] up
about that i'm going to be like oh my god i can't believe this i'm going to leave and then all the people that i knew that are live they're the last of the people this is it the robots are going to take over they're not even going to be robots they're going to come up with some cool name for them yeah i mean i think that there's a lot of um most of what i see in like the artificial intelligence world right now is not really intelligence you know it's uh it's just matching you know it's like you show a model an image of 10 million cats and then you can show it an image and it will be like i predict that this is a cat and then you can show it an image of a truck and it'll be like i predicted this is not a cat and i don't i think there's one way of looking at it that's like well you just do that with enough things enough times and that's what intelligence is um but i kind of hope not and i you know the way that the way that it's being approached right now i think is also uh dangerous in a lot of ways because what we're doing is just feeding information about the world into these models and that just encodes the existing biases and problems with the world into the things that we're creating um and you know that i think has uh negative results but but i mean yes it's true like this ecosystem is moving and it's advancing whatever and i think the thing that i think is unfortunate is that like right now that ecosystem this sort of um like really capital driven investment uh startup sort of ecosystem has a monopoly on like groups of young people trying to do something ambitious together in the world and in the same way that i think it's unfortunate that like grad school has a monopoly on groups of people learning things together you know um and so part of what we're trying to do different with signal is it's a non-profit
so because we want to be for something other than profit and so we're trying to like explore a different way of like groups of people you know doing something mildly ambitious has anyone come along go i know it's a non-profit would you like to sell uh well you can't do that it's like the the structure there's nothing to sell there's no right it's kind of amazing though that you guys have figured out a way to create like basically a better version of imessage that you could use on android because one of the big complaints about android is the lack of any encrypted messaging services and just good messaging yeah they've just recently come out with their own version of imessage but it kind of sucks you can't do group chats there's a lot of things you can't do with it and it's it's encrypted but it's is the new me and i don't think it's rolled out everywhere too right it's not everywhere i don't think it's rolled out at all actually oh you could get a beta is that what it is yeah i don't i don't know what the right so it's like um that you know android so google for android makes an app called messages which is just the standard sms texting app and they put that on the phones that they make like the pixel and stuff like that you know and then there's the rest of the ecosystem you know there's like you know samsung devices huawei devices you know all this stuff um and it's sort of it depends you know what's what's on those things and so they've been trying to move from this very old standard called sms that you mentioned before to this newer thing called rcs um which actually i don't know what that stands for i think in my mind i always think of it as standing for too little too late but they're they're trying to move to that uh and uh so they're doing that on the the device the part of the ecosystem that they control which is the the devices that they make and sell and they're trying to
get other people on board as well and they originally rcs didn't have any facility for antenna encryption and uh they're actually using our stuff the signal protocol uh in the uh the new version of rcs that they're shipping so i think they've announced that but i don't know if it's if it's on or not i have two bones to pick with you guys yeah two things that i don't necessarily like one when i downloaded signal and i joined basically everyone that i'm friends with who was also on signal got a message that i'm on signal so you ratted me out you ratted me out to all these people that are in my contact list why do you want it to be difficult for people to communicate with you privately well me personally because there's a lot of people that have my phone number that i wish didn't have my phone number and all of a sudden they got a message from me that i'm on signal yeah and then they send me a message hey i'd like this from you i want you to do that for me how about calling me about this i got a project so i just wish he didn't like rap me out i wish there was like a way that you could say do you want everyone to know that you just joined signal yes or no i would say no another one those little dot dots the ellipsis yeah yeah can you shut that off because i don't want anybody to know that i'm responding to a text turn it off can you turn that off oh okay so it's in the settings yeah privacy settings typing indicators you can turn off you can turn off that's a big problem with imessage people get mad at you like if you see the dot dot dots and then there's no message like hey you were going to respond and then you didn't like why don't you just relax just go about your life and pretend that i didn't text you back yet because i will but it's not like the dot dot dots like people go it's coming here comes the message and then there's no message yeah you can turn that off you can also
turn off read receipts so people don't even know if you've read their message yes that's good too yeah yeah my friend sagar has it set up so that if you uh he texts you you have 30 minutes [ __ ] and then they all disappear all the messages disappear yeah yeah that's that's kind of sweet i like that yeah with the um like the discovery question of like can you don't want people to know that you're on signal um it's kind of so we're working on it but it's it's a more difficult problem than you might imagine because um you want some people to know that you're on you know it's like you want stop text so you want nobody to know well me personally i i have a unique set of problems that comes with uh anything that i do like with messaging and stuff it's like i just there's two i've known too many people i've changed my number once a year it's just i have and i have multiple phone numbers yeah i got a lot of problems yeah but this is just a unique problem with me that it's like all of a sudden i'm getting like how the [ __ ] does he know and then i had to ask someone to go oh no when you sign up it sends everybody on your contact list that's on signal a message that says you're on signal yeah oh well we don't send that actually uh just as a i know you don't care about the uh we don't actually know who your contacts are you know signal does though the app does that the app on your phone does and it doesn't even send a message to those people it's just that those people know that you're on the signal they those people know your phone number and that app now knows that that phone number is on signal did you do that just to get more people to use signal was it an idea of the the reason why like why when you sign up for signal does it send all the other people in your contact list on
signal a message a lot of people like it so a lot of people like like knowing who that they can communicate with and so uh we're trying to make so and the other thing is like we try to square the actual technology with the way that it appears to work to people right so like right now with most technology it seems like you know you send a message and the person who can see it is the person you receive you sent the message to you know the entire recipient you know and that's not how it actually works um and so like a lot of what we're trying to do is actually just square the way the technology actually works with what it is that people perceive and so like fundamentally right now you know signal is based on phone numbers if you register with your phone number like some people are going to know that they can contact you on signal it's very difficult to make it so that they can't you know that like if we if we didn't do that you know they could hit the compose button and see just that they could send you a message you know they would just see you in the list of contacts that they can send messages to you know and then if we like didn't display that like they could just try and send you a message and see whether like a message goes through you know like it's always possible to like detect whether it is that you're on signal the way that things are currently designed it's interesting also how it works so much differently with android than it does with imessage like with android it'll also send it as an sms i notice that uh i can use signal as my main messaging app on android and it'll send sms or it'll send a signal message it doesn't do that with uh i with iphones yeah apple doesn't let you yeah i found that pretty interesting because i tried to send people messages i thought it would just send it as an sms and it didn't we would if we could but apple just sent it into the ethernet
it doesn't allow it interesting because apple's scared of you say it say it they're [ __ ] scared no i mean they should be apple is the better version of what they've got how about that uh i agree but uh yeah i mean they they have a much more complicated answer but maybe you could distill it down to that you guys need to just develop your own version of airdrop and then no one will need apple ever again that's what's holding people back like a universal airdrop airdrop keeps a lot of [ __ ] people on apple you think it's the best you make a video like a long video like a couple minutes long and you can just airdrop it to me whereas if you text it to me especially if i have an android phone oh it becomes this disgusting version sample it looks terrible yeah no that's true that's true yeah photographs are not too bad i think that it does it down sample photographs as well yeah but not too bad yeah it's like you could look at it it looks like a good photograph but video is just god awful it's embarrassing when someone sends you a video and you have it on an android phone you're like what the [ __ ] did you send me this is terrible what did you take this with a flip phone from the 90s that's so bad but i mean a lot of that is like uh i think the reason that that the the reason why it is that way is is kind of interesting to me which is you know it's like these are um protocol you know it's like when you're just using a normal sms message on android you know uh that was like this agreement that phone carriers made with each other in like you know whatever two no before that you know 96 yeah exactly you know and then have they've been unable to change the way that it works since then because um you have to get everyone to agree right and is apple holding back some sort of a universal standard because if they did have a universal
standard then everyone would have this option to use you could use a samsung phone or a google phone you could use anything and everybody would be able to message you clearly without a problem like one of the things that holds people back is if you switch from an iphone to an android phone you lose all those eye messages yeah yeah yeah they're probably doing that intentionally because they [ __ ] weasels they want people to continue don't they have enough money like jesus christ that's never enough that's that that is the problem right yeah and i think i mean it's like i think the thing that everyone's worried about right now with apple is like you know apple um you know what i said before if like bad business models produce bad technology um you know thus far apple's business model is much better than you know google or facebook or amazon or you know like their their business is predicated on selling phones selling hardware you know and that means that they can think a little bit more thoughtfully about the way that their software works than other people and i think what people are concerned about is that the that that business model is going to change you know that they've they're you know approaching an asymptote of how many phones that they can sell and so now they're looking at like software you know they're like what if we had our own search engine what if we had you know our own thing what if we had yeah you know and the moment that that starts to happen then they're sort of you know moving in the direction of the rest of big tech uh which you know who knows how they do it but that that's what i think people are concerned they've done a better job at protecting your privacy though in terms of like particularly like apple maps like the map app is far superior in terms of
sharing your information than say like the google maps but the argument you could make is that google maps is a superior product because they share that information like google maps is also waze now right like they bought waze which is fantastic let's you know where the cops are you know there's an accident up ahead all kinds of [ __ ] right but apple maps was not that good it's i use it because i like the ethic behind it i like their idea behind it they they delete all the information after you make you know if you go to a destination it's not saving it sending it to a server and making sure it knows like you know what was there and what wasn't there and how well you'd you traveled and sharing information they're not doing that they're not sharing your information right um i'm we don't know you know it's like i'm sure that they have a policy uh i haven't read the policy and maybe the policy says that um but supposedly so yeah you know but and you're also sort of you're still in the in the world of like um trying to make computers secure right you know it's like there's probably data the data is probably accumulating somewhere and maybe people can compromise those places you know um we don't know but i and and for sure the the intent behind this offer that they have constructed i think has been much better than a lot of the other players in big tech i think the concern is just that as that software becomes a larger part of their bottom line that that might change i wonder if they can figure out a way to have an i don't give a [ __ ] phone or i care phone like you want to have an i don't give a [ __ ] phone this phone is like who knows who's making it but look it's really good it's got a 100 megapixel camera and all this jazz and uh 5 000 milliamp battery and then you've got an icare phone and like here phone it's like like an iphone 10.
but what is what's the what's different about the eye care phone the i care phone you get like a clear line of distinction you get you get a real clear path this is where we got our materials these are the people that are making it this is how much they're getting paid their everyone is unionized they're all getting health care this is they all have 401k plans this is yeah it costs a little bit more and it's not as good if you if you truly encapsulated all of the social costs with producing that phone i think would cost more than a little bit more how much more do you think we could i think some astronomical number you know that it's like the you know it's like it's not like i'm sure apple would prefer not to have child slaves mining cobalt for the batteries that are in their fund is that a thing you can say when a company's worth as much as most countries like they have so much cash yeah can you really say that they they would rather not use slaves no i'm just imagining i'm sure that like at the border i have only have 14 trillion what am i going to do what am i going to do i need slaves i need someone to dig the the coal tanks what would i do if i was them well first of all i could never beat them it would never work uh but if i was i would say hey um why don't we open up a factory in america and why don't we you gotta mind the the cobalt is in america why don't right why don't we get all of our cobalt from recycled phones is that possible because that is going to recycle them that's a good question i think that's what the fair phone is trying to do right isn't aren't they using all recycled materials yeah i mean i don't any image i've seen of electronic recycling is equally apocalyptic you know there's just piles of [ __ ] like in some lake in china where people are you're bumming me out man how about we do but i think if you were the ceo of apple
and you were like this is a priority we're going to spend you know however many trillions of dollars it takes to do this um your shareholders go hey [ __ ] face you're fired yeah out yeah exactly yeah yeah you would have to be the grand puba of apple you'd have to be the ultimate ruler but it's not like um even then if you were just like you know i'm willing to take the hit you know uh i'm gonna do no one can oust me or whatever i'm the the grand pub you know yeah then it's like your share price plummets which means that um your employee retention plummets because those people are also working for the equity right so it's like other parking lessons and then they get pushed away by these other companies like dirty companies come and steal your clean employees this is what apple's website says now it says they're committed to one day sourcing 100 okay that's completely recycled every bit as advanced committed to one day sourcing one day we're planning on the year 30 000 i mean you know it's like i don't they're not 100 they're not like sitting around twirling their mustaches you know what i mean it's just like everyone likes good things and not bad things maybe they are let me read that again jamie this is um a 100 recyclable renewable materials across all of our products and packaging because making doesn't have to mean taking from the planet oh come on you guys it's like nike it's the same thing too right they're all committed to black lives matter and all these social justice causes and they're using slave labor too you know aren't they in china they're using slave labor to make nikes probably so go back to that um that thing what are they trying to do what's they have like this real i remember seeing a robot they have that can like take the planet right out of the box the pieces out of it at a very fast
rate than like probably human hands can okay so that's why i was trying to dig through here if i found that well that would be good i think that's the robot that's the the peace taking robot this is daisy don't name her the neighbor got a problem there you go 20 30. entirely clean energy which isn't quite as it's you know 2030 means transitioning hundreds of our manufacturing suppliers to 100 renewable sources of electricity well that's interesting if they can actually do that 100 percent resource use all the if they can figure out a way to do that and to have recyclable and have all renewable electricity whether it's wind or solar if they can really figure out how to do that i think that would be pretty amazing but who's going to put it together are they going to still use slaves to put it together i mean i i guess the people that are working at foxconn are technically slaves but would you want your child to work there you know yeah i mean i think you can say that about a lot of the aspects of our economy though you know would who would willingly go into a coal mine yes right yeah you know that there's there's some element of coercion to a lot of what keeps the world spinning right and that's the when you get into these insidious arguments about uh or conversations about conspiracies like conspiracies to keep people impoverished they're like well why would you want to keep people impoverished well who who's going to work in the coal mines you're not going to get wealthy highly educated people to work in the coal mines you need someone to work in the coal mines so what do you do what you do is you don't you don't help anybody get out of these situations so you'll always have the ability to draw from these impoverished communities these poor people who live in appalachia
or where wherever their coal miners are coming from like there's not a whole lot of ways out like i have a friend who came from kentucky and he's like the way he described to me was man you've never seen poverty like that like people don't want to concentrate on those people because it's not as glamorous as some other forms of poverty goes but those communities are so poor like yeah 40 million americans right yeah americans are living in poverty yeah um i mean i don't know if that conspiracy is accurate but that's the one that people always want to draw from right they always want to i mean i don't think you need a conspiracy you know you just you have you have poor people structural forces yeah yeah yeah um that's that's why it's rare that a company comes along and has a business plan like signal where they're like we're gonna be non-profit we're going to create something that we think is of extreme value to human beings just to to civilization in general the ability to communicate anonymously or or at least privately but this is uh it's a very rare thing that you guys have done and we decided to do this and to do it in a non-profit way like what what was the decision that led up to that and then was there any how many people were involved now um yeah okay well now there's uh you know 20 something people uh which do you think that's a lot or a little um i think that's a little okay yeah yeah i think you know it's always interesting talking to people like a lot of times i'll um i'll meet somebody they're like oh yeah you're the you're the person who did like signal or something like oh yeah yeah like okay cool what are you doing now you know i'm like oh i'm still working on signal you know they're like oh what is there like another signal that you're going to do you're going to do like signal 2 or like i think it's hard for people to understand that there's that software's
never finished you know that there's this which is something that i really envy about like the kind of creative work that someone like you does you know that like imd artists musicians writers poets painters um you know people who can create something and be done you know that like you can record an album today and 20 years later you can listen to that album and yeah it'll be just good you know it's like uh software is never finished and if you stop it'll just like float away like dandelion what happens if you stop because software is not um it's very hard to explain this it's not um it doesn't exist in isolation it's a part of the ecosystem of of like all software and that ecosystem is moving and it's moving really fast you know there's a lot of money behind it a lot of energy in in it and if you aren't moving with it it will just you know stop working uh and also it's like you know uh a project like this is not just the software that runs on your phone but the service of like you know moving the messages around on the internet and that requires a little bit of care and attention and if you're not doing that then it will dissipate and if you're doing something non-profit the way you're doing it how do you pay everybody like how does it work yeah well okay so you know the history of this was um i think before the internet really took over our lives in the way that it has there were the kind of um social spaces for people to experiment with different ideas outside of the context of their everyday lives you know like art projects punk rendezvous experimental gatherings um uh the embers of art movements you know that uh these spaces existed and were things that i found myself in and a part of and they were like important to me in my life you look like a dude go to
burning man uh actually i i i'm not a dude that goes to prince [Laughter] maybe you're missing it maybe i i've been once i went in yeah 2000 i think yeah uh and uh early adopter well it's funny because at the time that i want people like oh man it's not like you used to be what yeah it's like and now people are like if you've been i was like i don't want some 2000 like whoa wow that's when it was like the real deal i don't think so uh it's one of those things where it's like you know there's like day one and then on day two they're like it's not like day one yeah like just gets over of course uh but uh yeah i don't know those things those spaces were important to me and like an important part of my life and as more of our life started to be taken over by technology you know me and my friends felt like those spaces were missing online you know and so we wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to create spaces like that and there had been a history of people thinking about um cryptography in particular and uh and which is kind of funny in hindsight right so in the like 80s so the history of cryptography is actually not long like uh at least in outside of the military you know uh and you know it really in starts in the 70s um and uh there were some really important things that that happened then and in the 80s there was this person who was just sort of this lone maniac who was like writing a bunch of papers about cryptography during a time when it wasn't wasn't actually that relevant because there was no internet the you know the the applications for these things were harder to imagine um and then in the late 80s there was um this guy who wrote a who was a retired engineer who discovered the papers that this maniac david chom had been writing and was really is he doing this in
isolation or was he a part of a project or anything no i think david shawn was um i think he's an academic i'm actually i'm actually i'm embarrassed that i don't know but uh he um he did a lot of the the notable work um on using the the primitives that had had already been developed and um he had a lot of interesting ideas and there's this guy who was retired engineer his name was tim may uh who was kind of a weird character and he found these papers by david chom was really enchanted by um what they could represent for a future and he wanted to write like a sci-fi novel about that was sort of predicated on a world where cryptography existed and there was a future where the internet was developed and so he wrote some notes about this novel uh and he he titled the notes the crypto anarchy manifesto and he published the notes online and people got really into the notes and then he started a mailing list in the early 90s called the cypherpunks mailing list and all these people started you know joined the mailing list and they started communicating about you know what the future was going to be like and how you know they needed to develop cryptography to live their you know cryptoanarchy future uh and um at the time uh it's strange to think about now but cryptography was uh somewhat illegal it was it was regulated as a munition really yeah so if you wrote a little bit of crypto code and you sent it to your friend in canada that was the same as like shipping stinger missiles across the border to canada wow so did people actually go to jail for cryptography uh there were like some high profile legal cases um nobody i don't know of any situations where people were like tracked down as like munitions dealers or whatever but it really um hampered what people were capable of doing uh so people got really creative
there's some people who wrote some crypto uh software called pretty good privacy pgp and they uh they printed it in a book like a mit press book in a machine readable font uh and then they're like this is speech you know this is a book you know it's like i have my first amendment right to like print this book and to distribute it and then they like shipped the books to like canada and other countries and stuff and then people in those places scanned it back in uh to computers and they were able to make the case that they were legally allowed to do this because of you know their first memorize and people uh other people moved to anguilla and started like writing coding anguilla and like shipping around the world there were a lot of people who were fervently interested why anguilla uh because it's close to the united states and uh there were no laws there about producing photography so uh i think i know something people think they have like three cases of covid there ever oh really yeah it's a really interesting place yeah i used to work down there really you know okay international traffic and arms regulation it's a united states regulatory regime to restrict and control the export of defense and military-related technologies to safeguard u.s national security and further u.s foreign policy objectives aye tyre yeah they were closed and gila was closed until like november they wouldn't let anybody in and yeah if you want to go there they have like i was reading all these crazy restrictions you have to get covet tested and you have to apply and and then when you get there they test you when you get there because they've keeping it real they've had no deaths yeah yeah yeah that's cool yeah i like angular it's a it's a interesting place yeah this is what i was reading they're inviting companies to come move here
like come work here oh yeah come we'll test the [ __ ] out of you and you can't go anywhere but come here it's beautiful it is beautiful i used to work on boats down there yeah yeah what'd you do on boats uh i was like really um i don't know i i for a while was like really into sailing and uh i had a commercial license i was moving boats around and stuff but my parents lived in a sailboat for a while oh really yeah yeah they just decided to just check out and and uh this was like i want to say like early 2000s somewhere around them they just lived on a sailboat for a few years so my mom got tired of it they got around the welder uh they went they were in the bahamas yeah they were uh they were all around like that part of the world and they they were in california for a little while on their boat you know they just they just decided like let's just live on a boat for a while yeah it's pretty crazy i i i discovered sailing by accident where i was like um working on a project with a friend in the early 2000s and we were looking on craigslist for something unrelated and we saw a boat that was for sale for four thousand dollars and i thought a boat was like a million dollars or something i was just like why the sailboats are fourth and this is just some listing there's probably even cheaper boats you know uh and so we got really into it we discovered that you can go to any america any uh marina in north america and get a boat for free you know that like every marina has a lean sale dock on it where people have stopped paying their slip fees and the boats are just derelict and abandoned and they've you know put it on these docks really yeah you get a boat for free yeah they have an auction uh there's usually like a minimum bid of you know 50 bucks or whatever you know and most times it doesn't get bid on and they chop the boat up and
uh throw it away really and if you show a functional boat well functional oh that's the problem right you know you got to maintain the [ __ ] out of boats yeah so you know if you put some work into it though you can get it going and uh so we started doing that we were like you know getting both fixing them up sailing as far as we could and then uh eventually i got a commercial license and started sailing other people's boats wow all this on a whim of how much does a boat cost you can get a boat for four grand holy [ __ ] next thing you know you're working on boats yeah yeah i mean i was it's a really it's a whole world you know it's just like you know finding that link on craigslist was like you know opening a door to another reality right where it's like yeah because it's pretty amazing you know uh you know me and some friends used to sail around the caribbean and um you know the the feeling of like you know you pull up an anchor and then you sail like you know 500 miles to see another country or whatever and you get there and you drop the anchor and you're just like we it was just the wind yeah the wind that took you know like there was no engine there was no fuel it's just the wind you know when you catch fish and you know it's just like if you want to go real old school you got to use one of them what are those [ __ ] sex stances of course do you use one of those no you didn't did you really i was like really into like you know no electronics like it's just complicated you know they're expensive or whatever so we had a taf rail log you see one of those things it's like a little uh propeller on a string uh that you connect to a gauge and as it turns the gauge keeps track of how far you've traveled uh what yeah so it's like a propeller on a string so it's just a thing that turns a string at a constant rate depending on how fast you're moving so uh so we can gauge how much distance distance you've
traveled so are there is a string marked no no no like it's just a constant length that's it's always spinning and it's always turning the gauge and then it reads a number so it says so it's just like the island the number of how many nautical miles you've traveled and so then you're just like okay well we started here and then we headed you know on this heading and you know we did that and we traveled 10 months we must be here you know and then you know once a day you can take a a site with your sextet and then you can you know do some dead reckoning with the compass and wow dude you went old school yeah i once had a job actually who did you do this with just friends yeah and you got to have some [ __ ] committed friends because like the friends had to be you know you gotta be on the same page because they could be like hey man let's get a [ __ ] gps you guys are [ __ ] i don't want to die i'm not gonna get eaten by a shark how much food do we have people die out here man this is the ocean we didn't really have any money so it was like you know it wasn't like uh much of a decision i mean we you know it's like put things to perspective like you know we took a trip to uh through the caribbean once from florida the way that we got to florida was like riding freight trains to the you know we like hopped trains together you know it's like this was like a low low budget uh traveling you guys were hobos no but you know that's a hobo move it was low bagger for sure uh but like yeah i was i was also like uh just weirdly ideological about it where like um i had a job once in a caribbean that was like um i was almost like a camp counselor basically where there was this camp that was like a sailing camp but it was like 13 teenagers mostly from north america showed up in st martin and then got on a boat with me and another woman my age and we were like the adults and then it was just like we sailed from
st martin to trinidad over the course of six weeks with these like 13 kids on a 50-foot sailboat who left their kids with you that's what i want to know man it was like is this you oh yeah we made a uh me and my friends made a video called hold fast that was trying to demystify sailing bro you've been rocking this wacky hair for a long time [Laughter] you know pandemic wow uh uh well you had tornadoes out there yeah you caught fish yeah yeah so you lived off the fish that you caught basically yeah fish [ __ ] seaweed wow seaweed yeah so when you prepare seaweed what do you do you boil it you're gonna sharpen your [ __ ] knife son i know that's ridiculous what are you using a pencil to try to kill that poor fish this whole video is embarrassing but uh so thank you for that because you kind of didn't know what you were doing and here's you with uh you're what are you doing here you're mapping out where you're at dead reckoning yeah dead reckoning that position was 50 miles off 50 miles off so where you thought you were versus where you actually were was 50 miles difference yeah and you're going how many miles an hour very slow if you're doing really well you know you're making five knots five nautical miles an hour five miles an hour jesus christ so you're walking you're basically walking on the ocean yeah yeah not walking slow going but you never stop that's the thing you can sail all night you can just keep going you know you're a light jog you're jogging on the ocean yeah anyway i was retiring with these kids we're like we had like a nice boat and i just disabled all of the electronics and i like disabled the electric uh anchor windlass how long was this boat how long was this boat uh this was 50 feet 50 feet with 14 kids you said i think 13. 50 is a big boat that's
actually a big boat yeah but it doesn't seem like a lot of room for all these kids yeah people are like sleeping on the deck and in the cockpit oh my god that's insane did you feel weird that you mean you're responsible for their food you're responsible for making sure they don't fight with each other yeah i mean i i actually enjoyed it i think it was fun yeah and what seemed like it like so yeah yeah i have to make it work there's no other solution you're on this boat with these kids that's true do you still keep in touch with those kids no that was sort of like pre social media right so not really they're going to reach out to you now you know man i remember that that was [ __ ] crazy can't believe my parents left me with you i can't believe they did either man so did you have to sign any paperwork or anything like how did you take care of these kids i'm sure i had to sign something i don't remember you don't remember yeah wow was there any time where you were like halfway into this trip you're like what have i signed up for oh sure all the time yeah but i was i you know i i never really been in a situation like that either and uh who has i don't know it's like i don't even have siblings you know like it's like oh really yeah so but i i and i was pretty you know it was interesting i feel like i learned a lot and it was um but i was pretty like um tyrannical in a lot of ways you know where and but in a way that i was trying to like encourage it was it was fun to see particularly teenagers who had like a really sort of north american affect about how to be um just like let all of that go over a few weeks you know on the ocean where it's just like you know it's just us we're here there's nobody else watching um you know we're sleeping next to each other you know it's like the kids just getting comfortable with um themselves you know and you know i
would try and like so i was like um i am uh really into rock paper scissors uh how intuit are you i'm i'm undefeated uh it's not possible so whenever they wanted anything i would be like all right rock paper scissors you know they were like can we like do this thing and be like all right we'll do rock paper scissors if you win you can do this thing if i win and then i would like pick the thing that was like their sort of deepest fear you know it's like the really shy person had to like write a haiku about every day and then read it aloud at dinner you know like the you know the person who was like really into like um having like a manicure like wasn't allowed to shave her legs for the rest of the you know like that kind of thing wow and so then by the end of it it was just like you know everyone had lost you know everyone was like reading the haiku at dinner and do you know how are you so good at rock paper scissors it's just you know skill muscle intuition intuition can we play right now you want to play yes but i only play for steaks okay what do you want to play for okay how about uh if i win i do the programming on your show for a week no that's worth a lot of money you can [ __ ] off what kind of money what do you think that's what i'm saying like the ads or whatever like programming like who's going to be honest that's not possible we're booked up months and months in advance we're so confident now just now that's ridiculous to flip a coin on that there's there's no chance i mean what what would because then you'd make me have conversa listen the whole reason why this show works is because i talk to people that i want to talk to that's why it works yeah the only way something to play this game that's not a risk that's just one week no that's abandoning the show one week of your life no you could bring
some [ __ ] on here that i want to talk to and then i'm like what am i doing no impossible all right well do you think that there's something of equivalent value no there's nothing that's nothing that i know there's nothing that you could give me that would be worth a week of programming on the show what are you going to give me you'd have you'd have to give me a spectacular amount of money i sent you a it would be like but i wouldn't but that's the only way i would like the only way like if you ever put a monetary equivalent to that it would have to be a spectacular amount of money for me to let someone else program the show i've never let anybody do that before not even one day no that was the big one of the big things about doing this show on spotify they could have no impact at all on who gets on no suggestions no nothing the only way it works what was up with that dude in the suit outside with the clipboard that was telling me from spotify oh he's from the government he's the cia there's no one out there he's joking but the only way the show works i think the way it works is i have to be interested in talking to the people that's it so it's it has to be i get a i've like all these suggestions for guests i go oh that kind of seems cool oh that might be what if i let me read up on this what if it's like for a week i give you the list of suggestions no no no input no but i don't know no not that's that's a ridiculous stand right okay okay all right impossible in any case how about five bucks no no no it's got to be come on man 20 bucks 20 bucks i got 20 bucks in my pocket money is off the table money's off the table get that all right it sounds like someone's scared to lose at rock paper scissors it sounds like someone else is scared to lose no you're asking me for something that's ridiculous you don't have anything you don't have anything that's worth a week of programming on this show
you don't have it that's rough it doesn't exist that's rough no it doesn't it literally doesn't exist like there's nothing like you don't there's nothing that you can have that you could offer me that i couldn't by myself i'll make you i'll make i'll i'll know that'll be interesting no enjoy talking with you you can't no all right fine but that doesn't do anything for me that does something for you that does zero you would have if you went you would name your state i don't have a stake there's nothing i want from you that what you ask for me is a crazy thing yeah we can't play rock paper scissors now huh interesting anyway we were talking about something else before all of this we were talking about uh crypto sailing with children sailing with children well first we were talking about anguilla yes and the fact that yeah yeah so how did you learn how to do all this stuff was it trial by fire were you learning how to use all this so i mean i don't call it ancient equipment but mechanical equipment to figure out yeah yeah secret is to begin just start yeah i mean so sexton where the [ __ ] does one learn how to operate a sextant and then navigate in the ocean uh yeah just i would you know i started uh you know me and friends got a boat and um we started fixing it up and making a lot of mistakes and then you know we started taking some trips and then i lost yeah i got lost at lunch i took a solo trip from san francisco to mexico and back uh on a little 27-foot boat with no engine and whoa how long did that take a few months yeah and the way you did it did you stay close so i can see the there's the shore so if everything [ __ ] up i can kind of swim yeah well no you can't swim uh i learned that lesson too no why it's um i mean the closest i ever came to death in my life uh was just in the bay in the san francisco bay i was on a boat that capsized and um i was
probably 2000 yards away from shore and uh i almost drowned and i i mean i didn't make it to shore and um yeah it's just the water so cold you know you didn't make it to shore no yeah it's a long story i was like um i a friend of mine was living in san francisco and he wanted to learn how to sail and i was like you know what you should do is you should get like a little boat like a little sailing thing you know and then you can just anchor it like off the shore in this area that no one cares about and you know you can sort of experiment with this little boat and so he started looking on craigslist and he found this photos for sale for 500 bucks up in uh up in the north bay and uh every time we called the phone number we got an answering machine that was like hello you've reached dr ken thompson honorary i'm only able to take your call you know and we were like what is that like honorary fake doctor is he like a judge you know like what is it yeah and so finally we got in touch with this guy we go up there and it's the kind of situation where like we pull up and there's like the trailer that the boat's supposed to go on and it's just full of scrap metal and you know and you know this guy comes out he's like oh yeah this is the trailer um we were gonna do a metal run but if you want the boat you know we'll take the the metal off you know and we're like okay you know and he's like taking us around he's like okay the mast is over here and it's like under some leaves and you know it's like and then you know the the hole is in the water here in and it's he has like a dock behind his house and the tide is all the way out so they're both just sitting in the mud you know and i'm like well how do we get this out of here he's like oh you'd have to come back at a different time uh you know and then you take it over there and we're like you told us to come now like at this time you know what anyway so we go through all of this thing you know and any and you know my friend who knows nothing about votes it's like all right moxie like what do
you think you know should i get this and i was like okay oh and we were like so what's you know doctor of what he's like oh self-declared you know we're like oh okay he's a self-declared doctor honorary self-declared doctor you can do that i guess that why not it's just an answer jaime yes doctor yes i think we should become doctors i just became one [Laughter] i tried that for a while actually yeah did you really yeah i don't know i mean i never went to college though did hunters thompson ever get an honorary degree or did he just call himself dr hunter's thompson because he was calling himself doctor same trick same thing conrad thompson edward bernanke did this legally well bill cosby became a doctor for a little bit they took it back though that's you know he [ __ ] up yeah yeah yeah they take back your fake doctor degree yeah so this guy was like you know my friend's like what do you think maxine and i'm like all right dr ken i would have to consider i'm not sure that i would do it but i would consider taking this boat for free i'd have to think about it but i would consider that you know and he's like i might be a minimal to that you know so we've gone from like you know 500 to free uh and so we got this boat you know and it was something we had to deal with the metal and all stuff we got the boat and um we were just trying to do like a little um we're just trying to anchor it did you bring life vests yeah i was wearing a uh a pfd yeah at a type 2 pfd and um uh we took it we took it to this boat ramp and it was the end of the day and the wind was blowing kind of hard and the conditions weren't that good but i was like we're just doing this little thing this little maneuver and we were in two boats i built this little wooden uh rowing boat and my friend was going to go out in that with one anchor and i was going to sail out yeah out of uh plywood stitching glue and but it you know not the sturdiest
vessel so uh and so you know he's gonna go out in this little row boat and i was gonna sail out this uh this little catamaran and we had two anchors and we're gonna anchor and we're gonna get in the row boat and roll back and um it seemed a little windy and you know i got in the boat first and i got out around this pier and was hit by the full force of the wind and realized that it was blowing like 20 knots was way way too much for what we were trying to do but i had mis-rigged part of the boat so it took me a while to get it turned around and by the time i got it turned around my friend had rode out around the pier and he got hit by the force of the wind and just got blown out into the bay so he's rowing directly into the wind and moving backwards oh [ __ ] from the front of the bay and i was like [ __ ] and i'm on this little hobie cat and it was moving so fast like it was way too windy to be sailing this thing i've got just my clothes on i don't have a wetsuit on or anything like that i have a life jacket and just my clothes and we don't have a radio you know we're unprepared it's starting to get dark we don't have a light and i'm sailing back and forth trying to like help my friend uh and it got to the point where i was like all right i'm just gonna tack over i'm gonna sail up uh to this boat that was called the sea laos sail up to the sea laos i'm going to get my friend off of it we're just going to abandon it and then we're going to sail this hobie cat back if we can and so i go to turn around and right as i'm turning around a gust of wind hit the boat and capsized it before i could even know that it was you know just it's just like you just it's one moment you're on the boat in the next moment you're in the water you know and the water is like 50 degrees um like super uh it like is a shock you know it hits you and the boat was a little messed up in a way where it i couldn't write it uh it had
capsized and then the whole it capsized all the way and then sank and so it was floating like [ __ ] like you know three feet under water basically um and so i'm in the water but i'm like still i'm like a little bit out of the water but like in the water and you know i had a cell phone that just immediately was busted um and i look at my friend and he's a ways away now and he didn't see me and i was you know yelling as loud as i could but the wind is blowing 20 knots and it just you know just you can't hear each other you know just takes your takes your voice away and um he just i mean i was screaming i was waving he wasn't wearing his glasses uh and he just very slowly rode away oh my god and so then i was just like floating there i was starting to get dark um you know he rode away did he notice that your boated cap's eyes no he didn't even see me he he thought that i just sailed somewhere else you know because in his mind he was i was the person with the experience you still talk to this dude yeah all the time yeah i feel like you [ __ ] i don't blame him in his mind he was the person that was in trouble right you know and i understand and he thought i just sailed somewhere else but that's crazy yeah sailed out of vision yeah and then you know it basically got dark i could see the shore i wasn't far away there's nobody on shore there's nobody around and um the wind was blowing directly offshore so you have to swim you know swim into the wind uh and into the wind wave and all that stuff and um eventually i tried swimming and i swam you know directly upwind and i was because i was i was like okay like if i get separated from this boat and i don't make it to shore then i'm definitely dead you know like there's just no saving me uh so i was trying to go directly upwind so that if i felt like i couldn't make it i would float back down when it hit
the boat again and so i tried you know i swam for probably like 20 minutes upwind and made no progress it didn't feel like any progress you know my you know in 50 degrees you have 30 to 60 minutes before you black out my arms were just you know it's like i consider myself a strong swimmer like i free dive you know stuff and i just you know it's like you read these stories about uh how people die you know of just like they succumb to hypothermia on a local hike or they drown in the bay you know and the story is always like well timmy was a strong swimmer but and you're like really was timmy really a strong swimmer because he drowned in the bed you know and like floating there you know it just all came to me i'm like wow this is how this happens you know you just make a series of pretty dumb small decisions until you find yourself like floating in the dark in the bay there's no one around oh [ __ ] and it's a really slow process too you know it's like it's not like you know you just come to terms with the idea that like you're not gonna make it and it's not it's not sudden it's not like someone shot you or you got hit by a bus or something like that it's like this hour-long thing that you're getting dragged through all alone and you and you realize like no one will ever even know what this was you know how this happened and you think about all the people like joshua slocum jim gray people who are lost at sea and you realize they all had this thing that they went through you know this hour-long ordeal of just floating alone and no one will even ever know what that was or what that was like you know and uh eventually i realized i was going to make it short i looked back the boat was like way far away from me i started you know drifting back towards it i was still trying to swim i i realized at some point that i wasn't going to hit it i wasn't going to hit the boat on the way back downwind and i had to just give it all that i had to
try to connect with the boat you know to stop myself from getting blown past it and in that moment too you realize that like uncertainty is the most unendurable condition you know that like you imagine yourself making it to shore and relaxing you know just knowing that it's resolved right and in that moment of like i might not make it back to this boat you're you're like tempted to give up because it's the same resolution you know it's the feeling of just knowing you know the the uncertainties have been resolved you know and you have to really remind yourself that it's not the same you know that like you have to give it everything you have in order to survive you know and that that feeling that you're sort of longing for is not actually the feeling that you want you know uh and i just barely got the the end of a rope that was trailing off the the back of the hole pulled myself back on it almost threw up um then i had to then i was just floating there with the with the hole you know three feet water i tied myself to it i started to get tunnel vision and really at the last minute um ice a tugboat uh started uh coming through the area and it was coming straight at me actually and i i realized that it probably just wouldn't even see me it would just run me over and not even know that i had been there you know it's totally possible um and i was just you know i was trying to like wave i could barely lift my arm i was trying to scream i could barely make any noise and somehow they saw me and uh they they like it took them like 15 minutes to like get a rope around me and they started pulling me up the side of the boat and it was like lining every tugboat is um tires like tires usually um as like a fender you know and i got like wedged in the tires as they were like pulling me up and i knew what was happening you know and i was like all i have to do is stick my leg out and push against the whole of the boat
you know to like go around the tires and i couldn't do it wow uh and i knew and i could barely see and they like swung me around and eventually pulled me up they like put me in uh next to the engines in the engine room i couldn't you know i couldn't even feel the heat uh and they called the coast guard and the coast guard came and got me it was like really embarrassing and you know the coast guard like you know the coast guard guy's like you know he's like god these blankets over me and he's like trying to like talk to me to like keep me like alert you know and uh and you know he's like so is this is this your first time sailing and i have like a commercial like a 250 ton like master's license you know like it's like you need 600 days at sea to get this license you know uh and i was like no i i have a master's license and he was like what i think you're a [ __ ] idiot man you know like everything changed the tone totally changed you know oh my god dude that's insane yeah uh did that change your appreciation for comfort and safety and just life in general to like yeah totally i mean it changed well you know for sure the next day i was like um you know it's just like any near-death experience i feel like you're just like what are we doing here you know like what's the why are we wasting our time with this you know at the time i was working at twitter uh and you know you know your co-workers are like oh we got this problem with the slave lag on the database and you're just like what are we doing man you know shouldn't we be doing something else you know like uh but you can't i feel like you can't live like that for long you know that like what are we doing man you know the it's like it's impossible the world will like suck you back into it [Music] yeah yeah unless you go to angela
i mean a lot of those early people are actually still in angular really yeah it's funny yeah yeah that that's why we were talking about sailing and wheeling yeah so those those people the people who moved to anguilla um you know were part of this moment of like how much did that shift your direction in your life though did it did it change like the way like it seems almost i mean i haven't had a near-death experience but i've had a lot of psychedelic experiences and in some ways i think they're kind of similar and that life shifts to the point where whatever you thought of life before that experience is almost like oh come on that's nonsense yeah i mean it changes your perspective or it did for me and um you know because also in that moment you know it's like you know i think you go through this sort of embarrassing set of things where you're like oh i had these things i was going to do tomorrow like i'm not going to be able to do them you know and then you're like wait why why is that the thing that i'm concerned about you know it's like it's sort of a trivial thing yeah trivia you know we're just like oh i was going to see that person tomorrow i'm not going to see that you know or it's just like you know you're like i feel like i remember i was supposed to meet somebody the next day i remember being worried that they would think that i like stood them up or something like that you have the awesomest excuse ever i mean just tell them that story the way you just told it to me and they're gonna be like dude we're good [ __ ] [ __ ] glad you're all right yeah that kind of stuff you know and then and then you you know get more into the yeah it changes it the way you think about things and i and certainly you know it's like i was working at twitter at the time and i think um it made me think about
how i was spending my life and you know i was you know it's like the i mean even i i remember the first day that uh i was at twitter um the at the time uh the most popular person on twitter was justin bieber he had more followers than any other person you know was that when you guys were trying to rig it so that he wasn't uh trending number one always because they did do that right i don't remember that no i don't remember conveniently jamie and i were talking about that one day because they had to do something because if they didn't do something justin bieber would be the number one topic every day no matter what was happening in the world i can believe that they wanted to change that because the pro the problem was at the time twitter was held together with like you know bubble gum and like dental floss or whatever you know so it's like every time bieber would tweet like you know the lights would dim and like the buildings like kind of shake a little bit you know here it goes so they block me from trending this is 2010. i'm actually honored not even matt he's also 12. then i get on and see yet again my fans are unstoppable love you okay but okay so there's you know people talk about like invisible labor like the invisible labor behind that tweet is just kind of comical because it's like when he did that you know people like you know it's like my first day there you know it's like he he tweeted something and you know the building's like kind of shaking and like alarms are going off people are like scrambling around you know and it was just this you know it's like this realization where you're just like never in my life did i think that anything justin bieber did would like really affect me in any like deep way you know and here i am just like scrambling around to like facilitate what are your thoughts on curating what trends and what doesn't trend and whether or not social media should have any sort of obligation in terms of how things whether or not people see
things like shadow banning and things along those lines like i i'm very torn on this stuff because i i i think that things should just be and if you have a situation where justin bieber is the most popular thing on the internet that's just what it is it is what it is but i also get it i get how you would say well this is gonna [ __ ] up our whole program like what we're trying to do with this thing what do you mean [ __ ] up your whole program well what you're trying to do with twitter i mean i would assume what you're trying to do is give people a place where they could share important information and uh you know have people you know i mean twitter has been used successfully to overturn governments i mean there's there's twitter has been used to break news on very important events and alert people to danger and there's there's so many positive things about twitter and if if it's overwhelmed by justin bieber and justin bieber fan accounts and justin bieber if it's overwhelmed and the top 10 things that are trending are all nonsense i could see how someone would think we're going to do a good thing by suppressing that yeah i see what you're saying well why do you think they did suppress that what do you think you worked there why do you think they kept him from trending um well i mean i don't know about that specific situation i mean i think i think you know looking at the larger picture right like um in a way you know it's like if you think about like 20 years ago whenever anybody talked about like society you know um everyone would always say like the problem is the media it's like the media man you know if only we could change the media and a lot of people in who were interested in like a better and brighter future were really focused on self-publishing their whole conference is about underground publishing conference now
the allied media conference people were writing zines uh people were you know getting their own printing presses uh people you know we were convinced that if we um made publishing more equitable if everybody had the equal ability to like produce and consume content that the world would change and in some ways like what we have today is like the fantasy of you know those dreams from 20 years ago um but in a couple ways you know like uh one you know it was it was it was the dream that if you know a cop kill some random person in the suburbs of st louis that like everyone would know about it you know um just you know everyone knows um and also that anybody could share their weird ideas about the world you know and i think in some ways um we were wrong you know that we thought uh like you know the what we got today is like yeah like if a cop killed somebody in in the suburbs of st louis like everybody knows about it i think we overestimated how much that would matter uh and i think we also believed that the things that everyone would be sharing were like our weird ideas about the world and instead we got like you know flat earth and uh like you know uh anti-vaxx and like you know stuff right mm-hmm uh and so it's like in a sense like i'm glad that those things exist because they're like they're sort of what we wanted you know uh but i think what we did what we underestimated is like how uh important the medium is like the medium is the message kind of thing and that like what we were doing at the time of like you know writing scenes and sharing information we i don't think we understood how much that was predicated on like actually building community and like relationships with each other and that like just um like what we didn't want was just
like more channels on the television and that's sort of what we got you know and so i think you know it's like everyone is like on youtube trying to monetize their content whatever you know and that it's the same thing like bad business models produce like bad technology and bad outcomes and so i think there's concern about that but i think um i think like you know now that there's there's like you know these two simultaneous truths that everyone seems to believe that are in contradiction with each other you know like one is that like um everything is relative uh everyone is entitled to their own opinion all opinions are equally valid and two like um our democracy is impossible without a shared understanding of what is true and what is false the information that we share needs to be verified by our most trusted institutions like people seem to simultaneously believe both of these things they're in direct contradiction with each other um and so in some ways i think most of the questions about you know social media and our time are about like trying to resolve those contradictions and but i think you know um i think it's way more complicated than the way uh that the social media companies are trying to portray it yeah i think there's simplistic methods that they're using to um to handle complex realities like for instance like um uh banning q anon that's right this is this is a big one right because q anon's got these wacky theories and then like jesus christ these are weaponizing all these nut bags and like we're just going to ban queueing on but then where do you because you think what they're saying is not true and not correct like how far do you go with that you've sort of set a precedent and where does that end because you know are we going to ban jfk theories because jfk murders are probably still relevant today some of those people are
still alive do we ban uh there's there's theories about the challenger this the space shuttle challenger there's a lot of wacky conspiracy theories about the this spears conspiracy theories about the space being fake have you ever seen hashtag spaces fake yeah okay go on there if you want it if you want to really [ __ ] just lose all faith in humanity look up space is fake but i think oh my god there's so many people yeah and i think that people get something out of that yeah they do well people get something out of mysteries and and maybe being on the inside and knowing things where the rest of the world is asleep this is the reason why people love the idea of red pilled you know somebody even suggested i call this room the red pill my friend radio raheem said call the red pill i'm like ah there's a lot riding on that term too bad cause i'm a giant fan of the matrix but that that term has been co-opted uh forever yeah but this idea that you're just gonna ban people from discussing stupid ideas where does that end you know does it end with flat earth are you gonna you're gonna ban that they're gonna go oh they're suppressing us and then they're going to find these alternatives that's the thing about all these weird alternative sources of social media whether it's parlor or gab they become [ __ ] fests if you go to those especially gab it's just like god damn what have you guys done it's not even what have they done it's what have the people done that have all been kicked out of all these other places and then if you have a place that says we're not gonna kick you out and then all these [ __ ] cretans come piling into these places and i'm sure there's a lot of good people on gab don't get me wrong there's a lot of people that are they just didn't want to be suppressed
by social media parlor doesn't seem to be nearly as bad uh i've looked at that as well it's a little more like just super right wing information type stuff and there's some reasonable people on parlor but but i i i think that there's like a subtle thing there because i don't know how those things work but like i think part of what um if you if you if you um set aside all of the like take down stuff you know all the platforming stuff you say like okay facebook twitter you know these these companies like they don't do that anymore they've never done that you know they're still moderating content you know they have an algorithm decides like what is seen and what isn't right you know and in a way but what is how is that all algorithm programmed like what is for facebook and for youtube and a lot of these things it's done to encourage viewership it's got it's done to encourage interaction right this is done to encourage time spent yes looking at the screen yeah so that's how they monetize it they want more clicks and more more ad views and all that jazz um but when it becomes an ideological moderation that's when things get a little weird right but it's it is by definition an ideological moderation you know the the the if you optimize for time spent looking at the screen you're going to be encouraging certain kinds of content and not others okay but that's not always true like i'll give you an example for us um we did a podcast with kanye west kanye west was running for president right and if you were running for president and you were outside the norm like for instance twitter banned brett weinstein's brett weinstein had a um he had a twitter account that was set up for its was unity 2020 and the idea was like instead of looking at this in terms of left versus right republican versus democrat let's get reasonable people
from both sides like a tulsi gabbard and a dan crenshaw bring them together and perhaps maybe put into people's minds the idea that like this idea this concept of uh we it has to be a republican vice president or republican president maybe that's nonsense and maybe it would be better if we had reasonable intelligent people together what is this this is their video yeah um well it's a very rational perspective it's not conspiracy theory driven they got banned from twitter and for nothing just because they were promoting a third party because they were trying to come up with some alternative the idea was this could siphon off votes from biden we want biden to win because trump is better sure yeah this is the narrative right yeah i mean i i think that there's man there's a lot here but the yeah that was going to save the comment i got sidetracked i'm sorry let me finish the kanye west thing so we had a podcast with kanye west um it got i don't know how many millions of views but it was a lot but it wasn't trending and so jamie you contacted the people at youtube and asked them why it's trending what was their answer not trending um it like it didn't meet the qualifications they decided for trending or something like that no like like it didn't include everything you would assume like you just said all the interactivity comments it had it had more comments than any video we had that's what i mean massive amounts of comments massive amounts of views but yet nowhere to be seen on the trending but i don't think there was a person involved like there there was an algorithm involved that was trying to optimize for certain things in this case you think this specific case yeah there's a team there there's separate teams at youtube of my understanding yeah and the separate team had made a distinction and i don't even know if they told the person who told me that what it was so he that person may not know either
so they just decided this is not worthy of trending so you have arbitrary decisions that are being made by people most likely because they feel that ideologically kanye west is not aligned with i mean he was wearing the maga hat for a while you know so they just decided this is not trending but it is trending it's clearly trending yeah you've got millions and millions and millions of people who are watching it whether they're you know it's like whether there are but i think this is the point you know it's like whether they're whether it's people whether it's algorithms you know there are forces that are making decisions about what people see and what people don't see right and they're based on uh certain objectives that i think are most often business objectives but not in this case in this case the business objective was if they wanted to get more eyeballs on it they would want it to be trending and people say oh [ __ ] kanye west is on the journey people that like kanye like click on ads or not you know it's like to people that you know it's like there's there's a lot there's a lot in there that we don't know oh that's horseshit come on bro i don't know i mean maybe you know maybe they're making it millions and millions when you have a video that's being viewed by that many people there's going to be a lot of goddamn people clicking on ads no matter what the other thing that these platforms want is for their for the content to be ad safe you know it's like maybe advertisers don't you know it's like i don't i don't know it's but i think actually focusing on the like the outlying cases of like this person was d platformed this person was intentionally ideologically not um promoted or you know shadow banning yeah that kind of i think that that like obfuscates or you know uh draws attention away from the larger thing that's happening which is that like um those things are happening just
implicitly all the time and that like it it almost like serves to the advantage of these platforms to highlight the times when they remove somebody because what they're trying to do is reframe this is like okay well yeah we've got these algorithms or whatever don't talk about that the problem is there's just these bad people you know and we have to just there's a bad content from bad people and we have to decide you know what to do about these bad this bad content and these bad people um and i think that distracts people from the the fact that like the platforms are every at every moment making a decision about what you see and what you don't see that um is not as apparent you know i see what you're saying um so there's more than one problem there's a problem of de-platforming because in many ways he's deep platforming decisions are being made based on ideology it's a certain specific ideology that the people that are de-platforming the other folks have that doesn't align with the people that are being de-platformed these people that are being de-platform they have ideas that these people find offensive or they don't agree with so they say we're going to take you off yeah or sometimes they just find themselves in a trap you know that like a trap well i think that there's like okay so like there's i think a tendency for a lot of these platforms to you know make try to define some policy about like what it is that they want they don't want you know and i feel like that's sort of a throwback to this like modernist view of science and how science works and we can like objectively rigorously define these things um and i just don't think that's actually how the world works and that like what's up what do you mean how so um i feel like we're just past that you know that it's not like um first of all i think you know science is not about truth it's just not it's about utility what do
you mean um okay you know it's like i was taught newtonian physics in high school okay why it's not true you know that's not how the universe works uh but it's still useful and that's why it's taught because you can use it to predict motion outcomes that kind of thing right what's incorrect about newtonian physics in the sense that they shouldn't be teaching it um i mean today you know people believe that the truth is that you know there's like you know relativity like gravity is not a force there's like you know these planes and stuff whatever you know that like there are other models to describe how the universe works um antonio physics is considered outmoded but it still has utility and the fact that you can use it to predict the so you're talking about in terms of quantum physics and string theory and a lot of these more yeah it's like relativity at like the large scale quantum you know quantum physics at the the small scale and even those things are most likely not true in the sense that they aren't consistent with each other and people are trying to unify them and find something that does make sense at like both of the scales you know the history of science of the history of things that weren't actually true you know bohr's model of the atom tony and physics like you know people have these uh you know copernicus model of the solar system people have these ideas of like how things work and the reason that people are drawn to them is because they actually have utility that it's like oh we can use this to predict the motion of the planets oh we can use this to send a rocket into space so we can use this to uh you know have better outcomes you know first medical procedure or whatever but it's not actually um i don't i think it's not actually truth like the the point of it isn't truth the point of it is that like we have
some utility that we find in these things and i think that um you know when you look at like the the emergence of science um and you know people conceiving of it as a truth it became this new authority that everyone was trying to appeal to you know if you look at like all of the like 19th century political philosophy uh i mean okay i think the question of truth is like you know it's even a little squishy with the hard sciences right but once you get into like soft sciences like social science psychology like then it's even squishier you know that like these things are really not about truth or about like some kind of utility and when you're talking about utility the important question is like useful for what and to whom you know and i think that's just always the important question to be asking right um because you know when you look at like all the 19th century political writing it's all trying to frame things in terms of science in this way that it seems laughable now but you know like at the time they were just like we're going to prove that communism is like the most true like social economic system in the world like their whole disciplines of that people in uh you know people had like phds in that you know their whole research departments uh in the soviet union people doing that and we laugh about that now but i don't think it's that different than like social science in the west you know um and so i think you know it's like if you lose sight of that then you can try then you try to like frame social questions in terms of truths like you know it's like this is this is the kind of content that we want and we can rigorously define that and we can define why that's going to have like the outcomes that we wanted to uh but once you get on that road it's like you know you're like okay well terrorist stuff we don't like terrorist stuff so we're gonna like rigorously define that and then we have a policy no
terrorist stuff and then you know china shows up and they're like we've got this problem with terrorists the uyghurs you know we need you know we see you have a policy you need to you know and if instead it was just like i think if people from the beginning acknowledged that this isn't some you know that all of objectivity is just a particular world view and that like we're not going to regularly define these things in a way of like what is true and what isn't then i think we would have better outcomes but that's my weird take i mean i think you know from the perspective of signal you know it's like do you know what's trending on signal right now no not do i no okay but that's it's not a social media platform but but isn't it there's a weird thing when you decide that you have one particular ideology that's being supported in another particular ideology that is being suppressed and this is what conservative people feel when they're on uh social media platforms they're almost all they all almost all of them other than the ones we talked about before parler and gab and the alternative ones they're all very left-wing in terms of their the ideology that they support the things that can get you in trouble in uh twitter on twitter um did you say that but then the president of the united states just constantly violated every policy that they had but he's ridiculous that's a that's a ridiculous example right because he's one person and the they've actually discussed this that he and his tweets are more important it's more important that they allow these tweets to get out so you could first of all you can understand how [ __ ] crazy this guy is and second of all it's newsworthy it's he's the leader of the the you know and also it would be um very costly from a business perspective if yes very likely and it kind of amazing that
he didn't do anything along the way while he was witnessing people get de-platformed and particularly this this sort of bias towards people uh on the left and this discrimination discrimination against people on the right there's people on the right that have been banned and shadow banned and and blocked from posting things and you run into this situation where you wonder what exactly is a social media platform when it's just a small private company and maybe you have uh you know uh some sort of a video platform and there's only a few thousand people on it and you only want videos that align with your perspective okay you're a private company you can do whatever you want but when you're the biggest video platform on earth like youtube and you decide that you are going to take down anything that disagrees with your perspective on how kovitch should be handled in including doctors like this is one of the things that happened doctors that were stating look there's more danger in lockdowns there's more danger in this than there is in the way we're handling it there's more there's more danger in the the negative aspects of the decisions that are being made than it would be to let people go to work with masks on there's more and then those those videos just get deleted those videos get blocked there's people that are opposed to current strategies with uh all sorts of different things and those videos get blocked so there's an ideological basis in censorship and so you have to you have to make a decision like what are these platforms are these platforms simply just a private company or is it a town hall is it the way that people get to express ideas and isn't the best way to express ideas to allow people to decide based on the better argument what is correct and what's incorrect like this is this is what freedom of speech is supposed to be about it's
supposed to be about you have an idea i have an idea these two ideas come together and then the observers get to go home okay well this guy's got a lot of facts behind him this is this is a objective reality this is this is provable and this other guy is just a crazy person who thinks the world's hollow okay this is the correct one there's going to be some people that go no there's a suppression of hollow earth and hollow earth is the truth and hollow earth facts and hollow earth theory but you got to kind of let that happen you gotta you gotta kind of have people that are crazy you gotta remember the the old dude used to be these to stand on the corners with the placards on the world is ending tomorrow they're still there yeah but those are on twitter now right but those people no one said you got to get rid of that guy you would drive by and go look at this crazy [ __ ] those crazy [ __ ] making youtube videos those videos get deleted i don't know if that's good i kind of think that you should let those crazy [ __ ] do that because it's not gonna influence you it's not gonna influence me it's gonna influence people that are easily influenced and the question is what who are we protecting and why are we protecting these people well okay but i think i think in my mind what's going on is like the problem is that it used to be that some person with very strange ideas about the world wearing a sign on the street corner shouting was just a person with very strange ideas about the world wearing a sign on the street now there's somebody you know with very strange ideas about the world and those ideas are being amplified by a billion dollar company uh because they're algorithms that amplify that and and what i'm saying is that instead of actually talking about that instead of addressing that problem
those companies are trying to distract uh distract that strategies from that discussion by saying we're just going to remove that person's content oh it's like oh yeah yeah amplifying that that was probably a bad idea we're going to move their content instead of looking at how to change the algorithm so that we're not amplifying things that uh ultimately don't serve as well would the correct way to handle it would be to make algorithms illegal in that respect like to not be able to amplify or detract to not be able to ban shadow ban or just to have whatever trends trend whatever is popular popular whatever people like let them like it and and say listen this thing that you've done by creating an algorithm that encourages people to interact encourages people to interact on facebook encourages people to spend more time on the computer what you've done is you've kind of distorted what is valuable to people you've changed it and and and guided it in a way that is ultimately perhaps arguably detrimental to society so we are going to ban algorithms you cannot use algorithms to dictate what people see or not see you give them a [ __ ] search bar and you if they want to look up ufos let them look up ufos but don't shove it down their throat because you know they're a ufo nut don't don't curate their content feed yeah i mean i think it's okay it's complicated because um one i have no faith in like when you say ban or make it illegal whatever zero faith in like the government being able to handle this yeah nor do i every time i see like a cookie warning on a website you know i'm like okay these people are not the people that are this is what they've given us after all this time you know it's like these people are not going to solve this for us you know and and also i think a lot of what it is that the just the satisfaction that people
feel and discomfort that people feel and the concern that people have is a concern about power um that right now these tech companies have a lot of power and i think that the the concern that is coming from government is like the concern for their power you know that like the right has made such a big deal about d platforming and i think it's because what they're trying they're trying to um they're trying to you know put these companies on notice you know just like you [ __ ] with us you know like we will take power and but they've done nothing about it don't you think that they've actually made a big deal about d platforming because the right has been disproportionately de-platformed um i think the right is like doing fine uh how's that i i don't know i don't know what the numbers are but i i feel like it's like you say that though because you're on the left was still on yeah but that's trump that's trump he's it's not he's an anomaly you you can't really you know i okay i think i guess maybe let me just reframe this to say that like i think it's interesting that we are we've hit an inflection point right where like the era of utopianism with regards to technology is over yeah that it's just like you know after 2016 it was just like big tech has zero allies anymore you know on the left everyone's just like you just gave the election to trump you know and on the right they're just like you just removed somebody from youtube for calling gay people an abomination [ __ ] you you know like it's they have no allies uh no one believes in the better and brighter you don't believe that google is organizing the world's information no one believes that facebook is connecting the world you know like no and i think that that is um there's an opportunity there you know that like we're in a better situation than we were before you know all the cards are on the table
under like people more and more understanding uh how it is that these systems function i think you know increasingly see that people understand that this is really about power it's about authority and that like we should be trying to build things that limit the the power that people have if you had your wish if you could let these social media platforms whether it's uh video platforms like youtube or facebook or twitter if you if you had the call if they they called you up and said moxie we're gonna let you make the call what should we do how should we curate this information should we have algorithms should we allow people should we just let it open to everything everything and anybody what should we do well i mean this is what we're trying to do with signal you know it's like but it's different right because you're just a messaging app we're just a messaging app but no i don't say that it's a very good messaging app that i use no i understand what you're saying but i think you know the way that messaging apps are going you know there's like a trajectory where uh a project like signal becomes more of a social experience um and that like the things that we're building extend beyond just like you know sending messages particularly i think it's more and more communication moves into group chats and things like that um and the you know the foundation that we're building it on is a foundation where we know nothing you know it's like if i looked up your signal account record right now of like all the information that we had about you on signal there's only two pieces of information you know the date that you created the account and the date that you last used to signal that's it's all we know you know if you looked on any other platform it would be your mind would be blown no it's admirable what you're doing and that's one of the reasons why i wanted to talk to you but that and so i think that foundation
gives us um it's like now that we have that foundation there's a lot that we can build on it right and would you do a social media app well i think you know some of the stuff that we're working on now of just like moving away from phone numbers you can have like you know usernames that you can like post that more publicly and then you know we have groups now you have group links and then you know maybe we can do something with events and we can you know that's like we're sort of moving in the direction of like an app that's good for um communicating with connections you already have to an app that's also good for creating new connections would you think that social media would be better served with the algorithms that are in place and with the mechanisms for determining what's trending in place and for their trust and safety or whatever their content monitoring policy they have now or have it wide open wild west i mean i think um it depends on when you say like better you know better for what right better for humanity uh yeah no i i think censorship is better no no no i i think the problem i think bad business models create bad technology which has bad outcomes you know that's the problem we have today right so the problem is that there's a financial incentive for them to yeah that if if we you know if you look at like the the metrics you know that we talked about like you know what facebook cares about it just like time that you spent looking at the screen on facebook you know like if if we were to have metrics if signal would have metrics you know our metrics would be like what we want is for you to use the app as little as possible for you to actually have the app open as little as possible but for the velocity of information to be as high as possible so it's like you're getting maximum utility you're spending as little time possible looking at this thing while getting as much out
of it how could that be engineered do you think that's what we're trying to do so you're trying to do that with a social media app as well well i mean you know we're sort of moving in that direction right and it's like um and i think once you start from the principle of like well we don't have to have infinite growth we don't actually have to uh have profit we don't have to return uh we're not accountable to investors we don't have to you know uh satisfy public markets uh we also don't have to build a pyramid scheme where we have like you know two billion users so that we can monetize them to like you know a few hundred thousand advertisers so that we can you know right like we don't have to do any of that uh and so we have the the freedom to like pick the metrics that we think are the ways that we think technology should work that should that we think will better serve all of us so what would better be served is a bunch of wild hippies like yourself that don't want to make any money at all i mean we're you know you put together a social media if you work at signal you get paid oh yeah i'm sure i mean i don't mean yeah this is the company itself yeah as a uh as a corporation you get paid but that's it yeah i mean how do you generate the income well you know we do it by like tying ourselves to a community of users instead of advertisers right you know so but where's the money coming from though from people who use signal so similar to like uh do they pay for it no no it's like donation based so similar to like wikimedia oh you know it's like you know wikipedia exists there's no company there's no well that would be great if they could figure out a way to develop some sort of a social media platform that uh just operated on donations and could rival the ones that are operating on advertising revenue because i agree with you that that that creates a giant problem oh yeah and that's what we're working on slowly huh
do you think that what so you you just look at in terms of bad business model equals bad outcome that's how you look at all these and you don't so it's also by the way why we have people mining cobalt in yeah yeah and you don't think that they can regulate their way out of this situation with technology i'm i'm not super optimistic yeah just based on you know and even even the hearings you know it's just like so do you think that yes the hearings were amateur hour yeah when uh yeah there was some ridiculous questions yeah i mean it's just like they're talking to the wrong people they don't understand how stupid you know that's not good for this like don't you have a team of people yeah come on yeah it's um it's fascinating to watch right it's like you're your dad who doesn't know how to how do i get the email it's like these people are not gonna save us man you know it's like anything that they do will probably just make things worse do you think that it's a valid argument that conservatives have though that they're being censored and that their their voice is not being heard i i know what you said in terms of you know that if someone had something on youtube that said that gay people are unhuman and they should be abolished and banned and delete that video that the i get that perspective but i think there's other perspectives like the unity 2020 perspective which is not in any way yeah i mean i don't know what happened with that but i feel like what i i think it could be a part of this thing of just like well we create this policy and we have these you know we define things this way and then a lot of stuff just gets caught up in it you know where it's just like now you're like taking down content about the weakers because you wanted to do something else you know that if people would just be more honest about like there is not really an objectivity and you know we're looking for these specific outcomes and this is why that i
think you know maybe we would have better results but well how does one fix this though how does one like you worked at twitter you kind of understand these better than most these uh social media platforms how would one fix this if they hired you if they said hey uh moxie we're kind of [ __ ] we don't know how to fix this well uh is there a way because it seems like they make so much money yeah if you came along and said yeah well you got to stop making money they'd be like get rid of that [ __ ] nut exactly look at him goddamn sailor yeah what's he talking about what is he talking about [ __ ] out of here stop making money yeah well you want to play rock paper scissors [Laughter] you're crazy man how do you fix this i mean one thing i'm actually a little encouraged by is like um the organizing unionization stuff that's been happening in the tech industry uh so there's been um a couple of walkouts um and there's some increased communication among tech workers uh normally you think about i'm not totally aware of this like what have they been organizing and uh unionization about well normally you think about uh unionization as as like a process for improving material conditions for workers you know and there's some aspect of this uh in the organizing that's been happening where they where have they been doing this uh google is the big um where a lot of the activity has happened but it's happening across the industry what are their objectives at google at google uh there were some walkouts um the objectives you should talk to meredith whitaker about this actually um she's really smart and okay has a lot to say shout out to meredith yeah uh she uh and other people you know working there and um they were organizing for like one uh trying to apply the protections that
full-time workers and benefits full-time workers there had to a lot of the temporary workers like the people who work in security the people who are working in the cafeteria the people who work you know driving buses and stuff like that who are living a lot more precariously but also for creative control over how the technology that they're producing is used so google was involved in some like military contracts that were pretty um sketch yeah yeah like applying machine learning ai stuff to military technology and then finally there had been a lot of high-profile sexual harassment incidents at google where the the perpetrators of sexual harassment were usually paid large severances in order to leave and so they had a list of demands uh and they uh like a lot of people walked out i don't know what the numbers were but a lot of people they managed to organize internally and and walked out and i think i think stuff like that is encouraging because um you know it's like we look at the hearings and it's like the people in congress don't even know who's the right person to talk to you know it's like you know old people talking about technology they don't understand that people really do understand technology are the people who are working these companies and a lot of times they don't feel good about the way that that what they're creating is being applied how they're how what they're creating is being applied and um but isn't that another issue where you're going to have people who have an ideological perspective and that may be opposed to people that have a different ideological perspective but they're sort of disproportionately represented on the left in these social media corporations when you get kids they come out of school they have degrees in tech or they're interested in tech they tend
to almost universally lean left maybe but i think most like when it comes to the technology i don't think people are um i think you know what almost everyone can agree is like the amount of money and resources that we're putting into surveillance into ad tech into you know these algorithms that are just about increasing engagement that they're just not good for the world and if you put a different ceo in charge that person's just going to get fired you know but if the entire company organizes together and says no this is what we want this is how we this is how we want to allocate resources this is how we want to create the world then you can't fire all those people i understand what you're saying so they'd have to get together and unionize and and have like a very distinct mandate like very clear that this is what we we want to use this we want to go back to do no evil or whatever the [ __ ] it used to be right yeah where they don't really have that as a big sign anymore um do you think that would really have an impact though i mean there's it seems like the amount of money when you find out the amount of money that's being generated by google and facebook and uh and youtube and it's the the numbers are so staggering that to shut that valve off to shut that spout good luck it's almost like it had to have been engineered from the beginning like what you're doing at signal like someone had to look at it from the beginning go you know what if we rely on advertiser revenue we're gonna have a real problem yeah and i think but i think it's yeah exactly i mean you know i think you're right and there's there's um you know part of the problem with just relying on tech workers to to organize themselves is that they are shareholders of these companies you know they have a financial stake in their their outcome and so um that influences the way that they think about things but
um you know i think another aspect to all of this is that i think people underestimate just how expensive it is to make software and another thing that i think would really uh improve things is making software cheaper you know right now it's moving the opposite direction it's getting harder more expensive to prove software um and how so it used to be that if you made if you like write a piece of software you just wrote it once you know for the computer and then that was your software you know now if you want to write a piece of software you have to write it at least three times you have to write it for iphone you have to write it for android you have to write it for the web maybe you need a desktop client so it's like you need three or four times the the energy that you used to have and the way that um software works not worth going into but it's just it's getting more expensive and what do you what do you personally use are you one of those minimalist dudes i say i notice you have like a little tiny notebook here oh yeah and then you have two phones yeah i i'm like i have to have i try to be like i just want to you're also one of those renegades with no phone case oh yeah man i feel like that's like you and jamie should get together and talk about it he's radical i mean it's like people you know it's like industrial designers put all of that effort into creating that thing it costs a thousand bucks if you drop it with this thing on it it doesn't get hurt and see this this little thing right here see i stick my finger in there and then i could use it i could text better really excited yeah and also if i want to watch a video that like that'll prop it up [Music] you know how that works not bad yeah isn't that better than no case i mean some things i actually want to make more difficult for myself you know but i have two phones just
because i'm trying to i always just want to keep tabs on how everything works everywhere you know so you have an android and a an iphone do you keep things stripped down no i'm pretty i mean i don't actually use tick-tock well okay my problem is that like i spend all day i think you know sometimes i go through this thing where like um cryptography will be like in the news or something there'll be some like geopolitical thing that's happening and someone like you know vice or something will get in touch with me and they'll be like they'd be like hey we want to do a thing like a video where like we follow you around for a day like a day in the life you know it's because it's so exciting sounds good for them annoying for you well the thing i'll usually write back is like um okay uh here's the video me sitting in front of a computer for eight hours and they're like oh we can't make that video like no one would want to watch that you know yeah we need to do is take you to a yoga class then you go to an organic food store and you talk to people about their rights and then yeah exactly exactly yeah but it's like unfortunately i don't even want to watch the movie in my own life you know but they're um but so that is my life so it's like um i spend so much time like you know looking at a computer for work that i it's hard for me to continue like looking at screens and stuff yeah i can only imagine yeah but i try to be like a normal like um there's this like in the history of people who are like doing like building cryptography stuff like that um there was this period of time where the thesis was basically like all right what we're going to do is develop really powerful tools for ourselves and then we're going to teach everyone to be like us you know and that didn't work uh because uh you know we didn't really anticipate the way that computers are going so i try to be like as normal as possible you know i just like have
like a normal setup i'm not like you know i haven't you know i used to have a cell phone where i'd like you know soldered the microphone differently so there's like a hard switch that you could turn it off whatever really you did that yeah cause it's like you know whatever you start thinking about like how all this stuff works do you ever [ __ ] around with like linux phones or anything like that no no i'm just i try to be like normal you know okay yeah i still do run linux on a desktop just because i've been doing that forever but and you keep a moleskin for what just notes and you don't put them on your phone sometimes i do but i like writing more i guess oh okay so you just do it just because you enjoy it yeah but i guess you know you're right maybe you know like i feel the forces of darkness are not going to die yeah um does it do you feel like you have extra scrutiny on you because of the fact that you're involved in this messaging application that glenn greenwald and edward snowden and a bunch of other people that are seriously concerned with security and privacy that maybe people are upset at you that you've uh created something that allows people to uh share encrypted messages i mean maybe i mean i think uh you've kind of cut out the middle man right you've cut out you've cut out the the third-party door yeah and i think but so in some ways that means that there's less pressure on me because you know it's like if you're the creator of facebook messenger and your computer gets hacked like that's everyone's facebook messages are gone um and you know for me if like my computer gets hacked no i can't access anyone's signal messages whether i get hacked or not you know right and so it's i have sort of less liability in that sense there was like a weird period of time where um it was very difficult for me to
fly commercially like on a airplane um and i don't know why i think it had something to do with a talk that someone gave about wikileaks once and they mentioned my name and after getting flagged yeah it was very annoying i would like go to the airport and i would i wouldn't be able to print a ticket at the kiosk i had to go uh talk to a person they had to call some phone number that would appear on their screen and then wait on hold for like 45 minutes to an hour to get approval and then they would get approval to print the ticket so you had to anticipate this when you travel so you had to go their way in advance way in advance and then any time i traveled internationally on the way back through customs they would seize all of the electronics that i had yeah the us government would do this yeah customs important protection they would seize your [ __ ] and would you get it back they would eventually send it back but it's you just had to throw it out because it's not who knows what they did to it you know how i would want to give it to someone and go hey tell me what they did yeah yeah could you do that was it possible to back engineer what whatever i never i never spent time on it how much time did they have your [ __ ] for uh it would be like weeks weeks yeah weeks did you have to give them passwords and everything well that's the thing you know they would stop you and they would be like hey we just need you to type in your password here so that we can get through the full disk encryption you know and i would be like no and they would be like well if you don't do that we're going to take this and we're going to send it to our lab you know and they're going to get it anyway and i would be like no they're not and they would be like all right we're gonna take it you're not gonna have your stuff for a while you're sure you don't wanna type your password i'd be like nope and then you know it would disappear and
i come back weeks later and then it's like how bizarre yeah and with there was no they didn't have like a motive there was no thing you never know why you know what no but i'm saying they didn't they didn't say hey you were you're thought to have done this or there's some no they would always just be like oh no this is just random or whatever but there would be two people at the exit of the plane with photographs of me you know waiting for me to step off the plane and they would escort they wouldn't even wait for me to get to the uh so did you have to have like a burner laptop i just wouldn't travel with electronics you know because it was just even your phone yeah even my phone oh [ __ ] yeah if that was only internationally though because they can't do that domestically but uh so domestically you just had long waits and then they'd eventually give you a ticket yeah they would eventually give you a ticket and then you'd have to you'd get the selective screening where they'd take all the stuff out of your bag and like you know yeah and that's your deck too every connection the tsa would come to the gate of the connecting thing even though you're already behind security and do it again at the connection really yeah i don't know it was weird it was just like uh connections too yeah yeah so they're trying to [ __ ] with you i think so yeah i don't know how long did that last for that was a couple years yeah and when did it go away the day it went away were you like oh yep yeah one day i just stopped i was it's really it really did change the game what year did it go away when trump got into office no it's way before that yeah i forget uh yeah i forgot yeah i was thinking actually on i was thinking on the way here it's funny how like i remember after the last election everyone was talking about like california leaving the united states california succeeding you remember yeah and now everyone's talking about leaving california like after this
yeah imagine that president newsome yeah locked down in a communist state but do you remember people discovered that the cal exit the whole cal exit movement was started by a guy that lived in russia oh it was one of those uh ira things internet research agency scams but it wasn't i actually wasn't the guy down oh yeah in moscow at one time you tracked him down he's just some guy well did he do it for goof no he like really believes that california should leave yeah he he like he he lived in california and had been for years like trying to foment this cal exit thing and he's all the stats on you know why it would be better for california and all the stuff you know uh and then he sort of thought well this isn't working and he really liked russia for some reason he and he so he moved to russia just before the election not knowing what was gonna happen and then when trump won people were like wait a second [ __ ] this like maybe california should get out of here and they just found this like campaign that already existed and everyone sort of got behind it and he was just like oh [ __ ] and he lives in russia now you know and and but he like didn't really understand um optics i think where he like he like the re the way that people everyone found out that uh he lived in russia was that he opened a california embassy in moscow so he they like announced like you know cal exit has opened the first california embassy like in a foreign country but it was in moscow and this was right as all the like russian stuff was happening you know uh yeah so if you're conspiratorially minded you'd have drawn some incorrect conclusions yeah yeah he was just i think i i met with him i like hanging out with him for a day i think he really genuinely just so what was your motivation to hang out with this guy for a whole day i mean i was just fascinating you know because here's this guy's like doing
this kind of ambitious thing and it just the optics seem so bad you know yeah i think he reminded me of like that hannah or rent quote that's like um you know if the essence of power is deceit does that mean that the essence of impotence is truth you know that like he sort of believed that um just like the facts were enough you know it's just like the stats of just like yeah we spend this much money on like defense spending if we you know if we stop you know it's like we would have like so much money yeah california was a country and we would still have like the fourth largest military in the world and we you know we would have like uh you know it's just like the numbers actually are compelling you know and it was just sort of like that's you know people will just see the truth you know and i was like dude i think maybe you should like not live in russia anymore you know it was dude yeah why did he go to russia i don't he just he had been teaching english and uh i think he just sort of ended up liking russia um and so yeah he just decided to move there and didn't that was i was on the way um with a friend to abkhazia have you ever heard of that place no it's an autonomous region of the country of georgia uh and uh it's kind of interesting there's all these autonomous regions in the world that are essentially their own countries you know um but they're not recognized by the u.n or other countries you know but like texas you're in one right now uh i mean these places are like you know militarized border like they have their own like you know uh but they're not recognized by the u.n yeah uh and so they all recognize each other and it's like you know it's like if you want to be a country like it's kind of interesting you need a lot of stuff you know you need like a flag you need like a national bird you need like an anthem or whatever
and you need a soccer team definitely have to have a soccer team you know interesting so these countries all have their own soccer teams but they can't play in fifa because they're not recognized by the u.n so people can't recognize them so they have their own league it's like the league of unrecognized states and stateless peoples uh and they have their own world cup and they have really in abkhazia how many different countries are there that are like this there are a lot how many i mean i don't know i don't know how many p how many teams are in this league called khanifa um i mean it's 20 plus so there's 20 plus unrecognized countries or autonomous regions and also stateless people so like um the kurds you know um there's a you know people from chagas islands were basically evicted for a u.s military base in their diaspora there's um you know places like somaliland transnistria um suffocacia uh laplandia you know like um it's it's kind of interesting so i i went with a friend to ocasio for the the world cup of all the unrecognized states how was that it was awesome yeah it was like yeah it was really interesting i mean the smile on your face this is the biggest smile you've had the entire show it sounds like it was a great time i mean it just is so fascinating to me and i think it's like an interesting you know it's like in a way that i feel like you know society moves by like pushing at the edges you know that like it's it's the fringes that end up moving the center i feel like um you know looking at the margins of the way politics works is an interesting view of like how everything else works you know that like like going to abkhazia it was so crazy getting there you know it's like you know we travel all through russia we get to this like militarized border you go through these three checkpoints that aren't supposed
to exist but obviously exist you know you get to the other side and it's just the same as where you just were yeah you know you're like you guys fought a brutal civil war you know with like genocide like full on you know like crazy [ __ ] uh and it's just kind of the same you know like was it worth it like what's the deal you know and i feel like it's this thing you see again and again of like um like the institutions that we're familiar with of in the world that exists are like the institutions of kings you know it's like you know police military illegal apparatus tax collectors you know and that like moment in history since then has been about trying to like change ownership of those institutions and it's always sort of dissatisfying you know and like you know just seeing that happen again again and and just like you know realizing that it's like maybe what we should be doing is actually trying to get rid of these institutions or change these institutions in some way you know don't you think there's a very slow rate of progress but ultimately progress like if you follow pinker's work it looks at all the various metrics like murder rape racism crime all these different things it's over time there's we're clearly moving in a better direction maybe i mean and do you think it's just like you know i was listening to this uh um podcast today we were talking about uh religion and it was discussing um the bible and they were talking about all the different um stories that are in the bible that many of them that are that are hundreds of years apart that are that were collected and put into that just stop and think about a book that was written literally before the constitution was drafted and that book is being introduced today as gospel and that there's a new book that's going to be written 200 years from now and that will be attached to the new version of the bible
as well and then one day someone will come across this and it will all be interpreted as the the will and the words of god that all came about in in one particular era it like all came down from god but now we know that these things have like there's there's you you're dealing with giant spans of time yeah yeah but today the the spans of time are far slower like going from alan turing in 1950 being chemically castrated for being gay to in my lifetime seeing gay marriage as being something that was very fringe when i was a boy living in san francisco to universal across the united states today at least mostly accepted by the populace right that this is a very short amount of time where a big change has happened and that this these changes are coming quicker and quicker and quicker i would hope that this is a trend that is moving in the correct direction yeah certainly there are some things that are getting better yeah and i feel like to me it's important to you know for a lot of these things like the things you mentioned like gay marriage i think it's important to realize that like a lot of those a lot of that progress would not have happened without the ability to break the law honestly you know right right they're like how would how would anyone have known that like we wanted to allow same-sex marriage if no one had been able to have a same-sex relationship because saudi laws had been perfectly enforced you know yeah how would we know that we want to legalize marijuana if like no one had ever been able to consume marijuana yeah right uh right yeah so i think you know a lot a lot of the fear around like increased surveillance surveillance state or whatever is that like these that those those that space dissipates yes yeah but you know on the other hand you know it's like we're living in the apocalypse you know that it's like if you took someone from 200 years ago who used to be able to just walk up to the klamath river and dump a bucket in the water and pull out you know 12 salmon and that was
you know their food and you were like oh yeah the way it works today is you go to whole foods and it's twenty dollars a pound and it's you know pretty good you know they'd be like what have you done oh my god you used to be able to walk across the backs of the salmon you know across the whole river well we're trying to avoid slipping even further into that apocalypse i don't know if you've uh follow what's going on the bristol bay of alaska with the pebble mine no oh it's crazy they're trying to they're trying and well you know according to what joe biden said when he was running for office that when he's in office that will not happen but um they're trying to do essentially the biggest mine in the world that would destroy the salmon population it would destroy it it would literally wipe out a gigantic not just a gigantic industry but a gigantic chunk of the salmon i think it's i forget which kind of salmon it is um i don't want i'd say it's chinook i forget what kind of salmon it is but it's the biggest population sakai thank you the biggest uh population of them in certainly in america but i think in the world i think is responsible for an enormous number of jobs and an enormous and apparently there's [ __ ] billions of dollars worth of gold and copper down there yeah earth works what's at stake an average of 40 to 50 million wild salmon make the epic migration from the ocean to the headwaters of the bristol bay every year like no place on earth the bristol bay watershed they've been working to try to make this mine a reality for i think a couple of decades now and people have been fighting tirelessly to educate people on what a devastating impact this is going to have on the ecology of that area and the fact that the environment will be permanently devastated there's no way of bringing this back and there's no way of doing this without
destroying the environment because the the specific style of mining that they have to employ in order to pull that copper and gold out of the ground involves going deep deep into the earth to find these reservoirs of gold and copper and the sulfur they have to go through and then they have to remove the waste and mining companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in this and then ban abandoned it yeah so they're like we can't this is we can't [ __ ] do this and then people are like we can do it and then they've got and it's other companies that are i don't believe the company that's currently involved in is even an american company i think it's a it's a foreign company that's trying to i think they're from canada that are trying to do this uh spectacular cat i don't know which company it is but it's uh my friend steve ranella from uh the meat-eater podcast i want to recommend this this podcast because he's got a particular episode on that um where he he talks about it let me find it real quick because it's um it's pretty epic where he talks to this one guy who's dedicated uh the last 20 years of his life trying to fight this um let me just find it real quick because it's um it's really it's it's pretty intense and it's it's terrifying when you you see how close it's come to actually being implemented and how if it happens there's no way you pull that back like once they do it yeah it's like all the all that uh standing rock [ __ ] you know what they were like no the the pipeline's gonna be fine no way that it leaks into the water or whatever you know it's like sure enough exactly unfortunately i'm already listened to it so i'm having a hard time finding it in this app it's [ __ ] did you find it here previously played um yeah a half-life of never it's the
october fifth episode that's a good title yeah and the the gentleman's name is tim bristol which is kind of crazy just that is his his birth name his name is tim bristol and he's dealing with this bristol bay yeah situation i mean it's just a random coincidence and you read all that [ __ ] about the episode 241. like when they were building uh all the dams yeah you know california and it's just like the salmon just bashing themselves to death basically set them on fire seattle yeah same thing that happened up in seattle these knuckleheads they didn't understand the migration these salmon won't go anywhere else they have one specific river where they were born and that's where they will die and spawn oh it's crazy but these [ __ ] that just want copper and gold are willing to do this and there was this one politician in particular that has a gigantic windfall if he can pull this off um or lobbyists or whatever the [ __ ] he is but he he stands to make i think they said 14 million dollars if he can actually get the shovels into the ground that's uh how much he uh he earns so what are we going to do about it kill that guy assassination politics yes kill them all no i'm kidding don't don't get me in trouble you can get banned off of youtube for saying something like that i'm joking um what should we do we should make people aware of it and make people aware that this is uh their real consequences to uh allowing politicians to make decisions that will literally affect human beings for the rest of eternity because you will never have that population of salmon coming to that particular location that have been going there for millions and millions of years and the reason why you won't have them there is because someone is greedy it's really that simple i mean you we are getting along fine without that copper without that gold and we are using the the resource of the
salmon and people are employed that are enjoying that resource and they're also able to go there and see the the bears eating the salmon and seeing this incredible wild place alaska is one of the few really truly wild spots in this country yeah and someone might [ __ ] that up and if you get the enough greedy [ __ ] together and they can figure out a way to make this a reality and with the wrong people in positions of power that's a hundred percent possible yeah yeah you might even say we've organized the entire world economy to [ __ ] that up yeah like yeah but you know i think that it's like the the question of agency of like you know what is how do we affect these processes yeah tough you know well just i mean i was joking obviously about killing that person but there was a recent um um one of the iranian scientists was assassinated and this brought up this gigantic ethical debate and we don't know who did it where there was a israeli army massage held a press conference to say we didn't do it while wearing t-shirts that said we definitely did it assassinated iranian nuclear scientists shot with remote-controlled machine gun holy [ __ ] oh my god dude we're killing people with robots now right that was the other that um the other iranian guy that got killed uh soleimani who was also killed with a drone i mean essentially yeah this is out of another car but whatever oh so a car was driving by and there was a remote control machine gun [ __ ] says it was a he was in a bulletproof car too wow i don't know he was in a bulletproof like they knew they were going to kill this guy man damn so this is the question we got out of the car oh well there you go you [ __ ] up stay in that bulletproof car if you uh if you know that a man is going to like what if someone did that to oppenheimer you know what if
someone said hey uh we see where this is going and we need to find that oppenheimer gentleman and we need to prevent big boy from uh you know dropping down and and killing how many people like yeah half a million people what he got shot by that remote it was 164 yards away shot him in his bodyguard and then the car they were in exploded lasted for three minutes like the whole thing was three minutes wow so there's this ethical dilemma like if someone is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons and we think that those people are going to use those nuclear weapons is it ethical to kill that person is that person's a scientist they're not a yeah right yeah i mean i think the causality stuff is really hard to figure out you know um but i think most of the time it's not about the one person you know that it's not you know maybe sometimes it is but i think most it's just like i feel like assassination politics in the tech arena does not work you know that it's like you can get rid of all the people at the top of these companies and that's not what's going to do it you know that they're like these structural reasons why these things keep happening over and over again yeah i think they're trying to slow it down though right like this is the reason why do you remember when they employed uh sucks net stuxnet yeah yeah you know i mean that was uh for the same reason right they were trying to uh disarm the uh iranian nuclear capabilities yeah that was the same thing where they but that was kind of like we didn't do it while wearing t-shirts they were like we definitely did this but they did that with uh computer virus which is pretty fascinating yeah yeah and people didn't have a problem with that they're like well well i think people did some people had a problem with that obviously but well iranians yeah but also just like okay uh you know you go down that road and yeah and you know where things can
happen too you know a great example is um so one of the things that came out uh in a lot of the documents that snowden released was that the nsa had worked with a standards body called nist in order to produce a random number generator that was backdoored so random numbers are very important in cryptography and if you can predict what the random numbers are going to be then you win and so the nsa had produced this random number generator that allowed them to predict uh what the random numbers would be because they knew of uh this one constant that was was in there they knew they knew a reciprocal value that you can't derive just by looking at it but they they know because they created it and uh they they had what they called uh a nobody but us back door no bus nobody but us back door uh and they got nist to standardize this thing and then they they uh got a company called uh jupiter who makes routers and vpns and stuff like that uh juniper sorry uh to uh include this in their products uh and so the idea was that like the nsa would have these capabilities they had developed you know these vulnerabilities that they could exploit in situations like this you know that they could like take advantage of uh foreign powers and stuff like that um in ways that wouldn't boomerang back at them uh but what happened was uh in i think you know 20 early early teens uh juniper got hacked and somebody secretly changed that one parameter uh that was like basically the back door to a different one that they knew knew the reciprocal value to uh and it's most likely china or russia that did this and uh then what's kind of interesting is there's a big incident where the opm the office of personnel management i think was compromised and they have records on you know foreign intelligence assets and stuff like that um that their systems were compromised it seems like maybe by china and what's sort of interesting is that they were
running the juniper networking gear that had been uh you know hacked in this one specific way and so it's kind of possible that like you know the nsa developed this backdoor that they were going to use for situations like this you know against foreign adversaries or whatever and the whole thing just boomeranged back at them and uh the office of opm was compromised as as a result wow but and this is like um i don't know i think it's you know it's easy to look at things like stuxnet and stuff like that and just be like yeah this is harm reduction or whatever you know but um like in the end it can have real world consequences and this is also why people are so hesitant about you know like the government is always like well why don't you develop a form of cryptography where it like works except for us you know we can access the content you know yeah and it's like well this is why because uh if you can if you can access it anybody can access it like somehow that's gonna boomerang back at you well i remember when there was a terrorist attack in bakersfield california is that where it was i think it was bakersfield yeah where uh yeah uh san bernardino san bernardino thank you yeah and there was uh an iphone involved and apple wouldn't open it for them yeah it wouldn't allow the fbi to have access to it people were furious and they were like if this this starts here this does not end well yeah and i kind of saw their point but i kind of saw the fbi's point too like did you just open this one this guy's clearly a murderer has killed a ton of people and created this terrorist uh incident yeah but i mean it was a little disingenuous too right where it's like the f like the fbi had their entire icloud backup for this device like the only thing they didn't have was like the previous two hours or something like that and the reason they didn't have it is
because they [ __ ] up and like uh approached it in the wrong way and got themselves locked out of it oh right so it's like they had it was their own mistake that led to the situation where they didn't have the icloud backup so then it's like what are you really gonna get off this phone you know it's like the the actual possibility of what was there was like extremely marginal so do you think what they really want is the tools to be able to get into one of the best phones you know where they've just been waiting for like the moment of like okay here we go we got terrorists we got you know like that makes sense um what did you think like when the state department whoever it was banned huawei phones yeah did you think there was i mean yeah it's mostly political right like it's uh it's complicated right because there's like you know companies like huawei and um you know uh what the tencent plus you know uh the people make tick tock uh okay like they're yeah they're doing like all the sketchy [ __ ] um but it's the same sketchy [ __ ] that like all of silicon valley is doing you know like it's not um is it really are there is that a valid comparison to what they're doing in silicon valley like huawei did have routers that had third party access apparently and they were shown that information was going to a third party that was not supposed to be right wasn't that part of the issue am i reading this wrong uh well i okay i think there's like a couple um there there have been incidents where it's like yeah there's like data collection that's happening yeah well there's data collection happening like all western products too you know uh like i mean and actually the way that western products design our design are really scary i mean in the telecommunications space there's a legal requirement called kalia communications and law enforcement act or something like that that requires telecommunications equipment to have
um to have eavesdropping like surveillance stuff built into it like when you produce the hardware in order to sell it in the united states you have to like which hardware like phone switches and stuff you know it's like when you make a normal phone call it has to have uh i think what they call like uh the ability to tap yeah they call it something else but it has to have you know this ability to um record conversations intercept uh lawful intercept what is this how does a signal call work so signal calls work uh not using the traditional telecommunications infrastructure it uh is routing data over the internet uh and that data is entered and encrypted so nobody can ease drop on those calls including us and but so communication equipment that is produced in the united states has to have uh this uh lawful intercept so called offline intercept capability but what's crazy about that is that's the same you know it's like these are u.s companies and they're selling that all around the world so that's the [ __ ] that gets shipped to uae and yeah you know so it's like it's the secondary effect thing of like the united states government was like we're going to be responsible with this and we're going to have warrants or whatever and even that's not true and then that same equipment gets shipped to tyrants and you know repressive regimes all over the place and they've just got a ready-made thing to you know just avail everyone's phone calls so it's like i don't know uh it's hard to indict huawei for acting substantially different than the way than you know whatever the the us industry acts it's just certainly they have a different political environment and you know they are much more willing to use that information to do really brutal stuff well it wasn't just that they banned huawei devices but they also banned them from using google
that's when i thought like wow this is really like what do they know or what has been google yeah yeah well google has um no so you know android you're talking about like so-called they have they can't use the android operating system anymore they have to now they've developed their own operating system and now they have their own ecosystem they have their own app store the whole deal yeah but that's that's also um that's a business thing you know where it's like google's control over you know google is producing the software android and they're it's just free you know they're um releasing it but they want to maintain some control over the ecosystem because it's their thing that they're producing uh and so they have a lot of requirements about it's like oh you know it's like okay you can run android oh you want all this other stuff that we make that's not part of just like the stock free thing you know like play services and you know all the google stuff and increasingly more and more of android is just getting shoved into this proprietary bit you know and they're like okay you want access to this then it's gonna cost you in these ways you know and i think it probably got to the point where huawei was just like um we're not willing to pay you know even either monetarily or through whatever compromise they would have to make and they were just like we're going to do our own thing i thought it was because of the state department's oh it could have also been that there was a legal requirement that they stopped doing that yeah yeah i think i might be jamie'll find out i think i think i might be right but i'm not sure though but it just made me think like i understand that there's a sort of uh connection that can't be broken between business and government in china and that business and government are united it's not like sure you know like apple and the
fbi right where in china they would just give them oh yeah of course yeah they developed though yeah they would help yeah they would they were gonna have the tools to get into it they wouldn't have to have this conversation yeah exactly they just send it to the directly to the people what we're terrified of is that these relationships that business and government have in this country they're getting tighter and tighter intertwined and we look at a country like china that does have this sort of inexorable connection between business and government and we're terrified that we're going to be like that someday yeah is it just it it is what it is yeah i mean i and that's i think you know a lot of what snowden was revealing yeah it was like you know that there are already these relationships you know um you know the nsa called it prism and uh you know tech companies just called it like the consoles or whatever they had built for these you know uh for these requests but it's um that's yeah it's happening and i don't also you know it's it's sort of like i think a lot of people a lot of nations look at china and are envious right where it's like they've done this thing where they just um you know they built like the great firewall of china and that has served them in a lot of ways you know one surveillance obviously like they have total control of everything that appears on the internet uh so not just surveillance but also content moderation uh propaganda but then also uh like it allows them to have their own internet economy you know where like china is large enough that um they can have their own ecosystem where like you know google people don't use google there you know people don't use uh they have their own chat apps they have their own search engines they have their
own social networks they have their own everything and i think a lot of nations like look at china and they're just like huh that was kind of smart you know it's like you have your own ecosystem your own infrastructure that you control and you have like the ability to do content moderation and you have the ability to do surveillance and so i think the fear is that there's going to be like a balkanization of the internet where you know russia will be next and then yeah every country that has an economy large enough uh will go down the same road was it jamie uh there was a it seems like there's a couple things that happen that are what you're saying but directly seems to be sweeping crack down on facial recognition tech house and senate democrats on tuesday rolled out a legislation to halt federal use of facial recognition software and require state and local authorities to pause any use of the technology to receive federal funding the facial recognition and biometric technology moratorium act introduced thursday marks one of the most ambitious crackdowns on face this has to do with that it said it was part of this boycott that had to do with google's like uh anti-trust suit that also had to do with facebook and they were looking into it this was from like a month ago i mean i think this is connected to what you're saying just in the sense that like um you know the people who are producing that facial recognition technology it's not the government it's you know volunteer whoever sells services to the government and then you know the government is then deploying this technology that they're getting from industry and in kind of crazy ways like there's a story of the black lives matter protester uh who they like the police that like nypd you know not like the fbi or nypd like tracked him to his house using facial recognition technology um and so yeah it's like how do they do that
uh there's a story about it i've been finding stories no one knows what these things are there's things supposedly all over new york city and manhattan that are tracking everybody's face as soon as they go in there and people i've watched news videos from local new york local media asking people have you seen these what are they they get no answers well here's what's hilarious crime has never been higher the new york city crime right now is insane that shit's not doing anything yeah well everyone's wearing a mask too that's also part of the problem but i think you know the fear is that like so there's this like you know circle of like industry producing technology that is going into government and like stuff like fake facial recognition technology just just makes existing power structures much more difficult to contest do you use facial recognition on your phone uh no i don't i don't have any apps or anything that uses it you don't know with your iphone oh no i just have a pen yeah oh you don't use it what's going on jimmy new york city police department uses facial recognition software to track down a black lives matter activist accused of assault after allegedly shouting into a police officer's ear with a bull horn that's it the man what about that guy who punched rick moranis you [ __ ] they found him they did yeah last week right in jail but they did find him how do you find them they have facial recognition joe but he wear a mask i don't know anyway um listen i think what you're doing is very important and i love the fact that you approach things the way you do and that you you really are this idealistic person that's not trying to make money off of this stuff and you're you're doing it because you think it's the right thing to do and if there is a resistance people like you are very important you know like what you what you've done by creating signal it's very
important there's not there's not a lot of other options and there's no other options that i think are as secure or as uh as viable thank you thanks yeah um i appreciate you saying that and uh i support it and i try to tell other people to use it as well um last word you have anything to say to everybody before we wrap this up it's a lot of pressure sorry um can i can i put out a public plea for a project i'm trying to work on sure okay i'm vaguely obsessed with uh this thing that happened in the 60s um are you familiar with uh the soviet space dogs so the first animal in space oh it was a dog yeah lyca uh lycode in space uh sadly the second animal in space was a dog called strelka uh struck a went to space made it back to earth and had puppies uh whoa those puppies can read minds when khrushchev came to visit jfk in 1965 he brought with him the ultimate insult gift which was one of the puppies that's an insult oh dude it's like oh do you have anything that's been to space we have extra puppies you know do you want one you know that's an insult dude it's the ultimate insult gift like the united states had no space program had never been the soviet union was like way ahead of them they're like oh we've just got extra animals that have been to space like here have one you know it's a puppy stop being so personal that's what i would tell kennedy just take the puppy well kennedy took the puppy kenny took the puppy the puppy had a cold war romance with one of kennedy's dogs and they had a whole snap that the candidate is called the pup nicks and the pupnics captivated the imagination of children across america because jackie kennedy said something she was like i don't know what we're gonna do with the dogs you know and that ignited a spontaneous letter-writing campaign from children across america
who all requested one of the puppies uh jackie kennedy selected two children in america whose names were mark bruce and karen house and she delivered two puppies to each of these people uh one of them lived in missouri the other lived in illinois and i have sort of been obsessed with the idea that those puppies had puppies and that those puppies had puppies and that somewhere in the american midwest today are the descendants of the original animals in space the first animal to go to space and survive they've probably been watered down so heavily maybe but like chihuahuas and german shepherds and [ __ ] well they were all um they were there they are right there they were mutts they were um random dogs they found from around uh the like spaceport because they thought that they would be like tougher oh wow uh but they were small and uh so yeah i've been obsessed with the idea that these dogs could still be out there and i've been trying to find the dogs so i've been trying to track down these two people uh notably karen house because she got the female dog and i think she's still alive and i think she lives in the chicago area but i can't get in touch with her because i'm not i don't know i'm not an investigative journalist i like don't know how to do this whatever so if anybody knows anything about the whereabouts of karen house or the descendants of the soviet space dogs i'm very interested my my goal is just to meet one you know how should someone get in touch with you i'm on the internet okay just like that yeah i'm on the internet my name is moxie i love it thanks man i really appreciate it i really enjoyed our conversation thank you bye everybody [Music] you