How to Stop the Government From Spying on You, Explained by a Digital Privacy Expert

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You've dedicated your life to preserving privacy.

Let's just start a big picture.

What is privacy and why is it important?

I believe that privacy is core to freedom at the end of the day.

I would even go as far as saying that it is synonymous with freedom.

It is protecting you, protecting your inner core essentially,

protecting your identity as a human being from forces that don't want you to be individual

and a human being at the end of the day.

So nicely put it.

I think what it really boils down to is...

In that regard, I think privacy is relatively similar to what was originally intended also

with the Second Amendment in the United States.

It is a tool for you as a human being to protect yourself against coercive force,

against your very soul, your inner core.

So there are forces and this has always been true at every time in history

that seek to make people less human to turn human beings into slaves or animals or objects

and privacy is the thing that prevents that.

So the crazy principle that exists within this universe is that there's this asymmetry

baked right into the very fabric that we exist in.

There's certain mathematical problems where the effort required to undo them

isn't just scaling linearly or exponentially, but that scales so violently

that the universe itself prohibits persons that don't have access,

don't have permission to undo this mathematical problem that they literally cannot do that.

So what that means is that with a very little amount of energy,

a minuscular amount of energy, a laptop, a battery and a few milliseconds of computation,

you can create a secret that not even the strongest imaginable superpower on Earth

is able to without your explicit granting of access are able to recover.

That is the fundamental principle on top of which encryption, cryptography and privacy

in the modern age are built.

And it's so fascinating that the universe itself allows for this computational asymmetry

where I can create a secret, I can encrypt something, I can make something hidden

and you with the most powerful imaginable coercive force violence,

you could imagine content and sized computers running for the entire lifespan of the universe,

you would not be able to apply that force to my secret because I have encrypted it

and the universe inherently sort of smiles upon encryption and appreciates that.

So I always found that so intoxicating this concept that this is inherently baked into the universe.

It is an interaction between mathematics and physics sort of

and is a fundamental property just like you could say nuclear weapons

are a fundamental property of reality, right?

And so encryption and privacy exist in this reality

and before you, we assume and I figured that out that wasn't necessarily clear, right?

It could also be that you can never hide something, encrypt something, keep something to yourself

but it turns out you actually can.

And so that is fascinating, I think.

And what it conceptually allows you to do is to take something and move it into a different realm

and then encrypt that realm, right?

And if someone else wants to go into that realm, follow you there,

they would need unlimited resources to do so.

And I would say that's what really got me into cryptography and privacy.

Okay, I'm having all kinds of realization simultaneously for sure

that you're an extraordinary person.

I think that's the first one.

Listen to three minutes, okay.

Who are you, where are you from?

And are you ready to suffer for your ideas?

Because what you've just articulated is the most direct subtle

but direct possible challenge to global authority.

Anyone could ever articulate.

But first, how did you come to this?

Where are you from?

Tell us about yourself for just a moment.

So I was born in Germany.

I'm 25 years old.

And I originally actually in my life I studied law

and then later I studied mathematics and computer science.

And then at some point I met a few people who also had these kinds of ideas about privacy,

technology, distributed technology, decentralization.

And we then decided to found a company that builds this kind of technology.

And that's how I ended up here, I guess.

So you're German, your product of Europe and European culture,

which is not privacy for all of its wonderful qualities.

It built the world.

I love Europe and the culture.

But it's not a privacy culture.

It doesn't have no.

No.

So especially German, why did you come to this conclusion when all of your neighbors didn't?

So I think it's interesting, right?

If you privacy as this inherent political thing that protects you as a human being,

there is data protection laws, GDPR, right?

There's fines against surveillance, capitalist tech giants in Europe.

But as you said, I feel like most of that stuff is a charade.

It's not really about protecting your privacy.

And we're seeing that in the UK, in the European Union,

I mean, there's so many cases that already have made some significant movements already this year.

So I would say for me personally,

it has really been this technological and mathematical understanding

of the power of this technology.

So realizing this, realizing that the universe allows you

to do these things.

And the universe has this built right into it.

It got me so fascinated that I really thought deeply about this.

And what I realized sort of is that what humans have done in the past

is that they've allowed information, right?

Any type of information that we now share with our mobile surveillance devices.

So that information to be encrypted and be put addressed somewhere securely, right?

That is how encryption has mainly been used.

Or to do things like signals doing where we do end-to-end encrypted messaging, right?

Where we're able to send some message from one human to another human being,

via something, some untrusted channel, right?

Where there can be interceptors that try to get those messages.

But thanks to mathematics, we're able to send this message across the whole universe

and it arrives at the end point with no intermediary being able to take a look at the message

because of this inherent property of the universe.

What I realized sort of has been that there's a missing piece, which is,

whenever we are accessing this information, whenever we are interacting with this information,

whenever we want to utilize it basically, we have to decrypt it again,

which then makes it accessible to whoever takes a look at it, right?

Whoever runs the machine that you decide to put that data on,

which can be AWS, which can be cloud providers, big data, big AI.

Exactly.

Whoever, right?

And so this idea that I had was what if we can take this asymmetry that is a fact of reality

and move that to computation itself to enable that all of those computations can be executed in private as well.

And then we can do some amazing things.

Then the two of us can decide to compute something together, not just exchange information,

we have some secure communication channel, but actually perform some mathematical function over something,

produce an output from some inputs, but we can keep those inputs to ourselves.

So Tucker has a secret, Janik has a secret, and with this technology,

we can produce some values, some information.

While you don't have to share your secret, I don't have to share my secret.

And we can scale that to enormous sizes where the entirety of humanity can do those things,

where countries can do those things.

But importantly, at its core, what we are doing is we are implementing this asymmetry

that exists within the universe and bringing that to the next level,

to the final form sort of.

And that's how I ended up founding Arcium.

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I can't think of a more virtuous project.

And you said it in the first minute.

The point of the project is to preserve humanity.

To keep human beings human.

And they're not just objects controlled by larger forces.

They're human beings with souls.

And again, I don't think there's any more important thing

that you could be doing with your life.

So thank you for that.

Can you be more specific about our current system

and how it doesn't protect privacy?

Yes.

So I would say there's...

So I think there's a lot of things to unravel.

If we take a look at the systems

that we are interacting with every single day,

what those tools and applications,

those social media networks,

basically everything that we do in our digital lives

and all of our lives have basically shifted from physical reality

to the digital world.

So everything we basically do, everything we do in this room,

everything we do when we are out on the street,

because all of the technology has become part of physical reality,

has been consumed sort of.

And so all of this has been built on top of

what the former Harvard professor Shoshana Suboff

has called surveillance capitalism, right?

And I think that really lies at the core.

And it's relatively straightforward to understand

what those companies are doing.

If you ask yourself,

hey, why is this application that I'm using actually free, right?

Why is nobody charging me to ask this super intelligent

chatbot questions every day?

Why are they building data sensors for trillions of dollars?

Well, I don't have to pay anything for it, right?

So that's the question that you need to ask yourself, right?

And what you end up realizing is that all of those systems

are basically built as rent extraction mechanisms

where from you as a user,

you're not really a user,

you're sort of a subject of those platforms.

You are being used to extract value from you

without your noticing.

And they are able to extract value from you

because all of your behavior,

all of your interactions with those systems

are being taken and they perform mass surveillance,

bulk surveillance, and it's those companies, right?

We're just talking about companies.

We're not even talking about intelligence

or governments or anything.

We're just talking about those companies that exist

within our economy.

And so they record everything they can

because every single bit of information

that I can take from your behavior

allows me to predict your behavior.

And where I can predict your behavior,

I can utilize that to,

in the most simple case,

do something like serving your ads, right?

But in more complex cases,

I can do things like I can steer your behavior.

I can literally control you.

I can turn you into a puppet that does whatever I want.

And so those are the systems

that we are faced with right now.

And the internet has sort of been this amazing emancipator

for humanity, right?

This show is only possible because of the internet.

Otherwise, with traditional media,

we wouldn't be able to speak about those topics.

I feel like.

That's right.

But at the same time,

sort of nowadays,

it has transformed into one of the biggest threats

to human civilization.

At the user level,

at my level,

the level of the iPhone owner,

is it possible to communicate privately

with his sure answer privacy with another person?

That's an interesting question.

So we start with this concept

of insecure communication.

Yes.

And since every communication channel is insecure,

what we employ is end-to-end encryption.

And end-to-end encryption allows us

to take this information,

take a message,

and lock it securely,

so that only Tucker and Janik

are able to unlock them

and see what's going on.

And that is a fact.

So there have been,

there have been many cases

where there are big players

with big interests, I guess,

have attempted to undermine cryptography,

have attempted to get rid of end-to-end encryption

to install backdoors.

There has been what is commonly called the crypto-bores

in the 1990s, right,

where the cipherpunks

fought for the right to publish open-source encryption

and cryptography.

And many, many more cases, I guess.

But at the end of the day,

I would say as a realistic assessment,

this kind of cryptography is secure,

and it works.

Now, that unfortunately

is not the whole answer,

because what we have to think about is,

now, what happens

with those end devices, right?

Fair.

I mean, the message,

the messenger writes

that this being sent

from Janik to Tucker,

might be secure.

But now, if I cannot undermine

and apply force to this message,

to understand what's inside,

well, I'm just going to apply force to your phone.

And that's sort of what's happening.

So, when we look at different applications,

for sure, there is a whole variety of applications,

messaging applications, right,

that do not employ encryption

and security standards

and might collect all of your messages and images

and utilize them for those machines,

that extract as much value as possible from you.

But there's applications like Signal

that don't do that,

that are actual open source, cryptography,

technology that anyone can verify themselves

and take this code

and turn it into an actual application

and start it on your phone.

All of those things are possible, right?

So, that's not the issue.

The underlying issue really is that

you have this device in your hand

that is sort of closed hardware.

You don't know how that thing works, right?

It is impossible to understand how that thing works.

It is impossible to understand how the operating system

on that thing works.

And there's flaws in those systems, right?

Those are closed systems.

There's flaws in those systems.

For some reason, because people don't always

have the best interests of others in mind.

But also not always.

Not always.

But also because people make mistakes, right?

Honest mistakes that are not malicious.

And so, I think that in general also speaks

for the importance for free accessible hardware,

where people with technical skills can play around with

and find issues.

But at its core, what you're being subjected to right now,

I would say is technical surveillance.

And what it means is that there's some actor,

can be some state actor, can be someone else,

that decides that Tucker Carlson is worth to be surveilled.

I think that has been decided here.

I think I do.

I think I'm getting that sense.

So, so technical surveillance.

That means that you specifically are being targeted.

And that is in contrast to strategic surveillance,

which is this idea of everyone is being surveilled.

Let's just surveil everyone, collect every single bit

of information and store that for the entirety

of human history.

And then someday maybe we'll be able to use that, right?

So, those are those two concepts.

And what we've seen over the last few years

is sort of a shift away from technical surveillance,

towards strategic surveillance.

And surveillance capitalism has really helped this concept,

because there's so much data that is being locked,

that can be stored, there's so many new devices

and applications that can be employed.

And so, we see pushes like, for example,

chat control within the European Union,

that is sort of a backdoor to implement backdoors

within all of the messenger applications,

to be able to scan your applications,

to scan your messages, to take your messages somewhere else,

and decide whether or not those people like

what you're saying within your private messages.

So, I would say in general, as a normal human being,

with your iPhone, you are still able to privately communicate,

that is still something that exists.

However, this ability has greatly been limited.

If there is someone who wants to see your message,

I would say they can, unfortunately.

How difficult is it for a determined, say, state actor,

an intelligence agency to say,

I want to read this man's communications.

Listen to his calls, watch his videos, read his texts.

How hard is it for them to do that?

So, I think that, and we can look at different court cases

that have publicly emerged in regards to Apple, for example,

where Apple has refused intelligence

to give them backdoor access to their devices.

And what's so important about this discussion

that we are having here is that every time you're building a system

where you add backdoor access,

so that someone in the future can decide to get access,

and take a look at what you're writing,

what that invites is for everyone to do that,

because a backdoor inherently is a security flaw in our system.

And it's not just some specific intelligence agency

that decides to read your messages.

It's every intelligence agency on the other side of that point.

And so, that's why, as a nation,

you cannot weaken security by getting rid of privacy

without weakening your entire economy, cyber security,

and also social fabric at the end of the day, right?

And the whole strategic positioning of US and nation.

How difficult it is, I would say, also,

from a practical operational security standpoint,

depends on what are you doing with your phone, right?

Is your phone this strict device that is only used for messaging

or is your phone also using different types of media?

Are you sending images? Are you receiving messages?

So, I think two years ago,

there was this case where there was a zero-day backdoor

being used across Apple devices,

because when I sent you an image and your messenger

had auto download on,

I could get full access to your phone by sending you a message.

And you're not my contact, even, probably, right?

I just figure out what your phone number is.

I send you an image.

The image gets automatically downloaded.

Some malicious code that I have injected gets executed.

And now I own your phone and I can do whatever I want.

And then end training encryption doesn't help you, right?

Because I have literal access to the end device

that decrypts this information.

And so, that's very dangerous that that has been fixed.

But I think what it highlights really is that complexity

is the issue here.

So, complexity in the kinds of applications

that you're running, complexity in the underlying operating system

that this device has,

all of that complexity invites mistakes

and also malicious security flaws

to be installed in those systems.

Yeah.

Human organizations are the same way.

They are the easier they are to subvert.

Yes, of course.

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So that's very, I mean, that's a very simple thing, man.

To send someone, you know, to text him an image

and all of a sudden you have control of his phone.

I think we can be fairly confident

that people who have adversaries are being surveilled, right?

Yes, I think so.

I would say that technical surveillance

really is something that exists.

I would say in this battle for privacy,

it is actually not the most important thing to focus on, right?

Because this kind of technical surveillance,

sort of, I feel like to a certain degree

we need to accept, unfortunately,

not the technical surveillance that says,

Tucker Carlson is a journalist.

I don't like that.

Let me surveil him, right?

That's not the kind of technical surveillance I'm speaking of.

But if we have legal procedures and actual

truly carry warrants in place, right?

I feel like as a society we could accept that

and to convert.

As long as we try to determine the system.

Right, we could definitely accept that, of course.

But the fundamental issue really is,

and that's sort of so ironic, right?

That all of the surveillance sort of needs to operate under secrecy

in order to function, right?

You should not know that you're being surveilled.

Nobody sort of has oversight.

Not even the democratic processes are able to have oversight

because it's all wrapped in secrecy.

So that really brings us to the fundamental issue here,

also with strategic surveillance, surveilling everyone,

just deciding, well, I'll take a look at everyone's phone,

store everything, and maybe I don't like someone in the future

then I have this backlog of information.

So the important question to consider here

is thinking about, is there even a future

where from a legal standpoint it is possible

to implement procedures that guarantee

there is no secret surveillance in place,

which I think the answer is pretty clear to that question.

And it is.

I think it is not.

So I think it is important to have these laws in place, right?

That prohibits surveillance and that enable different kinds

of processes with warrants, right?

Literally the fourth amendment, right?

To allow for that to be implemented in the 21st century.

But what we've seen sort of is that the tools

that governments have access to are so powerful

that it is impossible to make a law

that prohibits use of that,

because whoever within a centralized architecture

that's always the case has access to this technology

basically becomes a single point of failure.

And that single point of failure will necessarily be corrupted

by the power that exists.

Just a couple of obvious low-brow textual questions

is the iPhone safer than the Android or less?

That's a good question.

So I would say a huge advantage that Android devices

bring to the table, right?

This is this nature of, I guess, a subset of those devices, right?

Not speaking for the entirety, but the operating system, for example,

being publicly fuelable by anyone, right?

Yes.

You can understand it.

Yes.

And I think that is so important not just for security,

but also for technological innovation.

And so I would say that is a huge advantage.

Now, the devices are manufactured by some manufacturer

who you need to trust at the end of the day,

based on how the hardware is built

and how the firmware is compiled

and then put on your device.

So they have been interesting operating systems.

I think there's one called Graphene OS,

which is a secure, open source operating system as far as I know,

haven't looked too deeply into that.

But you could, on an Android device, theoretically say,

I'm going to run my own operating system on that,

which I think is a strong, very proposition.

Now, I myself, I'm also an Apple user.

There is also an element of institutional trust involved here,

where you say, okay, I trust the manufacturing

and software process that this company has.

But in general, if I'm being honest,

if I wouldn't be lazy, right,

what I'd be doing is I would actually be looking for

a minimalistic, secure, open source operating system

for my mobile phone, and I would build that myself

and get some hardware and put that on there.

So I would say that would be the smartest thing to do.

If you are technically versatile.

I read the EU's and iPad, not a Mac.

Is there an advantage?

That's what I did back in the day.

But it started, yeah.

Is there an advantage to the iPad over the Mac

from a privacy standpoint?

I think what it boils down there, down to there,

is what kind of applications could be installed on your system.

I would say in general, devices like the iPhone or the iPad,

operating a more sandboxed way,

where applications are actually isolated right,

rather than how it works on operating systems like macOS

or Windows, where you could compromise the entire system

way more easily, right?

So on the iPhone, you just have an App Store with applications

and the level of compromise that such an application can have

theoretically, at least from the idea is limited

to just this single application, right?

It doesn't have access to your messenger

if you're installing an app.

Although it has, I guess, if there's some flaw in the system,

which always is the case.

So you never have this absolute security.

I think what it really boils down to is this idea

that really emerged in the 1990s of decentralization, right?

Moving away from central single points of failures

towards decentralization, where we can mitigate a lot of these risks

by not depending, I guess, on one single type of computer

and not even depending on one single computer,

but having many computers, which introduces redundancy, resilience,

and, I guess, risk reduction and distribution to computer systems.

So speaking more broadly about how the internet

in our free society should be built, I guess, yeah.

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You've said a couple of times that the problem is the hardware.

It's not the software.

It's a device, right?

It's a union of the hardware and the software.

What's the option?

Is there an option at this point?

If I am intent on sending a private message to someone else electronically,

is there a way to do it as of right now?

That's private, guaranteed private.

I would say the way that I, myself,

at least handled it really is to have a dedicated phone for that specific use case.

And then just have encrypted messenger there.

That you can trust because maybe you don't even install it via the App Store,

but you have built it yourself.

And there's no other interactions taking place with that phone.

I would say from an operational security standpoint,

that is as good as it can get.

Otherwise, you would really have to look at,

I don't know, you can do creative things always, right?

You could write your message and hand encrypted

then type it in the phone, right?

So it doesn't matter at that point.

So maybe we need to get away from the devices altogether, right?

What's interesting, what we're doing with RQM is that we never have a single point of failure.

Everything is encrypted.

Everything sits within a distributed network,

where as long as you're not able to basically get access to the entire globally distributed network

to every single participant, you have security.

And it's difficult to do that with your own phone.

But at the end of the day, I think over time,

those systems get more secure.

However, what is important is to be certain that there is no backdoors explicitly installed, right?

From those manufacturing processes.

I think there's some countries where

if you're buying a phone from there, you could be certain, okay, there might be something installed

because the company itself is owned by the government.

And we need legal frameworks for that.

And also what we require sort of is that the manufacturing process itself mirrors distributed decentralized systems,

where there again is not a supply chain of single points of failure,

where if one single worker decides to install some backdoor because they get paid off right,

they can do so, but instead there is oversight.

And I think that Apple runs on that model already.

So I would be relatively comfortable with these kinds of systems,

but there's also other interesting technologies.

So for example, Solana, which is an American company blockchain network, right?

And they actually have their own phone company or offering phones.

They have a very small manufacturer and they manufacture those phones because they say,

well, those phones need to be very secure because you literally stored your money on there now

because your money is digital and on top of a blockchain network.

And so I think those are very interesting approaches,

where I'm really looking forward to seeing more phones like this,

where there's then again a competitive market emerging for who's building the most secure phone.

I actually think a friend of Julian Assange from Germany, I don't remember his name,

had a company manufacturing secure phones.

The issue with explicitly built secure phones, however, always is that I would say many of these companies are honeypots.

I noticed.

Yeah, with the anchor chat or whatever it was called, there was this large scale,

yeah, police operation to stop truck cartels, which worked out nicely, I guess, in the end.

But the company itself was just a facade to sell backdoor phones.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, it's the perfect honeypot.

And so by the way, a signal, which I'm not saying is a honeypot, of course,

and I use it as the authorities know.

But it was created with CIA money, so it doesn't mean it's a CIA operation,

but why wouldn't it be?

I mean, honestly, I'm not accusing anybody because I have no knowledge.

Yeah.

I mean, pretty obvious move, right?

It would be.

I think what's important when we look at signal actually is that we look at what signal is.

Signal is open source software.

Yes, that anyone can verify for themselves.

And what it means is that we have this global community of mathematicians and cryptographers

that have invented those protocols that have independently without getting funding

from CIA or whomever.

Yes.

Ford of mathematical problems that they want to solve, that they are passionate about,

and all of those people look at those open source lines of code and mathematical formulas,

and they find those flaws in those systems.

And so that makes me confident in the design of signal itself.

Do you use it?

I use signal, yes.

I got my entire family to use signal.

Okay, good.

And I have to say, I know a lot of Intel people use signal.

Yeah.

A lot of the ones I know.

And so that tells you something right there.

Yes.

So I think it would be highly unlikely that signal itself would actually turn out to not be secure.

There has been, there has been this interesting case called, there was in the early 2000s,

where there was this attempt to actually undermine strong encryption called very exotic name,

dual elliptic curve deterministic random bit generator, dual ECDRBG, right?

Nobody understands, no non-technical person understands what that means, right?

And it was actually what you need to understand in order to comprehend what has happened there,

is that when we, when we encrypt information, when we, as I said earlier,

when we take something and move it into this different realm, where you cannot follow this information into that realm,

because that would require you to have literally infinite resources, more energy than the sun will emit over its lifespan.

Isn't that crazy, right?

So you, you cannot, you cannot follow there.

Well, how fundamentally this asymmetry is achieved in cryptography is that the universe runs on energy and uncertainty,

right?

Particles, chitter, stars, burst, and so there's this randomness in the universe.

If you look at the sky or if you just look at how, how, how things are made up,

there's random noise everywhere.

And so when we, when we encrypt something, we make use of that chaos,

and we unchecked it into a message that we are sending, for example,

and it's only possible to not decrypt that message in an unauthorized way,

if the randomness that has been unchecked in this message is actually unpredictable.

Now, if we think of randomness is truly random, it has to be truly random.

Yeah, I cannot, I cannot figure out how you arrived at the random number.

No, no pattern.

No pattern.

Exactly.

True randomness, true entropy, right?

Yes.

That's, that's what, what cryptographers, I would say, spend most of their time on thinking about

how can we achieve true randomness?

Because then if we are able to uncheck that using mathematics,

for you, it becomes impossible to distinguish this message from randomness.

You can't find a pattern.

Hence, you're not able to apply any, any optimized algorithm to undermine exactly.

So if we, if you think about it practically, what that means is,

let's say we have a deck of cards, 52 playing cards, right?

And I randomly shuffle the stack of poker cards.

We have 52 cards.

What that means is that there's so many possible ways that the deck could be stacked,

that it is very unlikely that for truly randomly shuffled decks,

there have ever been two identical decks in the history of humanity,

which is hard to believe in general, but that's how how statistics and mathematics work, right?

So we take this deck and we use that as the randomness.

Now, if I play with a magician, the magician can pretend to shuffle the deck,

but actually they have not shuffled the deck.

They know what the cards look like.

But we're doing with all of this randomness that we are injecting into information

is we're basically describing what key is being used to unlock them.

And if I don't know how the randomness looks like,

if I don't know what the next playing card in the stack is,

I have to try every single possible key and try to unlock it with this message.

So you could think of it as, I have this message.

Now I want to apply violence to this message in order to recover it.

What I'm doing is I take key number one, I try to unlock it, doesn't work.

Then let's try key number two.

And you do that for an inconceivable large amount of numbers.

So that's why you basically, practically speaking, cannot brute force these kind of mechanisms.

Although you can, if you know where to start looking for the keys,

if you know that you need to start looking at the, yeah, millionth key,

then you can recover it.

And so if the deck is being manipulated, the randomness is being manipulated,

then you can undermine encryption while the process of encrypting it itself remains sound, right?

You don't notice it.

You actually do what you mathematically need to do to securely send your message,

but the value that you use to do so this randomness is actually not random.

And that's what the, what had been attempted with this specific algorithm,

dual EC, the RPG.

What they did was they created this concept of kleptography,

where they actually have randomness derived in a way that is deterministic

and they actually have some some secret value.

And then from that secret value, they derive fake randomness.

They look random, but it's not actually random.

And the NSA proposed this algorithm to the, to the NIST,

the National Institute of Science and Technology in the early 2000s,

as the, yeah, best set of the art randomness derivation function, I guess, right?

And that got accepted.

They got accepted as official standard.

And then there was companies like RSA actually are highly sophisticated

and respected cryptography company, right?

With, with the founders being some of the fathers of modern and cryptography, right?

So that then build products and distributed it to industry and people using this technology.

Nobody knew about it, but it's not, not actually true.

Nobody knew about it, so there were a lot of cryptographers that raised questions.

A couple of years later, where they were like, I don't think this is actually random.

It looks suspicious to me.

Where they were like, if someone theoretically had access to some secret key S

and then created some mathematical formulas and actually mathematically approved

that there was insecurity there, it was not random.

Because they noticed a pattern in it.

They realized sort of that.

So basically what they realized is that there's just those numbers.

So they wrote this proposal.

Hey, let's use this algorithm.

And this algorithm contains some constant numbers.

So there's those numbers written there.

And then they were like, are those numbers random?

Because we're literally deriving our randomness from those numbers.

And we were like, yeah, those are random.

We randomly generated them.

And it turns out there was some other key that is being used

to then mathematically be able to recover whatever randomness you used.

So that was the secret attempt to undermine cryptography

by the US government.

Yes.

And I think what I was striking about this against that,

you're not just undermining privacy.

You're undermining the entire security of your economy, your country.

And banking, banking, missile codes, everything.

Yes, everything.

So the thing that didn't happen was in 2013,

Snowden revealed a few papers, I guess.

And one of those was Project Bull Run.

And within Project Bull Run, they allocated funding

to that specific project where they tried to undermine cryptography.

And so once that got published,

the corresponding companies and standardization institutes.

And it's so striking that you get standardization

because once it's defined as a standard,

you and industry need to implement it right to get certification.

So it's literally impossible to then use

some other alternative to the secure

because certification only gets provided

for disrespect or technology.

But I got uncovered, thanks to Snowden,

then people stopped using it.

Did he celebrate it?

Did he win the presidential medal of freedom for this?

Yes.

And then it turned into reality.

In the different realm, I guess.

One of the great patriots of our time.

Relentless, I mean, they'd murder him in a second.

He's still an exile, not by choice.

But it's, yeah.

But they also uncovered us that they actually paid

to this company that built those products

10 million U.S. stores, Tennessee,

to use that as a standard.

So yeah, that's why you cannot trust anyone.

As you point out, it's not simply,

I mean, so this is an intel agency trying to spy on its own people,

the ones you pay for yet to exist.

But it's, and that's immoral and, you know,

something that we should Fed against.

But they were also sabotaging the U.S. economy

and U.S. national security.

And because if your cryptography is fake,

then that means you're exposed

on every level throughout your system.

You are, yes.

Yeah.

And it's so interesting because it is debt or task

that's why it was possible for them to do that

to increase national security, right?

At that point, they were the leading cryptography research company

in the world sort of, right?

And so that really is striking to me,

that you're willing to undermine

the entire security of your nation.

And at the end of the day,

puts you in a worse strategic position.

I think many people don't realize that.

I've never thought about it until you mentioned it.

But it just highlights, I mean, I love Ed Snowden

and I'm not embarrassed to that, I'm proud.

But it just highlights, you know,

the suffering that he's been through

in order to help his own country

and he's still slandered constantly in it.

It drives me crazy.

But this has yet another example

of why he did something more than almost anyone else

to help this country.

But so you are,

sounds like you're convinced that open,

the current state of the art in cryptography

is actually secure.

Yes, yeah, 100%.

I think, as I said,

I think this is a great example to look at

where even with those backdoors

that had been implemented,

there were cryptographers

within this global open source,

mathematics, cryptography, community,

that rang the bell,

but nobody was listening to them.

But they actually identified the issue,

years in advance, and rang the bell

and said, this is not secure or not random,

even within those companies

and standardization institutes,

but nobody took it seriously.

Or I guess took it seriously,

but it doesn't matter if the law is,

you have to use this algorithm, right?

So that makes me very confident

that this system works,

the system of mathematician.

Is cryptography global,

which is to say like,

is Chinese cryptography different

or stronger than European-American?

Of course.

It is interesting.

So you have actually specific encryption standards

used by militaries of the world, right?

So the Chinese use different cryptography

than the Russians,

than the Americans.

It is, at the end of the day,

the same thing, right,

from a mathematical standpoint.

But there are some deviations

in the level of security

and the kind of numbers used, right?

So everyone builds their own standards

because they mutually distrust each other.

But at the end of the day,

they're underlying mathematics,

or are the same.

The cryptographic standards,

the way that cryptography works,

that is the same.

So there's no reason to think

that Chinese and the Russians

have stronger cryptography

than the Europeans and the Americans.

So I think,

no, no.

And I think,

I mean, it's interesting to think about,

is there cryptography

that is being developed in-house,

within militaries

or whatever proprietary human organization, right?

There's not publicly known

that there is incredibly powerful.

I mean, what I've been doing

with my team,

and I'm so glad that I have those,

incredible cryptographers in my team

that actually understand all of those things

on a way more detailed level than I do,

is build this protocol

that allows us to literally

take everyone's data

so you could imagine

the entirety of the United States, right?

We take everyone's health care data,

something like that, right?

And then we say,

well, we need to do something with that data.

Let's say we need to research our disease

or whatever,

instead of taking that data

and passing it to some company

that will inevitably expose it,

lose it,

it will get leaked,

or it will be used against those people,

we encrypt it,

nobody ever has to share any information,

and we just run whatever computation

that we collectively set,

we are going to do that with this data,

we do that,

we get the result,

we figure out a cure to cancer,

whatever,

but at no point in time,

you ever had to share your data,

your data never left your ownership,

and I think that's really core.

And it's sort of

it's the holy grail of cryptography, I would say,

being able to do these kinds of things,

because you can now run

any type of computer program,

instead of in the public,

in private,

and you can restructure the way that

your entire economy

and country can work, right?

And that goes beyond just

just economical human interactions

that also touches upon things like

rethinking how we can actually

improve democratic processes,

because what those computations

inherently have as a property

is so-called verifiability.

So what's the status quo sort of,

and the current internet is,

you task some cloud provider

to run a computer program for you, right?

Because you have limited resources,

you want them to run that computer program for you.

So you pass them some information,

an algorithm,

and you get an output back.

But how do you know

that this output is actually correct, right?

Could be that there was an error,

could be that

they maliciously tried to undermine

the output that they have sent you.

So this technology that we've built

actually solves this, right?

Verifiability for computations.

You can mathematically verify

that a computation has been correctly executed.

And that itself

is an amazing property.

An amazing property that you want to see

within every system, right?

But you don't get that amazing property

without implementing privacy for those systems.

Isn't that amazing?

It is amazing.

It is.

How did you all create this?

So I'm very lucky that within my company,

I have very experienced photographers

who've literally worked more years

on these specific issues

than I have been in cryptography.

And so I'm sort of building

on the shoulders of giants, of course, right?

And there has, for a very long time,

been research in those areas

being able to run those encrypted computations.

But it has never been practical enough,

where it is fast enough, cheap enough, right?

And versatile enough,

where you can actually do all of those things.

And so I think what really guided us

is to,

and what really guided me

in the way that I designed this system

is to think about, okay,

how can I actually build this system

so that people are going to use it

and are going to build applications

and are going to integrate that into systems, right?

Because I think with privacy technology

in general in the past,

what has been done is that

it sort of has been created

in an echo chamber

in a vacuum almost,

where you're a smart cryptographer,

it will be an amazing technology,

but you maybe don't understand

how markets work

and how to get product markets,

and how to actually get those users, right?

And so we've tried to build in a different way,

and that's how we ended up here.

But to be honest,

it was an evolutionary process for us.

So we originally started with a different kind of cryptography,

I would say,

that was more limited,

that didn't allow for all of those interactions,

and then, at some point,

we sort of decided, okay,

and we realized that

that was not good enough,

that was not enough,

and at that point,

basically everyone was still

building with that technology,

and we were like,

let's do something different instead,

let's think about how the future

will look like,

how sort of computation and privacy

can convert

and something bigger

for the entirety of humanity,

and that's then,

how we build that.

In very, very quick time, actually.

How did you fund it?

So we got investor funding,

and I'm incredibly thankful

for all of the investors that I've gotten,

Coinbase, for example.

So big names in the space of

blockchain distributed systems,

all of those networks like Bitcoin,

all of those networks are distributed

in nature, decentralized,

and yeah, there's a lot of players

within that space that truly believe

in the value of privacy,

and that privacy is a human right,

and privacy is inevitable as a technology

that like to support it,

but not just supported right,

because it is something they believe in,

but invest in it because they sort of

have realized that this is one

of the most powerful technologies

that can exist in humanity,

right, being able to take information,

move it into this realm,

and then it can stay in this realm,

and it can be processed,

and everyone can do that.

That is incredibly powerful.

It is emancipating,

and it is powerful for businesses,

but also nation states.

At the end of the day,

it is a neutral technology,

and so we have investors

that believe in that.

So one of the applications,

we're just talking about camera,

and one of the applications for this technology,

what one of the big ones,

is the movement of money

in a way that's private.

How exactly does that work?

And let me just add one editorial comment,

the greatest appointment of the last 10 years for me

is that crypto transactions

don't seem to be as private

or beyond government control,

as I thought they would be.

I hope they are someday,

but watching the Canadian truckers,

you know, have their crypto frozen

and was just such a shock.

I've never gotten over it.

Will this technology change that?

Yes, so if you think about Bitcoin,

as the state of the art model of,

or I guess the original,

or not say of the art model,

the original kind of blockchain network, right?

What it is at the end of the day,

is a way for distributed people

to find consensus over some unit of money,

which is actually more like a commodity

than actually a financial instrument.

That's right.

And they find consensus

and they create this currency.

And that's why people think

that it's fake, non-existent, right?

Although it's a way more real process

of creating a currency than fiat currency,

they mine it by taking energy

and solving a mathematical problem

and once they're correctly solved

that mathematical problem,

they get rewarded

in that newly mined currency, right?

So it's a very, very elegant design.

Most people think that these kinds of networks

are anonymous and are dangerous, right?

Because I feel like it has actually been a narrative

that media and different actors

want the people to believe.

I just have to add,

I would like them to be anonymously dangerous.

Oh, yes.

Oh, yes.

Yes, yes.

I was hoping, yes.

So people believe that,

which attracts people, right?

And also keeps other people from using them

and trying to outlaw them.

In actuality, they're not anonymous.

What you have in Bitcoin specifically

is pseudo-nomity.

So you don't see on the blockchain

Tucker Carlson has 10 Bitcoin

or whatever and San Giannick won Bitcoin.

You instead see ABCDEFG, blah, blah, blah, whatever, right?

A random string of numbers and letters

has sent something to another random string

and letters and numbers.

However, they're linked to this identity that you have.

So for every single transaction

that you've performed in history

on top of this distributed letter,

you will see all of those transactions.

So I, when you later after the show,

then we won Bitcoin, I guess, right?

So I would see their cheaper today

than they were yesterday.

You noticed.

So when you sent me something,

what I'll be able to see is

all of the other transfers

that you've performed in the past, right?

That's unfortunately how Bitcoin works.

And so it has this inherent full transparency.

There's no privacy because it's so easy to then

we are, I guess, on and off ramps

how you actually moved money in there, right?

Because you most likely don't actually

get this currency through work

by applying energy.

You buy it for a different currency,

via money, right?

So your identity is linked, everything is public.

And so that's a fundamental issue.

That is actually a dystopian scenario

where we could end up.

If this is adopted as the technology

where all of your money now sits

and you're sending transactions,

where you have this big upside

of having cash-like properties,

which is amazing,

but you have this tremendous downside

of literally everything being recorded

for the conceivable future of humanity, right?

And you have no privacy.

And that inherently limits your freedom

to use this technology.

And so that is an issue

that exists, not just within Bitcoin,

but also other blockchain networks.

And Bitcoin is this pure form.

That's why within the crypto industry,

there's a lot of competition also

between different players that say Bitcoin is this pure form

that only allows transfers of money, right?

And other networks allow execution as well.

And that has led to

what is commonly being called smart contracts.

So this concept of computer programs

that simply exist in the adder basically,

a computer program that can execute something

that you tell it to do,

and it will guarantee to do so.

And this amazing property

that all of the founding fathers

of those networks basically identified

as important as so-called censorship resistance,

which I think is also important in real life, very.

And so those networks provide censorship resistance.

It doesn't matter if one computer decides,

well, I'm not going to accept Tucker's transaction

because I don't like Tucker.

Well, there's going to be another computer that says,

I will accept it.

So that is censorship resistance

that is inherently baked into those systems.

And what that means is,

if you interact with this as this invisible machine, right,

you get guaranteed execution for whatever you tell it to do,

either send someone money

or perform some other computational logic

that is baked into the system.

And so there have been,

have been different kinds of pioneers

on the front of performing,

yeah, adding cryptographic privacy to those systems.

There has, for example, emerged

on a network called zero cache, C cache,

which is basically Bitcoin

with cryptographic privacy.

And there have also been pioneers

like the inventors of tornado cache

who have built a smart contract

that exists within this editor is unstoppable.

Once you've uploaded it,

you cannot stop it anymore.

So they did that.

And the kind of code

that they implemented there

gave you privacy on top of this public network,

which was the,

or is the Ethereum virtual machine?

So they did that,

and tornado cache to the tornado cache.

Well, did they win the Nobel Prize?

Did they get the presidential

and what happened next when they offered privacy?

So there were,

I think it was three founders,

Roman Storm, who's an American citizen,

Roman Seminoff,

who is a Russian national

and Alexei Peterson,

who is a Russian national as well,

who lives in the Netherlands.

He has been convicted

of assisting in money laundering

for five years.

And...

Five years in prison?

Five years in prison.

And Roman Storm has been convicted

of in the United States

of conspiring to run a money transmitter

with other license.

Now, why has this happened?

Why did they suffer such grave consequences?

They were arrested.

They were arrested.

A broad untrial.

I mean, it's actually,

if you look at what Roman Storm has faced,

it was 40 years in prison for this.

In the United States.

In the United States of America.

And why has that happened?

They built a privacy tool.

Well, it was an illicit actor

that used their privacy tool.

And that is a shame

because it was an illicit actor

that a lot of people agree on it.

It is an illicit actor.

I think the two of us also agreed

that North Korea laundering stolen hacked funds

is an illicit actor misusing a tool, right?

So there's no question about this.

The underlying question reveals.

Where were sure that actually happened?

We are sure that happened just.

For sure that has happened.

And so they stole funds

because they were able to hack

the French systems.

And then we're able to utilize

this platform to gain privacy

to then move those funds somewhere else.

Did Roman Storm participate

in the North Korean hedge fund theft?

He did not know.

So if I rob a bank

and then jump into my Chevrolet

and speed away,

does the president of General Motors get arrested?

Usually he doesn't know.

Okay.

Which is interesting because

he provided clearly this tool

for you to get away.

And he knows that people

get away with cars, right?

He does.

So got to weird how he dodged those obvious charges.

Is that really what happened?

That's really what happened, yeah.

And has faced 40 years in jail.

But the jury

could not find a unanimous decision

on the main charges,

I guess, circumventing sanctions

and helping with money laundering.

Now the interesting thing is

before they got arrested,

what has happened?

The OFAC,

the ORIOS for foreign asset control

in the United States,

they took the software

that those developers had written

and uploaded to the AFR

where it has become

out of anyone's control,

unstoppable by nature.

Anyone can use it.

They essentially wrote

code for a software tool

for anyone to get privacy.

That software tool got sanctioned.

It got put on the SDN list

for specially designated nationals

where you put the names of terrorists

and you put the address

in this AFR thing, right?

Of the software.

So the source code itself

became illegal.

It was deleted from the internet.

All of the companies closed

their developer accounts,

developer accounts.

The software they wrote,

the free speech that they performed

by coming up with those ideas

and publishing it to the world got censored

because they were added to a list

which they don't even belong on

because it is not...

Without any vote in Congress,

by the way,

or this is just...

Yeah.

Part of the...

I think it's under State Department now,

but I could be...

I have enormous power.

They've destroyed the lives of many

thousands of people without any

Democratic oversight at all.

And it's pretty shocking.

Yeah, and so...

So it got added onto this list.

And I think last year,

according to the State of Texas

actually ruled that OFAC

does not have the statutory authority

to do any of that.

And they then silently removed

tornado cash again from the SDN list.

However, nobody is able to use that

to an alright because every company

for compliance reasons

outcasts you from the user base

if you have ever touched

anything related to that.

And Roman Storm is...

He was convicted, you said.

There was a hungarian

on the strongest charges,

but on other charges,

he was convicted.

He was convicted on one charge.

On...

I think they...

It is called...

Yeah, conspiracy to...

to run a...

money processor,

financial institution, right?

A bank...

Without a banking license.

So, so...

So, so...

So they put him in jail.

Actually.

So, so he...

It is one year jail sentence

that's on the charge, right?

But he's currently in the process

of appealing that.

So, Roman Storm...

didn't run a bank.

He didn't create a bank.

He created software, right?

He made use of his

inherent right for freedom of speech

to build something that enables others

to make use of their right

for freedom of speech, right?

Because that is at the end of the day

the freedom of economic interaction, right?

Yes.

But he helped others

protect for themselves.

He never processed a transaction

for anyone, right?

He's not an intermediary.

He specifically built technology

that is disintermediated

where you yourself use that software.

Yeah.

And so...

The remarkable thing is,

I pay some attention, obviously, not enough.

I was not aware of this story

until I was reading up on you.

Where's all the coverage on Roman Storm?

He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.

I've noticed.

So, there is...

I think incredible institutions

like the Electronic Frontiers Foundation,

the EFF,

and DeFi Education Fund,

but also companies like Coinbase,

who actually have invested

substantial amount of money

into defending Roman Storm.

And, yeah, I like to say,

as well,

I think Alexa Peters

also doesn't get enough attention.

He's...

I mean, he's now under house arrest

in the Netherlands

and preparing to appeal his decision,

I think, something like...

Why are so many of the players

in this Russian?

I think it really boils down

to them having a deep understanding

about...

I think historically,

maybe culturally,

they have an understanding

about the importance of privacy,

and a society to uphold freedom,

which is a shame.

Well, they've suffered for that knowledge.

Yes.

For 70 years.

More than.

So, yeah, it's just...

It's very striking.

It's 140 million people.

It's a tiny country,

relatively speaking,

and yet they are way over-represented

from Pavlov Duraven down.

For sure, yeah.

That is true.

So, I think...

I think it's interesting,

how we also,

all of us take that,

take it as a granted,

that these kinds of people

go out of their everyday lives

and put a target on their head

by shipping this technology

to enable you to gain privacy,

and simply the knowledge

about the existence

of bad actors in the world

has made them victims

and put them in jail,

which is insane.

Well, I mean,

it's something the rest of us

should push back against, I think.

But the hurdle for me is not knowing.

Again, I didn't even know this was happening.

I should have guessed so.

If you could be more precise

about what you think the real motive was

behind going after tornado cash

and Roman storm.

Like, why was the US government

not prosecuting drug cartels

in order to prosecute Roman storm?

I think...

So, that has taken place

under the previous administration.

So, I think

President Trump,

with his administration,

has done tremendous work

in regards to pushing the adoption

of decentralized technology

of really allowing us,

all of the people in that space,

to try to rethink

the financial system

and build this technology

because they've sort of realized that

technological innovation

runs at a faster pace

and then legislative processes

and under the previous administration

that looked differently.

So, I think

that has helped this technology spread a lot.

And it is, however, important

to consider privacy.

And when the executive order banning

CBDCs was signed,

central bank digital currencies,

an explicit reason why

CBDCs should never be adopted

in the United States

was the privacy concern.

Because if we look at all of those

new digital shiny currencies

being built in Europe

and all around the world, I guess,

besides the US,

which is great,

which actually

is amazing, I think,

is that all of them

are surveillance machines

to even a higher degree

than the current financial system is already, right?

It is already a surveillance system.

But what's important

about this next generation

of money is

we are sort of at a crossroads

do we want our money

to enable us freedom,

freedom of economical interaction,

freedom of thought at the end of the day

because whatever we think,

we do, right?

We want to put our money

where our mouth is

or do we want

a monetary system

that enables automatic

subsequent action

based on whatever activity

you perform in your digital life,

which can mean things like

now all of your money is frozen

and you don't have any access to it anymore

because whatever you just did

was deemed as undesirable

by big brother, I guess, right?

So this is literally

the two possible futures that we have.

It's two extremes.

There's no possible future

in between.

And what if

the architects of

the you're assuming cash is over?

Cash already is also

being heavily surveilled.

So your bank note has a Syrian number.

So if you actually think about

something like tornado cash

or all of the, I mean,

there's a lot of applications

that, for example, utilize

RQM to also bring

this level of privacy, right?

If you think about all of these

systems,

they are in my mind personally.

I mean, as long as you have an internet connection

if you don't have an internet connection,

maybe you cannot

spend your money right now

but as long as that exists

even superior to cash

because you don't have any serial numbers anymore, right?

So you're surveilled.

Sure. I mean, when I go to the ATM

and withdraw money,

the serial numbers are recorded in some database

and when the merchant

at Walmart, I guess,

or wherever,

puts that into their cash registry,

you can also record a serial number.

Is that true?

Yeah, there has been, I read an article

a few months ago

about a tracking system like that within Europe.

So that is very practical

Yeah.

I'm going to take a magic marker, a pen

and distort the serial numbers at all my cash now.

Yeah, right.

So I mean, it should be,

should still be legal tender, right?

I would think so. I'd never heard of that.

I mean, I mean, there, there, there, there could be other tracking mechanisms.

But I've read about this technology

which clearly exists

and is being used

to even turn the cash system

into a surveillance system

and

it's not even, again,

I think out of this,

it's not even just

someone with governmental authority

deciding to surveil people, right?

It is also companies, companies

seeing economical value in surveilling you

and then utilizing

this new technology, utilizing the internet

to do that

and it boils down to power,

I would say, control, right?

If you have access to as much information as possible,

you can better prepare for the future

and you can predict behaviors

of your users or different actors

and so that's why those systems

get implemented.

So we are on this fork

in the past,

what's the future?

And what the people

that are architecting

those central bank digital currency systems

have realized and that's

so interesting to me

is this old concept

that the cyber punks in the 1990s

came up with, which is

code is law

which expresses what

has happened with tornado cash, I think, nicely

where

it is the ultimate law, sort of,

when you have this network

that nobody controls and there's some piece of software

and it just executes.

Whatever is written within the software code

executes, there's no way of stopping it

there's no way of doing anything about it

and so that's what they mean when they say

code is law

and the architects of those

alternative systems have realized that

there's so much power

in being able to

let's say take your chat messages

and see that you have said something

against big brother

and big brother doesn't appreciate that, right?

And so automatically now

your money

is frozen and that is

code is law, right?

In the utopian sense

automatically can lock you

out of all of those systems

and I would much rather

have a utopian future

but at the end of the day

from a technological standpoint

those things are

similar to the only difference

really is

cryptography

privacy

privacy

because you're offering that

on a scale even larger than

that

whether or not you have prominent investors

like you face some risk

Sure, so I think

what

what I'm doing with RQM

at the end of the day

is I'm providing

the most versatile and superior form

you can execute a computer program

right?

Within encryption

you can execute a computer program

and you can have

all sorts of things

you can do things

starting with

financial transfers, right?

You can add privacy to financial systems

but that doesn't just mean

we're adding privacy to

me and you Tucker

interacting with each other

we can also add privacy to

entire markets, right?

Which again can also have

downsides. I'm not arguing that

there's only upsides

on ethical activity, right?

The way that people may

interact.

And it's core it is

neutral technology

but the use cases that

I'm really focused on enabling

also are use cases like

enabling within the health care system

to actually utilize data

that currently

is being stored

but it is being stored in a very

inefficient way where it's isolated, right?

So with my technology we can take this data and use it

to be exploited without ever

taking ownership of your data

because you're the patient, you're the human, right?

I have no right to take ownership

over that and I don't need with that technology

because you can consent and say

let's improve health care

or whatever with my data

but you're not getting my data

because it's encrypted, right?

It's a crazy concept

to wrap your head around.

I get it but it enables so much

also on a national security level

and it really is a period of technology.

And I think this example that I

told you earlier about

verifiability, right?

Mathematically

being able to be convinced

that a computer

program, a computation that has been executed

in privacy, right?

Has been executed correctly

is such an amazing concept

and the way

I think about it really is

opening up a new design space

and allowing companies

to do actual innovation

instead of innovating only on the front of

how can I extract as much

as possible from my user by surveilling them?

So I don't really

think about it the way that you frame

that I'm building this generalized

computing platform that

can be used by anyone

because I don't have any control over it, right?

I'm not building a controlled

infrastructure.

I'm building open

software that is used

for good.

And I'm grateful that you are

and I don't at all mean to make you pessimist

to paranoid but in so doing

your threatening

current stakeholders.

Sure but I think

that's always the case

with new technology, right?

Of course, yeah.

I mean when cars first came

along, right? There were unions

of

horse carriage

taxi ride providers that did not

want to see cars on the road.

Of course. So there's always

interests that

try to utilize

both technology and

law to

prevent others from

getting into the system.

Exactly. Of course. Yeah.

The stakes depend entirely on how disruptive the new technology is.

Ask Nikolai Tesla.

Yeah. Right.

Sorry. Dark.

But so it's not a concern.

It is not a concern for me.

No.

I wonder if that's just a quirk of your

personality where you're just not afraid of stuff.

That's actually an issue.

I would say I sort of

suffer from sometimes

not being afraid of things but

good. I think you need that

in order to proceed.

So from the perspective of the average American consumer

who's not following this carefully, when does your life begin to look different

as a result of this kind of technology? When will you see this sort of thing in action? How you experience it?

That's actually a brilliant question.

I think

just trying to run numbers on my hand and trying to

do something I've never done.

By the way, I've never paused in mid conversation that I've got to run some numbers in my head.

I do this all the time.

I never have.

So I think it will affect your

everyday life positively.

Once I guess there's an

inflection point reached on multiple fronts, right?

I was talking about health care and national security.

Also financial system, right?

But it also, I mean,

so that's a criticism I actually have for a signal

that is that

there exists one single point of failure within signals

technological stack

that I've been vocal about

and I dislike which is that

what they call private contact discovery

where I have a set of contacts

in my contacts on my phone, right?

You do the same thing.

And if there is an intersection

between the two sets that we have

where I have used a contact,

you have me as a contact.

I get Tucker suggested on signal, right?

Only in that case.

How does that work, right?

How does signal ensure that

those contacts are encrypted and secure, right?

They use trusted hardware for that.

It is a critical flaw within their infrastructure.

So there's technology,