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A | Hey, guys, welcome to the debrief episode after our episode with Byron Tao on the total surveillance. Total surveillance is what we're calling this episode. The means of control was his book. Fantastic book. Yeah. What were your takeaways, David? |
B | The big takeaway is just the paper thin wall between the United States that I think is happening in a variety of different sectors with financial freedom, and this is with privacy. Just the paper thin wall of the United States of being a western liberal values democracy country state. And fingers crossed. Fingers cross... |
A | They just have so much surveillance power now that they've just never had before. And we as citizens insert your western liberal democracy here or any country. I don't think other countries are that much better when it comes to these things, and some are certainly worse, like, what's stopping them from using this again... |
B | Well, this is, this is why, like, this, like, silver bullet encryption. Encryption is actually the answer to this thing. It is the. The answer towards individual privacy. And it benefits from the same natural tailwinds that, like, the cheapness of data. It's like, so it's like a commodity to invade people's privacy. |
A | It makes it expensive again. |
B | It makes it expensive again. And, you know, the cheapness of, like, ZK is something like it's expensive now. Encryption is expensive now. It's. It's not a commodity now. It's like, cumbersome and bad ux now. But just in the same way that the arc of the cheapness of data bends towards the surveillance state, the arc of ... |
A | It's actually, it's actually our only hope. And I wish, like, broader society realized this. I think that I didn't realize it until I got into, like, crypto and understood, like, what cryptography actually gives us and the value of encryption. And, you know, it's not a lot worse right now because we have encryption. Ri... |
B | Yeah. The only experience I have with GDPR is, like, the fucking pop ups that slow my navigation through. But the conclusion of this conversation is like, okay, sweet. Say we win the war on encryption, which is not a given. That might actually be really hard just because when you fight on the side of encryption, you ac... |
A | Sure. |
B | Those people are on your side. Like, you actually at first, right? At first, yeah. You actually support, like, the long tail of catastrophic events. Right? And so the Daniel Schmachtenberger conversation here is like, well, okay, we can cease the total surveillance, total control, authoritarian state. We can prevent th... |
A | Yeah. |
B | Like, which side do you want to pick? And so this is the other side of this equation, which, like, we have to understand that this is, like, what we are creating here. |
A | Sure. That's why I, like, kind of, like, balance of power. Right. And though, like, no side completely wins out, but we just have this balance of power. I think that in order to get back privacy by default, which we really just don't have. So, I mean, he said, you sound like a crank. And this is Byron's words. You soun... |
B | Same thing with the concept in the crypto space where users don't care about decentralization. So let's all go use the more centralized, more convenient, faster, better UX blockchain. But then when the day comes that, like, the states want to literally control these systems, the more centralized, more convenient blockc... |
A | That's right. So we're preppers, David. We're preppers. |
B | That's ethereum, axies. We're crypto preppers. |
A | Well, I mean, that's why teaching people how to use these tools, like encryption, again, is super important. Having people have the ability and know how to custody their own assets, super important just in case something goes wrong. And so I guess you'll just be kind of a fringe on society if you care about these thing... |
B | Now we can grave dance in our bunker. |
A | It's encrypted. No, I mean, I wish. Yeah, I think we've talked about this many times before, but what do you think about the idea of bitcoin? Ethereum's just original sin being just not private. |
B | Fine. I feel fine about it. |
A | Yeah. I mean, it's just privacy is a trade off too, right? Because with the transparency, you sort of get other things. But. |
B | The tech wasn't even ready. It's not like we, like, do we want to make bitcoin private or do we not, like, we actually did not. Satoshi did not have that option to make. |
A | You know this about chainalysis that came from. I just actually don't know about the founding team of chainalysis at all that they came from. Kind of like in government circles. |
B | Yeah, right. They're not crypto natives. They were narcs before they started chainalysis. |
A | Yeah, I mean, they came from kind of. What. What's the term you used? Total. Total surveillance, total control, total informational awareness. |
B | Yeah, right, right. |
A | That whole paradigm. |
B | Yeah, yeah. |
A | It's just, I get, I guess what I'm saying. |
B | No, crypto native is like, you know what startup I'm gonna make that collects all the data about crypto? |
A | They're data brokers. They're crypto data brokers. And it's just a pretty powerful business. And I guess there's an argument that if you didn't have groups like that and you did have privacy of crypto from, like, day one, it didn't look even worse. Yeah. That we would have been strangled in the crib, basically. And thi... |
B | I don't think we landed the point that of, like, there aren't just, like, companies that are data brokers. There are companies who also data broke. I don't know if data broke is a word, but it's just like, it's like there are some companies, like chainalysis, who's like, that's their business model. But then there are ... |
A | Yeah. |
B | So it's not just like a sidecar. It's like, kind of the whole thing. |
A | I think that the other point that's interesting is basically, even though the US and just like, western countries didn't intend to achieve this outcome of, like, let's say, a totalitarian regime, like, outcome of total control, collect all of the information for control, all of these things. We have built a similar mac... |
B | We did it with capitalism. |
A | Yeah. |
B | We did it with freedom. |
A | Yeah. And now we do have a little bit of a wall, but it's just a very small firewall between taking that same machine and turning it against the citizens. There we go. We'll have to end it there thanks, guys. |
B | This has been the debrief. Bye. |
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