Deep Future

Hey guys, today we get to hang out with Ben Laurie who is one of my all time favorite geeks. You’re running code right now that Ben wrote. He built ApacheSSL, which is probably like half of the web servers on the internet that are secure running that code. He maintains OpenSSL, which is in everything else.Ben is one of the few folks who’s a true coder and cryptographer. And there are very few people who really understand both sides of that and what it really means to write secure code and how hard that is. So if you’re interested in hacking, if you’re interested in computer security, if you’re just a coder of any description this episode is absolutely for you.Beyond that, our conversation goes deep into the philosophy behind cryptocurrency. Ben has pretty counter views on Bitcoin to all the currency speculators out there. There are super interesting to hear. And if you want to learn about how to think about the crypto toolkit and what’s possible there I highly recommend spending time listening to this episode. I couldn’t be more proud of the chance that I had to pick Ben’s brain for a couple of hours. I’ve known Ben for 20 years. He’s a member of the Shmoo Group, which is nonprofit think tank for computer hackers. He also is on the board of the Apache foundation. He’s a principal engineer at Google and was at DeepMind for awhile as well. Ben developed a program at Google for certificate transparency, which is a really important way of understanding what’s possible using the crypto toolkit to change the way that we provide accountability around data and how it’s handled.I think you’re going to learn a lot. I really hope you enjoy this and definitely reach out with questions for me and for Ben and I’ll try to get to them next time we chat.Pablos: One of the things that is super unique about you, in my estimation, maybe there are 100 people on Earth who both understand cryptography and know how to code. That 100 people is not a lot, especially these days. In some sense, for the first time, we’ve got a lot of interest in the crypto tool kit because of Bitcoin. I want to ask you a bunch of questions about that stuff. Certainly, we both have had an interest in cryptography. Mine goes back many years. Yours is probably even more than that. You have a super deep math background so I’ve always thought of you, of all the people I know, as one who has the deepest understanding practically of what it means to implement this stuff, how hard that is to get it right and how easy it is to get it wrong.We have this situation where because of Bitcoin, people have gotten excited about what they call crypto, but what they mean is currency speculation. Everybody likes to gamble and this has been the most winningest gambling that’s been going on. It seems to me anybody who has any knowledge at all about crypto is tied up making some alternative to Bitcoin or some other blockchain-related project. I’m curious what you think about that stuff. We don’t have to talk about the mechanics of blockchain or Bitcoin. That’s been done to death, but I’m curious what you think of the state of society and the frenzy that we’re in over blockchain. I’m going to try not to jump in with my opinion here.Ben: There are lots of things to say about blockchain, but the first thing to say about blockchain is that I don’t think anybody knows what they mean when they say blockchain. Blockchain is like magic math stuff that’s going to make us all rich. It’s going to equalize society. This is all nonsense, but one of the things I like to say around Bitcoin is that there are two things going on. There’s one incredibly stupid thing and there’s one sensible thing. The incredibly stupid thing is I’m going to take a $100 bill and I’m going to burn it. I’m going to bottle the smoke and you should believe that that bottle is worth $100. There was a second thing going on which is, I’m going to produce this verifiable ledger of stuff. That verifiable ledger has cryptographic certainty of loyalty. Those verifiable ledgers are useful. In fact, what I’ve done for the last years is trying to build a sensible part of the verifiable ledger and that’s what the Certificate Transparency is.I’ve resisted calling it blockchain for a long time because as soon as I say, “I’m doing blockchain,” everyone’s like, “Now, you like Bitcoin.” I don’t like the idea of Bitcoin, but I do like this idea of verifiable ledgers. I think the interesting question is, “What is interesting about verifiable ledgers?” A lot of people are like, “You could take Bitcoin or almost any blockchain project and say, “I got a database and you’ll be doing the same thing.” What’s the difference between a database and a verifiable ledger? The difference is that it’s a thing that not only can you say, “Here is a database of stuff,” but also, “Here are cryptographic proofs that the stuff is in the ledger and the ledger has this appending the property.” You can go back and lie about what it used to say or what it does say.If you ever do, then you get checkable proof that you have lied. Certificate Transparency, in a bit of ancient history. In November 2011, the certification authority, the people who are responsible for issuing certificates for SSL. When you go to Amazon, you get the little padlock that says, “You are in Amazon,” the reason you get padlock is because a certification authority has said, “This public key corresponds to Amazon,” and then the site you connected to proves that it has possession of the private key that corresponds to the public gate. Now, you have a secure connection with Amazon, but you’re relying on that certification authority to get it right and not let some other person claim to be Amazon.In November 2011, it became apparent that the certification authority had issued 500 certificates for websites that they should not have issued certificates for. Those were all of the popular websites, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Facebook. Those were then used by the Iranian government to do manual attacks on civilians. Two things were interesting about that. One is that the attack existed in the wild for two months without anybody knowing it was going on. That was bad in itself. The second thing was that nobody ever knew what the complete list of certificates that they had issued. The aftermath was the certification authority has issued all of these certificates that they shouldn’t have done, what do we do about it?We have no alternative other than to say, “We have to distrust every certificate issued by the certification authority.” As it happens, the Dutch government CA were also issuing all these certificates that the Dutch government used for various things. When we shut them down and distrusted all these certificates, this was bad news if you’re a Dutch. There were a bunch of knock-on things. The three that I happened to know about, whether you could no longer buy or sell cars because you couldn’t register the sale anymore in Holland. The ability to electronically clear customs went away. Bottle imports stalled because you couldn’t play the customs. They also lost the ability to buy and sell electricity on the international markets. This was a mess. The question arises is, “What could we do about that now?”As it happens, we started Certificate Transparency and this is not a story I could tell because the underlying reason for us thinking about this was a secret. Google was making it difficult to see. We had decided internally that if we were going to do this, we should make it transparent. We should publish all the certificates that we issue so the people could check that we had issued them correctly. I proposed that we could not only publish it, but we could do it in an improbable way, so we will use the verifiable ledgers. We could commit the certificates that were issued. We could even close the loop so the brands are checked, that we had committed that there wasn’t the log. We couldn’t issue a certificate that was accepted by a browser that had not been published.The cool thing about publishing it and these verifiable logs was that you could make the claim that if you saw a certificate and you had approved that it was in the log, then you also knew the owner of that domain could see it in the log as well. If it had been incorrectly issued, they would have an opportunity to notice that and they could revoke it. Suddenly, you are not in this position that there could be these things floating around in the wild that you didn’t know whether it was Amazon or Google or not. We’d had this idea for our own CA prior to DigiNotar. When it happened, I went to my bosses at Google and said, “We could do this for every CA.” They were like, “That’s a good idea. Off you go, make it happen?”Several years down the line, we’ve done that and we’ve got all of the CAs to sign up to it. From April 2020, Chrome, IE and Firefox are all going to require that every certificate that they see has to be published in one of these public logs. That’s interesting in itself. If you imagine a world where DigiNotar occurred after we had done that, DigiNotar was hacked and that’s an issue. There were two months between them getting hacked and anyone becoming aware that this had occurred. We would bring that down to one day instead of two months, plus instead of having to shut down the whole CA, we would have a complete list for all those certificates that were issued.We’ll be able to say, “These are all the ones that were bad. We could just blacklist those. The rest will continue to function.” We would not have caused all that chaos, like in the Dutch ecosystem. Another thing that’s interesting is that publishing these logs caused this ecosystem of analysis around certificates that had not occurred before. Even though you could write that in public, you can crawl in that list of people who’ve done it before in the certificate authority observatory, but we haven’t done much with it. It wasn’t until we did CT that people started to go, “We can look at all of these things and find out other stuff that’s going on.”Decentralization is an impossible dream.Share on XWould you characterize this as an alternative, not currency-related use of what we call “blockchain?” Essentially, this is a different application. I like to characterize it as one of the tools in the crypto toolkit because where you and I come from, there’s a whole bunch of them going way back. Now that people are starting to clue in, the blockchain is the first one they heard about, but it’s the last one added to the toolbox and we have so many. What I imagine is that because of the success and in some sense of Bitcoin, it’s attracting a bunch of attention to blockchain, which is then getting people into the crypto toolkit. Hopefully, we’ll get a whole generation of coders out of this who are thinking with these tools and designing and engineering with these tools. They’ll be able to build things that we’ve always imagined would be possible. Since there weren’t very many people around to do it, it was very difficult to design products around those tools.To some extent, yes. One of the interesting things about CT is that it uses tools that were invented a long time ago. There’s nothing new in that toolbox. We’re not using it for what they were originally thought to be useful for. The reason I’m not so sure is that they say much further around this idea of cryptocurrencies and decentralization, which is an impossible dream. People are blinded to the true importance of these things. They are excited about what is effectively nonsense.They’re excited about currency speculation.If you look at Bitcoin or any of these cryptocurrencies, there’s a huge amount of fraud, theft and stuff like that. If you look at the history of money and the history of people doing business with each other, that’s exactly what happened. You started off with where we invented money and then people started to figure out how to rip each other off. People started to go, “We should have some rules around this stuff.” Gradually, we ended up with the restrictive “regime” around what you’re allowed to do money censorship, as people like to call it, which means controlling how you spend money and making sure it’s done in a lawful way. I think 99% of the people who are excited about Bitcoin or this kind of crypto anarchist dream and not about the interesting new prophecies that you can get by using these things in a sensible way.What I think about it is there seems to be a bit of a maturation process that at least we have gone through and probably other people too, who first spent a lot of time thinking about these things on the cypherpunk’s email list in the ‘90s. I feel like we’re living out a lot of what we were discussing and thinking about in those days. Personally, I have a lot of those dreams of decentralization in me. They’re probably tamer now. Why do you think that this is an impossible dream?I published a proof of why decentralized consensus is impossible.If it’s been proven, I would like to know.One of the slippery notions in this is, “What the hell do you mean by decentralized?” I think that the core idea that I can somehow figure out what some unknown group of people has agreed is fundamentally flawed for a reason. This obvious reason is that, if I don’t know who the totality of everyone is, then I don’t know whether I have captured enough of that unknown group of people to know what their decision is. I’ve got to imagine myself being in this position where I’ve captured enough, but there’s somebody else that I don’t know who sees some other portion of that decentralized group that has captured some other idea of what the outcome was. One of us must be wrong. I don’t know that I’m the wrong one or they are the wrong one. Any argument that says there’s some way you can make those two things always converge somehow has to rely on us not being decentralized. I still rely on this to be more distributed and decentralized. That’s all my proof says in a mathematical way.I’ll presume that’s true. The thing I’m curious about is I feel like what was happening at least in my experience back with the cypherpunk days was we believed that we could embody our values in the protocols. We believe that crypto was giving us the tools we needed to do that. Specifically, the values were to ensure that nobody got an asymmetric advantage on the network and to make sure that everybody got an equal level playing field. Not only that’s what TCP IP did, at least compared to other network protocols at the time. Building on that, what we wanted to create and part of the reason for so much of the attention going into cryptocurrency in the late ‘90s was that we knew we needed a way to exchange money, where nobody got an asymmetric advantage on it. When you have a centralized mentor or somebody issuing the currency, then they get that advantage. That was the point of trying to emulate some of the properties of cash, the unanimity. What a lot of the ideas in those days were about around bearer currencies, where we would make it, so whoever held the pile of bits had the money. It’s like holding cash. What we ended up with instead of going from double-entry bookkeeping to single entry, we went to triple-entry, which is what blockchain gives us. We’ve got this currency that nobody controls. It’s not the value that people are getting out of it now, but in the long run, I still imagine and believe that that’s important. Because of these technologies, the crypto toolkit, we’re going to end up with some currency that’s decentralized in a sense online that nobody has an asymmetric advantage on and that’s important. The idea that you can do this purely through protocols is fancy. I think it’s true, but it carries a lot of disadvantages with it. I can take a dollar out of my pocket and give it to you and we’re done. On the other hand, you can lose cash. It can fall out of your pocket. It can fall into the ocean and they can all get wet. In terms of putting all of my available assets, something that is so easy to lose is not a great idea. This is why we invented banks and checks.That’s exactly what’s played out. People have these Bitcoins, they don’t even realize that you can download them, put them on a floppy disc, stick it under your mattress and call it good. They’re putting them in a bank online, which is absurd to me because those guys keep getting hacked, but that’s the model.The disadvantage if they put it on a floppy and stick it under their bed is if their bed burns, then it’s gone. I want to tie up significant portions of my asset and something that’s so fragile and it’s even worse than that. I don’t want to put it under my bed unprotected because then my teenager can come in and spend my millions. That’s not a good plan either. I probably want a group and be protected and then I forget my password. That’s happened.I know I probably have millions of dollars in Bitcoins because I was mining in 2007 or 2008. I have no idea how to get that money back.This is the reason that we invent all these institutions around safeguarding the value by making it so it isn’t in this bearer thing so you can easily lose or destroy it.Fair enough, but the option is still mine. The point is I can still choose if this is the same argument for any data protection scenario. You have to consider your threat model, your adversaries are, how well-endowed they are and what the actual threat is. It’s a risk management problem, but the point is I have the freedom to choose what’s appropriate for me.The point is that if I have a system where I can hold the central authorities to account, I can see everything that they’ve done. If they ever break the rules, I can produce cryptographic proof that they have broken the rules. It seems to me that it is as good in practice even though you probably want to have those. You probably want to have ways to get things back that you’ve lost. The fact that you can produce these cryptographic proof means that centralization is okay, but the center is powerless because you have this evidence that they cannot argue with that shows what they have and haven’t done.If a government were to issue a cryptocurrency in a fashion where I could always see how much was issued, it would essentially eliminate their ability to secretly inflate the currency. That’s interesting.The price you pay for Bitcoin, people have made sensible suggestions to allegedly decentralized systems. If you want to put my decentralization, it is impossible going into a Bitcoin framing. The cost of doing that is burning insane electricity. It’s 0.5% of global energy production. That is ridiculous. When you contrast it against the alternative, which is to keep trees, doing hashes, it is cheap. I haven’t done the Bitcoin, but having done the equivalent some for CT, if reproducing the entire Bitcoin ecosystem in a verifiable, but not the decentralized way. I’d be surprised if the hash would cost me more than 1 or 2 CTs, instead of 0.5% of global energy.To put my previous arguments about not knowing whether you were in the right or wrong consensus. The argument is that there’s an economic incentive for people to play along with whatever is the consensus. The argument says that Bitcoin mining is at such and such point and the ledger says, “We’ve all got such and such money.” I went out mining the next block, wasting energy to show you that where you can chain on to whatever has gone on so far. The idea is that nobody would want to go back five blocks and mine five blocks, which is going to cost you five times as much energy to get a longer chain because they might as well mine one block on top of the existing chain. The problem is, “Why are you mining five blocks? Other people are mining one block.” You have to do it five times as fast.My counterargument to that is two things. One, not everyone is motivated by economics. You’re basically saying, “You would only mine the sensible block because mining the other block would cost you more.” It’s not necessarily going to explain why I mine blocks or why I might want to undermine Bitcoin. Another thing is that if you take this to the limit, the argument that, “If I do enough mining, I could own all the money in the world. I could go back and everything that you think you’ve done, all of these transactions, all this money that you think you mined, you didn’t mine aby of that. I mined it all. I now own all the money.” It’s a pretty strong economic incentive. That’s where we’re spending a lot of electricity on.With Bitcoin, in particular, it seems that the technical challenges that come up have to be dealt with by the people developing the protocol. They’re advancing the protocol. You could imagine at some point even migrating Bitcoin to another design that got rid of mining or got rid of the current scheme for mining and get that energy consumption down. Do you think that thing will happen?Censorship means controlling how you spend money and making sure it's done in a lawful way.Share on XYes. There’s the idea of currencies that are exchanged in a purely virtual way, where you have cash anonymity, but in a purely electronic format. They’re good ideas. The bad idea in Bitcoin is if you take $100 bills, burn them and bottle the smoke and that’s $100, that’s dumb. Saying, “I have a ledger of stuff so I can make strong cryptographic statements,” is a good idea. There are examples of theoretical systems, but not wildly speculative theoretical systems.Things that just need some work.They don’t need work. We know that they will work, just use hash functions and public-key signatures and nothing spectacular. RS coming is an interesting example by some people at UCL and centrally banked cryptocurrency. You fear money, but on a verifiable ledger of stuff. That’s cheap, but it still gives you all the prophecies of cash if you wanted to. It gives you verifiability, whatever you want from a cryptocurrency other than, “I can get rich by doing an ICF.”A theory or the idea is we’re going to do smart contracts. As far as I can tell, nobody’s doing that, but it has served as a platform to do things like watching ICOs and those things.People have done smart contracts and there’s the DIA. That was awesome.What’s that?DIA, which is done on that, it is a mega smart contract thing that had a bug in it and somebody immediately extracted the DIA. That caused the split in Ethereum in a way. One folk is weird, met the bug in DIA, junk all her money went to the person who found the bug. The other one was I know we backed off time, but before that, we did a revised version of the contract. We live in a smart contract entirely.I had blinders on to so much of this because I can’t stand the noise floor of currency speculators. It’s been difficult, but now I have to pay attention because it’s too far gone. The point I was trying to make is with something like EOS, which is meant to be a next-generation Ethereum, where they want to solve some of those problems technically. They imagined creating a platform, an operating system in the cloud where that database of the shared ledger enables a whole bunch of decentralized applications. I think people imagined using that as a kingpin, they’re going to be able to take some of these walled garden services that exist on Facebook, Instagram and all these places where it’s not the internet we dreamt about. I can’t get my data. I can’t do anything other than what Facebook wants me to do with it. I think what, at least some of the more fringe radicals now, are imagining is that the thing that kept us from decentralizing that before it was that we didn’t have this shared database. I’m curious what you think about those notions.I think that makes sense. Certificate Transparency is an example in a small microcosm way. You can apply these ideas to take a system that was countable and slightly broken. We’re broken that you were relying on random people who would race to the bottom end cost to maintain them.It’s like 1,000 root certs in your browser. It’s like having your 1,000 nearest neighbors have a key to your front door and you are saying, “It will probably be secure.”It turns out that mostly it is, but sometimes it isn’t and you don’t know quite what happened to your front door. I certainly think that this whole idea of verifiable databases, there are lots of interesting things. Not only that but you can democratize things that have traditionally required some central authority. It’s not going to central aggregation or you can have these distributed ledgers where you all agree on truth, then you publish it, and it’s not going back on it. I think you can do those quite cheaply and there is an interesting feature there.There’s a bunch of different things that are going on here. One of them is people are looking at blockchain as a way of taking back, if nothing else, at least spiritually, it’s acting as a marker for people wanting to take back the internet from these huge established players who built wall gardens where they control your data. They control the whole experience. That’s not what was going on in the ‘90s when we were all building web apps. Everybody had an equal footing and nobody has an equal footing anymore. Almost everything you do online, you’re beholden in some way to Facebook, Google, Amazon or Apple.One of the fascinating things was we used to be able to view source on a webpage and see how they did it. This is always true on BSD or Linux or wherever you’re going to go see the source of anything. For learning how to make things, it’s like opening the hood of a ‘57 Chevy and you could observe it and figure out how it worked. Now, so much of the code is in the cloud. You’re never going to see that. Even in the ‘90s, I could buy software and I could look at the binaries. I could at least observe the stuff I was running. Now, you can’t buy anything. Everything’s owned by someone else. It’s running on their servers. I can’t attack anything.I used to go buy a Cisco router and attack my Cisco router and figure out, “I’m not breaking any laws. I’m not missing anybody stuff up.” Now, everything is in the cloud. You can’t go attacking Facebook or Google or anything because it is their stuff, not mine. It’s a different world that we live in. I grew up with Apple II. My daughter has an iPad and it’s a radically different experience. Hers is a billion times better, but she never gets to see how it works. I’m discombobulated about a bunch of stuff here, but we grew up in a world where we can learn through this observation and trial and error. I think both of those things have been eroded in the world. You can’t observe how things work. You can’t get away with trial and error. That’s not just true for cars. That is true for everything with all the software, computers and iPad. The cloud collectively takes those features of the world away from most of the things we’re using. We can’t learn them through observation. There’s this meaningful spirit behind things like EOS, where we imagined we’re going to take back Facebook Messenger and make our own that we control. We’re going to take back Facebook’s event thing and make it something we control. We are going to take back that feed that Facebook used to elect the wrong guy. We’re going to take that back and we’re going to make our own that we control. Probably, there’ll be a market failure for a long time and we won’t be nearly as useful as actual Facebook, but that’s the sentiment.I feel like in some cases, we’ve been winning. Cypherpunk brought BitTorrent. It is 35% of the internet. You can’t make it go away. It’s a decentralized. It uses that crypto toolkit to give us something that we felt was important. The whole dark web, you could argue about the merits of that, but that’s cypherpunk’s making tour. That’s descendant of things like Mixmaster, remailers and those things. That was embodying our values in the protocols. I don’t know what percentage of the internet is dark web now, but it exists and it’s here to stay. You can’t get rid of it. I don’t want to make a case for WikiLeaks, but the same community brings you those things. Most certainly Bitcoin. On a long timescale, we are winning a bunch of these battles. All the things that we tried to imagine in those days are coming to pass on a longer time horizon and decentralized. This is why I questioned your arguments about making things decentralized.There are multiple pieces there. One piece is around complexity. The web has not changed in the sense that it still runs in my browser in terms of the bit that is involved in rendering. When you get down to it, those backend systems pretty much stay spaces. One of the giants, they say you can’t Google is that Google program’s job is taking one protocol and converting it into another protocol because that’s what happens on the backend. All the interesting stuff happens on the frontend, where you render stuff. What has changed there is that has become enormously every way become super powerful. They have incredibly fine-grain control on how exactly things look. I know if I open a modern web page and say, “Web page, what are you up to?” I get a megabyte of JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It’s a little compressed that it is super hard to understand what it’s doing, but that’s true.As you are talking about that, I was thinking that in some instances, generations of this stuff, in the ‘60s, ‘70s or ‘50s, you could take apart a car and you can fully understand how the car worked. You can make a piston at home or any useful part of an engine. There are probably some belts and things like that that I can make my own version of. I couldn’t make an engine, but on the other hand, there’s off the shelf part I can put it together. We’ve gotten to a stage where we’re in this permanent end state or whether it’s an intermediate state where suddenly we’re exposing the items. We were like, “There are little items in this thing.” It is hard to understand how all of these items work together. Maybe there’s a future where these things are super complicated, but they become building blocks. It’s like, “There’s a piston. I can’t make a piston, but I know how to make an engine.”That’s certainly the case. You could go get a Computer Science degree now without ever learning what a chip is doing or even learning to read hexadecimal because it’s Lego bricks. In an IDE, you are sticking Lego bricks together.I grew up in an era where mainframe computers were great bulky things that took up whole rooms, but they weren’t sophisticated. Microsoft was just starting to come out. They were at a stage where I could still imagine a bunch of transistors, the thing that the Micro did. If I learned to program an 80/80, I can stick a logic analyzer on it and I could see exactly instructions and so forth. I stuck a Logic Analyzer on a Pentium II. There was no way to know what was on the chip because of all of the caching. What came out of the chip, almost no relationship with what was going on inside it. I did this because I was trying to debug a program.One of the interesting things about that is that Intel will recognize this as a problem and you could switch all that shit off. If you wanted to debug a hardware, you could say, “Please stop all the caching so I can see what you’re up to.” Suddenly, it became comprehensible again and you could get your Logic Analyzer to disassemble, and all sorts of stuff. With it switched on, it was gibberish and I had no idea what’s going on. I sometimes think it comes from the last generation of software engineers who could see the whole stack if you think about transistors and chips, assemblies of these things.As we were discussing it, the speed of CPU has come from spectrum meltdown. It’s the ability for them to do these almost magical things with speculative execution, branch prediction, caching, and all of that stuff. You can no longer observe the outside of the chip and have any idea what’s going on inside the chip. You could argue that back in the day where I understood transistors, I probably didn’t understand how a transistor worked. They probably do better now than it did then. It’s a thing and it works, but I don’t know what’s going on inside. It’s a question of where you draw your boundaries and what are the building blocks and what you understand about the building blocks.Not everyone is motivated by economics.Share on XI think that’s fair. Truthfully, the trend has always been that you spend some of this extra computational ability on making things easier for whoever’s building with the blocks. I keep thinking about, in those days, especially on mainframes and on the early microcomputers and stuff, you had to make everything efficient because you didn’t have cycles to waste. You had to engineer everything perfectly. You had to test it end to end. It’s the way we do so much engineering. We try and design things that are perfect and you look at biological entities like you and me, we’re like 99% error correction. Cells are dying off all the time and somehow it mostly works and you’re still here. I think of that as probably the transition we’re going through.Now that we have a surplus of computational ability, we’re getting to a point where we’re wasting a lot of it on error correction. We’ll probably get to a point in the future when computers are mostly error correction and they’re mostly going wrong all the time. It generally steers us in the right direction. A lot of the things we have are like that. I remember loading the software to drive an HP printer. It’s like an inkjet printer and I’ve got 600 megs of shit loading on my computer to run the printer. It’s got every piece of software on demand. There are a database and a web server and all this stuff that’s running in the background on my machine just to print. It’s because it was easier to grab these gargantuan building blocks for whoever was making the printer software than it was to think about what was needed. I think there’s a full copy of Apache installed with every HP printer.Google started to realize that maybe that’s not such a great idea because you’re exposed.You can get all those security flaws too. There’s no system update for it. As you stand in the line, the printer is 100% vulnerable.It is certified pre-owned.When you get this cycle of simplification, it’s cheaper for me to maintain the simplified software even though I do have to customize it more. I have to think more about what goes into than to deal with the aftermath of deploying this giant massive crap. There are cycles in all of this stuff. There’s a little cycle around what you consider to be the building blocks. We start to get things but that’s insane. Why would you want to run down to the server? If I ignore all of the frameworks that I’m having to load, these ten lines of JavaScript do some quite useful stuff and I understand fully what it does. That’s a shift on what you consider to be the fundamentals. I consider the fundamentals to be set 80 instructions. I included this library that does a thing. I know exactly what that thing is. I can forget the internal workings of that library and look at the thing that I see.The building block is like a VM. It’s like, “If you need to sort, here’s a VM that does sort via this pretend Rest API.”Every time you go up the stack, there’s always a piece that’s going to say, “Don’t worry about that because that’s the mechanism,” and the interesting bit is what you did with the mechanism.What do you think are the cool things that we could build with the crypto toolkit that is under-appreciated or underrepresented or that nobody’s talking about? The thing I’m obsessed with is the Certificate Transparency as I said. This whole idea of using verifiable ledgers, which is a boring tool of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is half fun and half craziness. You can use those to build a record of the behavior of people in the system. You can have rules about how people ought to behave. If you construct carefully what it is you put in the ledger, you can determine whether people have abided those rules or not, and you can have strong cryptographic proof so that whether they did or didn’t behave, you can then use them to hold them to account.The interesting thing is you start to care a lot less about authorities. This comes back to our conversation. We want to not have an asymmetric advantage. Nobody in the system should have an asymmetric advantage if we know the rules. The people who nominally have the asymmetric advantage have to follow the rules. They don’t have advantages anymore. That’s what I mean by verifiable transparency is this ability to check that people have done what they’re supposed to do and hold them to account when they don’t in a way that can’t be disputed. It’s now a matter of opinion. Did you abide the rules or didn’t you? It’s like, “Here’s my cryptographic proof.”It needs to rearchitect a lot of the things that we do online with this structure that brings that.It’s figuring out what it is you can put into those pages, how you close that loop, and how you make those proofs water tight.With the Certificate Transparency, you have a working model of one case where this has been done. What are good candidates for where else to go?Money is another one but I think there are all sorts of things. One of the things that we heard about a while back in this blockchain frenzy, almost anybody says, “You should put it on the blockchain.” I think there’s a candidate for this stuff. There are things like a land registry. These are particularly in less first world places. There’s a lot of fraud around those kinds of things. The difficulty with those frauds is not so much that they occur, but you don’t discover them until it’s way too late to do anything about it. I think a lot of these things will be much more tractable. As soon as it happened, you knew that it happened because you can do something about it.Doing things on your house anymore is not all that useful in those environments. Whereas if I knew like five minutes after the official tip of a bribe that somebody had taken a bribe, then I have some chance of doing something about it. That thing is where this stuff ought to be going, which is funny because it’s the opposite of the crypto-anarchist rule of law. Mass is everything. Mass gives you a system that is internally self-consistent, but when it doesn’t obey the rules, then what do I do? I go to the masses.One of the things I get asked about a lot is the so-called cyber security. Whenever hackers use the word “cyber,” it’s such a dumb word. Nobody who’s legit at all will use that word, but we’ve lost that battle. We’ve had all these security problems. When you’re working on security, part of your job is to become a paranoic and imagine everything that could go wrong. Imagine every attack that could come and every threat. In some sense, it’s sad. It’s turned a lot of my friends into obnoxious, paranoid people. They’re not very happy. With that said, what I’ve seen play out over decades is all those things we imagined have come to pass.All the failures that happened with DOS and everything else, we saw that coming. We were right about all of them, but in almost every case, what’s happened as far as I can tell is shit hits the fan and then we reboot, run system update, kick out the bad guys, patch things and life goes on. I remember with Mirai, the biggest botnet in history at the time, 1.2 terabytes per second of bullshit traffic. It brought Netflix down for twelve minutes. That’s our poster child for catastrophe and it’s not so bad. It was probably a net gain for the society that people couldn’t watch Netflix for twelve minutes. We’ve had all these scary stories, like hackers could get in and control of the power grid and shut it down.In 2019, they did in Ukraine. They rebooted. They did some clever stuff where they rewrote the firmware on this Serial to Ethernet Converter so they couldn’t reboot. The point is the power grid came back. It’s fine. There’s a little bit of damage, but people have this almost paralyzing relationship with computer security. It keeps them from doing things. I don’t have that. I feel like I’ve seen it all before. I’m not worried. We’re full scale “cyber warfare” between nation states. This stuff is going on and it’s all significant. It does matter. It feels to me like you build comfort with it in a sense and you get a sense of wisdom about it, where you know that it’s not the end of the world, but people are still treating it as if it’s going to be. What do you think about that?Like you, I’m not that worried. One of the reasons I’m not that worried is that I worked in security for a long time. I worked for Google where we get attacked a lot. I’ve seen pretty frightening things. You figure it out, clean it up and carry on. There are two things going on. One is the decisions of building things that are falling apart on a regular basis, regardless whether they’re being hacked or not. That happens all the time. We’re always in this position, this thing that we thought to be reliable that isn’t. It comes and is patching up after it’s fallen apart. Sometimes it’s because somebody attacked us and sometimes it’s because we’re shit at programming. The reality is that you figure it out, patch things up, reboot, carry on and it’s all good.Sometimes you get some advantage in the house never that bad. The down the line concern is that they could be an outage that is hard to recover from and for security is that we build a stack of software that’s complicated that when it goes wrong, we can’t figure out how to fix it. I think we’re a long way from that because we’re bad at building it. There’s micro-scale all the time. Little bits of stacks always falling apart. We’re always like, “That bit fell over and it corrupted these discs over here and we lost that data. We’ll figure it out.” What worries me more is if we get to the point where it’s like 99.99% good, and then you hit the 0.1%, and then we’re fucked.Mass is everything. Mass gives you a system that is internally self-consistent.Share on XI remember it was such a problem in the ‘80s if your computer crashed at the wrong time. We solved that because computers crashed all the time and now, they never crash. I don’t worry about it because I know that no data is going to be lost. We solved that a long time ago.That’s part of my point. One of the reasons it was a pain in the ass in the ‘80s, you couldn’t autosave. Your work is going away for five minutes.You can’t type and save at the same time.That is the trend that will continue to rebuild this layered defense against unreliability, mostly because it’s unreliable. It saves us when it’s insecure as well. We are getting better at being reliable and having less bugs and maybe there is this future where we’re good at it that when a bug does hit, it’s horrific or it’s in pieces of software that have been untouched for years. Everyone is like, “There’s nobody around software anymore.”Dan Kaminsky goes, “Who knows how DNS works anymore?” I get lots of questions from kids all over the world who think they want to be hackers. Probably because my job seems cool and they want that. I don’t know what to tell them.Tell them hacking is easy and fixing things is way harder. That’s the interesting thing to do. This is one of the things I’ve been trying to do, “Don’t bring me attack.” Any fool can attack a system. If you must bring me an attack, bring me a defense. Even better, bring me a defense that is clever for that so I can move across systems and isn’t a defense against your particular attack. It was a defense against that whole class with attacks for a whole class or software, not just the one that got attacked. Speaking of asymmetric advantage, the attack has always had a nice advantage. That’s defending a piece of software. I have to fix every bug. To attack it, you only have to find one. If you want to be one of the cool kids, then you should figure out how to stop things from breaking, not how to break them.What about before that, where to start and how you learn?I’ve never been much of an attacker on the system. I’ve always been a defender. People often say, “The only way to learn is by breaking things first so you can fix it.”I think that might be what I said. You can learn by asking how it works than actually doing it. How would I stop that thing from working? You have to find novel attacks, interesting things to worry about. You can think about, what if I admit that we don’t know how to stop the attacks? What could I do about that? That’s interesting. It’s the principle of least authority and strong compartmentalization. There are interesting things that you can do that’s beneficial here after their hands to attack the things that were inside the boxes, you’ve got to know how to build the boxes and made those boxes useful.What about high school kids who don’t know what to do with themselves, but they’re interested and computers? Can you think of where they should start? Should they start learning math, coding? If you had to give some advice.I think the think about coding in general, even leaving aside security, attacking or defending is a lot of work. I’m going to decide one day that I’m going to take a block of metal to build a car, then the tech to do that. It’s hard to learn to do this stuff without having some problem that you want to solve. The main barrier to getting into this stuff is having something that you want to do. Once you’ve got something that you want to do, we’ll find ways to do things that you need to learn exactly. I think the main challenge is finding things that you want to do that are worth expanding all that effort because writing any serious piece of code. It is multimodal piece of work. There are even little toys that take at least a day or two. The last one is your experience. It’s having a thing that interests you. I suppose the funniest thing that you can get into these days that provides lots of challenges are things like machine learning. It’s relatively easily these days to get ahold of little kids that help you along the line. You can get fun things out. It’s all about reward.That’s the thing that people miss out on is that brains are optimized for learning things they’re interested in. Find something you’re interested in and you’ll learn a lot. It may not be what the school is trying to teach you, but you’ll learn something.The other thing is to understand that you’re going to fail a lot and you’re going to be frustrated. If you’re going to learn, the way you’re going to learn is by fighting through that frustration or satisfaction or banging your head against the program for days and at the end of it, solving it. It is incredibly rewarding. On the other hand, the days leading up to that reward are extremely annoying.You earn the reward. What are the hard problems left that interests you?What are the interesting frontiers in software engineering? There’s a bunch of stuff I’m interested in. I still think that the business of how do you defend against flaky software. That’s not going to have a chance. What do I do about the fact that flaky software, I am trying to run it? The damage is minimized. If you want to get on to more advanced topics. This is a purely selfish software engineering perspective. If you look at user interfaces, user interfaces for all users, except programmers have changed radically over many years. As you were saying, you had some crappy micro when you procreate. Your kids have iPads. We have amazing games and with Twitter and Facebook or whatever the kids probably have done exactly.That’s one of the interesting things is as a software engineer, you improve the life of software engineers. Make them more productive and make them come up to the standards of interfaces than everyone else. Machine learning a lot of is people’s neural networks. I think this case is a false impression and they have something to do with that in your brain. There’s nothing to do with brains all. There are reasonably effective and they’re in their infancy. If you look at what’s happened in the last years in terms of how people would move forward on machine learning, they’re screwing around with the fundamentals of it, putting things together in different ways, putting more it together, applying more CPU, and getting surprisingly good results that. I think that’s a huge territory, what you do with these things, how you put them together, what problems do you apply that and it’s a ton of fun to be had there.Is there anything interesting that we didn’t talk about that comes to mind? Do you have any questions for me?I think the one thing that we haven’t debated on is if we’re going to talk about security. We’ve talked a lot about crypto and building blocks and what can we do with all of these things. We’ve talked about any defending against bad programming and stuff. People get very obsessed with an attack. They’re counting crypto that we can use in cycles. One of the things I realized probably years ago is that most of the barriers to being good at security and not technological. They’re about the interface between humans. I think we’re still incredibly bad. Having people understand what the hell is going on and the traditional reaction of technologists to get to those stupid users should be better educated. “They should understand my system better,” and that is wrong.It’s fun to make fun of users though.It is fun to make fun of, but the thing is that we’ve done a terrible job matching the machine to the human and the human to the machine. The user-interface is the only serious problem we have. All of the technical stuff we can do is as nothing compared to making it easy to use.It’s interesting to hear you say that. I don’t think of user interface is something that you work on much. That’s great to hear. My fundamental experience was that I got one of the first thousand Macs ever made. In those days, it went from the command line to the Windows and that it became graphical. Mac took the responsibility for making it easy for the users. The first computer that did that. On a command line, you can type any junk you want. On a Mac, you can only give it the commands that are in the menus. That was a way of simplifying it for the user and saying, “Here’s the available options. If they weren’t available, they’d be great out or missing.”Hacking is easy; fixing things is way harder.Share on XThat was a way of bridging that gap and saying, “We’re only going to give you the things that you can do instead of a wide-open command line where you could do anything. That’s probably going to destroy your hard drive. That has always stuck with me. That was the first computer that I tried to operate the way people work instead of teaching people to operate the way the computer works in computer security like that lesson. A lot of times, there’s so much bullshit you put up even on an iPhone. I can’t believe how much time I spend putting passwords into an iPhone.The Chrysler, we gave back quite a lot of white-collar rates, the security, the cypherpunks and all that kind of stuff we’ve talked about. What still excites you about computing?The way I think about it, I got ahold of an Apple II. At the time, it was a piece of shit. I loved it, but it had an eight-bit processor. That was one kiloflop. I think I could do math faster with a pencil, but it lit up my imagination. I could imagine that someday I’ll have a faster processor, someday have more memory and someday it was going to be useful. I was trying to convince everyone of that. I had the Apple II and skateboard and people were conflicted about which one was a bigger waste of time. I got lucky the computer turned out to be useful. They did get faster. They did get more memory. They got to the point where we could use them for all things, but I’m still living in that. I’m still trying to find new things that we could do with a computer. I never ran out of steam on that.To this day, I’m still looking, what’s going to be technically possible? What problems can we solve? What can we do better with the computer that I’m and what does it change? That’s driven me my whole life. I don’t see any end in sight for that. I find different things to aim and what’s great is I know a lot about computers. I don’t know a lot about anything else, but I feel entitled to go take the computer and try and apply it to things I don’t know anything about. I spent half of my time trying to learn about the state of the art with new technologies and around computers, what they can do. I cram that in my head. I spend the other half of my time trying to learn about problems and cram them into the other side of my head. I imagine there’s a Rubik’s cube in there that sometimes matches them up.That’s literally what I think invention for me is. I’m collecting the tools and I’m collecting the problems. Every day you get new technology, you get a new chip, you get a new algorithm, you get a new sensor, you get something. You get to ask yourself, “Does this change anything humans have ever done?” That’s what keeps me going. I think security and hacking was a great place to start the irreverence of hackers. They don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. They’re not reading the directions. They’re breaking things. They’re discovering what’s technically possible and that to me is the seed of invention.That’s why I cherish them. That’s why I still hang out with hackers, even though I don’t care about the security. Those are the minds that I am inspired by. It was a great place to come from. I’m thankful that I learned so much about computers because going deep into something, it helps you respect the depth of knowledge that other people have in their area. It helps me, so I can communicate with them. I keep trying to stay up on what computers can do and use that as my tool. Thanks, Ben. It is great hanging out with you.About Ben LaurieExtremely proficient programmer (over 30 years experience) and system designer. Security, cryptography, privacy and civil liberties are my passions.Specialties: Security, cryptography, open source/free software, the Internet, privacy, civil liberties, writing, OpenSSL, ApacheRecorded on March 16, 2018The post Unboxing the Crypto Toolkit – Ben Laurie appeared first on .

Steven Sebring is an artist, photographer & inventor. This is a guy who’s invented new technology and advanced the art of photography with the tools that he’s built in a world-class fashion. By his own admission, he is not a technical guy, but when you see what he’s built, you’re going to be blown away.There’s nothing else in the world like it. There’s a lot of work going on to develop new kinds of capture systems for virtual reality that work in 360° environments. Steven came at it from a completely different angle and came up with a completely different solution.  He is putting out the most incredible content that works in 3D and in virtual reality on the planet. No one’s paralleled what he’s doing as far as I’ve seen. You really want to understand Steven and his thought process, and that’s really what we’re getting into in this episode.I want you to be able to see how an inventor thinks when they’re trying to solve a problem that they understand. We have a lot of situations in technology where we’re building a solution without really understanding the problem or the user whose going to be interacting with it. So, this is an amazing opportunity to get to know an inventor.I don’t think Steven has ever done a podcast before. He rarely ever talks about what he’s working on. He’s known to industry insiders in fashion. He’s shot a lot of celebrities. He goes way back with Patti Smith. He’s done cool documentaries and film and all kinds of artwork with her. And he’s shot some of the biggest brands on earth and the camera system he built is unlike anything else.So, anyway, I want you to get in here and understand Steven. We talk about his projects for Donna Karan, Ralph Laureen, BMW, and Spin Magazine. He just has all kinds of commercial work that he’s done. He’s also a guy who has worked on art projects, that if you have any interest in art, you’re going to want to learn about his Muybridge interpretation that he’s done.I met Steven a couple of years ago when he was doing this groundbreaking project called LIMINAL with Rodney Mullen. Rodney introduced us and we’ve been friends ever since. I cannot wait for you guys to see this stuff. This episode, you’re going to have to go to the website jetpackforthemind.com to look at the Steven Sebring episode. I’m going to post all kinds of cool stuff that Steven has created. There’s a music videos in there with Jack White. There’s all kinds of film and video projects that they’ve done with the camera system. There’s a lot to explore and I think you guys are going to be really impressed with what’s going on.Pablos: Even though my audience is smart and technical but they know about a lot of different things so I’m not expecting them to know anything in particular. The point here isn’t to dig into the tech stuff too much. What’s much more interesting is you have this amazing, unique career in history trying to advance your tools to support your art. That’s much more interesting than what most nerds are doing. We want to try and pick that apart so people can understand. A lot of what’s holding human back is that symbiosis is missing between the tools in the art, the creation and using technology to enable possibilities.Steven: This is beautiful. I feel honored to be here with Pablos. There is no nerd here.It’s not that you’re a nerd. It’s all the nerds are not able to do what they’re doing.They’re fucking nerds. That’s what they are. Nobody needs a nerd. I could use a few nerds.That’s one thing that could be valuable here.We’re definitely needing a lot of nerds to then obey my command.They thrive when they have some management. You need a dominatrix to tell them what to do all of that. I’m not exaggerating about that. It’s one of the winning strategies we’ve found for some folks with Asperger’s. You get on a dominatrix who tells them what to do at any given moment who can prioritize for that. Who can tell them what to worry about next because they don’t feel they have to worry about everything? It works great because then, they can be productive. In any given moment, they can do the extraordinary thing that they’re good at and the skills that you worry about taking care of the things that they suck at. This notion that somehow the world needs more well-balanced humans, I don’t think I believe it. We have a leader that’s extraordinary.Everybody is trying to find this balance by getting to the center. That’s the yoga strategy. They’re trying to get rid of every sharp edge and get to this center point where everything is perfectly balanced and hang out there. That, to me, is precarious. It’s not resilient. When you look, it’s trying to balance a teeter-totter on that point or trying to balance a pencil on your fingertips and that’s hard to do. If you look at a barbell, the barbell is balanced through extremes amount of weight on one end and the other. There’s nothing in the middle.Barbells are prone to be balanced almost all the time. We’re going a little too far with this balanced human thing. When you work in tech with a bunch of folks who are on the spectrum, you start to get an appreciation for what they’re good at. It’s antagonistic to try to make them balanced like normal people which aren’t what they are built for. It’s not what we need them for. You can find somebody else to do yoga and somebody else to eat organic quinoa and all that stuff. The folks with the ability to concentrate and create something the way a lot of folks with Asperger’s have been able to do, that’s special.That’s interesting. I love your perspectives, Pablos. To think that you fucking come from Alaska.Nothing in Alaska is normal.You grew up in Anchorage?I grew up mostly in Anchorage. I spent about five years in a small town called Soldotna.It was always dark. Do you get a minute of the sun in the winter?You would walk to school in the dark and walk home from school in the dark. We’re meandering but I want to back up. I come from the sport fishing capital of America.Do you like sushi?No. It’s a problem in relationships.Do you like cows? Do you like a good steak? Why do you think the cows are fired emissions that are affecting the climate? If everybody quit eating meat for a year, I hear that we would be in a much better situation. Is that true?Yeah. It’s because the gas is not CO2. It’s methane. Methane is about 26 times as bad as CO2.We got to do something about that. Why can’t they put cows in a big fucking building that’s taking the methane out of the air?That is possible. It’s just that they keep trying to make them fart inside of a building.It might be toxic for them. I would think that the cows would fall over in their cages.They would. It’s nasty stuff. What are you hearing about it?Methane is the exact same thing as natural gas. If you could capture it, put it in cars and you can power the world.Why can’t they capture that? Why can’t they do this?The day of that big photographer is dwindling down because now everybody's a photographer. Share on XThere are inventions which try to capture methane from the farts of cows.Whoever does that will make billions. Why haven’t you figured that out? We might have in this conversation the answer.The truth is you could do a lot if you catch that methane because something close to 30% of green gasses is coming from the cow farts.Why can’t they put a suction cup up to their butt?There is a patent on that. It’s expired though. It’s an open-source thing. Anyone could stick a suction cup on the bottom of a cow and collect the methane and sell it into the energy market. I don’t know what you’re doing here taking pictures when you can be rich.I own 1,200 acres in South Dakota with oil on it. I own mineral rights to the land. I can drill tomorrow. I just haven’t drilled.How did you choose South Dakota? I inherited it from my great-great-uncle.Did he want to get it oil?No. He was a sheep farmer. He had cattle and horses of about over 60 or 80 that ran around on his land. I did a book called Bygone Days of all his found photography and negatives. I remember going there when I was a little kid so I became close to Johnny. He lived in the original sod house that he was born in. It was the first homestead in the area in Dakota. It’s in the North-Western area. It’s incredibly beautiful. He put me in the will to take care of the land and keep the place but I’ve never drilled on it. As soon as I remember, when they were reading the will, people are coming up to me and say, “You can drill. There’s oil here.” I’m like, “Really?” I’ve never done it.It’s still going to be a little late.I should have done that deal with Halliburton sooner.This was your grandfather.Great-great-uncle of mine and I did a book called Bygone Days on him.Did you go to visit him?All the time. I loved it out there.Where were you growing up?I was born in South Dakota, Aberdeen and I have relatives in Sioux Falls and stuff that. My parents moved to Arizona when I was one because there were jobs there. There were nursing and teaching jobs, and it was starting to blossom in Phoenix. I grew up in Mesa which is outside of Phoenix. It’s lonely back there and it was suburbia. I didn’t have much culture when I grew up at all. It was cowboys and a lot of cotton fields. If my parents had $5,000 or $4,000 to buy land out there, they would have been great because now it’s sprawling.Was this in early or mid-’70s or something?I was born in ‘66. In 1967, we were out there and my sister was born. We lived out there. That was my life.Is your uncle the one that got photography in your head?No. It’s bizarre. I was a tennis player. That was my big thing. I was playing lots of tennis. I found a girlfriend of mine and she modeled in Phoenix. I started taking pictures of her and I’m going, “This is cool.” All my family is artists and teachers in the arts. I started taking pictures and I didn’t want to go to college for tennis or anything like that so I never went to college. I graduated from high school. I started a studio. I took pictures in Phoenix. I got over that then I went to Italy. I used to shoot cars and I shot all different things like food and all product stuff. I was into photographing girls. I built a book. I went out to Italy and that’s when I started photographing a lot of models. I came back and I ended up in New York City with this portfolio that I created in Italy and I landed a Ralph Lauren campaign. It was quick and I never went back.Is that the moment that legitimizes your career as a photographer?As a photographer, you start shooting a lot of editorials so you do a lot of magazine work before you get a campaign. You’re building your style and your image shooting editorial. For some reason, I did the Double RL campaign which is cool vintage type stuff. My portfolio was about doc style. I had a style for sure. I also did things instead of putting pictures in a portfolio like a normal portfolio, I’d design cards that folded out with my picture. I designed boxes that people would look at my stuff more design creatively and that showed off to people that I was thinking differently and I nailed that.That’s when I started shooting editorial because once I did the Double RL campaign, I did two of them and that was my launch. I started shooting a lot of male and women celebrities. I started shooting a lot of men’s stuff with L’Uomo Vogue doing stuff for W when W started. It started propelling my career and then I started shooting women. To shoot women’s fashion is a hard thing to get to. It’s the cram of the cram to get the best girls in the world where I could get the best guys in the world. That leads it into shooting women celebrities. I shot a lot of women celebrities for magazines then that propelled me to now.When the crossover was more about the woman’s celebrity than a model on the cover of a magazine or in an editorial because nobody cared about that, that’s when it was easier for me to do because I was shooting a lot at women celebrities. They became that fashion model in a way. I was on a plane once to LA and I was watching this woman. She had Vogues and all these magazines. I was watching this woman flipped through the magazine. When it came to an editorial with the model, she just kept flipping. When it came to an editorial with a celebrity, she stopped and read. I was like, “That’s a big indication that you have to be branded as a person.”We had a lot of experience in the last few years of a celebrity being the driver for everything. Now, we have a multitude of celebrities. For the first time, as far as I can tell in human history, their primary thing is being a celebrity. We used to have some legitimizing career to go with it.If you’re a new model, your mom and dad are celebrities. You’re almost branded immediately. That’s the only thing that people care about now. You see influencers that are branding and they’re doing all these different things. They’re now apparel designers or they have a soft drink. That’s the new thing now to keep up to have a girl come out of the woodwork from someplace. Male America and become a star are very rare anymore because nobody wants to put the work in to brand that. They want it to be already done. You come from this family and now you’re somebody.There are counterexamples like Charli D’Amelio on TikTok who came out of nowhere doing dance moves. Now, she’s the biggest thing on Earth.It’s insane. Every brand wants to link up to that because that’s the fan base and that’s how they sell. It’s a crazy time because that fashion or iconic photographer that shoots big ad campaigns that are fantasy and all this stuff has gone down the tube because nobody wants to pay their fees anymore and somebody can do it on their phone. The day of that big photographer is dwindling down because now everybody is a photographer.In some sense that the tools and skills became democratized because the phone in my pocket is now better than anything, you used in your entire career. You’ve got the same phone on your bike. We all have these tools and it makes everyone think they’re a photographer even if they haven’t done the work to build up the skillset. A lot of those skills are obsoleted. The position we ended up now is what you’re describing where the professional experienced photographer is not being hired for that photo skillset.Not much anymore.Their creativity is also less valuable because you’re competing with such a high noise score.There’s so much noise in how you breakthrough. You see now photographers in the fashion community using Instagram to help promote themselves. The actual photo agent is a difficult time now for them, but there’s only a certain amount of work out there. Now with the pandemic, where are the budgets? You could still be out there and be a cool photographer. It doesn’t mean you’re making money. For me, I’ve always evolved so much because when I was taking pictures, I started getting into film and I was interested in filmmaking. On a job, I met Patti Smith and shooting her for SPIN Magazine. I met her in Detroit and I started falling for her.That’s when I started like, “I want to start filming you.” I started learning. I didn’t go to film school. I bought a camera and started filming her. It wasn’t video. It’s always a movie film. It’s footage like Sally Lloyd. That was an eleven-year project for me for her and I self-financed it. I was taking my still world and getting into the storytelling world. When people heard I was doing this, that’s when people started having me shoot. I used to do more filmmaking. When I did Donna Karan stuff, I did these two short films. It was when the BMW films came out. These are short stories. I was doing that with fashion brands.That propelled me into more shooting fashion and then pulling stills from the cameras and that’s your ad campaign. We were doing that digitally with 2K files and we were finding out that it wasn’t enough for resolution for billboards so I went back to Sally Lloyd and I started filming. We’d get 2 for 1. Now with the cameras with the reds and all that stuff which I was one of the first guys to shoot the reds and higher resolution. You were getting 2 for 1 but you had to know how to run the camera to get a still because of motion blur and all that stuff. That’s when I got into app publishing. That’s when I started getting into more immersive content and pushing that.What year was this about?I started doing that many years ago. I was always interested in why people are interacting with a PDF file on a tablet and it seemed flat. I started getting into all this 3D stuff and using turntables but nobody made stuff that was automated that was quick that understood my workflow. That’s when I got into this with this camera and putting tons of money into the technologies. That’s how that happened.You’ll do a better job than this. Describe what you built here and what it’s capable of.This is the new photo studio. I call it the SRS. It’s the Sebring Revolution System. I put a lot of time into it where it’s automated and fast. You turn it on, you’re shooting and you’re getting 2D stills as well to feed the 2D roll. You’re getting everything done at once.I’m going to describe it for people reading. We’re sitting in a 30-foot diameter cylinder with twelve-foot walls. It’s white inside. There are 120 DSLRs mounted in the wall all the way around. Every three degrees is twenty megapixels camera. We weren’t going to tell a lot about the tech but the point is, Steven can set up a scene in here, a model, an athlete, a picture of a whole music video, or whatever. He’s filming the whole thing from every three degrees. He’s able to do real-time.I can tell the cameras what I want them to do. It’s a rabbit hole stuff where I’m constantly trying to find new dimensions and concepts. It’s Eadweard Muybridge concepts but I’m tapping into Eadweard Muybridge who was a genius and who is the godfather of filmmaking. All his studies on Stanford University with multiple camera systems were mind-boggling. What I’m doing is I’m creating the same concepts but it’s staggeringly fast because we need to make content fast and see results immediately. It has that ability and then I started telling cameras to do different things. That’s when I started seeing motion and time.That’s what all the great masters like Marcel Duchamp with Nude Descending a Staircase. You see Bacon and all these guys who looked at Muybridge photographs. When I started seeing things dragging and seeing a time and the light scene in this 3D world, I started seeing a lot of the cubistic and the Bacon’s and all this stuff. I always had been tapping into the arts and what were they seeing. That’s why I keep pushing these cameras systems so far. I want to go a lot further. I feel like I have now worked this much that I want to take it into another realm.One of the things here that stands out is you ended up in a different place than the rest of the tech world did in trying to create 3D content. You ended up in a place that’s much more photorealistic and compelling. You don’t have the uncanny valley problems that we have with volumetric capture systems trying to overlay textures on point clouds and all this stuff because you have photos and everything in the photos is real. It’s much more compelling to me. It’s been fascinating to me to be able to interact with the things you’ve created because they have that visceral connection that you skipped over all the problems everybody else is trying to solve.I’m not letting the tech rule my art and that’s the thing. For me, tech is a way to make new art. A photograph is the purest idea or way to capture a moment. At the end of the day, it isn’t about the cameras you’re using. It’s what you have at the moment. The fact that I’m using these whole camera systems laced with LED systems and it shoots with strobe. I’m not worried now about how I need to light something for an isolated image. I don’t give a shit about that. Honestly, the lighting, contrast and how fucked up I can make the picture and having high resolution, all the isolating tools work.Even if it’s flawed, that’s okay because that feels new. Everybody is trying to refine it and make it so straightforward and realistic that they’re missing the moment and the art and that doesn’t grab your heart. Nobody gives a shit about that. The fact that I can do it and see things within twenty seconds, it’s done and I can interact with things quickly. I can pull high-resolution stills quickly in all my workflow. We’re now accessing a lot of AI where all the posts workflow is fast so I can generate different assets quickly that work in VR, AR and all this stuff.The R&D that I’ve been doing here for years, I know exactly what I need to do in camera to eliminate posts. When I work with fashion brands or shooting high jewelry with Tiffany’s or what we’re doing with Christie’s and other auction companies, it’s about how quickly you can achieve the asset because you don’t have a lot of time with this stuff. If I need to do a campaign, I have to get 30 looks and I have to do some broadcast, if I can’t do that immediately in a day, as if I was at a normal photo studio, you’re dead in the water.Everybody else is trying to spend weeks or months creating 3D models and rendering them per seat.The money is not Hollywood. This is a thing that is always been important to me because I work with a lot of creative directors and I speak the language, the music and designers. If we can do things working with their existing budgets, you win. If you can deliver things in a day, you win. You delivering it in a way and you’re creating in a way that we all know. I designed these camera systems based on what we, as artists, do. That is where we are different. The approach is what I know and I don’t also want to see technology. When you come to my place, you don’t see technology, green screens and all this. You’re cooler because you see more tag. For me, that’s gross.It’s the opposite of modeling.I don’t want to see that. I love that but when you’re working with artists and designers or whatever you’re doing, the aesthetic is about design. I’m very much in design. When you’re working on this camera, you feel like you’re working in an installation and this is like Philip Johnson or Mies Van Der Rohe. You’re tapping into great artists and you’re lighting artists.It’s an extraordinary experience coming here. All that soulfulness that you’re trying to describe comes through for me. I’ve been here multiple times. It was struck hanging out there. I wanted to take a picture of the theater but you’ve got these camera systems that you’ve developed out here. One of the things I’m curious about that I wanted to pick your brain on is since I’m from the tech industry and we are motivated to advance the technology. We’re trying to get more megapixels in your camera, better specs on everything, more gigahertz, terabits and everything. It’s important. We have this abstract notion in our minds that like, “This is going to matter to somebody someday.” People like you enable artists and creative people to do more. That has been true but you’re coming at it from the opposite side. I don’t think you give a shit about any of those specs or numbers. As you said, you’re trying to hide the technology.Tech is just a way to make new art.Share on XIt’s not the arrows, it’s the Indians.Tell me what that means.What that means is that if you’re a skilled Indian, you don’t need the best arrow. It’s about what you have. I’m working with cameras that are fifteen years old in some of my older systems.You’re also the Indian who built the first crossbow.I’ve never heard that one before, but that’s funny.That’s the interesting thing to me. You may be a skilled photographer and that’s great and all. There are other skilled photographers and I can’t tell the difference between them and that’s fine. What I can tell is you did something they didn’t do. You took that bow and said, “I want to be able to shoot three times as far. I want to be able to get something well beyond what any other photographer could do.” You built the system to do it. To do that, you had to have the vision for creating this thing. I know that you went through various iteration of this concept and prove that. That’s normal.As you said, we’re many years in here but all along the line, you had to go engage nerds who could make your vision a reality. That’s one thing I’m interested in is what has that process been like? As far as I can tell, even sixteen years in, you’ve done an extraordinary job of not becoming one of them. I come in here and you were like, “We have cameras and you know what they are.” The point is you had to be able to express your vision for this tool you wanted to create and it’s very technical. There’s a lot of work to build this thing. This is a big hardware development project. You’ve done that and you had to get help. When you first started, where’d you get help?I started accessing people that I knew that knew developers. I went through the gamut and not being a tech whatsoever. My son knows more things than I do. I’m very slow at it. I’d spent a lot of money and then I was like, “I can’t work with you anymore.” I’d bring in another developer.What’s an example of why you can’t work with somebody?They were arrogant. There was something about the arrogance of the developer that blew my mind. I would bring in another developer and they say, “We can’t build upon what he did because he built it in this language where I can’t do.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” “He wrote it in this language and I can’t build upon what he did. I’m like, “What are you talking about? Can’t you finish the job?” He goes, “No, we have to start over.” This was my life and it was hard. At the same time, I’m not making money doing this. I have a life of shooting fashion and making TV commercials so that was my life. That’s how I supported all this tech. I kept throwing money into it and then eventually got the right people around me, developers and coders.We did a lot of R&D and they were understanding a lot because they were designing software that was my brain. When I saw a glitch in the tasks, I would say, “I want that glitch. Give me a button.” They would say, “We’re having difficulties because of the glitch.” I’m like, “I like a glitch.” That was an interesting moment because they were like, “You like it to be imperfected like not perfect the software.” I wanted perfect software but I wanted to be able to say I want to fuck it up too because that’s when you’re going to get something different.When I’m seeing a girl jumping in here doing something weird with shooting 600 frames per second, it’s slow-motion stuff, she’s glitching out because cameras are not timing perfectly. I like that but then I want to do it perfectly. This camera shoots 1,000 frames per second. It’s fast. I felt captured a strobe in the filament. That’s how fast this camera can be but if I wanted to put motion with it, I could do that too.I wanted to push it in such a hard world way through my mind but the challenge was the developer’s understanding of what I wanted. We hired a lot of junior developers because it was something they didn’t know anything about and they had to create it. It was interesting. They weren’t specifically image software guys. They’re guys that were trying to think differently and building hardware that was ours. Everything is proprietary. We were trying to do things like that. It’s one of those sayings that everybody can have an electric guitar but you’re not going to be Hendricks.You’re always going to come up with your own way of how you’re capturing stuff. They had to have that attitude that we’re trying to find new things that created emotion but also understood my workflow as a photographer. It has to be fast and I have to see playback immediately because when you’re working with creative directors and models or music stars, they need to see it quickly. All a sudden, you’re creating an environment where it’s happening organically together. It’s a true collaboration because you see the content in front of your eyes happening. That was a big push. I didn’t shoot a lot of stuff until my workflow and the post on these cameras were so fast.We call that rapid iteration.If I didn’t have that, I was done.There’s something analogous to that in almost everything in the world. One of the things that we’ve experienced in the last couple of decades in our lifetime is Silicon Valley took over every other industry. The reason is we use software to reinvent those industries. That was powerful. The software gave us this superpower of rapid iteration. Imagine if you’re doing the photoshoot, you’re planning it 1.5 years in advance what you want the picture looks like and you’ve got to get one click and it better be right. You have to plan everything but you can’t chart the timeline, you have it all figured out. That’s not going to be fun. It’s not going to be creative and you’re not going to end up with the image that the world needs right at that moment.Rapid iteration software development is I dreamed some shit up, write some code and launch it into the world. If it isn’t exactly right, no problem. I’m going to update it tonight or tomorrow morning. We’re launching 5 or 6 versions a day of those these days, which is enough that gives us the ability to steer towards what works and what’s successful. You don’t have to guess a year in advance what’s going to work, delightful, or meaningful to the user or the customer, whoever is at the end of that. That’s what artists like you’re describing, the photographers, were able to do as these tools got faster and faster. Twenty seconds later is fast. Much more you than I started with photography with chemicals so it took you at least a day to see what your picture came out to look like.I hated that process. When I started shooting, I did a lot of ad campaigns for big designers and I only brought a Polaroid camera. That’s all I shot with it. When the scanner came around, I could scan the Polaroid. It was a huge revelation because when we shot Polaroids, there was a moment of immediate gratification but there was always an off moment about a Polaroid. That’s what I wanted this to be.I wanted it to be something that you pushed it whether it was lighting or flaring the cameras. It has to have something that felt good because I think about the user. That’s all I think about right now. Brands are now accessing me to design the things on how the user will see, experience the jewel and the fashion. For me, this camera system is the place where you experience the content too. It’s being created in the camera and being seen in the camera. I love those new environment concepts and all this played into this camera when I was building it. Aesthetically, it has to be the new museum as well.Now, with projection mapping and all this stuff, you can go ballistic. We’re finding a new way to think of a hologram when you’re projecting stuff with motion, now that human being becomes a hologram of itself. We’re doing things where emotionally to any user they’re going to be like, “What is that?” That’s what you want. It took me a second to make it. That’s the more fun thing about it because I get bored.It’s tough to get you to go shoot in a regular photo studio. Why would you do that?People ask me, I was like, “I moved on from that because it seems one dimensional.”Plenty of people could do that and they’re still trying.This is the thing. They’re all still trying to do the same thing. When I monetize this company, I built these camera systems that other people would understand because they know who I am, our workflow and what cameras we work with.A regular creative director or photographer come in here and create stuff. They don’t need a nine months training program. They can be shooting tomorrow.They’re going to be like, “I get it.” The workflow is familiar to them. I call the SRS camera. It’s a camera, it’s not cameras. I always say revolutions because we’re doing different things in that 360 space. We’re calling it different things because being able to do 30 seconds takes in here with dialogue and all this is a different approach. It’s deep and it’s cool. You start adding the voice to it and all these things but it’s all happening in camera. That’s the thing that we understand. We don’t understand the value metric capture, you have to light it flat and you do everything in post. You strip in the backgrounds and stuff like that. It needs to be done more pure and quicker. That’s the way you can meet a deadline in 2 or 3 days. That’s the approach.There’s some interesting stuff here when you were talking about developing it. I was laughing on behalf of our audience who can relate to the notion of hiring a coder to build this thing or some developer who then tells you that they have to start from scratch because the language is wrong. We’ve all been through that many times. I’ve certainly been through that on both sides where I’m the guy telling you, “You have to start from scratch.”If it was done this way, we can’t achieve it.That genius was dumb shit. I’m smarter than him, I’m telling you.There are twelve languages.There are more than twelve languages for every day of the year but it’s not just the languages. There are a lot of other things that come out. Some of them might’ve been right but I understand from your perspective like that’s ridiculous. Along the way, you said you worked with a lot of junior developers. It may have been necessary for some sense because they don’t know what can’t be done. Everybody else is being bought up by Google.You were still able to make successful progress at least to some point.I was doing stuff in the wrong way but in those early days, I looked back at those captures and they’re brilliant. They’re stuff that I want to get back to. That’s how crazy that is. I was in the trenches, I looked back at that stuff now and I can see it in augmented reality. That’s isolating material.That’s one of the interesting things that in the time that you’ve been working on this, the headsets for AR have advanced and you serendipitously made content that was compatible with that.Before, I even knew what AR was. People are talking in VR and all this stuff. I was interested in capturing a 2D picture and having an interactive on your phone. That was about it. When I started understanding all these other things, that’s when we started testing it all. Even when we were doing Rodney Mullen, it’s an incredible project. He is so inspirational. It all came together through Dhani Harrison. In my early app days, we produced the George Harrison Guitar Collection app. I went to Friar Park and I photographed all Harrison guitars in 360 and all that stuff, and then we created this app that is incredible. Dhani who I adore.I remember he did the track for Liminal.He did the track for Liminal and we cut Liminal.Did he introduce you to Rodney?Yes. Dhani is a skateboarder. His dad would bring in great skateboarders to Friar Park and all that stuff in and then Dhani started doing some skate tricks in the old cameras that were in a geodesic dome which was cool. It was all mirrored out and it was badass. I’m like, “Dhani, you can skate cool.” Dhani is like, “I don’t know if we can do it.” It would be ultimate to get Rodney captured like this because he is the Holy Grail. I didn’t grow up skateboarding. I didn’t grow up with Patti Smith. I entered these things not knowing a lot. I liked that because I get to know who they are. When I first met Rodney, when he came, did a few things and Rodney started seeing the results, it was heaven.It’s cool because you come out at it without being sycophantic for sure. In both of those cases with Patti and Rodney, you’re working with a living legend. That could have been true with other skateboarders but what would not have been true is this who Rodney is. He’s perfect for this project.It was incredible to work with him. As a human being, I absolutely adore him. He’s as much of a brother and I miss being able to talk to him more. We love to talk more, even with Dhani, I don’t talk a lot which is hard. Being able to capture Rodney doing a trick and you still don’t understand what he’s doing, he’s Yoda. All that stuff works in all these new applications. That’s what’s incredible. It works in the augmented reality. We started seeing how my camera systems in the early stages were practically volumetric and this was years ago. That was a time when I did study a pose, which is 1,000 poses of Coco Rocha. I created the book and those now work in VR, holograming, AR, you can make 3D models because of our data. It lives. If there’s a new application that the tech role created, I know it will work. For me, being able to archive great moments, I always look at what I’m doing is an educational study. It becomes this 3D of Getty concepts where now you’re creating archives of skate, music, and people. It’s like doing this farmer imagery back in the early 1900 where there’s photographing. It’s like Richard Avedon’s Americas. I think like this. I want to do a version of Avedon’s Americas in these camera systems and now you’re documenting humans in a way that’s new and exciting and that’s not happening. I wanted to get Robert Frank in here who I’ve met a few times but he passed away. It’s one of these things that all they have to do is to come in, I do a couple of shots and I’ve got them forever. For me, this is also to the new portrait moment. There are a lot of things. What they capture into reality, it’s not made up. It happens like that Polaroid moment. That’s why it was important for me to get into the arts as well because the art world is about purity, reality, archiving and how you can make art of art because you got data.There’s another interesting thing coming that will give yet another form of life to what you’ve created.That’s why you’re here too because of Rodney Mullen.If you think about what you have, even watching Liminal, it is artistic in its editing. There are tricks in there that have never been done before like karate created new tricks that no one can comprehend but they’re in there. They’re presented in Liminal video in an artistic fashion. When you put on a Magic Leap headset, you can walk around Rodney and watch him while he’s doing those tricks. When I was a kid, I first knew Rodney because I got Thrasher Magazine and there are three images of Rodney on a skateboard, Rodney with his skateboard nine inches in the air and then Rodney with a skateboard in the air a foot and a half up without even touching anything but his feet.That was the first frame sequence of an ollie. I couldn’t understand. There was no way from those three images to figure out how to learn how to ollie. I was in a Podunk, Alaska and no one for 1,000 miles had ever got any close to a skateboard. I’m trying to learn from that but what we could do now is put me in the magical headset next to Rodney. In slow motion, he could do a trick. I could rewind back up, pause, move around and see exactly how he’s doing it and where his weight is. The computer can watch me try and do it and tell me what I’m doing wrong.I always going to be wrong with a Rodney Mullen.It’s always good luck because my body can’t move his ways but the computer now can watch my motion compare it to that reference that can come from what you’ve already captured. You’re not even a century, in 5 or 10 years, people could learn to skate by skating right next to Rodney from that content you’ve already made.That’s where you come in. For me, I’m creating the assets as beautiful as possible. My desire with this company is to have a team of monsters that can take my content and go ballistic with it. That’s something I dream about.A photograph is the purest way to create or capture a moment.Share on XThat’s why it’s cool that we are doing this because this audience might have those monsters you need. If you’re out there, a software engineer and you want to figure out how to do the future of 3D art, this is the coolest stuff that you’re working on.You’ve always had an interest here when we first met and I always thought that I was amazing. I am interested in the deep world of that part. I only know how to create emotion, moments and capture things in pure reality being able to take it further in the tech world.We have the opposite problem so much more where I come from. We have engineers, technology, all this stuff and we don’t know how to make anything compelling with it. That’s happening a lot. What I’m always excited about is figuring out how you cross-pollinate those communities, the skillsets until you fulfill the potential because technology is meaningless until humans put it to use. It’s quite frustrating to see a lot of meaningless stuff being done with technology in the so-called tech industry.They’re being funded with lots of money and you’re still seeing what they’re creating. You’re like, “What? I have no funding here. I’ve been doing this for sixteen years as a hobby.” All of a sudden, here’s a pandemic that is propelling immersive content that I’ve been creating for years with brands and now you’re starting to see a market. My timing as a photographer, filmmaker, artist or whatever you want to call me, there’s nobody that has this anywhere that comes from these communities. That’s something that I’m fascinated with.When I think about having the right partners and the funding because I built it all and it’s monetizing this concept and then adding to the camera systems with great texts that can understand how much further we can go and create a new future for somebody to see our content. That’s what I love about things. People ask me, “What is that?” I’ll say something and it’s like, “What am I seeing?” I’ll call it something. I almost feel like, “What did I call that?” They’re like, “I’d never heard of that before.” These people are going, “You’re doing volumetric capture.” I’m like, “I guess so. I call it this.” They’re like, “What is that?” I’m like, “I just call it this because it’s not how people do volumetric.” My approach is different. It’s like if I can’t do it fast, I don’t care because I don’t care.There are different reasons that aren’t important to pick apart here about why different approaches have been taken to creating 3D models and 3D imagery but it is fascinating that you ended up where you are. It seems like a natural soulful toolkit to use for artists and for people who have the experience that you have. Who should be in here right now? It sounds like it’s brands that have products because this is, by far in a way, the fastest, easiest, most beautiful way to get a product in 3D. If you had a brand in which we’re trying to put products in 3D environments.It might be true that this would be a better way to shoot products even if you didn’t care about 3D. If you’re trying to do any artwork that’s a performance with humans, it’s better to do it here than on any other stage. You’re going to end up with beautiful 3D compatible imagery that could go in a 2D environment. You can get 2D at the same time from every angle. It gives you the ability to do make more editorial decisions after the photos are made instead of before. Those are people who should be here. Anyone filming a music video should be doing it here. Where else do you want to?When I did the Raconteurs with Jack White and gang, Jack embraced this quickly but I use the camera system. I also walk in with a handheld camera. I use the space shooting regular video as well. I like to mash the two together. It’s interesting to tell stories. You can take the assets from the SRS and then create the other deliverables. That’s why this is such a great camera because even if I came in here and I do that too when I have folks in here, I’ll use my iPhone and take pictures. Here are my pictures that I’m doing as I would as a fashion photographer, I’m shooting video and then I’m shooting this camera so it becomes a tool of a tool.This becomes another tool to use to create an interesting video. Instead of going to a soundstage and you’re going to get a 2D moment on a YouTube channel or something. Here, I can do that but then I can also take it into the augmented reality world and the virtual world. It’s interesting because, for over years and being in all these brands and stuff, they never understood the fact that, sometimes they thought it was a risk working with the SRS. There are absolutely zero risks because you’re still getting 2D as what you get now.They could not get their head around that. I would say, “Here’s a picture. Here’s your still and you got a still from all angles. Here’s your interactive, virtual and augmented reality.” They are like, “What?” It was hard. I built this camera to say, “If you go to a photo studio and you take pictures, you’re getting a 2D picture.” That’s all you walk away with. For the same amount of money, what your budgets are, you shoot it in the SRS and you get your 2D what you would walk out of in the photo studio but you also get the 3D element.We need some forward-thinking art directors and brands to get in here. I don’t mean for this to be a commercial but we’re the only one in the world. It’s a special thing. People don’t even know.We’re based off here. I’ve been working with Tiffany’s brands, Christie’s, a lot of other auction companies, Smithsonian, we’re doing fashion brands and they’re all starting to now understand. I was working with these brands pre-pandemic in this world. That’s the other thing too about me is that I’m always working with the highest luxury brands in the world. I’m not interested in the low brow. It’s like LVMH or Chanel brands, Balenciaga or Alexander McQueen. These are the things that I do.Our level of luxury and sophistication in the way we capture stuff, we take it to the storytelling and then we take it to the user’s experience, that’s what we do here. Budgets are crashing if you look at the retail industry, the music industry, how do you tell stories differently and help them sell. The only thing that they’re interested in right now, the brands I have been working with is like help us now create a solution to help sell things differently because it’s not about a 2D campaign anymore. They’re approaching us now with help us. How can you help us plug the hole in the ship?To be able to go online in a much bigger way than they had prepared for.The bureaucracy has gone by the wayside. You’re still seeing a bit of bureaucracy with these big companies but what the companies I’m seeing that are little bureaucracy, they can move quickly. Those are the brands that are going to win because there’s no time to have 80 people trying to decide if it’s something that they should do. At the end of the day, I’m building my own auction platform. I’d much rather do my own thing and then work for you because I can give you my technology and ideas. I’ve come to the part now where I’ll do it for myself, cut out the middleman and make more money. Create original content, licensing and royalty deals.You can move faster. If you’re dragging along a big partner or whatever, it can be pretty inefficient.It could be inefficient and these are the things that I’m thinking about now.I’m curious, if somebody who’s a photographer like you were sixteen years ago, a professional photographer coming here, I’m sure there are things that you’re getting out of this system because you know it so intimately. Anyone else can get 80% or 90% of the value without having to have that intimate understanding of the system.It’s funny because I remember years ago a designer was like, “How can we use your camera and be different than that designer that you already did something with?” At that time, they thought that this was a gimmick like it was a one-off concept. I was arrogant at that point, I said, “This is bigger than your brand because it’s a new camera.” People shoot with cameras. How are they different? How H&M, Gap and everybody else is different? It’s because they style it differently. They have hair and makeup differently. It’s still the same thing. It’s a camera. It’s what you do with the camera is how you be different. What this camera is doing is giving you everything you need as far as assets.That’s a normal problem when there’s a new technology. People can have a difficult time extrapolating what the implications are so they underestimate it.That’s precise. A lot of people still are trying to get to wrap their heads around it because they don’t realize how deep this thing is as far as creating content.I’m going to share with the audience LIMINAL because I fucking love it. The Jack White video that you made. The Coco Rocha stuff. What other things that you’ve done here do you wish people would see?An important piece is the Nude Descending a Staircase I did. It was based on Duchamp’s Nude Descending painting that was based on a Muybridge captures of a Nude Descending a Staircase.It’s an artist, photographer, and art history that’s a critical one.I think they’d understand that because what we did was in the 6th rotation or 7th rotation. The video shows rotations as I shot it. It was the 7th or 8th rotation, we hit perfectly the Nude Descending painting. I’m using a strobe. There’s no composite work. It’s all on camera. Once we nailed the Nude Descending then I had her doing descending the stair backwards and doing all these weird things. I took the strobe away and then I took it to constant light where now I’m dragging cameras. That’s when we started seeing a lot of Bacon and cubistic stuff.Is this something that when they’re looking at Muybridge, they’re dragging with paint and we’re dragging with light? There’s a lot of interesting dolly moments. We were tapping into that. Nobody has ever brought the two masters together in this realm using what Muybridge did. We feel that that is an important piece to see. What drives me is tapping into these masters and their early works. The stuff here is we’re going off the charts with stuff. We did this project pre-pandemic with a dear friend of mine, Jordan Roth, and he and I did something so crazy here.He’s a great guy that socially is much in the industry. He works on Broadway. He is part of all this and he’s a great artist himself, and we did some masterpiece that we’re working on slowly. That piece is outrageously extraordinary. We are trying to figure out how to take this to an audience where they’re immersed with it. We’re not using goggles or things but more being in a space with this content where we’re projecting in and out at the same times where you’re in a theater and you feel like you’re with him. They were trying to figure all that out. He’s in fashion so he’s wearing great designs and it’s an incredible moment. That’s something to look forward to. That one is a crazy rabbit hole stuff.Anything that you can think of that we can ask the audience like things that you want from them? What do you want help with?We’re looking to build the teams here taking the technologies further. When you come here, I know you’re always thinking of how the camera systems can go even further. For me, we’re sourcing these teams of guys that work in AI because all my posts, I wanted to go quickly delivering me immediate assets in different applications. I’m a real believer in that machine learning stuff. There’s a way to use that stuff with our optical picture or whatever we want to call it and make the workflow faster. I’ve designed mobile systems where we’re going to be putting these camera systems on the back of semi-trucks and going to the people.There’s some engineering stuff there. We’re going to have them touring and going to the people, PGA, franchise as the NBA, shooting horse and nature. We want investors. I designed the systems using Tesla trucks which would be a great way to show future concepts where now you have the SRS pulling up in the most futuristic truck where you don’t even have to the plugin. Everything is open you up the back and it’s working. We’re putting the product systems on Q-trucks. This is something we want to do so we can go to where the auction and all the stuff are. We’re trying to get rid of the ability to have to bring stuff to us. We go to that. In the auction world, that’s a big hurdle. Insurances and moving, it’s not proactive.My thing here is the engineering of the systems because the technology has been done. It’s now engineering them where you press a button and it works. Everything opens up and it’s all these cool renderings that we’ve done. Years ago, I did these designs and we access the people that can build these trailers. You spend $1 million on these things and they super cool. I was like, “We should put it on a Tesla truck. That could be the tractor. Make it like the Space X crazy thing that shows up at somebody’s house.” It’d be cool to access these concepts. That’s where I see a big thing. With the post workflow, that all is happening where these trucks are sending us data. How do you make that go faster?We’re trying to figure out, maybe Hollywood owns one if they need some characters. It’s one of those things that could be easily sponsored and branded. We want to build another one of these things in Europe. We want to build one of these in LA but the trucks right now, even with COVID, are perfect timing because nobody’s getting on airplanes quickly. That happened a lot where people can’t get to us and I’m like, “Those are the way to get to them.” That would be the perfect solution and upgrading the existing technologies here. I already know what I want. It just needs to be done. These are iterations of the growth of the camera systems. For me, it’s less about the capture and how we’re doing it. It’s more about where can you see my stuff.That’s what I keep feeling. You know what’s here because I’ve been here, but I don’t even have no other than LIMINAL. I’ll have something to show people. They don’t even know where to go to find your stuff.I’ve been selective too on who I’m doing stuff for. Having a place where people can navigate, working with the gaming engines, and stuff like that, and being able to deliver all these different applications through one site, it feels more focused than the capture because we’ve done it, we know how to take it further. Now is like how can we think about how to control that working with influencers, brands and our own content? I want to make movies with this camera. I want to make short stories. It’s a great moment for Amazon Prime.You almost need a new generation of creative directors to figure out how do you tell a story.For me, it’s about doing things. I’ve written some ideas where I’ve been wanting to do this film for many years where the SRS camera is a character in the movie. It’s an actual physical character of this camera. It’s almost like a spaceship. You see the movie traditionally, I’m filming with cameras and I’m using content from the SRS, which is a character in the film which I see this as a character in all my short stories and films like horror films and all this stuff. After you watched the movie, you can then go into the mind of the character of the SRS. Now you’re seeing and being a part through AR and virtual.It’s a movie about a photographer who invents the SRS and then keeps it stealth for sixteen years. Nobody knows about it. Meanwhile, he’s making all this incredible art and then he gets run over by a Tesla truck. Somebody discovers all these hard drives, wipes them out and uses them to store Instagram photos. There’s your horror movie.I did a project with Rick Baker. He won eight Academy Awards. He did American Werewolf. He’s the guy who did all the special effects makeup. He did Thriller, Planet of the Apes and all that stuff. He retired early because the CGI took him out of the world. That’s the most tragic thing in the world because when you see the movies he worked on, Men in Black and all that stuff, it’s all cool. I want to bring him back in here and we do short horror films like B films and say, “Rick, go ballistic.” We’ll create short scenes in the SRS and then we can deliver through the TV a code. You take your phone or your glasses and now that character is in your house. We’re making this stuff. That’s what we want to do.If I could have put that Pennywise character in my daughter’s bedroom.How cool would that be? That’s the stuff that I want to do. I’m looking to free myself up so I can do other stuff. I don’t want to oversee technologists. I’m at a point where I want people to oversee those people. You have to hire somebody to oversee them. It’s not me. You need managers and all this stuff. We’re starting to fill positions as far as creative directors and producers within the beauty world or sports world. They’re focusing on the medical world and all these things and how we can tap into these industries.They’re becoming their own teams because we have content in all these different worlds because we’ve created it for many years. That’s what we’re growing and developing the businesses in sports capture and all these different concepts. It’s all educational too. One of the things that I did a whole render on and I created the whole concept was pro bull riding. They work with bulls and train bulls in a 30-foot diameter cage. Think about capturing a bull rider in this way. My thing is that capture and that experience of a bull with a rider at that moment but my move is to put it in MoMA or put it at the Met.People look at now who’s not so interested in bull riding but sees it as a Picasso or sees it like this is work of art that you can immerse yourself into and walk around it. You can go up to the bull’s nose. These are the things that I want to do more of. I’ve already thought about it but that’s the most obscure thing in the world like, “Let’s capture a rider on a bull.” It’s like, “What is that going to look like?”Let’s wrap this up so you can get to making awesome shit like that. Thanks a ton for hanging out with me.Thanks a ton for hanging out with me.I’m happy that you’re here and I’m glad we reached out to you because you didn’t reach out to us. We didn’t know you were in New York. What is the timing of that?Daniel emailed me and he’s like, “I want to show you some cool stuff we’re doing.” I’m like, “I’m in New York. I’ll come by.” What are the odds of that? The universe is colliding. Rodney would be super stoked and coming from Dhani and David Sunshine how this little family has come to be. We’re lucky. Thank you.Good luck with this. Hopefully, something good will come from the show. We’ll get some more of your amazing creations.You might end up having a glorified position here. You can take it over.Once that Tesla truck gets you on.Do you think it’s a Mercedes?It will cooler to be run over by a Tesla truck than a Mercedes. You could survive the Mercedes isn’t as heavy. You don’t want to survive.It's not the arrows, it's the Indian. If you're really a skilled Indian, you don't need the best arrow.Share on XHave you done all the physics on that?I have figured out. If you’re going to go by being run over it, you want it to be swift and effective. You don’t want the job half done.What do you think about every day, Pablos?I think about dying on impact. That’s what I’m going for. I want a long slope degrading into cancer. I want to get my kid through high school. It’s all fast cars, motorcycles, helicopters and skydiving. That’s what I think I’m going to do. I don’t know if I’ll pull it off or dying with cancer like everyone else.Don’t say that. I know it’s a scary thing but I love the idea because I’ve always wanted to fly choppers.I’ve flown one.I want to fly one.You can do it. It turns out there’s nothing to it. You don’t need a driver’s license, just show up. You go out on the Tarmac and take the doors off. There’s a preflight inspection and they teach you how to do which is try to rattle anything on the chopper. If you can rattle something, don’t fly. That’s all you do. I do it in Hawaii. It’s fucking beautiful. You can fuse of Hawaii, you’d never get otherwise.Do you have a license to fly a chopper?You don’t need a license because you have an actual license from the chopper pilot.They’ll let you take the reins.Take the reins. You try to kill yourself over and over again. Right before you succeed, they save you. It’s like having your life saved 1,000 times.I didn’t know that.I love it so much because I suck at flying choppers. It’s 99% ways to die and 1% away of flying. This is an amazing experience.I love helicopters.They’re super cool. They’re obsoleted by drone technology now.The drone you get into and it takes you where you want.That makes way more sense than a helicopter and safer. A helicopter pilot is an amazing tuned instrument but they’re simpler than a Volkswagen Beetle. Every part is observable. There are only a few moving parts. You can try to rattle all of them. It’s an awesome experience. I’ve auto rotated landings on black sand beaches with no road access in Hawaii. Shout out to Mauna Loa Helicopters. They’ll train you how to fly it all the time.I had no idea.It costs a couple of hundred bucks for an hour.Have you flown a plane then?I’ve never flown a plane. I don’t even have an interest in it. I’ve flown on planes a lot.You’re not interested in a Cessna.I’m only interested in jets and then I’ll let you start with them. I’ve lost interest in flying a plane.It might not be too late for you to join the military.The military had a few minor concerns about me. I’m already on all the lists you can get on.With your traveling experience, what is going through security like?I don’t have a problem with it. The TSA knows me already.When are you going to do your book?People ask me about that all the time, but I don’t write.You’re talking to the thing like I would be the writer and then I would be here with you.Someday, I’ll do that. We can take all the podcast and turn it into a book.Important Links:ays Sebring Revolution System George Harrison Guitar Collection Raconteurs LIMINAL Coco Rocha Nude Descending a Staircase – YouTubeAbout Steven SebringAs humanity undergoes global changes, evolution presses forward, industry after industry is shifting views, protocols and priorities adjusting to the new demands of our time. This is the revolutionary photography of the future, heralding a new era of interactive multidimensional content. An emerging visual distinction where authenticity is the epicenter of our new digital consciousness. We are redefining the experience of fashion, music, sports, art, science, education and technology with unprecedented personal engagement and connectivity.Recorded on October 15, 2020The post The Future of Modern Photography – Steven Sebring appeared first on .

Today, I spent some time with Hod Lipson who is a professor at Columbia University. In fact, we recorded this episode right out in front of the university with crying babies going by and kids playing in the park. So it’s a little noisy, but I’ve been inspired by Hod for a long time, because he’s another inventor that worked on 3D printing early on.  He is at the forefront of what we’ve been able to do with computers. That’s the kind of thing I’m always really interested in. He was actually inventing 3D printing at the same time I was, a long time ago.  We get to have a conversation about that…both of us were probably the two people who worked on inventing 3D printers for food. And Hod has since gone on to do a really cool side project trying to create a robot artist and it’s called Pix18. It’s not like any other creative robot that you’ve seen or heard about. Honestly, this is a difficult thing to get your head around: can a robot be creative? And that’s hard for humans to accept.  And so of all the people on earth to have a conversation with about this topic, I probably couldn’t do any better than Hod Lipson.  Towards the end of this episode, you’ll see. It’s pretty exciting because Hod manages to really blow my mind.Pablos: You’ve been at Columbia for the last couple of years. You were at Cornell before. For how long, fourteen years?Hod: Yes.It seems like a long time. Why make that change?The change ironically is to be closer to people. I moved to Columbia years ago in part looking for that energy that comes from collision density from the fact that you meet people that are doing all kinds of crazy things. They don’t sound like they’re related to engineering necessarily, fashion, architecture, retail and medicine, you name it. It turns out that once you indirectly get all that energy around you, you start creating new things. That’s part of that. That’s gone a little bit. Hopefully, it will come back.I never had a plan for my career but looking back, I can pretend I had one. The main way that I can frame it is that I always wanted to do new things with computers. I had this big superpower that came from having computers and the whole world hadn’t adopted them yet. You could see it in every business, every industry. As an inventor, I’m looking around for places where the computers hadn’t gone yet and trying to get there first.I remember you gave this talk when you said, “You can put a computer into this microphone, chair and into everything and they could do something they didn’t do before.”You’re here surrounded by people who are trying to be creative in a lot of different areas but they don’t know about the technology. The truth is you’ve inspired me even unknowingly over the years because your projects have exactly been that. You got to some of these things before I did. One of them is in 2008 or 2009, I was working on trying to invent 3D printers to print food. Because I talk a lot more than you, people think I invented that stuff. You did it a decade before me or at least years before me, you were printing food or at least had worked on the idea of chocolate or something. We printed chocolate in 2006 or something like that.You were there even before me. I didn’t know that at that time but that’s what I mean. It sounded crazy when I did it. It must’ve been even crazier when you did it because it still sounds crazy. It sounds less crazy every year.Especially now, suddenly people are saying, “What’s the new future of food?” You can’t go to restaurants as easily. I’m saying, “Let’s marry software and food, as you say.” Take software away where it’s not been before. Food is a big piece of our life. Software is a big piece of our life. Let’s put them together and see what happens.I’ve watched the progression of that one. There are a few robotic restaurants like Spyce in Boston where they’ve worked out automated meal prep using machines. I’ve been thinking it’s one of the most important things for robots to do because the old way is lots of grubby teenagers, lots of ingredients rotting in the back of a restaurant. A huge amount of work to sterilize environments, manage food safety and robots are good at all that stuff. At the time I started working on it, it sounded crazy to everyone but they’ve seen 3D printers and more robots. They spend more of their life in the last decade with computers, smartphones and stuff. They’re more open to it. Now that they don’t want to touch anybody anyway, I think it will be the right time.It’s going to happen in the killer app is synthetic meat which is a thing on its own. For many reasons, people want synthetic meat. 3D printers are perfect for synthetic meat because you can do more than a hamburger patty. You can start making interesting things.One of the problems with meats, in my understanding, having spent a little bit of time with the Memphis meat guys and stuff, meat from a cow has a lot of vasculatures, gristle and all these textures that you’re familiar with and become so used to. The hard part with synthetic meat is texture. With 3D printing, we can start to put that texture. We’re also evolved to be very suspicious of if it doesn’t have it. If you touch something and it doesn’t have the right badness to it, it’s not that kosher.I almost hesitate to bring this up. I know a startup that was working on making lab-grown foie gras. I thought that was a genius place to start because foie gras is premium, low volume and also the ethical issues make people nervous about it. The texture doesn’t matter because it gets blended anyway. It’s the perfect meat to start with. I haven’t checked with those guys in a couple of years but that seems like you start with foie gras. If you can make that in a compelling way, then we can use machines like 3D printers to go and start adding texture to the foie gras. If you want something that’s got a little more of a bite to it, we could work from that ingredient up to New York strip steak.Foie gras can be so esoteric that is not as you say, I have a caviar machine and most people don’t eat caviar. They won’t grab their way to get that. If you make a steak machine, now you’re talking something that half the people want. That’s a little bit of nuance but the bottom line is that these machines, the meat and everything that’s happened with COVID and the environment, although that is taken second to see to everything else, make people suddenly recognize that we should rethink food and that’s a door. That’s an opening for it. Somehow the candy, confectionary, pastries all these other things that we tried to do with food printing didn’t quite take off but this might. That’s my gamble. We’ll see what happens.It’s very difficult to gauge but I’ve had more than a couple of different investment groups since COVID asked me about food tech. It could be time. In your mind, why do you correlate lab-grown meat with the need to automate meal production? Why is that a killer app?It’s a killer app because of what we talked about this is uncanny value.This is a way to make lab-grown meat more compelling.People always asked, “What problems does it solve? What’s the problem with today’s meat preparation? It takes effort, but what’s the problem?” I didn’t even have a good answer for that, but there was this Frankenstein element to it. You’re putting it in a sausage machine and you put in these ingredients then something comes up but when synthetic meat becomes an option, it suddenly legitimizes this whole area of making synthetic food. It’s a legitimizing force.I hadn’t thought that too. That was cool. I eat sausage. How hard could it be to take the lab-grown meat throw in some sausage with other things to make the texture compelling?If you want to make burgers and sausages, sure, but if you want to make anything that has texture.I go back to thinking like, “I got a steak on my plate but the truth is I’m going to use a knife to cut it into little pieces so why not make the little pieces.” There’s a lot of romance around food.It’s very simple because our brain is evolved to validate that it is of good quality. If you eat something raw that’s a little bit rotten, you are dead. It’s some serious things. Our brain is very sensitive to the meat not looking right, not tasting right, not feeling right and not smelling right.I’ve noticed that there’s something equivalent to Zoom calls. My brain is sensitive to a lot of things that Zoom doesn’t do. I was hanging out with some guys and they said they hired someone who they’d only met on Zoom. When she showed up for the first time, she’s 6’3”. It wasn’t one of the questions they asked her. It’s no problem but it was shocking because everybody looks like they’re the same height on Zoom.People don’t look you in the eye on Zoom, at least until this AI thing.Even though they’re trying, they can’t.It’s how you can look at the camera for a while.It’s hard. I got a teleprompter so I can do it but the other person, unless they have it, they’re not doing it. There are a lot of things like that where we’re figuring out or starting at scale to understand. Another one I learned is the maximum latency that your mind can handle in audio before it starts to freak out and not think this is a real person you’re talking to and we talk over each other was 180 milliseconds. The average Verizon call in the US right now is 350 milliseconds. It’s a regular cell phone call. That’s why calls suck so bad. It’s not like the calls when you were a kid. You could call the United States from Israel and you’d have less latency. It was all analog. Even though there was latency, it wasn’t that bad. Now, an average call is so bad that my brain doesn’t believe the person I’m talking to is real. On Zoom, something like that is happening.Everything is like, “No, you go ahead.”It’s horrible. I don’t understand if you’re right about the uncanny value of meat, then what’s going on with sausage? How come I can eat hot dogs? Maybe Israelis don’t eat hotdogs.I do know how it was to eat the first hotdog.Kids love it. We’ve indoctrinated kids, so it seems normal.I bet if you take somebody who’s never eaten a hot dog.We learn new textures all the time. One of the ways I’ve been defending 3D printers is to say we couldn’t print a steak or French bread but we could print a new and compelling texture. The way I defend that is by pointing to cliff bars, smoothies and things that humans had to learn Fig Newtons. These don’t grow in nature but it was easy for us to adopt them. Doritos, that’s not something that God created. Pasta isn’t created by God. It doesn’t grow out of the ground.We haven’t questioned the psychology of food. I’m sure there’s a lot to discover there.We’ll find somebody else to harass about that. Robotics was the thing to track here. If there was a unifying theme, it’s robotics.I’d say the unifying theme is AI.When do you think you first would have started expressing it that way?I was a Navy Engineer for many years before I did my PhD. In Israel, everybody serves in the Army one way or another. I was an engineer and you think military engineers are making these fancy things but a lot of it is you need to install a microwave in a ship. Engineers will spend years studying all that stuff. They’re working with these kinds of problems. It takes a lot of time. There are no cutting corners. It’s important stuff, but I was thinking a machine can do this. There is an automated way to generate these ideas. I’m not talking about creativity at the level of a patent or discovering something new but all this stuff that we do that’s relatively mundane but it requires generating new ideas. Is there a way to automate that?To me, it’s the root of it. I started with that. When I finished my term, I went to do a PhD and that was the topic I was looking at. I started off with creativity. It was more formulated as design automation. It is the smaller, less exotic version of creativity. You just want to design something automatically. It doesn’t have to be Picasso. You want to be able to say, “I want this thing installed here.” You can go figure out what needs to be done.“I want to park in the middle of town. We had this much space. Go figure out how.”This is a little bit of a design. How do I arrange all the buildings so a maximum people can go through in there’s parking and yet everybody can see the bay? You put these constraints, you hit enter and the machine finds a solution. This is very different than most software tools that are about analysis. You can give them all kinds of things and then you can say, calculate the cost, calculate whatever the sequence of construction, calculate the materials whether it will break or not. That’s analysis but to find a new way of arranging things that solves a problem, that synthesis, that is hard to do for humans and it’s hard to do from computers. That was my goal from the beginning in a very small way. Over time, I’m going for more and bigger goals.This is amazing because what you’re describing is much a fundamental process. We need to be able to automate how we design any situation or thing with a given set of constraints or values. What you’re saying is over time, you’re finding bigger things to apply that too. In some sense, trying to go further with it. You described what you were working on as robotics or automation, I’m guessing when it became reasonable to describe it as AI. Years ago, we didn’t have enough computing horsepower to make any of this AI stuff particularly compelling.Exponential technologies make the rest of history look flat.Share on XEvery year, people say that. Back in 2000, people said, “It was different back in ’99.” That’s the nature of exponential technologies. They make the rest of history looked flat and in 2019, it is always far more than anything you’ve seen before. Every single year, everybody thinks this year is different.You’ve done a lot to try and convince people of this and show how these exponential curves play out. I had been paying attention to that and lived through those cycles enough times, I was building a better intuition about how the future plays out on those exponential curves and how our tools develop over those timelines. It may be better because I could invent for the actual technical future instead of the linear projected one that most people would. Do you feel like you’ve built a better instinct for that?I have a little bit of an artificial instinct. I don’t feel it but I know that in ten years, computing power is going to be 1,000 times more in a decade. I don’t feel it but I know that that resource will be so abundant. If something takes 1,000 times more computing power than I have, it’s okay.At this point, it will be easy for you to pick up a one terabyte hard drive and throw it in the trash but, can you feel like in years, we’re going to hold a petabyte hard drive?No.You can’t feel that.I don’t imagine if I have 1,000 cell phones in my pocket which is what I’ll have in ten years, what does it feel like? It feels bulky. What can I do with it? What can you do with it?We have 1,000 cell phones in our pocket compared to ten years, we wouldn’t know what to do with it.A lot of people understand this logically but they don’t understand it intuitively. That’s the nature of it.When I think about this progression of what you’ve described as automated design, I think of it as using these tools to help us make better decisions because design could be designing a park or designing microwave installation in a ship but it could also be designing a better set of policies for a municipality or it could be designing a better Master’s degree program for one of these students here. When you think about those tools, one of the issues that always comes in my mind that people haven’t expressed is using the tools. You described this as you’ve got to set all these parameters.Setting parameters and another way of framing this and you need to ask what you want to be able to express better models, what your values are, what you care about. Otherwise, you don’t get answers. Now that we have all these conversations about bias in AI and this stuff. What people are waking up to is that we haven’t got clear about our own values enough to express to those algorithms so the algorithms can’t give us answers that we’re satisfied with.That’s the next step. One of the reasons why you can have design automation to design a bridge but not the design of policy is because with bridges, we much agree on what we want. We want it to be strong, cheap and easy to maintain. With policy, we cannot quantify what it is that we want. This is important because it’s not enough to talk about it in big words, you have to be able to say it in a way that a machine can improve. The little secret behind design automation and creativity is that you need to be able to analyze before you can synthesize.You need to be able to make predictions before you can design. You need to know, “If I do it this way, it’s going to be good. If I do it this way, it’s going to be a little bit better,” and then the computer can find its path. It’s very good with bridges, aircraft, and things that it can analyze well but when it comes to predicting the outcomes of a policy, there’s no simulator out there that can do it. It’s very hard to design. We don’t know what to ask for and even if we knew what to ask for, there are so many unintended consequences so it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen. It’s a double problem.One of the examples that comes to mind that plays out popularly is the question of, if an automated Tesla has to make a choice between killing a pedestrian or killing its passenger because those are the only two possible choices, which one does it make? We’ve had cars with drivers making equivalent decisions since we’ve had automobiles but we had no control over which choice to make and now we do. In some sense, the technology-enabled us to make a choice that we didn’t have before. We’re being forced to make that choice proactively to tell the car what we want it to do whereas before, we had to live with the entropy of human drivers making that choice in the moment.It’s the same thing with bias. Bias existed all the time but AI exposes that.It gives us the ability to make a choice about it.Now, we suddenly have a choice. We can’t say we don’t know that it exists because it’s in our face and it’s documented. We now have no choice but to deal with it in a way that we couldn’t before.People’s knee-jerk reaction seems to want to blame the technology for being biased. What do you think about that?I didn’t know how prevalent that is really. I’ve seen articles about this. I never know if you stop the person on the street and whether they think that. I don’t think a driverless car is biased. Somebody might write an article about this. You can blame the media for hyping the bias thing.I tend to blame the media for hyping the scariest possible interpretation of everything.I was talking to a science fiction writer. They said science fiction helped with technology, AI and robotics. In my position, it’s a detriment because it outlined so many bad things that can go wrong which is important. It’s always humans against the machine. Humans either lose or win. It’s never a nuance coexistence but when you have literature about humans, it’s nuance and you can have characters. It’s complicated and there’s multifaceted and antiheroes but when it comes to technology, it’s very black and white. Why can’t we have something that’s a little bit more nuanced, complex and multifaceted?I’m so thankful that you described it that way because it’s lazy and irresponsible.It’s a lot easier.Scary stories sell and Hollywood using AI as a boogeyman for every story now. It’s giving us this distinct lack of positive possible futures and they’re important. We need science fiction authors to be helping us. That’s what Star Trek was about. We have a whole generation that grew up with cool stories about technology from Star Trek. To some extent, that’s why we landed on the moon. You could thank Heinlein for that. What modern science fiction authors are giving us as possibilities seems a lot of dystopia. Personally, I’m trying to boycott dystopia. The same thing let’s say with social networks. I don’t know if you’ve seen The Social Dilemma.I did watch it. I don’t want to talk about it.It’s painted a very bleak picture but it doesn’t talk about all the good things. There are so many good things and it’s a question of balance. If we talk about the bad things, we lose sight of the good stuff.You have some experience teaching here and talking to the students. What comes to your mind that is something you’re excited about that’s a good thing? What’s a technology that’s on the horizon or is becoming practical or something where you can see how this is going to make things better and people don’t even know?The number one thing is health diagnostics. That is so ripe for disruption and you’re seeing it everywhere. Everywhere we take AI with all the sensors that we have, you get better detection and diagnostic and it’s not about beating a team of doctors at Stanford, although that’s not a big deal. Think about how many people on the planet don’t have access to doctors at all. Suddenly, you can detect skin cancer from a camera, pneumonia from the X-ray or breast cancer from this low-cost machine. That is going to save millions of lives and untold misery and that is already working.That’s a good one. We worked on one of the first AI-based diagnostics using an automated microscope for malaria. That’s a hard diagnostic because you have a parasite that’s ten microns. The diagnostic is a human staring into a microscope counting cells for an hour. It sucks. Most of them suck at it. Most countries are lucky to have one person that’s good at this test. We do a billion to see your family. This was at the Intellectual Ventures Lab and we embedded an automated microscope, they could take the same a pinprick of blood and it could look at those slides and using neural nets.We eventually got to the point where not only does it outperform the best humans on Earth, it’s cheap, reliable and we can make a lot of those machines. The thing is now interpreting the slides, it’s finding malaria in samples where humans couldn’t find it but we don’t even know how it works. There’s was another conversation about transparency in AI and understanding how the algorithms work. In some cases, we have algorithms that perform so well but we aren’t capable of understanding them. It’s fascinating and amazing in some cases like, “I don’t need transparency to know how it figured out malaria.”Frankly, when it comes to medical diagnosis, there’s transparency anyway to most people like if you go to the doctor. I have to keep reminding people, half of the doctors are below average. This is a well-established fact and it’s a fundamental truth. Everybody has this example of this amazing doctor that can do whatever, but most people can’t and then you don’t get answers. When they miss a diagnostic then terrible things happen. This can happen. It’s going to happen fast. It’s for many reasons. That’s a no-brainer.The proliferation of the sensors, the way every new Apple Watch gets yet another capability to monitor you 24/7 modular charging.All of that feeds into all this AI.I am so excited about it. I agree with you. It’s exactly what I was asking for. That’s a major frontier and people don’t see it coming.You can take that and do these medical diagnostics. If you do it in agriculture, it’s the same thing. If you want to take disease in plants, it’s the same thing. That’s also a big deal in terms of yield, crop disease, all of that. Agriculture is another big thing. We use terrible techniques like spraying an entire field because we cannot detect the disease fast enough. We spray the whole thing in advance but you don’t need to do that if you have AI. Anything that has to do with diagnostics is inevitably going to be transformed. I would say it’s hard to argue why that would be a bad thing except for jobs. Even jobs, we don’t want to keep people from medical diagnostics to increase jobs for doctors. I don’t think that’s good.Back in the old days when we were doing lectures on stages, I would always start my talks with a slide showing the population growth in human history. That curve looks like flat until the last couple hundred years and then it goes from millions to billions. It’s the ultimate hockey stick growth curve. I would often say, “Look at this curve. In other way to read that is that we made a few billion jobs in the last couple of hundred years.” We can make a few more. People are terrified about how robots can replace jobs but that’s not what’s happened. We make more people but we make more jobs. I’m looking at that on a global scale and on time prizes. Not to diminish the suffering of any particular person who lost their job to a robot but overall, humans have found things to do.The way we structure things financially, most people don’t care about long-term jobs. They quit their job tomorrow. This is why this discussion is hard to have because academically, I’m thinking of a long-term, but when you’re talking about you have to feed your family and you need a paycheck next month, this discussion is completely irrelevant. It’s in fact antagonistic. This is a little bit of the mismatch when academics talk about jobs versus people who lost their job talk about jobs.I’m cheating all the time by looking on monitor time prices.I’m a little bit more sensitive to that also in academia that we completely have this luxury to talk about long-term stuff, but that’s not the reality for most people.It feels like almost a decade ago when you first started trying to do artistic robots or robots that could create. It’s been a while. What were you thinking at the beginning? Can you channel what your early perspective on it was? What did you think was going to happen?Before a lot of the AI tools that we have now are available, it started with this thing that I always wanted to paint. I’m not a good painter but I know how to build robots. It doesn’t take a lot to connect the dots there.There are few things I’m not good at.Generally speaking, if you’re good at making a robot and you’re not good at something, then you make a robot that does that. That’s been my formula.If we only talk of the bad things associated with technology, we lose sight of all the good stuff.Share on XYou’ve been able to outperform a good number of actual painters.I prefer myself for sure, but it culminated in this course that my wife and I were taking for painting. We took this course. It was a local artist. We’re taking this for a couple of months and then it came a time to renew the class. We weren’t sure we were going to renew it. It was an expensive thing. The instructor came to me and I’m sure he’s going to talk me into renewing it. He said, “Painting isn’t for you. You should stick to engineering.” He laid it out.He thinks your wife had more promise.He did. After being fired from painting class, I decided I’m going to start building it. I started off working with a student on this and he built the first iteration. It was a very cool robot. He got his Master’s degree. He went to work for Kiva and he made his fortune there. I couldn’t find any other student to work on this. This is almost a course in academia.You had such a great proof point. It’s like, “Do this robot with me and you’ll go become a millionaire in Kiva.”What happened is that engineering students don’t want to do art and art students don’t want to do engineering. There are many reasons, cultural mostly. If engineer does art, they go and they put it on their resume, the big engineering people will say, “What are you doing? You’re an artist. Why applying it?” The art people think engineering is not creative. I ended up doing myself and it’s been my hobby ever since.First of all, the problem you described has deep effects on what humans are accomplishing by separating engineering and artists, and not being able to see a future in combining them. We have a long history of problems that we had to overcome in the computer industry because we started with all engineers and no artists. Up until early 2000, the term UX didn’t exist. User experience wasn’t a thing. That was something you hire somebody to pick the color. It wasn’t until iPod when Apple proved that design matters. That was a way for every other company to justify getting people in the UX. That was that inflection point but now we’re learning it all over again in some sense that you described.It’s the other way around also. Artist feel like engineering are always crunching numbers but there’s no creativity there where I would argue if you were designing a bridge, there’s a lot of creativity there and it’s not necessarily in the traditional of creativity. It’s not big C creativity as in painting and music but it’s a different creativity. Creating a new amplifier circuit is a very creative process. If it’s different than any previous amplifier circuit, it’s no different than creating a new song. There’s this dichotomy and there are a lot of things that could happen in the world if these things combined. Practically speaking, I ended up doing myself and I’m happy that happened because it’s a fun thing to do.You’ve been building robots that can paint.I have the version four.Can I ask you about version one? Was that a very CNC thing where you feed it a picture and it paints the picture?Version one was more of, “Here’s a photo. Paint that photo but I’m going to give you constraints.” You can paint it only with straight lines, you can paint it only with these three colors or you can paint it with no more than 50 strokes. You give it some constraints because design is always constraints versus goal, as we said earlier and then the machine figures it out. We use the evolution, which is my favorite inventive approach.It’s the one with the longest track record.It’s still the most innovative in terms of what it can do. It thinks outside the box and the things that came out were amazing. If you try to paint a portrait with only twelve lines, you get some interesting things. Somebody could argue, you were the artist because you chose twelve so it blurs the line. What I’ve been trying to do ever since is blur the line even more, keep blurring it, shifting the line and moving it towards more and more than I say, almost nothing. I pay the power bill, that’s it. I buy the paints but I’m trying to clean up after the machine but I’m trying to remove myself. The experience that the robot has. I’ve talked about this a couple of places and they said, “He’s not an artist because you control this experience. It can only paint from things that you give it. It looks at all the pictures and it paints whatever it wants that it learned from those pictures.”You said it’s the 4th robot. This is Pix18.By the way, I’m talking about the AI. The physical body of the robot is completely ordinary. It’s a gantry. A real artist, you don’t usually care about the body of the artists, you care about the mind.You characterize this as the fourth generation of AI that you’ve built, the mind of the robot.There are bigger and bigger bodies, and that’s a whole other discussion.We understand that. It could be swapped out and you could have brain to it. Describe it to the people who don’t know.The first thing was more or less like here’s a photo, paint it with some constraints. It was a collaboration between an AI and a human. The next generation was, here’s a photo. Do whatever you want with this photo. I removed myself from the constraints, but I still give it a photo. It’s based on that. The third generation was I give it a set of photos, a movie or a video of some experience like videos of Columbia University. It’s not about choosing a frame but it’s more about what does all this create.The fourth generation is working now. When I did this third generation, people said, “You decided to show it Columbia. It’s a bottomless pit.” I said, “I don’t want to even say that. I’m going to hook it up to the intranet. I’m going to give it access with Google API. It can go places on Google Street View. It can see places. It can go to any if it wants to see whatever it wants to see within reason.” It has safe search. It can see and it does what it wants and it’s going places. Sometimes, I look inside and I see where he’s going.Is there no a shredding groups cat problem with that? If you look inside, does that affect its choices?I slow it down a little bit in that place. Humans aren’t completely neutral either. Humans are affected by other things, they’re affected about what sells and what doesn’t.As far as I can tell, most of human artists are affected by whether it gets delayed or not. What’s the net effect of this now? Describe what PIX 18 do.The net effect is that it creates bizarre paintings.Are they incomprehensible to humans?They are incomprehensible unless you see what it’s seen. If you can see, this robot has been seeing a lot of bicycles in Delhi and now you can see where it got its inspiration from and why it’s doing these circles. It’s not abstract so you know where it’s been. Imagine you had an alien artist. They cannot talk to you and you don’t understand how he thinks but all you can do is you can look back at what it’s experienced. Like idiot savant that cannot communicate about what they’re doing, but they are good at doing the thing. This is where we’re at. It’s a very interesting journey, I would say.My understanding, to be clear, is that it goes and it wanders around into some place on Google Maps. It chooses that randomly or I don’t know if it has the capacity to get aboard and go somewhere else but then it finds things it likes or is inspired by. It amalgamates some inspiration or collection of attributes from that. It composes a painting that the inspiration is a real word and then it paints that. The mechanical aspect of painting was fun to figure out, but we’re getting nowhere that for now, since that’s not where the real implications are. You’re saying so far, most of what it’s done is I get some impressionistic circles and colors that you might see if you were hanging out in Delhi that will be different than what you get in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you went and wandered around Delhi yourself in real life or on Street View, you might get a feeling that goes with that painting.I did a couple of tricks where I have a log file so I can see where it’s been. I say save what you’ve seen. It’s like a kid that I can go walk around but I can’t see nearly the quantity of things that it can see. The interesting thing is that machines can experience the world in ways we can’t. They can go places we can’t. They can walk simultaneously in two parts of the world. They can do things we, humans, cannot. We, humans, can do things they can’t. I don’t think it’s a competition or can a machine beat a human artist. It senses the world in a different way and it’s very interesting.Have these artists managed to get laid by impressing other robots? How do we measure success here? The ultimate question is can it sell paintings? That’s an easier metric. It’s less binary. There’s a gradient there, how much? That’s still hard.It hasn’t sold any paintings yet.It has sold a few.Does it have its own Etsy account or something?No.There are a lot of bots trying to sell shit online so we could co-op one of those without you having to do some of the work. I want to keep tabs. I’m using the Andy Warhol’s definition of art which is, “When somebody that doesn’t know you personally buys it, then it’s art.” There’s no other definition otherwise, this brick is art. It has to be paid for by somebody who doesn’t know you. That’s the only criteria. If I have to say what my goal when our project is there, I have a very concrete goal and that is, I want to divorce and liberate art from the artist. Up until now, art had this parasitic dependency on an artist but now art can be independent.I think Banksy is not an artist by the definition you stole from Warhol. His art is not for sale. It’s just creations.Would people pay for it if they could?Probably. At this point, there’s a strong enough brand that he can sell coffee mugs.You can refuse the money if you want.He’s refusing money doesn’t count. This is interesting because you’ve invalidated a whole class of artists who have failed to make any money but it made a bunch of things that they would characterize as art. It’s not you your definition. Warhol will take the hit for that one. This steers the conversation away from creativity because you’re defending it’s an artist. Are you also contending that this artist is creative?Yes.Does Andy Warhol have a definition of creativity?Humans no longer have a monopoly on creativity. They are no longer the center of the universe.Share on XI don’t know. That’s a good question.Do you?First of all, it’s not a black and white thing but it’s able to make something that wasn’t there before.That sounds good to me. I don’t know if it’s black and white, but if we take that, that’s fair start. Your robot artist is making things that weren’t there before so is my random number generator which I’ve had. It’s a shitty one but it’s gotten progressively better. Is that creative? In a very tiny way. This is why I said it’s not a black and white thing.Is rolling dice creative?I’ve had a whole paper about this and it has to do with one of the chances that that thing wouldn’t appear there spontaneous. The chance that a human would appear out of nothing by Adam bumping into each other is small. It’s not impossible. Creating a human, designing a human for evolution, or whatever you want to imagine is creative.Maybe creativity is taking a breakpoint of probability like rolling a pair of dice. That doesn’t feel very creative because chances of getting a seven are high at any given moment.If you know how to throw a dice that you can create ten sevens in a row, that’s creative.It’s more creative than one seven and more creative than nine sevens but not nearly as creative as eleven seven. We could distill creativity down to some probability meter. You can set a dial somewhere and you say, “Below this isn’t very creative and above this is creative.”The other thing I have to add to this is achieving some goal which is hard to say but it’s hard to assemble a rock in this particular shape but still, we wouldn’t consider that creative. That’s to satisfy a goal and this is where it’s a little bit subjective.The goal is Andy Warhol’s definition of art.If you want to say art is something that creates emotion in somebody that observed it, that’s another definition, then you can measure that.Now, we have two possible competing definitions for art. Andy Warhol’s and some viewer feel some emotion which might be possible with your robot’s art.There are holes in that definition as well. There are lots of things that will create emotions in you but not art. There are things that’s going to create negative emotions and they’re not art.Not everything that creates emotions in you is art. If your robot outperforms Jackson Pollack at the auctions selling his art and it becomes legitimized in art world as an artist by Andy Warhol’s definition, then some asshole is going to come along and say:“It doesn’t generate emotion in the viewer the way a Pollack does so it’s not an artist.” What are you going to say then?Aren’t people always arguing about what is art?That’s what the point of Pollack seems to be.I don’t think one can solve this. My only point here is that humans are not the only entities that can create art. This is a very new perspective.Humans are not the only creative force.This has never been said before. We had monopoly on art. We, humans, on creativity in general and that is now being challenged. Human is the center is no longer in the center. It’s the center of the universe, the top of the evolutionary pyramid, all these things that humans are supposed to be unique, but they’re not. That’s another one of those.On a long time horizon, once we get past this semantic argument and we have more creative machines, we could end up in a world where hopefully, we coexist with another abundant creative force of machines.The amazingly exciting thing about this whole thing is you can invent all kinds of solutions to problems, but if you can invent a machine that can invent solutions to problems, that’s the ultimate win.We should do because we’re getting increasingly sucky of that.There are more problems because we are opening so many possibilities so let’s create a machine that can solve problems. That’s what creativity is about. There’s going to be unintended consequences but it’s an incredibly efficient way to put our intellectual capacity. By the way, it’s the same thing with 3D printers. Instead of making a machine that can make something, make a machine that can make anything. Make the machine that can make any machine that can make anything. There’s so much more bang for the buck. There’s so much more leverage. If you can make universal machines, there was the idea behind the computer. Don’t make a machine that can tabulate insurance tables but make a machine that can do any calculation and then make a manufacturing system that can make anything. It’s paid off. Let’s create any problem-solving machine that can solve any problem. That’s what I’m after.You have managed to articulate that in a better way than I was expecting. That’s great. Thanks so much, Hod.It’s my pleasure.Before we wrap up, what’s the website for PIX 18?It’s PIX18.com.I appreciate the time. This is brilliant.I appreciate that you’re doing shows in these times where people are chasing the tails with negativity. Thank you.Thank you.Important Links:PIX18.comAbout Hod LipsonHod Lipson is a professor of Engineering and Data Science at Columbia University in New York, and a co-author of the award winning book “Fabricated: The New World of 3D printing”, and “Driverless: Intelligent cars and the road ahead”, by MIT Press (translated into 7 languages). Before joining Columbia University in 2015, Hod spent 14 years as a professor at Cornell University. He received his PhD in 1999 from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, followed by a postdoc at Brandeis University and MIT. Hod Lipson’s work on self-aware and self-replicating robots challenges conventional views of robotics, and has enjoyed widespread media coverage. He has also pioneered open-source 3D printing, as well as electronics 3D printing, bio-printing and food printing. Lipson has co-authored over 300 publications that received over 20,000 citations to date. He has co-founded four companies, and is frequent keynoter both in industry and academic events. His TED Talk on self-aware machines is one of the most viewed presentations on AI and robotics. Hod directs the Creative Machines Lab, which pioneers new ways to make machines that create, and machines that are creative.Recorded on October 14, 2020The post Can Robots be Artists? — Hod Lipson appeared first on .

This is an unusual episode where my old buddy Bill Scannell actually interviews me. Mostly this is a way for people who don’t know me very well to get a sense of who I am and how I think and where I come from. A lot of it’s really about my philosophy and what informs that. Bill does a lot to try and tie that back to how I grew up in Alaska, which may or may not be as relevant as it seems. We don’t really talk too much about projects I’ve worked on, this is just a conversation between friends about, you know, the background, behind a lot of a lot of what I’ve worked on and the things that matter to me, so I hope you really like it.Bill Scannell is actually one of the most interesting people I know. I met him probably almost 20 years ago at at Cypherpunks meetings. Bill was a spook in the Cold War. He was stationed in Army Intelligence in Eastern Europe doing surveillance and then after that, ended up becoming a war zone journalist and has lived through like seven civil wars with bullets flying over his head. He has got a lot of interesting stories. Most of the interesting stories I know about a living human are about Bill. We don’t get into that too much here.  These days Bill is a global strategist.  A hacker with a Rolodex.Want to launch a data haven?  Spin-up an international press center in 3 weeks?  Get a hacker out of jail?  Get the Russian mob off your back?  Stop a government surveillance program?  How about negotiate with a foreign power over a seasteading misunderstanding?  Bill’s your man.  There’s a reason why he is on so many people’s speed dial.It turns out he’s actually really good at interviewing people and I think you’re gonna like the way this came out. So hopefully you enjoy it.Pablos: Bill Scannell, I am glad we finally get to do this.Bill: When we became best friends many years ago, I remembered you looked at me, stared into my soul and you said, “How far are you willing to go?” Let me ask you that question.What did you think I meant by that?How consequent I was with my ideas.  It went into a long discussion about my view of the world, but people are way more interested in your view than mine.You thought I was asking because I was trying to antagonize you to go further. I was probably asking scared about how far you were willing to go. I’m not sure we had the same impression about that question. I don’t think it’s that meaningful of a question for me because I’m not sacrificing much. My life is good. My worst-case scenario is not that bad and I’m making choices about what to do with my time and attention. It was different than what most people would choose. I don’t think the right question because I don’t know how far I’m willing to go. I’m trying to discover how far I can go. That’s the difference. I’m not goal-oriented like a lot of people are where they’re like, “I’ve got to achieve this or that.” I feel like if I had ever set goals, I would have set them too low and I’ve been able to accomplish a lot more by constantly trying to discover what’s possible. That’s how I think about it.For people to understand Pablos, the most important thing for them to know about you is that you’re an Alaskan.Do you think that’s the most important?I do because there is something about the cold. There’s something about having to ask someone as a small child whether it’s nighttime or daytime.I was born there, but I think I was an aberration to Alaskans. It depends on what you count. It is an unusual place and the more perspective I get on the world, the more unique and special I think it was. I’m like the first generation to be born and raised in Alaska. There were lots of native Alaskans there and some people from the gold rush and stuff who were there before me. There was such a low population that in some sense it’s true, the first big generation of Alaskans was mine. In some sense, everybody who was there when I was born moved there from somewhere to get away from something or somebody.It was a harsh environment and not inviting. It is so remote that being in Hawaii would have been closer to the world, even though it’s not technically an island. Those people were a unique class of Americans. They were very independent. You had to work hard just to survive in Alaska and you had to get along with a lot of other strange people. It did have a big effect on me. My world view is different. Having left Alaska, what I tend to find is dramatically less self-reliance in the US. I’ve learned to appreciate those things over time, even though I think Alaskans might disown me. I don’t feel representative of the people that are there.There is no such thing as a representative of Alaska. People are all different and weird in their own way. There’s an interesting connection for me having chosen to move to Alaska and raise my children there because of meeting people like you, Lance Ahern and others. There’s this quiet solitude rock light thing inside them that lets them drive forward. I’m going to call it technological positivity.It’s a weird thing to have gotten there because it is not a technology center of any description. The economy there largely has been driven by the oil industry. They’re adopting technology in pragmatic ways, but even that is removed from society because it’s more than 1,000 miles away from where the people are. My dad and everyone’s dad worked in the oil and largely they would commute to the North Slope. That means your dad, once a week, flies for three hours to the North Slope, spends the week there working, and then flies home and stays home for a week. That’s normal up there. Even though you have a sense that your dad works in the oil, you don’t get to see it. I’ve never been to the North Slope. I’ve never gone to see the work environment. It’s not like a tourist destination, but I have a deep sense of it from growing up there. I got a lot of value out of that self-reliance, the general feeling that you could do anything. My parents raised me to believe I could do whatever I wanted. They didn’t try to steer me in some direction.What I’m trying to get at are two things. One is this technological optimism because without technology, it is impossible to have anything more than a basic existence living and out in Alaska. The second thing is that in your early high school days, you learned that the difference between near and far was three milliseconds.I guess I always presumed that what happened to me is that probably the most unique thing. I got an Apple ][+. It is one of the first computers you could have at a home in 1979 or 1980. I had my first home computer when was 9 or 10 years old. No one else had any real interest in it and I was able to play with it. It was this bottomless pit of intrigue for me. I learned a lot from it because it was fascinating, but there was no one around who knew more than me for a thousand miles in any direction. I had to learn the hard way and try everything. I feel like I learned about a computer in a unique way because of that but I got enough of a taste from it to always be able to see that it could be useful and it would someday be faster and have more memory.I didn’t understand Moore’s law at the time, but I knew that more memory would be a big help and eventually we would be able to do that. I didn’t know how much more memory, how soon, how fast or what the cost curve would look like, but I could see that someday it will be faster. Someday would have more memory and it will be useful. I would try to convince everyone of this because I felt like I had the superpower that I could use to do cool things for humans and almost nobody was convinced. I’ve said this a lot of times, the easiest way to understand is I had the Apple II and I also had a skateboard. I probably got more trouble at school for wasting time on the computer than the skateboard because people did not know that this was a thing. Computers were mythical, skateboards were real. It was a strange thing to be a 10, 11, 12, 13-year-old kid in Alaska evangelizing the power of computers and failing largely.This is where the Alaska part comes in because I lived in Alaska for many years and I watched people and people have to make do. Look at what people can do with duct tape and a couple of cardboard boxes. They hack things together to make it work because they have a job to do whether it be harvesting fish or keeping themselves warm, whatever it takes, and here you are as a kid with your duct tape, skateboard and your Apple II.I grew up on duct tape and WD-40. Between those two things, you can make anything happen. You got that experience since you lived there much more. In my mind, Alaska looks tamer now because we didn’t have delivery services or you couldn’t order stuff on your phone. You had to go foraging, even if it was to the store. You had to bundle up with all your snow gear and go to the store. It probably wasn’t even open. It could be noon and it would still be dark out going to the store and back. It’s a unique thing. I feel like I got a lot out of it, but probably to get to the bottom of what you’re getting at, what you would call technology optimism came from always being able to see how this computer could be used in ways that it wasn’t being used and it could make things better and more efficient, faster, and cheaper.It was easy for me to see it, but difficult for everyone else to see it that there was a big gap there. It made me feel like I was living in the future a little bit so I got hooked on that. In some sense, that’s what I have been doing. My entire career is building a greater toolkit of technologies that I could understand and wheeled on one side and then building a greater collection of problems that I could understand and articulate on the other side, and as an inventor in the middle of trying to map them together.You call it living in the future. I think of it like a fish does not know he swims in water, but you know how to swim in the water.Maybe, it was not clear that I do.Yet, you do. You have this weird ability to see beyond the horizon and this is relentless optimism with technology and what technology can bring. It’s not fatalistic or deterministic. You have a positive view.I was probably in my late twenties before I even knew what the word optimist was or conversely pessimist. I didn’t even have a reason to know those words. Even now, the reason that optimist resonates is because of the way I am. I’m always talking about what’s possible, but I think of myself as a possibilist. There’s a difference because partly optimists have been disparaged a little bit because they often seem like they’re unreasonably bullish about everything, which isn’t the case. I don’t think that things are going to get better, but I believe they could get better. What hangs in the balance is our decision making and our ability to apply ourselves to make things better.In my life, what I’ve experienced and seen is technology is bringing us the tools to make things better. We’ve done an extraordinary job in my life of applying technology to go after the problems that need to be solved. By no means, are we anywhere close to being done? We’re still at the beginning. There is much potential and every day our toolkit grows because of the invention. Every day we get more and more technologies. Each one of those is an opportunity to ask ourselves whether this changes anything humans have ever done. That’s the fundamental process I’m in, which is to try to learn about new scientific discoveries and technologies, even do products. Ask yourself with each one, “Could I use this to improve a problem from the giant pile of problems?” That’s what I’m doing.Is that the difference between an engineer and a hacker where you’re not out to solve a problem but you’re out to seek possibilities?It’s the difference between an engineer and an inventor. A good engineer is trying to know their field and apply it often with best practices in mind and they’ve learned an entire engineering discipline that helps them to do that. I’m a shitty coder. I learned to code by reverse engineering 6502 assembly language on the Apple II. Software development and software engineering weren’t a thing yet. I didn’t go to college. They have a whole system down for writing software that I don’t know. You probably don’t want me writing code on your enterprise software project because that’s engineering. We have trained engineers who can do a good job of that. I’m probably not that guy because I didn’t train to do that.An inventor is trying to do the mappings the first time. This is often poorly understood and poorly appreciated because it’s extraordinarily difficult to do something the first time. It’s almost miraculous sometimes. Figuring out something for the first time ever is hard, rare, and special. I’m not saying that I’m good at it. I’m saying that it should be celebrated more than it is. In rare cases, we managed to do that. Most of the time, the inventor immediately gets steamrolled by an entrepreneur who takes it and then does it the first 1,000, 10,000 or 1 million times. They’re the ones who managed to get the value of extraction. They’re the ones who get celebrated. They’re the ones we invest in. We’re missing out on how special it is to do something for the first time. We have cases like that when we celebrated musicians sometimes like Beethoven discovered those pieces for the first time. Four hundred years later, we’re still playing them.In art, we sometimes get it right, but you can’t name a lot of inventors. People can name Thomas Edison and Einstein. That’s a similar thing. That’s a scientific discovery. Scientists’ job is to discover scientific research is to discover how things work in the world for the first time and that’s amazing. That is why we give them Nobel Prizes and why we celebrate them when they do discover something important. That’s incredibly difficult, hard, long work, and you may spend careers on it without ever discovering anything, but an inventor is different.Also, they’re words that have been degraded. To call someone a visionary is not a job title.Inventor isn’t. I’m the only one who has a business card that says, “Inventor.”There are people who say they are influencers. How can you be an influencer? It’s like being a hand model, but probably a hand model is an actual real thing. You are a visionary. Millions of people have watched you speak either in person or on YouTube. People have paid good money to either hear you speak in person or illegally download the recording.Every day, our toolkit grows because of invention. Every day, we get more and more technologies.Share on XWith the job title, in the US, I get called a futurist. I would probably never say I’m a futurist, that’s sort of something people call you. In Europe, they call me a futurologist, which sounds cooler. That’s another thing where there’s an entire discipline of futurism, which I don’t know anything about. They have pie charts and graphs and the whole system down. They can go into your company and tell you about the future I don’t know. That’s not what I do. A futurist is probably a bad term for me because it overlaps something that I don’t even know about. Envisionary, as you said, that’s not a useful title but without the title, if you go back to possibilist, I’m trying to show with people the way I described technology tools, inventions, new technologies, and new scientific discoveries. On the other side, you get this pile of problems. People need to understand the technologies and they need to be demystified in a way that doesn’t sound like scary, magical stuff. An easy way to understand it is people are terrified of AI because largely Hollywood needs a boogeyman. AI is the new scary thing so they use AI as a catch-all for computers are magical and therefore scary and probably want to turn you into paper clips.That’s the prevailing narrative around computers. Technology is the new scary, poorly understood stuff that sticks in people’s minds. I’m trying to demystify that stuff. I’m trying to show, “Here’s how AI works. Here are the limits. It’s not that hard to understand. Here’s what we can do with it. Here’s why it’s helpful. Here’s how we could map it to problems.” It is an extraordinarily powerful toolkit that we could use to go after all kinds of problems. Even if we never invent another technology for the rest of our lives, there’s much power in machine learning that we could stay busy for many years. That’s where we’re at now.I’m glad you called it machine learning because when you say AI, people’s eyes roll to the back of their heads and they think of Skynet, but machine learning is creating an infinite decision tree.That’s one way to characterize it, but we have this semantic argument all the time about where does machine learning and where does AI begin? Technically, the way we frame it is you have what’s called narrow AI, which includes machine learning and the things that we have now, and then this notion of an AGI or Artificial General Intelligence. That’s something that we think might be equivalent to how human intelligence works. We don’t even have any idea of how humans work. We have some basic ideas about how an AGI will work someday and some people are happy to oversell that to you, but we’re nowhere near it.One of the big problems we have with the conversation is Moore’s law, which we’ve all lived with and experienced enough that we starting to believe it. What happens is somebody will take that and they’ll draw this curve and say, “Computers are getting faster in an exponential curve.” They’ll plot out here and say, “At this point, they’re smarter than humans,” which to me is saying, “No cars get faster every year, and at this point, you’ll be able to drive to Australia.” That’s not how it works. We don’t know much about brains, but one thing we know is they’re not digital computers. They do not work as our computers do.One thing you said to me years ago was, “Bill, how fast do you want Microsoft Word to open up anyway?”We got to the point where Word opens fast enough for everybody. Most of my life was spent staring at a computer with a little window called Progress. It should have been titled go get a red bull because you’re going to need the help to keep from falling asleep while there is no actual progress because computers were slow. No one’s seen that screen in years. Your computer is faster than what to do with it. You don’t even know how many gigahertz is your Mac. No one’s even bothered to keep track anymore because it doesn’t matter. You get a new Mac and it might be the same number of gigahertz. You don’t even know because you don’t care. It’s fast enough. A few of us are pining for a faster computer and I don’t even need a faster computer. I always want it in my whole life.There was some inflection point that we crossed where we’re no longer computationally constrained, but we’re imagination constraint. That’s a big deal. We, for my entire life, wanted faster computers to be able to execute our vision for what was possible with them. Now, we have such vast, powerful, fast computers we don’t even know what to do with it. That’s scary. It shows humans aren’t keeping up with our potential. We have these tools we’re not putting them to use. It’s an important thing to acknowledge so that you could makeshift in the mindset to think, “Shit, we could be doing more. We could be doing better.” That’s where the rubber meets the road for me because we haven’t talked about it, but that pile of problems is also fast.That’s what I want to move to in a moment, but I’m thinking about how you talk about the speed of computers. We haven’t touched on the speed of connectivity and how you almost don’t need any place to put anything anymore because it goes to information heaven, and then you pull it down when you need it.It’s weird how different the world is for us. I think about everything that way now. Certainly, we have a vast amount of competition and memory. We have extraordinarily fast networks to move data to these giant computers. At the end of them, not just microphones and cameras but we have sensors for everything more every day. We’re getting all this data and we’re bringing it back to our giant computers, our networks and we’re able to do incredible analysis. All this is unprecedented for humans. The bottom line is it can help us make better decisions. We have to learn to use it. We have to learn to express our values to it so that it makes the decisions that we would want it to make.It’s a different world now. I’ve often described this as saying, “For all of human history, we had this incredible innovation methodology called biological evolution. The way that works is that through sex and gamma rays, you make a lot of variations and mutations, and through survival of the fittest, kill off the ones that don’t work. You’re left with the best in class to go create the next generation with. That’s how we were created. That’s how we got here. That’s how you got two eyeballs, opposable thumbs, and the ability to appreciate music. These things evolved capabilities that are extraordinarily amazing. Humans are amazing. Once we got to be apex predator, once we got to the top of that food chain, once we became sentient, we killed off the mechanism that got us here. There’s no survival of the fittest anymore.You were born and raised in Alaska.This is why in my mind, that diversity that I have an appreciation for is that all over the world societies have dealt with different cultures, values and each of them has different experiments. Some are good for some things and others are good for others. It’s amazing and beautiful and getting to travel and meet people everywhere, you’ve done it even more than me in some senses. You learn to appreciate that, “Those people are weird. I don’t want to live like that, but it’s amazing and it works for them. It’s totally fine.” I feel that way about Israelis. I am fucking love them. They’re crazy and their whole society is nuts to me. I love visiting them, but I don’t want to live there because I’m not built for it, but it works for them and it’s incredible.I feel the same way when I’m in China. I feel stuck on something like that when I’m out of Australia. I feel that way almost everywhere I go. It’s like, “This is great but I can’t wait to get back home where my water faucet works absurdly reliably.” That’s the thing that you get to experience when you travel. What I think about it is that when you look at the inflection point, we’re at this point in human history. You’ve got to remember that last 160,000 years, it’s Homo sapiens. The last 400 or 500 years of that is science as we know it, but then the last 100 years is technology from the industrial revolution on. It is accelerating and it is new. We are at the beginning and what I believe it means is we have to learn to evolve with our minds and this is an unproven methodology. We don’t know if it’s going to work. For humans to advance, for us to solve the problems that we have in taking care of 7.5 billion humans, we’re going to have to use our brains and make better decisions. These tools that exist with the technologies that the computers and everything we call artificial intelligence and all these things, big data, machine learning, computational modeling, are tools to help us make better decisions.The French philosopher, Jean Gebser wrote the at the turn of the last century one of the great mistakes in human history was the enlightenment because that’s when the spiritual became separated from the scientific. When you were talking earlier about, we need to look at problems and apply logic, reason, what we care about, how you talked about different societies and how they have things that work for them.I’m not a trained philosopher, so you don’t want to hear me comment on the enlightenment and its relative merits and all that. In my mind, for almost anything like any belief system, you can find people overdoing it in one way or another. I’m not here to talk about politics, but I grew up in Alaska. There was one kid in my entire school who might’ve been gay and we don’t know for sure, but he got his ass kicked. There was one kid who was black. It was a conservative environment. My view now is the conservatives shot themselves in the foot because they overdid it by taking an anti-gay stance in those days. They’re over it a little bit now.Let me talk to you about what I had in mind because you’re a deeply moral person. I know this because you’re my best friend. A lot of technologists will apply science, it’s like Rule 2d20. You’re not like that. You’re willing to make value-based decisions in applying your box of tools to your box problems. I’m going to ask this question again. The French philosopher, Jean Gebser at the turn of the last century, talked about how the enlightenment was a bad thing in some ways, and that it’s separated the spiritual from the scientific. Before that, the Jesuits, everything worked together hand-in-hand, but when you split the two, that became disconnected from what we were building versus what we were.There’s got to be some truth to that. You do see a lot of people are on one side or the other of that. People who are specifically taking on a spiritualist persona or worldview are often reluctant to engage in understanding problems at a technical level. On the other side, we have people, the technologists that you’re referring to who are trying to build technologies and scientists who are trying to stay out of the realm of things that we can’t explain. For me, the way I see it because growing up in Alaska thing, I feel a grave sense of personal responsibility.In Alaska, you either take responsibility for making yourself survive. Take care of yourself, your family and earning what you need to take care of that. There’s no one to rely on. You have to do it. You have to be responsible. I feel that strongly for humanity. We made 7.5 billion humans. Making them is the fun part and you’ve got to raise them now. You got to take care of them. You got to get them through school. You’ve got to get them jobs. You got to hold there are hands through cancer and when they die, you need to process that. The everyday life cycle is the total cost of ownership of a human. We have a shit ton of humans in the world.You could argue that we made too many. I don’t think you want to choose which ones to get rid of. Whoever wants that job should probably be the first to go. We made these people, so we have to take responsibility as a species for taking care of them. Personally, it might make sense to make a few humans going forward. It will be a great thing to work on. That probably goes back to make better decisions, but in the meantime, we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to take care of these humans. I feel that responsibility. I’m probably guilty of separating the spiritual side of things from the pragmatic and technical side of things a little bit. To be intellectually honest, you have to be a little bit rigorous and you’ve got to be honest about where to draw the line. For me, it’s drawing that line between the things we understand and the things we don’t understand.There are a lot of things we don’t understand and that’s okay. There are possibly entire dimensions to the universe that we don’t understand. One of the problems with what people feel about the scientific community is that they’re a little bit disingenuous or they’re not willing to acknowledge what we don’t know. I want to do that. I want to be honest and say, “There’s a lot we don’t know, but that fact doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for also being honest about what we do know.” When we do know something and we have amazing rigorous methods for figuring out what we do know. It’s irresponsible not to accept the things that we do know into your worldview.This to me is what makes you the man you are because you’re able to take these alchemy tools or for what most people are pure alchemy and magic. You’re able to explain and bring them into the realm of possibility to deal with problems where people won’t agree on what the problems are.That’s part of why I’m motivated to do it. If I can take something technical and complicated, which in some sense, it was almost everything to do with computers. Demystify it, explain it in a way people can understand and relate to. Simplify it into layman’s terms and help people get comfortable with it, then it takes the power out of the people who would manipulate it. For example, AI is being used in a mercenary fashion. AI is being used against the people as a notion, not the actual technology. I’m talking about the story of AI because it is the big, scary boogeyman that no one understands. It’s being used by Hollywood in every movie to be the bad guy. It’s lazy and irresponsible, but I also acknowledge those scary stories sell better. That’s why that’s happening. I want to take the wind out of it. I want to take the power out of that story so that AI is no longer the bad guy. These are our tools and we can use that same set of tools to build a better future and not the worst one. If I can show a converse narrative or other possibilities, then it will help people to believe in using these tools to make a better future. If they believe in it, then they could try and work on it. We can succeed in doing it.The canonical example that sits in my mind was early on, I got to help start Blue Origin, which is the first privately funded space program in human history ever. Before, only governments could afford to have their own space program. In 2001, Jeff Bezos was worth about $7 billion, which was a crazy amount of money at the time. Jeff gave us the mission to figure out what we could do with $1 billion, could we start a space for him? We were researching ways of getting a space. I’m not a space geek, an astrophysicist named Keith Rosema and Neil Stevenson, the novelist are the guys that I was working with who were the real space geeks It was amazing to see how they had grown up reading Heinlein. Jeff, to some extent, grew up reading Heinlein and watching Star Trek. Those provided positive, practical visions of humans exploring space. Heinlein wrote stories about humans go into the moon and an entire generation of nerds grew up reading that.That’s how we got to the moon because they believed they had at least one story in their mind about how it might be possible, even though it wasn’t all worked out. It was good enough to where they could imagine doing it and put that story together and go solve the technical problems to make it happen. We need positive, practical visions for our future. I challenge you to name one. All anybody has in their heads is horrible stories about how it all goes south. That’s probably, in some sense, be true on the whole. Most humans in all of human history who had a story in their mind about how it gets worse from here, but it’s never been true. There’s never been a moment in history we’re on a longer time horizon, and things weren’t better now than they’ve ever been for humans as a whole. That is a difficult thing to hear head around, but it’s important.It’s interesting that you mentioned Heinlein and Roddenberry as being the two writers that did it because I’ve read both. I appreciate Heinlein getting us to the moon, but I would never want to live in his world.I might be overselling Heinlein as a possibilist because he did a lot of dystopian stuff.I don’t want to live in his fascist society. I would have lived in Gene Roddenberry’s society where everybody works together toward a common good, but hope, caring and positivism in society is one thing. Heinlein got people to the moon. He was able to the technological side of things. I can see how the two of them fit together.That is a weird thing. I never read a lot of science fiction because I was hooked on computers. It was science fiction in a way, but it was real. I never got to be the science fiction nerd that most of my friends are contemporaries most nerds have some background like that. For me, when people were watching Star Trek, I wasn’t even watching Star Trek. I have this problem as an inventor where every idea I come up with, somebody will say, “It’s like in Star Trek.” I’ll go, “I guess so. If I had watched Star Trek, it would save you some trouble.” There’s a gem in there. I wasn’t watching Star Trek. I was watching Steve Jobs announced what Apple was doing. Those Steve Jobs’ keynotes that are famous now, I was watching his keynotes when I was twelve. He was talking about the Mac. In the late ‘80s, I learned about object-oriented programming from Steve Jobs’ keynote. It’s weird to think that that was my science fiction.That’s the story of your whole life. You’ve never stopped continuing to explore the unknown in order to pick up the piece of paper, yet people have always seen in you. You’re like a comment. People have seen your tale and have wanted to go along with it, which brings you to Blue Origin and Intellectual Ventures.It’s extraordinarily difficult to do something the first time; that should be celebrated more than it is.Share on XI’ve been asked about this a lot. For me, I always optimized for whatever the most interesting thing I could do with computers was at any given moment. By the time I got out of high school, I wanted to work with computers, but in colleges, they were teaching the science of computation. I knew a lot of that, but I might’ve been able to learn something if I’d have gone to certain colleges at the time. I could get businesses to buy the coolest new computers and pay me to play with them. I thought that was a dream come true. As I did that, it was rewarding because I would come in, set up this new-fangled computer thing, teach some people how to do their jobs that they’ve been doing for years but with the computer. It’s either that or we don’t need you anymore. I had to have all those kinds of experiences of helping people advance their careers or lose them. I always felt like whatever job I had, I had to do a good job or I wasn’t going to get the next one. I always worked hard. I was trying to prove that I was useful, but also that the computer was useful.I’ve got to go to different industries and businesses and get the perspective you get from doing that was valuable. I always chose the coolest, craziest project I could find. It didn’t feel like a career. I didn’t feel like I had a backup plan. I also didn’t have a degree. To this day, I probably unhireable for any job that exists. I don’t have a resume. I took that and I would go do new things. The milestones were like by 1994, I was excited about getting people on the internet. The first ISP is what we’ve been creating, 1994 was the first year nonacademic or military people could be on the internet. Mosaic was out. Netscape didn’t exist yet. I would be showing people, “Here’s this internet thing.” They couldn’t get their heads around. No search engine existed yet. It was clunky, but I was excited about it. I started a web development company in 1995. It was probably one of the first ones where people hadn’t even seen a webpage. I was trying to convince them that web pages are boring.It was too early and I was still in Alaska, a remote spot. I felt more connected than ever because I was on the internet and it didn’t matter that I was in Alaska, but I was also disconnected from the community that would have built significant things on the internet in the early days. In the late ‘90s, I was working on cryptocurrency and that’s when we met. I was working on trying to use and discovered the cryptography toolkit and figured out if we could use that to build things. The cypherpunk was a way to find kindred spirits where we could use the crypto toolkit to create a different internet, to create the future of the internet that would preserve our values. I’m thinking cypherpunks are anarchistic, but they generally share the value of preserving freedom on the internet. By that, no one should get an asymmetric advantage on the network. I should be able to publish and subscribe. I should be able to buy and sell. I should be able to get in the middle of it. I should be able to talk to whoever I want without somebody in the middle. That was a powerful inflection point.Whit Diffie says it best, to my mind when he talked about the world that he wanted online was the one where George Washington and John Adams could meet in a field. No one would know what they talked about unless one of them either turned trader or was tortured and admitted something under duress.Whit Diffie, if anyone does know, was a pioneering cryptographer who helped invent some of the most foundational cryptographic. That’s what I’m talking about when I say something new as an inventor. He probably thought of himself as a researcher, a scientist, a cryptographer, or a mathematician, but he figured out for the first time that it was possible to make it an algorithm that could do a key exchange safely online. That’s what we called public-key cryptography. It was a cryptographic algorithm that allowed you and I to exchange the key. All cryptography has something like a password, a key that you use to encrypt a message.If I’m going to encrypt a message with a Cap’n Crunch decoder ring or some other simple algorithm, you’ve got to have the key to decrypt it, but how do I get you the key? If I had a secure channel to give you the key, I could give you the message. That’s like a chicken and egg problem that is fundamental to the internet. Whit Diffie is the guy who solved that problem the first time. We don’t have a Nobel Prize for cryptography, but if we did, that’s the guy who should get it. What’s cool about him is he is more than being a mathematician. He did go beyond that philosophically to understand the implications of the network. This is in the early ‘80s.The point is, I was inspired by that vision too. That’s what the cypherpunks were doing is saying, “We have that toolkit. We have that mathematical curiosity in Diffie-Hellman key exchange that we could use to go and create an internet where George Washington could meet John Adams online and nobody can fuck with them.” What people don’t understand about this is that there’s a big difference between privacy and secrecy. Secrecy is something you don’t want anybody to know. Privacy is something you don’t want everybody to know. Those are different. What has been lost along the way is this understanding that the basis has to be anonymous. It has to be private. It has to support secrecy. It has to support privacy. It has to be that way at the bottom level because you can always give it up later. You can always choose to expose the key and always choose to let everybody in on it, but you can’t ever take it away.In most cases, we failed with this and the architectural decisions made on the internet. That’s one of the frustrating things that we’re living with is we have an internet where it is not possible to preserve secrecy or privacy. It’s because you can’t strap that on later. The whole world, in some sense, has been overexposed. They’re living in a world where they have no privacy or expectation of it. They didn’t choose that necessarily. It’s the only option they’ve got if they’re online. I feel a lot of remorse about that because it could be much better for people. There could be much greater freedom online. There could be a lot less manipulation, which is what’s happening when you lose privacy, you submit to manipulation. A lot of these problems that people are fired up about now. The point being, I got a lot out of that community, which I would characterize as 1 to 200 active brains trying to figure out how we embodied our values of freedom into the protocols for the internet. Most people probably never heard of cypherpunks, but when I look back now, I see some success stories. The early ones were things trying to fight Congress on the things like the Clipper chip and that stuff, but also getting encryption deregulated. Encryption technology was a munition.Tell us the Jon Callas and Phil Zimmermann story. To preface it, this is why you can buy a jar of peanut butter online if you have your credit.We talked about the Diffie-Hellman key exchange with people’s eyes probably glazed over. That’s what made it possible to communicate in an encrypted fashion online. Every single time you use the internet, you’re using public-key encryption. You’re probably not using it Diffie-Hellman algorithm. You’re using RSA, which is a different one that came later. That’s more efficient. The point being when you see that little lock in your browser, it says secure. Every time you send your password or credit card number over the internet, you’re using public-key encryption. Even before it was in the browser, a guy named Phil Zimmermann essentially made an email program called PGP, which stands for Pretty Good Privacy.That was the first practical tool that people could use to communicate securely on the internet. That was a big undertaking for the cypherpunks to try and evangelists using PGP. That was largely a disaster because it wasn’t usable and it was a pain in the ass and you had to love being a nerd to use it. That was unfortunate. If you look at LinkedIn, there are jobs for UX engineers. UX is User Experience. That didn’t exist in those days. UX wasn’t invented in those days. PGP failed to catch on in a big way. Unfortunately, but had a lot of great ideas about how to use cryptography. Unfortunately, Phil Zimmermann didn’t use Diffie–Hellman key exchange. He used the RSA algorithm, which had been patented. The RSA algorithm was then owned by a company called RSA. The RSA company wanted to profit off of this because they saw it as being a fundamental thing that we would need on the internet and they were right.They tried to sue Phil Zimmermann and keep PGP from being shared freely with everyone. We had the view that encryption should be free to everyone. PGP ended up with a lot of problems because of that, but independently, it had a different class of problems, which is that the public-key encryption, the encryption used to encrypt the messages. That was strong algorithms that nobody knew how to crack. The US government had classified that type of encryption as a munition. It was as illegal to have a strong cryptosystem as it was like owning a nuclear warhead. They were classified the same way. We saw this as a big problem because if it was illegal to have it and to use it, then we weren’t going to be able to build the internet of the future that we were imagining where you could securely communicate online. We had to fight Congress and in some sense fight the NSA to get that changed. We eventually won. In the late ‘90s, we won what we called the Crypto Wars with the US government. These days, strong crypto is still classified, but it’s been declassified except for seven countries that you’re not allowed to send strong crypto to. If it’s still illegal, no one pays attention to it.Tell the story of how they got PGP out because this goes to your whole thing about toolkits and using the human mind.I didn’t have much to do with this, so we can get somebody to tell the core details. We’ll get lucky if someone will talk about it someday. It was illegal to export strong crypto. Cypherpunks, in those days, we would go offshore whenever we were working on cryptosystems. We used to go meet up in the Virgin Islands or other places in The Bahamas where there was outside the US jurisdiction. If we invented a crypto technology, it would be free of encumbrance by the US government. We couldn’t send the PGP code outside the US without violating the munitions regulations. ITAR is the name of the regulation for weapons, International Traffic in Arms Regulations. What they figured out is we couldn’t say code, but we could publish a book because that would be free speech. Cypherpunks printed out all the code for PGP in a book, all the source code, which we were trying to make it open source anyway, but there was not a legal pathway. It was thousands of pages of code if I remember correctly. We now had a book. Thanks to the US government First Amendment has strict freedom of speech laws. That’s been well protected.We classified our code as speech. We printed a book with the code in it and then flew it a thing to Amsterdam or Germany, and scan it in. That was a way to get the PGP code out of the US out into the world so that the whole world could use it. There were analogous things for other types of crypto in those days. The point we’re trying to make is that the cypherpunks were pioneering and creative. In some sense or another, they did a lot of the early thinking on what it would take to architect for freedom on the internet.After the Crypto Wars and PGP, a lot of people don’t know this, but cypherpunks made another big success because one of the things that happened online is people started to use MP3s for music instead of CDs. With an MP3, what was cool is you could have your computer play the song. Most people didn’t have enough bandwidth to send them anywhere at first, but then, as you got faster internet connections, people started to share their music online. There’s a lot of legitimate reasons to do that, but the law hadn’t caught up and the record industry was caught with their pants down. What happened is people started sharing music and the record industry panicked and thought that they weren’t going to make any money anymore. They started trying to sue anybody or their own customers whenever you shared music. It seems more black and white now than it was. At that time, I could buy a record and I could record it to a cassette tape and give that to a friend. That’s legal.I could buy a record and share it around with whoever I wanted. I could buy a CD and loan it to you. You could even make a copy of it onto a tape and give it back. There was a tax on every blank tape and every blank CD to cover that. The record industry started behaving poorly. They start to get pissed off about people sharing music. They started to retaliate against their own customers. There was a website called Napster, which was famous in those days. It was a file-sharing system where you could go online. My computer would tell the Napster server what songs I had and then other people who were searching for those songs could download them from me, but the Napster server was a central point of failure and it was killed by an illegal attack. The record industry sued Napster into oblivion.That server going away made the Napster service go away. Cypherpunks were able to architect a distributed replacement for Napster called BitTorrent. It doesn’t have a central server. It’s headless. There is no central thing to attack. The record industry hates it. Its bandwidth increased and the movie industry started to hate it, but they couldn’t shut it down. We saw it as an important capability for the internet was to be able to level the playing field. The real use case for BitTorrent was to make it so that anybody could afford to host large files. There are lots of non-infringing large files. If you wanted to share a video of a soccer game or something, in those days, it would’ve cost you a lot of money to have a server and pay for the bandwidth for everybody. Only Microsoft and Apple could afford to do that at the time.BitTorrent was a democratizing technology, made it possible for anybody to share a huge amount of data. The entire industries hate it, but they’ve never been able to shut it down because BitTorrent is a decentralized protocol. It’s using the crypto toolkit to make it possible for people to share data online at that scale. It did create a big problem for an industry that was used to using distribution as their business model. BitTorrent, in some sense, was another success for the cypherpunks. It’s important to point out that we were essentially fighting the notion of the centralized protocol. Before the internet, we had online services like AOL or America Online. It was a huge centralized network. You could subscribe, you could connect, you could talk to other people on it, but AOL controlled everything. They controlled who you could talk to. They controlled what you would say. There were like Big Brother monitoring every communication. It wasn’t private that you couldn’t transact evenly. Buyers and sellers had to be approved. You had to be approved to be a seller. To be a publisher on AOL, you had to pay them. It was asymmetric. We saw that as evil. Cypherpunks had nothing to do with this, but the reason the internet won over AOL was a decentralized protocol.TCP/IP is decentralized. There is no central switchboard for the internet. That’s been eroded over time by a bunch of bullshit, but essentially the reason the internet went wild and global is that it was decentralized. All you had to do is find somebody who was on it to connect. Over time, we believe the decentralized protocols would win out over these centralized authoritarian type services. Step one was BitTorrent. That’s our first real win is a decentralized protocol for cypherpunks. Step two is what we believed was that we had to preserve people’s ability to use the internet anonymously. Some other cypherpunks developed what were called anonymous remailers. That was a way to communicate anonymously online. They’re not popular anymore. Things have advanced beyond that, but we’ve built remailers in the late ‘90s and for a decade after that. The use case for that was like, “What if you need to report a crime, but you would be exposing yourself to risk if you did?” I used an anonymous remailer to report a crime. Somebody I knew had stolen a bunch of equipment and I reported it to the police without them knowing. He was a friend of mine. I didn’t want the guy to find out I was the one who ratted him out. That’s the use case, and then there are much worse situations that we’re trying to solve.Eventually, what to this day exist, the cypherpunks invented the onion router, which was a way to make and use something similar to the architecture for anonymous remailers to make it possible to surf the web anonymously. That’s called Tor and it exists on a large scale online now. Anyone can download what’s called the Tor Browser. You can search the web anonymously and you can’t be tracked by the server. They can’t tell who you are, where you are. At any given moment, you could talk, you could say your name, you could give up your email address, but if you don’t, you can use the web mostly anonymously. That’s not just for criminals. It’s the thing that turns out to be important for people who might get in trouble for what they are doing on the internet. There are different jurisdictions with different ideas about what’s cool. What we believed was that nobody should get to decide what’s cool and not cool for everyone. What you get for free when you build the onion router and the Tor Browser is to get the dark web. It is the same technology that made it possible to surf the web also made it possible to publish and host websites anonymously.If you’re using the dark web, you can make a website and no one on the internet could tell where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. You have to be careful not to give yourself up, but the important reason, people associate it with selling drugs and all this stuff. There was a lot of press about the website called the Silk Road, which was an early kind of eBay on the dark web that people were using to illicit stuff. You got to remember what’s illicit in one jurisdiction might not be in another. It’s probably not as unilaterally evil as people imagined, but I am not defending the Silk Road. What I’m defending is the notion of anonymously providing those services. The use case for these is you have people living in authoritarian regimes and jurisdictions where they don’t have freedom, and we don’t even know what’s going on there.If you’re a journalist, a human rights activist, or trying to get the story and figure out what ways people are being abused or manipulated. In America, we believe in free speech. Most of us do. We believe it should be a fundamental human right. We’ve signed treaties with lots of other countries acknowledging that. To be able to keep track of whether that right is being honored or not, you need people to be able to report on what’s happening. The use case in the minds of cypherpunks, a lot of times for these things is, “We’ve got people in places where the internet is being monitored by a not particularly benevolent government and everything you do could be liability or risk for you.” If you get caught reporting on, the concentration camp and the neighborhood next to yours, you’re going to get a knock on the door and you’re going to get sent to that concentration camp. We’re trying to preserve these freedoms that map to real human values about civil liberties and human rights.Unfortunately, you can’t get one without the other. What people don’t fundamentally understand is that you could use the dark web to sell drugs, but you could also use it to save the lives of people who are being oppressed and in a country where the government controls everything. I’ve been to these countries and you have too. I think of both the Tor Browser and the dark web as wins for cypherpunks. There’s one more, which people don’t realize, but cypherpunks made Bitcoin. There’s a lot of public mystery around who made Bitcoin. I’m not going to try and clear that up, but you got to understand, there are few people on the planet who could have made Bitcoin. That thinking goes back decades and it’s built on decades of financial cryptography work and a long conversation about what was needed.Bitcoin is another milestone. We have hundreds of cryptocurrency protocols that have been built over time. I’m not trying to claim any responsibility for them. Let’s make it clear that I had nothing to do with any of them. What I’m saying is that’s the community that has done all the thinking around cryptocurrency and why we need it, why it’s important, and how it needs to be architected to preserve those same freedoms. What we believed was that every currency in human history was subject to a centralized attack like the Napster server. Every currency in human history has a mint that prints more money whenever they feel like it. That can inflate or deflate your currency. They don’t play by the rules. You don’t know who’s printing more money when, and you’re using it for your livelihood. That’s true for hundreds of currencies around the world or a little less than that now.There are a number of different things you could accomplish with the cryptocurrency, but chief among them is that you could make a decentralized currency and nobody can fuck with it. That’s the real milestone that Bitcoin crossed for us for the first time. Before that, we had a zillion cryptocurrency protocols, but we always had a centralized mint and that feels dirty to cypherpunks. It feels wrong because that’s a centralized point of attack. If the currency is going to be strong, it can’t be subject to humans mucking with it because humans are unreliable.The beautiful thing about Bitcoin is it has proven the decentralized protocols win over centralized services. The entire nation-states fucking hate Bitcoin. They wish they could make it go away because it’s devaluing their currencies. That’s what’s beautiful about it. You can’t make it go away. Everyone’s tried to game it. Certainly, there’s been a lot of bad actors and a weird show with Bitcoin, but it’s proven that the decentralized currency has a place in the world and it’s allowed for an extraordinary proliferation of different use cases for transacting that wasn’t possible without it. We’re at the beginning. We could talk more about that, but Bitcoin is the latest success of cypherpunks.In the history book of the future, I’m hoping the cypherpunks get a chapter because there were some amazing thinkers there. I’m not even one of them. The truth is I’m influenced by some of these guys and they look fringe wackos to the rest of the world. Guys like Tim May who we lost had a huge effect on me. Most of the people whose names are highly correlated with cypherpunks, I learned a lot from all of them, even the ones I disagree with and some of them have poorly behaved. Some of them probably can’t get an endorsement, but intellectually, it was a wonderful experience for me. I learned a lot from that and the archives are public from the cypherpunks list. The other thing is we could have incredible intellectual discourse in public view with all kinds of random people who didn’t like each other. I wouldn’t use it as an example of people being respectful necessarily because there is a lot of hostile discourse as well, but it was good solid intellectual discourse. At the end of the day, what mattered every time was whether you were technically right. Being technically right in that community wins out over everything. I learned the value of that discourse. I got a lot out of that.When I lived in South Africa, I grew up in an urban area. Being in South Africa when I was younger going out to the bush, one of the first things that I was told was that the bush is neutral. It’s not going to help you. It’s not trying to kill you. You grew up in a neutral environment. When I hear you talking about the cypherpunks, it sounds like you’re talking about this neutral thing that could be used for The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse or to save a country from a dictator.My experience has colored my view a lot that these things are neutral. The bush isn’t trying to kill you, but you may die. It’s your job to make sure you don’t. In Alaska, it’s the same thing. I could die to walk into the school in the morning. I’m not an unreasonable threat. I have friends who did die walking to school. It’s a harsh environment and things go haywire. I have that view. If it’s not clear already, I feel strongly about this. Every single technology is a tool. A hammer is a tool that I can use to build you a home or smash your head. Artificial intelligence is no different. Everything in between. Some people will argue with me on this, but I believe these are tools for humans to exact their values into the world and that we got to be responsible for getting clear about what those values are, articulating them, and using the technology as tools to build the world that we want.People need to understand the technologies and they need to be demystified in a way that they don’t sound like scary, magical stuff.Share on XI’m going to take that view to the grave. I don’t think I’ll be convinced otherwise, these are tools. Some tools are controversial. I listed everything. The cypherpunks built is controversial. Those are tools. What I would say is to go figure out how to use them to build the world that you want to solve the problems that you care about. Don’t sit, bitch and moan about how other people are using them. This is a fair fight. These are democratized tools. That’s another thing that covers my perspective is that the tech industry has lost its way and it gets a lot of shit, but that’s because they’ve been doing dumb stuff. The tech industry is busy largely making iPhone apps to have weed delivered to dorm rooms and dumb shit like that using drones. It’s not actual tech. I have to figure out some way of articulating that what I’m talking about is actual tech. A lot of it has been fully democratized.There are kids living in South America, South Africa, and South Korea and they got the same computer that I do. They have the same technology that I do, the same programming languages, database, and entire toolkit that I have is available to all of them. It’s not fair. You can say I had better access to education earlier start and all those kinds of things. The tools themselves, a lot of them are democratized in the sense that everybody gets access to them. I know it’s not fair. Your kid in South Africa, you’ve got to play soccer quite a bit, which I didn’t have to do, but you could be a computer nerd and learn as much about a computer as I did. We see that all the time. Those kids run circles around me now.One of them went to the moon.This is interesting because we know Mark Shuttleworth from back in the day. He was a South African who worked on cryptosystems on the internet trying to make encryption in web browsers and things and ended up getting rich selling a company. He’s a guy who was a computer nerd like us when he was a kid in South Africa. I don’t know the whole story. I’m sure that there are a lot of ways to paint the picture that we’re a product of our environment that made us smart. The truth is one of the cool things that’s I’m proud of is that computer technology doesn’t care about you, but it’s made itself accessible to people everywhere. I never had somebody to teach me about computers. I had to learn the hard way, trial and error. Kids these days, every kid on Earth can get to YouTube with the exception of those authoritarian regimes. You can learn almost anything you want on YouTube. If you’re a coder these days and you get stumped, you’re like, “Why doesn’t my Python library compile on this version of Linux with these conflicts?”Type that into YouTube and you’re going to see somebody with a video explaining the answer. It’s insanely easy to learn to code now. For most of the tools, you can get the same access to them that I can. I’m wildly bullish and we don’t stop to celebrate that often. We’re fixated on inequality and the problems that do exist, that we’re not stopping to celebrate how far we’ve come? How incredible it is that these things can happen? I love it. That was one of the things I’ve spent some time trying to travel to these other countries and show them how we think in Silicon Valley help them to hopefully not to say that we’re right or that they should copy us, but that they at least understand what’s worked for us so that they can do better. Hopefully, they will. That’s what we need.When you talk about being a technology optimist years ago, you went and hung out with one of my sons for a little while. When I came back to him, I asked him, “What’s the most important thing you have learned?” He said, “You drive a computer.”That is one of the things that’s hard to overstate. People have been beaten over the head with this, but when I was a kid, there was one computer chip, a CPU in my house, in my neighborhood. You could find another one in the next neighborhood over where there was like some old person who got a bunch of money and had no wife or kids and spend it all on an Apple II like me. Now, we’ve proven that a computer is a fast, cheap, scalable, reliable way to add a bunch of features to anything. In my apartment where we are now, if I try to add up the number of things that have a CPU more powerful than Apple II, there’s probably no less than 1,000 in this apartment. It would not be an exaggeration for an average home to have a thousand computer chips equivalent to that at least. Not to mention my Apple Watch is a fucking supercomputer compared to a Cray from 1982.What he’s referring to is almost every product in the world has become a computer. I’m looking at an iPhone, a GoPro, a Smart TV from Samsung, a PlayStation, a Sonos, or a Mac. Every one of those things is a computer. Here’s a Sony camera, Alexa, and that air filter over there in $20 says it has a million times the processing power of my Apple II. Computers have gone everywhere. One of the ways I cheated as an inventor for a while was to look around and say, “We’re having computers gone yet.” A lot of times, you look around what’s left where there’s not a computer chip. There will be one. There’s no place where we’re not going to put a computer chip. You’ve seen that progression. It’s in the electronic lock on your door, in the light bulb, in everything except your fork. Imagine what would happen if you had a computer chip in your fork and you might get some ideas. That kid was seven then, and I probably tried to help him see that a car used to be made by the auto industry, making an automobile. Now, a car is an iPhone with wheels. It is true for Tesla, but essentially it’s true for every car.That has paid off. It’s worked in making everything dramatic. I remember when I was a kid in Alaska, we had this game called Padiddle. If you saw a car with a headlight burnout, then you would smack the ceiling in the car and whoever hit the ceiling first got the point for that. It was common and rampant that the headlights were burnt out. In Alaska, in the winter, it’s dark for 23 hours a day so you get a lot of opportunities to play this game and everything’s far away. You drive a lot. In a single evening, I could go to the movies and dinner and back with friends, I could get a score in over 100 cars with a headlight out. After reading this, let’s see if you can find a single car with the light out. That’s not because of computer chips, but computers helped us. The headlight in your car comes from a computational model in a CAD system. That’s been through CFD. That’s a Computational Fluid Dynamics modeling that knows exactly what the air cooling is, what the temperature range is going to be, what the materials have been tested. We know exactly how long that filament can burn for. We can put the exact perfect mixture of halogen in there. Everything about it has been improved by computers.When we talk about technology and I’m disparaging iPhone apps and enterprise software, but we’re at a point where the technology from computers is bled into everything else. When we talk about advances in biotech or nuclear reactors or whatever, all of it inherits the superpowers that computers gave us. If we’re securing cancer, we’re doing it on computers. With CRISPR, editing your DNA, those breakthroughs were possible because of computers. In our lifetime, there’s no question that the computer has been the most valuable technology going forward. It probably will, at least for the rest of our lives. That will continue to be true, even though there are amazing other fields. I’m big on computers, but things like CRISPR are amazing. We’re going to be able to do a lot to help humans now that we have CRISPR, but we’re at the beginning of learning how to do that.You’re an optimist about this. You don’t say CRISPR with the Frankenstein sound in your voice. You don’t talk about chips and things being a bad thing, like, “It’s going to tell me I need more electrolytes.”I want to know when I need more electrolytes. That is what Pablos craves. For example, CRISPR gives us the unprecedented ability to edit the DNA in cells, in living creatures, in humans. We could use CRISPR to change your eye color, but we could also possibly use CRISPR to go edit out the genetic predisposition you have with Alzheimer’s. We don’t know how to do that yet, but we have to learn because we have a lot of DNA. We don’t know what all of it does and it’s complicated. It’s a lot of data and we’re at the beginning of figuring out all the places we can go with it. There’ve been cases already where CRISPR has been used to cure people of terminal cancers. I got to emphasize that. If you had that technology, imagine somebody’s going to pay people to figure out how to cure cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, leukemia, and every other fucking thing that kills. There are 3,000 things that can kill you. Those are technical problems with humans. Not in our lifetime, but eventually we’ll solve them all.Death will be a solved problem. We’re going to have other problems created by that. We’ll talk about that some other day, but those are technical problems and they can be solved, but there’s a market for that. People don’t want to die. People don’t want their family members to get sick and die. There’s a reason to go develop those things. I’m sure some people believe that there’s also a reason to weaponize it. I could also use CRISPR to make a pathogen that targets anybody who’s not a blue-eyed blonde, and ends their life. That’s a sickening idea. Who’s paying somebody to work on that when you could be working on curing Alzheimer’s? There’s always this low-grade murmuring of suspicion and fear. I’m sure it leads to all the conspiracy theory thinking that people have, but the way to try to steer yourself out of that thinking is to look on a longer time horizon.At the beginning of nuclear weapons, it was easy to paint a picture of that. I grew up on the frontlines of the Cold War. Alaska was going to be the first one to get nuked. We had drills in school for what to do when the nukes came. I have a deep-seated Cold War in me. It was easy to paint a picture that the whole world is going to blow up and it will be done. That was what we believed was imminent. It has happened yet and less likely now than it was then. I’m sure that the same thing happened with the invention of manmade fire, the wheel or the internal combustion engine, all these kinds of things. They do get weaponized and people do use them to gain asymmetric power but on a longer time, horizon. Humans tend to get these things under control.You once said to me that a car can be used to mow down people, but that doesn’t mean you start tearing up the interstate.The car is the most dangerous thing, but they’ve gotten safer in my lifetime. They’re dramatically safer now that we have more of them. The overall death count has gone down, but the death count per capita certainly has. They can use it as a weapon at any moment. I’ve driven probably a million miles in my life. At any moment with one flick of the wrist, I could steer in oncoming traffic and kill. Somebody might kill me. That was a problem. I could hit a pedestrian, unlikely to kill myself or to kill them. I never do it. I never got around to it. I never wanted to do it. That’s true apparently for every other driver with rare exceptions. You could take a gun away. That’s fine, but you’re not going to stop people from having a weapon and hit a car.Let’s talk about The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse because that understanding that allows you to be the technical optimist that you are. The drugs, the mafia, these four things that are out to get you, the boogeyman.They’d probably change. It’s got to be more than four. I might be cheating because I haven’t had any of those problems directly, not to disparage anyone who has. I give people total freedom to do what they got to do. Everyone’s situation, I’ve been lucky that I haven’t had to deal with the kinds of adversity that almost everyone has. All the people I like, they’re interesting. I’ve not only survived some adversity but managed to thrive in spite of it. I have a deep appreciation for that. You go to do what you got to do to and take care of yourself and your family, but presuming that you’ve done that, then the job is to figure out how do you contribute more than you consume? The national parks view of humanity, how do you leave things better than you found them? I don’t want to be the person to judge any specific human on whether or not they’re contributing more than the number of jewels that they’ve used up in their lifetime. I don’t think it’s valuable to judge individuals that way. What I do think valuable is to take the responsibility yourself to ask that question, like, “Am I going to leave the world better than I found it?”It doesn’t matter what religion you are, what your spiritual beliefs are to accept that. That’s a good start. If you can do that, then you can go look for ways to do it. If you wanted to get good at it, part of why we share these conversations is I’m hoping people can at least learn the toolkit that I’ve learned to help with that. In the lab, we would take on some of the biggest problems in the world. I worked for Nathan Myhrvold for twelve years. What we were doing was finding ways to invest in an invention because we believed that’s where you get the new superpowers, but nobody was investing in it. That’s a weird thing. People didn’t realize that.We have scientific research, which is about discovering how the world works. Increasingly, scientists make a name for themselves by more and more narrowly defining their expertise so they can be the world’s leading expert in the left ventricle of the mouse brain or whatever. If you have less competition, you can be number one. That’s how they do it. It’s important to work, but it’s not an invention. At the other end, you have entrepreneurs and businessmen who are trying to create products and services that map to the market and make some technology relevant, but in between is invention. That’s where you get something. It’s where you take the output of scientific research. You map it to a problem and solve it for the first time. We figured, “We’re going to need a lot more problems solved, so let’s figure out how to invest in the invention.”What we found was that’s done with crazy hair in a garage with a DeLorean. It’s haphazard in the spare time of somebody who has a day job, an engineer or a scientist. We started trying to find ways to invest in the inventors. I got lucky I got hired to be one. I got hired by Nathan to build the lab and work on invention projects there. We were relatively free of the same commercial constraints that people would have in other companies. In a lot of places, you only get to invent a faster, cheaper version of whatever you did. If you’re a Hewlett Packard, you’re going to invent a faster, cheaper Inkjet printer. You’re probably not going to invent whatever comes after inkjet, but I got the freedom to do that. I could go to work on inventing the next generation of technology. That particular business is haphazard. You’re going to be wrong almost all the time. You’ve got to think of it like a hits business. That’s why Hollywood makes a zillion movies and hopes one of them turns out to be an Avatar.In a hits business, you’ve got to get a lot of shots on goal. Most inventors, if they’re lucky, savvy and know what they’re doing, and can file 2 or 3 patents a year on their own inventions. That not enough. In our lab, we aim for a batting average of one. That means for every invention that we file a patent on, we had a thousand ideas that we didn’t. For every invention that we get a patent on, we have a batting average of one. We had teams of inventors. We became the biggest patent filers in America on our own inventions, about 500 patents a year. Out of that, we’re hoping one of them pays for all the failures. That’s haphazard. You can’t do that on a small scale, so we have to do it at that large scale in order to get the hits, to pay for the failures. It works though at that scaleYou’ve done the world of service and millions of people have heard you speak. To my mind, for every million people who hear you speak, there is a certain percentage that will scratch their chin, and an even narrower or percentage that eventually saves the human race.If I can get to enough people, maybe. I started to feel like the speaking was possibly not going to have the effect I have hoped for because a lot of my audience, there were executives, CEOs and people already had successful careers. I might be able to entertain them, but the odds of me deeply affecting their work seemed low. Whereas every day, I get an email from younger people all over the world saying, “I finished my degree. I want to do something that matters. I’m excited about technology. I don’t know what to do. Can you teach me how to hack computers? Can you teach me how to hack into my ex’s email?”I’m hoping that with the show, we can share some of these conversations, the things that I’ve learned can go have a further life. It’s fine if it’s not a good match for people, but what I’m trying to do is in my life, part of how I’m cheating as an inventor is I’m looking around trying to find the smartest, most interesting people I can go pick their brains. I want to learn about every new technology, especially with computers out. All I’ve been doing for many years has been learning what’s new. It would be tough for you to catch up to me if you’re starting now because I’ve been learning what’s new since you were born.That gives me a deep sense of perspective when something’s new. If somebody does something new with the computer, I can understand the entire scope of it in minutes or as you’ll see hopefully in some of these conversations. I’m going to pick the part, somebody’s understanding of what’s new, a new technology, new discovery, new invention, and I’m going to start drawing pathways and connecting it to everything else I know and say, “What about this? What about that?” That’s my process and it works well for me. I’m thinking that if I can share that for people who don’t get the same access to smart people that I do, that can have a bigger effect as you’re describing.Hacking with duct tape to hacking an Apple ][+ to hacking a mission to put men in space.The lab is where we got to do it because that was a good example of taking the mindset of a hacker, which I’ve famously described for years the same way, which is if you think about how people’s minds work, anyone you know if you get a new gadget and give it to your mom or your grandma, she might say, “What does this do?” You can explain to them, “It’s a phone mom. iPhone says on the box.” That’s how that story ends. When you give that gadget to a hacker, the question is different. “What can I make this do?” They’re going to flip it over, take out all the screws, break it into a lot of little pieces, but then figure out what we can build from the rubble. That’s the mindset of a hacker and it’s markedly different than what you see in most people you know. Those people are important. That mindset is important because they’re good at discovering what’s possible. That’s where you get all the new superpowers. That’s where you get all these new capabilities.Somebody has to figure it out first and we have to support those people. I understand you might not want to hire them. There are a lot of risks. They don’t follow the rules. They don’t pay attention. They’re ADT. They’re running in circles. There they look like a risk to you, but you can’t hire them. That explains why a lot of companies suck at innovation because the more successful an institution is, a business, an industry. It could be healthcare, education, democracy, religion, the bigger and more successful it is, the more evolved its immune system is, the job of the immune system is to suppress risk. The thing that looks like the risk is anything new. We can’t expect our successful institutions to innovate. Change looks like a risk to them. This is why in Silicon Valley, we solved this problem. We solved it because in the ‘80s, every big American company had an R&D department. Research and Development job was to invent the next generation of technology for the company.They kept getting their butts kicked by two guys in a garage with no money, no resources, no time, but they had the mindset of hackers. We learned from this. In America, we shut down R&D, but we replaced it with M&A, Mergers and Acquisitions. Their job is to watch all the startups. We fund all the startups. We invented venture capital to fund them. We’ve got thousands of startups. Each one of them thinks of it as a million-dollar experiment. We’ve got a million-dollar experiment. We’re going to run thousands of those. When one of them spikes, mergers and acquisitions. M&A buys it up, takes it to our global marketing, manufacturing, distribution, all the things that a big company good at.One of the frustrating things that we're living with now is we have an internet where it is not possible to preserve secrecy or privacy.Share on XThat’s a way to have a relationship with innovation. That’s the paradigm. We’ve been mis-selling innovation to big companies trying to convince them that they’re going to be more innovative. They’re not. We didn’t hire CEOs because they’re good at trying crazy new experiments. We hired them because they’re good at doing the same damn thing every quarter. If a big company needs to innovate and they all have been told they’ve got to innovate or die, the way to get them there is to say, “You need to do figure out how to have a relationship with innovation.” You might not want to hire those hackers, but you might want to hang out with them once in a while, go out to lunch, play some Counter-Strike.Keep an eye on them and then figure out when one of them has something good and then learn to cooperate. They’ll need that. Every startup needs partners.What will be interesting in the coming weeks is for you to be talking to people about how we get past this M&A business where competition is simply crushed. The biotech area is probably one of the best examples. When you looked at where the DIY bio movement was years ago, flourishing. There is one company in Cambridge, maybe two.I don’t understand what happened there. Do you?It comes down to a bigger fish eating a smaller fish.Was it Meredith who did her own DNA extraction with a salad spinner code in 2002? Do you remember that?There were people doing things years ago. I saw a man years ago make a USB-powered electron microscope for under $200.We’ve done that a few times with cathode-ray tubes from televisions. They’re not good electron microscopes, but you can do it. The biohacking thing, I wasn’t paying attention, but I presumed it had been flourishing. You’re saying it’s not. I don’t understand that. It’s unfortunate. The truth is we’re not nearly at the scale of creativity, hacking and flourishing that we should be. It’s a real disappointment in some sense that I feel like the internet of the ‘90s was better than the one we have now. That’s sad because we were fantasizing about was when the world would have the same rich experience that we did online.We have everyone online or closer to it and ubiquitous 24/7 access for everyone with streaming video. It’s not a better experience. I remember the internet in the ‘90s seemed magical because whatever fringe wacko you are, you could find people who were excited about the same things as you. You could feel normal. I felt normal for the first time in my life because I could hang out with computer nerds. That wasn’t a thing in Alaska in the ‘80s and ‘90s. By getting online, I could find them. It’s like, “Not only are you a computer nerd, you’re excited about cartography. It’s amazing.”I did have 1 or 2 other friends in Alaska who became cypherpunks and followed that stuff, but that was rare. What I imagined was like, “This is awesome.” If you’re disabled in any way, shape, or form, if you’re a man minority of any kind, oppressed or otherwise, in my mind when I think minority, I think a minority of one. That’s what matters. I believe in individuals. I believe anyone should be free to be who they want to be. They should feel supported in that way. I was one of them. I was a lonely computer nerd who was excited about stuff that nobody else was. I found my tribe online because I was physically isolated from that. I could have moved to San Francisco but didn’t at that time as a kid.I felt a power in that. I feel like it was the right thing and the world should do that to allow people to be who they want to be and do what they want to do. Somehow, I don’t think that’s the way people would describe their experience online now. That’s a disappointment that I have. That maps to what you’re saying about biohacking haven’t taken off. When I started going to DEF CON, that’s the biggest hacker convention in the world. It always has been. It had 200 people, maybe 300. Now pushing 30,000. It’s amazing because those are people who found a tribe for whatever faults. I’m not trying to say hackers are the best role models or something, but we found a tribe and we were able to find each other and it’s grown a lot.I don’t even go to DEF CON probably most of the time. There are hacker conventions for niches within that. That’s cool. Kids are finding each other on TikTok doing the dances that they think are cool. I don’t think they’re cool. I have different ideas. It feels sad that to the extent that that is working, but we’re not celebrating it or trying to vilify everything. I do think that there should be much more creative potential in these tools that we’re realizing. I don’t know if that’s partly that we celebrated entrepreneurs who got rich instead of the ones to move the needle on what’s possible. That’s probably part of it. These kids think they want to be Mark Zuckerberg and I have a hard time figuring out what he invented.When you talk about invention and when we look at the Valley, I think of internet speed and getting things done in Silicon Valley time. Nowadays, the discussion is always about stickiness in keeping people in places. Between stickiness, how is your toolbox? How is the duct tape, the Apple II and the optimism?You got to remember that these are all moving targets. I’ve lived through enough to know that in my soul. I was addicted to email in 1982. That’s far back. I learned to manage that addiction. I remember vividly in 1996 or 1997, I had a modem hooked up to my computer at home and half of my life easily was online. I checked my mail, go out to lunch, came home, checked my email. There wasn’t any. I was addicted. I had to check it. Nothing was happening. It was like, “Reply.” I would, but that was where my society was and their conversations were there and I was hooked on it.It was like that probably up until about 2003, 2002 when I got my first Sidekick phone. I had a thumb board where I could read them. Before that, I had phones that could get an email. That was bad, but the Sidekick was the first one where I could read and write an email on the go. It was free. I could go out into the world and I didn’t have to go home to check my email anymore. I saw a whole new world. It was a flight for me, but I was still addicted. The psychic was great because it was a Zippo lighter. It had that mechanical action. You could flick it open. If you hear bling and you’d flick it open and look at spam, delete, close it, put it back in your pocket. I did that probably every 90 seconds.Around the same time, in the late ‘90s, we had ICQ. Before that, I even had IRC, which was Internet Relay Chat. We had online chat rooms. I had chat rooms on mainframes in the early ‘80s. It took off in the ‘90s. We had Internet Relay Chat and we could have chat rooms. We could chat with people and you felt like you were missing something when you weren’t there. With IRC, we had instant messaging. You can message people all over and it felt amazing. You felt connected to your friends all the time. I don’t even know that now. At least a dozen messaging tools on my phone that work 24/7 instantaneously globally will do a translation. I can talk to them.I don’t feel connected to my friends with them the way I did with IRC and ICQ, which was the first instant messenger. There’s a Spanish stringer since then. I don’t understand why that is because there were moments in time when I felt like I could open it up. It would show you who was online. You’d chat with whoever’s online. If I grabbed my phone now, I don’t even know who I would chat with. It’s not like that for me. It could be that I’m older and I have different friends and a different vibe. That could be it. What I think about it is along the way, I learned to tame those instincts that were addictive. I’m addicted to email and instant messaging. I had to do a twelve-step program with a couple of two-day follow-ups and I had to get that under control.Do we have to think of these things as enticements that require us to rise to the challenge of internalizing these tools, play with them, abuse them, go nuts, overdo it, figure out how much is it adding to your life and how much is it subtracting? Like sugar and cocaine, you got to come up with an answer in the middle of somewhere and say, “That was probably too much cocaine, but I need another chocolate chip cookie.” You figure out what the right level for you is and you get that under control. We’ve had to deal with drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and everything else. That personal responsibility needs to be the majority of the conversation about how we internalize these technologies and it’s zero.We’re back to Jean Gebser and separating the technology from the spiritual and the responsibility and the ability of tools to do things.I have no idea what you’re talking about, but that sounds like it’s possibly of philosophers.You are a moral person. When you look at these things, you go, “I need to take personal responsibility for taking all these dopamine hits every time somebody gives me a like.” You’re not saying, “Those marketing bastards, we need to go and put them on against the wall and shoot them.”The deal is a lot more straightforward. People are pretending like they didn’t know that. When is the last time you wrote a check and send it to Google or Facebook? If you can’t remember sending Facebook a dime or even putting your credit card number on your Facebook and you use it every fucking day. If you’re not the customer, you’re the crop there. Facebook spending billions of dollars to make a good product. Is the metric for a good product? Do you like using it? They’re making you better and better so that you’ll still be using it. You choose to use it, but you can choose not to. That’s within reason for you to choose not to. Some of these things are important. You’ve got to use Gmail for work and that thing and whatever, but you can still figure out like, “How do I use Gmail at a reasonable level where it doesn’t destroy my life and I still play with my kids?” What is important is to take personal responsibility for these things. There is an argument going around, especially with the release of The Social Dilemma. I don’t want to get into it too deeply because I have a lot of animosity about the way people are using this issue to create a lot of fear.They’re looking at this and saying, “This is different. This isn’t like sugar, alcohol and cocaine. This is worse.” The way I see it, we’re not able to wield a lot of power against you. If you don’t use them. I don’t use Facebook and you don’t use Instagram. I’m not saying to absolve them of responsibility. I know Facebook is making a dopamine machine. I know Instagram is making a dopamine machine. I learned that I’m better at managing my addictions because I’ve had more practice, but those things don’t ruin my life. I was able to get them under control and I do use them and they add a little bit of value and I use them in the way that they do and sometimes overdo it a little bit. Sometimes I don’t use it for months, but I figured out how to make the tools that add value to my life.Not to say that they aren’t doing sinister things when they lie. We should hold them up against the ropes for that when they lie, but I don’t think most of the time they’re lying. The deal is clear. You’re going to give us all the fucking data you possibly can and we’re going to give you these amazingly addictive toys. That’s the substrate, but I think that they also choose the wrong path. I’m a big aversion to monocultures. Facebook somehow thinks they’re going to figure out how to set the knobs so that they can steer clear of everyone in the world’s sensibilities. It’s wrong. Different cultures have different values. They think different things are important at different levels. They’re all right.That person in China has a different sensibility about surveillance than I do. I don’t want their choice. It’s not right for me, but that’s their choice and that’s what they want. That’s what they’re happy with. They’re comfortable with it. That’s cool. That’s their thing. For me and for Americans are not okay. We chose something different. They got a different thing going in New Zealand, North Korea, and Brazil. That’s okay. That’s about food. It’s about what you do with your time. It’s about education. It’s about what matters in business. It’s about whether or not you take a fucking siesta. That’s different cultures. We need them all to do different things. Facebook wants to impose one set of values on the whole world. They want to decide exactly how many boobs I get to see, how big it can be, and how much of them I see whether or not this doctor to a woman or man.If you like this boob, we’re going to bring this, but if we were living in a society where there’s discernment because you don’t have to use it. If you choose to use it, you’re continually dopamine up.They’re trying to train me around which boobs I should like, and that’s not okay. What’s Facebook should have done, and I intend to advocate for this because whether Facebook gets it right or the inevitable post-Facebook thing, which I’m hoping is a decentralized protocol that does what Facebook does. All you got to do is put the knobs in my hand as a user. Let me dial-up boobs or dial down boobs and beheadings, cuss words and hip-hop lyrics. Give you those knobs. Ninety-nine percent of users will never touch them. They’ll leave them right where Facebook set them by default and that’s okay. It would absolve Facebook of all responsibility for setting those knobs. That’s the right move. They should give me that control in their product and they’re not willing to do it. It’s the wrong choice for humanity, for Facebook and history. It’s got to be possible for them to make plenty of money and still give me the knobs so that I can tune that feed but they won’t let me.Maybe there is no spoon. They don’t need to give you the knob. We have discussed this before with your toolbox. You don’t have to ask anyone for a knob.The logical progression is that we can build. Let’s use Instagram as an example. What does Instagram do? It gives me an app on my phone where I can scroll and look at pictures. I can see when other people like my pictures. That’s it. You got filters, comments, and some other shit. It’s a fucking simple app. Facebook and Instagram centralized service. How hard would it be for us to make a decentralized protocol that does the same thing as Instagram, or is the same thing as our Facebook feed? I contend not only does the technology already exist, it’s already been built at least dozens of times, but it has failed to garner user adoption. It gives us the knobs. It’s ad-free. It’s open-source. It’s decentralized. Anybody could use it and we’re still using Facebook. I’ll give you examples.There’s one called Mines. There’s one called Mastodon. The one that Jimmy Wales called WikiTribune Social. These are decentralized or open-source platforms where you can do all the same things you would do on Facebook, but users have not taken responsibility for choosing to use an alternative platform that preserves their own values. They’ve surrendered their own values to Facebook, Facebook’s profit motive, Facebook’s dopamine machine. It’s the wrong choice. You could say, “I can’t switch from Facebook to Mastodon because none of my friends are on Mastodon. Fine, take your friends.” How many friends do you have? It isn’t the 2,700 people who you’re friends with on Facebook. You don’t fucking need them. They’re assholes who are posting about somebody you don’t want to vote for anyway. Get rid of them. Take the seven friends who care about who got your back, who babysit your kid, who drive you to the hospital. Take your actual friends and go to Mastodon. You could choose that. That’s how I think about it. These things are complex and I’m trying to distill hyperbolic advice that’s good.To me, this is about demystification because what is missing here, on one hand, you have a bunch of people using dopamine machines or using the dopamine machines for evil. You then have this layer of people, the sub-Pablos crowd around the world who will listen to you talk and not sagely and feel good because they heard you speak. What they can get from you is you demystifying these things so you can give them some power to make some decisions. All of a sudden, the dark web will be called the dark web. It’ll be called happy salvation web or Disney web.When you lose privacy, you submit to manipulation and a lot of these problems that people are fired up about right now.Share on XIt’s not dark, it’s an enlightened web. That’s the goal and hopefully, we’ll get to dig into these things in future episodes. I have an idea for how to make an Instagram killer that could work so hopefully we’ll pick that apart.Do you take Bitcoin? Essentially, no Cypherpunks have any skin in Bitcoin. Why is this?It’s obvious. We’re Cypherpunks. We’re not currency speculators and the people who got rich on Bitcoin are largely currency speculators or a modern version of that, gamblers and opportunists. I’m not interested in that. We go to Vegas every year for DEF CON. I don’t think I’ve ever gambled once. It’s not what I’m into. Probably some story like that as similar for most other people like me who were around. I’m guessing I am one of the first 50 or 100 Bitcoin wallets on a floppy disc somewhere. I’ve no idea because I was mining to test it. I probably have millions in dollars in Bitcoin.You are slow.You got to remember I had a 5,000 core supercomputer.I was only getting one every few minutes like, “Why am I doing this?” Certainly, my machine is getting too hot.It was like, “Fuck it, my machine is getting too hot. I’ll shut it down.” I don’t even know the password and can’t get to get those Bitcoins. One of my friends in today’s price is pushing a $100 billion worth of Bitcoin on wallets that we don’t know that he doesn’t know the password to. His mining rig is half mining, half cracking trying to cross this off password. Eventually, if we can crack the password on the wallet then we self-fund the rest of our crazy ideas. It is what it is. I don’t have a lot of respect for the Ponzi schemes and things that have compost Bitcoin. That’s given cryptocurrency a bad name, but what I’m happy about is that it attracted a generation of coders to the crypto toolkit. That is exciting because it means as they imagined and create apps, protocols and services of the future, that will be a normal part of their thinking. You can see it happening first with blockchain, even though blockchain is 1 of 100 things in the crypto tool kit and the newest one in some sense. We don’t even need blockchain for a lot of stuff. We need the other tools that are there. We need people to think about designing things differently.When people hear blockchain and they think it AI, it’s a mystery, it’s electrolytes. I tell them the same sentence again and say database. I don’t need blockchain.At some point, you get tired of engaging at that level. At least Bitcoin, there’s nothing like making people into billionaires that attract attention to technology. I got to acquiesce to that. None of my other ideas for getting people excited about technology have been business successful.We knew that all this was going to do was to build a bunch of hydroelectric plants for no reason. We should have been invested in any way. We would have been in early on the pyramid. It’s true. There are many ways that could have made money with my hindsight.I didn’t take that job in 1986 with Microsoft in the marketing department. I’m glad I didn’t, but it is true that we’re not as rich as those other assholes that we could have been, but I do sleep well. There’s possibly one thing worth covering, which oddly we didn’t which is I had a unique experience with Nathan at the lab. For people who don’t know Nathan Myhrvold, not so much outside but he’s famous in tech for being the first CTO at Microsoft. Microsoft bought a company and started a software company in 1986. Nathan is a smart guy. He’s a physicist. He was trained as a physicist and he ended up working for Stephen Hawking. For some reason, he got into software and ended up at Microsoft doing all the Windows and all that stuff in those days. Nathan is a polymath’s polymath. I’ve been in the room with Nathan when we had all different kinds of scientists, oceanographers, paleontologists, entomologists, nuclear physicists, computer scientists. I’m a computer hacker collectively. It doesn’t matter what scientist you are. It’s hard to keep up with Nathan. It’s an extraordinary mind that is unique. Probably people who are not that many people know Nathan, but I’d say the ones who do probably think he’s the smartest living human. It’s partly that because he’s got such an agile mind that can go all the way down to bits and atoms. It can go all the way up to interplanetary and world domination schemes. It can across Biology, Paleontology, Physics, and all these things. It’s inspiring. I’m unusual, but even for me, seeing Nathan’s ability to think at any scale was influential and inspiring to me. What it meant was that when we took on problems, almost immediately jumped to the Global scale. What’s the actual scale of this problem in the world? Whenever we started to look at what kinds of inventions, technologies, solutions could we bring to it, it meant we would back out from there do the arithmetic. The math you learn in elementary school to add up, is this solution going to move the needle at that scale? You’ll get wildly different answers doing that than what most people are getting. That helped me a lot. I had a head start because of living with Moore’s law, you go through this process. I remember one time when I was married, I put a hard drive on the table and told my wife, “Look at that. That’s a one terabyte hard drive. It’s a thousand gigabytes.” She’s like, “I remember when you put the one-gigabyte hard drive on the table and told me it was a thousand megabytes.”The difference is for guys like Nathan and to some extent me but not as great of an extent, we had to train ourselves to believe that in a few more years, I’m going to put it hard drive down one petabyte hard drive. That’s hard for people to believe in their heart of hearts. Intellectually, they get it, but to live with that assumption and have it drive your thought processes, being able to think of those exponential scales, Nathan’s a good example of that. I learned a lot about solving big problems from that.There was much talk about education over the years, but it’s always about what we want to prepare the children for the future of tomorrow. It always seems to involve, “We need to be teaching eighth-grade math in fifth grade. We need to add more vitamin D to vitamin D,” but you’re an optimist. You’re a technologist. We are all living in the future. Where is that arc? Can you give the people at home an idea of what that looks like? I have a daughter. That’s probably the main way I think that through. I’m not a role model parent. She’s way more in charge of her education than I am. I’m trying to talk her into dropping out so that we can go travel the world since we don’t have to be anywhere except Zoom calls. She won’t do it. She’s like, “I want to stay in school and finish.” I’m like, “We could be traveling, going to a cool place and doing Zoom from anywhere. Why do you want to do it from Seattle?” I don’t know what her math skills are. They’re better than mine already. That’s weird. I’m not great at math. I didn’t get a lot of math education. I learned math on the job. I’m good at math. Being in eighth grade, she’s being taught harder math than I could do on my own. I could make it Mathematica do it, but I couldn’t do it. Do I worry that she going to be prepared for the future? Does she understand how to question things? She doesn’t take the shit. I tell her for granted, she doesn’t even believe some of the stuff I tell her like, “Why not? I’m a genius and you’re a kid.” She’s not taking that. That’s probably a good sign. There’s what skills I have. I’m forced to memorize the names, dates and phone numbers from history. All the capitals of the United States, the name all the presidents. I had to memorize that shit, Washington, Adams, Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison. She’s got Wikipedia in her pocket 24/7 since she was six years old. She doesn’t need to know Van Buren. She needs to know how to look him up, learn about what relevance he might have to whatever she’s doing at any given moment. There’s a different thing. She’s in a world where on YouTube she can look up and learn how to do anything overnight that’s known how to be done. There’s a tutorial and also a bunch of bullshit. She might use that power to learn how to braid hair. She might use that power to learn how to paint her Nike Air Force Ones. She’s using it for things that are idiotic, but when I was thirteen years old, I was on a fucking skateboard in Alaska learning nothing useful. I wouldn’t take it back. I want her to turn out in different ways from all the other kids and then I’ll be satisfied.One would be an agency and the second one you mentioned or implied discernment. That’s where the rubber meets the road. I don’t try to make her feel like I’m going to take care of her for her whole life. I’m like, “You figure it out.” She needs to figure it out because I’m going to die probably assassinated by an audience or on impact. Hopefully, after she gets out of high school and I can get into skydiving and riding fast motorcycles. Thanks. We should wrap this up.It’s great. It is my pleasure. Is there anything else?What will make this an interesting show is what has always made our conversations interesting is that we’re both willing to not be the same as the smartest guy in the room. I want to be in a room where everybody is smarter than me, except one guy. I could show how smart I am by picking on him.That’s important. That’s the only way that you go forward. It’s worked for me and I ended up in rooms with smart people. I learned a lot that way. I’m hoping that we can bring that to a bigger audience.Mentioned in this Episode:Bill Scannell Blue Origin Intellectual Ventures Lab BitTorrent Tor Browser Mark Shuttleworth Nathan Myhrvold Mastodon Minds WikiTribune Social Lance Ahern Keith Rosema Neal Stephenson Jeff Bezos Whit Diffie Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Lucky Green Jon Callas Tim May Jimmy Wales Napster Anonymous Remailers PGP AOL TOR The Dark Web BitcoinRecorded on October 8, 2020The post Hot Seat: Pablos Interviewed by Bill Scannell appeared first on .