We are on air, welcome Caribbean Rhythms, episode 122, this special, unusual episode. I have a guest from undisclosed Arctic location, not allowed to say, but he is Urbit Aficionado and Shitcoin, that is a crapto-currency shitcoin developer, and Urbit Aficionado. And Urbit does not stand for, I thought it meant like go unusual Indonesian board game, But that's not what URBIT stands for. I want to welcome on show Ezekiel Stark, URBIT Aficionado. Welcome, Ezekiel. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Ezekiel, welcome to the show. So let's just get to it. Before having you on, I asked friends, I will have URBIT enthusiasts on the show to discuss this new technology, what it means. And I asked, what would you like me to ask him?

Most of them are quite plugged into internet culture and internet this. They still don't know what exactly it means. What is it? Can you explain what is Orbit? Sure. It's a classic question. And it does take some explaining because Orbit has a larger scope, larger ambition than almost any other software project. Basically, there are two ways of describing what Orbit is. I can talk about what it is right now, or how do you run it, what do you do with it. Yes. describe, what's the promise of it, why is it exciting? Yes. So I think I can, I'll start with the promise, I think, and then we can, and then I'll kind of bring it down to what it actually is right now. Yes, please, I met Frog, I cannot say who the Frog is, but I met Frog recently, that most friends online

know and love, and he told me he knew nothing about Orbit before, but after talking Orbit people, He thinks Urbit is the future. I don't know what means, you know? I think Urbit is the future, too, and it's trying to be the future. So that's the plan. Urbit is building a standard for all of computation, everything from machine code, programming languages, operating systems, the network protocols that computers use to communicate with each other, the sense of identity on the internet, the internet itself. All of this needs to be thrown away and replaced with something much better. What's exciting about Erbit is that it really is a lot better. So Erbit's building something that's very similar to like a DNA for computing, right? So with biological organisms, the base pairs of DNA,

they always mean the same thing, right? Everything from yeast and bacteria up to people, it's exactly the same. Software doesn't have this. Machine code on one processor is something totally different from machine code. Another processor, source code written for one operating system, doesn't work on another operating system, et cetera. And to the extent that there are standards, they're all basically 50 years old. All the software that was designed in the 1970s, the Unix operating system, the internet as we know it, this is 50-year-old tech. And it's missing a lot of basic things that we need now, things like public-private key encryption, a lot of learnings from distributed systems from the past few decades, and a bunch of other stuff. So the promise, basically, of Urbit

is that you have this standard. It's a standard that becomes timeless. The version numbers go down to zero and then stop. And so then everything digital could have the same lingua franca, the way that biological systems have DNA as the shared language. So that means it has its own machine code, has its own programming language, its own operating system, its own protocols. And all of that can layer over what exists now. So that kind of brings me to what we have at the moment and really what does Urbit do for you right now? And it's a program that anybody can run on their computer that lets you install apps into it. And all of those apps are designed to use Urbit's peer-to-peer network. That means that my Urbit can send a message directly to your Urbit that's end-to-end encrypted.

Nobody else can see it. What this allows is individuals and groups of people to configure their own software and act as a group without anybody having the ability to interdict it. Please, it's hard for, I'm not computer expert, most of my audience also not. Can you, how would you explain this to complete layman in terms of computer? Is it, it sounds to be roughly you're describing new kind of internet type. Yeah, very much so. One way of describing it, it's an internet that works the way your grandma thinks the internet works. You know, for my phone to send a message to your phone, it actually can't find your phone on the internet. Phones are not findable, generally. They're behind a network address translation layer. They're behind basically a firewall.

And so both of these phones have to find something that's in the public internet. There are really kind of two different parts of the internet. There's the public internet and everywhere else. And both of these phones have to find something public in order to communicate at all. And this is why basically we get all of these centralized services. You get Facebook and all this stuff because if my phone sends a Facebook message to your phone, it actually sends a message to Facebook, and then they look at it and use that to predict your purchasing behavior, and then they send it to you. And so, this whole arrangement where we have these huge companies that control a lot of information flow and control a lot of other things, the reason that happens is fundamentally just a technical flaw,

because this stuff is all built on 50-year-old technology. How would this work exactly? Somebody, you say, uploads on their computer this program, Orbit, and it works just like any other file would work? How works? That's pretty close, yes. You download a program, like the Orbit program, and then you have to get an identity. So an Orbit identity is like a handle. Sorek Namtayev is an example. And it's actually a number, but there's pronunciation scheme for it. So then the reason it's done that way is so that all you need to do is, you know, get one of these handles which you can buy and then you own them with a private key the way you own Bitcoin or Ethereum. Once you have this handle, that's all people need in order to find you on the network. So

even if you're behind one of these network address translation layers, somebody else on their Erbit can type in your Erbit handle, send you a message, and that'll get straight to you. And so the Erbit peer-to-peer network handles handles that make sure that that always works in order to get this to work so you have to buy one of these handles they're pretty cheap you pass that to the urban program there's a little file you give it yeah and then you're up and running and now you have this thing that's like an operating system but for all these peer-to-peer applications yes I see well I want to ask you more in a moment what you mean by operating system because you are saying it is a kind of internet in other words some kind of communication system

but there's also an operating system somehow involved with it and I will ask you more about it in a moment but can you explain to audience so you download it this program orbit on your computer you you buy a handle and then you can immediately start talking to other people and it's not really a network or whatever you would call it this universe of orbit but within it's structured in a certain way right I've heard people talk about planets and stars and galaxies can can you explain what that is and how it works so an individual address or handle is called a planet and that's a four syllable handle and then the way that this peer-to-peer network it's sort of mostly peer-to-peer because the way that it gets a message across the internet from my orbit to Europe is that it has

the set of root nodes and routing nodes that live in the public internet and And so those are galaxies and stars, respectively. So galaxies are the root nodes, which means that they publicize internet addresses, their IP addresses. So everybody can find all the galaxies. As a user, you have to find some star who will sponsor you. And there's a galaxy that sponsors that star. So the star is responsible for forwarding packets to you. So the star has to also be in the public internet. If you want to send me some data, even if my route is running on my laptop, that's on some residential internet, you can send me a packet through my star, and that'll get to me. And so there have to be some nodes in the public internet in order for this network to work at all.

And actually, all networks that call themselves peer-to-peer have this. So Bitcoin has root nodes. Ethereum has root nodes, torrenting systems have root nodes. More formalistic about it, right? Urban is acknowledging, yeah, OK, there actually are these nodes there. And then there's some other sort of details about this where They're called supernodes, the galaxies and the stars that do the routing on the public internet. At least the galaxies can vote in the Senate. So that's how the network governs itself. It's a republic and there are 256 galaxies and so they all vote to determine various decisions. Can you explain to audience what are advantages of organizing a new internet in this way? In other words, what concrete advantages you give the user

over what already exists, this internet now? What you get is more control, effectively, as a person and as a small group. But even just as an individual, I have more control over how my apps interact with each other. And almost all the apps we use actually communicate over the internet in some way. And so what you get over other things like Signal, let's say. Signal is a step in the right direction. It is end-to-end encrypted. But what you get over that with Erbit is that with Signal, you can't just install other apps into it. You can't do integrations. if I wanted to share a calendar, have a calendar link inside of it, or do some sort of cryptocurrency thing, or collaborate on some document inside of Signal, I can't do it, right? It's not an extensible protocol.

I think probably most of my audience knows what Signal is and they know to use it and they know to use ProtonMail and that these are somewhat more secure things than, let's say, Gmail or WhatsApp or other messaging services, but I just want to focus on what precisely is the problem that Orbit is attacking here. Is it a matter of safety of communications from third-party snooping, or what is precise advantage that would give over existing internet and communications? It's autonomy. It's autonomy of groups. So with Signal, you can have a group chat. But that group can't do anything more than that. It can't install custom software into the group chat. It can't have programs running on each person's behalf that are listening to blockchains, filtering data for you,

making decisions, running automated businesses, anything like that. There's no extensibility. There's no configurability for the average user. And so it's hard to know exactly how bad that is, right? Because nothing actually allows you to do this. But we're so used to all these services that are just completely siloed from each other and where the users have no control. We have this sort of learned helplessness, like, oh, it'll always be this bad. It always has been this bad. But it really doesn't have to be that bad, actually. Someone using Signal generally just uses it as a text app, right? Yeah. Can you give an example of what somebody could use Urbit as something extra on top of that? Let's say you wanted to work on some software together.

This is one of the first things that's really exciting about Urbit. It's mostly exciting to developers right now, like people who write software. Let's say we wanted to have a software company, right? We want to manage a bunch of assets that we have. We want to collaborate on documents. We want to collaborate on code. We want to push that code. We want to deploy that code, manage some servers together, have permissioning, all this sort of thing. Right now, any group of people have to cobble together all these different services. You have different logins for all of them. And none of them share data models, really. So two different apps can be made to work together sometimes. It requires a very specific integration. It requires usually a whole company

to build any kind of connection between two different things. It's one of those strange things where when you think about it, if you're a programmer, you know that often these things really shouldn't be that hard, that these things are really similar to each other. And stitching them together requires a ton of work and practice. It shouldn't require that much work. And it's because there's no shared language, this thing. There's a little bit. A lot of these things speak to the HTTP protocol to each other, for example. It's the JSON data format. There's some. There's a little bit. But it's nowhere near as good as it should be. What ends up happening is that we as users end up sort of stuck with whatever client

is given to us by Twitter, and there's nothing we can do about it when it doesn't work right, or if we want to have it communicate with something else. Yes, you bring up Twitter, actually, everyone now talking about Elon Musk buying it, and He is under intense pressure simply for wanting to re-establish free speech, which was supposedly one of the cornerstones of liberal democracy that everyone keeps talking about, and yet he seems to be under intense attack for something so simple. And apparently the richest man in the world does not have the power to establish his own online forum with his own standards of free speech. You see the difficulties he's having. I wanted just to ask you, what do you make of this, what do you make of this Elon thing,

and is Urbit, you think, I've heard some friends say when many of us keep getting banned off Twitter, they keep saying, come to Urbit, come to Urbit. And I will tell you in a moment what I think about that and why I haven't done it yet. But what do you make of this Elon Musk thing? Let me ask you that first. Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know. I don't have any insider information there. But my impression is that Elon is trying to push it in a pretty good direction. And my guess would be that the men in black came and talked to him and said, yeah, you're not going to fire the trust and safety department. So I think he has limited room to operate. And this is the problem with these big centralized services, right? They're choke points for existing power structures to use.

What do you think they could do to him? Because people are saying that, yes, people are saying that they could even trump up charges and indict him, send him to jail just for wanting to reestablish free speech, but I think even before that they could maybe just deplatform Twitter from all kinds of Apple and Google services and so forth and turn it into another gab and a kind of corral kind of ghetto and that would be that and it would be inconvenient for them but they could make their own second Twitter. Is that a risk you think, and do you think Elon Musk maybe intends to build his own electronic platform system for payments, for apps, and so on? My guess is that he mostly wants to fix the immediate problems with Twitter that he really didn't like.

There's that, and then maybe there's also some kind of four-dimensional chess about some sort of assets and tax losses or something. In terms of what he wants to do with Twitter, it seems like he wants to open up the protocol, really. So instead of being a proprietary protocol where you have to use Twitter's client, I think he might want to open it up, meaning that anybody could write a client for it. Now, I'm not sure he'll get away with that, and he might have already backed away from those plans because I think advertisers wouldn't like it. And so this is what we've seen so far. You're asking about could they turn it into Gab, and there's already been some motion in that direction because a number of big advertisers have pulled out from Twitter.

There's some group that was telling the advertisers to pull out big economic pressure to Twitter. Yes. So we'll see. I think that if he does open it up, it's actually great for Erbit, because then Erbit can just be a Twitter client, but it'll probably end up being one of the better ones. Yes, you have to understand, I am programming retard. When you talk about proprietary protocol, I don't really know what that means, and I think much of my audience, although is interested in such things, does not know. I sort of get the sense of what you mean. But do you think that he would have to build his own universe of apps and providers and so on that cannot be deplatformed, I guess? I wanted to ask you that first before moving on to orbit. Yeah, he could try.

I don't think he's gonna get that far, I think that he'll have a lot of constraints on what he can do with it. I do think that he'll get the Babylon Bee back on, which is his stated reason for buying it, if for no other reason than if he didn't, I think he would lose a lot of face. My hunch is bring some of the accounts back on. I don't think he'll bring Trump back on the way some people want him to. But I think that in general, Musk, he does a lot of work with the government, right? All those companies, to my understanding, at least most of them get a lot of their money from the government, they need to go to government contracts. My impression is that he's pretty savvy, has some understanding of how those things work, and is doing his best not to sort of step in any.

I do think he would bring Trump back on, we can make bet about this. I also think that he intends to loosen the restrictions somewhat, but maybe never to to reestablish something like exist in 2016, or at least not for a long time, but even a neutral platform, I say the other day, I think can help us. A neutral platform would be a great improvement. And him fact-checking White House, which had never been done before, was a very funny act of trolling. But look, I don't know about Elon. I bring him up because we keep getting banned. We had, I think, great success in 2015, 2016, and even after moving conversation in country, but we keep getting banned and replaced with very sometimes unsatisfactory mirrors of ourselves. I'm talking about the anonymous, you know,

some people say right-wing sphere, I call it the faction of truth, but we keep getting banned. And so sometimes friends tell me, I am on Urbit, come on Urbit because, you know, Twitter will just keep banning you and we can talk here. And my objection to this and what I want to ask you and about Urbit because we were on forums long time ago and actually I started posting on forums maybe 15 years ago and my friend Nick Salo, he made Salo forums, I don't remember if it was 2010 or 2011, but we posted on that alone for many years. There are maybe 11, 12, 13 of us to start with. And then I start to go to Twitter in 2013 during the uprisings in France, because very exciting time. I said, okay, this is mass communication platform and it was actually Hartiste and Roush,

but especially Hartiste, Chateau Rossy, who got many of us to come on because he was doing such a good job on Twitter, trolling authorities and so forth. So we went on Twitter because it was a mass communication platform. That's where all the journalists and everything were. We could challenge them, make them look like fools there, trip them up with facts and evidence and so forth. And at first I got much resistance from people in our small forums. We say, why, you know, they look down on this. Why are you going in, you know, in this normy sphere? And I said, no, it's mass communications. And, you know, I wasn't the first one to do it. I'm not saying that, but more and more of us started to go on precisely to engage people. And so my thought has always been, okay, if we all get banned,

we will just go back to forums and talk there. And so that's the reason I have not gone on, on orbit yet, because to me it seemed like it doesn't have enough people using it yet, it's not mass communication, and you've already explained some of this, but can you make very clear for audience what would be different on orbit versus going on a small forum, such as I say? You mentioned signal, and I know that, but can you go into that in some detail? What would be the advantage of URBIT over these other things? And how do you solve the fact that it's not a mass communication platform? Can it become one? That's a great question. Can it become one? And that's a big part of URBIT's promise, that it will become one. Now, of course, for that to happen, for it to happen with full force,

it requires a lot of people to get on URBIT. Something equivalent to the number of people who are on Twitter. This is a problem whenever you're trying to build anything, any new network, is that you need people on the network in order for it to be valuable to broadcast to people on that network. But then why would you get on the network in the first place, right? So there's a bootstrapping problem there. But I think that these things make more sense when you think about, all right, what happens if, what does the world look like if everybody has an ERP? All right, like assume that it works, all right? So if you assume that it works, yeah, everybody who has a Twitter account instead of that, they have an ERP account, all right? And you can imagine that actually most of what programmers

called Web 2, goes away. So Facebook sort of becomes this vestigial thing, sort of like email. And Twitter goes away. Instagram mostly goes away. TikTok goes away. All these things. And instead, people have Urban. When people have Urban, they don't need any of those centralized services. And so if you get somebody who's a poster posting on Urban, then lots of people find them. There isn't anybody who can shut that down. There's no mechanism. There's no central choke point where somebody can say, All right, you're banned, basically. That would require taking all 65,000 orbit stars owned by a lot of different people and convincing all of them not to route packets. So it's just much, much more difficult. How many stars are there? About 65,000. Yes, because the reason I ask you know why,

because if you said 65, they would be rather easy to intimidate if they could be identified. But 65,000 is harder, I would agree with you. But so now we get to, you're saying this is the advantage. It cannot be shut down by, as even a small forum perhaps could. It's one of the major advantages, yeah. Is it anonymized? People want to know such things. So these 65,000 stars or nodes who are themselves users, for example, would they have anonymity? They can. Yeah, so it requires some operational security, Right? Just like doing anything anonymous with the computer. But it is possible and there are people who own stars and planets anonymously. The planet is the basic username that you mean, yes? That's right. Yeah, planet is the individual address.

And just out of curiosity, you know, how much is it? Is it a membership system or a one-time buy? one time buy and then in the future you'd probably have a contract with your star, will you pay them a few dollars a month to route package to you? Yes, so it would work in other words what Elon is saying now about Twitter Blue which costs seven or eight dollars a month just for Twitter access. You are talking about entire new internet ecosystem that is not centralized, that cannot be shut down by central authorities if even if they wanted, and about how much would such membership cost, you think, overall? Sorry to get such nickel and dime questions, but basic users might want to know such things. It's an important question, yeah. I've heard people say that people think it would be a cost

about like a Spotify subscription, so I think that's about $15 a month right now. That seems to be about what users want to pay, or what they're willing to pay for this kind of service. We should go break soon. I have been keeping you for a long time, Ezekiel. But before we do, I do want to ask you this extra question, if you have time to answer. First of all, when you say it is different from a small forum or signal, which could have a messaging group that maybe also cannot be shut down, I don't know, can signal be shut down? I have no idea how signal works either, by the way. Yeah, signal can be shut down. Yes, I see. So OK, so this would not be able to be shut down. That's a major advantage. What other advantages? Because you said that it would have other apps possible on it

and that you would have ownership of these apps. Can you explain that for a layman, what that would mean, what that would look like? Sure, yeah. There are a number of apps on it already. I think there are about 70, something like that. The main one that people use is Chat. There's another one, there's a Bitcoin wallet. That's another app. And so that's another thing. There was an app that came out recently called Radio where somebody could basically pick a video and then everybody else can sort of log into this really ephemeral chat room and talk about the video and then somebody else can pick the next video to run this sort of new experience, right? Almost like an art piece or something. But somebody made it on a weekend, I think.

And there's an app called Studio that lets you publish a website. And they're trying to have that compete with substack. So what it feels like for a user is that you log into Europe, and it feels like sort of logging into a browser, different apps doing different things. A lot of them run in the browser for now. So it feels pretty similar. And you're seeing the individual user, the so-called planet user, planet level user, who is not, let's say, computer illiterate like me, but they would have the power to use coding within orbit to make their own new apps and so forth. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, that's right. And I think actually that'll get easier over time because I think a lot of these simpler apps will eventually be written mostly by AI. The past year or so,

there's been a lot of work, a lot of improvements on getting computers to generate their own code. And so I think the positive way that that goes is that, you know, something like Siri where you ask your orbit to, you know, write a new program for you that copies all the data from one chat channel into another one, right? Or, you know, transcribe some video for you and, you know, puts that in your reading list. Well, no, but it's very interesting because you are describing entire new internet ecosystems that, excuse if I don't say it well, I do not know the language, but it's user-based, it's not centralized, cannot be shut down and it's not just chat, it would involve basically all the apps that people use now, but not owned by

central companies that can use the internet of things so-called to put conditions on you and many other things. That's right. What about something like Uber? Could it do something? Look, I've been keeping you for a long time. Why don't we take break and come back because I want to ask you on whether it can actually supplant existing internet and become mass adopted, you know? Let us go to break. What do you say? Yes. We have a smoke break and I am here with Ezekiel Stark talking orbit. We will be right back. Yes. Welcome back to show. I am here with Ezekiel Stark, an orbit enthusiast. We just come back. We were smoking cat claw Amazonian vine. I don't recommend this for noobs, for beginners, but Ezekiel, welcome back, and we are talking Urbit.

I want to ask you how Urbit is different from Reddit. Did Moldbug, in fact, say that Urbit is like Reddit, but you have to buy a new account if you tank your old one's reputation? Is that so? I joke, but tell audience, we start to, On last segment, we start to talk about possibility of mass adoption of orbit. Do you think there are prospects for that? And how would it happen? Because I tell you, my worry is that it could become another ghetto for nerds or dissidents or autists like many of these small forums that I used to post on. And that, I guess, my question to you now, What prevents Urbit from just being another ghetto for coders and weird dissident-type people like me? And what are its possibilities for mass adoptions?

Yeah, well, I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean, that is the risk. The risk that Erbit faces is exactly that, staying just for niche uses, and then having reputational problems and ending up somewhat effectively censored just by public opinion. I think that it does have good prospects, though, despite that risk, mostly because there are things that will be able to be built with Erbit that will be essentially infeasible to be built without them. Kinds of applications, things that involve games and cryptocurrencies and sort of a whole sort of ecosystem of apps all working together. Those sorts of things can be stitched together in Urbit much more effectively than on the current internet. The reason for that is technical. I can't really articulate it fully,

but what I can say is that the architecture of Urbit, the code itself, the way the system works, it's a beautiful machine. There's a timeless, monumentous quality to it that is not to be found in the rest of software. And so there are these questions of what can Urbit do for me? But a lot of what interests people, especially programmers in the system, is just intrinsic. It's just want to look at it, want to work with it. There are a lot of positive effects from that beauty, including the way that applications work with each other. They work with each other more seamlessly. And that's difficult to describe, but it's something that urban developers commonly report. And that's gaining steam. There are now a couple hundred people who have written code in urban, and most of them say that.

So you're saying the intrinsic beauty and sexiness just coding in orbit is going to attract more and more programmers, make better apps and this kind of thing, and that will attract more people eventually? It's part of it, yeah, so it's not just that the apps are more intrinsically appealing, but also because of some of the technical details of how this stuff works, the apps can interact with each other in a way that's easier for programmers to build, so it's cheaper, a lot cheaper for programmers to build these interactions between things. And also, you're starting with open protocols instead of proprietary ones, and I know that's kind of technical, but basically the landscape that Urban provides has the potential to capture a lot more economic value than existing systems also.

So actually, I can give an example that also answers some of the question you started to ask at the end of the last segment about Uber, Airbnb, all these other marketplaces. There are lots of marketplaces on the internet. the company that runs the marketplace takes a huge cut. It's usually 20 or 30%. I know people who have owned properties that they use Airbnb for, and that cut is pretty brutal. You mean the cut Airbnb takes? That's right, yeah. Same for Uber drivers, it's tough for them. There's no alternative at the moment. So a real alternative would use cryptocurrencies and Erbit, and you need something like Erbit to have a reputation, that's how a lot of these systems work. You have to have a reputation as a rider, as a

driver on Uber, and as a tenant and as a landlord on Airbnb. So there's this interesting phenomenon though, where if you have a system with reputation, and Erbit does allow reputation to accrue, if you have a system with reputation and uncensorable money, cryptocurrencies, then also programmable money, right, Ethereum is highly programmable. Those things combine to have a marketplace for, you know, Uber or Airbnb or Craigslist or any of these things, where nobody has that opportunity to take that 20% cut, which means that you end up at lower prices, which means that, right, like in the long run, it has a major structural advantage against these closed systems. There's a form of optimism there, I think. Yes, if you can undercut prices on some of these mega market-type places,

I think that would be a major attraction point, you know? Yeah, I think that'll be big. Then, you know, can Erbit get mass adoption? Yeah, I really think it can. So there's still some work to be done on the operating system itself to get it to be more reliable and faster and make sure it's secure, you know, things like that. You know, it's still under active development. but there's no sort of fundamental limitation of why it couldn't sort of take over. And I think that what's going to happen is developers are getting interested in it now. They're building some apps. And I think that at some point, one of those apps, probably something involving crypto would be my guess. You know, something like poker, right? It's actually pretty hard to build a good poker app

that's decentralized, that's a difficult problem. There are a bunch of things like that, decentralized games of various kinds, right? Maybe games that involve money, DAOs even, right? Decentralized or distributed autonomous organizations, which are essentially like virtual companies. All of these things, they're very difficult to build without Erbit, and they're very clunky. And so I think what's going to happen is people will start building a lot of these things with Erbit plus crypto. Eventually one of them will go viral, or maybe some combination of a few of them will go viral. And when that happens, you'll see a big wave of adoption. And I think that'll bring on the first wave of mass users. And then it'll snowball from there. Something else will happen. I don't know what.

That's very plausible. That's a very plausible path, I think. Ezekiel, let me just interject for a moment, because we are promoting orbit here. And many people who listen to me have concerns about their privacy and anonymity. And you say, with some precautions, You can have anonymity on Urbit, just I want to tell people you should use a VPN, right? A virtual private network to mask your IP, because otherwise, I mean, just like you would go anywhere on the internet, people should already know to use this. Otherwise, your IP would show on Urbit, yes? Yeah, that's right. I would actually make another note there, another caveat, which is that Urbit might have security flaws at the moment, that it really might. And so it's worth being careful for now and sort of play with

it, but it's worth being careful at the moment. Yes, but I think it can be quite secure, and people should follow. There are several frogs and associated friends who have made manuals for OPSEC, operational security, how to mask your identity on the internet. people should be following those anyway. I know, I assume you can buy a membership on Urbit with Ethereum, that's how it's bought, yes? The planet you pay in Ethereum. And there are anonymous ways of getting cryptocurrency and so forth, actually I will ask you about this in a moment, and I just want to remind audience, one of the safest ways, at least in the United States, that you can pay online anonymously, you put a baseball cap and a sunglass on, you CVS, you go prepaid card and you pay in cash.

And the prepaid card can be accepted, I think, in most online things. Is that not correct, you know? Maybe you don't want to comment on this, but the path you mentioned to mass adoption, where you have certain apps that work on orbit but not on other internet universes is very plausible, I think. But what about a case then where some pervert like me comes up with an app like Tinder, but instead of Tinder, it's to pay in cryptocurrency for a girl and so on. In other words, it would be like Tinder but prostitution. You know that this could potentially be a very popular application. I'm not saying you should accept that. Actually, I don't know if you, two questions. Would you have the power to ban such an app? And second of all, would not a state say, wait a minute, this is illegal

and you are promoting illegality through this decentralized system and we're going to shut it down. I'm sorry to ask, but would this not be, yes. Yeah, so Erbit itself does not come with global censorship tools. And it's not very easy to do that with Erbit. Erbit's, of course, not the only thing that's like that. Signal, for example, does do things like that as well. But the risk that a state actor might try to shut down Erbit is a real risk. It gets into a bunch of complicated technical questions of exactly how would they go about doing that, what could be done to fight against it. It becomes sort of a cat and mouse game. An interesting sort of question is a bit torrent protocol, torrenting, where there has been a cat and mouse game going on between internet service providers

and torrenting for, I think, over a decade now. Internet service providers really don't like it. I don't know if they have legal liability issues as well, but at the very least, it tends to use a lot of bandwidth in the upload direction, which they don't like. And so they've been trying to shut it down, and they haven't succeeded. It's difficult to shut down these sorts of things entirely, especially when there are a lot of people using it. This applies to crypto, too, right? So a lot of people for 10 years have said, all it takes is for the government to ban it and then it go away. And that mostly hasn't happened, although a few countries, I think, have banned cryptocurrencies at various times. If I remember right, Nigeria did for a while. And then the usage of it went up during that,

and then they un-banned it. I think a lot of Nigerians actually get paid from the first world in stablecoins, so in crypto, it's just more convenient. So it seems like kind of a bad move on their part to turn that off, but I don't know. But in any case, it didn't work when they banned it. I think if the US banned it, it would be very different. Band what? You mean cryptocurrency? Yeah, band crypto, yeah. Well, yes, actually I was going to ask you about this next, because the entire universe of orbit, as you describe it, seems to be integrated with cryptocurrency. And I actually wanted to ask you about this possibility of cryptocurrency being shut down next in some detail. But what about orbit itself? Can the system somehow be shut down by the government?

And they could very easily use the existence of an app, like I just said, which as anarchic, if you want to be anarchic capitalist and so forth and say that's a good app, Tinder for prostitution, but I think all they would need to do, Ezekiel, is send a provocateur programmer on your orbit, on orbit, and have them engage in some type of trafficking, human trafficking like this, And it would be a broadly publicized case. The middle-aged moms would be outraged. And Uber and Airbnb and all the companies you are threatening will be rubbing their hands together in glee that they are not going to be put out of business by being undercut by your apps. Yeah, in fact, they would probably fund such an effort. Yes, they would be stupid not to try such a thing.

And they could just pay one of the Nigerians you just talked about to do it, it would never be traced back to them. So I'm guessing, I ask, how do you stop that? Or how, first of all, would the response of government shutting you down, could they physically do that? And second of all, how do you prevent this kind of chain of events I just mentioned? I'll answer the, how do you try to shut down the network? you can make it illegal to run an erbit. I think that's fairly unlikely, actually, just based on precedent. It's not illegal to run a general purpose computer, despite the fact that you can do similar things with those. But anyway, they could do that. I think maybe more likely would be a softer ban, like what happened with, if I remember right,

with Amazon Web Services and Parler, where they just basically, you know, they kicked, Amazon kicked off Parler, Parler wasn't made illegal, but Amazon said, we're not gonna do this, right? So private companies run all these cloud stuff. And so if people are running their orbits in, you know, other people's cloud, such as Amazon Web Services, then the Amazon could say, we're not gonna run our orbits. They already do this with crypto. You can't, they have this in their terms of service. You can't run like a crypto mining node on Amazon Web Services. So there was precedent there. But of course, people can move to different hosts. So that's sort of easy to defend against. A more difficult attack to defend against would be internet service providers trying

to shut down the Urbit protocol, the network protocol. So looking at packets and saying, oh, this is an Urbit packet. I'm not going to let it go through me. And so if they did that, then basically Urbit would have to tunnel its protocol through something else, such as a VPN protocol. So this is actually pretty easy to do. Technically, all kinds of things get tunneled through VPNs. From the outside, nobody can tell what kind of traffic is going through the VPN. Basically, there may be a little metadata leaks, right? So yeah, you would want to tunnel the protocol through something else, and then it's much harder to shut down, but you would still have a cat and mouse game. Yeah, I mean, interestingly, even China, they have the Great Firewall, of course,

but a lot of people in China still use VPNs. I don't know how many, but it's still very common, right? like everybody in China has seen American TV shows, even though they're not supposed to. I think it's relatively unlikely that the URBIT protocol will ever be shut down, but it does depend on this kind of attack that you're describing with the reputational attack where somebody creates just some horrible thing on URBIT, and then as a way to make URBIT look bad. The best strategy for dealing with that is to just get ahead of it by having a lot of legitimate use cases for a bit first, right? Bringing joy to the people, right? It's bringing jobs and all these other things. So I think that's actually pretty likely. I think most of the interest in Urbit is not for doing illicit business.

And so, I mean, that could change, of course, but older people I know are aware that this is an issue, right, they're aware that this is a risk, that somebody could build something specifically for illicit purposes and say, yeah, this is the new evil dark web. And so people aren't building that, they're building other stuff. It would be a big fight, I think, if that happened. It wouldn't be a surefire victory. Yes, I see. And in these connections, and I wanted to ask you about cryptocurrency, you know, everyone has high hopes about future cryptocurrency. There have been at least, what, two major runs on crypto now that has gone up to incredible prices. And it could, well, I have two separate questions about this on whether you think cryptocurrency could be banned.

First of all, I know I've heard some arguments, you cannot ban Bitcoin, you cannot ban blockchain and so forth, but really if United States government said you are not allowed to use Bitcoin for transactions and if you do, you go to jail, maybe you or I would love freedom so much that we would still illicitly use it, but the vast majority of people are going to be cowed into not using it. And I guess my question is, what stops eventually the American government especially, but any other government, from doing just that? Because governments, Ezekiel, want control over their own currency. They do not want an independent currency. That is a major threat to them. That's an existential threat, actually. So, why would they not eventually ban it the way I just said?

And once there is a law like that, why do you think that's just not the end of crypto right there? I think it's likely that the U.S. will, if not try to ban crypto outright, then something approaching that. I think actually probably the most likely thing would be that they do something like what FDR did in 1934 and when he confiscated everybody's gold. And the government paid something like market price for it, I think, but then devalued the currency severely over the next couple of years. So effectively just stole everybody's assets. The way that they would do that, I think, is by leaning on the few big companies that actually house most of these assets for most people. So Coinbase, that's the big company that has it's something like 70% of people who own crypto own it through

an exchange right which means that they don't really have it there's the old Bitcoiners adage not your keys not your coins and this is why they say that is that I think it's very likely that the US government at some point will will lean on come coinbase in some way and it might be that they say okay we're replacing all of all the Bitcoin that you own and all the ethereum and everything else that you own with an equivalent amount of dollars that are, you know, maybe some CBDC, central bank, digital currency that they roll out, which is very similar to normal dollar, except that they'd have a little bit more, it'd be a little bit easier for them to just, you know, freeze it or track it. And they're working on that, basically saying, yeah, here's some dollars for your crypto,

crypto's ours now, and then devalue the dollar, which I think they might need to do, right, the U.S. government I think is having some solvency issues where they have a lot of bills to pay, having trouble coming up with the funds. So if they start to get desperate and feel like their back is up against the wall, then crypto is a nice soft target. So one way to protect against that is just to own not your keys, not your coins. Get your crypto onto a hardware wallet if you're going to own it. If you are going to own crypto, you should own it for real. This goes for your Erbit also. You own Erbit in the same way, right? You have a private key that controls it. And so, yeah, you should do that with a hardware wallet the right way. But then, yeah, they might also impose some sort of

punitive tax on crypto transactions, something like that, or just impose very onerous regulatory burdens, right? So you have to report every time you looked at it or something. So if they did that, then they would basically neuter crypto within the US. And then the big question, I think, is could they extend that ban to other countries, right? Because within each country, it's true what you're saying, that your control of the currency is one of the major powers that a government tends to have, and so they don't like that power being taken away. But for a lot of countries, that's actually an external power that controls the money, right? The petrodollar system. And so if you're not the US and you don't want the US to become the one-world government,

not allowing the US to ban crypto within your country actually gives you a big advantage. Because then you have all these people trying to get out of the US or Western Europe would probably follow suit, I think. So you'd have people leaving the OECD countries, going to the third world en masse, maybe not huge migrations, but quite a few people with money might do that, or they might just send their crypto there, or you spend their crypto there. So if you have crypto off-ramps is what that's called, so some places where people can spend the crypto, then it's still useful. And so not everybody's going to move some countervailing geopolitical pressures against every country kowtowing to the US if the US tries to ban it. I don't think this future is set in stone, actually.

I think that a lot of this actually depends on the specific technologies that people build and a few high-powered autists can shift the landscape. No, it's very interesting speaking of autists because as I say, two major krapto runs unless I'm wrong and there might probably will be another one or two. I don't know what you think about future of krapto. If for no other reasons then building wealth is very difficult in entire world right now. And, you know, people want to make money and they see it as a casino and they will probably keep putting money in crap, though, to, it'll keep going up from time to time. I don't know what you think about that, but already it's gone up. And people on, that I call the frogs or some people call it dissident right, I don't like that word,

But let's say the frogs have already bought into krapto quite early. So I don't think I'm revealing anything that opposing authorities don't already know. But many, many frogs have made a killing on these internet monies called krapto. And imagine, let's say one, two, three more krapto runs, and you will have, again, I do not know exact order of magnitude, but many, many more frogs than would be acceptable to the government would be multimillionaires at many times over. I would say it would not be hundreds, it would be in the thousands or tens of thousands actually. So how would this regime accept, you know, the new millionaire class being so-called racist frogs? they would flip out. In fact, they already are. And so you mentioned possibility of high tax.

What would stop them with public approval from the usual demographics that approve such things saying we are instituting the George Floyd memorial tax on windfall crypto profits at 80 to 90% so that we will not have this new, you know, new millionaire, billionaire class of frogs. We need to, that's an existential threat to us. We're getting rid of them. 90% of what you own is ours. And again, this just variation on what I asked you before regarding banning, you say they could leave, but I know crapto people right now in United States who are trying to leave and it's not so easy. United States tax law, I think, who would still tax you on what you have made? They have a 27% exit tax if you try to renounce citizenship from the US on all unrealized capital gains.

So basically, if you've made a bunch of money on crypto or anything else, then you haven't sold it, right? So you still own whatever asset went up, then it's a 27% tax. If it's over a certain amount, I think around $2 million, that's how they do it. And I've actually heard rumors that it's worse than that, in that if you have a lot of money then they really don't want you to leave, and they might make your life difficult if you try. Do you see this as possibility to either banning crypto or effectively banning it? I know the solution you just gave that certain other governments, especially those with weak currencies, I know I lived for a while in Argentina and a lot of people use cryptocurrencies there even for daily transactions or to do business because you know or certainly as

a proxy for the dollar they use it all the time but is that the only solution that thousands or tens of thousands of not just frogs but people who love freedom and don't want to get sheep sheared in this way they would have to leave the country? There may be other things that people can do I mean it depends on how they own the crypto right? Because if they own it in a way where, you know, it's traceable that they have it, yeah, then the government might be able to find them and, you know, track them down and get them to cough it up. There are also people who, you know, got it in such a way where the government doesn't know that they have it. And so in that case, those people could keep it, keep it hidden,

maybe wait out the ban, assuming that it'll get unbanned at some point. But I don't know, yeah, it might be that they have to leave in order to keep their assets. This has certainly happened before but but you're saying it's not a given that it will be that governments especially United States government will want to ban it this way but you started to say it's not a given you say that I don't think scenarios where they don't want to do that you know well the US government is very big and there are a lot of different pieces of it and some of those pieces like crypto or at least I mean intelligence people use it for example and then there There are other parts of the government that get lobbied by industry.

A lot of traditional finance firms have gotten into crypto, if not almost all of them I think are in it now. And so those, you know, those firms have some power. They lobby for it not to be banned because they're invested in it. And there are governments abroad like, yes, institutional adoption of crypto maybe does not make it a given that this scenario I say will happen. But I still think Ezekiel, even with institutional everything and factions in American society loving it, how will these people accept? Because if there is, first of all, many frogs have already made a killing on this and have become millionaires and so forth. But if this continues one or two more runs, and it's going to be, as I say, orders of magnitudes of so-called racists, or at least people who are maybe not racist,

but maybe are techno-libertarians of the Elon Musk variety, and imagine, okay, he has many billions, but imagine many, many people like him who have five million to 100 million, and a lot of these so-called would be deemed racists or fascists by the United States government. How would they ever accept this, even in the best scenario you say? If that's how it's presented, then maybe they never will. but I think actually there are big chunks of crypto at least that currently aren't usually perceived that way. So Ethereum especially, I would say. The Ethereum brand is not anything like what you're describing. And the way they present themselves. It's not perceived to be, but it certainly is in terms of who has made a lot of money on Ethereum. I mean, I'm not keen to publicize that,

but the government knows who people are who make money on that. And it is people they would consider naughty racists. I mean, it's not just them, but it's, you know it is many, many of them. I don't know, my understanding is that people like the WEF are kind of into Ethereum. There's a lot of crossover there. I think that they might think that they can co-opt Ethereum. And there's some risk of that, I think. The Ethereum people certainly are at least somewhat worried about it getting co-opted, right? So that's the other strategy that the government could take generally would be instead of trying to completely ban these things, they try to get control of them in more subtle ways. So then when you start to think through that, and that's, it's softer, right, these governments

they tend to prefer using soft power if they can. That's sort of what we saw this year with the tornado cache sanctioned, right. So a part of the U.S. government sanctioned tornado cache, which was a way of anonymizing crypto. Yeah, so they put that on a sanctions list. Is that the same, excuse, I am a noob at this, is that the same as one of these tumblers? It's a kind of tumbler, yeah. Right, the government's basically just trying to force everybody into a sort of corral where they know who owns what crypto. Yes, they're preventing people, just to make clear for audience, they're preventing people from anonymizing the provenance and transactions of their cryptocurrency. A lot of people I know think that that was, I think I agree with this, that was sort of

of the opening salvo of the government's war against crypto, and it hadn't really started. Certainly the Ethereum ecosystem treated it as such, that there's a lot of development work that they're doing to nullify that kind of threat to the extent that they can. So that's a very complicated technical subject, and I don't know all the details there, but I know that they take that threat very seriously. Yes, we talk it in future, but tell me, okay, in terms of absconding to foreign lands and governments who are trying to opt out of, let's say, a world centralized currency system, there are some governments who have either allowed cryptocurrency on, you know, I know many cryptocurrency people are moving to Portugal because of holes in the laws there, but there

are others who have adopted cryptocurrency. I know you have studied some of them. And this very colorful president of El Salvador, Bukele, he made Bitcoin one of nation's currency. Do you care to comment on that? How does that work? And what are prospects for future based on that? Right. I think it's an interesting example of a country not playing ball with the IMF and the U.S. and American monetary policy. And so I think the Bitcoin stuff, my understanding is it's more symbolic than anything else. But symbolically it's important. And El Salvador actually boycotted some conference that the U.S. was throwing along with three other Central American countries. So the U.S. isn't necessarily getting its way with everybody. Depending on how things go, maybe they force their way.

It's certainly happened before. It certainly happened in Latin America. That's another one of those things where I don't think the future is set in stone yet. Yes, I am fond of Bukele. He very colorful, but I did have a friend who described what he did as a novel way. His innovation was to find a new way to bankrupt a Latin American country, as if they haven't found a hundred different ways to do it already. His new way was to buy in at the top of a cryptocurrency run and then Bitcoin fell. But I think, yes, but I think you said that he didn't buy that much and that their economy is actually doing decently right now? That's at least what he claims, yeah. And there's some evidence for this. I think tourism is up. General, I think GDP is up at least some.

And they started to buy back some of their own debt. And Bukele said that the money that they've lost on Bitcoin is a much smaller amount than the other positive things. But it is true. I heard the rumors that the United States was goading on the criminal gangs there, and he put the criminal gangs down. Because is that just a conspiracy theory, or is it? Oh, I'm sure that's true. Yes. Yeah, in fact, Bukele posted an interesting screenshot on Twitter of a conversation that he'd had with some American ambassador-type person who was trying to get him to release some guy from jail who'd been caught on video taking bribes from the gangs. I don't know exactly why the US does that. Why do they support the gangs there? It might just be a sort of general policy.

It's called GNC, but this is a family show with you, so I cannot explain what that means. I couldn't possibly know what that means, yeah. I do think they are essentially trying to keep other places down in order to at least have relative superiority over them as they're having their own problems. I'm not an expert in this, but my understanding is they did something similar in the 70s, they had economic problems. And in the context of Central and South America, they're trying to keep the Lebanese man down. I don't know if Bukhil is Lebanese or some other type of Araboid, but they run all the commerce there. Yes. The Palestinian man down is the United States government trying to keep him down. They run all the commerce in West Africa also.

In some countries, I think it's Christian Palestinians, and in other countries it's the Lebanese, and in some it's the Greeks. But the United States did this before during the Obango administration when Honduras, I believe it was in Honduras, yes, they had the overthrow of a dictator, a president so called who had the dictatorial bent and the military overthrew him and I think it was the Syrian businessmen in that country who were behind that coup, which was a just coup, I think, both morally speaking and according to their constitution, but the United States again chimped out when they did that because the United States supports GNC. But this family show, I want to ask you, Ezekiel, this very long segment, I hope you don't mind, but I have one more question.

There are all these conspiracy theories now, and I don't say that disparagingly, because I'm afraid of this also, of the so-called smart cities idea, where you see maybe this, I hear emerging in China now, where the so-called internet of things, everything connected to internet, not just Uber, where they can shut down, essentially your transportation or taxi or Airbnb, which is just hotel, you know, you can just go to normal hotel. But really everything, your fridge, your car, the electricity in your house, your air condition, everything connected to internet. And so everything that you own and interact with can be shut down. Let's say they can put, some of the wilder theories go, they can put a chip in you and to have anything work, this chip needs to interact with whatever,

whether you take the subway or anything else, it needs to interact with that. And if your social credit score goes down, if you are deemed to have said naughty things or to have done something the government doesn't like, that's it. You cannot use anything anymore. You cannot open your fridge. First of all, do you think this dystopian tech nightmare is a possibility? And second of all, is orbit something as a decentralized internet, something that would make this a moot point, that would cancel out this possibility? This is a huge risk. This is the primary negative future that I see happening that I don't want to happen. And orbit is one of the major pillars on the other side of that trying to prevent it from happening. What you're talking about of this internet of things stuff

And of the social credit score type things, those are both pretty real already. So cars have been like this for about 15 years. I know a guy who refused to buy a car later than, I think it was 2006 or 2007, because they had remote driving capabilities. And a lot of the software in cars is known to be pretty porous and not that difficult to break into. So cars are already like this. Internet of Things devices are notorious for being like this. the smart light bulbs, et cetera. When you buy an orbit planet, it comes with its own network of four billion addresses underneath it so that you can have a, they're called moons. Moons, orbit, planet. And so your car could be a moon. Your light bulb is a moon, and you have a lot of them. So the idea is that all these internet of things devices

should be completely owned by you. They don't phone home to some third party that are, you know, to some centralized service. The Ring cameras are another example of this. The Ring sort of home surveillance cameras type thing, where people put them on their doors to not get robbed. But there are a lot of really nasty stories about those, where people, you know, found ways of breaking into them, and like the movie Gaslight on people, and worse. That stuff is bad already. And you can clearly see it getting worse, and if you imagine something like Neuralink, or one of the other Musk companies, at that point that's a neural interface that they're trying to build. You know, if that thing works, I do not want a neural interface that is controlled by some third party.

I mean, you're basically building a whole country of slaves at that point. It's absurd. Yeah, I think the need for something like Erbit becomes a lot more obvious if you project into the future a little bit and think about, yeah, okay, what software do I want to run on my neural interface? It's like, yeah, you better own that, because otherwise it owns you very directly, you know, move your arms around. So the other side of that that you're asking about is the social credit score. There are pieces of that that are starting too, right, where somewhere in Europe they had some sort of credit card deal about carbon credits. Yes. I don't know exactly what it was, you got a better rate on a credit card or something like that.

There's clearly a big effort to try to store commerce toward ESG, environmental, social, governance. I think it's part of this whole sort of de-growth cult, basically, which I think is one of the most evil things on the planet. planet. Yes, well I want to talk to you at length somewhat on the next segment about that. I have kept you for quite a while here Ezekiel. Why don't we take a short break and we can talk about techno dystopian or utopian future when we come back. But I think this very powerful use of orbit if you can push this aspect and explain to people that it makes this centralized technological control impossible even then I am afraid that more people love convenience than freedom but let's continue talk about this in next segment we talk about

future of technology what do you say so good very good we will be right back Ezekiel, welcome back to the show. I have special guest Ezekiel Stark here, who is Urbit, a special enthusiast. And here we are talking also about technological future of mankind. Will it be dystopia or otherwise? And on a last segment we mentioned this trend among so-called woke capital, large corporations, which are using something called ESG which is just another acronym fig leaf for basically communism to take money and reinvest it in social justice causes as they see it and so forth and I just wanted to ask you Ezekiel your opinions on well this This whole thing, Internet of Things, which means objects tied electronically to a central

authority that can turn them off and on based on things you say, based on things you see, obviously none of this has anything to do with economic growth as such or with technological progress. It is rather a perversion of technology in the service of primitive social controls. And you started to say something I thought very interesting about how this degrowth mindset or degrowth morality is one of the most evil things. And maybe you would like to comment on this because unfortunately I see these types of ideas come also into our sphere. We who are, let's say, critics of normie morality or of the regime. There is all this tendency people say you should move to a cabin in the middle of nowhere and grow mushrooms in Alaska, you should become a homesteader, leave the cities, do not engage

in the political struggle aside from the way you do that is you leave cities and you go and maybe you pray, you pray in church and you have a family and you keep to yourself and you move back to this so-called traditional village life or traditional homesteading life. So, variations of this have come on our side too. I disagree with this for a number of reasons and I imagine you do as well because I've talked to you before, you've called it cottagecore. I mean, that's what they call it, cottagecore. We will return to the cottage, traditional cottage-hobbit way of life. What's your opinion on all this? I know maybe you don't like. Yeah, that's right, I don't. And I think it's a losing battle, basically.

It's not even a battle. It's not even fighting the battle, it's essentially a form of retreat. I think that people's attitude toward technology is misguided. I think Kaczynski was wrong, actually. Kaczynski had a point, point, but fundamentally he was not right. The right thing to do is not to throw away all technology and go back to, you know, banging on things with sticks. That's not the telos of man. It's not exciting. It's not particularly honorable, in my opinion. No, I understand. Look, I have friends who do something like that, right? And I understand that I don't mean to trivialize the matter. I understand that for guys who have families they're trying to protect themselves and protect their families. Okay. And that it can be a big

ask to do more than that. But I do think it's important, and I think basically this attitude that technology is necessarily evil, it's extremely widespread. And I don't know exactly why, but I can give some examples of where that shows up. So, Natty Iglesias just posted on Twitter recently that the New York Times instituted a policy in maybe 2016 or so, the policy of never portraying technology positively. They would only ever write negative stories about tech. The New York Times, this is the so-called neoliberal, which is another word that describes nothing, the neoliberal technocratic New York Times that is supposed to usher us into a Blade Runner future according to some people like Alex Jones, but they have a policy of, what you just said, never covering technology positively, right?

Apparently this was known to most journalists for the past several years, and they didn't bother talking about it until now, I don't know why he brought it up recently. You know, it's not just that, it's also pretty much any science fiction. You're not going to encounter science fiction where some scientist invents something and wow, it's great, and everybody loves it, and that's what saves the day, is that he invented something. He is. Basically, never. sci-fi ends with the new technology being essentially destroyed, and the status quo being regained. The one big exception is Interstellar, I think, you know, which... Oh yeah, I never saw the end of that. I just couldn't handle Matthew McConaughey in space, I couldn't suspend my disbelief.

Yes, I thought Interstellar was a good movie because it was one of the few that showed Negatively, the kind of society you're describing, it's run by HR type women who say that space travel is evil and we need to live closer to our animal selves and work in agriculture and that the world was destroyed by technology and actually the only salvation for mankind in that movie is space travel, you know, they have to filter it through having a female heroine, but I found the movie rather unusual in making that point. I do agree that rest of science fiction has a steady drumbeat of technology, evil, and we need to arrest development at present state of things and simply use them to forward social justice. Some people should not move ahead, everyone should be moving equally, if moving at all,

you know? I do think there are reasons to be very suspicious of modern technology. A lot of it has been horribly misused or grown into abominations. The American healthcare system is extremely corrupt. And the other forms of recent tech have also been bad for people. I mean, look at nutrition, right? That's sort of the obvious one. You've got 80-something percent of Americans are overweight or obese, and nobody can say why, for sure. I mean, it's just an abject failure of basic health. Well, and let's not forget the idiotic research into pathogens that is what most likely led to this so-called pandemic recently, and then, of course, the cure to it, which is also nightmarish, because at best, the vaccines seem to do nothing, and at worst, they are, you know, they're very,

they're quite, they could be very dangerous. They were used to destroy countless lives through the mandates, so I think most people see what happened over the last two or three years and they say no more thank you no no more of this so-called technological progress I mean how does that happen how technology become a misuse in this way yeah I think it is because the the state that we have thinks of itself as a technocratic state and so when it when it does evil things it pretends that their technologies right or uses technologies in evil ways some of it might be a regime complete problem like so many American problems. So wait 100 years for a coup and then maybe it'll get better. I have this thought that there are all these problems in science, these open problems, things

like quantum computing, the clear fusion, various forms of biotech. I often wonder whether there's something about institutional science that actually prevents them from getting done. If the culture of scientists and their funding models and all these things, if they flipped around, Maybe they go back to something more like the gentleman scientists model from 100 years ago or more, or maybe some new model. If that switches, I have a feeling that some of these problems that seem always 20 years away might actually get solved. You mentioned quantum computing. Do you believe that this possibility, I have friends who are scientists who say it is mostly a matter of PR and will never come about, Or at least not in any foreseeable future and same with so-called artificial intelligence

And I don't know if you read my Scott Laughlin, but Yes, would you get to comment on these the the fake fields of nanotechnology? artificial intelligence and quantum computing which Mostly seem to be a creation of science journalists, but I don't know Well, I think there are remote possibilities and certainly over a lot of these things Yeah, they pretend to be just around the corner or pretend to be 20 years away and then stay 20 years away. You know, of those, the only one I've looked into in any detail is the quantum computing, strong general artificial intelligence, nobody even really knows what that is. But I do think there are real technologies that can be built, that will be built as soon as people who could be doing science, real science, start doing it.

And that includes some academics and a number of guys who went to work at Facebook. What's happening at Facebook, is this, is through what they're saying about virtual reality? They're certainly trying. I have a feeling that's going to be harder than they think. I wouldn't take the bet, personally. I don't know the details of exactly what they've built. I do think that the positive, you know, the potential benefits of technologies are often just ignored or people don't even think of them. I think it's actually, most people I think just don't have a picture in their head of what the world looks like when it's better, better technologically, better socially. I think there's a rampant doomerism on the right and the left, actually. They look a little different.

And I think the doomerism is a psyop, essentially. In what sense? Well, there's no point in doing anything if it wouldn't go anywhere, right? If it's doomed to failure, then why do it at all? Well, we can talk more. I want to get into what you've called an attack on cottage score, and attack on the return to so-called traditional life close to the Earth. Because I think it's actually a quite profound subject, opens up many other questions. But before we get to that, you mentioned virtual reality. The problem in entertainment today is, let's say you have movie director, someone like David Lynch. I've heard sometimes people in Hollywood tell me such thing, that someone like David Lynch could never make it today. It's, Hollywood has ruled no white man allow anymore.

And I am told that by some friendly people in that so-called industry, who they insist they're not exaggerating, that this is the Hollywood program now. So I have also heard that specifically from people who work in it. Yes, so they say, so Hollywood is done in that sense. Perhaps there are possibilities maybe in other countries for parallel Hollywoods in other countries. But for now, Hollywood seems to be done and a man of great talent, like say, a new David Lynch, a new Scorsese, they cannot come about. On the other hand, in these new platforms like Netflix, ZET also is a platform owned by others and they're using to make a very bad series. Nobody watches them. It's not that they're woke, but if you notice, every shit flick series, Ezekiel, every shit flick series looks the same.

The same lighting, the same kind of camera quality, the same cinematography, because they don't have people who have skill working on them. And so, all of entertainment is becoming homogenized into this social justice, drumbeat, low-quality thing like the most recent example of Lord Damn Rang's series. And so, these people have told me if there's any hope for entertainment, it would be a new area of virtual reality. It is there that, let's say, new independent platforms could be built. But they say if you go into some of these new virtual reality worlds, they are already heavily populated by furries. I don't know if you've heard about this, but the furries are very big into virtual reality, so they are getting a first footstep in that before anybody else.

I just wanted to ask you if you have any thoughts on these matters, the future of virtual reality, a possibility of it being an alternative to these moribund entertainment platforms in Hollywood and what's going on with the furries thing? Yeah, the furries thing is beyond me. I think you have more detailed analysis of that than I do. Oh, you're attacking me now. I never dress like Annie Moore. I knew a furry once. He said that furries are the intersection of gay and geek. Well, I've heard that some tech companies, that CEOs are forced to install litters in the bathrooms bathrooms because of people who identify as cats, you know? I don't know if anything will surprise me at this point. Virtual reality, it's one of those things where I don't think that technology can

save the art by itself. It's not enough. The production quality that can be done with modern video for very cheap, for actually much cheaper than it used to be, is so much higher, right? And yet that's not enough to produce anything other than, you know, infinite sequels with all the the same lighting and colors. So I think it's a cultural problem, effectively. Cultural, and then it's sort of in, that cultural problem is, I think, enforced by funding, right, and the monetization, where basically, yeah, as you were saying, yeah, I don't know if David Lynch, could he get investment to make a film? Well, I'm saying if he was 20, there would be no pass for someone like David Lynch to advance, make his first movie, or through the Hollywood system,

I mean, he'd have to do it through something else. Right, I think there will have to be some other system. I don't know if that'll be something that happens in, just in some other country. It'll be something that happens in some sort of underground way. Maybe what's required is for crypto people to stop just being miserly, wealthy people and start patronizing the arts for real. No, that could be very interesting if they did that. Of course, it's not just funding a movie. It has them to be shown in cinemas which can boycott such movie, or it has to be put on something like Amazon or Netflix, and this is the problem. The lack of a platform to show a good movie, even if it was made, that's why someone suggested perhaps virtual reality can be a biome where such new platforms could be built.

Is that true though? I mean, wouldn't the VR, I would expect the VR stuff to be at least as locked down as movies, it's pretty similar in terms of the way they get distributed, right? Well, there's nothing there yet, was his point. It's not really a populated market. But look, we don't need to talk about VR. I mean, I know you have an astral dreaming VR, somebody told me, and you are able to look inside people's bedrooms. This is very inappropriate, Ezekiel. but on this attack, on this general attack on technology from all sides, right and left together, where technology is seen as something corrupting man maybe, and at the same time, I think they are the ones who are corrupting man with technology, the left very much so being behind what you call ESG,

ESG, what people call ESG, where technology is used for these social justice purposes, and really becomes a form of surveillance of everyday life. And on the other hand, the right doesn't really control anything, but their whole program of, at least part of the right, of pursuing traditional life in cottage, farming turnips and so forth, and rejecting, let's say, futuristic, coruscant earth, where you have flying ships and, again, giant skyscrapers into the distance and so forth. I think this image of life they both share, motivated at bottom by desire for democracy. I don't know if you are willing to comment on this, but it's some type of community-centered life that drives them towards this and to reject, let's say, individual striving. Maybe so.

Let me see if I understand what you mean. Are you thinking that basically these people have an idea of an idyllic life with a small community. Well, I'm being a little bit polite when I say individual striving, because I don't mean it in the Lockean sense, but what they are really afraid of when they attack, you will notice both left and right, attack so-called Lockean individualism and individual striving and so forth. And they both promote communitarianism, which is really communism in some other words. But I think what they both fear is that technology could in some way in future be used to refound a kind of hierarchy again among men and that it can empower, let's say, I've said before, excuse if I repeat, but the armor, the technological armor from Dune

if you remember, from the movie Dune, which allows an end to mass formations of soldiers and empowers the individual warrior. Something like that would make hierarchy return among mankind, and although that technology's not on the horizon, I think what both so-called right wing and the left especially fear is that technology might be used to empower the so-called individual, but of course what that would result in is a kind of new feudalism. I don't know if you agree with this, but to me feudalism is a good thing. It would allow a creation of human hierarchy, again an end to democracy, because democracy so far has depended on the banding together of large numbers against superior men. I do think they fear that effect. I do think there are lots of technologies

that do push in that direction too, so I think software is an interesting example. The great man theory of history applies at least as well to software as to anything else. For example, the Linux operating system runs 90-something percent of the internet. It was written by one guy. None, other people have made quite a few edits to it since he wrote it, but it was written by one guy. Linus Torvalds, who then also wrote Git, which is the piece of software that the vast majority of programmers use to store their code. In software, there is a concept of a 10x programmer, 10x engineer, who's someone who is 10 times as productive as the normal engineer. But if you look at the value created by Torvalds, or somebody like Daniel Bernstein who wrote a ton of cryptography that people use,

if you look at the value created by those guys, I think it's actually in the millions of times more value than your average program. The software then becomes a tool, or it is a tool and it's a tool that can amplify someone's will, right? So yeah, it can magnify differences. And I do think the, I think you're right. Yeah. Well, look, in Bronze Age, how Bronze Age start in the military sense, it start with charioteers. I've frequently talked about the rise of the charioteer. Let's say the first military use of chariots is perhaps around 1800 BC. Now what happened with this new technology was that the old type of infantry, which was quite disorganized and not very well equipped, it could absolutely do nothing against the chariot. It was completely powerless in front of it,

which is why the first real great empires were set up by charioteers, whether it's the Mitanni or many such thing, the Kassites, they set up the first big territorial state in Mesopotamia. They were a rather small tribe, and it was simply that everyone else in Mesopotamia was unable to stand up to their chariots. And of course, technology doesn't just come out of nowhere that you can just borrow it, especially that type of technology, that you can just borrow it from someone and without knowing how to use it, managed to take over a large state. The technology itself came out of a culture and a spirit and it required a certain type of man to use it and similarly, later with other military technologies, for example, when the hoplite style of warfare arose in Greece and it was initially

an individual way to fight. with the various forms of armor and the large spear and sword equipment. And again, at that time, there was no one who could really stand up to that. And so individuals were able very quickly to take over large states and overthrow their governments by having just rather small bands of friends or mercenaries who were fighting in this new hoplite way. And what I'm saying is technology in history has frequently acted this way to, I've used liberal language, tongue in cheek, haha, empower the individual and the individual's striving. But really it was a way to, as you just say, magnify natural human differences. And then something happened over the last 200 years where there was explosion in humanity, explosion in numbers.

probably because of technology invented by men such as you just named, but it led to a vast multiplication of the zeros of humanity, who then through their numbers, they negated these kinds of effects of technology. So it became the opposite. War became the reign of quantity over quality instead. And what I'm saying is, Could there be a path for technology to once again intensify natural hierarchies among men? And I think that especially the left, but some also who calls themselves right wing, but want to return life to the village level, and by the way, I'm not talking about mainly homesteaders who want to build a house in Greenland and be left alone, but there is a tendency also on the right to promote village life and communitarianism as a critique of so-called international capital.

And so, in my view, it's just a slight edit of the left. But I think both of these, but especially the left, are afraid that technology could one day again, they don't realize this consciously, I think, but they know intuitively that it can one day again magnify these natural human differences. And that's the kind of technology I would like to see. I'd like to see the return of the small band charioteers or the hoplite warrior and yes I don't know what you think about that. You know what it makes me think of is that there is a group of hackers took over some some government servers some Latin American country I think it might have been Costa Rica and they were ransoming the Costa Rican government and this actually happens with hospitals all the

time in the U.S. They mostly keep it hush-hush but hospitals actually get ransomed all the time and then they pay off their attackers. It's virtual, so it's not physical, but there is something like that, right, where you've got, it's probably a pretty small group of programmers. It is somewhat reminiscent of a chariot raid. And the interesting thing about it is that you don't know who those people are, right? It's like that bit in Fight Club, right? It's like we're making your meals and there's an interesting future potentially where there are groups of black hat hackers who do raid systems. This is one way around the bureaucratic state is for people to actually break the computer systems. How does someone get a passport? Well, the database says

that they're supposed to have one. The sovereign is he who controls the database. It's going to become a bigger part of life, I think, in the future. Look, aside from the possibility of genetic enhancement, which I am very wary of because I don't think it will actually be used for enhancement. I think it will be used for things like finding a gene that predisposes to criminality and wiping it out, which of course I think would wipe out many great things. Probably genius requires that gene to criminality. I don't know if you agree with that. But yes, my point is almost all technologies that is conceivable now is used for projects of human leveling, homogenization, and ultimately social control, the reestablishment of primitive social controls. And this the kind of dystopia I'm afraid of.

Now, maybe you say that's not a path mankind need go on. I've been keeping you for quite a while, Ezekiel. In closing, would you like to comment on what you think are possibilities for good future of technology and of mankind in this direction. In the very long run, I see something like families, or maybe extended families, or maybe even bigger conglomerations of people living in the clouds in some sort of partially biological structure. A floating tree that maintains its own nuclear reactor, produces all its own food. The family maintains its genetics the way that families used to maintain fermented foods. And these conglomerations of people, Each one is almost entirely self-sufficient. And so when they interact with other families or with other tribes or what have you,

they do so primarily on a voluntary basis. And you could have a mostly peaceful world this way. You could have a lot of freedom of movement, freedom of expression, freedom of commerce, freedom of thought within such a world. That sort of idea is missing from the public consciousness at the moment. And maybe that's not exactly what it should be, right? Maybe there's a somewhat different idea, but I think it's a good practice. just psychologically, to think through, okay, yeah, there's... Would I be able to have a floating spaceship with lasers to attack others like this? Maybe so. You know, laser control is, of course, a hot-button issue, but I think there are many positive visions of the future to be had. There's basically one big negative one, right?

The Monsanto monoculture of humans all locked into VR, and, you know, they get to flush their toilets once every Thursday, because if they do have more than that, then it's better for the environment. Thinking of the antithesis of that future, I think is very productive. Yes, do you think possibility to have a platonic eugenic republic, but a futuristic space faring? Do you think this would be something good? Maybe you don't want to say, but you don't need to say if it's good. Do you think it will be possible in future? I think it could be possible. I think it's likely that whatever attack comes next is going to come in sideways, and it's not going to be something that any of us predicted. And I believe in this. It will be the black sun, a second sun behind this one.

It will emerge, and it may be certain old friends returning. I cannot say much more than this, Ezekiel, but it's been a pleasure to have you on the show. I'm sorry I kept you a long time. I think we must go. I hear a helicopter in the background of where you are. But I really hope Orbit makes it and frees us from this terrible possibility of the Monsanto future of total control of mankind. In the meantime, at least, it promises freedom from censorship. So I encourage all friends to look into Orbit and I myself will do the same. Thank you very much for having me on. much for having me on. Very good. Until next time, Bap out.