Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1572 - Moxie Marlinspike
Uploaded: 2020-12-01T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1572 - Moxie Marlinspike' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-12-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1572 - Moxie Marlinspike' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-12-01. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1572 - Moxie Marlinspike

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
We're going to just sit here and talk for a long time, huh?
Yeah, we're started right now. We're already started.
It has begun.
Yes.
What was your question, though?
I was going to ask, you know, like, what if something comes up, you know?
Like what?
You know, you need to, like, pee or something.
Oh, you can totally do that.
Yeah, we'll just pause and just run out and pee.
That happens. Don't sweat it.
I want you to be comfortable.
Have you ever done a podcast before?
First time.
Really?
First time.
So tell me how, where Signal came from.
What was the impetus?
What was, how did it get started?
It's a long story.
Sorry, we got time. We got plenty of time.
Okay, well, you know, I think ultimately what we're trying to do with Signal is,
stop mass surveillance, to bring some normality to the internet, and to explore
a different
way of developing technology that might ultimately serve all of us better.
We should tell people, maybe people just tuning in, Signal is an app that is,
explain how it
works and what it does. I use it. It's a messaging app.
It's a messaging app, yeah. Fundamentally, it's just a messaging app.
Yes. Explain.
From lofty aspirations.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a messaging app, but it's somewhat different from the way the rest
of technology
works because it is encrypted.
So, you know, if typically, you know, if you want to send somebody a message, I
think most
people's expectation is that when they write a message and they, you know,
press send, that
the people who can see that message are the person who wrote the message and
the intended
recipient.
But that's not actually the case.
There's, you know, tons of people who are in between who are monitoring these
things who
are collecting data information. And Signal's different because we've designed
it so that
we don't have access to that information.
So, when you send an SMS, that is the least secure of all messages. So, if you
have an
Android phone and you use a standard messaging app and you send a message to
one of your friends,
that is the least of all when it comes to security, right?
That's, yeah, it's a low bar.
That's the low bar.
And then iPhone, what is this? Signal.
Oh, there you go.
It's showing it.
Yeah. So, iPhones use iMessage, which is slightly more secure, but it gets
uploaded to the cloud
and it's a part of their iCloud service. So, it goes to some servers and then
goes to the
other person. It's encrypted along the way, but it's still, it can be intercepted.
Yeah, I mean, okay, so there's...
Like Jeff Bezos' situation.
Yeah, like Jeff Bezos' situation, exactly.
There's like, fundamentally, there's two ways to think about security. One is
like computer
security, this idea that we'll somehow make computers secure. We'll put
information on
the computers and then we'll prevent other people from accessing those
computers. And that
is like a losing strategy that people have been losing for 30 years. You know,
information
ends up on a computer somewhere and it ends up compromised in the end. The
other way to
think about security is information security, where you secure the information
itself, that
you don't have to worry about the security of the computers. You could have
some
computers in the cloud somewhere. Information is flowing through them and
people can compromise
those things and it doesn't really matter because the information itself is
encrypted.
And so, you know, things like SMS, you know, the iMessage Cloud backups, most
other messengers,
Facebook Messenger, all that stuff, you know, they're relying on this computer
security
model. Um, and that, uh, ends up disappointing people in the end.
Mm. And so you, why did you guys create it? Like what, what was unsatisfactory
about the
other options that were available?
Well, because the way the internet works today is like insane. Uh, you know,
that, uh, you
know, fundamentally, I feel like, um, private communication is important
because I think that change happens
in private. Um, everything that is fundamentally decent today, uh, started out
as something that
was a socially unacceptable idea at the time. Uh, you look at things like, you
know, obvious things
that abolition of slavery, legalization of marijuana, legalization of same sex
marriage, uh, even,
you know, constructing the declaration of independence. Those are all things
that required
a space for people to process ideas outside the context of everyday life. And,
um,
those spaces don't exist on the internet today. And I think it's kind of crazy
the way the internet
works today, you know, that like, if you imagined, um, you know, every moment
that you're talking to
somebody in real life, there was somebody there just with a clipboard, a
stranger taking notes about
what you said that would change the character of your conversations. Uh, and I
think that in some ways,
like we're living through a shortage of brave or bold or courageous ideas in
part, because people don't
have the space to process what's happening in their lives outside of the
context of everyday interactions.
You know, that's a really good way to put it because you got to give people a
chance to think things
through. But if you do that publicly, they're not going to, they're going to
sort of like, like
basically what you see on Twitter, you know, if you stray from what is
considered to be the acceptable
norm or the current ideology or whatever, whatever you're supposed to, whatever
opinions you're supposed
to have on a certain subject, you get attacked ruthlessly. So, so you see a lot
of self-censorship
and you also see a lot of virtue signaling where people sort of pretend that
they espouse a certain
series of ideas because that'll get them some, you know, some social cred.
Yeah, uh, exactly. I think that communication in those environments is performative.
You know,
you're either performing for an angry mob, you're performing for advertisers,
you're performing for,
you know, the governments that are watching. Yeah. And I think also the ideas
that make it through
are kind of tainted as a result, you know, that like, uh, did you watch any of
the, um, like the
online hearing stuff that was happening over COVID, uh, you know, where like,
uh, city councils and stuff
were having their hearings online? No, I did not. Uh, it was kind of
interesting to me because it's
like, um, you know, they can't meet in person, so they're doing it online. And,
uh, that means that
the public comment period was also online, you know? And so it used to be that
like, you know, if you go
to a city council meeting, uh, they have a period of public comment where, you
know, people could just
stand up and say what you think, you know? And like, ordinarily it's like, oh,
you got to go to city
hall. You got to like, wait in line. You got to sit there, you know? But then
when it's on zoom,
it's just sort of like, anyone could just show up on the zoom thing. You know,
they just dial in
and they're just like, here's what I think, you know? And, uh, you know, it was
kind of interesting
because particularly, uh, when a lot of the police brutality still was
happening in Los Angeles, I
was, I was watching those city council hearings and, you know, people were just
like, you know,
you know, they were just calling, you know, be like, "Fuck you. I yield the
rest of my time.
Fuck you." You know, like, it was just like, uh, really brutal and, uh, not
undeservedly so. And, uh,
you know, what was interesting to me was just watching the, the politicians
basically, you know,
uh, who just had to sit there and just, they were just like, you know, and it
was just like, you know,
you get three minutes and then there's someone else who gets, you know, and
they're just like,
okay. And now we'll hear from, you know, like, and, you know, watching that,
you sort of realize that it's like, um, to be a politician, you have to just
sort of fundamentally
not really care what people think of you, you know, uh, you have to
fundamentally, uh, just be
comfortable sitting, you know, and having people yell at you, you know, for
three minute in three
minute increments for an hour or whatever, you know. And so it seems like what
we've sort of done is
like bred these people who are willing to do that, you know, and in some ways,
that's like a useful
characteristic, but in other ways, that's the characteristic of a psychopath,
you know?
Yes. And I think, you know, what we're seeing is that that also extends outside
of those environments.
That's like to do anything ambitious today requires that you just are
comfortable with that kind of, um,
feedback. Like Trump's tweets. If you watch, you know, if you look at Twitter
and look at any of
Trump's tweets, when he tweets, watch what people say. It's ruthless. They go
crazy. They go so hard
in them. So I'm assuming he doesn't read them. I'm assuming he just, or maybe
he does and just
doesn't say anything, but he doesn't go back and forth with people at least.
No, but, and I'm, I think, you know, Trump is perfectly capable of just not
caring, you know,
just like people like, you know, grazing is just like, yeah, whatever, what,
you know, I'm the best.
They don't, you know, and like, that's, um, you know, that's politics. But I
think, you know,
the danger is when that, uh, you know, to do anything ambitious, you know,
outside of politics or whatever,
you know, requires that you're capable of just not caring, you know, what
people think, whatever,
because everything is happening in public.
I think you made a really good point in that change comes from people
discussing things privately,
because you have to, it's a, you have to be able to take a chance. You have to
be daring
and you have to be able to confide in people and you have to be able to say,
Hey, um, this is not
right. And we're going to do something about it. If you do that publicly, the
powers that be that do
not want change in any way, shape or form, they'll, they'll come down on you. I
mean,
this is essentially what Edward Snowden was warning everyone about when he
decided to go public with
all this NSA information. He was saying, look, we, this is not what we signed
up for. You look,
someone's constantly monitoring your emails, constantly listening to phone
calls. Like,
this is not this mass surveillance thing. It's very bad for just the culture of
free expression,
just our ability to have ideas and to be able to share them back and forth and
vet them out.
It's very bad. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think when you look at the history of that
kind of surveillance,
there are a few interesting inflection points, you know, like at the beginning
of, um, you know,
the internet as we know it, and like the early to mid nineties, um, there were
these like DOD efforts to
do mass surveillance, you know? Um, and, um, they were sort of open about what
they were doing. Uh, uh,
and, you know, one of them was this program called total information awareness.
Uh, and, uh, it was,
they were trying to start this office, I think called the total awareness
office or something
within the DOD. And the idea was like, they're just going to like collect
information, uh, on all
Americans and everyone's communication and just stockpile it into these, uh,
databases. And then
they would use that to, you know, mine those things for information. Uh, it was
sort of like,
you know, their, their, uh, effort to get in on this at the beginning of the
information age.
Uh, and you know, it was ridiculous. You know, it's like they called it total
information
awareness. They had a logo that was like, um, you know, the, the pyramid with
the eye on top of it.
Oh yeah. This is, this is their logo. The pyramid with the eye, like casting a
beam on the earth.
That bit of Latin there means knowledge is power. Oh, wow. And interesting.
This program was actually
started by, uh, John Poindexter of all people who was involved in the Iran-Contra
s