It Could Happen Here - How To Make Your Own Encrypted Comms Network

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

Robert sits down with a friend to discuss setting up a mesh network to enable off-grid, encrypted communications between you and your people.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, everybody. I am Robert Evans. And I want to start today by kind of proposing a theoretical, right? You wake up in the morning and something is awry. You know, maybe you hear shots, maybe there's some sort of natural disaster. You know, maybe it's that weird Havana syndrome death sound from the Obama movie that just came out on, what was it, Netflix? But something's fucked up. And, you know, most people, I think, especially most people who listen to this podcast, you've probably had conversations with your friends and loved ones about what do we do when the quote-unquote apocalypse or shit hits the fan. You know, you've got your friends who maybe, you know, they have a lot of stored food or they have some other skill that you think would be useful and you've got some stuff that you know how to do. You've got your people, right, that you would want to be with and around if something's really going wrong out there because you know how to take care of each other.

But how do you get in contact, right? Assuming you don't all live together, assuming you're not all on some sort of commune type situation, as most people aren't, you're probably scattered throughout the city. Maybe you've got some friends out, you know, in the suburbs. Maybe you've got some friends who live out in rural land. Maybe you've just got a friend who lives halfway across town. And, you know, that's no problem when you got a phone and you've got, you know, Google Maps working. But can you get there on your own? Can you get there or get into contact with them if the streets are all clogged up with cars or whatever? Like, how are you going to reach them?

How are you going to, you know, get in touch in order to figure out what's going on? And how are you going to stay in touch while you handle whatever you need to handle for whatever is going wrong? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. Because if the cell networks are down, if they're being blocked, if, you know, the Obama situation happens, there are things you can do to allow you and your friends, comrades, affinity group, whatever you want to call them to stay in touch. And this, a lot of this revolves around a kind of technical usage called a mesh network. And I don't know much about that,

because I am a big dummy. But a person who is not a dummy is our guest today. They go by hydroponic trash on Twitter, and they are going to talk to us today about how to set up independent communications networks that do not rely on the standard grid. Hello, and welcome to the show. Hey, what's up? Thanks for having me on. Hello and welcome to the show. Hey, what's up? Thanks for having me on. Yeah, thank you for coming on. You posted a thread on Twitter about using, you know, it's called like LoRa, range frequency radio that broadcasts a pretty uh specific wavelength that can travel really far throughout the air so uh it's perfect for communications

long distance and it's if you've got devices set up on this they each basically act as nodes right so the more you have the kind of wider signal distribution you get, if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, like if you've got someone three miles away and then another person five miles to the west of them, then you kind of are able to cover that whole distance. Yeah, exactly. So think of it like a relay system, right? One person has a message, they send it off to another person, that person passes it on to the next node. And so mesh networks are really resilient when it comes to emergencies, when it comes to protests, when it comes to occupation and conflict zones, because if one node goes down,

as long as there's other ones, they can pick up that message and keep repeating it and broadcasting it out. So it's a really interesting piece of technology that is similar to traditional radios, but also different because all the communications can be encrypted end-to-end. Which is a huge deal. So that's another layer of security. I think most people's default, if you're thinking like, well, how do I stay? You get some like walkie talkies, right? You know, you get some and those can, you know, those have their place and stuff, but they are also not always the most secure option. So being able to encrypt shit is a huge deal, especially when you're talking about like outside of a shit hits the fan kind of deal, which is less likely than, you know, some sort of civil unrest protest use case. You know, being able to actually encrypt is huge. Yeah.

So, I'm a dummy. I don't understand much about setting up my own technology independently, but I find this interesting. I see the use case. I decide I want to, you know, set this up and start, you know, building an emergency mesh network with a half dozen of my friends where do i start so first thing is you'll need some hardware that supports lora there are a ton of different things out there ranging from maybe 20 25 bucks going all

the way up to thousands of dollars so there there's a big range. And that range really depends on the enclosure, what's included in it, the broadcast strength, all that good stuff. So obviously the cheaper you go, the weaker the broadcast strength is. There might be development boards that are just literally like the PCB, like actual hardware with no case around it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's, there's some that you could just pick up and immediately use.

And so it kind of depends, but that's the first step is, is finding, um, hardware that can handle LoRa and then, you know, obviously getting it and then flashing it with the correct, um, software. And that sounds really complicated, but for our purposes of sending text messages without any kind of cellular LTE or Wi-Fi connection, you can use super cheap devices and flashing them is, you click a couple buttons and you're done.

So first off, do you have any kind of specific, you know, I know you're working on a text piece that you can put up to explain all this, and I will certainly share that as soon as it gets up. in that that median range like kind of on the lower end a thing that someone doesn't know how to take you know a raw board and craft that into a usable device that you would recommend they they purchase is to start us off here yeah definitely so i kind of have two different options one is a standalone option that can kind of work by itself completely independent of anything else and another one uses your phone So you'll flash it to the board and then connect it over Bluetooth to your phone, just like a pair of headphones or something like that. Oh, that's so easy.

Yeah. And so you kind of have options. If you want a standalone version, there's a company called LilyGo that makes a thing called a T-Deck. And it's a pretty small... It looks like a BlackBerry clone. Yeah.

It has a little mouse thing. Yeah, it looks like a BlackBerry kind of crossed with a game camera. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because it's, like, thicker in the back. It's got that big antenna. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And so the Lilligo T-Deck is what this is called. It's a BlackBerry clone, basically. It has LoRa built in, it has Bluetooth. And so all you have to do is get power to this thing, flash it with Meshtastic, and there you go. Now you can type out messages, you can send direct messages, you can send encrypted messages, all with one device that's $35. direct messages. You can send encrypted messages all with one device. That's $35. Oh, man, that's great. And this is something you can get like AliExpress was your recommendation, right? Yeah. AliExpress would probably be the best if you're trying to order a lot. If you want one right now, you can order them on places like Amazon, but it's going to cost you and also fuck amazon so yeah i mean you are slightly doomed to support one horrible billionaire or another like aliexpress is but um no i i get it yeah and i mean one of the upsides to like an all-in-one thing like this is um like i 3d printed this case but you don't have to print a case you can literally just set this into a shoe box or something and protect it so there's a lot of

options on the cases that you want to use you could buy pre-made cases or you could just i don't know just put something to protect the board back here and then screw on an antenna you're good yeah i mean i've seen some shit people do with duct tape you can figure it out hi i'm ed zitron host of the better offline podcast and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned silicon valley into a playground for billionaires from the chaotic world of generative ai to the destruction of google search better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into

why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the

heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Piece, the Elian Gonzales story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job

is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu,

aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So my question is, or my other question is, you were talking about a way that you can basically do the communications through your cell phone, right? You can hook that into the mesh network.

Is that something you're able to kind of go over, at least in brief, or provide people with, you know, here's where they can go to read about how to do that? Yeah. So the same company, Lilygo, makes a smaller little device. It's really small, maybe about an inch. Yeah. Yeah. And it has a screen on it. So when you power it on, you can actually see the messages come through on the screen on the board itself.

Yeah. And it connects through Bluetooth to your phone. And you use the Meshtastic app to basically text like you normally would on a phone. Yeah. It looks just like Signal pretty much if you're used to that um that ui but uh yeah it's super small yeah it's perfect and so you're just also using that that mesh tastic app to flash the software on the devices once you get them am i am i understanding that right yeah i'm just asking i'm i'm re-asking everything because i want to try

to make this accessible for both me when I do it and for our listeners. Yeah, for sure. So, Meshtastic is the software that's running on these devices. And what Meshtastic does is a device that's also running Meshtastic can communicate with each other over LoRa long distance. over LoRa long distance. And so you need the hardware that supports LoRa and a client, which is Meshtastic, that will allow you to send text messages and stuff like that

and do the encryption and handle all that stuff. To actually flash these, it's super simple. Meshtastic has a link that you can go to. You plug in your device. Depending on the version, you hold down a button, you press flash, wait like 10 seconds, and boom, now you have a working Meshtastic node, probably in underneath 10 minutes. After you get this out of the box, you could be up and running in about 10, 15 minutes. That's great. And so, all right, if I've got like, say I'm the guy in my group of friends who has more disposable cash and I want to get this going. So I pick up five of those Lily boxes, 3D print a case for them or just wrap them in something, you know, and I keep one, I hand them out to my friends, I get the software on all of them.

get the software on all of them um how how do i get them all kind of in in comms together right like or if you know my friends buy them independently and we each flash them and get them up and running how do we all kind of connect like what is that process like yeah so the good thing with mesh tastic is it automatically handles um adding new nodes to the network. And so as soon as a new device that runs Meshtastic comes online, it'll broadcast and tell the entire Meshtastic network nearby, hey, a new device got added. You can send messages to me. So Meshtastic has two different things that it can do. It can do broadcasts where you're sending out a message

to pretty much everyone who has a device that's reachable um and that's good for say for instance you know your friend comes online you you can't talk to them directly you could send a broadcast out and say hey joe what device are you and they could reply and broadcast everybody oh okay i'm on this device you can also do direct messages so uh once you know that person's device name you can actually send messages directly to them now keep in mind it's not encrypted because technically it's broadcasting throughout each node it's just like filtering out the messages for whoever it was addressed for. But yeah, at that point, then you could start DMing people. And if you want to get started with encryption,

it's also really easy. You can use the Meshtastic client. So you can install it on your computer, plug it into your computer and just set an encryption key, a passcode, whatever you want to do to secure your communications. And then once that person has that passcode, key, whatever, those two devices can connect and talk completely encrypted, either one-on-one or if multiple people say, for instance, you have an affinity group of like 10 people, you all say, okay, hey, in an emergency, let's meet up at this place and physically share a key or passcode or whatever. Once everybody has that, you can also do encrypted broadcasts to multiple people as well. So getting up and running is super quick when it comes to flashing.

Actually communicating with people makes sense, especially on your phone. It feels just like a normal texting situation. So that's great. of flashing actually communicating with people makes sense especially on your phone it feels just like a normal texting situation so that's great yeah it's really it's really amazing i mean this this is a really interesting technology because like i've been interested in in radio for a while but the biggest downside to that is a you can't encrypt any kind of radio communications in the u.s b unless you're the license yeah unless if you're the cops or the military or the feds you cannot encrypt shit and if you do it's it's kind of an issue but yeah you can't encrypt messages on regular radios another thing is like usability if you hand somebody um like a bow thing

handheld radio most people are not going to know what to do with it at all they're gonna be like what the fuck is this but if i hand you a blackberry clone and say just type and if you want to send a dm to somebody find them and just send it like it's it's really easy for your average person to pick it up and use it which is honestly the best kind of situation especially in an emergency where you can't really rely on highly technical people all the time because what if everybody in your affinity group isn't super technical you know so it's a it's a good common device that anybody can pick up and start sending messages, even encrypted messages, pretty easily. So I think that covers the technical basics of

what you need to do. I did want to ask real quick before we get on to some of the more ideological, you know, stuff here, conversations about like why you specifically got into this and why like this is important for people i wanted to ask just really quickly in terms of that 3d printed case did you just go search in some repository and find one someone had made or is there one that you've put up somewhere that you might recommend to people yeah actually it was recently uploaded to thingy thingy verse um which is a website that has free 3d print uh plans and files and so um i just searched up lily go t deck on thingy verse and the full case i mean the back yeah it looks great it has yeah it looks like an actual device yeah and i'm assuming that one's just pla yeah just that's a type of plastic super basic yeah yeah looks great yeah and this only took all these pieces snapped together so no glue required

and all these pieces took roughly about eight hours to print at 100 density density. So you have a pretty solid case with plans that are available online. And in eight hours, you can have a literal professional looking device that's protected and able to go, you know, in adverse situations. Yeah. So now I want to get into some of the more kind of like just talking about first off, what got you into this? Like, when did you decide this is a skill I want to develop and a thing I want to figure out? Yeah, I mean, so for my day job, I'm an offensive security consultant, which is just a fancy way of saying that's a cool job for a living. Yeah. Yeah, you're doing like red team stuff. It sounds like. Yeah, you're doing like red team stuff, it sounds like. So I think technology is a really good tool when used correctly. And there's a lot of moral and social and political implications when it comes to technology and actually making it. But that's kind of how I got into it was kind of combining my interest in computers and hacking combined with kind of the social and political activism I've been a part of. So, that was kind of my entry point into it.

Yeah, that makes sense. Because I do think, like, when I think about what inspired me about the early internet, about, like, file sharing back in the late 90s, about, you know, when Wikipedia first started up and stuff, all that stuff like that. We talk a lot about like the days when we thought the internet was going to be an unqualified boon for human liberty. The ability to create effectively like a smaller and more limited private internet for like you and your people to communicate safely through definitely like scratches that itch and when we say like more limited internet you're not through one of these networks we're talking about you're not going to be like sending youtube videos and shit right but that's not what it's for you know that's it's it's it's got a its own use and it's very much kind of what the internet was about at the beginning

which is just allowing people to connect um that otherwise wouldn't be able to or wouldn't be able to as securely yeah exactly and actually um the same protocol lora you actually kind of can run a basic internet protocol that's called laura wan laura wide access networking and you can run some pretty basic programs on it outside of just text-based stuff. So it's a really interesting kind of rabbit hole to go down into. I will say if you start looking at LoRa

and Meshtastic stuff, you will eventually start to run into like a right-leaning, sometimes straight-out fascist people because there's a crossover between you know the uh the gun community and kind of off-grid prepper doomsday prepper people you know so you'll run into that anyone who doesn't like like the government is going to have a vested interest in being able to communicate in a way that can't be easily intercepted right like that and that doesn't always mean your buddies i think most people

are pretty familiar with that exactly yeah but um yeah it's it's it's really useful there there are other ways to say for instance make your own kind of like micro internet. I read an article that talked about making kind of like a DIY internet in quotes, where you can basically take your home router and connect, say, for instance, your neighbors to the same network. to the same network and then if you have a server of your own that has books that has maps that has music and information you can easily share that with other people and so there there are other ways to kind of get your own off-grid quote-unquote internet together but um just outside of text but yeah it's definitely possible it's just uh needs a little bit more uh technical know-how but um hopefully soon it'll be a little simpler to where you can just download something get you know a book server up and running and then have anybody come along and download books about you know permaculture or about emergency medical aid or fixing infrastructure

and stuff like that. Yeah, that's huge, being able to actually transmit text and stuff through that too. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get

me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck.

You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%.

I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So yeah, you said when we were chatting online kind of before we uh we we hooked this up you said something along the lines of you had a bit of a tangent you wanted to go on so i i've asked

kind of my questions here uh if there is anything else you wanted to get out or express or say just kind of on the subject of people taking more autonomy for themselves in their communications technology um well now's the time yeah sounds good i mean so earlier you asked like what kind of got me into this yeah but there's another situation that happened because i live in texas oh and a couple yeah so you know where I'm going with this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A couple years ago, there was a really bad winter storm. And for most people listening, you might be in the Northeast.

Like, who cares? Yeah, I was there for that storm. Oh, it was crazy. It was fucking horrible. It was fucking crazy. Yeah. And so for people outside of Texas, you might be saying, okay, well, winter storm, whatever, like how could that affect anything? But Texas's power grid is privately owned. It's completely separate from the rest of the US. Yeah. ERCOT is a private company that runs the Texas power grid. storm event happen and our power systems are not in any way built for extreme cold and so we had a situation where pretty much the entire state was out of power except for maybe a few areas in

certain cities that had you know a specific environment where they had backup generators and stuff like that but millions of people lost power. And when people lose power, it isn't just, oh, I can't like watch TV or like do anything. There's lives that are lost, you know, directly from people who require ventilators to live, um, to people who need electricity to run their medical devices, that impacted everything, right? So the power going out impacted transportation, impacted water, it impacted sanitation. So all these bits of infrastructure are all connected.

And communications is kind of at the core of our modern day infrastructure, right? Because in order to run a power plant, you need to have power. But not only that, you need to be able to communicate with other places in order to properly run a water sanitation program. Same with transportation. I mean, if communication goes out, you literally can't deliver food, you literally can't deliver water to people in places that need it. And so it's not just an impact directly to communications, but an impact to your entire life. these pieces of infrastructure we really have to think about the larger picture of how all this infrastructure is integrated in our lives and how an impact to one part of it can impact your life in ways that you never even thought of yeah yeah and that's also i mean i think i would imagine one of the benefits i i can say just from sort of the fairly minimal degree to which i've done stuff like understand the basics of of solar power what i can do and can't do in my area with it

you know even outside of the stuff that is is green and renewable understanding like how you can and cannot use generators in an emergency and like which work it's just giving me more of an understanding of how the regular stuff that i use day to day works a little bit better about what the real power draw of my life is you know and anytime you're kind of expanding your autonomy technologically it also just increases the degree to which you understand what's going on every day which i think is is always of value right like even outside of whatever theoreticals we might prompt for, like, what could happen or what is likely to happen, because we're all going to deal with more disasters in our lives before they're over. Hopefully more than one. The alternative

is worse. But yeah, well, that's kind of all I had to say. Did you have anything else you wanted to get into before we roll out? Yeah. I mean, there are a bunch of use cases outside of weather events or natural disasters to protest is one of them. A really big security concern when you're at a protest is bringing your cell phone. Not a lot of people know that your cell phone has a unique identifier number um and police governments states um all have technology to basically like bring up a fake cell phone tower and have your device connect to it so there there are ways to track say for instance you go to a protest, you have your phone on, now your identifier is kind of tied to being at this protest, right? But with technology like this,

it kind of circumvents that, especially when it comes to the ability for a threat actor to track you or know that you've been there. And it's encrypted even if say for instance a police department was able to intercept uh low raw they wouldn't be able to read the messages period and so that's another good thing same with you know conflict zones um yeah you know we're seeing now with the genocide that's happening uh in palestine with the palestin, it's increasingly harder for people to communicate what areas are safe. It's hard to communicate, you know, oh, we need to get out now,

have an early warning system of there are literal tanks coming down the highway towards us. We need to leave. And so something like this can also be, you know, really good in that situation because, again,

the messages are encrypted. It can go pretty long range, especially if you have direct line of sight. We're talking like up to 10 miles. And so being able to just send a text message to somebody can save someone's life in a situation like that. So there's a lot of different use cases outside of emergencies that this stuff can be used but that's where building the autonomy kind of comes from um and if we're talking about like leftist political organizing and talking about building a better future being autonomous from state and corporate

controlled uh infrastructure is really important right right? Because if, say, for instance, hypothetically, we had the big R revolution, right? Right. The first thing that people in power are going to go after is power, water, sanitation, and communications, right? They're going to go after the main infrastructure. And so if we want to have an autonomous and free future, we have to think about collectively owning the means of infrastructure not just the means of production yeah well and even outside you know the the big r scenario something that i think is probably at least certainly more immediate um is continuing sort of downs in social order and areas expanding where non-state actors, including the aforementioned

Nazis that we had talked about, are able to get bolder, right? And like one thing we've seen right now, if you watch videos of cartel operations in parts of Mexico right now, one thing you will see on their really good guys, right, on their special ops style teams, is they will all have these weird looking things that look kind of like a microphone attached to their plate carriers. And that's a cell jammer. It's the standard thing for them to carry into the field because it stops people from reporting in real time when they're carrying out an operation. And the cartels are not the only people who do that, right? Like it is a widely used tactic now. You see it all

over in Ukraine, right? Like it's in part, not just because of like cell phones, but because of like shit like drones and stuff. It's just an increasingly common thing. And so when you're talking about what are threats that are realistic, well, it's not just the state that can interrupt your ability to communicate traditionally, right? It's also your non-state opponents. And so for a variety of reasons, having backups, having alternates is just an incredibly important thing to be able to do to some extent. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Well, anything else?

No, I mean, right now I'm working on a kind of step-by-step article that kind of goes into more detail on what you need to do this, all the equipment you need, how to actually flash devices, how to start sending messages. And so once that's ready, I'll publish it. I publish DIY articles and stuff to my sub stack it's uh anarcho solar punk or you can go to hydroponic trash dot solar and i have a link there that goes to sub stack as well beautiful well all right um hydroponic trash uh thank you so much

for everything this has really been useful and enlightening. I'm going to go hop on to AliExpress in a second here and make a couple of purchases. And I'm sure there's going to be a number of folks doing a version of that. Again, you can find our guest at hydroponic trash on Twitter, where you can get in touch with them and keep an eye on what they're writing, their substack. Very, very excited to play around with this technology. Thank you so much for working to make it more visible. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me on. Yes, absolutely. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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