TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #23: Dylan Curran

Episode Date: April 17, 2018

Join Marty as he gets off the beaten path with Dylan Curran to talk about data in today's digital world, how we are controlled by it, and how we can change our tendencies to take back some privacy + control of our data. They get a little cosmic towards the end too. Follow Dylan on Twitter: @iamdylancurran Follow Marty on Twitter: @MartyBent

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy Marty bent here on a Tuesday morning odd recording hour for tales from the crypt that is because we have somebody calling in from Ireland to talk about a very very hot topic the topic that is that is on the top of everybody mind of everybody's mind in the last few weeks and that is data security um i've got lou to my right in the studio as well he wanted to hop in for this this is a topic he really wants to talk about uh but before we get dive into lou i'd like to introduce our guest dylan karen dylan welcome to the podcast it's dylan karen dylan karen but yeah you gotta know uh thanks for having me guys well like uh dylan thanks for coming on sorry for pronouncing your last name

uh wanted we wanted to reach out to you in particular you've uh blown up the last few weeks with a couple articles in the guardian talking about uh how much data facebook and google in particular have collected and share so why'd you do this i i i'm getting right in the way because i we got a lot of shit to do today too for other work like why did you do this like obviously i read the the fucking cambridge analytical thing and was like this is the craziest thing i've ever read um what made what made you just go down the google route was it because of the article so what actually happened was i was really hung over one saturday and yeah that's what i was just browsing through twitter and like yeah it's not what happens you just you

know you blow up the world a little bit by just being hung over yeah yeah i mean that's how kind of bar i don't know if you know anything about our company it's kind of how we all we just all fucking do whatever we want and it ends up working somehow i feel like that's where the best things come from or you're like ah fuck it but yeah no i was actually i was on twitter and i came across like a similar enough thread that was going through facebook collecting your call records and your text messages on android so after seeing that and people were so shocked like unbelievably surprised and i was like oh man you don't know the half of it so i went in and got the archives i was just sitting there eyes black from being hung over and then just went into it broke it

down to a big essay published on twitter and then just completely exploded yeah i mean nate wrote an article about it and i was just like and then i started to read all this shit and i was like obviously i want to say we're not the most data-driven company in the world but like i like all that stuff and i was just like this shit is fucking crazy like all right now i kindly get like like marty's a bitcoin maximalist he's gonna sit here and probably fucking he's the he's the goddamn moses of bitcoin so he's gonna preach to you about that but i was like all right i kind of get where like the next layer of the internet could help us now because like this shit was like they fucking have everything they have everything i ever did they have everything

that was ever said or done and like i didn't even know they had it all yeah we've been uh sort of complacently just giving away our data for the last few decades uh i would like to dive into your background so how did you get into privacy in particular you're a privacy consultant how did you sort of fall down this path and and lead to this tweet storm that has blown up and thrust you onto the scene so i kind of like i'm a web developer and i i've been in that kind of stuff for virtually my entire adult life but uh me and my friend he passed away a few months ago but we used to be really really really interested in the dark net kind of privacy online and like just not even doing anything nefarious we just like figuring out how would we actually hire

ourselves from google and facebook and after figuring out just how hard it actually is like there's a couple of sites like you know what's my identity or what's my id and stuff like that and these sites will basically just do their absolute best to figure out who you are where you are what you're doing no matter what extent to go to so we do the typical stuff like get a vpn use a proxy uh not sign or not use chrome etc all that kind of stuff and then we go on to these sites and they would still know where we are who we are what's our isp etc and after seeing that kind of stuff i was just fascinated like by the entire thing just even thinking about like how many people are doing illegal stuff online and to be honest they're

probably on the radars of like the nsa and the fbi they're just not bothered with them they're only going for the big fish you'll take too much manpower but there's almost no way to hide your identity online without going to ridiculous extents and then even once you hide your identity you can't use the vast majority of the services online because if you go onto google and you're using tor for instance they'll block you you can't use it you're not allowed to use google while you're on tor so it's there's several things you just cannot do while like trying to make anonymous it's not allowed anymore yeah that's the crazy thing is is privacy is is getting thrown out with the bathwater with the internet it's like maybe maybe the internet's like

a huge siren that's drawing us all in to collect all of our data and sort of become a huge surveillance arm of the government and would you i mean that's a huge topic in bitcoin and in the cypherpunk community in particular is is the internet broken like is this model of the internet where we have to share all of our data uh broken at its core and that's sort of what i want to dive into today like is this a big problem like do people actually care that's the thing because lou you know coming from sales that people like getting serve ads that sort of cater to their wants and their needs at a certain time but i guess you would also say that it goes too far in some extents yeah i mean i don't know what we do i mean i'm like i was the first ever like sales

guy at barstool so like obviously i understand like the data-driven sales approach and like i understand what google does from like the seo and what you would do for like how how you basically could use facebook or google to take a business and make a small business a very big business i mean we do it with art what stuff we do online i mean i remember one time a couple years ago we had like i remember when davin was cool we had a davin cam t-shirt and i got we that was like my first like huge like facebook campaign we did at the company and i think we did like 50 grand and like one in like one day on church just from like doing like super targeted like cam newton ads people who actually watched a dab in video and i was like this is crazy powerful like this is this

is probably four or five years ago four years ago i was like this is like crazy powerful so like i get why like what why it works but then i also look at it from the perspective of like i would want that data back at some point like that's what i like i'd want to know like okay like you're using this data to maybe show me something i want to buy but like if i don't want it i want it back and that's where i think like the big like where something has to change because like how i i don't think they're gonna just give it back to us yeah um so this is a good segue into the article that you published last friday on the guardian or are your phone camera and microphone been spying on you and you sort of went into the nitty gritty details of how these companies

are spying on us. So I guess we could dive into that. If you could sort of explain how these companies are collecting our data and at a point, I believe there's a happy medium somewhere where there's a line and you shouldn't cross that line. I would argue that Facebook and Google have crossed that line pretty egregiously. So if you could go into like the nitty gritty details of how they're spying on us, that would be awesome. yeah so one of the biggest issues is that they they have so many avenues of being able to spy on you so it's i i try not to go into full conspiracy theorist and say like oh no they are watching you and your every movement all that kind of stuff because that's simply impossible

like that's not happening but they can that's kind of scary thing is that's what my article was going into is that this can happen so for instance if you do give an app camera microphone access they can take pictures and videos of you anytime they can stream it online they can do facial recognition anytime they can do all this stuff at any point that you're using the phone so this is just all stuff that's completely possible now we don't know if they're doing it or not they probably wouldn't disclose it but i can't just say oh they're definitely doing it because i have no proof i have no evidence of that but it does go into kind of scary scary territory where we know with the prison program that edward snowden revealed for the nsa

that the nsa has complete access to all of these applications and programs and that they can access all of this information at any point or any time that they want so we're definitely entering to like a very scary period where they might not be doing it all the time they might be doing at any point they might not be doing it at all but they can't that's scary thing they can't do it's basically it's like the it's pretty much like the government having a key to your front door and your windows at any time that they want they don't have to ask for a warrant they have to do any of that stuff they just can just walk in the front door and get your entire life story so it is it's definitely scary in terms of solutions uh what i've mostly advocated for is like a digital expiry

data so that does solve the problem where you know we get our better user experience they get their information they get we get our ads everything's cool and we get to everything just works seamlessly the same but we get the information back in some aspect so if after say two to three years they can use all the information they want but they delete it they delete it after three years and they can keep everything keep getting information on a renewable basis so you just if say you use google for three years they'll delete the information from three years ago but then they keep collecting it and benefiting your user experience because they can't actually there's no reason for them to have your location from 10 years ago that's

not useful at all there's no benefit to that advertising wise why are they keeping it yeah you says don't believe in a delete button you said the uh the google uh data dump that you collected was like six gigs or something like three million word document pages yeah so look the three million word documents is a little bit disingenuous because that is composed of photos and videos but in my thread i was trying to clarify this for non-tech people so i was trying to be like look this is if i had to compare this it would be three million word documents but it's not three million word documents there's photos and videos making up maybe like 40 percent that size but there's still loads of information my search history document had 90 000 different

entries all from 10 years ago yeah it was huge and that's all in json as well so that's not readable for the average person like you can't just go in and read it you have to literally be able to decipher the code wow that's pretty crazy and so i like that so a digital expiry date i've never heard that term before like how would that work yeah like how so i guess i mean so they do do it like there was a reddit thread a long time i want to say it was maybe like eight or nine months ago where this guy from germany was uh what was he doing he basically was like i live in an apartment he was outside in a park and he was like i live in an apartment i don't need a washing machine and he went up to his went back up to his apartment and like filmed himself just just

like talk about washing machines and then he started to get all these facebook ads for washing machines so like he does it he based so that definitely i remember reading i was like this is crazy so they do it so like how do you incentivize users then because that's where i'm at where like my brain gets goes keeps going to like how do we incentivize users to care like i still don't think most middle most people are not going to care like they're not going to care there's gonna be like whatever it's facebook i don't want to sign up for my gym membership so i'm just going to click this button and it's going to sign up for me like i just think that's how 90 of people in the world think like they just want convenience so like what would be like an incentivization

structure so people will take their data back because that's the only way they're going to do it is like if there is some type of like i get it even if it's a dollar i get a dollar people be like oh okay like let me start thinking about this then so the way i look at this is i think very similarly to the obesity crisis in america where look we we can throw all the information and stuff at people that we want we can throw cheap gym memberships you can just keep telling them if you keep being like shit you're gonna die at 40 we can keep telling them that and they're just not going to care short-term pleasure always wins out over long-term benefit for the vast majority of people so it's the same thing with internet privacy there's going to be a small

subsection of people like people who go to the gym and need health to lead there's going to be small subsection people who are going to care are going to take the extra step and effort to take care of their online health that's all that's how it's going to be we need to kind of change into a different territory where like you said we do actually have to incentivize people to do this kind of stuff so i'm actually working with a company called presearch and they are like a google alternative and they use blockchain to do it so it's like um the way bitcoin is stored under your like anonymous public and private key your information under pre-search will be stored under a public and private key it's very it works very similar to that so they can collect the

information but it's not tied to your personal identity so they get the same benefits and then you also get rewarded with them tokens whenever you search you get a little bit of money every time you do it so it's a nice little like quid pro quo can't even say that word so you know what I mean, it's a nice win-win for both sides where, you know, like people get to get the same benefits as Google, where they get all their personalized search results, et cetera, while making a little tiny bit of extra money. And then pre-search get to serve the correct kind of ads and they get their information and they're not using the information to sell either. They're selling keyword orientated advertisements similarly to DuckDuckGo. So that's a nice win-win. yeah yeah yeah okay that makes sense i mean duck duck goes the only one that i mean they're they're

in pennsylvania that's all i know about them though but i know like they're yeah they're using their marketing basically like we're not going to follow you around the internet which which is so i've seen some people on twitter switch to duck duck go full sale um we'll see how long that lasts but um like you were talking about pre-search there this is what i'm interested in when this like tie bitcoin and the stuff into it is i'm interested in things like similar to pre-search like block stack and digital identity and using a blockchain to hash data and again going back to public private key cryptography the whole uh the whole way that data structure works is it's a push transaction instead of pull so instead of instead of these companies pulling

the data from you wherever you go you push when you're willing to push that data which is a completely flips uh the mechanics of how how the data aggregation is going at the moment um which interests me which is what i find most fascinating about how bitcoin and blockchain can affect uh data in particular yeah it's definitely a nice way to go while i so the thing what i'm doing research right now is i'm trying to show them that the way they're marketing blockchain that kind of stuff is for the tech people they're going to get that small subsection of the tech community but that kind of cryptocurrency community it's not really expanding that much anymore and it's also very very in-depth technology so it's not appealing to the vast majority of

people so i'm trying to clarify things and just make things as simple as possible make it like google you log on to the fucking site and you just search there's no more shit of logging in around like that you just log on and you search that's what the appeal of google is you just go in and you get your shit done and you're good that's what that that kind of user experience is really what benefits google is that it's so seamless and fluid that people don't even think twice about using it everything seems so trustful like you go on to it you don't even think for a second that's something nefarious is going on and that's one of the biggest challenges of i think the cryptocurrency and that kind of technology community in general is there's too much shit

going on the background like people are just not making things simple like google do yeah yeah and google had has a decades long head start at this point i mean they i remember i remember them in the 90s and how how janky their site was it was basically just like a bar that you type in and you'd get you get actually shitty ads back in the day but there's something to be said like maybe their ux is so good is because they have so much data and they know exactly what to put in front of us so like i said it's like finding that happy medium of how much data are we willing to give up and how much user experience are we willing to give up as a consequence of of taking back sort of our data integrity um but so other than pre-search are there any other um sort of fixes

to this problem that you're that you're heavily involved in now or interested in like what do you what do you think the next step is is like making awareness we've got zuckerberg going in front of congress in in two hours here i'm very interested to see that conversation um what do you what do you think the next steps are like awareness do you think again going back do people care like i feel like when you shock people with like say for instance like we might wear a thread like that was very shocking to people on an individual level and that was one of my biggest problems with the cambridge analytical scandal and the uh reporting behind it was that it was all you know like look 50 million facebooks have been stolen and this influenced the u.s election that

is so unbelievably broad that people just do not even comprehend it's you know it's like thinking like trying to think how many stars there are in the sky people are really that interested because they're like i can't even comprehend that your brain's not meant to comprehend huge numbers but when you show it on an individual level like when i go in and show personally how it affected me and how much they have on me that captivates people a lot more than talking in huge numbers so even though like mine is not really that there's not much of a knock-on effect that's kind of like who cares just dude but that shocks people but if you do with the cambridge analytical stuff then people don't really care like i i do believe that whole like the whole facebook scandal is going to

be gone in three weeks guaranteed like it's going to 100 die down unless something crazy happens like zuckerberg goes to prison or like something like that unless that happens nothing's going to come of it like people are just going to like the 24-hour news cycle it's just going to die away oh it's definitely going to die that's difficult that's why i mentioned the incentivization is going to die we work in media there's shit they fucking said this company was dead 100 times in the past 15 years and we're still here so like yeah like we're yeah it's going to go away there's no doubt about it's going to go away no one's going to care but like that's what like the incentivization what you're saying like that has to be it like it's incentivized people to do it

they're never going to do it. They're never going to do it. Yeah, yeah, because then what's scary is you can get to the point, I don't know if you've seen what's going on in China right now, but they have a surveillance arm that's so vast that their facial recognition system is so precise that they can start ticketing people on their phones for jaywalking. And that's sort of the Orwellian future that we can slip into

if we give out this much data without even thinking about it. I mean, people are getting text message tickets on their phones in China after jaywalking, like Donnie could be getting getting those texts. And so that's like, in my mind, that's like an Orwellian Orwellian dystopia that we don't want to move towards at all. And how do we how do we bring more awareness? Like you were saying, I like what you said there about people here, something like Equifax, 120 million social security numbers get hacked, and it's like, ah, that was a 36-hour news cycle people forgot about already. But what you said about what you did on Twitter and in The Guardian by describing exactly what happened to you, I mean, that was jarring and eye-opening. Holy shit. They know where you were in Ireland at what times, like where you were traveling up and down the coast. And that's creepy. i mean and and it's creepy because we're doing it and not even thinking about it and

most people probably don't even know they could access that data and now maybe that made more people aware than they go find this data and and that's another domino that falls um yeah it's very interesting and you're young so you're only 23 you're saying right yeah and it's interesting man i'm the oldest fucking person dude i'm fucking 30 everyone everyone i meet in bitcoin in all this world is everyone's younger than me that's how i know it's gonna work too no but it's something uh yeah it's something i find interesting about people like i mean i'm a little bit older than you but i'm already you're 26 like stop acting like you're like 100 years old i'm not but like i'm saying like i i find more and more that kids our age around our age

are very very fascinated about about tech and how it is invading our privacy because i feel like we were the first sort of iteration of people that grew up with a somewhat good internet where it was part of our everyday lives and maybe we rushed we rushed into the current structure of the internet not thinking about the consequences and the consequences could be as dire as they are in China right now so um what like what was your what were you fascinated in in high school and college just sort of led you to this point i actually really wasn't that interested in this kind of stuff until the last couple of years this is very much a recent development yeah no i had zero interest when i was younger i didn't even think twice about going on google incognito and

you know doing doing my thing but like it's those kind of repercussions that come back to bite you that does interest me and thinking about on a broad scale about you know that's why in my articles i try to be a little a little bit alarmist so i try not to go full conspiracy theorist but i do try to make things sound a little worse than they actually are because that's the only way you get people that's the only way you get people's attention like it's the only way people care like if i wrote in my article don't worry guys everything's cool we're completely fine nothing's gonna go wrong in the next 10 years no one gives a shit like literally no one cares but if i make it sound like you know something could go wrong which is entirely possible like something could

completely go wrong with this there's nothing to stop uh say the american government in 10 years subpoenaing google and getting access to all this information which they already do on a regular basis there's over three to four thousand cases a year of the fbi subpoena in google facebook instagram twitter etc and getting the information for people to use the court cases that's already happening so like if you know if america's so uh for like liberty and freedom that kind of stuff this stuff completely goes against it's like having cameras in your home it's like having microphones in your car like it's all the exact same stuff it's just someone else is doing it so it's not the government but it's someone else doing it for them and we're all consenting to

it willingly so i don't like what i tried to walk that kind of difficult line of not going full conspiracy theorist but also not being an apologist where i'm saying like no it's completely fine don't be paranoid i'd rather people were a little bit paranoid just a little bit just because then that's the only way they're going to actually take any steps to change things so it's the best kind of way to go for me personally yeah no if you were to tell somebody in the u.s in the 70s while like the nixon watergate scandal was going on that this is very the surveillance arm of the u.s would get this vast and this granular they would they would be shocked they would think they were living in in like the soviet union and that's sort of i mean if you go back a few

decades that's what people were most freaked out about like you talk about like russian spies and that they were talking about like people were worried about their houses getting wired and their phone taps getting wired and we just openly agree to all that like people are putting alexis and google homes in their houses like every day and they're basically just a spy they're just spying on them and they definitely are like you said you don't want to go full conspiracy conspiracist i'll go full conspiracy here uh with spotify in particular so this was a few weeks ago i went to uh a concert in brooklyn and it was a very very low level band i'd never heard of them my buddy hit me up was like yeah i got an extra ticket to the show you want to go i went with him

just so he didn't go alone like a loser but we go it's like two small bands it's the opening band for the main band they were okay i like their like their songs i think i iter i mean i don't know if my phone could hear me talking but it knew where i was because the next week on my discover spotify playlist the opening band not even the main act which is one very extremely small niche band that i've never talked about never searched nothing was on my discover playlist and that was just like too much of a coincidence where um somersault this this small ass band i just so happen to be at a concert they played the Saturday before and I never listened to them before and they end up on my discover playlist and I'm pretty positive it's because Spotify used geolocation

and possibly a microphone to know that I was at that concert so that's a difficult one to talk about because I also do think there's an aspect of confirmation bias going on where people are not noticing the thousands of times a day this could happen but then only noticing the times it does now that does that does see I've heard I've heard those of those stories but then it's also at the same time there's so many times you're using your phone a day and there's so many conversations you're having and there's so many things you're doing so many places you're going where this doesn't happen but then the times it does you know it that really goes on your radar yeah so it's kind of i don't really know what to think of that that's why that's why i try not to

go folk conspiracy theorist so i use my phone thousands of times a day as does everyone and that never happens and then you know it's the one time you might have like a weird kind of conversation and then it ends up being on your phone there's and the hardest thing is that we can't really prove it and that's also illegal if they are doing it if they're capturing um say your audio without using it without telling you that's not allowed so it's a weird kind of line to walk i don't i i don't know like that does sound really creepy really weird it's just i i don't know if i buy the whole aspect of it's always always always always listening and always capturing the information always collecting the data because there is no way to prove that uh completely yeah

i mean i i think there's shit like that too like there's times i mean god one time me and me and rebecca like i we were talking about like her back hurting and they started giving me ads for something like this like thing that like a it's basically like a massage thing and i was like oh they're definitely listening but then like i talk about gambling all day long and like i don't get any gambling ads i get no game well maybe because that's illegal but like but like we talk about shit all day long like i don't we talk about like stuff like we don't get ads for certain stuff you know so i don't know i don't know like i do think they listen and i do think that is a thing but i i don't know if it's as like dire as we think it is but i do agree that there could be

one day where like that there needs to be a way like uh like you're saying like we have to be able to get rid of the data and that's to be easy there needs to be an app where i can just press the app and be like all my data is gone everywhere and i want it gone because like that that to me seems like it's like you're right like you said it's like being able to open up your door and come in whenever you want like that's our entire life's online now like our entire life's online yeah it's got to be easy and it's got to be transparent i think i think that's what scares people the most is that there's no real transparency to this unless you dig dig deep into into your data on these platforms like maybe that is the the solution is these

companies maybe zuck sits up on congress today and realizes like hey maybe we have to be more transparent with how we're using your data and maybe not make you read a 40 page legal doc and hit i agree because 40 page man it's like 50 000 pages yeah i mean what you did like i was thinking about like what what what you did like like my mom would have no idea how to do that she would just be like whatever and just move on like she'd be like i don't even care yeah you know it's like there's and but maybe that also comes with like i guess like i mean i i personally think the next generation if you're not in stem you're just gonna end up being a fucking idiot like there's not you're gonna have to know some type of stem type thing to not like to make it in this world

so maybe that just ends up happening as like the world progresses where it's like they don't care because they don't understand it but like obviously you're 23 like everyone the next generation is going to understand everything that's happening on the internet like every single day because they're they have a smartphone in their hand when they're three years old not even it's crazy and again like we were born at this crazy inflection point like in the in the 90s where we're sort of transitioning from this analog world sort of very manual to this digital world where everything is online and that's a huge change like humans have been evolving for millions of years and just over the last four decades we've we've crept into this new digital

age and the way humans interact with each other and the tools that they've created has changed drastically in a very short amount of time and it's changing our nature i would argue well we could we've already it's already been shown that it's completely changing how our brains work so it's you know it's basically it's an addiction like our the dopamine section your brain lights up every time you turn on your phone to get a notification and you actually get feelings of depression anxiety and withdrawals from when you don't get a notification so that that's been shown in multiple studies that's already happening and you know what the one of the craziest things actually took a step back and talk about the third day so he's an app called

digital detox my phone which essentially just it doesn't let you do anything on your phone for like three to four hours no notifications nothing just you're not allowed to use it and i was saying like i spent 900 bucks on this phone to get an app that doesn't let me use it like that's if you think if you think a lot of people that app has like three million downloads and a lot of people are doing that it's such a weird line for us to walk where you know we buy these things to make our lives so much easier connect better and then we have to shut them off because then we'll be in a group of friends we'll all be looking at our phones and that's the like if i'm ever saying have a coffee with a friend i'll make them turn off their phone or put in their pockets because

it's the one of the most rude things i think you can do you know if you're saying i don't have like like a coffee with your friend it's just taking out your phone basically saying fuck you don't care i'm just scrolling down facebook like not even texting someone just scrolling down facebook i don't give a shit what you're saying but that's commonplace like that's it's not considered rude to the vast majority of people that's just what they do like it's it's it's a really weird kind of age we're entering yeah and again going back to like it's really weird how quickly we've sort of been thrust into this age where again going back to like human evolution it it happened over a time like most of human evolution happened during a time when there was no electricity

and then only in the last like 150 years or a little bit longer whenever electricity was discovered and then going into the industrial now the information age like the pace of change is quickening every fucking day it feels and just like is our chemistry ready to to evolve and react to that that's that's one thing i'm fascinated about and i would argue like you were talking about obesity in america earlier in the podcast like i think there's like ripple effects of these changes like obesity like opioid addiction to suicides at all time highs depressions at all time highs i think we are sort of being affected by this change and we need to take a step back and sort of realize what's happening to us and go ahead what i find most it's what's really weird

is that we're actually living in like the best time ever like this is the best you this is the best time in human history fact like full-blown fact like global poverty is down drug deaths are down uh what violent crime is down rape is down like domestic abuse is down everything's going down like technology is amazing we've made every single aspect of our lives super simple and easy and fluid it would be for some reason depression and anxiety obesity heart attacks are going up like it doesn't make any sense so you would think that because life's getting easier we'd have less depression and anxiety but what actually happens is that when you don't have an actual real problem to focus on when your life is that easy then you start creating problems your brain is trained over

millions years evolution to constantly look for and find problems so then it's going to constantly look for and find problems you get stupid anxiety over your job or your relationship which might not have existed before because you had actual problems like you were gonna fucking starve to death but now it's like a girl doesn't text you back and that's you know a guy is just completely upset over that so like that's why like if you look to say poor countries around the world who don't have internet all that kind of stuff suicide is extraordinarily low but then if you go to places like america it seems like suicide is a privilege of the rich where like the upper white the upper say the upper levels of the classes with who are you know more white predominated

are committing suicide on ridiculous rates in ireland the male suicide rate is insane it's the second biggest killer of men in ireland really just below higher tax yeah it's it's incredibly high and ireland's a really really easy country to live in like things are so easy they're so easy going uh everyone has the there's a lot of social welfare so it's really easy to live here like if you're if you're poor here you're great like things are fine like things might suck a little bit compared to other people but on a global scale it's super good so it's like i feel like people that need actual problems to survive you need like an actual purpose like these like the phones and you now are just destroying that completely destroying it yeah how fleeting

is the uh is the the journey for likes and retweets you know like it definitely i mean i've experienced this in the last like i had this time last year i think i had 300 twitter followers now i mean our i mean the entire company was our entire barstool sports was built off of this like it's like if there's not a problem or we don't have like someone to fight we're like we gotta find someone to argue with or we're fucking bored like or there's not someone we're competing against we're fucking bored like that's literally the entire company was built off this yeah like just literally being like okay like oh like how someone i mean i mean when the fucking bleacher report said something about us wasn't that bad we turned into something huge and we end up being the number one

like app downloaded that week right our world because it's like you're right there everything is super easy and we make problems that aren't really like real problems i agree that's you may be better than a therapist so if you want to quit and like go work at what one of those fucking places like mind space or something like that or what are they what are one of those fucking mind space yeah there's like what's the one there's like another one that is there's like another like huge one i can't think of it anyway that was probably the best way i've heard anyone even talk like talk about just like human nature in general now because everyone just creates problems for no fucking reason you're right it's 100 right right yeah you're a wise 23 year old

dylan yeah dude yeah you're pretty fucking smart man that's all i'm gonna you're really fucking smart i'm just saying i'm just saying words like i don't know yeah i don't know what i either mean i'm just talking but if if i were to ask you a question out of this like what do you think is there is there like a cause that we could all strive for that might give people purpose like are you interested in going to space like is there is there something in this world that we should be fighting for with a common common denominator with a common cause that will give people purpose you know well i feel like we're already doing that with things like uh say like tesla spacex hyperloop etc like that we are constantly improving and we're improving at a

ridiculous rate like with murphy's law like things are just getting unbelievably better every single year so like we already have those purposes it's more for like the the common person you know who's just going to like their dead-end office job where things already like on a global scale they're fine but like on an individual scale they do suck like you need to see improvement in your life for anything to be worthwhile like need discipline etc and phones are the biggest sap of discipline and any sort of purpose that there is like if you spend what was like what was this there was a statistic that some people are spending an average of about six hours a phone six hours a day on their phone and that's not including work so if you're in work and you're bored as shit then

you're probably spending 14 to 16 hours a day on your phone and what do you what can you possibly be doing on your phone that's productive like how many people do productive things in their phones maybe like business calls and stuff but apart from that not a whole lot you can't really do anything productive you're probably on twitter facebook instagram snapchat whatever and if you are not actually working constantly to improve your life then you're gonna feel like shit it's like i don't even know what people can actually go and do like that's a very self-fulfilling kind of thing and i'm only 23 so like i can't talk you know too much on this like i don't i barely know what my fucking purpose is my purpose for life changed two weeks ago i got a twitter thread

it's viral so like it's kind of difficult to say that's very much something you have to see for yourself it's just you have to take uh you have to take advantage of the information era where you can get anything in the world when you want when like at any point like you can just go find virtually any information so my personal life purpose is just getting information so i just love learning new things of reading books and then reading stupid websites all that kind of stuff going through even like a wikipedia unusual articles it's so easy to find your purpose online nowadays you just can literally google things to do to benefit your life purpose and you'll find like a list of 100 things and then you can go try each of them for 10 minutes a day you'll find it

like it'll it'll come up so like it's it's never been easier to better your life nowadays but for some reason that's just too much effort for people i think we're uh getting to the bottom of this it comes down to discipline and that's uh people have to have uh have to take full responsibility for themselves and you made a great point like these phones are distracting like they're they're here to distract us and it gets down to a personal responsibilities type argument like hey how disciplined are you going to be what do you want to accomplish are you going to set goals and are you going to let your phone and your laptop uh take you off that trajectory to to go uh fulfill those goals you know i mean i mean the internet controls my fucking life i can't even

lie like it's neither can i i mean oh yeah me too but like but like we work in it though so i don't know what it's like everything's the internet to me like everything's work to me everyone's like you work i'm like i'm working every day every moment of the day like there's not a day we don't like this this is fun but this is like work like this is work right now it's work it's work in a simple sense that it makes marty happy so he'll do a better job he'll do he'll do better at his job and marty works for me like we're not making any fucking money right now but like that's but it's still like making him happy makes me makes the company better so like this is work in a certain way and and i like to learn about the shit i like to learn about it and question all

right let me get into the the number one question though how much bitcoin do you use i mean do you own own don't ask people how much bitcoin do they own that's so personal that's like how big my dick is all right i didn't mean like i didn't mean like an exact number i mean i'm always i would never tell you my number either you do not have to answer this dylan dylan what we will ask go ahead i actually i actually own very little i have a lot of iota so i'm more of a iota man so i've gone i've gone very much into that kind of stuff i've got a lot dylan i've got to talk some sense into you get your shit out of iota they they tried to roll their own cryptographic functions which is uh a no-no in in the crypto in the cryptography world uh i like the ideology

behind see i don't see what i don't i don't trust bitcoin at all because they have a maximum of 2400 transactions every 10 minutes or so while visa has a maximum of like 20 million transactions every 10 minutes so it's just in in terms of like a pure performance scale we even saw when bitcoin scaled how it scaled during the investment craze like over the last six months that people were dumping money into it and it would take you hours like if you can't buy a coffee with a cryptocurrency then it's just not going to succeed in the long run it's more of a gold standard where people invest in it just to have their savings is something that's going to probably going to gain some interest um it's just not going to work in the long run maybe the alternatives will but i

don't think it will personally dylan we'll uh we'll talk off the record i've got a lot i've got a lot to teach you um bitcoin's going to scale in layers so bitcoin has a second layer called the lightning network right now where you can do millions of transactions per second it's just going to take time to get there um i'm not going to lecture you on how money becomes money right now this is not what this yeah because if we do it if we do it he'll end up to dude you'll end up sitting here for five fucking hours with them we've said we've said marathon podcast because we do friday nights because since we don't want to take off like the actual business of like actual serious xm so we do friday nights and do this he'll sit here you'll end up on a five-hour fucking

podcast with him about bitcoin we'll talk about everything from like the beginning you'll get from the tool of craze to fucking god damn today and i'll tell you everything there is about money and how money exists yeah i would be careful with iota in particular um but if you ever want to talk about bitcoin let me know uh my dms are open my email's open i'm happy to hop on a skype call as well because uh are you flirting with me what are you flirting with me maybe maybe you're cute i'm not um yeah but that's uh one thing in particular people marty's married marty's crazy he's married he's crazy he's a crazy fucking person but go ahead um no i fell down a similar path that you did where i thought hey bitcoin it's it's heavy and arduous and it's slow

and dumb um and went to the altcoins as well but you'll find over time that uh bitcoin is slow and dumb for a reason at the protocol level but i want to ask you one question and can you get rid of bitcoin minor fees with the next the upcoming protocols and all that kind of stuff no you need the minor fees in the long run because what incentivizes wouldn't say no i i get how it works i just don't think that'll work in the long run because if it's going to cost you for instance if you want to buy like a cup of coffee with a bitcoin wallet then that's if that's going to charge you like five bucks that's not going to work that's at the microtransaction scale yeah that's at the protocol level you can take microtransactions to another level where you

set up a lightning network channel and you put a little bitcoin in that channel and then you can transact basically fee-lessly on that second layer yes at the protocol layer you're not going to be buying coffee at the protocol layer protocol layer is going to be made for huge transaction settlements for for much bigger uh transaction types than a cup of coffee this is going to be like settlements between banks at the protocol level then at layers above you'll be able to create technologies that uh enable a medium of exchange where you can go buy a cup of coffee for no fee and do it instantly you don't have to wait 10 minutes for a confirmation on these second layers uh yeah it's just going to take time to get there you have to build out

the infrastructures technology is less than a decade old old um it's just going to take time a lot of people want a lot of people want i won't argue with it too much just i don't actually know the in-depth the nitty-gritty of it so i'm not going to speak authoritatively on it i just like send an email that's just more of an opinion no no i agree and it's a it's a smart opinion to have i mean yes money can't act as a currency if you have to pay that big of a fee every time you're trying to buy a cup of coffee but i would argue that's not going to be the way bitcoin works forever we're building stuff on top of it to to make it so uh you can use it as a medium of exchange that's the whole huge debate going around the cryptocurrency world right now is should this

stuff be a store of value or medium of exchange out of the box uh i'm under the volition or not the volition i'm under the uh belief that you have to establish a store value first then you can move to a medium of exchange from there um it just takes time money is all about trust you're talking about this in your bitcoin explainer uh and trust takes time to build um dylan really appreciate your time on the podcast today do you have any closing remarks for us like what anybody who's freaking out about how these companies are collecting their data what do you suggest they do is there any like first steps or uh recommendations that you have for people that are interested in protecting their privacy yeah so there's a couple of things you can do like if you're going to keep

using google and facebook then you should definitely go into the privacy settings and disable the data collection this lab you know this lab one repercussion where if you are using their services they're not going to be as good that's just how it is that they can't personalize it anymore so you know if they're not getting your location then they can't give you local businesses if they're not getting a youtube history they can't give you a recommend the proper recommended videos so that's you know i would just encourage people to kind of just take a step back and think okay am i okay with this data collection in exchange for the services and if they are then that's fine that's a personal decision at least they were informed to make it

that's kind of my point the entire thing is like at least they know at least they can actually just make that decision themselves and if they decide otherwise then you can go to the facebook settings go into privacy change them turn them off or go to google my activity and pause all the different settings so that would be you know google maps youtube google fit photos etc and i would i i would advise people to go to vpn and web rtc leaks etc like that you can look and you can look into those those yourselves that's a totally different topic for me to go into but if you do that if you think your searches or browsing history is any way going to endanger your life so this isn't applicable to maybe people in the western countries that's fine but why i think a

lot of people don't actually take into account is that there's people in like iran and syria and somalia and sudan where their google searches endanger their lives that's not here like over there though it's super dangerous like iran i think this is just maybe a year ago where they were they completely shut off the internet access to the outside when they were going through that um basically a civil war and they just shut off internet access to the outside and the wrong google search would get you beheaded pretty much so you can't even search for the tiananmen square massacre in china or you get thrown in jail like you know like it's it's crazy like that's it's yeah it's cool for us western people we kind of have these a little bit of liberty where yeah

no one probably does give a shit about what we're searching you know like at the metal level yeah probably no one does give a shit it's just for personalization but this really is really really dangerous for people who live in other countries i think people have to look at this on a global scale where it's like god like if someone in like indonesia iran syria kuwait etc like if they look up you know it's like is muhammad not real if something to some is innocuous is that like they might be curious about atheism or something like that boom like they're they're with they will be imprisoned or killed like so it's just that's definitely something to take into account and that being said you know like america is pretty okay at the moment like you're at the end of

saying stuff like that but there's there doesn't seem to be anything too nefarious going on you know with your google searches around like that you can look up isis and that kind of stuff and nothing's going to happen to you realistically but you know it's changed who thought google who thought donald trump would be president four years ago i want to see the odds i want to see the fucking odds on donald trump being president because they're probably astronomical and now he's president i mean yeah everyone got everyone got rich in australia on it everyone bet on donald trump and australia got rich we had some guys in from australia the other day and they were like yeah so many people got rich off that because the odds were so crazy they got rich like crazy rich

i mean yeah trump in particular i actually i'm not trying to toot my own horn here but i told people for like the year and a half leading up to the election that he was going to win just looking at his opponents and the uh the platform that he was running on there's a lot of disenfranchised uh manufacturing workers and lower class americans i said the exact same thing i was like he's going to win just sorry he's not going to win hillary clinton's going to lose that's exactly what's going to happen like and it went and it happened and most people who actually took a step back i looked at the overall trends i didn't just take the cnn polls actually came to that conclusion yeah yeah it's uh it was pretty obvious in the law like people are fed up of

the the meet the new boss same as the old boss like republicans and democrats are no different like they're one gets in and nothing changes um but again i don't want to take up too much of your time today yeah uh shout out your pantheon shout out how the fuck we can get you paid all that shit i mean i mean a lot of people are going to listen to this and we'll also tweet it out as well yeah atr.com slash i am dylan kern you can follow me on twitter at i am dylan kern and i'm on youtube just dylan kern dylan really appreciate your time today um or tonight in ireland uh i think we learned a lot here this is a little different for us on this podcast but uh read more into iota i got some shit to send you on that and uh peace and love freaks all right man

take care thank you thanks dudes thank you thank you have a good one dylan see you bye You too. Take care.