Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
OnlyFrens: Privacy & Memetic Warfare w/ @arjunkhemani
Recorded: Aug. 28, 2025 Duration: 0:47:30Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Hello, can you hear me?
Perfectly. Hey, Arjun arjun hey how's it going good dude i am so sorry i thought one had uh announced the space and like i thought it was his space to start um but it was mine
and i totally didn't realize that i was telling him to start it without me. Juan, dude, I'm so sorry.
I thought it was your space.
I forgot that I had set it up this week and just started.
I'm so sorry, guys.
No worries, man. No problem.
I'm glad we were able to make it work.
Yeah, me too.
Me too.
I'm excited for this one.
I'm really excited for the topics.
And I just had a personal call run long and needed to close that one out.
But I would have cut that abruptly short had I known that I was bottlenecking this entire thing.
So, sorry about that, guys.
No worries, dude.
Arjun, how are you doing, man?
Pretty good. How about you? Doing you doing great excited to dive into this
I know that we both have a hard stop the top of the hour so let's let's let's get into it
let's do it excited to be awesome all right Nate I'll let you I'll let you kick it off and then we'll go from there. Yeah, awesome.
So I think a proper intro is in order.
I guess I'll share the high level of how I met Arjun.
We got connected in person and then we, a mutual friend who connected us and then, um, and then we started talking
and we quickly realized we had a lot to talk about, a lot in common.
Um, and he actually asked how I knew you.
I forget what I was from.
I might've mentioned you and the work you're doing at Nillion, uh, around reframing privacy,
which is what I want to talk about today.
And I think Arjun will have a lot of interesting ideas and you'll have some interesting ideas on the mimetics of privacy
and how it's all framed and all of that, which is the nominal topic of this space.
But yeah, we quickly realized that we had a lot to talk about. He asked about you. And I was like, yeah, we have a podcast together. We do a Twitter space every week. And, um, and so then I was like, wait,
we could bring Arjun on to talk about the thing that I was excited to talk with them more about
a couple of weeks ago. So here we are. Um, and, uh, Arjun, I think you already know Juan and our guests probably know us from last spaces
we'll just assume that
but Arjun is doing memetic warfare at Zcash
as per the bio
I love that
and I want to talk more about what that is
and maybe get his opinion
but yeah Arjun if you want to give any more background on yourself
for the audience then that would probably be a good way to kick it off.
Yeah, that was a super funny serendipitous encounter.
I had no idea that a friend I met in a place you know that I don't want to make public, but he would introduce me to someone in crypto.
And one I'd seen on Twitter, like he'd be like
posting a lot about Zcash and privacy.
So I was interested in that.
And through that, like, yeah, it was funny to find out that you were a friend and we're
hosting weekly Twitter spaces with them.
But yeah, I've been interested in Zcash for about a year now, I guess.
Got into it when I met Zuko in person and he onboarded
me to Zashi and had a bunch of friends talking about it.
And at first I was like, okay, it's like Bitcoin, but private.
And I hadn't really understood the privacy limitations of Bitcoin back then.
I always sort of assumed that it was anonymous, semi-anonymous.
I didn't really care about privacy at all back then.
But once I started to realize like, oh, you're leaking so much information on chain and all of the glitches get connected and it'll be automated with the rise of AI.
That's why like I really got interested in privacy and encrypted money, right?
Because if you don't really have, if you don't have privacy, you don't really have freedom.
So, so yeah, that's kind of the background of how I got into Zcash.
I actually saw that quote today.
It might have been on Juan's timeline, but it was Ben Franklin was the one that said that,
or that's attributed to Ben Franklin.
So you're in good company there.
Oh, cool.
I was also going to say, it is indeed a small world and the privacy space is still very small for better or for worse.
But I think the idea is to make it a lot bigger so that it would really be an incredible coincidence for the three of us to be connected by some thread rather than like the likelihood that because we're all talking about the same. I mean, it is a huge coincidence you met in person, of course,
but that the three of us are sort of in the same space talking about the same things,
you know, makes it the odds more likely.
But so to make that space bigger so that there are way more people talking about and interested in this,
I think the framing of how you speak about privacy is really important.
And I know that you are approaching it from this really cool sounding angle of memetic warfare, which we can go into. But even, you know, earlier this week for the company I work for, right, completely separate from this podcast we do, but Nillion, where we're also in data privacy, we hosted a space with Zcash with Josh, CEO of Electric Coin Company. And kind of what he touched on and what we were discussing, which is something I've been exploring in the weeks leading up to it, is like when people think about privacy, I mean, look, for better, not for better, for worse, just for worse, they've been indoctrinated to think that it means you have something to hide.
Right. And there's a million logical arguments for why that's nonsensical.
But, you know, logic isn't the thing that people are looking for when they make decisions of these sorts.
And so, you know, I was thinking about how
could we reframe it in a way that it resonates with everybody immediately. And I was thinking
about privacy as security, right? Because like you said, if you leak less information, there's less
of a, like a surface area to create new attack vectors. And, you know, privacy in that sense is
directly correlated with safety. Like safety and security don't necessarily always mean privacy,
but privacy almost always means an extra layer of safety and security. And so Josh mentioned how in his conversations with different people, many of
whom are, you know, legislating or regulating or any of these things, they're pushing the angle of
privacy as a matter of national security, right? Which is more and more important, I think, as
continued cyber attacks, you know attacks occur across the globe.
And you may not like regulators, you may not like legislators. I know that Nate probably wishes,
even more so than I do, that there was a world in which you didn't have to have conversations
with any of them. But the fact of the matter is, they do control meat space. And if they can just
round up and jail any developers working on privacy technology,
well then it's going to be hard to continue advancing this tech, right?
And so I'll end my rant by saying that I think that framing it as security is one really interesting angle
where you can get people who might have been previously opposed to it to actually see it as a shield
rather than sort of the opposite, which is an attack on the institutions and the systems that exist,
right?
So I'd be curious how that fits into what you're thinking of and how you approach the
topic of mimetic warfare.
Yeah, the word privacy seems to be so diluted that I almost don't like to use it anymore.
I've been thinking about the word encryption lately and Zcash being encrypted wealth,
cash being encrypted wealth, right?
right?
Encrypted money, encrypted electronic cash that you can use.
Encrypted money, encrypted electronic cash that you can use.
And it's the, as far as I know,
the only cryptocurrency that actually encrypts the ledger
using zero knowledge proofs and the ZK circuit.
And like other privacy coins
will call themselves privacy coins
and like say that they are offering privacy by obfuscation.
But we all know that that's not really,
like you could quibble on the definitions,
but it's not giving you privacy 100% of the time.
Like it's not truly anonymous.
And the anonymity set in like those coins,
the mixers and ones where they have the decoys
is like far inferior to something like,
something that grows with each transaction, right?
Which is essentially what's happening with Zcash.
So yeah, I've been thinking about encryption.
And when people hear the word encryption,
they automatically think secure, right?
Signal is secure because it's encrypted
and it's 100% private by default.
So yeah, privacy is almost...
I don't know if that's...
It just doesn't... It's not even that cool to me to call it privacy.
Like, I don't know, for some reason it doesn't feel like it's a cool word.
That probably ties into Nate's position, which is that, I mean, don't let me speak for you, but you don't like privacy as normal, right?
but you don't like privacy is normal, right?
You think it's a bad slogan.
You think it's a bad slogan.
I can't hear you.
I know you're unmuted,
but for some reason I can't hear you.
We lost you.
Arjun, you can't hear me either, right?
No, it says the host is having connection issues.
Oh, sad.
All right, so let's see if we can hopefully reconnect. But in the meantime,
I'll put words in his mouth and then he can correct me if I'm wrong. You know, Nate basically
says that the slogan privacy is normal is not a good one because, you know, he says privacy
used to be normal and now it's been stigmatized. And therefore, that is not going to resonate with
people, right? And I guess that's, that's sort of, I won't say that I don't like the slogan,
I actually think it's a pretty catchy slogan. But I will say that I think it, it kind of elucidates
the struggle that I've been having over the last few years talking about privacy and financial
privacy and privacy tech, which is that either a, people just do not care because they don't understand the implications
of a world without it. And you really have to capture their attention to get them to realize
once you capture the attention, right, it's very easy to understand what they care about
and connect the dots to show them why they should care about it. But the fact of the matter is,
attention is a very sought after commodity, and it's hard to get it.
And then part two is that because of the way that privacy has been stigmatized by like all kinds of bodies, let's call it, you have to overcome this this huge sort of mental wall that people have put up where they think that you necessarily must be saying something
that is bad or sketchy when you start talking about the topic, right? And that's why I think
that starting from that angle may in fact be kind of like starting at a disadvantage,
like letting somebody else start the race and then you start running, you know, half an hour later.
And since it looks like you're running from your profile picture, maybe you can relate to that.
I'm curious what you think. Yeah, I think like even in the privacy space right like a lot of people will
symbolize it as like this uh dark cloaked figure wearing a hoodie or something in front of a laptop
and uh eric warhees actually had this great tweet where he was like anonymity shouldn't be symboled
with this like dark cloak figure in front of a laptop. It should be symbolized by the young child at the playground,
the woman in a summer dress,
an older couple enjoying mimosas on the beach or something.
So you don't know the child's name, the woman's body,
or the older couple's financial history.
And you don't have a right to know that, right?
And it is sort of normal for those people to have privacy,
but privacy just shouldn't be symbolized
by this dark cloaked figure
and just alienated from most of society.
So it's a very normal thing.
And most people assume that they have privacy,
like just going about their day-to-day lives, right?
Like you spend your credit card and like,
you don't really like, sure you're leaking information,
but you don't think like anybody's going to catch you, right?
Like anybody has the need to look at that information.
So like most people are just thinking that,
oh, that knowledge is like private by default,
but obviously not.
So one other thing is like people
don't realize they need privacy until like they really do right that like it's
not that the the importance of privacy rises like linearly in society or
gradually it's like one day you don't need it and the other day the next day
you do so that's also an interesting phenomenon I completely agree with you
and Nate I know you're having connection issues, so we won't wait on you.
If you are able to speak or if it gets fixed, just chime in whenever.
Otherwise, we'll just kind of continue.
But Arjun, so since I think we've agreed on pretty much everything so far the most compelling selling point right now in terms of just like positioning technology or an idea or whatever it is.
What do you think the right approach is to get people to convert to this?
I don't know. And I just want to get to sort of the nitty gritty of what is nomadic warfare and how do you apply it, especially in Internet society, right?
Yeah, it's a good question i think it's it's hard
to do um the reason i get inspired is because i'm i'm rooting for a world with infinite frontiers
right i don't want progress to ever stop i want us to all be immortal and um like you know populate
the stars and green dead worlds and all sorts of stuff um and I think you need tools of freedom
that enable you to do that and that make the world safe
for capitalism, as Peter Thiel would say.
So I think something like Zcash,
where you have encrypted money at planetary scale,
allows for that.
And you do need other institutions as well.
But at the base layer, a lot of things
are upstream of money.
Right.
And so like, I like to like sell privacy and, you know, encrypted vault to like a grand
vision of, oh, this is something you need for other things like immortality.
And maybe even like Zika was saying this, like perhaps we don't see aliens because like they
need private money to, you know money to get off their planet.
So we might need that as well.
So yeah, I like to sell these things on a grand vision of infinite frontiers
and how you can just make progress indefinitely if you don't have to.
If you're not just displaying
um all your financial activity and how much wealth you have which also makes your target
and so there's like i think there's different reasons that people would be attracted to this
right uh i don't i think the red teams and like uh all these wrench attacks happening is like one
reason but um it's more of like a reason from fear rather than inspiration. Most grand beings want to be inspired to work on great projects.
So it's not just you'll make people afraid of, oh, you're making yourself a target if you're displaying all your wealth.
You also need to sell them a positive vision.
So I think it's a mixture of those two things.
But yeah, it's a hard thing to do.
I don't think a lot of people care about, you know,
even though it's like so easy to use like these coins now,
like you just download Zashii and you get privacy by default, right?
And then people say that, oh no, I need convenience more than privacy.
But yeah, you're getting convenience and privacy now.
So yeah, it's just becoming easier and easier visually to onboard people
and sell
them the right vision.
Yeah, I mean, this kind of reminds you of, I'm sure you're familiar with him already,
but there's a great writer on X, Frank Braun, who writes a lot about Zcash, and I'll drop
a link to his profile in the comments here if anybody wants to check it out. And he has
this Zcash investment thesis, which is, yes, about Zcash, but I think more generally it
applies to all sort of, let's call it privacy preserving technology.
Although I think the nomenclature can be adjusted based on this conversation.
And I do think there are two key parts to it that you mentioned in terms of reframing and getting people to pick up on this instead of seeing like some boring or shady thing.
Right. Which is, one, with all accelerationist movements, there is this sort
of mentality, we will accelerate and things will go wrong in the process. And there will be
like horrible externalities. But these are tradeoffs that we must be willing to deal with
because we're accelerating, right? And that's something that turns people away from accelerationist
movements. I think that being able to accelerate in the way that you've just mentioned actually removes most of the externalities of, for example, crypto.
So with crypto, we must accelerate. And yes, there are these huge problems in terms of incredible amounts of value leakage via data being up for grabs for anybody to do anything with, all the way from wrench attacks to MEV attacks to all other kinds of methods of like essentially extracting wealth from people
and i think this what you're proposing allows for this encrypted wealth future where all those
externalities that come with crypto are basically no longer applicable right so we can have basically
all the good parts of crypto um without all the negative side effects, let's call them, that come with the
way it exists today. And then on the flip side, you can frame it, aside from this, like,
accelerate into the future with encrypted wealth, you can frame it, as you said, as almost like
cybersecurity antivirus software, right? Where what you're doing now is you are taking back
custody of your own money from the banks, et cetera,
the original crypto vision, but you are also removing all these attack vectors that are the reasons that people are now gravitating towards, for example, depositing into an ETF
instead of self-custody, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of the thing in the first place.
Why? Because they're like, I don't want to be a target of attack, right? And so
I really think that that's a very compelling value prop if you combine both those things into one
instead of this whole like
you know
you just gotta hide, you gotta like live in
fear and perpetuity
I think it's more empowering the way that you're proposing it
yeah 100%
yeah it is very interesting how
those like things are turning and people are
literally using ETFs
to like you know hide their vault instead of self-custiding and yeah being a target that way
i mean but look it's it's reasonable right like if you have bit if you are some some billionaire
and you have bitcoin or you have any any other asset on any fully transparent ledger
you either have to have basically a team
of people who are doing OPSEC for you and ensuring that that is not directly tied to your name and
address, right? Or you have some very complicated multi-custodian, multi-sig setup, one of these
like institutional type solutions. Or you just deposit it into ETF, right? Why? Because it's basically the equivalent of depositing to the bank,
except the bank is holding your crypto now.
And if somebody comes knocking, there's nothing they can take from you.
They have to go to this enormous company that is built on security, etc.
So it makes sense.
If you had that amount of wealth, you would probably not want to hold it
in an open, transparent ledger that is tied to your name with a wallet that's tied to your name.
And therefore, it'll always lead towards more centralization in the hands of custodians,
as long as that happens, in my opinion.
Whereas I think these types of...
Yeah, go ahead.
Sorry.
Yeah, I think this is also a good argument for the private store of value, right?
And private store of wealth.
Like historically, almost like... almost like what needs to be
stored privately um so like anyone rich you know like they don't really own things like they'll
have stuff stored in trust um and like even people bitcoin like you know with large amounts of bitcoin
they'll put it into etfs now um so and like i've there's like sort of this debate between like, oh, privacy needing to be like, oh, just like, you know, day to day transactions, or is it also a store of wealth, store of value, can it replace Bitcoin?
I think it needs to do both, right?
Like, as an individual, you want to be able to store your wealth privately and also, you know, not have to worry about being inflated away.
And you want to do that ideally yourself, right?
You have self-custody.
And you also want to be able to spend it privately.
In day-to-day transactions, you don't want to tell people where you're buying coffee.
Basically, whatever you want to do with the wealth, like you do that privately. So I think, yeah, like the best of both worlds
is like just you get privacy
in all your financial activity.
Well said.
And, you know, one of the advantages of Zcash,
I think here as well,
is that for a lot of these private technologies,
privacy coins, whatever,
they basically exist on an
island, right?
Like you can either get it peer to peer, extremely difficult.
Very few people have the know-how or the willingness to do so, or you buy from a centralized exchange,
you send it there, and then you better hope that whoever your counterparty is in the trade
is willing to take that in return for goods and services, right?
So given that for most of these, serving as a medium of exchange is the primary use case outside of SOV or store of value.
If you don't have that, then the token is pretty much useless.
However, I think one thing that's very interesting that Zcash is doing, especially through Zashi
and native integrations, is creating this sort of interoperability between Zcash and
all the other existing crypto ecosystems so that people can move in and out very easily. And I mean, even Zuko had a great example the other day of, you know, Proton, the company for like ProtonMail, ProtonVPN, etc.
They take Bitcoin. They don't take Zcash.
But using something like Near Intense, he can pay and shield the Zcash and they receive Bitcoin.
coin and now both of them have something they want he paid in a fully uh encrypted manner and
And now both of them have something they want.
received the services and they received the the you know currency or token of choice on their end
so you don't have to force basically like the biggest problem i'm trying to get to is that
currencies are supposed to solve this economic problem of double coincidence of wants right
meaning that you both agree that this is the medium of exchange and therefore you don't have
to have what 10 toothbrushes for one goat and then you have this whole problem trying to find a third person who's willing to participate in that trade as well.
A lot of these tokens are saying they solve for that.
But if you don't have somebody else on the other end who's willing to take that exact same token and there's no way to swap for other currencies that they are willing to take in a sort of immediate manner, then the whole point of it is kind
of defeated, right? So I think that really opens up the doors for a lot of different
use cases as well.
Yeah, for sure. Unstoppable private money and unstoppable liquidity, right? You need
both. And near intense is so awesome, man. Like I use it all the time. It's just like
so, and they're like,
soon I believe also going to integrate it into Zashi directly. So you'll be able to swap from Zcash to any of the coin.
And ideally want these things to be automatic, right?
So in the situation you're describing in,
like I just pay in Zcash and the other person gets whatever they want,
like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
And yeah, that just happens automatically without you like doing manual steps
but even right now like you can do like a couple of extra steps and get that outcome. So it's pretty cool
It really is
So one other thing I want to talk touch on because I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet
But I saw recently on your feed and I'm wondering if if you touched on this at all was i saw you had a podcast with naval most people know him even from outside of crypto
naval ravikant um and i think he's posted about zcash in the past if i'm not mistaken i'm curious
if you could shed any light on that yeah i have no idea about that um i don't know he he's like
i think he's posted stuff but uh i uh deleted it later or something i don't know. He's like, I think he's posted stuff, but I deleted it later or something. I don't know. So, yeah.
So was that conversation more so focused just on general, like, big picture ideas about the future of Western society? That's kind of what I got from it.
Yeah. So, like, a common interest of mine and Naval's is, like, The Beginning of Infinity, which David Deutsch wrote about, the book that David Deutsch wrote.
So it's basically the reason I got into Zcash, mainly for epistemological reasons, right?
That you need freedom to make any sort of progress.
And without privacy, there's no freedom. So he's basically arguing for, he defines Walt in a very interesting way,
which is that Walt is a set of physical transformations that one can affect in the physical world.
And so it's not a number, right?
It's like a set of physical transformations. And that repertoire can be increased by creating technologies and creating technologies that protect you from things like politics, right? like natural disasters and like things from nature that you just need to protect itself
with technology.
So it's like a very deep like argument for basically things that slow down the growth
of knowledge and things that like increase it.
So you want to like create technologies that are able that you're able to, you know, create
more knowledge with faster and just accelerate
the...
EAC and David Deutsch stuff is very similar.
I think a lot of it is borrowed from him, which is super cool.
So yeah, that's the reason why I got interested in Zcash in the first place, because it's
the technology that enables the machineware freedom.
Arjun, can you elaborate on that maybe a little more? it's the technology that enables the machineware freedom.
Arjun, can you elaborate on that maybe a little more?
Do you see it as purely enabling freedom from the financial standpoint, or do you see the blockchain itself?
You mentioned epistemology as being a driving factor
or an attraction of yours toward this tech.
How else does Zcash factor into the beginning of infinity
or like how else does it set the foundation for freedom in your mind sir i don't know if david
himself i'm not like putting words into his mouth like he he wouldn't um i think he has like
different sort of criticism for cryptocurrencies in general.
I don't think he thinks they're very secure. But on my end, I think you have a base technology that anybody can use from anywhere in the world.
And they're all able to basically be most authentic, right?
Because when you're spending money, like you're showing, basically things
that you value because any, any financial transaction happens where you any voluntary
transaction happens when like both sides think it's a win win. And so like, I'm paying $5
for coffee, because I value the coffee more than I value the $5 and the barista values
the $5 more than she values like making me the cup of coffee right um so um and so so you you're basically
showing what you value when you uh transact financially uh and so if that's if you're if
somebody's able to see basically wherever you're you know you're just uh flashing all your financial
transactions you're not going to be
authentic because like there's always uh big brothers always like watching and judging you
right um and so uh and just like in the way that it enables authenticity and how that leads to
creativity right because you you're not going to be creative if you're not free and you're not
going to create new knowledge by definition if you're not creative um and creating new knowledge
can mean like anything, right?
I'm super interested in longevity and these new peptides and PRP.
So these things and others like space exploration
are all enabled from the base layer of society.
That's money in certain other institutions as well, right?
Like science, it's just assume that questioning things is good.
So in the scientific community,
you're not going to be laughed at if you just like ask the professor why,
you know, like if you're in a seminar and you just ask a professor a question,
you're not going to be, if the professor says that,
oh, you're not allowed to ask that question,
you just need to like accept what I say.
So like everybody's going to laugh at the professor and be like, this is not acceptable, right? You've got to ask that question. You just need to accept what I say. So everybody's gonna laugh at the professor
and be like, this is not acceptable, right?
You gotta answer the student.
And so it doesn't matter who that criticism is coming from.
So you need institutions like science and also money.
So I think it all ties into it.
That's epic.
One, what other questions do you have because i was thinking of going more into like what is memetic warfare but i don't want to monopolize this and furthermore
my internet keeps cutting out so i'm not even sure you guys are hearing this right now
no we are we are so we can hear you that's the the good news. What's the bad news?
The good news is, I guess, bad news, I guess we might lose you again.
But, you know, we touched sort of broadly on what memetic warfare is.
And I think that it's kind of like that book.
What's the book called that everyone's been going crazy about?
There is no anti-memetic division, something like that, right?
Yeah.
I think part of what we're getting at is that memetic warfare cannot be like strictly defined because it is it is by its nature sort of elusive
this sounds like a bit this reminds me of when i did uh my ma in in comparative literature and
we were talking about things that like literally at the end of the class nobody knew what they were
talking about um but it is kind of elusive in that sense right where it it it is difficult to define
because it is it is something that encompasses everything and nothing at once and it's basically
how to reframe the ideas that people have about existing concepts that they may already have very
strong preconceived notions about whether they are conscious of that or not right so it like look
the basic example it's like the famous noting quote quote is like saying you have, I can't even remember what the quote is anymore.
But it's basically like if you if you have the same like, what do you have to hide?
What do you have to worry about if you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
And when you say that to people for the first time, it kind of shocks them because they automatically think, well, I have nothing to hide.
So I have nothing to worry about because I have nothing to hide.
It's like, OK, we'll start thinking about all the things you do in your day to day
that indicate that that's not true. Like you have a door in your bathroom, you have a door
in your house, you have curtains. You don't live stream when you're with your spouse in the
bedroom, right? Like, or I mean, some people do, but that's like only fans is business.
And so people start to realize like, oh, wow, I do have this really strong preconceived
notion. Like, where was this ingrained in me? Like, was there a class at school where they
repeated this a lot? Was it like subliminal advertising I saw on the subway? Like, how did
I come to this conclusion when privacy is such a normal human thing? And I now realize I've
subconsciously been thinking it's like this criminal thing for a very long time. And I think the point of it, right, is that trying to get people to get out of that requires
a lot of effort.
Whereas if you don't even use the word privacy, but you use another set of terms or nomenclature
to describe the things that privacy provides, people have zero reluctance, right?
Because they have no mental barriers up against it.
And so it resonates very quickly, the concept of privacy and security. It's like, oh yeah, I'm guessing
you don't have a front door. They're like, of course I have a front door. And you're like,
okay, so then why don't you have a front door for your financial transactions? They're like,
okay, that actually makes sense. I should probably put a front door on there, right?
Yeah. But that particular quote, okay, this is where I would like to transition it because I think that particular quote is ineffective and it's a're like, yeah, no, I don't really need freedom of speech because my opinions are so mainstream and
consensus. And that is why it sounds great to us, but that is why like tech bros and tech nerds,
like not tech bros in a diminutive sense, but like, you know, uh, like all of us D gens, like, you know, and the people,
particularly the people that are developing this technology should not be in charge of the
marketing because these are not effective slogans. Like I'm sure many people have come across that
quote by Edward Snowden, but most of them don't, don't recount it every week because they don't
give a fuck because they genuinely don't think they need this. And maybe they don't recount it every week because they don't give a fuck, because they genuinely don't think
they need this. And maybe they don't, but we kind of need them in the anonymity set,
and they don't realize they need it because it's sort of a tragedy of the commons where like,
yeah, maybe they don't need it individually, but they need the infrastructure to not have a complete dystopia.
So my rant is over. And what I want to ask Arjun is like, what are the best slogans that we can be carrying forward that all the people in this space can be propagating? Like of all the mimetics,
what do you think the best ones are that are going to be good for reaching the most people?
Yeah, I think it's very hard to one shot people with slogans, right?
Like it's even Snowden's comment, like, as you said, it sounds really, really cool and
awesome to us and we totally agree with it.
But to most people, like, they'll like maybe think about it and then forget about it, like
the next day, like not really care about it and then go about their day-to-day lives so like some of these like uh like memes in their minds right
they can take a while to sort of um to change not that so and then some people think that oh there's
some people in the world that you just can't change their minds right which i totally disagree
with i think everybody can change their minds you just need to um like that's the art of memetic
warfare just basically uh building sandcastles in people's brains and finding out how to change
minds but um it's very hard to do that with slogans i think like it's it's also something
that people need to do on their own you can like influence it to a big extent but ultimately like
the person himself needs to, you know,
to do the thinking on their own and basically add that new knowledge
in their framework.
So, yeah, like, I'm trying to think of ways,
and I think it's going to be different.
Yeah, go ahead.
Please go ahead.
I thought you were, I thought you were stopping.
Go ahead. No, I was just saying that I'm trying to think of different sorts of ways. And I think it's going to be different for different sorts of people, right? Like why does
someone believe that they don't need privacy? Or maybe someone believes that they need privacy,
but they don't think this is the right way to get it. And ultimately you need compliance for
some sort of things. So you need a backdoor or something, which, which will never work obviously, because that
can always be abused.
Yeah.
I mean, backdoors are just absolute bullshit.
Like I have, I agree that privacy is a spectrum.
Like I think there's always trade-offs and, and there's like really no perfect system.
Like even if it is end to end encrypted, maybe it's how you connect to that protocol or that
service that, that ends up, that ends up eroding your privacy. So I don't think there's a perfect solution, but backdoors are
basically a way of saying like, hey, it's private for now. It's private until it's not, right?
Because if there's a backdoor, it means somebody internally can access it or grant access to it.
And if that's the case, then it's almost just like one of the laws of physics,
right? Like the data will get out. It'll leak, it'll be exploited, whatever it is. So I think
that is absolutely misleading marketing to say that something with a backdoor is private. You
could say it has an extra layer of privacy relative to something that's completely
transparent for anybody to see. But I think it's very misleading to say that it is a privacy
service. So there's that. And then in terms of like speaking to what people resonate with, one very interesting thing I've noticed, this is very
anecdotal. I don't have any data to prove it. It's more based on just the engagement I get from
certain things I say, or the conversations I have with people, is that even if people hate
the current administration in whatever country they're in, whatever the political climate is,
they are more likely to resonate with messaging that says this technology keeps you safe from exploitative corporations
than they are to resonate with the angle of this technology keeps you safe from totalitarian
governments, right? And I don't know exactly why that is, but I mean, I think that's something to
kind of like look into, right? Because if that's what resonates with mean i think that's something to kind of like look into right because
if that's what resonates with people then that's what we should be saying in order to get more
people to start learning about this stuff yeah it's also true right like both are true you don't
want uh like corporations can also influence their decision making and thinking and you know
add new ideas to your brains and what i I really care about, even though we say
memetic warfare, ultimately I care about truth, right?
So I don't want to be promoting falsehoods
in any sort of way and I always want to be improving
my thinking as well.
But it is true that both corporations and governments
can see whatever you're doing.
So you want to be proud from them as well. And like any individual, right? Like any red teams, like,
could, uh, you don't want that information to be getting to them as well. Uh,
you want information to get to like whoever you like, uh,
willingly want to get to. So you can disclose it to anybody you want,
but not just like have it in the public sphere for anybody to get to. Um,
so, so yeah, I don't know where I was going with that.
Well, speaking of corporations, Paul Timofeev has been posting some comments under this,
one of the people in the audience. And he pointed out that Apple has some pretty good privacy ads.
And I will say, I've seen people mention this before, where, yeah, sure, there are companies
that within the privacy niche have done extremely well,
like Proton, Signal, etc., you know, combined 100, almost 200 million users, monthly active users.
But in terms of like mainstream, mainstream, Apple's been the only one who has been able to lean into the privacy angle and make it a selling point to the extent they put billboards up saying
Apple is private. So, and I myself can't exactly figure out why when they say it,
it resonates with such a large segment of the population.
Otherwise, since they are for profit, I doubt they'd be doing that
if it wasn't helping them sell devices and services.
So I'm curious why you guys think...
Do you think people actually buy Apple devices
because they get swayed by the marketing that it's private?
I've seen a lot of billboards.
I actually don't know.
I actually don't know.
But I mean, considering that they measure absolutely everything down to the 10th decimal
place, I can't see a world in which they would continue to spend this much time and energy
promoting the Apple is private narrative, which it is much more private than something
like, you know, Android's google pixel device with stock operating system
but i can't see why they would do that unless it was helping them sell so i mean do you disagree
with that no yeah yeah it does sort of make sense like i've seen so many billboards actually i'm
like i don't know.
Yeah, they're just trying to push a narrative forward because I know they get into a lot of litigations as well
in terms of privacy.
But yeah, I don't know if people actually get swayed
to buy Apple products because of those ads.
I don't know.
That's a good question.
I guess we'll have to talk to their user acquisition department.
Nate, are you still there?
Yeah, I'm still here.
And I think an important question is private from who?
And that's maybe a missing,
I feel like that's an underlying thread
in the conversation around why privacy is good from various people's perspectives.
And this one does go back to Snowden, where he said, it's not what you have to hide, it's from
who. And you've got all these various facets of your life that you don't want being completely
100% open to everybody all the time. But private, Apple may be private from
your competitors as a corporation, maybe, but it's not private from the US government,
which either has explicit agreements or is backdoor the software or whatever.
You know, there's privacy is a part of security and security has different threat
models.
There are different, you know, sets of data that you want to keep private from different
groups or individuals.
And so privacy is also on sort of a spectrum.
It's like a very multifaceted spectrum.
And that may be what allows Apple to get away with that marketing.
Because it's certainly not as private as, you know, like a graphene OS.
Actually, there's sort of a debate there.
And the debate is you can blend in the gray man philosophy.
You can blend in with the crowd on an iPhone,
but you really, you really,
you become a big fish in a small pond
when you're using graphene.
And so, or any other more private operating system,
whether it's a mobile operating system or laptop.
It all comes back. Oh yeah, the internet mini set. It all comes back to our first ever OnlyFriends episode, Nate, where we're basically debating
is it sufficient to make very strong privacy tools for a very small niche or subset of
the general population?
Or is it preferable to build privacy tooling that encourages and invites the mainstream to
participate even if they're not using it for privacy reasons per se because it increases
the anonymity set for those who are there in the first place and who care about it from an
ideological perspective and i still stand by that being the right angle but i'm curious if you've
changed your mind over the last couple months i've've been thinking about it from like, I think one of my favorite ideas and concepts is there's always a third option.
And I've been thinking about this different approach to privacy, which makes everybody in on it, whether they want to be in on it or not.
I don't know what that would look like at a societal scale with like iPhones or whatever.
Maybe it would be a protocol that Android and Apple start using because it's that good that they just want to use this networking protocol or whatever to communicate instead of, I don't know, instead of like a mobile network.
I'm speaking very abstractly here because we have little time.
But in privacy in crypto,
that looks like there are two examples of this. So one is EIP 7503, and we should have Kayvon on
sometime talking about Worm and EIP 7503, ZK Wormholes, which makes all ETH in a fresh wallet plausibly deniable.
And if merged into Ethereum, it would just make ETH basically anonymous at the base layer.
And people wouldn't have to change anything individually to be a part of the anonymity set.
They would just be a part of the anonymity set.
And then the second example of this is maybe
more relatable and easier to explain for those who have an understanding of UTXO-based systems
like Zcash and Bitcoin. GridPlus and later PhononDAO, P-H-O-N-O-N-DAO, created this thing,
this offline system of transferring fixed denomination UTXOs. So like,
let's say like 0.01 Bitcoin, you could tap your GridPlus hardware wallet against another one or
against a point of sale system and transfer that 0.01 Bitcoin to the recipient. And then that person could go transfer it to someone else
offline. And then whenever someone wants to finally broadcast this, they would just put it
on chain. So it's sort of like an offline lightning network. And the beauty of this system is,
if that got any meaningful traction at all, the entire Bitcoin blockchain becomes plausibly, deniably transactable.
Those transactions could have come from anywhere.
It's like there would no longer be meaningful links between people.
And so these are two examples of this type of obfuscation that makes everybody a part of the anonymity set, which is, I think, the crux of the question, do we need all the normies or not?
Good point. And I know that so we'll leave everyone with these Easter eggs. Go look them up on your own.
Maybe do with the next spaces. We can focus on that. I know that Arjun and myself have a hard stop now.
So unfortunately, we do have to wrap up. But hey, a cliffhanger is always welcome, right?
So see everybody on the next episode of Only Friends.
Arjun, thanks so much for joining us.
It was really a pleasure to be able to pick your brain.
Thanks for having me.
And hope we can bring you on again soon.
Yeah, for sure.
Great chatting.
See you all later.
It was a pleasure, Arjun.
Thanks, guys.
Catch you later.
Bye. thanks guys bye bye
