[00:00:00] Katherine Druckman: Hey everyone. Welcome back to reality. 2.0, I am Katherine Druckman today. I am talking to Doc Searls and Shawn Powers and Petros Koutoupis because, and we're, we're a little sad that we're missing Kyle, but Kyle is busy. And anyway, so today among other things, we are celebrating the fact that this is our 100th episode. We can't believe we've gotten this far. Wow. That's almost. It's almost a hundred hours. Cause most of our episodes are nearly an hour. Yeah. It's a lot of stuff. That's a lot of pontificating out into the ether. A lot of times we'll get that. We'll get back to that. [00:00:37] Shawn Powers: But does that make us influencers now? Are we in [00:00:41] Doc Searls: Or flatulencers [00:00:42] Katherine Druckman: Well you've been an influencer for a long time. I remember when people used to recognize you for your hair, Shawn. [00:00:48] Shawn Powers: It's true. And now most of it has fallen off. [00:00:51] Doc Searls: Yeah, the, uh, I'm missing mine, the testosterone poisoned ones on this call are losing it. [00:01:00] Katherine Druckman: I've still got mine, mostly burned off my kids. It's probably you have too much. I [00:01:06] Shawn Powers: don't think I should have the kind of universe has a horrible sense of humor. It's horrible. [00:01:10] Katherine Druckman: Right? What the hell? Um, so, so yeah, so one of the things I was just about to say, but I didn't want to go off record cause it's funny. Uh, one of our, I think our most popular episode ever. The title was "Destroy This Podcast. I don't know if I should take that personally or if it's just a lot of things. Yeah. I think we were talking, if you read the description it's are we talking about ownership and open-source and stuff, the concept of ownership, like what does it mean to really own something, which is always an interesting conversation, frankly, because a lot of that definition changes, it seems to be very fluid, right? Um, [00:01:50] Shawn Powers: My most popular ever YouTube video is how to break into my van. So I'm just not sure that the world is prepared for what really good quality. [00:02:01] Katherine Druckman: So, so you actually like showed people how to break into [00:02:04] Shawn Powers: your van? Yeah, it's true because I locked the keys in the car and I mean, it's an old video. It's like 14 years old, but it's gotten more hits than like all the other videos on my YouTube channel combined. And I like to use the, I use the cutting. Board like one of those cheap, thin plastic cutting boards and a string. And I unlocked it and made a horrible video of it and it got, yeah. So I'd be concerned. [00:02:27] Petros Koutoupis: I don't [00:02:27] Doc Searls: have the band anymore. How many vans are [00:02:30] Petros Koutoupis: getting broken into now [00:02:31] Shawn Powers: because of you quite a few, based on the comments they claim that it's their own van, but. I'm like I'm the Dodge caravan, like miser of Northern Michigan here. I just have like, like a yard full of them. Thanks, Steve. Oh boy, this podcast took a dark turn. Oh, [00:02:56] Katherine Druckman: well it could be a lot worse. I mean, I feel like we have to point out and talk about the elephant in the room. That is the whole world is going south. [00:03:02] Doc Searls: Yeah, this is, will this be known as 2 24, 24 2, depending on where you are. Definitely fruit for those listening in the future. Um, which is [00:03:13] Katherine Druckman: tomorrow, tomorrow, [00:03:15] Doc Searls: tomorrow is in, this goes up, yesterday is when, Russia was enlarged by one Ukraine and that's that. And I was thinking back, I had, you know, th there are these moments, you know, nine 11 was one of them. The Kennedy assassination was one, um, There've been a number of these. I think this is on that scale. I think what happened, even though it was, we knew it was going to happen. Um, uh, it was, it was likely to happen I mean you don't assemble that many troops around the country for no purpose at all. It's still, it upsets the world order and throws the world into a kind of chaos. And so that's a, that's a, an interesting thing [00:03:55] Shawn Powers: and particularly disturbing too. And I mean, this isn't getting political, it's just recognizing that, uh, the U S is so divided right now that having global chaos happen is even more unsettling. [00:04:09] Doc Searls: Well, firstly, you know, so I have, uh, I will. A little breach, a little bit of a confidence in a way. My, my sister is a retired Navy commander and, uh, got her masters from the Navy war college and studies this stuff. And she sees the, the new divide between those who favor democracy and those that favor authority. Uh, authoritarians. And I think that's the divide here. I think that's the divide in the us with, we have the authoritarian, uh, former president and sympathy with him and with Putin for that matter and with Russia on the one side and with Bolsonaro and, and the other guys that are that, that, uh, Duterte and others, that Trump blank and on the other side is democracy. And. We even had a little laboratory on that in our own country. And that's a really interesting thing. And I think that's a, that is a, kind of a new divide actually right now. [00:05:05] Shawn Powers: And I don't think that, uh, people would identify with those two sides. [00:05:09] Doc Searls: No, I don't think they will either, but I think that's what my sister thinks is going to sort out. Or at least she sees that as the challenge now that we, we have to confront authoritarianism, we have [00:05:21] Shawn Powers: to proceed, but as a nation right now on Twitter poutine, is trending. I'm not sure that we're at a state to have good conversations about such things as a nation. I don't know. I bet that's going down a dark road. So, uh, let's just, uh, [00:05:38] Katherine Druckman: but I wonder like, is the poutine misinformation? Is somebody out there just trying to disparage Canada or, [00:05:46] Doc Searls: you know, gravy, you know, it, uh, getting it wrong. You know, I mean, there's a lot that sort of weirdly like your. Catherine you're actually like tethered into a different port than you normally are. I had mailed problems to, for the last few days, but I, I called. M a I L okay. The other kind of just outgrow I'm old anyway, the, the, uh, uh, but with that full I called apple care with, and, um, and normally. If you have an apple, anything, and you have problems, they want to do screen sharing with you, which is really helpful actually. So they can see what's going on and help you walk you through whatever the solution is. And that was broken. Like for all of apple care, they, nobody could do the screen sharing thing. I [00:06:40] Shawn Powers: have never had apple care screen-share with me. I have ever called tech support. [00:06:45] Doc Searls: Yeah, well, you probably don't, maybe you don't need to. I do blame [00:06:48] Shawn Powers: and get it. It wasn't a humble brag. I was a little bit worried that maybe like you were talking to somebody who wasn't from apple, they're like, no, no, no need to go log into your bank. Now, while we're here watching, [00:06:58] Doc Searls: I think telephony still works to some degree, you know, you call a number of, you're probably going to get that number. Um, and the music on hold was definitely the choices, the three things. And they haven't charged me in years. I mean, it's kind of interesting. They never charged me. And so I've never had apple care for a long time. It does not actually do I buy apple care [00:07:18] Petros Koutoupis: with all my apple products? I just have never needed to use. [00:07:23] Doc Searls: Yeah. It's [00:07:25] Katherine Druckman: I buy it with laptops. Only figure anything [00:07:28] Doc Searls: else worth it. I did. Long time [00:07:30] Shawn Powers: ago, I buy it for phones because for phones anymore. Well, I paid like $1,300 for my phone. [00:07:40] Doc Searls: Yeah. But. [00:07:43] Shawn Powers: But, and [00:07:44] Petros Koutoupis: that's the, uh, the price of a Mac book air. I mean, you're, [00:07:48] Shawn Powers: you're [00:07:49] Petros Koutoupis: why buy it for the laptop and not the phone, if they're the same price, [00:07:53] Katherine Druckman: but you have to do some pretty serious damage to it, to justify [00:07:57] Doc Searls: AppleCare, but here's the trick with apple care. If you have it for one device. And is it connected to other devices? The Alicia go for the other devices? Really? I say, I don't [00:08:07] Shawn Powers: know that I've absolutely. Here's doc teaching us how to [00:08:10] Doc Searls: hack the world. It's a light heck. And I don't know if it's still working. It was a case, a couple of tutors for years ago. I thought, geez, you seem to have been a customer for 40 years, so maybe we're. [00:08:24] Shawn Powers: Can I do something that we never do in this podcast. And talk about apple for another second [00:08:31] Katherine Druckman: before we actually do have a topic. Just so hang in there. We're going to talk about, [00:08:36] Shawn Powers: I think this is, I think this is a good question. So, um, Uh, this year I've been redoing my entire home automation thing, right? Like I used to have a Samsung smart things hub and I hate it. And it's all cloud-based and I moved all to local, um, home assistant stuff. It's local, it runs in my house. It doesn't use the cloud at all. Right. So see this fits into the podcast. But, um, I also want to talk to the little robots in my house to tell them so that they can turn on my lights and stuff. Right. My question is how do people feel about there's Google home? There's Amazon Alexa, and then there's the home pod from apple. As far as privacy stuff goes. Do you guys think it matters at all? Where you, you. I, [00:09:20] Doc Searls: I, I would, I think it matters. I think, I think at least apple is promising to make it private to some degree where the other [00:09:28] Shawn Powers: stump. That's what I wonder. I [00:09:29] Katherine Druckman: mean, I think they at least make an effort how [00:09:31] Shawn Powers: successful it is. No. Yeah. I mean, that's what they say. I just wonder if it's lip service, you know what I mean? [00:09:37] Katherine Druckman: I think it might be marginally better. It's not going to be perfect for sure. It will be. There will always be problems. I mean, air tag, [00:09:45] Doc Searls: reliance. Uh, I've [00:09:48] Shawn Powers: always uses the cloud, right? Because the, we don't have the processing power to do voice recognition locally on the devices yet, at least not. Well, so I mean, all of that processing, I believe is done remotely. Like Siri, when you say, Hey, Siri, I think she, you know, queries the mother planet and determines what you said. I [00:10:06] Doc Searls: think so too, but I look I'm, I'm not a fan. Of any of the giant companies, but the, it is in Apple's interest in competing with Google and Amazon and Facebook to differentiate by being, you know, being committed to the privacy of their customers. And we, and we pay them, we pay them for that stuff. And [00:10:34] Shawn Powers: they're not, they're not, we're not the product. [00:10:36] Doc Searls: I guess we were customers. We're not the product. And, um, That that doesn't make them perfect or, or fully trustworthy, but I don't think it's quite right to lump them in with the others. [00:10:49] Shawn Powers: Maybe they don't have the financial motivation that the others [00:10:53] Doc Searls: don't. I mean, they're a $2 trillion company and they're, you know, rocking away. [00:10:58] Shawn Powers: So by one of those little home pod things and see how that works with turning my lights on. I have actually [00:11:05] Katherine Druckman: considered it as well as a, an option. I, I rejected, I had, you know, Amazon devices for a while and I just thought they're not, [00:11:13] Doc Searls: I don't even know. I don't even know how it works. I know it exists the Home pod. Yeah. [00:11:18] Shawn Powers: Same sort of thing. It just integrates with apple products and home kit products. And it's just like the other, from what I can tell, it's like the others. But the other thing too, though, is I think it integrates with, like, if you have an apple watch, like you could have. Tell your watch to turn on the lights. So that's, I'm going to try that. I'll report that [00:11:37] Doc Searls: here's the question means it does it, how, I mean, the home pod is like a, like a little Alexa thing or, you know what I mean? As far as I know, it's a, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a grapefruit with a speaker and an electric grapefruit. Actually, you know, like an Alexa only, not as good because it's not tied into the cloud and spying on you all the time, but I don't know how, how it controls your lights and stuff. How does it do that? [00:12:03] Shawn Powers: It's a, it's called home kit and it has like a built-in. So it actually has its own thing. Like you can buy it. Products like light fixtures and stuff and it scans them in and they're on wifi. And like, it just controls it. I'm actually already using a different platform called home assistant. That's all local inside my house, but, but you can integrate home pod into that. So. So my Alexa will turn on the living room lights that it got from home assistant. Like I just integrated and then it just sees them. And so it will know that those things exist and it will send a signal to my home assistant platform to turn the lights on and off. So [00:12:45] Katherine Druckman: do you have any I'm wondering, so now that we're, I actually really enjoy the home automation conversation, even though I don't do a lot of it myself. Um, do you have any like, particularly trusted. Devices or brands like, so here's my concern. Always, you know, if I buy some connected outlet or something, I don't know what the hell is in that thing. I sound like super like a paranoid tinfoil hatter or something, but I'm always like do I trust this brand to connect to my, uh, you know, home automation network in that way. Or do I not. Yeah. [00:13:19] Shawn Powers: So what I, I like to use. So there's, there's wifi devices. I'm always a little more suspicious about, um, that said like a from Belkin seems to be pretty decent. I only have a couple, I only have a couple of those that they integrate right. With home assistant. But the thing about home assistant, and I feel like this is like an ad for home assistant, but, uh, it's open source. Um, and it all runs locally. There's no cloud component to it. Right. So. When you connect to things like Z-Wave or ZigBee or all those other things, it doesn't li I mean, it, it, it uses its own, um, wireless frequencies is so it doesn't connect to the internet at all. It's just internal. So, um, pretty much anything that Z-Wave or ZigBee or. Well, there's some more complicated stuff, but then this'll turn into a complete tech [00:14:12] Katherine Druckman: podcast. That's our next, our next step or a future episode we need to do. Actually, [00:14:17] Doc Searls: I do have an answer to your question about what, who you trust. And, um, Sean, Sean, I shot everything that Sean says, um, is Sonos. Um, I've been a customer of Sonos since they started in Santa Barbara in like 2000. Five six and, um, and their customer support has been really good. Um, I'm not crazy about all their products. I don't like soundbars. I think they give you wide motto. [00:14:46] Shawn Powers: Um, I have thoughts on Sonos to docs. [00:14:48] Doc Searls: So go ahead. I mean, they started out there in Santa Barbara and Cambridge mass, and those are the two places I lived at the time. And, and I met with them and talked to them often. They seemed like great people. So, and at the time I've talked a little bit about them in Linux, Charlotte, cause they were Linux-based for a lot of the stuff that they did, even though, you know, their, their actual, you know, UI was proprietary. You know, and they've been pretty good about replacing stuff that's failed for me. So, okay. So, so what's the complaint. [00:15:20] Shawn Powers: So first of all, I probably have $10,000 worth of Somos equipment all over my ass and you're a better customer than it's amazing, right? I mean, the, the sound quality has always been a mess. The issue is they try to out mowed their old products and they got such back that they actually had to backpedal, but all the, all the original Sonos products that I bought the $10,000 worth is probably. $6,000 worth, I guess if I'm doing the math in my head, but anyway, there was a lot of money. Um, they tried to make them just not work anymore, like up it's time to upgrade, like upgrade. I spent, I spent like $1,200 on this, uh, soundbar with subwoofer and like satellite speaker system for my, my movie theater. And they wanted it to just no longer work at all. [00:16:06] Petros Koutoupis: Well then sort of reminds me how. How, um, hardware manufacturers managed a mobile phones, you know, early Android phones, all of a sudden after about 18 months, maybe even less than that after a year they'd stop updating it. And all of a sudden, you know, it just wasn't working right or correctly anymore. And you were sort of forced to buy something new. [00:16:33] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. Funny, wait, we actually have a. Speaking of our a hundred episodes, we have a very early episode specifically about that, about, uh, you know, sort of obsolescence in mobile devices and the security risks that come along with it. [00:16:47] Shawn Powers: Um, one more, one more smack that. All has all, has Alexa built in it all has Amazon, [00:16:56] Katherine Druckman: you can't have a Sonos device without, without [00:16:59] Shawn Powers: a no, I don't think so. I think all their speakers now have it built in because it's part of their, they can also be smart home hubs using the Alexa platform and, um, and they also have airplay built in, which is a weird dichotomy there. But anyway, anyway, yeah, the sound quality is amazing about [00:17:17] Doc Searls: that. Did they fix that for you? [00:17:21] Shawn Powers: There's two apps now. So there's Sonos as one as one and S two, [00:17:26] Doc Searls: we all keep saying all of our stuff is this one. Yeah. And we have, uh, you know, everything, [00:17:32] Shawn Powers: everything, but one of my devices is as two compatible, but if I want to switch to S two, which I have no idea, even what the advantage is, I would have to throw away my $500. So those five that I bought, because it just would no longer do anything. So anyway, I'm on S one they don't want, they didn't want to keep the S one app out there that that was in response to the massive, massive, like anger. That was all good. Yeah. [00:18:05] Doc Searls: Well, they listen that's then. [00:18:08] Shawn Powers: So, I mean, I guess that's good. [00:18:09] Doc Searls: Okay. So we've gone a half hour to this. No, we haven't arrived at our topic yet. [00:18:16] Shawn Powers: Well, [00:18:17] Katherine Druckman: you know, honestly, I, I wanted this episode to be fun because, and just like, talk about whatever we're into because that's, that's kind of, it's kind of half of what. We have some really great guests and we have some really great topics, but sometimes we're just us and I [00:18:31] Shawn Powers: think that's, and a couple of weeks we'll be like, what was that episode where Sean was frothing at the mouth over his speakers. [00:18:40] Katherine Druckman: I like it. Um, so yeah. So what is the thing that we were really going to talk about, which maybe we can get to, um, is so, okay. Tell this came at, came about, was offline or not offline actually, but you know, uh, outside of our little recording call here, we were talking about a really interesting blog post by. One of my favorite people who happens to be somebody that I work for, I guess, in some indirect way, but it's a Dries Buytaert who is the founder of the Drupal project. Um, that was a really interesting blog post about web three and kind of like a very, uh, let's say, call it a, an infant proof of concept. Um, For hosting, very simple static sites, uh, in a fully distributed, decentralized manner. And I think that's interesting and we happen to have a person, a guest, regular guests on our podcast. One of the podcast family who is something of an expert in IPFS, which is a interplanetary file system. Um, and yeah, I thought we could kind of talk about it. So first of all, I will definitely link to this very interestingpost. Dries, if you're listening, great post. [00:19:57] Doc Searls: Probably not listening, busy guy. [00:19:59] Katherine Druckman: It is. Yeah. It's really had all of us thinking and talking and yeah. So we wanted to share that conversation with everybody else, which [00:20:07] Shawn Powers: is basically like, he's gonna forget this. [00:20:11] Katherine Druckman: Tell us Sean. Don't listen to him. No, I don't think so. I don't, he would never think that about Sean. Um, So, yeah, so basically what I'm hoping. So, so the title of it is, uh, my first web three webpage and it's, it's kind of a fun through, of had found. Um, he posted a very simple static site. Uh, I'm using IPFS. And I wondered if Sean could kind of give us like a very high level overview and summarize this, this article for everybody, for, for people of all technical levels, because frankly, that's your greatest skill. Yeah, it was explaining the very complex ideas to everyone. He's [00:20:57] Doc Searls: the explainerator. . [00:20:59] Katherine Druckman: So I wondered if you could kind of give us a little intro to why this is cool. Why I think it's cool. [00:21:03] Shawn Powers: So IPFS in general is the super quick, I don't have a whiteboard in front of everybody version. Rather than w uh, thinking of a file as being stored in a place. If you take a file and you take a hash of that file, so that the hash itself is the contents of the file, and then you just refer to that file by its hash. Okay. So, uh, you're basically like you're describing the contents of the file bit by bit in some like tree hierarchy, hash that you get. Uh, CID, but I won't go too deep into it, but anyway, you, you reference a file by this hash of the file and it doesn't matter where that file exists physically. You just referenced the file. And so it exists everywhere and nowhere at the same time. So you say, okay, I'm going to point you to my, my, um, HTML page, which is this hash. And then the IPFS IPFS network is a peer to peer network that is global. And the interplanetary part means it can be multi planetary, you know, like we could have IPFS nodes on Mars. And the idea is that it goes out on the network and says, who has the actual bits that this hash. Right. Who, where, where, where do these bits live? And it assembles those bits from all the various nodes on the IPFS network that do or don't have that. And now that's scary because you don't know how, like, if it exists out there, right? So the concept is if you want to make sure it exists on the IPFS network, you pin it to your node. And so when somebody else is trying to get that hat. They go out in the network and the network says, ah, well, this guy has it pinned. And so then you get it from you, but also like a hundred people could have it pinned. So you get it from a hundred different people and it reassembles in real time to you. And so that's the idea of IPFS. There are some serious issues with implementation. It needs a lot of development work, but there's not a lot of money in it. So, you know, I think that's why we don't have, um, IPFS being far more prevalent and, and used different places. So you're sort [00:23:28] Doc Searls: of, you're sort of reminding me of. [00:23:32] Petros Koutoupis: Object storage, uh, in how, you know, there's no such thing as a directory structure concept of, you know, files, folders, things like that. Everything is, is essentially categorized by, by a hash it's sort of like a flat file system without it being a flat file system. You know, you. Everything is a hash and the way you access files is through this hash. And it doesn't matter where, like you said that, um, that file resides. You just have to know where [00:24:04] Shawn Powers: that hash points to. Yeah. And that's kind of in the hash points to the IPFS network. And if you have all of that hash, all those bits that assemble into that complete file on your local node, you still access it through the IPFS network. It just happens to be. No hops, right? It's just like almost instant because it's coming directly from you, but everything exists on the IPFS network and that's how you store the files as you just have them come from the IPFS network. But yeah, exactly. It's object storage as opposed to file storage. So it's just referenced by hash, not location. And then the other part of that, sorry, that there was two parts. So that's where the actual information is stored in the IPFS network. That's where the bits for his HTML page are stored. But the domain thing, the dot ether domain is a blockchain based DNS service. Um, do you remember name coin? Does anybody remember name coin? That was, uh, yeah. So that was, uh, something that kind of fell apart. It even is running anymore. I don't know, but it's the same kind of, kind of same kind of concept. It's just the, the DNS information is stored on the, in this case. It's theory on blockchain. The problem with that is the Ethereum blockchain is currently so. Busy and the Ethereum tokens or coins are so expensive that doing anything on the blockchain is absurdly expensive. Like to make a change to your DNS entry. It's like, I don't know, 15 bucks to make a DNS change. That's. Unsettling. And could [00:25:44] Katherine Druckman: you, why would you need to make such a change in this, in this scenario every time you went? [00:25:50] Shawn Powers: Yeah. I mean, change your DNS stuff. Say he wants it to point to another hash, say he makes an update to his HTML. It changes the hash potentially costume. If you have to point it somewhere else. Now, there, there may be some, there's probably some middleware in there that points to something else that points to something else. So you don't have to actually make a, a commit to the blockchain every time. But those are workarounds because right now the Ethereum blockchain is too expensive to use for things like. [00:26:17] Katherine Druckman: Right. So as a proof of concept, it's very interesting. [00:26:21] Shawn Powers: Yeah, I, yeah, it's awesome. I hope that it gets more development because if you've ever downloaded a bit torrent file, you don't have to tell me just, you know, it could be an Ubuntu ISO that you did. It's perfectly legit. It's so fast, right? I mean, BitTorrent technology love it or hate it. That is just amazing how you can saturate your internet connection without any problem. That's how I PFS should work. Right. It's the same kind of peer to peer technology, but they don't have a good backend code for all of the, the chunking and the, and the retrieval stuff. So it just needs, it just needs help. Okay, sorry. No, [00:27:04] Katherine Druckman: no, I, you know that, that's why we're here. We want you to talk about it. I'm just wondering, like, so I mean, we can talk, I actually would like to talk a little bit more about the hurdles, um, but let's assume in a perfect world, you could, you could get over these hurdles and, and, and, you know, maybe use something other than Ethereum. Ether, whichever [00:27:25] Shawn Powers: Solana, which is another chain that as much faster and more. [00:27:29] Katherine Druckman: Exactly. So let's say you could address all of these issues. Um, how could this be? What, what is this useful for? Why is this, why is this so cool? I mean, I think I have some ideas, but I'd rather hear your ideas from, because [00:27:45] Shawn Powers: it's decentralized. Okay. That's it. At the end of the day. So [00:27:51] Katherine Druckman: let's say, so it seems to me that this could be potentially a good way to get around things that plague our planet, like censorship and, centralized control, obviously, since it's decentralized, that is quite literally what it, uh, avoids, but I'm just wondering if we could kind of think through some real world scenarios where this might be particularly. [00:28:17] Doc Searls: Oh, I was actually just going to say what you just said, you know, I mean, I think, I mean, obviously, maybe not, obviously I think a lot of people don't have any problem at all with centralization. If they like centralization, actually that you kind of want some centralization. Do you want some bigness in the world? You just don't want to have to live there and. You know, humanity ourselves are decentralized. I think we're decentralized, we're distributed, we're independent, which I think is a distributed still assumes that you're always connected. That that was the way Paul Baron designed it. The first place they, it has like drawing of the internet, uh, back in 1964 was, you know, there was centralized, which is a central point and a bunch of nodes and decentralized, which are many in a polycentric basically. But still with one central one and then distributed, which is there the little lions going between all the same dots, but beyond that is independent. And I think that's what we want to be independent to me. That's what decentralization is actually about. It's about independence and getting and getting agency on our autonomy back. That's that to me is what Drees did with that post is he, he showed his first whack at becoming independent. Um, a question I have though, is that a quick technical one? Um, how does one go and get in an ENS and or an eat? You know, he says he starts out with last year. I minted by turn his last name dot E T H D purchased Reese UTA. Yeah. Okay. Th th these, you're not getting them from a domain name, but just, are you getting it from somewhere else? Where do you get the, [00:29:50] Shawn Powers: I dunno, the site. If you look at certain like literally Google for. Domain. And it'll take you to a site that you can actually buy a domain name and you have to pay an Ethereum. So you have to get to theory, you know, like with an app, like Coinbase or something. I mean, I think that's who did the Superbowl ad, right? Coinbase. So, uh, Ethereum there, and then you just send them a theory and it will, and it will do it. I haven't done it, but that's, that's the, the way that you go about it. But, but you're talking about decentralization. Uh, I'm going to make you fall in a little bit more love with IPFS, because you said people like centralization. I think that's true. Well, [00:30:25] Doc Searls: some people do [00:30:27] Shawn Powers: it's true when it, when it can, it can give you proof of good service. I mean, people host things on AWS because it's reliable and rock solid and fast, right. And, and scalable and all that, those things with IPFS, you could have a server running in AWS and all you do is pin the hash and all of a sudden. They are hosting your IPFS content with the full, you know, power of, of their cloud. If they get taken down or there's a shutdown notice, or you don't pay your bill, it's just unpinned. And then all of a sudden they're not providing it to the IPFS network. So you can pin something in multiple places, but it could be in a highly performant environment just by pinning. That, that hash. So, um, again, it's such an amazing concept that I truly hope continues to be developed. I it's, it's the, it's the underlying foundation. It's the same people who came up with file coin. If you've heard of file point, that's actually my day job, I run a bunch of file coin. The nodes and multiple data centers all over the Western us. And, uh, the underlying system, there is IPFS because it's made by the same people. It's all open source, but I mean it, the same company is, has done and they, and they raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Uh, to do this and I don't, I don't know. I just wish IPFS was more robust because the idea is so amazing. So anyway, I'll get off my soap [00:32:00] Doc Searls: box again, the guy who knows he's talking about. Yeah. That's why I [00:32:07] Katherine Druckman: wanted to bring it up. Yeah. That's, that's why I wanted us to talk about it because we, you know, it's a rare opportunity, right. For us to, to, um, dive into this area of your expertise. So it's kind of fun. Um, but yeah, so I, you know, I think, oh, I don't mean to, [00:32:26] Doc Searls: so any of us own a, a dot E T H? I do not, [00:32:32] Shawn Powers: no, I don't want to spend the money. [00:32:35] Doc Searls: What does it cost to [00:32:37] Shawn Powers: register one for a year? It costs like $15 in a theory of gas. And I don't even know what the cost is, but yeah, I just, I have domains anyway. I think it's a neat proof of concept. I'm not sure that it's. Something I'm ready to, and I mean, you have to use a browser that supports it too. So it switches brave today. Right? Brave does support it, which is, it's kind of huge, right? I mean, that, that is significant because that's not like some weird browser you have to like compile yourself or something. Uh, so that's cool. But I think brave has IPFS support built into, which is neat. Yeah. Um, and I, yeah, I don't know the, the domain registration. Kind of cool. It's not the first of its type. There have been other things like, I don't even remember. I, I do own a couple a hundred. You remember? It's like unstoppable domains was one of the, I own a domain registered there. I probably spent theory and back in the day. Cause that was when it was. But again, that, that concept isn't new. I just, um, it's not mature, but it's, it's not sexy enough. Right? I mean, [00:33:41] Doc Searls: Well, yeah, [00:33:43] Shawn Powers: it doesn't be a great place to store NFTs, but people don't do it because that's not sexy. So anyway. [00:33:49] Doc Searls: Yeah. And, and if teaser, jetting, just getting mocked all over the place so far, but I I'm wondering, this is not so much about IPFS, but about some of the friction you were talking about within the trying to make this work. Level of the whole thing that dreams set up here, um, whether the amount of oil burned to make. Uh, big blockchain work, a big public blockchain work is just, it's just a sense of it's a bridge too far. It's just a design flaw. You're just yanking too many chains at once. Um, I mean, you've got a distributed, I mean, the blockchain is a distributed, um, database and it's distributed all over the place and all of them have to be updated and that's just. I mean, people have talked about the energy, but I'm just talking about the, the amount of bandwidth and other sources of friction that might be involved. Is it, there may be a work around for it? I don't know. But I, I cannot the lender. [00:34:51] Shawn Powers: Yeah. The newer blockchains. Like, again, this is an, uh, an ad for Solano either, but, uh, they're moving away from the idea of proof of work where you just like, you know, crank away with the CPU's burning up so much electricity constantly like Bitcoin. Uh, they're moving away from that concept to proof of stake. Just means that if you have a lot of money, you have control because you have interest because you have a lot of money in vested. So it's an interesting, uh, again, this it's all new. I know, I know everybody says, oh, it's so new in the days of blockchain. Well, that's just true because we're trying to figure out what makes sense and conceptually, some of it's neat. Some of it's not neat, but yeah. [00:35:30] Doc Searls: Okay, listeners, tell us how it's working for you. Curious to know if anybody actually bothers with this after listening to this, you know, or just after just any way, you know, we know Dries is doing it, that's one. [00:35:45] Shawn Powers: I wonder to what degree he's doing it. Right? I mean, yeah, there's a site out there. If you go to like some, some weird domain that is controlled by the blockchain, you can see like, hi, my name is Sean Powers. Welcome to my blockchain site or something that I made. But yeah, I don't know if that's not the world that I'm living in, but. [00:36:08] Katherine Druckman: Well, it's a fun way to share sort of what's on the horizon, you know, and the [00:36:14] Shawn Powers: more people that do things like that, there might be interest, right? Like I said, I think that IPFS as a concept is so remarkable and I just want it to work so much better than it does. And [00:36:27] Katherine Druckman: always the voice of reason, Sean, [00:36:30] Shawn Powers: right now, if you want performance, Like downloads from the IPFS network, how you do it is set up a web game. And then you download things over standard web protocol from an IPFS note. It's kind of crazy. I kind of defeats the purpose, like a little set up. Yeah. It's funny. You know, it's like, so why don't you just host a web server showing up if you're an IPFS? It's super cool. [00:36:57] Katherine Druckman: Oh, too funny. Okay. Well, I thought it was pretty [00:37:01] Shawn Powers: cool. It is pretty cool. And it could get a lot cooler. That's the thing I tried to, we tried to start a whole business model using IPFS as a backend for file distribution and stuff. And conceptually, it was great. It was just getting it to work in practice. It w it was not ready for prime time and we weren't ready to hire. You know, a team of developers to continue the process. So, um, yeah, it's really cool and worth investigating and I hope that it continues to get better. [00:37:28] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. I think the, yeah, the bottom line is, I think it's, it's, there's a lot of potential and there's a lot of desire to make a truly decentralized internet a reality. And when you have those two things, you know, um, potential and desire, and then the rest to sort of come to a time, I think hopefully. But anyway. Cool. Um, wow. We've we've, we've almost hit our hour, mark. I mean, with editing, we'll probably get it down to a digestible length, but, um, yeah. What else we want to talk about [00:37:59] Shawn Powers: once we get rid of all the nonsense? No, [00:38:05] Katherine Druckman: no, no, no, it's all good. Um, So, yeah, I kind of want to go back to the conversation about home automation, but I think we save that for a future [00:38:14] Shawn Powers: episode. So can I, can I mention things about, uh, the future episodes that I want to be. Yeah. [00:38:20] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. I mean, what better time than, than at a milestone? Like number 100. Yeah. [00:38:25] Shawn Powers: So, um, you know, that Google has eliminated their, uh, G suite, like the grandfathered in domains. If you had. How it's going to disappear completely like July 1st, I think is a cutoff. They will just disappear and they'll start charging you, or just delete all of your stuff for those legacy G suite accounts. What was [00:38:47] Doc Searls: G suite [00:38:48] Shawn Powers: G suite is like, uh, where you have your own Google domain and like your Google docs and stuff, but it's all hosted with your. Yeah. At one point it [00:38:57] Katherine Druckman: was Google apps. We had it for Linux journal, our mail or combined our shared documents, all of that sort of thing, corporate, [00:39:05] Shawn Powers: and it was free, right. I mean, at first it was free and then it was free for a limited time, like a limited amount of things and you could pay for more and then the free option was completely eliminated. But if you already had, and that was like 2012, uh, but if you already had a legacy free G suite, they just let you keep it right. You just. Do anything with it, apart from what you were doing at the time. But anyway, they decided this, this year that they're doing away with that all those legacy G suite, uh, domains that have been [00:39:37] Doc Searls: better than Google graveyard with all those other [00:39:39] Shawn Powers: things. Exactly. And so what, why that's pertinent here? One, I, you know, it's really frustrating that they just can do that because that's their stuff. And if we have all of our email and all that stuff in there, so. They can do whatever they want and that's disheartening, but I am planning to move all of, all of, I think I have three. Three, I have three Google domains, juice, G suites things, and I'm going to move those completely off. I'm not going to pay them for the workspace thing, but I'm going to start hosting like my own email servers and, uh, uh, having Kyle on the show and talking about the security and privacy issues around self hosting, I think would be a really fun episode. [00:40:22] Katherine Druckman: I agree. You heard it here first back for that one. So we've got home automation, we've got self hosting. Um, how to escape from Google legacy? [00:40:33] Shawn Powers: Uh, yeah. Home automation with privacy in mind too. Right? Uh, that's really the key for me. I don't Teflon yet, but it's possible. I'm not kidding. I'm so impressed with how awesome it works in my house right now. And none of the home automation stuff requires the cloud at all. Like none of it. It's so cool. [00:40:52] Katherine Druckman: I love it. We need to do a whole episode on that. Yeah. 'cause I think, you know, I, having those, that kind of functionality is really cool, but you know, what do you, what do you do if you're not super comfortable having every action that takes place inside your own house, communicating with the cloud [00:41:09] Shawn Powers: and what happens if your internet goes out and you can't turn your lights on? I mean, that would suck. [00:41:14] Katherine Druckman: I would be, I would have been sitting in the dark for hours here. [00:41:18] Petros Koutoupis: There's no, Sean, what you do is you make another YouTube video and instead of breaking into your van, Show people how to break into your house and use your home [00:41:27] Shawn Powers: automation. Okay. Can I tell a funny story about that and the episode? Okay. So I I've been doing home automation since, before it was cool. Right. And, uh, one of the, one of the first things we did is I have a smart lock. It's a quick set. Uh Z-Wave home automation connected, deadbolt, right? And I also wanted to be able to turn on my lights with like Alexa, right. And so I hooked all the things up and it was really difficult to connect the luck to that system. And I couldn't figure out why. And I finally did it cause I'm Sean. I just made it work. Yeah. If you stand outside my house, not anymore. But then if you stood outside my house in shouted, Alexa, unlock the front door unlocked. [00:42:16] Katherine Druckman: Really? [00:42:18] Shawn Powers: There was a reason it was tough. So anyway, [00:42:22] Katherine Druckman: Oh, that's funny. Yeah. Yeah. Oh boy. [00:42:25] Shawn Powers: I was so proud of myself too. I like made a virtual switch that unlocked and tripped an automation that unlocked something else. And then I just, you know, face palmed myself after I stood outside and shouted through the window and it just opened right up. No, [00:42:39] Katherine Druckman: you can lock it. I mean, that's totally fine. Oh, Alexa lock the door. That makes sense. [00:42:46] Shawn Powers: And it absolutely worked and I'm like, well, this is so stupid. Why couldn't I, man? [00:42:52] Katherine Druckman: Too funny. Yeah. Funny. Yeah. [00:42:55] Shawn Powers: Yeah. That, that video would have been a lot shorter. I'm to break into Sean's house. Just shout Alexa, unlock the door. Yeah. Just [00:43:01] Katherine Druckman: ask. All you had to do was ask. Oh, funny. Okay. Well, on that note until next time. Thanks for making it through a hundred of these with us. Maybe. I mean, if you've been there from the beginning, which I think probably somehow, um, and, uh, yeah.