[00:00:00] Katherine Druckman: Hey everyone. Welcome back to reality. 2.0, I am Katherine Druckman and doc Searls is with me. And we're talking to James Walker, who I've known for. I think we've established at least a hundred years, roughly a hundred. And James is doing some really cool stuff. He's working with a company called fission. You're going to tell us more about that. And we're going to learn a lot about some cool decentralized Webby things. Um, you might remember, I will link to the previous episodes where we've talked about those things and I think it's going to be really cool. And we're going to hear, we're going to hear his journey from Drupal to web web three and beyond, and. Yeah, and we're going to reminisce a little bit, I bet. But in the meantime, before we get started, I wanted to remind everyone to check out our website at reality2cast.com. That is the number two. We have recently resurrected our newsletter, which was on a bit of a brief, well, okay. Not so brief hiatus, but now it's back and we will be sending you all of our links and supplementary goodness every week. And with that, uh, James, I would really love it. If you could tell our listeners a little bit more about who you are and what you are doing. [00:01:18] James Walker: Yeah. So I am someone who's known Katherine for a hundred years. And that initial introduction all those years ago, uh, was through the, the Drupal community, where I was very active for a lot of years. Um, and external and Linux journal. I was a subscriber for lots and lots of years, you guys would know better than I would. How many years I actually sent money. But, yeah, I, uh, longtime open source fan user, uh, contributor, who has always had an interest in, user controlled data, user controlled computing. Right? So it was my initial interest in Drupal was this is going back all those hundreds of years. I was a young, uh, university student who was working at a job and trying to learn on the job, and discovered that there was a bunch of open-source software, where I could dig into the code, uh, packages that were doing the kinds of things I was expected to do at work. And I got to sort of tear up in these, um, you know, these open source projects and really learn, how other people were solving the problems I was trying to solve. And one of the problems that I was trying to solve back then was how do, uh, you know, how did my company at the time allow our users to manage their own content? Right? So we were building websites. This is late nineties, we're building websites. And we wanted to, allow our customers to, to have control over their own content over their own data. So rather than email us, when you had a new press release or wanted to change an about page, uh, just take control of it, login and, and do it. So yeah, that kind of. Set me on a trajectory. And so one of, one of the open source projects that I got, uh, that I would dig around and look for how they were solving problems, was, was Drupal, and I ended up actually just diving sort of head first into the Drupal project and the Drupal community. Um, yeah. And then like fast forward through a lot of years, 20 or so, and today I'm actually working at a company called fission founded by, uh, an old Drupal friend of mine, Boris Mann who, uh, actually co-founded a Drupal company, way back in the day with, and, still focused on. User controlled data, and all of the things that that can mean. So, you know, better privacy, better user agency over where my data is being stored. And you know, how secure is it? Um, you know, if I'm putting private data on the internet, can I trust that it's encrypted? Do I have a little bit of control over who has access to it and who doesn't and that kind of stuff, and that, you know, for me at a high level is, is what we're trying to do at Fission. Yeah, and that, that starts with, so, you know, w what we're actually doing, uh, in support of that is we are, um, w we refer to ourselves as an, uh, applied research group, or protocol engineers. And basically what we're doing is designing, um, you know, standards, formats protocols, uh, that can help app developers build. Decentralized stuff, web web three applications. [00:04:46] Katherine Druckman: Um, [00:04:48] James Walker: you know, a lot of years there. Yeah, yeah, [00:04:51] Katherine Druckman: yeah, no, yeah, you did. You did. But, um, but it's funny because I feel like you, and I kind of started in exactly the same place. I discovered Drupal for the exact same reason I wanted to help somebody else put in mostly with little technical skill, but something on the internet. And that was, you know, and that was the beginning of it, giving them that control. [00:05:11] James Walker: It was, it was no small task for it. Like suddenly it's like in the late nineties, early two thousands. That was kind of a bit of a feat. Yeah. I guess I don't [00:05:19] Katherine Druckman: really go that back quite as far, but, um, but yeah, and you know, So the 2006 still, I mean, Drupa was pretty young even then. And, uh, yeah, I mean, it was, it was not as straightforward and as it is now, now it's what do you have? Like a hundred different, low code, slap some stuff on the internet apps out there. It was not that it was not, that was not the way we had to do a lot of wrangling even to get Drupal installed. I forget. And then now, like, you know, I'll, I'll see some presentation about how it used to be and I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe we had to do that. That's insane. Um, but here we are, again, talking about the same stuff, right. We're Doc is, well doc can tell us more about his involvement in the identity community, but yeah, it's funny how we all kind of, we all kind of arrive at the same struggle again, which is, which is a empowering. Individuals with it, an internet within an internet that is increasingly a siloed. Yes. Yes. [00:06:19] Doc Searls: So here we are. The gravitational pull of giants is very high. Uh, it just is. And, you know, and it's, I mean, we're, we're also talking about is right at a moment when, uh, Elon Musk is set to take over Twitter, maybe out of interesting news. That's talking about an elephant in the room. I don't even know what to do with that, except there's just an interesting thing, you know, and, and it it's important because it's centralized. Right. And it makes things easy. I mean, I, I, I remember, and this may be off topic for us though. The Drupal's relevant to it, but Linux journal, we got into Drupal when David Sifry and I were writing a story about blogging platforms in 2003 for Linux journal. And, um, and Drupal is one of the ones we covered. And I think Phil Hughes said, we like that one. We're going to use it. And then Lennox, Shirley used it. And Catherine came in and the rest of it is. Um, but the, up until about 2005 and six, I had like up to 50,000 readers a day on my blog and Twitter and Facebook came along and it dropped to dozens and all the writers, as well as the readers went to those platforms and why? Because it was easy, you know? And so I'm involved in something right now, which is, we talked about a geeky. This is, and again, it may be off topic, but I think it's sort of relevant. We're the, the project that I run out of, um, and run it for years out of the, the Berkman center Berkman Klein center at Harvard, which is I'm going to go into what it is, but we have lots and lots of developers, lots of, lots of BB user stories. And we want to compile those user stories somewhere. Um, and all the suggestions are let's put them on GitHub and then. And, and mastodon, in some other places and all of them involve learning. WordStar kind of, you know, I mean, that's what it's like for, for muggles, right. I, I have to learn markup who wants it, what muggle wants to learn markup, you know, but that's the geek answer, right? Well, just go on git hub and make it a git hub thing. So, and I'm kind of fighting that struggle right now. It's like, How do you make, how do you get the muggles to use the decentralized thing or to not just use it to design a decentralized thing? And my theory about this, I'm really interested in your thoughts about this. James is that the problem itself is the web and it's not the web it's client-server and client-server is something we developed for mainframes a thousand years ago with mainframes and dumb terminals, 32, 70 terminals and V2 one hundreds of two hundreds. And we brought that onto the web and say, Hey, we could do this with, with PCs. And, and that, that's just a form. It's just a way of approaching things. It's kind of like, it's almost like, well, you know, the military approach works. Uh silicious to organize everything in a military way. Um, it's very top down. We're always the user we're never independent and it's a very hard box to think outside of and to design outside of. And I, I so want to build something. Or some things or a way of doing things that's inherently distributed from the start, but it's not hard to use. And just isn't invention that mother's necessity. The hell do you do that? I, I don't know. I don't know. I have so many ideas, but none of them were combustible. [00:09:51] James Walker: Yeah. Yeah. I, I I've spent a lot of personally I've spent a lot of time, so, uh, one of the things I breezed past my first non Drupal, um, job, that thing I did, uh, was to work for a company called status net, with my friend, Evan Prodromou, uh, no. Where, yeah. Yeah. Where we did. Um, well, we had, we had the status net software, which ran identical, uh, which was for a while, like the, that was the open alternative to Twitter. Right. So bringing back our elephant in the room, uh, and one of the things that we did there was, uh, write up a spec, for thing we call it O status, which is, was the original protocol that, that mastadon used to federate. Um, we obviously we did at first, but, uh, yeah, it's, it has lived on it's it's morphed and, and, and evolved, but that was, you know, talking about this, how do we, you know, combat the gravity of centralized consolidated services, um, I thought and, and, you know, the status net thought and, and Mastodon, I, I assume still believes at least on some level that Federation was, was a potential answer, right? If you, cause it kind of worked for things like email, right? Where if you have a, an open protocol and an interchange format or agreement, uh, then multiple people can run their versions. Whether it's, you know, your club, your company, your family, uh, you can run sort of smaller instances, right? Um, run your own Mastodon server and you can still participate in the broader conversation. Um, but you said, you said something doc, that I think we've seen play out where it's, you know, the, the, the weight of the centralization comes down to the client server. It takes some level of server resources, right. To run. Yeah. A system like Mastodon or, or any sort of federated system I've been, there's a, uh, federated chat protocol called matrix. Uh, that if you guys haven't talked about, it seems, it seems like a thing that's right up your alley. Um, yeah. And [00:12:08] Doc Searls: we're all Jabber heads that almost worked out. Joe [00:12:11] James Walker: Jabber was another thing I got involved in for awhile. Yeah. It's uh, yeah, like in all of those cases, um, yeah, you, you need that the server component and the idea is that if you can federate, well, you know, Share the load somehow, right? Like, like you'll have groups where part of the group's existence will be to run one of these nodes. But when you talk about, you know, like running server software, like there's, there's ongoing maintenance and updates and, and having to deal with like, if your group, whatever it is, your organization grows, you have to scale and manage all of that, um, on top of anything else. And it becomes a really, um, Well, they say it's, it's, it's hard. It's it's work. It's friction. And so what's easier. Well, there's, you know, there's Twitter who, who give a lot of the same things. All their friends are on Twitter already. Anyway, we'll just use Twitter. Uh, and that's, you know, that's, that's that gravitational force where they they're putting the money and the resources into running the servers and making it easier for users to just use them instead. So. [00:13:28] Katherine Druckman: And yet when people get angry, you know, and quit Twitter in droves, well maybe because they're conservative or what are they, whatever, you know, it's, it's never the people who are, it's never the people who are quitting to go and reclaim their sovereignty, so to speak. It's always, you know, [00:13:45] Doc Searls: and the question doesn't go where, you know, the right, you know, the, we had a, um, on, um, the other podcasts that, uh, uh, both Catherine and I are involved with, um, floss weekly, the last guests, there was two casts actually. And it doesn't matter what they did. You could look it up if you want, but it's, it's, it's about their, their world, the world they work in and the world that they're making possible. And they're, they're basically making a platform for paying maintainers that that's their thing. And there, the issue they're addressing is how do you get maintainers paid. When, you know, and the mill you, they operate in is that open source is now endemic and it's required inside corporations. It's like, you're going to make a house you can use to buy for us. Okay. So that's open source and they all have it and they all work with it. Um, but their framework is the cloud because everything's in the cloud, all of the big cloud services there, every one of them has Azure for this and Salesforce for that. And AWS for that and, uh, Google something for another thing and a Rackspace, something for something else. And in my own case, I mean, I, and I'm not even that technical, but my, you know, searles.com my website by, you know, was on a box under my desk, you know? And, um, and so it was, so was my mail. I handled it, I handled all my mail and when spam assassin finally was something, I couldn't figure out, I, you know, I handed over to a service, but at least. It's substitutable. That's kind of a main thing is that, you know, you want, you want your services at least to be substitutable in a way banks are substitutable, right. Or brokers or something where you just have a, you can go from one to the other and you pick the one that serves you best. But tied in with that though is just the. The ease of it, the, you know, and so I think that's one kind of centralization and there's a VIN here. The, you know, one kind of centralization is there's a lot of stuff that's actually best done in a big place, you know, and you need big data crunched, you need speed, you need content distribution where you're going to buffer it locally. Like AKA my pioneered, you're gonna need something big for that. And the other thing is just the natural tendency for services to be best built and most rigorously built and maintain and so forth by big companies as well. And they're doing this in a digital world. And so here we are. Um, but I can't help, but think that. You know, and I, I, I put it in the chat and, uh, um, Catherine May have shared this in earlier things, but there there's so many questions we don't even ask because we're sitting inside a box, you know, such as, why are we always agreeing to their terms and not, are they not agreeing to our terms? You know, why, why do we not have our own shopping cart we could take from site to site rather than a different shopping cart for every site with no way to integrate these? Um, why can't I have my own calendar and contact application? That's all mine. I can have that with email actually like Thunderbird, you know, some other open source, things of that will work, not the, not the same with calendars and contexts. That's the most important thing we have in many ways. Calendars and contacts [00:17:08] James Walker: for a lot of people. Yeah, absolutely. So. [00:17:12] Doc Searls: So, I don't know. I mean, I have a zillion answers I've suggested, but none of them take taken off and nobody wants to fund them. So, so here we are. I mean, [00:17:23] James Walker: yeah. Um, yeah, I, I like I used to, so during my Drupal days, I got very into the open ID community, uh, when some grant, which I think was like $5,000, uh, for the Drupal community by implementing open ID as a, as a Drupal module. Um, and. But a lot of my interest in open ID was, was a very similar ID ID idea, which was, you know, I'm I'm me. Right. And why can't I just take my, you know, information about me and carry it with me as I travel around the internet. Um, and, and that sort of, uh, you know, used to use a lot of like real-world analogies, right? Like I carry a wallet that has my photo ID in it, and I don't. Recreate that every time, you know, I travel or, you know, have to show it at, uh, you know, at the DMV or wherever. Uh, it's, it's a piece of identifying information that I have and I just carry it with me as I go. Uh, and that I think was, you know, at least part of the sort of open ID vision was that you had, again, back to this like user controlled idea where I have, you know, I have some agency over my identity and I, you know, I control the information and then I say, who, who has access to it as needed? Um, yeah. So, uh, again, so a lot, a lot of common themes, recurring things. So, but the, the whole client server issue is. Uh, you know, how we get around that as part of bringing it back to today, for me at vision, um, part of why I'm excited about what we're up to efficient, uh, is, you know, we think we may have a, an answer and that's, you know, uh, you know, the, our good old friends, uh, you know, peer to peer networking. Right. Uh, and so a lot of, um, a lot of what we do around data storage is, uh, at efficient is based on IPFS. And I saw you guys have had a conversation around IP Fest before. Um, and, and that's, that's really critical to what we're trying to do because it takes the centralized server for my data out of the equation. Right. So, you know, if I am storing data that I want to have control over it, doesn't live on a single server. It lives on this commons network that is IPFS. [00:19:57] Katherine Druckman: And so just to give everybody, I mean, I think our audience maybe probably knows enough about IPFS, but in case they don't, maybe you could give us a quick rundown, Sean, this one, I understand that, you know, it's referenced by hash. There you go. End of story. [00:20:15] Doc Searls: Planetary is better. That internet protocol is interplanetary [00:20:20] James Walker: it's interplanetary. So yeah, so the, the race is on to, to, you know, get an IPFS node on, on the moon or Mars or wherever. Uh, so we can fulfill that vision. Um, yeah, I pay that. So the industry interplanetary file system, uh, is a, is a peer to peer based at work. It's not a thing. Vision invented, uh, uh, developed, uh, there's a company protocol labs who we work closely with that sort of, uh, you know, invented, started and shepherd that project. Um, but it's, uh, yeah, so. Peer-to-peer base. So, you know, the common analogy is that, you know, most people have had some experiences, something like BitTorrent, right. Where, uh, you know, if you're downloading something on BitTorrent, what you're actually doing is grabbing bits of files from everybody else who's running BitTorrent. Right. And you're exchanging the data that way, as opposed to making a request to a central server or central, you know, uh, cloud farm of servers, uh, and getting it directly. Um, yeah. And, uh, you mentioned hashing. So, so the, the way that you address, um, content on the IPFS network is, is through this, this hash called, uh, uh, a CID or a content identifier. Um, and that's, that opens up a lot of stuff. When you have basically like this, this universal. Unique, um, hash that refers to content. Um, you can, you can do things like just reference, you know, reference something by that. And you know, that, that content is going to be the same. Right. Uh, you know, it's like having, having its own show some built-in. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that, you know, you know, if I refer to, uh, you know, a file by its, by its content identifier, I know that hasn't been modified. Right. Cause any modification would actually generate a new hash and it would be, you know, it would be a different address that I was trying to get. [00:22:22] Katherine Druckman: and so how does all of this, I get, what can you tell us about your sort of vision for how the work you're doing lends itself to user empowerment? [00:22:36] James Walker: Yeah. Uh, so, so the big, there's a, you know, three sort of prongs to our, like our big grandiose vision. Uh, right. So it's identity, data compute, uh, all of which, you know, decentralized and, and user controlled. Um, so like, like everything I've been involved in, I think, uh, in technology, it always comes back to identity. Right. So you have to have some idea of, um, Or we can come at this another way. So, so on IPFS, one of the things about this peer to peer, uh, commons network for data storage, uh, is that everything is addressable by a CID. Uh, and also everything is addressable by that CID, right? So there's no idea of private or secured files, right? Everything is publicly available. If you know the CID, you can get, you can pull that content off the network. Um, so what if you wanted to build, you know, uh, take advantage of this peer to peer network for storage, but wanted to actually have some private, sensitive, personal data on it? Um, well kind of step one, anytime you try to do this, you know, like, just like in a, in a traditional client server thing, if you want to have. Allow users to be able to do something. Well, step one is how do I know that the user, how do I know who's trying to do this thing? Um, so that's where so, so efficient we have, um, uh, spec, uh, you know, uh, uh, system, uh, that we call you. Can you see a N uh, that is our approach to, um, doing. Authorization in, in this decentralized world. Um, so it, it uses, uh, an OCAP model. So a capability model, um, which is in contrast to sort of, again, most client service stuff works on an ACL access control list model, where you have a, you know, a list of users and who can do what to maybe it's grouped by roles or, or something else. But there's like, there's a master list, right? Uh, who, who can, who can do various things in your system, uh, and in that world. Right? So like, we can, we can keep picking on Twitter. It's the thing I love to do, uh, right. Like if I want to, if I want to post, you know, post a tweet on Twitter, uh, then you know, part of what Twitter system does is. You know, who's sending this request and do they have permission to, you know, to post that? And then of course, that gets, you know, then when it gets posted, it gets linked to my user account and all of that. Um, so our model, so, so in a decentralized world, you don't have that sort of central auth server or, or, you know, centralized server at all. Uh, so that ACL model doesn't really work, right? It's like if I go to post, you know, or create, create a file on, on IPFS in a peer-to-peer decentralized thing, there's there isn't that central server to check to see, does this person have permission to do that? Um, and if our, you know, our end game is having secure encrypted files on this network. So while who, who like, who can read that, who has the keys to decrypt, et cetera, um, So, yeah, so, so you can, uh, our technology is, um, based on, on this OCAP model. So a capability model. So instead, uh, so there's a couple analogies. Uh, one of the analogies I like is as you consider, like getting a ticket, right? So somebody gives you a ticket, uh, to go see a show or, or, or a drink ticket, right. At an event. Um, so when you take your tickets, so let's go with drink ticket in an event, right. You've been given a little piece of paper. Yeah. I figured that that would resonate. So, uh, so in, in that model, right, uh, you acquire the drink ticket from the person responsible for giving out drink tickets, uh, and then you take that ticket up to the bar. Uh, you order your drink and you give them the ticket and the person at the bar, the bartender, that's what we call people at the bar. Doesn't have to, you know, uh, phone the organizer or check in with the organizer, right? Like you have the ticket, therefore you're allowed to have a drink. Um, so that's, that's sort of how you can work, um, you know, on, on technical level. So it's, uh, an extended version of a JWT, uh, which is, uh, uh, ju uh, Jason token. Right? So it's, you know, a little bit of Jason. Um, yeah. Uh, so yeah, so once you had, so, and so these you cans, right? The, the extended JWTs, uh, basically contain information about capabilities that an identifier can, can have. So, so when you go try to do something on this decentralized network, uh, It already knows that, you know, can't check with us and trailer service. It knows what you're allowed to do in like self contained in the format. Right. Yeah. And [00:28:01] Katherine Druckman: no more, no less. Right. I mean, this is the very, this is zero knowledge proof. Yes. I mean, you know what, you, you, you, we, you know what we let you know, and nothing else, you know what I mean, to know what you don't need to know. Right. Right. Which is, which is the privacy angle and [00:28:17] James Walker: yeah. Private privacy is definitely part of it. Um, yeah. So I guess I kind of glossed over, so for the actual identifiers, right. So like how we identify users, um, we use, uh, so this is a broader standard, uh, did, um, I'm not sure. I actually know that acronym off the topic, but it's yeah. I believe it's being shepherded by the W3C. Um, so we use a specific format, from the DID foundation called did key, so we're actually D we're dealing all in public private key pairs. Right. Uh, so, so the way that actually works. So you're using a device, whether that's your phone, your laptop, right. Um, uh, you know, in, in a, in a browser, uh, we generate a key pair for that browser. So when you create a, you know, a Fission account creates a, a public private key in the browser, uh, using browsers have a, uh, there's a browser, uh, standard for cold web crypto that stores the private key in your browser, not exportable. And so then we get this public key and that gets formatted in this did key format. That is your identifier for the device. And I think one of the important things is that's, that's the identifier for your device now, you know, the assumption is there is a user using that device, but it's not a user account in the way. A lot of know client server. It's not, it's not James. It happens to just be, you know, James is iPhone or James's James's laptop. Yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah, [00:29:56] Katherine Druckman: well, so like a ticket. Okay. So it ticket the ticket analogy. Going back to that a ticket, it has one piece of information. And that is in that is I am entitled to a drink that the only payload it carries, so to speak. Um, so when you talk about the tokens in your identity system, um, What, what does it contain? I mean, can you, can you have multiple tokens for different purposes? In other words, can I go to, I don't know, name an application, can I go to the bartender with one electronic token and say this one, this token only says I'm entitled to a drink and nothing else at all. Therefore, no identifying information, nothing about me. Um, or I could use the same token to go into a music venue during a pandemic. And all the only information it will say is I am vaccinated and nothing else about me, nothing identifying it, you know? [00:30:51] James Walker: Right. Yeah. Um, yeah. So, so you can, um, basically, yeah, so, so you can build up basically you can chain, so an authorization chain. Um, so you have a. Your initial device, right? Your initial key pair can then delegate to others. Right. So, so actually before you even get to trying to get a drink and into the show, right. Uh, this is this particular analogy kind of breaks down a little bit, but you know, we have multiple devices, almost all of us at this point. Right. We have a phone and, you know, and our desktop browser. Right? Yeah. Um, so, so the first thing that we do is, uh, we refer to as, as linking, right. Which is really delegating. So you create, you know, you create your initial key pair and then you want to say, but the, you know, so I create that on my phone say, uh, and then you have. Your your laptop, uh, as a, as a second device, and you can actually link the two together and there's some apple started doing things, kind of like this in some places, uh, key base, if you've ever heard of them, they have a sort of similar model. There's a bunch of those where we show a QR code, you can scan the QR code, and what happens there is you actually delegate basically give that ticket to, uh, to the second device and say, okay, you know, James, his laptop can now, uh, can now do the things that James can do. Right. Um, and so in a similar model, yeah, you can go. Add things to this chain. We do allow support. So you can, you can define multiple capabilities, right? So I give Catherine a ticket to, you know, to get a drink and get into the show. Uh, you could do that as one, if it made sense, but you can also split it up as, as separate grants, right? Um, yeah. Yeah. [00:32:54] Doc Searls: We have a question, which is, I mean, it's the sense, an awful lot, like what, um, what's happening in the SSI self-sovereign identity world. Um, are you in that, is that, is there, do you use this part of your vocabulary as well? It's like verifiable credentials, DIDs, all of that. [00:33:10] James Walker: Yeah. Yeah. So I, I, I believe we're actually members of the DD foundation. And like as a company. Uh, certainly. So our CTO, Brooklyn Zelenka, has done a lot of contribution to the DID foundation [00:33:26] Doc Searls: so, uh, is anybody from Fission, are you coming to the internet identity workshop the week after next? [00:33:32] James Walker: Uh, I am not. I, I, so our CEO, Boris man has been to several over the years. Uh, Uh, we, we probably, as a company should, uh, go again in the future. Um, but yeah, [00:33:48] Doc Searls: not, not this stuff. I, I, I'm one of the people who started that and it's, it's out of control. We're actually sold out. Amazing. Yeah. We're sold a week after next we're sold out. We, we kept it a 2 75. Um, I, it, it threatened to get like over 400 or something crazy like that. We're actually turning people away now. I feel really bad about that. [00:34:08] James Walker: Yeah. I personally, I've never been, which feels like a shame again, like all the years I spent, uh, working in and around open ID, I never actually made it out. And like, I personally, I should have been. And so I will, I'll make it eventually. [00:34:27] Katherine Druckman: great. I mean, [00:34:27] Doc Searls: it, it sort of took off. Um, the first time we actually met officially, it started on a podcast and then the podcast turned to a bunch of people that have. Conference. So we decided to get together in Berkeley. And then since then it's been at the computer history museum, but. But the first way I had a Berkeley bread Fitzpatrick shows up, it says, I have this thing called open ID that I've been doing with, um, life journal. You want it? People said, yeah, we took it. And then it turned into it just like, you know, it, it, it snowballed from there and turn it to whatever else it did. And interesting thing about it too, is there's so many things that have come out of that. And one of them is OAuth and the whole idea with authors to do this more distributed thing in some ways. And it turned into, you know, log in with Facebook. [00:35:15] James Walker: Right, exactly. So, uh, so, uh, Blaine cook, who was one of the authors, uh, is actually a Fission adviser. Um, and yeah. He's yeah, he's a great guy. And yeah, so it's, I mean, it's a lot of the same people, um, you know, who have, who've been fighting this fight for the last 20 years? Um, but yeah, like. Very much wanted to do with solving a similar problem to what we're doing and, you know, fell victim to that centralization, um, uh, you know, gravity, the gravitational force sucked it in, and yet now we have logging in with Facebook instead of all this, instead of the, the original decentralized vision. [00:36:00] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. I, um, I keep saying, I need to go because, you know, we can knock out like a month's worth of the podcast episodes just in a couple, couple days, but I haven't gotten around to yet, but someday, someday, [00:36:15] Doc Searls: where are you physically in, in time and in [00:36:18] James Walker: space I'm in Toronto. I was guessing [00:36:22] Doc Searls: I've heard solutes in a boot so that, well, the thing is maybe, you know, the answer to this. There is no answer, but it's an interesting thing to me. There is a very high preponderance of Canadians. Identity world. One of my best friends is Kim Cameron who died recently, but he's, he was in Toronto. Um, but there's so many others. Uh, um, Pamela Dingle now runs a lot of identity for Microsoft. She's out of Edmonton, I think, but, uh, Kaleah a young who's, you know, identity woman, the other founders of, of, uh, of, uh, of this. So I don't know what it is, you know, since you're there, by the way, big Aurora tonight, really big one. There's a big solar storm coming in this. Yes, it gets dark walk out and take a look. Yeah. That's [00:37:14] James Walker: uh, that will mean I have to stay up late, but, um, yeah, I can pull it off. Um, yeah. Kaleah, Kaleah hangs out in our discord. Uh, yeah, I guess the same, same people still trying to save, um, Uh, save. So save to save the internet, save the internet from itself and solve, solve the same kinds of problems. Yeah. Um, yeah, so I mean, at Fission again, like I was saying, the, the exciting part to me is, you know, if we, if we agree that one of the reasons we keep getting back into these like siloed centralized world is, um, is that client server model, and, and just the, the, the effort that it takes to run the server side piece of that, If we, if we go to something that's purely peer to peer and take servers out of it effectively, uh, you know, does that get us farther this time? And obviously I'm betting this, this path there, this chunk of my career on it. Uh, I think, I think it solves one problem. The other problem, that vision currently is a little bit leaving as an exercise to the user because we're focused on developer tools, but is that, that ease of use, right? So how do we make it so that, you know, it is as easy, right? And, you know, going back to the status net days and you guys are Mastadon users. So you know, this, that, you know, Mastodon and, and the federated social networks still have this problem of, if I have to identify a user at a service. Right to like, if I want to mention somebody, I have to say at user, and then I have to remember what service they're on. Right. You know, you get these like little like decentralized systems, like this often have like that little bit of extra friction. And it's amazing just how little of that friction is required to, to tilt things in, in favor of the centralized service. Right. So, uh, and, and it drives me a little nuts, but you know, like every time, you know, if you're watching TV or billboards things, right. Like you'll just see like Twitter or increasingly now, like an Instagram handle, just like at username. Uh, and, and that is some, the assumption of the services is just baked right into it. And it's yeah. So [00:39:40] Doc Searls: to be in a service. Yeah. [00:39:42] James Walker: But, uh, but yeah, I mean, in terms of it out eventually, um, you know, on the, on the, the ease of use thing, one of the things, and I, you know, sort of blew past this in our authorizations game, you know, public, private key pairs, right? Like, and, you know, public private encryption is the, is the thing that's, you know, it's been arrived again. We certainly didn't invent it. Uh, it's been around for a long time, but it can take, or, we sort of feel like it can take some of the friction out if we do that directly in a browser. So again, like we, we leverage heavily the web crypto API that's in, in browsers. So if we can create and manage that key pair in each of your devices securely for you, you know, uh, that's sort of one of our efforts in removing some of that, that user headache, right? Like. Yeah. If we do our job well, like, you know, most users will never have to worry about the fact that they've got public private key pairs, it's transparently being handled on a, on a per device basis for them, uh, behind the scenes. So, yeah, but it is, I mean, do we have all of the usability issues of a decentralized internet solved? Uh, you know, will we ever, maybe not yet. Yeah. I mean, yes, exactly. Like, will we ever as a society who knows, but it's a. It's definitely on our minds and we're, we're, that's that's, that is what we're working on is trying to come up with the tools to make that possible. [00:41:15] Doc Searls: And I remember when, um, if there's a thousand years ago, I was, I got in the turn of the nineties, um, Esther Dyson to I value a lot and just a brilliant, she said, nobody's ever gonna write on glass. They're always going to need a keyboard. And I know somebody who can, well, all the way, one of those things where we write on glass. So, you know, it's, it's how you make it easy. And it turns out that's not easy to do in general. There's something about that. That's hard. And, um, I don't know why it shouldn't. I mean, I think geeks are really good at making what they do. Easy. I think that that happened with Unix like 35 years ago, you know, um, just coming down, you know, coming up with, you know, with pipes or regular expressions and little, there's just, uh, you know, th th the way a directory is organized and that's the legacy of that is now in a URL and other places, but then people can understand that to some degree, but it's still over in geek land, you know? And, um, uh, and geeks can drop into a command line and back out of it, but muggles aren't there, even though they use QWERTY keyboards, which are themselves pretty damn complicated, they [00:42:33] James Walker: are. Yeah. Um, yeah. Uh, yeah, I, I don't know that we have to have all of the answers. Um, I think that would be, that would be a bold, a bold prediction, but, Yeah, use usability, I think is still the tough challenge. And it's the other trap I've fallen into personally is when you talk decentralized, going back to some of the things I was saying at, at the start part of the important part for me is, you know, user agency over my data. I have learned over the last 20 years, uh, not, you know, the average, uh, Muggle, uh, maybe doesn't care about that quite on the same level that I do. And it's it, it in itself, and, and, you know, let's keep picking on Twitter, but, you know, Twitter or Facebook, you know, every, every time one of the main centralized silos, it gets caught up in a new cycle where they're, they're doing, terrible things with your privacy and your data, uh, um, You know, for, for a long time, I thought, okay, this will be the one, right. This'll be the time where, people realize what's actually going on here, they'll get fed up and they'll look for alternatives. Uh, and that, that hasn't quite happened yet. So it has, you know, the, the alternatives have to be easy enough to use. And I think present some value, which is the other really tricky thing. You know, some, some, some value beyond just being better for privacy, decentralized, giving you more control over it. Right? Like there has to be a reason people want to use these tools instead, which I think is the other really hard problem. When you talk about like the, the federated social stuff, right? Like, oh, it's like Twitter, except you have more control over it. Isn't isn't enough of a cell, right? It's like, well, why don't I just use Twitter? Cause it's easier. Um, so yeah, I think there's still some, some big questions to answer in terms of like, how do you make it simple and how do you make it so that it's the thing people want to use instead? [00:44:40] Doc Searls: Well, that generating that value is, is I think actually the biggest thing, because, um, I mean, this is sort of relevant. I mean, I, I, uh, I'm old enough, so that learning to type was two whole semester as a whole school year in the seventh grade, my son, I, he wanted a type, he was 11 or something. I give Mavis beacon siping tutor. I didn't look again and later he's typing something. I said, oh, so you did that. And he said, yeah, yeah, yeah. When did you do it last weekend? I said, well, wow. You know, How long did it take is it took a few hours as well. And he said, look, watch this. He put this, it was CD time, right? He's 25 now. But he put the CDN, you know, test his type types at 45 words a minute. He did in a weekend because he's motivated. Right. You have to, you have to do this. He didn't, he wanted to be a touch typist and he got it done. And I was thinking the same thing about. I mean, such as riding a bike as hard the first few times you do it, but you really want to do it. The values I write and, and having 27 gears on a bike is complicated, but you learn how to do that. And, um, driving a stick shift, there's, there's lots of things like that that are, that the backside value of it, once you learn it is so high that you just do, you know? And, and I think we kind of haven't found that yet, whatever that is, I think in this identity thing, it could be there if it gets us say past logins and passwords. Yeah. If you can get past logins and passwords. Holy shit. That's huge. Right. And, and the framework you've talked about has the, has the makings of that, right? Yes. [00:46:31] James Walker: Yeah. Uh, although I will say, right. So one of, one of the things that we've seen with some, some early, you know, uh, less technical users is now there's some unlearning. So every. Most people know, usernames and passwords stink and, and, and maybe have some, some notion as to why that is. Um, but you give them a passwordless login system and it freaks some people out. It's like, well, yeah, I never, I never, I never added a password. How does it know my password where you don't have a password, but like, yeah. So there's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. There's still some, or maybe there's some unlearning or there's some, some relearning to do, And then yeah, and then explaining why a system without a password is actually more secure than the password. So whole other challenge, but, uh, um, but yeah, but it can, it can be easy. And, you know, I think there's some other potential things. So one of the, one of the things, that I, and, some of us at Fission have been keenly watching is some of the things that apple is doing, right. Again, everybody in tech is always kind of keeping an eye on what apple is doing. Uh, but some of their work around, the apple wallet and starting to introduce like a driver's license that is, a valid driver's license that just lives in your phone. And when they announced the feature a couple of months ago, you know, one of the things they talked about is like, Paraphrasing, but basically like, you know, you present your, your, driver's license on your phone and only like only the information that's needed to, you know, needed for that purpose is what's is what's provided an exchange, which is, again, going back to like the internet identity crowd, that's part of what, you know, people have been pushing for all along is like, give us, give us a way to, you know, have verified credentials that we can, you know, show, show just that credential as needed. Um, so yeah, I mean, it's a hard problem. I don't have all of the answers to it, but yeah. Um, you know, we'll, we'll see, we'll see where it goes. Nobody [00:48:36] Doc Searls: does is say we're all pushing our own rocks up Hills, hoping they turn into snowballs and the other side. So. But we keep pushing, [00:48:47] James Walker: we do that. And apparently one of the things I've learned deficient is like all the same people are still pushing. Uh, so [00:48:54] Doc Searls: yeah. Yeah. It's true. It's it's football. [00:49:00] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, but ultimately, uh, you know, I kind of wonder, you know, all of these people spend all this time and it is of course, a worthy pursuit, you know, obviously it's, it's time, well spent solving these problems, but ultimately the only way for it to catch on is for apple to do that kind [00:49:18] James Walker: of, it does feel like that some days. Yeah. Uh, we, we just, we need, we need one of the big, uh, you know, one of that big tech company group to like do the right thing and set the stage for, for everything else. And, you know, uh, the problem is. You know, they're all mostly motivated in different directions, right? Maybe [00:49:40] Katherine Druckman: less so that's maybe the only one got not of contain a lot of other information and then that nice little, uh, digital, [00:49:47] James Walker: my date. Yeah. Apple is the one where, you know, and just because of how the, you know, the businesses is structured or the, how they make their money at the end of the day. Right. Isn't on having that vast collection of, of user data. So, yeah. I mean, I think there's, uh, there's a lot of people, myself included sort of looking to them to, you know, to be leaders on some of this stuff. Cause, cause yeah, like if a company, you know, at Fission, we're 16 people, right. So we are, we are young and small and don't carry quite the same weight in the industry that apple does. I think I can say that confidently, um, someday, hopefully. Right. But, uh, yeah. Um, yeah, so yeah, definitely. Uh, the things that apple then, so we spend a lot of time, like what are patterns that companies like apple, or are introducing that we can sort of leverage. Right. And then, and then the pandemic happened and scanning, QR codes became a normal thing for people to do. Um, and so we can, you know, we can lean into that a little bit, uh, and, and things like that. But, um, yeah, it's, it's, it's all hard problems, but that's, that's what makes going to work in the morning. Interesting. [00:50:56] Katherine Druckman: So speaking of going to the work going forward in the morning, so you work in like developer relations experience, you are the person who wants to make the experience better so that people use your product. Yes. And that's basically what you do. So I, it would be kind of cool and we have a pretty geeky audience. We have a lot of people who've fortunately followed us from Linux Journal, um, I wondered if I'm, I'm a nerd. I have some, some skills maybe, hopefully fingers crossed, sorry, I'm thinking about myself now. I want to check out Fission. How do I do that? What do I do? What do I, what do I, what do I use it for? What am I building here? [00:51:34] James Walker: Yeah. Uh, so our, our, our primary product right now is a, uh, uh, an NPM package, right? So, uh, uh, TypeScript library that implements a bunch of this stuff. Um, so you can go to, to Fission.codes, and there's some, some information there. Um, but the, the NPM package is called web native, um, which is how we refer to our collection of technologies. Uh, and, um, yeah, and, and you can build apps. I mentioned that somewhere along the line, you know, we have this broad vision of identity data and compute. We are, you know, somewhere in the, uh, in terms of, you know, things that we actually have working in written, uh, in the data portion of the three-step process. So, so that you can build apps right now that, you know, use this passwordless, uh, uh, UCAN based authorization, to give access to what we call the web native file system, which is our IPFS based file system. Right. Um, where we've done, you know, because we have these public private key payers and we can grant authorization to different devices. One of the things we do is grant authorization to read and write encrypted files that are actually stored on IPFS. Right. So you can use our library to build an app that can read and write files, uh, as though it were working on a local file system, but that stuff's actually being encrypted and then, and then put on IPFS. [00:53:18] Katherine Druckman: What are people doing? I mean, what are the developers that you encounter? What are the really cool applications that you're seeing? [00:53:26] James Walker: Yeah. Um, so a lot of, uh, you know, young, young tech company, there's a lot of like, uh, early adopters tinkerer types. Um, There's a bit of momentum. In fact, there's a meetup group that has actually like housed inside of our discord server. Um, that is, uh, the tools for thought rocks group, I think, is how they refer to themselves. Um, but there's a, yeah, a lot of interest in the whole note, taking tools for thoughts zettelkasten I think I said that right. Uh, that kind of group, right? So you have your, your personal private notes that you want to live, you know, have have durable storage that are, available everywhere. But also private and, and encrypted. Yeah. Yeah. They're like, they're like, it's like, yeah. It's like my it's my second brain, I think is another, uh, thing, those projects, uh, work on. Yeah. So there's, there's a bunch of, I would say that's probably the, for the, for our web native library, that's probably the biggest like type of app that, that people are poking around with. but one of the interesting things that's happened over my time. So I've been at vision for a little over a year and a half. One of the interesting things is the UCAN authorization format is, um, has kind of started to take on a life of its own. So one more time to bring it back to Twitter. Uh, Twitter spun off Twitter spun off the blue sky project. Um, And, uh, to, to do basically decentralized Twitter, uh, and blue sky is now actually its own separate company. Uh, blue skies, first engineering hire was a former FIssion engineer. Um, and they are very excited to the early days. I don't know how much of this is like committed, committed, but, uh, they are very interested in this UCAN authorization stuff for, for the work that they're doing, right? Because again, a decentralized Twitter you're going to have to have right. Identity is going to be at the core of that. Uh, and so they're looking at you can, so yeah, so we're an industry in an interesting position where bits of our underlying tech are, uh, are starting to get interest in and adoption, um, sort of. Independently of our, our broader toolkit. Right. So, um, that's, that's been, uh, fun. So we actually get created a, you can working group, uh, like github organization. So, so blue sky, and there's a couple other organizations that are interested in that particular piece of the technology stack. [00:56:24] Katherine Druckman: Um, I keep wondering if we need to, if we need to address the, the whole Elon Musk thing. I don't know. I wonder what impact something like this. It's I mean, can we call it a hostile takeover at this point? Do we know yet if it's takeover [00:56:40] Doc Searls: and I think he was goofing around. I mean, I think that's, I think he's having fun, you know, it's, it's sort of like, you know, the, the giants kicking around, you know, what he can, um, uh, I mean, w w what, everybody on the left fears, the political left fears is he's going to like Trump back in that if he lets Trump back in, it's going to be, you know, a big deal on the other hand, there's a lot of people who say, well, no, he he's talking about free speech. He will let Trump back in, but everybody else, yada, yada, has a lot of people that want to leave. It's going to be interesting. I mean, I, I, um, the fact that he can be done is itself weird and awful and, and indicative of something, you know, that, that, um, I mean, I, I don't know how one ethically runs the giant like that actually. Um, in any case it's it's to, to put all of ethics on, on, uh, on a big giant company that cannot begin algorithmically, which would have to be the only way to control what gets said is impossible. I mean, and I, Facebook has an even bigger problem, you know, in the wall street journal years ago had a, a wonderful article called you know, like something like Zuckerberg just hired 20,000 people to do the worst job in the world, looking at human depravity and flagging it, and only human beings could do that. And supposedly they've gotten better at it. You know, AI being what it is, but. Um, but it's crazy. I mean, I, I, a couple of days ago, um, I participate in a really goofy group on Facebook called I take pictures of transmitter sites and it's, it's all old broadcast engineers, myself included who as this frankly, radio broadcast radio is sinking into the ground. Okay. It's slowly sagging away as the internet eats everything. Um, but it's, it's a, it's interesting. And there was, uh, a piece by somebody who. Who have, have a site, a physical site in Russia of a giant abandoned tower. And I pointed to it and Facebook said, this, this is not at our community standards and we're not going to let you post this. And so I just posted something else that pointed to something had pointed to it, as far as I could tell that the page that had it had nothing at all wrong with it, nada, it just was Russia. It had a Russian topic and the Russian topic is off the table right now in the U S because they're suddenly the enemy and it's a big country. It's not the whole, the people aren't making war, the government's making war and it's complicated. And why, why push those people off the edge of the earth? You know, but I understand why they're doing it. They're there. Everything's suspicious right now. And they're, you know, they've got a bunch of settings. So the answer is, you know, something that, um, Is that an, the answer is an answer. Um, Brian Behlendorf, um, uh, said a few years ago, it just, he just dropped this line, which I love, which is we need minimum viable centralization, that's it? You know, what's the minimum viable centralization that needs to be a principle that we apply to things. Um, and, uh, you know, we, another, I mean, Catherine has heard me say this is as in times pretty boring on it, but I actually think it's early. I think it's really early. We, we invented digital technology, only ICS, like what's 50, 60 years ago in a serious way. They've only become hugely capable in the last, maybe 10 years. We've only had, um, the internet in its current form releases, April of 95 when the last backbone within it that had that forbid, some kind of traffic stood down. And then e-commerce exploded. So it's only like 27 years and we're going to be digital for the next few millennia. You know, that it's not going away. And digital technology is, is not a genie. That's going back into bottle. We have to deal with it. And we haven't figured out privacy yet. We have all kinds of stuff. We haven't figured out identity. We'll figure it out. Pieces of it. You guys are working on it. I've been encouraging it. But you know, we've met 35 times, 34 times in, you know, 17 years or whatever it is. We're not even close to whatever this is going to be, you know? And, uh, it's going to take a long time to make it all work out. And we'll probably never all will work out. People are messy [01:01:29] James Walker: TBD. Yeah. Um, yeah, boy, wouldn't uh, an Elon Musk hostile takeover of Twitter. Be the thing that pushes people away from Twitter. Wouldn't it be? Wouldn't that be poetic? It would be, [01:01:43] Doc Searls: I would miss it though. I mean, it's there, that's where my readers are now, you know, Linux Journal's gone, you know, um, it, it still exists on the web, but they don't, they don't use us. So you get rid of that, but the archives are there. [01:02:05] James Walker: I hope. Yeah, please, please update it. [01:02:08] Doc Searls: Um, [01:02:10] Katherine Druckman: I, I wonder about the, you know, the takeover hostile or not, it's just a reminder of how the fragility of the system, right. Anybody can just come in and buy it. You [01:02:21] James Walker: know, that's like weird. That's how [01:02:26] Katherine Druckman: we connect today. And [01:02:27] James Walker: yeah, the massively either the massive, giant centralized corporations on the internet, like have all kinds of vulnerabilities and this is one of them. Right. And it's, it's one I can't think of readily. Like we haven't really seen that happen. There's acquisitions and things that happen that changed the nature of a company. Um, but this would be. If this actually happens, I haven't even looked at the news today. I don't, I don't know if it's, if it's a done deal or anything yet, but, um, if it were to happen slash has already happened, uh, it'd be different than I, I don't know exactly how it would turn out [01:03:05] Katherine Druckman: and I may be overstating twitter's significance? But, you know, I don't know. I mean, it has, it still has a tremendous influence. [01:03:13] Doc Searls: It's massively significant. It's it's the it's, it's the, it's the news river of the internet right now that that's where that's where the news happens. And, um, I mean, admittedly, I mean, it's weird because everybody gets a different view of it. What's that Catherine? I [01:03:32] Katherine Druckman: said for a certain age, I just realized I age myself that I think Facebook matters because young people haven't, you know, they don't use Facebook. They use [01:03:38] Doc Searls: basically young people have, but middle-aged and older people have not. And they're a couple of billion of those. And, um, uh, we saw, we participated cause I'm at a university at, um, on a, uh, panel, uh, window. We were in on it, but I mean, it was there on, on the stage and online of course, cause zoom came in and that's all it was hybrid. But, um, what happened with the Rohingya. And, uh, in Myanmar was it's all on Facebook, Facebook create, you know, they created these, the machine that allowed a low level of pure, typical human prejudice to get really metastasized. And in that particular environment, it, it, it, it, it resulted in a frenzy of murder and mayhem and, and, uh, an exile. And, um, without that algorithm and without the internet, there is Facebook. Yeah. Apparently, you know, it's not like Facebook has an app on the internet, you get a cheap cell phone, an Android phone, it's got Facebook on it and it's got a few other things. And then. And it's their free basics, whatever they call it this week. And, and that's the internet to these people. And, um, and it was used for awful things. And at the same time, I mean, I'm really interested in what works and what doesn't work right now. And Ukraine, you know, I mean, they're on that elderly 10,000 star links in there trying to make things work. With cables that are like a thousand feet long because somebody could target the actual star link on the ground conceivably. You don't want it by your house. It's the, how, how are they, how are they coordinating stuff? How's this [01:05:32] James Walker: work it's yeah. I think social networking has been interesting. Right? Like I, you know, I mean, I think, I think it's a shame that, you know, uh, email has centralized into, you know, basically you use Gmail or, or outlook, you know, that, that seems bad, you know, it's, uh, a little bit funny, but mostly sad that, you know, get and get hub or synonymous. Right. Like, you know, there's, there's all kinds of ways in which our decentralized technologies get centralized, but, but social stuff has been, I think, just because it is social media, right? Like it is how people are interacting. There's a whole. New set of problems, uh, that arise out of the centralization of those technologies that make a lot of the rest of, it seemed like child's play, right? Like, you know, uh, you know, get is by design decentralized, you know, obviously a narrow audience in and developers. Um, but you know, the fact that it's basically centralized around GitHub, Is, you know, is not ideal, certainly not what was intended, but mostly harmless with some exceptions. But yeah, I mean, it does, like you said, the stuff that happens on, on Facebook and the way at the influence that those companies have, whether intentionally or not over. Real things happening in the world on massive scales. Uh, yeah. It's, it's a whole, it's a whole new level of scary. [01:07:06] Doc Searls: Yeah. So there you go to Catherine. So hold her level of yeah. Title. I think, I [01:07:11] Katherine Druckman: think, I don't know what the SEO on that [01:07:18] Doc Searls: it's that crazy on top is a little shit on top of like an otherwise really nice cake. [01:07:24] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. That sounds like every episode we always end with, well, the world's coming to an end. What are we going to do? [01:07:30] James Walker: I was going to try to fix it, but I was tempted to say, when you're saying we may not have this solved for a millennia. I was like, well, if the planet lasts that long. [01:07:38] Doc Searls: Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, um, I'm very budgeted geology and. You know, every time you, you look by the side of the road or you look at the grand canyon, you look at layers, there are catastrophes between something big changed, right. You know, and, uh, It's it's, you know, and there's this an onion story right now, a message from the sun. You don't want to be around when this thing blows up, which it will, you know, and in about a half billion years, which is about how long it takes to make a rock it's the sun is going to be too hot to support photosynthesis. So [01:08:27] Katherine Druckman: I don't, I don't know that we'll make it that long. We're [01:08:29] Doc Searls: going to know every species lasts a couple of, a couple of billion. You know, and we're, we may [01:08:37] James Walker: not even be able to say we may fast track ourselves out of that. [01:08:43] Doc Searls: Well, you know, every [01:08:45] Katherine Druckman: existential threat that we have, [01:08:47] Doc Searls: every species, every APA that has an apex of any kind is pestilential, they all do what they do, you know? And we eat the world. I mean, let's oh, well it took forever to make the, well, fuck it. We're going to burn it up anyway. You know, it's, it's, it's here. It's a resource because it's a resource. I don't think, you know, I it's amazing to me. The role that life plays on the planet and, um, 15%, something like that of all the rock on earth is limestone. This is stuff that was alive, right? The summit of Mount Everest is Marine limestone, what is this? What does this say? What is the world doing? You know, but it's, it's massively interesting to me, but it, it, there's no reason to be optimistic about the persistence of any species. And especially when one has, you know, we live in the Anthropocene right now. Right. That's what this is. But I think there's a, there is, I mean, there's a moral imperative that, that still rides in human nature. I think it's there, you know, we want, we want to do the right thing. We want to pick up the, the crying baby. We want to, you know, you know, pull somebody out of the burning house, whatever else it is, you know, there's, there's that, that, you know, You know, there, there is mercy in human nature is, you know, in generosity and other positive things. And I suspect that even Elon Musk has a feeling about that and what he's doing, I have enormous respect for what he's done with Starlink and space X and Tesla. I mean, Tesla, right? Yeah. Freaking remarkable actually, [01:10:31] James Walker: uh, of, of the, uh, you know, billionaire characters. I find him one of the more interesting, just because, you know, he's done some good things or at least moved some good things forward. Um, but yeah, humans are complicated, I guess I'll leave it at that. [01:10:52] Katherine Druckman: Well, you know, I was thinking it's sort of billionaire characters are thinking I will have. I mean, obviously it is different, but, but Jeff Bezos, bought the Washington post, you know, Rupert Murdoch has. Fox and everything else. And, and, uh, you know, but Twitter to me is more significant in so many ways. It's the platform for [01:11:14] James Walker: everybody. It continues. I'm, I'm always amazed. How much of content on like something like Instagram is screenshots of tweets, right? Like Twitter seems to Twitter seems to still, uh, particularly with breaking news, right? Like, like it's. Yeah. It's, it's where news and current events happen in, in a way. Seems to be different from, from some of the years. And it's yeah, like, cause I, I mean, you know, Facebook and Instagram have, you know, more monthly active users, larger user base, all of that. But like when something like when something's happening, uh, you know, people seem to still turn to Twitter to find out what's going on. [01:12:01] Doc Searls: Yeah. And I mean, people like my wife does not have a Twitter account, but she still looks at it somehow, you know? And, uh, to see what's going on, my Twitter does his best to make you belong, but it's still, you know, you can look at it. All of [01:12:17] James Walker: them are increasingly trying to force you. They'll let you scroll, scroll for a little bit too late until they make you work highly [01:12:23] Katherine Druckman: controlled with the illusion that it's not, we have the illusion that we're, you know, curating our own list and we're deciding, you know, deciding which content to look at, but it's not really true. Interesting well on that. [01:12:37] Doc Searls: Yeah. A long time, a long show. What are they an easy one to edit? So here you go. [01:12:46] Katherine Druckman: Have fun with that's a good time. Well, uh, anyway, I think, I think, I think we've covered. Is there anything you wanted to mention that you didn't get a chance to mention before [01:12:55] James Walker: we wrap up? No clue. I mean, clearly I can talk about this stuff all day, but, uh, yeah. I mean to have you back. Yeah. That's, that's, that's the gist of what we're up to and at least why I think we're up to it. Um, so yeah, it's, it's fun, fun to chat about it with somebody other than my coworkers for a change. That's [01:13:14] Doc Searls: great. Cool. [01:13:15] Katherine Druckman: Well, thank you to everyone who is listening to this far, and thank you, James and Doc and everybody. And until next time.