 Luke welcome back to the podcast man. Well thanks for having me again. No worries. So the last episode we talked a lot about globalism, elitism, CBDC, social credit scores, etc. This episode I want to focus more on privacy and privacy tools and I suppose how people can use them. So let's kick it off. So obviously crypto started with Bitcoin, right? So now that I think a lot of the lack of privacy problems on Bitcoin is sort of coming to fruition. On the other side of that Bitcoin is a sort of implementing more private solutions. So for example, Lightning is a lot more private than just normal Bitcoin transactions. So talk to me about privacy on Lightning, privacy on coin joins, the ups, the downs, do you think they work in general and do they scale to 8 billion people? I would say no. The thing to say about firstly coin joins, that's a more obvious example. I think coin joins have a miserable onset and I wouldn't even say they give you privacy. I would say maybe they give you like legal plausible deniability maybe, but they're so infrequently used and when they are they're just not very powerful for what they're supposed to do, I would almost like totally dismiss them as being an issue. Now Lightning I suppose you can say is good for privacy. I will just say that I mean Lightning itself is just software that is theoretically irrelevant to Bitcoin. I mean saying that Lightning is good for privacy is kind of like saying like Coinbase is good for privacy because you're not really transacting on the Bitcoin network. You're using some other system. No, that's not me saying Lightning is the same thing as Coinbase, obviously it's not. It's not a custodial system and it's much better. I think the complaint that I've had about Bitcoin as compares to Monero is Bitcoin obviously one of the foundational assumptions of Bitcoiners and there's a reason they have this, but one of the foundational assumptions is that we are not going to hard fork. We're not going to make any significant changes to Bitcoin and that makes it very difficult to fix principal issues in it and therefore by necessity requires you to rely on other systems like Lightning and the issue with that is that all the stuff you build on top of Bitcoin if you want it to still be worth using it has to retain all of the same benefits of Bitcoin. It has to still be decentralized. It has to still be free software. It has to still be custodial and all this kind of stuff and that actually is very much an uphill battle. It really is like reinventing Bitcoin for every layer you add on it. You need a lot of harebrained schemes to do all this kind of stuff and it honestly is just kind of nasty and inefficient. I think there's a I guess aesthetic disgust I have at the idea. Now I understand the modularity aspect of it, but I would just say that using Lightning, it doesn't give you privacy on Bitcoin. It's just a system outside of Bitcoin that isn't on the blockchain. That could be anything. That could be you writing transaction hashes on a piece of paper. So can it scale? I think there are a lot of issues in Lightning that the biggest ones are there's still an ability to lock up funds and stuff like this. You can attack Lightning in a way that is kind of easy. I would say that's a big issue. I think even bigger than that, a lot of Bitcoiners have settled on Lightning as this is going to be the panacea. In reality, how many people actually use this? A legitimate question, not many, barely any. That's just how it is. It's really technology that's still in its infancy. Not to say that Bitcoin isn't in its infancy itself, but Lightning is just so scarcely used. Even with its benefits, it is much less used than the Bitcoin layer that it's on top of. Yeah. That's, I suppose, one variable. Things obviously grow with time, as you mentioned, but some things that don't change and things that I like to focus on more are things that are set in stone. You talked about attacking Lightning. Break it down as if I'm five. How do you do that? Well, because you have to basically put up your funds, you open up channels and stuff like that. There are different ways of you lock when other people have opened up channels. There are ways of you locking up by creating dummy transactions and stuff like that. There are ways for you basically to keep their money out in limbo, doing nothing. Just ways of attacking the network. All of this is the same. Now, I have full hope that this will be fixed. That all of these issues are going to be slowly fixed, but the issue that I said before is the Lightning network or any other system is just reinventing the wheel at every stage. There's a point where you have to ask, why don't we just modify the original state of it? Why don't we don't have these privacy issues? Why don't we just try and alleviate them at the bare bone system of it? That of course is what Monero does. Monero has built-in hard forks, regularly scheduled things. That I think is, and others, there's a degree of trust involved in that. You have to trust that the Monero team is not going to screw things up. I guess you could say, but it does at least give them the ability to improve things. I think that is something beneficial. I want to take it back for a second because it's got me thinking. I mean, ideologically, why are you interested in privacy? Are you just, I suppose, a libertarian? Do you think it's... I mean, you answered the question. I'm just curious. Oh, well, I would definitely not describe myself as a libertarian. I think that I said before, I'm not really as interested in personal privacy. That is, and frankly, this is how most people are. Most people, when you really push comes to shove, they don't actually really care about privacy. They don't really care if some company knows all this stuff about them, and I know that they feel that way because they're obviously acting in a way consistent with that. What people do care about, and what I care about in this case, is I care about systemic privacy. That is, if I live in a world where, for example, there's all of this public metadata about all of these people that a corporation or government can use, well, that means, as we talked about in our previous episode, that means that a social engineer can say, okay, I'm going to design an algorithm or design an AI or these other things that can look at this mass trove of data, and I'm going to put in, maybe I'll start with targeted advertising, and it will move to things that are even more pernicious than that, where people are being controlled in a very systematic way. When you have technology that is just leaking privacy information all over the place, it's just dangerous. You don't know what's going to happen there. More importantly, if you are designing a technology from the top down, why would you, I mean, if you had the choice creating a cryptocurrency, do I want to make it private, or do I want to make every single transaction public information to anyone? Only the psychopath would say the second one. Now, the only reason Bitcoin has that is just because it's an accident of its architecture, but if now that we have technology that can alleviate that, it seems silly to go with the older system. And speaking of technology that can alleviate that, I know you've advocated for ZK proofs to be put on the narrow instead of ring signatures. So ZK proofs. Now, I've tried looking at this in a superficial level, right? A lot of the content you find online is pretty sophisticated with the maths and how they explain it. Maybe I'm just not finding the right content, but explain it to me like I'm five. So, well, I mean, you've heard like the Alibaba's cave metaphor, familiar with that. Okay, okay. So Alibaba's cave. This is like, when they were first introduced, this is like the metaphor that kind of explains them. So suppose there's this guy, Alibaba, and he has a, he has a little store and a thief comes and steals something from his, you know, shop and the thief runs into this cave. Okay. So how the cave works is it looks like this. They're like two, you can go into the cave and there are two paths you can take and they don't connect to each other, but they're very close on the other end. Okay. So the thief goes in. So Alibaba has seen the thief goes go in here and he knows that the thief went through one of the path paths. Okay. So he says, okay, maybe he went on the right path. I'll go on the right path as well and I'll try to run into him, but he doesn't see him. He runs out and he realizes, oh, I went the wrong path. He came out the other way, right? Makes sense. So then the thief does this again and again. So the next day he comes, he steals something. They go back to Alibaba's cave. Alibaba decides maybe I'll go to the left this side. Maybe I'll go to the right again. Either way, he realizes, oh, I haven't found him. And this, if this goes on for months and months and months, Alibaba mathematically knows something. And that is, he knows there's something weird about this cave. So and Alibaba, you know, tries to study the cave and he realizes, oh, these two legs of the cave, these, you know, parts of the cave, they actually, there's a secret door that connects them. And so what the thief is actually doing is he's going down whichever side and when he hears Alibaba come up, he goes through the secret door and he escapes the other end, right? So what you've just seen is a zero knowledge proof, okay? So Alibaba, so what we've decided, the thief knows something. He has a secret. He has the equivalent of a private key, okay? He has this ability to math, to transport between these two cave sides. And we know that because statistically speaking, we can keep going in the cave and he will always escape. He will always go out the other end, right? So mathematically, this is just what's happening more or less than a zero knowledge proof, where you don't reveal someone your private key, but you, with mathematical certainty, you know, using typical elliptic, well not typical, but, you know, cryptography, you can show that I'm not going to tell you what this key is, but I'm going to prove to you in this statement, in the same way the thief did, that I have the ability to use it without showing you what that actually is. And that's just kind of the five-year-old explanation of what a zero knowledge proof is, right? It's you showing someone else that you have this knowledge without actually telling you what the knowledge is. It's very interesting. One simpler example of a zero knowledge proof. Suppose you have a friend who's colorblind, you know, he's red-green colorblind, and you have a red ball and a green ball. Suppose he doesn't believe that there is actually a difference between red and green, and everyone is pulling his leg. Well, what you can tell him to do is hold the balls, and then put him behind his back, and maybe switch him around, maybe not, and then he will, you will always be able to identify which one the red is, and you could statistically prove to him that you can actually see the colors, and that would prove, that is a zero knowledge proof. That is you showing him that, oh, well, I don't see the difference between these, but this guy clearly understands the secret that defines which one is which, right? So that's pretty much where my understanding was at. So the ability to prove something without actually revealing the secret, right? How do you do that in a mathematical sense? How do you do that for transactions? You want me to, like, get out elliptic curves at this point or something? So this is where I'm at, right? So this is every time I do, like, the deep dive on YouTube, that's pretty much where I become unstuck because it becomes pretty advanced cryptography. Is there a way to explain it in a simpler way? You're going to have to start reading some white papers. That's what I'll tell you. If I had a PowerPoint, maybe we could go into it, but hey, I don't know anything about it. Well, I don't know everything about it, I should say. So that is, for those watching, that is your first step in the zero knowledge proofs. You can look up different white papers and different writings on it. Well, there are many. I mean, the nice thing about people working in cryptography is most of these papers are public. So they do require some math knowledge, but the intuition behind them is just the metaphor that I've just shown you writ large on an elliptic curve, where you can basically draw a line through a curve. And given the private key information, you can always get a set output. I guess that has to be homework for your viewers, I suppose. Sure. I might have even jumped a gun earlier. So we spoke about privacy online and coin joins that we jumped into, I suppose, ZK proofs, but Monero, right? Right. What problems do you think Monero solves in general? What it solves, you said? Yeah. Why Monero, basically? Oh, well. I mean, there are a lot of reasons. I mean, Monero, as it is right now, is just the only cryptocurrency out there of any decent usage that keeps user privacy secret. It's not perfect technology. It has some issues, has some areas where it can improve. But as I said before, firstly, Monero is prone. In fact, it's capable of improving. You do have scheduled hard forks that are washed over by the community. And so privacy improvements, and there have been many. Monero, when it first started, was actually kind of junky. I mean, it was kind of a proof of concept. The ring signatures were not required. That is, privacy was not required. And that actually decreases the in onset. That makes things more difficult. But Monero has added so many things as time has gone on to make it more, I mean, it's just frankly, it does the most of, it's the best of basically every world in crypto. It's private. It has low transaction fees. It is ASIC resistant to some degree. Again, it has community hard forks. And there are a lot of people, as people have probably noted, there are a lot of developers working on it. So I would just say there's a constellation of different things that make Monero kind of above the others. And obviously it does have a good bit more. I mean, the reality of cryptocurrency as it's being used online is Monero is highly overrepresented in people who are actually doing things with cryptocurrency, which is a small market, mind you. But Monero is kind of not quite the only game in town, but it's Bitcoin and Monero and then everything else is just kind of for fun. So as a privacy tool, as a monetary tool, where do you think Monero is going in this society? Do you think it's going to be adopted by most people or what's your thesis? Well, that would be, it has to happen one step at a time. And I also think it shouldn't be any, no technology should be adopted by people who don't need it. And as it is right now, I could say that a lot of normal people could use it because we are transacting digitally a lot, even in real life. But I think it's going to start first, where it is already, that is doing online transactions, you can buy server space and other stuff with Monero, obviously people know that people buy drugs online and illegal stuff because it has some privacy, or at least allegedly people say that, I don't know if there's some reason for it. So I think it's going to be slow adoption. But again, the cryptocurrency market, the reality is, and this is the in and out of bear and bull markets, should prove to you the fact that basically most of the people talking about cryptocurrency, they're not actually using it. And so the actual adoption is going to be very, very slow. In fact, the use of Monero, as it is right now in this bear market, is probably much more accurate than it would be in other times and places. And I think there also is a reason that Monero people can correctly note that even during this bear market, Monero is performing comparatively well. It's actually gained a good bit on Bitcoin. Now that might not continue. I mean, a lot of other factors go into that. But I would just say that it's going to be a slow adoption. I wouldn't expect to see your grandma using it anytime soon. But it happens one step at a time as more people get into it. Now, the biggest issue for Monero right now is how do you get it? Hey, could you tell me how to get Monero? For us, we know about it. For people who have cryptocurrency or have Bitcoin already, but how are you going to get your grandma to do it? Literally, the path of least resistance would be signing grandma up for a KYC exchange, buying Bitcoin or Litecoin, and then swapping it on some random site for Monero. And at that point, you already have KYC. What's the point? So that's the hurdle right now as far as I'm concerned. And when people ask me, oh, wow, you talked about Monero, how can I get it? It's hard for me to say, oh, here's this foolproof way of easily getting it without KYC because it often requires them using local Monero or BISC or one of these things that sounds creepy because it's like Craigslist and I might transact with some weirdo. So I think the onboarding people, that's kind of the difficult thing right now. Interesting. A bigger question too is, do you think you said that people take the path of least resistance? Monero is obviously hard to get. We talked about CBDC's globalism in the last episode. So in that case, what do you think is going to happen to Bitcoin? I think Bitcoin is going to continue to be what it is now and that is like a useless index fund. So like people will buy Bitcoin and it will go up and they don't really use it for much. I mean, it's like this theoretical thing. And if it hasn't happened already, I'm sure it will happen in the future that the vast majority of people, I mean, this is definitely already true, but the vast majority of people who use Bitcoin are KYC'd up the wazoo. So it totally defeats the point of even having the thing. So it really is just an index fund that's indexed to the price of Bitcoin. That's it. Like that's when people say that they own Bitcoin, that's what they mean. They have an account on, you know, Gemini or Coinbase or something where they have this pretend Bitcoin. So that's really where I see that going. And that's another little benefit of Monero because Monero is like not fully blacklisted from exchanges, but it's kind of like more of a, oh, wow, it's private. That's like suspicious. So it's less on centralized exchanges, which is a good thing. If you have Monero, if anyone has Monero on a centralized exchange, I don't know what is going through your head right now. I don't know what to say about that. But it could be a private wallet or if you have anything on a centralized exchange. So yeah, Bitcoin is kind of useless right now. I think maybe in the future, if there's some great lightning technology, maybe people will start using it for something in the proper way, like as custodians of their own funds, but I'm not very optimistic about that, to be honest. And I think the El Salvador situation with the kind of mess of the adoption there and all this kind of bad software, I think that's a great example. Yep. So I mean, El Salvador at the moment actually, which is evident with the newspaper behind me. Yeah, most people aren't using it here, but I wouldn't say it's completely failed. It's still early days, so I suppose we'll save it. Again, El Salvador I think is a great example because the government gave this path of least resistance to people where you get on the government custodial app where you don't have your private keys and you get the free Bitcoin from there and you have to use it. You actually, the thing I said about China before, where China was creating the CBDCs where you have to spend this money in some certain way. Well El Salvador actually did that with Bitcoin on the fake Bitcoin on their custodial exchanges or their custodial app where they said, well, you have to use this to buy some certain thing. You can't really transfer it to a private wallet. So I think that's a really good example. I mean, I think it's great that Bitcoin is legal tender there, but you always got to remember that people are going to do the easiest thing and most of these people just have no clue what Bitcoin is supposed to be about. I don't know if the president of El Salvador has any clue. I don't know. It might just be an index fund for him with some pleasantries about, I don't know, a new financial system. But I think if you were really a good ideologue for Bitcoin and for cryptocurrency, he would not have done any of this the way that he has. And I find it very suspicious. It's either ignorant or I don't know. I don't know what it is. So before we jump into just general privacy tools, what do you would mean that Minaris failed? What would you need to see to take place? That Minaris failed. Well, I'll tell you the most likely thing to cause Minaris to fail or Bitcoin to fail is actually a good failure. And I'm not talking about like the world ending or like the internet going out or something. I'm more talking about, of course, Bitcoin and Minaris are both proof of work currencies. And of course, there's proof of stake out there, and people are rightly suspicious of it. But you have to remember that proof of work is like this weird game theoretic solution to solve the problem of decentralized consensus. So the reason we have all these farms of servers that are mining Bitcoin or Minero is because this is just this weird scheme that Satoshi developed where we don't need a centralized custodian or decider to say how, you know, what is a real transaction or not. So I think I could foresee, in fact, I might even go so far as predict that as soon as we determine that there are other ways of doing this, that is a point which will cause Bitcoin and Minero to conclusively fail. Or at least, I mean, at least Minero can have a hard fork they can integrate this new technology or something. But what I mean by that is if you develop some kind of technology that has decentralized consensus without massive server farms, and it's done elegantly in some unpredicted way, there's nothing in principle that makes that impossible. It just happens to be that mankind has figured out this one way of doing it. But there are many others. I mean, the example that I think I used in like a essay on my blog a while back is like, you know, the Incan Empire, right, they never invented the wheel for use in carriages and carts. They're a great empire spanning, you know, over many countries, or what are now today countries, but they never invented the wheel. But even we're than that, they actually did invent the wheel on little toys. So they used them in children's toys, but they never thought, oh, we could put this on a cart. And you might say that, oh, well, that's kind of oblivious of them. But we might be in exactly the same circumstance where there's a very easy and concise way of getting decentralized consensus that doesn't need like server farms and stuff. That's right under our nose. And it's going to be, I don't know, some genius cryptographer, 16 year old kid, I don't know, someone's going to figure it out. And we're going to feel like idiots because we didn't think about it before. So that I think is the most likely way, you know, barring apocalypse that Monero will fail. Do you do not think that CPU money is the whole purpose of that? What do you mean? Like figuring out consensus in a much more distributed way. So obviously, one CPU per person versus the centralized asset model. Or it's the same thing. It's the same thing. I'm talking about like, you know, doing proof of work, like doing the, you know, hashing a bunch of stuff. It doesn't matter if it's A6 or CPU. It's the same thing. I'm talking about like, I mean, just as a point of comparison. So there's one I mean, proof of stake is a good example because it's a way of getting something kind of equivalent using a totally different mechanism. It's not to say I endorse proof of stake, or there's there's a cryptocurrency nano that has something that's kind of similar to proof of stake where they don't even have in this. This is the reason why it would be so earth shattering. So nano is an example. They don't even need a blockchain. They have block lattices where you basically have your the transaction history on your machine. And everyone else has their own and they interact in a certain way. And it's it's some kind of thing that's, I forget what they call it. It's like DPOS. I forget what the D stands for, but it's maybe delegated proof of stake. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, delegated. But that's not to endorse any of this, but that's just to say, think about that if we had some kind of way of establishing that consensus in a reliable way, you wouldn't have to worry about blockchain size. Okay, because you just have your transaction history on your machine, right? There are a lot of things you don't have to worry about the scalability issues, all this kind of junk, it just disappears into the ether. So that's what I'm talking about. So if you had someone to realize a better way of doing this, yeah, that would make Bitcoin and Monero sound like utterly stupid. And again, like the benefit of Monero is, you can have a hard fork where you integrate this new kind of technology, but that would totally change the way that we look at this. So let's talk about easy privacy tools for everybody. So any new person coming in, especially to something like Linux, right? There's, man, there's thousands of different distros, each of them do something slightly different. I mean, generally speaking, because I've been down the rabbit hole, and I'm still by no means an expert on the subject, not even close to an expert on the subject. And a lot of it's still confusing to even myself, who's put a lot of time into learning about Linux. So what's a good daily driver for a Linux distro, I suppose? I think new users to Linux have a tendency to see all these different distributions and they kind of improperly assume that they're really that different when they really aren't like there are some, I kind of want to say anything is fine, because the reality is they're really just specialized to the aesthetic purposes of the person designing them. But the distribution that I use and I usually recommend is Artix Linux. And now that's a derivative of Arch Linux. Now Arch Linux itself, you have to install via the command line. There's no graphical interface. Artix Linux, you can do it that way. It comes with different desktop environments that you can use. And the reason I recommend that is there is an unfortunate tendency in some Linux distributions not to keep things simple. And Artix is more on the side of let's not add things that users don't need. I mean, a lot of other distributions will try and add in all these different package managers and all this weird way of doing things. Artix Linux, I usually install by the command line because I like to just have the stuff that I want and nothing more. But if you go to the website, they have many pre-configured desktop environments you can choose from. And again, I would just say for in-depth users, don't fret about the differences because the reality is you can install any of these desktop environments. And if you don't like it, you can change it. You can look up how to do that. Use the Arch Wiki, which has all the great information about how to do things. So I would just say don't sweat your decision. Just go with whatever. And I mean, again, I recommend Artix because it keeps it simple. But anything's good ultimately. Anything is going to be an improvement over what you're using, frankly. Sure. So privacy tools for every single person, what do you think they are? How do you think every person can improve their privacy as much as possible, as easily as possible? Well, the number one privacy tool is using less tools. I mean, that's the biggest problem. I don't think that it's so much. A lot of people have this idea that, oh, there's all this stuff I do on my phone. There's all this stuff I do on my computer. And I need to find free software equivalents or all this kind of stuff. I think it's more asking yourself, do I really need this? That's step number one. And a lot of people are just getting themselves in privacy messes because they just, I don't know, don't have impulse control when it comes to using technology. That said, I mean, there are many sites you can look them up that will list out lots of different free software to use. I mean, honestly, the things that I use on my computer, I mean, I guess I have Firefox, but I mean, pretty much everything is free. Well, literally everything is free software. I think it might be a difficult transition for people, but I would just say take it one step at a time and get familiar with the new software you're using and start with, I would say, switch over software on your computer like browsers and image editors or whatever you're using one by one. And then at the same time, use less web services. This could be like Google Drive or Dropbox, all that kind of stuff that is really just an equivalent of like a USB drive, frankly, that you could put on your key chain. I think a lot of it is just, and of course, I was in a period of my life many, many years ago where I use Google Drive. I didn't even have a computer at some point in my life. And it's just not as hard as you might think to extricate yourself from that. I think people more need motivation than they do. The information is out there. The software is out there. It's just hard to change your kind of ingrained habits and just don't feel bad about working on that slowly. I mean, it shouldn't take years and years to get to use all free software, but take it one step at a time. A bit of a journey thing. Yeah. And there was a period when I first used Linux that I was switching through a whole bunch of programs, seeing what is the best for everything and I've converged on the stuff that I use and I haven't changed anything in years to be honest at this point. That's a natural process that happens and that's good. So it's probably a bigger question. So I've thought it off the top of my head. Businesses are always looking for, I suppose, the most efficient, most cost effective, whatever rationale that I might have for their solution, which often leads to these big tech companies, right? So how do we, how do employees, I suppose, get away, especially if you're forced to use something like Google Drive? For example, what I do, I have to upload to Google Drive, I have to download from Google Drive. How do I convince my boss not to use Google Drive? Yeah. Well, most people have trouble convincing their bosses because they don't try. So, I mean, the first thing, especially for people who are working at lower end, you know, not massive business, I don't know, maybe it's no business, no different for a massive business, but a lot of people just don't want to work up the courage to like say stuff like this to your boss, like, oh, let's use this software instead of that. The reality is like a lot of corporate proprietary software is well advertised and it's not actually better than the free software standard out there. And free software standards universally, this is the thing to remember, universally, they integrate better with other technology because they're built to that. Whereas when you're using proprietary software that's violating your privacy anyway, that software is meant to be its own software package. You got to pay extra if you want to do this, you got to pay extra if you want to do that. The incentives are very different where proprietary software is basically built to be annoying, like it does the bare minimum, and then it's made to be annoying. Whereas free software is made to integrate with other stuff. And so it's almost surprising to me when I, I don't know, when I have to deal with someone's tech problems who has an iPhone or something like that, I don't even, I can't imagine how people put up with this kind of stuff, because I'm so used at this point to using open standards. So I would be, I would say that's the case to make to your boss, like be knowledgeable about the technology and say, hey, you know, if we use this free software standard, this is, we could do this, we can integrate that, we could do all these kind of things. I can look at the source code, it has a config file, we can edit these kind of things that we need to change. The extensibility with free software is, it's real, it's powerful. And no proprietary software I've ever run across is anything other than a headache. So I would say be knowledgeable about it and make the case. And I don't know, it has to happen in one conversation at the time. But I mean, I have been able to convince a lot of people to use free software, again, not because I'm like necessarily even a free software ideologue, but just because I know about this stuff. And I know that it's better for basically every purpose. And yeah, I mean, that's basically it. So you touched on it slightly before, but what is some big no-knows that everybody should avoid in pretty much every case? Like what are the biggest, let's call them leaks of data out there? I would say using any kind of cloud storage, that's like a really obvious thing. There is like this convenience of using it and storing stuff on Dropbox or Google Drive or iCloud or whatever. That is one of the big things that I think people think that it's, it makes things easier to use. A lot of times it doesn't really. And that, of course, you literally just have your, I don't know, you have a company that has very intimate access to a lot of your data. That's a very obvious thing. I would just say a lot of the times the issue is not even necessarily using proprietary software where there's a free software equivalent, but using proprietary software where you've just been advertised to use this service when you don't really need it. You've just gotten used to it. I think that's kind of the bigger problem. But yeah, cloud storage is the biggest issue because you are quite literally just sending your data to some other dude's computer. Like that's what you're doing. It's just sitting there. And you have no control over if they actually delete it or if they're looking at it or not. We talked about in the other episode, right? You know, Benfam's Panopticon, right? Where there's a prison, the warden cannot be seen by any of the inmates and he could be looking at any of them at any point in time. They don't know if he is. And it's the same thing with cloud storage. Like you don't know if these people are looking at your data. They easily could. And that actually kind of keeps you in mind. Like I run across a lot of people who say things like, well, Google already has everything of mine. Oh my, it's no good. And frankly, back in like 2012 or something, that's how it was with me, you know? I was just like, I'm just going to put everything on Google Drive. I guess I get some convenience out of it. But just take it a step at a time and you'll realize there's a reason like to have your own files on your own computer and to be able to do whatever you want with them. That actually opened doors that you don't even realize. Like if you're on Linux, like the amount of like scripting and like iterating through folders and doing all this fancy stuff with my images because they are files on my computer. And you don't even know how to do that now if you're, you know, someone who's just new into Unix or Linux. But that it opens up a lot of doors that you don't even realize. So that's what I would say. And again, this is same thing you asked about, like how do you talk to your boss about it, extensibility, like free software, open standards, they make things easier, you can do more with them. Yeah, they take a little more time to familiarize yourself. Although that's not always the case, frankly, but it just opens up a lot for you. Luke, thanks so much for coming on, man. It's been a great chat. And you shared a lot of great info. Yeah. Very well, thanks for having me on.