#1572 - Moxie Marlinspike

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Moxie Marlinspike (0:15)

We're going to just sit here and talk for a long time, huh?

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Yeah, we were started right now, we were just started.

Moxie Marlinspike (0:20)

It has begun.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

Yes. What was your question, though?

Moxie Marlinspike (0:25)

I was going to ask, what if something comes up?

Joe Rogan (0:27)

Like what?

Moxie Marlinspike (0:28)

You need to like pee or something.

Joe Rogan (0:30)

Oh, you can totally do that. Yeah, we'll just pause and just run out and pee. That happens. Don't sweat it.

I want you to be comfortable. Have you ever done a podcast before?

Moxie Marlinspike (0:38)

First time.

Joe Rogan (0:39)

Really?

Moxie Marlinspike (0:39)

First time.

Joe Rogan (0:41)

So tell me how where Signal came from. What was the impetus? How did it get started?

Moxie Marlinspike (0:47)

It's a long story.

Joe Rogan (0:49)

Sorry, we have time. We're going to play you a time.

Moxie Marlinspike (0:53)

Okay, well, I think ultimately what we're trying to do with Signal is stop mass surveillance, to bring some normality to the internet, and to explore a different way of developing technology that might ultimately serve all of us better.

Joe Rogan (1:09)

We should tell people, maybe people just tuning in, Signal is an app that is, explain how it works and what it does. I use it.

It's a messaging app.

Moxie Marlinspike (1:20)

It's a messaging app, yeah. But fundamentally, it's just a messaging app.

Joe Rogan (1:24)

Yes.

Moxie Marlinspike (1:24)

From lofty aspirations. Yeah. Yeah, it's a messaging app, but it's somewhat different from the way the rest of technology works because it is encrypted. So typically, if you want to send somebody a message, I think most people's expectation is that when they write a message and they press send, that the people who can see that message are the person who wrote the message and the intended recipient. But that's not actually the case.

There's tons of people who are in between who are monitoring these things who are collecting data information. And signal is different because we've designed it so that we don't have access to that information.

Joe Rogan (2:08)

So when you send an SMS, that is the least secure of all messages. So if you have an Android phone, and you use a standard messaging app, and you send a message to one of your friends, that is the least of all when it comes to security, right?

Moxie Marlinspike (2:26)

That's a low bar.

Joe Rogan (2:27)

That's the low bar. And then iPhone, what is this? Signal.

There you go. So iPhones use iMessage, which is slightly more secure, but it gets uploaded to the cloud.

And it's a part of their iCloud service. So it goes to some servers and then goes to the other person. It's encrypted along the way, but it's still, it can be intercepted.

Moxie Marlinspike (2:55)

Yeah. I mean, okay. So there's...

Joe Rogan (2:56)

Like Jeff Bezos' situation.

Moxie Marlinspike (2:59)

Like Jeff Bezos' situation. Exactly.

Joe Rogan (3:01)

Yeah.

Moxie Marlinspike (3:01)

There's like, fundamentally, there's two ways to think about security. One is like computer security, this idea that will somehow make computers secure. We'll put information on the computers, and then we'll prevent other people from accessing those computers. And that is like a losing strategy that people have been losing for 30 years, you know? Information ends up on a computer somewhere, and it ends up compromised in the end. The other way to think about security is information security, where you secure the information itself, that you don't have to worry about the security of the computers. You could have some computers in the cloud somewhere, information is flowing through them, and people can compromise those things, and it doesn't really matter, because the information itself is encrypted.

And so things like SMS, iMessage cloud backups, most other messengers, Facebook Messenger, all that stuff, they're relying on this computer security model.

And that ends up disappointing people in the end.

Joe Rogan (3:55)

And so why did you guys create it? What was unsatisfactory about the other options that were available?

Moxie Marlinspike (4:04)

Well, because the way the Internet works today is like insane. You know, fundamentally, I feel like private communication is important because I think that change happens in private. Everything that is fundamentally decent today started out as something that was a socially unacceptable idea at the time. You look at things like, you know, obvious things like abolition of slavery, legalization of marijuana, legalization of same-sex marriage.

Even, you know, constructing the Declaration of Independence, those are all things that required a space for people to process ideas outside the context of everyday life.