#1970 - Bill Ottman

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Good to see you, buddy. What's going on?

Bill Ottman (0:16)

We're here, man.

Joe Rogan (0:18)

You are here.

Bill Ottman (0:18)

Everything's going wild.

Joe Rogan (0:19)

How is your site going?

Bill Ottman (0:22)

It's going. We're decentralizing as fast as possible, getting it out of our hands, so that we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.

Joe Rogan (0:31)

How do you do that? Tell everybody it's maps.

Bill Ottman (0:35)

Minds.

Joe Rogan (0:35)

Minds, rather. Sorry.

Bill Ottman (0:36)

minds.com. minds.com.

Joe Rogan (0:38)

Just had Rick Dobrin on. I have psychedelics on the brain.

Bill Ottman (0:42)

I sense kinship with maps.

Joe Rogan (0:45)

Minds and maps, the two of them should go together perfectly. They probably should work seamlessly.

Bill Ottman (0:51)

So basically, there's protocols and there's platforms.

So Twitter, Minds, other social networks, these are platforms. They're kind of built in the traditional social media style, which is on servers that live in huge cloud centers.

But there's also protocols. The one that we're working with now is called NOSTER, which stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relay. So there's no company owns this protocol. The founder is anonymous, sort of similar to Bitcoin. And what it is, is it's all about crypto key pairs and signing stuff. So with NOSTER, it's all happening in the background on Minds. Every user has a cryptographic key pair, which you can download in your settings. You're the only one who gets the private key.

That's your identity, your content, your followers. All that is tied to your identity. So when you post something, when you follow somebody, that is creating a signature on this decentralized network of relay nodes. So we run a relay, thousands of other people run relays. Snowden's on NOSTER now. It's like getting serious endorsement. And it's because it doesn't have a company. Because companies are choke points that can... We saw what happened with Napster, for instance.

Joe Rogan (2:22)

What happened with Napster?

Bill Ottman (2:23)

Napster just got rocked by the music industry and they basically died. I mean, they still sort of exist, but they pretty much got taken down because there was that entity to go after.

Joe Rogan (2:33)

I see. So if they were decentralized, but there was no real decentralization back then, was there?

Bill Ottman (2:38)

Torrents are decentralized.

Joe Rogan (2:40)

Bit torrents, right.

Bill Ottman (2:41)

Torrents, actually in Nostr, there's work that we're involved with now on integrating Nostr with Torrents so that more heavy files, video and rich media can be shared over the network. Right now, it's text and links, essentially.

Joe Rogan (2:56)

What is your opinion when it comes to copyright protection and stuff like that? Well, like if someone has copyrighted material, like say if like NBC has a show and then someone uploads it.

Bill Ottman (3:08)

I mean, that's illegal.

Joe Rogan (3:11)

But if it's on torrents, it's like how do you get it down?

Bill Ottman (3:14)

You don't.

Joe Rogan (3:15)

You don't.

Bill Ottman (3:15)

You don't.

Joe Rogan (3:16)

So it's just even though it's illegal, Yeah.

Bill Ottman (3:19)

I mean, that's why like, so we have moderation. I mean, if a copyrighted video gets reported on Minds, then we will take it down from our interface. But it still exists on the decentralized network.

Joe Rogan (3:32)

So you really can't stop people from sharing it?

Bill Ottman (3:37)

No. So, you know, I think I kind of have a nuanced view on copyright. Like, I think that people's work should be protected and, you know, not stolen and monetized. But at the same time, it's just like the nature of information.

Is not compatible with copyright. Right. Just because information wants to do what it wants to do.

Joe Rogan (3:57)

That's one of the weirder things about what's happening with the Internet is that essentially, as time goes on, it becomes more and more difficult to control what's just ones and zeros.

As they're out there, the bottlenecks between people and information, they're getting broader. It's getting more and more difficult to stop things.

And I think as time goes on, it will be impossible. I don't think there will be any stop. I think in the future, like anything, I have a feeling that we'll have zero privacy in the future. I have a feeling that all of this encryption and all this stuff, I think it's all going to be invalid once quantum computing is ubiquitous. I think I just have a feeling that there's no way you can stop information when technology moves past where it is now to some place where basically anybody could get access to anything at any time. And then the problem becomes how do you control money when that happens? Because money in a lot of it is just ones and zeros. And the only thing that stops you from being able to steal it or transfer it is encryption. When you don't have any more encryption, and anyone kind of has access to anything that's online.