How The State Makes Us Poorer | Max Hillebrand

**Max Hillebrand** (0:02)
A lot of the things that you produce just go away, right? And that's even discounting just the money, right? You're forced to use the US dollar. The US dollar is one of the most mighty printing presses ever. The sad story of the cypherpunks is that they've built incredible ideas, powerful code.
But they're just humans and they can be killed.
And they have been kidnapped, tortured and killed for decades. And that war is ongoing. And people will continue to sacrifice their lives in order to make these tools a reality. Scarcity is at the root of property. And we needed scarcity in cyberspace for money. That's why Bitcoin is such a massive achievement. We've introduced scarcity in cyberspace without a trusted third party. It's never existed before Bitcoin. Now the question is, how do we allocate our scarce resources such that we will solve our problems in the future? And that is what action is all about.

**Danny Knowles** (0:59)
Max Hillebrand, man. We have been trying to make this show for such a long time.

**Max Hillebrand** (1:03)
Well, it happens when it happens.

**Danny Knowles** (1:04)
We're finally here. So I want to start with a question that bugs me. Whenever you talk to someone who doesn't really know that they should care about privacy, they'll always say, it's fine. I'm doing nothing wrong. And those are the people that are now using, especially with AI, they're giving up so much data to companies that it's like kind of terrifying.
And it makes me wonder if the fight for privacy now is kind of over for most people.

**Max Hillebrand** (1:30)
If you don't do anything about it, it really is. Like the tools of surveillance have gotten so good, like so scarily good, that if you don't take extra precautions, you have very little secrets left. And we all want to have some secrets, you know. But the cool thing is that for the last 30, 40 years or something, the cypher punks have really worked hard to build tools that make privacy impossible.
And so if you use modern technologies and you learn a little bit on how to use them, and just choose to write applications in your tech stack, basically, you can have serious levels of privacy. You can have very well-protected communications, anonymous communications and secure sound money, that all rely on privacy as a whole, but it's absolutely achievable. You just got to know how.

**Danny Knowles** (2:27)
Yeah, it's funny, though, because the tools... If you use Signal, as an example, I have basically every single person on Signal now. I've managed to get even my elderly family onto it, because I stole this from Odell, but it's the only place to get baby pictures.
And that tool is amazing, it's really easy to use. It looks like any other communication app.
So the tools have got really good, so they're usable. But at the same time, everyone moves towards using the frontier AI models, and are probably putting pictures they shouldn't be putting up in there of their family, their kids, they're asking financial information about...
They're doing everything that they shouldn't be doing in terms of protecting your actual privacy. So I guess the point is, while the apps are getting better, more usable, at the same time, I feel like it's accelerating on the data collection side even faster. And I don't know how you pull someone who's like partly in that world where they are giving up way too much information. How do you pull them out? What can they come out with? And how do they get into a world that they are like retaining their information?

**Max Hillebrand** (3:30)
The problem is that it's always easier to build technology that doesn't protect the privacy of users.
Because to really protect users is an extra effort. And that requires technological protocol and just user experience, design and skills that take longer to build. And so we see that now with the frontier models. They don't care about your privacy. They want to see how you're using the software so that they can improve it further on.

**Danny Knowles** (3:57)
Is that part true? Is it so they can improve it or have they got other incentives?

**Max Hillebrand** (4:00)
I mean, that's one of the reasons.
They need a whole bunch of text in order to make the system better. And that goes for anything. If you know how the users are using the software, when they get frustrated, when it works well for them, then you can make your app better. Just listening to users is a very powerful thing to make tools work better. The problem is what if the users don't want you to listen?