Happy Bitcoin Wednesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, for another Citadel Dispatch. The show focused on actual Bitcoin and freedom tech discussion. I'm recording now on June 3 at seventeen hundred UTC. The Bitcoin block height is nine five two two four two. We are at one five two three sets per dollar. The Bitcoin price is just under $66,000.
Everyone's freaking out. Sentiment at all time lows. I don't know. Hang in there, guys. This is where this is where we make our bread. Just stay humble and stack sets about it. Bitcoin is needed now more than ever. Freaks, I know I haven't broadcasted for two weeks now. You know, summer's kinda slow. I've been focusing on family. I didn't really have any good conversations to do. And since this is a 100% audience funded show, we have no ads or sponsors. I'm not required by my advertising
to do, like, three shows or four shows a week. So I try and only do shows when they're something interesting to talk about. I just couldn't find anything that I really wanted to talk about I thought was valuable or anyone good to come on. So that's why I've been going for the last two weeks. But we have a great show lined up today. I have a great show lined up next week, with the guys behind Tando, the the Kenyan Bitcoin
app that makes it very easy to spend Bitcoin in Kenya. So I'm really excited about that. I think that'll be a lot of fun. As always, before we get started, all relevant links are still dispatched.com. Thank you to everyone who supported the show. The largest supporters of our last episode, which was about the attack on Bitcoin in South Africa, specifically self custody, which is continuing, unfortunately, but they're fighting the good fight. Money Badger zapped 21,000 sats.
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Just take their phone, open the podcast app, search civil dispatch, press subscribe. They won't know what hit them. I think they'll find it valuable. Like I said, all relevant links are still dispatch.com. Last but not least, since I last spoke to you guys, I've really refined I've really refined my clanker news desk, which you can find at citadelwire.com.
It's pulling from a 120 global sources right now. It's got a whole breaking news. I got a breaking news clanker that's constantly monitoring the situation for you, and it's tracking 400 open source projects. So if you wanna pay attention to what's going on in the world without wasting your time, without a bunch of different advertisements and engagement bait and bullshit, you can just go to silhouettewire.com.
And I hope you find that helpful. And any feedback is also helpful because I'm constantly iterating in on it. Like I said, I got got three different clankers working on it right now. They're using all the top tier models. It's been kind of cool to to build it out. Anyway, freaks. Oh, and also, you can listen to sealdispatch.com.
And also, you can listen to Seal dispatch and some other curated podcasts directly on to the wire. So maybe some people are listening to this show through there. I think right now, we've almost maybe when you listen to this, we'll probably have passed 17,000 visitors on the site, which is pretty cool. Anyway, we have a friend of the show, return guest, Anjan here. You heard from him last in December. That was civil dispatch one eighty seven. You might remember he's trying to build
basically the open sets of independent journalism. This is basically a six month update on that show. So if you haven't listened to that show, maybe go back and listen to it. I assume most of you have, but he has some really great updates for us. How's it going on, John? Things are great, Odell. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. So I don't know where to start. I mean, I think the the big thing is the Stringer Foundation,
aka the OpenSats for Independent Journalism. How how's it been going over there? It's I mean, thanks for having me in December. It was a great conversation. We've done so much since then. We had notably a full page in the New York Times last month announcing our inaugural 25 finalists. They're incredible. 50% women, 75% from the global South, 25 from the global North. They were chosen using our proprietary courage index, which measures
how much risk or how much the journalist is doing relative to their resources, how brave they'd be. So everybody's eligible to apply. We got we hadn't, we hadn't compiled our results the last time we spoke, but last year when we opened our applications, we got seven seventy six journalists who applied from 129 countries, 129 countries in 14 languages. And we used our courage index and our selection committee of, you know, top tier editors, journalists from Vietnam, Kenya, London, and Mexico,
you know, sorted through those journalists, sifted through them, chose the top 25 who we published in the New York Times. And we basically since then built, I, you know, even if I say so myself, I think one of the most influential
media networks in the world. We have now our board has the president of the International New York Times, the executive editor of Time Magazine, the chief growth officer of the Atlantic ninety second wide street, you know, leaders in media around the world, and they're all behind behind our journalists. We're super excited now to right now, our jurors are already in our high profile final jury is is looking at the 25 candidates evaluating them, and we'll announce
our inaugural winners in November on another page in the New York Times, who is really backing us and supporting our work. Christian Amanpour is gonna have the winners on our show. We're organizing multiple forums, 92nd, White Street and other places to host dialogues, events. We're really excited about bringing the work of these journalists to the
the broader public. And, you know, just just that announcement, just to give an example of the kind of impact we're having, one of our finalists was called in by his country's new environment prosecutor to ask him, who should we prosecute for environmental crimes? And so he was like he told her, and then he said, he asked why did you invite me and he said, well we saw your name on the New York Times announcement, we thought you have good information.
That for us is like, you know, golden. We want to translate these brave journalists work into policy impact. And so countries, think tanks, building those partnerships, sending the journalists work through those pipelines so they reach the corridors of power and influence policymaking and ultimately benefit populations around the world. That's what we're about. And, you know, if I just summarize what we're up to, we're basically, in my view, solving
a civilizational crisis. As you know, it's become easier than ever to distribute information, but the sourcing of truthful information, especially in the age of AI is harder than ever. Our journalists are more precious than ever, we want to build that frontline. We're building that frontline of brave journalists who are producing the truth and who are unfortunately lacking institutional support and visibility.
That's awesome. Very productive six months, bro. I also have to say, you know, since you asked a coder listening to our last show, reached out to me and said, listen, anything you need you need, let me know. And so I was at a Human Rights Foundation hackathon in January, and I called him up before I went to the hackathon. I was like, you tell me how should I structure this hackathon? And he gave me advice, and we won. And we won the hackathon. And since winning the hackathon, he's basically
built out the code we launched last week. Again, in the age of AI, I think we feel it's important to focus on physical security, human beings and their bodies. And so last week we launched sort of soft launched on the app store and Android. You can download it. It's called Kintab, K Y N T A B.
That's the name of the app. It's a personal SOS, and it's built, it automates the techniques that I've used and war reporters have used to stay alive and stay safe. And the idea is, you know, we're testing with our initial cohort. Try it out. You can submit feedback within the app. We're very responsive. We're updating and making changes. And the goal is to then send it out to writers at risk, journalists at risk, you know, women in hostile places like Mexico, people worried about, you know, maybe ICE,
people worried about being detained, kidnapped, their car being stopped. Basically, the fundamental principle is we can't trust our governments anymore. We can't trust our institutions. And so we need to rely on each other so you can send a personal SOS to your own network, trusted network. That's pretty cool. I love the ride or die freaks showing up. Is it public who that audience
member is? Oh, sure. I mean, I don't think he asked me to keep it confidential. His name is he runs snow services in out of Indonesia. Awesome. I love it. Working together as a day. Freaks globally. I mean, I I've looked at, you know, I get like very basic RSS feed analytic numbers, like where people are listening from, and it's pretty cool. Dispatch is truly global. It's it's there's, like, six countries where people don't listen. You know, it's, a 150 plus countries,
which is just awesome. It's a global movement of ride or dies. Okay. There's a lot to unpack there. First, let's start with Stringer, and then we can go into the app a little bit. This this courage score, what is the courage score? So it's a courage index, and it's a way of leveling the playing field. We have, like, five variables or criteria. You know,
how much is a journalist persisting in the face of harassment and danger, you know, threats, that kind of stuff. So interesting stats there. Twenty two percent of the journalists who applied to us have received death threats. Forty eight percent risk of active risk of imprisonment, those kinds of, you know, threats and risks. How much have they persisted and how much bravery have they shown on that front? So how does that work? Are they like completing a multiple
choice? Are they completing like a survey when they submit their application? Or Yes. So we designed the initial application, a very lean application. We designed it based on this Courage Index. And basically the journalists through their answers, which are narrative answers and multiple choice, they have to choose a multiple choice,
you know, answer multiple choice questions. How many times you've been arrested, stuff like that. Yeah. Like, you know, yeah, like a general one. Then we asked them in a narrative, in a text box to give details. So how many times you've been arrested, who, how, because each journalist, each country is different. And so we parse both of those and we use that journalist input to self score, to create a self scoring. And then our jury around the world from Vietnam and Kenya and everywhere, they assess how accurate the journalists are, have self scored themselves
based on their narrative information that they've given us. And so we were able to sift out the journalists who are, you know, maybe over promoting Yeah. Embellishing. And, and, know, the, the reality is the vast majority of journalists are
self deprecating. Don't, they don't see themselves as heroes. They don't value and recognize how much risk they're taking and they tend to underscore themselves. Often we're, you know, bumping them up. And those are the journalists who get, you know, first dibs at being in the top 100 or the top 25, and so that's one of the criteria, you know, the how much you've persisted despite the risks, but there's also how much are you amplifying marginalized voices,
what kind of power are you holding accountable, abusive power, like who are the powers, are they local powers, are they you know national, global, what's the scale, what's the scale of your impact of the issues that you're covering, you know, again, there are sometimes journalists, you know, will consider
a local river contamination of a river to be a local issue, but, you know, if the company contaminating the river is a global mining company listed on a, you know, global stock exchange, and that's a global issue. And so Right. We're often having to also
elevate their work, that's part of our job. You know, these people are on the front lines, they're deep, deep, their noses are deepened on local conflicts. They're putting their lives at risk. And our job is to elevate them to the global stage. We've built partnerships with we're developing partnerships with the New York Times and Time Magazine and other outlets of foreign policy just to get their work paid, published and paid them to get paid, and these kinds of things, it's actually, you know, we're helping one of the most entrepreneurial
customer segments in the world. These people all could have been working at big companies earning a lot of money, but they chose to do journalism to serve the public, and I find that if you give them a little bit of help, a little bit of resources, they multiply that out like, you know, 10x, 100x, they're it doesn't take that much work or effort to unlock a lot of potential. And that's what I'm I'm seeing already, and I'm really excited about.
I love that. Yeah. I mean, I I think the the courage index is clever because, I mean, you I think you said nearly 800 applications, like, 770 plus applications. I mean, OpenSets, we've had over 2,000 applications, and we've approved 400, over 400 grants. And if you're not like in the weeds and see it, like, it's just hard to appreciate
how difficult it is to sort through all of that and to vet it. And OpenSets, like we have an advantage in that a lot of it is code, right? So it's, you actually have something like relatively hard and objective to look at. Obviously, journalism isn't like that. So it's clever to try and create at least some kind of objective rubric, like measuring score to look at. I mean, obviously, also have to bet it. And I do
that. That's clever. That's a clever way. That's a clever way of handling. So then you have 25 people that you've recognized, I guess, as, like, almost, like, finalists. Does so does New York Times did they donate that space, or they make you pay for it? No. No. No. No. No. They they totally donated it. Full page in the weekend edition, April 11. Yeah.
There it's just a sign that Angie Salisberger, the chairman of the New York Times wrote wrote in personally to say how grateful he was for the work we're doing, how much we're filling a gap, you know A huge gap. Yeah. And doing important work. You know, it's been great to see that the media leadership,
we're all journalists. They're also humble. You know, the New York Times is the most prestigious publication in the world. You know, AG told me, you know, of course we can't be everywhere. We recognize that there's a humility. There's an understanding that we all need to work together and yeah, we're filling this huge gap. And yeah, man, my math major roots helped design that courage index and make it as efficient as possible to to, you know, you're right.
To process a huge number of applications and, you know, it's it to give another example, a friend of mine, he's won a Pulitzer for the New York times and he's an old friend, a mentor. He asked me, can I apply? And I was like, of course, man, you can, but the bar is going to be higher because you have the full weight of the New York times behind you. And you're not like an Angolan journalist who's going to be denied food you know, his land taken away, bank account emptied, kids kicked out of school, that that won't happen to you, so you gotta hit the ball out of the park, and we'd have had some candidates like that. One of our finalists is a journalist from Ukraine, and she works for the public broadcaster, so she has a regular salary, She has,
you know, backup infrastructure from the broadcaster, but she puts her body on the eastern frontline in Ukraine. And that's that's the kind of bar that we are setting, and many journalists are hitting that bar and deserve the recognition and extra support. And so it leveled the playing field in an interesting way. 50% of our finalist list is female, 75% from the global South. We didn't have to fudge that or, you know, do some affirmative action kind of mechanism
to get those kinds of statistics. We, it just happened naturally. You know, these women, 50% of our list are the best journalists in the world. They happen to be women. Many of them are from Africa. They happen to be from Africa. And there's nothing else. Why do you think what is? I mean, if if your courage score isn't weighting, like giving women more courage than men, which I take you at face value for, I do not think you're lying about that. Why are there more women?
Do you have any inclination there? Because there must be some downstream cause, for that to be the case. If it's that heavily weighted. So it's fiftyfifty. Right? It's I think it's 45% women 48% women. Oh, okay. Too misunderstood. Yeah. Fair enough. So there's no cost. It's No. They're It's just gender breakdown. Yeah. It's just it's matching global demographics for gender
and for global south global north. Like, you know, 75% of the world's population is global south, that's how the two I came up in on this. I thought you said 75% women. Yeah. Yeah. No. Makes sense. So it's basically just like it's a it's a micro it's a representation of population. That's what it is. That's it. Yeah. That's it. That's pretty cool. And I think, you know, in recent years, more women have been doing frontline reporting just because of how the field's changed.
I think Historically, it was male dominated, right? Yeah. Because anything that was like more violent oriented or threat based, right, was just male dominated.
Exactly. And I think we're getting, we're seeing now very interesting women's stories about, you know, the kinds of courage that they show, the kinds of spaces they can enter, which are different from where men can enter, you know, they can enter women's groups or homes in Afghanistan, places like that, or talk talk to warlords in different ways. You know, Mike's wife was a war reporter, and she would talk down to a warlord in in in Congo. She'd be like, You are not gonna
kill any more people. And he'd be like, Yes, mama. And she was like, You've been a bad man. She's like, I know, mama. And you know, that kind of stuff. It's just a different relationship. And I think it's better for journalism. Yeah. Yeah. Mean, the other piece there is like, yeah, obviously, money is important. You need money to survive and do things of value.
But the recognition is incredibly important. I like that you've you've realized that, like, a key thing that you can do at Stringer is the recognition piece. I mean, I can't tell you people are writing in after that New York Times page was published, they were like, you know, praise the heavens, and my eyes are welling up and really, really emotional messages because they just don't get recognition.
The recognition is often reserved for, say, the Pulitzer Prize, but to be eligible for the Pulitzer, you have to work for a US organization. And many of them, these journalists on our list and myself, I'm not eligible for the Pulitzer or the MacArthur or many of these global prizes, the Orwell, you have to publish in The UK. I have horror stories of trying to work, you know, gain the eligibility and trying to make myself eligible, it's super hard. And
myself, my own story, and I think this is reflecting many of the journalists, you know, I studied math, I went to Yale, I had this job as a quant at Goldman Sachs on job offer. I turned it down, went to Congo, bought a one way ticket, became a reporter. And I think that's representative of many of the journalists around the world. They all could be working comfortable corporate jobs,
and they chose to do this work. They chose to serve the public at a huge pay cut. And I think they don't do it for the money clearly, and they do it for the recognition. So my hypothesis, I've, you know, validated with journalists around the world is that if I had a million dollars, I could give a 100 journalists
10 ks each. Now that would have certain impact, but I think you could take that same 1,000,000 invested in a global transformative prize and you will inspire generations of journalists around the world. Like, you know, tens of thousands of journalists will vie to get that prize because that's what matters to them. Of course, the money is important, our prizes are funded, you can't, you know, recognition doesn't put food on the table. I've received many, many prizes where I have there's no prize money attached, and I'm wondering how do you how do I sustain this work? You get like fancy plate or something. Exactly. Or, you know, yeah, a fancy plate. They buy me a ticket somewhere,
you know, put me in front of their donors, raise money, but I go back without any material support, and again I think the answer there is you don't need to give huge amounts of money, these journalists will
give, you know, make limited amounts of money go a long way. The other the other thing that we're innovating is that unlike other prizes, we ask our winners to do what I'm doing, open up their networks to the other journalists, younger journalists, and multiply out what I'm doing so that in three to five years, this whole organization isn't dependent on my
admittedly extensive networks. I have good networks, and I built this because I am able to, you know, do draw on those. But the idea is three to five years down the line.
It should be independent of me. Each winner will bring to bring to bear and bring to our organization their own. Yeah. I mean, that's the hard part. Mean, the whole thing is hard, but that's very hard. But recognition is important. And I'm glad you bring that up because that's what we work for. We want recognition for society that the risks we take are worth it, that the work we're doing is serving society. And that's more important than money is important, but that's kind of what we're aiming for. Yeah.
I mean, just think people discount. First of all, I think people discount that you can just do things. And that's why it's incredibly impressive how much you've done and accomplished in six months. But then the second piece is like, people really discount how few people do things. Like, mean, I it's,
it's you need good people to push push the ball forward. And so finding good people, expanding momentum, de risking in certain individuals from these types of operations is incredibly, incredibly difficult. And all it takes is like, I don't know, it's kind of like, same same, but different with like, multi generational family wealth, where you have like, the guy who made the thing. And then like three generations later, it's like completely gone.
Right? Like everything is like completely gone. And it's because it's easier to break things than it is to make things. Entropy, So you have to be very deliberate. The law of entropy always increases, unless you fight to keep something organized. But yeah, 100%.
And to that end, you know, yeah, we're building out our board. You know, I mentioned we have people from the New York Times, Time Magazine, we have a family office CIO who's handling all our finances, we have AllianceBernstein offering to, you know, host the fund Goldman Sachs, know, all the usual suspects, Morgan Lewis, the law firm, all these folks have chipped in pro bono
you know, help us build what we're building. It's really, you know, I've been really aggressive single-minded about that, you know, getting good people who care and are in this for the right reasons and will, you know, help us amplify. We're speaking to the CEO on Friday of a major global advertising firm that wants to help us pro bono elevate these journalists, and like you said, de risking these journalists work is
incredibly hard, but it's it's there's a lot of goodwill out there for people who wanna do that. And getting a mention in the New York Times, a full page, getting, you know, we're we're building partnerships with psychologists, a network of 75 psychologists,
you know, getting free support, mental health support, the safety app, we're rolling that out. So there's a free version that will protect the journalists physically. Yeah. Just providing that base infrastructure that allows them to do what they do so well. And I'm sure we'll 10x and 100x what they do because they're so passionate and motivated that, you know, there's a community out there that's backing them and supporting them. There's an institutional home for them. I think this means a lot.
Yeah. Mean, for example, know this audio only, but just to, like, visualize what Anjan means when he says recognition in the New York Times, they they put together, like, really nice full page, like big red letters, truth has a cost, no journalist should bear it alone. And then it's got all their it's got their pictures and their names and like a little brief description of each person, each of the 25. It's incredibly well done in terms of,
like, just appearance and recognition. So so you so you have the 25 finalists, then you say there's gonna be 10 winners for the this is the first year winners. Right? Exactly. And then those 10 winners will then also be even more highlighted in another full page. And then they get they get a financial reward with that as well? Exactly. So we're building a pot. We're building a pot of money, building it three years at a time so that we can give, you know, stay stable and give stable
amounts of money. But the big goal, I mean, we're right now we're proving the concept in this inaugural year, right? We're basically showing the kind of impact that we can have. We've secured certain funds. Hopefully by November when we hand out the funds, we'll have secured more and we can announce a, you know, a serious amount of money. And the real goal here is So you don't know how much you don't know how much you're getting We them we set out no. We can guarantee 50 k
to the 10 journalists of e no. Total price pool Okay. For the next three years. So we've raised for the journalists, set aside a total of $1.50. That's guaranteed.
We have another, I don't know, 500 k that's been promised, and that's yet to hit the bank account. So once that hits the bank account, we will be able to It's not real. It's not real until it's end. That's that's all what I always feel. Like a lot of people promising us money and making commitments and in email in writing. So it's has an equal standing, but, you know, once only once it hits the bank account, will I, you know, raise the funds. I'm hoping we can give out
if if we're lucky, we can give out 200 k this year and guarantee that for the for the next two years as well. So for three years guaranteed. And with that That would be 20 ks each. So the winners would get more. So we'd give the grant the grant winners would get 25 k. The winner, the senior journalists, the fellows would get 50 k and the winner would get a 150 ks. So wait, wait, wait, wait, I thought there's 10 winners. There's right now we've guaranteed eight winners.
So it's one prize winner, two fellows and five grantees. Got it. So there's gonna be a single winner. You're you took 770 applications, and you're gonna pick one person. Yeah. Yeah. And, know, this is where what we can guarantee today as we're talking over the summer as money hits our account, we the board will choose to extend that, you know, do you have any concern that there's going to be 769 people that resent you for not choosing them? Everybody
who's applied, you know, that is important. I think we're an equitable partner. So they've invested, you know, the time to fill out We the application have to give them stuff in return. And so just for applying, we're giving them free access to the safety app. We're giving them access to the mental health resources.
So everybody will get something for being part of our journey. And yes, I think, you know, prize winners, there's, there's always that risk that you reward one person, but hopefully, you know, my sense from the applicant pool, when we announced the finalists, many of the folks who didn't make it to the list wrote in and said, we're just grateful that you're doing this important work. Hope I can make it next year. I think that's the spirit that we want to, you know, encourage.
Yeah, I'm being mostly provocative. I think the majority of them will still appreciate you and be graceful. And they get something material for it. No. So I want to I want to make sure they get. Yeah, just be prepared. There are going to be a subset. We will have seen them. Yeah, they won't say they won't say I don't like on John because he didn't approve me for the prize. They're gonna make up like other bullshit. And they're gonna say that's the reason they don't like you.
It has it's a it's a human condition. It's a small subset of people. It'll be a small subset people, of but just be prepared for it is something I wasn't really prepared for with open sets. The mental Yeah, health
go on. Yeah. No, guess, you know, to your question about money, I think this is the proof of concept, you know, this year, next year. The goal is to raise an open sets, right? We're raising an open sets. We're raising a $50,000,000 fund that at 4% will provide a $2,000,000 annual budget.
And that will a million dollars of that will go straight to the journalists. Another half 1,000,000 will go for programmatic support and only 20% will go for overheads for the team. 80% goes straight to the journalists. So that's the goal. That's what we're pitching. That's what we're building towards. Obviously
we need to prove it. And that's what we're doing this year. We're proving it, and we're proving that the whole media establishment is behind us and believes in this, and understands and agrees that we're filling the gap. And what we're offering, we built the infrastructure, we built the program, we're offering the legacy for whoever wants to take it. So people can name a prize, name it after their families, and we're in discussions with a small group of families who are interested in that.
Yeah, that's the journey. That's the final vision for making this sustainable, that it lasts in perpetuity to your point about the third generation. How do how do you how do you make sure this lasts and creating a a really strong board that manages its fund in a responsible way and efficient way. So it's not dependent your million, right? Like Yeah. How many people on the planet do you trust with $50,000,000 not to fuck it, fuck it up? Exactly.
Exactly. There's not many people. That's the hard part. So the mental health piece is interesting. How are you guys thinking about that? Because that's something I mean, we see it on the open source developer side all the time. Just they feel they're loners, they're oftentimes their work makes them loners, right? They're like up against the world on their own.
And it's not an easy it's like, it's not an easy problem. So how do you think about the mental health piece? Cause that's cool. I like that you guys are at least thinking about it. 100%. You know, mental health support has helped me in my work and helped me build this. Know, it's not easy building something like this. You have all these conversations,
you know, you know, a lot of support, but also rejections and, all kinds of stuff. It's not now, it's too early, whatever it is. And you need to be have some mental fortitude to like power through that and build build anything. I think, yes, we share a lot of spiritual connection with, you know, folks that you're supporting on the front lines of the world. Bitcoin, I think like our work, a lot of it is most valuable
and most relevant on the margins of the world. Not in The US that where you have a functioning financial system that Bitcoin is valuable. It's it's it's some authoritarian regime where they're gonna shut down your bank account and change the name on your bank account, which has happened to some of the journalists I've worked with. And that's where Bitcoin becomes makes you unassailable and, and, you know, sovereign.
And so, how do we how are we thinking about it? That's the need. How are we thinking about it? I've I'm developing a program. I should have a concrete proposal this week with a network of 75 journalists, a psychologist, trauma psychologist, who are spread out around the world and are willing to, you know, do three month targeted three month weekly
programs with these journalists. Wow. And and we basically get that they're willing to work on a cost efficient basis. Most of the psychologists are outside The US, so we're safe from regulatory kind of constraints,
you know, licensing approvals. Many psychologists in The US can't practice outside their state, licensed state, and stuff it gets more expensive, yeah. Exactly, it's more expensive. So by relying on psychologists in Colombia or India, where there isn't such a complex regulatory framework, we're able to match,
basically match journalists with psychologists in the region and at an affordable price that we fundraise, the journalist doesn't pay anything. And we fundraise with donors and say, Hey, for X amount of dollars, you know, for a thousand dollars, you can basically fund three months or two and a half months of support for journalists that can get them out of a hole. And
beyond that, if the donor wants to pay for extended support, that's great. Or more journalists, that's great. But beyond that, the journalist is free to negotiate with the psychologist and, you know, many of our psychologists are willing to work on a pay as you can basis. And so really encouraging that. And obviously we want the psychologists to do well as well. So as much as we can raise to pay them properly, know, we will.
And the psychologists internal will pay it forward and help our journalists at a reduced cost or sometimes even for free if they can. So that's kind of how we're doing it. This is a matching network of psychologists to journalists around the world. That's wild. That's a significant undertaking. Yes. And I have you know, again, I'm not reinventing the wheel. I'm finding the psychologists, good people who have
helped me in a personal capacity and are care about these journalists in the frontline care about the cause, and they're willing to take on the administrative burden. And so we reinvent the wheel, we manage it, we run the network, we build the community, we elevate the journalists, but anything programmatic,
we outsource that to people who know what they're doing, and we pay them for it, and that's, you know, that's our MO. There are great people who know how to build these operations, and we don't want to take on that, do something we're not experts at, you know, we want to fill gaps. As we're filling the gaps, as we, you know, discover the need for more resources, we'll build out those programs and take on more of the burden.
But right now we're keeping our operations really lean. And who is that who is that open to? Is that open to all 700 plus applicants or a subset? We will make it open to all the all the journalists in our who applied. I guess you have the benefit that most of them aren't taking you up on the offer. Right? Exactly.
I think, you know, that's a reality of mental health. And, you know, I know this from personal experience and other journalists have told me as well, you know, when you're in a dark place, it's not like the first instinct to reach out for help to be vulnerable, you know? And so we're counting on yeah. Not not everybody's gonna apply. Not everybody's gonna stick through the three and a half months. It's uncomfortable.
Yeah. Confronting your demons and getting to a better place. And so we're counting on a progressive annual, you know, as journalists spread by word-of-mouth. You can scale into it. Yeah. Yeah. It's not like you're just like, all of a sudden have 700 people that need therapy.
No. We could with the 75 journalists, psychologists, I think they could do 10 journalists at a time each. So we have the capacity already. But we're not counting on that. Just not gonna happen, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think that's fair too. Like, if you don't want help, like, it's not gonna be productive anyway, so.
Yeah, makes sense. You need to be open. You need to feel like your problems are, you know, a big problem, you know, a big concern that many friends I've tried to convince or talk to about mental health support has been they feel that their problems are not worthy. They're too small compared to other people's problems, you know?
My Yeah. Girlfriend broke up with me. How is that like a big deal? And it is a big deal because it's triggering, it's like a doorway, it's a portal into all this other stuff that's in your psyche, but you don't see it that way. And so you're like, you know, I don't want to ask for help. I'm going to be, I'm going to be made fun of or something or diminished by my psychologist.
You know, that's rarely the case. And so that's why that's, I would encourage people, especially those who are serving society to get help because we all need help. We need all of you to be stronger and to do the work that you're doing on behalf of everybody else. Yeah. Love it. Okay. I mean, I think let's just change gears a tiny bit here. So one of the things that I've been spending a lot more time with is all this new AI stuff. And I mean, everyone's heard
the doom and gloom. I think there is some credence to it. You know, like the robots are taking our jobs. They're making certain jobs obsolete. You know, I think the truth is probably somewhere I mean, and also, like, I think AI empowers individuals. So I think there's it's the reality is somewhere in the middle. But journalism is an interesting one, specifically independent journalism. I mean, in the beginning of the show, I mentioned this
clanker news desk that I created. And I mean, I was mostly just scratching my own itch. And I'm just I'm spending a decent amount of money on it and time on it. So I figured I might as well make it open to other people if they wanted to use it. But it's mostly just for me. It's like, okay, I have a growing family, I have a bunch of different projects.
I want to know what the hell is going on in the world. And I don't want to doom scroll. And I don't want to be fed ads. And the, know, like, I don't think I have to tell you that like the current mainstream news situation is is is very predatory and and not very productive. Like it's it's, oftentimes a waste of time. Like, just want to know what the hell is going on. On the independent journalist side, a lot of times, I think what we see is very well researched, long form non,
this is like not breaking news, right? So I mean, this is not something like sizzle wires, supposed to be like more breaking news stuff, right? Like new open source software release, you know, The US bomb someone, you know, there's a major hack or something like that, that's not really like, the purview necessarily of, of the types of journalists you support.
But I do see like, just on the most basic level, as an example, you know, one of the fellows you support or maybe even yourself, I mean, obviously, you have your own journalism career, spends eight months, ten months, five years researching something, writes a nice 20 pages, you know, about the thing, gets it peer reviewed and edited and does all this different stuff. And then the majority of people are just like Claude summarize this link.
And so and and that's very it's we're very early days on this stuff. So, like, how do you think about that? I think, you know, yeah, it's it's a it's a the world is shifting in how it consumes information, how it consumes news. The, you know, huge influx of AI generated content and misinformation also
means that, a, our sources of truth are more valuable than ever. The production of truth, that infrastructure is collapsing. That's what we're trying to hear hear to solve. That's what we're solving. We're, you know, building and staining that frontline
of journalists. And, you know, this is something you know, there's so many thoughts sparked by your question, but it's something I researched in my PhD. The international news system, to your point, your instinct that it's, you know, hugely problematic is also built into structure. A lot of the most high profile journalists were reporting during these long reports they're relying on the work of frontline local journalists
wherever they are in Nigeria and Congo wherever they are. The international news structure is such that those local journalists don't get much of the economic benefit, the pay, they don't get much of the reward, the credit, they don't get in the Pulitzers and whatever, they don't get the prizes, and that means that there's an obfuscation of how news is produced. And we tend to think, or we're led to believe looking at, you know, CNN, you'd be led to believe that, you know,
the journalist you're watching on screen is producing that information. They're giving it to you on screen. But actually the whole infrastructure producing that truth is invisible. And so that's what we're trying we're we're redressing through the courage index, you know, weighting everybody equally and sustaining these people on the front line. So that's that's important to mention.
Well, just to drill into that real quick. So, like, basically, what you're saying is even before the AI tools existed, it's like you had a team you had, like, an editorial team at CNN or something that is reading the 20 pages,
and then they're summarizing it or whatever, and repackaging it, and then shipping it with ads and clickbait on top of it or whatever. A 100%, a 100%. And the local journalists who produce that truth, the 20 pages report or whatever it was, and I have examples, you know, there were a friend of mine in Cambodia reported on these human trafficking call centers, these call centers that are perpetrating fraud,
you know, calling elderly people in The US and cheating them out of their savings. A lot of people working in those call centers are human trafficked and through illicit networks. And my friend reported on these call centers, lost every job that he had. Every newspaper he was reporting for was shut down in Cambodia. And his reporting was taken up by international news organizations. Huge spreads about these call centers that you've heard of now. Based on his reporting, he's still broke.
Still broke. He's posting on Facebook about how he can't take a girlfriend out on a date. It's heartbreaking. You know? He can't afford a dinner to take a girl out. He he's not in a healthy space mentally. How is that fair? How is that just? And he doesn't even get any recognition. It's not even just financial. Yep. It's just like it all got distilled to a CNN headline or whatever. Exactly. And nobody cited him because he's not powerful enough in the news hierarchy,
you know, in the chain of power. He's not powerful enough to cite him because he can't he won't sue anybody if they don't cite him. He won't be able to make a fuss, but he's doing the hard journalism on the ground. And so, yeah, that, that, that structural inequality is something that AI maybe exacerbates, but we, we can fix it. We're fixing it. We're elevating these journalists, putting them on the front pages, recognizing
the worth of doing. And it's not again, like, you know, it's not like people in the journalism hierarchies or CNN, the editorial team, it's not like they're bad people. It's not like they want to do this. They know sitting there and they're evil lair. Like, how do we fuck over this guy? Exactly.
It's just the system is broken and has been broken for a long time. And somebody needs to come along and build a new system. That's fair. And that's what we are. And that's it, you know, and when we present this to the editorial teams at all these, you know, global news organizations, they're like, yes, we wanted this. Thank you. It's like to your point about it's so important to have people do things. And now we're doing it. And they're like, thank you. And we'll work with you. But it took a lot to get somebody to do it. And they, know, yeah, it was hard to do. It's hard to do. And so somebody needs to do this hard work. Yeah. Then AI,
the bigger questions about, you know, the other feeling I have about AI is in this environment of AI shop, AI generated content, a couple of trends. Institutions are, you know, less trusted, and individuals are more trusted. So again, that's where we elevate individuals. People are more willing to trust a person rather than an editorial line where they can't see the machinations behind the behind the curtains. And
that's something that we're pushing. And the third trend is, I think, you know, related to that is we're elevating these journalists, you know, traditionally in journalism, the journalist has kind of been behind the scenes and said, I'm the objective journalist. I think the public is onto us. They know the journalists aren't objective. And I think the better tech is to say we're subjective and say how we're subjective. In my Own the bias.
Yeah, Jake, what, how am I biased? I'm a man. I'm from India. I'm, you know, I went to Yale, whatever. I have certain, I'm gonna be drawn to certain things and I'm gonna be blind to certain things. And let me be open about my biases and present that to the audience. And actually that builds trust.
And so we elevate these journalists as subjective individuals like fact based, we're publishing fact based work, we're very rigorous about our due diligence and about, you know, even going through their social media and making sure they're not saying anything antisemitic or
misogynist or racist or whatever it is. They're doing fact based work, but they're individuals and we're elevating them as heroes and as people doing their best and working within their constraints to produce what the world needs, which is truth. And, and we're, and I think that's a new, new thing in journalism to elevate these individuals, the reporters themselves as kind of heroic. They won't do it themselves, but we, as an institution, the Stringer Foundation, we can do that. And we think it helps their cause, it protects them, the publicity is protective,
and it helps them build audiences and build loyalty. And I think that's where we're going to see more and more of the world news consumption move to. It's going to be like kind of tapping into that influencer kind of vibe where these journalists are fact based influencers and they're people we want to follow and we believe in them and
that's because also the institutions aren't as or we can see through some of the biases of the institutions. And they're not being straight up about it with us. They're not telling us, you know, yeah. Like, I mean, that kind of makes sense to me. It kind of make I mean, obviously, it makes sense to me on the end of like, on, like, kind of short form opinions. But do you do you think, like, it's gonna have is so so let me use an example. Right? So, like, okay.
There's a journalist from Congo. You you give him recognition. He develops an individual brand and trust. He has an x account now, and his x account or an oster account. His x account has 300,000 followers. Like, people wanna know his opinion on things. They know it's a biased opinion, but they trust his opinion, and and and they just wanna know his angle on certain things.
And he sends out a tweet about a certain topic and, you know, they press retweet and they're like, that's very interesting to me. And maybe they support him because of that. That's different than him writing, like, 20 pages of long form that he researched for five years. Even in that situation, I feel like the incentives are towards the
short form, like, this is my opinion on this situation, boom, done. I'm like a talking head commentator almost. Do you not agree? I agree. I think, you know, even when I write my books or I'm doing my long form articles,
I become, I have to be a talking head, that's the world we live in. Have to summarize that article myself, even if it's not Claude summarized, I have to summarize and every time I'm on some show or something, I just need to regurgitate the same message, and that's what I'm doing, the five years of work builds those talking points. And my sense is, and this is my hypothesis, and this is what I'm seeing play out,
that the news industry is in crisis, and they're not able to monetize or pay properly for that work. But that work is valuable to society and it is monetizable. I think I can see where you're heading. What is the business model? I think that's an open question. It's not solved. Just want to be clear about that. It's also not my expertise. I'm not a publisher. I don't know how to get audiences.
I know how to get great stories and I know how to stay alive. And that's what I'm offering to the journalists. And we're partnering with publishing platforms, whether it's Time Magazine or the New York Times, they're in the business of getting the clicks or evolving. We're partnering with other, you know, we'd partner with Citadel if if we we'd be happy to tell the journalists to publish on Citadel Citadel Wire, and it's up to them. We don't take a cut. That's the Well, no. That's the fucked up part, kinda. I mean,
like, I'm just pulling I'm just pulling sources everywhere. So, like, instead of someone going to, like, techdirt.com or whatever, like, my clanker's checking it every five minutes, and then he's just writing a summary. And it it gives credit. It's like, this is tech dirt reported or whatever. But they're for it flips it all on its head because they're not the the whole thing was like
and it's not necessarily in a bad way, right? Because the whole the whole corporate media landscape turned into clickbait, because they wanted people to go to their page. And then they wanted people to stay on the page, so that they could get more ad dollars. And so it was prioritized two things get you on the page and get you to stay there. This kind of obviates that it definitely does not obviate, like individual brand and recognition and trust.
I do not think donations are necessarily the answer, but then on the opposite side, paywalls aren't the answer because then my clanker is going to ignore you. Like I, a lot of news organizations have open RSS feeds, for instance. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Some don't. If my, if my clanker can't find an open way of getting your content, then it just doesn't exist. Like, I'm just not, it's just not going to happen. So it's just an interesting dynamic to think about.
Yeah. Think I think you've you've just automated like what the Huffington Post did. Right? They just got the free information. Because I don't I'm just losing money on it. Like, I'm not it's not a money making endeavor for me. But what the AI can't do is make up a quote. And that will always be the ultimate, I think. So you can get a summary. You can get a pen. Right. But if you need a quote
But the client can't afford a quote. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess, yeah. But somebody yeah. Yeah. Somebody has to but you when the client pulls the quote, you have to credit that person because the court is Otherwise, it's useless. Yeah. Yeah. Without saying who got it and what circumstances is that person trustable. And so all that kind of stuff, that's where the value still is in human to human, a quote, a verifiable quote that can stand But, like, so then on that front, like,
I'm curious of your opinion here. So I'd like everyone, most people that are paying attention, like realize, like, okay, like, CNN isn't news anymore. It's more entertainment. Right? And they're saying the one liners, and I'm I'm gonna like, I keep we keep using CNN as an example. I'm not trying to like pick on them specifically. I'm sure you have friends over at CNN. Probably not listening to this episode.
The reason we don't pick maybe some of the other outlets is because they're not even qualified as news. You can't you can't call the news outlets. Right? So CNN, you can. Yeah. So so so and then it's it's dominated with like one liners and clickbaits, and there needs to be like rage. There needs to be like something around it. And so for the longest time, people are like, well, the age of the influencer will bring
the age of I mean, and people say independent journalists when they talk about this stuff. And I think it's a little bit disrespectful to the work that you and your peers do. Like, you know, they'll you know, like some podcasters and independent journalists now, and they're an influencer or whatever. And they say, Okay, now you have all these different sources, like, instead of having, you know, for news, major news organizations, you can open up x,
or open up your podcast app. And there's like 1,000 different opinions you can source or listen to or read. But they all have a lot of the same incentives as the corporate media does. Like if you want to get retweets, or if you want to get people to listen to your podcast, you do exact people do exactly the same thing that CNN has basically formalized and institutionalized. It's just distributed. Right? Yes. Yes. And I think, you know, to your answer, to your question, what is the answer?
What philanthropy can do, what donations can do is inspire. Create a prize, that's a tested model in philanthropy. You create a prize, you endow it, it inspires a generation, it creates a base of people who want the recognition, and, you know, that's what philanthropy can do. Now, is the economic, is the commercial part a world where some journalists run sub stacks, some journalists have side jobs as consultants, some journalists are eventually
sending, filling up surveys for hedge funds. I don't know, you know, what that, what that menu of options is. Is it, you know, people zapping Bitcoin on Noster? It's probably all of the above some combination and each journalist is gonna, as an entrepreneurial figure is gonna like figure out what the combination, right combination is for them.
Yeah. It's it's it's an open question what the, what that commercial model looks like. And our strategy is to partner with everybody and just make a menu for the journalists in our community and say, publicize that and say, Hey, Tyme is willing to pay $500 for your article. If it's worth it for you, go for it. Somewhere else you could, you know, fill out the survey, make a little money. That's, that's, you know, at no risk to your credibility or independence.
You know, if that's for you, go for that. Sign up on Noster and, you know, see if people will zap you money. We're, you know, we're we're It's more of an art than a science. Yeah. We're we're in a brazen world. I think, you know, it's like, I think the business model has been shot. It's been destroyed. I mean, Post cut its foreign bureaus. Everybody's struggling with how do you monetize
the news. It's valuable. We all read it. We all need to know, like you said, what the hell is going on in the world. How do you monetize it? How do you make it sustainable? There's clear value. Yeah. And people are, you know, exploiting that value. Yeah. People are, hedge funds and, you know, financial firms and all kinds of people are getting real value from this. It's just, how do we give it back? Like the AI firms basically scrape the whole internet
and now are selling it in different forms to people. Shouldn't that be a I mean, there's an argument that the models were literally trained on a bunch all human content. Exactly. And to stay relevant, they'll need up to date content from journalists. And so they're relying on these open feeds from news organizations. But then shouldn't a part of their
revenues be a public good because they've excluded a public good? I don't know. Well, we're in a brave new world. How do you how do you how does society, you know, capture some of that value and redistribute it to the people producing the value? The journalists? Yeah. Question. Open question. And I think the New York Times is at the forefront. They're pushing back. Some firms have sued the AI firms.
Some news organizations have sued them. Yeah, but those are the big guys, right? Those the big guys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I don't know what the answer is for a stringer or independent journalist on frontline in, you know, Myanmar. How do they get paid for what they're doing? I think it's a mix. It's it's some of it is philanthropy and some of it is inspirational philanthropy, and some of it is building that brand, and some of it is
commercial deals. Think there's something to be said about it's not like quite donation. Right? Like, if you and I think I've seen I've seen a lot of people that, you know, are independent thinkers or independent journalists, however you wanna put it. I think it's a little bit broader than just independent journalists, but people whose opinions I respect that want to ethically monetize, and they don't want to play the bullshit game. What they do is they release a book.
Now, most of your supporters won't actually read the book, they'll still have the clanker summarize the book, but they'll buy it, and they'll put it on their shelf, because they're proud of it. Right? And that and that situation is not a donation. Yeah. Right? You're actually buying something physical, but it's a little bit different. It's a little bit different than actually consuming the content.
Yeah, exactly. It's like a visiting card. It's a glorified visiting card that opens doors to other think tank fellowship, whatever it is. Yeah. It's a Yeah. I mean, I think we're just living in a time that's very exciting, but also very uncertain for this. Fair enough. Okay. I'm on to this app, Kin tab. Yeah. First of all, what is why the name would KYN tab? Yeah, I keep tabs in your Kim. Keep tabs on your loved ones. That's what it is. Like Kim is spelled with an I usually.
Yes, I was just the domain wasn't available. Fair enough. Okay. That actually makes sense then. Yeah. Keep tabs in your cane. Yeah. Curious. What are your thoughts? So, like, the key I mean, the key concept is you're in an adversarial environment, and the one thing people can't reproduce digitally is that you have a trusted group of individuals that that loves and cares about you and has your back.
And so this is basically just a very simple app that if shit goes south, you press the SOS button and they get notified of your location. Yes. Essentially, it's the simplest form. That's what it is. And you can voice activate it or you can hit a button. You can send your location. It'll send your location by default, but you can also send other information.
Like, what other information would you send? Like, you can upload on a journal on the paid version of the app. You can upload a journal, which is photos, audio, text
of, you know, for myself, a car that followed me. What what was the license plate number? I don't know if it's a risk. I don't know if it was But you're adding to it. And then when shit hits the fan, you just press the single button, and then it sends all of it. Yeah. It's all uploaded passively. And when you hit the button, the trigger goes to release in the cloud all the data to your network. So if you're in a hostile remote place
where the network isn't great, all you need is a couple of bytes to go out and trigger say, okay, I'll release all this information. And that's, that's essentially what it is. It's but it's, it has a lot of use cases. We're starting with journalists. The idea is that journalists prove the content concept. It's proved the use case, it's been battle tested on the front lines like a Swiss army knife, you know, that soldiers use, but ideally
it could be used by women who get kidnapped in Mexico, or you have a domestic violence situation where you keep uploading these verbal threats where you're not sure if those threats or whatever, and then one day it explodes and you can just trigger in your friends, your best friends, your girlfriends, whoever it Yeah. Like your daughter's traveling abroad or something. Totally. Yes. It's also for travelers, insurance companies. The idea is that these commercial applications subsidize
the use for journalists and human rights defenders who don't pay for the app or don't pay for the pro version. And it's subsidized by travelers The profits or go to Stringer Foundation or The profits, the Stringer Foundation is part of like the board that's overseeing how the profits are spent. Obviously, first profits need to go to the coders, you know. So it's certainly like a separate it's a separate project.
Yes. Separate project where a percentage of the profits will go towards the prize towards supporting the journalists.
We actually think, you know, a first place the the prize would be the ultimate goal, but the mental health aspect I think is very adjacent to the physical safety. And if the app as a first step could fund those psychologist sessions for journalists on the front lines, that's where we're thinking we can actually even with a couple of thousand dollars, like start to, you know, help journalists concretely in material ways and build out from there. I like that.
Yeah. I like that. General, I like the model of it's a completely functional app for free. And then power users can pay for additional things. And then you don't have to rely on donations, it's actually could be sustainable if it actually has product market fit. What I don't like, which I've said to you privately is, I, know, I think this is for people in very sensitive situations, and it has very sensitive information. And the app is not open source. So there's no way for anyone to verify
that you're not just tracking my location all that all the time. And, like, keep like, what about a journal? Right? Like, how secure is that journal? I'm sure you're gonna say it's very secure, but there's no way anyone can verify it. So we have yes. So I told you this already, but we have an independent audit from his name is Victor Ventura. He's a senior cybersecurity
researcher at Cisco at Talos Systems, and he's willing to put his name publicly and say he's he's verified our source code and that it's safe and, you know, it's even safe against Yeah. But or makes it very expensive for Pegasus Zone. Yes. I hear what you're depends on your threat model. It depends on what your threat model is. If the US government is not in your threat model, then a security researcher from Cisco is probably fine.
But like Snowden, like the NSA, Snowden exposed that the NSA was literally putting back doors and Cisco routers while they were in the mail on the way on the way to where people were getting them. So I just this so this yeah. No. I I wanna have an open sort of you know, I think we have stuff to learn here. But I wanna have an open discussion and learn from this from you in this regard. But first thing is that the Cisco researcher is
in his personal capacity. So Cisco as an entity is not validating. Validating our things. It's in his personal capacity. It's his personal reputation on the line as somebody who's, you know, respected in the cybersecurity community. But here's where I have a question myself as somebody who's put my own life on the line on front lines around the world, right? There
are secure apps, what does secure mean? That's a question that comes up in my mind. You can secure apps for secure communication, you know, to send information securely, to send information about a $100,000,000 deal securely, commercial security. What we're talking about here is a very, very different, much higher bar, which is a human's life. Right? So somebody's life is on the line.
My sense is in that situation, if the code is open source, if you even have like for an hour, somebody paid off by a Russian government who can insert some malicious code into the app, and it's live for an hour before some other good coder notices it and then wipes it out. And that's my understanding of the open source system. Like, you know, if somebody it's everybody's
checking on it. And so, but in that situation, even an hour and I have enemies, you know, from my own reporting, if somebody wanted to take me out, if they could get in our code for even an hour, wouldn't my life be at risk, at serious risk? Well, off, Andre, I know you mean well, like, I'm not questioning your integrity your motives or your intent. So I just wanna be absolutely clear here. There's
a reason why open source is the gold standard when it comes to security stuff. And with the carve out that militaries probably disagree, because they just they like hiding everything behind, like the cover of darkness. And there are very proprietary, you know, closed organizations. And the reason is, is because if someone does put a backdoor in, there is no one to independently verify that backdoor exists
without being able to look at what they are running. Like, that's why the code needs to be open. Now, concerns about open source code being easier to exploit has some validity to it. Because if a threat actor can see what is running, then they can potentially see holes that they wouldn't be able to see otherwise. But at the end of the day, the app is either vulnerable or it's not vulnerable.
And the beauty of open source is that you have so many eyes on it that those potential vulnerabilities can be detected and removed and obviated from the future. And then you have a much more secure app at the end of the day. So to your point of someone could add a backdoor, let's say the app is secure today, but someone wants to add a back someone adds a backdoor in six months. Right? Everyone has to update the app. Like, you have to it's not like they can just
change what's running on your device remotely in an open source world. Now on a closed source world, actually, the reverse is true. If someone compromises your system, it doesn't even have to be you. If someone compromises your system and ships an update to all of your users around the world, and there's no way for any independent researchers to actually look at that code and see what's happening,
then it actually could be way more effective than if it's open source. Especially in like today's age where we do have the clankers. Right? So you don't just have humans watching, you have humans with clankers watching that can be automated Lee running all different types of analysis on the code base when it's getting shipped. And a perfect example here is Bitcoin. Bitcoin,
if you wanna go with the highest level, right, one of the most important things is the 21,000,000 cap. If Bitcoin was closed source, someone could just inflate the supply, there could be $42,000,000 42,000,000 Bitcoin, nobody would know. And as a result, it's like, okay, so when Bitcoin was first released, it was open source, maybe people could find vulnerabilities in the beginning, because it was open easier.
But because it's been years and years of eyeballs watching it and, and making reports and whatnot, that risk is greatly reduced. It is it is a more secure code base as a result fifteen years later. So some people Yeah, you start, you start with it closed, and you open it up later, you know, you have, you know, 10 different independent researchers look at the closed code. So you make sure you're not just like exposing the super vulnerable shit to the world right in the beginning.
But the the reason it's a gold standard is because ultimately, first of all, the app is vulnerable or it's not. And then second of all, if you don't have a bunch of people looking at it, then ultimately, we're trusting a couple of people that could backdoor the thing. The thing could be secured today in six months, eight months, ten months. Maybe maybe you find so much success that some of, like, the best dissidents in the world are all using this fucking app, and that's when you have the issue.
And that's when all of a sudden people are trying to hack into your systems to compromise, and you don't even know it's happening and shipping it out, and there's there's there's no one to stop it because the code isn't open. Right. That makes sense. And I think I think that that all makes sense. And, you know, as a mathematician myself, I I see the beauty of the Bitcoin system, the open source system, and why it's so valuable. My question to myself, and, you know, again, in the spirit of,
you know, an open minded spirit and, like, an honest spirit, is not because I'm trying to defend the app. We're happy to make it open source if that's the answer, you know, or gradually open it or whatever that is. Open source the gold standard for information security, infosec, but not for life security? Where there It's is the same thing. Because my understanding is It's the same thing. Let's let's use message encryption, for instance. Right? Let's use signal.
Uh-huh. There's a Tucker Carlson can go on air and be like, signal is insecure. Okay? Yeah. I've been told also, yeah, it's not you can go verify
the because it's open source. The way they get into signal is the closed source phones that you're running, they compromise the phones to access your signal messages. But my point on the signal point is, yes, someone could use signal to send, you know, relatively benign baby photos to their grandma, or they can use it to fight an authoritarian government.
It's the same app. One is okay, quote unquote, info security. One is life security, but it's the same app. Like it's rabbits all the way down, you know, no matter how you cut it. And it is the gold standard. Like, there's a reason. There's a reason why Snowden there's a reason why Snowden says use graphene OS. Yes. He doesn't say use Apple iPhone. Right? Like, you can Apple can tell us that there's no backdoor in the iPhone. You're you're trusting.
You're trusting Tim Apple that there is no backdoor in the iPhone. There's no way for you to independently verify it. Yes. And I think the backdoor question is an important one. I guess where I'm coming at is, say there's a problem in the Bitcoin code. Somebody, you know, raises it secretly to or raises it to 42,000,000 instead of 21. You can discover that and go back. You can you can go back and, you know, go back to the point in the code where that wasn't the case, and you can fix it. Kinda.
Yeah. Yeah. But with a human life, can't. Right? Once somebody is doing Well, mean, if we're gonna go down this, Bitcoin would probably fail in that situation, depending on how long it had been undetected. Bitcoin fail in that situation. And there'd be someone that was living on Bitcoin that could not feed their family, and then someone would die. Like the stakes are incredibly high for a lot of these open source software. And it's it remains the gold standard. And
but could somebody update to 42,000,000 today? And it would be live for half an hour? No. Because just because code is open doesn't mean people are running the new code. Yeah. Right. So it depends on who downloads the code. No one's gonna run code that breaks Bitcoin intentionally.
Right? And so the question is, do you trust a small few to do the audit? Or do you trust anyone who has a computer to do the audit, and be able to independently verify and the problem with trust goes back to the Snowden leaks. Right? So if you go back to the Snowden leaks, what did they do? If there's a small few that are trusted with securities of systems, you pressure those people. Don't have and then they either comply and they're coerced and they comply, Or
maybe they're maybe they maybe they don't even comply. Maybe maybe they are compromised themselves, they get hacked or whatever, and you go in through them. It can go in both directions, right? This is also why you want to build things in the way that even if compromise, even if even if you're malicious, you can't compromise it yourself. Right? Exactly. The operators of Kintab, for instance, like, even if you wanted to, you shouldn't be able to read their journals.
That's how I'm sure that's how we've structured it. Yeah, it's allegedly, right? There's no way for us to verify that. Right? Now, have to trust Victor, right? The Yeah. There's group of people against him. And also, I I don't have to necessarily trust his intentions. I have to trust his competence. Yeah. Maybe he missed it. Yeah. Right? And that's why you would have a group. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And but the the group of people that think Snowden is a traitor to the country or whatever
might have the opposite opinion to me. Right? And that that that's I I I respect I respect that. That's like an, you know, inherent bias. But there's a reason why if you want to really empower individuals and you wanna protect them, you need trust minimized solutions. You need to reduce trust because anywhere there's human trust is a point of compromise. That's where the vulnerability lies. The weakest point of any piece of software is the humans that are trusted to run it.
And you also operate on the assumption that no software is fully secure or always secure. Of course. Yep. So the question is, do you how can you increase the cost of of infiltrating the code? Right? Yeah. And and and making it so I'm telling you, by making it open source. Make it that you're it's the wrong way of thinking about it, in my opinion, is is actually cheaper if it's closed source. I mean, the fact is, like, almost all our journalists, nobody's running graphene.
Everybody's on Android or Apple. Yeah. Which has a risk of a backdoor. Of course. Yeah. Of course. That's supposed to be out of world. Yeah. Why compound it? You need to work within that environment. Otherwise, you're asking all these journalists to be to move to a new system. Right? No. But that's not what I'm saying. Just because their setup isn't perfect doesn't mean you add additional trusted central censors. Centralized third parties are security holes. Yeah. So each one you add
Yeah. Is another security hole. So just because they trust Apple doesn't mean they should also trust you guys. So what we are what we do sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I see what you're saying. I mean, what we do is we make sure that Apple and and Google only have encrypted data. Right? And that's what Vitra has certified. Yes. But not allegedly, according to x person. Allegedly. There's no way to verify it. This is it's the reality of the situation. Let
me put it this way. Yeah. There's a reason why Bitcoin wallets first, we were talk we were originally talking about, like, Bitcoin protocol network code or whatnot, which is open source, but also Bitcoin wallets. Yeah. There's a reason why I have never recommended a closed source Bitcoin wallet. And it's because ultimately you're trusting whoever is running that Bitcoin wallet with your life's wealth. And once again, they don't have to be malicious. They can be compromised or coerced themselves.
They become a trusted third party and they become a security hole in your life savings. And there's a reason why it's the gold standard. And that's the reason, because you're just adding additional you're adding additional risk. And so I yeah. I have a question for you. So say, we have a journalist in Ukraine. Right? With all this sensitive information about what Russia's doing. We open source the code. Yeah. Russia, with all its significant resources,
you know Yeah. In in in its FSB, is able to change our code and, you know, have it updated What are they on that journalist's phone. How are they doing that? Because they're changing the open source code. Right? And it's which is open source. Yeah. But you still so this journalist, presumably. Right? Yep. Has they download from they they're they're opening they're not using graphemes. Yeah. They're on the app store. Say. Right? So they they have their iPhone.
They're downloading your app from the Apple App Store. Yep. Do you have an app store developer account where you're shipping updates to every update you ship is signed by you guys saying that we shipped it, not a malicious actor, not someone else. Apple's verifying that. It is a trusted third party. There's no way for me to verify it. But Apple's doing that verification.
They'd have to go out and download a different app, or your flows would have to be compromised, where you are shipping the malicious app. Otherwise, they're not able to change, like just because the code is open doesn't mean that a third party can just change the app. But sophisticated state actors are hiding malicious code within benign and very positive and helpful changes, right? That's a known way in which they're infiltrating open source systems, right? No, and closed sources.
That is completely tangential. I mean, closed sources pressure, no? It's pressure, through pressure. What do you mean? No, it's completely tangential. If they are getting a malicious update into your software package that you're shipping to your customers, then that is irrelevant of closed source or open source. But with closed source because they have gotten into your supply chain. They're in your supply chain shipping malicious code to your users.
Have to have your access to your developer account and be shipping updates. Yes. So that usually is through coercion. But in the open source case, you're opening up and allowing a lot of people to contribute to your code. Obviously, you're Wait. No. There's two different things. There's two different things. You can have open source code that people can go verify, and you're not taking outside contributors. Like you don't have to necessarily you don't necessarily have to take a random a nonce
pull request where they're like, trying to update, you know, trying to make a change to your app. You don't have to do that piece. There's plenty of there's plenty of open source projects, like signals not just taking like completely random contributors, updates, they have their process.
Those contributors might be might be there might be malicious code within snuck into their their code. But it's two different things. Right? It's two different things. It's whether or not you have open contributions. Uh-huh. Where you're like taking community contributions and community updates versus is can I verify what's running on my device? Can anyone, if they want to verify what's running on your device? Yeah, and I think the It's two different things. Yeah,
my sense is at the end of the day, this is something the market will have to tell us. Like I, as a journalist, obviously, have my biases, I'm worried about open code being compromised by some well meaning but infiltrated contributor. And if the journalists on the ground, you know, prefer to trust a journalistic creator, like, like Stringer Foundation with our board and, you know, our network of, of
auditors who are being public about their auditing and putting their repetitions to the line, That's one method. And we'll kind of have to see what those journalists prefer. If they prefer that or if they prefer anybody could be, or where like a large group of people could be contributing to the code and yeah. You know, that being the gold standard for information,
but what makes them feel more safe is the question. I guess the military in your example feels more safe with the other way. That's Well, military doesn't want other militaries to know what they're running. It's a it's a different threat model. But I think this is an important discussion and sort of question. I mean, the military like, what they have special iPhones that like don't have cameras on them.
You know, because because they can go to Tim Apple, and be like, okay, let's let's build a closed source proprietary thing for us. The average the average person, I mean, look, I mean, you'll never you'll never have a perfect situation. Like I said, you have to trust regardless. Yeah. But one of the cool parts about having like proper open source project is you could those people that are maybe super high risk could be running graphing. They could build from source.
They could have a reproducible separate app that they're able to pull from outside of an app store, not have to trust Google, not have to trust Apple. I mean, if you want to talk about threat modeling, at the end of the day, any user who's using the Apple App Store, Apple can Apple's obviously a trusted third party in that supply chain, right? They can ship a malicious update of kin tab just to one of your journalists. Not to everybody. Right? But
anyway, I would like to see this app open source. I'm not I'm not. I appreciate the friendly debate. I'm not questioning your motives or your integrity. There's a reason why open sets does not fund any closed source projects. Interesting. That's part of the reason. And it's not just security. It's also just like, it's good for the commons as well.
Like, if you guys disappear, it'd be good if some other development team, some random guys in Indonesia or whatever could just pick up where you left off, and still ship can tab they could arrest you. You know, they're good. They're gonna be still a team maintaining it. That's more important for something like Bitcoin, I think than something like this.
But just just things to consider. Yes, 100%. And we're working on enterprise versions of the app as well, for, you know, The New York Times and other news organizations. I think, yeah, this is a question that we'll be asking everybody.
So do you made this in a hackathon. I think that part's cool. Like not to dismiss. I think it's cool that you recognize there was a problem and presumably using AI tools, you were able to like rapidly iterate and produce this thing, which is pretty cool. Percent. Yeah. We've been vibrating this whole thing using AI. And and, obviously, you know, the coders, you know, services is very experienced and, you know, checking the the the Output.
Yeah. The code. You know? Just, yeah, just making sure that it's it's built in a secure way. And, yeah, and and the researchers security researchers who audited our code, like, gave us a very technical kind of blurb at the part how why it's secure. It's like every piece of of information is independently, I think, encrypted or something like that. Allegedly. It uses, yeah, a secure enclave and things like that. Yeah. Allegedly.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and just to be clear here, the reason I'm being, like, a little bit more aggressive about it is because this is the exact type of software that evil people would want to compromise. I understand. The user base is like the is is our targeted people. Right? 100%.
And and yeah. Yeah. 100%. And, you know, I I think I mentioned this. We have a a Western intelligence agent, a security chief, who hasn't doesn't have access to our code, but his job is his agency's job is to hack journalists and human rights defenders and other people every day. And so he's been advising us on the latest techniques that they're using. For example, we don't broadcast GSM locations. He's like, that's the number one easiest way that they compromise journalists location.
They look for GSM broadcast. And so we don't do that. It's all encrypted. And so we're trying to stay it's a, it's a, it's an arms race, right? It's a, you know, you're in an active arms race against very well funded, very capable governments.
Yeah. That are that are constantly trying to compromise these kinds of apps. And yeah, I hear you on the open source being, and maybe, you know, exposing or open sourcing parts of the code or, you know, as a way to start and yeah, but but I guess, you know, for the kind of thing just like Leroy Jenkins it and just,
like, just release, like, have it go through a bunch of different audits first. If, if your auditors are saying this, if your auditors are actually truly confident that this code is secure, then people viewing it shouldn't add vulnerability to it. Yeah, you understand that concept? Yeah, makes sense to you. Well, yes. The the one thing is the act of showing the code to the world should never make an app vulnerable. If the app was already quote unquote perfectly secure before you released it.
What the situation what the vulnerability showing code to the world could potentially do is people could see vulnerabilities that they maybe they didn't see previously. But those vulnerabilities already existed before you open the code up. Yes. And so let's just start with the assumption that no code is safe. Right? Every code is vulnerable. So let's start with that. The code is vulnerable. You expose it.
The risk here is that a very well resourced adversary will then be able to exploit it faster than your network can can protect it, secure. But that's the problem. So the problem is the this is and this is not like fiction. This is what the well resourced actors, namely the main security services, NSA, you know, Massad, whatnot. What they do is they find when they find zero days, they don't tell the rest of the world. They use them.
Yeah. Right? And so Yeah. How does the rest of the world find the backdoor to fix it? If it's closed, they won't. Right? That's why. If you have a private GitHub repo that's hosting your code and is closed source, Microsoft has access to it. Only the most retarded people in the world don't think NSA has access to Microsoft servers. But you're a random person who cares in Indonesia that's like a whiz kid.
Yeah. He doesn't have access to the code base. He can't analyze it. He can't try and verify it. He can't try and fix it. Yep. And I think what you're saying is is gonna be an active issue that more and more of an issue as we become more successful.
A 100%. I'm not gonna be the first person who brings this up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is gonna be it's gonna be more of a liability more for risks to some, you know, as as we become more successful. So that's something that we need to just think about it. Yep. But congratulations on the app. Anyway, I feel like we've been going for a while. Before we finish, I just want to you've been writing a book. What's the deal with that?
So I've started the book before I started the Stringer Foundation. It's about environmental defenders in Mexico, mostly indigenous, you know, frontline individuals who are protecting mountains, rivers, forests, and who are incredibly, you know, unresourced, don't have much institutional support, And yet they're putting their bodies in the line to protect what everybody seems to be saying that we need to protect the environment for future generations.
So why aren't they getting help? And so the book kind of tells their stories. You know, I traveled to a bunch of places where they got assassinated, where they got killed and where their communities are still fighting back. And I'm telling those stories. You know, it's really a book about different ways of, you know, asking, is it worth protecting nature? Is it worth protecting
our is it worth protecting the people who put their bodies on the line? It's a bit like a story. I see it like the 300 Spartans who were fighting for a noble cause. And I'm trying to tell their stories and have their battles inspire other people around the world to protect nature and maybe spur some of the global institutions to actually provide them the support that they need. I love that. Are
you almost done with it? I'm almost done. Final revisions, it'll be out next year. Publishing is very slow. I'm sure somebody's gonna ask Claude to summarize it, but you know, to be honest, can summarize Yeah, you
need to, you don't need to ask Claude. I can summarize it, but I think the value here is the individual human stories of each of these figures and the inspirational value of it, you know, that, you know, these people in very dire circumstances chose to protect higher cause, you know, and I think that's something Claude can't really summarize. You read these stories and you, I mean, need to learn from their learn from their sacrifices and their, you know, humanity.
And that's something we need more and more to preserve in this age of AI. What are the so is it like is it specifically was like pollution, deforestation? It's a lot of mining companies, industrial zones producing all kinds of stuff that we use. Mines for lithium, for electric vehicles, steel circuit boards, every piece of technology that we're producing needs mineral resources and those mineral resources are more and more accessible and available in indigenous territories.
And the interesting thing is across Latin America, Bolivia, Mexico, other countries, there are very progressive laws that protect the rights and ability of these local communities to protect their land. But unfortunately, when when the communities use those laws and kick the companies out or the governments out or the industrial developments out, the mines or whatever it increasingly organized crime is being used against these communities. And so extrajudicial,
the law doesn't matter anymore. Extrajudicial They just a bring in mafia tactics basically. Yeah. And they try to clear the communities off the land. And then they have done that in many cases. Then they build a mine or an industrial zone or whatever they want. And that's how, you know, more and more, we're going to need to rely on people and on movements to protect our public goods.
It's not going to be the laws. We can't rely on them. And we're seeing that laws can be as beautiful as you want, but there are no use when the economic interests are so high that people find ways around them. There are always organized crime groups in Latin America or in India or wherever you want, who are willing to play that role as mercenaries for these, you know, industrial interests. So it's a question like, are we heading in the right direction as a society? Are we destroying nature?
And instead of asking the academics who are, you know, in their ivory towers, why not ask the people who are putting their bodies in the line, what their convictions are, why they're doing this and what they think the world needs, how they think the world needs to act in order to build a better and more sustainable future. Love that somehow. Going to ask that question a lot. Always comes down to people. Yeah. What I just real quick, what is what is publishing that look like for you?
I mean, I'm aware that the road between now and the publishing is a road of increasing risk for me personally. I'm putting out information about the perpetrators of each of these assassinations in the public domain. They're very powerful actors. And as that risk, you know, threat goes up for me, yeah, I just some something I need to I need to build the systems, and that's also why why I built the app to protect myself. Do you know what a do you know what a dead man switch is, by the way?
Yes. Yes. Yes. And we're building that in as well into the You're gonna Like, if you don't open the app for, a week or something, then it automatically sends You us can program. If you're on a trip, you need to every three hours, you need to check-in.
And if you're, you know, in a passive situation, it could be a week or Yeah. Couple that's a good idea for a future. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's it's it's it's it's on our feature list for, you know, programming that in. And it's also useful for elderly people or, you know, other people like that. So that's a commercial application in that case, you know. I've fallen and I can't get up. Right? Elderly Yeah. Person living
And then and then it it triggers the and one thing that we've been given by Apple, which is rare, is a critical alert. So we can we have the ability to override silent settings. So it's like an earthquake alert or a flood. And so Apple's recognized that, yeah, that our app is That's like in that situation. So,
yeah, you could be at your desk in silent mode in the meeting, or you could be sleeping, and it'll it'll it'll the alarm, the siren will ring, and you'll know that you need to act. And, yeah, dead man's switch is an important one. You know, it's we try to make it as simple as possible, just sort of encrypted the whole way, zero knowledge,
a very simple to use. And the idea is that, yeah, this can hopefully start to save lives. So we're starting to test I like that. Simple thing. Building user user stories for people who are using this, including myself. And then socializing that and seeing where we can go. Which sectors are more likely to uptake? Yeah, and you'll see how users use it, then you can make changes, improvements.
But I distracted you a little bit. But, like, I on like, from a practical point of view in publishing, like, this is gonna be a physical book. Right? Yes. Physical book. Yeah. Traditional publishing. That's how I started. Do you have, like but you have, like, a publisher that you work with that is like cool with sensitive information being published and Yeah. A 100%. I mean, publish The US is I mean, each jurisdiction has its own legal quagmire.
The US is a bit better. If you're going after public figures in The US for powerful figures, you are protected from legal action and the publishers as well. Other countries are less protective.
The UK for instance, right? Like has like very bad libel laws or whatever. Exactly. And that's why Me Too happened in The US and you know, where you could the perpetrator and they can't sue you back. It's harder because they're public figures. And so in The UK, sometimes my publishers have to do an extensive legal review at great cost. And so it's its own beast, but yeah, my publisher is
kind of it's called Chelsea Green. They've published like frontline environmental works, and they're kind of on the edge movements and supported movements, they published, you know, the reason I went with them in this case was they published a memoir
of this Brazilian, very important Brazilian journalist who got assassinated with his indigenous Brazilian reporter friend, colleague. His name is Dom Phillips, they published his memoir. He was halfway through it, and they got his friends to complete the memoir and they published it. That outed that book outed a lot of similar themes, similar frontline except in Brazil. And it outed a lot of powerful players.
And so I feel I trust them that they will have my back and have that they have the movements back when publishing this book. So that's kind of why I went with them. I thought they had a publicity base and a, you know, readership and the ethos within the publishing house to push this book in the right way. Got it. Very important. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, that whole world is very foreign to me. So, like, you're, like, sending them you send them you send them to them
digitally. Right? Or you're just like, are you just sending them a are you sending them, like, a word document, and then they handle everything else for you? Yes. The reality is, I mean, I always have to be involved at every stage of the publicity of getting the word out of getting movements behind it, but they have credibility.
They have a distribution network. But yes, it is. I mean, in terms of info sec, if that's what you're getting at, it's it is a it's a word file that sent over email to their offices. Email them a word file. Right? Yeah. In this case, I might be a bit more careful. I might send it to them over, you know, tour or something, you know, a safe network.
But, but yeah, I mean, the end, the book is it's meant to be public. And the only advantage of doing that of securing security, sending it is to prevent your adversary from having time to discredit you, which has happened. Or like to respond, yeah. Yeah, like I published a book about Rwanda, the dictator there tried to kill me, and you know, they
got ahold of the book before it was published, but right at the end, like couple of weeks before. So I was able to delay it the maximum I could. And when they published rebuttals of my book or criticisms, it was very silly. They pop one of their ministers published in the Lancet said my whole book was a fabrication. And it's just it's just like they didn't know what to go out with. They just like responded liar or whatever. Exactly.
And that's just the stupidest way and everybody any any sane, you know, thinking person would can could see that that was that was, you know, desperate last ditch attempt. And so, yeah, again, it's an arms race. As much as you can, you're trying to prevent them from getting the information, prevent them from seeing the preparing and launching a campaign against you. Fair enough. I'm John. Always a pleasure. I appreciate all the work you're doing. You fucking Christian. Thank you, Odell.
We're moving at light speed. Yeah, maybe we'll do another update in six months. We'll see where you're at. I mean, you can just text me when you think another update is worthy. Sounds great. We'll have announced our winners. So we'll I'm sure we'll have updates around that will be interesting to discuss all the
all the decision of the the impact of that. And also, yeah, we'll have updates from user stories of the app in the field. So we'll we can share more and riff more on that as well. I mean, I'm sure you know, but your work has never been more important than it is today.
So thank you again. Thank you for the advice and the encouragement and support. Mean, we need Open man. Open source, Yeah. Need community people to help us. Yeah. I Do you have any final thoughts for the audience before we wrap? No. No. This has been great. I really appreciate, you know, having useful, encouraging, supportive, forthright discussions. So, yeah, grateful to be here and for your friendship. Likewise. Likewise. Freaks, I'll put all relevant links in the show notes.
I guess I should just say it out loud. What is it the stringerfoundation.com? It's stringerjournalism.org. Stringerjournalism.org and kintab.com. Correct. With a y. Yes. And I'll put all relevant links in the show notes. Huge shout out to all the freaks who continue to support the show. Thank you guys. It really does mean a lot. Keeps me going. Next Tuesday, next Tuesday, June 9 is when I will have Tondo on to talk Bitcoin in Kenya. Pretty excited about that.
All relevant links at salesdispatch.com. Share with your friends and family. Love y'all. Stay humble StackSats. Peace.