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Kim Crawley joins BJ Mendelson in this bonus episode to discuss her new Kickstarter-funded book: A sharp look at what happens after the Gen AI bubble collapses. Kim explains why she believes the damage will ripple through climate systems, mental habits, and everyday life, especially for kids being pushed to rely on AI too early. Along the way, Kim shares how she researches her work, why she archives everything, and what she thinks a healthier web might look like next. You're going to want to listen to this one.
Creators and Guests
Host
Rosie Tran
Rosie Tran is one of the fastest rising stars in the entertainment business! Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, she moved to Hollywood to pursue her career as a professional entertainer. The stand up comedian, writer, podcast personality, and actress has toured internationally, at comedy clubs, colleges, and overseas for the USO in Europe and the Middle East.
Editor
Andrew
I am the Editor of all things on the Stupid Sexy Privacy Podcast.
What is Stupid Sexy Privacy?
Stupid Sexy Privacy is a miniseries about how to protect yourself from fascists and weirdos. Your host is comedian Rosie Tran, and the show is written by information privacy expert B.J. Mendelson. Every episode is sponsored by our friends at DuckDuckGo. Tune in every Thursday night βor Friday morning if you're nasty β at 12 am EST to catch the next episode.
00:00
Hello everyone, welcome to a bonus episode of Stupid Sexy Privacy. We've got a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, so starting next week you're gonna be hearing, at least for a little while, yours truly reading the text of our book, How to Protect Yourself from Fascists and Weirdos. So we'll be doing these like little short snippets of the book. It's gonna be the entire book, but we're gonna release it very slowly so that hopefully we'll get your interest and then when the book comes out officially in October, don't hold me to this, we think...
00:28
We think October 9th is gonna be the launch day. We're not entirely sure, but it's definitely gonna be in October, because we signed the contract and everything is going with the launch of the audio book. So I'm excited to share all that with you. But so how it's gonna work is Stupid Sexy Privacy as it's currently running, we'll stop for a little bit and then.
00:46
I will ideally try to maybe find some advertisers or partners to bring back the episodes with Rosie and Andrew. But that doesn't mean Rosie and Andrew are going anywhere because there's a number of things from the run of podcasts that we had just done where, for example, like I might've been busy one week and we didn't have a privacy tip that ran with an interview, we might've just had the interview. So we're going to go back and we're going to add brand new privacy tips to the episodes that are currently missing those. And so as that happens, I'll let you know, and that will be new content from.
01:15
Rosie and Andrew, and then for a little while, you'll have me reading the book and then we're gonna also do privacy tips, which is I get asked like very basic questions like how do you download Signal? How do you use it? Because as much as we like to think everyone is very like advanced and intuitive when it comes to how to protect yourself from fascism, weirdos, you can't assume everyone is because most people aren't, so.
01:34
We'll be doing a little bit of that as well. Anyway, big changes coming. Please hang with us. Thank you all for your patience. know, originally the book was going to come out in February, but after the murder of Alex Preddy, we basically threw that book out and wrote a new one. And so everything is behind schedule. So that's my fault. I take full responsibility for that. But don't you worry because we're going to keep you entertained with new episodes of Stupid Sexy Privacy, Privacy Tips, which is the show where I'll walk you through some of this stuff. And of course, some bonus episodes like this where I'll drop in with some really exciting interviews.
02:03
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03:02
Kim, thank you so much for joining us once again. We had you on a panel discussion a little earlier this year. So for people who missed that, would you like to take a moment to introduce yourself? My name is Kim Crawley. I'm a former cybersecurity professor until I had to quit because my school, the Open Institute of Technology, was going to force all students to be, force me to subject my students to turn it in Gen. AI, which would make me feel absolutely queasy and nauseous if I was to do it.
03:32
My background is in cybersecurity. I'm probably best known for writing the pen tester blueprint actually, which is one of the top selling books on pen testing on Amazon. And I'm also in tribe of hackers, but you BJ probably know me better for the things that I've done in the past couple of years related to gen AI. So I founded Stop Gen AI in April, 2025.
04:01
Unfortunately, our organization doesn't get the kind of attention that it should be getting because we're the only organization that I know of that's trying to raise money for people to survive in the wake of Gen.ai. So it's a really crying shame that no one seems to care about our organization. And yeah, and it also made me very frustrated that no media wanted to talk to me when I had to quit my academic job because
04:30
I didn't want to subject my students to that horror. So I have been successfully Kickstarter funding books for the past little over a year now because I've had to, because I've had a lot of things to say that the commercial publishers I used to work with, such as Wiley and O'Reilly probably wouldn't publish because I'm critical of the tech industry. So.
04:56
You're probably familiar with Digital Safety in a Dangerous World, which uh I published last year. And that was a successful Kickstarter campaign. And it was controversial because I criticized the tech industry, and I connected it to what I call techno-fascism. And then after I wrote that book, I realized I had a lot more to say about techno-fascism, plus to connect it to the history of political activism.
05:25
in the 20th century like MLK Jr. and Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam and whatnot. So I wrote Technofascism Survival Guide and that was my most successful Kickstarter campaign ever. And I published that just at the end of June. And unfortunately, because my livelihood has been taken from me, because my overlords think that I can be replaced by Gen. AI,
05:55
Because it's not only that I was a cybersecurity professor, I used to make a decent living writing white papers and blogs and other sorts of materials like that for tech companies about enterprise cybersecurity products and whatnot. I lost that livelihood because my overlords decided that I could be replaced by JNAI. So everywhere I turn, they're trying to replace me with the
06:23
Planet destroying bots. So now I write self-published books. So because I rely on my Kickstarter income for the time being to literally pay my rent and buy groceries, I went into my next Kickstarter backed project right away, which is Recovering After Jenny Eye, which also is a book that I think addresses a
06:50
a need that hasn't been fulfilled. There's been a lot of really great books written and published that are critical of Gen.ai, such as Empire of AI and the AIcon and the books that I've written and whatnot. But I have yet to hear of a book that is specifically about what do we do in the aftermath of Gen.ai. So that's the campaign that I have going now.
07:20
My intention is that
07:23
Well, first of all, the thesis of my book is that Gen. AI will end soon, like within the next few years. Because, well, it's obnoxious. really, really annoys me when people keep saying, oh, AI is here to stay. You got to get used to it. blah, blah, blah. When all the indications are the complete and total opposite.
07:49
I cite multiple studies from MIT and the UN and Harvard Science Review, and I'm going to find lots of other research as well to substantiate that GenAI data centers are literally not sustainable. So even though our politicians are doing basically nothing, I think it would be foolish to expect politicians to do anything good.
08:17
The laws of physics will win before anything else happens. So the planet cannot sustain the GEN-AI data centers that these technofascists demand. So that's one thing. The other reason is model collapse. So model collapse is a concept in computer science, which I'm not going to get too technical. And you don't have to be too technical to understand the concept. It's basically, if you're a little bit older, you'll
08:47
probably remember that in the 1990s, there was a crisis called mad cow disease, where cows were fed beef and it made them really sick and they developed prion disease and it went mad and it made the beef very unhealthy to eat and whatnot. And there was a big scandal in the late 1990s. And so basically model collapse is like mad cow disease, but for computer data.
09:16
So what it means is basically with more and more of the data on the internet being AI slop, if you feed AI slop into GenAI, it becomes even worse, basically. becomes, however bad AI slop is, slop produced by feeding slop to the slot machine is even more sloppified. So there's model collapse is another problem. And then the other
09:44
reason why Gen.ai is not here to stay and will end in the next few years is because of the ridiculous financial bubble behind it. So in a healthy economy, consumers buy goods and services and that money goes back into the vendors and corporations and whatnot. then, but what's going on with Gen.ai is relative to the immense expense of Gen.ai.
10:13
Very, very little money is coming in from consumers. relative to the massive amounts of money that the JNI corporations are throwing into the paper shredder every day. Whatever revenue comes in from people paying for tokens and crap like that, it's a fraction of 1 % of how much they're spending. Right?
10:41
So really the financial activity in the so-called AI industry is micro-slop, and I'm always going to call them micro-slop, and Nvidia and CoreWeave and Google and OpenAI and Anthropic basically, and yeah, they're basically tossing around the same several billion dollars between themselves. That's all the economic activity.
11:07
in the AI industry. And the only reason why the financial bubble hasn't popped yet officially is because venture capital coming from places like SoftBank, for instance, is desperately trying to keep it afloat. But there's no money coming in from consumers. So it will collapse. And you've interviewed my friend, David Gerard. He can talk about that in more detail.
11:37
But all these indicators, the laws of physics, you can't fight the laws of physics. So there's laws of physics, model collapse, the financial bubble. Gen. AI is the opposite of here to stay. Gen. AI is going to be gone. So the thesis of my book is what do we do about the immense damage that is going to be left behind? And however many great books there have been published by other people.
12:07
critiquing gen AI. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first book that really focuses on the aftermath. So- I think you're right. I think you're right because I, yeah, typically I'm getting advanced copies of stuff that's in the works or things are in the pipeline. I haven't seen really anything. So could you expand on that a little bit for us? What does that mean? What is the aftermath as you see it? So the aftermath is multifaceted, which is why-
12:35
I'm interviewing experts from a multiple discipline basically. So first and the most obvious I guess would be the environmental factor. Our climate is totally messed up and although at this point we cannot reverse climate disaster, we shouldn't be accelerating it. Right? Because if we can at least slow down the climate disaster that gives humanity more time to adapt.
13:04
But unfortunately, JNAI accelerates that further, right? Because it's not possible to use nuclear or even better options like wind and solar. Wind and solar are excellent and more and more of that should be added to the power grid. But adding wind and solar to the power grid is a practical solution for normal
13:33
electricity consumption growth. If you add something monstrous like JNAI that consumed as much electricity as multiple countries and growing, then you can't keep up with that growth in demand with wind and solar. And you can't keep up with it with nuclear because nuclear power plants take a long time to build and whatnot. So really all the power that
14:02
The people serving the style of altman's in the world wants to keep adding to the power grid are the dirtiest options like oil, for instance. So that's one way that it's accelerating climate disaster. Also the immense fresh water consumption. And these corporations like OpenAI are being deliberately extremely secretive about their water consumption. But one bit of news that I heard earlier today.
14:32
was that there is a British water utility that is sounding the alarm about GenAI data centers being built in the UK because their water utility can see that they don't have the capacity to support GenAI data centers with fresh water. And it has to be, if you ask someone like Karen Cow for instance, it has to be fresh water. And the earth's
15:00
Freshwater supply is limited. I've looked at all the science related to all that. So there's that. So there's some fresh water. There's the absolutely absurd electricity consumption. And it would be one thing if it was for something that was serving humanity to some extent, but it's not. So they're accelerating climate disaster. so I'm going to be speaking to environmentalists who are able to speak about this in more detail.
15:30
than I can. The first environmentalist that comes to mind is Jerry McGovern. And I've been making friends with them lately, but I want to speak to some other ones as well. But they're all super concerned about this. So there's environmental. So then the other facet that I'm really concerned about is what it's doing to the population's brains. So basically there's already legitimate scientific research coming out.
15:59
which shows that people who use GenAI are delegating their thinking to LLMs and whatnot. And it's cognitively harmful. It's harming their capacity to think for themselves. It's harming their critical thinking skills. They don't have them anymore. And that's really concerning because chat GBT and other LLMs
16:27
Contrary to what a lot of people believe are not all-knowing oracles, they uh just repeat word patterns in their training data. Although, of course, the techno-fascists can take that over and put whatever they want in them. For example, Elon Musk with Grok with the very...
16:50
The very fascistic things that he's been getting his underlings to configure Grok to say as response to certain input and whatnot. But all of them can do it. And also when BLEMs are just left to their own devices, they spew bullshit most of the time. Right. Right. Right. So there's, there's that. So obviously when all this infrastructure goes kaput, because it is going to end really soon, we're going to have millions of people who are like,
17:19
My brain is gone. I can't think anymore. Yeah. That's me is when you were talking about the after-effects, like that's the one that I'm most concerned about. What I guess it's, tell us how far along in the research are you? Like, is this still, cause I found the last book, the Technofascism Survival Guide to be very, very well researched and put together. And so with this, I'm curious how much time you spend in doing the research and doing interviews for a book like this.
17:49
Well, right now I've just been starting to gather research sources. It usually takes me, I would say a month or so to six weeks to gather research sources. And then sometimes obviously, cause you've probably done research yourself. Sometimes when you get really into it, all of a sudden all these new research sources turn up. So my usual go-to places for research are first of all, people.
18:17
So as I said, I already have a list of environmentalists, psychologists, sociologists, technicians, engineers, who I've already started. I already have long email threads with all of them, emailing them questions and they email me answers back. For books, I usually refer to interview people over email. So that's what I've been doing so far.
18:45
Jerry McGovern, can definitely confirm is one of my interview subjects. Great. He's the author of Nightingale's Day. So my other research source is to actually, and this is really old fashioned, go to a old fashioned library. And I'm in Toronto, so I'm really, I've got great options here. So there's the Robarts library, which is part of U of T campus. And then there's also the Toronto Reference Library.
19:14
So those are two libraries that have all kinds of uh scientific and engineering documentation and various citations. When I was working on Techno Fashion and Survival Guide, the Toronto Reference Library especially was really great for getting newspaper microfiche from the 1960s about the civil rights movement and whatnot.
19:44
Obviously, like any newspapers that are before 1980 or so, they would definitely have a microfiche instead of as a physical paper. So that's great. We've got to teach kids how to use microfiche. do. Let me, speaking of teaching kids, I think that you, you've kind of hit on this, this model for authors who want to say things that the traditional publishers won't necessarily get behind. So I'm just curious if you could tell us a little bit about.
20:14
So you have a Kickstarter campaign now and ends August 5th. What is managing it? Like what is the day to day like in putting that together? The research? No, the campaign itself. The campaign. Okay. Well, it's a lot of work. I mean, obviously doing projects that are Kickstarter funded isn't as easy as it looks. And people can't just put a Kickstarter campaign up like they can a Facebook post, for instance.
20:44
It has to go through Kickstarter's approval process. And they're not only approving your campaign materials, they're also campaigning. They're also going through like the financial and tax information that you're giving about yourself. Partly to prevent fraud. I think it's mainly to prevent fraud actually. So one thing that a lot of people don't know, but everyone who's done multiple Kickstarter campaigns knows, is that I started
21:13
my campaign for recovering after Gen.ai, like a week after I fulfilled my campaign for Technofascism Survival Guide. But even so, even though there was only a week between one campaign being completely closed and the other campaign opening, I still had to give Kickstarter all my financial and tax data all over again. Yeah. So they don't like keep it on file beyond what they need to.
21:43
with the tax agencies and to pay people out and whatnot. They basically get you to start afresh with each Kickstarter campaign, all the tax information, all the financial data, and then they got to verify that and then they verify your ID all over again. So there's a whole government ID checking process. So if any technological platform is subject to a data breach, the one that's going to harm you the most would probably be a data breach to Kickstarter because
22:13
None of the other tech platforms have copies of my ID and my tax information anymore. Other than the Canadian government. What rewards are you offering for the Kickstarter campaign? Well, I learned the hard way when I was doing Digital Safety in a Dangerous World that having physical rewards is an added complication. Now some campaigns can't avoid having
22:42
physical rewards because the product itself is physical, right? But if you're writing a book and e-books are a medium, then it is possible for the rewards to be all digital. And it was frustrating for me when I was doing digital safety in a dangerous world and I had t-shirts.
23:04
because I had to wait until everyone's t-shirt and physical book orders were received in order to launch my campaign for techno fascism survival guide, which is perfectly understandable. And that's a good thing that Kickstarter doesn't allow someone to launch a new campaign before fulfilling the current one. Right. It's a very good thing.
23:30
Unfortunately, because I require Kickstarter income as most of my survival income now, that's a little bit of a complication. So I did fulfill that campaign, but it took longer than expected because there are all kinds of contingencies involved in physically shipping people t-shirts and printed books and whatnot. So then I was able to launch the campaign for Techno Fashion's Revival Guide and I learned, okay, from now on.
24:00
only digital rewards because then it's completely within my control. I don't have to worry about any manufacturers. It's all in my hands. And it is all in my hands. So the rewards for my current book are like the rewards for Techno-Fascism Survival Guide. They're e-books. So they're e-books and that's completely within my control because I do all my own writing and research and editing.
24:27
So if I'm slow with that, I only have myself to blame. Right? And then I convert it to ebook formats myself through Draft2Digital, which is a web app that converts documentation into ebooks. And then my rewards for the high tier backers, the ones who pledge like around $100 or more.
24:52
are all digital as well. this last time for like techno fascism survival guide, I had zoom sessions that were 90 minutes for people to ask me for their advice. And now for, for, for recovering after gen AI, my rewards are you can choose to have a 90 minute zoom session with me or I will write you 1500 words on
25:21
whatever topic adjacent to my book, Recovering After Gen. AI you want. And I would expect to be credited for it, but I will view pitch and I write, and that's part of your reward. And I feel much better about having those as rewards, because as I said, it's all within my control. I don't have to worry about manufacturers and postal shipping companies and stuff like that. And so.
25:51
Yeah. How can we tell us how we can help? you've got August 5th is the deadline. What's the lowest tier? What's the highest tier? Like what can we do to support your work and just get the word out about this campaign? I really appreciate that. The lowest tier would be just to have a single ebook of recovering after Gen. AI. And that's, they'll work in all ebook readers, by the way. And I believe
26:18
If you're talking about US dollars, it's the equivalent of about 12 US dollars. And then the highest I believe is about the equivalent, it's around like a hundred US dollars. So from around, my rewards are in Canadian dollars, so I'm trying to like convert it for you guys. Sure. Yeah. But it's, a single ebook is around 12 US dollars, depending on what the exchange rate is that day, I guess.
26:46
And then the highest tier, you get three eBooks. So you get the recovering after gen AI eBook. Plus you get eBooks by previous two titles. So techno fascism survival guide and digital safety in a dangerous world. And then you get your choice of either a zoom session or custom writing.
27:08
I think that's really cool. I think that's, that's also a unique offering that I haven't seen people do for a Kickstarter. Tell me where else, like where can we find your work? can we push and pass on that you're putting out besides the Kickstarter campaign? All right. Well, I've got kimcrawley.com. So I tried to link to everything professional there. It's basically just a redirect to my Linktree page. So that.
27:38
If anyone is stumped about where to find my books and all that, all of my commercially published books with O'Reilly Media and O'Reilly and all that, they're all linked there. All the media appearances that I've been doing and all my self-published books now, they're all linked there. Yeah. Is there anything else you want us to know? Yeah. So first of all, I want people to have hope.
28:06
that this nightmare will be ending very soon, but there's going to be tremendous damage that we're going to have to deal with. So I'm concerned about adults who have been delegating their thinking to GEN.AI, but I'm even more concerned about children because adults at least have had, hopefully have had some practice with actually reading websites, you know, the old fashioned
28:35
search engine and you go to a website and you read the webpage, reading books, going to the library, you know, navigating the Dewey Decimal system, asking people for advice. But children, like they're more impressionable and I'm getting the feeling, I'm getting all kinds of anecdotes and reports that at a lot of schools, like Gen AI is being implemented into like every
29:04
facet of a kid's school life. And I mean, that's just incredibly disturbing. And it's going to have such tremendously harmful repercussions. And when you're a child and you're being taught to look for answers or chat GPT rather than go to the library or ask an expert or even search the web, right?
29:32
There is scientific research coming out now that is suggesting, and psychology today publishes a lot of it, that's suggesting that this is atrophying people's brains, and it's going to be even worse for children because their brains are just developing, right? So I'm really, really concerned about that. It's going to be a crisis. There are going to be all kinds of people with nervous breakdowns when their gen AI infrastructure is no longer.
30:02
available to them to tell them that there are 27 Rs in strawberry. Right. It's going to be really chaotic. So another problem is there's going to be all kinds of abandoned data centers and people keep asking me, can the abandoned data centers be repurposed as other things? So that is honestly something I have no idea about, which is why I am specifically
30:31
speaking with engineers who specialize in that sort of infrastructure to ask them about that. But it's not like a small town restaurant, they build a structure and then they go out of business and you got to tear down the restaurant building. Like a data center is a behemoth of concrete. It's a bigger deal than tearing down a shopping mall.
30:59
So it's going to cause a lot of harm. One bit of research that Jerry McGovern pointed me to recently through Mastodon is a lot of us are aware of the immense waste of electricity and fresh water, but also the construction of the data centers themselves pollute the water in local communities.
31:23
So yeah, he's been citing something from the Guardian, some journalism about that. When I see anything that is news that's in a webpage, what I do, because you wanted to know about my research process. So when I, I would say probably about half of my research comes from the web, which probably surprises people because your average person is like,
31:50
Well, I go to Google and I just get the AI summary. So how is Kim able to get information from the web these days? They don't know that I don't use Google for anything. Of course I use DuckDuckGo with no AI as my default search. Right. But also when I find a webpage, what I do is I copy the URL.
32:16
And then I go to either the internet archives, so web.archive.org, or I go to archive today. So the URL that's been working for them now has been archive.pe... So I'll use whichever one seems to be working the best at any given moment. And I'll paste the URL and I'll get them to make an archive of that webpage. And then if you look at the citations in my books, I actually link to the archives.
32:46
And the reason why is I'm starting, I've been around now long enough to be burned by 404s. And I don't want my reader, I'm sure most of my readers don't check my citations, but I am fully prepared for me to have some readers who do scour my citations to make sure I'm doing my research well. So I want them to be able to look at my citations and see where I'm getting my information from.
33:14
Yeah, I'm one of those people. appreciate it. It's one of the things I want to talk to you about with techno-fascism is that I really appreciate. There seems to be a move away from citations and indexes and footnotes in a lot of books that I'm reading, or they'll just simply list the books that they read and kind of leave it to your imagination as to what they pulled and what they didn't. But you actually did the work and I really, really appreciate that. I'll tell you, part of it is
33:42
I used to write white papers for tech companies. I wrote white papers for CINAC, which is a vendor that does automated security testing. used to write white. I wrote all kinds of content for JumpCloud and for NGINX. Again, these are companies that a lot of people who work in IT have heard of, but they're not consumer facing companies. So for instance, NGINX makes a lot of the
34:12
computer networking software for like the stuff that's used in cloud deployments for ingress in traffic and managing that sort of thing. all these companies that people indirectly use every day, because most of the web content that people interact with every day is now going through cloud networks, right? But they don't see these companies because they're all on the inside.
34:42
So I wrote about Kubernetes for Nginx and security testing for Synac. Yeah. Most of the brands I've written for are not consumer brands, but they're brands that IT people have definitely heard of. And so when you do that kind of work, you are scrutinized. yeah, if I couldn't come up with a solid citation for any factory.
35:08
Factual claim that I make then it would be negative for me professionally, right? So you just get into the habit that I was a professor for a year But I entered academia without going through the usual epidemic channels so I learned my I basically taught myself my research skills and then honed my research skills in such a way that
35:36
corporations were happy with the nature of my writing bibliographies and stuff like that. That's where I honed those skills, not in academia so much. It was odd because most people are expected to learn that in academia. I've had to teach myself all kinds of things, which is one of the reasons why Gen. AI bothers me so much. uh I was on the web since the 1990s.
36:05
No one sat down with me in the 90s and taught me how to use PCs and how to use the web and all that. I was a child and a teenager on the early worldwide web teaching myself how to do stuff. And I kind of missed the way the internet was in 1998. was a lot more fun.
36:29
I have to say it felt a lot more fun. On that note, just do you think, this is my last question for you. Do you think that in the aftermath that you're going to explore, do we return to that kind of web or do we return maybe to just being more offline and not centering the web as much as we... I personally would like to see the... I'd like to not completely abandon the web, that's for sure.
36:56
One thing, one of the things that does give me hope is there is an IndieWeb movement that you may have heard of. So I think about things like NeoCities for instance, which they're trying to revive GeoCities. There are also people reviving web rings from the web in the nineties and stuff like that. There's a whole like underground community of people building the web the way it was like web 1.0 before corporations ruined it.
37:26
So there's that. And another thing that I talk about, which is a kind of controversial, is I think that we can really utilize the Tor network. The Tor network, using it is completely legal. It's controversial because it made the dark web possible, but there's all kinds of legitimate uses of the Tor network as well. There's all kinds of big corporate brands that actually have a presence on the Tor network.
37:55
There's an official BBC tour website and there's an official tour version of Facebook and a tour version of the New York Times. You need the tour browser in order to visit these websites. You can't use a normal web browser. You have to use the tour browser, which is a Firefox fork, which has a tour client built into it.
38:23
And then these websites have the .onion top level domain. And yeah, so you can use the Tor browser to visit the ordinary clear net web, anything on the web that you want, but you absolutely need that browser to visit Tor websites. And as I said, a lot of them are just like innocuous websites, well, innocuous to some people like the BBC and whatnot.
38:51
but it's also where the so-called dark web exists, you know, markets where people sell illegal things and whatnot. So that's why it's kind of controversial. But the U S government developed the Tor technology and it is legal. That's right. Right. But the thing is it obfuscates your location in a way that is similar, but different than the VPN.
39:20
So basically your traffic goes through a series of nodes and you're not impossible to trace. Sometimes when law enforcement does investigations on the dark web or on the Tor network, they will park at an exit node. And so the way that Tor works, I guess I should kind of explain that. Yes, please. Your PC or your phone has an IP address that it uses to interface with the internet.
39:49
So that IP address is sent when you try to use the internet. And then if it's going through Tor, it'll go to your nearest Tor node. And so that Tor node will know your IP address and it will know the IP address of the next node in the chain. And then it goes to the next node in the chain. And the next node in the chain knows the IP address of the previous node, but it doesn't know your IP address.
40:18
So it just knows the IP address of the previous node and the IP address of the next node that needs to send data to. And it goes through that chain, maybe five or six different nodes until it reaches the exit node, which goes to the web server or other sort of internet server, which is hosted on the Tor network. And so that node pointing to your destination knows the IP address
40:48
to the next node, but it doesn't know your IP address, it has to go through that chain. So that's how it obfuscates traffic. And like, as I said, like U.S. government agencies developed Tor technology. I'm thinking that more more people should be building websites that are like exclusively Tor websites. And we should start taking advantage of doing that.
41:17
for as long as using Tor is still completely lawful. Yes, I agree. The only major downside I would say to Tor is now I find like in Toronto and probably in much of the US, it's now almost as fast as the normal internet. So that's not a big inconvenience, but I hear in other parts of the world where they don't have as many Tor nodes, it gets really, really slow.
41:48
Yeah, can say, mean, from my experience, it's always been slow. Like Tor's always been slow. It does seem faster for whatever the anecdotal, whatever that anecdotally is worth, but it's still, it's still definitely when we train people to use Tor, we constantly warn them it's not going to move as fast as Chrome or Firefox. Maybe I'm kind of spoiled in the part of the world that I am because I use Tor as my VPN, basically.
42:14
Okay. That's that seat. was questions I had for you about from techno fascist survival guy. And that was one of them was like, would you recommend people just is in an either or situation or do you, are you just using Tor and not worrying about the VPN now? Well, I, I keep telling myself that I'm going to deploy my own open VPN on a Raspberry Pi. And there is a specific like open VPN configuration specifically for a Raspberry Pi.
42:44
And that's great for putting a VPN on your own home ULAN. And, the downside is that when you leave your home WLAN, it's not going to support you anymore. You're going to be out of range. Right? So I keep telling myself that I'm going to deploy my own open VPN server and I never get around to it. Now that this Mercury retrograde is going to end on July 23rd.
43:12
Well, it'll probably be after July 23rd by the time you hear this. Maybe that'll be a good time for me to put down 50 bucks on a new Raspberry Pi and deploy my own open VPN server. But for now, is like my default VPN, so to speak. When I'm away from home, Tor, in my opinion, would be the best option. But the thing is, it's a good option for me still because I seem to live in a part of the world where Tor isn't that slow.
43:43
Right. I know a little bit about Canada's internet infrastructure and apparently the backbone of the internet for all of Canada is very close to where I live. Like I can, I can walk to it basically. It's on Front Street West. so that it's definitely a, your mileage may vary kind of. Yeah. If you live right near the central hub of the internet.
44:11
for a nation of 40 million people, you'll have great service. And I just want to, I want to put in the plug for the techno fascist survival guide. I enjoyed it. I needed more time to live it up on Kindle than I was able to get, but I really appreciate it because it looks like we both, you and I wound up coming to the same points from completely different angles from how to protect yourself from fascist and weirdo. So.
44:39
I really like your book as like, seems more, if you've read ours and you're like, oh, that's simple. Kim's book is definitely like a step up and a step in the more technically advanced direction. So I really can't recommend it enough. And the Kickstarter closes on August 5th. So we're going to air this next week early, probably on Monday or Tuesday, 27th and 28th. So we'll make sure we send people to the Kickstarter and make sure you get the level.
45:07
where can get Kim's earlier books, because I really recommend them. Thank you so much. I, yeah, I'm sorry we've had some audio problems today that were kind of frustrating. I genuinely believe in astrology and I'm a lot more open about that now than I used to be. And we're just at the end of a Mercury retrograde and I believe that's what's causing a lot of these issues. I'm right there with you. Yeah. No, please, please keep us posted because I, you know, I think that
45:34
Like you said at the start, you and Gile Durand, or maybe I didn't mention this, but like I felt like as I was reading the techno fascist survival guide, you and Gile Durand are the only books that I've read so far where you've kind of put everything together where you're explaining the history of Silicon Valley and how it was always fascist, which I think is something that's always, always, always overlooked. So I can't thank you enough for that. And please come back. And when the book is out, I would like to talk about that in detail with you. Thank you very much.