So, if you didn't know this, money issues can actually tear your relationship apart. I was doing some research the other day, I was looking through some research studies and one of them was talking about how research shows that the number one reason couples say when they're filing for a divorce in America is actually money. And so, and as our guest Shanti says, when money is the problem, it's not actually really about the money. And so, today we're going to be talking about what it's actually about, how to have these conversations around money, and what to do if your partner's resistant to dealing with the money issue. And so, hi, my name is Matthew Coast and welcome to Commitment Connection. Today, I have Shanti Felden from, she's, she just wrote this book called Thriving in Love and Money. She's actually written a few different books. She does a lot of really great work. She's brilliant. She does research. And not only is she brilliant, but one of the reasons that I really, really like Shanti and I wanted to have her on here was because she's a huge advocate for relationships and marriage. And if you don't know right now, there's kind of this, this big war or this big fight kind of against relationships and marriage. Our culture is really attacking the idea of relationships right now, and it's encouraging and pushing superficial and meaningless interactions between people. And so, I really wanted to kind of put her in the spotlight for you. If you haven't, if you haven't seen her work before, I wanted you to know about it. So, thanks for being with us today, Shanti. Oh, it's a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on. Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about these money issues. So, so if, if you want, I've actually been asked a few different questions from women in our community about money, which was kind of interesting that you're launching this book recently, because I was like, oh, we were just talking about this in our community. And one of the questions that really came up was how do you start to have these conversations about money if you've never brought it up before, if you're kind of dating or you're in a new relationship, or even if you're in a relationship that's been going on for a while, how do you, how do you kind of bring up this conversation of money? I know a lot of people are kind of awkward and weird about it. And so, so what would you say that someone should do? Well, we certainly were in that awkward and weird place too. And when, when Jeff and I started this research, this particular research project, we had been married 22 years at that point. And this was a topic we were never able to talk about well. We, you know, we've done all these research projects over the years.  But this was the one area we were not on the same page. And probably many of your listeners, this is an area that we found statistically, most people are like us. We don't necessarily always fight about it, but we just kind of avoid it.  My guess is that the vast majority of your people are thinking, I don't want to bring it up because, because it's going to get hard and defensive. And the good news is that what we found in the research is that when you're having issues around money and tension around money or you're avoiding it, it's not about the money. It turns out it's about how money makes us feel and how it makes our partner feel. And if you understand that stuff, first of all, it's kind of fascinating. Like, don't talk about it initially. Really just learn about yourself. Like understand why you react a certain way and realize it's about all this other worries and insecurities and expectations, all sorts of stuff running underneath the surface. So learn about yourself first, and then you can learn about your partner. And suddenly of this eye-opening new information that makes you so much more empathetic to each other. And the talking about money flows naturally from that point. Hmm, that's that's pretty interesting. I actually, just to kind of go off of what you were talking about there for a second, I've had kind of when I was growing up, for instance, my family didn't really talk about money at all, right? And we had certainly had money problems. And we just, I mean, I knew that they were going on, but nobody was talking about it, right? And it was kind of this thing where I think when we, when we were growing up, it was kind of like, you know, you'd say something about money and everybody was like, like, this is the topic we don't talk about, right? And so we just kind of hide around it. And then when I was, especially in different parts of my life, I've had money issues before, like no doubt about it. And it was one of those things, at least for me, it was always kind of embarrassing. And it felt like, at least from a man standpoint, I know the idea of not having money, for me, made it feel like I couldn't be really in a relationship, like a real relationship. Because, yeah, because it's like, it's like, I feel like I want to be a provider. I want to be a protector. I want to be able to take care of the woman that I'm with. And if we have a family, I want to be able to take care of that. And so if I'm having issues with money, it just, it stresses me out. I feel like at least in the past, it's made me feel like I wasn't necessarily good enough as a man, you know, and all kinds of things like that. And so I know for a fact that it's definitely something that brings up these different emotions.  And he's like refocusing his life over here on career and business. And so he's not hanging out with me as much. He's not talking to me as much. Like, you know, what, what should I be doing in, in this situation in order to kind of make him feel better and make it, make him feel like it's okay that, you know, he has money issues and, and we don't have to break up because of the fact that he has these money issues. And, and what, what do you think you would say to something like that? Oh my gosh, I hear that all the time. And I mean, we do all sorts of women's events and Jeff and I do marriage conferences and relationship conferences. And that is such a common thing. I've had so many, and it's especially women who will say, you know, he just doesn't, he doesn't care about me because he's working all this time and he's spending so many hours at the office and, you know, really like focusing on money. And, you know, when I go and try to diagnose this, I'm like, he's trying to get to a point where he feels like he's stable enough to ask you to marry him is what's happening. I mean, that, and that is not always the case, but the vast majority of the time, as long as there's not, not something wrong in the relationship, that's what's going on. And, and one of the things that I also just want to tell anyone who's listening to this man or woman is that especially when there's any time of economic uncertainty, when there's periods where people are a little bit more worried about money, this is an area that is huge in the back of the mind statistically for everybody, but especially for men. And this is a, this is a moment where it makes so much difference. If especially a woman, now statistically these numbers tend to be about 80 to 85%, it's not 100. But in general, this is one of the few things we've seen that does have statistical differences between men and women, where it makes all the difference. If you can help remove some of that worry from his mind and, and for him to actually hear you say and believe, you know, honey, listen, I really appreciate all the efforts that you're putting in and the fact that you're killing yourself to try to do overtime or whatever, whatever that is. I so appreciate that.  I just care about us. And I don't need that big thing that you're trying to save up for. I'd rather be together and I'd rather start our life together now. And, you know, that removes so much pressure from the brains of the average man that is really thinking that what she most wants is what he's providing when for us as women, what we most want in most cases is him. Man, that is beautiful, beautiful that you just said that and the way that you said that was just absolutely fantastic. I loved it. You know, and it's, it's so cool to hear stuff like that. And to hear you say something like that.  It's like, OK, I hear that from you and it's almost like I feel a weight kind of coming off of my shoulders. Like I'm like, oh, OK, I can, I can just relax here into this and just, and just be here with this kind of situation without worrying about money and all those kinds of things, right? And, and I, yeah, absolutely. That was beautiful, beautiful advice for sure. Well, thanks. I appreciate that. I mean, we've been doing this research for so many years. I mean, the, what I'm talking about there is some research we did on men and women years ago for our books for women only and for men only. And it was one of those things that I even having done the research on how men think and what percentage of men have this kind of hovering black cloud, like in the back of their brain that's asking, how am I going to be able to provide? Even having heard that and seen that on the survey, we do all these massive nationally representative surveys that cost a bazillion dollars to get really great data. So I knew the data was good. I'd heard this personally from thousands of men. And yet, after seeing how the books were received and after seeing what happened in the hearts of the men, especially once they either read that or heard a girlfriend or a wife say that, that, look, I know you're working so hard to provide. And that's awesome. But what I most want is you, right? And seeing the weight that just seems to lift from the shoulders, it never really goes away statistically for most men. But you can do so much to give them the recognition as a man that you, a, you appreciate what they're already doing, because if they don't hear that, then that shuts them down as well. But that you appreciate what they're doing and their heart behind it. But listen, you need to take the pressure off because I would live with you anywhere. I don't need the big house. I actually, if you don't mind, I actually have a personal example. I'd love to share. Yeah, absolutely. My husband and I actually, when Jeff and I started off our marriage, we were living in Manhattan, living in New York City. And and he is an attorney and I was an analyst on Wall Street. And we were both working tons of hours, right? But his hours were even worse than mine. And he literally was working billable hours, like 100 hours a week, like something you don't think is physically possible. But he was and I never saw him and we were newlyweds. And we were living in a doorman building and sort of a general area of Manhattan. And I was constantly in the rare times that I saw him constantly saying, honey, can't you just tell your boss? No, like, can't you just say, no, I'm not coming into the office on Saturday or can't you do? You know, can we get away for a weekend? Can't you just tell him no?  And it wasn't until he was finally able to articulate these words. And he said, do you think I want to be working this much? Do you think I want to be away from you? And he finally was able to articulate, I'm working this much because I was saying, don't you care about me? Don't you love me? And he said, do you think I want to be working this much? I'm doing it because I care about you. We have a hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt from Harvard that we have to pay off. We're living in a doorman building in New York City because you wanted a doorman building because it made you feel more secure. But yeah, it's a little more expensive. And I'm busting my tail because I love you. And it was this huge moment where I realized without intending to, I had been putting this pressure on him that I didn't even realize he was feeling candidly. And I was able to say, honey, I will live anywhere. I will live in a little like hut in Brooklyn, like and have to commute an hour a day. If that is what it takes, where it takes some of the pressure off of you, we can go quit our jobs right now and you will find another job. We can move to another city, do whatever we need to do so that you can have the kind of life that you want to have as well. And hearing those words, which I kind of assumed he knew. But hearing me actually say that, he said it totally changed everything. And probably within six months, we had left Manhattan and we had moved to where we live now in Atlanta because he recognized I really meant it. I really did care more for him than for what he was providing. So for any woman listening to this who's sort of wondering, I wonder if that's what's going on statistically, probably is. Yeah, absolutely, it probably is. I mean, just knowing guys and I was in kind of the men's dating space for a while and I talked to a lot of them and I still kind of talk to a lot of the guys that are teaching the men's dating space. And I look through some of their forums sometimes. And it's pretty interesting. A lot of men are really, really concerned about it. And a lot of times they feel like sometimes I know women will meet guys that that are kind of in different stages in their life, right? And a lot of guys sometimes if they're kind of in the stage where they're building their empire or whatever you want to call it, some of them are scared to death that they're actually going to meet this amazing woman that they want to be with for the rest of their lives because they're like, I'm not ready yet. You know, I need to be in this other place, right? And there's there's some guys that that when they are there, they'll they understand that it's not that big of a deal. But there's a lot of guys that don't. And so you just you just have to be aware of that and aware that men might have that kind of mentality. And I'm just curious, like, how would you know about, like, whether a guy has these feelings or not, or whether his, you know, whether these are kind of big concerns of his? Is it like something that you start talking to him about? Is it something that that you kind of look at and you're like, OK, I think, you know, this is one of his challenges. I think he's worried about this. Like, what do you what would you have to say about that, Shanti? Well, one of the things actually if you're talking about people in the dating space, primarily there in that question, correct? Yeah. OK. So one of the things we found when we did the surveys of single men and single women, because we've we've done all these surveys from age 15 to 75. So when you look at people in the single not married yet space, whether they're living together or whether they're just dating casually or dating seriously, what we find is that the average man tends to assume that something else is attractive to women than women do. And this is the way you can actually open that conversation just as a casual. Again, if you're just dating, you know, and it's sort of casual conversation time, you're not going to want to like jump into so how do you feel about providing for a family like it doesn't necessarily work that way? But one of the questions that we actually asked the guys on one of the surveys was rank these lists of what you think women find attractive. And it's a good question to ask a guy just, you know, again, for a fun conversation, like, what do you think women mostly find attractive?  And it's telling because the average guy and this is a great way to open that conversation, the average guy, what we found is somewhere between seventy five and eighty five percent of men said that the top three most attractive qualities were buff body, athletic and rich. Those were the three things that guys thought were the most attractive to women. Well, guess what? Those were actually among the bottom three for women. And the top for women was sense of humor, self confident and thoughtful. Those are the top three.  And he mentions money in there. Well, that gives you a place to start to start. Casually putting in his brain, the fact that that, yeah, it's not like that's a bad thing. It's just not for most women at the core. And and for someone, and it is, we found amongst married couples that about that it was seventy percent of married women would trade off the stuff if that was what it took to get more of him. You know, if they would downsize or take cheaper vacations or whatever. If he was working a ton of hours and that was what it took to get more of him. That was seventy percent of married women. But that means thirty percent wouldn't, right? Thirty percent. They do really value that financial provision and that gives them a sense of security. But that's only thirty percent. That's a minority. And so if you're in the seventy, tell them that you're never going to be able to know how each other feels based on assumptions. You just have to talk about it. Yeah, yeah, for sure.  And that's that's like, I love it. I love it. I love reading about statistics. I love looking at research. You know, some of it's kind of like, you know, like you get different research studies that tell you all kinds of different things. Yeah, we see that. Contradict each other. But but it's, you know, it's one of those things. Like what I was going to say, like when you're talking about that, the first thought that came in my mind when you were talking about like the things that women would be most attracted to was emotional connection. That was the first thing that came in my mind was things that would create that emotional connection, the sense of humor and the thoughtfulness. We what we were going after was what are those things that create that? Exactly. Because you can't tell a guy, create emotional connection. Like you have to actually say, how do you do that? Right. And that's one of the things that we found in the for women only and for men only research is a lot of guys, they they really truly don't recognize that, for example, what listening means and how central listening is to a woman's heart. And for a guy, and this is the way Jeff, because I did a lot of the research with my husband, and he's just the average guy's guy, you know, we're not psychologists and he was the captain of the football team in high school. Like he's like, I don't know. What does listening mean?  And that's the way a lot of guys tend to think about it.  I can't remember what the number was. It was like eighty seven percent. It was a really high number that it means listen to my feelings.  A guy is trying to comfort his wife or his girlfriend by saying, honey, just don't think about it. Like you can't do anything till tomorrow, so just don't think about it. Well, that's actually pretty much impossible for most women. And especially in a time, you know, when there's something big going on or whatever and it makes a difference in for a guy to know that instead of saying, just don't think about it or trying to fix it, that it makes all the difference if he will actually pull those feelings out of her. If he will actually say, I'm so sorry that he embarrassed you. What what happened and, you know, asking questions like, well, what did the what did you hear from your colleague? Like, did you feel like your colleague was kind of laughing at you? Like what and a guy hearing that can get kind of alarmed because for him, it's like pouring gasoline on a fire. He's like, you know, it's going to explode if I ask more questions. But you'll see that she's got all these tense feelings inside of her. It's not gasoline on a fire. It's more like you're pulling your your drawing poison out of a wound. And and that for most women is what listening means. Listen to my feelings, draw them out of me, help me feel heard. And that is then what builds that sense of closeness that sort of transcends for most women, everything else in terms of the importance of the relationship. Yeah, that's that's really, really good information. And I just want to kind of flip it around, too, because, you know, since our audience is mostly women here, I want to talk a little bit about what that kind of can mean from your standpoint as a woman, if you're interested in getting a guy to start doing some things and feeling masculine and manly around you, right? Because men, when they look at problems, I've heard this thing not too long ago where it was like men tend to want to either fix something or they want to minimize it, right? So they either want to fix a problem or they or they want to make it as small as possible so they can deal with it later or think about it some other time when it's possible for them to fix it, right? So one of the things that you can do as a woman, if you want to make a man feel masculine and like he's he's got some use in your life and, you know, he's he's there to do something and he's got a role to play with you is to actually give him something to fix, right? Something that was a time when you don't feel like you just want to, you know, talk and and and get a connection and just vent something out and and get get those those emotions of of connecting with him that way. And you actually want him to to feel like he can do something for you and feel more invested in you. And and we kind of use the term chasing with this because it's like an investment. You can give him something to fix, right?  So anyway, that is that is very true. The only caution is that it's got to be genuine, right? I mean, if it's if it's you as a woman going, OK, well, I'm not emotionally attached to it. So Pat Pat Pat, I will let him feel like he's helping me. That that's going to backfire because, again, with both of us, we have to understand what's actually going on under the surface and what's actually going on under the surface for so many men. And this is going to shock some women listening to this. And this applies in every area of life. We've been talking a bit about money. This is a huge deal when it comes to money, but it's a huge deal when it comes to all sorts of issues in relationship. Is it in every area of life? What's actually going on underneath the surface of you men is that you're not as confident as you look. And there's a lot of hidden self-doubt running underneath the surface and most men that we don't even realize is there because you guys have pulled the wool over our eyes. Like we we really think you think you're all that, right? And that is not the case. And so when a guy wants to fix something, he is he is absolutely deep inside, is wanting to be needed. He's he's doubting that he has anything to offer this amazing woman that he is married to. And I want to be a great husband, but am I? I want to be a great dad, but I don't I don't know if I know what I'm doing. And so and I want to be a great salesman or whatever it is that he doesn't work. But, you know, somebody's going to find out. I'm not sure I know what I'm doing. Now, we women have plenty of our own insecurities, but that's not one of them. Like we don't walk around feeling like an imposter. And and so it's it's really important to recognize that when you're giving the man in your life something to fix, it's got to be something real where he you really do need him and a lot of women are like, I don't need a man. Well, you know what, if that's the case, then I would really encourage you to rethink whether this, you know, if you're dating somebody and that's the way you feel, that's not the good foundation for a relationship. Because when you get to a committed lifelong marriage, you know, relationship like marriage, you're both supposed to need each other and you're you're both supposed to really truly want to go from, you know, you and me to we. And it means that you're supposed to be able to depend on and rely and rely on one another. So that would be my only sort of caveat to what you said, is it has to be genuine? No, and you said some amazingly great information there. You know, the one one thing about about men being more insecure than than we kind of appear like we are. And it is it's a big thing because we want to be respected by people. We want people to look at us and feel like we're the super humans, you know, running around like, I can do it, you know, and and so it I think for a lot of women, they kind of get this impression that if a guy, you know, if he sees you and he's attracted, he just comes over. If he if he, you know, if there's something that's going on, he will go and do it. Right.   And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, that there's actually they've done some statistics on on approaching to, for instance, like, let's just take approaching topic and the overwhelming majority of men will not go over and just approach a woman that he doesn't know and is just standing over there unless she gives him some kind of indication that he's interested in him coming over and talking to her because he has to risk getting up, walking in front of all these people, right, going over and talking to her. And I've done it before, right, where I was just like, I went and started talking to some some woman that I saw and I go over there and start talking and it just blows up in my face and you just turn around.  Right. And guys don't want to feel that way. Guys don't want to be rejected. Guys are scared of of having their ego smashed like that. And, you know, maybe it's true that they're not really worthy of having a great woman in their life and and all the other, you know, real deep insecurities that they have within themselves. And so it's it's really important to realize that and recognize that and that we're all just people. You know, I think a lot of times a lot of women in my community sometimes we just set a new rule in my community where you're not allowed to do any kind of you're not allowed to call men bad names, right? You're not allowed to do it anymore. You can't call men, you know, powers or yeah, it's absolutely. Right. And some of the women left our community because of it. And I'm like, that's fine. You know, we are changing things. Right. It for in one way, you know, in the way that I kind of explained it is it's it's when you do that, it's like objectifying him. Right. It's like turning him into this object.  All of a sudden he's Mr. Coward, right? Or Mr. Liar or Mr. Whatever. And so it what it does is it is it makes it so that you you feel like you can do these things and say these things and act these ways that you normally wouldn't even do or act and and is totally below you as a person towards this guy because you don't feel like he's actually this human being anymore. And instead he's kind of this object that you've created in your mind. And so if I could point out, it's also it's not just a terrible habit just because as a human being, it's a terrible habit. To speak down to anybody. I mean, that's just that's unkind.  Nobody wants that, right? But it's also a terrible habit because especially once you get into a relationship, whether it's dating, you know, sort of casually all the way up to a lifelong marriage, recognize that the man that you're with, he really truly this is this is not sort of fiction. He really, truly does doubt whether he's any good at what he does, whether he measures up, whether he's adequate in any way. You know how we as women, the easiest way to compare it is statistically women are more likely to have an insecurity about. Am I lovable, right? Am I special? Am I beautiful? Am I worthy of being loved for who I am on the inside? That's that is statistically more likely to be the internal thought of a woman. And so we love to feel loved. That's when I, you know, when my husband reaches over and takes my hand, it says, I love you, right? Like, that's that helps. Well, for men, we women have to completely change our grit and recognize that the insecurity and the doubt for men isn't am I lovable? It's am I able? Am I any good at what I do on the outside? That's that's what it is. Again, not everybody, but the vast majority. And so he's just like, you're looking to feel loved and cherished. He's looking to feel like you think that he's got something going on that you need him, that you admire him, that you appreciate what he does. And we actually found that for single men and even more so for married men, but for single men, the single most attractive quality in a woman outside of the initial sort of visual attraction, the single most sort of intrinsic quality in a woman is whether he feels like she appreciates and admires him. That is the single most thing you're talking about, you know, a woman that you've, I don't know, men at the office and you're kind of nervous to approach her, ladies, if you're interested in him, the best possible thing that you can do by far is to look for something that you can verbally appreciate about what he's done because he's doubting it. He really truly doesn't think that, you know, he's necessarily knows what he's doing as an analyst or as a salesman or as the project manager on whatever. And when you tell him something like, you know, that was a really good presentation. They I know that they didn't give you much time. You did a really good job. As long as it's again, as long as it's genuine, that is exactly what he needs to build him up. And you're building a habit that's then going to transfer to eventually, once you find your soulmate and you get married, look for things to tell your husband, thank you for. Look for things that you appreciate him doing. And that like it fills up that place inside of him. That really questions that every day. And it really is what is necessary to build a great relationship. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and another thing that I just kind of want to mention there, based on what you're just talking about is this idea of. So we're talking about the emotions of men and sometimes men don't feel like they're good enough or sometimes men have ideas about what's going on and what they're supposed to be doing that's completely different than what you think he should be doing and what's going on in all these different things in the relationship. And one of the things that ends up happening and I see this a lot in my community and sometimes it's warranted and sometimes it's not, is a lot of women when they'll like come up and ask some questions. Right. And this woman's married and she's got some issues that are going on in her marriage and she's like, what should I do? And like, you'll get this laundry list of women being like, dump on, you know, get a divorce, right?  Right. Sometimes it's like, you know, you might want to start by having real conversations that that's that that might be the starting point instead. Right. Actually talk to him and find out what's going on. You know, make sure that he's committed to the relationship. If he's committed to the relationship and you're committed to the relationship, there's a lot that you guys can do, you know, it's like walking away from it. It might not really be the answer a lot of times. And if you're kind of in this mindset, like you're just, you know, you're just trying to get out of it no matter what. Right.  And sometimes I hear it with women because they they have kind of these and it's with men too. Right. Like I say women, I say women, but a lot of it's with men as well. Right. Where where they'll they'll see things and they'll just end up feeling like they need to jump ship because it's supposed to be this fairy tale, right, where you guys get together and everything's perfect and and, you know, a great relationship. There's no problems. Right. And and it's perfect. And I've seen it over and over and over again. And it's usually the people who pretend like there aren't any problems. They pretend like there aren't going to be conflicts. Right. Like it's two people coming from completely different backgrounds. And usually most people have different values. They have different things going on in their life. They were they were treated differently when there are children. They they learned how to connect and be in a relationship completely differently when they're when they're being raised and and the relationships that they were in, if they he was in another relationship recently, she might have had completely different expectations for him and what his behavior is supposed to be like.  Right. And so there's a lot of things that that come are going to come up no matter what. Right. I mean, it's possible, I guess. I don't know that I've heard about a couple just getting together and never having any problems, but very rare. Right. And honestly, one of the things that we found just to encourage people again, especially if this is the it doesn't matter whether you're married or not, but especially in sort of the dating world where you're trying to figure this out, you know, for the future is to recognize we actually did another one of our studies was on what are the secrets of the happiest couples? Like, what are they doing differently than everybody else? Because it's really easy when you're not happy. It's really easy to think, well, go find somebody else to be happy with. That's kind of that tends to be a default, especially in today's culture and sort of recognizing that now, wait, like whoever I go be with next, the common denominator in these relationships is me. And so I kind of need to work on me regardless of where I'm going to be, because some of those same issues are going to follow me and recognizing as much as you hate to admit it, it's true. And when we did the study on the happiest marriages and the happiest couples and what were the common denominators, the big lie, it turns out, is that, well, we just don't have complimentary temperaments. Like he has this kind of temperament. I have this kind of temperament. We're just not made for each other. So I'm going to divorce him. It's just we're never going to stop fighting. Turns out that is absolutely not true. That the happiest couples came from every conceivable type of temperament, childhood background, experience, this, that, like different ways of handling money, like every conceivable thing that some people say is the reason that we have problems and know the entire focus of what we found around that research project was it's entirely about how you choose to handle it. And it's entirely about how the attitude that you choose to have. And that could be a whole nother program, because there were so many things that we found that really make a difference. But the key is to be encouraged that we did find very statistically, like off the charts in terms of kind of the correlation, the statistical significance is that the stuff that we found that makes a difference. If you're in a difficult place in your relationship, it's usually not the big stuff that's going to make the big difference. You don't have to have solved huge problems.  Like stop that habit and you immediately change your mindset about a lot of things. That's just one example. Yeah, no, that's fantastic, fantastic. So by the way, if you're watching this right now, make sure let us know if you get what we're talking about in the chat. And if you if you don't get what we're talking about, ask questions about it. But if you have any questions about your situation or anything that's going on with you in your life right now, let us know about it. I'm going to go and check out the the comments that we have right now. And by the way, you can check out Shanti's new book at Thrive and Love and Money. There's there's a link right here. You can go check that out. There should be a link above or below, depending on where you're watching this right now. And so let's see what people are saying. Was there anything else you wanted to mention about any of that, Shanti? Well, the main thing while you're looking for the comments, the main thing, if we're translating this over into the love and money conversation, which is where we started because we kind of went all over the men and women conversation. But when it comes to sort of understanding what's under the surface, when it comes to money, it turns out it's it's not necessarily gender related. There's a few things that are like the fear that every guy has of am I going to be able to provide for the family that tends to be statistically gender related. But it turns out that again, if you want a great relationship around money, it's not the big things. It's the little ones. It's like recognizing that one of the factors we found that was underneath the surface and having a great relationship or not around money is recognizing that we tend not to be valuing what the other person values. We just don't recognize that somebody else has this other thing that really matters to them, and it's totally legitimate. It's just probably totally different than what would matter to us.  It's just somebody cares about something different. And once you actually can listen again, we were talking about listening if you can listen and try to get at what's underneath the surface of that. And we did all that research, try to figure out what those things were. You kind of empathize with each other a lot more. You have a lot more compassion, and you don't think the other person is kind of stupid for handling money the way that they want to handle money. Yeah, for sure. No, for sure. I mean, I totally, totally agree with that. And that's that's that's pretty interesting. So OK, let's look at some of these comments here. So CJ says, what do you do with a man that has more money and he's always talking about what he did when it comes to spending more money in your relationship? She says, it makes me feel belittled like I don't do anything or haven't contributed to our relationship. Oh, man. Hey, listen, was was your name CJ? I think with her name CJ, first of all, I feel your pain. And I hear what you're saying, because it can be so frustrating. And yet, can I tell you what I suspect is going on underneath the surface there? That sounds and it may, you know, it may not be. But I've interviewed and surveyed many men and women and heard very similar things in a dynamic where the man is feeling like you just don't respect him. Like you just don't appreciate him. You don't you don't feel like or he doesn't feel like you need him. And so he's going, hey, see what I did. See, I bought this. See, I care about you. See, I bought you these diamonds. Like he's trying in sort of a clumsy way in the way that he thinks would matter to you. He's trying to get props. He's trying to hear a good job. That's what his heart is longing for. And I know that for you, you're thinking, what? It's like making me feel belittled like I haven't contributed enough. OK, so here's my challenge for you. And you may think this is ridiculous, but just hear me out for a second. For the next, let's say, two weeks, pick an easy number, two weeks, every day, find one thing or more that you can say thank you for to him, something he's done that, I don't know, Maui, he mowed the lawn or he bought this or he did that. Find something to say thank you for every single day and try to stop the natural thing that sometimes we do where we're critical of something because he didn't quite do it right. And like you didn't put the dishes in the dishwasher right. Like here's how it works. OK, just stop that for a couple of weeks, try it. And you may see some of the stuff that he's doing that makes you feel belittled just disappear because he's feeling more built up by you and like you do appreciate him. He doesn't have that sort of need to kind of establish himself. I know this probably sounds funny. If you don't believe what I'm saying about men being insecure and needing this, don't believe me. Just try it and see what happens. Yeah, love it. Love it. Hope you're listening, CJ. Hope you're listening. All right, let's I'm sure. OK, so Sherry says, how do you have a conversation with a man when you know you have more money?  Maybe I'm, you know, doing all these things. Like what do you what do you have to say about that? Listen, that's very common today. I can't remember what the number was on our survey, but it was something like 18 percent ish of women earned more than their partner. I can't remember exactly, but it was something like that. It was something about one in five, which is which is a pretty large number. Especially when you compare it to historical numbers. And the thing for women to recognize is that, A, of course, there's nothing wrong with that. That's awesome. Like there's no reason why there has to be a problem from that kind of income disparity. The only thing that creates the problem is if the man feels that as a result, you think he's inadequate or inferior. And so how do you help avoid that from happening? How do you keep a man from feeling inadequate or inferior? And actually, the answer is exactly what I just told CJ, which is to look for things to appreciate. And it's got to be genuine. Again, this is not like drumming it up and rolling our eyes because he's going to be able to tell. But no, seriously, like, what is it that you can appreciate? And I'll give you an example from our own life. There was a period a number of years ago where Jeff, Jeff and I both were running our own businesses and and mine was taking off. And I was doing all this research and writing these books and they were best sellers and I was speaking all over the country. And at the same time, Jeff's company ended up he was starting a tech company and the market just was crashing. And he just couldn't make a go of it. He tried.  And he was feeling like a failure. And it made and and he his money, so to speak, the stuff that he felt like he was earning on his own talent, his own skill was going way down. And suddenly the money that he felt like I was earning, even though it's all joint money, he felt like it was mine, was going up and he was feeling inadequate. He needed to hear me tell him just, for example, there were a couple of months where he was a stay at home dad and he needed to hear me tell him just how much I loved watching him with the kids. We had these two little kids and he was just an incredible father. And that was me looking at the things that he was incredible because he did things very differently than I would have. And yet he really was a good dad. And it made all the difference for him to see that I truly appreciated that you look for those things that may not be monetary and yet those are the things that are going to matter just as much in the end if he knows that you mean it. Cool, cool. She actually she has a follow up question to this and it's if you get serious, how do you set up your money, especially if it's a second marriage? The great question. Hey, listen, I'll tell you what we found in the research. And truly, I mean, the thriving and loving money book, this is one of there's a whole chapter on this because it is so tempting, especially for us when we're kind of strong, kind of opinionated, maybe semi-independent minded women. It is really easy in a second relationship, especially, but people do this in the first marriage as well to kind of try to protect yourself and have like, this is my money over here and this is your money over here. And hey, send me the money that I need for the utilities or I'll send you the money for half the mortgage or whatever. Right. It's very easy to say I'm going to protect myself and set up money separately. And yet what we found statistically is that is actually likely to create some of the problems in the relationship you're trying to protect yourself from. It's actually going to create and build a bit of a wall because there's a lack of trust there. And that wall and that lack of trust ends up probably going higher rather than lower because you can tell you don't quite trust each other and that actually can bring down the relationship as opposed to what feels more risky but is actually safer, much safer statistically. Whereas you say, you know what? This is marriage. This is I'm going to say that we have no eject button. I'm going to drop all my barriers. I'm going to be at risk, so to speak. That's what it feels like to open up completely to this other person and open myself up and choose to trust you. And the vast majority of relationships that is the winning strategy, not the most risky one because there's only a tiny, tiny percentage we found of relationships where there's not goodwill and there's a reason for a lack of trust. That happens sometimes, but it's very small compared to the likelihood that you'll actually hurt your relationship by withholding yourself and your money. Yeah, it's kind of that whole concept that we're talking about earlier about being actually like fully committed, right? Like actually being committed and how much you can kind of solve and figure out and get through if you're both fully committed to this and you're really in it. You don't have one foot out the door, you know, waiting for something to happen. So you can just you're like, oh, I knew it. I knew that this was going to happen. Now I'm going to run, right? And instead, you know, actually being there in it and and like fully committing to it and having real conversations. And, you know, it's it's amazing. I mean, it's just absolutely amazing what you can overcome when you're both really committed and fully. Absolutely. Well, we actually found that was one of the the studies, like I said, we did this, the studies of the happiest marriages. What was it that the happiest couples were doing differently than anybody else? And one of the things we found is that they went into marriage, whether it was a remarriage or first marriage, they went into it saying, this is for life. There is no eject button because that if there is kind of even that option, it's easier to view it as an option as opposed to, well, we have no choice but to figure out how to make this work.  So let's figure out how to make it work. And once you do that, it was it's astounding how much both people end up getting creative and they kind of go, OK, I've got to work on myself. And we actually found, by the way, that that mindset, it actually works to really create a wonderful marriage, even if only one person starts out with that mindset, believe it or not. Nice, that's awesome. So there's an assessment over on your website there. Can you talk a little bit about what this assessment is? Yeah, the assessment at thriveandlovinmoney.com is just it's this assessment that we built based on our research. It's a very simple assessment. It probably takes five minutes and it's sneaky how simple it is because it was based on this three research project where we were pulling out the the ability to help somebody understand where am I starting in love and money? Like where where are the things that are already good and strength and where are the things that we really need to work on that we may not even have recognized were issues about like communication, for example, or about kind of some of those different values that we sometimes have and we don't really realize that that's what's getting in the way when it comes to money. And again, this is about money and relationships. Some of the other stuff that we've been covering is that's a different assessment about different books. But when it comes to these matters, what is it that is going to really make the biggest difference if I recognize, huh, I do need to work on that. And so that's what the assessment is designed to to dig out very quickly. Awesome. All right, well, and if you're here with us right now and you want to go check out that assessment and and learn more about this and make sure that you're setting yourself up to have the best relationship you possibly can, go check out thrive and love and money and dot com and check out the assessment there, check out Shanti's book. I also suggest that you go and check out her other books, too, because she has some really amazing books out there. They're all really highly rated. There's one called for women only that one is a great book. I highly, highly recommend it. There's a few more that I saw. I didn't even know that she had on Amazon. You might want to go and check those out, too, because I was looking through them and the ratings were just amazing.  So my suggestion is you go and check out her book, go check out her other stuff and become familiar with what it is that Shanti does because she has great information. She does great research and her products are absolutely phenomenal. I actually didn't interview with Shanti. I think it was like four or five years ago and it was for this really small program that I had at the time that I just created.  And and after I created it and women started buying the program, what we actually found was that more people came to me and they're like, you know what, that interview you did was actually a lot better than the program you put together. And I was like, oh, my God, you know, but her stuff is awesome. Right. And then hopefully my stuff has gotten a lot better since then. But but thank you so much for being with us here today, Shanti. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you, everybody who's who's watching us right now. The women in our community are some of the most beautiful, amazing, smartest women in the entire world. And so thank you, everybody who's with us here today.  This is it for the interview and always remember you are worth it. Well, we'll speak with you again soon.


Welcome, everyone. This is the second event in the Breakthroughs and Computing series. Yesterday, we had the event with Nick Bostrom, and we spoke about digital minds and AI. And tonight, we're going to be speaking with Ahmed Gapour and Max Techmark. We're going to be starting with a talk from Ahmed on cryptographic privacy and transparency and a fireside with Will Scott. Afterwards, Max will join and will have a fireside with me. Before we started, I wanted to walk through a little bit of the impetus for this event. So a protocol is we think about computing and the power of computing. And we think of the tremendous scale of the massive computing systems that we run and how this system is getting integrated with our daily lives. How this superpower computer, superpower granting machine, is enabling us to interact in tremendous ways, but at the same time, can be abused and subverted and potentially be a harmful system. When we think about the way in which systems have evolved across the internet, we now have many cases of, or we've seen a large swath of cases of severe abuses that when maybe individually are very bad and very significant in their totality and in their trajectory are extremely alarming. So what we wanted to do was to have a discussion with people who have a level of foresight in this arena to try and think about what the future may hold. We already have many examples and many cases of using the existing information in social networks or just available through other kinds of information gathering systems to manipulate mass groups of people. And we now have several examples of feedback loops and control theory style systems to orient and coordinate large populations. So the impetus for this event also came from a conversation that Max and I had a few months ago about how, about extra risks and the importance for lots of work on many areas, things like biotechnology, climate, AI, nuclear weapons and so on, and how the potential emergence of our William States represents an extra risk at this kind of scale. Like it might not itself be an extra risk because it itself might not lead to extinction, but it might create the conditions by which we lock in an extremely dangerous environment and from which there we might get into extra risks. So in a moment we'll start with Amit and Will and after that Max and I will speak. I want to dedicate this evening to George Orwell who gave us a little bit of a glimpse through his famous book, although it was perhaps too generous on how weak those Orwellian systems might be. In reality the technologies that we have might be extremely, extremely powerful and might get us to lead us into a position where it might be very difficult to recover from this. So let's try and prevent it. And with that I will hand off the floor to Amit who I think will speak for a bit and then we'll join. Thank you. Thanks so much, Juan. I hope everyone can hear me. Good evening. My name is Ahmed Kapoor. I am the Chief Legal Officer of NIM technologies, Swiss company that provides privacy infrastructure at the network level. I'm also an Associate Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. I want to thank the conference organizers and especially Juan and Will for inviting me to speak about the importance of individual privacy in realizing a transparent society. It's quite humbling for me to talk about this topic because I'm quite passionate about it. And so over the next 10 minutes or so I just want to set up the backdrop for my chat with Will with some very basic defining here. So privacy and transparency seem to be at odds with each other. So on the one hand, you have privacy, which is typically defined as the control of information to the exclusion of others, where on the other hand you have transparency, which is thought to include as part of its definition almost always the openness to public scrutiny. And so transparency in the organizational sense signifies openness and is often thought of as being the antidote to corruption and hypocrisy exactly for the reason that in a democracy, the way you get rid of corruption or hypocrisy is by calling it out. And this accountability that's facilitated is what makes transparency such an important tool and why it is thought of as being the currency of trust. Now, the reason that we need individual privacy to realize a transparent society is precisely because no one should fear retaliation of any kind for revealing government or corporate abuse. And I think that nothing really exemplifies this more than whistleblowers such as my colleague, Chelsea Manning, who is now a security engineer at NIM technologies, those that are documenting government brutality as those that documented here the brutal murder of George Floyd in the United States and, of course, those that are documenting evidence of war crimes and other atrocities on a hot battlefield. So what does this have to do with crypto? What are we in crypto doing to help? And I think one way, or at least an example of the ways that we in crypto are trying to help is a project that NIM technologies and protocol labs recently partnered up on over in Ukraine at the Kiev Tech Summit. This was a hackathon, and we partnered with protocol labs on a bounty for something called a non-drop. Now the intention for a non-drop, the goal, essentially, was to facilitate a safe and secure revelation of information on the ground in Ukraine in a manner that did not pose a risk of tracing, and therefore a risk of retaliation by the enemy, in this case, Russia, who was by all accounts a very sophisticated adversary, at least in cyberspace. Like, in other words, they have the capability to perhaps do traffic analysis on the whole country and trace almost any communication. And then, of course, the purpose, ultimately, was to account for war crimes and to verify existing evidence that might be in the hands of the Ukrainians. At its core, the core of the technology is essentially a mash-up of the features that the NIM network has and IPFS, of course. So the core of the core technology for NIM is a mix net, which essentially takes data from ordinary users, mixes it together using encryption, makes everything look identical, and spits out information packets in a manner that cannot be traced back to their source. In other words, it protects people, or it protects against people from watching the network along doing metadata surveillance and other forms of IP tracing. And now, while NIM provides this sort of anonymity layer that allows users to transmit data without revealing who they are, the information gets stored on the decentralized storage network of Filecoin. And in this way, it enables witnesses to upload the evidence without fear of retaliation, but also without fear that their media will be tampered with or destroyed. And the permanence of IPFS is critical to this. Now, in closing, before handing off to Will, I just want to emphasize that the existence of a hot battlefield and an illegal occupation in Ukraine only amplifies the reality that all of our network communications are exposed, all of our network communications are at risk, and they are at risk of surveillance or censorship by any sophisticated adversary, whether that be an industry competitor looking for an edge, whether that be an oppressive government or a war criminal, as is the case in Ukraine. I will mute now and hand off to Will. Thank you very much. You got into NIM a little bit and the importance of MixNet. We should probably just dive a little bit more into there so that we've got a concrete basis. You clearly see this as an opportunity. Why do we need a MixNet as a building block? And how is something like NIM going to be able to give us privacy in a way that has that unique opportunity? So the problem that the NIM network solves writ large is the problem of the God's eye view, right? And that is the all-seeing adversary that is sophisticated enough to do correlation analytics between inputs and outputs and basically through a number of various attacks that investigate the timing of packets when received by an anonymity network and when they're released by it. And the size of the packets through doing analytics on that are able to then trace back packets and identify their sources, essentially. And this was a revelation that came out during the, well, thanks to Edward Snowden and the NSA revelations of 2015. And it was at that time that we realized that the best network that we had, the best privacy network that we had at the time was Tor, the onion router. And it was subject to both of these attacks, right? The attack where the size of the packets is dynamic in the Tor network and therefore, as well as the timing of the packets exiting the Tor network. So the EU at the time, or sorry, the European Commission, I believe at the time, put out a call for a research academics to essentially build or design a network that could withstand even NSA surveillance. The mixed-net does this by essentially mixing all packets of information and making sure that they are released out of the network in similarly sized, similarly timed packets. And it does this by inserting a lot of noise. It's very expensive in terms of the resources that it takes, like any other anonymity network. And so this is coupled with another innovation. So the first is, of course, the mixed-net itself, which absolves us of these two sort of God's eye view vulnerabilities that we have in our communications. And the second is really taken from Bitcoin itself. And that is the idea where I believe it was Adam Beck mentioned to CEO of NIM, Harry Halpin that, well, one thing that the proof of work, one thing that he sort of like would do over is instead of having computers hack on and do all these impossible and meaningless math problems, wouldn't it be great if these computers that were mining were actually doing something that was going towards privacy, right? That was helping to make the internet more private and so taking that, right, we at NIM incentivize our nodes through a token, essentially. So we've got this global incentivized, permissionless, decentralized mixed-net that absolves us of two major vulnerabilities that most other networks have. So for me, it's a huge danger, you know. What are the trade-offs? You've still got latency. Do you think there's a way to make everyone use this? Is that the goal? Absolutely, yes. So the goal is to provide privacy infrastructure for general traffic, right? General messaging traffic. It's not unique to any type of messaging. And I think that, you know, so just as background, you are talking to the general counsel. I do have an engineering degree, right? But at some point when we get way deep into numbers and stuff, right? I might have to defer to the team back at NIM, right? So what we have done, at least, is come up with a tokenomics in a manner that we believe the more users we get, we will be able to scale to in a manner that actually keeps data rates feasible, you know, for use. So yeah, I definitely bet the farm on this and, you know, have dropped everything to join NIM just a few months ago for this reason. So maybe you brought up your sort of general counsel role and that's probably, I guess, relates really well to the framing that we had at the beginning, which is there is abuse and how do we deal with this? So we get anonymity of communications. Who are the targets and how does this shift that balance? In the context of whether the system can be abused, is that the idea? Yeah, I mean, you add an anonymity system and now, I mean, as we've seen in Tor before, both the system itself and then participants of it get take on risk in that. You've got an incentivization system and I guess you've got a couple of things that you must have grappled with, which is how does a very concrete incentive get weighed against a very nebulous risk of being made an example of. And then yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, I think from at least the legal standpoint, I think networks are very much in the clear. I mean, the idea of, let me start with this, right? A privacy network is not a privacy coin and is not a tumbler or a mixer, it is like a VPN, right? And in the world, there are only maybe a handful of countries that absolutely ban VPN, right? And the rest of the world is at least at the state of play where they won't cross the line where they start to actually censor a network itself, right? Because censoring a VPN, censoring an ISP, censoring something like the Tor network or censoring the NIM network, all of a sudden we're getting into the terrain where we're thinking, well, any dual-use tool that facilitates communications, now you're thinking about, now we're talking about the slippery slope of censoring telephone communications, right? So I think that one sort of brilliant or a great sort of quality that we have at NIM and our product is that it is a network, right? It abides by the principles of end-to-end point stability, and it leaves regulation, it leaves the regulators an area to focus on which is what happens after the network or what happens before the network, right? So in the network itself, I think it's in the clear from at least something like 97% of the world in terms of regulation. Whether that could change, sure. Yeah, I believe in, I think that especially in the area of where there is technical ignorance, right? And we wave scary sort of signs at people telling them that crimes are committed and folks use this new thing called the telephone. What's the telephone? Oh my God, band match it, right? That's the sort of idea, right? And so, but instead of like, we're all accustomed to what a telephone is. I just sort of hope that through education and other sort of initiatives, we can get folks to sort of back off the scare of tech. One of the things you did at the beginning of that answer that I think was interesting was drawing that clear distinction of NIM being a utility network rather than a privacy coin. Do you think there's a different set of risks? I mean, we saw the beginning of a set of sanctions where there's clearly this worry around things happening that are financial. Do you think that's going to be sort of the focus of legislation for a while over? Absolutely, yeah. So basically, and I say that not based on my role as general counsel as NIM. I say this more with my background in national security and criminal law. So for years before going into academia, I started out my career as a human rights lawyer doing Guantanamo cases. I later did work on federal criminal cases, espionage cases, hacking cases, national security cases. Through that, I kind of like began to accumulate some sort of knowledge base and intellectual capital about how these things work, right? So what happened in 2015 was we had an executive, we had a executive order by Barack Obama that essentially declared malicious cyber incidents to be a national emergency, right? The second we declared malicious cyber incidents, we elevated the risk to that of a national emergency. We put it sort of on the same page as terrorism, right? And other national emergencies. That is what allows the government to, for example, designate the Lazarus Group, right? As a specially designated national that we are not to deal with and basically equivocating something like the Lazarus Group from the perspective of sanctions with something like Al-Qaeda or Bin Laden or something like that, right? So once you have brought the problem to escalate the problem to that level, and now you've basically, you haven't yet taken out the sledgehammer, but you have access to the sledgehammer, the regulatory sledgehammer to do almost anything, right? Because of the national security interests. So that's the first phase, right? Second phase is in trying to get rid of the national security emergency, right? We at least in the United States have focused on first, well, ultimately we focused on ransomware and the problem that ransomware poses for the United States. And also the fact that ransomware and it's sort of, at least the belief is that it began to snowball only after we sanctioned North Korea for certain attacks on the United States. Most of them were, all of which, sorry, were information attacks, right? Cyber attacks, right? Sony and then, well, the list goes on until the pipeline attack, right? But ultimately, it was, well, a couple of things happened. First it was like, okay, well, we've sanctioned North Korea, but they were getting millions and millions of dollars with ransomware payouts, right? And how do we deal with ransomware? Do we tell people that they're not allowed to pay ransomware? Well, we've already done that. Do we designate the group as a terror, as a specially designated national? We've done that. In fact, paying ransom to the Lazarus group is a crime punishable by 20 to 35 years in prison, depending how it's charged, right? So, and that didn't work, right? And so the next phase is, okay, well, let's go after the money, right? Let's control the money in this situation. If you sort of look back on any major sort of surveillance push, and I include financial surveillance, I'll allow the Patriot Act and the anti-money laundering statute. So basically resulted in the travel rule and the other rules that require us to, sorry, that require us to essentially have a stricter sort of retention and reporting requirements for money transfers, not from banks per se, but from something like a Huala Western Union and so on, right? So now I think the focus is on ransomware, but the problem is that we are dealing with entities, the problem is we're not dealing with the same sort of brick and mortar type of money transfer, right? And so applying that old law to this new technology is especially difficult and it's resulted in some very sort of bold moves on the part of the government. For instance, most recently the designation of an algorithm as especially designated national an algorithm with no actual humans, but I know personhood, right? So when you think of designation of something, you think of like, okay, a company, an organization, an entity, whatever it is, it's going to have something that at the very least has some sort of personhood. Now what personhood means, is there a distinction between an automated sort of smart contract and a person? I believe so. I think the automated smart contract can't make decisions. I think the automated smart contract can't challenge a designation of being especially designated natural, even though it has all the same sort of impact on the associates, sorry, on the actual code, but also all of those that sort of associate with the code. And that has had some sort of a trickle down effect, I think, and has caused very reasonable panic, I think, in not just the crypto industry, but I think also just the open software industry writ large. Yep. I guess. Sorry, that was a very long answer. I kind of lost myself halfway in there. I think it's a useful progression. And maybe the thing then that I'll sort of ask you is, money has been a source where we've seen the government go and various governments think about a lot because it's very quantifiable what they're losing and what these risks around this are. But the other thing that governments care a lot about is stability and we see this in the, there might be cyber threats to our national infrastructure, but also we see this in plenty of countries that just don't like politicians being made fun of in ways that they find embarrassing or challenged and that they will censor websites or censor voices that they see challenging that stability or that they'll put in restrictions to attempt hacking of infrastructure. And so as we see this progression of future and continued challenges, are you worried about that sort of lashing out in an attempt to preserve stability to also affect things like NIM? Yeah, I think that you can't ever be in the clear if you are in the, I don't mean to sound cheesy, but you're never in the clear if you're in the freedom game. That's why you're in it. I am at NIM because I believe in freedom of speech, freedom of association and there will always be some force against that. And so we're just at a point where we're at a point in time where the stakes are getting heavier, right? And they're hitting places that we didn't expect to hit ever like Western democracies, right? And I think at the end of the day, we can't let fear sort of control us. Like if folks in Ukraine are brave enough to take a photo of a war crime, then you and I should be brave enough to try to come up with a solution so they don't get killed. At the very least, and as long as we do things with in a transparent fashion, there's that word again, right? You do things in a transparent fashion trying to abide by the law as much as humanly possible, like what are you gonna do? Yeah, I mean, I think there's this challenge and you've studied issues around the dark web and issues where jurisdictional boundaries start to break down. And I think that's the thing that we can expect to continue to see increasing. And so there's this challenge of these very place-based states trying to understand their jurisdiction and their reach online as this sort of notion of a state is continuing to evolve around us. And that struggle seems like one that is going to be a significant challenge for crime and privacy and access. Yeah, I think one of the major sort of... So it used to be the case where you had... So internet regulation, maybe like 1.0, right? Where it used to have different countries regulating the internet, right? And so you could have one... You could, for instance, let's say you ban gambling in the United States, right? You ban online gambling, but somebody starts up a server in Greece and it's accessible over here, right? And so they are technically committing a crime in the United States by having the server, right? But, and we actually have a law, let's say, that says this is unlawful, right? But the thing that, in other states might have laws that say this is lawful or is not lawful and so on, right? And these sort of overlapping effects, one of the things that sort of took care or one of the reasons why we didn't have to really worry about these overlapping effects was that they were sort of balanced off by enforcement jurisdiction. So all these countries can prescribe the law. They can say, this is a bad thing, don't do this, it's against the law, but it's another thing for the country to actually cross the border over into Greece and like march in there and actually arrest somebody for that, right? That is an infringement of sovereignty on Greece that requires much, much more than just calling the act unlawful in your home, right? And that's why over in North Korea, they could call it an act of terrorism to make fun of the Supreme Leader and that means that I guess Seth Rogen is a terrorist in the eyes of North Korea, but that doesn't matter because they are not going to march in and arrest him, right? That's the idea. Now, one of the things that sort of complicates this a little bit on the internet or specifically in born cyberspace is the fact that oftentimes some of this enforcement happens online, right? So if you're going to hack a computer online in order to effectuate some sort of search, right? That might go overseas into someone else's sovereign territory, some other country's sovereign territory. In the same way, if you are going to, let's say you have a judgment for X amount of cryptocurrency, whether that judgment is something that was a judgment of an administrative agency like OFAC or a judgment of, I don't know, like a court, a district court, et cetera, right? One way, well, we have methods now to actually reach in, to reach out and actually change or in my view enforce, sorry, actually assert your jurisdiction over something that is overseas or belongs to somebody overseas. So I think it's becoming a lot more tricky now. And I think the dark web obviously makes it tricky. I think privacy tools generally make things tricky. And it'll be interesting to see how it unfolds. Maybe the other aspect of that same issue of sovereignty is that we're seeing increased vulcanization, most recently with Russia, beginning to sort of enforce and establish the walls around its national internet, but we've seen this previously with Iran and China and various levels. NIM is betting that there's going to be a sufficiently interconnected network between countries that you have the anonymity of mixing towards jurisdictions that include ones where your outbound traffic is legal. How do you think about that risk? Because if I, as I understand it, if I end up in a local intranet for my country, there's ones that are laws that are going to affect all of the providers there. And I go back to a very different risk model. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. So if you have a closed internet, okay, so are we in agreement that there is no actual enforceable, completely closed society, or, sorry, completely closed internet, or a country that's completely closed the internet, or do we disagree on that? Because even I think Iran and China and Russia, you can still communicate outside of their networks. Most people in North Korea can't. Ah, so North Korea is the exception, right? So I think North Korea would be a good exception. Yeah, most people in North Korea cannot. Yes, so if you have, yeah. So what, I think that all you can do, well, not all you can do, there are at least, so for instance, the ways that you might filter out an entry node, something, let's say equivalent of an entry node, or VPN, or a gateway for NIM, right? There are ways for us to sort of, it is a cat and mouse game, right? But essentially, there are ways for people in a closed country to communicate with a server, at least for a short period of time before the powers that be realized that it's a gateway to the outside, right? And I'm counting on folks like you will, frankly, to define, to design a better way to do that, right? But I see no, like, do I see a legal issue there? If a country makes it unlawful to run a node, like, or imposes requirements, like data retention requirements on running a node, right? Making it feasibly impossible to run a mixed node, or a poor mode, or even a VPN for that matter, right? What we have seen happening is a lot of folks are actually moving out of those countries, but really, I think you gotta figure this stuff out, though, like, because, you know, on my end, I think it, like, fine, we can violate the law in China by having a gateway, maybe. I'll think about that, right? But it's really on you to make it a functional gateway. It's really on the tech side, really, right? Because I didn't- And there is a community of circumvention tech and circumvention development that I guess is tackling that problem. But a Balkanized Internet, I mean, I think actually NIM does better than a Tor in this world. It does, yeah. Because as long as you've got the nodes in country, you're still getting your anonymity guarantees. That is correct, yeah. Cool. I guess maybe then... So we've looked at sort of a bunch of these, like, dystopic potential futures, and sort of how privacy plays a role for advocacy and communication within them. Do you think it's like, if you have this voice that brings accountability, is that going to be enough or does the increasing surveillance around us still win? I think this is like a longer philosophical question, but it's sort of the broad framing that we went into this with, in some sense. We get this voice of accountability. That's great. How does that, I don't know, maximize its potential? Yeah, and I feel like maybe 10 years ago, I would have been much more optimistic about things, right? But I feel like all we can do is facilitate the existence and the publication of information about brutal atrocities. And we have to let the world then sort of take over and do something about it, right? And whether that is through institution building or utilization of existing institutions or that got a million ideas as to how to do that, right? But I feel like the cool thing about tech is that we can look at our goals kind of in a vacuum, right? So the goal is very simply to allow people to upload files without having those files get them in trouble through, sorry, without having that upload essentially result in their tracing, result in retaliation against them, and so on, right? So can we make that happen? I think so, right? I think there's some technical problems that arise that have to do with, okay, well, how do we authenticate the evidence, right? And I think that's more interesting, right? Like how do we authenticate the evidence? Maybe we use a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of the evidence. Maybe we use an open library that Adobe has, right? Maybe that Adobe is developing for image providence. Maybe we partner up with institutions that are sort of subject matter experts, stuff like that. I think that's really interesting, right? But as far as do I have faith that transparency will win, it's really tough. I think you can continue to have a transparent society. I think ultimately we are trending towards total surveillance, right? Ultimately, like the high density cameras that were once only available in places like China and North Korea are now, for example, all over the Middle East, right? I'm not, the United Kingdom, for instance, has more CCTV cameras than almost anything, right? So the reality is that we are trending towards total collection of information. I don't think that privacy per se is the solution. When we think about privacy as in terms of control of your information and that alone, I think that things like anonymity are quite helpful, right? So if you're surfing the web and chatting, doing whatever you do, you're leaving fingerprints everywhere with all these third parties that are then accessible by the government and governments, right? They're also hackable, right? So you're basically leaving all these digital footprints, right? And the way I think about it is, you know, NSA level surveillance doesn't have to happen.  Your threat model can be a simple subpoena, right? A subpoena in the United States is the most used law enforcement tool out of any of the instruments of surveillance, right? And a subpoena is basically does not require judicial review. All it requires is relevance to an investigation. So for example, if I was investigating, if I was investigating one and I want to subpoena all of Will's records, all I would have to say to justify that subpoena is, well, I'm trying to figure out if this guy, Will, is involved in this crime. And that's relevant to the investigation, right? And from that, I can get all of your financial records. From that, I can get anything, almost anything, that's been stored with the third party, right? And so when we had computers come up and network computers and emails and stuff like that, the government for the longest time was thinking, well, this is all information that's been abandoned with third parties. We don't need warrants to get this information, right? Eventually, a court decided that you do need a warrant, but just to get emails. Still to get the session information, the account, all of this stuff is basically another version of a subpoena. Some of them might require judicial review, but ultimately the burden for them is so low that you have to assume that all of your data is being accessed, right? Or can be accessed. So to go back to your original question, will surveillance win? I don't think surveillance wins if we hide in plain sight, basically. How do you hide in plain sight? Well, maybe it's a misdomer. I don't think surveillance wins if we make it hard for surveillance to happen. How do we make it hard for surveillance to happen? We use anonymity tools. We encrypt our contents, right? If all the data that you have about your, all these digital footprints that I'm talking about, if they only tell the person who has subpoenaed your records that you're using NIM or that you're using Tor that you're using a VPN, then yeah, I think that surveillance is lost, right? They've collected all the data they believe they can get. They have authority to get, but it's not actionable, right? So in that moment, you win, right? It's very, very complicated. But there's a big gap in what you just drew, which was you started at saying, we've got the chance with anonymity to get a view of brutal war atrocities. Yeah. That's not going to change the norm to everyone using Tor and surveillance technology so that we get to this utopia that we don't fall out of. We've fallen pretty far. Like, do we have a chance of recovering the norms up to a place where that becomes expected? My actual opinion, not representing my company at all, right? I think it would take a miracle, right? And I think it would take mainstream adoption of anonymity. Like, how does that happen? Does it take Elon Musk, like, buying Twitter, getting really high one night and deciding that, well, I think we could secure Twitter and make it censorship-proof by using the name Mixtap? Maybe it does. Maybe it takes that, right? But once you have a big mainstream player like that kind of shift, I think that's really the move that we're waiting for. Maybe it's Signal. Maybe it's Twitter. Do you think it's a positive example of someone taking an initiative to bring it mainstream? Or do you think it's a negative example of something, you know, taking that next step in a surveillance state that becomes the example that people want to actually avoid in the same way that 1984 is something we point to as that's a bad thing. Let's not go to an Orwellian future. Like, we have these views of bad things, but do you think it's one of the examples of moving towards a better norm that is what we should be hoping for? To mainstream anonymous communications? Yeah, no, I don't, yes, absolutely I do. I do think that it's moving towards a better norm. What do you think? It's curious. Oh, I mean, I think we absolutely need it. I think we're a long ways away. But we'll see if it's cryptography versus continued systems developments that, I don't know, get it to versus liability or surveillance that are the things that push it more, right? Like there's a set of technical forces and then there's a set of norms and societal forces. And I don't know if I know or have opinions on which of those two is gonna be more powerful over the next years. And the question is at some point when they converge, right? So when societal forces actually influence tech and tell tech what to do, right? So, and it depends which part, which pocket of society is doing that. So if you have law enforcement telling tech what to do, for example, it might be like a government OS with the Apple, iPhone, FBI, and debacle a few years ago, right? If you have, I don't know, freedom seekers writ large telling a tech what to do, then you might have more private privacy preserving technology. It's interesting. Do you think that gets easier as we progress into the future and there's other bigger problems and tech has sort of more space to build these things without the government, I don't know. Seeing that as the problem that it has to control. Yes, absolutely. I definitely think that it will become easier. I think that privacy is normal. It's just a question of people realizing that and what that means, right? On the flip side, we are trending towards this like individual transparency and organizational privacy, right? So like kids wanna tell the world everything about each other and all of their, they wanna basically reveal every, they want to be scrutinized by the public for everything, right? If social media is any indicator, whereas corporations and companies are becoming more closed, right? And private and having privacy, right? So I don't know. That's sort of the other side of the coin, right? If you really think about it. All right, well, we've got 30 more seconds. It's been great talking to you on it. This was fantastic. Yeah, it was such a pleasure. I don't know if you have any final words. I'll give the last few seconds to you if you want it. Hello, Lisbon. I wonder if people can hear back. They could and they said hello back. All right, I think with that, I'll hand it back over to Juan and we will continue.


Keir Starmer's attempt to change the rules to elect his successor has led to a lot of speculation as to whether he's considering standing down. And we are already hearing rumors of MPs maneuvering to replace him. Tiski Sauer viewers, I'm afraid I must inform you, one of them is apparently where's Streeting, the register of MPs interests, shows that in the past year, Streeting has raised 45,000 pounds from free wealthy donors and Huffington Post has spoken to Labour sources suggesting he's planning a run. They quote a Labour source as saying, people are talking about the where's Streeting leadership road show and whether Keir's office realize it's happening and don't care or don't see that it's happening. He's basically mid-campaign now, even though there is no contest, he is everywhere doing everything. He's trying to do rounds of union delegation dinners. He looks to be the runner for the right at the moment. This account has been backed up by Owen Jones, who in response to the article tweeted the following, I've been repeatedly briefed that some of Stammer's current and former aides have given up on his prospects and are now pinning their hopes on where's Streeting, who they hope can be made Labour leader via the Electoral College. For those who are not familiar with where's Streeting, he is one of the most viciously factional right-wing MPs currently in the Labour Party and the archetype of a career-driven Blair right. Like many right-wingers in the party, Streeting's rise was thanks to organizing within Labour students. Their support into 2008 helped him to become president of the National Union of Students, which under his leadership dropped its commitment to abolishing tuition fees. Streeting then went on to work for Progress, Stonewall and Pricewaterhouse Coopers before being elected to Parliament in 2015. Once an MP, Streeting became known for committing an inordinate amount of time to sending negative quotes about Jeremy Corbyn to a hostile media. That included in 2016, when on the request of the Bakers Union, Labour banned McDonald's from purchasing a stand at party conference. They'd done that to protest the firm not recognizing the union, where's Streeting responded with this comment to the sun on Sunday. I'm exasperated that we should throw away £30,000 worth of sponsorship like this. It smacks of a snobby attitude towards fast food, restaurants and people who work or eat at them. McDonald's may not be the trendy falafel bar that some people in politics like to hang out at, but it's enjoyed by families across the country. It's a complete misrepresentation of what was going on. McDonald's was not banned from conference because the party had negative attitudes about people who eat at McDonald's. It was because the Bakers Union, one of the affiliated unions, was annoyed at McDonald's for not recognizing their union.  But why ignore the opportunity to deliver a Murdoch paper, a negative story, even if it ignores the facts? A few more reasons you might recognize where's Streeting. He told Sky in the run-up to the 2017 general election that Jeremy Corbyn would not make a good pro-minister during the election campaign, and he was one of the right-wing media's favourite contacts to call upon when they wanted an MP to say that Corbyn was soft on antisemitism. Ash, could Labour's future really be one led by Wes Streeting? I'm sorry, I'm just still really stuck on falafel bar. Like, what's a trendy falafel bar?  You know, it's not... Like a kebab shop, essentially, isn't it? You know, like Otolengi, do you know what I mean? It's just like a veggie kebab.  And I think it just speaks to, and I know this is a bit off-topic, the really weird and like psychologically loaded politics of food and food as class signifier that we have in this country, but particularly when like the left is trying to litigate like what constitutes, you know, a proletarian habit, what constitutes a middle-class one. People start saying ridiculous things, like there are trendy falafel bars, rather than that's the rap which you can get for a fiver as opposed to a seven-pound, you know, donna meat one. And, you know, things like lemon or like feta cheese or like basil become like incredibly exotic and rare rather than something which has become a pretty integral part of the British diet over the last 30 years. But that's really off-topic. It's just something which I feel very strongly about. I think what this shows is that the labour right truly is out of ideas and all they've got is a set of aesthetic political gestures. So West Street is somebody who, as you said, is a career politician. He's not somebody who came up through the trade union movement or was a community organizer. He's somebody who really committed himself to kind of the most low stakes and factually vicious politics that exists, i.e. campus politics and won and was like, OK, I was good at that. I'm going to get into the Labour Party. But what he actually offers in terms of a vision, a policy platform, a theory of change or a view of how the world works, it's scanty, flimsy, verging on non-existent. I'm not saying this as a part. I'm just saying that you would have thought that the labour right, if they were confident of their powers within the party, they perhaps would have been able to call on an MP with a bit more experience, maybe a bit more to say for themselves, a bit more of, I don't know, say strategist, somebody who has given politics and what they want to do about it, a lot of thinking, rather than simply being able to cannily react to various media blow-ups in order to position themselves more favourably in the eyes of the country's political editors and current affairs producers. It doesn't speak to me of a hugely confident Labour right, if that's their guy. We should potentially put Wes Streeting's mugshot on our screen more often because it's made us some money. Buzzbeard with 8.99, sending you this, begging you to remove Streeting's mugshot from our screens immediately. And LB comes in with nine quid. Buzzbeard is right. Oliver Count with £2 says, Wes Streeting hates Taka Taka, which I very quickly googled, which I think is a falafel bar. I mean, I don't know. I've just never been to like a falafel bar. I've been to like a falafel fast food place where really the prices are comparable with McDonald's. Taka Taka, go Greek. I don't have time to look through the prices. Let's go to another story about money, which is the same story. I said that Wes Streeting has got £45,000 in the last year. It's interesting to see who that money is from. So according to the register of interests, Anthony Watson, who is a financial services entrepreneur, donated £15,000. He had previously bankrolled the Owen Smith campaign when he challenged Corbyn. £20,000 was from Francesca Perrin. She runs something called the Indigo Trust, which is part of the Sainsbury family philanthropy network. And £10,000 was from Lord Waheed Ali, a media entrepreneur. Very interestingly, of the £45,000 donated this year, £40,000 was in August. So £40,000 in a single month. What does Wes know that we don't? Luckily, if there is a leadership election, I own a video which could tank the whole thing. Let's take a look. Everyone changed their tune after that 2017 general election. Didn't they? They've been saying, oh, he could have possibly win. He does very well. Finally, they come round to it and talk about, oh, potentially he was a good leader. Obviously, they memory hold that. Now, no one is allowed to talk about 2017 ever again. Ash, we're obviously Corbyn supporters, but can you imagine the Conservatives putting Wes Streeting singing, oh, Jeremy Corbyn into some kind of attack ad? He's going to be running as the guy who was publicly opposed to Jeremy Corbyn and therefore not tainted by 2019. Yeah, I mean, maybe. But that's the thing is that it has also been an attack line which is used on Keir Starmer, which is now you're turning your back on Jeremy Corbyn. Didn't you fight a general election saying he's the right guy to be PM? And that's the problem with these politicians who really try and distinguish themselves by how not Jeremy Corbyn they really are. Well, you went into two general elections with that guy as your party leader. You stood on his policy platform. And in Wes Streeting's case, you sang, oh, Jeremy Corbyn with Navarra Media's very own Michael Walker. So so what changed? It does look, I think, self-serving and hypocritical. But, you know, look how happy he looked in that video. I think you sort of unlocked his authentic self. He just wants to be a fun Corbyn Easter out in the sunshine with you, Michael. He doesn't want to be a Blair Wright taking swipes at imaginary falafel bars.  One looks happy when they're standing close to me at London Pride. I don't think we can read too much politically into that. There is one reason that Wes Streeting standing in a leadership election could be good is because if Clive Lewis, who is another sort of standout option to stand in any future leadership election stands, we could relive, relitigate this legendary Twitter interaction from 2013. This is when Clive Lewis and Wes Streeting were both prospective parliamentary candidates. Clive Lewis says, Blair and Miliband split over future of Labour. Tony Baby, stick your fluffy eczema cards. You had your chance. Stick to your fluffy eczema cards. You had your chance. Wes Streeting says, didn't agree with a raft of Blair policies or aspects of his article, but surprised to read such a plural tweet from a PPC. Clive Lewis responds, if you don't like, don't follow. You jumped up turd. I should say Clive Lewis was initially sharing a Blair article, I think, or an article about his comment. Can you imagine that and the next hostings? You know what, I would like a bit more of that, you know, I kind of can't stand the kind of disingenuous politeness of hostings where everyone really hates each other and also themselves. Give me a little bit more of calling each other a jumped up turd, you know.