EVERY SPOKEN WORD
45 min read · 9,075 words- 0:00 – 0:51
Intro
- JGJoel de la Garza
We're really at an inflection point because you have the birth of essentially coin-operated intelligence at scale.
- BLBarrett Lyon
The internet has really kind of stagnated a bit from protocol design. There's like not a lot of new stuff. All of it's built on top. Erasing that is kind of what I'm trying to go for.
- JGJoel de la Garza
What you're saying is you've actually built this transient way for folks to connect and chat without there being any record.
- BLBarrett Lyon
The really big problem is on WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, Telegram, and all of those applications disguise themselves as you sending something to somebody else, but you're really sending something to a server. But the question is like, okay, well, whose servers are those?
- JGJoel de la Garza
It's coming at such an important inflection point for like the future of our country in tech, and to just have this conversation that seems to be manipulated to some extent.
- BLBarrett Lyon
It feels very manipulated, and to me, the future of our tech is needing to build this infrastructure now. If we're crippling it-
- 0:51 – 7:08
Barrett's engine failure over Oakland
- JGJoel de la Garza
Well, today we're joined by Barrett Lyon, perhaps the most, one of the most interesting people in tech.
- BLBarrett Lyon
[chuckles]
- JGJoel de la Garza
Uh, I, I have a lot of stories to share, and I am always kind of blown away every time we catch up because you tell me a new story that just puts everything I've ever done in, uh, pale in comparison.
- BLBarrett Lyon
[chuckles]
- JGJoel de la Garza
Um, and I think the, the most interesting one I heard recently, and I had never heard it before, and this was during a period, I believe, where we were investors in your previous company, um, was you, you are a pilot, you have a pilot's license, and you decided to optimize your life by flying places. Um, and, and you had a, a, a, an unfortunate experience, I believe, flying back from one of our meetings.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah. Well, I mean, uh, one day I was driving to work in the Bay Area, and I realized it was almost 45 minutes, which used to be 15, and, uh, my family lives up in the Tahoe region, so I'm like, "Well, I think the plane can fly there in about the same time." [chuckles]
- JGJoel de la Garza
[chuckles]
- BLBarrett Lyon
"Maybe I could just commute that way." And that was before, um, before work from home was, like, codified by, uh, by, uh, COVID. So I had a phys- like, a need to physically be present. Um, so yeah, I started flying and-
- JGJoel de la Garza
So your daily driver was a daily flyer.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Right.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah. [chuckles]
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah. So I put, like, 1,300 hours on, on a Cirrus. And, um, yeah, one day after a meeting here, I left and got in the plane, took off from San Carlos, and somewhere around over the, over Oakland Airport, the engine started acting up. And, you know, I thought maybe it was, like, just some sort of water in the fuel or something, but I climbed up, cleared bravo, and felt like I was okay, and then right after that thought, lost pretty much all power. And, uh-
- JGJoel de la Garza
And what went through your head immediately after that? [chuckles]
- BLBarrett Lyon
Uh, yeah.
- JGJoel de la Garza
[chuckles]
- BLBarrett Lyon
Actually, I messaged my friends and said, "Hey, guys, I have an emergency."
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
"Love you." Um, uh, I, I don't know, I just declared emergency and just tried to think, "Okay, where do I crash and not hurt people?" [both laughing] I found a field, and then it turns out, you know, I was up pretty high, and there was a, you know, giant airport right next to us, not Oakland, but it was, um, Buchanan Field. Uh, s- uh, I forget the name of the town. And, uh, it's a giant old military airport.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Oh, in Alameda.
- BLBarrett Lyon
No, it was-
- JGJoel de la Garza
The other one
- BLBarrett Lyon
... the other one.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Okay. Gotcha.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Uh, on the other side of the mountain range there. Uh, Buchanan Field is the name of it, I believe. But, um, anyway, landed there, but so, but before that, I kind of went to this field and I was like, "All right, well, I've got a parachute, ballistics parachute."
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah. [chuckles]
- BLBarrett Lyon
"Do I pull it?" And I was thinking, "All right, well, when I read all these crash reports, the reason the pilot dies is 'cause they didn't use the parachute."
- JGJoel de la Garza
Absolutely.
- BLBarrett Lyon
[chuckles] I'm like, I'm like kind of like, well, the airport's right there-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah
- BLBarrett Lyon
... and I'm still in the air flying.
- 7:08 – 10:11
What Doxxnet actually is
- BLBarrett Lyon
Well, okay, so Doxx.net, first of all, uh, maybe I should explain the name of it.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah, sure. Yeah, please.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Uh, you know, I was, uh, as a kid, uh, my hacker name was Doxx, and then I started a business in high school with my high school friend, uh, called Doxx.net, and we were renting... It was before cloud, and we were renting ser- server, basically giving user accounts for, for money.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Um, totally legit business, in, in high school. We were making pretty good money.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Were these shell accounts?
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah. [laughs]
- BLBarrett Lyon
Shell accounts. So we were selling shell accounts for $5 a month, but we had 1,000 users.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And we had all these features, and people liked it, and there was actually a little community around it for a while. Um, but I sh- you know, I got out of high school and shut it all down and started my career, and but I kept the domain. And also, I'm very fascinated about protocol design and the fact that the internet has really kind of stagnated a bit from protocol design. There's, like, not a lot of new stuff. All of it's built on top. So there's that, and then just noticing the shift of censor- censorship-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm
- BLBarrett Lyon
... and people's privacy being eroded and all of this kind of thing kind of, and then the uprise of VPN-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah
- BLBarrett Lyon
... uh, made it really interesting to make a, a kind of an alternative network-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah
- BLBarrett Lyon
... that kind of is designed from the ground up to protect people, uh, from advertisers, trackers, malware, uh, and, you know, foreign adversaries trying to learn about what you're doing. Um-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah. Well, I mean, the original promise of the internet was this incredible marketplace of ideas, unrestricted, no censorship, right? I think a lot of original... Or a lot of the original people around the founding of what became the internet were, were, you know, free speech maximalists. It was sort of a, a very, um, very specific crowd, and I think over the last couple years that, to your point, is, has shifted pretty incredibly, right?
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah, and it's in the hands of a few. Um, so, you know, for example, China's a good example. There's China Netcom, China Telecom, and, and those... Or is it China Netco? Yeah. Anyway, either way, the um, it's a pretty good chokehold-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm
- BLBarrett Lyon
... of the entire population, using that network as an opportunity to force people into different decision-making processes.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And the internet originally, like you said, was kind of designed with this, like, more open kind of concept, so bringing that back is some- one of the things I was kinda interested in doing. Um, trying to figure out new ways of doing things that might kind of leverage before the internet, you know... Way back in the day, wireless networking-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm
- BLBarrett Lyon
... was what? Uh, AlohaNet or something like that. It was, like, wireless through, um, uh, packet modems and things.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
But now we have, like, really high powerful Wi-Fi on the edge, um, incredible opportunities to create better mesh protocols-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm
- BLBarrett Lyon
... and, and better P2P and, and kind of the, really one of the biggest stains of the entire internet is carrier-grade NAT.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm.
- 10:11 – 12:59
When censorship comes home to the US
- BLBarrett Lyon
for.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Gotcha. Um, and also, I think, you know, one of the interesting things is we always talk about sort of foreign governments restricting internet access, right? We, we, we harp on China and Russia. Um, but I was in a, in a state recently that has a know your customer rule, and they were requiring or blocking access to certain websites, um, you know, whatever they define as being inappropriate. It could be a health website. It could be whatever. Um, and so we're actually seeing the cro- the creep of kind of this censorship even within the United States.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah, it's creeping into the US, and it, it's being done in, in a way that's kind of odd because you're asking, a lot of times they're asking the network to solve, uh, an identity problem, and the network doesn't do identity.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
You know? It's not like-
- JGJoel de la Garza
It has a hammer, and it's gonna-
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah
- JGJoel de la Garza
... it's gonna hammer the nail. [laughs]
- BLBarrett Lyon
An IP address is not your, your driver's license, and asking people to do network restrictions based off of age and things like that, it makes a lot of sense, but in a different place in the stack.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
You know, if they wanna present, you know, restrict things for certain reasons-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm
- BLBarrett Lyon
... then that should be done in a much different way and not asking the network to do it. So yeah, I, I, I think that we're starting to see that in the United States. We're seeing it definitely elsewhere.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Um, and it's also not just with, like, age restrictions, but a interesting problem popped up the other day where Google or Cisco Umbrella broke for, like, a major carrier 'cause they classified that carrier as France. They're not even in France really as far as their corporate structure goes, but France had a, a rule requiring them to block, like, 100-plus piracy sites, and they said, "No, we're gonna go scorched earth. We're just gonna block France." [both laughing] Well, then there's the blast radius of that, which is, okay, well then, if your geo provider accidentally identifies somebody as the wrong location, then you're also now- Part of that policy.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Oh, yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And it's terrible.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Those, those classifications are always the worst. I mean, we were looking at inve- we were looking at an investment opportunity in a company that makes chatbots that are focused on more like partnership type stuff or companionship type stuff, and half of the classifications engines classified it as adult content. And, and you're just sort of like, okay, well, this is like a legitimate like, you know, e- e-partner, e-spouse site. Like, it's not doing the untoward stuff.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah, we've run into that a little bit too with Doxx-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah, yeah, yeah
- BLBarrett Lyon
... 'cause it's got two X's in it, and then also-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Oh, you're hitting a signature
- BLBarrett Lyon
... there's doxxing.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah. [laughing]
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah. But it actually worked out in our favor because we got flagged, I think, with, uh, Claude, and then we applied with, you know, the proper means to go through their, uh, their registration process, and they opened up everything for us.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Oh, nice.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Which was quite nice. Yeah.
- JGJoel de la Garza
That's great.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah.
- 12:59 – 17:56
Why VPNs don't cut it
- JGJoel de la Garza
And so maybe, I mean, I think so, so, you know, the, the, the, this creeping sort of, the creeping information totalitarianism, um, has given birth to a whole bunch of products of which we know we're all super familiar with, right? And VPNs is probably the most, most, most common. Um, and so maybe it'd be great to hear a little bit about sort of why the existing tools aren't enough. Why are you building Doxx? How is it different? Maybe we could double click a bit on, on sort of your thoughts around it, 'cause-
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah, sure
- JGJoel de la Garza
... I think that's the interesting part.
- BLBarrett Lyon
So a lot of the VPNs, um, I would say are just entry and exit points.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm.
- BLBarrett Lyon
So they're operate, they lease a server from a landlord and, uh, set up a pol, you know, their software on it, and then you connect to it encrypted, and then your requests and things that you do on the internet come from out that node.
- JGJoel de la Garza
And that's to solve the, your IP address is your identity problem that we sort of discussed earlier.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah, kind of, kind of as a, a way around that, I guess.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And but it's also kind of people feel like there's more security to that.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And I could argue against that, but, um, you know, it's very basic. It's not... If you think about it, uh, that, those networks are real-time adjustable. You could apply APIs to everything, and, uh, all of a sudden you could say, "All right, well, here's an API that your agent can use that can build an entire network." And you're just using the VPN protocols as a way to get into that area. And then inside, we can create either, you can call it a walled garden or a parallel internet or whatever you wanna call it, but we built an entire mesh network, 196 different domains that don't exist on the internet. You can register domains, you can lease IP addresses, you can lease mesh addresses or public addresses, uh, create policy all within like milliseconds.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Gotcha.
- BLBarrett Lyon
So it's a whole different ecosystem in there. And then on top of that, we've been able to use that, uh, system since we, we can kinda control it, um, to create P2P applications that actually work. So like phone calling, video call, chat, uh, all of those things that sit best of class on top of the app run across the mesh network, and it's all encrypted.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Gotcha. Okay.
- BLBarrett Lyon
No phone numbers, no, no email addresses, no names, no, uh, no nothing.
- JGJoel de la Garza
So it's, it's funny. It's funny, and that's, that's, that's, that's phenomenal because I think, you know, we're, we're, we're both pretty well steeped in the security space, and, um, you know, I think I come from sort of a... I've had it drilled into my head that if you wanna have a private conversation, don't do it anywhere any, with anything with a battery or an electrical signal, right?
- BLBarrett Lyon
Right.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Um, and so, and so what you're saying is you've actually built this sort of like transient way, um, for folks to connect and chat without there being any record.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah. So you create your account. You just have to prove you're human by doing a little puzzle.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Uh, once you do that, you get a token, and it's yours. Uh, you can change it, um, you can delete your account, make a new one. Uh, but once you're in there, you can create a certificate and share it with a friend. You don't really know you're doing it. It just says, you know, "Invite friend."
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And it looks kind of like normal. But it's actually doing a cryptographic exchange with each other, and then you have extra privileges.
- JGJoel de la Garza
I, I think the key lesson of PKI was actually if you tell people it's PKI, it's not gonna work. So yeah, you have to kind of abstract that layer away, right?
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah. It's, it's, it's... Well, it's not even PKI, it's private key infic- like, it's not public.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
So anyway, you, you, you and your friend just decided, "Okay, we trust each other."
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Now that unlocks the ability for the phones over the mesh network to talk to each other directly. And then all of a sudden you have all these really cool fire, file transfer stuff which has no file size limit. The really big problem is on WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, Telegram, and by the way, Telegram's creepy. Um, all of those applications disguise themselves as you sending something to somebody else.
- 17:56 – 22:05
The FBI's trojan messaging app
- BLBarrett Lyon
about that too.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Which is what's interesting. I mean, you mentioned that, you know, Telegram is creepy. Um, I, I, I, uh, I would say I think I find all It just seems like a lot of the VPN, I don't want to say all because it's an absolutist term, but it seems like a lot of the VPNs are very creepy, right? And, and without bashing on anyone specific, I think for me, the most illustrative story was in the, in the news, there was, there was actually an issue where, um, a bunch of organized criminals were arrested across the world. Australia, I believe, had arrested some, the US had arrested some, and it turned out that the FBI had built a secure messaging app, um, and then marketed it exclusively to organized criminal groups. And so these guys are like, "Don't trust Signal 'cause that's the NSA."
- BLBarrett Lyon
[chuckles]
- JGJoel de la Garza
"Let's, let's use, let's use this app 'cause this is safe, and only five people use it." And it turned out that they all got indicted 'cause, and they are, I think most of them are in prison now. Um, and so like in the US, right, we've seen this activity. Uh, and then if you look on any app store and you look for VPN, you probably find 50 VPNs-
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah
- JGJoel de la Garza
... that are all-
- BLBarrett Lyon
They're free
- JGJoel de la Garza
... hosted abroad.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Well, if it's free, there's nothing free.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah. [laughs]
- BLBarrett Lyon
And if you're not paying for it, you are the product.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
You're being eaten alive. You know, the United States has pretty cool laws. We can use them to protect people. And so DoxxNet's US-based, but we also have a Swiss company that handles all of European operations, so there's separation between the operations between the two regions. We're doing other regions like that too. So it's, it's, you know, corporate governance actually matters in these, these types of sit-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Totally
- BLBarrett Lyon
... situations. But like, you know, I just don't feel comfortable with my data going to a company that doesn't talk about who owns it, [chuckles]
- JGJoel de la Garza
[laughs]
- BLBarrett Lyon
Why they exist-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah
- BLBarrett Lyon
... other than privacy.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Um, you know, we've made a very, very conscious decision that we're very open about what we're doing, who's involved, why, why the decisions have been made those ways.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And, and it's, and it's also kind of to drive community too. But, um, yeah, uh, there, it, there are creepy VPNs out there.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Oh, yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Really creepy.
- JGJoel de la Garza
I mean, and, and you know, and it's not just... I mean, it's funny because we like to talk about nation states. We like to talk about intelligence agencies, right? Like CIA, NSA, these are all super cool. Um, but in reality, like the risks are a lot more low level than that, right? Like in-
- BLBarrett Lyon
True
- JGJoel de la Garza
... you know, for some of these, there were instances at the beginning of sort of the crypto, the initial cr- cryptocurrency waves where people's accounts were getting drained, and they were using some of these services, uh, that were in other countries. And it turns out that like, you know, in some of these countries, you have the meshing together of the intelligence state apparatus and organized crime, right? And so, [chuckles] and so you, you see where these things start to bleed into each other.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah, I mean, uh, and then people look at the policies for the VPNs, like, "Oh, no logs, no this," and the, but the question is like, okay, well, whose servers are those?
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- 22:05 – 25:03
Running a network with AI, no sysadmin
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah. Well, and I, I think that was, that was one of the funny things, I think, when we originally started talking about this was, um, you were, you were incredibly distrusting of large inference and AI providers.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Uh, and, and you've built your own AI stack.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah.
- JGJoel de la Garza
That's, and so, so I mean, GPUs are short, in shortage. It's data, power is hard to get. Everybody's anti data center now. Like, how did you pull that off in probably six months? [laughs]
- BLBarrett Lyon
Very efficiently. [chuckles]
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Well, I mean, we built, uh, so far it's like 26 sites around the world with redundant-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Wow
- BLBarrett Lyon
... routing and, uh-
- JGJoel de la Garza
And how many employees in the company?
- BLBarrett Lyon
Uh, total, I think the people involved is 12.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah. Wow.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Okay.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And we have no network administrator, no sysadmin. It's all done by AI. So-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Wow
- BLBarrett Lyon
... um, and it's actually working quite well. Uh, I've, I kind of, I'm kind of on top of every... The nice thing though, if you think about our footprint of like, uh, who's involved, you know, we don't have 1,000 employees with access to this network.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Me. You know, the, the, uh, the blast radius of, uh, the, just the corporate structure is, is very minimal.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
So-
- JGJoel de la Garza
No, that's, that's impressive, and I think, you know, the, I think the, the, you know, the thing we very rarely talk about 'cause it's kind of uncomfortable is just how great an extent insider threat is.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah.
- JGJoel de la Garza
And how it's like the most crippling, catastrophic cyberattacks are always sort of the insider threat angle. And now you're saying with agents, like you're kind of eli- [chuckles] you're o- e-eliminating at least a, a good portion of that risk.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah, and it's running in its own, you know, secure environment that's not exporting data to like, uh, one of the big AI companies. So all the context and inference and stuff stays inside, and we have it secured, and we monitor all our equipment with cameras, and, uh, no one goes in and touches anything.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Do you have agents that watch the camera footage?
- BLBarrett Lyon
Actually, well, I mean, technically we don't, but the camera companies that made the agents do.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. [chuckles]
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah, we get alarms if something moves and something like, you know, something goes around. But, um, yeah, we even thought about putting lasers in a couple of the spots, but-
- 25:03 – 28:40
The data center misinformation campaign
- JGJoel de la Garza
[both laughing]
- BLBarrett Lyon
That's the other thing that's driving me crazy is people, like, don't understand data centers at all.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Oh, yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
It's crazy.
- JGJoel de la Garza
I mean, I think you're seeing that in the popular press, right?
- BLBarrett Lyon
Oh, yeah. Oh, they drink water.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
It's like, come on. No. It's... A data... The data center's been around for a very, very long time, and yeah, they need water when they break, and you have to replenish some of the water, and there's some evaporation, but it's not like they're running off of water.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Well, and, uh-
- BLBarrett Lyon
That's the crazy part
- JGJoel de la Garza
... yeah, and it's, it's just sort of like... I think, I think in, in order of, like, most impressive machines humans have built, like, one is probably commercial airliners, right? And two has gotta be data centers. Like, they're so incredibly sophisticated. They're closed systems, like-
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the data centers themselves are kind of just boring buildings.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And the, uh, the other thing is, like, the sounds, I've never heard sound outside of a data center before.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Maybe a chiller or something. But I see videos where people are watching videos, and it's like, "Look at how..." And it's audio from inside-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah
- BLBarrett Lyon
... being dubbed, and people aren't smart enough to know that-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah
- BLBarrett Lyon
... that it's, uh, it's fake.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's all contained within inside these things, right?
- BLBarrett Lyon
People are being manipulated with this data center thing.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Isn't it amazing, right? And I think, like, it's gonna be f- I think m- over, as the years progress, it's gonna come out that this was all just some sort of, like, very interested group of, of, of organizations or interests-
- BLBarrett Lyon
I completely-
- JGJoel de la Garza
... are manipulating public opinion to some end.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah. But it's very interesting to be in the know and then watch this-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah, yeah
- BLBarrett Lyon
... and then go, "Oh my goodness. These people are mi- missing the mark."
- JGJoel de la Garza
Have you seen... I mean, 'cause you, you've been to 20-something data centers in the last couple months. Have you seen actual protesters outside?
- BLBarrett Lyon
No.
- 28:40 – 32:35
Ad trackers know you better than your spouse
- JGJoel de la Garza
Well, and this is the second half. I mean, I guess the... I know we, we had talked about sort of intelligence agencies and the big, bad, scary government, right? But like... And now we're talking more about clearly an operation that's probably being done by some sort of commercial interest to manipulate public opinion.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Right? Which goes to kind of the second half of why you built Doxx, which is, like, you know, advertising.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Oh, yeah.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Which is, which is sort of like the, the, like... People like to think the NSA is incredibly sophisticated, but, you know, advertisers are probably far ahead of what they're doing. And I think you're seeing now where intelligence agencies are actually using data brokers and using the techniques of ad agencies.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah. So, like, all your apps have these trackers in them. Uh, WhatsApp has dat.whatsapp.net. Apple even has Apple Telemetry. They call it telemetry or metadata, whatever they wanna call it, but it's, it's some level of it is a tracker.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And you can block them. It doesn't break the app. Doesn't break... Most websites don't have any problem with that telemetry data breaking 'cause the rest of the site will still load. But, you know, somebody asked me, very controversial, wealthy individual said, "Well, so what? Someone won't, won't know that I purchased, uh, underwear off of target.com." And then I'm like, well, it's not really that one, it's all of them. When you combine all of the tracking that's being done on every different app that you're using or every different website, and it accumulates, and then it's being stored by who knows who, where, and being sold, and then when you aggregate all those data points together, you could know if you're a coffee drinker, what time you wake up in the morning, uh, what, what your income is, where you shop, um, how often you purchase things. And-
- JGJoel de la Garza
If you're preparing for the birth of a child or perhaps for a divorce or-
- BLBarrett Lyon
Right. It-
- JGJoel de la Garza
... some other big life event, right? Maybe even better
- BLBarrett Lyon
They probably know these events m- sooner-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah
- BLBarrett Lyon
... than your spouse would.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah, yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Um, so turning that off doesn't bother me at all. [laughs]
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah. [laughs]
- BLBarrett Lyon
I love all that stuff being turned off. I hate that kind of stuff, so that's a big piece of the app is, or the, the network, it's not just part of the app, it's part of the network, is to kind of deconstruct all of that and get rid of it.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And just kinda like the get back to the old internet that has, uh, the ability to connect to things and has the ability to, you know, create-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm
- BLBarrett Lyon
... and, and then also, you know, not be spied on by, you know, advertisers and governments and everybody else. Uh-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Well, and it seems like we're really at an inflection point because you have the birth of essentially coin-operated intelligence at scale, right? You can deploy millions, you've got the preve- you, you got the proverbial millions of, of monkeys with millions, or infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters. Um, and, and so we're sort of looking at this world in which there's more telemetry, there's more data, everything you do is being tracked, and you can combine that with intelligence, right? To, to actually arrive at some pretty scary conclusions.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah, you can take all that and just dump it into an LLM and say, "Tell me about this person."
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
[laughs] And you get an answer.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Probably do really effective targeting against things like data centers as well, right?
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah.
- JGJoel de la Garza
[laughs] Like, you start to see these mass movements orchestrated across multiple platforms, and you start to think like, "Huh, that's, that's pretty clever." [laughs]
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah. But, but people should be targeting those, maybe not the data centers, but the tr- tracking is pretty bad, ad tracking. It's, you know, that, that kind of stuff really can go away and your life would be better.
- 32:35 – 44:51
Prolexic, Russian hackers, and MoMA
- JGJoel de la Garza
So I don't know if you know this, but our paths crossed a long time ago. Um, I r- I, I was looking back through some of my archives and, and I, I did a lot of work, um, sort of in the early 2000s on DDoS bots. So Stacheldraht, TFN, TFN2K, um, and then obviously a large, large denial-of-dessert service distributed account attacks. And you were at the forefront of building a lot of the solutions to prevent that, like at Prolexic.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Um, like how did that get going?
- BLBarrett Lyon
Well, actually it kinda goes back to Doxxnet. In high school, people were attacking my servers.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And so we had to figure out better ways to protect them, and techniques and tricks and, and, uh, all the different things you need to do to survive a DDoS attack. And, uh, I started writing, uh, kind of my list of what you would do to survive, and then somehow I, I presented that at SANS.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And then it got in, in Google, and then people started calling me. And, um, then we started dealing with real cybercrime.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Mm-hmm.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Extortion, people trying to take, you know, one company sells watches, the other sells watches, the other one is attacking the other watch company during Christmas sale season. Um, or, you know, Super Bowl's about to start and all the gambling sites go dark.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Um, things like that. And it got pretty serious and, and so I built a whole company to protect businesses from these attacks. And the way I looked at it is like you need big scale. You need to have the biggest, most expensive stuff, and not everyone could afford that. So we'll turn that into kind of a leased service as a, as a, you know, it's one of the first cloud services to exist. And, uh, it was pretty s- very successful. Still exists today. It's Akamai Prolexic.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah. Absolutely.
- BLBarrett Lyon
They even kept the name. [laughs]
- JGJoel de la Garza
[laughs]
- BLBarrett Lyon
Which is rare. And then we did DefenseNet later on, uh, which became F5 Silverline. And, and then so in between all that, I really liked big scale stuff-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah
- BLBarrett Lyon
... and, and bandwidth. And, uh, so the other one we did was called BigGravity, and that was one of the first, or the first video-centric CDNs. So big file, big m- object delivery, and we had some really great customers there early on. People got it, and then we had a lot of tech around it to save people money. F- m- you know, people didn't realize hit play and you're s- downloading a progressive file and it, before all of this kind of media management stuff existed, you're just wasting bandwidth just to scroll into the middle of a video. [laughs]
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah, yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
And it cost people money. So anyway, we created all kinds of cool stuff around video and, um, so as far as like building a, a new network for consumers, it... Well, actually, and it's a little bit for bots too. Um, there's actually a lot of agentic networking components to it. Um, it's, uh, right up my alley 'cause I love building big infrastructure, I love build- building, uh, scaled stuff. But now it's kinda like s- twisting it. Instead of doing this for corporations, we're doing it for people. And I haven't really seen a lot of that being done, at least well. So it's gonna be fun to see kinda how people adapt to it. But, um, I think one of the more interesting things about that is, uh, we might even see some DDoS on our network. [laughs]
- JGJoel de la Garza
I'm sure you're ready for that. [laughs]
- BLBarrett Lyon
Uh, well, inbound from the internet, but what happens if somebody gets onto my network-
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah
- BLBarrett Lyon
... and starts using it inside, and now I have to deal with those, those silly people.
- JGJoel de la Garza
Yeah.
- BLBarrett Lyon
But, uh, you know, the truth is, even if you have privacy, there's still laws, and you need to- At least follow them as much as you can. [laughs] So
- JGJoel de la Garza
Well, and I think one other interesting thing, so you know, it's, it's sort of the... And this is the kind of spending, spending years talking with you. One other interesting thing is that you created an artwork-
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah
- JGJoel de la Garza
... that, that actually hung in the, at the, at the MoMA.
- BLBarrett Lyon
Yeah.
Episode duration: 45:05
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode bmDrbHOh7Bo
