Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Living on Blockchain. Today we are speaking to JB. So JB or Benjamin, he is the founder of KyroTech.co.uk. Basically KyroTek is a company that is creating a host of solutions.
You might have used their Vox Messenger, they are coming up with Vox Crypto Wallet, which would allow users to send bulk transactions without incurring the bulk of the gas fees. These guys are also working in AI and they’re creating basically an interconnected ecosystem where the power is essentially for the user. They also have a very, very profoundly kind vision to give away their profits as well by 2030 for the welfare of the downtrodden and people who are perhaps not doing so well and are not so well on their feet.
It was a wonderful conversation with JB. We laughed, we giggled, we shared some great ideas. He’s very anti-establishment, but honestly I haven’t come across anybody who puts forward their ideas in such an eloquent manner and such a convincing manner perhaps.
So I really want you guys to really listen to this one. It was a great conversation. Hi JB, thank you so much for making time for me today.
How are you doing? I’m fine, thanks. Thank you for having me here, Tarusha. It’s amazing, seriously.
Thank you so much for being a part of Living on Blockchain’s journey. And for our listeners, can you tell us a little about yourself, your background, how you got into this space? You’ve done some absolutely brilliant stuff and we’re going to touch upon that, but let’s set a little context first. Okay, so a little bit about myself.
I’m Jean Brunel, everybody calls me JB. I’m just a young kid, well I’m 42, almost 43 now, from the back ends of Birmingham in the West Midlands of the United Kingdom. Read a lot of books, studied a lot.
I was reading Descartes and the Baudrillard by the time I was five and six. I had a very unusual childhood actually. I was being taken to protest marches for freeing the Birmingham Six and stuff like that.
I was frequenting places like Zebedee’s Cafe and Alum Rock, which was a hotbed of all the socialists and communists at the time, who were all activists seeking hopefully societal freedom across the West Midlands from their brutal police force. So my childhood was run really of intense education and a lot of exposure to the real world around us in terms of the politics. I mean my sister and I almost got born in prisons because my mother was protesting poll tax riots at the time and stuff like that.
Wow. Yeah, so I mean you say oh yes it was a childhood where I got nothing but books, scientific equipment, went to plays and had to write essays on them and did not have any childhood friends or peers, but on the flip side of that I feel it did actually massively better prepare me for the world I’m in now to be honest, because unlike a lot of my peers growing up I can concentrate, I can do lots of stuff on my own self-initiated, I don’t question a great deal about myself and I can get things done pretty damn quickly. My background, I was kind of trained to be a scientist.
Originally I was going to be a physicist, but as we know… That’s very exciting. Well I always loved physics, I love how the world works, what makes things do the things they do, and if you understand physics you can kind of develop a better understanding of the world around you. One of my main favourite subjects of physics was most quantum mechanics actually and waveform theory etc.
Then spin the clock forward, as you know with any overbearing parent, does the child do that which you were telling them to do? No, they go and do the opposite. So I went into the visual arts actually and I went to college and did my first training in film production because I wanted to be a filmmaker actually. But as we know in the United Kingdom you can’t get money for making films unless it’s for a romantic rom-com with Hugh Grant or some kind of like top boy kid adulthood kind of gang related drama reinforcing all the stereotypes about black people.
I’ve never been interested in either of those to be honest. So I’m into martial arts movies if so instead I moved to 3D and AI. When I went to Ravensbourne University I believe I was with the person to produce the first procedurally generated AI animation which really kind of spun their noodles because they were only expecting a very basic stop-motion animation.
Instead I used an AI plugin in the Maya software to create two robots that fought each other and the outcome of the fight was undecided until the actual procedural system worked out itself. Spin the clock forwards. I’ve had four children.
My partner and I are no longer together and I’m trying to stop myself from going insane because at the time I’m not allowed any access to my children because it was an acrimonious breakdown of our relationship unfortunately. But what this did was instead of doing what most guys do when they like lose access to their children something which is either going to get drunk, get into alcoholism, get into sleeping with women serially or anything like that, I decided I was going to sit down and do something different. So I created my own messaging platform.
Pretty I guess an unusual way of dealing with trauma but it worked. I built a messaging platform from scratch starting in 2017 and I quickly discovered while looking at my competitors where pretty much everybody was going wrong which was that we as consumers were giving up our most valuable asset, our data to be exploited by a bunch of rich people so they can gain even more wealth. Bear in mind when you use a social media platform like Facebook, Twitter or any of these your very digital existence, everything you do and talk about generates data and that data can be leveraged for metrics and analytics for advertising revenue of course which means they’re making money from just you clicking on a like.
You get nothing out of it do you other than mental health issues. Yeah that’s a fun way of putting it actually and it’s very very succinct and right. Yeah I try to be succinct because I do so much stuff.
I’m also acutely aware that it can become very confusing very quickly. I mean I don’t just run one company which is kyrotech where I created the world’s first post-quantum encrypted post-quantum encrypted video chat messenger which is messenger but there’s also Dijin Technologies where we solved another industry problem which was how do you have a truly markeless volumetric camera system so you could create six degrees of freedom 3D maps from any environment using any camera source and again we’ve actually just filed the patent for that technology which we followed at Dijin Technologies and then we have my other company Gorgon Blackbox where we take the various technologies that we’ve created in these other two companies and we then put them to a utility for something like personal security close protection or something like that. I mean our core products the main one Vox Messenger the one I built to save myself from going insane.
We’re now over 70,000 users all over the world in over 40 countries and that’s without any advertising that’s just purely organically and it’s also I think partly because of how kyrotech is. We’re about transparency and accountability. We are very open and upfront about what we do and what we’re doing and we make sure because we actually care about our consumers and our revenue model is not based on advertising or exploiting your data for advertising we are able to do things that none of our competitors can do which is basically actually provide innovative solutions to our problems.
Wow you know this kind of throws up so many questions in my head but I’ll start with the first one. So for me as well as for our listeners can you tell us a little more about a post quantum cryptography and quantum proof that you know you’ve kind of touched upon. By the way I’ve you know heard of Vox Messenger and I’ve used it as well and I know a lot of my friends who are like coaches who you know use Vox Messenger primarily to give coaching and one-on-one sessions as well to their clients.
So you know I’m already like pretty much a fan and you know the UI and everything is so clean and I would encourage everybody who’s listening to go and give it a shot because really it’s one of the cleaner messengers that I’ve seen. Otherwise every other messenger kind of looks alike so you know kudos on that and please tell me a little more about post quantum cryptography and explain it like I’m five. Okay so to put it really simply the word post quantum encryption is a buzzword like so much else.
The current standard that most of that all of my competitors use is something called elliptic curve or EC and they’ll use a whole bunch of algorithms based on the elliptic curve which is the process of finding the point of a line between a parametric curve. The problem with a lot of the elliptic curve algorithms is that most of them are incredibly old and most have been already either backdoored or mitigated by bad actors and most of whom are in the governmental space in any case which makes them incredibly unreliable for actually truly secure operation. It should be remembered that WhatsApp and Signal use incredibly similar algorithms to each other because they were fundamentally created by exactly the same people.
In fact Signal is now being run by the very guy that created WhatsApp and Signal’s servers are now closed source which basically means that you can no longer state that they are absolutely open with what they do. With VoxMessenger we use these things called post quantum algorithms. Post quantum algorithms are basically algorithms which are classified as lattice based cryptography which is two to three hundred times two to four hundred times stronger than the elliptic curve equivalency because of the complexity of the actual algorithm calculations taking place.
The reason they’re called post quantum algorithms is because they are theoretically meant to be safe for the first couple of generations of post quantum supercomputers. It just means that a conventional modern computer cannot break them in the same way that it could say break the nearest competitor which is elliptic curve. Now VoxMessenger is the only current consumer available instance of this incredibly high-end technology.
I do understand that Signal have just announced they’re finally joining the post quantum era but the variant of post of the algorithms they’re using are ones which are hybridized with the current EC equivalency. Which is good because it provides a high level of backward compatibility but it also means there is the capability for it to be mitigated in potentially the same way that you would already mitigate their pre-existing security. Now VoxMessenger is an open source not yet and the reason for that is because we are a self-funded company.
We don’t get money from big VCs, we don’t get money from government backing or little black box projects that fund projects in countries of strategic interest to the United States. We don’t get any of that kind of funding because we pretty much won’t kiss anybody’s ass for it. So the way we got funded was by me doing things like working on building sites, being a building site laborer, building a security guard and just pouring my money into developing this tech.
Now we are close to being revenue generating because VoxMessenger which has encrypted video and voice calls is adding a zoom-like capability so you’ll be able to have very long and extended webinars, video conference calls and stuff like that within VoxMessenger. And also the prices, I think our prices are like 10 or 20 percent cheaper than Zoom. Oh and our UI doesn’t suck like Zoom’s does.
Yeah that’s what I was saying, your UI is pretty amazing. That is something that’s amazing. Well I mean thank you, I mean we’re only available on Android at the moment but we have iOS coming out in the next couple of weeks finally and we also have a desktop client coming out as well to make life even easier.
And what makes life even more fun is that we have VoxCrypto coming out in a couple of weeks which allows user-to-user crypto transfers but you don’t have to pay massive gas fees. I’ll give you an example, say you have a large family and you wanted to send a bunch of crypto to all of your friends and family. If you did it now it would cost a lot because the gas fees, you’d have to pay a gas fee for every transaction.
So say as those numbers increase that gets bigger. We created an algorithm in our smart contracts that allows us to culminate group transfers into a single gas transactional fee. So you could send $50 to 50 people.
So instead of it being $50 times 50 people plus 50 times transaction fees, it is $50 times 50 people, one transaction fee. Wow okay so this is very fascinating because I’ve never heard of these bulk transactions happening in the web3 space without incurring like you know multiples of fees. How are you achieving this on a tech end? Well on the tech end we’ve done that just by using our smart contracts and our incredibly smart coders and our smart contract is actually already available for public review on etherscan because we’ve already published and verified it and because we’re about transparency and accountability we are ensuring that all of our smart contracts are reviewed made publicly available and audited before we even launch the application.
It should also be remembered we’re also going we are currently undergoing registration with the FCA or the Financial Conduct Authority as a small electronic institution which would make us the only crypto wallet in the space that is officially financially registered and financially regulated. Wow that is quite hard like I know this because personally I we you know we wanted to look into getting licensed in the UK and more power to you guys for being able to do this. So tell me a little about and I’ll touch upon the regulation aspect again you know the more you speak and I have all of these questions coming into my head but I do want to understand how you say different when you talk about Woxcrypto how is it different say from a bulk sender app or you know there is also I think BitKeep earlier it was known as BitGet I think they allowed batch transfers as well right? So is it similar to that? Well all of those other people offering batch transfers they’re still actually generating in they’re still actually charging you individual gas fees for each transaction we’re not so what we do is the entire transaction is wrapped out as one so it generates one gas fee but we’re also the at the back end we also generate individual transactional IDs for each transaction so you can actually still trace the individual transaction.
Wow. So with our competitors when they do bulk transfers you lose the individual transactional data because of the bulking process with ours you do not. Wow this is amazing this is brilliant I think like I’ve been in crypto since the early days when mining 2012 and you know I’ve never heard of something like this is brilliant absolutely wonderful so when do you guys go live again? And we have pre-registrations starting on vox-crypto.app on the 12th of October.
We also have announcements going out at the Bitcoin Amsterdam show also on the 12th of October and we’re also being interviewed on the street later this week so there’s lots of ways to find out and keep an eye out also we’re on Twitter you can check out the VoxCrypto and VoxMessenger Twitter handles too VXC and VXM 2020 or alternatively just look me up on Twitter with my name and you’ll find everything anyway I’m incredibly public despite me being the guy who’s built the most private platform in the world I’ve discovered that I have to be incredibly public because otherwise people can’t really trust you if you know what I mean which I get because this is the dichotomy we have in the world around us we have all of these personality CEOs who are clawing for everybody’s money and attention and resources claiming that they’re going to be the ones that save the world when in fact all they seem to be interested in doing is vanity projects you know I mean it’s I get going to Mars that’s cool that takes it that makes us a type 2 civilization on the Kardashev score but other things that make us a type 2 civilization and the Kardashev score is universal basic income equity parity equality not just you know putting a penis shaped rocket into the atmosphere to Mars if you know which does seem to be the entirety they seem to they base their designs on especially Bezos Jesus that’s true and again you know you have an incredible way of putting things and I love that but you know this is something that recently realized and you know really I’ve been in this space for like I don’t know as an entrepreneur 13-14 years and you know every it’s like a re-realization that I have every few years that you know you have to be a little public if you’re building something that you know you want people to put their trust in you can’t not talk about you have to talk about both the sides you have to talk about your failures as well as the triumphs and it’s not similar to building just in public because you know it has to the content and what you’re putting out the narrative that you’re building unless you know there is a story there and there is a story in everybody’s life right if you’re putting it out there it’s easier for users to perhaps you know put their trust in you when you’re a platform yeah I mean the other thing is it’s also kind of how we’re trained to some extent that’s true because we’ve always been taught to look up to these figures of authority and if somebody doesn’t come across as a figure of authority then we don’t really listen to them but this is also what makes us incredibly easy to control yeah yeah I mean if you look at all of these different personalities we have out there who seem to be espousing fairly unethical immoral and incredibly exploitative methodologies for dealing with other human beings for example the Andrew Tate’s of the world as an example they seem to be focused solely on the exploitation of women for their own self-aggrandizement and advancement they give the air of authority and because we they give the air of authority and certain groups of people allow them to maintain that by supporting them for example be it Elon Musk by giving Andrew Tate a preferential access to his platform after he’s been pretty much probably you know he’s got the police after him he’s under public investigation under investigation by the police and law enforcement yeah or be it re-platforming somebody like Trump after he’s been de-platformed because of the very egregious things that he was saying right all of these things are things which are being uh directed at us to control us and manipulate us more towards not actually any ideological outcome it’s just about getting more money out of us ultimately it’s like the people who are supporting who predominantly support Trump or the people who go so and so anti-woke this that and the other they’re doing it to generate likes and engagement which equals money yeah about there’s no real ideological authenticity that’s exactly what i was about to say yeah there is no real ideology it is just about generating likes and you know garnering a few eyeballs so that they can generate a quick buck yeah that’s what it is yeah it’s um and the thing i find most hilarious is how we all become part of it yeah like be it the children who are doom scrolling on instagram and tiktok and all of these platforms all of these platforms vying for your attention your eyeballs and for what what do you get out of it nothing so this is reason why if you look at say um for example vox messenger vox uh vox alive which is our equivalency of facebook but again it has zero ads and no data tracking all of these systems are building towards an ecosystem that once actually adopted across the world as the alternative will provide ways for people to learn to earn or participate to earn so for example i’m firm believer that given that our personal data and our digital existence is more valuable than gold is now i would point out that really there’s no reason that anybody as an individual cannot be cannot self actualize their own monetization and thereby profit from their digital selves which is what the big war is at the moment it’s all about in the world around us you see all of these laws being passed like the online safety bill in the united kingdom and various bills across europe and the united states which are to curb access to our data they ostensibly put more and more of our own personal existence data or our personal digital lives in the hands of governments and corporations who will just make money from it while denying you the ability to do the same thing my platforms are designed to help you actually eventually get to the point where you’ll be able to your digital existence will be self-monetized to you and it would always and it will supplement the universal basic income that you’re already receiving from our the share of our profits in any case wow you know it’s quite a grand vision and i’m absolutely in awe like you know you paint a story so i’m thinking about this and i think this is the right way to go without a doubt and more power once again to you for being able to do this now you know something that has been this is more like a personal question and that i think that i would like to know you know you said that you know you’re working on three there are various things that you’re working on three different companies as an entrepreneur how do you manage that how do you like divide up your time and this is that’s why i said it’s a personal question because i have a problem with and i feel like you know as soon as i move from one thing one project to the other uh you know i i though other projects starts lagging and i would love to get some advice there and as i said this is coming from me personally i would love to know um okay is it this is the thing when people look at my companies and they look at my ecosystem and the things that i work on the thing they seem to always miss about everything i do that actually everything i do is interconnected in fact every single one of the projects i’m working on in all of my companies either benefit another objective in one of my other companies or is because of a benefit reaped from something done at that company or one of my other companies is incredibly synergistic so the only reason in fact that i have three companies is because investors predominantly and shareholders and vcs in particular they cannot wrap their heads around the fact that one person can be more than one thing so you can’t have one company that does everything because then they say you’re oh you’re not specialized enough so you have to you end up with a company for each individual thing that each of these kinds of sections sectors you’re covering i mean between my three companies i’m covering the top four market sectors of the entirety of the 21st century ranging from artificial intelligence computer vision machine learning and all of that groovy stuff all the way through to personal protection right so but these are designed to be the counter of the modern consumer capitalist based mainstream our technology is very much designed for the 21st century i mean once we’ve got to the point of being revenue generating we’re completely rebuilding vox messenger from the ground up to be in completely entirely decentralized but not just decentralized but also interoperable with our competitors because i do not believe i don’t want to live in a world where there is only one version of something it’s not you know as humans there’s lots of different versions of us why shouldn’t our products reflect that and i don’t view actually signal on whatsapp telegram and all of these other people really as competitors i view them as people who i can actually in the future connect with so that’s the reason why the next version of vox messenger will be interoperable which means you won’t need to join whatsapp or signal or telegram or any of these other platforms to talk to your friends and family if they’re on those networks in fact you’ll be able to talk to them under one single client and that’s your vox messenger client and no unlike other so-called all-in-one apps you won’t need to get api keys you won’t need to log in with with a user id from that platform because that’s not truly interoperable is it if you have to register on their damn platform no it would be completely interoperable it also will include vox crypto natively encapsulated inside of the application which is what we’re doing later this year wow okay so i would say the key to the time management thing is if you can create if you can have as many of your tasks actually interconnecting in a way that benefit each other it won’t feel like you’re jumping from thing to a thing and it won’t feel like you’re abandoning one over the other because whatever you do with one advances the other and vice versa yeah that’s beautiful i think you know you’re absolutely right when you are what you’re doing is perhaps working towards one larger vision right there might be multiple ways to reach there uh then you know you’re kind of sorted i and what you said about how obese is perhaps not able to understand that you know one person can be many different things uh that that kind of really um hit out for me i think you’re absolutely right and as long as there is a larger vision that you’re working towards uh the path can be multiple perhaps and you know you can walk them uh towards that larger vision absolutely awesome uh so you know apart from the your technical prowess uh you know you are able to effectively communicate uh both technical and non-technical um details of your product and you know just simplify it for the users so tell me how can somebody what would be your perhaps advice for somebody who’s building in the tech space to be able to imbibe that because i think that is very very important uh you know we can build the most brilliant products and if you are not able to at least convey uh the brilliance of those products in a simple way there wouldn’t be any adoption and i do think that that is one of the problems in web3 currently uh that you know there are all of these brilliant platforms and solutions that people are building on but they’re not able to put in um the or communicate the value that they’re bringing to the table in an effective manner so if you had to give suggestions to somebody who’s building in the space because you’re so good at it what would it be um i would say my advice to anybody building in the web3 space is to throw out the window pretty much what you’ve been told by anybody recommending white combinator or what or pioneer or any of these other kind of like incubatory programs because when you look at programs like white combinator and pioneer yeah they’re brilliant for startups and all this kind of stuff and they’re great for networking but the biggest problem with them is is that they are reinforcing the uh the exploitative business model espoused by consumer capitalism which makes them unfit for purpose for the 21st century where it’s actually the 21st century is about non-exploitation and the advancement of humankind as a whole as opposed to the advancement of certain groups over others but through predatory greed or anything like that i would i would recommend that you do not follow the whole um do look at a search a trend and try to find a gap in a market that you can you can squeeze into and do loads of consumer research into what people want okay it’s a great idea on paper but the reality is it doesn’t actually lead to any really useful products because the reality is not all consumers are the same all consumers are different they’ll all think and feel differently and everybody will anybody will say anything if you do a paid survey so most of this consumer research given that it has to be heavily incentivized in the first place thereby making it non-authentic actually means that all of these people who are just hunting for a trend to fulfill are looking looking for a miasma a thing that doesn’t actually really exist and has no true usage so if you go out there doing loads of questionnaires to find out what people really want what you’ll actually end up finding is that you build something incredibly niche now niche can really work because niche can give you a very dedicated user base but in but hyper niche things do not have great growth and are going to be difficult to grow because they’re niche which means if you can’t go for something that’s incredibly niche that has a hugely wealthy and dynamic user base what you’re going to be looking at is building a product that you can hopefully generate some revenue with and then sell and have a quick exit but then and this is what leads me up me to to raise the comment about what I feel is one of the big problems in the sector right now people are evaluating each other and are being evaluated on the number of exits they’ve done this to me is a dumb concept because to me if say I meet two people and one of them’s done six exits they’ve built six tech companies and exited all of them and made billions but then the other guy I speak to is a is a is actually truly innovative and comes up with some crazy some really good and interesting idea ways of solving problems I’m going to pick the guy that hasn’t done the exits you know why because the guy who’s done all of the exits they’ve done the exits because they have no interest in any of the things they’ve actually built that’s which me and if you and not being funny you cannot build a truly great product unless you love the thing that you’re building bear in mind designing and building is a work of love in itself it’s an action of love you what you’re building you’re building something that you hope will bring fun joy and ease and profit to the person that you’re giving it to you know yeah no then my advice would be um be authentic build something that is that is going to be that is not just useful to a bunch of people you don’t know and have never met outside of their name on a piece of paper build something for you build something for your community build something for your people that you know they will actually gain usage don’t build for profit don’t build just for an exit because it’s all you’re doing is just putting something another useless thing out into the world that’s not really real if you know what I mean also I’d say build a product don’t just raise go out there trying to raise money on a pitch deck because a I got to be honest I think those times are gone now if we’re honest and b it doesn’t prepare you for what happens next because a lot of startups they’ll get they’ll pitch a product on a napkin with a beautiful pitch deck get some amazing names behind them as advisors and then raise a ton of cash but then they’re stuffed because the products they’re actually trying to build either can’t be built or can’t be built in the way that they promised it could be thereby not being able to produce the product they’ve promised their shareholders and then the shareholders will do their thing the investors do their thing and nobody’s ever really happy and the company either gets sold on or broken up and somebody somewhere makes a tiny little bit of profit but what is it actually done that is useful what’s the legacy of it other than a document somewhere that existed and made a bit of cash there is none and I don’t know about other people but for me my like my whole world existence is not based on the concept of money it’s based on the concept of what you can do with money to make people’s lives better right you know yeah I think everybody kind of starts off perhaps a lot of us start off with that those same ethos but you know it kind of gets lost uh while traversing this path because uh as you mentioned that there are a lot of um that there is that shiny object syndrome bit right you know you kind of see the other thing and you know it seems more attractive and you you think that it’ll help you make a quick buck so you veer towards that promising yourself that you’ll get back on path but well you know that that kind of doesn’t happen so what you’re saying is absolutely bang on and I kind of got lost there because I start thinking about my journey and you know how uh how far you know I’ve come and we kind of I think at least I got into tech because and I was I’m a self-taught techie I was not really I did not get any official training or organized training in technology and when you know I started the path I used to say there’s one thing that I want to make technology so simple and you know basically it’s about convenience so I want to drive in that convenience via tech uh so that you know my father and my grandparents can perhaps be you know using that technology and it should be that easy I think tech should always be about uh solving uh problems and making life better for people no absolutely it’s any tech if you look at the technological landscape the technology that’s been developed purely for profit really does very little for humanity generally yeah that’s true that is absolutely true I think yeah it’s more of a face book solving yeah exactly they you know it’s a short term sort of a game then it’s a short term game you’re playing if you’re just looking to make a quick buck if you’re trying to really make a difference in people’s lives or change the way they are living um their life in some way and actually withstand the test of time you would have to be playing the long game and looking at a larger vision and that’s what I’m interested in I mean for me kyrotech is a 2000 year company that will be here far far into the future providing products and services that will protect nurture and support all of humanity yeah well that’s the objective anyway no I I think it’s it’s a wonderful objective to have so tell me you know because the tech’s landscape is constantly evolving uh you know what trend or emerging technology do you feel most bullish about or do you feel uh that is like the long game that is there and it’s not like just a short-term trend that will be here now and you know not there the next um I would probably say that everything you have right in front of you right now is a short-term trend until the next shiny thing comes along for example if I remember correctly to a year ago it was metaverse this everything metaverse oh my god yeah yeah I mean look everybody spunked billions on that thing I mean the amount of companies that are for that will which were raised up with millions of VC money just to be dropped by the end of the year with zero profit and zero revenue generated and we have the same thing happening with AI but the difference being is that the metaverse is a dangerous toy to play with yeah but there is nothing more dangerous than a nuclear powered hand grenade in the hands of a five-year-old and that’s what we have with artificial intelligence right now we have artificial intelligence being pushed on the rest of us by effectively three white guys who are trying to set the tone ethics morality and thinking process for AI for the rest of the world for the future to come Sam Altman Musk Bezos all of these people and I got to be honest these these people are a threat actually to the development of a of an AGI that would be universally safe for all of us and the reason for that is their data sets the thing that everybody seems to be ignoring I’ll give you an example something like 90% of all computer vision systems are bait are trained on the same four data sets one of which is the Microsoft face data set and these are data sets which are predominantly filled with blue-eyed white people because it’s based on the western paradigm as opposed to anything else now this basically means any AI or computer vision system based on that system will not be able to recognize anybody that’s just a couple of shades off of the color bar this is hugely unsafe given that we have autonomous cars out there relying on computer vision systems trained on these very models right but it’s being ignored and then we have Sam Altman who wants to reap all of our eyeball data in exchange for the most wishy-washy non-existent variant of universal basic income I have ever seen described in my entire freaking life yeah it is a little dodgy yes I agree understatement of the freaking century and bear in mind this is Sam Altman Sam Altman who refused the rest of us human beings as median humans because apparently his AIs will replace the functions of most of us median humans I’m assuming that Sam Altman believes he’s a superior human I’ve got to be honest any human being that comes up with that kind of a classification for another human being we have to be worried about because we have been we’ve seen the results of individuals from the western hemisphere classifying other humans by their intellect and their skin unfortunately and when I start seeing big powerful guys making statements like that I get a shiver down my freaking spine right yeah that is that is true you know Sam has made a lot of controversial statements and uh you know the more you kind of read about it the more you you feel a certain sense of disdain almost you know kind of that that arises from his statements and but uh but I’ve got to say like this is again this is my personal take so AI is right now currently in its form it is helping a lot of people and people are utilizing it to become more efficient and productive what do you what is your take like I understand that everybody you know has a take on this uh they’re okay they this need then this needs to be regulated uh but to what degree then you know what to what degree does the regulation come in and then how does it um but you know how does it remain perhaps neutral right now obviously it’s not it’s not neutral in any sense of the world we have you know the system AI systems are as good as the people who train those systems but how do you make this work perhaps what is your take on it like you know so that we can benefit from AI but perhaps we it’s it’s not like the kraken being uh you know set out on the world um I would think that just like humanity we need more than one AI I think the idea that we should only have four super dominant AIs controlled and run by the four biggest white-owned companies in the entire freaking hemisphere it would be an absolutely ridiculous dumb idea because just like with humanity what happens with humans when you let uh when you allow one group of humans to gain dominance over another yeah it turns to a cluster sorry I was going to swear then it turns into a cluster of the fifth or whatever you want to call it it does it’s not a great it doesn’t work out well and unfortunately given that we’re training AI on human data sets effectively human orientated data sets it would be highly logical to conclude that if you were to generate to create a few dominant AIs you may start to see the same kinds of evils and issues set in that happens when you have certain dominant humans with a ton of power the difference being though with dominant humans is that there is one thing that breaks their ability to fully control all of us which is that we are all different we all communicate differently we don’t have a standard form of communication other than speaking but then we have different languages and different cultures now if you have multiple if you have four dominant AIs which are sharing a common language and a common culture that is no longer the case you get absolute homogeney an absolute homogeney it leads to a utopia that only a certain group of people would have wanted us to have from the 1940s but what I’m trying to build towards is a model where we have lots of individual AIs I’ll give you an example one of the products we’re developing at kyrotech is something called Angel Eyes which is a 360 degree threat awareness wearable you either wear around your neck or you can wear it on your head like a halo and basically what it does is using the computer vision system it is able to give you a 360 degree threat awareness so say for example you’re walking down the park it’s late tonight you’re listening to your Spotify it will be able to tell you that there is an IC100 male approaching you about 10 meters behind with a with a facial expression that would indicate 60% chance of so and so and he is going to intersect with your path in x amount of time and what it would do is record that interaction and then saves it or puts it pushes it out there to the people on your list who are your allies or angels to alert them or to look in alerts law enforcement now over a period of time this AI will be listening to you if you give it permission to it will start to understand you it will be able to talk to you that’s the reason why we call it because eventually this AI would then if you gave it permission be able to plug into your vox messenger and vox crypto system and learn even more about you it’s an AI that is never trained on any data other than your own and that data never leaves your handset in its in any unencrypted or personalized format which means say we had mass adoption of the angel eye system we would create a system where the world would be filled with millions hundreds of millions of different trained AIs all of which that the main big corporate and governmental AIs have to talk to and negotiate with this basically means we create a system where there is no dominant form of artificial or secular human intelligence that can take over the majority of people in one hit now unless we’re going to fix all of our data sets this methodology becomes a necessity because unless we’re going to clean our data sets and establish ground truth for a completely equitable and sane AI to be created we need to create lots of AIs that generate create what people would call imbalance but by virtue of their multitudinous imbalance create an actual natural balance wow okay that’s wonderful you know and yeah you’re absolutely right i think there has to be some sort of a balance in what you said about multiple AIs right i think that is perhaps the way to go and that’s a very interesting perspective i’ve never really heard anybody expound on this particular idea a lot but this gives me a lot to think about i think you know you as you mentioned i think the safest and the best analogy to give is that if you know you given too much power concentrated at any end uh would you know corrupt so might always corrupt always does yeah that that is what history teaches us and if it is going to corrupt then we might as well make it distributed in nature so that we don’t come to that that particular point it’s like that yeah uh so now you know kind of touching upon uh just something in in hypothetical uh that you know because the world is vast and you know you’re working already in several aspects it’s all interconnected but if you had the chance to address one particular uh you know global challenge with with any kind of a tech solution i i think i know the answer but what would it be and perhaps how would your solution work um i i think the first i think the biggest world problem at the moment is the inequitable sharing and allocation and control of resources be that financial or mineral etc etc and i would basically do exactly which i’m doing which is i would because i have already seen that charity doesn’t work and i’ve already seen that governments most definitely don’t work and i’ve seen that the biggest corporations in the world their idea of saving the world is to come up with puff pieces and to give money to charity and to go to the met gala dinner and you know pontificate about this and the other while they jump in their private jets to fly to cop 26 in freaking unison while telling us that we can’t drive the cars that we’re just too poor to be able to barely afford so to given all of that in the world around me i’m just doing exactly what i think would be necessary which is to build alternative ecosystems to the current mainstream paradigms and ensure that come that you know come hell or high water that come 2030 we’re generating enough revenue so we can fulfill our commitment to give 60 percent over to a universal basic income fund that would allow us to give people money as users of vox crypto and vox pay we will also continue campaigning on the back end for the removal of local councils and their replacements with smart contracts and ai systems which are infinitely more efficient cost effective and far harder to corrupt than a human in those positions right yeah that’s that’s absolutely true uh so that that that would be a great problem to perhaps resolve you know i want to touch back on the last question a little bit again uh because i do want your take on so if somebody because you mentioned that okay all of these trends um you know in the space they’re all like the short-term game so if somebody had to say you know decide right now uh what they should be working on what would your advice be there for them that okay this this particular use this particular set of technology or uh or you know had to like latch on to this particular trend uh what would be your advice to people who are just starting off well you know looking at trends to start working on something or building something as i said the problem with trends is they’re so ephemeral unless you have a budget to i mean because the trend window is so small nine times out of ten unless you’ve got somebody who can build the thing from start to finish incredibly quickly it could even be that you spot a trend and you’re even you can’t even get to market in time to maximize the trend that’s that’s the reason why looking at short-term trends really doesn’t work i really is is so look at the mid-term to long-term and what you’re going to see trending is an increase in the utility and application of artificial intelligence into everyday operations of our lives so anything that is going to be a mood that’s going to be a trend that continues to not only move forward but also expand maybe i would suggest looking at how ai can be used to improve connectivity between users in the metaverse because that is one that’s a big problem in the metaverse right now which is to solve how do you get large numbers of people with pre-existing technology into a virtual environment cohesively and on an equitable basis right in fact it’s a massive challenge in fact there’s very few people are even successful in insomnium is one of the few companies who’s able to put tens of thousands of people into a single virtual experience but i’m sure there is some real i’m sure there is some crazy kids out there just like i was who can who can think of a way using ai to shortcut that even more so look we’ve got spatial scan with the patented technology where you we can scan you and you become an avatar but what if you took that another step forward and made it so you could take only one photograph of a person and turn that into an authentic realistic 3d model which can then be automatically put into the metaverse which is then automatically spun up just on your handset as a localized environment that nobody else can interfere with or exploit that’s just off the top of my head and by the way somebody please go make that there will be no challenge by me and you can have it don’t care if i mentioned it here because we need it at the end of the day i’m not this is something else your listeners should also remember is that also with my companies unlike with other companies because we’re not so focused on exploitative profit and for us the idea of profit is more than just money we are also we are also more interested in working collaboratively with other people and startups than other companies are potentially awesome okay that’s wonderful to hear i think you know there are so many guys who are just starting off who get intimidated by these you know bigger ideas and who would like nothing better than perhaps a collaborative hand or you know just a holding hand so they can scale their solution so that is wonderful for you to give that as a proposition here so now let’s let’s move on to some fun okay and we are almost out of time but i don’t want this conversation to end so i’m gonna put in like a few fun questions as well that this this has to be one of the better conversations that i’ve had by the way jb and in the last month or so and you know it’s it’s really it’s given me something to think about it made me giggle and chuckle and thank you so much but um yeah now back to it uh tell me a little if you um okay so this is hypothetical question if you had to if you got a chance to perhaps have a conversation with any you know fictional character uh who would it be and uh what what burning tech question would you ask them fictional character oh my god um okay if i could ever i could question any fictional character it would probably be james t kirk and i would ask him what the hell is it is that he’s typing into the arm of his chair when he’s only got six buttons to that that’s a good question star trek every time he did something what the hell are you doing six buttons yeah yeah that’s a good question okay so another one wasn’t more serious but no but this is supposed to be fun yeah this is supposed to be the fun part so i i love these questions because everybody has a different perspective and yeah you know that’s a very interesting way and interesting question to ask kirk so tell me um again you know this is not so much in the lighter side but if you had like a superpower okay uh and what would what would it be on on the like a tech inspired superpower okay and what would you use it for um i already have the tech i already have the tech superpower that i wanted which was to be okay it’s gonna sound really weird but i’m kind of like cable out of x-men those who are not i’m actually a dc fan personally my youngest son is called cal l and i bear the sign of the bat tattoo but i’ve liked a lot of early marvel as a kid and cable the son of um the son of scott summers cable is somebody who’s natively able to understand any technology as soon as he sees it and that was something i always wanted and i i’ve discovered i kind of have that skill it’s like anytime somebody brings me a new piece of hardware a new piece of software or anything like that i don’t actually have to be told how it works i kind of work it out and intuitive incredibly quickly this is how i’m able to deconstruct most of my competitors mechanisms so freakishly quickly because i can normally work out how something looks just by looking at it it’s very weird thus far i’ve got like a 98 success rate so i’d say um if it was going to be like a super superhero kind of superpower i guess it would be professor x of the x-men of course yeah that is a yeah the ability to read minds yeah who doesn’t want that right but i think you know you say that but no no no wait for it wait for it okay so everybody says they would like to be able to read minds just like everybody says yeah i’d love to be a model the thing is is what do you do with that information and most people such most people are not pragmatic people think about it so if they knew exactly what everybody around them was thinking they would die of depression self-loathing or they’d hate everybody that is true you see what i mean yeah it’s like people who say you would know you want to be immortality right yeah yeah when people say you want to be immortal then you know they’re not really seeing it seeing it through you know they’re not thinking it through yeah because yeah yeah bear in mind most of these people are people who say i’m bored what can i do where to go and they want to be immortal wow yeah that’s true very true i’m sorry yeah the you know this is this is there you know where you really should think things through before wishing for them you know you should be careful what you wish for it’s not tell me a little about perhaps any creative process or routine or habit that you have that you know you find particularly effective for sparking innovation creativity or just you know just getting out of bed in the um my process is probably a little bit different to other people i mean i’m a huge advocate of uh of cannabis and the benefits of marijuana by myself smoke uh cannabis and i do so and i do so while i’m working and i noticed that doing so allows me to free up my mind so i can actually focus on the things that need to be to need to be done but it is not kind of like an obsessive focus it just means you can quiet your brain from worrying about the day-to-day dramas that the world brings you bear in mind there’s nothing worse than when you i’ll give you an example waking up this morning what did i see on the news i see that israel and palestine are at it again big style this i’m sure i’m actually going through a financial raise at the moment which means that kind of stuff happening in the market apart from being a humanitarian freaking disaster on both sides it is also going to lead to a necrotropic effect yeah so again if you’re not somebody who can detach themselves from that reality and detach themselves from all of this that we get plugged at us on social media and everything around us if you can’t detach from that you cannot innovate if you can’t detach from the bs realities around you you’re not gonna be able to think your way to a solution to some of these problems so um having a deep ability for pragmatism and smoking a bit of weed really helps yeah i i think you know so that’s i i do sorry yeah no it’s a process right i think to each their own and i do think that quieting the mind however you are doing it like you know some people would like to meditate some people uh get into these flow states very easily but for you it’s it’s via cbd and cannabis and that is that is absolutely okay there’s no judgment there i think and uh more people i think would do well if they throw out judgment out of the window and really get okay correction if people smoked good cannabis let’s get it right because the stuff that you see the kids hawking on the streets around us is this chemically imbibed bs which is what’s driving people nuts so if you are going to be somebody who’s going to consume cannabis get good quality stuff people if you want to do stuff that is focusing on your energy and your mental acuity then focus on sativas don’t go for indica’s because indica’s are the ones that will knock your ass up you know and don’t get it from people who are spraying grow cultures all over it to get a bigger yield because they’re greedy mofos want to make more money from it because it’s the same thing about the food that we eat bear in mind if you’re somebody that just lives on mcdonald’s i’m telling you now your chances your ability to innovate is reducing with every mcdonald that you eat that’s true yeah hundred percent you know it’s about what you’re putting in right it can be or whatever even if it’s edibles it’s whatever you’re eating whatever you’re consuming who are you interacting with all of it is an energy right and whatever you’re imbibing that’s what you’re going to be able to put out right and if you’re going to be like you’re investing shit so what is going to come out so you know you have to keep that in mind look there’s it’s no mistake it’s no there’s a reason why if you look in the crypto space for the longest time it’s been filled with red bull monster drinking crypto chads because it’s that it’s been that energy and that’s what and that’s the reason why it’s become it became such an exploitative negentropic place i mean you asked me earlier about my position on regulation i hate to say it ladies and gentlemen despite me being one of the most anti-government anti-establishment people you can probably find out there i am pro-regulation when it comes to ai and i’m sure as hell pro-regulation when it comes to crypto because the reality is you need a little bit of regulation actually because if you don’t people are going to die plain and simple yeah no that’s absolutely true i think even i am i i try to see i think initially um my stance was also pretty much that okay why do we need regulation because again i don’t think that you know the governments are up to any good so i don’t think regulation is going to do at least initially i didn’t think it was going to do us any good but i’ve been around for a long enough time to know that okay some amount of regulation is required in ai web3 all of these technologies because not all actors are good actors and you know there are some folks who actually dirty the pond for everybody else so it it can be either in the form of some some amount of self-regulation which in an you know idyllic world would work but if if that is not happening uh then you know some kind of government regulation and some kind of intervention is required but then that comes when i say that comes with a bit of a caveat that you know the government need to first understand the tech before they try to police it so i i don’t know how far away if we are away from that but um i i do understand where you’re coming from the regulation ai versus crypto is an interesting one because with regulation with ai i hate to say it but i feel that the eu is probably the ones who have got the best approach right now so with the e with the responsible ai acts that the eu have passed there is multiple levels of ai that need to be documented and audited and published and made and their workings and mechanisms made public and shared with the european governments before they’re even allowed in the public space which i’ve got to be honest after knowing implicitly and understanding what ai can be used for in the public space i fully agree with i mean this this is what’s causing the tension between the eu and tesla because tesla don’t want to hand out hand over to the eu the data sets and training models they’ve been using on their cars probably because they’re going to find out they don’t want the eu to see how they’re based on horrifically biased and skewed data because if they did and the european union didn’t like it they would classify that ai as having a level four threat rating which means it would be harder for it to be operated in the consumer space i agree with that actually you know if you if you have if you’re using ai and you’re using it as part of your business model and for some reason you’re afraid to share the model or the data sets with other people i got a question why it’s a dodgy right it’s a little shady then you know what exactly are you doing why can’t you be transparent yeah exactly especially when it comes to something so massively pervasive and as an and invasive as artificial intelligence when it is leveraged on big chunks of personal human data absolutely yeah you’re right that is true so yeah some regulation uh with perhaps uh bits of you know a lot of understanding of the tech i think is a go because especially because it’s so fast evolving right even before you can wrap your head around something there’s a new version of it and then you know you have to start the process all over again so yeah i do think that this is this is becoming increasingly important as we move forward especially because everything is so as you said you know you wake up today and there is another war and you know everything is so fragile that it’s it’s uh it’s very important that we at least have regulation in the right places uh else these things and this technology can be weaponized very quickly insanely so i mean we have seen multiple countries lord their utility of artificial intelligence and robotics in the military space and we have also been shown very very quickly how it can absolutely mean freaking nothing when you are leveraging it on people exploitatively and oppressively yeah makes sense okay so we are really running out of time so now i’ll just come and i would love to this is something i ask everybody and uh because this podcast was is it was always about uh you know initially it was just a labor of love about getting to demystify web3 and i i felt very honored to be able to do that i think now more and more people know about it but nevertheless this question has remained a part of the script that i share with everybody uh that comes on the show i would love to know what is your take or what are your suggestions perhaps for somebody who’s perhaps uh sitting on the fence you know between web2 and web3 and thinking whether they need to take a leap of faith into web3 what would be your suggestions to them to start living on blockchain um okay so if you’re sitting on the fence i understand it you know none of us want to keep losing money hand over fist like you know anybody does if they invest in any exchange or any of these platforms like terralune or anything like that i also understand that the culture is bloody horrible and incredibly misogynistically male-dominated it’s not very it’s not a nice place the space right now so how do you get started in that um do lots of research if you’re going to be in the crypto space you have to remove your resistance to learning and this is something i find a lot in modern people because we expect everything to be now now now now now now now now give it to me now give it to me now that’s the reason why you know kids are obsessed with tiktok and instagram but if you’re in the crypto space move slow move steady move with purpose and do your own research i don’t care if the person is your great uncle and you’ve known them your whole life and they’re giving you some crypto advice you better research that stuff seriously because you are the world this is the great thing about the web3 space if we look at web 2.0 web 2.0 was the world where we give control over to a third-party service in exchange for something free yeah the is centralized horrifically centralized this basically means as part of that tacit understanding between us and the platform provider there was the assumption there would be security and there would be protection and trust now in web3 because it’s decentralized you are responsible for your own security you are responsible for your own trust which means all of these people going into the web3 space who are saying oh my god i got robbed of this why isn’t it like this i hate to say it a lot of it is because they do not understand this is a very different this is not a centralized playing field where you can say where you can leave you know reliably rely on coinbase protecting you because the reality is decentralized world there is no risk the only person who has responsibility for protecting their assets is the asset holder yeah and this is the thing that people don’t get they want to be able to have the laziness and ease of web2 where they have no responsibility whatsoever and they can just go oh i can’t believe that company’s done this with my data but they you know without the knowledge that they wouldn’t do any better with it themselves but in web3 you are the single most powerful entity in the world you control your data you control your existence and you need to realize that move past the resistance point and learn to become responsible for that because of the people when i look in the space the amount of people out there who are saying oh why can’t the platforms do this why isn’t this happening why isn’t this happening it’s not happening because it’s not a centralized system it’s decentralized you are king but the problem everybody wants to be king but the reality is people need to realize that becoming king comes with consequence and the consequences you are responsible so if you want to get into the space be prepared to learn and learn a lot do lots of research speak to lots of people and this is another thing trust your gut if something if somebody’s telling you something you’re in a situation and something feels off chances are it’s off so just trust your gut because your gut works off of your instincts and human instincts are incredibly well attuned to something that feels like a scam or feels like a lie you see what i mean yeah no absolutely i think that that is good advice for anybody who’s trying thinking of getting in the space or is just waiting to the web3 waters so i think and download vox crypto yes absolutely download vox crypto i’ve already signed up to be on the wait list so i’m waiting uh to for you guys launch it and for me to use it i’ve had such a good experience with your previous products i can’t wait to use vox crypto and it’s going to save me money as well so it’s quite a win-win thank you very much seriously oh my god that’s so cool i’m really looking forward to it thank you so much jb for taking out this uh time to speak to me this has been such a wonderful conversation i’ve already mentioned it that i’ve had a lot of fun recording it i hope our listeners have a lot of fun listening to it any last thoughts before we wrap this up um well first i just want to say thank you for having me here teresha it’s been great and it’s i always love taught i’m a bit of a blab mouth i love talking about this stuff um but i would say last bit on my signing out last bit of advice would be if you can do anything today find the person that you love and give them a hug because human contact is more important than any of this stuff at the end of the day any of the tech i build is just a way of trying to connect humans to being closer so my advice is go close and go be close with some other humans get off your phones touch some grass and be close with your loving humans that is such good advice i think that’s very different from the usual stuff that i hear but wonderful pretty much like this conversation thank you so much once again uh that’s great advice and a great way to close the show thank you thank you very much