Clif High - NDA - Transcript

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Feb. 18, 2024 - Clif High

35:07

NDA

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	Hello humans.
	Hello humans.
	Still February 17 after one.
	Heading out to the coast now.
	Looked at the house and the property.
	Got a big decision to make.
	Huge amount of work.
	So I don't know if I'm going to do it or not.
	It'll take a few days to cogitate.
	Anyway, I wanted to talk about non-disclosure agreements, NDAs.
	So you'll see some people, especially like, oh, well, okay, so some people are going to, some of the grifters will alibi their situation by whenever it gets too close to shit that's real, they'll pop up and they'll say, oh, I can't discuss that.
	It's covered under an NDA.
	I've got an NDA, non-disclosure agreement.
	And mostly it's bogus.
	None of these people have NDAs, in my opinion.
	And if they do, they can quite legally prove that because all the NDAs always allow you to talk about the document itself, okay?
	So that legally, if you were hauled into court or in some circumstances like that, you could be pressured to discuss the document, even not necessarily discussing the contents of the document or what the document actually covers.
	So I've been under NDAs relative to design and coding work for companies.
	And usually for me, it's always been associated with intellectual property, right?
	So I do not believe that Charlie Ward has an NDA preventing him from discussing certain aspects of the QFS, okay, or med beds or whatever the fuck.
	I don't believe that anybody would sign an NDA with him.
	And it would be tedious beyond understanding to negotiate that with him.
	So when I had an NDA with a private company that was in the telephone business and they were thinking about hiring me and we wanted to discuss certain aspects of my work and also sort of like guard certain aspects of the work from being discussed.
	And so they wanted an NDA on what would become their intellectual property.
	That took four days to negotiate, right?
	It was just tedious beyond understanding.
	That's four eight hour days other than, well, even at lunch, because I was going out and having lunch with the lawyers and we were talking about it then.
	So four damn days.
	I hate NDAs because if you're in the business, you need to have that thing as tight as possible.
	You can't have a broad NDA because you could be, because then it's open to interpretation as to whether or not you actually violated the terms and sanctions could be imposed against you.
	And so bear in mind, NDAs are the ability to sue somebody.
	So if you talk about something in an NDA, well, and your NDA was with the government, well, the government can sue you, but they can't come and arrest you for talking about it or anything like that.
	You know, there's no criminal penalties for discussing something under the NDA.
	It's all a civil kind of a lawsuit thing.
	And usually, okay, so in my experience, I'll have to say my experience because I don't know usual, right?
	But in my experience, and I've worked for local, regional, state, and federal government.
	And I worked for foreign government.
	All of those were covered under NDA because I was doing development.
	I was writing software.
	And they take forever to negotiate on these things, right?
	But you can talk about the NDA itself.
	You can say, yes, I have an NDA.
	Sometimes you have to say the other principal, the other party in the NDA, can't be released due to the terms of the NDA, right?
	In other words, who you had signed the contract with is covered by the NDA and you can't talk about it.
	And that's legit, but usually that's not the case.
	Usually you're allowed to talk about it.
	And in case, so for instance, if I was sued, well, I was, if a company I was working for got sued and I got roped into the suit because of intellectual property violations or whatever they were being sued for, then my NDA with some other third-party company has to be respected, even in that court case.
	And so we have to skirt around those things that are covered by that NDA that can't be discussed.
	Usually, and also, okay, so in my experience, I've never seen an NDA that covered non-intellectual, non-proprietary intellectual property.
	And so, in other words, so in my experience, there would be no reason to have an NDA around medbeds if you're not working on the software or the hardware, just if you're doing marketing or something for them.
	There's no reason to be covered by an NDA on that.
	So, Charlie Ward claiming to have an NDA that precludes him from telling you when the QFS is going to roll out is horseshit.
	You don't have NDAs covering what is going to be basically public information or manifesting events that can be described.
	You know, you don't have an NDA procluding you from talking about sand or water or some other factual aspect of our reality.
	They are, in my experience, as I say, they're 100% tied to intellectual property.
	And I've been in some tricky ones where there was, you know, where I was working for one company as a subcontractor, that was Microsoft.
	And Microsoft had me subcontracting through their consulting division to some airlines.
	And I had to write software that involved telephony stuff, right?
	So this was back when there were the phones in the back of the seat in the airplane ahead of you.
	And so if you wanted to make a phone call, there was no cell service.
	You couldn't run cell phones on the plane, yada, yada, yada, at that point.
	And so if you wanted to make a phone call while in flight, you would pay an outrageous amount of money and you would do it through the telephone that was in the back of the seat ahead of you.
	And I wrote the software for those.
	And I had to write the software that, you know, did all of the technical stuff from the phone to the transmitter, checking that the transmitter was good, all the error codes, you know, checking the phone was good, all of this kind of stuff.
	On, it's called power on self-test, okay, a post.
	And I had to write all this software.
	I also had to write the software that went through the connection in the airline and connected to the OSP, the other service provider for the telephony industry.
	And so the phone company basically that was handling the phone call down here on the ground charges money for that service.
	And I had to be able to effectively transmit to that phone company from the phone call, the amount of time, the billing, all of that kind of stuff, so they could bill as well.
	And then the airline took a percentage off of that.
	And so it was real complicated shit, right?
	There was like, there were like seven different corporations involved at a primary level, and maybe another 10 or 12 at minor levels, like the guys who wrote the firmware for the transmitter in the airplane, right?
	So they were involved peripherally and minorly and so on.
	So I had an NDA that allowed me to discuss what I was developing, but I couldn't betray anything that we would call a trade secret that belonged to the company I was hired out to code for, which was the airline.
	So even though I was getting paid by Microsoft Consulting Services, I was working for an airline that in turn paid Microsoft.
	And so my customer, even though it was really Microsoft Consulting Services, I owed my loyalty, so to speak, to the airline for whom I was writing the software.
	And so this was a tricky fucking NDA.
	We were still working on that maybe two months into the contract because there were just new shit coming up, right?
	This counter process billing, and I needed on the firmware.
	There was a thing where I needed to be able to get at the timing clock in the transmitter.
	So the guys who wrote the firmware for that were all whipped up.
	They were just like really freaked out.
	And we ended up coming up to a very nice conclusion.
	And I just wrote a piece of software that I gave to them, a piece of code, and they included it in The API, the access point to their firmware, such that I could just query the transmitter firmware and get a bunch of data that I needed to be able to include in the header and the trailer unit to the phone call for appropriate billing.
	Bearing in mind that we're billing every six seconds, right?
	That's the way the telephony industry worked on landlines at that time, was that they would bill on a six-second increment.
	It's really complicated shit, guys.
	There's all kinds of laws, there's international laws, state laws, there's taxes involved there.
	You have to slice and dice the taxes.
	And this is no joke, you have to slice and dice the taxes based on what state you're flying over while that phone call is being made.
	So I needed to know.
	It was really a fascinating chunk of software to write.
	And it's too bad they don't have those phones in there because it worked really, really, really well.
	But, you know, you needed to find out where you were geographically such that you could know what state you were flying over, such that you could know which tax ID had to be presented for the remuneration from that phone call along with all the other shit going to the other service provider, the OSP.
	And so, like I say, it was really complicated.
	And it was just a hell of an NDA to negotiate.
	There was always some stuff coming up.
	Oh, this developed and so on.
	So we'd have to amend the contract.
	So there must have been, oh, I don't know, it was over two and a half or three months.
	We may have had 20 or 30 revisions to the contract that all needed to be signed on and revision dates and changes and so on all signed off on.
	And so it got really complicated because I'd sign off on it.
	It might be 15 or 20 days later before we find out that the firmware guys weren't going to sign because of some pissat little thing that was their concern that we didn't know about at the time that we were doing the NDA.
	So like, you know, gene decode under an NDA?
	No, I don't think so, guys.
	That seems like horseshit.
	I've heard the guy speak on videos.
	He is not in control of his, it does not appear that he's in control of his thoughts and words to the level that would suggest that he's watching them because of an NDA, right?
	And also, you don't usually have, or they don't, in my experience, no one develops an NDA that's going to cover what will become public information.
	So you wouldn't put an NDA on people that were about, say, med beds.
	So say they existed, say the technological industry was there to create them.
	Bear in mind that a med bed would require not only solving the big issue of how to get the energy into the human body and in what form you needed it to be, but also how to control it.
	But say you solved all of that, you're still going to have a huge industry that's required to build these.
	You're going to have to have, you know, all kinds of hardware stuff, you know, whatever the energy form is, you know, the bed stuff you're going to lie on, all that's going to have to be medical grade.
	It'll all have to be examined, checked, double-checked, and so on, theoretically, by the various aspects of government medical industry before it would be allowed to be out there.
	You know, bear in mind, you don't want to put somebody in a medbed version one, hit the switch, and turn them into, you know, a French fry, right?
	You don't want to crisp them.
	So all this shit's got to be checked out.
	It's got to be seriously investigated.
	Going to take years to do that.
	If we were dealing with an ordinary government that actually had our interests at heart, so if the Food and Drug Administration actually gave a shit about quality food and quality drugs, and this would have a tendency to come under there, medbeds would come under there because it would be being used in lieu of a drug.
	But even if all this stuff were solved and there was economic interest for them to be forthright and really look at this shit, make sure it all worked.
	If that were the case, you might be looking at 10-year tests, 10 years of tests before they would say, okay, you know, this version is allowed to treat for these things.
	So nobody's going to give you a blanket, you know, approval to run a med bed for anything and everything, right?
	So it just isn't going to work out that way.
	That level of scrutiny would preclude even talking to people like Gene Decode or having him involved.
	He's really, he's not very well educated, right?
	He may be acting as a low intelligence person or he may really be a low intelligence person, right?
	So like Phil Godlewski, he's a low intelligent person.
	And as is Corey Goode.
	And they demonstrate this by the nature of the suits relative to the fact that they're grifting and that their grifts are exposed by them suing people, not by them being sued.
	They were just so, so Phil Godlewski, if he had never sued the newspaper, if he just let it die, it's like, hey, you know, none of this shit would have been out.
	All of the receipts in the movie that was made about him would not have bubbled up to the surface and he could have continued his grift on for who knows how long, right?
	There were a lot of people pissed at him.
	I have heard anecdotally that people within the Trump organization were really irritated by this guy and that irritation was growing fairly rapidly and that they were doing small little moves to shove things along, right?
	In terms of show their displeasure, so to speak.
	So Phil would never have been exposed.
	He would still be happily grifting along.
	I don't know what he's doing now.
	He's probably having a major freak out.
	But the same thing is true of gene decode, right?
	You get up in your grift a certain level, and then if you start saying, oh, well, I can't talk about it because of an NDA, well, you're probably fairly close to the end of that grift being able to continue.
	It's just in the way of the practical reality of everything here.
	Once you're at that level of alibying your words, then you're basically exposing the fact that you're lying just by continuing to lie about your lies.
	So anyway, so no, I don't think gene decode or Charlie Ward or any of these guys have NDAs.
	I thankfully have none.
	They're such a royal pain.
	You know, you wouldn't believe what it was like to have to walk around with.
	I had at one point in that telephone software gig, I had to walk around with like 65 or 67, something like that, pages that detailed the NDA.
	Hey, just in case I sat down, had, you know, had a meeting with one of the other parties, I had to go to, it was a pain in the ass.
	I had to go to the appropriate pages that, you know, told me what I was able to discuss with them and so on.
	And I had to be really careful about that.
	You know, there was, you signed in such a way on these NDAs that, you know, if you abrogated them, they would start censuring you and coming down on you right away, long before they sued you.
	So, you know, they, in the NDAs I worked on, if you violated the NDA, they could hold up payment.
	Legally, they could just simply not pay you for the work you'd done until it was all straightened out.
	So that might be months, right, because it would be at their discretion as to whether or not it had been straightened out sufficiently.
	As I say, super, super pain to work under those things.
	So nobody does it when there's just, where they're just talking about shit that may happen or may not happen.
	But they do do, for hardware, they'll do embargoes, okay?
	And so they'll tell some people, maybe potential sales guys, right?
	So say they were going to roll out med bids or something close to it where you had that kind of a technological rollout.
	They would, ahead of it all, you'd have to have your distribution centers set up.
	You'd have to have your retail outlets, so to speak, set up.
	You'd have to have all this shit planned.
	You'd have to contact these guys.
	You'd have to have contracts in existence ahead of that.
	And they would put a form of a non-disclosure agreement that they would call an embarcadero or an embargo on the information that you were being told about your business here.
	And they have very solid levels of being able to enforce it because they would, if you...
	if you, you know, if you blew it, if you spoke about something you shouldn't, well, they would not use your firm.
	You wouldn't get the business.
	You wouldn't be allowed to sell the med beds, that sort of thing.
	They would take actions against you, and there would be repercussions for fucking up and talking about stuff you should not have.
	And those repercussions would be so severe, you would not want to face them.
	But it wouldn't be a formal non-disclosure agreement under that title.
	They would have you have a contract, and I went through a bunch of these, okay, in the telephony industry where various aspects of it were rolled out.
	And I was working on the technical implementation of some of these rollouts, and the people we were working with were embargoed against speaking about what was going on until such and such a date and or could be postponed based on circumstances.
	But it was basically you couldn't say shit about it until the primary contracting company that you were doing business with said you could.
	And it would be in your interest to keep your mouth shut, beat the shit out of your employees, fire them, shove a sock in their mouth, whatever, just to keep them from shutting up because you want that business because this shit is going to be very, very, very lucrative and may well set you up for the rest of your business life, that sort of thing.
	So people just, you know, legit guys don't fuck around about it.
	Now, a lot of it, there's no NDA that I'm aware of that says you can't talk about the fact that you've got an NDA.
	You can say that you've got an NDA and frequently, like I was saying, there are NDAs that you can't even talk about who are the other principles.
	But many of them are not an issue, right?
	So I could tell people I'm under an NDA by Microsoft Consulting Services and I can't discuss that.
	And usually that ended it right there.
	I would usually say I'm unwilling to discuss it, right?
	So they would know that no matter how much they pressed on me, they're just not going to get any further.
	Microsoft and these guys liked me that way, right?
	Just because I don't give a shit what people think about me.
	I'm not going to respond to normal social cues to, you know, I can't be played in that regard.
	And I was really good at running projects that way and keeping them tight and everything under control.
	So the issue of NDAs is really a non-starter in my way of thinking for things like, you know, med beds or whatever.
	It does not seem likely, does not seem real, does not seem realistic that any banking institution or government or anybody is going to impose an NDA on certain personalities.
	Just in my experience, when it came to that, when we started getting into discussions and negotiations about NDAs, there's only certain kinds of serious people that get involved in that.
	The corporations just don't bother themselves with the Charlie Ward Gene Decode type of guy.
	And as I say, Gene Decode can prove me wrong because if he does have an NDA, he should legally be able to describe the circumstances that came to that NDA existing.
	You know, so you can't necessarily say who you signed it with, but you can say it was done with this attorney, you know, it was registered with such and such a state or federal agency at such and such a date and time as per this contract and this contract number, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, details about the NDA that in no way betray what it covers.
	And so they could legally talk all about that.
	So Gene Decode could prove that I'm wrong here, that I'm full of shit, by saying, look, I've got an NDA, here's who I signed it with, because usually, as I say, that part is not restricted.
	But you could do that.
	You could say, you know, these are the particulars of the NDA that proves that it exists.
	Because you as a signer, as a person being bound by the NDA, you have a real economic and legal reason to have that ability to talk about it.
	And you need to at times.
	So I've been in on jobs where I'd had to tell them, oh geez, sorry, I can't accept that because you guys are that job, because you guys are working on software that is similar to or includes the same functionality as software that I worked on for so-and-so, which is still covered by an NDA.
	Usually those NDAs on the software, so the NDA on the software for Microsoft Consulting Service, now long expired, was good for three years.
	And my contract was basically for about a year.
	So, but, you know, they needed to cover it for the expected time before the next major rewrite.
	Now, it turns out that, you know, cell phones came along, they did things to the planes to remove all of the problems of the phone calls.
	And that was really a problem.
	It was a bitch to get all that wired in and do it effectively and so on.
	And they always had problems with the hardware.
	So eventually, I mean, it wasn't even that long.
	And they took the phones out of the planes and they just didn't do things that way anymore.
	But then long before that, the NDA had expired, and I'm free to talk about it.
	So it just is the way that these kind of documents work.
	They do things in a tricky way within the software business, or they used to.
	It's not so much a thing now because we basically have populated all of the good software algorithms.
	Yes, there will be patents in the future that will need to be put out and people will apply for and so on.
	But it's like we've sort of industrialized our digital world to a great extent, so we're not inventing major new design patterns or algorithms at this stage.
	But it used to be that when things were new in the software world, that companies would do this thing they called a white room.
	Okay.
	And so what they would do is they would hire you, they would hire, okay, so they would buy the competitor software that they were going to attempt to replace in the market, right?
	To compete with in the market.
	And they would take this software and they would hire somebody that was a documentation specialist, was an end-user documentation specialist.
	And this person would sit down with that software and they would write a manual all about what that software did in a very generic sense, leaving out anything that was proprietary to that particular software's manufacturer.
	So not, they would describe all of the functionality, but they wouldn't get into, you know, oh, the title is placed here or that kind of thing, right?
	They would just describe these things in a, you know, sort of a generic sense.
	But they would, they would get into it very particular as all of the functionality, how many screens, what happened, what modes were operated on to achieve these, etc., right?
	Everything you had to go through.
	And so basically what they did was they took a product and they developed, or they created a development manual as though it was the original specifications that the company used to develop the product that you were going to replace.
	And so they'd come up with this big, thick manual that was much more extensive than any user manual, but it encoded within it all of the end user experience down to the gnat's ass.
	Then that person would leave, right?
	That person's job was done.
	They were the specifications creator.
	They would have been under an NDA.
	The specifications that they created would be looked at by somebody who worked at the company that is going to hire you to make this software to replace their competitors or to go up against their competitors.
	They would look at it, they'd fine-tune it, they'd make changes that they want, so on, until they finally had what they would call the specifications manual.
	And then they would hire people like myself to come in and do a white room creation, right?
	A clean room creation.
	In other words, I had never seen the software that the competitor made.
	So if it went into court, which I had one brief experience that got to the point of depositions for a company, but it never got into court, never got further than that.
	But in any event, so if you're called upon to testify, you can say quite truthfully, no, I've never seen that software, never used it.
	You know, I'm working off of a generic functional operational manual, you know, a software design.
	And then you'd create code.
	And so the odds on you, now, of course, the odds are you're going to find the same kind of problems.
	You're going to discover the same kind of workarounds and the same kind of optimizations and so forth that the original company discovered as they developed that software because this is just the nature of software business, how it works.
	It's very digital.
	There's only certain options that can be done.
	These options constrain you.
	And then there's conventions.
	You know, it's commonplace to use the return key to signal end of interaction by the user and to send the resultant work to the actual CPU.
	And so the constraints are there everywhere.
	So software is basically a bound box, right?
	We all know the sides, we know the top, we know the bottom.
	It's not like it's digital software, I should say.
	It's not like it's going to be filled with new and interesting innovations at that level.
	We do have a different situation coming up with analog computing because analog computing, nuanced computing, is not like that.
	Okay, it can be constrained.
	There will be consensus ways of doing things within analog computing.
	But because in analog computing, you're not looking at simply ones and zeros, but you know, the full range of the electricity coming into whatever device you're dealing with, and you're able to deal with that electricity both in voltage and well, in all three, voltage, amperage, and time.
	Analog computing will be really an open book.
	There will be lots and lots and lots and lots of places for innovation in there.
	So in a clean room operation like that, you'd do the development.
	You would end up handing them the software, and then they would hand it over to their regular end-user support specialists, their documentation guys to make the manuals, their screen guys to pretty it up.
	you know, put their logos in and all of that kind of stuff.
	They're internal designers.
	And you would have recreated an existing product and without actually stealing any of that existing product, you would go for the same level of functionality.
	This was, I've done two white rooms.
	I didn't like them much.
	The constraints are almost as bad as NDAs.
	They were both under NDAs, but the NDA was quite broad.
	You know, you can't say who you're working for, this kind of thing.
	You can't say who you signed the contract with, but you have all of these particulars.
	You can talk about the contract, the contract number, who originated it, who's paying you, etc., etc.
	Rather, how the money is coming in, these kind of things, right?
	So you have particulars that you can say that establish that indeed you're not just bullshitting.
	You've actually got an NDA.
	And if it comes to that sort of thing in a trial, you can just bring the NDA in and let the judge have a look at it and they'll seal it.
	They'll keep a copy of it, but it'll be sealed and not able to be examined by most people.
	There will be some people that will be able to get at it, but most people will not.
	Anyway, so that's the story on NDAs, especially as it relates to technology.
	So I would expect that there would be vast quantities of NDAs on the development team for medbeds, for the science team, and all of this kind of stuff.
	But for the people that say they're in charge of rolling it out, no.
	You know, that's horseshit.
	For the Charlie Ward, you know, loose lips kind of guys, that's horseshit too.
	So anyway, these are all spurious claims by these individuals.
	It's kind of like the claimed, well, it's like the stolen valor of Phil Gotluski, right?
	Stolen valor of Corey Good.
	They were claiming to be in the military when they were not.
	I mean, that's actually fraudulent, and you could be sued on it if anybody gave a shit and there was some real reason to sue you for it, like they suffered damage or something that you could prove.
	You could be sued for these kind of statements for making these claims, right?
	But also, they're egregiously immoral to do because of the nature of the people that have to suffer and go through the problems that you're trying to steal status from them is what it really works out to.
	A terrible kind of thing there.
	I'm going to stop and get fuel here.
	I'll pick up on a slightly different subject here in a few minutes after I get onto the next leg of this return drive.
	There we go.

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