#1970 - Bill Ottman
2023-04-13 02:52:50
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And we're hello Bill, good to see you buddy. What's going on?
We're here, man, you are here, everything's going wild.
How was your site going?
It's going. We're decentralizing as fast as possible, getting it out of our hands, so that we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.
How do you do that? Tell everybody it's maps, mines, mines. Rather. Sorry.
Mines.
Com m-i-n-d-s.com.
I just had Rick Dobrin, Rick. No, I wasn't yet I have psychedelics on the brain.
I sense kinship with maps. Yeah, yeah.
Mines and maps. The two of them should go together perfectly, they probably should work together seamlessly.
Yeah, so basically there's protocols and there's platforms, so Twitter mines other social networks. These are platforms. They're kind of built in the traditional social media style, which is on servers that live in huge cloud centers, but there's also protocols.
The one that we're working with now is called NOSTR, which stands for notes and other stuff transmitted by relay. So there's no company owns this protocol. The founder is anonymous. Sort of similar to Bitcoin, and what it is is it's all about crypto, key pairs and signing stuff, so with NOSTR, this is all happening in the background.
On Mines, every user has a cryptographic key pair, which you can download in your settings. You're the only one who gets the private key. That's your identity, your content, your followers, all that is tied to your identity.
So when you post something, when you follow somebody, that is creating a signature. On this decentralized network of relay nodes, so we run a relay, thousands of other people run relays. Snowden's on NoSTR now.
It's like getting serious endorsement, and it's because it doesn't have a company, because companies are choke points.
We saw what happened with Napster, for instance.
What happened with Napster?
Napster just got rocked by the music industry. And they basically died. I mean, they still sort of exist, but they pretty much got taken down because there was that entity to go after.
I see so if they were decentralized, but there was no real decentralization back then, was there.
Well, torrents are decentralized.
Bit torrents, right?
Bit Torrents Actually in NOSTR. There's work that we're involved with now on integrating NOSTR with torrents so that more heavy files, video and rich media can be shared over the network. Right now, it's text and links, essentially.
What is your opinion when it comes to copyright protection and stuff like that? Like if someone has copyrighted material, like, say, if NBC has a show and then someone uploads it?
I mean, that's illegal.
Right, but if it's on torrents, it's like, how do you get it down? You don't, you don't, you don't.
So it's just, even though it's illegal, there's no recourse.
Yeah, I mean, and that's why, like, so we have moderation. I mean, if a copyrighted video gets reported on mines, then we will take it down from our interface. But it still exists on the decentralized network.
So you really can't stop people from sharing it.
No.
No.
So, you know, I think I kind of have a nuanced view on copyright, like I think that people's work should be protected and, you know, not stolen and monetized. But at the same time, it's just like the nature of information is not compatible with copyright, just because information wants to do what it wants to do.
That's one of the weirder things about what's happening with the internet is that, essentially, as time goes on, it becomes more and more difficult to control. What's just ones and zeros like, as they're out there, the bottlenecks between people and information, they're getting broader. It's getting more and more difficult to stop things, and I think as time goes on, it would be impossible.
I don't think there'll be any stop, I think, in the future. Like anything, I have a feeling that we'll have zero privacy in the future. I have a feeling that all of this encryption and all this stuff, I think it's all going to be invalid. Once. Quantum computing is ubiquitous, I think I just have a feeling that there's no way you can stop information. When technology moves past where it is now, to some place where basically anybody could get access to anything at any time. And then the problem becomes, How do you control money when that happens?
Because money, in a lot of it, is just ones and zeros. And the only thing that stops you from being able to steal it or transfer it is encryption. When you don't have any more encryption and anyone kind of has access to anything that's online.
So yeah, I hear you. It does seem like over time, technology is working against privacy.
Yes, that's a better way to put it.
But encryption hasn't been broken. Some encryption has been broken, but encryption is still good. It still works, and as quantum computing advances, encryption protocols will advance too. It's a race and there are people trying to break it.
But I heard the other day you were mentioning the whole thing with Signal and Tucker, and so to clarify that, based on my understanding, signal has not been compromised. The Pegasus program that you were referring to does have the ability to hack people and get into their device. But once you get into someone's device, it's actually easier to get into someone's machine or phone than it is to hack the encryption protocol. So if you can get into someone's phone, then you probably can get into their messages.
I think that's what they did.
So that's different, that's different than signal being irrelevant.
Right, it's not that signal's irrelevant, but it's just that the government right now has the ability to get into things no matter what. According to Gavin Debecker, who's a securities expert, he said All they need is your phone number. Signal 1. Excuse me, Pegasus 1. Was you needed a link? So someone would have to? That's the whole Jeff Bezos story.
Someone sent him a link on WhatsApp, he clicked on that link, bang. All of a sudden they have access to his phone.
Right, and you have to be super sophisticated to lock yourself down to avoid that. I'm sure that there are people who, well, I know, there are people who are probably less victim to something like Pegasus.
Sure, yeah, probably less victim, but I mean, I guess with a guy like Jeff Bezos, he probably has someone scan his phone all the time. But I wonder if they could even detect Pegasus at this point, yeah, and if we know about Pegasus 2, how do we know if there's a Pegasus 3?
Like, whatever sort of workarounds they found, I'm sure we're not going to be privy to it until it's too late.
Yeah, I mean, the layers of surveillance kind of keep zooming out. And you know, I think this whole intelligence world is getting out of control. I mean, because you've got artificial intelligence, you've got. We have what we know is the state of human intelligence.
We then have what is speculated to be potential non-human intelligences. Have you heard about this Arrow Office that just came out? No, so Arrow All Domain Anomaly Research Office? That in the NDAA recently, there's all these UFO pieces of language and so. And Christopher Mellon, who you've had on, is kind of really knowledgeable about this.
I learned a lot of this from him. And anyway, the reason I'm talking about this is, I think that intelligence. And like secret information, like, as it transcends through the corporate world and the government world, like, it's all kind of interconnected. And like, the same types of models are used. So, but anyway, Arrow is. The NDAA that recently passed now gives all these whistleblower protections to people to come forward, which is an absolute game changer.
And Arrow is this new office that's like decently funded, I think like 11 million a year or something like that. And they're doing an audit, basically of the government on these issues. And I think that it correlates to surveillance, to me, at least in a speculate, you know, in speculation. Because like, what is this system like? If they're here, which I don't know, but that is surveillance. And you know, it's just all compartmentalized and we don't know what's going on.
So that's why it's great that this office exists.
So, like, if someone wants to get a hold of what I feel like with with, think when you have something like Pegasus, all you have to do is have access to it and you can get a hold of anything. And someone wouldn't even know if you. Obviously Tucker didn't know, I don't know what kind of security protocols, Tucker's company, or what, you know what he uses. But obviously he didn't know that they had access to his phone.
Right, yeah, I don't know all the specifics of Pegasus, but you know, we also know everything from Snowden and the Prism program, which, you know, maybe was. Wind was winded down a little bit. I remember I heard some of that stuff got rolled back, but realistically, no, no, no.
It's probably expanded, for sure, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I would imagine they could do what I imagine they could. Just get all the access to anyone who's in any room, just zoom in on that room, know where all the phone numbers are, and just bam.
Yeah, but the paradox of having all these back doors is that it makes everybody less safe. It makes all of the government people less safe to have these back doors. I mean, right in the in some of the Twitter files, you know, we found that these were these chat rooms that they had.
Were they were using signal? yeah, the government uses signal very heavily, yeah. And you know the Twitter rooms where they had people from, you know the social media industry, and they they, they use that.
So to advocate for back doors into encryption is just like self mutilation. MM Hmm, it's bizarre.
It's bizarre, but it's one of those things where they want to use it on other people, even if it could be used against them. They probably feel like a lot of the people they're checking in on don't have access to that. Like, you know, like a standard journalist, they want to, like, zoom in on Matt Taibbi's phone. I'm sure he doesn't have access to that.
So it's like he can't use it on them, but they could use it on him.
Yeah, I just feel like we're living in sort of a Petri dish a little bit. I just like the the type of information that, like the level of discourse on this planet right now is very like, tampered down compared to what's really going. I mean, that's just an undeniable fact.
We were down.
Yeah, I mean, there's and this is, this is verified. I actually, I'm a fucking dork. I read the whole Wikipedia article just about top secret information and like all the levels and the U.S.
Government produces more classified information than non classified information.
So even if, like, there's an audit, they could redact everything.
Yeah, and it's just all these different divisions and departments, and they all have their own protocols. So just getting a handle on it is, I mean, that's the first thing that has to get done, we have to.
But not that we're even going to get the real information from there, right, but.
But then there's also the national security aspect of it. It's like, you know, you have to have some things redacted because you know of China and Russia, like, you could just say that and then.
Yeah, that is the phrase that gets used, sure.
Because they have a full like clamp down on their population. I mean, they limit the access to the internet they're in, essentially like China based. Like you, VPNs are illegal.
And they're trying to do that here in America.
It's all backwards, yeah, with the restrict that is wild, it's getting, it's getting nasty.
20 years if you use a VPN, which is hilarious.
And it's it's managed by the Commerce Department. Unelected bureaucrats are the ones see the tech talks actually not named in that act, right? They're just letting the Secretary of Commerce decide which apps.
Yeah.
That's insane.
It's insane.
So yeah.
Dan Crenshaw posted about it, he.
He thinks it's not that big a deal because he thinks that, you know, there's a lot of get pushed and then they never get passed through. But what's disturbing is just the idea, the desire to do this, and the fact that, imagine if it did get passed. I mean, it's just a fucking full on assault on free speech.
Yeah, I mean, it seems to be getting a toxic stigma connected to it. Did you see Jesse Waters grill Lindsey Graham about it?
No, I didn't.
Oh, he didn't read it, but he endorsed it.
Oh, Jesus.
And it was, and he just got completely called out, it was, it was really funny. Like that should be illegal, you should not even be able to sign something that you haven't read.
And they can't read it. It's too, it's too long, right? There's not enough time.
There's not enough time. That's a lot of these acts, right? Oh, and they slip a bunch of shit in there, that's like, Wait a minute.
What about page 485?
Like, what the fuck is going on there? And then like, Oh, I didn't read that.
Yeah.
I mean, meanwhile, it's just like, because it changed discourse in this country, it's going to change what people have. You know, the the the access to people have to free speech and communication.
And I mean, I think a lot of people endorsed it righteously, being concerned about TikTok. You know, that's what was so sneaky is, you know, they they enrage you to then support this disaster, yeah.
And it's just like we, we can all agree that there's a problem with TikTok and that there's, you know, the Chinese government. Having access to all of this data is problematic. But like, there should be an encrypt act, like encrypt everything, but you can't go around banning apps, it just doesn't work.
It's irrelevant, people are going to use VPNS. I think this this act needs, I don't think it's going to make it.
I hope you're right. Yeah, because more people are talking about it. Tulsi Gabbard posted A big thing about it. There's a lot of people that are up in arms. But my concern is if it wasn't for social media, that act, which was kind of ironic, right?
If it wasn't for social media and people sharing this and becoming outraged and people discussing this, it would have slipped right through. Like the Patriot Act did. The Patriot Act existed in a time where there wasn't social media and people weren't really aware of what they were pushing through until it was too late.
Yeah, I think there's much better solutions. I mean, did you watch any of the TikTok CEO getting grilled?
Yes, I did.
OK, so, you know, that was interesting, because, you know, he's a pretty, he seemed like a sober guy, but in his point was well. You have to have consistent standards for other social media companies, too. I mean, right, like, how do we know that Facebook and Google just because they're U.s?
Based doesn't mean that they're not giving data to China. We have no idea.
We have no idea.
So that's really the issue. We need to understand what specifically are all of these apps doing? They should be labeled very specifically, you know? And we're starting to see some of that happen. But the thing is, you can't know with these proprietary apps because they're just not sharing anything.
I think one of the problems that people have with, whether any kind of decentralized app like yours or any other decentralized social media network, is that people immediately go. Oh, what do I have to do to do this? Like Mastodon, when people start using Mastodon and you get on it, you're like, What is this? There's so many servers and how do I know what to join and what's going on here? Yeah.
So well, mines is different, mines is actually not fully decentralized. We're a hybrid, so we run a centralized infrastructure, but we interface through delegation delegated cryptographic events. Signing. That's happening in the background, but, like, our app, feels like a normal social media app.
It's different, Mastodon. The way that that works is federated instances, so there's all of these different instances with different URLs, and there's like 20 people on each one. But there is sort of some interoperability between the instances, because you can subscribe to somebody on another instance from your instance. But it's not fully decentralized, it's federated.
And the problem is that you don't own your identity, so if one of those instances goes down, you're screwed, your stuff is gone. In NOSTR, which is like an architecturally different setup, and there's other protocols similar to NOSTR, but it doesn't matter.
If the website goes down, you just pop over to another one, upload your key and all your stuff is there. And that's why we like it, because it keeps us in check, because our users can now. Basically, if we fuck around, they'll bounce and they can take their stuff. And that's because the social graph specifically is the key, because you spend a decade getting all these followers, it's your life.
People spend their lives doing this and then to be able to just get taken out by YouTube is so devastating and unethical.
It's ridiculous. Well, it's really creepy, too, because many of the things they took people out for have turned out to be true. Like there was a lot of things that they were labeling as disinformation or misinformation, which are 100 proven fact now. And people lost their accounts and there's no recourse, they're not going to reinstate you.
And that was a problem also with Twitter, that for the longest time. If you said anything that was contrary to whatever the narrative was, whether the government was pushing it or the CDC was pushing it, like anything contrary to that narrative, you would get fucked.
Yeah, and those people are not back, though. I think Twitter is making way more progress than everyone else. And look, I'm ultimately an Elon fan, I'm rooting for him. I think it's vastly improved.
But there's chaos currently underway at Twitter.
Oh, sure.
And those people have not all been let back on, and I don't really understand why who hasn't been let back on? The people that we don't know, the people whose random Joe Schmo posting a Covid study like?
Has he been let back on all the thousands of people that got banned?
Well, I think he essentially let back on everyone who didn't do anything illegal.
Not Alex.
Not Alex. Yeah, that's true. Why? Yeah? Well, that's a personal opinion of Elon's, which I don't agree with at all, yeah.
Because they let Andrew Tate on, right?
Yeah, it doesn't mean that he's endorsing Alex to let him back on.
Right, it doesn't, I mean, because there's a lot of people that are back on that are. You know, they didn't make that one specific mistake that Alex made, but they've said some horrific shit.
But the mistake that Alex, the reason Alex was banned, was because he confronted it was actually for something he did off Twitter. So he confronted this journalist, Oliver Darcy, in a line at some event, and he was, you know, being Alex Jones, sort of ranting at him, yeah. And then Twitter said, Oh, you're bullying this guy, and this is like, not acceptable behavior.
So you're going to leave? But then when I remember, you know, the exchange with Elon and whoever it was that was asking, asking. It was that he hadn't been let on because of this, which is not the same. That's not even why he was banned. So, you know, it's not easy, I understand, you know, the politics of it.
And he probably has Tim Cook being like, you know, we're not going to advertise if you have Alex Jones. But I don't know what's going on. But it doesn't seem to me. Because he could, he could win the argument if he would just let him back on, right? And did you see this crazy clip of of Elon and the BBC guy?
I did amazing, it was amazing, it was amazing because the guy kept trying to change subjects and let's move on.
Like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, what the fuck are you talking about? Because that guy thought he could just say the narrative without specific examples, like, give me an example, and the guy had no examples.
That's most people who are concerned about this.
Well, this is like a lot of people that I know that are famous that, like publicly announced, they were leaving Twitter. And, you know, one of them I really love. And I was like, Why are you doing it? I didn't even say anything to her, but I'm like, Why are you doing this? This is so dumb.
Like, you're just doing this because this is the thing that everyone feels like they're supposed to do. Hey, well, Twitter's kind of fucked now, so bye no, it was fucked before, it's less fucked now.
Yeah, are there people that are going to say things like what I showed you earlier today, which is hilarious? And someone posted to Kamala Harris after she said something about the assault ban, that shit's important, it's important to have people mock people.
Like, I'm sorry if it hurts someone's feelings, but that shit's important.
Yeah, and I think the way that Elon handled that was great. Because obviously you need a specific example to back up an argument. However, I sort of think the whole premise of the conversation is wrong, this idea that this war that Twitter is at with all the think tanks. And I think it was the Institute for Strategic Discourse that had actually compiled the information that the BBC guy was talking about, and there is information there.
There is data showing hate speech x y z has increased. However, this is the wrong conversation, it's not the existence or even rise of hate in the presence of that content on an app.
You're not just trying to ban hate. banning hate does not stop hate, and this is what the peer-reviewed research shows. So, trying to bully Elon and Twitter for, look, even if there was a bump of hate speech since it became a little bit more free. I mean, it seems like that's a potentially understandable intermediary effect to happen while things reorient.
Like, we open up free speech, we open up the valve. A little bit, okay, because we think that this is going to be healthy for society long term, so let it bump a little bit. We need that. We need to see what we hate or what other people hate.
You need to like, what is it? Free speech lets us know who the idiots are like, you need to identify them.
Yes, yeah. The best response to whatever it is, bad speech is better speech is better arguments, and that's you literally have a debate platform, which is what Twitter essentially is.
Yeah, that is the purpose.
Yeah, it's the purpose.
Yeah, yeah. And not to mention that the hate isn't defined, so it's only one type of hate that these people are typically referring to.
Right wing hate.
Right wing hate, not left wing hate, right, that's okay, and so, actually, so we're suing California.
We just filed this law, this complaint, they are trying to pass this social media law called AB 587, which requires it's a censorship law. They require these policies on disinformation, misinformation, hate speech, and then they use undefined use, the words extremism and radicalization. There's no definitions.
They don't require you to have a child exploitation material policy, but they do require you to have a policy on hate, which isn't defined, right? And so we're suing them with the Babylon Bee and Tim Pool.
When did they start this, when they start trying to pass this?
It just went into effect in January.
So it's now.
It's now, it's in.
So if you live in California, what's the repercussions?
So it is it's targeted at social media companies, okay, so basically mandating that social media companies submit these policies. So we would have to, they would force us to write a policy on hate speech and submit it to them. And then additionally, we would have to, on like a biannual basis, submit analytics about all of our moderation data, which honestly, we're already transparent about our moderation data.
So that's largely public anyway, we have a jury system and we have in-house moderators, but it's just it's a huge burden like.
It's crazy that they would expect companies to submit all that. And then have these arbitrarily, well, actually not arbitrarily specifically chosen categories for policies that are clearly politically charged. And knew some, like, when he came out and announced this law, it was very. You know, we have to stop hate on social media and misinformation and disinformation, protect society, protect democracy. No, you know, you're not protecting democracy by stopping free speech, that is.
There's no, there's no checks and balances in place. If something turns out to be accurate, where? Then whoever put out that disinformation initially, like, if someone like, someone posts something. I say Mass don't work and they get banned off of Twitter and say, Oh. This is in response to the CDCS. But if it turns out that MASs actually don't work, the CDC doesn't get punished. Which is kind of fucking crazy. Because if they're the ones that are setting these guidelines and these guidelines turn out to be inaccurate. And people get banned off of social media for arguing with these, these guidelines, there's no repercussions, there's nothing, you know, they just these people are fucked, and there's no recourse.
Actually, that's the policy that we do need. we need the policy for social networks and media companies to, you know, apologize and fix their wrongs.
Yeah, well, and also like, why wouldn't the CDC be punished then, or shouldn't they be banned, or shouldn't they be like, have a strike against them? But they're not.
It's like, it's, it's really frustrating because you're dealing with narratives that are oftentimes 100 propaganda, and they're not backed by science, they're not back. It's just like some things that people say, like, Rachel Maddow was on on television telling everybody that this vaccine stops the virus in its tracks. If you get vaccinated, the virus can no longer affect you, it can't affect anyone else.
It stops and we can get out of this thing. Well, that's not fucking true at all. And that person? There was no repercussion other than public mockery, which continues to this day. Where, you know, whenever she posts something, people post that video, what about this stupid? And you know, there's nothing other than that.
I know they're not even inviting the other side on to correct the issues, They're certainly not, you know, correcting their errors. And you know, it's just not that hard to admit you're wrong. I don't know, maybe it is hard for, but people get into their own egos and they just can't handle it.
Well, there's people that are beyond reproach, and that's the problem, or organizations that you know. Like, one of the things that's fascinating about Twitter now is they fact checked the Biden administration. So the Biden administration put out some tweets that were 100 horse shit, and then underneath it, Twitter fact checked them.
So they deleted the tweets, which is glorious, like, that's amazing and that's never happened before.
Yep, Community notes is my favorite feature on Twitter by far, it keeps everybody in check. It has a process for kind of vetting information, surfacing it to the top, you know, showing the better idea to the bad idea. And actually, their community notes stuff is all open source.
It was a little bit disappointing, though, when they open sourced the algorithm the other day, open sourced the algorithm. Which step in the right direction? I'm not trying to attack, but you know, what we learned, basically is that it's not the live algorithm, it's an algorithm.
What do you mean?
So it's not the production algorithm, at least from what we can tell, because you saw what happened with Substack.
Has that been reversed?
I think it has. Yeah, I don't, I would need to confirm. I think that the ability to engage with those posts got changed back. But then, like Tayubi's posts, you can even search them. And. But the point being is that. And I submitted a comment on their GitHub where this algorithm exists.
It's like, Well, if this is the algorithm, why wasn't the substack blocking showing up in the algorithm the other day? I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't there. So clearly there's some sort of a link blacklist, and you know, Twitter did say that this isn't the whole algorithm. And they're going to be releasing more over time. But the problem is, we should have seen something change in that when all the substack blocking went down.
So.
How many users does Mines have now?
We are 5 million. Oh, that's great. We actually had to take a little haircut. Because we, you know, and we're trying to be as honest as possible. Because, oh, basically, we had been counting that people who, you know, fail. Data is hard and so people who had, like, tried to sign up were in our data showing as signed up.
So, you know, backed it up a little bit. But the point being, we don't use any closed source, proprietary analytics tools. So, like, the temptation when you're running a startup, trying to create an app is to just go to the, you know, Silicon Valley display case of Google Analytics and Customer..io. And all of these surveillance tools, they're an analytics tools that are very powerful and can give you very precise data about what's going on. But but we have refused to use any of those tools. Because you when you put Google Analytics on your website, you are becoming Google. You are now part of Google's tentacles, and you're basically handing over all your that user data to Google.
And we just like our whole foundation, has been fully open source and just don't take shortcuts. And so we're going to, like our growth path is is healthy, it's happening, we're continually growing, but we're. I'm not gonna I. I don't care about the pace of growth as much as the quality. And so, you know, we built a whole day like we do machine learning.
We were. We're starting to do AI, but we're doing it in an open source way. So like in the AI wars right now, you have, like, open quote, unquote, open AI, which isn't, you know, it's barely open. They don't share much of what's going on and they shroud that in some sort of like, Oh, we're, you know, we need to protect you and we need to not let this get out of control. Which maybe there's an element of truth to that. But then there's a whole other part of the AI world, like with stable diffusion and instability, and we're all. It's all open source and it's being done in the open and everybody has access.
Because, you know, do you as you see all this AI stuff coming about you? Do you think that you should? How do you feel about that? Do you think that you should be compensated in a way? Do you? Do you have any, like you mentioned, copyright? do you have any issues with it?
No, I mean, it is what it is. There's no stopping that. And I saw it a long time ago because this company from Canada was the first one to take all of. I mean, they essentially got a database of all my audio recordings, which is fucking thousands of them. So there's so many hours of me talking that they could easily have me saying a bunch of things.
And so they put together. Like just this recording of me saying a bunch of things that I've never said. And me talking about some subjects and doing these things. And it was a conversation that I never had. And then they did one with me doing a podcast with Steve Jobs, which is wild, and then now there's a new one with me doing a podcast with Sam Altman, and it's a full podcast.
I listened to the beginning of that one. I think they did it tastefully because they made it very clear that it's not you.
Yeah, it's a proof of concept. It's like they're showing that this is something that can be done. And there's no flavor to it, which is interesting. Like, there's no like. If you and I are having a conversation, it's there's fun, there's like there's laughing, there's, you know, there's like there's human interaction.
This was just like question answer.
Question answer And you would be like, Oh, well, that's interesting, yeah, and that just kept happening, you can tell.
Yeah, yeah, you can kind of tell, but for now, for now. I mean, they'll be able to sort of code your personality in the future and sort of gauge yours. And maybe even have some, you know, some weird interactions that are just silly that you could sort of program in that make it look like personality and make it.
And you can do that now, you can prompt more, like casual attitude. Yeah, but I think that okay, so maybe you don't care.
I don't care, it's just that it is what it is, right. Would I rather it not exist, of course?
Of course, I mean, I just I'm getting sent these things where I'm doing these ads for products that I've never used and I never talked about. And you know, these companies, and we tried to chase one of them down. It was like, I think it was like a testosterone booster or something like that. But you when you do go down this rabbit hole legally, when you sick, a lawyer on it. They're like Jesus Christ, like there's a web, like there's there's Shell company companies, Shell corporations.
It's very difficult to find, it's all overseas, very difficult to find who's actually making this and how they would profit off.
Of it, yeah, when we talk about AI, like displacing work, you know, on a mass scale. I think that we do have to have a conversation about these companies. And you know where they're getting all their data, and you know who's getting compensated. Because, so I actually prompted Chat GPT and asked it, you know, do you have the rights to the data that you're using? And it said it's, it said no. It said that we, we. We do not have access or rights to all of the data that we're using. And that, you know, that could be become more of a concern over time.
I posted this and so what does that mean, you know? Cause what are they doing? They're scraping the the world's use of language? That, all the data, all the imagery, everything. And so when we talk about open AI becoming, you know, uh, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, probably that's as fast as growing app in the history of the world.
Right, it got to a hundred million faster than, like, way faster than everybody doing massive. You know, $10 billion deal with with Microsoft, they're profiting off of the world's data, right?
So I'm not saying that that's not okay at all. But I mean, if something that I created that I didn't give them permission to use is get you know if they're profiting off of that. Basically, I think there's a world where some type of ubi that. But the companies pay people. So like we, we split revenue with our users. We we do like crazy rev share programs. Because our whole thing is like, if you bring energy to this network, like, get paid.
So how does that work, like when you say revenue, like, what kind of revenue we're talking about and like?
Where's the revenue coming from? So we have minds plus minds pro similar in functionality to like Twitter Blue, but we do. You get more reach, more exposure.
Verified and more video upload HD, and you pay monthly. yeah, you pay monthly. yeah, you know, Minds plus is like seven bucks.
Minds Pro is more How much is Minds Pro? Minds Pro is $50 a month. 50, yeah.
That's like, Dude, I, I'm. I think people want to support platforms that they care about. What do you get? Here's a tip for you. A month, you just get a lot more video, dude.
Video is so expensive.
Right, cause you have to put it up transcoding.
And you have to transcode into, like every version and its mother, we have. We have free users who are actually costing us like, I shouldn't even say this cause.
But because they're just uploading video all day and it's getting no traffic, so it's like they're costing us lots of money. But it's okay, that's that we want free video upload. But like, you know, YouTube like the amount that they're paying, like they were losing money forever because of that, right?
So it's the videos is killer, but, you know, basically. And then we also have a non surveillance native ad network where you can boost your posts and so you can, people can pay for that, but what we do is that well, so one, if you serve boosts on your page, we give you, we split it with you. And we may even go deeper and give people more than half for the ad, for the ads that they're serving. And then additionally, if you get someone to buy a membership, you get half.
Is anyone that's cool? is anyone making a living off of minds?
There are some, yeah, really, yeah.
So they, that's their job as they post on minds, Yep.
How much money? Well, one of them, I mean, you know, they're, you know, they're making thousands of dollars a month, so you know, it's it's money.
It's real money. Yeah, yeah.
But that, you know, if thing if you're doing it in a traditional business way. Like, we're going to build a salesforce and bring on a bunch of sales reps and send them out into the world and help sell our product. And give them a commission, you know, maybe typically a company, if they're trying to do a A sales, a salesforce, you know, maybe 20 commission, maybe 10 to 20 commission. If you sell something. We're just like, Well, I don't really want to manually hire everybody, like, why wouldn't we just offer this crazy commission to our whole community? Yeah, and then cause we are community owned.
So our code is owned by everybody, everybody owns their content. We're actually we. We just reopened our stocks, you can buy our stock on We Funder right now.
We want to be owned by the world.
Yeah, so it's, it's like a distributed salesforce, but you know, cause, like, not everybody's a big creator. So you know, only some people can make a ton of money serving ads on their page, right? There's only a certain type of people that that that's relevant to. You know, a couple of the a normal person on social media might be able to make a dollar, a couple of dollars a month. They get a few views.
But the reason the commission program matters is because everybody has a network, everybody has friends, everybody.
Everybody can be, you know, have boots on the ground and go off and do work and and and sell stuff. So, you know, if you sell a thousand dollar ad deal on mines, take 500. Like, and and that's real incentive. We want to, like, really like, go far beyond. So, you know, here's a tip for Elon.
And Elon, you know, would love to to collaborate with you. But he should have, like a thousand dollar a month option, people would pay. People want Twitter to win.
And what would you get for a thousand bucks a month? People pay worth 12 grand a year?
I mean, if you got, you could bake in advertising, you could bake in a lot of advertising. So you're you get a lot more reach, you could get access to the Twitter team. You know, there's stuff that people will pay for. People want to grow on social media because, you know, reach is influenced, right?
But wouldn't that be a problem?
You're, you're only allowing that reach for people that have a lot of money, that can afford a thousand bucks a month.
Yeah, but they're already selling ads, you can already do that. What's the difference if you just bake it into a subscription?
So how does it work? Cause I've never bought an ad on those things.
Like, just click, add, give credit cards, say how many you know, how much you want to spend per day, how long you want it to go.
And it just shows up in people's feeds, cause I've always wondered, like, why? why is this in my feed? Cause for a long time it wasn't.
And then now you do see these like paid ads.
Yeah, the promoted post, and you know, it's we. The the people who do it on mines are much less like annoying advertisers and more so just artists and people trying to get the word out about their stuff.
Yeah, and so what's your typical user base, like, how are you? how are you attracting people other than like, coming on a podcast and talking about it?
People just find us organically looking for alternatives to big tech. I mean, people are sick of this shit, this is insane. Everything has gotten totally out of hand and it's just unapologetic. Like with Facebook and Google, you know, they're just not, they're not leveling with everybody.
Like, Okay, so we understand that there's horrible content on the internet, like, let's deal with this and not erode freedom of speech. And like, I would love to see, you know, Sundar Pichai or or Zuckerberg, or, you know, Tim Cook, like, have more of a balanced conversation about this. But it just seems like whenever they talk about it, it's like they're, it's like they're posturing, it doesn't feel real, and like they're really acknowledging. Even like the the academic conversation with regards to censorship, because the academics are saying that censorship causes increased radicalization.
So what's going on here?
Yeah, what, what are the?
I mean, open sourcing is foundation number one. Like, everyone's afraid, you know, look, there. Companies will say, Oh, we couldn't share our secret, our secret sauce. You know, that's what, that's what makes us competitive, but you, it's just it's. It's just really not true. Like, you can use software licenses as well that restrict people.
So you can still be transparent. Like, for instance, there's this. There's this really cool app called Uniswap, which is a decentralized protocol for crypto, so you can swap tokens with the and there's no intermediary.
And they used a time delayed GPL. GPL is general public license, one of the most famous free software licenses. But they basically said, Look, we want, we need to be transparent. No one takes anything in crypto seriously unless it's transparent and audited. So we're going to make it so that we're showing you all the code.
You can make sure we're not spying on you doing anything sketchy. But if you're a commercial entity, you cannot fork our code and compete with us for the next two years. So they basically were giving themselves a headstart. The license that we use is the GPL V3, which says that anyone can do whatever they can and people do. There are other versions of mines around the world, people running it and having their own social network, but if they make changes, they have to share those changes with the world.
So it's referred to as copy left in, kind of the copyright world. It's basically that, yeah, we're you, you have to. It's sort of a pay it forward. I borrowed from you. I'm going to use that to build my business, yeah.
I'm going to sell it, I'm going to make a ton of money. But you know, the development that I did, I also have to share. And there's many others. I mean, there's even licenses that are way more restrictive, but still provide the transparency. There's ones that are just read only, like, listen, you can read, read this and see it, but you cannot touch it.
You know, that would be a step in the right direction for Facebook. But and the thing is that they know about this power dynamic because they do create tons of open source tools like React and Facebook created React, which is like one of the most popular Javascript frameworks. And you know, Angular was made by Google, and tons of databases and backend tools. These big tech companies do contribute a ton to open source. But they only do it on the stuff that, you know, our developer tools, because they know that the developers will only use their stuff if it's open source. Developers are never going to use something that they don't have control over.
So it's like this very intentional game that they're playing their main apps. They do not. They're not transparent about it all, but they know that they need the developer energy. So, you know, I think that they should just do it. And the the the great thing, even though the Twitter algorithm is not, you know, there yet, I think that Elon is. When I saw that happening, I would just say, Finally, you know, it's like one of the big guys dipped their toe in the water.
But it really has to be. Someone like Elon is eccentric and insanely wealthy, who's willing to go out on a limb for $44 billion and overpay for a company? And then sort of like, fucking, throw it upside down.
But it's, you know, it's, it's working, it's working.
And it's, you know, besides all the people that, like, publicly decried that they were done like, that's not real, like the reality is like, that's not really that important. The real important stuff is the mass amounts of humans that are constantly sharing information, and that seems to have gone up.
Yeah, I think that Elon also just changed the way that the billionaires act like before him. You know, who's another billionaire that shitposts memes? Nobody, I mean, just, but that don't underestimate, and you don't. But the fact that he did that, I think it sort of paves the way for other people up on his level to start being more real.
You think so?
I hope so.
I think most of them are cowards and they just don't have the courage to like, be that wild and just really post things they think are funny. Like when he. For me, my favorite one ever was the Bill Gates one, when he posted the photo of Bill Gates next to a pregnant man emoji. And it's like, if you ever want to lose a boner real fast.
And he has a specific beef with Bill Gates because he's shorting Tesla stock. Yeah, but yeah, exactly, I mean, they should. It's good for people like real things, people don't like fake things.
Like they should, even if they were being sketchy and like, manipulative about it, like they should be acting real, because that's what people like. I saw Bezos tweeting, Bezos, I think he wants to come out of his shell. He was tweeting like a Barry Weiss article, which was weird, interesting.
You know, because Amazon, we just ditched Amazon, we moved our whole operation over to Oracle because they're more committed to free speech.
Does Amazon censor?
I mean, they banned parler.
Oh, did they? Yeah, interesting, yeah.
And they have much worse terms, which like, kind of spell out.
What was their justification for banning Parler? Did they make a statement?
It was all around the Jan. 6 stuff, and, you know, extremism type reasons. And meanwhile, all that content is on Facebook and on other, certainly on other platforms that were on AWS.
So do you think that that's just sort of like a PR move to ban Parler?
Partially, I don't know all the specifics of, you know, the back and forth between them. And, you know, I don't know if they were given warning or the ability. But the thing is, even if they were, it's like, what Amazon would have been at. You know, take down this content, or you're going to have to leave, you know. That would be violating what they were trying to do with free speech.
You know, because there's a group of companies now that are like pro-free speech platforms, which are gaining dominance. It's awesome, you know, you've got rumble, you've got parler, you've got minds, you've got, you know, there's a bunch of them.
But unfortunately, the waters get muddied. Because, you know, Rumble uses Google Analytics. They are totally closed source, so they're doing some of the speech stuff right, which is absolutely essential. And so again, it's a huge step in the right direction. I actually had a back and forth with Chris, their CEO, and he said that he would be open to some open source stuff. Except he's been icing me on a couple of emails recently.
He's probably busy, though.
Oh, he's very busy. But I think that this open source issue, like, needs to be honed on. We can't just let the next wave of free speech companies be doing all the same shit that big tech was doing on the technological end. We can't just let them keep doing the surveillance, keep doing the secrecy. We're not moving forward if that is where we ultimately end up.
But what I'm hoping? So we're core developers at. Well. We contributed what's called a NIP, which is a NOSTR improvement proposal, which is the framework which could enable a site like Twitter or Rumble, or any of them to integrate NOSTR. Like we do so, you don't have to be fully decentralized, but you can integrate NIP 26, which is delegated event signing, so that your users have an escape hatch.
And that's really all people want. People are going to keep using Twitter just because a fully decentralized option exists doesn't mean people are going to stop using Twitter. And I feel like that's kind of what Elon has in his head because he even NOSTR was on the Remember. When, like, a couple months ago, Twitter came out with this policy, like, we're banning links to Instagram, Facebook and Mastodon. And then they rolled it back. Do you remember that?
I don't.
So they did do that and people were bugging out, of course, and so they rolled back the policy and said, Okay, we're not going to do that. NOSTR was actually on that list, so they're aware of this system, but I think that they're thinking about it the wrong way. Because the fully like. There's a fully pure NOSTR client called Domest, which is super nice and it's a great option.
But, you know, fully decentralized options don't have a ton of functionality, you know, they don't have the notifications, they don't have a lot of the discoverability of stuff. There's serious limitations with fully decentralized stuff that's never going to be able to compete with more of. Like, a centralized option where you can do all this fancy data processing and whatnot.
So I think that this idea that we need to push out decentralized competitors is really just like the wrong state. Like if, Elon repeatedly says, like, we need to maximize public trust, and I do believe that he believes that and wants that, and that's why he's trying to be more transparent. But maximizing public trust is about, you know, give people their own keys, and then, you know, that's going to hold the company accountable. And then, if you know, Twitter messes around, they can go pop over someone else, but they don't lose all their stuff.
But how would you possibly move Twitter stuff to some other network, though?
Because if they—.
Like, if you—let's say if someone did something like that and you had all your posts on Twitter, and you've been on Twitter since 2009. And you know, Mines gives you the ability to port your shit over to there. How the fuck would you ever wind up doing that?
I mean, if it gets integrated, then all the posts can just be signed and then—.
If it gets integrated, but that seems like that would be very beneficial to mines. But not very beneficial to Twitter, because at the end of the day, Twitter is still a company.
But think about the—we're a company.
Right, but it would be beneficial to you. You're far smaller, right? But how many users does Twitter have?
Oh, of course.
Hundreds of millions, right?
Right, but we—actually, there were people on our team who asked the same question to our team, why would we give people the ability? —you know, why would we let people? You know, they're just going to go take their mines stuff and go somewhere else. So it's not like just us, it's not—.
Right, but you're a very small company relatively speaking. Like when you first came on the podcast, I think you had 2 million. Is that what? It was somewhere around there?
Yeah, yeah, that sounds right.
And now you're more than double that, you're 5 million. But relatively speaking, when people start talking about social media networks, Mines does not get into the conversation. It's a mass, you know, distributor of information.
Right, and you know, now rumble is, yeah, and do you know why?
They've spent a lot of money.
Oh God, they've spent a lot of money.
They came to me with a fucking shitload of money.
Same thing happening with Substack. They're spending millions of dollars bringing over top talent, it's not sustainable. So, but now I wonder about rumble, I mean, it's just—.
Yeah, because I'm like, how much are you guys spending? It's a lot of fucking money.
Right, and—.
Because they have Steven Crowder on there, they have Russell brand, they have all these people that I know they had to fork up some serious cash.
Yeah, I don't know, I mean, I think that they're well bankrolled, that's for sure.
I guess, and it also seems to be working in terms of, like, just generating more publicity and users. And I know there was something that was on rumble recently. I forget what the video was, but it was over 2 million views. I was like, that's significant.
Yeah, no, it's great, I mean, it's great for these options, it's very validating regardless. See, I'm in it for the actual speech. I want them to succeed.
I want that to happen, you know, I just—just while it's in my head, because I forgot to bring it up before about substack. So Elon actually accused them of stealing Twitter data. What do you mean? And that was part of his justification for blocking them.
How did they steal Twitter data?
So, I mean, that's a very strong word that he used, and I don't know all the details, but what I know is that. So, Substack is largely powered by Twitter's API, which means, you know, API application programming interface. It's basically a developer tool set so that websites can integrate with Twitter. You know, you see log in with Facebook, log in with Twitter, you have tweets embedded in Substack.
The API is how you facilitate that. And Twitter, you know, has been locking down its API. Because it's been, quite frankly, probably costing them millions of dollars. Because, you know, when Substack makes an API call to Twitter, that costs Twitter money. So Elon's perspective is okay. We're hemorrhaging money, I'm speculating.
I don't want to speak—put words into his mouth. But I think that he's locking down the API. Because it's costing them so much money to be supporting all these websites that aren't paying them. So, you know, Substack the authentication and sign-up uses Twitter, the social graph and recommendations uses Twitter. So Elon's tweet said that, you know, they've been trying—they've basically been abusing our API to bootstrap their own social network.
Because Substack just came out with a social feed called Notes.
Right, how does that work?
It's just a news feed.
Can you show me that? I want to see what it looks like?
Substack notes Because I just heard about this.
I don't want to stain this table, I just—.
Oh, it's good to stain it, it's good it gives it life. This is a relatively new table, the old one we had, the old studio, was covered in stains.
Introducing substack notes, unlocking the power of the subscription network. And so—what is this?
So there's a screenshot down there, yeah.
You have to sign in.
No, just do continue. Yeah, there it is okay, so it's just a news feed.
So it looks exactly like Twitter, right? Literally? it has a heart, it has comments, and it has some sort of a repost, but it's not a square.
It's a circle, it's basically a copy of Twitter, just like the truth social network is right.
Yeah, and so to dig into that a little deeper, like, so, you know, Marc Andreessen? mm-hmm, brilliant guy.
I love that dude.
I mean, he's super—yeah, he's one of the most legendary tech investors of all time. He's so smart, and he's so smart, and so he owns. —. I don't know what percentage of Substack, but Andreessen Horowitz is one of Substack's primary funders. Okay?
And Andreessen Horowitz also put hundreds of millions into the Twitter deal.
So there's a—and Elon and Andreessen are probably super tight, and so what's happening? —In another tweet, Elon had,—someone had said you should buy substack, and Elon responded, Yeah, maybe I will. And this was like two months ago. And so they've been pursuing—.it seems as though they've been in negotiation for Twitter to actually buy substack.
I mean, Elon said it, and he's also super tight with Marc Andreessen, and so probably Substack thinks it has a certain valuation. Elon wants to get it for less. And was trying to say, Listen, you are reliant on us.
Right, we're helping you grow, and then I'm thinking about buying you.
And I'm thinking about buying you.
This is costing me more money the more time that you're doing this.
So what I'm going to do is cut off your API access and show you who's daddy. Ooh, right, so I mean, who knows? because I don't think that just speculation.
I don't think that he was out this to censor. And unfortunately, Elon has successfully enraged both mainstream and now independent journalists, which is not—I don't think he intended for that to happen, but that's what happened. I mean, all the substack—that's one of the best places for independent journalism. Yeah, and now they're all pissed because there was a period of time where their businesses were screwed up.
Well, not only that, it was the very people that were using Twitter to put out these Twitter pages. So there were all the emails that showed the collusion between the intelligence agencies and the former heads of Twitter. You know, like this was the same guys and they were publishing this.
Yeah, and like, they all thought they were friends.
Yeah, well, as soon as the bunny got involved, you know, that's where things get weird, right?
Yeah, and so I think it kind of is a corporate negotiation byproduct. It seems like that's kind of what happened, because I don't think that he intentionally wants to hurt those—.
What I like about Elon is he will change course if he doesn't. —If people respond in a negative way, they don't like it, they get upset. He's like, Okay, we won't do that, and he's publicly said that he would do that, and I like that. He does do that. He's flexible in that regard, and he's not completely dogmatic about these ideas.
Yeah, he's like doing it live.
Yeah, he really is, fuck it, we'll do it live, he really is, which is kind of interesting, and it's also part of the fun of the chaos of Twitter under him. You know, you've got this one incredibly intelligent, super eccentric guy who happens to be one of the richest people on the earth. And he decided to take over the—and he did it very specifically because he thinks it's a threat to democracy. That having this censorship and having this control over the access to information and the narrative, which is what you're—what previously you were getting. And it's like, we see it with YouTube, we see it with these other social media networks where someone has a problematic opinion. They get shadowbanned and ghosted, and their algorithm gets fucked up, their access to new subscribers gets fucked up, and there's real-world consequences.
There's also demonetization, right? YouTube's got this really sneaky thing that they do, where they just demonetize things and so you self-censor because you don't want to get demonetized. And you know, that's not good for anybody.
It is an existential threat having social media platforms censored. I mean, that is how humanity is educating itself.
Right? But it's also a new thing, right? Because these things didn't exist two decades ago. So now, all of a sudden, we have this new platform that really should be considered like a utility. I think your access to it should really be just like your access to the internet. Like, if we just decided that someone was problematic and you can't have the internet anymore, holy shit, that would freak people the fuck out. Well, it should freak you the fuck out.
If you don't have access to YouTube, it should freak you out. Because that is the primary way where people share video and post video and post their opinions on things.
Yeah, it gets hairy, too, because Twitter's still playing this game with other countries, which we've basically said, and actually we're dealing with this right now. I'll just call them out. Germany has this horrible piece of legislation called the Network Enforcement Act, which is similar to the California thing I was mentioning. And they want you to take down stuff at their request, and we're just not going to do that, so we've made that decision.
And Twitter's doing that for Germany.
Twitter's doing that, and they're also doing it with India.
Really, so if India posts something negative about the government, the government can say, take this down and Twitter will take it down.
Twitter has these interstitials, like different content policies on different states, so Pakistan, there's basically a different Twitter in all of these different countries.
Is that because it's the only way they can be on in those countries?
That's the argument, but it's the same argument that Google goes through. When they're like, should we go to China? we want to go to China. We have this dragonfly project. Are we going to, you know? Let's work on them behind the scenes.
What is Dragonfly?
It's like Google's, I don't know all the details, but it's their kind of China project, their project to get Google accessible in China. And have it be okay with the government.
I was friends with someone who was an executive at Google back in the day and what she described to me was that. If they didn't, and they were in negotiation and doing business with China. And she said, If we don't do this, they're just going to copy it, they're basically just going to rip off Google. And so we're in this battle to either appease them with their rules and have it go over there. And have, you know, some things like Tiananmen Square be censored, where you can't access information about Tiananmen Square? And it's just like, Well, it seems to be a situation where we kind of have to do that, or they're just going to copy Google.
Yeah, I don't think that that's just a game that we're not interested in playing. I think that we're just going to stick to the laws that we're required to obey. And if other countries are going, I mean, we've been banned in China, we've been banned in Vietnam. We had a huge wave of like, this was one of our largest. We got like half a million users in like two days from Vietnam. Because there was a revolving door between their government and Facebook. And, you know, the journalists of Vietnam found out, and we got this huge wave.
And then, shortly after, Vietnam banned us. And but, you know, people still can use VPNs at their own risk there. I just feel like it's a losing battle. Constantly catering to all of these different countries and their censorship laws, it feels like just sort of a waste of time. And you can. We can bypass all that with decentralized protocols.
And so, you know, but I get it. It's not easy, especially when you know a company could go bankrupt. And if you, you know, if you lose all your German users, you know. If Twitter gets banned in India, like, that's a major problem. We're not dependent on those users.
And I appreciate that you're not independent, I think what you do is very important and I'm glad you're out there. I really am, and I'm glad there's this option and I'm glad you guys have these like rock solid ethics.
In regards to that, it's just it's very important. And it's. I wonder, like, at scale if it's like, if Minds, if we come back and do another podcast in two years and Minds now has 50 million or a hundred million, let's make that happen. You're like, what happens then?
And is my. I have to be honest, I only got on minds a couple of times after you gave me.
You know what's funny, you know your your first time sharing minds.
No.
It was in like 2009 or no, maybe like 2011.
And you shared this viral video that was going on in minds of this. Like Quantum levitation disc, I don't know if you've ever seen that. It's like, if you look on, if you just search like Quantum, you know, superconducting levitation. And you had just seen that, and you know, this was way before, we knew each other, and you had just shared that.
Are you sure it's me? I'm almost positive? I'm, Yeah, I bet it's not, no.
I had friends message me, they were like, Dude, Rogan just shared this video. I bet it's not really.
Yeah, I bet it's a fake me.
No.
I think he got duped, really. Let's go look at it.
Can we find it on your Twitter?
Yeah, how is it? how would it be me?
No, because you just shared a link to a video you didn't know, you just thought.
I shared it on Twitter.
You shared it on Twitter.
Oh, okay, that makes sense.
Yeah, no, no, you weren't on, you weren't a user, right?
Yeah, okay, yeah.
But.
That makes sense.
Yeah, I think.
So I shared this thing, and this thing originated on minds, and then it boosted minds.
How many views?
It was just like one of those like crazy levitation videos where it's just like, what the hell is going on? Like, this magnet is just levitating, right?
Right, right.
So like, what is like, what's do you have? like the number one post ever on mines? Like, how many people does it reach?
Um, I mean, yeah, we have. We have posts that have hit probably over a million views.
And is it because someone's sharing it on other social media networks like I did?
Yep, for sure, yeah. And that's what's so malicious about these algorithms getting clamped down is that, you know, everyone's in survival mode, right?
And even Twitter doesn't. What we learned from the algorithm is that the link, you know, links are punished. all links. If you post a link on Twitter, it's getting, it's not getting elevated in the algorithm. And that is because they want to keep people on Twitter, really. Yeah, and we always speculated this because you can just tell you post and the reach of posts with links is is way down.
And so we have historically have obviously used that. I mean, the problem is that the way that big tech emerged, there was nothing else. There was nothing to throttle them, right? So now they can just throttle competition by not allowing links to outside sites to be, um, elevated.
They have, I'm not saying they don't have the right to do it, but I think that it's just. It's just not helpful for the open web, I think that people need to be able to post links and not get punished for it.
Yeah, for sure, I didn't know that that was even a thing.
Yep, that's one of the things we learned, you know, obviously they're they're favoring native video, native content, they're favoring Twitter blue, which is again, some of it's. Some of it makes sense, but, you know, don't, don't piss off the journalists.
No, it doesn't make sense, it's not smart, but the link thing is really weird. So I could understand encouraging people to post links, but how would you do that? And then I, I don't, I mean not encouraging people to post links, but posting it native. I can understand that you'd want, like, just put the whole article on Twitter, or just put this on Twitter.
Yeah, and it is a better experience. Typically, to use the native functions of the app, it's smoother.
It looks better, but it's so easy to just say, you know? Like, if I find something interesting on YouTube, uh, oftentimes I will just say, Oh, that's a fascinating video. Let me just post that real quick. And the problem with that sometimes is it posts it with the clickbait headline. You know, and then people think it's yours. But you're saying that, you know, Libs get owned, you know, like that kind of shit.
One word to two of the words in caps.
And now I'm like, Ah, fuck, well, maybe I should like, post it, but put my own thing on it instead of right?
But like, you don't want to have. If you want to share a video from YouTube, well, you don't want to have to download the video and then upload it. Like, first of all, you can't do that, you're not supposed to do that, right?
So the only way to do that is to screen capture it or get.
An app that downloads.
Yeah.
Yeah, so all the sites do that, I mean, we, we when we were first starting. We cause. We have like over a million followers on our Facebook pages. And we would drive crazy traffic back in the day. Just posting viral videos and cool articles. And you know, we had journalists on and we would post their stuff and we so much traffic. Like, you know, millions and millions of of users a month hitting the site, and then Facebook was just like, and then boom.
And, you know, but we always knew that we didn't want to be, you know, it was a nice to have thing. So we. The reason we do what we do is cause we didn't want to be relying on them. But it just goes to show how much power they have. I mean, they can literally wipe out jobs and people's livelihoods and companies just overnight, yeah.
That's what happens.
Yeah.
You know, if you're not favored and you don't play the algorithm game, it's just me. It's so sickening and like, worrying about the algorithm. It's like, people are just worship this thing. And you kind of have to for survival because you're trying to succeed. But then you know, what are you really spending your time doing?
It's an interesting discussion in the standup comedy community because a lot of comics are trying to gain the algorithm and you hear these discussions. Like, I was talking to a friend of mine that was telling me about these comics at the cellar, that we're having this conversation where they were trying to figure out. Like, this is what you do to get the algorithm, this is what you do to go viral, this is what you do.
And then, and this comic, who's like an established column, he's like, This is fucking gross. I don't want to have any part of this. Like, why? Just just make the best shit you can make, like, don't do this. And so then you see people that become sort of captured by this idea.
Like, you see, there's some guys that do it where it's like it's an art form, like Mr. Beast. He's figured out how to do it in a way that's like, really, kind of fascinating. Because he really knows what words to use, what images to use. Like, and that there's a there's an actual science to it.
Oh yeah, he is a weird and interesting guy. Watching his interview with Lex. The way that his brain works, it's like everything is being processed through. How does this play to the algorithm? And it was it it. It slightly unnerved me a little bit.
I think that, you know, he just seemed like I got this sense and he seems like a great guy and like, super smart, and you know, obviously. But it seems he felt like, Oh, I don't even necessarily know if this is worth my time to even be doing this interview right now. Because I don't know how many views it's going to get, and I don't know like, how it's going to play to the algorithm. Because his time is so he knows how much he can make every second of the day spending on a video. And like, So, if he's going to go do an interview with another smaller YouTuber, like, that's impacting his, his rev, right? And I just, I think that's dangerous to to let that control the content that you create, it's backwards.
Like, you're, you're, like the comic was saying. It's like, do the thing that you do as as best as you can possibly do it. Don't make the algorithm like, I guess you could, if the algorithm is your thing, if that's what you want to be, the passion of your like. I guess maybe some people do love it, but it seems a little bit inverted.
It's a little bit inverted, but that's also. I mean, he does so much good and it's so interesting to watch him do the thing. I mean, I, I get it because, like, his content is fantastic, so what he's trying to do is maximize the reach of his content. And so it's just just clever.
Oh yeah, the the blind carrying the blind people, I mean, that was that. We need more of that.
What's wild is he got hate for that.
Right?
But who gives a fuck? But it's just funny because you cannot do anything that won't piss someone off. Because people are engaged in recreational outrage. And that's what they're doing and they're trying to figure out an angle. All this rich guys doing this thing and really shouldn't even be rich, no one should be rich. Oh, you're just trying to do this to make yourself look good.
There's all these angles that people will take on things, which is their prerogative. And in a world of free speech, the the beauty of what you know is the nature of the First Amendment is that you should be able to express yourself. And so I fully support those cunts to rag on him.
How many blind people have you cured?
I mean, I mean, they're allowed to have their perspective on it. And yeah, I mean, obviously that's the take, like, you're not doing anything, so shut the fuck up. But people who aren't doing anything are also allowed to chime in on stuff. And they can look petty, and they can look foolish, or they can have really good points, you know, and that makes you. But that's the beauty of what we have today. There's so much dumb shit involved in social media and there's so much bickering and hate, and there's so many people that are addicted to it. It's elevated their anxiety level and they're all on medication now because they're fucking tweeting 12 hours a day.
There's a lot of that going on, but if you can figure out how to manage yourself and manage it. Now, we have access to information at an unprecedented level. Where, like something like the Restrict Act gets picked apart by brilliant people on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on everything. And that's so valuable. So we have to figure out a way to preserve that and to have this kind of thing today, it has never existed in human history, never.
Not one time has there been a time in human history where a person could tweet about a thing and it could be shared by millions of people. And all of a sudden, the conversation about the subject changes. So you have a public narrative that's being pushed forth by these propagandists. And then someone comes along and says, Actually, this is what's really going on, and Twitter will fact check and then people will chime in. And this is a beautiful thing, I mean, it's really, an amazing thing.
So with all the bad that comes with social media and all the weird shit that it's doing to kids, it's just not good.
But yeah, the government is now using it for, you know, propaganda purposes as well, and everyone's playing the game now because the government's in it. I mean, the Twitter files by Lee Fang exposed how the government was pushing propaganda. So it's not only about taking down, but also pushing out, yeah.
So, you know, they're in it.
They're in it, not just that way, I guarantee you, they're in it the same way Russia's in it. And these Eastern bloc countries that have troll farms. The idea the United States is not engaged in something like that seems to me to be pretty ridiculous.
I'm sure they are.
Oh, yeah, they are, I mean, it's on record now.
And when you see like someone will post something and then you'll see someone has a very specific response. And then if you take that specific response and google it, you'll see hundreds of verbatim, exact responses from people that look like real people. You go to their site, there's a picture of them smiling, there might even be a picture of them with some fucking AI generated kids.
It's really weird when you look at someone's feed, like, I've looked at someone posting something controversial, and then look at someone who has what seems to be like. Well, this is a suspicious take, and then I'll go to their page and it's all suspicious takes like that is. And occasionally the retweets and the retweets of things that go along with the narrative that they're posting. But it seems like very calculated, and then you realize, like this person has 30 followers.
This is not even a real person.
Yeah, human detection is so key now, because there's going to be armies of bots, AI bots fully autonomous are coming. They're mostly here and we just, you know, they're not going away. I mean, there's going to be, and there's going to be mastermind sort of engineers who have these armies that they control.
And it's actually entertaining, like there's going to get the AI Jre, you know, that's getting hundreds of thousands of views. I mean, that's like they're blowing up, so that's a whole thing for that person. And there's going to be value and there's going to be negative stuff that comes from it.
But, you know, I just I just love being able to watch it play out. And just everyone's at war, mainstream media at war with independent journalists.
I mean, where do you think it goes? Do you ever like, try to extrapolate? do you ever try to, like, look at it? Like, from where we're standing now? With the the chat, GPT influence, the AI influence, all this different stuff, all the deep fakes, do you ever wonder, like, where?
How does this play out?
I think that it's, it's similar to what you were saying before. Just like the transparency is just increasing so, so drastic, even just thinking about how transparent everything is now compared to 20 years ago. And what we're seeing play out real time. I mean, we're seeing Seymour Hersh, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, at war with the New York Times, over Nord Stream right now. And that's just happening in front of us, like the U.S.
Government is denying that we did. Nord Stream Seymour Hersh thinks otherwise. And you know, that is just what is the New York Times take on. Oh man, if we can, if we can, bring this up, I don't. I don't want to abuse Jamie's powers. But there they on Easter, their post of the Nord Stream situation was so egregious, they said.
It may be best that the truth is not revealed about this. Like, it's why, I mean, because they probably think nuclear warfare is on the table. I mean, it would be a false flag.
Look at this. Suspicions multiply as Nord Stream sabotage remains unsolved. Intelligence leaks surrounding the sabotage of the pipelines have provided more questions than answers. It may be in no one's interest to reveal more. What?
That's wild. I mean, you literally are in the business of revealing more, I mean, that's what you're supposed to be doing. If, if the United States government is engaging in something that is potentially dangerous to the human civilization, because we can start a fucking nuclear war. Because this, if you don't report on that, that's going to allow more of that shit to take place.
I just I can't believe those words were printed and they're still there. Like, how, how can that be where we're at, you know, in terms of where it's going? Like, honestly, I think that we are on the precipice of a whole new paradigm and level of access to information. That is just going to be like a total shift in inhumanity. I think we're getting closer.
And I mean that with regards to classified information coming out, corporate secret information coming out, it's happening. I mean, it's the Twitter, what we're seeing from the Twitter files, which Elon just just did. He became a whistleblower on himself. Yeah, and I mean the amount of information that that gave us, and they were denying it for years and gaslighting everybody.
It's so egregious and dark.
It's so dark and they don't have any punishment on the table, which is really crazy. You know, when you saw Vidya like testifying, and she had to kind of admit things that they've said in the past that were not true. It's really fascinating to watch that because the ramifications of that, they're so. It's so dangerous, it's so dangerous to limit the truth and deny the truth.
And when you're something like a social media network, that is basically the town square for the world. And you're doing that, and you're doing that based on your ideology, and you're doing that based on input from intelligence communities.
It's social engineering. Yeah, that's what it is. It is their guide, they want to guide us in this particular way, yeah.
And because they, they don't think we can handle it right, which maybe we can't, I don't know. I mean, if the truth about all of the deep corruption came out to the extent that is real, I mean, it could cause.
It could cause wars, it could, but. But at the same time, I actually don't think that. I think that ultimately, you know, America is for transparency to kind of happen and for us to fix it.
The problem is, the idea is that we're in competition with China, and China does not allow that, so we will hinder ourselves and our ability to compete with them. That's the argument, and it's not a good argument, right? Because this country has a very robust belief in free speech.
It's one of the reasons why, you know, dissent is tolerated, is one of the reasons why we can get away with. What we get away with is like, we have protection in this country and it's really the only country that has that. And the idea that in order to compete with China, we have to become China, is fucking.
Gross, It's not true, I don't think. I think the competition that we have because of free enterprise, free speech, like the reason we have the best businesses in the world, is because of that. It wouldn't be allowed to happen in other countries.
They just scoop them up and, you know, distort the vision. So it's a national security risk to not be transparent with the American people. You know, there's all this banning Crypto Restrict Act. All of this stuff is is devastating for innovation, I mean, that's the that's the edge of of innovation.
So I mean, yeah, these these lawmakers don't understand the technology, it's hard to understand.
It's hard to understand, they don't even care to understand that they're not even reading the stuff. They're just saying whatever they think their constituents want to hear, or whatever the public narrative is, or whatever the government is pushing, and they just sort of like, pile on and repeat the propaganda.
I mean, rather than banning bitcoin, the U.
S government should be stockpiling bitcoin right now. It is a national security risk to not do that, because what if all of the other countries do that? They're all moving. De-dollarization is occurring.
You know, Russia, China, Brazil, they're all starting to trade, you know, outside of the petrodollar, yeah. And if in bitcoin, adoption is occurring in these other countries, I mean, so even as a hedge, you know, our country should be stockpiling. What if all these other countries and it blows up and it becomes the global reserve currency and then the U.S?
Is just out of luck because we didn't participate because we were trying to be, you know, too heavy handed with it. It doesn't mean that, like the Bitcoin, Bitcoin and the dollar can can coexist and should coexist, like it's not. It's not necessarily one or the other, but I mean.
Yeah, we just. We just need a new wave of politicians, who who are going to open up.
Is that going to happen? I doubt it. I have to take a leak. Let's come back. This is kind of wild.
Jeremy Corbell just sent me this, he said. He has the project manager for the government's largest UFO program, if our government has in possession, down Flying, Saucers said. For the first time being interviewed on camera about this, he answered publicly, and the answer was yes.
What are we back? Yeah, we're back, here we go.
What does that mean?
I just sent it to you, Jamie, let's watch it to see what you think. Your take on this, because I know that you're fascinated by the subject too. And this is a bizarre subject when it comes to disclosure.
I don't hear anything.
Maybe it's nothing you know, but what? What do you know about the phenomenon? About UFOs? What can you say? For sure? Maybe it's nothing you know, but what do we know about UFOS and where does this go?
As I said, what we know is what we gleaned from all of the data that has been discussed, and you know that the UFOS are real.
Well, I mean, tell me.
Yes, UFOs are technologically sophisticated, they have performance characteristics that are, you know, the five observables are sort of well documented. But they also have a very profound effects on some people, or they have superficial effects on other people, but they do have effects on people. So going forward is is to combine both of those is to study UFO performance.
And, and you know, the hope is that out of UFO performance can come theoretical physics, which will eventually translate into engineering.
Does our government have downed UFos from unknown origin? That they've been trying and are trying to reverse engineer and exploit those technologies? To understand the physics and understand that technology, do we have that to work with?
I can't talk about that, but the answer is yes.
So this is from weaponized Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp's podcast, Just That Answer alone.
So who is Combe, who is he?
Well, he is. According to Jeremy, he is a program manager for the government's largest UFO program.
Which is that arrow? I don't know it might be.
Jamie could find that out.
Yeah, I mean, and the type of whistleblower protections that are available, like, I hope we can expand that. So it's not just for UFO related stuff, but also for surveillance, to protect the Snowdens and Assanges of the world. Like we need, we need that, and that's why I think that this office is going to be successful. Because, like, you can't.
The people who are doing the Black projects need to have reassurance that they're not going to be screwed after coming forward. And so, you know this, this type of legislation is so key. I had an exchange with with Mellon recently and he actually told me to to mention this. So he was saying that Lazar should come forward through Arrow.
Because now, oh so, because why not? I mean, if he was involved, then he could participate in that organization and and put it through, because that's the channel that we have now.
The idea that someone is going to come out and say, we have downed UFOS, but we can't talk about it. What does that mean? Do you have something that was unidentified, that is from some other state, some other government that you found and it's unidentified? Or are you saying you have something from another planet? There's two.
There's two very different answers.
Right, because the the Chinese balloons included in this as well, so if that gets downed, you know, that's that constitutes crash materials.
Right, like, what is a UFO? It's unidentified. What does that mean? But are you saying that you have something that you're, you're back engineering from another country?
Are you saying you have something that is of some completely unknown origin, like outside of this world?
Well, I mean, based on the testimony from you know, whether you're talking about Roswell, or particularly the one that I've been just loving. Deep in the rabbit hole is the Virginia incident that's in Brazil. Yeah, I mean, that is completely mind blowing. James Fox did an epic documentary about it. Moment of contact.
And, you know, there are military whistleblowers in his documentary, which say that the U.
S. flew in and transported. I can't believe I'm about to say this. But bodies and materials, like in this documentary, there's aliens running around all over Virginia, Brazil. And these three, these two sisters and their friends saw it, the doctors saw it, they did x-rays on it, like they talked to these doctors.
And they did x-rays on the body.
They did x-rays on the bodies and they had to demolish the whole wing of the hospital where it occurred. Because the smell was so bad. That, and this is this, was reported independently from the guy who saw the crash. Everyone said that it smelled like ammonia and sulfur, just like. And they couldn't get out of their system for weeks. And so, you know, there's, there's record of the hospital, you know, doing this like this.
Renovation. And I don't know. The speculation was saying that. It's like, maybe like a skunk or something like a Skunk type smell. Yeah, well, no, but that's like a skunk. You know, animals have reactions when they're in a scary environment.
And that maybe these aliens have a similar reaction to, like a skunk.
That's what everyone said, that the smell was so, so horrible that they couldn't get it off their bodies. They had to demolish the whole wing of the of the hospital. And like, the weird thing about this? So Virginia is very similar to Roswell in that. Like, when you go to Roswell, it's like UFos, you know, it's a tourist attraction, right? So you go to Virginia, there's like huge UFos everywhere. It's like the culture at this point, because the whole city was basically locked down.
They had like hundreds of people all over the city that saw military checkpoints. Or know somebody who was directly involved. And like, you know, I approached. Obviously agnostic on what is happening, but it's it's like you don't have hundreds of people saying exactly the same thing just out of nowhere. I mean, yeah, it could be some sort of government, but it was like, the mayor of our did you see? moment of contact?
No, oh dude, it's so wild, it's so good, it's so well done. He's such a great filmmaker.
Is there any evidence?
Yeah, there's, there's, there's lots of evidence. I like, so all of the.
I mean, there are hospital records, there are.
There, you mean, like, in terms of physical, well, James says that there is, and that he's, you know, on top of it. To try to find it. But I mean, evidence is a spectrum, so, you know, physical evidence, you know, people died. So this guy Cherise, so, so they confronted this guy, Eric Lopes, who with this guy Cherise, Carla, I think Carla, Cherise. They basically were police who, like, captured apparently allegedly one of these things. And they talked to this guy's sister, who died like a week after grabbing this thing.
And, you know, she has a death certificate and like, the cause of death was unknown. He had this like super weird infection. And so, you know, I would consider a death certificate, you know, based in, you know, he was who he was. A He was a state worker, and he died for super bizarre reasons. So he touched, he grabbed it.
And then apparently there was like, he got a cut or something, infection, and he died. They confront the other guy who was driving the car, Eric Lopez, and he threatened to kill them when they go on his property. It's so crazy, but. But it's more so like it seeps into the when, something seeps into the culture that deeply. Like it did in Roswell. And you know, like it's in Brazil. I just I tend to feel like there there's something there because of just how overwhelming, you know, so many people saw the craft.
So many people were involved. It's just it's either the most ridiculous hoax of all time, which why would you, even who would do that and why? And so it's like, when you're when you talk about Occam's razor, you know, the simplest is the most likely answer.
I feel like Occam's razor in both cases of Roswell and Virginia are.
That something actually did happen. I mean, yeah, Roswell has some weird stories about bodies, you know, bodies and little caskets and stuff like that. But it's just like, there's so much attention to these things, there's so much hype that I always wonder, like, how much of this is just people feeding off of the narrative and the stories? And the fact that this is like an exciting thing to talk about, and how much of it is that they want it to be real.
I don't think any of these people want it to be real. I mean, half of the witnesses will only go on video with, you know, voice modulation and from behind because of ridicule. Yeah, but but why? But they, they don't even.
Yeah, because they don't want to, they don't want to do it, they're just not interested in coming forward. So I feel like, if that was, I mean, that certainly is the reason for a lot of people and the UFO world that they can just milk. And they get speaking gigs and they were contacted. And you know, it's a life.
There's a lot of that, obviously, and that's something that whenever there's a speculative phenomenon like that, it just seems like you're always going to get a bunch of bullshit artists.
But, you know, the type of specific evidence that I'm interested in seeing more of is like, OK, so if the military witness claims that you know u?
S Air Force came and transported something like, there are probably records somewhere of these flights. So like, that's, but that's the type of thing that's just inaccessible to us, yeah.
So, but you know, it probably exists somewhere, and you just need a mechanism to dig that up. And so hopefully, hopefully, Arrow can get down to it. But it's this guy, Sean, Sean Patrick, I want to say, is running it. But, you know, Kirsten Gillibrand was grilling the some military officials over the lack of funding. They had requested that it gets far more funding.
It's only it's getting like 11 million a year right now. Which I think for government ops is, you know, that's some. It's somewhat modest for the magnitude of what this really needs to be. But, you know, yeah, there's clips of, you know, people in Congress want this.
What do you think is going on?
I think it's happening, I do I, you know, I also want it to be happening, and I recognize that urge in myself. But I mean, I've been, I mean, I have no interest in falling for bullshit.
I don't, I mean, I'm looking for holes, I want holes. I don't want to, you know, be, yeah, that would just be embarrassed.
It's just there's so many different cases and there's so, and it's becoming legitimized now. I mean, they changed the whole word to UAP because of the stigma, so we're seeing official acknowledgement and progress like government is investigating this now they're compiling the information.
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