Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 435: Fredrick Brennan

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Fredrick Brennan, programmer, creator of 8chan, fontographer, and global hero of the summer, joins the DTFH! You can see Fredrick on Q: Into the Storm. You can follow Fredrick on twitter, and check out Fredrick's open source fonts here. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Mud Wtr - Visit mudwtr.com/dtfh and use promo code DTFH at checkout for 15% off your first order! Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. ZipRecruiter - Try for FREE at ZipRecruiter.com/Duncan

Ghost Towns. Dirty Angel. Out. Now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns. Dirty Angel. Out. Now. New album and tour date coming this summer. And now a reading from the book of Zebaldoth the Cursed. This book was recovered from the ruins of the KLV building in Amsterdam after the first iteration of the Nova Weapon. Nisha the Wanderer traveled down the muddy hill and passed an all decrepit wall upon which sat a little boy with long greasy rocks of black hair. The little boy was holding a wand of hellfire and he pointed at Nisha and said, If you don't move faster, I intend to reduce you to ash.

Nisha smiled at him and said, Do you not know where I come from child? Do you not know who I am? He shouted at me and I will spare you. The child laughed and said, Why should I bow to a stranger? How is it that you see me as a stranger? The great traveling lord known by many names including Duvan Ananda, the blind one, waved his hand and removed the seal of forgetfulness. He had placed over the child. The child remembered that he was once a celestial lord who almost destroyed the seven realms of Bonavita and Nisha had used powerful magic to place him in an illusory world. This was the pin in this illusory world he had caused many problems with his powerful wand and he had incinerated many forces. He was ashamed and begged Nisha for mercy.

Nisha smiled and said, I will give you mercy. I will make you awaken in a new life, in a new world where you will be listening to the greatest podcast of all time. You mean my favorite murder? Said the child. No, said Nisha angrily. You mean WTF with Mark Marin? Said the little boy. No, said Nisha, growing even angrier. Then you must be in your mom's house, upon a cigarette, Kristina Pozitzky. No, said Nisha, I mean the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. And with that he cast a spell upon the child and the child became you in this very moment, listening to the greatest podcast that ever was. Here's your host, it's Cromberlin Caffey.

Greetings sweet friends, it is I Cromberlin Caffey and this is the DTFH and you have tuned in for a glorious episode. If you're one of the zillions of people who was entranced by Q into the storm, the amazing documentary that is on HBO right now, then you already know today's guest and no doubt you fell in love with him. In this dimension we call Fred a programmer, but in any other far less boring dimension, Frederick would be a very powerful magic user, a sorcerer, a wizard, whatever you want to call it. And Frederick actually encountered one of the problems that happens to wizards, which is the thing that you create sometimes escapes and runs amuck, terrorizing nearby villages and causing all kinds of problems. In Frederick's case, this being that he summoned up was a Chan and and one part of Fred's story is his quest to put that demon back in the bottle. And that's what the QAnon documentary is all about. And I really hope that you will watch it. Maybe even before you listen to this episode, I'm so excited for you to meet this wonderful being who I have awarded the global hero of the summer award.

And if you watch the QAnon docker listen to this conversation, I think you'll see why we're going to jump right into this episode. But first, this. Thanks to Mudwater for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH Mudwater. It is a coffee alternative with four medicinal mushrooms and Ayurvedic herbs. With one seventh the caffeine is a cup of coffee, you get the energy without the anxiety, jitters or brutal coffee crash. Each ingredient was added for a purpose. You get cacao and chai for mood and energy, lion's mane for focus, cordyceps for physical performance, chaga and rice sheet for immune and stress and turmeric for soreness. Throw in some cinnamon for antioxidants and you have got Mudwater.

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Go to mudwater.com forward slash DTFH and use code DTFH for 15% off a checkout. That's mudwater.com slash DTFH. And we are back. Do I sound different than in the beginning of this thing? If I do, the reason is because yesterday was my birthday and my wife took me out for a night on the town. She's much younger than me. I imagine her liver is like some kind of garden of Eden. Whereas my liver is like an old desiccated wasteland, a cursed place where countless wars have been fought.

Bloody, horrible, forgotten wars, you know, like that. The part of the forest you go to where you just get this feeling of like something fucked up happened here, but you'll never know what or what it could have been because it was probably thousands of years ago. Or, you know, those parts of town that just seem basically cursed, you know, like places where it's not just one area that's messed up, but like all the stores are kind of Lovecraftian, dilapidated, people sort of in a disheveled, sad, stunned state. And you get the feeling that if you could rewind time and go back a thousand years, 2,000 years, 3,000 years, that this place would be sort of perpetually rotten, that's what my liver has become. But I would, you know, I got a tray of shots, like I'm on a fucking cruise ship in my 20s, got a little drunk, a lot drunk.

Then the baby kept my sweet darling wife up all night, so I got up with forest. Just, you know, that feeling where you're like, fuck, I thought I'd get to sleep a little bit more, but that snatched away from you by your own karma. But it wasn't that bad, you know, that's the thing. Anytime I get to do anything remotely not selfish, it seems to be some kind of universal antidote. Went downstairs, made the kids some yogurt and honey and berries. We're watching a B documentary right now, which is pretty intense, a Bumblebee documentary. You know, these nature docs, you gotta watch out if you have a kid.

I'm sure you know this, but fuck, like 9 out of 10 of these nature docs, it's just the walking dead. But with like a B, you know, it's unrelentingly cruel out there. Like if you're a Bumblebee, you're just fucked. The whole story is about this bee that is looking for a hole to live in, and that means like finding a hole that doesn't have something living in it, but it finds a hole where there's like a adorable mouse and this nice little nest of, you know, mint leaves and seeds. And this fucking Bumblebee that woke from being frozen, because I guess they freeze themselves or they get frozen in the winter

and they have some kind of alien juice inside of them that melts the freeze. This fucking B goes like barreling down this mouse tunnel and evicts this mouse. I don't know how they filmed it. Evicts this mouse from its hole, essentially. Like they got a lot of angles. It's really confusing how they shot this. The bee is like raises its back leg, which means danger and the mouse is not going to fuck with the bee. It's basically like imagine if, you know, a demon just suddenly came barreling into your house, making you run out and then proceeded to like lay eggs in your house to hatch more demons.

So you could never go back. That's what Bumblebees do. And then to cap it all off, you know what happens at the end of a Bumblebee's life? All the other bees sting it to death and it gets replaced by a new queen. It's a built in evolutionary system that ends with matricide. So the next time you see some cute, adorable Bumblebee buzzing around, just know that thing is eventually going to kill its mom. Now, before we get into this conversation with the brilliant Frederick Brennan, I want to say something and I don't want it to be a spoiler or anything,

but somewhere along this conversation, I say to Frederick, you know, in my dark times, I don't see how the planet isn't going to descend into fascism. And the other night I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about how I said that and how incredibly dismal that prognostication is. I don't think that's our only shot. I don't think it's the only possibility, obviously. I just feel like I need to say that. I think more likely than a descent into fascism or as Frederick proposed,

some kind of constitutional convention where we maybe change the framework of how this country runs itself, there's another option. That isn't some utopian thing where our species reaches the peak of an evolutionary pinnacle and we all become, I don't know, some kind of non-stinging hive of proto-hominids and a kind of orgasmic lattice of hyper-technologically enhanced connectivity. But the things just kind of keep going the way they're going, but they get a little better and they keep getting a little better and a little better and a little better. See, my problem is I want an instant solution, you know?

I'm never satisfied with just the tiny little incremental steps forward. My wife and I yesterday were in bed watching the fucking George Floyd verdict, you know? And we were so happy, like anybody who isn't a demon was, to see that the jury convicted that murderous cop on all charges. But then, probably like most people we thought, holy shit, it took so much energy to make that happen. So many protests. Someone had to film it.

People had to be brutally honest and like get over their fear and testify. You know, if you look at it from the perspective of not right now, but two years from now, three years from now, if you don't do the one foot in front of the other thing, things can look really dire. That's what I'm trying to say. Even the little victories seem like nothing at all in the face of the abyss. But if you just look at it in the moment and accept the little victories and stop seeing all the shit Tucker Carlson wants you to look at,

and by the way, he's very upset right now. He's very upset right now. If you're someone who likes to hate Watch Fox News, definitely tune in because he's, it's like somebody threw salt on his hemorrhoids and that's a good sign. It's known as the Carlson equation, which is GH equals the inverse of CH, meaning there's a there's an inverse correlation between global harmony and Carlson's harmony. So the more upset or turbulent Carlson is from that, you can deduce that global harmony has increased somewhat and he is freaking the fuck out right now.

So things are looking up. That's what I'm trying to say here. And when you hear me belt out some nonsense about some inevitable authoritarianism descending upon our planet, please understand that I am in a lot of ways a true dope. Like I actually thought a meteor was going to smash into the planet in the beginning of COVID and that COVID was some kind of ruse, I guess, to get us all inside to increase survivability. All my all my smart friends are just normal friends, including my wife. They rolled their eyes at me made fun of me anytime I would get going on this and then it didn't happen.

So when you hear me make some grand forecast, just know it's I also thought a meteor was going to hit the planet and it didn't. Okay, much thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. My lovely trembling darlings, it's time for you to press that sweet honey soaked finger into the worldwide web and leave your beautiful print on the canvas. That is the internet. Squarespace is the best way to do that, whether you want to buy a domain name, whether you want to build a website in less than an hour easily, or whether you want to create some incredible thing of such profound beauty

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and you will get 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Thank you, Squarespace. We're back. Now, my dear friends, I know what you're thinking. Duncan, the bumblebee thing, and the commercials, and just go, I want to listen until you talk to the global hero of the summer. I don't want this, whatever this is. I don't want this sugar coating or whatever you're putting around the conversation that I came to listen to.

I want the free base version of the DTFH. Well, you can get that over at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. You subscribe and you will no longer be assaulted by commercials, but you will just get pure conversation. You're going to get a lot more than that, though. We have a weekly meditation group. It meets every Monday. It's called Journey into Boredom,

and also every Friday we have a wonderful family gathering, and we have a thriving community of geniuses located on our Discord server. You can immediately connect with your eternal family by going to patreon.com forward slash DTFH and subscribing. And now, my sweetlings. Here we go. God, one last little thing. I'm sorry. Zencaster, the software I use to record many of my podcasts,

it kind of malfunctioned on me, sadly. And we lost the first, I don't know, four minutes of this conversation. It was personal and intense about Frederick's past, but we lost it. We lost me saying, welcome to the show. And so, I'm sorry. So, it's going to have this disjointed feel, like you're kind of like dropping in a few minutes in, which you are,

because I lost the first four, six minutes of this thing. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm not a professional journalist. I wish I were. If I had been, I would have, if I was even a professional podcaster, I wouldn't have lost these four minutes.

And there wouldn't be this rambling intro. There'd be this quick boom, boom, boom, boom thing. And it would be, wow, it's so tight and polished. So tight, so polished. And now, without further ado, my friends, I want to introduce you to the global hero of the summer. You've seen him on QAnon, End of the Storm. You probably are aware of him,

because if you're anyone who spends any amount of time on the internet, you've been, or you spent some time on his creation, no longer available. A Chan. And if you're a coder or someone who's into fonts, then you probably know about him, because he is a brilliant programmer who has made some world-famous fonts.

You can follow him on Twitter, at FR underscore Brennan. But now, at this moment, I mean it. I want you to extend that probiscus from your third eye and spray as much sweet, orgasmic, astral love gel into the eternal, undulating, connective fabric that connects all sentient beings in the universe so that Fred feels the love of countless souls raining like honey down upon his head.

Welcome to the DTFH, Frederick Brennan. My dad, you know, got custody through a series of lies. He basically accused my mom of doing something that women essentially never do, which is sexually abuse their children. And the courts went along with that for a little while. She was never found guilty or even charged, but she was held in jail for 30 days for something. I don't know. But she was never officially charged. They do know that.

And so by doing that, he was able to kind of keep the money. And so he just left me and my brother in the care of this 24 hour nurse that I learned later, he was having sex with. And then he was abusive. So I did a lot of the self harm stuff to try to get out of the house like I actually wanted to go to a mental hospital or something like that. And so I had read this book about this girl that had, sorry, about this girl that had, what's the word, anorexia, sorry. And then she caught herself and went to a mental hospital. So I just did that. And then anyway, when I was there, it sort of came out why I was there. And so the state and everybody, you know, basically this nurse was going to be fired.

Because I told them about some of the things she did like my brother experienced a rare condition during neglect, which is called fecal vomiting. It's where somebody doesn't poop for a really long time, it comes out the other end. Yeah, so when they heard about all that and that she covered up and everything, they fired her she's not even allowed to be a nurse anymore, like a home health they they're called that actually our ends but Anyway, she basically convinced my dad that she wouldn't stay with him, like as his partner if he did not tell CPS that he didn't want his kids anymore. So, he got so angry that I snitched on him that he called CPS and told them that basically without baby that's the name of the nurse. He wasn't going to feed us. And he was just going to let us die. So the CPS needed to come right away and take us and he had this warrior who helped him sign away his parental rights and then that's how I went into foster care so that that's the story before care. And foster care for for two years did you go in with your brother to did you go to the same place.

Yeah, we did. There was a short period where we weren't together but we did go together. How's your brother doing now. Oh, he's fine. He's not nearly as well known as I am. Yeah, but he's fine. Yeah, you I mean now you are a. You're a global hero. Now, you might be one of them.

I don't know. I think so. I think you might be one of the most like famous heroes on earth right now. Well, you know, because the one of the most famous hero right now, it changes, you know, month to month, but right now, your April's global. What I say to people, what I say to people is that there are so few decent people in that Q documentary that I come out looking much better. That's because I am one of the only, like, I mean, who am I competing with there and watching Ron Watkins. Well, all of these just really weird people or otherwise, like, researchers who don't actually have a role in the event. So, you know, they're not like, the audience isn't like, sympathizing with like, Will summer or Mike Rothschild because they're just kind of you're being humble, which is a very quality of global here.

It's a quality of global heroes. But because, you know, yeah, sure. Like, I don't think anybody thinks these days, I don't know if anybody thinks anybody's perfect anymore, but you didn't have to do that. You didn't have to put you you essentially destroyed your life. Or at least like temporarily, like created mass chaos, because because you have a strong feeling regarding your wayward child, a Chan and it's a great feeling which, you know, I'm sure a lot of people disagree with I agree with it. You know, I, and it's something I would love to hear your thoughts on in particular, regarding freedom of speech. But you know, I think most of us when we're watching we recognize that it would have been easy for you for another person to ignore the reality that their little, little, little creation had turned into some kind of I mean, I mean, you're, you're, you're totally right about that. I mean, there are so many ways that I could have done that.

Like, for example, Jim Watkins had sole ownership of a Chan beginning in 2015, which is before a whole bunch of stuff happens. So beginning January 2015 and I was the only only the admin until April of 2016, which is even before Trump gets elected. So there were like a lot of PR lines that I can take right. Like, like the kind of thing that, you know, X founders of like PayPal or Facebook, the things that they say, oh, we're no longer involved in these companies, we have no control over what's going on. It's unfair for you to even talk to me. Yeah, I didn't do that. I guess partly because I did still work for Jim Watkins until 2018, even though I wasn't working on that. And I discovered while there that the entire reason that I even gave it to him was based on a lie. Like, I gave it to him because I thought that he was the legitimate owner of two channel that Japanese website that predates fortune. And then it turns out that he actually stole that. And both he and Ron lied about that to me. So that is was a huge mindfuck. And I kind of wanted to let people know about that. And I didn't really know how eventually I figured out how it took a few years. Yeah.

But yeah, you could have done a Pontius pilot. I wash my hands of this, you know, like out of my control. Yeah, you're right. It probably would have been easy, but it wasn't the right thing. You redeemed yourself. I knew. I mean, I knew a lot of stuff. It wasn't the right thing to do to just not tell people all of the stuff that I knew about them. I mean, it, they had so much influence and it would have been really wrong for me to just tell them everything I knew to myself and, you know, just ignore all of the people requesting information from me. Yeah. But still, you know, just there's just so many people in the world who had just pretend, you know, imagine that they didn't really have that responsibility and this, but this is the world is I like tangle with this problem that you faced head on, not just with a champ, but in gent with with the superpower of the internet meeting the reality that we live in a planet where there are like hyper manipulative psychopaths who would love to be the next Hitler, you know, who would love if they could to, you know, take over the planet and if not that then take over a country and if not that then take over a business and if not that have a small gross group of cultists around them that do awful things. And, you know, and, you know, fortunately, not everyone is very charismatic, or interesting or not everyone has like the Elron Hubbard angle, you know, that somehow magnetizes

people to them but a shit ton of people do. So, yeah, thoughts on ways that are that we can simultaneously maintain like this great idea of freedom of speech being able to say whatever you want. How do you use the internet like how do you keep it going. If inevitably, people are just going to pop up and try to get kids to you know shoot people or do rotten things. Things that I consider that first I think I need to provide a little bit more backstory. What you say about there being very charismatic people is really true. And some people would say well Trump is one of these very charismatic people that knew how to use the internet to his I would say that actually what we saw was a downgraded version of what is really possible because Donald Trump himself was more out for himself than he was out for an ideology. Then he was out for actually reshaping the United States at all costs. And if Donald Trump were actually one of these psychopaths like Hitler there would probably not be a United States right now. He would have done everything he could to take over the military to launch an actual coup to, I mean, you know, think about it this way. Mike Pence was just walking around in the White House, essentially unprotected. If Donald Trump was able to turn even one of his, you know, secret service people that are loyal to him, and supposed to follow the orders of the commander in chief, that person could have just walked up and shot Mike Pence yet. Like that kind of thing happens in other countries where a coup is something that Americans think can't happen here. And that's not true at all. A coup can happen in any democracy.

And we were extremely fortunate that Donald Trump is not at heart an ideologue. He just likes to be popular. And he's more concerned about the risks to him if he fails than getting this done at all costs. So we haven't yet seen the actual what a magnified threat would look like somebody who is a psychopath, and is using audiences on the internet to bring about their ends and does also in a position of great power at any cost. We haven't seen that yet. And I think it's partly because the people that are in power right now are still too old to have fully like the internet was not around when they were young enough to kind of where they were neuroplastic enough we can say for that to just, you know, become something that is like eating to them that they just understand like you and I do. So we definitely why I gave that back story is because this problem is even more severe than Donald Trump and it's more severe than anything we've seen yet. And we have to get this right very, very soon, because the clock is literally running out on our society and on our ability to do anything. Another way that the clock is running out. Sorry to give so much back story, but I think it's important because I think people don't understand the free speech online is going to change, even if we do nothing, and people don't get this they think that as long as America is continuing to uphold these norms that that means that the internet is not going to change at all. And that's not true. Other countries are becoming extremely, we can say pissed off at the United States. And what we are seeing right now is a rise internationally of an idea called cyber sovereignty.

And the doctrine of cyber sovereignty is that the laws of your country should not end when someone picks up a phone or plugs in an even that cable that the laws that are respected in your country, all of them Bible laws, pornography laws, copyright laws, patent laws, all of them should apply to the websites that are doing business in your country. And what this means is, if it continues on the trajectory that it is right now. Our grandchildren will not have an internet like we have, they will have essentially a US internet that has websites that cater to Americans, and they will perhaps be able to email people in other countries. And there will probably be like a way to pass messages in between these internet like right now. There are ways to message people in China, even though people in China cannot see Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of that. There are still ways for you to contact them and of course, people in China can get around the firewall still but the Chinese government has become more and more effective at clamping down on that. I remember in the early 2000s, early 2010s, a lot of people were kind of treating the firewall of China like it was a joke. We can use a VPN, we can use Tor, we can get around it. This is no big deal. This government is ignorant of how the internet works and they don't actually understand that there's nothing they can do, that they've let in this Pandora's box. And actually, although their initial attempts were clumsy, they learned because any program that a government puts an enormous amount of money towards is eventually going to hit on how to censor the internet.

And so, they discovered that you can close down Tor gateways. That blocking VPNs is not actually a hard problem that 4chan, for example, which is not a big government, manages to block almost every VPN on Earth. So, they have discovered many, many myriad ways that they can control their internet and they've been highly successful at it. In order to right now go on to a prohibited website in China, if they really don't want you to go there, like if you go to Xinjiang and VPNs and everything are banned. You need to take incredibly technically difficult measures, you know, installing a Tor browser, not from the Tor official website because it's blocked, getting it somehow from a friend, etc. You can't even just launch it on your computer and run it because Tor operates via something called a directory, essentially, it knows a bunch of servers that can tell you where the other Tor servers are. Most P2P networks work like this. Tor, therefore, it cannot work like that in China because all of those are blocked. So, you need to know, so you have to get the software from somebody, and then you need to know how to configure the software with an IP of a gateway that is not yet blocked, and hope that you don't get discovered for using that gateway, because you can be arrested and tried as distant for trying to circumvent the Great Firewall. So, the Great Firewall has actually become quite effective to an insanely high degree of people in Xinjiang, for example, are also required to install monitoring software on the computer.

What do you think musk satellites are going to change that, make it impossible to block because it's coming from a satellite? I don't think that I, you know, China, for example, has a lot of internal control and that satellite technology is something that is very easy to stop people from using. They could very easily monitor who has a satellite dish. They have a lot of cameras and stuff like that. They could launch a system where you can report on your neighbor for having an unauthorized satellite dish. They could have, for example, satellite dishes which are authorized, which would only be able to like, for example, get, you know, CCTV and the actual Chinese activities. The satellites I don't think are going to work. But now that I've given all that backstory, I can say that we are really, really, really close to losing the internet that we have. And what is happening in China right now is happening worldwide. To get back to our own story, my own story here, Australia and New Zealand blocked HN after the Christchurch shooting. Those kinds of things did not used to happen. And increasingly we're seeing that governments in free Western countries are becoming less and less tolerant of web services. And there is going to come a day when I feel there is going to be an EU social network and they're going to kick Facebook out because everything that's going on.

With Facebook and Twitter with the taxation there that they don't want to pay and now it's becoming a world trade issue. India has blocked a bunch of apps and these big tech giants might be able to survive in this environment, but what it's going to cause is fragmentation. Like, you may still be calling it Facebook in different countries, but not everybody is seeing the same thing and not everybody is able to see everybody else's accounts. It's like some horrific version of what's already happening. Like you can on Netflix, you can only watch the movies that you're allowed to. Right, but that's just going to. It's like Netflix for the entire. Yeah, that's it. So this is something that you view as bad, right?

Of course, yeah. But there's, but you know, I'm just saying the paradox is that you also were like, fuck, I gotta, I gotta figure out a way to shut down this site that I created because it's getting people killed. Right. So this is some kind of like, right, a paradox for you, right, which is on one. Right. Yes. Yeah. And that's why I feel like this reckoning with free speech is something that our generation needs to do. This reckoning with free speech online is something that we absolutely need to do, or we will lose the internet. That's.

Oh, I got you. I got you. Because yeah, because you're saying what I'm saying that these countries are going to get so pissed off, essentially, by our inability to control ourselves that this problem is going to keep getting worse and worse. I'm saying that we cannot control what our authoritarian countries do. And it's very likely that China will keep getting worse and worse. And it's very likely that there will be parts of the world that the internet no longer reaches. However, if we are not able to deal with this problem, it will be the whole world. So I'm saying that we need to figure this out. And part of the way that we can figure it out is simply by applying existing laws and updating those laws where they need to be updated. You know, when we look at, for example, what happened on HN. A lot of the things that happened there are supposed to not be allowed direct threats of violence. You know, is there supposed to not be allowed. Not kins is were called one of them Jim was called in front of Congress and I feel like they either didn't know what to do with him.

Or they just didn't know, you know, how to handle this issue and they don't see the gravity of it because he has never faced legal consequences for anything he's done. And he's gone to the point now where he is either himself or somebody he's closely related to is impersonating a federal agent online. And that impersonation is bringing about revenue to Jim Watkins is pro Q and on Super PAC and to Jim Watkins is, you know, advertisements on HN is pro Q non business, you can say. And that, you know, there's no way to say that that's not impersonation of a federal agent and also receiving something of value. And if that is a case that would be hard to prosecute, then the laws need to be updated so that that's not how it takes forever. You can't just this this thing that this thing you're you're talking about is that we to me it's we were not nuanced enough. We this this internet thing has barely existed in human history. And we're treating it like it's a newspaper or something or rather than some living like maybe sentient like evolving brain thing.

And so and it moves so quick to me. It's like, yeah, definitely. If people are breaking the law, shut them down. But we the kind of laws that we need for this are like, how do you create a law for insidious manipulation that leads children into white supremacy? You know what I mean? How do you create a lot or even prove that that's happening? Like, you know that white supremacists are actively manipulating kids actively and they're smart about it. The mean magic and all that bullshit, you know, they're they're they're good at pushing the needle.

But how the fuck do you create a law that says you can't push the needle of like teenagers towards becoming fascist Nazis? Duncan, I think part of the problem is that we aren't even trying to do the things that are easy. And we just immediately jump to the things that are hard. And so before we even can go there and I'm willing to go there and to discuss that. But before we can even go there, we need to do the things that are easy and then see the effects of the things that are easy and then figure out if more is needed. Because if it wasn't allowed to do, you know, to impersonate a federal agent, to have a website that openly says embrace infamy, you can post your manifestos here to have a website that is not moderated. You know, that is not automatically moderated at all, which in effect means it's not moderated because a website of that size with as few employees as. Wait, can I just stop you for one second?

Embrace infamy. I mean, I think it is important to make sure folks listening know when they're saying that they're saying that after people are getting murdered by people who are radicalized on that site. That's fair to say, right, or at least the precursor. Yeah, yeah. Fuck man that and so that's just them saying. And I mean, if you watch the Q documentary, you can see that Ron Watkins is basically laughing about the Christchurch shooting. He says that he doesn't really care about it at all. I mean, he's even, he tells the director of the documentary, Colin Hoback, that he had not even talked to any reporter about the Christchurch shooting.

And they allowed the Christchurch shooting thread to get 750 replies, which is the maximum on a chance. And then it was automatically deleted by the system. They didn't even delete it. They claimed to Congress that they deleted it falsely by using that time that the automatic system deleted it. So I obviously being a chance admin, I would know that that's not what happened there. That the system proved it, but in any case, they probably lied to their lawyer about that. But yeah, I when we do the things that are easy and then see the effects that they have, we can start working on the things that are very hard like hate speech online. And it's possible that that issue can be dealt with in a type of, you know, kind of cyber sovereignty way where you're, you know, applying European speech laws in Europe and that kind of thing where it's not so utterly severe as to where the Europeans are saying,

we cannot trust you Americans at all to moderate that when we pass our laws, Facebook pretends to follow them and then doesn't and that we because we no longer trust you at all. And because we know how much revenue it could bring into the European Union to have our own social network and how much data that that could, you know, have for us here at home. We are just shutting you off. You know, so that it could avoid that but I mean, I think that when we actually do the things that are easy, that there will be a lot less need to do, you know, to handle these extreme philosophical questions that you know people like play to Socrates would probably at this time. Okay. Not knowing where to post your job to reach the right people. That's why hiring can feel like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Sure. You can post your job to some job board and more than likely you're going to wake up in the middle of the night with someone throwing rocks through your window because you connected with someone who is a member of some dark arcane underground cult that believes a massive black obsidian pyramid is going to be exploding out of the earth and part of making that happen involves applying for jobs and then kidnapping the people who posted the job or you could try zipper cruder for free at zipper cruder.com slash Duncan. When you post a job on zipper cruder, it gets sent out to over 100 top job sites with one click. Then zipper cruders matching technology finds people with the right skills and experience for your job and actively invites them to apply. In fact, zipper cruder is so effective that four out of five employers who post on zipper cruder get a quality candidate within the first day. It's no wonder over 2.3 million businesses have come to zipper cruder for their hiring needs. So while other companies overwhelm you with way too many options, zipper cruder finds you what you're looking for the needle in the haystack.

And right now you can try zipper cruder for free at zipper cruder.com slash Duncan. Once again, remember to go to zipper cruder.com slash Duncan. That's D-U-N-C-A-N zipper cruder, the smartest way to hire. I love it. And you're right. And it's very pragmatic and I love it because my brain always goes for the hardest problem, but you're right. Like, do you think what Twitter did with Trump? Is that an example of the right thing to do?

Well, you know, it's a very complicated case because he clearly broke their rules. Yes. And by not blocking him, they're essentially saying that if you're powerful enough, you don't get blocked. And it's true that he is a political figure of some import, you know, a lot of import, he became president now probably only some import. But I do think that, you know, social networks have a responsibility to their users more than anything, not really like to like laws. This isn't really something about the First Amendment, but it's more about the social network has a responsibility to its users to not have a website that is full of disinformation and that is making their efforts. And Twitter recognized that. And so took out one of the main person that is spreading extremely harmful disinformation like that the election was stolen.

And so I feel that they did do the right thing, but it isn't anything that could ever necessarily be codified into law. We can just expect it to happen whenever there's moral people running a social network. Yeah, it did work. I mean, that was, you know, when it happened, everyone was all of like the Trumpers are in the QAnon people are like prognosticating the apocalypse from shutting him up. And it was great. It got better like Twitter got better without him on it. It did. And we barely talk about him anymore, unless you know, we're talking about past events.

Like, the great thing is, we're no longer necessarily talking about Trump as a going concern. And that's something that's very positive. We're no longer like, you know, most people probably because he's no longer on Twitter, don't even know where he physically is in the world. Is he in Mar-a-Lago? Is he, you know, he is just not a part of our lives to any degree. And, you know, he essentially is stuck in Mar-a-Lago writing these messages that come from the office of the president. Sorry. He uses the presidential seal, which is illegal, but it says the office of Donald Trump.

And he is essentially writing tweets in press release form, hoping that the media republishes them and less and less that's happening. The only people that are republishing them now are OAN, you know, those sites. And so I feel that it's been very positive. And obviously he's had deeply damaging effects on our society and on people's trust in our elections. But I would say that without him being on Twitter, the more rational Republicans have still got the other Republicans, they still believe something falls. But it's not as dangerously false as before. When you ask a Republican now, was the 2020 election legitimate? So before, like in November to January, when Trump was really spreading all that propaganda, their answer would have been no, because it was stolen with all of these illegal ballots that were brought in from China and that line.

But now, because the more rational Republicans, even though they're wrong, even though they're still fascists, even though they still want to destroy our country, at least the line that they're giving us now is the election was illegitimate because too many people could vote. Yeah, that's the most fucked up thing that they say that. That's an improvement, though. That's an improvement, though. It's crazy. They just say that. And it's very, very, very, very fucked up. I totally agree.

But it's an improvement over what they were saying before, because what they were saying before was at least not an argument that could bring change from within the system. It was a call for a domestic terror. It was a call to take out election officials. It was a call to destroy the republic essentially because it had been taken over by communists. What we are seeing is at least a call to change laws and to reform the system in a way that would be deeply damaging and would be horrible for our democracy. But at least, I hope you can see this, that at least it's still within the system. We can still do something. We can still make it harder to vote.

We can still. Yeah. You know. All is not lost. We don't need to raid the capital. All we need to do is make it harder to vote. Yeah. And that's not going over well for them anyway.

Thank God. So to me, I do, I feel a little bit of hopefulness, but a lot of times I don't. And I feel like you more than maybe anyone I've ever talked to have. How do I put it? I feel like you, based on your POV and my fantasy, which is that you get information from all kinds of weird sources that I could ever imagine. And I just let it be a fantasy. Don't tell me if that's not true. But when I'm looking at the world, and I'm feeling particularly cynical.

I don't understand how it doesn't just turn in everything just doesn't turn into fascism. I don't understand how that isn't going to happen. Just based on, you know, this pandemic, you know, knowing that we now have a bio weapon floating out there, whether or not it started as one who gives a fuck it is one now. Someone can bottle it and use it. And if you look at like democratic governments versus fascist governments, you can obviously see which one's going to be able to handle that pandemic better than the other. It's the ones that can just lock everybody up and where people aren't going to protest. And so when I do hear that, and it's absolutely a truth that authoritarian regimes have done better at handling the coronavirus that's broadly speaking, like across, you know, the individual means and so on, that's been the case. However, there's another element to that.

Which is that some democracies have done better than others. And some democracies have done a lot better than others. So perhaps the lesson that we need to take from this is that our real problem is that we don't have a very cohesive society and countries in Scandinavia did a lot better with this virus. Which is, you know, that should be completely unsurprising to us, because those countries are better at it. Those countries are better than us in almost every other way. You know, America is not the greatest country on earth as much as we have to think that it is. It is only the richest country on earth and being the richest and the greatest are not the same thing. A lot of people equate those two. We're the richest, therefore we're the greatest. And when we say we're the richest, we don't mean the average person either. So it's already a lie.

You know, the income of the country is the greatest of all the countries, but it doesn't curdle down. Anyway, so that's one big component that we need to look into. How can we increase the cohesiveness of our society? What do you think the answer is? How? Well, it's really tough, but I do think that if we were willing to make some radical changes, we could perhaps get closer to it. And so I'll preface this by saying I'm not a politician, not a foreign policy expert or any of those things. Just somebody who has looked around at our society and has seen the deep divisions that are getting deeper and deeper. And by the way, I think that even if we solve the free speech problem entirely online to a way that, you know, like to a perfect utopian way, that these divisions would continue to accelerate because they're not primarily like it.

It's true that like extremists, domestic terrorists, etc. can accelerate these divisions. That's why they call themselves accelerationists, but these divisions are still there and they continue to get deeper. And so I wonder often whether or not what we need in this country is to learn from the great, you know, American diplomats that went overseas. And what constitutions did they give those countries that are not doing so much better than us? Look at Germany, for example, which is doing a lot better than us. They did not give them an American-style constitution, same with Japan. Why didn't they give them the constitution? That seems to be implicitly admitting that the constitution needs to work. Exactly. And because I lived in the Philippines, I know that we learned a lot from the mistakes that we made in the Philippines by giving them a constitution that was based so much on our own. We gave them a bicameral legislature. We gave them a Senate. You know, that's what that means.

We gave them all of these trappings of American constitutionalism and their country's government is extremely dysfunctional because the bicameral system is certainly not the best system for democracy. Most advanced democracies, let's think of Israel, you know, Germany. They don't have one because they don't work. You mean they always get stuck in a quagmire? They always get... Yeah. And it's always so easy to blame the other house. And, you know, it needlessly slows down laws. And the only people that it's really good for are capitalists who don't want change. And so they can endlessly slow down the system via these two houses that have to, you know, come up with a reconciled bill. And so, you know, our system is designed in such a way that the rich and powerful and landowners, that's specifically the purpose of the Senate, is to make landowners more powerful than the people have extreme ability to slow things down. So I think that really what we need to do is realize that as a country, America has become extremely divided, that our system does not work for most people and that we cannot afford to just sit around and do nothing because the next coup is likely to succeed. The next coup is going to be by somebody who's younger and who is going to be much more ideologically driven. They're not going to be a reality TV show star that is just looking at their own brand.

They are going to probably be somebody that would be willing to die to destroy the federal government, as we know. So I really think that what we need is to do, you know, and this is going to sound radical to a lot of people, do something like what Venezuela did. They had a constitutional convention. They asked everybody, what do you citizen want Venezuela to be? And maybe the way that Venezuela did that was not the greatest way to do it. Maybe it was a cover for the people in power there to, you know, force this system down people's throat to make it look democratic. Okay, I'm not saying that's exactly copy what happened in Venezuela. I'm just saying our founders for as much a mythos that we have around them as being these perfect people who wrote this perfect document, and that they were just extremely, extremely intelligent, and there's nothing that could be done to improve that document. And it gave us a way to not only amend the Constitution, but to literally replace the Constitution. And that's, I really feel what we need to do. It's called an article five convention. The legal term. And what that is is three quarters of the states get together, and they decide on a whole bunch of amendments all at once. And it Congress does not have to agree because this is likely to change their jobs extremely. They're very unlikely to agree to this because I imagine if this happens, and we decide, you know what, we're really having a lot of trouble getting along. All of us states, we're really having a lot of trouble.

Some of us are really upset that immigrants are crossing into our borders. Some of us are really upset that the taxes are too low. I mean, there are so many things that this kind of the devolved power system of the EU, and the EU is still extremely strong on the stage. It's still extremely strong in NATO. It still has extremely strong trade rules. I mean, the EU is not, you know, a force that's nothing. And we could very easily decide that what we need is something like the EU class of Defense Union. So, yeah, every state essentially, and we could even, you know, the great thing about an article five convention is we can make more states while we're there. We can join states while we're there. You can change anything. And they three quarters of the state legislators have to vote for it. And yeah, that's all that needs to happen. I love that. What are we doing here? It's like our country's acting like people who've been in a shitty relationship for years and years. It's not working out. We don't need to be in the shitty relationship. We don't need to. If people at the grassroots level would demand that their state legislature votes for an article five convention, one would happen. And we could, you know, this country could change so much overnight. And I, I really feel that if we don't do this, we are going to be changed by war. Yeah, because the article five convention, that process was added there by the founders, because contrary to American myth, which is mostly supported by people that are in power right now under the current American system, you know, because it's worth their jobs.

Contrary to the American myth, they knew that their document was not one everlasting or two perfect that it was going to need changes. And so they gave us two ways to make changes. They gave us the way that's the only way that we've ever done it, where basically, you know, three, I think it's two thirds of the states decide and then, you know, Congress and all of that, but this article five convention is the second way. And even though we've never done it, we could. And at one of those, I mean, you can make new states, you can, you know, you could give tribes their own countries. I mean, you could dissolve everything. You really, as long as three quarters of the state legislatures agree, a lot could get done. And so we sit here and we say, this Constitution, it's just so old and there's nothing we can do, because every, you know, amendment has to be passed one on one by one. It's so hard to get everybody to agree. But I really think that if we all sat down and tried, you know, there are ways to make this palatable to everybody because states like Texas would no longer need to accept every immigrant from the other states, like that could be great, you know, you would have something like the EU where the countries that make up the EU control their own borders. And so even though an immigrant would be able to enter, you know, this new United States, they would need to become a citizen of it to even be able to cross into Texas. So Texas would be seeing a lot less, you know, and that's even if we have complete freedom of union. Sorry. That's even if we have complete freedom of movement like the EU. Right, which we might not want.

But see, that's the scary part is let's say you end up in like some hyper reds, you know, you're one of the liberals living in some hyper red state. And all of a sudden, like it's, you're fucked, like you're stuck in some horrible hellscape. But here's what I would say to you. You're stuck right now, because if you are a political minority in one of these states, you are certainly seeing all of these militia movements growing around you. You are certainly seeing far right people getting into office in that state. And what I'm trying to say is, we can't just do nothing. Like, if we do nothing, there will probably be a civil war in this country. And then not only are they fucked, everybody's fucked. So at least in a peaceful process, a liberal person who knows that they're about to become part of this hellscape could move. I mean, if you look at, like what's happened in other countries when this kind of peaceful dissolution has happened, it hasn't always been perfect. But people are kind of given a year to decide which state do you want to be part of now. And that is going to be a lot more important than it used to be because you won't be able to move as easily. And so, you know, if that's the road that we decided to go on, if we decide that we don't want complete freedom of movement, that would be an option. But I mean, I really, really feel strongly that the Constitution needs radical changes. And I don't know exactly what those changes should be. But we need to start asking people and figuring it out because this relationship is not working. You can feel it. And there's this, I think QAnon is just some weird flower on the tree that you're talking about. And there's going to be more flowers and more flowers. And we like to imagine like, oh, that's cute.

That's a cute little thing that happened, that QAnon thing. And when they stormed the Capitol, that's a cute little thing. But you know, we're going to, people are going to cover their zits. They're not. They're not. It's going to, they're not going to come to their senses because, and I mean, if you look at the reasons why QAnon wanted to do what they wanted to do, which is affect a coup, put all the Democratic politicians in Guantanamo Bay and execute them. Jim Watkins says in the documentary that his idea for fixing the government is taking all the politicians, shooting them, doing that three times, anybody who wants to become a politician. And then on the fourth round, according to him, he will, you know, those people probably be the better ones because they aren't the kind of people that wanted to become politicians. That's a crazy way to look at the world. But when you, when you look at this, and you see the fact that this QAnon movement, a movement to affect a coup, that's really what it is, got so much support, you can see that there's a lot of internal dissent for the American system. And I'm sorry to say, that does not only exist on the right. A lot of people on the far left of this country agree with the fact that the Senate is essentially a legitimate institute that it should not exist in any sense. No, that's the weird overlap. That's the weird overlap between the left and the right is they both, they both seem to share that perspective, which is odd. Which is why I think an article five convention could work.

Yeah, it's really interesting, kind of scary to think about it. And I don't know what I was expecting. I don't know why I thought you were going to give, you were going to make me feel better. It's really scary. Yeah, I agree that, you know, I actually agree that an article five convention is really scary to happen because you don't know what three quarters of these state legislatures, you know, based on, you know, they're going to probably do a lot of surveys and stuff and figure out what everybody wants. And, you know, it will be a democratic process, but you don't know if everything that comes out of this radical change is going to be positive for you personally. And that's very, that's really scary, you know, especially if you live in a red state. But I feel that everybody who's paying attention knows right now that if we keep these institutions, the Senate, and similar to the Electoral College, and we're going to have a fascist coup, it's going to happen. That's how I feel. Yeah. Scary. We have a responsibility to use the system that exists in the law to try to change our system before it's changed for us. And this option goes away. I've got one more question or a couple more questions. We're almost in an hour. Do you have a little bit more time?

I do. I have a lot more time. Okay, thank you so much. Yeah, I'm a big fan of yours. I really did like the Midnight Gospel. Thank you. Yeah. If I would say one thing about how people talk to you on Twitter, here's what I would tell you. Everybody who answers every one of your tweets would like, where's season two? I want season two of the Midnight Gospel. You know, I'm sure that that's extremely frustrating and I'm going to tell you that the Midnight Gospel is perfect, even if there never is a season two. And instead of asking for season two, they should watch it again because so much is going on in every frame that you literally cannot understand the Midnight Gospel in one sitting. Or even, you know, I feel five. I feel that I don't even understand.

Thank you. So it's conversations like this that are the ones that actually make me really want a season two. You know, I get it, people love it. But when I have this kind of conversation, I'm already in my head seeing what character you might be and how Clancy would react to some of the things you're saying. And like, so these are the moments where it's like, I'd love to do this again. You know, I think, of course, I would have got the season two, but I'm just saying that, you know, it was, it's a wonderful work of art. And I would hope that someday in the future, when English has the status that Latin has today, and it's only researched for like, classics purposes, that one of the classics people are trying to understand is the Midnight Gospel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This, that's so sweet to hear, man. Thank you so much.

I didn't think you'd respond to me when you did it. I was like, whoa, and then you see your, you've seen Midnight Gospel. That was when I was just like, I was telling my wife, he watched the show. Because we were riveted. When I first responded to you, I was thinking, he might think this joke that I'm about to make is really dumb, because it looks like from the glasses man episode. He might think this joke I'm about to make is really dumb, but I'm very familiar with this show. No, I appreciated that you joking, sort of joking lure. For me, the chromatic ribbon, I mean, not to sound like a complete loon. It's not quite a non-existent place. So like, I just did the part of the multiverse we exist in. Obviously, it's a Netflix show. Of course, yeah, I know I've heard your conversation with Hamilton Morris, where he said that, you know, that place, you basically came up with it on Ketamine.

Yeah, it exists. It exists. Yeah, somewhere. Now, this is, so this is something I discovered, which I thought was interesting because I was googling inventors who came to regret their inventions, because I thought it'd be interesting to talk to you about that. To see who you're who you exist with. One of them, of course, Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atomic bomb. And I'm sure you know this because, and this brings this brings me to where something I want to talk to you about, because this, do you know who Vincent Connors Connors is? I'm Vincent Connors. I don't think so. He is the creator of Comic Sans. Oh, yeah.

Yes, I do. And he says that his, you know, regret regarding creating that font is not so much that he created the font, the much made fun of font, but that people think that's the only thing I've ever designed. Right. And he also made Trebuchet on that. Yeah. Exactly. But you know, once you make Comic Sans that you're the Comic Sans guy, which he said people will say you're the you did that to us. But do you want me to defend the Comic Sans? Yes, please. I can I'm actually, I'm a type designer. That's my main thing that I do. Yes.

It seems like a weird transition, but it wasn't really that was always what I wanted to do. Actually, 810 was a detour in my life. I mean, I, I recently found my first font that I released publicly, which I did in 2006 when I was 12. So this is something that I saw you tweet that and you know what, I think you maybe you criticize. I thought it looks so cool, man, that first. Yeah, I wanted that. That font looked cool to me. Yeah. Well, okay. Look, I'm not a font. I don't I love fonts, but and I recognize their power, but I don't know anything about them, which is why I wanted to bring up this. Comic Sans to get into the font discussion in defense and Comic Sans.

First of all, the main reason people don't like Comic Sans is just because of how used it is. And a fatigue like this happens with a lot of designs, where you see something so often and not only that you see it used in the worst possible situations. You see a sign of the DMV. You see something important in, and so you begin to develop this visceral hatred for Comic Sans, but not only that. The design of Comic Sans is actually objectively ugly, but that's only because we're displaying it in a way that Vincent Kanair did not mean for it to be displayed. He developed Comic Sans to be used as a pixel font in Microsoft Bob. And so when you're looking at Comic Sans, you're really only supposed to be seeing it being like eight or 10 pixels tall. The way that he drew the outlines, the outlines were more of an afterthought to get that certain shape at that size. So when we're seeing Comic Sans printed out in huge letters, that is not what he intended. So if you actually download an old Windows 98 release and you set your font size down really small and you type in Comic Sans, you'll actually find that.

Comic Sans is extremely good at giving you a comic book feel in a very small font size, which is very hard to do because your expressivity is very reduced if you only have like nine or ten rows of pixels. So Comic Sans is not a bad font. Everyone is just using it wrong. That's the answer. This is something I was really impressed by when I was going through your tweets. And you don't accept money for the fonts that you have out there. I guess someone was like trying to snitch on some big brand by showing that they had used your font. And I'm sure they were well intended because they thought you were getting ripped off. But your response was, I'm giving these away. It says they're free. I'm giving them away. And then also, I love that you tweeted a little bit, that hacker hymn, that beautiful free software song, which is pretty intense when you see him singing it live. It's religious or something. You know what I mean? It's like beautiful.

It is almost a religion. The free software philosophy that I subscribe to is almost a religion. And that is even recognized by the founder, that guy that's singing the song. He has a whole ripoff of religion where he calls himself Saint Ignatius. GNU is the name of the free software project and he wears a halo and he like says a bunch of things that, you know, make fun of religion. But anyway, so the reason, the fundamental reason that all of my fonts are free is because I, first of all, I don't like to chase people down and try to get money out of them for using. Like when they made a copy of the font, I still have the font and I can still use the font and all my users can still use the font. So they didn't do anything that harmed me by doing that. They just liked my work and wanted to use it. And so for me to come back at them with a whole bunch of negativity is making the world a worse place and, you know, continuing to kind of manifest in the world all of these systems that we're trying to get rid of like, you know, disaster capitalism.

So I, you know, and I'm not the only one that looks at it this way. I look at it more that you can either as a programmer spend your career working for large software companies, Microsoft, Adobe, even small ones, you know, like the people that make lifts up and you can spend your whole career building walls and making walled gardens and making systems that are not interoperable and trying to lock your users into this software so that they become so good at using this software that it becomes an indispensable tool for them. And so they need you for their entire career. And you can, you know, you can do that and that's a way to make money and maybe you will make enough money that you'll be comfortable and you'll be able to write a whole bunch of nice programs and, you know, you'll solve a whole bunch of interesting problems, which is mostly what you do. But at the end of your career, when you look back, you spent your entire career making the world the worst place because all of those programs are not interoperable. People cannot study them to figure out how they work. All of the work that you did to solve all of those very hard problems is locked up. And all of those problems will need to be solved again by somebody else. So your career, I'm sorry to say, if you work on proprietary software, I agree with the founder of the free software movement, Richard Salman, you've made the world the worst place.

So instead, what you can decide to do is to develop software in a way that's more ethical, where you can still make money from the software, but in a different way. You charge people to change the software. You charge people to make the software do more things. It's called writing patches. You know, I work on fonts, but I also work on font editors. And that's actually where most of my commissions would come from because it's like, fix this bug in this. Is that what you're working on right now? Or is that all the code you've been tweeting? Yeah, yeah, I'm working on a font editor called M F E K module font editor K it's supposed to be. So I'm a maintainer of the largest font editor free software editor font forge. But of course that's not the largest font editor that's like the largest free software editor, which is like 1% of you know, and the reason that I feel that font words doesn't have as much penetration as it could is because after training it for as long as I did, I felt like it is so hard. Even for somebody with as much experience writing free software as me to push this program further because it was written in the early 2000s and that's the great thing about free software it lasts and free software will probably outlive.

And proprietary software will not because it's in the interest of those proprietary software companies people writing. So the work that people that are now retired at Adobe did on Photoshop CS5 CS6. Most of their work is probably gone I'm sorry to say, and if it's still being used by Adobe they're probably uncredited. And it's probably only in marginal utilities like, you know, little libraries and stuff, but when it comes to free software. Your contribution is basically forever because you can continue to take the source code of the program and compile it on new and new new computers and keep, you know, changing things out so that it keeps working. And the original font words was written for a very, very, very early versions of Linux, which had something called X windows, you know, the common desktop environment, which nobody on earth. Well, maybe a few people use right now, and over time, we, it's maintainers, you know, that I've found and gone have made it so that, you know, font words continues to work on modern systems and that doesn't happen with proprietary software. It comes with called abandon and abandon where the bugs never get fixed. Nobody can work on it legally. And those who patch it illegally are taking risks. So, you know, and we have something even worse now called, you know, a soft service as a software substitute where you're not even having the program anymore.

You're going to a website which has all your data, and that website can close at any time. It can change at any time. And, you know, if you go to a website to like edit photos, I mean that photo editing website might not be there tomorrow. They might have a server problem with all your photos. They might get hacked. And now, you know, all of your potentially embarrassing photos are out there on the internet. So I'm really against that, you know, using services instead of software on your computer. And I'm also against, especially from my own work, using software that I cannot compile myself because at the end of the day, I've worked on a lot of difficult fonts that took me a really long time to finish. Like, especially my typewriter font and my cursive font, those two projects. But your typewriter font has become kind of famous, right? Like it's, yeah. Yeah, it's my most famous one. Some people actually are shocked when they've learned about me through this Q thing. And then they realize that they are graphic designers and they've had my fonts installed for years. Yeah. That's what I thought. And it's like, I know with the Q doc, what are they going to do? Like, you know, spend an episode talking about your fonts.

But to me, I felt, man, this, this blows because your art is like getting sort of like the spotlights over here on the apocalypse. And you're making these incredible fonts that you're just giving to people. And to me, that is, I mean, taking down or trying to attack QAnon is like, that's awesome. But what makes you a global hero of April is that you're also giving away all your software and fonts. And, you know, I'm not starving by doing that either. I still, people still commissioned me to patch font for it. They commissioned me to make another font. You know, I've even been commissioned to make a font for Google. I made on the new version of Notosan's Tagalog, which was a font for the Tagalog language. Which basically Google has Android and Android is supposed to support every language in the world. And the Tagalog script is like a marginal script. What is Tagalog? Tagalog is the script that used to be using the Philippines and is having. Oh, after the Spanish colonized the Philippines, they destroyed the Tagalog script, essentially they tried to destroy all records of it.

Same thing that kind of happened in Mexico and Latin America, but the Tagalog script has made a lot of research in the Philippines. It appears on a lot of official seals. It appears on the money and there are some efforts to teach it in schools and so on and so there have been updates to the script and people have added new letters and so on. So I submitted a proposal to the Unicode consortium, which, you know, funny enough after that proposal, I got a lot more involved in how I actually contribute by sitting on a few of his committees, you know, funny how that works. But I, just because I had time and I, you know, there aren't many Unicode experts in the world and so those that have time should use it to try to help Unicode because there aren't enough of us. Wait, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You know what, earlier when you were kind enough to say what a bicameral government is, I appreciated that. Could you do the same thing for Unicode for me, please? Okay, yes. I'm sorry. You know, I sometimes think that people have more technical knowledge than they do and that's totally my fault. So, okay, it used to be in the battle days that if you had a Commodore 64 and somebody else had a BBC micro, the character systems that were on those computers were not interoperable. The same byte did not represent the same character. And there were characters that were on one computer that were not on the other. And both of those computers did not even support foreign languages. Well, foreign to their authors, meaning anything that's not English. So Unicode is a system of assigning a number to every character used in every language.

Okay. They're also the people that decide which emoji exists. So they have two jobs. They decide which numbers are assigned to which emoji and then which numbers are assigned to which characters. And when I noticed that deficiency in the big olive script that it was missing the letter raw, and it was also missing a little mark that goes next to a letter that basically silences it. It's called a killer, a pure killer, essentially, like it kills the vowel. That's what it's supposed to be. It's a very dramatic name for something that is very pure killer. So I got those two characters out of it. And then when I did that, the Google was basically like, Hey, you already know about this problem with our notosans to go look font. So how about you would just fix it? Because you're the guy that wrote the proposal. And I know that you know how to develop fonts. So yeah, I fixed it. Wow. You are such a badass.

Listen, you are definitely you're the, I think you've gone in my mind from global April hero, we're, we're going to do like summer, you're the hero of the summer. I really, really appreciate the time that you've given me and I really, really appreciate all the work that you, you've been doing and everything that was shown in that QAnon documentary because we, you know, you inspire me, I want to be more like you. So thank you. Thank you so much, Frederick. And you inspire me as well. I would probably like to be more like you. So I think it's a beautiful feeling. Hopefully when this fucking pandemic ends, our paths will cross. Do you think you could let people know where they can find you? Sure. Twitter.com fr underscore Brandon. That's my main web or that's my main, you know, way that I kind of communicate. And then I have a shortened version of the domain that can bring you to my website for all of my funds. That's dba.gd dba.gd. Yeah. All those links will be at dugatrustle.com if you forgot them. Fred, thank you. You're the best. Hare Krishna. Thank you.

That was Frederick Brennan, everybody. All the links you need to find them will be at dugatrustle.com. Much thanks to our beautiful sponsors, Squarespace, Mudwater, and how could we forget? Zip Recruiter for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. And much thanks to you for listening. Please like us and subscribe on whatever your podcast feed may be. And head over to our Patreon. Patreon.com forward slash DTFH. If you need any of the offer codes, those are all going to be at dugatrustle.com. Thank you for supporting this podcast. I love you. And I will see you next week. Until then, Hare Krishna. Good Time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JCPenney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford, and Jay Farrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in-store, and we're never short on options at JCP.com. All dressed up, everywhere to go. JCPenney. With one of the best savings rates in America, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than choosing Slash to be in your band. Next up for Lead Guitar. You're in. Cool. Yep, even easier than that. And with no fees or minimums on checking and savings accounts, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet?