TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #74: Andrew Torba

Episode Date: May 24, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Andrew Torba, Founder and CEO of Gab.com, to discuss what it's like to be de-platformed, the Silicon Valley "cognoscenti", building more resilient communication tools, the fight for Free Speech, forking open source software as a business model for Gab, the normalization of deviant values, and much more. Check out Gab: https://gab.com/ Follow Gab on Twitter: https://twitter.com/getongab If you like this podcast, subscribe and give us a rating on your local podcasting platform. Every bit helps. Shoutout to this week's sponsor: Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today.

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and download cash app today. Hope you freaks enjoy this interview with Andrew Turba. Um, I know I certainly did. A very interesting man fighting a very, very admirable fight in my mind. Hope you freaks enjoy. Tales from the Crypt. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent in some random hotel in the fashion district of Manhattan, New York.

A very foreign studio. This interview came together, I believe, 12 hours ago. Maybe, eh, probably like 16 hours ago. I'd like to introduce you freaks to the founder and CEO of Gab.com, Andrew Torba. How's it going, everybody? Thanks for joining. Yeah, I appreciate you coming out here. It's a last-minute thing, but I'm glad that we could get this done.

I'm pumped to get this done because you are a man who's drawn the ire of a lot of online haters because of what you're doing with Gab. So let's just jump right into it. This is Tales from the Crypt. Our tale is usually about how you came to find Bitcoin, but I'm more interested about why you came to found Gab. We'll get to Bitcoin later. Yeah, I could talk about that as well. Yeah, we'll get to that. We've got plenty of time.

So, Gab, what is the reasons behind starting it, and what sort of sent you down this path? Sure. So, my last company was in ad tech, and we were working very closely with Facebook, with Twitter, with Google on their ads APIs. So I have a lot of friends inside of Facebook, Twitter and Google. And, you know, in the run up to the 2016 election, I was very active on the Donald subreddit. I was very active on Twitter. I had a lot of sock accounts and stuff because I had to keep my my politics to myself. And that was true when I was in Silicon Valley as well. So, you know, as a Christian, as a conservative Republican, it's it's something that you tend to self censor about, especially if you're in Silicon Valley or really any major city which is sad but it just it was the reality at the time and up up to the 2016 election I started to see a lot of this censorship start to happen some weird stuff happening on the Donald where you know things weren't appearing on

the top page that were trending and were breaking news and random stuff being pulled down and the CEO going in and editing stuff about himself and just shady stuff. Alexis O'Hanahan? No no it was it was spez okay yeah so just weird stuff and then obviously the the manipulation of trends on twitter and and um you know people like milo getting banned and stuff like that like that that had never happened so silicon valley had always you know touted free speech and individual liberty and american values for the past decade and all of a sudden they just did this about face you know during the rise of brexit and during the rise of donald trump and this populist movement that's happening really all around the world. And I said, you know, we can sit here and whine

about this or we can build a solution. And I said, I'm going to build a solution. I don't see anybody else building. We have this illusion of choice where we have, you know, the top 20 apps in the app store are really owned by like three companies. You know, consumers don't know that Facebook owns Instagram. They own WhatsApp. They own all of it. Right. So you think that you're using different apps, but you're not, you're using apps that are owned all by the same company. I said, well, I'm just gonna found my own and you know, free market, right?

You don't like it, go build your own is the saying. And that's exactly what I did. And I would learn that the market isn't so free very quickly. Why do you say that? Well, first of all, with mobile app distribution, Apple and Google own 98% of mobile app distribution. So that's not a free market, that's a duopoly.

And they refuse to allow us into the app store, even though we're compliant with their App Store guidelines. We went out of our way to become compliant with their App Store guidelines, probably even more so than some of the apps that exist today, and they still won't let us on. And they have direct partnerships with Twitter, with obviously Google has YouTube. So we're kind of competing with some of their partners

and some of their core products. So I see that as them abusing their market power to stifle competition, which antitrust, where are you at? So do you have to use like F-Droid to... We were sideloading for a while, but we started focusing a lot of our product initiative on mobile web and doing things like a lot of people don't know you can add a Safari bookmark to your iOS home screen and it will open up and it looks and feels and operates like a native app. the only thing you don't get is push notifications so we've been focusing on that and it's actually worked really well and it's it's incredible that we've gone to now almost a million members without any apps on the app store as a social network in 2019 that's just wild but it is what it is

it shows the demand that's there it does i've got a couple questions based off of that that line of thinking right there so one uh obviously a lot these social networks these companies these entrenched silicon valley companies have huge market share huge mind share and sort of an entrenched lindy effect if you were talking bitcoin lindy effect comes up what is it like how's it been trying to get people to use gab and switch because there is switching costs mental costs stuff like that like myself like i'm i have a gab account but i don't go on it too often to be honest yeah i think um you know from day one we welcomed everybody right I didn't want GAAD to be a conservative only.

First of all, technology does not have a political ideology. Technology is politically agnostic. But, you know, inevitably, we started getting people who were banned from other sites. And increasingly, as more and more people are being banned, we're starting to see our community shift from center-right into more of a centrist and center-left. because now it's not only people on the quote-unquote far right that are being banned, but it's centrists and people that are in the center left or even people that are apolitical that just happen to post a wrong thing on the Internet. So I think that as this starts to accelerate, people are starting to wake up,

and some of their favorite content creators can't be found anywhere else but on Gab. So they're signing up, and they're following them, and they're starting to post. And I think that really for us, the next step is about access technology, And that's, that's what the browser is about is, um, you know, we fundamentally have to build our own access technology. Like at first I just wanted to build a social network, but it turns out now I have to build a payments infrastructure. I have to build a hosting.

I have to find a new DNS, uh, all of it. So, um, that's the next step for me is, is providing the access technology as a top of the funnel, uh, driver to back to gab. And I think that's, that's working phenomenally. so so far with the the browser and it's it's only in alpha i don't say beta i say alpha and again there's so many we're going to get down all these paths so the first path is why do you think these these institutions are censoring so hard like a big theme on this podcast is that we're boring and we've been born into this inflection point right predicated around the

internet things are changing at a pace at which they've never changed in human history right and To me, it seems like it's just entrenched power, hierarchical power, trying to cling on to the power that they do have. Yeah, that's exactly what it's about. All these companies are based in one central location. You want to talk about centralization. I don't think that there's anything more centralized than the technology industry is today. And I think that's rapidly changing. We have developers from all over the world who are helping us with Gab.

And I think that that is the future forward where you don't have to be in this centralized location. There are people all around the world who, you know, share the values that we share. You know, free speech for everybody, privacy rights, you know, the ability to access information. And this censorship, it's really all about control. You nailed it. It's just they're losing their power. They're losing their power to influence and to control narratives. And, you know, somebody could be out on the street and be at an event that is happening right now

and give you the truth versus seeing the quote-unquote framed truth on CNN and if they want to spin it or whatever. So they don't have that power anymore to control the narrative around situations or around political movements or any of that, and that scares them because it's a threat to their power. So that's why we're seeing this. Yeah, and it seems like it's getting to a point where it's, and I think this is why your gab exists and dissenter exists now,

where we have to fight back and fight for our rights, uh which is right at a time i wrote an article in the daily newsletter that i write yesterday about brad sherman coming out against uh bitcoin and it's like if we if we want this stuff we have to fight it we have to build it and there's the crux of my argument is like there's been an entropy in america around freedom since since the declaration of independence was was signed and we've gotten so far away from that that i don't think the system is is able to be saved from within so well i think we take it for granted to um you know try being a christian in china try being gay in any middle eastern country right you know we could openly talk about these things

we could be who we want to be here but unless we defend our fundamental civil liberties and and human rights to be able to talk about stuff first and foremost that's that's priority number one because when you lose your ability to talk about things there's there's no way to fight back you can't you can't uh you know when they come for your speeches first and then they're going to come for your guns and then they're going to come for your privacy so it's just it's it's an it's an escalation effect and I don't want to see that happen I don't want to grow up I don't want my kids to grow up on an internet where it's controlled by like two or three companies who you know decide what we can talk about and what we can't and what information we can access and can't and what is

news and what isn't that's that's not a world that I want to live in and that's why I'm building I think you know there's a lot of people now this issue when I first started talking about this back in 2016 and you know kind of raising the alarm like hello this is happening what are we doing this is insane we have american citizens who are being silenced on the internet by corporations that have a monopoly a duopoly on information on every vertical in technology and infrastructure this is madness like why is no one talking about this and now we're getting to the point where the president united states is tweeting about this issue this is a major campaign issue for 2020 for both the left and the right talking about big tech talking about the censorship

which is great but we can't just talk about it we have to build um nobody else is building right and and people rag on gab a lot and criticism is fine and and whatever but um you know at least we're building right like i don't see anybody else stepping up to the plate and building something building real solutions everybody likes to just whine about problems and not actually build a solution to them and that's that's what i'm focused on that's why i think bitcoiners in particular are drawn towards gab or and we're sort of rooting for gab it's because we we find ourselves in a similar situation right yeah we're trying to build the financial side of it well it's the same thing i mean you look at the the uh the start of bitcoin and you know you

look at the silk road and um bitcoin got smeared a lot too oh it's only used by criminals and it's the same thing that happened to gab right oh it's only used by the the far right and um you know slowly it's uh it's it's becoming more about it's for everybody and it's about freedom and it's about individual sovereignty and all these things that we take for granted as Americans that I want to outsource American privacy to people around the world. I want to outsource First Amendment protections that we have as an American company to people around the world who don't have those things. I think Silicon Valley is very, very hypocritical. You see the Arab Spring, for example, where it was literally called the Twitter revolution.

And free speech is great when when it's powering an Arab revolution. But now we're seeing a populist revolution happen, you know, in the West. And now it's not OK suddenly. And now we have to start cracking down and banning people and shadow banning and demonetizing people that are pushing fundamental liberties. To be honest, they're not even pushing like violence or anything illegal per se. They're just pushing a different political opinion that the people in power happen to disagree with. Yeah, and so you spent some time in the belly of the beast. I think not too many people know, but you spent some time at Y Combinator. Yes, yeah. My last company, we were a Y Combinator company. And for those of you who don't know, Y Combinator is basically like the Harvard of tech accelerators. So I was in the inner circle of inner circles. I was in the belly of the beast.

I spent a lot of time at all of these companies, you know, working with people in these companies. So I know how they think. I know what their agenda is. I know how they act. And, um, you know, it's, it's great to be out of that belly. Uh, when I found a gab, I was like, okay, I got, I got to get out of San Francisco. One in particular, um, their mindset sort of, uh, perturbed you. Um, the group think, to be honest, it's, uh, it's, it's like, it's a little bubble and, um, they think that their way of thinking is the only way to think. And their political ideology is, is the only political ideology that is uh has merit and the the moral superiority is really

what gets me um you know a lot of them obviously went to ivy league schools and stuff and they think that because they they had that privilege uh that they are superior in in morality and in wisdom that they should be the benevolent dictators over the entire internet and and over what is news and what what information we're allowed to access what we're allowed to talk about what links we're allowed to share um and i just i think that's that's fundamentally wrong and it's it's not what the internet uh has been for decades and it has slowly become more and more centralized which i think is bad um not only centralized in uh you know the technical sense but centralized in just location too there it's like all of these major companies are all in one city like that's a

problem you know you have you have you have technology that's used by billions of people and it's it's controlled by a handful of them that all share the same political ideology the same beliefs they think the same way and they shun anybody who doesn't think like them and you know we're seeing that manifest itself with with these bands and stuff now revenge of the nerds not as funny as we thought it was going to be um so let's jump into your your college major you double you double majored in philosophy and political science right um i ended up dropping the poli side because i I was starting a business and doing a double major, being in the honors program.

I dropped the honors program, too. And then I had a minor in entrepreneurship. So I just stuck with the philosophy, which a lot of people balk at and say, well, what are you going to do with that? Well, I use it every day. You know, writing, critical thinking, being able to speak clearly and concisely, all those things I use every single day. and just being able to study some of the greatest thinkers in history was really pivotal and influential

on my thinking and my approach to life. I was an econ major, but I spent every elective I could on philosophy classes. It's addicting once you get into it. It is. I've been reading more philosophy books after college and diving into it

and Stoics in particular. Stoicism is really coming back. It's kind of like the hip new way of thinking now. really simple yeah just be a good person is basically yeah so what who what thinkers in particular uh sort of form your oh i think um i think uh the classic socrates is uh is the perfect example of of uh someone who was censored for wrong think uh not only censored but killed um starve to death right or poison yeah well yeah he had to starve then poison no he had to kill himself with the with the poison um but yeah it's uh and by the way he he could have escaped as well

but he didn't he chose to take the punishment because if he was going to stand up for for justice how why would he you know be hypocritical and run from justice you know the people had spoken whether it was right or wrong obviously it was wrong but I think you know we see a lot of similarities in in what he went through today you know he was he was a wrong thinker right he was he was literally put to death for wrong think and you know we see a lot of people facing similar similar trials today uh thankfully they're not being put to death yet but in some countries that that actually does happen um and again we take that for granted here we take it for granted and it's scary because this stuff's a slippery slope like we're seeing it slowly in uh united

kingdom with hate speech like what the fuck is hate speech i don't know um the supreme court says that it is free speech and unanimously by the way you know you have a divided court on pretty much every major social issue every major any issue that comes up it's it's a divided court right left and right but they were unanimous on this one which was you know hate speech is free speech whatever hate speech is it's free speech and this term hate speech it didn't even exist 100 years ago you know you go back 100 years and say well why are you saying hate speech they're gonna be like what like what is that it's like this absurd concept now are there hateful people in the world sure is there hateful rhetoric sure but who am i uh to decide what that is i'm not a

judge i'm not a jury you know i'm not the executioner i don't want to be um i want people to decide for themselves if they think that something is hateful uh then they can choose to not you know consume that content not follow that person block that person right you have individual liberty freedom of association goes with freedom of expression that's uh i feel like the concept of freedom of association has gone way over the head of much of the public like you do not have to listen to this stuff you do not have to read this stuff you can ignore people change the channel right like turn off the tv you know so like i get offended by cnn msnbc whenever i happen to be in an airport at right at my in-laws and it comes on tv and i'm just like you

you can't turn it off there right you could just kind of look away or put in your headphones but yeah i think uh the freedom of association thing people people tend to to neglect um you know we in particular and obviously a lot of the other social networks give people the tools to shape their own experience and that's how it should be um if you don't want to see something block it if you can even get down to muting individual words on gab and now on twitter you don't want to see certain words you can mute those and then you never see them so like what's the problem right like if other people want to see edgy content or um you know that's the other thing too is i'm a big fan of comedy right and i think you can measure the uh the health of free expression

in a society by what comedians are allowed to get away with and by who the popular comedians are and you know you look at the popular comedians now and it's like amy schumer talking about her bowel movements and i i just i don't find that funny first of all i i don't i don't understand how she's a mainstream comedian and most of my you know most of my favorite comedians are not mainstream comedians they're you know they're anonymous accounts on on gab or or on twitter titiana mcgrath right yeah parody accounts which are now by the way getting banned yeah it's just it's it's insane like overt parody oh literally says parody in the the headline yeah crazy but it is what it is it is what it is but it's scary because and again this is another topic we talk a

lot about and this is touching on what we mentioned earlier they get to build your way out of this fight for it like you have a path right now you choose to become dystopian china or your facial recognition or jaywalking or we can build these systems that that sort of let us hold our sovereignty and individualism um that's uh i guess that's a good topic to jump into now it seems like the the concept of individualism of extreme ownership over yourself and your your being and your your house is is something that's been led astray yeah yeah it's dying it's dying it's dying it's dying it's very sad um you know individual sovereignty the the belief in the individual is is uh is a fundamental um cornerstone

of american society and of western culture um and civilized society yes absolutely absolutely and um it's really sad that you know if if you happen to belong to a certain certain race or you happen to have a certain sexuality you're now grouped in with everybody that shares that and if you don't you know have the politics of xyz group or xyz race you're a traitor uh and you're you're ostracized yeah the venn diagram of what you have to agree with with uh to be on the far left is is getting wider and wider you have to the the the rainbow coalition is consuming itself yes you have to be okay with letting six-year-olds transition now it's it's it's beyond it's you know it's sick it's and it's it's getting into our schools uh it's getting into our culture um and it's uh it's

something that you're not allowed to to speak up about either and if you do you know you're fired or i felt compelled to speak up about it for some reason cnbc has been uh retweeting a tweet of the the drag kid uh who was at the gay pride parade and was like basically dancing for older men right getting money thrown at him now if that was a young girl exactly right if that if that was like a 10 year old girl i had this conversation with my wife where she was like oh it's not that bad like what are you he's just being himself and i was like imagine if we had a daughter and she was doing yeah oh yeah i'm about to have a daughter it was immediately like oh yeah that's not horrifying me yep right but for some reason like they're trying to normal it seems yeah don't

don't they're going after the kids that's that's the problem uh and they're going after them in a lot of ways and that that's why they're doing a lot of this this censorship too is because they know that the kids are on social media you know they're not sitting in front of the tv i haven't had a cable subscription in six plus years a lot of millennials don't have cable subscriptions so they can't influence us in the normal channels and they have to crack down now because the kids are sitting on youtube all day watching you know these content creators who are calling out this stuff as absurd because it is and um they can't allow that to happen because it it messes with their agenda so yeah and it's and again it's uh there's a lot of like the normalization of

of hate speech of things like being okay with letting little kids transition and stuff like that it seems like again like if you don't agree with the whole party line like you you get right you get labeled as a as a as a zealot basically well it's it's happening to the left too i mean you see feminists now who i think they call them turfs where if they don't want um uh trans women uh you know being involved in in feminism they see it as kind of a takeover like a hostile takeover type deal from what i understand they're ostracized right and and we've seen those type of feminist band which is it's crazy because censorship inevitably comes for everybody who steps outside the party line um and it's now starting to to hit people on the left as well

no another which by the way they're welcome on gap too everybody is it's we don't ask for uh your political ideology at sign up and you're welcome on tales from the crypt too but it's like feminism in particular too like the hijabs also like becoming a sort of de-alienation of are you feminist or not like you have iranian women taking off their hijabs and in protest and then uh quote-unquote feminist here in the states thinking it's a sign of a of modesty yeah right exactly power so it's uh i don't know i'm worried i'm worried about the future i'm happy that you're building things someone has to what someone has to right you know but let's let's dive into like are you a neo-nazi trying to take take over the world no

absolutely no i i'm a i'm a classical liberal if anything um liberal in the old sense you know individual liberty uh for everybody um you know by the way including communists including nazis uh i fundamentally believe that the best way to fight back against hateful ideology hateful speech is with more speech right like if logic right with more you if you if these people are not exposed to other ideas or to counter arguments it's this stuff is just going to fester and build and by the way if people can't express themselves with words on the internet what's their next move violence in the real world and we're starting to see this manifest um and that's not a world that i want to live in that's why i fight so hard is because if we if you keep silencing these people

you know they're gonna go to the streets um they're gonna get violent and let them post whatever the heck they want as long as it's legal as long as they're not themselves you know making threats or doxing people you know common sense stuff right like follow the law um well then what's the harm right like you know if they're not exposed to other ideas then that stuff is just going to fester and build and build and build and they're going to express it in other ways and take it to the real world so i'm not trying to dive into any conspiracy theories but like do you think it is a conscious effort by these uh entrenched social media companies and search engines uh that are sort of imbuing their views on their users or do you think it's a

mandate from the government like hey we can't have this happen we need your help here yeah well like the deep state or something yeah um yeah i i think you know i think it's a lot more common sense than that i think it's uh the advertisers uh are putting pressure on them and saying like we don't want to advertise on these wrong think channels because it's going to cause controversy for us i think it's just all about the money fundamentally is is they're getting pushback from their advertisers who are you know that's that's who they answer to and also their shareholders too you look at twitter which is you know they've got a nice chunk of ownership by a saudi prince 80 of their user base is international so they have foreign governments who are saying like if

you want to still operate here, you better do this. And in our case, you know, we don't have that. We're only based in the U.S. We're a U.S. company, so we have U.S. privacy laws. We have the First Amendment. We regularly turn down data requests and censorship requests from foreign governments all the time. I think that's part of our value add is if you're somebody who's in the U.K. and you want to speak freely on the Internet without having the government come and knock down your door and arrest you um then you could do so on gab you know as long as you're not threatening any violence or anything crazy right um if you're just expressing your political opinion that happens to be politically incorrect or happens to be something that the government doesn't like

like criticizing the migrant crisis for example uh you can do so on gab without worrying about your data being handed over to the feds uh and then them knocking on your door and throwing you in jail which by the way is happening it's happening in the uk like it's crazy it's happening at an increasing pace yes like comments on facebook are sending people to jail correct yes this is insanity and it's not like the comments are like them threatening to kill somebody or anything like that it's just like their political opinion it's crazy i think i saw one dude get a knock on the door from the british cops because he said like he didn't agree with the immigrant policy that's basically all he said that's all he said yeah i saw that it's crazy

right uh that's insane and and so the another crux of the problem here is that these companies have the ability to sort of instill these policies on their users yeah oh yeah bitcoin is sort of in my mind the first emergence of something where it's like holy shit this is totally nobody can no one entity or central authority can uh influence this network right and actually i know we're talking a lot of shit on twitter and these companies i interviewed jack dorsey a few months ago and speaking with him you could even see it in his eyes when we're talking about like the early days of twitter it seems like he had like a nostalgic sort of i'm sure he does memory of it he he described it as like a protocol in the early days and he misses that feel where that's

it's almost like he didn't have control he doesn't have control uh you know he's not a majority shareholder uh zuckerberg is you know he still has 60 voting rights and stuff so there's really no excuse for him um but jack is is not in a position of power you know he may be ceo by title but he doesn't have the power that um you know somebody with majority voting share like myself or like mark zuckerberg does um and that's that's it's really sad because you can tell you can you can see in his eyes you can see in some of the interviews that he's doing that he doesn't like this stuff i don't think he agrees with a lot of the censorship um you know twitter used to call themselves the the free speech wing of the free speech party and you know they stood 100 by the

first amendment principles and all this stuff and you know as they started scaling and after they went public and you know now they have to appease advertisers they have to appease the saudi shareholder that they have etc they have to appease the foreign governments because the majority of their user base is international as i mentioned so i think you know his hands are kind of tied in a lot of situations um which i think is is why he's excited about bitcoin because it kind of gives him like a second chance to, to, uh, to, to, uh, express himself through these values that I think he does share. I really do. I think he actually does believe in freedom of speech for everybody. Um, you see the interview with Joe Rogan where, you know, they were talking about

shining a light on, on the, the negative stuff to, to cleanse it and whatever, um, which is my exact argument, you know, more speech versus the censorship and trying to push it into the shadows. Um, so I empathize with Jack because, uh, you know, I, I, as a, as a public face of a social network, I can empathize with him. Um, you deal with a lot of stuff and a lot of stuff that you can't talk about and a lot of stuff that happens behind the scenes and a lot of stuff that involves your family. Um, you know, I've been doxed and swatted and plenty of death threats and stuff like that, that you just, uh, most people don't know about, but it's a cross that I carry to, to defend, uh, you know, the civil liberties and the fundamental human rights that,

that i believe everybody should have on the internet you've been swatted yeah yeah what was that experience like well my parents were actually fuck yeah a little fun uh yeah i got a call from my mom she said the fbi is here and someone put an isis uh bomb threat on their house they had to close down the local elementary school and it just it wasn't fun um uh you know that's that's the thing i hate too is that you come after me fine criticize me fine you want to you know sling stuff at me fine leave my family out of it you know that's uh that's not cool you know but they're they're tough too and uh i've had their full support from day one and um uh very blessed to to have nothing horrific happen a lot of scares but but um you know thankfully we're we're we're

protected and everything's been all right well i'm happy to hear that it's shit scary it's really scary yep some asshole can just call up the fbi and send them to your house yep without any cause or reason well they actually sent it to the local news stations yeah it was it was not fun they sent it to the news station yeah they sent the threat to the news station and the address was my my parents house jesus christ yeah not fun at all um it's reality the situation and i'm sure jack deals with this stuff every day too um so i can empathize with him on that and And again, he just doesn't have the control. And speaking of protocols, I did listen to your interview with him,

and I think you're right. Early days of Twitter, it was like a protocol when their API was very open and stuff. But of course, they had to kind of stop that because they wanted the eyeballs in their app and not in these third-party apps where they could sell the ads to them and stuff. We don't have to worry about that, thankfully. But where we're moving now is towards more of a protocol as well.

So we're moving Gab basically to full open source. You know, we obviously have the browser, which is the fork of Brave, which is ours is fully open source. We have Bitcoin, which is fully open source, which we're going to be building on. The dissenter extension itself is fully open source. And now we're in the process of moving Gab to an existing open source protocol. And our fork of it will be totally open source as well. So it's going to be exciting. Hey, you're describing this business model to me.

And before we hit record, it's forking open source software. Yes. We're building on that. So what made you come to this realization that this is sort of the best way to leverage these open source softwares? Well, it's about working smart and not hard, right? And it's about maximizing what you can do with limited resources. So if we have a team of five now and we fork a bunch of open source projects that are being worked on by hundreds of engineers and maintained, and we can continue to just maintain that stuff

and pull it down into our forks, I think that's a pretty smart business move. It's a pretty smart move for making Gab even more anti-fragile. So, for example, we open source all of our stuff, and if something happens to me, if something happens to Gab as a company, Gab as an idea lives on, and people from around the world can keep building on it

and hopefully sticking to our principles. So that's the idea, is just make it more anti-fragile and outsource a lot of the development and being nimble and thinking outside the box, too. Because, I mean, you'll never see Twitter open source their whole code base. You'll never see Facebook do this. And that's why we're doing it, is we want help from developers around the world who share our values, who maybe they can't use their real identity

to either join the company or to express support for the company. publicly but they can express it in code anonymously through github or wherever yeah i think you're exploring a model which may work better than the first iteration of the internet so that's another topic that we talk a lot of tales from the crypts is maybe in the first go around the internet the way we build it was probably not the best ideal way and and not leveraging open source software is as much as should it should be leveraged and it seems like people are starting to wake up like all right this is this is probably where the signal is over here and these these tools building on this type of framework well open source has a lot of

benefits right i just touched on some of them like you know you have this army of people around the world that are contributing to these projects and helping us by the way whether they like it or not you know it's like and uh you know we've seen some some pushback we've been called uh parasites uh for forking open source software um which is kind of bizarre to me because that's the Who's called you a parasite? Brendan Eich from Brave has called us parasites. You should not worry about what shitcoiners think of you. Oh, I don't.

I don't at all. Yeah, I think it's just a big tell. You know, it's a tell when you have the co-founder of JavaScript and the co-founder of Mozilla and the CEO of a company that raised $42 million and has a shitcoin that has a $500 million market cap sitting on Twitter all day coming after an upstart that happened to fork their open source software and calling us parasites, and my mentions are just filled with brave engineers and with brave CEO all day long, and I just laugh because it means we're a threat. You put the code out there. What did they expect?

Exactly. That's how open source projects tend to work. You figure if you're in software engineering for 20-plus years, you would understand that, but it is what it is. And you've had other leaders of projects come at you as well, particularly Ethereum. Didn't Vitalik and Vijay double-team you a couple years ago? yeah yeah that that was that was another saga uh i tend to i tend to really piss off shit coiners for some reason i know it's um but you know it's something that like with brave for

example like when brave first launched like i was i was a huge fan i i was like this is awesome like they're incredible they're gonna block ads they're gonna block trackers they have bitcoin integrated like i'm all in and then all of a sudden like this ico came out of nowhere and this like model around advertising and i'm just like oh like what happened here so you know there's a reason that we fork brave because i'm a big fan of brave browser i am not a fan of bat um and you know it's just a fundamental disagreement on business model they want to sell user data to advertisers and you know of course their pushback is well the data is stored locally and it's anonymous and it doesn't matter that's still your business model and like you know i can fill out

online surveys and make you know a couple bucks a day versus if you do the math of getting five ads an hour on on brave and getting paid in bat which you can't cash out um you're gonna get like what 40 cents a day or something it is the incentive and they're like oh the the the user gets the lion's share of the ad revenue and it's like okay it's like 40 cents dude like sorry i don't want to see ads for 40 cents i don't want to see ads for five bucks you know like it's just it's it's a it's a it's a fundamentally flawed model and i think advertising has ruined a lot of the internet and people take for granted they think that advertising is the only business model on the internet and it's absolutely not and i think that's where things like lightning

network and bitcoin come into play of cutting out that middleman of the advertiser and creating this peer-to-peer exchange of value between audience and content creator and that's that's where we're going that's something we're experimenting with here at tftc2 we just put up a website and using btc pay server to see if we can get a user contributor model um to wean off some ads and we'll see how it goes but it's possible now with bitcoin i hooked it up to btc pay server hooked that up to a trezor and if people decide to contribute it's right in my hands my possession we're on btc pay server as well because we've been uh we've been banned from coinbase we've been banned from bitpay we've been banned from squares cash app not only um the company accounts

but also my personal accounts which is telling so it's guilt by association of association right it's uh yeah this episode was brought to you by cash app too so that's fine that's fine hey make your money man that's fine no it's uh no problems no it's it's it's really it is and i'm and i think we we are philosophically and mentally aligned a lot in this but it is something like as a somebody who's trying to monetize on the web it's not easy yeah outside of advertising absolutely No, I agree. And I think that if the fundamental problem that Bitcoin has right now is ease of use and user experience, you know, people should be able to just input their debit card and top up and get Bitcoin. You know, this model already exists, right? If you look at mobile games, people will buy credits in mobile games and then use those credits in the game to buy in-game items or whatever.

like i think the bitcoin industry uh especially developers need to look at the gaming industry and how this is done and mimic it um uh because it most of the people aren't gonna like normal people like you say sound money to them and like what does that mean like can i hear the money like literally like that like i don't know what that means as a normal person right but you tell them that bitcoin is free speech money and you know they get it right they're like oh like you You know, you can send money to anybody in the world and you don't need the permission of a bank or a government or any entity to do so. That's interesting. And I get it.

You know, so I think Bitcoin has a little bit of a branding problem. So, you know, we should rebrand it as free speech money, in my opinion. Thank you for signal boosting that meme. Did you start it? I don't want to say I started it. I think I helped propel it a little bit. I wrote about it after you tweeted it. Yeah, I remember in your newsletter I think I saw that.

No, it is. That is something like the first decade in, unfortunately, we had people marketing Bitcoin as basically free, fast, and free, fast, and able to buy coffee at the protocol level, which was refining. Probably not the best way to market it, considering the limitations of the network. Right. and you know also like talk to grandma about blockchain like what she's not gonna understand it but talk to grandma and say there's this digital currency that allows you to uh you know send money to anybody without permission from a bank or anything she's like oh i'll get that you know free speech money oh cool no it's uh i can't like this is another thing i repeat a lot like

the gravity of this innovation has not been grasped by not at all by most people it is like new forms of money don't come around around no like every few millennia happens every day yeah yeah um but i i think um you know i i look to paypal right um and there was a time where people were so hesitant to use their credit card use their debit card on the internet put their bank info on the internet they just would not do it um and paypal was over to you know break through that ceiling um and they were able to do it through uh email right like that was the first iteration and then ebay um you know partnering with ebay to do payments and i think if we can bake in lightning into the browser uh and empower people to you know reward content creators or buy

stuff or whatever and make that experience flawless and seamless and easy um i think adoption can really take off like we have an opportunity to introduce bitcoin to a million people from around the world in our case um in a way that these big tech companies couldn't do like twitter can't just like turn on bitcoin tomorrow for 300 million people it's just it's not going to work they have a lot of problems but because we're still smaller um we can experiment with stuff like this and um and introduce people to new products a lot faster so when you say bitcoin native in the browser what do you mean by that what kind of functionalities are talking like uh node extensions while it's in the browser no that stuff you know it's it's probably going

have to be a desktop app uh but that communicates with the browser so it's running in the background you install it one time if we can get people to install a browser which by the way is happening at a faster rate than i even anticipated actually and we're still in like alpha testing here uh we haven't even had a general release i just put out a couple of tweets and a couple of gaps and you know we have tens of thousands of people installing this browser um but if we can get them to install the browser i think we can get them to install a wallet something like a zap and then you know have that wallet communicate with the browser and our extension overlays like the dissenter extension right now overlays on twitter on youtube etc so you can like dissent individual tweets to

send individual youtube links there's a button we can actually put a button over the entire internet and i think that we can do that with payments as well where we can put you know a send this person money uh through zap through through the back to their gab account and just attach a uh a gab wallet to to every gab account and go from there i love this this is what this is what i've been waiting for it's early it's early like it's i think it's super super early right and the technology is probably not quite there yet uh let's be honest but the promise is and um you know the ability to experiment and to to test out different ideas and stuff i mean once you get the combination of the access technology which is the browser and the payment infrastructure which

is something like a lightning and you pair those two together it the the the opportunity becomes limitless in terms of what you can do you can do a marketplace you can do an app store you can do tipping you can do a patreon style subscription service i mean there it's it's limitless um so i think that's what's really exciting and that's kind of the next step for the browser is um is figuring out how that works and what it looks like and um uh what the first iteration of that is going to be it's crazy how creative you can get with this so for the website that we launched last week tftc.io go check it out uh we have a page called the dime bag where we're where we're experimenting with little 10 cent micro transactions so that the first tool we made uh was a final

thought generator random i have a final thought on every newsletter we wrote a scraper to scrape the final thoughts and you pay 10 randomizes it has a link to the article just a fun way to interact with content but this was impossible before bitcoin right exactly and that's the other thing too i think um that shitcoin companies should should be aware of is especially for open source is you can do exactly what we did like if you have anything interesting about what you're doing like say a browser that blocks ads and trackers and happens to have a shitcoin in it somebody can come along and fork it and integrate bitcoin and now your shitcoin is useless right But any project that is doing something like anything interesting is susceptible to this.

So it seems like you're a monetary maximalist, a Bitcoin realist. How did you not get swept up in the shit coinery? Yeah, here, so we can do my Bitcoin origin story now. Let's do it. Yeah. What's your tale? Sure. So I got into Bitcoin in 2012, 2013.

And I was actually originally mining. I had a boss. I had about 45 rigs in the basement with one of my buddies, and we didn't have to pay a heating bill that winter. We actually had fans going. I mean, you live in Pennsylvania. It gets pretty cold during the winters, but we actually had to have fans running to keep the basement cooled down. It was hilarious. It was a good time.

It was a good learning experience, and it got me exposed to the fundamentals of Bitcoin, like understanding mining and and how it works and what is this thing like what what is going on here and then i um i i wrote actually there's an article in a coin desk from 2013 for me there was a a subway in allentown which was about you know an hour from me uh that was accepting bitcoin and it was one of the first like i remember this article remember this yes it was um it was one of the first uh real world businesses that i was aware of that was especially that was like a major chain that was accepting bitcoin so i was like i i have to go there just to like say i bought a subway sandwich for uh for in bitcoin and uh i recorded the experience and uh i wrote about it

and stuff and i i think that uh that sub is now worth like a couple thousand dollars but uh it was worth it because you know you have to if we're not gonna use it if everybody's gonna huddle and not use it to transact then it's not gonna go anywhere like people actually have to use it um not everybody can just sit on it and hope it goes up uh the transaction volume is is important and the actual real world use case uh outside of you know a store or a transfer of money of large transfer of money is important um so i don't regret doing that but that that was my my intro and then i never i never really got into coins at all to be honest um you know none of it was really interesting to me a lot of it is vaporware you know we see just words on paper and nobody

actually building anything we see you know ethereum which is allegedly you know the global super computer that can't handle 25 000 users on crypto kitties without congesting the network and it's just like if we were to integrate ethereum uh into gab we would probably explode the network instantly so it's like you know like build something that actually works and that has an interesting use case i think some more contracts for like legal ip and stuff potentially have an interesting uh use case in the future um i think it's still a little bit too early uh but nothing nothing compares to the glorious bitcoin do you think uh do you think there's a world in which bitcoin can ever be usurped uh what the flippening um no i i just because

there's too many people that are too invested in it now um the community is growing every day and it's not just uh you know normal plebs like you and i it's uh billionaires that are involved now and they they don't let stuff happen to their money um so i think that's actually a good thing it's kind of like a defense mechanism for bitcoin um and i just i don't see what could possibly do it like i don't you know it's the greatest thing satoshi ever did too was was stay anonymous because you know we're seeing these forks now where these cult of personalities are you know the centralized figurehead of these forks and bitcoin doesn't have that problem right there's there's no centralized person that you can point to like for example when there was that rumor that

vitalik had passed away and it just tanked right ethereum just tanked why like that's that's very telling um you don't have that problem with satoshi uh you don't have that problem with a centralized figurehead where if he said something stupid or did something stupid or died for example god forbid uh it fucks everything up um so i think uh i don't think we're gonna see a flipping anytime soon neither do i um yeah i'm a i'm a believer that this is going to be winner take most bitcoin's lindy effect has gotten it to a certain point and we're almost at a point hopefully if we get Schnorr and Taproot and that stuff implemented to the protocol level where we're done replacing parts

and we're more tightening screws. And like you said, I've been saying more recently that the decade mile marker is huge psychologically for the billionaires and companies coming into the fray. Just from a marketing standpoint too, I can go to my grandma and be like, hey, Bitcoin. She's like, oh yeah, I know what that is.

I saw that on CBS or whatever. Well, she actually heard about it from me back in 2013. so she's been listening to me pitch bitcoin to her for five or six years now um but you know you go to grandma and you say hey tron she's like what like movie yeah exactly right any normal person oh yeah i saw that movie you know like it's like you know or uh or ripple ripple what what are you like what are you talking about um so that that uh that psychological barrier of the 10-year mark is big i agree um the the the marketing aspects of it too it's like everybody knows what bitcoin is now um it's just getting them uh to easily be able to buy it and actually

use it that's the the hurdle that we have right now and i think the rebranding part will help too free speech money you want to be able to support your creator that you like on the internet who is banned from paypal who is banned from chase bank who is banned from all these other payment processors well then you're going to have to get bitcoin um and in our case that's that's what we told our community it's like listen we're banned from all these payment processors if you want to support us and you do you're gonna have to learn about bitcoin and you're gonna have to get some and you're gonna have to you know here's how you send it to us um and we introduced a lot of our community members to bitcoin for the first time which i'm really proud of no that was i got that

email it was an incredible email that you guys sent out and uh no it's it's thank you for all you've done to help bitcoin adoption as a bitcoiner myself and uh going back to like the messaging i think bitcoiners uh are very good at memeing too so digital gold i think that's better than sound money uh free speech money is obviously great we start we're starting stacking sats here um at tales from the crypt and it seems like bitcoiners are big memers and that's uh that's sort of the world we live in is is meme is the new propaganda and the new new way to to bring something into existence sure sure and uh so that's the presidency donald trump is a meme president absolutely people are trying to meme andrew yang into the white house they're trying

to secure the bag yeah yes yeah he's he's he's in the city now he's speaking at consensus i heard yeah he's uh sitting down in mirage interesting and uh but this this is again this goes back to the free speech memes are starting to be like the npc meme instagram is fact checking memes now what do you mean they announced that they are going to be fact checking memes what does that even mean how do you do that i i assume that they're going to do it like uh like youtube is doing it where youtube is fact checking videos now too where if it's if it's a video about a historical event they will link to the wikipedia page underneath the video and there's no way for the creator to remove that so i assume that um if a meme is on instagram they're going to detect

probably through machine learning ai it's talking about this subject link to this information about this subject which is scary because wikipedia is so bad that even far-left academics tell their students not to cite it not to use it you look at our wikipedia page for example and it is literally camped on by communists like and that's just not me calling them communists like it's in their profile it says they're antifa they're communists like they sit on there all day long and we have an admin we have a former wikimedia employee and we have like two or three communists who call against self self-identified communists who sit on the profile and just smear it with just whatever you know they want citing you know the new york times said this which is an opinion this is the

reality about gab and you know i will even there are people that go in and like try to edit it and say well this is what gab said like they publish this information here and they say oh that's a direct source we can't we can't use that so it's like you can't use a direct source from the company itself at like for example information that we filed with the sec which it's the real deal you're not going to take this information you're just going to take the opinion of this random new york times writer as the reality and smear the page so that when if they're going to do that with every topic now on instagram on youtube videos etc it's just propagandizing you know it's it's it's dangerous fact-checking memes what a time to be alive how would you even

fact-checking me means there's just like a picture i don't know most parts like most instances it blows my mind i don't know well it's uh it's scary again it's scary this conversation's scaring the shit out of me and uh like what at what point do people like you said like people are starting there's more populist movements here in the u.s and stuff like what is the tipping point do you think like where people just throw their hands up like hey this is enough fucking work yeah enough yeah um i think we're we're slowly getting there um and you know i think people take for granted like it's not just um you know popular influencer influencers who are getting banned and stuff it's like you know i go down my corner bar and i hear people talking about

oh i was i was thrown in facebook jail again it's like normal people um and they're going to get sick of it you know people especially adult human beings don't like being treated like children and when you tell them not to do something they're going to want to do it more and they're going to start seeking out alternatives i think um we're going to inevitably see the balkanization of the internet um where you know one side of the internet is this corporate you know safe space and the other is um you know the free and open web that we've always known and loved and i am intent on leading that side of things uh for as long as i can um because again i don't want to grow up in a world where there's two or three companies deciding what we can talk about and

what is news and who am i allowed to interact with on the internet yeah so what is uh what is the world and where we succeed look like in which we succeed oh well i think um you know bitcoin adoption is crucial to that i think open source is going to be crucial to that and i don't know like i don't think facebook's ever going to just outright shut down but i think that um you know the best thing that we can do as as normal individuals is just opt out opt out of this matrix and I think the browser for us is a big part of that is like stop using these browsers that are owned and controlled by these companies like Google Chrome you know even Firefox they they claim to be fighting for liberty and stuff while banning us off their add-on store and

etc but you know I think getting people to kind of opt out of the matrix you know like take take the red pill off out of the matrix and and use products that are built by people who share your values and um the browser again is a big part of that for us because it's um you're no longer using and being tracked by these companies number one you're cutting off their ability to make money off of your data number two and um your experience is going to be faster and stuff it's just a benefit and hopefully we get you introduced to free speech money and then you don't have to be reliant on paypal or a bank or anybody uh to be able to uh reward people that you care about and you know talk about what you want to talk about without you know worrying about having a decade's

worth of content and and network effects that you've built up be shut down overnight so that's that's kind of the world that I think that we're going towards yeah we can't get there quick enough in my opinion it's gonna take time though right it's gonna take five or ten years but I don't that see that's that's the thing too is um I think uh people look at gab and like oh they only have million members whatever uh you know there's this misnomer in tech where if you don't have you know hundreds of millions of users in a year or two you're a failure um i'm building for the long term uh you look at somebody like matt drudge for example who is one of the most traffic websites on the internet is one of the biggest referrers of traffic on the internet and he built

that up and it hasn't changed in like 20 years it's this simple you know great aesthetic right yeah great 90s aesthetic um but he built that up over 20 years right it didn't happen overnight but now he's you know it's one of the biggest websites in the world uh and i look at gab is the same the same model you know we're building uh for the long game here um and uh the censorship stuff is it's only going to get worse it's it's accelerating now and it's it's accelerating at a pace that i even i didn't predict like i knew it was going to get bad but i didn't know it was going to get this bad this fast and um you know obviously that's good for our business but um it's not good for humanity it's not good for uh the free flow of information on the internet and for

civil liberties on the internet um but again i'm doing something about it and i hope to inspire other people to do something about it as well i think you are i think i can be confident in saying that i think you are inspiring other people and i'm on a similar path like write the newsletter once a day slowly but surely i don't have millions of users i don't consider myself a failure at all i like writing right building like an audience slowly but surely um like shifting back to like the the landscape of politics in america today like that's why i'm into bitcoin is because i think people have been given this false framing where it's like red versus blue and they're pitted against each other and i believe wholeheartedly that it's a money problem it's the money the

creation of money the access to the spigot of money creation proximity to the access of the spigot um is sort of what's driving this inequality and the strife in our country more so than any republican or democratic policies sure sure and it's helping people realize that and again like south park said it best you're voting between a turd sandwich and a douchebag that really aren't saying anything meet the new boss same as the old boss no matter what party it is yep that's the mission i'm on this isn't a question or anything it's a statement let's try to wake people up like the framing is off you guys are fighting over something that really isn't the crux of the problem right let's let's let's start learning about bitcoin right

exactly i think um the other interesting thing too to me is you go back to like 2011 uh with the occupy wall street movement on the left um you know fighting against the corporations and the one percent and you know then you have the tea party on the right fighting against big government and let's make government smaller and now you fast forward to 2019 and we see the left lobbying corporations to use their power to silence political opponents and we see the right whining to government to do something about it so it's just like this whole world has turned upside down on both the left and the right and i don't think either of those things is the solution and again it's it's um you know you see people on the right that are uh you know begging government

to do something well what both sides of the aisle in congress are owned by big tech you know how many lobbying dollars are given to both sides so it's all a dog and pony show the government's not going to save us the corporation's not going to save us the only one that's going to save us is ourselves and it's it's individuals like myself and like others who are building uh real world solutions to these problems that we're facing and that are going to get worse um you know picking picking yourself up by your bootstraps so to say and and taking the problem on head-on and you know it you're not going to not have adversity right like we have been no platform from app stores from payment processors from hosting providers you name it uh but ultimately it has made us more

anti-fragile um i've got i've got a list of every platform that you've been banned from oh there's a lot so payment bands stripe paypal square bitpay coinbase hosting joy and azure backblaze register uh asia registry godaddy app stores apple app store google play mozilla google chrome extensions shopify uh third party tools and bedley help scout pusher crowdfunding websites It's StartEngineLA and Patreon. And then you can't do Twitter ads either. Yes. There's a lot.

That's everything that we've been banned from. And there's probably more that I'm not thinking of there. But every single one of those, when they happened, forced us to think outside the box and forced us to innovate and find a solution. So they think that they, aha, I got them now. Gab can't possibly get back online. we were offline for six days um you know we are our hosting provider gave us i think it was 24 or 48 hours to find a new provider and um you talk to any uh developer about trying to transfer everything to a new hosting provider in 48 hours and they'll laugh at you it's like so we we uh

thank god we had uh one of our guys who was just up around the clock 16 hour days for like a week straight and got us back online on a new hosting provider it was really a miracle seems like these are coordinated efforts yes big time yeah that's how is this how are they able to coordinate oh well who's gonna stop them right i mean who's gonna who's gonna stop them they all again are in the same place they share the same values the same political beliefs etc so they're different companies on paper yes but they really are a unified oligarchy in reality and that's why i kind of laugh at people who are like well follow me on instagram in case i get banned from twitter and it's like oh like are you that naive come on and now we're starting to see instagram actually

was kind of a safe haven for a little bit where they really weren't doing the bans that like facebook and twitter were and now they're starting to crack down even more we're starting to see like we just saw milo alex jones all those people get banned um because their networks were growing over there too so and a fell swoop too big fell swoop just out of nowhere yep not surprising again it's going to continue happening so it's it's bold it's very bold and again who were the consequences there's no consequences why would they stop who's doing anything about it you know okay going back to like the entropy of freedom like you have and fighting for it like i i've been saying too like tsa airports they are testing grounds to see how much shit people will put up with and exactly it

seems like it's seeping into the digital world now like oh more and more you guys are okay with these people just disappearing goodbye we're gonna turn it up and it's again frogs boiling in water how do we wake the people the fuck up like um i i it may take a bigger ban uh might be a catalyst um but i think it's it's starting to compound now um you know at first it was just oh it's just the it's just the nazis on the far right right like quote-unquote nazis but now it's it's you know paul joseph watson is is a classical liberal and you know you look at his instagram page and it was like selfies of him and his girlfriend like there wasn't he didn't post anything political there and he got banned so it's like people are starting to wake up you know james woods

you know um you know a lot of people know him as you know a famous actor whatever so it's like the normalization of even people that you would deem quote unquote untouchable celebrities whatever and they're getting banned um you know it's starting to wake a lot of people up and i think um hopefully people will reach a point where it's just enough and they're going to just check out and seek out alternatives or or i think they're going to check out of of social media in general i think we're going to see a large portion of of the population that is just like i don't want to be on any social networks and that's fine um but there will be others who will seek out uh like minded communities um uh the balkanization as i said uh and our community is going to be the

community that believes in freedom of expression and individual liberty and privacy yeah well it's a shame to see them doing this because again like the access to information on twitter in particular twitter has been my favorite tool over the last decade especially as a bitcoiner because you get access to like some of the best instant information instant information and why would you try to throttle something that's so fucking beautiful and useful at the end of the day and it's it's a net positive for humanity like it is yeah there's hate speech and stuff like that and that's the other thing the media fucking highlights these things and it's really a micro it's not even they endorse it they endorse it's not even it's a microcosm it's a little again all about framing

you you take a video of 20 neo-nazis walking down the street and neo-nazis are taking over america right exactly they're not representative of most people oh yeah not even majority of most people Yes, like ninety nine point nine percent of most people. Right. But, you know, it's the reason that they're endorsing it is because, you know, people like Tim Poole, independent journalists are Tim. Shout out to Tim Poole are a threat to their careers and to their power. So, yeah, of course, they're going to try to smear him and which they have and try to no platform him, which they've tried to do and attack him and whatever. and um it's just a threat to their power it's a threat to their careers and um uh their control over the narrative so yeah and actually talking about people waking up i think the podcasting world is a little uh leading indicator that like podcasting in general this is obviously a podcast

but i started it uh out of a want to share information i did not think was being shared or right accessed by people and in bitcoin in particular the number of bitcoin podcasts that are popping up is like there's a lot there's a lot like even in other areas it's it's individuals really like hey i can be the news now yes because i have good information and people want to come to it like i don't need we'll do it from your kitchen table yeah we can do it in a hotel room yep exactly right i think mark dice he i think he literally works from like his kitchen table every day and you know he's got millions and millions of followers and fans and viewers and And, you know, the other thing is, like, we're not owned by anybody.

You know what I mean? Like, in our case, we're owned by our users. You know, we did two crowdfunding rounds where we sold equity to our users, and they're our shareholders. So we answer to them. And that is a net benefit because it holds our feet to the fire to stick by our principles. And, you know, a lot of people are owned. A lot of famous voices are owned, and people don't know that. so when they're all pushing the same agenda or the same narrative there's a reason for that you

know there's there's shadow money behind them that are are pushing that agenda how about the easter worshipers thing like how how weird was that that they were like all tweeted at the same time like there has to be somebody at the top like all right this is what we're talking about today yeah i guarantee they have like their you know we see these like bitcoin slack groups and stuff they probably have their own internal comms where they all you know all their comms people are all in one place and like, okay, what's the agenda today? What's our unified response on this? And Easter worshipers, as a Christian, that was highly offensive. It was. Highly offensive. That's the other thing that I have a problem with too, right? If they want to have these hate speech

policies, enforce them equally, right? So that means, you know, banning people who are being hateful towards Christians, banning people who are being hateful towards men, banning people who are hateful towards white people. And they're not doing that. You know, there are certain groups and certain protected categories quote unquote that um uh you know they will punish you for saying anything even criticism uh and others that it's free free game you know you can threaten to kill white people and get away with it and not get banned and um you know say christians are scum or be hateful about them and have no consequences so if they're going to have these rules uh enforce them equally right you can say that white people should be genocided and get get hired by the new

york times i was just gonna say you're gonna yeah you're gonna get hired by the new york times right absolutely insane absolutely not banned and then verified on twitter too it's like what what a world right that's and how going back to the easter worship thing like how fucking sound deaf how tone deaf are these people that to think like you could all tweet this out at once and be like people no one's gonna pick up on this right yeah yeah no one's gonna notice that everybody's saying the same thing that's what gives me confidence that we we have a good chance of being successful in our endeavors because these people are so again tone deaf and out of touch with reality they are yeah and people are waking up like people are smart they're picking up on these

patterns and they're saying like what like are you like you know what i mean it's like what are you kidding me easter worshipers like what does that even mean uh do i do i worship the easter bunny or something like come on let's be real here um so i i think you know i'm i'm optimistic about i think a lot of people want to preach doom and gloom and be negative and oh the the world is burning and i'm optimistic uh because there i know that there are other people out there like me who are building um in particular in the bitcoin community and in the open source community um so i'm optimistic about the future and i think that there will be others who who also rise up and build and hopefully i can influence them to do so i am too i feel i feel like i mean the great

awakening has been talked about a lot but we're in the beginning of a renaissance of human potential the likes of which has never been seen oh yeah and again like the empower people are becoming empowered like holy shit i can start my own podcast i can hold my own private keys i can use dissenter right it's there's a lot and it's exciting right it is and that's what makes me overall optimistic is all right these tools exist now there's no shutting pandora's box right it's just getting to work and uh you got to put in the work that's the thing most people don't want to open up the terminal and and write hello hello world right yeah um getting that far is is a big step past what most people will do um and and again you know even five years ago ten years ago

we didn't have a lot of the open source technology that exists today a lot of the tools that exist today where your most upfront cost is actually like incorporating for 150 bucks in a state to you know start an llc you do that and uh you know you plug in uh all this open source technology and all these apis and you can have a new product uh you know in a month if you put in the work so i hope that other people will start doing that and i hope that we could um uh you know kind of serve as the canary in the coal mine and hopefully one day provide infrastructure for others to build as well like we want to build our own extension store for the browser and have developers be able to build their own apps for that stuff like that that we can provide distribution

We can provide infrastructure for others who share our values and want to preserve liberty and individualism and freedom of expression on the Internet to be able to build alternatives to everything because that's where it's looking like we're going. We see this week Microsoft Word puts out a – they're going to start, I think, editing recommendations for politically correct recommendations for word changes and stuff like that. What? Yeah. So it's like they're even politicizing Microsoft Word now, which is like how far are we going to go here? People are tweeting me. They're like, when are you building a free speech Microsoft Word? and i'm like guys i was like how like i can't do it all you know like i can't build it all i mean

if i have to i will but um it started out like i said it's just a social network and now it's like well nope you need hosting you need infrastructure you need payments you need a browser you need all and uh thankfully again it's making us stronger and hopefully we can offer these tools and these distribution channels to other people who want to build and inspire them to build yeah and so building it it's uh it takes a lot of guts right as somebody i was in bitcoin world i was a lurker for many years just in the background on twitter a few hundred followers never really speaking up and took me a while to like develop the confidence actually i'd have like a big life event traumatizing life event happened like light a fire under my ass be like all right i'm gonna start fucking

building yeah you get one life right yeah exactly you gotta live it vicariously so what would you recommend to somebody who's maybe like lurking or thinking about building but uh doesn't have the confidence and right. How would you, how would you, it takes courage. It really does. It's, it's not easy and it won't be easy, but it's so rewarding and I wouldn't change a thing. Um, I love what I do every day. I love our community. I love fighting for something and building something that I believe in, uh, and that I believe is essential for, for humanity and for freedom um and for progress uh you know the thing that i would say is um if you don't do it and if everybody cowers in fear uh nothing's going to change nothing's going to get done so you know

it takes somebody to step up and push that first domino um which hopefully i've done and uh uh to to be a mover uh to push that first domino over and inspire the other dominoes to to fall in line and come out and and uh say i'm not afraid um and stand your ground too this thing with um apologizing for tweets that are 10 years old you know we see sports uh sports people that are uh you know when they were 14 years old they tweeted out a thing and i i think that you know there there's there's stuff that we say in the moment maybe maybe i was having a bad day i'm not the same person that i was 10 years ago i don't think any of us are and this this you know uh this lynch mob of going after people for old tweets or whatever is is

absurd to me it's you shouldn't be afraid to fail you shouldn't be afraid to say something that you might uh look back on and say what was i thinking you know because then you'll never say anything you know you just and we start to see this on twitter now and stuff where people are self-censoring um they're afraid to say certain things because they don't want to get banned um you shouldn't be telling people to learn the code all right yeah that that's that that was absurd and oh that that was that it's uh journalist privilege there we lost a couple bitcoiners to that to that to that hashtag michael bitstein michael bitsy michael goldstein i always mess up his last name had the perfect learn to code tweet or something i did i saw that i think

i retweeted that yeah one some journalist was like we need to block all these people with the hashtag learn to code it's like if you know how to use twitter's api and you learn to code yeah if you learn to code you could do this right yeah shout out bitcoin carnivores right yeah yeah i'm uh i eat a lot of steak same i'm an omnivore same i eat a lot of steak yeah i went full carnivore for a while i might go back it's hard it's hard in this city in particular oh yeah there's so much good food around you man there's so much good food yeah it's so much convenient food like that's like i work at home i work from my desk at home and there's a shake shack down the street and like sometimes i'm just like all right marty see i'm italian so i love the pasta oh yeah i've been

trying to uh i like a chicken parm everyone chicken parm's good every once in a while some good pasta this is now a food podcast folks oh um no again like back to big like that's one thing that drives like there's finally uh again before bitcoin and before a lot of these open source technologies that are proliferating i feel like reality uh humanity has been detached from reality and from an economics perspective like the cpi doesn't make sense the fed has no idea what they're doing the like a lot of things that are reported are really have no connection to reality sure and in the media as well cnn based fake news framing narratives and stuff like that to their advantage now we have twitter and bitcoins provided a common mission that i feel

like has not existed on this planet in a while yes it's it's unifying um and and i think that's why we see a lot of overlap with the bitcoin community into what we're doing because uh most bitcoiners tend to be uh you know people that believe in individual liberty believe in freedom of expression um you know code is is free speech too um that's the other thing that we should be worried about is um if they're gonna start censoring speech and creating new rules around speech and attacking the first amendment they're inevitably going to attack code hate codes common freaks hate code well that's actually i mean that's that's a narrative that's being pushed now i mean you see the the drama with in the linux community with um the sjw's going after

the slave um yeah you're trying to change the terminology and stuff it just absolutely insane like why does everything have to be politicized they made linus apologize yeah yeah and he bent the knee man if there is one thing that i could anybody can get from this podcast stop apologizing it's weakness why do you say this it does not get you anywhere it doesn't get you you don't get points with the left for you know bending your knee to their demands and then apologizing for it you have to stand strong and say yeah i said it maybe i don't agree with it now but i don't apologize for it and i'd say it again right like just like f you i don't care um we gotta have this this alpha attitude of of just not caring about what the mob says um and not bending to it because

a lot of it is fake too like there's a lot of botnets that when people are in the outrage mob the botnets will pick up on it and they'll go after that target just to make it look like oh there's a lot of people that are really mad about this so i better go and apologize and it's like it's fake so much of it is a house of cards it's not reality um you know i think that's the other thing we take for granted is people think that like every american is on twitter well reality is that there's only about 30 million alleged active accounts in the u.s and of those i would say probably a nice chunk are bots uh meaning they have usips but they're automatically tweeting they have like they sign up for a horoscope app back in 2013 and it's been tweeting their

horoscope every day ever since and that's an active u.s user right um so reality probably you know 15 20 million tops so like that's not all of america it's a very small subset of america and um it's not what all americans believe so seeing it on twitter does not it's not an active reflection of what reality is trump's presidency proved that you mean you had yes you had this whole coalition of three pillars of the four pillar system basically saying that hillary's gonna win and that's why they were so caught off guard middle america was like nah well yeah exactly well like they were so caught off guard because everything that you would see on Twitter every day and on Facebook every day was like Hillary's

gonna win and on TV every day and every medium but that's not an accurate reflection of what the populace was was thinking clearly well if most of the population isn't on these social networks how did Russia and infiltrate yeah right to 200 accounts and $100,000 in Facebook ads I used to work in advertising I was an ad tech for about five years in my last company I will tell you a hundred thousand dollars in facebook ads did not sway this election i will tell you that right now i'm sorry i'm sorry to break it to you but that did not and 200 uh sock accounts from the russians on on twitter did not influence the election i'm sorry i hate to break it to you

but no it's it goes back to like personal responsibility extreme ownership just everybody wants to uh allocate blame to something that they perceive as a boogeyman but it's like take some fucking personal responsibility like look look take a look inside right get your house in order and figure out why people are voting this way don't just try to blame clean your room jordan peterson would say yeah right clean your room um yeah it's i think um people want to look to the state they want to look to the corporations which in a sense are now more powerful than a lot of states i mean you look at facebook and it is worth more it has more information than any state on earth um and probably has more power than a lot of countries on earth uh and we have to ask

ourselves if that's a world we want to live in where corporations are uh you know dictating what civil liberties we're allowed to have on the internet and in in my case that's not again not a world that i want to live in so that's why i'm building on the world that i want to see which as individual liberty freedom of expression open source user choice you know free association i talk a lot about freedom of speech but i think freedom of association as we when we started earlier is often overlooked um why do you think this i don't know i i think this this concept of of you know looking to big brother to to save the day uh whether big brother is the corporation or the government has kind of um and this collectivist thinking this group think has uh really just

eliminated the whole concept of free association from people's minds because free association goes hand in hand with individualism and individual liberty and and uh taking you know control of your own life and your own experience so i think when you eliminate the individualism uh it eliminates the oh wait i don't have to follow this person and i can take control and block them and mute this word or unfollow them or hey put my phone down for five minutes you know so i don't know i think that's that's all they all are kind of interconnected so i think that's part of the a symptom of the larger broader issues if you were to give advice to to an individual out there to sort of develop a framework through which to critically think

based off your your history of studying philosophy like how would you how would you sort of because That's one thing we both went to Jesuit schools, the Jesuits. I went to a Jesuit high school and they were very keen on teaching us to think critically and why messages were being framed a certain way. And I'm interested to hear what you believe or what you think on this subject. Yeah. Know what you don't know. You know, Socrates says, know thyself, or at least we think he did because he never wrote anything down. We only know what we know from him from through Plato. Know yourself enough to know what you don't know.

and um you know seek out and surround yourself with people who are experts on those things so uh i'm not an engineer for example you know i've dabbled in coding and stuff but i frankly don't have the patience for it right and it's not something that i would be very good at and i recognize that so i surrounded myself with people who do know how to code and are very good at it and um you know there's other things that i don't know a lot about and that i seek out people who are experts in those things to to learn um so you have to know what you don't know and you have to know yourself enough to know what you don't know so that's i guess that would be my advice yeah no it's great advice and again bringing it back to bitcoin bitcoin sort of highlights this because

it's so multifaceted you know computer science economics monetary history and that's the beauty of the bitcoin quote-unquote community um a community of people that like to talk about bitcoin uh is that each brings their own knowledge base i studied economics like i don't i can't code either i don't have the patience for it either i love going to talk to developers that are working at the protocol level to get their their view of how things are going and then um well it's it's it's economics it's computer science it's it's a lot of philosophy um it's a lot of uh political science as well um so these things all overlap and you have experts in different verticals that all have this shared uh value system that all are working towards the same goal that's very powerful

And that's that's what makes the Bitcoin community so powerful is like this global network of experts in all these different fields who all see the potential and all see are excited about it in different ways. You have economists that are excited about it for one reason. You have computer scientists that are excited about it for another. You have philosophy guys like me who are excited about it for just the philosophical aspect of it. So I think all those those shared passions and those shared values coming together towards a common goal I don't think we've seen something like that on a global scale in a long time And that's why it's so exciting for me is like, you know, you could be you know a kid a 13 year old kid in India who is excited about Bitcoin and Can code up a project or can contribute to the conversation and add some value?

Exciting to me. Yeah, there's a 15 year old out. There has been hacking all the hardware wallets, right? Shamir, I believe his name is. I could be butchering that, but he's a 15-year-old, Anon, I believe, and he's packed the treasure ledger multiple times. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. He's contributing.

Yep. And again, like we both said, this is a common mission that is waking people up. And me personally, I think I've met some of the smartest people I've met in my life just by being into this stuff. Absolutely. It's rewarding, and it's led me to this conversation today, which has been thoroughly rewarding.

It's been a great conversation, man. Yeah, I appreciate you having me on. Thanks for coming by. I don't want to take up too much of your weekend here. You got a magical crypto conference. I got to run over there, yep. I'm not going to make that. I am about to interview Jack Mahler later in this interview, Freaks.

Andrew, before we part, do you have a parting note for the Freaks out there? Any words of wisdom? Getongab.com and buy Bitcoin. Pretty simple. Good advice. Yep. Peace and love, Freaks. Bye-bye.