The Joe Rogan Experience - #1970 - Bill Ottman

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Bill Ottman is founder of Minds, an open source and decentralized social network focused on civil dialogue and Internet freedom. Attend Minds Fest on April 15 at Vulcan Gas Company in Austin.minds.com

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Hello, Bill. Hey, man. Good to see you, buddy. What's going on? We're here, man. You are here.

Everything's going wild. How is your site going? It's going. We're decentralizing as fast as possible, getting it out of our hands so that we need to protect ourselves from ourselves. How do you do that? Tell everybody it's MAPS. Mines. Mines rather. Sorry. Mines.com. M-I-N-D-S.com. I just had Rick Dauberman. Rick, no. Psychedelics on the brain. I sense kinship with maps. Yeah. Yeah.

Minds and maps, the two of them should go together perfectly. They probably should work seamlessly. Yeah. Yeah. So basically there's protocols and there's platforms. So, you know, Twitter, Minds, other social networks, these are platforms. other social networks these are platforms they're kind of built in the traditional social media style which is on servers that are you know live in huge cloud centers um and but there's also protocols the one that we're working with now is called noster which stands for notes and other stuff transmitted by relay so there's no company owns this protocol. The

founder is anonymous, sort of similar to Bitcoin. And what it is, is it's all about crypto key pairs and signing stuff. So with Nostr, this is all happening in the background on mines. Every user has a cryptographic key pair, which can download your settings you're the only one who gets the private key that's your identity your content your followers all that is tied to your identity so when you post something when you follow somebody that is creating a signature on this decentralized network of relay nodes. So we run a relay. Thousands of other people run relays. Snowden's on Nostra now.

It's like getting serious endorsement. And it's because it doesn't have a company. You know, because companies are choke points. That can, you know, we saw what happened with Napster, for instance. What happened with Napster? Napster just got rocked by the music industry and they basically died. I mean, they still sort of exist, but they pretty much got taken down because there was that entity to go after. I see.

So if they were decentralized, but there was no real decentralization back then, was there? Well, torrents are decentralized. Bit torrents, right. Torrents, actually in Nostra, there's work that we're involved with now on integrating Nostr with Torrents so that more heavy files, video, and rich media can be shared over the network. Right now, it's text and links, essentially. What is your opinion when it comes to copyright protection and stuff like that? Like if someone has copyrighted material, like say if like NBC has a show and then someone uploads it. I mean, that's illegal. Right. But if it's on torrents,

it's like, how do you get it down? You don't, you don't, you don't. So it's just, even though it's illegal. Yeah. I mean, and that's why like, so we have moderation. I mean, if, if a copyrighted video gets reported on minds, then, you know, we will take it down from our interface. But it still exists on the decentralized network. So you really can't stop people from sharing it? No. No. No.

So, you know, I think I kind of have a nuanced view on copyright. Like, I think that people's work should be protected and you know not stolen and monetized but at the same time it's just like the nature of information yeah is not compatible with copyright right just because information wants to do what it wants to do that's one of the weirder things about what's happening with the internet is that essentially as time goes on, it becomes more and more difficult to control what's just ones and zeros. As they're out there, the bottlenecks between people and information, they're getting broader. It's getting more and more difficult to stop things. And I think as time goes on, it would be impossible.

I don't think there will be any stop. I think in the future, like anything, I have a feeling that we'll have zero privacy in the future. I have a feeling that all of this encryption and all this stuff, I think it's all going to be invalid once quantum computing is ubiquitous. I think I just have a feeling that there's no way you can stop information when technology moves past where it is now to some place where basically anybody could get access to anything at any time. And then the problem becomes how do you control money when that happens? Because money in a lot of, I mean, a lot of it is just ones and zeros. And the only thing that stops you from being able to steal it or transfer it is encryption. When you don't have any more encryption and anyone kind of has access to anything that's online.

And anyone kind of has access to anything that's online. So, yeah, I hear you. It does seem like over time technology is working against privacy. Yes. That's a better way to put it. But, you know, encryption hasn't been broken. Some encryption has been broken. But encryption is still good.

It still works. And as quantum computing advances, encryption protocols will advance too. So it's a race. And there are people trying to break it. But I heard the other day you were mentioning the whole thing with Signal and Tucker. And so, yeah, to clarify that. So based on my understanding, Signal has not been compromised. The Pegasus program that you were referring to does have the ability to hack people and get into their device. But once you get into someone's device, it's actually easier to get into someone's machine or phone than it is to hack the encryption protocol. So if you can get into someone's phone, then you probably can get into their messages. I think that's what they did.

So that's different. That's different than Signal being irrelevant. Right. It's not that Signal's irrelevant, but it's just that the government right now has the ability to get into things no matter what. According to Gavin DeBecker, who's a securities expert, he said all they need is your phone number. Signal 1, excuse me, Pegasus One was you needed a link. So someone would have to, that's the whole Jeff Bezos story. Someone sent him a link on WhatsApp.

He clicked on that link, bang, all of a sudden they have access to his phone. Right. And you have to be super sophisticated to lock yourself down to avoid that. Like I'm sure that there are people who, well, I know there are people who are probably less victim to something like Pegasus. Sure. Probably less victim. But I mean, I guess with a guy like Jeff Bezos, he probably has someone scan his phone all the time, but I wonder if they could even detect Pegasus at this point. Yeah. And if we know about Pegasus too, how do we know if there's a Pegasus three, like whatever sort of workarounds they've found, I'm sure we're not going to be privy to it until it's too late. Yeah.

I mean, the layers of surveillance kind of keep zooming out. And, you know, I think this whole intelligence world is getting out of control. I mean, because you've got artificial intelligence. You've got what we know is the state of control. I mean, because you've got artificial intelligence. You've got, we have what we know is the state of human intelligence. We then have what is speculated to be potential non-human intelligences. Have you heard about this Arrow office

that just came out? No. So Arrow, all domain anomaly research office that in the NDAA recently, there's all these UFO pieces of language. And so, and Christopher Mellon, who you've had on, is kind of really knowledgeable about this. I learned a lot of this from him.

And anyway, the reason I'm talking about this is I think that intelligence and like secret information, like as it transcends through the corporate world and the government world, it's all kind of interconnected. And the same types of models are used. But anyway, Arrow is the NDAA that recently passed now gives all these whistleblower protections to people to come forward, which is an absolute game changer. And Arrow is this new office that's like decently funded, I think like $11 million a year or something like that. And they're doing an audit, basically, of the government on these issues. And I think that it correlates to surveillance to me,

at least in speculation, because what is this system? If they're here, which I don't know, but that is surveillance. And it's just all compartmentalized and we don't know what's going on. So that's why it's great that this office exists. So if someone wants to get a hold of... I, what, I feel like with things, when you have something like Pegasus, all you have to do is have access to it and you can get a hold of anything. And someone wouldn't even know if you, obviously, Tucker didn't know. I don't know what kind of security protocols Tucker's company or what, you know, what he uses, but obviously he didn't know that they had access to his phone right yeah i don't know all the specifics of pegasus but you know we also know everything from snowden and the prism program which you know maybe was wine was winded down a little bit i

remember i hear heard some of of that stuff got rolled back, but realistically, no, no, no, no. It's probably expanded. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would imagine they could do what, I imagine they could just get all the access to anyone who's in any room. Just zoom in on that room, know where all the phone numbers are, and just bam. Yeah, but the paradox of having all these back doors is that it makes everybody less safe.

It makes all of the government people less safe to have these back doors. I mean, in some of the Twitter files, we found that these chat rooms that they had, they were using Signal. The government uses Signal very heavily. And the Twitter rooms where they had people from the social media industry, and they use that. So to advocate for backdoors into encryption is just like self-mutilation. It's bizarre. It's bizarre. It's bizarre, but it's one of those things

where they want to use it on other people even if it could be used against them. They probably feel like a lot of the people they're checking in on don't have access to that. Like a standard journalist. They want to zoom in on Matt Taibbi's phone. I'm sure he doesn't have access to that.

It's like he can't use it on them, but they could use it on him. Yeah. I just feel like we're living in sort of a Petri dish a little bit. I just like the type of information that like the level of discourse on this planet right now is very like tampered down compared to what's really going i mean that's just an undeniable fact we we were down yeah i mean there's uh and this is this is um verified i i actually i'm a fucking dork i read the whole wikipedia article just about top secret information and like all the levels and the u.s government produces more classified information than non-classified information. So even if there's an audit, they could redact everything.

Yeah. And it's just all these different divisions and departments, and they all have their own protocols. So just getting a handle on it is, I mean, that's the first thing that has to get done. We have to, but not that we're even going to get the real information from there. Right. But. But then there's also the national security aspect of it. It's like, you know, you have to have some things redacted because, you know, of China and Russia, like you could just say that.

And then. Yeah. That is the phrase that gets used. Sure. So. Because they have a full like clamp down on their population. Russia. They could just say that. Yeah, that is the phrase that gets used. It's so sad. Because they have a full clamp down on their population. They limit the access to the internet. Their internet is

essentially China-based. VPNs are illegal. And they're trying to do that here in America. It's all backwards. With the restrict act, it's getting nasty. 20 years if you use a vpn which is hilarious and it's it's managed by the commerce department unelected bureaucrats are the ones see the tiktok's actually not named in that act right they're just letting the secretary of commerce decide which apps. Yeah. That's insane.

It's insane. So, yeah. Dan Crenshaw posted about it. He thinks it's not that big a deal because he thinks that, you know, there's a lot of acts that get pushed and then they never get passed through. But what's disturbing is just the idea, the desire to do this and the fact that imagine if it did get passed.

I mean, it's just a fucking full-on assault on free speech. Yeah, I mean, it seems to be getting a toxic stigma connected to it. Did you see Jesse Waters grill Lindsey Graham about it? No, I didn't. Oh, he didn't read it, but he endorsed it. Did you see Jesse Waters grill Lindsey Graham about it? No, I didn't. He didn't read it, but he endorsed it. Oh, Jesus. And he just got completely called out. It was really funny. That should be illegal.

You should not even be able to sign something that you haven't read. And they can't read it. It's too long. There's not enough time. That's a lot of these acts, right? And they slip a bunch of shit in there that's like, wait a minute, what about page 485? Like, what the fuck is going on there? And then like, oh, I didn't read that.

Yeah. Meanwhile, it's just like it's going to change discourse in this country. It's going to change what people have, you know, the access that people have to free speech and communication. the access that people have to free speech and communication. And I mean, I think a lot of people endorsed it righteously being concerned about TikTok. That's what was so sneaky. They enrage you to then support this disaster. And it's just like, we can all agree that there's a problem with TikTok and that there's, you know, the Chinese government having access to all of this data is problematic.

But like there should be an encrypt act, like encrypt everything. But you can't go around banning apps. It just doesn't work. It's irrelevant. People are going to use VPNs. I think this act needs, I don't think it's going to make it. I hope you're right. Because more people are talking about it. Tulsi Gabbard posted a big thing about it. There's a lot of people that are

up in arms. But my concern is, if it wasn't for social media, that act, which was kind of ironic, right? If it wasn't for social media and people sharing this and becoming outraged and people discussing this, it would have slipped right through like the Patriot Act did. The Patriot Act existed in a time where there wasn't social media and people weren't really aware of what they were pushing through until it was too late. Yeah, I think there's much better solutions. I mean, did you watch any of the TikTok CEO getting grilled? Yes, I did. Okay. So, you know, that was interesting because, you know, he's a pretty, he seemed like a sober guy. But in his point was, well, you have to have consistent standards for other social media

companies too. I mean, like how do we know that Facebook and Google, just because they're US based doesn't mean that they're not giving data to China? We have no idea. We have no idea. So that's really the issue. We need to understand what specifically are all of these apps doing. They should be labeled very specifically. And we're starting to see some of that happen.

But the thing is you can't know with these proprietary apps because they're just not sharing anything. I think one of the problems that people have with whether any kind of decentralized app like yours or any other decentralized social media network is that people immediately go, oh, what do I have to do to do this? Like Mastodon, when people start using Mastodon and you get on it, you, oh, what do I have to do to do this? Like Mastodon, when people start using Mastodon and you get on it, you're like, what is this? There's so many servers and how do I know what to join and what's going on here? Yeah. So, well, Mines is different. Mines is actually not fully decentralized. We're a hybrid. So we run a centralized infrastructure, but we interface through delegation, delegated cryptographic events signing. That's happening in the background, but like our app feels like a normal social media

app. It's different. Mastodon, the way that that works is federated instances. So there's all of these different instances with different URLs and there's like 20 people on each one. And, you know, but there is sort of some interoperability between the instances because you can subscribe to somebody on another instance from your instance. But it's not fully decentralized. It's federated. And the problem is that you don't own your identity. So if one of those instances goes down, you're screwed. Your stuff is gone. In Nostr, which is like an architecturally different setup, and there's other protocols similar to Nostr, but it doesn't matter if the website goes down. You just pop over to another

one, upload your key, and all your stuff is there. And that and that's why we like it because it keeps us in check because our users could, can now basically, if we fuck around, they'll bounce and they can take their stuff. And that's, you know, because the,

the social graph specifically is the key because you spend a decade built, you know, getting all these followers. It's your life. People spend their lives doing this. And then to be able to just get taken out by YouTube is so devastating and unethical. It's ridiculous. Well, it's really creepy too because many of the things they took people out for have turned out to be true.

There was a lot of things that they were labeling as disinformation or misinformation, which are 100% proven fact now. And people lost their accounts. And there's no recourse. They're not going to reinstate you. And that was a problem also with Twitter, that for the longest time, if you said anything that was contrary to whatever the narrative was, whether the government was pushing it or the CDC was pushing it, like anything contrary to that narrative, you would get fucked. Yeah, and those people are not back, though. I think Twitter is making way more progress than everyone else. And, look, I'm ultimately an Elon fan.

I'm rooting for him. I think it's vastly improved. But there's chaos currently underway at Twitter. Oh, sure. And those people have not all been let back on. And I don't really understand why. Who hasn't been let back on? The people that we don't know.

The people whose random Joe Schmo posting a COVID study, like, has he been let back on? All the thousands of people that got banned. Well, I think he essentially let back on everyone who didn't do anything illegal. Not Alex. Not Alex. Yeah, that's true why yeah well that's a personal opinion of elons which i don't agree with at all yeah because they let andrew tate on right you know it's like it doesn't mean that he's endorsing alex to let him back on right it doesn't i mean because there's a lot of people that are back on that are, you know, they didn't make that one specific mistake that Alex made,

but they've said some horrific shit. But the mistake, the reason Alex was banned was because he, it was actually for something he did off Twitter. So he confronted this journalist, Oliver Darcy, in a line at some event. And he was, you know, being Alex Jones, sort of ranting at him. Yeah. And then Twitter said, oh, you're bullying this guy. And this is like not acceptable behavior. So you're going to leave. But then when I remember, you know, the exchange with Elon and whoever it was that was asking, asking, it was that he hadn't been let on because of the Sandy Hook stuff, which is not the

same. That's not even why he was banned. Right. So, you know, it's not easy. I understand, you know, the politics of it. And he probably has Tim Cook being like, you know, we're not going to advertise if you have Alex Jones. But I don't know what's going on. But it doesn't seem to me because he could win the argument if he would just let him back on. Right.

And did you see this crazy clip of of Elon and the BBC guy I did I posted it today oh you did it's amazing amazing it was amazing it was amazing because I got kept trying to change subjects and let's move on like no no no no no no no no what the fuck are you talking about you because that guy thought he could just say the narrative without specific examples like give me an example and the guy had no examples that's most people who are concerned about this well this is like a lot of people that i know that are famous that like publicly announced

they were leaving twitter and you know one of them i really love and i was like why are you doing i didn't even say anything to her but i'm like why are you doing this? I didn't even say anything to her, but I'm like, why are you doing this? This is so dumb. Like, you're just doing this because this is the thing that everyone feels like they're supposed to do. Hey, well, Twitter's kind of fucked now, so bye. No, it was fucked before. It's less fucked now. Yeah, are there people that are going to say things like what I showed you earlier today, which is hilarious. Someone posted to Kamala Harris after she said something about the assault ban. That shit's important. It's important to have people mock people.

Like, I'm sorry if it hurts someone's feelings, but that shit's important. Yeah. And I think the way that Elon handled that was great because obviously you need a specific example to back up an argument. However, I sort of think the whole premise of the conversation is wrong. This idea, this war that Twitter is at with all the think tanks, and I think it was the Institute for Strategic Discourse that had actually compiled the information that the BBC guy was talking about. And there is information that there is data showing, you know, hate speech, XYZ has has increased. However, this is the wrong conversation. It's not the existence or even rise of hate in the presence of that content on an app is not. You're not just trying to ban hate. Banning hate does not stop hate. And this is what the peer reviewed research shows. So, so trying to bully Elon and Twitter for, look, even if there was a bump of hate speech since it became a little bit more free, I mean, it seems

like that's a potentially understandable intermediary effect to happen while things reorient. Like we open up free speech we're open up the valve a little bit okay because we think that this is going to be healthy for society long term so let it bump a little bit we need that we need to see what we hate or what other people hate you need to like what is it um free speech let us lets us know who the idiots are like you you need to identify them yes yeah yeah the the best response to whatever it is bad speech is better speech is better arguments and that's you you literally have a debate platform which is what twitter essentially is yeah that is the purpose

yeah it's the purpose yeah yeah and not to mention that the hate isn't defined. So it's only one type of hate that these people are typically referring to. Right wing hate. Right wing hate. Not left wing hate. Right. That's OK. And so actually, so we're suing California. We just filed this law because this complaint. this law because this complaint, they are trying to pass the social media law called AB 587,

which requires it's a censorship law there. They require these policies on disinformation, misinformation, hate speech, and then they use the undefined use the words extremism and radicalization. There's no definitions. They don't require you to have a child exploitation material policy, but they do require you to have a policy on hate, which isn't defined. And so we're suing them with the Babylon Bee and Tim Pool. When did they start this? When did they start trying to pass this? It just went into effect in January. So it's now? It just went into effect in January. So it's now? It's now, it's in. So if you live in California,

what's the repercussions? So it's targeted at social media companies. Okay. So basically mandating that social media companies submit these policies. So we would have to, they would force us to write a policy on hate speech and submit it to them and then additionally we would have to on like a biannual

basis submit analytics about all of our moderation data which honestly we're already transparent about our moderation data so that's that's largely public anyway we have a jury system and and we have in-house moderators. But it's just it's a huge burden. Like it's crazy that they would expect companies to submit all that and then have these arbitrarily. Well, actually, not arbitrarily, specifically chosen categories for policies that are clearly politically charged. For policies that are clearly politically charged and Newsom like when he came out and announced this law It was very you know, we have to stop hate on social media and misinformation and disinformation protect society protect democracy no, you know, you're not protecting democracy by

Stopping free speech that is there's no there's no Checks and balances in place if something turns out to be accurate where then whoever put out that disinformation initially like if someone like someone posts something like say masks don't work and they get banned off of twitter and say oh this is in response to the cdc's but if it turns out that masks actually don't work the cdc doesn't get punished, which is kind of fucking crazy. Because if they're the ones that are setting these guidelines, and these guidelines turn out to be inaccurate, and people get banned off of social media

for arguing with these guidelines, there's no repercussions. There's nothing, you know, these people are fucked, and there's no recourse. There's nothing, you know, they just, these people are fucked and there's no recourse. Right. Yeah. Actually, that's the policy that we do need. We need the policy for social, social networks and media companies to, you know, apologize and, and fix their wrongs. Yeah. Well, and also like, why wouldn't the CDC be punished then? Or shouldn't they be banned? Or shouldn't they be like, have a strike against them? But not it's like it's it's really frustrating because you're dealing with narratives that are oftentimes 100 propaganda and they're not backed by science they're not back it's just like some things that people say like when rachel maddow was on on television telling everybody

that this vaccine stops the virus in his tracks. If you get vaccinated, the virus can no longer affect you. It can't affect anyone else. It stops and we can get out of this thing. Well, that's not fucking true at all. And that person, there was no repercussion other than public mockery, which continues this day where, you know, whenever she posts something, people post that video. What about this stupid? And, you know, there's nothing other than that.

I know. They're not even inviting the other side on to correct the issues. They're certainly not correcting their errors. And it's just not that hard to admit you're wrong. I don't know. Maybe it is hard. But people get into their own egos and they just can't handle it. Well, there's people that are beyond reproach, and that's the problem, or organizations.

One of the things that's fascinating about Twitter now is they fact-checked the Biden administration. So the Biden administration put out some tweets that were 100% horseshit, and then underneath it, Twitter fact-checked them, so they deleted the tweets, which is glorious. That's amazing. And that's never happened before. Yep. Community Notes is my favorite feature on Twitter by far. It keeps everybody in check. It has a process for kind of vetting information, surfacing it to the top, you know, showing the better idea to the bad idea. And actually their Community Notes stuff is all open source. It was a little bit disappointing, though, when they open sourced the algorithm the other day. Open sourced the algorithm, which stepped in the right direction.

I'm not trying to attack. But what we learned, basically, is that it's not the live algorithm. It's an algorithm. What do you mean? What does that mean? So it's not the production algorithm, at least from what we can tell, because you saw what happened with Substack. Has that been reversed? I think it has. Yeah, I don't, I would need to confirm.

I think that the ability to engage with those posts got changed back, but then like Taibbi's posts, you can even search them. But the point being is that, and I submitted a comment on their GitHub where this algorithm exists. It's like, well, if this is the algorithm, why wasn't the substack blocking showing up in the algorithm the other day? I mean, it wasn't. It wasn't there. So clearly there's some sort of a link blacklist. so clearly there's some sort of a link blacklist um and you know twitter did say that this isn't the whole algorithm and they're going to be releasing more over time but the problem is we should have seen something change in that when all the substack blocking went down

so how many users does mines have now? We are 5 million. Oh, that's great. We actually had to take a little haircut because we, you know, and we're trying to be as honest as possible. Because basically we had been counting that people who, you know, fail. Data is hard. And so people who had, like, tried to sign up were, in our data, showing as signed up. So, you know, backed it up a little bit. But the point being, we don't use any closed source proprietary analytics tools. trying to create an app is to just go to the Silicon Valley display case of Google Analytics

and customer.io and all of these surveillance tools and analytics tools that are very powerful and can give you very precise data about what's going on. But we have refused to use any of those tools because when you put Google Analytics on your website, you are becoming Google. You are now part of Google's tentacles. And you're basically handing over all that user data to Google. And we just, like, our whole foundation has been fully open source and just don't take shortcuts. And so we're like our growth path is healthy. It's happening.

We're continually growing. But I don't care about the pace of growth as much as the quality. And so, you know, we built a whole day. Like we do machine learning. We're starting to do AI, but we're doing it in an open source way. So like in the AI wars right now, you have like open, quote unquote, open AI, which isn't, you know, it's barely open, they don't share much of what's going on. And they shroud that in some sort of like, oh, we're, you know, we need to

protect you. And we need to not let this get out of control, which maybe there's an element of truth to that. But then there's a whole other part of the AI world, like with stable diffusion and stability and we're all, it's all open source and it's being done in the open and everybody has access because, you know, do you, as you see all this AI stuff coming about you, do you think that you should – how do you feel about that? Do you think that you should be compensated in a way? Do you have any – like you mentioned copyright. Do you have any issues with it? No.

I mean, it is what it is. There's no stopping that. And I saw it a long time ago because this company from Canada was the first one to take all of – I mean they essentially got a database of all my audio recordings, which is fucking thousands of them. So there's so many hours of me talking that they could easily have me saying a bunch of things. talking that they could easily have me saying a bunch of things. And so they put together like just this recording of me saying a bunch of things that I've never said and me talking about some subjects and doing these things. And it was a conversation that I never had. And then they did one with me doing a podcast with Steve Jobs, which is wild. And then now there's a new one with me doing a podcast with Sam Altman. And it's a full podcast.

I listened to the beginning of that one. I think they did it tastefully because they made it very clear that it's not you. Yes. Yeah. It's proof of concept. It's like they're showing that this is something that can be done. And there's no flavor to it, which is interesting. If you and I are having a conversation, it's, there's fun. There's like, there's laughing, there's, you know, there's like,

there's human interaction. This was just like question, answer, question, answer. And you would be like, oh, well that's interesting. Yeah. And that just kept happening. You can tell. Yeah. You can kind of tell, but for now, for now, I mean, they'll be able to sort of code your personality in the future and sort of gauge yours and maybe even have some you know some weird interactions that are just silly that you could sort of program in that make it look like personality. And you can do that now. You can prompt more like casual attitude. Bump check, whatever.

Yeah. But I think that, okay, so maybe you don't care. No, it's not that I don't care. It's just that it is what it is. Right. Would I rather it not exist? Of course. Of course.

I mean, I just, I'm getting sent these things where I'm doing these ads for products that I've never used and I never talked about. And, you know, these companies. And we tried to chase one of them down. It was like, I think it was like a testosterone booster or something like that. But when you do go down this rabbit hole legally, when you sick a lawyer on it, they're like, Jesus Christ, like there's a web. Like there's shell companies, shell corporations. It's very difficult to find. It's all overseas.

Very difficult to find who's actually making this and how they would profit off of it. Yeah. work, you know, on a mass scale, I think that we do have to have a conversation about these companies and, you know, where they're getting all their data and, you know, who's getting compensated. So I actually prompted chat GPT and asked it, you know, do you have the rights to the data that you're using? And it said, it's, it said, no, it said that we, we, we do not have access or rights to all of the data that we're using. And that could become more of a concern over time. I posted this.

And so what does that mean? Because what are they doing? They're scraping the world's use of language, all the data, all the imagery, everything. And so when we talk about OpenAI becoming worth hundreds of billions of dollars probably, it's the fastest growing app in the history of the world. Right. It got to 100 million way faster than everybody. Doing massive $10 billion deal with Microsoft.

They're profiting off of the world's data. Right. So I'm not saying that that's not okay at all. But I mean, if something that I created that I didn't give them permission to use is get, you know, if they're profiting off of that. Basically, I think there's a world where some type of UBI that, but the companies pay people. So like we, we split revenue with our users. We, we do like crazy rev share programs because our whole thing is like, if you bring energy to this network, like get paid. So how does that work? Like when you say revenue, like what kind of revenue we're talking about and like, where's the revenue coming from so we have mines plus mines pro similar in

functionality to like twitter blue but we do uh you get more reach more exposure uh verified and more video upload hd you pay monthly yeah you pay monthly yeah you know um mines plus is like seven bucks mines pros more but pro mine's pros 50 a month 50 yeah that's like dude i i think people want to support platforms that they care about what do you get here's a tip for you a month you just get a lot more video dude video is so expensive right because you have to put it up transcoding and you have to transcode into like every version and its mother we have we have free users who are actually costing us like i shouldn't even say this because but because they're just uploading video all day and it's getting no traffic so it's like they're costing

us lots of money but it's okay that's that we want free video upload but like you know youtube for like the amount that they're paying like they were losing money forever Because of that right so it's the videos is killer, but you know basically and then we also have Non-surveillance native ad network where you can boost your posts and so you can people can pay for that but what we do is that well so one if you serve boost on your page we give you we split it with you and We may even go deeper and give people more than half for the ads that they're serving. And then additionally, if you get someone to buy a membership, you get half.

That's cool. Forever. Is anyone making a living off of mines? There are some, yes. Really? So that's their job is they post on mines? Yep. Wow.

How much money? Well, one of them. I mean, they're making thousands of dollars a month. So it's money. It's real money. Yeah. Wow. How much money would that be? Well, one of them. I mean, you know, they're making thousands of dollars a month. So, you know, it's money. It's real money. Yeah. Yeah. But that, you know, think of it if you're doing it in a traditional business way.

Like, we're going to build a sales force and bring on a bunch of sales reps and send them out into the world and help sell our product and give them a commission. Help sell our product and give them a commission. You know, maybe typically a company, if they're trying to do a sales force, you know, maybe 20% commission maybe. 10% to 20% commission if you sell something. We're just like, well, I don't really want to manually hire everybody. Like, why wouldn't we just offer this crazy commission to our whole community? And then, because we are community owned. So our code is owned by everybody.

Everybody owns their content. We're actually, we just reopened our stock. So you can buy our stock on WeFunder right now. We want to be owned by the world. So, um, yeah, so it's, it's like a distributed sales force, but you know, cause like not everybody's a big creator. So, you know, only some people can make a ton of money serving ads on their page. There's only a certain type of people that, that that's relevant to, you know, a couple, a normal person on social media might be able to make, you know, a dollar, a couple dollars a month, they get a few views. But the reason the commission program matters is because everybody has a network. Everybody has friends, everybody. Everybody

can be, you know, have boots on the ground and go off and do work and sell stuff. So, you know, if you sell a $1,000 ad deal on mines, take 500. Like, and that's real incentive. We want to like really like go far beyond. So, you know, here's a tip for Elon. And Elon, you know, would love to collaborate with you, but he should have like a $1,000 a month option. People would pay. People want Twitter to win.

What would you get for $1,000 a month? Dude, people pay. What's worth $12,000 a year? I mean, if you could bake in advertising, you could bake in a lot of advertising, so you get a lot more reach. You could get access to the Twitter team. There's stuff that people will pay for. People want to grow on social media because reach is influence. Right, but wouldn't that be a problem?

You're only allowing that reach for people that have a lot of money, that can afford $ thousand bucks a month yeah but they're already selling ads you can already do that what's the difference if you just bake it into a subscription so how does it work because i've never bought an ad on those things like just click ad give a credit card say how many you know how much you want to spend per day how long you want it to go and it just shows up in people's feeds. Yeah. Because I always wondered, like, why is this in my feed? Because for a long time it wasn't. And then now you do see these, like, paid ads.

Yeah, the promoted posts. And, you know, the people who do it on Mines are much less, like, annoying advertisers and more so just artists and people trying to get the word out about their stuff. Yeah. And so, yeah. What's your typical user base? Like how are you attracting people other than like coming on a podcast and talking about it?

People just find us organically looking for alternatives to big tech. I mean people are sick of this shit. This is insane. Everything has gotten totally out of hand. And it's just unapologetic. Like, with Facebook and Google, you know, they're just not, they're not leveling with everybody. Like, okay, so we understand that there's horrible content on the internet. Like, let's deal with this and not erode freedom of speech.

the internet like let's deal with this and not erode freedom of speech and like i would love to see you know sundar prashai or or zuckerberg or you know tim cook like have more of a balanced conversation about this but it just seems like whenever they talk about it it's like they're it's like they're posturing it doesn't feel real and like they're really acknowledging even like the the academic conversation with regards to censorship, because the academics are saying that censorship causes increased radicalization. So what's going on here? Hmm. Yeah. What what what other things could be done to sort of level the playing field? I mean, open sourcing is foundation, number one. Like, everyone's afraid. You know, look, companies will say, oh, we couldn't share our secret sauce.

You know, that's what makes us competitive. But it's just really not true. Like, you can use software licenses as well that restrict people. So you can still be transparent. Like, for instance, there's this really cool app called Uniswap, which is a decentralized protocol for crypto. So you can swap tokens and there's no intermediary. And they used a time-delayed GPL. GPL is General Public License, one of the most famous free software licenses.

But they basically said, look, we need to be transparent. No one takes anything in crypto seriously unless it's transparent and audited. So we're going to make it so that we're showing you all the code. You can make sure we're not spying on you, doing anything sketchy. But if you're a commercial entity, you cannot fork our code and compete with us for the next two years. So they basically were giving themselves a head start. for the next two years. So they basically were giving themselves a head start.

The license that we use is the GPLv3, which says that anyone can do whatever they can, and people do. There are other versions of minds around the world, people running it and having their own social network. But if they make changes, they have to share those changes with the world. So it's referred to as copy left in kind of the copyright world.

It's basically that, yeah, you have to, it's sort of a pay it forward. I borrowed from you. I'm going to use that to build my business. Yeah, I'm going to sell it. I'm going to make a ton of money. But, you know, the development that I did, I also have to share. And there's many others. I mean, there's even licenses that are way more restrictive

but still provide the transparency. There's ones that are just read-only. Like, listen, you can read this and see it, but you cannot touch it. You know, that would be a step in the right direction for Facebook. And the thing is that they know about this power dynamic because they do create tons of open-source tools, like React.

Facebook created React, which is, like like one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks. And, you know, Angular was made by Google and tons of databases and back end tools. These big tech companies do contribute a ton to open source, but they only do it on the stuff that, you know, are developer tools. Because they know that the developers will only use their stuff if it's open source. Developers are never going to use something that they don't have control over. So it's like this very intentional game that they're playing. They're main apps. They're not transparent about it all.

But they know that they need the developer energy. So, you know, I think that they should just do it. And the great thing, even though the Twitter algorithm is not, you know, there yet, I think that Elon is, when I saw that happening, I was just like, finally. You know, it's like one of the big guys dipped their toe in the water. But it really has to be someone like Elon who's eccentric and insanely wealthy, who's willing to go out on a limb for $44 billion and overpay for a company and then sort of like fucking throw it upside down. But it's, you know, it's working.

It's working. And it's, you know, besides all the people that like publicly decried that they were done, like that's not real. The reality is like that's not really that important. The real important stuff is the mass amounts of humans that are constantly sharing information. And that seems to have gone up. Yeah, I think that Elon also just changed the way that the billionaires act. Like before him, you know, who's another billionaire that shitposts memes? Nobody. And you don't. But the fact that he did that, I think it sort of paves the way for other people up on his level to start being more real.

You think so? I hope so. I think most of them are cowards. And they just don't have the courage to, like, be that wild and just really post things they think are funny. Like, for me, my favorite one ever was the Bill Gates one when he posted the photo of bill gates next to a pregnant man emoji and it's like if you ever want to lose a boner real fast and he has a specific uh beef with bill gates because he's shorting tesla stock yeah um but yeah exactly i mean they should it's good for people like real things people don't like fake things like they should even if they were being uh sketchy and like manipulative about it like they should be acting real because that's what people like i saw bezos uh tweeting bezos i i think he wants to come out

of his shell he was tweeting some like a barry weiss, which was weird. Interesting. You know, because Amazon, we just ditched Amazon. We moved our whole operation over to Oracle because they're more committed to free speech. Does Amazon censor? I mean, they banned Parler. Oh, did they? Yeah. Interesting.

Yeah, and they have much worse terms, which kind of spell out. What was their justification for banning Parler? Did they make a statement? It was all around the Jan 6 stuff and extremism type reasons. Meanwhile, all that content is on Facebook and certainly on other platforms that were on AWS. So do you think that that's just sort of like a PR move to ban Parler? Partially.

I don't know all the specifics of, you know, the back and forth between them. And, you know, it's, I don't know if they were given warning or the ability. But the thing is, even if they were, it's like what Amazon would have been at you know take down this content or you're gonna or you're gonna have to leave you know that would be violating what they were trying to do with with free speech which you know cuz there's there's a group of companies now that are like pro free speech platforms which is are gaining dominance. It's awesome. You know, you've got Rumble, you've got Parler, you've got Minds, you've got, you know, there's a bunch of

them. But unfortunately, the waters get muddied because, you know, Rumble uses Google Analytics. They are totally closed source. don't so they're they're doing this some of the speech stuff right which is absolutely essential and so again it's a huge step in the right direction I actually had a back and forth with with Chris their CEO and he said that he would be open to some some open source stuff except he's been icing me on a couple emails recently so probably busy though no oh he's very. But I think that this open source issue needs to be honed on. We can't just let the next wave of free speech companies be doing all the same shit that big tech was doing on the technological end.

We can't just let them keep doing the surveillance, keep doing the secrecy. We're not moving forward if that is where we ultimately end up. So, but what I'm hoping, so we, we're core developers at, well, we contributed a, what's called a NIP, which is a Nostra Improvement Proposal, which is the framework which could enable a site like Twitter or Rumble or any of them to integrate Nostra like we do. So you don't have to be fully decentralized, but you can integrate NIP26, which is delegated event signing, so that your users have an escape hatch. And that's really all people want. People are going to keep using Twitter

just because a fully decentralized option exists doesn't mean people are going to stop using Twitter. And I feel like that's kind of what Elon has in his head because he even, Noster was on the, remember when like a couple months ago, Twitter came out with this policy, like we're banning links to Instagram, Facebook, and Mastodon, and then they rolled it back. Do you remember that? I don't. So they did do that.

Um, and people were bugging out like, of course. And, and so they, they rolled back the policy. They said, okay, we're not going to do that. Nostra was actually on that list. So, so they're aware of, of this system, but I think that they're're they're thinking about it the wrong way because the fully like there's a um a fully pure nostre client called damas which is super nice um and it is it's a great option but you know fully decentralized options don't have a ton of functionality you know they don't have the notifications they don't have a lot of the discoverability of stuff. There's serious limitations with fully decentralized stuff that's never going to be able to compete with more of like a centralized option where you can do all this fancy data processing and whatnot. So I think that this like this idea that we need to push out decentralized competitors is really just like the wrong state.

Like if Elon repeatedly says, like, we need to maximize public trust. And I do believe that he believes that and wants that. And that's why he's trying to be more transparent. But maximizing public trust is about, you know, give people their own keys. And then, you know, that's going to hold the company accountable, and then if Twitter messes around, they can go pop over someone else. But they don't lose all their stuff. But how would you possibly move Twitter stuff to some other network, though?

Because if they— Let's say if someone did something like that, and you had all your posts on twitter you've been on twitter since 2009 and you know mines gives you the ability to port your shit over to there how the fuck would you ever wind up doing that i mean if if it gets integrated then all the posts can just be signed and then if it gets integrated but that seems the posts can just be signed. If it gets integrated.

But that seems like that would be very beneficial to minds, but not very beneficial to Twitter. Because at the end of the day, Twitter is still a company. But think about that. We're a company. Right, but it would be beneficial to you. You're far smaller. Right. How many users does Twitter have? Oh, of course.

Hundreds of millions, right? Right. How many users does Twitter have? Oh, of course. Hundreds of millions, right? Right. But we actually, there were people on our team who asked the same question to our team. Why would we give people the ability, you know, why would we let people, you know, they're just going to go take their mind stuff and go somewhere else. So it's not like just us. It's not. Right. But you're a very small company, relatively speaking.

Like when you first came on the podcast, I think you had 2 million. Is that what it was? Somewhere around there? Yeah, yeah, that sounds right. And now you're more than double that. You're 5 million. But relatively speaking,

when people start talking about social media networks, Minds does not get into the conversation as a mass you know distributor of information right and you know now rumble is yeah and you know why they've spent a lot of money god they've spent they've spent so they came to me with a fucking shit same thing happening with substack they're spending millions of dollars bringing over top talent. It's not sustainable. So, but now. I wonder about it. I hope.

I mean, it's just. I'm like, how much are you guys spending? It's a lot of fucking money. Right. Because they have Steven Crowder on there. They have Russell Brand. They have all these people that I know they had to fork up some serious cash. Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, I think that they're well bankrolled. That's for sure. I mean, I think that they're well bankrolled, that's for sure. I guess. And it also seems to be working in terms of just generating more publicity and users. And I know there was something that was on Rumble recently. I forget what the video was, but it was over 2 million views. I was like, that's significant. Yeah, no, it's great. I i mean it's great for these options it's very validating regardless see i'm in it for the actual speech i want them to succeed i want that to happen so um you know i i just the just while it's in my head because i

forgot to bring it up before about substack. So Elon actually accused them of stealing Twitter data. What do you mean? And that was part of his justification for blocking them. How did they steal Twitter data? So, I mean, that's a very strong word that he used. And I don't know all the details, but what I know is that – so Substack is largely powered by Twitter's API, which means, you know, API, Application Programming Interface. It's basically a, you know, a developer tool set so that websites can integrate with API. Twitter, you know, you see login with Facebook, login with

Twitter. You have tweets embedded in Substack. Like, the API is how you facilitate that. And Twitter has been locking down its API because it's been, quite frankly, probably costing them millions of dollars. Because when Substack makes an API call to Twitter, that costs Twitter money. So Elon's perspective is, OK, we're hemorrhaging money. I'm speculating. I don't want to put words into his mouth. But I think that he's locking down the API because it's costing them so much money to be supporting all these websites that aren't paying them. Right. So, you know, Substack, the authentication and sign-up uses Twitter. The social graph and recommendations uses Twitter.

So Elon's tweet said that, you know, they've basically been abusing our API to bootstrap their own social network. Because Substack just came out with a social feed called Notes. Right. How does that work? It's just a news feed. Can you show me that? I want to see what it looks like. Substack Notes.

Because I just heard about this. I don't want to stain this table. Oh, it's good to stain it. It's good. It gives it life. This is a relatively new table. The old one we had, the old studio, was covered in stains. Introducing Substack Notes,

unlocking the power of the subscription network. And so what is this? So there's a screenshot down there. You have to sign in. No, just do continue. Yeah, there it is. Okay. So it's a screenshot down there. You have to sign in. No, just do continue. Yeah, there it is. Okay. So it's just a news feed.

So it looks exactly like Twitter. Right. Literally. It has a heart. It has comments. And it has some sort of a repost. But it's not a square. It's a circle. It's basically a copy of Twitter.

Just like the Truth Social Network network is right yeah and so so to to dig into that a little deeper like so you know mark andreessen brilliant guy i love that dude i mean he's super yeah he's he's one of the most legendary tech investors of all time he's so and he's so smart and so he is he owns i don't know what percentage of Substack, but Andreessen Horowitz is one of Substack's primary funders. Okay. And Andreessen Horowitz also put hundreds of millions into the Twitter deal. So there's an Elon and Andreessen are probably super tight. And so what's happening, in another tweet,

someone had said, you should buy Substack. And Elon responded, yeah, maybe I will. And this was like two months ago. And so they've been pursuing. It seems as though they've been in negotiation for Twitter to actually buy Substack. I mean, Elon said it. And he's also super tight with Marc Andreessen. And so probably Substack thinks it has a certain valuation. Elon wants to get it for less and was trying to say, listen,

you are reliant on us. Right. We're helping you grow. And then I'm thinking about buying you. And I'm thinking about buying you. It's costing me more money the more time that you're doing this. So what I'm going to do is cut off your API access and show you who's daddy. Ooh. Right. So, I mean, who knows? Because I don't think that- Just speculation.

I don't think that he was out this to censor. And unfortunately, Elon has successfully enraged both mainstream and now independent journalists, which is not- I don't think he intended for that to happen, but that's what happened. I mean, all the sub-stack journalists, you know, that's one of the best places for independent journalism. And now they're all pissed because, you know, there was a period of time where their businesses were screwed up. Well, not only that, it was the very people that were using Twitter to put out these Twitter pages. So there were all the emails that showed the collusion

between the intelligence agencies and the former heads of Twitter. This was the same guys, and they were publishing this. Yeah, and they all thought they were friends. Yeah. Well, as soon as the money got involved, that's where things get weird, right? Yeah, and so I think it kind of is a corporate negotiation byproduct. It seems like that's kind of what happened because I don't think that he intentionally wants to hurt those.

What I like about Elon is he will change course. If people respond in a negative way they don't like it they get upset he's like okay we won't do that and he's publicly said that he would do that and i like that he does do that he just he's flexible in that regard and he's not he's not completely dogmatic about these ideas yeah he's like doing it live yeah he really is fuck it we'll do it live yeah yeah he really is. Fuck it. We'll do it live. Yeah. Yeah, he really is, which is kind of interesting. And it's also part of the fun of the chaos of Twitter under him. You know that you've got this one incredibly intelligent, super eccentric guy who happens to be one of the richest people on the earth. And he did it very specifically because he thinks it's a threat to democracy, they get shadow banned and ghosted and their algorithm gets fucked up, their access to new subscribers gets fucked up. And there's real world consequences. There's also demonetization, right? YouTube's got this really sneaky thing

that they do where they just demonetize things. And so you self-censor because you don't want to get demonetized. And, you know, that's not good for anybody. It is an existential threat having social media platforms censored. I mean, that is how humanity is educating itself. Right. But it's also a new thing, right? Because these things didn't exist two decades ago. So now all of a sudden we have this new platform that really should be considered like a utility. I think your access to it should really be just like your access to the internet.

If we just decided that someone was problematic and you can't have the internet anymore, holy shit, that would freak people the fuck out. Well, it should freak you the fuck out if you don't have access to YouTube. It should freak you out because that is the primary way where people share video and post video and post their opinions on things yeah it gets hairy too because twitter's still playing this game with other countries

which we've we've basically said and actually we're dealing with this right now i'll just call them out germany germany has this horrible piece of legislation called the Network Enforcement Act, which is similar to the California thing I was mentioning. And, you know, they want you to take down stuff at their request. And we're just not going to do that. So we've made that decision. And Twitter is doing that for Germany? Twitter is doing that. Yeah, Twitter.

And they're also doing it with India. Really? Yeah. So if India posts something negative about the government, the government can say, take this down. And Twitter will take it down. Twitter has these interstitials, like kind of different content policies on different states. And so Pakistan, you know, there's basically a different Twitter in all of these different countries. Is that because it's the only way they can be on in those countries?

That's the argument. But it's the same argument that Google goes through when they're like, should we go to China? We want to go to China. We have this Dragonfly project. Are we going to, you know, let's work on it behind the scenes. What is Dragonfly? It's like Google's, I don't know all the details,

but it's their kind of China project. Their project to get Google accessible in China and have it be okay with the government. I was friends with someone who was an executive at Google back in the day. And what she described to me was that if they didn't, and they were in negotiation and doing business with China, and she said, if we don't do this, they're just going to copy it. They're basically just going to rip off Google. And so we're in this battle to either appease them with their rules and have it go over there and have some things like Tiananmen Square be censored

where you can't access information about Tiananmen Square. It seems to be a situation where we kind of have to do that or they're just going to copy Google. Yeah, I don't think that that's just a game that we're not interested in playing. I think that we're just going to stick to the laws that we're required to obey. And if other countries are going, I mean, we've been banned in China, we've been banned in Vietnam. We had a huge wave of like, this was one of our largest, we got like half a million users in like two days from Vietnam because there was a revolving door between their

government and Facebook. And, you know, the, the journalists of Vietnam found out and we got this huge wave. And then short, shortly after Vietnam banned us. Um, you know, people still can use VPNs at their own risk there. I just feel like it's a losing battle, constantly catering to all of these different countries and their censorship laws. It feels like just sort of a waste of time. And we can bypass all that with decentralized protocols. And so, you know, but I get it. It's not easy, especially when, you know, a company could go bankrupt. And if you, you know, if you lose all your German users, you know, if Twitter gets banned in India, like that's a major

problem. We're not dependent on those users. And I appreciate that you're not independent. I think what you do is very important. And I'm glad you're out there. I really am, and I'm glad there's this option. And I'm glad you guys have these rock-solid ethics in regards to that. It's very important, and I wonder at scale, if Minds, if we come back and do another podcast in two years, and Minds now has 50 million or 100 million. Let's make that happen. What happens then and is my i i have to be honest i only got on mines a couple times after you gave me uh you

know what's funny you know your your first time sharing minds no it was in like 2009 or no maybe like 2011 and you shared this viral video that was going on in minds of this like quantum levitation disc i don't know if you've ever seen that it's like if you look on if you just search like quantum you know superconducting levitation and you had just seen that and you know this was way before we knew each other And you had just seen that, and this was way before we knew each other, and you had just shared that. Are you sure it's me? I'm almost positive. I bet it's not.

No, I had friends message me. They were like, dude, Rogan just shared this video. I bet it's not. Really? Yeah. I bet it's a fake me. No. I think you got duped.

Really? Let's go look at it. Can we find it on your Twitter? Yeah, how would it be me? No, because you just shared a link to a video you didn't know you just thought you just shared it on twitter you shared on twitter oh okay that makes sense yeah no no you weren't on you weren't a user right yeah okay yeah um but that makes sense yeah i think so i shared this thing and the shing this thing on Minds and then it boosted Minds. How many views?

It was just like one of those like crazy levitation videos where it's just like, what the hell is going on? Like this magnet is just levitating. Right, right, right. That sounds like something I would post. Yeah. So like what is like, what's, do you like, the number one post ever on Minds? Like, how many people does it reach? I mean, yeah, we have posts that have hit probably over a million views.

And is it because someone's sharing it on other social media networks like I did? Yep, for sure. Yeah, and that's what's so malicious about these algorithms getting clamped down is that, you know, everyone's in survival mode. Right. And even Twitter doesn't – what we learned from the algorithm is that the links are punished, all links. If you post a link on Twitter, it's not getting elevated in the algorithm. And that is because they want to keep people on Twitter. Really? Yeah. And we always speculated this because you can just tell you post in the reach of posts with links is way down and so we have

historically have obviously used that I mean the problem is that for the way that big tech emerged there was nothing else there was nothing to throttle them right so now they can just throttle competition by not allowing links to outside sites to be elevated. I'm not saying they don't have the right to do it, but I think that it's just not helpful for the open web. I think that people need to be able to post links and not get punished for it. Yeah, for sure. I didn't know that that was even a thing. Yep, that's one of the things we learned. Obviously, they're favoring native video, native content.

They're favoring Twitter Blue, which is, again, some of it makes sense, but, you know, don't piss off the journalists. No, it doesn't make sense. It's not smart. But the link thing is really weird. So I could understand encouraging people to post links, but how would you do that? And then I don't, I mean, not encouraging people to post links, but posting it native. I can understand that.

That you'd want, like, just put the whole article on Twitter or just put this on Twitter. Yeah, and it is a better experience typically to use the native functions of the app. It's smoother. It looks better. But it's so easy to just say, you know, like if I find something interesting on YouTube, oftentimes I will just say, oh, that's a fascinating video. Let me just post that real quick. And then the problem with that sometimes is it posts it with the clickbait headline you know and then people think it's yours that you're saying that you know libs get owned you know if that kind of shit yeah one were to two of the words in here so now I'm like fuck maybe I should like post it but put my own thing on it instead of

right but like you don't want to have you want to share a video from YouTube well you don't want to have to download the video and then upload it like first of all you can't do that you're not supposed to do that right so the only way to do that is to screen capture it yeah or get an app that the ripper downloads yeah yeah so all the sites do that i mean we we when we were first starting we because we have like over a million followers on our Facebook pages, and we would drive crazy traffic back in the day just posting viral videos and cool articles. And, you know, we had journalists on, and we would post their stuff. So much traffic, like, you know, millions and millions of users a month hitting the site.

And then Facebook was just like, and then boom. And, you know, but we always knew that we didn't want to be, you know, it was a nice to have thing. So the reason we do what we do is because we didn't want to be relying on them. But it just goes to show how much power they have. I mean, they can literally wipe out jobs and people's livelihoods and companies just overnight. Yeah.

That's what happens yeah you know if you're not favored and you don't play the algorithm game it's just me it's so sickening and like worrying about the algorithm it's like people are just worship this thing and you kind of have to for survival because you're trying to succeed but then you know what are you really spending your time doing it's an interesting interesting discussion in the stand-up comedy community because a lot of comics are trying to game the algorithm. And you hear these discussions. I was talking to a friend of mine that was telling me about these comics

at the cellar that were having this conversation where they were trying to figure out, like, this is what you do to get the algorithm. This is what you do to go viral. This is what you do. And this comic who's like an established comic was like, this is what you do to get the algorithm this is what you do to go viral this is what you do and this comic who's like an established comics like this is fucking gross I don't want to have any part of this like why just just make the best shit you can make like don't do this and so you then you see people that become sort of captured by this idea like you see there's some guys

that do it where it's like it's an art form like Mr. Beast he's figured out how to do it in a way that's like really kind of fascinating because he really knows what words to use what images to use like and there's a there's an actual science to it oh yeah he is a weird and interesting guy like watching his interview with lex the way that his brain works it's like everything is being processed through how does this play to the algorithm yeah and it was it it slightly unnerved me a little bit i think that you know i he just seemed like i i got this sense he and he seems like a great guy and like super smart and you know obviously but it, and he seems like a great guy and, like, super smart and, you know, obviously. But it seems like he felt like, oh, I don't even necessarily know if this is worth my time to even be doing this interview right now.

Because I don't know how many views it's going to get. And I don't know, like, how it's going to play to the out. Because his time is so, he knows how much he can make every second of the day spending on a video and like so if he's going to go do an interview with another smaller youtuber like that's impacting his his rev right and i just i think that's dangerous to to let that control the content that you create it's backwards like you're you're like the comic was saying it's like you do the thing that you do as as best as you can possibly do it don't make the algorithm like i guess you could if the algorithm is your thing if that's what you want to be the passion of your like i guess maybe some people do love it but yeah it seems a little bit inverted it's a little bit inverted but that's also

you mean he does so much good and it's so interesting to watch him do the thing i mean i i get it because like his content is fantastic so what he's trying to do is maximize the reach of his content and so it's just just clever oh yeah the the blind curing the blind people i mean that was that we need more of that what's wild is he got hate for that right but what was the hate specifically who gives a fuck but it's just funny because you cannot do anything that won't piss someone off because people are engaged in recreational outrage and that's what they're doing and they're trying to figure out an angle oh this rich guy's doing this thing and really shouldn't even be rich no one should be rich and oh you're just trying to do this to make yourself

look good there's all these angles that people will take on things, which is their prerogative. And in a world of free speech, the beauty of what is the nature of the First Amendment is that you should be able to express yourself. And so I fully support those cunts to rag on him. How many blind people have you cured? I mean, they're allowed to have their perspective on it. And, yeah, I mean, obviously that's the take. Like, you're not doing anything, so shut the fuck up. But people who aren't doing anything are also allowed to chime in on stuff. Yeah, yeah.

And they can look petty and they can look foolish or they can have really good points. You know, and that makes you, but that's the beauty of what we have today. There's so much dumb shit involved in social media and there's so much bickering and hate and there's so many people that are addicted to it and it's elevated their anxiety level and they're all on medication now because they're fucking tweeting 12 hours a day. There's a lot of that going on. But if you can figure out how to manage yourself and manage it, now we have access to information at an unprecedented level where like something like the restrict act gets picked apart by brilliant people on Twitter, on Facebook,

on Instagram, on everything. And that's so valuable. So we have to figure out a way to preserve that. And it's, it's the,'s to have this kind of thing today. It has never existed in human history. Never. Not one time has there been a time in human history where a person could tweet about a thing and it could be shared by millions of people. And all of a sudden, the conversation about the subject changes. So you have a public narrative that's being pushed forth by these propagandists. And then someone comes along and says, actually, this is what's really going on. And Twitter will fact check and then people will chime in. And this is a beautiful thing. I mean, it's really an amazing thing. So with all the bad that comes with social media

and all the weird shit that it's doing to kids, which is not good. Yeah, the government is now using it for propaganda purposes as well. Everyone's playing the game now. The government's in it. I mean, the Twitter files by Lee Fang exposed how the government was pushing propaganda. So it's not only about taking down, but also pushing out. Yeah. So they're in it.

They're in it not just that way. I guarantee you they're in it the same way Russia's in it and these Eastern Bloc countries that have troll farms. The idea that the United States is not engaged in something like that seems to me to be pretty ridiculous. I'm sure they are. Oh, yeah, they are. I mean, it's on record now.

When you see, like, someone will post something, and then you'll see someone has a very specific response, and then if you take that specific response and Google it, you'll see hundreds of verbatim exact responses from people that look like real people. You go to their site, there's a picture of them smiling. There might even be a picture of them with some fucking AI generated kids. It's really weird when you look at someone's feet. Like I've, I've looked at someone posting something controversial and then look at someone who

has what seems to be like, well, this is a suspicious take, and then I'll go to their page, and it's all suspicious takes. And occasionally the retweets and the retweets of things that go along with the narrative that they're posting, but it seems like very calculated. And then you realize, like, this person has 30 followers. This is not even a real person. Yeah, human detection is so key now

because there's going to be you know armies of bots ai bots fully autonomous are coming they're mostly here and we just you know they're not going away i mean there's there's going to be and there's going to be mastermind sort of engineers who have these armies that they control and they're it's actually entertaining like there's going to the ai jre you know that's getting hundreds of thousands of views i mean that that's like they're blowing up so like that's a whole thing for that person and there's gonna be value and there's gonna be negative stuff that comes from it but you know i just i just love being able to watch it play out and just everyone's

at war mainstream media at war with independent journalists. I mean, where do you think it goes? Do you ever like try to extrapolate? Do you ever try to like look at it? Like from where we're standing now with the, the chat GPT influence, the AI influence,

all this different stuff, all the deep fakes. Do you ever wonder like where, how does this play out? I think that it's, it's similar to what you were saying before, just like the transparency is just increasing so drastically. Even just thinking about how transparent everything is now compared to 20 years ago and what we're seeing play out real time. I mean, we're seeing Seymour Hersh, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, at war with the New York Times over Nord Stream right now. And that's just happening in front of us. Like the U.S. government is denying that we did Nord Stream.

Seymour Hersh thinks otherwise. And, you know, that is just. What does the New York Times take on? Oh, man. If we can bring this up. I don't want to abuse Jamie's powers, but on Easter, their post of the Nord Stream situation was so egregious. They said, it may be best that the truth is not revealed about this. Why?

I mean, because they probably think nuclear warfare is on the table. I mean, it would be a false flag. Look at this. Suspicions multiply as Nord Stream sabotage remains unsolved. Intelligence leaks surrounding the sabotage of the pipelines have provided more questions than answers. It may be in no one's interest to reveal more. What? That's wild.

I mean, you literally are in the business of revealing more. I mean, that's what you're supposed to be doing. If the United States government is engaging in something that is potentially dangerous to the human civilization because we can start a fucking nuclear war because of this, if you don't report on that, that's going to allow more of that shit to take place. I just I can't believe those words were printed and they're still there. Like, how how can that be where we're at? I you know in terms of where it's going like honestly, I I think that we are on the precipice of a whole new paradigm and level of access to information that is just gonna be like a

Total shift in in humanity. I think we're and i and i mean that with regards to classified information coming out corporate secret information coming out it's it's it's happening i mean it's the twitter what we're seeing from the twitter files which elon just just did he became a whistleblower on himself yeah and i mean the amount of information that that gave us, and they were denying it for years and gaslighting everybody. It's so egregious and dark. It's so dark, and they don't have any punishment on the table, which is really crazy. You know, when you saw Vidya, like, testifying,

and she had to kind of admit things that they've said in the past that were not true. It's really fascinating to watch that because the ramifications of that, it's so dangerous. It's so dangerous to limit the truth and deny the truth. And when you're something like a social media network that is basically the town square for the world, and you're doing that, And you're doing that.

And you're doing that based on your ideology. And you're doing that based on input from intelligence communities. It's social engineering. Yeah. That's what it is. It is their guide. They want to guide us in this particular way. Yeah.

And because they don't think we can handle it. Right. Which maybe we can't. I don't think we can handle it, which maybe we can't. I don't know. I mean, if the truth about all of the deep corruption came out to the extent that is real, I mean, it could cause wars. But at the same time, I actually don't think that. I think that ultimately, you know, the best thing for, you know, America is for transparency to kind of happen and for us to fix it. The problem is the idea is that we're in competition with China and China does not allow that. So we will hinder ourselves and our ability to compete with them. That's the argument.

And it's not a good argument, right? Because this country has a very robust belief in free speech. It's one of the reasons why, you know, dissent is tolerated. It's one of the reasons why we can get away with what we get away with. It's like we have protection in this country and it's really the only country that has that. And the idea that in order to compete with China, we have to become China is fucking gross. It's not true, I don't think. I don't think it is either. I think the competition that we have because of free enterprise, free speech, the reason we have the best businesses in the world is because of that.

It wouldn't be allowed to happen in other countries. They just scoop them up and then distort the vision. Which stifles innovation. It's a national security risk to not be transparent with the American people. You know, all this banning crypto, restrict act, all of this stuff is devastating for innovation. I mean, that's the edge of innovation. Right. I mean, yeah, these lawmakers don't understand the technology.

It's hard to understand. It's hard to understand. They don't even care to understand it. They're not even reading the stuff. They're just saying whatever they think their constituents want to hear or whatever the public narrative is or whatever the government is pushing. And they just sort of like pile on and repeat the propaganda? I mean, rather than banning Bitcoin, the U.S. government should be stockpiling Bitcoin right now.

It is a national security risk to not do that because what if all of the other countries do that? They're all moving. D-dollarization is occurring. Russia, China, Brazil, they're all starting to trade outside of the petrodollar. Yeah. And Bitcoin adoption is occurring in these other countries. I mean, so even as a hedge, you know, our country should be stockpiling.

What if all these other countries and it blows up and it becomes the global reserve currency and then the U.S. is just out of luck because we didn't participate because we were trying to be, you know, too heavy handed with it. It doesn't mean that like the Bitcoin, Bitcoin and the dollar can can coexist and should coexist. Like it's not it's not necessarily one or the other. But I mean, yeah, we just we just need a new wave of politicians who are going to open up. Oh, boy. Is that going to happen? I don't know. I doubt it. I have to take a leak.

Let's come back. So this is kind of wild. Jeremy Corbell just sent me this. He said he asked the project manager for the government's largest UFO program, if our government has in possession, downed flying saucers. Said for the first time being interviewed on camera about this, he answered publicly and the answer was yes.

Oh, shit. What the fuck? Are we back? Yeah, we're back. Here we go. What does that mean? I just sent it to you, Jamie. Let's watch it.

Just see what you think think your take on this because i i'm i know that you're fascinated by the subject too and this is a bizarre subject when it comes to disclosure let's hear this i don't hear anything maybe it's nothing you know but what what do you know about the phenomenon about ufos what can you say for sure maybe it's nothing you know but what do we know about ufos and where does this go as i said what we know is what we gleaned from all of the data that has been discussed. And, you know, that the... UFOs are real. Well, I mean, tell me... Yes, UFOs are technologically sophisticated. They have performance characteristics that are, you know,

the five observables are sort of well documented. But they also have very profound effects on some people, or they have superficial effects on other people, but they do have effects on people. And, you know, the hope is that out of UFO performance can come theoretical physics, which will eventually translate into engineering. Does our government have downed UFOs from unknown origin that they've been trying and are trying to reverse engineer and exploit those technologies to understand the physics, to understand that technology? Do we have that to work with? I can't talk about that, but the answer is yes. So this is from Weaponized, Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp's podcast. Just that answer alone. So who is Kohn? Who is he?

Well, he is, according to Jeremy, he is a program manager for the government's largest UFO program. Which, is that Arrow? I don't know. It might be. Jamie could find that out. Yeah. I mean, the type of whistleblower protections that are available, like, I hope we can expand that so it's not just for UFO related stuff, but also for surveillance to protect the Snowdens and Assanges of the world. Like, we need we need that. And that's why I think that this office is going to be successful.

It's because, like, you can't the people who are doing the black projects need to have reassurance that they're not going to be screwed after coming forward. And so, you know, this this type of legislation is so key. I had an exchange with with Mellon recently and he actually told me to to mention this. So he was saying that Lazar should come forward through Arrow. Because, no. So, because why not? I mean, if he was involved, then he could participate in that organization and put it through, because that's the channel that we have now. The idea that someone is going to come out out and say we have downed UFOs but we can't talk about it what does

that mean do you have something that was unidentified that is from some other state some other government that you found and it's a it's unidentified or are you saying you have something from another planet? There's two very different answers. Right, because the Chinese balloons included in this as well. So if that gets downed, that constitutes crash materials. Right, like what is it? It's unidentified.

What does that mean? But are you saying that you have something that you're back engineering from another country? Or are you saying you have something that is of some completely unknown origin, like outside of this world? Well, I mean, based on the testimony from, you know, whether you're talking about Roswell or particularly the one that I've been just loving deep in the rabbit hole is the Virginia incident. That's in Brazil. Yeah. I mean, that is completely mind blowing. James Fox did an epic documentary about it. Moment of contact. And, you know, the there are military whistleblowers in his documentary, which say that the US flew in and transported. Can't believe I'm about to say this, but bodies and materials. Like, in this documentary, there's aliens running around all over Virginia, Brazil.

And these two sisters and their friends saw it. The doctors saw it. They did x-rays on it. Like, they talked to these doctors. They did x-rays on the bodies. They did x-rays on it like they talked to these doctors and they did x-rays on the body they did x-rays on the bodies and they had to demolish the whole wing of the hospital where it occurred because the smell was so bad that and this is this was reported independently from the guy who saw the crash everyone said that it smelled like ammonia and sulfur, just like, and they couldn't get it out of their system for weeks.

And so, you know, there's record of the hospital, you know, doing this, like this renovation. And I don't know, the speculation was saying that it's like maybe like a skunk or something, like a skunk. Type smell. Yeah. Well, no, but that's like a skunk. You know, animals have reactions when they're in a scary environment and that maybe these aliens have a similar reaction to like a skunk that's what everyone said that the smell was so so horrible that they couldn't get it off their bodies they had to demolish the whole wing of the of the hospital

and like the weird thing about so so Virginia is very similar to Roswell in that like when you go to Roswell, it's like UFOs, you know, it's a tourist attraction. Right. So you go to Virginia, there's like huge UFOs everywhere. It's like the culture at this point because the whole city was basically locked down. They had like hundreds of people all over the city

that saw military checkpoints or know somebody who was directly involved. And like, you know, I approached obviously agnostic on what is happening, but it's like you don't have hundreds of people saying exactly the same thing just out of nowhere. I mean, yeah, it could be some sort of government. But it was like the mayor of our, did you see Moment of Contact? No. Oh, dude, it's so wild. It's so good.

It's so well done. He's such a great filmmaker. Is there any evidence? Yeah, there's lots of evidence i mean like so all of the i mean they're they're hospital records there are um they're you you mean like in terms of physical well james says that there is and that he's you know on top of it to try to find it but i mean evidence is a spectrum so you know physical evidence you know people died um so this guy um sheree's so so they confronted this guy eric lopes who with this this guy, Sharizi, I think Carlos Sharizi.

They basically were police who like captured apparently, allegedly one of these things. And they talked to this guy's sister who died like a week after grabbing this thing. And, you know, she has the death certificate and like the cause of death was unknown. He had this like super weird infection. And so, you know, I would consider a death certificate, you know, based in, you know, he was who he was. He was a state worker and he died for super bizarre reasons. So he touched. He grabbed it.

And then apparently there was like he got a cut or something infection and he died they they confront the other guy who's driving the car eric lopez and he threatened to kill them when they go on his property it's so crazy um but but it's more so like it seeps into the when something seeps into the culture that deeply like it did in roswell and you know like it's in brazil i just i tend to feel like there there's something there because of just how overwhelming you know so many people saw the craft so many people were involved it's just it it's either the most ridiculous hoax of all time, which why would you even like who would do that and why? And so it's like when you're when you talk about Occam's razor, you know, the simplest is the most likely answer.

I feel like Occam's razor in both cases of Roswell and Virginia are. That something actually did happen I mean yeah Roswell has some weird stories about bodies you know bodies and little caskets and stuff like that but it's just like there's so much attention to these things there's so much hype that I always wonder like how much of this is just people feeding off of the narrative and the stories and the fact that this is like an exciting thing to talk about and how much of it is that they want it to be real i don't think any of these people want it to be real i mean half of the witnesses will only um go on video with you know voice, voice modulation and from behind. Isn't that possibly because of ridicule? Yeah, but why?

But they don't even, yeah, because they don't want to, but they don't want to do it. They're just not interested in coming forward. So I feel like if that was, I mean, that certainly is the reason for a lot of people in the UFO world, that they can just milk it and they get speaking gigs and they were contacted and right you know it's a life yeah there's a lot of that obviously and that's something that whenever there's a speculative phenomenon like that it just seems

like you're always going to get a bunch of bullshit artists but you know the types of specific evidence that i'm interested in seeing more of is like, OK, so if the military witness claims that, you know, U.S. Air Force came and transported something like there are probably records somewhere of these flights. So like that. But that's the type of thing that's just inaccessible to us. Yeah. So but, you know, it probably exists somewhere and you just need a mechanism to dig that up. And so hopefully, hopefully Arrow can get down to it, but it's this guy, Sean, Sean Kirkpatrick, I want to say is, is, is running it. But, you know, Kirsten Gillibrand was grilling the, some military officials over the lack of funding. They had requested that it gets far more funding. It's getting like $11 million a year right now, which I think for government ops is somewhat modest for the magnitude of what this really needs to be.

But, you know, yeah, there's clips of her. You know, people in Congress want this. What do you think is going on? I think it's happening. I do. I, you know, I also want it to be happening. And I recognize that urge in myself. But, I mean, I've been, I have no interest in falling for bullshit.

I don't, I mean, I'm looking for holes. I want holes. I don't want to, you know, be, yeah, that would just be embarrassing. It's just, there's so many different cases and there's so and it's becoming legitimized now i mean they changed the whole word to uap because of the stigma so we're seeing official acknowledgement and progress like government is investigating this now they're compiling the information we have the best you know who you've had on the best military witnesses Air Force pilots like these guys are not fucking around they're just not do you I mean I'm certainly you don't think that Ryan Graves or commander

Fravor are full of it no I don't think they are Ryan Graves doesn't have like a physical interaction with them he, what he said was they upgraded their equipment, and then immediately they started seeing things that are defying what they understand to be the laws of physics and what are currently known methods of propulsion and the way these things are able to operate and stay stationary in 120-mile-an-hour winds and things along those lines. He was pretty convinced that this is something outside of our realm of understanding. And then there's the Commander Fravor instance, which is very bizarre

because there's multiple witnesses, video evidence, the equipment that they used to detect it. All of it rings true. to detect it, all of it rings true, it all works correctly, and that this thing was able to go from 50,000 plus feet above sea level to 50 feet in less than a second. They don't know what the fuck it is. They don't know why it behaved the way it behaved, the fact that it was blocking their radar systems, the fact that this thing...

It knew where they were going to go? Yeah, it went to their cat systems, the fact that this thing... It knew where they were going to go. Yeah, it went to their cat point, which is their predetermined location where they were supposed to meet up later. It went immediately to that. The fact that this thing operates with no visible method of propulsion and that it moves at these insane speeds, it would turn human beings into jelly if they were inside of it. It was a biological entity inside of that, which you think like okay are these drones are these like super sophisticated drones that some black ops project's been working on for a long time

melon thinks that it's a post-biological probe um and that the gray you know the traditional kind of gray because that's what they were described almost exactly in Virginia, the drawings of it, the renditions of what the witness saw looks just like the gray, except it was brown with red eyes, which is a little bit strange. You also have to think, like, why would we assume that there's only one version of this thing? If we, you know, look at the cosmos, that this gray alien with the black eyes is the only one that exists.

Wouldn't there be some sort of parallel evolution? And I mean my take on where human beings are headed seems that we're headed into some sort of an integration with technology. It's already integrated into our lives to the point where it's inescapable. And then what if it becomes physically integrated? And what if when we're looking at declining in sperm counts, the human beings are becoming more feeble and weaker. And there's all this weirdness with gender in our culture. And as technology advances, this obsession with gender and the lack of gender and gender being a social construct and the decrease in testosterone and penis sizes. Actually, didn't they say penis sizes are going up? Isn't it kind of weird that the transhuman – you kind of have the transhuman movement but then also the transgender yeah

it's like both trans it's like both sort of this divergence well one of my concern is that it's just like a decaying of biological relevancy and that we're eventually going to succumb to this thing and we're going to become a part of it and that's what we're seeing when we see these essentially genderless muscleless creatures with enormous heads that that becomes what all primates eventually evolve to and that we're thinking of technology like it's not life and that maybe it is life and maybe it's just a different kind of life and we're creating this kind of life and we will eventually be that kind of life. Yeah, I think that within the transhuman path, there's multiple branches. So it's not as if

it's all sort of this degradation. Though I typically, like i'm in no rush to integrate you know neural link but if i had alzheimer's and i was faced with that see that's everyone can be a skeptic and say i would never put that in my body until the moment that you know some incurable disease is suddenly some incurable disease is suddenly fixed by it. Yeah. Well, yeah, paralysis. That's going to be a big one. People that can't use their limbs and also now they can.

And then the thing is it's going to – if it does do what Elon thinks it's going to be able to do, which is radically alter your access to information and change your ability to process information, and it's going to give the people that adopt it a significant advantage. Not just a significant advantage, but an almost insurmountable advantage without it. And then everyone's going to do it, just like how everyone wears clothes. Someone invented clothes because it's way better. You can survive outside, you know, with a fucking down parka on and wool undergarments and you could you could

live in a way that you could never live without it so it's much more sustainable to use clothes so everybody eventually put on clothes i mean clothes are a form of technology we've we were all wearing them you can't go anywhere without seeing people in clothes. And that sort of, like, it is an invention. And we don't think of it that way. We just think of it as clothes. But it's a method that we have devised in order to walk on sharp surfaces and inclement weather. And we protect ourselves physically and biologically from that. If that is just one step in the human's invention that sort of removes us from the biological limitations that we currently have,

that's going to keep going. And it's going to keep going, and the end point seems to be integration. Yeah, clothes as technology. And the end point seems to be integration. Yeah. Clothes as technology. Like that's so important for people to recognize because you just – we don't consider them the same. Right. For the most part. And like – so do you know the first use of the word computer?

Mm-mm. Guess. What year? What do you want me to guess? Guess what year? I you want to guess what year i'm gonna go crazy let's say 1500 pretty good 1613 and it was to refer to a human who conducts computations so we called a human was the first use of a word computer. Somebody who's like just doing math. And then it just escaped from there. Yeah.

So we are. And, you know, there's going to be a fork in the road where, see, like, I just my brain that can just like switch me off that I can at least unleash some computer scientist on to audit it, make sure like, okay, is this going to do anything to me? I mean, that's the thought process that I go through when I ask like, would I integrate? I would probably only do it if I had to. Do you think there's going to come a time when you have to? Or someone of your generation will have to? Well, have to. It better not be have to.

I want to say like even physically forced, but in order to compete and to exist. Like phones. You don't have to have a phone. You don't have to have a phone. You could be that dude who lives in the woods and you know chops down trees but do you think that that is going to be the same decision i feel like a lot more people are going to resist biological integration even though phones you know they're on our bodies they may they are biological extensions sort of but you know they're actually having biological impact you know your

foot your leg vibrates like there's definitely energy exchange but i don't know i mean i i don't envision myself just like buckling to some cultural trend i don't think it's necessarily just a cultural trend i mean you really if you want to compete in the workforce and you don't have a smartphone, you're at a significant disadvantage. But you don't have to physically integrate to get access to that. Well, yeah, you probably do to a certain degree if you're going to be able to do the stuff that Neuralink is potentially capable of. But like, yeah. I mean, but are you saying that you would because of that competition? I'm not saying that I would.

I'm saying that everybody would. I think if it gets to a certain point. Look, it took a while before cell phones became basically universal and across all cultures. I mean, sure, you can go to some hunter-gatherer tribes and they don't have cell phones. But you don't want to live like that. But it's so much easier to make the decision to get a cell phone than get an operation. Yeah, but what if it becomes a thing that becomes very easy to acquire? An injection?

The other thing is it's also there's a haves and have-not aspect to it. There's a haves and have not aspect to it because the people that are early adopters, if it is effective and it does work, you will have a massive advantage over everyone else. If it really does change the way your mind is able to access information and the way your mind is able to process things. Imagine having the computational power and the access to information that ChatGPT has, but instantaneously in your mind. That seems to me where it's all headed. And it just doesn't seem like it's going to stop. It seems like everything keeps moving in this general direction of integration. Agreed. Yeah, I don't think it's stoppable at all. And it's more so how do we guide it so that it isn't just total dystopia? Because there are different versions of this technology and similar to this whole issue with

like, you know, freedom based social media versus, you know, big tech, like it's the same dichotomy. You know, there will be super advanced transhuman technology where the creators of it actually want to be as ethical as possible. There's already those AI camps that exist. And so if the AI is getting integrated with the hardware that's coming in, then, you know, we just need to be cognizant of that distinction because there's no, we don't want to stop it. of that distinction because there's no we don't want to stop it i mean is that it's it's amazing what's happening there was a instance with chat gpt where a dog this guy his dog was dying and he was like what what am i going to do the doctor's telling me there's nothing we can do he takes the blood test from the doctor he's like give me the blood results feeds the specific

results into chat gpt and asks it some questions about like what could possibly be going wrong here you know give me some give me something to work with it it gives him a couple of options he then takes that back to the doctor and they found it and the dog's fine the dog was gonna die the dog was it was anemic so what was wrong i don't remember all of all of the specifics dog was, it was anemic. So what was wrong? I don't remember all of, all of the specifics, but it was, it was, and he was in, the dog was anemic and there was some, something, but he, he successfully used it to help the doctor diagnose and it actually fixed the dog. So, you know, at this point this point I mean specifically with medical

applications so here it is started dog in the proper treatment she's made almost a full recovery now note that both of these diseases are very common babe seous is the number one tick-borne disease I was a tick-borne disease and I am H a is common complication of it, especially for this breed. So that looks like an Australian Shepherd, I think. I think, I'm not sure. It says, I don't know why the first vet

couldn't make the correct diagnosis, either incompetence or poor management. GPT-3.5 couldn't place the proper diagnosis, but GPT-4 was smart enough to do it. I can't imagine what medical diagnostics will look like 20 years from now. Wow. Will you say that? Pull that a little higher up there.

The most impressive part was how well it read and interpreted the blood test results. It simply transcribed the CBC test values from a piece of paper, and it gave step-by-step explanation and interpretation along with the reference ranges, which I confirmed all correct. Wow. That's pretty wild. That's pretty wild. So even as a supplemental tool for doctors to be referring to when they're coming up with their at it. And they have like 15 people coming to their office and everybody's got five minutes and, you know, then they have student loans to pay and insurance to pay. And all they have are eyeballs. They have human eyeballs. And also all they have is their, what they've absorbed in terms of the amount of research and information they have. And that varies widely between the doctors because some doctors are more studied and some

aren't and some are specialists and some aren't. And some have, you know, done an incredible amount of work on certain subjects and some of them are completely ignorant of it. You ever try to talk to a general practitioner about vitamins? They don't. They all, you don't need vitamins, you just need a well-balanced diet. And you look at this fat guy who's telling you this, you're like, the fuck do you know? You don't. You don't. I mean, you're literally talking to a person that hasn't had an education in nutrition. And they're telling people. I've had conversations with doctors like that.

And I'm like, well, that's pretty ridiculous. What you're saying is patently untrue. Yeah. I mean, it's going to potentially become a liability to go with the human. potentially become a liability for to go with the human because you know how if you're if you're if you're studying an mri or something just with your human eyeballs you know ai can find the most minute little trace of something that you could so easily miss yeah and so that's just I mean that's going to be a revolution for lifespan Is ChatGPT4 now available to anyone? You have to pay

You have to pay but you can pay and get access to it It's like 20 bucks a month But for anyone? Yep They did remove some abilities, features, upgrades recently, it got too busy Oh I see

I don't know what that means and how they can do that or... Processing. Turning it on and off. How many people are using it? You do have... I mean, there's occasional just, like, total garbage.

And it's so confidently spit out, which you just really... It's why it's not ready for primetime, but... What kind? It will, like... I don't know.

I asked it about me just to see what it would come up with and it just came up with this like right wing piece of shit problematic anti-american i mean communist it said that i was like founder of it said a lot of 90 correct but then it said that i was with this other company that i just never even heard of is that because it's getting the information from websites that are incorrectly saying these things? We don't know. So the system could be gamed in that way. You could put up some sort of like factchecker.org bullshit website where you put out a bunch of propaganda and it sucks that information off the web and uses it at least to flavor an answer. Yeah, that's a great point.

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if that becomes much more of a problem. And that's why we need to know what are the data sets that these tools are scooping from. It's like, so you're scanning the whole web for all the world's data and images and use of language, but you're pulling in from, you know, misinformation.com. Like, why are you using that? And we don't know what they're using. Right. So.

Well, that's probably going to be better with chat GPT 4.5. Right. So what you're dealing with is like a constant improvement upon this resource that has in a relatively short period of time revolutionized the way people get access to answers so the word that is an interesting word which is going to become more talked about is alignment have you heard this no so alignment is the phrase used in in ai research to kind of understand how aligned this technology is with humanity. So,

you know, and it's going to be abused for the same way that we see chat GPT becoming biased already. I mean, you can ask it to make a joke about... I took this screenshot off of a chat GPT ad for GPT-4 ad for safer and more a lot

aligned with oh really yeah it's all about a line announcing chat GPT for a large multi-modal model with our best ever results on capabilities and alignment yeah what is that? So it sounds very similar to creating. I think there's validity to it. We need to be concerned about alignment. We need to be concerned, how is this technology helping or hurting humanity?

However, the problem is that different people have very different perceptions of what is good and what is bad for humanity. So the people at OpenAI are telling it not to make a joke about Biden, but make a joke about Trump. They're already kind of creating these rule sets of like, what is acceptable and what's not acceptable. You know, Elon comes out, you know, we need truth GPT, the fully uncensored version, which is going to come out. And then that's going to be chaos because, you know, you'd be able to, how do I, you know, create this virus? Right.

How do I make a bomb? Yeah. Yeah. Granted, you can already do that in searching. Right. So, you know, ultimately models are going to become more personalized. You would hope that you would have the ability to control that yourself. How censored of a version do I want?

Do I want the safer version? But, you know. And then Max Tegmark and his institute and Elon signed it, came out with this whole thing to pause AI. Do you see that? Yes. Which is surprising, but also, you know, they're concerned, rightfully. We don't know because it's becoming more autonomous and it's potentially, yeah. So here's something that Jamie just pulled up.

Elon Musk reportedly purchases thousands of gpus for generative ai project at twitter reports say it's a commitment to ai despite signing cautionary ai pause letter wow i don't know exactly what that means like why yeah so basically they're pursuing their own because this so so there's some drama involved with Elon and OpenAI because he put $100 million into the original. And then – so they were a nonprofit in their first years. And then they realized, okay, we need more money. We need supercomputers. So this is not going to be a cheap endeavor.

We need billions of dollars. need supercomputers. So, you know, this is not going to be a cheap endeavor. We need, you know, billions of dollars. And so they, now they have a sort of hybrid model where there's a for-profit entity and a nonprofit and they sort of help each other. And I think there was a semaphore article on Elon's trying to take over OpenAI, which I'm not going to say that it's like the full truth of it. I think we don't know. But so Altman and Elon were working together early on. And then Elon, I think, tried to like take over. Not I don't even know if it was a hostile takeover, but wanted to lead the effort. And it didn't work.

People didn't want it to happen. And so, you know, they went off and did their thing. And then Elon left. And I think that, you know, they went off and did their thing and then Elon left. And I think that, you know, that must be frustrating to him. He put a hundred million in and they, to, to, to do open AI, which you would assume means it's going to be open source and ethical. Yeah. And then they keep on going, they become the biggest app in the world. And, you know, you know the original investors are kind of like okay right um you know that's not cool and so you know i'm you know i should twitter should start their own they have the some of the best training data in the world it's just the the most accurate real-time

language use in humanity so they're probably going to come out with something cool and then you've got a bunch of other folks there's's an open alternative chat GPT called Colossal, which is decent. But they're still reliant on some small parts of chat GPT. But, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, with what we're seeing, there's more than meets the eye. There's a lot of business drama happening behind the scenes, you with the subsect stuff with the open ai stuff and yeah you know i think that i i just don't buy into the whole secrecy is going to save us mentality and i don't i don't see open ai like saying okay at this point we now believe this to be safe enough to release. I just think that they're going to keep hoarding. And when really they should give us a path to when it's, if we're going to be relying

on them, they're getting so powerful so fast. They need to give us a path to when it's going to be transparent. And also why are you doing all this bias? And I think there should be rev share baked in for humanity. Like, why not have, rather than have the government fund UBI, why not have the, you know, billion dollar tech companies that are taking everybody's data, give everybody a little rev share on it. If they're using your data and it's actually being processed and used on a regular basis, give everybody a little bit. You can still be rich. You can still become a huge company. That's your mindset.

Yeah. But to be honest, it's not just me. That is what is going to be smart for them. Elon even is doing monetization on Twitter. They're working on it. They're trying to do encrypted messages apparently you know ultimately what's best for the the community is I think better for the corporation long term unless they want to fight this war which they're going to and maybe they do but fight this war this war for you know to be the top ai yeah i'm sure that's what they're doing yeah i mean it kind of makes sense but it's a very good point like where are you getting the

data that's allowing you to do this it's it's basically everyone's data everyone's data yeah it's just the internet yeah and who owns the internet no one knows because the internet is an open source decentralized protocol but it seems to me me like this is the first rumblings of cyborgs. This is the first steps that is going to force our integration. Because if this does become something you can access instantaneously in your mind with something that you put on your head or something you put in your head, I don't see people not taking that what does that look like in your in your visual system so you so you

integrate neural link it's it's in there and because we kind of have like you know our internal I mine's I I don't know what it is what what we whatever it is what we see when we dream, it's something. Our eyes aren't open, but we're seeing. Right. But what would that even feel like to search the internet through your brain? Like, are you seeing something? Do you feel it?

I think there's probably going to be multiple versions of it. It's going to get better and better, which is why you, A, don't want to be an early adopter, but maybe you do because those are the people that are going to be able to get access to the second version of this and the third. And it's going to become progressively more and more powerful. I really wonder, like when we're talking about aliens, we're talking about these creatures, maybe that's a natural course of progression for intelligent life. That intelligent life eventually realizes there's limits to biological evolution. But technology allows you to jumpstart and bypass all those limitations radically, quickly, where the versions that are created by human beings, once AI is able to take over and make better versions of it, it's going to make a better version of itself. It's going to continue to evolve to the point where,

I mean, you really become something that's completely different than a human being. Yeah, and it's a question of, you know, do I want to live? You know, that's the question that we're going to get faced with. Like, do you want to keep living or do I want to live you know that that's the question that we're gonna get faced with like do you want to keep living or do you want to die and you got a pick if you're gonna integrate or not if you want to live because our our bodies just can't handle it do you want to be in a Norman Rockwell painting or do you want to be in a Stanley Kubrick movie yeah how do you want to live and like for what you were saying about, you know, what will, where is the disclosure process taking us?

Like I think that there is real possibility for social unrest and the global economy. This is most likely the reason that they're taking their time letting information out because religion, the global energy economy. I mean, if these things are real and they're powered by some, you know, propulsion system with a new form of energy that is, you know, near limitless or whatever it is, then what does that do for the economy? Suddenly all the top largest energy companies in the world are just irrelevant. Right. And then the religion, the religious stuff is like a whole other level of the equation.

But like people, people will have concern. And they should. And they should. Because we might not be people very much longer. But there's a cool book called A.D. After Disclosure, which kind of does a thought experiment about what would happen. So it's a fiction book about what happens if the government comes out and has an official press conference and tells us what's going on. And it's cool cool it's by a really smart researcher how's it play out I didn't read it but there but I

love Richard Dolan who wrote it and I've watched like hundreds of hours of his of his podcast he's he's a great researcher I need to to read it. Maybe I'll listen to it. Yeah. If you had to speculate as to, like, imagine if there is some large worldwide wholesale disclosure of information, like if invasion is imminent or some sort of undeniable event takes place how do you think that plays out but the weird thing is is that if Virginia happened mm-hmm if you're living there and you're seeing that like this is it right but that's a crash right what if it's a landing right like on the White House lawn. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, they have buzzed the White House. Yeah, in the 50s. In the 50s. Yeah. Yeah. And so, but yeah, there's something going on where they're, you know, in some senses being bold, but they're not being bold enough that it for some reason is able to take hold. that it, for some reason, is able to take hold and just all of human society says, okay, we can't not talk about this anymore

because what'll happen now is there'll be all these, you know, New York Times article, Pentagon leaks, and it's like, whoa, can we, like, stop and talk about that for five minutes before we just go back to life? Right. And we just keep going back to life and forgetting about that

well don't you think there's like an information overlord overrule um overwhelming aspect to this that it's just overload of data and you just constantly inundated by new stories and new things and there's so much to talk about and think about that it's very difficult for one thing to stick unless it's like a nonsense thing that people get excited about, you know, like this Bud Light nonsense. Like, you know, Dylan Mulvaney is the spokesperson for Bud Light and now people are shooting Bud Light. And, you know, my take on it has been like, yeah, I think that person is a silly person and a tension whore and a fucking weird person to be a cultural lightning rod. They're obviously just a narcissist. But why aren't you freaking out about all these other things that are happening?

Why are you not freaking out about the Restrict Act? Why are you not freaking out about what's happening with ChatGPT? Why is everybody freaking out about this dumb thing with Bud Light? Yeah. There, I mean, there has to be room for paying attention to just silly, crazy drama.

And we're always going to, that it's, it's good to a degree. Why is that primary? I don't know. Do you think it's primary? Yeah. Yeah,

I do. I think there's way more people concerned with Bud Light than they are with the restrict act. You have to like force that into people's minds. I think there's a certain percentage of our population where their minds just gloss over. Like when you start talking about open source and you start to – Exactly. A lot of people are just like –

They don't have whatever it is, the software to handle that. Yeah. I don't know i i i think it's it's coming and we just need to we need to stay on it i mean we what else matters like i don't want to die without knowing because you think like if that information information exists and we're living in a world right now where there are people in, you know, D.C. or, you know, elite figures in the government who do. It's basically multiple civilizations coexisting. There's people with access. Because when you digest certain new breakthrough information, which, you know, humanity has done repeatedly, I think that changes who we are. It changes how we interface with the world.

It changes all of the decisions that we make. And so if this is – we know that we're living in this almost like information caste system where there are people with access and people without. system where there are people with access and people without. And so that does exist, whether that includes actual aliens, I don't know, but it exists for all kinds of issues that absolutely matter to our existence. Could be dealing with energy technology, could be dealing with energy technology, could be dealing with corruption, major geopolitical events that would totally change the trajectory of the world. So I'm just like not comfortable not knowing and having these people that I don't know who they are and why do they get to know. It's not cool.

No, it's not. But it's kind of, that's always been the story that has taken place. That was the, I'm sure you're aware of the Jackie Gleason story. Right. Jackie Gleason was friends with Nixon. They're drinking and Nixon says, hey, you want to see some fucking crazy shit? friends with Nixon. They're drinking. And Nixon says, hey, you want to see some fucking crazy shit? And he takes him to whatever Air Force base where they have a downed UFO. And he has access to see this. And he sees alien bodies. And that this is something that the government has always had. And they've had this thing. And Gleeson, you know, there's speculation as to whether or not he really did

have that conversation with Nixon but there's no speculation to the fact that he built a fucking house that looked like a UFO after that happened and that house is you know you look at it looks like a flying saucer house yeah and we just don't I mean the the laws that we need are laws for more information. What do you think would happen if human beings absolutely knew that we do have UFOs from another world, that we're back engineering and we're trying to figure it out, that we have been in contact with alien civilizations, we are being monitored? You know, the UFO folklore is, is of course that once we drop the bombs that all of a sudden they start showing up which totally makes sense like okay there's a

detection that these people uh these these beings on this planet they've entered into this new phase of understanding of technology and they can harness the atom and they use it to of course they use it as a bomb now they're using it as nuclear power. They're using it in all these different ways. And we have to make sure that they safely transition to the next stage of evolution without complete total destruction, which would send them back to, at the very least, the Stone Age. own age. And then you're dealing with a, you know, tens of thousands of years of, you know, reinventing everything and getting back to the state where they were at now and give them another shot at doing it again. So maybe that's why they showed up. And maybe that's why they're monitoring us. And that's why they're here. That's a bridge. And they're just here to make sure that we don't

fuck everything up. So that this is a very delicate and precarious process that exists with all intelligent life forms and all throughout the universe and that we're at a stage just like um you know there's there's speculation and there's people openly discussing that some primates lower prim primates, have entered into the Stone Age. They're using tools, they're using things, and this is very similar to what they think happened to human beings. And that over the course of millions of years, they'll eventually become like us. And that this is just a natural process that exists where intelligent life forms learn things slowly at first first and then eventually

incredibly rapidly, which is what we're seeing now with AI. It's totally logical. I think that- Totally logical. And in the way that we interface with species below us is, you know, sometimes we're fascinated by them and want to learn about them and study, but other times we're like, well, a squirrel. Okay. Right.

Exactly. And so it's kind of both of those things. Like, you know, people polarize the conversation. They say, oh, they'd never be interested in us. That's stupid. Of course they would be.

Yeah, that's Neil deGrasse Tyson's take. Just like we are in everything. Of course. But at the same time, like, they probably also have other cooler things to pay attention to. Maybe there's other way cooler species than us to pay attention to. I'm sure there are but but this is

the transition so if if I was an alien life form it's superior intelligence from some other galaxy or some other part of the universe I would 100% be concentrating on integrating this new species into the galactic network if there is one you know and then you know helping them get to this next stage because maybe i mean maybe life is fairly rare maybe intelligent life is much more rare and maybe this thing that we're we're seeing is like these rare nuggets of some very precious thing that exists in the universe. And so they seek it out and they recognize that this is the thing that brings them to the ultimate next stage. Yeah, it's rare, but also potentially fundamental.

Potentially fundamental. Right. So basically consciousness as the core of all things, all matter. You know, that guy you had on, I actually connected with at one point, Philip Goth. Mm-hmm. He's really interesting. He's a panpsychist. Yes. And those, you know, actually Annika Harris, Sam Harris's wife, wrote a cool book, which I also haven't read, but I know about it.

It's called Conscious, and it's all about panpsychism, which is cool coming from her because she obviously is rigorous. If you're going to be married to Sam Harris, you probably need to not be full of woo. And so she kind of explored, and I listened to some podcasts with her explaining it. And so this is a real thing that's getting taken seriously. It's not necessarily like physically provable, but like you can't actually deny that it's a possibility that consciousness is sort of the engine of everything. that consciousness is sort of the engine of everything. So philosophically, when you're arguing against materialism versus fundamental consciousness, the materialists, they kind of arbitrarily try to point

to when consciousness emerges. It's like, but how can you pick that point? Because if all matter is evolving and eventually becoming complex enough to have conscious properties, but still, show me the exact time when you consider something conscious. Because there's plants, there's all kinds of microbes. You just keep going back is it when it's reactionary to its environment and and trying to preserve its own life or is it when it's interactive and conscious to the point where it's communicating is that when we decide that it's conscious is it when it's able to manipulate its environment like we are i mean do we we obviously prioritize our consciousness above orcas because

we we what we're doing to orcas is fucking horrific and accepted in some strange way that you know you can go to sea world and watch something that might be as smart as us do tricks for fish you know like why are we willing to do that that's clearly a conscious thing that has a language and yet we're like yeah yeah stay in the pool bitch you know it's it's weird what we do and what we prioritize as consciousness we we seem to have like a caste system of our own where we decide that we only favor things that are able to manipulate their environment. Yeah. I mean, but that's way beyond, I think, you know, orcas.

Like that's so maybe to other people they don't consider orcas conscious, but I feel like that's like a certain type of person that really hasn't looked into this at all. Yeah, they're clearly conscious. They're clearly conscious. And then, I mean, but going back to microbe, I mean, I would say that a microbe is obviously conscious. I mean, like, but that's just where I'm at in the conversation. Maybe viruses are conscious as well. Right. I mean, there's obviously evolution in viruses.

It's all just decreasing. It's very rapid. You know, look what we saw in terms of variants from COVID. You know, look, look what we saw in terms of variants from COVID, like these vaccine resistant variants that popped up like almost instantaneously. You know, that these viruses recognize where immunity is and they figure out a way to move around that immunity and become more contagious. There's also, you know, the words we use matter, like life and conscious are a little bit different, you know, because something would be considered alive probably earlier than most people would consider conscious. So some of the panpsychists like to talk about experience. You know, is the matter having any sort of an experience? And sometimes that's a little bit more digestible for people.

Well, isn't that just an evolved level of consciousness? You know, we have single-celled organisms. We consider them alive. Yeah. But they're not multicellular organisms. I mean, I tend to lean towards it being fundamental just because I can't place a spot on the emergent continuum. Like, it's just too random. I'm not going to pick.

You're not going to make me pick. There's not a light bulb that goes off. Right. There's not like a switch that gets hit or, you know, a turkey tester that pops out. Boink. You know, like, oh, it's ready. Right. Yeah. a turkey tester to pops out, boink, you know, like, oh, it's ready.

Right. Yeah. And it's the same thing when we look at, you know, a human being born and, like, being in the womb. Like, you know, people arbitrarily saying, oh, this moment, that, stop. Right, right. How do you know? You don't know. We're not going to play this, like, number of days game.

Right. Like, when does this soul enter into the fetus? And that's why Chris Rock and Louie also has a great bit about that where it's just like, oh, you know, you should be able to kill. You know, like kill it. But you're killing. Right. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Bill Burr has a great bit about that as well. Like I support you're right, but I also think you're killing a baby.

Yeah, Bill Burr has a great bit about that as well. Like, I support your right, but I also think you're killing a baby. And that's, you would think that that just feels like a more healthy place to be having the conversation. Well, it's just very uncomfortable for people. Right. Especially people that support a woman's right to choose. They don't want to think of it that way. But it's undeniable. It's undeniable. You know, I had a conversation with someone online once a long time where Richard Dawkins was saying that there's no difference between a human fetus and a pig fetus. I'm like, what are you talking about? That's a ridiculous way to look at it because a human fetus has the potential to become a human being. That could be your neighbor. It could be your best friend. It's going to turn into a person. If someone doesn't intervene or if it doesn't die, it's going to become a person.

Pig fetus is going to become a pig. They're very different things. You could argue that a pig is intelligent because they are. They're calculated. They do things. They're smart. They're smarter than dogs. Is your dog conscious? I think my dog's conscious. I have conversations with him. He knows when it's time to eat. He knows what I'm saying when I ask him if he wants to play. He knows he's fucking conscious. He's just not at the level that a human being is. But that's also because he doesn't have the hardware. The pro-life, pro-choice debate, it just feels so shallow, similar to the climate change debate, where it's like, obviously, human life is precious and we should preserve it as much as is humanly possible. And guess what? Yes, if you choose to have an abortion, yeah, it's killing something. You're killing something. You know, whether or not people should have the legal right to do that in certain circumstances, I'm not someone to answer that. But like it would be so much more of a healthy conversation if we could agree at least on what we're talking about.

Right. Which seems that people are trying to deny that it's life, which is not reality. And with climate change, it's like who cares if it's global warming, blah, blah, blah. Do you think pollution is good right right if if if pollution if we all agree pollution is bad right then we're getting the outcome that we want which is less pollution yes but we're not worrying about is that like based on you know millions of years like who knows like right so it's like i feel like some of these debates are just arguing about the wrong things. And it's just we need to reset some of these conversations to just find the place where we can agree on one thing and then make progress from there.

Because I think that a lot of people who are who are pro abortion, like like Louie and Chris Rock, who made those bits, which are, you know, kind of crude bits. But they're at least honestly acknowledging what's going on yes yeah but that's the purpose that humor does serve in those ways is it makes you laugh at something that is kind of like you leave there going how's this got a fucking good point it was funny but there's actually there's some truth in that and if if it didn't have truth in it no one would be laughing and that's the test of it all it's like it does it resonate with that part of your mind that recognizes these inconsistencies and there's a there's also another problem with both the pro-life pro-choice and also the climate argument that they become embedded in ideologies so they

become these dogmatic things that you cannot question. If you are a part of this group and you want to be accepted by this group, there's essentially two groups. There's one group that believes in guns, but also believes that babies are sacred. It's like very strange. They're in general pro-military and pro-killing bad people, but also they think all life is precious. Protect babies with guns. It's fucking wild, but it's also if you don't give up your gun, people with guns will take your guns, and they'll have all the guns to make sure that you don't have guns. And it's just like Jesus Christ. It is a thought virus cult to think that you have to have your identity sort of align with this cluster of beliefs.

Everything intersects. And so like I need to do that. I honestly feel bad for people who find themselves in that spot. Well, it's brilliant people. This is the problem. Thomas Sowell had a great point about that, that intellectuals will oftentimes compartmentalize and ignore evidence. We're talking about brilliant people that we rely on to be the voice of reason or the voice of intelligence and fact when it comes to certain particular arguments that they'll align with only the facts that support their case or support their position. And if it doesn't support their position, they'll conveniently ignore it. And we see that with almost everything. We saw that

very clearly with the discussion about COVID and whether or not metabolic health is important and whether or not other treatments are important and whether or not other treatments are important or whether or not you should accept the narrative that there's one binary argument and that there's one answer and that this is the only answer to solve this problem. And clearly that's not the case and not true. It was represented across so many different demographics, so many people that were similar but did different things, had better outcomes. So there's also this weird thing that human beings almost automatically do is they try to find the most convenient answer and the answer that supports their pre-existing conditions or their pre-existing positions rather. Yeah. It's weird how COVID seems far away now, but like for history books are going

to look at that as, you know, the, the largest scale psychological experiment on humanity that's ever occurred. I mean, literally billions of people behaving. I mean, you know, it used to be like Stanford prison experiment, you know, the elevator experiment, you know, that one where like people, everyone in the elevator is turned the opposite way of the door. And then people who walk in just turn and face the other wall, just because everybody else in the elevator is doing it. I mean, billions of people doing that type of behavior now. Yeah, it's a problem with human beings that we're tribal. And we want the respect and the acceptance of our tribe.

And if our tribe is, even if it's illogical, is heavily leaning towards one position, we feel absolutely compelled to do what the tribe is doing. And we support each other. We talk about it. We discuss it. And we find rationalizations. It's hard, though, because you can't know everything and you want to be able to trust experts and defer to scientific consensus, which isn't even really – shouldn't be a thing. Well, no, it's not even scientific consensus. It's scientific consensus along people that are willing to accept the proposed narrative

by these very corrupt organizations that you could follow a very clear paper trail of money and influence that led them to these decisions. Like the lab leak hypothesis is one of the best examples of that, where there's literal emails, actual emails that show people thinking that it came from a lab and then there is discussion with other people that don't think it came from the lab. And then there's money that gets exchanged where they get these grants and they've changed their position. where they get these grants and they've changed their position. And it's very weird. And no one is discussing it in any mainstream source where they're saying,

hey, we've got a real fucking problem with this, and this is the problem, this is how it happened. It takes independent journalists and people that are very brave that get censored, they get removed from YouTube, they get banned from Twitter, and these are the people that came out and had a problem with this. And a lot of them have rock solid credentials. A lot of them are established doctors and scientists, and they're saying, here's the problems and why aren't we addressing these problems? And these people are getting these pejoratives labeled on them, like they're anti-vaxxers,

they're conspiracy theorists, they're fools. You know, it's very strange. But we did watch it. We did witness it. And some people learned from it. And some people developed a new healthy sense of skepticism about public narratives. And other people are just, they're still, they have their heels dug in. Why don't you believe in science? Like what science are you, what are you talking about science is data i don't believe in data are you looking at all the data because i

bet you aren't let's discuss some of that data and then when you see the panic on their face when they they're forced to discuss this data and they're forced to discuss like these inconvenient realities it's fucking fascinating yeah and it's just another example of the lack of access to information because China is just keeping it all super tight. Because obviously if the pandemic spawned from them, that's going to have geopolitical consequences. But it's a perfect example. Like that just ripped through this planet and we don't know what happened. And there are people who know more than we know about what happened and we're, you know,

but, but they, you know, probably national security reasons from all governments on lock. We got to, we can't let this out because you know, it could cause unrest or, well,

how about that fucking New York Times article about Nord Stream? It's the same attitude. Like, maybe it's best that we don't know. Did you see the clip of Biden saying that, oh, we will put an end to Nord Stream? I did not. Oh, my God. So this is in the original Seymour Hersh article, you know, basically how the U.S. destroyed Nord Stream. And there's a clip of Biden pre-Nord Stream saying it will be, you know, we're going to put an end to Nord Stream.

That guy must be such a fucking nightmare to those people because he's so compromised, you know, his mind. A nightmare to his team? Yeah, to the people that don't want that out there. Oh, right. Because he's just he's so mentally compromised. Like he. Right. You can't trust him. He gets in front of a microphone. Let's hear what he says. Russia invades. That means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.

Jesus Christ. How will you do that exactly, since the project and control of the project is within germany's control we will uh i promise you we'll be able to do it oh my god what a fucking nightmare he must be and you know for from the new york times end of things like they're scared people are scared because if it i mean that is an act of war and But it seems like what Seymour Hersh said seems to be true. I mean he has all the documentation. He knows what happened, when it happened, who did it.

And if he's – he's Seymour Hersh. He's not a fucking moron. He's not just some random person. He's an 80-plus-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He's one of the best journalists that's ever existed. Exactly. And for this, I mean, it's basically the most recent false flag that has occurred, if it's true. Because that was providing energy to Europe. I mean, that had serious effects on how much people were paying for energy. Serious effects.

Serious effects. Yeah. So it's scary. Is it completely destroyed? Yeah. So it's no longer providing. Right. That was the second pipeline, I think.

Right. There was two. There's another one that still does. Two. Then what I heard recently was that Saudi Arabia is buying Russia's oil and then distributing it to Europe. Oh, great. So they bypassed it. Right.

Right. Smart of Saudi Arabia. I mean, when you have a president that's saying something like that, then it actually happens. And he's like, we don't have anything but this is actually one of the things that makes me not believe in aliens um is that unless the current administration is just so in the dark about what is going on on our planet like i would think that if the government was actually in on this and aware they wouldn't be going around blowing up pipelines like wouldn't the wouldn't uh government relationships with aliens mean that like they have some semblance of understanding of um how to how to behave but do you think that that's the level of understanding and information exchange they have

or do you think it's more like chimpanzees in the Congo being aware of researchers watching them? Because I would imagine it's more like that. But even still, that is so – if they know – I doubt Biden has been clued in if it is real. About UFOs? About UFOs. Well, it seems that Clinton and at least Obama that was – and Trump, even Trump talked about it. They tried, but it seems like they failed. Based on, yeah, I think.

Trump said that he knows some things, but he can't talk about them. Yeah. And then famously, like Obama. And, you know, this is the one thing that is still funny about Jimmy Kimmel, which his level of funniness has degraded. But he grilled Obama and Hillary Clinton about UFOs, which is just a great thing to do, which we can all agree on. But don't you think that that was previously discussed? Because when you do one of those shows, they break down what you're going to talk about. Yeah, but I mean, why would they agree to it?

Because they have a patented way of dismissing it and answer. But Obama said, like, I cannot reveal more. I don't know. I think that they're aware. Based on their behavior, it seems they're aware and interested in the subject. You know, you've got Hillary walking around holding the UFO book, which we have on camera. What UFO book, which we have on camera with Podesta.

There was one, she was photographed holding a well-known book about UFOs. And, you know, because Podesta also has an interest in it. But I mean, yeah, but to get back to would Biden engage, would we be engaging in all this warfare if we knew aliens were kind of observing us right it just seems it doesn't make sense i i mean it's not that it needs to make sense but if i were in office and i knew that you know there were these craft that like were watching us we didn't really know what was going on like i would be focusing on that and trying to like clean up, you know, make nukes safer, clean up the planet, like do things that and even go talk to Putin and Xi about what's going on. Yeah, but it doesn't seem like you're ever going to stop this control of natural resources and this this grasp of power that human beings have. And if you're engaged in that, and that's a gigantic part of the economy of international relations, why wouldn't they continue business as usual,

even with the knowledge that UFOs exist? I feel like it's a risk. It would be a risk to our relationship with the ETs. What if we don't have a real relationship? Well, but even if we don't, if we, if the behavior that we're exhibiting is just reckless, blowing each other up, destroying the planet, that's going to not make us look good to them. In which case, maybe they would start messing with us. I don't know. It just seems like it doesn't, if there's a higher level of like beings that are higher than us i would not be risking playing these earthly games right but how do you stop this if you if the whole purpose of this like this war machine is this constant try attempt to control resources and consolidation of power which it

seems to be. This is the game that they're playing no matter what, and there's a lot of money involved in this game, and there's a lot of influence in this game. This is the game that the United States plays. But no matter what, unless... They're going to stop playing this game because there's a space daddy out there watching us?

I think that the space daddy is potentially the one thing that could make us stop. But it hasn't. Right. Which makes me think that there is no Space Daddy. It makes me think they don't have a relationship with Space Daddy. This is what I think. I think they're just doing what they've always done and maybe

in relation they're just watching all this shit go on and they don't have real answers. I think they're risking our planet by, you know, if aliens were going to get hostile, I feel like they would much more likely get hostile to humans who could potentially fly out into the universe with nukes and, you know, spread our devastation. But that's very far in the future. We don't really have that capability right now. I would imagine that if they're watching and they're observing that this is business as usual for the human race, if they were going to intervene and step in, they would step in if we employed nuclear weapons and we were face on the schoolyard. This is not as horrific as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But imagine you're in office and you get verification.

You get the physical proof that you need to know. And it's super classified. Would that not change your whole reality and view on the world? What do you do with that? Do you go to the military industrial complex? Do you go to the pharmaceutical industry? Do you go to all these people that are polluting rivers and all the fucking East Palestine thing? Do you say, hey, this can never happen again because UFOs are watching us? Well, I think that you at least hit up world leaders on private channels and start having

the conversation like, hey, guys, can we talk about this for a second? Because we're seeing these crafts and it's occurring and we want to be on the same page because probably a good idea to do that. Yeah, but there's no evidence that because probably a good idea to do that. Yeah, but there's no evidence that it's a good idea to do that. There's no evidence that they're doing anything other than watching us. Well, but wouldn't it be a good idea for us to coordinate other players in the Earth to understand our strategy? Sure.

It would if it got to that. But it hasn't gotten to that. Right now it's gotten to the oh there's this thing that flies really fast and goes into the water and doesn't make a splash the fuck is that i don't know but uh it's a lot of fucking oil and uh we got to get that oil and there's a lot of resources we got to control those resources because if we don't china will if we don't putin will if we don't this this and that. And we have to maintain our control, and we're the world's leader, and we're the this and the that. And it's just business as usual

while this is all happening in this very weird way where the Pentagon discusses it, but not very specifically, and not gives you all the information, and just says, I can't talk about it. But yeah, we do have a crashed UFO. And we have more video that we haven't shared, which we know, Malin said that, that they have higher res stuff that they're specifically not sharing. Mind-blowing stuff.

I mean, just the fact, when I first heard that, that they have higher res stuff, like in my brain, I feel like I changed because that felt like another level of validation for this being more of a real thing. Not that I believed in that moment, but I feel like it changed who I was a little bit

because it felt more real. My concern is that it's a distraction and that this is all black ops stuff and these are drones and these are some things that we have uh the the capabilities of of utilizing and that we've created and that the united states citizens don't need to know about and the world citizens don't need to know about and this is a massive advantage that the people that are in control of these technologies have over everyone else,

wouldn't it be better to say these are from another world and we don't have any idea? I mean, to be honest, I sort of lean towards that option given how they're behaving. Because they're behaving more in a military application mode of this stuff. They're not behaving in a human way. Whenever they say it's something, I'm like, why are you telling me that? You're telling me that because you want me to believe it's something. Why would I believe you when you lie about basically everything? If they lie about Nord Stream, they lie about the Gulf of Tonkin, they lie about all the different things they've lied about.

Why would they tell the truth about this all of a sudden? Right. And the whole thing like, oh, well, they wouldn't be messing with our own pilots in restricted airspace. Well, maybe they would do that because that is how you create confusion. Yeah. So, but that being said, I don't know. It's just like a bobblehead. I'm just back and forth every day.

Well, I think we're basically just mentally masturbating until there's some real information. Well, there is, but there is. But there is. So there we're back again. But there's so little. There's so little, and it's so inconclusive, and there's so many statements. Maybe we can teach AI to go and get the information for us. I wonder what chat GPpt says about ufos yeah and well now that it's becoming autonomous like amy want to give it a run what would you like okay specifically ask it let's say are to your

knowledge are we being visited by beings or crafts from another world? How about that? Okay. Yeah. Being visited by. Beings or crafts from another world. Dun, dun, dun. It'll probably provide a bullet list of cases.

That's what I'm guessing. Here it goes. As an AI language model, I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, but I can provide you with information based on the topic of extraterrestrial visitation. As my knowledge to cut off date of 2021, there's no conclusive evidence that definitely

proves the existence of extraterrestrial life or that we are being visited by beings or crafts from another world. While there have been many claims of sightings, abductions, and encounters, these have often been attributed to misinterpretations of natural phenomenon, hoaxes, or psychological phenomenon. However, some scientists and researchers continue to explore the possibility of extraterrestrial life and the potential for interstellar travel. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI, is an ongoing scientific

effort to detect signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, while initiatives such as Breakthrough, Starshot aim to develop technology for interstellar travel. In summary, while there is no concrete evidence of extraterrestrial visitation, the search for extraterrestrial life and the possibility of interstellar travel remain topics of scientific interest and investigation. Oh, that's so weak. Yeah. I mean, they're not even aware of the most recent advances in the U.S. government for how it's being looked into. You know, they're talking about 2021.

Yeah. So why is it giving you information from two years ago when all this stuff really kind of broke? What broke in 2017, that was the New York Times article that claimed that the Pentagon. Right. So that should be there. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, man. No, I love it. All of these issues are so much fun to talk about, whatever it is. They're the most fun. Yeah. UFOs are the most fun to talk about. And it yeah ufos are the most fun to talk about and it's just like we're i'm just focused on trying to have more civil conversations about it because it just seems like everybody just wants to jump on their team's side and just have shallow

conversations like be able to pursue possibilities from the other side steel man the other side like steel man steel man steel man constantly that's what like that's nice that i didn't why isn't that being taught in school right i've never heard that until i was like 35 right that's so true yeah it's so important to be able to do that with every argument i try to do that with things that i'm opposed to i'll try to steel man things it's it's important to really not know why you think about things and that's that should be taught it's not you know it's except the narrative there's um these pentagon files are the same thing the New York Times is doing with the Nord Stream stuff. So there's basically been a media blackout over these Pentagon files.

Like it's being called the biggest U.S. government leak since Snowden. This happened in like the last couple of weeks. And Fox News even made a statement. We're not going to cover this. We're not going to show the documents because like serious blueprints for Ukraine were leaked. And do you hear about these? Yes. Explain that to people. I'm not, I'm definitely not an expert on this. But it seems like a blueprint for setting up this war.

Yes. And like very sensitive document. I mean, Kirby, one of the John Kirby, he's like Biden's spokesperson. He's the guy who lied about the Nord hear from, you know, a government official telling the press not to cover a leak. Did he give a reason? I mean, national security and like screwing up the whole Ukraine situation. With the truth? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's a huge strategic blunder. Don't come to the truth, guys. You're with us. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a huge strategic. Don't come to the truth, guys. we're going to get these – keep getting these leaks and it's going to be worse for them. Yeah. Because it's going to come out willy-nilly and it's going to cause a lot more problems. It's going to completely er for them. Yeah. Because it's going to come out willy-nilly, and it's going to cause a lot more problems. It's going to completely erode trust. Right. Yeah.

Yes. So, like, let's, you know, we can probably all get on board for a path to getting there. Yeah. So, we'll see. Well, listen, man, I appreciate you, and I really appreciate what you're doing and your thought process behind all this and that you're stuck to these ethics.

You've stuck to them from the very beginning when you formulated this company, and you're still doing it. Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it very much. Tell people it's minds.org. Minds.com or minds.org, both. Or you can get it on the App Store. Just search Minds, M-I-N-D-S. Or if you want to support us, wefunder.com slash Mines.

Trying to be community-owned. My pleasure, brother. Thank you very much. Bye, everybody.