The Pomp Podcast - #771 The Future Of Free Speech In America w/ Jason Miller

Episode Date: January 4, 2022

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What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Jason Miller is the CEO of Getter. It's a brand new social media platform that is focused on free speech. In this conversation, we discuss everything from social media platforms, free speech, censorship, his campaigning with President Trump, and also how ideas propagate throughout society. I really enjoyed this conversation with Jason, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is LMAX Digital, the number one institutional crypto exchange. They offer clients the deepest pool of crypto

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All right, let's get into this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, we got a whole bunch of stuff to go over here. We've got Jason joining us now, who is the CEO of Getter. Jason, how are you? Fellas, good to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Dude, I'm super excited to talk to you. I have a million questions. I have no clue if we're going to get through all of them. But first, let's start with your time in the White House. Just so everyone understands, you were a advisor to President Trump. Explain what the hell does that mean in terms of how you work with a president like that? Yeah, well, I'll give it a little bit. So I never went into the White House, but I was a senior advisor for President Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 races. Now, my brother from a different mother, Steve Miller, was in the White House, but I'm the much better looking of the Millers who worked for President Trump. But so as a senior advisor, here's the thing with President Trump.

He's completely different than anyone who's a traditional politician. Traditional politician, you write things, you put the words in front of them, you hope they'll say what you write out and try to focus on a particular message. With President Trump, I kind of liken it to, say, the bowling alley when you take your kids to the bowling alley and kind of the guardrails pop up on the side. And your job is just essentially kind of go down to he's going to do whatever he wants to do. But if you can help him amplify his voice, you can come up with additional tactics or ideas, then you can work well with them. But you don't go and put things in front of him and say, please read this because he has his own script. OK, so when you talk about advising his communication strategy, is this just speeches or are you also like advising him on what to tweet? Great question. So in the 2016 campaign, usually we'd start off every day with the 630 call, just President Trump and myself.

So if you can imagine, first of all, talking to anybody at 630 in the morning is a little bit a little bit unique. But then someone who's at that point, then the Republican nominee for president or is going to 2020, the president of the United States to call up and talk through what's in the paper, what's on TV, what his schedule looks like, what messages we want to be driving, what things we want to be putting on Twitter. Those were all things that we were conversations we're having at 630 in the morning during those years. And so I built a pretty strong relationship with him over that stretch. Got it. And so when you see some of the tweets go out, are you like texting him and being like, dude, what are you doing? Delete that tweet. Like, don't say that. Or is it just like, OK, when something goes out, whether it's something he says in a speech or he tweets, then you're like, OK, we're just going to deal with what to do next after this. So great question, because, again, the typical politician might call up and say, hey, you got to go and remove that. Can you do something slightly different? The one thing in politics is as soon as you become the no man, the person who just says no to everything, you pretty quickly get tuned out.

What I always viewed my job is to hear, Mr. President, here's how you can say something smarter or more efficiently or maybe alienate fewer people in a particular post. Or sometimes, look, we might say, let's go in and pick a fight with somebody today to go and create the news. So sometimes I can give him ideas for specific tweets. And look, sometimes he'd go into it. Sometimes he'd say, hey, Jason, I like you, but your idea sucks. And so that's the thing with working with him is he doesn't pull any punches. If he likes your idea or run with it, he doesn't like the idea, he'll tell you. All right. I got a couple more questions about your time with Trump, and then we'll get to the free speech stuff, because I think it's important to understand kind of from a perspective standpoint where people come from.

When you just mentioned, sometimes it's very much defensive, right? So, hey, we're responding to something where we're reactionary. Other times it's offensive. And hey, let's go pick a fight with somebody. What's an example of where you guys were like, let's go pick a fight with somebody. And why did you want to pick a fight with that person? Or like, how did you execute on it? Yeah, great question. So sometimes on that, it might be because we want to highlight a particular message. So in the 2016 campaign, of course, picking a fight with Hillary Clinton, who's the Democratic opponent, that was an easy one. Say sometimes if we knew that we were going to have a bad news cycle, maybe in 2020, there's some easy left of center targets. The squad, AOC, Ilhan Omar, they're easy targets. Again, picking a fight with Hillary Clinton is easy. the left of center media, maybe MSNBC, CNN. So it sometimes you want to amplify what you're already planning on doing that day. Sometimes you want to work on a bit of a diversionary effort,

but all kind of works into in a campaign sense. How do you ultimately go and bring people on your side? How do you motivate your base and demotivate their base? Or sometimes, for example, say with Joe Biden, look, Joe Biden had some serious issues with the African-American community that were highlighted in 2020. And so we might go and pick certain fights in 2020 that would shore up president trump's support he got the highest amount of african-american support of any republican since 1972 uh do things that will go and draw attention to some of the terrible comments biden made in the past or things like that so it all kind of goes to how do you build in a campaign it's all about how do you build and get to that point by election day where you get

more votes than the other person yeah it's all like a kind of psychological warfare and very much like intellectual warfare it's very interesting um i heard a uh i think i read it actually in maybe scott adams book uh about kind of marketing and persuasion and all this stuff that trump actually came up with uh make america great again like he just came up with that off the top of his head uh when you see things like um if i remember uh some of the attacks he had on other republicans i think he said low energy jeb i think he said little marco like there's a bunch of these kind of nicknames that he came up with people um did he come up with those himself are you coming up with those like what it's such a unique strategy to basically resort to name

calling but it seems to be very effective for him uh how did those come about so almost all of those are his picks uh there were a couple that i came up with or gave ideas i'll tell you one of the funniest moments i think it was maybe in 2018 i was driving my uh now 13 year old daughter to a softball tournament and i get a phone call that pops up on the uh the plug-in for the car and an answer and said jason that this is the white house the president united states is calling for you and so i told my wife and my daughter who were in the car it's like quiet quiet you know the president's calling. And essentially the question that came to me was needed a nickname for a particular member of Congress. And I was asked to think of a couple of different names

and ended up not using the particular name. But so sometimes it might be a little more humorous on that. But the one thing that I think a lot of times people look and might do a bit of overgeneralization and say, okay, he just wants to go and make fun of the person. But there was, let me take you to 2016. So I came up with the nickname for Tim Cain. People forget Tim Kaine was Hillary's running mate. I came up with the nickname, thought it was pretty good. He was in the air, so I didn't run it by him before I announced it. He calls me next morning, goes, hey, saw that little nickname. He came up for Tim Kaine. Not bad. Not as good as one that I would have picked, but not bad. But he goes, I don't want to use it. He goes, the reason why is

Hillary is the single most disliked candidate in American political history. Why would we draw any attention to her running mate? Let's keep all the focus on Hillary. He goes, besides, crooked is the the best political nickname probably in history. So let's stick with that. And then he said, but Hey, um, tell you what, if you ever run for president, you can pick the nicknames in the meantime, let me do it. Man. I wish that'd be the most amazing job ever. I don't want to be involved in politics whatsoever. Other than I want to be the guy who gives people nicknames, like I'm both sides of the aisle. If you need a nickname, call me and I'll come up with some crazy names for you. All right. Now the other thing that I think is very interesting

is the use of Twitter itself, uh, from a communication standpoint, how much of that was like an intentional strategy versus just like that was a way to talk directly to people and uh the president uh either in the campaign or once he was president realized that like nobody could twist his words and he didn't have to ask for permission anyone he could just go straight to people and it became a communication strategy more so than it being intentional just like kind of morphed into it i think more the latter i think it's something that kind of grew to become the strategy that was kind of his style his tactics what i always tell people is president trump's superpower so to speak was that he could go around the media he could directly to people

and and because of that he largely snuck up on uh the would it be the media elites whether it be the um uh you know the the professional prognosticators in 2016 they were running for him in 2020 some of the rules of the game were changed at the different warning labels to be put on things the being put on timeout whether it be on twitter facebook some of these other restrictions that were put out there. Also, we saw a lot of his supporters being shadow banned, algorithm out of existence, things like that. Really, that's part of the reason why we started Getter. But the buildup to it, what I would say is probably the single most egregious example of political discrimination or censorship in U.S.

history was how the media titans came together, worked with big tech to shut down the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. And that's something where I think one out of every six Biden voters after the election when surveyed, so they would have considered changing their vote if they'd known about that. Anyways, but with President Trump, though, that was really his superpower, going around the media and directly to people. And quite frankly, we've seen some other politicians around the world, whether it be Prime Minister Modi in India, President Bolsonaro in Brazil, use similar tactics. And those folks have been very successful. But again, the key point, they were ready for him in 2020. So they changed the rules and it wasn't as effective. I wish we had a platform, whether

be my platform or someone else's in existence for 2020 you may have pulled off that victory all right now one of the things is uh we don't know each other super well so uh i'll give you a little context here i hate the extremes of all political parties i'm more of kind of a centrist in in my views uh and so one of my challenges to people is when they come on if they lean very heavy left or right is to do two things one say something good about the other side and then also critique something about their side. I don't want to classify you on any one side, but I think that you obviously lean a little bit more Republican than not. And so is there something that, whether it's the current administration, the Democrats, et cetera, something that you're like, you know

what, whether it's a communication strategy, something that they've done, et cetera, you're like, you know what, I really think that that was a unique thing or a positive thing that they did. Yeah. Great questions. I think about the Democrats. I have to think about that one for a moment. I think about um nancy pelosi i would say does a much better job than many republican leaders of keeping her folks in line and that now that's a tough thing and i'm a free speech guy and so i realize i might be getting a little bit conflicting messages but um being a leader on capitol hill is to say it's hurting cats is probably an understatement but pelosi does it with an iron fist and if you cross her you mess with her i know as a republican i like to dunk on pelosi and

talk about her ice cream or her appointments at the hair salon, things like that. But boy, if you get on Pelosi's bad side, she will crush you and you're never going to see the light of day ever again. So I got to give Pelosi credit for being able to herd her cats. I would say on the Republican side, I think way too often where we get things wrong. This is part of the reason I think President Trump cut through is we always seem like we're mad about things. And that's why When people ask me my ideology, where I come from, I'm a conservative, but I'm not angry about it. And that's my perspective because I do obviously have some ideological ideals and frameworks that we work within. But if you're always against something and you never lay out what you're for,

that's a surefire way to lose. Got it. Now talk to me about, you said that the rules changed in the 2020 election. I think what you're specifically referencing, and I want to put words in your mouth, is this idea that the social media platforms kind of woke up to a lot of the political stuff that was happening. And I'm of the belief that once somebody figures something out, both sides use it. Right. So like Facebook ads kind of were not really used in political elections. All of a sudden, one side figured it out. Then everyone started to use the Facebook ads and targeting and all of that. And it seems like going into the 2020 election, there was tons and tons of people trying to figure out how the hell do we use social media, talk directly to people and basically win

the vote. Right. And so when you started to see things around, whether it was labeling, when it was kind of the arbiters of truth, when it was actual kind of distribution or deranking in the algorithm. Just talk to me about what you guys were seeing and how that was changing the landscape from a communication strategy standpoint for a politician. Yeah. So in 2016, and keep in mind that the campaigns are completely different. In fact, in 2016, we're kind of playing with house money. People didn't really expect us to win. So we could come up with unconventional tactics. We We can come up with crazy ideas, you know, bringing the former Clinton accusers to a debate. If you had brought that up in context of any other political scenario, people would have said you're going to be blackballed from politics.

This is the stupidest idea with President Trump. We just call it Wednesday. It was, you know, it was just the kind of part for the course. But what we saw in 2020, of course, being an incumbent president there, you know, everything from the decorum to the power to the what people expect from you, the responsibility, I would say. But what we saw is it really started with COVID coming on the scene early 2020 when the big tech platforms, the Twitters, the Facebooks, the YouTubes, even the Googles would be punishing people for saying that the virus came from a lab in Wuhan. Now, I personally don't think that there were scientists there creating the virus, but I do think that they were doing experiments on, say, gain of function and some worker inappropriately traipsed it out. And that's how it got out. Because we know they're doing gain of function research anyways. But the point being is we saw people being shadow banned and put in digital jail for saying the virus came from a lab in Wuhan. Then we saw people being criticized or put into a digital jail for criticizing Dr. Fauci. Then, of course, what we saw happen where literally Twitter and Facebook and YouTube would not allow anyone to talk about the New York Post reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop. That's changing the rules of the game. I'm fine if another big tech platform has an ideological worldview.

Again, I'm a conservative Republican. I'm not going to pretend to be somebody that I'm not. But when it comes to free speech, whether someone's on my side or against me, I think people should have that right. As long as you're abiding by that terms of service and you're not, say, pushing hate imagery or using racial or religious epithets or threatening illegal behavior, I think you should largely be able to say what you want if it fits within those parameters. But what we saw that was unique is the political discrimination in 2020, and I think that's wrong. Okay, so one of the things that I want to kind of get into some of the free speech, the censorship, and the social media platforms is I think most people think of when they hear censorship in social media platforms, you're on the platform, you're off the platform. We've obviously seen Twitter now, two sitting U.S. politicians, they've taken off the platform and most people think of that as censorship. But one of the key pieces that I think has sort of entered the conversation is, well, maybe it's not just is somebody on a platform or are they not? It's also things around shadow banning or not giving them as much distribution in a news feed, et cetera.

And this isn't just a political conversation. I think this also happens for certain businesses, certain celebrities. Like you see a lot of people kind of talking about this. And so when you all think about kind of free speech or censorship or some of these ideas, how much of that plays into just like the black and white, you're on a platform, you're not on a platform versus the more nuanced, like, do you get enough distribution? Is distribution evenly applied? Like, how does that play into the conversation? It plays in. I think you make a really astute point here is that what people want is to be treated fairly, regardless of what side of the spectrum that they're on.

And one of the things I do sometimes is even though a lot of the passion right now of the free speech debate is in the center right space, just a few years ago, it's in the center left, but now it's more in the center right. A lot of times when people are coming on getter and saying that you're number one in a very New York kind of way, in a way that Danny Boy Hustlehard might say if you gave him a too small of a tip or something of that nature. Frequently I'll repost it and say, see, we have people from all across the ideological spectrum on here. But I think that what people want is to be treated the same. So a real quick thing, don't want to get kind of nerd out on this too much. There's a thing called Section 230, which came up back in the 90s when we had blogs. Remember the AOL and the dial-up internet, all that nonsense back in the early days, the annoying sound. And Section 230 allows essentially platforms that are just places where people can go and post their information to not be held liable.

As long as obviously they're taking down illegal content, things like that. But where people or platforms are not going to be held liable for what users go and post because they want this digital town square. The spirit behind that is to make sure that we keep this digital town square, but then obviously not going to be held liable or say otherwise people just close up shop and say this isn't worth it. What we've just seen over the last few years, really last four or five years, is for a lot of these big tech companies to say, well, wait a minute, I like this person's free speech, but I don't like that person's free speech. And I think that the rules, regardless of what side you're on, have to be applied the same. Got it. Tell us about Getter and kind of what is the idea in terms of what you guys are building compared to some of these other social platforms? Absolutely. So Getter free speech platform, we launched on July 4th of this year. we're already up over 3 million users. And in fact, I would say just over the past 24 hours,

we're up over a quarter million new users. We had 171,000 new users yesterday when Joe Rogan announced that he was coming on Getter. We are already up over 75,000 users today, probably hit over 100. So we're at about 3.1, 3. I think we're about 3.2 million users, up over 10 million downloads, but about 3.2. We're the all-in-one free speech platform. What that means is we want to be the place where if you support free speech, if you oppose cancel culture, we think you'd be a great getter user. I would say right now we're largely a marketplace competitor to Twitter and Facebook. When we launch in early February, Vision, which will be our short video format, they'll make us more of a competitor with TikTok and Instagram Reels. And then a little bit more

to your speed, and this is where I hope I can come back on the show, we're going to be launching Getter Pay right around 4th of July, our one-year anniversary, where it's not just going to be a payment platform. We're going to have a two-coin ecosystem with a stable coin, also a fluctuating coin, as well as our own getter marketplace. So where we're starting to go into the DeFi side of things, the peer-to-peer lending, this is going to become really exciting because there are tens of millions of people in the US who aren't able to participate in the digital economy right now, whether because they're not marketed to or they don't trust it. Hundreds of millions of people around the world, we're going to help try to bring this to them. So I think the next time that we

talk we start getting the details on the blockchain the crypto side uh i think you guys are really going to be excited to get into the weeds on it all right my last question and then i'll uh i'll let my brothers ask a couple questions here is uh how the hell do i get kicked off getter is it just like i could say whatever i want no matter if i uh you know uh threaten to kill somebody or like are there rules or is it just literally you could say whatever you want it's a free-for-all like how do you guys think about designing the space uh i'm assuming that you can't just say anything but like where is the line and like uh i go to the extreme example just like how does somebody get kicked off uh in terms of compared to you know maybe uh twitter or somebody else great question

and i'll tell you the two things i probably spend the most amount of my time on are on moderation and on security because those are the two things that can get you deep platform to get you essentially um kicked off of whether it be the apple ios store with that closed environment they decide what apps live and what apps die so obviously we have to play within their rules But also their thing, too, is it's not just about trying to paint within the bright lines when it comes to working well with an apple. But it's also you want this to be an inviting platform. If people think that they're going to get doxxed or if they're going to get harassed or if people are going to threaten illegal activity or suggest self-harm or use racial or religious epithets, those are all things that are post-pornography. Look, there are plenty of places you can go if you want to get porn, plenty of places you can go to.

it's something that we don't have on getter because just our community doesn't want to have it. Um, so we have terms of service and things might go for maybe a couple hours of a time out to, uh, if you have some, say, if you're threatening to, uh, to kill somebody and it's, uh, um, and it's not something that say, you know, repeating what a politician said or repeating something in, uh, in just, if it's a serious threat, then you can be banned or permanently kicked off. Uh, we're not going to mess around with it here. Here's the thing though, fellas, is that we're not going to get it right every single time. Uh, we're going to get some things wrong. We've reversed a couple of things or revised a couple of policies. So we realized

maybe we got something inaccurate, but our goal is to try and let people express themselves politically. And our pledge, since we kind of have the ideological, ideological North star is the new one's ever going to be shadow banned or censored or de-platformed or kicked off for expressing themselves politically. If you're expressing yourselves politically, this is a safe space for you. Joe, John, what questions you guys got? Hey, Jason, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you. Of course. So my question would just be around like censorship and decentralization has been a hot topic obviously and you guys are building a business off the back of those things but when it comes to uh content specifically web 3 is

enabling people to own their content is their their pitch do people on getter own their own content that they produce on the website or do you guys own it and if you do is that going to change uh absolutely great question so when it comes to your actual your intellectual property you own that and in fact here's the thing you actually own uh your own content when it comes to what's on Twitter and Facebook and these other platforms as well. Because otherwise, if the platforms owned it, if say, if Instagram owned it, then they would be held liable for everything that's going on. So one of the really cool features we have with Getter, and as you can see, not so subtly

behind me, are the platform names spelled out. When you sign up for an account, you can import all of your tweets. So then you populate your timeline in Getter with all of your tweets from the past. So people then see who you are. It's a way for you to back things up. If you have artwork, if you have recordings, imagery, things like that, memes that you want to go and have backed up, we allowed it. And again, that's because it's your property. As we start going into, we're going to have some pretty cool things coming when we do start getting to the getter pay side of things.

We start working on some more of that peer-to-peer lending. Also, some things, most likely the NFT space, where there'll be some other aspects of the decentralization. But fundamentally, your intellectual property is your intellectual property. John, what do you got? Jason, how do you think about censorship that is happening on platforms today, such as Twitter and everything like that? How do you go about thinking about it? Well, things I think in particular with with Twitter, first of all, I have to say thank you. I know that might sound terrible for for free speech, but it's great for business.

I mean, the fact of the matter is that if if Dr. Robert Malone is one of the he helped develop the mRNA vaccine and he was recently kicked off of Twitter this last week or Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia. who was kicked off of Twitter just yesterday, if they hadn't been kicked off, I don't know if Joe Rogan makes the jump to come on board. And then next thing you know, we're a quarter million additional users later. So I think with the new CEO, Mr. Agarwal, who's come on board with Twitter, he's taken an even further leftward lurch than where Jack Dorsey was. So I think it's terrible for the whole aspect of free speech. I think it's great for Getter. But I think there's a broader concern here is that I think by Twitter and some of these other platforms taking such strident moves where they're picking winners and losers in the political discrimination space or in the

political free speech space, I think what it's doing is pushing society apart. Look, this is a bit of a capnobious. I think as a country, we've become entirely too divided. People are retreating into their ideological corners. People watch either right-of-center TV or left-of-center TV. They'll listen to right-of-center musicians or left-of-center musicians. Politics doesn't have to be everything. In fact, one of the coolest people that I like on our platform is Enos Cantor Freedom from the Boston Celtics. I couldn't tell you what Enos' domestic politics are.

I couldn't tell you if he votes Republican or Democrat or anything. But I know that he's an outspoken opponent of slave labor in China. He's criticized LeBron James, a number of other folks for kowtowing to the CCP. And he's someone who has embraced his free speech space. Also, he's a pretty good athlete. Celts aren't using him near as well as they should. They really struggled against the Magic yesterday, if you caught any of that game. But Enos Kanter is someone who, great, he's someone who just embraces free speech.

I'm glad that he's now a U.S. citizen. I think that's a really cool story for him to tell. So it's not always just about politics, but we keep pushing people to the corners. Society is only going to become more divided. Jason, when you think about somewhere like China, obviously, we've seen, you know, platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc, all kind of get kicked out of the country. Some of them have tried to get back in some of them, frankly, just threw up their hands and said, Hey, you know, we're not interested in it. But if you compare it to something like maybe the movie industry, we obviously know that a lot of the Hollywood organizations that is a lifeblood of revenue for them now is getting into China and getting that distribution there. how do you think about it from a social media platform our most western-based social media platforms just going to have to resign the fact that hey we're never going to get in uh and that's okay we're going to build a business without having to get to the you know one plus billion

people there in china or do you think that there are going to be kind of capitulation from some of these platforms and they say yep tell us the rules and like we'll create like a china version uh if you will of the existing social media platforms and that's where you think you guys kind of have a wedge into the market like how do you think about china and these existing platforms Great question. With regard to China specifically, and we spend a lot of our time criticizing the CCP in China and trying to find a way to stay, even the logo that you see back behind me, the torch there is about bringing freedom to places where it doesn't exist, to bring lightness to dark. That's really kind of our whole mission. When it comes to getting into China, though, that decision really has already been made. the the ccp has said you're not going to be allowed we usually will track because we don't just track by country but also by language usage we probably have about four percent maybe five

percent daily use in mandarin that so we watch that pretty closely and that's because people use vpns or other uh aspects uh to try to to use getter uh but that's uh you can't get getter in china you can't get twitter uh remember these other social media platforms are just i mean even even twitter as woke as they are they're not allowed uh in china because again that would be spreading some aspect of democratic thought. Where I do think we're seeing the broader decoupling those when it comes to technology, whether you think about corners or capitulation that someone, whether it be an Apple maker, someone who's a semiconductor producer, or maybe the robotics industry or car dealers, for perfect example, where China essentially said you have to

get a local joint venture partner to be able to produce anything. So what happens? You partner up with a local firm. They spend a couple of years learning your product, and then they just take all the technology and literally you find your door kicked in. They steal a couple of robot arms, and then the shop right next door starts building the exact same thing. And it's a knockoff. I do think that we're heading towards a larger decoupling between the two countries. A lot of businesses on Wall Street look and say, wait a minute, there are 1.4 billion people in China, largest growing middle class in the entire world. We want access to that capital. but here's the reality it's the ccp it's all about control it's all about power i think they're

going to further move to to decouple from their their side as well got it and then one other thing that uh i've seen a couple of people uh mentioned as i was kind of googling around this morning before uh before you came on is uh miles quok it was one of the founders or i don't know if he's still involved or not or whatever um and i don't know a ton about this so uh spare you know bear with me for a second, if I enter into a kind of out of my depth, but I saw an interview with him and Kyle Bass, uh, on the real vision platform. And I was struck, I think just by, um, a whole bunch of different things they talked about and kind of the worldview. And it just was very different than a lot of the information that I'd seen before. Uh, I guess one is just like,

is he still involved or was he a founder? Do I have that? Right. And then two is like, how do you think about folks who I think, uh, have leveraged American free speech to get a message out there that obviously other people in the world don't want out there? Like, how do you just think about, you know, the experience of having, being able to leverage speed, free speech for benefit, uh, as an important skillset or experience to build something like this versus could just somebody in America who's grown up with, you know, free speech their entire life, uh, and almost things of it as the default, is it possible for them to build a free speech platform without having to actually have seen something else yeah a really good point i'll

take those in reverse order because i think that one of the cool things for me look i've largely worked most of my the last 20 25 years um in domestic politics and domestic corporate communications it really just been over the last few years where i've worked more internationally and then of course with launching getter that were one of the things look the u.s is only about 35 percent of our user base. The other 65 percent is all around the world. I always thought that the free speech debate was largely, I looked at it from a very myopic perspective of what's happening to us, what's happening to right of center political figures. But what I saw is this is happening all over the world. I think as Americans, we really take the First Amendment

for granted. And I think that even on our worst day, OK, say Dr. Robert Malone, who I referenced a moment ago, he gets kicked off of Twitter. And that causes all sorts of headlines and explosions, things of that nature. But at the end of the day, does that ultimately, does that mean that your family is going to get thrown in jail? You're going to be discriminated against? It's terrible for free speech, but it's not a life-threatening change. In these other countries, you get on the wrong side. You speak out against the government. You take an unpopular position. You might find yourself beaten, thrown in jail. It's pretty scary. You guys may have seen the headline where I was detained in Brazil by a Supreme Court justice for three hours. It became a big

international story, but simply because I visited with President Bolsonaro when I was down in Brazil and I'm helping to bring a free speech platform. And one of his government opponents literally had me detained for three hours. And here I am. I never viewed myself as being some freedom warrior that was, you know, I'm not standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square. I never thought I'd be someone who'd be thrown in the middle of something like this. But you realize in other countries, This is a life or death type issue, and we take it for granted here in the U.S. But now going to your first point with regard to Miles, Miles is someone who I would say is an ideological ally. He does not have a direct financial stake.

His family's investment fund are part of the coalition of investors, the international investors we have at the beginning here. So Miles doesn't have a day-to-day role. He's someone who has a lot of good ideas. I'd say he's a very strong ally in this. Obviously, I work with the investment fund that his family helps to support. But he's someone who, again, who's battled the CCP, who's really made it his life mission to take on the CCP. So I'm glad to have him on our side, in our corner. But I'm the CEO.

We have a board and we have shareholders. And I'm glad I have Miles as a supporter. All right. There's one more topic I want to talk about. But first, do you still talk to Trump at all? Are you guys friendly still? Do you still talk to him regularly? Yeah, absolutely.

And so we probably talk maybe once a week, once every other week. And obviously he's launching at some point here, we'll see him launching his own platform to which I told him I want him to do well. It's just, you know, maybe not too well. But look, if he runs again, of course I'll support him for, for running for president again. And I told him I just, I won't be able to help out 18 hours a day like maybe he got me to in the past, but a lot of times when we catch up, look,

it could be on something as small as on football or some event that's, that's going on or sometimes we might bounce ideas off each other about different communication strategies or things like that so there's nothing quite like getting that phone call though at the house and your your daughter comes running up and says dad it's it's president trump it's president trump so it always kind of gives you that little bit of uh you know gives that kind of that little bit tingly feeling of wow someone who's the president united states is uh is calling which is pretty cool all right i got a question and then i gotta ask for you my question is uh i saw recently that he had comments about Bitcoin. He doesn't seem to be a fan of Bitcoin. Have you

ever talked to him about Bitcoin or like what are the general thoughts in terms of Bitcoin and some of his interests or like whatever, you know, in terms of conversations you guys have had or his views? Yeah. So I think part of it is, look, I think some of this might be just the industry that he came from. He's a real estate guy. And so in real estate, you walk out and you see here is say, plot of land. Here is a building as a developer that we went and built. Everything is tangible. One of the things to keep in mind with President Trump is he was never even that active in the stock market, for example. And I've even heard him say that the stock market, in a lot of ways, is just legalized gambling. I've heard him say that might be slightly out

of context, but it's roughly what he said. And to him, an investment, you have to see an investment. You have to keep in mind his dad was a developer also. So his entire life has been spent around the worth or something is if you can go out and point to it um that's his worldview that's where it comes from we have a bit different perspective i think uh where i'm trying to get him to a better place when it comes to uh not just bitcoin but other uh aspects of crypto is look even if you're not the biggest fan well you have to realize this with the broader inflationary concerns uh with the broader uh just on the way the currency valuations and what's happening you you have to realize that crypto is here to stay.

It might not be replacing the dollar anytime soon, but it's only going to continue to get bigger. And even the most hardened skeptics are now saying, man, let's go and put 5%, 10% each week or each month's check aside into crypto so I can watch it grow. But I think also too, just I don't think necessarily his economic advisors

in the White House did a good enough job and explained to him about some of the benefits as we go to the blockchain space and especially how that's going to change some of the peer-to-peer lending. so after hearing that my ask to you is i think that you should try explaining bitcoin to him as it is free speech right because i might take and again you know again uh never talk to the guy you and i obviously talking here and i'm kind of hearing some of the stuff you're talking about

free speech is obviously important but i think that's ultimately what bitcoin specifically ends up uh kind of accomplishing right is that the exertion of your financial free speech if you want to send money to somebody in the world nobody can stop you from doing it no one can tell you you can't do that uh it's like that permissionless uh free speech if you will but from a financial perspective uh is pretty important the other thing too i think is that the software right we know that uh the ability to write software it's been tested in courts is uh is free speech as well right you can write words on a database and uh and ends up kind of operating so i think that like it's interesting to hear uh because i think when i saw that he was he wasn't a fan of

Bitcoin. Right. He comes off at least kind of from an external view as being somewhat anti establishment. Right. That the way that things have been isn't necessarily the way that he'd like to do them. And I also see this on the other side of the aisle as well. So I think that some of it is just like, hey, if you're part of the political machine in some form or fashion, even if you're kind of an outsider to the machine, but you still participate, it seems like a lot of folks don't really like it. And I can't yet tell if it's just because they haven't spent the time to really learn about the intricacies and eventually they'll kind of come across and be proponents or if it's just that you know hey look to your point uh i don't even like stocks i don't

like anything that i can't touch and you know you can tell me all you want about all this stuff but like hey is it real estate no okay then i'm not interested um so so it's fascinating to kind of hear you know especially your interest in activities and building a free speech platform and then you know i think my view that bitcoin is free speech uh i would think that he'd be into it but maybe it's just the uh just the lack of interest in anything other than real estate ends up being the difference? I think a lot of me, look, I'll tell you that my father, who was a welder before he retired,

I've had conversations with him about crypto in the past. And he's just, look, he's a welder. He's like, you know what's real? When I go and make something here. And that's just his worldview and his approach for how he spent most of his life. But I think when we talk about Getter being an all-in-one free speech platform,

it's not just being able to speak your mind politically with what we're doing now, being a marketplace competitor to Twitter and Facebook, or as we launch our vision, our short video format that will allow us to compete with TikTok and with Instagram Reels, express yourself creatively. But then also as we look to your freedom of speech with regard to your personal finances, that's exactly where we are. And that's why we're launching Getter Pay, because really the next step in this, and that's why I'm so glad to have the opportunity to chat with you on this, is this financial freedom of not being, for lack of a better term, indentured servants to

uh to the big financial companies it shouldn't just be these banks uh that are setting uh they're sending their rates and they're making you that be within their construct that's why i think some of the peer-to-peer lending in particular is so great if you want to go and send money to someone you don't have to go and pay these exorbitant fees uh but then also i think too the way that people are investing now uh and where there's a an opportunity for people to to get greater returns they have greater control over their economic self-destiny uh absolutely it's free speech so i agree with you 100 joe john you guys got any last questions no thanks for coming on jason i appreciate it jason i'm super excited i'm super excited for you guys thank you so much for

for coming on and uh i gotta say joe rogan joining uh it's not surprising to hear the data right it's like one of those things where uh when somebody big like that and then tweets it out uh it's not surprising that you'd get so many downloads but 150 000 i got one more question did joe rogan reach out to you guys before joining the platform uh he did not and in fact um i will tell you that We've reached out a ton because, obviously, I've been trying to buy advertising on this show for months. Never talked to them. But I know that Dr. Robert Malone, who was a guest on his show last week, had a pretty epic three-hour conversation about vaccine mandates and some of the other things. I think that was the show.

I think it came out on Thursday or Friday. It may have been Friday. I think they recorded it Thursday. It came out Friday. I've never spoken with Joe. Obviously, would love the opportunity to chat with him. We've still never communicated with him directly. But I think Dr. Malone chatted with him.

And I think Joe just woke up yesterday, saw what was happening with Malone, with Marjorie Taylor Greene, even some traditional news outlets that were being shadow banned or put on digital, put in digital jail by Twitter. And he's like, I'm going to jump on. So, you know what? It's sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. So we're glad to have him. All right. Where can we find send people to find you on the Internet? Absolutely. Go to the Apple store, go to the Google Play store, simply type in Getter, G-E-T-T-R. If you're wondering what Getter stands for, it's a truncated version of Get Together. It's all about building community. It's a free speech community. If you're on the left, if you're on the right, we want you on the platform.

We want everyone on the platform who believes in free speech and who opposes cancel culture. Look, I need to go get Antonio Brown next. He probably needs, he's probably looking for some additional income. As a Bucks fan, I tell you, Bruce Arians just ripped his head off. and uh i mean ab is totally nuts but uh he needs a voice so ab if you're out there watching uh if you're not still driving around with the any boy hustle hard uh come and jump on getter it's a lot of fun that's awesome all right thanks so much all right fellas thank you