Timcast IRL - Timcast IRL #337 - Censor Proof FreedomPhone Sparks Establishment PANIC w/Erik Finman

Episode Date: July 24, 2021

Tim, Ian, and Lydia join youngest Bitcoin billionaire and FreedomPhone entrepreneur Erik Finman to discuss Erik's invention, the FreedomPhone, and analyze some of the smear pieces that have been written about Erik, as well as break down how the social media algorithm drove the left insane, and answer some frequently-asked questions about the device. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A bunch of Republicans criticized Joe Biden saying that he was acting like Fidel Castro or something to that effect because of the censorship that the Biden administration is admittedly engaging in. A few things. One, that they're going to be engaging phone companies to censor private text messages. And the other is that they are actually themselves flagging things on Facebook to be removed by Facebook, which is government censorship. Well, recently news broke about something called the Freedom Phone.

This is the uncensorable phone. And somehow the media lost, or for some reason, I should say, they absolutely lost their minds. Now, it could just be this is the grift, right? The Daily Beast comes out and says, this phone is a cheap Chinese knockoff. And it's like, do you know that? Or are you just speculating? And then all of a sudden, these copycat articles emerge criticizing the

phone with none of these people ever having tested it and no real argument against it, except it's made in China. All right, well, things should be made in China, I guess. We'll criticize things made in China. But does that mean the phone is bad? I don't know. I've not used the phone. How weird is it? And this is something that always freaks me out. When a narrative emerges that is definitive, when no one's actually done any legwork on the journalism. No one's done nothing. Nothing at all. What does the phone do? Why does it cost so much? Were any of these questions answered? No. But sure enough, I can Google it and find like 50 articles claiming, avoid it, don't buy it, it's bad news.

And then to see the weirdest thing, people on the right joining in, calling it a scam. And I'm like, dude, none of you guys have actually done any analysis on this device. Isn't that weird that everyone just immediately jumps out in total alignment. Maybe it's a garbage phone. I don't know. How about we get one and we actually start testing it to see if it actually does what it's supposed to do. So we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about censorship

and probably a bunch of other culture war stuff, but we're being joined by the Freedom Phone guy himself, Eric Finman. Hi. Thank you. Yeah. Well, we'll go over all the stories and everything like that. Do you want to just briefly introduce yourself? Yeah.

So I'm Eric Finman, and I guess my background before this phone project was in the Bitcoin world, the claim to fame. People annoyingly refer to me as the youngest Bitcoin millionaire. And then, yeah, I mean, the media was all nice to me when it was just that. And then suddenly I did something that was very pro-free speech, and then without ever holding the phone in their hands, they just wrote all these hit pieces and all that, and it was a total smear. But yet they all liked me before this. Gizmodo called it a black box that should be avoided at all costs, and I'm like, how did they make that assessment without actually having the phone to do any tests on it?

Exactly, and Gizmodo, they never reached out asking for a phone. And I mean, it's terrible. And these people, they don't know anything. And you see, you know, Gawker, you know, who used to run Gizmodo. I mean, they're just such a smear piece. And then, you know, you see like these tech publications and people think, oh, well, the tech publications, they must be credible. But these are just, you know, total anti-free speech journalists that just work everywhere.

We'll get into this. We've got Ian Jones. Well, hello, everyone. Friday night. Thanks, Tim. Yeah, man, I'm glad you're here. We've been working on the Fediverse, a bunch of developers, and we're talking about mesh networking and the future of Internet

and how it might be nodal and delocalized. So I'm excited to maybe even integrate that into the Freedom Phone in the future. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have plans to make this so that way, you know, literally it comes with the phone that it's capable of being able to do mesh networking in the future and all that because that's so needed in the sense of having a decentralized Internet because that's my biggest fear is if they somehow are able to prevent us from communicating freely anywhere on the internet, I mean, we're screwed.

Right on. We got Lydia pressing the buttons. I am increasingly uncomfortable with all the monitoring that's being done of normal people, especially in light of like the January 6th interviews and I'm looking at social media companies and everything. So I'm really excited to have this conversation about the Freedom Phone. We'll see what it's all about. We'll kind of break it down. Stoked. Before we get started, go over to TimCast.com. Become a member to get access to exclusive members-only podcasts from the TimCast IRL podcast. And you'll also get an ad-free experience.

We are working through the bug, so I appreciate everybody bearing with us as we work to make the site better and better and better. In the next week or so, we're going to be launching probably the new show. Doing a lot of really great stuff. And it's all thanks to all of you who did sign up. You're allowing us to do more than we ever imagined. So sincerely and seriously, not both at the same time, thanks for being members. But don't forget to like this video, share this show with your friends. We're going to be a big conversation. It's Friday night. You know how it goes. I want to talk about this here, Freedom Phone. Let's do this. Let's talk about this first, this story

that comes from the Daily Beast, the uh internationally renowned technologist technical expert an expert on the far far far far far far right will summer oh i'm kidding he's he's none of those things magas maga world's freedom phone actually budget chinese phone maga influencers are pushing a phone pre-loaded with apps like Parler and Rumble that appears to be a vastly more expensive version of a phone made in China. The first thing I'm going to say to this, well, actually, the first thing I should say is Will Summer is a political activist. I don't take anything he says seriously, and I don't understand why there are people on the right, people who oppose censorship, who are like, well,

Will Summer of all people said it. Will Summer's published false information in the past. And yeah, I'll just leave it at that. The dude is not an honest actor. So why should I care if he's making some ridiculous argument in an article that's clearly an opinion, but not labeled opinion? Because this dude is just trying to probably grift. Now, the thing about the Daily Beast is they smear anybody and everything that's to the right of Stalin. So for some reason, this article comes out and that's it. Now, I've even got people in the chat right now saying it's a cheap Chinese knockoff. Have you tested the phone? Do you know anything about it? I don't. So I'm not going to make that assessment. But I can say a few things right off the bat. First, they say it's a knockoff of a cheap Chinese phone. Well,

obviously, you know, we're sitting here with Eric, but I'll just say this before we get into it. And I'll ask, let me just say, if this is the way I described it on my main channel. First of all, I get it. I haven't tested the phone. We want to do a forensic analysis and go through it. But if someone was selling a Chinese canvas and it was $5, you could buy an order off Amazon. And then if Ian painted me a beautiful picture of a lighthouse on a canvas, I would not expect to pay the same price for it. If someone takes a phone that costs a hundred bucks and then puts a custom operating system on it and preloaded software and provides the service and then charges more, that's just called free enterprise. It's called business.

How is that a negative? And it's made in China. What isn't made in China? So these aren't arguments against the Freedom Phone. There certainly are questions and concerns. But we'll start with this. Is it a cheap Chinese knockoff of the Umidigi A9 Pro? Absolutely not. We customized the phone itself.

So that way, you know, it's so that way it was quality. We looked at the supply chain of the phone, of all the parts that come from it, just making sure everything's secure, everything's safe. But no, I mean, it's not. And then two, in addition to just it being a custom phone, we did our own custom operating system on it too. Is it made in China? Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is you can't make phones in the United States, which is terrible. I mean, even Motorola, they put $3 billion into opening up a factory back in the day for making smartphones. But didn't you tweet that it wasn't made in mainland China?

Yeah, yeah. It's in Hong Kong. It's out of Hong Kong. Oh, okay. But unfortunately, that's made in mainland China? Yeah, yeah. It's in Hong Kong. It's out of Hong Kong. Oh, okay. But unfortunately, that's China now. No. Yeah, exactly. When we feel like that was our best option, and I have family out in Hong Kong and everything.

But yeah, I mean, you still get that. I mean, we get parts from Taiwan as well, but then yet they still call that China and all that. So, I mean, it's just China. It's a special economic zone. Exactly. It's made by Umidigi. Can I pronounce it? I think so, yeah.

I mean, we get some of our stuff from Umidigi and all that stuff. But, yeah, we partnered with them. And so basically we have a design lab in the United States. So that way we can – so I'll go through in the beginning of the process. So we actually wanted to create like a blockchain based phone, which is, you know, a little bit marketing there, but, but my background is crypto and that was the original thinking. So me and my design lab, which is here in the US, we were like, how do we do a phone? There was template designs of a phone that we can look at where there's other phones we wanted to look at and see what, what

can we take the best of everything? And then yeah we uh we ended up putting something together and we tried finding manufacturers um in the u.s to do it but it was literally impossible um to find manufacturers in the u.s like it's just you know because of terrible political choices made uh you just can't make a phone in the u.s and you need like 10 billion to apple they have hundreds of billions of dollars and they don't choose to do it. They could probably figure out that much money. Well, let's try and get as technical as possible. Yep.

Who manufactures the phone in Hong Kong? What company? Umidigi. Umidigi. And then we get another factory as well because, I mean, not to sound marketing, but we did have high demand. So now we have another factory as well. So that way we're manufacturing stuff out of there. But they're both Umidigi?

One is Umidigi, one's another one. Oh, okay. What is that one? That one, I mean, they just have a long Hong Kong name and all that, but they're just basically to carry the demand that overflows. But, yeah, we partnered with Umidigi. Can you say what company it is? No.

I mean, well, I could, but I don't remember their name. I do remember their name in my head. I can see it, but it's a very Asian Chinese name. That could be important. I mean, what if it's like a known company that works with the CCP or something? They don't, and we looked into that. Well. And I guess don't take my word for it.

Yeah, we can't. I mean, Umidigi is one thing. I can be like, oh, okay, it's a company that makes phones, but now there's like this mystery other company. We don't know what it is. Yeah, I mean, they're just an overflow factory that does production and all that. And we talked with them. We looked at what they do, and they have no connections to the CCP or anything.

Well, that's tough. How are people supposed to trust the phone now if you can't even say where it's made? Well, I mean, it's made in Hong Kong and all that. By who? By who? I mean, Umidigi. And then, yeah, I mean, they're just a group of people that do, you know, increase production. Yeah, their company.

Yeah, and then we have representatives out in Hong Kong. And, like, you can look at the name of the company and all that stuff. And, like, how do people find out about that? I'll put it on our website right after this. No worries. All right. Well, there you go. Yeah.

On our spec sheet, we're going to be adding, you know, sourcing of where we get every single part from. Right on. And just to clarify, Apple and Google also make their phones in China, right? Yeah, I mean, I feel like that's the real stories. And in my opinion, I think Apple chooses not to make their phones in the United States because, you know, unfortunately, I don't have billions of dollars. Like Motorola, they tried doing it with $3 billion, and they couldn't do it back in the day. And, like, I think they were doing that with the Moto X, et cetera.

And Apple, they have tens of billions of dollars. I think there was a former president that asked Apple to actually make phones in the U.S. because it would be like a $30 billion endeavor, in my opinion, and they choose not to. So that's, I feel like, the real story of these companies is they choose not to make stuff in the U.S. And when you're an upstart and you don't have tens of billions of dollars to be able to set up whole new, brand new factories in the United States, you're screwed.

So one of the other things they mention in the Daily Beast article is that there's no specs, but you immediately just put the specs on the website. Yeah, the specs are on the website, and you can look at them and everything. What's the website? Freedom Phone. FreedomPhone.com. So feel free to look in the specs and everything. Yeah, I looked at the specs.

I'm kind of just like, okay, like there are specs. I don't understand. I suppose the argument is if people didn't know the specs, they didn't know what they were buying. But I find that also kind of weird because I'm like, most people don't know what any of this stuff means. Yeah. Like, you know, F8 megapixels, R13 plus 2 plus 2 MP. Like, most people are going to be like, I don't know. Yeah, exactly.

They're going to look at that. They're going to know what they're talking about. What is that, R13 plus 2 plus 2? So that's like a front-facing camera and rear-facing camera. So the F is front. R is rear-facing. And then plus two means that there's two cameras. Plus two, and there's multiple cameras on the back.

What do the multiple cameras do? What are they for? I mean, you know, just I feel these days, because you need phones that work with augmented reality, that takes usually multiple cameras. And then, yeah, I mean, be able to have, like, depth in your photos. I mean, multiple cameras just all help with that. So, I mean...

Zoom in, zoom out. Yeah, exactly. So just being able to match the phone, being able to match phones of today with something good and quality. I couldn't help but notice there's no 5G though. There's no 5G? Yeah, I mean, 5G is just like real genuine 5G

is just in like a few blocks in a few cities and all that. So, and we started on this phone like a year ago. Yeah, you guys were explaining to me before the show that 5G phones are different than the 5 gigahertz network. Yes, yes. That has confused me for years. I had no idea until tonight. So here's the craziest thing to me

is the amount of smear pieces that have popped up. And right away, I'm just like, that's a red flag. It's like when new phones come out from Google or from whoever else, Huawei, someone will be like, this phone sucks. Someone will be like, well, you know, there's the pros and the cons. I've seen so many tech reviews and I've seen so many devices. To see all of these companies, all these news outlets, every single one line up in lockstep with the advice not to buy the phone, I was like, now that I find very strange considering they've never tested the phone and there's really no issue to be upset with it. If the phone doesn't do what it says, it's a phone, whatever.

I've developed a few apps myself with one of my business partners. I've done a ton of work in mobile, hacking phones and hacking other devices, making programs. And I've probably owned like a thousand different smartphones throughout the production stuff we've done. There's so many different kinds. And what people got to realize too, when you travel, and this is back in the day, they use different frequencies for all the cell antennas. So when I would go to like Turkey, the specific frequency, I'd have to check to make sure certain devices worked with certain phones. GSM typically worked in most places. So getting a GSM phone would be okay. But like Ukraine was actually cdma so i'd have to go and buy a new phone and they got phones that you can buy from samsung in eastern europe you can't buy in the united states and they're cheap and anyway i'm

just like okay so it's a phone if somebody wants to buy it because it's got oa on it or parlor or newsmax or whatever what's the problem now it could be that all of these news outlets are simply just, hey, here's an other. Let's smear them because we'll get clicks. Their audience expects to hate Trump. They called you MAGA world. They're trying to put you in that category simply for, you know, the kinds of sites that are or apps that are put on the phone. So maybe it's just a grift.

They all decided it's fair game. They can attack you and you're not going to do anything about it. And you know what? Hey, the reality is, I think most people, James O'Keefe is probably the only person who actually does sue for defamation and go after people. And who? Bloomberg. Bloomberg?

Michael Bloomberg. Yeah. He sues for defamation a lot. But I mean, I'm talking about the right. James O'Keefe's like the only one who does it. To be fair, Candace Owens, we'll maybe talk about that in a bit, just had her suit dismissed. But very few people try. And one of the most annoying things is whenever I've dealt with defamation, the advice I usually get from people on the right is just ignore it, blah, blah, blah, because you know.

And I'm like, why? Just sue and make your argument. Make a better argument. Improve your arguments and find the vector in which you can go after the people who are lying. But anyway, I digress. I want to tell everybody why I think the first and most important reason I think Freedom Phone could actually be very, very good, very, very important, and why the establishment is probably coming after you so hard. First, let me say, I have not tested the device.

I have not done a forensic analysis on it. I would like to get some of our tech experts to crack it open, go through it, hardware and software, and see if it can actually do what we think it can do. That's no problem at all. There are some concerns about whether or not there will be some Chinese spyware perhaps because it's made in China or whatever. Maybe there's concerns that there's data leakage in some capacity that it's spying on you. Some people are saying it's a honeypot, that the feds are funding this to get all of the patriots to use the phone and they can track everything you do. And I'm like, they do that through Google and Apple.

They're called national security letters. If you were worried about your phone being spied on, you are literally in the NSA database with your existing phone. They can't get any worse. They're already spying on you. But here's the thing. Why are all these outlets freaking out?

Anti-censorship as a service. So when Daily Beast comes out and says, this is a cheap device, it's garbage. When Gizmodo says it should be avoided at all costs, I'm like, what are they really freaking out about? Most people cannot get an Android device, jailbreak it, and flash it with whatever, boot up whatever operating system they want. I'm seeing a bunch of people on Twitter and they were like, you could just put Graphene OS on it. So for those that are not familiar with this, you know, maybe I don't want to get too jargony. Phones come with the Android operating system.

Android phones do. Then usually there's some like skin or bloatware that a company will put into it. So like Samsung has their specific version. You can actually plug it in, hook it up to your computer, erase that, and put a fresh, new, clean operating system. And many activists and hackers have created anti-censorship, and they've created free speech and anti-tracking, and even operating systems that erase themselves at a certain period of time.

They've created these things to enhance individual rights and security. I would say 99.9% of people would never figure out how to do that. I know people like, sure, you can pull up a YouTube tutorial, like here's how you make your phone secure and sensor-free. All of a sudden, you pop up, and you're like, just buy this. It's done. So where is that money? So they try claiming that it's a cheap knockoff.

Okay, well, you've got a custom operating system on it. Even if it just loaded up a sensor-free store, that'd be worth it. An app store that has apps on it that Google and Apple don't like. So if you want to choose what you consume, you can. The reason I think this is so dangerous is that it gives the opportunity, assuming it works, again, like I said, I didn't try it. I'm not endorsing it. I'm just saying the concept, the average person who cannot make a device can just buy one and have it. And assuming it does what you claim it does, this is really, really dangerous for the establishment that wants to track people. They don't want you to shut down. We already know we got the stupid Amazon robot spying on us. We

already know that the smartphones have their microphones on. We know that the NSA is incidentally collecting all this information. I shouldn't even say incidentally. Glenn Greenwald exposed X-key score and the things that they're doing with bulk data collection. So if you can buy a device that's not connected to those networks, you're still going to get spied on very likely through just general cell networks, where your phone is, what it's connected to. Let me tell you guys something. I got an alert on my phone and it said, you know, Maryland tracking. How do they know that my phone's in Maryland? How, what, because listen, of course they know where my phone is, right?

But what gives them the right to share it and act upon it? And that's where it gets really weird. My phone number is a New York City number. My primary residence is not Maryland. I am in Maryland. My phone alerts and says Maryland information on COVID and tracking and all that stuff. And that means that the cell company has given my data to the Maryland government. Or at the very least, the cell company is acting upon my data at the behest of a government program. Yeah, I'm not a fan of that. I never consented to them alerting my phone based on location in that capacity. But you know what?

Amber alerts, presidential text messages, they know where you are. They're tracking you all the time. If regular people can get access to a device that adds even 1% or 0.1% to their privacy and their free speech, that's going to be a real threat to the machine, which is trying to eliminate this ideology, classical liberalism, the right, whatever. If they are slowly eroding free speech, banning people on Twitter, banning people on Facebook, banning people on YouTube, and then all of a sudden someone can just pay money and get a device that immediately puts a halt to that operation, what are they going to do? Send a bunch of muggers to go steal your phone?

They can't do that. So you look at what YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are doing with banning hate speech, promising to do more, to clean up and end the rabbit holes, and then all of a sudden you get a phone and you can talk to whoever you want. So like I said, we'll have to actually you know before i actually say it's a good device i'll get you phones and you can tear it apart rip it apart we've tested but we're not going to take the phones from you oh well get them we're so what our plan is no bias then get them right so once you ship the phones we will reach out to people

and randomly select phones for testing do it oh yeah perfect yeah that's perfect not not through you because look if i if i went to you'd be like oh here's the phone and then we'd be like it's perfect it's great oh you're right you're right attention phones yeah exactly no randomly get some and all that happy to put it to the test but anyway when we're hearing what with with the binding administration is doing with censorship with the text messages and you know like yeah i mean seeing an article come out, right before we launched our phone about how they're pressuring phone companies to, like, get, you know, prevent the spread of misinformation in your text messages. I mean, it's sick. I mean, you know, if you're texting your mom or your father, your daughter, your son, I mean, it's terrible, like, what they're doing.

Could you imagine if you were talking on the phone to your mom and then you said something and it just cut the phone off? Yeah, like Twitter, you get a label for misinformation, right? I mean, maybe you get that in text messages. Maybe you get like an Amber Alert while you're on the phone or something. Your personal phone number. You're talking to your mother on the phone and they blockade you from being able to communicate. That's insane.

At least they had the decency to lie before and say they weren't monitoring you, or at least the decency to say it was for your safety. But now it's just so blatant. We've made the argument for a long time that social media networks should operate like phones. And we would use that point as an example as to how shocking it would be. Should they actually do that? We'd be like, you know, Twitter should be like a common carrier. Like they shouldn't be censoring what I say. Could you imagine if you texted your mom and your tweet, your text got deleted?

I mean, that'd be crazy. And now we're here and they're doing it. Or at least there's rumors it's happening, but they've stated they are doing it. Well, from the press, you know, from the White House, the press secretary's podium, I mean, that they're saying they're doing it.

I mean, it's or they want to do it. They said that they're working in conjunction with like the DNC and phone companies to what do they say uh meet out misinformation but there have been rumors from people saying that they've tried sending texts and the texts don't go through wow on certain issues yeah but that's something i can't confirm but i don't know if i have to considering the white house says this is what they're doing or at least that's that's their intention they're actively working in this is what they're doing, or at least that's their intention. They're actively working in this direction. And they said that they're actively flagging things for Facebook, in which case it's happening, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the thing is the Internet was the biggest weapon in the fight against just hoaxes, honestly. And, you know, obviously it spreads some could but i think it's a net good because you're not able to do hoaxes like wmds in iraq anymore and uh and because of social media because the yeah but they did russia yeah they did they did and i i think you would have seen the number the poll numbers on people believing that uh way higher if you didn't have the internet i don't know i i I feel like it's, in a sense, easier and harder with the internet to do these large-scale hoaxes, right? They just make a fake video. There was a video I covered years ago where some video footage got leaked, and I think it was in

Iraq. There was a news report from, I think it was like CNN, the BBC, and they were like, bomb blast goes off, people injured. And then someone leaked footage where you see a car blow up, and then a bunch of people run into frame, lay on the ground, and start writhing in pain. Wow, wow. So I don't know what that was. You don't know who staged it. For all we know, Russia could have staged that claiming it was staged by someone else.

You see the point? You never know who's trying to manipulate you. A exactly a false flag false flag oh snap you're making me nervous false flag how deep does it go the inception i don't know where that video is from you know you see you see the car explode and you see people run up after the fact lay down and act as though they were in the blast wow we don't know what it was from but it does call into question the initial reporting because the reporting talked about the people who were were in the blast room. We don't know what it was from. But it does call into question the initial reporting. Because the reporting talked about the people who were there in the blast. And then you see the blast and you're like, well, at least that story is not true.

So why is it being pushed out? I say it's easier and harder. It's easier in a sense that you've got to do the hard work of making fake content. Hiring people to run the sock puppet accounts. But then you have a substantially larger reach in terms of that kind of manipulation. I didn't even know what fiat currency was until 2007 when I saw Zeitgeist or 8 or whatever.

I went to school in the United States, grew up in the 90s and the 80s. We've been on fiat currency since 1970, 71 or something. I never even heard the phrase fiat currency. I was never taught that, never explained that they can print as much as they want until the internet. They found a way to tax you without you realizing it. Yeah, and if the internet had not come around and opportunities like Zeitgeist had not been presented, I would still not know probably. It's crazy, crazy.

Yep, and now they're slowly taking those rights and those freedoms away. I mean, look at the internet where it was in the late 90s. You could find wacky, crazy stuff. Oh, my gosh. Bangedup.com. I mean, you could probably still find that. It was just dirty, dirty, dirty death porn. No, no.

Yeah, but that's exactly the point. I mean, the stuff you'd see on LiveLeak. Yeah, LiveLeak. And take a look at torrenting and take a look at the height 10 years ago. Napster. What happened with Kim.com? You remember that? What did happen?

What went down with that? He had – so let me break it down for you, what the wild west of the internet was. Mega upload was a file locker. You'd set up an account and then you'd say, I want to store my files here, just like Google. If you're on Google Drive, you can upload a video and look, it's your kids doing it. You run around the yard or whatever. And then you can share the link with your friends so they can download it. It's an easy way for people to just all download something at once and be sending it to everybody. Well, the problem was people started immediately using a mega upload to post movies and TV shows. And it was just almost like, I think

more than half of it was piracy. A lot of people were using it, but piracy. Well, Kim.com, a New Zealand businessman who had, who has never been to the U S had like, I guess U S, um, I think it was the, the, um, was it the MPAA motion picture association of America? I could be wrong, but like some American industries and the FBI, I think it was the FBI and New Zealand authorities raid his home and arrest him in like the middle of the night or whatever. He's the super rich guy. And they claimed it was like piracy, whatever. I interviewed kim.com for a vice. And he made a really, really interesting point. Cause I was like, I was trying to challenge. I'm like, why wouldn't you take these things down? Why weren't you deleting the movies when they were uploading piracy? And he said,

are we supposed to go into our users accounts and spy on them? Are we supposed to start reading through their file names to see what they uploaded and why we did take them down? He was like, when we would get sent links and say, this is piracy, we would delete them immediately. But proactively, that would mean someone would create an account and we'd have to go into their account, look at what they're uploading, and then even watch the video to make sure. Because people can name videos whatever they want. And then he was like, it's not something we could do, but we were actively telling them we will do it. It didn't matter.

They came in. They shut it all down. The point of the story is 10 years ago, the Internet was the Wild West. Every movie, every show, you could watch anything anywhere. and they've done a really good job doing two things shutting all that down the piracy and actually making it a lot easier to watch movies to be honest i got no problem paying 10 bucks a month so i can get a big library of movies and i have to worry about viruses and garbage links and there have been times where it's like i'd see a movie and someone sent me a link and i'd be like oh cool you know an independent stand i'd click it and then it would be some like weird rom-com like wrongly labeled or something and i'm like a link and I'd be like, oh, cool. You know, Independence Day and I'd click it.

And then it would be some like weird rom-com like wrongly labeled or something. And I'm like, this is dumb. I just want to watch the movie. So they created streaming services. It was a great improvement in my opinion. But the point is what happened with the end of the Wild West, how everything became more streamlined like channels, we're seeing that happen now with social media as well. I really don't like the term piracy when you talk about copying information maybe illegally on the internet or whatever but copying information because a pirate would steal your thing and then you wouldn't have it anymore a pirate didn't come

and copy it down and then take a copy of it and leave you with your original the pirate piracy is stealing making a copy of something is different than that i I disagree. Oh, it's completely different than stealing. I had friends who worked in the movie industry who were losing their jobs because they would spend a couple hundred grand on doing a low-budget feature, and then it would immediately get pirated, and then they'd be like,

guys, we turned zero profit. We can't do this anymore. Sorry. I know people in the trucking industry that are losing their job. Modern technology has altered the way we communicate. It's not piracy. That's the point. I disagree.

You can't redefine piracy to make people look like villains and make it seem like they're stealing when they're making a copy of something. It's different. But I think they are stealing. You could argue that because of copyright law, but that didn't exist until like 1600 or something. Well, piracy happened after that too yeah piracy has been happening for a long time before that i i was never i i was never of the opinion that people should be allowed to just copy any bit of information they they wanted in the sense that like you don't need to give someone it's it's i don't even understand how this is

an argument like if you are if you believe in the in the rights of the working class to be able to have someone let's let's let's think about like an invention or designing a structure someone sits there and tries to figure out how to make this object work how to design this engine properly and then you're like i can copy it you can't do anything about it and you're like dude i've worked for 10 years to design this and like we don't care yeah i'm not stealing it i'm just duplicating right but if they try and sell it now they're like, we don't care. I'm not stealing it. I'm just duplicating it. Right. But if they try and sell it, now they're on the hook for illegal activity. But copying it is – I think that's human right.

And then copying it, everyone gets to use it. And so the issue there is I certainly like the idea that if someone invents something or makes something that can be easily shared and everyone can enjoy the fruits of that product, I like the idea they can. But then to say that the person who broke their back worked really, really hard to make that gets nothing for it. No, that's a problem. So say you made something, data, and I copied it and then sold it. I think it should be written into the code that if I get paid, you get paid a large amount because you're the creator of the content. So what you need to understand about the content that was being taken was that the consumption of the content was happening on mass scales with millions of people who did not pay for it. So shouldn't the person who made it allowed to be compensated for the fruits of their

labor? I think artists should be able to make money, you know, and if they want it to be available for free, they can, you know, they can have a license where it's available to people, you know, put it out in the open domain. I'm just a realist. I'm an artist. I'm an internet video content creator i'm a musician if people take my stuff you can't stop it that's the point

trying to make it illegal and you can no you can't stop people from trading information they they created spotify they created pandora they created youtube yeah but if you if you want to go online and look for a movie and watch it for free you can it's it's it's not as easy as it used to be that's what i'm saying they did a really good job of shutting down all these sites they didn't really dirty ways to be honest like i think based on my understanding of the kim.com case it was completely wrong what they did it was it was nightmarish the man's house i mean when they could have just been like stop doing this but they they didn't it was like they wanted to put a show they want to make an example of people that's the problem when they went after these people who use napster like metallica went after him for suing saying you're stealing or when there was

like one guy who downloaded an mp3 and they showed up to his house and he got a fifty thousand dollar fine or something that's insane that doesn't solve the problem that's stupid what solved the problem was just innovation technology spotify right and now you know bitcoin obviously solves a lot of these problems too because now we have the blockchain which means there can be digital assets that can be can create can be created and not copied so now we enter the space of digital property without fear of being copied of course then you enter the realm of theft which is still possible if someone can steal your encryption keys or whatever then you get access to it anyway to wrap this back up the internet was a wild crazy place it was it was

nuts what you could do on the internet and nowadays it is increasingly becoming more and more like mainstream establishment television this show huge thorn in their side but you know not the most egregious steven crowder a much bigger thorn they've already banned the bigger thorns like like alex jones or miley annapolis he's still on youtube i don't know what he's doing but like even Crowder, a much bigger thorn. They've already banned the bigger thorns like Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos. He's still on YouTube. I don't know what he's doing. But like off of Twitter, like the place where these like counterculture individuals have been able to grow and become prominent.

They have removed them because they are trying to dictate culture. They're trying to control it. Well, the beauty of the internet when it first came out and, you know, I grew up, you know, I was very young. I don't remember a time before the internet. I don't remember when it didn't exist. And, and, and just the ability that you can be yourself. And that's what I loved about the internet. And growing up where I grew up, it was, you know, an amazing, wonderful place. It was very beautiful geography. I'm from Idaho. But, you know, it's just the ability of the internet is that you can truly be yours. And

that's how it started out. You can truly be yourself and you can truly be who you really are and it felt like you know when you're getting into school back in the early days you know they're they try to shun you and i feel like that only elevates in life when you know you get stuck in a corporate job you hate and all that and then and then now they're coming for the internet and ultimately if we're all i mean this sounds like a platitude but it's true is in a sense of if if we're able to be ourselves, you know, that that ends up being a threat to the establishment. And the problem there is that the current ideology that we're seeing rise is the kind of ideology that murders people who are inconvenient. It doesn't stop at like, oh, we're going to take your phone away. It doesn't stop at, oh, we're going to take your social media away.

It stops at you're a threat to the revolution. You're committing crimes of hate speech. Off to the gulag. I've had people say to me, it was really funny, you know, I had one lefty from Occupy post on my Facebook wall, don't never forget you're first against the wall. And I'm like, oh yeah, a little old me in the wall. You know, it's funny when the SPLC calls me a reactionary what they're saying. Re oppose the revolution they genuinely believe they are in a revolution to and it's funny shouldn't that make them the insurrectionists if you use language critical of those who are like the constitution is good ah you're a reactionary they want to get rid of the constitution they want to get rid of this country doesn't that make them insurrectionists

right well they're the ones who have more and more institutional power conservatives are the ones who aren't doing a whole lot about it and one of the reasons i think the one of the only reasons i think we're actually seeing a culture war is because former liberals who believe in free speech freedom of association you know uh classical liberalism have started standing up and pushing back not not because of conservatives. Now, of course, conservatives absolutely are pushing back, but I think if they carried on the establishment with a unified liberal order of some sort, meaning young people who played video games

weren't being told to engage in a fringe ideology, if they didn't try forcing the liberals too far left too fast, there would be no culture war. It would be politics as usual. We wouldn't think twice about it. But something happened where the left spread out and many people who are like center left individuals, traditional liberals did not want to agree to this new racist ideology that was being implemented by the Democrats and by the progressives, which led them to resist it and led them to lump in with conservatives. And now you have a large faction of Trump voters, 75 million people.

You think mesh networking is the answer to this? Yeah, I mean, I think that that's why I think they dislike my project so much is if you have your own hardware, because it doesn't matter. You could have the best software in the world, you know, like, you know, and if you're leasing basically on someone else's app store and someone else's hardware, you're screwed.

So that's why on our phone we did... We put our own app store on there, which has normal apps but also banned ones, and we feature, you know feature pro-free speech ones. But I think mesh networking is the future, and that's why we want to incorporate it on this phone. So that way you're able to communicate. Basically, what that means is being able to communicate even if they try to shut you down. I mean, why I got into Bitcoin in the first place was I guess I was a weird kid because I was really interested in currency.

And before Bitcoin, there was something called Liberty Dollar. Oh, yeah. They went after that guy. And they went after that guy. I think they put him in prison or at least said, if you don't shut it down. So what that was is basically wanting to go back to the silver and gold standard. And he basically set up his own little mini treasury, I think, in his garage or something. And you would get a $10 bill with Ron Paul's face on it.

And you could redeem that with him for $ dollars worth of silver and then you know small business i have like a we accept liberty dollar sign even it's uh that's that's in my place um and and they shut that guy down because technically it's illegal to start your own currency in the u.s and it became illegal um during the civil war uh that you know there actually used to be i i'd also because again i'm the bitcoin guy um and now now i'm the Freedom Phone guy is what they're calling me. But one of the things I did is I have all these old currencies because before the Civil War, it was common to actually issue other alternative currencies, whether that's a company or an area. And so I have all these things in the Civil War, they want to consolidate all the money into one currency. And then, so that's why Bitcoin was invented in the first place. People go think,

you know, Satoshi Nakamoto, the founders anonymous, or, or, you know, what, what, what is the purpose of blockchain was they, anyone who started their own currency, they were either throwing in jail or threatening them to go to jail. And, uh, and that's, and, or, you know, and shutting down any centralized operation. So that's what was beautiful about Bitcoin is you're able to run it even if they shut you down. And that's why the founder is anonymous because back in the day, if you started your own currency, you were in prison. And you were saying that mesh networking can bypass issues with DNS.

What were you saying? What is DNS and what are potential DNS issues? We got to explain to people what mesh networking is. Yeah, and explain mesh network. Thanks. Well, let's start with mesh networking. How would that work? What does that mean? So, yeah, I mean, the goal is to be able to have – being able to run and piggyback, other people's hardware for Internet.

Hopefully, you can have your own mesh network. So that way, whether that – if you have like a box at home, being able to communicate with other things, with phones and all that, being able to communicate. So even if they shut down everything – I'll simplify it. Right now, your phone. Here's what people got to understand about phones. Your phone does not send out a lasso to a cell tower.

There is no direct laser beam from your phone to a tower. The tower is broadcasting information in every possible direction. Your phone is broadcasting information in every possible direction. So while the cell tower sees your signal and then interprets it and then transmits a signal, which your phone interprets, it's entirely possible that the signal sent equally in the opposite direction can be intercepted by someone as well. This is a large centralized data network. Mesh networking would mean my phone connects to Ian's phone, connects to Eric's phone, connects to Lydia's phone, and then all the way down. So imagine this. With a mesh network,

you could line up a person probably, I mean, cell phones have massive range, a few miles, right? Yeah, yeah. You could take a, well, depending on how you do the mesh network and what bands you're using, you could have zero cell phone towers. You would never have a dead zone ever again. Imagine this. You're in your office and you're like, my phone just doesn't work when I'm on like the seventh floor in the corner because the tower can't reach here. With mesh networking, your phone would just look for available phones around it and transmit data through everyone else's phone network. We wouldn't need cell towers in cities.

Could we set up solid state mesh networking nodes that don't require electricity? I think it would all require electricity, but you can set up solar panels. They're run by solar panels. So that way you could have totally self-sufficient ones where you're not relying on the grid. And I think that's a huge... You saw what happened in Texas being reliant on the, on the grid. It can, it can go bad. I'll give people a simple example that I was on a cruise ship once. And before you got on, they were like, download this app. It's a Bluetooth mesh networking, direct messaging app. There's no cell service. Your phone will not work in the middle of the ocean. So what happens is you get

on the boat. The boat goes off and you're in international waters and your cell stops working. But somehow you just got a message from your friend on the other side of the boat. Your friend on the other side of the boat sent a message to your username. Hey, where are you at? His phone at the end of the boat saw Jane Doe 30 feet away, jumped to her phone phone and then jumped to the next person's phone, to the next person's phone, to the next person's phone until it found your phone. And none of them get a notification.

None of them get your message. It just piggybacks until it finally found you. There were so many phones on this boat that it was instantaneous. The mesh network just existed as long as people's Bluetooth were on. So the more nodes, the faster the network runs. Yeah. The phones recognize the range of devices. So like I nodes, the faster the network runs? Yeah. The phones recognize the range of devices. So like I said, it's not one-to-one.

It's not like your phone just sends the signal straight to the tower and back. When that one phone sends the signal out, 15 phones in front of them all see it and instantly, exponentially just track down the code they're looking for and then your phone gets a message. No cell tower. A mesh network of a bunch of different devices.

I don't know why we're not doing that technology now in cities. Phones should – I mean, one of the things they've been doing with, like, home internet is that they also create a public node off of your own Wi-Fi node. I've never been the biggest fan of that, and I definitely think people should have a choice to turn it on or off, but I don't understand why we don't do this. Oh, the profit margin of centralized systems are keeping it that way, I think, intentionally. They love that you have to go through Comcast, loves that you have to go through their Wi-Fi node to get to the gatekeepers. Actually, I think it's easier to spy. Yeah, I think so too.

Definitely easier to spy. So with a mesh network, though, if I sent a message to you and you were over there and it went to like 50 people and then to you, would they not be able to spy on my message to you? Well, that itself is encrypted. So because, you know, I mean, ideally, right? If you're using a mesh network, yeah, it breaks up onto little pieces and all that and then sends it all united to you. They can easily go to a centralized node, spy.

But to go to each and every individual phone with different modifications and different specs, that'd be a nightmare. It's possible, though, for sure. You could use centralized nodes in the mesh network. It's not like we have to rip down these cell towers. Those could be part of the mesh. You would need backhaul access. So the way it would work is you're standing in the middle of the desert. There's a guy 100 feet in front of you, 100 feet in front of him. And then your phone sends a signal that bounces off of all those phones and then hits the backhaul. Cell phone tower or a hard line connection or something and then boom. It hits the rest of the internet.

And you were saying the DNS could be a problem. What is DNS and how could that – how does that affect like centralized systems right now? Yeah. So for example, when you have like a domain, you have what's called, you know, your DNS settings. So if you're, you know, that enables you to direct people, you know, direct a certain domain. And then, you know, people have been noticing just a lot of problems with, you know, DNS propagation. Not just, you know, you can have sometimes, you know, you're not doing it right. Like even if you go on like GoDaddy or any of these things, you can look at your any place where you have a domain, you have what's called your DNS settings. And then, yeah, I mean, a lot of people have been noticing these weird DNS propagation problems where it's just kind of going in and out.

And I just think that's such a vulnerability right now where, you know, I feel like powers that be can mess with that and make it so domains can be banned. I mean, you saw when- Gab. Yeah. Was it Gab? Gab had their domain seized, I think. Was it Gab?

I think their registrar banned them and all that, but that's the next step is you can go to one of the best domain registrars. It's called Epic, E-P-I-K, and that's where we host our domain. And that's where I believe Gab hosts their domain as well. Don't they do their own everything now, though? Aren't they building their own everything? Yeah, I mean, I think Gab, yeah, they have to. I mean, it's honestly props to them in many ways.

I mean, we made – Gab doesn't have an app, so on our phone, we have Gab right in our app store. Because then we built basically a whole app around their website, so that way when people get it, they want to install it, they can get it. Didn't they use Fediverse, though? Gab switched to the Fediverse. Oh, did they? Oh, I didn't know that. A while ago, a while ago. Wow, wow.

For those that aren't familiar, the Fediverse is like Twitter, but decentralized. Yeah. So that means, it was really funny, uh mastodon i think was the biggest node the biggest website that used the the fetiverse and when gab switched over all of a sudden all of these evil far right people were now in the same network as the far left on mastodon and they panicked they were like we're banning these servers so we won't see them it's really really funny actually the hackers who are like we're creating a free speech network. The goal of the Fediverse was to create an uncensorable network, decentralized internet, to stop the Feds and the establishment.

But then when the hacker community got woke, they immediately were like, yay, establishment, and then turned over their servers to being banned, to blocking and everything. But anyway. Yeah, it's weird how the hacker community went woke. To me, that's surprising. I know, right? Yeah, it's like out of all the went woke. To me, that's surprising. I know, right? Yeah, it's like out of all the people. Pro-FBI? Yeah.

Pro-Fed? Wow. DEF CON's probably going to be fun this year. Free speech doesn't mean uncensored is what I've found. If you allow everything to happen, then there will be mass chaos and people won't be able to speak properly because they'll get beat down when they try to talk. And it's just, hey, everyone's able to do everything. So you have to create like you have to censor evil in a way or whatever destruction. You have to censor that so that people can speak freely.

You know, that's as per the U.S. Constitution. We've set up rules so that we allow for free speech. Well, similar with the Internet, but it's dangerous because if people decide who's the arbiter, you know, then they can be pretty heavy handed. The difference is speed. So when it comes to the real world, first of all, people have their faces on their face, you know. And on the Internet, you have anonymity, which is good. It can be good in a lot of ways. It can be bad in some ways.

Ultimately, I think anonymity serves a better, more good than bad. But imagine if every human being on the planet had the superpowers of the Flash. Every single one. Somebody would be holding a feminist rally at a local community center, and then some anti-feminist instantly could be there shouting them down. Same thing would be true of Antifa. So you get some right-wing people saying, we love America, and then instantly 10,000 anti-America, flag-burning Antifa are all screaming, and no one can talk.

So in the real world, we have physical security. That's not censorship if we have a private event. So the challenge, I suppose, is the modern left says, Twitter is a private company. They can ban whoever they want. And it's like, yes, but they're like the only one that monopolized the space. And that's creating a strain on discourse. And it's causing

serious problems in this country but you know what the problem is these leftists enjoy the fact well first of all some of them enjoy the fact they're winning because they have the control of the institutions but most of them are just like i'll say whatever i'm told to say because they just want to ride the wave what they don't realize is that they're destroying the fabric of society and here's the way i put it a lot of people think you know super villains want to destroy the world right i was watching austin powers recently and dr evil and which one is it gold member he's he's like no no no this is in the second one he's like even after they pay me all the money i'm still going to destroy the cities with liquid hot magma it's like no you wouldn't because that where

do you spend the money after you destroy all the cities? But again, it's a comedy. It's funny. What people don't realize is that they're like, yay, I'm winning. And it's like, congratulations, your victory will make you the king of a pile of rubble. So you may want to have you want to have political battles. But if you are creating such a strain that you are causing serious physical conflict and violence to where Joe Biden just went out and was like, do the Republicans think that Democrats are sucking the blood out of kids? Like what? The president just said what? Like, come on. You know, Donald Trump said Kung flu, but geez, Joe Biden, that was way. That's how insane they're being driven by the fact

that they are high on their own supply. Let me just say it. I'll say it so good. Jack Dorsey, he invents Twitter, and then he just takes the whole vat and sticks it in his veins and believes all the psychotic garbage that the toilet has produced and is being flushed into his veins. They are high on their own supply. And eventually people are going to freak out from the psychosis of social media algorithmic chaos. And it's all just going to go. Well, they're going to build minds is what they're going to do. And they did it. They built it in 2011.

I was there. Yeah. The centralized Internet is very, very dangerous. And having a CEO decide what gets to be said on the network is also very dangerous because the CEO can change and become a psychopath. Yeah. I mean, Dick Costello was like that. He went, you know, former CEO of Twitter. I mean, he went from saying we're the free speech wing of the free speech party to just, you know, ranting on Twitter about how they should be stronger on the bands.

They're high on their own supply. Yeah. It's a downward spiral. They start, they start, they get into these arguments you know a cgp gray has a great video called this video will make you angry where he talks about how people rile each other up about the other and he said that they don't actually talk to each other like you know it's it'll be like you know i'm i'm i'm pro tim and ian's pro ian but instead of us actually arguing with each other about our beliefs we i argue to you and he argues to lydia i get so

annoyed when people do that that's what they do. And so what happens is our mental image of the other gets crazier and crazier and crazier until ultimately we're just like, you're evil. The problem is the people who control the institutions got high on the supply of leftism. They were being fed algorithmic junk that would generate more clicks and more traffic for these rage bait blogs. And so they started to go insane, believing insane things. Let me tell you guys something. I've often explained how the algorithmic psychosis took hold in America. For those that aren't familiar, I'm going to explain it. And for those that are familiar, please bear with me as I explain to those who are not familiar. In the late 2000s, Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and whatever else were trying to figure out algorithms. Not so much Twitter. Twitter didn't

go algorithmic for a while. They were trying to figure out how to get the most amount of engagement on posts. So they created algorithms. Regular people then would see a post and it would say, I like chocolate chip cookies. And they would interact with it. And then Facebook would be like, people seem to like chocolate chip cookies. Show them more interact with it. And then Facebook would be like, people seem to like chocolate chip cookies. Show them more posts about cookies. But then one day, someone posts a video of a black man being beaten by police. And all of a sudden, a million shares,

300 million views. And the Facebook algorithm, without any disdain for what the video was, said, this is what people want to see. No, I don't think people wanted to see that. I think they were mad about it and wanted people to know because they wanted justice. Well, the algorithm then started feeding more of these videos. But more importantly, humans figured it out.

Humans figured out, I get way more views when I post these videos. So the Ragebait blog started posting more and more and more of this. In fact, at one point, there was a website dedicated to nothing but police brutality that was in the top global 500 websites. All they did was post police brutality videos. Then something more magical happened. The discovery of intersectional feminism. Wait a minute. If we combine racism and sexism, we don't just get X views or Y views and we don't get X plus Y, we get X Y views. An exponential increase by combining the keywords.

Thus, we saw the rise of intersectionality, which was this idea, which is rooted in, it stems from critical race theory, that a black woman experiences a unique kind of sexism and racism that a black man and a white woman would not experience, creating an all new interpretation of racism. What ends up happening is you have all of these companies producing rage bait to the great to great. Every article is police brutality nonstop. Mike dot com started as my understanding is a Ron Paul libertarian website. No way. Did Mike start off as Ron Paul? That's that's why there was an investigation I read about. So correct me if I'm wrong, everybody. But it started off

by just being like, what was the Internet? What was big on the Internet back then? Ron Paul. Ron Paul. I mean, he was number one on Reddit. I mean, that's where I first heard about Bitcoin was a Ron Paul event. But then something happened. They realized that anger was the number one, was the emotion that caused the highest amount of shares. So then instead of being about Ron Paul, it became about police brutality. Now, you got to understand, too, the Ron Paul crowd overlapped with the police brutality crowd because libertarians didn't like seeing people be beaten by cops and they liked Ron

Paul, too. But the police brutality people found that enraging people with intersectionality was worth more. And eventually it leaves the Ron Paul people behind who are probably, to be completely honest, more rational in their thinking. And they were looking for information. They were finding it. They were getting away from the mainstream.

Which brings me to the current state of our generational algorithmic psychosis. Someone who is 10 years old in 2008 goes on Facebook, maybe for the first time. I know they're not supposed to because you're supposed to be 13, but they're 10. And what do they see? Nothing but police brutality videos. Every video in their feed is a cop beating a black man. Five years goes by. A third of their life is inundated with nonstop posts of police beating black men. Now, does that mean that more and more cops are doing this? No, not at all.

It's just that when you have how many million, 300 something million interactions with cops per year, a handful of them are going to get really, really bad. Some may be taken out of context. Now, it's 10 years later. We're talking 2018. And these kids are now 20 years old, half of their lives. They have seen nothing but the police, the brutality videos and racism and sexism. Now it's 2021. Now they're all in their early to mid-20s, these young people. Most of their lives inundated with algorithmic psychosis. Is it true that police sometimes will beat a person unjustly? It is.

Does sometimes mean a lot? It actually doesn't. Is a lot relative? Okay,, it is. Does sometimes mean a lot. It actually doesn't. Is a lot relative? Okay, sure it is. But out of hundreds of millions of interactions with police, a tiny, tiny fraction, I think the Wall Street Journal said 19 unarmed black men were killed by police. That's a problem. Each and every one of those deaths is bad.

But when you play those videos on loop for a decade, people's worldview, these kids, they grew up in a world where the only thing they ever saw were these videos played on repeat, sometimes from different angles. I mean, the internet is like raising kids now. I feel like I was raised by the internet. I mean, I had a great family and all that, but a lot of people, they don't even have a great family and they're raised by the internet. But these kids grew up in a world that doesn't exist. So I remember, I noticed this from time to time. You go on Reddit, and I'll see the same police brutality

video from like 2014. And it pops up once a week because it gets karma. Because if someone says, I want to get internet points, they put it, they post it, and they know people are going to upvote it. And they don't know, or they don't care that it's really old. That 10-year-old kid sees that video

every week, and then they forget, and they see it a month later, and then they engage, and these videos are constantly recycled in this way. It's algorithmic psychosis that is warping the minds of people who live in the internet, who are growing up with it. The other thing that is causing the chaos

is what I call the scaling problem, and it's basically, if you have 100 police officers and one of them is a dick and a psychopath who beats somebody, that's 1%. Most people are going to be like, arrest that guy. Problem solved. It's just one guy. If you have 100 million police officers, you've not got a million cops going around doing all this stuff. That's a very, very serious problem. But it's the same percentage. Now, it's not nearly that high in terms of bad police officers.

We do have problems with cops. Don't get me wrong in terms of like enforcing unjust laws or seizing people's guns and things like that in violation of the Constitution and violating people's free speech. I've seen it. The cops who sprayed those girls, the women at Occupy Wall Street for no reason just walked up Tony Bologna and he sprayed her. That's wrong. But when you look at the actual ratio, these people who grow up in the paranoid, delusional world of rage bait algorithms and their whole lives have been inundated with this,

they live in this world that's completely inverted. The 0.001% of cops who are actually doing these things become the 99.99% of cops because they've never seen other interactions. Now they're going into politics. Now they're voting. So if you think everything is going to stop, what people need to understand is it's not about you. It's about the kids from 10 years ago and where they are now. It's about the kids who are 15 years old right now, what they've been raised on and who they will vote for in the next three years, which could be crazy crackpot far left cult member who microwaves their underwear and is using a curling iron to make pancakes because that's what they see on the Internet.

Could be Kanye West. I believe that's not so bad. I believe I love Kanye so much. I mean, those Sunday services are amazing. I mean, that's why I want to get into politics. Actually, I feel like Kanye was one of the biggest motivators um because just just seeing someone you know like in the song reborn uh and all that with kid cuddy it was it was just so beautiful you know i want all the smoke i want all the pain i want all the blame what an awesome thing engulfed in shame and uh and that's that's

what made me want it because i've i've been like what got me into got me into Bitcoin was Ron Paul and all that and that whole world. And some guy had a Bitcoin. It was actually Adam Kokesh. It was actually an Adam Kokesh event. What year was it? And it was all Ron Paul people. I forgot the – I mean it was around when Bitcoin had come out recently. And my older brother brought me to an Adam Kokesh event and he got arrested at the Jefferson Memorial for dancing and all that.

Do you remember that? I vaguely remember that. Yeah, and then my brother, we flew in and we went to go protest that. And then, yeah, so it was like a Footloose-like protest. And then some guy had this orange Bitcoin shirt on or had an orange B and it looked like a dollar sign. I'm like, what's that? And he's like, it's Bitcoin, man. It's going to end Wall Street, bro.

And he ran off. You know what I love about Bitcoin? That started it ran off you know what i love about it all you know i love about bitcoin what the people who endorsed it early on had no idea what it was at all and the reason i didn't buy is because me and my friends more so knew what it was now uh so my story is that back in 2011 bitcoin was at 70 cents and i look over to my friend i I'm in LA at a hackerspace. $0.70 per Bitcoin. And I'm like, I was like, hey, I got five grand in savings. Should I just buy all this Bitcoin, like put it all in Bitcoin?

Because I'm not going to touch the money. You know what I mean? It's just my savings sitting in my bank account. And he goes, dude, like first of all, how do you even buy this stuff? And second of all, it's probably a scam. Like somebody makes this and they tell you it's valuable. And sure, it's like, you know, we understood Bitcoin. But he's like, what can you really do?

You're going to buy it. And then a month, it's going to be a fad. And then you're going to lose everything. And I was like, that's a good point. I won't buy. Well, I'm familiar with the people calling product scams when they're not. I remember seeing it and thinking like, okay, so now my currency is going to be I got to write a string of numbers on letters on paper. If my paper gets lost or burned, it's gone forever.

And if I lose access to electricity, I don't have my money. So I didn't get into it. But what was your impetus to get into it? Well, so actually, yeah. Do you want to tell us what year and how you got into it? Yeah, I got into it 2011 as well. So I had about – my grandmother, who was very old, and she gave me $1,000. And she's like, Eric, use this for your scholarship.

One day, go to school. I'm going to buy fake internet money. And that's what I did. So that's what I ended up doing. So I bought that. Yeah, my brother taught me how to like get that out and actually buying bitcoin was easier back in the day because it was like you could just pay some guy over paypal and you know and then uh and get bitcoin sent to your wall just i mean you had bitcoin faucets back in the day which is where they would give away free bitcoin

i got 0.15 bitcoin from that faucet wow yeah but that org right.org, right? Yeah, that computer got destroyed, though. Oh, my God. So I probably – I don't even know how many Bitcoin were on that computer, the computer I had back at the hackerspace, because I didn't put my savings into it, but I still did get some Bitcoin. It was worthless. I was like, whatever. It's like I had like a dollar. That happened to my friend. American Airlines lost his bag, and that had about 500 Bitcoin on it.

No! Yeah, I know. Where did you store it in the beginning? Back in the day, and definitely not now, but I just stored it on my laptop. You download the Bitcoin.org desktop wallet, and that's what you did. I'll pack a socks if anybody remembers that. And yeah, I mean, I was a weird kid. I mean, some kids had video games, some kids had sports.

Mine was Bitcoin. I just spent every day and i ended up actually i dropped out of high school because i had some bitcoin money then moved moved my butt to uh to palo alto sulcan valley and just like you know tried to do a business and all that and that ended up going well but um eventually sold that company put it all back into bitcoin but bitcoin to me i mean when i first got into it i actually did think it was going to be big. But it was kind of in the way you hope for world peace. It's like, well, you hope for it, but you don't know if it will happen. There's a funny meme where it's like some – there's like a guy who's wearing a nice polo and glasses.

And he's like, Bitcoin seems interesting, but I'm not entirely sure that people will build confidence in this decentralized network. But I'll look into it. And the next guy is like fat with a beard and flies and he's like, I want to buy drugs on the internet. And it's like that guy's a millionaire now. Because he was just like some scumbag who's like, I don't care. Did you pre-install

wallets or on the Freedom Phone wallets? There's a crypto wallet on the phone. What's it called? It's called MetalPay actually. Do you have the phone? Yes, I do. Do you want to's it called? It's called MetalPay, actually. Do you have the phone? Yes, I do. Do you want to pull it out?

I have a pull-out. Do you want to pull out your phone? We won't use the pronouns. I know. Do you want to pull it out? But that's another thing. Rip it out. Everyone told me when I got into Bitcoin, and they were all like,

yeah, bro, that's a scam, bro. Get out of here. Someone took your money on the internet. Some guy named Bitcoin took your money, and that's how it happened. I got into an argument with some ancap guy and i was like great it was funny because i was like talking about this is this is like probably 2012 or 13 i was like so bitcoin was still relatively cheap back then and i was talking about my concerns and he didn't know anything at all and he's probably like worth hundreds of millions of dollars right now and i'm like i wish i was dumb you know what i mean and just like oh cool bitcoin and cap woo

anarchy and i just bought a bunch not thinking about it but i was like hmm there are some very interesting problems with this we saw some of the hard forks uh or not the hard forks the hard forks the the um bitcoin cash and there was the act no no the accidental ones oh do you remember when uh i think it was in 2013, Bitcoin forked on accident? Oh, yeah. And then they had to do an emergency like, no, no, that's not the real thing anymore, and switch to this node. And so I was like, eh. But you know the mistake I made back then was it was investing in – the one thing the ANCAPs understood was that it was a decentralized, non-copyable asset that was difficult to locate.

And that's all that really mattered. I was ANCAP back when I was 12. But there's two things. There's that. And that in and of itself was like, we don't care what the value of the Bitcoin is. I can have this Bitcoin and trade it, and it's easy. The other thing was back in the day, it was actually a very interesting way to transfer funds very quickly internationally, not because you cared about the value of Bitcoin. Put it this way. I need to give you, let's say I need to give you a dollar,

and you're a thousand miles away. So I can't hand you the dollar. So what I do is I go on, I send you a dollar's worth of Bitcoin, and then you immediately sell it for a dollar. So I just transfer the dollar instantly. Neither of us are holding Bitcoin. I go to the site and I say, buy Bitcoin, send, and then you go accept Bitcoin, sell. The dollar transferred like that. That was very, very early in Bitcoin's history when I was like, now I started to understand why this is such a powerful tool because it basically cuts out a lot of the financial infrastructure for transferring funds very quickly it didn't matter what the price of a bitcoin was because if someone could transfer value instantly then there would be more demand

for buying than selling and so that's when i was like okay i'll get some bitcoins i'm taking more seriously and since then i have i mean that yeah i mean I mean, the ANCAPs back in the day, I mean, I was really into that, and it's still a part of me. And, but, I mean, that was that whole world was just, you know, a bunch of, I mean, that's how all great things get started is people that are a little different and all that. So, but how did you, so you bought in 2011, you bought all these Bitcoin, and then when did you become a millionaire?

Yeah, so I became a millionaire at 18, so I was like 12 back then. So, again, that was... Wait, you bought Bitcoin these bitcoin and then when did you become a millionaire uh yeah so uh i became millionaire at 18 so i was like 12 back then so again that was when you bought bitcoin when you were 12 yeah i bought bitcoin when i was 12 and again it was easier back in the day because uh you know uh although i ended up having to do it later but all the kyc stuff you know you could just like yeah paypal some guy on local bitcoins and uh so that's what i did and um yeah i mean i was 12 years old and I just spent every day. I was like mowing lawns just to try to get more money to put into it. Really? Yeah. See, that's, that's it. Cause a lot of people say like, when I tell that story about having the five

grand and savings and wanting to buy Bitcoin, everyone responds with, you would have sold it 20 bucks. And I'm like, you're correct. If I put five grand into Bitcoin and hit $20, I'd be like, I'd sell right away. I'd be like, and I'd sell right away. I'd be like, just get up. Because I wasn't smart enough, I guess. I didn't have the vision. I didn't see it. I think to me it was just my whole identity was wrapped up in Bitcoin because it's like, what are you going to do as a 14-year-old with this money when it went up? And then again, it was just like I was just obsessed with Bitcoin.

It was my identity, and it just inspired me to do so many other things. But yeah, I became a millionaire at 18. I'm 22 now. I'm an old man. Did that. And then, yeah, a bunch of articles came out. You know, youngest Bitcoin millionaire, which was nice, but, you know, ultimately was, you know, cool, I guess. But you didn't buy Doge.

I did buy some Doge early on. I did cash out Doge early, though. That was my mistake. I now have some coin in Doge and all that. But, yeah, I mean, I was all in Bitcoin. I mean, I remember I made like $300 on Dogecoin like back in the day. And I was like, well, this is as far as it's going to go. Because Dogecoin is one of those coins that has lasted for such a long time.

I mean, they did the whole NASCAR thing early on. And then after that faded, I was like, well, maybe Dogecoin. I love how in the early days of Bitcoin, there was like thousands of altcoins. We'll call them altcoins. And they were just like clones of Bitcoin with different names. And then people would be like, this is the one that's going to beat Bitcoin. And I'm like, it's nothing. It's all the same thing.

It's like you just cloned the code and then made it and then sold it. And people made money doing it it was it was crazy because even if it was almost worthless you could make like a million coins go on some some uh trading uh website and people would be like i'll give you bitcoin for it it was so scammy i mean i know and it still is still is yeah i mean litecoin was one of those things i mean seeing litecoin like ethereum's kind of the new litecoin but i remember litecoin was just you would always – whenever Bitcoin went up, like Litecoin was always that number two. And they would say Bitcoin is gold, Litecoin is silver. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

I mean it was literally the logos and it was – that was just such a crazy, beautiful time. Wild, wild west of the internet, man. It was the wild, wild west on the internet. And then again, I mean I remember there was this thing called World of Text and it was like when Chrome first came out and you had like a web GL, I think it was called. And it was, uh, and, and it basically was this whole just giant text page where you could just write anything and be yourself and all that. And that was what was beautiful. And, and, you know, and again, I just feel like, uh, not, not to tie it into today, but I mean, just, it's just, they're taking away the ability to be yourself.

And people use the terms like free speech and all that. And I mean, that's the perfect term for it. But what does that really mean? It's the right to have your own voice, the right to be yourself. Can I see that phone? Yeah, absolutely. So here, should I open it to the camera? This is the box.

Should I be fancy with it? Should I be fancy with it? Yeah, show the people the freedom phone. I looked it up. So this is the freedom phone,. Should I be fancy with it? Should I be fancy with it? Yeah, show the people. Big time. I looked it up. There you go. This is the Freedom Phone, guys. Yeah, it's white. And all that.

It's beautiful. It's a beautiful box. Okay, cool. Cool. I'm bumping my microphone here. So here we go. Your frame is probably like at your chest. Okay.

Okay. So there we go. So this is it and all that. Up a little bit. Up a little bit. Perfect. There you go. Can I see it?

It still darkens the camera because of the white. Yeah, absolutely. So here we go. Here, I'll hand it to you in just a second and all that. Up a little bit. Perfect. There you go. It still darkens the camera because of the white. Absolutely. So here we go. I'll hand it to you in just a second. This is what it looks like. It's a quality phone and all that. Oh yeah. It's a quality phone and all that and you can boot it up. We basically combined

some of the best custom ROMs on Android Plus. I hired a really great CTO to basically rebuild Android from the ground up so that way it was secure and all that. So we mixed Lineage OS,

Graphene OS. We took some of the best parts of all these things. It was tricky to do because that can break a lot of things. We did that and then yeah, so you have like trust on there, which is kind of a privacy guard for your phone. And then you put it up. And then we have – I'm just trying to think. One of the things we did is we made this really explicitly kind of political in a way because we thought about making –

like should we make this phone like a little bit more um like a little bit more neutral um in a way um and not so like hard standing on uh on on kind of free speech and and you know right-wing politics um and all that but we wanted to you know i feel like we did a good job we wanted to have like i'm never afraid i guess of being provocative and i think a lot of people they don't they're they're, they're, I can hand this to you, by the way, if you want to play with it. Yeah. Freedom phone. Yeah.

Freedom phone. How long did it take for DuckDuckGo on it? Yeah. So DuckDuckGo is right on the home screen. Brave browser is the default browser. Yeah. We preloaded Fortnite because we did that as a troll because Apple, Apple banned Fortnite off their app store.

So again, they're, they're not just, they're not just banning conservative apps they're banning apps like fortnight if they don't pay up or if like some governments like for example not that i use this app but but grinder i mean that's you know like tinder for gay people i mean that's they banned that they banned that not in the u.s but a country asked them to ban i forgot which one but it was like so the so they're responding to countries and all that and that's the problem with these huge, huge multinational corporations is they're just in it for the money and all that. And that's the whole purpose of this phone and all that was to make a phone that was a true alternative to Apple and Google's duopoly. Multiple SIM slots. Yeah, you got multiple SIM slots and everything and all that.

How long did it take from the drawing board to prototype and then from the prototype to finished product? You can connect it to Wi-Fi, too, if you want to use the Internet. So that's like a test unit. Where's the camera? Use the camera. So it's at the bottom right corner. Oh, I see. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, looks like a camera. Yeah. It zooms. Look at that. Hi. So I think I'm looking at the specs, and I think the Umidigi A9 Pro actually has a better camera. Yeah, so we customized the camera on everything. The problem is we wanted to make sure that on the supply chain front that we got our parts in a secure way and all that. So that way we just didn't feel satisfied with the UmiDigi, their camera supply chain.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks, man. Absolutely. Oh, I see. Well, I Googled it. They say they have a 32 megapit. A 32 megapixel. Megapit.

Megapixel camera. Actually has less... They have an octa-core processor, which I think yours is also. Yeah, also we have an octa-core processor. Nice. But yours is 8 gigabytes, right?

8 gig... Oh, no, no, no-core processor. But yours is eight gigabytes, right? Eight gig. Oh, no, no, no. This is great, man. Four gigabytes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just epic that one human can build, go and do something like this. Well, thank you.

I mean, obviously you have a team of 20 people. And factories and research and technology. How long did it take you guys from start to finish? It took a year. It took a year. So again, this started out as a, as kind of my background is crypto and all that. And we thought, well, would it be great to have a phone, you know, preloaded with a bunch of, you know, kind of blockchain based apps and everything. And, and we thought about that. But one of the reasons we wanted to call it a freedom phone was to have that provocativeness and to go right into the, like, I think that there's a huge problem of people, a lot of people, you know, if they voted for Trump, they don't want, they're scared to market to, and you know, I voted for Trump and everything. They're scared to market

to these, scared to market to this audience. You know, you see, look at, there's like a pillow company, right? That's the least political thing ever. But if they say they care about your values and they do, you know, they end up doing well but getting hated. I know so many friends, they have some of the best online alternative education apps in the world that would appeal, in my opinion, to a lot of right-wing people that care about alternative education because right now the education system itself, in my opinion, it just teaches, you know, CRT and a lot of left-wing values. And, you know, you could say you can have that argument, but in my opinion, there's teaches, you know, CRT and a lot of left wing values. And, you know, you could say

you can have that argument. But in my opinion, there's no ideological diversity. So that's another reason why I think I'm getting attacked so much is this. I'm unapologetically free speech. You know, I'm in my opinion, you know, I'm a Republican. So and I think that's the it's weird because it flipped. It used to be that Republicans back in the day in the George Bush era, they were kind of a little bit, you know, not so good on free speech, and it used to be the left. And it's totally flipped now. I'm like a one-issue voter. I just care about free speech. Yeah, I think centralized education is a big problem. It is good to build social cohesion through what we understand and know, but I think the modern-day education is teaching people how to learn, not what to know. Exactly.

And this education system seems to be shoving specific information into people's heads as opposed to teaching them how to think critically, which. Exactly. I mean, I dropped out of high school because I love to learn. And that was the problem is, you know, you look at Richard Branson, he dropped out same age as me and all that is I love to learn. And that's why I had to leave. Because I felt like if – and that's one of the reasons why I care about free speech. Because I was like – you know, I've done a TED Talk. I had met, you know, with Jimmy Carter and all that, like Time Magazine. The media had liked me up until July 14th when we launched this phone and all that.

That's so weird. And, like, I had all these – like, literally, I did an interview with Business Insider and all that before. They didn't know that I was launching the phone, and it was very nice. CNN had me on to talk about crypto a few days, and they didn't know, and they wrote these glowing things about me. So I pulled up – I had the wrong specs before. I had the A9 Pro. On the A9, the specs look the same. Yeah.

What's the difference between the Pro and the i guess the pro is a better camera it's marginally more expensive so but but let's let's get down to brass tacks here the specs look very very much the same same camera front and back uh this display is the same they say they have a dot what is this a dot drop display not the same as the the what what did your what did your what is it what was Freedom Phone have? Is it Waterdrop? Is that different? No, no. Well, yeah.

I mean it's like – I mean is it different? I mean I think that's their name for just it. Again, I haven't looked at like the A9 specs really. So why is it more money? Why is it more money? Well, one, to source all the parts of this device, we – it does cost more money to be able to get the parts we get from. Because if you don't want a supply chain reliant on, let's say, CCP companies or whatever, it ends up being a little bit more expensive, a little bit more pricey. And also, when you do things at scale, the overall product ends up being cheaper. So when people look up the price

of these phones, uh, you know, a lot of these prices it's for ordering, you know, 50,000 units at once. Well, because companies did and they can sell it because it's exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, or another company does it and then they, yeah, they resell it at that cost. So they're the root cause of these phone is they're selling 50,000 or a hundred thousand phones. And then, yeah, they either resell, um, or, or, uh, you know, that. And then, yeah, they either resell or it counts as buying 100,000 phones or something. What does the operating system do? Because, look, regardless of the reason why it costs you more money, why should someone spend more money on a phone that has effectively the same specs as the A9?

Well, yeah, I mean, at the operating system level, I mean, we, I mean, if you buy that, if you buy that phone, I guarantee it has a ton of Google stuff on it. I mean, not just guarantee, you can look it up. It has a ton of Google stuff on it. It uses the Google Play Store, which totally tracks you. And it's, the supply chain has not been verified and all that. And we're going to post on, you know, our whole supply chain process, which I think on our website coming up. And then we just got out there, and it was like a crazy launch. So we honestly did not expect to honestly have it kind of blow up this much. But right now, is that basically like the Freedom OS?

Yeah, Freedom OS is a mix of AOSP, Android Open Source, Lineage OS, Graphene OS, a couple other custom ROMs, and our own touch. And so one of the things we do on this phone is we silo every app in its own little digital island, its own little digital bubble. So that way it can't see anything that's going on the rest of the phone. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, exactly. Sandboxing. Yeah, sandboxing.

So, you know, like right now on iPhone, I think even Apple Developer Analytics, just as a normal developer, you're able to – You don't have YouTube on that phone, do you? No, no. YouTube is – you have the option. You know what annoys me? What? When I'll be using the browser on my phone and I'll go to Reddit and then it pulls up the app instead. Oh, that's so annoying.

And it keeps telling you to do it. And there's been periods where I've had to do – like I've been out, right? So like I'll record everything and then I'll leave. And then I'll get a notification from – like someone messaged me and be like, oh, hey, there was a typo in the thumbnail or something or a typo in the title. So I'll have to go in to make changes. But every time I go to the browser to try and log into the browser, it pulls up the YouTube app and then not the actual studio. So I have to actually delete the YouTube app because the apps all connect to each other.

Exactly. The browser should be independent from other apps. If I'm in the browser and I need to pull up a site for a specific reason, and I can't remember the specific reason, but I think it's because the YouTube studio app doesn't actually allow you to affect, I think, monetization. You have to go into the browser to do it, but then the browser default pulls up the YouTube app, not even the studio app, and then I can't go in. So I delete YouTube from my phone, log in, fix it, then reinstall YouTube.

You might be able to fix that in settings and have it so it doesn't auto default to the app. Yeah. Ultimately, that's what I end up doing. Yeah. Something like that. Like, don't switch. Oh, sorry.

No, no. Have you guys looked into setting up anything that allows you to mine cryptocurrency on your phone while it's active the problem with that is uh i mean we could you know give you the option to do that but your phone is uh it doesn't have this headphone is a great processor but for literal like bitcoin mining that takes like a huge amount of processing. Could you tap into a mesh network and be part of a group of nodes that we're mining? I don't think the money would end up being worth it for you. So, yeah, you could, but I don't think it'd be worth it for you. 500 bucks is steep, man. $4.99.

Yeah, I mean, you know, we give coupon codes 50 bucks off and people can pay monthly if they want to and all that. But, yeah, I mean, to me, I mean, I mean, you see the phone feels as good. I mean, you have $1,000 iPhones, even $1,300 iPhones. We didn't want to like cheap out on, in my opinion, the quality. You know, I'm thinking about it because I'm like, I understand some of the arguments people make. They're like, dude, the A9 is cheap. And I'm like, if I wanted to buy the phone right now and I wanted to get someone without them having to worry about it, I want to get them a phone that's not being tracked, that's got these apps that have been censored they can get access to.

That's going to be hard for me to do. Like I'm thinking, you know, what if I were to just buy 100 of these A9s and then just go through them and then load up a new operating system? There'd have to be so much stuff you'd have to do to make sure it works and quality control. I probably wouldn't be able to do that. I've got to be honest. I think $ bucks sounds steep, but I stand by what I was saying earlier that if your device does what it says it does and you're providing a service effectively, hardware be damned.

If it's a service that provides people with instant access to a clean operating system that doesn't track them and provides them a way around censorship, that's seriously, it's massive. Also, you're not using slave labor, right? Yeah, no. that's seriously that's that's it's massive also you're not using slave labor right yeah no and that's that's another thing is just yeah i mean to me i feel like the real story of this is that you know what like apple like i always thought it'd be great if um if if some president had put sanctions on on the import of any goods made by slave labor because that would just shut

down a lot of these big phone companies and hold everything up because it's bad. Yeah. But then the American people would be like, why does my phone cost 10 grand? I mean, you know, I think, well, trust me, we make this phone. What is it? It doesn't have to. It doesn't have to cost that much if you're not using using that kind of labor and all that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hong Kong is got problems right now, but I don't. Yeah, they're not. Well got problems right now, but I don't. Yeah. They're not. Well, actually, I don't know for sure.

Foxconn's not in Hong Kong. They're in. They're in Taiwan. They're in Taiwan. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Well, they have stuff from all over.

I mean, exactly. Wait, Foxconn is in Taiwan? I believe they're a Taiwanese company. Fact check me. New York Times fact check me right now. Eric. Yeah. Isn't an iPhone like $1,000?

Yeah, exactly. An iPhone is like $1,000. I thought it was Shenzhen. Oh, okay. You're right. Shenz000? Yeah, exactly. An iPhone is like $1,000. I thought it was Shenzhen. Oh, okay, you're right, Shenzhen. That's where all the people are committing suicide. Yeah, okay, good, I'm glad. Because I was like, I like Taiwan, you know, and all that. I thought it was Shenzhen. Yeah, New York Times fact-checked me. But yeah, I mean, with the phone at the operating system level,

yeah, it's completely de-Googled. It has its own app store and all that, so you're not relying on the Google Play Store or anything. And we we you know like you know trying to sideload apps or all that for i mean the thing about this phone is a lot of just normal people that aren't aren't like yeah trying to jailbreak their phones root their phones and all that got that and then yeah i mean that's that's it's just a huge problem that we're reliant on in my opinion anti-free speech hardware i mean it's ironic to me that apple's motto used to be think different and now they ban apps who think different um yep and uh uh so i mean it's or google which was do no evil and then now there's company policy

they got rid of that motto and all that and that's and that's why i think you know like uh you know we're a startup but ultimately and uh and i i don don't have a PR team of 1,000 people like these people. I'm just coming on this podcast just trying to share the word. But I mean it's just – if we don't have our own hardware, in my opinion, we're screwed. It's the weirdest thing that people were saying it's a honeypot, like buying the phone is a trap. I'm like, what do you think your phone already does? It's a honeypot. Welcome to modern the phone is a trap? I'm like, what do you think your phone already does? It's a honeypot. Welcome to modern technology.

Smart phones are honeypots. They wouldn't attack me this much if it were. And then two, yeah, I mean, they've doxed my... Unless they're trying to convince everyone you're on the level by attacking you, saying, see, look, they're attacking him. That must prove it. The double-double cross. The double-double cross.

Yes, the false flag, false flag, false flag. Well, because of these articles and because of Will Summers' article, my mom got doxxed and all that. And they're releasing – That is a coordinated harassment campaign from Will Summers. In my opinion. And, I mean, it's just – I mean, luckily my mom's Scottish, so she's tough. She was tough growing up in the best way possible. And they've doxxed my mom because my mom, she worked on the, I mean,

she's an incredibly smart woman and a great mother. She worked on the Star Wars project under Reagan and all that. And then, yeah, so they're trying to say, like, I'm this honeypot and all that just because my mom, you know, worked on a project under the Reagan administration and all that. And, I mean, it's crazy, honestly, that my mom has gone to – I mean, coming into the political world, I almost like – I mean, I knew what was coming in the sense of –

but I was so well-liked by the left-wing media. I was doing interviews with them and all that, and I was fine. I wanted to give it up because – for free speech and all that. I mean, it sounds cheesy, but it's actually true. But to me to see like, yeah, my mom get doxxed, these people write fake articles and for people that hadn't even touched the phone yet. I mean-

It's amazing when I think about how we got to this point. You know, I was talking about- I'm still shell-shocked, honestly. But you know, I was talking about algorithmic psychosis. And I'm thinking about it from like the perspective of the psychopaths who live in the mirror world shocked honestly like you know i was talking about algorithmic uh psychosis and i want i'm thinking about it from like their the perspective of the psychopaths and who live in the in the mirror world in the in the in the in the upside down or whatever and you know how did how did we come to this position of knowing computers of no like how look we knew about bitcoin in the early

days most people didn't even find out about bitcoin until like 2016 or something and i'm like i was on the internet as long as i can remember my family family had CompuServe on DOS, you know? And then, so then we got Windows 3.1, we had AOL. I've always had access to the internet to learn and read whatever I wanted. And I guess that makes you a deviant because you have access to the summation of human knowledge or so much knowledge at the time. Regular people, other millennials didn't get the internet until they were teenagers. So they didn't necessarily grow up with it as heavily. Like I was programming stuff.

I was doing video games. I was doing Flash animations and Flash websites when I was like 12 or 13. That's amazing. Yeah, I built my first computer when I was like seven. So here I am with all the access to this information, totally independent. These other people don't. And I think that might be where this like hard bifurcation starts the people who are internet savvy who understand the rules of the internet don't argue

with trolls it means they win but then you get these other kids who aren't internet savvy and they're just watching nothing but this horror content and so they become insane and we become discerning and then you get tough to say because me and Eric are both, we're like almost different generations. I'm 42, you're 22. Yeah, wow, 20 years apart. That's crazy. We're both internet dudes. I didn't get internet until I was 16, AOL, but I'm still like... What year was that?

1996 or 4 or 5 or something? 1994, I think. What year were you born? 79. 79? You look like a product of the 70s. Yeah, I feel like a man. Just barely. But it's the critical thinking skills. And I don't know if it matters when you're born 79 79 so right around there you look like a product of the 70s yeah i feel like just barely but it's the critical thinking skills and i don't know if it matters when you were born if you're going to have critical thinking skills realizing what you see isn't necessarily like if you see something a thousand times that doesn't mean that it happened a thousand times

i don't know what do you i don't know i don't know i don't know i What do you – I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I just think that there's two different universes that exist. Yeah, it seems like that. There are people who live in the paranoid – it's really funny. There's this very, very high-profile podcaster who apparently said that I was one of these people who's too online. And like, oh, there's these people. They're just too online and they live in this world. And I'm like, the people on the left who believe in all of this algorithmic psychosis and are completely unaware of it, they're the people who are too online. The people who believe that Donald Trump was a Russian agent, that's because of the too online people.

I'm afraid that it's their lack of critical thinking skills and if they just watched a lot of like violent action movies they they think that that was normal too they're they've they've been how do you how do you tell someone who's spent 15 years of their 25 year life that everything they've seen and experienced on social media as they were growing up and learned was wrong. You encouraged them to take psilocybin. Here's an example. That's the only way.

Imagine you're in an aircraft hangar. Massive. We're talking like 50, 80,000 square feet. There's massive aircraft hangar. And we're all looking around at stuff, constantly walking over and asking, what's that? Ooh, that's interesting. And these people are in the corner staring at the corner of the room, pointing, thinking that's reality. It's almost like the allegory of the shadows in the cave.

Yeah. That they've been sitting in this cave seeing nothing but police brutality shadow puppets. And so when you're at the door of the cave yelling, that's not real life. They're like, you're crazy. These people are conspiracy theorists. It's a rabbit hole. You know, it's like,

I can't remember the exact quote from Breitbart about walking towards the fire, but, you know, people think, I can't remember the exact quote, but someone said to me something similar, so it might not be Breitbart, that people are scared to walk towards the fire because think they'll get burned but the other side is freedom and you know you you walk past it and then everything's normal and you're fine these people

are trapped in the cave yeah because the shadows on the wall it is real life it's just one tiny fragment of real life right exactly so they're living in this paranoid delusional state they look look at what they say when they're like when they say when they say things like police are hunting black people. Jeez. We know that's not real, but imagine you're 18 and you were eight years old and you had no life experience.

You were playing hopscotch. A few years later, you get on Facebook for the first time and what do you see? Remember that book we had with Azra? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. The CRT book. It was the book where the little kid was like seeing a video on the internet, like eight-year-old kid, and then saying like,

Mommy, what's this? And the mom's like, No, don't watch this. And then the little girl finally snaps one day like, I know the truth about what the police are doing. It's because people realize

you'll make money off of police brutality videos. I think I figured out how to get through to these people or maybe something that can help is my mom. I used to play video games a lot. My mom would be like, it's not real. This isn't real.

But what she didn't realize is if she just told me this is real, but there's more. Look, these are also things that are real. So acknowledge that what I was doing is real. Like if I'm playing a video game and it's a character and a story in my mind, that is reality. It's just a fragment of this greater reality. So if you acknowledge like critical race, all these theories and things, yeah, they are real.

They are valid concepts, but there's more. There's a meme where it's like there's this guy playing video games. And then his dad walks in and he goes, hey, do you want to play this cool new game? Basically, you have to go on adventures. You try and raise money to buy artifacts and items to improve your character's stats, become better equipped, stronger, and faster. Make friends.

And he's like, yeah, you make friends along the way. And the dude's like, wow, sounds awesome. And then he shoves him out the door and he's like, have fun. It's life, dude. It's funny. Life imitates art and all that stuff, you know? Shall we read Super Chats? Yes. Let's go. It's time. Let'sitates art and all that stuff, you know. Shall we read Super Chats?

Yes. Let's go. It's time. Let's read all the Super Chats if you haven't already. Give that like button a little tap. Subscribe to this channel and become a member at TimCast.com so that we can hire more and more and more journalists. The next person we're going to hire is probably the fact checker.

And their whole job is going to be just to read the website and then yell at us. Yeah. And then they're going to have like a – Is it going to be New York Times fact check level though? It's going to be like – So we're going to be like so strict with our fact checking. Good. Like not even just checking facts but also checking framing.

Like if someone says, you know, Ian is – Ian Crossland, comma, the absurdly skinny co-host from TimCast IRL, we'd be like, absurdly skinny, that's poor framing. We got to – you can call him skinny, I guess. But absurdly – we don't need those adjectives in this. So I actually had an email. Someone emailed me saying they were upset about an article. Not upset, but they were like, hey, this article is like really loaded. And I went and saw it and I was like, oh, geez.

And I had to go and I went in and immediately issued a correction. Like none of that loaded garbage so we're actually um planning on covering a lot of the election invest audits and stuff like that and uh so we're going to have like the statements from the democrats and what they've been saying about a statement from the republicans but we're not going to play stupid games with framing and adjectives we're going to be like here's what they're saying here's what they're saying, here's what they're saying. You decide. Let's read these super chats. Give them to me. All right, let's see. The Curly Afro says,

for women being drafted, proved they're a separate, separated, lightweight, quick-moving force. Integrated forces is horrible idea for reasons. As a former FMF hospital corpsman, third class,

sexual assault is a giant issue and problem in the military for both genders. It is, yeah. Wow. Velvet Schvinkter says, class sexual assault is a giant issue and problem in the military for both genders is yeah wow velvet schvinkter says freedom phone is as good of a phone as lynnwood is a lawyer okay that's pretty good that's hilarious honestly the dashing rogue says is the freedom phone the umidigi a9 pro i believe it's actually just the umidigi a9 or comparable to that's the specs that

i pulled up uh we have slightly different specs you can look at the specs on freedomphone.com and there's a specs button right in the nav bar. So feel free to look at it. It's a custom phone and that has different parts, but no. And obviously the different operating system as well. They say, I read your company's privacy policy and I'm wondering if you sell your company, where does my data go? Where does our data go? So, yeah, I mean, all that we do in our privacy policy is we say, hey, we track, uh, uh, just your name and your address if you buy a phone and that's it. So, uh, if, uh, if you want to do like a return and one, I don't want to sell. And then two, uh, uh, even if somehow, you know, that happened and one, I, I really don't think I will. Um, even if somehow that happened, and one, I really don't think I will, even if somehow that happened, it would just be your name and the address if there's a return or something, and those are all kept private.

All right. Warframe for the Win says, does the Freedom Phone have physical hardware switches like the Pine Phone and Librem 5? No, that's something we want to add. We feel very confident. You can literally go in your settings settings and in a much better way, just like literally turn things off. We want to be able to add that. But I think the problem with those other phones, although I like, I like anyone doing honestly

a secure phone. It's, that's something we want to do. But yeah, the problem, we wanted to make a phone that was usable. And in calling, that was one of the first things that when making a privacy security phone is that it was usable for a normal person. And I tried out all the privacy phones. And a big problem was, although they were secure, so I love that. I love that part. But they just weren't usable.

So that kind of ended up affecting the usability. And at the operating system level, we just feel so confident. But I think that's something we want to add in maybe a Freedom Phone 2. What was the problem with the usability with those um it just ended up making it like super insanely bulky um and that was a problem like physically large yeah physically large so that was a problem on our side and uh and it didn't really fit in the hand well so we had like a bunch of prototypes at our design lab um and so we ended up going with this option as the best option we felt very confident the operating system level security

was good enough right on and we're gonna real quick we're gonna open source actually the operating system coming up as well so that way people can look at it cool shepard shepard in studio says hey guys just joined timcast.com today love the content Are there any plans to be able to cast to Chromecast, etc.? We want to watch on TV. Yes. So there's only so much people can do. The website is launched. We're doing the bug checks now,

making sure everything works because, you know, it's like you fix one bug and then 10 more pop up and then you're playing whack-a-mole for a bit. Then we're going to do the mobile app

because we want to make sure people can listen to the show while their screen is off. And then we're going to be doing what's called OTT over the top. So that's like Roku players, Apple TV, Amazon, all that stuff. You'll be able to pull up the shows. So we're heading in that direction.

And we also are planning on doing more and more content. Right now, if you're a member, you get the members only podcast episodes. When the next week or so, we're going to have a new show, which is going to be, I just call it like mysteries and spooky stories. But you'll see the launch and we're working on the graphics and the branding and all that stuff. All right, let's see. Jonathan Dugars says, not naming that other production when confronted about it is not a good look. And it seemed like a deflection.

Seems a little shady. Referring to the factory, the other factory. I'll literally post on the website after this. It's just in a name I can't pronounce. It's literally that. It sounds shady. It's like, I can't say the Asian word. I can't say it, so I feel like that's it.

I'll put it up on the website for anyone that's concerned. So I guess I have a little bit of an ego. I don't like looking stupid. You should write it on a card and just hold it up. Write it on a card, yeah. Lua Coder says, Tim, there are certain Samsung phones

that are bootloader locked and you cannot install custom operating systems. Some people are stuck with that. Yes, I've experienced that. That's annoying. Mm-hmm. All right, let's see.

Brenton Dehan says, this phone comes out right after the story of intelligence agencies making and distributing the same type of ghost phones to a crime ring. And this is being sold as the perfect phone for dissidents. Not suspect at all.

Yeah. I mean, this goes back to like this. I mean, that's why it's just overall. It's been weird, I guess, weird and amazing to get in, in my opinion, the political realm. Like, yeah, just like people accusing my mom of, you know, basically being deep state and helping me with this. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that it's weird to experience because I don't think that they would be attacking me this hard. And I guess, again, you're right. Maybe it's a double cross or whatever.

But I mean, I'm funding this whole thing myself. So I have like no other investors, no anything. I mean, the CIA literally has a venture arm and all that which is not a lot of people know that but yeah I mean honestly I would be living a much better life I feel if they were supportive of me and I would never accept that

I just got to shout this out right now someone's Soleil Cucumber Lime says if you use Brave Browser there is a setting to allow video playback in the background, a.k.a. with a screen off. Oh. We did mention that before. Someone super chatted us.

I use the Brave Browser for everything. Brave is amazing. Is it on your phone? That's the default browser on the phone. Brave is? Yeah. Hey, there you go. Yeah, Brave is the default browser, dot, dot, go, default search engine.

It's right on the home screen. I love Brave. Yeah. Oscar Olu says, Eric, if you want people to trust you, you need to release the source code for freedom OS and have it available for compiling. Ian, would you say free the code? I would like to free the code. Yeah. I mean, the goal is, is to be able. So, you know, yeah, we want to, like, like I said earlier, we're going to be open sourcing the, uh, the operating system code on this. And then, yeah, I mean, if you want to be able to not even go through us

and all that and get your own, install it yourself and go through that difficult process. You can do that for free. Well, that's the plan. People can just take it and do it. I mean, to me the phone is just about making it easy for people so it's all on one device so you

don't have to be good at... Have you looked at um using like an mit license like a copy left license so that people take the code and change it those changes have to remain free also oh that's a good idea actually we should do that for that because to me that would be the most important thing is that you know people weren't you know that way they can make it just continues on zanroff says the spec site says it uses freedom os but when i google what that is, I get a logo that looks similar to the red salute.

That's troublesome at face value. Am I missing something? Yeah, that's a different operating system. I think that's Linux-based and all that, but yeah, I mean, that's just a different one. That's, I believe, open source as well and all that. And then, yeah, it has the red fist.

Ours is a blue shield on a phone. I believe, open source as well and all that. And then, yeah, it has the red fist. Ours is a blue shield on a phone. It's really interesting. There's a lot of superchats as I'm scrolling through that you literally just answered. Like, yay, God says, can we jailbreak our own Android phones and flash your custom ROM and effectively do the same thing with our existing phones? That's the plan. And hopefully for when we release this. I mean, we just want to get this out there.

And then, yeah, I guess there's maybe been some marketing greenness, if you will. But, yeah, I mean, you know, people sent us a lot of requests like, hey, can you open source this? And we're like, yeah. I mean, the goal is to be able to have anyone be, you know, have the ability to flash, you know, to be able to be secure and have all that. I mean, we incorporate a lot of stuff at the, you know, kind of that hardware-software marriage on our own phone. But own phone but yeah i mean the goal is to be able where if you

want to be able to uh flash if you're tech if you have the technical know-how to flash it on your phone you can do that for free that's the plan qui-gon says kevin smith lied he man died f hollywood well i haven't watched the new master of the universe but i guess people are like saying like he ruined the kevin smith ruined it Apparently Tila is the sorceress of gray skull. That's like the female lead character. She was kind of like a side character and the original He-Man, but now apparently she's like one of the, what does that mean?

That means like she has the power now. I don't know. I didn't look into it. It just, it looked so weird. Like He-Man's the beast. He is Prince Adam. I love him.

You look like Prince Adam. Yeah. Honestly, it's been interesting because, uh, uh's been interesting because I remember I did a – back when I was liked by the left-wing media, I did a New York magazine thing, and then they made me look so nerdy. They combed my hair to the side, made me button up my shirt, and looked like a total nerd and all that.

I guess I am a nerd at heart. I went to a photo shoot once for Spin Magazine, and they wanted me to look a certain way. And the first thing was like, okay, now take off the beanie. And I was like, no, I'm not doing that. No, it's the look. And then she was like, you have to. We're not doing the shoot. And I was like, I stood up, grabbed my bag, and I was like, all right.

And I looked at my friend. I'm like, yeah, get the door. And then she goes, wait, wait, what are you doing? And I was like, I'm leaving. She's like, but we're doing a shoot. And I'm like, that's staying on and she was like she goes there's only one person i've ever let keep the hat on and it's the edge and you are not the edge and then i was like okay and then i started walking towards the door again she goes fine and then i went back and sat

down modeling sucks man yeah i mean like doing photo shoots i know they like they make your body in a weird pose they're like like, pull your back up, now twist your arm to the right, and then they put clips all over your back, and you're like, and then they make,

now don't move for a minute, and I'm like, I can't breathe. It's painful. If you can't breathe, you can't move. It's a job, honestly.

It's a job. It's a lifestyle. It's crazy. You gotta watch what you eat. That's annoying. I can't do that. Here's a good one. Mike Tacha says,

piracy is small-scale communism. You take away the means of production from the original creator and give it to any idiot that can click a link. It dilutes the essence of the work. Yeah. Interesting. I actually think communists should be mad about piracy, too. If there is a dude and he's like, I have designed this great image and would you like to buy

it? No. Picture, picture, picture, picture. Now everyone has a version of it. And you're're like but i worked so hard to make this do i am i not deserving of access to food and and and and well people copying your information doesn't mean you can't sell it that's the that's the how am i supposed to understand value comes from the scarcity of the object no no not necessarily scarcity is involved in that, but also quality. So if somebody makes something and then everybody just has it, why would someone give him money? If everyone has it, that means it's probably something that needs to be commons.

Like a song. No, commons isn't common license. So I write a song and then it took And then it took, it took, it took what, like it took us several months to make Will of the People. Right. And so for me, that was kind of just like, you know,

a side project. I'm not worried about losing money on it. It was expensive. We're not going to make a million bucks off or anything. But maybe there's a hope. Maybe it'll sell. We'll make money.

But we're in a new era. Honestly, like people listen to that on YouTube. But all of that work we put into that if it was any other person and they took off time uh from their like this is their job and it's entertainment people value it and they want it and then everyone gets it for free how does he get the money to buy the instruments how does he get the money to pay for the recording process well you sell he do more you sell the song for 99 cents a download. That doesn't mean, just because

a million more people get it for free doesn't mean you're not going to be able to sell a bunch of more copies of the song. Well, that's a million dollars. It literally does. Yeah, but those people may not have bought it. In fact, usually when people copy things for free, it's because they can't afford things. And I think that proliferating the information... And if there's a large percentage of people who

would have bought it, who don't? Maybe. You don't know. But I think proliferating the information. I mean, that's true. I think that proliferating the information makes people more excited for that information. For the regular person who says, if it costs me $10,000 to work to produce this song, I at least need to make $10,000 back. And then everyone copies it and shares it online. And now the guy makes no money. His business ceases to exist.

It actually happened with Kick-Ass. Kick-Ass 3 got shut down because Kick-Ass 2 got pirated so much that they said, we didn't recuperate our losses. We're not going to do another movie. It's not worth it. Nick Cage was in the first one, right? He was in the first one. My understanding is it didn't do well enough.

It was like people liked it. We could do another one. The second one was like, people liked it, but everybody pirated it.ated we didn't make enough money we don't care to do it and the movie sucked so kick-ass 2 didn't suck well you just said it was like yeah that sucks i'm talking about the revenue i thought kick-ass 1 and 2 were awesome i i would have loved to see part 3 like you don't problem is people pirated it and then they didn't make enough money so they don't want to do it again you don't want people to to copy and sell your content it's not about selling it's about if if they're going to invest 100 million dollars in a movie they at least need to

make a hundred million dollars now i know hollywood plays dirty games with how they calculate revenue and everything like that but what happens is they go how much did we get back on this we got pirated like crazy so people like it they do but we're not making money scrap it now i don't get to watch a movie i like because people don't want to pay for it i don't even think pirating things means that people like it i don't like that word pirate because right i liked the movie and people pirated it so now i don't get to yeah but them copying the the movie doesn't mean that they like the movie they just want to see what does that have to do with anything you just said that a hundred million people pirated it so they

like it that doesn't i like i didn't say that i said i liked the movie and then people pirated it so they like it that doesn't i like i didn't say that i said i liked the movie and then people pirated it so now i don't get to see the sequel i think artists being able to make money is just it's just really important and i think you know i understand if people can't afford but then you know i feel like if the artist wants it to be available for free you know that should be his choice rather than rather than uh uh you know just some guy and again there's i feel like a lot of it is just a lot of people trying to cheap out. And 10% of it... This is inherently like... I wouldn't even call this a leftist worldview because the left hates the idea of exploitation

of the working class. This is just like... What we're doing with the Fediverse project is an act of charity in a sense that I can plan out funding for a project and people can donate their time to it to give something for free to a lot of people. But there's a lot of people who've already had this conversation who need to work full time to make this thing happen. Okay. I can and will provide funding to make sure we make the world a better place because I'm not worried about it. Tim Cass is successful.

And that means what are we going to do? Like I said, I don't want to buy a Ferrari. I want to make the Fediverse app so that people can live better lives and have their speech and their rights protected. Now, as for that person who's going to do the hard coding, he needs to eat food. He needs to actually have a house. I have to give him money to do it. What if he said, okay, I'm going to work on a project that's going to make everyone's

lives a lot better, and he didn't have access to funding. Who's going to pay for it if everyone just takes the code and then rips it from him? How can he actually work 40 hours a week and then get nothing back for it? Because it's not stealing to take his hard work from him. This is what I'm talking about. You need a technical solution because people are going to copy information. It's never going to stop. Sure. The whole idea of an artist being able to make money, it didn't exist until the 1920s. This is what I'm talking about. You need a technical solution because people are going to copy information. It's never going to stop.

Sure. The whole idea of an artist being able to make money didn't exist until the 1920s, until radio. That's not true at all. You couldn't cap. There was no mass media. A singer and musician would have to go play shows at an inn every night to make dinner for the night. That's about any industry. There were actors. That's any industry.

I'm talking about entertainment. That has nothing to do with it. Movies and TV, digital art. It didn't exist 150 years ago. They weren't rich. They weren't actors. We're not any industry. I'm talking about entertainment. That has nothing to do with it. Movies and TV, digital art. It's that didn't exist 150 years ago. It's new art. Stealing architecture blueprints and copying them and pasting them is the same thing. No, it's very different. Stealing someone's blueprints is very different than making a copy of them.

What? I'm literally talking about if someone designs a building and comes up with engineering practices and then people start copying it and sharing it all around and that guy doesn't get compensation for it, he won't be able to keep innovating. His career is done. He will starve and he will lose his livelihood. The point you're making that I agree with is that if they're copying his art and then selling it and he's not getting compensated, that's a problem that we need to put into

the code. You need to be able to follow where the data came from so that the original creator gets a portion of the sales and if there's no sales because they're just copying it then what's the harm the guy can't make more music well it's up to the guy it's not up to the people that are copying the information if the guy continues to make music ports in front of his mouth they weren't going to buy it anyway they copied it because they couldn't buy it why are you assuming they were or weren't going to buy it clearly Clearly some people who like it would have bought it. I don't think either of us should assume that it would have been sold. Just because someone made a copy of it doesn't mean that they would have bought it. Revenues literally dropped when Napster came out. People actually saw

revenues go down. Now, I don't care about multi-millionaire celebrities, but when we're talking about a regular hardworking person, you like his work, you want his work to continue, but then everyone just copies instead of buying it. That's a problem. Yeah, but everyone does not copy instead of buy it. That's the situation. People still buy stuff. So the revenue's dropped.

And we actually saw this for a lot of people. Dude, I have friends who lost their jobs around this time. Okay, the market's changing. Actors are severely overpaid. Musicians get paid millions. In the 90s, musicians were paid millions. Millions. That's ridiculous.

My friends like, I've produced this short film. I would like to show it to you. If I can get everyone to pay me a dollar to watch it, I can continue to do work. And they said, meh, I'll just digitally copy it. Yeah. You think that making a movie should make you a millionaire? I mean, you think that these actors should be getting $30 million for a movie? That's insanity.

Ian, you are clearly getting triggered because what your argument is makes no sense. I'm telling you the reality of the world right now. You're just saying that, oh, no, they shouldn't do that. That shouldn't be. So let's make it illegal and punish people. When did I say that? You're saying that they shouldn't be able to make the copies? What are you saying?

I said it was wrong that they went after those guys with those big fines. Okay. I said when they gave that guy a massive fine and started going people's houses i said that was wrong it was insane it's like the 3d we're talking like 3d printing guns like it's a very simple morality that piracy was destroying the the the livelihoods of the people who made the work no it was maybe reducing their income but it was not destroying their livelihoods there are a lot of people who lost their jobs over this. Who? Friends of mine. Possibly.

Not possibly. Literally people I know. The whole industry is changing, dude. I remember my friends said to me. Automation is, many people are going to lose their jobs because automation is taking it away. And you know what's funny is that they already solved for this problem. You're defending something that doesn't exist anymore for the most part. No, I'm trying to solve for copying data.

Amazon, Paramount+, Netflix, all of these services have solved for that problem and revenues came back. It was a bad thing that happened. My friend once sent me a video saying, please share this. And it was a PSA about all the people who had lost their jobs in the industry, PAs, people making $12 an hour because their studios were

downsizing after they couldn't turn a profit on making short films anymore. Yeah, because those studios were overblown. Look what we're doing right here in your house, dude. See, this is the problem, Ian. People seem to think that movies are only blockbusters. But see, I have friends who were PAs and worked in the industry, and a lot of movies are actually low-budget short films. There is a massive amount of low-cost dramas and comedies.

Now that special effects is getting better, we're starting to see low-budget sci-fi and fantasy. And then at the cream of the crop, the top of the top, what you see is Marvel movies. My friends were working on low-budget films that cost $100,000. They lost their jobs because these things would get posted online and then shared, and nobody would want to pay for it. Dude, that's not – That all got solved, though, with streaming services. That's not because of digital – I mean there's 100 – how many more movie makers are there now than there were 30 years ago?

Because it's more accessible. You can buy a $3,000 camera, spend like four grand on audio equipment, and make an incredible movie. We're going to move on because I don't think you're arguing anything anymore. Ayabat says, Eric, love the Freedom Phone. You should consider preloading them with a Zcash wallet. I think you know what Zcash is, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love Zcash.

Zcash is a cryptocurrency with the strongest privacy guarantees. Also has encrypted messaging feature. Wow, really? Zcash, shout out. I'm a huge Zcash fan. Monero's good, but Zcash is... I love Zcash, and that's a great idea, actually.

All right, let's see. The Raptor's Talent says, Ian, I get that you're trying to play devil's advocate. Stop it. You're trying to play devil's advocate. Stop it. You're trying to use nonsense to argue with facts. Piracy in the context of the internet is not simply theft of content.

It is theft of income. By copy pasting onto the internet, you are robbing them of their ability to make money. You're assuming that because someone made a copy that they would have bought it. That is an assumption. We know for a fact revenues went down, right? Yeah, some revenues.

That means they did lose metallica lost some of their hundreds of millions yeah but but ignore the fact that you know who metallic is you don't know who like jimmy's basement barbecue it also is yeah people lost income it's also cheaper to make movies so that's that's that's a non-sequitur it's equalizing yeah so you make less for your sales and you spend less to make the thing. All right. Let's read some more. Andrew Lance says, Freedom Phone Dude, please give me the hard sell.

My iPhone is about to turn two, so the built-in obsolescence will come. Can you promise that my phone will still function well five years from now? Yeah. I mean. You can. I feel confident about that your phone will last for five years and all that. I mean, we make these phones to last. I mean, obviously, if you're throwing it in water or anything like that, I mean, it's not. And then we also have very generous return policy as well.

So, I mean, but yeah, I mean, these phones, we make them to last for a long time because we know phones will do it. But I mean, if you end up being really rough, if you're working in the if you're trying to take it to space or something, it's not gonna last but yeah i mean it should last like a like i i feel in my opinion this will last for five years i mean the hard sell on it is um is if you want a phone that uh has like has its own app storage has all the normal apps your normal phone has plus banned ones as well if you want a phone that cares about your privacy cares about your, and feel free to anyone that wants to test it out, feel free to do it. And we're going to be posting videos soon of the testing that we've done.

We want to put a top-notch hacker and just... I mean, we've done this internally, but actually publicly make a little video about it of them trying to get into this phone. And I'm sure this is what people are going to do when the phone is shipped out to everybody. But yeah, I mean, that's the hard sell. I mean, we're just trying to challenge the Apple and Google duopoly here.

All right. Weston Hecker says, does the phone have its own baseband software or modifications to the HAL hardware access layer, OTADM, or any other stuff aside from the custom OS? I should get my CTO on the phone because that's over my head. I hired a white hat guy that has been my friend for years, and he built this out. So we're going to be posting on – we're going to have freedomphone.com security that goes into literally all the things that we did on the security front.

BlackRockBeacon says algorithmic psychosis is an availability cascade driven by confirmation bias and virtue signaling reinforced by gamification or human interaction. Well, there you go. All right. What is this? Logan Culver says, Tim, how many of the normal chats are from bots? LOL. I don't know. We made it so that you got to be a subscriber to use the chat, though.

And a lot of people were like, I don't like that. And I'm like, if you're not subscribed to the channel, like, why are you? I don't understand what the issue is. Like you come to the show and watch. The point of the subscriber chat was to get rid of a lot of the spam. Cause spam bots come in, don't subscribe. And then, so I was like, okay, that solves that. Easy, right?

Crazy. All right. Let's see. Daniel Nelson says, sign me up. Having my browser redirected to apartment.com repeatedly of my exact location when trying to send a political message was my wake-up call. Not cool. Leave U.S. citizens alone. Well, there you go. All right, let's see. Sewer Turd says, can the phone be picked up in person to avoid possible tampering and root by a third party right now we ship it to you and we uh we put a little tracker um to make sure it got

got to you and all that um not a tracker on the phone but just like uh we put on the outside of the box so that way you make sure that there's anything and then we've got a seal as well so that way if anyone has opened the phone you would know by the time it gets there and then man i'll tell you this i've had more than enough of my uh of my time at the tamper evident village in defcon to know how to get past those seals you know that's true have you ever been there uh defcon yeah i've been once you get like the little steamer thing and then you steam the sticker and the two and you get the tweezers and you peel the sticker back and you can pop it right open go inside and then close it and put the tamper evident thing back. And we also put it in,

in a, in its own case as well. So it comes like on this one, I don't have it on that. This is just what I bring around to show people. I got an idea. Have people send you their fingerprints. Then you can preload the fingerprint so only they can open it. That's perfectly safe.

Well, yeah, I don't want to, I don't want to have to have people submit their fingerprints. I'm kidding. It's not going to happen. All right. I'm kidding. That's not going to happen. All right. Let's see.

There was just a super chat that jumped away from me. Let's try and find it. Smokey says, anyone who thinks these phones can't be tracked is an idiot. Anything with an electronic signature can be tracked. We put the operating system level, and it turns it off at the hardware level. We put the option as a button, a virtual button, to be able to turn it off, and it really does turn it off on the phone, everything. And out of the box, like so many phones, they come with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth already on,

and that's one of the vulnerabilities that people can kind of get into your phone with. So we make sure it turns all of those things off when you get it. WCouch says, does Freedom Phone support right to repair and can I change my own battery? Can you change your own battery? I mean, yeah, you're welcome to. In our policy, yeah, you have totally the ability to repair it on your own. The battery is in there and all that. So if you want your battery, if it's a problem, you'd have to ship it to us. But I mean, if you're able to figure that out on your own,

that's totally, it doesn't break our warranty policy. All right. Yeah, if you break, you know. Player FDW says, question for Eric. If this has been asked before, I apologize.

Will there be a less pricey version of the Freedom Phone? 500 is a bit steep for some. Well, you can get any coupon code online, $50. I don't want to plug it here or anything. But yeah, so it's pretty easy. If you go anywhere, you can pretty much get $50 off and look it up. And that makes it $449, which is a little bit better.

Is that one of the codes? Yeah, Poso is one of the codes and all that. I knew it. I bought the slippers for my pillow. Oh, yeah. And I was like, you know, considering the smear pieces, I'm like, I bet Poso is one of the codes and all that. I knew it. I bought the slippers for my pillow. Oh, yeah. And I was like, you know, considering the smear pieces, I'm like, I bet Poso is one of the codes. Yeah. And was it?

Is Poso? Yeah, Poso. Oh, for like the pillows. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Poso is one of the codes. That's hilarious. Poso, Candice, you know, any, you know, and you can use any. We have a lot of codes.

You really can get it for $4.9 if you just use any of those codes. But, yeah, I mean, the goal is to be able to – the more sales that we can get, the more we can get the parts cheaper as well. So, yeah, we hope to make it cheaper, and we've been growing at a great rate, so we think we can, but, you know, it might be a sack. Oh, apparently I think we have the let me see if i can fix this someone said the description is the wrong link no it looks good that's right freedomphone.com freedomphone.com yeah yeah yeah freedomphone.com that is the correct link and

what's the other one there's another one people people are mentioning? Yeah, there's like, I think like a freedom-phones.net or something. That's a different thing. Okay. So it's just freedomphone.com. Okay. All right. Jay Dubski says, Eric, check out Rob Braxman. He's a tech expert against tracking and censorship.

I would love to see a review of your phone on his YouTube channel. Yeah, I mean, if he wants to review you in it, tell him to reach out to us. Rob Braxman. Big Mac Attack says, hey, Tim, I'd like to be able to pay for in it, tell him to reach out to us. Big Mac Attack says, Hey, Tim, I'd like to be able to pay for an MP3 version of your Will of the People song. Tongue clicks. Do you know the way? In the description of the video, Will of the People on YouTube, is a link to Bandcamp where you can get the full high-quality MP3.

And you may notice that the video version has some sound effects that the MP3 version does not. But it is, I believe, on Spotify, iTunes. It should be on iTunes. I think you can buy it on iTunes. I'm not sure. But it's, like, everywhere. And we've got someone here who may be our new composer, which means likely going to be recording a lot more music. And it should be a lot of fun.

I've got a million and one songs that need to be recorded. Stoked. Whoa, what's this? Seth Essington says, Ian is making me extremely angry. I am about to punch my monitor. Don't do it. Don't do it, Seth. Don't do it.

It's too expensive. I'm very passionate about data transfer. Wyatt Caldenberg says, Ian, if a farmer grows corn and everyone steals his corn, the farmer will stop growing corn. Yeah, it's called theft. So what are people consuming when someone makes music? What are people consuming when a farmer grows corn? You said they're eating his corn.

They're consuming the corn. They're consuming the corn. They're destroying and eating the corn. What is a person consuming when someone plays a song? Nothing. They're not consuming anything. No, they're just listening. That's consumption. No, it's a vibration in your ear.

There's no consumption going on. So consumption is just a, you're playing semantics. A consumption involves destruction of the product. is just you're playing semantics. A consumption involves destruction of the product. No. You're playing semantics. Okay, give me an idea of something that you consume

that isn't destroyed. The beef. A movie. You don't consume a movie. Come on. Consumers go to the movies. You're misusing the word consume. So what do you call...

So we say absorbers? Sure. Like AMC refers to the customers as absorbers. Understanders. Call them consumers. Listeners. You AMC refers to the customers as absorbers? Understanders? Call them consumers! Listeners? You're so desperate to somehow finagle some kind of semantic argument.

Listening to a song and eating a piece of food is extremely different. Yannette Santana says, can Ian move to Cuba? I don't think I could legally, right? Adam Griffin says, intellectual property, Ian. Code is also intellectual property. I know. It's straight communist for the state to steal someone's work to distribute it to the masses. Yeah, I would never encourage the state to steal someone's product and distribute it.

Smokey says Ian is a straight up socialist. Look, copyright law was made by Queen Elizabeth to prevent people from making copies of the Bob. She wanted control of the information. X Runner says Ian loves, but hates NFT. Are you not an NFT guy? No, I love NFTs. Oh, okay.

I was about to say. But you can't copy it. Full of nonsense. Non-fungible. All right, let's see. We'll just do, we'll get a couple more in here because we're getting to the bottom.

Thomas Conservative says, sensor proof is great, but what about when you want to be tracked? Having an alibi for your location can sometimes be useful if cops come knocking. Well, I'll respond to that right away just saying, just get a receipt for your donut. Yeah, I use my credit card

even if I don't need something just every once in a while just so that way you can get a little paper trail of yourself. But you know, you have the option if you want to turn that some tracking like if you want to use GPS, you have the option to turn that on if you yeah exactly you know and then if there's even uh uh if you want an option to download an app although we silo it and all that you you know

we're not going to ban you from using facebook um you're welcome to although i discourage it and you'll get a warning uh uh when you download it and we silo it so it is more secure than using another phone but you know what you do if you're scrolling on facebook um facebook will see that if using that app but they won't see or be able to do anything on the rest of your phone like you know listen or anything good good all right let's see um hank trey says i need a shout out for my shout out my cat he passed away a week ago and i miss him dearly rip louis louis sad sad to hear it buddy sorry rip louis i had a cat i i that was my favorite pet i love i love dogs love them but i had a cat

and she was she was like a dog and she was so sweet danine s says ian if nobody pays for art the artist will be forced to make a living by other means and won't be able to make as much art well if you're making art for anything other than the love of art, then you're doing it wrong. So artists shouldn't be allowed to have like food and a shelter? What do you mean allowed?

Of course they're allowed. So if there's an artist and they're like, I would like to paint a picture, but it takes me. They don't deserve it if that's what you mean. You don't deserve things in life.

You have to earn them. Well, that's why they're putting out art to make money. Yeah, but art is not a profit thing. It's art is a. But it's the ability to do more. Like we live, you know, it's the ability to make money. Yeah. But art is not a profit thing. It's, it's, it's art is, is a, it's the ability to do more. Like we live, you know,

it's the ability to make more art, right? If someone wants to buy more canvases and buy more painting material and be able to have, you know, so rather than it, I mean, I think the goal is always to have art be a full-time job.

If you're really into that, not a full-time job, but something that you can do full-time. If you can control the flow of the output of the flow of your data, then you can profit off of it. But once you lose control of that. If you can control the flow, the output of the flow of your data, then you can profit off of it. But once you lose control of that flow, you live in a dark world. It's real.

It's called reality. Welcome. In my world, people just come to agreements on how to make sure someone who produces art can live a beautiful life. But in your version of reality, just because the possibility exists, artists should have to work other jobs and do art on the side. My middle name's Art, dude. I think that G Prime 85 over here

with these beautiful pictures of Joe Biden eating children should be allowed to be compensated. And you know what? I paid him for the art. Yeah, but now a million people are watching this show and seeing that art for free

and he's not making money on it. They don't have it on their walls. But it's making him more famous and it's making people want to buy them more yeah so some people are the one percent of artists and they can make tons of money off of people displaying their art because it's so good but what about somebody who just draws like you know a landscape and that one's you can't see that one it's not even on the camera should that person just be like well it's for the love i'm gonna work 40 hours to make this, but I should not get paid.

Well, you're talking about making art. It's a fun job. You know, they used to have patrons, like Leonardo da Vinci or these people, Michelangelo, they would have to find someone to fund them to make their art. But I think an artist shouldn't have to have a sugar daddy or anything to be able to produce things. But this whole should and shouldn't thing

and what people deserve is like, I don't like that conversation. You earn what you're worth. Reality dictates... People shouldn't steal corn. The whole should... I don't like this whole should and shouldn't thing. People can steal corn. You can walk right up to a farm and just take it all. No joke. Because the farm is so massive.

Like, there's one farm not too far from here. It's a hundred acre apple orchard. Anybody can walk in and just take the apples. Yeah, well, if you have a warlord hoarding everyone's corn and they have to go steal it from the warlord to survive, then yeah. Ian, you made that up. It has nothing to do with the local farm that makes apples. You just said people shouldn't steal corn. They should not.

What if there's a warlord that has taken all the corn and now people have to steal it from him to survive? Ian, you are so desperate for this argument. We are talking about a farmer who grows corn. And people can just walk up and take it. And said that we shouldn't talk about should or shouldn't i know people shouldn't take his corn people should pay for it people should pay for the art there you go just because we found out a way to to duplicate things online doesn't mean people should not have to pay for it hey man i want to code a solution this is the whole point i think no i think they did. I think streaming services have solved the problem.

But you make like point zero zero one cent every time someone listens to it. It's not not really a solution. Spotify makes way more money on those artists. I think it is better than free. I guess. Yeah. You could. You're adapting to an interesting market. I would like to see the user dictate the sale amount.

Like, I would like to see people be like Spotify, you're going to pay me if you want to. But I don't know. They do want to get their art seen and heard, too. I think that then we're in agreement then because I think the artist should be getting paid what they deserve for their art. But what is that? If you make 100 million copies for free, then what are those copies really worth? 100 millionth of what the original was worth? I mean, if they're free they're they're

free yeah like now you can proliferate data back in the day you could make play a song and that was it you had to pay money to go listen to that now you can make 100 trillion copies of it at the cost of next to nothing so are the value of those copies also 100 trillionth of the here's probably when people would buy an mp3 you would get a dollar for the MP3 and their right to listen to that song whenever they wanted. Now, when I listen to a song on, say, Spotify or Pandora, each listen has a value to it. So instead of just one transaction, it's a prolonged transaction. The more people listen to your music, the more money you make. That's solving for that problem.

Because now I don't got to worry about buying. I can literally pull up Spotify because I have a subscription and just pick up whatever song I want. And then I can listen to it and I don't got to worry about buying. I can literally pull up Spotify because I have a subscription and just pick up whatever song I want. And then I can listen to it and don't got to worry about it. And it's easier than finding some torrent website to download an album. I remember back in the day with like Kazaa and LimeWire. You'd see like, you know, I'd be like, oh, bad religion. And then you click it and it would be Metallica or something.

This is dumb. Or, you know, it was my favorite. People who would name files after their own, like they would upload their own band. Hoping that like calling it Metallica would get me to listen to their band. Anyway, my friends, it's been a blast of a Friday night. Thanks so much for hanging out and for all the super chats and the likes, smash

the like button, subscribe to the channel, share the show with your friends. Friday is a chill day. So make sure you go to TimCast.com, become a member. Members only segments go out Monday through Thursday, but we're going to be adding more and more shows, so hang tight, because once we get these next two three shows the dnd show is going to be happening we're having those people we're having some dnd people come out not this weekend but the next weekend and then we're going to have a show which is like dnd adventures but based on

real world political events to see how people react to certain situations it'll be a whole lot of fun it'll be fun to get a socialist and like an ANCAP and then be like there's an economic crisis in the dwarf city or whatever and like see how they respond and like I choose to do this. It'll be fun. It'll be hilarious. It'll be like hanging out with your friends and having a good time. So you can also follow us at Timcast IRL on Facebook and Instagram at Timcast underscore IRL on TikTok. And you can follow me personally at Timcast. Do you want to shout out your social media or anything else, Eric?

Yeah. If you want to follow me for updates, it's just at Eric Finman, E R I K F I N M A N. If you want to check out the freedom phone, it's just freedom phone.com. People keep saying Ian is stealing our car. Dude, Eric, thank you so much for coming in. Thanks for building this too. Yeah. Thank you.

And feel free. I want people to check it out tear it apart and see how good it is because that's that's the plan and and thank you so much for just having me on ian and tim oh everybody you guys follow me ian crossland.net i love corn you know it's really funny stealing it the the super chats are people saying ian's wrong that's what people are paying and then in the the chat, which is free, everyone's saying Ian's right. Oh, interesting. Dude, reality is changing. We have to adapt.

We have to adapt. I guess the 1% coming out in the comments. Well, I am very glad to have Eric. This is a really fun conversation. I don't really enjoy all the arguing, but I'm glad it happens and I'm glad that we have free speech to do it. And you guys can follow me at Sour Patch Lids on Twitter

as I attempt to gain more followers than Sour Patch Kids. Don't follow them. Follow me. Thanks, guys. Head over to YouTube.com slash Cast Castle. We're going to have an episode of the vlog up tomorrow at 9. The vlog crew is expanding, and we're hoping to soon be moving into daily vlogs. We'll see if we can get there.

We'll make it work. I mean, we're a busy company, but the more people who are here, the crazier things get. And then you'll also see some of the behind-the-scenes stuff when the guests arrive, and it'll be fun and silly. So again, it's youtube.com slash castcastle

at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning. Thanks for hanging out. And Ian was wrong. We'll see you all next time. Bye, guys.