July 23, 2021 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:12:27
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 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. | ||
| 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, 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 Gawker, who used to run Gizmodo, We'll get into this. | ||
| just such a smear piece. | ||
| And then you see these tech publications and people think, oh, well, the tech publications, | ||
| they must be credible. | ||
| But these are just total anti-free speech journalists that just work everywhere. | ||
| We'll get into this. | ||
| We got Ian Jones. | ||
| Well, hello, everyone. | ||
| Yeah, man, I'm glad you're here. | ||
| We've been working on the Fediverse, you know, 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. | ||
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| We're going to be a big conversation. | ||
| It's Friday night, you know how it goes. | ||
| And we're going to talk about this here Freedom Phone. | ||
| Let's do this. | ||
| Let's talk about this story that comes from the Daily Beast, from the internationally renowned technologist, technical expert, and expert on the far, far, far, far, far, far right, Will Sommer. | ||
| I'm kidding. | ||
| He's none of those things. | ||
| MAGA World's Freedom Phone, actually budget Chinese phone. | ||
| MAGA influencers are pushing a phone preloaded 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 gonna say to this... Well, actually, the first thing I should say is, Will Summers is a political activist. | ||
| Like, 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 Summers of all people said it. | ||
| Will Summers 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, 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, 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 it and order it 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 customize 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, OK. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We get some of our stuff from Umidigi and all that stuff. | ||
| But yeah, we partnered with them. | ||
| 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, you know, a little bit marketing there. | ||
| But my background is crypto and that was the original thinking. | ||
| So, me and my design lab, which is here in the U.S., we were like, how do we do a phone? | ||
| There's template designs of a phone that we can look at. | ||
| There's other phones we wanted to look at and see what can we take the best of everything. | ||
| And then, yeah, we ended up putting something together and we tried finding manufacturers in the U.S. | ||
| to do it, but it was literally impossible. | ||
| To find manufacturers in the u.s.. Like it's just you know because of terrible political choices made | ||
| 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. Yeah | ||
| Who manufactures the phone in Hong Kong? | ||
| What company? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Uh, that one, I mean, they just have a long, you know, Hong Kong name and all that, but, uh, they're, they're just basically to carry the demand on that, that overflows. | ||
| But yeah, we partnered with, uh, well, can you say what company it is? | ||
| Uh, no, I mean, I, I, well, I could, but I don't, uh, I don't remember their name or I do remember their name in my head. | ||
| I can see it, but it's the, it's like a very, it's a very Asian Chinese. | ||
| That could be important. | ||
| I mean, what if it's like a unknown company that works with the CCP or something? | ||
| Uh, they don't. | ||
| And we looked into that. | ||
| So. | ||
| Well. | ||
| And Phil, 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, but... 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. | ||
| The other company? | ||
| Yeah, and then we have representatives out in Hong Kong. | ||
| You can look at the name of the company and all that stuff. | ||
| I'll put it on our website right after this, no worries. | ||
| On our spec sheet, we're going to be adding 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, etc. | ||
| And, you know, Apple, they have tens of billions of dollars. | ||
| I think it was, there was a former president that asked Apple to actually make phones in | ||
| the U.S. because they, you know, 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 | ||
| 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? | ||
| Freedomphone? | ||
| 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 their specs. | ||
| I don't, I don't, 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. | ||
| Cause I'm like, most people don't know what any of this stuff means. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you know, uh, F8 megapixels are 13 plus two plus two MP. | ||
| Like most people are going to be like, Oh yeah. | ||
| They're going to look at that. | ||
| They're not what they're talking about. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| R 13 plus two plus two. | ||
| Arthur, so that's R13, so that's like a front-facing camera versus 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 you know 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, like real genuine 5G is just in like a few blocks and a few cities and all that. | ||
| So, and we, we started on this phone like a year ago. | ||
| 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 OAN on it, or Parler, 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 or apps that are put on the phone. | ||
| So maybe it's just a grift. | ||
| They all decided it's fair game and 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. | ||
| Bloomberg also. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Okay, 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 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, you know, 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're 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, you know, 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 wanna 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, you know, free speech and anti-tracking, and even, like, 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 Zoom, 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 XKeyscore and the things 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? | ||
| 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, it's a good device. | ||
| I'll get you phones and you can tear it apart, rip it apart. | ||
| We've tested it, so go on. | ||
| Oh, but we're not going to take the phones from you. | ||
| Oh, well, get them. | ||
| 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 through you, because look, if I went to you, you'd be like, oh, here's the phone, and then we'd be like, it's perfect, it's great. | ||
| Potemkin phones. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| No, randomly get some and all that, happy to put it to the test. | ||
| But anyway. | ||
| When we're hearing what the Biden administration is doing with censorship. | ||
| Mm-hmm. With the text messages and you know like yeah I mean seeing an article come out like 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 that 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, it's maybe you get that in text message, you know, maybe you get like a 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 White House, the press secretary's podium, I mean, that they're saying they're doing it. | ||
| Or they want to do it. | ||
| They said that they're working in conjunction with the DNC and phone companies to, what do they say, meet out misinformation. | ||
| But there have been rumors from people saying that they've tried sending texts and the texts don't go through on certain issues. | ||
| 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 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, but I think it's a net good because you're not able to do hoaxes like WMDs in Iraq anymore because of social media and because of the Internet. | ||
| Yeah, but they did Russia. | ||
| Yeah, they did. | ||
| I think you would have seen the poll numbers on people believing that way higher if you didn't have the Internet. | ||
| I don't know, 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 false, false flag. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| A false flag, false flag. | ||
| Oh snap. | ||
| You're making me nervous. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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, uh, well, at least that story is not true. | ||
| So why is it, 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, you know? | ||
| 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 dirt, 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, like, torrenting, and take a look at, like, the height ten 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're running 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 Dotcom, a New Zealand businessman who has never been to the US, had like, I guess US, I think it was 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 this super rich guy and they claimed it was, like, piracy or whatever. | ||
| I interviewed Kim Dotcom for Vice and he made a really, really interesting point because I was, like, I was trying to challenge him, 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 filenames 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 completely honest. | ||
| I got no problem paying 10 bucks a month so I can get a big library of movies and I don't have to worry about viruses and garbage links. | ||
| And there have been times where it's like, I'd see a movie and someone would send me 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 wanna 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. | ||
| Piracy is stealing. | ||
| Making a copy of something is different than that. | ||
| 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 like, you know, a couple hundred grand on doing like 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, they're losing their job. | ||
| Modern technology's 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. | ||
| Piracy's been happening for a long time before that. | ||
| I was never of the opinion that people should be allowed to just copy any bit of information they wanted in the sense that, like, you don't need to give someone... I don't even understand how this is an argument. | ||
| Like, if you believe in the rights of the working class, To be able to have someone... 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 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 and everyone gets to use it. | ||
| And so the issue there is I certainly like the idea that if someone | ||
| invents something or make something that can be easily shared, 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 | ||
|
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it. | |
| No, that's a problem. | ||
| If I 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. | ||
| And if they want it to be available for free, they can have a license where it's available to people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You can. | ||
| No, you can't stop people from trading information. | ||
| They created Spotify. | ||
| They created Pandora. | ||
| They created YouTube Music. | ||
| Yeah, but if you want to go online and look for a movie and watch it for free, you can. | ||
| 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 did it in really dirty ways, to be completely honest. | ||
| I think, based on my understanding of the Kim Dotcom case, it was completely wrong what they did. | ||
| It was nightmarish. | ||
| I mean, they raided the man's house. | ||
| When they could have just been like... | ||
| Stop doing this. | ||
| But they didn't. | ||
| It was like they wanted to put a show, they wanted to make an example of people. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| When they went after these people who use Napster, like Metallica went after them for | ||
| suing, saying you're stealing. | ||
| Or when there was like one guy who downloaded an MP3 and they showed it to his house and | ||
| he got a $50,000 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 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 they can get access to it. | ||
| Anyway, to wrap this back up, the internet was a wild, crazy place. | ||
| 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 Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos. | ||
| He's still on YouTube. | ||
| I don't know what he's doing. | ||
| But off of Twitter, the place where these 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 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 day, you know | ||
| They're there 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 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 gonna take your phone away. | ||
| It doesn't stop at, oh, we're gonna 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. | ||
| Reactionaries 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? | ||
|
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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... 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, classical liberalism, have started standing up and pushing back. | ||
| Not because of conservatives. | ||
| Now, of course, conservatives absolutely are pushing back. | ||
| But I think if 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'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, pro free speech ones, but I mean, 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. | ||
| Uh, and he basically set up his own little mini treasury, I think, in his garage or something. | ||
| And you would get, you know, a $10 bill with Ron Paul's face on it, and you could redeem that with him for $10 worth of silver. | ||
| And then, you know, small business. | ||
| I have, like, a We Accept Liberty dollar sign, even. | ||
| That's in my place. | ||
| And they shut that guy down. | ||
| Because technically it's illegal to start your own currency in the US. | ||
| And it became illegal during the Civil War. | ||
| There actually used to be, I had also, because again, I'm the Bitcoin guy. | ||
| And 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 wanted | ||
| to consolidate all the money into one currency. | ||
| And so that's why Bitcoin was invented in the first place. | ||
| People go, think Satoshi Nakamoto, the founders Anonymous. | ||
| Or, you know, what is the purpose of blockchain was anyone who started their own currency, they were either throwing in jail or threatening them to go to jail. | ||
| And that's an or, you know, and shutting down any centralized operation. | ||
| So that's what was beautiful about Bitcoin is, you know, you're able to run it even if they even if they shut you down, you know, that's why the founders anonymous because back in the day, if you start your own currency, you were, you know, it's prison. | ||
| And you were saying that mesh network and can bypass issues with So yeah, I mean, the goal is to be able to run and piggyback off other people's devices. | ||
|
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DNS issues. | |
| Well, before we, we got to explain to people what mesh networking is. | ||
| Yeah, and explain mesh networking, 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 off | ||
| other people's devices. | ||
| So rather than having to rely on, you know, basically, again, other people's hardware | ||
| for internet, hopefully, you know, you can have your own mesh network. | ||
| So that way, you know, whether that, if you have like a box at home, being able to communicate | ||
| with other things, you know, with phones and all that, being able to, being able to communicate. | ||
| So even if they shut down everything. | ||
| I'll simplify it. | ||
| Right now, your phone... Here's what people gotta 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, what's, 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 like solid state mesh networking nodes that don't require electricity? | ||
| Uh, I mean, I think you can have, like, self... I think it would all require electricity, um, but you, you know, you can set up, like, 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 know, you saw what happened in Texas being reliant on the grid. | ||
| It can go bad. | ||
| I'll give people a simple example. 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 in your 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, HeyWhereAreYouAt. | ||
| His phone, at the end of the boat, saw Jane Doe, 30 feet away. | ||
| Jumped to her 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 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 bling, 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 a home internet is that they also create a public node off of your own wifi 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 gatekeepers. | ||
| Actually, I think it's easier to spy. | ||
| 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 all into 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You'd need backhaul access. | ||
| So the way it would work is you're standing in the middle of the desert. | ||
| There's a guy a hundred feet in front of you, a hundred feet in front of him. | ||
| And then your phone sends a signal that bounces off of all of those phones and then hits the backhaul cell phone tower or a hardline 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 does that affect like centralized systems right now? | ||
| Yeah, so for example, when you have like a domain, you have what's called the, 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. | ||
| When you're, 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, you know, domains can be banned. | ||
| I mean, you saw when... Gab. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was it Gab? | ||
| Gab had their domain seized, I think. | ||
| Was it Gab? | ||
| Um, I think, uh, their registrar banned them and all that, but that's the next step is you can go to, uh, one of the best domain registrars is called Epic, E-P-I-K, um, and, uh, that's where we host our domain. | ||
| And, uh, uh, 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, I mean, they have to. | ||
| I mean, it's honestly props to them in many ways. | ||
| I mean, one of the, you know, we made, uh, uh, Gab doesn't have an app. | ||
| So on our phone where, uh, we have Gab right in our app store. | ||
| Um, cause 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. | ||
| For those that aren't familiar, the Fediverse is like Twitter, but decentralized. | ||
| So that means, it was really funny, Macedon, I think, was the biggest node, the biggest website that used the Fediverse. | ||
| 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 Macedon, and they panicked, and they were like, we're banning these servers so we won't see them. | ||
| It's really, really funny, actually. | ||
| The hackers were 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. | ||
|
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|
I know, right? | |
| Yeah, it's like, out of all the people... Pro-FBI? | ||
| Pro-Fed? | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| DEF CON's probably gonna be fun this year. | ||
| Free speech doesn't mean uncensored, is what I've found. | ||
| Like, if you allow everything to happen, then there'll 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, A, 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's 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, Goldmember? | ||
| He's like, no, no, no, this is in the second one. | ||
|
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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 where do you spend the money after you destroy all the cities? | ||
| But I get it, it's a comedy, it's funny. | ||
| What most people don't realize is that they're like, yay, I'm winning! | ||
| And it's like, congratulations, your pyrrhic victory will make you the king of a pile of rubble. | ||
| So you may 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 jeez, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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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 bans. | ||
| They're high on their own supply. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a downward spiral. | ||
| They start, they start, they get into these arguments. | ||
| You know, CGP Grey 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'll be like, you know, I'm pro Tim and Ian's pro Ian. | ||
| But instead of us actually arguing with each other about our beliefs, I argue to you and he argues to Lydia. | ||
| Oh, 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 Ben 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 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 XY 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 degree. | ||
| Every article is police brutality, non-stop. | ||
| Mike.com started as, my understanding is, a Ron Paul libertarian website. | ||
| No way! | ||
| Did Mike start off as Ron Paul-y? | ||
| Wow! | ||
| There was an investigation I read about, so correct me if I'm wrong everybody, but it started off like just being, like, what was the internet? | ||
| What was big on the internet back then? | ||
| Ron Paul, love revolution! | ||
| 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 gotta 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 pro-hospitality 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 non-stop 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 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, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| 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, 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 notice 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 wanna get internet points, they put it, they post it, and they know people are gonna 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 a hundred police officers, and one of them is a dick, who, uh, and a psychopath, who beats somebody, that's one percent. | ||
| Most people are gonna be like, arrest that guy. | ||
| Problem solved. | ||
| It's just one guy. | ||
| If you have a hundred million police officers, you've not got a million cops going around doing all the 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 Maloney 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 wanted to get into politics, actually. | ||
| I feel like Kanye was one of the biggest motivators because just seeing someone, you know, like in the song Reborn and all that with Kid Cudi, 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 that's what made me want to, because I've been, like, what got me into Bitcoin was Ron Paul and all that, and that whole world, and meeting some guy who had a Bitcoin, it was actually Adam Kokesh, it was actually an Adam Kokesh event, and it was all Ron Paul people. | ||
| What year was it? | ||
| 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 bee and it looked like a dollar sign. | ||
| I'm like, what's that? | ||
| And he's like, You know what I love about Bitcoin? | ||
| 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, so my story is that back in 2011, Bitcoin was at 70 cents. | ||
| And I look over to my friend, I'm in L.A. | ||
| at Hackerspace, 70 cents per Bitcoin. | ||
| And I'm like, I was like, hey, I was like, I got five grand in savings. | ||
| Should I just buy all this bit, like put it all in Bitcoin? | ||
| Because I'm not going to touch the money. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's going to 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, Bitcoin. | ||
| But he's like, what can you really do? | ||
| You're gonna buy it, and in a month it's gonna be a fad, and then you're gonna 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, OK, so now my currency is going to be I got to write a string of numbers on on letters on paper. | ||
| If my paper gets lost or burned, it's gone forever. | ||
| And if I lose access to electricity, I can't. | ||
| 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... Yeah, I got into it 2011, as well. | ||
| So I had about a... My grandmother, who was very old, and she gave me $1,000. | ||
| And she's like, you know, Eric, use this for your scholarship. | ||
| You know, one day, go to school. | ||
| I'm gonna 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 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, you know, and get Bitcoin sent to your wallet. | ||
| 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, Bitcoin.org, right? | ||
| Yeah, that computer got destroyed though. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So I probably, I don't even know how many Bitcoin were on the 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, he, American Airlines lost his bag and that had about 500 Bitcoin on it. | ||
|
unidentified
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No! | |
| Yeah, I know, I know. | ||
| Where did you store it in the beginning? | ||
| Uh, back in the day, and definitely not now, but I just stored it on my laptop. | ||
| Like, you download, like, the Bitcoin.org, you know, just desktop wallet, and that's what you did. | ||
| Alpaca 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 my butt to Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, and just like, you know, tried to do a business and all that. | ||
| And it ended up going well, but eventually sold the 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. | ||
| Like, it's like, well, you hope for it, but you don't know what will happen. | ||
| There's a funny meme where it's like, Some some there's like a guy who's like 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 like 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 yeah cuz he was just like some scumbag who's like I don't care | ||
| Did you pre-install wallets 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 pull it out? | ||
| Do you want to pull out your phone? | ||
| We won't use the pronouns. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| But that's another thing. | ||
| Like everyone told me when I got into Bitcoin, you know, and they were all like, Bro, that's a scam. | ||
| 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, it was funny because I was like talking about this is this is like 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, or not the hard forks, the hard forks, the Bitcoin Cash. | ||
| And there was the, no, no, the accidental ones. | ||
| Oh, do you remember when, I think it was in 2013, Bitcoin forked on accident? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| And then they had to like do an emergency like, no, no, that's not the real thing anymore. | ||
| And like switch to this node. | ||
| And so I was like, but you know, the mistake I made back then was it was an, it was an investing in the one thing the end caps understood was that it was a decentralized non-copyable asset that was difficult to locate. | ||
| And that's all that really mattered. | ||
| And so I was in cap back when I was, you know, 12. | ||
| But there's that. | ||
| 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 Bitcoin and start taking it more seriously, and since then I have. | ||
| I mean, yeah, I mean the ANCAPs back in the day, I mean, I was really into that and it's still a part of me. | ||
| 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 when you were 12? | ||
| Yeah, I bought Bitcoin when I was 12. | ||
| And again, it was easier back in the day because, you know, although I ended up having to do it later, but all the KYC stuff, you know, you could just like PayPal some guy on LocalBitcoins. | ||
| And so that's what I did. | ||
| 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 it. | ||
| Because a lot of people say, like, when I tell that story about having the five grand in savings and wanting to buy Bitcoin, everyone responds with, you would have sold at 20 bucks. | ||
| And I'm like, you're correct. | ||
| If I put five grand into Bitcoin and hit $20, I'd be like, and I'd sell right away. | ||
| I'd be like, just get off! | ||
| 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, 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, it's ultimately was you know, cool, I guess I didn't buy doge | ||
| I did buy some doge early on. Oh, I did cash out doge early though. That was that was my state | ||
| I put I now have some coin in in in doge and all that but But yeah, I mean I was I was all in Bitcoin | ||
| I mean I remember I made like 300 bucks on dogecoin like back in | ||
| the day and I was like well This is as far as gonna go cuz 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 wow, maybe doge 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 gonna 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 crazy because even if it was almost worthless, you could make like a million coins, go on some trading website, and people would be like, I'll give you Bitcoin for it. | ||
| It was so scammy in the early days. | ||
| I know! | ||
| And it still is! | ||
| It 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, 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. | ||
| 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 WebGL, I think it was called, and basically it 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, you know, and again, I just feel like 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 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, I'll try to open it to the camera. | ||
| Should I be fancy with it? | ||
| Show the people the Freedom Phone. | ||
| So this is the Freedom Phone, guys. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| It's a beautiful box. | ||
| Okay, cool. | ||
| I'm bumping my microphone here. | ||
| So here we go. | ||
| You probably 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 | ||
| It still darkens the camera because the white yeah, absolutely. So here we go here | ||
| I'll hand it to you in just a second and all that. But yeah, this is what it looks like | ||
| You know, it's a quality phone and all that and then oh, yeah | ||
| There's a quality phone and all that and you can boot it up, you know | ||
| We basically combined some of the best custom ROMs on Android++. | ||
| I hired a really great CTO to basically rebuild Android from the ground up so that way it was secure and all that. | ||
| We mixed LineageOS, GrapheneOS. | ||
| 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 and then yeah, so you have like trust on there, which is a Privacy guard for your phone and then you put it up and then we have I'm just trying to say 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 Like a little bit more neutral, in a way, and not so, like, hard-standing on kind of free speech and, you know, right-wing politics and all that. | ||
| But we wanted to, you know, I feel like we did a good job. | ||
| We wanted it to have, like, I'm never afraid, I guess, of being provocative. | ||
| And I think a lot of people, they don't, they're, I can hand this to you, by the way, if you want to play with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Freedom phone. | |
| Yeah, Freedom Phone. | ||
| How long did it take from DuckDuckGo on it? | ||
| Yeah, so DuckDuckGo is right on the home screen. | ||
| Brave Browser is the default browser. | ||
| And Fortnite? | ||
| Yeah, we preloaded Fortnite because we did that as a troll because Apple banned Fortnite off their app store. | ||
| So again, they're not just banning conservative apps. | ||
| They're banning apps like Fortnite if they don't pay up or if some governments, like for example, not that I use this app, but Grindr. | ||
| I mean, that's like Tinder for gay people. | ||
| I mean, that's... They banned that? | ||
| They banned that. | ||
| Not in the US, but a country asked them to ban it. | ||
| I forgot which one, but it was like, so they're responding to countries and all that. | ||
| And that's the problem with these huge, huge multinational corporations is, you know, 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. | ||
| That's like a test unit. | ||
| Where's the camera? | ||
| Here's the camera. | ||
| It's at the bottom right corner. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I see. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| Oh, looks like a camera. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It zooms. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| So I think, uh, I'm looking at the specs and I think the Umidigi A9 Pro actually has a better camera. | ||
| Uh, yeah. | ||
| So we, we customized the camera on everything. | ||
| Like the problem is, is we wanted to make sure that on the supply chain front that we got our parts in a secure way, um, and all that. | ||
| So that way, uh, like we, we just didn't feel satisfied with the Umidigi, um, their camera supply chain. | ||
| Can I look at it? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Oh, I see. | ||
| Well, I googled it. | ||
| They say they have a 32 megapixel camera. | ||
| Actually, they have an octa-core processor, which I think yours is also. | ||
| Yeah, also we have an octa-core processor. | ||
| But yours is 8 gigabytes, right? | ||
| Oh, no, no, no. | ||
| This is great, man. | ||
| Four gigabytes. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's 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. | ||
| One of the reasons we wanted to call it a freedom phone was to have that provocativeness. | ||
| I think that there's a huge problem. | ||
| A lot of people, if they voted for Trump, they're scared to market. | ||
| I voted for Trump. | ||
| They're scared to market to this audience. | ||
| There's a pillow company, right? | ||
| That's the least political thing ever. | ||
| But if they say they care about your values, and they do, 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 CRT and a lot of left-wing values. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| I'm unapologetically free speech. | ||
| In my opinion, I'm a Republican, and 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 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. | ||
| When you look at Richard Branson, he dropped out the same age as me. | ||
| I love to learn, and that's why I had to leave. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why I care about free speech. | ||
| I've done a TED Talk. | ||
| I had met with Jimmy Carter and all that, like Time Magazine wrote. | ||
| The media had liked me up until July 14th when we launched this phone. | ||
| 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 let's get down to brass tacks here. | ||
| The specs look very, very much the same. | ||
| Same camera, front and back. | ||
| This display is the same. | ||
| They say they have a dot... What is this? | ||
| A dot drop display. | ||
| Not the same as the... What does Freedom Phone have? | ||
| Is it a... Water drop. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Why is it more money? | ||
| Why is it more money? | ||
| Well, one, to source all the parts of this device, 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, a lot of these prices, it's for ordering | ||
| 50,000 units at once. | ||
| Or because companies did, and they can sell it because it's... | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| Or another company does it, and then they resell it at that cost. | ||
| So the root cause of these phones is they're selling 50,000 or 100,000 phones. | ||
| 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. | ||
| At the operating system level, if you buy that phone, I guarantee it has a ton of Google stuff on it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The supply chain has not been verified and all that. | ||
| We're going to post on our whole supply chain process, which I think is on our website. | ||
| I'm coming up and then we just we just got out there and it was like a crazy launch | ||
| So, you know, we just we honestly did not expect to honestly have a kind of blow up this much | ||
| But it but is right now is that basically like the freedom OS? | ||
| Yeah, freedom OS is a mix of linear Joanne AOS P Android open-source | ||
| lineage OS graphene OS couple other custom ROMs and our own touch and | ||
| So one of the things we do on this phone is we silo every app and its own little digital island its own little | ||
| digital Bubble so that way it can't see anything that's going on | ||
| the rest. Oh 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, uh, 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 will message 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 ended up doing. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Like, don't switch. | ||
| 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, I mean, we could give you the option to do that, but your phone... | ||
| is it doesn't have this headphone is a great processor, but for a 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. | ||
| 499. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, we give coupon codes $50 off and people can pay monthly if they want to and all that. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, to me, I mean, you know, 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, you know, 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 a hundred 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 won't be able to do that. | ||
| I gotta be honest, I think 500 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. | ||
| And that's another thing. | ||
| To me, I feel like the real story of this is that Apple... I always thought it'd be great if some president had put sanctions 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. | ||
| It doesn't have to. | ||
| It doesn't have to cost that much if you're not using that kind of labor and all that. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hong Kong has got problems right now, but I don't... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, actually, I don't know for sure. | ||
| Foxconn's not in Hong Kong. | ||
| They're in Taiwan. | ||
| They're in Taiwan. | ||
| Really? | ||
| 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, isn't an iPhone like $1,000? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| An iPhone is like $1,000. | ||
| Shenzhen. | ||
| I thought it was Shenzhen. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Shenzhen. | ||
| That's where all the people are committing suicide. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| I'm glad. | ||
| Because I was like, I was like, I like Taiwan, you know, and all that. | ||
| Yeah, I thought it was Shenzhen. | ||
| Yeah, New York Times fact check me. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, with the phone at the operating system level, yeah, it's completely de-googled, you know, it has its own app store and all that. | ||
| So you're not relying on the Google Play Store or anything. | ||
| And, uh, and 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. | ||
| It's ironic to me that Apple's motto used to be, think different, and now they ban apps who think different. | ||
| Or Google, which was, do no evil, and now it's company policy. | ||
| They got rid of that motto. | ||
| And all that. | ||
| And that's why I think, you know, like, you know, we're a startup, but ultimately, and I don't have like a PR team of like a thousand people like these people, like I'm just, you know, coming on this podcast, you know, you know, 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 like, saying it's a honeypot. | ||
| Like, buying the phone is a trap. | ||
| I'm like, what do you think your phone already does out of the box? | ||
| It's a honeypot. | ||
| Welcome to modern technology. | ||
| Smartphones are honeypots. | ||
| They wouldn't attack me this much if it was. | ||
| And then two, yeah, I mean, they've doxxed my money. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Luckily my mom's Scottish so she's tough. | ||
| She was tough growing up in the best way possible. | ||
| She's an incredibly smart woman and a great mother. | ||
| 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 to the political world, I almost like, I mean, I knew what was coming in the | ||
| sense of, you know, but I was so well liked by the left-wing media. | ||
| You know, 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, you know, 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. | ||
| I'm still shell-shocked, honestly. | ||
| I was talking about algorithmic psychosis, and I'm thinking about it from the perspective of the psychopaths who live in the mirror world, in the upside-down or whatever. | ||
| How did we come to this position of knowing computers? | ||
| Look, we knew about Bitcoin in the early days. | ||
| Most people didn't even find out about Bitcoin until 2016 or something. | ||
| And I'm like, I was on the internet as long as I can remember. | ||
| My family had CompuServe on DOS. | ||
| 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, 7. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Mm-hmm, and then you get tough to say cuz me and Eric are both. | ||
| We're like almost different generations. | ||
| I'm 42. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're 22 We're both internet dudes like I didn't get in at a 16 AOL, but I'm still like that 1996 or four or five or something 1994. | |
| Both internet dudes. | ||
| Like, I didn't get internet until I was 16, AOL, but I'm still like. | ||
| So what year was that? | ||
| 1996 or four, five or something, 1994, I think. | ||
| What year were you born? | ||
| 79. | ||
| 79, 79. | ||
| Yeah, so right around there. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like it, man. | ||
| 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 just think that there's two, um, different universes that exist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It seems like there are people who live in the paranoid, you know, it's really funny. | ||
| Uh, there's this very, very high profile podcaster who apparently, um, said that I was one of these people who, who's too, too online. | ||
| And, uh, you know, like, oh, there's these, these people that 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'd think that that was normal too. | ||
| They've been... 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. | ||
| That's the only way. | ||
| Here's an example. | ||
| Imagine you're in an aircraft hangar. | ||
| Massive. | ||
| We're talking like 50, 80,000 square feet. | ||
| This 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I can't remember the exact quote from Breitbart about walking towards the fire. | ||
| 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 they think they'll get burned, but on the other side is freedom. | ||
| And you know, you walk past it and then everything's normal and you're fine. | ||
| These people are trapped in the cave now. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Look at what they say when they're like, when they say things like police are hunting black people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Geez. | |
| You we know that's not real, but imagine you're 18 and you were eight years old and you had no 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 um, azra 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. | ||
| Well, 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 certain, to buy artifacts and items to improve your character's stats, become better equipped, stronger, and faster. | ||
| Make friends. | ||
| And then, 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! | ||
| Life imitates art and all that stuff, you know? | ||
| Shall we read superchats? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| Let's go! | ||
| Let's read all the superchats 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 gonna hire is probably the fact checker and their whole job is gonna be just to read the website and then yell at us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| And then they're gonna have like a Is it gonna be New York Times fact-check level, though? | ||
| It's gonna be, like... So, I'm... We're gonna 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, comma, we'd be like, absurdly skinny? | ||
| That's poor framing. | ||
| We gotta, you know... That's opinion. | ||
| You can call him skinny, I guess, but absurdly? | ||
| Like, 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's like really loaded. | ||
| And I went and saw it, and I was like, aw, jeez. | ||
| And I had to go in. | ||
| I went in and immediately issued a correction. | ||
| Like, none of that loaded garbage. | ||
| So we're actually planning on covering a lot of the election audits and stuff like that. | ||
| And so we're going to have like the statements from the Democrats and what they've been saying about it, statements from the Republicans. | ||
| But we're not going to play stupid games with framing and adjectives. | ||
| We're just going to be like, here's what they're saying, here's what they're saying. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| You decide. | ||
| Let's read these superchats! | ||
| Give them to me. | ||
| Alright, let's see. | ||
| TheCurlyAfro says, for women being drafted, proved they're a 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| VelvetSchwinker says, freedom phone is as good of a phone as Lin Wood is a lawyer. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 it 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 all your data go? | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, all that we do in our privacy policy is we say, hey, we track just your name and your address if you buy a phone, and that's it. | ||
| So, if you want to do, like, a return, and one, I don't want to sell, and then two, even if somehow, you know, that happened, and one, I really don't think I will, even if somehow that happened, you know, it would just be your name and the address if there's, like, a return or something, and those are all kept private. | ||
| Alright, Warframe4theWin says, does the Freedom phone have physical hardware switches like the Pine phone and Librem 5? | ||
| Um, no, that's something we want to add. | ||
| We feel very confident, like you can literally go in at, you know, in your 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 anyone doing, honestly, a secure phone, 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 the future, maybe a Freedom Phone 2. What was the problem with the usability with | ||
| those? 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, uh, 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 going to, real quick, we're going to open source actually the operating system coming up as well. | ||
| So that way people can look at it. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Shepperton Studios says, Hey guys, just joined Timcast.com today. | ||
| Love the content. | ||
| Are there any plans to be able to cast to Chromecast, et cetera? | ||
| 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, 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, and the branding and all that stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Let's see. | ||
| Jonathan Duger 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, uh, it's just in a name I can't pronounce. | ||
| Like it's literally that. | ||
| And we just added, you know, so it sounds shady. | ||
| It's like, I can't say the Asian word. | ||
| I can't say it. | ||
| So I feel like, I feel like that's it. | ||
| I'll put it up on the website for anyone that's concerned. | ||
| So I guess, uh, I guess I, I guess I have a little bit of an ego. | ||
| I don't like looking stupid, but you should write it on a card and just like hold it up. | ||
| Right in the car, 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. | ||
| All right, let's see. | ||
| Brenton Deon 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 week. | ||
| I mean, that's why I said 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 that's the kind of stuff that that 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 there's you know, it's a double cross or whatever but I mean, I like I 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, uh, Soleil Cucumber Lime says, if you use Brave browser, there is a setting to allow video playback in the background, AKA this with a screen off. | ||
| Oh, we did mention that before someone super chatted us. | ||
| I use the Brave browser for everything. | ||
| Brave is amazing. | ||
| That's the default browser on the phone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hey, there you go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Brave is the default browser. | ||
| DuckDuckGo default search engine. | ||
| It's right on the home screen. | ||
| I love Brave. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oscar Oliu 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. | ||
| Uh, not even go through us, you know, and all that and, uh, uh, and get your own, you know, install it yourself and go through that difficult process. | ||
| You know, you can do that for free. | ||
| Oh, so you could, you, you're going to, well, that's the plan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people can just take and do it. | ||
| I mean, to me, this, the phone is just about making it easy for people. | ||
| So it's all in one device. | ||
| So you don't have to be good at, you know. | ||
| Have you looked at using like an MIT license, like a copyleft license, so that if 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. | ||
| Cause 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 FreedomOS. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| There's a lot of superchats as I'm scrolling through that you literally just answered. | ||
| Like, YayGod 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, you know, 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 yeah, I mean, the goal is to be able, or if you want to be able to 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 saying that Kevin Smith ruined it or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Apparently, Teela is the sorceress of Greyskull. | |
| That's the female lead character. | ||
| She was kind of like a side character in the original He-Man, but now apparently she's one of the lead roles. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| That means she has the power now? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I didn't look into it. | ||
| It looked so weird. | ||
| He-Man's the beast. | ||
| He is. | ||
| Prince Adam. | ||
| I love He-Man. | ||
| You look like Prince Adam. | ||
| Yeah, honestly, it's been interesting because I remember back when I was liked by the left-wing media, I did a New York Magazine thing and they made me look so nerdy. | ||
| They combed my hair to the side, maybe buttoned up my shirt. | ||
| And look like a total nerd. | ||
| 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, The hat's staying on! | ||
| The beanie's iconic. | ||
| 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, it's a tough job. | ||
| Like doing photo shoots? | ||
| I know. | ||
| They make your body in a weird pose. | ||
| They're 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, like, now don't move for a minute. | ||
| And I'm like, okay! | ||
| It's painful. | ||
| If you can't breathe, you can't move. | ||
| It's a job, honestly. | ||
| It's a job. | ||
| No, it's a lifestyle. | ||
| 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. | ||
| on 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. | ||
| Like, if there is a dude and he's like, I have designed this 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 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 thing I think people need 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 is in Common License. | ||
| So like, I write a song, and then it took us several months to make Will of the People. | ||
| 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 gonna make a million bucks off of it or anything. | ||
| But maybe, there's a hope, maybe it'll sell, we'll make money. | ||
| But we're in a new era, honestly, 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 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? | ||
| How does 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 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... We do. | ||
| 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 gonna 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, and we could do another one. | ||
| The second one was like, people liked it, but everybody pirated it. | ||
| We didn't make enough money. | ||
| We don't care to do it again. | ||
| And the movie sucked, so... Kick-Ass 2 didn't suck. | ||
| Well, you just said it was like, eh, that sucks. | ||
| I'm talking about the revenue. | ||
| I thought Kick-Ass 1 and 2 were awesome. | ||
| I would have loved to see Part 3. | ||
| The problem is people pirated it, and then they didn't make enough money, so they didn't want to do it again. | ||
| You don't want people to copy and sell your content. | ||
| It's not about selling, it's about if they're going to invest $100 million in a movie, they at least need to make $100 million. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I liked the movie and people pirated it. | ||
| So now I don't get to... Yeah, but them copying the movie doesn't mean that they liked the movie. | ||
| They just wanted to see it. | ||
| 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 mean they like it. | ||
| 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 really important, and I think, you know, I understand if people can't afford it, 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, you know, just some guy. | ||
| And again, 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, we'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. | ||
| TimCast 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 didn't exist until the 1920s, until radio. | ||
| That's not true at all, dude. | ||
| 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, Ian. | ||
| I'm talking about entertainment. | ||
| That has nothing to do with it. | ||
| Movies and TV, digital art. | ||
| It 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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, 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 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, hard-working person, you like his work, you want his work to continue, but then everyone just copies it instead of buying it? | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| Yeah, but everyone does not copy instead of buy. | ||
| 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 friend's 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You think that making a movie should make you a millionaire? | ||
| I mean, do you think that these actors should be getting 30 million dollars 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. | ||
| No, 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, those big fines. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I said when they gave that guy a massive fine and started going to people's houses, I said that was wrong. | ||
| It was insane. | ||
| It's like the 3D, we're talking like 3D printed guns. | ||
| We're talking about a very simple morality that piracy was destroying 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. | ||
| Automation is, many people are going to lose their jobs because the automation is taking it away. | ||
| And, and you know, 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 bucks 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 at 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's not because of digital. | ||
| I mean, there's a hundred. | ||
| How many more movie makers are there now than there were 30 years ago? | ||
| Because it's, 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. | ||
| Cause I don't think you're actually, 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. | ||
| They say 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. | ||
| Alright, 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 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 money. | ||
| Metallica lost some of their hundreds of millions. | ||
| Yeah, but ignore the fact that you know who Metallica is. | ||
| You don't know who, like, Jimmy's Basement Barbecue Band is. | ||
| Yeah, people lost income. | ||
| It's also cheaper to make movies. | ||
| So, that's a non sequitur. | ||
| It's equalizing. | ||
| You make less for your sales and you spend less to make the thing. | ||
| Alright, 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, 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, yeah, it's not going to last. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, it should last. | ||
| I feel, in my opinion, this will last for five years. | ||
| I mean, the hard sell on it is if you want a phone that has its own app store, which 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 security, And feel free to anyone that wants to, you know, 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 like a top-notch hacker and just, I mean, we've done this internally, but actually publicly make like a whole video about it, of them trying to get into this phone. | ||
| And I'm sure this is what people are going to do when they, 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, you know, we're going to have freedomphone.com slash security that goes into literally all the things that we did on the security front. | ||
| Blackrock Beacon says, Algorithmic psychosis is an availability cascade driven by | ||
| confirmation bias and virtue signaling reinforced by gamification or human | ||
| interaction. | ||
| Well, there you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| What is this? | ||
| Logan Culver says, Tim, how many of the normal chats are from bots? | ||
| LOL. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Uh, we, we made it so that you gotta 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 US 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 en route by a third party? | ||
| Right now we ship it to you and we put a little tracker to make sure it got to you and all that. | ||
| Not a tracker on the phone, but just like we put on the outside of the box so that way you make sure that they're seeing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Man, I'll tell you this, I've had more than enough 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? | ||
| DEFCON? | ||
| Yeah, I've been once. | ||
| You get like the little steamer thing and then you steam the sticker 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 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 fingerprints 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. | ||
| 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 like 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Yeah, if you break, you know, your player FDW says question for Eric. | ||
| Mm-hmm. 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| POSO. | ||
| Is that one of the codes? | ||
| Yeah, POSO is one of the codes and all that. | ||
| I knew it! | ||
| I bought the slippers from MyPillow. | ||
| And I was like, you know, considering the smear pieces, I'm like, I bet POSO is one of the codes. | ||
| Yeah, and what was it? | ||
| It's POSO. | ||
| Yeah, POSO. | ||
| Oh, oh, for like the pillows. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So POSO is one of the codes. | ||
| POSO, Candice, you know, and you can use any. | ||
| We have a lot of codes. | ||
| You really can get it for $449 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 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 a review unit, tell him to reach out to us. | ||
| Rob Braxman. | ||
| 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 should be a lot of fun. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| 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, you're playing semantics. | ||
| Consumption involves destruction of the product. | ||
| Not, no, like you're playing semantics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| You're misusing the word consume. | ||
| So what do you call it? | ||
| Like, so we say absorbers. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like AMC refers to the customers as absorbers. | ||
| Understanders. | ||
| Call them consumers! | ||
| You're so desperate to somehow finagle some kind of semantic argument. | ||
| How about the difference between listening to a song and eating a piece of food is extremely different. | ||
| Yanet 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 Bible. | ||
| She wanted control of the information. | ||
| X Runner says Ian loves blockchain but hates NFT. | ||
| Are you not an NFT guy? | ||
| No, I love NFTs. | ||
| Oh, OK. | ||
| I was about to say. | ||
| But you can't copy it. | ||
| Full of nonsense. | ||
| Non-fungible. | ||
| Alright, let's see, we'll just do, uh, we'll get a couple more in here because we're getting to the bottom. | ||
| Thomas Conservative says, Well, I'll respond to that right away, just saying, just get a receipt for your donut. | ||
| an alibi for your location can sometimes be useful if cops come a-knockin'. | ||
| Well, I'll respond to that right away just saying, just get a receipt for your donut. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| There you go, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I use my credit card, you know, 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. | ||
| Yeah, I like that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| If you want an option to download an app, although we silo it and all that, we're not going to ban you from using Facebook. | ||
| You're welcome to, although I discourage it, and you'll get a warning when you download it. | ||
| And we silo it, so it is more secure than using another phone. | ||
| But what you do if you're scrolling on Facebook, Facebook will see that if you're using that app. | ||
| But they won't see or be able to do anything on the rest of your phone, like listen or anything. | ||
| Good. | ||
| All right, let's see. | ||
| 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 Louie. | ||
| Louie. | ||
| Sad, sad to hear it, buddy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry. | |
| Rip Louie. | ||
| I had a cat. | ||
| That was my favorite pet. | ||
| 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 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, 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 Ian. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But 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 1% 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. | ||
| You know, 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 you said we shouldn't talk about should or shouldn't. | ||
| No, 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 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. | ||
| No, I think they did. | ||
| I think streaming services have solved the problem. | ||
| Nah, you make like .001 cent every time someone listens to it. | ||
| It's not really a solution. | ||
| Spotify makes way more money on those artists. | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| It's better than free, I guess. | ||
| You're adapting to an existing market. | ||
| I would like to see the user dictate the sale amount. | ||
| I would like to see people be like, Spotify, you're going to pay me if you want to. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| People want to get their art seen and heard too. | ||
| But 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, what is, what is that? | ||
| Like, if you make a hundred million copies for free, then what are those copies really worth? | ||
| A hundred millionth of what the original was worth? | ||
| I mean, if they're free, they're free. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 a hundred trillion copies of it at the cost of next to nothing. | ||
| So are the value of those copies also 100 trillionth of the, yeah, 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 gotta 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 have 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'd click it and it would be Metallica or something, and I'd be like, this is dumb! | ||
| Or, you know what 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. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Anyway, my friends, it's been a blast of a Friday night. | ||
| Thanks so much for hanging out. | ||
| And for all the superchats 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 up 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 D&D show is going to be happening. | ||
| We're having some D&D people come out, not this weekend, but the next weekend. | ||
| And then we're going to have a show, which is like D&D 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 would 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, uh, 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 freedomphone.com. | ||
| People keep saying Ian is stealing our corn. | ||
| Dude, Eric, thank you so much for coming, man. | ||
| 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 the plan. | ||
| And thank you so much for just having me on, Ian and Tim. | ||
| You guys can follow me, iancrossland.net. | ||
| I love corn. | ||
| You know what's really funny? | ||
| The super chats are people saying Ian's wrong. | ||
| That's what people are paying. | ||
| And then in the chat, which is free, everyone's saying Ian's right. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| Reality is changing. | ||
| 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 castcastle. | ||
| We're going to have an episode of the vlog up tomorrow at nine. | ||
| 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 more, the crazier things get. | ||
| And then you'll also see some of the behind the scenes stuff when like the guests arrive and it'll be, it'll be fun and silly. | ||
| So again, it's youtube.com slash castcastle at 9am tomorrow morning. | ||
| Thanks for hanging out. | ||
| And Ian was wrong. | ||
| We'll see you all next time. |
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