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March 4, 2022 - Viva & Barnes
44:04
Livestream with GiveSendGo CEO - Viva Frei Live!
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Time Text
Streams for the next little while.
How is everyone doing?
How's the audio?
How is the backdrop?
That's my mother-in-law's rose mailing right over there, that duck with her beautiful artwork on it.
Loud?
Sorry, hold on.
Let's go to the mic.
Well, now I'm sweating because I don't know how to adjust the mic for myself.
I'll keep the mic away from my...
Is it better like this?
My apologies, people.
Okay, let me know.
Sound is bad.
Audio is a bit off.
Hold on one second.
Let me just go make sure that my mic is good.
Settings.
Audio.
Now we've got the mic on.
USB.
UMC.
No.
And I'll put the mic.
Oh, well, the mic volume is quite high.
Okay, good.
And I see our guest is in the background.
So let me know if this is better.
Audio is peaking.
Am I plugged into the Cloudlifter?
Hold on.
Maybe if I do this.
Is it better now?
I'm going to tinker with buttons and I have no idea what I'm doing.
The ingot is here.
Okay, good.
No audio sounds like it has vibration.
Let me just take two seconds to see if I can figure this out.
I got that Behringer thing.
Power.
Gain.
So maybe I'll...
The gain.
Let's do this.
This.
All right.
How's this?
Is this better, people?
I apologize.
You're good now.
Okay.
I'll keep the mic away from my face.
So this is another one which is going to be very interesting.
Co-founder of Give, Send, Go, which has been not only in the news lately, they were asked to speak before Parliament on...
I don't even want to get wrong what they were asked to speak on because it was preposterous.
I was going to start this with the clip of...
You know what?
It might be worth sharing just for a second.
I'm going to go risky here and go to my actual Twitter feed.
You have to hear the soundbite that occurred yesterday when the co-founder, Jacob Wells, was asked to speak to the MPs about hate and extremism.
I mean, you slap these idiotic labels on anything.
Here we go.
Let's bring this up.
Let's bring this up here.
Okay.
I'm going to share.
Bear with me, people.
And Jacob is in the back screen.
I'm going to play this, give the standard disclaimers, and then we're going to go live.
Share screen.
Chrome tab.
Pam Damoff.
Share.
Am I seeing it?
Okay, there.
It's good.
Hold on, people.
And then I'll see if I...
Oh, you know what?
I won't make the same mistake I made last time.
I'm going to mute myself.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I have extreme concerns though with the comments that you were making to my colleague about Proud Boys.
We listed them as a terrorist entity in 2019.
The United States has not done that.
You continue to fundraise for them.
You continue to fundraise for groups that promote Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Nazi sympathizers, white supremacists.
I'm just wondering how you can justify giving people like that That's a great question.
If we started mandating litmus tests for how good people ought to be in order to use public services, we would be in a very, very difficult situation.
Would you allow a fundraiser on your platform from the Ku Klux Klan?
If the fundraising activity was legal and it was legally authorized to have happen, we would allow people to fundraise for things that are legal.
So the Proud Boys will still be able to fundraise on your platform and you would not have a problem fundraising for the Ku Klux Klan, is what you're saying.
Just be clear, if individuals...
Individuals or organizations that are legally authorized to receive payments and go through the KYC checks and the AML checks that everyone is required to and have been done through our platform.
And if they pass all of those measures and what they're fundraising for is legal, then yes, we will allow them to fundraise.
And in the same moment...
We will share our hope with them.
Do you not have anti-hate provisions in your terms of service?
Because the groups that we're talking about are hate groups.
Groups that promote Islamophobia, groups like the Proud Boys, groups like the Ku Klux Klan have no place in our society.
I'm sorry.
All this mumbo-jumbo about legal...
Do you not have anti-hate provisions in your terms of service?
What we have, you can read our terms of service.
They're very clear.
They're right there on our website.
We have plenty of terms in there that guide how we operate as a business, as an organization.
We believe completely to the core of our being that the danger of the suppression of speech is much more dangerous than the speech itself.
And this has been attested through history.
Sorry, my time is up, but I'm just going to say my brand of Christianity is very different from yours if it includes hate.
Thank you very much.
Nothing better than getting lectured on Christianity.
Like, no true Christian, no true Scotsman.
This person, Pam Damoff, after the dog is going to knock over the lighting.
Okay, that was close.
After asking a loaded question and not getting the answer that she wanted.
She then goes to lecture Jacob Wells on Christianity.
And we're going to get to why that's so darn dirty in a few seconds.
And when someone throws in the word sir in their question, and just refusing to understand the actual answer.
And just this is how she explained it on Twitter.
Give, send, go.
Wants the KKK and Proud Boys to know they will host their fundraisers as long as it is legal.
Hate has no place in Canada.
She seems to be filled with a lot of hate herself, but set that aside.
GSC, give, say, and go, actively avoided questions about abiding by Canadian law.
No, he didn't.
No, he didn't.
He specifically said, if it's legal, we'll host it.
But whatever.
Companies like GSG need to be regulated ASAP.
Okay.
All right.
Now I'm going to stop sharing.
That's the ultimate state or the absolute state of Canadian politics.
Hate.
And the underlying idea to the questioning here being, it's not enough to not allow fundraising for illegal activities.
You can't allow fundraising for incidental, unrelated activities if the people behind them are alleged to be members of Proud Boys or KKK.
So, someone from the KKK needs to crowdsource for a heart transplant?
That's a KKK activity, according to Pam Damoff, or the phrasing of her question.
Not listening to the answer, but...
Oh, man.
What...
She is branding people in a hateful...
No question.
All right.
So before I bring Jacob in, standard disclaimers.
Thank you all for the super chats.
I will not get to all of them.
And if I don't bring them up and you're going to feel exploited, do not give the super chat.
I'd rather you not feel exploited than get a super chat and have someone walk away feeling...
YouTube takes 30% of Super Chats, and if you don't like that, I can understand that.
We are simultaneously streaming on Rumble, so I'll go check the Rumble rants that they have there.
Rumble takes 20% of those.
Better for the creator.
You might feel better supporting a platform like Rumble.
If you want to support us, you can follow us at vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
There's a ton of stuff that is not behind a paywall, but there is a lot of exclusive stuff for people who are supporting members.
Okay, two questions.
What are you doing?
What are you doing about the hacker?
And what have you done to prevent future data briefs?
There's no question we're going to get that.
I'm going to take a picture and we're going to ask that question.
I see Jacob laughing in the background.
All right.
I'm going to bring it in.
Let me just back this up.
Anti-hate provisions.
Anti-hate provisions.
By the way, when they decide that honk honk is a hate term, then you understand what they were actually getting at all along by trying to brand speech hate speech.
It starts with flags.
With objective symbols.
And then it goes to Honk Honk, which according to some Canadian MPs, literally means Heil, the foreboding name.
No legal advice, no medical advice.
You all know the rules.
Okay.
Okay.
Talix.
BLM and Antifa are hate groups.
She's fascist.
And I believe our government actually gave directly to BLM.
Okay.
So with that said, people, we've got Jacob Wells here, co-founder with his sister.
Of Give, Send, Go, which has been at the spotlight, limelight, you know, crosshairs, bullseye of politics and everything, you know, related to the news.
So we're going to talk about a lot of stuff.
So she's like, you will allow hate.
And he's like, you're saying hate speech is legal.
Fair point, because in Canada, hate speech is actually illegal.
So to the extent that Jacob...
Okay, I'm speaking for him.
Full disclaimer.
I met Jacob Wells at the Project Veritas event.
A fortuitous meeting because I've gotten to know him personally.
I think he's a fantastic person.
I've had discussions with him.
I won't get into the tenor of those discussions.
But when Give, Send, Go was stepping in here to fill the void that GoFundMe left, I had to make sure that I felt comfortable with Give, Send, Go as an entity myself.
And so I spoke with Jacob on the phone and clarified some of my own concerns.
So a lot of this is not going to be news to me.
This is not a sponsored ad.
This is not a sponsored stream.
And whether or not it's an endorsement, that's up to you.
I feel comfortable with Give, Send, Go as a platform, but this is not disguised or overt sponsorship.
This is Jacob now who's going to answer some questions for the crowd and tell his story.
And with that said, I'm bringing him in.
Jacob, how goes the battle?
It is a battle.
No doubt about it.
Yeah.
Look, I want to get into some of the history, but for those in the chat tonight who may not know who you are, elevator pitch, although I think everybody knows, then I've got my brief history of time questions, and then we're going to get into the current events.
Sure.
So, Jacob Wells, I'm number five of 12 children, grew up in New England, and had a stint in the Navy where I was a cryptologist after that time.
Went to Bible College previously before and then after some and then started real estate landscaping.
Saw an opportunity with a crowdfunding platform completely outside of my wheelhouse or anyone in my family's.
And we jumped into it because we said, man, there's something here.
And then over the years, it's just slowly grown and then really kicked off with Kyle Rittenhouse's fundraising campaign for his legal defense fund.
And now it's culminated into this moment in time that we're at right now.
In the chat, by the way, just for A for this layout and B for this layout, who says what when I bring up comments that...
Oh, what is that?
Sorry.
This is what it looks like.
A and B, let me know and I'll make a decision.
Okay, I don't think I knew that you were number five of 12 kids.
I did know...
Well, I know that you're religious.
I mean, the idea behind Give, Send, Go is a religious concept, but it's not a religious platform per se.
B, okay, good.
So here's the question, first of all.
Were you born religious?
Were you coming from a religious family with 12 people?
I can assume that your parents were quite religious.
Yeah, my parents definitely were.
Their parents weren't necessarily as much.
My grandmother on my mother's side was more so.
But yeah, my grandparents, my parents came to a relationship understanding who Jesus was in their early 20s or late in their teen years.
And they grew up really engaged in that.
Just being involved in local church.
My dad actually was a missionary for a short period over in Poland, kind of bringing Bibles behind the Iron Curtain back in the 80s and did some stuff around that.
We saw it engaged in our lives.
They taught us.
We saw God actively move in our family as we grew and Him provide.
It became real to us as we grew into adulthood ourselves.
I'm speaking personally for me.
It became real as I grew older and actually found out what that actually meant.
And it made sense of the world around me.
So definitely.
And that's really the basis a lot for the platform is that we recognize as Christians that money meets our material needs.
Like it'll help you buy a new house if yours is burnt down or pay for medical bills if you have a situation.
But it doesn't meet the immaterial world.
That still accompany those material needs.
No amount of money that you give to somebody that's son has died in a tragic car accident is going to fix that pain.
But we believe that Jesus actually gives hope for those situations because of who he is and the life that he brings.
And so that's what we want to share with people as they use our platform because we see more than just money in this world.
And I want to say, well, I'll say one thing.
When we talked on the phone, You're the type of person, or your perspective is the type of perspective that kind of even makes me want to think about getting religious, but I know I'm not down with the religious side of religion, but rather the ethical and moral side that you, that I was convinced, thoroughly convinced of, that you believed in and lived by when we spoke.
People are pissed about the data breach, but we'll get there.
As if give, send, go is the first time that there's been a data breach, but we'll get there.
So young, five of 12 kids, you said New Hampshire or Connecticut?
Yeah, Southern New Hampshire.
I was actually born in Massachusetts, but grew up in Southern New Hampshire.
It's actually Salem, a small little town.
And there were six boys and almost went back and forth, boy, girl, boy, girl.
And yeah, so that was the upbringing.
12 kids, 18 years.
So single births, no twins.
That's my question.
To get into the TMI, all natural births, no C-sections.
Yeah.
The youngest...
The youngest was a C-section just because of some complications at the last moment.
But, yeah, they're all single births, same parents, and individual, no twins.
And are your parents still alive now?
They are, yes.
They're still there.
Fantastic.
And still alive, still married?
They're actually not still married, no.
They're not still married, actually.
When did they?
It is a question.
People are like, oh my gosh, 12 kids.
Well, imagine the kids on a marriage.
If you have any kids, you know that kids can be as stressed.
In my teenage years, my parents went through a difficult patch and difficult for the whole family after the 12th child was born.
Eventually, my dad went on to marry someone else and now lives in Florida.
In New Hampshire.
And continues to be a champion.
And my parents' relationship has mended in the sense of they walk out forgiveness towards each other.
Completely social.
They've had real sit-downs about the whole breakdown of the marriage and how to get past it.
As I think my dad said, you can't unscramble eggs once it's been scrambled.
You kind of just have to deal with the consequences of it.
They've really navigated working that up, which has been a testimony for us and forgiveness, but yeah.
And if I may ask the question about how long after the 12th kid did they get divorced?
Did they wait through what was a tumultuous marriage until the kids were old enough to get divorced, or was it sort of still when some of the kids were young?
Yeah, so my youngest sister was four years old at the time, four years old.
And I was in my mid-teens during that time.
And there was a breakup period of separation.
And then eventually, a year or so after that, or two, it ended in divorce.
Yeah.
All right.
Okay.
Well, that's interesting.
I didn't know that.
We didn't get this far into the discussion.
No, we didn't.
And so how long has Give, Send, Go been in existence as an entity itself?
It was 2013.
I'd come up from Virginia.
I'd been stationed down there, gotten out, was still living down there, came up to visit family for Thanksgiving.
I was sitting down with a bunch of siblings, and one of my friends was like, man, I have a friend that started a crowdfunding company to compete with GoFundMe.
And I had always been looking for what was it going to be?
What was my purpose?
I always felt like an entrepreneurial bug, all of these different things.
And so this was like, oh my gosh.
This is what I need to do with my life.
This is it.
And it just felt like this was the moment that God had been planning me, positioning me for.
And so I jumped into it.
And my sisters, two sisters that were part of this original group, we came together.
We each had our own little giftings and talents.
And we started within the first year.
We laid a foundation.
We had the platform being built by a development team.
And then one of my sisters early on, right around the time that we soft launched, she just couldn't.
Couldn't manage continuing on in the company because of life and circumstances.
Starting a new company, a startup, requires all your time.
It's like a baby.
So she stepped out of the company, and then my sister Heather and I, from that time, the end of 2015 is when we launched.
And from that time, we just have walked it out to me.
And I mean, I guess you've seen exponential growth over the last two years?
Yeah, I mean, we were growing at a...
Really, company from the very beginning, like from 2016, it was about 100% annual growth, which for companies, good annual growth, 100%, 80%, 90%.
But when you bootstrapped it, because we didn't take any outside investors, we weren't doing the typical startup route.
We didn't have any background in startup.
Neither of us at the time even had degrees.
We'd done some schooling.
We didn't have degrees.
So we were just walking this thing out.
And by 2019, you know, both of our spouses, my sister and my spouse, man, they were like chomping at the bit for us to throw in the towel and be done.
And it's just not moving fast.
But we have great people who bring wisdom into our service.
It's not just us running the race by ourselves.
And those people said, man, this is in front of you.
This is where you're supposed to be.
Keep up.
And we continued.
And then it was right at that moment.
Kyle's campaign came in and really pushed us into a mud light.
And people started to become aware of who we were and that we were championing freedom, not just ideology of left and right politics, but just freedom in general.
And we had seen the outcome of some of that play.
There's a backstory to the whole Kyle situation that most people don't know.
And we could talk about it or not, but that's just another story.
Jacob, are you able to move towards a window?
I'm getting some comments that you're a little choppy, but it's only you and not me.
So maybe if you're able to move towards the modem or a window or something.
Either way, we'll make do with what we have.
Your video is a little choppy with the MP as well.
Yeah, I was very frustrated by that.
That was very frustrating.
Because, I mean, it hampers expression.
It sort of freezes you in your tracks, literally and metaphorically.
Okay, get into the backdrop.
I don't think I know of the backstory behind Rittenhouse above and beyond, you know, GoFundMe doing what it did then, but much less.
The Rittenhouse, when they said, look, we're not going to allow fundraising for the accused of a violent crime, everyone had come to the conclusion already.
I could understand that.
I say understand in the sense that it was accusations of the most violent crime imaginable.
And they say, okay, it's an easy one to nitpick.
What they did with the truckers was over the top and really broke a lot of people in the middle ground's confidence.
But what's the backstory that we might not know about Gibson going Rittenhouse?
Well, it wasn't necessarily Rittenhouse in particular.
This is kind of what steeled us up.
The position that we've taken is there was, in the news, it was the big story of that moment, and it was on our platform, and we were getting lots of hate because of it.
And as it was continuing on for a couple of days, and we were kind of balancing out, okay, how do we navigate this?
This is way better than we've ever dealt with.
What are we doing?
And in that moment, there was another campaign that started several days after, probably a week and a half, 10 days after Kyle, for a young...
Say young.
He's, I think, 40 years old at the time.
Jake Gardner.
You may have heard of his story.
So George Floyd and the whole situation that surrounded that and the unrest that fell out throughout cities across the country.
Jake Gardner was a military veteran.
He owned a bar in Omaha, Nebraska.
And you can read about the story online.
It was a big story.
And his boss, as the Antifa BLM, People, rioters, came down the street, breaking, bashing.
They bashed in one of his windows.
He pulled the fire alarm, got outside.
His dad got in an altercation with some of the members there.
And he stepped out.
And he ended up getting in an altercation himself with some of these just rioters, people that were there to cause havoc.
He shows that he's armed.
He's got a gun.
He's walking away.
And they attack him.
They jump him.
They take him to the ground.
It's all on video, you know, going after him.
And he ultimately shoots somebody that's on his back, James Sherlock.
So it all fit the narrative.
There's a guy that's jumping on him.
He shoots him.
He happens to be white.
The guy jumping on him happened to be black.
So it was the narrative that the media wanted to run with.
The police came in.
They looked at all the videos and said, there's nothing here to prosecute.
Like, this is clearly self-defense.
He was walking away.
He was telling them to leave, to move on.
They kept attacking him.
But because of public pressure, a grand jury was forced to be convened.
And he went into hiding, Jake Gardner.
And over the next three months, he was deplatformed from everything.
Had no crowdfunding platforms, had no Facebook.
Everything shut him off.
Kyle Rittenhouse's situation happens.
He sees that our platform...
Allowed Kyle.
And he's like, oh my gosh, here's a platform that might allow me to have.
And so he sets up a campaign.
Literally, all of a sudden, the moment he sets up a campaign, a couple people start donating.
He writes into his campaign on gifts and go, his personal cell phone number, all of this personal detail, which we say, don't tell people.
You never know who's going to be looking at this stuff.
He was desperate for connection.
The next day after he set up his campaign, and obviously, Kyle Rittenhouse was the news of the day.
Nobody was talking about his story anymore because news cycles move on.
His grand jury had convened and came back and said, we're going to take this to trial.
There's enough evidence.
And so he kills himself.
He commits suicide, puts a gun in his mouth and blows his head off.
And this was, I know for a fact, this was because of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and these platforms.
We don't want to give anyone a voice that we don't agree with on the moment.
We don't want people to have a jury.
We want trial by public.
We want trial by mob.
And they platform from everybody.
I know today that if he knew about Gibson Go three months earlier and had been able to fundraise, that he would probably still be alive today.
His team said the same thing.
All of the prayers, the messages, the support, seeing the community rally around.
It gives you strength to walk through the difficulty of your situation.
And he would have found the same thing.
Big Tech killed him.
And so it was at that moment, and we said, you know, he's a military veteran, honorably discharged, served our country.
We're never going to let this happen again.
We're going to stand in the gap for everybody that...
That big tech decides to cancel.
And so that was all in the background of Kyle's campaign happening.
And it was super tragic.
It was so sad.
And not because we even had all the facts.
It just never was able to even get to that point because of what big tech decides to do in these situations.
So we're like, never again.
And I remember that story.
I didn't remember the names.
It's atrocious.
The government has realized that they don't need to have another Kent University type situation.
They can just do it digitally.
They can shut people off, cut them off.
If they do it to themselves, cynically, it's not on the government's hands, but it is.
That's phenomenal.
Phenomenally interesting development of the company.
We're going to get into the data breach, everybody.
I'm reading in the chat.
You can be upset about that.
Rightfully so.
And we'll get into how it happened, what they're doing about it.
But the growth of the company in terms of dealing with demand, I mean, with Rittenhouse, I assume year-over-year growth of 100% is one thing.
With Rittenhouse, I imagine it was exponential?
Yeah, I mean, I think we saw almost like 1,000% just increase over those next couple months.
Obviously, we continued to stay in the news because people saw that we weren't just taking campaigns down willy-nilly.
So when Breonna Taylor, that incident happened, and all of the police officers were deplatformed from GoFundMe, like, well, they deserve an opportunity for their legal defense.
Like, why are we prejudging all of this stuff?
And so we allowed them.
And then, you know, it was one thing.
It was a very quick acceleration.
And up until that point with Kyle Rittenhouse, it was literally just Heather, my sister Heather, and I. And people as we needed them, contractors, developer, a full-time developer, but that was it.
It was one full-time developer working on the site.
So it was very small.
So it was after that Kyle Rittenhouse where we really started to bring more people and get people involved in more customer service other than Heather and I. We put all the hats on for those first several years as we just reinvested everything into the growth of the company and marketing.
Someone had asked, I know the answer, how does Give, Send, Go make its money?
Yeah, we allow generous givers to give generously, is the way that we can say it.
But originally, crowdfunding platforms, when they first came out, it was like a platform fee.
GoFundMe to Kickstarter is like 5% to 10% of whatever you raised, they would take as their platform fee.
And then there was a payment processing fee on top of that.
We said...
Early on, really within like the first two months, first couple months, we just undercut GoFundMe and it's like, oh, we'll do 4%.
And the more you raise, the less we'll charge.
And we felt challenged by, we're calling people to step out of their comfort zone and raise funds to do something incredible and believe that they could be there, believe that God was going to provide for them.
So maybe we should be doing the same thing.
Let's just ask people to be generous with us and not mandate anything.
And so, and also...
People raising money typically need the funds that they're raising.
So it's like, it doesn't make sense to take money from the people that need it.
Let's ask the givers that typically have the money to give a little bit more.
So it made sense in so many different levels.
And that's how we decided.
We took that step of faith.
And over time, it proved that it was a good business model.
GoFundMe started something similar.
I guess the oversimplified answer is now you no longer charge any fixed fee.
It's the tips from the donors or the tips from the campaigns.
So I noticed that GoFundMe, I'll never use them again, full stop.
But I did notice that when I went through them, they asked for a tip.
And I didn't like tipping GoFundMe, period, and I didn't.
When I went through Give, Send, Go, there was a tip.
So it's bottom line.
It tips from the donors, and then GoFundMe started copying you.
Yeah, I mean, there was another company that they acquired that had a similar model.
So, you know, they probably just say that they acquired that through the purchase of another company.
But we were doing it back in 2016, really early, or 2015, actually, really early on.
I love that fish.
That's a beautiful striped bass.
It's fantastic.
Not to get into too much of it, but it's been more profitable for the company relying on the generosity of the donors than saying, just give us a 4% and no tipping option.
Yes.
It's definitely been something that's been a good business decision and something that's worked out.
Again, because Heather and I We bootstrapped this.
We didn't have a lot of money to propel forward at the beginning stages.
So for the first four or five years, or even six from 2014, we just didn't even, we weren't making anything.
So, you know, our spouses were on us hard.
But we believed in the vision.
Yeah, we believed in the vision of what it was.
We said, man, I think there's something here.
And so did the people around us.
And so, you know, we just walked it out.
So Rittenhouse happens.
I mean, in the context of Rittenhouse, how much pressure did you as a company, you as an individual, feel to shut down the campaign?
To shut them down and say, no, we're not going to take this hot potato either.
I mean, what was the pressure that you were feeling?
And did you have the temptation to say, people will understand, forget Rittenhouse and let him fend for himself.
We'll move on to the next campaign.
Yeah, so we're just not built like that as people with how we think.
I mean, we're very solid in our foundation, and we felt to the core of who we were that, no, people deserve...
Our Constitution actually, I think this is like the one thing that it says twice in two amendments to the Constitution is due process.
It's like important, and they wrote about it twice.
And this idea of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law, like, if we don't have those things, man, we're screwed.
So how can we not defend this?
I will say there was a tremendous amount of pressure, but it only kept us in the fight even more.
And what we saw was a lot of...
I have to laugh at some of these chats.
If they get distracting, I won't bring them up.
I was like, wait a second.
I don't have any hair.
And everybody knows the joke.
When I met Jacob at the Project Veritas event, Jacob's told me, we're like, I'm a short, stocky, big fro dude.
Jacob is slender, taller, and different with the follicles.
It was a good joke at the time.
What we saw was massive amounts of emails coming in.
Take it down.
Every negative name under the sun.
...of negativity, cussing us.
You guys aren't Christians.
You guys aren't this.
You guys aren't that.
And you're going to hell and everything.
But our policy was we want to respond to everybody because we like communicating with people.
We love people, even people that disagree with us.
And so we would respond and then find that most of these just went undelivered.
And so we're like, 90% of this hate mail is fake mail.
It's probably a couple of college kids getting paid somewhere to just bombard us with crap to make it seem like that there's an army of people out there that really aren't even there.
And so we're like, you know what?
Forget this.
Like, we're just going to delete this garbage, and then we'll respond to people that actually have, you know, want to have a discussion.
Because some people were curious, like, why?
Even Christians, some Christians, why are you taking this?
Like, what are you doing?
This guy, and...
And so we would try to engage when we could.
This is a question.
Who do you allow to fundraise?
Anyone.
Even people with unacceptable views.
We are all equal.
If Stalin rose from the dead and wanted to fundraise a new Porsche, we would allow it.
We'll get into that question because what she did not understand was they want to cancel the person, not the illegal activity.
But I think they understand that.
Okay, so you do not heed to the person.
In terms of growing pains with Rittenhouse, this will lead us into the data breach because those are growing pains.
What were the growing pains and how did you accommodate to them?
And what are you doing now to sort of meet...
I imagine your learning curve with the truckers was exponentially heavier traffic than with Kyle Rittenhouse?
Yeah.
Oh, no, completely.
I mean, we couldn't...
With Kyle...
I mean, it overwhelmed our servers and everything, our infrastructure at the time.
Now we've had much stronger infrastructure, and the convoy overwhelmed it even more so.
I mean, it was a tremendous amount of people trying to get on the platform for the trucker campaign.
But the pressures of the growing pains, it's like, it's find people and bring them on and train them about who we are and how we operate.
You know, it's a great team that we have, and we're growing as fast as we can.
We've got 25 or so people now.
We're hiring some incredible development, DevOps security team members to really up the game, like some of the best of the best.
And that's what, fortunately, some bigger campaigns have allowed us to actually...
The movement, though it's been a year and a half, two years since Kyle...
Let's see, Kyle, it's been a year and a half since Kyle Rittenhouse.
It happened very fast because it was one big thing after the next.
And so we're always jumping from these big things, trying to grow at the same time and like dealing with the pressure of all of that and then wanting to have good people and saying, is this going to last?
We have a big campaign, but is it going to last?
So you don't want to hire a bunch of people and then be like, listen, we can't afford to keep you because we just hired too quickly.
So it was all like measured, trying to do it.
We want to be the best of the best in what we do.
I don't know if this is a sarcasm or not.
Stop the hate.
Stop Viva Fry.
If anybody has ever found anything hateful on my channel, that might be the most hateful comment we've had in a little while.
I think it's tongue-in-cheek.
I'll take it as a joke.
Okay, let's get the elephant out of the room.
The data breach, before we get into all of this, we, okay, we'll back up to get to the convoy stuff, but let's just, let's address this because I don't want to forget.
How did it happen?
Do you know who did it?
There was that individual who made a video on TikTok, which my gut feeling says I don't actually believe that individual did what they're purportedly admitting to have done in their video.
That's my belief.
Do you have any knowledge that you can share publicly as to who did it?
But how did it happen?
Why didn't you send out an email to let people know, you know, what did you learn from it and what are you going to change going forward?
Yeah, oh man, so many parts, so many things.
So as of right now, there's an ongoing investigation.
There's a process to all of this.
Some of it...
It revolves around how our platform's insured and what's allowed through our policy as far as bringing on quickly to get things going.
Some of it is, you know, bringing on forensic teams that do this professionally to start tracing this out and figuring out, and then security teams to say, okay, where are the vulnerabilities?
How can we fix it?
So we don't have any concrete evidence that this guy, Aubrey.
Did it outside of him admitting on multiple occasions that he did do it, not just in that video, but also to people personally.
So that's all that we have attestation of people.
Listen, I know him personally, and he told me that he did that in a conversation.
So those all lend themselves to that.
Their ongoing legal investigation through investigative sources, The police and the FBI creating investigations into this.
How much we can trust that they're going to follow it all the way out.
I mean, our hope is that they do take it to the nth degree.
Because this was an attack on us just as much as it was an attack on our users.
To give a little context here, we had hired a security audit company for the previous year to audit our company.
Frequently, quarterly, if not monthly.
Oftentimes we're coming back to them and saying, we think that there might be an issue here.
Can you audit us on these different things?
And they were constantly giving us feedback on things that we needed to improve.
We weren't just ignoring this.
Even one of our lead DevOps guys, he's very secure in the things that he does.
The things that we do in the technology as we roll out new features on the platform and all of that, everything that we did was we attempted to do it through a lens of security.
And we had outside parties auditing regularly to also enhance it.
So we're involved in this.
We think we're higher level actors.
They weren't just mom and pop Joe hacker at the computer.
Sophisticated hackers that gained insight into our platform.
And we hate that it happened.
It's not something that we take lightly.
And we've since hired, like I said, some of the top people in the field.
Literally, we had some amazing people reach out to us and say, man, this is horrible.
I am one of the specialists.
We do all the background checks to make sure that they are.
And they're coming in and putting systems and...
Programs in place to help prevent this from ever happening again.
That being said, technology is a moving target with security.
There's new technology always coming out that you're rolling out and blending.
And vulnerabilities, because humans are vulnerable, most of our stuff is vulnerable to some extent.
And so, you know, the best of the best, Big Ben, Twitter, Experian, you know, if you go through the companies that have data breaches over the past couple of years, it's massive.
It's like they happen every day to companies.
This is what some people make a living on doing.
This seemed like a very coordinated attack from, in our minds, it coincided with what the Canadian government wanted to happen at a very particular time.
And we said, wow, man, this looks very suspicious.
Ultimately, we hope that the forensic team will be able to unveil some evidence of that.
Knowing the sophistication of technology and how you can even hide your traces through bouncing your signal and VPN and other things that people use, it's going to be difficult.
We're doing everything that we can.
We literally have hired on the cream of the crop from...
All different perspectives to be able to take a look at this.
So two things.
People in the chat might have noticed I had to put chat on 15-second slow-mo because I can't keep up, and there's a little too much spamming, so don't spam people.
The hacker admitted to working for the government in the past.
Here's my deal.
I'm eternally skeptical.
Even seeing someone admit to something, someone cannot admit to something that they didn't do.
I'm skeptical.
The body language, the opportunity, the looking for attention.
I'm skeptical.
Maybe the dude did do it.
And if he did, he might be much smarter than...
Not might be.
Probably is much smarter than me, but using his intelligence for bad purposes.
Unless, you know, it was to teach, give, send, go a lesson.
Get more strict on your security.
But the way to do that is to do the breach and then not share the info because...
Show them they have a weakness.
Make yourself value-added like that guy Abernathy from Catch Me If You Can.
So he admitted to it, I'm still skeptical.
But bottom line, there is a pending, there's a criminal investigation into this, and you guys are not letting it go anytime soon?
No, no, no, no, no.
We want to see this thing hounding the investigators to push this.
I mean, because this didn't just affect people, obviously, here in the U.S. It affected people in Canada, it affected people in Australia.
It affected people around the world that gave to this.
And it's completely unacceptable what happened.
The reality of where we find ourselves is, because of the stances that we've taken, we have a massive target on our back.
It just is what it is.
And we've really begun to realize that knowing that we've taken the stances that we had, which we just thought were freedom-oriented, it's like, okay, who cares that we allow freedom?
It's very evident that some people care very dearly about not allowing freedom to happen.
And they are doing everything that they can to come against it.
And so we need to be the best of the best.
And thankfully...
Because of the growth that we've seen, and obviously in a very quick amount of time, we've tried to ramp up.
We brought on all sorts of more teams.
This is really going to open up the door for us to have the best of the best people that are looking at our security, that are working on our security, that are building out the best systems in place.
And again, we want to say we don't want to ever see anything like this happen again.
I'm going to read this.
I don't actually know what it means.
Was there an open S3 bucket?
A rumor I heard also previously disclosed vulnerabilities that were ignored by your team.
Why not just refund everyone like GoFundMe?
RO is former CTO from GetItLocal.
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