Hello everyone and welcome back to the Rounding the Earth
podcast. Rounding the Earth is a multimedia education project based on the popular newsletter
series published on Substack written by applied statistician and educator Matthew Crawford.
Topics of discussion range from critical analysis of conventional wisdom to Bitcoin and everything
in between, in particular the ongoing plandemonium and the many offshoot topics that come about
such as the one we're going to get into today. Our goal is a careful examination of important
topics and perspectives shaping the world that too few people talk about. Subscribe
to Rounding the Earth on Locals, Substack and Rumble to join a burgeoning research community
and to help us unflatten the earth. My name is Liam Sturgis. I recently fell under a lawnmower.
I'm a musician, music producer and writer slash editor coming at you live from Vancouver,
British Columbia, Canada, and I will be your host for today. Now please allow me to introduce
the author of Rounding the Earth and my co-host for the podcast in the blue corner, Mr. Matthew
Crawford. Hello sir. How are things? Did I say red corner or blue corner? I forget which
one I said. I don't know. I'm in our corner. And that's what really matters. Well, let's
not waste any time. We've got another guy in our corner today that I'm really excited
to introduce to people. Somebody we've been working with. He's in the Canadian corner.
He is in the Canadian corner, which means we're in the hat area. Whatever corner that
is we're in America's hat area. But let me please introduce someone we've been working
with through Operation Uplift behind the scenes for a long time now and more directly in recent
weeks and months. Please allow us to introduce Gabriel. How are you, Gabe? Hey guys, it's
a pleasure to be here. And we all call Gabriel Gabe. So that's a familiarity thing for anybody
watching. We've known Gabe for a while now. Yeah. And as part of my introduction, I may
as well jump straight into my slides if I just share here. Yeah. Do you want to give
the audience a quick one or two sentence summary? What are we talking about today and why are
we talking about it? So today we are talking about big tech and my approach to technological
solutions moving forward. Let me know if you can see my screen share. We've got it looks
like there's a yeah. Perfect. All right. So add it to the screen. Yes, absolutely. Please.
Boom. There we go. So I'm Gabriel. I'm a Canadian, as has been mentioned, born and raised in
Ontario, Canada, and I'm passionate about free software. Now free software isn't just
software that's free as in free in price, but free as in freedom. And I also come from
a tech support background. I worked in at Canadian Blood Services in a tech support
capacity before the Plandemonium ejected me from this aspect of my life. I maintain my
own personal website at Gabe dot rocks. But more importantly, the Libra Solutions Network
is the project I start about talking about what we can do when it comes to technology.
This slide from the Snowden leaks is actually something I come back to all the time. It
in a nutshell explains exactly what's wrong with big tech and how we've been using it.
For people who are listening, I'll just describe that it is a graphic. Can I stop you for a
second? We're seeing both your slide preparation and the slide itself. And I want to see the
slide bigger. But also, I think that's not what you intended. Yeah, I just noticed that's
what this was as well. It was oddly rectangular. Oh, well, then you're getting a sneak preview
of the slides. That is very of course a big part of tech is troubleshooting. So entire
screen. Ah, there's the problem. Okay. Now you can re add it. Yeah, there we go there.
Now you can actually see the picture. That picture, as far as I'm concerned, is 90% of
our technological problems. We have all been bribed by big tech offering us basically free
storage and bandwidth to use their services, whether it's Gmail, whether it's Facebook
and now tick tock that they're even thinking about banning, though that bill has other
issues to discuss on its own. The main thing I want to point out about this graphic is
it has this little note SSL added and removed here. Smiley face. This is because although
big tech has spent a lot of time making sure your communications and data are private.
Once it gets to them, the moment it hits their door, you have no more guarantees. The other
side of the problem is what your audience and people generally are more familiar with.
Big tech platforms will sensor people locking them out of the discussion, and then they'll
use their advanced tools to shape the one conversation they want people to have. And
in any aspect of the plan, pneumonia, or even some of the broader social issues, this censorship
and centralization of discussion itself will create its own kind of problems. So Richard
Stallman is somebody who's actually seen the coming decades away. He advocates for what's
called the free software movement. And he wrote the core utils for the new operating
system. Free software involves the four freedoms, the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study
and change the software. This is what makes free software separate from proprietary software.
The answer here is open protocols, whether it's XMPP, matrix, IRC, NOSTER, or even IPFS.
There are tons of different ways where you just simply establish the rule set for how
people want to interact, and then they can use their own tools, their own environments,
their own preferred ways of interacting with what is effectively an open system. As an
example of an open system, I'm going to reference the Fediverse. On the most basic level, the
Fediverse just establishes that you are a actor, whether it's a person or a blog, and
you have an inbox that you receive messages at, and you have an outbox that you send messages
to, which is how others receive what you send. What makes this system really powerful is
that the activity pub specification is an open protocol. Many different platforms and
services actually use it. In this graphic, it shows WordPress, Mastodon, which is the
one you might have heard about, but there's also PureTube, Rightfullyly, and Funkwhale
for podcasts. I'm actually going to demonstrate this interoperability for you right now, as
this is a video I have where I demonstrate what is the Fediverse actually. And I'm going
to go back to my MISKI instance, which is kind of like a general social media platform.
And so I'm just going to write, hello, rounding the earth. And once it sends, I don't know
if it'll take a minute or just a second, but I'll just refresh this page. And the comment
here from my MISKI instance actually shows up in the comments here. Sorry about that.
I hope you didn't hear the audio, but there it is. So what's excellent about this is the
interoperability. Now, while this is something that's built into the Fediverse itself, it
is by no means unique to it. Fundamentally, any interoperable and public system will work
this way. Many people will describe the Fediverse as it's like email. You have multiple servers
that communicate with each other. And you'll have your own home base, and then your home
base talks to the other home bases. And this really does help with single points of failure.
Remember last weekend, Mastodon.social, the largest Fediverse instance, had its own DDoS
attack ongoing, but most of the network didn't exist because most of the network doesn't
just exist on one server. And so as a broader way of distributing not only the conversation,
but the actual technical infrastructure itself, it's a lot more resilient and robust.
Taking the walk. Now, fundamentally, we could all just sign up to Amazon Web Services and
create Fediverse profiles on their giant machines, but ideally it would be best to self-host.
Unihost, LibreServer, and both Start9's, embassy OS make that really easy. Those are all different
systems you can run that will just make installing most of these services one click as install
like you would on any other system. You can also do it through Docker, which is a containerized
system that does make getting started a lot quicker. And as well, I put the photo bash
there because bash is the Linux command terminal and you can still do it quote unquote by hand
if you like. There are some excellent guides on this online. Landshad.net maintains basically
whatever service you want to start. It has excellent instructions and it's not just limited
to the five limited there. As well, I also want to point out that this website, gofoss.net,
is actually quite excellent. It is probably the most comprehensive break free from the
cloud and retain your digital sovereignty website I have seen to date. And there are
a lot of people trying, so it's a high bar to meet.
Lastly, I also just want to discuss the three primary resources in cyberspace. And these
are what I call the limits to decentralization. Because far too many times people will just
look at a software, an app, an ecosystem, and just examine it on the software level.
To truly decentralize the technological landscape, we need to think in terms of computing power,
storage, and bandwidth. Who has it? Who controls it? And how are they all used together? Thank
you. And that's my presentation.
That's who you are. That's incredible. Wow. Yeah, that was a lot very fast. And some of
that is familiar. Some of it is brand new. But the concept is, I think, something as
you suggest, that specifically the running gear at the audience is starting to understand,
which is when we have a centralized system of connected things on the internet that are
still controlled by just a handful of companies, you wind up with situations where we're not
allowed on YouTube anymore. So that's awesome. Thank you for that quick rundown.
Before we hit different points, Gabe, can you keep up that slideshow? I know that I
will have questions and want to go back to certain points in the slides.
There we go. I've added it back.
In the wonderful Locals chat we've got going, we have our usual fantastic group of people
who have come over to... I don't think Locals is a decentralized platform in the way you're
discussing it. Maybe we can talk about that. But we do have people contributing to the
chat saying, this seems like it's over their head, but they'll try to keep up. I don't
think it needs to be over their head, right? I think this is actually a fairly straightforward
set of concepts. But if you were to take what you just said in that presentation and introduce
the notion, introduce the concept to somebody in a single sentence, what is the problem
you're trying to address with everything you just said?
My first goal really is on some level to educate, because I take a lot of this for granted and
I want to bring it down to a level where I don't get that response. That's very much
a work in progress. But my one simple answer would be, is that the ideal state is you are
running a program on your own machine that isn't phoning home or accessing internal resources
if it doesn't need to. For instance, you can download AI models. You don't have to use
chat GBT. Currently, if you want the nice performance, it does operate that way. But
as far as decentralization goes, you need to make sure that the ideal, whether it's
your own machine, your own server, or even something just run by people you trust, any
kind of system you're using that's run by people you can't trust, can't trust, not even
won't trust, but can't trust, will end up hurting you in the long run.
Let's stop there for just a second. This is a topic where people in the tech space are
going to know exactly what you meant. Just then, when you said people that you can't
trust, not even people that you won't trust, this is a conversation that I think we should
stop here and flesh that out simply because a lot of people may not understand it as quickly
as you said it. I think we have the opportunity to bring more people into that conversation.
The Bitcoiners are talking about this is trustless currency. This is money for enemies. You don't
have to rely on a trusted third party. A lot of people hear these phrases and it takes
a little while for these to sink in. A trusted third party is really somebody that you can't
trust. Is that right? Is that in the ballpark of what you mean there?
Part of what I mean about somebody you can't trust is that if you're using some kind of
corporate site, whether it's social media, whether it's video hosting, the problem fundamentally
is that they have an existential reason to put their interests ahead of yours. They're
not going to fight a court order just because you'd like them not to. There are real contingencies
that they have to have when it comes to those situations. Part of the whole ideal state
I would draw it down to is that if you are ideally running the system yourself as an
individual unit, though practically you may want family members involved just to remove
some deduplication, the smaller you bring that in, the less harm these other entities
can do to you.
Yeah. Just to try to bridge a couple of these topics, you didn't mention cryptocurrency
or blockchain or Bitcoin, but it sounds like these things are fundamentally linked, if
not technologically, than in premise. Can you speak to that?
Yes. Bitcoin is a perfect example. It itself is free software. You can download the software
source code. You can edit the source code and run it however you like. However, there
is a whole consensus algorithm, which is the whole point of Bitcoin. You are not going
to just run Bitcoin with your wallet set to a million Bitcoins. You do have to stay with
the rules of the system. This is very similar to many of these other systems because Bitcoin
at its core is an open protocol. Open protocols are the answer here, whether it's Bitcoin,
whether it's chat, whether it's whatever crazy systems we want to design.
When it comes to how the crypto space overlaps with a lot of this, the honest truth is I
personally feel like crypto has underestimated some of these problems when it comes to the
three primary resources, storage, computing power, and bandwidth, because you need a reason
for people to run those nodes. In my opinion, Bitcoin and Monero are the only two that have
actually answered that question. I remember looking into some of the fancier Ethereum
spin-offs that have a lot of the smart contracts. Smart contracts are excellent if you actually
have value on the underlying asset, but when it's all just moving imaginary digits around,
why not just use the US dollar? These three primary resources are important because somebody
has to have a reason to run your nodes. If all the people running the nodes want to censor
your transactions, they will, and there's really nothing that can stop them no matter
what system you're using.
You need them to be adversarial with one another.
Right, and Bitcoin to be acting as if they are not one unit. Going back, and I was spending
a moment processing this, and I want to slow down and hesitate here because I think that
there is a lot for people to process. I'm actually going to go all the way back from
the existential conflict of interest. For people who have studied economics, this is
kind of the equivalent of the Triffin paradox, the Triffin dilemma, which is where the nation
that runs the reserve currency has a different interest in what happens with that currency
than everyone else in the world. That conflict of interest creates this adversarial relationship.
What shatters that conflict of interest, that conflict of interest that may dictate, that
snowballs into most or all of the wars of the world really, it's that schism right there.
It's that difference between one ruler and then everybody else having to put up with
whatever the policies are. Here, you've distinguished, and this is so important, so let's do this
slowly. Let's unpack this. You've distinguished Bitcoin from other digital currencies and
in particular central bank digital currencies because a lot of people lump all these together.
I think that that is intentional. I think it's probably a Psyop to get people to not
think of cryptocurrencies as the primary categorization, but you're stepping in and saying, no, look,
this other aspect is the primary distinction between the categorization. We can say, hey,
look, it's about being digital. That could be the attribute that we focus on, but you're
saying, no, it's the open protocol. From there, you begin to be able to more clearly point
to something like storage, the incentives over the storage system as being a crux in
how it is that the system can operate on an economic basis.
Yeah, and that was a big thing that fueled the block size wars in the Bitcoin community.
Do you set a one megabyte limit to the block size so that people can run nodes on Raspberry
Pis, or do you let it grow so that it can run more transactions per second, but then
what happens to that storage incentive? Can you put that in plain English? At what point
did this discussion occur? Who was having this discussion? What was this? Bitcoin Core,
as it exists, has that limit. They later added a soft fork to raise it with a different system,
but the gist of it is that at a certain point, I want to say around 2016, I forget when this
was, there was a rift in the Bitcoin community, the quote unquote big blockers versus the
small blockers. The big blockers eventually forked into Bitcoin cash, which is what some
may be familiar with today. And that was the fundamental divide over whether Bitcoin itself
should have large blocks or small blocks. And as far as I'm concerned, the dividing
line was how people felt the storage economics worked. Because one of the arguments the small
blockers had, Bitcoin Core devs themselves, was that you shouldn't record your coffee
transaction on the global public ledger. Maybe it really should only be for important transactions.
The challenge with this though, especially as it's worked out over time, is that Bitcoin,
but even blockchains built on the same kind of system, they're effectively an auction
every 10 minutes or whatever the interval is on a transaction. So the smaller it is,
the more I would say inflexible, the more flexible the fees are. Because if you have
a small auction and a ton of people are trying to get a transaction through within a short
period of time, suddenly that auction can go to the roof quite quickly.
Right. Do you need the security that you purchase in order to buy coffee in your neighborhood?
The answer is no, it's coffee in your neighborhood. Your neighborhood businesses run on a different
level of protocol because socially you do all know each other. If a business just begins
to abuse people two blocks down, you find out about it, you know about it. They depend
on their reputation within that tight geography. People don't need to worry about whether or
not they buy their coffee directly on the Bitcoin blockchain.
There are some other solutions bubbling up and developing to this. There's the Lightning
Network. Yeah, there's the Lightning Network. We can set that aside for another conversation
another day because it's not really core to what we're talking about today. But I just
wanted to present that because for some people it's going to make another connection to something
they may know about or partially know about. All these things I feel like I partially know
about and every time I have these conversations, my understanding branches a little further.
What I would say that the big mindset change that needs to happen is I initially got really
excited about Bitcoin because I saw that computing power. I got there and I'm like Bitcoin could
create a market incentive to democratize general computing hardware. The reason why it didn't
is because ASICs were invented and suddenly there were specialized machines for mining
Bitcoin and that torpedoed that dream. But I personally see self-hosting, whether it's
the Bitcoin network, whether it's your own email server, whether it's other kinds of
services, self-hosting provides a real reason for people to actually care about democratizing
access to hardware.
So maybe we can look at a couple of real world things that are going on right now. So if
you don't mind, I'm just going to share my screen. Now, we brought up the TikTok act,
but before we get there, I want to... Oh man, where did I hide it? Once again, too many
windows open. So here we go. So here in Canada, I don't know, Matthew, to what degree you're
familiar with this, but we have right now this thing going on in our government where
they are... It's called Bill C-11 where they're attempting to, let's see, change Canada's
broadcasting policy and give new powers to the country's broadcasting regulator, among
other things. The idea seems to be it's going to control the internet more in terms of prioritizing
Canadian content to help us Canadian musicians get our music out in front of audiences. And
it's based on a similar... We've already got this for TV and radio. There has to be a certain
proportion of Canadian content that is broadcast, but I think the idea is now they're trying
to add that to the internet. Now, everyone I know looks at that and understands it's
an information control mechanism. I don't think Justin Trudeau gives two craps about
my music or any musician from Canada or otherwise. So Gabe, what insight can you give us on what's
going on here? Well, actually, sorry, before you answer that, let me show you how this
has impacted the tech space because Google has publicly come out and said, as it stands
right now, this bill's not good. Now, you might be like, well, hey, Google's coming
to our defense, except I don't trust that that's what they're doing. But what they are
saying is because of Bill C-11, we're going to make changes to how we deliver content
to Canadians. So it's not even strictly the government coming in and censoring or redirecting
information. You have Google now saying, I think it's like 7% of Canadian users are now
part of an experiment. They're now beta testing how they're going to treat Canadian users.
And this may be related more to some of my public statements, but I know I can't post
Google reviews anymore. So there's some weird stuff going on. Can you elaborate what is
this Bill C-11? What the heck is going on? And then how does that relate to what we're
talking about? I can't talk too much about the specifics of the bill, though I have listened
to Michael Geiss podcast. He actually does a great job outlining it. He's even done an
interview on his podcast with a senator about it as well. And the major issue here is that
I hate to say it, it's not in a vacuum. It isn't just Canada deciding to firm up their
internet regulations because, oh, we're behind. No, in the UK, we have their online harms
bill where they're trying to censor online discussion. And in the EU, they're actually
going a step further. And it's quite scary where in the EU, they have the chat control
proposal where they want to do client side scanning because they're not going to break
encryption, but they just want to make sure they can scan your device before you send
anything off. What's concerning about this global push towards internet control is that
I believe the real motivation for this is that they have realized that big tech was
able to build a machine that could brainwash people fundamentally, whether you're right
or left. Most people will agree this is a brainwashing machine, whether you think it's
for good, whether you think it's for bad, whether you think it's for nobody, that's
what it's doing. And the problem is governments across the world want that power. The problem
is that power can only exist if the storage computing and bandwidth are all centralized
in one place. When you have this panopticon that controls what everyone can see, hear,
and express, they're going, both governments and corporations are going to clamor for control
over it. And so, you know, now that I guess governments are starting to understand, oh,
what's an algorithmic feed? Oh, you can determine what other people can see. That's what they
want control of. They don't actually, I don't think they actually care what any of our individual
opinions are. What they do want is the ability, like discussed in the previous rounding the
earth discussion, is that they want the ability to hit a button. Oh, I want to talk to the
people who care about this right now. That's what they want. And it's total control, total
information control, total suppression. And this is why this is my mission, is that by
understanding how this stuff actually works to a certain level, to understand how those
three primary resources work, we can actually formulate a plan to fight back. Because if
you distribute that communication, that, you know, control across, you know, people generally,
they literally cannot do this.
It's a little bit of a long road, though. Oh, yeah. We're, we take ourselves out of
the conversation pool in these other platforms in order to participate in one that has this,
you know, this gossip protocol, you know, this, you know, that keeps anybody from having
the censorship button or censorship arrangement power. It really is like it's crafting a maze,
right? That's really what they can do. Put you in a maze, put you in a maze at the monitor.
For us to withdraw first means that we're withdrawn. It's a cost. There's a real short
cost to pay. Yeah, it's a prisoner's dilemma. And now at some point, though, and maybe this
is the moment, maybe the pandemic pushed so many people, you know, to the edge with censorship
that the cost is smaller, right? When people have fewer rights, the cost is suddenly smaller.
Well, not only that, but I would also argue that our tech hardware is so good that if
you just want to run a basic website, it is practically impossible to keep a basic website
offline provided people are flexible enough. And that's the challenge is while things like
I to sorry, while things why like IPFS and different dark nets exists, the problem is
that censorship is also a demand side problem. People have to want to look out for the alternative
voices, the alternative view. But when it comes to actually being able to be heard,
for at least some types of content, you can be uncensorable. For instance, I was involved
over the summer with a bunch of people trying to figure out how to get Laura devices able
to communicate with each other over long distances. We did a test and we can get messages, you
know, 26 kilometers with a very cheap and expensive device. The challenge is what is
this device? It's Laura. And we were using a system called mesh,
Tastic, which is actually, you know, as the name implies, quite fantastic. But mesh, Tastic
allows you to build a mesh net of nodes that can exchange really like short and simple
messages. And this is actually a big part of why discuss things in terms of the three
resources because they're not going to run your own network, your own Netflix on that
network. It's for really critical, you know, short term messages. And that's how the three
resources come into this aspect of the discussion. This system exists. It's practically uncensorable,
but it's only suited to certain applications. Okay. So tell me if this is what Laura is.
I've imagined for a number of years. What if I could carry around something like a Blackberry?
And what if each of us has a Blackberry and we kind of make a mesh, a network where, I
don't know, kind of like walkie talkies do, except everybody's already tuned in, you know,
to the same wavelength. So we are, we're networked so long as we're within distance with each
other. And each of us could type some sort of a message on there. And now maybe I need
to send the message to you, Gabe. But what's going to happen is, is my device is going
to gossip out to other devices that are going to look for, you know, closer connections
to you until the message gets to you. Right. And now maybe that message is encrypted so
that not everybody's reading it. It's only read when it gets to you. Well, Meshtastic
actually does have encryption built into it. And that is kind of how it works. I suspect
what the Laura device is, is it's literally just a small radio with a screen. And all
what's really fancy about it is that you program it in advance with, you know, the configuration
can be done from a smartphone because it syncs up by Bluetooth. So your smartphone talks
to it. It talks to the other Laura devices and you can share those text messages across
the network. The problem is, the two major problems you hit is you do actually need a,
you know, network of connected people, you know, unless you're running all the nodes
yourself, then that becomes a greater challenge. You do have to become a service provider at
that point. The thing is, though, is that the other problem is that this is a public,
you know, ban. The great thing is you can use it without a license. But the other problem
is, is if say you're like, oh, well, everybody should use it. Not everybody needs to use
it because it's like, well, the internet still works, you know. And it's, when it comes to
these considerations, I brought it up as an example, is that the technology exists nowadays.
As far as I'm concerned, it is impossible to keep any specific piece of information off
the internet, but not necessarily content itself. You know, every piece of content is
replaceable. And I would argue even most of the systems we use are actually quite replaceable.
You know, whether we replace, you know, one mastodons right now, the biggest on the Fed
reverse, but it the open protocol exists that there are other servers out there. So if there
is some government hate boner against mastodon, there will be other systems that can still
work within it. And I think the best thing people have going for them right now is that
the tech is diverse, powerful, and you know, flexible enough these days that I think if
people were willing to a cyber rebellion would go quite well.
Interesting. Now, I think a lot of people are sitting at home though, and they're thinking,
no, I still don't know how to participate in that cyber rebellion.
Well, I would recommend in general, you know, part of my content is laying that out in general.
Yeah, yeah. In fact, I was gonna ask you to do that, which is to bring back your slide
deck. You had a list like a sort of a how to get started list. And I feel like that's
that's one of the slides that needs to be like held up for longer. Right? Like people
and it should be on a website somewhere like a lot of, you know, getting started is having
a map. So land chat is handles that you're going to use to climb that wall before you
get started climbing that wall.
And Chad is excellent. But I would say for honestly, complete beginners, go fast.net
is a whole lot better for what you're describing, because I can even give a bit of a tour. If
you give me a moment, I can share that instead. There we are. Perfect. Okay, so now I'm sharing
go fast. So for every category here, it outlines what can be done. So on the left here, it
says browse the net safely, keep conversations private. And I actually really like some of
the specific points they felt the need to elaborate. So I'll go to unlock your computer
first, because that's for many people, it could be the first step, or it could be the
last step, depending on your patience, where they advocate switching to Linux. Personally,
I would not recommend making it your first step, I would say learn Git before you can
go out to Linux. But that's just a personal preference if you want to dive into it. And
they have for all of these different categories, they have an how to and you know, this as
a qualifier of like, which is Linux the solution, and they list the different flavors and you
know, what might work for you. And let me go to speak privately or browse probably.
There we go. So this site itself, and one of the reasons I wanted to mention it is it
itself is open source, you can contribute to this website. And this is actually something
I'm considering doing is for any oversight they have, you just clone their repository
and put a request, and you can make your changes. And this is where they talk about the basics
of it. They have encrypted emails. They talk about XMPP, which is one of the major encrypted
services and it's quite good. But I'll also throw up land chat up there. Just because
that was the one I think the slide that initially got your attention. It shows you how do you
set up a website basic, you know, get started with, you know, a web page that says hello
world, you know, whatever this will get you there. But then it's all these services. How
do you run this service? You know, this,
Go back, go back up to the list, just because, okay, like, you know, this, in these conversations,
I think what gets a lot of people scared of technology is moving past that list too quickly.
I almost feel like, like, it would be a worthwhile exercise to like, you know, focus in on that
list, and just like put that list on the screen, and then just play like, you know, like relaxing,
like, you know, music in the background, and, you know, you know, turn on your favorite
tunes, and have people do whatever they want, whatever, just like keep that list up just
to just to know, just to drive into just to drive into people's minds. There's a checklist.
It's really like, and I'm saying this partially because I'm in the middle of like putting
together an article on, you know, what are the things that you need to do to start a
business. And it's one of those things that seems to carrier to people that it really
is. But for any one thing that you do in life that is like that, you know, once you've done
it once you know, it's not that big of a deal. And yet and yet approaching it, approaching
it, that's, that's the hardest thing is getting started. And for most people, this is in a
new, this is in a new domain. And now Gabriel has said, if we wanted to, we could have a
cyber revolution. And the fact of the matter is 80% of the people out there going, Nope,
Nope, Nope. You know, like I have not begun that checklist yet. And yet, as people have
pointed out, sometimes it only takes, you know, three and a half percent to actually
enact the revolution. And I think this is actually partially why, because the number
of people who would actually be in that spot to choose where we go next, it's only a smaller
percentage of people who are within that area. And not everybody needs to know, not everybody
needs to be able to necessarily act on a level of, you know, operating within this system
at a complex level. What Gabriel has done is he's mentioned, look, they're the people
who are going to use Bash and interface directly with Linux. Those are going to be the coders
out there. Those are going to be the people who do this for a living. And Gabriel is a
technologist for a living, right? And then they're going to be those people for whom
they may, they may never again want to use a command prompt. Because the fact of the
matter is that's not what they're doing with their daily life and their time. So I wanted
to lay that out because I want users not to feel like this is just, this is a terrifying
thing that they would just be pulled through, right? We get pulled through terrifying things
so often. The problem is when we're terrified of them, then you have the one central group
that can come and pull everyone through all at once and there's no choice to the matter.
Whereas if we orient ourselves along with that portion of the technologists who believe
in freedom and decentralized power, where we all have a voice as to how the system evolves
and operates, then, you know, that is, well, that's the question. Do you want liberty or
not? And that's why it is that it's important to begin at this square one, square one. And
Gabriel's one of the people with a sword. And, and, you know, I wanted to stop and have
that aside with the checklist on the screen. That's my hypnotic music. I'm going to let
you go, Gabe.
Yeah, no, I think that's an excellent point. And, you know, part of the biggest problems
people have, especially when it comes to this is, well, where do you start? And I would
say having a website is a good place to start, whether it's a simple, you know, something
you maintain by hand or whether you, you know, even just get, get some managed WordPress
hosting. The honest truth is that people need, in my opinion, like you say, it doesn't have
to be every single person, but at least, you know, one in 10 would go a long way if people
had their own platforms, because my primary motivation in getting started during the plandemonium
was I'm like, we could have made censorship impossible. Now, it would require constant
effort, not like, oh, we did it. We sponsored censorship forever. You know, it does take
a consistent level of effort. But the thing is, is that I believe there are two major
problems. One, like you said, you labeled a certain segment of the population, those
of us with the tech skills, and hopefully the desire to make some of this happen. But
the problem is, is if we don't really have users, you know, if I'm like, if I'm not getting
my friends and family on these systems, you know, whatever I hate to say it, all I am
is just one guy hiding alone. Ooh, I'm not on Facebook. I've saved the world. No, you
haven't saved anyone if you're just saving your own mind. And then all your friends are
on TikTok and Twitter or whatever, getting brainwashed by the system. You need, I'll
have to say that this is kind of tough talk for the techies, but you do need to figure
out how to provide services to an enterprise level for at least a small user base. And,
you know, personally to my, I have my own limitations, but that's the thing standard.
I think we should get people to at least think about accessing. If you're a relatively technical
person and you think you have the resources and the skill to provide enterprise level
services, why not do it for your friends and family? Think of all the thing hassle you
could save if instead of the system brainwashing them, Oh, everybody's communicating with each
other and there's not this extra hassle. You know, most people, the biggest problem they
have is, Oh, I don't want to install another app and install another app, which is why
I'm in love with these open services because then it doesn't matter if somebody's on Mastodon,
somebody's on MISC, somebody's on Playoma. Everybody's instances can all talk to each
other and that's, you know, my server people talk to your server people, you know, it all
works.
Right. And I just want to point this out. I've been suspicious of this the entire time
during the pandemic. Okay. So censorship started and then there was sort of a, a migration
to these different platforms, gab and getter and, and truth social and whatever. And, and
the more it happened and the more that I saw the way that some people were made social
media famous due to their censorship, the more I felt like it was a controlled operation
that really and truly that when you look at it, what you have is this map and you have
the town square and then you have the ghetto, you know, and you have different ghettos and
you farm people into these ghettos and back again at times, according to the conversation
that you want to have and when do you want to have it? And this has resulted in their
being too few nodes. Yeah. Right. I called them sometimes the 800 pound gorillas of the
medical freedom movement, but, you know, almost all of them, not, not all of them necessarily.
Like, you know, RFK junior was sort of already around at the very beginning. And so it's,
it's not necessarily the case that he, that he, you know, aimed at being an 800 pound
gorilla node, but I think that everybody should look at all of the, the mega nodes in the
graph that is the medical freedom movement and think about how it is that our attention
could have been arranged around them and what that means. And this, this is different. This
keeps that from being as powerful and for there possibly being any sort of psychological operation
around, you know, those, those centers, right? Because any one of them, maybe their messaging
is actually being controlled by Google or, or, or by the Canadian government.
And you know, sorry, I'll let you go, Liam. No, no, go for it. And then I want to introduce
the next part of this, I think. Okay. Well, because the thing I found funny is that during
the planet ammonium, a lot of people were saying, oh, they're going to shut down the
internet, they're going to shut down the internet and knowing what I knew and where I was kind
of going through this process of trying to get this stuff written down so that people
can hopefully understand it was that we aren't using the internet well enough for them to
bother shutting it down. You know, as far as I'm concerned, none of us are doing our
jobs to use the internet effectively, that it's seriously a problem for them. It's working
perfectly as a brainwashing machine. And so part of my goal is to teach people how to
use the internet in a way that will make them want to shut it down.
Boom, you just defined, you just defined the level deeper in the SIOP. You're absolutely
right. It is working so well for them as a brainwashing machine. The idea that they would
shut it down is total absurdity. Now, there is some possibility. I mean, obviously, yeah,
like if an asteroid hits the earth, you know, people are going to lose power, right?
And we are seeing this sort of economic decoupling of the world. But to the extent possible,
they want to maintain that that drip, drip, drip of their own information channels, you
know, packet stream to your home. They do a pretty good job controlling it. That that's
spot on.
Okay. So, Matthew, you brought up the really good point of, you know, sort of people thought
leaders as almost nodes in this system. But so and we've also talked about how there was
this exodus from Facebook and from, you know, Twitter at first, certainly. I myself basically
left all of those platforms, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, in part because they've straight
up started threatening to report people for domestic terrorism, which is really obscene.
That was a real program that they rolled out in 2021, at least on Facebook, where you could
report your friends and family for extreme, you know, whatever. So it became but that's
a that's kind of another thing. Point is, I did what you were saying, Gabriel. I'm like,
I'm going to fight the system by not being on those platforms. And for a while, the idea
of being on Facebook terrified me, especially as I started to learn about the origins of
some of these companies and just what they're set up to do. But what's the result? You then
wind up Matthew, as you say, going to gab, going to get her going to parlor, some of
those companies wind up almost acting like traps where if you're on parlor, depending
on when you're there, now you're a white supremacist just by being on there. Okay, so then you
start to get platforms like rumble, come up, which are talked about as being the, you know,
the censorship free the free speech, the alternative to YouTube. And I want to use rumble as an
example, I'm going to pull up, I did a bit of research, I finally, I had this itch, I
really wanted to know, I knew, in the case of rumble, there were there were people or
companies behind it that made a couple people nervous. And it's one of those things I just
didn't want to think about. So yesterday, I finally thought about it. So rumble before
its IPO, so it's now it is now a publicly traded company. And we'll get to some of those
stockholders. But before its IPO, did you know that Peter Thiel was one of the three
big investors in it? I think Whitney Webb mentioned that. Matthew, did you know that?
I've heard it. It's not necessarily on the top of my mind every day. But yeah, that's
right. And neither is it on mine. And the other two are this one called Colt Ventures.
They're big into bio pharma, biotech, you know, some of the same companies, you know,
Alnolam is is a gene therapy focused company. Some some interesting focus in their portfolio,
really primarily on pharmaceuticals, you know, which gets my red flags going up. And then
the other one was Narya, which same same here, they've got some some therapeutics they like
to invest in. So that that's that. And I think Whitney, in particular, you're right, has
sort of been early on being skeptical of rumble. So okay, but that's fine. After the IPO.
If I could put a pin in that, this is the prisoners dilemma, right? Yeah, do you like,
it may be that the same people who would be invested in the pharmaceutical companies would
want there to be an out, right? Because that that gives people the possibility of paying
the cost to try to to get out of the prisoners dilemma to try to to exit whatnot. And if
you have that, it's sort of it's a short term delta, it's a short term change in the system
that removes those people from the discussion that's happening in the broader arena. And
they're more likely to do it. If they're more likely to do it, if something new is available.
So you make that available right at the most important critical moment in history.
It could be wonderful. I will, I will say though, like from from the perspective of
the three primary resources, what rumble is giving you as a creator is they're giving
you a easy to configure server that has a ton of bandwidth and a ton of storage right
away. Fundamentally, I do think when it comes to solving this problem, you do need people
within their own circles somehow to acquire and share those resources. And that's the
only way you're going to unseat something like rumble. Fundamentally, though, these
services will always exist, there will always be greater concentrations of, you know, these
resources together, simply because that's how the economies of scale works. And in my
opinion, this is kind of why I blame, you know, the audiences a bit, because you do
need to be flexible enough to switch from one service to another. You know, as you say,
you know, people were kind of like nudged into one service or another. But if people
were really flexible enough that it's like, oh, I don't care where this is coming from.
That's a win and it's on its own right. Absolutely. And and and you you just went where I want
to go as the next step before we get there, because the other part is, oh, okay, well,
so you've got this Peter Thiel guy. And by the way, Peter Thiel, to be clear, for those
who don't know, we won't go in a deep dive. But he, as far as I'm concerned, is in the
same category as, you know, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, like they are the same class.
In fact, they a lot of those guys come from this PayPal mafia. So my point is, there's
an initial set of information you should have about who's who's, you know, originating these
companies. But of course, it went public. And now there's this there's this there's
this revolution in my own mind, I went through about a year and a half ago, when I learned
for the first time, that all of the biggest companies in the world are owned by the same
basically top three companies, those being BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, I think,
and that they all own each other. And therefore, you've got this sort of corporate mafia that
runs everything. Now, that's sort of obvious. But it was a very big transition point for
me in my understanding and seeing the graphs and you know, Coca Cola and Pepsi basically,
you know, imagine thinking they actually care which of the two you prefer Coke or Pepsi.
So what my point is, yeah, you probably at this point, don't think rumble falls in that
category. But there's this wonderful tool, Yahoo Finance, which lists the top 10, you
know, institutional stakeholders and stakeholders, stakeholders in a fairly easy, shakedown holders,
excuse me. Anyway, here they are. The this is not in order. This is an alphabetical order.
BlackRock, Cantor Fitzgerald, Commonwealth Equity Services, David Sachs, who's another
big tech investor, Geode Capital Management, Invesco, Platform Technology Partners, Royal
Bank of Canada, Susquehanna International Group, Matthew and Vanguard. Thoughts?
Well, I'm thinking through Susquehanna. Of course, I worked there for for about a year.
It's run by Jeff Gaz. I do know that just just having seen, you know, various things
over time, he is one of the largest donors to Republican political campaigns. But I don't
know. I mean, he interviewed me, but I don't know like so much about him personally that
I can that I have like a real, real strong opinion on what that that means, except that,
OK, you know, there's investment. And I was, you know, and even before that, I was going
to mention you could imagine a pool of investors. You know, what I said about rumble being something
that could be sort of a short term trap. Once something like rumble exists, you can imagine
there being two types of investors, good actors and bad actors in the same pool. And each
of them would want influence over how the tool is used. So to me, I'm not sure how much
time we should spend going down a list like this, except to point out that there are that,
you know, like BlackRock and Vanguard, like there's so much heft to those organizations
that that it's important to realize that they are in the pool. But otherwise, to realize
that the platform has gone into a similar realm, it's achieved another level of notoriety
or acceptance. Gabriel, you know, like you were saying, it's now become this, you know,
the scaling up of a service. You will eventually wind up, whether it is BlackRock or Vanguard,
you know, in 20, 30, 100 years, there will be an equivalent, you know, big financial
powerhouse that will seek out the next good business opportunity and and and buy it. So,
Matthew, you're right. In that sense, this itself doesn't have to mean more than this
platform isn't just as you know, this small new competitive that's come out, it's become
something else. And notice well, that I wasn't aware they had actually acquired locals, but
locals is now a subsidiary of rumble. So that's something else too, is the consolidation of
services. And yet,
in some way, but I wasn't sure what the relationship was. Yeah, I thought it was a like a license
it like a sharing of the video infrastructure. But no, it's it's more intense than that.
But this goes to what you were saying, Gabe, this, I think this doesn't then mean we should
now stop using rumble. No, that would be absurd, because it provides a fantastic service that
maybe and maybe you could elaborate on this. This doesn't solve all our problems. It is
a tool in what needs to be a very large toolbox. Am I right?
So there's there's a challenge here because Matthew point out pointed out the prisoners
dilemma where you can either withdraw from the conversation and not be, you know, exposed
to the brainwashing machine, so to speak, or you participate in the hopes of reaching
people within that system. So I would say, you know, using rumble to the degree you are
trying to communicate with the rumble audience is important. But as we've already discussed,
you know, that people are being moved in certain directions. So from a, you know, outreach
perspective, you would want basically to have a highly specialized person in each silo,
you would have a Facebook, you know, spokesperson, you would have a rumble spokesperson, and
those would be ideally, you know, very popular content on those platforms. The problem is,
is that I, you know, the reason why that logo there you see on my my thing is, is the Libra
Solutions Networks logo is three interlocking shields, as I'm like, we need to protect each
other. You know, you shouldn't put your personal family photos or videos on YouTube or rumble
anyways, those should be private within the family. And so just like a family would have,
you know, a private collection, you may also want private digital infrastructure within
your trusted network. And that's really the core of my message.
And yeah, and that that's, that's, and that's, oh, gosh, I mean, there are a lot of important
aspects of this conversation. But that's the one that's going to pierce a lot of families,
a lot of people are going to understand this better and better people already. I mean,
people have been questioning whether or not we should put that much information on social
media already for years and years. And I sometimes cringe, like I love to see my my friends'
children, you know, especially the ones like, you know, I've known them, you know, like
I was around them while they were pregnant, you know, like I love seeing my friends' children
pop up on social media. You know, cute pictures of puppies and law cats, too, you know, like
all that stuff. You know, just a little snippet of like being in somebody's home when you
can't always do that. Right. So
see, but the funny thing is, a lot of that doesn't have to go away, because you could
just run a soapbox.
Yeah, yeah. This is the invitation. This is the look you can control. You can you can
retain ownership and total control over your information and your data. And you can permission
it how you want. That will never be able to happen if you don't have open if you don't
have free software, free software and the resources to run it. It cannot happen. That
is the Faustian bargain right there. Right. That's the that's the cheap versus free.
Exactly. Now, you're you're this is fantastic. I wrote down private digital infrastructure
like family photos treat similarly like this is now starting to form in my head, like the
ways in which I could begin to use this in my own life.
There's so now specific questions start to come up, for example, will Edmiston in our
room or locals chat asks, what's a good photo app for private and easily displayable photo
sharing? Has that been has that been figured out? Well, the funny thing is, there's a million
different ways to do specific things off the top of my head just because of what I've I've
used. You can use Nextcloud, which is your own kind of normie friendly cloud solution
and throw your photos on there. And I think it has some useful features like you can share
a link, you know, say you want to give a one off photo to one person. But, you know, the
Fediverse has a lot of these options as well, where like you'd they have a Instagram clone
instance called Pixel Fed, and you could use Pixel Fed for just if your goal is just to
share photos, that's a good one to build for that. But you don't have to use the Fediverse
for everything, you know, being able to create your own private website can do that as well.
You know, there are so many different options where if you just have the control of your
own digital infrastructure, the options are endless. It's just how you want to set it
up because you get to be the master of how those are used. You can install a server that
does something differently or another, you know, it could just be a simple, you know,
website that all here's all the photos, or it could be this super complicated, you know,
all perfectly tagged, you know, collection, though I'll admit, I don't know much about
which would be the the perfectly curated collection, I'm sure there exists.
I just have to say for the sake of conversation, we need to come up with a better phrase than
normie friendly. We need a better term than normie because it is that so fishbowling,
you know, I mean, like, my dad on board. Yeah. May as well out by affiliation. This because
we are in fishbowls, right. And we're trying to figure out how not to be in some sense.
But but also, they get to, you know, it's a social I don't know that. Well, I'd argue
the language is, you know, first before it even happens in the protocols. But they catch
us that way. It is so easy, though, right. Like in our conversations and our private
conversations, it's the easiest, simplest way to make people everybody understand at
once. Well, I would argue, you know, the only way
I've noticed to really get out of the fishbowl is with your extended relatives and family,
because you have no control over what you know, brainwashing they may or may not have
been a part of. And really, that's how you grow throughout at least somewhat organic
channel of communication. I don't know. OK, maybe now is a good time to move into this
tick tock situation. I am once again going to try to locate a very specific tab out of
hundreds. A, B, C, D. There it is. So I heard about this yesterday. So look, so here's here's
some background as I understand it. Tick tock is in fact a platform based out of China.
I believe ByteDance is that the parent company. And the way that as far as I understand the
way that it works in China, it's a little different, at least in theory, than it works
in the Western world. Basically, everything is is affiliated with the Chinese government,
essentially like the way that the infrastructure is set up. And maybe that's fine. Maybe it's
not. Point is, there are genuine concerns about the widespread mass adoption of this
like for all the same reasons that we should be skeptical of all the other social media
platforms. I'm not saying they're not doing everything tick tock is doing, but tick tock
in particular has this added aspect of being potentially a surveillance tool, a tool to
manipulate from the Chinese government. So that's the premise. Then you have these social
aspects of it's just particularly salient among young people. And there's some weird
stuff going on with what kind of content our kids getting from this thing. So look, I think
we're all more or less on the same page about this. There have been previous talks about,
I think in in, in the States, the first discussion of banning tick tock might have been like
2017 2018 under President Trump. I think in Canada, there was talk of maybe even just
a couple of months ago, making it so government officials in Canada were not allowed to have
tick tock on their phone. So there's there's a long several year history of this. But now
what's happened is the introduction of a bill that is entirely focused on either on banning
tick tock or otherwise responding to the tick tock problem. But am I right, Gabe, that that's
not what it seems.
Well, the biggest challenge I find is that, like we've said, they've they've built this
big, you know, mind control infrastructure, and they want control over fundamentally.
It's they're lying on the table, even if they were totally benign. And you know, this was
all for the good of people. Grabbing that hammer makes everything look like a nail.
And the problem with a lot of these bills is like somebody I think it was the Mises
Caucus pointed out that the verbiage in the restrict act literally says they want to stop
any transaction that undermines national security, whatever this could be a full blown Patriot
Act 2.0. And the problem is, the reason why I think internet regulation plays so well
right now is because you have part of the power structure being like, oh, yeah, you
know, censorship really saved our asses in the pandemic. Imagine if misinformation was
even more extreme. And so now there's like tons of money flowing in that direction. And
the biggest problem I see with a lot of this stuff is that even if, you know, people don't
want to admit that there's a big coordinated plan, the problem is an open auction effectively
is that when there's a ton of money pouring into controlling people's minds, people are
going to figure out ways to get together and do it. And the legislatively, I'm more concerned
over what they're going to stop people from doing because we can all leave TikTok, but
we can't leave them doing another Patriot Act kind of thing.
I don't know enough about TikTok specifically. I've never been on TikTok myself. I've seen
TikTok videos, of course. You know, it's hard to have a computer not have seen TikTok videos.
So I'm going to ask this question, and I don't know if either of you can answer this for
me. Would you say that per account, attention on TikTok is more or less centralized?
Attention?
Right. Like, sometimes I see like videos that have gotten a million views on TikTok. You
know, on Twitter, that's more likely to happen to the same account over and over and over
again.
Oh, I see.
Every tweet from certain people, once they get the fall, once it's, you know, they're
in it. I think that these circles form where everybody promotes each other's tweets and
everybody has a certain degree of fame themselves. And it sort of creates sort of supernodes.
I think the medical freedom movement has clusters of sort of supernodes where everybody pushes
everybody's out. In fact, I think that's actually part of what's appealing about Carolina Bonita
to a lot of people in the medical freedom movement is that she brings that understanding
as to how to orchestrate that. And that's why people are sort of hush hush about the
conversation about, you know, the truck full of guns and, you know, you know, conflicts
that she's had and questions about a lot of her behavior. But I guess more of what I'm
asking is, is TikTok a place that let's say that the U.S. government or powerful business
interests want to be able to control people's thoughts? Are they better able to do it through
TikTok or less well able to do it? As in, does, you know, the average account wind up
getting more attention than the supernodes? Well, I would say the big thing is that in
some ways we have seen proof that it does centralize attention because what it, you
know, shorts the short video format went viral across all the other platform. Then YouTube
had it, then, you know, Instagram integrated and then Facebook, you know, they've all copied
that mechanism. Now I openly speculate it's because, oh, they figured out how long people's
attention span currently is. But the sad truth of the matter is, is what I'm more scared
about when it comes to TikTok. Yes, it's a smartphone app and smartphones are, you know,
have a whole bunch of their own issues. But the thing is, is we've already seen TikTok
apply basically like not very transparent filters over the content. And so as a silly
example here, you know, everybody remembers a Snapchat dog, you know, girls would have
this silly dog with the ears, you know, whatever. But the thing is, it would be obvious there's
a filter running over that. I have seen a handful of TikTok examples here of our some
woman, you know, in, you know, relatively normal shape, you know, not like supermodel,
not like, you know, super offensive. But the thing is, is the TikTok app itself will alter
how it looks in real time, not in, you know, just to the viewers, but also to the person
recording it. When you are looking into your camera to through TikTok, you are not even
looking at yourself. You are looking at what TikTok wants you to look like. And it's actually
quite extreme. I've seen, you know, those where they hold it up close to their phone.
So you see it pop in and out. It is actually quite extreme. Suddenly you're giving people
control over self image. You don't give people control over projected image, but also you're
giving somebody else control over your mirror.
And the thing I'm most worried about, truthfully, when it comes to this is we know where the
technology of, you know, text generation, AI, you know, media generation, whether it's
text, whether it's audio, whether it's video, they can do that in real time now. So now
when somebody gives, you know, video, a live stream or whatever, it's the whole, is anything
real, you know, they can change it, whether it's video, audio, whether it's, you know,
the whole shebang can be manipulated.
Okay, okay. I want to stop here. I want to think about this. This is enormous right here.
Like this, this point about controlling the mirror. So I always get, I always get my mythological
stories a little bit wrong. So help me out if I, if I make a mistake here. The story
of Narcissa, the story of Narcissa is that Narcissa's, there was some sort of like a,
like a sort of a bargain curse where Narcissa's was cursed to never know himself. Right. That
was the story. And, and then, and then even like, and the test was echo, you know, this,
this beautiful woman whom, you know, could have been part of Narcissa's life, you know,
echo could call out, but Narcissa could not even, you know, reflect off of echo to be
able to then observe himself. Right. That would break the curse to know him, his own
self to be able to, you know, incorporate somebody else into their life and therefore
have their perspective. And, and, and this is the story of narcissism, right? It's something
that, that is, is a molded thing that can happen to somebody. And, and, you know, people
point out sometimes like, you know, Western society or US culture in particular is like
the most narcissistic, narcissistic society ever to exist. I think that that warning should
be, there is the most pressure toward not knowing yourself than there has ever been.
And that, that pointing this out, this content filtration, if someone else controls not you,
they control the level of your narcissistic madness. I don't know how well I said that,
but I'm trying to meander through here. I think you're bang on in the sense that this
doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing. People have horribly underestimated how much
big tech has been able to influence people over time. And, you know, regardless of how
people feel about TikTok, I will warn that it is the state of the art of whatever this
machine is. Right. So, okay. But now the, maybe what you said about, so there's language
in the, like, so I haven't gone through it myself. I heard Barnes, Robert Barnes, Viva
Barnes law, dot locals dot com, talk about it yesterday, where, or two days ago, where,
as you say, Patriot Act 2.0. And, and that meme has already spread. Like, I don't think
there's many, I think people are aware something's up with this bill and aware of the premise
that things get hidden in these bills and hidden behind fun names like the restrict
act. So it's not just that this bill would allow new powers to restrict social media
or, or, you know, it's not just TikTok, it's social media, but it's not just social media,
it's transactions. And the timing of that is really interesting, of course, because
as we started the conversation with, there's this entire worldwide changeover happening
in the financial system that seems to have started in earnest with the FTX nonsense and
everything that's happened since then. And it's now happening with actual banks. You
have the rollout of the Federal Reserve's FedNow system, which, as I understand it,
is not itself a central bank digital currency, but it is like an instant liquidity, you know,
transactional platform that is the infrastructure required for a central bank digital currency.
And then you have all of these other, like the banks that are being targeted by this,
either genuine bank runs or sort of arbitrary closure by the banking regulators, them being
crypto friendly banks and this having knock on effects on on various cryptocurrencies.
Point is, there's this entire changeover that seems to be happening in a way that that seems
to tie together information control and financial control using the same underlying technology.
I don't know, could you speak to am I onto something here? Am I right to think that the
timing of this bill, even though it's hidden under the context of a TikTok ban, could there
be something else going on there? Well, I assume that the technocracy, because
I wrote a series called the tools of the technocracy that kind of touches on the technological
side of it. I see they have the same, you know, bandwidth computing power storage issue
that we do. Fundamentally, they have to store all those, you know, communications they intercept
one way or another. And I think one of the better points made I've seen made by different
commentators is that what's the real fight right now is, yeah, it's all going to be through
a CBDC and, you know, that's that's going to be a whole lot of stuff. But the problem
is are the retail banks and the retail, you know, financial institutions, are they going
to be just getting the surveillance job? Are they going to be the ones deciding, oh, that
person did a bad, so they're getting censored? And I think part of the rub right now is that
with some of the automated tools that exist right now, I don't think they're even sure
how that's going to fundamentally shake up when I hate to say it, if you don't care that
much about, you know, getting the details right, you can automate it, use AI. And if
things go wrong, since you control the system, you can just reverse it. That's not really
the concern. And so I think the power has always been gradually ramping up and that
these stages in the system is really more what they can do to get that extra bit of,
you know, leverage in the legislative sense. You know, these laws will say we can do X.
And the problem is nobody stops to think, hey, maybe they don't have a right to do that.
And this is why I kind of emphasize self-hosting, because if people run their own services,
fundamentally, that'll fall under free speech and some case law somewhere. And if we can't
defend, oh, this guy's running his own server that's, you know, communicating with his family
or whatever, it's all lost anyways. And so I do think there are important battles to
fight. And I would personally not rush to defend, you know, TikTok per se. But the problem
with all of these bills, whether it's chat control, whether it's the UK harms bill, whether
it's this TikTok ban, is they are all fundamentally giving this information control system over
to a different power that built it.
Yeah. And it's a matter of who is centralizing and controlling that power. I'm always, you
know, skeptical of further centralizing any of those control levers. But in this case,
there's sort of a blame China aspect to it. Right now, we're seeing Sino-Western relations
deteriorating pretty rapidly. It seems like every story in the West has some sort of embedded
narrative of, you know, we're in this fight with China, right? We're in the struggle for
control of global hegemony or something like that. And it could just be used as an excuse
for power levers. Right. But I don't think so. I think, you know, in the past, historically,
when you had competing nations and you had policies that weren't necessarily optimal,
but were specific to that nation, you could sort of just bury it in history. You know,
everybody could just sort of like roll their eyes, go, well, it was in context of a war.
Now in the modern age, where nobody forgets anything because of the internet, if they
really want to hold on to it, be able to hold it up again and make everybody remember it.
It's governance without principle like that becomes a different thing. It begins to appear
as though that the republic has been smashed. John Titus does a good job laying that out
just from like the money side of it. He's like, yeah, you know, they've ignored, they've
let the criminals get off free. So like we like to him, it's like we're a post constitutional
state. The thing is, is what scares me a bit is that it's global. You know, we exist on
a planet that we don't understand the governance structure for. How do you find that out?
Right. There's this question right now as to whether or not, you know, people are trying
to destroy the government. And I just keep thinking, like, I have not believed for a
very long time. And I know that I'm in the small minority here, but I believe since I
was a teenager that the world was not being governed the way that we were told. And that,
you know, this idea that we were part of a nation. And that's not that it's not meaningful,
right? Like the United States is still meaningful to me. I assume Canada is still meaningful
to you. You know, when I recognize the shared cultures and I appreciate them. Right. I appreciate
the American people, for instance. And yet, and yet I believe that that these power levers
have been routed around what we would think of a constitutional authority so long ago
that what we're actually seeing is the breakdown of the facade, not the nation itself. I could
be wrong about that. I'd love to have, you know, for anybody who has the perspective
that what this is about is trying to get people to destroy their own nations. Actually, you
know, I worry it's more having people, you know, I don't think that's the problem, actually.
But I would love to have those conversations with those people.
To steelband the idea, if you talk to anyone, you know, millennial and younger, they are
vastly out of touch with any kind of common culture, common framework. So maybe it's not
the systems are being destroyed, but that for many, you know, the future of humanity,
they're already gone. Possibly. Or the fact that they could get online and it would be
as if it were, you know, one global online world shows that it wasn't there before, perhaps
that there was that we just didn't have a portal to the other side of the connectivity.
And now suddenly, it's a very small world after all.
Well, I do think I've watched and picked up on perhaps, like, I'm wondering if there is
an intentional effort to turn people against and you distinguish between the government
and the nation. And I do think this is there's probably several layers of nuance here. But
I think there is an intentional effort to get people to turn on something about the
system. And I don't mean holding people accountable for crimes. I mean, going in and dismantling
everything and allowing it to burn without building alternate solutions. So we're here
talking ultimate solutions, sometimes among trusted circles, you know, people I know,
I love and I believe are earnest. Sometimes they'll say something, they'll propose a
solution that to me just sounds not like not like anarchy, but like intentional chaos.
And it you see how they got there. But if so, then I zoom out and I go, OK, well, JJ
Dewey, OK, he's been a couple of months ago, he discovered this video, which if I had handy,
I'd play it. Is it a video? Yes. Yes. And plays every every stream he does now. And
I'm happy because it's this guy. Matthew, have you seen this? No, I'll try to explain
it. It's maybe I have. But Peter, for me again, I'm sorry. In a nutshell, it's this guy. I
don't know who he is, but he talks about how if you wanted to create a crisis to have people
turn on their government and everything, what you would do is you would manufacture a health
crisis with like a small, you know, one percent. Right. That video with the guy talking. OK,
yes, yes, yes. And that's what I thought we were talking about. I'm just going to mention.
So. Here's here's one thing that I wonder about is. Is this more like a controlled process?
The corporations are already creating their own private armies. Right. There are there
are private police forces, private police forces aren't even that exclusive. Right.
You can hire private security, you know, a gated community can hire private security,
a mall can hire private security, one store can hire private security. Right. You know,
it is there is something about that that is in that is evolving. And it may simply be
that this is the moment at which the actual governance structure is saying that that that
the pieces of your governance structure are to us more expensive than we know how to make
operate. You know, a good example for it, the ball is going to be in your court to also
come up with your own solutions. A good example of that, actually, oddly enough, speaking
of the Internet regulation in Canada, I was listening to Michael Geist podcast where he
has a Canadian senator talking about it. And this is my own analysis on top. So don't quote
him for it. But the thing is, is the senator was furious. She is furious that the government
of Canada puts through this bill that, you know, we can speculate comes from some other
upstairs. And they send it in as is. It doesn't conform to our laws. It doesn't conform to,
you know, the way it should be in the system. And the Senate has spent a lot of time. OK,
we've got these amendments so that it can still work within the existing legislative
framework. And the Trudeau government apparently said no to that. Those amendments I haven't
kept up to recently. Last I heard, they knocked it down. And the senator herself even said
if they if they don't accept those amendments, she's like, we don't know what to do now.
You know, it's like this isn't passing. And if there is a set of laws that, you know,
they're going to government saying you have to pass these, you know, maybe other governments
are going to like try to make it work. Whereas Trudeau is just like, no, it's going to pass.
Just shove it through. It doesn't matter. Let's all check our paychecks and go home.
Well, and I think that's right. Like if I said this out loud to my partner Sam the other
day, I said, you know, these people really do just sound like they're saying SFA, not
swearing here today and hoping that critical thinkers aren't watching. But everyone who
is watching sees like there's nothing of substance behind this ridiculous assertion you just
made. So Justin Trudeau can't just say whatever the heck he wants. He can avoid answering
any questions. And by the way, I'm going to say I'm starting to see the same from Pierre
Poliev and basically every leader of any significant position. Another example, Emmanuel Macron
is now in and I don't know the details of this, but has now just basically pushed through
some change to pension, like pension reform policy that I think the idea is it was clearly
going to cause people to be very upset. And it seems like the agenda sent from above was
this has to be done. So he just did it. And there's almost not even an attempt to get
people on side anymore. It's just we're just going to do this. And it's not we're going
to round people up and shoot you. So it's it's just hidden enough from the eyes of anybody
not paying attention. It just seems more and more like that. Or Joe Biden, another example,
like when I look at almost every world leader, I see that now. Like I don't see. I don't.
I I just see I just see people who are there to push through stuff. And as you say, Gabriel,
like there will be people who try to fit it into the system. But that's certainly not
how it came in. And it's certainly not the intention to have it reflect whatever national
sovereignty it's trying to wedge into. Do you see that as well? Like, do we have any
legitimate world leaders at this point? I mean, I can't speak for the world. I don't
know. Maybe there's a country out there that has has something good going for it. I'm I'm
very skeptical. Like, to be honest, I called it the Liberals Solutions Network because
I'm like, here's what we need to do about this, because I don't have any ideas on. Oh,
here's how we can fix the governance structure. I'll admit to me, you know, the reason why
my logo is shields and not swords is because I think the only way we get out of this is
by protecting each other. We need to make strong communities that can actually support
each other, whether it's digitally, whether it's financially, whether it's, you know,
with the real stuff that's needed. You know, I just focused on a small slice of this overall
picture. And the real tragic thing is, is that I think the governance structure as it
exists, you know, in the last tools of the technocracy, I wrote about the human dominance
hierarchy, which is my placeholder for basically whatever this thing is, it has certain components.
And there are different people, like you say, who want to smash everything down. You know,
I'll call them the radicals. And there are people who just want, you know, let's just,
let's just make it, you know, fix it. The people on our side who are trying to just
make it work within the system. I have different advice for people in those two camps. I think
if you're on one side of those barriers, we can still work together as long as we recognize,
you know, there are some overlapping goals. And I do think that's one of the big ways
they keep people, you know, in these little silos where it's like, oh, you're a reformer.
Therefore, you know, you're a sellout shill. Oh, you're a radical. Therefore, you're trying
to get us all arrested. To me, the authentic radical side of things is you want to fundamentally
change whatever this dominance hierarchy is. And the reason why liver's illusions is the
shields is because the way to do that is defensively, not offensive.
Or maybe we should say even before that, the radical thing is we should think about the
health of humans first. Right. Is is, you know, we've been in this rat park. This rat
park is the result of this hierarchy. You know, it's the hierarchical command then interacting
with us as a system. Right. And then the radical thing is to say, hey, if what we want is the
healthiest world that we're sharing in terms of our interaction with it, then what needs
to happen in in that protocol level, you know, way up where the hierarchy is forming, can
we do it from the root up and compete with that that's coming down at us? And I think
this is a critical conversation. I would like to revisit it like as in let's let's come
back and talk about this aspect of things later, because I think this is important.
You know, the Fediverse, you know, is it's it's meant for this conversation. But we you
know, this conversation goes deep and we can put a pin in it here and come back to it.
And on that, Gabe, this has been absolutely fantastic. Like I said, I've been writing
down notes this entire time, services I've never heard of. I've pulled up tabs for the
websites that you gave that have the checklist. There's been robust discussion going on in
the locals chat. People are finding that you are a fantastic presenter. So I think people
want to hear more from you, which was sort of what got me thinking we should have you
on in the first place, because you had put together this fantastic presentation that
I thought would be and I think correctly, I thought would be a great basis for a conversation
like this. So given that you've got all of these fantastic resources, we've got the
substack link, the link to your substack scrolling on the bottom of the screen here it is for
those listening audio only Libre Solutions Network dot substack dot com. And I will bring
it up on screen now. Do you have anything you want us to leave the audience with any
any instructions, any suggestions anywhere people can find you that we haven't thought
about yet? Love one another. That's great. That's wonderful. Yeah, you know, when you
go back that's your source protocol level. A lot a lot makes sense. Right? Well, I do
mean that sincerely, though. I mean, the more we can do in our lives, whether it's technologically,
whether it's in other areas, the more we can maximize maximize genuine joy with each other,
the better we will all be regardless of what we're facing. True story. True story indeed.
Well, I'm going to that was a very short and succinct plug, which is excellent. That gives
me a moment to plug rounding the earth dot locals dot com, where as I mentioned, we've
had robust discussion and a solid community of people who have joined us over there once
again for a fantastic chat. So go rounding the earth dot locals dot com. Sign up to be
a free member to stay in the loop with everything we're doing, or you can become a paid supporter
for as little as five bucks a month. You can even still for a couple more days get a free
month. RTE March twenty twenty three is the promo code. And we do fantastic weekly supporters
only live streams and a bunch of other fun stuff. And most importantly, we love each
other. We we create community. This may be a centralized platform, but the way the decentralized
platform start is by connecting with people who then have the idea to go and make their
own thing. So I think that's what we're starting to do here. So that's what I recommend people
do. And in the meantime, any final thoughts, gentlemen, anything we want to leave people
with? I think Gabriel hit the nail on the head. I mean, that that, you know, the source
of the protocol is is a healthy human community and love and and, you know, that that interaction
right there, everything else springs from it. And you make more sense of a lot of it
when you when you come back to that route. Thank you, guys. It's been a pleasure. Thanks
for joining us. OK, we'll see you guys again very soon. Goodbye, everybody.