Ladies and gentlemen, 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 so-called plandemonium.
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 local, Substack, Rumble at all to join a burgeoning
research community and to help us unflatten the earth.
My name is Liam Sturgis.
I am a musician, music producer, writer slash editor coming at you live from the very, very
rainy Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and I will be your host for today.
And as always, there's a yin to the yang or the yang to the yin, so to say.
Please allow me to introduce the author of Rounding the Earth and my co-host for the
podcast, Matthew Crawford.
Good afternoon, Matthew.
Hello.
How are you?
I'm well, thanks.
How are you?
I'm good.
I assume it's not storming quite as much in Texas as it is here.
No, we have like it's a beautiful day in the Dallas area.
You guys are having a storm?
Yeah, well, I was sending you a message saying that I was concerned my power was going to
go out.
I think it will survive, but it's a bit bluster.
But no bluster in our discussion today.
No bluster coming from our guests today.
Look at that transition.
I'm really excited about the conversation today.
You and I have been talking for a few weeks about the prospect of doing a follow up to
a discussion we had.
In fact, let me pull it up here, a discussion we had with our friend Gabriel of Libre Solutions
Network where we talked about Web 3.0 or the next generation of online services that can
be used to decentralize technology and combat the various issues we have with centralized
big tech.
I think what's really cool at the moment we have this conversation, people started to
reach out to Gabe.
I listened to at least one interview, radio interview that he gave afterward.
Well how about this?
Let's bring our guests on one by one and we'll ask Gabriel.
Hello Gabriel, how are you?
Great.
How about you guys?
Doing very well.
Now because Matthew brought this up, in fact, I'm going to bring on Mark as well and we'll
do a full round of introductions, but I want to ask you about that interview.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome on Mark Kulak of Housatonic Live.
How are you, sir?
I'm fantastic.
Thank you for having me on.
Thank you for joining us.
So we're going to have you introduce yourself in a second, Mark.
You've been on before, but not necessarily for a round table, but I want to focus just
for a sec.
Gabe, you had this fantastic interview.
Do you want to tell us about that?
Yeah, Havoré from, you might know him from Geopolitics and Empire.
He had me on TNT radio, which I had a lot of fun.
It was great to talk to him.
Honestly, I'm a big fan of his work as well.
So I was shocked when I got the email.
It's like interview requests.
Well, I don't get those, but here I am.
Yeah, I hadn't heard him conduct an interview before.
That was an introduction for me of him, but he sounds like a real smart guy.
He ran a real good interview.
Well, we'll make sure to get a link for that and I'll post it in the comments as we go.
Now in the meantime, more broadly, Gabriel, you are of Libre Solutions Network.
Do you want to just really quickly introduce yourself in general and recap the work that
you, the wonderful work that you do?
Thank you.
Yeah, I would definitely summarize my work as I am basically trying to market online
digital freedom.
How can people think about ways they can liberate themselves from either dragnet surveillance,
information control, and honestly, sometimes the tools themselves?
Fantastic.
And we'll have in fact, the link to LibreSolutions.network as well as the next website about to show
or in the description of the video.
Now Mark, welcome to the show.
Do you want to just briefly introduce yourself to the guests who, if they for some reason
have not yet become familiar with your work?
Do you want to introduce yourself to them?
Absolutely.
My name is Mark Kulak.
I live just outside of Boston and about four years or so ago, I started a little company
called Hustonic Information Technology Services.
And I have a program called Hustonic.live.
Hustonic is the name of a river in the state of Connecticut for those outside of the region
may be unfamiliar with it.
And my background is in the data storage industry, electronic data storage industry as a software
engineer, as well as a product marketing director, competitive intelligence analyst.
And several life circumstances, Lyme disease, drug addiction, et cetera, pulled me into
the world of online research about six or seven years or so ago.
And about four years ago, I decided to give it a full time go.
And the goal was to merge my own background with the needs of research and other people
in the community.
The program has been running for about four years.
Right now we have a little over a thousand episodes and I manage a very large archive
of information, all publicly sourced stuff or stuff that was acquired through paywalls
at the very least.
And once again, the link to your website is available in the description, no matter where
you watch in the video to your audience.
And Mark's got a tremendous, as he says, a back catalog of research that is being updated
daily, as far as I can tell.
And it is somewhere I go to reference information all the time.
And I just want to give a quick shout out as well to Let's Talk America, episode one,
which just happened.
I was privileged to watch the premiere of this live as it happened.
Mark, do you want to just explain what this particular show is?
Oh, it's a new show.
It's actually run by my friend Marie Clark, who lives not too far from me in the state
of New Hampshire.
She is a survivor of the Remdesivir protocol.
And that experience led her to using her skills, conversation, networking, professional networking,
running interviews to now start a program where she's interviewing other people who
have been through that, either loss of a family member or survived it.
This is her first episode.
I'm merely providing some technical expertise and hosting for it.
And in here, she interviews a Laurie Sederstrom, whose husband was a fairly well-known conservative
talk show host in the Arizona area who passed in, I think it was August of 2020, a brutal
almost 60 days in the hospital.
Much of it was effectively malpractice involving Remdesivir.
And it took her a long time to finally step up and to have the ability to recover enough
to start asking, has this happened to anyone else?
And sadly, it has happened to a lot of other people.
So I talk about some of my story a little bit here, but I think the most important focus
with respect to the theme of the program, perhaps, is going to be Laurie Sederstrom's
story.
I think you're going to see a lot of her going forward.
She is a very smart, very strong woman who definitely wants to get the word out and start
networking.
And congratulations to my friend, Marie, for finally getting her own program started.
Yeah, a huge congratulations to Marie and a big thanks to Laurie for coming out and
being so brave.
And it was very difficult to listen to and simultaneously so tremendously well done when
you have earnest people coming out and discussing their real lived experiences, even in this
tremendously painful context.
It was a very worthwhile listen.
And I hope everybody watching this right now goes and listens as well.
And I'm going to put the link in the comments as well.
Thank you, Liam, for mentioning that.
I appreciate that.
Thank you.
I am a big believer that this is exactly what is changing the environment, not alt media
turning into several large nodes that are pushing out what sometimes seems like templated
information, but conversations with real people that everyone can scale.
My wife and I had a conversation with a boot seller in Fort Worth who told us about going
to a Baylor Scott hospital, or I don't know if it's Baylor Scott White or something like
that hospital, and them trying to convince him for a week while he was there to take
remdesivir.
And he kept shutting them down, but it was injured.
He's probably in his 60s, I'm guessing.
And it just sounded like he was being pressured and targeted, but that he had just enough
information to dodge it.
Thank goodness.
Now perhaps we can use this as our way to introduce the premise of today's show because
on your channel, Who's Satanic, Mark, you have gone in depth on the history of this
drug now called remdesivir, also called Veclary, has had some other more coded type names as
early drugs tend to.
And interestingly, a lot of that information, perhaps so much as including its Wikipedia
page, have been wiped, memory hold, altered in some way.
And that's part one.
Part two now is the concern that real stories like the one that Marie and Laurie and yourself
have just shared, that those themselves could be at risk of being wiped as well as we've
seen with, for example, Facebook groups of 100,000 plus people with injuries from various
medical countermeasures being simply vanished from the internet and that information being
lost to those who may be looking for it.
So this, to me, spells out a huge need not only to be able to openly share this on a
variety of platforms, but to then be able to capture, archive, protect, distribute in
a sort of more like a library sense this sort of information.
I'm wondering as someone from this field, someone whose expertise is in exactly this,
what would the first thing be that you would start this conversation with?
What is data storage beyond what people think of as downloading a file to their computer?
What does it mean to have data integrity?
How would you start this conversation?
Well, data integrity is ensuring that there is no loss of quality of a data set.
There's no frame within a video that the bits flip, the values change and maybe the colors
change or it's not visible anymore.
That's the data integrity part and there's a pretty high amount of quality on most data
storage devices, even in your phone and so on.
So that usually is not too much of a problem anymore, but it's protecting against the risks,
the risks of the environment, the physical environment, as well as the political environment,
the human environment.
And those risks include, well, first of all, user error, accidentally deleting something,
maybe overriding a file, opening up a document and deleting a bunch of pages accidentally,
wanting the older version back.
So there's diversioning and protecting yourself.
There's making sure that your device could fall into the bathtub or get stolen or something
of that nature.
And house fire, so that can you have a copy of your data?
Can you restore it somehow?
I'll be a little bit inconveniently if one of those things happen.
And then of course, there is the newer threat.
And this is something that wasn't spoken about too extensively when I worked at Dell Corporation
and EMC and NetApp.
And that is, well, what if the feds come in and say, we're confiscating your data?
And so in that case, how do you survive those challenges?
And many people will say, well, I'm using the cloud.
Well, that's great.
You have an off-site copy that will protect you against your device being stolen.
House fire, et cetera, will probably give you versioning so that you can access old
versions of your files, however, that can be confiscated as well.
And I don't save anything illegal.
As a matter of fact, if you listen to my program, I tend to be very skeptical of most whistleblower
stories even.
And as someone who had to reverse engineer multimillion dollar storage systems like with
EMC, I developed the craft of just taking conversations with people, white papers, old
videos, and actually breaking it down to data storage diagrams.
It would take a while, but I could usually get pretty far with just public information.
It was scary, actually, to some people.
They were convinced I couldn't do it, but I could.
And now I've sort of applied that to my own work.
So there is those threats.
And this is being mapped, of course, right now with the tools that are currently available
on the internet, the platforms, the Wikipedia is probably the one I talk about most, which
sort of works on a singular truth model.
There is only one truth.
And because there's a belief that there's only one truth with respect to narratives,
it can be tweaked a little bit.
Little facts can be left off.
Narratives can be remolded.
And based upon someone's seniority on a platform, they can have a lot of influence on the final
story.
If I could interject, even beyond the seniority of editors or something like that, the rule
got laid down like there's a standard for sourcing.
And certainly there's gradations in quality, but you make a bright line somewhere in the
middle, and then all of a sudden you're creating an inherent bias, but also if there are people
who want to futz with information, they now know exactly who to go after to futz with
that information, and to the extent that anything is corrupted there, now we're entering an
age in which we have these new AI tools like chat GPT.
And those can only be as good with their information as the sources that they look to.
So there's so many downstream effects that are exploding into society right now.
So we've got to, we need to pay attention to the marks and gaves of the world and the
solutions that they're looking for on the back end of all of that process.
It's a much bigger can of worms that I was jumping into, so to say, than I thought when
I started.
I knew that there were some challenges that our own family saw, things which weren't being
represented effectively or in a useful way for other people to take action or to avoid
certain risks.
And then that turned into, everything was on fire when Trump became president.
And I was like, okay, what's going on here?
Because I always knew that there was bias in the world and media bias to some extent,
but I was not yet ready to comprehend just how serious it was.
So this mission has sort of grown over time.
It first turned to new off, we could just get a little bit of background on Adam Schiff
or something just lame like that.
And the grand scheme of things, it's like, wow, I actually thought that that would be
the pinnacle of revealing stuff.
It's way deeper than that.
And although I've sort of veered out of the tech work that I've done, I do sense that
ultimately I'm going to be going back in that direction.
Again, no one could have expected this pandemic, at least I didn't, now.
And not just inconveniencing us and maybe a few lives lost, but actually reorganizing
our entire society.
So it's a very pressing thing.
And it's made it challenging to say, okay, I've done enough research, right?
Now I'm just going to focus on maybe making some new platforms.
Hence, I've been sort of stuck into the research work and the archival and not enough time
doing the tech work that I used to do.
I'm starting to get a little rusty there, sadly.
I'm almost a little intimidated to be with Gabe here, to be honest with you.
But it is an honor, just the same.
But that's sort of like the high level view, hopefully, to get things started.
That helps Liam.
Yeah, Gabe, what's your take?
How would you introduce the topic of data storage or information preservation?
How would you take the baton that Mark just passed us?
Well, my focus recently has been ways that people who aren't like Mike and I, who aren't
very familiar with this stuff, how can we get people to a level where they can actually
participate?
Because one of the biggest problems is that when people want to participate, they just
rush to whatever Facebook group or new service that offers an opportunity.
But the truth is there are a lot of ways we can create our own opportunities.
My most recent piece I wrote about the best website for a single person, which I say static
websites that you can generate without knowing web design, without knowing any of the coding
side of it.
You just run this static site generator on your content.
As long as it's formatted correctly, it will spit out an entire website that you can host
inexpensively.
But really, like Mark would probably point out, this is only part of the picture.
Not only do you have to have the ability to present something, but you need something
to present.
And in addition to this, static site generators are awesome, but there's a technique I've
noticed certain people using, especially in the online privacy space, where you pair it
with a Git repository.
And you don't need to know a whole lot of technical information to use Git-like tools.
There are even user interfaces built on top of Git, where people can collaborate at a
really low technical level.
You don't need a whole lot of skill.
It doesn't require a whole lot of different software.
And I find the biggest advantage is that you can use your own stuff.
So I'm planning on writing about this technique of using Git and static websites.
I want to call it Operation Beehive, because the honey is the information.
You know?
Sorry, just a point of clarification.
What is Git?
So Git is the...
Mark mentioned earlier, you want versioning.
You want to be able to go back to a previous state.
And Git is the software programmers use to collaborate on code.
But the nice thing is, is code is just text.
Really any kind of text, whether it's latex, whether it's documents, whether it's even
like large data sets, you can use Git for all those different types of workflows.
And I consider that tool itself important enough to work into the workflow, because
then you get the versioning, but you also get the collaboration.
And it's funny, a friend of mine pointed out to me that Git has been used by the older
tech wizards who you can do Git over email.
You don't need a centralized service.
You can spit up your own email services.
It is way more powerful a tool than people give it credit, which is why a lot of my work
has been going back to the foundations.
What are the really basic stuff people can use that doesn't have as much as a learning
curve because they're ancient.
My engines make the harsh word, but do I recall correctly that Microsoft bought GitHub?
They did.
But the nice thing is, is you can run your own code for it.
You can like there's four Joe, there's a what's the other ones get lab is the other one.
You can self-host what most of GitHub does.
Obviously, you won't get co-pilot.
And I believe the pages functionality is different.
But that's the thing.
The tool that GitHub is built on top of is something anyone can use whether or not you
touch GitHub.
Would you describe it like a WordPress where the product has sort of become a right up
a language a platform in and of itself?
Yeah.
But it does slow down adoption perhaps a little bit when people have to think through like
every time you know, prior tech interests come in and they see that somebody has has
built a nice spaceship to know that has launched with some new technology.
Then there is sort of there's the secondary challenge of okay, now we need to make that
technology easier to use within the larger ecosystem.
And for more people to find it.
Like I wouldn't have known the other platforms that you mentioned.
And I was actually just trying to write them down and accidentally wrote GitHub down.
What did you mention again?
There's code.
There's sort of there's four Joe, which is what I run for myself.
It's based off get T, how do you call that for Joe, for Joe.
And then there's GitLab, which is what was basically the big competitor for GitHub.
And you can host that yourself as well.
Okay now, Gabriel mentioned a great point about people hosting their own websites or
using using Wix or Google sites or whatever the case is.
How do you how do you immortalize that information though?
How do you ensure that it continues if someone misses a credit card payment or you know,
when they pass on, you know, how or at the very least stop doing their work, right?
How do you how do you ensure it continues on who then takes ownership of that?
Where does it go?
What is conceptually nice about a collaborative platform like Wikipedia is multiple people
can contribute to this shared body of knowledge.
However, ultimately, then they become gatekeepers who own it and massage it.
And you know, we'll erase a few facts here and a few facts over there.
And suddenly the the what people understand to be the narrative changes just by masking
facts.
Okay.
So these are all you know, these are I don't know what all the solutions are.
I have some ideas have been floating around in my head.
But the first part is to understanding the limitations of the of the of the platforms
and the tools that we have.
I have an idea in my head of something like interplanetary file protocol, where you know,
many people somewhat somewhat like oh gosh, we're everybody's storing different things
and getting the files downloaded from other people.
What?
Quarantine.
Thank you.
I'm thinking like interplanetary file protocol with with torrenting where so long as storing
something is either worth it to you or worth it to you plus the payments, you know, micro
payments that come in from other people searching for it and downloading it from you or something
like that, so long as that value exists, then the information will exist.
And in a sense that that may be sort of like the correct economic pruning of all the information
storage in the world.
So perhaps we are beginning a true optimization process of in an age where we probably have
you know, gone so many directions with information that we haven't organized it well, and we
haven't, you know, optimized the value of it well.
So I bet that there will be a combination of the collaborative tools, but also like
the individual file storage.
Well, I have different economic values to build on this.
Actually one of the things that the Internet Archive, the Wayback Machine has done that's
somewhat controversial is if your website changes your robots dot txt file, which is
basically what it tells Google to index or not, a website can choose not to be archived
by the Wayback Machine.
Now ostensibly this is for privacy reasons, you know, if somebody has, you know, certain
profiles you want to be able to lock it off.
But the thing is, is that means it itself is moderated by the websites themselves.
Now maybe I should be quiet about it so that people don't proactively do it, but that's
the option that's out there.
Have you noticed many websites doing that?
I have identified a couple in my journeys who have gone that step and actually made it so that they cannot be archived.
You know, this URL is excluded from viewing, I believe is the message you get.
But have you noticed that beyond just a couple examples?
I haven't noticed it come up in my area because I am looking into specifically how to get
things that are relatively uncontroversial done.
But I'm trying to package them in a way that's useful for, well, really anything.
I haven't seen it, but I've seen URLs that I was at the very least surprised was not
in the Wayback Machine.
That doesn't mean they were ever there.
It's just surprising that some URLs are not there at certain times or that they didn't
start until certain dates.
Well, Mark, I'm sure you've seen, I know you've been looking at the World Health Organization
website a fair amount, and perhaps you've noticed they in maybe it was mid 2020 decided
that they were going to do an entire website reshuffle where it's not that the stuff was
deleted.
It's just you're going to find it at this new URL.
Now we've just moved where everything is stored.
So I didn't know that.
You wonder why they did that, though.
You wonder.
I mean, sometimes engineers get in there and they just they are they just they they think
they have a better way of doing things.
And maybe it is better, but they think change for the sake of change.
And it just winds up being complicated.
There may have been a nefarious reason behind it as well.
But it's a good observation.
Changing the URLs.
Yeah.
Or reshifting of priorities of what the WHO would prefer the public focus on, perhaps
if they're engaging in messaging campaigns one way or the other.
It could make sense.
Now, I want to turn to Vilma Betancourt in the chat who said Mark has a structure for
saving and backing up his data.
Can he give us a peek into his system?
Now I'll qualify by saying I don't expect you to reveal anything that would be proprietary
or that would compromise the, you know, the safety of your system.
But that is sort of the premise of why I figured you'd be an excellent guest on that specific
topic, because you do appear to have a very good system.
And you gave us just a bit of a sneak peek just on this call here before we went live.
So I'm wondering, is that something you can introduce to the audience at a basic level?
Well, I would like to be using a more sophisticated database than online spreadsheets.
But I've made decisions to go simple and to focus on how to say the data management rules
as opposed to building up a system to do a lot of the automation.
However, at some point, I do need more scripts to be able to validate that I have everything
perfectly indexed.
But what I have is I have my own proprietary identification system for digital assets that
I save.
I would encourage people if they have found something of interest on the internet to save
their own copy.
Nice to have a link to something, but you need to save it.
You need to print it out to a PDF file.
If it's a video on YouTube, you can download the MP4.
And make sure you note the date that you saved it, because these digital assets that was
at that particular web address can change at any time.
And one of the most important pieces of metadata of any digital asset, I'm sure Gabriel would
agree, is the date that you found it.
And you say, oh, the Wikipedia page for so-and-so says this.
I'm like, well, when did you look at?
Oh, there are no New York Times articles on this particular subject there.
I just researched not to get into the weeds on something, but a company called IntroGene,
I-N-T-R-O-G-E-N-E.
And I forget something to do with adenovirus-vectored vaccines.
And it was mentioned in an interview of someone that I don't want to talk too much about right
now.
We wouldn't want to divide, right?
Exactly.
So I went to the newspapers.com, and I'm like, wow, there's not one mention of this company.
How does it happen?
How does that even happen?
And then one way you can verify that it should have been there is if you'll find 24 articles
in the Wall Street Journal.
So that doesn't mean that it's erased.
At the very least, again, Gabe understands this stuff.
It's unindexed, which is hilarious.
I've had times where I've searched for something on the ancestrynewspapers.com, can't find
it.
And then I'll actually find articles with that same topic later on having those articles
found through other methods.
So they don't always delete things.
Sometimes they just delete the metadata, the indexing for it.
But on my end, you need to have a unique ID.
I have a proprietary one.
You need to save your assets somehow.
I have a unique name for every file.
I always save the date.
And in addition to a bunch of topical pages that you've seen, about 1,000 or so of those,
I have about 50,000 digital assets saved behind the scenes.
New York Times articles, I have the whole collection of Sandia National Laboratory newsletters
that were bi-weekly from 1951 to 1998.
So that thing is just a freaking gold mine.
For example, I have all kinds of assets like that.
That's clearly a big deal.
I'm sure you guys know of Johnny Vedmore.
Yes.
And the story that he told that most stuck with me was how he and his roommates were
growing weed inside their home.
And the police come and knock on the door and come in.
And they didn't take the weed plants.
They took his boxes of saved newspaper clippings.
Whoa.
This is sort of what shook him and turned him into a journalist.
The fact that information control is that valuable.
It's so valuable that police who don't even care sometimes to do what you would think
their ordinary job would be.
Clearly we have a lot of instances in which we know that police are just stopping controlling
crime in the United States at this point, but in many countries.
But they're interested in his saved newspaper clippings.
So go ahead.
One more thing.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
And again, it's cool to have a fellow techie on the line here.
I go out of my way to avoid vendor lock-in, to avoid platform lock-in.
There are many individuals right now who are doing amazing research.
And they will dump it all onto a particular proprietary website, web portal.
Maybe Wix would be one of them.
Or on Twitter even.
And all of their data is on that one platform.
The only way, they don't really have a backup copy.
I mean, they could request a copy of it.
If their account is deleted, it goes away.
And even if they do have a copy, well, how are you going to refactor that for another
platform?
So while I use a very, I actually mostly use Google sites right now.
Not because it's the best.
It just happens to be what I started with.
But I'm always thinking of if within the next hour, if Google says, we've just shut off
all your accounts, your Google Drive is gone, it's all gone, goodbye.
Can I recreate that?
And even if it takes me a few weeks, that's okay.
It's a pain, right?
But I can do that.
I'm not locked in.
I don't use any formatting, any of the way that I've saved the data, named it, organized
it, that's specific to Google Drive, Google Sites, or anything else.
And I would encourage people to think about that.
Run that mental exercise, whatever platform you use.
If it goes away, what are you going to do?
Do you at least have a copy?
And if you do have a copy, how are you going to re-present that somewhere else?
Being able to do it is good.
How much work will it be?
Is it going to take you another year to rebuild it?
So just ask the questions and when people start thinking about it, they'll start architecting
their layout better.
So I focus on that more so at that level.
And not so much on the, I mean, I used to do all my websites in raw HTML.
Right now I'm not doing that anymore.
Although I wish I could in a way because that would be portable.
More portable than going straight to, like for example, a Wix website.
Over seven years, how many times have you read or architected your hierarchy of information?
I ask because I've done it now.
I think I'm in the middle of the fourth time in three years.
Well the question seems to be how often, not how many times.
Not many.
It may be that-
I'm using a model, Matt, that I learned when I was the top data storage division analyst
at Dell.
And I started learning this at NetApp.
So I went through multiple permutations of this.
I would have to save lots of documents, user guides, service guides, and so on.
I would save demos that people would post on YouTube and I had to have a way to be able
to organize all this stuff and to make sure that the legal department would be okay with
it.
So I've sort of have, I've been doing this for a while.
Okay.
So you're back-
I was an engineer for about 12 years.
I did OS's and drivers.
So I was always at, you know, very meticulous, right, on how I had the right code.
And I developed a model and I more or less have used that model, which is, it's not patented
or anything.
But you just have to list out the rules and be rigorous about following those rules.
And there's a benefit to that.
And I'll, I'll pass the mic over to Liam here.
The other benefit of that is as a researcher, most of the most amazing things that I've
found as a researcher has come when I was not looking for it.
It has come when I'm kicking back and enjoying a cream soda, organizing my files for hours
and hours and hours and hours.
I'll just find like, wow, this is a crazy name.
That looks familiar.
You know, because I'm trying to get everything to match my particular proprietary layout
to the rules that I've had.
And I'm like, holy crap, I have that document saved somewhere else.
Holy crap.
There's a suspicious R guy in here.
Interesting.
You know, and then, and then stuff just kind of falls out from there because we, when we're
looking for something, we only see what we want to find.
And when you're more relaxed as an analyst, and usually that happens when you're just
in your data, but you're just organizing it, you're not looking for stuff.
And now you're amazed.
You're not looking for models that you've built instead of search algorithm that you
use.
Yes.
Yeah.
Cause you're, you're subject to confirmation bias by default, right?
But I've on the research side, I've experienced exactly what you're describing.
And I think I, I watch people like you and some others who have identified this as a,
you know, as a fact that, that you can fall into kind of missing the picture if you're
just looking for something.
So I've come into it a little consciously.
And so it's very relatable.
You know, I'm working on a report right now, just a bit of a background on a couple of
people for a letter that's going to be written.
And there's a basic premise behind the question, you know, you know, look for this kind of
thing on this person.
And almost inevitably the story winds up being even more interesting, but not in the direction
that people are looking.
Bingo.
You got it.
Yeah.
Mark, it makes it really hard to stick to deadlines.
Yes, it does.
Yeah.
Because you got to now, the question is what's the goal here?
Cause if you're honest, then you're not going to want to, you know, settle for subpar data,
especially if you're, you know, maybe accusing or suggesting somebody may have a conflict
of interest, which is often the subject of my research.
Anyway, I want to relate in that I, so as a musician,
so I went to recording school and at recording school, there was a very solid rule, an unbreakable
law, which is if it doesn't exist in three places, it doesn't exist at all.
And the reason there is if you're a recording engineer or a producer and you're recording
something and it's a great session, you've got a three gig, you know, a session file
and you've got it on your portable drive, but then you drop it down the toilet while
that entire project is gone.
And oftentimes that's hundreds, thousands of dollars of work that's gone into that.
And then what?
You don't necessarily have insurance for that.
So you have two drives, you have cloud backups and I've made this mistake, luckily in low
stakes scenarios, projects have been lost and I learned.
So I want to tell you what I've done now based on what I believe your advice might be for
people and you critique my system.
Okay.
You ready?
So when I find something online, the first thing I do, I'm going to share my screen here.
Oops.
I'm going to share my screen.
So let's say I'm looking for just, yeah, like just a page.
So let's say it's on this Wikipedia page, just a random one.
It has nothing to do with this.
And the first thing I do when I get this almost by reflex is I do two rounds of digital archiving
using third party services.
The first is archive.today.
I have a fun little button loaded in as a extension on my, I use opera browser, at least
on this computer.
And it automatically, when I hit the button, starts the archive.
Great.
And I also do the same thing, but on the Wayback Machine, which is probably the one most people
are familiar with.
So simultaneously, you've got two digital copies that are not proprietary, or they're
not behind anybody's paywall.
They're just accessible to anybody else who may then come on those services later and
may need to find a digital archive.
The next thing I do usually is I then put it into a format that is publicly accessible.
So let's say I'm organizing it on our Campfire Wiki, which is essentially our version of
what you've got with your Huesotonic research site.
Or it could be Wikipedia.
Sometimes I myself will go in and at the same time edit the Campfire Wiki, edit Wikipedia,
and now edit Wiki Spooks, because I'm an editor there as well, as some found out in a rather
hilarious turn of events.
And so there, now it's accessible to the public.
And usually this is all very quick and easy to do.
But what I've started to do, this is the part that you've introduced in my world, is not
just in the music context, but taking what's on here and capturing it.
For example, Opera has the ability to save the entire page as a PDF.
In the case of Opera, full functioning links and everything, which I believe signifies
that it's getting all of the metadata you'd need in order to be somewhat forensically
accurate.
That then gets downloaded onto a hard drive.
I've called it Campfire Wiki Drive A.
And I want to talk about, I want to have you guys explain the difference between different
kinds of hard drives in a minute, but it's a hard disk drive.
I have two separate cloud services that I then back up to.
One of them is just constantly backing up the entirety of all of my drives, just on
an ongoing basis.
And I have nothing sensitive being backed up.
It's specifically targeted just to what I want to accidentally spill into the public
sphere if that were to happen.
And I have a separate file sharing system that links my computers in real time.
And then I can send to a, it's called a vault, a more permanent cloud storage.
So in summary, I have two hard drive, oh, sorry.
And then once a month I back up this first hard drive, I clone it to a second hard drive.
And you keep it.
But perhaps there's a step beyond that, that you do that many others don't.
What are your thoughts on my system and what would you add on to it or take away or what
would you change?
Would you like to go first, Gabe?
I'll let you go first because I have a question to follow up that could be suited to the broader
or you specifically.
Well, the good news is you will not lose your data to disaster at all.
The good news is if you have a machine failure or theft, you're not going to lose your data.
The good news is you have lots of versions of your data.
If you accidentally override it or delete it, you're in good shape.
How that is indexed, at the very least, depending upon when you're backing up your data, you
may not have a central index for it, for the different versions.
But that's okay at your scale and my scale as well.
You don't need that.
The only potential risk or vulnerability is if there's a request to confiscate your digital
assets, which will include or could include all cloud copies as well.
Now, of course, the stuff that goes into the Internet Archive might be exempt from it.
There is a lot of really interesting discussion right now that's being had and this week in
tech has some good people that have been covering it.
I wish I had more time for this particular topic and that is the Internet Archive, what
to do about books that have been put on there and other copyrighted material, when can it
be shared, when not to.
It's a conversation that needs to be had.
So most of the stuff that you've been putting on there is stuff that was already in the
Internet anyways, which is good.
But each month I invest about $200 or so for another 2 to 4 terabyte SSD that I just send
out to a different person.
I have dozens of volunteers right now who have taken drives.
Should something happen?
I own all the assets that are on these drives until such a time when I don't care.
But this is really my protection.
So these also give me an additional versioning, a copy of everything that I had in my archive
at the particular time that I make them.
It also means that they're offline.
It also means that they are no longer arguably confiscatable.
So if someone needs to or is willing enough to be my friend and make sure that the data
lives on, that's still the case.
So it's a little bit of an expensive venture and I know some people probably will not do
anything with them.
It also means that I need to have things organized in a way that it's compact and efficient.
There's no reason to store every HD video I've downloaded in highest quality.
It's also important to have a directory system, a file folder system that I'm not putting
my iMovies in there, not putting my personal photo album, my own resumes and all of this
stuff.
I have the web pages that I have, source documents, versioning of my Wikipedia type file system,
my database files, which are all versioned, et cetera.
And I have a lot of copies of them all over the place.
So it's again, it's an extra couple hundred dollars a month, but it's that last little
piece.
And if you're a company, let's say like you're a law firm, you can't necessarily do something
like that because you have laws on how long you can retain data.
If you're a law firm, you need to hold on to things for, what name escapes me right
now, for usually like seven years.
And then after that, it becomes a liability.
After that, you need to destroy it because now you could have data out there that could
come back and haunt somebody in a case, right?
I don't have that.
So I don't have those types of, it's so embarrassing, I can't think of the name right now, policies
that I need to follow regarding data destruction.
And I don't really have to deal with privacy too much either.
For some, for a company with a lot of legal requirements, you need to have your offsite
backups and they also need to be sure that only certain people can see them, maybe even
at certain times before they automatically get deleted.
That gets really complicated.
And that's why backup managers are sometimes the highest paid people in a company because
they have to have networking experience, data security experience, as well as know how to
use something like com fault or net backup or, you know, a networker or whatever the
tool is.
It's incredibly, incredibly complicated stuff.
For me, I just need to make sure that the data is invulnerable and I have versions of
it.
So again, you have to talk to each person.
What are your requirements?
What are the legal risks that you need to meet?
And you need to have that discussion.
And I think that most online researchers, archivists such as myself, have a very similar
set of rules that we can adhere to.
And I think that's good.
So what I just said wouldn't necessarily speak well to, you know, a bank or a law firm.
They have different requirements.
Okay.
A lot we could dive off of from there.
Gabe, you had a question.
So I'll first get into it by pointing out that there's a tool created.
It's called Wayback and I'll, I meant to throw it here.
It is I put it in, I'll actually throw it in the chat.
Liam, I put it in our chat.
It's called Wayback.
And what it'll do is it'll upload something to the internet archive, as well as keep your
own copy and distribute it over, you know, Tor hidden services, your own local, you know,
web server.
It has a lot of flexibility.
I'd almost call it a Swiss army knife of archiving.
It's an excellent tool.
And you know, when you really go into the weeds of what tools are available for this
kind of activity, one of the things I'm curious about is how does AI change the game?
And so OpenAI created this tool Whisper that is excellent at transcribing audio or video.
If you turn it into audio of at least a single speaker with multiple speakers, you'd have
to go through the effort of saying this person said that that person said that.
But at least for a single speaker, you can get a transcription, which means in some cases,
you may not need the recording, you may not need the video.
And so my question is, what do you guys think about compressing your archives instead of
having to lug around, you know, terabytes of video if you're doing, you know, video
for this kind of purpose?
Why not compress it down to a transcript and some screenshots?
And that's way easier to store and manage and distribute in a lot of cases.
I agree that the ability to transcribe is a lot of it's done automatically right now
for most YouTube videos.
It's amazing.
It's amazing how much content we find.
And a lot of Apple products right now are doing automatic optical character recognition
as well.
So many times I've saved, you know, just raw images of articles and it's finding words
on them.
So and I didn't even say, hey, you should run OCR net.
It used to be something I had to do manually.
Up to your point, though, yes, there's no there's generally no reason to save everything
at the highest resolution.
And in fact, Matt kind of alluded to that earlier.
You know, I mean, we have security cameras in the house, you know, monitoring the doors.
Do we need to save the 24 seven security fee?
There's no value in that.
It really isn't.
However, sometimes there's videos where someone may they may do a very telling eye roll at
some time during a major presentation.
So you know, but saving a video at compressed, you know, 720p or 1080p, oftentimes you can
save you can reduce the overall size of the video by about 90 percent, sometimes more.
And also as someone who does content creation, it's always really helpful if you can if you
realize there's an older video out there that has a lot of value to be able to show it if
you still have it embedded into, you know, the newer video production that that I'll
make.
It can be really powerful to see someone that you've spoken about in the flesh, so to say,
actually presenting a particular topic doesn't need to be at the highest resolution, though,
a little bit more than 240p.
But you're right.
There are ways to reduce the amount of data storage dramatically with with some cleanup.
It takes time.
It does take time.
It's not nothing.
None of this is totally free.
But thank goodness transcription has been a blessing.
One of the most powerful things I've seen out there.
Almost embarrassing, though, is someone who makes videos because I my little dyslexia,
you know, I get left and right and, you know, words mixed up sometimes.
And I'm like, oh, did I really say that?
So, but yeah, I can sympathize.
Empathize.
Really weird thought.
You just made me think about the whole Sinbad episode with the Genie movie and the Mandela
Factory.
Is everybody here familiar with with that story?
Only from your substack article about it.
Can you spend can you spend a minute and just review it?
Yeah, I think the name of the movie was Shazam.
That's not to be confused with the recent.
Is it Marvel that made a movie called Shazam?
OK, the comic book movie.
So and this was part of my childhood.
I remember that this movie was made and it was out there and that I watched.
I don't know if I watched some of it or all that.
I didn't watch that sort of TV much, but I remembered it myself.
And so when there was this controversy that came out online, maybe seven, eight years
ago where some people remembered the movie and yet we were being told that the movie
didn't exist and Sinbad, who was the Genie in the movie, said, no, you guys are confusing
this with the Shaquille O'Neal movie where he played a genie.
And so, you know, there's this very real discussion of of what was going on where some people
had this memory.
You can call a false memory.
Well, finally, some it surfaced that there was, you know, somebody had the actual old
movie and then even Sinbad did an interview where he came out and said, you know, OK,
yeah, the movie was made.
And this is a government operation where people were sent to collect as many of the few copies
out there as there were of the video and destroy them in order to run some sort of an operation.
And he didn't explain what that operation was.
And he said, look, there are only about three copies left in the world.
And I'm sorry that I participated in this.
You know, and that was what he said.
So I like, you know, that's a very strange operation.
This math gaslighting of everybody in the world over whether or not this movie had ever
been made.
So here's a hypothesis.
It's a test to see how well the world is archiving information.
I wholeheartedly agree.
I mean, to me, that's what I call the collapse of the intangible, where you have AI tools
making it easy to, you know, distribute any kinds of events or, you know, evidence for
one thing or another.
And the challenge is when you can do that, how do you validate things?
I mean, I would argue we're still quite lucky that things like, you know, the way back machine
and archive.is exist, because at least we have a relatively neutral tool that will say
this website did look like this at this time according to this server.
But as time goes on, I think it will be very hard to prove authenticity.
And I think, you know, Mark, you're really right.
The versioning is probably one of the better ways we have to prove authenticity, because
if you can at least show how something has changed over time, it's almost like a proof
of work of, oh, here's my copy of events.
It's something and it's more solid than somebody just saying, oh, I have a screenshot.
That's for sure how it was.
And in a world in which, you know, we're being told by some people, I believe this myself
for a pretty good while, but there are people like Whitney Webb who are saying, look, we're
really in an era of blackmail governance.
And I think that there is an extent to which that's absolutely true.
But you know what?
All this information, if we do this right, if everybody does this the way that you two
would teach it, then in a sense, that distributed archived information with good, you know,
source control, that is in a sense blackmail against the blackmailers or blackmail against
the power levers who might themselves be leverageable by other blackmailers.
Right.
Like we the people, you know, we then would be the people again, in a sense.
And I think that's really important because what we can all do, you know, I have a saying,
the only thing bigger than too big to fail is too small to shut down.
You don't want one person holding on to all the information.
You want them to create the capability to spread around the tools so that other people
working actually independently, there's no consensus building.
There's no just people looking around.
Here's what I see.
Here's my evidence.
And then other people bringing it together.
I love this conversation.
Okay.
Now I'm going to make a proposal just and this is something that this is an idea, you
know, it's worth beating on perfectly happy for for everyone to beat on this idea.
What if what if we were if we and when I say we I'm going to use that very loosely.
Maybe it's the four of us, maybe some other people, maybe, you know, mix match, pull people
out, push people in where they need to.
What about running some sort of a modern journalism class that involves all of this, all of this
conversation right here.
Here's the techie side of journalism.
This is the techie side of journalism.
And you know what, aiming at a combination of parents and children.
And the reason the reason to reach down to children with a class like this is because
when it comes to the use of new distributed technology, it's always the 12 year olds who
get this like, you know, they're the ones who will spend six hours a day for the next
17 days and just like instantly be, you know, where their parents will be after four months.
Right.
You know, but a class, you know, could we could we leverage this scale this into a class
that that that people would come take and be able to walk away with it, knowing how
to do these things, maybe have, you know, and even like Liam, when you said, you know,
cloud services, you know, I don't know which cloud services you use.
But you know, I've been using various ones for for 20 years now or so.
And and but but it may be that that we should go through a list of what does each one do
and why do you use two different ones for what reasons?
Right.
But yeah, you know, teach a class in it.
Thoughts?
I would definitely be able to contribute to something like that.
And I'd be ecstatic to contribute.
Speaking of cloud cloud services, actually one of I started out from a position of the
cloud is evil.
We should all leave it, you know, to the maximum extent possible.
And for public information, I am softening on that, you know, websites are public.
Somebody can download it from your place.
Putting it on the cloud does not put you at any additional risk of exposure.
And so one of the things I've explored recently is for anyone who uses online hosting and
Mark might know what I mean by this is object storage.
It is very cheap posting for static files.
Some people even use this to host their static websites.
And I think for even, you know, if you have backups of information that you just want
to exist, you can throw it on an object storage bucket for cheaper than, you know, a lot of
cloud Google storage plans anyways, simply because it's optimized for storing, you know,
whether it's videos, audio clips, images, whatever.
I think object storage now, yes, there's Amazon S3, but there's other different hosting providers
have their versions of it.
And I think it's a very powerful tool to leverage leverage for these kinds of situations.
And object storage, just so that I do you mean that that external hard drive?
No, it's like I was discussing in the context of cloud options and object storage is something
you'll buy from, say, your web hosting provider.
And what makes object storage special is that it's easily automated by tools.
So for instance, I run my own Fedover server that sends all its attachments to so when
somebody makes a post, that attachment is actually on the object storage server.
Why do I bother with this so that the database for that exists on my machine, but the attachments
will load faster from that object storage.
So people could stop and get you rewind.
I still don't know the definition of object storage.
So you're you're you're far down my.
It's a cloud service that lets you or programs you run store files.
And they can read you to drive it as content addressable storage.
Not really, because it's still got like its own URL.
But it's it's how it is is basically they call it a bucket.
You have this bucket that through scripts or whatever your software is running, it throws
files on.
So what's nice is that that object storage has a ton.
It's way faster than my home connection, as an example, which is why I use it for attachments
on my Fedover server is that I don't if somebody loads my profile on it, my page will load
at a normal pace because my home Internet can handle that.
But then the attachments say there's a video.
I just uploaded a video of Danny Rancourt talking recently that will load from the bucket.
And that's in the cloud.
And that has way faster bandwidth than my own home connection.
So it's the objects that people are referencing are stored in the cloud.
So it doesn't have to go through the smaller pipe.
Right.
Your house.
And it's I think it's cheaper than Google Drive in a lot of ways.
I get 250 gigs for five dollars a month.
I don't know how competitive that is with cloud storage these days.
I see.
So then this is especially useful with videos in particular.
I think you could build your own YouTube on top of object storage if that was your goal.
But just for your own videos, not for you know, if you want everybody to use it, then
you pay out the wazoo.
But just if you have a small amount of videos, create a static website, throw your videos
on object storage, badda bing, badda boom.
It won't cost you much.
I like it.
I do like I do like the idea, Matt.
The only thing and maybe this is a picnic, as you were saying earlier, is I've been
trying to get the definitions right or the delineation between journalism and research.
I do I do mostly research and made it data management and archival.
And I would have nothing to work with if we didn't have people doing the journal out there.
You know, what did people say?
Who you know, what do I use for my sources?
Right.
And it's great to go out to events and to be part of that conversation and to provide
a journal of stuff that other people can then use as a source.
Many journalists do research.
Many researchers do some journalism.
I tend to be more on the research side.
And I say that because I've seen there are journalists who have really put themselves
into serious harm.
And it's not appropriate for me to say that the work that I do is that it should be on
par with that.
It's a different skill set with different sets of risks.
But there's I think we there's plenty of room at the table for both groups right here and
for people who do that crossover.
Yeah, that's a good distinction.
And you're right.
I shouldn't I shouldn't make it sound overly focused on journalism.
Research is actually the more specific basic skill, I guess.
And then journalism includes, you know, a different skill set that can involve it, but
but involves a lot of different work.
So this crossover and most people do a little bit of both and we need each other.
Just sometimes I find it can be helpful to know, you know, sort of, you know, like the
different interfaces that are that are out there.
And when someone is, you know, doing a lot of journalism to, you know, they sometimes
they need support, you know, to do whatever travels.
It's a different type of support structure.
Yeah.
And this is a question of like even before we were to build such a class, we would want
to talk this through it like what you're doing is you're pointing to an architecture of knowledge
and to to walk through what that is.
Somebody somebody may have like a good chart out there that already does this or something.
This may be part of the education that that that we're sort of stumbling on as we as we
imagine the need to distribute this outward.
But or maybe we're recognizing right now what that architecture is.
But there are different forms of it.
But that's good.
Awesome.
Now I'm curious.
So research and journalism, I think you're totally right.
Crossover but they're also distinct.
And one thing that so in my work, I've worked with the Canadian COVID Care Alliance on preparing,
you know, research based, you know, everything from simple information gathering and education
all the way to, you know, very well detailed position papers and letters to elected officials
and such on complex issues.
The point is, with that as an example, there are times where the priority is making an
effective argument, and then there are times where it's the opposite, where all you're
trying to do is summarize the most complete version of the the data or the facts, the
information, the resources that you can.
But it seems oftentimes, in my experience, at least working on our campfire wiki, you
find yourself doing a bit of both.
And there's bias, just like with Wikipedia, there's bias.
What's the scope of a project?
And who are the people contributing to it?
And what's what is the self stated mandate?
What are people asking for all of these things, I think affect affect how the same information
can then be presented.
So I'm curious, in your work, well, broadly, what's your perspective on that?
But in your work, what do you find is your priority between those two?
If I'll jump straight in, I would say, please, I would say there's three different disciplines.
There is research journalism.
And the third one I would add is advocacy, which is what you brought up in the COVID
Care Alliance.
To be honest, while there is some research part of what I'm doing, I do consider the
Libra Solutions Network a advocacy project, where I am trying to really emphasize why
people would want to do various things as a means of undermining information control.
And so to me, there are aspects of it.
But to me, journalism is basically saying, what?
And then research is trying to figure out how that works.
And then journalism will really present that in a way.
And the arguments come out in the advocacy, because that's where your values are coming
out of it.
And so you're trying to figure out some goal or some even worldview you're trying to just
explain so that it can be applied to different parts of things.
And that's the direction I try to push.
I'm not trying to tell someone, you need to do this, or you're a bad person if you're
not doing this.
I am merely just trying to say that with these goals in mind, I think this is a useful way
of looking at it.
That's an excellent breakdown.
And yes, that's exactly what I was unable to put in towards, the advocacy part.
Fortune enough to have some people who do a lot of research participate in my channels
to be guests who are amazing advocates.
And the one name that just comes to mind is my friend Paul G out in California, who just
works with the best people in the country regarding wireless communication safety.
That's wireamerica.org.
He's not anti-wireless.
He's just, you know, you don't need 4K video everywhere you go in the world.
And there is such a thing as a little bit too much wireless at certain times.
And you know, what's safe levels for classrooms and stuff like that.
He's an advocate.
He's working with the state legislators.
He's helping people in other states put together constructive arguments.
He's working with Scott McCullough.
That's advocacy.
And I deeply admire that.
And I do some of that within the drug addiction space and recovery.
But it's actually turned out to be the one area I do the most advocacy in is just how
to, for people to protect their own data sets.
And I think that's where it will carry me more so than advocacy on vaccine safety.
While I may dig up a lot of stuff there, I don't foresee myself as being a leading voice
putting together those arguments, whatever safety is.
And I know different people have different opinions on that.
And I don't want to get into that.
But that's a great point.
There is the advocacy part.
But again, the advocates needs intelligence.
They need actionable information.
They need to know how to have their arguments constructed in a way that they can deliver
a three-minute pitch on why certain things need to be done.
And that hopefully is based off of good intelligence, good assessment and analysis, which in turn
is based off sourcing.
So there is a pipeline of information here.
Yeah.
That was a great question, Liam.
Yeah.
Well, and now I wonder, so in the context of what you're covering on the public front,
because what you've got a two, in fact, both of you, but Mark's site is a great example
where you have a dual module product or show or manifestation of your work as it stands
currently, like what you're currently focusing on.
You've got the presenting of the resource or the document, the item that you found collected
into in terms of how it's accessible.
You've got it on profile pages of people, organizations, concepts.
And as far as I can tell, there's no editorializing there beyond simply choosing what to include
or not to include.
And then on your show, that's where you have a much more open, robust kind of discussion
back and forth.
And importantly, the introduction of often people with different perspectives in your
chats.
I love your live streams and your community because of that.
People aren't afraid to say they don't think you're right or they think someone else in
the chat maybe has it wrong.
And oftentimes they're rather polite.
But have you experienced what I've experienced, which is as you become known as someone who
has access to a repository of information, they start only wanting things that affirm
an argument they're making, even if right beside it is information that sort of suggests
at a minimum that the picture they're trying to advocate for isn't quite complete.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
We're all there.
Nobody wants to be wrong.
I don't like to be wrong.
Well, that's human nature.
At some point, though, during my career, and it was just a blessed series of events.
There is no college course on how to be an analyst.
There is none.
There's very few programs.
There is a school that does competitive intelligence.
And they have a good LinkedIn group.
But at some point, you need to realize, or not you, I'm sorry, that's the wrong way of
saying it.
At some point, as someone who grows into becoming an analyst, you realize, am I capable of genuinely
working really hard to prove myself wrong?
It's really hard to do.
But if I can prove myself wrong before anyone else does, well, I'm going to stay ahead of
the pack.
So you have to, we have to constantly look at our own work and go, can I prove this wrong?
And if it is, well, how do we adjust it?
How do we tweak it?
Because there's no prize for just being right.
It would be for people to carry Mullis.
There are a handful of scientists who are really good to look for for various lessons.
There's a lot of fun in science.
And there's the Feynman's who are good to look for, too, for certain types of fun.
Kerry Mullis is one of those guys who's like, science is this adventure of trying to falsify
your views.
And actually, this is actually the reason why I was asking you about how many times
you change your architecture.
Because I think what has motivated me to change the architecture of my notes.
And I'm on the fourth iteration.
The third iteration was actually when I was trying to bring an operation uplift and turn
it into a group exercise.
And that's sort of that I think ultimately for at least my use of my notes that turned
into a failure.
And so a lot of my notes sort of stayed at version two, but with some things already
ported over to version three.
And then as stories got more complex, I literally have 300 something partially written articles
at any one point in time.
And I didn't even realize I didn't have that Sinbad piece in an article yet.
I have it like in a half written article that's been sitting on a tab open on my computer
for like a month now.
But I thought I had already put it in an article.
You have.
That was a big thing.
Was that the one where we needed to say we knew somebody existed?
But it was the follow up nation.
And then I had a follow up article to that.
And I think I had written up like I don't think I've put the video where Sinbad talks
about having participated in this operation.
And I've got a whole bunch of information about his military service and connections
to military intelligence.
Understood.
So yeah, like, you know, you get to a point where where architecture of your own information
becomes important.
And Mark, you're you're implying this in several of your observations today, where that relates
to how it is you can see the information together.
And I think that that does constantly like good organization constantly pierces your
knowledge frameworks, you know, the things that might be your biases already, so that
when you aren't in your more myopic mode of research, you do make these grant these great
observations all the time.
This happens to me.
I think it probably happens to anybody who's put together enough information that they
have to zoom in and zoom out and see it in different resolutions and see it in ways that
they didn't intend to focus on it the first time around.
So I guess that that's part of the that's that's a lot of the reason I wanted to go
down that road.
And that's also part of the reason why I'd love to to have a class on it, because I feel
like I have skipped past failure modes or I've hit failure modes multiple times.
Some of that you you probably just skipped from because you it was already part of your
nature from your job.
Yeah.
Well, and there's different ways.
You know, there's some people need the mind maps.
Some people need the timeline.
Sometimes you just need the, you know, collections of raw data.
And there's all different ways to and even, you know, just even within the timeline tools,
do a search for all the different timeline platforms.
It's about 40 of them.
Some of them do spans well.
Some of them are single points.
Some of them are more visually oriented.
Some of them can can do they have different limitations on different types of grouping.
Because all even just in timeline tools, there are so many different options and and ways
to lay it out.
And you know, you have to use several different tools every time you use another platform,
another tool.
Well, guess what?
That's one more thing now that needs to be updated.
So and and of course, if you would like not you, but we need to use things which can provide
a that provides some ability to both be backed up that facilitate showing a concept, demonstrating
a concept to another person.
This is a platform that I found Tiki Toki.
And it is a subscription based.
It's not free.
I chose this one because it's it's let's just say it's web based, right?
It's cloud accessible.
I don't need to host it locally.
I like it because it has a basic 2D and a 3D.
It's it's basically, you know, it provides some level visualization.
You can zoom in, you can zoom out.
But here there's again, you can have different lanes.
You have to choose the granularity.
You want just single point and time events.
You want to do spans.
The way that these links look and are presented are different.
When you have a particular event, do you want to say it's in this group or that group?
You know, is it is it related to I don't know, a pharma event?
Is it related to the life, the birth or death of someone noteworthy?
There are so many different ways to to map and visualize this data.
But it's important to to at least try some of these things as a researcher, because when
you're just you're relaxed, you're spending hours on end populating the data in there.
So if something's going to happen, you're going to populate a data point and you're
going to look at it and you go, I can't believe a happened the day before B.
And like, how did I miss that?
Right.
How did I miss that?
You know, the question, if you populate this with all kinds of information, do you put
tags on them so you can say, now I want to look at everything just associated with remdesivir?
Now I want to look at everything just associated with with the government.
Now I want to look at it.
Does it have that hide and just show there is categories, but the categories are they're
binary.
So you so this you know, these are concepts that gave are familiar.
Right.
Is it is it a bit mask?
Yeah.
Can you choose multiple things?
You know, a vent can be in multiple different categories at the same time.
Whatever it's just one.
Well, which one does it go into?
Because if you only want to use some types of categories of information, you you may
actually miss something that's really important because of the way it's categorized.
This is a good yeah, this is probably one of their public ones.
Right.
No, I made this.
Oh, this is you know.
And I'm so proud of you, Liam.
I'm so proud of you.
Can you give us an introduction to this one?
Yeah, so this is this is just one iteration of something that Matthew has been pushing
for for a while, which is the Plandemonium timeline project.
OK.
And it's based on what you did with Remdesivir.
I'm just trying to get it so we can actually see everything.
But it's it's so so that so you introduced everybody and me in particular to this to
this platform, which lets you go.
And as you say, so what what I've done just to explain is I've tried to take events that
largely may seem unrelated or depending on who you're talking to.
And that's why I want to qualify.
This is an in-progress, you know, experiment of thoughts more so than anything official.
I want to be really clear.
But taking these these sort of potentially unrelated events and putting them up alongside
each other, as you've done in the Remdesivir timeline and seeing what we get, you see various
organizations being formed, various important cultural and geopolitical events taking place
and then the ramifications of them.
You see various exercises that or some rather strange, supposedly fictional events that
then in very short order seem to happen in real life.
And no conclusion is required other than just look at the proximity of these events in time,
you know, start to analyze, is there a cause and effect?
You know, well, this is a good example.
For example, LifeLog, the Department of Defense program, tracking everybody's life, everything
they do forever, shutting down the exact day Facebook is initially founded.
That's the kind of thing where, you know, I went into this knowing that was the case,
but perhaps someone didn't know that.
And now there you go back to back.
You see all of these, you know, in the context of COVID, you've got bioterrorism exercises
going on.
You've got various elected officials who throughout their careers even before, for example, taking
the presidency were involved in some very interesting nations and their bio weapons
programs.
A great example of those events.
They don't seem related to anything.
But when you're like, wow, well, look at all these things going on in 2005 in Ukraine.
And when you see it together on a timeline, like, wow, okay, why did why did no one talk
about this?
Why didn't no one talk about the withdrawal of Ukraine from Iran with the AN-225, the
only plane plane in the world capable of carrying a mobile bio lab at the same time that the
anthrax mobile labs disappeared from Iraq?
Like, oh, gee, you know, I'm not brilliant.
I just happen to be the one of the first people that put those things on paper or electronically
again.
Well, anyone can do this.
So many people can find so many things that are just sitting there.
There's so much gold that's just inches below the surface all over the place.
Yes.
I would really bang the drum that the more people can do to independently create enough
data to find these patterns, that's probably what scares them more than people saying tweets
they don't like on Twitter.
Yeah.
And I just reached out.
You know, this is a document that I have.
It's 62 pages.
I just put this up on my substack maybe four or five days ago.
It was barely over half the size then.
And just within a day, 25 pages had been added.
It's fairly organized and dense.
And then Liam can take this and put it on the timeline the way that he is.
And what I have is sort of month by month, I mean, this is I'm guessing this is 10% populated,
if not 5% populated.
So it's month by month.
You can mention something that happened where you don't have just one date, but you have
just generally this happened this month or something like that.
But then you can also start adding day by day.
And we have it more populated once you get to 2020 and beyond.
But even just like September 2019, you have all these events that occurred.
And every time I see more of these put next to each other, I'm just like, wow, you know,
like there's too much going on in September of 2019 and October of 2019 not to view as
suspicious at the very least, meaningful at the very least, right?
And you see it better when it's all laid out, but all the way down to now, all the way down
to April.
So I guess Liam and I are building this as we go and we'll have better and better tools
as we go.
But yeah, thank you, Mark.
Now I love it.
I love it.
I just want to share because Gabe, Gabe is a very smart man.
He sent something in the back that I'm just going to pull up here.
Now this is something that I think it might have been Tonica in Operation Uplift originally
sent me, but it went around in our in our chat there.
This is the COVID-19 slash biodefense mafia chart graph thing that's put together by the
anonymous Spartacus.
I don't know very much about Spartacus.
Just disclaimer.
But I thought this as a tool was just fantastic.
The tool itself is called Graph Commons and you can do what Spartacus did here.
Well, you could start by looking through Spartacus's work here and seeing all of the connections
of the individuals and organizations that in the perspective of Spartacus are involved
in the so-called planammonium, as we would like to call it.
And it's just like Tiki-Taki, you can do a lot with images and almost a mini wiki in
itself and you can begin to connect to other pieces of information and use these different
tools to interlock and to almost look at the same set of information from entirely different
perspectives like in ways that you wouldn't be able to synthesize without looking at it
in a given way.
So, I'm going to reference here for DTRA.mil, but that I have used, for example, as a Campfire
wiki link.
Now, I'm just going to pull this off the screen just in case there's any private stuff, but
I am going to show one that I made.
So these are some tools.
These are some tools that anybody can use.
As Mark says, there are paid things.
You can't always have free access to everything, hopefully, because not everything is collecting
your data.
You want to pay for something that will be a good service and not have a trade-off like
that.
But yeah, I encourage other people to use these things as well.
And I know everybody out there wants everything to be free.
I think that the time of people's labor, things like that, that has to be part of the consideration.
There are more and more people moving toward things like software as a service as opposed
to intellectual property passive income.
And I feel good about supporting those people when I see the work that they do to put this
stuff together.
And these types of graph software tools, when they first came out, they were in the hands
of exactly the forms of centralized journalism that maybe have pressure on them or connected
to intelligence agencies themselves or connected to at the very least powerful interests.
And now they are available and teachable to everybody.
And we can do this.
And it's part of the increasing level of pressure that we can put on those gated systems.
Well, for those who would like everything to be free, I would just point out that you
would want to make sure your content is in a machine readable format, whether it's JSON,
XML, whatever.
And if it's machine readable, then you could pay a competent programmer to build the same
kind of accessible presentations on top of it.
The biggest challenge really is that your data does need to be standardized and accessible
because if you just have a bunch of even spreadsheets actually do count as machine readable web
pages, it depends.
And there's a lot of flexibility if we standardize things is really the point I'm trying to have
our home here.
Yes, absolutely.
Wikipedia gives a little bit of standardization.
It'll be like a biography of a person.
There's basic fields, the way that's presented.
Someone is a professor, where they go to school, who mentored them, if they're a company, number
of employees, revenue.
There's a little bit of that.
But how do you index the world?
I mean, how do you index everything?
I don't know, but to make some of these tools, the automation capable, that work needs to
be done.
And look, much of these searches, the ability to search across 50,000 files, these are very
powerful or 100,000 or millions are only possible because of the indexing capabilities of computers.
Nevertheless, it still comes down to just burning the midnight oil and a lot of hard
work as researchers, organizing, sorting, indexing and so on.
So the computers aren't going to take over anytime soon, maybe someday, but it's not
anytime soon for sure.
I think we're being hit with the psychological operation, which is you must choose between
being a Luddite and accepting the brave new world.
But no, I think that it's just the opposite.
I think that we all need to up our games a little better.
And as we up our games, that's when we take back the system.
They're great tools.
There's a lot of very powerful tools.
Can we use them, respect them?
I'm optimistic about it.
There is a little bit of a, it does feel as though that like some of the chat GPT capabilities
are being oversold or taking some things that are simple.
And it's our concept was like, wow, it understands the basic sentences.
It must be a massive supercomputer that does that.
Like, well, not really.
Here comes Skynet.
Yeah, Skynet, not just yet.
It wasn't supposed to rain today.
It rained.
We don't even have 12 hour weather predictions down yet in New England.
So you know, maybe someday.
I would go as far as to say a lot of the fear mongering also about sentience is to confuse
people about other topics such as their own rights.
Oh, this computer has a whole other complicated domain that may be outside of the scope.
But I do think that there are multi layers to that.
Well, unfortunately, we're coming up on while we're over an hour and a half now, this has
been a tremendous and robust discussion exactly as I thought it would turn into.
And we've got plenty to come back to at a later date.
I hope both of you will rejoin us.
In the meantime, let's let's speak of using these tools for good.
Let's just one more time go through how each of us is is fighting the good fight.
So Mark, any final thoughts anywhere you want to direct people?
Anything specific you're working on that you think people would be most interested in or
that you want them to find?
We're doing a lot of research right now on this product of Remdesivir, how it was approved
and the implications that it has in understanding this this pandemic.
There's different people who are doing research and evangelism here that are have different
goals. For examples, some people, the end goal is to just stop interventions which are
doing bad things right now.
We need to support those people.
My goal is really thinking about how do we reduce the risk of something like this happening
again by having archived the stuff before it goes away.
And I have a series of videos on this on my channel, Houston Tonic dot live, because of
censorship, I can't leave stuff on YouTube, a lot of things up for that long.
Although it's surprising some things I can leave up a lot longer than I would have thought
possible.
I don't even even myself, I don't have that algorithm down right away.
Most things I'll put backup copies onto, but shoot Odyssey, Rumble and just continuing
on day by day.
My channel is not for everyone for sure.
But as you can see, sometimes I'm as excited about the methods of doing the research and
finding things and how to organize it and where do we go from all the new potential
of the Internet in the future as I am about the topics themselves.
And it's been really great.
This was an unexpected introduction today, but I'm looking forward to another episode
with Gabe and you, Liam and Matt.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much, Mark.
Moving on to our very favorite Libre Solutions Network.
Gabriel, you have a website, you have a substack and for me, as of yet untapped gold mine of
information that I'm trying to wrap my head around.
So with that in mind, can you remind people LibreSolutions.network is your website.
What else are you working on that you want people to go check out?
Something that is particularly exciting to you right now.
What do you want to leave people with?
The biggest thing is that it really is a collection that I'm trying to grow not only in amount,
but also the types of content.
There are articles, some of them will include voiceovers and then the videos themselves
will go on to my PeerTube channel that is linked directly.
The embeds will work.
You'll be able to click on to it.
And that's where I mirror either interviews like this or my own presentations on how to
get certain things done.
One of my first demos was how tracking links work.
If you scroll down a little bit further, a lot of people aren't aware that in a lot of
links you share after the question mark, there's a whole lot of other stuff being shared in
that information that you may not want getting out there.
To me, the scariest part about that is they can then map who's looking into this stuff.
And to me, that is information we shouldn't allow to get out.
You have changed how I approach copying and pasting links.
I was not aware of it until you put that, it must have been about six months ago in
the Operation Uplift chat.
And I have ever since then, I have cut out all of the tracking material every time I
remember to, which is almost every time.
So thank you for that.
This has been going on for years and years.
I think I first noticed this like 15 years ago, but I didn't even make it a good enough
habit until more recently because I guess I was not deep diving as often.
So it does need to be a habit.
Yeah, I cut off everything after that question mark.
I just want to mention this.
Gabe is also helping, I'm kind of rebooting the education network that I was building
that was my primary focus at the beginning of the pandemic before I dropped it to do
all this drowning the earth and everything else.
But he's helping rebuild the website and I just decided recently, which apparently Gabe
enthusiastically approves of, we're going to open source all of our educational materials.
So I have thousands and thousands of pages of math curriculum.
I'm just going to put it out there.
I'm not going to bother to bind it into books.
I mean, maybe we'll put it into books later if you prefer binding, maybe you can buy it,
that's fine.
But we're mostly focused instead on building a community.
And the community is at locals.
We've just kind of started to like, you know, try to gather people.
So there's like 100 people here or like 99 as at this moment.
But that's where I was thinking, you know, if we start hosting classes, I'm going to
do like an adult math club, you know, sort of let people get a better sense of statistics,
for instance, by reminding them of the foundation, maybe helping them see it better than they
had the first time around when they were in school, and maybe then they will be less likely
to be fooled by statistics or more likely to put together their own spreadsheets to
follow data along.
We can do something like, you know, really anything that is valuable, hopefully, like
I want this to become a community that can just sort of begin to run its own classes.
Right.
And, you know, the business side of it would just be, you know, a few memberships to a
locals community.
I think that that will actually work in terms of, you know, being able to have enough revenue
for interesting projects.
Right.
So, yeah, you know, the website, well, we're still trying to rebrand all of the curriculum,
pull off, you know, branding labels of my past schools and, you know, just put something,
put a new face on it.
But it will be up for, especially in this age, millions of new homeschoolers.
That's a lot of people who will find at least some of that subset valuable and hopefully
other people are going to provide it too.
So that's one of the projects that I've been working on lately that I think fits in with
all this.
That's a booming market, Matt.
That's a big market that's growing really fast for you to access.
That's very smart.
Speaking of locals, we've been having a robust discussion over at roundingtheearth.locals.com.
It is the best place where you can subscribe to the show if you want to become a free member.
It's the best way to keep up to date with what the community is talking about.
It's where we post all of our information.
We host our live streams there as well.
And indeed, in the chat, we've been having questions.
We've been having community members discussing amongst themselves, engaging with us as well.
So and of course, if you do want to support the show financially, which is very helpful,
you can do so for as little as five bucks a month and you get exclusive access to supporters
only weekly live streams where we gossip.
I'm just kidding.
But they are very interesting, very fun.
We had a music listening session a couple of weeks back.
Great community of people, real friendships being made.
So roundingtheearth.locals.com.
And I will put one more plug right at the end, which is the still growing, still probably
underused but still awesome campfire.wiki.
It's where we're trying to in a lot of ways, we're following Mark's lead.
We're trying to do what we think is an effective effort of gathering and arranging and presenting
information as we find it in a way that isn't simply speculative.
It's open minded discussion, research.
But in the end, we're just trying to make sure things don't get memory hold.
So campfire.wiki.
And yeah, join us over there.
Gentlemen, any final thoughts before I kick us all out and shut down the stream?
It's been great.
I had a great time.
Thank you.
Great.
Yes.
Lots of fun.
Okay.
Thank you guys so much.
And thank you to everybody who has been watching on Rumble, Locals, Rockfin, Odyssey, CloudHub
and Facebook and also Twitch.
Now quick heads up on Twitch.
I don't know what happened.
I can't get back into our Twitch account.
I don't think anything nefarious happened.
It's just given me some trouble.
Yet I have been streaming live to Twitch on all of our recent streams.
So if you are watching there, hello.
Thank you so much.
And we will be back tomorrow for our weekly local supporters exclusive live stream.
And I hope you all learned something today.
There's lots of questions we didn't even get to because this is how broad and robust a
topic and really whole area of societal change that we're undergoing.
But don't hesitate to continue the discussion in the locals community or wherever else you
may be hanging out with us.
I've been Liam Sturgis.
We will see you on the flippity flop.