Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Rounding the Earth podcast.
You know, I usually have a script open when I do this introduction, and as I hit go live,
I realized I hadn't pulled it up.
So I'm going to improvise this.
Rounding the Earth is what would you say?
The gathering of people who take no formal stance on the shape of the Earth would be
the first thing I would say.
The second thing is this is where people gather to discuss important issues that are normally
not talked about in extensive enough detail or something like that.
But for those of you who have joined us before, you know that Rounding the Earth is based
on the popular Substack series written by applied statistician and educator Matthew
Crawford.
And you can keep up with us by going to roundingtheearth.locals.com, roundingtheearth.substack.com, or of course,
subscribing here on wherever you are watching.
My name is Liam Sturgis.
I am co-host of the Rounding the Earth podcast, and my usual co-host, Matthew Crawford, may
well join us at some point.
He's just recovering from another night of very hard work, as he always does.
But I'm very excited today because for the first time, we're having an open round table
where our guests are the members of Operation Uplift, which is, well, I'm going to have
some of them explain what Operation Uplift is.
So let's bring them on.
I'm going to come one by one.
First, allow me to introduce Cody Porter, then Diane, and finally, Gabriel.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show.
Great to be here.
So I don't know about you guys, Cody has gone black on my screen, and I prefer his handsome
face, so hopefully that reappears.
But in the meantime, do you want to introduce yourselves to the audience who may or may
not be familiar with who you are?
Let's start with Cody.
Can you see me now?
Yes, sir.
Excellent, excellent.
So my name is Cody Porter.
I've been a member of Operation Uplift since pretty early.
I helped run it for a long time, and now I've taken up more of a backseat.
I've been on this program once before, interviewed with Matthew, so anybody who's interested
can look up the past interview on that.
And if you have any other questions, I guess Liam, let me know.
Yeah, I just thought maybe you could pitch the topic of discussion that you and Matthew
had, because it was quite interesting.
Could you give us just a one-liner of what it was?
Yeah, so my work is with a certain receptor called RAGE, Receptor for Advanced Glycation
In Products.
And I think it has more of a possible role in spike protein-induced damage, either from
COVID or from the vaccine.
And so we did an interview talking about how I think that has a role in spike protein-induced
damage.
Awesome.
So I'll make sure to grab a link to that interview and put it in the chat as we keep going.
Wonderful.
Diane, would you like to introduce yourself?
Hi, I'm Diane Beagle, and I'm one of the few people in Operation Uplift that doesn't know
anything.
I'm kind of the team mom and sometimes a life coach, and sometimes I am needing life coach
work.
I live in Houston, where it's raining, and I was just playing around when Etienne posted
the link and I hit it and here I am.
This is unplanned.
I am in my kitchen, as you can see.
Yeah, when you came in, one of the first things you said was, I didn't mean to be here.
Well, and that's sort of, in a sense, sort of the nature of Operation Uplift as a group
of diverse people with diverse skill sets.
I think you do know a lot of stuff.
I don't think you're giving yourself enough.
I'm a generalist, and I have been in this group since almost the very beginning.
Yes, you have.
August 21-ish or something like that.
I want to dive into a bit of the background of Operation Uplift in a minute, but finally,
Gabe, now Gabriel, you're someone who is probably becoming quite familiar to the Running
Beard audience, which is, I think, a fantastic thing, but for those who may be tuning in
for the first time, do you want to introduce yourself?
Yeah, I mean, I consider myself one of the newer members or junior members of Operation
Uplift.
I had recently gotten in touch with Crawford asking about how I could make changes to the
wiki because there are certain elements that I wanted to expand on the Canadian context
for, which was great getting to know Liam, who is also Canadian, and I had seen it was
already well in good hands already, but I'm grateful to have been able to add, and it
seems like I have found a good place to talk about some of the issues I really care about,
which I do really appreciate.
Of course, you got your own initiative that itself could have a team of 125 people running
with you, but you do it all on your own, Libra Solutions Network.
Can you tell us about that very briefly?
Yeah, my goal with that is really to market online freedom because there's a lot of things
that people could do, but I want to explain why, first and foremost.
Well, that's fantastic.
Before we dive into the prompt, the topic of discussion, which is DDoS attack on the
mind, I think it would be wise for us to just briefly explain what Operation Uplift is,
maybe provide just a bit of historical detail, and address some of the projects that have
been mentioned, the first being, of course, the Campfire wiki, which, Cody, as far as
I understand, you were instrumental.
You were one of a couple of people who physically created the thing and deployed it and maintained
the admin keys that even I don't have.
Could you give us a little background on what the Campfire wiki is, how it came about, and
anything else surrounding that that is important?
Yeah, so it's our group's attempt to catalog the research that we've done to kind of synthesize
and bring together a lot of information because when we were first starting it and when we
were forming right after the pandemic, there was a lot and it was very difficult to keep
repeating ourselves and to keep track of everything.
And so we thought, well, what if we put it all in one place?
And so, yeah, I mean, I was in discussions with the name formation.
I think Matthew eventually was the one who came up with it, but we were getting there
into the ballpark for it.
I mean, I helped put it together.
I am one of the admins for it, even though I've not been as active as some of the other
members on it lately.
I helped put it together.
And so I think that I'm very proud of it, of the work that we've all done there.
And so it was interesting because I had never, who develops a wiki?
I had never done it before.
And so it was a lot of work figuring out what service to use, how to get it set up, how
to, you know, I put a lot of time into trying to come up with a backbone for how to store
and sort the information, and then we ended up kind of scrapping that and going with a
more organic approach, which has its benefits and pitfalls.
So I think it was a lot of fun to do.
And I think it is good to have a place where this kind of information can be organized
and distributed.
Yeah.
And the project does continue to evolve as we ask, what are the things that are even
relevant these days?
As the COVID-19 story, at least officially, according to say the WHO has now wrapped up.
It's, you know, it's come up in conversations.
Gabe mentioned, well, are there other topics that maybe would not to the average eye seem
to be relevant, that maybe we haven't put as much thought into organizing information
on, but maybe now's the time to do that.
So it's interesting.
It remains a dynamic project.
But the fact that it got up and running in the first place, as you suggest, is sort of
unique.
And I think you did a fantastic job pushing that boulder off down the hill where it continues
to gain steam.
So thank you for doing that.
Thank you.
Now, I'm curious.
I'm curious, because this was, if I'm not mistaken, was this one of the first projects
that Operation Uplift undertook?
And furthermore, how did Operation Uplift start?
What is it?
Cody and Diane, I know you two are around before me.
I came on, I don't know, I guess it would have been around August, September 2021, maybe
even later.
But do you guys have some insight?
Were you there at the very beginning?
What is Operation Uplift?
Diane, were you here before I was?
I can't recall.
I don't know.
I think maybe we were semi-simultaneous.
Visceral Adventure wrote the best description.
And had I known you were going to ask me that, I would have had it in front of me.
But I don't.
So to me, it just was this really oddball assortment of people worldwide who just did
a crazy great job of curating information.
And there weren't really projects because there wasn't any mission, per se, at the time.
It was just a group of like-minded people going, what the hell's going on here?
And what would happen is that everybody is just blasting stuff in the chat.
And then it was something like, what the hell?
And everybody, nobody said a word.
And we were all off trying to source something that we found just incredible.
Like the life insurance guy, is this real?
Did he really say this?
Here I found the source video.
And everybody is blowing and going for hours to vet out a news headline or an article.
And it's just amazing.
And it was like we had some sort of something keeping us all in lockstep, but we didn't.
But we all came together.
Everybody was doing the same thing to the same end.
And so when I told people about the group, I would say it's the most intelligent group
of curators I've ever come across.
I mean, that's where you get your COVID news.
Excuse me.
Maya, go ahead.
No, no, no, please, Cody.
My experience was slightly different, but very similar.
When I joined the group, it was pretty early.
I can't recall exactly when, but it was when Matthew first said he needed a research assistant
or somebody to help him out.
That's when I started.
I was in the second.
Yeah.
I think maybe you and I both did.
And I don't remember which was first.
But he had found somebody by the time that I asked him, but he said, hey, do you want
to join our group?
It's just started.
And I said, well, of course I did, as posterity shows.
But for me, it was more of...
For me, it was really a collection service because you guys are all so good at finding
stuff from all over the internet.
And so you would all post it into a chat system.
And I would have a ton of things to look at and say, do I believe this?
Do I not believe this?
How much evidence is this?
How much evidence is that?
And it was very useful because I have a scientific background.
And that was helpful because when I would read them, people would say, is this something
I should care about?
How important is this?
And it forced me to sort and analyze and synthesize and discuss a ton of information really fast.
Because as we're going to talk about today, the speed at which it was coming at you is
just almost insurmountable.
And so I think it really helped to have not only...
It killed any sense of echo chamber for me because I wasn't looking in just one spot
or another.
At one point, we had 150 people who were just pushing out stuff into this feed saying, I
found this on this part of the internet or this over here.
And how much do we believe it?
How do we weigh it?
Is this something we should care about?
And so it became just for ourselves, just as a personal sense-making apparatus, it became
very valuable.
And we realized that...
And to answer your earlier question, the Wiki was very early.
But we realized this is valuable to us.
How do we make it valuable to other people?
Yeah, that's the key.
And I'm also curious.
I think this is a good place to transition into our topic, but I want to do it in a bridging
way.
I'm curious as to how each of you first connected with...
Well in this case, we can say Matthew as the sort of team leader.
I believe at one point he called himself a benevolent dictator, tongue in cheek.
But how did you guys first connect with Matthew or with each other in a way that then led
to the group?
And I asked the question through the frame of not only is there just a fire hose of information
always, and particularly early on, it was difficult to know what was real and what was
not.
And it's a much better grip now, I think, but it was also that there were so many messengers
and there were so many people where it was very difficult to know if people had good
intentions or if people were bots or if people were bad actors.
So I'm curious how you each connected with this larger group or with Matthew.
Gabe, how about you as someone who's more recently connected?
Yeah.
I had been following Matthew a while, not very closely, but I would see either his comments
on various social media or Substack itself.
I would sometimes butt heads with him in the early days over the mass formation psychosis
discussion because that's a contentious issue, right?
And so I got in touch with him to see if I could contribute to the Wiki.
But I will also say that it was really nice getting to know Visceral Adventure, who's
also been part of the Spice Girls project, and a bunch of other multimedia efforts to
communicate a lot of the stuff we discuss on the Wiki and during this crisis, so to
speak.
Yeah, wonderful.
And then, Diane, how did you initially connect?
Because you respond to a call for assistance with research, but how do you even first find
these people who are then putting out the calls?
How did that connection first come about?
Oh, God, I don't remember.
So long ago now.
It seems like a long time ago.
I was so underwater here with this stuff, and I'm trying to think, and I was just pulling
threads out there mostly via Twitter.
And having kids, I was really interested in the vaccine and the dangers thereof.
So I was all over that because I had explored the HPV vaccine 10 years prior when it was
suggested my girls get it, and came down with a hard pass, had words to the pediatrician
who told me I was crazy and do I want my girls to get cervical cancer?
I said, well, of course I do.
Well, what a wee idiot.
Anyway, yeah, that's exactly what I want.
Anyway, so I'm trying to think.
It was just through thread pulling.
I mean, I think, but I don't recall.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, the testament to how long it's been going on.
How about you, Cody?
I'm afraid I'm in a similar boat.
I remember there was a Discord channel, and Bonnie was on it and you were on it.
I just don't know.
Well, right.
But I mean, that happened in August.
I think I found Matthew sometime in June or May when he was talking about the pandemic
and when he was looking at death rates in different countries post-vaccine induction.
And so, I mean, I was, but the reason I got there is because, well, essentially it's because
the Dark Horse podcast, I think, which very early was saying, how much weight should we
give this safe and effective kind of stance that everybody's taking and saying that this
is safe and effective?
Is that even possible?
And I said, well, I don't think so.
And then a couple of scientific papers came out that ended up forming the hypothesis that
I discussed with Matthew on this channel.
And then, so I was concerned.
And so I was looking into this and I just happened to stumble upon, I don't even, it
may have been from Twitter, but I wasn't even using Twitter very actively until after the
pandemic.
So I'm not sure.
So yeah, but the Dark Horse podcast was Bret Weinstein, Steve Kirsch and Robert Malone.
It was in June of 21.
And I had watched literally and read everything from Robert Malone and Kirsch.
And I was an active Bret Weinstein podcast listener.
So that's, that all came together, Cody.
And I think that's probably...
Somehow we started there and ended up looking at Matthew's work.
And then when he put out a call, he said...
And all those tapes.
And the thing about Matthew is, is that, you know, he and I have had disagreements on whether
this is happening or that's happening.
But I feel that he's intellectually honest.
He's saying what he believes.
And so I could tell that from reading his work and whether I disagreed or agreed or
thought the evidence was there or not quite there.
I knew that talking to him about stuff he was doing would be valuable to me because
he was somebody who believed what he was saying.
And so when he needed help, I said, well, I could help.
And it just ended up...
I think the very first night I spoke to him, you know, he had said he didn't need a research
assistant and it was on Discord because we were using Discord at the time.
I was the one that transferred us mostly over to Telegram.
And we were on Discord and he said, you know, I don't need a research assistant, but I'm
very busy.
So I need somebody to run Operation Uplift.
Would you just take over the group?
And I said, oh, yeah, I guess I can.
And so I was kind of like second in command for, you know, 2021 and part of 22 before.
I think, Liam, you mostly have that job now, is that right?
Well, Operation Uplift, I'd give it...
It's...
Well, so I think Diane and I are technically admins in the Telegram.
I'd say Diane probably is the bigger cheese there.
So you're in charge now, Diane.
Yeah, right.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
This call is in charge.
That's...
Yeah, that's the good...
We have been mostly...
As far as Operation Uplift goes nowadays, that really has become more of a gathering
place for discussion more so than a project group.
And this is something we were talking about a couple of days ago.
But yeah, and I mean, as far as I'm concerned, I'm focused almost entirely on the rounding
the earth, the podcast side, like the external public engagement part now.
Yes, but also the way that these other things have happened is because of the collection
group, right?
Like that gives us not only connection to people who are excellent at what they do all
over the world, and then we have people literally all over the world, but it also gives us the
community and the drive and the stability to be able to actually have these other projects
that are done.
Oh, yeah.
And also I'll say something else we were talking about on a call the other night with a few
of us that there's all of that.
And then what's happened is if you consider the social landscape of the last few years
especially, it's been very alienating and very isolating.
And I know there have been, you know, a lot of times it revolves around pets, as we were
talking about Diane just before, but there are a number of very challenging personal
experiences that we've had across the last couple of years where, for example, at the
end of last year, it was when my cat Turtle got very sick and then passed away very quick.
And it was you guys primarily who helped me get through that.
And it's in the little ways where you wouldn't plan for yourself to be surrounded by people
who get it.
And yet you guys stood up and helped get through that.
And I know that's been the case with other situations, not just with pets.
We've got family illnesses.
We've got illnesses ourselves.
So you're totally right, Cody.
It's become something that enables so much more.
And I do want to specifically share that Operation Uplift has as one of the projects that we've
been trying to get off the ground forever.
And we've successfully got this off the ground.
If I can just pull it up here.
The Operation Uplift sub stack, which I highly recommend everybody go check out.
It's not as active as any of us would like it to be, but it's getting more active.
And have you guys contributed anything to this yet?
I have not had the pleasure yet.
Me neither.
This is a place where ideally we can have an outlet as a group where we can, of all
the people who could contribute, our perspectives are so varied that this could wind up being
a platform where you see more and more of, as Cody's saying, not necessarily agreeing
on everything, but understanding and sort of respecting or trusting the process by which
somebody arrives at their argument.
Which again, is sort of the premise of what we're here to discuss today is the overload
of information that we've seen just head on for the last several years.
It's been sort of nuts.
And I wonder if we could start, maybe Gabriel's the best to do this.
Could you in relatively simple terms, explain what a DDOS attack is in the context of computers,
the way you would usually use that term?
All right.
So a DDOS attack is a distributed denial of service attack.
This means that there are many places being, whether they're computers or information sources
being used to basically clog up a particular information channel.
That can be a website.
It can be your own home connection if you piss off the wrong people.
And the purpose of the distributed denial of service attack is that it's a relatively
easy way for somebody to constrain access to something, whether it's a website, whether
it's content, whether it's somebody being able to access the internet across the board.
Now does that sound familiar to you guys?
Do you ever feel like you are that computer and somebody or something is just overloading
your circuits?
Yeah.
So I actually have maybe a less accurate but slightly simpler way of explaining.
I was trying to explain to my wife this morning what the conversation was going to be about
and said, you know what happens when an old man tries to use an app on a computer and
they just click it and they click it and click it and click it and they're trying to use
this function and it causes the computer to freeze because they keep doing the thing.
A DDOS attack, a D DOS is essentially a whole bunch of computers trying to do a normal function
of a website or web service all at the same time so that they function as the angry old
man clicking and clicking and clicking it and cause the system to just completely stop.
And they do that for a considerable amount of time and with enough bots or computers
or hacked software so that it shuts down the service.
And what we see I think sometimes on accident and sometimes possibly on purpose we see that
happen with our mental states where we are just inundated with a fire hose of information
from a thousand, thousand sources and our brain will just shut down.
And you're right that it does happen to us.
I think there are times when because of the connection to the internet it's almost like
we have to guard ourselves to stop it from happening, to not let that happen to us, right?
Because if we just put ourselves out there, we pull our walls down and put our brain into
the internet, then what ends up is all of the people who are actively excitedly talking
about a topic come into our brain and shut us down.
And this is possible to be manipulated such that you end up with somebody who's wanting
to shut people down, targeting people with a whole bunch of information, which I think
is more of an affair as a way, but we also have to consider the just what happens when
you have so much communication.
Yeah, and you know, the way you put that is reminding me of the discussion that Gabriel
had with Matthew yesterday and the conclusion that was, I'm not sure if Gabriel, you and
Matthew both agreed exactly on this, but the idea that the solution is to basically stop
doing so much on the internet, like remove aspects of technology from our lives or from
society as a whole in order to better manage, you know, I think you were primarily talking
about privacy or the use of big data, but in the end, it's sort of the same beast that
the brain has to process.
What's your perspective on that?
Well, I do think anyone wanting to withdraw should do so intelligently, you know, like
there are experiences that you may still want to have, whether it's, you know, being on
certain websites.
But as an example, when this fire hose of information opened up on the internet as the
chaos got started, I made a deliberate decision to kind of filter information sources.
I started out with a wide net, but basically I was testing, you know, oh, does this person
seem to keep making sense over time or are they just, you know, trying to promote products
or you know, whatever, whatever associated incentives will align themselves over time.
And so, you know, one of the things that actually helped me a lot was Corbett did a Solutions
Watch episode on RSS feeds and RSS feeds are very powerful because basically instead of
an algorithm telling you what you can see, you can curate your own feed based off amalgamating
a bunch of different feeds.
So I had started using a service called Fresh RSS, but you can use any RSS reader you want.
And I started collecting these RSS feeds and that became my main source of information
over time.
And I would mostly go for that as a first check.
So instead of, you know, saying Facebook or deciding what I would see or Twitter deciding
what I would see, I made a conscious choice to use the software that exists and is widely
used to keep on associating with stuff I like.
And that can create a bit of an echo chamber effect.
So you still want to, like I said, cast a wide net to not be like huddled into your
own little corner and not see what other people are talking about.
But I find going to something that is low stimulation, as I would call it to start,
can really help keep, you know, emotional shields from either going up or distancing
yourself from particular topics.
When it comes to withdrawing from the internet as a whole, you know, it's really interesting
because my other half has been watching this interesting video of kids playing Minecraft
together in this new adventure format.
It's based off some mod, I'm sure.
But the premise of the game is to get people who are both English speakers and Spanish
speakers to play the game together.
They have to do tasks in it.
And they have this really cool software that will translate what they say out loud into
the other language text above their head as a speech bubble.
This is an interaction you cannot have in real life.
Let's be real, at least not without a whole lot of extra stuff built on top of.
But you know, it's funny because it's such a, you know, innocent and beautiful experience.
But imagine how that could be applied in other areas.
I don't think the answer personally is to tell people, oh, to stay away from things
entirely.
I just think we need to make better choices about what we're doing and how we're doing
it.
That's a fantastic point.
And I want to circle back in a little bit to the solutions and also specifically the
risk of the echo chamber.
But before we do that, I'm curious, Diane, because you had mentioned the HPV vaccine,
which was an issue that you engaged 10 years ago.
Now we've come together in this interaction that, by the way, as well could not have happened
without the internet.
So another point for the internet.
But we came together around this issue of COVID-19.
And while in large part the vaccine products that were rolled out and as such, a lot of
what we're familiar with right now is that issue.
But I wonder if this similar fire hose of information or if I wonder with the experience
processing information around the HPV vaccine as another example, how that compares to the
time we're in now.
Can you speak to that?
Well, the HPV vaccine was just accepted like every other vaccine.
And it's this dirty little secret.
And I'll tell you what, from what I know now, I would not have vaccinated my children at
all for anything.
It is mind blowing.
And it's available and it's out there and it's data and it's facts.
And it's just, oh my God, what have we done?
So on the HPV, that was just me being Diane going, you know, this sounds really crazy.
Also being from Texas, there was an additional public push.
The governor, Rick Perry, who was energy secretary under Trump as well, he decided that because
he met this gal, very young woman who ended up tragically dying from cervical cancer in
her twenties, and he met her and she said, please, please promote this vaccine.
Gardasil is one of the names, one of the brands.
And so he wanted to make it a state law that children get vaccinated with Gardasil.
And I just, oh, don't do that, baby.
So my knee hit my chin and I started, I learned VAERS.
I went to VAERS and I started reading all this stuff and then, you know, went to the
papers and learned how to do that all by myself.
There was no group.
And then when the country of Japan took it off their national schedule, you know, I thought,
you know, the country of Japan has a lot more experts than I have in my little head, so
I'm going to go with them.
And that's kind of how I made my decision.
But the familiarity with VAERS was kind of a leg up at the time when we first started
because we had a lovely medical doctor in the group at the time, call her Dr. M, and
she and I started really working on the VAERS stuff and identifying some early signals.
And since my middle name is jumping to conclusions, I think I'm batting a thousand on my conclusions
though, Cody.
I really do.
But, you know, she and I would really start looking at, you know, what's showing up as
far as adverse events from the COVID backs.
And then I found out that my county, Harris County, the public autopsies are public data,
literally identified detailed autopsy reports.
And so we started pulling those and looking at those and really kind of went all different
directions trying to find some purchase to say, this is what's happening.
But it was pretty shotgun.
It was not rifle shot.
We were just all over the place.
And it was like flavor of the week or of the day and what's interesting and what's going
on.
So.
Okay.
Well, I was all over the place on that non-answer.
No, no, no.
I think that's very informative.
Now, I am pleased to share that we've had somebody sneak in the back and I'm looking
to see if he's going to give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down as to whether or not I should
bring him in, but I'm tempted to.
And I didn't even have to.
Hello, Matthew.
Hey, yeah, I wasn't like sneaking or lurking or anything like that, but I did want to jump
in at some point.
Hey, everyone.
Hey, Matthew.
Well, I don't know if you've caught the first bit of the show, but we've been having a lovely
time reminiscing and catching up on the origins of Operation Uplift, some of the early projects,
how we each got involved.
And we've now started to explore what it means to have the brain subject either intentionally
or not to the equivalent of a DDOS attack.
So maybe there's a good opportunity to have you give your thoughts on the premise, because
this idea came about in a Zoom call we were having the other night.
And I believe this was this was your idea.
Am I right?
I think so.
I guess I do see us as being one of my early articles was, hey, we're beset by a fire
hose of information.
Right.
We are constantly just inundated with information and that you know, this is I guess this is
what led me to, you know, to want to organize a group of people.
And I you know, it's funny, I had actually forgotten exactly how Operation Uplift started,
but maybe it did start when I had a call for an assistant.
But so many people I got maybe 50, 60 emails.
So many people reached out to contact me that I said, wow, you know, maybe I should just
put people in a pool, you know, like, you know, what what could go wrong?
Right.
It occurred to me that people needed healthy community that was something like a bubble,
perhaps from the DDOS attack from the fire hose of information.
You know, it can make you feel crazy if all you have are corrupted information sources.
So how do you do something else?
Well, you build your own community, you step away.
And I appreciated Cody saying that that we connected because he felt I was intellectually
honest.
And, you know, I do disagree and people disagree with me within the community.
And that's all fine.
And you know, we and we can continue to discuss topics to like I've changed my mind on a number
of things during the pandemic.
I just wrote an article last night where I said, you know what, I still don't know whether
some of the images we saw out of Wuhan from the very beginning are real.
Right.
I thought they were real.
Then I thought they were faked.
And now I'm like, you know what, if there was something like a controlled pathogenic
release, then maybe some of them were actually real.
And yet, you know, you have to peel back layers of what could be going on.
But you don't want to commit too hard to a belief that that's at least partially what
separated people who wanted to join Operation Uplift, perhaps, at least for many of them
is is they recognize something wrong and perhaps that something wrong is the need for you to
commit to a belief.
Right.
And I think that that even within the and I think that there's corruption all over the
medical freedom resistance and that we see in various groups a a purification tests,
purity tests where people need to commit to to belief.
And that's something that bothers me.
But you know what, just just to make the point, I'm going to share an email that came to me.
I think this is this is really important for everybody to see.
I started collecting these because I had so many of them sent to me.
But this is an email just sent to me the other day.
I think that what Operation Uplift is so threatens people who put themselves in in positions
within the medical freedom movement to I think to be part of the grand show.
Do you want to read this out for those who'd be listening just says, hey, Matthew, don't
know if this will help or not, but just started listening to your video on the above only
10 minutes through in the month.
I've got some information redacted.
I had a few people both MFM that's medical freedom movement and alt MFM reach out uninvited
and said I should be wary of you.
I told them politely to go bleep themselves as I think for myself, enjoy the chat and
think I can make it my own mind about people.
I keep all purse cons confidential.
So don't mean to tease as I won't name names, but I think it was you who is being targeted,
not me.
At least that's how it felt to me.
Yeah.
Well, I think and in general, like what I would say is, you know, somebody has like
a critique, you know, like Cody said, we've been able to disagree.
Right.
If somebody has a critique on an idea that we're discussing, you know, it can be discussed
and that's fine.
That's what people should bring out.
But what we have is, I think, a very controlled ecosystem of resistance that is part of the
DDS attack where people establish nodes and and and I think it was, you know, it was likely
prearranged.
Right.
If you have something as big as what has gone on, a program to mass vaccinate.
And of course, we have more and more information about forced vaccination.
That was even part of my article last night, the identification of a woman from Australia
at the World Vaccine Congress who who told people, no, do not communicate with people
who do not already agree with with our message here that everyone should be forcibly mandated
to be vaccinated or discuss safety and efficacy at all.
They don't have the conversation stand in the way of it.
So I think that we should absolutely expect for there also to be nodes, you know, planned
with within resistance to that.
And this is why people should be forming their own nodes and whether it's Operation Uplift
or some other node, you know, reach out and find community and build a new node.
We need new nodes.
One of the most important aspects to me is the ability to disagree because I couldn't
be in Operation Uplift.
I wouldn't have been able to be in it if there weren't people with whom I could disagree
because as soon as somebody says this is a forced belief, you have to believe it.
That's I'm out, which is how I got here to begin with.
I think that's how I'm not in the mainstream because as soon as you force me to say, yes,
this is true, no, this is not true.
Like, sorry, hands off, I'm done.
And so I think it's important.
I think other people could probably use that same heuristic, right?
Somebody says this is the case.
People here, we don't like those people over there.
And if you like those people over there, you can't be part of our group.
You're out.
Like you're just out.
Like you should you should say thank you very much.
Just like the person who wrote to Matthew did, thank you very much.
I can make up my own mind.
I guess and it is it is isolating, which is why Matthew's idea of nodes, whether they're
part of our group or not, is so valuable.
You have to find the community that you can disagree with but still be a part of.
And a big part of that is because like I don't know what the normal ratio in someone's life
of being right versus wrong about a given thing is.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that if you were to really dumb it down, you'd find
that 75 percent of the time on a given thing, you're wrong and 25 percent of the time you're
right.
And then ideally that, I guess, expands over time to being more correct about stuff.
But then that's still the wrong question.
Like what does it mean to be right about something or wrong about something?
Isn't it more about the process?
And I also have had my mind flip back and forth on a number of issues.
And I think without the ability, without the recognition of the necessity of doing that
as the information and as the as everything changes in favor of a new reality, if you
get stuck, if you dig your heels into something, then it becomes religion, not information,
I suppose.
And so I echo that's what's been very valuable is being able to have sometimes very heated
disagreements that then wind up being rooted in a fundamental respect, even if the person
really ticks you off on a given day.
I think if we can't engage in that as a group, as one on one or as a society, that's where
we're going to continue to fail.
And so that's why this group has been fantastic.
If I could jump in there, every principle has its boundaries.
Right?
Is it an unreasonable ideological purity test to keep people out who who believe that the
best thing to do is just extinguish all of humanity?
Right.
I see.
Right.
There are there are obviously going to be boundaries to a community.
Most of them are natural.
I think of them kind of like I think of natural law.
Right.
If your boundaries for running a community are basically the same thing as natural law,
then you're going to be fine.
OK.
You know, at some point there may be reasons to test those boundaries.
But you know, not really.
Not for a note of, you know, one hundred something people.
Right.
So you know, don't don't worry about like people shouldn't worry about if they're forming
community.
Don't worry about the edge cases now.
You know, find groups of people that you can work with and and don't don't let some parasocial
relationship dictate what you're going to work on.
Yeah.
Excuse me.
I'm curious about hearing examples about things that have that people have flip flopped on.
And just to give an example, I so there's this as of yet unresolved issue as far as
I'm concerned about this whole this whole.
And it sounds crazy even to say and that's partially why I'm going to use it as an example.
This whole magnets situation where there was this period of time where that was all the
rage on the alternative video platforms and I'm sure Tiktok and others of people sticking
magnets to themselves.
And the premise was that it was because they had just received a covid shot and it was
equally trashed and ridiculed in mainstream sources.
And then it sort of doesn't get talked about anymore.
But I'm going to go ahead and say I definitely myself experienced that magnetic phenomenon
very specifically on the place where I would if I had chosen to receive a covid shot, it
would have been where I got it.
And so it's an interesting unresolved phenomenon for me, but it's not just me.
There are very credible people who at the time were looking at it and going, I've also
I'll give you an example.
Tess Lori, who I find to be largely credible, said she had witnessed firsthand this phenomenon
as well and had no explanation for it and simply wanted an explanation.
Can you clarify what you mean when you say that you were so let's say you are you saying
that you took a magnet and put it on your arm?
You did not get a shot, but you put a magnet on your arm where you would have gotten a
shot.
Yeah, stuck.
It stuck in a way and over a long enough period of time, like I replicated the experiment,
so to speak, enough times where it appeared as though that's what was happening.
But you would be a control case because you didn't.
Right.
It should be independent of.
Well, he would be a case for some variables.
And we still we still don't know exactly what the possibility of shedding might mean.
Right.
Or, for example, because I, Diane, received one dose of Gardasil, for example.
That's I'm not saying it was that I'm saying that's another thing that others have have
suggested is perhaps it's not specific to this shot.
So that's sort of the idea of we maybe are so overwhelmed with information that the second
applause something comes up and then the first plausible explanation that comes in is the
one we stick to.
But that doesn't actually mean that it is attributable to the thing.
But my point is it started as being a crazy thing.
Then I dismissed it.
Then I experienced it myself.
And I've sort of flip flopped on on what that actually means.
But that's just one example.
I'm curious if there's anything that's come.
Oh, well, and the related graphene oxide question started as being this like, is this something
worth even thinking about?
I remember people at the time in our clubhouse groups dismissing it as, you know, oh, we
don't want to touch conspiracy theories when it hadn't even really been articulated as
one.
And then it went away as completely nonsense.
Now it's coming back as well.
No, graphene oxide is part of the equation, but it doesn't mean it's the part of the equation
that everyone else has been discussing.
And is it relevant at all?
What are some examples that you guys have experienced on things where you've you've
changed your mind?
I'll jump in.
Would somebody else like to answer?
What are the really contentious ones?
Because I don't come from really a medicine background at all.
You know, my biology knowledge is not very solid.
And so I saw a lot of people making noise about Tarrin theory.
You know, they were basically saying things along the lines of all Louis past there is
a fraud and, you know, here's why viruses aren't actually real.
And that was something I seriously entertain.
I can I can definitely admit I'm like, OK, what is the deal here as far as I was trying
to understand it?
And I'm lucky that my other half is fairly rounded in biology.
So she was able to answer a lot of my questions about some of this.
But I was entertaining it enough to really upset her over this.
And the thing that really where I really settled on at the end of that process was that I realized
that the problem is not actually viruses themselves as much as like the way they kind of talk
people into it.
But there are a lot of things about health that honestly someone like myself who doesn't
know much about biology are absolutely wrong about.
We don't have a clue what health actually looks like.
I mean, I'm a pretty heavy guy because I did not prioritize wealth or health well enough
because of that.
And I do think there are a lot of things, you know, things like sunshine, you know,
nutrition and any exercise is a big one.
Anything you can do to be healthier will absolutely change your outcomes on honestly all kinds
of aspects of life.
And yeah, that'll have an effect.
So to me, it was an interesting way of looking into, OK, this is something that people won't
even discuss.
But I was really digging into it.
I'm like, OK, what's what's missing here was what I was trying to understand.
And I do think it is kind of like a crowbar almost because whoever's, you know, originating
where this is coming from, they know most people don't think about this stuff in any
level of depth.
And that was what it revealed to me how little I knew about all of it.
Not only that, but I think that there are a lot of there are a lot of lies sort of within
the literature and embedded within the literature or like like weird mistruths even.
Right.
Like the my wife who studies viruses, like the way that she might identify viruses is
not the way that it's taught in a textbook.
Right.
Like when people hear things like, you know, some particular methodology or some particular
test, oh, gosh, what's the one that that that is often?
Oh, goodness, I'm forgetting the name of it now.
But there are some people who are like, oh, like Koch's postulates or something like that.
Right.
You know, people might have like one particular test that has nothing to do with the way that
it's actually done in a laboratory.
And they say, well, you know, this definition here, that definition here, and they'll point
to like three textbooks and the definitions will be different.
And you know what?
That's fine.
You know, that that the textbooks are not consistent doesn't mean that there isn't a
definition or doesn't mean that there's not a process.
But yeah, this this made me think of an idea right now, which is that that I think that
these types of events allow for us to be studied.
Right.
And I think that that's actually one of the things that we should think about and try
to like if if you are forming into groups that can be commoditized either because of
a personality that you're following or like a like a parasocial relationship that can
be designed to steer you one step at a time.
And I have several in mind.
I'm not going to say them out loud, but or that you can have a belief tested and then
you can be that that people can be farmed into two groups and then those two groups
can be sort of you know, media can be aimed at them.
And I do think that there is establishment of sort of alt media empire that seems to
be going after those people.
And some of that may be for various purposes.
Some of it may just be for business models.
And yet the business models can themselves drive feedback loops that corrupt the pool
of people in the same way that everything felt corrupted before we reached out to form
new nodes.
So I mean, John, did I say any of that clearly enough?
I want to jump in on that because for let's just say for this audience, probably most
people would hear that and not really recoil.
But for a wider audience, people would hear like, oh, the pandemic, we formed groups and
it allows us to be studied.
And perhaps somebody could say, well, that seems kind of conspiratorial.
You know, that seems a little maybe that's too far.
There are research papers that are written and published online.
You can go and check them out where they are literally using the pandemic to study how
people respond to different forms of propaganda, persuasion.
I mean, these real out there, it's funded by the government and it's not just like,
you know, a patent from 60 years ago.
This is stuff that's been published right now in response to the pandemic.
And it was very fast.
It's not only papers.
We have entire governmental organizations that have developed process.
Right.
The book, the nudge that was written by Thaler and Sunstein, the the UK government created
a nudge unit that was embedded within its intelligence agencies.
It was a new agency within the intelligence infrastructure of the UK.
It was then spun off into a corporation or I don't know if corporations the right word,
but some sort of like an entity organization that then contracts with other governments
and intelligence agencies and corporations around the world to do that work.
Right.
Kind of psychological testing follows very easily from like the A B testing that's done
in computer science.
Right.
So this kind of stuff, I mean, it's very, very straightforward.
How are the kids to to the psychological testing on groups of people?
And we are in the age of Cambridge Analytica.
Right.
Cambridge Analytica happened.
You know, the Brexit vote happened.
And you know, whether or not we know the entire public story on that, we cannot at this point
say that anything like intended mass manipulation, even to a refined and granulated degree, is
not happening.
It absolutely is.
So I think that people should be very considerate of, you know, step forward, be a leader,
form your own group, and these things may be malleable, but you're going to wind up
with a healthier ecosystem and a healthier situation that way.
Can I can I just poke on the Cambridge Analytica thing?
Because I've always heard about it and never known the story other than Steve Bannon worked
at Cambridge Analytica.
And I bring that up because he's been someone I recently looked at in some of this same
context.
Can you just give a quick overview of what that what what was the Cambridge Analytica
situation?
I don't know if I can tell the story like from A to Z.
But somebody decided that they were going to I guess somebody who was who was politically
involved decided that they were going to hire an analytics firm to do the job.
And yeah, that's basically what it comes down to.
And then, you know, I guess they knew somebody and they had confidence in them and they brought
them in.
And suddenly you had a team that started growing and it became like the mission.
It was like it was like that was the way they were really focusing the entire operation
on the Brexit vote.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, this A B testing that Cody, you just brought up, it's interesting
because one way you would do that is by, let's say, controlling two telegram groups and separating
people based on a factor.
Just hypothetically, Operation Uplift could be one of them.
I don't think it is.
But you would separate people based on one difference and then test different messaging
and then see how they react.
And I guess it's the reason why people might have trouble not reacting immediately is that's
conspiracy theory.
I think people don't have a mental map for that.
This has never been something that we've had to consider for real goes on in our lives,
except we know that it does because that's what Facebook is.
And that predates like that knowledge and understanding predates COVID.
So we can simultaneously not have a mental map for knowing or for being able to process
that we might be all of us by default subjects in a social experiment and simultaneously
understand that the NSA and Facebook and Google are doing exactly that to us all the time.
How can we have two conflicting thoughts as people?
And not be able to...
It's very strange because people don't seem to account for how much permission they give
for other places to use their data.
So beyond anything else, we've been doing this for decades where you just hit yes to
the terms of service for anything you sign up for.
And then as you continue to sign up for things, you don't realize, it's like, oh, well, the
data can't be traced back to you.
Well, maybe it can, maybe it can't.
But what you end up with is a whole bunch of companies learning how to improve or target
their products based off of what you would like and dislike and say and don't say in
places you visit.
And so this kind of thing is, I mean, it really is, can act as one of the bases for what we're
seeing now on a different scale.
Because if you continue to reward companies for targeting you and for manipulation of
you, then they're going to find better and new exciting ways to target and manipulate
you.
I think that also what people underestimate is the degree to which their choices can be
steered.
Yes.
Right?
Like I think that to actually follow the process of a nudge unit, it would be fascinating if
somebody were to put together a documentary.
In fact, we really need that.
We need somebody to make an educational documentary that walks through such an operation.
And I don't know who might have footage of that or something.
But I think most people don't know how much their thoughts are steered at this point.
And they don't know all the techniques.
I think they don't know how powerful ash conformity experiments have become.
Right?
People think they know that experiment well.
But really and truly, there are different reasons why people wound up making the wrong
choice and how frequently they made the wrong choice according to the setup in the room.
How many confidants are there?
How many false confidants are there?
How those confidants are dressed?
What is your perception of those confidants?
Right?
People don't know how well they can be steered and manipulated.
Well, I think a big part of it, though, is that regular people are kind of robbed for
time.
If you're dealing with all these pressures from all these different areas, whether it's
your career, whether it's the chaos of inflation ramping up and political instability and polarization,
from almost every direction, this is, in my opinion, what really drives the DDoS effect
on people's minds is that they have a very small amount of time to really parse through
these issues.
And so this is where what's funny is that some of the more extremely online people who
have a lot of time on their hands will be able to parse through these issues.
But good luck communicating it to somebody who doesn't have the time to even get to
where that person is at.
And so if that wasn't bad enough, you've got this huge time barrier.
And then you have the emotional barrier, where as far as I can tell, fear, stress, anger,
all the things that have been really ramped up as things get crazier are things that will
reduce your capacity to think about anything in any kind of depth, seriousness, or even
curiosity.
And I think of that like a flock of birds effect.
I think people very often underestimate how mimetic we all are.
Think about to your days in school.
When we were all school children, the vast majority of the time, when we didn't know
what we should be doing, we looked around and followed a line or a crowd.
And I don't even just mean that physically.
I mean, what should I be doing with myself?
How should I be handling a certain assignment?
I was exactly one of those students who would sometimes get lost in thoughts.
Instructions would be given out, and then I would look around.
And I'm just one personality type.
I'm sure it happens a little bit differently for everybody.
But just in order to figure out how should I be on task, I might look around the room
and then look at the board and see a set of instructions and put two and two together
and figure out what was going on.
Not always, but just if I lost myself in thoughts.
People are very mimetic and for a lot of different reasons.
It is economic.
Just like Gabe said, you don't have time to figure everything out.
Going with crowds is an ordinary evolutionarily obvious strategy for a species, especially
one as complex as we are.
I would double down on it because I think that's part of the social fabric.
There is this assumption that the people in positions of power are doing it responsibly,
are doing it with the tribe's goals in mind.
And so when you have this betrayal, I've heard a lot of people say, oh, X institution can't
be corrupt because that would mean we can't trust anything.
And I've myself come back with, yes, you can't trust anything.
That's so hard.
Well anything from such centralized nodes, right?
There is a lot that we can trust if we just organize it differently, but it is an economics
problem.
Now, I want to move to a slightly different perspective.
An example, I want to talk about busy work because I have, for example, for years been
incapable of managing the constant input, not strictly of new information as we've been
discussing, but new communications, which themselves you could call information.
What I mean is with the full array of social media apps, you've got your Facebook, your
Instagram, your Twitter, your YouTube comments, your, gosh, I don't know, your Snapchats,
your text messages, your emails.
And no clear method that I've been able to develop or that I've had anyone else be able
to explain to me for how to manage all of it.
Not of course being on its own, the important thing, managing it alongside just living your
daily life, not attached to a computer, also managing it in balance with important work
that needs to be done.
And I wonder if others have considered the possibility, in fact, Matthew, I think you've
discussed it before, the idea that people can use just little distractions, like little
calls for your attention to derail you.
And so that's assuming it as a tool.
But even in the absence of the use of distraction or busy work or small tasks or whatever as
weapons, I think it's just another inherent challenge we probably all face just trying
to figure out in the era of instant communication and in the era of piling up communication.
You're no longer just answering phone calls as they come in that you can then maybe return
if you miss it.
It's now you've got a thousand little red dots in your inbox.
What do you do with that?
Now Diane, as a mom, you're probably the most inherently busy just as your base job description.
And so you're probably best qualified to help shed some light on how you manage the duties
of being a mother and everything else you live with in daily life and also engaging
in such a constant stream of people reaching out to you, I assume.
Sorry, I've got a whole houseload of contractors and it's sort of like everyone is four years
old and I was on the phone when my kids were four and I would look down and say, do you
not see this phone in my ear?
And here I am talking to my computer.
And do you not see Diane, Deanna, mommy talking to the computer?
Yes, I'm involved in something, but hey.
So my daughters are grown up.
The littlest one is now 21.
So they're early 20s plus a 40 something stepson.
And I think so we get Slack messages, we get text messages, we get emails, and then we're
on all these chats on Telegram and Signal.
And my biggest challenge, well, let me just say this, I used to have a very seven days
a week.
I get up really early.
I go to bed really early.
I mean, I get up like at four or 30 or five.
So I'm not around as you know past eight o'clock usually.
Plus being in real estate, I learned I had to turn off all the screens early before I
just lost my mind because I feel a need to respond, which I had to get over.
But I think for me, just managing it, the biggest problem for me is the source of what
I saw.
And you're going, oh God, somebody asked me a question or somebody sent me something.
Was it on that Slack channel or was it on Signal or Telegram?
And it gets very frustrating to source it.
That's one thing.
And then the text thing really irritates me.
To me, that's an urgent personal channel.
My children text me when they're in trouble, which is why I've been on my phone for the
last 20 minutes because the car insurance payment didn't make it because they got canceled
by the real insurance company, both of them simultaneously.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, one speeds and one gets in unilateral wrecks with herself or parking lot structures.
Anyway, so yeah.
So I think it's just way too many sources.
So I used to get up very early in the morning and I would go through a process where I would
go through the Operation Uplift channel, that's always my first priority, and catch up with
those messages.
And then I would hit my email and I literally, I'm pretty OCD, I admit it, but I would just
go through this, you know, all this tap tap kind of OCD stuff and go through it all just
to keep myself sane.
So I could say, okay, I'm caught up.
And now I can switch to iced tea from coffee.
That means I'm caught up.
It took a while, but I did that every day of the week for 18 months, 18 months easily.
And you know, I managed myself with all this stuff.
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, because what wouldn't that take?
To me, that sounds like it would probably take hours.
Like how long do you realistically need to set aside as a part of your routine to do
that?
Well, one thing I have, which is a blessing, I have a couple of things going for me.
I read really fast, I synthesize really fast, and I've got a semi-photographic memory.
Actually, I've killed so many brain cells, that's probably mostly gone.
But I literally can remember things from where they were on the page, if you will.
And so everybody says, how do you find things?
How do you use bookmarks?
And I said, I never could use bookmarks.
I'm horrible.
And I always get them messed up.
And so I have everything under recipes.
So I just gave up on that.
But I just read really fast.
I'm so jealous of that.
Oh, I know you are, man.
I can't imagine being dyslexic in this business.
So I also, I'm a good skimmer.
And so I can go through, if it's fairly, something's fairly well written, you know, I can look
at the topic and the summation and see if it's worth reading.
You know, and I'll favorite something, you know, to come back to or something.
That's pretty much how I go about it.
It sounds so clean and concise.
It's not.
I know.
It can't be.
But you make it, you present a framework for something I suppose I could at least try.
And it's fairly straightforward.
But again, it never works out that cleanly, right?
Well, yeah, and part of the raising kids thing for a control freak, it was very difficult
because you have none.
And so you find these areas where you can establish control like your, you know, like
your COVID information.
That was a lot easier than children.
OK, what about you, Cody?
How do you manage that same problem?
Oh, sorry.
The problem of the attempted DDoS attack or the flood of information.
Well, yeah, but in the realm of like productivity, keeping up to date with your communications
and then how you balance that with the time you spend, whatever your work is, whatever
you consider the work, you know, and of course, just living your life.
Right.
Well, I'm not sure that I have anything to teach anybody with that.
I struggle as much as anyone else, especially with, you know, my if it doesn't catch me,
my attention span is very poor.
And so the things that I'm interested in, I can hyper focus, I can read through the
paper, I can, you know, analyze the information, as long as it's something that I wanted I
want to do.
And then when it's not, it's like holding onto soap.
It's absolutely atrocious.
And so, yeah, I don't have any answer to give.
I mostly will.
So this is going to touch on something that I think you wanted to get to, but what Gabe
said, I mostly withdraw from sources that are not at least giving me something.
So if it's, so there are sources, I mean, you can play games or watch something, entertainment
for relaxation purposes.
But if you're thinking about information source, then, you know, I only follow on my Twitter
only follow a couple of hundred people.
And that's probably too many.
And I don't spend all that much time on there.
You know, I watch, you know, a few different news, podcasts or sources like that from across
the spectrum, some conservative, some left it some center, you know, I have OU, but I
really am more or less unplugged from things.
Like, because I just, you know, everybody has the loss when you change from one topic
to the other, when you get a text, when you are suddenly interrupted, everybody pays the
cost for that, right?
But I find that for me, it's very, very difficult.
Like the cost is very steep.
And so when I'm distracted by something like, you know, I've lost not only have I lost whatever
was that I was building in my head at the time, I saw a comic the other day where somebody
who had a sort of a flow chart building in their head and somebody says, Hey, wait a
second.
And they turn and he's, Oh, nevermind.
And the person's flow chart is pop like a bubble is popped and is gone.
And so like they had this whole thing, they spent hours playing together.
They were interrupted for a second, and then it's gone.
And I was like, well, that's very relatable because, you know, I feel the same kind of
way.
So if I intend to get anything done, it really has to be without distractions.
Yeah, Gabe, what about you?
I think, Cody, you suggest that's related to what Gabe was suggesting earlier with the
curating of the RSS feeds.
And I think that's certainly a good, I'd be curious for more of a step-by-step guide on
how to do that, because there are sources that I wouldn't assume generate RSS feeds.
Now of course, the problem, that's like step two, step one probably is pruning out a good
chunk of stuff that we right now have, you know, funneling into our various inboxes and
brains in general.
So I'm curious, Gabe, first, what about you in terms of channeling what comes in, but
also time management?
Like, how do you get past the feeling of I'm not doing enough or I'm not doing the right
thing if you have that?
Maybe I'm projecting.
Well, you know, that's really hitting it on the head for me because when things started
getting going in 2020, I knew there was a problem.
I knew something was off.
And I spent a lot of time, honestly, really taking myself to task of am I as an individual,
you know, who am I?
I certainly put a lot of pressure on myself.
What am I doing to contribute to solving this problem?
And that caused a lot of stress and anxiety.
I'm going to be honest, you know, that was very emotionally difficult because my answer
for most of it was I'm not.
I don't know.
I don't even know.
You know, you need direction and direction is very helpful.
And so having, you know, even a list of things to do can do go a long way.
One of the things I actually borrowed from Matthew is he's mentioned many times that
he takes notes.
And I have started journaling as of this year, and I find that a very helpful way to keep
track.
And I think that's what can help you preserve that architecture you're building in your
mind if you get it down somewhere.
And because I had started publishing on Substack before then, but this year I focused on trying
to have some of my own notes that maybe don't need to be as formal as a whole article going
out there.
And I have found it very helpful.
So I that's something I appreciate a lot, especially because it does also help with
the emotional side, because if you write, you know, this made me really angry and you
revisit it, you may be able to reassess why that made you really angry or why, you know,
it was able to get under your skin.
And then from a different frame of mind, you can now reevaluate it.
And I, in my personal opinion, that has been the biggest power up I've had this entire
time has been having my own notes and trying to revisit them occasionally.
And it does help with like dispassionate approaches to occasional topics.
Absolutely.
You know, if I could jump in right here, everybody has a different method for dealing with the
information overload.
That's something that you should want in a community, right?
You should want all the different personality types who are going to process all the information
differently.
This is one of the reasons why it does trouble me that there seem to be attempts to farm
people into communities based on a shared belief first, like, you know, the belief that
the vaccines are making everyone magnetic or the belief that that they're alien babies
in the vaccines, you know, like the more or less absurd or whatever.
Right.
And I've seen people online where if I if I just posted any bit of pushback or even
just asked a question, then I was just verbally assaulted.
You know, I immediately stopped going to Thomas Rintz's Substack, for instance, because just
just a one sentence question and then boom, you know, there's this there seemed to be
and I think that this is put in place, actually, I think this is part of of the operation of
what all this is in the attempt to keep people outside of the mainstream from forming healthy
communities.
I think that there are people put in place as whips to to ensure that conformity.
So look around.
And if you're if you're talking with a lot of people who aren't similar to you, that
might be healthy.
I love it.
Well, what what do we do from here?
Like where where can we begin to establish?
Like I'm curious as to how people who are aware that everything that's coming at them
could be either just garbage or unintentional act of distracting or of overloading the mind.
Like how do we identify what is important and how do we how do we then dismiss everything
that's not maybe maybe that's already a question we've beaten into the ground.
But I wonder if there is a one, you know, a one sentence summation or something.
Oh, I don't know that I have a one sentence summation.
I don't tend to do one sentences.
But so it reminds me of one thing I wanted to go back on that gave had mentioned.
He said that you needed to withdraw intelligently.
Right.
To the extent that you withdraw, you have to withdraw intelligently.
I think this is vitally important because I know that a lot of people on we're going
to say most of my experience of people who are kind of espousing these ideas are on the
right or conservative side.
They're like, let's just we're going to form our own communities.
We're going to like in person, you know, move away from other places.
We're going to cut off entire websites or entire types of media.
And we're going to completely isolate.
And while that may stop or slow the medic kind of infection, right, it may stop or slow
the ideas from getting into your community.
It may may make you feel better.
Probably, probably would really.
But is it going to be the winning strategy is my question.
I'm not sure that a complete withdrawal or a an unintelligent withdrawal is the answer.
Right.
What we have to do is we have to we have to, like you said, withdraw intelligently.
And so kind of the retreat to the to a way that doesn't exist anymore, a way of the past
that doesn't exist anymore is not going to be an answer of no Internet, no communication,
because any group that does this.
And I had a conversation with a man in OU last night about this.
Any group that that self isolates to that degree may continue on individually, but they're
not going to be influential in the world.
They're not going to be able to spread what they've got.
And so they may be a small granule that lives as they are and continues as they are, but
they're not going to be able to spread that.
They're not going to be able to influence.
And so I think that if we if we are too reckless with how we draw, we will lose the power that
we have.
What we have to do is to withdraw in such a way from from the places that are completely
toxic to us.
We have to say, look, this is too much.
I can't I can't be on this side of Twitter.
Like it's just poisoning me.
It kills my kills my morale.
It kills my my ability to continue through the day.
Can't do that.
I can't pay attention to these issues here because, you know, if I had if I had Twitter
2000 years ago and all I did was read about how, you know, these wolves keep killing all
the sheep and we're never going to have enough food to eat and look at what's happening in
this place.
And these potatoes are I've got a disease.
Maybe I wouldn't have been able to continue right to the modern day.
Right.
Because, you know, archaic Twitter would have would have killed my ability to continue.
And so I wouldn't want to spend my time on toxic topics.
But what I need to do is to be able to trim those topics without trimming, first of all,
my ability to communicate.
And second of all, my ability to receive important information.
Like I do need to know if I do need to know if there's a war in some other place.
But I don't need to follow excruciating detail exactly what's happening.
But I so I think it's I think the question of how you do this is in the air.
Like I don't I don't know what the answer is.
But we do need to keep in mind that we have to be very careful not to over withdraw for
the reasons I've stated.
Yeah, tremendously interesting.
And I do like I like the honesty we can have with ourselves in a group of saying the specific
solutions aren't clear yet.
But the general premise as it begins to open up and shed light, you know, moving in that
direction, I think is a good idea.
I definitely don't feel I have the solutions in my life yet beyond just reminding myself
that it's OK to not, as you say, not know the nitty gritty of absolutely everything.
It's OK to miss an email from time to time.
Like there are certain underlying principles that so long as they remain your driving force,
the details can be worked on and improved.
And then the bigger picture questions, you know, we don't need to rush to an answer.
But as we're moving to an end here, I'm wondering if anybody has anything else on the topic
that we haven't been able to get to yet.
Any any any core anything we haven't addressed yet?
Matthew, what are you thinking?
I was listening to Cody and I was thinking about the difference.
I was thinking about exit and build, which is something that it's a phrase that I like.
It's promoted by John Bush and Derrick Brose.
And I think that there is a way to do that and still do what Cody's talking about, which
is to you know, you don't have to be a Luddite.
And in fact, it's probably a losing strategy, I would think.
Or at the very least, the Amish aren't going to decide how the next technological era unfolds.
Right.
If you are interested in participating in that, you need to still be connected, but
you need to be connected smartly.
You know, maybe not with a you know, Cody puts it as withdraw smartly, but maybe that's
a disentangle.
You know, maybe maybe also think of it as connecting smartly.
I would also build on what Cody said, because one of the things I've been trying to almost
have as a mantra to myself to kind of rephrase what he said is I think it's good to humanize
yourself and others.
You know, you make mistakes, they make mistakes.
Try not to treat people as oh, this person is from that camp.
Therefore x, y and z.
I'm from this camp.
Therefore, I'm x, y and z.
Treat everyone as people.
And that can really go a long way when you're trying to connect with people who are different
from you.
Everyone is different from you one way or another.
Just giving people an out.
Very interesting way of putting it.
Interact with grace.
So one thing I don't know if we have time for this.
I'm not sure how long the program runs.
Yeah, go for it.
Some things I was I had marked down a couple of things that were maybe worth talking about
that we didn't actually get to.
And the only thing left on my on my list was do we want to talk about examples of times
where we think there may or may not have been an actual DDoS attempt on on the psyche as
a whole.
So it's an actual psychic attack.
So a good example of this.
I mean, we've been seeing sort of continued attempts, I think, over the course of the
past few years.
But one that struck me was around the the 2020 election, we're not going to be on YouTube,
are we?
I'm streaming to my YouTube, but it's maybe not going to stay up.
So whatever extent anything happened, the discussion around that at that time, I found
incapacitating, right?
Whether you think something happened, something didn't happen.
I found the discussion to be incapacitating.
It was like I was very busy at the time.
And, you know, I was running OU, I have my job, and I have my life outside of that.
And I really just had to completely stop.
I completely pulled back from all communications outside of OU, because I was I mean, it worked.
It functioned to shut my down my services down.
So whether that was just a lot of people are interested in the topic, and we're going to
discuss it, or whether it was to the extent it was a dedicated denial of psyche attack,
it functioned on me.
And so I wondered if we wanted to talk about other examples that may or may not have been
such a thing, or if we just want to discuss anything along those lines, since we didn't
touch on the main topic as, you know, exclusively, we talked about a whole bunch of other stuff.
So yeah, yeah.
Well, are there any other examples that people have thought of?
On a broader level, one of the things I'm curious about is an education.
You know, a lot of people will talk about, oh, the standards are declining, or they're
just passing students.
And even on the university level, they had a word for it, which they called elite overproduction,
which was, oh, there are too many qualified people entering, I guess, the workforce, so
to speak.
And even though this is not information, this is actually whole people being moved through
the system faster, and has that bit part of the way information has been pushed through
systems and created these additional difficulties.
I think in that specific question, I think that is an unintended consequence of the game
theory of how the university systems are set up.
Because of the cheap, because of the structure of the one mentor and the multiple graduate
students and because of the cheap labor that you get from graduate students.
I think that the benefits of pushing people out with degrees to get more people to work
in your lab for cheap is set up in such a way that you, I mean, it could be somebody
was using the fact of that to push information out.
But I think that just on its own, if you have that kind of a setup, you're going to end
up with an excess of educated people who want to go out and talk about their education.
You know, I want to briefly return Cody to the example you gave because I think it's
actually a really good one, the 2020 election.
So my what I watched happen, I think you're right that that was maybe one of the most
obvious attempts at a DDOS attack for a really obvious intended outcome.
Because it's my understanding that what happened is you had reason to believe something went
wrong.
So that aside, then it came to people talking about what actually went wrong.
And you had a few different narratives.
One involved foreign interference through digital connectivity and networks out of China
or Italy, Germany.
There's a few variations of that story.
Then there was the vote counting machines and how they were the primary source, you
know, for all the obvious ways you can hack a machine and get it to spit out a different
outcome.
Then you had everything to do with mail in voting.
And that's why COVID was done is to get Trump out of office because they needed to implement
all these COVID measures to then justify mail in voting.
But what which of those were the ones that got the most attention right off the bat?
Well, they they were the China interfering through the Internet and the Dominion and
smartmatic vote counting machines being rigged.
And which of all of those had the least evidence to back them up?
It was the ones that got the most attention.
And quite please.
Oh, yeah.
And and so what wound up happening is and and correct me if I'm wrong on any of this,
but what wound up happening is the initial lawsuits that were very high profile, you
know, the ones involving Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and a few other big names wound up
being so premature.
And so they wound up not having the evidentiary base you might desire for such a serious allegation.
And they then basically made it impossible to bring any other kind of perhaps more nuanced,
more legitimate argument about, for example, signature match verification, looking at all
of the ballots and and finding whether there was evidence that they were in fact sent by
the person who said they would.
But that has nothing to do with the Internet or that has nothing to do with ballot machines
actually miscounting.
And so the way that the story played out, at least in that summary, which which I may
there may be others who disagree that to me would be an example of how you might apply
a DDoS type information overload early on with slightly wrong stories in order to distract
from what could be a very plausible.
Yeah, I have two things.
I think to to be more to hold me to it.
So first, I think that ordering it by the the amount of interaction it got is maybe
the wrong way to look at it, because I think that these kinds of things, if done, they
would be done in a sort of a shotgun approach where they want to have low interaction and
high interaction, medium interaction.
If I were designing it, this is what I would do.
So I would have very high believable, very low believable, like all sorts of things intermixed
and put out at the same time, because if you put only the big stories fake and then, you
know, I just feel like it would be easier to see through if I were if I were, you know,
an evil genius, whatever evil overlord, that's what I would do.
Second, I had a second.
Hmm.
We may have to come back to it.
I think I may have lost the first one.
But so so I think that the ordering may not be as important, because I think that if I
were going to do something like this, I would do it in a certain way where it would not
only be that.
But I think that I think it would be very easy to accomplish, because people were so
concerned and everybody had an opinion.
And I just felt inundated everywhere I looked.
And very importantly, I feel like it seemed like no two places were talking about the
same thing.
Yeah.
And it seemed like every single source had a different but vital flaw that they were
like, oh, this thing or do you see these people handing off this?
Here's an image of people handing off a flash drive.
We see this happen.
And this person was here who did that in this.
And then some other people said, well, the special forces attack this base and some other
place.
Like it was it was very, very different.
It was everywhere you went.
And it was to a degree where you couldn't make heads or tails of the situation, I feel
like.
And so that's what leads me to believe that it was a propaganda or an influential.
The part of it was an attempt to influence people is because that's how propaganda is
done.
Propaganda is everywhere all the time, constantly, or else it doesn't work.
And so this is the same kind of deal where what you were seeing was different stories
everywhere all the time.
And that's how you were able to demoralize the people who were interested in learning
more about the situation.
In my opinion.
Yep.
Agreed.
And I just want to point out it is one of those discussions that everybody should be
very interested in because it does not actually matter which side you're on.
Shouldn't we all be very concerned about the integrity of our election systems?
We're dealing with something here in Canada very similar where and I have not gotten to
the bottom of what I think is actually happening.
But you've got this huge story right now about how Justin Trudeau's reelection campaign and
possibly many others in recent Canadian history have been influenced by Chinese operatives.
And money and it's interesting how you can talk about that, but you can't talk about
any version of the same in the States.
So that on its own is also interesting.
The contrast in what's acceptable discourse.
It's very, very wild because what you see is the number one, the US interferes with
elections everywhere.
We absolutely if we don't, then we should fire people in charge and start doing it.
We're a major country.
That's something that's expected.
You should be making sure that the people you were at the table with at the world stage
are friendly to you.
You have to do what you have to do to get that to happen.
And I think that's just good management of your government.
And so you would expect that other people are doing the same to us, which I'm sure they
are and they should be.
And so it's our job to defend the integrity of our elections.
And what we have is interest groups have for I don't even know how long in our country,
either entire political parties in certain locations or throughout the country have actually
influenced elections in certain ways.
I mean, there's the whole story about was the battle of Athens where there was a town
in Georgia where people were taken over the voting polls and not let in deciding who was
going to be the sheriff of some local role.
And there was a gunfight in the middle of a city in the United States to clear out people
who were influencing, who were stopping fair elections.
I mean, this is what happened with voting, was the voting test polls, exams that they
would give to people to stop certain undereducated or minority people from voting.
This is not new to have people influencing elections in the South and the North all over
the country on different levels.
And this is just historical examples.
This is 50, 100 years ago or plus.
So this is not even like new, maybe contentious things.
These are things you can read about in your history books.
And so why should we expect it to have stopped?
We shouldn't.
And so as technology increases, so does a group or a single person's ability to influence
something.
They're force multipliers.
That's exactly what technology does.
And so we just have to keep that in mind.
Yeah.
Yep.
Very good point.
Well, we are kind of at the, you're right.
We could have, there was a bunch of topics that would have been really good to get into.
And I think this is testament to how this has to be an ongoing conversation.
And that's sort of the premise of rounding the earth from the get-go is to be able to
over time flesh out these complex ideas.
And that's what Operation Uplift has been about as well.
We've been going on however many years now of seemingly never-ending discussions that
continue to change as new information comes available.
So we'll have to have another Operation Uplift open discussion like this.
Any final, yeah, go for it, Matthew.
Operation Uplift is two years old.
Two years.
That blows my mind.
Yeah.
Here's to many more.
Well, here's to many more and hopefully they're more focused on the just hanging out with
awesome people side of things and maintaining more of a normal kind of life.
Because I don't know about you, to the extent there are ongoing crises, I'd very much like
those planes to start to land.
Too much of an optimist, Leo.
Perhaps what we should root for is for there to be offspring.
What do you mean as in community nodes?
Yeah.
Like the core of Meerkats, it begins to split and it becomes multiple groups.
And then that's part of the health of everything.
There's a death and a rebirth and all of that going on.
So long as it's all healthy.
Agreed.
Okay.
Well, let's go around.
Let's say our final notes here.
Cody, where do you want to direct people if they want to learn more about your work or
where they can best dedicate their time and attention?
Oh, as for the second one, that's quite difficult.
I don't know where the best way to spend your attention is.
Hopefully you can figure that out for yourself as you continue to watch rounding the earth.
Uh oh.
I think I've lost video.
Oh, I still see you.
Look at that.
Okay.
Well am I back?
Oh yeah.
Yep.
You there?
No.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm here.
You hear of a DDoS attack?
Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Excellent.
Okay.
Anyway, I do have a I have a sub sack that I have one article on and hope to add more
to.
So we'll put a link to that in the description, but I don't know how to when I figure out
how to answer the question of how do we stop the DDoS attacks and how to handle the fire
hose, then I'll be sure to let you know.
Sounds awesome.
Okay.
And we will get that link in the in the description for everybody.
And Gabe, how about you?
Where do you want to direct people?
I mean, I have my own website at liprasolutions.network.
If anyone is interested in keeping up with what I'm up to, but I would also say if anyone's
interested in Campfire Wiki and the project itself, even if you're not, you know, feel
like you have the time to, you know, really edit it or become involved, if you even have
feedback, you know, feedback is really useful for those of us who, you know, are working
on it.
If you could just say, oh, this article could be improved.
Here are some ideas, you know, you'd like to see fleshed out.
That can go a long way and, you know, the operation uplift email is in the chat and
anything you can do to suggest ways it could be made better or even more relevant is probably
quite welcome.
Absolutely.
Okay.
All right.
Well, let's say, let's say our goodbyes there.
Diane and Matthew both appear to have had to step out and we thank them both very much
for joining in and Cody, Gabriel, thank you both very much for joining us today.
I've had a lot of fun talking with you guys and look forward to the next opportunity.
Thank you.
All right.
Oops.
I took myself out instead of Gabe.
Funny how that works.
Well, yes, thank you for watching.
There's been a very robust discussion in the locals chat running your thought locals.com.
Thank you to 72 pine cones and Tonica visceral adventure, Jack's a Rue and yeah, the whole
OU gang, everybody who's watching on rumble.
And yes, as Miss Weasel points out, it is important to let people know that there is
indeed a campfire Wiki to begin with.
I think part of the issue is if people don't know it exists, people will not use it.
So campfire.wiki go check it out.
It's a place to collect information, historical records on the COVID-19 declared pandemic
and associated topics.
Thank you so much.
I'm Liam Sturgis and we will see you again tomorrow for our weekly locals supporters
only exclusive become a supporter or a free member at www.roundingmyourth.locals.com and
we will see you tomorrow.