In this episode, we talk about censorship, the Freedom Phone, and the media's reaction to it. We are joined by Eric Finman, the lead developer on the project, to talk about his experience with censorship in the Bitcoin space.
00:00:23.000One, that they're going to be engaging phone companies to censor private text messages.
00:00:28.000And the other is that they are actually themselves flagging things on Facebook to be removed by Facebook, which is government censorship.
00:00:37.000Well, recently, news broke about something called the Freedom Phone.
00:00:40.000This is the uncensorable phone, and somehow, the media lost, or for some reason, I should say, they absolutely lost their minds.
00:00:49.000Now, it could just be this is the grift, right?
00:00:52.000The Daily Beast comes out and says, this phone is a cheap Chinese knockoff, and it's like, do you know that, or are you just speculating?
00:00:59.000And then all of a sudden these copycat articles emerge criticizing the phone with none of these people ever having tested it and no real argument against it except it's made in China.
00:01:09.000All right, well, things should be made in China, I guess.
00:01:42.000And then to see the weirdest thing, people on the right joining in, calling it a scam, and I'm like, dude, none of you guys have actually done any analysis on this device.
00:01:52.000Isn't that weird that everyone just immediately jumps out in total alignment?
00:02:05.000We're going to talk about censorship and probably a bunch of other culture war stuff, but we're being joined by the Freedom Phone guy himself, Eric Finman.
00:02:12.000Yeah, we'll go over all the stories and everything like that.
00:02:15.000Do you want to just briefly introduce yourself?
00:02:17.000Yeah, so I'm Eric Finman, and I guess my background before this phone project was in the Bitcoin world.
00:02:24.000The claim to fame, people annoyingly refer to me as the youngest Bitcoin millionaire.
00:02:30.000And then yeah, I mean, the media was all nice to me when it was just that, and then suddenly I did something that was very pro-free speech, and then without ever holding the phone in their hands.
00:02:42.000They just wrote all these hit pieces and all that, and it was a total smear, but yet they all liked me before this.
00:02:48.000Gizmodo called it a black box that should be avoided at all costs, and I'm like, how did they make that assessment without actually having the phone to do any tests on it?
00:02:56.000Exactly, and Gizmodo, they never reached out asking for a phone, and I mean, it's terrible, and these people, they don't know anything, and you see Gawker, who used to run Gizmodo, We'll get into this.
00:03:26.000We've been working on the Fediverse, you know, a bunch of developers and we're talking about mesh networking and the future of internet and how it might be nodal and delocalized.
00:03:35.000So I'm excited to maybe even integrate that into the Freedom Phone in the future.
00:03:40.000I mean, we have plans to make this so that way, you know, literally it comes with the phone that it's capable of being able to do mesh networking in the future and all that because that's so needed in the sense of having a decentralized internet because that's my biggest fear is if they somehow are able to prevent us from communicating freely anywhere on the internet, I mean, we're screwed.
00:04:03.000I am increasingly uncomfortable with all the monitoring that's being done of normal people, especially in light of like the January 6th interviews and I'm looking at social media companies and everything.
00:04:12.000So I'm really excited to have this conversation about the Freedom Phone.
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00:04:55.000Let's talk about this story that comes from the Daily Beast, from the internationally renowned technologist, technical expert, and expert on the far, far, far, far, far, far right, Will Sommer.
00:05:09.000MAGA World's Freedom Phone, actually budget Chinese phone.
00:05:14.000MAGA influencers are pushing a phone preloaded with apps like Parler and Rumble that appears to be a vastly more expensive version of a phone made in China.
00:05:23.000The first thing I'm gonna say to this... Well, actually, the first thing I should say is, Will Summers is a political activist.
00:05:28.000Like, I don't take anything he says seriously, and I don't understand why there are people on the right, people who oppose censorship, who are like, well, Will Summers of all people said it.
00:05:37.000Will Summers published false information in the past.
00:06:26.000We want to do a forensic analysis and go through it.
00:06:28.000But if someone was selling a Chinese canvas, and it was $5, You could buy it and order it off Amazon.
00:06:36.000And then if Ian painted me a beautiful picture of a lighthouse on a canvas, I would not expect to pay the same price for it.
00:06:43.000If someone takes a phone that costs a hundred bucks and then puts a custom operating system on it and preloaded software and provides the service and then charges more, that's just called free enterprise?
00:09:26.000And then we get another factory as well, because, I mean, not to sound marketing, but we did have high demand, so now we have another factory as well, so that way we're manufacturing stuff out of there.
00:09:40.000Uh, that one, I mean, they just have a long, you know, Hong Kong name and all that, but, uh, they're, they're just basically to carry the demand on that, that overflows.
00:09:49.000But yeah, we partnered with, uh, well, can you say what company it is?
00:09:52.000Uh, no, I mean, I, I, well, I could, but I don't, uh, I don't remember their name or I do remember their name in my head.
00:09:59.000I can see it, but it's the, it's like a very, it's a very Asian Chinese.
00:10:17.000Yeah, I mean, they're just an overflow factory that does production and all that, and we talked with them, we looked at what they do, and they have no connections to the CCP or anything.
00:10:57.000And just to clarify, Apple and Google also make their phones in China, right?
00:11:01.000Yeah, I mean, I feel like that's the real stories.
00:11:03.000And in my opinion, I think Apple chooses not to make their phones in the United States because, you know, unfortunately, I don't have billions of dollars.
00:11:11.000Like Motorola, they tried doing it with $3 billion and they couldn't do it back in the day.
00:11:17.000And like, I think they were doing that with the Moto X, etc.
00:11:20.000And, you know, Apple, they have tens of billions of dollars.
00:11:26.000I think it was, there was a former president that asked Apple to actually make phones in
00:11:29.000the U.S. because they, you know, it would be like a $30 billion endeavor, in my opinion,
00:11:37.000So that's, I feel like, the real story of these companies is they choose not to make
00:11:42.000And when you're an upstart and you don't have tens of billions of dollars to be able to set up whole new, brand new factories in the United States, you're screwed.
00:11:53.000So one of the other things they mention in the Daily Beast article is that there's no specs, but you immediately just put the specs on the website.
00:11:58.000Yeah, the specs are on the website and you can look at them and everything.
00:12:44.000I mean you know just I feel these days because you need phones that work with augmented reality that takes usually multiple cameras and then yeah I mean be able to have like depth in your photos I mean multiple cameras just all help with that so I mean zoom in zoom out yeah exactly so just being able to match the phone you know being able to match phones of today with something good and quality I couldn't help but notice there's no 5G though.
00:15:17.000Hey, the reality is, I think most people, James O'Keefe is probably the only person who actually does sue for defamation and go after people.
00:15:29.000But I mean, I'm talking about the right.
00:15:30.000James O'Keefe's like the only one who does it.
00:15:32.000Okay, to be fair, Candace Owens, we'll maybe talk about that in a bit, just had her suit dismissed.
00:15:37.000But very few people try, and one of the most annoying things is whenever I've dealt with defamation, the advice I usually get from people on the right is, just ignore it, blah blah blah, because you know, and I'm like, why?
00:15:48.000Just sue and make your argument, make a better argument, improve your arguments, and find the vector in which you can go after people who are lying.
00:15:57.000I want to tell everybody why I think the first and most important reason I think Freedom Phone could actually be very, very good, very, very important, and why the establishment is probably coming after you so hard.
00:16:11.000First, let me say, I have not tested the device.
00:16:15.000I have not done a forensic analysis on it.
00:16:17.000I would like to get some of our tech experts to crack it open, go through it, hardware and software, and see if it can actually do what we think it can do.
00:16:24.000There are some concerns about whether or not there will be some Chinese spyware perhaps because, you know, it's made in China or whatever.
00:16:29.000Maybe there's concerns that there's data leakage in some capacity that it's spying on you.
00:16:33.000Some people are saying it's a honeypot.
00:16:35.000That the feds are funding this to get all of the patriots to use the phone and they can track everything you do, and I'm like, they do that through Google and Apple.
00:16:42.000They're called national security letters.
00:16:43.000If you're worried about your phone being spied on, you are literally in the NSA database with your existing phone.
00:16:48.000They can't get any worse, they're already spying on you.
00:17:26.000Then usually there's some, like, skin or bloatware that a company will put into it.
00:17:30.000So, like, Samsung has their specific version.
00:17:33.000You can actually plug it in, hook it up to your computer, erase that, and put a fresh, new, clean operating system.
00:17:40.000And many activists and hackers have created anti-censorship, and they've created, you know, free speech and anti-tracking, and even, like, even operating systems that erase themselves at a certain period of time.
00:17:52.000They've created these things to enhance individual rights and security.
00:17:57.000I would say 99.9% of people would never figure out how to do that.
00:18:02.000I know people like, sure, you can pull up a YouTube tutorial like, here's how you make your phone secure and sensor-free.
00:18:09.000All of a sudden, you pop up and you're like, just buy this, it's done.
00:18:14.000So they try claiming that it's a cheap knockoff.
00:18:17.000Okay, well, you've got a custom operating system on it.
00:18:20.000Even if it just loaded up a sensor-free store, that'd be worth it.
00:18:24.000An app store that has apps on it that Google and Apple don't like.
00:18:28.000So if you want to choose Zoom, you can.
00:18:31.000The reason I think this is so dangerous is that it gives the opportunity, assuming it works, again, like I said, I didn't try it, I'm not endorsing it, I'm just saying, the concept.
00:18:39.000The average person who cannot make a device can just buy one and have it.
00:18:43.000And assuming it does what you claim it does, this is really, really dangerous for the establishment that wants to track people.
00:19:04.000Glenn Greenwald exposed XKeyscore and the things they're doing with bulk data collection.
00:19:09.000So, if you can buy a device that's not connected to those networks, you're still going to get spied on very likely through just general cell networks, where your phone is, what it's connected to.
00:20:08.000Amber Alerts, presidential text messages, they know where you are, they're tracking you all the time.
00:20:12.000If regular people can get access to a device that adds even 1% or 0.1% to their privacy and their free speech, that's going to be a real threat to the machine which is trying to eliminate this ideology, classical liberalism, the right, whatever.
00:20:27.000If they are slowly eroding free speech, banning people on Twitter, banning people on Facebook, banning people on YouTube, and then all of a sudden someone can just pay money and get a device that immediately puts a halt to that operation, what are they going to do?
00:20:41.000Send a bunch of muggers to go steal your phone?
00:20:44.000So you look at what YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are doing with banning hate speech, promising to do more, to clean up and end the rabbit holes, and then all of a sudden you get a phone and you can talk to whoever you want.
00:20:55.000So like I said, we'll have to actually, you know, before I actually say it, it's a good device.
00:20:59.000I'll get you phones and you can tear it apart, rip it apart.
00:21:02.000Oh, but we're not going to take the phones from you.
00:22:55.000They said that they're working in conjunction with the DNC and phone companies to, what do they say, meet out misinformation.
00:23:03.000But there have been rumors from people saying that they've tried sending texts and the texts don't go through on certain issues.
00:23:09.000That's something I can't confirm, but I don't know if I have to considering the White House says this is what they're doing, or at least that's their intention.
00:23:14.000They're actively working in this direction.
00:23:17.000And they said that they're actively flagging things for Facebook, in which case, it's happening, isn't it?
00:23:23.000I mean, that's the thing, is the internet was the biggest weapon in the fight against just hoaxes, honestly.
00:23:35.000And, you know, obviously it spreads some, but I think it's a net good because you're not able to do hoaxes like WMDs in Iraq anymore because of social media and because of the Internet.
00:24:04.000There was a video I covered years ago where some video footage got leaked and I think it was in Iraq.
00:24:10.000There was a news report from, I think it was like CNN, the BBC.
00:24:14.000And they were like, bomb blast goes off, people injured.
00:24:18.000And then someone leaked footage where you see a car blow up and then a bunch of people run into frame, lay on the ground, and start writhing in pain.
00:24:45.000I don't know where that video is from.
00:24:46.000You know, you see, you see the car explode and you see people run up after the fact, lay down and act as though they were in the blast.
00:24:54.000We don't know what it was from, but it does call into question the initial reporting because the reporting talked about the people who were there in the blast.
00:24:59.000And then you see the blast and you're like, uh, well, at least that story is not true.
00:25:03.000So why is it, why is it being pushed out?
00:25:07.000It's easier in a sense that you've got to do the hard work of making fake content, hiring people to run the sock puppet accounts, but then you have a substantially larger reach in terms of that kind of manipulation, you know?
00:25:21.000I didn't even know what fiat currency was until 2007 when I saw Zeitgeist or 8 or whatever.
00:25:28.000I went to school in the United States, grew up in the 90s and the 80s.
00:25:31.000We've been on fiat currency since 1970, 71 or something.
00:25:35.000I never even heard the phrase fiat currency.
00:25:38.000I was never taught that, never explained that they can print as much as they want.
00:27:13.000But, like, some American industries and the FBI, I think it was the FBI, and New Zealand authorities raid his home and arrest him in, like, the middle of the night or whatever.
00:27:21.000He's this super rich guy and they claimed it was, like, piracy or whatever.
00:27:25.000I interviewed Kim Dotcom for Vice and he made a really, really interesting point because I was, like, I was trying to challenge him, like, why wouldn't you take these things down?
00:27:33.000Why weren't you deleting the movies when they were uploading piracy?
00:27:37.000And he said, are we supposed to go into our users' accounts and spy on them?
00:27:41.000Are we supposed to start reading through their filenames to see what they uploaded and why?
00:28:20.000Doing two things, shutting all that down, the piracy, and actually making it a lot easier to watch movies, to be completely honest.
00:28:25.000I got no problem paying 10 bucks a month so I can get a big library of movies and I don't have to worry about viruses and garbage links.
00:28:30.000And there have been times where it's like, I'd see a movie and someone would send me a link and I'd be like, oh cool, you know, Independence Day, and I'd click it, and then it would be some like weird rom-com, like wrongly labeled or something, and I'm like, this is dumb, I just wanna watch the movie.
00:28:43.000It was a great improvement, in my opinion.
00:28:45.000But the point is, what happened with the end of the Wild West, How everything became more streamlined like channels?
00:28:51.000We're seeing that happen now with social media as well.
00:28:54.000I really don't like the term piracy when you talk about copying information, maybe illegally on the internet or whatever, but copying information because a pirate would steal your thing and then you wouldn't have it anymore.
00:29:05.000A pirate didn't come and copy it down and then take a copy of it and leave you with your original.
00:29:15.000Oh, it's completely different than stealing.
00:29:18.000I had friends who worked in the movie industry who were losing their jobs.
00:29:22.000Because they would spend like, you know, a couple hundred grand on doing like a low budget feature, and then it would immediately get pirated.
00:29:30.000And then they'd be like, guys, we turned zero profit.
00:29:40.000You can't redefine piracy to make people look like villains and make it seem like they're stealing when they're making a copy of something.
00:29:50.000You could argue that because of copyright law, but that didn't exist until, like, 1600 or something.
00:29:55.000Well, piracy happened after that, too.
00:29:58.000Piracy's been happening for a long time before that.
00:30:01.000I was never of the opinion that people should be allowed to just copy any bit of information they wanted in the sense that, like, you don't need to give someone... I don't even understand how this is an argument.
00:30:13.000Like, if you believe in the rights of the working class, To be able to have someone... Let's think about, like, an invention or designing a structure.
00:30:22.000Someone sits there and tries to figure out how to make this object work, how to design this engine properly, and then you're like, I can copy it, you can't do anything about it.
00:30:29.000And you're like, dude, I've worked for 10 years to design this, and they're like, we don't care.
00:30:33.000I'm not stealing it, I'm just duplicating it.
00:30:35.000Right, but if they try and sell it, now they're on the hook for illegal activity, but copying it is...
00:31:01.000If I say you made something data and I copied it and then sold it.
00:31:04.000I think it should be written into the code that if I get paid, you get paid a large amount because you're the creator of the content.
00:31:11.000So what you need to understand about the content that was being taken was that the consumption of the content was happening on mass scales with millions of people who did not pay for it.
00:31:20.000So shouldn't the person who made it allowed to be compensated for the fruits of their labor?
00:31:25.000I think artists should be able to make money.
00:31:27.000And if they want it to be available for free, they can have a license where it's available to people.
00:32:28.000What solved the problem was just innovation, technology, Spotify, right?
00:32:32.000And now, you know, Bitcoin obviously solves a lot of these problems too, because now we have the blockchain, which means there can be digital assets that can be created and not copied.
00:32:42.000So now we enter the space of digital property without fear of being copied.
00:32:47.000Of course, then you enter the realm of theft, which is still possible if someone can steal your encryption keys or whatever, then they can get access to it.
00:32:53.000Anyway, to wrap this back up, the internet was a wild, crazy place.
00:32:56.000It was nuts what you could do on the internet.
00:32:59.000And nowadays, it is increasingly becoming more and more like mainstream establishment television.
00:33:19.000But off of Twitter, the place where these counterculture individuals have been able to grow and become prominent, they have removed them because they are trying to dictate culture.
00:33:50.000But you know, it's just the ability of the internet is that you can truly be yours and that's how it started out
00:33:55.000You can truly be yourself and you can truly be who you really are and it felt like you know
00:33:59.000When you're getting into school back in the early day, you know
00:34:01.000They're there they try to shun you and I feel like that only elevates in life when you know
00:34:05.000You get stuck in a corporate job you hate and all that and then and then now they're coming for the internet and
00:34:10.000ultimately if We're all I mean, this sounds like a platitude
00:34:13.000But it's true is in a sense of if if we're able to be ourselves
00:34:17.000you know, that ends up being a threat to the establishment.
00:34:22.000And the problem there is that the current ideology that we're seeing rise is the kind of ideology that murders people who are inconvenient.
00:34:30.000It doesn't stop at like, oh, we're gonna take your phone away.
00:34:32.000It doesn't stop at, oh, we're gonna take your social media away.
00:34:35.000It stops at, you're a threat to the revolution.
00:34:38.000You're committing crimes of hate speech.
00:34:42.000I've had people say to me, it was really funny, you know, I had one lefty from Occupy post on my Facebook wall, don't never forget you're first against the wall.
00:34:50.000And I'm like, oh yeah, a little old me in the wall.
00:34:52.000You know, it's funny when the SPLC calls me a reactionary what they're saying.
00:35:17.000Well, they're the ones who have more and more institutional power.
00:35:19.000Conservatives are the ones who aren't doing a whole lot about it.
00:35:21.000And one of the reasons I think... One of the only reasons I think we're actually seeing a culture war is because former liberals who believe in free speech, freedom of association, you know, classical liberalism, have started standing up and pushing back.
00:35:36.000Now, of course, conservatives absolutely are pushing back.
00:35:39.000But I think if If they carried on the establishment with a unified liberal order of some sort, meaning young people who played video games weren't being told to engage in a fringe ideology, if they didn't try forcing the liberals too far left too fast, there would be no culture war.
00:36:05.000But something happened where the left spread out and many people who are like center left individuals, traditional liberals, did not want to agree to this new racist ideology that was being implemented by the Democrats and by the progressives, which led them to resist it and led them to lump in with conservatives.
00:36:23.000And now you have a large faction of Trump voters, 75 million people.
00:36:29.000You think mesh networking is the answer to this?
00:36:34.000Yeah, I mean, I think that's why I think they dislike my project so much, is if you have your own hardware, because it doesn't matter, you could have the best software in the world, you know, like, you know, and if you're leasing basically on someone else's app store and someone else's hardware, you're screwed.
00:36:51.000So that's why on our phone we did, we put our own app store on there, which has normal apps, but also banned ones, and we feature, you know, pro free speech ones, but I mean, I think mesh networking is the future, and that's why we want to incorporate it on this phone.
00:37:04.000So that way you're able to communicate.
00:37:05.000Basically what that means is being able to communicate even if they try to shut you down.
00:37:09.000I mean why I got into Bitcoin in the first place was I guess I was a weird kid because I was really interested in currency and before Bitcoin there was something called Liberty Dollar.
00:37:46.000Because technically it's illegal to start your own currency in the US.
00:37:50.000And it became illegal during the Civil War.
00:37:54.000There actually used to be, I had also, because again, I'm the Bitcoin guy.
00:37:57.000And now I'm the Freedom Phone guy is what they're calling me.
00:38:01.000But one of the things I did is I have all these old currencies, because before the Civil War, it was common to
00:38:06.000actually issue other alternative currencies, whether that's a company or an area.
00:38:13.000And so I have all these things in the Civil War, they wanted
00:38:15.000to consolidate all the money into one currency.
00:38:17.000And so that's why Bitcoin was invented in the first place.
00:38:19.000People go, think Satoshi Nakamoto, the founders Anonymous.
00:38:23.000Or, you know, what is the purpose of blockchain was anyone who started their own currency, they were either throwing in jail or threatening them to go to jail.
00:38:32.000And that's an or, you know, and shutting down any centralized operation.
00:38:36.000So that's what was beautiful about Bitcoin is, you know, you're able to run it even if they even if they shut you down, you know, that's why the founders anonymous because back in the day, if you start your own currency, you were, you know, it's prison.
00:38:47.000And you were saying that mesh network and can bypass issues with So yeah, I mean, the goal is to be able to run and piggyback off other people's devices.
00:39:36.000Right now, your phone... Here's what people gotta understand about phones.
00:39:39.000Your phone does not send out a lasso to a cell tower.
00:39:44.000There is no direct laser beam from your phone to a tower.
00:39:47.000The tower is broadcasting information in every possible direction.
00:39:51.000Your phone is broadcasting information in every possible direction.
00:39:56.000So while the cell tower Sees your signal, and then interprets it, and then transmits a signal which your phone interprets, it's entirely possible that the signal sent equally in the opposite direction can be intercepted by someone as well.
00:40:10.000This is a large centralized data network.
00:40:13.000Mesh networking would mean my phone connects to Ian's phone, connects to Eric's phone, connects to Lydia's phone, and then all the way down.
00:40:20.000So imagine this, with a mesh network, you could line up a person probably,
00:40:26.000I mean, what's, cell phones have massive range, a few miles, right?
00:40:29.000You could take a, well, depending on how you do the mesh network and what bands you're using,
00:40:39.000You're in your office and you're like, my phone just doesn't work when I'm on like the seventh floor in the corner because the tower can't reach here.
00:40:46.000With mesh networking, your phone would just look for available phones around it and transmit data through everyone else's phone network.
00:40:53.000We wouldn't need cell towers in cities.
00:40:55.000Could we set up like solid state mesh networking nodes that don't require electricity?
00:41:02.000Uh, I mean, I think you can have, like, self... I think it would all require electricity, um, but you, you know, you can set up, like, solar panels.
00:41:19.000I'll give people a simple example. I was on a cruise ship once and before you got on,
00:41:24.000they were like, download this app. It's a Bluetooth mesh networking, direct messaging app.
00:41:29.000There's no cell service. Your phone will not work in the middle of the ocean. So what happens is
00:41:34.000you get on the boat, the boat goes off in your international waters and your cell stops working.
00:41:40.000But somehow, you just got a message from your friend on the other side of the boat.
00:41:44.000Your friend on the other side of the boat sent a message to your username, HeyWhereAreYouAt.
00:41:49.000His phone, at the end of the boat, saw Jane Doe, 30 feet away.
00:41:55.000Jumped to her phone, and then jumped to the next person's phone, to the next person's phone, to the next person's phone, until it found your phone.
00:42:01.000And none of them get a notification, none of them get your message, it just piggybacks until it finally found you.
00:42:07.000There were so many phones on this boat that it was instantaneous.
00:42:10.000The mesh network just existed as long as people's Bluetooth were on.
00:42:13.000So the more nodes, the faster the network runs?
00:42:21.000It's not like your phone just sends the signal straight to the tower and back.
00:42:25.000When that one phone sends the signal out, 15 phones in front of them all see it and instantly, exponentially just track down the code they're looking for and then bling, your phone gets a message.
00:42:36.000A mesh network of a bunch of different devices.
00:42:38.000I don't know why we're not doing that technology now in cities.
00:42:41.000Phones should, I mean, one of the things they've been doing with like a home internet is that they also create a public node off of your own wifi node.
00:42:49.000I've never been the biggest fan of that.
00:42:50.000And I definitely think people should have a choice to turn it on or off, but I don't understand why we don't do this.
00:42:55.000Oh, the profit margin of centralized systems are keeping it that way, I think intentionally.
00:43:01.000They love that you have to go through, Comcast loves that you have to go through their Wi-Fi node to get to gatekeepers.
00:43:10.000So with a mesh network though, if I sent a message to you and you were over there and it went to like 50 people and then to you, would they not be able to spy on my message to you?
00:43:19.000Well, that itself is encrypted, so, because, you know, I mean, ideally, right?
00:43:23.000If you're using a mesh network, yeah, it breaks up all into little pieces and all that, and then sends it all united to you.
00:43:29.000They can easily go to a centralized node.
00:43:49.000So the way it would work is you're standing in the middle of the desert.
00:43:52.000There's a guy a hundred feet in front of you, a hundred feet in front of him.
00:43:54.000And then your phone sends a signal that bounces off of all of those phones and then hits the backhaul cell phone tower or a hardline connection or something.
00:44:02.000And then boom, it hits the rest of the internet.
00:44:05.000And you were saying the DNS could be a problem.
00:44:07.000What is DNS and how does that affect like centralized systems right now?
00:44:11.000Yeah, so for example, when you have like a domain, you have what's called the, you know, your DNS settings.
00:44:16.000So if you're, you know, that enables you to direct people, you know, direct a certain domain.
00:44:23.000And then, you know, people have been noticing just a lot of problems with, you know, DNS propagation.
00:44:28.000Not just, you know, you can have sometimes, you know, you're not doing it right.
00:44:32.000When you're, like, even if you go on like GoDaddy or any of these things, you can look at your, any place where you have a domain, you have what's called your DNS settings.
00:44:39.000And then, yeah, I mean, a lot of people have been noticing these weird DNS propagation problems, where it's just kind of going in and out.
00:44:49.000And I just think that's such a vulnerability right now, where, you know, I feel like powers that be can mess with that and make it so, you know, domains can be banned.
00:45:07.000Um, I think, uh, their registrar banned them and all that, but that's the next step is you can go to, uh, one of the best domain registrars is called Epic, E-P-I-K, um, and, uh, that's where we host our domain.
00:45:20.000And, uh, uh, and that's where I believe Gab hosts their domain as well.
00:45:23.000Don't they do their own everything now though?
00:45:24.000Aren't they building their own everything?
00:45:49.000For those that aren't familiar, the Fediverse is like Twitter, but decentralized.
00:45:53.000So that means, it was really funny, Macedon, I think, was the biggest node, the biggest website that used the Fediverse.
00:46:01.000And when Gab switched over, all of a sudden, all of these evil far-right People were now in the same network as the far left on Macedon, and they panicked, and they were like, we're banning these servers so we won't see them.
00:46:44.000Free speech doesn't mean uncensored, is what I've found.
00:46:47.000Like, if you allow everything to happen, then there'll be mass chaos and people won't be able to speak properly because they'll get beat down when they try to talk, and it's just, A, everyone's able to do everything, so you have to create, like, You have to censor evil in a way or whatever.
00:47:08.000We've set up rules so that we allow for free speech.
00:47:11.000Well, similar with the Internet, but it's dangerous because if people decide who's the arbiter, you know, then they can be pretty heavy handed.
00:47:37.000Somebody would be holding a feminist rally at a local community center, and then some anti-feminist instantly could be there shouting them down.
00:47:49.000So you get some right-wing people saying, we love America, and then instantly 10,000 anti-America, flag-burning Antifa are all screaming, and no one can talk.
00:47:58.000So in the real world, we have physical security.
00:48:02.000That's not censorship if we have a private event.
00:48:04.000So the challenge, I suppose, is The modern left says, Twitter's a private company, they can ban whoever they want, and it's like, yes, but they're like the only one that monopolized the space.
00:48:14.000And that's creating a strain on discourse, and it's causing serious problems in this country.
00:48:20.000These leftists enjoy the fact, well, first of all, Some of them enjoy the fact they're winning, because they have the control of the institutions.
00:48:28.000But most of them are just like, I'll say whatever I'm told to say, because they just want to ride the wave.
00:48:33.000What they don't realize is that they're destroying the fabric of society.
00:48:39.000A lot of people think, you know, super villains want to destroy the world, right?
00:48:42.000I was watching Austin Powers recently, and Dr. Evil, and which one is it, Goldmember?
00:48:47.000He's like, no, no, no, this is in the second one.
00:48:49.000He's like, even after they pay me all the money, I'm still going to destroy the cities with liquid hot magma.
00:48:54.000It's like, no you wouldn't, because where do you spend the money after you destroy all the cities?
00:48:58.000But I get it, it's a comedy, it's funny.
00:48:59.000What most people don't realize is that they're like, yay, I'm winning!
00:49:03.000And it's like, congratulations, your pyrrhic victory will make you the king of a pile of rubble.
00:49:08.000So you may want to have political battles, but if you are creating such a strain that you are causing serious physical conflict and violence to where Joe Biden just went out and was like, do the Republicans think that Democrats are sucking the blood out of kids?
00:49:26.000You know, Donald Trump said Kung Flu, but jeez, Joe Biden, that was way... That's how insane they're being driven by the fact that they are high on their own supply.
00:49:41.000He invents Twitter, and then he just takes the whole vat and sticks it in his veins and believes all the psychotic garbage that the toilet has produced and is being flushed into his veins.
00:50:08.000The centralized internet is very, very dangerous.
00:50:11.000And having a CEO decide what gets to be said on the network is also very dangerous because the CEO can change and become a psychopath.
00:50:17.000Yeah, I mean, Dick Costello was like that.
00:50:19.000He went, you know, former CEO of Twitter, I mean, he went from saying, we're the free speech wing of the free speech party, to just, you know, ranting on Twitter about how they should be stronger on the bans.
00:50:32.000They start, they start, they get into these arguments.
00:50:36.000You know, CGP Grey has a great video called, This Video Will Make You Angry, where he talks about how people rile each other up about the other.
00:50:43.000And he said that they don't actually talk to each other.
00:50:45.000Like, you know, it'll be like, you know, I'm pro Tim and Ian's pro Ian.
00:50:50.000But instead of us actually arguing with each other about our beliefs, I argue to you and he argues to Lydia.
00:50:55.000Oh, I get so annoyed when people do that.
00:52:44.000If we combine racism and sexism, we don't just get X views or Y views, and we don't get X plus Y, we get XY views.
00:52:54.000An exponential increase by combining the keywords.
00:52:57.000Thus, we saw the rise of intersectionality, which was this idea, which is rooted in, it stems from critical race theory.
00:53:03.000That a black woman experiences a unique kind of sexism and racism that a black man and a white woman would not experience, creating an all-new interpretation of racism.
00:53:13.000What ends up happening is, you have all of these companies producing rage bait to the great degree.
00:53:18.000Every article is police brutality, non-stop.
00:53:21.000Mike.com started as, my understanding is, a Ron Paul libertarian website.
00:53:28.000There was an investigation I read about, so correct me if I'm wrong everybody, but it started off like just being, like, what was the internet?
00:53:33.000What was big on the internet back then?
00:53:42.000They realized that anger was the number one, was the emotion that caused the highest amount of shares.
00:53:49.000So then instead of being about Ron Paul, it became about police brutality.
00:53:53.000Now you gotta understand, too, the Ron Paul crowd overlapped with the police brutality crowd, because libertarians didn't like seeing people be beaten by cops, and they liked Ron Paul, too.
00:54:03.000But the pro-hospitality people found that enraging people with intersectionality was worth more, and eventually it leaves the Ron Paul people behind, who are probably, to be completely honest, more rational in their thinking, and they were looking for information, they were finding it, they were getting away from the mainstream.
00:54:17.000Which brings me to the current state of our generational algorithmic psychosis.
00:54:22.000Someone who is 10 years old, in 2008, goes on Facebook, maybe for the first time.
00:54:28.000I know they're not supposed to, because you're supposed to be 13, but they're 10.
00:55:38.000But out of hundreds of millions of interactions with police, a tiny, tiny fraction, I think the Wall Street Journal said 19 unarmed black men were killed by police.
00:55:49.000Each and every one of those deaths is bad.
00:55:50.000But when you play those videos on loop for a decade, people's worldview, these kids, they grew up in a world where the only thing they ever saw were these videos played on repeat.
00:56:24.000Because if someone says, I wanna get internet points, they put it, they post it, and they know people are gonna upvote it.
00:56:29.000And they don't know, Or they don't care that it's really old.
00:56:33.000That 10-year-old kid sees that video every week, and then they forget, and they see it a month later, and then they engage, and these videos are constantly recycled in this way.
00:56:43.000It's algorithmic psychosis that is warping the minds of people who live in the internet, who are growing up with it.
00:56:51.000The other thing that is causing the chaos is what I call the scaling problem.
00:56:55.000And it's basically, if you have a hundred police officers, and one of them is a dick, who, uh, and a psychopath, who beats somebody, that's one percent.
00:57:05.000Most people are gonna be like, arrest that guy.
00:57:09.000If you have a hundred million police officers, you've not got a million cops going around doing all the stuff, that's a very, very serious problem.
00:57:18.000Now, it's not nearly that high in terms of bad police officers.
00:57:21.000We do have problems with cops, don't get me wrong, in terms of, like, enforcing unjust laws or seizing people's guns and things like that in violation of the Constitution, and violating people's free speech.
00:57:37.000But when you look at the actual ratio, These people who grow up in the paranoid, delusional world of rage-bait algorithms, and their whole lives have been inundated with this, they live in this world that's completely inverted.
00:57:50.000The 0.001% of cops who are actually doing these things become the 99.99% of cops because they've never seen other interactions.
00:58:30.000I mean, those Sunday services are amazing.
00:58:33.000I mean, that's why I wanted to get into politics, actually.
00:58:35.000I feel like Kanye was one of the biggest motivators because just seeing someone, you know, like in the song Reborn and all that with Kid Cudi, it was just so beautiful.
00:58:49.000What an awesome thing engulfed in shame.
00:58:52.000And that's what made me want to, because I've been, like, what got me into Bitcoin was Ron Paul and all that, and that whole world, and meeting some guy who had a Bitcoin, it was actually Adam Kokesh, it was actually an Adam Kokesh event, and it was all Ron Paul people.
00:59:04.000I forgot the, I mean, it was around when Bitcoin had come out recently, and my older brother brought me to an Adam Kokesh event, and he got arrested at the Jefferson Memorial for dancing.
01:01:16.000Yeah, my brother taught me how to get that out.
01:01:19.000And actually buying Bitcoin was easier back in the day because it was like, you could just pay some guy over PayPal, you know, and get Bitcoin sent to your wallet.
01:01:27.000I mean, you had Bitcoin faucets back in the day, which is where they would give away free Bitcoin.
01:01:38.000So I probably, I don't even know how many Bitcoin were on the computer, the computer I had back at the hackerspace, because I didn't put my savings into it, but I still did get some Bitcoin.
01:02:17.000I just spent every day And I ended up actually, I dropped out of high school because I had some Bitcoin money then, moved my butt to Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, and just like, you know, tried to do a business and all that.
01:02:29.000And it ended up going well, but eventually sold the company, put it all back into Bitcoin.
01:02:33.000But Bitcoin to me, I mean, when I first got into it, I actually did think it was going to be big, but it was kind of in the way you hope for world peace.
01:02:40.000Like, it's like, well, you hope for it, but you don't know what will happen.
01:02:43.000There's a funny meme where it's like, Some some there's like a guy who's like wearing a nice polo and glasses and he's like Bitcoin seems interesting but I'm not entirely sure that people will build confidence in this decentralized network but I'll look into it and the next guy is like fat with like a beard and flies and he's like I want to buy drugs on the internet and it's like that guy's a millionaire now yeah cuz he was just like some scumbag who's like I don't care
01:03:06.000Did you pre-install wallets on the Freedom Phone?
01:04:25.000And so I was like, but you know, the mistake I made back then was it was an, it was an investing in the one thing the end caps understood was that it was a decentralized non-copyable asset that was difficult to locate.
01:05:27.000That was very, very early in Bitcoin's history, when I was like, now I started to understand why this is such a powerful tool, because it basically cuts out a lot of the financial infrastructure for transferring funds very quickly.
01:05:40.000It didn't matter what the price of a Bitcoin was, because if someone could transfer value instantly, then there would be more demand for buying than selling.
01:05:48.000And so, that's when I was like, okay, I'll get some Bitcoin and start taking it more seriously, and since then I have.
01:05:53.000I mean, yeah, I mean the ANCAPs back in the day, I mean, I was really into that and it's still a part of me.
01:06:00.000But I mean, that was that whole world was just, you know, a bunch of, I mean, that's how all great things get started is people that are a little different and all that.
01:06:08.000So, but how did you, so you bought in 2011, you bought all these Bitcoin and then when did you become a millionaire?
01:06:15.000Yeah, so I became a millionaire at 18, so I was like 12 back then.
01:06:19.000So again, that was... Wait, you bought Bitcoin when you were 12?
01:06:23.000And again, it was easier back in the day because, you know, although I ended up having to do it later, but all the KYC stuff, you know, you could just like PayPal some guy on LocalBitcoins.
01:06:42.000Because a lot of people say, like, when I tell that story about having the five grand in savings and wanting to buy Bitcoin, everyone responds with, you would have sold at 20 bucks.
01:07:02.000I think to me it was just my whole identity was wrapped up in Bitcoin because it's like, what are you going to do as a 14-year-old with this money when it went up?
01:07:09.000And then again, I was just obsessed with Bitcoin.
01:07:13.000It was my identity and it just inspired me to do so many other things.
01:07:18.000But yeah, I became a millionaire at 18.
01:08:14.000It was crazy because even if it was almost worthless, you could make like a million coins, go on some trading website, and people would be like, I'll give you Bitcoin for it.
01:08:29.000I mean, Litecoin was one of those things.
01:08:31.000I mean, seeing Litecoin, like Ethereum's kind of the new Litecoin, but I remember Litecoin was just, you would always, whenever Bitcoin went up, Litecoin was always that number two.
01:08:40.000And they would say, Bitcoin is gold, Litecoin is silver.
01:08:51.000It was the wild, wild west on the internet.
01:08:53.000And then again, I mean, I remember there was this thing called World of Text, and it was like when Chrome first came out, and you had like a WebGL, I think it was called, and basically it was this whole just giant text page where you could just write anything and be yourself and all that.
01:09:10.000And, you know, and again, I just feel like not to tie it into today, but I mean, just it's just they're taking away the ability to be yourself.
01:09:19.000And people use the terms like free speech and all that.
01:09:21.000And I mean, that's that's the perfect term for it.
01:10:29.000We took some of the best parts of all these things.
01:10:31.000It was tricky to do because that can break a lot of things.
01:10:35.000We did that and and then yeah, so you have like trust on there, which is a Privacy guard for your phone and then you put it up and then we have I'm just trying to say one of the things we did is we made this really explicitly kind of political in a way because we thought about making like should we make this phone like a little bit more Like a little bit more neutral, in a way, and not so, like, hard-standing on kind of free speech and, you know, right-wing politics and all that.
01:11:07.000But we wanted to, you know, I feel like we did a good job.
01:11:09.000We wanted it to have, like, I'm never afraid, I guess, of being provocative.
01:11:13.000And I think a lot of people, they don't, they're, I can hand this to you, by the way, if you want to play with it.
01:13:33.000So again, this started out as a, as kind of, my background is crypto and all that.
01:13:36.000And we thought, well, would it be great to have a phone, you know, preloaded with a bunch of, you know, kind of blockchain based apps and everything.
01:13:44.000One of the reasons we wanted to call it a freedom phone was to have that provocativeness.
01:14:08.000That's the least political thing ever.
01:14:10.000But if they say they care about your values, and they do, They end up doing well, but getting hated.
01:14:17.000I know so many friends, they have some of the best online alternative education apps in the world that would appeal, in my opinion, to a lot of right-wing people that care about alternative education.
01:14:28.000Because right now, the education system itself, in my opinion, it just teaches CRT and a lot of left-wing values.
01:14:36.000And you could say you can have that argument, but in my opinion, there's no ideological diversity.
01:14:41.000So that's another reason why I think I'm getting attacked so much.
01:14:46.000In my opinion, I'm a Republican, and it's weird because it flipped.
01:14:52.000It used to be that Republicans back in the day in the George Bush era, they were kind of a little bit not so good on free speech, and it used to be the left, and it's totally flipped now.
01:15:03.000Yeah, I think centralized education is a big problem.
01:15:06.000It is good to build social cohesion through what we understand and know, but I think the modern day education is teaching people how to learn, not what to know.
01:15:16.000And this education system seems to be shoving specific information into people's heads as opposed to teaching them how to think critically, which.
01:15:23.000I mean, I dropped out of high school because I love to learn.
01:17:44.000Because, look, regardless of the reason why it costs you more money, why should someone spend more money on a phone that has effectively the same specs as the A9?
01:18:51.000So, you know, like right now on iPhone, I think even Apple Developer Analytics, just as a normal developer, you're able to... You don't have YouTube on that phone, do you?
01:18:59.000No, no, YouTube is, uh, you have the option.
01:19:23.000So I'll have to go in To make changes, but every time I go to the browser to try and log into the browser, it pulls up the YouTube app and then not the actual studio.
01:19:36.000So I have to actually delete the YouTube app because the apps all connect to each other.
01:19:42.000The browser should be independent from other apps.
01:19:45.000If I'm in the browser and I need to pull up a site for a specific reason, and I can't remember the specific reason, but I think it's because The YouTube studio app doesn't actually allow you to affect, I think, monetization.
01:19:55.000You have to go into the browser to do it, but then the browser default pulls up the YouTube app, not even the studio app, and then I can't go in.
01:20:02.000So I delete YouTube from my phone, log in, fix it, then reinstall YouTube.
01:20:06.000You might be able to fix that in settings and have it so it doesn't auto default to the app.
01:20:10.000Yeah, ultimately, that's what I ended up doing.
01:21:09.000And I'm like, if I wanted to buy the phone right now and I wanted to get someone without them having to worry about it, I want to get them a phone that's not being tracked, that's got these apps that have been censored they can get access to.
01:21:22.000Like, I'm thinking, you know, what if I were to just buy a hundred of these A9s and then just go through them and then load up a new operating system?
01:21:30.000There'd have to be so much stuff you'd have to do to make sure it works and quality control.
01:21:35.000I gotta be honest, I think 500 bucks sounds steep, but I stand by what I was saying earlier that If your device does what it says it does, and you're
01:21:42.000providing a service effectively, hardware be damned.
01:21:44.000If it's a service that provides people with instant access to a clean operating system that doesn't track them and
01:21:50.000provides them a way around censorship, that's seriously...
01:22:00.000To me, I feel like the real story of this is that Apple... I always thought it'd be great if some president had put sanctions on the import of any goods made by slave labor because that would just shut down a lot of these big phone companies and hold everything up because it's bad.
01:22:19.000Yeah, but then the American people would be like, why does my phone cost 10 grand?
01:22:23.000I mean, you know, I think, well, trust me, we make this phone.
01:23:09.000But yeah, I mean, with the phone at the operating system level, yeah, it's completely de-googled, you know, it has its own app store and all that.
01:23:14.000So you're not relying on the Google Play Store or anything.
01:23:17.000And, uh, and we, you know, like, you know, trying to sideload apps or all that for, I mean, the thing about this phone is a lot of just normal people that aren't, aren't like, yeah, trying to jailbreak their phones, root their phones and all that got that.
01:23:29.000And then, yeah, I mean, that's, that's, It's just a huge problem that we're reliant on, in my opinion, anti-free speech hardware.
01:23:36.000It's ironic to me that Apple's motto used to be, think different, and now they ban apps who think different.
01:23:41.000Or Google, which was, do no evil, and now it's company policy.
01:23:49.000And that's why I think, you know, like, you know, we're a startup, but ultimately, and I don't have like a PR team of like a thousand people like these people, like I'm just, you know, coming on this podcast, you know, you know, just trying to share the word.
01:24:04.000But I mean, it's just, if we don't have our own hardware, in my opinion, we're screwed.
01:24:10.000It's the weirdest thing that people were like, saying it's a honeypot.
01:24:32.000Yes, the false flag, false flag, false flag.
01:24:34.000Well, because of these articles and because of Will Summers' article, my mom got doxxed and all that, and they're releasing... That is a coordinated harassment campaign from Will Summers.
01:25:52.000I was talking about algorithmic psychosis, and I'm thinking about it from the perspective of the psychopaths who live in the mirror world, in the upside-down or whatever.
01:26:05.000How did we come to this position of knowing computers?
01:26:09.000Look, we knew about Bitcoin in the early days.
01:26:12.000Most people didn't even find out about Bitcoin until 2016 or something.
01:26:15.000And I'm like, I was on the internet as long as I can remember.
01:27:38.000But it's the critical thinking skills.
01:27:39.000And I don't know if it matters when you were born if you're going to have critical thinking skills.
01:27:44.000Realizing what you see isn't necessarily... Like, if you see something a thousand times, that doesn't mean that it happened a thousand times.
01:28:00.000It seems like there are people who live in the paranoid, you know, it's really funny.
01:28:04.000Uh, there's this very, very high profile podcaster who apparently, um, said that I was one of these people who, who's too, too online.
01:28:12.000And, uh, you know, like, oh, there's these, these people that just too online and they live in this world.
01:28:18.000And I'm like, The people on the left who believe in all of this algorithmic psychosis and are completely unaware of it, they're the people who are too online.
01:28:29.000The people who believe that Donald Trump was a Russian agent, that's because of the too online people.
01:28:35.000I'm afraid that it's their lack of critical thinking skills and if they just watched a lot of like violent action movies, they'd think that that was normal too.
01:28:43.000They've been... How do you tell someone who's spent 15 years of their 25-year life that everything they've seen and experienced on social media as they were growing up and learned was wrong?
01:28:57.000You encouraged them to take psilocybin.
01:29:42.000I can't remember the exact quote from Breitbart about walking towards the fire.
01:29:48.000You know, people think, I can't remember the exact quote, but someone said to me something similar, so it might not be Breitbart, that people are scared to walk towards the fire because they think they'll get burned, but on the other side is freedom.
01:29:59.000And you know, you walk past it and then everything's normal and you're fine.
01:30:02.000These people are trapped in the cave now.
01:30:03.000Yeah, because the shadows on the wall, it is real life.
01:30:06.000It's just one tiny fragment of real life.
01:30:36.000It was the book where the little kid was, like, seeing a video on the internet, like, eight-year-old kid, and then saying, like, Mommy, what's this?
01:30:43.000And the mom's like, No, don't watch this.
01:30:45.000And then the little girl finally snaps one day, like, I know the truth about what the police are doing!
01:30:50.000It's because people realize you'll make money off of police brutality videos.
01:30:55.000Well, I think I figured out how to get through to these people.
01:30:57.000Or maybe something that can help is my mom.
01:31:04.000But what she didn't realize is if she just told me this is real, but there's more.
01:31:09.000Look, these are also things that are real.
01:31:11.000So acknowledge that what I was doing is real.
01:31:13.000Like if I'm playing a video game and it's a character and a story in my mind, That is reality.
01:31:17.000It's just a fragment of this greater reality.
01:31:20.000So if you acknowledge, like, critical race, all these theories and things, yeah, they are real.
01:31:26.000They are valid concepts, but there's more.
01:31:29.000There's a meme where it's like, there's this guy playing video games.
01:31:32.000And then his dad walks in and he goes, hey, do you want to play this cool new game?
01:31:36.000Basically, you have to go on adventures.
01:31:38.000You try and raise money to buy certain, to buy artifacts and items to improve your character's stats, become better equipped, stronger, and faster.
01:32:03.000Subscribe to this channel and become a member at TimCast.com so that we can hire more and more and more journalists.
01:32:08.000The next person we're gonna hire is probably the fact checker and their whole job is gonna be just to read the website and then yell at us.
01:32:30.000Like, if someone says, you know, Ian is... Ian Crossland, comma, the absurdly skinny co-host from Timcast IRL, comma, we'd be like, absurdly skinny?
01:34:16.000So, yeah, I mean, all that we do in our privacy policy is we say, hey, we track just your name and your address if you buy a phone, and that's it.
01:34:25.000So, if you want to do, like, a return, and one, I don't want to sell, and then two, even if somehow, you know, that happened, and one, I really don't think I will, even if somehow that happened, you know, it would just be your name and the address if there's, like, a return or something, and those are all kept private.
01:34:45.000Alright, Warframe4theWin says, does the Freedom phone have physical hardware switches like the Pine phone and Librem 5?
01:34:52.000Um, no, that's something we want to add.
01:34:54.000We feel very confident, like you can literally go in at, you know, in your settings and in a much better way just like literally turn things off.
01:35:01.000We want to be able to add that, but I think the problem with those other phones, although I like anyone doing, honestly, a secure phone, that's something we want to do, but yeah, the problem, we wanted to make a phone that was usable, and in calling, that was one of the first things that, when making a privacy security phone, is that it was usable for a normal person, and I tried out all the privacy phones, and a big problem was, although they were secure, so I love that, I love that part, but they just weren't usable. So that kind of ended up
01:36:23.000We're doing the bug checks now, making sure everything works because, you know, it's like you fix one bug and then 10 more pop up and then you're playing Whack-A-Mole for a bit.
01:36:30.000Then we're going to do the mobile app because we want to make sure people can listen to the show while their screen is off.
01:36:35.000And then we're going to be doing what's called OTT over the top.
01:36:37.000So that's like Roku players, Apple TV, Amazon, all that stuff.
01:36:43.000So we're, we're heading in that direction.
01:36:45.000And we also are planning on doing more and more content right now.
01:36:47.000If you're a member, you get the members only podcast episodes.
01:36:51.000When the next week or so, we're going to have a new show, which is going to be, I just call it like mysteries and spooky stories, but you'll see the launch and we're working on the graphics and the, and the branding and all that stuff.
01:37:51.000Brenton Deon says, this phone comes out right after the story of intelligence agencies making and distributing the same type of ghost phones to a crime ring.
01:37:59.000And this is being sold as the perfect phone for dissidents, not suspect at all.
01:38:03.000Yeah, I mean this goes back to like this week.
01:38:05.000I mean, that's why I said just overall it's been weird I guess weird and amazing to get in in my opinion the political realm like yeah Just like people accusing my mom of you know, basically being deep state and helping me with this I mean, that's that's the kind of stuff that that that it's weird to experience because I don't think that they would Be attacking me this hard and I guess again, you're right.
01:38:25.000Maybe there's you know, it's a double cross or whatever but I mean, I like I I'm funding this whole thing myself So I have, like, no other investors, no anything.
01:38:34.000I mean, the CIA literally has a venture arm and all that, which is not a lot of people know that.
01:38:39.000But yeah, I mean, honestly, I would be living a much better life, I feel, if they were supportive of me.
01:38:48.000I just got to shout this out right now.
01:38:50.000Someone's, uh, Soleil Cucumber Lime says, if you use Brave browser, there is a setting to allow video playback in the background, AKA this with a screen off.
01:38:59.000Oh, we did mention that before someone super chatted us.
01:39:02.000I use the Brave browser for everything.
01:39:16.000Oscar Oliu says, Eric, if you want people to trust you, you need to release the source code for Freedom OS and have it available for compiling.
01:39:26.000I mean, the goal is, is to be able, so, you know, yeah, we want to, like, like I said earlier, we're going to be open sourcing the, uh, the operating system code on this.
01:39:34.000And then, yeah, I mean, if you want to be able to.
01:39:36.000Uh, not even go through us, you know, and all that and, uh, uh, and get your own, you know, install it yourself and go through that difficult process.
01:39:53.000So you don't have to be good at, you know.
01:39:56.000Have you looked at using like an MIT license, like a copyleft license, so that if people take the code and change it, those changes have to remain free also?
01:40:06.000Cause to me, that would be the most important thing is that, you know, people weren't, you know, that way they can make, it just continues on.
01:40:13.000Zanroff says the spec site says it uses FreedomOS.
01:40:16.000But when I Google what that is, I get a logo that looks similar to the Red Salute.
01:40:23.000Yeah, that's a different operating system.
01:40:26.000I think that's Linux-based and all that, but yeah, I mean, that's just a different one that's, I believe, open source as well and all that.
01:40:43.000Like, YayGod says, Can we jailbreak our own Android phones and flash your custom ROM and effectively do the same thing with our existing phones?
01:40:51.000That's the plan and hopefully for, you know, when we release this.
01:40:53.000I mean, we just want to get this out there and then yeah, I guess there's maybe been some marketing greenness, if you will.
01:41:00.000But yeah, I mean, you know, people sent us a lot of requests like, hey, can you open source this?
01:41:04.000And we're like, yeah, I mean, the goal is to be able to have anyone be, you know, have the ability to flash, you know, to be able to be secure and have all that.
01:41:12.000I mean, we incorporate a lot of stuff at the, you know, kind of that hardware-software marriage on our own phone.
01:41:17.000But yeah, I mean, the goal is to be able, or if you want to be able to flash, if you're tech, if you have the technical know-how to flash it on your phone, you can do that for free.
01:41:54.000Yeah, honestly, it's been interesting because I remember back when I was liked by the left-wing media, I did a New York Magazine thing and they made me look so nerdy.
01:42:06.000They combed my hair to the side, maybe buttoned up my shirt.
01:42:55.000They're like, pull your back up, now twist your arm to the right, and then they put clips all over your back, and you're like... And then they make, like, now don't move for a minute.
01:44:12.000So like, I write a song, and then it took us several months to make Will of the People.
01:44:20.000And so, for me, that was kind of just like, you know, a side project.
01:44:24.000I'm not worried about losing money on it.
01:44:27.000It was expensive, we're not gonna make a million bucks off of it or anything.
01:44:30.000But maybe, there's a hope, maybe it'll sell, we'll make money.
01:44:33.000But we're in a new era, honestly, people listen to that on YouTube.
01:44:36.000But all of that work we put into that, If it was any other person, and they took off time from their, like, this is their job, and it's entertainment, people value it, and they want it, and then everyone gets it for free, how does he get the money to buy the instruments?
01:44:50.000How does he get the money to pay for the recording process?
01:44:54.000You sell the song for 99 cents a download.
01:44:56.000That doesn't mean... just because a million more people get it for free doesn't mean you're not going to be able to sell a bunch of more copies of the song.
01:45:23.000For the regular person who says, if it costs me $10,000 to work to produce this song, I at least need to make $10,000 back, and then everyone copies it and shares it online, and now the guy makes no money, his business ceases to exist.
01:45:38.000Kick-Ass 3 got shut down because Kick-Ass 2 got pirated so much that they said, we didn't recuperate our losses, we're not gonna do another movie.
01:46:08.000The problem is people pirated it, and then they didn't make enough money, so they didn't want to do it again.
01:46:12.000You don't want people to copy and sell your content.
01:46:15.000It's not about selling, it's about if they're going to invest $100 million in a movie, they at least need to make $100 million.
01:46:21.000Now I know Hollywood plays dirty games with how they calculate revenue and everything like that, but what happens is they go, how much did we get back on this?
01:47:01.000I think artists being able to make money is just really important, and I think, you know, I understand if people can't afford it, but then, you know, I feel like if the artist wants it to be available for free, you know, that should be his choice rather than, you know, just some guy.
01:47:15.000And again, I feel like a lot of it is just a lot of people trying to cheap out, and 10% of it... This is inherently like...
01:47:22.000I wouldn't even call this a leftist worldview because the left hates the idea of exploitation of the working class.
01:47:27.000This is just like... What we're doing with the Fediverse project is an act of charity, in a sense.
01:47:36.000That I can plan out funding for a project and people can donate their time to it to give something for free to a lot of people.
01:47:45.000But there's a lot of people, we've already had this conversation, who need to work full-time to make this thing happen.
01:47:50.000Okay, I can and will provide funding to make sure we make the world a better place.
01:48:16.000What if he said, okay, I'm going to work on a project that's going to make everyone's lives a lot better, and he didn't have access to funding.
01:48:23.000Who's going to pay for it if everyone just takes the code and then rips it from him?
01:48:26.000How can he actually work 40 hours a week and then get nothing back for it?
01:48:29.000Because it's not stealing to take his hard work from him.
01:49:12.000I'm literally talking about if someone designs a building and comes up with engineering practices, and then people start copying it and sharing it all around, and that guy doesn't get compensation for it, he won't be able to keep innovating.
01:49:23.000His career is done, he will starve, and he will lose his livelihood.
01:49:25.000The point you're making that I agree with is that if they're copying his art and then selling it, and he's not getting compensated, that's a problem that we need to put into the code.
01:49:34.000You need to be able to follow where the data came from so that the original creator gets a portion of the sales.
01:49:40.000And if there's no sales because they're just copying it?
01:50:07.000Now, I don't care about multi-millionaire celebrities, but when we're talking about a regular, hard-working person, you like his work, you want his work to continue, but then everyone just copies it instead of buying it?
01:52:03.000My friend once sent me a video saying, please share this, and it was a PSA about all the people who had lost their jobs in the industry, PAs, people making 12 bucks an hour, because their studios were downsizing after they couldn't turn a profit on making short films anymore.
01:52:14.000Yeah, because those studios were overblown.
01:52:16.000Look at what we're doing right here in your house, dude.
01:54:39.000I mean, obviously, if you're throwing it in water or anything like that, I mean, it's not.
01:54:43.000And then we also have very generous return policy as well.
01:54:45.000So I mean, but yeah, I mean, these phones, we make them to last for a long time because we know phones will do it.
01:54:50.000But I mean, if you end up being really rough, if you're working in the If you're trying to take it to space or something, yeah, it's not going to last.
01:54:58.000I feel, in my opinion, this will last for five years.
01:55:02.000I mean, the hard sell on it is if you want a phone that has its own app store, which has all the normal apps your normal phone has, plus banned ones as well.
01:55:12.000If you want a phone that cares about your privacy, cares about your security, And feel free to anyone that wants to, you know, test it out, feel free to do it.
01:55:20.000And we're going to be posting videos soon of the testing that we've done.
01:55:23.000We want to put like a top-notch hacker and just, I mean, we've done this internally, but actually publicly make like a whole video about it, of them trying to get into this phone.
01:55:31.000And I'm sure this is what people are going to do when they, when the phone is shipped out to everybody.
01:55:36.000But yeah, I mean, that's the hard sell.
01:55:37.000I mean, we're just trying to challenge the Apple and Google duopoly here.
01:55:41.000All right, Weston Hecker says, does the phone have its own baseband software or modifications to the HAL hardware access layer?
01:55:47.000OTADM or any other stuff aside from the custom OS?
01:55:52.000I should get my CTO on the phone because that's over my head.
01:55:56.000I hired a white hat guy that has been my friend for years, and he built this out.
01:56:02.000So we're going to be posting on, you know, we're going to have freedomphone.com slash security that goes into literally all the things that we did on the security front.
01:56:10.000Blackrock Beacon says, Algorithmic psychosis is an availability cascade driven by
01:56:15.000confirmation bias and virtue signaling reinforced by gamification or human
01:57:12.000Sewer Turd says, can the phone be picked up in person to avoid possible tampering en route by a third party?
01:57:19.000Right now we ship it to you and we put a little tracker to make sure it got to you and all that.
01:57:26.000Not a tracker on the phone, but just like we put on the outside of the box so that way you make sure that they're seeing.
01:57:31.000And then we've got a seal as well, so that way if anyone has opened the phone you would know by the time it gets there.
01:57:37.000Man, I'll tell you this, I've had more than enough of my time at the Tamper Evident Village in DEFCON to know how to get past those seals, you know?
01:57:49.000You get like the little steamer thing and then you steam the sticker and you get the tweezers and you peel the sticker back and you can pop it right open, go inside and then close it and put the Tamper Evident thing back and...
01:57:57.000We also put it in its own case as well.
01:57:59.000So it comes like on this one, I don't have it on that.
01:58:01.000This is just what I bring around to show people.
01:58:26.000Smokey says anyone who thinks these phones can't be tracked is an idiot.
01:58:29.000Anything with an electronic signature can be tracked.
01:58:32.000We put the operating system level, and it turns it off at the hardware level.
01:58:38.000We put the option as a button, a virtual button to be able to turn it off, and it really does turn it off on the phone, everything.
01:58:44.000And out of the box, like so many phones, they come with like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth already on, and that's one of the vulnerabilities that people can kind of get into your phone with.
01:58:52.000So we make sure it turns all of those things off when you get it.
02:01:40.000I think you can buy it on iTunes, I'm not sure, but it's like everywhere.
02:01:43.000And we've got someone here who may be our new composer, which means likely going to be recording a lot more music and should be a lot of fun.
02:01:51.000I got a million and one songs that need to be recorded.
02:04:11.000But, you know, you have the option if you want to turn that, some tracking, like if you want to use GPS, you have the option to turn that on.
02:05:01.000I love dogs, love them, but I had a cat and she was, she was like a dog and she was so sweet.
02:05:06.000Danine S says, Ian, if nobody pays for art, the artist will be forced to make a living by other means and won't be able to make as much art.
02:05:13.000Well, if you're making art for anything other than the love of art, then you're doing it wrong.
02:05:19.000So artists shouldn't be allowed to have, like, food and a shelter?
02:05:24.000So if there's an artist, and they're like, I would like to paint a picture, but it takes me— They don't deserve it, if that's what you mean.
02:05:35.000It's—art is a— But it's the ability to do more, like we live, you know, it's the ability to make more art, right?
02:05:41.000If someone wants to buy more canvases and buy more painting material and be able to have, you know, so rather than it, I mean, I think the goal is always to have art be a full time job if you're really into that.
02:05:51.000Not a full time job, but something that you can do full time.
02:05:53.000If you can control the flow, the output of the flow of your data, then you can profit off of it.
02:05:58.000But once you lose control of that flow.
02:06:21.000I think that G Prime 85 over here, with these beautiful pictures of Joe Biden eating children, should be allowed to be compensated, and you know what?
02:09:31.000Because now, I don't gotta worry about buying.
02:09:33.000I can literally pull up Spotify because I have a subscription and just pick up whatever song I want.
02:09:37.000And then I can listen to it and I don't have to worry about it.
02:09:39.000And it's easier than finding some torrent website to download an album.
02:09:43.000I remember back in the day with, like, Kazaa and Limewire, you'd see, like, you know, I'd be like, oh, bad religion, and then you'd click it and it would be Metallica or something, and I'd be like, this is dumb!
02:09:52.000People who would name files after their own, like, they would upload their own band, hoping that, like, calling it Metallica would get me to listen to their band.