You know, it's fair to say that this
little engine that could, the higher side chats,
is one of the longest running and most
successful ad free podcasts in Internet history.
Not really because I'm so great, but because
the ad creep is everywhere. It's 2, then
4, then 6. It's invading paid subscriptions even
with a price hike almost every other year.
It's why we have to scroll further and
further down just to find anything we're actually
looking for.
But it's kinda nice to know there are
at least a few places left that have
not surrendered and are holding their ground,
really, thanks to community support in one way
or another, which is also related to how
much value it provides to the individuals who
crossover.
And THC Plus members have over a decade's
worth of uninterrupted
and well edited interviews with some of the
best guests and researchers in the alternative everything
space. 750
plus episodes with probably something like 550
plus unique guests
with some fairly advanced search functions built right
into the higher side chats dot com. Even
free first hour listeners have plenty to play
around with there, including getting the closing songs
if you don't hate them and searching that
very big archive for the free shows.
But if you like what I do and
respect the commitment to sponsor free independence,
think about how much more there is in
all those extended episodes where the conversation continues
to get deeper into a guest's work or
we can get their thoughts on adjacent or
more bizarre things
or get into the thornier topics that I've
even had guests on occasion say they wouldn't
wanna talk about in the free first hour.
The whole thing even starts with a 7
day free trial, $8 a month after that.
When you sign up, you make a username
and password like any other website, but you
also get a welcome email that contains a
custom individualized
RSS feed. Just copy and paste that into
any podcasting app that accepts RSS feeds,
and you have the whole archive in one
easy list without the need for those login
credentials.
But when you want to engage in the
comments, suggest a guest on the forums, or
contribute to the ratings I regularly mention, do
that at the higher side chats.com.
When you log in, all the episode posts
magically switch over to the extended plus versions,
which I consider a very nice touch too.
THC plus is also available on Patreon if
you don't mind not having access to the
website. The trade off is being able to
listen on Spotify and pay with PayPal,
systems that don't really wanna play with me
directly.
If you were a previous member who ever
had issues, we've done a lot to continually
improve the system and we have more support
in the ticketing system than before for any
tech support needs.
And, again, the 7 day free trial is
standard now.
But staying independent is a lot more expensive
and a lot more in need of ongoing
attention than the ad model is, and that's
fine. This is how we do it. I
think the value is there, the interviews are
better for it, and I like being part
of a very small elite class of great
shows that have been able to just say
no.
I hope you're able to squeeze me into
the budget somewhere. Either way, enjoy the free
first hour and maybe tell some friends if
you wouldn't mind. We are a little algorithmically
challenged, if you know what I mean.
Good luck out there and enjoy.
The planet's puppet masters almost surely have a
plan.
There's clearly maybe something there beyond the realm
of man.
And until we thoroughly tested every last close
chested view, I find the more we think
we know, the less we really do.
Rock me like a hurricane, people, from the
sunshine state. I'm Greg Carlwood, and many of
us recognize that there are some major psychological
differences between the old tradition of reading a
morning paper or sitting down for the nightly
news and the situation we have today, where
we're immersed in a chaotic and almost overwhelming
Internet swarm of narrative, counter narrative, and counter
counter narrative information on nearly every event,
oftentimes mistaking that immersion for realness in our
ritualization
as participation.
Many news stories now feel closer to an
engaging ARG than an actual event, and even
the conversations being had are oftentimes designed to
steer your opinion to a desired conclusion by
bot accounts masquerading as genuine.
We've all heard of the dead Internet theory
that suggests the volume of genuine human activity
is actually far smaller than advertised, and that
hunch many have seems more than justified when
hundreds of accounts using the exact same phrases
are collected up and screenshotted together.
And it gets weirder still, but here to
talk all things under the hood of the
Internet from shadow banning and bots to engineering
opinion through social media, attacks on alternative platforms,
the death of whistleblowers, and Reddit moderator Ghislaine
Maxwell, is returning guest, Magnora 7. You might
remember him from 2 killer episodes we did
in the past, our first in 2017
covering the Rothschilds' carving up of Africa and
the diamond mine monopoly in a show titled
the Rothschild World Order and the Ownership of
Everything,
and then he returned in 2018 for a
look into the deaths of Anthony Bourdain, Kate
Spade, and the suicide string conspiracy.
I initially discovered magnora 7 from his in-depth
Reddit posts at a time when that was
a bit more rare, And in the years
since we last did the dance, he's been
the man behind the only true Reddit alternative
I know, setit.net.
And we're gonna talk about all the things
he's seen and experienced firsthand in that struggle
for a censorship free platform in a compromised
and corporate digital landscape.
So let's do it. Trying to be the
change he wants to see, the free information
advocate, censorship critic, and digital dystopia dissident, Magnor,
a 7, my man, long time. Welcome back.
Hey, Greg Carla. Glad to be here, man.
Thanks for having me back. Of course. Thanks
for doing this. So
I initiated this conversation because I really liked
those 2 previous interviews, and
you kinda came back at me with, well,
what's the point if the 2 we've done
already aren't even searchable?
You can put in the exact title in
word for word in YouTube and it won't
come up.
Well,
this is directed more at the listeners than
yourself, but we need to stop trying to
go where we're not wanted.
The first show we did is there, but
you have to look pretty hard. And the
second show we did was removed from YouTube
entirely.
But you know where you can find them
both? On my website, in the show archive
of any podcasting app, and with a search
on a non Google search engine.
So we can only control what we can
control, and I'm very interested in all the
things you've seen as someone trying to run
a censorship free alternative.
But I'm kinda past expecting these platforms to
change their behavior,
and I'm encouraging users to change theirs.
I hope we get that message across today
by explaining how bad it really is.
Hence why you started setit.net in the 1st
place. Right?
Yeah. That's right. Reddit had some censorship problems
that's been growing since about 2012 or so.
And in response, a lot of people tried
to make Reddit alternatives, especially since it was
open source.
And a few did it, and most of
them went under in about 2 to 3
years because of all these pressures to shut
down that we're gonna talk about, but
said it's still around 6 years later. So
anyone can go to it, said it.net, and
check it out. But this censorship problem, going
back a little to what you're saying about
our YouTube things, if you just type in
magnora 7 higher side chats into YouTube,
it's not there, you know, and it should
be there. The top result should be, you
know, 1 and 2 is our 2 interviews.
And I think 10 years ago, it might
have been that way where it would have
responded like that, but now it's tough to
find. You have to use alternate search engines
and stuff just to find these basic interviews
that we did. Yeah. And it it is
frustrating, but like we were saying before we
started recording,
podcasting
is such a godsend because it's totally decentralized,
the RSS feeds and a bunch of different
podcast apps,
And they're trying to go after it, but
the only way really is to try to
convert it all to video. And if you
have a video show, there's only a few
places to put it, really only one, and
that's YouTube. And so the advertisers
love YouTube because you can see all the
views right there. There's no guessing,
and the algorithm helps them too. So if
you're not playing the advertising game,
there's really not a reason to convert to
video to get shoehorned into YouTube and out
of the podcasting apps,
and so I'm staying strong. It's tough because
a lot of my colleagues don't agree with
me, but here we are. Yeah. And I
gotta commend you, man. I mean, you've really
stuck it out and fought the good fight
so far and, you know, diversified on a
lot of different platforms because it is easy
to just plop it on YouTube and turn
on ads and just let that be that.
And you've gotten away from that ecosystem, and
I think that's great. You know? To have
you've got your footprint in a lot of
different places, and I think that's real smart
for the future.
Fair enough. But sometimes I wonder what it
all is worth because it just seems to
be like the game is the game, and
I'm doing this other thing, and maybe some
people, you know, give me a tip of
the hat, but, you know, what is it
really worth? I don't know. It doesn't seem
to bother
guests to go on shows full of ads,
and it doesn't seem to bother listeners to
listen to shows full of ads. Yeah. And,
I mean, there's too many ads and but,
like, a few ads isn't necessarily bad, but,
you know, I'm on the same page as
you where I said it. We've never had
ads for 6 years.
Now we've run the site completely based on
Patreon donations
and my personal funding. So
there's no excess. There's no profit being made.
There's no employees.
It's just all going back into the site,
and it's just there as a public resource.
You know? It's a charity, basically.
Yes. Well,
let's get past ourselves. We got a lot
of people listening that really
I think we'll be quite interested to hear
what you've learned trying to launch such a
big platform like this. You've seen it all
from DDOS attacks and all kinds of things
in the back end. You know, sent me
some videos of Chinese click farms that are
really insane. Obviously, we don't have the video.
We just talked about that. But Reddit seems
more like a propaganda
tool for engineering consensus than anything. And I'm
on Reddit a lot. It is basically my
portal through the Internet, sadly,
but the Internet's gotten a lot smaller. I
mentioned dead Internet theory in the intro. What
do you think about that? I mean, it's
not literally dead, but I do think there's
so much less going on than
people think. It's decaying more than dead. It's
becoming fossilized in a sort of way.
The old Internet was all people. You're basically
guaranteed to be talking to a person,
and then bots started to exist and become
popular.
And then shills started to become a thing,
you know, paid actors who are there to
influence opinion on the Internet.
And then now we've got AI and chat
GPT that can act, you know, as tools
for these shills and these other bad actors
that wanna destroy or censor content on the
Internet.
So the amount of worthless garbage, basically, of
just noise is increasing,
And
it's a real uphill battle, and I don't
know if the cat can go back in
the bag, frankly.
No. No. I tend to say, like, if
it's broken, then fine.
I'm spending less time online. I see that
as a good thing.
So I know you have a lot of
notes. I don't wanna take up too much
time before we at least get rolling with
those notes. Talk to us about some of
the things that you think are important that
more people should know but don't.
Yeah. There's a lot of different techniques to
Internet censorship, and a lot of people think
Internet censorship is just your comic. It's deleted
or it doesn't. But there's a lot more
subtle things like search hiding is something we
just talked about with our YouTube videos.
Those interviews are there. If you have the
link, you can go to it. It just
won't appear on the YouTube search, so it's
just kind of downplayed. And they've gotten better
too where it'll show up as, like, the
30th result, so they can say, oh, you
know, it's there. It's technically there, but it
clearly should be the number one result because
it's the only thing with the text match.
So
that type of search hiding is real common.
And then other than search hiding, there's shadow
banning, which I'm sure a lot of people
have run into. And shadow banning is all
over YouTube and Reddit comments, especially.
Shadow banning is when you personally see something
is posted, but it's not visible to anyone
else. So, like, on Reddit or YouTube, you
can spend your whole day making comments and
never get any votes, never get any replies,
and wonder why. But if you log out
or go into the 2nd browser,
look at incognito mode or something,
you'll see that, you know, it's not there.
It's gone. So it only appears when you're
logged into the account, and that's what shadow
banning is. So it gives you the appearance
you're participating,
but nobody else can see or participate back.
So it's a bizarrely
isolating kind of censorship maneuver to do the
shadow banning, and it's become really common in
the last 10 years. It's like the new
hot tool because people don't know they're being
censored, so they don't get mad.
And so you don't have this user pushback
to fight against. You know? It's just a
very silent sort of censorship.
So search banning and search hiding and shadow
banning are really super important, and that narrative
shaping power of these tools is huge.
You know, it's done across all these different
media websites.
It's not a small effect. You know? It's
the Internet now is larger than TV and
radio and these things. So
having the communities on these websites be shaped
by these tools
really influences the culture on the websites, but
also the people who use the websites think,
you know, this is what modern culture is.
This is how society is now, but it's
not. It's an illusion. It feels like the
evolution of polling. You know, they used to
just
have a poll that said whatever public opinion
they wanted to promote, and then they put
it on the news and say, well, 70%
of people think this. And it's, like, 70%
of what?
The 70 you asked? You know, that's not
really a true representation.
The people who answered their phones. Right. And
now they do it a little more
nuanced
with actually crafting the opinions, using bots, using
these
Chinese click farms or any kind of click
farms, I guess, that's not limited to China.
But just elevating
the bot opinions, the mainstream opinions, suppressing the
other ones. And then people who do absorb
the mainstream opinion,
they get more emboldened because they think everybody's
on their side, and then they
talk more shit to people like you and
I. COVID, it became pretty clear.
But the beautiful thing about COVID, and you
could even say the last election to a
degree, is, like,
the narrative broke down.
Like, the people who thought maybe they were
isolated to an opinion of 1 found out
that, no. Actually, a lot of people do
agree with me. And that's a beautiful thing.
You just have these choke points
where
they make it appear as if you're
an opinion of 1. And, you know, so
if as long as you've learned to see
through those things,
you can trust that, yes, we know sheeple,
a lot of people are dumb, and this
and that, but a lot of people aren't
dumb.
And a lot of people do agree with
you. They're trying to make people look dumb
as well. Like, there's this impetus to make
society look dumb so that you go, oh,
everyone's dumb. I shouldn't even try.
No. I'm chanced here with this book, Manufacturing
Consent.
There you go. Basically, what this is, it's
a manufactured culture
and a manufacturer's consent and the people who
participate in the culture.
And, yeah, it's serious business.
It is. And we should talk about the
business. So
let's use Reddit. You were saying that Reddit
is considered to be the 6th most visited
website on the Internet and has been for
years, but they haven't turned a profit
until
going public this year. And that's a big
thing people might not realize. If you are
a Reddit user, they went public in March
of this year, which means you're gonna see
way more ads, way more censorship. They have
just signed up, a company that never made
money before, just signed up to need
10% growth year after year forever through infinity
because that's what a public company must do.
It's insane and ridiculous, but that will be
what Reddit is turning into. You're precisely right.
And then it's gonna be totally oriented towards
the investors because all public companies have to
be operated in a way to maximize profit
for the investors.
So the censorship on Reddit and so on
is gonna change as well.
It's something I've anticipated. Actually, we built seta.net
6 years ago anticipating they were gonna go
IPO that year. So it's been a long
time coming that Reddit's been talking about wanting
to do this, but, yeah, they've never turned
a profit. I don't know how a company
who's never once turned a profit,
you know, is able to go IPO and
get all this investment.
It it literally doesn't make sense. Are they
valued at a 1,000,000,000? They're not. But a
100,000,000?
I don't know. Let's look it up real
quick.
30,000,000,000.
30,000,000,000?
30,000,000,000
dollars, apparently.
It's all funny money. Yeah. And it's a
lot of advertising money like we're talking about,
and a lot of the advertising money is
based on these fake users that don't exist
that are AI users and bot users and
chill users. And Reddit has zero incentive to
get rid of those users because it makes
their advertising click through rates higher,
which increases the advertising revenue, which increases their
valuation. So this valuation is totally based on
their advertising potential, basically,
which is based on the number of monthly
active users,
which is based on all these fraudulent tools,
essentially.
So it's really a house of cards,
but it's one that stood for 20 years.
So
Yeah. And not that this is all about
podcast advertising, but people in that space are
saying the same thing that
they've gotten a lot of people dependent on
the ad revenue, and they're gonna rug pull
them. YouTube has already done this several times
just by chopping the ad rate lower and
lower and lower for people who that's their
only mechanism for income.
And it's like, you think they would wanna
make their content creators happy because that's the
only reason anyone goes there. But this happened
with Apple where Apple used to auto download
any podcast you were subscribed to, which would
count as a download, and they made an
update where they do not do that, and
people suddenly looked at their podcasting statistics,
and they're way down, like 40%
down. Well, if you're selling
ads and you're giving your views
and downloads to ad companies,
it it's not gonna work out.
And that's just one step on a big
road that I think is gonna make people
not quite so
happy
in their podcasting business in a couple of
years, but, you know, we do what we
can. Yeah. And it's a way to control
the Overton window as well. Right? They can
say, like, oh, if you step outside these
narrative boundaries, you know, you're demonetized.
And so they can control the narrative that
comes on YouTube just by deciding the winners
and losers in terms of who gets funding
and who doesn't.
Yes. There was something I know there's an
overlap with the no agenda audience. Adam Curry
actually just referenced the Hireside chats not long
ago, but he said it was Cliff High's
podcast, which, you know, I'm still waiting on
a correction,
Adam, previous guest.
Doesn't know who the host of the show
is. No. It's fine. I don't really care.
Cliff Hire actually makes sense, the Cliff Hire
side chats. I understand.
But
the point
was that
they played some clips on no agenda where
a totally
random I think it was a show that
just looked at peer reviewed science. It was
not even a controversial
show, not trying to be controversial at all.
They found out they were on a list
that's given or shared amongst the big five
advertising
firms, and it's like a do not
participate list.
So they literally were blacklisted, like, on a
no fly list, and you're like, wait. I
never did anything just because I have a
name that sounds like someone else?
And, you know,
that sucks for them, but it just made
me aware that such lists exist, and you
don't really come off of them easily. Right.
And we're in a world now where you
could have that list is global, basically. There's
no escaping that list anymore. If you run
something on the Internet,
you can't just up and move to, you
know, Argentina or whatever. You're on the Internet.
Yes.
And another thing we had kinda talked about
is that
building
a platform that requires public participation
is very hard. You know? Said it. It's
like people are only gonna go there because
there's a lot of engagement. Why would I
post there if it's dead, if no one's
talking about it or active on it? Right.
It's the bootstrapping problem. Yeah. You've gotta have
this lead in audience
to be able to start a social media
site. It's something you know, I was lucky.
I wrote all these articles. Like you mentioned,
I used to write articles pretty regularly on
Reddit.
I had a pretty good following, and when
we launched the site, you know, I announced
it to the people who read my articles,
and we got I was, like, 20,000 people
or something came over that 1st day or
whatever. And that was kind of the nucleus
that started the whole thing, and a lot
of sites didn't have that
to fall back on, and they, you know,
have to
sort of create a false community
to draw people in because you can't just
have it be dead like you said. So
Reddit actually started with bots, and they had
moderators running multiple accounts pretending to be the
community they wanted to see, basically,
until they got enough people in. And I
don't know if they ever stopped doing that,
but surely they've got enough people now. But
in the very beginning, they said they literally
generated a fake community, basically, by running multiple
accounts. So it's not a real community. Even
back then, that was 2,007,
2000 6, so
this type of thing's been going on a
long time. And when it comes to setit.net,
you mentioned to me that
you're one of the only websites to make
use of Aaron Schwartz's open source code before
Reddit closed it off to the public in
2015.
And Aaron Schwartz,
you know, really tragic
story. I don't even know if it's ever
been talked about on the air here, but
talk to us about Aaron Schwartz and his
story. Yeah. Aaron Swartz, he's about my age,
and he he was one of the guys
who was initial
coders of Reddit. He didn't start it right
at the beginning, but he joined it about
the 4 month mark or something and was
there till about year 2 or 3. But
he built basically the main code of infrastructure
of Reddit that Reddit uses to this day.
So he built all these distributed
database systems and all these things required for
Reddit to be able to scale for millions
of viewers, you know, on an hourly basis.
I looked yesterday. Reddit has 1,500,000,000
page loads per hour.
So if you can imagine that server infrastructure
required to do that smoothly, you know, it's
incredible. So Aaron Swartz was the guy behind
that, and he used to give interviews and
he'd say things like information is power, but
like all power, there are those who wanna
keep it for themselves.
And then I think people heard the story
later. He went to MIT, and he did
this thing where he snuck into MIT
server room and basically downloaded all these scientific
papers that he decided
should be free to the public because they're
basically paid for by taxpayer money.
And he put these papers out there on
the Internet, and then
basically, the Department of Justice
dropped the hammer on this guy. They literally
said they wanted to, quote, make an example
out of him,
and they threw the full weight of federal
law
in his direction saying, you know, he'd violated
privacy agreements for stuff that was, you know,
military or had protections on it. But,
anyways,
this court battle was just getting started, and
then
one day he was found suicided, basically, and
he was gone, and they didn't even get
to have the trial or anything.
That's different. I thought he was looking at
35 years, and then he committed suicide. I
mean, obviously, any suicide, you always wonder
if it was a real suicide, but you
seem to lead towards he was suicided.
I would think so because they didn't get
to I mean, I don't know. You know?
But
there was a movie recently that came out
about him that brushes on the subject, but
it's just too convenient. And he was such
a strong conviction. You know? He was always
like, we're gonna fight things, make the world
better. That was his whole deal. So
to arrive at this sort of big junction
where he might have an influence and then
to just fold and walk away. You know?
That just seems out of character for him,
and that's all I'm really basing that on,
but, you know, it's speculation.
Well and so just so people understand,
there's a lot of debate about if he
even committed a crime because
what he did is he took
peer reviewed scientific papers that are behind a
paywall,
but
these papers are free if you are an
MIT student. And he downloaded them through an
MIT account and then just
made them public.
So it really is a gray area on
if he committed a crime. And as you
say,
academia,
we rail on them so hard around here.
It's like, there's this thing where it's like,
if it's gonna be publicly funded,
then the results should be publicly available too.
Right. Yeah. We paid for it, so we
should be able to see the results.
That's not even really a debatable thing to
me. I you know, it's just crazy to
me that why would I pay for a
service and then never even be able to
look at the results of that service, be
disallowed legally from even looking at it? You
know, it's just
bizarre. It's just like people, when they talk
about Aaron's situation, they always use the word
hacked. And it's like he didn't hack into
anything. He used an account
to access something
he
had privileged access to as an MIT student
and then released it. You know, maybe that's
against the terms of service. Is that against
the law? I don't necessarily think it is,
but, you know, the law is massagible
when they wanna make an example of someone.
Right.
You could make the argument he did have
software to sort of scrape the whole server.
So I think he it was a pretty
extensive
information
grab that he did, and and some of
that might have overreached into certain areas of
the server that he wasn't supposed to have
permission to, I think, was kind of the
crux of the issue from the perspective of
MIT.
Mhmm. And now his memory is kind of
like as a martyr
or a figurehead for
the dead idea of the freedom of the
Internet. Like, the last
guy who was gonna really push for it,
and then once he was snuffed out,
it really just became the corporatized Internet.
Well, I've read it especially. Yeah. And then,
like you said, the actual thing that happened
with him taking the papers from MIT never
actually went to court. So there was never
actually a trial on that. There was never
a decision on that. So that
whole issue is still legally undecided because of
his death.
But our site, set it.net, we're the only
site to use the open source code.
Reddit
still runs it, but they had it open
source until 2015, and then they closed the
source a few years after Aaron's death.
But we use open source, and it's really
complicated. So most sites that were our peers
tried to build their own software from scratch,
which worked out great when they were small,
and then if they started to take off,
it would always crash and fall apart because
it wasn't built to be scalable.
But this open source Reddit code is built
to have a 1000000000 page views an hour,
so it's like a Ferrari. So if you
can set this thing up right, it runs
super well, and we were able to do
that with SetIt.
Right on. And you said that your moderation
you put a lot of consideration
and thought into how it should be moderated.
This is one of my issues. I don't
wanna get too in the weeds for people
who don't use Reddit
specifically,
but
you find that if there are censorship
free platforms,
they just become something like 4 chan lite.
And it's like not all the content in
my life is conspiracy content, believe it or
not. So it's like I would just like
to go somewhere where I can watch comedy,
pop culture news, and
real
deep diving conspiracy rabbit hole stuff all in
one place. And maybe that's too much to
ask, but you go to Rumble or some
of these alternatives, and it's just
way too intense, I guess. And it's basically
only one type of content exists there,
and that to me is a bit of
a problem too. That's a great point, and
I kinda call that the overflow problem because
the stuff on Rumble is only there because
it isn't allowed on YouTube a lot of
the time. Right? It's the overflow.
So that ends up making Rumble be all
these extreme things that aren't allowed on YouTube,
and then the more moderate stuff just is
on YouTube because they'll get more views there.
So it creates a certain cultural selection pressure,
you could say.
And Sedit had a very similar problem where
we had kind of the overflow for Reddit.
It's all the people who weren't allowed on
Reddit basically kinda overflowed into set it, and
then we have to make the choice of
what people to allow and what people not
to allow. And you can't just allow everyone
because there's people are literally
doxing people or advocating murder or doing crazy
things. You gotta tell those people to go
away. You can't just let them take over
the culture.
Right. I got a little bit of hot
water myself for not moderating my forum well
enough, and
a lot of people know that story. Yeah.
It's a tricky deal because you wanna be
Cedit's whole thing also is free speech, so
we wanna be like a free speech website.
Right? But you can't be too free speech
or else it just goes crazy with people
trying to sort of poison the
culture. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you
about that. This is not in the outline,
but as I was digging in to set
it, it seems like one of the big
controversies, things you've had to deal with, is
the Ice Poseidon
saga or debacle or what whatever we could
call it. Now, Ice Poseidon, I know the
name as a Twitch streamer. I'm not big
in the Twitch streaming space. I don't watch
a lot of that, but
there's a lot of eyes on these Twitch
streamers, and they get quite big. And I
don't know if he himself is a problem
or if it's the people that have rallied
around him that have started to dox him
and stuff like that. My understanding is his
own listeners or his own viewers
called in a bomb threat to an airport
when he was walking around the airport streaming,
and that became, like, a funny thing, a
prank. Actually, I believe he did it. He
called it in. He did it? I don't
know. I don't wanna get it. We don't
know. It's a crazy
culture. But the relevancy here is that I
believe Ice Poseidon got a
sub on Sedit, and then I believe you've
even said 40% of Sedit's traffic came from
this community,
and that became a bit of a problem.
Yeah. It actually got up to 60%, so
they were the majority of the site at
one point. And
the group of people that follow the sky
around, it's like a tornado just destroying everything
all the time. And in trying to be
free speech, we let them hang with us,
and I defended them for a long time.
You know, even though I don't agree with
what they say, I agree with their right
to say it sort of thing.
So I
tried to work with these people, but we
actually moved our server farm to Switzerland to
try and get better free speech protections.
And after we moved our our whole website
to being hosted in Switzerland, we got DDoS
because of this group.
They were inviting all these DDoS, and we
got booted from the server farm that we
were on in Switzerland with 24 hour notice.
They said, we can't do this. You're destroying
our server farm.
Your
specific instance is being attacked so many times,
it's taken down our backbone for our server
system. So they gave me 24 hours to
leave, and so we had to change servers
again. So, yeah, we we ended up having
to change servers 2 or 3 times, basically,
because of this group,
and it got to the point where
the 3rd time the server group was gonna
boot us again a different one, and we
had to cut them a deal where we
had to let this community go, basically. So
I just had to kick off 60% of
my community,
and that was a hard decision, man, after
4 years of work on this thing. Mhmm.
Well, some men just wanna watch the world
burn, and they're gonna just keep pushing and
pushing, and, you know, that's when a moderator
has to step in and do something. But
talk to us about the kind of attacks
that you generally see, and where is a
DDoS attack really coming from? I mean, this
is, like, the most commonly talked about type
of attack. Yeah. Like, DDoS attacks
were real popular in the nineties and early
2000s.
But basically,
I mean, they still go on, but there's
a lot of protections for them now. But
basically, a DDoS is you try and request
a web page to load,
and you just do that like a 1000000
times a second.
And it's so many requests that the server
simply can't keep up, and it gets gridlocked,
and it just shuts down. And that's what
a DDoS is. So the way to protect
against it is you put a layer of
software in front of it that receives all
the requests, and then it only lets the
legitimate ones through it. It tries to detect
if one is trying to do, like, a
1000000 requests a minute or something crazy
and block it.
So set it as DDoS attack probably about
9 hours every single day for the last
6 years.
So it's like a non stop somebody has
it on a scheduled calendar sort of thing.
So we have our DDoS protection turned on
maximum all the time, and that's true for
a lot of websites now, but that's Cloudflare.
I don't know if you use Cloudflare. Do
you ever use Cloudflare?
I know of it, but I don't think
that I use it.
Okay. It's like the DDoS protection. And, basically,
if you're gonna run a website, you gotta
have Cloudflare. Well, then I do. Then I
definitely do. You very well might have it
as part of yours. Yeah.
So there are other types of things too,
and I guess you should tell us about
them because people might be curious to know
what
an admin of such a site has to
deal with. But let us know if you
have any more insight into
where these attacks come from and that kind
of thing.
Unfortunately, you really can't know where they're coming
from because
with the DDoS attack, you can see the
IP address of every packet request. So you
could, in theory, you know, look up the
IP, but in reality, they use VPNs
and actually even more advanced IP spoofing, so
they can just have any IP address they
want.
So they can pretend to be anywhere in
the world or pretend to be any government
or whatever just by pretending to use their
IP address.
So you can get Duo attacks attack from
Russia, and it looks like it's from New
York or something. You know? You really have
no idea.
And that's one of the really frustrating things
about this is it's so untraceable,
And the only people who have the access
to trace it back are the the backbone
Internet service providers like l three and stuff
who control these Internet backbone lines that go
across the ocean and stuff.
They're really the only ones who have the
capability to trace these things back to where
they're coming from.
So it's truly unknowable, which is extremely creepy,
I gotta be honest. Well, you've also had
really creepy things happen
in terms of people just trying
to get into admin positions
and weasel their way in there so they
can
de admin everybody else and take over the
space. That's odd. Yeah. I say, oh, I'm
so trustworthy. Oh, I've been here for months
being real prominent user. Hey. You should make
me head admin. And then the second they
get head admin, they just start wrecking the
place, you know, just deleting stuff, banning people
who are good.
And we had that happen a couple of
times. I mean, people would play it cool
for literally months and, like, embed themselves in
the community to gain a trusted position. And
then as soon as you give them power,
a week later, they start doing everything wrong
that you would want them not to do,
and it just creates a real situation.
But, I mean, that just happened continually over
and over and over. I mean, you'd finally
root one out, and you'd be like, oh,
we got it. And then the next guy
would come. It was just a never ending
thing. So they're always trying to get admin
position. And if they can't achieve that, then
they'll often just talk to the admins and
say,
hey. The other admin was saying bad stuff
about you and they actually hate you, and
they'll try and drive these weird wedges between
the admins so that they turn on each
other
and
fracture the admin groups, and they fall apart.
There's a site that was a competitor called
Ruckus, and Ruckus basically had
5 admins or whatever, and it was too
many cooks in the kitchen,
and then little birdies started tweeting their ear,
and they all turned on each other, and
that was it, man.
Well, we know that the feds used to
do this to a lot of counterculture
communities
and the Black Panthers and, really, anyone that
was critical of the war or the government
in general, they'd infiltrate. So why wouldn't they
do the same thing with freedom loving online
communities? Sure. Exactly. And you don't even have
to go there in person. You can do
it from a college dorm or whatever. It's
so easy.
So, of course, they're doing it.
And then the other types of attacks too,
there's software level attacks. So if the Reddit
open source code had a bug in it,
for example, someone could exploit that.
And then lastly, there's social attacks. So we
talked about the admin attacks, but there's also
people trying to just ruin the culture of
the website by, say, posting 50 times a
day about
some garbage thing no one cares about and
then trying to act as if, oh, this
is the culture of the site now. Like,
one guy was really into Cher. He's like,
I'm gonna post videos of the singer Cher,
and that was his thing. Right? And then
he'd have other accounts that would upvote it
to the front, and it started to make
said it looked like a website about share,
and it's like, this is not what we're
doing here.
But if you've never seen the website before
and you hop on it and that's what
you see,
you know, you might be like, oh, this
is a stupid website. And there's always that
kind of undercurrent happening.
Stuff that's so dumb that it's gotta be
purposeful, and it's happening for years years. You
know? It's not just a one off here
and there. It's a very constant thing. Yes.
And something else you brought up to me
was a connection between Reddit and Langley, Langley
Air Force Base. Is that just where a
lot of the traffic comes from? What's that
connection? Yeah. There was a big story that
came out, I wanna say, 5 years ago.
They found the number one source of all
of Reddit's traffic was Langley Air Force Base.
So we're talking about that 1,500,000,000
page loads an hour, you know, like, how
much of that is from Langley?
Yeah. It's another checkbox towards it
working to influence public opinion. It just shows
that
that's who's interacting with it. That's who's using
it. Mhmm. And I I hope we have
enough overlap with Reddit
users in this audience that they find this
interesting, but
they might be surprised to know how few
moderators
Reddit really has that you think when you
go to a sub, it's like, oh, well,
it's moderated by a few super fans. The
Joe Rogan sub, there's a HireSight chat sub,
there's all kinds of different subs, and they're
usually just a couple of super fans who
make sure the spam is down and, you
know, there's no mutinies even though a lot
of podcasters have mutiny subs.
Looking at you, Brendan Schwab. Sorry, man.
And
I think what's surprising is that you've said
that
a small group of super mods control
basically 90%
of Reddit, and
they didn't even really
require approval from anyone. It looks organic. The
subs are seemingly separate, but not really if
all the information,
all the posts are funneled
to a few different hands that can say
thumbs up or thumbs down.
Yeah. At the beginning of Reddit's life, it
was different people for different subreddits or different
moderators, but over time, it sort of consolidated,
and there's these people who kinda made it
their mission to become moderators of as many
subs as possible.
And
there's some moderators that moderate, like, 600
subreddits,
and each subreddit
gets millions and millions of views a day.
So there's no way you can moderate
100 of those at I mean, it's not
physically possible.
And then they get rid of the other
moderators, you know, that might fight against them
or whatever, and it becomes a sort of
little fiefdom, these little kingdoms of subreddits that
these people kind of assemble.
Yes. And when you pitch this as a
topic of
an interview,
I thought the most compelling thing was this
one potential
super moderator,
this Maxwell
Hill account. And this is something, you know,
if you're in the Reddit rabbit holes, you're
aware of this situation,
but it's heavily speculated. No one, I guess,
knows 100%,
but it's heavily speculated that this Maxwell Hill
account
was or is Ghislaine Maxwell's account, and that
she
was in charge of moderating a lot of
content, and she was a real super user.
She was always on Reddit, probably had multiple
people
using the account, but it seems like she
was one of them helped make the case
that Ghislaine Maxwell,
before she went down, one of her big
operations was controlling a huge chunk of Reddit.
Yeah. Maxwell Hill, the account user Maxwell Hill,
has been around basically since the very beginning
of Reddit,
and it posted daily,
probably
20, 30, 40 posts every day hitting the
front page of Reddit, which is very hard
to do, but doing it extremely consistently for
14 years. And then the day Ghislaine Maxwell
gets arrested,
the day the account stops posting forever and
has not posted since.
Wow.
I mean, that's a pretty red flag there.
And, also,
I mean, she was arrested a couple of
years ago at this point. Right? I wanna
say maybe 2 years sounds about right. Sounds
right.
This account is still the 8th biggest
Reddit account of all time. I think that's
correct. Yeah. It has so much karma from
all the accumulated
posts and stuff.
And if you go to Reddit, you would
see a Maxwell Hill post for years years
years. I mean, that's how it was. And
the name Maxwell
Hill, it's Ghislaine Maxwell's name,
And then her father, Robert Maxwell,
who was a Mossad agent,
apparently owned the Hill McGraw textbook company that
we all used in school in the eighties
nineties in America.
So you probably used the Hill McGraw textbook,
and Robert Maxwell owned that textbook company.
And that Hill McGraw is where this Maxwell
Hill
likely comes from in in my estimation.
So
those are the puzzle pieces I've got that
I've been able to fit together. And, of
course, you know, I'll never be able to
prove it one way or the other, but
it's pretty astounding that after 14 years of
DailyPost,
this user that shares the name of Maxwell,
you know, goes away when she gets arrested.
So it's very likely she was funding it.
You know, I I really doubt she was
actually doing it. I don't think she was
sitting behind the computer. She's got bigger fish
to fry, but I would not be surprised
if she had, you know, a team of
4 people that she hired that were employees
of her that did this.
Do you think the logic there, the motivation
is kinda like why Jeff Bezos spies a
newspaper? He's like, I don't really care what
you talk about. Just don't talk about me.
Yeah. Is it that kind of thing? Like,
she was just looking for posts that would
maybe be about Israel or Mossad or her
father or Epstein
and just shutting those things down and just
flooding Reddit with a bunch of unrelated content.
Just as long as it sticks, throw it
up there because anything that is unsavory will
get buried in this avalanche of content.
Yeah. That's definitely part of it, and then
also the promotion of narratives that they do
want people to see, you know, like, oh,
Israel's
doing such a great job or, you know,
whatever.
And so they promote those as well. And
then there's the additional
pressure she now has that she's bringing in
this account is a core part of the
Reddit culture. So the admins of Reddit
love this account because it's, like, 1% of
all the Reddit culture, basically. So they'll never
touch this account because of the ad revenue
being generated. So there's this implicit threat of
do not mess with this account,
or we can damage
your ad revenue.
So as an admin,
these super high profile users can get kinda
scary to deal with because they have a
lot of power and they know it. And
it seems like the admins have all the
power, but really the website's nothing without the
users. Right? So
the super prominent users actually do have a
lot of pull, and the ones who know
it can use that leverage and get things.
Yeah. And I was looking into this just
to flesh out the case a little bit
more, and,
apparently, the people who have done this research
say that
not only
did the account go down when she was
arrested, but if you look at the phrases
and language
used, there's a lot of things that suggest
this person is a knowledgeable international
traveler. Now, you know, there's a lot of
international travelers,
but they also sussed out
a, quote, seemingly unapologetic
attitude towards pedophilia
in this account's
comments.
Yeah. That wouldn't surprise
me. That's part of this cultural manipulation and
this
manufacturing of false consensus, you know, and they're
trying to normalize certain bad values
in young people that read this website.
And, you know, there's a lot of kind
of cultural sub movements on Reddit that are
like that that are just genuinely destructive
if you take them seriously.
Yeah. And, man, the
rabbit hole of content on YouTube is insane.
I mean, you wanna
suppress and remove
videos that are just 2 guys talking with
no video whatsoever, just a blank screen and
a conversation
being had that's gotta be removed, but the
things that you can find on there for
kids, like it looks all cutesy, and then
the bears chop each other's heads off with
chainsaws,
or the little girl licks a lollipop that's
being held by the knees of a dog.
Really nasty stuff. I mean, they're playing with
every possible line, and YouTube's just like, whatever.
I thought when Daniel Tosh did that whole
Elsa gate thing, it became a little bit
of a viral sensation, but all that stuff
is definitely still there.
You can find
a lot of nasty stuff on there, and
that's fun.
Yeah. It's crazy. But then you, like, can't
say the word murder sometimes. You have to
say, like, unalived. That's why all these people
are saying unalived now because the murder word
is too scary, and it's just it's it's
a very bizarre
prioritization
of values, but, you know, it's not real
is the thing. It's just this isn't a
real culture. This doesn't reflect real human beings'
values. It's just a manufactured
culture.
I think that's really the takeaway here. I
agree. And even just having little kids, you
constantly hear about miss Rachel.
Well, I just watched a psychological
analysis of miss Rachel, and they go through
and they
count every
instance of overstimulation
that's being used, whether it's a graphic
or an exaggerated
tone
or music in the background. Like,
to some people who know a lot more
than I do about this, it appears like
it was engineered from
absolute maximum
psychological
manipulation
and
basically engineering
ADD in children. But, you know, parents get
lazy. They want something to put on for
their kids. They say, well, everyone else does
it, and it's educational.
And then their kid is super hyperactive
and has no attention span and has ADD
going into kindergarten,
and you wonder why.
Yeah. It's incredible
how far a lot of the culture has
gotten from how people actually think and operate.
Mhmm. But luckily for ADD, there's a pill
for that. So, thankfully,
we can solve that problem. You know, it's
a lifelong
prescription, but you'll be okay. Yep. They create
the problem and sell you the solution.
Yeah.
Man, so another point, one last point about
Reddit and Ghislaine Maxwell is apparently,
her father, Robert Maxwell, used to own
Conde Nast,
which is the company that bought Reddit.
Oh, is that right? Yeah. That checks out.
I didn't know that specifically, but, yeah, that
checks out.
Yeah. Conde Nast had it for quite a
while.
Crazy. Yeah. That is crazy. I didn't know
that one. Nice. Good digging. Yeah. Well, you
know, I've done this a time or 2.
Very nice.
One more thing on Reddit, though. Also, they're
headquartered in the New World Trade Center is
something I read. They rebuilt the World Trade
Center, and then they gave Reddit, like, 3
floors of it. Really? Yeah. And this is
a company that's never turned a profit. Hey.
Let's set up shop in the most expensive
office space in the world. You know? Like,
who's paying for that?
Yeah.
Pretty crazy.
Well, man, this is one of the more
in the weeds
subjects
that I've done a show about in a
long time. And
mainly just because I use Reddit, and we
have a good history, and I was curious
about the things you see
managing
such a situation.
What are some of your final points or
the things you want people to take away
who might be
listening? So like we said, don't listen to
Internet culture, especially text based
Internet culture that is on its way out.
We just gotta think of it in the
same way you think of TV. When you
turn on the TV, TV news,
our generation, you know, we immediately are like,
this is garbage. They're gonna lie to me.
You go into it with that mindset. And
I think we need to have that same
mindset going into reading comments and stuff on
the internet and just
being aware that this is happening, and it's
not just like a faraway
theoretical problem. This is, like,
half the Internet comments you read every day
right now are this.
The comments you actually read on daily basis
are constantly being influenced by this. So if
you see something weird and there's like, oh,
this culture doesn't make any sense,
it's probably manufactured. It's probably fake. So just
walk away from it. Yeah. Don't be so
invested,
and don't let a few comments
psychologically
manipulate you into thinking that that's
a bigger opinion
or a widely adopted opinion when maybe it
really isn't.
Exactly.
We are lucky to have known a pre
Internet world. You know, the younger kids,
not so lucky. This is all they know,
and a lot of them seem very erratic
and very ADD and
basically traumatized without knowing it. I mean,
suicide and depression are up. The popping of
all kinds of pills is up. It's having
a huge effect. They're figuring it out though.
I mean, people are starting to connect the
dots on this stuff. You know, it can't
remain a mystery forever. And just like we
saw pre Internet culture, there may very well
be a point coming up here of a
post Internet culture Yeah. Where people get tired
and walk away and have some sort of
post Internet society, you know, like Amish but
stuck in 2008 or something. Yeah. Well, get
the disc man out, people. I'll start mailing
you the monthly CD.
We'll go Columbia House on this bitch. Nice.
Awesome. Well, anything else to add in terms
of what's next for you, what's next for
SET IT? Do you have a plan going
forward?
Anything else to throw out to people?
SET IT's gonna be around. It's not going
anywhere, and, you know, I'm probably not gonna
be super active with it, but it'll be
there for a resource for people who need
it. So
and then, you know, I might come out
with some articles here and there. That was
kinda how this whole thing got started as
I I wrote a couple articles, and you
caught them, and here we are. So Yes.
And go to setit.net.
Make an account. Share your cat videos there.
Share content that doesn't
trigger the sensors because we don't want it
just to be
based 4 chan light.
Exactly. It doesn't need to be only overflow.
It can be just regular stuff too.
Awesome. Well, it was good to reconnect
after
I don't even know how many years, but
I think 7, actually.
7 years.
Unreal. Yeah. Time does fly. Indeed.
Well, I appreciate your time. Thanks for sharing
some of the stuff you see behind the
curtain, and,
hopefully it was good to vent a little
bit. And Oh, this is great, man. I
appreciate you, Greg. Thanks for doing what you
do, man. Of course. Thanks for doing what
you do, and we'll talk again in the
future.
Alright. Have a good one.
Alright, people. A little something different, a little
unexpected.
I initiated this by reaching out to magnora
7 because I thought our previous two interviews
were true standouts,
really top tier. The one we did first
about the Rothschilds
taking over
diamond mines in Africa and how they basically
co opted every country. Like, going through that
country by country,
there really is no other show in the
archive quite like it. And then later after
the death of Anthony Bourdain and then that
really weird Kate Spade thing with the rescuer's
mask on her husband,
He crushed that as well, and it was
also very unique.
So I was looking through the archive of
who we should talk to again, and I
rang his bell and asked him about any
more recent work, and he outlined a show
built around the themes we covered today.
It seems like that's really been his big
focus, trying to get set it off the
ground rather than doing the kind of research
he maybe did previously. I mean, it all
weaves together. You know, you gotta weave.
But I think he really wanted to
let people know about the hidden headaches and
behind the curtain coordinated attacks that he's had
to deal with trying to build a truly
independent free speech social media alternative.
A very ambitious and noble goal.
And I do find it interesting to hear
about, but I worry that we might not
all be Reddit users or care too much
about the strife of building an alternative
platform.
Like, it might be a narrow segment of
the audience that is really engaged with this
one, but it does help to explain why
we can't have nice things. Right?
And the two pieces of information
that stuck out the most to me
that I felt like should be in the
THC record were the bits about the highly
likely Ghislaine Maxwell Reddit moderator account and the
tragic
tale of Aaron Swartz.
Certainly not new information for the people who
swim in those waters, but certainly not anything
we've talked about here as far back as
I can remember,
which is sometimes not that far.
But what is new though is now that
Trump is in the driver's seat again, he
actually made good on one of his big
promises that's kind of adjacent to this sort
of stuff.
A little bit of an obscure promise, but
one that was really important to Internet culture,
and that's the communing of the sentence
of Ross Ulbricht,
the founder of Silk Road.
And really a major reason why Bitcoin has
any value at all. He was sentenced to
life in 2013,
and I definitely think 12 years is plenty.
I don't really wanna go too deep into
the moral or philosophical
analysis
of Silk Road.
I do know people who have used it
to access psychedelics. That's no big deal.
And it really is just an interesting
test case of anarchist values.
Do you truly think anyone should be able
to buy anything anonymously?
It's a bold stance and a pretty tricky
situation because we have things today that can
do insane amounts of damage.
Although based on some articles I'd read, at
least 70% of the sales were drugs and,
you know, don't really have a problem with
that as long as
it's just purchases for personal use from people
who
are of an age to be able to
make all those decisions about what to put
in their own body. But then you get
into hacking services
and purchasing
computer viruses and malware and stolen credit cards
and weapons, of course.
But from what I remember,
contrary to news coverage, Silk Road specifically said
it prohibited the sale of anything that could
be used to cause harm,
and then either this got done anyway or
it was more something done on Silk Road
clones. Because once the website is made, others
can just duplicate the model and have even
more laxed rules.
But what Ross did technically is actually just
pretty amazing in terms of how it all
worked anonymously just on reviews and permissionless
blockchain transactions,
especially at the time.
Of course, you mess with the bowl, you
get the horns and all that, but I'm
glad he's free.
So back to the show today. In the
second hour, we filled it out with some
more semi related stuff like the death of
Trevor Moore,
Pokemon Go and the CIA,
and Hugh Hefner as a proto Diddy Epstein
archetype.
And a few other things too, but, you
know, Magnora's problems with Sedit are of interest
to someone in my own position swimming upstream
where I'm not wanted.
Sometimes it is the corporate system attacking alternatives.
Sometimes your shadow banned for too much raw
truth, and sometimes it's just human nature that
gets in the way.
Little bit of THC history, but this is
kinda what happened with the original attempt at
community with the THC Facebook group. It was
sort of hijacked by people who tried to
build their own brands by promoting
to THC fans now that they were centralized.
And that was a long, long time ago,
but then Aaron Keith stepped up to be
a big help, and I hope people are
still enjoying it. I don't really get on
Facebook much anymore.
And then I thought, well, what if we
had a private forum for Plus? That way
we could keep the
community a little more insulated from that kind
of thing. But I'd let it become the
wild west, and it got me caught up
in the Tracy thing because one user was
being creepy and weird.
If that one guy from the mysterious
strange campground
wasn't messaging her and she wasn't coming to
the forum to see those posts, I probably
never would've got mentioned in that video.
And then even recently, the Telegram that we
have had a recent dust up with band
users feeling like the moderator was too harsh
and drama. Honestly, I just like to focus
on the interviews and keep to myself.
I really am pretty social by nature and
extroverted and all that, but any time you
have communities, you're gonna have people trying to
use them for their own thing.
And any time you give people that moderation
power, you can likely find times where they
flex it.
So thinking about what Magnora is doing and
running something like a Reddit alternative, that sounds
like a nightmare to me.
I don't even really get too friendly with
guests anymore because, of course, the Tracey thing,
but I also had things go sideways with
Jon Brisson.
He was happy to use THC for promotion
and he wrote a great book about gut
health. I wish we could do more shows
together, but then he went nuts posting all
over the place that Gordon White is my
occult handler and my friend's psychotic break was
because of my magic use,
and I don't even have any legitimate
magic use. Yes. I've made some sigils. I
tried the sigil a day project, but this
isn't summoning Baphomet or anything
dark.
And just like exercise
or having any kind of discipline when it
comes to diet,
I fell off pretty quickly. Not because anything
crazy happened, but because it just takes work
to do magic right.
So, you know, in that instance, I think
his Christian bias
had him very paranoid
and making massive assumptions,
and I thought we were becoming friends, but
so it goes. And people wonder why I'm
critical sometimes of people that have that persuasion.
But, again, coming back to this show, Raiders
will let me know how they feel as
they always do. But I can understand some
people feeling like this was just kind of
a slow news day or a range of
topics not exactly relevant to them. But I
love the work Magnorra has done, and I
thought we'd give it another go.
Sometimes when people do work that doesn't seem
to be appreciated, they just need time to
vent.
Hopefully, this was cathartic for him.
But mentioning the ratings, yes. Let's look at
the last show, the most recent episode with
Charlie Robinson.
It clocked in at a 4.8.
Yes. We're back, baby.
I knew it would be a good one.
In the past, I always enjoyed interviews with
Charlie, but I just sort of waited until
he had a new book out. That's been
my philosophy with many guests who tend to
write regularly.
But now I hope we can just check-in
a bit more often. Clearly, he's very busy,
busier than ever, but hopefully he'll make time
for us when we get these strings of
highly charged, manipulated events.
And on with the routine, doing the meetup
calendar thing we do, let's see what's going
on.
January 23rd, LA truth at the coral tree.
January 25th, McCall Collective Brewery in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
February 1st, Conway Pub in Conway, Washington.
February 3rd, Gail Brauth's Ale House in Auckland,
New Zealand.
February 8th, McCall's Collective Taphouse in Barrensville, Pennsylvania.
February 10th, Roots and leaves in Santa Fe,
New Mexico,
and February
15th,
h two booster
in Vlissingen,
Netherlands.
Love it.
And, again, big event with Gordon coming up
on March 8th here in the Tampa area.
In fact, now I think it might be
at High Springs Brewing, and we're gonna take
a party bus from here to there.
Here being Tampa, but
that's probably
90%
gonna happen. I do still need to lock
it in.
Probably shouldn't say anything till it is locked
in, but it's looking good. I know the
High Springs Brewing guys. I've met them.
It seems like it's gonna work out.
And because High Springs is a little off
the beaten path and not exactly close to
any major city, and every time we've done
this before, it's been in a city, and
we don't really know anything about our draw
in Florida.
We might open this up to non premium,
non plus members and just really rip the
doors off and go with, a free and
open event for the total
broad audience we might have.
Could get crazy, but, again, more on that
later.
In Hireside news, I did add the recent
custom episode specific songs to the bottom of
the show posts on the website.
A lot of mixed feelings about those songs,
but I've always loved
writing
lyrics.
And in high school, one of my best
friends played guitar, so we had a little
Tenacious d type of thing going on.
When I moved away from him, I would
use Fruity Loops and different
programs
to
basically use loops and the Lego blocks of
music to put things together just so I
could get that creative outlet.
And now I use some of these AI
systems.
I have huge problems with AI in a
lot of different areas. I guess, just for
me, music isn't one because it's just something
I've always
wanted to be able to do, but never
took the time to really develop it, and
it went from
outsourcing the music to a friend,
to using the Lego blocks of software,
to just pressing create.
But if I was using Fruity Loops
or Garage Band Loops, nobody would think I
was, like, affecting a musician's
job.
Right? It's just kind of a weird thing.
You use AI, you're doing something bad. You
use
loops and digital software that basically get you
there just with a few more building blocks
and that's acceptable.
I don't know. But I'm sorry.
There's no way I could make custom songs
for each episode any other way and I
just like doing it, guys.
Not everybody hates them,
but because they're easy for me to make
and they're free,
they're available to anyone. Go to thehiresidechats.com.
If you hear a specific one you like,
go to that episode page, scroll to the
bottom, and just download it.
But, hey, not a lot more to say.
Check out setit.net
if you want a free speech alternative to
Reddit and you want it to be successful.
It requires participation.
I hope maybe this made you think about
how hard it is to beat back the
big system and how lucky we are to
have anything left.
I hope Magnora 7 keeps fighting the good
fight and sees some new users making his
efforts worth it. I'll see you next time.
I've done my part.
Your move, corporate controllers, independent
platform destroyers, and agents of the sanitized and
maybe even dead Internet.
Your
fucking.
Some of us remember
a better
time. The Wild West spear
was in full swing alive online,
but we got baited,
and they
got switched.
They'd a harvesting
in full swing,
billionaires
in risk.
This digital
public square
connected, but gotten lonely.
And the blue light pouring out
is killing us slowly.
It's so