Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] In my eyes, one of the most common playbooks used by the ruling class is to identify a life essential resource everyone is using, introduce a new and better version of it, and widely promote that new option until the old one is completely displaced and then once a market monopoly is established, tighten the screws until the replacement is far worse than what preceded it, but there is no longer any real alternative to it. This has happened in agriculture, education, transportation, medicine and most recently social media.
[00:00:40] The best in Bitcoin made Audible I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible Foreign what is up guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else you know. This show is brought to you by Leaden the place to get a Bitcoin backed loan. A secure, reliable bitcoin backed loan that's easy to get by a company that has survived the bear market. Proof of reserves, monthly open books and crazy easy experience. It's how you get the fiat out of your bitcoin without selling your bitcoin and without without paying capital gains. Literally saved my butt this past bear market. Also pubkey and their protocol stack for censorship resistant web tools and specifically built with all of the things that are already tried and tested but putting them together in the most useful way. Check out PubKey that's P U B K Y no E Pubkey app for kind of a preview their proof of concept of what you can do with it. And don't forget to check out the Financial Freedom Report from the HRF and the Oslo Freedom Forum. The place for dissidents, journalists, activists and supporters of freedom around the world to get together and share ideas and tools and solutions. And lastly, get Chroma for your light health, for balancing your hormones and your energy levels and for discounts especially for bitcoiners with bitcoin. Audible all one word. All of this will be found right down in the show notes. All right, so today we have one from midwesterndoctor. This is a substack that I follow and I actually it was only because of this article that I started paying so that I could get access to the very last of it. And I hope, I hope he's not mad that I read the whole thing, but I really really liked it and I thought it was kind of.
[00:02:47] It doesn't close out right and there's some really valuable tools which I was aware and could have just recommended all of the tools but I figured I would just read the last little bit that was behind the paywall and if he hears this, I hope he's thinking that, you know, this is me supporting his work. Because this, that's part of what I wanted to do and that's why I paid and I'm free to cut out this audio and he can do whatever he wants with it. Like, this is not my I do not claim ownership of the this article in audio. I just thought it was really good and really valuable and something that I know this audience in particular would get a ton of benefit out of. And they may not know the Midwestern Dr. Substack. So with that out of the way, if this gets taken down, it's because that's not how he saw it. And I apologize. But in the meantime, let's go ahead and get to the article. It's a good one, and it's titled the Great Vanishing of Information by a Midwestern Doctor Today this publication hit a milestone I never imagined could Happen. It passed 100,000 subscribers. I'm a big believer in the Golden Rule Treat others as you would want to be treated. And since I started writing this publication two and a half years ago, one of my principal goals has been to create a newsletter I would want to read, which is why I can only produce two emails a week.
[00:04:14] One of my central reasons for doing that was that I realized that even though the Internet was getting bigger each year, it was actually getting much harder to find the information I was looking for, and the overall quality of information now is so much worse.
[00:04:31] This is to the point that I do not think it would be possible for me to know a lot of what I know if I had not used the Internet from its infancy in the 1990s, or to know how to find what I'm looking for now, and how to sort fact from fiction online.
[00:04:49] As best as I can tell, this transformation was due to three things that we also see in many other Facets of Life 1 a recognition by the ruling class and their corporatocracy that the Internet threatened their power and that it hence was essential to curate or censor what information it showed people 2 an ideological capture of Silicon Valley and 3 the frequent tendency for successful institutions and societies to become complacent from their success and then degrade. For example, what's Happening Now, a topic I have previously written about in detail and something that was recently highlighted by Elon Musk.
[00:05:35] The purpose of this month's open thread, in turn, will be to expand upon those points and share some of the strategies I found for navigating this tangled web of half truths.
[00:05:47] I started making monthly open threads because as the publication grew, while I wanted to respond, it was simply not possible for me to respond to everyone who reached out to me. Because of that, I wanted to have a monthly place where people could ask me whatever they wanted to inquire about so I could direct my resources toward prioritizing responding to everyone on that thread.
[00:06:07] Overcoming Misinformation as you start studying the truth, it becomes clear how incredibly malleable that construct is and how easy it is to twist or rearrange things to suit their sponsor's message. For example, a large portion of modern scientific research revolves around this because the public and much of the scientific community is unaware of the common ways to rig a scientific publication.
[00:06:37] This helps to explain one of the most uncomfortable facts in research today.
[00:06:42] Most experiments, 80 to 89% of them, cannot be replicated. For example, Pfizer's vaccine trials were overtly fraudulent and as a result, once their vaccines hit the market, they were nowhere near the promised safe and 95% effective.
[00:07:02] Overall, I believe one of the most effective approaches to navigating the current information landscape we have is 1. Determine a source's biases. 2. Assess to what degree the currently presented information agrees with or opposes the source's bias.
[00:07:21] 3. Rank the information as if it agrees with the source's bias. It is likely wrong or distorted. If it neither agrees nor disagrees with the bias. For example, it's a very neutral topic and the source appears to make the effort to be credible, it's likely generally correct. If it disagrees with the source's bias, it is likely correct and worth seriously considering.
[00:07:45] 4. Develop some type of intuition that lets you know where to look for what you need. For example, when I look at a large body of information, I often am drawn to one part of it. People in other fields, such as stock traders, also told me this allowed them to become highly successful in their endeavors. For example, I often take published medical studies, especially published in highly ideological journals such as jama, with a grain of salt because I know those journals historical tendency to publish content that supports the pharmaceutical industry, regardless of how at odds with reality it is. For instance, whenever I see an email notification about a JAMA publication on a politically charged topic, I can normally predict most of what the article will say and make a good guess at the lies that will arrive at that conclusion. To illustrate, JAMA and other top journals published numerous studies debunking the use of ivermectin to treat COVID 19 that were widely paraded across the media yet each of those studies had serious issues that both indicated the study had been set up to fail, and simultaneously it was often possible to see the study had lied about its own results.
[00:08:54] In other words, the results contradict the conclusion. Likewise, in some cases this was so absurd during the pandemic that leading medical journals published overtly and obviously fabricated data. The journals only retracted once the public pointed out their clear oversight.
[00:09:12] As I detailed in a recent article, there is a long history of promising medical therapies with a large body of evidence behind them, for example ultraviolet light, blood irradiation, IV vitamin C for sepsis, or various cancer treatments that compete with the medical industry, then being buried by a single unscrupulous research study.
[00:09:33] Additionally, something many people do not understand is that a large number of valid scientific publications exist which are in journals not indexed by PubMed. The primary resource most people use to locate scientific evidence, which in turn leads to academics and doctors believing no evidence exists as their approach to researching a topic often is to search for it. In PubMed, for example, a study was completed which showed COVID vaccine shedding was a real thing, but despite months of work the authors have not been able to get a journal indexed by PubMed to publish it.
[00:10:11] Conversely, there are also many cases where I feel a topic I am interested in is relatively non politicized and and you can hence rely upon the easily available published data on it. Likewise, I consider Wikipedia to be incredibly biased, but I simultaneously find it very useful for distillations of complex but non controversial scientific topics.
[00:10:34] Finally, I know that if a study that goes against the existing medical orthodoxies is published in a prestigious journal, it is guaranteed that it was subject to an immense degree of scrutiny and there was probably a large battle fault to get it published and since it stood up to that scrutiny there is likely compelling evidence underlying it.
[00:10:53] All of this hence requires a truth seeker to strike a very challenging balance. On one hand you need to actively consider the biases of your source, but simultaneously you need to remain open minded towards everything you see and not erroneously filter critical information even if what you see directly disagrees with your biases or you disagree with the bias of the presenter.
[00:11:21] Archetypal Gestalts Whenever you observe groups, you will often observe people defaulting to mimicking the behaviors of the group so that they can fit in and be accepted. In time, this often evolves to there being a very characteristic linguistic style and set of behaviors that emerges, which in many cases seems to be prioritized over the actual substance of what the group is about. For example, I met many people who claim to align with the science who copy the same phrases and chains of logic prominent scientists like Anthony Fauci use, but simultaneously don't understand any of the scientific points they are discussing.
[00:11:59] Many examples of this mimicry occur. For example, I know numerous men who came out of the closet and then rapidly adopted an identical lispy and flamboyant style of speech. While in the New Age field, I've noticed the underlying thread they all share in common is a very distinctive style of speech which emphasizes a profound jubilation over a variety of inconsequential things they encounter. What's remarkable about this mimicry is that you can often provide nonsensical examples of it that are fully embraced by the group. For example, I periodically send my New Age friends random nonsense created by a New Age language generator which matches the cadence of the New Age field and frequently receive accolades from my friends.
[00:12:39] Likewise, in academia it's been repeatedly shown that if one produces incoherent nonsense that is written in the postmodernist style, it will often make it to publication. And likewise, I've had a lot of fun over the years with essays from a nonsensical postmodernist language generator that many take as being legitimate scholarly writings. In turn, I've noticed that in some groups this repetition or desire to belong to the group will magnify and before long reinforce itself into cult like behaviors that seem completely insane to an outside observer, a process which is particularly likely to happen if a nefarious individual deliberately manipulates the group to create this behavior, a shrewd marketing team, a talented dictator, or a sociopathic cult leader.
[00:13:25] The above was excerpted from a recent article where I attempted to explain the Democrats fanatical devotion to the COVID 19 vaccines in spite of the fact many of them were being severely injured by the vaccines they promoted.
[00:13:38] Whenever I read someone's writings, I now just hear their voice and often can immediately identify what biases are creeping into their state of mind and influencing their writing. I believe gaining this skill while simultaneously remaining open minded is one of the most important ways of being able to accurately evaluate information.
[00:14:00] At the same time, that's hard to do. So I'd like to share one of the things that led me to be able to do that and becoming better and better at recognizing each of the archetypal patterns mass formations of different subsections of people the Woke Mind Virus over the years I've heard various terms, many of which are fairly offensive but sometimes quite accurate, to describe the tendency for institutions to become so politically correct that in the name of political correctness, their functionality is critically undermined and and they stop being able to uphold their basic responsibilities.
[00:14:40] Elon Musk, for example, recently popularized the term the Woke mind virus to describe the process, and since many proponents of doing this, for example Kamala Harris, also use the term woke, I will use it here.
[00:14:54] Note One reason I dislike the term woke because I simultaneously like to use the term awake to describe free thinking individuals who see what's in front of them.
[00:15:03] For years, and especially over the last decade, I've noticed numerous sources of information I used to find fairly useful, get ideologically captured by Wokeism, and transition to becoming nearly impossible for me to find what I'm looking for within them.
[00:15:20] Generally speaking, this dovetails with a general corporate push for more censorship of inconvenient topics, for example the misdeeds of Big Pharma, which in turn has led me to view the current DEI diversity, equity and inclusion push as a combination 1 a self perpetuating mass formation around wokeism 2 a smokescreen being used to distract the populace from the serious misdeeds of large institutions. For example, if token social justice initiatives are promoted by a predatory corporation, its customers will typically ignore the gross human rights violations it commits overseas, a tactic that was previously pioneered by egregious polluters who would greenwash away their culpability with token efforts that somehow might combat climate change, for instance, in medicine after the COVID 19 debacle, one of the most common messages I heard from the medical community, for example for how to revamp medical education, essentially, was that the immense shortcoming of the COVID 19 response, which made many permanently lose their trust in medicine, were due to a lack of DEI in medical education, not, say, the suppression of off patent treatments for the virus and the mandating of deadly and ineffective vaccines.
[00:16:34] Likewise, the CDC has given far more attention to racism being a public health crisis than the unexplained epidemic of excess deaths that swept the country after the COVID vaccines were introduced.
[00:16:48] 3A backdoor way to implement undemocratic policies as anything that opposes the corporate bottom line can now be labeled as anti Woke. At which point a group of ideologues in the Woke mass formation are happy to erase it from history, regardless of how unethical doing so is. Traditionally I was used to seeing this tactic used by an authoritarian government, for example China during the Cultural Revolution, but now it seems to have been repurposed by the corporatocracy, for example Peter Hotez who is continually propped up by the corporate media, constantly tries to associate any criticism of vaccines with hate speech, and calls for governments around the world to neutralize the industry's critics.
[00:17:29] I initially suspected DEI would be used as a way to covertly and then overtly censor individuals who threatened corporate interests. This was because in 2017 I saw a variety of alt right groups be banned by Silicon Valley, including having their payment processor accounts revoked after the Charlottesville rally, as before long, the alt right label was expanded to cover conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones. At the time this happened, I told my Natural Health friends who supported this crackdown on hate speech that if they let it stand, their business would be targeted in a few years.
[00:18:04] Not long after that, I saw people in the vaccine safety movement get canceled under similar reasons. For example, one person who had a large mailing list he'd worked for years to build to share health freedom information had his account and all the vital information he had collected in it be abruptly pulled by mailchimp for, quote, violating their terms of service, which essentially is why I've advised a lot of people to avoid that service. In turn, because the censorship of hate speech had rapidly become so normalized within Silicon Valley by the time COVID 19 happened, every large platform rapidly deleted any counter narrative posts about the subject, for example its lab origins, off patent treatments for the disease, or personal reports of vaccine injuries for community safety.
[00:18:52] To illustrate how rapidly this new form of censorship has proliferated, recently Twitter sued an advertising conglomerate that had been using WOKE justifications. For example, X was creating an unsafe environment to have the major advertisers collectively boycott the platform and other free speech ones like Rumble. Given that many of the objections to X were due to things like IT promoting content critical of vaccines or the current wars, justifying this antitrust activity on WOKE grounds provided a perfect cover for their actual motivations.
[00:19:26] Likewise, consider this identical statement from Kamala Harris, vp, who throughout Covid enacted authoritarian policies like encouraging neighbors to report anyone who violated his unscientific social distancing mandates.
[00:19:43] I think we need to push back on this. There's no guarantee to free speech, on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.
[00:19:51] Search Result Censorship in my eyes, one of the most common playbooks used by the ruling class is to identify a life essential resource everyone is using, introduce a new and better version of it, and widely promote that new option until the old one is completely displaced, and then, once a market monopoly is established, tighten the screws until the replacement is far worse than what preceded it, but there is no longer any real alternative to it. For example, this has happened in agriculture, education, transportation, medicine, and most recently social media.
[00:20:30] In the case of Google, it initially was an excellent search engine, but once it gained a market monopoly it began hiding undesirable content. For example, I found it often impossible to find a medical story I remembered reading a few years ago through Google, and I now instead need to use a different search engine. Fortunately, a federal court recently ruled it was illegal for Google to bury its competitors within its search results.
[00:20:56] Likewise, more and more people have become aware that Google will alter search results in real time to suppress unwanted narratives. For example, this happened throughout COVID 19 and recently many examples have surfaced of Google redirecting searches for Trump or his VP to Harris campaign.
[00:21:16] One thing I find remarkable is how often Internet behemoths come to prominence because they support free speech and and then begin mass censoring once they become larger due to attracting corporate funding as the financial value of their censorship is recognized by those industries, at which point the platform then gradually dies and is replaced by a new one that supports free speech in turn. I am sincerely hoping this does not also happen with substack and we are forced to migrate again. Fortunately, however, to make authors feel secure with this platform, Substack set itself up in a way that makes it very easy for authors to migrate from it.
[00:21:55] A key part of this monopolization of information has been to have specific websites elevated to the highly credible status and then manually censoring them. For example, Reddit rose to popularity because it provided a way for Internet intellectuals to bounce ideas off of each other and for the best ones to rise to the top with its algorithm. However, as it became more popular, it got taken over by woke moderators and corporate advertising campaigns which in coordination with the moderators, along with thousands of bots, fake programmed accounts buried any undesirable content, for example criticisms of vaccines.
[00:22:35] This is a shame since a group of like minded users were very good at upvoting the most pertinent information and as a result I now use Reddit alternatives that were made from the most useful subreddits on the website to source some of the information I present here.
[00:22:52] One of the most consequential examples of this happened to Wikipedia, a non profit attempt by thousands of dedicated volunteers. For example, there are many editors who have put tens of thousands of hours of work into the website around the world to objectively catalog and concisely synthesize the world's information, which in turn has been massively boosted by Google and treating it as the authoritative source for many questions inquiring minds wish to learn about.
[00:23:25] Wikipedia's preeminent status as the authoritative source for information in turn has led to many groups, for example government intelligence services or PR firms working for corporate clients wanting to aggressively censor or distort the information on it. For example, every now and then you'll see a controversial edit be publicized because it comes from an IP tied to a government office.
[00:23:48] As best I can tell, this shift began when in 2017 a non profit was established to ensure Wikipedia's non profit mission to make the world's information available to everyone could be funded in perpetuity.
[00:24:03] This foundation in turn received hundreds of millions from large groups with a vested interest in ensuring Wikipedia promoted their narratives. For example, Google heavily funded it, thereby allowing Wikipedia as a trusted third party to promote their interests, a tactic commonly utilized in the PR field.
[00:24:26] This in turn kicked into overdrive during the George Floyd protests, where, seeking to fight racism, the foundation that owned Wikipedia enacted a WOKE policy that began firing senior editors. For example, those people who spent tens of thousands of hours trying to make Wikipedia's content be objective, and people who questioned the shifts in Wikipedia so they could be replaced with people of other ethnicities who could effectively represent the diverse views of the country.
[00:24:56] This in turn recently came to the public's attention after one senior and very dedicated editor was kicked out for questioning the ethics of Wikipedia's new management.
[00:25:09] I've seen the same pattern in many other areas. For example, I know a few people who've worked with BBC, England's leading new service for decades who shared that due to the push for dei, which until recently was termed bame.
[00:25:24] There, many of the senior journalists who were the best journalists were kicked out and replaced with ethnic minorities who, being new to the field, were not as experienced but simultaneously very ideologically driven.
[00:25:38] Because of this, the quality of BBC journalism has greatly declined and in recent years they've made remarkable mistakes. For example, the BBC was taken by complete surprise by England voting in 2016 to withdraw from the European Union.
[00:25:53] Likewise, in 2021, after the Floyd protests, 94% of new jobs at top US corporations were given to ethnic minorities.
[00:26:03] Where can we find information now?
[00:26:07] What I find noteworthy about this new form of WOKE censorship is that while it's not quite overt, it was building in the background for a long time. For example, I stopped using Reddit for most things about 10 years ago because it was censoring them from the platform.
[00:26:23] Likewise, with a lot of sites like Wikipedia, I view them as not the truth, but rather a concise presentation of the existing orthodoxy's perspective on a subject.
[00:26:35] So on politicized issues, its only value is to show the prevailing narrative, whereas on more neutral scientific issues, for example Physiology or pharmaceutical mechanism of action is still a good starting point for something I want to learn about and likewise to link to, as it concisely represents a concept topic some readers may want to learn more about.
[00:26:56] This, in turn highlights why information literacy is so challenging in this era, you are often forced to consider each idea being presented and independently assess it on its merits.
[00:27:11] This highlights a key reason why I spend so much time sourcing my claims. By virtue of being anonymous, I have a lot more freedom to avoid the biases an audience would project onto me, but simultaneously, to earn the trust I have, I have to continually show it, for example with clear references. Likewise, one of the things I've found immensely frustrating is studying an idea someone puts forward, digging up the reference which underlies the crux of their argument, and then discovering the reference does not support it. So I feel I'm obligated to prevent each of you from having to go through that.
[00:27:45] Fortunately, natural systems always equilibrate, and despite a massive effort on every front to censor all unsafe content online, the demand for it has rapidly increased. This, I in turn believe, is best shown by how popular X has become as it provides more accurate and more up to date news than the mass media, hence allowing it to take more and more of their audience, and the fact that in the last month it's derailed numerous government narratives being promoted throughout the mass media, including countries outside of the United States. For example, it just became the most downloaded news app in England.
[00:28:24] Nonetheless, while X is excellent for having a more honest account of the currently trending topics, it's not geared towards unearthing lost information.
[00:28:33] In the last part of this month's open thread, which exists for you to ask me any unanswered questions that have come up, I would like to share some of my best resources I've found for unearthing the forgotten sides of medicine or anything else I'm looking for, such as an article image along with another song from the gifted and anonymous composer. Many of you have expressed your appreciation for that I frequently listen to as I am searching for those lost pieces of information.
[00:29:00] Search Engines after using search engines for a prolonged period, you get an innate understanding of their biases. For example, Google has gradually become terrible for non narrative information.
[00:29:13] In turn, I find that different engines are useful for specific things Google Like Wikipedia, I find Google is useful for non controversial subjects. Additionally, many of the censorship parameters can be bypassed if you do site specific searches which can be done at Google's advanced search page or by typing site colon and then the URL of the website when you search for it. Likewise, when I want to find something I already wrote here, I will often do the same. For example search Prozac site www.midwesterndoctor.com Additionally, I frequently utilize Google Scholar to locate journal articles, but in many cases other services, for example Scopus which requires an institutional subscription is better for locating them.
[00:30:02] Bing Bing is Microsoft's competitor to Google and hence one of the largest search engines on the Internet. It frequently will provide different results from Google and I find about 25% of the time it has something I was looking for which is not on Google's first page.
[00:30:18] Yandex Yandex.com is a major Russian search engine. Due to the politics in Russia, it's less curated, so some of the sites it links to have malware on them. Hence you need to be mindful of which domains you go to. However, it does not have the censorship that the Silicon Valley ones have. So typically if I am trying to find an article I know exists but Google won't show it, Yandex typically does.
[00:30:43] Likewise. Yandex is often much better for images I am trying to find that express a certain theme.
[00:30:50] Health Databases over the years, various dissidents compiled a lot of alternative health information, which was often merged with other controversial topics decades ago. I read through all the medically related content on those websites. I periodically see two of them be linked to, but I've never seen the most comprehensive one mentioned anywhere.
[00:31:13] Those websites for reference are wail. To w h a l e. To the most controversial educateyourself.org that's educate-yourself.org the smallest total content, but covers many pertinent topics, and rexresearch.com in my opinion, the best website but also the hardest to come across.
[00:31:39] The main issue with these websites is that you often need a background in a related area to properly evaluate what's being presented there, but simultaneously they've been incredibly useful starting points for ideas that I was exploring.
[00:31:53] Likewise, I don't agree with many of the things presented on those websites, but I'm able to essentially ignore what isn't useful and look past it for what I'm looking for.
[00:32:03] Books I tend to find that books provide better information than articles as they can go into greater depth on things. Over the years I have read numerous books that were on lists that compilers of those databases said everyone interested in medicine needed to write about. For example this one about the dangers of dental metals in your mouth and the harmful electrical currents they can create in your brain.
[00:32:25] Note Unlike articles, One of the really nice things about books is that you only have to get the sense of a single person's presence of mind, the author, and their conscious and unconscious biases. So as a result it's much easier to get a sense of the value of what you are reading.
[00:32:42] Likewise, once I ran out of many of the books on those lists to read, I started listening to a lot of medicine related books on Audible along with a few other genres and gradually found all the ones on there that could be in my genres of interest through their recommendations.
[00:32:55] The great upside to Amazon's Audible is that you can speed up the playback. For example, I listened to most of the books at a 2.524 speed depending on the reader's voice, which allowed me to get through a lot of content there while doing other day to day activities. At the same time. However, I found the density of useful and accurate information was sometimes a bit lacking in the Audible books that were suggested to me, which hence made being able to speed it up quite helpful.
[00:33:23] When I'm not tired, I can process information faster by reading it than by listening to it, so typically I do the reverse. For example, I often use an AI system to transcribe something I was going to listen to and skim the transcript. Likewise, I find I can listen to things at significantly faster speeds, which the VLC media player allows you to do if I am wearing headphones.
[00:33:43] Because of all of this, when writing, I will often dig up a PDF or ebook of a book I'd read previously that I know has pertinent information and then either review it in more detail or search it for what's relevant to the current topic, or in other cases get around to reading a book I'd meant to read that I know is relevant to the topic at hand.
[00:34:02] Miscellaneous Websites Sci Hub is a website that makes many but not all of published scientific papers accessible.
[00:34:11] It Hints is extremely helpful for any researcher, but many people still do not know about the website. For papers I cannot find on there, I often find the PDFs of them have been posted on ResearchGate.
[00:34:24] The Wayback Machine catalogs most of the websites on the Internet, and I frequently find when a reference exists that has since been deleted from the Internet, it can be found on there, hence why I frequently link to it mentors.
[00:34:40] Since there is such an overwhelming sea of information out there, you often need a talented and awake mentor or guide to tell you where to initially focus, although in time they can stop being the right mentor due to their biases locking them into a single path.
[00:34:56] In turn, I was immensely lucky to cross paths with remarkably gifted individuals who took me under their wings and then, as time went on, identify more of them since they have certain qualities such as shin in their eyes. Detailed further at the end of this article. Link provided since that option isn't available to many of us, I'm essentially trying to convey a lot of what I was immensely fortunate to receive from them in this publication and make that available to far more people. Although unfortunately, I will admit I still have not figured out how to teach many of the forgotten arts of medicine through text, but fortunately I've already seen that many can be conveyed in this manner. I honestly feel that what I'm doing leaves much to be desired, hence why I'm always trying to figure out better ways to do this. But I've nonetheless received a lot of positive feedback from people. For example, a few doctors wrote to me to say they felt I was a supportive mentor who helped them get through the pandemic.
[00:35:53] My hope in turn is that I can continue to evolve with this publication and get a better idea of how to bridge teaching the subtle qualities I feel are the most important aspects of life through the medium Substack has provided to me. I sincerely thank you for the support which has made this publication possible, and sincerely hope that it will continue to help more people than I ever imagined was possible.
[00:36:18] All right, and that wraps us up. But this is a topic I wanted to read this article because. Not. Not because of the.
[00:36:25] Not really because of the COVID stuff, but I think it's a great kind of foundation for this conversation to start from.
[00:36:34] But this is, I think, really close to kind of the hearts of a lot of bitcoiners and the kind of experience that we've seen in the Internet. Anybody who's been here who's kind of in the 30 year old to 40 year old range, I feel like is probably aware of this shift that has happened in the Internet. And it's funny, we grew up thinking that, you know, quote unquote, the Internet is forever, but that's largely not the case.
[00:37:00] In fact, it almost kind of seems like there's this 10 year turnover where old stuff just gets deleted. Links that I have saved just go nowhere. Just 404 like the cost of just hosting the Information is too great and tons of information is just cycled out. This is even. This even occurs on things like substack. There's an article I read not too long ago. I got it saved somewhere too. I couldn't. I couldn't actually find it, but I thought this one was like a better kind of foundation for the concept because it's really about the corporate interest and why a lot of that information is disappearing, especially when it comes to controversial information and also how to navigate it. Because I have found, like, everything that this article went through that the Midwestern Doctor went through, and I have subscribed. I've only done the monthly and I did pay with Moon for like two months. FYI. A little trick that you can do if you want to subscribe to something, but you hate when you just forget about subscriptions. And so you just want to test something out and read and you want to support. Like, I would love to just donate to the Midwestern Doctor, but obviously he doesn't do Lightning or Noster. So, you know, I could easily send $10 that way, but instead I can buy a card on something like pay with moon. Privacy.com lets you do it too.
[00:38:19] There's.
[00:38:20] There's a bunch of different services.
[00:38:22] The only one in my mind right now really is the one that I use. Oh, like Bitcoin company. I've done this with Bitcoin company as well.
[00:38:28] But you can just buy a card and put like an exact amount on it. So you just know, like, I'm willing to put $14 to this. That's two months at $7 a month. And so I subscribed to get the full article, which I actually read the full thing. There's just the. The last little bit was. Was behind the paywall. But I like to think I'm helping the Midwestern Doctor, helping out his substack and bringing attention because I thought this was a really good article and really wanted to talk about this topic. But the little trick is that you make a card and you put exactly how much you want to do in your subscription on it. And then, you know, if you forget about it, okay, well, you've just donated or you've paid for exactly how much you're willing to pay for and you can come back to it if you're like, oh, I actually like this newsletter and I like this sub stack. So I'm going to go back to it and I want to keep doing. I'll put my real card in there also really, really great for protecting your privacy and from Getting your information, getting out there in places that you don't want, that you just like are using for a short period of time. Great little tool. And something I always like to mention if people don't know about it or don't use it, like one of my most useful things that I do on a regular basis. But it's just going back to the topic though, it's just wild how much is lost. You know, like there was like Buzzfeed like recently.
[00:39:46] Well, just really kind of at many different times there was what's the Geomedia and like Tumblr and like so many things that were massive, massive resources and databases of images and articles and conversations and news items just cleared out, just completely wiped out up to a certain year and how unbelievably critical it is and how much shorter that time span is for things that are controversial, even for things that were completely aligned with the narrative but were basically shown to be total lies. Like they just like completely pretended like whole portions and things of the lockdown and calling for literal concentration camps and re education camps of the unvaccinated and treating them like second class citizens openly and saying that they shouldn't even be allowed to have medical care because they're putting everybody else at risk. Literally. The people who are so wrapped up into groupthink that they completely supported this when it happened within like a year or two are like that never happened.
[00:40:57] Nope. Not even never existed. You're imagining it. This is actually a huge part. And you know, maybe I don't end up being, you know, very useful in this. Maybe the project doesn't really go where I want it to go, but I like to think this is. So much of that information is still out there.
[00:41:16] So much of it is still out there. It's just inaccessible, it's unindexed and it's unorganized.
[00:41:23] This is a huge part of why I am trying to make pear drive of why I think things like NOSTR and peer to peer technology are so critical.
[00:41:34] Because you know, like we go back to the BitTorrent Lessons of BitTorrent episodes that we covered. I think there were four, four different pieces in that series. But one of the most important things that stood out to me about that is that you have to be breaking the rules. You have to be challenging something and answering a question or answering a need that all of the other major platforms are not providing. And one of those things is access to old information, access to old websites, images, news items to the history of the Internet, which we thought was just going to be permanent. And it turns out it's actually super ephemeral. It's actually easier to edit and easier to change and easier to remove and pigeon or just black hole anything that we don't that's inconvenient for the established narrative and the major corporate enterprise enterprises. Things just up and vanish. They just disappear. And there's even like crazy and bizarre things about like having like a fundamental record which is so beautiful and fascinating about Bitcoin as you know, as its use for a timestamp server and something like OpenTimestamps.com and simple proof that is actually using them for voting systems and voting records so that you basically can't, you can't black hole the history about what the voting records were because the hashes won't veri. Won't be.
[00:43:04] Won't align with the thing that was posted the very night of the election. It's so interesting to think about like that what Bitcoin provides is an immutable record of history, a truth as to who owned what and what piece of information existed when. And all you need is a hashtag.
[00:43:24] It's a much more powerful concept than I think people give it credit for because most people are thinking in the current. They're thinking in just. It's that perspective that social media kind of pigeonholes you into is what's the new thing. And that's the thing that gets me about Twitter and you know, and why I think nostr and these sorts of things are so unbelievably valuable is because I would love even digging through like I have a backup of my Twitter history. But you know what? I don't have a backup of everything that I've liked and retweeted or interacted with. I have this kind of out of context history of like my replies and that's it. I would love to know what I replied to. I would love to actually have the video that was being shared that was in the context of the conversation or that I shared rather than just a link that's now dead. And God forbid you think you can use Twitter to find this because or X because if you go up there, that's the thing is like all the social media is does everything it can to make stuff from last week disappear so that you have to keep engaging and working with stuff that's new. Like it is literally a chronological history of everything that's being shared in all of the news. And yet it is trying its damnedest to prevent people from going back in history to Find out what actually happened. Even bookmarking stuff is a huge pain. If you could center, if you could make that accessible again and dig through the entire history, the value, the unbelievable value there would just be astronomical. But I fear it's just going to be another one of those things that gets black holed and it just gets lost and there's just no way to go find it again and no way to go access it. And then they just aggressively put the new thing, the new notification and the new outrage in front of, of you so that you're just distracted long enough that you can't even go find it anyway. And there's even crazy, like, bizarre things. Like, have you ever, ever heard that the bizarre theory about Shazam and the movie with Sinbad as a, as a genie. There's this like, crazy weird. There's even like a bunch of bizarre conspiracies around this. And Sinbad swears it existed, but there's like this whole part of the Internet that thinks that movie never existed and that everybody's just confusing it with Kazaam. Or wait, no, Shazam. Kazam. Oh, crap, now I've even forgotten. They're confusing it with the Shaq movie where he's a genie. I think the Shaq one is Kazaam and the Sinbad one is Shazam. But there are so many people. I remember a trailer. I don't, I don't know if I ever saw it, but I, I would have said yes. Both of those movies existed. And in my mind, it was one of those things where I was like, why do they. What is it with them making two of the same movies? Like that was in the category of the. They make one movie with one actor and one another movie. Two different production companies make the same freaking movie because they each got word that the other one was doing it. But there are people who swear up and down and there is like, no, like you can't find it on IMDb that the movie never existed. And there is a subset of the Internet, like literally tens of thousands of people who swear. I have seen it. I remember having both of the VHS tapes or having recorded or it was on tv. I remember the trailer. My wife remembers seeing the trailer a bunch. She thinks it was on. It was a trailer on a VHS of a different Disney movie. But like, this is a super heated debate on the Internet. Like people literally call each other retards and get angry at each other on Reddit and all of this other crap, trying to source out the truth of this. And both sides are certain that they are. Right now I have no idea if we actually still have the vhs, but I'm actually like super intrigued about this and want to go see if we can dig back through that. And as a huge movie collector, I really hope that there's some record of something somewhere.
[00:47:25] Something has to be out there. Do anybody, if anybody thinks that they know that that movie existed, do just a cursory search for a VHS or find some old Disney, Disney movie, VHS or whatever and just watch the previews at the beginning. Just see because I'm. This is such a dumb. It's such like a frivolous kind of version of the much larger problem here.
[00:47:52] But think about that. In the age of digital media when we can literally put a tape into a VCR and record it, that we don't have a solid record proving one way or another whether or not this exists. Now that may literally mean that it is just a what the Mandela effect or whatever, that people have just kind of imagined this thing into existence. But it's also not out of this world. It's not crazy to believe that the information has just been lost. Like a lot of information gets lost and memory is not reliable to the positive or the negative. This is why I have always personally been kind of a.
[00:48:33] I've been really a digital hoarder and I. My big problem has been organization and indexing and I keep thinking, and I know I'm close to some degree of a solution to actually dig back through things because I even have like from probably computers from maybe 20 years back.
[00:48:54] And it's funny because you know, like the first drives are like 100 gigabytes and then it's like 200 gigabytes, 250 gigabytes, 512 gigabytes. I actually have just mirrors like a disk image copy of those old hard drives on new storage drives. I'd literally have one of my storage drives in my raids that are just this Linux machine that I shut down at, you know, 2015, this computer backup of this Mac, etc, etc and honestly I wish I had been better. I still can't believe I wasn't better about it during COVID 19 because there were so many things that I wish I had saved and I should have saved and things that I even bookmarked in order to save. That's one of the big things is I want to. I want a tool that grabs the.
[00:49:43] That grabs an entire web page and also any like relevant pieces of media inside of it. Like one of the things that like J. Downloader has been like kind of a pain for me lately because it's not pulling from YouTube. It now gives me this like four. Oh, some, some whatever. Error, no account detected because they're like blocking any like scrapers or whatever from pulling from YouTube. But I've got a new command line tool called yt dash dlp actually let me run the command, make sure I've got that right.
[00:50:19] Ytdlp running it with nothing, just is usage. Yeah, okay. Yeah, so YT DLP is a command line tool. I think I just brew install ytdlp if I'm not mistaken, but that I now I can put in a YouTube URL. Make sure you don't use the URL with like the reference data or whatever, like the one that you're watching in the domain. Go to the share URL, the one that's like u.yu tube or something like that. It's like a special URL and it's just got that little code because for some reason the main URL doesn't, doesn't work. It's like limited to like a logged in account or something. Whereas the share link allows you to look at it. I don't know what it is but they're trying to segment off and they're trying to keep people from being able to access it. But that one still lets you download and anything that I find that's especially news relevant.
[00:51:15] And then there's also download Helper I believe. Oh wait, no, it's called Explore now It used to be.
[00:51:23] There's an Explore app in fact that might actually not be available. I think you have to have it on your phone. But it was on iPhone. It's Explore and it's like a red orange app and it looks like just like a outline, like just a solid line of the download icon.
[00:51:42] But I have used that on my iPhone for ages to download stuff media off of Twitter and social media.
[00:51:49] Again not very well organized but because I've been working for AI tools to actually categorize and pull a lot of it together.
[00:51:58] It sucks too because there's some that like I don't have the context for and the tweet that was like related to it would actually be super relevant or super helpful to know this was a congressional hearing on this. Whereas it's just like two minute segment and it's really kind of the context of saying like this is them admitting blah blah blah. That would be really, really helpful. But I have done my best and I try to save as much as I possibly can. But I know there are other people like me out there. I know. And being able to get access to information or index and organize stuff as a community. This is where.
[00:52:34] This is why I'm actually so interested. A lot of people, especially on Nubster, give Pub Key like massive hate. But one of the things I love about Pub Key and what the Synonym team is doing and how they're thinking about it is their tagging system.
[00:52:47] So they, they go into something, they're doing something called the semantic Web and what they're allowing is for other people to tag content. And I really think rather than pubkey, the pubky app, which is really just kind of a social media thing, it's like, okay, well what can you do with social media with this new protocol? I really think the secret in there might be in tagging socially tagging and organizing information, because that's a huge problem is how do you find like the history. Nostr is a great. Because Nostr is actually super ephemeral as well. It's hard to find old posts because it costs so much to host it. So bandwidth and hosting data for relays is a huge problem. This is why I have been running my own relay and I encourage other people to run relays and I want people to run to be able to connect to private relays is because I have no problem hosting all of the things that I've been interested in. Like, I would love to host everything I ever retweeted or re noted on Nostr. I would love to host everything I ever liked. I would love to host everything I ever zapped. I would love to host everything I ever replied to. So not only the reply, but what I was replying to and the OP post that the replies fell under. And importantly, that is not a massive cost just for me. But if you were ever looking for it, what if you could look in my database and what if all of the people that you trust in your web of trust, which the only two tools or networks that really utilize this are Nostr and Pub Key, like kind of built in is how do you utilize what my friends are interested in or what they trust and how close to my friend circle are they? And this is a perfect example of the Midwestern doctor, right is I would follow the Midwestern doctor on Noster or pubkey or whatever and they would be in my web of trust and then anybody who is in his web of trust would then immediately show up or would be, you know, one step removed from what when I was looking for information or what information I was trying to filter. And if I was looking for something on COVID 19 or I was looking for data, I wouldn't necessarily have to know all of the sources that the Midwestern doctor was using, like Sci Hub and how to search all of the right places. Because we have this sort of shared database of the things that were all relevant to us and important for us to save. And all of the things that he collected for his articles and to write on his sub stack, and all the things that I collected for, you know, the videos that I was doing. Because I do a ton of research and save a ton of crap and I just archive it and stick it away, knowing that one day I. And I have gone back and searched for stuff. I've even used, like elements that I've done for like a matrix video or like even one of like my memes or something, or one of my two sats videos where I use some found footage. I keep a copy of the found footage in the project folder and then stash it away on my Linux. And then when I'm like, oh, what was that? What was that clip? Boom. I know it's in that 2Sats video. And so I can just go back, dig through the thing, grab it, and then use it in the new video. But there is something there. There's a staggering, staggering untapped demand and untapped supply that just needs a way to access it. And this is a big part of the reason. Even though I'm trying to like, we want PEAR Drive to just work for simple, like getting, like. The most important thing for me is to get stuff from my phone to my Linux machine or to my desktop in a reliable, simple way.
[00:56:23] So that whatever AI tool I can get that will automatically transcribe videos or find anything related to it, or find its context and record out the transcript or the details or the tags or the con, like object orientation, object recognition stuff. Anything that I can get it to index and organize for me, I can basically start to discover, start to pull things from the void because I know I have literal terabytes of stuff. It's just like a hash. It's like a, you know, Twitter, just Twitter/hkul156. Like, just like that, that URL. And that's all it is. It's just the. Whatever tagging or hashing system they have for numbering a post. Same with YouTube videos, same with images saved online.
[00:57:12] I mean, you name it. Like, there is just this ocean of lost stuff out there.
[00:57:19] Like somebody's Disney VHS with a Trailer for Shazam. If that movie even existed, that for some reason people just can't find because it was 30 freaking years ago. Think about how important that is for history.
[00:57:34] Like I see censorship and lies and just utter BS pushed live like today when we have the information and when it's findable and then six months later you can't find it anymore. Like Climategate. Climategate's hard to find.
[00:57:52] There were literal records of email conversations, of data being manipulated, of quote unquote researchers talking about how you align the, the, the temperature anomalies as opposed to just the flat temperature ratings so that you can see this constant increase in recent years. Like talking about how you can't just show them the truth because they're too stupid to understand it. So you have to make sure the data shows is aligned to the narrative that we know so that we can help the world. Like explicit discussions of censoring data and of manipulating data. But I didn't save enough of that. And what's crazy is that there are, there continue to be charts and stuff that are shared around that I know are part of that group. And I don't care what your climate change opinion is. In fact, if you actually care about that and you actually believe climate change is a thing, then the last thing you should want is people spreading lies in support of it. That's exactly the kind of crap that really makes bitcoin look bad, is when people spread bullcrap but it's pro bitcoin and they get a bunch of dumb bitcoiners to go out and rally behind it. It's just as bad to lie and fuel the opposition, even if you have the right case as it is to lie and spread a narrative that's nonsense. And we should hold ourselves and other people to a higher standard because when we don't, we find ourselves in a really bad spot, just like we are today.
[00:59:30] All of this is exactly why the web of trust and social and semantic, not only, not only actually just the trust problem and sourcing data through your network and controlling your network, which is everything about what the Pear stack and Keat and what we're trying to do with Pear Drive is what pubkey and Picard like their, their whole stack.
[00:59:56] And it's what NOSTR is all about. It's why these are the three projects that I am most interested in and I think each have their place. And I don't really, I don't care if you're a noster maxi or a Pubkey maxi, you just, you hate pubkey Pubkey Stupid or pubkeys awesome and Noster stupid because it's not the right developer or why would you use Keat or, you know, the PEAR stack because their DHT's much smaller than BitTorrents. Like, I don't give a shit about the technicals behind it. I care about what works. And you know what? That's what everybody else cares about too. Only the developers argue about the technicals. And I can't tell you how many times have I, as I have dug through my decades of Internet history and my fascination with protocol wars and arguments with developers and what actually won and what succeeded and what didn't. And why is that the better thing, quote unquote, argued by whatever subset of whatever was actually going on in the history of the Internet didn't win because they didn't care or they weren't focused on the problem. They weren't focused on what the average person actually needed. I care about results.
[01:01:00] I care about results. I want to know what can solve this problem, what can access those petabytes of untapped information out there, that history that is lost because the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive are all we've got. You know, there's that, there's that beautiful story. I can't. I can't tell you how many times. Every time that this thread comes up, there's inevitably somebody is like, well, what a stupid waste of time. What a stupid woman. And all I can think is like, what an angel, what an absolute hero is. There was a.
[01:01:34] It was a black woman, she was.
[01:01:36] Oh God, what was her name?
[01:01:39] It was something in like the, the 80s and the 90s, but she just noticed. She was aware of seeing the news change, like seeing how she would remember that the story was told this way and then not too long after it would shift, it wouldn't be told the same way. Some little details would change and it was. And it would just drive her crazy. And she went on this wild mission to record everything, to record all of the major news stations, 24, seven on VHS. And she has like 77,000 or some crazy number of VHS's of this, this archive of history. And her family has actually donated this most of the time, the posts.
[01:02:28] It's like it travels around in the version of a picture that just has like this text on it and a picture of her face, so I can't remember her freaking name. And again, something that I'm certain I have on my computer somewhere, but I would not have the capacity to search right now because I bet its title is ekjul1z y3.jpg but they actually donated it to the Internet Archive. And the Internet Archive is apparently the last thing I want to say. I want to say they were like through like a fourth of it or some craziness, but they are literally pulling it all from the VHS and trying to make it available to like search through. And they're going to have like this crazy comprehensive video history of like the news for like 20 years or something. Like all I can think is what an ocean, like what a, what a goldmind that is. I don't know if I just love digging through history more as I've gotten older, but all I can see is what immense value that is and how amazing it would be to dig through that, especially if you had context aware search. I just don't think people recognize that this is one of the most valuable tools in valuable ways to use AI in my opinion. And I've been looking for the best. There's a great embedding model that's really small and it's not, it's not perfect. But for contextual search, something I believe it seems to be small enough to run on pretty much the bulk of phones. And what sucks, sucks, it's good, but it also kind of sucks is that even if you want to leverage desktop, like you wanted to use a more advanced model to create the embeddings and like the vector database of like a searchable bunch of information, you actually have to use the same model to search it because the weights are completely irrelevant to a completely different model. Because you know, these things are huge, complex, like it's based on, you know, their training data. So if you, you can't really leverage like a desktop to have like more powerful embeddings or a more accurate vector database and have like a really small model search it on the phone. Because if you're searching it with a small model, you have to embed it. You have to do the search database, the vectorizing with that same small model. Luckily I think they're good enough and obviously they get better at an incredible rate, especially as the smaller models get more specialized.
[01:04:56] I think this will actually be. But just, I mean the untapped of just having a simple organization and indexing of tons of lost information even with a suboptimal model would just be massive. And then to be able to unlock another 5 or 10% with the next like 5 years worth of model updates for better understanding the context rather than just like a flat transcript. What is This a transcript of this is such a, like just an incredibly valuable tool, but really. And this is why Bitcoin and an open financial and monetary network is so unbelievably critical. Bitcoin lightning noster zaps pub key peer to peer tech like the Pear stack. The reason I think there is an answer in this is because this isn't just like X being less censorship prone to whatever vaccine stuff or you know, politically, politically right leaning topics is not a solution. Finding some new host or copying the Wayback Machine in another similarly incredibly expensive way is not a solution. It's about changing. You have to change the economics of hosting and accessing data and you have to change the way networks are built between people. You actually have to connect people directly rather than through a central party because every single time it's the hosting cost that causes the information to be deleted. And it's the central party that deletes it when they're trying to censor it, or worse, makes it so that you just can't access your own information.
[01:06:43] That I can't just download all of the things that are relevant to me off of X or Facebook or YouTube or whatever. They trap it, they silo it and they control how much you can access and whether or not you can, whether you can even download or have the content yourself. And if they change it later or decide that you're not allowed to watch this episode of Joe Rogan or whatever podcast it is, they have this really great link or this resource that you just knew was out there. And then of course Google's gonna censor it so you can't find it on the search engine. It can literally just die.
[01:07:16] It can still be out there accessible somewhere, but it just dies in the fact that all of the major networks that we use to connect to the other people we want to connect to, we don't control them. We don't own our connections, we don't own our network. We don't own the second stage, the one step removed from our network. But on Nostr, on pub key, in a peer to peer network, we can, and this is specifically one of those quote unquote, breaking the rules that this can provide. It's just about putting these tools together in the right way. And I cannot get away from every single time somebody tells me it's not possible, you're not, it's not going to be built right or people don't want to use peer to peer stuff. All I can think is that BitTorrent was one of the, was the like Peer to peer networks. And the, the mainline DHT was one of the largest, actually it was, it was the largest, like 70% of the bandwidth of the Internet in 2005 at its peak or 2006, somewhere around there. And the entire thing was run on a volunteer network.
[01:08:25] Hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people were offering up their hard drive space to categorize and make searchable and downloadable content of all different types for anyone in the world, all for free.
[01:08:42] It wasn't even monetized. There was no network or system to actually get information, to get payment from one person to another, to even donate to those that were hosting. But now we have that open payment system. Now we have that open, uncensorable, undilutable monetary network.
[01:09:02] There's no way we can't go back and fix the problem that made BitTorrent fall from its peak. And the real thing is there's clear demand here, like there is a clear need to be solved is how do you create an index of scientific papers? How do you create an index of historical articles? And how do you pull it from people who are collecting that exact information? How do you make it so that the information continues to exist even if some supposed authority that decides that it doesn't belong in their index because it's not friendly enough to the pharmaceutical industry?
[01:09:44] How do you make it so that the people who saved that or bookmarked that can still get it through their bookmark? How do you make the connection to the information persistent and remove the authority's control, control over what the user sees? How do you separate the network from the platform?
[01:10:04] That's what these tools are doing. And that's a huge benefit with a huge demand that is untapped. And I know it's a big demand because I read articles like this that talk about exactly this problem. And I have this problem too. It's about how do you put these tools? And these tools have all the solutions, by the way, all of them. Nostr can identify anything over a huge set of relays by the key that signs it pubkey and Picard allows you to create addresses, domains essentially that can't be shut down, so that if somebody censors one location in which it's located, you can replace it with the new location and you can still just use that same key that you had used before, that same quote unquote domain, and go right to the new location and you never have to change anything. You don't have to know what happened. It could be censored a hundred times and Your link still takes you straight to it. And then of course the pairstack is just peer to peer hosting, which you can kind of technically do on all the Picard and pubkey stuff too. But the pair stack is more immediately and directly built for that. So that as long as you can find them, as long as all the IP addresses or everything in this country isn't being so horribly locked down that there's literally no way to punch through the network, you can literally download it directly from the source or anybody else who decides to mirror it. It just needs to be built, it just needs to be put together in the context of that demand of solving that problem for a very specific set of people. And importantly, it remembers, it's a path that remembers that the way to actually succeed is to break the rules, is to do the things that the platforms don't want you doing that threaten their ability to control the narrative, that threaten their ability to control the information.
[01:11:58] You have to be working in the what can peer to peer do? What can decentralized do, what can censorship resistant do that the platforms can't? And I think those two big things in my experience, or at least from my perspective that seem to make sense. For example, the thing that I think Nostr, the reason NOSTR is still a strong network, has a strong atomic network, is zaps.
[01:12:26] It is the money element, is being able to choose your lightning custodian, plug in your own wallet with NOSTR wallet connect. It's the ability to just easily and cheaply send and just friction just so fast in 20 cent 210sats a dollar to just zap people.
[01:12:47] That is a huge thing. And I know it's a huge thing because the few people I have onboarded and then reposted their thing, I always get them to set up a lightning address, even if it's just with a simple custodian for the time being. And they're kind of blown away. They're like, why did, why did I just get $5 worth of Bitcoin? And the Midwestern Dr. His substack being posted on something like, well, just being posted in long form on NOSTR or something on like pub key.
[01:13:13] Perfect example of how you could utilize something like that. But I still just think that's one part of the equation. The other big one is controversy, political controversy, critical scientific evidence that is undermining the establishment because they do an immense amount, they spend an immense amount of resources trying to suppress it to make sure it doesn't become available. And I have had things that I have saved links some places that literally are now dead. And I know the information is still out there, but I don't know how to find it. And it's exactly like this is why I thought this was such a great article to read is because it shows a bunch of gives the example of a bunch of different methods that helps you to get around that to just think about the Internet differently. And how do you use Google so that Google is still useful? Searching a site colon man, that's a great trick. I would actually go just for fun, especially if you're a nerd, but also just because of the immense use that you can get out of it to avoid the kind of mainstream narratives. But not only the site colon www.whatever Reddit.com if you're just trying to search a specific place, that is a great way to search for something. I've actually searched my own podcast by doing that. I've used the fountain link for my podcast so that I could find something easily. And with AI searches in a lot of the browser, the increasingly context related search, it turns up a better result than just doing a, you know, control or a command F. But there are actually a handful of other neat little tricks in just kind of like search syntax that you can use that will speed up that process a lot and try to get around a lot of Google's constant attempts to downvote the hell to downgrade exactly what you're looking for in place of the traditional the establishment narrative, but then obviously just the alternatives and knowing which alternative to use for what thing. And one thing that I'm surprised he didn't mention in the article, which I think is another incredibly valuable tool is a VPN and change your country because you will get completely different roles results based on which country you are in. And this is a perfect way to especially when it comes to political controversial political topics particularly heated between two different areas is literally go to a China server and search it, a Russian server and search it, Middle Eastern server and search it Switzerland, eu, anywhere in the EU and then the US and literally the exact same search terms, the exact same everything will get you completely different results depending on what the jurisdiction is, how the degree of censorship and the degree of manipulation that that jurisdiction goes through to make sure that you get particular search results. And then also it actually is heavily influenced by corporate influence as well because different companies will pay for, you know, a different ranking in the search results.
[01:16:24] Again, specifically in one jurisdiction you're not going to get a advertisement for Swiss watches.
[01:16:31] 4th down in your results if you're searching in the US so anyway, this topic was just really close to home and it's exactly what I've been thinking about in all the contributions that I've been trying to make and where I think that next step forward could be in utilizing the tools that we have at our disposal. And that's really the big thing, is that we have the tools, they are here, and we're finding little niches, like little things to go out and use them for. But I feel like that major demand is not being met. And I don't know, it's not like I know the magic sauce that, you know, what's the recipe that puts this all together so that it can serve that demand?
[01:17:14] I have no idea.
[01:17:16] But it is out there. And that's why I talk about it on the show. Because somebody listening to this might think it might click if we talk about this crap enough or think about like, what's the user, how does the user like somebody like the Midwestern doctor? What does he need in order to that if he just, if he just got that one thing or an index or that app or something?
[01:17:41] Maybe no matter which way you do it, there's still like a network bootstrapping problem. I'm sure there is some degree of that. But what is it that he needs that would jump the bridge, that would kind of jump the gap into becoming immediately useful in some context and worth taking a little extra time to try to extend it to that next thing, to that next piece of the puzzle, to finding that next study or piece of information or app that was hidden or removed from the app store, etc. I spend a lot of time thinking about this because I really think this is a major.
[01:18:19] There's a really clear path here in my mind to having something that hundreds of thousands of people would find immensely valuable and could extend to millions very, very quickly. The question is, how do you put it in their hands and how do you make it intuitive enough that they know what they're going after as soon as they can see it?
[01:18:40] So anyway, great article.
[01:18:43] Definitely check out the substack if you don't know it or were interested and you like the article and the direction and kind of theme of the content. I'll have the link down in the show notes, obviously check out Pub key and the protocol stack that they are building and then nostr and the pair stack as well if you want news on financial freedom. And really kind of the core of the technology and the political side that is both fighting against Financial freedom and monetary access and permissionlessness and enabling it. You want both sides of that story from a non establishment view, check out the Financial Freedom report and our sponsor, leden ledn.IO you can actually use your bitcoin without selling it. And obviously the last thing you do is do that with a company that you do not know is trustworthy. Have they survived a bear market? Do they have open books every month? Do they do a six month, you know, bi yearly proof of reserve where you can just prove that your exact bitcoin balance is present? There are an extremely few number of companies that I would even entertain for this and I've been using LEDN for a few years now and they just have a fantastic service and it's an insanely valuable tool. I specifically did not have to sell in the bear market because of it. And lastly, get chroma for your light health. I've been kind of shocked. I keep going a little bit further down this rabbit hole every couple of days at the number of things that are actually related to especially skin mitochondrial health. And that red light therapy is showing substantial improvement. I was literally just digging and I saved to go kind of deeper down this rabbit hole and saw this has had a meaningful improvement on hair loss, which is kind of wild. I had never. That one never crossed my mind for some reason. But on top of checking out that in general and then getting your hormones right, getting your circadian rhythm right by controlling your light, that's been the biggest thing in my direct experience being someone who's always on the computer editing or recording or whatever is cutting off that blue light at the same time every night, using my nightshades and my sky portal, it's made a huge difference. Check them all out. Oh, and discount code 10% off with code Bitcoin Audible. And that helps out the show. So a shout out if you use it, plus, you know, discounts. All right, guys, thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode. This is a topic, as you obviously know, that is very close to my heart and hopefully, as always, I hope to have something meaningful to contribute in this way. And I'll let you know when I do. So stay tuned, stay subscribed, don't forget to share this out with everybody, you know, even if they don't like bitcoin. Share this one out and I will catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. And until then, everybody, that's my two cents.
[01:22:02] The Internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The Internet is a threat to human civilization.
[01:22:17] Julian Assange, from Cypherpunk's Freedom and the Future of the Internet.
