Latest / The Higherside Chats / Magnora 7 | Information Control Tactics, Reddit Sketchiness, & MaxwellHill

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Magnora 7 | Information Control Tactics, Reddit Sketchiness, & MaxwellHill · The Higherside Chats

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The planet's puppet masters almost surely have a
3:35
plan.
3:40
There's clearly maybe something there beyond the realm
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of man.
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And until we thoroughly tested every last close
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chested view, I find the more we think
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we know, the less we really do.
4:22
Rock me like a hurricane, people, from the
4:24
sunshine state. I'm Greg Carlwood, and many of
4:27
us recognize that there are some major psychological
4:29
differences between the old tradition of reading a
4:32
morning paper or sitting down for the nightly
4:34
news and the situation we have today, where
4:36
we're immersed in a chaotic and almost overwhelming
4:39
Internet swarm of narrative, counter narrative, and counter
4:42
counter narrative information on nearly every event,
4:45
oftentimes mistaking that immersion for realness in our
4:49
ritualization
4:50
as participation.
4:51
Many news stories now feel closer to an
4:54
engaging ARG than an actual event, and even
4:56
the conversations being had are oftentimes designed to
4:59
steer your opinion to a desired conclusion by
5:02
bot accounts masquerading as genuine.
5:04
We've all heard of the dead Internet theory
5:06
that suggests the volume of genuine human activity
5:09
is actually far smaller than advertised, and that
5:11
hunch many have seems more than justified when
5:14
hundreds of accounts using the exact same phrases
5:16
are collected up and screenshotted together.
5:19
And it gets weirder still, but here to
5:21
talk all things under the hood of the
5:23
Internet from shadow banning and bots to engineering
5:26
opinion through social media, attacks on alternative platforms,
5:29
the death of whistleblowers, and Reddit moderator Ghislaine
5:32
Maxwell, is returning guest, Magnora 7. You might
5:35
remember him from 2 killer episodes we did
5:38
in the past, our first in 2017
5:40
covering the Rothschilds' carving up of Africa and
5:43
the diamond mine monopoly in a show titled
5:45
the Rothschild World Order and the Ownership of
5:47
Everything,
5:48
and then he returned in 2018 for a
5:50
look into the deaths of Anthony Bourdain, Kate
5:53
Spade, and the suicide string conspiracy.
5:56
I initially discovered magnora 7 from his in-depth
5:59
Reddit posts at a time when that was
6:01
a bit more rare, And in the years
6:02
since we last did the dance, he's been
6:04
the man behind the only true Reddit alternative
6:06
I know, setit.net.
6:08
And we're gonna talk about all the things
6:10
he's seen and experienced firsthand in that struggle
6:13
for a censorship free platform in a compromised
6:15
and corporate digital landscape.
6:17
So let's do it. Trying to be the
6:19
change he wants to see, the free information
6:21
advocate, censorship critic, and digital dystopia dissident, Magnor,
6:25
a 7, my man, long time. Welcome back.
6:29
Hey, Greg Carla. Glad to be here, man.
6:31
Thanks for having me back. Of course. Thanks
6:33
for doing this. So
6:35
I initiated this conversation because I really liked
6:37
those 2 previous interviews, and
6:40
you kinda came back at me with, well,
6:42
what's the point if the 2 we've done
6:44
already aren't even searchable?
6:46
You can put in the exact title in
6:48
word for word in YouTube and it won't
6:50
come up.
6:51
Well,
6:52
this is directed more at the listeners than
6:54
yourself, but we need to stop trying to
6:56
go where we're not wanted.
6:58
The first show we did is there, but
7:00
you have to look pretty hard. And the
7:02
second show we did was removed from YouTube
7:04
entirely.
7:05
But you know where you can find them
7:06
both? On my website, in the show archive
7:09
of any podcasting app, and with a search
7:12
on a non Google search engine.
7:15
So we can only control what we can
7:17
control, and I'm very interested in all the
7:19
things you've seen as someone trying to run
7:22
a censorship free alternative.
7:24
But I'm kinda past expecting these platforms to
7:27
change their behavior,
7:28
and I'm encouraging users to change theirs.
7:32
I hope we get that message across today
7:34
by explaining how bad it really is.
7:37
Hence why you started setit.net in the 1st
7:39
place. Right?
7:40
Yeah. That's right. Reddit had some censorship problems
7:44
that's been growing since about 2012 or so.
7:47
And in response, a lot of people tried
7:49
to make Reddit alternatives, especially since it was
7:52
open source.
7:53
And a few did it, and most of
7:55
them went under in about 2 to 3
7:57
years because of all these pressures to shut
7:59
down that we're gonna talk about, but
8:01
said it's still around 6 years later. So
8:04
anyone can go to it, said it.net, and
8:06
check it out. But this censorship problem, going
8:09
back a little to what you're saying about
8:11
our YouTube things, if you just type in
8:13
magnora 7 higher side chats into YouTube,
8:16
it's not there, you know, and it should
8:18
be there. The top result should be, you
8:20
know, 1 and 2 is our 2 interviews.
8:22
And I think 10 years ago, it might
8:23
have been that way where it would have
8:25
responded like that, but now it's tough to
8:27
find. You have to use alternate search engines
8:29
and stuff just to find these basic interviews
8:31
that we did. Yeah. And it it is
8:33
frustrating, but like we were saying before we
8:35
started recording,
8:37
podcasting
8:38
is such a godsend because it's totally decentralized,
8:41
the RSS feeds and a bunch of different
8:44
podcast apps,
8:45
And they're trying to go after it, but
8:47
the only way really is to try to
8:49
convert it all to video. And if you
8:51
have a video show, there's only a few
8:52
places to put it, really only one, and
8:54
that's YouTube. And so the advertisers
8:57
love YouTube because you can see all the
9:00
views right there. There's no guessing,
9:02
and the algorithm helps them too. So if
9:04
you're not playing the advertising game,
9:06
there's really not a reason to convert to
9:08
video to get shoehorned into YouTube and out
9:11
of the podcasting apps,
9:13
and so I'm staying strong. It's tough because
9:15
a lot of my colleagues don't agree with
9:17
me, but here we are. Yeah. And I
9:19
gotta commend you, man. I mean, you've really
9:21
stuck it out and fought the good fight
9:23
so far and, you know, diversified on a
9:25
lot of different platforms because it is easy
9:27
to just plop it on YouTube and turn
9:29
on ads and just let that be that.
9:31
And you've gotten away from that ecosystem, and
9:34
I think that's great. You know? To have
9:35
you've got your footprint in a lot of
9:37
different places, and I think that's real smart
9:39
for the future.
9:41
Fair enough. But sometimes I wonder what it
9:43
all is worth because it just seems to
9:46
be like the game is the game, and
9:47
I'm doing this other thing, and maybe some
9:50
people, you know, give me a tip of
9:51
the hat, but, you know, what is it
9:53
really worth? I don't know. It doesn't seem
9:55
to bother
9:56
guests to go on shows full of ads,
9:58
and it doesn't seem to bother listeners to
10:00
listen to shows full of ads. Yeah. And,
10:02
I mean, there's too many ads and but,
10:04
like, a few ads isn't necessarily bad, but,
10:06
you know, I'm on the same page as
10:07
you where I said it. We've never had
10:09
ads for 6 years.
10:11
Now we've run the site completely based on
10:13
Patreon donations
10:15
and my personal funding. So
10:18
there's no excess. There's no profit being made.
10:20
There's no employees.
10:22
It's just all going back into the site,
10:23
and it's just there as a public resource.
10:25
You know? It's a charity, basically.
10:28
Yes. Well,
10:29
let's get past ourselves. We got a lot
10:32
of people listening that really
10:34
I think we'll be quite interested to hear
10:37
what you've learned trying to launch such a
10:39
big platform like this. You've seen it all
10:41
from DDOS attacks and all kinds of things
10:44
in the back end. You know, sent me
10:46
some videos of Chinese click farms that are
10:49
really insane. Obviously, we don't have the video.
10:51
We just talked about that. But Reddit seems
10:54
more like a propaganda
10:55
tool for engineering consensus than anything. And I'm
10:58
on Reddit a lot. It is basically my
11:01
portal through the Internet, sadly,
11:04
but the Internet's gotten a lot smaller. I
11:06
mentioned dead Internet theory in the intro. What
11:08
do you think about that? I mean, it's
11:10
not literally dead, but I do think there's
11:12
so much less going on than
11:15
people think. It's decaying more than dead. It's
11:18
becoming fossilized in a sort of way.
11:22
The old Internet was all people. You're basically
11:24
guaranteed to be talking to a person,
11:26
and then bots started to exist and become
11:29
popular.
11:30
And then shills started to become a thing,
11:32
you know, paid actors who are there to
11:33
influence opinion on the Internet.
11:35
And then now we've got AI and chat
11:38
GPT that can act, you know, as tools
11:41
for these shills and these other bad actors
11:43
that wanna destroy or censor content on the
11:45
Internet.
11:46
So the amount of worthless garbage, basically, of
11:49
just noise is increasing,
11:51
And
11:52
it's a real uphill battle, and I don't
11:54
know if the cat can go back in
11:56
the bag, frankly.
11:58
No. No. I tend to say, like, if
12:00
it's broken, then fine.
12:02
I'm spending less time online. I see that
12:04
as a good thing.
12:06
So I know you have a lot of
12:08
notes. I don't wanna take up too much
12:09
time before we at least get rolling with
12:11
those notes. Talk to us about some of
12:13
the things that you think are important that
12:15
more people should know but don't.
12:18
Yeah. There's a lot of different techniques to
12:20
Internet censorship, and a lot of people think
12:22
Internet censorship is just your comic. It's deleted
12:25
or it doesn't. But there's a lot more
12:27
subtle things like search hiding is something we
12:30
just talked about with our YouTube videos.
12:33
Those interviews are there. If you have the
12:35
link, you can go to it. It just
12:36
won't appear on the YouTube search, so it's
12:38
just kind of downplayed. And they've gotten better
12:40
too where it'll show up as, like, the
12:42
30th result, so they can say, oh, you
12:44
know, it's there. It's technically there, but it
12:46
clearly should be the number one result because
12:47
it's the only thing with the text match.
12:50
So
12:51
that type of search hiding is real common.
12:53
And then other than search hiding, there's shadow
12:55
banning, which I'm sure a lot of people
12:57
have run into. And shadow banning is all
12:59
over YouTube and Reddit comments, especially.
13:02
Shadow banning is when you personally see something
13:05
is posted, but it's not visible to anyone
13:07
else. So, like, on Reddit or YouTube, you
13:09
can spend your whole day making comments and
13:11
never get any votes, never get any replies,
13:14
and wonder why. But if you log out
13:16
or go into the 2nd browser,
13:18
look at incognito mode or something,
13:21
you'll see that, you know, it's not there.
13:23
It's gone. So it only appears when you're
13:25
logged into the account, and that's what shadow
13:27
banning is. So it gives you the appearance
13:29
you're participating,
13:30
but nobody else can see or participate back.
13:33
So it's a bizarrely
13:35
isolating kind of censorship maneuver to do the
13:39
shadow banning, and it's become really common in
13:41
the last 10 years. It's like the new
13:43
hot tool because people don't know they're being
13:45
censored, so they don't get mad.
13:47
And so you don't have this user pushback
13:49
to fight against. You know? It's just a
13:51
very silent sort of censorship.
13:53
So search banning and search hiding and shadow
13:56
banning are really super important, and that narrative
14:00
shaping power of these tools is huge.
14:02
You know, it's done across all these different
14:04
media websites.
14:06
It's not a small effect. You know? It's
14:09
the Internet now is larger than TV and
14:11
radio and these things. So
14:13
having the communities on these websites be shaped
14:16
by these tools
14:18
really influences the culture on the websites, but
14:20
also the people who use the websites think,
14:22
you know, this is what modern culture is.
14:24
This is how society is now, but it's
14:27
not. It's an illusion. It feels like the
14:29
evolution of polling. You know, they used to
14:31
just
14:32
have a poll that said whatever public opinion
14:35
they wanted to promote, and then they put
14:37
it on the news and say, well, 70%
14:38
of people think this. And it's, like, 70%
14:41
of what?
14:42
The 70 you asked? You know, that's not
14:45
really a true representation.
14:46
The people who answered their phones. Right. And
14:49
now they do it a little more
14:51
nuanced
14:52
with actually crafting the opinions, using bots, using
14:56
these
14:57
Chinese click farms or any kind of click
14:59
farms, I guess, that's not limited to China.
15:02
But just elevating
15:05
the bot opinions, the mainstream opinions, suppressing the
15:08
other ones. And then people who do absorb
15:10
the mainstream opinion,
15:12
they get more emboldened because they think everybody's
15:15
on their side, and then they
15:17
talk more shit to people like you and
15:19
I. COVID, it became pretty clear.
15:21
But the beautiful thing about COVID, and you
15:23
could even say the last election to a
15:25
degree, is, like,
15:27
the narrative broke down.
15:29
Like, the people who thought maybe they were
15:32
isolated to an opinion of 1 found out
15:34
that, no. Actually, a lot of people do
15:36
agree with me. And that's a beautiful thing.
15:38
You just have these choke points
15:40
where
15:41
they make it appear as if you're
15:43
an opinion of 1. And, you know, so
15:46
if as long as you've learned to see
15:47
through those things,
15:49
you can trust that, yes, we know sheeple,
15:52
a lot of people are dumb, and this
15:53
and that, but a lot of people aren't
15:55
dumb.
15:56
And a lot of people do agree with
15:57
you. They're trying to make people look dumb
16:00
as well. Like, there's this impetus to make
16:02
society look dumb so that you go, oh,
16:04
everyone's dumb. I shouldn't even try.
16:07
No. I'm chanced here with this book, Manufacturing
16:09
Consent.
16:10
There you go. Basically, what this is, it's
16:12
a manufactured culture
16:14
and a manufacturer's consent and the people who
16:16
participate in the culture.
16:18
And, yeah, it's serious business.
16:21
It is. And we should talk about the
16:22
business. So
16:24
let's use Reddit. You were saying that Reddit
16:27
is considered to be the 6th most visited
16:29
website on the Internet and has been for
16:31
years, but they haven't turned a profit
16:34
until
16:36
going public this year. And that's a big
16:38
thing people might not realize. If you are
16:40
a Reddit user, they went public in March
16:42
of this year, which means you're gonna see
16:44
way more ads, way more censorship. They have
16:47
just signed up, a company that never made
16:49
money before, just signed up to need
16:52
10% growth year after year forever through infinity
16:56
because that's what a public company must do.
16:58
It's insane and ridiculous, but that will be
17:01
what Reddit is turning into. You're precisely right.
17:04
And then it's gonna be totally oriented towards
17:07
the investors because all public companies have to
17:09
be operated in a way to maximize profit
17:11
for the investors.
17:13
So the censorship on Reddit and so on
17:15
is gonna change as well.
17:17
It's something I've anticipated. Actually, we built seta.net
17:21
6 years ago anticipating they were gonna go
17:23
IPO that year. So it's been a long
17:25
time coming that Reddit's been talking about wanting
17:28
to do this, but, yeah, they've never turned
17:30
a profit. I don't know how a company
17:32
who's never once turned a profit,
17:34
you know, is able to go IPO and
17:36
get all this investment.
17:37
It it literally doesn't make sense. Are they
17:39
valued at a 1,000,000,000? They're not. But a
17:41
100,000,000?
17:42
I don't know. Let's look it up real
17:44
quick.
17:45
30,000,000,000.
17:46
30,000,000,000?
17:47
30,000,000,000
17:48
dollars, apparently.
17:49
It's all funny money. Yeah. And it's a
17:52
lot of advertising money like we're talking about,
17:54
and a lot of the advertising money is
17:57
based on these fake users that don't exist
18:00
that are AI users and bot users and
18:02
chill users. And Reddit has zero incentive to
18:05
get rid of those users because it makes
18:07
their advertising click through rates higher,
18:10
which increases the advertising revenue, which increases their
18:10
valuation. So this valuation is totally based on
18:13
valuation. So this valuation is totally based on
18:15
their advertising potential, basically,
18:17
which is based on the number of monthly
18:19
active users,
18:20
which is based on all these fraudulent tools,
18:23
essentially.
18:24
So it's really a house of cards,
18:26
but it's one that stood for 20 years.
18:28
So
18:31
Yeah. And not that this is all about
18:32
podcast advertising, but people in that space are
18:35
saying the same thing that
18:37
they've gotten a lot of people dependent on
18:39
the ad revenue, and they're gonna rug pull
18:41
them. YouTube has already done this several times
18:44
just by chopping the ad rate lower and
18:46
lower and lower for people who that's their
18:48
only mechanism for income.
18:50
And it's like, you think they would wanna
18:51
make their content creators happy because that's the
18:54
only reason anyone goes there. But this happened
18:57
with Apple where Apple used to auto download
18:59
any podcast you were subscribed to, which would
19:02
count as a download, and they made an
19:03
update where they do not do that, and
19:05
people suddenly looked at their podcasting statistics,
19:08
and they're way down, like 40%
19:11
down. Well, if you're selling
19:13
ads and you're giving your views
19:16
and downloads to ad companies,
19:18
it it's not gonna work out.
19:20
And that's just one step on a big
19:22
road that I think is gonna make people
19:25
not quite so
19:26
happy
19:27
in their podcasting business in a couple of
19:29
years, but, you know, we do what we
19:31
can. Yeah. And it's a way to control
19:33
the Overton window as well. Right? They can
19:35
say, like, oh, if you step outside these
19:38
narrative boundaries, you know, you're demonetized.
19:41
And so they can control the narrative that
19:43
comes on YouTube just by deciding the winners
19:45
and losers in terms of who gets funding
19:47
and who doesn't.
19:48
Yes. There was something I know there's an
19:51
overlap with the no agenda audience. Adam Curry
19:53
actually just referenced the Hireside chats not long
19:56
ago, but he said it was Cliff High's
19:57
podcast, which, you know, I'm still waiting on
19:59
a correction,
20:01
Adam, previous guest.
20:02
Doesn't know who the host of the show
20:04
is. No. It's fine. I don't really care.
20:06
Cliff Hire actually makes sense, the Cliff Hire
20:08
side chats. I understand.
20:10
But
20:11
the point
20:12
was that
20:13
they played some clips on no agenda where
20:15
a totally
20:17
random I think it was a show that
20:18
just looked at peer reviewed science. It was
20:20
not even a controversial
20:21
show, not trying to be controversial at all.
20:24
They found out they were on a list
20:27
that's given or shared amongst the big five
20:29
advertising
20:30
firms, and it's like a do not
20:33
participate list.
20:34
So they literally were blacklisted, like, on a
20:37
no fly list, and you're like, wait. I
20:38
never did anything just because I have a
20:40
name that sounds like someone else?
20:42
And, you know,
20:43
that sucks for them, but it just made
20:46
me aware that such lists exist, and you
20:49
don't really come off of them easily. Right.
20:51
And we're in a world now where you
20:52
could have that list is global, basically. There's
20:55
no escaping that list anymore. If you run
20:58
something on the Internet,
20:59
you can't just up and move to, you
21:01
know, Argentina or whatever. You're on the Internet.
21:04
Yes.
21:05
And another thing we had kinda talked about
21:07
is that
21:08
building
21:10
a platform that requires public participation
21:12
is very hard. You know? Said it. It's
21:15
like people are only gonna go there because
21:17
there's a lot of engagement. Why would I
21:19
post there if it's dead, if no one's
21:21
talking about it or active on it? Right.
21:23
It's the bootstrapping problem. Yeah. You've gotta have
21:25
this lead in audience
21:27
to be able to start a social media
21:29
site. It's something you know, I was lucky.
21:31
I wrote all these articles. Like you mentioned,
21:33
I used to write articles pretty regularly on
21:35
Reddit.
21:36
I had a pretty good following, and when
21:38
we launched the site, you know, I announced
21:39
it to the people who read my articles,
21:41
and we got I was, like, 20,000 people
21:44
or something came over that 1st day or
21:45
whatever. And that was kind of the nucleus
21:48
that started the whole thing, and a lot
21:49
of sites didn't have that
21:51
to fall back on, and they, you know,
21:53
have to
21:54
sort of create a false community
21:56
to draw people in because you can't just
21:58
have it be dead like you said. So
22:01
Reddit actually started with bots, and they had
22:04
moderators running multiple accounts pretending to be the
22:07
community they wanted to see, basically,
22:10
until they got enough people in. And I
22:11
don't know if they ever stopped doing that,
22:13
but surely they've got enough people now. But
22:15
in the very beginning, they said they literally
22:18
generated a fake community, basically, by running multiple
22:20
accounts. So it's not a real community. Even
22:23
back then, that was 2,007,
22:25
2000 6, so
22:27
this type of thing's been going on a
22:28
long time. And when it comes to setit.net,
22:31
you mentioned to me that
22:33
you're one of the only websites to make
22:35
use of Aaron Schwartz's open source code before
22:39
Reddit closed it off to the public in
22:41
2015.
22:43
And Aaron Schwartz,
22:44
you know, really tragic
22:46
story. I don't even know if it's ever
22:48
been talked about on the air here, but
22:50
talk to us about Aaron Schwartz and his
22:53
story. Yeah. Aaron Swartz, he's about my age,
22:56
and he he was one of the guys
22:58
who was initial
22:59
coders of Reddit. He didn't start it right
23:01
at the beginning, but he joined it about
23:03
the 4 month mark or something and was
23:04
there till about year 2 or 3. But
23:07
he built basically the main code of infrastructure
23:10
of Reddit that Reddit uses to this day.
23:13
So he built all these distributed
23:16
database systems and all these things required for
23:18
Reddit to be able to scale for millions
23:20
of viewers, you know, on an hourly basis.
23:23
I looked yesterday. Reddit has 1,500,000,000
23:26
page loads per hour.
23:28
So if you can imagine that server infrastructure
23:31
required to do that smoothly, you know, it's
23:33
incredible. So Aaron Swartz was the guy behind
23:36
that, and he used to give interviews and
23:38
he'd say things like information is power, but
23:41
like all power, there are those who wanna
23:42
keep it for themselves.
23:44
And then I think people heard the story
23:46
later. He went to MIT, and he did
23:49
this thing where he snuck into MIT
23:53
server room and basically downloaded all these scientific
23:55
papers that he decided
23:57
should be free to the public because they're
24:00
basically paid for by taxpayer money.
24:02
And he put these papers out there on
24:04
the Internet, and then
24:06
basically, the Department of Justice
24:08
dropped the hammer on this guy. They literally
24:10
said they wanted to, quote, make an example
24:12
out of him,
24:13
and they threw the full weight of federal
24:15
law
24:16
in his direction saying, you know, he'd violated
24:19
privacy agreements for stuff that was, you know,
24:21
military or had protections on it. But,
24:25
anyways,
24:26
this court battle was just getting started, and
24:28
then
24:29
one day he was found suicided, basically, and
24:32
he was gone, and they didn't even get
24:34
to have the trial or anything.
24:36
That's different. I thought he was looking at
24:38
35 years, and then he committed suicide. I
24:41
mean, obviously, any suicide, you always wonder
24:44
if it was a real suicide, but you
24:46
seem to lead towards he was suicided.
24:48
I would think so because they didn't get
24:50
to I mean, I don't know. You know?
24:52
But
24:53
there was a movie recently that came out
24:55
about him that brushes on the subject, but
24:58
it's just too convenient. And he was such
25:00
a strong conviction. You know? He was always
25:02
like, we're gonna fight things, make the world
25:04
better. That was his whole deal. So
25:07
to arrive at this sort of big junction
25:09
where he might have an influence and then
25:11
to just fold and walk away. You know?
25:13
That just seems out of character for him,
25:15
and that's all I'm really basing that on,
25:16
but, you know, it's speculation.
25:19
Well and so just so people understand,
25:22
there's a lot of debate about if he
25:24
even committed a crime because
25:27
what he did is he took
25:29
peer reviewed scientific papers that are behind a
25:32
paywall,
25:33
but
25:34
these papers are free if you are an
25:37
MIT student. And he downloaded them through an
25:40
MIT account and then just
25:43
made them public.
25:45
So it really is a gray area on
25:48
if he committed a crime. And as you
25:50
say,
25:52
academia,
25:53
we rail on them so hard around here.
25:55
It's like, there's this thing where it's like,
25:57
if it's gonna be publicly funded,
26:00
then the results should be publicly available too.
26:03
Right. Yeah. We paid for it, so we
26:05
should be able to see the results.
26:07
That's not even really a debatable thing to
26:09
me. I you know, it's just crazy to
26:11
me that why would I pay for a
26:12
service and then never even be able to
26:14
look at the results of that service, be
26:16
disallowed legally from even looking at it? You
26:18
know, it's just
26:20
bizarre. It's just like people, when they talk
26:22
about Aaron's situation, they always use the word
26:25
hacked. And it's like he didn't hack into
26:27
anything. He used an account
26:30
to access something
26:31
he
26:32
had privileged access to as an MIT student
26:36
and then released it. You know, maybe that's
26:38
against the terms of service. Is that against
26:41
the law? I don't necessarily think it is,
26:43
but, you know, the law is massagible
26:45
when they wanna make an example of someone.
26:47
Right.
26:48
You could make the argument he did have
26:50
software to sort of scrape the whole server.
26:52
So I think he it was a pretty
26:54
extensive
26:55
information
26:56
grab that he did, and and some of
26:58
that might have overreached into certain areas of
27:01
the server that he wasn't supposed to have
27:04
permission to, I think, was kind of the
27:05
crux of the issue from the perspective of
27:08
MIT.
27:09
Mhmm. And now his memory is kind of
27:12
like as a martyr
27:15
or a figurehead for
27:17
the dead idea of the freedom of the
27:19
Internet. Like, the last
27:21
guy who was gonna really push for it,
27:23
and then once he was snuffed out,
27:26
it really just became the corporatized Internet.
27:29
Well, I've read it especially. Yeah. And then,
27:31
like you said, the actual thing that happened
27:33
with him taking the papers from MIT never
27:35
actually went to court. So there was never
27:37
actually a trial on that. There was never
27:39
a decision on that. So that
27:41
whole issue is still legally undecided because of
27:44
his death.
27:46
But our site, set it.net, we're the only
27:48
site to use the open source code.
27:50
Reddit
27:51
still runs it, but they had it open
27:53
source until 2015, and then they closed the
27:56
source a few years after Aaron's death.
27:59
But we use open source, and it's really
28:01
complicated. So most sites that were our peers
28:03
tried to build their own software from scratch,
28:05
which worked out great when they were small,
28:07
and then if they started to take off,
28:08
it would always crash and fall apart because
28:10
it wasn't built to be scalable.
28:12
But this open source Reddit code is built
28:15
to have a 1000000000 page views an hour,
28:18
so it's like a Ferrari. So if you
28:20
can set this thing up right, it runs
28:21
super well, and we were able to do
28:23
that with SetIt.
28:25
Right on. And you said that your moderation
28:27
you put a lot of consideration
28:29
and thought into how it should be moderated.
28:32
This is one of my issues. I don't
28:34
wanna get too in the weeds for people
28:36
who don't use Reddit
28:37
specifically,
28:39
but
28:40
you find that if there are censorship
28:42
free platforms,
28:44
they just become something like 4 chan lite.
28:48
And it's like not all the content in
28:50
my life is conspiracy content, believe it or
28:52
not. So it's like I would just like
28:54
to go somewhere where I can watch comedy,
28:57
pop culture news, and
29:00
real
29:01
deep diving conspiracy rabbit hole stuff all in
29:04
one place. And maybe that's too much to
29:05
ask, but you go to Rumble or some
29:08
of these alternatives, and it's just
29:10
way too intense, I guess. And it's basically
29:14
only one type of content exists there,
29:17
and that to me is a bit of
29:19
a problem too. That's a great point, and
29:21
I kinda call that the overflow problem because
29:24
the stuff on Rumble is only there because
29:26
it isn't allowed on YouTube a lot of
29:28
the time. Right? It's the overflow.
29:31
So that ends up making Rumble be all
29:33
these extreme things that aren't allowed on YouTube,
29:35
and then the more moderate stuff just is
29:37
on YouTube because they'll get more views there.
29:40
So it creates a certain cultural selection pressure,
29:43
you could say.
29:44
And Sedit had a very similar problem where
29:46
we had kind of the overflow for Reddit.
29:49
It's all the people who weren't allowed on
29:51
Reddit basically kinda overflowed into set it, and
29:53
then we have to make the choice of
29:55
what people to allow and what people not
29:57
to allow. And you can't just allow everyone
29:59
because there's people are literally
30:01
doxing people or advocating murder or doing crazy
30:04
things. You gotta tell those people to go
30:06
away. You can't just let them take over
30:09
the culture.
30:10
Right. I got a little bit of hot
30:12
water myself for not moderating my forum well
30:15
enough, and
30:16
a lot of people know that story. Yeah.
30:18
It's a tricky deal because you wanna be
30:21
Cedit's whole thing also is free speech, so
30:23
we wanna be like a free speech website.
30:25
Right? But you can't be too free speech
30:27
or else it just goes crazy with people
30:30
trying to sort of poison the
30:33
culture. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you
30:34
about that. This is not in the outline,
30:36
but as I was digging in to set
30:38
it, it seems like one of the big
30:41
controversies, things you've had to deal with, is
30:43
the Ice Poseidon
30:46
saga or debacle or what whatever we could
30:48
call it. Now, Ice Poseidon, I know the
30:50
name as a Twitch streamer. I'm not big
30:52
in the Twitch streaming space. I don't watch
30:55
a lot of that, but
30:56
there's a lot of eyes on these Twitch
30:58
streamers, and they get quite big. And I
31:01
don't know if he himself is a problem
31:03
or if it's the people that have rallied
31:05
around him that have started to dox him
31:07
and stuff like that. My understanding is his
31:10
own listeners or his own viewers
31:12
called in a bomb threat to an airport
31:14
when he was walking around the airport streaming,
31:17
and that became, like, a funny thing, a
31:20
prank. Actually, I believe he did it. He
31:22
called it in. He did it? I don't
31:24
know. I don't wanna get it. We don't
31:26
know. It's a crazy
31:28
culture. But the relevancy here is that I
31:31
believe Ice Poseidon got a
31:33
sub on Sedit, and then I believe you've
31:36
even said 40% of Sedit's traffic came from
31:40
this community,
31:41
and that became a bit of a problem.
31:43
Yeah. It actually got up to 60%, so
31:45
they were the majority of the site at
31:47
one point. And
31:48
the group of people that follow the sky
31:50
around, it's like a tornado just destroying everything
31:53
all the time. And in trying to be
31:55
free speech, we let them hang with us,
31:57
and I defended them for a long time.
31:59
You know, even though I don't agree with
32:01
what they say, I agree with their right
32:02
to say it sort of thing.
32:04
So I
32:05
tried to work with these people, but we
32:07
actually moved our server farm to Switzerland to
32:10
try and get better free speech protections.
32:13
And after we moved our our whole website
32:15
to being hosted in Switzerland, we got DDoS
32:17
because of this group.
32:19
They were inviting all these DDoS, and we
32:22
got booted from the server farm that we
32:23
were on in Switzerland with 24 hour notice.
32:26
They said, we can't do this. You're destroying
32:28
our server farm.
32:29
Your
32:30
specific instance is being attacked so many times,
32:33
it's taken down our backbone for our server
32:35
system. So they gave me 24 hours to
32:37
leave, and so we had to change servers
32:39
again. So, yeah, we we ended up having
32:41
to change servers 2 or 3 times, basically,
32:43
because of this group,
32:44
and it got to the point where
32:47
the 3rd time the server group was gonna
32:50
boot us again a different one, and we
32:52
had to cut them a deal where we
32:54
had to let this community go, basically. So
32:56
I just had to kick off 60% of
32:58
my community,
32:59
and that was a hard decision, man, after
33:02
4 years of work on this thing. Mhmm.
33:04
Well, some men just wanna watch the world
33:06
burn, and they're gonna just keep pushing and
33:08
pushing, and, you know, that's when a moderator
33:11
has to step in and do something. But
33:13
talk to us about the kind of attacks
33:16
that you generally see, and where is a
33:19
DDoS attack really coming from? I mean, this
33:22
is, like, the most commonly talked about type
33:24
of attack. Yeah. Like, DDoS attacks
33:27
were real popular in the nineties and early
33:29
2000s.
33:30
But basically,
33:31
I mean, they still go on, but there's
33:33
a lot of protections for them now. But
33:34
basically, a DDoS is you try and request
33:37
a web page to load,
33:38
and you just do that like a 1000000
33:40
times a second.
33:41
And it's so many requests that the server
33:44
simply can't keep up, and it gets gridlocked,
33:46
and it just shuts down. And that's what
33:49
a DDoS is. So the way to protect
33:51
against it is you put a layer of
33:52
software in front of it that receives all
33:55
the requests, and then it only lets the
33:56
legitimate ones through it. It tries to detect
33:58
if one is trying to do, like, a
34:00
1000000 requests a minute or something crazy
34:03
and block it.
34:05
So set it as DDoS attack probably about
34:07
9 hours every single day for the last
34:10
6 years.
34:11
So it's like a non stop somebody has
34:13
it on a scheduled calendar sort of thing.
34:16
So we have our DDoS protection turned on
34:18
maximum all the time, and that's true for
34:20
a lot of websites now, but that's Cloudflare.
34:22
I don't know if you use Cloudflare. Do
34:24
you ever use Cloudflare?
34:25
I know of it, but I don't think
34:27
that I use it.
34:28
Okay. It's like the DDoS protection. And, basically,
34:31
if you're gonna run a website, you gotta
34:33
have Cloudflare. Well, then I do. Then I
34:35
definitely do. You very well might have it
34:37
as part of yours. Yeah.
34:39
So there are other types of things too,
34:41
and I guess you should tell us about
34:43
them because people might be curious to know
34:45
what
34:46
an admin of such a site has to
34:48
deal with. But let us know if you
34:50
have any more insight into
34:52
where these attacks come from and that kind
34:54
of thing.
34:55
Unfortunately, you really can't know where they're coming
34:58
from because
34:59
with the DDoS attack, you can see the
35:01
IP address of every packet request. So you
35:03
could, in theory, you know, look up the
35:05
IP, but in reality, they use VPNs
35:09
and actually even more advanced IP spoofing, so
35:12
they can just have any IP address they
35:14
want.
35:15
So they can pretend to be anywhere in
35:17
the world or pretend to be any government
35:20
or whatever just by pretending to use their
35:22
IP address.
35:23
So you can get Duo attacks attack from
35:26
Russia, and it looks like it's from New
35:28
York or something. You know? You really have
35:30
no idea.
35:31
And that's one of the really frustrating things
35:33
about this is it's so untraceable,
35:36
And the only people who have the access
35:37
to trace it back are the the backbone
35:40
Internet service providers like l three and stuff
35:43
who control these Internet backbone lines that go
35:46
across the ocean and stuff.
35:47
They're really the only ones who have the
35:49
capability to trace these things back to where
35:52
they're coming from.
35:53
So it's truly unknowable, which is extremely creepy,
35:56
I gotta be honest. Well, you've also had
35:59
really creepy things happen
36:01
in terms of people just trying
36:03
to get into admin positions
36:06
and weasel their way in there so they
36:08
can
36:09
de admin everybody else and take over the
36:12
space. That's odd. Yeah. I say, oh, I'm
36:14
so trustworthy. Oh, I've been here for months
36:16
being real prominent user. Hey. You should make
36:18
me head admin. And then the second they
36:20
get head admin, they just start wrecking the
36:22
place, you know, just deleting stuff, banning people
36:25
who are good.
36:26
And we had that happen a couple of
36:28
times. I mean, people would play it cool
36:29
for literally months and, like, embed themselves in
36:32
the community to gain a trusted position. And
36:34
then as soon as you give them power,
36:36
a week later, they start doing everything wrong
36:39
that you would want them not to do,
36:41
and it just creates a real situation.
36:44
But, I mean, that just happened continually over
36:47
and over and over. I mean, you'd finally
36:48
root one out, and you'd be like, oh,
36:50
we got it. And then the next guy
36:51
would come. It was just a never ending
36:53
thing. So they're always trying to get admin
36:55
position. And if they can't achieve that, then
36:58
they'll often just talk to the admins and
37:00
say,
37:01
hey. The other admin was saying bad stuff
37:03
about you and they actually hate you, and
37:05
they'll try and drive these weird wedges between
37:07
the admins so that they turn on each
37:09
other
37:10
and
37:11
fracture the admin groups, and they fall apart.
37:14
There's a site that was a competitor called
37:16
Ruckus, and Ruckus basically had
37:18
5 admins or whatever, and it was too
37:20
many cooks in the kitchen,
37:22
and then little birdies started tweeting their ear,
37:24
and they all turned on each other, and
37:26
that was it, man.
37:27
Well, we know that the feds used to
37:30
do this to a lot of counterculture
37:32
communities
37:33
and the Black Panthers and, really, anyone that
37:36
was critical of the war or the government
37:39
in general, they'd infiltrate. So why wouldn't they
37:41
do the same thing with freedom loving online
37:44
communities? Sure. Exactly. And you don't even have
37:46
to go there in person. You can do
37:48
it from a college dorm or whatever. It's
37:51
so easy.
37:52
So, of course, they're doing it.
37:54
And then the other types of attacks too,
37:56
there's software level attacks. So if the Reddit
37:59
open source code had a bug in it,
38:01
for example, someone could exploit that.
38:04
And then lastly, there's social attacks. So we
38:07
talked about the admin attacks, but there's also
38:10
people trying to just ruin the culture of
38:13
the website by, say, posting 50 times a
38:16
day about
38:17
some garbage thing no one cares about and
38:20
then trying to act as if, oh, this
38:21
is the culture of the site now. Like,
38:23
one guy was really into Cher. He's like,
38:25
I'm gonna post videos of the singer Cher,
38:28
and that was his thing. Right? And then
38:29
he'd have other accounts that would upvote it
38:31
to the front, and it started to make
38:32
said it looked like a website about share,
38:34
and it's like, this is not what we're
38:36
doing here.
38:37
But if you've never seen the website before
38:39
and you hop on it and that's what
38:40
you see,
38:42
you know, you might be like, oh, this
38:43
is a stupid website. And there's always that
38:45
kind of undercurrent happening.
38:48
Stuff that's so dumb that it's gotta be
38:51
purposeful, and it's happening for years years. You
38:53
know? It's not just a one off here
38:55
and there. It's a very constant thing. Yes.
38:58
And something else you brought up to me
39:00
was a connection between Reddit and Langley, Langley
39:03
Air Force Base. Is that just where a
39:05
lot of the traffic comes from? What's that
39:07
connection? Yeah. There was a big story that
39:09
came out, I wanna say, 5 years ago.
39:11
They found the number one source of all
39:13
of Reddit's traffic was Langley Air Force Base.
39:17
So we're talking about that 1,500,000,000
39:19
page loads an hour, you know, like, how
39:21
much of that is from Langley?
39:23
Yeah. It's another checkbox towards it
39:26
working to influence public opinion. It just shows
39:29
that
39:30
that's who's interacting with it. That's who's using
39:32
it. Mhmm. And I I hope we have
39:34
enough overlap with Reddit
39:35
users in this audience that they find this
39:38
interesting, but
39:39
they might be surprised to know how few
39:41
moderators
39:42
Reddit really has that you think when you
39:45
go to a sub, it's like, oh, well,
39:46
it's moderated by a few super fans. The
39:49
Joe Rogan sub, there's a HireSight chat sub,
39:51
there's all kinds of different subs, and they're
39:53
usually just a couple of super fans who
39:55
make sure the spam is down and, you
39:57
know, there's no mutinies even though a lot
39:59
of podcasters have mutiny subs.
40:01
Looking at you, Brendan Schwab. Sorry, man.
40:04
And
40:05
I think what's surprising is that you've said
40:08
that
40:10
a small group of super mods control
40:13
basically 90%
40:15
of Reddit, and
40:17
they didn't even really
40:18
require approval from anyone. It looks organic. The
40:21
subs are seemingly separate, but not really if
40:24
all the information,
40:26
all the posts are funneled
40:28
to a few different hands that can say
40:31
thumbs up or thumbs down.
40:33
Yeah. At the beginning of Reddit's life, it
40:35
was different people for different subreddits or different
40:39
moderators, but over time, it sort of consolidated,
40:42
and there's these people who kinda made it
40:44
their mission to become moderators of as many
40:46
subs as possible.
40:48
And
40:49
there's some moderators that moderate, like, 600
40:52
subreddits,
40:53
and each subreddit
40:55
gets millions and millions of views a day.
40:57
So there's no way you can moderate
41:00
100 of those at I mean, it's not
41:01
physically possible.
41:03
And then they get rid of the other
41:04
moderators, you know, that might fight against them
41:07
or whatever, and it becomes a sort of
41:08
little fiefdom, these little kingdoms of subreddits that
41:12
these people kind of assemble.
41:14
Yes. And when you pitch this as a
41:17
topic of
41:18
an interview,
41:20
I thought the most compelling thing was this
41:22
one potential
41:24
super moderator,
41:26
this Maxwell
41:27
Hill account. And this is something, you know,
41:29
if you're in the Reddit rabbit holes, you're
41:32
aware of this situation,
41:34
but it's heavily speculated. No one, I guess,
41:37
knows 100%,
41:38
but it's heavily speculated that this Maxwell Hill
41:41
account
41:42
was or is Ghislaine Maxwell's account, and that
41:46
she
41:47
was in charge of moderating a lot of
41:50
content, and she was a real super user.
41:52
She was always on Reddit, probably had multiple
41:55
people
41:56
using the account, but it seems like she
41:58
was one of them helped make the case
42:00
that Ghislaine Maxwell,
42:02
before she went down, one of her big
42:05
operations was controlling a huge chunk of Reddit.
42:09
Yeah. Maxwell Hill, the account user Maxwell Hill,
42:12
has been around basically since the very beginning
42:14
of Reddit,
42:16
and it posted daily,
42:18
probably
42:19
20, 30, 40 posts every day hitting the
42:22
front page of Reddit, which is very hard
42:24
to do, but doing it extremely consistently for
42:27
14 years. And then the day Ghislaine Maxwell
42:31
gets arrested,
42:32
the day the account stops posting forever and
42:35
has not posted since.
42:37
Wow.
42:38
I mean, that's a pretty red flag there.
42:41
And, also,
42:42
I mean, she was arrested a couple of
42:44
years ago at this point. Right? I wanna
42:45
say maybe 2 years sounds about right. Sounds
42:47
right.
42:48
This account is still the 8th biggest
42:51
Reddit account of all time. I think that's
42:54
correct. Yeah. It has so much karma from
42:56
all the accumulated
42:57
posts and stuff.
42:59
And if you go to Reddit, you would
43:00
see a Maxwell Hill post for years years
43:03
years. I mean, that's how it was. And
43:05
the name Maxwell
43:07
Hill, it's Ghislaine Maxwell's name,
43:10
And then her father, Robert Maxwell,
43:13
who was a Mossad agent,
43:15
apparently owned the Hill McGraw textbook company that
43:18
we all used in school in the eighties
43:20
nineties in America.
43:22
So you probably used the Hill McGraw textbook,
43:24
and Robert Maxwell owned that textbook company.
43:28
And that Hill McGraw is where this Maxwell
43:31
Hill
43:32
likely comes from in in my estimation.
43:34
So
43:35
those are the puzzle pieces I've got that
43:37
I've been able to fit together. And, of
43:38
course, you know, I'll never be able to
43:39
prove it one way or the other, but
43:41
it's pretty astounding that after 14 years of
43:44
DailyPost,
43:45
this user that shares the name of Maxwell,
43:48
you know, goes away when she gets arrested.
43:50
So it's very likely she was funding it.
43:52
You know, I I really doubt she was
43:53
actually doing it. I don't think she was
43:55
sitting behind the computer. She's got bigger fish
43:57
to fry, but I would not be surprised
43:59
if she had, you know, a team of
44:00
4 people that she hired that were employees
44:03
of her that did this.
44:05
Do you think the logic there, the motivation
44:08
is kinda like why Jeff Bezos spies a
44:11
newspaper? He's like, I don't really care what
44:13
you talk about. Just don't talk about me.
44:16
Yeah. Is it that kind of thing? Like,
44:18
she was just looking for posts that would
44:21
maybe be about Israel or Mossad or her
44:23
father or Epstein
44:26
and just shutting those things down and just
44:29
flooding Reddit with a bunch of unrelated content.
44:32
Just as long as it sticks, throw it
44:34
up there because anything that is unsavory will
44:38
get buried in this avalanche of content.
44:41
Yeah. That's definitely part of it, and then
44:43
also the promotion of narratives that they do
44:45
want people to see, you know, like, oh,
44:47
Israel's
44:48
doing such a great job or, you know,
44:50
whatever.
44:51
And so they promote those as well. And
44:53
then there's the additional
44:55
pressure she now has that she's bringing in
44:58
this account is a core part of the
45:00
Reddit culture. So the admins of Reddit
45:03
love this account because it's, like, 1% of
45:06
all the Reddit culture, basically. So they'll never
45:09
touch this account because of the ad revenue
45:12
being generated. So there's this implicit threat of
45:15
do not mess with this account,
45:17
or we can damage
45:19
your ad revenue.
45:21
So as an admin,
45:23
these super high profile users can get kinda
45:25
scary to deal with because they have a
45:27
lot of power and they know it. And
45:29
it seems like the admins have all the
45:31
power, but really the website's nothing without the
45:33
users. Right? So
45:35
the super prominent users actually do have a
45:37
lot of pull, and the ones who know
45:39
it can use that leverage and get things.
45:42
Yeah. And I was looking into this just
45:44
to flesh out the case a little bit
45:47
more, and,
45:48
apparently, the people who have done this research
45:52
say that
45:53
not only
45:55
did the account go down when she was
45:56
arrested, but if you look at the phrases
46:00
and language
46:01
used, there's a lot of things that suggest
46:04
this person is a knowledgeable international
46:06
traveler. Now, you know, there's a lot of
46:08
international travelers,
46:10
but they also sussed out
46:13
a, quote, seemingly unapologetic
46:15
attitude towards pedophilia
46:18
in this account's
46:19
comments.
46:20
Yeah. That wouldn't surprise
46:23
me. That's part of this cultural manipulation and
46:25
this
46:26
manufacturing of false consensus, you know, and they're
46:28
trying to normalize certain bad values
46:31
in young people that read this website.
46:34
And, you know, there's a lot of kind
46:36
of cultural sub movements on Reddit that are
46:38
like that that are just genuinely destructive
46:41
if you take them seriously.
46:43
Yeah. And, man, the
46:45
rabbit hole of content on YouTube is insane.
46:49
I mean, you wanna
46:51
suppress and remove
46:53
videos that are just 2 guys talking with
46:55
no video whatsoever, just a blank screen and
46:59
a conversation
47:00
being had that's gotta be removed, but the
47:02
things that you can find on there for
47:04
kids, like it looks all cutesy, and then
47:07
the bears chop each other's heads off with
47:09
chainsaws,
47:10
or the little girl licks a lollipop that's
47:12
being held by the knees of a dog.
47:17
Really nasty stuff. I mean, they're playing with
47:20
every possible line, and YouTube's just like, whatever.
47:23
I thought when Daniel Tosh did that whole
47:25
Elsa gate thing, it became a little bit
47:27
of a viral sensation, but all that stuff
47:30
is definitely still there.
47:32
You can find
47:34
a lot of nasty stuff on there, and
47:36
that's fun.
47:37
Yeah. It's crazy. But then you, like, can't
47:39
say the word murder sometimes. You have to
47:41
say, like, unalived. That's why all these people
47:44
are saying unalived now because the murder word
47:46
is too scary, and it's just it's it's
47:49
a very bizarre
47:50
prioritization
47:51
of values, but, you know, it's not real
47:53
is the thing. It's just this isn't a
47:55
real culture. This doesn't reflect real human beings'
47:58
values. It's just a manufactured
48:00
culture.
48:01
I think that's really the takeaway here. I
48:03
agree. And even just having little kids, you
48:06
constantly hear about miss Rachel.
48:09
Well, I just watched a psychological
48:11
analysis of miss Rachel, and they go through
48:14
and they
48:15
count every
48:17
instance of overstimulation
48:19
that's being used, whether it's a graphic
48:22
or an exaggerated
48:23
tone
48:25
or music in the background. Like,
48:28
to some people who know a lot more
48:29
than I do about this, it appears like
48:32
it was engineered from
48:34
absolute maximum
48:36
psychological
48:37
manipulation
48:38
and
48:39
basically engineering
48:40
ADD in children. But, you know, parents get
48:43
lazy. They want something to put on for
48:45
their kids. They say, well, everyone else does
48:47
it, and it's educational.
48:49
And then their kid is super hyperactive
48:52
and has no attention span and has ADD
48:54
going into kindergarten,
48:56
and you wonder why.
48:58
Yeah. It's incredible
48:59
how far a lot of the culture has
49:01
gotten from how people actually think and operate.
49:05
Mhmm. But luckily for ADD, there's a pill
49:07
for that. So, thankfully,
49:09
we can solve that problem. You know, it's
49:12
a lifelong
49:13
prescription, but you'll be okay. Yep. They create
49:16
the problem and sell you the solution.
49:18
Yeah.
49:19
Man, so another point, one last point about
49:23
Reddit and Ghislaine Maxwell is apparently,
49:26
her father, Robert Maxwell, used to own
49:29
Conde Nast,
49:31
which is the company that bought Reddit.
49:33
Oh, is that right? Yeah. That checks out.
49:35
I didn't know that specifically, but, yeah, that
49:37
checks out.
49:39
Yeah. Conde Nast had it for quite a
49:41
while.
49:42
Crazy. Yeah. That is crazy. I didn't know
49:44
that one. Nice. Good digging. Yeah. Well, you
49:47
know, I've done this a time or 2.
49:51
Very nice.
49:52
One more thing on Reddit, though. Also, they're
49:54
headquartered in the New World Trade Center is
49:56
something I read. They rebuilt the World Trade
49:58
Center, and then they gave Reddit, like, 3
50:00
floors of it. Really? Yeah. And this is
50:02
a company that's never turned a profit. Hey.
50:04
Let's set up shop in the most expensive
50:07
office space in the world. You know? Like,
50:09
who's paying for that?
50:11
Yeah.
50:13
Pretty crazy.
50:14
Well, man, this is one of the more
50:16
in the weeds
50:18
subjects
50:19
that I've done a show about in a
50:21
long time. And
50:23
mainly just because I use Reddit, and we
50:25
have a good history, and I was curious
50:28
about the things you see
50:30
managing
50:31
such a situation.
50:33
What are some of your final points or
50:35
the things you want people to take away
50:38
who might be
50:39
listening? So like we said, don't listen to
50:42
Internet culture, especially text based
50:45
Internet culture that is on its way out.
50:48
We just gotta think of it in the
50:50
same way you think of TV. When you
50:52
turn on the TV, TV news,
50:54
our generation, you know, we immediately are like,
50:57
this is garbage. They're gonna lie to me.
50:59
You go into it with that mindset. And
51:01
I think we need to have that same
51:03
mindset going into reading comments and stuff on
51:06
the internet and just
51:08
being aware that this is happening, and it's
51:10
not just like a faraway
51:12
theoretical problem. This is, like,
51:15
half the Internet comments you read every day
51:18
right now are this.
51:20
The comments you actually read on daily basis
51:22
are constantly being influenced by this. So if
51:24
you see something weird and there's like, oh,
51:26
this culture doesn't make any sense,
51:28
it's probably manufactured. It's probably fake. So just
51:31
walk away from it. Yeah. Don't be so
51:34
invested,
51:35
and don't let a few comments
51:38
psychologically
51:39
manipulate you into thinking that that's
51:43
a bigger opinion
51:45
or a widely adopted opinion when maybe it
51:47
really isn't.
51:48
Exactly.
51:50
We are lucky to have known a pre
51:51
Internet world. You know, the younger kids,
51:54
not so lucky. This is all they know,
51:56
and a lot of them seem very erratic
51:59
and very ADD and
52:02
basically traumatized without knowing it. I mean,
52:05
suicide and depression are up. The popping of
52:07
all kinds of pills is up. It's having
52:10
a huge effect. They're figuring it out though.
52:12
I mean, people are starting to connect the
52:14
dots on this stuff. You know, it can't
52:16
remain a mystery forever. And just like we
52:18
saw pre Internet culture, there may very well
52:21
be a point coming up here of a
52:22
post Internet culture Yeah. Where people get tired
52:25
and walk away and have some sort of
52:27
post Internet society, you know, like Amish but
52:30
stuck in 2008 or something. Yeah. Well, get
52:32
the disc man out, people. I'll start mailing
52:35
you the monthly CD.
52:37
We'll go Columbia House on this bitch. Nice.
52:41
Awesome. Well, anything else to add in terms
52:43
of what's next for you, what's next for
52:47
SET IT? Do you have a plan going
52:49
forward?
52:50
Anything else to throw out to people?
52:52
SET IT's gonna be around. It's not going
52:54
anywhere, and, you know, I'm probably not gonna
52:57
be super active with it, but it'll be
52:59
there for a resource for people who need
53:01
it. So
53:02
and then, you know, I might come out
53:03
with some articles here and there. That was
53:05
kinda how this whole thing got started as
53:06
I I wrote a couple articles, and you
53:09
caught them, and here we are. So Yes.
53:11
And go to setit.net.
53:13
Make an account. Share your cat videos there.
53:16
Share content that doesn't
53:18
trigger the sensors because we don't want it
53:21
just to be
53:23
based 4 chan light.
53:25
Exactly. It doesn't need to be only overflow.
53:27
It can be just regular stuff too.
53:29
Awesome. Well, it was good to reconnect
53:33
after
53:34
I don't even know how many years, but
53:36
I think 7, actually.
53:38
7 years.
53:39
Unreal. Yeah. Time does fly. Indeed.
53:43
Well, I appreciate your time. Thanks for sharing
53:46
some of the stuff you see behind the
53:48
curtain, and,
53:50
hopefully it was good to vent a little
53:51
bit. And Oh, this is great, man. I
53:54
appreciate you, Greg. Thanks for doing what you
53:56
do, man. Of course. Thanks for doing what
53:58
you do, and we'll talk again in the
53:59
future.
54:00
Alright. Have a good one.
54:04
Alright, people. A little something different, a little
54:07
unexpected.
54:08
I initiated this by reaching out to magnora
54:11
7 because I thought our previous two interviews
54:14
were true standouts,
54:16
really top tier. The one we did first
54:19
about the Rothschilds
54:20
taking over
54:22
diamond mines in Africa and how they basically
54:25
co opted every country. Like, going through that
54:27
country by country,
54:29
there really is no other show in the
54:31
archive quite like it. And then later after
54:34
the death of Anthony Bourdain and then that
54:36
really weird Kate Spade thing with the rescuer's
54:40
mask on her husband,
54:43
He crushed that as well, and it was
54:45
also very unique.
54:47
So I was looking through the archive of
54:49
who we should talk to again, and I
54:50
rang his bell and asked him about any
54:53
more recent work, and he outlined a show
54:55
built around the themes we covered today.
54:58
It seems like that's really been his big
55:01
focus, trying to get set it off the
55:03
ground rather than doing the kind of research
55:05
he maybe did previously. I mean, it all
55:07
weaves together. You know, you gotta weave.
55:09
But I think he really wanted to
55:12
let people know about the hidden headaches and
55:15
behind the curtain coordinated attacks that he's had
55:18
to deal with trying to build a truly
55:20
independent free speech social media alternative.
55:23
A very ambitious and noble goal.
55:27
And I do find it interesting to hear
55:28
about, but I worry that we might not
55:30
all be Reddit users or care too much
55:33
about the strife of building an alternative
55:36
platform.
55:37
Like, it might be a narrow segment of
55:39
the audience that is really engaged with this
55:41
one, but it does help to explain why
55:43
we can't have nice things. Right?
55:46
And the two pieces of information
55:48
that stuck out the most to me
55:51
that I felt like should be in the
55:53
THC record were the bits about the highly
55:56
likely Ghislaine Maxwell Reddit moderator account and the
56:00
tragic
56:01
tale of Aaron Swartz.
56:03
Certainly not new information for the people who
56:05
swim in those waters, but certainly not anything
56:08
we've talked about here as far back as
56:10
I can remember,
56:12
which is sometimes not that far.
56:14
But what is new though is now that
56:17
Trump is in the driver's seat again, he
56:19
actually made good on one of his big
56:20
promises that's kind of adjacent to this sort
56:23
of stuff.
56:24
A little bit of an obscure promise, but
56:26
one that was really important to Internet culture,
56:29
and that's the communing of the sentence
56:32
of Ross Ulbricht,
56:33
the founder of Silk Road.
56:35
And really a major reason why Bitcoin has
56:38
any value at all. He was sentenced to
56:41
life in 2013,
56:43
and I definitely think 12 years is plenty.
56:46
I don't really wanna go too deep into
56:48
the moral or philosophical
56:50
analysis
56:51
of Silk Road.
56:53
I do know people who have used it
56:55
to access psychedelics. That's no big deal.
56:58
And it really is just an interesting
57:00
test case of anarchist values.
57:03
Do you truly think anyone should be able
57:06
to buy anything anonymously?
57:09
It's a bold stance and a pretty tricky
57:11
situation because we have things today that can
57:13
do insane amounts of damage.
57:16
Although based on some articles I'd read, at
57:19
least 70% of the sales were drugs and,
57:22
you know, don't really have a problem with
57:24
that as long as
57:26
it's just purchases for personal use from people
57:29
who
57:30
are of an age to be able to
57:31
make all those decisions about what to put
57:33
in their own body. But then you get
57:35
into hacking services
57:37
and purchasing
57:38
computer viruses and malware and stolen credit cards
57:41
and weapons, of course.
57:44
But from what I remember,
57:45
contrary to news coverage, Silk Road specifically said
57:49
it prohibited the sale of anything that could
57:51
be used to cause harm,
57:54
and then either this got done anyway or
57:57
it was more something done on Silk Road
58:00
clones. Because once the website is made, others
58:02
can just duplicate the model and have even
58:04
more laxed rules.
58:06
But what Ross did technically is actually just
58:09
pretty amazing in terms of how it all
58:11
worked anonymously just on reviews and permissionless
58:14
blockchain transactions,
58:17
especially at the time.
58:19
Of course, you mess with the bowl, you
58:20
get the horns and all that, but I'm
58:22
glad he's free.
58:24
So back to the show today. In the
58:26
second hour, we filled it out with some
58:28
more semi related stuff like the death of
58:31
Trevor Moore,
58:33
Pokemon Go and the CIA,
58:35
and Hugh Hefner as a proto Diddy Epstein
58:38
archetype.
58:40
And a few other things too, but, you
58:42
know, Magnora's problems with Sedit are of interest
58:45
to someone in my own position swimming upstream
58:48
where I'm not wanted.
58:49
Sometimes it is the corporate system attacking alternatives.
58:53
Sometimes your shadow banned for too much raw
58:55
truth, and sometimes it's just human nature that
58:58
gets in the way.
59:00
Little bit of THC history, but this is
59:02
kinda what happened with the original attempt at
59:04
community with the THC Facebook group. It was
59:07
sort of hijacked by people who tried to
59:09
build their own brands by promoting
59:12
to THC fans now that they were centralized.
59:15
And that was a long, long time ago,
59:17
but then Aaron Keith stepped up to be
59:19
a big help, and I hope people are
59:21
still enjoying it. I don't really get on
59:23
Facebook much anymore.
59:25
And then I thought, well, what if we
59:27
had a private forum for Plus? That way
59:29
we could keep the
59:31
community a little more insulated from that kind
59:33
of thing. But I'd let it become the
59:35
wild west, and it got me caught up
59:37
in the Tracy thing because one user was
59:40
being creepy and weird.
59:42
If that one guy from the mysterious
59:45
strange campground
59:47
wasn't messaging her and she wasn't coming to
59:49
the forum to see those posts, I probably
59:51
never would've got mentioned in that video.
59:54
And then even recently, the Telegram that we
59:57
have had a recent dust up with band
59:59
users feeling like the moderator was too harsh
1:00:04
and drama. Honestly, I just like to focus
1:00:07
on the interviews and keep to myself.
1:00:09
I really am pretty social by nature and
1:00:12
extroverted and all that, but any time you
1:00:14
have communities, you're gonna have people trying to
1:00:16
use them for their own thing.
1:00:18
And any time you give people that moderation
1:00:21
power, you can likely find times where they
1:00:23
flex it.
1:00:24
So thinking about what Magnora is doing and
1:00:27
running something like a Reddit alternative, that sounds
1:00:30
like a nightmare to me.
1:00:32
I don't even really get too friendly with
1:00:34
guests anymore because, of course, the Tracey thing,
1:00:37
but I also had things go sideways with
1:00:39
Jon Brisson.
1:00:41
He was happy to use THC for promotion
1:00:44
and he wrote a great book about gut
1:00:46
health. I wish we could do more shows
1:00:48
together, but then he went nuts posting all
1:00:51
over the place that Gordon White is my
1:00:53
occult handler and my friend's psychotic break was
1:00:56
because of my magic use,
1:00:59
and I don't even have any legitimate
1:01:02
magic use. Yes. I've made some sigils. I
1:01:04
tried the sigil a day project, but this
1:01:07
isn't summoning Baphomet or anything
1:01:10
dark.
1:01:11
And just like exercise
1:01:13
or having any kind of discipline when it
1:01:16
comes to diet,
1:01:18
I fell off pretty quickly. Not because anything
1:01:20
crazy happened, but because it just takes work
1:01:23
to do magic right.
1:01:25
So, you know, in that instance, I think
1:01:27
his Christian bias
1:01:29
had him very paranoid
1:01:31
and making massive assumptions,
1:01:34
and I thought we were becoming friends, but
1:01:38
so it goes. And people wonder why I'm
1:01:40
critical sometimes of people that have that persuasion.
1:01:45
But, again, coming back to this show, Raiders
1:01:47
will let me know how they feel as
1:01:49
they always do. But I can understand some
1:01:51
people feeling like this was just kind of
1:01:53
a slow news day or a range of
1:01:55
topics not exactly relevant to them. But I
1:01:57
love the work Magnorra has done, and I
1:01:59
thought we'd give it another go.
1:02:02
Sometimes when people do work that doesn't seem
1:02:04
to be appreciated, they just need time to
1:02:06
vent.
1:02:07
Hopefully, this was cathartic for him.
1:02:10
But mentioning the ratings, yes. Let's look at
1:02:12
the last show, the most recent episode with
1:02:14
Charlie Robinson.
1:02:16
It clocked in at a 4.8.
1:02:20
Yes. We're back, baby.
1:02:23
I knew it would be a good one.
1:02:25
In the past, I always enjoyed interviews with
1:02:28
Charlie, but I just sort of waited until
1:02:30
he had a new book out. That's been
1:02:31
my philosophy with many guests who tend to
1:02:35
write regularly.
1:02:36
But now I hope we can just check-in
1:02:38
a bit more often. Clearly, he's very busy,
1:02:40
busier than ever, but hopefully he'll make time
1:02:43
for us when we get these strings of
1:02:45
highly charged, manipulated events.
1:02:48
And on with the routine, doing the meetup
1:02:50
calendar thing we do, let's see what's going
1:02:53
on.
1:02:55
January 23rd, LA truth at the coral tree.
1:02:59
January 25th, McCall Collective Brewery in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
1:03:04
February 1st, Conway Pub in Conway, Washington.
1:03:09
February 3rd, Gail Brauth's Ale House in Auckland,
1:03:11
New Zealand.
1:03:13
February 8th, McCall's Collective Taphouse in Barrensville, Pennsylvania.
1:03:17
February 10th, Roots and leaves in Santa Fe,
1:03:20
New Mexico,
1:03:22
and February
1:03:23
15th,
1:03:24
h two booster
1:03:26
in Vlissingen,
1:03:27
Netherlands.
1:03:29
Love it.
1:03:30
And, again, big event with Gordon coming up
1:03:33
on March 8th here in the Tampa area.
1:03:35
In fact, now I think it might be
1:03:37
at High Springs Brewing, and we're gonna take
1:03:39
a party bus from here to there.
1:03:42
Here being Tampa, but
1:03:44
that's probably
1:03:45
90%
1:03:46
gonna happen. I do still need to lock
1:03:49
it in.
1:03:50
Probably shouldn't say anything till it is locked
1:03:52
in, but it's looking good. I know the
1:03:54
High Springs Brewing guys. I've met them.
1:03:57
It seems like it's gonna work out.
1:03:59
And because High Springs is a little off
1:04:02
the beaten path and not exactly close to
1:04:04
any major city, and every time we've done
1:04:06
this before, it's been in a city, and
1:04:08
we don't really know anything about our draw
1:04:10
in Florida.
1:04:11
We might open this up to non premium,
1:04:15
non plus members and just really rip the
1:04:17
doors off and go with, a free and
1:04:20
open event for the total
1:04:23
broad audience we might have.
1:04:26
Could get crazy, but, again, more on that
1:04:28
later.
1:04:29
In Hireside news, I did add the recent
1:04:32
custom episode specific songs to the bottom of
1:04:36
the show posts on the website.
1:04:38
A lot of mixed feelings about those songs,
1:04:40
but I've always loved
1:04:42
writing
1:04:43
lyrics.
1:04:45
And in high school, one of my best
1:04:47
friends played guitar, so we had a little
1:04:49
Tenacious d type of thing going on.
1:04:52
When I moved away from him, I would
1:04:54
use Fruity Loops and different
1:04:57
programs
1:04:58
to
1:04:59
basically use loops and the Lego blocks of
1:05:03
music to put things together just so I
1:05:05
could get that creative outlet.
1:05:08
And now I use some of these AI
1:05:09
systems.
1:05:11
I have huge problems with AI in a
1:05:13
lot of different areas. I guess, just for
1:05:15
me, music isn't one because it's just something
1:05:18
I've always
1:05:20
wanted to be able to do, but never
1:05:22
took the time to really develop it, and
1:05:23
it went from
1:05:25
outsourcing the music to a friend,
1:05:27
to using the Lego blocks of software,
1:05:32
to just pressing create.
1:05:34
But if I was using Fruity Loops
1:05:36
or Garage Band Loops, nobody would think I
1:05:39
was, like, affecting a musician's
1:05:42
job.
1:05:43
Right? It's just kind of a weird thing.
1:05:45
You use AI, you're doing something bad. You
1:05:47
use
1:05:48
loops and digital software that basically get you
1:05:51
there just with a few more building blocks
1:05:54
and that's acceptable.
1:05:56
I don't know. But I'm sorry.
1:05:57
There's no way I could make custom songs
1:06:00
for each episode any other way and I
1:06:02
just like doing it, guys.
1:06:03
Not everybody hates them,
1:06:05
but because they're easy for me to make
1:06:07
and they're free,
1:06:09
they're available to anyone. Go to thehiresidechats.com.
1:06:12
If you hear a specific one you like,
1:06:13
go to that episode page, scroll to the
1:06:15
bottom, and just download it.
1:06:17
But, hey, not a lot more to say.
1:06:19
Check out setit.net
1:06:20
if you want a free speech alternative to
1:06:22
Reddit and you want it to be successful.
1:06:24
It requires participation.
1:06:26
I hope maybe this made you think about
1:06:28
how hard it is to beat back the
1:06:30
big system and how lucky we are to
1:06:32
have anything left.
1:06:34
I hope Magnora 7 keeps fighting the good
1:06:36
fight and sees some new users making his
1:06:39
efforts worth it. I'll see you next time.
1:06:41
I've done my part.
1:06:43
Your move, corporate controllers, independent
1:06:45
platform destroyers, and agents of the sanitized and
1:06:48
maybe even dead Internet.
1:06:50
Your
1:06:51
fucking.
1:06:54
Some of us remember
1:06:57
a better
1:07:00
time. The Wild West spear
1:07:05
was in full swing alive online,
1:07:08
but we got baited,
1:07:12
and they
1:07:13
got switched.
1:07:16
They'd a harvesting
1:07:18
in full swing,
1:07:20
billionaires
1:07:22
in risk.
1:07:24
This digital
1:07:25
public square
1:07:41
connected, but gotten lonely.
1:07:45
And the blue light pouring out
1:07:48
is killing us slowly.
1:07:53
It's so