The Crypto Lark
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the show, everyone. It’s the Krypto, like I’m superexcited, have back on the show today. Naomi Brockwell. Naomi, how’s it going? Going pretty well. How are you? Doing great. Doing great. For those of you who may not know Naomi. She is the Bitcoin girl, has a lot of different Bitcoin related music videos out there on the Internet, as well as being a really just a massive part of the crypto community, having emceed lots of the top cryptocurrency events, as well as making fantastic content on her YouTube channel about privacy and bitcoin and all kinds of fun and interesting topics. So they linked Downbelow to her YouTube channel. So do go and subscribe to that. But today we’re gonna be talking about really what’s going on with this crazy crisis, how governments are using this crisis as a way to take away our privacy and just bail out some Bitcoin and all that fun kind of stuff. So stick around. It’s gonna be a great, great chat. And now I think we should hop right in with a nice, juicy one. Did we learn nothing from 2008? This this crash happened. It was terrible. Banks looted everything. And now here we are in 2020. What’s go ahead. We learn nothing. I think it’s the opposite lock. I think we learned everything from that, which is why it’s all happening again. And what I mean is that government got a taste for how easy it is to print huge amounts of money injected straight into the pockets of all of their crony friends. And then, I mean, we still haven’t had an audit of the top bailouts from 08. We don’t know where all of that money went. And the government. I think people in power realized how much power they could garner by having that leverage tool to be able to say, well, we have all of this money to dispose of. Who wants it? Put up your hand. What have you got to offer? And so, yeah, they learned a great lesson of how easy that was. So now rolled around. This is basically the same same process that is on steroids now. Right. The amount of money that they’re printing is astronomical. There are trillions of dollars in corporate bailouts and once again, the people are getting screwed. So I think at the end of the day, yes, individuals did not become suddenly economically literates. They are looking at this one thousand two hundred dollar check that the US government is saying, well, we’re going to send you the stimulus package, 1200 dollars. That’s gonna be fine for you being shot in your house for months, not being allowed to work. That will tide you over, I’m sure. Meanwhile, they’re handing trillions of dollars to that crony corporate friends. And no one gets an eyelid because they were able to, you know, just grease people’s agreement with all of this by by giving them something inside, like throwing them crumbs. So I think it’s the same thing happening over again is history repeating. And what we learned from 08, like when we have these emergency measures, they’re not emergency measures. They lost. And I think this is something that we definitely need to keep in mind, especially when we start to talk about privacy and and how we’re dealing with that crazy crackdown in terms of surveillance that is happening right now. The policies being implemented. I think I think it’s a scary slope, to be honest. It really is. I think you make a great point that when we do see these things happening, they rarely get rolled back later on. Oh, it’s just now it’s just during the emergency. And then 10 years down the line, we’re still saying, hey, why? Why is this still the case? Why are we still doing these things? It’s an emergency measure. And suddenly you realize this emergency never ended, you know? And yet people keep buying it. They keep saying, oh, well, it’s just an emergency. It’s just a stopgap measure. And these things, as you said, they never get rolled back. And we should especially when we’re talking about privacy solutions right now, because there’s all kinds of surveillance technology out there. And honestly, you know, if people want to create contact tracing apps and use them, I think that’s great. Pay individuals can can choose to use these things. But if governments are going to be saying, like, we mandate, you use this project, this app, and we’re going to have access to wherever you are at any given time, it’s all going to be identifiable to your post said it’s just surveillance and we need to be really careful with what measures and what invasions of privacy we’re going to allow right now, knowing that this is going to stay in place for the next 20, 30, 50 years until they cook up something new and worse. It’s not going to be rolled back. And I think too often people is like a high stake is a high stake selling environment. You know, where where the government’s I click going to do something immediately. Let’s pass this bill that has all of these really important things, because we have to ask you, time is of the essence and people go, oh, OK, just pass the toss it quick, guys. And they don’t read these things. And then, like policies, people don’t kick up a fuss because people like what we need. We need all this checking stuff. And so just pass it, you know, mandate it all. Let’s get a hold on this thing. And it’s it’s just so such a terrible. Is it. I hate that people fall for this stuff that they do every time because these high stakes environments at high. Just sales. You could call it. It just hurts all of us because at the end of the day, as you said, these are not things that are just going to be around while this emergency is going on. These isn’t going to be around forever. These things don’t get rolled back. So we just need to look at what’s actually being implemented and decide, is this the future that we want to be creating right now with these policies? It’s very interesting points there. And I think one of the things is that there’s no one to help us. This is something people need to realize. I mean, we back in 2008, I mean, the Occupy Wall Street movement came out of that and that was short lived and a bit disorganized. And I think, you know, the media ignored and then vilified and then it was kind of over. Right. And people had to go back to doing stuff. Whereas here you’re up against this behemoth of these these banks that have nothing. But they have thousands of Full-Time lobbyists working to pursue their interests and to bribe politicians and to get their policy initiatives passed. I mean, I think that I can’t river which leak it was that came out, but it showed that in Obama’s entire first cabinet was chosen by Citibank. I mean, the level of corruption going on in governments and both parties agree on. This is a thing or a take across countries, not just the U.S. I mean, most parties in any given government agree on the general narrative of this is how banking is done. This is how power is given over to the elites. And this is how we take away privacy from our citizens. Yeah, no, it’s it’s devastating. And I just like and reading your poster in the background, because honestly, this is so Orwellian when you say war is peace free. Free war is peace. Freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. What is this? Oh, William. Doublespeak way where they say things like that to get these things passed. They say, you know, they give us these false choices and they they make us buy into this system that is hurting all of us. And really, you’re just selling your rights to make choices about your life and you’re selling it to the highest bidder and opting into mob rule people to make decisions about how you live your life. I mean, it’s just such a like it’s a crazy situation in general. But right now we’re in particular danger because we have all of these big decisions to make. I mean, right now, honestly, that there are systems around the world that are so stressed right now that some people are saying, well, this is crazy. We’re on the verge of collapse as a society. Could you are when you’re looking at a six million people in a single week filing for unemployment and then just so many more millions across the world just being unemployed? People are predicting that 40 percent of the population might end up being unemployed as a result of all of this is the lockdowns of businesses, et cetera. I mean, that’s the recipe for civil unrest. Absolutely. And so I think that when you’re dealing with such a high stakes environment like that, some people say, well, society could collapse entirely and this would be scary and let’s protect ourselves. They’re about to enter into this, you know, crazy Hunger Games scenario or something. I don’t know that other people are saying, no, this is the perfect opportunity. These systems are stressed. This is a great chance to build something better, to implement better strategies and better systems and better policies. And, you know, that’s a really difficult thing to do. But it’s not completely out of the question. You’re looking at people taking matters into their own hands already. Like when the FDA screwed up so badly with testing and when they were they had a monopoly on testing. They banned any competition in testing and then they screwed up the test. So America was just so prepared for everything going on. And then not only that, but then they started banning the innovation coming out where people were picking up the slack, sort of banning at home testing. They made it so that you had to all the testing had to go through that a single state you couldn’t do testing in your own state. And that went on for like a month. I mean, that blows my mind that you have systems like that and people started to just say, OK, I’m just going to go around you and not ask for permission. And people started to do things. People started to 3D printing masks. People started to use their computing, hashing to your phone link for a QR to fold proteins, to start to look at how we can we can help in this situation. People when you have like people being told where they can spend their money, what price they have to use, what they are allowed to spend, how much they are allowed to spend on these goods. Which businesses are essential? Which business not? You say people start to say, well, I’m going to find alternatives. I’m going to go around, I’m going to maybe use online marketplaces that aren’t as heavily monitored as Amazon, for example. Well, I mean, you have these small in towns. You have this little ecosystem set up where people are buying and selling goods from each other rather than going to their usual places. There’s this whole shift that’s happening in society as people are taking matters into their own hands. And I think something like that could be exciting if you use it in the right way. This sort of idea of a garrison where you can go around the existing systems that don’t work. My hope more than ever is that through this process, we learn how corrupt and inept the government is with all of that awful policies that they’ve implemented and awful reactions. And just like this corruption, I mean, just blows my mind and all of this and the devastation that they’ve caused as a result of everything that’s going on. But I hope the people start to wake up to this and find better systems, start to use their systems. That’s that’s why frame for at the end of all this. Hopefully we can we can hope. And I think to an extent, honestly, we are starting to see at least if we talk about let’s talk about the cryptocurrency aspect here. We are seeing to an extent, people starting to move into this. And we’ve seen big volumes picking up across Latin American crypto exchanges, for example, Argentina. We’re seeing record volumes in Venezuela. We’re seeing record volumes, Colombia, Brazil, on and on. We’re seeing a lot of new interest from people and it’s coming at the exact time. It’s not just I think the people want to cop in and grab some quick gains when there’s those people to. Right. There’s definitely a speculators coming. I think we’re seeing a lot of people coming in for the unique aspects of cryptocurrency that you can’t evade capital controls. We see capital controls affecting a lot of countries or people can’t send sometimes any money out. We’ve seen that in Lebanon where you can’t send any money without. Getting special permission, which which basically means that if you’re rich and connected, you can do whatever I want, and if you’re not rich and connected, well, you have to come begging for scraps from the banks. If you can get anything at all, which is a broken system. And so we’ve seen these volunteers picking up everywhere, really. I mean, even major exchanges like crack. And for example, we’ve seen I think they said they saw an 83 percent increase in sign ups or something like that. So we see a lot of new people coming into the crypto space at the exact same time that we see the governments. I mean, I think the U.S. is the absolute worst offender when it comes to this. I mean, how many trillions that literally lost count of how many trillions? It’s two trillion later. It’s a trade side. I mean, it’s really over here. It’s half a billion here. I mean, that the one thing I think I just did is such an egregious example of how screwed up the whole system was as the small business loan situation where they had three hundred and fifty billion dollars set aside for small businesses, almost all of it went to big businesses. The banks took 10 billion dollars in fees to do almost no work except to take money from the government and hand it straight to their friends by taking a nice little chunk in the middle. So it’s decimated. It was disgusting. Well, I see this idea. Good. Yeah. Yeah. No, I’m just going to mention what you were saying before about this uptick that we’ve seen. I think this is completely to be expected. If we think about the conditions that led to Bitcoin becoming popular in the first place, it was alright. We had this giant economic collapse. You had all these corporate bailouts. You had all of this corruption. You had just a printing press going crazy. And then someone released this white paper and said, here’s an alternative money. And I think that these days when people get into crypto, especially the last few years, they get into it and they’re like, what is what’s the price? How can I speculate on this? You know, how can I flip it back? I’ve bought them. And they don’t really understand why Bitcoin has so many impassioned users, people who would like changing their entire lifestyle to fight this. They will like it. It’s just a money like I didn’t guess it. But the fact is, in 08, people were so angry about what was going on. They were disgusted at the policies that the government was enacting and they wanted a better way. Now, in right now, we’re in the midst of another financial crisis. Right. And people starting to get a say that same feeling of why it’s so important to have alternatives. They’re saying the corruption in traditional finance, the same the corporate bailouts are seeing all the cronyism and the politicians just lining the pockets of their friends. People are angry and they’re starting to look at alternatives. Now, this is the first crisis that we’ve had since we’ve had Bitcoin, since we’ve had cryptocurrency in general. So I’m very interested to see what’s going to happen here. You know, I don’t know whether there’s going to be hyperinflation or inflation in general. We didn’t really see it in 08. So I don’t know whether that’s going to be something that we’re going to see this time, even though the government is really ramping up policies that they even did in a way. It’s on a much larger scale this time. But who knows, maybe the Fed’s able to juggle this. And we don’t really see the inflation that a lot of a lot of people are like the apocalypse people are predicting. But I think that even if, like, first of all, people worried about that. So they’re getting involved. But second of all, people just want out of this system. It’s unfair. It’s unjust. And. And so I like more than ever, I’m looking to the people who are providing everyday use cases for cryptocurrency. It’s not just that I want people to hold and buy so that they have reserves. If things hit the fan and all of their money goes to trash because it’s just being inflated away. Right. I actually that that’s great. And I love that. And I think it’s good to have a hedge just in case and diversify. But I also want to see people pulling their power away from traditional finance. I want to see people closing their bank accounts. You know, right now, I don’t think we’re going to have bans on whether or not you can get your money out. I think we’re just going to see banks ramping up the bureaucracy, all of the things that they have to jump through to get their money. There’s not going to be some oh, we don’t have the money. You can’t come here or there’s only five thousand dollars a day you can access or whatever. I don’t think we’re going to see that. I think we’re going to just be waiting through this molasses of bureaucracy. So it’s gonna be harder than ever. And that’s how the banks are going to safeguard themselves because they don’t have the money that people will want to get out. Right. That I haven’t. I want to see people pull that power away. Don’t rely on them to give you permission to access your own money. Haven’t had money in crypto that you’re using every day. Buy your groceries with crypto bio gas or petrol with crypto. Pay your bills with crypto. All of this stuff is possible now. We have had 10 years of development. We have all kinds of third parties that make this a whole lot easier. Places like Refill make it really easy to do all of this stuff and, you know, go to your local meat market, go to your local vegetable garden and ask them if they will accept crypto. Go to your local brewery. Tell them that you’ll give them. You know, I like places like any pay, for example, actually give you a percentage. If people sign up to accept Krypto. There’s all kinds of incentives in place for you to be using crypto in your everyday life. That’s that’s the world that I want to say that that that’s an exciting world soon. I think more and more and people realize that you can there. There is alternative ways to pay. I think that’s one of the great things about Bitcoin, is that we’ve set up this alternate rail of being able to pay people and obviously Bitcoin just the tip of the spear. There’s a whole lot of cryptocurrency that people can accept if you want to accept, like going except like going into one theory, we say, except Ethereum. And that’s that’s a great diversity, a choice versus saying, well, you have to use this government dollar, this government fiat currency, the one that we you have no control over. I think that’s one of the things that really excites me about Bitcoin, is because I know what Bitcoin is. I know what’s going on with the network. I understand the economic policy of it. I know you know that there’s no changes coming to that except the ones that are pre-programmed in, whereas what we see with the central banks, whenever they want to print another trillion dollars, they do it and they rob you every time they front run you. First and foremost, they give the money straight over to their banker buddies who then lend it out to you at 20 percent a year or whatever. That’s a broken system. And Bitcoin is the opposite of that. Bitcoin is giving you monetary freedom, this Swiss bank account in your pocket and all that stuff. It’s very, very powerful stuff. And it’s you’re removing yourself from this corrupt banking system when you hold Bitcoin and of course, other crypto currencies are providing this whole new just explosion. I feel like it’s this like evolutionary Cambrian explosion moment where we see all these different financial tools starting to come out across decentralized finance. So it’s very, very exciting. No, it’s absolutely exciting and I want to see people not just taking back control, taking their own financial sovereignty back into their own hands. I want to see people supporting those that are building our decentralized future. Because when you’re using these services, you’ll giving in market signal that says, yes, this is something I want in my life. When you’re going to a brewery and paying with crypto, you’ll telling them, yes, I want you to be using crypto. Remember, if things hit the fan and U.S. dollar goes to nothing, then like, what are your options? Right. If you’re if there aren’t voices around you that are accepting crypto crypto, I mean, is it gonna be that useful for you if you don’t know how to spend this stuff? Is it going to be that useful for you? Right. So I think that people need to start to oil this mechanism. This crypto ecosystem support the places that are already investing in this and just pull your power away from traditional finance, inject it into the future, which is decentralized money that no one can control, because people as I said, they’re so angry about what’s going on, they’re looking for alternatives. And this is the moment where we need to show them we have a better alternative. That’s right. And we have better if I go back, I think back to like 2017, we had this whole ICL boom and bust and all that stuff. And that was we didn’t really have a lot of great working product. And we had, you know, his bitcoin is working fine. And there were some other things are working just fine that we fast forward to 2020, the entire crypto ecosystem. It’s so good right now and it’s only getting better all the time. We have so many great wallets. We have so many great now decentralized services, decentralized exchanges and decentralized lending and decentralized insurance and decentralized loans and decentralized gaming and decentralized content hosting services. It just it’s wild as well. You can actually start using the stuff and some of these things you can use to get rewards for. And then some of these things you can actually just use to make your everyday life just a little bit better. No, absolutely. And I think that it feels empowering. It feels empowering to take control of your finances, to take the power away so that when you. I mean, essentially when you’re using traditional finance, you’re asking for permission. Every time you use it, every time you swipe your card, they can put a hold on things. Mr. Banker, please, can I have some money, sir? May I please use. It’s my money. That’s my money. Like, for example, the other day a friend of mine said she tried to get her money out of her bank account, but she’s been doing a lot of traveling. And her bank said no, because this seems to be some crazy activity going on. We just don’t want you to get money. Maybe they didn’t have the money. I don’t know. And and she said, well, I want to get my money out. What do I need to do? What forms to fill in? So she jumped through all of these swims and then they kept telling her, no, you can’t get it out still. Just like what you want. Then they’re like, well, you need to provide documentation of all the places you visited and all this just like, well, what do you told me? Why do you need all that information? It was such an overreach. And then they eventually said, well, you already got out a thousand dollars in the last week. That’s enough. What do you need more for? As if it’s their business at all. How much money is she is spending? How much of her own money she has access to? I mean, things like that should just send up giant red flags to people. I mean, I’ve had my bank account frozen before because I’ve sends it to something related to crypto in the early days and my bank account free. So I was like, no, we don’t deal with crypto. And I’m like, well, it’s my money. You know, I either I send it directly to this place or I take it out and I send it anyway, like, but unfreeze my account because this is my money. I want access to some people and not so lucky. Some people have their assets forfeited. Some people have their accounts. Saiz, some people have at first indefinitely. This stuff happens. And I don’t think people realize how important financial sovereignty is until that personally affected. Until then, people like my credit cards fine. You know, all of that’s fine. But there’s so many things wrong with that. It’s not just the corruption, like the corrupt system that you’re feeding into and giving more power to up, but it’s also that you’re not safeguarding yourself. I mean, identity theft alone is like a trillion dollar industry. Every time you use your bank card, you’re putting out details out there into the ether, the pain that hackers are always getting access to. JP Morgan gets hacks like every other week. You know, all of it does get stolen. You know, we should be using services that protect us more. We should be taking more responsibility and care with ourselves. Right. And I mean, I just I long for the day when the majority of people start using alternatives because we’ve had a stranglehold in finance for so long and people who get away with anything and they could extort people and they can charge whatever fees they want. We didn’t have a choice like in Australia right now. There’s a ten thousand dollar cash limit on anything that you want to purchase. So basically what they’re saying is it doesn’t matter how much you dislike the banks, whether or not you want to give them your business, you are forced to use their services. Whether you want to know whether you think they’re good or ethical business or not, you’re forced to use that. I mean, that’s a government supported cartel right there. I’m forcing this these systems so they charge higher fees, more rate than withdrawal fees, more account overdraft fees, more account maintenance fees. Don’t have enough money. We’re going to take money from you. It’s it’s a crazy system in Australia, actually is one of the more generous countries in their limitations on your freedom. If you look at some European countries I know I think it was Spain’s got like a two thousand euro cash limit. And this the thing is not this, that the idea is that once if you make a purchase using more than the allowed limit by the government, you’re a criminal. You can get fined or put in jail for using cash as a payment. And I think it’s really good points about that. It can happen anyone at any time. This is the thing when you’re using their system, they’re in control. They own your money when you put it in there. If you want to support WikiLeaks, right. Hands up, son, or WikiLeaks, you’re not allowed to do that. You’re not allowed it. That’s what it’s like. The guidance book right there. Edward Snowden spoke. They just got to seize the account that that money went to inside us. It’s illegal. You’re not getting any of those profits. You purchased his. You sent him a crypto donation that goes straight to Snowden. That’s insane. It’s insane when you think about it. And this is this is the monetary system we live in. If you want to get your money back at the bank, you have to beg. You have to plead. You have to hope that they’re going to give it to you. I mean, hey, look, if you’re rich and powerful, you’re all good. But if you’re anyone else that’s not super rich and powerful, you are in a position of weakness when you have your relationship with the bank because they’re in charge your money. The second you give it over to them, it’s hard to get it back. And that is a broken system. I think when you see the power of crypto, they can send money to anyone, anywhere with no restrictions. If you want to support WikiLeaks when it by Snowden’s books, whatever you can do that you have that freedom to do these things. Now, I want to talk just a little bit before we end up our chat here about really the attacks on privacy that we’ve seen. So this. Mexican beer crisis has been used as an excuse by a whole variety of different actors to increase censorship across the Internet, as well as to try and get these different things through that are decreasing people’s privacy. We’re seeing attacks on encryption. We have these tracking apps that they’re bringing out and schist. Orwell couldn’t have written it better himself. I mean, I don’t think that he even conceptualize how crazy things could potentially get. Yeah, I think that when we get started with contact tracing, I think that we shouldn’t demonize that in its entirety because it’s absolutely possible to have a contract tracing app that is completely anonymous and that is privacy focused. That is completely feasible is whether or not the government decides to implement that or not or whether, again, they use this as a as a facade for trying to sneak in more of that surveillance policies, which seems a lot more likely to me. I mean, they’re doing that with encryption. You mentioned the attacking encryption. So you got, Bill, by the attorney general right now with Lindsey Graham being one of the major proponents by it, that they put this bill forward called Earn It and Earn It is a disaster that, again, they using the guise of a way protecting children. And what it actually is. I mean, these have been the two most vocal opponents to encryption. They have been saying, like literally Lindsey Graham said about a year ago, said to Facebook, We want to access all messages on your platform. If you don’t let us do this, we will do it for you. And then, lo and behold, he’s a major sponsor of this bill that comes out that will do justice under the guise of protecting children. So you get all kinds of bad policies come through when it’s called something notable so that when voters look at it, they like, well, I don’t want to support someone who didn’t want to protect children. And it’s like, oh, no, that’s that’s not what this is about. Like this attack on encryption. It isn’t just an attack on encryption. It’s far worse than that since an attack on free speech. So there’s something there’s a policy in America that basically gives a safe harbor to companies that host other people’s content, and that’s safe. Harbor says that someone else is posting illegal content on your platform. You’re not liable for that as long as you don’t know about it. If you find out about it, you take it off, whatever. But this is like the linchpin of freedom of speech in America. If we did not have this, there would be no way that websites would be able to host anything that would not be this freedom of expression that we say blossoming on the Internet because people a company is going to protect themselves. They’re going to erred on the side of caution, because if they’re facing jail time and bankruptcy, they’re obviously going to be more cautious than they need to be. So but the government is doing is saying we are going to take away the safe harbor from you unless you follow our detailed plan and follow our guidelines that we set forth. By the way, we haven’t written those guidelines yet. This is a blank check we’re going to give to the committee to write whatever guidelines they want. And lo and behold, Bill Barr is going to be the head of this committee. You’ll have that guy who wants to bad encryption because he thinks that there are people who have private conversations online. I should should be labeled as criminals. Yeah, he’s going to lead this. And so what are they doing? I mean, you have a f f talking about this. You had Snowden’s organization, Freedom of the Press, talking about this. You have WikiLeaks told him about it like you had everyone who believes in freedom of speech and believes in privacy on the Internet just in absolute shock and outrage about this bill saying this is a ban on encryption. Do not pass this. And I think that is just it’s really hard to convey to people how important policies like this are, how important it is to speak out against them, how important it is to stop them. Because when things like this get put in place, as we said, people. These are cold emergency measures. Either they protecting children or they are stopping misinformation in the age of Mexican beare illnesses like that. They all these they are labeled as they stop, got temporary things and they are never temporary things. These policies lost. The Patriot Act kept getting reauthorized every time it expired. Right. And then then it gets worse. They didn’t just reauthorize the Patriot Act, which was the biggest invasion and overreach in privacy. And I think a step towards more surveillance, a totalitarian Orwellian, not may that we’ve seen, they increased. It’s when they reauthorize it. So, I mean, this stuff is dangerous. We should be vigilant against it. We shouldn’t be having these knee jerk, terrified measures. We’re like, just pass whatever, make sure that we protect ourselves right now. We need to be thinking about the future we’re creating. Do we want an Orwellian nightmare situation where I mean, we’re living most of our lives these days on the Internet and we rely more than ever on robust security for those platforms? Do we want this Orwellian future where we have no privacy left on those platforms where literally the only way to have a private conversation is to be physically with someone and have no electronic devices around us? Because I could be listening as well. I mean, that’s a scary situation where we’re feeling like we’re monitored with everything we do. People start to walk on eggshells. There’s this chilling effect that comes across society. This is not a future we want to be creating. And we need to be exercising more than ever our freedom of speech right now. And now you mentioned, like you mentioned, these. Platforms that are censoring things. And I just. Oh, my God. Like things. Then they say anything that goes against her guidelines. YouTube is is deleting. That stuff is chilling. I mean, on the one hand, YouTube can do whatever they want. Right. And they’re a private company. But it is chilling that they think that that’s a reasonable thing to do. I mean, right now, like, I have a library platform and I’ve had a library platform, which is like a YouTube alternative for years. And I’ve always thought of it as this sort of I’ll hedge my bets. I have this small community growing. I’ll just upload my content there. I’ll just mirror it so that it’ll stay that way. My channel’s deleted for whatever reason. I’ve got it all. And then last month for the first time at one of my videos on library got more views than the same video on YouTube. I hit 12000 subscribers on my library platform and a video that was demagnetized on YouTube. I owned over three hundred dollars full. So suddenly I’m going, whoa, that there are real alternatives out there. Now the trick is getting people over to those alternatives and getting them to frequent those because I mean YouTube. I think that they’re killing themselves right now. Facebook. I think that they’re destroying themselves with this censorship, that shooting themselves in the foot. Because if people people would flock to the Internet because they wanted freedom of expression, they wanted to be able to connect with people. It was this free flow of information. As soon as you start to inhibit that. People will start to leave. And before that, it was harder for people to leave because they weren’t alternatives. But you can bet that there are flourishing alternatives out there right now. So I honestly, their days are numbered. Well, that’s the thing. We have the marketplace of ideas. Right? So if we do have. One place starting to not be as good as it used to be. Then you will see people voting with their feet and they will go other places. They will find alternative content platforms. And, you know, it’s trying to censor what people say or what people think was really what it comes down to or talking to thought crimes here. Right. You can’t have those opinions. You can’t have these thoughts when you start to look at that. It’s a very, very dangerous precedent when we let Silicon Valley and the tech overlords decide what is and is not acceptable to be discussing. We’ve seen all these tiny little algorithm changes that actually more and more support the establishment. Right. Some of that, for example, I think was last year they passed a new update to the algorithm that prioritize, like MSNBC and CNN over alternative media sources on YouTube, like a Jimmy Door, secular talk radio, these kind of shows, they got deep prioritized. So we actually see the official story, which is almost always lies and misinformation actually being what is promoted as the truth. I mean, it’s sad, I guess ironic because YouTube was created as an alternative to CNN and MSNBC and FOX. Like we wanted just a free flow of ideas. And that’s what you should have started out as. So that that’s a fact. Is that what you’re thinking? So I think that I can’t remember which publication I wrote about this, but yeah, they started satirists herding such queries on their site with like an embedded code that leaked the rating a channel had. So as you said, like they would think YouTube was manually rating channels with how good they thought they were so sad it would get a really high score. And then, like, maybe Krypto, like an NBA TV would be like had a low score so that they just wouldn’t show up in search results like this. This is someone this isn’t an algorithm that’s just making guesses. This is an individual at Facebook. I mean, at YouTube going through and manually choosing which channels people should watch over others. I mean, I think if they’re going to do that, fine, but be transparent about it. Let people know that that’s what your platform is about. Don’t pretend to be this egalitarian alternative to mainstream media where anyone can post their videos because that’s not what they are anymore, you know, and then people can make an informed decision. Do I want to be on this platform? That is very much funneling what I can and can’t say and what I kind of can’t access or do. I want actually to be able to access all kinds of things. So I want to broaden my horizons. That’s it. And that’s one of the many reasons why I also upload online videos over to library. So it’s just important to support the decentralized ecosystems as well as just having that extra place where you can put your videos. Final thought for today. What are some practical things that people can do to stay safe online to preserve their privacy? Cool. This is a really great question. Are the number one thing that I would say is never use the same password twice. You should be having a strong password on every single platform that you’re using. And you’ll think, well, I’m on hundreds and hundreds of Web sites. How could I remember all these passwords? Get a password manager? Honestly, this is gonna be a lot safer than what’s currently happening. Like recently, there was a there was a zoom hack. Right. And it turns out Zoom was never hacked. What happened was you had all these other leaks, like maybe it’s LinkedIn had that big hack, or maybe it’s JP Morgan had they had and hackers collects passwords and then they try the same passwords on all these other Web sites. So hackers were able to access all of these Zoome accounts because people would just be using passwords. This is the biggest security threat. That’s the easiest to change. So get a password manager. Remember, only one password for your password manager. That’s super long. Find one that is recommended by privacy experts. I think the dash lane is a great one. I think that Freedom of the Press Foundation they recommend. That’s one of the ones you can use. Some of them are better for Mac, some of them a benefit. The pay say so check out their information on that, but do not ever use a password twice. I also don’t just like change one letter and your password, because that’s not going to help you figure it out. They figure it out. They just it gets run through all this automated process. Number two, update your software as soon as there is an update available. People so often just say, well, I don’t have time right now. I keep putting it off. It says, update now. And you’re like, no, I’m in the middle of work. I can’t do it right now. The reason why there are so many updates is usually because people have found security holes and they’re patching them. So if you are not updating the first thing that people do when hackers find out there’s a security hole, they will. Absolutely. Try to exploit that security hole. They will take that hole and then try to see which accounts that they can access. So if you are not updating your software immediately, that’s a big risk. And then I guess the third thing I would say just does not make things too complicated. E-mail is inherently insecure. Estimates is inherently insecure. Almost every messaging platform you use is inherently insecure. If you are using Facebook Messenger, don’t it’s inherently insecure. All of these platforms that I’ve support to have good encryption, you know, that’s so great. But encryption is a very complicated thing. Some encryption is absolutely already broken by the NSA. There does seem to be some encryption that seems to still be robust. And although we can’t know for certain, experts have looked into these things and are constantly innovating and trying to make platforms more secure than ever. And so, again, Freedom of the Press Foundation, which their primary focus is to make sure that journalists and whistleblowers are protected when they’re leaking information. So they want you to be as secure as possible. I think that they recommend to messaging services, as Snowden recommends, to messaging services signal and why up and says that they are the most secure in his opinion. So if you’re using any other messaging service, I mean, sure, maybe you like the the stickers or something. The stick is really worth having a database of a log of the history of every conversation you’ve had. That one day probably will be released on Facebook stickers. But my Facebook stickers. Yes. Signal. Why? I would encourage everyone to stop putting everything that emails, even if you have purchaman mail like partial mail is much better than things like Gmail, which is. Absolutely. You’re just creating a log for the NSA to collect everything you’ve ever written. Right. And but when I say NSA, this is this faceless corporation. You’re saying that you’re creating a log that employees every day, people to access all your communications as well. So, you know, this is you’re just opening yourself up to major security threat there. So just use while signal whenever possible, whenever it doesn’t need to be in an email. Just use those things. And then the probably the three things that I would just mentioned right off the bat as ways to protect yourself immediately. Simple things, really easy things that don’t require a giant shift in your day to day living. But just, you know, you start to think about those things. There you go. Nice, easy, simple steps to follow, guys. Naomi, thank you so much for coming on the show today and talking about Krip to talk about the kind of talking about privacy has been a fun chat. Again, day one who stuck around to the end of this chat. Thank you so much. And of course, is the leak down below where you can get subscribe to Naomi’s channel, Nancy. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.
