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