Based in Sydney, Australia, Foundry is a blog by Rebecca Thao. Her posts explore modern architecture through photos and quotes by influential architects, engineers, and artists.

Episode 161 - Fighting for Free Speech with Sam Jacobs

Episode 161 - Fighting for Free Speech with Sam Jacobs

Max talks to Sam Jacobs of the Resistance Library Podcast and Ammo.com about the war being wages on free speech by large tech corporations and platforms.

Links

Sam Jacobs Bio
Resistance Library Podcast

Ammo.com: How Big Tech and Corporate America subvert the 1st and 2nd Amendments
Ammo.com: The Spanish Civil War and Today’s America
Libertas Bella
Gateway Pundit: Chase Bank Shuts Down Personal Account of Joe Biggs

Related Episodes

Episode 160 with the New York Times article on Rationalists revealed their (quite different) thoughts on online censorship
Episode 155 on Why Oppose Censorship
Episode 70 with the Ode to the Podoverse

Transcript

Max Sklar: You're listening to the Local Maximum Episode 161.

Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to the Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.

Max: Welcome, everyone. Welcome. You have reached another Local Maximum. This was—the last week was a big week in The Local Maximum. Big week! Five, five interviews I got done in a single week. I was working all day, and then either in the morning, or at the end of the day, in the evening, I hopped on and did an interview for like 20, 30, 40 minutes, depending on who it was. I interviewed five very different people. I am really excited to share those with you over—I guess what will be the next two months? I don't know, if we have, if we have any more callers. By the way, I'm always taking callers. So if you're interested in calling into the show, localmaxradio@gmail.com. But I think I'll go once a week, unless we get a few more. Then I might have to kind of double up a little bit. I've never doubled up twice a week. But if I have so much content, I will be happy to pull the trigger on that. 

You'll hear at the end, after today's interview, what I have in the can and what order I might do it in. That was a big question like how to figure out the order. I took some funny notes in a notepad while conducting these interviews. So I'll post those on maximum.locals.com if you want to jump into my Locals group. So today, let's just get into the stuff today. 

Today, you're gonna hear something good, you're gonna have a great conversation. It actually might be a little bit of a polarizing episode today. I'm not going to—I’m waiting for it. We're going to be talking about online censorship again. I laid out my clear opposition to censorship and why in Episode 155, that's about six episodes back. Lots of people care about it, it turns out. And so someone from www.ammo.com reached out to me. They said they saw that episode, they saw Episode 70, which is a couple of years ago, which is my “Ode to the Podoverse,” which was, you know why I was why I feel like podcasting is kind of the last bastion of free speech on the internet. 

And so they liked the article and say, “Hey, it's great. Can you check out our article, maybe link to it?” And I said, “You know,” I sometimes write back to these. I said, “You know, can I just get the author to talk with me on the show?” So they reached out and they reached out to Sam Jacobs, who is, who writes for ammo.com, and he's also a podcaster it turns out. So it was like, “Yeah, great, let's do it.” And I really enjoyed our conversation. There are a lot of different aspects to this issue. So I know that, you know, a lot of people come at it from different angles, and you might listen to our conversation, you'd be like, “Well, I'll take it a different angle, I have a different perspective.” 

One of the takeaways from me on this that I absolutely agree with Sam on, is that the people doing the censoring are not going to stop it. Like, you know, private companies have a lot, lobby private company and say, well, it's a private company, they could do what they want. And as it's an internet, it's their internet companies. Its Twitter, its Facebook. So, the point that he brings up, and I'll get into the interview in a little bit, I just want to say why this interview, what I took away from this conversation is that they're not like, why would people stop at just doing that? Like, will they go into banking? Will they go into other areas of life? Will they use, eventually, use force to try to get people to stop saying certain things? Why not? What, why, the people who are doing this don't have, you know, scruples like that. So why wouldn't they? So there needs to be some pushback. 

And so, you know, Sam talks about the political angle of that I have some other angles up to it, which I'll probably get into in future shows in the next couple weeks. Now, remember from last week, last week's episode was not on censorship online, and deep platforming. But I did read an article about the New York Times. There was kind of a throwaway line that the New York Times gave about in this article about the rationalists, where they actually insinuated that online censorship, not only is it not really an issue, but the big tech companies are run by these free speech extremists who like you know, won't, who won't budge and that's causing a lot of problems. And I just, that just seems like a different world to me a whole different set of facts. So please, if you take that position, I want to talk to you about it. I'd like to hear your perspective because I just haven't heard it. I mean, I guess I know some people, maybe some people I work with who kind of take that as a given but they maybe they haven't really thought about it very much. But if that is your position, look, I promise I'll let you talk. You'll see I let my guest talk today. I'll let you talk just as much. I just haven't heard that case laid out in that perspective. So that'll be interesting if I get any takers. All right. I'll talk about the future at the end. 

My guest today is the host of The Resistance Library Podcast and lead writer for ammo.com, and has been following closely all of the censorship and purges that have been taking place online. Sam Jacobs, he reached the Local Maximum. Welcome to the show.

Sam Jacobs: Hey, man, thanks for having me on.

Max: Yeah. So before we start, tell me a little bit about your podcast and your site.

Sam: Well, the podcast is called The Resistance Library Podcast. It is sponsored by ammo.com where we have whatever ammunition you guys are looking for. And if we don't, try back in a couple of days, and ammo.com has a section on the site called The Resistance Library. I'm also the managing editor of a news aggregator that you can find at news.libertasbella.com. And I'll send you links to all these, you can put them in the show notes.

Max: Yeah, yeah. Well, I say, I am not in the world of ammo. But I know a couple people who are, who tell me that there is some kind of a shortage.

Sam: Yeah, there's like, I mean, yes, basically, you know, there's like, not a lot of ammo around. And what you can find is, a lot of times, is weird calibers. And, or it's like, you can get a box of 20. Or you can get a box at 20,000. And there's nothing in between. We pretty consistently have stuff from normal calibers, like 9, 10, 44, 45, 223, 12 gauge, 20 gauge. And if we don't, we'll have it in like, you know, another couple of days. And it's usually, it's pretty— I don't like to call things cheap. But it's pretty inexpensive, as far as ammunition goes, so.

Max: Gotcha. So you, you wrote an article about censorship in big tech, and you took a pretty, you took some pretty strong stances. What was it? I mean, I almost feel ridiculous asking you—what was it that prompted that article? Is there anything that happened over the last couple years? But, you know, but what, why now? 

Sam: Well, not any reason, in particular, I mean, you know, we generally have a, like, queue pretty long of ideas that we're going to write about, and it just kind of like came out, because it was time to write something about it. I mean it came out a while ago. But there wasn't anything in particular, it's just like, I've been watching this, you know, slow-motion car crash going on for, since, I mean, when did they deplatform Milo? You know, that was like seven years ago, at this point.

Max: It feels like it. I don't think it was that long ago, but it could be. I don't even want to guess it could be like four years ago.

Sam: I think it was 2015, but I don't know that. That'd be six years ago, I don't know exactly off the top of my head. But this is like, this has been going on for a while. And I think that, the writing was pretty much on the wall from the word “Go on this.” That this was, you know, that people like Milo and Alex Jones were kind of, who are both people, by the way, who I have, like, enormous amounts of respect for in their particular function, in what they do. You know, it's not like that I want to be Milo or I want to be Alex Jones. Or that I think that they're like, you know, the wisest men under the sun, or anything by any means. But I don't want to do the thing where I dump all over somebody in the, to make my point, particularly when it's people that I, you know, have some admiration and respect for. But, yeah, I was pretty clear to me, that this was gonna, you know, I'm not surprised that the President was deplatformed. I'm kind of surprised that it, that they didn't wait until Biden was in office to do it. That's kind of the only thing that really surprised me about it.

Max: Right, because then they wouldn't have the talking point. Oh, that the D platformed. The sitting president, it would be slightly different. I don't know.

Sam: Yeah. So I just kind of been following this for a while. And, you know, I suspect, as I say in the article, that I don't think it's gonna stop at social media. I think it's gonna move to people's bank accounts. I think that, you know, if you are in the wrong kind of business, payment processors are going to shut you down. And I think that is extremely dangerous, and also kind of this huge blind spot for libertarians and kind of didactically small government conservative types. Because if your response to this, is to just kind of throw your hands up and go, “Oh, well, you know, it's the free market, and private companies can do whatever they want.” And you know, this kind of response to it. I just don't see that as a winning response to this.

Max: So, yeah, I wanted to start it like, sort of name the offenders that we're talking about. Obviously, Twitter, but a lot of times these companies work together. And as I've said, like when Jack Dorsey came back to Twitter in 2015, there were articles like, “Oh, he’s gonna bring it back to its free speech roots.” It's kind of funny to read that today. But which companies do you think are the worst offenders? Do they kind of all work together? Are there some that aren't as bad? Or are they just all, are the ones that aren't as bad, just like, you know, a year behind?

Sam: Well, I don't know that there's any one that's kind of worse than the other. I mean, every platform that I'm aware of that has some kind of commitment to free speech has been organized in response to deplatforming on mainstream social media. So things like Parler and Gab, Mastodon, these things all come to mind. But in terms of big tech, I mean, they claim they don't work together. But like, you know, Donald Trump lost his Pinterest and his Spotify, the same day that he lost his Twitter account. So I find it extremely difficult to believe that they're not working in concert in some fashion or another. I mean, they claim they're not. You know, I don't have any inside information on this. But it seems fairly clear to me that they are.

Max: So do you think that the people who started these companies like you know, do you think that Jack Dorsey intended to make Twitter a free speech platform and all that? Or do you think that they, you know, do you think they wanted to do this all along? Do you? I mean, I know, it's kind of a hard question to answer. But how do you think about the leadership? Are they just being pushed by forces outside their control? It's hard to tell sometimes.

Sam: I don't think they're being pushed by forces outside of their control. I don't think that they started off saying like, “Oh, you know, we're gonna shut down free speech on the internet” or anything like that. I mean, I think people, you know, I tend to like, ascribe good intentions to people and assume that people are good faith actors until they give me reason to think otherwise. In the case of big tech and deplatforming, I think that it's very, it has a lot of overlap with kind of the left's growing distaste for democracy. In the West, and also well, less so in the post-Soviet countries, because they don't have the same, you know, leverage there. But we did a podcast yesterday about the Spanish Civil War, and kind of got on the topic of what's called illiberal democracy. And it's not, you know, a new trend by any means. But basically, there's a recurring pattern in democracy, where there are populist movements. A rise on the left door, on the right, but basically that are distasteful to those in power. And they're toadies. And those aspiring to be in power. And then those people say, “Well, that's enough of that for now. We better shut all this down.” And I think that that's basically what happened with Twitter, and Facebook. And, you know, pick a social media platform. I think it was like, “Well, free speech is good. But now it's not anymore because people are using it to do things that we don't want.” And if I have to pick a tipping point for it, I would say it was probably the 2016 election. Because, you know–

Max: It has been baked in for a while.

Sam: I think it's I think it's really difficult to overestimate the degree to which the 2016 election ruined the plans that the kind of, you know, for lack of a better term, the globalist elites, the neoliberal elites, however you choose to frame it. Really messed up, really messed up their plans. I mean, they had what they had planned was mass amnesty, open borders, war against Syria, Trans-Pacific partnership, and they didn't get any of that. They just thought it was a done deal, we're gonna get Clinton and we're gonna get all this stuff, we're gonna get everything we want. And then they didn't get any of it. 


And I think that that was the big wake up call for them was like, “Whoa, free speech is out of control.” And I think that there's this kind of like, misconception on people on the right, where they're like, “Well didn't the left used to be for free speech?” No the left used to be for greater power for the left, and they still are. And in an earlier era, greater free speech was to the benefit of the the left in this country and in the West. And now that it's not anymore, now that it erodes their power and attacks their power, and as a base of resistance to their power, they don't like it anymore and want to shut it down. And I don't think we're anywhere near done on this. I mean, the whole like, campaign against, you know, dangerous misinformation that's coming out of these conspiracy theory cable news channels, like Fox News, that they're having hearings about in Congress literally today. They're very, you know, I mean, think about that for a second fox news is giving your, you know, big tech overlords and their and their puppets in Congress the vapors right now.

Max: Yeah, I want to ask, though, you said that they are, you know, they are. It's like, they've had it with democracy. But oftentimes, I hear from people who are proponents of this censorship, like, “No, we need to do this to save democracy, because the people on these platforms are themselves attacking democracy.”

Sam: Well, what they really mean by that is saving liberalism. I mean, there's like, you know, there's...

Max: There’s always a—misunderstood today.

Sam: Right? And there's this kind of like, conception that came out around the time at the end of the Cold War. And again, we talked about on The Resistance Library podcast, when we talked about the Spanish Civil War, that was like, well, the Soviet Union fell. And so now we're just gonna build a McDonald's in Warsaw. And, you know, in 10 years, they'll all be like, you know, these two-income family, abortion-worshiping, you know, American, liberal, herbal, urban coastal Americans, basically. And they thought that this was like, the thing everyone wanted, you know, was just for like the entire world to be New York City or San Francisco. And it's like, no, they got democracy in Poland. And they were like, “We don't like any we don't like any of this. You know, we don't like any of this kind of contemporary consumer culture stuff. We like, you know, the church and and intact families” and things like this, and they use the ballot box to do it. And I think that increasingly, what you're seeing, you know, I believe it's strongest in post Soviet countries, but you're seeing it in the West. I mean, I think that, you know, for example, I think Marine Le Pen is probably going to be the next president of France. You have Bolsonaro down in Brazil, of course, Trump in in the United States. There's, I think that there the Conservative Party is in real trouble. In the UK, if Nigel Faraj, his rebrand of Brexit, that of the Brexit party is successful. And he rebranded as a kind of anti lock down. Party, I think the Conservative Party is in real trouble. There's the Sweden Democrats, there's the other Alternative for Germany. And there's all these kinds of like, you know, anti- anti-liberal populist parties that have arisen in the West, and they hold power in, in post Soviet countries. So I think that, you know, when contemporary liberals talk about Neoliberals talk about democracy, what they don't really mean democracy at all. And I think that there's like, like, I have criticisms of, of democracy, and you can read them on this. You can read them on the site. But the criticism of democracy that liberals have Neoliberals have is not, “Oh, the one that I would have, which is like it's not, you know, it's not right that 51% of the population can take toothbrushes away from 49% of the population.” Or to translate it into more concrete terms in the United States, you know, “I don't think that Wyoming and Iowa should be coolock, food serfs for large coastal cities. So I would be very opposed to unfettered democracy anywhere.” But I think that when liberals talk, neoliberals talk about threats to democracy, and their critique of democracy to is always about, well, “we didn't get our way,” you know, and anytime they don't get their way, it's seen as this kind of like prima facie evidence that something went wrong, that something went awry.

Max: This is sort of like the spirit of democracy where, you know, everybody has to get their say, you need to be, you need to have many voices. I mean, I know this sounds very, like, you know, airy pie in the sky, but like, that's the society I want. And that's sort of like, if it's like, okay, we're all gonna vote, but everybody's, you're not allowed to talk to each other. There's no, like, democratic theory where that's that's the kind of democracy that works.

Sam: Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that like, that's the thing. I mean, I think that the notion that I think that the whole note— I mean, I think free speech is basically, you know, the the whole like, claim that whole free speech is a right wing thing. Now, I think that's true. You know, I don't think it's like this own that, you know, the writers of The Daily Beast thing, or what, we'll pick your favorite kind of corporate toady liberal publication? I don't, I don't think that that's untrue. Yeah, I think that like, you know, for all intents and purposes, Glenn Greenwald is on the right now to pick up a specific example. Because like things like localism, transparency of intelligent, you know, demanding that our intelligence agencies be transparent, free speech being opposed to wars of choice and adventure around the world. I think that yeah, I think these are all like, right wing issues now. And I don't think that and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. You know, I think that that's like, these are, these are many of the issues that unite the new kind of populist, right. And I think a lot of it just boils down to skepticism, distrust and hostility towards large institutions. And centralization of power, I think is ultimately what it comes down to.

Max: So what, so one thing you mentioned before was, you know, it's not going to stop at social media? Where, what are you going to look for is kind of like alarm bells as to where people are going to be deep platformed. Next, you mentioned banking. You know, what, how far could this go?

Sam Oh, there's no limit to how far I could go. I mean, we have ample examples throughout the 20th century. And, you know, in both communism and fascism, of how far I mean, well, we all hope not that far, but like, do you think they're gonna stop because they're such good people, and they're so concerned about your rights? Of course, they're not.

Max: Sometimes at some point, well, I mean, I don't know even even the Soviet Union ended at some point. 

Sam: Well, the Soviet Union ended at some point, but if it's like, well, kids, we're gonna win, but we get to suffer under Bolshevism for 80 years. You know, it's like it's not like the Soviet Union burned itself out in like eight years or something. It was 80 years that these people were terrorized by their government. I think banks, I think it's going to be banks. I think the banks are going to be a big thing. I think that they started this, I want to say about 10 years ago when the federal government working in concert with the big banks, meaning like the commercial banks that you and I use, not financial banks, decided that they were going to plot, deplatform and deny banking services to people in the porn industry. And I don't have any great love for pornography. I don't think it's a good thing. And by any means, I think that there's a lot of criticisms to be made of its social effects. But at the time that it happened, it was very, very clear to me and to other people that I knew that like this was their, this was them testing the waters. Can we take porn stars’ bank accounts away? Can we get away with it? Because if we can get away with it, then it's just slicing the salami further and further and further. So, and conservatives have had their bank accounts closed. We talked, I cite specific examples of this, in the article conservatives have been denied banking services. So I think that like, if...

Max: Can you remind me of that example?

Sam: Let me find it. I got to look it up. I don't have I don't have it, sadly, the article. But yeah, I mean, I'll put the link in the show notes. People can go read it. I mean, it might have been Rambo Biggs, but I'm just pulling a name, you know. But what's the difference between, at what point do you go it's not okay to deny people services based on their political beliefs? And I think that we really need to have a robust response, where we treat, and I think this is absolutely essential, where we treat people's political convictions the same way that we do their religious convictions, their racial identity. I think the political speech should be protected in a similarly robust fashion. And I think that, you know, if you think that the founders would have allowed five companies, who are hostile to American values and freedom, to decide who gets to exercise free speech, and they just would have thrown their hands up and going, “Oh, well, it's the free market at work. And I guess we can't really do anything about it.” It's like, “No, they absolutely would not have allowed it”. It's like Tucker Carlson is really sharp on this. 

The free market is great, but it's a toaster. It's not a principle. It's a tool. It's a tool that we use for prosperity and the distribution of goods. And we got sold this false bill of goods in the conservative movement in the 70s, in the 80s, that the goal was the free market, rather than that the free market was a tool that we use to create the kind of society that we wanted.

Max: So you mentioned also like, and you touched on this before, how sometimes these companies will start off with someone who is like, on the more unpopular side to see if it's okay. And like, you know, do not appease them by, you know, and sometimes it puts you in a position where you have to defend someone who you don't, you know, who most good people don't want to be on the same side of, but you kind of have to?

Sam: Well, that's the thing. Free speech doesn't mean anything, if it doesn't apply to speech that you think is reprehensible and disgusting. That's it. I think that all kinds of, I'm not gonna, you don't want I'm not even going to single out I'm not even going to sing a lot of specific person or like, ideology. I will only say that there's tons of views in the world that I find, like morally reprehensible and absolutely disgusting, that somebody would take that position, vocalize it, and encourage other people to share that idea. But do I think that they should have their Twitter account taken away? No! I think that people should, I think that there should be a clear set of ideologically neutral rules when it comes to her, when it comes to online harassment, but I think that they have to be crafted very carefully. And what we basically have to do is we have to say like, you know, like doxing is not okay, threatening people is not okay. There's various forms of speech that are not, that are for a variety of different reasons, that are not legal in this country. And I think that for the most part, where we've drawn the lines on what speech is legal and what speech is not works for me in this country, I think that Western Europe has a–

Max: A legal precedent.

Sam: Right, right. Right. Like Western Europe has hate speech laws. I'm not in favor of hate speech laws. But I think in America like, the lines that we've drawn around what you can legally say, and how you can legally express yourself or basically like, I'm cool with those, they seem to be in conformity with free speech as a principle. So I basically think that, you know, any legal speech should be protected. And, you know, there's Jeremy Carl, who we had on the podcast, who actually ended up going to work in the Trump administration during its final days, said that basically, like, you know, somebody at some point, should sit down with Twitter and go “Okay, here's my opening offer. We nationalize you. So what's your counteroffer to that, seeing as you're just, you know, using this to shut down free speech.” And it's not just Twitter. I mean, Amazon is responsible for something like 80% of the book sales in this country. So if they take a book off of www.amazon.com, for all intents and purposes, you and I can't buy it.

Max: Yeah, so I want to ask, what do you think about, like, oftentimes, they're going to, people are gonna want to build, like smaller platforms that have, like a specific point of view, or, you know, there are people being harassed on Twitter all the time. And they're like, “Okay, we're gonna go away, we're gonna create our own platform.” How would you set up the rules on those? So it's like, hey, you know, it's at some point, I assume you think, well, if you're small enough, you should be able to take out whoever you want, you know, ideologically, right. 

Sam: Well, here's the thing. I mean, like this whole, just start a new platform thing. Like they tried that with Parler. And then Amazon said, “No.” You know, so it's like, the concentration of, I mean, Gab has their own servers. They spent, you know, I don't know how Gab’s running these days. But like, yeah, super slow was how it was running for a while because they have their own servers. There's things like if CloudFlare decides to stop working with you, good luck stopping your site from getting DDoS every day. 

So I basically think that like, I don't—it's not that I don't think the free market has any solutions to this, because I absolutely do. But I think that relying on the free market alone, particularly in an economic environment where the big tech is basically a cartel, and they're not—I think for them is like, I think part of it is ideological, I think part of it is that big tech is, is in fact hostile towards American values. But I think part of it is just good old fashioned anti-competitiveness, you know. Why would Twitter want to allow a competitor to operate in their market, if they don't have to? If they can make phone calls and get something effectively banned from the internet. Which is what happened to Parler. Why would they not? Why would they not do that again, because there's such good guys? They've demonstrated that they're not! They've demonstrated, and it is to go back to the thing I said, is like, I assume people are good faith actors, until they give me reason to think that they're not. And all I get from big tech is reasons to think that they're not. I mean, they're constantly getting caught targeting—I mean, it's not even like—I think that it would be bad, even if they only targeted extremist speech, I think that that would be bad, because...

Max: It's almost like clockwork, where you target the extremist speech. And then a year later, you're moving down the line.

Sam: Right. And I also think that like...

Max: I almost held out hopes at the beginning where it was like, okay, it'll only be like, these five crazy people, almost like wishful thinking, but that's not what's gonna happen.

Sam: And I also think that kind of like, I think that there's a separate point to be made that driving the extremists into the dark makes them more dangerous. I really believe that, and that's the thing that I've believed pretty much since childhood. That like, when you drive extremism into dark corners, basically all it does is metastasize, for one. And for two there's always an appeal, there's always a kind of sexy appeal of the forbidden that I think is real. I don't think it's like a made up thing that people want things that are forbidden and have this kind of air of danger about them. I think that that's absolutely true.

Max: Yeah, so to conclude, like, what do you think a sort of ,an average person or an individual can do about any of this? What do you think our prospects are for the future on this? Is there any silver lining? Is there any, like...?

Sam: Sure, I think there's tons of ways I mean, first of all, like if you're not writing your Congress critters on a regular basis, you need to be doing that. You need to write your state reps, and you need to write your reps in the House of Representatives and the Senate. And I would also urge you to—anytime a politician does something that you support, whether you are their constituent or not, send them a quick email. Or better yet, pick up the phone and call them and leave a message. 

You know, I've called Ted Cruz, I've called Rand Paul, I'm not represented by either of them. But when they do something that I'm like, very, very much in favor of I want them to know that people are kind of on their side. Also, you've seen kind of moves in both Texas and Florida. For states, like—there's, they're limited in what they can do, but what your state government can do is not nothing. So for example, Ron DeSantis is moving to find tech companies, significant sums on a daily basis, every time a candidate for public office in the state of Florida is deplatformed. 

I don't know what kind of teeth that will have, or how it will be enforced, or anything like that, I assume that there will be enforcement mechanisms in place. But that's like—that's just what one state can do. So I think that people should really be communicating with their state reps, communicating with their reps at the federal level. And if you have even more time and inclination, get involved in your local political parties. A lot of times, there's positions like say, the ward captain of your local Republican Party. You could probably make a phone call and be the ward captain in a week because they're like dying for people to take these positions. And for the most part, it's just about who's going to show up and do the work. So that's for somebody with a little more level of commitment. And then kind of the next level of commitment is run for congressman, like somebody needs to. 

And there's this real hunger right now, I think, to get rid of these extremely deferential to big business Republicans, in the kind of mold of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, who just think that, like conservatism is about how many tax cuts can we give to big corporations? I think that there is a big hunger for people to run against these entrenched politicians who are not serving their constituencies. And people laugh, and it's like, “You know what? Somebody's gotta do it.” Somebody eventually has to step up and do it. And I think that, you can say, well, who's gonna vote for me, I mean, we just elected like, a reality game show host as President of the United States, barely four years ago. So I think that the thirst on the part of the electorate, for people who come outside of the traditional channels of where politicians are, “supposed to come from,” you know, I think is really at an all time high. So I would urge people to consider doing that.

Max: All right, great. Thank you. So thanks Sam for coming on the show.

Sam: Thanks for having me.

Max: All right. So like I said, we have a lot of episodes in the can. Some related to this topic, and some not. Next week, I would say, will be related because I am talking to Assaf Lev, who is the CEO of www.locals.com, about that alternative online line platform, which I use maximum.locals.com. 

And if you want total freedom online, I have this new saying that I like. I don't know if I invented it, but maybe, but it's just, “All roads lead to Bitcoin.” So I think—I mean, we talked about, you know, deplatforming from banking, all that like all those roads lead to Bitcoin. So I think it’ll be in three weeks, we'll have Peter McCormick on the show, and he is the host of What Bitcoin Did, which is a Bitcoin podcast—Bitcoin news podcast that has just a really—an average person can listen to, but it has fascinating speakers. And it's just really been on fire recently. So look forward to that. 

And I know I owe you a math episode. So I might try to talk about log space and linear space, which I know I wanted to talk about in a co-hosted show. If we get Aaron back on and maybe we'll bring him a little news update too. So that's the next three weeks Local Maximum. Lots to look forward to have a great week everyone. 

That's the show. To support a Local Maximum, sign up for exclusive content and our online community at maximum.locals.com. The Local Maximum is available wherever podcasts are found. If you want to keep up, remember to subscribe on your podcast app. Also, check out the website with show notes and additional materials at localmaxradio.com. If you want to contact me, the host, send an email to localmaxradio@gmail.com. Have a great week!

Episode 162 - Assaf Lev: Cofounder and CEO of Locals

Episode 162 - Assaf Lev: Cofounder and CEO of Locals

Episode 160 - Digital Art, Tokens, and Rationalists

Episode 160 - Digital Art, Tokens, and Rationalists