Joe Rogan Experience #1792 - Daryl Davis & Bill Ottman

(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night! All day. (instrumental music plays) And we're up.

Gentlemen, what's happening? Good to see you.

Hey, you're happening, man. Good to see you again.

Good to see you.

Thank you for having me back.

You have a beautiful purple shirt, I love it.

Uh, thanks for having us.

And, um, thank you. And Bill, tell... So, first of all, tell me what's going on with Minds. Minds is one of the first, that I was aware of, like alternative social media networks that was committed to free speech.

Yep.

What, how- how's it going?

It's going. I mean, there's sort of a whole landscape of alternative networks emerging. And so you've got this spectrum of apps where you've s-... Like, I think of... I put everything through a litmus test when I'm thinking of an alternative network. Basically, is it transparent? Does it publish their source code? Most of these alternative apps, I don't need to name names, but I could, they're, they don't publish their source code, so you can't look at the algorithms to see what's happening. You can't see if there's spyware in there, if they have Google Analytics little nasty-

Right.

... stuff that's, that-

So you're talking about Gettr.

Gettr.

Yeah.

Um...

Uh, 'cause I found out that, like-

Parler, Rumble and now, and now, I'm not-

All of them?

I'm not trying to trash these people. I think that the free speech stuff is good, like the more... But some of their terms aren't even free speech. So, you know, free speech policy is essential. So I absolutely respect any network that is putting forward a free speech policy. But if, you can't have free speech policy with sketchy algorithms-

Mm-hmm.

... and closed source code, because then we don't know if you're soft, uh, censoring, shadow banning. We don't know what's happening in the news feed behind the scenes.

Right. Which we definitely know Facebook does, Instagram does, Twitter does, that's all real.

Right. So then you've got, are they privacy focused? End-to-end encrypted? Do they have access to the content of your messages?

Mm.

Um, like, so we use a end-to-end encrypted messenger protocol called Matrix, so that we don't even have access to people's conversations. Like, I don't want access.

Right.

And then you've also got, um, you know, do they pay creators fairly? So you've got these check marks that you go through with e-... But open source is key. The future, there is nothing without open source. Any app, if they're claiming to be an alternative and they're not open source, they're not in the same conversation. It's a completely different animal, and they should not be taken seriously, because they're not being transparent with the world. So, and then you get into decentralization and actually building an app that... So, Google says, "Don't be evil." But it's really, "Can't be evil." Make it, we wanna make it impossible for us to even take down our network at all, and that's why the, like immutable distributed systems, like blockchains and, uh, you know, Tor and all of the... IPFS, all of these different decentralized systems are emerging, and we're inter- we're interacting with them. We're not fully decentralized yet, so... But that's, there- there's like a progression that a lot of apps in the Web3/decentralized web space are moving towards. So... (laughs)