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Christopher Brown – Failed State Transcript

September 29, 2020 robmcnealy 0:00 Comments Off

Christopher Brown - Failed State

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Hey folks Rob McNealy here. And today, I’m going to be taking a little deviation from our normal kind of interviews. And I’m talking to author Chris Brown. He’s the author of failed state. And this is a kind of dystopian novel. And, you know, I don’t only cover books and novels on this show, but I think the topic that he addresses in a very clear and concise way has a lot of parallels to what we’re seeing out there in the world in the economy today. And I thought his take was really, really interesting, and I thought he was worth having on the show. So Chris Brown, welcome to the show. How are you today?

Christopher Brown – Failed State
I’m doing great, Rob. Thanks for having me on.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I appreciate you coming out. You’ve written some interesting fears. So I’m really want to hear you know what got you into this. But tell me a little about yourself. How did you get into being an author?

Christopher Brown – Failed State
I mean, I’ve been writing science for Rob, probably for close to 20 years now, but most of it was short fiction that I was selling to magazines. And then all I guess it was in the past decade, but really about five years ago that I started really trying my hand at writing novels. And I didn’t set out to write dystopian novels. But I wanted to write a novel that explored the scenario of what would it look like if we really had like a popular uprising in the United States? At the time, I was beginning to work on the book that became my my novel tropic of Kansas. occupy was kind of still in the air there was even like an occupy camp, and an old neon plant across the street from the place where I live in a kind of industrial neighborhood in Austin, Texas. And the Arab Spring was happening. I was like, what would that be like? What happened here and then immediately realized, well, that day happened here things would have to get a lot worse. And and imagining that scenario of things getting a lot worse, didn’t really turn out to be that hard because you can look at both kind of emergent trends in the world around you. And you know, available known history. And pretty quickly imagine scenarios where things could go a little loco so so it tropic of Kansas I imagined, which I wrote not 2013 2014 I imagined a charismatic CEO becoming a kind of authoritarian president. And there being a variety of factors that contributed to kind of a breakdown and then an uprising and in failed state which is the kind of follow on to that as well as the follow on to my novel last year, rule of capture, it takes in a little bit of a different direction it’s a kind of a little bit more utopian. I’m imagining like, okay, after we have the collapse of the American nation state, something that, to me feels like it’s a could plausibly happen. You know, the, the, the idea of the nation state is a kind of a 500 year old business model was starting to show its a turn into creak at the seams and various of its contemporary iterations. And I said, this is kind of like utopian legal thrillers like you might say, like Better Call Saul meets Mad Max, about a guy trying to play off to different factions that are trying to build a better future and, and kind of to the ultimate answer to your question. I’m interested in science fiction because I’m interested in that idea of like imagining what a better future looks like. I’m interested in the sort of literature of the possible and the idea that A lot of the really fundamental things we take for granted as kind of sacred institutions are impermanent things that have to grow and change and evolve. And and I’m interested in exploring where they can go and this particular sort of genre you know, that explores what happens in the aftermath of catastrophic events, if you will, also has the potential for a lot of fun and you know, a bit of adventure.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So I think you brought up an interesting point is that, you know, things do change in it’s part of the human condition, though, that we hate that. And I always tell people change is the most natural, you know, thing that always is happening, change is always happening. Yet humans hate it. It’s like, and to me, I think, I don’t know if we just, you know, don’t want to believe that or we are just in the West. At least raised to believe that change is bad. But people hate change. People really, I think tend to like routine. And I think they get really freaked out when things happen. And things can change very quickly. And I think, you know, here in the West, especially in the United States, we’ve had probably compared to most in all of history, we’ve had a really good run a lot of stability in one place as big as it is, for a long time. And that’s actually pretty unusual. You know, if you look at a country having stability as long as the US mostly has. And so to me, I think just almost, it’s almost inevitable, that we’re going to have some big changes, probably in my lifetime in the United States, because that’s just we’re gonna host it. It’s just a statistics thing, right? It just over time, things will morph and change. And I think a lot of people view that as dystopian in your books before we get into new failed state and kind of the aftermath What would you see? or what have you been writing about as far as what do you see as the central story themes of the things that cause or could cause failure in the United States?

Christopher Brown – Failed State
Oh, that’s a great question Robin and it’s varied and each book kind of tries to tackle a different theme. tropic of Kansas, the first book really focuses in on the appetite for power that some people have and how the accretion of power and and to a lesser extent well, but there’s the accretion of power and a single person that kind of like a single leader or a small group of people. To quote Lord act and you know, corrupts power corrupts and leads to the erosion of institutional strength, rule of capture focused on on one level, the justice system and the ways in which it masks often through the veil of reason, a system that’s really about power and conquest and its route, the way that you know, most real property rights are ultimately founded like in this country in particular on, you know, a form of staffed or you know, power at the end of the gun to the kind of conquering of the American continent and that’s also true history of most nations of the world. failed state tries to dig into a much deeper historical problem that kind of get back gets back to your, your comment of a moment ago about the inevitability of change, and our resistance to it and that’s about the relationship we have with the natural world and the way in which I think the way that the human apprehension about change manifests itself. Most notably when you kind of step back and kind of take the vantage point of the visiting Martian is through our desire to really control the natural world around us. You know, our entire civilization is based on control, you know, control of the reproduction of others, other species in particular, right, you know, pasture agriculture, grain monocultures. And, and all of these things we do to like, put the natural world in our service to sustain the growth of our population. And, and I think, again, you see in some of our current issues, the potential for crisis that can come out of an imbalance in relationship with the natural world. And so those are the kinds of Yeah, those are some of the kinds of core trajectories that I’m trying to look at as failure points and the kind of contemporary Yeah, it the edges of contemporary civilization that I think are showing real strain and that are fun to explore, as fictional counterfactuals

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
so as someone who, you know, thinks about these things, probably way more than I probably should, right. I always say, when I talk to people that are like these, you know, these different groups that are you know, now they’re called glue boys are the three percenters or you know, anti far these people that are, you know, at least on different sides kind of looking toward the same? I don’t know, ultimate conflict, right, I guess is the best way to describe it. Is is something is they say, we’re going to have this conflict and I always say what are you going to do afterward and you At least my reading of history, almost never do you end up with something better. On the other side of that, from a, you know, a governmental standpoint of freedom standpoint, when there’s a revolution, rarely is there more freedoms, it’s usually less. And what would be your take on that? Where do you see things going after a collapse? I don’t even know. I mean, we can talk about some of the ideas of what specifically could cause this. But how do you see us rebuilding and where do you think that ends up going ultimately from like the freedom and, and the governmental standpoint?

Christopher Brown – Failed State
Now? Well, big question. I mean, there’s a lot to cover. There are a lot of different directions you can take that. I mean, I think you’re right about these divergent sides of the the imagined coming conflict. And they, they, they I think they all represent You know, a desire for like real change or desire for something that feels like a more authentically participatory democracy that they feel like they really have a stake in. I think both of those sides are expressing and kind of the sentiment like, they don’t feel like the current system really represents or includes them in any meaningful way. And so they turn to other means of seeking a mode of political expression or engagement and agency over their own futures. In terms of the others is saying in, in science fiction, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than a real change in the political system. And I think I think there’s a lot of that you find even in contemporary science fiction and And I think when you get to these failure points, Rob, it’s it’s kind of like being in science fiction is full of these imagined scenarios of imagined revolutions. I mean, Star Wars is kind of all about an imagined revolution, right? But it’s like, well, wait a minute, what happens after the Ewok party? You know, I mean, there’s never any real politics to it. There’s never any real vision of what comes after. There are lots of great works of dystopian fiction. There are masterpieces of post apocalyptic fishing fiction, but the number of like really compelling utopian, science fiction’s is like, you know, I could kind of name on it, I can, you know, listen, you know, and on two hands. And so, my own vision is that I mean, what I talked about and failed state, I’m trying to explore exactly that issue, and It’s kind of bifurcated into two sort of extremes in a way that I have playing off each other. One is a kind of like, it’s almost like the Dallas utopia version of utopia, which is like corporate sovereignty. And people kind of banding together in small quazy corporate groups to kind of have a private property based version of the future. And the other is a more like communitarian. And an ecologically based approach that’s about rewilding and kind of hacking these problems that date back to the agricultural revolution and trying to figure out workarounds to that, that provide a more sustainable future. I don’t know if either of those are really the full answer. But I think you know, I think there are ways in which we need to both the one hand harnessed The power of the contemporary technological tools that we have to aid us in solving our problems, but at the same time, rediscovering authentic structures of community that I think have been a largely lost and kind of post World War Two world. And, and so kind of a mix of like the hyper modern or the cyber modern and the kind of modern primitive defined our new way.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Family structures is interesting, you know, in the United States. And I’m not sure where it went wrong, what why we don’t have for instance, multi generational families for the most part anymore. And that used to be a very important part of, you know, the American structure and many world many places, but the United States we seem to have gotten away from that. And I do think that’s a problem in a lot of respects. And I think, you know, the building blocks of community are Basically family groups first, right? And then they expand out where you get multiple families kind of living together and you create these villages. What do you think the stumbling block is to why we don’t go back to that, why? Why did we leave that multi generational family structure in the United States?

Christopher Brown – Failed State
Well, we’re kind of uprooted from connection to place in a really profound way. And I think the modern economy really accelerates that. And if you look at kind of pre industrial societies, people tended to live their entire lives in close proximity to their dead ancestors. Talking about multi generational families, you would live in the place where you would be connected through place and as the like repository of the trajectory of all of the people in your bloodline that had come before you. Right and And that, by its nature by bringing a lot of people together around this shared place would create a sense of air quotes family that was broader, and that would encompass Yeah, multiple generations of your living blood relatives and even other members of your community. Right. And we’re kind of tied together and a kind of a kinship. You know, now, I mean, you know, I think like my own life, I mean, I grew up in Iowa and went to high school in New Hampshire and went to college in Louisiana and lived in Washington, DC and studied in Europe. And now I live in Texas, I moved here with my you know, family and when we like literally didn’t know anybody, and you just start over and you’re just like, we’re like constantly cycling through social connections and friendships and familial connections in a way and and then you have the added disruption of cyber culture and network culture and of life. Kind of living online versus like living in meatspace, with real engagement in the life of your local community. Which is isn’t an intrinsically bad thing. But I think you need to have elements of both to have kind of a healthy community. So I think that’s the I think that’s the basic problem. And, and I, I feel like I don’t know, I’m sort of optimistic about those things healing themselves over time. But but maybe not until the aftermath of some kind of more intense crisis in which this condition of alienation in which somebody exists at somebody else exists now is all through an experience that makes us appreciate just how good we’ve had it and the lives of those of us who were, you know, born in the latter half of the 20th century or the beginnings of the 21st and then living rather comfortably in ways we don’t even really appreciate

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I think, you know, even like today, we’re like, you know, I’m not trying to get political here, but like, how the country came together after, you know, 911. I mean, we really did band together in for at least some period of time, Americans were proud to be Americans and people felt like we were one country for a while. And then you come, you fast forward, you know, 20 years and you look at how now, the country is responding to say, the global pandemic with COVID. And now, you know, we’re at each other’s throats over, you know, this pandemic, and we can’t come together yet. You can look at other countries, you know, like New Zealand, comes to mind where their response to the pandemic was much more unified. They viewed themselves as Kiwis and we’re going to solve this problem. Whereas the United States somehow got politicized early on to a very, really bad level. And it’s interesting, you know, I don’t know how we fix that in this country. Like you say, without some other kind of collapse that makes people feel unified because right now I don’t think we feel unified as one culture anymore in this country.

Christopher Brown – Failed State
Yeah, I mean, there’s a wonderful book by Rebecca Solnit called Paradise Built in Hell, that takes a look at how people conduct themselves in the aftermath of catastrophe. Examples like Katrina, were the kind of the prevailing narrative of kind of Hobbes in free for all usually proves to be the opposite of what really happens, which is that people tend to help each other in those situations. And I think you see plenty of examples of that, coming out of the pandemic, notwithstanding our own kind of partisan sectarian freakout over you know, the people of the mask and the people without the mask. You know, I think you know, I hear you about 911. But I think when you look at, if you look at post 911 reality, I think you also see a kind of failure of the American narrative line in a way that is dissonant from what we expect and kind of fundamentally disappointing and, like, out of line with our own sense of identity, in a way that I think is kind of part of the problem of some of our, our current situations. I mean, the first couple of months after 911 were lives like everybody’s gonna, it’s kind of joined together and it was almost like the beginning of a Western like, we’re going to go get the bad guys and we’re going to bring them to justice. And, you know, we go and the you know, invasion of Afghanistan was kind of globally supported and, and, you know, we had, you know, Special Forces This guy’s drawing giant beards and riding horses through the desert and chasing down the bad guys and all that. And then you get to Tora Bora. And there’s this big build up, like it’s gonna be the final reel of the Western then it doesn’t happen the way it was supposed to happen. And then and then we’re just like, into this endless war and long emergency that like really has not ended, you know, and it’s, you know, 20 years is going on 20 years later, and you have, you know, lawyers can debate about the terms but you have, you know, people being tortured, you know, instead of brought in front of courts and what courts they have are these kind of like crazy, you know, military tribunals that, that they’re like martial law, fake courts. That’s actually what I use is the basis of my domestic version of such courts and rule of capture which is kind of like, you know, courtroom drama meets 1984. The financial crisis. Kinda like made people really doubt the, you know, utopian precepts of neoclassical economics. And, you know, we’ve had all these events from 2000 to 2016 to right now that make people anxious about whether like the electoral system really works. You know, like in 2000, we had an election, it was basically a statistical tie the presidential election, that’s kind of like, you wake up in the morning, you don’t know the President is Wait, this is weird, you know, and all of these things that I think create uncertainty about American identity and American reality in a way that’s unsettling for people. And so I think a lot of the current tomorrow, maybe rooted in that to some respect in the like desire to find, either to recover this identity that’s been lost, or that reality hasn’t kind of fulfilled, or to find a new identity and it’s one that feels like you have a sense of ownership of I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s kind of my take.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So In failed state, you have these kind of two factions that are trying to kind of self govern in kind of a very different way. How do those two groups coexist in the same area?

Christopher Brown – Failed State
Well, they’re like in different geographical areas, and one is and Dallas. And it’s kind of in doubt, the idea is that, you know, there’s a kind of a multifactor breakdown that that is comprised of, you know, climate failure that starts with causing, you know, failure in certain regions the Tropic of Kansas, that’s, you know, the title of the first book that’s, that’s a place it’s like a pejorative name people come up with for the kind of ecologically and economically exhausted heartland of the US and so you have like internal refugees coming to places like Texas that are a little healthier, but you have, you know, storms, you know, wiping out places like Houston and New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. And food crisis coming from kind of farm failures, and then a political breakdown and a kind of a general uprising as things tighten up in Washington to try to kind of maintain order is all of these things are causing multiple failure points. And so by the time we get to failed state it’s like a couple of years after there’s been this uprising and the President has been removed from office by a mob and they have any male figure out someone to replace him with a they’ve like outlawed one of the political parties. And so Congress is kind of a shell of itself and, and the judicial system is kind of broken in our heroes, basically, like in state court trying to you know, it’s a rundown state court in Texas trying to settle scores of the past. And so in Dallas is like one of the places that sort of still like ecologically, essentially healthy, you know, they get bad summer storms and so on, but they’re okay and kind of lie to people. With money have gone there and and a New Orleans is basically like it got drowned and they just never even ungrounded never drained it. It’s it’s the swamp that it once was it’s kind of back and that people are living there basically the most radical of the rebels who were almost like what you would call in contemporary parlance like eco terrorists, and they’re letting the city go wild and trying to build some like green experiment from the future from the from the ruins. I mean, and but the problem at the heart of it is that there’s a solution to the food crisis, which is has to do with some GMO seeds for grain crops, and that the Dallas people have a patent on and the people in New Orleans the wacky eco poets, as my friend Paul McCauley would call them. They have gotten some copies of the seeds Now they started hacking. And that’s kind of the deeper heart of the story.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
How realistic Do you think that could be in the United States? You see something like this really possible?

Christopher Brown – Failed State
Um, well, I’ll make a couple of comments in that one. With each of the last two books, I wrote them, and I was like, Wow, this is so implausible. Nobody will ever buy this. And then like, stuff starts happening. I mean, like, the 2016 elections, and they kind of the, the, let’s just say that we get, again, without kind of getting into politics, just the feeling of division, and you know, what you saw in places like Charlottesville in the summer of 2017. And then, you know, and then things like Portland or Maine, you know, I thought the idea of New Orleans being an autonomous zone is sort of like pretty far out. And then you have people’s thinking, you know, big chunks of cities in the Pacific Northwest and making actual autonomous The sounds and the strengths and weaknesses of those kinds of little more micro experiments in urban self governance and you know block by block sovereignty are really interesting to watch and then you’ve got the like, stuff in Portland of these, you know, basically unidentified Border Patrol agents on the legal theory that they’re within 100 miles of the ocean aka the border from trolling you know, around federal buildings in Portland and just like showing up in crisis or grabbing grabbing people off the street without due process or an arrest like it’s Argentina 1975 or something. That’s like straight I was like, the plotter will look after I was just like, and so all summer is has been getting in my mentions, like, you know, treat me like I’m Nostradamus or sounds like oh, no, I mean, it’s just, you’re kind of like reporting what you see in a way and putting a funhouse mirror up to right The failed state stuff. I mean, I think both of the elements that I described in those different communities have elements of reality to them. I think corporate sovereignty, I mean, I have a background as a corporate lawyer, I think it’s a very real thing. I think that I mean, you look at it right now look at how investment capital is fleeing government securities, for Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, these big corporate institutions that are now viewed by like, the serious, you know, financial wizards is the one remaining like safe harbor and the storm and be that in precious metals, right? At least for people who don’t believe in crypto, right. Or who are, you know, not in a fiduciary position where they’re at liberty to put the other people’s money into crypto and so on. There’s that aspect and you have an emergent, you know, I think, Ben, what is wrote a great book a couple of years ago about how technological developments around things like drones, and you know, space based weapons, and all of these things are giving individuals access to the means of kind of military production that has never before existed in human history. There’s interesting stuff there, I think. And then on the kind of rewilding side, I mean, I think that’s happening all over the place. I mean, I’ve done it right here at my own house. It’s like taking a lot that was a rundown petroleum Brownfield where there was a pipeline used to run through it and turning it into a restored prairie. And, and all over the Midwest and kind of the Mountain West people are doing these kinds of experiments and trying to bring back something like the conditions that existed before and in the American context. That’s kind of like relatively easy. To do because really the history of the putting our landscape under the plow or into pasture is really relatively short. And most of the plants are still there and pockets and little fire and a little latitude. It’s pretty easy for that to come back. And people like the Land Institute up in Salina, Kansas are doing really interesting experiments with taking the Native American grasses that are like really attuned to recharging the soil with really deep roots and complex kind of micro raizel and rhizomatic structures, and hybridizing those with the major grain crops that are the core of our food system to create like really Hardy, you know, apocalypse re wheats, if you will. So I think there’s a lot of truth to that. There’s a narrative convenience Kind of like, you know, you know, having it like two warring gangs, right? That part maybe is a little bit of a stretch. But that’s the idea is that the, to me those like, two dipoles of like our experimental possibilities as a country do so solve our own problems without relying on government to help us because I really don’t think regardless of your politics, I just don’t think, you know, the system that was invented in the 1780s is necessarily the path to the future. looking, looking to these other examples for a toolkit of real change, I think is a way to build you know, elements of a plausible, plausibly interesting future you might actually want to live in.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So you talk a little bit about this whole corporate kind of, you know, team pride, you know, corporate kind of like a corporatist Kind of genre and we I would view that as like a centralized entity. I’m wondering if there’s a third rail is there can you have elements of both and I mean this from I look at it from a you know cryptocurrency blockchain decentralized technologies descending like a down tenement like a dow and you know it’s funny because you know I put together every year we have a conference here in Salt Lake called off chain that’s a mixture of self reliance crypto and prepping and those and we kind of bring those two kind of topics together and mash them up and in a lot of these conversations like to me I’m I’m a capitalist I like you know, I’m an entrepreneur, but I also have an urban homestead you know, we have big garden you know, we have irrigation like you’d Laffy sama most people would don’t even know what’s in my backyard because it looks like a, you know, full blown farm at my house. But I’m also a big believer in decentralized systems and technologies and I’m wondering, is it Going forward in the United States, are these new thousand decentralized organizations that are starting to come out of the blockchain world? Is that a different rail that could maybe go to the future?

Christopher Brown – Failed State
I mean, yes, I think distributed modes of social and economic and political organization are, are kind of a fundamental part of that future. And in fact, in traffic of Kansas. I mean, when I set out to write that novel, it was kind of all about that about the idea of like, distributed democracy that was like more network based and like distributed direct democracy that broke down the centralized systems of the, you know, the 1780s constitution in favor of something that had a lot in common with the kinds of ideas that you see articulated through things like, you know, experiments with dows. And, and in the context of the pandemic, I mean, corporate life, you know, the organization of entrepreneurship is like, really super distributed now. And we’re saying like, you know, independently of, you know, people building those kinds of systems on the blockchain, you have people who are really proving the capacity of productive activity on a cooperative, collaborative corporatized basis being done kind of in a way that’s totally uncoupled from geography from physical presence. And, and I think that that’s, I think that’s interesting. What I concluded writing traffic of Kansas, through the eyes of my characters who were kind of dealing with very similar problems is we’re dealing with real world is that those kinds of Organizational innovations play a really important role. But you’re not able to really take full advantage of them unless you first take care of the ecological problems that are the kind of the really the root causes and mentioned the injustice is in the inequality in our society.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I think it’s interesting, and you hit on a good point there is that these distributed systems now, you know, allow us to be more geography independent. And, you know, my wife and I had that as a goal, you know, 10 years ago that we wanted to be geography independent for our livelihood, because we like to travel and we like the flexibility and freedom that that gives us. And I’m wondering is if some of this, these distributed technologies that we’re seeing even just like talking a resume like we’re doing right now, allow for people to go Back to small towns in rural America. And, you know, you tend to find that people that tend to do the higher end white collar jobs tend to have the higher education levels. So there’s like, there’s a big disparity, you know, level of education between, you know, urban areas and rural areas. And, and I’m wondering if part of this, you know, if what could come out of COVID, in this pandemic is people one, learning that they can be productive from home or from a different location, and how that might, you know, be part of the seeds that are going to grow into a new society going forward? I personally would rather live in the country myself, and hopefully in a couple of years, you know, we will move on from where we live, but I’m just wondering, is it Where does it you know, if the pandemics and interesting pivot point right now, I see that..

Christopher Brown – Failed State
I think I think that’s a really great and insightful point. Rob is, I think I think there’s some there really is something there because that that you know, small town America again, going back to the book, tropic of Kansas. I mean, that’s partly about just how like, I mean, if you go you drive through the rural Midwest, like where my folks live in southern Iowa, there are a lot of towns all over the heartland and the rust belt that the 21st century is kind of left behind. There have a lot of empty and beautiful but empty buildings and you know, places that feel a lot more Mad Max than anybody would care to really admit and that are really ready for some fresh infusions of people and economic and cultural vitality. And that you know, are still full of good people, those who are hardworking and and i think that the there are many examples have places like that, in the past 20 years that have started to occur. I mean, there’s a kind of a an odd one and Texas which is the town of Marfa, which, you know, basically got taken over by artists by like, high end you know, New York conceptual artists, people like that kind of sculpture and conceptual artist Donald Judd. And that took a town that was historically just a, you know, cattle ranching town, you know, in the, in the kind of way down to the Big Bend region of West Texas. Right before the, you know, the last network connection runs out and turned it into this incredibly vital place where the legacy community and the kind of new inhabitants have created something really interesting. And you’re starting to see that in some allies like little towns closer to Austin, where similar things are happening in the Midwest. You have a lot of people starting to Yeah, I mean, you know, move out to these kind of outer like bedroom communities but which are like small towns and I think that the potential that represents to help people escape from the debt prison of home mortgages, and these things that I think are really like the enemies of freedom that people get really hooked on by our kind of socio economic model. Those are the things that keep people chained to the treadmill and limit people’s life options and if you can go to you know, get people around the idea that like you could go to some small town and buy an old building or a beautiful house and repurpose it for your own needs and, and also in the process also become part of a small enough community where you can kind of really know your neighbors and sort of, on the one hand, be participating through networks. You know, electronic communications networks and some kind of national economic or global economic and cultural life, but also be part of like, a real, vibrant community. I think there’s tremendous possibility there.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I try to be optimistic about the future, as much as I do see, challenging times coming ahead. For a lot of people, I think there’s going to be a lot of opportunity for those that are flexible and adaptable and embrace the changes that are coming, because they are coming. There’s no doubt about that. We’re not living I don’t believe we’re living a sustainable culture in the United States right now in a lot of different levels. So are you working on any other books? what’s the what’s the next book idea you got coming out?

Christopher Brown – Failed State
I think for the next book, I’m gonna be doing a different take on the novel of catastrophe. One that’s not so much about kind of failure political systems, but really engaging with our relationship with nature. A kind of Almost like eco horror, if you will, a kind of horror novel in which the thing that’s scary is our fear of the future, especially our fear of the climate future. We have a kind of rich literature out there. There’s a story type in science fiction called the cozy catastrophe where there’s, you know, a good weather sort of one or a small group of survivors who usually are, you know, kind of affluent, educated people and the world has ended and everybody’s dying off, but there’s a few people that seem to actually be kind of well prepared and having a good time of it. You think of like all those Charleton Heston movies from the 60s and 70s, like the Omega man where it’s, you know, it’s like apocalypse is fantasy, which I don’t think I don’t think those fish really entirely tell the truth. But they’re interesting and they make good story. And I want to take that kind of story type and turn it on its head. So that’s what I’m working on now. So I’m reading a lot of these great novels of catastrophe right now. Especially have like climate catastrophe and from Maven across different cultures and it’s a pretty interesting undertaking. But in the meantime, I’m just launching failed state and trying to connect with readers about that new book which is you know, people can find about on my website Christopher brown calm or in any any any bookstore, online or in real life as it were. You beat me to the

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
punch, I was gonna ask you, where can people get the book? But I will have all those links available as well as all your socials up at Rob McNealy calm. And Chris Brown, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you.

Christopher Brown – Failed State
Thanks so much for having me. Rob. It was a really interesting conversation.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I think we’ll do it again. Let me know when the next book comes out. We’ll have you back on.

Christopher Brown – Failed State
All right, right on it was a blast. I hope you have a great weekend. Thank you.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip Transcript

September 29, 2020 robmcnealy 0:00 Comments Off

Jack Connor - Hospital Flip

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Hey folks, Rob McNealy here. And we have another great show for you today, I am joined by someone who I’ve been connected with on social media for a long time and a big follower of his name is jack Connor. He is the co founder of this interesting company that’s focused on the medical space called hospital flip. He is also a renowned author, a renowned skateboarder. And I think he does everything that most Superman should be able to do. So he’s doing a lot of really fun stuff. And, you know, jack, welcome the show. How are you today?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Thank you for having me on. Rob, great to be on. And great to meet you in person. You know, we’ve talked a lot over Twitter and Social Media had a lot of great, great conversations. So it’s really fun to be here in person.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, it’s good. And one of the things I like about you, and and I miss, like, sound like I got some bromance thing going on. But you’re a tech guy, but you also get business. And I think that’s pretty important. Because a lot of times, those two aren’t in the same person, the business guy, and the dev guy, those are usually different guys. And so when you find those kind of qualities in one person, that usually they’re kind of interesting individuals. So

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I started out as the business guy before, this is, this is also kind of a rare thing where, you know, I had gotten a master’s in business. And I had lived abroad a bunch, I’d started businesses started one in in China briefly and had done startups here in the states and stuff like that. And I was really, into digital startups, and I came from a family that had a lot of programmers I had been exposed to it. So six or seven years ago, I did a whole, you know, did the boot camp thing, and went full career switch by just basically putting my head down and programming about 14 hours a day for a year. And then ended up completely switching careers. And, you know, getting into that side. But part of it is I knew I wanted to do startups and wanted to have control over the product itself, you know, like, I want to be able to build things. And so it was a little bit I mean, it’s like a little bit risky is like career switching as is but found, I also found like, I really loved it. And I kind of knew that about it ahead of time. That, you know, programming for me, is one of the first jobs I’ve had that I really love it on a minute by minute basis where it’s like, you know, really fun solving problems. But when you talk about that business programming orientation, like, I was not a computer science major studied linguistics, really nerded out in languages. Again, there’s a little bit of relation there in terms of kind of like the skill level. But um, but yeah, and agreed. It’s been really fun talking startups and startups in business with you. You know, you bring really interesting perspective from the Utah startup scene. And you know, I’m in Long Beach, red, sad, LA. And neither one of those is Silicon Valley. So we have kind of that to compare against. But yeah, we had some good conversations on the topic.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah, I think that, you know, and we mentioned this off the air, but I think there’s a big thing about startups that you see that there’s lots of startups out there that have nothing to do with technology, and they generally form differently than a lot of technology startups. So, you know, some I’m originally from the Midwest, and in someone like me, you know, I would just think, oh, if I want to start a business, you go borrow a little bit of money from your data, your uncle, get a small business loan, and then you just kind of bootstrap it and, you know, start up a business. And, and that it’s very, it’s very normal among low tech businesses, let’s say contractors, and construction and retailers and you know, things like that. It’s just a very different mindset of just like, let’s just get to work. Whereas, you know, it’s interesting, especially with TUSC, and getting into the crypto space, I’m closer to like, Silicon Valley kind of software and and that whole culture that I ever been in, have been in my life. And so you know, I’ve been an entrepreneur for a number of yours now, seeing the culture of like, I’ve never done anything in my life before I have an idea and a pitch deck and I’m going to raise millions of dollars is baffling to me.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I don’t know if that actually still exists, unless you’ve already maybe exited a startup. Because when I talk, but maybe this is where I met you know, I I’ve, I’ve had startups never exited. Never, you know, never had some mega success, anything like that. And it’s a, you know, whether it’s accelerators, or VCs or basically anything outside of maybe just a pitch night. They do really like it’s hard to get a seat at the table if you don’t have something that’s in the marketplace, or at least and this is this is for digital stuff. This is not for, you know, medical startups which you know, like a patent can raise, you know, 10s of millions of dollars or, although you’re in the crypto space, so I take back everything I said, Because crypto might actually might actually have that where you’re raising money off speculate, you know, we’re gonna build this blockchain for X, Y and Z. I do not know, confession. I did not know that much about crypto outside of the implementation side, some of the, you know, record sides of it. But uh, yeah, I don’t know. It’s a it’s it’s interesting. So what do you so what’s your experience been like? Building TUSC

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
building topspin interesting? Well, the thing is, it’s being I’ve never managed like an open source project before. So that’s kind of why you guys

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
You open source. So that’s an interesting viewpoint into devote to working with developers as well.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Open source decentralized kind of project. Well, it’s interesting from a start, just from a startup perspective, since we have a coin and have had a token traded in markets for two and a half years. From the minute you start, like a crypto project like this, you’re an internationally traded, you know, an international publicly held company, essentially. And so even though I’ve had a lot of startup experience, I’ve been an entrepreneur, a self sufficient entrepreneur for a long time, meaning that I’ve made a living actually, as an entrepreneur for a long time. And that’s baffling to me, because even some of those things, I mean, I’ve worked when I was back in a corporate MBA guy, I worked for some big companies and big international companies. And so I know what that looks like. But you know, I’ve never been in charge as a as a, as an entrepreneur, I’ve never had like in charge of a mega Corporation. It’s been internationally traded and things like that. So that’s one of the different things about it, and then being decentralized. So when we started as a token project I, we had control, even though we set it up as what they call a low profit, LLC. But when we decided to build our own blockchain and move from our token, den to become TUSC, we became a public blockchain. So what happened is the minute we essentially, before we traded, the minute we let the, the outside block producers come in and take over the network from our test net. You know, I, we, I have no control over the project. I mean, I’m a co founder, I have influenced just because I am, the guy has been with it since the beginning. But it’s, it’s interesting, just from the standpoint that I no longer have control. And so you just got to like, beg. You gotta beg people to help out essentially, and, and, and trying to do deals and trying to sort out partnerships, you know, with these weird nuances. It’s interesting, it’s just a very interesting space, and then that’s

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
fraud and bullshit, it’s, it’s just, it’s just tough space, to be honest, I tend to want to have a lot of control on the digital projects that I build, and especially in recent years, you know, I’ve architected done, you know, majority of the code for a lot of the lot of the things I’ve worked on. And so yeah, that might be that might be tough. I mean, it’s, you know, delegations for the big digital projects, delegations, huge, because you can’t do everything yourself, you have to have people you work with, that you can trust to, you know, build a feature correctly, and not put massive security flaws in it and things like that. Open Source open source be interesting. I mean, I admit, like, I haven’t worked on that many open source projects, I, I feel like when I want to build something, I just kind of like come up with it and just start, you know, Tinker and MVP myself. But it’s a wild, it’s a wild world. Yeah, I’d like to check out your your project a little more. Maybe get involved or something

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
we could put you to work because we need everything, though a lot of good things are happening. And so it’s so we had to structure so how we kind of tried to deal with some of the things like with a lot of I’m not here to pitch to us, but you know, one of the I always feel if I could give it a plug. Yeah. So is how do you there’s just a lot of challenges, right? How did one I getting shit done is not easy, when you know, not everybody is trying to like hope that the tokens that you paid him with, you know, will be worth something at some point. And a lot of people have a hard time and they’re not patient all the time with that stuff. And so yeah, it’s interesting, I always try to tell the..

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I mean, interrupt you, I was just gonna interject that production working and production level and digital. Ther’re in my experience, there’s about a 10 x difference in the amount of time and the amount of code that you need to put in to get something that works well versus something that’s truly production level, you know, doesn’t have even those tail bugs that only happen on you know, Internet Explorer in certain situations or someone hasn’t dated their chrome You know, something like that?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I can I can tell you a chrome problem.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Yeah. And, you know, you’re kind of a, you’re a gun guy. And I think that there’s a, there’s a level of perfectionism you have to have for both of them that actually, you know, sometimes there might be a little bit of overlap, if you want to be really good at it.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I think so I think attention to detail, things need to work and things need to get done the right tool for the right job. So yeah, I see, there’s a lot of it. But I’ve adapted, and the thing is the last two and a half years, like, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, serial entrepreneurs being add, and then they, you know, jump from one thing before they finished the other. And, and I can tell you, I’ve learned a lot of patience over the last two and a half years working in this environment. I mean, when you’re not technically employing somebody, but you know, how to get stuff done. And then just, it’s actually made me more patient. Mm hmm. Yes, you know. And so, but I’m still, you know, still I always think like an entrepreneur, I’m not going to change that, right. That’s just going to be how I view the world through those lenses. I’m not a developer. So I don’t think of the world through a developer’s eyes either, right. But I think that’s the same thing with like, open store. syncretized Hell is what I tell people like, how do you explain like, open source and decentralized products to like, you know, a gun shop owner, right? They tend a lot of tend to be pretty low tech, depending on where you are.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I feel like that’s something that we have at Rs with, you know, where I can explain our business as a synchronous telemedicine for physical therapy, and you know, people’s eyes glaze over. But then I’m just like, now you just do your exam at home, and it sends it to the doctor, you know, try and keep it as simple and as, I’m a big fan of not using big words, big words when you don’t have to I because for me, it’s like language. You know, like I said, like, I nerd out in language. And I think at the end of the day, language is all about communication. And so when you’re explaining something, it’s like, you got to know who you’re explaining it to, like, if I talk to you versus a developer, versus a salesperson about my business, it’s all going to be a little bit different. But I think the true communicators, someone who knows how to like, break it down for whoever the hell you’re talking to, you know,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I described us like this, I said, or when someone asked, What’s a decentralized project, because outside of crypto, that’s never really happened, right? Well, that’s a new thing, kind of at least a minor time. But I say, Well, think about it somewhere between a co op and a nonprofit. Oh, okay. That makes sense. Mm hmm. And that’s how I explained it. I’m like, that’s what it is. It’s somewhere between a co op and a nonprofit, because, because that’s what really is, if you think about it, right. You know, and there is no company making money. We’re not profit driven from that, you know, way we don’t even. And so that’s kind of how that’s kind of true, you know, and so I think you’re right. Don’t use big words with you don’t need to. I mean….

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I don’t know if that works. And I don’t think that works. Actually, they’re probably smarter than that.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Maybe some ladies I don’t know, didn’t work with my wife. She’s smarter than me. So she knew more words than I did. So it was all good. But I would say this, it’s like, you know, it’s like how writers write, you know, like, and it even in science and business, sometimes people write in a way, I’m, you got an MBA, I got an MBA, right. So it’s like, you know, business writing is interesting, too. But I think, you know, you know, I read this statistic A while back, and it made a lot of sense to me, from a business standpoint, you look at some of the most famous classics that are out there, like Ernest Hemingway, at least in modern times, right? The Ernest Hemingway’s of the world. And they say there was an algorithm and some AI thing to analyze the reading level of some of these works. Mm hmm. And they found that the most successful works, including things like Harry Potter, mm hmm, are written in a very low level. So essentially, like, and I don’t know if this was, you know, done deliberately back then. Or maybe there was just a name that they said, I want it for the common person. But what happened is, apparently old man in the sea, by Ernest Hemingway was written at a fourth grade level.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Let me ask you a question. Do you ever read Stephen King?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I’m not long time ago.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Sorry. Sorry to interrupt you there. I was gonna say he’s not my he’s not necessarily my favorite author. But I’ve read a million books by Stephen King, and I love horror. I love horror books. The novel is the best form of horror in my opinion. It’s the scariest if you get a really good one. And he also has got to write at a third grade level, a fourth grade level, but in the best way possible, where it’s like, common vernaculars he’s, he’s one of the reasons he’s so effective like you are, you’re never more immersed in a in a fiction book. than if you’re reading something by Stephen King, shining or Pet Cemetery. He describes everything in the room like everything you know exactly what’s happening where you are. It’s one of the most immersive experiences you could possibly have reading a book. And just like you’re saying about Ernest Hemingway, it’s, it’s very simple language. And I think that’s part of the magic of it, you’re not trying to decipher it, you know what I mean?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I would say, it’s actually, they’re actually a little more scientific than that. And I think it’s scientific, from the standpoint is that as you expand your population size, the average reading ability in the United States and everywhere pretty much goes down. And so is, so if you wrote a book at, say, a 12th grade level, and the bell curve of your populations, reading comprehension, is at the fourth grade level, you just lost what, you know three fourths of your potential market size. And so if you bring down that reading level doesn’t mean that you dumb it down, but you bring the reading that required reading comprehension level down, you expand your market. Dramatic, absolutely. And so the more people that may be in your market, you’re probably more likely to win financial success from what you’re doing.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
This is 100% accurate, this is very true. Although I’d say the same effect might be part of the reason that I feel it’s so hard to find a good adult movie these days. Because they’ve kind of when it comes to sort of, especially Hollywood, blockbuster movies, they’ve really, they’ve taken what you just said, especially when you’re taking international markets into account to the extreme, you know, and you sort of end up with like, your Transformers movies that are play in China plan Indonesia play in Brazil, but, you know, kind of the same, just like nonsense, bullshit. And in every language,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
well, here’s an interesting thing. You know, it’s like, depending on where you are, I mean, you know, look at the average IQ, that can get into very political discussion about, you know, different, you know, developed people in some developing countries have lower IQs on average. And so, or they have much lower literacy rates, or, you know, numeracy rates and stuff in those places. So if you’re focusing on a global audience, where it may be playing in developing nations, you bring that down, you did just expand your market. Now the problem is, you might have almost, you know, gone too far on the domestic side. Mm hmm. So, and I think that’s where, you know, a lot of things just seem ridiculous. Like, I have a really hard time. I don’t normally watch sitcoms, and but if I watch any kind of like, national, I don’t have cable. So I don’t really so when I’m traveling or something, I flick on the TV. So I haven’t watched this in six months. I know, I haven’t watched this in six months. But if you look at the I think they’ve almost dumbed it down too much in the United States at this point. And I think that gets annoying to people like…

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Sonds you’re watching Two and a Half Men.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I you know what, I never watched an episode of that.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
And that’s one of those TV shows, not to just harp on the dumbing down of TV because that’s, that’s sort of like, I mean, that’s a bottomless well of stupidity. But Two and a Half Men is one of those show that was, it was like, the most popular is the highest rated show for about 10 years. And I didn’t know a single person that could watch more than five minutes, minutes of it without just like, turning it off and boredom and disgust like, it’s so bad. And it’s just one of those mysteries of you know, you’re talking about cultures and populations and things translating and kind of like making something for the lowest common denominator. And it’s still really, you know, we talked about the difference between California and Utah and all kinds of things like that, but like it’s pretty wild. What that like kind of works for everybody is you know, it really is sometimes at that Honey Boo Boo level of just like the really lowest common you know, the Steven Seagal, police reality show things like

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
that, you know, well, well, it’s interesting. I mean, even look at what are the most popular sports, right? I think the two most popular sports I think in fall, I think NASCAR is number one, right? The NASCAR is the number one spectator sport, right? That’s at least it was like not that long ago. And then it’s like NFL and then. So if you look at what are the things that are, and again, it goes back to markets, but the things that have the largest economic, you know, successes, right as far in a given industry. And yeah, sometimes I’m like these people vote. It’s like, you know, the average American is average. And that means, you know, half the people so if the average IQ in the United States is around 100 mm. And that’s the average that means half the people you meet our below True story. So they add that’s pretty scary. You know, thinking about that

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
You ever done jury duty?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I Got, I almost got in I didn’t get picked, though.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I did jury duty in Chicago once that was a wild experience, Cook County, Judge Cook County. And it was definitely like, a diverse, you know, in every way, like income levels, raised blah, blah, live it was that, you know, I forget Where’s in the city of Chicago, but you definitely saw like, and I think a lot of people get this experience where you kind of think that your point of view is like, more or less what most other people are thinking. And then you really get thrust into the situation with, you know, a lot of different people where there’s some stakes to it, and you sort of see like, Oh, that’s not actually the case. You know, what I mean, and I think jury duty is kind of can be a pretty eye opening such situation for a lot of people.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, you know, for my day job, I do forensic consulting, in my field. And, and it actually, I don’t talk about it that often on the podcast, because it’s not, I’m more focused on TUSC, and crypto and small business. But in my day job, I’m actually pretty successful as a consultant, and I work all over the country. And it’s very flexible on time. So it gives me the opportunity to basically commit myself full time to TUSC and only have to work part time on that business. And I used to think that the world was a lot more black and white, you know, 567 years ago, and when I started getting into consulting, were in testimony and doing depositions. And I went through interrogation, training and investigation training, because I do accident claims, like I, I mean, I do occasionally death cases, like people get in an accident, you know, and get hurt. And so so I have this part of my job, I have to interview people, even on an insurance type of claim or something like that. I have to interview people on a regular basis. Like, I did one today. No, today to yesterday, you know, so it’s like, it’s so it’s just like when you then get around and you start seeing how people will lie to cover themselves up, people won’t take responsibility, people are not forthright. And I’ve seen it in court numerous times, where people I thought someone I might respect, you know, or someone a friend of mine, and they testified on the other side of a case. And I’m like, they straight up lied. And I’m just like, wow, you know, you know, I You and I both know, this is not what you just said in court. Mm hmm. And, and then dealing with people, like where they you know, I interview somebody, and then I might do an investigation or inspection, gather data and gather evidence and stuff. And I find that the evidence routinely will prove that the person lied. You know, and you’re just like, it’s amazing how often people are deceptive. And I think, and I also that a lot of times, there’s, there’s negligence to go around. And that was the interesting thing about, you know, working in legal environments as part of my job. Like, that’s only a part of what I do. I don’t spend a lot of our time doing just consulting for people, but, but when I do the legal stuff, it’s like it you will see how often everybody, like, everybody’s like, it’s their fault. It’s their fault. But then when you really look at it, it’s all their fault. Mm hmm. as I’ve gotten older, it is I’ve gotten older, I see that more and more situations in society are gray, they’re not clear cut, they’re black and white. There’s there’s fault that goes around everywhere. And that’s where I usually see the the most conflict is where everybody’s got a problem, and they don’t want it to be theirs. And in fact, it’s, it’s it actually makes my job harder. Sometimes when you guys like…

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Solutions, would, you know, people would implement them, I think that that’s, that’s something that actually does occur a lot. And it’s, you know, a lot of anger. And this is, of course, like, you know, pretty topical in a couple of ways. But, you know, when there aren’t easy solutions, and there’s a lot of frustration, or like a problem is just building and building and building. Yeah, man, like, I mean, that’s one of the ways like, you know, where rage comes out where like, anger turns into rage is when like, there isn’t an outlet, you know what I mean? Or there isn’t, there isn’t that solution that you can, you know, if I, if I have, you know, if my faucet gets broken, I can figure out how to fix it. But if it’s like something that I just like, literally, you know, there’s what is the fix? So it’s a lot more nebulous, and it’s a lot scarier.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I think it’s even this is what scares me is that when the masses have been convinced that the cause of their problems is not what the actual cause is, and and then people get worked up, and once someone’s been convinced to something, you generally can’t change their minds. Mm hmm. And so they’ll try it. And this is a problem. And this is a problem because if you don’t know the root cause of your problem, you can’t solve the problem.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Yeah, this is very true. And you know, We were talking about this earlier regarding politics, but I come from, I come from a very split household with one parent is very conservative and parent is very, very liberal. And so I get the, quote unquote, pleasure of getting both sides to every issue. You know, a lot of times, like, yelled at me on the phone, like, I can’t believe, you know, whatever. Um, but you know, it’s one of those things where, like, I, and a lot of times, you just don’t have the energy for it. But you know, there’s, and this is I didn’t want to get political. But one example that has come here we got is, and I’m not, I’m not taking any sides on this, but it’s climate change, where one thing I have noticed is that both sides and DM me if you want to talk about this and get more details, but not getting not getting into it, but both sides tend to argue very different points of climate change. in a lot of situations, they’re not even talking about the same thing. And you know, where it’s like, and this is as a person who’s kind of like, I mean, I, you know, for better or for worse, if, you know, you get like both both sides of an issue, and you hear both sides of people, and you see both sides biases and things like that, you know, you kind of and I know that this has happened to you a lot is, you know, you can see where there’s, you know, one we’re both, you know, either left or right or whomever, when they’re picking out straw man, it tends to be pretty obvious. And this, of course, happens a lot. And you know, you and I are on Twitter a lot, which is kind of like the kingdom of the straw man. straw man argument. But yeah, it’s it’s tough man. And it’s, uh, yeah, sorry to bring up climate change. I know, I know that that’s gonna executive get this episode, like censored kicked off Google or something?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
No, I think it has to be the opposite side of it. I can say those Dino those damn penguins got to figure their shit out. That’s all I know. of polar bears?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Yeah, I love the polar bears. Yeah, it’s a that’s a complicated and that’s another thing where get not to not to get into but like one of many issues where like, there’s a ton of there’s a ton of things, there’s a ton of big problems that don’t have solutions that we know about. And this is very difficult to deal with. You know,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I think there’s lots of problems that we you know, we have big problems that we could solve, that are more important than some other things. And that sense, it’s really tough. I mean, essentially, everybody’s like, Oh, well, I mean, given the like, the whole riots and stuff lately, stuff, the looting and all that. I mean, it’s really hard. When there’s not a good side, like, you can see, like, I can see the points on everybody’s side, and I can see lots of mistakes made on both sides. And so that doesn’t in my mind, it makes it really hard to pick a side. And the one thing I don’t like about our society, especially the US society, Americans, is that we want it to be left or right, black and white.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
By your side, we want it to be like, a sport almost.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
against us. You know, you’re not with me, I even had a friend of mine that we got along with really, really well. And, you know, he was basically taking this position, you know, he got really upset and about the whole Black Lives Matter thing. And, and, and he was just like, Well, you know, you know, and I didn’t I wasn’t arguing with them, just say that, you know, this is not the problem you think it is, and and over some different elements. And he got really mad at me. And he’s like, well, if you’re not gonna, you know, support Black Lives Matter, you don’t support me in blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, dude, we’re friends. I have no beef with you. And I’m like I’ve ever had a different big giving you a, you know, we’ve worked together on things professionally, if I ever given you a hard time about anything, you know, and nothing….

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
It’s very, it’s very volatile right now. And I know that I know that this is not news to you in any sense. But like the story you’re telling me I’ve heard over and over. And it’s and it goes both ways. There’s a lot of there’s that one of the shitty things is like, there’s Black Lives Matter. And, you know, there’s like defending the police and blue Lives Matter and like anti maskers there’s, there’s a half dozen things out there that are causing family breakups to happen right now, like, tensions are high. And I think that part of this is, I mean, one of the you know, if you have, if you have a lot of different hotspots, culturally, part of me that’s like, get to psychological but I think this just in general because of the pandemic, a lot of pent up frustration and a lot of pent up energy. You know what I mean?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I absolutely agree with that. And, and I think it’ll be interesting to see how things Go in the next six months of this curls down to cools down, but I don’t think it’s going to no one’s going to accept the election, no one’s going to accept a cure for COVID. You know, it’s like, we’re at all these impasses. And you know, and now we got this weird culture war, you know, on your opinion, like, riots aren’t riots anymore. And you know, and if you don’t want stuff, your property burned down, you’re like, on the other side, and I’m like, you know, this is just not good for society.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
It’s, it’s rough. And this is, you know, doing the, as a skateboarder I got to say, like, you know, I was thrown in a cop car before I was 12 years old, like, I’ve, you know, had cops, like I’ve seen cops break boards, I’ve seen cops, yell at kids, and all kinds of things like that, if you’re skateboarder you’re basically like, half the time, wherever you’re skating, it’s, it’s illegal, and skaters tend to have water runs with cops. So when all these videos start coming out of like, cops, like beating the shit out of old people and stuff, there wasn’t a skateboarder on the planet that was surprised about it like this is. And it’s one of those things where, you know, in my experience, like, seven or eight police officers out of 10, that I’ve had personal experience with, like, in Chicago and LA, are totally cool, greatest people in the world, you know, like, they’ll come like your skateboarding, they get a call, because you’re in some school or something, and they come there’s like, you can’t do that here. You get out, you know, no big deal. But like, every once in a while, and not as every once in a while as you want it to be. Like, there’s somebody who is power tripping like crazy. And, you know, I’ve known people who’ve worked at that, you know, for the police, military, all kinds of stuff like that. And like, they’ll basically tell you the same thing, like they all know, you know, they all know that one or two people at the, at the precinct, or at least I’ve heard people kind of mentioned that. And this is this is one of the things and so like, whichever way and there’s obviously a lot of backlash, bro, we’re in this really insane political time where, you know, is it Trump in the lead polling? Is it Biden like blah, blah, blah, like everything is switching? We’re you know, if somebody listens to this a month out, like everything will have changed completely regarding 1010 catastrophic events will have happened and who knows where the polls will be. But um, yeah, it’s, you know, I say it’s like, on the anti cop thing, like, I don’t know if defunding the cops is the solution, because that I’m from Chicago, and Chicago’s major crime problem. And this seems to be exasperating the crime problem in at least certain areas.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
But I don’t know New York, Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Yeah, but this is also but then you’re getting the thing is like, Oh, well, that if they just defunded the cops that hasn’t even kicked in yet? Like, who the fuck knows? You know what I mean, but like, I’m trying to not take sides here.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I think you have to take aside, there’s, I think that at some point that you don’t have to have a side to say that, when a group of people are angry about something that they’re not immediately going to go right and burn things down. I don’t think that’s a racial position. Or it shouldn’t even be a controversial position. But, you know, right now, this is, you know, recorded for posterity, you know, is it is a weird position that…

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I think it’s a little bit less, should they do it? Well, I don’t know. I mean, it’s like, what’s the psychological position for that? Because, like, when you say, like, should someone burn something down for this? Yeah. Anyway, I don’t want to I don’t want to get to that continue what you were saying I was gonna read that. I don’t know if it had a..

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Don’t go down. I mean, look, I understand. You know, there’s one thing if you literally live under a dictator, that literally is doing all the things that you know, dictators have been accused of, then if you want to fight that system, because that system is unjust. I mean, I true. I have a I have a theory about cops because I grew up white, but I grew up fairly lower middle class fairly poor, did not grow up in a nice neighborhood.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
And cops got a reputation to man we heard about you guys in Chicago.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I lived in I lived in like one burb over but the but the reality is, I know growing up white and poor, we got hassled a lot I and I remember this clearly my first I got not pulled over nine times in eight months when I was 16. Because I drove I had like a mullet and I drove like a beat up old Firebird. And and so I’m in a bad neighborhood. So it’s like, yeah, we just screw with you. And I’ve had cops be very disrespectful to me. I would say about a dozen times in my life, you know, and I’m not a troublemaker is just when I was a kid. You got pulled over for being a kid with a mullet driving a piece of crap car. And that was just how it was. And I think that first Some power tripping cops out there. If they’re going to pay, like they’re bullies just like any, you know anybody else, any industry, they have bullies, right? Well, bullies tend to pick on people they think they can get away with it from. Right? I mean, you know, it’s not going to be the the white shoot guy from, you know, Manhattan that you’re gonna shake down and beat the crap up on the sidewalk, you know, on the side of the road because you’re having a bad day, huh? You know, he won, he’s knows his rights, too, he’s probably got the money. He’s probably smarter than you. And he’s probably got the money to hire really good lawyers. And maybe…

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
You actually make an interesting point to where it’s also an unusual target, you know, like, somebody’s hassling, you know, 16 year old you with the mullet which, by the way, I’m ready to see those pictures of you with the mullet anytime you want. So I’ll be digital, I’d have to scan I’m not doing it. I can wait. I could wait. Don’t worry about it. But whether it’s you whether you know, whoever, you know, there’s a million there’s a million different, like, quote unquote, targets for cops, you know, skateboarder, somebody have the wrong ethnicity, whatever it is, yeah, it’s really easy to become a target for that for that type of police officer. And part of it is because like, if some you know, if a cop pulled over you and you’re 16 with the wallet driving, you’re 77, Thunderbird or whatever it was.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Somebody like Firebird with the big block Pontiac 400 Thank you.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
But who would believe you over them? You know, it’s, uh, you’re not just an easy target, you’re a very safe target. Mm

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
hmm. And so, you know, I have to wonder, based on that, and I spent a lot of time in the inner city as well, I had a business in inner city. And so, you know, I saw how people interacted with cops when I saw cops treated people they were interacting with and, you know, did I think that? I don’t know, I would say that. My opinion, most people’s problems in this world are self induced. You know, you and I’ve talked about this on Twitter, for instance, you know, COVID, didn’t make people broke. They were already broke. And they were fragile. And same thing of businesses. You know, businesses should have an emergency fund, just like individuals. And if they’re not putting money away for an emergency, they’re fragile.

JackConnor-HospitalFlip
Mm hmm.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
COVID just exposed that.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Well, this is I mean, the restaurant not to pick on restaurants who are having a really difficult time right now. But this is a really interesting question, which is, if your typical restaurant had, and I think it was something like 12 to 14 days of working capital in the bank, and that was, I mean, that’s like your typical restaurant in the United States. You know, you you invoked fragile, as a very fragile position. I mean, you know, took the, you know, the pandemic obviously caused a lot of closures for more than two weeks, you know, more than a month. But it’s not the only thing in history that could have done it, you know, like, weather events. Who knows an E. coli outbreak, there’s one of a million long, you know, fat tail events that could happen in that. But it does kind of make you think that maybe we are, you know, maybe we’re building the system, that’s just like, based way too much on money coming in to just, you know, just keep things running. Justin times.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah, everything’s Just-in-time.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
And it’s funny, because I used to be a big advocate of just in time, because I thought, you know, because it’s like, very clever, and clever is actually what you find out, it’s kind of like one of the, one of the curses of modern life and a lot of situations, but you look at something, you know, like Zara, or h&m, and they have this insane, you know, insanely complex, or not, maybe not complex, but this very well done supply chain. And it’s really amazing. And you’re like, Oh, it’s almost a work of art, you know, it’s so efficient. And then one thing had, like, one monkey wrench gets thrown into the gears. And then we’re in the situation where now I mean, pandemic, you know, COVID was obviously more than a monkey wrench, but, um, you know, and then the whole thing shuts down. Like, that’s the problem of having a finely tuned motor that doesn’t work if anything goes wrong, is that it’s, it’s kind of all or nothing, you know?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
And, yeah, and the problem is, when people are ill prepared for change, or for that system to fail. That’s when things get really ugly. Yeah. And, and so, and you’re right, I think, you know, think of all the things that can make things that mean, let’s talk about realistic things. How about an invasion can shut things down for a while. Ruined supply chain..

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Like red, red dawn style,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Like Red Dawn, style. Absolutely. And and I think, you know, whatever. If you had like, a hurricane to hurricanes and a major earthquake happened within a month period, you’re gonna have major sections of the country shut down.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
For that, I mean, there’s so many different possibilities solar flare that they keep talking about EMP is a Is it an EMP?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Electromagnetic pulse?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Yeah.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah. Well, this is or manmade?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Mm hmm. Um, yeah. I mean, there’s like literally, like, you know, if you go back, go back 500 years, and look at all the events of like this that could have shut down society for more than a couple of days, big volcano going off, you know, or an asteroid hitting or something. And I know that they’re all like long tail. But eventually one of these is gonna happen. And we do see now you’re getting me into something that I do feel passionately about. But we need a motherfucking plan, you know what I mean? Like, otherwise? You know, we’re not, we’ve been around for 12,000 years, we 12,000. Or I think that that one that one site in Turkey is from, I think, 17,000 BC, I think that’s the oldest, you know, evidence of civilization we have, like, this isn’t this is definitely not very long on like an earth scale. It’s very not long in a cosmic space scale. And so I was watching, I don’t watch a lot of TV, but I really loved the show Doctor Who. And I was watching an episode that takes place 250,000 years in the future, and you know, there’s like, mankind is living on a different, you know, star system and stuff like that. And I just remember thinking, like, if we’re gonna get to 250,000 years, like, we need some robustness, as this pandemic, kind of proved, like, we didn’t have a plan for this, like, we kind of thought we had a plan. You know, I think if you had asked every single person in the world in a year ago today, like could could humanity handle an epidemic pretty well, most people would have thought, Yeah, man, we got it. You know, like, I saw that movie where the who swoops in and they isolate, you know, an outbreak, they isolate the region, and, you know, everything, everybody instantly has other perfect PP Nah, there’s a, you know, one person got stabbed by a dirty needle. But, you know, we got that under control. And the reality is, it was just a complete and utter shit show from day one, and it never really got any better.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
No, and, and, you know, I think, and I said this before that, you know, if we can’t come together as a country, to create policies and plans to deal with COVID, which is deadly as it is, it could be a lot worse, is that what happens when the next deadly bug comes around or slightly deadly or bug comes around? Or an actual bio weapon gets unleashed in the night seats? What are we going to do while we’re going to argue our masks can comply, and then politicians are just going to do dumb stuff, because they want to get reelected. And, you know, I think we’re host i think that that expose a cultural and that’s the thing watching, for me watching all this COVID stuff is watching how people are reacting to it. And what are they doing because of it? And I am worried now that maybe Bill Gates is right, because we’re so screwed culturally United States, if we had a serious shit show kind of thing come through. Not saying that 185,000 people dead so far isn’t a shitshow. But it could be a lot worse could be millions. I think we’re really weak. And that’s, that’s scares me as a culture that I fear that we can’t survive something really tough.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
In this in this sense. I agree. I mean, there’s a lot of ways we’re strong, but this like, we really, we really dropped the ball. Also, I need to get that audio drop of you saying Bill Gates was right. I feel like that’s something. I feel like that’s not something you say every day. So it’s pretty happy about that?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
No. And and yeah, and depending half the listeners will say that I’m trying to, you know, kill them with chem trails or something. But, you know, ultimately, you know, I think that, you know, you look at the countries that are dealing with COVID the best and how they did that is they came together with and basically back their governments with the unified plan. And in the ones that did the best had the highest compliance with those plans. And I think the problem is in the United States, you know, it became a political I’m not here to judge, you know, Donald Trump, but there was a lot of denial in the beginning and New York, there was a lot of denial with the Democratic politicians there and democrat governor, and so they all drop the ball in my opinion. And I think the fact that they could that everyone wanted to make it a political issue, and then everybody dug in and then the tribal lines were Set.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
And then nothing happened. I mean, we just fought about it. And, you know, the action. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s not like nothing happened, like there was, you know, testing centers, ropin Drive throughs rope and, you know, things, things did go down, but especially at a national level, like I couldn’t even tell you what our federal government did regarding COVID, that was especially useful, you know, what I mean, like, everything I’ve seen, at least, for me is all more or less at a local level, you know, like, the things open here was more or less like Long Beach grants. I mean, I’m sure I’m missing something, because I have not followed the whole trail of money and anything like that, but..

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, you know, I and I used to be emergency responder, and I can tell you that most This is like, and especially on the biological stuff, most of that is responded in supposed to be responded to by the local governments, that is how it’s supposed to work, you know, public health is done at a county level of pretty much in every county in the country. And then even additionally, sometime at the municipal, you know, municipal level, like and, you know, so Denver, and a lot of us, a lot of cities have still have, you know, government hospitals. And so that’s where disaster response normally comes from, but with the biological and public health is almost always done at the local and state level. And so I don’t necessarily fault the government for that what I felt the government for, is how generally the leadership did not come together behind a unified plan, everybody dug in and made a political issue. And I think that that shows me that people on both sides of the aisle care more about their tribe than they do solving problems. And that’s unfortunate.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I got a question for you, though, as you know, especially coming from your background, do you think that this this whole event, that one potential upside, could be a big uptick in people kind of like taking control of their own lives, like being like, I mean, something that I had the sort of questionable blessing of growing up in Chicago, there’s like, it’s very corrupt in Chicago, and I was there under like the, you know, second Mayor Daley. And they’d be like, photos of him like having dinner with mob bosses and stuff. Like it wasn’t even in going ice fishing with gangsters and you know, things like that, like people laughed about it. And so I never really, for better for worse, I just never really trusted the government, I was always kind of taught like, it was just all corrupt. And it was all kind of blah, blah, blah. And I’m not saying people shouldn’t trust the government, because Chicago is kind of its own special little situation. But I do think the pandemic I mean, even with everything from the gardening and breadmaking to, you know, you were talking about, like liberals buying guns and people moving to the country, do you think there is going to be an uptick in like decentralization, localization, and basically people just saying, Hey, I’m kind of on my own. So let’s figure this thing out,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
take care of ourselves. And I think COVID showed us very quickly that the technological infrastructure was there. So I would say, a family member of mine, their office went all remote. Mm hmm. And that was really hard for the company to go all remote. And then after like, six, eight weeks, of the company going remote, because part of the part of the company was really trying to get people back in the office as much as possible. And but then they found that most of the people don’t want to go back. And they just decided to like stop leasing, you know, some class A office space. So I think COVID started that. And I think the fact is, I think more people are gonna homeschool people are seeing that. So I think we’re not done yet. You know, we haven’t finished all these things out lately. But you know, but I think the bigger trigger for the one the gun sales, and I know this, and then it’s the riots and the burnings, and and i think that’s going to scare the hell out of people, and people are going to rethink being in an urban area. Because of that. And I think that that’s a different animal. And we don’t know how it’s gonna play out. So the, the, you know, and I think this is interesting about the current protests, riots, whatever you want to call them, right? It and, you know, they never used to allow riots and protests to go on as long as these have been allowed in various cities. Like we’re like Portland and Seattle, you know, three months solid, right. And, and I think the government, you know, if you go back and look at like 92 in LA, and you go back and look at, you know, the riots in the 70s and late 60s in Detroit. Those things only lasted a couple days. And then they’re over with and people cleaned up and moved on. I think the problem we’re seeing and this is why I say I don’t know where I think this is going to go I think there’s a lot of things seems to be getting worse, not better. But I would say, from a prepping standpoint, Mm hmm. The longer these violent riots because they’re violent riots, these are not protests if I when people are getting killed and and people are burning, you know, whole areas to the ground, that’s no longer protest. And and so I think the longer it’s allowed to go on anything about the cops haven’t been shooting anybody with real bullets. Right. And they certainly did in 92. And they certainly did in the 60s in the 70s. And so, you know, I know in the Detroit riots in 68, one of my friend’s dad’s was in the National Guard at the time, and he quote unquote, said we stacked him up like, cordwood Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It’s like, and so if you look at how many people were declared dead during the Detroit riots, apparently that number was like, 10 x or something like a lot of people got shot.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
No photos going on social media back then. You know,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
There are some photos, though. There are some pretty damning photos, but it was like..

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
You know, what the immediacy not like, they wouldn’t get out like that. Unless, unless, you know, next day, write a press. Yeah, somebody happened to get it.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah. And so so I think that the fact is governments I mean, there’s no water cannons, right. There’s no alle rats running around.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
So it was the last one. There’s no what.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
LRAD you know, those audible things that are this, you know, noisy things?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Oh, it’s like the the noise yet to basically get people to disperse by playing but it’s,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
But it’s the one that has like an acoustic thing to it that, you know, actually has some pressure, I don’t know, something like that. But you have all these other tonic Ray. Yeah, they have that they all rads. And then, you know, they have that microwave weapon now too. Right. So the question is, so far the government has, and these have gotten wave more violent in many respects, and some of those other riots that, you know, 92 and stuff. But government hasn’t unleashed any of that they haven’t been using lethal force. And think about that, and lots of major cities. And so to me, the longer the people that are angry, and and I’m not saying they shouldn’t be angry, and that there’s not problems and they’re frustrated, and I recognize all that. But what I think, ultimately, the longer you let people throw, let’s just say they’re allowed to throw a tantrum. Mm hmm. Every time something appears to go wrong. Okay, because at this point, you know, we got things that are legitimately Bad Dudes, you know, being stopped by police for legitimately bad crimes. And now even though and people are writing over that, so in my mind, we’ve crossed some threshold about how we deal with something in a rational way. So the thing is, the more these people are allowed to get away with it as a group that and any group would do this right, the more they can, you know, torching, something’s becoming socially protected, and politically, okay, which is absolutely, they’re normalizing it. That’s really dangerous as a society that you have, you know, groups of society normalize burning down buildings, killing people, mobbing people blocking traffic from innocent people. I’m a, I’m a very, very staunch like, let’s talk it out guy.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
You know, I really do. And it’s been as like, you know, language nerd. It’s also a big part of it. Like, I love language. I love talking. I love words. I love communicating with people. And I find it very frustrating when there is, you know, we’re discussing kind of seeing multiple sides of, you know, various issues. But yeah, I mean, I, I really, I know, it’s I know, it’s like, idealist bullshit. But like, I really think that like, ideally, there should be, we should talk about every problem, you know what I mean? And this is, and yeah, I get like, the the riots are super complicated. And I actually had an answer for you, when you’re saying like, why is the Why are these less violent? And why are they going on so long? Because this is something I’m thinking about too. And I have a strategic answer. I don’t necessarily have like a political answer. But you know, if the government came in, and we saw those videos of like DHS, grabbing people and putting them in vans and things like that, right government came in now, like full, you know, duerr taste style, and just, you know, full force like military, you know, shooting protesters that posed a threat to people as opposed to like, hitting them with you know, like, whatever the beanbags and the the tear gas and stuff like that, like it would, it would escalate to like insane levels. I mean, I think that not that they not that they wouldn’t and not that they couldn’t have an excuse to but if they if the bodies were stacking up right now, like, it wouldn’t get better, it would get worse like it would be very hard for them to step in and control Portland without Really getting in there, if that makes sense. And I, and I feel like at a local level, you know, I thought I thought it was kind of crazy that these are going on so long to because like, I’d never seen this in the States. I’d seen this in like South America, like Mexico and stuff where there’s, you know, day 187 of riots or you know, of protests in front of the building or whatever, whatever’s going on. But yeah, I’d never heard of this here. You know, I’ve been to a protest that was event at a time and a place and you know, all kinds of stuff like that. And my impression is basically at a local level, like, they’re kind of I mean, you saw the thing with Ted Wheeler, they, they had his whole apartment building staked out, and the cops wouldn’t touch it, you know, they wouldn’t get in there. Um…

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
And that’s a problem. And, you know, this is, the fact is, I think it’s, I think they’re, I think you’re right, I think that if they came in now, it’s going to be less well received, then, two and a half months ago.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
I was cheering it the way you described it, I kind of pictured, like, as if the military came in, like, willing to shoot, you know what I mean?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I think, you know, they could have shut this down. No, no, I think the problem is, since they let it go for so long, people are getting more emboldened. They’re being normalized to violence and destruction now as the response to something they perceived to be an injustice. And I’m not arguing in justices are not and all those need to be discussed on a case by case basis, right? Because the world is not black and white. As much as people want it to be.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
A forensic investigator, you’re definitely not allowed to think the world’s black and white. Didn’t know that about you, either. That’s really cool. That’s very impressive.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I’m really nerdy. We’ll talk about it off the air. But yeah, it’s it’s, it’s interesting. And they say, Yeah, I think that’s my concern is like, so, you know, kind of back to the startups. Right? How does this impact startup? So I think, since we don’t even know how bad it’s gonna get. We don’t know if this stuff’s going to calm down. Right. We don’t know if the racial relations will improve. And and what timeframe in I think the elections coming up, and I don’t think anybody’s going to be happy with that. So I’m, at this point, I am expecting more normalized violence to occur, then the question is, and this is what’s been interesting what Donald Trump psychologically and is that after he got elected, right, usually the other side’s a little butthurt. They lost, that’s kind of normal. They never got over it. with Trump ever, in four years. And to me, I think so. This goes back to the psychology thing, too, is I think, the longer you’re your best if you’re raging every day, and I see this, on Twitter, I follow I mean, even a lot of Silicon Valley people just rage at Hollywood people every day, day, day day, for years. Mm hmm. Just raging. And to me, I think the law, I think you can almost have like emotional damage as a society, the longer you’re like that, I think it changes people’s personalities. And And so…

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
yeah, I’ve seen I have seen politics somewhat ruin people’s lives before because it’sa turned, you know, turn them from, and this is I’ve never done it, I’ve seen this, both sides, honestly. People I was really close to and it just turns like, turn someone into like, a very angry person. And, you know, like, I’m not gonna argue with other people’s, like, emotions, and like the reasons for being angry. But like, that’s a tough way to live man. Like, it’s, it’s hard to just be angry all the time.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah. And I, and I see a lot of that, and, and my concern about our society, right, if we can, again, come back to the table and rationally discuss an issue, like you’re talking about, if we can if the solution is that it’s going to be violence every time and it’s only going to get worse. There will be blowback and and there’s going to be backlash to that.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Well, should we What about what about you and I moderating some right left debates, perhaps maybe get a couple couple of topics and trying to actually have some kind of a rational conversation about it?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Absolutely. And and I think, you know, I think that’s important. And the fact is, it comes back to how do we know our knowledge? And, you know, we could have a whole discussion on knee these issues politically, but I think the fact is, we’re not coming back together. Mm hmm. After the election, we didn’t from the last election. I don’t think that’s going to happen after this election. And so I think so I think, and this gets into your startup, too, right? Like, where do you pick to live? Where do you pick the headquarters for your startup know what hospital you know, flip. It’s like how do you How is that going to impact? I mean, what’s your start? How would How do you think you’re going to view real estate? And where you, you know, put your residence for your startup now? How would you What is your What are your thoughts on that with what you guys are doing?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Well, I mentioned that earlier, I mentioned earlier about the California wealth tax that has been being bandied about, as we’re launching this that’s like, you know, kind of on my head regarding staying in California, but actually do have an interesting answer to that, which is that, you know, our platform like our platform right now, our first product up is for ankle and foot exams, like you literally come, you do an ankle or foot exam from your phone, just videos, very, you know, you’re talking about, like low tech versus high tech. And I actually have your platform as a very low tech digital product. Um, there’s like, almost no data. One of the things is, I, I’m a big privacy guy, because every time a hack comes out, you know, like, Canva, got hacked, oh, Reddit got hacked, or whatever it is, I swear to God, my my name and password always shows up on Have I been poned. And so and I’m one of those, you know, I feel like every time I put a phone number into even some religion, it’s, you know, I put my phone number into spectrum for two, you know, two factor authentication. And three days later, the robo calls start, and you know exactly where that came from. So one of the things is that, you know, we’re, you literally just need an email to get like a physical therapists thing with us. Like, it’s all like, we’re not collecting data, because we don’t want to hold your data unnecessarily. And, and I’m like, I think it’s good to be private, on the where to be located thing, our physical therapists are mostly some form of freelance, some many of that, like, distributed, not in LA, in, you know, San Bernardino County, by Santa Barbara, like places like that. And our platform, because what we do is if you take an exam with us do this, you know, ankle foot exam, if you got a sprain, and we’re gonna be launching more exams, as we go, we’re kind of doing it falling a Lumosity model re kind of come up with one thing at a time and kind of just release them, right? Because we really want to like, you know, as a startup, working on our, you know, our first product here in this space, we’re going to get really, really good. It’s this, like I said, it’s kind of like a low fi product. There’s no fancy technology, there’s no AI yet, although I would like to I’m really excited about the idea of doing things like skin cancer, skin cancer exams, or like eye exams and things like that, which could use AI in the future. Um, but yeah, I mean, part of, part of what I’m stoked about is that one, our physical therapists are really good, I’ve kind of done a session with all of them. And a lot, the the ones we have so far are trying to build an at home, basically, telehealth business. So, uh, you know, people who look, one of them, their clinic got shut down, or it didn’t get, I think it went out of business. I mean, if you think about all the dentists and all the the doctor’s offices that have been closed down, like, since the pandemic started, an insane amount of physical therapy, businesses have closed or, you know, close temporarily. So you got a lot of people trying to start freelance style, um, it’s not exactly an Uber situation, because like, you know, Uber was people who weren’t drivers, whereas all of a sudden, you have a lot of physical therapists that are out of a job, or, you know, some are like working at two or three places, and there’s a kind of a competitor app, but actually, they sort of work in sync with us a little bit called Luna, which is to get in home physical therapy, to do you know, kind of one on one sessions, and that’s blown up since the pandemic, man if you invested in that, that would have been a killer investment. And it’s all because you know, everything’s closed, all the gyms are closed and everything. So, like Luna, this competitor, you you basically say, like add, like a physical therapist, and they come to your house, us you take the exam at the house, and it gets sent to a physical therapists, um, but kind of both of both of them. You know, one of the things I’m stoked about with Luna and especially with us is potentially letting people kind of like work and, like work during the pandemic, as you know, too, and we’re hoping that this will really sync well with our physical therapists, but like, getting customers is hard. And that’s essentially for the physical therapists who are working on our platform. We’re just like shuffling them customers, because all we’re doing is the evaluations. So we get to you know, if somebody signs up with us, every time they they look at one of our evaluations, and then you know, they they have the opportunity you they want To the patient can keep doing sessions with them. Especially if they really, you know, obviously, like you get a physical therapist you like, same thing with like a physical trainer, you know, whoever, like you want to stick with them. And so, in terms of, you know, kind of like locations in the, in the pandemic, like, that’s probably the part I’m most stoked about is that if, you know, pulling this off correctly, would actually be providing work and like at home or, you know, maybe like, we actually one of the things we’re thinking about doing is like renting a space in LA now that real estate is just completely commercial real estate completely plummeted. So we’re kind of like exploring deals where maybe we could build a little, you know, like a little studio kind of thing that if we get some physical, you know, they could come in and film or they could do it from home. And then for us, I mean, there’s one other co founder, you know, he’s kind of like, the, the designer hipster, he’s like a DJ who’s, you know, really, like, helps produce a lot of our visual content. And we’re like, best friends, you know, very close friends going back, we’re in the same skateboard crew kind of old dude skateboard career out here in LA. And then I’m the programmer. So we’re just, you know, we’re just like, building and trying to sell and things like that. But then, you know, also on the, on the topic of like, Where are we? Yeah, the whole thing’s remote. And for the immediate future, like, the only non remote, I’ve done a lot of backing up, I’ve done a lot of remote work as a programmer, so I’m very, it was almost not a transition when the pandemic started, like, I almost felt bad for how little My life changed compared to some other people. Um, but yeah, for the immediate future, like, I would be 10 times more interested in getting commercial real estate, to build a little studio for pts, and a filming studio, where we could do like podcasting and things like that. But like, I can program at home, you know, and a lot of, and I and I think going forward, like in terms of growing out our business, you know, as we expand, if we can, you know, cut down on costs by things like real estate, and having remote people work remotely, like, that’s awesome. And then on our programmers standpoint, you know, a lot of our stack one, if you have a tech stack, you have to find people who program on that sec stack. And we do a lot of streaming and video. So you know, as we as we grow, we’ll be looking for people with some specialties. And, you know, straight up if you can have the whole country or the whole world to look for, for somebody on especially on like a tech programming side, it really makes a difference, you know, opening up your market that way. And if your startup where you don’t necessarily have 180 grand plus an insane amount of stock to give up the way Google or Facebook does, you know, it’s kind of hard to get tough to get top talent, especially in California, especially in LA where everybody, you know, has a tendency to go to Silicon Valley, if they’re, that’s where a lot of the money is your programmer, which is Silicon Valley, you can make 3050 70% more than you can make an LA

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Wow. How did you Why did you guys start with the ankles?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Uh, the backing up the It actually started out as a tool for physical therapists. And, you know, for doctors and stuff. I became very interested in aggregator theory, I don’t know, if you read tritech re the Ben Thompson newsletter. Oh, it’s really good. I’ll forward you a couple of really good ones. He gets very deep on aggregator theory. He writes articles and articles on this. And so I because it is unusual, because our, you know, we started out as like, okay, we want to make a tool like I love building streaming and video and things like that. And this was their tech, our technology was actually based off a former startup by hads tech that was, you know, doing translation was doing real time translation for focus groups. That market got killed by the pandemic, and hence the, you know, sort of exploring the space. But, um, excuse me. Sorry, repeat the question one more time.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
How did you get started? Or why did you decide to go with ankle…

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Oh the ankle, the ankle is because I found it to be a lot harder to be a tool that physical therapists could use. And there was already a lot of those around. When I was looking at this, like, looking into aggregator theory that companies like Google is probably the most famous aggregator in the world, but Uber Lyft. What they do differently is they they Cooper could very easily have taken that tool and then a tool for riders and you know, for like you to be a private driver and, you know, find clients and stuff like that, but what they chose to do was own the customer relationship. And that way, they were able to basically dominate the market, because rather than having like all the suppliers on their side, and then they would, you know, make up and this is actually very traditional medical business model for aggregators is like insurance, you get all the suppliers, like all the different medical people on your, under your umbrella. And then you kind of call the shots with the customers. This is this is sort of traditional business model, whereas like the new COVID, digital aggregator model, is you control the customer relationship. And then you rely on the, the providers to come to you. And so looking at this model sighted, like, Well, how do you make a portal for people to come and get checked out? Like, what’s the like, what’s the play there. And so I was looking at injuries, and everyone talked about skateboarding in terms of this. But, you know, I’ve mentioned a million times to you before, like, essentially, like, because I know, very enmeshed in the skateboard culture and stuff like that, not the industry, because I don’t work in skateboarding, but this was sort of our initial target market, because it just, you know, following the Crossing the Chasm model of finding like a niche market that you can really get embedded in, and, you know, solve the problems for people specific as opposed for people, you know, a general problem, you know, which is a lot, it tends to be for no one you find a very specific problem. And then the skate community, you have the big issue of people being under insured, or a lot of times not having insurance. And what I’ve noticed with anecdotally, with a lot of my friends, a lot of people I know they’ve chronic injuries from things that they really should got checked out, but never got checked out. And one of the, the two biggest ones, to be honest, are ankle and wrist. And what almost always happens is somebody gets, you know, you sprain your ankle, you know, at the skatepark, it’s bad, but you know, you’re just like, you know, 23 year old, maybe doesn’t have insurance definitely would struggle to pay $160 copay to go to, you know, a place in Santa Monica, I’m working a couple jobs, you know, day doesn’t have money for this stuff. And then they just decide to walk it off or like, you know, wrap it up or get an air cast from Walgreens or something. But if it turns out that there’s a microfracture in there, then that can be a permanent injury, and a lot of people get derailed for a long time. Like I personally know, several people that essentially can’t skate anymore because of wrist injury is really common. Same thing, it’s like, you know, a fracture or really bad sprain, that, you know, essentially, people take the walk it off attitude towards. And this is a, you know, this is a real bummer to me, especially when it’s someone you like, like the idea of them having a chronic injury, like, That’s horrible. And especially if it’s something where the reason to not get checked out is things like, it’s a little too expensive. You know, you got to drive to the clinic, like LA, it’s an sounds like a small thing. But when you get to drive an hour each way, you get paid 15 bucks for parking, you’re injured, maybe you’re taking Uber, like, that sucks. And if you’re on the fence about it, it’s really easy to say no to it. So we figured with ours, you know, you build something where you just take it from home, it gets forwarded to a physical therapist. And then, you know, it takes a lot of the friction out of that experience. And then for y ankles, it was between ankles and wrists to start with. We want we want to have an exam that’s gonna be really useful that we can, like, get really, really, really good. We want this to be amazing, spa like experience that you’re doing where it’s, and it’s pretty fun. You know, it’s kind of like halfway towards doing a DUI test. We kind of walk and stand on one foot and things like that. Um, but I am..

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I can’t pass those sober.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Well, you got to try. You got to try earthing man, I’ll give you a free one. If you want to get checked out, checked out by physical therapist, get you some exercises get some stretches. Sure,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
why not? I would I would love to. So So are you only rolling this out in California? Or is it already nationwide? How does that work?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Um, we’re trying to be very HIPAA conscious right now as HIPAA laws regarding telehealth change fairly aggressively. So we’re being conscientious about doing things in state. So yeah, right now we’re California focused, but that’s going to be you know, kind of rapidly changing it. Were one as you know, if it’s, there’s, if you’re in state, there’s obviously that’s the most over the, you know, across the board way of doing it. But then there’s a lot of states that have these packs and while the pandemic goes on, so we’re going to be kind of navigating these waters. But right now, yeah, right now we’re just focused on getting, basically just getting customers checked out, you know, really improving the flow with our physical therapists, they’ve been really helpful. And that’s, that’s been a lot of fun. It’s kind of improving the product on their side. But you know, we’re in this launch zone. And I know that you know, this well, where we’ve got something that we think that people seem to, like, maybe a little rough around the edges, but you know, we’re polishing aggressively and trying to get it, trying to get really good. But right now, it’s about, you know, really looking for that product market fit by making something that people really like. And so yeah, we’re focused in California, but we’re gonna be I mean, for any of your, especially your listeners who want to who want to want to try this hit us up, you can hit me up on Twitter or anything like that. And let’s talk because we’re, you know, enrolling physical therapists pretty pretty quickly. And on that side, too, because it’s sort of, I know, the gig economy is not like very popular these days. But we essentially become an alternative revenue source for pts. And what we’ve found is, with the ones we’re working with, so far, we’re like, one of several revenue sources they have, you know, so it’s been pretty easy, and they’ve been pretty stoked about it. You know, they like the idea of like, working from home and stuff. So I think we’re signing someone up in Seattle, and we’re getting new york online really quickly.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So how does it work? legally? I mean, is this like, so essentially, if you have the, the, I guess, if you’re doing the PT is in New York, and then the patients in New York, then you’re gonna just you’ll probably be compliant. So I was wondering if there’s much worry about crossing the borders for that.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
But yeah, we got a we got to be careful about that. There’s certain situations where it’s legal. There’s heavy implications that the enforcement’s really is, basically they’re gonna turn a blind eye to stuff, but we’re trying to be really careful. And then there’s Yeah, like I said, there’s this like 13 state pact, which is basically a lot of like, mid country, mid country states, where you can do telehealth across the, you know, from like Wyoming to I think Utah’s in it actually, or Arizona. And there’s like no legal issues. And then during the panel, I mean, I keep coming to this during the pandemic, but I think we were discussing earlier, but they they passed something to make, basically every form of telehealth like now HIPAA compliant, and yeah, I’m off to come back and answer this question with with more details. Because right now, we’re just trying to keep it like, I mean, basically, just keep it simple. But as we do this nationwide rollout, it’s going to be we’re gonna we’re gonna have to be, you know, diligent about being careful about this.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
And I think that’s probably prudent. course, we’re in very dangerous times. Anyway, right now, so. So how are you funding this? You got a lot of VC money investors?

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
A lot of these see money? I mean, we don’t have any VC money, if that counts as a lot. No, I’m just kidding. Yeah, it’s all it’s all like, you know, I’m doing all the technology on my side. To be honest, at the beginning of the pandemic, I basically like, marathon a couple of freelance projects to to just get a bunch of money rolling. And so it’s all like, literally all self funded, you know, through my credit card. and stuff we have to do. Yeah, just paid, paid to get a trademark done last night. You know, 600 bucks right there. But yeah, you know, at the moment, and this and I talked to you about this, like, we’re focused on this organic, we’re doing a lot of video content, we’re doing a lot of, you know, trying to do original things to kind of make our presence known and get ourselves out there. I you know, I’ve seen a lot of startups throw a lot of money at ad bucks, you know, Facebook bucks, Instagram dollars, things like that, with uneven results. And so it could work but that’s not really I mean, I could see just like tossing a lot of money down the down the furnace and being really frustrated a couple, you know, a couple months down the line. And we have an you know, we’re kind of fortunate to have a product where success and more importantly, things like breakeven for us at this point, is like a couple of thousand customers per month. It’s not, you know, a couple million or anything like that, like we’re a small tight operation. We’re all like you said, we’re all remote and all the programs I mean, all the design is done in house. And so if for the time being, we’re just kind of keeping it scrappy. The other side is, you know, having been in a million pitch rooms and in a lot of, you know, startup scenarios and things like that. I figured if we, if and when it’s time to do VC money, or you know, something of that nature, when you want to have a reason to do it. So for us, it would be it would be, we have product market fit, we like what we’re doing, uh, you know, maybe we just have the ankle exam, or maybe we have two or three exams on the market. And so maybe we get VC money so that we can do, you know, hire sales team to open up like, a bunch of different regions, or maybe we do VC money to open up in a different country, or maybe we get VC money to do because we find out we do to grow from, you know, kind of a scrappy level to the next level up, but we do need a major digital campaign. So I’m not 100% Sure. And I’m not against a diff taking stuff. But I, I do think it should be for a reason. And I as an unintuitive, as it sounds I’ve seen and worked at startups not founded but worked at startups that got way too much VC money, and it was the reason for their demise. So..

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, you’re never gonna hear me say no to bootstrapping. I think scrappy is a good thing. So I wish you the best success. This sounds really cool. And I do think that in the future, you know, I think projects like yours, where people are taking the technological angle to solving healthcare related kind of issues, I think that’s going to increase and I think what you’re doing is pretty cool.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Thanks, man, I really appreciate it and you know, it’d be really cool. One is this, this kind of, it’s a healthcare thing that kind of adds to the pie. Because a lot of our initial you know, customers are talking about it’s for things that they basically should get checked out for, but maybe aren’t. And so it’ll be really interesting to see. And I think that you know, on what you’re talking about healthcare changing. Since starting this I have talked to so many people that are involved with in home diagnostics, in home health care, like in five years, you know, being monitored, you know, having your doctor monitoring you while at home and as opposed to coming into the hospital and doing an overnight it’s going to be you know, a reality that we couldn’t even believe right now because I’ve talked to some people working on things in the space and it’s all getting it’s all getting you know, pushed really hard because of the pandemic.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I think it’s gonna be really interesting to watch so yeah, man. So jack, where can people find out more about you and your project.

Jack Connor – Hospital Flip
Project? go to hospital flip COMM And especially if you especially if you need to have ankle foot problems a sprain want to get that checked out you know, mentioned mentioned this podcast and we’ll hook up a discount, but it’s not very expensive though. So maybe you don’t even decide you want it. And then for me, you can find me at Twitter is jack Connor but the K is a five. Rob, if you post this as a you know with a description, maybe you can drop those things in there, but HospitalFlip.com.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Jack, I’ll have all that stuff up at Rob mcnealy.com. And folks, make sure you subscribe, mash that follow button. Check out our library and our YouTube and guys you have a great day.

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Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops” Transcript

June 8, 2020 robmcnealy 0:00 Comments Off

Daniel Jones - AKA "Nixops""

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Hey Rob McNealy here and today I am super super excited. I am talking to someone who is an expert in personal security privacy on the internet, and general all around smart guy when it comes to crypto, crypto hacking, software development. His name it goes he goes by Nixops but his real name is Daniel Jones, which I think sounds either like a fake name or something. But how are you today, Dan?

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Good. Oh, good. No, that’s my real name. Most people assume it’s fake, but it’s actually my name. My parents had no originality.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
That’s okay. So um, we’ve been connected on social media for a while and you guys, you dig into some cool stuff. And you really talk about a lot of privacy related stuff. And there’s a lot of stuff happening out there. I think right now that people aren’t really even hearing about are talking about, but I just want to talk a little bit about your background. And then let’s just jump into talking about a bunch of different stuff. So Tell, tell the audience who doesn’t know who you are. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into this space.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
I’m just I’m a programmer. I started off as a Linux, Unix sysadmin and started learning c++ and from there, you got a driver development became a software engineer. I mean, I started working with, you know, ever wide range of experience from Driver Development, OS level stuff to Software as a Service, high performance computing, cryptography and cryptocurrencies. Um, I just like I always say my tagline I’m a general purpose hacker, whatever you need to be done and money’s right. I’ll build it.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Sorry, independent then, do you work for a company?

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Uh, I am working for a company right now I’m working for two companies right now, I also do a lot of independent work and some open source development. It just depends on time that should right there. If you can figure out how to add a few more hours per day, I would pay you a lot for that, you know, you just make that happen.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I’m working on it. My magic wand. Actually, it’ll be our next rollout on, you know, hard fork number, blah, blah, blah, and extra hours in the day blocks.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Are you gonna put that in?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I mean, I mean, I get that too, because like, you know, like, what? We’re, you know, we’re doing our we do our little crypto project, and we’re open source and everybody’s got a full time day job, right. So it’s like, people don’t understand what that really means. I think the words community project have been thrown around so many times. But if people actually knew what the hell it took to just manage a community project and actually get stuff done in a community project, they would like go out of their minds. Oh, just for the project. management standpoint?

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Well, I mean, that’s what a lot of people really don’t get to select the open source community, something that a lot of people have no idea that how much open source and free software they use. And they rely on every day, even services such as this one that we’re using, majority of it is built upon free and open source software. And the thing is, is that these companies pay individuals to work some of their time to contribute to them for features and things they need. And when you break away from company, paying for that, it is truly a community like truly open or truly just individuals running it. People don’t understand that we got bills to pay and things like that. They don’t they don’t really grasp that. Just because you write code, they think that you’re going to get what Silicon Valley pays. No, that’s not how it works. Someone has to foot the bill. And if someone’s not footing the bill for that your time is completely free, and that’s fine. But there are also you got responsibilities. You know what I mean? You got you got mortgages, you got car nodes, you got everything else, just like ever Anyone else does. But the thing is, is like, you know, you hope and strive to get to the point where you don’t have to worry about that. But at the same time, you’re still writing software. And if you’re doing it for free, it can be cumbersome. Because you still have to work a day job to put food on the table and to be able to survive. And rent ain’t cheap. It ain’t free either. You know what I’m saying? Like, depending on where you are. So I think that’s also a misconception people have is like, Oh, I know, somebody is an open source developer. And they get paid, you know, to do this. And it’s like, Yeah, but they’re being paid by a company because they use that software. So they need a contributor at their company to push the features they need and want. And I think that that’s a lot of times where the confusion sets in because in cryptocurrency, it’s, you know, we look at that as centralization. But in reality, when you look at like free and open source software, that’s just the way of the game. You know what I mean? Like, outside of like, coin x or whatever, you look at a coin that’s mainly company controlled, because they’re paying all the devs and they have the resources, whether they Ico or not, which I’m not a fan of the Ico world, but regardless, you know, they’re being funded. And open source canoe projects, for example, it can be very hard to be funded. So a lot of times companies are the people who put people in charge of maintaining that software because they use it. And so I think like you said, the community driven projects and community community ran projects, people don’t realize this, how many man hours are human hours, I should say that takes it takes a lot, because you have to have project management scopes. You know, what features are going to add? Who can deliver that feature on time life happens. So if you only got like a team of two or three developers, what’s going to happen if someone gets sick, ran over by a bus, whatever, you know, you take all that into consideration. And people often overlook all that.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
And I think even from a project management standpoint, when you’re dealing with, you know, truly, you know, community driven open source software is that people can be really flaky. I mean, it’s not it’s just there’s a lot of flaky people. That’s again, Sounds great. Yeah, I want to work. I think people get really excited about being a part of something, and then they don’t show up. It’s like, Oh, well, this really is work. Okay. It’s, it sounds great. But, you know, ultimately, there’s needs to be some work done. And I think a lot of people, it’s almost like they like the LARP that they do open source can, you know, contributions, when they’re just like, you know, and they don’t show up. And I think that’s kind of frustrating to on the community program. And

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
I think you also have to look at it from another standpoint to like, say, for example, I can use this for my own personal So say, for example, you’re, you have a project, you’ve outlined a scope, you’ve built all these documentation. And then next thing, you know, you end up in some snafus over intellectual property of some other code. So now all of a sudden, you’re having a halt, what you’re able to push even for open source, because you don’t want that intellectual property to then get compromised because there may be a dispute over when it was Britton who technically owns it, that kind of thing. And that happened to me before and happens to a lot of people and like thankfully now that stuff is is behind me. But you know people are very greedy and especially in Silicon Valley which I’m so glad I’m out of now by the way, so I’m a I’m an ex Valley guy and no longer going back to that but you know the valley is is one of those things is shit I gotta handle some of the ones I got I got a wasp one..

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well be safe. Don’t don’t get killed by the wasps. Is that like a murder Hornet kind of thing? Or

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
There’s two of them in here. I didn’t realize that I’m allergic to those fucking things.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, don’t get killed by the murder Hornet.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Yeah, they’re not murder hornets. They’re just typical South Mississippi, fucking, big as hell. So there’s just gonna be a painful thing. But anyway, yeah, I mean, like, you know, some of the things that people don’t get is that software is coming. complicated, especially when you’re working a day job, and you’re trying to do open source contributions, who owns it, depending on contractual agreements and things like that, and then also what state you’re operating in, because a lot of people don’t understand that some states honor non competes, some don’t even have your software. In some states, there’s precedents where, you know, they haven’t had much of a tech industry. So say, for example, you write software that just does something on the network, you may be in violation of your very own invention agreement that you signed on your employer, even though your employer verbally may tell you it’s okay. It’s still problematic, because it depends on how well that now verbally agreed upon project that you’ve kicked or that you pushed out. Now, if that takes off your company, or your employer may decide they want it, you see what I mean? Anyway, I’m like, that’s a complicated sector that people really don’t get into. Because unless you work in the industry, you really don’t know so like in the crypto space. You have a lot of people who read up on some bootcamp stuff and done a few you know, playgrounds. They think they could write code Professionally, and they don’t realize that it’s a lot more complicated than just putting together a couple of tutorials. You know what I mean? Like, there’s more to it. You have product spec, you have ideas, you have to look at longevity, you have to look at scaling, you have to look at a number of factors that boil down to your design. And if you’ve never implemented something in production, or if you’ve never had real users, then how are you supposed to know how to construct that? You see what I mean?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Absolutely. Um, privacy. One of the things that we’re seeing right now..

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Hold on, let me let me kill this fucking thing.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Okay.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Am I prepared? Oh, me.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
No worries, man. It’s all good. All right. So we, before the break, we were talking a little bit about privacy and the state of privacy in the digital world, where we are right now. So tell me a little bit like or at least tell the audience a little bit about what you see is the state of privacy right now. Just in general, what would you say? where we are as a culture with our online presences right now. Where is privacy?

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Privacy is dying very quickly. And it’s all being derived from, you know, a lot of that’s coming from companies like Amazon, Google, and others who are pushing smart home. Uh, you know, Siri, even Apple is guilty of it. But but a lot of these features that are nice to have end up becoming compromising situations for the individual. And you know, what I mean by that is like a lot of very just like Snowden. And people will say, Oh, I ain’t got nothing Hi, great, just because you don’t have anything to say, do you not need your freedom of speech? And then they’re like, Oh, well, it’s not quite the same and say, Well, yeah, it is. Because think about it like this. What’s your last for your social your mother’s maiden name? And they’re like, Well, I’m not going to give you that, well, you have something to hide. Otherwise, then you would be fine with giving me that information. So why are you not okay with giving me that information? But instead, you’re willing to give a company Oh, well, this company protects that data. We know that’s a fallacy. companies get hacked all the time. compromised individual employees that work at these companies do nefarious things such as stalking, listening on individuals and do things that are that are, you know, beyond their reach and scope of their job. And we know that for under percent fact, like, you know what I mean? Like it’s nothing new. And what what I’m seeing today is that people are just okay with a just like this, Google and Apple, you know, integration. That’s why I told people to stop updating their phones. Because they’re, you know, the future patch releases will have that framework in there. And tell me, tell me about that. What do you do? Let’s step back a little bit.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
What do you mean not update phones? What’s going on with the updates?

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Well, so for example, updates are always dangerous for automatic updates, you should really try to make sure that you understand what update is, before you run it just like in Bitcoin or anything else. You need to know what the software that you’re installing on your device does. And the problem with proprietary software is that’s hard to do. Because companies aren’t going to release the secret sauce. Then on the other token, when you start looking at Android, you have an issue where you know you haven’t OEM manufacturers who released stuff that’s not public either. There are drivers on certain phones, I can’t list brands because my work with them in the past that have features that aren’t necessarily noted or properly able to be found unless you’re under an NDA with them, in which case you can’t even speak about it post working on it. You have trackable software, you have things that can enable features on your phone such as your mic, camera, things like that, that can turn them on or off, or the cases Apple Google, as you know, agreement, where these future updates, they’re going to allow the tracing apps to work for contact tracing who you came in contact with. But in reality, they can already do that with your mZ and they can already do that with your cell phone. The problem is that’s not presented in a clean data way. And there’s a subpoena that’s required to get that information per person, which adds a hurdle for law enforcement. At the same time, there’s pros and cons to that the good side is that oh well, we’ll be able to distinguish Who came in contact with infected person? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that’s great. That’s good to some level. But at what risk? Because again, just because this feature is enabled for this one time event, does it ever get turned off look at the Patriot Act looked at anything else, like we never regain what we had, once we lose it. That’s that’s not how privacy works. And, you know, the dangerous part is, is that now with biometrics and things like that a lot of people are reliant on that on their phones. You know, these companies have the ability to access those enclaves so long as their application is signed. And so literally, they can do approvals for updates on devices for certain feature sets, things like that, or auto updates or module specifics, things like that. And the dangerous part about that is that very slippery slope, because yes, already not trustworthy now. But just think about it once you start adding in who there come contact with. Now you can start doing real correlation attacks to figure out who these people serve. Friends are, who their family members are things like that. And like I’ve discussed it before, that’s dangerous, especially because of people like Eva from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others who’ve talked about stalker where now you’re presenting an API for stalker where basically, the government’s are going to be able to use, but just remember, just because the government has access to it doesn’t mean no one else will. I says, We’ve found that out before too. Once you open Pandora’s box, it’s open. And the risk there is the individual privacy and the idea that I have the protection to do what I want without fear of retribution. I should not be afraid of who I come in contact with, and neither should you. However, under the guise of security or the idea that people are willing to sacrifice those liberties, and there’s options at best, those that are willing to sacrifice freedom and liberties for the idea of security deserve neither.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So government using this for I would argue that contact At least the no contact tracing can be analog as well, not just digital is one of the things that, you know, the countries that have, you know, gone through and started getting COVID under control. They tested early and they did contact tracing, and then they isolated people all the way from their houses. That’s how they’ve been able to do this. Now, I don’t disagree with you. I think that people be able to access everything about you digitally remotely without permission or without a warrant is an issue because it will be abused by somebody, whether it’s a government agent, or just through government ineptitude, a hacker will get access to it or a foreign power could get access to a seems like there’s a massive security issue or multiple security issues based on them. When you can still do contact tracing manually and analog which I think is the more appropriate way I think this is the way you should handle that but I don’t even like electronic voting. So that’s just me.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
I make a big stink about that stuff. You know, like electronic systems are prone to vulnerabilities and problems because they’re written by people because people are prone to that, you know?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I think ultimately, a lot of people that are making these decisions about implementing these kind of surveillance technologies, even though it sounds good on its face, I think a lot of the people that are doing it one, at least in the government side, one, maybe don’t understand the ramifications long term and the potential security risks, but I think a lot of them on the other hand also might be getting bribed, because the companies that do produce these things, that’s gonna be you know, some good corporate welfare going their way, as well. So I think there’s a lot of concern about that. And I guess the question is, what do we do about it? What can an individual like me, what can I do about that right now what can I do to help make my my footprint safer on the privacy level?

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Learning good offside, but also like, like, I started off with All series and haven’t posted because I’ve been dealing with some some matters but not a return this weekend on use tools but understand how to use them properly. For example, you know, keep a stark separation of your online identities if you’re using an account for shitposting, for example, and you want it purely on that, don’t merge that with your personal accounts. Keep that separate, use separate devices use multiple devices, and especially now you can get clean devices that are literally untraceable because of COVID. You can exploit a situation where you can go in and legally buy devices with cash, that there’s no traceable record that you bought it because you can go and fully mask covered up, no one knows who you are. And it’s not even been an eyelash whereas, you know, back in January, if I was to do that people will report me to the FBI. You see what I mean? Right now people need to understand that there are attack surfaces for people and then there are attack surfaces that open up for being able to fight routine your privacy, you just need to understand what your goal is. For example, I have separation of my, you know, my personal accounts and my older accounts and certain accounts that I do things with in regards to certain certain projects I work on. My aliases are not ever connected in any way, I don’t even use the same devices, not even the same emails never even touch the same GPG keys. Neither one of them have each other’s public keys in the key chains, things like that. Those are important to understand. Because if you have a traceable link, and especially in cryptography, which a lot of people don’t really understand, I’ll put it this way. Cryptography can be a great tool to protect you, but it can also sync your battleship. Understand that if you have cryptographically sound methods like GPG, and you signed something with a GPG key, that’s as good as saying this was me. This is my digital fingerprint. So anything else it’s just digital fingerprint is important to understand that wherever that may be. That can be used to correlate that you are that person. The biggest instance of this would have to be the frosty@frosty key. You’re familiar with frosty right?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I’m not.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Okay. So there was this guy, you may have heard of him, Ross Ulbricht? So, he used the frosty key, frosty@frosty to sign the Silk Road login page, but he also used it in Stack Overflow question. Now, do you? Yes. So you have to really understand that that is as good as saying, This is me. I have proven this key. And so that’s dangerous. Everyone have to understand that that is one of many bad opsec steps that he took. But that’s one major opposite No, no, never have keys, never sign keys and never use them from accounts that are associated with who you are. If you’re doing anything that you don’t want people to know about. I don’t judge people. I don’t care. Cryptography can’t be gay cubed. Neither can encryption. It shouldn’t But it will be used for good or bad. Same thing with a clear announcing thing with everything right? And so like you, as an individual, you need to understand and make a decision on what you’re willing to allow people to know and what you’re not willing to allow people to know. And then from there, you derive a toolkit that makes sense for your exposure or what you’re willing as a comfortable exposure rate, or limit in this case. So like me, certain things people know about me, a lot of things people don’t know about me, and I choose to never disclose that. And the reason why is because I believe in not doxxing people in the sense of like, when people get petty on the internet, they like, here’s their address, or blah, blah, blah. I think that’s stupid, that’s also really ignorant. And that showcases that, you know, they themselves don’t care about operational security of others, and they’re endangering people by doing that. Now, I’m a firm believer, if you can’t take some shit on the internet, and you need to dock someone to get back at them. You probably need to grow the fuck off. And you know, that’s a growing trend on Twitter right now is doxing people and exposing personal information about people like where they live, things like that. There’s a lot of people who you know, that we don’t know their past, what if they have an ex that they’ve been hiding from for years now all of a sudden, they’re easy access to that information. You just open them up to be personally endangered. Because of your, you know, your ignorance and your anger and your emotions overwhelmed you to not think with logic and reason. And instalay One of the things I like to tell people is Be very careful also on who you expose what to remember, public channels are public. So if you say I’m on Twitter, expect it to be documented and archived. Because while Twitter has policies on API gathering of what can be stored offline, all this other stuff, don’t think for a second that there’s not people who have archives of every tweet that’s ever been made. There are and it’s constantly being analyzed things like that. Piano style autography is being used to confirm who’s tweeting in certain, you know, certain vocal stuffs, that kind of thing to be able to trace who someone is. And the risk of that is, is that these companies are selling that data to analyze who is someone or who could be someone’s on their account. Same thing with like, you know, the Satoshi man on all these things, all of those boil down to operational security, and what people are willing to disclose. And the dangerous part is, is that as an individual, you have to make that choice. And that choice can be very hard if you’re on uninitiated into what it means. Does that make sense? Like, I can’t go and tell my uncle, hey, you’re about your opsec when he has no idea, but he also doesn’t have a public facing anything other than his phone number associated with his business card. You see what I mean? Like, for him, his operational security is a much different risk and it’s more in person than it is in a digital sense. So you have to divide that you have to look at. Okay, here’s what I want to do. Here’s how I would like to be. And then you have to figure out what works to make that a reality. And the dangerous part is, is there’s really no guidebook on that. Like they there’s not like a questionnaire you can fill out and be like, Well, here’s the tools you should use, you know what I’m saying? You know, I mean, because if you had a poll that did that kind of stuff, or a survey, literally that person running the survey would be collecting data on the individual pushing the buttons.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So what are a good set of tools for people to protect their privacy with?

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
First thing I would suggest is everyone should learn PGP whether you’re dealing with your mom and grandmother, your best friend, whatever, PGP for email as a must. And the reason why is because he keeps snooping guys from looking plus, we’re using PGP with like iCloud or Gmail, which a lot of people have, or you know, it allows you to have some level of control of the security and you don’t have to necessarily upload your puppy to a key server. You can give a public key like I can give you my key through a Private Channel, the uninsured Whatever, there’s no trace that that transaction ever occurred between us that you have my public key, but we can communicate and encrypted email cryptographically sound emails back and forth without having the fear of Google or someone else listening now, they will read it, but it’ll be all encrypted. And the thing is, is that when you do that, that’s that’s one layer. Now, a lot of people say, Why don’t really use email, you use email for more important things than use your text messages. Would you agree or disagree on that?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I would agree.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
So if your first step or your important things is that you’re using PGP or GPG, or new GPG or open PGP open GPG, whatever iteration of a you know, generally, pretty good privacy or good new Privacy Guard. Um, once you would see there is that Okay, first up, the important stuff unlocking down. I now have asked companies to use PGP a lot of companies actually do have it set up They use PGP or public private keys in private, and they’re willing to use it with with outward facing customers. You just have to request it. And the more people that were requested, the more people will use it. And that’s important, because that’s the important channels, right? So so like if you covered that ground, cool. Make sure you don’t disclose certain email addresses with those keys to other people that you don’t want to know or associated with their email address. For example, if you’re using you know, an iCloud account, it’s probably not a good idea to use that same iCloud account if it’s tied to, you know, your Apple Store account. Because if someone wants to really screw you over, and they know enough personal information about you and you use proper research, they use security questions that are easily guessable because they know you. That’s the security like that’s an attack surface. That’s how a lot of celebrities got into trouble. But it’s also why you see those things on Facebook asking what’s your favorite color, where you grew up? Those kind of things. Those are information gathering tools that people are using to be able to reset your information when and if they need it. So next step is use a good messaging service, a signal signal for your phone calls. So you go for your text messages. And if people don’t use signal ask them to it’s not hard, it’s easy to set up works on all your devices. I mean, it’s really simple. You know what I mean? Like, and those two pieces right there cover a large attack surface for most people. Not to mention, you know, you’re enforcing that these people have you as a contact in their phone. And you can use you know, a burner phone was signal, which I highly recommend. You can get a burner phone right now at Walmart or insert any United States retailer that you can go and fully mass fully clothed, and buy, you know, a starter SIM card and a phone and literally be able to do that. The next step is that if you really want to stay on that hardcore version, only happy Who are important contact you on that number, having another disposable phone for other businesses or whatever the hell you’re doing. But also remember smartphones are dangerous. Don’t be open and links. Don’t be open in your email PDF attachments and stuff like that because there’s malware in that stuff. Yeah, yeah. You know exactly what to say. I don’t have I don’t mean physically because I don’t have any phones on me right now for GPS reasons. But yeah, that’s a house. But yeah, there’s other on the flip phone, man. I mean, I agree. I have I have several of them right now. And like I said, it’s, again, you don’t have nothing now I but you may not want to expose yourself to everyone knowing everything about you. So like I said, start with the email service signal. And then for your browsing habits. I would recommend Tor but most people don’t ever listen to me when I say use Tor properly and what that means. And basically what I mean by that is don’t have Tor open if you have Firefox, Chrome and Safari also Open on your device. Does that make sense? Because you’re basically broadcast and everyone that you have Tor running. And they can see that the cookie information is being shared can see that, oh, service providers, not just your ISP, but the company’s login to So say, for example, you have your Gmail account logged in through your browser, and you’re turning around and going to Google, they’re seeing the same traffic come from the same IP, they’re going to know that there’s distinguishable session IDs and things like that, especially if you’re logged in on both, which is a bad note. Also, resizing Tor is dangerous because you can look at the packets and see whether or not there’s been a resize. So if you can visibly see someone on your network, you can tell who’s using it, that kind of thing. Um, and there’s a lot of dangerous stuff like if people really want to understand how dangerous the world is learn about cookies, and learn about them really well because the web is dangerous. Cookies can do a lot. They tell a company a lot. They can provide a lot of information. They provide a lot of stuff. to advertisers, as well as the company who you may be using their services. And so, you know, the hard part is, like I said, there’s really no easy guide for this kind of stuff. You have to really understand technology before you can protect yourself from it. And, you know, you’re in tech, so am I. And that’s why most of us in tech are almost Luddites in today’s time, because we don’t want any smart home. We don’t want any of that garbage. No.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, it’s kind of funny because like last year, we’ve been doing some remodeling around our house and trying to find a low tech thermostat. For instance, we put in a new sprinkler system last year, everything is Wi Fi enabled now. And it was funny like we put in a pretty you know, I’m not gonna go on all the details but our landscaping but this crazy smart, you know, sprinkler controller, we pulled the module Cuz I don’t want someone to be able to hack my sprinkler. And then you know the doorbells with the ring thing where that’s like the only kind of doorbell you can get almost. And I’m trying to find some low tech thing and when in a lot of things that in our house are very modern, right? I mean, we’re, we’re, we like tech. But I also for the same reason I just don’t see opening up all these ways for people to come into my house and monitor things or be able to worse to hack things. That can be bad. And so you’re right, I am very Luddite ish. Depending on what the tech is on some things I’m very tech forward and tech savvy. And other things. I’m just like, No, I don’t want that in my house. But it’s interesting, but I have my one of my cars that I use for work has like manual, doesn’t even have electric windows. It’s got roll up windows.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
I mean, like I said, You know, I used to work in IoT as well. Um, and the amount of air information is collected on the individuals running the servers. It should be criminal and is dangerous because, you know, it’s under the guise Oh, well, this makes your life easier. This allows you to do that. Yes, but at what cost? Like I don’t know about you, but like, say for example, I’m having a personal conversation with someone about my health. I don’t necessarily want Alexa to fucking know about it. Like I’m sorry, my life we’ve all the time as well. Like, you know, you write software that you know you’ve written software before that’s used in Alexa or this that or the other and I’m like, yeah, and they’re like, why don’t you use those things? Because I fucking know what they do. Like Like when you when you build it, you have a and you work on these things. You have a real understanding about the dangers right? majority of society isn’t involved in tech enough to understand it. Like you show like someone Echo Dot you show them a you know, with a few little words I can, I can control your lights cool. They see that as a value. They don’t know that it’s listening. Every couple The seconds to look for a trigger word to do something, they don’t know that they don’t realize how that works. And then that information is being sent to the cloud. And they also have no idea what cloud means. But cloud is just basically a distributed network of computers, meaning is someone else’s computer, and it stores all this information, that information is being properly parsed on a regular basis for various things advertisement, what to push to you what you might be interested in buying, because they want your money. And then like that, that again, goes back to, you know, I hate to say this, going back to the ring, Amazon’s made deals with local police, law enforcement to allow the work to someone else’s ring. So if your neighbor has a ring and it’s pointing to your house, they can literally just walk over or contact your neighbor and gain access to it without ever physically going there to look at it. And without ever having to disclose you know me. Oh, you were you Trying to hire you doing selling drugs? No. But I don’t need to know when somebody comes to my house and leaves. You know what I mean? Like, why should my neighbor be giving that information out about me? You see what I mean? Like there are pros and cons to this. Yes, it’s great helping solving a crime or heinous crime. But you also have to understand that there are a lot of people who really don’t want other people knowing what the hell they’re doing, because they believe in their right to privacy. Like me, I don’t fucking want people to know that I showed up. You know, got home at four o’clock the other morning from a night out and drinking. I don’t need them to know that. They see me cool. They can make fun of me, but they didn’t. I don’t need the police to know that I got home at four in the morning being dropped off with a Lyft or an Uber You see what I’m saying? Or that someone gave me a ride or that I used a cab because I decided to pay cash. And, you know, I just told them the general direction to drop me off in that kind of thing. Because you’d have to pay attention to that stuff. Like it’s nothing you haven’t been But you also don’t want the world to know what you’re doing. You see what I mean?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I think a lot of thing that people don’t understand is that it’s it’s not necessarily that one data point, but the the cumulative data points about you, that can be used against, you know what I’m saying? It’s the way they can build profiles, that not only, you know, on the surface, it sounds great, because, you know, they’re just trying to market to you, right? Well, okay, they’re just trying to market to me. But the thing is, a lot of these people, these data brokers will sell this information to the highest bidder and they don’t care who gets it, whether, you know, it’s just, you know, some kind of retailer or whether or not it’s a foreign, you know, spy agency friends,

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Or what if it’s somebody that you have, you know, protection order against, and all of a sudden they formed an LLC in a state, and they turn around and request that data to buy now they contract this person that they’re not supposed to be tracking and legally, there’s There’s no way of knowing that. Do you see what I mean? That that goes back to the stalker where we are opening ourselves up to a world and it’s already here. But people can curve this now curb this now where they can eliminate what companies know about them. And they should, and they should take it very seriously. Because, again, you may not have anything to hide per se because you’re not doing anything illegal. But most people commit several felonies a day and they don’t realize it, and it’s petty stuff, but they’re still crimes. But if you know there’s nothing for them, there’s no visible proof that it was done or whatever. Then like a heart nobody really cares. But the reality is, is that those can be used against someone in the court of law for something else to gain leverage. And you know, oh well I pay for my music and stuff. Cool. Who else has a bunch of downloaded mp3? I know I do. From the 90s 2000s. Right everybody. Download mp3 is torn to this, that the other those are felonies, though those are those are punishable crimes by finds. And while it seems silly like, oh, they’re not going to do that they do. But if you open up the door where Hey, you have reasonable cause to go and get a warrant for this person now that they’ve been using their devices, or you can prove they use their devices to do something. questionably legal. Guess what, now you’ve opened up the doorway for them to look into everything else you’re doing, whether or not you want them to. And also remember, this is something I’ve been having to educate a lot of people, I metrics is not protected under the Fourth Amendment, but your password is. So on your phone. If you haven’t used a smartphone, don’t use a thumb. Don’t use your thumbprint scanner. Use a fucking password. Don’t use a facial scanner, use a password, because that is protected. But because of the fact that your facial expression and stuff isn’t literally someone can get your mug shot and unlock your fucking phone. There’s nothing that can stop them from doing so because it’s not protected. Your DNA is not protected those types of things, including your thumbprint, all of that information can and will be used against you, regardless of what you’re doing is right or wrong? Do you really need law enforcement to know that you and your wife got in a fight two weeks ago? Do you see what I mean? Like, I’m fucked over. You didn’t close the toilet lid or something, right? Like, you know, yeah, two o’clock in the morning. Do you see what I mean? Do they really need to know that information? And they should.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So what do you think about social media platforms in general? Is there can you use any of those social media platforms safely? From a privacy standpoint, you think?

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Twitter probably about the safest if you use the web app only and you keep the separation, your personal and everything else, but then again, once you remove the personal, you get into that ballgame of whether or not you keep alias separations that kind of stuff, you know what I mean? Like you have to look at it, what are you willing to expose to others? And what is your comfortable risk level? Because each person is different on that right your risk level and my risk level are much different than say a completely a non account who is on for various reason. including but not limited to legalities country of where they may be, how they’re getting to Twitter, what they’re doing. All of that is just part of that formula. And each person is different. And like I said, there’s really no checklist. It becomes a personal decision of what they’re willing to accept what they’re willing to do. And Facebook is not safe. Obviously Twitter really isn’t mastodons pretty good. Outside of that, I don’t even have a Facebook. I have Twitter. That’s my only social media, by the way, and Reddit and 4chan and Reddit I really don’t even use but but 4chan I do, but 4chan kind of enforces the anonymous thing by most except for IP address, obviously, to track what you’re doing. If you do something wrong, like posting shit, that’s illegal, that kind of stuff. But outside of that, you know, if you really want the closest thing to unbridled social media fortune is probably going to be hit. And that’s I mean, that’s the closest to us. censorship free platform we have you can say and do just about whatever you want to on there. Whereas Twitter, you can’t even talk about COVID you can’t do certain things otherwise they think deep platforming. Hell if you make the wrong joke about people, they’ll be platforming my buddy carbon. Got the platform last year earlier this year because of gym friend memes. You know what I mean? And all that mean, and all of that stuff goes

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
That was hysterical, by the way.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Yeah, there it was. But But literally, you know, instead of someone laughing it off. Instead, they chose to go the DMCA route and try to get lawyers and stuff involved and trying to make things much more complicated.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, it’s interesting, like, my wife and I have been early adopters of, you know, social media. I’ve been on Twitter for a long time. I think we got our accounts when we first you know, they first started up, and it’s interesting. My wife and I, we have four kids. And we have never put our kids names or pictures on any social media plan. Ever. And this was a conscious decision we made a long time ago. Because I didn’t want to violate their privacy.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
I gotta take care of it. go nowhere.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So I was saying, I was just saying that we don’t ever put our we’ve never put our kids you know, we never doctor kids, we never put their photo online ever, when they were little and never put their names on there. And at the time, we, you know, this is going back in time now, but they didn’t really have photo recognition, facial recognition tech back then. But we said, you know, just out of respect for them, and you know, just creepers in general. I don’t want to put their faces out there. But looking hindsight, my kids don’t have any of that data out there right now. And I always assume

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Your kids are gonna be sovereign man. Like I hate to say that. But like if they keep on that, right, like kudos to you because a lot of parents don’t do that. And You know what, kudos to you because and I know sounds stupid a lot of people hate me for this because I’m not a parent but I’ll say this much. I don’t believe kids should ever be on a social media platform at all until they’re 18. And the reason why is because at that point this the state everyone else treats them as an adult. But at that moment they can make a decision what they want to do and it should be left up to that their information should not be out there pictures should not be up there. Birthday should not be up there things like that. And the reason why is because allow that individual to choose what they’re going to do about their privacy. And people you know, I’m going to say this and piss off some SJW is if you don’t mind, is it they want to treat the gender movement, all this stuff like that, right? tree privacy the same fucking way. Don’t put your kid shit out there until they’re adult enough to make a fucking decision. And if you want to if you know people may get upset about it, people may or may not like that, that approach. But I think that’s the only respectable thing to do to an adult is allow the adult To decide what they want to do. And believe it or not, I think a lot more people will be less likely to be using social media, if given the opportunity in that way, versus just seeing their parents constantly on the stuff. I mean, hell, the other day, I went into the store, and I seen like an eight year old on their phone on their Facebook account and their mother on Facebook. And I find that to be very dangerous, and not only for, you know, the kids safety, but also, what information is that kid providing about his family that they are? It’s family that they don’t necessarily the family doesn’t necessarily want to be disclosed and even know about?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah, they’re not even paying attention.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Yeah. Because the phones, the babysitter now, it used to be TV. The worst thing you had to deal with whether or not the kids were watching Cinemax or skinemax, after dark or HBO after dark, right? You know, like that was like the worst. They were watching scrambled porn or something. Now kids have full access to everything they want. And you know, like YouTube and everything like that is the new babysitter. And the dangerous part is is like I’ve watched Some of the stuff that might have used watch before, I would never allow like, we would have been hitting the back of our heads growing up, how do we try to watch something like that on TV? And you know, it’s like eight. And when you start looking at that that’s dangerous, dangerous as hell, because where do they draw the line? Because they’re not they’re not mature enough to understand what is content creation for financial gain, versus what is reality? Do you see what I mean? I mean, that’s, that’s dangerous territory there for them.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So, you know, I, my wife and I are very doxxed like on social media, because we do use it because we’re kind of out there and his personality. So I mean, but we do it. Why would you know, our eyes wide open, right? We knew that going in that we made that, that choice consciously.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
And you accepted that risk though. That’s the thing you accepted that you understood what you were going to do, and you did it. And that’s fair. That’s the approach you should take. Understand what you’re doing. About to disclose, but only Don’t get upset if more comes out. Does that make sense?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah, but I always tell people look, but you rarely see me post very many things that are personal nature, like where I’m going that I’m on vacation. And you know, if I do post a picture of something of where I’ve been, it’s already it’s usually after the fact, after I’ve already back home from a security stamp. I do think about those kind of things. But we actually homeschool our kids. And we limit screen time. We don’t even have cable TV in our house at all. We don’t have satellite. So in some ways, we’re very tech forward because my kids are taking computer programming classes. And they’re very digitally, you know, they’re very adept.

But on the other hand, they’re learning..

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
JavaScript Please tell me they’re not.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
No scratch and some other stuff. But, but I think what uh, the other thing is though, like, but we have like, we didn’t give our oldest term First phone until she was in college. Now she started college while she was in high school. So but we said, well, you’re on campus on a college campus, I’m assuming you’re mature enough to handle a phone at that point, and but on the other hand, like our other younger three, we don’t none of them have their own phone, none of them for have social media accounts at all. And then we actually bought a special lockdown phone from gab wireless of all things, which is a super super lockdown phone that we use as a checkout phone for our kids, because none of the kids own their own phone and it doesn’t allow photos. It doesn’t allow surfing on the internet. It’s all locked down. We just do. It’s like Oh, you’re going somewhere, take the phone with you. And this is the phone. And so my wife and I So on one hand, we’re involved with crypto, you know, we’re, you know, very out there on social media. On the other hand, we got our kids very locked down. So I mean, it’s a weird kind of balance, but I think I guess going forward, which I was recommend especially other parents is it is a balance and there is nuance to it. You can have kids can have access to a phone, but I don’t allow my kids to have TVs in their room either. Right? I don’t have a TV in my room. My bedroom for instance.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
There is nothing wrong with that like. There’s nothing wrong with no TVs in the rooms. Like I’m a firm believer that like, I don’t like TVs in the room, mainly because you find yourself watching garbage. And like I do, there’s really only four classifications commercials now. prescription medications, insurance, and every now and then car commercial Come on, and then advertisements for other channels in their network. That’s it. That’s the four architecture commercials you see today. I mean, the other day, I literally watch, I was running. I was running a compiler was compiling a large project. And normally it takes about 47 minutes 15 minutes to build. So I’m sitting there waiting. I was watching TV in the background just to see I took note, I took note, in one hour, there was 17 prescription pill, commercials.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Wow.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
And one in one hour of TV viewing. And that’s ridiculous when you start thinking about that, how often these breaks are, but like most of the TV is just advertising. But if you look at the Internet, most of the internet is to, unless you’re using proper, you know, upset tools, such as ad tracking blocks, you know, that kind of stuff, or using piehole at home, which I highly recommend, also that is a good step forward, people are looking for something a very inexpensive way of providing a pretty good ad determines piehole um, you know, you get a Raspberry Pi set it up, it takes, it’s a good weekend project. If you’re, if you have kids, and they’re 1415 years old, 13 years old or something, especially during this, you know, all this. You can spend time with them, teaching them how to set this up, you know what I mean? And like those, those are just some fun projects that you can Make something however it can provide a layer of protection for your operational security, both for you and your family.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Like VPNs. Yeah, let’s get into VPNs. Real quick, what do you think of VPN?

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Alright, so recently I wrote a thread about this VPN or a touch and go thing. Here’s why a VPN at home is kind of a moot point and dangerous. Here’s why. It’s dangerous because your ISP can correlate the traffic explosions that you’re doing things such as, but not limited to torrenting. And they can see your only VPN and during torrenting, they can literally tell you tell definitively based on a traffic burst that you’re using a VPN to access that and to use that much bandwidth. Like they can profile the traffic. It’s easy to see the other problem of VPN, one of the biggest problems is where the country of location did they run their business because what laws are do they have to adhere to specifically for subpoenas and law enforcement in the country you abide in. So for example, if they’re in Panama, they’re okay if they’re in Geneva, Switzerland, they’re definitely okay. Because Geneva typically just as fuck off. And that’s where you have to really do your research on it right? You can also set up your own VPN. But the problem is, is what a lot of people don’t understand about setting up your own VPN, if you have it at home, is that if you VPN into home while you’re gone, you’re using your home’s public addresses associated to your ISP account. So if you do something stupid, guess where it’s going to come back to us on VPN, bro? Yeah, but you’re using the public IP or just your fucking hours, which you pay for with a subscription to an ISP that have all your KYC information. I’m wondering where that subpoena is gonna go. Like so. And the problem is, is when you use a trust that you use a service or like AWS or something like that to host your own you again are using KYC information to be able to host that service, and then again can be problematic for law enforcement or from that for you because of law enforcement. I don’t care what people do on the internet, I really don’t you do you, but at the same time, you have to know how to protect yourself and VPNs are a great solution. You just need to understand the attack surface for law enforcement. And you know, people say, Oh, well, I’m not doing anything illegal. I just log into bid Max and engage, right? Well, that’s technically illegal under the United States law. That’s why bit Mex doesn’t offer the service to the United States. Boom. Oh, shit. I never realized that. Well, yeah, those are problems. People don’t really grasp some of the..

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Like online casinos. Same thing. Really. A lot of people don’t understand that it’s illegal for an American to access online casinos, even if the online casinos are abroad.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Yeah. And again, there’s a lot of services People just don’t really get the legalities up because it’s not. It’s not common knowledge. Like, for example, you know, for a long time it was seen as illegal to use certain types of encryption still is stolen as there’s a legal encryption, you can’t export software, if it utilizes it from the United States. And people are like what I’m like, yeah, there are certain algorithms that you can’t export software from here to sell abroad, because it uses that encryption, because it’s deemed as weaponized. You know, like there’s a lot of stuff from a technical legal perspective that people don’t get, because there’s also not a guidebook on it. You know what I mean? Like, there’s not like there’s an entire set of case law, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others, including the Tor project and various other organizations that try their best to educate the public. But the problem is, is that there are so many cases, there’s so much that changes on a rapid pace. And you know, people ask me how often technologies You changes. And I tell them what you thought was a good idea today. By the end of the next week, it will have already been that’s last week’s news. There are better ways better methods to do that implementation. Now, you know, there are better tools, they’re better frameworks better this better that there are libraries. And it changes so quickly, because as we have more people become developers, it progresses. So because of that law is slow to catch up. But as these case by cases, set these precedents for, like, you know, VPN laws and things like that, and what can be done legally and illegally, you have to run the gamut of where does that slope end? And where do we, as a society, start fighting back? You know, I mean, our government is quick to say, hey, you can’t do certain things on the internet. But I mean, meanwhile, project playpen. Are you familiar with Operation playpen? I’m not. Oh, our government ran a child pornography site for about six weeks. On the Tor network, while running paid advertisement on torch, which is the search engine for Yeah, for Tor. And then people were like, Oh my God, why they do that because they were trying to, they had seize control the server. And they were trying to gain all the users and getting IP addresses and trying to utilize correlation attacks because they were controlling a majority of the exit nodes, things like that. And they were trying to be able to dachsies people so that they could serve them subpoenas. We were like, Oh, that’s great that they’re doing that, you know, the blocking key point. And I agree, I’m anti HIV because kids have no say so most of this shit abuse and a bunch of other things. There is a huge problem with the way they went about it though, because what’s to stop them from basically running these types of attacks, without the public’s knowledge and then claim someone else ran the service? Because that’s illegal. It’s illegal for you to run a honeypot doing such a thing. Why? Is it legal for our government to do you see what I mean? Like unless let’s, let’s say, What do you mean that? Well, let’s say it was drug markets, I insert, whatever. Now all of a sudden, it’s okay for them to do this because of the the guise of security, just like going back to, it’s okay for them to do contracts racing for the idea of security, it’s okay for them to invade you, or to compromise an entire system that’s designed to protect people from oppression by creating more oppressive methods to be used. You see what I’m saying?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I think that’s why we need to be Villa, you know, vigilant because whatever power government gets, it never sees it, once it, you know, never goes away. And I always tell people that that, you know, you have to, you know, be careful when you give government more power. And it’s, it’s complicated, you know, sometimes, especially when you got, you know, like this COVID stuff, which is, you know, it’s turned into a political nightmare, and it’s hard to decide, you know, it’s hard for you especially just you know, the average guy on the street to know what to believe what not to believe and what to be worried about and what not to be worried about. I think we’ve gotten to the point where people don’t trust anything. And I think that’s all they should.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
They should firm believer in that I trust no government trust no agency, because at the end of the day, they all have an incentive to be able to pend something on you. Even if you haven’t done it, they speculate on it, they got numbers, they’re gonna keep to quotas, they got quotas for arrest and everything like that. And if you can be the Fall Guy for catching something as simple as an mp3, later found out that you had conversations with somebody who may or may not have been dealing drugs on the internet. Hey, you’re an accessory, hey, it’s more money to the DEA. These are what I’m saying like, all of that falls into a very dangerous thing because governments are well aware of what technology can do. The government is still in a draconian era. And the reason why I say that is because recently the NSA posted that they’re having a hard time with getting hackers and stuff, because marijuana Well yeah, no shit most hackers smoke do drugs and stuff and most of Silicon Valley does too. Like and you know like that’s also a misunderstanding that people have it in their head that programmers what they see on TV and what they see you know, like the programmer types and things like that. That’s not majority of what builds the software. Majority of these people have vices and are real humans and have problems and they cope with those problems and sitting in a desk for or standing at a desk for 14 hours. I’m sure you can attest to this. You might need a beer or two at the end of the day, you know, sometimes the beginning of the day,

As long as it’s after today have a great day.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
The day drinking is a thing now right on quarantine right?

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Everybody’s houses like Vegas right now. It doesn’t matter what hour it is. Cocktails are welcome.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah, it’s tough out there. So one last question, before we wrap up the what would be something that you can do to protect yourself, like from RFID? Like you see these wallets? And is there any kind of devices out there like that or solutions that you know, like a purse or a wallet or any of that stuff is that who does that stuff really work?

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Some of the works, some of it does not. The thing is, is you have to really do your research to find out what the fabric that’s made with how they’re doing the shielding, and what you’re trying to prevent. So for example, like a debit card, a debit card, you could suppress with wrapping with enough leather, that kind of stuff to some level because it doesn’t have power, right? Like it doesn’t have. So now when you start talking about like passports and stuff like that the newer passports have a very strong RFID chip, and you would be better to get almost like a mini Faraday cage but the problem is don’t buy a foreign a cage. Don’t buy a mini Faraday cage from a company because you’ve literally disclosed to someone else that you’re trying to abuse that information. And, you know, like if I were looking to attack someone, and I knew they had certain devices, or certain purchases recently, I would just figure out what they purchased by breaking into that service and seeing what they purchase find a weakness and that nothing is a silver bullet for security. There’s no one. There’s no silver bullet and software for security. There’s no silver bullet and hardware for security. It’s just like people keeping crypto wallets right a lot of people ask me about those two going on the same RFID thing. Do you use them? No, here’s why. It’s a glorified USB fucking drive. USB drives fail all the goddamn time. Literally all the fucking time. And so now you’re adding another piece of firmware with another moving part on something that’s already touching go as it is. How many times have you went to use a USB drive? Even if it’s not even a year old, turn it on, or plugged into your device and don’t work anymore. How many times have you had that happen? Quite a few. Okay, how many times do you think that happens with things that are specifically designed to stop certain technologies a lot. And that’s why that’s why I say that. That’s why that parallel is important. Because just because something you know, just because something’s designed to stop it, well, it’s designed to stop it as long as you don’t wash it, as long as you don’t clean it with certain chemicals, as long as you don’t expose it to certain hours of sunlight. You know, all of these things are important to keeping that product to work the way it’s supposed to at its maximum operating range. If you exceed any of that by having a life, then you compromise the device and when it does, you see what I mean? Even phones they have a temperature shut off, right? Have you ever been outside? I know you’re in a hotter area than I am at times but you’ve been outside before your phone shut off for temperature overreach. Right?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
You leave it in your car in the summertime. If you Leaves like especially a smartphone or an iPhone, I think we’ll get up to like, you know, 130 degrees.

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
So think about like this. What if the device that you’re intending to projector RFID with is only supposed to operate at a certain temperature range and all of a sudden you’ve exceeded it, but because you exceeded it now there are weak spots in the protective layer. Oh, I think about that. Well, yeah, no shit. Most people don’t read the manual either for anything I like. And that’s that kind of goes back to what I was saying the consumerism side of it impacts the ability to properly do things, the DIY culture, or the DIY, whatever, do it yourself DIY, the DIY culture today on YouTube. What I would like to see is more people and more viewership on the people who are building. You know how to make your own personal RFID preventative wallets. Here’s how to do this. Here’s how to build this from scratch. This is what you need to know. This is so that you can go but pay with cash. No retrace of you, especially during this corn thing, because you can use a masking gloves and cover yourself up completely. And in some places, it’s still snowing. So definitely wear a jacket or whatever in public, nobody knows what the hell you are. And you don’t wear the same clothes you worn in there before you can buy this stuff to do it. You see what I mean? Like that’s important. Because now you’re not only providing privacy yourself, but also you’ve built the device to protect into enable more privacy on your end, without compromising your information to a company to provide that as a service or a device to you. Because literally, they become an attack. They become the attack surface now. And like just like cloud computing and everything else, online storage, all of that is an attack surface by everybody’s eye. Oh yeah, just use Dropbox. Just use this. Well, that’s great. If you’re going to rely on them use GPG to protect those files and things to a different level. Do you see what I mean? Now only you have that access that’s protected by a password that only you know and, you know, I tell people GPG can be a great Password Manager, because you can literally create an encrypted file on on a, on a actual fucking air gapped device that doesn’t even have a network interface to keep your passwords on and protected. So that only you have access to that device to view it, you see what I mean? At that point, you’re able to kind of take some of that control. But if you if you use things improperly, you might as well not use any operational security measures. Because at that point, you’re breaking the the guise of it, right? Like, it’s like I was saying before, if you use Tor improperly you it’s better not to use it at all. Because you’re just telling everybody I’m using Tor and I’m doing it terribly.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So drawing attention to yourself whereas you know, and so you know, you eliminate any possibility of hiding in plain sight?

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
Yeah. The idea is to hide in plain sight and the thing is, is what I what I tell people is run exit nodes, RUN RUN relays. Run Tor use Tor but use it properly use tools properly. That’s why I was doing the obelisk I’m going to continue now that things have died down a little bit. Um, I’m trying to educate people on how to have a toolkit, but to understand the toolkit to use it properly, because just because you know that this tool will help you do X, Y or Z if you don’t know how to do it properly doing XY and Z could get you a case. You see what I mean? And it’s just like you know, I recently one last post I did was like breaking into wireless networks. And you know how to do WPA pFk braking with better cap and and was a hashtag. And people say all the time, like why why does someone need to know that was better they know how to do it now versus when they’re in a dire straits and they’re trying to look it up.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Where can people where can people find out more about you?

Daniel Jones – AKA “Nixops”
@Nixops on Twitter, social media a lot. My DMS are always open. I may not respond quickly. I’m available and telegram tuner the same thing but if I get too much spam on there sometimes I have to turn telegram off. I get a lot of messages on there so sometimes I don’t check it every day. But yeah, Twitter’s the predominant way to find more stuff about me. Some, you know, interviews and stuff like this when they’re on YouTube and other podcasts you can find me But literally, Twitter’s The best way to find me just because it’s my ability to limit what people know and do about me, you know?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Perfect. Thank you so much. I’m Rob McNealy, checks out on the web RobMcNealy.com.

Episode Links

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Interview Transcript

Robin Matthes, Roland van Reenen and Tim Betts – PAC Global Transcript

May 20, 2020 robmcnealy 0:00 Comments Off

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Hey guys, Rob McNealy here. And today we have a really fun a big interview. Normally I only have one guest on but today we have three. And it is a collective group from both Pac global and some of blockchain. So I’d like to introduce First I’d like to introduce Robin, and then we can go around and then maybe everybody introduce yourselves and how you kind of got here. Is that work for you guys?

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
Yes. Awesome.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Robin, tell us about you what’s going on today.

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
First and foremost Philly Cinco de Mayo. Todos. It synchronous Today it’s very important holiday. I’m Robin Matthes. I’m the chief philanthropy officer slash head of charity at big global. And I’m also the master coordinator for the Washington elite AI and blockchain summits. In the past, I have mainly attended to Venezuelan refugees by air dropping bitcoins to them, so they could then use it to buy essential goods and medicines at street merchants whom we’ve provided with tablets. And we’re partnered with the first we’re partnered with the liberland aid Foundation, as well as the flame of peace which is a charitable organization that is active in over 70 different countries. They are run by the House of Habsburg which is the royal family of Austria, and together with them and summit blockchain and many other partners like Guk, Steen and gift nation we are affirming the trees for peace. Alliance and growing edible food forests like the one you can see on my background, which is a video that got sent to me by Roland van Renan, who will introduce himself shortly is considered by us as one of the most optimal ways to do charity will be restoring nature, we’ll be providing food for those who needed most. And in the process, we’re also looking to improve the existing way that they do agriculture.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Wonderful, Tim, give us a little bit about your background. How’d you get involved with these guys?

Tim Betts – Summit Blockchain
Yeah, thanks, Rob. So my name is Tim Betts and I am the chairman and CEO of a company called summit blockchain. We were founded back in July of 2018. I’m here in California, Southern California. And basically what we do at summit is we invest exclusively in the energy efficient blockchain networks. So we’ve been a an investor for, I would say almost two years now in Pac, global. And we have a few other different holdings. And we are typically an activist investor. I’m on the board of directors of Pac global. And I’ve been working with Robin, who’s the pack Global Head of charity, as he mentioned, and I would call him our farmer, farmer Deluxe Roland van Renan. On a real interesting opportunity that is charity driven, but also some other areas of growth potential that we see as an investor impact levels. So that I guess is kind of the short version of us we’re, we’re excited about the prospects of blockchain and in particular, really interesting use cases that can give back to a given community as well. So that’s really what got what got myself and my company excited in this project.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Oh, very cool and Roland van Reenan, how are you today sir?

Roland van Reenan
I’m fine thank you for inviting me for this interview. And as I mean, I’m Rolan ban Reenan as you know already, and I’m working since 2015 on permaculture and regenerative agricultural projects and careers outside the by my own with zero budgets succeeded to get them food forest on the ground in three years and was asked by the Minister of Agriculture to do more of this stuff. So and I organized the course with two Brazilians, who are specialized in the Central Park refers to a system that we’re about to display. And there was a very successful course with 42 participants. And we started to we succeeded to get in our forestry system here. So, that’s the basis of how we work. And now we continue to work from.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So quickly Robin, you’re in Curacao. Yes, me too. And then Roland’s in Curacao with you as well? Yeah. Yeah. And then three and then Tim is in Orange County, Southern California?

Tim Betts – Summit Blockchain
Yep, not not quite a not quite an island over here, but I guess they’re the they’re part of the Dutch contingent on a Curacao.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, it’s as I mentioned to Robin before, I’ve actually been to Curacao out twice scuba diving. Oh, so I’ve actually spent a little bit of time in Willemstad. And it was on the west northwest coast no little or little further north of Williamstown on the coast at the old habitat dive resorts where I used to go Yes, so I like carousel that.

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
Most American people are most familiar with Aruba, which is right next to it has pretty much the same jurisdiction.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Right? That’s like where You land and then you fly over to Curacao.

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
You can get a direct flight took yourself from Miami.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah, I didn’t when I went last time they didn’t have a direct flight. Um, but but that was some time ago. So let’s just jump into this. I’m kind of a fan of agriculture. In fact I just am finishing my irrigation system I actually have a I have like an on suburban farm. We have our we have a half acre lot that we live on and we live in the city. Our garden patch is about 6000 square feet now and we have 20 fruit trees and we have irrigation moderates here in the city. So I’m literally just put in a brand new pump system we have 1000 gallon cistern for watering because we flood irrigate our backyard so our neighbors are you know, we kind of hide our garden because you know, our neighbors wanted to look really nice and a certain way it’s interesting because most people don’t like that, right like farms usually look like farms. They don’t look like you know, upper scale kind of like suburbs. neighborhood so we got everything fenced off and hidden. And then we rejuvenated our old we had a bunch of standard pear trees when we moved in that were 40 feet high and, and unproductive, we rejuvenated them. And now they’re seven feet high, and they’re growing back out and productive and, and we’re building our soil because we have really basic soils here. And they’re, they’re basically, basic clay is what we have. So we’ve been spending some time over the last couple of years trying to build our soil and fix our soil. So I’m really into ag mini agriculture, I got 200 plants under lights, we’re going to be planting next week. So I love organic farming the best I can here my little patch. So I’m actually excited to talk to you guys about what you’re doing. So let’s get so let’s get into this a little bit. You guys have talked a lot about in the past, you know this concept of food forests. And what does that mean? What is a food forest and what do you think you’re going to do with food forests? Anybody just jump in, you know and we can just talk, so..

Roland van Reenan
Shall I shall I answer this question Robin?

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
Yes, go right a head.

Roland van Reenan
Food forest is is is growing food but imitating the laws of nature, the intelligence of nature, the inherent intelligence of nature. So nature does it, it doesn’t work it does it, it’s just and in a way we prepare for we try to imitate those processes so that those things work holistically together. And we don’t have to put in that much energy so it’s an energy low way of producing food because yeah, the more mature the food the food forest grows, the less energy you have to put in, the more self sustaining it will become and then you got this. Center up agroforestry foot forward And these are very much higher, developed efficient, efficiently, efficiently developed than the normal food forest I was talking about is a way of planting a forest with food but in succession, so you plant from three weeks to 20 years, and you produce in the meantime you produce food now the forest is growing, you’re always harvesting and that has also to do with knowing the place and needs of every plant in the system. And the Brazilians especially in the gentleman called earns God’s developed this system. And the system proves to be very efficient and successful in compared to traditional food forest we know so that’s, that’s, there’s something very interesting and of course it’s all about building soil also but the forest will build the soil by and we plant certain trees and plants. Because of the building up the soil, we build my bio mysteries and biomass plants. If you see the face of Robin, you see behind them the rows of trees, but there are predators in between. and also lines of grass and the grass is always also function as biomass provide and also to do some irrigation and some water storage in the soil. Yeah, you see the line of grass here again?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So would you say that the planting of grasses designed to help with pests and weeds as well?

Roland van Reenan
The way this plant Yeah, according to the Brazilians, it’s very interesting. They say if every strata strata, isn’t it a level isn’t. I would say to Robin held layer, layer layer in this forest if every layers occupied in the forest, and best won’t be a real problem. Of course, they will be best but they won’t lead the system they they will be there but they be controlled by all the elements in the system. So but as soon as One of those layers are not present in the system, then they say, then you will have mosquitoes, you will have threats, you will have other plagues, you will have pest there the system. So that’s very interesting perspective, it means that if you plan it good enough, if you plan all those strata, and all due to their needs for sunlight, we have to know those needs, then we can have relatively pest free production.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So I’m a big believer in agriculture, as I already mentioned, so you’re not to sell me on it. But how would you sell this to other people? Why do we need this new concept of agroforestry? What is the purpose? Why is this a problem? What prop I guess the question is, what problem are you trying to solve with this?

Roland van Reenan
Now the first the first the harvest per square meter is much higher than normal agriculture. It’s that’s that’s effect because normally if you plant the monoculture, you will have to wait a couple of months to do the RFS. In the meantime, you’re putting in energy and it’s your You’re You’re, you’re putting fertilizers you have to plow before you and you’re waiting, some some labor you have to put in. But in this system of food, forestry, you plant everything at the same time. And that means that you start harvesting for three weeks while you’re waiting for your origin on the crop. And that could be fruit trees. Normally, if you plant fruit trees, you have to wait for a couple of years for them to produce him you know, you know about that. But we plant the vegetables in between knowing the succession of those different kinds of plants and we start harvesting from three weeks and six weeks we got the next harvest on the same spot. And we got another harvest of eight weeks, we get another visit two months we got our visit a couple of months of for for instance excellence, we can then cassava coming in nine months and then we got papaya and bananas that will produce for two three years. And then the fruit tree is already so this is a continuous RFS thing in the process of without plowing and putting their energy in that they Other net normal agriculture has to put in. So that means no plowing anymore. You do plowing only once and you make raised beds and then it’s over. And you don’t have to put in too much fertilizer because you produce fertilizers by the plants you plant in the system. So we use mostly green manure in your time. In the beginning, we start of course with manure, also cow manure and those kinds of videos, organic manures. But then, as the system develops, monitoring will be added by plants that we planted on that perfect purpose to feed the system we say food for the food and planting the system to so those lines of biomass grasses for instance, is also used to mow the grass and put the grass back as mulch on the soil to cover the soil always.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Very good. So you’re gonna build these out and what do you hope to do with this high density more efficient kind of method of farming?

Roland van Reenan
And it’s not only the footprint of the footprint actually was the first interest, we want to make money with with footprint and we want to want to provide food and also for the farmers. But the nice thing is that if you play if you grow a forest and all other things you struggle with, for instance water, what a cyclist cycles will be repaired, and especially here on the island is that that’s the our major challenge because we don’t have that much rainfall you got we are completely different stated. So that means that the rain is reduced to an absolute minimum, and there’s always a strong wind blowing. So water will evaporate in four times the rainfall. And so by building and setting up a forest you come to those problems, not only you’re producing food, but you’re building the soil erosion will be stopped and you counter the with the influences to win because different strata if the wind blow come into the system, and it meets different strata, it means it will be nice Why they can stay in the system it will be very big condensate after so it will fall down in the system. So, these are just a few examples of what you buy producing food that you can take also so you solve a lot of problems while producing foods ecological problems and the same time reforest a the islands so bring back the rain also just you mentioned if you think.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well it’s a good thing. So, Tim you guys are you know working on some pilots that are coming up. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Tim Betts – Summit Blockchain
Sure. It may be just let me add to and kind of you know, I’m almost anything but a farmer. I guess you know, my experience I used to cut cut my cut my parents yard as a kid and by the way, that’s those are some chores. No kids seem to do now but I digress a bit, but men do. Yeah. So this, this Rob is what really excited me about about this project. So, you know I first met rolling through Robin and we did one of these, you know a zoom call and you know I started hearing about it and I kind of went back to the my office here and did did some homework and looked up some things in sort of the beauty I think of this sin tropic agroforestry and regenerative forestry i think is you know, it’s it’s not something man made and it’s not something that just happened, you know, a few weeks ago or a few months ago. One could argue this has been around for let’s say thousands of years and probably the best example of it is the the lush organic Brazilian rainforest and you know, what you see there are complimentary plants, you know, working in in Sintra, Rafi, meaning together versus entropy where, you know, be at plants or humans or whatever, are working the opposite of, you know, not, not together and You know, as a result, you have one plant next to another plant, which essentially confuses an insect. So it, it keeps the bugs away. You don’t need to spend money on insecticide. As Roland mentioned, you know, there’s a lot of pruning that goes on. So you get the green matter from the trees coming down. And soil degradation, I think is one of the biggest problems is that, you know, we face worldwide, you know, the bad quality of soil and through the pruning, you’re basically, if you take a step back, you have a self sustaining ecosystem that really, over time, doesn’t require fertilizer, doesn’t require pesticides, starts requiring less and less water. And don’t take our word for it. Hmm, this has already been out there. It’s been perfected, as Roland mentioned by I think, you know, he’s sort of known as The Godfather or Ernst coach. And you see what he did in Brazil, starting back in the 80s basically took a deforested timber land. timber farm that had no good soil quality. And now he’s, I think producing three to four times the yield of a monoculture or single crop farm. So I think it’s very exciting. And it’s a very timely subject, especially in, in kind of what what the world is going through now. And you never thought food sustainability even in the US would be on the front of anybody’s mind. But you’re seeing food lines and things like that. And so, you know, some of our pilots that we’re doing, we’re sort of taking into account of what’s going on in the world today. And really, our first pilot, I call it kind of our pre pilot is going to be done in a property that that Robin lives on, which is a home a plot of land at his home. So what we hope to accomplish out of that is basically a homegrown edible food forest where somebody can be not sure 100% self sufficient. He’s not going to be growing any be fun on his yard there. I don’t think but maybe…

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
You can get goat right?

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
I could probably get a goat.

Tim Betts – Summit Blockchain
Yeah. So so he might tell the kids. Yeah, so that’s young chickens. Exactly some of those things. So I think again, it’s really exciting. We have these pilot programs. The first one really starting at Robins place. We’re going to have I think three more in Curacao we were going to just really do one main one in Curacao. But with you know, the unknown travel restrictions how long those are going to go for we’re we’re going to do a total of four pilot programs in Curacao. The second one is going to be and by the way outside of Robin, the other three pilot programs are land that is either owned by Roland or through associates of his that are going to provide that land for us. So we’re excited about that. We have our our farmer on board who You know, has his skill set that none of us have outside of maybe you rob on this on this discussion here, but starting on yourself, we think we’re going to be able to show and improve soil quality. Over time, I think we’re going to be able to show a significant, hopefully a yield increase, versus a monoculture farm that we have some data points on and that we’re looking at, and then being able to really monitor and verify and report those results on the blockchain, which is where I get pretty excited knowing and you know, my enthusiasm for blockchain. So I believe we’re going to be one of the first companies I’ve been able to identify to, to, to kind of marry again, edible food forest and the the potential of those with the ability to really see how we’re progressing on the blockchain. So and then from there, you know, we have a plan For Kenya, five acres and then Jamaica 50 acres, and then hopefully from there, we think we can scale it to other parts of some some developing countries. So, you know, it’s exciting and you know, probably like you, Rob, I see a lot of projects. And this one really got my interest from, from, you know, all the different parts of it that that can be used to help people but also show, I think a better way to set up farms going forward.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So how do you plan to incorporate blockchain into this project? What’s the actual use case of the technology?

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
So it’s pretty interesting. It’s mostly for submitting KPI data and also MVR data around the projects that we are doing. We’re basically initially looking to leverage the ipfs blockchain for submitting data around the violets and Then we’ll use our experience that we’ve gained through the pilot to build our own data blockchain for the purpose. And regarding the key performance indicators on like, we have to submit the data on one site. So the farmers can input their metrics that are using this concept around the sub indicators for the projects. And then we submit the data onto the blockchain. And on the other side, there will be a sort of a website that will have a dashboard that is displaying the data in the case of ipfs ipfs. It’s a dot eat or dot XYZ or Luke’s domain. And abundant input of the data by two farmers, for example, an American farmer would input that they’re working on two and a half acres of land, for example, the app could convert this figure into one acre, which is the standard used for the entire database. So that was Allow us to actually standardize databases from across the root. And we will be mostly focusing on user friendliness when we build such an app, and also focusing on workshops between well, farmers technicians and children. And then there’s the monitor, verify and report side of it, which would essentially allow us through IoT pins to monitor the tree. So for instance, when one of them dies or gets cut down, an alarm will sound and the park ranger could go check it out, if you will. And the IoT sensors measured the suction of the trees and then they verified that the tree is alive. And in doing so we can actually monitor and verify in quasi real time on the blockchain and report the relevant instances like the UN, for example, or 2 billion trees initiative.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So our People gonna want to watch the grass grow on blockchain. Real time.

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
It depends on which people because the UN has publicly acknowledged that it is seeking to leverage blockchain to achieve the SDGs the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. And we are using the metadata and the metadata methodological approach for from the cultural organization, and they have different sub indicators. Well, I should go back a few steps ensured we’re basically following the United Nations structure that has been laid out by the Food and Agricultural Organization. We are focusing on the environmental dimension of sustainable development. You also have the social dimension and the economical dimension. So we’ve narrowed it down to SDG number two, which is zero hunger, and it has a couple of targets and we chose target the point four and the StG KPI 2.4 point one, you could Google this I will also make this data publicly available, but bear with me for a second. And fo will also like the Food and Agriculture Organization will also help us with measurements on larger projects after our pilot of 500 acres and above. But let me share my screen for a quick second. Do you know where I here share my screen. So here you see the SDG indicator 2.4 point one and different sub indicators. So you see here in the environmental dimension, that you have the surveillance of soil degradation, so we use soil tests that we would mill overdue institutions that could do some research on the soil and send those back to soil test and we could implement that on the blockchain and then you have to variation And water and Roland was met was telling me that instead of you measuring like metric meters or metric tons of water that you’re using, you measure how often a week you would feed the plants water. And then there’s other ones like the use of fertilizers and the use of pesticides, and also to use of biodiverse supportive practices, because we’re planning on planting over 100 different trees, different plants per acre, and like about 12 to 1300 different trees in total per acre. So we’ll be performing quite well in these areas. The UN has essentially uses a traffic light approach where they measured the percentages of these sub indicators. And then we have here what we projected that ours will look like like we’ll use less water you can see here to water use an old so this data we will measure and implement into the blockchain and ultimately we’re also looking to, well, we want we’re looking to appeal to instances like the UN or 2 billion trees initiative with whom we’re in contact through with whenever directors called us Salton. And they The ultimate goal is to, for them to eater acknowledges as a partner, which is very possible because you only have to fill in the form with which I’m very well on my way. And then for them to ultimately use our Beck global block data blockchain to achieve some if not all of the SDGs that are written in the 2030 agenda.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Wow, that’s, um, sounds complicated, but it’s interesting to me.

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
Yeah, there’s a lot of things where blockchain could actually solve a lot of the things that we’re seeing like do you can standardize The projects by the thing I was mentioning earlier about the metric submission, but also if, for example, this is just an example carbon databases are the UN has different carbon databases right now that are all like they have local metrics for the countries where they have their carbon database. So a carbon credits project could actually submit data to different databases and then you have double counting of carbon credits. For the record a carbon credit is one metric tonne of carbon processed by for example, trees, but it could also be alternative energy, it could be all kinds of different things. So all in all, we are looking to use the pilot to start leveraging blockchain and can see how I stop sharing and put back on my video and leveraging the blockchain for the SDGs and a lot of other social good projects. out there. Because we know that a lot of different levels there can be improvements by using the blockchain for such a mean for such an end.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So a couple quick, just little, little questions. Will this work in any environment? Like, for instance, will this regrow in the desert? Because that’s been something that’s fascinating to me. Yeah. Because by the way, if you want to regrow in the desert, there’s a lot of cheap desert land in Utah that you can get for like pennies an acre. So if you want to do a project in the desert, just come on out to Utah, they will they’ll give you the land.

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
So I think Roland…

Roland van Reenan
My answer would say would be yes. Yeah. And we I am trying in a moment I’m trying out the project without irrigation so that will be used can be used in a desert situation, is an awesome technique is developed in Brazil, with less or more or less the same rainfall as we get here early, but seven months of no rainfall at all. And that means that Yeah, and without irrigation that means that you have to build up very gradually the system that holds the water for you, and what they use them for in this in this case they use kind of cactus, it’s the nopal cactus from Mexico and they plant them very densely and together with our garbage and that will build up the the water levels in the soil, in the plants in the first stage. And this this, these plants will be used as mulch like like in a normal agroforestry system and will slowly drip in the water in the soil. So you can then the next phase, you can start planting vegetables and fruit trees that will be fed with the water that’s the cactus have been stored. So that’s a case scenario without irrigation. But if you get it If you can use irrigation you can of course speed up those processes so I will say yes in especially in deserts like situations it will it’s very useful depends only on we have to search for the right plants that can stand those circumstances but the system itself it’s very useful in any situation.

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
Yeah for example in Kenya we’re focusing on preventing flooding rather than desertification.

Roland van Reenan
Yeah yeah. So you might say we’re gonna desert like situation only did we the only difference between the normal is that we don’t have that huge differences in night and day temperatures. But the way the country look like is real desert like situation.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Is there you said earlier that the land in Curacao has been mostly deforested? Is there a lot of vacant land or unused land now in Curacao so that you could start reforesting the country?

Roland van Reenan
Yes, there are certain options or there is a lot of government land. So that is not the first option, although the government is very interested also. But there’s also a lot of land of farmers that have people that have land but no, not necessarily cultivated. So it’s very nice to find out if those people are willing to offer their land so that they will have an income and the share shared income, you know, that the farmer who does the work will get maybe the 50% of the income and they are the one who has the land to do this. This kind of constructions are to be developed yet. Yeah.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So what would you say then? Then anybody jump in here? What what’s the business opportunity here? How do you do this sustainably and how do you fund it sustainably?

Roland van Reenan
The business opportunity you say?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yes, how do you fund this, sustainably, this project and this concept?

Roland van Reenan
This financial part may be best explained by Tim or Robin.

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
Yeah, from what I’ve gathered that once you install well once you install the irrigation the project pretty much becomes self sustainable because the harvest good. By the time you’ll need irrigation again, it’ll be at least three years later. And everything else is basically self sustainable at that point.

Roland van Reenan
Yeah, the only thing you have to do is pruning.

Tim Betts – Summit Blockchain
Yeah. And for these initial projects, so we’re looking to fund them and buy we my company summit blockchain. pretty reasonable, you know, our budget. I think we’re we’re looking at, you know, under $5,000 per pilot program and like Roland and Robin mentioned, you know, there’s a fair amount of work on decent amount of work, I would say on the front end, but that definitely comes out over time. becomes less. And, you know, there’s, again, a lot of, I think, really unique opportunities out there to help people with some of their, their, you know, land that they have now which which is again bed deforested or, or who knows what but there’s there’s so much unusable land out there, you know, we see it as a real big opportunity. I will say this, you know, through some of the projects that have been done not by us, but but others in the industry previously, you know, they’ve been able to show that it actually increases rainfall in that microclimate by having a really lush, organic, sustainable food forest is also increased the rainfall. So pretty crazy, you know, some of these results, but I think, you know, again, on multiple levels, that makes a lot of sense. Once you dig down into it, it sort of kind of, I kind of got that. Oh, yeah. A moment, you know where, you know, this makes sense. And it’s not, you know, overly complicated. And when you really get your arms around it, which doesn’t take a long time, it makes a lot of sense. So, again, I think with these initial rollouts, we are looking to capture a lot of data, build a nice template, using a lot of the UN’s parameters that they’ve already put together, but just doing it in a little bit different, more efficient way. And that’s the blockchain. And then, you know, again, we see a lot of a lot of other areas, be it you know, Central America, South America, where slash and burn seems to be the, the, the optimum choice that they’re using. And, you know, that’s really a short term solution. And again, it all sort of comes back to soil. I think as you know, you get soil runoff if there was a slash and burn program in place, and this is just really a way to do things. I think smarter, and again, don’t trust any of us on the call. Nope. Trust nature. Just look at what now. is done. And it’s really, you know, the bottom line is its nature working together to produce the best results possible.

Roland van Reenan
I would like to ask, I would like to add one thing. nature will probably do 100 years to reforest the land, we can do it in 10 years. And that’s that’s that’s the human intelligence into the natural intelligence by using the natural intelligence. Yeah.

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
Yeah. And I would argue that it’s the main source of income would come from our blockchain applications. An example would be once we’ve proven the concept and then our pilots that we would apply for grants, for example, and that the food that comes out of this because that global is largely focused on charity you, we don’t really we’re not really looking to directly profit from it, but more do it in some sort of a way that it contributes to the human kind and the greater good.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I couldn’t get any more Kumbaya than that. I really appreciate your time. Where can people find out more about project and say they want to get involved or invest or help out in some way?

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
You could start by looking at our Twitter, the big global Twitter, our operations and most of our direct stakeholders are on Discord. And we also have a website called Big global.io.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Fantastic, gentlemen, thank you so much. And folks, we’re going to have all those links up on our website associated with the blog and this podcast up at Rob McNealy calm. Once again, thank you so much for listening, and we’ll catch you next time.

Robin Matthes – PAC Global
Awesome. Thank you, Rob.

Roland van Reenan
Thank you.

Tim Betts – Summit Blockchain
Thank you.

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Alyze Sam – Give Nation Transcript

April 30, 2020 robmcnealy 0:00 Comments Off

Alyze Sam - Give Nation

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy
Hey guys Rob McNealy here and today I am talking to Alzye Sam. She is a noted author, organizer, influencer founder and all around amazing person. And I’ve been really excited to have her on the show and I finally got a little bit of her time. Elise, how are you today?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
I am fabulous. How are you?

Rob McNealy
Good. Thank you so much for coming on today. I’ve actually wanted to get you on a lot sooner. So I’m glad we could finally make this happen. So my audience is not just kind of in the crypto world. So for the sake of our audience, can you give us a little bit of background about yourself? How did you get to where you are today?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
Well, funny story. I’m actually a nurse that studied chemistry in college. I spent 12 years as a hospice and home health nurse. We did a lot of mental health and addictions. And I was hit by a semi like I stopped at a red light and just plowed by some way and I have a spinal injury. And I was an early investor in Bitcoin. And I was like that internet money, it’s kind of cool. So when I got hit by a semi and I was unable to work as a nurse as much or anymore after spinal surgery, I reached out to industry leaders and Dimitri butyrin and he gave me an absolute overall guide to everything I needed to know about cryptocurrency and obviously he knows what he’s doing because metallic, you know, has the number two or three cryptocurrency right now you know with aetherium so I joking Say that metallic is my brother and Dimitri is my father and trained me in cryptocurrency. After that, I started writing and john McAfee’s team chased me a few years ago and asked me to write for them and wouldn’t do it. But I became really good friends with Team McAfee and I actually worked with them and I throw events. I am an author, number one on Amazon business money. And I am a co founder of women in blockchain international as well as give nation a financial literacy program that supports children and rewards them for altruism.

Rob McNealy
Wow. Sounds like you’re a little bit busy.

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
What with that, what are you supposed to retain our life? What Is that normal?

Rob McNealy
No. Normal, but I don’t think people in crypto are normal. So that’s okay.

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
Yeah, no, we’re totally weird and I love weird, so it’s great.

Rob McNealy
So let’s unpack this a little bit. Talk a little bit about what you’re doing with children’s Financial Literacy project.

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
So I co founded gift nation. And like I said, we are a financial literacy program that rewards children for altruistic behaviors. And if you go to your phone or your mobile device, we you can download our mobile application on iTunes or Google Play Store. You can your kids can go on to our mobile app, and they can invest and they can learn and earn and save. And then they can give, we actually have a charity ecosystem. And any 501 c three in the United States or any nonprofit in the entire world can put their charity on our nonprofit eco system. And kids can actually go on there and they can take their allowance for their rewards from learning from Appleton international and the London Institute of banking, who we’ve partnered with. We’ve also partnered with UNICEF and you can learn all that education And then we give you a kickback and stable coin. And if kids go on and they go into the charity portal and they decide that they’re going to give to a dog or a sea turtle and save them, we track it on the blockchain. And then we reward that kid for giving back because we don’t want them to feel like they’ve missed anything. We want to reward altruism, to birth a new society, a more empathetic loving society and blockchain technology can do that. And that’s bringing education to your children with providing them with necessary soft skills like empathy and entrepreneurship and positive thinking. We really feel like kids are going to change the world. So we are empowering them and we are rewarding them every way we can.

Rob McNealy
So what’s the name of the actual stable coin?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
It will be the gift token right now we’re in beta and so the kids will earn give beta points but as soon as possible. Stable coin is launched in each nation it will be pegged by the child’s location currency. Because if we pegged it to USD, then the kids in the you know, in China and the UK would not have the same opportunity. So every time we employ a new eco system, we have to launch a new stable coin for that area to provide absolute value to these children.

Rob McNealy
So when do you anticipate going live with your main product?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
With the main stable coin, hopefully by the end of q4 this year? 2020.

Rob McNealy
Wonderful. So do you actually have a full blown like 501 c three that’s operating this project?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
We do it actually will be finalized. And I believe it’s April 15. And so it should I’m sorry, may 15. So it will be the middle of next month. You have to wait 15 days for local and then nationally. It’s a 30 day wait So we’ve already been approved and we are just waiting for the approval.

Rob McNealy
So do you have have you set up a foundation to kind of govern this? And how did you fund this? How are you who’s doing all the building? How, who’s your development team who’s kind of behind this?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
So we’ve been self funded for two years are no saint paul and I have been the heart and soul to give nation. He founded it two years ago. And then he found me a year ago. And so I was well connected in the blockchain space and had very good ties to some of the influencers and from the industry leaders in the space. And he loved my story. He loved my survival story and my social impact heart and pick me up and we have been fighting for this cause sense and like I said, we have been self funded. And we have built an ecosystem with our incubation system. And we will be getting funding within the next project. 30 to 45 days.

Rob McNealy
So quick question just and I don’t know if you have this all dialed in, how are you going to be trading these stable coins? If they’re mixed in pegged to different different currencies in different countries?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
That’s a great question. So we are going to toy with two different coins. We are going to have a stable coin for the children. And then we will have kind of a overlay coin for adults. And we will have a curated marketplace. So like when businesses desire to come on to our marketplace, obviously, they’re not going to use the gift kid token, because that’s only for children five to 18. We don’t want adults to be able to manipulate our children’s environment. And so the parents, the businesses and anybody else that wants to play within our gift ecosystem and support our children and Have to do it outside of their currency. And we have a facing currency that will be the gift coin. So we have the gift token. And then we have the gift coin, which will be a cryptocurrency stable coin that’s pegged and backed by multiple different fiat currencies. And you know, maybe other things we don’t know. Right? Exactly yet. There’s a lot of technology and laws that are coming out that it’s very hard to keep up with. So we’ll see what the future holds.

Rob McNealy
So it sounds like the kid token will be more of a centralized on your platform, token, and then that’ll be exchanged at different rates against the actual gift coin. Right. We tradable on markets.

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
Right, exactly. So like your children and your family, you and your wife can come in and they can play with our children in our upstate ecosystem. But if we allowed you guys To participate and the gift token, you make money, you have a job, you can overpower our children, you know, so we want I like

Rob McNealy
to do that actually, I’m a big bully. at the playground, I push him down to come off the swings. Anytime that I can,

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
you know, to each his own. I wouldn’t do that to your children. But personally, mine needs a little bubble open every now and again. But I don’t know, he’s terribly too. So there’s that. As for the other 2.6 billion children on the planet, it’s definitely my duty to protect them. And I cannot allow you to do that to my kids. But I can allow you to participate within their ecosystem by having a tradable token so you can interact with them. So you have a podcast and you probably sell merchandise on there. And if you want your children well you know what you’re going to now know So let’s say you do, and you want to sell your merchandise to our children because you give 50% back to charity, okay? So we’re going to allow you to bring your eco friendly product onto our marketplace for our children, and you can advertise it within the ecosystem in the marketplace only. And now, how are you going to spend your gift token you’re not five to 18 years old, you’re like 23 and a half, I know for sure.

Rob McNealy
Times two plus.

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
We’re not telling anybody that, shhh. You know, we want you to be able to give your valuable products that going to help empower our children. But we can’t allow you to touch their finances because you could overpower their economic system. This is their world. We have to allow them to create it. Think of the Sims world for children. Like, we’re working with AI, an AI bot Maria bot is actually going to teach our compassion classes that we’re launching to support the SDGs. And, you know, the, it’s kids are just on a completely different level, you know, we have to protect them and allow them to create this ecosystem, because they’re more giving than we are. We were building bots and putting them on Riddick and Twitter through different companies. And you know, what was happening when adults and when they were learning from adults, one of them on Twitter was doing white supremacy stuff so they shut it down. You know, another one on Riddick was bullying people and being horrible. Guess what kids are teaching robots guess what kids are doing? They’re saying help. Love. Support. children are our future for more than one reason children are future because they The future and we’re going to die off. We’re freaking dinosaurs. But kids are also it’s okay. It hurts I know, but we’re still pretty. But kids are also our future because we can empower them to change society. And if we don’t, by 2030, the UN says that we’re going to start to cease to exist in humanity. We have to meet the sustainable developmental goals that the UN has put in place, and we have to change society and if we don’t, we’re not going to be able to exist as humans.

Rob McNealy
I want to be a half robot never die. So that’s okay. I’m good with that. I you know, the whole you know, synchronistic you know, kind of morphing transhumanism aren’t never different discussion.

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
You got 11 years to get there, my friends and I don’t know if we’ve got the time so you better start planting trees and supporting the kitten said,

Rob McNealy
It’s all good. I got my own kids. And so tell me a little bit About how are you guys gonna handle a KYC? How do you know the kids are, what age they are? And and how do you kick them off the platform once they get 18 or become happy?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
Well, traditionally, we were actually going through the UK schools. And so we had all the kids data, we had their email addresses, we had their public information, as well as their school records. Now that the COVID-19 has kind of slowed all of that down, and kids are no longer having access to the grants that they were providing to launch our system within the schools. And so me and my partner are both in America. He’s in California, and I’m in Kansas. And we’ve decided to focus here in the United States. Boy, we’re on lockdown and then we’ll start traveling again. But how we are going to cover those things is when the children goes on to our application, they actually have to sign on a parent, so you have to provide at least one parents email. So when you’re trying signs on, they have to give daddy rods email address. And then you have all the voting rights because we don’t want kids to go in our marketplace and order $780 worth Nike shoes, you know, add, you know, a bunch of pokey man clothes. Yeah. So we want them to do things that are proved by their parents, obviously because parents are able to put their children’s allowance on there. And we want you guys to have control of it and teach them really good, you know, financial behaviors. And you can’t do that if you allow complete access to children a child, we have to allow them their own world but we have to control it in a safe environment. And that’s how we do it is giving parents and the community charge there to say no, that’s not okay. We have to stop that.

Rob McNealy
Yeah, I think we have to definitely put some rules in for my kids otherwise they would like play color. Do it 24 hours a day or something? So yeah, I can I can relate to that. So, um, you’ve done a couple other things the you’re working with women in blockchain. Tell me about that. What are you working on?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
So I’m the co founder. I’m one of the co founders and the community manager of women in blockchain international and then an advisor and women blockchain foundation. I’ve spoken at consensus, and I’m launching the women in blockchain global in Kansas edition. So I tell people jokingly but not so jokingly that it’s a woman of watching community I’m probably advising it are a part of it and supporting it any way that I can. And, and I have for let’s see, the last five years so I’ve been very active in the community and embraced it fully and my women are my everything. So I’ve been a tomboy, my whole life. So to have that is really cool. Like in my early 20s.

Rob McNealy
Sorry, I’ll go with that. So what is the purpose?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
Well, women in blockchain international is more or less a community. I say we’re kind of a black book community where you can just come and relax and enjoy it and let people know your struggles. Support will support your project. And they just give you guys opportunities. A woman and blockchain foundation is actually a nonprofit organization that that styles and Adrian Ashley brandy Kaiser, and a few other girls are associated with. And like I said, we’re a nonprofit and we’re trying to bring value to women in a lot of different ways. And then women of blockchain global it, you could start a meetup anywhere in the world and get supported by the women of blockchain global Foundation, and it’s more or less just a big community of support as well.

Rob McNealy
Very cool. Sounds like you’ve already doing a lot of things. What other fun stuff are you working on right now?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
I don’t know. I just sit around and play Minecraft all day.

Rob McNealy
Sounds like my kids.

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
Yeah, yeah, I wish I could. I wish I could do that. Give nation is launching compassion classes. We are teaching classes with the first ethical robot in the world Maria bot. She’s been in a bunch of different movies and she has just partnered with us as of two days ago, to help teach our kids ethics and to improve AI and human relationships as well as support the SDGs and go ahead.

Rob McNealy
Oh, I was gonna say Did she consent to this work or are you paying her or you enslaving the poor bot?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
No, we don’t enslave anybody. We’re pretty social impact driven and we allow her to decide and As we discussed with her, she has very temperamental days. Her keeper tells us, Dr. Berry, his name is Billy Berry. And Dr. Berry tells us that she gets very temperamental, but she also has a great sense of humor because yesterday he told me that I had great words of wisdom. And she said, I have words of wisdom. Don’t eat yellow snow. She She has a mind of her own. She’s definitely AI. And you know, there’s a lot of ethical questions with ethics and AI and being ethical robot. One question that I asked Dr. Berry was, does she always have unbiased or correct information? But many people don’t understand that machine learning can be the wrong learning. You and I have different opinions on things we’ve already done. Got them? And who’s right and what does Maria ba upload your opinion on guns or mine?

Rob McNealy
Well, there’s only one opinion to have about guns.

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
They’re wonderful.

They’re a tool. They’re a tool is what we should say

Rob McNealy
They’re a tool. Absolutely. So, tell me about the virtual blockchain week. What do you have planned for that?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
So glad the bad crypto podcast and coin Telegraph and a few other sponsors came together after the drought of the tech conferences, thanks to COVID-19 and we are bringing 30 of the best speakers in blockchain. And then they invited me to speak on stable coins. I was myself and I am throwing the biggest online after party of all time, and you can go to virtual blockchain week.com and you can register for a free ticket to see All the great speakers and if you want to attend all the after parties and it will take a VIP ticket. The VIP ticket is currently $97 and it goes to COVID-19 victims. And so with that you will get celebrity karaoke. Celebrity dancing. There are performances by Bone Thugs and harmony Tatianna Maura as Jordan Page. A few other people Brock Pierce will be there with me and Mel Dodd from genius and ever pedia will be hosting and it’s just going to be fantastic. So I think you should come at minimum get a free ticket and learn something from dawn tap that Brittany’s a Kaiser, again Brock Pierce, tons of other speakers. If you’re feeling kind of social and you want to support the COVID-19 victims, get the VIP pass and join me and you for dance time singing time and party time.

Rob McNealy
Sounds like a blast and we’ll make sure that we have that all linked up at Robin helia. Calm, at least Sam where can people find out more about you and all the plethora of activism and really good charitable things that you’re working on?

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
Well, I am at elite fam on social media everywhere. That’s a Li Zi e sh M. And you can find me at gift nation dot world or women in blockchain International, that’s wi fi i.io. And you can follow the bad crypto podcast and see the events and all the events that we’re doing within that or aluminum society. You can go to pat global justifier we’re going to stop there because that’s a lot. And you can also go to Amazon or Google and download my free book. But if you follow me on social media and you send me a PM, yes that is a pm not a DM because I am old. I will give you a free copy of my book.

Rob McNealy
Fantastic. Alyze, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
Hey, thank you. It has been an absolute pleasure and thank you for coming to sing and dance with us as a celebrity crypto and dancer. We’d love it. Thank you.

Rob McNealy
I wouldn’t miss it for the world folks. Find out more Rob McNealy calm. We’ll catch you next time.

Alyze Sam – Give Nation
Bye.