In this episode Trent Lapinski interviews Murray Thom, VP of Software and Cloud Services at D-Wave Systems, to talk about quantum computing, and their new quantum computing cloud solutions.

Learn more about Leap 2 from D-Wave.

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Trent Lapinski interviews Ruben Merre, CEO of Ngrave.io. In this episode Trent and Ruben discuss blockchain security and their new crypto hardware wallet the Ngrave Zero.

Host: Trent Lapinski
Guest: Ruben Merre
Music: kaffekrus

Automated Transcript (may contain errors):

Ruben Merre: 00:05 what we focus on is security so that people can invest in it and don’t have to worry about the fact that it’s tomorrow, the investment might just be disappeared. We are really applying the most paranoid model you can think of. So this is our hardware wallet. It’s called the Ngrave Zero. And so we came up with the idea by thinking first about what is actually wrong with all the existing solutions. So if you think about it, if you’re not sitting in the same room as me, you cannot, you can not attack me anymore, which is of course incredibly secure. And that’s, let’s see the remote dectector we removed that completely. And then we have a physical attack factor. So the device, we build it from scratch with one of the world’s leading r and D and innovation institutes on none of electronics. Um, and so basically we built this from scratch with their experts to make sure that if somebody gets their hands on these devices on the Zebra and tries to open it up, the device will wipe itself, your keys will be gone. And then obviously we have the second template as a backup.

Trent Lapinski: 01:16 Welcome to Techpost. I’m your host Trent Lapinski. In this episode I interview Ruben Mirror. He’s a CEO and founder of ingrained there are hardware crypto wallet solution. And in this episode we talk about how they’ve solved for most of the vulnerabilities of existing hardware wallets and what it takes to generate secure private keys. This is an amazing episode if you’re interested in learning more about cryptocurrency. So please stay tuned.

Trent Lapinski: 01:51 welcome to the podcast. I’m here with Ruben. Tell us a bit about who you are and what you’re working on.

Ruben Merre: 01:56 So I, everybody I trend, yes, I’m Reuben, a Reuben Mirror, if I say it with an English accent, um, and the CEO and go find a roughing grave. But we basically do in a nutshell is we take away, we remove the most important attack vectors of your blockchain wallet. So we have built a solution that is completely offline and we think about hardware wallet. It’s a completely offline hardware wallet. There is, there are no online attack factors anymore. We don’t have any connection that we need. So we don’t need USB NFC for g any kind of network capability. And that means that we actually effectively have taken away the whole online attack factor that comes into mind. And basically, which is the most important way that all crypto wallets today get a get hacked and compromised. Um, and then the physical device itself, we build it together with a world’s leading experts in their fields, in nanoelectronics, in a hardware security, in applied cryptography to ensure that the device itself physically, because that that’s the last kind of attack sector that exists.

Ruben Merre: 03:00 If you attack it, if you try to open it up, if you tried to preprogram it, the device has been tamper-proof on many, many different layers to basically ultimately self-destruct and watch your keys away. And that’s only number one, part one of our solutions. So we are actually bringing out the first end-to-end, uh, solution to managing your private keys to managing the access keys, the credentials, the private keys, or the master receipt to your cryptocurrency wallet. And we have thought about all the what if, so if you have the first one, if we should think about is what happens if I lose my device? Um, today’s market gives you a base of piece of paper. We give you a cryptographic puzzle made of two stainless steel plates is deliberately done completely non-electronic because electronics can degrade. And the thing is you need both plates to find the key back.

Ruben Merre: 03:50 It’s a, it’s quite an advanced cryptographic principle. Some people might compare it to Shamir secret sharing with sexually something different. Um, the, the core morale there is that if you only have one plate, you have zero information on the key. So you still have to brute force the entire private key, which is basically impossible computationally with the, uh, computers we have today. And then the question becomes, what if I lose that packet? We also have a way of recovering those plates for you, but without any third party risk and we can even go as far as opposed to him recovering those plates and getting them to your next skin. And by doing that, we basically created a fully end to end solution, the first one of its kind. Um, but I guess that’s more about engraved in about me. So,

Trent Lapinski: 04:39 Hey, no, that’s what you’re working on. So it’s a really, it’s a fascinating concept what you’re working on. I love the fact that, you know, you’re trying to solve for all these use cases because unfortunately right now when it comes to crypto wallets and hardware, it’s a mess. I mean, you know, you’ve got all these different devices. Like you said, you’re literally storing your private keys on a piece of paper. Um, you know, paper wallets in some cases. You know, now we’ve got no custody wallets, which just use like a QR code, which I can’t even imagine how many potential security issues that I can raise. Um, obviously you probably don’t want to s anyone who’s listening. You probably don’t want to store a lot of crypto in a noncustodial wallet. But, um, you know, they’re, you know, there’s so many different vectors and challenges and we’ve, we’ve seen this with, you know, people who have left a lot of their crypto and exchanges.

Trent Lapinski: 05:35 They’ve been, you know, they’ve had their cell phones hacked because you know, a lot of people enabled like two step authentication. So we literally had this situation where people were like calling at and t or Verizon and pretending to be the user and like get spoofing their numbers and getting access to their phones and, you know, switching their phone to a different device that, you know, the hacker had to, I mean there’s, there’s a lot of pitfalls with the existing security solutions when it comes to managing crypto securely. And then for a lot of companies, you know, like that are in the blockchain space, they have to figure out like how they’re going to exchange crypto. So many cases, a lot of these companies have to essentially become an exchange themselves or at least have some initial exchange functionality within their blockchain or their blockchain project. And then they now become vulnerable to all of these, you know, all of these hacks. We’ve seen this number of watching companies since, you know, kind of the 2017, uh, boom there. And you know, there’s been a number of people who’ve walked away with millions of dollars in crypto because you know, they just took that little piece of paper, that private key and millions of dollars of crypto it, you know, were stored on one, a hardware wallet and a yeah, they disappeared all it. And that’s it.

Ruben Merre: 06:57 I think a good example, there is a, the Winco vase product set it themselves not so long ago that they basically cut their piece of paper, that paper want in to and then stored it to different places. Um, well paper Wa as for one, it’s the worst part place where you can actually write down your, your, your key. Because if you just spill a bit of water or coffee on it, you already lose your, your all, your bitcoins. Um, so towards them I would really say, just have a look at our Graffina solutions called in gray for graffiti. And that’s the, that’s those two plates. So these two plates are made of stainless steel, um, and they can withstand a house fire, corrosion, water, uh, [inaudible]. You can basically put them in a vault and they will not fail. Just like paper. They will not fail in the next 50 years. And the fact that there are two of them and you need both means that you can put them somewhere separate and it’s even harder to basically get your hands on somebody.

Trent Lapinski: 07:51 Well, and then let’s talk about the actual device itself. So I love the concept of the two plates and I mean curity implications of that are pretty obvious, but your device, your actual hardware device that generating these wallets, that’s storing, uh, you know, that’s creating these, these private keys. Can you talk a bit about that and how it works?

Ruben Merre: 08:12 Yeah, sure. Well, I guess this is a podcast right? So I can show this to you. Uh, I’m not sure if I already did that, like one of our previous encounters, but, um, so this is our, our wallet. It’s called called the engraved zero. And so we came up with the idea, um, by thinking first about what is actually wrong with all the existing solutions. And we found that concept, we call ourselves the, the box of Pandora for cryptocurrencies. And for us opening the box of Pandora of Crypto, it’s the equivalent of, um, setting up an online connection. Um, any kind of connection to connected device also falls under that category. So if you look at incumbent hardware wallets, they either use, which is not only friction but also are not very safe. Uh, if people know about it, like the flux net hacks, uh, a couple of years ago were basically, um, very advanced and sophisticated hackers.

Ruben Merre: 09:07 They, uh, were able to replicate the virus simply by the USB drivers on the USB. And so eventually they were able to get into the, um, the atom, um, well where they were enriching and raining, I think it was in Iran, I’m not sure. But even those offline computers, they were able to infect those and disturb the process of enriching that uranium correctly. Um, it’s completely crazy. But, or something like that. Yeah. Stuxnet, Stux and that, so it’s a, so even you’re with a USB connection, like incremental use. It’s dangerous. And it’s the same with NFC, with Bluetooth, with four g basically the moment you have that, all my connection, you’re opening, um, some kind of avenue where hackers can start trying all their Arlen special tricks. So all we’ve done there is we kept it completely offline. You can compare it with setting up a wall in between our device and your private keys and the online world.

Ruben Merre: 10:07 A wall, an offline world, one, like let’s say the game of Thrones wall, but one that doesn’t, uh, fall in the end of the last team. Um, how is that riding for sure. Um, so imagine now that you can create on that device, your private keys or your seat. So you just click on the side of the, of our, of our RL wallet, and if the screen pops up, it lights up and you can create your private keys. And from that point on, the only person who’s ever seen them is you. And you can sign transactions, receive transactions, whatever you want to do with your wallet, without ever even exposing those private keys to secrets, cryptographic keys to online connection. So if you think about it, if you’re not sitting in the same room as me, you cannot, you can not attack me anymore, which is of course incredibly secure.

Ruben Merre: 10:58 And that’s, let’s say the remote attack factor. We removed that completely. And then we have a physical attack factor. So the device, we built it from scratch with one of the world’s leading r and d, uh, and innovation institutes, um, on nanoelectronics. Um, and, and so basically we built this from scratch with experts to make sure that if somebody gets their hands on this device, on the Zebra and tries to open it up, the device will wipe itself, your keys will be gone. And then obviously we have the second template as a backup to protect you against that. So basically you have a device that is effectively the most secure in the world to manage cryptocurrencies.

Trent Lapinski: 11:37 And the thing that I found really interesting too is the fact that you could generate as many wallets on this device as you want. So in theory, you know, an exchange could use this to generate all of their private keys, um, and you know, use one device to be able to do that. And then in print them on those, uh, on the steel plates that you were talking about earlier before, I’m not in that way, they, you know, they’ve got a secure method of generating this that I never touched a computer that was online. Um, I mean that’s basically what you have to do. You have to have a solution that’s not connected to the Internet because if it’s connected to the Internet, it’s vulnerable.

Ruben Merre: 12:16 Yup, exactly. And um, so we are, we are really applying the most paranoid model you can think of. Um, one of the reasons for that is basically our CTO, he has been in the space in the crypto space since very early. He was a victim in the Mangox hack. He was a victim in the Dow hack. Um, and he was working on a project called arcade city and then swamp CD where they raised 40, 76,000 eater in an ICO 2016. And for those who have heard of the parity hack, it’s a famous a heck, um, their project was impacted the most. So they stole 44,000 eater from, uh, the whole ICO, uh, um, bulk of money they had, but they realized it very quickly in the team. And what they did is they replicated the act to all the other projects that were protected by the same smart contracts.

Ruben Merre: 13:06 And they had all those projects, uh, you know, white hat form so that they, so that they basically could secure and safe and safeguards those projects, their money. So they gave it back obviously afterwards. That’s crucial detail. Um, but, um, but ivs, our CTO, that was really one of the reasons why he said I have to go to security. And every time we are building something, we think of every single detail that can go wrong. We are working for a security site. We are working with uh, seven, uh, professors who are basically world renowned for their expertise in cryptography. Um, if you think about all these, uh, cryptographic algorithms that blockchain is based on, a has two 56 shout to shout, we get shocked. The uh, the way that bitcoin actually creates private and public keys. It all stems from either completely from their minds 20 years ago to even today they compete in the Nesta, uh, competition for the next post quantum cryptography standards.

Ruben Merre: 14:09 So we have an amazing, amazing back there of, uh, of these guys and together with them and the technology player and ourselves, we, that’s how we can actually build the best solution. Um, and maybe one interesting angle just to give an example of how paranoid we go. Um, in the creation process, the first thing you do in your device, a lot of things can go wrong. And simple example is an incumbent hardware wallet. They give you a key. They say, here is your are your 24 words, write them down on a piece of paper. That’s it. But who’s to say that they don’t have a whole database of every key? They every January. I don’t believe it’s real possibility. While it always is that it’s super small, but it’s something that we don’t even want to use as a user to worry about. So we basically have taken more or less the same, um, process for generating your private keys.

Ruben Merre: 15:02 But we add additional inputs like your fingerprints, a specific technology such as a photo technology just to make the key better. Um, and we also include one crucial thing that nobody has done before and which is an interaction step between you and the key. And the easiest you can imagine is, um, that you are allowed to change a couple of the characters in the key, let’s say. And by doing that, you know that, okay, even in grief, the guys who made the wallet have no way of knowing what my t can be because they cannot computationally get to it anymore. Um, and obviously we have taken into account the psychology factor. People are predictable and all of those things to make sure that we still have a strong process. Uh, but by doing that, you as user, even in the first step, no Ikea has been generated offline. It’s statistically unique. Nobody else will ever have the same key. There is no process that can predict what kind of key I have. And I’m the only one who’s ever seen it. So I put my bitcoin on that, tried to steal it.

Trent Lapinski: 16:00 I mean, that’s a, that’s quite the solution. And we were talking about this a little bit before we were recording. I mean, ultimately if you didn’t create something like this, someone else was going to have to, because ultimately for Crypto as a market to succeed, we need security solutions to be able to secure, uh, you know, our, our cryptocurrency, there’s not really like, there’s no other path there. There has to be a way to secure your private keys. And ultimately, like I said, removing the internet from the equation, removing computers from the equation, removing all the known attack vectors from the equation, exactly what we’re being to something as simple as a standalone offline device. And then those two steel plates, uh, you know, that’s not ultimately is a, you know, a fairly secure solution for this. Um, and I mean it’s, this is gonna have implications for a lot of these crypto companies so that they can figure out like, Hey, like we’ve now got a secure way of doing this and it’s, it’s gonna enable some innovation for them because right now I know a lot of these companies have to partner with different partners to try and secure it.

Trent Lapinski: 17:12 I mean, people are literally walking their private keys and bank faults and like, Yup, Yup. Taking that kind of older traditional model. Uh, and they don’t have a tool to be able to do that. They’re still just storing their paper wallets. So, um, it’s to be really interesting to see, you know, once your devices on the market, you know, how things start to shift. Is this going to open people up to being able to be more flexible with their exchanges and you know, offering additional layers of security for their users and what that looks like. So Ms ads, you know, adding extra layer of security

Ruben Merre: 17:50 adds a lot of potential to the market and allows people to innovate on top of that as well. Um, for example, I met the guys from skews to a fault. I didn’t know if she knew that, I’ve heard about that company. Um, so what they, what they do is they basically have set up a bunker in the Swiss mountains where they keep private keys for whoever wants to put their keys there. So that’s completely crazy, but it’s, it’s, it’s what crypto needs right now. Um, and we also talked before we were podcasting about, um, centralization versus decentralization and the implicit word, it’s happening between, between them. Um, our first solution now is completely decentralized. So I want meet a continuum of centralization, decentralization, and then looked at every aspect of what we do. And we’re based basically now completely decentralized, meaning that if you buy our solution today as a PTC customer, you don’t need us anymore.

Ruben Merre: 18:51 We don’t, we don’t need to exist after that. And you don’t have to be afraid that the third party will get access to your keys. Now we’re to your plates and so on. Um, and obviously if you know, you know, like Clayton Christensen’s books on the innovator’s solution, the innovator’s dilemma, um, I haven’t read them personally, but yeah, I’ve heard one of the things he talks about is how you can disrupt, disrupt the markets. And we have, we have these existing solutions that, uh, are having already a certain quality. Um, but you have obviously a demand that is, has, has some sort of a statistical continental distribution. And most people at some point, uh, in, in that set at the time is zero. They want, um, the exact capabilities of that solution. Let’s talk about, for instance, smart phones, your smartphone. Nowadays, it can do so many things that you don’t need anymore.

Ruben Merre: 19:46 So the distribution of your demands will actually shifts towards, uh, new layers where you say that is good enough for me. Um, and how this, how disruption typically works is somebody comes with a way cheaper solution, let’s say a first super cheap smartphone, but at some point they’re innovating themselves and they become, they come on the radar of good enough. Um, and people start buying that because they don’t need to buy that expensive thing anymore. And the expensive players, they are actually happy that they don’t have to have that. They don’t have to serve the low margin segments anymore. So they just start to, um, they’re actually happy to meet with, to move up in the market to, to higher ends. Apple’s whole business model, they, they literally have built their business models so that they don’t really serve the lower margin. Yeah. So, so actually apple is kind of an anomaly in that model because normally at some point the, the, the premium player will be out of the market because the player is good enough for everybody.

Ruben Merre: 20:48 You know, a smartphone, like an apple in its weight, it has all these capabilities. Nobody needs them. You can send a rocket to the movies that iPhone two I think so apple hack that model and they’re still capable of grabbing all the demand. But in other industries you really see that it’s a problem almost perfectly. It’s super interesting to see because they’re basically one of the few players that ever was able to just crack that model and don’t be bothered by the fact that there’s cheap smartphones. Um, the brand appeal is amazing. Um, and why, why am I saying that? If you, if you will get that full decentralized model we have now and next to that we have a fully centralized model. The thing is you have people with different demand periods as well. People who want to be completely decentralized, who are super paranoid, they don’t want to have anything to do with even the smallest central is centralized a vulnerability. But the reality is that we are not there and we will probably have to shift a bit towards the centralized version where people say, no, no, I want you to keep my private key or at least the backup in case I lose my plate. Um, so that we actually have to move a bit towards the realized part. And I think a lot of these centralization players today in the markets, if they start from that model, they can actually overcome the centralized partners they have today. But it’s a complex, uh, your session starting in.

Trent Lapinski: 22:10 Yeah. So you’re basically saying start with the decentralized model first and then move backwards towards centralized services on top of the decentralized model. Um, as a way to kind of bridge that gap to help, you know, user adoption in certain use cases for different, uh, solutions. That’s a awesome approach. Cause I told a lot of people in this space like, we’re going to need to start with hybrid solutions. You can’t, it’s really hard to go 100% decentralized from day one and be able to provide the same level of service that people are used to on a centralized system. So you need that kind of a hybrid. But I definitely see the, uh, the benefit of, you know, as from a product standpoint, you really want to build that decentralized product first and then move backwards towards figuring out how can we now create additional layers or services that will then connect in a more centralized fashion so that you can kind of bridge that gap.

Trent Lapinski: 23:11 Because you’re going to probably have customers that are going to be like, complete blockchain purists are gonna be like, I don’t want wanna. I don’t even want to talk to your company again. Like, we’re going to buy your device and you won’t even know our name after this and we’ll buy it with cryptos. You don’t even know who we are. So then you’ll, then you’ll have the guy who’s like, I don’t want to deal with this. Uh, I’m happy for you to have, you know, a copy of the private key on, you know, your secure server system as a backup. And I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to worry about putting my plates and, you know, a Swiss, you know, mountains, the, you know, in a bunker and that kind of thing. So you’re going to have eventually, probably more people in that camp, um, that it’s going to grow your user base. But at this end of the day, they’re still gonna want your device because they want that extra layer of protection that your, they’re not gonna get from the existing exchanges or any of the existing wallets out there.

Ruben Merre: 24:09 No. Well, I think like you have a couple of, you have a lot of centralized players and their strategies should be different. And we started from scratch and we, we are serving a niche that doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t, there is no other player doing this, giving you the full decentralized possibility. If you’re a centralized player today, it makes sense to gradually move it more towards decentralized. But we wanted to start with the end users. Uh, security as the, as the most important goal, taking away every kind of little detail that might jeopardize that. Like even us having the possibility of knowing what your key is. And that’s also what we as users ourselves are looking for. The only place I would ever want to put a significant amount of crypto is on is on the [inaudible] device. That’s why we built it.

Trent Lapinski: 24:57 Very cool. Like I said, you know, this is a, this needed to exist. This is going to bring legitimacy to the market and it’s going to allow a lot of exchanges to have a more secure solution. You know, we’ve seen the hacks, we’ve seen all of the things that have happened. Uh, we’ve seen this battle taking place between decentralized and centralized companies. And the number one thing is centralized companies point to security, which is ironic because they’re also getting hacked on like a daily basis. I mean, apple one was just hacked recently. Um, it was a, I believe it was an AWS employee that got access to their, uh, to their data and stole like a bunch of information. Um, which one was that? I was capital one. Uh, yeah, yeah. Major, major credit card and uh, you know, Financial Company and loan provider vulnerability is not always necessarily even on the technical side if it’s in the human being.

Trent Lapinski: 25:55 Um, it’s actually people that are your biggest vulnerability when it comes to any computer system because at the end of the day, if you can hack the person behind the computer and convince them to do something that isn’t in their best interest, you’re in their system and you don’t even necessarily have to have remote access to their system just as long as you got a human being to do the wrong thing to get you access. That is kind of what just happened with capitol one and that’s going to continue happening. So you’ve removed the, that from the equation because now basically someone would have to physically give someone their, their two plates in their keys and say, here’s my key. And that is pretty much the only vulnerability that’s present is someone would have to physically give those items up. That’s just reality. Your, your, that’s a challenge that, you know, as a tech company, you’re, you’re never fully gonna be able to solve, but you know, at the end of the day, you’ve solved for everything else by having an offline solution. So that, you know, that is the only real vulnerability, uh, is the reality that we live in a three d universe.

Ruben Merre: 27:01 Yeah. And, and I, I guess like, uh, some of the cryptic change hacks are supposedly like inside jobs. Um, we’ve also eliminated the possibility of having even an inside job in, in say, in grief as there as we will never know what your keys. Uh, so, yeah.

Trent Lapinski: 27:19 Awesome. Well, do you have any final thoughts before we wrap up?

Ruben Merre: 27:24 Uh, sure. Yeah. Um, I think a couple of things. First of all, we believe that, um, our, our, our goal is to foster worldwide blockchain adoption and what we focus on a security so that people can invest in it and don’t have to worry about the fact that tomorrow the investment might just be disappeared for us. That is really important. And we also believe that that is something we’re not doing against, uh, incumbent hardware wallets and so on. We think we’re all in this together. It’s a story of challenging each other to become better talking to each other, be it customers, be here, uh, competitors and so on. So it’s a, it’s a joint effort. It’s a, it’s basically all of us together against malicious hackers, against the losing your keys. Um, it’s a sort of a revolution, a blockchain technology and, and we still have to get that community feeding up again and um, and, and realize that, um, and apart from that I would say, so we will be launching a presales campaign as from September. Uh, I think the ninth might be the 16th. So, uh, mid, mid September we will be live with our presales. That’s where you are. We’ll kind of get the steepest discounts if you ever want to buy a solution like this. So definitely keep an eye out on that. You can just go to our website and, um, and ngrave.io very simple. You can subscribe. Now today you get a VIP, uh, um, uh, what’s it called? The VIP status for the rest of your uh, life, uh, crypto life. And then um, yeah, that’s it basically.

Trent Lapinski: 28:53 Awesome. And where else is there anywhere else people can find you? So that’s ngrave.io and

Ruben Merre: 28:58 yeah, so the Facebook handle and the Twitter handle and zone is engrave official and mine is just Ruben and double r e you can find me anywhere and talk to me wherever you want.

Trent Lapinski: 29:13 Awesome. Well thank you for coming on the show.

Ruben Merre: 29:15 Thank you. Trans. A pleasure. As always

Trent Lapinski: 29:23 thanks for watching another uncensored episode of Techpost.io. I’m your host Trent Lapinski and don’t forget to subscribe to us on Youtube and hit that little notification bell next to the subscribe button so that you can get notified when we release new episode. You can also find us on iTunes, Google play and other social networks including Twitter and Facebook at tech post Io. And you can find me personally at Trent Lapinski. Once again, I’m Trent Lapinski and this has been another great episode of Techpost.io. We’ll see you soon.

Trent Lapinski interviews Greg Osuri, the CEO of Overclock Labs and Akash Network. In this episode, we discuss distributed networks, blockchain technology, and what it takes as an entrepreneur to build amazing tools for other people to use.

Host: Trent Lapinski
Guest: Greg Osuri
Music: kaffekrus

Automated Transcript (may contain errors):

Greg Osuri: 00:00:05 The key thing we figured out a site we learned over the past year, but something that has always been behind that and behind our top was the challenge for distributed systems is not technology. It’s the experience aligned with the principles of the Internet, how the Internet began. You don’t need anybody’s permission to go to a website or post the website aligned with those core foundational principles. Internet has been built. We built a complication network or teacher. We believe the combination should be scalable, frictionless, and free of censorship and we believe in the unstoppable revenue we’ll be doing is we are cautious is essentially creating a new operating system for the Internet and how you’re doing that is by tapping into unused 85% capacity. 8.2 million data center compliments some cloud. Akash is essentially a peer to peer network of competition clusters designed for global first applications, planetary scale applications.

Trent Lapinski: 00:01:29 Welcome to Techpost. I’m your host Trent Lapinski in this episode. I Review Greg Story. He’s the CEO and founder of overclock labs and Akash network. And in this episode we discuss his new operating system for running a decentralized cloud network. In this episode, we discuss entrepreneurship, what it takes to create and launch a new product and talk about crypto currency, the crypto market at large, and what it takes to create and launch company in this new space in this emerging market of the decentralized Internet. This is an amazing episode, so please stay tuned.

Trent Lapinski: 00:02:11 Welcome to the podcast. I’m here with Greg is Siri, tell us a bit about who you are and what you’re working on.

Greg Osuri: 00:02:17 Thanks Trent. Great to be here. I am the CEO of overclocks labs at [inaudible] overclocks labs. We know we had to create of our cash and we absolutely believe that software is eating the roads and the developer is at the epicenter of distribution and Ben builds. Okay. And everything we do at over clock is centered around making this a builder successful. Every feature we think about every design choice we make, every roadmap B plan is centered around the prosperity of the developer. And we built Aakash network as a mere manifestation of these core beliefs. We, another core belief we have is the ability to innovate on the Internet should be accessible to all. We believe the foundation should be scalable, frictionless, and free of censorship. And we believe in the unstoppable web. And what we are doing is with Aakash is, is essentially creating a new operating system for the Internet.

Greg Osuri: 00:03:40 And how you’re doing that is by tapping into unused 85% capacity in 8.2 million data center. The compliments someone’s cloud and Akash is essentially a peer to peer network of competition. Clusters, designs for global first applications, planetary scale applications, and with the massive distribution that we get with the permission model that we adopted for providers to sell services and for users to consume these competitions services without needing anybody’s permission, without any censorship direct, without a middleman aligned with the principles of the Internet, how Internet began. You don’t need anybody’s permission to go to a website or host a website aligned with those core foundational principles. Internet has been built. We built a complication network for the future.

Trent Lapinski: 00:04:42 Awesome. Yeah. So you and I have talked previously, I actually interviewed you on my previous podcast and I definitely recommend going and checking out that episode if you haven’t seen it yet. But I’d love to kind of focus this episode on kind of an update of where you’re at, you know, what you guys have experienced over the last year since we last talked. And kind of, you know, feel out where the space is. Cause it’s like 2019 where we’re at right now compared to where we were when we first, when I first interviewed you. I mean it may as well be a lifetime ago, but it also may as well be yesterday. So yes, you know, it’s time seems to be moving at different speeds these days. Can you tell us a bit about the progress you’ve been making and some of the things you’ve experienced over the last year?

Greg Osuri: 00:05:30 Yes. Or the last year we built and shipped Aakash network to the hands of our users. What I’m really excited about is the kind of adoption we got. And, and I think the, the secret adoption is not because what we do is because why we do it, right? Because we, by placing the developer in the, in the center of everything we do, our tronics match really progressed to optimize for love from the developers. When you use Aakash command line, what you’ll immediately notice is that this command land was designed for you. It speaks to you, right? And a so we have incredible applications, both blockchain and non blockchain applications. We, you know, we’re we entered into a strategic partnership with a coil ripples subsidiary to bring forth interoperability to the Internet. And also we’re a running, we will be soon running the entire payment network that is supposedly the future of frictionless payments are permissionless payments we made headways and several other blockchain you know, based products because they align with us when it comes to building products for developers.

Greg Osuri: 00:07:05 Right. And the ones that I’m most proud of are our companies that haven’t really thought about blockchain. But after looking at Akash, they are thriving. One of the companies is cactus applications. A cactus is a peer to peer. You use extremely service that essentially strings music directly from someone’s computer to your poem. And so if you’re a music fan, like, like me I have, you know, over time I collected about 40,000 tracks and some of these tracks are were when I was 18 or 17. Right? So all this great music collection that I have, I want to ask, is that music directly from a computer without paying somebody in the middle? Right. So I use, don’t love Cactus, but the challenge cactus had was the reliability in, in, in traffic because coming directly from a computer is not necessarily reliable because that depends on a home network.

Greg Osuri: 00:08:11 So they have to use a relay based architecture at the edge. And cloud wasn’t quite cutting it for them in terms of performance because cloud is optimized for hyperscale less high density data centers, but Aakash doesn’t have that limitation. Aakash will optimize the global scale for thousands of modes. So so by using our cash, they could get the cost down from remember the numbers correctly. I think it’s four x or five x than what they would otherwise pay on the cloud with about four 40 times more distribution than the cloud and decimal. The most exciting part, the most exciting part is this what they have in the future, right. So you know peer to peer abusing service relies on a computer to stream. And in this age of mobile where our computers are moving from desktops to laptops your computer is not on all the time.

Greg Osuri: 00:09:17 So that’s the limitation. So they want to ship to a hardware model where you have a dedicated hardware device in your house as a music center that hosts all your music. And if you’re a photographer or an artist like me I have tons and tons of high large size files and I can be stored on the cloud because it gets really expensive. So for someone like me, I need a large liable hardness that a host my, my, my creative files. So cactus wants to build that, but as you know, hardware expensive and and, and, and, and they found a solution without cash and a solution happens to be so that this device sits in your house and becomes part of the Akash Node Network by rich the rewards you know, that this particular node gains by hosting other workloads through our cosh, we’ll subsidize the cost for the hardware.

Greg Osuri: 00:10:31 So they cleverly a dead beautiful economic model where they can bring the cost of the hardware device to almost free and, and, you know, free in the sense the customer’s paying electricity and, and say it’s that type of redistribution of incentives. And it’s only possible because of a distributed in decent last cloud like Akash. This is the true promise of blockchains, right? Block chain. When we talk about web three, when we talk about the future infrastructure of Internet, the Internet has to work for everybody in this case, a music streaming app, which has nothing to do with blockchain. No. I mean, whatsoever is a benefactor by a peer to peer economy. I like to see those kinds of applications because that speaks volumes to the mission that we all of us share in the decent class community.

Trent Lapinski: 00:11:32 Yeah. And I mean that is a perfect use case and I think for the listener that really demonstrates the power of where decentralization can lead. I mean, as you said, man, like it, you know, they’re saving money on their cloud hosting costs. They’ve got a more reliable network and now they’re able to innovate and do things that they couldn’t have done before. And you know, this is on the precipice of like a centralized Internet that right now is like facing so many challenges. You know, we’re facing censorship, we’re facing conglomeration of these major tech companies, we’re facing monopolies, we’re facing all this kind of infighting that’s happening geopolitically. Right now. The ultimate solution is we have to decentralized, we have to stop relying on these major centralized networks. And you know, you’re essentially creating the recipe and the solution that people need to, you know, in the infrastructure they’re going to need to be able to build these solutions on.

Greg Osuri: 00:12:35 Absolutely. And I think a key thing, we’ve figured out, a key insight we learned over the past year, but something that has always been behind behind our, you know, I’ve taught was the challenge for distributed systems is not technology. It’s the experience, right? And this is very visible, especially when it comes to blockchain based decentralized technologies. The user almost is not at the center of what we do. So by taking a different approach, by taking an approach that involves user solve the adoption problem. And I think that’s how we are going to win. We’re not going to run by simply overstating the mission, but we are going to win by aligning our actions to our mission. And, and we are, we absolutely should never forget that builders are at the center of our society. I mean, this is a tradition that goes back to our primate ancestors. When a builder change the course of humanity by when the realize you can put a stick and a stone together that makes the prey, the Predator, the hunted became the hunter because they figured out by building a tool we can overcome God. Give a limitations and change the nature that will, the builder was at the center of humanity to, to thrive. And by putting that bill there, but continuing that sacred tradition is how we’re going to win.

Trent Lapinski: 00:14:30 And you’ve been going through a little bit of a, you know, some personal development as well. I mean, since the last time I interviewed you, you’re much more grounded. You seem to kind of have a glow to you what’s been going on in your own life that’s kind of helped you through this experience and you know, launching a startup and all the stress of that and then being able to get through that.

Greg Osuri: 00:14:52 Yes, entrepreneurship is extremely hard and unless you’re passionate about what you do, it is going to, you’re not going to succeed. And, but the challenge as entrepreneurs fall under is by being tunnel focused and we miss out everything else. And I think every entrepreneur, every successful entrepreneur you speak to, including Bill Gates, they all say the same thing. And I realized if you find a hobby that you enjoy as much as you enjoy your work, it significantly improves your quality of life. And for me that was art. As a cartoonist I love people, I love listening to people. And I started, you know, I used to take a lot of pictures just to understand the character of people so I can draw them and naturally fell into, I found a love for photography. And what photography made me is, is to really taught me how to listen with my eyes, right?

Greg Osuri: 00:16:05 It opened up this new sensory input to listen. And as an entrepreneur, being able to listen is the number one quality, I believe. And photography or art makes you a better listener. And my goal with photography is to bring humans at their element and capture them. Because to me that I meet people, I don’t necessarily care what they’re bad at. I want to know what you’re good at so I can align myself with those things that are you good at? And I think most of us want to see the best in people. And when you’re good at something, when you’re passionate about something your, the way your eyes lit up, the way you talk about it, your new element. And I wanted to capture that and wanted to capture that because that will be the best photo you’ll ever get. And as you as you learn.

Greg Osuri: 00:17:04 So I, I don’t take pictures of random headshots, no wedding photos or no events, no headshots, none of that stuff. I only photograph what inspires me, what drives me right. Sometimes as nature, sometimes as people and I’m in. And my goal is to become a better storyteller. And you do that by listening. And I think it naturally kind of aligned with my work because now I, it opened up so many doors that were not previously open to me because a few things to think. I think number one people understood my values and my mission with, with art and people want to be part of this journey, right? So I started taking pictures of incredible people that I surround myself everyday, inspiring people that I meet everyday. And those pictures started speaking volumes about themselves. They saw things that they never saw something about themselves.

Greg Osuri: 00:18:20 And the most important thing in business is listening to customers now. So now when I meet developers and I just started a new project called faces of Silicon Valley because I felt we as a society are not doing enough to celebrate the builder, the Unsung hero or heroes behind startup companies, elect founders a and the public facing individuals get all the glory, but the unsung heroes that people that actually do the work don’t get, you know, glory. I wanted to tell their stories and I wanted to bring the human behind the inventor and barked on a, an art series. It’s a humongous project. We are interviewing about 600 developers. And since my process involves knowing somebody before capturing them, so I have to spend time with each one of them in this. I listened and I, and I understand where the come from, understand what drives them, understand the challenges and what do you need to build a good product. That understanding and I think not to commercialize my, my values, but I think you naturally find alignment in everything you do. If you have these core set of values, and I think photography or economics are cartooning are building infrastructure projects are always centered around that person that I’m building for. Yeah.

Trent Lapinski: 00:20:01 And I mean art is ultimately, it comes down to art and artistic direction and there is an artistic element to coding. I mean, you know, many people compare it in spend compared to poetry, you know, a good programmer and a good coder is essentially a poet. You know, they’re manipulating language and they’re manipulating words to create outcomes. You know, it’s often behind a computer and the average user doesn’t actually see what’s executing in the background. But, you know, a good programmer has spent the time and effort to create a structure and how they write their code to achieve a certain result. And it’s a form of art. So it really doesn’t surprise me that, you know, you getting into other forms, art has helped

Greg Osuri: 00:20:48 Kind of open your awareness to bringing those same processes to your products. To your services and to the things that you’re doing on the technical side as well. Yeah. So, you know, if you define art as a medium of self expression, and a code is a medium of set as compression, right? And I think it was Einstein who said, all great scientists are artists as well. And there was study done on this and I think there was a survey about for Nobel laureates. And I think over 40% of them had a creative outlet besides their primary primary you know, upon a primary job. And another interesting thing, I think photography contributed to this realization for me, for us you know, we, I’ve been programming for 25 years, right? And I don’t remember the time. I didn’t program. And and in when we building products, especially the notion that you have to make everything simple is fundamentally wrong.

Greg Osuri: 00:22:08 Right? And it realize this essentially because I shoot on a film camera, I shoot on a camera that was built in 1965. There are no electronics in this camera. Everything is analog, everything is mechanical, but it produces incredible pictures. Every Time magazine cover is shot on this camera till date and, but it’s extremely hard. It, it, it goes against everything about, you know, building products. The products has to be simple and whatnot, right? So in my programming career, I use tools that are extremely hard to use. I use them everyday. Them is one of those tools. If you, you know, use it for the first time, try getting it out, try getting cracked, quitting. If you do successfully, you know you’re, you’re not human. So, so I use incredibly hard products because love and there are products that are super simple to use.

Greg Osuri: 00:23:12 I don’t. Right? And it started, I started questioning what is the metric, what is the framework we need to adopt to build products? Is Simplicity obviously not turns out the answer is cognitive coefficients define, and this is a term I coined, a cognitive coefficiency is essentially the ratio between value delivered to c to a cognitive tax. So how that, what that means is if you programmer here, believe it or not, last time you picked up a tool, you heard about a tool you know, you your friend told you about it or you find it from Internet, you go download the tool and you run it, right? You try to be intuitive, right? Because the tool is supposed to do something and you type Eh, the, the command and because you think that’s how the tool should be used. Two things happen.

Greg Osuri: 00:24:16 One of two things could happen at that moment. One thing is the tool could succeed. Fantastic value has been delivered, captured, beautiful. You’re going to come back and use the tool again. But more often than not, it fails. Especially infrastructure tools. It fails not because it’s broken product. Most often the not, it fails because the user did not know. They have to input something that requires input, right? It is a Delta in knowledge that the tool fails. Right now when the tool fails, the user makes a very important decision consciously or not. And the district decision is, is the value delivered greater than, than the cognitive tax? Should I go back and read the man, which should I go to stack overflow and pay this cognitive tax to to learn is a value greater than the tax, right? You’re describing experiences in entrepreneur right now is it’s always, do I want to cross this delta?

Greg Osuri: 00:25:24 It’s always the question for writing. You know, that comes up that I’m, that’s new, that I don’t know yet. Right? So if the ratio is one, I do it as long as the ratio is one, I do it because the tax increases include at one point you’re going to come to a point that it is not worth it and you’d drop, right? So one thing that thought us is, well, if you delivering value is extremely hard because value is nonlinear, you can’t quantify it, right? Everybody sees value differently. And so delivering value is that it’s not linear. How do you, how do you, how do you measure? So instead of measuring value, how about reduced cognitive tasks? Right? So you’re not, for example, I’m going to do something else. Pale forgiveness. So what that means is in order to deploy a workload on Aakash, you gotta type Aakash deploy you know, and the manifest filed for one of the key and whatnot.

Greg Osuri: 00:26:28 In case you forgot to provide the manifest file or report card, the key Aakash will ask you, hey, we detected a key in your local cash. Would you like to use it? Hey, we just detected a manifest file in your local folder. Would you like to use it? Right? so Alqosh that happens only in interact remote archives. Crum island also supports programmable modes such as gs on and Shell outlets. And js on output obviously is designed to make the command line extensive and have much stricter syntax and grammatical rules similar to with w with Shell command line. But if you are an interactive mode, which is by default designed for humans, you’re going to find Aakash command line extremely easy to use and delightful because and the, in the aesthetics we put in, we understood that command lines are scary. You look at because they over inform a user, they miss out important things and, and, and gives you things in a very linear fashion, right.

Greg Osuri: 00:27:33 And if you look at my history of all the work on a good, how my open source work I’ve consistently have libraries that gain massive adoption to think my first library has 400 stars and 700. And, and in my cofounder Adams, we have height the adopted tooling because my tools improve the command aesthetic of the command line and it’s been adopted by Coobernetti’s. And my favorite is Misha Somato, who’s a founder of Hashi Corp who created a terraform. And if I have to you know, think of another person that focuses on developer experience thing, Hashimoto would be, and you know, him using my tools. It’s just a, a testament to having the builder in the middle of everything we do. All these values just align and they just magically merge into everything we do, right? So fail forgiveness is a novel concept.

Greg Osuri: 00:28:39 We introduced a with Akash command line. And another thing we’re extremely thoughtful is about growth of gratification. It’s another term acquaint. Growth gratification is the consistent gratification you gain from growing in a certain fields, right? To give you the best analogy would be photography. There’s a million ways to take a picture there. Their million risks. Use a camera. It’s an deterministic, right? And if you too deterministic about your product, you will miss out on the under deterministic part and you end up designing products that are very limiting, right? So every time you look at platforms, why we love a certain platform is because yes, they may perform the primary function for you. Like take a film camera and get the technicals right, get the exposure right and take a picture, get a developed and it can get from

Greg Osuri: 00:29:52 Like bad to good by following certain technicals and the gratification you get from being bad to good as immense. And now the next challenge is getting good to great. You’re right. The platforms should be designed around quote gratification. That means making decisions when it comes to design as to how many primitives we have in the court system and how many workflows we have, right? Primitives and workflows are these things that are kind of related because workflows are built on perimeters, right? And really thinking in those terms you know, was derived from my passion for art and, and being observant and being a good listener. And I think entrepreneurs when they found, when they find that that passion, I think it just significantly improves everything around you. And yeah, I think specialization also met some people say that you, you, in order to be successful, you gotta be doing the one thing. One thing only is a myth because greatest luminaries like Leonardo Da Vinci or Einstein always had a creative outlets and all that. They were good at two things, you know, maybe sometimes more. And you start questioning all the popular biases, you know, and I think when people ask me, I think it was a

Greg Osuri: 00:31:34 Thiel he always asked the question like, what is the one belief that is not popular? And one of those beliefs from me is specialization, isn’t it? Yeah.

Trent Lapinski: 00:31:48 I mean, when it comes to specialization, I’ve always almost seen it as a downfall in some regards. I mean, I see so many people who over specialize in one thing that they just completely miss out on everything else. And I think, I just saw a quote the other day, I think it was actually a Steve jobs quote. He was talking about people in Silicon Valley and you know, he was saying the problem with a lot of these people that over specializes the number of dots and experiences that they have to be able to connect is there’s just not enough dots there to make a connection. Because without those other experiences, without trying things that you’re not specialized in and things that you’re not good at, and without getting that extra experience, you don’t have the dots to connect, to be able to find those extra things that are going to help make a better product. Because when listening to you, what I hear is, you know, ultimately your intention for doing this is to create a product that’s usable by these developers so that they can achieve whatever their intention is.

Greg Osuri: 00:32:50 And it’s

Trent Lapinski: 00:32:52 So difficult to do that because your, you don’t know what they’re going to create with your tool. You know, you’re just trying to create the best tool for them to create with which is such a challenge because the possibilities are endless and there are use cases that you can’t even comprehend and that you haven’t even thought of yet. So to build a tool for that person is you know, an incredibly difficult

Greg Osuri: 00:33:18 Task. Yes, it’s daunting and difficult, but if you listen, okay, gets easier, right? So the yes intention, I mean our caution overclocks and mission is to build tools to make the builder or successful developer more successful. But photography and art using art and photography contributes that to the intention without intending [inaudible] you know, so, you know, just the sheer value or the sheer power gives you to listen and express what you listen is what we is, how we build products. And I think apple is a great example. Because they understood that, right? So apple is one of those companies

Trent Lapinski: 00:34:17 I liked how you past tense that

Greg Osuri: 00:34:21 Yes. Sadly, I am with badly the $1,000 monitor. Stan just didn’t sing with me. I mean, it just reminded me that the lost their way so much and it was never the case from the beginning. You know, apple was always, I bought apple products from me. Right? they, I mean the messaging has always been, you know, when you look at why people make decisions, it’s not rational. That derives decisions. It is the inner brain that right. People don’t buy because of what you’re selling. People buy because why you’re selling. Right? And I’m like, if apple would, you know, carry themselves by saying that we make beautiful computers, we make them easy to use, we make them fast. Would you like to buy one? I don’t think apple would succeed, but apple starts off by saying that we believe [inaudible] changing the status quo.

Trent Lapinski: 00:35:38 Right? Do you believe you know, everything we do needs to push the humanity forward and we just happened to make a computer. Would you like to buy one? Right? So Martin Luther King didn’t go and say, I have a plan. He said, I have a dream. Right? I think having those core beliefs are very, very important to accompany. Because you know, when things are great things that great and raise all the money, you can, you know, do all the great things. But unless you have a team that believes in what you do you’re bound for greatness. And I learned this three years into entrepreneurship overclock labs make several mistakes. And finally realizing that what drives people is that shared on dead to their word. Okay. A devotion to common set of beliefs. And that’s what we wake up every day. And then you realize, okay, a good thing you do is that, is that core belief.

Trent Lapinski: 00:36:54 It has not, the number of hours you put in it is every hour that you put it is more valuable. Right. yeah, that’s been a significant contribution. A contributor to my personal growth goal the last one year and a, just going back to the apple thing, just one last second there. But you know, it’s interesting because they, you know, Johnny, I just left Apple, so he was the chief, you know, design. I don’t even know what title he was going for at the end there. But you know, he was their chief designer and he, he did lose that passion. And you can kind of see that in what Apple’s products have been over the last few years and now, you know, it’s ultimately ended with him leaving the company. I’m hopeful that there will be a new generation of designers that can potentially, you know, take his place and get apple back on the right track.

Trent Lapinski: 00:37:48 But you know, it speaks to what you were just talking about. If, you know, finding that passion and making sure that you keep that passion and having that balance that we’ve been talking about throughout this entire episode. Because I think ultimately that’s what it comes down to is having that creative balance to kind of create a, you know, a more round builder or more around a individual who’s creating a round product that has a number of use cases that, you know, can do these things because we, we’ve had a lack of vision in silicon valley over the last probably five, six, seven years, maybe a little longer. And I really love that, you know, we’ve been talking about all of this stuff, but you’re at the end of the day, you know, it’s, you’re building something that you’re passionate about and it’s leading to this decentralized future and it’s creating a decentralized possibility that just didn’t exist five, six, seven years ago. And now, you know, you’ve, you’ve executed it like the codes out there. You’ve got people building on it. You know, you’re, you’re getting that positive feedback. You’re, you’re seeing these, these things become real. Can you talk about like what it’s like to actually see this thing come alive and see developers starting to use your code and create with it? Oh, you know,

Greg Osuri: 00:39:16 I get chills when I see people use it. Especially people tried for the first time and they tear out because they suddenly found something that speaks to them, suddenly found something that finally gets them right. And for me to see that his chest you know, something I want to do every day. No, there’s nothing that the feeling cannot be replaced by the thing I get. I tear up when I see that and it just reminds me, we just getting soldered, right? If we have users that absolutely love the product and that is what is going to, you know, accelerate our mission, that is what is going to get us to the next step. Right. And and people are coming up to me wanting to write two features for Aakash people that have worked on work with us because they’re inspired and they want to contribute to the success of our costs as a shared mission.

Greg Osuri: 00:40:30 Right? And the challenge of course is as the company grows, how do we maintain that core customer focus, that core focus in the builder? And that’s the culture I want to build at old talk Akash and and and that is a, that is going to be extremely difficult because hiring the right type of people, building the team and expanding fortunately we’re also you know, the next big steps for us obviously is to provide the liquidity, self sustaining ecosystem. So Alqosh as you know, is a peer to peer self-sustaining ecosystem. And the most important thing for self sustainability is capitalization. Liquidity, right? And and one of the reasons for the Akash a tokenized computing asset is too okay, is to provide the sustainability because the blockchain function, some consensus of different individuals and the incentives have to be aligned.

Greg Osuri: 00:41:44 You know, in a manner to support their initiatives because they had to pay bills as well. So so we are very, very excited to introduce our, our economics white paper is completely redesigned from ground. Deb. One of the things that dresses is how staking results directly in providing the necessary liquidity and providing the necessity of value for this asset. And because again, for liquidity, the most important thing is investors and when you talk to investors it’s, you know, you have to be aligned with their goals as well when it comes to turn up investment and whatnot. So we designed the economics in a manner that with higher demand, higher usage for the system, the value of the token in significant increases, which in turn increases the value of the ecosystem, which further feeds into more adoption. So it’s a cycle of adoption and value of value creation.

Greg Osuri: 00:42:50 Right now as a business, we need to capture something without okay. And because Aakash is completely independent, I’m really excited about stuff we’re doing at overclock labs to capture value. Obviously cannot talk about it publicly. But but a business model aligns so well with our network, right? And one of the challenges when you build network based businesses is priorities, right? So as an economist I think everybody con every economist’s dream would be to create a marketplace that has perfect competition. So the term perfect competition means no one in the marketplace has an upper hand than the other. So commodities and things of that nature become are considered for, for competition. And perfect competition is no individual player has a significant than tangible [inaudible] player. And everybody exchanges goods and services in a perfect manner. Whereas companies optimize against the companies like monopolies, right? Companies want to be the only provider because that’s how they make more money, right? So when you have a company like overclock labs, and when you have a network like Aakash network, they have different priorities. And I think the magic realize and how do you reach that cat, right? How do we create a business model that is

Greg Osuri: 00:44:36 You know, the same thing that they haven’t experienced so far in terms of censorship, in terms of no, agreed in terms of all the bad things that they’ve experienced today in capitalistic world. How could we build a company that is aligned with the goals of society as well as aligned as you know, as well as aligned with the goals of shareholders. Right. So,

Trent Lapinski: 00:45:01 Well, when you figure it out, let me know because this is quite the challenge that I think a lot of blockchain companies and people that are experimenting with cryptocurrencies and different economic models is how do you create that balance between, you know, doing the right thing and still achieving economic success and what is economic success defined as? Is it stockpiling money and becoming a monopoly like Google or is it doing the greatest amount of good for the most amount of people and making enough money to sustain itself?

Greg Osuri: 00:45:35 I like, I like the apple model. I love Google, but I think I liked, yeah, marvel selling betters

Trent Lapinski: 00:45:41 As a product to the consumer, to the person and versus, you know, trying to achieve total complete like market dominance and just selling a very specific tool to a very specific person. Is that what you’re referring to or

Greg Osuri: 00:45:59 No, I think market dominance has nothing to do a values in the company, right? Platforms. It’s a winner take all market

Greg Osuri: 00:46:10 And you know, there is no place for the second person doesn’t work that way. When you enter a market you want to absolutely dominate and you want to do it because you want the values not to be, you want your values to align with industry to take precedence over people with creep. We are on a mission because we want to make the world a better place. And money is something that just comes and, you know, money is abstraction about you and the more value we capture that distraction is going to happen. You can have high margins, there’s nothing wrong with making money, but you have to be aligned with your core values. Right? So I think we cracked the code when it comes to tokenize business models. And this is something I’ve been thinking about for quite long time. If you look at open source business models, there are essentially three business models, right?

Greg Osuri: 00:47:13 The first business model, the most common one is what we call support model. Which red hat would be the biggest company that builds an entire business by supporting something that’s extremely complicated, that’s Linux, right Lennox or a fully open source and is still fully open source. And the fact that for enterprise to adopt you need someone to pick up the phone and red hat obviously saw a niche in the market and the capitalized on it. Great. Second type of business model, which is more common these days is open coal business model. So the core of the software is open source, but you build additional features on top of this core that addressed side the usability, either, you know, value creations, whatnot. And a, a best example would be get hub, right? [inaudible] Is open source and free creative at list store walls, but get hub added collaborative features.

Greg Osuri: 00:48:17 The push and pull and whatnot. I mean, before it could have, there was an a forking those, none of that cooler pictures and social element to it. Now the social programming element to it, if you look at a spark databricks mix spark, right spark is a beautiful a real time analytics engine, most almost all AI and machine learning folks rely on and data bricks obviously built and beautiful UI and other things. Another friend of mine is doing fantastic job at Kang. Kang is API gateway free and open source and be supporting them at Akash, but they have an enterprise version. So that is called an open core model. Extremely successful. These companies are creating billions of dollars of market capitalization as something to really look at if you are an investor and third type of business model, which is, I think we’re all trying to figure out is tokenized business model, how can we create a high growing company in an open source environment where your, not only your source code is open, but your data is open as well as open data. Right? Okay. And while taking advantage of this token as acid, right. So you know, I would love to talk about a business strategy, but unfortunately I can’t and but I think it’ll be evident very, very, very soon as to what that looks like at the end, what that business model looks like. I’m super excited actually.

Trent Lapinski: 00:49:56 I’m definitely curious to see when you, you bring this to market because you know, it’s the challenge of the entire Crypto blockchain space is, you know, who’s going to crack that model and the person or the company that does, you know, is going to be wildly successful. I mean, you could make some arguments, you know, uranium has probably been the most successful so far. You’ve got ripple and a couple others, but we still haven’t seen that. I Dunno, market adoption, especially on the user side where it’s like, okay, like there’s actually people on this platform using this product that’s actually creating this tokenized economy that’s working and all the parties involved are benefiting from it right now. There’s, you know, there’s still so much speculation in the market and there’s many challenges to overcome that I, at least, I haven’t seen it cracked quite yet, but I feel like we’re close,

Greg Osuri: 00:50:55 Right? The biggest challenge when you’re trying to business build a business model on a marketplace is how do you align a features and what features belong where? Right? And I think the answer to the question a really comes down to your audience and your user, right? I was talking about you know, to give you the best example, let’s put it this way. Camera’s right. Again, low cameras. You can make a camera and you can build a beautiful camera. And camera is a platform because you can do so many things. You can test valences splashes, do different films, and do all kinds of things to platform. You can build your camera that way you want, you can put different types of lenses, or you can put different types of films. Like Fujifilm is a, is the company that makes film, but they also make cameras, right? The other companies that make film as well. It’s ultimately the user’s choice as what kind of film I want to choose to get the results I want to get right is nothing. I mean Fujifilm is of course being the camera, but it’s also boom itself. And to build a platform and build the things that make a platform, they build lenses. Same thing with Kodak, right? They’re just examples how you can build industries at and capture value that aligned to the industry.

Trent Lapinski: 00:52:21 Kodak did launch a cryptocurrency of course.

Greg Osuri: 00:52:25 You know, it’s sad. It’s really sad to see Kodak. They don’t have the same owners that they had. Polaroid is one of my favorite things and really sad stories, but it’s beautiful. Films I love from Polaroid are not available anymore. And you know, I think analog photography’s coming back now into fashion. In this day and age we have so much noise doing digital photography. And what I love about analog photography is it by removing electronics, it, it just makes me more present. Right? I’m not looking at a screen, I’m looking at things, I’m just observing and everything I shoot is intentional. Right? Anyway. So anyway, just not too far off on photography, but I think a lot of lessons we need to learn from other fields. Especially art. And and I was just talking to Gary. And there are a lot of incredible entrepreneurs you know that do amazing photography.

Greg Osuri: 00:53:33 Get a Tan you know, from initiatives capital. He recently bought a hustle bodies. He’s just discovering this power of storytelling. It great. A good friend of mine is, is what, as an early investor and a big inspiration for me is Chris Michael, founder of a military dotcom and nauseous ventures all giggle home. But John has a lot of incredible pounders that, that found this passion. There’s a small community in silicon valley and a lot of them should go, which is amazing. And yeah, yeah, pick whatever your passion is, right? Like, and just, just run with it and try to find ways that you can align your work and the pat and the hobby. You gotta be passionate about both of course, but when you’re passionate with two things, when they merged together, a just, just such a new thing, it’s very hard to explain. You just got to feel it.

Trent Lapinski: 00:54:26 Awesome. Well, I’ve got to ask know what are some of your final thoughts before we wrap up here?

Greg Osuri: 00:54:33 Woo. Boy, final thoughts. Huh?

Trent Lapinski: 00:54:36 We’ve been going for quite awhile already.

Greg Osuri: 00:54:39 Jamming.

Trent Lapinski: 00:54:41 You covered a lot of good ground here.

Greg Osuri: 00:54:44 Final thoughts? I think a big challenge that you’re facing in crypto industry is gross disregard for ethics.

Greg Osuri: 00:55:02 It’s really sad to see how much people don’t care about what some good and bad. I’m not saying this as a sane, but I think there’s incredible evidence and I’m, I’m, I’m a victim of terrorism. Don’t, I’m not a victim, but more you’ve experienced upset, upset, right? People copying your stuff and, and and I think, you know, just a common pattern I’ve noticed is people raising massive amounts of money from unsophisticated investors by presenting

Greg Osuri: 00:55:48 Incorrect, or misinformed information. A by ops vacating drops, suffocation. That means putting all the fancy words and putting all the fancy diagrams you know, it’s sort of like, you know, following the hype, the trend and capitalization capitalizing themselves for that by essentially what otherwise other ones, I mean what generally people would say lies and then you know, shifting their strategy is okay. And I think it, you know, why that’s not okay because it sets the precedence, you know, excessive precedence to our generation out of our future generation that this is how people did it and people think that’s okay. Hm. I don’t, I’m the longterm, I don’t think it’s going to hinder people that took the higher ground. But in the short term is definitely a distraction and a nuisance. Right. and it’s very important for people to,

Greg Osuri: 00:57:02 Have the core beliefs that are rooted in such depth and that connection of your beliefs to, to how strong you connected with this called integrity. A final thoughts would be to not sacrifice for your integrity or short term greed, integrity. I’ve lived in Silicon Valley for over 11 years, and this is a magical place because people don’t build relationships on transactions. People build relationships. You know, and integrity is, is cornerstone. You could succeed, you could fail in your current venture, but if you’re not at the college, not integral to your core beliefs, you’ll never be able to succeed. And it’s a very forgiving place. Look about into failures but not very forgiving place when it comes to integrity. I think people should remember that. And I’m still great friends with everyone. I’m investors from the beginning because, you know having that honest conversations, having their opinions, never, you know, failure or success, trying to communicate anybody important. And my, yeah, that’s really my final test bank.

Trent Lapinski: 00:58:30 Well, and I can tell you, at least from my experience, you know, ultimately, you know, when people do copy, you you know, it’s a form of flattery in one way or another. And ultimately, if they can’t execute on it, it’s not gonna matter. Because without that integrity, without that passion, without all of the things that we were just talking about, they’re not going to achieve whatever they’re trying to achieve. They’re just trying to achieve short term goals. At least that’s what I’ve experienced. And I’ve seen those kinds of people in those kinds of projects fail time and time again. And I’ve seen the people that pursue the right path and the harder path and that stick to their integrity. I see those people succeeding more often than not. So

Greg Osuri: 00:59:17 Yeah, I completely agree. I’m, I’m not questioning the long term trajectory. But what I’m concerned really is about these Shakti term windfalls where you confuse the market and you ruin it for the rest of us. Right? So it’s, it’s, it’s one of those things that people will ultimately realize and if you have to put timing as everything for a market, yeah, it does what it is. And I think of course it’s more than anything else. It is you know, factory, right? It’s extremely flattery. You can come up,

Trent Lapinski: 00:59:54 You guys keep ladder raising. It’s like, oh, I’m flattered. But like it’s also kind of creepy.

Greg Osuri: 01:00:00 It is creepy. I mean you can copy our code, you can copy our research, but it cannot copy us very right. So that’s fair. It is always going to be with us and with the people that we surround with. So

Trent Lapinski: 01:00:12 Well it’s been awesome, Greg, to have you back on the show. And I’m glad that you know, you’ve been able to get this and make this a reality. Cause the last time we talked, I think you were just about to go into your testnet or main net. And you know, it’s so awesome to, you know, follow up a year later and see the progress that you’ve made both on a personal level but also, you know, with your projects and your companies as well.

Greg Osuri: 01:00:40 It’s an absolute pleasure catching up with you again and I’m looking forward to seeing the podcast live. Well, thanks for coming on. It’s been awesome. Thank you so much Trent.

Trent Lapinski: 01:00:56 Thanks for watching. Another uncensored episode of tech posts. Dot Io. I’m your host Trent Lipinski, and don’t forget to subscribe to us on Youtube and hit that little notification bell next to the subscribe button so that you can get notified when we release new episodes. You can also find us on iTunes, Google play, and other social networks, including Twitter and Facebook at tech, post io, and you can find me personally at Trent Lapinski. Once again, I’m Trent Lapinski and this has been another great episode of tech.io. We’ll see you soon.

Trent Lapinski interviews Ashley Baker, a songwriter and artist, who was diagnosed with Lyme disease just over a year ago. In this episode we discuss her diagnosis, her advocacy work trying to raise awareness, and the controversy that surrounds Lyme disease.

For more info on Lyme disease, please read my article Hacking Chronic Lyme Disease and Co-Infections.

Host: Trent Lapinski
Guest: Ashley Baker (Facebook / Instagram / In the News)
Music: kaffekrus

Automated Transcript (may contain errors):

Ashley: 00:05 It’s really sick that, like people are this sick and even has to be a discussion whether or not our government webinars takes. I think that that’s, that disturbs me kind of the most of all of this is like creepy side. I’m like, that’s shadow government. What if question that we’re asking the Pentagon now to answer, why is there not more initiative being taken to educate and figure it out instead of it just being, everybody kept telling me it’s a controversial disease. I’m like, what’s controversial about me being sick? That America is a whole like, you know, the dog get me wrong. I love my country. But there are a lot of things that happen specifically 1952, 1975 that they didn’t tell people about and people are suffering today from their thinking. They have these other ailments and you’ve been getting put on Cymbalta and opioids and other medicines when they really have underlying sections and the Diet that air the water, everything around us is kind of designed to keep us sick. And that’s the sad reality of it. And you have Lyme disease. It’s not just Lyme disease, not just some infection that causes one thing. It is a complex of co-infections and all side effects from hurting, which is what happens. We kill off the line bacteria during the treatment. So I have multiple coinfections and elements that regardless of what caused it, it’s still there.

Trent Lapinski: 01:38 Welcome to the Techpost podcast. I’m your host Trent Lapinski. In this episode I interview Ashley Baker. She’s a musician and an artist and in this episode we discuss her getting diagnosed with Lyme disease about a year ago. I also have Lyme disease myself. So in this episode we dive into the topic about how she got diagnosed, some of the controversies surrounding it, the treatment methods, and some of the stuff that’s been happening recently in Congress asking the Pentagon for more information about it potentially being part of a biological weapons research program. This is an amazing episode. So please

Trent Lapinski: 02:11 Stay tuned.

Trent Lapinski: 02:20 Welcome to the podcast. I’m here with Ashley Baker. Hey Ashley. Tell us a bit about who you are and what you’re working on.

Ashley: 02:26 Hey guys. So my name’s Ashley. I go by Asheville artists. I’m a songwriter from Maryland, a singer, songwriter, rapper, actress. I have Lyme disease, so I’m a Lyme disease advocate and warrior you would say. It’s been about like a year since my diagnosis. And yeah, I just love music and talking to people and connecting people.

Trent Lapinski: 02:51 Awesome. And we talked for quite a while before he ended up hitting record on this. So, oh, there’s so many different topics we could get into, but God, quite the story there. So, you know, just for some context for the audience, I also have chronic Lyme disease myself. But I really want to talk about your experience and what you’ve been through. So can you talk a bit about, you know, for the audience, just kind of explained like what have you been through? Like, let’s, you know, what this, what’s this disease and this diagnosis and you know, battling this, what is, what is this, what are we dealing with here?

Ashley: 03:26 Right. Okay. So a Lyme disease is, has only been in my vocabulary for about a year and a half now. Basically a year and a half ago I was working, I was a server full time, also a trainer, all garden. I was also a cosmetologist. I just graduated beauty school. It was working as an assistant manager and a color specialist at a shop that had just opened up in Hagerstown, like we were in the newspaper, were so excited and then I tore my knee one night while I was serving and you know, I went to the doctor, got an MRI and found that I have a condition where basically the cartilage would go through my legs with my knees is kind of like deteriorating equipment than it should. So I started to do physical therapy for like two, three months and about a month in or a couple of weeks, I started to get very fit, like bizarre symptoms.

Ashley: 04:16 I started to get very fatigued, bad inflammation. I develop eye floaters. So like where I looked around, I had like disruption in my vision. My hearing started to suffer as well as like confusion and like this feeling of psychosis of brain fog. So basically my doctor decided to check me cause I used to be type two diabetic for my glucose levels and she for some reason decided to test me for Lyme disease and it came back as like a false positive. What that basically means is unfortunately the CDC standard is like five bands to be CEC positive. And I didn’t have enough to be considered positive. So she did treat me with doxycycline for a month. I got retested again a couple of months later and my numbers went up. I was now CDC positive for Lyme disease and we were all very confused as to how when I was being treated with doxycycline, which is said to outline disease. So from there I bounced around a doctor’s rheumatoid arthritis, bacteria, infection, neurologist, all that good stuff. They tried to diagnose me with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, like you can name it. They were trying to say, I had all these things. I’m like, one doesn’t just randomly develop these symptoms.

Trent Lapinski: 05:33 They did the same thing to me. All kinds of diagnosises three letter a abbreviations for things, Ivs, this, that, the ADH, whatever. Like they just like they just threw on the diagnosises and all that crap. I, sorry to interrupt, but I, you know, I wanted to touch on something you mentioned about the CDC and I think it’s really important for anyone listening to this is the CDC criteria is like criminally, scientifically inaccurate. You actually don’t need to necessarily test positive for five bands to get a proper diagnosis. There are certain antibody bands that are Lyme specific that if you test positive for those you have Lyme disease. Even if you don’t have five antibody bands, there are certain ones that most tests don’t test for like 31 and 34 that you’ve got to go to a private lab to get those tested. And if you do and you end up testing positive, then the only way you can get that antibody is if you have Lyme disease. So yeah, the CDC situation, I mean, I mean did it change your outcome or you know, did they say that like did they delay your treatment or anything? Like what happened there?

Ashley: 06:45 I mean, they basically sent me to a bacteria infection specialists in my area and I’m Hagerstown, Maryland and this was supposed to be the top dog of the, you know, company to help me out. And what they said was that I had an infection, I had antibodies because of course if they don’t test for the actual bacteria can test me on the antibodies, which is interesting. But I’m basically, they figured I had Lyme disease that they didn’t catch early enough. They don’t know how long I’ve had it, but it’s called chronic Lyme disease complex. And they told me that I was supposed to go to cognitive therapy. Like my treatment plan was to go pretty much see a psychiatrist and meditate, eat more Broccoli.

Trent Lapinski: 07:25 Yeah. I had a doctor told me who go to just go live your life. And I was like, well, I don’t have a wife because I’m sick and so literal infection in your brain and it’s causing inflammation. So yeah, I mean you have to treat the underlying bacteria.

Ashley: 07:43 So I’m, after I got the false positive test, my doctor didn’t really know what to do. This was my primary physician. She was super unfamiliar with line, but at least she was smart enough to test me for it. So they put me on Doxycyclin, which is said to be, you know, the first thing you’re supposed to do with Lyme disease. And I was on like two, two or three months of Doxycyclin immediately. And this was before I even had the whole, you know, full positive tests, results she was doing. It

Trent Lapinski: 08:12 Recently did not like, honestly, like they, at least they did that because, I mean we’re, we’re calling it a false positive because that’s what the doctors call it. But it was really a positive positive for Lyme disease. It just didn’t meet CDC criteria.

Ashley: 08:26 Exactly. That’s why I asked my doctor, I’m like, so would a normal, healthy human have any of these antibodies? And she didn’t know the answer to it at the time, but she was like, well, maybe. And so she’s like, maybe it’s not Lyme disease. And like, you know, and it wasn’t even her fault. It was lack of education in the whole healthcare system as a whole. Yeah. So yeah, from there they refer me to all these different doctors. And then I went to see a bacterial infection doctor and he put me, he told me to do the cognitive therapy. He said to go therapists, your psychiatrist, and that was going to be the help for my brain infection.

Trent Lapinski: 09:01 Yeah. And that’s just so ridiculous because it’s literally an infection in your brain, you know, and it’s eating away at your nervous system and it’s causing inflammation in your brain. Like they did the same thing to me. They’re like, oh, it’s in your head. Yeah. Well, it was literally in my head, not mentally in my mind. Those are two different things. It was literally a spiral in our brains. You know, so it’s just so ridiculous that the Goto in the medical system is, oh, here’s, here’s antidepressants, here’s a, you know, here’s mood stabilizers. Oh, you want an anti-psychotic? Like that’s, that’s the crap I had to deal with. Like, especially when we really didn’t know what Lyme disease was and it wasn’t being diagnosed properly. I mean you’ve [inaudible] your story is so interesting because you just don’t know when you got it. Cause most people story starts with I got bit by a tick and you know, and it’s interesting because there’s so many unknowns even about how you get this disease. Were you born with it where it was? Did you get it sexually transmitted? Was this from a transfusion? Was it a different bug? Like is that a possibility? These are all questions that we haven’t researched. We don’t know the answers. Like there’s literally no answers to these questions.

Ashley: 10:23 Well there should, there should be with this being a thing since the seventies seventies but since it’s being more publicly a things since then and we have made like no progress at all, that really raises the question of why, why is there information being suppressed? Why is there not more initiative being taken to educate and figure it out instead of just being, everybody kept telling me it’s a controversial disease. I’m like, what’s controversial about me being sick? You know?

Trent Lapinski: 10:51 And why does, why is disease controversial? I mean, we can get into it. I mean there’s, you know, there’s what’s happening in the house right now. They’re, they passed an amendment. They’re asking the Pentagon if the u s government weaponize ticks in insects for biological research. And it’s, it’s based on a book by Chris Newbie. She did the under our skin documentary, I think she was a producer on it. And you I think had some interactions with one of her associates. And you know, I, I’ve reviewed her book on this podcast. You can go listen to that episode if you want to go take a, I’ll listen to that after this one. But what are your thoughts on all this and can you tell us a bit about the, the guy from under our skin that you’ve been working with?

Ashley: 11:38 Yes. So first I want to say the book bitten. I definitely recommend anybody and everybody to read that book. Not just if you deal with Lyme disease, but if you have any type of disease or if you just want to know about history in the country you live in, you should check it out. I’m actually in just a fun back. You can get it for free on Amazon Audio Book and you can just sign up for the month trial. You can get it. That’s what I did. I downloaded that and lab two, five, seven. So that’s been interesting. So anyways, I think that it’s really sick that like people are this sick and it even has to be a discussion whether or not our government weaponized ticks. I think that that’s, that disturbs me kind of the most of all of this is like the creepy side of like that shadow government.

Ashley: 12:24 What if question that we’re asking the Pentagon now to answer. And Andy Andrews, he was mentioned in bitten actually because he, him a Christian movie did work together for under our skin. Speaking with him, he actually lived in California for a long time. He was anti Lyme disease cause lax, why are you interested in mind disease? And he was like, his sister had gotten mine disease and he didn’t believe her. He thought she was being a hypochondriac. And then one of his friends got it and got really sick and then he started to do more research and found out there’s more to this. So, you know, I think that it’s great to have people who don’t have Lyme disease such as Andy Andrews shedding light on this subject. I think America has a whole like, you know, don’t get me wrong, I love my country, but there are a lot of things that happened specifically in 1950 through 1975 that they didn’t tell people about. And people are suffering today from it. They’re thinking they have these other ailments and there’ve been getting put on Cymbalta and opioids and other medicines when they really have underlying sections and the Diet that air the water, everything around us is kind of designed to keep us sick. And that’s the sad reality of it.

Trent Lapinski: 13:37 My opinion. Yeah. I mean they’re poisoning us. And then even the treatments for these conditions, I mean, it, you know, they, they put me on antidepressants and there have been studies to show that the antidepressants can lead to bacterial resistance to antibiotics. So we don’t really take into drugs that, you know, that can potentially hurt you when you have these infections. So I know you’ve had to take some of these medications and manage some of these symptoms stuff as well. And it’s just, it’s so crazy because you know, we don’t have a medical system that knows how any of this stuff works and there are so many variables and so many, like I, I’m just reflecting back on some of the horrible experiences I’ve had with the medical system. I mean it’s to the point now where I literally just canceled my health insurance cause I was like, I’m just going to pay doctors that know what they’re doing for their knowledge and just pay them in cash for it because that’s the only way that I can guarantee that I’m going to get an honest answer because having to dance around the insurance companies is a nightmare.

Trent Lapinski: 14:44 Can you talk a bit about how you’ve been able to actually successfully get treatment with insurance? Because I find that kind of these days, cause I was denied treatment.

Ashley: 14:54 Yeah, no, totally. And I definitely, I’m Emma empathetic person. So when I went, I’m going to tie this into what you just asked me, but when I went to the chronic Lyme disease rally in DC where we actually talked to the people from the CDC and raise awareness about Lyme disease it was just crazy because it’s like, you know, people just have no idea, you know, and somebody, I feel like when anybody sees one disease written down, like in a medical term, they kind of get a little anxious. I’ve had doctors kind of shy away from me or Kinda just brushed me off because people don’t want to deal with Lyme disease because it is controversial. There are doctors who lost their licenses for practicing outside of what, you know, the American government is saying is good for the medical community, for Lyme disease, and you have Lyme disease.

Ashley: 15:41 It’s not just Lyme disease. It’s not just some infection that causes one thing. It is a complex of co-infections and side effects from hurting, which is what happens when you kill off the line bacteria during treatment. So I have multiple coinfections and ailments that regardless of what caused it, it’s still there. So my doctor is trying to kind of focus on neurological side effects and the inflammation and things we can see with MRIs and blood work versus like just saying what I have. Like we’re trying to get hard proof and documentation on my case.

Trent Lapinski: 16:16 Yeah. And you’ve actually got a pick line in your arm right there. Right now while you’re talking to me because you’re, you’re actually going through an extended round of antibiotic treatment right now. How’s that going?

Ashley: 16:28 It’s going well. For the first time since May, 2018 I can say I have more hope. I don’t think that I’ll ever be the same ever. But you know why misuse takes you to a really dark place? Like it wasn’t just, I’m tired all the time. It was, my body is like, like I felt like my life energy was just leaving me. Like I’ve lost so much muscle mass and just,

Trent Lapinski: 16:54 Yeah, it, it’s, it. I mean, it’s a battle. I, I’ve gone through it to the, you know, it’s, it’s a muscle wasting disease. It, it steals your energy, it breaks down your joints, it affects your nervous system and your brain, your memory. Your recall, I added these podcasts episodes cause I have to edit things out because I say my ums and ers and so’s more skew it sometimes it’s hard to find the right words, so, so no worries here. Ultimately, this is a, you know, this is a, an epidemic that’s happening here now in the United States. This is real. What were you doing before all this? Like you, you’ve got a music career. Like you have a life that is more than just Lyme disease.

Ashley: 17:36 Yeah. so music has always been my thing. Since I was like a little girl. I’ve done, my mom forced me to do talent shows and I was a kid. So I’ve always had a musical background. I did like, I did some on musicals. I got done rent filled on the roof was, you know, things like that. They’re a high school and college. And then recently we did the rock opera, which is a musical all about the aids epidemic in the late eighties, early nineties, which is ironic because like I auditioned for rent back in April and then I got diagnosed with Lyme disease may and then we practice for a whole year. Cause the whole theme with the show of the show is, you know, how do you measure a year? And some people are calling the AIDS epidemic AIDS part too, like B cell aids.

Ashley: 18:21 And you know, just weird for me going through that. But you know, prior to all this, I didn’t even know about Lyme disease. I thought you just get it from a tick. I was working, I had just graduated a beauty school and was working full time as a assistant manager at a salon. I was a color specialist. I was a server, a trainer at all gardens. I was doing a lot of physical physically demanding jobs. Drinking coffee twice a day, consuming cheese, dairy bread. I mean I worked at olive garden, so like Pasta, dessert, like it’s all right there. And then my whole life just changed, like, you know after I tore my knee and then developed the bizarre symptoms and found out about line and then found out that it’s controversial and then I have to, it’s sad that I even have to fight to be sick, but I would say I’m physically not better off with one, but like mentally I’m better off with what I’ve been through from one disease.

Ashley: 19:20 I don’t think my health will ever be the same, but I’m thankful for the lessons I’ve learned already. And I’m only a year in. And you bringing up, you know, and not to bring this back here, but you’re speaking about insurance being a factor with treating line. When I went to the rally in DC, there were so many people from different states, like Texas. We had people from Canada, we had people from all over the place. And just seeing different people from walks of life. One person’s paying like a thousand to 3000 a month for treatment and another person is getting lied to about treatment. They’re getting treatment, but they’re taking like pain medicine and Cymbalta. It’s sick that there’s not just one place we could go to get the right answers to the truth because that’s literally the only thing that’s going to fix this is the truth and true healing. But I’m, I’m not sure if we will see that

Trent Lapinski: 20:09 On every doctor I’ve ever seen. They all have a little puzzle piece of knowledge. And you kind of almost have to see as many doctors as possible and hope that you can gather puzzle pieces from all these different doctors cause they all have different opinions, different solutions, different practices, different herbs that they use or different medications or different protocols. And it’s, there is no guarantee with any of this. There’s no, you know, there’s no one protocol fits all. There’s no just take this drug and you’re going to get better type solution. There’s a lot of experimentation involved. There’s a lot of figuring out like who in what is going to work for you. That’s the other problem is your condition, your, your set of coinfections might not be the same as mine. So you might be dealing with the Lyme and Mycoplasma and I might be dealing with Lyme and BBZ and Bartonella well you’re gonna have a totally different symptom profile than I would and we’re going to have totally different treatments and protocols and things because we’re dealing with different colon factions.

Trent Lapinski: 21:16 Maybe you’ve got Lee, you know Epstein Barr virus. Yeah. You know, maybe I don’t. Maybe you know there’s another virus that we don’t even know what, we haven’t even found it. We haven’t even named it yet that’s causing us both to have symptoms. There’s so many coinfections and there’s so many issues with polymicrobial infections. That is the major issue here. When I’ve talked to doctors, like our medical system talks about one infection at a time and not other educated is you treat one thing at a time and you only deal with one thing at a time. And the idea of multiple infections, it existing in coexisting and actually changing the symptom profile of each other is just so out of left field for like 90% of doctors.

Ashley: 22:07 It is. And I mean when you read the book bidding and lab two five seven and get into this information you it’s mind blowing. It’s really one blowing that they’re splicing bacterias and viruses and like depending on your DNA is going to affect you differently. And like I want to view, I’m sure you know about the like the Tuskegee experiments and I currently am like they were testing with syphilis and with why I’m to see why I’m a aspire keeping a direct cousin. I’m syphilis and it just makes you think because the u s I believe did admit to the Tuskegee experiments at timeline wise. That was right before 1950 1975 it’s just, I don’t really do believe in coincidence is like that. And if not, you know the government’s going to do what they’re going to do regardless of, it’s like me saying this, like I just want them to do the right things. This might save some lives, but I feel like they’re making too much money off of the false diagnosises and surprising the truth. So I don’t know if we will see the truth on that.

Trent Lapinski: 23:09 I hope we do. I mean, part of me is really, really hopeful that, you know, we’re finally at a point where it’s been long enough that they’re willing to say, yeah, you know, we were doing this biological research. You know, I, I don’t know if it escaped the lab. I don’t know if it was, you know, sent out into the world on purpose. I don’t know if, you know, the Russian government stole it and then attack America with it. I don’t, we don’t know those answers because unfortunately that information is likely classified and someone somewhere or some documentation at the Pentagon and the CIA, they know what happened and they’re not telling us. I mean, if it was the Russians, I think as citizens we have a right to know that we were attacked by another country if it escaped the lab by accident. I think as citizens of this country, we have a right to know this escaped a lot by accident.

Trent Lapinski: 24:03 If our government did this on purpose and released this with an intention, we have a right to know if they did this on purpose. Or if the purpose was something else and then it was an experiment that, you know, went the wrong way or I don’t know. But at the very least, if we can get the reality of what this is figured out and we establish that, hey, we’re working from this point, this is, this is a fact, and then we can move forward from there and figure out what the next solution is, then we can form plans, then we can strategize around this, then we can enact legislation to make the insurance companies provide accurate treatment. We can push the CDC to, you know, figure out better testing methods. I mean, one of the things that boggles my mind is veterinary medicine is like 10 years ahead of where we’re at with people.

Trent Lapinski: 24:56 They have more effective Lyme disease tests for dogs, for people, and they have better treatment protocols and they have more like laid out protocols for chronic versus non chronic for animals. But yet for human beings it’s controversial and we’re using western block tests that are inaccurate. And then the criteria, even though you’ve tested positive, they tell you, oh, it’s a false positive. And it’s like, no, it’s, it’s a positive and you shouldn’t, that, that means you need to be treated. So it’s, it’s so, it’s so crazy because we, we unfortunately we live in this world now of fake news of you know, of altered search results that no longer, you know, no longer reflect the facts. I mean, part of the biggest issue with Lyme is the misinformation that is available when you search and you get involved in these lime communities. Like, I mean, on one hand I’m really appreciative of the wine community because they’re doing everything they can to try to help each other.

Trent Lapinski: 26:08 At the same time, it’s a bunch of people who are sick trying to figure out how to solve this problem and we’re not the ones that should be solving this problem because we’re sick. So unfortunately when you’re dealing with an infection that like impacts your brain and your decision making, like it’s really difficult to all of a sudden learn how to become your own doctor. Unfortunately as happened to the line community. So you get sucked into this kind of like rabbit hole of, Oh, have you tried this? Have you tried that? Have you tried this? And just all constantly trying to like meet up and compare notes and what worked for you, what didn’t work for you. And it’s, it’s chaos. And then I’ve even talked to some people who did not have Lyme disease who then were misdiagnosed with Lyme. And you get those people who are harmed as well because they do a year of antibiotics and just get worse because they didn’t have Lyme and were misdiagnosed. So you get both ends of the spectrum where people who have diagnosises like Fibromyalgia, like Ms that is actually Lyme disease and they’re not given the adequate treatment they need. Then you have other cases where someone’s misdiagnosed with Lyme when they don’t have it, and then they get treatment they don’t need. And it’s all just simply a lack of education and a breakdown of the medical system. Right?

Ashley: 27:37 So once it is why, why when we are so advanced in all these other areas, why it makes you have to come back to the accusations and the information that you and I both know about what the government did do for the future. Even just Lyme disease, they also did other experiments with, I mean I’m not trying to take it super farfetched year, but like mk ultra, there was some things with like Frank Olson, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. Like there’s something on Netflix called Wormwood I believe and that’s like his Frank Olson son. He gets into the story about like his father and like how they were given the scientist psychedelics and some of them couldn’t handle it. They were dropping viruses and like subways, listen, there’s crazy information out there and like it’s not for a, things don’t make sense right now and I just hope people open their eyes up and become their own advocates. Otherwise, if we just let the government continue to do this, like there’s no hope for the future. Everybody is going to be completely sick and then what’s going to happen?

Trent Lapinski: 28:40 Well, the crazy thing is like with mk ultra, I mean that is a declassified program and you can go read their declassified reports of what they did and people still don’t believe it. It just boggles my mind when the source of the information is the government. And people go, oh, that can’t be true. And it’s like, so you’ll believe the government and you’ll believe the CDC that if you have less than five antibody bands, you don’t have Lyme disease in that chronic Lyme disease doesn’t exist. But yet you won’t believe them when they declassify something where they’re saying, yeah, we did this,

Ashley: 29:18 It’s crazy. And that falls into the problem as like a collective conscious that we were really failing. I feel we’re so easily distracted, especially in America, not just here, but we’re so easily distracted by planets of the, I mean a district 51 means and you know, Kardashians and what Kanye is doing, it’s like there are things right now that do affect you and your children, your children’s show do. Or people are so consumed in this ego mentality. It’s just, it’s really detrimental as a whole for like,

Trent Lapinski: 29:55 No, absolutely. And it’s, I mean, I on one hand I’m hopeful that people like yourself who are coming out and speaking about this, I mean me telling my own story, it took a really long time to come out with this. It’s not easy. But you know, it’s, it’s really important that people like yourself have the courage to speak your truth and tell people what’s going on. This is not just happening to us. This is happening to millions of people around the world. This is right at the demic. This is the infection that I’ve been reading about super bugs and how in the future they were going to be antibiotic resistant infections and you know, there was going to be, I mean, there’s literally an entire movie industry of Zombie movies about this. You know, like there’s an entire genre of films about this exact kind of subject and topic and we’re here in 2019 when we’re recording this right now. Lyme disease is the superbug we’ve been warned about for decades. It’s here, it’s now, it’s happening. I have it. You have it. People’s childrens are getting it. Are Dogs in our cats and our pets are getting it. Our, I mean, I, I’m afraid it’s in our food supply.

Ashley: 31:19 I agree. Because think about it, if a rabbit or something goes and uses the bathroom, a garden, and then maybe that bacteria is there and grows on the cucumbers, who’s the say it’s not there? Still?

Trent Lapinski: 31:29 Well, think about cows, cattle you know, think about the actual livestock. I mean, they, they dose our livestock in this country with antibiotics and hormones and all this crazy stuff. Well, you know, one of the theories in lot two 57 is, you know, that this was potentially created or at least released potentially from plum island, which was an FDA research facility. And they were doing research because they were looking at using these diseases possibly as a way to eliminate an enemy’s food supply. So,

Ashley: 32:04 Oh, right. And here’s the FDA that was doing it technically

Trent Lapinski: 32:09 Correct. So it was in association with the military and you know, we don’t know if Lyme disease came from plum island or not. Based on what was in bitten, you know, we’d know that it potentially came from, what is it, the mountain the rocky mountain lab and yeah, that’s where, or Darfur was actually doing his initial research. Then he was going to Washington d C bringing samples with him to the Pentagon and giving a, I think it was Fort Dietrich and giving them these diseases that they were breeding inside of these tick stomachs. So we know, like, I mean the guy confess, that’s the thing that just like huddles my mind. Like I, you know, I’m in, I’m admitting this as a man, but whatever. I literally cried when I was reading bitten because when I got to the part where he confessed, it became real.

Trent Lapinski: 33:06 That was it for me. It literally brought tears to my eyes. I, I don’t get that emotional that often to the point where it brings me to tears. But that brought tears to my eyes when I got to the part where he confessed in the book, I believe him more than whatever is going to happen next with whatever the government says, whatever, you know, news report comes out or whatever the Pentagon says, I at the end of the day, I’m going to believe the guy who confessed on like right before he died, probably more so than whatever they conclusion they ended up coming to.

Ashley: 33:44 Yeah. Like how it’s cause he’s, he’s been incredible this whole time and helping you guys figure out what while I’m sparkly was and all that. So isn’t he still just as credible?

Trent Lapinski: 33:55 Yup. And it, I mean, the thing that really got to me as well was the fact that there was a Rickettsia Helvetica, which just was left out as a causative agent, as a potential causative agent. And now we know Rickettsia Helvetica at the time, it didn’t even have a name, it was called the Swiss agent. We now know that it’s pretty much undetectable. It causes a range of neurological symptoms. And it very well could be that it is still a potential causative agent is one of the Colon infections that is infecting people and causing some of these symptoms. So it could be that the person who gets Lyme disease from, you know, one tick doesn’t get Rickettsia Helvetica and around the doxy cures them and they’re good to go and they don’t get any other coinfections that can happen. That’s a possibility. But what happens is the person who gets bit by a tick that’s got the BZA Lyme disease and Rick hotseat Helvetica, what happens to that person? Doc sees not going to fix them. So, and they’re not going to test positive on a test. So, you know, they might test positive for the lime, but they might not test positive for the Babesia or the Rickettsia. So there’s just so many different variables here. It’s just, it’s insane.

Ashley: 35:14 Yeah. And people don’t even know about the other coinfections. Like I had no information of it. Whenever they present Lyme disease to me, I’m thinking it’s one bacteria. I have had a bullseye rash. You know, all the information we know about Lyme disease is just completely incorrect and we need to completely reeducate people about Lyme disease, you know, and

Trent Lapinski: 35:34 Especially our doctors.

Ashley: 35:36 Yeah. And that’s, that’s the thing. But we really need like the CDC and IBSA and all these other people too, like and corporations too. He real and I just seemed so unrealistic because of the world we live in today. I am just, listen, I completely agree with you and I read that I was heartbroken. I still am. I mentioned earlier, I have a really good poker face, but like Lyme disease is the most terrible, amazing thing that ever happened in me. It’s awful. I wouldn’t wish it on my enemy because it’s suffering. You are suffering people. I do a lot of like positive posts and like music and things like that and people always come to me and say, you’re so uplifting and like you’re positive all the time. It’s like all of this stems from deep pain and struggle and like suffering. And for me to even have to fight to be sick, like I don’t want to have Lyme disease.

Ashley: 36:31 I don’t want to have to be an advocate for this or share all these things on my Facebook constantly, but I have to talk about it. I won’t talk about it if you don’t talk about it. Who is gonna represent for this whole group, these millions of people who were just dying silently. And it’s really heartbreaking. It really is. And I, I really just hope that people will wake up in America because America, as I mentioned, people are very distracted. You’re vibrating on a very low level and people, it’s time for people to wake up because we can’t keep repeating our father’s mistakes. Like it’s time to fix stuff.

Trent Lapinski: 37:05 Yeah, no, I fully agree with you. It’s completely changed the course of my life. And I mean even yesterday I had a minor flare up. You know, luckily I kind of know what these things are now and I’m able to manage them, but I mean, I was pretty much incapacitated last night. I had to drop everything I was doing. I basically just had to manage this minor flare up. I was having my lymphatic system swelled up. It happens every full moon. I mean it sounds so crazy to tell people this, but full moons cause my Lyme disease to flare up and oh I’ve talked to dozens of other Lyme disease patients who also have Lyme disease and they all experienced the same thing and we don’t even know why it is like there’s theories, there’s hypothesis but we don’t know why. Every time there’s a full moon there’s most of the people who have Lyme disease have a flare up.

Trent Lapinski: 38:06 Yeah. Is it frequency? Is it, is there something gravitational happening inside the human body? Is it reproducing on a lunar cycle? Ways like we don’t even understand a almost universal symptom for everyone who has Lyme disease. We don’t, we don’t talk about it. We don’t, there’s no research done about it. It’s just yet all these people have this experience. Other one is EMF sensitivity. Yeah. I mean you and I talked a little bit about this before the recording and you know I could tell you are probably hearing some things that you might not have heard before and I’m going to explain it to the audience real quick. Here is basically Lyme eats away at the neural sheets. It’s called De myelination and it’s this fatty layer that’s around the nerds. So if the Lyme disease fire key comes in and eats that fatty layer, the nerve is then exposed.

Trent Lapinski: 39:04 So it’s exposed to all stimuli. It doesn’t matter if it’s EMF, it doesn’t matter if it’s a fluorescent light, it’s just now hypersensitive period to all things. So of course someone with nerve damage is going to be sensitive to electromagnetic frequencies and energy. Like this is not a, this is not woo woo. This is not like nonsense here. Like this is, this is a real symptom that happens to people who have nerve damage and the amount of like blow back. And people that I’ve had to argue with about this topic is just insane. You bring up EMF sensitivity and people are like, that’s not real. That can’t possibly be like, you can’t sense why Phi and cell phone signals. And it’s like, actually I can and it’s because I have nerve damage and it’s a real condition caused by Lyme disease. And it’s so difficult to explain to people that know we do not live in this black and white world.

Trent Lapinski: 40:10 We live in this world of all these different possibilities and all of these different variables. And you literally can’t get the information because it’s just not available. You can try to Google this stuff, but you’re not going to get the truth on Google. Like if you got the truth on Google, they’d be out of a job. Like, because their business is selling advertising and products. Like it’s what they do as a company. So you’re trusting an advertiser organization for looking for the truth. Like what? Like that’s not how they make their money. They don’t make their money telling you the truth. So people unfortunately trust what they find when they Google for something. And you shouldn’t because it probably isn’t true. So you can look at the studies and you can try and rely on the medical research. But I think something like 90 to 95% of studies can’t be reproduced, like insert it.

Trent Lapinski: 41:06 Especially when it comes to like psychology and psychiatry and certain things. Like a lot of this science is just made up. It’s not real. But I can tell you that every time there’s a full moon I relapsed and my symptoms, I can tell you, I’ve talked to many other Lyme disease patients who have experienced the same. I can tell you that when I’m in a room full of people who are all in their phones and I want LTE, like it has an accumulative effect that can trigger some of my nerves. Symptoms. Yeah. And cause inflammation. It’s, it’s not fake. It’s real. This stuff is real. It’s, it makes logical sense. It makes scientific sense. But the amount of flack and pushback you get from some people is just, it’s insane. Like you literally have to fight just to explain to people that this exists and we shouldn’t have to do that. Like [inaudible] it’s nonsense really.

Ashley: 42:03 Yeah. It’s exhausting

Trent Lapinski: 42:06 When we’re already chronically fatigued,

Ashley: 42:09 Like literally, I’m so tired. I was in it. And going off of what you said, I think that denial aspect is really hurtful, especially even in the Lyme community. I’ve had people who have had Lyme disease for like 2030 40 years coming at me because I’m still trying to be positive and optimistic and uplifting, and they’re like, you’re naive. Do you have this for 10 years? Like you’re never gonna get better. You’re not. You know what I mean? It’s like I think people are tired. People are exhausted. Your signal, not like leading death with one diseases. Honestly, from what I’m understanding, the suicide, if I’m not mistaken.

Trent Lapinski: 42:48 Yup. It’s, there’s a high suicide rate with people who have lung disease

Ashley: 42:51 And I see it. I can see why. Like if I wasn’t mentally strong, I don’t know where I would be right now because this disease will test every single limit in you physically, mentally, and even spiritually. And you know why me? And like I never, I didn’t listen before this, I didn’t take Ibuprofen. I didn’t drink soda. I rarely ever ate at McDonald’s. Like I always was like that help nut stay woke person. So it’s like for this to happen to me, I don’t believe in coincidence. I know I’m at the right place at the right time and I just, I pray for humanity as a whole and I hope that people will become their own advocates and instead of just clicking a link on Facebook, do your own research and cross reference your sources and like for yourself, you know,

Trent Lapinski: 43:42 Or what I do is I talk to people, I trust people like, you know, I trust talking to another Lyme patient and comparing notes. Like I trust that that’s been almost more valuable for me than even some of my doctors because I, at the end of the day, I trust people. I don’t, I don’t trust the crap I find on the Internet. I trust having a conversation like what you are and I are having right now that there’s something to that that we’re forgetting because of snapchat and likes and tweets and clicks and all this crap and we’re forgetting that. Yeah, there’s a human being behind that device, right? There’s millions of us suffering from an epidemic of a super bug that’s here, that was possibly by our own government. And you know, that’s, that’s reality. I mean, that’s reality for me and you and millions of other people.

Trent Lapinski: 44:40 So I’m hopeful, you know, [inaudible] people like you will continue to get the word out that we can continue to raise awareness for this. I’m hopeful that science is going to provide some answers and we’re going to be able to find some solutions. I mean, there’s definitely two things here where, you know, you have to treat the actual bacterial infection first and then you’ve got to figure out how to reverse the damage. But I mean, we’re making advances in stem cells, we’re making advances in you know, at the genetics and how to improve these things. So, you know, there are going to be new innovations in the medical field that are going to help people like you and I, and we can’t lose hope. We have to continue to push forward.

Ashley: 45:26 Yeah. So you have to keep your faith and that doesn’t have to be religious faith, faith in yourself. Faith in just hope as a whole. You have to keep it, otherwise you will be taken under and you know overall the where we’re at. We’re in a really weird spot. Like we’re waiting to hear what the government’s going to say. Like you guys are already

Trent Lapinski: 45:49 Alright. I’ve already read the evidence. The evidence to me is already clear. I don’t care what the government says at this point.

Ashley: 45:55 That’s what I’m saying. Like you guys weaponized it where ever we want to talk about it. Y’all did some am world work. You basically continued Nazis work when you brought them over here under project paperclip. Everybody gets so offended about the Holocaust and all the things that happen, but like dude, they were doing those experiments and similar things here. There was weird animals that washed up near my island. I’m, I’m going to take it there. Listen live it. I’m telling you, even the celebrities who have a wide disease such as like Avril Levine, Shenai Twain, I was Baldwin. Why don’t we see them on your speaking like if the Pentagon’s getting questioned if they did this or not. What celebrities and bigger people of status standing up for us.

Trent Lapinski: 46:35 There is a senator that has Lyme disease or had Lyme disease and was treated. I wonder what information they had access to that you and I don’t.

Ashley: 46:44 And are they speaking up about the corrupt part? Because they’re above us. They’re more, they have more on the line it sponsorships. They have the public eye on them mainstream. So it’s like we’d be, they got threatened and I’m not saying anything

Trent Lapinski: 46:57 Saying they might’ve been told to we’ll give you the cure, but you can’t tell anyone.

Ashley: 47:03 Got It.

Trent Lapinski: 47:04 Yeah. And we’ll see. Yeah. Do you have any final thoughts here before we wrap up?

Ashley: 47:10 I mean, just overall for anybody out there watching, like, you know, do your own research and get on here and talk to people and don’t take everything at face value because nothing’s really ever than seen. So Liz Earth well I am diseases. I never had any idea. I never fathom that Lyme disease was as serious as it is until it happened to me. And as Cliche as it sounds, you just never know until you, and unfortunately there’s people walking around with ms diagnosises or ailments and you actually have infection in your brain and body and the things your lifestyle and diet and low vibrations are just feeding this parasite that’s eating on you. And as drastic as it sounds, I I believe in, I’m hopeful I have faith. I’m hopeful that things will turn around for people and as of right now I’m gonna forever talk about Lyme disease. I’ll be advocate and so I can’t speak about it anymore because there’s people out here who don’t have a voice, who have died, who have committed suicide or just don’t have people like how you and I have each other now to speak. There’s people out here alone suffering. So please do your research and let’s just pray that something happens and comes of this whole department of Defense and Pentagon being questioned.

Trent Lapinski: 48:29 Yeah, I’m hopeful of that as well. And thank you for having the courage to come on this show. Talk to me and continuing your advocacy work and raising awareness because you know, this is a, this is, these are our lives. This is not, you know, this is not this is not, we’re not promoting, you know, something here. We’re not trying to sell you anything like our literal lives depend on figuring these things out, figuring out what the facts are so that people like you and I can get treatment and get better and live our lives. For me, I want to eventually have kids and start a family. Like I can’t do that if I’m getting flare ups. Every time there’s a full moon, you know, it’s a, it’s crazy. So again, thank you for coming on the show. Where can people find you?

Ashley: 49:19 Thank you. Thank you. So I am on I just not recently got my cell phone off streaming platform. So Spotify, apple music, Amazon music, youtube, all that good stuff. You could look up ash, the artists, it’s all one word, capital A’s, ash. The artists on Facebook. I have a Facebook page as well as an Instagram page. Both are called Ash. The artists. I also have a Facebook and Instagram page for Lyme disease awareness, which is called one, don’t kill, modify on Instagram and live life on Facebook. So I’ll hopefully be able to send you some like links for this so people can maybe like,

Trent Lapinski: 49:56 Yeah, I’ll put them in the description.

Ashley: 49:59 Perfect. Yeah. And just overall like I hope people can hear my story and have inspiration and know that we’re not what we’re going through. We are not what we going through and don’t ever be ashamed of where you’ve been because it’s building your character and making you strong and overall doing research online while we’re in bug spray and like educate yourself please cause it’s

Trent Lapinski: 50:24 Yourself. That’s a really important is people really need to wear bug spray and long pants when they go out in the woods and that kind of thing. You can get bit anywhere on your body. You know, and a lot of people do get bit on the chest, on their arms, on their necks. So yeah, and then there’s a possibility that some of these infections can come from other bugs in other situations as well. So we don’t know because no one will fund the research. So tell you what the answer is because no one will prove it. But again, thank you for coming on. It has been absolute pleasure. I will put those links in the description so people can find them and please continue to do the work that you’re doing and I hope you feel better. Thank you. I hope you feel better into the light that you’ve shuttle in from me as well.

Trent Lapinski: 51:24 Thanks for watching another uncensored episode of tech posts. Dot Io. I’m your host Trent Lapinski and don’t forget to subscribe to us on Youtube and hit that little notification bell next to the subscribe button so that you can get notified when we release new episodes. You can also find us on iTunes, Google play, and other social networks including Twitter and Facebook at tech post Io. And you can find me personally at Trent Lapinski. Once again, I’m Trent Lapinski and this has been another great episode of tech posts, not io. We’ll see you soon.

Learn how Google kills competition through anti-competitive behavior. This is the true story of how I tried to compete with YouTube and Google with two of the former founders of Myspace between 2006-2008 on a startup called LiveVideo.com.

Some old files I found related to LiveVideo.com:

Automated Transcript:

00:05 You know, I should be a multimillionaire right now like we should have been what YouTube is today or at least a major competitor of YouTube and we should be a multibillion dollar Unicorn Tech Company. And the only reason we’re not is because of anti competitive behavior from Google. When I hear or see people on the internet make the argument like, oh, just go create your own YouTube, go build your own platform. Well, I did. I literally did. I created my own alternative to YouTube. I did it with Brad Greenspan. I did it with Toan Nguyen who is one of the original architects of Myspace. I literally worked with a team of nearly a hundred people to try and create a competitor to YouTube and YouTube and Google dismantled our entire organization and made us uninvestible and killed our company. From what I understand and what I was told is Google was cutting checks to live video users who has affected from YouTube and paid them to go back to YouTube with any year. Most of our network was delisted off Google

01:25 Welcome to Techpost. I’m your host Trent Lapinski in this episode, I talk about my past experience running a YouTube competitor back in 2006 through 2008, I worked for a company called live video.call. And we were actually bigger than YouTube at the time when all this happened. And this is a story that I’ve waited 11 years to tell you. It is a story about how Google’s anti competitive behavior killed a major competitor and why you can’t compete with Google because they will just simply do list your website from search engines if they don’t like you and you start gaining traction. This is a really complex story that goes into all the details of what happened with live video.com and how Google destroyed our company and prevented us from being able to raise money. And ultimately why YouTube is what it is today. And there are new major competitors. YouTube, I’ve had Google now destroyed two of my startups and they’ll probably try and destroy some of my startups again in the future. That’s the reality. Until we break these companies up you know, we’re we’re going to keep seeing this history repeat itself. So here’s a little blast from the past of what happened to live video and why you can’t compete with YouTube.

02:59 I’ve been meaning to record this for quite awhile. It’s a really personal story. I’ve totally told this story in person to a probably less than dozen people. But this is basically the story of why I’m not a millionaire or possibly even a multimillionaire. I have been in the startup game for a really long time. So when I was a kid, I started an apple news and rumor website in late 2001 so to put that in perspective, I’ve basically been working in the tech industry since I was 12 years old and I’ve got an 18 to 20 year career here that I’ve accumulated. So one of my biggest

03:46 Failures I guess you put it is, you know, working on a project called live video.com when I was 19 years old, I dropped out of college and I went to work for two of the former founders of my space. They offered me a job at their company after I had written some articles and I had been publishing quite a bit. I wrote a piece on Valleywag that got mentioned in New York Times. It was about my space and what happened with the news court purchase and a lot of the craziness that went down there. Ultimately, I met Brad Greenspan, who was the original founder of the parent company that started my space when I was doing the research and interviewed him for those articles and him and I got to know each other. Our values aligned. I left school to go work for him and I got to learn firsthand from inexperienced entrepreneur, you know, how, how startups are done.

04:47 You know, he walked away with about $50 million when News Corp purchased my space. He should have walked away with a lot more. That’s a whole other story and I might save that for a later day. But this story is about, you know, how we built live video.com to be what YouTube is today. So we had a network of, I think about 20 different properties that I used to help run. This was again, this was like 2006. So we’re talking, you know, a while back here. I, most of the work that I did for the company was in 2006, 2007 leading into like halfway through to 2008 and I helped work on all kinds of things. I did content creation for them. I worked with the PT and development side of the company, helped a little bit with UI, UX design. I did a ton of SEO.

05:51 SEM, worked for them advertising. I worked in the marketing department. I worked research and developments. We were developing hardware devices using three g wireless modems. And at the time they were called New Mtcs, these mobile pcs. This was pre iPhone, pre iPad. And we were working on mobile streaming devices. So this was around the time that Justin. Dot TV was launching and Ustream and a lot of these other sites. And so we have this giant network we owned, like I said, about 28 properties and we had more traffic than YouTube at the time that YouTube got purchased by Google. We were bigger than YouTube, we had more traffic, we had more content in our network. We had more websites, we were a bigger, more successful company. We actually hadn’t launched shortly before we were like in an early, like kind of Beta.

06:52 And we were about to do basically our, what was our you know, our hard launch. And then YouTube got bots by Google. And that was a major indicator for us that hey, we’re onto the right thing here. Like this is, this is a good thing. And there’s still competition. Like, you know, a major tech company just bought into the space. Like this is going to be the future. And a lot of YouTube users defected and came to live video.com and started producing content exclusively for live video.com because they did not want to produce content for Google. So this kind of set off a whole chain of reaction of events because you know, we were gaining a lot of traction and once YouTube got purchased by Google, we took off over night. We hadn’t even implemented our full like SEO SCM strategy yet and we weren’t even sending all the traffic that we had intended to, same to live video.com and it was still taking off without us having to do anything on live video.com we have the, all the features that YouTube pretty much has today.

08:02 And then some we’ve advanced streaming component where you could play videos that were on your channel. You could have conversations with like believe, if I remember correctly, it was up to like five or six people. You could kind of like curate and like video DJ your own channel alive. So you could run videos, you could interact with other people, you could choose who was on the main part of the channel. And then there were little like sub cameras that you could cut to. So you could interview people, you could have active conversations. So it was a really, it was a really robust idea and comp site like set up where you could, you really had control of, you know, what users saw, how you could use this. I mean, you could do everything from chat with it to host a show.

08:56 It was way more, way more advanced than even a YouTube live streaming stuff today. There’s been a couple other startups that offered a somewhat similar experience. Most of them maybe the bread and bought out or shut down or failed. Periscope is kind of similar, but honestly, like periscope is just like, I don’t know, like maybe half of the features we had. So it’s just so weird and kind of bizarre to watch over the last 11 years. Basically all these companies working on similar projects to what we had 11 years ago. And they’re still not getting it right to this day. We had all the social networking features. We kind of, it was like, it was kind of like a mashup between my space, what YouTube is today, periscope. And then we even had a couple other additional features and functions on top of that.

09:51 So it was a really, really robust platform. That, you know, for 2007 was incredible. You know, it blows products that are out on the market today out of the water. But this was all, again, this was pre iPhone. This was pre mobile apps. This was pre android. I mean I literally remember when android got bought by Google and brought into their fold and you know, I told the research and development team like, Hey, like we should take a look at this android thing. Like I think this is going to be something. And they kind of laughed at me cause they’re like, ah, I forget that. Like we’re onto this and you know, we’re doing our own thing here and you know, we’re going to be successful and Dah, Dah, Dah. We had a whole content team that we had in house and I was a part of that team as well, where we were producing some of our own shows and content.

10:44 We were on the red carpet, we were all over Hollywood. We were able to live stream these events. We were doing live streaming with, you know, athletes, celebrities, all kinds of crazy stuff. It was, it was, I honestly, it was an amazing, you know, period of my life. I mean, especially again, this all started when I was 19 years old. So it’s from like 19 to 21. I’m working for this crazy startup. We’ve got, you know, $50 million to burn and you know, we were reinventing what it was like to put video on the Internet. We were creating this new paradigm and then something happened, you know, it was Google buying YouTube. That was the big shift. Well, a lot of the content creators we were working with stop working with us and stopped uploading their content. We started interacting with them, talking to them, like asking them like, Hey, like all these people that we had good relationships with started going cold on us and we’re like, what is going on?

11:45 And they’re like, sorry you know, we can’t really talk about it but we’re going back to YouTube and we’re like, okay, well what’s go on here. So from what I understand and what I was told is Google was cutting checks to live video users who had defected from YouTube and paid them to go back to YouTube. I, I heard sums is anywhere between 10 to $20,000 for exclusive contracts to only produce content for YouTube. I’m not going to name names of any of the people that I believe received a, this kind of compensation, but a, I have it on good authority that they were cutting checks to these content creators to go back to YouTube. So that was the first strike that Google made against live video is they, they, they stole all our power users, all of our content creators that were successfully creating content and doing live streams.

12:47 And you know, all the users that were making live video, live video they, they started paying them off to go to YouTube so that we couldn’t compete with, we couldn’t offer these guys $20,000 to, you know, produce content for us. I just wasn’t realistic to start paying all the top users to create content. I mean, it was a little heartbreaking and you know, in retrospect now that I’m looking at it, you know, 11 years later and talking about this, finally I can tell you, you know, Brad Greenspan, who’s the CEO of like video and like the universe in this company, you know, he’s been vilified. You know, there’s a lot of people that, you know, probably are still owed money by him. I don’t know all the details. I can tell you that the reason that a lot of the things that happen is what I’m about to tell you right now.

13:39 I video and ultimately live universe failed because all of a sudden Google started delisting all of our websites and most of our video networks from search, Google goes and buys YouTube and decides they’re getting into the video content creation space and then all of a sudden you know they’re paying off our creators and our content creators aren’t users paying them to go to YouTube and create exclusive content for you too. And within a year most of our network was delisted off Google. So when you searched for videos or content on Google, you would only see YouTube results and you would not see results from live video.com you would not see results from any of the other websites that we owned. We owned websites that were trafficking tens of millions of users. We had more traffic than YouTube. Like it’s, it’s crazy to think about, but you know, we had all of a sudden all of these websites that we own just overnight, their traffic just was gone.

14:49 All the search traffic was gone. I was on the SEO and sem team at the time that this happened. I was warning our executives and our higher ups, like, Hey guys, like, you know, Google’s doing something, something’s not right with our numbers. We admittingly we were doing a few things internally to push traffic between our properties and we were doing things that at the time was still playing by the rules. We weren’t breaking Google’s rules. You know, we were creating this backlink network with, between our sites. We were pushing traffic between our properties. We were cross promoting between our properties. We owned all these websites. So everything we were doing was within our own network of sites that we owned. It wasn’t deceptive. They were all branded and labeled. You know, if you clicked a video and it clicked through to live video.com like you knew, like, Hey, now you’re on my video.

15:41 It was all, it was all the Gitelman. It wasn’t it wasn’t anything nefarious. So the reason that Google cited that they were delisting our sites was because they’re like, oh, you have, you know, adult content and there’s child porn on some of your properties and whatever. So we actually hired a content moderation team. I actually worked on the content moderation team. What are the first content moderators online, video.com and working on our other properties as well. I actively choose to chase down pedophiles and get them off our platform, deleted their content, and we got sex offenders off our platform. Like we hired entire team in the Philippines to review all of our content before it got uploaded, which was not cheap or easy. Occasionally a video or two would slip through, but we hired, you know, and then we had a whole flagging system.

16:40 We created an entire mature section on the website so that, you know, all the content went behind that section. We were doing everything we could to combat these issues. And the fact of the matter is that in 2019 right now when I’m recording this, Google has not solved these problems on YouTube. YouTube has child pornography on it. YouTube has sex offenders using their website. YouTube has all of these problems. So they were asking us to solve a problem that they can’t solve in 2019 with artificial intelligence, we were doing everything we could to try to solve these problems. We put a ton of money and resources into it. Again, I worked on the team that helped try to figure this problem out because we knew that if we didn’t try to solve these problems, we were going to be at risk. We didn’t want the legal risk.

17:32 We didn’t want any of this content on our sites. Like there was no motivation for us to have this content. This was not our intention. Brad Greenspan believed in freedom of speech and he was trying to create a free speech platform. It was about free. It was about not being oppressed, it was about not being censored. It had nothing to do with child pornography or any of this other nonsense. We also owned a number of websites that were a lyric website. So they, they had lyrics. They would show up in search terms, you know, you could get the lyrics to your favorite song, whatever. And we got sued by the major, by the major record companies for this. And we were trafficking some of the lyric content search sites, trying to push them to live video in our other properties. We were using our network to, you know, try and push content to turn live video into what is essentially YouTube.

18:28 Today we get sued by the record companies, Google delist almost our entire network off of, you know, off of search results. And this was all in 2000 and at the end of 2007 leading into 2008 so the market is crashing. You know, most people who remember 2008 Oh, the market didn’t crash til October. Well, it didn’t matter the official date or September, October, wherever, like the official day didn’t matter. The effects of the economic crash were already happening in the beginning of 2008 arguably before that, even in 2007 it was a really, really chaotic time to be trying to raise money for a startup. And we had burned through most of Brad’s capital that he had put into the company and we were struggling to raise money. So while we’re struggling to raise money, we’re getting delisted from Google. They’re punishing us for something that they’re guilty of still to this day that they haven’t solved yet.

19:33 And then we got the final blow. The final blow is when they kicked us off adsense. We were monetizing most of our ads and most of our ad revenue through Google, they were our major advertising partners. So when we lost Google as an advertising partner and we lost all of that revenue, no investor would touch us because we went from a company producing millions of dollars in revenue to a company and producing $0 million in revenue with a bunch of websites that you can’t even find on Google search results. All our major content providers have been paid off to go back to you too. And we were pretty much dead in the water. Then you add in the lawsuits from the major record companies and you add in all this other chaos that was going on with my space in News Corp still. And it was, it was madness.

20:31 You know, this was around the time that my space was, you know, trying to survive Facebook. And we all know who won that war and you know, Brad was still legally pursuing cases against the whole news corp back was [inaudible] because he believed that my space sold to Newscorp undervalued news corp as we all know, pretty much ran my space into the ground. Ultimately, you know, the intention for why Brad and I and many others, I was not a cofounder by any means. I was an employee. But you know, I was one of the early employees. I was on the ground when we started creating this thing. You know, I helped in many different divisions of the company. There were many amazing other people who’ve worked for this company as well. So I cannot take all the credit, but I was there on the front lines and I was a paid employee.

21:27 I had equity, I was a part of this. It is because of what happened to this company in the failure of this company that you know, I should be, I, you know, I should be a multimillionaire right now. Like we should have been what YouTube is today or at least a major competitor to YouTube and we should be a multibillion dollar Unicorn Tech Company. And the only reason we’re not is because of anti competitive behavior from Google where they paid off our users. They deep platformed all of our sites and our entire network with millions of users. We have millions of videos, we had a ton of content. We have millions of people visiting our network of websites. We were bigger and more successful than YouTube until they turned us off. All of a sudden we were just shut off from the entire search results in internet. And then as the, as the mobile wave came, unfortunately man, I mean in 2008 I lost my job because we ran out of money.

22:35 So the site lingered on for another year or two after that. It came on and off. Most of the network got taken offline. It most of the sites lasted a little bit longer, some sites longer than others, but eventually everything got taken off the Internet. You can no longer access any of this stuff today. We had an opportunity to be what periscope is today, what YouTube is today. We had an opportunity to possibly even be something bigger. We’re a true and real competitor to Google. We had $50 million to get us started and it was Brad’s personal money, you know, that made this a reality and you know, we got screwed on so many levels. It was mostly the results of anti competitive behavior from Google. Had Google not delisted our sites from search results, we would have been on equal footing with YouTube had they not paid off content creators.

23:30 We would’ve been on equal footing with YouTube had they not banned desks from their advertising platform, we would have made them millions of dollars. That’s the most ironic thing about all of this is they lost money by banning us. They knew, they make that money up in the longterm because they would basically steal all that traffic and all those content creators had nowhere else to go. So they had to go to YouTube. When I hear or see people on the internet make the argument like, oh, just go create your own YouTube, go create your own platform. Well, I did. I literally did. I created my own alternative to YouTube. I did it with Brad Greenspan. I did it with one new one who is one of the original architects of my space. I literally worked with a team of nearly a hundred people to try and create a competitor to YouTube and YouTube and Google dismantled our entire organization and made us uninvestible and killed our company.

24:28 So I am not a millionaire by any means or any stretch of the imagination. And I should have been, and Brad Greenspan, I don’t even know where he is anymore. I can’t even get in touch with the guy. Maybe you’ll see this. I have no idea. I would love to talk to them again because I miss him. He was a visionary. He was legitimately a tech visionary and he saw where we’re at today all the way back. Then he knew that these tech companies were going to do what they’re doing to us now. He knew that they were going to surveil us. He knew they were going to spy on us. He knew all of this was going to happen and he was doing his best to create a free speech platform to prevent that from happening. You can get mad at Brad for whatever reason, you know, because of how things went down with live video and what happened with live universe and that whole company and yes, I’m sure he might owe somebody money or back taxes who freaking cares at this point, like at the end of the day, the reason why the company failed was not Brad’s fault.

25:28 It was because we couldn’t secure an investor and we couldn’t secure an investor because we got cut off our ad revenue. You got all of our sites you’ve listed off Google and we were the victims of the anti competitive behavior. From what I understand, Brad has routinely tried to sue Google for this and has tried to take this case to court several times. I don’t know if those cases are still pending or what’s going on with them. Most of the time those cases have been shut down, but now that the Trump administration is investigating them and is willing to look into antitrust behavior, they need to go after Google and they need to look at what happened with live universe and live video because that is a perfect example of why you cannot compete with YouTube. You cannot compete with Google. They will delist list you from search engines.

26:16 They will prevent you from making money by not allowing you to participate in their advertising network. They will do everything they can to make sure that no one sees your website. That is the reality that we are living in. That is the reality of the monopoly. That is Google and them being in control of both search and the probably the largest advertising network on the entire Internet. So not only do they own, not only do they own search, but they own advertising on the Internet. They own three things. That one company should probably not be allowed to dominate all three of those things. So now we live in this weird dystopian reality where YouTube is being censored. Content creators on YouTube can’t even get their videos out there not being recommended. You see people like Tim Pool, you see Luke Ridowsky from year change being demonetized. You see people like antiwar protesters having their videos taken down and do monetize and having their content deleted.

27:18 You have people who are historians and teachers who are trying to educate people about actual Nazi-ism from actual world war two and they’re having their content deleted. Google is actively trying to suppress the public. They’re actively trying to interfere in the 2020 election. They’re actively doing everything that they can to prevent competition and competitors. It is because of Google that I am not a millionaire just because of Google. That live video no longer exists and Brad Greenspan has gone into hiding. I don’t even know where he is. I don’t really know how to tell people this. Like I’ve been sitting on this story, I’ve been under NDAs, I’ve been thinking about all of this stuff for a really long time and I’ve been wanting to tell this story. You know, there’s, there were couple people that actually survived this whole onslaught. One of those companies was actually Justin TV and they had to pivot away from live streaming to video games to create twitch.

28:20 And then they were able to get acquired. And that was the only reason why they were successful is they had to pick a particular market and go after the video game market and pretty much abandoned all their other ambitions because they probably realized they couldn’t compete with Google either. And they probably saw what happened to live video and they probably realized, Hey, we’ve got to find another path. You could make it similar arguments about Ustream and some of these other streaming websites that also didn’t become anything. They ultimately failed or fell into oblivion. I don’t really know what happened for these sites. I’m the only one that made it. The only one that survived was Justin. That eventually became twitch because they picked video games as a category and just eliminated everything else. And YouTube didn’t really go after one market like that. They went after all video on the internet, so Google let them kind of have video games and that was it.

29:20 And then they got acquired by Amazon and that’s kind of the end of that story at the end of the day with the leak that we just had from project Veritas, you know, let me read this now. This is what we’re dealing with with Google now. This is from a lead to Google document. If a representation is factually accurate, can it still be algorithmic unfairness? Yes. For example, imagine that a Google image query for CEO’s shows PR preliminarily men, even if it were a factually accurate representation of the world, it would be our ethic unfairness because it would reinforce a stereotype about the role of women in leadership positions. However, factual accuracy may affect product policies, positions on whether or how it should be addressed. In some cases it may be appropriate to take no action if the system accurately affects current reality. While in other cases it may be desirable to consider how we might help society reach a more fair and equitable state, the either product intervention or broader corporate social responsibility efforts.

30:23 In other words, Google is now saying that they are changing their search engine algorithms to no longer reflect facts, but rather someone’s opinion of what is fair and equitable. We no longer are participating in a YouTube Google experiment where content is weighted or judged based on the quality or accuracy or factual nature of the content. We now live in a world where there is an executive at Google, our teams of executives at Google making decisions about what is not or what is fair or what is equitable, and then changing the algorithms for how search works to prevent the searcher from seeing what is factually accurate and instead seeing a representation of the world that the executives that Google want you to see. We are now living in a false reality where fake news, where propaganda, where content that is being pushed by the mainstream media, that is an accurate content that’s being pushed by political activists that is inaccurate, is now being rewarded because it is unfair to not reward fake news and these, you know, activists and we have to make it equitable and we have to fight facts and we have to fight reality to make the world appear to be different so that we can effect change to then create this equality.

31:54 So it’s this really kind of like backwards screwed up mentality where they’re saying, oh, in order to make things fair we have to censor a bunch of people and change facts to make it look like reality is different than what it factually is. Well, that’s not the, there’s nobody that reelected at Google. There’s no elected representatives. There is no democracy here. There’s nothing that says Google. Hey, I want you to determine what is and is not real for me. That’s not what Google’s purpose is as a search engine, as an advertising platform or as a video sharing website. So we’ve reached this point where all of the things that Brad Greenspan was trying to fight and all of the censorship that we knew was coming, the data scandals, all the crap that’s been happening in the last 11 years is a reality. Now, you can’t compete with YouTube because YouTube will just call up their bosses at Google and say, Hey, this guy’s actually getting some competition going and they’re competing with us fairly.

33:09 It’s time to turn them off and that’s what they do and that’s what they’ve been doing to countless startups. Probably if I had to guess, the number of companies that have been affected by Google’s anti competitive behavior is in the millions. I am not exaggerating because I’ve witnessed companies including live video, including my personal experience. I’ve witnessed other companies, other startups also be affected by this. In fact, my next startup that I went and ran, which was in the wordpress space and I was selling themes and products, I bootstrapped that company into $1 million in revenue. No, that did not make me a millionaire. I had to pay salaries and my team and actually keep the company running. I didn’t get to keep the money. So even that company got affected by Google because Google made search engine changes that affected all wordpress websites on the entire Internet.

34:04 They direct all sites that we’re no longer responsive, that no longer worked on mobile sites. So now when you search for anything on Google, you are only seeing results for mobile optimized websites. That’s it. You will not see the Internet like pre 2013, 2014. So the entire Internet from before 2013 2014 is gone from search results. You cannot find it because it doesn’t work on a mobile phone. So I profited off this selling themes that helped people make their websites mobile friendly and responsive. And that was like the main selling point of my products because I was trying to help people bring their websites into the future, into this modern present where they can actually still show up in search results. But I was punished for that because I had millions upon millions of back links and sites that were using my software that we’re linking to me.

35:03 At one point, I believe it was over 74 million and after a Google search change, that number went down to less than 12 million overnight, so all the backlinks, all the websites that were linking to my site, that boosted my rank, that gave my site a good search cloud. This was all organic. I did not use tricks or anything deceptive. This was all organic traffic. These were all organic backlinks and all of a sudden Google just decided I’m turning it off and they did. So guess what happened? My search traffic completely plummeted. It pivoted, it changed all my numbers started coming in from other places. It devastated some of my sales from my us customers because all of a sudden I stopped getting traffic from the United States. I literally used to get phone calls from Google executives who would call me saying, our computer system is estimated that if you run ads on your website, you should be making two, $3,000 a month.

36:04 Well, I didn’t want to run ads on my website because I was selling my own product. Why would I advertise other products on my website? It didn’t make sense. That wasn’t the intention or purpose of my website. It was an ecommerce website selling a product. So I didn’t want to advertise other people’s stuff. I would get called on a regular basis from Google ad execs begging me to put Google ads on my website. I told them like, hey, like this doesn’t make sense. So finally I conceded and put the ads on my free user forum. Then I start getting calls saying, Hey, well, your numbers aren’t high enough and they’re not matching our predictions. It was like, I told you like this wasn’t gonna work. Like people aren’t on my website to buy other people’s products. They’re on my website to buy my product. It’s basically like Google is basically running like a mafia.

36:57 Like you basically have to give them their cut, otherwise they’re not gonna let you play and they’re going to screw with your search traffic. So what ended up happening to me, like I said, I lost most of my u s search traffic. I ended up selling the company to a company in India because most of my traffic all of a sudden started coming from India. It made sense like at the time, like that’s what I had to do. But in the longterm, like now that I look back on it, like not that I regret selling my company, I sold at the right moment, but like I shouldn’t have had to have sold it. Had Google not done this, I would’ve continued to make money for my us customers. I would have continued to grow my u s customer base. I don’t know why. I had to receive phone calls from Google executive asking me to run ads on my ecommerce site.

37:47 Like I don’t know why I had to deal with that. I don’t know why they changed their search engines to basically send me traffic from India instead of us customers that I had had. I don’t know why they deleted all of my back links or at least the vast majority of them. I don’t know why any of these decisions happen. They didn’t do anything to help the open internet. They didn’t do anything to help wordpress. By doing this, they basically de ranked every wordpress installing the entire internet by these actions, so it didn’t help anybody who had their own website powered by wordpress. I was not the only person affected by this. There were millions of other websites that were running wordpress that were affected by these same search engine. Algorithm changes. People lost their livelihoods, they lost their jobs, they lost their companies. I had to let my team go.

38:41 They lost their jobs after the company sold. This has a direct impact on millions of people globally around the world who can’t compete with Google. They can’t. They literally can’t because if they tried to, they will be d listed. They will be down ranked, they will be shadow band, they will be demonetized. You cannot compete with Google. Google is a complete and total monopoly and you cannot compete with them. I cannot compete with them. I have tried multiple times to compete with Google and they have destroyed every startup and every project that I’ve pretty much ever worked on in the last 10 years, maybe even longer. I don’t know what the answer is to this other than we potentially need government regulations. The government needs to step in and do something and investigate this. Google needs to be broken up. There’s no other logical solution here because a single company should not be able to use their ability to change and manipulate search results to eliminate competition that is wrong.

39:44 They are an advertising company. They’re a search company. They’re a product company or a services company. They’re a cloud provider. They’re a YouTube like video hosting platform. Like how many different areas can this company be involved in? Like how big does a corporation have to get until it gets to the point where they’re controlling reality and they are interfering in democracy in our country and they’re doing it openly. Embracingly we’re going to sensor people. Yeah, we’re going to, you know, we’re making YouTube more politically correct by only promoting the mainstream media. That’s what they’re doing for anyone who ever makes the argument, well, Google can do what they want because remember I blog, no Google can’t do whatever they want. They are anti competitive. They are a monopoly. This is against the law. Previous to like the last hundred years, it was illegal in the United States of America for a company to do anything that was against the public.

40:43 Good companies were shut down on a regular basis by the u s government for doing anything against the public good. What Google is doing right now is against the public good. They are censoring us. They are violating our rights to privacy. They are violating our rights to free speech. They are being anti competitive than their behavior. They’re destroying businesses. They’re destroying competition. They will not allow anyone to compete with them and they are flexing their arm every time anyone tries and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop them. There is no technological innovation that is going to out Google Google at this point. They control search. As long as they control search, they control the vast majority of what the Internet sees and how people get access to information and that is the reality of the world we are living in now is the majority of people believe whatever they see and read on Google.

41:38 Even though Google has admitted that they are changing their search results to create fairness and equability or whatever the crap, like what does that even mean? Nobody knows. Like honestly nobody knows what the hell is going on in these executives head because they’re so ideological and they’re so insane and there’s so out of touch with reality that there are like this fringe political, whatever. I, I can’t even call it the left or the right because the ideology of these people is not left or right. It’s just insanity. They think they’re gods. They think they’re the super admins of the Internet and they’re not. They’re just freaking executives that work at some major tech company who are flexing their muscle in power, who are creating an anti competitive network that have pretty much destroyed the open internet. Like these people are not good people. They are not doing good for the rest of the Internet.

42:33 These people are creating products and services that are destroying the livelihoods of millions of Americans and people globally around the world so that they can continue to stay in power and get people to vote for the people that they want you to vote for. This is the reality of what Google is. This is the reality of why you cannot compete with Google. And I am telling you this, as someone who has tried, who worked for a company that had $50 million and failed simply because Google cut us off for not solving the same problems they still can’t solve to this day, they still can’t solve their content issues, their pedophile issues. They still can’t solve these issues. Even with advanced artificial intelligence, they can’t solve these problems. So why is Google allowed to have the same problems, but they’re treated differently than the rest of the Internet? Why are they allowed to decide what is in it is not content? Google is not God. They are not a moral authority. They are not anybody. They’re just a harp puration trying to make money and they are destroying the livelihoods of everyday Americans and people around the world and they are now interfering and going to interfere in the 2020 election to try and influence people to vote a certain way and that should be illegal. They are doing something that is against the public. Good. Google needs to be broken up.

43:59 Thanks for watching another uncensored episode of Techpost.io. I’m your host Trent Lapinski, and don’t forget to subscribe to us on YouTube and hit that little notification bell next to the subscribe button so that you can get notified when we release new episodes. You can also find us on iTunes, Google play, and other social networks, including Twitter and Facebook at tech post io, and you can find me personally at Trent Lipinski. Once again, I’m Trent Lapinski and this has been another great episode of Tech Posts. Dot Io. We’ll see you soon.