#1792 - Daryl Davis & Bill Ottman

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

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

Daryl Davis (0:14)

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

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Beautiful purple shirt, I love it.

Bill Ottman (0:18)

Thanks for having us.

Joe Rogan (0:19)

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

How's it going?

Bill Ottman (0:34)

It's going. I mean, there's sort of a whole landscape of alternative networks emerging. And so you've got this spectrum of apps where you've, like I think of, I put everything through a litmus test when I'm thinking of an alternative network.

Basically, is it transparent? Does it publish their source code? Most of these alternative apps, I don't need to name names, but I could. They don't publish their source code.

So you can't look at the algorithms to see what's happening. You can't see if there's spyware in there, if they have Google Analytics little nasty stuff that-

Joe Rogan (1:07)

So you're talking about Getter.

Bill Ottman (1:08)

Getter. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:10)

Cause I've found out that-

Bill Ottman (1:11)

Parler, Rumble, and now I'm not trying to trash these people. I think that the free speech stuff is good. But some of their terms aren't even free speech.

So, you know, free speech policy is essential. So I absolutely respect any network that is putting forward a free speech policy. But if you can't have free speech policy with sketchy algorithms and closed source code, because then we don't know if you're soft censoring, shadow banning, we don't know what's happening in the newsfeed behind the scenes.

Joe Rogan (1:47)

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

Bill Ottman (1:52)

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

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

And then you've also got, do they pay creators fairly? So you've got these check marks that you go through with each, but open source is key. The future, there is nothing without open source. Any app, if they're claiming to be an alternative and they're not open source, they're not in the same conversation. It's a completely different animal and they should not be taken seriously because they're not being transparent with the world. So and then you get into decentralization and actually building an app that, so Google says don't be evil, but it's really can't be evil. Make it, we want to make it impossible for us to even take down our network at all.

And that's why the like immutable distributed systems like blockchains and, you know, Tor and all of the IPFS, all of these different decentralized systems are emerging. And we're in, we're interacting with them. We're not fully decentralized yet. So, but that's, there's like a progression that a lot of apps in the Web3 slash decentralized web space are moving towards. So, okay.

Joe Rogan (3:17)

And so Daryl, to fill people in on you, you've been on the podcast before and you have an incredible history. You're a brilliant musician and you have personally converted, what's the number now? It's more than 200 Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis. I mean, we talked about these guys giving you their Klan outfits and retiring because they met you and just because you had reasonable conversations with them made them realize how stupid these ideologies that they had somehow or another been captivated by.

Daryl Davis (3:51)

I mean, at the end of the day, you know, a missed opportunity for dialogue is a missed opportunity for conflict resolution. It's as simple as that. But it's not just having a dialogue or a conversation or a debate. It's the way that we have it, how we communicate, you know, that makes it effective. Like, for example, you know, I've been to 61 countries on six continents. I've played in all 50 states. So all that is to say that I've been exposed to a multitude of skin colors, ethnicities, religions, cultures, ideologies, et cetera. And all of that has shaped who I've become. Now, all that travel does not make me a better human being than somebody else. It just gives me a better perspective of mass humanity.

And what I've learned is that no matter how far I've gone from our own country, right next door to Canada or Mexico or halfway around the globe, no matter how different the people I encounter may be, they don't look like me, they don't speak my language, they don't worship as I do or whatever, I always conclude at the end of the day that we all are human beings.