J. Burden Show Ep. 338: Joshua Moon 2025-09-25

0:00:03
Unknown_01: It's going to cause a tree fall 5,000 miles away, man.

Unknown_00: Ain't nobody seeing nobody. Man, it's like you don't even know, man. It's like you're falling into this world, man. And you got like, it's like that, like a dust of wind, man. It's like a dang pin on me, man. It don't matter.

0:00:37
Unknown_02: All right, Josh Moon, welcome to the Jay Burden Show. How are you doing, man?

Unknown_00: Pretty good. How are you?

Unknown_02: Doing well. This is kind of a weird time to record this. We're not really going to mention it because it's still ongoing, but we're recording this basically two hours after the unfortunate assassination of Charlie Kirk. Obviously won't get into that, but just to kind of put this contextually and when this episode comes out, we'll be obviously we'll know more information. I've decided not to address it until we actually know what's happening. Expect kind of a 48 hour rule for me there, but I am obviously aware. But anyway, Josh Moon, obviously I'm familiar with who you are and the website that you unleashed upon the world, but some of my audience may not be. So who are you and what do you do?

0:01:09
Unknown_00: I host, primarily, I am known because I host a website called The Kiwi Farms. I also do a podcast called Mad at the Internet at maddie.live. And my website is controversial for... Every conceivable reason, basically.

0:01:46
Unknown_00: It depends on who you are as to why you don't like us, but it allows dissemination of public information, even if the subject would prefer if that information was not public. It allows critical discussion about everybody, but in particular, transgenders who consider that our discussion about them violates their human rights for some reason. And then politically speaking, it leans right wing and sort of identitarian, but it's a grab bag. It's it's anybody can register and most people register just to talk about locales and stuff. So you have a lot of people who disagree with each other on it, but yeah. Basically that we have survived some of the most intense deplatforming efforts ever. I have seen deplatforming at levels I've never heard of for any other legal service. They pulled out stops for the forum that you would see warranted against the child pornography website, if even that, because we know that. Pornhub sells child pornography, and that's been proven in the courts.

0:02:29
Unknown_00: So we literally get treated worse than animal torture websites and child pornography websites simply because we host discussions that some don't like.

0:03:07
Unknown_02: Yeah, it was an interesting thing. Obviously, I won't say I don't have an account. I'm not a habitual user of KiwiFarms, but it is a useful resource. One, if you're trying to find something about a controversial figure, or two, if you're trying to get a comprehensive rundown on an internet happening, it's the place to go. To that point, I never really understood why...

Unknown_02: Kiwi farms was singled out so much because look like it's old school internet, right? You're going to read slurs. You're going to read things that are not, you could put out a network television, but it's not.

0:03:39
Unknown_02: You know what I'm saying? It's not that bad, right? Like in a world where LiveLeak was still on the internet, Kiwi Farms being the target of so much hate never really made sense to me. So do you think that's, you know, as far as why the powers that be went after you, do you think it was the trans angle or do you think there was something more to it?

Unknown_00: Most of the trouble that we received came from either an individual who had information on the site he did not want on the site or from, um, gender people, basically. Um, there, there is, I mean, there's every kind of objectionable content on the forum.

0:04:21
Unknown_00: Uh, You know, because even when it comes to Lollicon and stuff, if we have a thread about an artist who draws Lollicon like Shadman, we have his art on the site, which is a protected use. And it's completely legal. I mean, Lollicon as a whole is legal, but we limit it to that. As far as like live leak, we have a thread for posting videos of people dying. I'm not a big fan of it. I don't understand it, but people use it. But none of that, ironically, has been what causes the issues. What causes the issues is that somebody has a controversy. And unlike with 4chan and unlike with Twitter, even, if somebody has an issue, they do something stupid and then people react to it. It doesn't go away on the Kiwi Farms. There's not a point where that thread gets bumped off the catalog and it disappears. And even with Twitter, it's like, you know, there's however many billions of tweets on Twitter. Those things get forgotten eventually.

0:04:58
Unknown_00: If you are...

0:05:32
Unknown_00: For instance, a multi-millionaire, transgender Google network engineer who's very highly connected, and you were credibly accused of raping somebody during a business trip to Geneva, and that goes up onto your thrive in the Kiwi farms, there's only one way to take it down. And to take it down is to take down the entire forum, which if you're a very well-connected and wealthy person, you may be inclined to do so because it directly impacts your bottom line. So that's usually what does it. It's just like either highly dedicated individuals who are willing to break laws to cause the site to go down or highly dedicated individuals who have clout that are able to cause enough outrage to cause problems for service providers to get us taken down.

Unknown_02: So, yeah, obviously, you know, you've mentioned, shall we say, the inciting motivation. But when we're talking about the sort of the degree to which you have been deplatformed, obviously, there's been and I hate to say it like this, but sort of like the basic level, you know, when anyone gets deplatformed, the stuff that happens. But you have faced sort of like an extra level of that as regards payment processors. So this is a little more technical. So do you want to explain first, you know, what a payment processor is, why that matters, and then how you've been targeted?

0:06:26
Unknown_00: I think actually it's a more pervasive issue than people are aware of. Certainly anybody who's far enough right will come into this issue where they are unable to send and receive payments if they receive any kind of negative attention or if anyone even bothers to report them, basically. There are many layers to sending and receiving a payment online. But in the United States, our payment system is completely and totally captured by the card networks. And there are four card networks. It is MasterCard, Visa Card, American Express, and Diners Club, which is Discover. And these payment networks... I want to say more than 80 or 90% of all internet commerce. And they facilitate more than half of all consumer purchases in the entire country. So if you want to send and receive payments, you must use a card. And if you are an internet business, you basically have two options. You can either use a card or you can receive cryptocurrency. And because cryptocurrency has a poor reputation, even after... However many years, not many people still use cryptocurrency to this day.

0:07:52
Unknown_00: So when it comes to actually processing a credit card payment, there are many layers. There's up to seven layers. They can each be different companies. But as everything has become more monopolized, the number of companies that handle multiple functions in this process have increased. The most popular well-known payment processor in the world is Stripe. And Stripe is actually so big that they processed over $1.4 trillion of payments in 2024, which is more than 1.2% of the entire world's GDP.

0:08:26
Unknown_00: So even in the field of payment processors, there is some diversity in payment processors. But even there, you're basically talking about Stripe and Square and that's it. There's a bunch of small ones, but a lot of companies use Stripe and Square. And you need to integrate these tools into your commerce platform. So if you use WooCommerce, there might be 10 plugins that you can find by looking at the WooCommerce payment network system. So getting into problems with any of these companies is a big deal. And they can blacklist you.

0:09:05
Unknown_00: at various levels. MasterCard manages a list called Match. VisaCard has its own block list. There's a company called First Warning Services or something. And that's actually much more powerful than I realized because they own...

Unknown_00: Um, Zelle, Zelle is a, is a direct property of first warning, which all the credit card companies use to process your, um, your credit information. And I received it like as an example, I got blacklisted by a company and I was told that it was because of something on first warning. And then I asked first warning, why did I get banned from this payment processor? And they just sent me a copy of my credit report and said, based on this information, We made the determination we have to block your account. So and of course, I didn't include like a little note from anybody saying that this guy is like a racist or whatever. So it cleared up. No, no.

0:09:50
Unknown_00: It's just opaque and opaque by design. And you have no right to know why certain decisions are being made.

Unknown_02: Josh, I feel like I need to ask this just in the interest of fairness. Is your credit so astonishingly bad, just millions of dollars in debt, your third repossessed hellcat taken by the bank that you can't get a card? Is that the issue?

0:10:28
Unknown_00: I have an 800 credit score, sir.

Unknown_00: I have pleased the bankers through my timely payments.

Unknown_02: So again, it's pretty clear that this is targeting. If there were no name attached to your file, I'm sure you would have no problem getting a credit card. It's absurd.

Unknown_00: I have no issue having a credit card. I have a wallet full of credit cards.

Unknown_00: People don't realize this, but I would encourage you to look at this yourself. If you take out your wallet and go to your debit card, you might think, well, my debit card, that's not a credit card because it's going directly from my bank account. but it will definitely have a MasterCard or VisaCard logo on it. It's handled the exact same way that credit card is. And I bet you that your debit card says Visa on it because in a world of monopolies where you have basically a duopoly, a MasterCard and VisaCard process, I think 80% of all transactions, it might be 90%, and then Diners Club and Amex fight over the other 10%. In this world of monopolies, Visa card actually has a stronger monopoly on specifically debit cards than MasterCard. And there's actually an ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Visa from the DOJ because the DOJ alleges that Visa card implements anti-competitive practices that force banks to try and get their customers to use a specific number of Visa card swipes per year or something. So even there, it's like... Visa doesn't want banks offering alternative payment systems like Zelle to their customers. They want them using Visa debit cards.

0:11:49
Unknown_02: Well, fair enough. You obviously know more about this than I do. So when we're talking about, you know, any sort of these deplatforming, right, whether it's on social media, debanking, the sort of stock, you know, SJW in heavy square quotes response was always, well, why don't you start your own? If you don't like the moderation policies on then Twitter, why don't you start your own social media platform? And obviously that's a ridiculous assertion. It's not made in good faith. But how complicated would it be to sort of start your own solution to this problem?

0:12:38
Unknown_00: Oh, God, the payments or the websites?

Unknown_02: The payments. We'll start with that, right?

Unknown_00: Okay. You're talking about $100 million investment, like right off the bat. I remember a statistic. I don't know if this is accurate to this day, but I remember to get licensed to be a payment facilitator or payment network in every state, it's like a $70 million initial investment. And then you also have to actually...

0:13:20
Unknown_00: I think you have to be a bank. And if you have to be a bank, that's another like $5 billion just to get off the ground. You have to hold $5 million to make it work. And then you have to think about how you're going to make it financially successful. And then there's additional complications. So it's not just that... You never know who's making decisions. So it's very easy to blame MasterCard. But we don't know... Like, for instance, with the Steam debacle, where a bunch of pornographic games were forcibly removed from Steam, we actually have no idea still, I think, which payment network was responsible for it. So we don't know, actually, if it was MasterCard, VisaCard. And in some instances, I remember that a guy called Dick Masterson made a Patreon alternative called New Project 2. And New Project 2 was deplatformed. by the payment networks. And after hassling the banks enough, he actually got them to admit it was Discover Card.

0:14:01
Unknown_00: So keep that in mind that a payment processor like Stripe has agreements not only with all four card networks and more because they do business with the Chinese too. They have agreements with acquiring banks and there is an acquiring bank on either side. So you have the client's bank and then also the acquiring bank that It handles that payment processor. So Stripe has their own collection of acquiring banks. And they're liable to all of those banks and all those payment networks. So if one of them, even the one that only has less than 5% market share in the industry, says, we don't like that customer, get rid of them. They have to. So it's not just... individual terms of services, you're mutually and individually liable to every terms of service, and you'll never be told why unless you really hassle them. So even if you were to make your own credit card network, you were to make your own burden card or whatever, you would still have to accept payments like the merchants would through a payment processor. So you would just be adding another set of contracts to their regulatory burden and their business burdens. And they would still be banning people at the request of Discover.

0:15:18
Unknown_00: And then, also, as I mentioned, Visa has a monopoly when it comes to debit cards. You would have to convince banks to issue credit cards or debit cards as a burden card. So you would have to not only make your own payment network, you would have to make your own acquiring bank, and then you would have to make your own payment processor, and then you would have to find people willing to accept your card and only your card, which has no market share, because you wouldn't be able to Use only your payment processor to accept the MasterCard because... And if you did have one that accepted multiple, you have no... It's the same problem. Nothing's been solved because they still would have to accept marching orders from Discover, which has 5% market share. So it doesn't solve anything, really. There is no... free market solution to this. The free market solution would have been cryptocurrency, but cryptocurrency was very beautifully corralled and harnessed by the government. And it has an extremely poor reputation. So people just choose not to use it.

0:16:02
Unknown_02: It's sort of an interesting thing.

0:16:41
Unknown_02: One of the biggest lies of, and honestly, you saw this during COVID, but you see it again with crypto from the libertarian point of view, is the idea that like, oh, if you just give people the opportunity for freedom, they'll take it. And very clearly, that's not true. Right. That would be a little bit inconvenient. And so people don't go for it. Right. You know that you could conceivably, right, have, you know, run everything on crypto. And there are many Bitcoin maximalists who will tell you about it. But you run into the adoption issue very quickly and look like, you know. dabble in this space.

Unknown_00: Cryptocurrency saved my ass. It's very unfortunate that despite having been dealing with crypto for probably over 10 years now, I'm not super rich. And it's because I've been spending crypto the entire time to feed myself and pay rent, right? So the true issue with crypto is that it doesn't have market saturation. I probably get less than one-tenth of what I would get if I could accept credit cards. Um, and it's entirely just because of how that onboard the onboarding process. I don't know if you've ever done this. I assume that you have, but if you try to go to crack in or whatever, and you try to set up an account, they literally, these days they have you scan your passport or photo ID, and then you have to hold the app out in front of your face and like, look left, look right, smile, frown on command so that they can do biometrics of your face. Um, And it's just like the most humiliating... I call it the Goy Shuffle. So they make you do the Goy Shuffle. And it's the most humiliating thing on the planet. It's like deliberately humiliating on the front end and on the back end.

0:18:09
Unknown_02: Like if you have any gains to report, doing the taxes for it is its own special humiliation ritual.

Unknown_00: Oh yeah, there's a special form for that. And they made me... They gave me a form and made me list all my holdings, even if I hadn't sold any. So me not wanting to get fucked, I did. I dutifully reported to the IRS all my crypto holdings, much to the chagrin of my users. But it's not that much. But at the same time, it's like, Yeah, they made the entire thing just so awful. And they did such a great job. You know, sometimes you just got to sit there and think, damn, you guys really fucked this up. You did a great job fucking this up. Good job.

0:18:41
Unknown_02: Yeah, I know what you mean, where it's like it's sort of like, you know, if you're the caveman getting eaten by a saber tooth tiger, you're like, damn, it's a pretty good predator. You know, it ruins your life.

Unknown_01: Clever girl. Clever girl.

Unknown_02: Exactly. Yeah. Well, and it's like to your point about if you did try to build your own system, you basically have to vertically integrate your whole fully developed economy. So it's basically when someone says start your own, they're basically telling you, well, why don't you create your own entire economy from like the banking sector up? And it's like, okay – is that mathematically possible, right?

0:19:23
Unknown_00: Like if you had unlimited resources, could you do it? Technically, but it's trying to do it. I don't know. Maybe easy card is coming in to save the day.

Unknown_02: Something tells me I'll have a hard time securing credit, but who knows?

Unknown_00: I'll be the first in fucking line to get an easy card.

Unknown_02: Honestly, me too. It'd be funny. Well, yeah, man, the, it is kind of crazy because, you know, you mentioned the fact that,

0:20:03
Unknown_02: A lot of guys on, shall we say, the extreme right have gotten deplatformed this hard. And as much as I hate to say it, with some of the guys who've gotten completely deplatformed, you kind of get it, right? You're like, okay, this dude planned a terror attack. Okay, maybe I don't agree with the fact that you can't get a bank account, but you can at least kind of draw a line there. Whereas like in your case and in so many of the others, it's just weird, right? It seems like the, you know, the regime just picked out a few guys and decided to just ruin their day. So just to kind of, obviously you've spoken about, you know, getting donations for the site, but how inconvenient is it to be debanked? I mean, that may be a stupid question, but I'm just asking you to kind of quantify that.

0:20:45
Unknown_00: I have a great story for this.

Unknown_00: So Uber, one of the first things I was ever banned from was PayPal. And I like to, after my big rant about how awful card networks are, I like to remind people that PayPal is actually the worst of the worst. There's nothing worse than PayPal. They are not regulated in any way, shape, or form. They're basically just like an LLC that can do whatever they want at any time. And they were one of the first things to ban me.

Unknown_02: I'll put it this way. I was in high school and I used to buy and sell designer clothes. Cause I lived near a factory outlet. Right. And I was what? 16, 17. They froze my account for a year and a half with $1,800 in it, which was literally all of the money I had for no reason. Right. And that was all the time for no reason. They just decide to ruin your life. And it's like, Oh, this is the capital you needed to, I don't know, get an apartment or whatever. It's like, yeah, sorry. It's your problem, but I'll throw it back to you.

0:21:19
Unknown_00: Yeah. So when they banned me, they so thoroughly banned me from their platform that if they recognize any card belonging to me, it gets denied even through other programs that use them as a payment handler. So I can't book Ubers using specific credit cards because they use PayPal. So I have to use special cards that they don't know about in order to book an Uber if I really need to.

0:22:00
Unknown_02: Well, it's just absurd, because it's like, what are you going to do if you can get an Uber, right? Is that going to increase the range of your evil scheme?

Unknown_00: I would like to make a distinction, though, because we use this term a lot, and I think it confuses people, because it is a misnomer.

Unknown_00: I'm not debanked. Now, I have lost bank accounts, as some people have, as Trump has, but... Banks actually have, and when I say banks, I mean financial institutions. It's very easy to confuse financial, like payment processor, financial service, financial institution. A financial institution is a bank or credit union. They are a company that holds money, basically. And when we talk about debanking, we talk, people generally think of a closed bank or credit union account, right? And in our country, we actually have a great amount of real competition in the banking sector when it comes to financial institutions. And there are many good credit unions and local banks that are awesome and will help you out. I happen to have accounts for all my businesses, including the Kiwi Farms with Old Glory Bank may have been phenomenal. So if you're properly debanked, either check your local small bank or credit union or go with Old Glory Bank. What they cannot do, however, is provide me a payment processor still. So I literally get checks in the mail and I have a guy that scans the checks with his phone app to deposit old school checks. And that's actually how I get a lot of a good chunk of the donations that we receive, probably as much as I get in crypto to show you how unpopular crypto is. Many people will simply go to the postal service and get me a money order for $100 and mail it and then it gets scanned and deposited. um the banking almost always however refers to denial of financial service such as stripe or or paypal yeah i'm glad you brought up uh glad you brought up paypal because uh i sort of forgot how mad i was at paypal until i heard you on the show and i was like you know what those guys they are the worst i'm not i'm not exaggerating

0:23:58
Unknown_02: Well, I'm like, I could think of like, obviously, you know, your case is much more serious than mine, but it is, it's the same experience. Like you've ever been banned. I had to use Facebook for work, right? Where you, you'll be kicked out and it's something you can use connected to a business, right? A large portion of your livelihood can be tied up in it and it is completely and totally unaccountable. Right. You're desperately trying to find what did I actually do wrong? Right. What can I do to solve this issue? And the answer is basically there is no answer. And it's when we decide to give you any sort of explanation. Right. It's just like you're you're dealing with just never to be clear.

0:24:55
Unknown_00: You're not sitting waiting. You'll never know. You can't sue to know. The main thing, and this always surprises people when I say it, so I say it a lot. The main thing that they like to pull is that you'll write them up and you'll ask, you've destroyed my business and my livelihood. Can I get an explanation? And they'll say that they've come to a final determination. This is not negotiable. They will not accept an appeal. They've already reviewed your case and it's over and done with. And if you really press them, they might use the term trade secret because technically what they're doing when they close your account is they're putting your data through a risk management scheme. And if you ever hear the position of risk manager, by the way, if you're interested in that jobs.now H1B stuff, I like to go through every so often and type in risk and see what positions are hiring Indians to determine if I can and cannot have a bank account or payment processor. Um, but quite literally making sure you cannot redeem SAR literally. Yeah. Uh, So the risk management process is a trade secret, which means that what they're saying when they ban you is that we have put your data into a computation, an algorithm, and we have detected elevated financial risk from you. And our process, our algorithm for determining this is a trade secret. And we can't tell you why we've banned you. Because to do so would be to potentially divulge information about how we detect credit card fraud to a credit card fraud stir. So you have no right to know. So they're not just saying, we don't like you, which is how it feels like. They're explicitly accusing you of financial crimes. Not explicitly, but implicitly implying that you're a financial fraud. a crimester and that you are involved either in some kind of terrorism business or sanctioned activity or, or a good old fashioned fraud where you're stealing your carding. So what they call it on the street, you're carding people.

0:27:05
Unknown_00: So they're, they're technically saying that you know, you would expect you have due process. You've been implicitly accused of a crime. So maybe there should be a due process element. No, it's a private entity. You have no constitutional rights whatsoever with a private entity. They have an at-will association with you, and it's up to them to decide if you are too risky or not. As I mentioned, because they all kind of operate by these same sets of rules, mutually and individually, with all these different companies... you have little luck looking elsewhere. The best thing, the absolute best you can hope for is that you'll bump into a guy who's deep into the business and he'll tell you exactly what to do. And if that ever happens, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's his ass.

0:27:40
Unknown_00: So, but, uh, yeah, I've not found one of those. So I've, uh, I'm cashing checks with a phone, but I've have heard the people say like, I know a guy and then the guy, we get into touch and he's like, nah, I can't help you. Yeah.

Unknown_02: Yeah, well, and it's one of the things – and forgive me for getting off on kind of a chin-scratching digression. But you mentioned the free market aspect of it. And oftentimes, particularly kind of like mainline conservatives and liberals get themselves really tied up in knots talking about like, oh – you know, is this system capitalist or is this system socialist? And the correct answer is like, well, both and neither, right? Like these terms don't mean anything anymore. You know, it's this like horrible, like amalgamation of like every horrible ideology of the 20th century. And so it's like, is it free market? And the answer is like, well, when it would screw you over for it to be free market, yes, it is. They have no obligations to you. It's an at-will association from their perspective. But also it's a controlled network. If you're not one of the big dogs, you can't get in. They're in bed with the government. And like, I think a lot of, you know, conservatives or right-wingers have those kind of anti-socialist pro-big business priors. And so, you know, they always want there to be that silver bullet of the market, you know, to blow this whole thing wide open. And in this case, it's like, look, man, like there is no market solution to this, right? These players have, you know, dug themselves in so deep like a tick that it's just a controlled sandbox. And unless there's some sort of should we say like outside shock, they're going to continue to keep that duopoly, if you see what I'm getting at.

0:29:35
Unknown_00: Yeah, there is some.

Unknown_00: It's such a it's such a Gordian knot and it needs a big old axe just to cleave through it. The issue is also in part, as you mentioned, that this is effectively a state sanctioned monopoly. The rules on financial regulation are so complicated that I doubt there is even a single person in the entire world who actually knows what the fuck the rules are. for being a credit card network. So you probably have multiple attorneys who do literally the most soulless automaton, the husk of men in brown suits who are accountant attorneys in MasterCard that handle one section of the bank regulation code each. And there's no way that anyone actually knows what's going on at any time. And it is possible that some of the censorship we see is that soulless corporate attorney, automaton number 47 knows that rule 47 D says this about pornographic content being distributed in our state. And therefore steam is legally in the wrong to do so. And so as a genuine risk precaution, it must be taken down. Yeah.

0:30:49
Unknown_00: But it could be something like that. And that kind of regulation makes it so that nobody can even penetrate the market because you actually do need a human experience and understanding of the law that's so great. How do you even find people for that job? You can't H-1B that. So in part, it is due to that. But then on the other hand, we've seen that even in instances where there's not a state-sanctioned monopoly, there is a monopoly of convenience. If you try to sell a birding card or Yeezy card or whatever, how many people would actually adopt that when we already have what quote-unquote works for the vast majority of people, for 90% of people? And we see that with YouTube because YouTube's real... asset is not its platform. Its platform sucks. Everyone hates YouTube. But what do they have? They have, what is it, 16 years of internet history? You know, petabytes of data on servers. And you can't replace that by just making a new a new video uploading platform. You cannot replace what's already there. And it's the same thing with MasterCard, VisaCard. It's both sanctioned as a monopoly by the state, which is very convenient for them, by the way, because I forgot to mention that the government can ask these four companies that are under its boot all the time anyways to do something that would circumvent the Constitution and due process, which I'm sure they do, because I think we...

0:32:31
Unknown_00: have actual proof of that from COVID. I think that the government did tell private companies to ban people from certain things. So they probably do that all the time. And it's very convenient for them because you don't have to go through the court system. So that's one part of it. But then the other part of it is People are lazy and they suck. And it's a very frustrating thing to me because, you know, you think of yourself as a solution maker, problem solver, like that scene in iRobot where Sonny stands over and all the robots come out and bask in his wisdom. And you kind of think, God, if I can just reach the people and let them know how terrible MasterCard is. But the truth is that they're all happy with their system. They got Apple Pay now. They put their credit cards in their phone. Now they pay with their phone. Yeah. They like their system. They don't want to change it.

0:33:07
Unknown_02: Well, I mean, to that point, right, we've seen that, you know, what was it? Was this Schwab, right? The guy, the boomers were all freaked out about a few years ago, right? The public private partnership, or it's like, you know, if government wants to get rid of you, you know, either, I guess, literally in some cases, or, you know, like, you know, kind of figuratively or socially, you know, there are ways to do it. So it's like, well, we didn't, we didn't make you. But we sort of sent a wink, wink, nudge, nudge email to all of the social media platforms. And like Alex Jones, you get yanked over an evening. Similarly, you see this kind of between us and the other Five Eyes nations, that if it would be technically illegal for us to do something, well, we'll get the Brits or someone else to do it. Again, it's like the rules exist for people like you and me, Josh, where it's like we have to do everything by the book. We have to make sure that we state all of our crypto holdings because if you don't, that's the thing they'll use to break you.

0:34:19
Unknown_02: For the other team, whoever you constitute that other team, they don't have to. So if you are, for whatever reason, unpopular with the powers that be, you almost need to be more on top of their rules than anyone else.

Unknown_02: And to your point about... It's very true. So many of these things are sort of perpetuated by just convenience. It's like, look, I'm guilty of the same thing. I use all of the normal payment processors and cards because they're easy.

0:34:57
Unknown_02: And if I... was donating money to your website you know i'm i use crypto more so it wouldn't be that difficult for me and it's like oh you know there's this website i use and in order to go out of my way to give money which is already a relatively small percentage but now i have to you know as you say do the goy shuffle you know show off your full face and name your your government id to do so it's like you're just numbers for this

Unknown_00: Google has put out studies that show that the average person on the internet expects a page to load in 0.5 seconds. And when you talk about getting money from people, every time they have to do something, every time there's another thought in their head between wanting to spend money and spending money, that's called friction. So the idea with every e-commerce platform is is to reduce friction between the impulse and the actuality of it as much as possible, which is why you have things like the Buy Now button on Amazon. Because you think, oh, man, I need this. And then you click the Buy Now button. Well, then you might think, oh, well, I didn't need to spend $50 on that book. I'm probably not even going to read it. But the friction between... That regret and canceling the order is like five different clicks, whereas the friction between want and buy is one button press. So that's how the average consumer is trained. And when it comes to donating to a site, well, it's like I can't. Number one, I have issues with the site's performance all the time because I don't I have to self host everything. I have to self-host things. People don't even know exist in the stack of how the internet works because IMD platform so thoroughly. So I have really poor performance in general. So if there's like seven different things you have to click and entire...

0:36:20
Unknown_00: explanations like died books on how you get money to me. Like you're talking about loading a page. It takes five seconds. Then they have to wait for it to load and read the thing and then click this other button and then do the, like, so only the most dedicated people will do that. And of course I'm very thankful for those that go out of their way, but I understand that, um, I'm not under a delusion that there's an enormous number of people who can't be bothered to go to the post office and get a money order and put it in an envelope with a stamp and mail it. You know what I mean?

0:36:55
Unknown_02: I mean, I've been making fun of those people. And then the moment you said, too lazy to go to the post office, I realized I have had a package in my car I was supposed to take to the post office like two weeks ago and still haven't done it. Right?

0:37:35
Unknown_00: And that's for something that's like actually... I bought shit off Amazon that arrived so quickly that I, it's a stack of stuff in my hallway that has been there so long. I don't need it and I can't return it anymore. And I don't, I don't know what to do with it. I'm thinking of sending it to goodwill. So it's like, you can only be so frustrated at the laziness of mankind because it's just human nature, you know? And the other thing is, um, well,

0:38:08
Unknown_00: credit cards caused a lot of this too. The whole reason why credit cards took off is because of credit purchases. Back in the day before the 90s, the overwhelming majority of people did not buy things on credit. So you would walk into a store and you'd think, I've got to buy groceries for this entire month. I have $100 to accomplish it. And when you're thinking, I have $100 on my bank account, And I need to buy groceries. You start making economic decisions. You start thinking, I can't afford this. And you put it back, but then came the credit card and you're like, Oh, well, I really want this. So I'll just put it on the card and I'll pay it off next week. And then, you know, and that's, that is why it, accelerated market velocity, which is a very fun term. The money velocity went up as people started buying things they couldn't afford. And that was a very good thing. Everyone was quite pleased with this development. So they had to use credit cards for these micro credit lines. And then that just became the norm. And you had to use a credit card to accomplish it. And of course, everybody, all the merchants encourage this behavior. Of course, of course, we proudly, we accept MasterCard and Visa cards. So you can buy stuff on credit here.

0:39:18
Unknown_00: And then, you know, that's just, then it shifted online and they would have absolutely no reason to develop an alternative to this thing that's already giving them extra money. It's getting people to pay you with money that they get next week. So they had no incentive whatsoever to say, well, we don't want to keep using credit cards with the internet. It was the best thing ever. Like, oh man, they can use their credit cards on the internet now. They can buy even more from the comfort of their own home. Wonderful. And now here we are 35 years later and we're all slaves to the mark of the beast and there's nothing to be done about it.

Unknown_02: I mean, you even see that with the popularization of these. They call them like microloans, right? Like the infamous burrito loan.

0:39:59
Unknown_00: It's crazy. You go to Walmart and you buy $20 worth of shit and it says, don't you want to pay with a firm? Low payments is low at $3 a month for 12 months. It's like, no, I don't want to pay with a firm. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Unknown_02: And it's like the same worrying thing.

Unknown_02: Just because I'm cheap, every car I've ever bought, I bought with cash. But before I became a full-time internet face fag, I had a real job and needed to drive. So I went to a dealership. buy not even a new car but like a relatively new ish used car and went through the whole process of financing and found out as many people do that because I had never financed they were going to make it particularly expensive and so I walked out I said no I don't want to do this and What was especially funny about that was, one, how astonished the people at the dealership were that I would look at financing and say, that's too expensive because, quote, the payment was very low.

0:41:07
Unknown_02: Also, you realize, Rick, wait a minute. If that's the reaction, that means a lot of people are signing up for this.

Unknown_02: If you ever dug deep into this, which I highly recommend, look into the data on subprime auto loans. This is a not directly what we're talking about, but indicative of a wider problem, dude, there are so many people deeply, deeply underwater on vehicles and they're giving credit to yes.

Unknown_00: As a, as a, as a Kiwi farms users, certainly, you know, Ethan Ralph, right?

0:41:42
Unknown_00: Yeah. He bought a Nissan. I think it was a Nissan Ultima. He bought a Nissan Ultima. Now, of course, he's gone through a bankruptcy, so that credit score is not looking the best. So what you're saying is he's the target Ultima buyer. The peak target Ultima buyer.

Unknown_02: 300 credit score.

Unknown_00: Yeah, terrible. Gone through a bankruptcy, has never paid his student loan. He proudly announces on his podcast, he'll never pay a dollar for that damn student loan. So terrible payment history, no credit score, bankruptcies in recent history. I think he owes child support. I think that shows up on your credit score too, but they'll give him a loan for that Nissan Altima. I think it has like a interest rate of like 40%. I want to say that he's crashed that car and he still owes money on it.

0:42:14
Unknown_02: I think delinquent child support payments are a requirement for buying an Ultima. I may leave it on that.

Unknown_02: No joke.

Unknown_02: Nissan actually builds their entire business model on repossessing cars, right? They know exactly what they're doing. They have courted that market and want it. Uh, honestly, man, like this is one of those things that, uh, look like, you know, the internet can be very, very bad for some people for most people. Right. But one of the things that I think it's particularly helpful of is, you know, seeing sort of like the unvarnished, just self-imposed human suffering, uh, it kills certain myths, right? So, you know, we were talking off air and you've mentioned it before about the, uh, The Kiwi Farms thread about post-op troons basically reacting to their medical decisions. But one of the other ones is I think that the idea that the way to make the best human society, the way to make the most people happy is just to give everyone access to the most choices possible has been so thoroughly debunked. by the internet you know where it's like oh well if we just give everyone the choice to get financing for whatever they want you know then we'll have all these new people who have access to capital they'll be able to do smart things with it think about the world we'll live in and the real answer is guess what you can gamble on everything you can get a loan for everything and guess what your burrito is going to cost 80 over the next 20 years it's it's insane

0:43:38
Unknown_00: One time I tried to door dash a burrito. Not only was it like $20 by the end of this, I never got my burrito. They just canceled the order and they didn't even tell me why.

Unknown_02: So I literally only used DoorDash once and it's because I got given, which was very kind, a gift card for DoorDash. I just wouldn't for the same reason. I'm cheap. I don't like spending money on it, but it offered a very unique window. And look, obviously at a different levels, but as a locale appreciator, have you noticed that one of the bizarre recurring traits with internet locales is like a hardcore addiction to DoorDash? Like, oh, what's the name of the... TikToker who had her brother shot in a carjacking.

0:44:47
Unknown_00: Oh, it's like, it's like named after Sonichu. Yeah. Yeah. It's not Sonichu, but it's like another version of that.

Unknown_02: And like, that's one example, but like, it seems like it's all of, she was like homeless.

Unknown_00: She lived in hotels and she was door dashing and shit to herself.

Unknown_02: You put your address is just like a location on a street for door dash. And it somehow still works.

Unknown_00: Under the bridge. Ralph would door dash booze to himself all the time. It would be a common occurrence. Midstream. You have to get up to go get the, uh, maker's mark. That was his joint. He liked maker's mark. You'd have to go get the maker's mark at the door. Um, Amberlynn Reed, very big fat woman. She admitted that she would door dash herself a hundred dollars of food every single day. Um, and yeah, Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. This is something that I say a lot of my podcast. This is what I've determined because I remember growing up and I heard this expression a lot, but I especially remember hearing it from my mom that we were in a period of post Darwinism that thanks to the welfare and the marvels of modern medicine, we now lived in a world where there was no the bumpers were up on human evolution. And so the dumb could reproduce and out reproduce the smart. And I don't think that's true anymore. I think it was true for a little while, but it's not so true anymore. I think that we're now in a new evolutionary phase where the people who lack... impulse control are screwed. They are just completely and totally screwed. If you can get addicted to masturbation, you're going to cut your penis off. If you get addicted to food, you're going to be 600 pounds. You can't get off the couch and you can door dash a pizza to yourself. So, you know, you're never going to get up. If you get addicted to drugs, you can buy drugs online at crypto and your crack dealer will drive it up to your house at three in the morning. I've seen it happen. I know that that's the thing. Um, if you, you know, every addiction is so, Oh, gambling. Oh, don't even get me started on gambling. I don't know how familiar my boy Boston and Jack, but, um, that's who I was going to bring up. I lived outside the U.S. for about 10 years, and the biggest culture shocks to me coming back is that everybody smokes now. It's called vaping now, but everybody smokes. Smoking was basically dead in the country when I left it, but now everybody vapes. And then the other one is gambling is everywhere. I remember that there was a brief time when I was a kid where it was the World of Texas Hold'em or something was like a... craze and then it went online i remember my mom would even play texas hold'em tournaments and stuff online it's like a five dollar entry fee to potentially win a hundred thousand dollars or whatever by the end of it and then they outlawed that and there was a time where it was almost impossible to find gambling now you drive through some states and they got slot machines and the gas stations you got online gambling fantasy sports las vegas is dying because everyone took their stick and you can find it in the gas station now It's genuinely culture shocking to me to see gambling so ubiquitous.

0:48:02
Unknown_02: So look, like I live in a fairly rural area of the country and it got hit by a lot of the same things as the Rust Belt, right? That when industry left, there wasn't really a reason to be there. And so unless there's some government contractor or university, these towns are dying. There's a town like an hour south of me, old and used to be kind of like a textiles town. And it's just been dead since the 70s. And their big plan to make everything better was to bring a casino in. And so they dropped a giant casino in the middle of this town.

Unknown_02: And okay, yeah, sure. There's the guys who work at the casino. Now they have jobs. But all it's done is just bring together the saddest, poorest gambling headaches and concentrate them in one area. And it's the equivalent of like, oh, hey, you're not doing so good and your heart might be going out. So we're going to give you a transplant and cancer at the same time. But your heart's going to be okay, you know? And it's like, you said earlier about the, you know, the monetary velocity, right? The rate at which things are going through the economy. Like this whole, it's sort of dismissively referred to as like line go up, but the idea that like, well, technically more people are spending more money. So everything is better. And then you look outside and it's like, you know, 80 year old zombie is just like playing slots in a gas station at two in the morning. And you're like, is, is this better? Yeah. Is this what winning feels like?

0:49:21
Unknown_00: I remember hearing an anecdote, I need to hunt this down, about fascist Spain and how Franco never entered World War II famously, but he was a fascist military authoritarian. And so he was not held in high regard after World War II, but nobody could really do anything about him because he just minded his own business. And that's why he survived for so long. And so Francoist Spain is held in this very weird... annals of history just because he is so unusual and that he was like a true fascist dictator that managed to keep a country for more than a decade. And I remember hearing anecdotes about how Franco Spain was poor. It was very sanctioned. They had to rely on a lot of their own devices to make ends meet because they could not trade with the West like any other country could. But I remember hearing that Franco Spain was very happy about, They were happy and poor people. And when I see the H-1B people saying, my good Sa, when you get rid of us, your economy will collapse into shambles, Sa. You cannot survive without us. I'm like, good. We are now like a rich country, but it's like at what cost, at what cost? And it doesn't really feel that fucking rich. It feels like, okay, people are making more money, but then inflation is going up twice as fast. So who cares? I'm not benefited by this at all. Nobody I know in the entire world is benefited by line go up. So if line has to go down for things to get better, I'm willing to try it at this point.

0:51:03
Unknown_02: Yeah, exactly. We've certainly tried the alternative. And to your point about the great filtering, I've noticed the same thing.

Unknown_02: To me, I sort of look at it in the same way that the Black Death was a big selection event, where it's like 30% of bloodlines in Europe just ceased all at once. Now, obviously, this is different. I guess people are dropping dead in the streets, but that's just fentanyl. Or it's kind of the same thing happening, but it's basically instead of your literal immune system, it's basically how disagreeable are you? Like how willing are you to buck social pressure? And also how resistant are you to like the most cursed combination of addictive factors, right? Like not just like sexual depravity, but like the most insane thing ever, right? Not just opium, but like super Chinese fentanyl cooked up in a lab. And it's like, if you can't make it through, okay, sure. It's not like you get the black death and you cough a lung out and die, but it's like from a bloodline perspective, sort of the same thing, right? It's like those people are getting filtered. If you see what I'm getting at.

0:52:13
Unknown_00: Yeah, no, for sure.

Unknown_00: We're in a time period that is completely unique. We are facing novel threats to our culture, to our country, to our people, our tribe, if you prefer, and to humanity as a whole. things that nobody is prepared for. How will we deal with AI? Speaking of impulses, there are already people who are falling in love with their AI and they have replaced socialization with talking to a computer. I got to say, I got my AI already trained up. I asked questions about gardening, about computer stuff, and I got the parameters tooled to my liking, very concise answers. I don't need my ass kiss, just spit it out. But, you know, and it's like it replaces even like I don't even Google search that often anymore. Like we don't have to find stuff. And that's really dangerous because when the Internet was new, 50 percent, when I say new, I mean like 2008, about 50 percent of Internet traffic was shared among a thousand websites. And then in 2018, I think it was I saw a statistic that it was now like eight websites. And some of those websites were owned by the same company, Meta. It was like Instagram and Facebook were like two of the most popular websites that shared 50 percent of Internet traffic. And it's like, well, it's just one company.

0:53:29
Unknown_00: So it's like it's that's always been the most shocking thing to me. We have more people online than at any point in human history. Every day, more people are online. We have more money and economic activity on the Internet than ever before. but it's all through fewer and fewer channels with fewer and fewer different things and with less and less variety.

0:54:07
Unknown_00: And it's, it's,

Unknown_00: it, it, that's what alarms me the most is that we're really, we've really put everything, all of our eggs in a few baskets that are not even real. If you want to think about it, if you take the entirety of the internet as photons, it's the size of a strawberry. The entirety of the internet fits in the size of a strawberry. And it's, It's stewarded no longer by 90s white libertarians that pioneered the Internet, which, by the way, the first countries that really took on the Internet were the United States and Germany, which is why in German, almost every computer part has a unique German name. Whereas in most other languages, they just say memory, motherboard, graphics card, just like directly transliterated. But the Germans have their own words for it. uh but yeah it was like a bunch of like weird germans and american white libertarians that got together and made the internet and old internet stuff like email um has not changed at all uh it's still very decentralized you can host your own email server and um most people don't because it's a huge pain in the ass but you can do it nowadays it's like if you want to communicate with people Hope your ex account's not banned. Hope your Instagram's not banned. Hope your Facebook account's up. And that's the opposite of what they had in mind. We've outsourced not just development positions to Indians. We've outsourced the stewards of our tech companies and by extension, our freedom and our democracy to Indians. They are the executives running the companies that we rely on to talk to each other and to get things done. And that's, that's really scary.

0:55:23
Unknown_02: I mean, there's, there's a lot, there's a lot there. Uh, first of all, to your point about, you know, the Indian thing, like you saw that with that, you know, the recent tragedy in Florida, right. With the Indian truck driver who killed three people, or it's like you, you make a post about that and it's getting, you know, community noted and ratioed to hell. And you're like, what the, this doesn't make any sense. Yeah. So you check the comments and it's a million guys who look a lot like that truck driver, right? You know, that sort of like ethnic mafia when they, in many cases, do control the internet, control these companies is, I mean, look, it would be serious if it were a thousand companies. It's way more serious in concentrated world where almost all discourse happens on, to be generous, 10 web pages, right? It's also, and you've seen this over the course of the internet, even the invention of social media, and I guess you would say that's what web... 3.0 or 2.0? I can't remember the generations. That's a bullshit marketing term.

0:56:46
Unknown_00: Don't worry about it. Fair enough.

Unknown_02: But point is, right? And it's actually one of the things that I really miss about the older internet was forum culture, right? It used to be like if you had a specific interest, there'd be a constellation of different message boards. We could go to talk about that thing. So you'd get, you know, there'd be a Pareto distribution. There'd be some guys helpful, some guys, you know, talking about something completely off topic, but you'd find a group of people with a relatively small number of contributors. So you could, over the course of, you know, a small amount of time, vet everything. You're like, oh, okay, that guy knows what he's talking about. You know, he's a, you know, a pioneer in whatever this bizarre micro field is. For me, it was, you know, 90s Nissan sports cars, but you know what? Other people had their own interest. And first that transition to, social media, places like aggregators like Reddit or Facebook groups. And that created its own problems because one, now it's open to everyone. It becomes massified, but also it becomes impossible to find anything. As you mentioned earlier with Twitter, it's very difficult to search for a specific post or piece of information on social media. But then everything becomes for everyone. It's no longer a specific community devoted for people interested in this. It is that thing in the global marketplace, right? It becomes like the world's largest strip mall. And so you're competing with earlier, right? Like the digital version of super fentanyl. you know, like everything becomes, you know, extreme and very monetized and sort of a way to, you know, sort of increase your personal brand, your personal hype or whatever your clout. I don't know what the kids call it anymore, but it's like the, the centralization of the internet is, and to your point about ai it's like a further extension of the problem with like aggregators like reddit right which is like you're not even dealing with primary or secondary sources anymore right it is a you know another layer of disambiguation controlled with you know given a set of instructions by someone who isn't you you know it's like when people talk about dead internet theory i think generally it's a lot of like over dramatic hand-wringing but like if you've been on the internet long enough, it kind of feels true. Like how many websites, Josh, do you, did you used to use that are now completely gone? Like you just can't find them anymore.

0:59:08
Unknown_00: Oh, a bunch. Um, I, I was active on like a bunch of different websites that, I mean, even, even with websites that are still around, I don't use them anymore. Um, I've completely stopped using fortune cause it's, uh, it's become utterly useless.

Unknown_02: Uh, the Russians and Ukrainians ruined it like genuinely, like it was already in a bad spot and then that kicked off and it's like, I don't know.

Unknown_00: I think it started getting really bad after Trump. I mean, it's always been a meme. Even way, way, way back in 2008, I remember it was a meme that 4chan was dead. But now I literally can't. It's not even a thing where I say it's dead, but I still check it for things. I have completely stopped looking at 4chan for anything. Any obscure information that I'm trying to find, I can generally find with... um, AI these days and for political stuff, for discussion, I just use my own website. Um, and the few times in the last couple of years, like the handful of times I tried to use 4chan, it was just terrible, terrible. Um, so, so I mean, yeah, yeah. That's what I mean. It's like we should have flourishing communities all over the place because we have more people than ever before. But it's just Discord servers. We have 3.5 billion internet users shuffled away into random Discord servers. And that's it. That's all. Here's your internet. Here's your internet, good sir.

1:00:19
Unknown_02: Well, Josh, we're almost at time. I'm sorry. I did not talk to you about really anything we were supposed to. We got like 20 minutes and then got off on a off topic, which are always the fun episodes. But dude, if people want to find you, want to find your work and support you, how can they do that?

1:00:50
Unknown_00: You can't. If you want to just see my websites, though, it's kiwifarms.net or kiwifarms.st at the moment, and mati.life, mati.life, and at the internet.com. That's my podcast. My podcast is basically just me laundering my forum information into a podcast format, but I do go into rants every so often. I can give you a brief response on something. Oh, look, I have...

Unknown_02: Josh, I have developed a disdain for my audience, which means if they want me to talk about something, I will only do it obliquely. So I had people being like, oh, you got to talk to Josh about payment processors. We got some of it, but you know what? I'm not going to give them too much of what they want. They might start thinking that their opinions have any sort of weight on what we do here. But dude, yeah, I'm not a habitual or regular listener of your show, but I'll catch an episode every couple months, and it's very, very good. I highly recommend that. That will be linked as well as the website. And Josh, I'll have to have you on again sometime. This was a ton of fun. As far as my stuff, Jay Burden Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, anywhere you listen to podcasts. If you want the episodes early and ad-free, you'll have to throw me a few bucks. But you can do that on Patreon, Subscribestar, all the normal platforms. Again, Josh, I appreciate it. And everyone at home, keep your head up. Life can't last forever. Good night.

1:02:03
Unknown_01: Thank you.