In recent days the number of Free Talk Live hosts who have joined the LRN.FM Matrix chat server has increased to include Captain Kickass, Bonnie, and Nikki! If you haven't heard, we launched our Matrix server a while back to give us control over our chat system instead of leaving it in the hands of the censor-y big tech companies like Discord. It's an open source system that is self-hosted and federated with other Matrix servers around the planet. If you are already on Matrix, you can join in some of our chat rooms, but other rooms are exclusively for people who have accounts on our server, which is located at https://matrix.lrn.fm . You can get step-by-step instructions on how to join by visiting https://chat.lrn.fm
You can join one of dozens of existing chat rooms, or make your own, whether public or completely private - encrypted or unencrypted. You decide.
Tune in Wednesday from 7-10pm Eastern to our live stream on Odysee for the topless edition of "She Talk Live" featuring Aria, Angie, and Nikki. This will be the first time ever that an all-female episode of Free Talk Live will be hosted topless and since pretty much every other live streaming platform would take down our channel for this, Odysee is going to be our exclusive live video venue. So bookmark the FTL Odysee channel and during our stream, you'll see a special notice at the top of the channel page. Please also don't forget to follow our Odysee channel .
If you haven't heard, Odysee is our official video archive and streaming system. Odysee is the front-end website that LBRY launched last year to compete with...
Listeners have asked regarding our live streams over the years, "Why are you airing FOX News?" The answer was: because the liberty newscasts had ceased production and I couldn't find any other alternatives. FOX seemed to be the only option for the top-of-hour news position in our broadcast clock. All talk radio follows the format of news-on-the-hour, and so does LRN.FM during our live and encore programs, so I have to put something there.
Thanks to the suggestion from LRN.FM affiliate WZQR-FM, we've now replaced FOX with "Feature Story News". No, they aren't libertarian, but they aren't FOX. We're actually paying $15 a month for their service, and so there are no commercials in their newscasts, which is a nice change. They are a decades-old service with reporters around the globe. Plus, since they offer a three-minute newscast in addition to a five-minute, we are now airing their five-minute news at the top of the hour and their three-minute at the bottom, so we now have...
Several years ago, we were one of the first shows to begin experimenting with LBRY , the decentralized, blockchain-based media protocol. Over the last year LBRY launched a front-end site, Odysee to compete with centralized video services like YouTube. The move was well-timed as last year YouTube went even more control-freak than before and began cracking down on any channels criticizing or questioning the government gang's position on COVID. As a result, content creators who care about freedom of speech and who want to protect their content from takedowns have been moving to the uncensorable Odysee , which is now a top 2,500 website in the world, according to web ranking site Alexa .
Big news: LRN.FM has transitioned! The 12-year liberty-oriented streaming audio channel is now nearly wall-to-wall podcasts instead of live shows. The only remaining live program is Free Talk Live. In our earlier days, we had live shows every weekday from 9am all the way through Midnight and still other live shows on the weekends. Over the years, they either ceased production entirely or switched to being recorded and podcasted. Given that it's easier and more convenient to record shows and most of them weren't focused on taking calls so there was no reason to be live, it's clear this transition was inevitable. The LRN.FM mission remains the same, however - to bring you the best liberty-oriented talk content out there, in a streaming format. It's a way to discover new shows as a listener and of course it provides 24/7 audio for broadcasters looking to program their radio stations with freedom-friendly shows.
Forkfest has officially started, following up the largest Porcupine Freedom Festival in history. I'm tremendously excited to see what the week has to offer, though it looks like "a lot of rain and thunderstorms" are on the agenda. Regardless of the weather, it's going to be a great time. I've been discussing things with people, and it's been suggested that the best dates for next year's Forkfest may be June 18 through June 30. Apparently a lot of people are still showing up early for a pre-party, and it has no name, whereas a large number of the people I've talked with plan to leave this coming Wednesday. Having the dates of June 18 through June 30 would allow Forkfest to be both the pre-party and the after-party. While it's good to have outreach to the non-libertarians who will begin arriving Thursday for the Independence Day celebration here at the campground, it also raises some concerns about theft and other things that occurred around the...
UPDATE 6/23: We're back to the 603-283-6160 call-in line! Please get rid of the temporary 202 number we had for a week as it will no longer work.
But that's not the only news. Now we can accept SIP calls at this SIP address: sip:ftl@ftl.onsip.com
Don't know what SIP is? It's a free method of making high quality calls online. You can now use SIP to call in to Free Talk Live from anywhere on the planet. If you already know how to SIP, give us a call with your favorite audio-only client. If you're new, here's an easy way to jump in and try:
The first thing you need is a SIP account and there are multiple free options, such as Linphone.org , sip2sip.info , or onsip.com . I'll walk you through the Linphone account setup, since they run a decent open source SIP client for iPhone and Android in addition to providing free SIP...
Big news: Today was the last day of the live production of "Declare Your Independence" . Don't worry, Ernest Hancock won't be leaving LRN.FM and his show will be staying put on weekday mornings. However, what *is* changing is that he'll no longer be doing a live show.
There are a few reasons for this:
First, Ernie has over the last year been producing his show from the road as he is traveling the country in an RV. This is good in that it will allow him to talk to more guests in-person, but the down side is he is relying on mobile internet connections which vary from okay to terrible when it comes to live audio delivery.
Second, by recording his show as a podcast he'll have more flexibility on when he can record his interviews. Since Ernie never took callers on his live show, whether it is produced live or not really doesn't matter.
Third, it means he can go commercial-free and do a...
Well, it's been nearly 3 months since the raid on the Free Talk Live studio, and, as you might imagine, we've all been pretty busy. Until very recently, Ian Freeman was still detained; Nobody (also known as Rich Paul) remains in detention, with a hearing pending.
Ian is now free, but under very tight restrictions. In fact, all of the Crypto Six are under pretty tight restrictions, although, luckily, the restrictions on myself seem to be the least limiting. My supervisory officer has proven to be very fair.
Free Talk Live was back to operating in some sort of normal capacity, but then Ian was released, and everything crashed. The terms of release prohibit Ian and I have from having contact with one another. Seeing as we've both become critical to the back-end of Free Talk Live, you can imagine how this made things difficult. While we have filed motions to amend these conditions (because it's silly for my conditions to demand me...
We're even experimenting with peer-to-peer video streaming but it's not-quite-ready for primetime. Meanwhile, thanks to a tool called "Mobcrush", we are now to get around the pain-in-the ass hoops that YouTube and Facebook have placed in front of regular live streamers like us. As of tonight we are going to be streaming video not only on DLive and Twitch as normal,...
