Gabriel Custodiet | Technocracy Rising, Utopian/Dystopian Literature, & Privacy Preservation

00:00 Oh baby, before we dive into this today I got to announce a big update we have made to the Plus system. An upgrade that allows you to bypass the need for a username and password to get Plus on your podcasting app it's true but how is that possible? Well now when you sign up for plus you'll get a customized RSS link emailed to you You copy it and you paste it right into whatever podcasting app you like to use And you're done Of course, the site still has cool stuff like the category displays a great search function for older episodes and specific topics comments ratings and the forums. And you do need a username password for that but now you don't have to log into the site at all if you don't want to

00:47 From a convenience standpoint this is about as good as it gets and that is the feedback I hear most often. It's not about the $8, I just don't want to have to use the site or remember another password or stop using the podcast app I like and I get it hey I'm a podcast listener too! And that is why I set the IT guys to the task and they crushed it This custom plus feed not only has all two hour plus shows going back to when it started, but it also includes the pre-plus episodes going all the way back to my first real interview with Michael Tesarion over a decade ago. And if you forget this URL or you need it again for any reason, you can always go back to that welcome email or find it on the My Account page just so you know

01:35 So if you've ever been a Plus Member and left because of the hassle or some glitch with authentication, or getting locked out, having the feed not updating properly, or just finding it too confusing. I would ask you now to give it another try! The guys assured me that not only is it easier for all of you, but it's also a much lighter load on the site and the server and all that. The system verifies if accounts and feeds are active in a much smoother way now too... But I will spare you all that technical stuff And really the only caveat is Spotify. If Spotify is your podcasting app and you want Plus to work there, then I need you to sign up through Patreon corporate partners going to do what corporate partners do but any app that allows you to add a show via a link or RSS URL will allow plus and that's basically every podcast app I know of

02:31 Don't take my word for it, try it with a free one-week trial. Me and the IT guys are standing by to help anyone who needs it but I have gone through the signup process several times now and I can't even think of a way to make it better or faster or easier...I don't even think we asked for your name! If you're a current member you can of course get this link on the My Account page at any time too but the old system has not been messed with either so no need to do anything if it ain't broke don't fix it And that's it. I've done what i can do technically to be best in class and I do everything I can to give you the best ad-free interviews out there The full two hour versions are always deeper and oftentimes weirder, and you really do miss a lot if you're only getting that free first hour

03:18 I'm laying it on thick, but this is how I make a living. I just spent a lot of money on this upgrade and consider a subscription, a tip for a service that is maybe a little more valuable than bringing a sandwich to your table or pouring you a couple of draft beers. You know? Use the link right in the show notes to sign up grab the RSS link from the welcome email and your right back in your app getting the whole THC enchilada Few people in the game care more about the user experience and keep an eye on the latest technology available, and also work every time to make sure interviews are very information-rich and easy on the ears. I take my job seriously! I hope you appreciate it! Help me help you become a Plus Member! Thanks for listening... Enjoy! The planet's puppet masters almost surely have a plan

04:14 There's clearly maybe something there, beyond the realm of man And until we thoroughly tested every last close-chested view We know unless we really do where would we be? THC, it went up THC It was flying to us just THC The higher side chat show Frank couldn't cover It's the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine. From The Sunshine State, I'm Greg Carlwood and too often many of us seem to be struggling with a mental calculus and philosophical tug-o-war between privacy and convenience using Google and Gmail regularly allowing all cookies granting all permissions always sharing our location giving out all our information to everyone from a grocery store clerk to an oil change mechanic

05:19 Blindly barreling through oppressive terms of service and a thousand other digital micro-concessions that only make us easier to manipulate and extract the maximum value for the corporate technocratic takeover. It's gotten so bad that resistance to any of it is met with an assumption of some sort of guilt or skepticism in a world that is pushing to criminalize autonomy and privacy. But, in an era where protesters and dissidents face deep platforming and frozen assets... High-profile targets are assassinated in war zones with facial recognition AI automatic machine guns even exploding pagers Deep diving journalists crash into poles at 100 miles per hour when their vehicle controls are overridden

06:01 And police are visiting regular folks at home for edgy social media posts, I would think keeping some distance from the individualized digital control network they're working hard to build should be the standard. Well these are the lessons we learned last time we talked to today's returning guest Gabriel Custodiette in a 2022 interview about privacy and personal freedom in our digital dystopian age And in the time since then, he's written a new book, Privacy and Utopia that offers up an intellectual history that covers the death of privacy alongside the rise of centralization where these ideas were seeded in popular fiction. And the origins of the slow subtle death squeeze of the technocratic tentacles invading our lives today

06:43 As a reminder, Gabriel Custodiet is the host of The Watchman Privacy Podcast. He's been living a privacy lifestyle for many years and enjoys consulting and teaching others to live more genuine lives through techniques of secrecy and the cultivation of a worldview that sustains individual freedom You can learn more and buy his first book, The Watchman Guide to Privacy at watchmanprivacy.com and use the multiple toolkits or take his Escape the Technocracy course at escapethetechnocracy.com So let's do the dance as we do with a guy who has become my own personal privacy guru—the technocrat tamer, privacy protector, and watcher of The Watchmen! Gabriel, welcome back.

07:26 Hello, Greg. I hope your audience by the way appreciates that kind of production value of those intros that is fabulous. It's nice to be here Yeah man it is an honor and a pleasure congrats on the new book! I really enjoyed it. I can't believe that our last interview was already two years ago Of course the COVID operation was a huge wake-up call to so many people regarding privacy bodily autonomy and just how invasive the big machine can be when it wants to. Some high-profile people I was very thankful to have during that time faced some pretty serious consequences for these opposition positions, and we saw a lot of dystopian elements in play but what about the last two years since we spoke? Some people might feel like well...the COVID time is over but i just wouldn't be so sure that these same techniques

08:18 Wouldn't be used again we are at a time of heightened geopolitical tension and wartime is a dangerous time to be speaking one's mind on unpopular opinions. What are some things maybe you've seen in the last two years that make the case that privacy should still be one of our biggest concerns? Yeah, you know what's funny Greg is that in the last couple of years I've stopped prothetizing privacy. So that's maybe the biggest change but no, I started talking about what I talked about during the COVID era it was blatantly obvious to anybody the coercion that was being exerted on regular people and how freedom was just being swept away and so it was pretty obvious then and of course I would say in the last couple years maybe things we've seen is a lot of cancellations from people

09:06 things have never been more unstable in recent years in the world. I just think of, there was a video game streamer blanking on this guy's name as Azrov and he said something disparaging about the Palestinians and he gets shut down and of course is probably facing any matter of death threats and all sorts of other things for saying things that people would normally say in kind of a regular conversation. So we do see a lot of the outrage culture still abides and, of course, we still have PeopleSearch websites like TruePeopleSearch.com and many others I've interviewed some people who explore these websites where you can easily track down somebody's address their phone number this is all publicly available information that has been collected by a lot of companies And so that's just one little thing

09:53 to be concerned about. Of course, we have all the big tech platforms they've never been more censorious really well maybe during COVID they were more censorious but they have certainly continued that legacy in many ways We have Microsoft who is rolling out Windows 11 that's promising an AI assistant to take screenshots of your computer every five seconds and use it for archiving purposes and to help you search your history Of course, that's always a double-edged sword. So we see increased intrusiveness of big tech platforms And of course, the Microsoft service agreement says that if you perform hate speech on any of their platforms which by the way would mean Xbox Live Skype. Microsoft Word 365 or even I think just Windows they can actually kick you off of their platform Of course because you are a renter with these things and you must abide by their terms and services so just a few things for people to consider again I try not to prophetize because I find that people just don't get it then they just don't get it

10:55 but your adversaries are still out there. It's government and big tech and their collaboration between the two, and it's never been more important to consider offline solutions and non-big tech solutions like Linux, like private messengers, all of the things I'm looking at on my computer screen right now almost all which have nothing to do with big tech. I own this software I can see exactly what's going on behind the scenes. There's nothing being hidden and in most cases, most of this is privacy respecting software so never been more important to track these things down get comfortable with them and you don't really have to sacrifice that much convenience to do so in my opinion right on that is always the challenge for me. I really hate two-factor authentication

11:38 For example, because I don't always know where my phone is and I don't want to know where my phone is. And I come to my computer to log into something even something like Facebook. I'm like, man you guys are really over emphasizing how much I care about logging into this stupid platform but I have to do it to post shows and then they're like, Where's your phone at? Get the code as just like so frustrating sometimes because time is the only real resource I care about 10 and they suck a lot of it away But in the last two years like just a few things i referenced in the intro there exploding pagers and that was pretty crazy technological thing that happened then you did an interview with someone or conversation on your podcast about.

12:24 The facial recognition assassination of motion barons are the iranian nuclear program director and you got really into the nitty gritty of how that was accomplished it's like jesus christ i didn't know such a thing. Was possible and then another example is the debunking of nigel farage head of the uk independence party, That's the thing that worries me is debunking i can pretty much handle any platform and i mean the people who like me will find me i hope although you do notice that. If u don't do certain things like comply with having your show on spotify a lot of people won't actually just go to your website but thats kinda their conditioning in there problem but,

13:07 Do elaborate a little bit on that assassination of the head of the Iranian nuclear program. Just for people who haven't heard about this, talk a little bit about the technology that was used to accomplish such a thing? Yeah I'm glad you mentioned that because probably there's a subsect of your audience first 10 minutes here we're talking about the regular privacy stuff they're probably just rolling their eyes oh it's another guy here to talk about encrypted messengers and all the rest Look, I understand some of that stuff is boring. And so that's why I did branch out recently on my show and my colleague is very interested in all these crazy things that are happening around the world that are in a sense connected to the things I talk about right technology, the technocracy that is no coercion through technological means which it really is a product of last hundred years. That's why we use the term technocracy

13:56 So we've started to do conversations, my colleague and I. And one of them was the assassination of this director of the Iranian nuclear program Mosin Fakhrizadeh is his name. This is a very interesting story. I encourage people to go to The Watchman Privacy Podcast and track that one down. Of course, Iran sees itself as the internal enemy of Israel. And so they keep things very secret that this was a guy who was claiming to be a professor they had a whole kind of separate identity for him and only after a long period of time did Israel

14:35 apparently find out through secret documents that they stole, that hey who is this person? Who's this weird signature that we see and they eventually put it together. That wait a second... This guy is the head of the nuclear program in Iran and so they spent years tracking this guy learning his every move. So they had clearly had agents in this country maybe they had bugged certain who knows up his phones security cameras, whatever. They had a team of people dedicated to learning everything about this guy every daily habit in the meantime they managed to smuggle in an entire killer robot into Iran all right? They managed to smuggle in and entire killer robot piece by piece which was then assembled and was set up on a road now as this guy it's Friday night he's done in the city he's going out to his villa so he drives out

15:32 and suddenly there's a disturbance, he pulls over on the side of the road. He gets out of his car... Bam! Bam! Bam! He gets shot several times by this killer robot that was being controlled apparently potentially all the way from Israel okay so it's remotely controlled satellite-controlled it had detected his face through facial recognition and it had created distraction It's kind of murky details. He gets out of his car And he gets hit by this killer robot that's so accurate, apparently that it shot him several times. And it did not hit his wife who was in the passenger seat. So this was a crazy story

16:11 in many ways, but that's the basics of it. And when you hear this sort of thing my friend who I was talking to he read this in some comment section somewhere and immediately was like come on that's silly that's just a bunch of buzzwords right killer robot facial recognition AI controlled... The AI comes in apparently there was a serious lag between Iran and Israel so this thing was being remotely controlled so they had to compensate for the lag in order to get the best shot. And all this stuff came together and this guy was taken out, and it set back the nuclear program by some estimates for several years just killing this one guy so it was successful. It's just a crazy story of like wow! This stuff is possible? This happened years ago right? So who knows what new technology is available now. Of course again Mossad recently we saw the Patriot attacks so they've got a lot

17:06 cards up their sleeve that they're playing in terms of controlling technology and using it to attack their enemies. It's a crazy world. Yeah, that's a great summary of that story. It happened under Trump is my understanding and there was even a detail where the gun was built with a bomb inside of it to self-destruct so the technology they used wouldn't be recovered And it does sound like James Bond shit but this is real world stuff People might think well i'm not gonna be the head of iranian nuclear program so i hope im never in those crosshairs. But like i said people are getting visited at home for social media posts now getting a knock on the door from the cops like hey did you write this here's the transcript it's like wow world is getting crazy and its just nice to know how crazy it is getting but, i didn't want to get to the new book privacy and utopia

18:00 As an overview i think one of my big takeaways is that we often say this total control mindset of the elite, has not changed and nothing new but the technology to enable it is finally kinda coming together. And it seems like your book talks about how about a hundred years ago there was a similar emergence of new systems in tools that facilitated A major level jump towards centralization and the road that brings us into. The post a true act world that were in now take us back to that time and the changes that were going on that helps this, level change happens similarly to the level change we had just right before covid i would say

18:45 Yeah. So I'm talking about the privacy strategies, as people will know from last time. I'll talk about the crazy current technocratic things and also wrote this book as you said called Privacy in Utopia and I kind of trace back to the origin of the death of privacy. And along the way, I discovered some very interesting things The book focuses mostly on the last decade of the 19th century, so the 1890s. And what was fascinating about this time is suddenly you have this confluence of technology that meets up with these ideas about desiring to change the world and they create... They start us on a path to where we are today which your audience knows, so much control in many ways, so many technocratic agendas

19:31 We've never had less power in certain ways. And so if we were to go all the way back in time, let's say to other world conquerors... Let's go back to Genghis Khan or back to Alexander the Great. These people tried to conquer their known worlds but they didn't really have great ways to do so right? They had to go by foot, they had to go by horse They didn't have two greater ways to communicate back in the home, the homeland and all the rest. And so there was a huge limitation on whether they could really conquer the world. Now fast forward to the 1890s where you have a steam engine, suddenly you can go against the wind and you can cross the entire globe in a relatively short period of time. In 1800 Lewis and Clark in the US go on expedition that's a lifelong journey just across the U S right there is

20:22 a lifetime journey, fast forward 100 years to 1900. Now you can make that trip in a few days with the train right so you have this technology the telegraph planes would start to be developed pretty quickly. That would be a huge game changer, you have the technology to really create nations so you have your boundaries, you can patrol your boundaries that's why we have the rise of nationalism during this time. Of course Germany is many different tribes and then suddenly World War I and World War II especially just kind of becomes its own one single entity. The same with Italy right these were all little individual states suddenly they combined into one entity

21:00 There's a great line, by the way. Somebody talked about Italy during this time and the joke is what is a language? Well it's a dialect with an army and the Navy right? And so you have all this technology that's coming about and a greater sense of understanding the world. As all these things become possible you can instantly see hey now that we can patrol the landmass a lot more easily we can do censuses. Okay, so the census becomes a really big thing and ID cards become a thing. ID cards weren't really a thing in the West before 1900 you could go where you want nobody was asking for an ID card You could leave your country you could come back there wasn't on a passport system

21:39 Passports arise during this time. Why? Because there's a way to police this stuff, okay where there is will there is a way Where the means to do these stuff new ideas get developed So there is weird thing between new technologies coming about controlling technology and birth of technocracy And this idea that hey why don't we use these things to alter world no accident that the welfare state becomes introduced in Britain in 1905. Why? Well, we now have photographs right we can see all these poor people that are showing up in the newspapers all the time so there's an outrage against this We have the census data here's the statistics being presented to Parliament oh look at all these poor people look at this percentage of poor people

22:23 And you have the increased identification and all these things, you have a system where we can help people. Right? And it starts with helping people and then the welfare state becomes... The warfare state becomes big government and all the rest. And so this was a period of time, Greg where there was such a birth of technology to really change things that you had people come along and HG Wells is one of these big figures. He looks at the technology and he says hey we have the means to change things we should change things and he became a big proponent of world governments He thinks that we need to have a common goal, common plan. That we can't just have this Liza Faire 19th century mentality. Everybody has to have their role and of course we need big institutions especially world government in his case to enact all these things. Eugenics is a big thing during this time

23:15 almost as soon, Gregg, as heredity is understood. Okay? Mendel has these theories of heredity that he doesn't publish because he's just a monk testing these peas and suddenly in the late 19th century when the mechanism for heredity becomes well known even Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity when he wrote The Origin Of Species suddenly we understand heredity and Francis Galton, one of the scientists during this time great popular scientific figure. He writes down on a napkin two words eugenia okay eugenics so as soon as this idea of heredity becomes apparent the idea of eugenics that is controlling the offspring of people becomes immediately apparent to him So this is kind of the mindset at the time it's both the technology to change the world and this collectivist idea that hey

24:05 We need to change things. We have the ability to do so, it would be irresponsible not to change things and you can easily see how this becomes the slippery slope that we're all the way at the bottom of today. That is a great summary and you really come at scientism hard in the book talking about all these advancements were really just ways to justify the psychopathic control ambitions of the controller class and i think that's really right on. You even have a couple lines about something i never thought much about but you talk about the greeks in accumulation of knowledge and, you can trust that with these people in industrial age the robber barons and all them

24:51 Any basically say like the greeks they just wanted to acquire knowledge for the sake of knowledge and. In the early twentieth century there was something else entirely with acquiring knowledge for the sake of control and it's just that, The greeks didn't have that mindset i'm sure some amongst them did you can really categorize huge groups of people like that but it did seem like the greeks were trying to observe nature and learn about as much as they could about the world around them. But just learning and then saying oh okay i kind of understand that and thats a huge difference from the way these people are trying to learn about the world in scientism and progress. How they could use that information to reach their aims that were just on reachable at the time of gangas con as you mentioned

25:41 Yeah, that's kind of one of these little bits where I'm trying to kinda piece things together and understand why is this moment in time different from previous periods of time? Because the ancient Greeks Greg were more intelligent than we are today. Right they were more learned there more intelligent they're more thoughtful than we are they invented from nothing okay They invented from nothing logic and a proto scientific method right when Thales the pre Socratic looks out into the ocean And he says hey We need to stop explaining things in terms of gods, and we need to start understanding the mechanics behind it and how the world works. That was the birth of the scientific method that was the birth of Western thought of Western philosophy. And these people had you just think of Aristotle

26:27 how much he knew about the animal kingdom and about how processes develop in the cosmos. Now, he was still a little bit off about the cosmos obviously but they were thinking of all sorts of things and they understood profoundly ethics and all these kinds of things why in the world did these people not have the industrial revolution that we would have 2,000 years later? They had all of the groundwork to do so frankly there's no reason why they shouldn't have developed things like the steam engine and all these kind of things that would have set them off onto modernity 2,000-2,500 years earlier. And I don't really have a full grasp of how this works but just to say that you do fast forward 2500 years later and there is a different sense of understanding things not just as a way of understanding them but hey understanding things as a way of enacting

27:20 social policy, right? So we understand heredity not just for intellectual discussion but so that we can change things. Eugenics is the natural thing that comes immediately after heredity is understood like why in the world would not happen and you look at Marx I think Marx's kind of key to this. So Marx is a little bit before this period 1850s-1860s he's writing In The British Library He's writing Das Kapital the famous work of communism, where he and his whole mentality is... He has a famous line where he says philosophers in the past have only tried to understand the world. The point however is to change the world so this is a key thing that's happening I can't say have a full grasp of what kind of changes this but you know Marxism and just this idea that we should not be understanding the world but we should be understanding it to enact social policy to change things This was in my view

28:20 Certainly a double-edged sword and as much bad certainly as good, and maybe wasn't always for the best. It's kind of what I ruminate on in this book. Yeah well said it is curious that difference And you say in the intro of the book The first contention of the book Is that the way in which we've been attempting to understand privacy is incomplete and indeed might itself be counterproductive We'll elaborate on that how might it be incomplete and even counterproductive? Yeah, so understanding privacy is kind of a key theme of this book and it's tightly tied into decentralization. And so a lot of people when they talk about privacy these days what is the first thing that a lot of them say? Well we need privacy laws and this is kind of a central hypocrisy that I point out which is what is privacy? Privacy is not something that can be imposed, it's the opposite. It's something that has to come bottom up like for example

29:18 I have an episode on this on my show. Apple cannot grant you privacy, privacy exists when Apple is not granting you anything. Privacy exists when you're not using Apple services. Privacy exists when you are in control of your data. Now we do rely on third parties and all these sorts of things but privacy exists in nature when we are existing in a ecosystem, a society, a software ecosystem where we are in control of all of our data and we decide when we want to expose certain things. And so this idea of a privacy law, like you think of the GDPR in Europe where they say hey, you and UNU get privacy which means that

30:03 Anyway, we don't have to get into GDPR. But the idea is that in order for you to qualify for this, you have to be a European citizen which means that we have to know you, we have to have your photo give us your passport We have to have all these paraphernalia of being a citizen in order for us to grant you this idea of privacy So there are many contradictions to Privacy law privacy exists when there are no laws All laws all government aren't imposition upon privacy and if we think about this 19th century which didn't have ID cards, which the founding fathers in America were pretty close to anarchists. Basically government has no power and even Thomas Jefferson says that hey this idea of a federal government policing this landmass it's impossible we shouldn't even attempt it people have their little communities you think of the wild west you have your sheriff you voluntarily decide to go into this small community where you know the rules and you participate or if you don't want to leave

31:01 That's kind of the decentralized early American days. And that is a place where privacy can exist because there's not something being imposed on you, where you can choose to live in an area and you can choose what you want to reveal about yourself so maybe I over complicated that but that's kinda basic contradiction trying to point out when we understand privacy that We shouldn't think about it in terms of laws or somebody granting you privacy. This is a bottom-up activity, this is decentralization. Decentralization and privacy are kind of sister terms and that's how we should be striving to understand privacy." Yeah yeah! A lot of our guests in the past have said that in terms of solutions to the big problems, decentralization is the main one because the more you decentralize,

31:47 Damage a corrupt person can do within the system if we have a one world government and it's run by corrupt people there's a lot of victims of that but if you have just a corrupt. County commissioner that's a lot easier to overcome and correct so yeah i definitely am pro decentralization in everything i don't want to go even from florida too. Portland and see mcdonalds and chick-fil-a i wanna see what you guys got going on up there i like to go to different areas and regions of the country and world, do experience what makes them unique not this uniform blanket

32:29 Factory food thing and so i love decentralization and i think that if you had decentralization working with capitalism are keeping it kind of in check. It would probably be obviously much better system have mom and pops still self directed businesses that people decided to have but just, Regional instead of everything being so global and to illustrate the point you are just talking about i copied this paragraph down from the book but you say. A legal right to privacy assumes that only the government can provide it, and yet privacy did not need so much legal protection during an era of limited and relatively innocuous pre-1900 governments. Especially in the United States and Britain. The reason why the term privacy is so rare until the 20th century

33:21 is not because it was an invented neoliberal construct, as historians such as Sarah Igoe have suggested. But because privacy was not so explicitly needed until the 20th century. The decline of privacy in recent decades is precisely the result of offloading privacy onto the state And that is well said man people didn't start to think about privacy until they had a government and centralized systems coming at them and they were like wow this is all new indifferent maybe we should. put some measures in place to stop this. But yes, counterproductive because privacy laws don't do anything about addressing the big machine. It's just a nice little piece of comfort slapped on there and a law can always be repealed but the big system would be too big to dismantle at that point if it isn't already but these are good points that you're making philosophically I don't know if there's much

34:17 action we can take in these regards. But what do you think about that? Is this actionable intelligence?" It is actionable and by the way, to kind of summarize this as well a centralized system is one where the center right the control group that elites however you want to put it and there's always an elite up at the top controlling a centralized system there's never oh you'll own nothing somebody owns something and it's just not you it's this other group How centralized systems work is the center has to know all of the constituents. That's how it works, that's how the Soviet Union works, that's the idea of communism, whatever centralized system you want a group of people needs to know everything in order to control everything if they know everything

35:00 then you can't have privacy. So, privacy is metaphysically impossible in a centralized system and that's why decentralization... decentralized systems so-called systems are the only way to actually have privacy just at a very deep metaphysical level In terms of actionable stuff I think it's important to realize that you should not be going to your government begging for privacy You should not be advocating for privacy laws in my view My friends, samurai wallets who were actually recently arrested. They have a Bitcoin wallet unjustly arrested. They had a motto and it was privacy is not a human right. It's a human fight and that's a better way of thinking about it is that what is the right? A right is only that which you have decided to fight for yourself. That's the only thing you have a right too because the things you fight for so that's kind of maybe the takeaway message. Yeah, to me it's just

35:53 Ideological commitment to the premise of decentralization it's identifying a potential solution and never wavering from that ground because things get really complicated and people will throw out this issue in that issue when, party systems designed to have a better answer for this one but you hate that one and its all intermixed instead up that way so i think that. If people can just keep in mind decentralization really is kind of key to solving so many problems. Even when they're just an intellectual argument or having some discussion if you just return to that premise and hope that idea propagates,

36:36 You can get more people on board, whether they're liberal or conservative. I think a lot of times you can cut through that by just going to decentralization as a solution and people from both sides might be able to see value in that and ideas spread and hopefully they mean something eventually. And just add to that real quick Greg the US is coming up on election Really, people look and the two sides hate each other. And I understand why they hate each other. They should hate each other. Why? Because well, they're both fighting for a central institution that will control what the other ones want right so what's the solution to that Well you have two Americas

37:17 That's decentralization. That's how America was founded, where you had all these different states and the states had all the power and even within the states counties had all the power so if didn't like how this worked well go to a different state, go to a different county they have different rules they have different laws You can live according to your values And what happened of course in the period that I talk about in this book and last hundred years there has been more centralisation within The United States So that there is more federal powers and there's fewer states' rights and fewer county rights. So yeah, I mean it does solve the problem in a certain sense. Two Americas or hey 350 million Americas that's fine with me. Yeah yeah i agree and i'd like to see a difference between the states just like the food example i mean let's change it many ways let's have different governments and see which systems work best and reduce the federal government to a secretary like that's what they said it was initially is supposed to be just a liaison for

38:14 Or interactions between the states some kind of system you know if we had fifty different languages for example it would be hard to get a lot of stuff done. Throughout the united states that wouldn't be so united but just a couple of systems that are uniform for communication and basically just those secretarial types of duties that would be great i don't know forever Get back to their but anytime someone talks about succession or breaking california into three states everybody goes wild and i remember when i lived in san diego that was on the ballot. And i remember correctly, What was on the ballot is the opportunity to vote for it for real. And the people said, yes we want that and then they said no, no, no, no, we can't put that power in your hands kind of like a Brexit thing but they were like No you can't even have the option to vote for it and yeah that's a lot of times how this stuff goes if people really were talking about Texas seceding They would clearly go to war to keep that from happening

39:13 But i think about examples like db cooper just a fun example of a guy like the anti hero who. Was kind all the people on the plane but got away with some shit, The reason we don't know who db cooper was is because this is a time when you can go into an airport. I don't even know if he had an id and pay for a ticket in cash and get on the plane, end then pull off a stunt that was nineteen seventy one it's like wow lot of people listening were alive then seems like an entirely different world to now being an iris scan to get on a plane

39:48 you know, every hoop you have to jump through. But man just a few short decades ago we had D.B Cooper and the opportunity to pull off something like that. Just a fun example of how different the world was not that long ago. Yeah I know somebody who's older who says that in the 1970s they brought their rifle onto the plane put it in the above compartment and he was just like what? but what happened Greg and here's another term for people of course is what I call The Cult Of Safety where in the last 20 years, especially since 9-11 in the US there's just no appetite at all for so called risk. Now I think safety is the biggest risk of all. I think safety is the most dangerous word that humans have ever created it's the most dangerous concept that humans have ever come up with. Safety is the Aztec goddess who was always demanding more people to be sacrificed in its cause but yeah

40:41 suddenly, hey you can't take certain things onto the airplane. Now this is stupid and we've seen how these actually don't deter people or if people still get things through the TSA checkpoints but it's just this endless chase for so-called safety which itself is a risk because you know people are losing their freedoms and other things along way Americans have become over-policed, they've become whipped dogs. I was talking to somebody yesterday in the US who says he doesn't even like driving around anymore because of potential police encounters just because they have a quota you don't have to be doing anything they're just going to pull you over so The U.S has absolutely declined since the 1970s and

41:21 bigger federal government, obviously more control. But I think that's a second order issue. I don't think that government and economics are first order issues. I think these are results of other things and people really need to reflect on who Americans are and what they believe in, and who is in our country? And all these other sorts of first order issues of which big bureaucratic and evil governments are simply in consequence of. Well said and a lot of your book is about the popular fiction of the time and how these ideas have utopia and dystopia centralization decentralization were being utilized. Do comment on society and the trajectory of things probably most popular among these writers would be hg wells all this huxley and george orwell,

42:09 How would you compare and contrast their works because in some cases they seem to be warning us against how things can go with a technocratic centralized state. And in some cases they seem to be advocating for such a thing right? Yeah, so privacy and utopia. I did delve a lot into literature there are traditional historical chapters which we've kind of touched on but one thing i did is hey let's look at the period through the most prominent writers of the time and you know it's not as if when i talk about something like hg wells it's not as if it's a side note or anything right in fact george orwell here's what george orwell says of hg wells this is his quote

42:47 Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells' own creation. I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920 at any rate in the English language influenced the young so much, the minds of all us and therefore the physical world would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed." So HG Wells A lot of us know him from War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Time Machine right? His best book out of a hundred books he wrote was his first book, The Time Machine which is amazing to think about And this is a guy who wrote fiction early on. And as I write in the book, you can detect all of his world government technocratic eugenic ideas even in War Of The Worlds where the Martians are applauded for wiping out a decentralized laissez-faire humanity with no plan who are an underdeveloped society because they value individualism and privacy and all these things. And the Martians looking from on high who are surveying them

43:46 are able to wipe them out because they are single-minded, they're singly focused. They're a collectivist society and this is the superior life form and HG Wells applauds the Martians people don't realize that they're being applauded in War of The Worlds for what they have done And you can see this across his other early fiction but in 1900 he would start writing more explicitly world government texts right? He coined the term The New World Order. He wrote the book okay HG Wells wrote the book The New World Order. He's the guy And he wrote all kinds of other books, as I said around 100 books in total throughout his career advocating for world government at every turn. In 1905 he writes a book called A Modern Utopia where he explains a world government, okay? A world welfare system where everybody is tracked and traced

44:32 right, where they're surveyed. Fingerprints was the technology of the time so everybody's fingerprints is attached to their identity he says that hey we you know people can have some private property but you have to share it with others and you know we can have some freedom etc but if you don't we're going to send you to an island prison where you are going to be forbidden from breeding okay? So this is him playing the utopian card where hey everything's nice and all this kind of stuff the peace of the world is assured forever as he says But if you don't agree, we have a group of leaders up at the top and they're going to crush you. Okay? So that's the coercive stick at the end of every utopian society. So HG Wells is a huge figure in this book and over time as we can see here big advocate changed the world as Orwell said perceptibly he influenced the welfare state with his book A Modern Utopia

45:18 Winston Churchill, who was a liberal politician at the time. One of the architects of the early welfare state he read this book sympathetically and HG Wells transformed the world and led it on the track successfully to what you think about what taxes Americans paid in 1900 I don't know 2% of their overall money these days it's more than 50%. American is more socialist than not is what that statistic tells And so he was successful, H.G. Wells in advocating this now a modern utopia in 1905 which H. G. Wells writes quite seriously about showing this perfect world where everything is organized let me see if I can get the exact quote so he's trying to create a scientific mechanical civilization those are his words right? This is a guy who went to the Soviet Union and talked to Stalin and said I'm a big fan of you Stalin I am more extreme than you are

46:13 Okay, this is H.G Wells." You don't hear that side of H. G Wells do you? No. Right? So we just hear his nice little quaint stories about the invisible man which by the way is an assault on individualism when you get down to it right? It is suggesting that individualism necessarily and privacy necessarily leads to psychopathy. That's what The Invisible Man is really about. Right. You can't trust people to behave if they have any anonymous Features to themselves cuz invisible man obviously is physically invisible that's just a creative device too. Make the point that privacy leads to immoral behavior gonna be raping everybody and robbing everybody if we don't have a lock on you thats really the psychological message in, that book which i've heard you talk about it was like yeah never thought about it that way

47:05 Exactly. Yeah, here's a quote from it. So the crowd of people in the little place that he's staying at says he's invisible and it reads like rage growing to mania The things he may do the things he may do and he's upstairs free as the air what on earth ought I to do? Right? So he hasn't done anything yet, but they're just assuming that this guy is invisible. He's very individualistic. He's unlike other people in the book who are kind of represented as the crowd right? The main group of humanity, he's different from them and so he's necessarily evil. There's a lot to unpack in the early fiction of Wells but just to kind of finish the original question you had... Then people key on the fact that Wells' utopia is actually

47:50 not a good thing, right? And so Ian Forster writes a long short story called The Machine Stops where he parodies and explains how actually utopia is not a good thing. We shouldn't be striving for this And then Brave New World, Aldous Huxley has exactly HG Wells in mind when he writes his dystopia. And then so does George Orwell who was a huge critic of Wells. In fact, he says of HG Wells something about the fact that I look at Nazi Germany and see all the things that Welles talked about happening in Nazi Germany. So he was not a fan of Wells. The dystopian genre was spawned from HG Wells trying to create this perfect world. He created the dystopian genre. Congratulations to HG Wells you've created at least something good

48:32 Hmm. And you also talk about childhood's end and this is a book I've never read, but you also talk about CS Lewis and he's a guy who I always kind of wrote off because I grew up in a Catholic school and it's like here's this guy putting Catholic values in some fiction like fuck this guy. I was just young and rebellious against that. I have more respect for him now but He said of childhood and that here we meet a modern author who understands that there may be things have a higher claim on humanity than its own quote unquote survival, add that quote unquote survival is always the justification for increase surveillance as you said safety no what will we sacrifice in the name of safety. And how safe can we ever really be like it's never ending thing

49:20 So talk to us a little bit about Childhood's End or even just C.S Lewis because you seem to have deep appreciation for him and some of his ideas in the realms of the topics of the book, which are things I don't hear about very often from him. Yeah, I think one of the values of my book is that I touch on all these things and they seem to come together right? Science fiction... All these popular figures like CS Lewis dystopia, utopia, collectivism. All these kind of ideas and how they manifest. And so Childhood's End is one of these famous science fiction books I hadn't been familiar with it until Doug Casey actually...I'm a big fan of Doug Casey and he advocated this book at one point in time so i read it by the way go look up childhoods end original published cover that that is one of the most haunting and amazing covers that you'll ever find

50:11 And it actually influenced my own art style and the cover of my own book. It's a story about an alien craft that one day just hovers over the world, okay? One of the major cities in the world. And it doesn't do anything for years or long time. So people finally decide they're going to try to shoot down and instantly disintegrate, instantly deflected And they realize at that point, that they're screwed. Humanity realized hey these people are so much more advanced than we are, we are screwed and then suddenly or after that this alien representative starts to communicate through a intermediary, a human intermediary and he basically says look we've been watching you

50:52 for a long time. We're world builders, we've been around the universe, we know how to do things and so we are going to solve all your problems." And so they give them unlimited energy, they use coercion surveillance to end apartheid in South Africa and all these other sorts of things So the author actually says, by any account this was utopia. Right? After a few decades of this, this was utopia and I'm not going to spoil the ending because it's an amazing powerful ending in Childhood End about the failure of all centralized systems, of all collectivist systems, of anybody who thinks that central planning is a solution for anything. It is the most damning critique of those ideas that have ever encountered in childhood end

51:37 But it does have this basic idea that, that which is surveyed gets controlled and central planners always have their own agenda. Even if it's good, It's not your agenda. It's their agenda and If your ethics are I'm going to value what some other group of people says or I'm going to value the collective over myself then That could lead to your death right? That could lead you hey You're not good for the collective so you go away you get wiped out So that's the idea of Childhoods End, very powerful story. I'd recommend people go track it down on the topic of our friend C.S Lewis wrote a fantastic book called The Abolition Of Man and through this you see one of the early critiques of the technocracy and HG Wells understood that all these people talking about eugenics talking about transhumanism HG Wells talked about transhumanism all these sorts of early things CS Lewis was trying to nip in the bud

52:34 And he says, look there's no way of getting the rewards of the system and not being punished in terms of freedom and privacy. He says things like hey there are more important things than material gain then you know welfare and all these sorts of things so C.S Lewis was...and I have many quotes from him across my book. He was one of the early people that realized Progress, as progressives are defining progress is not actually progress. Progress as C.S Lewis says is the expansion of happiness and goodness for individuals. It's not a collective term it's not a government term it's not a nationalistic term its an individual term And so he's fighting against all these ideas that HG Wells was just throwing out there one after the other

53:17 CS Lewis was there combating them in a very intelligent way. And I am certainly more of the mind of CS Lewis and CS Lewis is more in line with 19th century thinking, that lies are fair approach to Christian moral approach. CS Lewis is a powerful counterpoint to all these people in early 20th century who wants to change the world. Well i like that you cover a lot of those authors in the book because we talk to all kinds of guests about how media influences us media seeds ideas the whole goal of hollywood it seems is super patchy wait certain ideas and themes. All under the guise of entertainment but its not just entertainment it's entertainment with an agenda, add if u go back to this era it's all gonna be written can be about the novels that were popular at the time so

54:06 I think it is a great way to discuss how the public was kind of softly conditioned to want this kind of stuff, to appreciate this kinda centralization. I think it's a good approach and In terms of recent news I wanted to throw out here just that's on topic, we had the arrest of the guy who started Telegram. I don't know what happened with that but clearly they don't like these people who make these platforms and even have encryption even if it's not on by default and then The Internet Archive known for its Wayback Machine tool was recently hacked and DDoS attacked at the same time

54:44 I can't be sure if it's down still or will be down when this goes up but i was suspicious i would say cuz i just read the had a major lawsuit that they lost and. I guess that's a pretty conventional site by your standards but it's a pretty big blow to a lot of folks who are lied on at four, Finding older information or things that have been scrubbed you know they wanna get rid of certain things the way back machine can resurrect it and that whole system is down so that to me as a bigger blow than if like wikipedia was down i love the way back machine in the internet archive. But in terms of news before we do wrap up stuff are there other things that you've seen, that concern you mean the internet archive being down the rest of the telegram guy cbdc's be enrolled out

55:31 What are you seeing? Yeah, I'll throw in another one. My friends who made a Bitcoin privacy wallet were arrested unjustly and are still facing serious time in prison for basically running a Bitcoin privacy service that never even took custody of funds. This is called Samurai Wallet. Feel free to look into it if you want but I consider things like that to be an assault on... We talked about encryption and things of this sort. Your Bitcoin private keys as one person has said are the strongest property rights in the history of the world And I consider that to be a true statement. More strong property rights than the gold that you have in your own house because the gold can be found, taken...

56:10 a one single location on earth or maybe if you that you can store things whereas your Bitcoin private keys are protected by really powerful encryption and you can memorize them. So anyway, that's kind of going up in the tangent samurai wallet arrest concerns me assaults on self custodial cryptocurrencies worry me a lot being in that kind of sphere. You mentioned telegram The CEO was arrested in France basically he's plane landed in France who is immediately arrested? He's basically being held responsible for all the things that people or a lot of the things that people have done on Telegram, which is many heinous things in addition to many awesome good things right 99% of all things on the internet are good law abiding people just wanting to talk about things as they want to. Telegram is the uncensored internet

56:54 There are many things that occur on Telegram that do not occur anywhere else in the world, anywhere else on the internet. They only exist on Telegram or talk about firsthand journalism from Ukraine and wars and war zones and all sorts of thing only happens on Telegram. And previously as in a few weeks ago September, Telegram's policy on their website was they had an FAQ section and the question was I found something illegal on Telegram how do I report it? And telegram response We don't respond to that. Okay, talk about a liberal policy of free speech! And now it's changed since this guy has been arrested, surprise surprise that they're going to start tracking and reporting in the sorts of things. But still you can go on Telegram which is a forum treated as a form don't treat it as a private messaging app be careful what you say on there You can find things on telegram that would shock you that would amaze you people have coordinated on there for all kinds of causes People have channels on their sharing information that does not get shared As I said anywhere else on the internet

57:52 This is the uncensored internet that you remember. Just be cautious how you use it, and we'll see about the future of Telegram by the way So yeah, Internet Archive troubling. Very useful resource to go back in time basically just taking snapshots of the internet throughout time. Fantastic idea! Now I'm saying we need an Internet Archive of The Internet Archive as soon it comes back on live so you know...I talk about these things on Twitter and all my show regularly if people want to kind of follow that for the latest stuff but those are definitely a few of the hot button issues shall we say but the same things remain true is always encryption works Otherwise, the entire internet would essentially shut down governments included. So encryption works and we need to use that in as many ways as we can whether that's VPNs private messengers hard drives are locked down running Linux private note taking private email services like proton mail We need to be using encryption in every form that we can because that is really our protection on the Internet That is digital privacy Cheers to that

1:00:31 Thank you. Stay dangerous, Greg. I like it. But either way, I like his vibe and as new book does hit on that sub theme. I've been enjoying more and more and that's highlighting the real impact fiction has on us on our governing philosophies what views and stances we end up getting subtly nudged towards when we think were just being entertained

1:01:08 All very much wrapped up in this and seeing how centralization is depicted in popular fiction of its day, it's just super interesting because these are all authors and works that I think we're familiar with for the most part. And clearly this sort of culture shaping goes back well before Hollywood It's funny that even the creation of Hollywood, I think is 1903. It goes right back to that couple decades we're always returning too in terms of the times when everything changed Very curious But i think a guy in Gabriel's position focused on privacy picked a very good way to broaden his range and expand on what he does and why privacy is important And how he'd been sort of manipulated into giving more and more of it up

1:01:53 I like the stuff where he's focused on the relationship between centralization and privacy or the lack thereof. And yeah, he's clearly right that a centralized system can't be private because the central authority needs your information to sort of rule over you or govern you...to use a more neutral term Lots of good stuff and remember if you want to get 15% off his books, his course website-wide The code is Hireside Always cool when people do that and it's just smart to give a little get a little 90% of people who do an interview with me are trying to get their Work out there And promote themselves more and sure killing a two-hour interview helps do that But you know what else helps? A discount code. So easy yet so few take full advantage of that, so kudos to him

1:02:49 Of course the first hour was fun and the second hour was as well, become a plus member and get the full uninterrupted 2-hour interviews as God intended. Today's second hour included stuff like AI as the new tool for centralized technocracy Libertarian values and trying to scale that up to a large society. The unacknowledged value of the Tor browser, probably my favorite part this might actually open up some doors for new guests for those who heard that clearly it'd be interesting to seek out some of these unlisted journalists or unlisted media organizations even if they have a surface web presence still it would be cool

1:03:30 We talked about free and open-sourced options for our digital lives, the eugenics philosophy and the next wave of new technologies. Efficiency implementations in the future of work as well a few other things Compelling stuff, definitely unexpected and I kind of went on an unneeded California vs Florida rant in there. And once it veered into a back-and-forth about a libertarian society then we both quickly realized that it's just not good podcast conversation to do the whole libertarian point counterpoint thing My short and sweet message on libertarianism is that it's the best personal philosophy I know of, the best way for an individual to live and approach interactions with their government. But it doesn't really scale to a governmental level if it does we've never seen it And if it could It'd be out of our hands anyway So it's all just hypothetical stuff but how you choose to live Is not so hypothetical! So good material Good reminders To shore up our digital game

1:04:34 It's fun to be hard to track. You can really make a game out of it and the digital lifestyle is not going anywhere Isn't it worth having a better grasp on it? Some mastery over it or at least some proficiency But that's on you guys. I hope this was somewhat motivating in that regard and I like the history stuff, I like the context in his latest book related to fleshing out why things are the way they are and the parallels based on the changing technologies that show us that the controller mindset really hasn't changed just their abilities to implement have

1:05:10 But speaking of motivation, let's see how that last episode with inversionism is going. Lots of health based knowledge and motivation there and it is sitting on the THC website at a 4.8 Very good! That is what I would expect Actually maybe a little higher than expected because if you're in the vegan vegetarian camp And some are...I would have expected to get a little tiny bit dinged up from that but hey 4.8 is great Dolan told me he's getting lots of DMs and email requests and questions, so very good. And then let's hit the meetup calendar as we always do! The next event November 3rd this Sunday is in Alberta at Atlas Brewing I did tell Darren & Graham of Gramerica about that but don't know if i told them fast enough

1:06:02 November 7th, Montana Tap House White House, Montana. November 9th Los Angeles Trails Cafe. November 13th Athens Ohio West End Cider House and November 22nd, the Sale Plaza in Tampa Florida. Love it? A fair amount of events all over the place please if you hear about one in your area take advantage don't leave the host hangin' and just meet a couple new friends that all like the same kind of thing You never know when that can be useful especially in such volatile times But yeah, I made it! Two hurricane scares but still five shows in at the buzzer and still time to do Halloween with the family. Big thanks to Gabriel and all you guys for listening

1:06:49 Got a couple dozen new plus members this week and no complaints so far on the tokenized RSS process. It seems to be working well for everyone and is very clear that everyone can do it themselves, and it only takes less than a minute No support tickets related to that So we are cooking with gas! All right I've done my part your move privacy violators dystopia inviters and freedom annihilators you're fucking You can try your best but you won't succeed In the transhumanistic future we see We'll keep you wired so you can sleep Tech is a curve It's just one chip behind your And some parts below that we can replace This leaves no time to wait and list the Lights inside forever connect

1:08:19 The people that first get it should have a massive advantage over people that don't have it yet. Well, I mean its the kind of thing where your productivity would improve

1:09:24 dramatically maybe by a factor of 10 with it so you could definitely just take out a loan and do it put the money back real fast. Yeah, super smart When do you think your gonna do? How long will you wait? Our big dream new face is our big dream A new phase Stand by our big dream New face Highs are big dreams

1:10:34 new face