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

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Help me help you become a PLUS member. Thanks for listening. Enjoy. The planet's puppet masters almost surely have a plan. There's clearly maybe something there beyond the realm of man. And until we've thoroughly tested every last close-chested view, I find the more we think we know. Unless we really do, where would we be? 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 the mental calculus and philosophical tug-of-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, 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 deplatforming and frozen assets, high-profile targets are assassinated in war zones with facial recognition, AI, automatic machine guns, and even exploding pagers, deep-diving journalists crash into poles at 100 miles an hour when their vehicles' controls are overridden, 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 the 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. As a reminder, Gabriel Custodiette 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 the guy who's become my own personal privacy guru, the technocrat tamer, privacy protector, and watcher of The Watchman, Gabriel. Welcome back. 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. 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 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 proselytizing privacy, and 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 of years, maybe things we've seen is a lot of cancellations from people. 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, Az-Rav. Oh, yeah. And he said something disparaging about the Palestinians, and he gets shut down and of course, is probably facing any manner 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 people search 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 is being collected by a lot of companies. And so that's just one little thing 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. 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, like all the things I'm looking at on my computer screen right now, almost all of which have nothing to do with big tech. I own the 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, 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 overemphasizing 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? I get the code. It's just so frustrating sometimes because time is the only real resource I care about. And then they suck a lot of it away. But in the last two years, just a few things I referenced in the intro there, exploding pagers. I mean, that was a pretty crazy technological thing that happened. And you did an interview with someone or a conversation on your podcast about the facial recognition assassination of Motion Baranzada, the Iranian nuclear program director. And you got really into the nitty gritty of how that was accomplished. And it's like, Jesus Christ, I didn't know such a thing was possible. And then another example is the debanking of Nigel Farage, head of the UK Independence Party. That's the thing that worries me is debanking. I can pretty much handle any de-platforming. I mean, the people who like me will find me, I hope. Although you do notice that if you 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 that's kind of their conditioning and their problem. But 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 coercion through technological means, which it really is a product of the last 100 years. That's why we use the term technocracy. 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, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is his name. And this is a very interesting story. I encourage people to go to the Watchmen Privacy podcast and track that one down. So basically what happened is that, of course, Iran sees itself as the internal enemy of Israel. And so they keep things very secret. 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 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 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, of 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 an 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 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 a distraction. It's kind of murky, the 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 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 control. 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. And it's just a crazy story of like, wow, this stuff is possible. And this happened years ago, right? So who knows what new technology is available now? And of course, again, Mossad, recently we saw the pager attacks. So they've got a lot of 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's 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. And people might think, well, I'm not going to be the head of an Iranian nuclear program, so I hope I'm 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, the world is getting crazy. And it's just nice to know how crazy it is getting. But I did want to get to the new book, Privacy and Utopia. 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. It's nothing new, but the technology to enable it is finally kind of coming together. And it seems like your book talks about how about 100 years ago, there was a similar emergence of new systems and tools that facilitated a major level jump towards centralization and the road that brings us into the post-Patriot Act world that we're in now. Take us back to that time and the changes that were going on that helped this level change happen, similarly to the level change we had just right before COVID, I would say. Yeah. So I'm talking about the privacy strategies, as people will know from last time. I've talked about the crazy current technocratic things. And I also wrote this book, as you said, called Privacy and Utopia. And I kind of trace back 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 the path to where we are today, which a lot of your audience knows, so much control in many ways, so many technocratic agendas. 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 world, but they didn't really have a great ways to do so, right? They had to go by foot. They had to go by horse. They didn't have too great a 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 the steam engine. Suddenly you can go against the winds and you can cross the entire globe in a relatively short period of time. In 1800, Lewis and Clark in the U.S. go on an expedition that's a lifelong journey just to cross the U.S., right? It's a whole lifetime journey. Fast forward 100 years to 1900. Now you can make that trip in a few days with a 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. 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. And 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 was not a passport system. Passports arise during this time. Why? Because there's a way to police this stuff, okay? Where there's a will, there's a way. Where there's a means to do this stuff, new ideas get developed. So there's this weird thing between new technologies coming about, controlling technologies, the birth of the technocracy, and this new idea of, hey, why don't we use these things to alter the 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. 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 H.G. Wells is one of these big figures. And he looks at the technology and he says, hey, we have the means to change things. We should. We should change things. And he became a big proponent of world government. He thinks that we need to have a common goal, common plan, that we can't just have this laissez-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. Almost as soon, Greg, 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 of 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 of the time. It's both the technology to change the world and this collectivist idea that, hey, 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. And you even have a couple of lines about something I never thought much about, but you talk about the Greeks and the accumulation of knowledge, and you contrast that with these people in the industrial age, the robber barons and all of them. And you basically say, like, the Greeks, they just wanted to acquire knowledge for the sake of knowledge. And in the early 20th century, there was something else entirely. It was acquiring knowledge for the sake of control. And it's just odd that the Greeks didn't have that mindset. I'm sure some amongst them did. You can't 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 that's a huge difference from the way these people were trying to learn about the world and scientism and progress and how they could use that information to reach their aims that were just unreachable at the time of Genghis Khan, as you mentioned. Yeah, that's kind of one of these little bits where I'm trying to kind of 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. They were more intelligent. They were 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. How much he knew about the animal kingdom and about how processes develop and the cosmos. He was a little bit off about the cosmos, obviously, but they were thinking about 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 2000 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 kinds of things that would have set them off onto modernity 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, you know, 2,500 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 social policy, right? So we understand heredity, not just for intellectual discussion, but so that we can change things, right? Eugenics is the natural thing that comes immediately after heredity is understood. Like why? Why in the world would that happen? And you look at Marx. I think Marx is 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 I 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, certainly a double-edged sword and as much bad certainly as good and maybe wasn't always for the best is 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. Well, 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, 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's 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 an 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 you and you get privacy, which means that we're going to... Anyway, we don't have to get too far 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 are an 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, you leave. 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 overcomplicated that, but that's kind of the basic contradiction I'm 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, the less 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 to Portland and see a McDonald's and a Chick-fil-A. I want to see what you guys got going on up there. I like to go to different areas and regions of the country and world to experience what makes them unique, not this uniform blanket factory food thing. And so I love decentralization, and I think that if you had decentralization working with capitalism or keeping it kind of in check, it would probably be obviously a much better system to have mom and pops, you know, still self-directed businesses that people have decided to have, but just regional instead of everything being so global. And to illustrate the point you were 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 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, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is all new and different. 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 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, the 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. That's whatever centralized system you want. A group of people needs to know everything in order to control everything. If they know everything, 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 a right? A right is only that which you have decided to fight for yourself. That's the only thing you have a right to, is the things you fight for. So that's kind of maybe the takeaway message. Yeah, to me, it's just an 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 and that issue, and the two-party systems designed to have a better answer for this one, but you hate that one. And it's all intermixed and set 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 in an intellectual argument or having some discussion, if you just return to that premise and hope that that idea propagates, 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 to add to that real quick, Greg, the U.S. is coming up on an election, and really people look in, 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. 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 you 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 the last 100 years, there's been more centralization within the United States so that there's 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 in 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. It's supposed to be just a liaison for interactions between the states, some kind of system. You know, if we had 50 different languages, for example, it would be hard to get a lot of stuff done throughout the United States. It wouldn't be so united. But, you know, 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 if we'll ever get back to there, 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 if 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. It's kind of like a Brexit thing. But they were like, no, you can't even have the option to vote for it. And 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. But I think about examples like D.B. Cooper, just a fun example of a guy like the antihero who was kind to all the people on the plane, but got away with some shit. But the reason we don't know who D.B. 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 a plane and then pull off a stunt. But that was 1971. It's like, wow, a lot of people listening were alive then. Seems like an entirely different world to now being an iris scan to get on a plane and, 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. Wow. 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 you're just like, what? But what's 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 U.S., 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 is always demanding more people to be sacrificed in its cause. But, yeah, I mean, 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 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 the way. Americans have become over-policed. They've become whipped dogs. I was talking to somebody yesterday in the U.S. 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 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 their country and all these other sorts of first-order issues of which big bureaucratic and evil governments are simply a consequence of. Well said, and a lot of your book is about the popular fiction of the time and how these ideas of utopia and dystopia, centralization and decentralization were being utilized to comment on society and the trajectory of things. Probably most popular among these writers would be H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell. 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 H.G. 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 H.G. Wells. This is his quote. 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 of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed. So H.G. 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 100 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, right? Where the Martians are applauded for wiping out a decentralized, laissez-faire humanity with no plan, right? Who are in underdeveloped society because they value individualism and privacy and all these things. And the Martians, looking from on high, who are surveying them, are able to wipe them out because they are single-minded, they're singly focused, they're a collectivist society, and this is a superior life form. And H.G. 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, H.G. 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. 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, 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, people can have some private property, but you have to share it with others. And we can have some freedom, et cetera. 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 H.G. Wells is a huge figure in this book. And of the time, as we can see here, big advocate, changed the world, as Orwell said perceptibly. He influenced the welfare state with this book, A Modern Utopia. 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 H.G. Wells transformed the world and led it on the track successfully to the kind of, well, 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%, right? American is more socialist than not, is what that statistic tells you. 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, okay? This is H.G. Wells. You don't hear that side of H.G. Wells, do you, 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. You can't trust people to behave if they have any anonymous features to themselves because the invisible man, obviously, he's physically invisible. Well, that's just a creative device to make the point that privacy leads to immoral behavior. You're going to be raping everybody and robbing everybody if we don't have a lock on you. That's really the psychological message in that book, which I've heard you talk about, and I was like, yeah, I never thought about it that way. 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? 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, the main group of humanity, he's different from them, and so he's necessarily evil. So there's a lot to unpack in the early fiction of Wells. But just to kind of finish the original question you had, so then people key on the fact that Wells' utopia is actually 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 H.G. Wells in mind when he writes his dystopia, and then so does George Orwell, who is a huge critic of Wells. In fact, he says of H.G. Wells something about the fact that I look in Nazi Germany, I see all the things that Wells talked about happening in Nazi Germany. So he was not a fan of Wells. And so the dystopia genre was spawned from H.G. Wells trying to create this perfect world. He created the dystopian genre. So congratulations, H.G. Wells, you created at least something good. And you also talk about Childhood's End, and this is a book I've never read, but you also talk about C.S. 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's End that here we meet a modern author who understands that there may be things that have a higher claim on humanity than its own, quote-unquote, survival. And that, quote-unquote, survival is always the justification for increased surveillance. As you said, safety, you know, what will we sacrifice in the name of safety, and how safe can we ever really be? Like, it's a never-ending thing. So talk to us a little bit about Childhood's End, or even just C.S. Lewis, because you seem to have a 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 you know, like C.S. 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 Childhood's End original published cover. That is one of the most haunting and amazing covers that you'll ever find. And it actually influenced my own art style and the own cover of my own book. And it's a story about an alien craft that one day just hovers over the world, okay? One of the major cities of the world. And it doesn't do anything for years, for a long time. And so people finally decide they're going to try to shoot it down, and it's just like instantly disintegrated, instantly deflected. And they realize at that point that they're screwed, right? 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 for a long time. We are 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 I've ever encountered in Childhood's End. But it does have this basic idea that that which is surveyed gets controlled. And central planners always have their own agenda, right? 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 to, hey, you're not good for the collective, so you go away. You get wiped out. So that's the idea of Childhood's End. Very powerful story. I recommend people go track it down. On the topic of our friend C.S. Lewis, 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 H.G. Wells understood that all these people talking about eugenics, talking about transhumanism, H.G. Wells talking about transhumanism, all these sorts of early things, C.S. Lewis was trying to nip it in the bud. 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, than 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, hey, 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. It's an individual term. And so he's fighting against all these ideas that H.G. Wells was just throwing out there, one after the other. C.S. Lewis was there combating them in a very intelligent way. And I am certainly more of the mind of C.S. Lewis. And C.S. Lewis is more in line with 19th century thinking, the laissez-faire approach, the Christian, the moral approach. C.S. Lewis is a powerful counterpoint to all these people in the early 20th century who want 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 to perpetuate certain ideas and themes all under the guise of entertainment. But it's not just entertainment. It's entertainment with an agenda. And if you go back to this era, it's all going to be written. It's going to be about the novels that were popular at the time. So 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 kind of 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 that 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. I can't be sure if it's down still or will be down when this goes up, but highly suspicious, I would say, because I just read they 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 relied on it for finding older information or things that have been scrubbed. They want to get rid of certain things, the Wayback Machine can resurrect it, and that whole system is down. So that to me is a bigger blow than if Wikipedia was down. I love the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive. But in terms of news before we do the wrap-up stuff, are there other things that you've seen that concern you? I mean, the Internet Archive being down, the rest of the Telegram guy, CBDCs being rolled out. 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, you know, 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. You only have a one single location on Earth or maybe a few 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 off 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. He was 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. 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. We're talking about firsthand journalism from Ukraine and wars and war zones and all sorts of things 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's response was, we don't respond to that. Okay. Talk about a liberal policy of free speech. And now it's changed since this guy's been arrested, surprise, surprise, that they're going to start tracking and reporting and these sorts of things of this sort. But still, you can go on Telegram, which is a forum. Treat it as a forum. 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 there sharing information that does not get shared, as I said, anywhere else on the Internet. 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 as it comes back on live. So, you know, I talk about these things on Twitter and on 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 as 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 that are locked down, running Linux, private note taking, private email services like ProtonMail. 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. Well, this is super informative. And I think you chose a great path for the new book and a way to broaden out your overall focus. And I appreciate you sharing it with us. As for your own links and podcasts, do remind people what they might want to know about following up your course as well. And this code you mentioned, the higher side code. Yeah. So we talked in this episode about my book, Privacy and Utopia. You can buy that on Amazon. And same with my privacy guide. I wrote a physical guide called The Watchman Guide to Privacy. You can find those on Amazon. I also created my own website. My own website. So there's minimal tracking. And we're trying to get rid of even that. You can purchase anonymously. If you use a credit card, we don't ask for your name. We don't ask for basically any information except the basics. You can pay Monero and Bitcoin if you'd like. So we have our own website called Escapethetechnocracy.com, where we sell both of these books. You can buy non-DRM PDF copies. We're not your controllers, right? And you can also purchase my privacy course called Escape the Technocracy. I think it's the best privacy tutorial on the internet for really locking down your life, your phones, your computers, learning Linux. We're going to talk about self-hosting, all the good sorts of things to find your freedom on the internet. So that's Escapethetechnocracy.com. And yeah, we do have a code, HIGHERSIDE. You'll get 15% off anything that you buy on that website. So, and yeah, just follow me, the Watchmen Privacy Podcast for my regular updates. Love it. And I appreciate that code. I'm sure on behalf of the people who use it, they appreciate it as well. Thanks a lot, man. Fun to reconnect with you. Take care out there. Thank you. Stay dangerous, Greg. I like it. Staying dangerous with the best of them. Gabriel Custodiette, back after two years. Man, the time does fly. Even my editor said it seemed like just yesterday that he edited the first episode with Gabriel. But either way, I like his vibe. And his 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 we're just being entertained. All very much wrapped up in this. And seeing how centralization is depicted in popular fiction of its day is 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 of decades we're always returning to 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's been sort of manipulated into giving more and more of it up. 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 HIGHERSIDE. Always cool when people do that. And it's just smart, too. 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. Of course, the first hour was fun and the second hour was as well. Become a Plus member and get the full, uninterrupted two-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'd be cool. We talked about free and open-sourced options for our digital lives, the eugenics philosophy, and the next wave of new technologies. Efficiency implementations and the future of work, as well as 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, I think 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. 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. 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 and all that. 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 and Graham of Gramerica about that. But I don't know if I told them fast enough. November 7th, Montana Tap House. It's 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 hanging 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. 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. Your fuckin' move. You can try your best, but you won't succeed. In the transhumanistic future we see. We'll keep you wired so you can't sleep. Back is a curve. It's just one chip behind your face. And some parts below that we can't replace. There's no time to fix you. The first get it. It should have a massive advantage over people that don't have it yet. Well, I mean, it's the kind of thing where your productivity would improve, I don't know, dramatically, maybe like a factor of 10 with it. So you could definitely just, you know, take out a loan and do it and earn the money back real fast. Yeah. It's gonna be super smart. When do you think you're gonna do it? How long will you wait? A new fake, a big dream.