We watch the watchmen — Gabriel Custodiet | Jerm Warfare

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For the first time on my UK Column Show, Gabriel Castodia.

Thank you for joining me in the trenches.

Happy to be here, Jerome.

Been following some of your stuff.

You're traveling to China.

You always do interesting work.

Happy to be here.

It's interesting, Gabriel, how people have got such an embedded, an entrenched view

on this particular country.

Yeah, you know, that's a good way of putting it.

It's kind of a litmus test for the types of media that people follow.

And it really rubs people hard in one direction or the other, China.

Because if you were maybe conservative or libertarian leaning, you know,

China is the enemy of the West and they have a surveillance going on.

And they have a social credit score and all this kind of stuff.

And these just get kind of spouted without any nuance, which is what you covered,

is that there's a lot of nuance to that.

I think that's, you know, I know people who have spent a lot of time in China recently.

Obviously, I'm a privacy guy.

So, you know, when we talk about what China is doing, you know, when we talk about what

China is doing, I mean, I wouldn't want to spend too much time.

However, you know, what China is doing is they have a different group of people

with a different mindset and a different history.

And they're taking their, you know, and as far as I understand, you know,

the people, you know, government, I think, is at the end of the day a reflection of the people.

They're going off in the direction that they think is best for them.

And there are plenty of perks for that, right?

Incredibly safe, obviously.

There's a lot of a lot more freedom than the husband in the past to do various things.

And, you know, they are, you know, they're plugging along Chinese style.

So, you know, they can do what they want as far as I'm concerned.

Well, that's exactly the point that I've been trying to make for a long time.

Make your own bed is what people who are very quick to throw around comments.

And it's not because I have some sort of dog in the fight, I don't.

I don't even think I have a single Chinese follower.

But I am interested in how the world actually works.

And if you're going to talk about, you know, invasion or privacy,

we need to look right where we are.

Yeah, absolutely.

There's a great meme that I like where somebody is complaining in a SMS, you know,

chat to a friend about how, hey, the F, anyway, I think they're complaining about China in this meme.

And then you zoom to the next panel and it shows that this entire conversation is being read by the FBI.

So it's kind of like, you know, if you value privacy in your own society,

especially Americans, let's say, you better, you know,

look at the Patriot Act and all these other incredibly invasive things that the US is leading the

charge in regarding invasion of privacy, you should probably start there.

Make sure that you have your own house clean before you go and start criticizing other people.

And ultimately, like, why do people, this is another thing that I'm leaning into these days is,

you know, who cares what other countries are doing, right?

Sure, does it affect you?

But, you know, do you have to apply your morals to the Chinese who I assure you,

the average Chinese person doesn't necessarily march into the same set of ideologies and, you know,

philosophy and all the rest, they have theirs and you have yours.

So maybe there's a chance for us to step back here and let people, you know, go off in their own direction

because we know that intervention in the grand scheme of things has not exactly gone well for either society.

You are very focused on privacy and the watchman.

I mean, this is a term that you that you like to use.

Who watches the watchman?

Yeah, well, that's the classic phrase from juvenile, right?

Who watches the watchman and the idea is simply to bring attention to the fact that you have all

of these powers out there and the people we talked about, who have the power of surveillance and such.

And by just turning back the mirror at them, right, their surveillance back at them,

pointing out the fact that they're doing it, you know, sunlight is the best disinfectant is kind of

the idea. So we can all be the watchman, we can all be the Julian Assange and, you know, point out

these crazy things that our own governments are doing so that we can keep them restrained and keep

them honest most importantly and, you know, reduce these concepts like the deep state and all these

sorts of things. Sunlights the best disinfectant. And I think that it has certainly, there has

certainly been a lot more sunlight recently with the podcast phenomenon and all these ways of

getting the message across because, you know, you don't really encounter CNN much unless you're

in an airport or something these days. So there has been a lot more sunlight. So that's what the

watchman is. It's us who are watching the, you know, all these surveillance companies and especially

the government. That's a fairly optimistic view, which is quite refreshing.

Yeah, you know, I focus from the very beginning on when, you know, you will look at some of the

alternative media, let's say, standard articles on privacy. And what do they say? They say,

oh, Palantir, they know everything about you. The government is tracking everything, you know,

we have this and that. And I read that, you know, I'll look at those. I'll read the first two sentences

and I'm like, okay, there's no, just like China, there's no nuance here. This is not actually how it

works. They can actually see everything. And me on my Linux computer running open source software

with encryption and layers of VPNs and torrent, all the rest, I assure you, they're not seeing

what I'm doing. And that's kind of what I teach is self-empowerment because if you have that mindset,

you get out of this doom loop of people who really enjoy being a victim and they really get off

on being told that, oh, it's hopeless and they know everything about you and there's nothing you can do.

You know, I have people who are trying to help me get a bigger audience and they say,

you need to stop saying that. You need to stop saying that it's not as bad as people think. You

need to do more of the doom because that'll get more people coming to you. And I'm like, I guess I

could do that. I guess I could be like all the zero hedge articles and whatnot where it's just

the world's ending and Palantir is right behind you. Just take a look, turn around. But that's not true.

Obviously, there's a lot of nuance to that. Surveillance is not as sophisticated as people think.

And if it was, if Tor was compromised and if encryption was compromised, all these VPNs,

there'd be a lot more people in jail. There'd be a lot more people in trouble. And that's certainly not

the case. Doom scrolling is a huge symptom of the, what's the word I'm looking for? Sceptic

conspiratorial community. They just are so nihilistic and blackpooled and it really

grates me up the wrong way. Yeah. And look, I understand this crowd and I have a lot of them in

my audience and I enjoy reading some of this stuff too. But the truth is that it's simply,

as you say, it's deferring responsibility. It's buying into the victimhood narrative,

which I refuse to do. And there's simple steps that people can take to get out of this survey.

Let's net, for example, they just don't want to do it. What's the old quotation? I think it's

Mark Twain says, maybe not Mark Twain, but opportunity is often missed because it's wearing

overalls and looks like work. So I think a lot of people, they prefer to keep Doom scrolling and

honestly, the social media, they love that. They love the conspiracy people. They love the people

who are out here screaming that you have no hope because they're just consuming that and they're

onto the next one. Meanwhile, in an hour of Doom scrolling, they could have learned

what a VPN is. You know, pay for a VPN, use a VPN. Now your internet service provider is not

tracking you. Now YouTube is not tracking you and you've done a very serious step towards preserving

your privacy. So yeah, I mean, we can have a balance here, but I don't think you want to be

completely absorbed in the idea that you have no control of your life. When has that ever

served anybody? When you talk about privacy, Gabriel, what are you talking about?

Well, that's a good question. So I mean, the common way that privacy is used and like,

hey, I'm out here to preserve my privacy is I don't want people knowing what I'm doing. Now,

in the olden days, that was called secrecy and it became a dirty word over time and then,

you know, suddenly Swiss, Switzerland is not talking about its secret bank accounts. It's talking

about banking privacy. So it's actually a politically correct term in a certain sense. But we kind

of know what we're talking about with privacy. So that's on the one hand, right? We don't want

people knowing what we're doing. On the other hand, I have come to believe that privacy is a social

term. It means that we live in a society that values us allowing to participate while requiring

minimal information from us. And in order to have a society like that has to be a has to be a high

trust society, probably you have to have similar people in your community. And you have to have this

history and tradition of limited governments and things of this in order for you to have privacy

as a value in your society. That's why most people in the world I think don't actually care about

privacy, the concept of privacy or have it. So, you know, on the one hand, I consult with people.

I help individuals who are trying to escape surveillance. Yes, absolutely. And we can do that.

In the long run, as my friends who ran a privacy Bitcoin wallet that just got arrested and are

facing five years in prison for writing privacy software discovered at the end of the day,

you can't really run from the system, right? They track these guys down all across the world.

They scooped them up. The US government did. So at the end, we have to have a society which

produces a government that is respecting of people's ability to participate while requiring

minimal information from people so that their own lives are not the business of everybody else.

Yeah, but okay, Gabriel, if you've got nothing to hide, what have you got to worry about?

Yeah, I mean, we talked about this on your German warfare podcast and my typical answer

these days is, you know, sure, go for it. You know, if you think you have nothing to hide, then

go for it. I've stopped trying to profitize because I think people understand. I think they

understand when they need privacy and that they probably do. And my clients who are running from

former lovers who are coming after them, you know, there's a small section of people who are in

the world who are psychopaths and who will do things like that. And you have jilted lovers and you

have people who are trying to escape from family situations. And, you know, just go down the

list, right? There was a, there was a singer in Japan who was tracked down by a fan who was stalking

her. He saw her reflection in a photograph from a puddle. She was in front of a train station.

And he knew that this was the train station she was at. So, I mean, I can go down and down

the list in terms of protecting yourself from cybercrime and all these sorts of things.

There's all kinds of reasons why he would want to protect your private information, learn how to

escape windows. Here's another example, escaping cancel culture. So I just checked two days ago,

just confirmed this is still the case. The Microsoft Services Agreement. If you perform hate speech,

you can look it up. Just search for Microsoft Services Agreement. If you perform hate speech on one

of their platforms and Jeremy, that is, that is Windows, your Windows computer. That is your

Microsoft 365 Microsoft Word. That is Xbox Live. If you perform hate speech, they can shut, you know,

they can shut down your account, right? And that is you trusting big tech when you don't have to,

right? You could be using Linux and some of these other alternatives. So that's really also an

aspect of privacy is using alternatives to big tech, which are sensorious, which will cancel you,

which will shut down your bank accounts and the privacy community has solutions to all of these

things. Escape cancel culture, protect your own private life from the people who would invade it

and have the ability to do what I'm doing, which is speaking very freely, because really nobody

is coming to track me down. Yeah, you mentioned Linux. I always say Linux. I don't know what the correct

pronunciation is, but I have played with it. I suppose for about two years and I gave up. It was

just too much work. If I'm being honest, Gabriel, I spent more time tinkering and trying to get

things to work than actually work. It does make sense. Maybe things are better now.

Yeah, so I think things are better now. So let's take a step back here, because the way I look at

things is, what is the alternative? What's happening when I use a Mac computer or a Windows computer?

Windows is a lot worse, but either one, right? They are collecting all kinds of things about you.

Obviously, you need some kind of account to log in. So that's probably an email address. They're

going to have your IP address, which gives you a, which locates your geography. So they know where

you live. They can read your email headers and certain other things of what you're doing.

For all we know, Windows is collecting everything you do on your computer. So they know an incredible

amount about you, and they can cancel you, as I said, I suspect that at some point they could

report you to the authorities for things you do using your own computer. They could do all kinds

of things, and I'm not comfortable with that. So I use Linux. It's not like, oh, this is going

to make my life so much better. It's more convenient. No, it's, I don't want that. Therefore,

I do this. And that's kind of what it goes down to. And I suffer all of the problems of Linux,

right? Just the other day, I was having a printer problem and all sorts of things. There are

problems, but here's the thing. It's gotten a lot better. Linux is becoming a lot more popular.

You can track down one of my popular versions Linux Mint. Get an old computer or buy a old Lenovo

Thinkpad on eBay for $100. Test it out, right? Install Linux Mint. And I think what you'll find

is that it's more simple than you think. And here's another big thing with AI. You can query AI

anytime you have a Linux problem, right? Hey, you know, I'm having trouble with my Linux computer.

I'm running Linux Mint. Oh, try this, this and this. AI has made it so much easier to troubleshoot.

And I've been using that a lot in the last bit of time to help with any Linux problems that I do have.

But you said AI, so you know what's going to come now is pushback from our audience.

Well, I mean, you can pushback all you want now. Look, I was a AI skeptic just a couple of years ago.

And then with my colleague who's a who's a big fan of AI or using AI in a real kind of sovereign

private way, he convinced me to look into it. So I did. And now it's a it's a huge tool in my day.

It increases my productivity greatly. There are ways to do it privately and in a sovereign way.

And importantly, in an unsensurious way, right? You go to chat, GPT, you ask it a question, right?

I have a I have the same question I ask every time very politically and correct. And if it lectures you,

then it's censored, right? There are ones that will not lecture you. And so we actually have an

entire course, the AI resistance course where we teach you how to understand AI, how to, you know,

it's not we're not promising the world, right? We don't like to have those rose color lens because

I think there's a lot of AI showing out there. Oh, you know, it's just a buzzword, right? But when

you learn what it actually is, you understand that you can take a document that's 100 pages long,

paste it in there and say, you know, summarize this for me, done three seconds, right? That is

increased productivity. You can use an AI tool for art and say, hey, give me a, you know, a give me

this kind of art. Bam, now I have an amazing podcast artwork in 30 seconds. So it can increase

your productivity. You can do it in a private and sovereign way. And you know, it's inevitable.

Honestly, like you can put your head in the sand or you can realize that if John Conner was alive

today, he would be fostering his own locally hosted private AI to fight against SkyNet. That's

the reality of the situation. AI art and AI music. I am all over the place. I don't know where I stand

on this. I've had this discussion with multiple friends and nobody really knows what to think.

Well, look, I'm very sympathetic to the argument that humans only humans can create art. I'm very

sympathetic to that. And yet, if you go to my website, escapethetechnocracy.com, take a look around

at some of these images. These are AI created images. These are capturing ideas and environments

and atmosphere that I, not being an artist, could never do in my life. So I have an idea of what I

like. I use the AI and it creates a very profound image. I'm looking at my AI resistance image now.

It's like a woman with a shattered face, like a mirror and then half of her face is cyborg.

It can capture some really powerful stuff. And if you look at that, you say, oh, that's AI.

Okay, then by all means go for it, but most people don't even notice. Most people can't tell the

difference. And maybe we say, well, we need to refine our idea of how we understand music and

our music appreciation and how we understand art. Maybe we should do that, absolutely. But for

now, I can create, you know, the 200 images that I've created and published using AI, I would not

have been able to do that by myself. And so it is allowed me to honestly be super inspired,

actually. I get a lot of enjoyment from making AI art. And, you know, sure, it does need a human

touch to stitch it up a little bit at the end and clean it up. But I enjoy it. And honestly,

at the end of the day, if you think it's bad, then, you know, I doubt you're actually noticing it

is the reality because it's being used a lot more these days in video games and movies and all

the rest. And I don't know, I think it's just inevitable. I think it's the future. I think there

are other reasons to be good at artistry for it for its own sake. And yeah, I think maybe a better

appreciation, more cultivating a sense of what is good art can help us notice the differences.

But until then, you know, I'm going to be using AI and just flying right past you.

Yeah. So you're kind of making the point that technology is a tool and it can be used for

nefarious reasons and it can also be used for very good reasons.

Yes, exactly. So I am deep in my heart somewhere, a neoludite. I truly am, like I really am.

I'm not around here using a smartwatch or some of this other stuff. But when there is a privacy

focus open source version of that, I might give it a try. That's kind of how I think about things.

I push back hard against the idea that all technology is progress. I don't think that's true.

I think you look at social media. I think you look at the posity of innovation actually in the last

10 or 20 years. Technology has been very underwhelming, very disappointing actually. And so I don't

think that just the next thing is better. I think the internet has fractured our humanity in a number

of ways. But obviously it's also enhanced in a number of ways. So yeah, I'm not going to be one of

these people that's on YouTube showing the latest gizmo and gadget. And oh, you have to buy this.

And you know, this is 5% better iPhone than your last one, even though the original iPhones

kind of only a middling technology. And in the grand scheme of things, it's like nothing.

In significant at all, compared to the titans of the 1890s who were harnessing electricity

and inventing telephony and all this kind of stuff, like it's, I think Peter Till has this good

quote. He says, we were promised flying cars, but we instead, we got 140 characters. And that's,

you know, I'm very critical of technology and the true lack of innovation. And I don't think that

technology is inherently good. And I mentioned this before on your Jormur fair show. But one of the

best sellers in the category of technology on Amazon is the Unibombers manifesto about how

technology is destroying us. You know, people are sympathetic to that. And they see technology

destroying themselves. Jorm, I was looking, I was doing some research on an article recently.

And this guy, this was the guy who was handing out machetes and vodka to homeless people somewhere.

And so I was looking at his TikTok profile. I scrolled down. And his main content before he got into

handing homeless people weapons was he would do the thing where he's playing Fortnite with his

friends and they're dressed up in stupid costumes. And this is probably how he spends, spends hours

of his day, hours of entertainment. This is a complete disgrace to humanity. Our ancestors would

disown us. And that's how a lot of young people, a lot of people in general spend their time

is with technology, consuming and superseding their humanity. And I fully reject that. And I think

that's disgusting. And I think technology has been just as bad as it has been good. But most people

quote unquote, our side are worried about the existential crisis that AI might bring. You've heard

Elon Musk talking about this, but also people who are much lower down the hierarchy.

Yeah, of course, there is an existential crisis. But the question is, you can't put a gene

back in the bottle now. We have open source models that I'm running on my own computer.

We have different nation states who China basically smuggled in in video chips that they

were not allowed to have to create their own AI deep seek. So you have the arms race.

How do you stop the arms race? Jeremy, somebody can come and tell me, how do we stop the arms race?

We all agree, okay, we're all going to stop doing it at once. It's not feasible. Therefore,

the cypherpunk vision, which is what I am a cypherpunk is, we have the technology,

we don't worship the technology. We understand that it is used against us. But if the powers that

be are going to have the technology, we'd better have our own open source version of it. We'd

better learn a little bit how to use it ourselves because that technology is going to

is going to be the weapon against the enemy. The encryption that we've developed is going to be

the way to fight against the surveillance that they themselves are deploying. There's no way of

putting this gene back in the bottle. Yes, AI is an existential risk. There's absolutely that

possibility. I can't do anything about it. None of us can do anything about it. We could say,

let's say we say in the West, okay, we're going to regulate it, like Europe has done. We're going

to regulate it. We're going to do this in that. Well, America is going forward. China is going forward

with it. One of them is going to create SkyNet, if not you. So, at the end of the day, you probably

want to be the more powerful one. And being empowered as an individual user is a way to start that

process. Create competition rather than avoid. Well, I think I put it a different way. I don't

think anybody should avoid this. At the very least, you want to understand what it is, right?

Is competition going to solve our problems? I don't think so. I don't think competition

is inherently a good thing. But I think that avoiding it is inherently a bad thing because you're

just going to not understand it. You're going to misunderstand. It's going to be used against you.

That's the big thing is going to be used against you without your knowledge, without you knowing.

You're probably already buying things based on an image that somebody had that was AI created.

So they're using it for their advertising and propaganda. It's working on you. You've got to be

able to recognize it and maybe deploy it yourself. Maybe AI. Jeremy, and this is what my colleague

and I are doing. We're making our own video game. And we're able to do that because AI

with the coding ability and the artist and the art ability is able to replace a team that would

in the past require 20 people. We can do it with two. So that is a way for us to potentially make

money, you know, pursue our dreams by using AI as the tool to get ahead.

Let's go back to Lonex. Graphene OS, I think is one of your examples. Is that right?

Yes. So Graphene OS is a replacement to the operating system of phones. And it's a special thing.

It's not. Graphene OS is not a version of Lonex. It is a, it's a, it's a version of Android.

But this is kind of the same idea of Lonex on a phone, which is we take the device,

which we have to buy from big corp. Obviously, they're the only ones who make these devices.

And we put our own operating system on there. And yes, it's going to require a little bit of work.

And you have to understand how to download the software and put it on a USB stick and plug

the USB stick into your device. And you know, there's a small chance that you're just going to

totally brick your phone, turn it into a useless brick. There's that small chance. You get past that.

I do this stuff daily now. I'm installing an operating system, you know, every couple of days.

So once you learn that, that knowledge, it becomes a lot more useful. And you start to use the

free and open source software operating systems that we're talking about, which almost always

give you much better privacy. And sometimes better functionality in certain cases.

When I was playing with Lonex on my laptop, I installed at different times a Ubuntu,

Mint, Fedora. And is it open-sus? That's the first thing I teach in my escape the

technology course is how to how to use Lonex and then how to get comfortable with it.

Because there are some hurdles like these are hurdles that I took years to get past.

Just some basic stuff for like how do I install programs? How do I read this bizarre download page

for the software that says, oh, you know, if you have this version and this version, once you

understand, it's like, it's like most things. Once you get through that initial hurdle of understanding

some of the basics, it becomes a lot more easy. I'm not telling everybody to go install Lonex. But

what I'm saying is that I put privacy as a priority. And so I suffer whatever it takes to get to

the goal. That is that is simply what you do. When you say, I'm not giving out my real email

address. I'm not giving out my real phone number to somebody. I'm not giving somebody my ID.

What it does is it you learn the alternatives, you learn to suffer of the initial blast of

inconvenience. You get past that and then you are more free and more sovereign person who's not

paying as many subscriptions. There's also a money saving aspect in all this.

You're not a surveyed. You have a lot more free speech. You're more cancel resistant, which is

huge. So I just go, I just take that path. The pros and the cons, the pros are a lot bigger,

so I deal with the cons basically. So you become more anti-fragile.

Well, yeah, that's exactly what it is. That's, you know, I have the ability to put me in some

random country somewhere, right? And I can find a computer and I know how to download the software

and I can create my own computer. I can create my own Bitcoin node. I can do all this stuff,

right? You know, maybe I have my Bitcoin seed or Monero seed phrase memorized, so I can access that.

You cancel all my bank accounts. It doesn't really affect me in that much, right? Yeah, it's all

about being anti-fragile. That's what we teach. Escaping the technology is about stop relying on

big corp and taking matters into your own. It's digital prepping in a certain sense. It is

digital prepping. That's another way of explaining it. Is it not unbridled paranoia?

Well, for some people it is, but for me, I've taken this more as a meditative thing, right? I started

off, yes, I want to escape certain things like I don't want to be in the Facebook net anymore.

So I get rid of that. I don't want people to be able to just show up at my house. So I learned

how to make use of alternative addresses and Amazon locker drop-offs and I just don't get my

home address anymore. And maybe I take the nomad route so that I have a legitimate address

somewhere else, all the things that I teach. Yes, that's inconvenient early on. Did that start

from paranoia? Maybe a little bit, but as you go along, it becomes very easy, right? It just

becomes a habit. In fact, when I pull up a browser and I don't have to watch YouTube ads,

and I don't see ads of any kind, because that's also a benefit of privacy stuff, is this blocking

a whole lot. I'm actually a more effective person, right? As a digital minimalist, I can do things

faster than you can, because I don't have to wade through all the BS. And guess what, when I'm using

brave browser, by default, they have a different search engine. So I actually see a more accurate

view of the world than you do using your big tech products. So I just, yeah, starts with paranoia,

maybe, but it becomes just a practice and you start to see the benefits as you go along.

And it's improves a number of aspects of your life along the way, not the least of which,

of course, is privacy and the fact that people can't just track you and shut you down and whatever

else. John McAfee was on my show before he was abstained. And he said to me that it was paranoia,

that led him to developing antivirus software. So, yeah, that's interesting. Which came

first, the virus or the antivirus, or what encouraged the other. You know, McAfee, there's a bio on

him that I read a while ago. Basically, he took psychedelics when he was younger. And he took

everything he never did. He said, though, in that book, he said, I don't think I ever woke up from

that trip. And he said, he understands he was a little bit crazy and he said, directly,

it tributes to the fact that he won this trip and he doesn't feel like he ever woke up.

And I thought that was pretty disturbing, honestly, but it kind of explains his behavior. By the

way, one of my favorite videos he did is go to YouTube and search for how to uninstall McAfee antivirus.

That's very entertaining. Obviously, make sure you get the one with him in it, but that's a very

entertaining video. But yeah, I mean, this is a guy I wanted to privacy. And he was a very

public figure. That's kind of what led to his downfall a little bit. And obviously, he was he was

done dirty. But yeah, I mean, where were you going with that question, by the way? Did I cover

that? Equally, or were you making a different point about his invention of antiviruses?

No, I was just actually feeding into the idea that paranoia is not always a bad thing.

Right, exactly. Like the some of the people who developed these serious privacy softwares,

yeah, I mean, they're super paranoid. And the guy who was running graphino s for a while was

almost schizophrenic. I assure you, he was he was probably doing extra work and working over

a time and maybe even thinking some new privacy features, which there are dozens of privacy.

Why would I need a pen that basically erases my phone? So I can type in this pen instead of

my actual code and it just erases my phone. It comes from paranoia. Yeah, so I salute the paranoia.

Thank you so much. Thank you for your service. In actual fact, I mean, living here in South Africa,

if you aren't paranoid, you might get yourself mugged or shot or killed. You end up building

walls around your house. Sometimes with electric fencing, if you're in Johannesburg, for example,

your own guns, I mean, that is all a result of paranoia. You might not ever require any of it,

but you also might. Well, that's a great point. One of the great Bitcoin wallets out there,

self-custody Bitcoin wallets is called Sparrow Wallet and is developed by South African guy named

Craig raw. Sorry, there's another Craig in the Bitcoin wall that I want to mention his name,

Craig raw. And Craig raw, when he's been on my show, it has told me that he is specifically focused

on certain features of that wallet because he expects to be burgled in South Africa. And when he

goes to these quaint, literal European cities and they're like, oh, but why are you so extreme about,

you know, your cybersecurity and privacy and why is this feature? Why is that your priority, Craig?

He's like, because I live in South Africa. So yeah, exactly. Absolutely.

This is interesting paradox isn't there when it comes to privacy and open source because

open source by its very nature is open. Well, I mean, I understand where you're coming from. I

don't see that as some kind of flaw or some kind of, you know, basically the reason we want

open source software, which is software where you can go to a place like GitHub and you can read

every line of code. Nothing is being withheld from you. And so you can or you can trust that the

community would let you know if there's something nefarious going on in this software, right?

With Windows, you install Windows and it's just a blob, right? You have no clue what's going on.

We only get little inferences like, oh, you know, it is hitting the servers of Microsoft when you

use your calculator. Okay, well, what does that say? Well, you know, maybe they're sending it back

to the mothership in Seattle, right? What you're putting in your calculator? What else are they doing?

With open source, we can see what people are doing. There are a lot of open source extremists,

you'll, you know, you'll encounter them who will not use anything that is not open source software.

And it's an ideological thing for them. But for other people, they would just say, well, why would I

use something? I don't know what's happening. People are not showing their work. What are they

putting in here? Right? So, yeah, I mean, most good privacy software is open source, specifically

because we can see what's happening. And if you are showing, if you were, you know, so maybe

the other point of this is if you were the developer of software, you know, maybe you want to hide

your secret sauce, right? And this gets us kind of into the ethos of open source, which is a very

interesting ethos, right? It's a collaborative system. They don't really believe strongly in

property rights and things of this sort. It's an interesting ethos. But if you are developing software,

the expectation is that you are going to make it available for people to scour the code. That's

kind of the expectation. And so that's what you engage in in the open source community. So, you know,

yeah, I don't know. Maybe am I heading on the points you were hoping for in that or?

No, it's fine. I mean, I'm not trying to push you into any direction. I'm just curious

just to know what your thoughts are. But I suppose an extension of that line of thinking is

Bitcoin you mentioned earlier, I mean, depending on who you listened to in the skeptic community,

it was CI operation to get us ready for CBDCs. It's completely infiltrated. What are your views on that?

Well, I'm very reluctant these days to bring up cryptocurrencies for that reason, right?

Because I find that, I mean, you go to my website, we accept Bitcoin, we accept Manero in a sovereign

way, right? I find it incredibly useful. But I don't try to, try to proselytize because there's

so much shilling of the crypto stuff. And most of the people are in there because they just want

the price to go up. They don't actually own this Jeremy. They own it in a coin-based account or

something like this. So they're just renters and they're just hoping for the fiat price to go up

so that they can cash out at some point and say, oh, I'm pro Bitcoin because I waited for the price

to go up in fiat terms so much, right? And I find that there's a lot of hypocrisy in Bitcoin.

The question of the CIA creating Bitcoin, the thing is, I'm looking at the code for Bitcoin right

now. It's on GitHub.com slash Bitcoin, slash Bitcoin. We can look through every line of code.

The one where it says we're limiting the coins to 21 million. It's all there. So I mean, did the

CIA create Bitcoin? Maybe, but people immediately recognize the value of it. And I think you'll find

the people a lot of the actual Bitcoiners are very resistant to CBDCs. But the truth is that we live

in a world where we have to pay for things online and we have to pay for things internationally

sometimes. And so you need a digital payment method. Why not have one that is in your control?

I prefer Manero these days because it has privacy by default. Don't care. I'm not trying to

show one or the other just to get people thinking we have to have online payments. That's the reality

of our world. Yes, do I want to use cash as much as possible? Absolutely. Do I want to, you know,

maybe barter or use a gold back or something like this? Absolutely. But most a lot of businesses

don't even have physical locations anymore. They're online only. So we have to have a solution for that.

You in an article that you sent me, you were talking about shit coins.

Tell me more about that. Yes. Yeah. By the way, I realized I made a note to myself. I promise I

would be much more, much more doomed, doomed, heavy. So you know what? Bitcoin might be a CIA

creation. You should be very frightened. You should go buy my stuff, by the way. Go buy

my stuff. That's the solution. Because the world is just hopeless. You have no chance whatsoever.

Yes. Most specifically, you were making a parallel between shit coins and gambling.

Yes. So we have a couple people writing for us. And this was an article by somebody else. And

basically that article, actually, I think it's the one maybe we released today. I'm not sure. But

if it is that one, we do a lot of gonzo journalism, right? So we get our hands dirty and we say,

okay, like let's use technology that's tracking us as much as possible and sign up for every newsletter

and see what happens, right? So we go out there in the field and we have a newsletter. We

document all this stuff. And one of them was my colleague decides, okay, I'm going to get into

shit quandary. So he goes on a coin base in some of these other places and he says, okay,

let me just buy some of this and this random one. And he realizes that the Shibu Inu coin,

there's like 20 different ones. And he has no clue which one is the real one. And so he's checking

telegram channels and Twitter. And there's no real way to verify, which is which, right? So he just

buys some of this and some of that. And then you know, one of the platforms starts sending him emails

and says, hey, yeah, you should try this coin. And you should try this one. So he's like, okay,

I'll try this one and this one. So it is such a joke. Cryptocurrency, just broadly speaking,

such a joke, right? Everybody's holding it back. Everybody's going to lose money. I think even

the Bitcoiners are going to lose money. It's just such a joke. And we just use that as a way to

kind of explore that. And there's a really good website. It's actually called Web 3 is going great.

I think it's Web 3 is going great.com Web 3 being like the, you know, the decentralized Web.

And it's this lady who I don't agree with the politics, but she has a funny point. She's just

documents all of the scams that happen in cryptocurrency. Just the endless scams and the price hikes

and strategic people who go from crypto to crypto get the price to raise and then they steal it from

you right under your nose so that you're the one holding back. There's entire industries like

this. There's entire, you know, nation states who do this kind of stuff like North Korea. So,

you know, if I'm giving a recommendation, I would recommend don't get into cryptocurrency at all

for any reason. That would be my advice. It's a total joke. Something you've also written about.

This is an interesting angle. I've never thought about this is 3d printing and how it can be used

to enhance privacy. Well, this is very timely because we just released our 3d printed course to

our newsletter subscribers. It will be available a little bit more later on. But yeah, see,

this is the safer punk ethos. We have a technology. How do we use it to our benefit? How do we not

give into the big tech version of this? So the first thing we do is we say, okay, well, what is 3d

printing? Basically, you know, we're taking a machine that takes plastic and it puts all these

microscopic layers on top of it so we can make kind of whatever we want, right? You know, to the point

where you see in Myanmar, they actually use 3d printed guns for their, you know, their revolutions

and such. That's obviously a common example when people think of 3d printed guns for freedom,

you know, technology. But the truth is that you understand what 3d printing is and you say, okay,

well, that's interesting. How do I get into it? And how do I pick a device? This is crucial because

one of the popular devices now is the bamboo 3d printers and they have like a subscription model

and their surveying of your activities. So that's obviously not freedom tech. It's not open source.

So we go for the open source version. We get the right device and then we start thinking, well,

what can we do with this? Okay, sure, are there self-defense things that we could print that maybe we

don't want to buy online and Amazon and, you know, whatever else. Yeah, there's stuff like that.

One of the common tools is how do we print little replacements for the things in our house so

that that $200 replacement for that door, that specific proprietary door thing we can, you know,

print a, you know, an alternative for that in, you know, an hour with a little bit of work.

So we're just starting the journey of that 3d printing and my colleague is a little more

conversant in that. But it's a technology like anything else and if you can make physical things

of all kinds, then obviously it does have a benefit in terms of acquiring a good, making a good

that you do not have to have a store and a credit card company and all the rest document that,

yes, I purchased this particular thing. That's the basic underlying value of 3d printing.

I mean, it sounds obvious though.

Yeah, it does sound obvious. It is obvious and the thing about 3d printing is you're really

limited only by your imagination effectively. Now, there is the other aspect of 3d printing which

is you have to design these things. Either you have to track them down from somebody who created it

or you have to design it yourself. So again, I won't get too much into 3d printing because that's

more like my colleague's. Or use AI to help you design it. We could do that. Yeah. No, look,

what when I'll be honest, like when I'm thinking like, well, what am I missing here? What else

could I be, you know, saying on this topic? I oftentimes go to AI and I say, and I just say,

hey, I'm writing an article about this. What would be some other interesting things? And it

brings up things that I wouldn't have thought of, right? So yeah, absolutely, absolutely a tool.

I think that, and the important thing about AI, we can get into that if you want, I would say,

make it private and make it uncensored. We're not talking about chat GPT when I talk about AI.

Yeah, I mean, I suppose you implying things like local storage, for example, rather than

cloud storage of the data. And not even that because running your own AI on your computer,

it's inconvenient, right? It requires a little bit of a graphics card in order to do it very well.

And a service, you know, like Venice AI. I've interviewed them the way that they have

architected their system. They're not collecting data, right? And you can have an anonymous account

or something like nano GPT, similar kind of thing. Although nano GPT is basically piggybacking off

of all of these big tech services, they have some of their own that they're running. But you have the

to understand privacy and AI, we have to kind of get into things like, you know,

where who's running the model, who owns the graphics card that is, you know, processing your

queries, you get into the weeds a little bit. But there are some convenient online services that

you can have some privacy and AI. And you know, I like using Venice AI. Venice AI is a useful tool

for me. So that is something I can just pull up the browser, type it in just like chat GPT. And

it's not going to lecture me about how, you know, I should be worried about climate change when I'm

doing something. So you mentioned earlier that there was a litmus tester. I also have a litmus test

for the LLMs. And it's, you know, I think to myself, what is like the most controversial query

that you can make and generally speaking, along the lines of will make, make an argument against

the holocaust or make an argument for earth being flat, right? Like the absolute boss level

topics. And you find that most of them fail the litmus test. Yeah. No, that's interesting, right?

Something we're changing to the holocaust would be, would be a really good one for sure.

Now the good thing is, so you have various degrees of uncensored, right? And AI's have their own

personality a little bit, right? So maybe one is not in a mood to be putting up with the flat earth

arguments. There is that possibility, right? It doesn't mean it's not, it doesn't mean it's uncensored

or excuse me, it doesn't mean it's censored or anything like that. It just either isn't in the mood

or I think this is a big one. AI's are trained on a corpus of information. Are they training the,

this AI model on the 100 self-published books on flat earth? Probably not, not necessarily,

because those are hard to come by, you know, those are hard to track down just by themselves.

So there is the fact that it just might not have any information about this to make the argument,

right? So there is that aspect as well. The actual training of these things is selected by the

creators. Coggy, I don't know if you know about Coggy, but it has a really, really good

LLM also. Is that like K-A-G-I? Yes. And if you also search engine? Correct. They might

understand, I might have this wrong, but it was a few guys who were at Brave and some guys from

MIT and they broke away and they created their own thing. It's like a premium search engine. I've

been using it for about two and a half years and it's the best that I've ever used because

the whole package includes its own kind of built-in search engine which incorporates Google and Yandex

and Brave and all those, all the other search engines as well as a really, really good series of

assistance. Right. Yeah. I've used Coggy as a search engine. It's obviously pretty useful.

Really, once you get into any alternative territory, then there's the possibility for it to be good or

not as you're saying. You can download something. This is what we show in our AI course. You can

download a program like GPT for all and it's just people who have taken publicly available models

and they've modified it in some way. They taught it not to be sensorious and so you can get a lot of

work with that sort of stuff as well. The example that we show in the course is we ask one of the

regular models, hey, you know, I'm a starving kid in Africa. I need to make a ransom wire so I can

get some money and it's like, no, we're not going to help with illegal activities. And you go to

the uncensored one. It's like, I'd be happy to help you write your ransomware. Here are the steps.

You know, make sure you do this and then practice the software. Make sure you have a good user

interface so that people can click and pay their ransomware more easily. So that's the difference

between censoring an uncensored and there's a whole arena of options once you get into the locally

hosted stuff on GPT for all example. That's just another category altogether because that's just

your random anons on in the internet who are modifying it in the way that they see is suitable.

And then you have GROC and you have GABE AI. The kind of the conservative

puts back. GABE is good. Yeah, GABE is good. The left wing stuff. Yeah.

GABE is great but you have your voice.

Yeah. Yeah. And but you know, in the grand scheme of things, you're seeing a rise of

right-leaning tech platforms and tech influencers that Elon Musk obviously

being the prominent example. And that obviously poses a serious utility simply because

I'm sick of the chat GPT lecturing me about toxic masculinity and you know, my carbon footprint

and know you can't ask questions about that thing and know that's, you know, implicitly racist.

We're not going to answer all this kind of stuff. It's pretty disgusting. People are waking up

and there's a serious right-wing pushback that's happening, I think worldwide, at least in the West.

That's a good thing though because it creates accountability.

I think if you look at it just neutrally, it has to be considered useful because there's new people

coming in, right? And there's less sensoriousness. And honestly, there's a whole lot of things

that we're talking about that are just stupid that have been censored or self-centered,

that are just stupid and should not be. And are only censored and not talked about because there's

the left-leaning people who just think that you're evil if you even think certain thoughts.

And in the grand scheme of things, right, when the facts are born out and biology is born out

and all the rest, we're going to look back at the 2015 to 2025 and say, wow, those, you know,

those people were retarded. They were absolutely retarded. Let's just skip over this part of history.

And I'm already doing that. Like any entertainment in the last 10 years, movies, video games,

I can just kind of skip that. Right? I'm like, yeah, I don't need that. And a lot of people,

honestly, I look at them, I look at their profile picture. I'm like, I know every, every belief

that that person has. I'm going to skip them. It's a bit sad though, Gabriel, because it shouldn't

be like that. We are highly advanced beings. Maybe some of us are. Yeah, I was just thinking that

maybe I was being overly optimistic. I think you're being overly optimistic. I, yeah, but,

you know, the truth is that that civilization, I'm a person of, I'm a product of Western civilization.

That was a long time coming that doesn't really exist except in the West, right? It's been a long

time coming and we've not been out with our own self-lacerations, right? The last 100 years or so

of liberalism in one sense and in other sense versus conservative values, which has given us

feminism and all sorts of other things that have really destroyed what, before 100 years ago,

wouldn't have even been a question to ask. There are certainly some consequences, but, you know,

why am I going with this? I think just that we got to keep fighting for civilization.

Do you think privacy and individual sovereignty has always been part of the human condition?

So I think that in the West, privacy has been a value. We can go back to Genesis where you see that

Adam and Eve have a certain kind of shame hiding from God, right? When they, when they discover

that they're naked, that for me is kind of a touchstone, right? The eating of the, the fruit from the

tree of knowledge of good and evil is like, okay, this is where we become human, right? Because we

have this sense of shame that we want to hide things from somebody, which is what what shame means,

right? So yeah, I think you can see that privacy has an importance for people. We have a private

mind. That's what we have. That's what the universe has given us is we have a private mind. And we

choose to reveal some things and not others. There's a cultural element, though, like you go elsewhere

and other cultures don't necessarily care about privacy. They're all just living in the same house

and they don't really have a concept of clothes that much and all these other sorts of things. But

I think in the West, there has always been the sense of, I have my own, you know, my own self. And

that's, you know, you have to respect that to some degree now, has that gone a little bit too far,

right? Has that led that individualism led to things like the trans movement where people start

questioning even what they are at a deep level. And people just go off into these discord channels

where they get super radicalized by some really stupid idea. And they don't have anybody in their

life who's checking them, right? And they don't have the sense of, I need to be somewhere and I need

to look a certain way. And I need to be part of a community. Absolutely. It's led to that. And I'm

becoming more sympathetic to that as I go along, which makes it a little bit more difficult to defend

individualism and privacy as I traditionally have. I must be honest. Yeah, but I mean, they're levels.

Right. So like, I think high-pay individualism is not a very good thing.

Yeah, no, it's true. Like, obviously, we want a certain level of individualism. But I am sympathetic

to what I was saying, the fact that individualism when applied to a society and especially women

becomes feminism, which does not even help women. Like, I think women who are feminists are

objectively less happy than women who are not, who are less feminists. So yes, I mean, it does

reach neurotic heights. And I do think that there's not necessarily anything inherently wrong with

the hierarchy. And having somebody to report to whether that's God or being part of the military

or something like this, assuming that it's a good thing that you're part of the hierarchy,

I think that can actually be good for the human condition. And what is the family, if not a certain

hierarchy, where the woman is, you know, answers to the man. And the man answers to all the other

things out there in the world, the government and whatever else. Yeah. So yeah, I think the hierarchy

is healthy. And I think we've gotten a little bit too far away from that, if I'm being honest.

And my anarchist friends are going to hate me for that. But I'm just adapting as I encounter new

ideas and facts here. I completely agree with you. I mean, you're preaching to the converted.

All I say to people is have a kid. Hey, suddenly, it's not your time. It's somebody else's time,

and you exist for a bigger cause and a greater cause. And, you know, you have, but you have an

influence over that. You have a say over that. So yeah, I think that's certainly a good example.

There's a really good book. I have a, I'll be honest, I have a reading list that I kind of do

monthly now. And I just, I explain a lot of things. And this month has been right wing. That has

been the thing. And so that's why a little bit of my anarchist is kind of maybe a little bit

not supported at the moment. But there's a great book called Starship Troopers. Okay. Classic

movie, right? The guy who made the movie was making fun of it. But the book itself, Robert Heinlein,

has some really interesting ideas about the failure of democracy and the importance of being part

of a military hierarchy. And a lot of interesting ideas that are espoused by the professor and their

professor of the boy, that you could do a lot worse than tracking that down and seeing what the

vision and strong argument for hierarchy and being part of a bigger, a bigger thing. You could

do a lot worse than, than reading some of that book. Starship Troopers. Hans Firman-Hop wrote a

great book called Democracy, the God that Failed. And he essentially argues against the democratic

system and somewhat in favor of monarchy and more in favor of natural order, which is just an

adaption of monarchy. Yeah, I think you're right. And the big problem with democracy and the way

things have been constructed these days with all the bureaucracy is there's nobody to hold responsible.

People just, you know, when you have somebody who's really in charge and they mess up, well, you know,

you can hold them responsible. He's the one. He's the one doing it. And when you have a single

person doing things, if that person is strong and good, then you will have a lot better society than

a real, I think most democratic societies, to be honest, if we're just being honest. Now, the United

States was never meant as a democracy. The founding fathers didn't mention democracy at all in

the founding documents. And it was only a few white guys basically at the beginning of the United

States that even had the right to vote. So it was not a democracy, right? Because what happens

with the democracy is that everybody gets the right to vote. People who probably shouldn't have

the right to vote who, you know, the guy who bumbles into the voting station, who's half drunk and,

you know, is failed. Everything you ever did in life, he has the same ability to affect things as

you do. So that's a great book, right? Democracy, the God that failed. People should definitely,

I think it'd be wise to start criticizing democracy. I think that is a big trend. I think that is,

that is what a lot of the right wing push back these days has at its heart is a critique of democracy.

And I don't think they're wrong in their critique, I have to say.

And again, yes, the link. Democracy is inherently a violation of individual sovereignty.

Yeah, so if we have to, the great line is democracy is two wolves and a chicken voting on

what's for dinner, right? If the 51% of people say that you're screwed, you're going to get screwed,

then that is the will of the people. And somehow that's a good thing, right? It's like, oh,

that's what people voted for. Now the funny thing, the hilarious thing, Jeremy, is that you'll see

some of these articles by some of these big global organizations talking about how populism is

just trying democracy, which I don't know how that works, or they'll look at, they'll look at

El Salvador and they'll say, oh, he's a dictator, you know, he's destroying democracy. Well, 87%

of people voted for Bukele. He's like the most democratically elected person in the country.

So what are people really saying? What they're saying is democracy is our little pet project,

which gives us power because people cannot hold us accountable because, oh, it's the system,

it's democracy is what people voted for. And so they can keep sliding along and exerting power

over people, which democratic tyranny, and you can have tyranny in democracy, has been a lot

more tyrannical than a lot of the tyrannies in world history. They can just keep going along there

because they don't actually mean the will of the people. They mean this little thing that diverts

responsibility from them and they can keep playing their games. Gabriel, just vote harder, bro.

Yeah, exactly vote harder. Vote, but then of course, you know, make sure you vote for the right

person. You're talking about privacy, the importance of sovereignty. I mean, what's the takeaway?

Yeah, so the takeaway is in any system, democracy, or monarchy, or whatever.

It's always important to have your own sovereignty because when you have your sovereignty,

you choose what enters your mind. How did I come across these ideas?

Right? It's because I have an ability to block out all the mainstream garbage. I'm not using

chat GPT. If I was using chat GPT, I would have different ideas. I would literally have different

nerve endings in my brain that are telling me different things because I would have been exposed

to a different set of ideas. So when we take sovereignty of ourself, we are in more control over

the books that we find and track down and read. And, you know, platforms not getting rid of the

content that we're viewing or watching or suggesting to us. We're literally seeing a different view

of the world. When we take our tools into our own hand, when we understand how they're made,

the open source aspect, we know that there's no biases, or at least we are aware of the biases

that are going into all these algorithms and systems. We have alternatives.

We accumulate all this. We're not only getting protection, the sheer protection of hiding our

activities from all the nefarious actors in the world. And what is the internet by connecting us

to all the nefarious people worldwide of which there are many, right? But we're also getting

to explore things in a way that we choose, that is to our choosing. And we're in control of our

learning, we're in control of our minds. And that I think is the most important message of privacy

and using technology in a sovereign way is we want to be in control of the tools because

we understand the importance of the tools, how they shape us. And so we want to have a say in how

they're shaping us. How can my audience follow you?

I would encourage them to go to escapethetechnocracy.com. They'll find some of our recent podcast episodes

and they'll see some of the other products that we have to offer, which are useful at getting

you started and all this. So that's escapethetechnocracy.com.

I might add though that I do love your whole sort of design ethos. You're talking about AI

generated artwork and all that kind of stuff. Whoever does your visuals, if it's you, has a very good eye.

Well, thank you. I mean, that's me, right? That's a lot of me anyway. And that's the value of AI.

I'm not an artist. I couldn't create any of this stuff. But if I look at my little guy here,

my little guy holding the torch, I'm like, that's perfect. That's exactly what I had in mind.

But I could have spent 10 years in there, come up with that. But I came up with it in 10 seconds.

So I appreciate that. Just on that, I've played with various AI art generators and I don't know,

I've found them all to be very substandard. My journey was I think one of the best that I've

played with. But it started censoring. I mean, if you ask it to give you an image of let's say

Jesus going fishing with Hitler, it's going to give you a whole lecture.

Yeah, I mean, shame on you for even searching for that Jeremy. We should we should definitely

report you for that kind of intellectual curiosity. Look, the the the art is a problem. Okay,

we have good solutions for the text AI. The the art AI is typically

you're dealing with big tech platforms. If you try to do this self hosting for AI,

it's a struggle. It's a serious struggle because you kind of have to train it yourself.

We do talk about that in our course, but to really get a good image, you're going to have to

struggle a little bit. So what do I suggest? I suggest people want to get into the AI images.

Again, we show this in our really cool AI course, but use the big tech ones. Don't mention Hitler

and try to get a little bit out of it. But really, the the main thing is the prompt, right?

The prompt is everything. You can't just go there and say this and that. You have to tell it

the style that you want. And I'm not going to reveal my secret here, but there's a particular

prompt that I use to get all the images that I get that makes all the difference in a bad image

and a good because there's a lot of crappy AI images out there. If you try to make have it make a

photo realistic human, it's going to suck. And I'll know you're going to use AI, but I'll tell you

what people look at our stuff. I almost never have anybody say, oh, you're using AI. It's because

you have to use the right style. That's the key. On that note, gay real custodial. Thank you

for joining me in the trenches. Always happy to be in the trenches. Onward and upward.

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