[Music] What you are basically. [Music] Deep deep down, far far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. [Music] [Music] The fabric and structure of existence. Hi everybody. Welcome to the panel on my podcast. I'm your host Mike and thank you so much for joining me for tonight's episode. Tonight on the show we have a new guest. His name is Gabriel Custode. He is the host of the Watchmen Privacy Podcast. And Gabriel is here to talk to us about how we can start taking back control of our own digital world, ensuring that we don't unnecessarily give out information to the totalitarian, to the technocrats, to Silicon Valley, and anyone else who seeks to undermine our privacy without our explicit consent. Of course, there is a big skill gap here and that's why I've got Gabriel on the show. He is pretty much the best you're going to find when it comes to this subject. Now in Part 1 we discuss privacy more over so we discuss about just how bad things have got in terms of digital surveillance and data mining. We talk about the state of privacy and why people have somehow allowed themselves to willingly be lulled into a false sense of security around it. Then we start to talk about solutions about what are the simple things that you and I can do right this moment in the next week or in the next month to really take massive strides forward in terms of taking back control of our digital privacy. We also of course talk about physical privacy because it's not just digital, it's physical too. And Gabriel has some fantastic solutions to share with you. So all in all, a fascinating episode, a practical episode, I learned a lot and I'm sure you're going to too. So members, please head over to paralomay.com to sign in and listen to the full episode. If you're not a member yet, please consider joining us. You'll be able to listen to part number two of this and every other episode. Also, Gabriel has kindly offered a promo code for members. So if you do become a member or if you're already a member, there will be a promo code in part two that you can use on Gabriel's website if you want to buy his online digital website. His online digital privacy course. So that's something to look forward to as well. I'm going to be taking it myself and if you take it, we can talk about it in the members section. In closing, take care of yourselves, hope you are well healthy and reasonably happy and like always, I'll see you in the next one. Hi everybody, welcome to the paralomay podcast. We are joined today by Gabriel Castodiet. He specializes in teaching people like us how to take proactive steps to protect our digital privacy in spite of the rapidly growing technocracy. So I'm really excited to have you on the show, Gabriel. I think you're going to teach me and the audience a lot, but before we get started, how are things going today? Things are going great. I'll just add one thing to that. You said digital privacy really like the real privacy as well, which is the physical privacy and the other kinds. So there's a lot of people showing the digital privacy stuff out there. It's important, but I know especially a lot of your audience probably wants some physical privacy and other kinds. So I try to keep well rounded, unlike a lot of people. That's awesome, Gabriel. Actually, I think that's a really good place to start this one. I'd like to maybe impart one, discuss privacy more as a concept to just discuss why it's so important that it's actually a fundamental right. I call it a God-given right. Some people call them human rights, which I don't agree with personally, just because I believe that I don't need a human to tell me what matters. A human to tell me what my right is over my body or my right to privacy. That's mine. I believe we've all got that, indeed, within this. But putting that to one side, maybe we could just have that initial conversation about the philosophical understanding of privacy, because you actually opened your book with that, and I thought that was a great hook. It really got me hooked in that first one or two pages of that book. I said to my wife, like, I'm not normally somebody who would be interested in, say, the digital aspect of stuff because I'm a Luddite, but I really wanted to read the book after that page. So can you tell me how you understand privacy and why your thoughts on it evolved from? Yeah. I don't like to get too overly complicated. I feel like the academics are out there really confusing terms in many ways. So I just think that what is one thing that we can be certain of is that we come into this world and we all have a private mind. So we're individuals, right? That's what Descartes tells us is the one thing we can be certain of is that I exist, right? I'm a thinking thing, I exist. And so the way I see it is individualism is baked into the universe. And obviously we have privacy as a result where we can choose what to reveal to others. And it's pretty obvious to anybody who thinks for more than a few seconds that if I give up too much information, it can come back to bite me. There are evil people in the world. There are psychopaths. There are institutions that are not pursuing your interest. And so you want to be careful about what you have out there that can come back to bite you. If I were to define the term privacy though, which I do in my book privacy and utopia that I recently published, I would consider privacy to be a, it's kind of a social term ironically. And it's a social scenario in which I can participate in society while choosing what I want to reveal. And ideally a minimum of what I want to reveal. And so it's not, you know, people will define it as hiding and solitude and escape. We already have words for that, right? And I just use those words. So privacy really indicates a society in which the ability to hide and selectively reveal ourselves to the world as has been said by the cypherpunks is at the core of things. And do you think, Gabriel, that when it comes to society, basically we're in a situation where we have to agree to give up some of our privacy for the benefits of having some kind of structure around us, which I guess for most of us we don't have a choice in that because we're born into a society. But I think most of us would be willing to give up some of our privacy to enjoy some of the trappings of modernity. And potentially let's say an army that protects the country at least or a police force that they're there about is fair and doesn't allow people to just take our stuff or to have our loved ones. So I think most of us would agree to that. But I guess what we're getting at is there's some kind of overreach there. There's a point in that where they can actually go too far and it becomes a case of stealing your privacy and it's beyond the boundaries of what's acceptable. Is that to you where we are now, we're in that situation where that line's being crossed or has it been crossed on a go? How do you view it? I don't take the black pill. I don't encourage people to, but it is pretty obvious to anybody who's looked at the last 100 years that there's an increased encroachment on our lives. And I have tended to view this from the anarchist position in previous years. In fact, I would say that privacy is exclusively an anarchist value because it's something that cannot be granted to you by somebody else. It's a bottom-up virtue and it's something that you have to grant to yourself. And so small societies, if we think about the early United States, this was a bunch of people who had their little communities. If they wanted to participate in their county governance and they had some idea that they were part of a bigger collective, but they were mostly focused on the individual level, family, close social ties, and they defended their own community. So in terms of these big abstract things like national defense, I may be foolishly tweeted out to the, I think it was the US Postal Service or something on Twitter. They were tweeting out where we're hiring people to scan your packages and deter evil people. And I may be foolishly tweeted. I replied to that and said, I'll manage my own self-defense. Thank you. And that's kind of how I feel about it, is that a lot of these solutions we can solve ourselves. And that's certainly where most of your privacy is going to come from. And it is the case that exposure, decline of privacy has arisen from a rise in government intervention into our lives in many forms. And then, of course, the corporate lackeys that show for the government, unfortunately, big fan of Ayn Rand, but she failed to realize that a lot of these corporations are very interested in not really producing things as much as getting free handouts from the government. And that is, unfortunately, what most of these big tech companies do, and they're willing to give information to the government on a whim and to actually participate in a lot of what they do. One thing that came out during the Snowden revelations was that Microsoft was not only willing, but they were eager to give a lot of this data to the US government. So that's the situation that we're in. There are solutions. I don't take the black bill. I don't use a lot of big tech platforms. We can certainly live without them. And we can protect ourselves from all of the so-called threat models out there in very powerful ways. So I'm very proactive about this stuff. I'm not somebody who talks about, "Oh, privacy is dead," and these sorts of things. Always looking for solutions, and there are many out there. Yeah, I think that's something that I really like about your approach as well. I think it's easy to take the black pill on this one, and I'm certainly somebody that feels like we're always going to be quite a few steps behind when it comes to technology. Because quite simply, they've got so many resources that are available to them. They've got the best minds in the world, the best cryptographers or mathematicians coming straight out of university into these teams where they've got vast amounts of money. In fact, an infinite budget. I'd probably say at the NSA in places like this, and really cryptography is their thing. It's such a key tool of control, but that doesn't also mean that it's silly to not try and protect our privacy as much as possible. Because it's not just them. There's so many people that are trying to take our data and sell it, or use it for nefarious purposes, that if we can put ourselves further into the shadows, we might be able to avoid, you know, 80, 90% of it. And sure, if somebody shines a spotlight right upon us, some powerful, let's say, three-letter organizations, yeah, maybe they would be able to get through many of our safeguards, but it's unlikely that's going to happen for most people. And even then why make it easy? You know, the point of privacy for me is to protect it because with any of our rights, if you don't protect it, if the society isn't forcing those rights and forcing them and saying to the state, "No, we're keeping these," then they just get taken from you, right? And then we literally give up our privacy. It's gone. Yeah, you've made a lot of good points there. I'm very fond of a group of people who are involved in. It's a Bitcoin privacy wall. It's called the Samurai Wallet. And they have a model. They say that privacy is not a human right. It's a human fight. And I think that's a good way of looking at these so-called rights is, obviously, you can't just go to your government and say, "Hey, I have a right to this, so you must give it to me." They are in power. They can choose to give that to you or not. They can start saying, "Hey, the Constitution that we had all this time ago, we're going to change that up." That's really more guidelines, right? So it's really all about what you yourself can carve out for you. Now, I will say this. You mentioned that they have the best cryptographers. They have the best minds. I don't know that that's true. I think that governments and a lot of these powerful organizations tend to attract some actually not the brightest minds. And I think that is obviously to our benefit. I have encountered a lot of intelligent gifted cryptographers and people of this sort. Very few of them work for the government. And if we think a lot about the powerful tools, whether that is literally in the founding of encryption, which is fundamental to which is basically online privacy, basically these people were anti-government, anarchist hacker types. And these are the people who have created so much of our online privacy and continue to do so. And so the tools for online privacy continue to be made by people who are skeptical of government. And I think we can keep that in mind. And it really helps us to not take the black pill because the tools work. And we know the tools work. We know that the Tor browser is a good solution. We know that encryption works because if encryption didn't work, then all of our banking logins would be exposed immediately. The internet itself would collapse. So encryption is simply complex mathematics. You cannot coerce mathematics. All of the darknet markets, my colleague and I were very into researching all the stuff. So we're always checking out these darknet markets. They're using Monero, which is a privacy cryptocurrency. They're hosting all their stuff outside the US. And they're using Tor in the implementation of their sites. And they still exist. Like they're thriving. Right now, there are people who are totally off the grid, who are using Monero and who are running websites on the dark net. And these people are not caught and they're not captured. And in some cases, they're not at risk of doing so. We think of Ross Ulbrick, who was running the Silk Road. This was a darknet market several years back. And he was, it took them years. It took them years to find this guy. And he wasn't even the most tightened up in terms of his operational security. So no, I don't think that the enemy is all powerful. That doesn't mean you should underestimate them. But I do think, and I think there's plenty of evidence that we can carve out huge pockets for ourselves, even if we do want to participate in the digital realm. Well, that's good to hear Gabriel. And yeah, I'd love to explore that more in this interview with you to find out how we can do that and what solutions we can take. And, you know, I'm a little bit through your book now. And as somebody that is online a lot, you know, I do feel like I'm running up the hill constantly and to have somebody that is optimistic and has actually got people in here. People in his community or your community. I'm assuming you're a guy, but we did have a little conversation beforehand that you are anonymous by choice because you're trying to practice what you preach. So I'm assuming you're a guy, but maybe not. And there could be a voice changer. However, my point in all of that is like, it does make me feel optimistic that somebody with a much higher level of knowledge than I've got is saying, no, there's solutions out there that we can use. And I'm trying my best over here with what I've got, but I really do need guidance. I'm hoping that's what you can give us. But before we get into that, maybe you could just tell us from your perspective, Gabriel, what is the state of play right now? So forgetting about the future technocracy and all of the dystopia because of course, some of its reality, some of it is actually happening. There's also, in my opinion, a lot of fantasy narratives designed to make us feel afraid because I think that's what they want. But what's the current state of play? How exposed are we in terms of digital surveillance in our day-to-day lives as it stands right now? I think it's more than some people think and less than others think is maybe how I would phrase it. And I'll just start by saying that I'm obviously reading a lot of the alternative media, and I'm part of a lot of groups. And what I find is that, and this is where I really differentiate myself, I find that there are a lot of groups who are just sharing the latest world economically. World Economic Forum says this, or this comes out about this person's signal private messenger was compromised. And people immediately start to extrapolate and say, "Oh yeah, we don't have any more privacy anymore, it's all gone." And that's not nuanced at all, of course. And in both of those cases, it's simply not true. But what I found is that, and this occurred to me one day, is that, wait a second, it doesn't matter if I explain to people that signal is actually not compromised. And the encryption does work, and that this person had their phone literally taken. And of course, if I have your phone and it's unlocked, then I can locate your messages, right? Encryption is not going to help you if I have your unlocked phone in my hand, which is what happens in all these cases. But I found that people weren't looking for the nuance. They wanted to get their daily dose of fear and say, "Oh, the scary technocracy." And I don't know, it's the kind of people who might tune into Infowars just to say, "Hey, look how bad the world is." And it's kind of this shot in Freud, I'm not sure. That started to rub me the wrong way because I'm certainly solutions focused, and I have myself gone off the grid to an incredible extent, and it seems to have worked. I show other people how to do it. And I've rambled for too long now, I forgot your original question, give me back on Jack here. No, I totally resonate with what you just said because that's one of my struggles, and that's probably the reason a lot of listeners tuning to my show over other shows is because I'm one of the very few out there who isn't hopeless. I'll tell you what I think about it, I think it's disturbing, I think we're going to have some really hard times, and I don't discount that we could see lots and lots of people disappear from the planet in a short space of time. I'm not going to lie to people about what I think is going to happen, but I think it's still a hopeful situation. I think we've all got personal responsibility, and with that, you can do a lot for you and your family. It doesn't mean you're going to be able to save the planet or the entire country or your whole city. No, but you can do a lot for yourself. I think there's a choice in this, there's always a personal choice, and mindset to me is absolutely everything. And to think that I'd wake up with a mindset of defeat, well, you know, I think you've just handed them the victory, and that's the point of it. They want you to hand them the victory by giving you these terrifying narratives, and almost you bring it into being, you will it into being because where our mind goes, our actions go. So totally on board with what you're saying there, I just see it as a personal fight, you know, I don't have to think about everyone else, I just have to think about me and my mindset, and I know I'm just going to do everything I can. And if I still lose, I still feel like there's value in that loss, it's not a bad loss, it's a heroic loss, if that makes sense. Yes, well said, and I remember now you're asking me to speculate or give my survey of the current state of privacy. And here's another thing I'll say is, I'm just kind of going back to the doomsday mindset. A lot of people are going to listen to this, and they're going to not like this episode because I'm not giving them their daily dose of porn fear. But, you know, I've heard for so long over years and then decades, you know, the economy is going to crash, all this stuff is going to happen. And it just seems to get worse and worse and worse. And it just hasn't happened. And I think William Butler Gates, the Irish poet, he says, "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart." I think that's kind of where I am, and I actually think that the system can go on for, at this point, for longer than we think. And so we do, I think that, yeah, that those are kind of my thoughts. And I will also say that I think that there's a lot of incompetent people who are out there kind of behind the scenes. We have this vision, a lot of us, of these controllers of the landscape. And I think a lot of them are just average people, and we know how unintelligent the average person is. And we see how incompetent a lot of politicians are, and we want to attribute a higher level of power and intelligence and planning to a lot of these entities who are behind the scenes. I'm not saying we shouldn't plan for the worse, but I do think that there is a lot more opportunity for privacy in our daily lives. Yeah, I think there is intelligent design, but then I also think, like Hugh said, and this is something I always say to people, you can have intelligent design, for example, around COVID. That was clearly an agenda that was enacted on mass, and it was designed long in advance. It was very precise what they tried to deliver, and there were certain aims of that, which I think they probably achieved. But also it had to be enacted by human beings who, like Hugh said, are completely fallible. There's lots of people out there who are not passionate about the things they're being told to do. And they're simply just trying to get a paycheck and they're going out and doing their job. And I always use the example of traveling across Europe at the height of the lockdowns. It was when you still couldn't cross borders without a check, you still couldn't enter other countries. You had to go through official channels, and me and my wife traveled through five different countries. I never once took a PCR test, never will, never took a vaccine of course. Yeah, I was just creating even how I did it, and I think that will be the case for a long, long time. I mean, if they ever get the technocracy up and running to its full expression, then maybe it won't be. But I don't see that for at least 50 years. There's just so much other stuff that would have to happen first. Then nowhere close to it. And yet there's people out there who genuinely believe that within 10 years we're going to be living in a smart city and be completely controlled by AI, which is just so ludicrous to me. That I think, yeah, prepare for it all to fail. Don't prepare for it to succeed. Prepare for it to fail. However, there will be a huge part of that that is on you. It's on you to find the solutions. And also to be a willing dissident, because at some point just expressing yourself as a human being could be criminalized. I mean, we're getting there already with certain things to do in the UK, except for so that's my take on it Gabriel. I don't know if it resonates with you. No, it does. And just to emphasize this, we talk a lot about the alternative media and the decline of free speech. I've never in my life seen so many channels and Twitter posts and all the rest of people so skeptical of vaccines and basically everything out there. I've never met so many people like this. I sit next to them on planes. They're listening to podcasts, which have gone around the traditional mediated airwaves, which require all the various permissions. So I see a lot of people who have woken up. And I think the reason why there's so much fear now is just because there are so many people who have woken up. And that's maybe something to be optimistic about, even as we, and I'm very happy to get into the extreme tactics, which is something I love. I'd love to ask you about how the system at present, the one that we've got right now, how much of that has been shaped by our lack of action in the past around privacy. Do you feel like where we are today is because we had this period of rapid development, and I don't want to put words in your mouth. This is how I see it. Rapid technological development made our life easier. But part of that was we seem to have dropped the ball on privacy, and maybe it was just lack of understanding as well, not understanding what these technologies were doing in terms of data. But do you think that a big part of the problems we're facing now is just our lack of action? And maybe that's where we have to turn our attention now to trying to catch up essentially. Yeah, I think that's fair. And you can make the decision one day to start taking your privacy seriously and start using VPN and start using Linux and all this good free open source software. And of course, reject technology altogether. I think that 99% of the things that come out in tech these days are not actually good technology. And we shouldn't be spending our time on them. You know, the latest, the YouTuber who's showing all the latest gizmos and gadgets. You don't really need a fridge that tells you if your run had a milk or something. That's not a good technology. That's a waste of time. Most of these apps that you look on the Google Play Store or the Apple Store on your iPhone, most of the stuff is worthless. It's a waste of human endeavor. And so, yeah, I think I would agree that a large part of this is people simply not focused and interested in privacy, which. And this is one thing I talk about is privacy. There's a serious behavioral component to it where you have to have a desire to keep people from having your information because everywhere you go. Let's say you go to a website, it wants to know, "Hey, what's your name? What's your email address? Create an account." And you have to have the mindset of, "Hey, I'm going to access this and I'm not going to create an account." Or, "I'm not giving them my real email address." Or, "I'm certainly not giving them my real name." You have to have the mindset when you go to the dentist that, "Hey, I'm going to paint cash." And if I do that, they don't need to know a single thing about me. Fake name, fake phone number, fake address, refusing any other information. I'm not showing you my ID, et cetera. You need to have that mindset, and that's what I do. And if you do that, if you simply start to restrict, say no to all the advances that are foisted on you, right? I was at an airport and going through the checkout and they said, "Yeah, here, stand in front of this. We're going to scan your face." And I just asked everybody in front of me did that. I just asked them, "Hey, is this optional?" And I said, "Hey, come here a second. Yeah, it's optional. Go ahead." I just walked away. You just have to say no sometimes, and there's just not enough of that. And so that's rule number one is have the mindset to go throughout life without giving away your information. And there are some tools we can use to help us have that, right? We can have a phone number ready. We can have a burner email ready. And this can help us to get through life without giving our information because that is a big part of the problem is we have so many systems that are expecting us to give things. And we should teach them to expect that we're not going to give anything, or we're going to give bogus information. Yeah, I think that's a great answer, and it definitely highlights something really important that we ourselves are the ones that have to enforce our privacy. It's not something that is given to us. It's something that we are the gatekeepers of, and I've always been like that. So it's strange to me that people are so willing to give up personal information. I used to always give, for example, if I set up an email account, I'll just do a random name. And I used to get people message me and they're like, who's gone Zalith Horatio? And it's like, oh, it's me. Don't worry. It's me. And to be wondering who this random guy was, I was like, oh, it's me. And like, why did you do that? And I'm like, because I don't want to give away my name, you know, and my date of birth. Like it just is a natural thing for me, but I don't think it is natural for everyone. It depends if you were born with a rebellious streak, or maybe you're more of a questioner. So you question a lot of things and you think, is this right for me? But there's also a lot of people out there who may be by nature or maybe just because of conditioning in society. They feel obliged, you know, that they must do these things and they are a little bit intimidated by authority. And it's not their fault. We're living in a society that totally is shaping us towards being subservient. And, you know, one of the things that I wanted to bring up with you is this whole idea of if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about. I think that is a huge style designed for this very thing to make us feel like we have to give everything over. And do you think that there is a social engineering component of this Gabrielle and that we need to really potentially do some psychological work on ourselves to become more assertive and sane? Actually, I don't feel good about this. Do I have to do it? Like, is there another way, like you said, with the airport? Yeah, psychological engineering. No doubt. Yeah, I mean, the answer to that question is always yes, right? It's never no. There's no psychological engineering happening. And, you know, I just think, Mike, of all the websites that we visit and I've talked to and I've had my hand in various e-commerce in the past. And the rule with e-commerce is to learn everything you can about your customer. And so there has been kind of a shift to just mass data collection that really has seeped into the pores of our society such that you have an e-commerce website and go and look at all the tutorials of e-commerce. This is what they want to know. They say, you need to capture your, the behavior of your customer as soon as they get to the website. Ask for their, not just their email. You need to get their phone number, right? Because if we send it directly, if we send, if we send our messages directly to their phone, they're whatever, five times more likely to act on that than if it was their email. And then you need to be collecting the, the mouse location when they're on your website and make sure if they check out, you wait 12 hours. That's the best time to send an email to say, Hey, you forgot to check out. Let's, you know, let's, let's finish this. So there's a lot of this, I guess it's nasty stuff behind just e-commerce websites. And so, yeah, you can see that seeping into the culture that we need to be collecting all this stuff. And, and the truth is we don't. And the truth is that this was a progressive idea. My book, privacy and utopia. I discussed this that we, there was this idea in the late 19th century that we need more data so that we can guide society. That society is incapable of just going along by itself. H. G. Wells says that the 19th century and before had this idea of lies, I fair, right? That things are going to sort themselves out. That's unacceptable in modern society. We have to have a guided hand. And I just think that's ridiculous. And I think Hayek says in his writing about, you know, spontaneous order, that's, that's simply not necessary whatsoever. And that we are fully capable of making decisions for ourselves. So yeah, psychological component, certainly, we do need to be better at rejecting these things. And another big component of privacy, I'll say Mike is understanding the systems that are in front of you. So if you under, if you go to the website and you understand what they're trying to do, and you understand how the internet works and how your internet service provider works, and what your router is doing for you on your internet. And therefore what a VPN can do for you. And therefore what the Tor network can do for you. You can get onto your computer and feel very comfortable that you are doing things the correct way. So another big part of this is just understanding what you're up against. And once you do that, you feel very invigorated. You feel much freer and you certainly have the tools at that point to gain more privacy in your life. I like that you brought up H.G. Wells because at the start of the 1900s, there was so many different social commentators, scientists, biologists that all came to prominence and they were all being pushed by the same people by the rural societies. And we had this wave also of emsified that came along, and a lot of it was about social engineering. It's about making us believe that technology was far more powerful than man, and that we were going at some point be enslaved by it. We had to, you know, we was going to be subscribing to it. And all those narratives still exist today. I had an AI expert on the show just recently called Job Stand Grieve. You know, he's like you, he's a consultant only in AI and he's a professor at a university. And he was telling us about how the narratives around AI are completely artificial. They are sci-fi narratives and they're created, but he said that that is not how AI works and it never can work like that because, you know, it can't be imbued with a soul. It doesn't have human creativity, basically conforms to mathematics. And the mathematics you put into it is all it can ever do. It may appear to have some kind of superior thinking ability, but it's an allusion to the user, to the end user. And it feels to me like the same thing exists with privacy and cryptography in that, you know, for us, it seems like these people are all powerful, but I guess what you're saying is that no, actually, a lot of it, if you understand it, it will not feel so scary. You can actually have some of those same advantages with cryptography. You just need to know what you're doing. I mean, one big fear for me, Gabriel is backdozing things because, although I'm done when it comes to the technical side of things, I'm very good at the history, so I can understand the history of, say, the NSA, backdooring things. And I guess as lay users, they're always going to be working to accept some of the solutions that we're going to be talking about. Is that correct? Yeah, I see where you're coming from. And I see this a lot. I saw I was looking at one of your recent episodes. You had a guy exposing the crypto charade and cryptocurrency charade. And, you know, a lot of people in the comments saying, yeah, you know, Peter Schiff is right about crypto. The problem is there's there's some distinctions to be made here. I think that pure self sovereign cryptocurrency, especially Bitcoin and Monero is an amazing tool. Now, all the stuff that your guest was talking about is obviously, as he explained, quite the charade. And so we do need to make distinctions and we can't just remain in our ignorance, especially if we use these tools all the time. So in terms of something like a backdoor, there was a, you know, I'm big into the Bitcoin privacy scene, and there was recently, well, samurai wallet developers were arrested. Okay, they were arrested and they had this great, this great wallet. And suddenly, the Bitcoin privacy seems like it's not possible. And then just the other day, a wallet comes out to replace it. And so it's on the tour network. It's only downloadable on the tour network. And it's not available in any, you know, Google Play Store or anything like this and the developers are anonymous. So what do you do? Like, how do you establish trust? And, you know, I just had an episode on it on my show, The Watchmen Privacy Podcast and my colleague, who is very expert in these things, he says, look, here's what we do. We have all the open source code in front of us, right? Any good software has all the code right in front of you. Okay, so nothing is being hidden. Okay, but that doesn't mean that we understand the code. So what do you do? Well, you could learn how code works and go about that way. That would be a lot of work. Or you could understand that when the software comes out, you have immediately very bright people and very liberty oriented people who are scouring the code. Okay, how does this work? Why is this here? And double and triple and quadruple checking to the point where we have signal messenger, private messenger or tour or any of this other stuff. We get to a consensus in our communities that this is, this is okay. This is secure. And we know that that is the software that is running on our computer. And then if we're not confident about that whole open source process, then what we can do is we can look to the world and say, Hey, all these people, again, using all these VPNs, right? VPN is a piece of software that basically allows you to hide your internet activity from your internet service provider. And if those did not work, we would have a lot of people arrested right now, Mike. There would be a lot of people in trouble. There would be a lot exposed. There would be a lot of people in jail. The dark net markets of the world would not be able to exist without these tools working. And so there are certain assurances that we can have. And at the end of the day, any of the software that we're running, we can look granularly at the code or starts to make friends with people who do understand this stuff and who can look at the code. And give us some assurances because this stuff does work like the process is there. And there is a, you can do this in a trustless way. And if you're knowledgeable enough or put a little bit of trust in the other people who are going out there every day and looking at all this software and showing you for a fact that there is no backdoor to certain of this stuff that doesn't mean you shouldn't be vigilant. That doesn't mean I expect people to trust all this stuff. I'm always open to skepticism. But at the end of the day, you need to find at what point you would say I trust something. That's a very important thing for people to determine at what point do I trust this and then strive to reach that point. Yeah, I think that's a healthy approach because ultimately, you know, if you're going to be using things and you know you're going to have to have some exposure to it. Why not do our very best to make that as secure as possible to give yourself the best chance of defense. And maybe this might be a bad metaphor, you can tell me, I guess we could liken it to your house, like, you know, you can lock the gate, you can lock all the doors, you can put shutters on the windows, you can have bad way. It's up to you how far you go, but at the end of the day, yeah, you can't stop somebody who is so intent that they're going to blow a hole with a cannon through the wall, like maybe the NSA or the CIA, if they really want to grab somebody yeah maybe they could do something. But that's not actually applicable to most of the things we're protecting ourselves from. And maybe actually we could still divert them from that we don't actually know that's just a question mark but if I can stop Amazon and Google and all of the other big fans taking my stuff I'd love to do that so that's that's kind of how I feel about it. No, I think that's right that we can we can go a long ways before we start to really question some of the stuff and so everybody out there to the extent that you need to use some of these digital tools and I'm not somebody who says yeah we should all be using digital tools. I'm a bit of a Neil Luddite myself I see no problem with it. But when we do hit our computers for all the important things, you know, use a trusted VPN, I like IVPN or Mulvad, use the Tor network and you can layer these things on top of each other right that's another one. That's another way to feel like you're secure you could use a VPN and then a second VPN and then the Tor network, or you could use something like Tails which is an operating system that lives only on your computer's RAM. And it never touches any of your storage whatsoever. And the whole thing is protected by the Tor network and if people aren't familiar with the Tor network, it's this amazing international community of people who run different computers basically different notes and through the power of encryption. Your internet traffic bounces from one node to another to another and each one of those has incomplete information of the one adjacent to it. And then so, you know, Edward Snowden says that this is one of the great tools that we have for internet privacy and if you don't trust Edward Snowden, then, you know, I, I would say a similar thing. And so you can layer these things on top of each other and you can certainly go a long way before you just throw in the towel is what I would say to people so private messengers and get on Linux. This is important get away from Windows and Mac OS get onto Linux Linux is an open source operating system that doesn't have any of the tracking that Mac and Windows have. And then just start kind of going slowly down the list of privacy tools and winning yourself off of big tech and winning yourself off of closed source programs, okay, which we can't see what's happening in the code. And you can do a lot of great work before you come to a question of, hey, I think we can do a whole lot before we kind of given and say, yeah, I don't trust kind of the next step. I think one of the most liberating personal steps I took in terms of my digital life in terms of my computer system was going from Windows to Linux. That was a huge step for me because I'm a total low diet. I was worried about it. I didn't know how it would work. I didn't know if I'd be able to use all of my recording equipment. Only one issue, which was a microphone not working on Linux, so I got a new microphone. But besides that, everything else was compatible. But it really felt to me like a huge step when I no longer had Windows forcing me to update. Like, I remember one time Gabriel attended my computer on and my start bar was rainbow colored for pride. And okay, it was disconcerting, but it was more just the feeling of intrusion that somebody had forced this ideological attack on me. Like, we're going to force you to consume this. And even if I was into that stuff, even if I was totally all about the ideology, I'd have felt the same. Like, why should somebody have control over that? So when I went to Linux, all that disappeared. So that, before we even get to privacy, as such, although I guess it's kind of linked, it was just that feeling of control again over the operating system. So maybe you could give us some of the reasons why Linux is so important. And you can tell us just how bad Windows is. Is it as bad as I'm saying? Because a lot of people who know about IT, who I've spoken to, said nobody knows where the date is going with Windows. Is that correct? Yeah, it's correct, Mike, because it's closed source. So we don't know what it's doing. And people have done various tests showing what, excuse me, packets and what things are kind of being sent. And there's quite a few of them. It is quite possible that Microsoft is recording all of your mouse clicks, even potentially your screen. And we don't know and we wouldn't know. And what we have seen with Windows 11, the Microsoft CEO came out recently and he introduced this new I'm blanking on the term, but basically it's going to take a screenshot of your computer every five seconds and it's going to use it to as an archive for your assistance, of course. And this guy said this straight face to the camera. I'm like, dude, do you realize you're in a dystopian film right now? Can you at least show some awareness? But no, completely serious because these people, these technocrats do think that they're helping. And so Microsoft is not a company that we know we want to trust. And their product is Windows. And the way that they make money on Windows is by serving ads. And for all we know, by collecting some of your information and potentially selling it. And Mac OS, by the way, is not that much better. So people who are Mac users, let's all just get off of these things and get on to Linux. So when you install Windows, and I do this all the time, I'm playing around with new devices and installing all kinds of things. When you install a Windows machine, you don't have an option to, it basically says, do you want to us to collect a lot of telemetry? Okay, data about your use or a little bit. Right. So those are kind of your options. So there's really no way to to escape it. There are a lot of people who use various programs to shut things off, but you, and this is the important thing to understand, Mike, your operating system is the, is the program that runs all of your other programs. Okay, so you start your computer up. And this is it, you're into your operating system. This is the untranscendible horizon of your computing experience. And so if that, you can't trust that, then you really can't trust anything else you're doing on that computer. And so that's why my number one thing for people is really considered getting on to Linux. Linux is an open source operating system, a number of operating systems, right? Because once you, this was developed. Okay, let me step back. So, this is an operating system developed by a guy named Linus Torvalds. And he basically said, I'm going to create this alternative to these products, and I'm going to make it available to the public for free. And I'm going to show my work. I'm going to show everything that's happening. And so he did that. He created the Linux kernel in the 1990s. And there are many offshoots of Linux, because once you make that code available to everybody, then people can do whatever they want with it. They can create their own version. So there are many different versions of Linux. I recommend people to go into Linux Mint. If you're looking for an easy step into it, especially from Microsoft, Linux Mint is a familiar thing. And you simply need to put it onto a USB drive. There's a process. I talk about it in my tutorials. And you install Linux onto your computer. And now you're looking at an operating system, which I'm looking at right now, Mike. And I can do all the things I can do on Windows, every one of them. And I can, you know, I'm on a browser right now talking to you. I have my notes up right here. I have a Word document alternative up right now. So you can do all the things you need to do. You just need to make that commitment to move to Linux, because we can see what's happening in Linux, and it's not collecting your data. It's not doing any of the nefarious things that Microsoft is doing. So it is a huge step. And you can listen to some. I had a guy talking about Linux recently on my on my show. It's a common thing we talk about because it's just a really important thing to be confident and comfortable with an operating system that is also not part of big tech. Okay, it's not just about privacy, but it's about it's about freedom. It's about many other things. When it comes to free and open source software, you're supporting that you're participating in that when you start using Linux instead of Microsoft Windows or Mac OS. Yeah, and it's really not as difficult as people might think. I know there's a lot of people in my audience who are probably just like me and they struggle with tech and, you know, they've just about got it figured out with Windows and they think, oh, this is going to be a huge deal. And that might feed you away from going forward with it. I'm so bad at technology Gabrielle. I couldn't even do the USB thing. I had to get a new laptop made. So I got someone, it took me a long time actually to find a good company, but I found one in Europe and I got a laptop built with Linux put in there. I had it encrypted, got no camera. It's got no microphone. So I can be sure that unless I plug something in, nobody can listen remotely. But I'm not an expert in any of this stuff and I never will be. I asked somebody else to do it. And, you know, if that's who you are, there are other ways to do it. If you can't do it yourself, what I would say is if I had your cost Gabrielle and will come back maybe in the future, hopefully you'll rejoin us and I'll talk about what I learned from that course with you. But that is another option is you can actually learn that and I would prefer to do that because I can stay up to date and I can continually update it because the world's changing really fast and I think with this kind of stuff, it's always going to change. So I think it's better to empower yourself. But if you need a head start, you can definitely get someone to get out a laptop for you. So that was my experience, Gabrielle. And maybe before we end part one because in part two, we are going to discuss some of these things. I want to talk about Monero. I want to talk with a little bit more about Linux and also about phones and just get some more strategies. But really, you've got a comprehensive cost as well on this and I just wanted to hand it over to you so you can tell listeners a little bit about that and your book, because I'm sure some listeners that just listened to part one will be interested in that. Well, I mean, if you're giving me a chance to pitch my stuff, I'm not going to say no. Yeah, so look, my main thing is I have a podcast, The Watchmen Privacy Podcast. This is free. We talk about all kinds of this stuff and I welcome all skeptical questions and we try to answer every skeptical question that you can imagine. So that's free and you can certainly subscribe to that. And then I support the show. I don't have any sponsors. Right. I want to remain completely objective. And so I make courses and books that are useful to people. And so basically, if you go to escapethetechnocracy.com, you can see all of my offerings. I do have a privacy course. I walk you through all this stuff. It's a digital privacy course for the moment. And we have new offerings coming. I have a book on privacy and I have a historical book as well on the death of privacy. So that's kind of my stuff. And if you want, Mike, I don't want to do this without your permission. I do have a code that I could give the audience for a small discount for your audience. Would you be okay with that? Yeah, I'd absolutely love that. And I don't know if you want to give it to all the audience or just the members. I'll leave that up to you. But if you let me know, after the show, I'll put that in the description to whichever one you prefer. Okay. Well, there we go. So, yeah, that's me. And, you know, I'm, again, I'm not sponsored by anybody. I'm trying to be out here completely objective and so that you can trust what I'm saying, show my work, all this good stuff. And yeah, on our privacy tutorial on escape the technology.com, we do have a comprehensive guide to installing Linux on your computer. That's the first thing we talk about. Maybe the second thing. Yeah. Anyway, it's really early on. And we're not trying to be these tech overlords of basically saying, yeah, you need to understand this stuff, right? I talk extreme, but I also realize that people are starting. They're all coming from a starting place. I realize that there's a lot of older people who are scared of technology. Now, you do have to overcome that fear. You do have to want to put an effort to learn. If you don't, then you're going to be like, for example, my grandparents who are just every time I go over there, they haven't used their computer in months because some small thing happened and they're just frozen up. And I feel bad for those people, but at the same time, I think that's the world they want. They love that. I think they enjoy fear of technology and they like being victims, frankly, if I'm just kind of spelling it out. So you need to get past that. And once you do, certainly have a step-by-step instructions. And if you don't want that, just listen to my show. I think you'll find a lot of useful information on the Watchmen Privacy Podcast. So yeah, thanks, Mike. No, thank you for your time, Gabriel. It was a great part one. And I'm looking forward to getting into some of those practical solutions in part two. And yeah, I have to say to listeners as well, this is my own personal recommendation. I only met Gabriel for the first time today on this show, but I've been listening to the podcast. Gabriel and I've loved it. I've listened to about 10 episodes over the past two or three days. I keep taking you out on runs. And it's one of those podcasts that I've been really enjoying. So I'm glad that got brought to my attention because it's not the kind of thing I would have sought out myself. I'd never have looked for a podcast around that topic. But the way it's delivered and also some of the guests that you've had on, which I was surprised about, I thought it would all be about the privacy and the technology and trying to increase your privacy in terms of the digital world. But actually, I was wrong about that too. You've actually got guests on. There was a guy, I can't remember his name, but he was talking about India in the third world. And that was just a fascinating conversation. I think I might have to steal that guest and invite him on my show because I really enjoyed that one. Yeah, that's my friend, giant Pandari. That one's gotten me in a lot of trouble as if I wasn't already trouble with the big tech overloads. But no, look, I talk philosophy on there as well. I talk, obviously, digital and physical privacy. So it's, it's a show. I kind of go where the spirit moves me so to speak. So it's not one of these. Oh, is he just going to be talking about Linux every day? No, absolutely not. We talked about all kinds of interesting things. And I have a new segment on there. We talk about interesting world events. For example, I'm looking at episode 120, the assassination of Mohsen-Fakrizana. This was a guy who directed the Iranian nuclear program and he was assassinated by an AI remote controlled killer robot. So my, my friend and I, we dissect how that happened exactly. Not necessarily all the geopolitics, but kind of the technology and the mindset that would go into that kind of assassination. So there's some interesting stuff on there besides just, oh, is he just talking about private messengers again? I'm not, trust me. Okay, everybody, we're going to leave it there for part number one, but we've got plenty more to come in part number two. We pick up where we left off discussing Linux and why that's such a vital step. We talk about VPNs, physical privacy. Gabriel also gives us his expert opinion on Bitcoin and Monero for those that are interested. We also discuss how to back up data safely and with encryption. So plenty more still to come cause. If you would like to take it one step further, Gabriel has kindly offered members a discount code so you can go and take his online privacy course, which will walk you through tutorials on how to use all of these different techniques step by step. But with that, let's leave it there for part number one. Thank you so much for listening. Members, I look forward to seeing you over on parallomite.com to listen to the full episode. And if you're not a member yet, please consider joining us. But with that, take care of yourselves and I'll see you all in the next one. [Music] What you are basic, deep, deep down far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself. [Music] Peace for all men and women. Peace for all men and women. That merely peace in our time. Peace in all time. The fabric and structure of existence itself. [Music] The fabric and structure of existence itself. [Music] [Music] [Music] The fabric and structure of existence itself. Honestly expressing yourself. [Music] Peace for all men and women. Peace in our time. Peace in all time. You [BLANK_AUDIO]
