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- [00:18]
A
Hello and welcome. This is Gabriel Custodiet of Watchman Privacy, Privacy practitioner, consultant, author, and frontline fighter in the push for privacy. I know why you're here. Like the rest of us here in the Resistance, you're trying to escape the technocratic apparatuses that you see enveloping you and crushing your freedoms. That's why I created all of this, all without sponsors. I hope you enjoy this show. But then when you're ready to take the next steps to secure your privacy and your future, Visit my website, escapethechnocracy.com to start the real journey. Your support alone does not determines the future of the show. See you there. I'm very pleased today to be joined by Paul Rosenberg. Now, Paul has been on the show four times at this point. This will be the fifth time that he's on the show. And you can certainly go check our previous interviews, episode 1654, 96. I don't know what the fourth one is, but you can search for Paul Rosenberg and find it. And Paul is an author. He's a philosopher, a lay theologian, a novelist, an anarchist, a cryptographer, and part of the original movement. He was, by age 21, a master electrician and has developed courses and course material for universities on that particular topic. So, more importantly, he's one of my favorite people to talk to. So, Paul, welcome back to the show. How are you doing?
- [01:33]
B
I'm well, Gabriel, and thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure.
- [01:36]
A
Absolutely. So I always like to ease us into the conversation with a very simple, straightforward question. Uncontroversial. And I wanted to throw this to you, Paul, because I don't know who else to ask this to. There's a video game called Soma. It demonstrates a kind of a thought experiment that is fairly common in, let's say, science fiction. Let's say that we were able to clone a human being, atom for atom, and essentially teleport them somewhere else in the universe. If every atom was cloned, exactly, and replicated, what would be the result on the other side in terms of, you know, the theological and moral consequences of that? And would that be the same person?
- [02:15]
B
Oh, well, first of all, it would not be the same person. It would, in the moment of creation, so to speak, be an identical person. Not only like an identical twin, but with identical not just brain structure, but brain routines. You know, our minds are composed of the physical brain, and God only knows how many routines, ways of analyzing things, ways of thinking of things, not just the content of our memories, but. But the ways we've trained ourselves to behave the habits, if you will. And there's many, many kinds. So at the moment of creation or cloning, that would be the same person, but they would diverge. You come back 10 years later, it would not be the same person. Theologically, I don't think it makes a bit of difference. Philosophically, I don't think it makes a bit of difference. I don't really see any fundamental problem with it. I don't know why you'd really want to do it, but. But it would, you know, I don't see any fundamental problem unless, you know, somebody does it to somebody against their will or something like that.
- [03:21]
A
And then let's say the clone or the original person wanted to harm the other person. That would still be just as immoral as if it was any other person, correct?
- [03:29]
B
Absolutely. If you create a human being, which is, you know, what we do all the time when we create children, you create a human being, they're a separate person, even if they're an infant. Well, you have to do everything for them. But that goes away incrementally as they get older. And at some point they're just completely their own person. It would be the same way with this.
- [03:52]
A
Let's get into some cypherpunk questions. Always like to start with that particular category after we get our easy question done and dusted recently in the news, and we're recording this. October 1, 2025, we have the. These various digital ID laws that have been passed in some European countries. Switzerland voted yes to digital id. We don't have to go into the details, we don't have to go into, like, how is this, you know, monitored and all the rest? But would. Did you ever think, Paul, that we would be sitting where we are at this point in time and actual digital ID laws are just about to be on the books? Your thoughts on that?
- [04:28]
B
Well, I've been concerned about it for a long, long time. You know, there's a reason why it's happening in Europe, and I guess I might as well just talk about that for a minute. Intelligence. And we're talking. What we're talking about here is intelligence wars. It's not just crazy politicians who want to have every piece of information on everybody, which there is that too. But it's not just that, it's the intelligence agencies, because the deeper intelligence you have, the better. You can not only predict what's going on, but you can mess up with your enemy's plans. And if you're really good at that, the margin of victory doesn't have to be much. You can be, you know, I don't know what the proper number is. 2, 3, 5% better and win consistently. So the intelligence agencies world over, all of them at can, are trying to get more and more and more and more and more and more and more information on every single person. It's not targeted. They want the whole stream because they have heuristics, they have computer ways of using a computer to do it and to be able to analyze it. So what has happened in the US is that the intelligence agencies just gobbled up Google and Facebook and the rest of those, because they were right there. I mean, with Facebook, you have deep personal surveillance of literally billions of people, and people give it to them for free. And they put, you know, they know what you had for breakfast. They know which of your kids you prefer to the other one. They know, you know better than your spouse does, what you were looking for, what you want. So the intelligence agencies, well, they had to jump on that. I mean, what kind of spy master wouldn't? So the US has Google and Facebook and so on. They own them, you know, for whatever the details are. They own them and they will protect them and they will keep it going foolishly on their part. They centered on it and put all of their effort into that. Because once people start dropping out of that matrix, which they really, really should, and more and more people are, then they've just shot themselves in the foot again. They have to rebuild a structure that they just let go to go to pot. The Europeans, on the other hand, don't have that. That's why they're crazy with financial surveillance, because that gives them not the same thing, but close enough to keep up in their intel wars. It's really about that. Of course, reality is much more complicated. It always is. But it really comes down to that. They want enough information to. They just want more and more surveillance. It's like a heroin addict. They just got to have more. They want more data all the time, and they want the systems to analyze it and they want, you know, just to get more, more, more. They're mainlining it. And so the Europeans have to go really hard on the financial side, whereas the US doesn't have to go so hard on the financial side. And in my opinion, that's why you're getting these in these abominations is that's what they are in Europe. I hope they don't work very well. I hope that they fall apart, you know, fill in the blanks on that. And they might fall apart and they might not work. And you know, I pray to God that they don't because they're abominable.
- [08:14]
A
Interesting that the absence of big tech entrepreneurship in Europe means that they have to use their governments to get some of the surveillance instead. Interesting take there. I hadn't thought about it in that way. Now, on the topic of the cypherpunks who are political prisoners or who are under attack, this is a topic that you like to discuss. You've been a big supporter of people who have gone to jail for these sorts of things over the years, over the decades. Samurai wallets. One of these groups of people, they are going to be pleading guilty in November. We'll see what, what their fate is. And it's just something you have to do when you're playing the, the judicial game these days. I'm sure they figured out that their likelihood of winning the case probably wasn't good, which is why they're doing this. But your thoughts on the latest cypherpunk political prisoners in October of 2025?
- [09:15]
B
Well, again, the word that springs to mind is abominable. These people are providing an honest service and so far were, and so far as I know, they didn't do anything that was immoral in terms of making something illegal. Well, a guy some years ago now wrote a book called Three Felonies in a Day and it was a guy named Harvey Silverglate. I don't think I met the gentleman, but he was a lawyer, a civil free speech lawyer of some flavor, I think. And, and he said, he went through the numbers and went through it and said anybody who's active at all commits three felonies a day. Because there's so many laws, there's so many different regulations that are enforced as laws that it's not possible to live any sort of active life without being a felon multiple times daily. So if they want to get you, they can get you. You know, it's just, it's, it's a real problem. They can get you on, on, you know, felonies anytime they want you to. And that's what they do to these guys. So far as I know, the samurai guys ran an honest business and didn't do anything nasty, didn't intend to do anything nasty, didn't know about any nastiness going through their system. Well, what more do you want? You know, if you're going to go after these guys, go after AT&T, go after Sprint, go after Verizon, how many dirty deals do you think go on through those networks, how many money launderers use those systems? How many money launderers use dollars? All of them. Pick whatever crime you want. And AT and T and all of the big networks are equally as guilty or more guilty than samurai. So what this is is some politicians decided that, or who knows, maybe some intel guy behind it, I don't know, decided that they don't like it and they want to do this and they figure that they can scare enough people and make them, you know, think it's some kind of evil, terrible thing. They're helping money launderers and terrorists and things like that so they think they can go after them and, you know, get a few scalps and feel powerful. I mean, it really comes down to that level of stupidity, although it is cloaked in very expensive suits and haircuts.
- [11:43]
A
Yeah, there's a number of hypocrisies, as you mentioned there. And one of them, Paul, is we just wrote an article on this for our newsletter. There was a cache of telecoms devices in New York City that was recently discovered that was large enough to shut down the cellular network in New York City. We're talking about 100,000 SIM cards in this setup that we calculated was half a million dollars just to run this. Now there's no way that the cellular companies behind those didn't have an idea that something nefarious was going on. So why is the first person not investigated, the CEO of that particular company? If. Right. The logic is that if you have a service that allows for bad people, then, you know, we're going after you and not the, you know, not the bad people. So there's a lot of hypocrisies to this. And just another one just off the top of my head.
- [12:31]
B
Yeah, I would love to know the details on that. I don't think they're available, but I want to know who was behind that thing. That's a big deal.
- [12:41]
A
There is a three part governmental system in the United States and for all the crazy laws that get passed and signed into action and people arrested through the executive branch, the judges, all are supposed to be the people who are the final people that say, no, this is ridiculous. This is not constitutional, this is not whatever. This is not right. So we're not going to. Right, these people are not going to get punished. How culpable is the judicial system in the current state of things, in your view?
- [13:11]
B
It's hard to quantify and it's hard to place blame specifically on people.
- [13:21]
A
Or.
- [13:21]
B
Well, put it this way, I don't Know enough, I don't think anybody does, to really name the names outside of the few that you run into. But it's big. The judiciary is not pristine and glorious. Well, I'll tell a couple stories. When I was, oh, I don't know, 20, 30 years old, I knew the guy who assigned all the cases in the county courthouse. And this is in Chicago, this is not some little place. And I knew the guy who assigned cases to judges. This guy had like a fifth or sixth grade education. He swore like the worst sailor you ever could imagine in your life. You know, apologies to sailors. He was essentially a sort of a mob guy and he was the guy who assigned cases to judges. So, you know, is Chicago an outlier? Probably, but it's not the only one argue, you know, I've heard cases for other places being worse. I happened to know the brother of a federal judge, which is, you know, a big thing. And when my friend ultimately passed away at the funeral, you know, I was there with the judge, among other people. And this guy was a big name federal judge. He was a rotten person. He was an arrogant jerk. I don't know exactly how corrupt he was or wasn't, but just from meeting him, I would bet he is or was. He was a rotten guy talking crap about his brother at his brother's funeral. It was, you know, so these people are not. And the judge in Ross Ulbricht's trial, where I, where I went was just, you know, take away the robes and the fancy and the nice haircuts and everything. She was just fake, a fraud. I don't know how to describe it properly, but I was extremely displeased with this person and did things in the courtroom that you just can't do in a courtroom. Now at the same time, when you get to the civil or. Yeah, the civil layer of things, you know, lawsuits, you know, somebody sues the contractor because he broke their roof or something. I found the judges at those levels to be quite good. I've worked with some of them and known what's going on. So at that level, I've been generally pretty happy with them. At the top level, no, I don't know about any of the Supremes. Some of them seem to be thoughtful human beings and I hope I'm right about them. I think I am. But judiciary in general is. Needs a lot of work.
- [16:30]
A
Let me ask you about the. We can call it the simple web, the simple Internet. You grew up through the entirety of the Internet. You've seen it evolve. And there's a Certain nostalgia that I've noticed among people, Paul, for the Internet of the early 2000s, let's say, or the late 1990s, where the websites were all HTML, they were very simple. There was not all these. All these. All this tracking seemingly going on. And as the years go by, we have all these terms, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, where basically things get really cluttered, clumsy, it takes a long time to load pages. At this point in time, we have algorithms that are feeding us things, not in a chronological order as traditional forums were, you know, designed to do, so that you can see basically everything that is being said. Do you have a certain nostalgia for the earlier days of the Internet, and do you think that the course of just web design and the way the web functions has degraded over time?
- [17:35]
B
Okay, good question. Yes, I do have nostalgia for the early, early ages. It's not really nostalgia, although, you know, everybody who gets of a certain age kind of looks back and go, yeah, those were good times, and in some ways they were. But it's not just nostalgia, because when the Internet came along, we used to call it the realm of the mind. And it was. And all of the fancy stuff that came after, and from what I call the vampire parasites, the whole economy that thrives on grasping and seizing human attention, human brain cycles, they used to call it capturing eyeballs, but it's much worse than that now. That whole model with free accounts and then the currency of the realm is capturing human attention that didn't exist at the beginning, and it was a realm of the mind. And there's nothing really wrong with interesting web design, but it became part of this larger thing. Some people call it the surveillance economy. There's all sorts of ways to describe it, but it's an attempt to seize by force as much human attention as is possible. In the old days, we didn't have that. And so your mind was free to be a mind, to look around and make your own connections, to put things together yourself. And, you know, it's hard to put any kind of real measurement on such things, but my memory is pretty good. And if it serves me correctly, the quality of conversation was much better then. Forget about the political stuff. Politics now is just, you know, just a sink of my team versus your team, and we're going to kill each other. And you're wrong. And I'll never admit, you know, I'll never admit I was wrong. Even if I die, there's a lot of that going on. And it has been stirred up by this, by the algorithms, by all this because if you want to capture people's attention, you know, oh, look, there's a fight. Let's go see there. Oh, there's a train wreck. We got to watch. And that's what they give you to capture your brain cycles. So in the old days there wasn't that the problem? The websites, you know, they've upgraded for that, which is a problem being prettier. Well, that's fine. It's neither here nor there to me. I kind of liked the simple websites. You know, there's no bs, it was just, this is it. This is Bob's site and he has some really interesting things to say. You might want to read it. And I, you know what? If I could go back to that, I go back to it in a minute.
- [20:28]
A
Yeah, I just remade my watchman privacy.com website. It's basically just HTML and it loads instantly on Tor. It's quite refreshing, honestly. And I realized I didn't need all this other stuff on there. So, yeah, it is certainly something to think about and I appreciate the simple web movement that is going on. Let me ask you about Wikipedia. This was a project that was created explicitly because the creator read Hayek and liked his essay the Use of Knowledge in Society. One of these great manifestos of how decentralized systems are superior, non coercive, lead to better things. In the end, all else being equal. Wikipedia these days is a little bit of a cesspool, to be honest. You have these, There's a lot of bias in there. You have actors, nefarious actors who are perverting things and all the rest. And Wikipedia, the organization does not, my understanding is because of its, its agreements, it doesn't really have the power to go in there and really change anything. Is there any, any lesson, in your view to be learned about the current state of Wikipedia?
- [21:43]
B
My experience is that when Wikipedia started, I thought it was wonderful, great idea. I contributed. I didn't, you know, I didn't have time to do too much, but I did a little bit, put up a page or two and edited a few things a couple times. I think I gave them a few bucks once or twice, but then they were just taken over by political types. From my experience, I don't know on the inner workings, I don't know the internal things, but they just got really political. And I would go there and I knew exactly the bias I was going to find. It was going to be, you know, left wing. And I, you know, I'm almost tired of saying left wing. I'm diverging from the point just a little. I'm tired of going, oh, they're progressives. Oh, they're. Well, maybe they're socialists. You know, I'm just at the point where I'm ready to call everybody commies. You know, if. If they really believe in that stuff, might as well just call them communists. These guys argue about terminology from a living sometimes, and I'm just. I'm tired of it. So there was just a very communist bent at Wikipedia to the point now where if I use it, you know, I know if they admit something that's anti communist, well, it must be true, because they have no choice but to admit it. And so I'm really disgusted with Wikipedia. Are they able to fix it? Well, that. I don't know. Fundamentally they are, of course, but if they have sorts of agreements, then they just need to. Somebody needs to just put up a new one and say, I took up here. We got the 2016 Wikipedia database before it wasn't utterly corrupt, and we're starting over, and here we are, and we'll be neutral to the best we can. And if you see someplace where we're not neutral, you tell us, fix it, and we'll try to support you in it. It's never going to be perfect, but it's going to be good. So here we go. I would love for somebody to do that. Heck, I would send them a few bucks.
- [23:52]
A
Is this a failure in decentralization?
- [23:58]
B
No, no, no, no, it's not. Fundamentally, decentralization is not perfect and never will be perfect. Well, until humans themselves are perfect, whenever and however that could possibly be. I don't know. You know, decentralization is a function of us. We put in the ethics, we put in the morality, we put in the virtue to make the things work. Centralization is more or less the manipulators running the whole show. And it, gosh, it fails all the time, every day in a massive scale. So we can't expect decentralization to be perfect because it won't be. But less bad generally, yes. And my guess is that is the centralizing aspect of Wikipedia, the control. The interlinked agreements that are rigid and can't be moved are probably the core of the problem. And that is very definitely not decentralization. It is actually the opposite.
- [24:59]
A
We have talked in almost every one of our episodes together about the Eliza Faire City, the very interesting project that occurred decades ago. You have a book on it that people can track down if they're hungry for more, called the Untold Story of the Greatest crypto project ever, talked about it a lot over the past episodes, but I don't think we've really talked about how it's unwinded and, and maybe if we're in a little bit melancholic mood today, how did that dissolve and were there any lessons to be learned about the way that that project not just flourished for a time, obviously we've discussed that, but how it kind of dissolved.
- [25:40]
B
Sure. That's actually some important stuff in there. What happened is that to get the project done and to get it done properly, a guy named Orland Graby and his partner, who I saw his real name once, but I chose not to remember it, they had to fight very hard to get the system built right because the other guy who funded a great deal of the project and ran a great deal of it, just didn't give a darn about security. He just didn't get it. He was an older guy, kind of a gruffy old time kind of guy, and he just didn't get the security thing and wanted to build it and get it done now and give me a damn programmer who'll get it done, I want it up and running, you know, that sort of thing. So Arlen and his partner had to fight very hard against it. And as is very common in our species, they got pissed off and kind of crusted over about it. And they fought, they had to fight very hard to get the thing done right. And to their immense credit, they did. But they rather insulated themselves from exterior input given, you know, human psychology, perhaps that was necessary. It was not, however, useful. So they had this system. It was up and running. It did work for quite a while. It worked well, by the way. But eventually they started getting into things where they were out of their depth. They were both brilliant, brilliant guys, but they didn't have experience in everything. And it turns out that they had no experience in banking. They could understand the numbers and how you manage things in general, but they did know the intricacies of the international monetary systems and how they worked. In particular, they didn't know that bank wires can be recalled and there was a scammer using the system. And anytime, a warning to anybody who builds such a thing in the future you're going to have scammers find your system and try to use it. I wish I had a perfect fix for you, but I don't. It's just the human condition right now. There are a certain number of people who, who are thieves that would rather thieves rather steal by brain power than Fist power. And you will eventually get them. And I'm sorry, and do your best and, you know, God be with you. Anyway, there was a particular guy who was using this system and doing some kind of scams. I think it was with selling used cars or whatever it was. It was some kind of scam. And these guys didn't know that bank wires could be recalled. And they weren't monitoring what everybody was doing. They were not surveillers. They were running a financial system. They were running a market. And markets in their pure form have no morality attached. They're just mechanisms of interconnection. So that's what they were running. Well, they allowed money to go out when they shouldn't have. And so the scammer got a lot of money. And afterwards the wire that. That went to the financial system was recalled because of the crime involved. Well, that put them insolvent. And they scrambled and they tried to do everything they could, but they, you know, the money that they thought was theirs was actually recalled because there wasn't a crime associated with it, which I think was a real crime. They eventually had to just shutter the thing. And then, you know, everybody, they tried to pay everybody back. Everything that had been lost in the system. And there was a lot of arguing and anger at that moment about that. It wasn't their fault. It was. And I did a lot of very serious investigation into this. I was given complete access. I knew. Or at least just about complete access. I knew what was going on. I examined the paperwork afterwards. And as far as I'm concerned, there was no ill intent involved whatsoever. There was a little bit of hubris. And these guys just got caught and they closed it down as well as you can do with such a thing. It was honest. It was open. There was an audit committee that came in to close it all down. Work of the audit committee was done honestly. And that's bad breaks. But that's the story of how it ended. And the lesson from it is, number one, that interaction with the big financial system is extremely dangerous if you're not part of the game. Look, if they were hsbc, they could have made a phone call and said, look, we got a problem here. What do you want us to do? And the Lords of dollars would find some way to keep them going because, you know, they all work. They all worked in tandem. To be an outsider and work through the mainline financial system is very dangerous. Unless you've been in that business for 20, 30, 40 years at a fairly high level, you really don't know all the things that can bite you. So that's one lesson. The other is that centralized points of failure will get you over time and they make you vulnerable, which is of course the lesson that Satoshi took for building Bitcoin. And you can read Satoshi's emails and postings and such and you know, saying, look, we want something with no head that can be cut off because that's what happened in this case as well.
- [32:01]
A
Final cypherpunk question. Then we can go to some questions on morality. Quantum computing people are increasingly concerned, and they have been for a long time. They're increasingly concerned that quantum computing will or already is breaking the encryption that gives us digital privacy. Why should people be concerned or not concerned about quantum computing?
- [32:26]
B
I'm not concerned. I'm not concerned for several reasons. One is that this stuff is being done in laboratories and, you know, they're working with 10 qubits, 100 qubits, which is the measurement of the strength of quantum computing. You need a whole lot more than that. You need millions of qubits to break a bitcoin transaction. So, and this is stuff that's being done in a laboratory, not out in the field, you know, which is a lot harder. So I'm not really worried about it. There's a lot of fear that being spread about it again, people want attention. Oh, no, look over here. We're going to break Bitcoin. Oh, let's go take a look. They're a long way from it. And we already have quantum resistant computing. We already have quantum resistance protocols. So I'm not worried about it. You know, the only real concern with quantum is if it came really fast, it would be things done years ago. In other words, if they could go backward and decrypt the things you did five, 10 years ago and maybe try to find something that wasn't 100% kosher and get you that way, that's possible. I don't see that coming anytime soon. I'm not worried about it and honestly, I don't really think it's going to be a big deal. I suppose it's possible. I mean, I don't know. I'm not working in it every day. But if it is, we're going to have plenty of time to adapt. I'm not particularly worried.
- [34:04]
A
Let's get to some questions about morality and anarchism. And let's start with the steel manning for starters. Paul. So question of might makes right. So we, we have the situation, let's say, of Ross Ulbricht, who was you Know, given a very unjust sentence by basically an activist judge for two, two life sentences, and then, you know, decades on top of that. And it was not the collective anarchist movement that freed him or could have freed him. It was, you know, Trump. Essentially, we have an example like Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore who basically said, hey, I'm going to use the power of government to create a very close thing to a free market here and all the enemies, I'm going to use the States to get rid of them, punish them. When faced with a overwhelmingly powerful evil, opposing it with government power seems like a winning bet. What are your thoughts on the question of might makes right and whether or not anarchy can be nearly as effective as fighting power with power? Does that make sense?
- [35:19]
B
Sure, sure. I'll start answering this. And you. If I get off the. Off the road, you get me back on.
- [35:27]
A
Sure.
- [35:28]
B
Okay, let's first, let's start with Ross. It was the anarchist that really got Ross out. And here's why I say that, first of all, they're the ones who kept the thing going. And they were, you know, Lynn, Lynn Ulbricht, Ross's mom, was the one who really made all of this happen. And she was going to all of the anarchist meetings and she had a bunch of us helping her. And the people that were helping her were, well, generally pretty serious anarchists and certainly bitcoiners, which is, you know, bleeds heavily into anarchy or at least hardcore libertarianism. So there were lots of those people and they were the ones who did the heavy lifting. They're the ones who did everything when nobody else would. And, you know, the people at the Hackers Congress in Prague and 100 others, Porkfest, and all of these groups of people, all of them jumped in and helped Roger Ver. A lot of people donated a lot of money and kept the thing going. My old pal Mike Gagulski made the first site. Anyway, people were busy doing this, and that's what really made it work. And then it rolled over into bitcoin, and the bitcoin community got involved very seriously because. Well, because they were basically moral human beings and gave a damn about it. And by the way, Silk Road is really kind of what put bitcoin on the map for many people. So they were warmly intentioned and it was bitcoin winning. And Mr. Trump and others, seeing that they were winning and seeing that this was a lot of people, and these were pretty much kind of conservative sort of people. I mean, bitcoiners, I don't know how to generalize their political leanings. But these are people who have virtue. You can't be a bitcoiner. Certainly couldn't in the old days without having courage. If you're just going to go along with the easiest possible thing, you're probably not going to be a conservative in America, at least not a serious one, because, you know, everything was tilted against all the news stations, all the big newspapers and so on. So I think Mr. Trump saw that bitcoin had won and was winning and that there were a lot of votes there that he could get. And hopefully there was some other element of human virtue involved. I hope so. I think that's really what made that happen. It came to the point bitcoin and our basic group of people, large group of people, have finally reached the point where we're setting the terms of the debate, which is astonishing, but it's kind of true. So there's that. Now the use of government power is really an interesting question. You can go through the scenarios of, well, if I were somehow miraculously President of the United States, what would I do? And there are probably cases where you would say, okay, well, I will send the Marines out for this. I'm not going to start any war. I'm not going to do anything. But I've got this thing and Party XYZ is killing a lot of innocent people over here and I have the ability to stop them. I think maybe I should do it. And there's always going to be something like that and there's always going to be cases for practical matters, while why that maybe matters now the issue is that mean that is anarchy, a failing model, a model that can't survive. And the answer is no. It's actually a much, much better, better model. Under the existing model, the use of force and the use of in the execution of justice, shall we say, is limited to a very small number of people. You're not allowed to. If I go out and fix some criminal problem somewhere, I'm as likely to go to jail as the bad guy. And God help me if I injure the guy too badly or, God forbid, kill him, I could very easily go to jail too, in a true voluntarist, AKA anarchist situation. Well, everybody's an enforcer, which, interestingly enough, John Locke wrote about when he was doing his analysis 300 years ago. But everybody's an enforcer. It doesn't mean you have to go, you know, barging into, you know, an armed robbery, make a phone call, throw rocks, scream, do something, whatever you can. You just have to Justify yourself to your neighbors. Were you standing out in front while this family was, you know, whatever, something horrible? Yes. Did you do anything? Well, yeah, I did. I started screaming and calling people and I started throwing things at the getaway car. I hid behind a tree, but I was throwing rocks. Then you're justified before your neighbors. You don't have to be the superman of violence to go in there, but you gotta do something. And in that type of situation, there is a dense wound web of safety that blankets the earth. Everyone's an enforcer. So all the little things that lead up to the big things and all of the little seeding of power, giving away power to the big man, that doesn't happen. I mean, look at the people we want to stop. Let's say the Stalins or the Maos or the tin pot dictator of whatever place they have power only because people think it's their God given duty to support the big man. Honestly, it's a primate model, but people think they have to do that once they no longer have to do that. What's Joe Stalin without people obeying him? He's a petty thug. He would have, you know, he would have robbed, you know, little stores and stabbed store shopkeepers until finally the shopkeeper, stun, came out of the back with a lead pipe in his hand, you know. How much damage would he have done? A pretty fair amount. But not 20 million or whatever the number is that he killed. It would have been 20 or 50 or 100, not 20 million. So it is the structure of centralization that makes big monsters possible. And of course there's a lot to add to that. But anarchy, proper anarchy, the way you and I mean it, voluntarism, it's a much, much better model. It's a moral model, and it's a much more effective human model.
- [42:52]
A
I wanted to ask you about the stock market. Not inherently a bad thing. I assume you would agree with me on that. But how does one who is, let's say, interested in speculating or investing, what should they be careful of when they're in the stock market? For example, if you are in one of these quote unquote defense companies and the stock increases because there's a war going on, is that immoral for you to have been participating in that? You're simply betting that there is going to be more war. How would you evaluate those sorts of situations?
- [43:31]
B
Interesting question. Like you say, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with trading shares of a company. I think the whole model has really gotten kind of way out of control. Essentially, Wall street ate the world surplus starting in about 1980. And again there's exceptions and fine points and all that, but before then people tended to invest to get dividends. Especially 100 years ago or so, people wanted to retire on the dividends. And I think that was a much, much better model. But beginning 1980ish, all of the world's surplus was just funneled into Wall street and to the city of London and a few other places. And I think this is a bad model in that way. Again, nothing fundamentally wrong with owning shares of a company. The problem with trading the market is that the fundamentals no longer matter. When I was young, we would study the earnings price to earnings ratio and the book value and all these various things that at one time mattered. Sometimes they didn't matter very quickly because there was also a lot of psychology going on. But fundamentally they matter to some extent. Not so much anymore. Now things have changed and fundamentals really don't matter that much. And there's this giant big black box in the middle of all of the markets that we can't see inside, which is called the central bank. And we don't know what's going inside there. We don't know really who those people are. We don't know what they want and whether if they try decide to increase their portfolio, which means that they're going to buy all kinds of stocks and bonds and guess what, the prices are going to go up. And if they decide to decrease their holdings, well guess what, it's going to drive prices down. But we don't know what they're going to do. They sometimes announce it after, but I promise you there are people front running that. And so we're at a major disadvantage. The fundamentals don't matter. We can't see inside of a very pivotal piece of the operation being the central banks. And then there is the issue of what am I investing in? If you want to invest, if there's some tech company that's going to make self driving cars and you think they're going to be really good at it and they're going to make a lot of money with it, okay fine, you can buy some shares of that company, I don't see any real problem with that. You're making a guess, but that's what investing is. We don't actually know what's going to happen, so that's fine. Defense companies, personally I don't want them. I don't mind somebody who makes two small arms because I think that's okay. Self defense, I think is something people should have the right to do. And if somebody makes a nice personal defense weapon that has virtues in it, has good qualities about it, fine, I wouldn't mind investing in that. But to invest in bombs and fighter planes, I'm not interested in doing that. And I'm not interested in investing in anything that I think makes the world worse. I wouldn't touch Facebook, for example. I don't care if it's going up. I had friends that told me, oh, we're investing in Google. It's going to make a lot of money, Paul. You know what? I don't care. Now look, I know some people are, you know, really, really need the money. You know, it's kind of easy for me to say. I'm older and I've got at least a few bucks. I understand being young and desperate. I've been there, done that, I get it. But at some point you got to say, what am I investing in? Am I investing in things that are just going to be used? I don't know where to break buildings and kill people. I'm not too into that. Do I want more money? Yeah, I do. But I'm not willing to do that. But these are choices all of us have to make and there's all sorts of trade offs involved, but you got to choose somewhere and you got to draw your own line. Maybe five years from now you'll say I was a little bit too much this way or that. Fine, fix it. Then go back to what you think is right. But we have to make these choices. The, the real function of morality is that we do choose not sit around and pontificate, but actually do make choices and then later fix them if we find that they were off by 10 degrees. But we have to do this. We've got to make our choices and that's it. Do what you believe in and live with it and you'll live happily with it. And then later on if you find you're a little off, adjust.
- [48:50]
A
So let's end with this question. Paul, maybe practical question for folks. You, you used to run a VPN called Crypto Hippie. It's no longer functional for various reasons, mostly because people were not supporting it. But you obviously know more than most about VPNs. I've never heard you recommend a specific VPN. I'm not calling on you to, but for people who are. And you've also hilariously called out the VPN industry at large in our previous episodes, which is very much appreciated. There's so much crazy advertising, it's almost become comical. Paul. I'll be listening to a podcast and there's some ad. I'm like, what is this for? They're promising total security for me and my family, all future generations. What are like, what is. Oh, that's how far we've gotten with VPN promising. So obviously it's overblown. We've talked about that a lot on this show. But where are we with VPNs today? I don't know if you're willing to recommend one or what people should be looking for or what the future of VPNs is. Just your updated thoughts on VPNs, though.
- [50:00]
B
Sure. I'm not up on all of the current stuff like I used to be, but I will say several things. One is, anybody is trying to sell you a VPN for cheap, cheap, cheap, and we're going to magically protect everything for the end of time. Run away. Don't buy this. Okay, I understand. It sounds really good because they paid people to make it sound that way. Don't do it. There is no absolutely perfect anything in this business. Somebody who's running a VPN is facing off against massively funded professionals on a daily basis. Basis. You're going to have to pay for this. If you're not paying, you're not getting much, and you may very well get into something worse than nothing. You want a professional VPN, don't worry about servers in 50 different countries. That's not important. That's, you know, if it's useful for you in some way, fine. But that doesn't make it better because what makes a VPN effective is crowding at the exits, the way we call it. And you want a lot of people coming, going from someplace so that your traffic is indistinguishable. If you're one of three guys who are going out of the server in lower Botswana, well, they can find you. If you're one out of 1,000 people going out of a node in, who knows, Sweden, then you're going to be a lot harder to pick up. You definitely want a VPN with more than one hop. That's, you know, signals bouncing from Chicago to Madrid to Ecuador before it goes out into the general Internet. You want multiple hops if possible, and I'm not sure how possible it is these days. You want a VPN that doesn't have a single point of failure. What we did at Crypto Hippie is we had one company that ran the customer side and one company separate that ran the networking side, and they were not the same company and they did not even have identical ownership. And they were very carefully kept separate so that God forbid, if something happened to one of them, the servers are seized or whatever it is, there would not be enough information there to give everything away. So you want that if you can get it. You want people that have some kind of reputation, if possible. Look, the people who own and run VPNs are a little skittish and you can't blame them because it is sometimes a risky business, especially if you do it well. So you might not be able to find exact information. But if they've been in business for four, for 10 years and they have basically happy customers, that's a pretty good recommendation. And if there was a VPN that was going to be bad, that was just going to steal everybody's information and take their money and go away, they wouldn't last very long. They have to get in and get out and do it really well. Because people who are paying for you to protect their information are going to be really pissed off if you just steal their stuff. I used to tell people that, look, my customers love me and we tell them the truth and we give, you know, we do the best we can for them. If we made some kind of mistake and accidentally lost their data, I think they would forgive me. If I did it on purpose, they would not. So, you know, don't worry too much about a VPN that has existed for a while and that has conducted honest business, has communicated, has done what they said they were going to do, and doesn't smell like a huckster. I hope that gives people enough to work with. Please, please, please don't go for cheaper free. Please don't.
- [54:17]
A
Is there any that gets the Paul stamp of approval or are you specifically not mentioning any particular companies, which I understand?
- [54:24]
B
Yeah, I'm specifically not mentioning mentioning any. There are a couple, a few that I think are quite good. And if you, if you look at the things I said specifically, multiple hops in business for more than a few years have done honest business, you're going to find that charge. You know, you're not going to pay $1,000 a year or anything, but you're going to have to actually pay and find those people. There's not that many of them that are really good that aren't hucksters.
- [54:59]
A
So thank you, Paul. This has been. Paul Rosenberg, Free Man's Perspective. Now, we do have some news here. The Free Man's Perspective. If you visited the website that we've shared in the past and that we'll have in the show. Notes is changing a little bit and Paul is now on Substack, so we're obviously going to recommend those links and I'm going to give you the final thoughts here, Paul, so you can kind of walk people through what you're up to now and how people can find out about your work.
- [55:23]
B
Sure. Thank you. Freeman's perspective is closing down. There's two more issues remaining to go out on our subscription email, the site will remain and all of the, I don't know, 180 or whatever is posts that we have will continue in rotation. I've paired them down from 400 or so to be the ones that just have enduring importance rather than, you know, that we're detailing specific problems of that day. So I think that's, I think they're really of value and I, you know, I wish everyone would read them all. So that will remain. That will be up indefinitely. But I'm, you know, I'm finishing up with the subscription letter, which was hard and I'm kind of, you know, slowing down and being at least semi retired. But I am writing at Substack and you can find a place called the Findings. There's actually three different parts. One is the Findings, which are general posts which I'm sure you will find interesting. The second is called 10 second thoughts, which are little self improvement clips. One paragraph, two paragraph. It turns out that humans cannot really absorb a concept, a new concept, unless they give it 10 seconds of concentrated thought. So these are short little things that are potent and are worth 10 seconds of fixation upon. And there's a number of them already up and I'll keep adding to them as, you know, cool ideas pop into my head or pull out or pull them out of my many notes. So those are those two. And then I'm going to have another paid newsletter which is going to be quarterly because I don't want to do the same thing I had been doing for so many years, mainly because it was very, very hard. It's called the Wreckage and the Rebuild. And it's really an examination of all the things that are falling down and growing up in the world as we go forward. It'll be done, it'll be issued quarterly, like I say, and it's going to be very interesting. I've got really interesting notes for it and it's going to be just an examination of the world, what's going on, what's very likely to happen next, and how we are moving from the old world to a new and better world. And we really, truly are. For all of the mayhem that you hear about every day, things are going pretty darn well. I know it doesn't seem like it because we're so focused on darkness, but there's a lot going on to the good. And we're going to be covering both the wreckage and the rebuild. And that'll begin January 1st. I'm not sure of the price, 150, 200 a year, something in that range. And it'll be quarterly, and I don't even know about the length. It's just going to be, you know, the best I've got to give in that particular quarter.
- [58:27]
A
All right. Thank you again, Paul. Best of luck in the upcoming endeavors.
- [58:32]
B
Thank you, my friend.
- [58:34]
A
Hey, thanks for listening. I could really use your help. Real quick, if you could share this episode with someone, engage with me, leave a review anywhere. This helps me to break the technocratic shadow banning that is happening with my brand. And of course, if you really want to escape the technocracy, go to escapethetechnocracy.com privacy, tutorial, series, books, newsletters, consulting. And of course, you can leave a donation. Thank you very much,
- [59:17]
B
Sam.