When you're in winter's favorite town, the snow-covered mountains surround you, a historic Main Street charms you, and every day brings a new adventure. Welcome to Park City, Utah, naturally winter's favorite town. Join the experience at visitparkcity.com. - Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets, and today we focus on the insight, because we're gonna talk about history. I'm proud to welcome back to Radical Personal Finance, my friend and coworker, Gabriel Custodio. Gabriel, welcome back to Radical Personal Finance. - Joshua, it's a pleasure to be here. I know that you don't invite too many people these days, and I'm very pleased to have connected with you and a lot of your audience at some of your events.

And so I know they're very intelligent people. I know they'll enjoy this episode, and yeah, glad to be here. - Absolutely. Yeah, we've been working together for a couple of years. You, primarily we've done a number of courses that we have taught, and I've recommended your book on privacy.

That's what I think you were most well-known for in the beginning. And you've recently come out with a new book called "Privacy and Utopia, a History," which is completely different than your previous work, which was very practical. This one is historical and very detailed and quite a fascinating and interesting book as we talk about the history of privacy.

So before we begin with the actual concepts that we're gonna talk about, and by the way, just for the audience, here at Radical Personal Finance, I talk about privacy as a useful strategy in the toolbox for various aspects of financial planning. There are a number of different assets. There are a number of different ways this can be expressed.

It can be a tool in the toolbox for asset protection planning. It can be the tool in the toolbox just for living a low-hassle, low-risk life in many ways. It can be a tool in the toolbox for protecting you from identity theft and other financial risks and frauds that are very common.

And of course, this resonates with me due to my kind of philosophical bent. So this episode is not going to be specifically personal finance-y in the sense of here's what you specifically should invest in, but it's going to be extremely informative as we talk about the history of privacy as a concept, and then think about how to apply that in the modern world.

So with that introduction, I'd love to hear the story of the book. Why, what caused you to want to write this particular type of history book? - Yeah, so the people who are aware of me from your show or elsewhere, they know that I do tend to talk about a lot of practical things, but I am interested in the ideas.

And frankly, I'm more interested in the ideas, right? I kind of got into the Watchman Privacy Podcast trying to teach people some of the tools and the skills, but always kept my foot in the door of talking philosophy, talking ideas. And I decided to write a book about, basically, we have this important question, and I know a lot of the people in your audience are kind of libertarian-leaning, and this sort of people.

And we see the last 100 years as a decline in personal freedom, and consequently, a decline in many other things. And we all have this question, what caused it? What was the origin? What caused this to be the case? Hoping that we can kind of change this. And I set out to do this, focusing on privacy.

And of course, that led me to bigger concepts like the rise of centralization and things of this sort. And it took me back about 100 years ago where I start this book, "Privacy and Utopia." But yeah, it was really just a opportunity to explore, okay, what happened to our freedom and privacy, and try to tackle it in a very historical way, but also a very philosophical way.

It's an intellectual history, so I'm not just kind of detailing this law of this year, and the welfare state gets set up on this particular occasion, but also trying to explore the undergirding ideas of the time that themselves led to these particular dates being cemented in history. So yeah, that was the intent, just trying to get to the first principles of the things that I talk about on a daily basis.

- Yeah, the book is very much a philosophical history, which is what makes it so interesting. Why do you begin your historical narrative in the 1890s? - Yeah, so you've got to start somewhere. And I think the 1890s are a very important decade because, in my view, we have the rise of centralization.

Okay, and centralization makes privacy, when it reaches its culmination, centralization makes privacy impossible because a centralized system, whether that is a server that is controlling various webpages, whether that is the ISR, whether that's the central government, a centralized system has to know all of its components, okay, in order to function, as opposed to a decentralized system where there's no center, there's no one, for a good image, ISR on that is looking and controlling everything.

So in a centralized system, privacy is metaphysically impossible. And in the 1890s, we have this serious beginning of the rise of centralization. And there are two different things at work here, Josh. There are the ideas of the time, and there's the technology that, well, I don't know which causes which, so I'll just say they're mutually reinforcing.

So in the 1890s, you have the kind of the culmination of the industrial revolution. We have trains, we can now cross a huge landmass, and we now have the ability to police nations, right? This is the rise of nationalism, where suddenly the United States 100 years before this, Thomas Jefferson said that there was no way of a central government ever having any hope of patrolling the landmass of North America.

Well, flash forward to 1890s, now we have trains, now we have the early automobiles, now we have steam engines that can go against the wind in the ocean. We have telegraphs, we have all this technology that basically makes it possible to have a strong central government. So this is the rise of statism, that's to use the term that a lot of libertarians and anarchists like to use.

And so we have technology that is leading to centralization in the 1890s. And of course, the decline of privacy is basically on the same graph as the rise of central government over the last 100 years. So this is kind of the origins of this. And also at the time you get this, in addition to the technology, we have this idea in the 1890s.

And I think people started getting this idea partly because of the technology that they see, but also just because there's something in the water of the time, right? We have Marxism, Marx is writing a couple of decades before this, he's writing out his ideas about how society influences people and how we need to essentially have a central governing body that can reallocate things in the best way.

There's this idea that the states or some powerful figure should be intervening into society and should be changing things, should be adjusting them. The welfare state starts around this time or in the turn of the century, early 20th century. We get all kinds of ideas where suddenly you're not just an individual, you're part of a collective.

There's a lot of things in the water, which we can go into more detail about how individualism is no longer cool, laissez-faire is no longer acceptable. One of the figures I talk about is H.G. Wells. He has a lot of good lines talking about how the 19th century was about people doing what they want, right, individualism.

That's not acceptable in the 20th century. In the 20th century, we're going to have to have a common purpose, a common plan. We're gonna have to have top-down planning. And of course, anytime you have planning, centralization, then you have a decline of freedom and consequently a decline of government.

So there was just something going on in the 1890s result of the technology, but also a result of the ideas of collectivism that start sprouting at this time. That makes it a very consequential decade for us to consider. - Tell me more. You just mentioned H.G. Wells and you talk a lot about his impact in the book.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to understand a lot of that history. Why was H.G. Wells such an interesting and pivotal figure at this time? - Yeah, we could talk for an hour just about H.G. Wells. Let me just give the summary to pique people's interest. So first of all, a lot of us know H.G.

Wells for the guy who was prominent in early science fiction. We have "War of the Worlds," we have "The Invisible Man," "The Time Machine," "The Island of Dr. Moreau," for those who are familiar with that one. These are all written in the 1890s and H.G. Wells would more prominently, if you can believe it, become known as a huge proponent, perhaps the biggest proponent of world government.

He literally wrote the book called "The New World Order." All right, 1939, writes this book. So this is a guy who devoted his entire life after he wrote a handful of science fiction books to world government, world order. He disbelieved in individualism. In fact, he would write a thesis later in life trying to argue at a biological level that individualism is a biological delusion.

He actually wrote that as a PhD thesis later in life. And so this was a great enemy of human individualism, freedom, a huge proponent of world government and centralization. He wrote a number of books that I talk about in my book, "A Modern Utopia," which is a perfectly dystopian world where everything is controlled and top-down planning and anybody who disagrees is sent to an island prison.

But that's who H.G. Wells was. He was very influential. George Orwell says of him that, let's see. Yeah, here's the quote. This is what George Orwell says. He says, "Thinking people who were born about the beginning of the century are in some sense H.G. Wells's own creation. I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much.

The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed." So this was not just a proponent of all these things, of centralization in its purest form, but he influenced the welfare state. He was friends with Winston Churchill. Early 20th century, when the welfare state in Britain comes about, this great emblem of centralization and incredibly influential person.

And you know, Josh, if we look back at some of these stories that we are familiar with, let's just do that for a moment. We have "The War of the Worlds." Think about "The War of the Worlds." First of all, why is humanity destroyed if you read that book?

And I do a close reading of all these books. It's destroyed because it is too disorganized. It's too decentralized. The people have no, this is exactly what he says, people have no, there was no common plan in London, right? So all these people are scattered because they don't have a plan.

Now, the Martians who have, by the way, been looking at them for a long time, right? This is the great Eye of Sauron, this great organized, perfectly technocratic society, for lack of a better word. They're not blamed at all for their invasion. In fact, they're encouraged for their invasion.

This is actually something that the narration encourages, because this is a more advanced, more developed, more evolutionarily advanced race of beings who are centralized, who do have a plan, and who destroy humanity because humanity is too laissez-faire. We look at "The Invisible Man," right, where individualism is basically concomitant, or is basically, you know, if you're so much an individual, right, this invisible man, you become psychotic, right?

You become a monster. That's kind of one of the takeaways of that particular book. You look at "The Island of Dr. Moreau," this very disturbing technocratic island where this doctor goes to experiment on animals and turn them into humans, right? This transhumanism that is in this early work, which is encouraged.

H.G. Wells was actually surprised that people were so critical of it and so disturbed by it. For him, this was just, these were his ethics. And just to finish my point here, this was a man who was one of the first human beings who had a purely scientific education.

He was part of this experimental college in London where he was taught actually by T.H. Huxley, who was known as Darwin's bulldog. So this is a man who was saturated in evolutionary thinking. He was saturated in scientific thinking. He was an atheist. He had a huge disdain for humanity as individuals.

He thought that they should be directed from the top down, and he wrote a hundred books, okay? He wrote a hundred books, almost all of them dedicated to describing how humanity can and should be directed from a top-down, from a top-down approach. And that's what he dedicated his life to.

And many people were influenced, not just by his early fiction, but by his more prescriptive books later on in his life. - I admire your having read through his, I've never read a single H.G. Wells book. And so I admire your having gone through and traced that history, 'cause I just hear about his name.

But him being the origin of so many of these ideas is something that I need to learn more about. After your chapter on H.G. Wells, you go to another writer named Joseph Conrad. Tell us about Conrad and what he contributed to this saga. - Yeah, so there's a lot of connections here that I tried to bring together.

And Joseph Conrad is actually a friend of H.G. Wells in the 1890s, when H.G. Wells started going on his tirade for world government, they stopped being friends. So that kind of tells you the difference between the two. And I simply elevate Joseph Conrad, this Polish-born author who was writing in his third language and actually managed to become arguably the best English novelist, despite writing in his third language, incredible story.

Wrote books such as "Heart of Darkness," "Nostromo," who, the guy who wrote "The Great Bank Gatsby" actually said, "If I could write any book ever written, "I would prefer to have written 'Nostromo.'" So Joseph Conrad is this really amazing writer, much better than H.G. Wells. And they basically have a disagreement.

I kind of, I put H.G. Wells as the great centralist, and I put Joseph Conrad as the decentralist, right? In his fiction, he's writing in a narrative way that is emphasizing individualism, that is emphasizing this idea that we don't live in a perfect world. We should not be pursuing this utopia, this perfect world on earth, that humans are flawed.

And his fiction is basically just recognizing that humans are flawed and appreciating humanity. He has this great line. He writes to Wells as their friendship is breaking up. He says, "The difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. "You don't care for humanity, "but think there are to be improved. "I love humanity, but no, they are not." So that's this strong dichotomy between the utopian and the anti-utopian view.

And I just see Joseph Conrad and his fiction and his ideas as emblematic of this 19th century, more laissez-faire, more constrained vision of humanity. And so he's there as a contrast to H.G. Wells. - The next section in your book is the one that I was particularly fascinated with just because it has such a great bearing on modern finance.

So you, in your third section, you title it "Privacy, Utopia, and the Welfare State" as a financial planner and one who pays attention to government finances and things like that. I'm intensely conscious of the welfare state. So how did these ideas influence the creation of the modern welfare state?

- So if you go back in your minds to this period of time where suddenly we now have journalism in a serious way, we now have photography, we now have census data that is right there in front of us, it's hard for you as a politician or as somebody reading the newspaper not to pick it up and say, "Oh, hey, we have all these statistics now.

We see how many people are poor. We see how many people are destitute." And of course, this has been the case throughout human history. The real miracle, of course, Joshua, is why that is not the case, right? What free markets, capitalism, et cetera, why they made it so that at least not everybody is poor, right?

But that's not how people looked at it, right? Of course, in the 1890s, around this period of time, people looked at all this new data, this photographic realism about how destitute people were. And of course, people said, "Well, we should do something about it," right? Those infamous words. And they actually had the ability to make it happen, right?

Because now we have all these central institutions, government is becoming a bigger role in people's lives. There's a lot more urbanization. And so everybody's just kind of crowded around and, you know, it's kind of right in front of you. You know, there's a good statistic in the UK, in Britain, in 1800, 10% of people are urban.

And fast forward 100 years, 1900, 90% of people are urban. So there's a lot of things just happening on the face of the earth within the West that are showing that, hey, we have all these poor and destitute people. And it makes sense if that's right in front of you, and you have this growing idea that individualism is old-fashioned, that we need to have a common plan, we need to have a collective solution.

It makes sense that, hey, what if we give some money to these people, okay? And it's just kind of a logical conclusion. You can understand how that came about. And so as we get the welfare state in 1905, I think is when Britain passes its first welfare laws, that is the camel's nose under the tent, of course.

You know, one of the politicians who was the main politician who was behind this, George Lloyd, who was partners with Winston Churchill, also a big proponent of the welfare state, he had this great speech he gave talking about how we need to wage war on poverty. And if that sounds familiar, that was certainly happening 100 years ago.

So basically it was politicians who were starting to realize they had increased power over people. They could increase their power. Maybe they thought they were helping people. I'm sure there was some of that. I don't think it was exclusively that, but either way, the welfare state is just the camel's nose under the tent of letting government intervene in our lives, the rise of statism.

And once that happened, you can easily see how fast forward from 1905 to 1910, we had the first world war. Suddenly we have a nationalist conflict and you are now a citizen, right? You have passports also crop up during this time. So you are now a citizen of this nation, right?

Germany was not really a nation before this time. Suddenly it's all kind of conglomerated into one. The same for Italy. These were previously kind of disparate little states and now they're one entity. So now you are part of a nation. You're a citizen. You have the yoke of citizenship, as I call it.

You're given welfare perhaps in some cases. So you have an obligation even to fight for your government, to fight for the state. So this is just the origin of big government as we know it. It started in a nice way, right? Let's help the poor people. And then suddenly we get to the point where you cannot leave the country in Italy.

We've revoked passports of young men so that they literally cannot leave Italy. This was, you know, first world war. It was a very quick, but logical, ethical succession from welfare state to warfare state to where we are today. - You move from here into talking about the concept of utopia.

And what I find so fascinating about that word is that word expresses something that I think we all want. We all want to live in a perfect world. So why do you see the utopian mindset as a problem? - Yeah, it's a good question. So the reason I see it as a problem is because the way the utopians of this era, of which HG Wells was a prominent figure, 1905, I think he publishes his book, "A Modern Utopia." And it's because there's a difference, Joshua, between an idea of, let's say, a Christian idea of utopia, and then this atheistic, rationalistic, eugenic idea that we need to create utopia now, right?

Because these utopians who really gained footing in the period of time that I'm discussing are people who said, hey, we have a powerful state. We have a scientific understanding. We should apply this to the world and create what we, of course, this is a group of elites, right? What we think is best for everybody.

And so utopia, according to this idea, is always coercive. And you could argue that by that fact alone, it is evil. I start off my book with a great epigraph from "The Tempest," Shakespeare's famous final play, "The Tempest," where there's this character talking about, yeah, there's gonna be this perfect world, and everybody's going to be idle, and all the women are going to be pure, and there's not gonna be any sovereignty.

And then his friend cuts him off and he says, yeah, but you're gonna be the king of this place, aren't you? And it's, as always, Shakespeare understands human nature and the way things work very carefully. Behind every utopia, every atheistic utopia in this sense, there's always some coercive force, right?

You look at H.G. Wells' "1905, A Modern Utopia." Everything seems nice, everybody has this, everybody has that, but wait, you disagree? Well, we're sending you off to an island prison. And if you disagree with being able to share your possessions with others, well, then that's not acceptable. We're going to have a force that is going to take it from you and give it to somebody else.

So this idea of utopianism is, in the sense that I described in the book, is a very coercive idea, right? Marxism is a utopian idea. It sounds good until you realize that, wait a second, there's going to have to be somebody in charge. It's not going to be me.

It's going to be somebody else. And they're going to have their own view of things. And they themselves are going to be fallen humans with their own problems. And of course we know, as a lot of this audience is libertarian, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So that's the problem with utopia as I see it in the way I explain it in this book.

- So why then, it was, was the dystopian not, the dystopian movement, especially the early dystopian novels, was that just a natural reaction or were people seeing already some of the downsides of these social movements and then writing and extrapolating from there? - So this is a very interesting thing that I discovered in writing this book, that the H.G.

Wells, especially his 1905 book, "A Modern Utopia," it actually inspired the dystopian novel. And you can look at H.G. Wells' book, "A Modern Utopia," and I think everybody should read it. It's a great historical document. It actually literally influenced the welfare state. Winston Churchill actually says he read it with great sympathy.

And he was one of the chief architects of the welfare state. And this book itself can be considered dystopian. Now, H.G. Wells did not write it with that mindset. So, what is dystopia, first of all? Dystopia is simply basically recognizing what I've recognized and just explain that in any utopian world, there is a coercive element.

There are people in control, people in charge at the top, and these people have their own agenda. And that's what pretty quickly a lot of people recognize. So 1909, just a few years later, E.M. Forster, the famous English novelist, E.M. Forster, who wrote books like "Howard's End" and some of these famous books, he actually wrote a long, short story called "The Machine Stops." Now, "The Machine Stops" is a dystopian short story about a society that's underground.

They kind of messed up the earth, trying to mess with various things. So they have to live underground. They all live in these little cubicles. They don't interact with each other. They have telescreens where they get all their news and information, and the machine, who is never seen, basically takes care of them.

It gives them what they need. It does all these things. And of course, as you can imagine, these are very depressed people. These are very purposeless people. And E.M. Forster basically describes this seemingly utopian world that's actually, when you get to the end of it, dystopian. So he has a negative take on the idea of utopia.

So H.G. Wells's own work would literally inspire the dystopian genre. He literally created the dystopian genre of people. E.M. Forster, shortly later, you have Aldous Huxley and Brave New World, another famous dystopia. George Orwell specifically mentions H.G. Wells' work as inspiration for his own take on things, which is simply, hey, this idea of utopia is silly, in the sense that it gives power to a group of people that is going to use it for their own ends.

We don't want any of that. We're going to expose it. So that's the origin of dystopia. - Bring it forward, then, to where we are today. As you have now been informed of the origins of some of these ideas, what do you see working out in today's world, and how does that impact your life and our lives?

- So part of writing a book about 100 years ago is so that I don't have to answer this question right away. But let me do my best. - I gave you 26 minutes of background, and now it's time for the, what do I do, which is what I care about.

- Yeah, yeah, fair enough. And I don't have a good answer. I think, obviously, people listening have a sense of things. You have a good sense of things. So I think maybe the main takeaway of this book is simply to recognize the origin of some of the ideas out there.

When you see people saying, hey, we need to fix things, we need a powerful person in charge, we need to, you can even see to this day, we didn't talk about eugenics, but eugenics was a big part of this era. And in eugenics, you can see the two-sided aspect of this progressive utopian view, which is, hey, we have all this data, we can see that moronic people, that's what they call them, are literally holding our society back.

In fact, they presented the evidence, right? People with low IQs are actually holding back our economy. They gave lectures on this. Everybody you know from the era was a proponent of eugenics, including Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf, Helen Keller, you name it. They were a proponent of eugenics, of course, HG Wells.

And you can see that these ideas remain with us. This idea that we need to tamper with humanity, we need to go beyond our physical nature. Of course, Neuralink and things of this sort, I remember listening to a talk on an Asian guy who said that Asian people are shorter, they consume fewer resources, so we should in the future modify people to be shorter.

Of course, we have CRISPR, which has the ability to change genes. So if we recognize the fundamental assumptions of this worldview, which are that we should go beyond our nature, right? We are in control of our nature. We can conquer our nature. Of course, as C.S. Lewis says, "If we conquer our nature, who exactly will have won that battle?" That's a good question.

When we understand and really ruminate on how flawed humans are, we're not going to elevate them in positions of power. We're not going to use that same human nature to try to transcend ourselves. We're still trying to figure out ourselves. And so we need to have this more humble, constrained view of humanity, which will necessarily lead to more limited governments, more limited power, more people working as communities together, more people who are just trying to do things in a decentralized, local way.

That's kind of the main takeaway that I hope people get from reading about this. I end the book with a great quotation from the famous anarchist Leo Tolstoy. He says, "Everybody thinks about changing the world, but nobody thinks about changing himself." What we need is an internal revolution. The regeneration of the inner man.

And I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. - Ideologically, I'm sold on these ideas. They're what I seem to be, they're what I think is correct and broadly effective. So I'm aligned with you. But I also consider, I've been considering the other side, just thinking a lot about how, am I just too extremist?

Am I dogmatically committed to a certain approach without considering the evidence? And I'll give a practical example, which is quite chilling when you talk about the novels and the things of olden days. I recall seeing some, I don't know, a month or two, a couple of months back, some tweet that you had made about how people are constantly using AI.

And everyone says they're opposed to the machine and then they're turning everything in their life over to ChatGPT or whatever local AI platform. And I see the integration of ChatGPT as like the perfect current example of this philosophical challenge. I find it to be one of the most incredible daily tools that I use and I use it constantly because it is profoundly helpful.

And yet it's also profoundly flawed. It makes up stuff left, right, and center. Constantly just making stuff up out of thin air, constantly getting stuff wrong. And it does become a crutch. It becomes something that you kind of lean on and say, well, if I can use AI to do this, then I don't have to think it through myself.

I can just have the machine do this. And so I'm trying to find the place to put my feet down where I'm not just a Luddite, just anti-technology for the sake of it. I'm not just dogmatically opposed to programming. I'm opposed to progress because I'm a contrarian. But I'm also trying to take the informed approach and learn and say, well, where are my weaknesses?

And so I've been trying to sort out kind of the proper way to do that. And I don't expect you to answer that because each person, each of us has to make our own decisions. But it's fascinating to think about my challenges of myself and think about how can I create this balance.

Maybe I just like to ride the fence, but I don't want to be that person who says, well, I'm opposed to progress. I want to be the person who's building towards a utopia, but I want to do it in an informed way, recognizing the flawed nature, the sin nature of human beings, the fallen nature so that we build proper safeguards around it that create towards progress without having to believe the lie that humans are somehow fundamentally different today than they were 100 years ago.

- There's a lot of wisdom in that, Joshua. I don't have too much to say on it. Maybe I'll just recommend a good book for you or for other people, "The Abolition of Man" by C.S. Lewis. He was a guy who, I think this is written in 1943. And so he saw all the technocratic things that were building up.

He saw the idea of transhumanism early on. He saw the idea of the welfare state and its consequences. And he's got some interesting things to say in there, but I have been very anti-AI and anti a lot of certain things. And I think that all I'll say is, I think we should be okay with putting our foot down about certain things and say, yeah, I'm not, this is not progress, right?

Because this is maybe one of the nastiest consequences of the utopian era, the progressive era, is that they suddenly have us really questioning things and saying, why shouldn't I do this? Why shouldn't I try this? That's progress after all, but we need to define our terms very carefully. What is progress?

If I have a fridge that can know what I need and order more of it, there's obviously, and this is something I talk about a lot in privacy circles, there's a consequence to all of this stuff. And of course, the consequence of technology is that we lose our ability to be self-sufficient, our memories degrade, there's all kinds of consequences that I would not categorize as progressive.

So there's a lot of technology, smart watches, for example, I think are not progressive at all. I think there's more human time lost with all the alerts and all the rest of a smartwatch than it actually benefits. So I would just encourage people to be more critical about this idea of progress.

Not everything, not all movement is progress. And just to quote another great conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, he says, "We think that there are no new discoveries to be made in morality." - Interesting. I can see the point that you're making and I could lend some arguments to it from my kind of watching modern society.

We've created, with all of our progressive culture, we've created a culture that demands less of human beings and that easy living seems to be toxic to human beings. The rates of depression, the rates of suicide, the rates of just general unhappiness, the rates of loneliness, all of them are much higher than they have been historically.

And even just the continuation of our species, that the most progressive cultures where there's the least, in general, the most progressive cultures where there are the fewest problems tend to be the cultures that are literally dying out and literally going extinct over the course of time, unless we can find some way to correct it.

Meanwhile, the cultures that have not progressed in the same way and have not just openly embraced every single technology tend by those metrics to have higher rates of happiness, higher rates of satisfaction, higher rates of human connection and higher birth rates for the continuation of the species. So it's fascinating that what we would think would be an unalloyed good of making life easy doesn't seem to be the pathway for humans that automatically makes for better outcomes.

But I also simultaneously find myself frustrated by people who just stand against progress. So once again, I try to straddle the fence. - Right. And I think I do a good job of straddling this, Josh. So I don't use any Apple products. And so I miss out on that whole ecosystem of, oh, hey, all your devices are integrated and you have Siri.

Oops, maybe I shouldn't have said that. You have our favorite female AI, Apple Assistant helping us out and all these kinds of things. And you know what? I've used those from friends at times. And I have to say that not having them in my life, I see no difference, no difference.

In fact, sometimes I think I'm more productive not having the distractions, not having the worry. Obviously my privacy is more preserved. So I can still use a computer. I'm looking at a computer right now. It's a Linux computer. I'm using all these useful programs. I just don't buy into the idea that I need an app for this and an app for that.

'Cause you don't. You can benefit from the underlying technology of the internet and computers and all these sorts of things without going that bizarre extra mile of saying, yeah, but progress is always pursuing that next little gadget. In my experience, that is not the case. There are technologies that are useful and there are many that are worthless.

And I think that unfortunately, most of the things that humans are producing in terms of technology these days are actually useless. - Yeah. So it seems like privacy, do you consider that privacy is a good, the word is failing me, but like a good, the thing, the word that means or the idea that means that you can just kind of plug one proxy, I guess, is a good proxy for some of this stuff that by maintaining privacy, you can advance, but basically have a digital minimalist lifestyle to channel Cal Newport's book.

You can make appropriate progress, but not go so far that you wind up getting sucked into the utopian vortex that winds up destroying you. Do you see that as, do you see it as a useful proxy, kind of a metric that aligns with these other metrics that lead to human flourishing?

- My first, my very first episode on the Watchmen Privacy Podcast, I talk about digital minimalism. And for me, a privacy lifestyle started from the very beginning in, wait a second, how do these systems work? So it started with understanding these systems, computer systems, how data is shared, how the internet works.

And once I understood them, I could say, okay, do I really need to participate in all these things? And the answer was no. And that immediately gives me privacy. And then I could start to understand what tech I need and don't need. So yeah, I found that a privacy lifestyle, especially as I talk about it, is a way of understanding our technology to a better degree, hiding from a lot of the surveying systems as a result.

But yeah, just being more in touch with what is important and what is not important. So it is more of a holistic philosophy. And as a result, you avoid sharing your data with all these systems. So yeah, I think the mindset of understanding your threat, your threat model, understanding the system, understanding the technology, and deciding purposely to refuse a lot of these technologies is a very good mindset.

And I feel very at peace in where I am as a result. - Yeah, excellent. Is there anything in the book that I haven't asked you about that you think would be interesting for this kind of podcast format to talk about? - Yeah, let me think about this for a second.

- By the way, while you're thinking, I just want to congratulate your media. I enjoy reading your writing because you write with a flair that is often gone in modern business writing. I know you do these podcasts and things because you have to, to promote your writing. And I just want to say, keep up the good work, keep writing, because you do so, you're a great writer, and I really enjoy reading your prose.

- I appreciate that. Maybe that's one thing to point out for people who are listening and say, well, is this overwhelming? No, I've decided from now on, I'm not going to write a book more than 200 pages. I don't think it's necessary. I think it's a waste of time.

So I'm the kind of person, I rewrote certain paragraphs 30 times just to remove certain things, to say 10 things in one sentence that didn't need 10 sentences. So I think if you give the book a try, you'll realize that there's a lot of ideas condensed in a very approachable way.

I'm not trying to use crazy vocabulary. And it's actually more like 160 pages when you kind of cut out some of the intermediary parts. So that is my intent to not just have good ideas, but to explain them in a good way in writing that people can really grasp onto.

And there's a whole lot here. We talk about science fiction, utopianism, defying privacy early on, have a good philosophical discussion about decentralization, which is almost synonymous with privacy as I argue early in the book, as well as have some historical facts to kind of grasp onto. We talk about eugenics, some good explication of some famous and really important books throughout history.

So yeah, I don't know that I have too much more to discuss in terms of a conversation. - Where would you prefer people, where and how would you prefer people to buy the book? And then I want to go to your new project that's more practical, but where and how would you prefer people buy the book?

- Yeah, so easy. If you want a physical copy, you have to go to Amazon. So just go to Amazon, search for Privacy and Utopia. I'm Gabriel Custodiate. It should pop up right away. Very attractive cover. I try to do everything with style. And so I think you'll find that the cover itself is, I can see three symbols in it, just looking at it very quickly.

So it's a very pretty book. I've held physical copy. So Amazon's the way to go there. I don't have a Kindle version. Amazon has a problem with you selling it digitally elsewhere. And also I don't like to participate in the Kindle surveillance. So if you want a digital copy, that's where you would go to my new website, escapethetechnocracy.com.

We're gonna give you a code for Joshua Sheets in a moment, but you can buy it and you just go through the checkout process. Bam, you get a PDF instantly, no DRM. That is your PDF to own and do with as you'd like and share it as you'd like.

So either Amazon or escapethetechnocracy.com and you can buy the PDF there. - Yeah, now let's talk more because not only is the book available at escapethetechnocracy.com, but you have moved all of your training courses there. We've closed down the previous trainings and courses that we've done together and you have reworked everything and created a whole new world.

So tell us more about the new training that you offer at Escape the Technocracy. - Yeah, I'd love to. So I think a lot of the audience who we've talked to before about Bitcoin privacy, just digital privacy generally, hack proofing yourself. You mentioned like what's the connection of privacy to finance?

Well, $10 trillion of cyber crime every year. How's that for a connection? So we did have these courses. We've since closed them down for various reasons, but I have resurrected them in escapethetechnocracy.com. Definitely use your code RPF for 15% off. And basically I have with a different partner this time, although you're an affiliate, so you're benefiting, you're contributing to Joshua as well as me.

And you can have these excellent courses on digital privacy, how to use cryptocurrency, all of the important stuff for escaping this technocratic regime of preserving your privacy and some cyber security along the way. So yeah, it's a whole new website, also a course called Escape the Technocracy. And we have a code for you to use for radical personal finance.

You get 15% off of that. And so I'd encourage everybody, if you're interested in privacy, I really do think these are the best privacy tutorials, video tutorials online. So if that is your cup of tea, and even if you've already been in the Bitcoin course and the Hack Proof course, definitely go check this out.

There's a lot of new stuff here. So you're gonna definitely want to go check it out. - Yeah, and what I would say is there are lots, there's lots of material out there in the privacy space. If you're interested in the topic, go and read 58 books on it.

If you just wanna know what works from somebody who knows the market and is able to articulate in a straightforward, direct fashion and say, here, do this, follow these instructions in a series of relatively short videos. They're comprehensive, but relatively short, straightforward, then go to Escape the Technocracy and use Gabriel for that, 'cause that's what he is really, really good at.

And that format that he updates continually and has updated, that format is the best way to convey this kind of work. So if you're a reader, get his books, but if you just want to cut straight to the meat, as I usually do and know what to do, then go through his course there.

Use code RPF, I'll get a small commission for that and you'll save 15% on the sales price and we'll keep Gabriel doing what he does really well, which is writing and researching and producing things that help the rest of us. Anything else, Gabriel? - There's also a URL. You can go to escapethetechnocracy.com/RPF and that coupon will also be automatically applied.

I appreciate it. - Excellent, I will link to that directly in the show notes. Enjoy your time in Western Finland. I know you are finishing up your autumn in Finland. I can't do my jokes. - It is. No, it's great this time of day, of course. Between Finland and Karachi, I definitely get around.

- Exactly, exactly. All right, my friend, I look forward to seeing you soon. Thanks for coming on. - Thank you. - Save on family favorites at Vons and Albertsons. This week at Vons and Albertsons, get USDA choice beef tri-tip roast untrimmed for 4.99 per pound with membership where applicable.

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