As a parent or mentor you have the awesome opportunity to help a young person build a future So if the future they want is in the military take the time to learn more at today's military.com Because their success tomorrow begins with your support today Today I'm radical personal finance expert interview with Gabriel custodiate author of the watchman guide to privacy Welcome to radical personal finance show dedicated providing you with the knowledge skills insight and encouragement You need live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less My name is Joshua sheets.

I am your host and today we have an expert interview I've had a massive list of guests that have been wanting to get on the show and With the vagaries of my current lifestyle. I haven't been able to line them up. But today We're gonna get started on that list Topic of privacy digital privacy financial privacy lifestyle privacy personal privacy.

This is a topic that is certainly of Significant and I think growing interest in our modern world. I think many of us understand that the need for privacy especially in an increasingly Connected world can be significant and yet the question is how do you actually do it? And so today I've got Gabriel here with me to talk about this Gabriel.

Welcome to radical personal finance. I'm glad you're here today, Joshua I'm very glad to be here. Let's let's do this I have found myself recommending your book quite a lot over the last couple of months has come up on the public podcast The cops are coming for us. You hear them It's come up on the on the podcast in public a couple of times and then I've also had that come up several times with With private consulting clients, etc.

People who asked me said Josh I'm interested in privacy and I'm looking for something that's a little bit that that gives me kind of the the starter steps To get me started and it's it's actually hard to do I have a few favorites right on the one end. I often recommend to people who've never heard of privacy I recommend JJ Luna's book on How to be invisible there we go how to be invisible I blanked on the title because it's it's so beautifully written It's very attractive, but it's getting a little bit dated and out of it is out of date at this point on some of the techniques I really admire what Michael Bazzell has done with his work But it's so hardcore that it's hard for me to hand a 500 page book to someone expect them to read it And so I love your book because you are current on all of the cutting-edge strategies But you're writing them in an accessible way that I think is is much more useful.

And so we're gonna talk extensively about some of the content of This book because I think it's a really worthy manual for somebody who's looking for one book I want to begin though today not by talking about techniques, but I want to ask you a question That's a burning question.

I have and it's how to know how much is Enough. So let me articulate it with my own personal experience when I became interested in privacy as I'm want to do I went hardcore. I went as hard into the deep end as I could I tried on all the techniques I did the simple ones.

I did the intermediate ones. I did the advanced ones and I found that my life was basically unlivable It was so frustrating to do it all I couldn't keep it up and I had to make conscious decisions To back off of some of the hardcore techniques because it was unlivable for me personally.

It was costing me money It was costing me relationships. It was costing me business and I'll give you a practical example of How I have how this has been important to me A number of years ago when I got into privacy I started moving everybody away from contacting me on my phone on my phone To contacting me on an application and I set up a variety of different applications signal Wire whatsapp even Facebook.

I used various phone voice over IP services At the time I was really enjoying using Pseudo and I had a plan all set up and I was doing this partly for international relocation but one of the things that happened to me when I relocated outside of the United States is Bunch of my systems broke because I put in foreign SIM cards and all of a sudden pseudo stopped working because I said Oh, we're not authorized and I found myself Isolated from people and at first I didn't realize this big problem But my friends who used to used to would have sent me a text message or used to Call me now just didn't do it because they didn't know well Do I use how do I reach Joshua?

and so I actually had to make an intentional decision to go back to kind of the normal world of Having a phone number and texting people instead of sending the messages Because I found that my relationships were suffering because people didn't know how to get a hold of me So, how do you think about this this question of how much is enough as a privacy consultant?

Well, Josh, I think that a lot of people who get into Privacy in a serious way have probably encountered this scenario. I know that I have I think for most people This is not a concern for them for most people maybe listening They're just finding the the first way to get into privacy they haven't gone off the deep end but What I will say is for most people You know, if you if you haven't touched on privacy at all I appreciate the recommendation for my book.

That's definitely the place to start just to just to get your feet wet But I think a lot of people when they get into it, they do want to be the James Bond they want to be hardcore and your situation is a little bit different because you're You're going back and forth between countries a SIM card will really mess you up Especially if you're using a an app like I recommend my pseudo which is really tied into Where you are located.

So my pseudo is is a serious challenge Although signal and wire and some of these others even whatsapp, they will work just fine and especially Work very well if you're if you're in different countries But what you do have to decide and I think it's it's a lot more important to have good relationships to have good business opportunities Then to be very private and so some people talk about threat modeling where you sort of set your priorities who are you trying to be private from and I Personally tend not to do threat modeling I feel like people should just go as far as they can as far as they feel comfortable But when you do feel that you are losing out on opportunities because people can't reach you because you are postponing the Dental filling because you don't want to go in there and confront them about giving your social security number.

I'm not speaking from experience but you you can't you you have to make a determination at that point and what I what I will say is if you are in that boat just kind of experiments a little bit with it push it a little bit and then and then let it go and learn from that lesson and Maybe find an alternative do a little bit better the next time.

So let's begin with discussion on digital privacy Because well, obviously there are different levels I think most of us some of the simplest steps that we could take that can dramatically improve our Personal privacy is in the area of digital privacy. Let's say that I come to you and I'm concerned about About the internet.

It's not that I have anything going on I'm just someone who's saying well, I noticed that people are getting doxxed or I noticed that you know Something could happen and my information could be made public and that could be really concerning to me What are some of the basic steps that you think everyone should take with regard to digital privacy?

well You should definitely be concerned about Digital and internet privacy even if you're not a public figure Obviously if you are some kind of public figure you should be very concerned I give examples in the introduction to my book about how these days if you apply for a job They might do a background check on you.

They might check all of your social media There's one guy who posted on Twitter a 300 page document categorizing all of his social media posts by various Fouls basically and suffice to say this guy didn't get the job So there's an endless 300 page document was the hiring companies analysis of him, correct?

And there are entire companies that do these background checks. And of course, there's a new there's a new industry Called open source intelligence and they are looking for all kinds of your information that's out there on the internet Whether that's for marketing whether that's just to give to law enforcement.

There's all kinds of things that can go wrong So number one, there are a few things you can do and these are not very difficult First of all you advocate using a VPN Definitely pay for a VPN. There are a few good ones out there. You can check out proton VPN Express VPN is getting a little bit too big for its britches, but that's still very good You have more that you have a variety of these what you're really looking for is something that's paid and is therefore going to be reliable and Something that is not logging your information a VPN will basically Make sure that your internet service provider whether you're at home and that's Cox or Xfinity or you're at the Starbucks down the road, they will not see your browsing activity and Likewise, if you go to Google or you go to some website, they are not going to See a recognizable IP address so there they won't be able to build up a dossier on you.

So a VPN is Definitely the first thing that you should do number two, I would say definitely get into the private messaging Now you don't have to funnel everybody in your life into private messaging. One thing I do as I say Look close family. If you want to talk to me, this is where I'll be.

I'll be on signal. I will be on wire I will be on session. Maybe even whatsapp whatsapp have some have some problems with it, but it's better than nothing It's still end-to-end encrypted. So I people cannot see whatsapp Facebook cannot see the content of your Conversation and your text but definitely get on to private messengers These are by and large free though.

Of course, you want to donate to things like signal if you use them often So that's that's a big step. If you are messaging your girlfriend on Facebook, just tell her let's let's go to signal and and do that so VPNs private messaging, of course, I should have said this first which is to do more things offline and This is a difficult one most people when they want advice they want a list of okay What are all the services I should be using?

What should I be paying for? How can somebody else give me privacy? and that's kind of a contradiction of What privacy is entirely? So you want to do fewer things online if you want privacy have have fewer accounts go first of all Go through your accounts and see what you all have out there and then start to go in there and get rid of the ones That you don't need Tone down social media.

We'll get time. We'll get to that in a second I use a lot of I like to buy my books in print. I don't need Amazon seeing a list of how quickly I read on Kindle and What I'm interested in and what? Particular pages I focus on there's a lot of information they have on you So I just try to do more things in person buy more things in cash in person and to avoid Especially always online services.

I prefer free and open source software So I don't use instead of an office 365, which is Microsoft's product now Where they're monitoring every keystroke. I just download in a Libra office and Sure, it takes there's a few different things, but I'm perfectly fine using Libra office It's a piece of software that is free and open source I can see everything that's going into it and it does not it's not connected to the Internet at all times.

So just realize how much you are using the Internet and whether that's through your phone or Your entertainment or you just have all of these Even financial apps that are looking at what you're spending and and measuring I'm an advocate of going back to some of the physical Some of the physical methods and just doing a evaluation of Your Alliance on the Internet and cutting that down a little bit So I want to go back because I think if we're gonna approach this in a practical way, which is my intention probably the simplest place to start with privacy is publishing less I Think I don't want to gloss over what you said about social media It's astonishing the personal details that we share in a very public format And there are things that perhaps we know about hey, I'm on vacation right now for years That has been something that thoughtful police officers have warned people against don't post I'm on vacation.

Don't post your vacation photos Because someone can easily track down your house and target it I don't know that it happens that much but it certainly does happen and it's fairly easy for it to happen in a modern world especially if your social media posts are in your Your legal name if you have a legal name, that's John Smith and you know that you're on vacation and I can go to your town and if your profile says where you live and I can go to your County recorders I can find your address and I know there's a pretty good chance that that house is unoccupied If you're actively posting photos when you're on vacation So I think you can minimize output with regard to social media to your point posting on social media is is a Significant risk for most people because the post that seems innocuous to you May be the post that eventually undoes your whole career I think the best example that I like to point to this was is Justine Sacco many years ago She was the lady who was flying to Africa and she posted a poorly worded joke But she was just making a joke and it was intended to be a form of self-deprecating humor Where she was pointing out that she was privileged and yet the joke was badly Misinterpreted and when she was on an airline flight her entire life unraveled because of a post she made on Twitter and we see this again and again and again where somebody posts something and they word it poorly and yet it winds up backfiring on them and So one simple strategy is post less.

I Personally am NOT particularly skilled at the use of humor or sarcasm Especially in 240 characters or 280 characters And so I've tried to cut pull back from that because I don't do well in that format And I think that in a modern world of social media can actually be a competitive advantage for you to have fewer posts Do you think if you go for a job?

Do you think an employer is suspicious if you don't have a social media presence? So yes, yes, they might be suspicious But they will just have to live with that now if you do find that Your employers and you're trying to get a job are suspicious You might keep your Facebook account and your social media and just pare it down So let's go into my my number four point then which is to tone down social media.

Everything that you've said is is correct What you post on social media can cost you your job It can cost you I believe here's a statistic 31/3 of all divorce Hearings meant use the word Facebook in them. So there's all kinds of reasons why you might want to tone down the social media I'm not trying to ruin people's fun here.

But what if you had a social media account and it wasn't your name It was your initials. What if you did not make it publicly available? What if you made sure that you were not tagged in your posts? What if you didn't use geolocation so people didn't know exactly where you were?

what if you decided to Communicate with your followers or your friends outside of that social media on one of the private encrypted Messengers that we just discussed there are all kinds of ways to tone this down and Let's not forget that Facebook and a lot of these companies are using your images and they're using your text or AI and facial Recognition and all these kind of things that could be used later on in unsavory ways And of course we have all the stuff happening with kovat If you say X Y or Z that could absolutely There's all kinds of examples we could point to cost you your job cost you all kinds of things So tone down the social media I'm not I'm not saying to ruin your fun by doing that but there you can certainly do less You don't have to have your own photo on there.

Just have a fun photo of a cat or something It doesn't have to be your face. You can interact with the people you want to interact with and But and say the witty things that you want to say But in a more pared down and thoughtful way and if you need examples of what can happen to you social media Just go to Amazon look at the first introduction of my book, which you can see for free.

You'll get a list of many examples Tell us your favorite story. What's the one that usually is super surprising to people? Well, here's a here's a good example. So a guy I think he's a He was a he was a jeweler. I believe like a jeweler rapper kind of figure He was in Miami and he posts a photo of all of his bling spread out on his hotel bed well surprise surprise he goes out for the night and he comes back and his Room has been busted into and all of his stuff has been taken So of course thieves unsavory people saw that he posted it They knew he was in Miami because he said so so it was a matter of looking at the photos seeing where he might be calling around to a few hotels using a little bit of social engineering Discovering where he was and then breaking in there and and taking I think it was millions of dollars worth of his stuff so just one one small example of Of how you're not thinking about these things can come back to bite you pays to be thoughtful I think that my only comment is I I pared down my social media use when I got into privacy.

I actually deleted a couple of my accounts And I regretted Isn't I regretted some of the deletions? But that was largely because I make money from my social media and it provides a valuable Way for me to keep in contact with my listeners. And so I Reestablished after fully deleting several of my accounts.

I reestablished Several of my accounts and got them back because I realized that I needed them and I wanted them and I genuinely Appreciated them for their ability to influence my business And so my number one thing is if you're not making money with social media, then you should seriously consider just dumping it But I do understand kind of an in-between area it's hard to say that there is a It's hard to say that there is a positive Benefit for most people from social media the way that most people use it.

My observation is that more people are angry They feel the the data is pretty clear that people are angry They're upset about the arguments that invade their life on a daily basis. Many people are upset. They feel less worthy They lack self-confidence because they see other people's continual flow of peak moments and they don't understand that Those are just peak moments even if you know it intellectually It feels like everyone else is sitting on a beach with a cocktail in their hand having a great old time with all their good Looking friends and here I am poor little old me dumpy old me sitting at home alone lonely right now.

It's it's just not Overall productive unless you're using it to make money. One thing I've never regretted doing though is simply deleting past history On Twitter. This is the easiest I run tweet delete and I've been on Twitter since 2008 But I have it set up various times where just automatically deletes all tweets older than a month You can set it where it's older than six months older than a year.

I removed Over a decade worth of history from Facebook back when there was a Facebook tool that allowed me to do it fairly easily Facebook no longer allows that tool to work But they do offer more ability to archive things I've deleted a huge amount of history from all the other ones and that's always felt better because I Don't have any skeletons in my younger closet.

I didn't say I didn't post racist stuff online I didn't do anything particularly scandalous and whatnot But still what you realize is that the person that I was is not the person that I am and while for my own records It's nice to sometimes go back and say hey, who am I now?

And and what do I know now? I don't necessarily want to be judged by the person that I was back then So I think that even if you do have if you do have something that you're ashamed of in the past get rid of it Now before you're applying for something but even not I I just appreciate being able to be in the moment and not being so tied To my past.

Do you have any great tools for people who want to kind of simplify their previous life without actually deleting accounts all the way Yeah, I don't know that Particular tools for social media come to mind I'm a big proponent of just making your own list and doing things manually But tweet delete that sounds like a that sounds like a good tool I was going to say when you when you say that you don't have skeletons in the closet I think that people who ten years ago said that There were two sexes right might these days Come to regret that and it might even be illegal in certain countries to say that by hate speech laws so you never know the the way that the winds Will be going and so you are you are correct and and right to want to keep control of that But I do want to speak to a demographic of your audience who is probably budding entrepreneurs people who are starting up businesses and when they go to YouTube when they when they listen to the podcast, they're told that they need to Be on all platforms and they need to be engaged with their audience and they need to be on Facebook and Instagram and all these Places I'm not saying that's not true But in my experience and I think this is something that you've done as well Joshua is if you have a very good product and you put it on enough places You will you will get a following and I think that some entrepreneurs go a little bit too far They think that they have to be everywhere that they have to reveal every part of their life that they have to treat their audience buddy, buddy But I know I know people who have done well by by not advertising by not being on social media in that kind of pronounced way and so You know, if you put your podcast on Spotify and Apple, that's most people right there.

You put it on YouTube You put it you create a patreon account. You're probably doing pretty well. And if you have a good thing it it will get noticed and just a just some thoughts on the entrepreneurs out there who Are told that they need to be on social media.

Maybe that's not the case. Let's switch to financial privacy you talked briefly about Spending privacy, which I think is some of the simplest areas to ways to be private first make the case as to why somebody it's always easy to say I've got nothing to hide and we are without question fully agreed that Saying we've got nothing to hide and actually having nothing to hide Are two different things right the the quote we were talking earlier.

You said the quote Do you remember who to attribute it to? Cardinal Rishalu He says that give me six lines from the hand of the most honest of men and I will find something in them Which will hang him. Yeah, so Yeah, you're right that you don't know. Well, let's let's let's give one example There's a lot of Americans listening one in 20 of you are going to spend time in jail That's just how our justice system is in this country We incarcerate a lot of people or the United States incarcerates a lot of people and so you have your Christmas gathering here And you have 20 of your family in there one of them is going to or has spent time in jail and so the way it works is you might go to a jury and Maybe if the attorney and the judge are a little bit tech savvy they might for example want to subpoena your your Amazon Shopping list.

I think that would be something that I would push for because your Amazon shopping list tells a lot about you Let's say that they go to the Amazon shop list and they see that you're into Hardcore privacy or that you bought a Glock holster or X Y & Z now imagine how an attorney could spin that in a particular way So that an emotional jury could change their verdict based on what they find just one example about how?

Being more careful in this case. You have an Amazon account There there ways we can we can talk about to to hide your Amazon purchases Of course The best way is simply to buy more things in person Especially sensitive things buy things in person with cash as opposed to buying them online But just one small example of how it can cost you and always practice kovat safety when you're doing that, right?

Oh extra extra large mass for extra social responsibility Exactly. Exactly. So, how do you let's go let's talk about spending money privately. So the simplest way is You pull out physical currency you go to a place that has what you want. You make sure to wear your kovat mask for good protection of your fellow shoppers, and of course it has a side benefit of providing a little bit more privacy from all the cameras and You simply buy it that's obvious.

But what if it's not that simple? What if there's something that's only available on Amazon? What if it's a digital product? How do you protect your privacy and buy things privately? Yeah, let me let me speak to cash really quickly. What what you said is true, and I think people Intellectually understand that but they don't go about doing that so if you believe in privacy and you don't want to live in a world where there are central bank digital currencies and the Federal Reserve is dictating what you can and can't purchase or where visa recently is setting limits on the carbon emissions of particular Purchase or they're talking about this about the particular purchase you buy Then you are a big proponent of cash and you want a cash culture and you want to fight against the war on cash So I would advocate anybody who's listening who believes in this stuff Seriously, stop the credit cards as much as you can take out cash Go to a bank that lets you that has a that has a high limit of taking out cash Stockpile some cash be careful how you How much you take with you where you put it hide it I have some suggestions for that in my book and then use it use more cash, please for For the good of your fellow man good of your fellow man, please use more cash now, obviously some things you have to buy online And I have some maybe more controversial chapters sections in my book about how to acquire things for free online We can talk about that only if you want to Joshua You can acquire all kinds of things for free online and make it up to the company in in various ways But for that thing on Amazon or wherever that you want to buy, of course Americans have privacy.com Which is one option now privacy.com Very popular.

It's highly recommended The basically here's how this works. You set up an account with privacy.com I'm sure the audience actually now that I think about it knows because Josh you talked about this you set up the account you attach Your bank account. Alright, so there's no privacy that privacy.com knows what's going on here But the merchants in this case does not know So if you want to buy the poop hurry online and have it shipped to your house or not to your house In this case, you can use a privacy.com debit card, which you can create on the fly You can put whatever name you want You can put whatever address and billing address you want and it will it should go through So that's kind of how privacy.com works It allows you to hide your personal information from the merchants from the merchants and as well as from your bank because it will just say Transaction from privacy.com.

That's one small way and an easy way and this is a free service because privacy.com makes their money as part of the as part of the Card fees so it's actually a free service So privacy.com is a way use as many gift cards as you can you can buy gift cards in cash this is a great way to Get all kinds of stuff online whether that's eBay eBay has gift cards or Amazon and That's a that's also a great way Of course if you really want your privacy then you're going to have to create a new Amazon account to use this gift card That is not attached to some of your personal information Let me just throw out kind of extreme scenario here of how to buy something privately on Amazon You would go to a public Wi-Fi spot.

Let's say a Starbucks create a new Amazon account Put a small gift card onto it. Not a big one a small one Test that out with a very small purchase send that to a delivery place like a Whole Foods And this is how you train your account Amazon's becoming a little bit more Cracked down about how they how they view these kind of transactions So you'll have trained your account at that point if you wanted to you could just use Amazon gift cards purchase things and have them sent to a Whole Foods you arrive at the Whole Foods.

I Like a little sticky note. I approach from the side I cover the camera at the Whole Foods drop-off and I pick up my stuff and I'm on my way So just a couple examples we can pivot whichever direction you want. I know that was going a little bit extreme for a second there well, it's it's an interesting thing because I've I've tested and done some of this stuff and I Consider myself a privacy enthusiast, but these are some of the things that I have discovered are a Step too far for me based upon the benefits for my life.

So I've I've done this But I have discovered from several years of living without Amazon. I've discovered that Amazon is a major quality of life Improvement for me. In fact when my wife and I were talking about moving back to the United States We're talking about the benefits of why we would want to move back to the United States on the top three list was Amazon Because you it's such an amazing, you know Same day next day two days here comes the product as any product in the world shows up to my door.

It's high quality I can see the reviews. It's just fabulous and for me and my family went three years and really didn't buy Well, excuse me We bought very little on Amazon because we were traveling who didn't want to wait for the boxes, etc And but what we would do is it was such a big deal that whenever we came to the United States We'd wind up with thousand fifteen hundred dollar Amazon orders to pick up and go home with bulging suitcases so what I wonder here is for the people who are so there's the hardcore guys like you who will go all the way and I believe that's the ideal but in this case maybe a good way to do it is First to say to someone think do it at least a couple of times because here's what I'm trying to articulate I have pulled back on privacy, but I'm glad that I have tested the things that I've done And so knowing how to do it if you need to do it is I think better than not knowing how to do it and never Having done it.

So maybe for the in-between people you might maintain most of your Amazon stuff But it's fairly innocuous the fact that you order a certain brand of diapers for your child and that's on subscribe and save But practice setting up something and practice ordering things not Not anything that you're actually concerned about So that you have the skills of knowing how to do it in case the time comes when you might want to buy Something else for example I think for me the biggest thing that would be concerning if it were exposed for me personally as my library Because I read a huge amount and you could take any number of dozens and dozens of books in my library And you put those on a big screen with a lawyer and I'd be shocked I'd be scared stiff of what he could say about Joshua But anybody who knows Joshua knows that this is just Joshua So I refuse to buy books on Amazon for this reason, but I don't mind buying a lot of other stuff So maybe there's a balance that someone could integrate.

Yeah, and I think of Somebody who may be the listeners are aware of Doug Casey. He recently Published a novel called assassin where he where he defends that practice. So of course if you have that on well That was after drug lord. That was after the what was the first one in the series?

Speculating. Yes So yes, there's you're correct about this. So how about this? I did advocate a very hardcore strategy if you get a privacy.com account and You I have I have plenty of Amazon accounts. They use privacy.com card fairly simple Don't use my real name. Okay, great And you could send them either to a UPS box or to an Amazon drop-off location in that scenario What does Amazon know about you?

They don't know your name. They don't know your address They don't really know anything about you. And so a subpoena could draw these things together But Amazon in that case doesn't know anything about you. So that's a less hardcore way of going about it Start start small, but I agree it can be important to and fun sometimes to push this all the way But some of this stuff just you have to sit down think about okay.

What does this company know about me? What do I not want them to know and how can I get around that? Sometimes the solutions are fairly straightforward if you know some of the right tools privacy.com for instance All right. We talked about spending money What about Making money. What are the suggestions or thoughts you have about privately generating money?

Yeah, this is a this is a topic of course that this show is all about Of course if you are self-employed then you are doing privacy correctly. We were talking about Being employed earlier in this episode and if you're getting a job these days, of course, you have to give your information to that company You will have to Give your social security number in the United States at the point of employment I wouldn't give it before then you might have to be part of that company's LinkedIn page You might have to give them your photo.

You might have to post on your personal account various things you might have to use that company's equipment, which is by the way, be careful about mixing the the personal in the business always have your business device separate if that were the case But there's all kinds of exposing thing if you are exposing things if you are an employee if you are self-employed Of course, you don't have to give out that information You do business and you have a bank account in a name of your creation and that LLC or that business?

Should be a fairly innocuous name that does not tie Tie things to you. And so when you have that you have the vehicle to acquire money privately now, how can you do that? Well, I would suggest going back and listening to all the episodes that Joshua talks about in my experience.

I'll just kind of boil it boil it down You obviously have something to offer the world because you do that right now as a job You probably also have some kind of hobby that people would be interested in knowing so find a way to offer that service or offer that perspective in a very compelling way and starts to approach people get clients get some kind of a web presence and If you have the right work ethic And you follow some of the basic advice about there out there about how to be an entrepreneur You can have more clients and not be as vulnerable to the single client Who is your boss when you are employed?

I think that that's a key idea I mean there's there are diminishing returns on business privacy and privately generating income There are some people for whom their ability to to generate income privately is literally a matter of life and death It's protecting them from from people who are tracking them down but for most of us it's not that big of a deal, but when you combine the lifestyle benefits and you combine the when you combine the lifestyle benefits you combine some of the Career benefits when you combine some of the security that can be had and then you add privacy on top of it it can be a compelling factor for many people to be able to generate money privately and It's I Thing I'm most passionate about is just simply helping people support their families There are a lot of people who if they couldn't generate income privately, especially through self-employment They're their children wouldn't eat because they don't have the right papers.

They don't have the right permissions They're not the don't have the right, you know working documents and so the ability to generate money privately is a big big deal to a man's ability to feed himself and feed his children and It's important for all of us to maintain that and to help encourage the ability that people have to generate income privately yes for sure, I'll just talk a little bit for a second about the mechanics because I left that out, let's say for example you have a Service that you want to offer somebody you're a plumber and you quit your company and you want to be your own plumber I don't know all the qualifications and certifications and all the rest so maybe that's not a good example, but what you can do is create a Bitcoin wallet for example with Electrum and you can give out one of the addresses To your clients and they can pay you in Bitcoin.

You don't have to have a bank account in that case There could be various reporting requirements, etc If you wanted to be in full compliance of the IRS, etc But that's a very simple thing you can do in a matter of minutes to be able to Get money in the form of Bitcoin from a service that you offer.

So things are getting increasingly easy for people to get money All right, you have crossed you have just crossed the magic barrier that I was going next is into Bitcoin and I want to spend a good amount of time here because I think this is some of the most important area for us To focus on as far as the opportunities that are available to us and then actually practically how to do it I'm deeply invested in this because as I see it the biggest impediments right now to privacy in the financial space are Banks and various financial institutions who?

Number one our data hogs like they love to suck up your data in order for there to be Giant repositories of information for more effective marketing and while I respect the hustle, I don't want to be in it Number two is the fact that they're all spies All right, any person any person who is affiliated with the financial institution any financial advisor any banker?

They're all spies. I used to be one too all unpaid spies for the federal government and That there's just this culture of a lack of privacy. Although there are Properly enforced consumer financial laws I could make some arguments as to why bank secrecy in the United States is actually pretty good And I think those are fair arguments.

It is a big is a big deal And and when you get into the world of banking, it's as I as I concern it as I see it It's one of the biggest issues that we face right now where your individual transactions are compiled organized collated for marketing purposes across various credit cards, etc And what's more important is that your transactions themselves are being scrutinized?

By institutions who have no idea what's happening If you make a transaction with the wrong person you buy the wrong thing you wind up on a blacklist It's a major major concern so I'd like to take a few moments before we get into Bitcoin and Just ask you like how do you see the financial space?

Tell some some stories or share some of the the depth of the the market data That's being collected and compiled based upon the simple act of opening a bank account or swiping a credit card Yeah, sure So I think most people are have a sense of what's going on in banking of course post 9/11 in places like the US and consequently in other places, especially the 14 eyes countries who are it's basically a spy surveillance network of various countries and you have You have the five eyes nations, Australia, Canada, New Zealand UK and the United States and they're sharing a lot of this information and so Yes, there is all kinds of information being gathered by Banks and financial institutions.

We just saw recently in the last month in the last few months and you've talked about this Josh the bar being suggested to be lowered for Transactions reported to the IRS. I can't recall did that did that what was the Conclusion to that pass didn't pass didn't pass but you can see it is certainly in the zeitgeist and so Here's the facts Anytime well, first of all, you have your money in a bank and I like to talk about self-sufficiency and as well as privacy You have your money in the bank and the bank essentially is the owner of that money.

I don't like that That's why I like to hold as much cash in person as I can and when I hold more cash in person that not only gives me ownership, but it also gives me privacy because I am NOT sending that cash out to That money out to various people and places now Let's talk about some of the information being gathered on you.

Of course if you're using a visa card Chase visa card whoever the company is They're collecting all kinds of marketing data people love to use their credit cards because they think that They're getting 5% back or whatever I think some of the studies show that people's depend on average 10% more when they use a credit card So I don't think in the end that you're winning in that In one of the greatest marketing campaigns in human history the the credit card and they're of course gathering all this all this information and Chase knows that you bought that gun at that store last week and this information is a Record of your life your interests where you were who you were with and In the same way we talked about the jury earlier on Chase can see your purchases on Amazon and everything and all of your other purchases So it is not a system that I want to be a part of I use more cash and you can use cryptocurrency Which is I think the direction that we're going.

All right, so let's talk about cryptocurrency Bitcoin is totally secret right once what I spend out of my Bitcoin wallet is totally secret, right? Absolutely, Josh. So if if you were to send me some Bitcoin I could click on your wallet to see how Wealthy you are in terms of Bitcoin see Who else and everybody you have ever paid?

Possibly where you were when you paid them if I was a little bit more savvy And of course the IRS can tell that and more and all of these open-source intelligence gatherers Can also see a whole lot more so Bitcoin the idea of Bitcoin is that there's no central authority which means that everybody is the authority and The way that works is you have a public ledger, right the blockchain and this documents Every transaction that occurs so that the entire Bitcoin community is verifying the transaction.

They are the authority So we don't have a central authority. Okay, fantastic. Great But that also means that you can go back and analyze and study and see all of the connections How much Bitcoin is in each wallet all this kind of information? It's not Private in that sense, but you can make it private if when somebody traces it back it comes back to nothing So that obviously I'm joking But I think that it's often misunderstood that people think that well because people have used Bitcoin to buy drugs and it's all private It's actually far more public in terms of the transaction data.

It's far more public than anything else It's far more public than a credit card transaction is in terms of publicness But that doesn't mean that there aren't ways to to use it privately So let's say that I did want to interact more with Bitcoin because I find it Doesn't matter why let's say that I wanted to transact more with Bitcoin what are some of the ways to Acquire and use Bitcoin in a more private way to support the growth of the Bitcoin Environment for whatever reason is important to you That is really the correct question and one that almost nobody Asks when I get into Bitcoin most people they're told to get into Bitcoin I think for the wrong reasons because they're told that it's going up and it will never go down and that's probably not the right reason And so people typically say well, yeah get a coinbase account or something like that well, the idea of Bitcoin is that there's no central authority that you own your thing and By going to a place like coinbase now coinbase owns your Bitcoin and they've reported all of that To the IRS and anybody else who comes with the proper government Documentation and you've seen recently in Congress in the United States.

These crypto companies are bending over backward to be regulated they would love to be regulated because they're making a lot of money and they do not believe in what I see as the essence of Bitcoin, which is to be a Currency that is outside of any government structure. Of course, that is an existential threat.

So To have private Bitcoin Okay, and we've already explained how the transactions Cannot be private, but if people trace that back and they can't find a name, they can't find a coinbase account They can't find any information. That's a good start. So, how can you do that? Well One simple way is to visit a Bitcoin ATM.

There's a great website coin ATM radar calm coin ATM radar calm you can also try Google Maps and Find a Bitcoin near you unfortunately most of these or fortunately for the American audience most of these are in the United States But these are growing by the day now a Bitcoin ATM is a repository It looks like a regular ATM you walk up you approach from the side and cover the screen cover the camera because why not?

and You go through the go through the prompts on the screen and hopefully it will let you insert your cash and Get Bitcoin to your wallet now in order to do that. Let's let's take a couple steps back so you'll want to have a Bitcoin wallet That is not Online only that's not really online except to interact with the blockchain The one that I recommend a lot of people recommend is Electrum.

This is an easy wallet You can download it right now in a few seconds Electrum You download Electrum you go through the process of setting up the account make sure to note your seed phrase The seed phrase is the identity of your Bitcoin. Don't lose that Write that down somewhere put it in the safe And at that point you have your Electrum wallet and you can receive and send Bitcoin with it now When the Bitcoin ATM asks for your address you would give it that address Hopefully it's accepted your cash without you giving any information and then you it will process that transaction in about 30 minutes Now Bitcoin ATMs have some problems a lot of them have Know your customer KYC things that you have to do It will want you to scan your driver's license, obviously, I don't advocate Doing that it might want various information from you if it asks for a name Give it a name if it asks for a phone number.

There's a great website that I use sometimes It's called free phone num and you am free phone num calm and you can make use of a few different numbers that typically can Receive SMS text messages. And so if you were to go to the ATM and you have your phone out you go to the website free phone num calm then you can use one of those phone numbers and Hopefully if you give them a phone number and a name you can be on your way and get your Bitcoin from the ATM.

I know I'm kind of going on and on there are a lot of variables here It's really not easy to get Bitcoin Privately the ATM is is simply one method and of course the ATM is going to charge you 10 15 percent For for your for your troubles a few of the other ways to get Bitcoin privately I'll just kind of cover them and you can tell me if you want to Go into more detail, of course, if you are part of some kind of community you can go to a conference You can buy Bitcoin in cash.

You can see if your store Excuse me. You can you could try to sell something for Bitcoin a lot of it is simply some of this hustle that you've talked about of finding somebody who has Bitcoin and Offering them something for it. There. There are some other ways to get Bitcoin privately, but those are Quote-unquote the easiest ways if you don't want to be part of the the coinbase centralized KYC Bitcoin route which in my opinion cuts against the a lot of the purpose of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies Why do you think people?

Well first I guess I could ask this question. I'm pretty sure I know the answer Do you think people should have the right to financial privacy in their affairs Assuming that you do think that why do you think that should be the case philosophically? Why should you have any right to privacy with regard to your money?

After all, the only reason you would want to do it is because you're a tax cheap, right? well That is what people would say and they would have entirely Missed the point. The point is there are a few things that are immoral in life. I would consider stealing from somebody to be absolutely Immoral hurting somebody would be immoral if you're not doing one of these very basic things Then you are not doing anything wrong.

The government may disagree Voltaire once said that it's it's dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. That will remain to be the case but financial privacy you Are not directly harming somebody Whatever you're doing with your money, and so I see no justification whatsoever for banning of transactions, of course we can talk about Where we can talk about the banning the criminalization the Justice system as it pertains to harming people physically and such but money itself is a Neutral thing just like the air we breathe just like weapons just like any kind of thing It's not a it's not an easy an easy Question to answer and I think that unfortunately well in some ways it is an easy question to answer You don't really need I don't need to justify anything that I want to do As long as I'm not harming another person All right, I can do pretty much anything I want to do as long as I'm not harming another person But I think to me one of the reasons why I'm quite passionate about helping people enhance privacy of Communications privacy over your life activities privacy over your financial transactions, etc Is because I see it as one of the best things that you can do to minimize the worst-case outcomes There's not a single point in history that you can point to where giving a government agent more data ever did anything good Even in the short term when you say oh, it doesn't look good.

You go back and you look at it And you find that the biggest I guess it It's a massive risk to have a repository of data I think about it kind of like this Do you remember the the explosion that happened in Lebanon a couple years ago, right? You have this giant Concentration of explosive material You are a fool if you ever put massive amounts of explosive material in one central warehouse You're a fool now.

There may be reasons and times at which you amass certain amounts of explosive material You might be getting ready for a firework show. You might be ready ready to bomb somebody, right? There are maybe reasons and times but in terms of a general practice You don't put large amounts of explosive material in a central depository And it doesn't matter whether the guards of that central depository are totally honest and totally good-hearted Let's assume that they are when you put the material in one place You put all the financial data you put all of the current all of the contact data, etc You put all the explosive stuff in one place You create an incredible target for someone else to try to attack you create the target by making it a rich target And so maybe everyone who's guarding the warehouse is perfectly honest and perfectly right and perfectly moral It's still dumb to put the repository all the information there on the other hand What do you do when you get more and more material in one place?

Will you raise the stakes you raise the temptation for somebody to use that data? And so whether it's in this case a government agent or a non-government agent doing it You have to protect the data and the only way again, the only way to protect it is through putting barriers and Watertight doors through segmenting the data out properly in in diverse Institutions and so this is the one of the basic problems that we face in the modern world is that because of the digital Connectedness if we were to go back a hundred years where you were working with a bank and you had all of your records With a local banking institution didn't matter right?

So what the local bank knows something of my institutions. It's not that big of a deal Yes, somebody could go and they could rob that bank and they could possibly get that data. Okay, that's fine They might get a hundred people's data or a thousand people's data, but they're not gonna get millions of people's of data But today if a hacker goes in and accesses the Bank of America Databases that hacker gets the data for four hundred four millions of people and then you get some goofy email from Bank of America Oh dear customer.

We're so sorry that your data has been exposed in a data breach We're taking actions to quickly fix this problem in here We're gonna offer you 12 months of free credit monitoring from blah blah blah blah blah And so you're creating the temptation and it's vastly worse when you're creating the temptation for people who have the power And authority to put you in prison for people who have the power and authority to take your stuff, etc.

And so it's philosophically stupid to support the centralization of data because even the most honest and moral and upright of Men can be corrupted by when the temptation is too big And so to me that's my reason is that we live in a world where there's massive risk And I don't particularly care for anybody to have access to your data about what?

About your life your communications because it simply creates too many opportunities for trouble So, I mean that's not the most eloquently stated of arguments But to me, I don't want a bunch of explosive material in one place if explosive material has to be created I want it to be separated it out And since I don't see anybody on the public space who's who?

Everyone around just wants to put more and more explosives in a giant warehouse in the center of town I think that's unsafe. And so I just keep trying to move a little bit farther out of town Well, that's that's well said Joshua. That's a that's a typical Joshua sheets analogy there which I which I always appreciate and You're right a lot of people we like to talk about monopolies Amazon this and that the only monopoly in your life is Government because government is the only institution Which you have knows you have no say in the matter when I didn't want to use Facebook I stopped when I didn't want to use Google I changed when I didn't want to use Amazon That's a little bit more difficult, but I can go elsewhere.

That is not the case with government if you Continue to go around believing that Santa Claus is real or that government is there to help people I would encourage you to listen to one of my episodes called privacy and psychopaths I think that right there might in itself change your mind about whether government is there for you or Whether it's there for its own interest as all organisms in the world are and so you're right what you've touched on is the fact that privacy and decentralization are sister terms and If you want to have privacy in your life and privacy ultimately is protection against any of the many threats out there Then you are going to aim for more decentralization in your life when one broker is planning things out when one broker has all of the authority all of the information then you don't have that and When they get exposed and they will get exposed they always get exposed They there are always breaches breaches every day Coinbase and all these places are hacked all the time I deal with clients just in the last few weeks Their their money's gone from their bank accounts.

Their crypto is gone from their Coinbase accounts You have trusted to a central authority. You've given them the keys. You don't have the keys yourself you have not Made sure to possess your own finances your own information on your own local computer or in your own house and you are at risk of Every you are at risk of all the things that follow from centralization.

I would add to those companies Lest we be accused of beating too hard on government was it five eight years ago when the Department of Defense database was breached and basically anybody who had ever had any kind of clearance or relationship with the Department of Defense their information was released and For crying out loud right now I mean hold on Gabriel.

I'm sure you're shocked Do you recognize that they haven't yet found the whistleblower at the IRS? Who mailed the private data of hundreds of the wealthiest Americans to the newspaper? Articles, can you can you believe they haven't yet come to the bottom of this yet? It should be America's most wanted somehow It's not somehow it's not because it's politically convenient and even if my guys are in control today I know that my guys will be out of control tomorrow and I don't trust any of the guys and so I've got to put Some some things in place.

I want to go back to the Bitcoin question Okay, because here is the catch-22 first question. Is it possible to? acquire store and transact Bitcoin without a cell phone Yes Yes, you can do that it becomes a Little bit more tricky, of course to transact in Bitcoin you either need the address which is a long numerical alphabetical address that you would give to somebody or type in or it is often abbreviated most people use a QR code.

Okay, and so you could for example Remember your code or write it down Take a photo of your QR codes And okay and carry around carry them around with you on paper. Of course, you could do that Is there a kind of intermediary? step where You're not because in this scenario You would have to go back to your computer and look at your account and all this kind of stuff Is there a kind of intermediary way?

That's a good question, I'll have to get back to you The reason well the reason I I lift it up because because in my opinion one of the hardest things to do for most people In the privacy space is to have a private cell phone It's not that it's not possible right in your book you lay out some of the solutions.

It's totally possible It's just very difficult and I see that the set in my opinion The cell phone is what is the biggest privacy breach that most of us have right? We carry around a personal location device to page basically everywhere we go virtually all of our most important information is is stored on or Accessed through that device and yet that device is not particularly secure and when we add on to it Using it for Bitcoin, then it becomes more more difficult.

There are a couple of devices on the market I've been meaning to get and look into as far as some of the the hardware the device wallets that are trying to solve this But I think it's an interesting area of interesting area focus for us. Yeah, that's an important question.

I can I mention the That's an important question. And I'm performing all the research to have the Have the extreme worst-case scenario. Let's say you're you're you're fleeing a country and you can't bring your phone and we might have more to say about that and in a crypto course that that we're working on and so It's a good question.

It's a good question because you obviously The phone we haven't even talked about phones yet phones are not your friend and privacy surprise and you don't want to be walking around with an extra phone or An iPod touch or something like this an iPod touch doesn't have all of the the various GPS Chips and such in it like a like a phone does you don't want to be?

encumbered with all that stuff and you still want to use your Bitcoin, of course, the easiest way is to go around with your laptop and Pull up your Electrum wallets not always convenient hopefully There are people coming up with some intermediary options and I'll have some more to say about that soon Yeah, I want to add one more comment Because there is a good segment of the audience that agrees with you are in my position There's also a good segment of the audience that doesn't see the point I want to add one more point and this is why I'm so Enthusiastic about trying to be involved and help to see these areas grow You and I can easily afford to have bank accounts you and I can eat our wells You and I are well served by the financial industry.

We have phones. We have computers. We have bank accounts We get low-cost banking low-cost investment low-cost transactions Yeah strike charges me a good amount of money But it's not that much in the grand scheme of things given the the convenience of it PayPal. It's useful, etc But there is a massive massive percentage of the world that does not have access to these services And what my hope is that we can use the exciting prospects of Bitcoin The growth I used to see is a major problem.

I don't see it as a major problem anymore. I see it as something that Requires consideration the devices etc Just using it will help to bring the services that we take for granted to an increasing segment of the world Population and that is going to help us create an exceedingly exciting future when more and more of the smartest people in the world that are currently Blocked locked out because they don't have the right passport.

They don't have the right government ID number. They don't have the right Ability to get with a certain merchant processor as those people come into the global economy it's just gonna turbocharge the current great growth that we enjoy and and Bitcoin is a major component of that going forward as I see it, but unfortunately Josh, there's no accountability with Bitcoin So what you're looking for is a one world government digital currency Hopefully we'll get maybe the Chinese version will be the one that will bail us out lovely Anything we've missed anything that you think we should cover looking through the table of contents here for the book We could talk about Phones for a moment if you'd like.

Yeah, let's do that because that's very practical so you just you just had a good summary of a phone it is a Device that has a camera pointing at you and at others. It has a built-in microphone It has multiple chips that are used to pinpoint your location when the phone is working within a few meters wherever you are in the world bouncing off of the satellites and cell towers This is very juicy information it by default uses something called SMS text messages, which are free floating in the air Which are easily captured with the right equipment, for example by police during protests.

They have devices called stingrays They can read all of that all those SMS text messages being sent your phone calls Can be certainly documented especially the metadata Okay, and your phone as well has a operating system that is designed to integrate all of these things and make life more convenient so it's not your friend in privacy and What we will say with phones what I'll say with phones is first Learn to do more with a real computer as opposed to a phone I don't use my phone for almost anything.

I use my phone as it's meant to be used as a communication tool when I'm away from home and Particularly using private encrypted end-to-end encrypted zero knowledge Messengers we've mentioned signal wire whatsapp doesn't have all those characteristics, but it's better than nothing And so that is what your phone is meant to do.

It's not meant to be your bank account it's not meant to Well, let's put it like this let's let let's go back to some of the facts the Facebook app was found in a Wall Street Journal study to be communicating and getting information from Various other apps that were around in this case menstruation calendar apps Weather apps all kinds of stuff.

This is information that's being gathered and attached to your Facebook profile I'm not very comfortable with that kind of stuff being shared, but that's just how phones work They're highly incestuous They are designed to do this now. It's quite simple if you commit to it to do these things on your computer More of these things on your computer get a good laptop.

Not a Chromebook get a good real laptop You can get a cheap one I like cheap a sir laptops for example a couple hundred dollars or a few hundred dollars and you're on your way You can instead of going to the Bank of America app. Just go to the website When you want to check the weather, you don't need an app for that just go to a browser and type in the The weather weather comm or whatever you're searching for there So there are first of all you want to do more things away from your phone and on your computer As you can.

All right. I've lost my train of thought. What what should we be talking about as regards phones? I think the first thing would be which which service provider right? You basically have two options Apple versus Android so I think you need to begin there, right? Okay, so We might let me let me try to do this without getting into the weeds so First of all, how do you have a private phone a private phone is a phone first of all that has been purchased Without a connection to your name.

So that would be cash in this case It would be a phone that has service That is not in your name. So you could buy a prepaid SIM card and Re-up it with gift cards or any other way. This is not too difficult To do this kind of thing.

So you will have purchased it privately You'll have purchased these service privately and I realize that you can't do that in all countries. I think Nigeria South Korea If you get a phone SIM card, this is highly tied to your national identity It's difficult to get around that now if you're using private messengers on your phone You can connect to Wi-Fi and use that and communicate just like normal Of course The benefit of phone is you have that satellite signal the data signal so that you can use the device When you're not near Wi-Fi, I understand them.

That's the goal But in order to have the private phone you want to acquire the SIM card In cash gift cards, whatever the case may be So that's not tied to your name now you start up the phone. Is that an Android or an Apple? I don't really care.

I don't I don't differentiate a whole lot between those two because what I'm looking for is a phone That's going to do the basic stuff for me and it's not going to be doing all this other stuff If you are downloading a hundred apps, then you don't care about privacy But in that case you could go with Apple because Apple is a little bit better out of the box When you create an Apple ID There's a process that you'll get to There's a process that you'll go through you don't want to give you a real name You want to have an email address perhaps a proton mail email address that is New and dedicated just to this don't obviously don't reveal Information about yourself.

You'll have to give a phone number for that Apple account. You'll just have to give your Phone number attached to the SIM card. They probably already know that information anyway And so at that point you will have an Apple device or an Android device Purchased not in your name SIM card not in your name And you will then have to take your prudence your privacy prudence and apply that to what apps you download or don't download The information that you give it be careful about permissions things of this nature.

You can use your VPN on a phone That's always wise we have things like Faraday bags which block out all signals if you don't want your phone to be pinpointing your location Where you are, you can slip it in the sleeve. You obviously can't use it. And so that's why That's why I kind of conclude in my chapter on phone privacy.

It's it's It's almost impossible to have a phone privacy because if the phone is working it's pinpointing It's identifying you by your location by definition And so there's one way around that which we can talk about if you want. That's the my pseudo iPod touch version we could also talk about Graphene OS which is a custom software that you would have to install on your phone.

These are these are more complicated things but in For them the primer version I would say Simply start using your phone less stop attaching as much information to it as you can And just kind of be more aware of what you're doing on your phone. Are you willing to say are you using?

Do you continue to use the iPod? Trick or using the graph a graphing phone at this point What are you willing to say? Feel free to say no Privacy expert. What are you doing? Well, I'm using and testing out both and The the thing about graphene OS graphene OS as I said is a custom software you download on your computer.

It strips out it strips out a lot of the Android functionality that was previously being reported to Google now when you're using the graphene OS It's still pinpointing your location with its data trail But it's not doing a whole lot else So if you've acquired that phone and SIM card privately that will do you fairly well now the other option is which you reference Joshua is the Apple iPod touch approach now.

This is a little bit complicated. Let me just try to boil it down. So you have an Apple iPhone and You have an iPod touch Okay, the iPod touch is the thing and I don't take credit for this by the way This is something that Michael Bozell and and others have have worked out but the iPod touch is for at home Okay, the iPod touch stays at home your iPad your iPhone is what you take on you with journeys on your on journeys when you're outside of the house so when you start to approach your home you slip your iPhone into a Faraday bag and that does not get used anymore.

You get home you use your you use your iPod touch which is not calling out to Geolocation at all and it doesn't have some other things that are Anyway, it is not calling out your geolocation and you can connect these two devices to Use the same apps that you would use on your iPhone.

And so for example, here's the here's the main point There is a program called my pseudo Joshua has mentioned it before doesn't always work in countries outside of the US especially but My pseudo allows you to have Up to nine phone numbers Which are not sent through your typical phone wires It is through a data connection.

You have nine phone numbers legitimate phone numbers and you can make your calls You can do your SMS Messaging you can do your code verification through these numbers And so that might be something you're interested in I realize I'm getting to the weeds again with this one. Let me just for the let me give the non Well sort of the non-technical reason as to why that that works so if we understand what a phone is and what it is doing you can see that it has a number of major vulnerabilities for those who care about privacy and The number one vulnerability that a phone has a cell phone a normal cell phone is it has a radio chip that radio chip in it is communicating with local cell phone towers and it's establishing a constant Connection through the local cell phone towers if your phone can reach a tower.

It's reporting its position It's reporting its position through triangulation for the towers and they could tell exactly where it is So now you go back and let's use an event like say if you were in Washington DC on January 6 for a protest and You had your cell phone on you or if you were in downtown Insert City here for a protest and you had your cell phone on you If that cell phone is on you and it is powered on it is Communicating with a tower and it is creating a real-time record of your location This is for the most part for most of us doesn't matter right not going anywhere a place I shouldn't be right to go and protest as a First Amendment, right?

There's no reason why I can't assemble on the streets of my local town. There's no problem with it But what happens is oftentimes there are events and then frequently in this case is law enforcement law enforcement will go and they will Solicit the request the subpoena the records from all the local cell phone providers and say tell us all of the phones that were In this certain place at this certain time and then continue their investigations and sometimes a protest that you went to that you thought was just a good ordinary protest for you to say say your mind downtown Kenosha, Wisconsin or You know downtown Washington DC, etc Can or just a local gathering of some kind?

Call of a sudden loops you into some stuff that you really didn't want to be involved with and can wreck your life so the first vulnerability in a cell phone is the radio chip if a cell phone is powered on and if it has contact with a Tower it's creating a real-time record of your location Tower it's creating a real-time location now in some cases even if the phone is powered off if it's within contact with the tower It's creating a real-time connection I noticed with the most recent update from Apple on my iPhone that I had that it said We know that find my iPhone is going to work Even if your phone is powered off and we in the privacy community, they've been saying for a very long time Oh look, even if your phone is off It can still be accessed remotely and people weren't really sure well There was right on the screen of my iPhone last week saying find my iPhone is still gonna work even if your phone is powered off kind of a confirmation of that the second problem is that your phone has in it a GPS chip and so that GPS chip is also Absorbing and consuming data third problem is there's a wireless card And so it's keeping a record of all the Wi-Fi networks nearby the Bluetooth networks, etc And this is why even if you don't give Facebook author is your Facebook app on your phone Even if you don't authorize it to have access to your location It still knows exactly where you are.

Even if it's not using your exact GPS chip It's using the information from all of those networks that are around This is why if you go into a foreign country and you want to navigate with your GPS even if you have your phone an airplane mode with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the phone can still figure out where it is because it has a GPS chip and it's accessing the local networks and Having an idea of where it is So now when you add to these sensors that it give real-time Geolocation data you add the other things that are in a phone you add the cameras and you add the microphone you get a very significant vulnerability now most of us are not being hunted by some by the US Marshals or by the NSA or by the Russian blah blah blah or the Chinese government most of us are not but some of us are right some of us have positions of power some of us have position where leaders and companies and there are people who are paying our competitors to to Going online and contacting a hacker and saying hey, I'd like you to study out the competitor who's leading the local You know fortune 500 company or who's in the the c-suite level I want to not find out where he is and this data is generally publicly available So if you're creating the data, although it's been denied many times There's ample evidence that the big cell phone companies were sharing this data and this data was available for purchase And so again think here again Most of us are not coming to the attention of law enforcement a lot of the time You simply might have a competitor or somebody who's trying to get inside industry information.

So how do you get out of all this? Well, first way is you can just say I'm not gonna carry a cell phone. I'm gonna carry a CB radio Well that doesn't work for most people if you had the discipline where you could simply go around with a computer You could set up a secure computer and then you could find a Wi-Fi network when you needed one and you could do that But most of us don't want to fit a 15-inch Acer laptop running Linux in our back pocket.

That doesn't really work So what are the alternatives to this you could if possible you could have some kind of device That would allow you to access information with minimal with with fewer of these radio chips and These devices would be known as an iPhone or an iPad right an iPad mini could also work So if you were to purchase sue me, I said iPhone I meant iPod if you were to Apple is for many years sold the iPod touch which Functionally works the same as the iPhone in terms of the apps that can be loaded onto it But it doesn't have a cellular card in it.

It doesn't have a GPS chip So it's automatically creating fewer records and it's automatically communicating less with the local radio signals so if you take an iPod touch or you can do the same thing with an iPad mini or an iPad that doesn't have a Cellular card in it and you simply use it you use the Wi-Fi in it and you turn on a VPN You can access the information that you need from those applications without Creating all of the metadata all of the location data And so Gabriel is talking about as many people are quite sensitive about where do I sleep at night?

and so they'll have the iPod touch which allows them to be in contact at home and then when traveling they might use an iPhone or some people who are super hardcore will take an iPod touch pair that with something like a What's it called the hotspot jetpack type of thing an internet jetpack device to get internet data And so this is one of your if you really if privacy were a big deal to you You were a big shot.

You had a big risk profile or something like that Then this would be one way of accessing mobile data. You would have some kind of internet hotspot device Frequently the nice thing about those is they don't have cameras on them. They don't have Microphones they don't have speakers. They don't have GPS chips.

They're just on the on the on the internet service also Frequently they have a removable batteries and so if you want to get them off the grid you pop the battery off and then you pair that with something like an iPod touch or an iPad mini that doesn't have a radio a cell phone radio chip in it and you have a pretty good Solution that allows you to stay connected when you want to be but have fewer of the vulnerabilities of the constant and never-ending metadata All I would say is I would personally never go to any kind of protest of any kind And carry a cell phone in my pocket.

And so if you need to have something have information On it and again, remember it's just because for this simple reason my guys are in power today But my guys won't be in power tomorrow And so if all of a sudden my guys aren't in power anymore and I go from politically favored to politically disfavored I got a problem and so you want to be thoughtful about that and this is one way of potentially doing that a good summary that that was that was Great Josh.

It's it's that time of the afternoon. My coffee's running out. So I'm glad you picked up the slack there Let me just bring it home real quick for for the people who are made May be lost in the last 15 minutes Your location. Why would you want to protect your location?

You mentioned a couple things if you're involved in a protest Of course your location can and if you've watched looked at the news lately the people in January 6th Their location was pinpointed. They were inside Federal property. Okay, they there's proof right there or they Said X or Y via SMS.

They interrupt you just to add because that's super politically charged The Australian government is knocking on people's doors right and asking you have you been to a protest in violation of kovat regulations? So don't just think this is about like right-wing ism in the US like all over the world people are doing this continue correct Yes, maybe it's it's best to use a neutral thing.

And of course during the the kovat stuff. There was all kinds of geolocation and here's one example in in South Korea, there was a There was a man who went to a shop now in South Korea. They they had an app they were being They were being monitored their location by their their cell phone.

And as I mentioned in South Korea your cell phone is deeply attached to your national ID now this man goes to a restaurant and He tells the restaurant owner that he has Kovat and if he doesn't give him something for free he is going to Yes, he's going to blackmail him so with kovat, of course you can understand the importance of Location, but let me just cover a couple of other things.

Let's say that you visit a gold shop or a gun shop You bring your phone with you. Well, there's a record that you have visited those locations in the US There is a vice president who has publicly laughed at the idea that the Second Amendment cannot be overturned So don't be any doubt about what the future might hold for people who have visited Gun shops if you're being stalked or you're a CEO or you're a wanted person Obviously your location is the difference between life and death sometimes Verizon and a lot of other I think probably all phone services Offer a marketing service in Verizon's case that's called Verizon insights and basically they will sell the location information of their customers To businesses who want it.

So let's say you are at a Trump rally Let's say that there are people at a Trump rally Well Verizon can sell the information of those people who are at the Trump rally to somebody else so you can you can kind of see How your your phone location can be a bit of a vulnerability one more story There was a man riding his bike through a neighborhood one afternoon He he rode it back and forth a couple of times now He had his phone with him and he gets a message from Google that they were going to share his Have you told this story?

I don't know this one. So he gets a message from Google. They have shared that or they're about to share various information Including his location with law enforcement and so he kind of panics what what's going on here hires a lawyer burns through savings Burns through some of his family's money Fighting this he doesn't want to give this out it turns out that he just had a phone with him and he had a Google app on there which we most of us do and Google Was noting just like his phone service, right?

Google is also noting your location When you have it on your phone and Google was aware that he was in this area law enforcement will oftentimes go to Google when there's been a crime in an area which was the case here and This gentleman not only was in the crime scene once but twice and so he has to fight this He has to defend this he burns through his family savings and just one more reason about why you might just want to Use your phone less use a Faraday bag use something like graphene OS or use the iPhone and iPod touch strategy which we've talked about just just a few examples there of why your location Can be a serious vulnerability and if you say oh, no, I you know back the blue I Beg you go and spend a little time on innocence project calm go and read some of the cases That are found and you'll see why this is a major a major concern for completely innocent law-abiding Citizens just always remember this in the United States You live in the statistics you said earlier Gabriel one in twenty you live in the country if you live in the United States You're dealing with the country that incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country in the world by a wide margin I need to go and check and see if it's double the next one But it's by a wide margin very much more than anyone and yet what percentage of those Incarcerations are justified and what percentage of them are actually of guilty people That's a very very different number.

So I think it's best to be prudent in all affairs. All right last thing Gabriel Do you what ideas do you have for the person who like me says Gabriel listen, I'm into it I think it's so cool to set the stuff up. I love it. I can't do it Gabe.

I can't live I can't live this way. I can't run my business from a my pseudo number I can't get that I can't get SMS reliably from the verification on my bank account I get like I can't do it as well as I'd like to do it because having been a privacy Enthusiast you got to be committed because it's a real hassle You have spent dozens and dozens and if not hundreds of hours of your life working out ways that work and fixing things when they go Wrong, do you have any ideas for how you can just simply have everything work?

Without being so committed if not, I'll give you mine. But like let's say that you said, all right I don't want to have it. I can't do this all the time. It's all lost. Do I have to give up privacy? What do you think? Well, of course what I will say first is if you're doing something It's obviously better than nothing if you were going all the way then you would have to go very far indeed, and I can't say that I have Gone that far whatsoever.

So if you're doing something That's great. If you were just switch to Linux a Linux operating system So you're not giving Microsoft and and possibly Apple your data. You have one small victory. So don't be Don't feel that you're a failure for not having gone all the way if you've gone any distance at all That's a great thing in terms of strategies for making this more smooth More efficient.

I don't I don't know. I wish there were unfortunately. It's it says Tolstoy said everybody Thinks about changing the world. No one thinks about changing themselves Okay, that doesn't quite fit what I'm saying But my point being that if you want to have privacy that by definition means that you are doing everything yourself You're doing more things yourself.

You're relying on fewer and fewer Third parties external services that is difficult that requires a lot of work Maybe it's not worth it in the end, but I want to just have one more pitch for privacy here, which is that privacy? Can shield you from the increasingly? ideological Constraints that are placed on the Internet's if you are if you're not using a VPN if you have your Cookies and history being remembered on your browser, which I would recommend Not it can change if you're only using Google and Google search and YouTube it can change your access to reality You will be shown things that Google and whoever else wants you to see you will not be exposed to other things So what we're talking here is not just about protection, which is important, but we're talking about how you have access to reality to what's really going on in the world as opposed to what somebody some company some Institution wants you to see what that said Josh.

Let me know what what what you're thinking about making things easier Well the point you're making to drive off of that. I read this really great article the other day by I wish I could cite him He was talking about his The way that he controls his children's internet usage and this essay I make this I thought that made this point brilliantly Many times as parents you feel a little bit guilty controlling and monitoring your children's usage now If you're a parent and you don't know every single thing that your child is doing on the Internet You're a fool and you're gonna reap what you are, you know, you're gonna reap major problems But you need to fix that first of all and there are some good tools for doing that But he was talking about this guilt.

I know that was a strong statement, but please I beg you It's very very important that with your children. I hope this what I'm about to say gives you reason to do it He was talking about this guilt that sometimes you have a feel as a parent of Watching your children's activity and monitoring them and you say well this flies right in the face of privacy.

What about their privacy? The point he made which I thought was so well put he said if you think that you have privacy on the Internet You're living in a like a world from 1996 right you have no privacy on the Internet and he says you're you're behaving foolishly Because you think that you're on a free and open Internet where you have privacy You are you are the one being manipulated step by step for every single thing that you're doing You're the one who's being who ever everything that you do online is being controlled monitored watched absorbed purchased every single thing that you're doing online is Manipulated and you are falling prey to a non-stop flood of algorithms That are seeking to control your behavior systematically and his point as a parent Was that by monitoring my children's activities online and by the fact that they know that I'm monitoring Them I'm teaching them how to live in the world that we live in Which is a world of constant and never-ending monitoring and I thought it was I didn't say it as clearly and eloquently as he did But I thought that's a really powerful point I say immediately sent it to all my friends and family like listen This is this is a very important point because I have a bias for privacy and my children have no privacy with regard to their online activities And and they won't for a very very long time and I thought how do you reconcile this and I thought this is the wreck This is the way that you reconcile it Can you be private on the Internet for a few minutes if you're a techno wizard and you know how to set up?

You know a sandboxed Virtual machine running through multiple layers of VPNs. That's everything like you can do it. It is possible but it requires a vastly high level of technical knowledge and So most of us aren't gonna reach that level or live that way on a daily basis I think your point Gabriel about using clean browsers is really valuable for many years I have used a clean browser to simply change the browser settings If you just set Firefox every time you close eliminate history eliminate cookies I'll just scrub scrub the browser that in and of itself gives you a very different experience on the Internet because you don't wind up In a side and in a silo you don't wind up just constantly having feedback Of the an echo chamber And so if you go on YouTube and every time you see just native naked YouTube without your being signed in It gives you a vastly different experience than your own personally trained, you know algorithmically enhanced Personal account.

So I guess what I was saying was I Believe that the audience of radical personal finance tends to be quite wealthy and quite well educated and quite busy And I think that privacy You are exactly right. There are levels of privacy that are possible And that are and that every level is good, right?

Just putting a VPN putting it on your phone putting on your computer running it. It's great gives you a major upgrade Being thoughtful about the apps that are on your phone gives you a good upgrade being thoughtful about where you go on the internet And how you go good good upgrades.

My answer is you can use money to solve some of this We didn't talk and I for the sake of time I don't want to get into things like location privacy but after doing all kinds of stuff over the years on location privacy, I became convinced that If you can afford it the best way to have location privacy is just simply to have an apartment where you live that you don't personally set foot in much and Looking like a normal person is a big deal for phone privacy right one of the best things you can do is just have a traditional phone number a Traditional thing that's useful for two-factor authentication and verification, etc and so I spent I have spent a lot of time and a lot of money using many of the solutions and Found out the limits as to where they work and don't work similar like with a business.

I love my pseudo I think it's great. I would never run a business on it. It's gotten better, right? But I would never run a business on it's not reliable enough So if I'm running a business, I'm gonna have a phone that's dedicated to that business But knowing how to leave that phone behind Knowing how to put the phone in a Faraday cage knowing how to use the phone for what it's just to be used for Maybe I teach people right having a backup set right having you may not use a private phone every day all the time But knowing that you have a privately purchased phone that's clean that set up that's ready to go that has service and that's sitting in a Faraday Cage, you know a Faraday bag in your buddies gun safe or in your storage unit or at your office or something like that So if you need that secondary form of communication, these are powerful ways to do it And so this is I've had this kind of tenuous relationship with privacy where I'm totally into it because I'm into like weird hardcore stuff Like that, but I find that a lot of the techniques are Difficult, but yet I'm really glad I'm into it because having it as a backup option has been really powerful And that's kind of my point is that if you're a guy who's making a good income and you don't have a private phone at least as a backup sitting somewhere I Think you're you're not planning ahead enough, right?

if you don't have a place you can go and know how to go to a place where you could fall off the grid if you all of a Sudden we're on the front page of the newspaper. I don't think you're planning ahead well enough in the modern world That's that's all well said let me just say one final thing here, which is slight tangent But I want to make sure to say it and that is for people who think we've gone off the deep end here Let me get let me give you something very practical for the the wealthy listener out there let's say that you have your bank account and you have X amount of money in there and you have your coinbase account and you Have your fidelity and Vanguard accounts and you have X amount of stock in there the easiest thing you can do to protect that is To have two-factor authentication.

I didn't mention this. I should have Joshua referenced it just a minute ago Go into your important accounts go to the settings set up two-factor authentication That is going to force you whenever you log in to provide a code that can be sent to your phone Or through an app like Authy and I recommend that you consider an app called Authy This is an easy way to make sure that you're not part of some of my recent clients Who the statistic of six trillion dollars of cybercrime per year?

Which is growing which my clients recently have contributed to because they didn't have two-factor authentication in their important accounts Because they were using a Yahoo email address, which they didn't change the password and Yahoo accounts were breached a few years ago So there's the keys to the kingdom right there.

They lose all of their coinbase money Just like that and you can't recover cryptocurrency. So have the two-factor authentication Change your email address to one that is not hackable. For example proton mail They do not have the credentials of their users so they cannot Theoretically have a breach. So go create you a proton mail email account change your important Financial accounts to that make sure you don't forget the password because you will be locked out for eternity set up your two-factor authentication and you will have just done your financial future a Huge benefit by making just those steps Absolutely.

So I want to plug your book the watchman guide to privacy reclaim your digital financial and lifestyle freedom This book is fantastic. I Strongly recommend it. It's wonderful. It's a it's a really good and Gabriel You're very good at organizing information and you're very good at laying out kind of the philosophical underpinnings of your position and giving a good Introduction to people but also giving enough tidbits of how you can go deep in this book.

I love this book I think it's great. You're also doing a podcast Yes, that is simply the watchman privacy podcast available pretty much anywhere including YouTube, etc So watchman privacy podcast and are you additionally maintaining a blog or is it most of your writing in this book? You can if you want to track me down get the book check out my podcast You can check out my website watchman privacy comm I have a newsletter I hope to be doing some important things with that in the upcoming year So those are the three ways and then Gabriel and I are working on a project Which we hope to be announcing the details of very soon about Bitcoin Bitcoin privacy, etc my Hopefully that'll be a q1 2022 launch that was supposed to be q4 But I've messed that up and so q1 2022 is the plan for a pretty cool Bitcoin collaborative project Gabriel Thank you for coming.

Thank you for being on the show today. Thank you Thank you.