EXITING The Technocratic State and BUILDING Economic Power (Due Dissidence Podcast)

We are going to admit our special guest for the afternoon. He is an activist and an author who writes for the Conscious Resistance as well as unlimited Hangout in the Last American Vagabond. He currently has a 2026 activation tour set to kick off in Arizona tomorrow on May 1st. Please do welcome for the first time to the Due Dissident Show, Derek Bros. Derek, great to see you. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for joining.

Hey, thanks for having me on. Can you hear me okay?

I can hear you fine. Yeah, I'm gonna. I'll adjust your. Nope, you're on auto volume so you should be good. You should be good. Let the stream yard handle it all. But thank you. It's great to meet you. We've been in contact before you went on Misty show when we were producing that, but I have not met you face to face. So it's great to meet you. Thanks so much.

Yeah, thanks for having me on. I appreciate the work you guys do.

Thank you. Thank you. So you have a tour that's getting kicked off in Arizona tomorrow. I guess that's where you are right now. So thanks for making time for us early in the morning out there near the West Coast. Before we get into this because we definitely want to talk about the tour and your current projects. Just a little background on you. I saw a YouTube video that you posted, I think it was last night or the night before, where you talk about having gone to prison at a young age. And can you tell us how that experience sort of shaped your anti government, anti authoritarian views and informed your position that politics won't save us? I think that's a good sort of introduction into what you're all about.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. So as you said earlier, I've been an independent journalist for about 16 years now, starting in 2010, activism coming right after the financial crisis and of course early on into the Occupy movement and Tea Party. All those sort of things were swirling about as I started to wake up, as they say, or start to question the political realities that I really hadn't been paying any attention to prior because as you also mentioned, I went to prison at a young right out of high school, went straight into college, got it, pulled into drinking, using drugs, ended up getting hooked on crystal meth at 20 years old and kind of getting pulled into that whole world of drug dealing and living on the streets and just all kinds of stuff, which for me was kind of a form of escapism. For me it was, you know, a result of some lifelong depression I've been battling and suicide attempts at a young age. And so when I found myself locked up the week before I turned 21, I really thought, you know, I needed to figure out what, what I wanted to do with my life because I come from a family of drug addicts and alcoholics. My birth father was in and out of prison my entire life and unfortunately he died of a drug overdose in 2018. So being around, in and around drug use and having uncles in prison and all this sort of stuff was pretty normal for me. But I knew that wasn't the path I wanted to take. So it was actually getting locked up that kind of started me on my, my current journey in a way not to give any credit to the horrible prison system, the injustice system, because there's really no redeeming value there, but just simply me being faced. I was sentenced to a two year felony possession of drugs. And I did 18 months in the end on that. The first year I got locked up for first sentence, I got locked up for a year. So, you know, at 20 years old, turning 21, I got locked up. And I was just looking at the calendar and realizing, like, I'm not going anywhere for, you know, close to a year. I need to figure out how I got here and how to make sure it doesn't happen again. And that was a back and forth journey that took the better part, part of 2005 to 2008, as I said, I ended up doing 18 months. So I did a year, got out for six months, did another three months, got out for a year, just played that game for a while, and eventually was convicted of this felony in the state of Texas, where I'm originally from. And I got out for the final time October 2008, which if you cast your minds back to that time, it was an interesting time in the world. It was a month before Obama became president. And there's all the, you know, Obama hype and things. And I wasn't really much for politics at that time. I kind of grew up in a punk background, so I was always like, yeah, screw the government, anti authority. But not with any kind of philosophical understanding or deep analysis. It was just like, yeah, whatever, I don't trust government, I don't trust, you know, the system, so to speak. The only time I've ever voted in my life was I voted for John Kerry against George Bush. I was in high school and graduated high school in 2003, right as the war was launching. And so it was very much anti Bush and was kind of still in that, like, okay, well, if this side's not the answer, the other side must be the answer. But by time 2008 rolled around and I'm now getting out of prison, I'm a felon in the state of Texas. I'm having all these experiences of not being able to get a job certain places, not being able to get rented certain places, and just generally being judged as a felon. You know, we like to say you have a bullseye on your back. And that was kind of, as you said, it was all shaping my reality. I ended up spending a lot of time at the library applying for jobs, going to felon job fairs and this sort of thing. And one day while I was in the library, I decided to start reading, you know, years of being on drugs and kind of my depression lifting and all these sort of circumstances. My brain started working again. I rediscovered my own intelligence and that I had a curiosity for the world. And the first book I ever voluntarily took notes on was called Cannabis A History. And it was basically a history of the American Drug war, specifically focused on cannabis, but it was all about the Harrison act of 1914 and a lot of the original drug laws, which were very motivated by racism and by trying to get rid of the hemp industry, the oil industry, trying to push out hemp, things like that. And for me, that was a lot of new information. It was like, this is not what I was taught in high school or even the little bit of college that I actually attended. Maybe there's other things in the world that I, you know, a sort of a light bulb went off, like, maybe there's other things I really don't know about the world. And it just kind of all those. Those circumstances converge at the perfect moment where I had been getting out fresh out of prison. My mind was open in a ways, I'd say intellectually as well as potentially spiritually in ways that hadn't been before. And I started just diving in and started reading books, everything from conspiracy books. I also hung out in a lot of left anarchist spaces in Houston originally. That's kind of where my background was. I also discovered people like Ron Paul. So it was kind of getting a mix of like, like I said, the Occupy movement, the Tea Party stuff, conspiracy culture, left wing anarchism. Just all this sort of countercultural, anti authority roots to. To my philosophy. And in 2010, I started an activist group called the Houston freethinkers. And from 2010 to 2017, that was pret. My life I lived in. We called the Freethinker House. It was basically an activist space where we would host monthly meetings, documentary screenings. We did community garden work, of course, protests, rallies, marches, outreach, all that sort of thing. But it became my entire life. And somewhere along that way, somebody told me they could pay me a little bit of money if I. If I started to do some writing, some blogging. And so it sort of started out very simply like that. And it didn't take long for me to start taking it more seriously and going to the local press conferences for the mayor, for the police chief, and realizing that nobody wanted to ask hard questions. I was in there with my little handheld camera in the early 2010s and all these people with their big fancy cameras and they're throwing softball questions to the mayor and the police chief. And I started to realize that my favorite sport is confronting politicians and asking them hard questions. And it sort of has evolved since then. I launched the Conscious Resistance website in 2013 as my own sort of home to explore my interest in and, you know, anarchism and volunteerism and spirituality as well, Consciousness. Just a place that I could talk about all the weird things that I was into, but also do it in a way that I strive for doing independent journalism in a credible way, in a factual way, of course, documenting, sourcing, everything I do. And since then I've produced a number of documentaries, Most recently my 17 part documentary series, the Pyramid of Power, which people can [email protected] I've written some books, how to Opt out the Technocratic State, a few others. Recently, in December, I just released my memoir telling this whole story that I just sort of outlined here. November 2025 was the 20th anniversary of my arrest. So we just released it on the 20th anniversary, kind of going deeper into the narrative of sort of the prequel to the life I'm doing now. And I just released the Pyramid of Power as a book version as well. And yeah, as you said, I'm getting ready to go on my first US Speaking tour in five years. These kind of events are really important for me because I think there's too many of us spending time just behind the screens. And obviously there's value and there's use there, there's utility there, but I think there's really something special when we get connected face to face and build those relationships even stronger.

Yeah, well, so much of what you write about and talk about is sort of the trappings of the digital space that we use to communicate with each other. So it creates this kind of conundrum because on the one hand, you know, the Internet and the various platforms that we disseminate our ideas through kind of free us to be able to do what we do. On the other hand, they're kind of a trap. And we'll get into that. But I wanted to ask you because you mentioned how someone gave you an offer to start paying you for writing. In the interim, did you think you would eventually do journalism to support yourself? And how did you support yourself coming out of jail, struggling to find work? When did it ever click to you? Or did it occur to you over time that, wait a minute, I'm amassing all of this knowledge. I'm really building a philosophical framework that I could maybe use to inform a career in journalism or commentary. You know, when did it occur to you that this might be what you do for a living? And in the interim, how did you make a living?

Yeah, that's a great question. No, it never really initially occurred to me. I mean, my initial drive was just that, you know, that kind of young, early 20 something passion for like, oh my God, I just realized the world's a fucking crazy place. How can I do something about it? I got to go out there. And so, I mean, and again, like I said, it was, there was a lot of energy at that time, you know, in Houston, where I was from, the Houston Free Thinkers, every week we were 2011, I'm speaking about, we were partnered with the Occupy Houston branch. And so we were doing marches on the banks. There were sit ins gone. There's just so much energy that it just kind of consumed my entire life. And as far as making a living, you know, I'm my background prior to journalism and this sort of work, I've always just been, you know, a working class guy, working kitchens, cooking at restaurants and stuff like that. I love to cook, you know, so that's kind of what I got into when I first got out of prison. After getting turned down for many jobs, I ended up finding a guy who was willing to take a chance on me. You know, a lot of people hear like, hey, I just got out of prison for felony crystal meth possession, and the last thing they want to do is trust you, work with you. But thankfully, this guy was willing to work with me and he gave me a shot. And so when I was starting my activism, I was still working that day job. But it's funny because I remember as I was getting consumed with this material and I was just starting to read and consume so much, one of the days, my boss, who was a friend as well. But, you know, he was the boss. It was his restaurant. He showed up at the restaurant, and he sees me in the back, and in my mind, like, everything's done. There's no customers. I've done everything I'm supposed to do for the day. So he finds me back there just like, you know, pawing through this book, just deep in research and learning. And he's like, what are you doing, man? I'm like, I'm reading. There's nothing going on. And I remember him telling me, it doesn't even seem like you're here anymore. And I wasn't. I was already like, you know, I didn't know what was going to be the path. But I knew that activism and eventually journalism meant more to me than anything else I'd ever done in my life. It felt like it actually had meaning than just some bullshit job. I was working only just to pay my bills, you know, And I worked that job for all of 2011. By the end of 2011, I sold everything I owned. I got rid of my apartment, and I bought a touring bike. And I spent the first three months of. Actually, this was 2010. So I spent the first three months of 2011, January to the end of March, traveling across the United States by bicycle, volunteering on farms. And just kind of. This is also when I started to get more into, like, permaculture and growing food and stuff. And it was a. It was a big healing, spiritual journey, but it was also an educational journey. And when I came back from that trip, that was pretty much the beginning of me ever working for anybody else and diving more into entrepreneurship. When I came back from that trip, I started some small businesses. And when I say I started small businesses, I mean, I literally just posted a website and said, hey, I'll build gardens for you. Because I got really into that. So for about a year or two, me and a buddy built gardens for people around city of Houston. And that was just cash work. I was doing odd jobs. You know, since I was a cook, friends would get me jobs working at art galleries, doing cooking for art gallery openings. I mean, literally all kinds of things. You. You can imagine. As I was realizing, like, the activism was. Wasn't paying my bills, of course, but it was what was feeding my soul. And so I did a lot of different things in that interim period. And I think the first I started to get paid 20 bucks, you know, an article in 2013, that was the first time it happened. And there was still no thought in my mind that this could be Something that could sustain me, especially because at that time, you know, obviously $20 an article is not much money at all. So in order to make any kind of living, I'm having to write a whole bunch. But I loved it. It was just the idea that, oh, my God, this whole research and thing that I'm getting into, I could actually even just put a little bit of money, you know, in my pocket doing that. And then eventually, as I. As I said, as I started to take it more seriously, I did take online journalism courses and get some certifications, you know, and I took the. And threw it away and kept what I thought was good, like journalistic ethics and things like that. But, yeah, I never originally thought this was going to be the path. And ultimately it's through that pushing myself in that way that I did lead that it led me to networking with a lot of other activists. Of course, now it seems so commonplace for us to be interacting with people around the world. But I remember, for me, 2009, 2010, 11, it was still a very. Still a very novel idea that I could be meeting activists from around the world and around the country. And that feeling was just like, oh, my God, look, there's other people like me in these other places. And those networks eventually led to, hey, I can get. You can write for my website. You want to work for my website? You want to. You know. And so at one point, I was writing for five or six websites at a time, eventually writing for Mint Press and others like that. And it's just been something I've continued. And of course, an independent media journalist, at least for some of us. Maybe for others it may be more profitable. It's not a hugely stable line of work. So I've worked for 15 or more outlets because when censorship rises, you lose a job because people say, hey, we can't pay you anymore. We're, like, not reaching anybody. We're not getting clicks. And so it's. It's a challenge, but it's one that I've learned to navigate. And of course, by building up my own reputation of work, I can. You know, I built up that repertoire with my. My audience.

Yes, for sure. And you do. You do have a book here, how to Opt out of the Technocratic State, first edition, released January 31, 2020. Oh, man, that. You must look back at that and be like, damn sure. What's that?

Oh, sorry about that. Yeah, I was. Sorry, I was talking to someone else. Yeah, with the date. You're looking at the date of January 2020.

Yeah, that's yeah. Talk about predicting the future like three

weeks before we heard the word Covid or.

Exactly.

I think they've been talking about it in China, but nothing major. Probably a proud moment for me to anticipate what was about to happen. It doesn't talk about COVID of course, or anything like that, or viruses or pandemics. It was just sort of anticipating where things were going in a broader picture.

Yeah, yeah. Pretty, pretty eerie. Pretty eerie. I'm about to ask if you were at the Wuhan lab at that point, did you. Because it's like amazing. This came out right before all that. But you have here inspired by Samuel E. Conkin. So you lean heavily on Conkin's theory of agorism. And for someone new to the concept, how does a person sort of transition from being a consumer in the technocratic state to being a producer in the sort of agorist county counter economic system, if that, if that makes sense. And you can open as broadly as you want just to introduce people to these, these concepts.

Yeah. So I'll say one thing first before I mention Conkin. So just to kind of set the stage for the book and, and how it's inspired by him. So again, I, I, I started writing the book in late 2019, I think, Sec. The third quarter of 2019. We released it in January 2020. I had been researching just through my independent journalism work. We were talking about, I started to notice a trend of facial recognition and even AI discussions a decade ago, the very early discussions and how there were people much more educated and informed than me talking about this is posing some unique danger. It's posing a threat to or it will pose a threat. Like I remember an article I wrote back in 2017 talking about digital rights attorneys and lawyers and computer scientists signing an open letter saying that there should be a ban or at least a temporary mortgage moratorium on facial recognition. And just realizing like, nobody is paying attention to this, or at least not nobody, but at least the majority are definitely not aware of what's about to come in. So I started writing the book first as kind of a warning of like, hey guys, this is what is on the horizon. This is what we're facing. And then kind of, you know, giving some examples of where that's played out. But then also, most importantly, what matters most to me is about solutions. Okay, well, what does a person, as the book says on the back there, like, how does a person who values liberty, values privacy, navigate this world that is quickly coming, which is now staring us in the face? You know, six years after I published the book, it's come very rapidly where AI is, you know, interfacing with everything, facial recognition, digital IDs, all the whole gamut of what we're, many of us are concerned about. And how do you navigate that world? And I don't think there's any way to really turn off the switch, so to speak. You know, there's not like we're not in a Hollywood movie where there's just one giant computer we have to smash and then everything's gone. It's a little more complex than that. And also, as you said, many of us are interacting with these systems and participating in them. So I started to think like, how do we navigate that world? And how can I put forward some solutions that I've used in my life? I haven't used banks since 2008. I don't talk to certain government agencies. I navigate the world in my own complex way. And so I put a lot of my own direct experiences and they were very much and are inspired by the work of Samuel Konkin. And so Konkin was a Canadian activist who actually was an illegal immigrant in the U.S. it's kind of funny. He came to the U.S. in the 60s. He was part of that, that big period of student activism in the 60s and the 70s. And he was there at a lot of big moments for he worked with the Students for Democratic Society. He worked with like the early libertarian anarchist movement, some of whom would go on to form the Libertarian Party. And he always thought that creating a political party was kind of a selling out of the original, you know, the fervor and that the ethos of that movement from the 60s, which was very much anti Vietnam War, anti conscription, draft, things like that. And he was even probably one of the more radical people among those radicals. And by the end of the 60s, going to the 70s, as some people said, hey, we're going to form a political party. Others tuned in and you know, tuned out and dropped down, started using drugs. He just start. He was starting to like think about this. He was very much a systems thinkers to sort of analyze the situation. Like the war hasn't stopped the machines marching forward. Some people are going to politics, some people are going to apathy or just, you know, dropping out. There has to be another way. And so he started to try to find a middle path or a third way. And that eventually became what he called agorism, which comes from the Greek word the agora. The agora, the marketplace. And more specifically he talked about the Action, the strategy being counter economic. So you could kind of think of like agorism being his sort of overarching philosophy, which was definitely inspired by and kind of an outgrowth of some of those libertarian activists. And I say that word, I know that it's kind of a, it's a loaded word, especially in our time. But I think he meant it in the truest sense of like self ownership and, you know, fighting for liberty for all people. In fact, he was often labeled and labeled himself at different times a left libertarian for various reasons. So he was kind of coming out of that and said, okay, look, we get the philosophy, we have this foundation, but how do we actually get to that place? Politics isn't going to be the answer. Violence isn't the answer, apathy isn't the answer. And he started to study at that time the Soviet Union as well as some other parts of the world where he could see that no matter how aggressive and powerful the state got, there was still this counter economy or the informal economy, the underground economy. Like where I'm from, where I live in Mexico, the informal economy is huge, it's massive. Some people estimate that the informal economy, the counter economy around the world, is in the trillions of dollars and actually might be the biggest economy. And that is a non taxed, non state economy that governments around the world would desperately love to control. And of course, with the digital world we're facing, they are getting closer to being able to control it, or at least they're trying. So Konkin was seeing that in the Soviet Union, no matter how aggressive the state got, there was still this underground black market economy. Even the most ardent supporter of the Soviet Union working for the government would still go to the black market to get certain goods that they couldn't get from the mainstream economy. And so Cotton can sort of analyze the different economies that exist that he talked about. The white market being the mainstream economy. This is the taxed economy. If you have a check that the government's taking money out, you're in the white market. Then you have what he considered the red market, which is non state, non state money and transactions, but things that include violence. So for example, you're thinking of the Mafia, you're thinking of like violent crimes. It's technically a out of the government's hands, but it involves violence. And he did believe the initiation of force and violence was immoral. So he said, well, what if we put our energy into these gray and black markets and we focus our energy on exploiting these areas where the state can't control a gray market would kind of be like, let's say the government expects you to get a license to cut somebody's hair or something like that, right? You're not doing anything wrong, you're not doing immoral, you're just choosing not to participate in that. And he believed, excuse me, he believed every time that somebody participated in that market outside of the state's hands and outside of giving their funds to this violent state, that was a potentially revolutionary act. And same thing with the black market doing things that the state considers illegal, like let's say in the state of Texas where I'm from, still illegal to buy weed and to sell weed. You know, it's a simple little thing, right, but it's still legal. And so if you choose to participate in that, that in his mind, you're doing a counter economic act. Of course, doing that alone is not revolutionary on its own. So his thought was we have to raise the consciousness of the people to understand that exiting from the mainstream economy, from the state's economy and building what he called the counter economy or a parallel economy could potentially be a revolutionary act. And if you could raise the consciousness of the people enough so that they start to, bit by bit, take their money and their time and their energy and their support from these systems, then you could eventually build this counter economy, this parallel economy. And he had, in his book, New Libertarian Manifesto, he kind of outlined his whole vision of how this process would potentially play out over time, you know, whether or not people subscribe to his, his full vision or his theories. I was very inspired by this idea of like, okay, if we want to fight the system, you don't do it by participating. You have to stop participating. And particularly for me, one of the first issues I got into was the Federal Reserve System. And like, okay, we're not going to defeat the Federal Reserve or you know, the central banks by expecting them to pass a bill to audit it, which is a big thing that people like Ron Paul were trying back in the day. And it didn't take me long to realize they're not going to audit themselves, they're not going to end themselves. We have to do that our own self. So through these sort of individual and communal acts, by getting people to, for example, do divesting from banks and things like that, we could take our financial and spiritual moral support from them and try to focus on building parallel institutions. And so I was really inspired by that. Kankin was kind of singularly focused on the economy because obviously economics is a big part of their machine. But I tried to take that whole message and make it a bit more holistic. And so I tend to call counter economics and what he called counter economics. I phrase it as exit and build. So exiting from the systems that don't align with our values and principles and, and focusing on building new systems that do align with our values. And if you're not a builder, like, for example, I'm not a technologist, I'm not a coder, I'm not a developer, but I have a lot of friends who are. And I'm not going to be the one to build the alternative tech tools, but I like to support those who are building those. So exiting from the systems, whether that's the banking system, whether that's the big tech system, education, you know, you list whatever you think matters to you and focusing on building parallel institutions counter to the current ones that actually are aligned with our values. Now, obviously this is a big vision. It's a generational change. It's not going to happen overnight. But this is something that I've really dedicated my life to. And unfortunately, a lot of things that Conkin kind of predicted would happen or that he thought would play out as a, you know, as a result of the state getting more aggressive and people looking for alternatives he did not live to see because he did not take care of his health. And he died of a heart attack in 2004, unfortunately. And his. His movement has kind of taken on a life of its own in the age of the Internet, where people like myself have discovered it and really kind of become champions of it. So, you know, I've taken inspiration from him and then sort of put my own spin on it. And that's what I focus on in how to opt out of the technocratic state is how do we see these systems that we're facing and then take steps to exit from them. And again, it's not necessarily an overnight process. If you're somebody who's got thousands and thousands of dollars of student loan debt and credit card debt and all these different. If you're super plugged into the matrix, so to speak, it's going to take some time to start to figure out how to untangle yourself and then to start to learn about these alternative systems which are, which are cropping up. And so I think that is, it's kind of a competition, it's a race between their building of this technocratic, you know, techno feudalism, techno capitalism, whatever term you want to give it, and those of us who are trying to exit from those systems and also technology as a tool. Use the tech as best as possible to our advantage as we create these new systems.

Yeah, so this is a point that I think is worth digging into a little bit, because I think a lot of people hear this and they think anarcho capitalism. But you once wrote a piece saying that, no, this is actually specifically not anarcho capitalism. So how does this algorithm sort of solve the tension between the ownership class and workers without relying on state mandated labor laws or union regulations or things like that? Because there does seem to be a difference between the kind of market anarchism, which kind of seems to be what you're talking about, and anarcho capitalism. And this is something I've wrestled with for a while because I'm very skeptical of concentrated power, whether it's state power or corporate power. I think both can be equally threatening. So how do we achieve a kind of market anarchism without economic power eventually consolidating and centralizing to the point where we're essentially back to where we are now?

I think that's a great question, and I will preface that by saying I obviously don't claim to have all those answers, but I think these are the kind of conversations we need to have. You know, you're right. I did write this essay years ago called Agorism is Not Anarcho Capitalism. And it was definitely a response to me getting kind of lumped in with that crowd. And I'll say this too as well. I have a lot of great friends who would identify as anarcho capitalist or things of that sort, which is not a label I've ever worn and one that I've never felt comfortable with, just because there's a few reasons I'll get into. But so, you know, there's people that I think I'm allied with in a lot of ways, even if I think we would probably diverge, for example, on them thinking that the answer to every single problem is to just privatize something. I think that there's some benefits and there's some areas where we can definitely see where the state isn't the answer and that sometimes privatizing something will play out better. But I don't think privatizing the oceans or privatizing, you know, there's some really extreme kind of ideas that get put forward, at least in my view, that I think won't end up creating more liberty in the long term or individual or collective freedom in the long term. And the concern you mentioned is also very real, like how do we? It's not just state power that we should be aware of. Again, this is another blind spot that I think some of my colleagues and friends tend to have and one that I've probably had in the past as well, that was more simplistic that, okay, it's just the state that's the problem. But even if we were to abolish the state right now, we still, I mean, we have the technocrat billionaires and all the billions and trillions that they've amassed and the power and you know,

Palantir, Palantir contracts already signed. Too late, you know.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, so getting rid of the government alone doesn't get rid of Palantir. Right. It doesn't get rid of, you know, these other players in there. So it's not, I think, as simple as just saying, like, let's abolish the government, the state. There's always going to be somebody who wants to try to use that. And I think that's kind of the other aspect of it is to me, I do think the creation of the state, the implementation of the state as a tool to lord over other people is immoral and that it does end up leading to bad places. I also think that again, private power can be just as bad. So I think there have been some oversimplifications and lack of nuance when it comes to this. And although I probably wouldn't call myself a left libertarian if push comes to shove, that's probably something that, you know, I would feel more, more close to than an anarcho capitalist. I tend to call myself just simply an agorist or a market anarchist. Another term that gets thrown around is voluntarist. And I think that this is a label that I wish more people were comfortable with or, you know, if we're going to use labels, would understand that it's not simply a, another version of anarcho capitalist. Because in my mind all anarchism or anti authoritarianism should be the root of it should be voluntarism. You know, just again, separating it from any sort of history with libertarianism or closeness to anarcho capitalism. The voluntarist ideal which has been around since the 1800s is just that all relationships should be voluntary and consensual. And you know, obviously there's some, some deeper discussions to be had about that. But I feel like if that's the foundation of your philosophy, no matter what other labels you throw on top of that, you can call yourself a anarcho communist or whatever, or just a communist or a socialist or whatever your labels may be working class person. But if you recognize that the foundation is voluntarist. So that means that for me the solutions that I propose are things that I'm trying to implement myself, trying to lead by example, trying to encourage people to try out and to live. But I'm not trying to use coercion, whether that's my own private coercion or the coercion of the state in order to implement these ideas. So that's kind of where I come back to with any sort of potential economic solutions or other solutions. Is. Is it something that people have to consent to, that people can say no to, that people can exit from? Because if not, then in my mind it just becomes ends up becoming form of violence if people are forced to be free under your system. And you know, it's. I don't know if that's the solution. And I again, I've seen that play out in different areas whether the American Libertarians or ANCAPs or you know, the. My left wing radical friends as well, that we sometimes think we can force people to be free and our version of this utopia. And I don't. I think that's where the problem. That's where you kind of start cycling back to being the same people you're fighting. Which I will add this and maybe this won't resonate with everybody. But this is why I also do call my work the conscious resistance. I mean when I got into prison I really got into to meditation as a form for me starting to heal my underlying trauma which was leading, which was the root of my. My suicide attempts and my depression and all the things I was dealing with. And I do believe that on a psychological, spiritual, mental level that humanity has some deep seated traumas, intergenerational traumas that do need to be overcome. And I say this from my experience as my family being native to Texas, part of my family being Seminole and I mentioned the drugs and alcohol abuse. I that's directly related to all the trauma that our families went through over the generations. And I think all of us, no matter what your skin color, background, race, ethnicity, et cetera, just as a member of the human species, there are things within us I think that need to be to worked out and they could be big or small traumas. But the reason I bring that up is to say I think sometimes the lack of willingness to confront those things is part of the root of why people end up becoming authoritarian and wanting to dominate and control over other people. I think the fact that that, you know, I don't think that's a normal human characteristic to want to dominate other people. I want to see you happy and joyful and living your life to the best of your abilities. And so long as you're not infringing upon my ability to do the same, you know, it doesn't bother me. Right. But I think that there's a certain type of person that is dealing with their own trauma that tries to then say, well, I know what's best for other people, whether that's through the government or private means or any other means. So I don't know if I exactly answered your question, but these are complex conversations and I appreciate the, the dialogue here and I think more of us need to have, have them because for what I've seen just of the last 16 years is sometimes we get off in our own little camps and I don't even know what camp I would fit in. But let's say right wing independent media and left wing independent media, to oversimplify it, and then within that you got radical media and, you know, anarchist media. Right. And we're not necessarily always talking to each other, we're talking past each other. In fact, that's one big thing I learned from hanging out with the anarcho capitalists is that the anarcho capitalists love to talk about the anarcho communists, but they'd never read any of their books. And the anarcho communists love to talk about the angels caps, but they've never read any of their books. And so we just have these sort of caricatures of what each other is saying and not actual dialogue to find common ground. And, and that's what I'm really after.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think, I think that's a great answer. I'm, I'm very, very sympathetic to a lot of that because what I find attractive about it is that it is based in voluntarism, which, which to me is the most pro human foundation to have when establishing any kind of political philosophy. To me, there's always been something very nihilistic about the use of force, whether it's violent force or coercive force. Right. There's something kind of nihilistic in insisting that other people be enlisted in your project. Right. Whereas, you know, to me a much more attractive philosophy is one that says, no, it's on all of us to come together and decide voluntarily on how to build a parallel system or how to build a system that replaces the current system. And by basing it in volunteerism. You are aspiring to actually appeal to the best of people in a sense. Right. You're forcing yourself to appeal to people's sense of what is possible as opposed to what is necessary to do, because I was told to do it by somebody else. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You hit it right on the head.

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I think that that was, that, that was a great answer. Now, following up on that,

I just want to mention, just in case anybody hearing this is curious for some of my deeper thoughts on this, my third book is called Manifesto of the Free Humans and it's since been collected into one book that's just called the Conscious Resistance Trilogy. But in case anybody is curious on that, my thoughts on everything from property, from borders, from immigration, from this sort of, like I said, agrist, left leaning, libertarian, whatever you want to say, perspective. You can find that book out there either on my website at the Conscious Resistance or just where I usually get books. It's called Manifesto of the Free Humans and it was released in 2017. And I think I still stand by what I wrote in there and it kind of continues to guide me. So just in case anybody's curious on some of those thoughts.

Absolutely. Thank you for that. Now, opting out the exit and build can to some people perhaps feel like it's a lonely or an isolating path, but you put great emphasis on physical community and that's a lot of what you're towards is about, I would think. So how do we build those communities when digital communication is so heavily monitored and when we're so reliant on digital communication to actually build the kind of community that we're trying to make parallel to this system?

It's a great question and we'll start by coming to the tour if we're anywhere near you. Obviously I'm going to promote that a little bit. But I mean, I'm being serious in the sense that if there's an event near you or if you're going to be the one to organize it, whether it's a big event, local event, small event, international, whatever, or you're the one who has to start it or join, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of face to face interaction. And I think this does largely come for me from my activist roots because so much of my, the first half decade plus of my work was being involved, as I mentioned earlier, living in a community space with a couple of other activists where this was a full time gig, you know, where we were hosting everything from meditations to community garden work to Documentary screenings, to discussions and just, you know, just being connected and plugged in on a local level. It just felt so vital for me. And I always understood that this was going to be key moving forward. I don't think that any of us are an island. You know, I am a strong, proud, individualist anarchist. But I also believe in collective liberation. And I know that I can't do this alone. I don't have the financial resources or the desire really to do this alone. And so community is absolutely necessary. And I think Covid Covid 1984 showed us that plenty. So many people felt isolated and separated. That was by design. And those who were able to find like minds, of course we know so many of the political boundaries were blurred or just completely obliterated where people who may have felt like they were left wing or progressive became politically homeless and vice versa. And that continues to today. And being able to find others in your area and connect, even if you don't, and especially if you don't agree on everything. I mean, I think that's important, right? We don't have to agree on everything to be order to work on a specific project or to even just kind of build camaraderie and recognize that I'm not alone. I think that's one of the biggest things that the lessons for us to take home. So many people again interact with these amazing digital tools. But then when you're walking around your local community, going out shopping or doing your business, you're like, wow, I'm the only one here in my town that feels this way. I'm still so alone. Alone. But what I've found when doing these events. So this will be my fifth, fifth US fifth speaking tour, fourth US one. I did one in Mexico as well. And the last time I went on the road was spring, excuse me, the fall of 2021 and in the spring of 2022 in Mexico. And I'd done tours in 2017, 2018, every time, and even going back to the Houston Freethinkers every time we would host a monthly meeting, without a doubt, there was always somebody who'd said, I never knew there was other people like me. I felt so alone. I felt so isolated. And you know, you could just see how it changed for them, how they felt like even just on the simple, basic human social level of being able to speak freely, where a lot of people as we know, maybe, I'm sure even people listening to this have to go to work and put on a metaphorical mask or during COVID a physical mask and not be themselves and not actually, you know, speak, please speak openly about what they believe in. And so when you get around other like minded people, all of a sudden it's like the floodgates open and people just want to chat night and just you know, because it feels good because you're like, oh my God, I don't have to start with all this bs. I can just be my true self again, even if we don't agree on everything. And so what I've seen is doing these kind of events, bringing people together. People often will, maybe they know who I am. So they come to the local event to just meet me or to hear the talk. But then they realize, oh my God, there's 50, 60, 100 plus other people in my own community. I didn't know they were here. I didn't know about this venue doing these cool things and that me is a big part of it. So of course I'm coming to share my message and ideas. But this tour, probably more than ever I'm going to be spending less time talking and more engaging with everybody and trying to see like what do you guys actually want? Where's, where are you at on your exit build journey? What is the challenges you're facing? How can I be supportive? How can you guys support each other? And community is key with that, right? Because especially on the tour I'm doing some cities, you know, multiple nights in a row, right? So from one day to the next, I'm going to be going on to the next place. But the people who live there locally are the ones who are going to have to build whatever it is that they're going to build. And that's going to be dependent on their resources, their environment, their local community, their needs, their desires, their interests. I can't tell them what that looks like. And that's going to look like different things from different city to city. And I've seen this in action, I've seen this work, you know, I, I've also been involved with a project called the Freedom Cell Network. The website still exists. It's, again, it's, obviously there's a digital home for it, but it's mainly a real world concept. Like we like to tell people. FreedomCells.org is the website. If you need to go there, you can create a free profile, put your interest, put your skills, add yourself to the map, search the maps to find people and groups within your area, connect through there, then meet them in the real world. Leave the website behind, right? Because it's all about real World connections. But if you've already got a community locally or if you're going to come to an event like my tour or something else, that's a great way to connect with other like minded people. So if you are feeling alone, I encourage you to step beyond that. Even if you got to drive an hour or an hour and a half to get to the closest, you know, local event, whether it's my tour or something else, I promise you it will be worth it. Because once you realize that you're not alone and you start to build these relationships and not just social relationships, which as I said is important, but then start to get goal oriented and focused and say, well, what are our biggest concerns right now? Hey, I'm very concerned about the local AI data centers and how they're affecting our water supply. Maybe we should start having discussions on water security. Maybe we should start organizing, going to the local county, whatever board and seeing if we can stop this. You know, start to really figure out what are your goals, you know, what are your interests. And then as a group, as a collective, like in Freedom Cells, we talk about groups of 8 to 10. Ultimately the number doesn't matter. You know, there's some, some, some good research behind group dynamics and group size. But ultimately, if you got five people, work with them. If you got 15, 20, work with them. Find the most serious people who are actually ready to do something. Not just talk, not just post on the Internet, who want to get together and focus on goals and accomplishing these goals and start to build something. And again, the name is also irrelevant. Some people don't like the term Freedom Cell, so they call them circles, hubs, whatever, it doesn't matter. The concept is what matters. Localized, decentralized organizing. And to me, the more we focus on building these system, these groups on a local level. And the cool thing, during COVID we saw groups in Germany, Australia, India, parts of Africa. I mean the concept really took on a life of its own. Prior to Covid we had about 1500 people on the website. It blossom to like 40,000 when Covid happened because everybody was freaking out. So they were starting, starting to look for community. And unfortunately things kind of eb and flow. When life goes back to quote unquote, normal people tend to like, oh I don't need community more, life's fine, I, I don't need to worry about that. But with the war going on, with everything else, with technocracy marching forward, for me it felt really important to get back out on the road and try to connect with People and say, hey, everything I was warning about back in 2020 has only gotten worse. It's only advanced further. If you didn't do anything then, if you thought I was full of it then, or you just, you know, chose not to, now is the time. So the tour is kind of a hope, my. One of my hopes to kind of go out and light a fire under people's asses again. And also because again, everything that I'm sharing from are things that I'm practicing in my own life. I'm not, you know, just talking from, you know, some pedestal, pedestal or something. I'm speaking from my direct experience. In 2020, I chose to move to Mexico to be closer to the land and to reconnect to some roots. And it just felt right for me and my partner. We've since bought land with a group. We're building a community called the Conscious Agora. We've got six households who bought in. We've paid off the land. We did it without using banks. We're about to go home and do our first Hemp Creek build, start building some structures. Like everything that I'm sharing is things that I'm doing directly. That's not to say the only route is to go to Mexico or to buy land, although I think if you can collectively come together and buy land and become the stewards of the land, there's some big value to that. I'm not wealthy enough to just do it myself. So again, community was. Was important. But the point is, whatever. Whatever your path may be, the specifics of it, we need to recognize that the politics aren't going to save us. The midterms aren't going to stop technocracy 2028, whoever they throw up for either party isn't going to stop what's happening. And instead, I believe the answer is for us to focus on building parallel systems. And so the tour is going to largely focus on that, but mostly, as I mentioned, trying to say, look, guys, if you've heard me speak before, you know what my message is. I don't need to repeat myself. I'd rather you guys. Let's sit around together and brainstorm. What are the biggest problems you're facing? What are the biggest obstacles you have right now? How can we collectively come together and take those on? So the Tour website is activationtour.org as you mentioned, I am in Phoenix right now. The tour starts tomorrow evening. We actually move this, the first stop to Prescott, which is just like an hour and a half north of Phoenix. And then on May 13th I'll start the rest of the tour in Denver and then I'm going to be on the road for two weeks and then pick it up again in July. We're going to go to the Midway and the east coast and down to Florida. And so yeah, I mean we're adding cities. People keep requesting new cities. If anybody's curious, if you want to meet face to face, you want to come get my books, great. But more importantly than that, come out to meet other people who are like you, who see the problems, but most importantly are asking what can we actually do about it? And I don't claim to have all the answers, but I know if we get together and we brainstorm, we focus on this, we can come up with some solutions.

Yeah. So you, you bought lands in Mexico. What are some. Because a lot of people might hear this and think, well this is utopian. And I would say that, you know, every political theory is utopian to a certain extent in the sense that nothing gets realized 100%. Right. Like life does not cooperate with you in the way that you expect it to when you come up with an idea in your head of how something is going to go. But to ground this a little bit, what are you are some early sort of exit and build steps that people can take in their day to day lives that they could put into action without like, you know, getting them thrown in jail like with it like invasion or something like that. Because that doesn't free you, that just imprisons you more. So like what are, what are things people can do to sort of, you know, break from the system in, in ways that, that are not going to get them thrown in a system.

So it's a great question and this is something I have spent a lot of time on. So I've created a couple resources. For one, I do want to mention that how to Opt out the Technocratic State. You can download it for free if you don't want to pick up a physical copy. The website is the conscious resistance.com how to and as you see there, there's Spanish versions and all that stuff, you can read the PDF there. There's also, I'm pretty sure we have a audiobook linked on there. So if you want to listen to it and instead of read it. But I just want to mention that. So if you want to get deeper into the concepts, read the book, you know, listen to it for free. And the other thing is I put together a 45 day exit and build challenge. It's probably been two years now. It's completely free. So it's, the website is just theconsciousresistance.com EXB for exit and build. EXB. And as I mentioned earlier, I've taken a lot of inspiration from Samuel Conkin, but I tried to make my approach a more holistic approach. So in that 45 day challenge, you know, take it at your own pace. But the way I kind of designed it originally was that let's say you start today, today's Thursday, right? So let's say you start today and you start on week one. I think on week one we start with food. And basically every challenge or every episode on there, which is about an hour long each, I talk about these different systems. So with food I say, look, here's the different problems we have with food. Pesticides, wasteful, destructive, violent food systems. You know, we go to the problems, we go through some of the potential solutions and then I give some homework like, hey, this weekend go visit your local farmers market, get more connected to your local food supply, volunteer at a community garden, things like that. And the idea is that you take each of these for one week, you know, sort of see how you can implement some of these steps in your life. And then we go through food technology. I can't remember them all off the top of my head, but that I think would be another great way for people to start because as you mentioned, there are so many things that you can do that don't have to involve getting yourself thrown in a cage and don't have to involve buying land if that's not in the cards or if it's just not where you're at right now. I do talk about the idea of getting land I think in the final week, but there's so many other things prior to that. I mean, probably one of the biggest ones, most relevant ones would be in the area of technology, digital technology. So many of us are using tools that are working against us, right? If you're, if you're participating in like let's say the biggest one, Google, right? There's a lot of, of other search engines out there. There's alternatives to Google Sheets, to Google Drives. I use something called CryptPad, which does everything that you do with Google sheets and drives and all that, but it's not supporting Google and it's, it's encrypted and it's privacy based open source. I'm always looking for open source, privacy based alternatives to all the mainstream things that we do. And of course with the understanding that there's going to Be a learning curve with some of these tools. Like I'm talking to you right now on a Linux computer. So I'm not using Microsoft, you know, I got rid of Microsoft. Those are the kind of things that I think anybody can start to do right now. You could make a commitment to stop using Google products. It would take some effort. Of course, maybe you got to switch over your Gmail to something new. And on the topic of email, email is inherently insecure. So you know, it's not a perfect thing. You shouldn't share anything in email that you think you're going to get arrested for later. But there are better versions, there's surely better emails than just Gmail. And I will say again, this is not a judging anybody. This is just my own experience. I've seen a lot of amazing activists, activists and different arenas, people organizing awesome events and doing things and doing so much good work. And they're doing the whole thing on Gmail, they're doing the whole thing on Google Drives. You know, I can't tell you the amount of events that I've got invited to where the contract or the communication is on a Google Drive. And again, I do my best not to be like, hey, shame you this and that, but say, hey, here's an alternative. Do you know your entire team, like we host an event in Mexico called the People's Reset. All of our stuff is done through Crypto Pad, it's done through open source alternative tools. There's simple things like that that you could start doing now. And again it does take a little bit of a learning curve. It will take some transition. But if your barrier to entry is, oh, I don't know, Derek, that sounds really hard. I'm going to have to switch my Gmail contacts over. Well then maybe you really don't desire to be in line with your values and principles. Because for me, that's what this ultimately comes down to. It's not about running away from their systems or things like that. Obviously there are things we don't want to participate in. But like for example, with getting the land, one of the biggest critic I'll hear from people like, two main things. For one, there's the doomers who are like, you really think they're going to let you grow your own food or get your own land? Have you ever heard of Waco? They're just going to come kill you. And I always say, look, in the realm of infinite possibilities, anything's possible. But how long is that going to take? 2 years, 5 years, 10 years and maybe Never. So I shouldn't do anything because there's a fear of what may happen. I'd rather just focus on building the life that I want. And that's the other thing. This isn't running away. Think about this as living a life that is more in line with your values and principles. And to me, that's what matters more than anything. I want to be as in line in our imperfect world as possible. Again, imperfect world. So there's going to be caveats, there's going to be challenges and struggles, but why not at least strive to be as close and in line with your values and principles as possible and to not support immoral systems? We understand voting with our dollar. We'll apply that idea across the board. Not just I won't shop at McDonald's, I won't buy Monsanto, but think about that when all these different areas of your life, whether it's education, health care, whether it's technology, money, etc. Again, imperfect systems. So there are difficulties to cross here, but why not at least strive to go in that direction? And even if you never get to the full on implementation, completely free from the system, living as in line as humanly possible, you're going to get somewhere better than you are now. You know, maybe many people out there, even with the best intentions right now, have their money and bank of America, Chase, Chase Bank, Chase bank helped Jeffrey Epstein launder his money, money that he, you know, used for his victims. Bank of America and other banks robbed the American people and people around the world in 2008. Why would we continue to participate in those systems? Why would we continue to give them our time, our money and our energy, Right? So I try to take that ethic and that idea and apply it across the board as much as possible. And there are a lot of things you can do that don't have to involve getting you thrown in a cage and that don't have to take a lot of money. I mean some of the things I just briefly mentioned here, you don't have to spend a dime, do those things, right? Like you just have to make the effort and in that, that search, you're going to find if you actually do care. What I've come to see, unfortunately for a lot of people, liberty, liberation, it's an abstract, I said nice idea, that feels good philosophically, but when it comes to the real work to get there or to do it, some people don't actually want to do it. So, you know, that's a challenge and a conversation for you to have with yourself and to decide how far you want to go. I like to consider myself an extremist out on the edge, you know, trying things out and then sharing what works and sharing best practices.

Well, I think this really speaks to the digital trap that we have sort of slowly walked into over the years. I mean, what you said a few minutes back was so telling. When you're talking about COVID and coming out of COVID about how the more things normalize, quote, unquote, the less desire people have for community, where. Which is such an eerie statement, but it's so true. Like, in a way, I feel like we've drifted so far from what normalcy actually is, which is a desire for community. I mean, we are social beings, but we've drifted so far from that that to even take a step back towards that seems almost too difficult an idea to process for some people. I mean, example, we should address the elephant in the room. We're streaming to YouTube right now. If we didn't, we'd have a fraction of the audience that we have right now. And so we've gotten to a place where what would SEEM Perhaps dystopian 20 years ago is the norm now. It seems so inescapable now that it seems radical to suggest we should even restore a sense of normalcy that we took for granted. Did you know, 20, 30 years ago. Does that make sense?

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, and. And to your point about YouTube, I mean, this is, again, this is. This is the. The time where we have to, as individuals and as communities make those decisions. Like you said, if you chose to not use YouTube, which is obviously a Google product, you lose a good chunk. If probably not the majority of your audience. I'm in the same boat, you know, but I was censored by YouTube from 2020 to 2025. They turned me off and then all of a sudden randomly gave back. And I sat with myself for a while thinking about that. Like, okay, I've survived without them for five years. I definitely lost a big chunk of my audience because, as you know, even the. The most ardent, you know, supporters, if you disappeared off YouTube today, they might not go looking for you. They might not go following, you know, are you on the other platforms? Because I've been on bit shoot since 2015. I've been on Odyssey, you know, since all these other platforms. And I'm grateful for them and I will continue to use and support them, and I'm grateful to everybody who does watch these, my content on there. But I can't deny I get Way more views on Facebook and YouTube and these other places. And I wish it wasn't that way, but I tried for years to get people to leave. They're not leaving. So in order for me. And then, you know, you could argue this is just my justification, but I tried to make a kind of analysis of like, all right, is it better to just push myself into the corner and not be able to influence people, or can I swallow my pride a little bit and keep participating in that system to some degree so that I can in the hopes of trying to move people towards better solutions? And that's kind of where I'm at. Right. I mean, this is what I was saying is there's no. We're in an imperfect world. There's no. I try not to, you know, hold judgments against other people and instead just do what feels right for me and then invite other people to do what works for them. But, yeah, it's, it's a challenge. But you also made a great point that it seems so out of the norm for us to get connected and, and to, to build community because we have gotten so used to the digital tools. So, you know, grateful, thankful for the digital tools and for what they've allowed me to do in my life. My, my, my journalism wouldn't exist, my ability to pay my bills wouldn't work without the digital tools at the moment. But I don't want to continue to put my entire life into that and, and hope that it's just going to last forever, because I don't think it will last forever. I think people like us will continue to be some silenced. And as things get more aggressive and as the technocratic control gets all pervasive, it will be difficult for people like us to continue to broadcast and reach people. So there needs to be another way. And this is, you know, my colleague Whitney Webb, she's working on a physical magazine. I still think that there's a place, despite the fact that local newspapers are dying everywhere and independent newspapers have died over the last decade. Plus, I still think there's a place for physical. Whether it's in person events like I'm discussing discussing or handing flyers to people or printing out your articles like, there, there's always going to be ways for us to navigate and connect. And so we should use the digital tools to the best of our degree, but we shouldn't rely on them and think that they're going to last forever. At least those of us who are determined to speak truth at all costs.

Yeah, it's funny because, you know, when the topic of Internet censorship comes up, there are a lot of people who say, well, you know these guys, companies who are setting their community guidelines, they're private companies, they're at liberty to do that. YouTube is not a public square. Twitter, Facebook, they are not the public square, they're private companies. If you want free speech, what do you do? You could go into the public square and hand out pamphlets. So talking about physical magazines, right? And the counter to that is, well, if we stand on a street corner and pass out magazines, we're going to reach a few dozen people a day if we're lucky. Whereas now we can hit a button and go live to thousands of people, people at once. And so there's a great trade off there. But it seems to me like using that physical public square as an example of where your free speech is really meaningful in its purest form, it seems to me like for all of the good that the Internet has done, it seems to have really made us less free in ways that we really did not anticipate or realize until it was too late. Late. What's your opinion on that? Because that's kind of a big question. The Internet, the advent of the Internet presented all these possibilities and it fulfills amazing possibilities beyond what we could have imagined 30 years ago. But ultimately, do you think it's made us more or less free?

I think that's a great question. And just by the way, brother, I'll probably have to leave in the next 10 minutes or so.

Sure, yeah, no, this is the last question. Yeah, this is my last question, but

I, I think that this is an important discussion because so I've, I've been a big fan of like the Cypher punks and the early, you know, people in the, on the, the, the chat rooms and the forums in the early, early Internet in the 90s, you know, who were predicting and hoping. These are the, the group of basically, basically digital anarchists and that believe that technology would free humanity. Obviously they were concerned that it could turn into a dystopia as well. And you know, the, we still haven't come to the conclusion on that. It's definitely not the utopia believed. And even the Internet itself, it's so many false promises, right? Because the original idea of the Internet was something that was very decentralized, was something that was very distributed and there are people who are working on these projects and again, I try to support these people. There's the Quartal team, there's ifpf, ps, pfs, something like that. There's different People who are working on decentralizing the Internet and truly making it where. Where you don't have to go through, you know, telecommunications companies to get access, where you don't have to go through the DNS name servers. And a lot of people who don't understand the Internet infrastructure don't realize that there are companies out there who, there's institutions, international institutions who decide what websites get approved. And most of them do get approved. But the point is they can take you down if they choose to. We've seen that in different cases, right? So the Internet is way more centralized than we'd want to believe, even to the point of the undersea cables, that much of the Internet lives on, that Edward Snowden revealed that there was, was traffic being intercepted through that. Like there's so many different points of centralization that have failed to live up to the Internet as this truly decentralized space where anybody could pop up a website. Anybody, you know, we have that. Sure, you can make a website, but you're going through a centralized company, through an isp, et cetera, et cetera. When the real vision was closer to what many people talk about now in terms of mesh networks having these central, these decentralized nodes where you're running essentially your own server, your own node and everything you do is hosted on your, your device or you know, your own servers. Whereas now everything we do is it's a private company with their servers. Everything we're doing right now, all your, you know, this stream is running through Google servers, etc. So the vision and the hope for the Internet definitely has not been fulfilled yet. And it's questionable as to whether it ever will be because of the direction it appears we're going is, does not appear to be decentralization and anonymous and open and all these sort of stuff. It's, it's getting more closed loops, more digital cul de sacs. You know, Apple's a great example of that and these other companies that want to keep you in their kind of digital containers. So yeah, I mean it's a tool that we have been able to use. The so called awakening of the last 15, 16 years wouldn't have existed without the Internet. Some of the first viral videos on YouTube were so called conspiracy documentaries and things that got people questioning even if they weren't all facts, actual or you know, all that credible. Just the fact that the Internet in the beginning, YouTube at the beginning was this just wild west of people sharing all kinds of ideas and theories. And the best case scenario, people are able to use their critical thinking skills, decide what's real, decide what's, you know, not debunk the, the bad stuff and the good stuff rises to the top. That is not what we've seen. We've seen bad information rise up and I mean not in the sense of what the state says about misinformation and disinformation like during COVID but true misinformation. I actually just posted a little rant on social media this morning about why I don't consider myself a so called conspiracy theorist, a part of that space. Because so many people in the age of the Internet just believe any random thing. And yes, it's important to question everything and it's important to question narratives that are being fed to us, but it's also important to practice critical thinking skills and to question and avoid logical fallacies and things like that. So we haven't necessarily seen the best, smartest, brightest information rise to the top. We've seen social media companies and algorithms in my view inflate the bad stuff and, and kind of push it up to the top. And so there's so many questions about how this is all going to play out and it's a, it's a minefield out there, honestly. I mean I feel like it's even I'm 41 myself. So I remember like the, you know, MySpace in the early days of the Internet and pre algorithms and stuff. But I think about my six nieces and nephews who are 15 and under and how the Internet that they're used to is just the Internet that we are very concerned about. And that's all normal to them. You know, algorithms controlling what you see and AI and all this stuff, that's their normal reality. So I do worry about how that is going to affect not only us, but the coming generations after us. And that's its relation to shift to the truth. And one other point I'll make is that back in 2017 the Bilderberg Group met and you know, they don't release the details of everything they discuss, but they'll usually kind of release a pretty vague, broad list of topics that they kind of covered like Middle east and things like that. But in the 2017, it was either 2017 or 2018 meeting, you can find it on their website. One of the topics they discussed was the post truth world. And I believe that these crazies who believe that they are the, the architects and the technocrats of our world and future, that they either have knowingly allowed this to happen or they knew that it would happen that we would get to this so called post truth world which is only going to get more difficult with AI and deep fakes and things like that. And because they know that it serves their purposes to have a public so freaking confused they don't know up from down, you know, can't tell facts from lies. And I see this a lot on my accounts and my pages where people will just repeat claims and when I sort of inquire like do you have any evidence or anything? I can look further into this and they have nothing. It's just a feeling. It's just I heard a rumor or something like that. Right. And I think that's a very dangerous space to be. So I do worry about the future of humanity and what it's going to look like when people can't do basic research and when they can't tell truth from lies and how that that plays out from us. I do have real concerns about that. But you know, ultimately I'm going to keep doing what I can and I know you will as well to use the Internet as a tool and a force for good. And really we have to take some personal responsibility too. We have to, you know, be willing to step away from the screens every now and then. We have to practice critical thinking. We have to do our best not to just repeat things that we hear and just share headlines without doing deep research. And you know, we're all playing a role in this. This too ultimately.

Alrighty. Well, the tour is called the Activation tour for tickets activation tour.org that's where you go for more information. Hopefully Derek is coming to a city near you and you can get out there and see him. Derek, do you have anything else to plug before we go anywhere else people could find you?

I think that's it. I mean I mentioned the Pyramid of Power if anybody's interested in that. The book or watch the the documentary series the pyramid of power.netactivation tour.org Again how to opt out of the Technocratic State is available to download for free at the conscious resistance.com how to the 45 day exit build challenge the conscious resistance.com exb find me on social media. Let's connect. Let's keep working to build a better world. Thank you so much for having me on, brother.

Beautiful. Thank you. Derek, it was great to meet you. I've been a fan of your work for a long time so it's great to finally have you on and hopefully I'll come down to New York City when you're in town and I'll go to that door. Stop. But let's do it, man.

I'd love to connect face to face.

Absolutely, man. Thanks so much. It was great to meet you. Thanks so much for joining. Please clap.