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Welcome to the Future Review.
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Today's guest is Eric Prince, a former Navy SEAL, a current entrepreneur, and, of course, the founder and former CEO of Blackwater, the world's largest and most effective private military firm, well known for never losing a protectee.
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Eric led the company until 2009, eventually selling it a year later.
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Following his exit, he moved to the UAE, where he played a key role in helping the government develop a team to successfully tackle piracy in the Gulf of Aden.
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Now, if you're curious about that chapter of his career, there's a fascinating documentary on YouTube called the Somalian Project, so we've linked to it in the show notes.
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Eric didn't stop there.
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He went on to establish Frontier Services Group, a security, aviation and logistics company focused on Africa, supporting China's Belt and Road initiative in regions where relying on local security forces wasn't viable.
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Currently, Eric is the co-founder of Unplugged, a company born out of his concern over the duopoly that Google and Apple have created in the communication space.
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Unplugged offers a phone that looks like your typical Android or iPhone, well, I think, but without an advertising ID, meaning that you're not being tracked, monitored, and listened to at all times.
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Eric views Unplugged as a critical response to the invasive data collection practices that have led to government agencies accessing what many assumed was private information, an issue that's even more relevant in the light of the USA's Pfizer Act and its implications for electronic surveillance.
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Now, Eric is a man who can speak on a wide range of topics, from the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the current situation in the Middle East to the complexities of China-US relations.
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And if you want to dive deeper into those subjects, check out the show notes for links to Eric's podcast, Offleash, and his appearances on the Sean Ryan show.
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But in our conversation today, Eric of course brings his deep knowledge of warfare, past, present, and future, to the table, and we do discuss the evolving nature of modern warfare.
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But first, we kick off with a conversation about the information environment and the ongoing battle between user privacy rights and surveillance capitalism.
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I'm Eric Prince.
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I was born and bred American.
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I'm a father and I'm a veteran.
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But at my core, I'm an entrepreneur and a capitalist.
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We're building Unplugged to turn the tide on technology that exploits the individual, extracts our personal data and secrets, and harvests our information for the benefit of big tech or big government.
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Unplugged is a company founded to restore basic human rights in the digital age.
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We're empowering you to embrace freedom and to be fearless in a fast-changing world.
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It's our hardware, our own operating system, store, messenger, VPN, and antivirus.
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It's called Unplugged.
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The Unplugged phone is built with a kill switch, an independent operating system called Libertos, and a proprietary privacy center.
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It's basically a firewall.
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It features a kill switch which separates your battery from the electronics.
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So that off means off.
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You can completely disconnect the location tracking with our firewall.
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Our Unplugg Messenger includes a dump feature.
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If you're under threat, you can enter a code and it wipes it.
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Your data is gone for good.
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Our messenger generates a new encryption key for every call.
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An important mission needs to be matched with superior quality.
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The unplugged phone's camera, speed, storage, and chipset rival premium big tech devices.
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Because this phone is real, coming to you soon.
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You can order a phone today at unplug.com.
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Eric Prince, it's amazing to have you on this podcast.
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Thank you very much for joining us today.
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Nice to be here.
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Now, I wanted to talk to you about loads of things.
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Obviously, there are loads of things to talk about with you, but particularly and recently, this phone unplugged.
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I've seen you talk about it in a few places.
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And I just wondered if you could explain what it does, why it's different, and why you think it's important that people have this.
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Well, thanks.
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I've been around the communications, security, signals, intelligence space for 20 some years.
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And as I saw what is first the indispensable counterterrorism tool, ultimately always seems to point any any new gadget ultimately gets used by the government against its own people.
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And so I saw the amount of data collection and surveillance, and I would even say, start to say abuse of a lot of those tools.
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And then especially after the 2020 election in the United States, seeing how big tech, the hegemony they had in controlling and altering speech from uh what could be searched, what would be available in the app stores, uh throwing people off the platforms.
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And I just said to a friend of mine, we're never gonna change big tech by complaining about it, we have to compete.
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And so we set about to build a completely independent phone platform outside of the Google or Apple universe, because it's really a duopoly, and we did it.
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And because we had a tech team together already that had built some highly secure phones, they just said, look, we're gonna we're gonna do this again, but we're gonna make high-grade government encrypted privacy phone available for everyday carry and uh make it available to everyone at an affordable price.
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And so now, three odd years later, we've done it.
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And uh this is actually one.
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Uh we uh last year, last fall, we did 500 units as kind of our beta test and moved those around the world, and then uh we took delivery of the first 10,000 production units in May, and they've been selling very well on a day-to-day basis ever since.
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The difference about it is, is our phone doesn't have an advertising ID.
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What really happened, well, immediately after 9-11 was advertising companies started using their data to try to help the government find a needle in a stack of needles.
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How do you find other people that have the same profile as the 1991 hijackers still amongst the American population to see secondary and tertiary cells?
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And that really became digitized, and it became a hunt for all this big data, and then in like 2009 or 10, and you when you have the advent of smartphones, you have all the apps that are starting to be made.
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Uh, they're free.
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Free.
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And if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer, you're the product.
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And so these apps started harvesting everything you do, where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse, every interaction was logged by those apps and sent back.
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You know, collected on you.
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And if you wonder why there's such a massive growth of server farms and data centers around the DC and major hubs of the internet, it's because that amount of data that's collected and analyzed.
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And so our phone doesn't do that.
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So your Apple or your Android running Google mobile services is has a like a 30-digit advertising ID which tracks your unique device.
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And if I have two or three places that I know Tracy has been in the last couple of months, I can track your device everywhere you've gone for the last five years.
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It's shocking the amount of data that's collected.
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So this phone doesn't do that.
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Whereas the default of your regular phone is to collect and export all your data.
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This one actually has a firewall, which walls off any attempts to collect on your data.
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It has its own secure messenger, it even has its own kill switch, which separates the battery from the electronic.
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So that off actually means off.
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So if you switch your iPhone off or you switch it to airplane mode, no way, it's still emitting.
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It's still pinging towers, it's still pinging Wi-Fi, leaving a digital breadcrumb trail wherever you've gone.
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So we just took what people expect in terms of a phone that can have good uh it can navigate, it can communicate, communicate securely, great camera, great storage, but its default is data privacy and your sovereignty over your own information versus everything being leaked everywhere.
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And what really made this even more relevant is in America, there's something called the FISA extension, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
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Keyword being foreign.
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But it's now been everything domestic.
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And so they went from the feds would come before Congress and be uh were sick of getting yelled at by Congress for buying all this consumer data.
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And now with this last law that Congress just passed, they they actually said that any federal agent for any reason can go to a private company that has any of your data, any of your banking, navigation, surfing, email, whatever, and to turn it over without a warrant and without even probable cause.
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So the constitutional protections of the Fourth Amendment and really First Amendment, they're really trying to throw out the window.
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So this is sadly more relevant now than ever.
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And it's it's really the only thing that's standing in the way between you and the federal government is running over any any modicum of privacy that remains.
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So what are your terms of service then on Unplugged?
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Because presumably then, as you say, if an agency came along with with or without, I don't know, you can tell me, a warrant, are they going to be able to take that device and look at any data?
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Or is that what the kill switch is about?
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Well, so i i if they came to us, if they came to unplug and say, give us everything they have on user XYZ.
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And when they registered, they don't have to register in a true name or anything else.
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They can we they can register with an email or a bogus email if they want some kind of uh email if they're trying to recover their encryption keys.
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If they don't, we have nothing.
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Nothing on them.
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And someone can say, give us the messenger traffic for that phone.
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Again, we have nothing because this phone with our secure messenger, if I'm calling you with it, it generates a new encryption key between my device and your device every time.
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If you call on Signal, right, it's a very popular secure messaging app, it answers right away.
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Why?
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Because you're using the same old encryption key you got when you downloaded the app.
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This generates a new key every time.
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So it takes like five to seven seconds to connect.
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This also has a dump switch where if someone says, uh Tracy, give me your phone, I'm here to inspect it, and you say sure, officer, and you enter an unlock code called the ClearPin Data Code, it wipes the phone.
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Amazing.
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So what is actually on it?
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You've got antivirus, messenger, trying to think what what else?
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What are the apps on it?
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Ah, so we have a we have a very capable VPN, which I can tell you literally works globally.
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You can surf unfettered in Tiananmen Square, Red Square, or in Martyr Square in Tehran.
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It goes through all those firewalls, which is super relevant.
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Obviously, if you're connecting to a Wi-Fi or connecting anywhere, that's a great point of vulnerability.
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Now, we have an app store with thousands of apps, everything from you know banking, travel, sports, airline apps, navigation, games, or Twitter or Facebook, or a lot of those, but it has it looks somewhat different because it doesn't have the personalized experience because we prevent the apps from collecting all your data as you're going.
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But you it look the idea is to be in the world, but not of the world, where you control how much of your stuff is permitted out versus the the standard iPhone Google mobile services experience on Android is a thousand percent leakage of everything, whether you want to or not.
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Even if you're selecting no, like even Apple, it's really it's it's shocking.
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Some of their advertising, they say, yeah, Apple is all about privacy.
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No, they even say in their in their in their um company public statements, basically their ad revenue is starting to grow a lot because they're sharing that consumer data.
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Um yeah, because Tim Cook told us that privacy is a human right, right?
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It is with Unplugged.
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So when you turn your phone off, if you've got an Android or an iPhone, people think the phone's turned off, but it's not, is it?
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That's correct.
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What's it doing and what can it access?
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So what we noticed, we did a test with our device and the other guy's devices, and every night the other two guys' devices send about a 50 megabyte burst of data around 2 to 3 a.m.
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And what is that?
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That's the phone calling home with your comings and goings and a data update about what that device has done that day.
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And it's shocking.
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Ours doesn't do that, but uh and and so even if you turn it in airplane mode, the phone will do it itself once it's connects to a network, any kind of network again.
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Yeah, and also I think people think they're kind of safe on something like WhatsApp.
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But I've had conversations with people on WhatsApp, and I've like talked about, let's say, a brand or something like that that I would never have spoken about in my everyday conversation.
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And then, I'm not kidding you, two hours later I saw an ad for that brand on my Instagram account.
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Well, exactly.
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So there's a reason Mark Zuckerberg paid$20 billion for WhatsApp.
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When he bought it, it was like 12 people in an office that was like three months late on rent, but they paid$20 billion for it.
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Why?
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Because every call, message, picture, voice note, anything that passes through WhatsApp is analyzed by their algorithm.
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They might say it's end-to-end encrypted, but when it passes through their server, their algorithm analyzes everything and it's listening.
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And I I learned that um that became really clear to me early on when I managed to, I was using WhatsApp and I had pissed off my wife, and she sent me a scorcher of a message on WhatsApp.
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And for the next two months, she was getting nonstop advertising from divorce lawyers and from match.com.
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So again, I've had I've had people that I've talked to about our phone, and they say, Yes, I was talking to my wife, not texting, not mess check talking, the phone just sit sitting on the nightstand, talking to my wife about needing a new mattress.
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And the next day we're getting advertising for a new mattress.
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That's shocking.
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So if the if if if your device is listening to you in the bedroom, imagine what else it's listening to.
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Oh, totally.
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It's why my TV wants to update itself every single day, because I always turn the voice recognition off, knowing sort of deep down, it's not really gonna make any difference, but it makes me feel like I might be in control of something.
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I turn it off every single day, and every time I do that, it asks to update, do a software update, and I know it's just kind of you know changing the permissions.
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Maybe someone needs to make a fair day bag for a TV.
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I could do without my TV anyway.
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So on Unplugged then, is it audited?
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How do you prove that there are no trackers, that there's no software uploaded?
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So fair question.
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Um, we because we knew people would ask this, and we asked it, I we asked ourselves this all the time.
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Uh obviously, we've gone through audits with Price Waterhouse, you know, like a like a big three accounting firm with their IT audit the same way they do that.
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We've gone through a lot of third-party penetration testing, trying to hack our device.
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And then we've also done a bounty program at the DEF CON Hacker Conference.
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So a year, two years ago, we put out a bounty, anyone that could hack our messenger or our operating system.
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And uh the bounty is still there and it's more valuable because it was in Bitcoin.
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Oh, yes, interesting.
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We might get onto Bitcoin.
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Um, so my question then is really, if you've got unplugged, which sounds fantastic, but how useful is it in a world where your fridge, your coffee machine, as I just said, your TV, all of that stuff, your ring doorbell, everything is listening to you, your car, every other device, could they be tracking and locating, listening to you, in future, probably even persuading you?
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Even that kind of happens a little bit now, just not just monitoring, but persuading you.
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In a world of all of that, how big a difference can unplugged make?
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Or what do you see its role being in the sort of information environment, if you like?
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Sure, you're right, because the the Internet of Things has made collection of that data pervasive.
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I mean, even the the air pressure sensors in your tires can be collected.
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Uh it's shocking.
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Uh, but what does a phone become?
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It's become the center of all your communications and banking and travel and everything needs.
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It's become the PC that you just carry around in your pocket and you do most of it from there.
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And so if you can start from there with a secure data privacy focused device, it's the first step and a long journey.
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It's not the end all be all, but if the device that has all your contacts, all your messages, everything else is 100% leaky, then you've got a problem.
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It's almost like it could be an unplugged world, couldn't it?
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Like unplugged is an ingredient that goes into lots of other things, maybe.
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Well, and the so you know we're a uh we're a small company growing quickly.
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We will never be public.
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It will always we are we are here to be an antidote to a I would say an overreaching, pervasively invasive digital surveillance state.
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Yeah, so we'll do we'll do some um laptop, we'll do other variants of this device with the same theme, but uh crawl walk run.
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Because, you know, three years ago we just woke up and said, Yeah, we're gonna take on not one but two multi-trillion dollar companies.
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What, because we can?
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I don't know.
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It was uh maybe it was a a dumb thing, but uh we're doing okay so far.
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Not exactly, I think it's phenomenal.
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And actually, I was gonna ask you who has built this for you, because I think you've got some quite amazing people in the team, haven't you, on the tech side?
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Yes, our uh our manufacturer is uh is a Singaporean company based in Indonesia.
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So all our supply chain is really selected to not come from China.
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The camera is Japanese, the uh Sony, the memory is from Korea, the chipset is from uh MediaTech from Taiwan Semiconductor.
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What really made this possible in the first place was a guy named Iran Karpin, who is the original guy that developed Pegasus.
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But Pegasus is an offensive phone hacking virus, but he developed Pegasus uh before it became offensive to do remote phone service.
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If you have a problem with your phone, the phone company could send you a text, click on it, they take over your phone remotely, fix your problem, and then leave.
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When it became offensive, he left and he went and built a smartphone, a very secure, government-grade, encrypted, secure phone.
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And then after he did that, he went on to do uh pacemakers, the device that is implanted in your heart, and obviously the phone that controls that, you really don't want that hackable because you could literally shut somebody off with a mouse click.
00:20:04.160 --> 00:20:12.559
In fact, when when Dick Cheney was vice president, that was the major security threat the Secret Service was worried about was someone hacking his pacemaker.
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No comment.
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Um yes, that's amazing.
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Does anybody still um use Pegasus?
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I think Latvia were still using it, weren't they?
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Is it still used around the world?
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Uh yes, there's a new version, new variants constantly, zero-click variants and all the rest.
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And so uh again, having a phone, our phone, which is developed by people that really understand controlling those attack surfaces and minimizing it and making it exceedingly difficult for whether it's attacking through the modem or the GPS or the camera or whatever.
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I'm not gonna say it's unhackable, but we want to be in the last one thousandth of one percent of hackable.
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Now, you mentioned about Apple and Google, obviously.
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And we had a conversation before this about where we mentioned um airpods or earphones potentially sort of tracking or monitoring your brainwave data.
00:21:08.559 --> 00:21:32.000
I think most people aren't necessarily aware of all the sort of stuff that is going on beyond just sort of location, environmental data, this whole idea of digital phenotyping, for example, which is basically patient data, treating us like patients, where they use our actual data from the phone, lots of the vectors that you've just explained, but also a lot of sort of environmental data.
00:21:32.240 --> 00:21:38.960
And they work out where we are in sort of not only in our physical form, but also mentally.
00:21:39.119 --> 00:21:49.119
So Apple said a couple of years ago that they'd like to start diagnosing whether an Apple user, an iPhone user has, for example, depression, something like that.
00:21:49.279 --> 00:21:57.359
And I find that so nightmarish and so scary because I know where that potentially goes, which is that you're depressed or you're this or you're that.
00:21:57.519 --> 00:21:59.759
They're diagnosing you, and before you know it, you're off in.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:04.079
An internment camp, or you shouldn't be reading this media because it's having an effect.
00:22:04.559 --> 00:22:05.200
Dangerous for your health.
00:22:05.440 --> 00:22:06.240
Exactly, exactly.
00:22:06.319 --> 00:22:07.440
It's dangerous for your health.
00:22:07.599 --> 00:22:13.839
And so I don't know if you have uh anything to say about that, but I I think there are much wider sort of ramifications.
00:22:14.160 --> 00:22:15.519
I have plenty to say about that.
00:22:15.759 --> 00:22:20.160
George Orwell wrote a book about that in 1948 called 1984.
00:22:20.720 --> 00:22:27.920
And the current trajectory of big tech and big government is very much taking us down that road.
00:22:28.079 --> 00:22:30.400
And it's really it's really frightening.
00:22:30.640 --> 00:22:44.079
And I was not comfortable with having to communicate on a device with that was basically that the app store was controlled by some 25-year-old super wokester from Silicon Valley.
00:22:44.319 --> 00:22:45.839
I wasn't going to live like that.
00:22:46.000 --> 00:22:48.640
And so that's why we did an unplugged phone.
00:22:48.720 --> 00:22:55.200
And people can can like me or hate me or not like my politics, but I'm kind of a free speech absolutist.
00:22:55.440 --> 00:23:10.240
And I think that it is essential for a free society to have a rigorous debate of the facts and ideas, and let's just look at what is working for society and what's not.
00:23:10.559 --> 00:23:20.240
And uh man, the the desire for uh big media, big tech, big government to cover up certain facts is truly alarming.
00:23:20.400 --> 00:23:34.480
And then I you know, uh even during COVID, I think you saw the the statist, almost fascist default that some people resort to, and that's again, that is the antithesis of a free society.
00:23:35.440 --> 00:23:39.200
Have you been watching the events of the UK over here?
00:23:39.359 --> 00:23:46.960
Mark Mark Stein always said uh described the UK, or has recently anyway, the UK where everything is policed except for crime.
00:23:47.200 --> 00:23:54.319
I don't know if you know, we have this counter disinformation unit, which was let's say deployed during COVID.
00:23:54.559 --> 00:24:24.319
And um, not only did they surveil MPs, journalists, lobby groups, think tanks, human rights organisations to quite obviously accrue information on them, monitor them, but they also started to engage in what I would say is disinformation, where they started to put out letters or started to correspond about these people that were under their surveillance, and effectively to me of them, in a sense, because they weren't using the facts from the official narrative.
00:24:24.559 --> 00:24:31.039
That counter disinformation unit, although it's got a new name now, has been redeployed now in the wake of those riots.
00:24:31.200 --> 00:24:40.640
So to me, it seems like it would be like a perfect opportunity to get something like unplugged, so that um somebody wasn't necessarily surveilling you all the time.
00:24:41.039 --> 00:24:41.759
We're coming.
00:24:42.000 --> 00:25:04.000
So I can tell you firsthand, I was just in London last week that uh my unplugged phone worked perfectly, roamed perfectly, and uh our next production batch will be CE register, CE compliant as well, so we can sell regularly, and I'm I'm sure there's enough Britons that are ready to take back communications, privacy, and security that will uh will do well there.
00:25:04.319 --> 00:25:05.440
Actually, that's a point.
00:25:05.519 --> 00:25:09.200
Um it's on ATT, and I think is it T-Mobile at the moment?
00:25:09.519 --> 00:25:10.960
ATT and T-Mobile, yes.
00:25:11.279 --> 00:25:14.799
Have you got on with the telcos in terms of you know privacy protection?
00:25:14.880 --> 00:25:22.960
Because you know, years ago, and I've worked in telco, I worked in telco a long, long time ago, but for a lot of different telcos, you know, there were some problems there in terms of privacy.
00:25:23.359 --> 00:25:23.759
Yes.
00:25:23.920 --> 00:25:29.839
So here's the thing you know, even an unplugged phone is a device that has to connect to a tower.
00:25:30.079 --> 00:25:39.279
So in terms of geolocating, yes, you you can with an actual warrant, you can geolocate the phone as should be.
00:25:39.519 --> 00:25:54.960
However, between a good VPN and a good secure messenger and not leaking an ad ID and all the other stuff, it makes all the other peripheral tools that are used and abused by big tech and big big government, we prevent that.
00:25:55.279 --> 00:25:55.599
Okay.
00:25:55.759 --> 00:25:58.319
Now, one question for you about what's coming.
00:25:58.559 --> 00:26:09.039
Have you started to look or think about AI or large language models or the introduction of kind of, if you like, synthetic data and where that might fit into the unplugged world?
00:26:09.680 --> 00:26:24.400
We have started to look at putting quantum encryption on the device so we can ensure the security of two-way communications in terms of AI and AI's ability to falsify or fabricate data.
00:26:24.559 --> 00:26:25.839
I'm not an expert on that.
00:26:26.240 --> 00:26:43.119
I was reading a paper not long ago from Stanford and Google, our friends at Google, which is around using lots of the data that they've acquired through generative AI, putting these generative AI agents in sort of a sandbox and then watching what they did.
00:26:43.279 --> 00:26:46.160
So, for example, they're using them as human proxies.
00:26:46.319 --> 00:26:53.440
So they're they're using all of the data that's been collected in these generative AI models, putting them together, watching the behaviour.
00:26:53.599 --> 00:27:01.440
For example, they sent out a party invite, if you like, to these generative AI agents, and they only sent them to some, but all of the agents turned up to the party.
00:27:01.519 --> 00:27:04.000
That's that's kind of like the experiment they did for the paper.
00:27:04.160 --> 00:27:12.720
And it just shows how much information is going to get transmitted from AI agents to AI agents, not even just for sort of man to machine and machine back to man.
00:27:12.799 --> 00:27:14.799
It's actually from machine to machine now.
00:27:14.960 --> 00:27:17.359
So it's going to be a very interesting landscape.
00:27:17.839 --> 00:27:29.359
Well, last fall there was an article and it said that the average kid in America, by the time they reach the age of 13, has had 72 million data points collected on them by big tech.
00:27:29.599 --> 00:27:31.119
72 million.
00:27:31.599 --> 00:27:37.680
Every kind of color, activity preference, schedule, all those interactions.
00:27:38.000 --> 00:27:49.680
And so, yes, if you think about that amount of data sloshing around about that kid and the ability for AI to grab onto it, yeah, I I prefer to not be digitally groomed, as that trajectory seems to predict.
00:27:50.160 --> 00:27:52.240
No, this is all about security, isn't it, Eric?
00:27:52.400 --> 00:27:57.759
And security is a massive trend at the moment, whether it's national security or personal security.
00:27:58.000 --> 00:28:09.519
Everybody is feeling rather unsafe and safety and security, but particularly security, has risen as a consumer need, a personal need, a user need in these markets.
00:28:09.759 --> 00:28:12.720
Where do you think the whole idea of security is going?
00:28:12.880 --> 00:28:17.599
Well, let me ask you what you think is going on in the world and where you think we might be heading next.
00:28:17.759 --> 00:28:23.920
I know it's a big question, and there's lots of flashpoints in the world, but what are your insights around it?
00:28:24.319 --> 00:28:36.960
So I think I think you can see the global war on terror launched by the US and Friend after uh 9-11 has proven to be a pretty significant failure.
00:28:37.200 --> 00:28:41.599
Yeah, there's not been a major attack inside the United States again since then.
00:28:41.839 --> 00:28:47.519
However, the likelihood of that trend continuing is very, very low at this point.
00:28:47.759 --> 00:29:08.079
The amount of terror sanctuaries after 20 years of presence in Afghanistan to take it from the Taliban to only turn it back over to the Taliban, and unrepentant, even more aggressive and trained Taliban, and Al-Qaeda and ISIS variants, large parts of North Africa controlled by them as well.
00:29:08.319 --> 00:29:18.400
And so the the diffusion of technology and the empowerment of small groups is now more potent than ever.
00:29:19.039 --> 00:29:38.640
And so you're seeing a systemic breakdown of deterrence and credibility of the United States, where you have the Houthis, a relatively unsophisticated group of tribesmen from the interior of Yemen, have now shut off the Baba Mandab.
00:29:39.119 --> 00:29:41.839
And, you know, like the first day I was in the U.S.
00:29:41.839 --> 00:29:43.119
Navy, they trained us.
00:29:43.359 --> 00:29:44.480
The mission of the U.S.
00:29:44.480 --> 00:29:50.400
Navy is power projection and sea control, and to make sure those choke points stay open.
00:29:50.559 --> 00:30:08.960
And the Houthis, now with facilitated by Iranian weapons, long-range drones and missiles and ballistic missiles, have shut that raw that waterway off, uh forcing all the traffic coming from Asia to go around uh South Africa.
00:30:09.200 --> 00:30:10.559
It's a major disruption.
00:30:10.720 --> 00:30:26.079
I don't think consumers have even fully felt it yet, but that's a tip of the iceberg of the kind of uh of slow unravel of the last 70, 80 years that that has been very, very beneficial for global trade and and affluence.
00:30:26.160 --> 00:30:46.960
I think you're gonna have a significant breakdown and have much more regional economies because there's a there's gonna be a lot more bad lands out there because of the superpowering, uh I would say the the amplification of power of different small groups that can wage problems over extended different distances.
00:30:47.200 --> 00:31:01.920
And and now when you think about warfare, the acceleration of warfare, think of it this way: when Genghis Khan put his band of men together, at that point people were walking into battle.
00:31:02.240 --> 00:31:05.680
So you'd walk into battle at three or four miles an hour.
00:31:06.000 --> 00:31:08.640
Genghis Khan figured out stirrups.
00:31:09.039 --> 00:31:13.680
So now you could have a guy ride a horse, but now he could stand up in the stirrups, and what could he do?
00:31:13.920 --> 00:31:16.160
He could shoot a bow and arrow fast.
00:31:16.559 --> 00:31:26.799
So they would ride around the enemy formation, showering them with arrows, and so now instead of moving twenty miles in a day, they could move a hundred miles in a day.
00:31:27.119 --> 00:31:34.079
And so it allowed them to really dominate massive areas that has not been replicated since.
00:31:34.400 --> 00:31:44.640
The the the FPV drone, small racing drone with the goggles, with a with a beer can size explosive charge on it.
00:31:44.880 --> 00:31:55.359
Now a guy can drive that remotely 10, 15, 20, 30 miles into a target and destroy it for a few thousand dollars.
00:31:55.680 --> 00:31:57.759
It's a massive step change in war.
00:31:57.839 --> 00:32:08.799
It's like going from spears and longbows, think Henry V, Agincourt, to to not just a wheel lock musket, but to a bolt-action rifle.
00:32:08.960 --> 00:32:25.039
It is a massive step change in empowering small groups, and so the the hundreds of billions of dollars of old school military equipment is now just kind of inventory because it could be very easily destroyed by that FPV type drone.
00:32:25.359 --> 00:32:33.200
So it's gonna be a few years until the defensive technologies really catch up, but the uh advantages to the small unit attacker right now.
00:32:33.680 --> 00:32:37.920
How personalized are some of those sort of remote weapons, if you like?
00:32:38.079 --> 00:32:44.079
And I think I've heard you talk about them being able to sort of personally identify a target, that kind of precision.
00:32:44.799 --> 00:32:45.119
Sure.
00:32:45.279 --> 00:32:57.839
If you have the ad ID on someone and you have a pretty good idea of where they are, and you can send a drone that can scan and look for a specific face or even for an ad ID and drive into that person.
00:32:58.160 --> 00:32:58.319
Yeah.
00:32:58.480 --> 00:33:02.000
It's a bit like if you did you um see the slaughterbots video.
00:33:02.319 --> 00:33:05.839
It's a it's a it's it's it's like uh, you know, what was the last Terminator movie?
00:33:06.079 --> 00:33:13.440
So Terminator 6 will be holy shit, there's there's just drones out hunting you because you launched a mean tweet or something.
00:33:13.839 --> 00:33:15.920
But what's this how can anybody escape from that?
00:33:16.000 --> 00:33:23.680
Because it does feel like the civilians are now i involved in this, and that actually we could be in a sort of sort of world civil war, if you like.
00:33:23.839 --> 00:33:27.200
So it's not a war that's fought over there somewhere that's far away.
00:33:27.279 --> 00:33:36.160
It's actually sort of on your doorstep, kind of in your neighborhood, and that you are some kind of digitally anyway, you're sort of now involved.
00:33:36.799 --> 00:33:56.240
Uh look, elections have consequences, and you need to elect people that actually believe in liberty and small government and finding a way for free people to solve those problems in a small and efficient paradigm.
00:33:56.559 --> 00:34:10.800
The the the paradigm of this of the statist, the Fabian socialist, you know, the the the socialist mentality is if we just put the right people in charge, everything will be fine because they know they know better.
00:34:11.039 --> 00:34:12.559
No, they don't know better.
00:34:12.719 --> 00:34:26.000
And and it's usually the the smallest innovators figuring it out at the micro level and and let that scale because they can compete well, is still the best way to organize the society, I think.
00:34:26.159 --> 00:34:32.480
Look, in America, we have a big problem with the federal government because it's become massively too large.
00:34:32.719 --> 00:34:55.440
It's been it's like an obese triathlete that it can it could just because of the dollar being the world's reserve currency and they can print trillion dollar deficits a year, they could just feed themselves way too much in every way on defense spending, on security spending, on welfare spending, on regulatory stupidity.
00:34:55.920 --> 00:34:57.039
It's really bad.
00:34:57.360 --> 00:35:20.320
Our state and local governments, by and large, are pretty good because they have to live within their budget, they can't just print money, and there's an internal competitive system that certainly people vote with their feet inside of America, and during COVID and some of the old the craziness, a lot of people moved to different states that govern differently.
00:35:20.559 --> 00:35:22.000
Think about Florida.
00:35:29.440 --> 00:35:33.679
Gillam was a total leftist and it was only a 30,000 vote margin.
00:35:34.639 --> 00:35:48.079
So elections really do have consequences because I can't even imagine what Florida would look like if Gillam had been the governor from 2018 to 2022, embracing every kind of COVID madness.
00:35:48.559 --> 00:35:49.519
People are fleeing.
00:35:49.599 --> 00:35:53.199
Oh, look, the Tories have done a shit job for the last 15, 20 years.
00:35:53.440 --> 00:35:55.199
They deserve to get trounced.
00:35:55.599 --> 00:36:03.119
They've just kind of gone with the Tories have been going downhill on one on one ski instead of two, on immigration, on a lot of that stuff.
00:36:03.280 --> 00:36:06.320
So again, elections have uh they do have consequences.
00:36:06.639 --> 00:36:11.039
You can see it, there's well-run big cities or well-run cities in America.
00:36:11.280 --> 00:36:16.239
There's some very well-run states, but there's some big states that are horribly run and people are leaving.
00:36:16.320 --> 00:36:19.039
And they're, you know, California is one of them.
00:36:19.360 --> 00:36:24.960
I think people, probably in the the states, have taken back more control at a local level, though.
00:36:25.119 --> 00:36:31.679
I mean, they've got involved with their schools or their the voting at elections and all these sorts of things.
00:36:31.760 --> 00:36:47.519
And I think there's a uh either a paralysis or an apathy, I'm not sure what it is in the UK, that um people haven't quite woken up yet, that they've got to be actively involved if they want to change things, because it isn't going to change unless they actually do participate in it and make the change happen.
00:36:47.679 --> 00:36:49.360
I think America's much better at that.
00:36:49.519 --> 00:36:58.800
And it may be partly to do with your political system, but I think it's um it's probably something to do with sort of just the psychology, the mentality of the nation, actually.
00:36:59.119 --> 00:37:00.000
Well, you know what?
00:37:00.239 --> 00:37:05.360
America was based on uh the traditions of individual liberty that came from Britain.
00:37:05.599 --> 00:37:13.920
The Magna Carta visited Washington a couple years ago, and I went and visited, and it was just it was magnificent.
00:37:14.000 --> 00:37:26.239
I almost wanted to genuflect because the the idea of a document that defines a citizen's role versus the state and the idea of limiting government, it's just amazing.
00:37:26.480 --> 00:37:33.199
And I've been around the world many, many times, I've been to some great countries, I've been to a lot of really bad ones.
00:37:33.840 --> 00:37:53.119
The idea of limited government, of rights embodied, uh of documents that that explicitly impair uh and limit the right of the state to impress on certain things on an individual is that's a it's unique and that is that is well worth defending.
00:37:53.440 --> 00:38:01.760
I mean, maybe we can take this from that, that uh King John was particularly bad, and if he hadn't have been such a so awful as a king, we wouldn't have had the Magna Carta.
00:38:02.079 --> 00:38:05.199
So maybe we can take that that away with us.
00:38:05.679 --> 00:38:06.400
Well, you know what?
00:38:06.480 --> 00:38:09.679
I there's I guess there's still a saying that I that I use today that still applies.
00:38:09.920 --> 00:38:13.760
You know, if you give an asshole a gun and a badge, you get a bigger asshole.
00:38:13.920 --> 00:38:15.840
Yeah, well, that that's that's very true.
00:38:16.079 --> 00:38:17.760
Eric, um, thank you for this.
00:38:17.920 --> 00:38:18.559
It's been brilliant.
00:38:18.639 --> 00:38:28.400
Um, your final thoughts on the future of surveillance and unplugged and everything else in terms of personal protection of our own private data.
00:38:28.800 --> 00:38:40.239
Look, the big tech guys, the four or five biggest, especially Google and Apple, are two of the largest companies in the world because they are sitting on top of the surveillance capitalism heap.
00:38:40.719 --> 00:38:45.840
And their entire business is based on collecting and exporting your data.
00:38:46.159 --> 00:38:49.280
If people are sick of that, some people are not.
00:38:49.440 --> 00:38:53.199
Some people are fine being plugged into the matrix.
00:38:54.239 --> 00:39:16.079
But if you are serious about your privacy and freedom of thought, and your freedom of speech and religion, and your freedom of assembly and data sovereignty, then uh unplugged or companies like it are worth uh looking into because I am I am not one gonna ever gonna bend the knee on that stuff.
00:39:16.400 --> 00:39:19.039
So, where do people go to find out more of Unplugged?
00:39:19.119 --> 00:39:21.760
Is it a a global website or is it different per country?
00:39:22.079 --> 00:39:30.719
It's unplugged.com, and uh we've now started delivering to Canada, and I would say by October we'll be delivering in the UK and Europe.
00:39:31.199 --> 00:39:33.519
Canadian truckers really need this.
00:39:34.000 --> 00:39:35.679
Dang right, they do.
00:39:36.320 --> 00:39:42.239
Look, so we even have a dating app on the uh in our store for people that are unvaccinated.
00:39:42.559 --> 00:39:53.840
Oh, do yes, so uh again, we are the we are the natural repository for for free people, free speech, health freedom, etc.
00:39:54.480 --> 00:40:03.920
There's so there's a there's quite a few odd ones that are not in the the Apple or Google stores because again, we are free speech absolutists on that stuff.
00:40:04.320 --> 00:40:11.760
I do really worry about that idea that you'll be denied access to a service literally on the basis of your political beliefs.
00:40:11.920 --> 00:40:16.800
We saw it from PayPal, we saw it with the Canadian truckers and GoFundMe, and we're gonna see it again.
00:40:16.960 --> 00:40:17.599
I know we are.
00:40:17.679 --> 00:40:20.239
We've seen it with debanking in the UK very specifically.
00:40:20.559 --> 00:40:25.599
Yeah, and well, and it's um again, we still live in a free society that's worth defending.
00:40:25.840 --> 00:40:26.400
All right, brilliant.
00:40:26.480 --> 00:40:27.440
We'll leave it there, Eric.
00:40:27.679 --> 00:40:28.639
Thank you very much for your time.
00:40:28.800 --> 00:40:30.719
Fantastic to speak to you, and good luck with Unplugged.
00:40:30.960 --> 00:40:32.239
Thank you likewise.
00:40:37.679 --> 00:40:41.119
Thank you for listening to the Future of You, hosted by me, Tracy Follows.
00:40:41.199 --> 00:40:45.119
Be sure to check out the show notes for more info about the topics we covered today.
00:40:45.280 --> 00:40:49.840
If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
00:40:50.000 --> 00:40:53.679
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00:40:53.840 --> 00:40:59.599
For more on the future of identity in a digital world, visit futuremade.group slash the future of you.
00:40:59.920 --> 00:41:04.800
And to explore the future of everything else, head over to future made.group.
00:41:04.880 --> 00:41:08.400
The Future of View podcast is produced by Big Tent Media.
00:00:19.760 --> 00:00:21.600
Welcome to the Future Review.
00:00:21.760 --> 00:00:36.159
Today's guest is Eric Prince, a former Navy SEAL, a current entrepreneur, and, of course, the founder and former CEO of Blackwater, the world's largest and most effective private military firm, well known for never losing a protectee.
00:00:36.399 --> 00:00:41.119
Eric led the company until 2009, eventually selling it a year later.
00:00:41.359 --> 00:00:50.320
Following his exit, he moved to the UAE, where he played a key role in helping the government develop a team to successfully tackle piracy in the Gulf of Aden.
00:00:50.479 --> 00:00:58.079
Now, if you're curious about that chapter of his career, there's a fascinating documentary on YouTube called the Somalian Project, so we've linked to it in the show notes.
00:00:58.320 --> 00:00:59.600
Eric didn't stop there.
00:00:59.759 --> 00:01:12.480
He went on to establish Frontier Services Group, a security, aviation and logistics company focused on Africa, supporting China's Belt and Road initiative in regions where relying on local security forces wasn't viable.
00:01:12.799 --> 00:01:23.519
Currently, Eric is the co-founder of Unplugged, a company born out of his concern over the duopoly that Google and Apple have created in the communication space.
00:01:23.840 --> 00:01:36.000
Unplugged offers a phone that looks like your typical Android or iPhone, well, I think, but without an advertising ID, meaning that you're not being tracked, monitored, and listened to at all times.
00:01:36.239 --> 00:01:54.560
Eric views Unplugged as a critical response to the invasive data collection practices that have led to government agencies accessing what many assumed was private information, an issue that's even more relevant in the light of the USA's Pfizer Act and its implications for electronic surveillance.
00:01:54.799 --> 00:02:05.760
Now, Eric is a man who can speak on a wide range of topics, from the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the current situation in the Middle East to the complexities of China-US relations.
00:02:05.920 --> 00:02:14.639
And if you want to dive deeper into those subjects, check out the show notes for links to Eric's podcast, Offleash, and his appearances on the Sean Ryan show.
00:02:14.879 --> 00:02:25.520
But in our conversation today, Eric of course brings his deep knowledge of warfare, past, present, and future, to the table, and we do discuss the evolving nature of modern warfare.
00:02:25.759 --> 00:02:36.400
But first, we kick off with a conversation about the information environment and the ongoing battle between user privacy rights and surveillance capitalism.
00:02:41.120 --> 00:02:42.479
I'm Eric Prince.
00:02:42.639 --> 00:02:44.000
I was born and bred American.
00:02:44.080 --> 00:02:45.520
I'm a father and I'm a veteran.
00:02:45.599 --> 00:02:48.400
But at my core, I'm an entrepreneur and a capitalist.
00:02:48.560 --> 00:02:58.479
We're building Unplugged to turn the tide on technology that exploits the individual, extracts our personal data and secrets, and harvests our information for the benefit of big tech or big government.
00:02:58.719 --> 00:03:02.800
Unplugged is a company founded to restore basic human rights in the digital age.
00:03:02.960 --> 00:03:07.439
We're empowering you to embrace freedom and to be fearless in a fast-changing world.
00:03:07.599 --> 00:03:13.360
It's our hardware, our own operating system, store, messenger, VPN, and antivirus.
00:03:13.439 --> 00:03:14.719
It's called Unplugged.
00:03:14.879 --> 00:03:21.759
The Unplugged phone is built with a kill switch, an independent operating system called Libertos, and a proprietary privacy center.
00:03:21.840 --> 00:03:22.960
It's basically a firewall.
00:03:23.120 --> 00:03:26.719
It features a kill switch which separates your battery from the electronics.
00:03:26.800 --> 00:03:28.560
So that off means off.
00:03:28.719 --> 00:03:32.159
You can completely disconnect the location tracking with our firewall.
00:03:32.319 --> 00:03:34.400
Our Unplugg Messenger includes a dump feature.
00:03:34.479 --> 00:03:37.360
If you're under threat, you can enter a code and it wipes it.
00:03:37.439 --> 00:03:39.199
Your data is gone for good.
00:03:39.360 --> 00:03:43.120
Our messenger generates a new encryption key for every call.
00:03:43.280 --> 00:03:46.080
An important mission needs to be matched with superior quality.
00:03:46.240 --> 00:03:52.240
The unplugged phone's camera, speed, storage, and chipset rival premium big tech devices.
00:03:52.400 --> 00:03:55.039
Because this phone is real, coming to you soon.
00:03:55.280 --> 00:03:58.240
You can order a phone today at unplug.com.
00:04:01.039 --> 00:04:04.719
Eric Prince, it's amazing to have you on this podcast.
00:04:04.960 --> 00:04:06.800
Thank you very much for joining us today.
00:04:07.199 --> 00:04:08.240
Nice to be here.
00:04:08.560 --> 00:04:11.520
Now, I wanted to talk to you about loads of things.
00:04:12.159 --> 00:04:19.920
Obviously, there are loads of things to talk about with you, but particularly and recently, this phone unplugged.
00:04:20.079 --> 00:04:22.959
I've seen you talk about it in a few places.
00:04:23.199 --> 00:04:30.639
And I just wondered if you could explain what it does, why it's different, and why you think it's important that people have this.
00:04:31.120 --> 00:04:31.920
Well, thanks.
00:04:32.160 --> 00:04:39.360
I've been around the communications, security, signals, intelligence space for 20 some years.
00:04:39.759 --> 00:04:52.639
And as I saw what is first the indispensable counterterrorism tool, ultimately always seems to point any any new gadget ultimately gets used by the government against its own people.
00:04:52.879 --> 00:05:01.680
And so I saw the amount of data collection and surveillance, and I would even say, start to say abuse of a lot of those tools.
00:05:01.839 --> 00:05:18.160
And then especially after the 2020 election in the United States, seeing how big tech, the hegemony they had in controlling and altering speech from uh what could be searched, what would be available in the app stores, uh throwing people off the platforms.
00:05:18.240 --> 00:05:23.839
And I just said to a friend of mine, we're never gonna change big tech by complaining about it, we have to compete.
00:05:24.079 --> 00:05:34.000
And so we set about to build a completely independent phone platform outside of the Google or Apple universe, because it's really a duopoly, and we did it.
00:05:34.079 --> 00:05:51.279
And because we had a tech team together already that had built some highly secure phones, they just said, look, we're gonna we're gonna do this again, but we're gonna make high-grade government encrypted privacy phone available for everyday carry and uh make it available to everyone at an affordable price.
00:05:51.439 --> 00:05:54.560
And so now, three odd years later, we've done it.
00:05:54.800 --> 00:05:56.639
And uh this is actually one.
00:05:56.800 --> 00:06:12.079
Uh we uh last year, last fall, we did 500 units as kind of our beta test and moved those around the world, and then uh we took delivery of the first 10,000 production units in May, and they've been selling very well on a day-to-day basis ever since.
00:06:12.240 --> 00:06:17.279
The difference about it is, is our phone doesn't have an advertising ID.
00:06:17.600 --> 00:06:29.759
What really happened, well, immediately after 9-11 was advertising companies started using their data to try to help the government find a needle in a stack of needles.
00:06:30.000 --> 00:06:41.439
How do you find other people that have the same profile as the 1991 hijackers still amongst the American population to see secondary and tertiary cells?
00:06:41.680 --> 00:06:56.879
And that really became digitized, and it became a hunt for all this big data, and then in like 2009 or 10, and you when you have the advent of smartphones, you have all the apps that are starting to be made.
00:06:57.040 --> 00:06:58.399
Uh, they're free.
00:06:58.720 --> 00:06:59.199
Free.
00:06:59.920 --> 00:07:04.079
And if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer, you're the product.
00:07:04.399 --> 00:07:17.279
And so these apps started harvesting everything you do, where you go, what you buy, who you call, what you browse, every interaction was logged by those apps and sent back.
00:07:17.920 --> 00:07:19.759
You know, collected on you.
00:07:20.000 --> 00:07:31.040
And if you wonder why there's such a massive growth of server farms and data centers around the DC and major hubs of the internet, it's because that amount of data that's collected and analyzed.
00:07:31.199 --> 00:07:33.519
And so our phone doesn't do that.
00:07:33.680 --> 00:07:44.319
So your Apple or your Android running Google mobile services is has a like a 30-digit advertising ID which tracks your unique device.
00:07:45.120 --> 00:07:57.759
And if I have two or three places that I know Tracy has been in the last couple of months, I can track your device everywhere you've gone for the last five years.
00:07:58.079 --> 00:08:00.399
It's shocking the amount of data that's collected.
00:08:00.560 --> 00:08:02.480
So this phone doesn't do that.
00:08:02.720 --> 00:08:08.160
Whereas the default of your regular phone is to collect and export all your data.
00:08:08.399 --> 00:08:14.800
This one actually has a firewall, which walls off any attempts to collect on your data.
00:08:14.959 --> 00:08:20.560
It has its own secure messenger, it even has its own kill switch, which separates the battery from the electronic.
00:08:20.639 --> 00:08:22.240
So that off actually means off.
00:08:22.399 --> 00:08:26.879
So if you switch your iPhone off or you switch it to airplane mode, no way, it's still emitting.
00:08:26.959 --> 00:08:32.799
It's still pinging towers, it's still pinging Wi-Fi, leaving a digital breadcrumb trail wherever you've gone.
00:08:32.960 --> 00:08:53.440
So we just took what people expect in terms of a phone that can have good uh it can navigate, it can communicate, communicate securely, great camera, great storage, but its default is data privacy and your sovereignty over your own information versus everything being leaked everywhere.
00:08:53.679 --> 00:09:02.879
And what really made this even more relevant is in America, there's something called the FISA extension, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
00:09:03.279 --> 00:09:04.799
Keyword being foreign.
00:09:05.440 --> 00:09:07.840
But it's now been everything domestic.
00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:16.960
And so they went from the feds would come before Congress and be uh were sick of getting yelled at by Congress for buying all this consumer data.
00:09:17.279 --> 00:09:40.399
And now with this last law that Congress just passed, they they actually said that any federal agent for any reason can go to a private company that has any of your data, any of your banking, navigation, surfing, email, whatever, and to turn it over without a warrant and without even probable cause.
00:09:40.720 --> 00:09:46.960
So the constitutional protections of the Fourth Amendment and really First Amendment, they're really trying to throw out the window.
00:09:47.039 --> 00:09:51.120
So this is sadly more relevant now than ever.
00:09:51.279 --> 00:09:58.960
And it's it's really the only thing that's standing in the way between you and the federal government is running over any any modicum of privacy that remains.
00:09:59.360 --> 00:10:02.399
So what are your terms of service then on Unplugged?
00:10:02.639 --> 00:10:14.000
Because presumably then, as you say, if an agency came along with with or without, I don't know, you can tell me, a warrant, are they going to be able to take that device and look at any data?
00:10:14.080 --> 00:10:15.840
Or is that what the kill switch is about?
00:10:16.320 --> 00:10:23.039
Well, so i i if they came to us, if they came to unplug and say, give us everything they have on user XYZ.
00:10:23.919 --> 00:10:29.519
And when they registered, they don't have to register in a true name or anything else.
00:10:29.759 --> 00:10:37.440
They can we they can register with an email or a bogus email if they want some kind of uh email if they're trying to recover their encryption keys.
00:10:37.600 --> 00:10:39.919
If they don't, we have nothing.
00:10:40.159 --> 00:10:41.039
Nothing on them.
00:10:41.279 --> 00:10:44.879
And someone can say, give us the messenger traffic for that phone.
00:10:45.120 --> 00:10:56.720
Again, we have nothing because this phone with our secure messenger, if I'm calling you with it, it generates a new encryption key between my device and your device every time.
00:10:57.120 --> 00:11:03.200
If you call on Signal, right, it's a very popular secure messaging app, it answers right away.
00:11:03.360 --> 00:11:03.919
Why?
00:11:04.159 --> 00:11:08.080
Because you're using the same old encryption key you got when you downloaded the app.
00:11:08.320 --> 00:11:10.000
This generates a new key every time.
00:11:10.080 --> 00:11:12.960
So it takes like five to seven seconds to connect.
00:11:13.679 --> 00:11:24.799
This also has a dump switch where if someone says, uh Tracy, give me your phone, I'm here to inspect it, and you say sure, officer, and you enter an unlock code called the ClearPin Data Code, it wipes the phone.
00:11:25.120 --> 00:11:25.919
Amazing.
00:11:26.240 --> 00:11:28.480
So what is actually on it?
00:11:28.559 --> 00:11:32.399
You've got antivirus, messenger, trying to think what what else?
00:11:32.480 --> 00:11:33.519
What are the apps on it?
00:11:33.840 --> 00:11:39.759
Ah, so we have a we have a very capable VPN, which I can tell you literally works globally.
00:11:40.159 --> 00:11:46.480
You can surf unfettered in Tiananmen Square, Red Square, or in Martyr Square in Tehran.
00:11:46.799 --> 00:11:50.320
It goes through all those firewalls, which is super relevant.
00:11:50.399 --> 00:11:55.440
Obviously, if you're connecting to a Wi-Fi or connecting anywhere, that's a great point of vulnerability.
00:11:55.600 --> 00:12:17.440
Now, we have an app store with thousands of apps, everything from you know banking, travel, sports, airline apps, navigation, games, or Twitter or Facebook, or a lot of those, but it has it looks somewhat different because it doesn't have the personalized experience because we prevent the apps from collecting all your data as you're going.
00:12:17.519 --> 00:12:36.159
But you it look the idea is to be in the world, but not of the world, where you control how much of your stuff is permitted out versus the the standard iPhone Google mobile services experience on Android is a thousand percent leakage of everything, whether you want to or not.
00:12:36.240 --> 00:12:39.679
Even if you're selecting no, like even Apple, it's really it's it's shocking.
00:12:39.840 --> 00:12:42.799
Some of their advertising, they say, yeah, Apple is all about privacy.
00:12:43.039 --> 00:12:54.480
No, they even say in their in their in their um company public statements, basically their ad revenue is starting to grow a lot because they're sharing that consumer data.
00:12:54.799 --> 00:12:58.960
Um yeah, because Tim Cook told us that privacy is a human right, right?
00:12:59.279 --> 00:13:00.480
It is with Unplugged.
00:13:01.200 --> 00:13:07.120
So when you turn your phone off, if you've got an Android or an iPhone, people think the phone's turned off, but it's not, is it?
00:13:07.440 --> 00:13:08.000
That's correct.
00:13:08.320 --> 00:13:10.320
What's it doing and what can it access?
00:13:10.720 --> 00:13:24.399
So what we noticed, we did a test with our device and the other guy's devices, and every night the other two guys' devices send about a 50 megabyte burst of data around 2 to 3 a.m.
00:13:24.879 --> 00:13:25.759
And what is that?
00:13:25.919 --> 00:13:33.200
That's the phone calling home with your comings and goings and a data update about what that device has done that day.
00:13:33.360 --> 00:13:34.240
And it's shocking.
00:13:34.399 --> 00:13:42.799
Ours doesn't do that, but uh and and so even if you turn it in airplane mode, the phone will do it itself once it's connects to a network, any kind of network again.
00:13:43.200 --> 00:13:49.120
Yeah, and also I think people think they're kind of safe on something like WhatsApp.
00:13:49.279 --> 00:13:58.720
But I've had conversations with people on WhatsApp, and I've like talked about, let's say, a brand or something like that that I would never have spoken about in my everyday conversation.
00:13:58.879 --> 00:14:04.240
And then, I'm not kidding you, two hours later I saw an ad for that brand on my Instagram account.
00:14:04.639 --> 00:14:05.440
Well, exactly.
00:14:05.600 --> 00:14:10.080
So there's a reason Mark Zuckerberg paid$20 billion for WhatsApp.
00:14:10.559 --> 00:14:19.919
When he bought it, it was like 12 people in an office that was like three months late on rent, but they paid$20 billion for it.
00:14:20.000 --> 00:14:20.320
Why?
00:14:20.480 --> 00:14:29.279
Because every call, message, picture, voice note, anything that passes through WhatsApp is analyzed by their algorithm.
00:14:29.840 --> 00:14:37.519
They might say it's end-to-end encrypted, but when it passes through their server, their algorithm analyzes everything and it's listening.
00:14:37.600 --> 00:14:48.639
And I I learned that um that became really clear to me early on when I managed to, I was using WhatsApp and I had pissed off my wife, and she sent me a scorcher of a message on WhatsApp.
00:14:49.279 --> 00:14:54.799
And for the next two months, she was getting nonstop advertising from divorce lawyers and from match.com.
00:14:55.120 --> 00:15:11.279
So again, I've had I've had people that I've talked to about our phone, and they say, Yes, I was talking to my wife, not texting, not mess check talking, the phone just sit sitting on the nightstand, talking to my wife about needing a new mattress.
00:15:11.600 --> 00:15:16.559
And the next day we're getting advertising for a new mattress.
00:15:16.960 --> 00:15:17.840
That's shocking.
00:15:18.000 --> 00:15:22.000
So if the if if if your device is listening to you in the bedroom, imagine what else it's listening to.
00:15:22.320 --> 00:15:23.039
Oh, totally.
00:15:23.200 --> 00:15:35.360
It's why my TV wants to update itself every single day, because I always turn the voice recognition off, knowing sort of deep down, it's not really gonna make any difference, but it makes me feel like I might be in control of something.
00:15:35.519 --> 00:15:44.000
I turn it off every single day, and every time I do that, it asks to update, do a software update, and I know it's just kind of you know changing the permissions.
00:15:44.320 --> 00:15:47.279
Maybe someone needs to make a fair day bag for a TV.
00:15:48.399 --> 00:15:50.559
I could do without my TV anyway.
00:15:50.799 --> 00:15:53.519
So on Unplugged then, is it audited?
00:15:53.679 --> 00:15:58.000
How do you prove that there are no trackers, that there's no software uploaded?
00:15:58.480 --> 00:15:59.600
So fair question.
00:15:59.759 --> 00:16:04.559
Um, we because we knew people would ask this, and we asked it, I we asked ourselves this all the time.
00:16:04.799 --> 00:16:13.440
Uh obviously, we've gone through audits with Price Waterhouse, you know, like a like a big three accounting firm with their IT audit the same way they do that.
00:16:13.600 --> 00:16:18.399
We've gone through a lot of third-party penetration testing, trying to hack our device.
00:16:18.559 --> 00:16:22.639
And then we've also done a bounty program at the DEF CON Hacker Conference.
00:16:22.960 --> 00:16:29.840
So a year, two years ago, we put out a bounty, anyone that could hack our messenger or our operating system.
00:16:30.240 --> 00:16:34.960
And uh the bounty is still there and it's more valuable because it was in Bitcoin.
00:16:35.360 --> 00:16:36.559
Oh, yes, interesting.
00:16:36.720 --> 00:16:38.159
We might get onto Bitcoin.
00:16:38.320 --> 00:17:03.360
Um, so my question then is really, if you've got unplugged, which sounds fantastic, but how useful is it in a world where your fridge, your coffee machine, as I just said, your TV, all of that stuff, your ring doorbell, everything is listening to you, your car, every other device, could they be tracking and locating, listening to you, in future, probably even persuading you?
00:17:03.519 --> 00:17:07.759
Even that kind of happens a little bit now, just not just monitoring, but persuading you.
00:17:07.920 --> 00:17:11.519
In a world of all of that, how big a difference can unplugged make?
00:17:11.599 --> 00:17:16.160
Or what do you see its role being in the sort of information environment, if you like?
00:17:16.640 --> 00:17:22.400
Sure, you're right, because the the Internet of Things has made collection of that data pervasive.
00:17:22.559 --> 00:17:29.119
I mean, even the the air pressure sensors in your tires can be collected.
00:17:29.359 --> 00:17:31.279
Uh it's shocking.
00:17:31.519 --> 00:17:34.079
Uh, but what does a phone become?
00:17:34.319 --> 00:17:40.799
It's become the center of all your communications and banking and travel and everything needs.
00:17:40.960 --> 00:17:46.319
It's become the PC that you just carry around in your pocket and you do most of it from there.
00:17:46.720 --> 00:17:55.359
And so if you can start from there with a secure data privacy focused device, it's the first step and a long journey.
00:17:55.519 --> 00:18:05.599
It's not the end all be all, but if the device that has all your contacts, all your messages, everything else is 100% leaky, then you've got a problem.
00:18:06.000 --> 00:18:08.240
It's almost like it could be an unplugged world, couldn't it?
00:18:08.319 --> 00:18:11.680
Like unplugged is an ingredient that goes into lots of other things, maybe.
00:18:12.079 --> 00:18:16.720
Well, and the so you know we're a uh we're a small company growing quickly.
00:18:16.880 --> 00:18:18.400
We will never be public.
00:18:18.799 --> 00:18:30.480
It will always we are we are here to be an antidote to a I would say an overreaching, pervasively invasive digital surveillance state.
00:18:30.799 --> 00:18:39.440
Yeah, so we'll do we'll do some um laptop, we'll do other variants of this device with the same theme, but uh crawl walk run.
00:18:39.839 --> 00:18:46.559
Because, you know, three years ago we just woke up and said, Yeah, we're gonna take on not one but two multi-trillion dollar companies.
00:18:46.799 --> 00:18:47.839
What, because we can?
00:18:48.000 --> 00:18:48.400
I don't know.
00:18:48.480 --> 00:18:52.480
It was uh maybe it was a a dumb thing, but uh we're doing okay so far.
00:18:52.799 --> 00:18:54.400
Not exactly, I think it's phenomenal.
00:18:54.559 --> 00:19:01.519
And actually, I was gonna ask you who has built this for you, because I think you've got some quite amazing people in the team, haven't you, on the tech side?
00:19:01.920 --> 00:19:07.119
Yes, our uh our manufacturer is uh is a Singaporean company based in Indonesia.
00:19:07.279 --> 00:19:10.880
So all our supply chain is really selected to not come from China.
00:19:11.200 --> 00:19:20.559
The camera is Japanese, the uh Sony, the memory is from Korea, the chipset is from uh MediaTech from Taiwan Semiconductor.
00:19:20.799 --> 00:19:26.640
What really made this possible in the first place was a guy named Iran Karpin, who is the original guy that developed Pegasus.
00:19:26.880 --> 00:19:35.279
But Pegasus is an offensive phone hacking virus, but he developed Pegasus uh before it became offensive to do remote phone service.
00:19:35.440 --> 00:19:44.240
If you have a problem with your phone, the phone company could send you a text, click on it, they take over your phone remotely, fix your problem, and then leave.
00:19:44.480 --> 00:19:52.000
When it became offensive, he left and he went and built a smartphone, a very secure, government-grade, encrypted, secure phone.
00:19:52.319 --> 00:20:03.920
And then after he did that, he went on to do uh pacemakers, the device that is implanted in your heart, and obviously the phone that controls that, you really don't want that hackable because you could literally shut somebody off with a mouse click.
00:20:04.160 --> 00:20:12.559
In fact, when when Dick Cheney was vice president, that was the major security threat the Secret Service was worried about was someone hacking his pacemaker.
00:20:14.640 --> 00:20:15.759
No comment.
00:20:16.079 --> 00:20:17.839
Um yes, that's amazing.
00:20:18.000 --> 00:20:20.240
Does anybody still um use Pegasus?
00:20:20.400 --> 00:20:22.400
I think Latvia were still using it, weren't they?
00:20:22.480 --> 00:20:24.000
Is it still used around the world?
00:20:24.559 --> 00:20:29.759
Uh yes, there's a new version, new variants constantly, zero-click variants and all the rest.
00:20:29.839 --> 00:20:47.920
And so uh again, having a phone, our phone, which is developed by people that really understand controlling those attack surfaces and minimizing it and making it exceedingly difficult for whether it's attacking through the modem or the GPS or the camera or whatever.
00:20:48.079 --> 00:20:53.759
I'm not gonna say it's unhackable, but we want to be in the last one thousandth of one percent of hackable.
00:20:54.799 --> 00:20:57.759
Now, you mentioned about Apple and Google, obviously.
00:20:58.000 --> 00:21:08.079
And we had a conversation before this about where we mentioned um airpods or earphones potentially sort of tracking or monitoring your brainwave data.
00:21:08.559 --> 00:21:32.000
I think most people aren't necessarily aware of all the sort of stuff that is going on beyond just sort of location, environmental data, this whole idea of digital phenotyping, for example, which is basically patient data, treating us like patients, where they use our actual data from the phone, lots of the vectors that you've just explained, but also a lot of sort of environmental data.
00:21:32.240 --> 00:21:38.960
And they work out where we are in sort of not only in our physical form, but also mentally.
00:21:39.119 --> 00:21:49.119
So Apple said a couple of years ago that they'd like to start diagnosing whether an Apple user, an iPhone user has, for example, depression, something like that.
00:21:49.279 --> 00:21:57.359
And I find that so nightmarish and so scary because I know where that potentially goes, which is that you're depressed or you're this or you're that.
00:21:57.519 --> 00:21:59.759
They're diagnosing you, and before you know it, you're off in.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:04.079
An internment camp, or you shouldn't be reading this media because it's having an effect.
00:22:04.559 --> 00:22:05.200
Dangerous for your health.
00:22:05.440 --> 00:22:06.240
Exactly, exactly.
00:22:06.319 --> 00:22:07.440
It's dangerous for your health.
00:22:07.599 --> 00:22:13.839
And so I don't know if you have uh anything to say about that, but I I think there are much wider sort of ramifications.
00:22:14.160 --> 00:22:15.519
I have plenty to say about that.
00:22:15.759 --> 00:22:20.160
George Orwell wrote a book about that in 1948 called 1984.
00:22:20.720 --> 00:22:27.920
And the current trajectory of big tech and big government is very much taking us down that road.
00:22:28.079 --> 00:22:30.400
And it's really it's really frightening.
00:22:30.640 --> 00:22:44.079
And I was not comfortable with having to communicate on a device with that was basically that the app store was controlled by some 25-year-old super wokester from Silicon Valley.
00:22:44.319 --> 00:22:45.839
I wasn't going to live like that.
00:22:46.000 --> 00:22:48.640
And so that's why we did an unplugged phone.
00:22:48.720 --> 00:22:55.200
And people can can like me or hate me or not like my politics, but I'm kind of a free speech absolutist.
00:22:55.440 --> 00:23:10.240
And I think that it is essential for a free society to have a rigorous debate of the facts and ideas, and let's just look at what is working for society and what's not.
00:23:10.559 --> 00:23:20.240
And uh man, the the desire for uh big media, big tech, big government to cover up certain facts is truly alarming.
00:23:20.400 --> 00:23:34.480
And then I you know, uh even during COVID, I think you saw the the statist, almost fascist default that some people resort to, and that's again, that is the antithesis of a free society.
00:23:35.440 --> 00:23:39.200
Have you been watching the events of the UK over here?
00:23:39.359 --> 00:23:46.960
Mark Mark Stein always said uh described the UK, or has recently anyway, the UK where everything is policed except for crime.
00:23:47.200 --> 00:23:54.319
I don't know if you know, we have this counter disinformation unit, which was let's say deployed during COVID.
00:23:54.559 --> 00:24:24.319
And um, not only did they surveil MPs, journalists, lobby groups, think tanks, human rights organisations to quite obviously accrue information on them, monitor them, but they also started to engage in what I would say is disinformation, where they started to put out letters or started to correspond about these people that were under their surveillance, and effectively to me of them, in a sense, because they weren't using the facts from the official narrative.
00:24:24.559 --> 00:24:31.039
That counter disinformation unit, although it's got a new name now, has been redeployed now in the wake of those riots.
00:24:31.200 --> 00:24:40.640
So to me, it seems like it would be like a perfect opportunity to get something like unplugged, so that um somebody wasn't necessarily surveilling you all the time.
00:24:41.039 --> 00:24:41.759
We're coming.
00:24:42.000 --> 00:25:04.000
So I can tell you firsthand, I was just in London last week that uh my unplugged phone worked perfectly, roamed perfectly, and uh our next production batch will be CE register, CE compliant as well, so we can sell regularly, and I'm I'm sure there's enough Britons that are ready to take back communications, privacy, and security that will uh will do well there.
00:25:04.319 --> 00:25:05.440
Actually, that's a point.
00:25:05.519 --> 00:25:09.200
Um it's on ATT, and I think is it T-Mobile at the moment?
00:25:09.519 --> 00:25:10.960
ATT and T-Mobile, yes.
00:25:11.279 --> 00:25:14.799
Have you got on with the telcos in terms of you know privacy protection?
00:25:14.880 --> 00:25:22.960
Because you know, years ago, and I've worked in telco, I worked in telco a long, long time ago, but for a lot of different telcos, you know, there were some problems there in terms of privacy.
00:25:23.359 --> 00:25:23.759
Yes.
00:25:23.920 --> 00:25:29.839
So here's the thing you know, even an unplugged phone is a device that has to connect to a tower.
00:25:30.079 --> 00:25:39.279
So in terms of geolocating, yes, you you can with an actual warrant, you can geolocate the phone as should be.
00:25:39.519 --> 00:25:54.960
However, between a good VPN and a good secure messenger and not leaking an ad ID and all the other stuff, it makes all the other peripheral tools that are used and abused by big tech and big big government, we prevent that.
00:25:55.279 --> 00:25:55.599
Okay.
00:25:55.759 --> 00:25:58.319
Now, one question for you about what's coming.
00:25:58.559 --> 00:26:09.039
Have you started to look or think about AI or large language models or the introduction of kind of, if you like, synthetic data and where that might fit into the unplugged world?
00:26:09.680 --> 00:26:24.400
We have started to look at putting quantum encryption on the device so we can ensure the security of two-way communications in terms of AI and AI's ability to falsify or fabricate data.
00:26:24.559 --> 00:26:25.839
I'm not an expert on that.
00:26:26.240 --> 00:26:43.119
I was reading a paper not long ago from Stanford and Google, our friends at Google, which is around using lots of the data that they've acquired through generative AI, putting these generative AI agents in sort of a sandbox and then watching what they did.
00:26:43.279 --> 00:26:46.160
So, for example, they're using them as human proxies.
00:26:46.319 --> 00:26:53.440
So they're they're using all of the data that's been collected in these generative AI models, putting them together, watching the behaviour.
00:26:53.599 --> 00:27:01.440
For example, they sent out a party invite, if you like, to these generative AI agents, and they only sent them to some, but all of the agents turned up to the party.
00:27:01.519 --> 00:27:04.000
That's that's kind of like the experiment they did for the paper.
00:27:04.160 --> 00:27:12.720
And it just shows how much information is going to get transmitted from AI agents to AI agents, not even just for sort of man to machine and machine back to man.
00:27:12.799 --> 00:27:14.799
It's actually from machine to machine now.
00:27:14.960 --> 00:27:17.359
So it's going to be a very interesting landscape.
00:27:17.839 --> 00:27:29.359
Well, last fall there was an article and it said that the average kid in America, by the time they reach the age of 13, has had 72 million data points collected on them by big tech.
00:27:29.599 --> 00:27:31.119
72 million.
00:27:31.599 --> 00:27:37.680
Every kind of color, activity preference, schedule, all those interactions.
00:27:38.000 --> 00:27:49.680
And so, yes, if you think about that amount of data sloshing around about that kid and the ability for AI to grab onto it, yeah, I I prefer to not be digitally groomed, as that trajectory seems to predict.
00:27:50.160 --> 00:27:52.240
No, this is all about security, isn't it, Eric?
00:27:52.400 --> 00:27:57.759
And security is a massive trend at the moment, whether it's national security or personal security.
00:27:58.000 --> 00:28:09.519
Everybody is feeling rather unsafe and safety and security, but particularly security, has risen as a consumer need, a personal need, a user need in these markets.
00:28:09.759 --> 00:28:12.720
Where do you think the whole idea of security is going?
00:28:12.880 --> 00:28:17.599
Well, let me ask you what you think is going on in the world and where you think we might be heading next.
00:28:17.759 --> 00:28:23.920
I know it's a big question, and there's lots of flashpoints in the world, but what are your insights around it?
00:28:24.319 --> 00:28:36.960
So I think I think you can see the global war on terror launched by the US and Friend after uh 9-11 has proven to be a pretty significant failure.
00:28:37.200 --> 00:28:41.599
Yeah, there's not been a major attack inside the United States again since then.
00:28:41.839 --> 00:28:47.519
However, the likelihood of that trend continuing is very, very low at this point.
00:28:47.759 --> 00:29:08.079
The amount of terror sanctuaries after 20 years of presence in Afghanistan to take it from the Taliban to only turn it back over to the Taliban, and unrepentant, even more aggressive and trained Taliban, and Al-Qaeda and ISIS variants, large parts of North Africa controlled by them as well.
00:29:08.319 --> 00:29:18.400
And so the the diffusion of technology and the empowerment of small groups is now more potent than ever.
00:29:19.039 --> 00:29:38.640
And so you're seeing a systemic breakdown of deterrence and credibility of the United States, where you have the Houthis, a relatively unsophisticated group of tribesmen from the interior of Yemen, have now shut off the Baba Mandab.
00:29:39.119 --> 00:29:41.839
And, you know, like the first day I was in the U.S.
00:29:41.839 --> 00:29:43.119
Navy, they trained us.
00:29:43.359 --> 00:29:44.480
The mission of the U.S.
00:29:44.480 --> 00:29:50.400
Navy is power projection and sea control, and to make sure those choke points stay open.
00:29:50.559 --> 00:30:08.960
And the Houthis, now with facilitated by Iranian weapons, long-range drones and missiles and ballistic missiles, have shut that raw that waterway off, uh forcing all the traffic coming from Asia to go around uh South Africa.
00:30:09.200 --> 00:30:10.559
It's a major disruption.
00:30:10.720 --> 00:30:26.079
I don't think consumers have even fully felt it yet, but that's a tip of the iceberg of the kind of uh of slow unravel of the last 70, 80 years that that has been very, very beneficial for global trade and and affluence.
00:30:26.160 --> 00:30:46.960
I think you're gonna have a significant breakdown and have much more regional economies because there's a there's gonna be a lot more bad lands out there because of the superpowering, uh I would say the the amplification of power of different small groups that can wage problems over extended different distances.
00:30:47.200 --> 00:31:01.920
And and now when you think about warfare, the acceleration of warfare, think of it this way: when Genghis Khan put his band of men together, at that point people were walking into battle.
00:31:02.240 --> 00:31:05.680
So you'd walk into battle at three or four miles an hour.
00:31:06.000 --> 00:31:08.640
Genghis Khan figured out stirrups.
00:31:09.039 --> 00:31:13.680
So now you could have a guy ride a horse, but now he could stand up in the stirrups, and what could he do?
00:31:13.920 --> 00:31:16.160
He could shoot a bow and arrow fast.
00:31:16.559 --> 00:31:26.799
So they would ride around the enemy formation, showering them with arrows, and so now instead of moving twenty miles in a day, they could move a hundred miles in a day.
00:31:27.119 --> 00:31:34.079
And so it allowed them to really dominate massive areas that has not been replicated since.
00:31:34.400 --> 00:31:44.640
The the the FPV drone, small racing drone with the goggles, with a with a beer can size explosive charge on it.
00:31:44.880 --> 00:31:55.359
Now a guy can drive that remotely 10, 15, 20, 30 miles into a target and destroy it for a few thousand dollars.
00:31:55.680 --> 00:31:57.759
It's a massive step change in war.
00:31:57.839 --> 00:32:08.799
It's like going from spears and longbows, think Henry V, Agincourt, to to not just a wheel lock musket, but to a bolt-action rifle.
00:32:08.960 --> 00:32:25.039
It is a massive step change in empowering small groups, and so the the hundreds of billions of dollars of old school military equipment is now just kind of inventory because it could be very easily destroyed by that FPV type drone.
00:32:25.359 --> 00:32:33.200
So it's gonna be a few years until the defensive technologies really catch up, but the uh advantages to the small unit attacker right now.
00:32:33.680 --> 00:32:37.920
How personalized are some of those sort of remote weapons, if you like?
00:32:38.079 --> 00:32:44.079
And I think I've heard you talk about them being able to sort of personally identify a target, that kind of precision.
00:32:44.799 --> 00:32:45.119
Sure.
00:32:45.279 --> 00:32:57.839
If you have the ad ID on someone and you have a pretty good idea of where they are, and you can send a drone that can scan and look for a specific face or even for an ad ID and drive into that person.
00:32:58.160 --> 00:32:58.319
Yeah.
00:32:58.480 --> 00:33:02.000
It's a bit like if you did you um see the slaughterbots video.
00:33:02.319 --> 00:33:05.839
It's a it's a it's it's it's like uh, you know, what was the last Terminator movie?
00:33:06.079 --> 00:33:13.440
So Terminator 6 will be holy shit, there's there's just drones out hunting you because you launched a mean tweet or something.
00:33:13.839 --> 00:33:15.920
But what's this how can anybody escape from that?
00:33:16.000 --> 00:33:23.680
Because it does feel like the civilians are now i involved in this, and that actually we could be in a sort of sort of world civil war, if you like.
00:33:23.839 --> 00:33:27.200
So it's not a war that's fought over there somewhere that's far away.
00:33:27.279 --> 00:33:36.160
It's actually sort of on your doorstep, kind of in your neighborhood, and that you are some kind of digitally anyway, you're sort of now involved.
00:33:36.799 --> 00:33:56.240
Uh look, elections have consequences, and you need to elect people that actually believe in liberty and small government and finding a way for free people to solve those problems in a small and efficient paradigm.
00:33:56.559 --> 00:34:10.800
The the the paradigm of this of the statist, the Fabian socialist, you know, the the the socialist mentality is if we just put the right people in charge, everything will be fine because they know they know better.
00:34:11.039 --> 00:34:12.559
No, they don't know better.
00:34:12.719 --> 00:34:26.000
And and it's usually the the smallest innovators figuring it out at the micro level and and let that scale because they can compete well, is still the best way to organize the society, I think.
00:34:26.159 --> 00:34:32.480
Look, in America, we have a big problem with the federal government because it's become massively too large.
00:34:32.719 --> 00:34:55.440
It's been it's like an obese triathlete that it can it could just because of the dollar being the world's reserve currency and they can print trillion dollar deficits a year, they could just feed themselves way too much in every way on defense spending, on security spending, on welfare spending, on regulatory stupidity.
00:34:55.920 --> 00:34:57.039
It's really bad.
00:34:57.360 --> 00:35:20.320
Our state and local governments, by and large, are pretty good because they have to live within their budget, they can't just print money, and there's an internal competitive system that certainly people vote with their feet inside of America, and during COVID and some of the old the craziness, a lot of people moved to different states that govern differently.
00:35:20.559 --> 00:35:22.000
Think about Florida.
00:35:29.440 --> 00:35:33.679
Gillam was a total leftist and it was only a 30,000 vote margin.
00:35:34.639 --> 00:35:48.079
So elections really do have consequences because I can't even imagine what Florida would look like if Gillam had been the governor from 2018 to 2022, embracing every kind of COVID madness.
00:35:48.559 --> 00:35:49.519
People are fleeing.
00:35:49.599 --> 00:35:53.199
Oh, look, the Tories have done a shit job for the last 15, 20 years.
00:35:53.440 --> 00:35:55.199
They deserve to get trounced.
00:35:55.599 --> 00:36:03.119
They've just kind of gone with the Tories have been going downhill on one on one ski instead of two, on immigration, on a lot of that stuff.
00:36:03.280 --> 00:36:06.320
So again, elections have uh they do have consequences.
00:36:06.639 --> 00:36:11.039
You can see it, there's well-run big cities or well-run cities in America.
00:36:11.280 --> 00:36:16.239
There's some very well-run states, but there's some big states that are horribly run and people are leaving.
00:36:16.320 --> 00:36:19.039
And they're, you know, California is one of them.
00:36:19.360 --> 00:36:24.960
I think people, probably in the the states, have taken back more control at a local level, though.
00:36:25.119 --> 00:36:31.679
I mean, they've got involved with their schools or their the voting at elections and all these sorts of things.
00:36:31.760 --> 00:36:47.519
And I think there's a uh either a paralysis or an apathy, I'm not sure what it is in the UK, that um people haven't quite woken up yet, that they've got to be actively involved if they want to change things, because it isn't going to change unless they actually do participate in it and make the change happen.
00:36:47.679 --> 00:36:49.360
I think America's much better at that.
00:36:49.519 --> 00:36:58.800
And it may be partly to do with your political system, but I think it's um it's probably something to do with sort of just the psychology, the mentality of the nation, actually.
00:36:59.119 --> 00:37:00.000
Well, you know what?
00:37:00.239 --> 00:37:05.360
America was based on uh the traditions of individual liberty that came from Britain.
00:37:05.599 --> 00:37:13.920
The Magna Carta visited Washington a couple years ago, and I went and visited, and it was just it was magnificent.
00:37:14.000 --> 00:37:26.239
I almost wanted to genuflect because the the idea of a document that defines a citizen's role versus the state and the idea of limiting government, it's just amazing.
00:37:26.480 --> 00:37:33.199
And I've been around the world many, many times, I've been to some great countries, I've been to a lot of really bad ones.
00:37:33.840 --> 00:37:53.119
The idea of limited government, of rights embodied, uh of documents that that explicitly impair uh and limit the right of the state to impress on certain things on an individual is that's a it's unique and that is that is well worth defending.
00:37:53.440 --> 00:38:01.760
I mean, maybe we can take this from that, that uh King John was particularly bad, and if he hadn't have been such a so awful as a king, we wouldn't have had the Magna Carta.
00:38:02.079 --> 00:38:05.199
So maybe we can take that that away with us.
00:38:05.679 --> 00:38:06.400
Well, you know what?
00:38:06.480 --> 00:38:09.679
I there's I guess there's still a saying that I that I use today that still applies.
00:38:09.920 --> 00:38:13.760
You know, if you give an asshole a gun and a badge, you get a bigger asshole.
00:38:13.920 --> 00:38:15.840
Yeah, well, that that's that's very true.
00:38:16.079 --> 00:38:17.760
Eric, um, thank you for this.
00:38:17.920 --> 00:38:18.559
It's been brilliant.
00:38:18.639 --> 00:38:28.400
Um, your final thoughts on the future of surveillance and unplugged and everything else in terms of personal protection of our own private data.
00:38:28.800 --> 00:38:40.239
Look, the big tech guys, the four or five biggest, especially Google and Apple, are two of the largest companies in the world because they are sitting on top of the surveillance capitalism heap.
00:38:40.719 --> 00:38:45.840
And their entire business is based on collecting and exporting your data.
00:38:46.159 --> 00:38:49.280
If people are sick of that, some people are not.
00:38:49.440 --> 00:38:53.199
Some people are fine being plugged into the matrix.
00:38:54.239 --> 00:39:16.079
But if you are serious about your privacy and freedom of thought, and your freedom of speech and religion, and your freedom of assembly and data sovereignty, then uh unplugged or companies like it are worth uh looking into because I am I am not one gonna ever gonna bend the knee on that stuff.
00:39:16.400 --> 00:39:19.039
So, where do people go to find out more of Unplugged?
00:39:19.119 --> 00:39:21.760
Is it a a global website or is it different per country?
00:39:22.079 --> 00:39:30.719
It's unplugged.com, and uh we've now started delivering to Canada, and I would say by October we'll be delivering in the UK and Europe.
00:39:31.199 --> 00:39:33.519
Canadian truckers really need this.
00:39:34.000 --> 00:39:35.679
Dang right, they do.
00:39:36.320 --> 00:39:42.239
Look, so we even have a dating app on the uh in our store for people that are unvaccinated.
00:39:42.559 --> 00:39:53.840
Oh, do yes, so uh again, we are the we are the natural repository for for free people, free speech, health freedom, etc.
00:39:54.480 --> 00:40:03.920
There's so there's a there's quite a few odd ones that are not in the the Apple or Google stores because again, we are free speech absolutists on that stuff.
00:40:04.320 --> 00:40:11.760
I do really worry about that idea that you'll be denied access to a service literally on the basis of your political beliefs.
00:40:11.920 --> 00:40:16.800
We saw it from PayPal, we saw it with the Canadian truckers and GoFundMe, and we're gonna see it again.
00:40:16.960 --> 00:40:17.599
I know we are.
00:40:17.679 --> 00:40:20.239
We've seen it with debanking in the UK very specifically.
00:40:20.559 --> 00:40:25.599
Yeah, and well, and it's um again, we still live in a free society that's worth defending.
00:40:25.840 --> 00:40:26.400
All right, brilliant.
00:40:26.480 --> 00:40:27.440
We'll leave it there, Eric.
00:40:27.679 --> 00:40:28.639
Thank you very much for your time.
00:40:28.800 --> 00:40:30.719
Fantastic to speak to you, and good luck with Unplugged.
00:40:30.960 --> 00:40:32.239
Thank you likewise.
00:40:37.679 --> 00:40:41.119
Thank you for listening to the Future of You, hosted by me, Tracy Follows.
00:40:41.199 --> 00:40:45.119
Be sure to check out the show notes for more info about the topics we covered today.
00:40:45.280 --> 00:40:49.840
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00:40:50.000 --> 00:40:53.679
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00:40:59.920 --> 00:41:04.800
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00:41:04.880 --> 00:41:08.400
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