TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #449: DEATH ATHLETIC: A Dissident Architecture with Jessica Solce

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

Marty sits down with Jessica Solce to discuss her new documentary following the story of Cody Wilson. Find the film here: https://www.deathathletic.com/ Jessica on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jessicasolce 0:00 - Intro 6:27 - Stumbling into cypherpunk docs 11:24 - Dealing with scandals 16:12 - Death Athletes 22:44 - The process of following Cody 24:04 - Fighting digital tyrrany 28:14 - Apathy 32:39 - Free information 40:11 - Dealing with courts of law and social media 45:37 - JStark 49:38 - Corporate control 1:01:13 - Aesthetics and the film industry 1:07:57 - AI 1:11:21 - Plugs + wrap up Shoutout to our sponsors: River https://river.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/concierge/ Bitcoin Talent Co https://www.bitcointalent.co/ TFTC Merch is Available Shop Now: https://merch.tftc.io Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://tftc.io/podcasts/

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this episode with jessica solche the director of death athletic a dissident architecture a documentary film that will be dropping next month that i had the pleasure of getting a sneak peek to and that i highly recommend you freaks go see when it drops October 21st. You can pre-order at deathathletic.com right now. We will include that website and other information about the film in the show notes, but can't speak highly enough about the film and the importance of the message that it's trying to portray. Jessica and I have a whole conversation about it that you're about to listen to, so I won't uh give any spoilers here um yeah i'm really excited that you guys are going to listen

to this conversation we don't have any boosts to read because uh we just recorded back to back with godfrey bloom and jessica and so the godfrey episode hasn't dropped yet so there are no boosts to read but logan if you had to think of a boost what would it be let's give them something this this is logan's boost come rocket it's just come rocket okay very uh very classy very classy of logan the service brought to you by good friends on that note it was brought to you by good friends at river river uh is doing things the right way in the bitcoin space they're building their own infrastructure they're bitcoin only they don't rely on any trusted third parties uh like fortress

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when you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. I'm going to Parallel Nepali on Wednesday. I was just seeing that. The first time in 2017, they had these big huddle posters.

Yeah, we've got the Extreme Privacy book. I actually don't know that. What is that? I think it might be sponsored by them. Michael Basel. um how to get your privacy on in the digital age gotcha which is um it's important like did you uh do you now consider yourself a cypherpunk i mean i would that's a beautiful title but i'm i haven't i haven't done any accreditation for such a such a thing i feel like i've uh documented some pretty

cypherpunk shit I would I mean that would be a beautiful title to try to work to I mean I love this world I don't really say it so directly sometimes I mean it's a weird thing like filmmaking and are we recording

oh we are it's a weird thing filmmaking and trying to stay outside of your film or like away from the film but also I love this world so yeah did you stumble into it um basically so i didn't know i was going to make documentary

filmmaking films um and in i've been jumping around doing a few things including acting and theater directing in new york city and then i was like i really need to make something i was dying to make something and i thought it was going to be a fiction film that i had written or was in the process of writing and um we went away on a little vacation and i like through family family friend was telling me about this artistic piece that he was doing basically drawing an ar-15 that was like 20 feet by seven feet and it was going to be this very beautiful but emotional piece and he was going to enter into the conversation about gun control via this art piece and visually it was really beautiful and this was post sandy hook and it was everywhere and I said well maybe this is a

different angle to just think about this subject and within five days I just was like I guess I'm making a doc film I didn't really know what that was yet in the sense of I never even thought I was ever even going to make a doc film that wasn't on my radar in any capacity um and five days later I started making a documentary film and that weekend like basically I think the first day of filming um one of the subjects greg boger he was like oh and have you heard of cody wilson he's doing this thing and it just started happening and i was like well obviously he's the yang to your ying like that's these are the two far opposite we have the emotional and we had the person that's building and creating that's technically i mean you could say is the

unemotional aspect of it so like enjoying a political spectrum on very two sides and so they became the subject of my first film um but you were asking me how i entered into all of that wait yeah the first one was no control no control yeah so basically that first weekend i met with cody in uh july of 2013 i learned about bitcoin i learned about all these things and they were immediately super interesting to me and within a month i was i you know got into bitcoin yeah yeah no it's it's funny because the uh your individual archetype like a artistic individual in new york city many people wouldn't expect that they'd be making somebody like you would be making like hardcore films about cypherpunk individuals and tools like defense distributed

open source software open source cad files sure i'll take it i mean i think at some point like New York was supposed to be like where the artists were right but it's it's it's a different kind of artistry now it's more of a in lined with a certain memo um yeah I experienced that making this film since it took eight years oftentimes people were like what the what are you doing like it was very very um thematically untouchable the idea that I was enjoying this world so much it was so unknown and didn't spark as much curiosity sometimes in conversation that i would have thought like people i guess it's the whole thing of like pushing outside your box um you're either you're either like ready for that like new that new aspect of life or you

just kind of like shut it out which we see over and over again with new ideas yeah i guess i mean you just touched on it but this film took quite a bit yes of time to actually film and then produce yes at what point did you realize that it was going to take you many years to actually tell i mean definitely in 2018 when uh the story flipped yep because in 2018 so the film started in april or march um let's say march 2015 and that's when i knew i wanted to do this and by 2018 i thought i had a film or i thought maybe i'd have to film a little bit more but i had something so i was basically with a pr guy that was a fantastic person um started pitching it to streaming because i knew at that point i still needed even though i had been self-producing

um everything at that point to do post-production i needed i need money to do this so i um you know he pitched it to the netflix and basically the response back was it was on the wrong side of history because i was profiling someone that was not a desirable basically and within the you know we can put all the words in that but um so this film that was on the wrong side of history that didn't have any quote-unquote unbiased opinions of people telling their opinions of what Cody Wilson was doing and how dangerous criminals can use this, et cetera. I didn't have that, and it was very obvious in my sizzles

that they were shipping around. So I knew in 2018 that on top of what happened to Cody in 2018, I was like, oh, this is going to be an even longer process. um i think i probably always knew that unconsciously because the reasoning for doing this film was that and the reasoning for my first film was that we get the majority of our information with two minutes clips on the news five minute little docs that are heavily biased that the journalist is like also a main character and you can you can read their opinions from their bodies like it's it's always you know it's not it's not not that not that a film can be completely

unbiased i mean let's let's be honest someone's cutting it someone's creating message visuals etc but you can try to remove yourself you can try to let the characters represent themselves as much as possible and then thematically code in what they're demonstrating trying to show right um and that's what i've hoped to do with death death athletic so in 2018 i definitely was like oh this is going to be a longer process and it's going to be far harder to find any kind of support because we had coupled now that it was on the wrong side of history then we have a whole kind of cancellation process that even forces other people to not want to be aligned with such a film even i mean not even speaking to the film specifically but i think cody's incident in

2018 when he got embroiled with that underage sex scandal which i think you guys handled it very well in the movie and um because even me personally like a bitcoiner who's paying very close attention to defense distributed i know uh when that news dropped a lot of people in the space like ah like god damn it cody like sort of like we can't associate associate um not me personally but there was definitely that chilling effect well in these tangential cypherpunk movements for sure i mean it's a huge um it's a hard thing to get over especially if you are if you know someone not get over like get over but to even you can think of anyone that's ever russell brant right now yep uh you can be his best friend and know his core i don't know anything

about it i don't know him but you can still have doubt and that doubt can eat you hard if you don't know what the story is and most people don't or aren't able to like completely examine all the aspects of it or they're just willing to like you know throw the baby with the bath water like it happened i believe the internet bye um so i mean that was a very difficult difficult part of the journey for sure because not only do you see someone that i'd become very close to get you know killed in the media um but you have to ask you you start asking yourself a lot of questions and how much information can be found out and what happened etc etc yeah that's why you say that right because death athletic the name of the film and it's mentioned without giving

away too many spoilers um like having these personal deaths and then i watched let's tell you i watched cody's death athletic presentation from guns and bitcoin last year where he really dives into the the topic of like killing yourself death athletes yeah death athletes and um his whole journey with defense distributed and getting these files out there into people's hands and fighting the court battles that he did are these sort of athletic deaths that are necessary to sort of push these technologies to a point where pandora's box has been opened and it can't be shut again yes so um the idea comes from peter slaughter dyke a german philosopher and and he uh he's talking specifically in the framework of a religious like religious martyrs religious

peoples jesus you know that you know they have a moral conviction they have an ethical conviction and they look at like the tyranny of death and say my my ideas override the fear of that death yeah it's he talks about um the euthanasia right yeah um in the book as well i think i think slaughter dyke uses euthanasia as a euphemism um so yeah but and this is kind of like the film kind of modernizes it to now um we're not really having religious martyrs in the moment but we are having like idea martyrs we're having information like people all are getting cancelled or destroyed socially by being called what racist white supremacist you know you name it across the board and it's creating these so you have to choose do you are you willing to

ride this wave of like maybe being maybe being hailed and then literally dying a social and uh cultural maybe maybe like you get kicked out of places you're no one wants to associate with you anymore and trying to get back up and prove prove what you're doing is correct um so yeah death athletic is i feel like it's a new motto for life to be a death athlete yeah and then the guns and bitcoin presentation cody references jesus when he's on the cross and he's it has been done he was talking to god and it's really a powerful statement because you're up there on the cross there are people saying ah we got you but you're out there on the crossing no i actually got you my work is done so it be done and whether it's cody julian assange snowden ross albrecht

aaron schwartz aaron schwartz i mean rest in peace yes i mean that's why it's interesting with cody i think cody um still being around obviously he went through his legal battles but he's still out but you have snowden's exiled julian assange has essentially been tortured to death and interesting that chelsea has not yes and she was the main leaker yeah so like you they pick the architects that they want to go down so like the you know the dissonant architect idea for the the title is also like are you the chosen the chosen like death athlete right um in cody's case there's tons of people hosting files all over the internet to this day they haven't went after anyone he's the only one that's constantly um you know in trouble yeah we're hosting these

things i mean i think some would make the argument that jay stark was uh targeted to sure jay stark as well yeah but but despite all that and i think that's this is why the film's so important bring this back to the context of bitcoin and um i do think the biggest battles that bitcoin and as a network and then bitcoiners individually fight have not happened yet that will come in the future and in the context of the other death athletes whether it's assange schwartz snowden ross albrecht they've all sort of been contained to a certain degree maybe snowden to a lesser degree than the others um he's able to enjoy life in exile in russia but um i think the defense distributing cody's story specifically provide like a good framework of oh like he went up there

and i actually fought the courts fought the battles and won to a certain extent obviously um it hasn't been the easiest path and maybe he doesn't feel like he's completely won yet but i do think uh him as an individual the defense distributed story is a success story in this day and age of this dissident technology movement i mean it is in the sense that he literally is not in jail yeah because from the very beginning i mean cody's super smart he knew the law he's had lawyers ever you know he he knew what he was doing like he at no point was he like oh i'm just gonna of like wingless um even though maybe some of it was you know at the very beginning young and impulsive and mischievous and at the same time he read the law right um so the interesting part of

him and why he's never been in prison for these reasons is because he really played a heavy hand of techno politics it's where that you know his technology was doing exactly or using technology to do exactly what he wanted but playing in the exact framework of law that could not keep up with the technological changes it's so sclerotic so yeah it's a it's a very interesting game and you know he say he hasn't won that because technically it was a license but the license been held and like things the film goes into it but in essence he has won because the files are still being out there that on his website on def cad and it might be under you know restriction you have to be a legio member and you have to access things and you know it's not just like

out there on the internet free will free willy as just like other people like just going to like well i won't name them but other sites just have it click of a button but he can't because he's being watched um but in essence he's won yeah what was it like for you behind the camera going through this process and watching this over eight years whether it's the individual self-development or cody or the development of the the case against him the cases against him how he sort of maneuvered i mean i always felt like i was like in it i mean it's i think part of it is i had to be very i had to be constantly on top of what was happening i had to be constantly like okay cody did you get a message yet like what's happening what's happening do i need to come down like

so there's there was a constant back and forth so um on my side i constantly felt like i was in this story and definitely like deeply dedicated to every step of the way um so even though i wasn't helping build or do any you know i was just watching um i feel like i've been there side by side the entire time so it's been intense and awesome and fun and um it's always this making this film because of its subject matter in in some way has been a super rebellious endeavor for myself so maybe i'm not a cypherpunk i think that's it would be a beautiful thing well i mean especially in today's day and i mean that's why i focus on bitcoin bitcoin's a bit of a rebellion trying to separate money and state and it does feel like i don't know

if you would agree but it feels like at this particular junction in history as we transition from the industrial age to the digital age we're really fighting for a future built on freedom we have two roads we get freedom tech and the ability of free speech free association free money or the state the superstructure that it has become over the last couple of centuries um wins and we get cattle herded into this digital panopticon where humans really aren't free at the end of the day and like whether it's bitcoiners working on the bitcoin network or cody and defense distributed working on the uh 3d printed weapons um working on that fight like these are very important fights that we need to be having right now in a world in which many people are complacent

probably apathetic if we're being honest with ourselves like it is important that we do have these dissidents and this dissident architecture to ensure that we have some form of freedom moving forward for sure like and possibly and probably there's always going to be two hyper distinct worlds um and the people that use things like bitcoin without realizing that they're joining they're they're they're strengthening um you know some people you know stock market you know the bros that have gotten in just to make money even they're kind of forcing that dissidence whether they like it or not which is a beautiful which i always thought was a beautiful thing about bitcoin maybe at the beginning some people when

they saw you know the rise of holidays in in some ways like it doesn't matter why you're in the space it's so democratic that it doesn't matter who you are but if you're playing in it you're pushing it forward and that's the most interesting thing is when people create things that um the ethos lives inside that system, despite what person uses it in some senses. Like, I mean, we can fight with KYC and all that other stuff, but it's like, if you're pushing that conversation forward and that system forward, I think it's interesting when it doesn't matter who's using it or why they're using it, but the fact that they're using it is actually building that

system stronger, if that makes sense. Yeah. And it gets back to the concept of the entire intolerant minority. If you believe that thesis of how the world has gotten to where it is, the intolerant minority of the late 18th century was the revolutionary Americans who fought for our independence. and it was a very small group of people who ensured that we had freedom moving forward. And fast forward to today, the Cody Wilsons of the world, the others in the 3D printed gun movement, the Bitcoiners,

like this intolerant minority that recognizes, hey, this is all really structurally and systemically fucked up. Like we need these new systems to sort of clear the board and make sure that we have freedom moving forward. And we're going to build it despite your distaste. And when you change your mind, come join us.

Yes. Yeah. That's like the beauty part. That's the, it's the meme of Bitcoin. You'll get Bitcoin at the price you deserve. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's right.

That's right. Goodness. Yeah. Everything that's being built right now and being torn down. It's, it's a terrifying and interesting time in the sense of like what's happening across United States and other countries. Well, that actually is a very good framing too. I was having there was a conversation about this over the weekend somewhere I was at is like at

this particular point like should we focus on tearing things down or building things up or do we need to do both simultaneously yeah I think uh El Salvador is doing that very well yeah tearing down and building up at the same time which it makes it rather interesting yeah but going back to the sort of large-scale apathy that exists out there are you confident that we'll be able to succeed in this endeavor to build new while also tearing down the terrible superstructures that exist in our life i don't know if i'm confident of it no no i mean you hope i think there's going to be like actually right now the whole like empire is dying i think it is dying in an essence but it's going to be like a long death it's not going to be like civil war tomorrow our wars are

now in the digital framework framework um they're just you know the future shock is coming too fast for an actual war in some ways unless it's on other people's ground right i'm just talking about like in america it seems like the people that are building or want to build or attracted to this like um dissident architecture if you will they're moving to countries that are willing and they're so broken by their past that they're like, we have nothing to lose except to grow. And so the apathetic people, I think in some ways might get left behind and other communities

that have like strong belief systems, no matter what they are. I mean, we see these popping around, like their attempts. Those are the ones that are gonna get built up. But then most of these communities that are building are also building tech right and that tech will end up being in competition probably with larger tech google blah blah the ais of the world that are all going to be competing against each other and then it'll just be there as an out yeah but i don't know if i don't know

how you win on the tech front other than always have that out without war well i always actually recorded an episode right before this with godfrey bloom it was in the uk parliament or has been historically i'm not sure if he is right now but um we got to a point in the conversation where they're like big tech whether it be youtube but russell brand um twitter before elon took over but i'm pretty convinced that elon's like the manchurian candidate of the private sector i don't think every now every day it changes is like do i like what's happening but i do think you have apathy in the general populace but then you also have like this undeserved confidence and almost bold overstepping of the line by big tech and big governments where

it's becoming increasingly obvious even to those that are apathetic they'll have these sort of moments of like wait a second that's a little messed up like youtube can just take his salary away nigel farage in uk they can just take his bank accounts away yeah it's like at one point does it go too far and then everybody has to wake up in that in that way covid lockdowns i think that woke a lot of people that did wake a lot of people up people that were hardcore like i mean not to use yeah yeah status to use all those words but yeah hardcore i met some of those people in new york like new friends that got woken up during that that period of time and they went hard it wasn't just like you know it's like take the red pill and and go hard like it was like oh okay

nice to meet you um but but there's that also also the part that i think um why people seem also so apathetic is because a lot of people are just so quiet and they're scared to cross that line and to be that person and to you know ruin their friend group and which was an interesting part what we were talking before is like when i was making this film like i'd bring up all these topics and i would always be like oh i wonder if i still have a friend tomorrow just because i was like introducing them to all this stuff that was happening a lot like over and over and over again but you have to keep on doing that I guess that was my own death athletics with my friends

well I think if your friends if they did sort of say alright I'm going to disassociate from Jessica you see the end product that's what I think you did really well in this film is really highlight the first principles arguments the philosophy behind

why if you sort of simply strip away the end product which is a gun and get down to the philosophy behind hey this is open source technology this is information that is out there and that you as a human with inalienable rights to freedom of association freedom of speech and freedom to access information should have access to and really laying out that first principle like what does it mean to be human not only that to be a free human it's if you are to believe that you're free uh you should believe that you should

be able to get access to information and discern for yourself what to do with that and not have it sort of fed to you or gate gate kept by authorities for sure and like this is a film quote-unquote about guns but it's much broader than that like it's amazing how many people still think cody like bought and sold guns like physical guns like that was never a thing he's never given anyone a gun um it was always about code always about information so sure you have this gun debate that's going through the film but it's really about who gets to surveil who gets to control who gets to govern what you get to share on the internet this you know like internet freeway like of digital information like and can you even so with when when I talked about gun control my first

one was like everyone talks about gun control but is there any efficacy to any of this and when you look at this whole online information debate of who gets to control code at the same time everyone's trying to throw legalities and laws on that but you can't control it you literally it's uncontrollable think what they can do is just scare the living daylight out of you like new jersey did new jersey passed laws that if you were like so um cootie's website defcad had to basically block the state of new jersey because new jersey said if you give information to a new jersey resident you're doing a criminal activity and if a new jersey resident has that information on their computer criminal activity so like literally the information was you know a ticking bomb like that that was a felony

which is wild which only just makes criminals of anybody who has information right um so yeah the interesting part of it is this film is about guns it's about fighting the united states government taking it off itar taking certain munitions off of itar which is the cold war um set of regulations that united states put together during the cold war that still exists to this day because once the law goes up they never go down um it's really about the spread of information who gets to control it can like i think cody says that can the government oh yeah he does get in between you and your computer and to what degree cut to like all the digital tech that needs to form to make sure they can't.

Yeah. Now, again, going back to that critical inflection point, the future in which the government is that gatekeeper and all this information is extremely scary. I mean, we're seeing it play out in real time. They're trying to. I mean, you had that law pass in the UK. It was last week or the week before

where they're forcing companies to inject backdoors to their end-to-end encryption services, which essentially renders any end-to-end encryption. did signal say they're closing down for like i i haven't i haven't i haven't caught up on signals particular response to this but you can see they and again that's why it's almost beautiful too because we're at this inflection point because i think the governments who have overstepped the boundaries and are really encroaching like they never have before on civil liberties and freedom in the digital age do realize that once this stuff is widely accepted

to be free and open information that cannot be controlled it sort of defangs them to a point that is scary for them sure and for the apathetic masses it might be scary for them too because i think the state is the natty that's going to make sure everybody plays nice but when it comes back to the particular um subject of gun control i mean i grew up in philadelphia and my mother was a parole officer and she didn't she didn't hold a gun because she's so anti-gun so i wasn't even allowed to watch power rangers growing up because they had guns in it um it wasn't until i found bitcoin probably like early college years i was probably like people would consider me a liberal i was like guns are bad but uh getting into bitcoin and really exploring these ideas of

open source technology and what is freedom of information freedom of association freedom of money um you get down to like the criminals are going to find a way to do criminal activity at the end of the day whether it's money launder find a gun to hold somebody up or kill somebody um and there's nothing you can do to stop that and it's like what i try to do here and the broader conversation i think that needs to happen what death athletic really does a good job of sort exploring and putting out there is like this information should be accessible to anybody like you you can either have the government gatekeep and at the end of the day they're doing a lot of nefarious things at the end of the day they're using that gatekeeping status to

basically commit crimes behind the scenes or you can have this all open and just accept that we live in a world with risk and trade-offs and where do you want that that trade-off to sit but what would the politicians do for their job you know they're all sociopaths too that's the problem what would menendez do that's another perfect example what would he do i mean he's got to take things on the side kind of hold the law for those side hustles that was i mean that's the beautiful irony of this so for anybody's unaware bob benendez senator in new jersey or yes um basically just got indicted for minister of foreign affairs i believe yes yeah he got indicted for accepting uh off the book payments in gold to waive the sentence of

somebody i forget i forget yeah yeah i was like yes i think i i didn't read the whole thing or combat also combinations giving information to the egyptian government yes um he took a bribe yeah he took some bribes and this is after the it's ironic because he um singled out el salvador and bukele of course um and their bitcoin legal tender law and all the monologue that's right because i did a post like i did like his own little like post about it but also like a few years ago um he was he was basically caught red-handed as well getting like fake visas for some guys like girlfriends and doing all this a you know nothing shocks you you show what you are from the beginning well i mean i guess that's a good topic like what was it like for you filming

death athletic and being this up close and personal to the the sort of court process not only of this case but like generally like dealing with u.s courts appellate courts I mean, wow. Like, uh, definitely this was very, uh, enlightening, um, both for, um, the, the process of, um, DD suing the United States government, um, and also through the criminal, the criminal process about how difficult it is for courts to address information and to process information if that makes sense like there's so many times when i mean i don't know all the like the words for it but um they wouldn't consider um oh i forgot how it's what it's called like sometimes there was there is a we need cody right now um they wouldn't always oh they wouldn't

consider the merits and they still wouldn't consider the merits in the case so when you see him in 2018 and at one point he's like i guess we're gonna have to go to the supreme court they would never actually address the merits of the case because if they address the merits then they would have to consider that oh they're right this is a first amendment thing we was basically already established under um bernstein and pgp and pulling it off itar this is this is code this is not guns this is code we have to let it pass and giving the license that cody got in 2018 was a demonstration of the doj going okay we're gonna lose we've had these five incidents prior um which the film highlights you know in 85 and 95 like of saying you know you know what this

is this is unconstitutional guys this prior restraint on this information is it's unconstitutional we need to change this finally doj was like let's give them a license game over move it off of itar let's go but then you know the ags attorney generals across the united states just went berserk because what are they going to do about their gun policies and their you know their their for the only thing they talk about if if uh cody wins um so sorry i lost i lost my train of thought of what your original all being part of the process yeah so it was really interesting how just how difficult it was for the system to really acknowledge the complete battle if they won't even consider the merits and then on this other side of the the criminal part just the system of actually

watching in the news how like one piece of news came out and then everybody parroted it and the words they chose to use and how um you see it with other people in the news like like they're guilty before they're guilty it's not there you know it's the court in the social media it's death by social media it's death by journalism it's not you know wait to see what happens what's the what's the facts um and seeing that firsthand with someone that you know is so intense um when you're getting different stories across the board so yeah this this entire film has been definitely an educational process court systems of um how difficult it is to win and knowing that people that aren't supported within court systems doing criminal or or not not doing criminal but just you're fucked yeah

is that jaded you as an individual or um radicalized yeah probably radicalized me more I mean, I saw it a little bit. I was researching many years ago the death row system in Texas and how just even if you, let's just say you support execution, it is so tax, like to keep someone on death row just sucks money out of the system like crazy. So you can even be like for death row, but you're like, oh, but where are my taxes going?

Yeah, it's going towards like the 92 times this guy's gonna come in and out of the court system with lawyers that are falling asleep that won't even present cases. And sometimes they are innocent. And if you just have some lawyer that's doing cocaine on the side that won't even give information,

like there's steps to giving information, the guy the people don't even have a chance yeah they don't have a chance um anyway so i saw some of that sclerotic broken system then and this only i mean yeah this only fermented all of that but on a much larger kind of like u.s broad scale well that's the interesting thing about cody defense distributed in this 3d printed gun movement is it's i think maybe they sparked the fire and now i mean we mentioned jay stark earlier but like people are really picking this up and that's the incredible thing about this particular movement and this story is we are seeing the fruits of that free access to information today whether it's the uh insurgent uh military amin

Myanmar, they're, they're using Jay Starks, um, FGC nine, um, to, to fight back against what they would deem to be an oppressive government. Like it is again, going double edged sword. Yes. Guns can kill people and criminals can get access to them. But if you only give criminals access to them, like you are damning people to a life of oppression and something like Myanmar, I believe, uh, many other countries in Latin America are leveraging it too just showing different ways in latin america yes but showing they're like hey this is giving people like a bit of asymmetrical leverage against potentially oppressive states yeah the asymmetrics and that is definitely a very hard concept for a lot of people

um jay stark is super interesting that's my one regret we were talking from the beginning and he's like you should come visit and covid hit and i was like i can't come yeah i can't come and not knowing that he was going to pass away so quickly. Yeah, it's a story that I think is, you know, even if someone hates guns, it's not a story really about guns. So, yeah, Jay Stark. Yeah, no, the interesting,

one of the also interesting parts of this story is because Cody's life changed in 2018, it did embolden the very first movement that like what was going to happen people had dedicated themselves to the ideas but nobody was really like people were making things but there wasn't that ethos that that immediate like we must take the reins call to action call to action and that happened in 2018 with deterrence dispensed and jay stark and ivan the troll And that was a super interesting moment because it was like, okay, if something does happen,

there is a movement behind this. There are people that will try to take the reins and continue. And Jay Stark did that extremely well. Yeah. Well, it goes back to the title of the film, Death Athletic. That athletic death needed to happen for people to realize, oh, he proved that this is out there. There's nothing anybody can do about it.

It shouldn't be this one. And I mean, Satoshi is very similar in the sense that he had an, not even like a publicly athletic death, but I think whoever he or they were had the intuition, like I need to remove myself from this process. And somebody just let everybody else take the reins. And amazing how well he did that. Like, I mean, we know everybody was trying to find him and then we found Craig Wright. Is he going to sue me?

I think he's getting sued in Australia right now. The latest I heard, he's getting extradited to Australia. Oh, interesting. Made some tax crimes there. Now, that's Satoshi's ability to truly cloak themselves. Pretty amazing. Yeah, I mean, not only amazing, but essential to the long-term success of Bitcoin.

Sure. um similarly with the 3d gun and print uh gun 3d printed gun movement like again like you just mentioned like it wasn't until people realized that situation that cody got into in 2018 like oh shit like he's not here to lead this like we gotta pick it up like you need those events whether it's satoshi's just stop uh answering message board questions in april 2011 or whatever it was um or this very public sort of death that cody had in 2018. sure yeah um and definitely his his cycle started in immediately in 2013 and then 2015. um and the other part is like at which he continues to struggle with which any company is gonna it's

gonna happen more and more which leads to the need for more for bitcoin is that paypal closes you down um you lose your bank accounts banks decide to close like they don't have to give you reason and we are so dependent on that little plastic card that that i mean it just shuts life down i mean we saw it in canada with the truckers like we're being fed like example after example after example so maybe it will push the apathy into a direction that's so extreme that one day you do take down your masters right um and maybe that's what has to happen i mean just like mastercard and visa what they they recently added in the last year or so the um like the like on their back end like they're essentially labeling with product numbers like

the types of goods you're buying guns being one of them and like they're literally setting the groundwork to just whether or not debank the the gun companies industry here i will not you know not the big ones though not the defense no and of course not the defense industry um yeah i think desantis was saying something i don't know what happened with it he was gonna like force those like make sure that that didn't pass in florida like they couldn't do that to floridians or something i don't know where that i don't know where that uh went um but yeah it's like uh who's in control of your money we're not getting blocks of gold like menendez from egypt so if you're not getting blocks of gold who holds your money right yeah that's

again it's gonna become more like and it's getting into weird territories too where guns are obviously very controversial and uh it makes sense that the government and it's funny going back to the godfrey conversation we do live in a somewhat fascist society if you go with mussolini's definition that the convergence of the states and the corporate world is what the true definition of fashion fascism is and whether it's the media the payments networks uh big pharma big ag like they are completely molded together and many people want to blame it on late stage capitalism but we live in a truly centralized fascist economy globally if you go with the definition that fascism is the state and

corporatism mending molding together for sure all supporting each other and on the information freeways yeah but it's weird in 21st century 2023 that's sort of uh what people call the hyper real reality that's been erected uh around us like access to our our smartphones and thinking that we have freedom and quality of life but it's really sucking us into i mean i mean we all have our like weaknesses with our phones right but it is creating that apathy that allows everything to blow past us right it's like yeah everything's great yeah that's the internet i can tweet yes or XZ whatever we're calling it these days I can live stream over the internet

sure our families are falling apart yeah I can call a cab for my for my app it's pretty cool it's pretty good times but again it's it's getting weird I'm scared and I said I'm not scared

but let's just like definitely scared is not the right word it's like we need to figure this out you have children I have children it's like I think of my kids and they're very young like what world are you going to grow up in

sure and I think free access to information I think open source 3D printed gun files and open source money

are we're going to allow them to be free yes the world will come with risk risk exists we live in an uncertain reality

trying to communicate to people to be comfortable with that risk and not try to have the nanny state manage it for you sure

yeah i don't know how to bridge that divide i mean do you think most people are apathetic oh yeah i think most people are i do think people are waking up i think again going back to the government and this fascist superstructure really shooting itself in the foot it's overstepping its boundaries and i think it's lost control of the frankenstein it's it's built um particularly on the monetary side of things people really are hurting yes due to the inflation that exists out there and they're being like like just seeing how much money is going abroad is it's just this i think but uh this there's so much news it's which is which is behind this idea of future shock so much is happening um and people are you can't take in all

like our brains are not meant to we don't have the ability at the time of day for most of us because we work you get around you have to do all these things to absorb understand also inform yourself about what's actually happening by doing your own research so it no matter what even if you're not complacent there's no way of dealing with this onslaught so it ends up taking you out of like what actually is important which is like stabilizing what you have in the immediate and if If everybody was just to like take care of their own immediately, that actually would like, that would, that would have a bounce effect, right? What does that mean?

And then it bounces out and you realize that you have to, you have to dissociate from the top. Um, but that's a hard thing to do. Yes. When we're so addicted to now so much information and have opinions on it. and the convenience and um mirage of comfort that these technologies provide it's like people are just like fuck it like i'm gonna submit to the borg uh i'm well fed i'm okay like just people get complacent they're like running on the hamster wheel they're like it's not worth it

it's like give me my vr goggles and put me get my uh get my instacart delivery here on time and i'll be fine whatever i won't push back i'll go go into the pod willingly i was doing this um brief other job um basically research i won't go into too much but um it was really interesting to learn how many people buy on the internet everything even and it's across all economic structures very poor to very rich everybody is having massive amounts of packages coming in it's like a constant flow of material that but it's it's why do you need 10 packages a day you're also ordering food from McDonald's to be delivered. It's, it's, we are so complacent in the form of like all the things that we can get. And it's so constant that most people aren't fighting for

anything anymore. They don't even know what they're eating. Right. They're not eating food. Like most people aren't eating food. Industrial sludge. Yeah. I mean, it's, and if you're not eating food, then what kind of reality are you living in? You're living in the reality that's given to you um yeah it was a very interesting how like no matter where you sit in the economic scale the majority of people are just it's just consuming but it's consuming via the internet it's not consuming like even going to a shopping mall and walking around with friends which you know it's like oh nostalgia for the 80s like at least you had to like socially interact while you were buying your like cheap earrings or something um now it's really just constant

amazon packaging things things things without even need i've seen it in real life it's pretty crazy yeah that's like one of the nefarious minute details of the borg's sort of strategy which is divide people um sure whether it's philosophically with particular framing that's put forth through the media or physically where it's like literally create the conditions that make it so it's not necessary to actually have to go out and interact with people you can get everything delivered to you yes and meet space uh by using your phone you get all the information you need by using your phone all the information you need yes it's scary and like you said like i'm i fall prey to it too um i mean we go to the farmer's market every weekend we go to the store

um to get our food i like to stay very connected to the food i'm feeding myself and our children um but yeah no it is very easy again going back to the convenience of it all that's what sort of lulls people into that false but it's actually not very convenient why do you say that because it's for people that are either you don't have money and they're just buying a bunch of cheap things that's not convenient on their wallet and in the end if they're eating just sludge they're going to be sick they're going to be overweight their body's going to break down while they're young they're gonna this is not convenient this is fake convenience with the you know like intentional slow suiciding of your own body yeah so convenience isn't even like

like convenience is like not even living in the moment because that would, I think that would be something nice. It's like just, it's just being, I don't know. That's really falling prey to like your dopamine receptors. Yeah. The concept of instant versus delayed gratification.

Yeah, for sure. But that instant gratification as a diminishing return on utility after a until you wake up fat diabetic and yeah it's not very convenient then oh yeah how do we get on this subject the apathy why are people apathetic and bringing this back to death athletic again that's why i really enjoyed the film and i think it's very important for people to watch because diving into the first principles of like why this is important again stripping the guns away and just getting back to the first principles of you are human you should have access to this

information i think you portrayed that beautifully and that i do think even if you're skeptical normie who hates guns like it's going to be hard to walk away after watching 102 minutes of this film and not understand that like hey this is a human issue not a guns issue i hope so that's what i hope um and i i think it's i think it's there um yeah this is this is this is a real human rights issue yeah and um so what do you think's next for the 3d printed gun movement and cody and defense distributed not going away no i just saw they released gat gbt yeah so cody's playing with ai now um that's actually like when they announced that like their their trailer your trailer that's one thing and i'm really interested to get your insight to this defense distributed

again i think this is part of the reason why cody's been so successful is number one he knows this shit he understands philosophy inside and out and this focus on aesthetics and messaging is really sort of threaded throughout all this which is important or sort of like a beautiful aspect to it aesthetically that um draws people in as well did you notice that for him yeah oh yeah from from the get-go I mean at the beginning everything he was doing was purely symbolic right and he was he was creating like he makes all his videos that's that's Cody's behind everything right um and he's always been very aware maybe in his other life he would have just like tried to be a filmmaker or an artist of some sort um but yeah no that's he I think he's very

drawn to the process of creating story and propaganda and visuals and beautiful images and filmmaking in general and how you build the story and that's that's all in his work the music that he always chose you never thought he was going to pick like arvo par for the very very first you know he's gorgeous classical music like it's always very very um interesting and beautiful to watch. And also oftentimes his films are, you're like, what was that about? Like, he's not, he's not, he has like anagrams. He has like a little puzzle pieces. He gives, you know, pictures of things that he doesn't explain. And then four years later, you realize that's something called Goliad. Um, so he's always constantly playing with symbols and slogans and anagrams and ideas. So

i think it's it's a lot of play for him for for all the seriousness of his life all the things that he's like having to fight for i visuals his visuals his his films um in my opinion are his like are his relief projects those are his like beautiful things that he makes and he's really proud of those and when youtube took everything down that was that was not a fun time no that's still do yeah i've taken a lot of our stuff down there yeah but no i think in this day and age like the film that you produce is beautiful obviously cody and the work that defense distributed did they have like a really important focus on the aesthetics of it on it like in this day and age the world is wrought with so much ugliness yes in the physical world in the social aspects of how we

talk to each other and even in state of discourse films films are kind of ugly now i mean i couldn't watch the little mermaid but that looked like a two-dimensional flat the the few scenes that i saw i mean films are ugly now and they and documentaries i mean i love documentaries but now they all look exactly the same and they have the exact same formula they have the exact same crescents everything stretched across nine nine episodes to keep on bringing you back bringing you back and so you watch the same footage over and over again it's all like i don't want to make that like aesthetically we need to make beautiful things beautiful things that surprise people so i kind of hoped to make that as well in the world i like film what do you think has led your

industry astray to such a point where it's all very formulaic well i think uh streaming has definitely changed the formulas that have come out i mean they're they've got lots of money and they want to bring people back to their platforms and it works um and so and they want control i think basically if unless you're like a famous director and you're doing something for streaming they have final cut um directors who do things with smaller directors i guess for they don't own their rights you know they're paid to make the film and then netflix owns it hbo owns it you don't own it right so in essence you're just like paid hands and so where's the at what point where does the artistry come in if you don't own it it's very again formulaic yeah you're working for a boss

it's like an industrial process so i think that's happened across the board for basically like everything are you bullish on these uh well it seems like the the strike has always yeah it looks like it's ending but were you happy like was there i wasn't happy or not happy i've been always i've never really been within hollywood i mean i worked i worked as a personal assistant for a while like a while ago but um i for many reasons i've never i've never done that um so it just doesn't affect me it's not my world it's i i have friends i i don't want them to suffer i want them to do their jobs i want them i don't want them to be like selling their face to ai i wish them the best and i hope they came up with a great deal but in some ways it doesn't

touch me whatsoever yeah and it's a it's an old rough uh system with convoluted incentives to power structures very and they just make a lot of bad stuff yeah so i'm trying to think like what's like the most the best movie i've watched like that's come out in recent years like that's a big hollywood film yeah good question it's not like an indie director out of like spain or something like that good hong kong parasite um parasite was it was good it was good here i love that film yeah it was really good it was surprising at the end i'm going back like pan's labyrinth what was that like two decades ago that was a while ago yeah that was a while ago um i mean there are good films coming out but i don't know if they're directly coming from

hollywood no yeah hollywood seems like uh the epicenter of the degeneracy and there's tentacles to many things when you say hollywood but um yeah i mean i i hope the thing is like if you're not in hollywood to find funding to find uh all of that it gets very very difficult extremely difficult i know this firsthand i mean we mentioned it a couple times if you think like these ai technologies have any validity in terms of helping creative filmmakers drop the cost of what it takes to produce you know their vision to the world or is that all i'm sorry is that all noise i don't know like the craziest thing is like last week i was like oh my friend sent me something because um they plugged in their film that they're making and they were like just like

what the hell the ai just like broke down the entire film gave them i mean wrote the entire documentary wrote a documentary like in seconds so i was like oh i wonder if i plugged in death athletic what would it what would it write and it was kind of mind-blowing like it gave you a format it gave you scene breakdown if you wanted it gave you like so i mean there's a legitimate concern especially if what needs to be produced is just formulaic why have a writer write down the 900 scenes that you need when AI can do it in four minutes or less or less. And then you can just pick the best ones. Yeah. Um, so that was a moment last week where I was like, Oh, Oh dang, man, this is, this is crazy. But then that will, I think just create an extra

divide between things that are like, um, industry made going to be, it's going to be made like a processed food and like probably films that have to struggle to be made and maybe actually have a voice and maybe that was always the story hollywood makes hollywood indie filmmakers struggle to make and then one of them actually you know not everything hollywood can make good films sometimes i love the westerns you know you know um there there were there are moments of everything right um but that just means when one pops up maybe it'll have more force of nature and be more amazing who knows yeah i don't want to like pan and uh say everything's gonna like be die because there is there is there's always there's always exceptions to the rule oh like

death athletic proves the human spirit always finds a way to finds a way to to peek through and that's I go back and forth with AI because I leverage it I use it to create thumbnails for a website and

I need to prove read something I'll dump it in one of the chat bots just like hey help me edit this but or something

the idea that AI is just going to wholesale replace everything we do just again unless you can strip humanity away from planet earth

sure yeah maybe it's just going to go after some people's jobs we've had this happen all the time this is what factories did

is what sure the internet email did this is the way things go this is the second industrial revolution it's the ai revolution yeah we'll see what happens i don't know i honestly ai is gonna like um force all the seed oils to stop being produced i hope so it's gonna it's gonna decide for us that would be great that would be great it integrates in the system and says you will die that's what that's what we need can the ai just tell us like all right here's how you regenerative farm the world and you can get all the beef tallow you want instead of this industrial sludge um jessica this has been great thank you for having me i know it's been a bit of a meandering conversation but i feel like i'm in like in your house yeah it was just we tried to set up the

studio that way um where can people find out more about death athletic when's it coming out so um deathathletic.com um i'm on twitter jessica solche um solc um trying to keep it updated i'm like really venturing into using twitter um but the trailer dropped um there's a pre-sale right now so the pre-sale is just through my website i will have bitcoin up soon everyone's asking um it's just uh i had i had someone buy the other day and then i've been seeing um basically put in like a really gnarly email that's not a gnarly email it's like i can't get you the product if you don't put in a real email guys like it doesn't it's not gonna compute um anyways so uh it'll be up soon but so pre-sale on the website and then it's going to release um those pre-sales

release on october 21st it'll be on google's and i google's google itunes and amazon amazon voodoo didn't take it i guess voodoo doesn't want the i thought that was funny um so be there but buy off the website buy off the website because it'll go you know i don't have to do a 50 cut with amazon etc um so yeah october 21st and then we'll see where it goes from there where do you hope it goes i mean i just i hope i hope more people see it i mean you can only wish that it becomes like a film that has legs and the more people see it and talk about it and spread the information and you know you can i can only hope that it kind of pushes out there into the wild um Um, I'm getting really good feedback from the trailer.

So that's been been super nice. Um, and then parallelly pulley this weekend or next weekend. Um, and then there's going to be premieres. Urbit Lisbon, I think is happening. Um, and then I'm hoping that people can reach out and be like, let's do a screening here. Come to wherever we'll put up a screening and then, you know, get tickets, you know, and do it like that to just keep on spreading the word yeah we were talking earlier we might try to do a screening here at the commons awesome at some point um you fit a couple hundred people in here

that's a lot of people great jessica again thank you for the work that you've done the movie's incredible thank you and the uh great pleasure of getting a sneak peek to it and it's enthralling beginning to end and again it's a very important message to get out there and story to be told so thank you for telling it and spreading the message thank you that's fun that's athletic.com we'll link to all this in the show notes peace and love freaks