The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW Rob Travalino "Revolution Empire"

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

Author Rob Travalino — a Telly, Effie, Gemini, and Emmy Award winner — joins to talk about his soon to be released book that weaves the American Revolution into a tale of revolution against a high tech dystopian empire, a modern corporate police state."Revolution Empire: History Never Retreats" speaks to young adult audiences in a way that history books can't to convey the concepts of libertyFind out more about the show and where you can watch it atTheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation through Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal,go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters – growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate, the IT solutions people. All right, welcome back. We're going to be talking to an author who has, as I pointed out,

he's an Emmy Award winner and many other types of awards like tellies and things like that, but he's also a writer. He's got a new novel out. It's called Revolution Empire. I read you one of the reviews from a homeschool curriculum training and support group, Home Link Yakima, said it offers the brutal truth of absolute power and the preciousness of the freedom that can defeat it. Another review said, serious though its themes are,

Revolution Empire is above all entertaining, highly readable. It will find a big audience and so its ideas will be deservedly spread wide. Stories like Revolution Empire give us hope that the young will leave behind a better world than that which previous generations have handed them.

And then finally this, to pull the reader deep into a web of dystopian oppression and thrilling intrigue, Rob has created a strange new world that will be eerily familiar to careful readers and students of history. And I would say probably to careful observers of what is happening to us right now. So joining us now is Rob Travolino. Thank you for joining us, Rob. Pleasure to be here, David. Thanks for having me. Let's talk a little bit about what inspired this. I'm sure there's a lot of parallels to contemporary events and dystopian novels. What inspired you to write this?

Oh, man, it's been a long journey. Part of it really just comes out of my career. I started off at a college in advertising and marketing. I had intended to be a journalist. And during my senior thesis, I got to interview some people high up in a major network news organization. This is back in the late 80s, who actually told me, because I was trying to determine whether news was still news or whether it had become more entertainment based and they told me on the network side that um you i should go into like local newspapers or something else because the network news had sort of been hijacked a little bit by corporate sponsors telling them what they wanted them to say and and sort of approving copy and improving stories and you know the what was the movie that the russell crew

movie the insider certainly talked a lot about that showing the the the trouble they had exposing big tobacco um because the network was trying to censor the story um or the sponsor was trying to center the story yeah and oddly enough i was drafted into advertising um just basically i interned at an ad agency um college, and they hired me on the spot. And so I went on this really strange journey in advertising for a number of years. I worked a lot in the kids space, I worked on G.I. Joe, I worked on Transformers, I worked on Batman, I worked on bringing all of these really big franchises to market. And while I was there, and this is kind of a convoluted journey, but I'll tie it all

together, I started to see from inside the boardrooms of the kids' business as the corporate concerns in the mid-'90s started buying more and more of kids' companies, that there was an agenda driving the narrative in the country in terms of how entertainment was being sort of steered toward something. And I didn't know what it was, but at some point it wasn't as much about kids and their power and their empowerment. It was more about somebody else's sort of molding into the message they wanted, if that makes sense. Oh, yeah. else is sort of molding into the message they wanted if that makes sense oh yeah and so rather

than selling toys and games to kids and teenagers i wanted to sell them what kids and teenagers play with toys and games for they play because they want to learn about good and evil they want to learn about changing the world they want to learn about their personal power and not the brand they're being sold the brand they want that they want to develop is themselves their own sort of you know determination their own ability to sort of make their own life and so that sort of molded into my entertainment career and the where Revolution Empire came to be was after selling a TV show to Disney and developing TV show for Discovery I sort of got the the the gist in the gist in the entertainment space that, again, there was an opportunity to give kids stories that were self-determinist, that were sort of about

core rights and core principles and about the things that kids can do outside the system and within the system to change the system, if that makes sense. Yeah. outside the system and within the system to change the system if that makes sense yeah and as i watched the world sort of change over the last you know 10 15 years especially um i saw the you know changes the patriot act things coming up i saw rights being sort of stripped away i saw things in you know in the in the culture and in the entertainment space and in the political space, all starting to work in a similar fashion or a similar agenda.

And not to put it towards a conspiracy angle, but the profit motive, I think, kicked the door open for big companies and governments to recognize that the more you can control discourse and narrative, the more money you can make, if that makes sense. Oh, yeah. I just played a clip earlier in the show about Larry Fink saying that six years ago. He said, we're going to force corporations to do this and that because you've got the purse strings and you've got unlimited amount of money if you do what we say. Otherwise, you're not going to get anything. And even so, that really becomes what they're focused on. They're focused on satisfying the people at the top of the economic food chain who are above the

corporate level. And they're focused on selling a narrative that the government likes as well. So that's really a prescription for disaster, a prescription for a kind of dystopian society that you talk about in your novel, and you have a lot of parallels into the American Revolution. Talk a little bit about that. It's set in kind of a, is it a parallel universe, or is it a kind of a recapitulation of the American Revolution that you see in this empire?

I kind of look at it like a thought experiment. And the idea being that I don't define whether it's a parallel universe or if it's a future time. I kind of leave that open for the reader. But ultimately, as I looked at the world changing, and this is interesting, you brought up, Larry, the idea that if you look at the way the world is sort of headed, you see a large sort of globalism, you know, component to it. You see a lot of recipe for tyranny. You see a lot of recipe with surveillance, with, you know, you having to register all of your, you all of your devices a certain way. I'm not saying that we've hit tyranny yet, but there's an incredible danger and potential for it. And when you look back at the revolution of the United States in 1776, it was the largest corporate entity on the planet was the East India Trade Company.

And the British Empire was the largest corporate banking entity on the planet was the East India trade company. And the British empire was the largest corporate banking entity on the planet. And so it's almost like history is repeating in a way. I know I at least see you smiling because that's what the danger is to me. And so when I looked at that and I look at the way from the inside, the advertising marketing space, how people are segmented and divided. When I hear people talking about systemic racism and I hear people complaining about it in the context of the present day, I watched corporate America for years segment minorities,

blacks here, Hispanics here, whites whites here asians here and everything else and they sold to them that way they sold them that because it was it made more money whether they did it on purpose or whether they did it by you know did it by accident the quest for profit created a systemic inequality and those things are all tyrannical in their own sort of sense when they're taken far enough if that is am i yeah you know correct a little too off the rails but but as i looked at things i looked at a present-day version of royalty and elitism in celebrity culture in excuse me expert culture you can't make a decision without an expert telling you me expert culture you can't make a decision without an expert telling you what to do you can't make a decision without government telling you what

you're supposed what's best for you you can't make a decision without you know your your computer reminding you that you shouldn't do this or your software telling you hey step back and you can't say this or you shouldn't be mindful of your words i use a program called grammarly um which constantly tells me be aware of the you know I use a program called Grammarly, which constantly tells me, be aware of the, you know, worry about your speech and your being about being inclusive here. And you're doing this. I'm like.

So they folded in the Associated Press's terms that you're allowed to use for this and that. They've folded that into Grammarly now? Kind of permeating into everything. And, you know, and you look at the core and I look at the, to go off on another small little tangent, there's an effort in the last 20 years to make socialism seem like it's a wonderful thing. And historically, and again, this is leaving the ideologies out of it and the current political discourse out of it. Historically, socialism and communism have killed more people than most wars combined.

That's right. And so why are we talking about that? Why are we suddenly making it look like it's okay? the context of um you know how control systems work and how you know altering language for example cancel culture and altering light altering language is a version of of marx that's that's a marxism playbook it's right on the playbook of socialism and marxism that's right make some hijack the word make it not okay create another word and make that word okay, and then make everyone go in line. And at some point, you're actually giving away your right to speak by association. And that's a very slippery slope between losing your right to speak freely out of association to losing your right to speak by mandate, by law, by some official decree. And when you look back at the back of the revolutionary days, people

were jailed for pamphlets that they said. They were unjustly accused and taken prisoner during the early stage of the American Revolution for speaking out against the king, speaking out

against the taxes, and speaking out against the infringements on their the you know taxes and speaking out a bit against the infringements on their rights and so i look at the world today and i go i hope we're not heading that way but a lot of signs point to the fact that we're heading that way now well you know human nature doesn't change that's one of the reasons why as you point out you know the corporations change in the nature of the business changes you know we don't have the east india company anymore uh you know but we've got bigarma. We've got other things that are out there, and they're going to be allied with the government that is there. A lot of these ideological labels are there kind of as a distraction, I think, to keep us from really seeing what's happening here. Because there's a merger between the government and between these corporations. And we even have this, you know, we have some people over there who say,

well, you know, the corporations can do no wrong, the government can do no right, and vice versa. They don't understand how they have merged together. And so that's a key thing. And so in your book, you know, human nature does not change, but it's interesting to be able to reach a younger audience to, to show them and to put it in a different context, because you start telling them some of these things and going back in history and it's like, oh, I can't relate to that.

Uh, they didn't have phones and they didn't have cars or whatever virtual reality. So I can't really relate to that world. So you, you put in some of the trappings that we have now because human nature doesn't change and you still have the centrally, the same story is going to be repeated again, right? And that's the fascinating thing that was always a fascinating thing from there because the idea that when i looked back at the if you if you google you know some of the founding you know founding fathers words and the documents and the federalist papers and everything else you tend to get you know 20 search results that are irrelevant or are

why they don't apply why they're you know why they don't they don't apply, why they don't work in today's world, or they're bastardized and changed and almost manipulated versions of what they are, or they're spun to an agenda. And again, it's not like, again, I'm not saying that there's some concerted effort going on because I don't know and i can't prove that but it certainly seems like there's a there's an effort to disempower the funding the founding principles of this nation where whereas but in the meantime they were the they were the truths that were unassailable in in the 1700s and in the 1800s those truths could not be at some level could not be argued with you could not argue with inherent born you're born with inherent rights you cannot argue with you know some of the core principles of the ownership of private property are what actually are tied

inextricably to freedom because if you don't can't own things, you have no freedom at some point. And they don't want us to have any freedom or dignity. That's one of the things you look at, uh, you know, especially the last few years, it's like a BF Skinner type of world that they've created. And he said,

you know, we need to move beyond freedom and dignity and they want to move in order to move beyond freedom and dignity. They want to move beyond these principles that were put there because people had lived under tyranny and they knew what it looked like uh yeah they're pretty obvious about the fact when you listen to these people in academia they're up front about the fact that they want to deconstruct everything about our society and our our culture and and government and everything else and institute uh you know what we have seen in the past is pure dystopian

societies and we can it doesn't history and societies. Isn't history full of examples every few decades, every hundred years, every millennium where that does not work? And eventually human beings who have an inherent sort of drive to believe in greater things and an inherent drive to be free to choose ultimately end up saying i we can't do this it's against my nature you know human nature has again the double it is a double-edged sword you know if you look at you know in the john milton faustian sense it's a double-edged sword because you're either gonna sell yourself for some security in the ben franklin sense you know you're gonna give up some for security and liberty in the you know the interest of security and then you're gonna lose these things forever and sense you know you're going to give up some for security and Liberty in the you know the interest of security and then you're going to lose these things forever and at some point you're going to like I want them back because that's who defines who I am and so

Revolution again you can't teach that necessarily to a kid and in the young adult novel space you can't just go out and and say here's the here's here's the Bill of Rights, here's this, and you could teach them in a classroom. Here's why these things matter. Here's why these things worked. Here's why these things took down tyranny globally for a period of time. They took down authoritarianism globally. They took down communism in every instance. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting

and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters. Growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit has you covered visit innovate today innovate the IT solutions people until maybe recently yeah and so you know ultimately the best way to teach those things or at least give people the choice again because that's for me that's that's the birth of revolution empire came out of what I saw was we're losing the choice. We're losing the free will we're supposed to be born with, and we're losing the free will that the country had instilled and enshrined

in its very founding documents and core principles. And so these things, you can take these things in small doses, and I'll get to the book in a second, and you can say, you know, you can look at the 1619 projects and go, okay, here's all the bad things we did. But you can also look at the fact that all those documents and all those core principles are how we ended the bad things that human nature allowed us to do. Talk a little bit, you mentioned Franklin, you know, of course, Franklin talking about

people who are willing to trade essential liberty for the promise of safety because he knew that that wasn't going to be safe. And that you enslave yourself to the extent you enslave yourself. You're not safe. You're not prosperous. None of this. And of course, they never deliver on that. But but how does that I'm sure that plays a part in your in your book. Talk a little bit about that.

The trade. So I looked at the world around me and I saw saw that we were moving sort of in that direction. We're moving in the direction, as Ben Franklin said, and again, it's an illusion of security in a lot of ways, right? Because all the things we're being sold now were not any more secure, were actually less secure. So I looked at the world. I noticed that there was an incredible parallel between the way things were headed and the royal kings and queens, you know, giant financial concerns that everything about them was being in control, dictating what my subjects could do, defining their freedoms, and then holding the purse strings so that if they were bad citizens or they didn't do what you wanted to, we would just take away, survive their

very ability to survive. We'll take away their livelihoods, we'll take away their money. And if we had to, we'll constantly increase their expenditures in the form of different taxes in different ways. And so when I looked at that, I was like, well, this is something that I think we all really feel because as adults and as taxpayers, we always know that it's always a battle of each little slice, whether it's coming in inflationary, inflation's sort of a hidden tax. There's a fee for this, it's a tax and now corporations are on board. They're charging a fee for everything. You used to have all these things on a navigation system in a car

that now you have to pay extra for. You're constantly being reduced in your choices unless you pay for them or unless you play nice to get them. And that's very similar to the British empire in a lot of ways and what happened with the colonies and the natural struggle between the population and the people with the rights they feel they have so I wanted to construct a world that would allow uh kids and teenagers and young adults to learn the concepts as they read them as and as they saw them as opposed to reading them off of these old documents that to me are relevant to you are relevant but to a 17 year old or 16 year old maybe not so much but the concepts under them are timeless the concepts under them still apply

the concepts under them when you really study them and actually learn them and realize what they say and don't read the cliff notes version or the version somebody told you to read you say this way second this is what this second, this is what my struggle is. This is your childhood. This is adolescence. This is young adulthood. This is all the stuff I'm doing. I'm trying to define who I am.

I'm trying to find my power. I'm trying to find my right to be who I am. And instead of having it being sold to us, you can be this, or you can be that, or you can be this. No, no, you're not supposed to be sold a menu of things you can be you're supposed to decide what you want to be if you have to create something new to be to be that's what you should be able to do um or create a new you know create a new you're supposed to be able to create a new world starting with yourself and so a revolution Revolution Empire basically is a dystopian thought experiment on what would a surveillance state,

technologically advanced society look like blended with the world of the 1700s. That's great. Yeah, so I use some of the slang slang of the period so there's colonial slang throughout the book um i used um like what for example what kind of colonial slang uh um colonial slang are things like you would call the boxman you'd sit and call an undertaker you would call him the boxman and an undertaker at the time was an undertaker slash pawnbroker because he would take, I mean, you see like the little Christmas carol scene where the undertaker's selling off property from the person who died because they had no

relatives or they had nobody to bequeath to. And so that's what undertakers were. They were boxmen. They would just box up you and your stuff, and then they would bury some and sell the rest. That's great. They accuse people of being a nutmeg addict. Yeah, exactly. So fire cake is a hard-baked, hard-tacked. It's just whatever dough you got, throw them together and bake it to a hard biscuit that can be stored and held for long periods of time. And because the kids in the story, the entire story is our teenagers,

everybody's teenagers in their twenties that are the critical aspect of the story, because people don't realize or recognize so much that there were people who signed the Declaration of Independence that were, you know, 22 years old, 24 years old. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters,

growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate, the IT solutions people. People fighting in the war that were 14 and 15 years old, there were people who were you know founding founding players to be that chose to do this at you know 14 15 16 17 and left home some people disguised themselves as adults

some women disguise themselves as men to join them to join the fight you know it's it's it's a remarkable story that we don't have told in the detail that it really happened. So I'm faithful to a lot of the things that really took place. And that's an important thing as well because, you know, we are so babied in our society. You know, we live in this, you know, for 12 years. You go to this institution where everything is highly structured, highly structured. You got one authority figure up in the front of the room and that type of thing. But in the real world of a couple of hundred years ago, just or even less than that, people

would grow up very, very quickly. They would be given command in some cases of ships as teenagers. And it was done on the basis of merit, but they would mature very, very quickly. They'd stay in a babysitting environment for that long. And I think that's one of the reasons why, uh, it seems like the longer you stay in school, the number you get, because it's like a babysitting, it dulls your imagination. It actually dulls your, uh, your, uh, inquisitiveness and critical thinking

and all the rest of this stuff by just kind of keeping you in this controlled environment, but that's a real important thing for people learn. and critical thinking and all the rest of this stuff by just kind of keeping you in this controlled environment. But that's a real important thing for people to learn. And I think that is something that is very beneficial for young kids to see. I know my son learned to read by reading G.A. Hinty novels. He was a novelist back in the Victorian period. And he would take a 17-year-old and he would put that 17-year-old in a historical context and he would be interacting

with these historical adult figures that you know of right but he would be right there in the midst of it there's always a coming of age novel i imagine that's a key part you talk about characters being uh 17 years old and around that age uh yeah donovan russ is the is the main protagonist of the story and he's kind of a blend of george washington uh thomas paine and and uh and benjamin rush oh that sounds great yeah and basically the the premise revolution empire is is is there's an underground society that is is literally under the empire the the empire is kind of like a giant city state and it's and it's miles miles high and and literally buried under it is the remnants of a previous world of a previous civilization in that civilization lives kind of a distant franchise and since i've had to

set it up in in a present context it's kind of like the disenfranchised masses. It's it's it's anybody who's. At or below the poverty line or at or below the. The cultural line in the world today, whether they're refugees, whether they're. You know, Native Americans, whether they're, you know, inner city kids black white hispanic because you know i in one of my documentary filmmaker i did a documentary in the south in in the late 2000s and i found unbelievably depressed and poor cities in the south that were um incredibly integrated because they were all they all had everything in common they were all struggling together to survive and when you look at the world from that perspective you realize especially now that we're so top heavy with a

small group of people controlling what i forgot what it is it's 90 something percent of the wealth is controlled by like five percent of the people in the world and so in a lot of ways we are all in some form of debt servitude and we are all in sort of the same boat in a lot of ways, we are all in some form of debt solitude, and we are all in sort of the sameoffs of society or they were disenfranchised or they had or they lacked the freedom to be who they wanted to be whether it was religious freedom whether it was economic freedom whether whatever it might be so the world is literally underground called the sewers these people live in near perpetual darkness and all they have left behind is a book written by a guy named dr ruck dr princeton rush who's kind of like a Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush character. And he's the father of Donovan Rush. And he wrote this long treatise on

rights and on inherent rights and on property ownership and on liberty and all these concepts that these kids have no idea of, because they live in this oppressed under society where they're not allowed anything. They're basically allowed what gets thrown down from empire city into their midst except for empire city has a form of a lottery which is again vaguely familiar to today's world these floating magnetically floating ships will come down once in a while find groups of kids that shouldn't be assembled or find kids to pick and they literally lift them up into the light and it's called becoming an empire builder you're brought out into the light of empire city and offered a chance to serve his magistrate in a much more sort of you know advanced way you

get you can get coveralls on you get dressed in the empire garb and you get a chance like it's like winning a lottery ticket so that you're suddenly being granted the opportunity to get out of your miserable state and into a land of opportunity where you can quote unquote be wherever you want to be but it's only if you succumb to all the rules that are in the empire system that's that's above you and very few kids get up here and get accepted and get kept so donovan in his following his father's book um looks for a way out of the sewers um for his people for his kind for all the people that are there that are sort of aligned with all the kids all the people who are disenfranchised and he gets taken in an

empire builder transport and dumped into the city and brought to the magistrate's tower and meets um a guy named dr richard franklin who's a sort of rakish character in the empire who is a friend of his father's and got his father a pardon from a death sentence and thrown in jail and donovan is finding his way to the empire and franklin was hoping because he's sort of a brand franklin character that some kid would break out at some point and lead a change because franklin thinks the empire is unjust and so he's working sort of clandestinely to undermine it so when this kid appears in the empire city he sees the next level of prison so his father always says that like freedom they can't if the one place they can't take freedom from is in here that's where the only

the the the one prison you can put yourself in is in your own head and once you're in the prison you'll never get you're never going to get out so once you realize that you're free there you can free yourself everywhere else so once it goes back to the sewers he organizes a a channel crossing which is kind of like washington crossing the delaware where these kids break out of the sewers and they sail across this this massive channel and they land on the shores of the colonies the colonies are a industrial business sort of suburb of Empire City, where the people there aren't allowed to go to Empire City either. They're the commerce, commercial engine, factory workers, all the people who do all the working to support the empire. So they are separated like the American colonies, but they can't go back and forth.

Some of the people in power can go back and forth but most people work their their whole lives and their some of their money goes to the empire so when donovan realizes that this the world is unjust based on his father's writings he leads a landing in the colonies and that's the first book because the the empire realizes they've got a problem and they don't know who caused it and they suspect that richard franklin is behind it and they realize the only way they can they can quell it is by giving some of these sewer rats a foothold in the colonies as long as it makes money for them as long as it helps them stay in control and so it's out of one trap into another trap

waiting to get into another trap that's kind of how the book is set up interesting kind of like some of the people who came to america as indentured servants it was being run by those interesting employers indentured servants once they land in the colonies yeah interesting show show the cover of the book there. Again, so the first book is Revolution Empire, and there are several books in the series, right? How many of them are there? There's three. The first one is called Revolution Empire History Never Retreats, and that tells the story of Donovan Rush's escape from the sewer and leading some of the sewer rats, as they're called, to colonies and then there's this

there'll be a second book which is already written called the wild colonials which shows what happens there and another thing that's really important to the book is that all of the main characters keep journals and so the book does a very unique thing where there's journal pages spaced throughout it so every once in a while you get an internal dialogue from donovan an eternal dialogue from richard franklin an internal dialogue from from various other characters and all the words and all the dialogue are based upon the writings speeches and letters of ben franklin thomas camperson john adams because all the characters are in the story so you learn as a reader the concepts that these that again to circle it back again I know I talked about a lot of things because

they tend to globally go all over the place but you learn the concepts of the Federalist Papers you learn the concepts of you know the motivations behind George Washington John Adams you see what made them tick and you hear their own words through the journal entries but you don't absorb it as the dense information as it is you you learn it on the fly as it applies to the situations that these characters are in and you look at a world that's reflective of today and you go oh crap that matters this like this this matters and this matters this is why it matters this is why people break out of a prison to try to instead of just to be free but to change the world this

is why you know this is this is why people take the stands they take this is why people recognize inequality in its true forms this is why people recognize tyranny so why people can recognize authoritarianism because you know there's standards, there's standards of individual power and individual rights that without them, you can't measure authoritarianism and tyranny. You can't expose it and recognize it until you realize what it actually takes from you personally. That's a great way to put it. And that's a really ingenious idea that you've got there. I mean, you're giving them the philosophies and the writings in a way that, you know, is being put out there gradually and in a context that they can relate to.

And they're not realizing that they're really learning this kind of stuff. You know, that's one of the difficult things about educating kids because, or anybody, you, you know, it's, it's, you put stuff out in a didactic way, like a lecture and you say, well, this is this and that is that. And that doesn't really get through to most people, you know, it's like handing them, uh, you know, some kind of a pamphlet or something like that. But then the next step is to do a documentary and the documentary is more engaging because you see, uh, visceral pictures and you hear people and you see things. And so that brings it in a little bit more. But when you do it as a work of fiction, you can really draw them in in a very visceral

way because they can get inside the character's heads. And that's a really ingenious way to educate these kids about these principles that are so vital and so timeless that are now being destroyed. And that's a great approach. I really love what you're doing with that. I appreciate that. And that's my worry. My worry is some of these things have been lost. Some of these things are being taken away. Some of these things are under attack. And the way the narrative discourse is going, you know, in terms of the medium, you know, obviously yourself and those who are talking about the same subjects as you and examining the world the same way you are we're you know the your voice is getting um people try to distract people from what you're talking about people try to distract people away from there's an agenda trying to silence the discourse yeah one of the things that you know elon musk talks about in in twitter in terms of the

restoration of free speech whether he's done it or not um or whether you know what is whether what his ultimate intentions are although I'm fascinated by what he's been doing you know without the discourse without the free speech without the without art without the ability to discuss these these things um and really look at them um you know freely and fully um we're going to lose them yeah and we're look at them freely and fully, we're going to lose them. And we're already losing them to some extent. So the book is really designed not to push a certain agenda, but just to make the comparison between...

I mean, obviously every writer has an agenda to some extent, but my agenda is to expose, again, where the dangers are in the present world, where those dangers are historically, where they've always sat, where they've always been, the damage they've caused, but what they fundamentally take away from us as individuals, the rights they really strip, the control they really exert, all the flavors of the control and all the flavors of servitude they put upon you so that people kids will learn through the course of an adventure they'll say wow i agree with this thing that donovan's fighting about i agree with this thing that john a is talking about he's that's the john adams character i agree with this thing that richard franklin is talking about i see what they're fighting against it's actually kind of like what I see going on around me. And then at least have the conversation and say, well,

if this applies in this narrative concept and this entertainment concept that I'm looking at, but it's reflective of the world, like all good entertainment is always, I got to think about this because if I'm being told this all the time, but this feels true, we got a problem. We should be talking about this. And that'm being told this all the time but this feels true we got a problem we should be talking about this and that's what i'm hoping i'm hoping the book is a conversation piece oh yeah and of course it's key you know we go back and we look in the middle of the 20th century

orwell solzhenitsyn they understood that it was about control over your mind right uh two plus two equals five or yeah language and getting you to say even what you know is not true. So Solzhenitsyn wrote, you know, live not by lies, because he knew that was the ultimate thing to get you to live by what you knew was not true. That's how they control your mind. That's what totalitarianism is. But of course, Jefferson understood that as well.

That's not a new insight. You know, one of his most famous quotes, it's inscribed there at the monument to him in Washington, is, you know, fighting every form of tyranny over the mind of man. And so he knew that tyranny's ultimate throne was to take control of your mind. And these people, you look at it, one of the things I find interesting about the American Revolution is that these people were very wealthy and elitistist and yet they didn't accrue all that power to

themselves because they also saw themselves as the underdog to an even higher tyranny that was there what you talked about the the east india company and the big the big bank and the big corporations and the big empire and all the rest of the stuff and they didn't want to recreate that because they knew what it was like to live under that in the same way that people have lived under a communist government can smell that a mile away. These people knew what totalitarianism was about. They knew it was a tyranny over the mind of man and all the rest of this, why they enshrined freedom of speech and religion as the very first thing.

But they understood that. And so they weren't going to reinvent that. And we're coming up to a time where things are getting very difficult. And if the population doesn't have this understanding of what tyranny looks like, and the reason that we had these things in there, we're in big trouble. That's why what you're doing in terms of reaching to kids that way and, and, you know, putting it in this context where they can understand

assimilate and identify with it that's really important and so I can understand why homeschooling foundations recommend your book so it's gonna be three of them right the first one's about to come out in July yeah yeah and the three of them and the third one goes up to a surprise ending but i obviously can't tell you about it but the idea is that there's there's way more than three books in to tell the story fully because it's the story parallels the american revolution so it parallels an uprising in the colonies you know a stand against the empire at some point um and and all the players are involved in you know i don't know how into the details of history you are,

but even characters on the other side are represented. General Burgoyne is in the story. There's a guy named Benastry Tarleton, who is a notoriously vicious British officer. Oh, yeah. War crimes. He's a central character to the story. And I've added other characters into the story. There's a central character to the story and i've added other store other characters into

the story there's a there's a gang leader named kz who is loosely based on uh the marquis de lafayette but a combination of the marquis de lafayette and and sort of confucianism and and because there's a there's a there's a component of the empires outside of empire outside of the empire itself there are other geopolitical players that are reminiscent and reflective of today's world There's a component of the empires outside of the empire itself. There are other geopolitical players that are reminiscent and reflective of today's world because they need a France and they need a Spain and a Portugal in the story. But if you look at today's world, we have all that stuff still going on because we used to have all the great seafaring nations. Now we have the nations that have know navies and nuclear arsenals so they're the same it's the same struggle right it's the same it's always the same struggle yeah it's a struggle for resources just struggle for hearts and minds it's

a struggle for you know for influence and so all these things are incredibly reflective you can look at you know you can look at if you look at, if you look at the American Revolution in the context that I want to find everything that's wrong with it, you can. If you want to look at, you know, if you want to look at any point in history and find what's wrong or right in it, you can. But at the end of the day, you cannot, you really can't assail the principles. And I'm glad you talked about the fact that some of these guys were very wealthy some of these guys were very elitist they understood above all else human nature they understood all else how they got there they didn't want to get there to be in control of it it's a difference between an authoritarian and a person who believes in liberty and freedom and god and god-given rights one person wants to lift

everybody else up or give everybody else the opportunity to come up to their level one person wants to control how they do it that's right one person wants to meet her and meet you know meet it out to them in little doses so that they will always and forever be in control these guys understood their own human nature as well as any as well as anybody ever has or may or may may to you know to the future the way we're going they knew to build in safeguards that prevent the world and even themselves from taking control did it work entirely no because people chipped away at it people you started using lawfare as early as like you know 1780 and 1790 to chip away at these principles because they knew these principles when they worked prevented people from assuming authoritarian control

and so we've been doing this this country's been doing this battle for over 200 years oh yeah we're starting to slide with global with global help you know yeah it's a constant battle it's a constant battle it has to constantly be renewed and uh jefferson said that as well you know yeah it's a constant battle it's a constant battle it has to constantly be renewed and uh jefferson said that as well you know constantly tree of liberty constantly refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants uh and so that's not the desk it's like you're gonna if you sell your soul at some point you're you know good luck getting back out you know once you go far enough into hell you know i did you know the the ad it was just you went to churchill if you go if you if you find yourself going through hell keep going there's no exit sometimes you can't get deep you're not

coming back i know i said that at the very beginning you know that when we went into lockdown on that monday following the friday the 13th i said you know uh keep calm and carry on remember that was a sign that was there as they had this massive army right across the channel and also freedom is in peril defended at all your might. I said, look, these guys knew they were going to die. It isn't any question if there's some disease or something like that. But they were concerned about preserving liberty and freedom. Just as Jefferson was.

He said, look, life is not, you can't take away life and liberty. You can destroy those, but you can't separate them from each other. And so that was what gave us a free society that respected freedom and dignity and all the rest of these things. I can't even imagine anybody in today's world saying the kinds of things that JFK said, for example. He said, look, a rising tide floats all boats. Can you imagine anybody thinking like that anymore? And that wasn't just him thinking, saying this on his own. That was really kind of the whole zeitgeist of our society and of our government at the time. Let's help everybody get a home. Well, that's not what they're doing anymore. They're all in it for themselves. They're all a saluting mentality

that is happening at this point in time. And they all think that they're going to come out on top. That's a part that I, and then, you know, it's, it's, I'm glad you brought that up there because that's a part that I saw, you know, again, I even saw it back when I was in school, because my, you know, I was, my family worked very hard to move to the suburbs. My, both my parents worked, my mom went back to college, you know, I was, you know, the, you know, by the time I went, you know, by the time I was in late in elementary school and high school, I was home alone most of the time. My brother and my sister went off to school and I was raised myself in a lot of ways. And we came from a very upper lower class, lower middle class

sort of beginning. When I went to school in I saw when I went to school in affluent suburb of New York, I saw as a kid, the agenda sort of switch, I saw the weather returns change. Yes, I saw the I saw myself being given choices instead of being given opportunities. I taught myself, I saw myself being taught by some teachers in an increasing matter through high school, especially you weren't, you were taught about the things,

the things you could, again, like I said before, the things you could pick from a list as opposed to the things you can, the list you could make, if that makes sense. And that sounds, it sounds a little weird,

but oddly enough, I went to a Catholic college and the most freedom i had to argue with my professors or my teachers the most freedom i had to choose what i wanted to study the most freedom i had to you know to disagree or agree was in a catholic school which my entire high school taught me was not the case like or you go to a catholic school they're gonna just they're gonna ram religion down your throat and you're not going to give you any they're going to control your mind you're going to this and then when i it was an eye-opening experience for me because i went to iona college and when i got to iona college i was arguing theology with my you know with with my

because i had to take you had to take one class in you know theology i was arguing you know you know god and theology with my professor and he was like bring it on. This is the conversation we should be having. Yeah, exactly. Which is completely different from what I happened, what happened when I was in high school. People were telling me like, you know, oh, you can't have that conversation. You should never. Yeah.

If you, if you really believe, if you've had, if you've wrestled with this stuff yourself and we all should, and you understand, uh, you, you know, you, know you you cared enough to look into it is there a god is this stuff and you've looked into that uh you welcome uh the discussion that is there uh you don't try to hide run from what is true you unleash it as augustine said right truth is like a lion that you unleash let's have that debate And it really is out of those kinds of religious foundations that our society said, well, the answer to bad speech is more speech. And we're going to continue to want to free things up. We don't want to have some small clique of people who are going to control everything. You had Francis Bacon who said that, you know, we want to have a scientific

method. We don't want to have experts, you know, But now we're going in the other direction really hard, and we've got to push back hard against that. That's a key thing to reject this idea of scientific dogma that's going to be put on people. That's an intolerant religion that can't stand scrutiny. A lot of scientists

are complaining that it's become a dogma to religion. I mean, more and more scientists are complaining every day that it's a dogma to religion. I mean, a lot more and more scientists are complaining every day that it's a dogma to religion. But we're turning everything, and listen, again, is this Marxism? It smells and it sort of smells and looks like it, because at the end of the day, making everything a division, you know, a quantification of division, making everything into a dogma, is literally straight out of, like the saul linsky straight out of the marxist playbook and it's really funny too because when i went into advertising i studied edward bernays and i studied all the all the tools and

propaganda i could use because that was my job but when i got into it i had to learn the human nature behind it and i'd taken psychology in school i actually majored in it for a while but when i when i saw it in operation i was like wow this is really dangerous stuff like this is and i did at that point i chose to use it for you know i'm going to teach kids i'm not going to sell my my clients products they're not going to sell their toys and games. I'm going to sell why kids come to I explained people, but there's no such thing as a brand without people. You can make a logo, you can do a million, you know, commercial television commercials, you can bombard people with the message. But unless people join, and they're seeking some kind of experience or empowerment or some kind of benefit. That's where the brand lies. The brand lies in the the consent of the governed for lack of a better way to put it and so you can govern them

all you want and but when you go off the rails with your brand you know the way some some companies have in the last two or three years let's say oh yeah um the people just go we're not having it this is not who we are we don't care what you are this is not who we are. We don't care what you are. This is not who we are. And again, that's a big component of what I wanted to take away from Revolution Empire. We have consent. We were born with consent. We were born with the ability to make the choice and make the decision that we are free to do so that it's that's our call and when we when governments are built they're supposed to be built what gives five people the right to rule over 500 people or 5 000 people that's right only if those 5 000 people agree that those people can can govern and that's the you know that's again that's a big central premise well I want a boardroom I want a boardroom telling me what I can and can't buy and what I should do do I want a Wall Street telling me what I can and I can't buy and and what I can do no it's like I

want the choices I want I want my choices I want my choices I want my freedom that's right and I think typically as these people who are experts they know better than we do you know it's a paternalism that is there. And that enables the socialism. That is what they come in with Marxism. Oh, we're going to do this for the good of the group, right? Trample over the rights of the individual. And it was a very different approach that Jefferson and others took where they said, we are going to, what is government's purpose?

Well, government's purpose is to protect our God-given rights and otherwise leave us alone. And so that's a fundamentally different approach than any of these other systems or any of these other historical governments had. And of course, we have gotten away from that in our paternalism. You know, when you talk about your book, that's a key thing. And I think it's important for people to see this type of understanding, this approach, this philosophy in a futuristic standpoint. Because that's another thing I see people despairing of. Well, look at this sophisticated technology. We've never wedded this kind of totalitarianism with technology.

And we need to understand that the human nature can overcome that technology or anything that is created to control us by other humans. We can overcome that. Listen, 95% of the universe is invisible and can't be measured. Dark matter. That's right. And so, you know, a lot of scientists are looking at intelligent design now, cosmologists, because they're going like, well, wow, we can't figure out how this universe came to be. We don't know where it came from. We know that it started.

That's all we know. But the complexity of it and the sheer mind, I mean, complexity of that and DNA seems to have an imprint of a predetermined design. But we're only as good, the takeaway is we're only as good as what what we the tools we have to measure right and so in terms of science science is limited by our powers of observation and then our materials that we use to measure when you i'm going to shift this over to what you were just talking about when you talk about totalitarianism and you talk about new technology you're talking about new things that we can use which may or may not damage our rights what are we measuring those with and so the greatest tools we have we have created on earth to this

point in terms of government in terms of rights is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights because those are the those are the those are the one group of documents and group of thoughts that that restored power from the few to everyone they gave power to everyone the idea of the you know the idea of these documents was to give power to everyone equally in a sense you had you had your you had your power the those those are now measurement tools they're almost like scientific tools if you look at new if you look at ai we should be measuring that against rights we should be measuring that against our rights as sentient beings our rights to determination at some point giving away any of that is a danger giving away

any of our choices a danger these things are these things like everything else are tools like i'm i'm looking i'm using um ai right now in you know various things in i do a lot of consulting work too and i'm using the ai in the consulting work i keep it in a box because that's where it should be like in a box over here i use it for what it is but I use it so I can evaluate it. Because the dream is, you look at, what's the guy named Noah Harari? Is that the guy's name? Yeah, Yuval Harari, yeah.

Yuval Harari, right. Oh, the machine should just make all the decisions. I'm sorry, go ahead. Not to say just what a wacky thing to say, the machine should make all the decisions for us. I remember back in the day, I didn't't believe it a friend of mine sent me a thing that said that the slogan of the World Economic Forum was you'll own nothing and be happy and I didn't believe it and I looked it up on the site and there it was and I took a screenshot of it

because I couldn't believe that I saw it and it's been taken down like long ago, two years ago or so it was taken down. And the UN had a site up that said the same thing. It had screenshots of it. It was taken. I couldn't believe that it was there. And I'm going like, if that's the vision that we're going towards, then this book needs to come out. Oh, yeah. And that's kind of.

And we can see how that is rolling out. We can see how that's rolling out as well, because, you know, we look at this foundation of individual liberty, how it was used to create prosperity. And you look at the middle of the 20th century where we started having the ability to have a home and, you know, that necessitated people being able to commute, the suburbs that they hate and all the rest of the stuff. But now even the appliances, you know, not just the cars, but now they're even coming for the appliances, coming up for waste, take everything away from us. And so we see this, it's like a bell-shaped curve. We got up to the top and now we're on the way down where they're stripping all this stuff away from us

that were essentially accoutrements of the liberty and freedom so that they can get down to that foundation of liberty and freedom and take that away from us and completely enslave us. That's what it's all really about with what they're doing. It's a pretty clear agenda, I think. For sure. And David, just, I mean, like flashing back to the revolution, to the post-revolution, you know, let's flash back to the early 1800s.

Some of these things were stripped away, were being stripped away then by decisions that were being made by people. But the thing that people forget when you look back at the country, and if you want to be a person who pooh-poohs the US and says, look at all the bad things they did, you can pick these things out as individual moments and say, well, freedom was taken away here and this was then there. But these were always done by people who had authoritarian or controlling agendas and wanted things to be controlled or or you know or or parsed out in a certain way and they damaged the cost damaged our rights they they switched things in the constitution they They switch things a little bit. Again, they, they change laws. They,

they maneuvered around things. So the, again, the, the fundamental rights and principles always apply, applied from the beginning, still apply. The only way authoritarians can get ahold of this country is to

bastardize them and, and run around them because they can't be fought directly. Yeah, that's right. Let me ask you, because there's so many parallels in your book to 1776, you understand that, you're teaching that in this in an interesting way. As we mentioned before, you know, we talk about God-given rights, and of course their faith in God was a key aspect of that. Does that play a role in your book as well? Absolutely. Good.

Good. Yep. Good. Well, that's a key thing. Yeah. It's too big of a part of human history, and it's an most part that human beings for whatever reason i don't know what it could be are wired to believe in in a higher power they're what we are literally genetically evolutionarily wired to believe in god and predisposed to believe in god well why do we

have that you know why why would we we do we do we why what's the evolutionary purpose of that what's the if you put purely scientific perspective like if i was elon musk well what's the purpose of why would we have that so we have it for we've evolved it for some reason what did it serve would it serve well you know it's funny i just did a consulting or i did some consulting work on this and um you know it turns out statistically people are healthier, they live longer, they live better together, they live better with each other if they are believers in God. If they're believers in the divine, they're actually better people.

Not better people, that's a bad way to say it. Well, they have a better life, we'll just put it that way. They end up with a better life, and they end up better to each other, and they end up doing better things in the world. And so let's—I don't understand why—I didn't understand why churches were shut down during the pandemic and bars and strip clubs were open. I couldn't process it. I couldn't process why—

That was a big tell, we're sailing all religion and all faith when we're and meanwhile we're we're you know as as some global governments they are fighting against nations and people who are fiercely religious and god-believing and so um at some point you're like like what's going like just go what's going on? Like, just go, what's going on? So I had to put that in the book because it's a huge component of life that again is under attack. Religious liberty is under attack the same way personal liberty is. And you can't leave that out of the story of America.

You really can't leave that story out of the idea of freedom and individual liberty either. Well, the book is called a Empire, and it is book one, History Never Retreats, and it's going to be a series, and it looks like a wonderful book, and we've got a writer here, Rob, who says, Gard Goldsmith is a listener. He's got shows of his own, liberty conspiracies. He said, I can't wait to get those novels. Uh, and I think,

uh, it's going to be a very popular series and, it truly is, uh, has been interesting talking to you. Uh, I can't wait to see it myself either. So,

um, thank you so much for joining us and good luck with this. And I hope it gets a wide audience. We'll do what we can to push this out there. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Have people look at it, have people look it up at Amazon with my name, because by name because Amazon has a weird sort of thing where the

new books sometimes they bury, they're a little harder to find. So if you look at Revolution Empire, you might see 12 other books with it if you're looking for Revolution Empire with my name. Rob Travalino, T-R-A-V-A-L-I-N-O, Rob Travalino. Look that up on Amazon to find it. That's great. And it's coming out in the middle of July, right? The first book.

It's out July 25th. Okay, great. Great. Look forward to seeing that. Thank you so much, Rob. I appreciate it. The Common Man. They created Common Core to dumb down our children.

They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us. It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide. Please share the information

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