TrueLife - Censorship Sparks Rebellion: Celebrating Psychedelic Defiance in a Controlled World 2025

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/A riveting conversation about the future. Julian Assange being interviewed by Google ceo Eric Schmidt. A battle of minds & the truth about “do no evil” One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Aloha, everybody. Happy Thanksgiving. Hope you're all enjoying things that you're thankful for, spending time with family. and being around people you care about, thinking about things that are important.

Just wanted to come and do a quick book review for this Thanksgiving. Here with my family having a nice afternoon and getting ready to have a nice dinner. Here's a book I wanted to talk about here on Thanksgiving. Right, here's someone I'm thankful for, and I think we should all be thankful for, is WikiLeaks, Mr. Julian Assange.

This is a great book. It's called When Google Met WikiLeaks. And it's a fascinating read. There's some great chapters in here. One chapter is called The Mountain Comes to Muhammad. It talks about how Eric Schmidt, Cohn, all these people came to meet Julian Assange while he was being held hostage in the embassy. You know, it was shortly after the revolt in Egypt, the first spring, if you will. And I'll just read you a couple passages.

It's interesting to think about how we've gone from the first uprising in Egypt, from a man flipping over a cart because prices are too high, to the yellow vests, to where we are in Hong Kong now. and reading this book you can actually see quite a bit of evolution of how things happened and i'll just give you one example uh and part of the example during the chapter uh communicating in a revolutionary moment there is a i'll give you a little bit of insight into you know try to help paint a picture for you imagine being in the embassy And, you know, here's Eric Schmidt talking to Julian Assange and the conversation went something like this. This is Eric Schmidt talking.

When we were chatting initially, we talked about my idea that mobile phones being empowered is changing society. A rough summary of your answer for everybody else is that people are pretty much the same and something big has to change their behavior. This might be one of them. You said you were very interested in some... somebody building phone-to-phone encryption. Can you talk a little bit about roughly the architecture where you would have a broad, open network and you have person-to-person encryption? What does that mean technically? How would it work? Why is it important? That kind of stuff. I think people don't understand any of this area in my view. That's Eric Schmidt. And it's interesting he's asking

that question. You know, here's this technocrat that's... Probably the United States biggest defense contractor now asking Julian Assange, who at the time, probably understands more about the architecture of IT as much as anybody else. If not at that time being, at that time definitely being one of the, maybe the premier person about information technology. Anyways, his answer says something to the effect of. When we were dealing with Egypt, we saw Mumbarik's government cut off the internet, but there was one ISP still connected. Quite a few of us were involved in trying to keep it open. It had maybe 6% of the market.

The Mubarak government also cut off the mobile phone system. Why is it that this can be done? People with mobile phones have a device that can communicate in a radio spectrum. In a city, there is a high density of mobile phones. there is always a path between one person and another person that is there is always a continuous path of mobile phones each one of which can in theory hear the radio of the others so basically what they're talk he's talking about is implementing some sort of a peer to peer network

you know without their without the use of the cell towers the actual phones themselves being the methodology in which people can communicate you know if you remember the that first Arab Spring they shut down all the internet they didn't want people communicating they didn't have

you know ways to really do a runaround on it and you know it's it's funny that looking back I guess everything's 20 20 in hindsight but I maybe I'm wrong

but I thought I remembered hearing analysts talk about that this is what's going to happen all over the world. You know, this is the revolution that people talked about. And since then, we've seen quite a few of them,

and we've seen different ways governments have responded. We've seen a lot of heavy-handed governments, you know, like the great firewall in China.

It's funny because they kind of get into China a little bit. And that's going to be the next part that I kind of go into. here but I just wanted to talk a little bit about the beginning part about what they could do. I was watching a little bit of the Hong Kong riots and some of the first time I'm proud of those young kids out there and people fighting for their freedoms throughout the world I stand with you.

In Hong Kong I was impressed to see people using using their phones. There's different apps you know, that utilize the Bluetooth system so that their phones can't, the mobile system can't be cut off. There's a lot of good apps out there. I'm going to try to look through them and I'll put some of the ones I've heard about in the discussion box.

I know I have a lot of that to do going through my videos. So when I get in there and edit them, I'll try to put a link to some of those apps that I've heard people discussing that can make your phone an antenna or a receiver for Bluetooth, you know, kind of appear-to-peer. further down the book they talk about technology and the internet and censorship and again i just i think

it's interesting that you have eric schmidt and other people talking to julian asange about censorship you know on one hand it seems like you have julian assange who wants no censorship and And then you have people running the tech companies, the new technocracy, trying to pick his brain about what they can do to implement more censorship. It's a fascinating read. And you guys should pick it up. If you can buy it on the WikiLeaks website, when Google met WikiLeaks. But you should pick it up just to support WikiLeaks and pick up a shirt while you're there. Why not?

Maybe some CryptoKitties. But anyways, as they begin talking about the surveillance state and they begin talking about censorship in China, I'm going to read this blur from Julien Assange that just shows you why he's different than everybody else. So they're talking about the impact of technology and the impact of the Internet and censorship in China. So the previous paragraph starts out kind of like this. I'll just kind of skim through it and then I'll give you Julian Assange's answer. Let me tease out some of this. It sounds like you've got a view of the globe with certain societies where the impact of technology is relatively slight.

Certain societies where politically the impact of technology could be quite great. And certain societies where it would be a sort of. middling way and you would put china into i guess the middling category since our book is all about technology and social transformation 10 years down the line what's the globe that you see given the structure you are describing and here's julina saunge's answer i'm not sure about the impact on china it is still a political society so the impact could be very great here's part of the that I really like. I often say that censorship is always cause for celebration. Hmm, think about that for a minute. He always says that censorship is always cause for celebration.

Before I read the rest, can you think of why he would celebrate censorship? I had to pause there for a minute myself and think about it. Okay. It is always an opportunity because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care what people think. So let me read it in full, just so you can get the gist of it. I often say that censorship is always cause for celebration.

It is always an opportunity because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have a opportunity. got to care about what people think. So that's a little bit about this book right here. And I hope you guys take the time to get into it and check it out. There's other strains that of censorship that you probably wouldn't,

you may or may not think about. They talk a little bit about the financial system. And they talk about complexity as a form of censorship. Julian Assange, there is another type of censorship. that I have thought about but don't speak so much about, which is censorship through complexity. And that is basically the offshore financial sector. Censorship through complexity. Censorship of what?

Censorship of political outrage. With enough political outrage, there is law reform, and if there's law reform, you can't do it anymore. So why is it that all these careful tax structuring arrangements are so complex? They may be perfectly legal, but why are they so... complex? Well, because the ones that weren't complex were understood and the ones that were understood were regulated. So you're only left with the things that are incredibly complex. So basically more noise, less signal. So I just, I hope you guys take a few minutes to think about it. Maybe going weeky leaks. Think about what that guy's done. You know, I don't know. I'm not a judge or a jury.

but I think that that guy has definitely changed the world and I think that while I understand the need for there to be in some situations maybe not all the information given out publicly I can understand the need to hold back some things however I think we're holding back way too many things

I think if more things came out into the public public if more things came to life and the world would be a little bit better place so anyways that's it for today's and uh hope you guys were having a great thanksgiving aloha