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Feb. 20, 2026 - The David Knight Show
02:03:10
Fri Episode #2206: Palantir: Building the Architecture of Total Control

──────────────────────────────────────── 00:00:42:27 — Cybersecurity as Power, Not Protection Cybersecurity is framed as a tool for centralized control and regime continuity rather than public safety, with Palantir cited as emblematic of surveillance-state architecture. ──────────────────────────────────────── 00:02:06:22 — Pam Bondi’s Epstein Record Reexamined Questions resurface about Bondi’s inaction on Epstein cases despite a public reputation for aggressively prosecuting trafficking crimes. ──────────────────────────────────────── 00:08:38:07 — Trump–Epstein Social Ties Revisited Prior associations and evasive statements are revisited amid renewed scrutiny of elite political networks. ──────────────────────────────────────── 00:16:02:29 — From Ministry to Cold-Turkey Heroin Recovery A missionary outreach in 1980s Madrid evolves into an international addiction recovery model emphasizing discipline, structure, and community over substitution therapy. ──────────────────────────────────────── 00:29:23:23 — Heroin, Shared Needles, and Spain’s AIDS Explosion Intravenous drug culture and prison conditions accelerate HIV transmission during one of Europe’s worst heroin crises. ──────────────────────────────────────── 00:31:56:02 — Addiction as Spiritual and Social Breakdown Recovery is framed as rooted in restored relationships, accountability, and moral transformation rather than purely medical intervention. ──────────────────────────────────────── 00:58:25:07 — Palantir Hack and the “Backdoor State” Alleged breaches raise fears of embedded surveillance backdoors across government and corporate systems. ──────────────────────────────────────── 01:07:07:00 — Internet of Things as National Security Liability Expanding military and infrastructure interconnectivity is portrayed as multiplying systemic vulnerabilities rather than strengthening defense. ──────────────────────────────────────── 01:12:03:04 — Pentagon AI Expansion Despite Repeated Breaches Vault 7, NSA hacks, and other incidents are cited as evidence that automation and AI integration are outpacing competence and safeguards. ──────────────────────────────────────── 01:17:22:01 — Offline Nuclear Systems vs. Cloud Defense Cold War air-gapped missile systems are contrasted with today’s cloud-dependent defense architecture. ──────────────────────────────────────── 01:36:10:00 — Low-Tech Tools Defeat High-Tech Drones Simple heat shielding and optical tricks demonstrate asymmetric weaknesses in advanced surveillance and warfare technology. ──────────────────────────────────────── 01:44:29:12 — Autonomous Vehicle Ethics and Control Hierarchies AI-driven transportation raises unresolved questions about programmed value judgments, liability, and loss of human override authority. ──────────────────────────────────────── Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code KNIGHT Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.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-show Or you can send a donation through Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764 Zelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.com Cash App at: $davidknightshow BTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7

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Pam Bondi's Justice Dilemma 00:10:24
In a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
It's the David Knight Show.
As the clock strikes 13, it's Friday the 20th of February of our Lord 2026.
Well, today we have a couple of interesting interviews for you.
We have Goat Tree is going to be joining us later in the program.
We're going to talk about cybersecurity, especially in light of what Kim.com said this week about Palantir being hacked.
We need to understand that as technology has evolved, it's no longer really about our safety and our security.
Just as we talk about national security, that's not about our safety.
It's not about our peace.
It's not about our privacy.
And when we talk about cybersecurity, that is no longer really about any of those things for us either.
This is really about perpetrating their power, their surveillance, their continuity of government.
And we're going to talk to an individual who grew up in a missionary family in one of the heaviest drug use areas in the world during the AIDS crisis.
It's kind of like, I guess I'd describe it as a mixture of the Waltons meets panic in Needle Park.
But it has a lot to say about the solution to drug addiction.
It's not about destroying boats in Venezuela.
It's not about destroying the Constitution and the rule of law.
It's really about restoring the rule of Christ in our lives.
Well, yesterday I talked about the head fakes, the lies, the betrayals of many different areas that Donald Trump has done.
Of course, many people only think of what's going on with the Epstein files.
I didn't have enough time to get to, I think, one of the key things that was a part of this, and that is Pam Bondi.
There was a good article by Brian Shulhave on Health Impact News.
Pam Bondi has been denying justice for Epstein victims for almost two decades now.
And I played the other day her campaign victory where she was bragging about the fact how she was going to get tough on sex offenders.
Well, she actually didn't.
Did you realize that she was, as all this stuff was happening with Epstein in Florida, she was attorney general there.
And that's the gist of Brian Shulhave's story.
Pam Bondi was the Attorney General in Florida from 2011 through 2019.
She had experience in covering up Epstein's crimes from his sweetheart deal in 2008 in the state of Florida.
So she was not attorney general when he had his basically got away with all of it with Alex Acosta, the federal attorney and local law enforcement there.
And that was when his defense attorneys were Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr.
However, there was a lot of information that came out after that, a lot of outrage and a lot of concern from the victims as to who these other people are that are not getting punished.
They wanted to limit this strictly to Jeffrey Epstein.
And there are victims that were crying out then to have the people that he was pimping for, essentially, something that happened to them.
She also refused to bring justice to the victims when they went public in November 2018, as published by the Miami Herald.
And so as you've got Roger Stone and Benny Johnson now trying to deflect this over to Hillary Clinton, and certainly the Clintons deserve to have consequences for this, of course.
But that does not inoculate Donald Trump.
It does not inoculate Pam Bondi from what she has done.
As a matter of fact, here's that commercial that she was running.
She actually talked about, campaigned on justice for sex offender victims.
Florida ranks third nationally in calls for help for human trafficking, where young women and children are enslaved and abused.
I knew we needed all hands on deck.
Businesses and hospitals to spot it, our great law enforcement to stop it, and tougher penalties to punish it.
We're taking on Medicaid fraud, pillmills, gangs, and more, and I'll fight to put human trafficking monsters where they belong behind bars.
Pam Bondi, our attorney general.
Yeah, yeah, what a joke that woman is.
So you've got all these people that were involved with Epstein, and she's not going to do anything about them.
And the victims were asking for that in the wake of the 2008 case.
They were outraged at the special treatment that Jeffrey Epstein got and of the cover-up for all the victims even at that time.
She did nothing about it.
She built her brand on protecting the survivors.
But when it came to Florida's most notorious sex criminal, she looked the other way.
And actually, this was originally a Bloomberg article from July of last year talking about that.
They said Bondi was elected after Epstein had served his senates in Palm Beach and quietly, rather quickly, tried to establish her office as an advocate for victims of sex trafficking, erecting billboards across the state to bring awareness to the issue, creating the statewide council on human trafficking.
In her last months in office, she announced a criminal investigation and allegations of past sex abuse by Catholic priests in Florida.
But if you got a guy who's working for Mossad, she's not interested in past abuse by him.
Bondi kept her distance from the state's most prominent sex trafficking case, even as Epstein's victims pleaded with the courts to invalidate the provisions for his non-prosecution agreement, and they filed lawsuits alleging that he abused them when he was on work release from jail.
Again, as I've talked about, he got this deal where they let him come back to the prison to sleep, but he was out all day like the town drunk in Mayberry RFD.
You know, Otis, the town drunk, he just had the keys and he would let himself back in and sleep it off at night.
I mean, it makes sense given those jobless sex trafficking for Mossad that his work release would involve sex crimes.
That's right.
Yeah, that's what I do for a living, right?
So, of course, if you're going to put me on work release, I'm going to be doing some of the same stuff you just locked me up for.
In November 2018, the Miami Herald released its investigative series on Epstein.
It was called Perversion of Justice.
It exposed the details of the government's decision to allow Epstein to bypass federal charges.
Instead of suggesting the state get to the truth, however, Bondi remained conspicuously silent.
Perhaps that's why she was picked for the job, you think.
When Bondi took the top job at the Justice Department under Trump, she got a second chance to rectify the damage.
She could have announced a sweeping internal probe, released the DOJ files in a show of transparency, and revamped the agency so this kind of miscarriage of justice wouldn't occur again.
However, she did not do that.
She did just the opposite of all that.
She again leaned into public relations rather than into substance.
She went on Fox News in February to boast that Epstein's client list was sitting on my desk.
That's what she was saying a year ago.
She had long capitalized on MAGA World's obsession with the records, telling Sean Hennedy in January of 2024 that the files, quote, should have come out a long time ago, unquote, and blaming it on a, quote, two-tiered justice system.
Well, certainly she understands what the problem is.
And she is part of the problem, right?
She is part of that two-tiered justice system.
As a matter of fact, you know, we don't want to pay any attention to anybody other than just the Democrats.
We want to ignore what Trump did.
And yet, this is kind of interesting by Trump's own admission.
You know, I'm just devastated over what's happening.
He's been a friend for a long time.
A great guy.
Was he at my wedding?
Have you ever had a personal relationship with Donald Trump?
What do you mean by personal relationships?
Have you socialized with him?
Yes, sir.
Yes.
Yes, sir.
Have you ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18?
Though I'd like to answer that question, at least today, I'm going to insert my fifth, sixth, and 14th Amendment right now, sir.
I don't know how the 14th Amendment applies that way.
What were you going to say, Lance?
Just this article from Bloomberg is doing the same thing in reverse.
You know, they're talking about MAGA's strange obsession with it back, you know, when Biden was in office.
It was weird to have an obsession with it then, but now it's weird that they're covering it up.
It's the same double think just on the other side.
That's right.
Yeah, Bloomberg didn't care at all when it was Clinton, just like the MAGA people try to point away from Trump when it's his turn to be looked at.
She destroyed every last ounce of independence her office might have had when she went to the White House in May and warned Trump that his name was in the Epstein files.
Of course his name is in there.
Did she even need to know that from her?
Bondi is probably the number one most guilty person in the U.S. for perverting justice and covering up Epstein's crimes and refusing to prosecute the pedophiles and failing to protect Epstein's victims, says Brian Shahi.
And I absolutely agree with him.
How does one prosecute, however, the Attorney General of the United States who controls the Department of Justice?
It was a brilliant move by Trump after he failed to get Matt Gates, who was previously under investigation for child sex trafficking by the Department of Justice.
Trump tried to get him as the Attorney General, but that failed.
Gates had resigned from Congress when he was not approved, but just to prevent a congressional ethics report from being published on his sexual activities with underage girls.
When you look at the Trump administration, how could anybody think that this guy is going to give you an honest assessment of this?
Join Jonathan Tepper Soon! 00:03:18
How could you think that he is not a part of this?
It absolutely does not make any sense.
Well, I don't want to take time away from our interviews that we've got here.
And we're going to go to the first one shooting up with Jonathan Tepper in just a moment.
But I want to say before we stop, here we are.
This is the 20th of February.
We've got about one week left in February.
We're not quite halfway up the gas gauge right now.
So I just want to say we're not going to put this behind a paywall, but I just want to speak to people who, if you listen to the show for a while and you have never contributed to us, we would really appreciate it at this point in time.
If you just give us $5, I mean, that would even just a few of the people that did that, that would put us way over our budget.
We had 28,000 people listen to the show just on Rumble last week.
And Imagine if those people gave us $5 a piece.
That would be several months' worth of our budget alone.
But we would appreciate it at this time if you find value in the show, if you could support us.
And I want to thank some of the people who have supported us in just the last day or so.
We've received some donations from William G., Stephanie Kay, David and Deborah W., Scott C., Margaret and Mary T., and Margaret Mary T., I should say, not Margaret and Mary, but Margaret Mary T, and Mary Ann.
Thank you so much.
We're going to join our first interview here with Jonathan Tepper in just one moment.
We'll be right back.
Night show.
Addicts Gradually Becoming Christians 00:12:56
Joining us now is author Jonathan Tepper, and his book is Shooting Up, Memoir of Heroin, AIDS, Love, and Loss.
He grew up as an American missionary kid in the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in Spain.
He has an amazing story about what his family went through and as they create a vast network to help people who are addicted to drugs and then wound up being in the center of the AIDS epidemic.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you, Jonathan.
And, you know, one of the things I like about this, looking at your story, of course, it's a much darker version of and almost sounds trivial to compare it to the Waltons.
But what I like is when you've got the memoirs of an adult going back and looking at his childhood and reinterpreting it through, you know, the experience that he's had as an adult and talking about what he saw as a child.
I always liked that kind of a story.
That's one of the things that really drew me to your story.
And of course, also the Christian involvement there, your parents as missionaries.
So they go to Spain as missionaries, and they kind of get drawn into this situation of helping drug addicts.
That wasn't their first priority, was it?
What was their original mission when they went to Spain?
So my parents moved to Spain in 1983, and my father and mother had worked in Mexico beforehand for about four years with university students, and they thought they would go to Spain and do exactly the same thing.
So start a church among university students and be a university chaplain.
But they settled in the neighborhood of San Blas in Madrid.
Missionaries tend to be poor.
And so I think they settled there because the rent was cheap, not fully knowing what the neighborhood was like.
And the neighborhood had one of the highest rates of heroin use and juvenile crime in Europe at the time.
And they started helping young men and women and families trying to send their sons and daughters off to drug rehab centers outside of Madrid because there were almost no centers in Madrid at the time.
And it was through that sort of helping people day to day that led them to feel that they had a calling from God to change the mission or what they were trying to do and start a drug rehab center working with heroin addicts.
And so that's what they did.
And the drug center started in 1985, two years later.
And how old were you at the time when all this?
I was seven when we arrived in Spain.
And so they were, my parents were sending me and my three brothers out to hand out little flyers with our home phone number and address.
And then they would have meetings in the house.
So the addicts were coming over.
And so I was like seven, eight, nine, interacting with the addicts, often as they'd shoot up, handing them flyers.
And then the men and women in the program became like older brothers to my brothers and me.
Wow.
And of course, crime goes hand in hand with that because people having to support their habit.
And so you got to be friends with some people who were some serious criminals there as well.
But it kind of reminds me the way your parents got involved in this, just one person basically coming in, I think, and then another and then another, gradually building until it got to be fairly large.
It reminds me of George Mueller back in Victorian times, the time of Charles Dickens, where the real big issue then was not drug abuse, but it was kids who were orphans on the streets.
And he brought in one, then another, then another.
And before you knew it, he had this vast orphanage that was there in Victorian England.
Your parents grew that ministry.
And of course, they grew it without the help of the original missionary society.
The people who sent them over and were supporting them wanted something else done rather than this.
This was what your parents saw.
They were drawn to that need and got involved in it and then had to find a way to support themselves.
And that mission grew quite a bit, didn't it?
Yes.
So the drug rehab center when it started had one addict who came in off the street and he was sharing an apartment with Lindsey McKinsey.
He was a young Australian missionary.
And then Raul invited eight of his friends in.
So they were all living in the apartment.
The neighbors rightly complained about having a lot of recovering addicts living in a residential apartment.
So then they moved out to a farm and then there were about 30 men living on the farm.
And I think it was, as you drew the parallel with George Miller, it was not some grand plan to have an organization or to build something, but rather.
It just kind of naturally evolved, yeah.
Exactly.
Showing love to one person at a time, trying to answer a need.
And I think the addicts themselves, one, needed help, but two, responded to that love and compassion.
And then they wanted to help their friends.
And that really was how the drug center grew from its beginning in 1985.
And then 40 years later, it's still running in 20 countries with over 2,000 addicts in the program.
Wow.
And how'd you feel about these guys?
I mean, these are some pretty hardened street guys, and you're pretty young.
Did it scare you?
Were you fascinated with their lifestyle?
What was your reaction?
In general, it was probably more fascination than fear, but there were a couple addicts that I was afraid of.
One of them in particular was Manolo Majara, and his nickname in Spanish meant crazy.
And he got that because a dealer had stuck a gun in his face.
And so he took the barrel of the gun and stuck it in his mouth and dared the dealer to shoot him.
And so people thought he was crazy, but he would grab my hand and just squeeze until it hurt.
And I would punch him and it wouldn't do anything to him.
I was always glad when Graul, the first addict, was around, he would protect me.
But overall, the addicts really looked after us.
My parents thought that they wouldn't do anything to us because we didn't have drugs and we didn't have money.
So, you know, we were more curiosity to them than anything.
You weren't attractive targets.
Exactly.
All they're looking at is money and drugs, money for the next hit that they're going to use for the next drugs that are there.
So your family is on your own and they have to find money for this and money to support themselves.
So what do they do?
So a lot of the addicts had been manual laborers before they had gotten into a life of drugs.
And one of the ways that they were raising money was basically starting businesses.
So they started a secondhand furniture store where people would try to get rid of furniture, donate it, and the men would pick it up and restore the furniture and sell it.
There were also gardening teams or plumbing, brick masonry.
So the men just did any odd jobs they could to pay the bills.
And so these were essentially businesses run by recovering and former heroin addicts.
And all that revenue provided for a free drug rehab for the addicts.
That's great.
So what is the motivation of these guys coming in?
Are they just looking for a place to live, a place to crash or something?
Are they really trying to get off of drugs?
And were they looking for Christ, for example?
So I think most of them did want to get off drugs.
So they saw that, you know, in the early stages, obviously, like people enjoy the first time they shoot up or the first couple of times, but then it becomes less pleasurable or you're trying to increase the high.
And then it's the life of heroin that leads them to lose their jobs, to lose family and friends.
Most of the kids or the young men and women stole much of their family's belongings or money.
And not that they had that much to begin with, because almost all of these were working class families.
And so it ends up breaking their social bonds and they often end up kicked out of their house, living on the street.
And so for many of them, they did want to get off heroin and then also wanted to simply get a roof over their head.
And some of them obviously were aware, certainly almost all of them were aware of the Christian ethos behind the program, but I don't know that they were specifically setting out to become Christians.
I think they were attracted to the daily example of love that was shown to them.
And when they had seen the friends that they used to shoot up with now clean and off drugs, that was, I think, one of the things that truly inspired them.
And so it was that love in action.
And so you have some interesting stories about one of the guys who was doing furniture repair, one of the businesses that you guys were in.
And you thought it was an interesting analogy for this whole program.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Oh, yeah.
So at first, when I started writing the book, I hadn't explicitly set out some of these themes in my own brain, but I guess these come out subconsciously.
And I was writing about one of the main characters in the book, his name is Khambadi, and he ran a second-hand furniture store.
And I was struck by the beauty of them taking these discarded pieces of furniture that often were in a terrible state, repairing them, restoring them, turning them into beautiful objects, often antiques that you didn't know that they were beautiful when they came in the store, but they were when they came out.
And I thought it was a beautiful metaphor for their lives, the way that people's lives can be restored and turned around.
And then it becomes a theme throughout the book where in the early days, there was not much of a budget for the Drug Rehab Center.
So they would take over abandoned houses or farms that were in a state of disrepair and rebuild them and redid them.
And these houses too were a metaphor for rebuilding and restoration.
So it's a theme that runs through the book and is a central part of sort of the history and ethos of the program.
That's right.
And it really strikes me as something that Christ does with us, you know, the carpenter.
He sees something that is there of value and he takes us apart and he fixes us and puts us back together again.
That's what was happening in those addicts' lives.
I think that's a really apt metaphor.
So how did your relationship with them, did they become Christians?
I'm sure not all of them did, but a good number of them.
Yeah, no one was under any obligation to believe anything.
So people could live in the program and they did have to participate in the morning devotional.
So I mean, they had to sit there and listen.
And then there was a Sunday morning church service.
And so obviously they were exposed to quite a lot of preaching and Bible verses.
But I think most of the addicts did end up converting because they saw that they often explicitly said, I want what he's got.
So if Raul, the first addict in the program, came in and turned his life around and they had known him as a violent criminal on the streets and an addict.
And then they saw that he turned into someone who would give up his own bed so that people could sleep while he slept on the sofa or the floor.
That deeply touched people.
And so it was that lived example of love and compassion that motivated others to want to come in and then transmit that to the next group of people who came in or the next generation.
Yes.
Yes.
That's another story that reminds me of the cross and switchblade.
And that became gradually built into an entire program.
And I talked to a pastor a few weeks ago, Matt Trohala, who has a ministry.
And that's what got him.
He was from Broken Family.
And it was that program that eventually got to him and made a difference for him.
So it's not a situation where somebody, you don't go in there and you don't hand them a track and tell them, go read this or give them some, you know, try to scare them.
But instead, they see the fruit of what Christ does in other people's lives, starting with your parents and moving out like a ripple in a pond, gradually affecting more and more people.
That's a great way to do it, I think.
Yes, one of the key lessons in writing is show, don't tell.
You should accept the scene rather than tell the reader that they need to know something.
And it creates for better writing and better enjoyment from the reader.
But I would say in life in general, it's actually a good rule of show, don't tell.
And one of the things that my parents quoted when the drug center was starting was from St. Francis of Assisi who said, preach the gospel at all times, use words if necessary.
And this idea of show, don't tell.
Right.
Yeah.
That's great.
You have an interesting title for one of these chapters, An Older Brother and a Missing Eyeball.
What is that about?
So the visits out to the men's residences and the farms were always humorous, odd, and memorable.
Drugs and Unemployment in Spain 00:07:09
And so in that specific chapter, I was very young.
I had to be probably nine or so at the time, but my brothers and I would go out and stay with the farm.
And, you know, one of the addicts, he used to rob stores by taking an axe under his trench coat and destroy things.
And another one, he had a pet ferret that he brought into the drug center and they would swim around in the makeshift pool.
But one of them had an eyeball, Manuel Luasco, that would occasionally fall out when he was playing soccer, football, and they would have to stop the game and search for the eyeball.
And then when he, you know, one of his eyes, if he fell asleep, one of his eyes would close and the other would just sort of stare at the people.
So these were like very interesting characters who were larger than life in many ways.
And what I tried to do in that chapter is sort of give them a flavor for the different characters in the drug center.
Yeah, yeah.
And so you're living as children in this area, this very poor, very rough area.
You'd play soccer in the streets and it wasn't just the people who had come to your family for help, but you point out that you would see syringes in the street and a lot of things like that, even with blood on them.
Talk a little bit about the environment there of that town.
Yeah, so Spain in the mid-80s was growing very, very quickly.
And in 1975, Franco had died.
And so they transitioned from dictatorship to democracy.
So you had this sort of high rate of economic growth, a lot of social housing projects being built at the outskirts of Madrid.
And then the way Spanish zoning and planning works, basically you have these sort of, you know, either high-rise housing and social housing, and then like empty fields.
And in the empty fields, you had behind our house, there was a dump where, you know, brickmasons and others would dump construction material.
There was quite a lot of garbage too.
And then further down, two blocks away, there was a gypsy village that had about 3,000 gypsies.
And they sold a lot of drugs.
They certainly weren't the only ones.
Spaniards sold them too.
But people came from all over Madrid to buy their drugs at this sort of camp called Los Focos.
And so we would see the used needles everywhere in the fields by the gypsy camp.
And generally it had blood that was drying or it dried.
And it was sort of through that that then comes about in the book where I talk about how most of the early addicts shared needles and became HIV positive.
And then in jail, one of the addicts, Jamdi, they had like, you know, I think two syringes for 200 inmates.
And so the AIDS, the HIV virus spread very, very quickly among the addicts in the mid to early 80s.
Wow.
Yeah, that's one of the things I've talked about in terms of our war on drugs.
You know, it has been so fruitless that we've done this over half a century now because it is a spiritual problem at its root.
It really is.
And you're not going to stop it with interdiction.
Now, I've talked about talking about how they're sharing needles in a prison.
They don't have enough needles, but they got plenty of drugs.
They're doing fine with drugs.
And we have people in the United States that are dying from overdose in prisons all the time.
So what kind of a society do we have to have if you've got to try to interdict that by force?
There's something else there that is really the answer, I think.
And so all this is happening before the AIDS epidemic, but then your family winds up at the very center of that, of course.
Now, you mentioned heroin over and over again.
Is that, are there other drugs that people are using?
Or is that kind of the king of it all?
Why so much of a focus on heroin?
Yeah, so heroin really was sort of the end of the line where most people didn't start with heroin.
They were generally starting, you know, with alcohol and cigarettes, which don't necessarily lead to harder drugs, but then they would do, you know, hashish and cocaine.
And they were generally doing multiple drugs before they got to heroin.
They were rarely starting with it, but heroin was the big drug in the neighborhood and in Madrid at the time.
And it's certainly the most addictive and the one that has the most impact in terms of taking over people's lives where they need to constantly be getting drugs to shoot up.
Yeah, yeah, well, it's interesting.
And I wonder what the situation is right now.
Have they moved on to fentanyl or something like that?
But you're out of that scene now, right?
Well, in the United States, a lot of the opioids and fentanyl have really taken over.
In Spain, I think it's starting to, I'm out of that, but obviously I speak to my father who still runs the rehab center.
There are sort of newer drugs, and they're of the same family in terms of like opioids.
But heroin is still, at least in Madrid, is very, very big.
Now, what was it that got people off of the drugs?
Because I know that you look at a lot of the secular programs where they're just doing counseling things, they'll offer them methadone or something like that as an alternative.
And then people become addicted to that.
What was happening with your family?
What were they doing to get people off of drugs?
What was the path?
So the drug center Battelle at the time and still didn't use drug substitutes like methadone.
And it was just cold turkey to get off.
So there was no alcohol, nicotine, or any other drugs in the program or methadone.
The Spanish government and private organizations didn't have any methadone treatments in the 80s in Spain.
And it really was basically, I think, in the early 90s that they started giving out quite a lot more methadone.
And then as they became aware of the AIDS virus, they started giving out tons of little small bleach bottles where even if they were using the same needle, they could at least clean the needles.
And that came later.
One of the issues with methadone is that while there is some success with it, generally people are supplementing their methadone with other drugs.
So they're polydrug users.
And at least from the research that I've seen, backing your point, it's not a purely physical addiction that causes the whole addiction problem.
There's generally other things that drive people to take drugs, whether it's, for example, in the neighborhood at the time, very high youth unemployment rate and drugs entering.
A lot of young people were not in school, they were not working, and plenty of time to experiment with drugs.
And so if you did get off heroin, but go back to hang out with the exact same friends that you were doing heroin before, you're likely to get right back on it.
And so it's the change in the lifestyle, the change in the surroundings, or dealing with underlying problems is generally much more effective.
And so a lot of the men and women in the program didn't go back to their old friends.
They stayed in the program and tried to bring in the friends to the program or tried to go out and have different friends who were not involved in the same habit.
Reading Habits Established 00:05:28
Talking about how your family was in your own little universe, what was the life for you?
I mean, you're American kids speaking English.
I'm sure you spoke Spanish a lot as well.
But are you there immersed in the Spanish school system or are you homeschooled?
What'd that look like on a daily basis?
Yeah, so we were briefly in the Spanish school system, but then there was a very small missionary school that my parents sent us to.
And there were many years where my parents didn't have enough money to send us even to that missionary school.
Missionaries tend not to have very much money.
And some years there were not a lot of tithes.
And in the late 1980s, the dollar lost about half its value versus the peseta after the plausible cords.
And so we were homeschooled for about two years by my mother.
And there's a chapter called Our Own Little Universe.
My parents were highly literate and used to have very long devotionals in the morning and after dinner, which we hated at the time, where they'd read things like St. Augustine's City of God and T.S. Eliot.
And while I hated it at the time, I think it really did provide us with a great education.
And we had this sort of very strange life, a hyper-literate life at home.
And then going out and spending time on the farms with the recovering addicts and playing soccer out in the street.
And that continued throughout our entire educational life.
That's kind of interesting.
That's something that I did with our kids when we were homeschooling them.
I bored them to death reading to them, but actually they got to where they liked it.
We tried to teach them to read at the very beginning and they pushed back on it.
They were not interested in those books.
And so we kind of thought, well, let's regroup this and see how we can approach it and decided that what we would do is try to build a love of literature for them.
So I was the one who was going to read all the books to them.
And that's basically how it worked.
I guess it kind of worked that way with you as well.
You talk about how there was a tremendous amount of books always around on the table and other things like that with your parents.
Yes, I think one of the most important things for teaching is not necessarily conveying specific information, but rather cultivating that love of learning, that curiosity.
And I think if parents or teachers do that, then the kids will end up teaching themselves.
They will have the desire to go pick up the books, to read great works of literature.
We had encyclopedias, National Geographics, and so we spent a lot of our time just randomly pulling them off the shelves and reading.
I absolutely loved it.
And then we ended up working our way through our parents' library when we were homeschooled.
And then when we were able to go back to school, that practice and habit of sort of reading for ourselves continued.
And then when I went off to college, I realized that actually I was like fairly bored in a lot of my classes and ended up doing quite a lot of advanced studies and research projects with professors because I realized that was the way I enjoyed learning most.
And fortunately, the professors were kind enough to indulge me.
That's great.
Yeah.
You point out that you and your brothers learned that you could teach yourselves anything from books.
I think that's the key thing.
I think having the tools of learning, somebody expressed it as saying, you know, when we're teaching, and this is something people need to think about when they're doing homeschooling, it's not the filling of a bucket, but it's the lighting of a fire that you're trying to get, right?
That love of learning or that love of finding out that information.
And that's the key thing.
Sounds like that's what your parents did with you as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think if you do that, then it comes from inside.
It's the students who want to, you know, and I had different interests than my brothers had, but each one of us then had the desire to go off and follow our own passions.
You talk about how you went back to America and you had a tragedy that happened in your family in a car accident.
Tell us a bit about that.
Yes.
So missionaries, and it depends, it varies by mission, but generally they'll go back for what's called a furlough, and that might be every three years or four years.
We would go back every four years.
And so in 1991, we were visiting my mother's family staying in Wilmington, North Carolina.
And my father wanted to go on a road trip to Kitty Hawk.
And so we were driving there.
And my older brother, who was just about to turn 17, was driving.
And the car went off the road on a bend in the country road.
And my youngest brother, Timothy, who I was closest to, and I used to walk him to school every day and cared for him, he died in that car accident.
And it completely changed my life.
It changed my entire family's life.
There really is only before and after when a family faces a tragedy like that.
And after he died, we all grieved differently.
I think often there's research and statistics showing that obviously it leads to an increase in divorce rates in couples because the husbands and the wife grieve differently.
It affected my brothers and me and our personality.
But much more broadly, a lot of the men or families in Madrid, in our neighborhood, they lost sons and daughters to overdoses and then to AIDS.
And I think it made us much more loving and empathetic to them and understanding their loss.
And I think they also realized my parents didn't leave the mission field or go back to the United States.
They continued working, trying to help others.
Life's Defining Loss 00:15:16
And so I think they realized that we were sort of just like them.
uh you know no one in life is spared a sickness or death um and it really was the defining event of of my life certainly and uh i hope it has led us all to have more love and compassion and empathy how old was timothy when he died it was a week before he turned 10.
Wow, wow.
And you pointed out in your book that you and he, as you just said uh, were very um, very close on issues.
You were five years older than him and you both shared a love of jazz, you said, and the two of you were talking about what you wanted to do in life did, were you a musician?
Did you guys aspire to being musicians?
Because you were what, 15 years old or so by that.
I used to play the, the trumpet, and I think our our, our dreams, of course, were always uh, exceeded our abilities uh, but we certainly, for all of us, of course yeah yes yeah we, we loved listening to jazz and when we were went back to the library in Wilmington, North Carolina, which was down near the Cotton Exchange um, you know, the public library we could rent or sorry, check out as many books or recordings as we wanted, and we just absolutely loved listening to miles Davis, John Coltrane and um Louis Armstrong.
And so we, we loved um Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
They were the great duo, and so I was going to be Dizzy Gillespie on my trumpet, and he was.
He had just gotten a saxophone for the, you know, a month before he died, and he was going to be like Charlie Parker, and in the book I touch on the fact that almost all of these guys um were either heroin addicts or, you know, drugs and alcoholism as well cases like Stan Gets.
But the it's interesting in um, John Coltrane got off heroin and he had a religious experience and he recorded an entire album called A Love Supreme um, which is about god um, and so it was very interesting, the parallels between the jazz musicians and the addicts we were growing up around, and so I have a few pages in there on that which was sort of a yeah, we were really into at the time.
I didn't know that about John Coltrane.
I didn't know that uh, he got off of it, had a religious experience, a Christian experience that he had or yeah wow interesting yeah, it's kind of you know um, I actually played once with Dizzy Gillespie in college.
We paid him to play with us.
He came for a concert series and uh, so the jazz man we had in college is Dizzy Gillespie and boy, he had a set of chops, cheeks that we have to hear um, it was very unusual uh, and quite a trademark.
I think that helped his his popularity quite a bit.
It certainly was an interesting way to look at.
We also had uh Maynard Ferguson and uh Don Ellis uh at the thing, and so yeah, I was very much involved in that, but I was again, as you point out, my dreams were bigger than my achievements in that area.
But when you get into the music world like that, you do see a lot of drugs, especially if you're playing as a musician and they still had live music back in those days.
And what was it?
Did you ever have a situation where you looked at people as you got older?
If you looked at people and you saw them doing drugs and other things and you were tempted in that or you thought about doing that.
Do you ever have a situation like that, being immersed in that environment?
So there's always a lot of curiosity in terms of, you know, what's the physical sensation like?
And I do deal with that a little bit in the book.
And, you know, I was curious as to how much did it cost to get a gram of heroin and how did you prepare it and all these kinds of things.
But I never ever did drugs.
I knew people who had died of overdoses.
I had seen people being tended to, being taken in ambulances, who would overdose by the gypsy camp.
And it was just not something that I ever wanted to do because there's always the possibility of overdosing too.
And so it was something that I never even experimented with.
And that's a key thing, I think.
When we look at this and the people that we are around that when we see alcoholism or we see drug addiction or some of these other things, and we see how it has been so destructive on these people's lives, I think that's a real deterrent.
Certainly was for me, you know, being around that in some regards, but also, you know, growing up in a family like yours where that was not done.
And so you see these two different worlds contrasted and it's like, yeah, I really don't want that.
I think it's a valuable lesson.
Yes.
And I think that unfortunately some people, you know, are exposed to it and still do it.
But it was certainly it can be a very good antidote.
It even put me off of dancing, I got to say.
It's a running joke with my wife and I was like, I'm sorry, I'm not going to dance.
I've watched too many drunk people out there dancing.
Put me off of that in just a small way.
That's just a small part of it.
But in the bigger picture, you see that as well.
Now, you talk about your calling and something that you saw on an inscription on a wall.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yes.
So the early addicts share needles, become HIV positive.
And then the average incubation period is about five years.
And for some, it's much shorter.
For some, it's longer.
But most of the early generation of addicts were spending quite a lot of time in the hospital in the late 80s, early 90s, and many died there.
But I used to go visit them in junior high and high school evenings and weekends.
And the main hospital in Madrid, where they would take the addicts for AIDS, was La Monique Jajal.
And it was named after the first Spaniard to win a Nobel Prize in medicine and in science.
And at the entrance to the hospital, there's a quote from him, and it said, todo hombo depode de sir lescutor de supiasa cedo dosi i solbropone, which is, every man can become the sculptor of his own mind if he sets himself the task.
And that quote was deeply inspiring to me.
And particularly after my brother died, where I found solace or escape in books.
The idea that I could be the sculptor of my own mind, I could develop my mind was something that inspired me and it still does to this day.
And that was one of the great experiences of my life, seeing that quote and then trying to apply it.
And how did you apply that in your life?
You say you went to university in the United States and what did you study and what did you wind up doing?
How'd that affect you?
So when I got to, I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
And I wasn't very good socially.
I didn't have that many friends.
I went in 94.
That was the 94, 95 was the peak of deaths from AIDS.
And so a lot of my friends were still in Madrid.
And I didn't know if I'd be able to get back and see them again.
And so I really withdrew and poured all my energies into my studies.
But I studied economics and history at Chapel Hill and I ended up graduating with highest honors in history and honors and economics.
And partly out of financial need, trying to get a lot of scholarships and fellowships.
But also, I think, you know, I was trying to make my brother and Timothy proud of me.
I was trying to live a life for two.
And then in my senior year, I applied and was enormously fortunate that I was able to become a Rhodes scholar and go off to Oxford.
Wow.
What was that like?
That's a very from the slums of Spain where there's heroin on the streets and I think to Oxford.
What kind of a culture shock was that for you?
You know, it was pretty big.
But it felt like an immense relief.
My parents had sacrificed an enormous amount over the years.
And whenever they did have money, they would give it to the Derby Hab Center.
But I felt that what they had done is give us the gift of learning and reading.
And so the Rhodes application and interview itself, it's a very, very difficult thing statistically to get.
And I think my year, there was something like 990 nominations and 32 scholarships.
And so it totally changed my life.
I don't know where I would be or what I'd be doing otherwise, but it allowed me to go to Oxford and I met an enormous amount of very interesting people that I'm still, many of them I'm still friends with today and absolutely love.
But it was, and even there, again, it was a bit schizophrenic to leave Oxford and go back to Madrid or go visit friends in Marseille or Naples and work in the derby habs, like in my Oxford breaks.
Wow.
Talking about the extremes of life.
Again, we're talking to Jonathan Pepper.
The book is Shooting Up, a Memoir of Heroin, AIDS, Love, and Loss.
And you had so many people that you loved and lost because of AIDS.
And as this all began, I remember in the United States, everybody was uncertain of how it was being passed along.
And there were concerns about even, you know, well, if this is going to be passed in the blood, can we, is this something that we can get from mosquitoes or something like that?
What was that, the fear of that like there in the area, in the epicenter really of that?
I still remember vividly when my parents told us about the virus because we had been out playing soccer and came in too late for dinner.
And I thought they were going to punish us.
They called us into the living room and I thought they were going to punish us for staying out too late.
And instead, they told us about the virus and they told us about how it was transmitted.
And in 1985, they did know how it was transmitted.
They knew that it came from either bodily fluids.
So whether it's sex, which obviously we were too young for at the time, or sharing needles, which we didn't do, but they told us to not touch the dirty needles, which we took as obvious.
So I almost wondered why they were telling us that.
But even so, in society at large, there was still this enormous irrational fear of people with AIDS, where you couldn't get it by shaking their hand or hugging them or giving them a kiss on the cheek as one does in Spain to on both cheeks to men and women to say hi.
And some of my early memories of, I didn't go to the hospital because my parents thought I was too young, but my father went and told us stories.
And then when I went, you could see it.
Sometimes even family members were afraid to go and hug their own children who were HIV positive.
And I think the level of ignorance was very high for many, many years, even after it was well established, how it was spread or not.
And the people with AIDS in the 1980s, whether it was gays in the United States, which is where it started and was Maine, or Spain, which is near Venus drug use, really were sort of the lepers and outcasts in the 1980s.
And my parents' view was that if you read the New Testament, Jesus spent time with the lepers, healing them, with the outcasts.
And so we never treated anyone any differently.
And my parents thought it was the essence of Christian love and compassion to try to show love to them.
I remember, yeah, I remember watching Ben-Hur with my kids.
And Travis was, we were watching it.
And at one point, you know, leprosy is at the center of it when the characters get leprosy.
And at one point, the main character reaches over and touches and he jumped like it was some kind of a slasher film or something.
So it is that you see these horrible wasting diseases that people are concerned they're going to get.
And it is understandable how people feel that way.
But now, all the people that you were involved in, especially the early people that you became very close to, some of the first addicts that came into the program, they all wound up getting AIDS, right?
Was it fatal for all of them?
Yes.
Yes, for almost all of them.
There's one or two from the very early days who are still alive.
But like that early generation that I met on the streets, they died in 94, well, even before, but the peak was 94, 95.
And the Khambudi, another main character in the book, was like an older brother, 96.
So it was an entire generation of addicts who ended up dying.
And so it wasn't just one loss.
It really was like being in a war zone where there were dozens and dozens of deaths.
And it really did mark me in the Drug Rehab Center.
And even at the time, my parents organized a conference about AIDS so that people could ask questions and talk to each other about it.
And then we knew about it.
But I think everyone just sort of got on with their lives and tried to help other people.
It was only in the 20th year anniversary of the Drug Rehab Center when they were doing a video and slideshow of the history of the center.
And they had the friends that we've lost.
And they had photos of a lot of the early people.
And this was at the time I started writing the books.
I wrote this about 20 years ago and just put it aside.
And I was just struck by the number of people, one after the other in that slideshow.
And then that's, I think, when the magnitude of the loss and what we had actually lived through really hit me.
Truly is an amazing life that you had there.
And your parents loved it to the fullest.
Your mother has passed away, but your dad is still at this work, isn't he?
Yes, he's 79.
He had a minor stroke last year, which fortunately he's recovered from very well.
And he wants to work helping others until the day he dies.
And I think he will.
I hope he will.
He's an old lion and is working.
He doesn't want to retire.
He just wants to help other people.
Yeah, you talked about he's reading at the dinner table.
He calls it his pontifications as he's teaching you and that.
What about your brothers?
Did any of them get involved in that?
What do they wind up doing in their lives?
So my older brother David did work quite a few years running the Drug Rehab Center in New York City.
So he'd been an accountant.
And so his background and training was in business and accounting.
But he worked with my parents for a while.
He had an autistic son and ended up for family reasons leaving the Drug Rehab Center, ran his own accounting and investment practice.
And now he works with me running Pravat Capital.
And then my younger brother, Peter, he, well, he and David actually both went and got Oxford degrees after I did, and they studied theology.
But Peter ended up staying on and became a student chaplain at St. Eldates, Oxford, which was an Anglican church.
And then he moved to Florida and now pastors an Anglican church in or an Episcopalian church in Florida.
So he stayed further closer to what my parents were doing in terms of ministry.
But my brother David and I work in investing.
Where is he in Florida?
I grew up in Florida.
Yes, he is, I think he lives in DeLand, and I think his church is in my mind's going blank right now.
It's right outside, it's near the coast.
Peter's Ministry Path 00:03:59
It's one of these.
I grew up in Tampa, is a reason why I ask.
And I was just thinking about how our paths probably crossed one time or the other because we were there near Chapel Hill, which is where we lived right about the time that you were there.
So probably ships that passed in the night.
Who knows?
Definitely.
So it is a fascinating book.
Your parents and your family had a fascinating life, and it is a life of love and accomplishment that I think you can all be proud of.
And I think it's really important for us to go back and look at these true life stories.
I prefer, you know, truth is always stranger than fiction, and it is always much more important, of course.
And so I think we can all learn a lot from these true stories.
And like I said before at the very beginning of this, I really like these stories of people talking about their childhood as an adult and the perspective that they have on it as they get further along in life and as they're adults.
So thank you so much for joining us.
Jonathan Tepper, and the book is Shooting Up, a Memoir of Heroin, AIDS, Love, and Loss.
And people can pre-book this now, right?
When is this coming out?
It'll be out next week.
And so I don't know when the podcast will be released, but it'll be out, I think, February 17th.
And they can buy it wherever they buy books.
So Amazon, Barnes Noble, or their local bookstore.
Again, the title is Shooting Up, A Memoir of Heroin, AIDS, Love, and Loss.
And the author is Jonathan Tepper.
Thank you so much, Jonathan.
Thank you for sharing your life and your story.
And look forward to reading the full thing.
I've got the synopsis here, but looking forward to reading the whole thing.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
It's been an absolute pleasure.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
Thanks, you too.
Making Sense. Common again.
You're listening to The David Knight Show.
All right, joining us now is a guest that we've had on many times before.
Very interesting, and he knows a lot of interesting things.
I want to get him on to talk about what Kim.com was saying in terms of Palantir, of all people, being hacked.
This is something we see happening over and over again, whether it's the Pentagon or whether it's Palantir or whether it's the NSA, these people that you think would have the sophistication to not have a problem are constantly getting hacked.
Called War: Alphabet's Soup 00:02:36
And so I want to talk to him about the increased vulnerability as we become more and more of an internet-connected, AI-connected system.
But Goat Tree has something to say about this Nancy Guthrie kidnapping as well that goes back to something that he was working on more than a decade ago.
Thank you for joining us, Goat Tree.
My pleasure, David.
It's always great to be back with you.
Yeah, yeah.
Tell us a little bit about your comments about this Nancy Guthrie thing.
One of the first things I noticed about it was the fact that she had, you know, they eventually showed this picture of the perp at her door.
They said she was not using their online storage system.
She didn't pay for that.
She was just using it for real-time monitoring.
And so they said at first, well, that only we only store stuff if it's the paid accounts and stuff like that.
But then it turns out that they were storing it anyway.
That's why it showed up a few days later.
But you have other things that you noticed in it.
Talk to us a little bit about that.
Well, to me, I hate to go off sounding like a conspiracy theorist.
Well, this is the right show for that.
Yeah.
I know.
That's what I'm saying.
The scary part about it is what we turn into conspiracy theorists, it comes true.
Yeah.
That's right.
But this thing is striking me as made for TV.
I mean, you turn the news on, everybody's breathlessly hanging on to some special analyst giving his special analyst opinion.
And I'm looking at this, and this stuff that they're doing is so amateurish.
I don't know both sides.
The criminal and the FBI.
I'm saying, I mean, I can't watch it.
I mean, I'll throw stuff at the TV and start ranting.
I just, I don't need to get my blood pressure up over this.
What's some of the amateur stuff that the FBI is doing?
Well, you know, it goes back to InfoWar days.
I sent you that build that we were doing for the Alphabet Soup.
Yeah.
And it was a, we called it war driving.
I don't know what sophisticated term they got right now, but you go run through and you're picking up every device, every network, everything that's being sent out.
War DrivingInterceptor 00:03:11
And these things, you could deploy them.
It was a car.
I mean, if you want to show the picture of it.
Yeah, it was an interceptor Dodge.
So it's one of these souped-up dodges that they give to the police, police interceptor.
It was a Dodge in 2015.
They got the first Hellcats that came out.
We didn't even know what Hellcats were at the time.
Yeah.
Oh, man, I love that car.
Anyhow.
I remember you said you can have a Batmobile.
I want this thing.
That's right.
But it was a mobile, complete, it performed several six or seven different things at the time.
And one of them was sniffing for cell phones, cell phone pings.
It was very versatile.
And what we had done is we had went through and actually built into the grill an amplified sniffer, which, as they were saying with this helicopter, okay, first off, you've got to start.
The pacemaker only has a range of 50 feet.
If you amplify the signal or your sniffer, we had it up to about a football field.
But we were on a time constraint and weren't able to really advance it out further than that.
If they wanted to throw more money and gave us more time, we probably could have expanded it exponentially.
And this was a decade ago, and I've really not kept up that much with Anancy Guthrie's story, but you said they've got a helicopter that's out.
They're trying to find the pacemaker signal, right?
Yeah.
And this is what's blowing my mind.
This is just one of a dozen things that I'm like, I'm asking, what are they doing?
They are buzzing these houses at apparently 50 feet or less, since that's as far as the pacemaker will reach out.
And they're searching for that signal.
Yeah.
I'm sitting there, you know, thinking, what are they doing?
I mean, can you imagine the rotor wash that's hitting the houses and the yards?
Yeah, probably got a lot of small dogs that have gone missing.
Yeah, garden gnomes, pink flamingos raining down in Mexico someplace.
I don't know.
But I'm looking at it.
Here's this guy sitting in the door of the helicopter with a box.
What are they doing?
I mean, they're probably roof shingles, roof tiles, everything else being ripped off these houses, not to mention the vibration.
Lance says, you know, why does a pacemaker need to announce its location in the first place?
Vulnerabilities Exposed 00:02:54
And of course, going back to one of the things we talked about over a decade ago, these black hat conferences and DEF CON conferences that have a regular basis in Vegas.
And there was a friend of yours who was showing how they could be hacked.
That was one of the first devices that he's looking at, how you could kill somebody by hacking into these devices.
And what happened to him?
Barnaby?
Yes.
Barnaby went, I had a man, this is one of the first, I'll say it.
People can argue with me.
I knew him personally.
He was assassinated the night before he was going to the Black Cat Convention and show this.
And the way we work is we did not show this for malicious intent.
We showed the vulnerability so that people could correct it.
Right, right.
If we showed them how simple it was to hack into pacemakers and insulin pumps, all this, it's on them.
It is their responsibility to patch this so that they're secure.
And they will not do it unless they're drug out into the public.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
That night before Barnaby was supposed to give his demonstration, he died of heroin.
A heroin overdose in the hotel.
That would be like someone saying David died of a heroin overdose.
Barnaby didn't do that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that was a big one.
And apparently, I mean, I hate to say it because it really hurts me to say this, but after that, I dropped it.
But I have my doubts that they have patched any of this.
And I don't want to scare people.
Right.
But well, we know that they tolerate a lot of this.
Yeah, we know they tolerate a lot of this.
I mean, just take a look at, it wasn't that long ago that they had the power issue.
And look at in San Francisco or whatever.
Look at what happened to Waymo, right?
All of the self-driving cars lost it.
They blocked everything.
And that goes back to a novel that was written back in 2011, Robo Apocalypse.
And it posited how in that story, the villain was a rogue AI that brought all this stuff on.
But what it was showing was a vulnerability of society once it becomes an internet of things and an internet of people.
Backdoored Devices Everywhere 00:02:01
You have all these, and that's what's really happening.
I think what's happening with our military.
I mean, they are pushing in a really hard way to try to get everything online and interconnected, which means that it's just a lot more vulnerable, isn't it?
This is a prime example, David, of the incompetence of both the criminal.
The criminal must have like a sixth-grade understanding of technology.
And then the FBI with all these toys being built and given to them, and they don't know how to use it.
I'm just picturing Kash Patel's expression if you try to explain some of this stuff.
I'm sure you'd be, I don't know, bug-eyed.
He can call me if he wants to.
I'll be happy to talk to him.
He's bug-eyed about everything.
Yeah, get your checkbook out, Cash.
We can fix some stuff.
Yeah, that's amazing.
Well, you know, when we look at this, one of the things that Kim.com said was, and you've talked about this many times, the back doors.
You know, when you look at the technological side of this, the really dangerous thing is that there's backdoors in everything.
And they demand to have to have it there for the developers.
They demand to have it there for, let's say, the CEOs or whatever.
And once you've got those back doors, you get into everything.
That's one of the things that Kim.com said in terms of what was revealed with his hack into Palantir.
He said, I'll quote his tweet here that he put out.
He said, they have backdoored devices, cars, jets of world leaders.
They've accumulated the biggest archive of black male material anybody's got.
So basically, what he's saying is, Palantir is the new Jeffrey Epstein.
Yeah.
And, you know, remember Colonial Pipeline?
Oh, yeah.
That fell off, that fell off the map in a hurry because, oh, no, the CEO did it.
It wasn't no big technology spoof or CFO.
Bitcoin's Blockchain Threat 00:15:23
I better be careful here.
One of the insiders did it.
I don't know who.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it was backdoors, backdoors, and all that.
Then the railroad hacks, you know, it's like back doors.
And that's one reason I left.
I finally said enough.
You cannot help the people that's unwilling to help themselves because they will say we've patched it, but nothing's been patched.
You give them top shelf.
Well, they may patch it.
That's like saying the window's broken.
And you take a hammer and knock more out and then put a piece of plywood over it.
You know, it's like, what?
I remember you're talking about the banking industry, the ATMs and stuff like that, finding the vulnerabilities in that.
And you tell the companies and they don't want to go out and fix it.
No, I laid the whole thing out where they had tiers.
Where if you stole over a million dollars in cash, it was cost of operations, raising rates on your users.
Yeah, we'll just spread it out.
Yeah.
And then after you got to a certain level, which back in the old days, about $5 million, I mean, it was like the Bangladeshis did.
They went in there and they stole like, I don't know, $100 million.
They had every red team in town and every cyber dog they could find turned loose on them.
They got them liking within a week, which if, you know, that was back in the days when people were taking care of business.
This stuff going on right now, I'm like, man, what has happened?
But I think this whole thing's orchestrated.
It's like built for the 24-7 news cycle.
And you have all these specialists that aren't very special.
Yeah, I look at this, and when I look at this full speed ahead, let's incorporate AI into everything in the Pentagon.
They've convinced themselves they're in an AI race with the Chinese and they got to get there first.
Doesn't matter if this stuff works or not.
Doesn't matter if we can control it once we let it loose.
And that's the key to it all.
Well, all this technology that we've built and handed to these people, they don't know what to do with it.
They're going to plug it into AI.
Make it simple.
Let's keep it, you know, the KISS method.
Keep it simple, stupid.
We can put a trained orangutan on it.
And sure, it'll work great.
Yeah, it's going to be, yeah, when you look at the fact that they are constantly getting hacked, as I said before, you've had the NSA get hacked.
The CIA is on Vault 7 tools, the tools that they used to hack other people and disguise their identity.
That got stolen from them.
So it's this spy versus spy countermeasures and counter countermeasures that keep going and going.
And yet, in spite of that and the vulnerabilities that all this heavy automation introduces into every system, they're escalating this at a very rapid rate.
And I think much, much faster than they can actually keep track of it or test it.
Exactly.
And the thing is, if you're not competent enough in person or have a person that can manage it, you plug it into a mainframe, which is what they'll be running.
Who's going to be running the AI?
The same idiot that can't manage what he's already got?
What do you think about these AI agents?
Because occasionally we get stories when things go really, really wrong.
Like it deletes an entire company's database and says, oh, I just deleted a database.
I'm sorry about that.
I know you told me not to do that, but I did it anyway, and you can't get it back.
We've actually covered stories like that.
What do you think about this and this race to put AI agents out and give them control over real-world assets?
What do you think?
Well, once again, this is one reason I finally just threw the towel in on information security and pen testing and the whole thing.
You've got to go back once again through history, which we've been screaming about for God, 30, 40 years.
Everything's on the cloud.
What is the cloud?
Well, it's a new term, but it's an old, what we used to call FTP server.
File transfer protocol.
Well, that sounds so old school.
Let's name it the cloud.
It's sitting on someone else's server.
Someone else is managing it.
You simply use it.
And now you're going to turn AI loose on it.
It's like the fox in the hen house.
All the chickens in the hen house, they've got a real problem.
And what the fox eats is what the fox wants to eat.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And of course, the Pentagon, I remember when they were talking about the contract, there's this big competition between Amazon and Microsoft as to who's going to provide the Jedi system.
And that was basically putting all the Pentagon stuff on the cloud.
It's like, why would anybody do that?
It gives everybody in the world essentially an opportunity to take a have their shot at cracking it, right?
Once you do that.
Yeah.
One-stop shopping.
You know, if you know who's on the cloud, pick the account and start cracking.
Yeah, that's right.
Right.
You've given them physical access.
You give them physical access, and then they just need to figure out how to get past the electronic obstacles that are there.
But, you know, they basically gotten them a great deal of the way there.
I mean, if you really wanted to keep something that was vitally important secure, I would think you would remove it off of the ability for people to be able to even get to it unless they went into some facility that physically got into some facility.
Then they would have to still go through the process of breaking in through the electronic stuff.
But they don't take those kind of precautions, not even with the stuff that is at the very essence of what these agencies are doing.
You know, I have had calls at three in the morning where a hack was in process.
They're downloading a company server.
And my suggestion to them was kill the power.
You can't do that to these clouds.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, I hate to be, I keep going back.
I didn't intend to do this, but I keep going back to the past tech.
We got it right the first time.
They keep tinkering with it and don't know how to use it.
They've over-perfected things to the point where it's unusable.
Yeah.
I'll tell you this.
Corey Doctorow.
Corey Doctorow, a science fiction writer has got a term for that.
He calls it insidification.
Sounds good to me.
Yeah, it looks like what we're saying all the time, doesn't it?
You know, when I came out of Compaq in 1986, this is my first expedition into the military.
They wanted to secure the nuclear ballistic missiles.
I'll tell you how we did it, and they were never hacked.
The computer system was totally offline.
There was no way to reach it from the outside.
And, you know, you see the movies.
The codes were on five-inch floppy disk.
That was what was in the safe.
If the signals came through, they had a series of releases.
Finally, they would get around to cracking open the safe with the floppies.
The floppies were updated every day.
They were delivered with the mill, I guess.
So then, if you got to a certain level, the operators would put the floppies into the PC and the countdown would start.
Once you got to that zero, you would turn a key, like your car key, and then you could push the button.
And all hell would break loose.
They would never hack, but people don't understand that allowing outside access to your material is your own doings.
You cannot help the stupid.
And that's the key.
Like you and I say, in terms of putting stuff on the cloud, we see this happening over and over again.
How did they break into the NSA?
How did they steal the CIA's tools?
How did they get into the Pentagon files?
It's because they allow people to have access to the database.
And then it becomes a much, much, much simpler problem.
Still, there's some things that you have to get past, but if you don't keep that offline, then if it's online, then they've got an opportunity.
Well, I would probably, I've not kept up with Palantir.
I've been off on some other stuff.
But I'm going to venture a guess that either the government or Palantir probably, since Trump's been doing away with a lot of government employees, probably have a government employee that was assigned Palantir or vice versa that was terminated.
And human resources, for whatever reason, dropped the ball and did not take their credentials to that cloud back.
Well, on the open market, something like that's very valuable.
If you're unemployed and you've got the opportunity to sell something as simple as your credentials, boom, done.
Yeah, that's right.
Now they're probably going to try to invoke something like, oh, it was so complicated you can't understand it.
Well, fine, whatever.
But look at what they're doing to this industry case.
They're displaying.
They don't have very much skills.
But this is how the real world works in cybersecurity.
And it's stuff that is going on.
They were talking about her ransom in Bitcoin.
I'm like, this guy don't know what he's doing.
Don't he understand that Bitcoins are recorded forever on the blockchain?
That's right.
So I have to go back to John McAfee.
Remember, you interviewed him and he was talking about the Monero coin.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
And now there's a couple of them.
There's also Zanero is 20 years old.
Yeah.
That's been around for a long time.
Now they've got several others that are going to be there.
It's never been breached.
It never been breached.
When that goes into the system, it's gone and there's no way to tracing it.
So that tells me that the dude that don't know how to cover himself in a camera, you know, in the camera, doesn't understand what he's doing.
Secondly, if I was going to take a ring camera or whatever, pop it out of there, I'm going to use some real serious low-tech, and it's called the heel of a boot and crush it.
That's right.
Yeah, you know, when you look at this stuff, it's like Bitcoin, for example, as you said, you know, it's going to be traceable.
And that's why I look at this.
And we've had situations where people have had their accounts hacked.
One of them was a guy who was a billionaire, and it was nearly a million dollars.
And, you know, people are saying there they're watching these transactions, these large transactions they call from whales, right?
And so some guy's watching these transactions go by, and he sees nearly a million dollars go through there, and he goes, hmm, who's that?
And he's able to track the guy down.
Yeah, he tracks a guy down.
He's a few that are billion.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it's some millions and billions of dollars.
But he found out who this guy was, Go Tree.
He finds out he not only sees a transaction there, but he's able to trace that down and figure out who it is and sends him a text or an email and says, you know, why are you doing this?
Or ask him something about it.
And the guy didn't know that he had been ripped off.
It was a stranger who saw the transaction, tracked it down to him and contacted him.
So when I look at Bitcoin, to me, you know, we talk about putting these things out there where they're available.
It's almost like you have a safe with all your money in it, and you decide that where you're going to keep that safe is going to be on the town square.
That may be a very secure safe, but it's at the town square.
Anybody's got a crack at it that wants to take it, right?
You've got a $10,000 safe and a $2 lock.
You know?
That's right.
But, you know, I've got to go back and I can explain some of this to you.
I was working with ARPA on the Memex project.
Now, there's something that's going to be really scary when you plug it into AI.
It's called MEX.
And they had a parallel.
I'm trying to recall the code name for it.
They had a Naval Labs.
Man, my memory isn't what it used to be, but they were running in 2014, 2015, they were running a simultaneous blockchain that mimicked Bitcoin.
So I don't know whatever happened to that project, but I did download some of the source data, which I don't know where it got off to.
But you could set up accounts that mimicked each other.
Same number, same everything, but they're on a different blockchain.
They would jump from blockchain to blockchain.
So, if someone got a hold of that, I mean, literally got a hold of that and were able to use that technology and convince someone to jump or not even unknowingly jump from the blockchain to that other blockchain.
You got them, but you got control of them.
And all these work off notes anyhow.
So, if you build a clone node, you can build these wallets any way you want.
I mean, at one time I was running nodes.
I think I had like 300 Bitcoin wallets.
Control of Clones 00:15:54
Just, I don't know.
It's time I was just experimenting and just keep clicking formal wallet.
Now, you know, anyhow, I lost a bunch of Bitcoin doing that, you know, time transfer and all that.
Yeah.
But yeah, all this comes, everything we're talking about, you throw out a subject, it all comes back the way it was done right the first time.
And you keep tweaking, keep it just to the point where it's unworkable.
People are unable to use it.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah, that's the sort of thing we see in engineering.
Usually, there's a guy who's got a vision for this thing.
And you have a very small, you know, one or a couple of people who put together a system.
That's what I've seen.
And people say, oh, it's pretty good.
They buy it, and then the corporation takes it in.
And then you get a team of people who didn't have anything to do with the development of it, don't really know what's going on with it.
And the thing gets ruined as they maintain it, quote unquote, or add features to it or this or that.
And that's kind of what's going to be happening with the AI stuff, I think.
They're using it for programming.
And I've seen from a lot of people say, well, because I didn't put this thing together, it's really hard for me to maintain it.
I don't really understand what it did or why it did what it did.
And it's kind of opaque, even though I've been in this for decades doing this.
Of course.
I mean, you could do anything on AI.
You can write books.
You can compose music.
You know, I hate to go way off into the weeds, but one of my, I thought was the funniest thing I'd ever seen on YouTube.
There is a music video called That's One Ugly Baby.
I suggest you users like that to watch it.
It's AI.
And they took an old Motown song and modded it to where they're singing about ugly babies.
You know, I was like, man, this is getting just too crazy.
Yeah.
But with AI, you know, you have got people that don't understand what they're doing using it.
And they're going to, once again, let's simplify.
Let's put everything on AI.
Let it control it.
It'll give us warning beeps of something's wrong.
No, it won't.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, you go back to Gaza and a lot of people are saying, well, I think this was set up because this is in an area where the Israeli government had automated guard towers and things like that.
Very high-tech, very sophisticated.
And you see things like that.
And everybody believes that because it's high-tech, sophisticated, expensive, that it's going to be working correctly.
So therefore, they had to have had a false flag.
Now, that may have happened.
However, when you look at some of the things, you sent me a video of a guy that was, what was it, eight years old?
And he was talking about how to become invisible to surveillance cameras.
And it was a really simple idea.
Really simple idea.
As a matter of fact, we got a Yeah, we got a where is that clip?
Do you have yeah, here it is right here.
I'm going to pull this up and show the audience here.
What he did was he look at his head as just this glowing ball and you can't see anything.
And his insight was that since they put these cameras, these surveillance cameras around, they want them to be somewhat hidden from view in terms of people understanding that they're being surveilled, they will put night vision on them.
And so he said, if you get something that has a um you know the same frequency that this is using in terms of light stuff, that you could put that on your glasses and put out a very bright spectrum of light that it's only sensitive to, but that people can't see.
It's not in the visible spectrum, but it's going to basically create a massive lens flare for that night vision camera and it can't see who you are.
Yeah.
Well, you know, when we were pen testing, we would take these RF diodes that were tiny and we'd build a hat band out of them.
And then for the nine little, oh, I forget what size battery it was.
And we walk around there just in plain sight and the cameras couldn't read us.
If we really wanted to get stealthy, we would either, well, I think we sewed them into like jackets and stuff.
And you couldn't make heads tell us out of body shape, face, anything.
It's just one big glowing orb.
That's right.
And we were hacking ATM machines and they were like, how are you doing this?
Well, we were doing it at their permission.
Right, right.
You know, pen testing.
Hey, you're ATM vulnerable.
But I walk through facilities and they're like, oh, it's a ghost.
Well, that's the thing.
You know, when you look at this, when it's being used for something like the defense industry or something like that, you know, you think that you've got some really sophisticated system and yet it might have a very, very simple vulnerability like you were just talking about.
And, you know, that's the thing I see happening with the rapid introduction of this technology.
You know, it used to be back in the day when I was in engineering.
That was a long time ago, about 40 years ago.
I remember one of the reasons that I didn't want to get, of course, I didn't want to develop stuff for the military because of what the military was doing with it.
But I had friends who got into that and they were complaining.
They said, the stuff we're using is so old.
We're not allowed to use anything unless it's been around and tested for years, unless they've taken it to the North Pole, unless they've taken it to the desert and all the rest of the stuff.
They've got to have this stuff.
It's got to be tested in all these different environments and have a very long history behind it.
That's not really what's happening now.
They're rushing to get stuff out.
And I think that's creating a whole new class of vulnerability.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, see, it's like the technicians and the people that you teach this stuff to, they're retiring.
They're on their way out.
It's like William Benny.
Man, you ought to be, I know he's deep in his 80s, but you should try to book William Denny, Benny.
Yeah.
And try him tell some sports stories.
Yeah, to try to get him out.
My son Lance just said, while they looked at the footage and said, we've been hacked by a lens flare.
We've been hacked by the human torch.
Yeah.
It's like we've been hacked by aliens.
Where's this spaceship?
Maybe it's Lucifer, a being of light.
Yeah.
But that's what I'm saying.
Back in the day, you did not put it out until it was perfected.
Now, you've got these.
And another problem that we have with The tech industry is who wants to go to work for the government, set in a cubicle for a hundred thousand a year when you can go out there, take some existing technology, tweak it a little bit, and go and have a hundred million dollar IPO or work for someone and they pay half a mill or a mill a year for what you know and know how to make work.
So the government's behind the eight ball on this one, big.
And I was watching that with that Miss Guthrie, and I'm like, what did they do?
Turn loose the village idiots to solve this.
I mean, you've got the village idiot doing the crime.
Now you've got the village idiots running it.
Oh, yeah, you really do literally have the village idiots running the FBI.
That's that's for sure.
Uh, cash for telling crew.
That's amazing.
Call me, Cash.
Yeah, call me, get your notebook out.
We'll fix some stuff.
Anyhow, this kind of stuff, and now you're talking about AI.
The people that really know AI, they're out there doing stuff that actually makes money for themselves.
The people that the $100,000 crew, which I don't mean to be slamming anybody, they really don't know what they're doing.
They're going by the manual.
And you only know what the manual tells you.
Yeah.
So, that's right.
Yeah, that's one reason I just threw up my hands and said, you know, I've got better things too and keep doing this because you tell these people this.
That's why I was showing you these old links and stuff.
We've already solved it.
Where is it at?
Use it.
So, where do you see this going?
Where do you see this going as we have our technology gets more and more advanced, as the rate of change increases more and more, as there's less and less ruggedness in the system, more and more vulnerabilities?
Where do you see this all happening?
As you know, it seems to me like it's getting shakier as it is getting more advanced, and it's happening at such a rapid rate that nobody's keeping up with it.
Where does this all crash?
Do you see that happening soon?
What do you think is going to happen?
That's what I look at.
I'm going to get the house cards up this high.
Yeah.
So, how high can they keep continue building that house of cards?
I really don't know.
I think, you know, I think if people had a reality check, but they're all disbelieving, they're all not understanding the obvious, it will continue until something really bad happens.
And I don't know what you define as bad.
You know, where is bad anymore?
Yeah.
Million people dead, 10 million dead.
So, and then when you work for the government, it's that old saying: politicians and government people, I'm not responsible for the things I do.
Yeah, that's right.
They got community.
How can you stop it?
Yeah, how do you stop it?
Yeah, you have so many different systems that are involved in it.
You got medical systems, infrastructure, transportation, you have defense systems with weapons.
I mean, now there's going to be a major push for autonomous killer weapons, autonomous killer robots, as well as drones and things like that.
By the way, you know, there was also another interesting video.
Do you have that?
Yeah, we got it.
I'll show the audience this.
This is protecting yourself from an aerial drone using an umbrella.
Thermal drone person.
Yeah.
Go ahead and open the umbrella.
And look at this is a split screen here.
It looks like, let's go to IR.
Can see anything.
They can see what he's doing.
He puts the umbrella on and he disappears now completely.
I'm looking at a steep round.
Yeah.
And it's still quite difficult, to be honest.
I think he's slightly hearing the drone and pointing his umbrella towards that.
Now, can you close it?
Yeah.
And open it again.
That's too good.
That's too good.
You know, it's kind of interesting because that's where Eric Schmidt is hanging out now.
You know, he left Google and he has been a big man on campus at the Pentagon for quite some time, setting up very advanced systems and AI-based systems and that type of thing.
And yet, you know, they could go out and spend billions of dollars on some kind of autonomous killer drone thing.
They're talking about creating a no man's land, which is pretty much what they've done in the area between Ukraine and Russia now with all the improvised drones.
And that's changing the nature of warfare very, very rapidly.
And so you put all that stuff together.
And then, you know, maybe somebody finds a way to a vulnerability that's as simple as opening up an umbrella so they can't see you with the advanced targeting that it's got.
Well, even worse is they are perfecting the drone swarms.
Yeah.
I mean, at New Year, you remember, I forget, there was one city that was doing demonstrations of art in the sky with the drone swarm.
Everybody's like, ooh, this, I'm not even going to tell you how to do it.
It's one simple modification where you can put a bomb on it and it will release it.
So if you've got $550 drones in a swarm loaded with whatever, Molotov, cocktails, whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You've got a force to be reckoned with.
Oh, yeah.
As a matter of fact, all this.
Yeah.
I was going to say, Goat Tree, I just want to be working.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
All this push about trying to stop ghost guns and the licensing, not licensing, but the requirements that are being talked about in terms of a Washington state, isn't it, Lance?
Yeah, Washington State.
There's a new bill in New York, and now there's, I think, five states that are putting out similar stuff.
It's pushed.
Yeah, they're trying to stop 3D printers.
And as Lance's take on all this, and I think it's the right one, he doesn't think they're as worried about ghost guns and creating ghost guns as much as they are worried about stopping people printing their own drones.
Right.
Hey, you could, I'll tell you what.
I have a 200-drone swarm full of all kinds of nasty stuff I can drop on you, and you've got a ghost gun.
Who are you most worried about?
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
That's the asymmetric warfare of the future right there.
Yeah, you got low-tech people playing with high-tech stuff.
Yeah, and they're desperate to stop that down, shut that down right now.
So, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
It is interesting as we see these things changing very rapidly.
But it is an odd mixture, and that's kind of where you operated as cybersecurity.
This odd mixture of technology and human nature.
And always, when I talk to you about the different cases that you're on, it was always almost kind of like a Colombo thing.
The Occam's razor was, well, who is it that's got a gripe with a company?
Or who is it that could really profit from this because they know where the back door is?
So really, more often than not, it was really about human nature in terms of finding the culprits in these things.
Well, now here's something.
I've got all mine shut off.
But if you're on automatic updates on your computer or PC, whatever they call them now, your phone, any device that has automatic update, you've got a back door open.
Now, if I wanted to say if I wanted to, let's stir up Microsoft.
I hack in there and get that code.
I can put anything I want on your device under their name.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You aren't sure what they're sending to you, but you're totally got your vendor door open and it can come in that way.
Back Doors Open 00:14:39
They do do a lot of sharing with the government.
So, I mean, who knows who they shared with?
Yeah.
And the reasons why.
A lot of this software, I mean, this is so old school that they allow you to create back doors if you know how.
So you can have your own personal back door into anything.
Yeah.
And while I'm on my rent, people really ought to shut off the vendor.
Go download what you're sure you're downloading.
Oh, man.
My temper got up and I forgot what I was going to say.
So go ahead.
So turn off your automatic updates.
Any other things that you would tell?
I mean, I do that just because I don't want them constantly messing with my machine.
You know, if there's been an update, they may break something, even if it's a legit update.
So, yeah, I always turn that off.
Any other things like that that you tell people?
You know, I hate to sound as nihilistic as I do, but it's to the point where if you could use 1960s technology, that's the only safe place I can think of going.
I'm talking about putting in a landline.
I'm talking about finding 1960, 1970s version TVs.
Yeah, TVs that don't watch you back.
Yeah.
You know, don't record what you're doing on TV or what you're watching or anything else.
You know, it's like we have created such a society that is so reliant on tech that we're letting it get away from us.
Yeah, it really is.
Yeah.
And I think that's the government's involvement in it.
When you look at what they have funded, it's what Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex, and he said also the academic aspect of it as well.
And it's because the government is funding all this stuff that the government is funding things that can be used for centralized control and manipulation of people.
And that's why when we talk about this, I talk about this all the time with Eric Peters when he comes on.
Get yourself a car that doesn't have all the electronics, especially not a car that is constantly online.
Because of the types of vulnerabilities that you've pointed out with the Black Hat conferences and things like that, they've illustrated just how dangerous these things can be.
It could be somebody hacking it, or it could just be that the device itself is not working properly.
Do you remember when we went back to those automated cars where you just turn it on, you sit there behind the steering wheel and you're not in control of anything?
That's right.
I explained it then that this is all on a sliding scale of basically I forget what they even called it, but it's its own ATT just texted me, thou shalt not talk about them.
It's on a sliding scale, basically a probability.
So let's say the president on that scale one to ten, president gets a ten.
It's programmed in your car.
You're going to avoid running into him at all costs.
And it becomes, of course, the programmers, they're going to give themselves a 10 too.
It becomes who's the decider here?
Let's say you give a school bus load, yeah, the short bus loaded with kids an eight.
But you have a rare species of squirrel that is in danger, and you give it a nine.
So you're driving alone, and that squirrel runs out at you, and you've got the short bus coming at you.
The computer's going to say hit the short bus because it's lower rated than the squirrel.
Yeah.
Right.
So, you know, who gets to decide these things?
Who gets to decide of who's a zero?
You know, that means everything runs into you.
Well, and of course, it's not even just that kind of hierarchy that could be imposed on us of values, but it's also if the device is going to work properly.
I mean, we just had a situation where a car was passing another car, and because the auto lane change thing misread it, they're trying to get out of the way of the oncoming traffic, and it pushed them back in at the last minute.
And they had a head-on collision, killed everybody in the car.
So you have these types of situations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, people are like, oh, this is great.
I can read, well, nobody reads papers anymore.
I can text crazy stuff on X and drink coffee while on my commute.
And you have no clue what your car is programmed to do.
That's right.
You have no input on it.
And actually, I'm sitting, you know, I've got a pristine 1998 car.
It don't even have a CD player.
I'm sitting in it right now.
It's like, I don't want, I could go buy whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, yeah, that's exactly a lot of the cars like Teslas and things like that.
Even the door locks are under kind of software control.
So if there's an accident, you can't get out of your car.
It's difficult for them to open the car doors.
I had a friend of mine with a Tesla.
He got stuck in the car for quite some time.
He had to get, fortunately, he had his phone with him and he contacted tech support to get them to open his door.
And it wasn't the heat of summer.
So, you know, he didn't die of the heat in the meantime.
But, you know, once you overly complicate things, you take away the ability for people to just even crank down their window, for example, since now all the cars have got electric windows.
Now you've got issues of people when they drive into a body of water, they can't get out of the car like they used to be able to.
So those are just simple examples of what's happening as we needlessly complicate everything.
I think we are turning into a Rube Goldberg society, even if it's not malicious.
It's even worse.
It is just out of complacency.
I don't know if complacency is the right word.
Laziness has been so simplified that we go with it without thinking about what we got.
Yeah.
You know, oh, okay.
My coffee, we went over this with IOT years ago.
I've got a IOT coffee pot, and you don't realize how open IOT is to everything.
I don't even know if they call it that anymore.
Yeah, the Internet of Things.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Well, my pet peeve is like a black hat.
Go ahead, sorry.
Well, if I'm a black hat and I really hate you, I can hack into your IOT coffee pot and I don't know, do something, set it on fire, and it burn your house down.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, it's to the point where we have a.
I was going to say, we got a television in our living room that is, you know, of course, they don't give you a knob on the front where you can just turn the thing on or off or even a button.
Nothing that you can see.
They put it on the back and it's black on black.
And it's like, I'm trying to reach around there.
It's almost, you can't see anything and you can't really even feel anything.
They don't even give you some kind of a tactile feedback to turn the thing on or off manually.
It's like, and now we're struggling to find the remote control because we've got a two-year-old that is roaming the house and moving everything around.
But it's like, why complicate this?
Why can't we just have a button that turns it on or off or a knob that turns it off?
Everything is, you know, the geeks are out there thinking, oh, wouldn't it be cool if we hid this and we did that and we put that under software control.
And they've made everything very, very difficult.
But anything that you would tell people in terms of precautions like, you know, make sure that you don't have automatic update on, of course, other things like that that'd be of any practical value to people.
When you're not using it, and everybody's going to say, I've lost my mind, but if you're on a router, turn it off when you're not using it.
Of course, you're always using it.
So I would go hardwired into computers and things that are online.
I would just plug directly in.
I would not be using Wi-Fi anymore than necessary, which I'm doing right now.
But it's a necessity, but it's an unneeded necessity because it opens you up to all sorts of things.
Whereas if you plug directly into the wall, you have knocked off a lot of this, well, like I was saying, war driving.
I could drive around, and if I can find a router open, that's what we call war driving.
I can get in your router and do all kinds of cool stuff.
Yeah, that's right.
Of course, they can even use the Wi-Fi signals.
They can even use Wi-Fi signals to see you inside of your house now.
They can kind of reverse engineer the signals that are there.
But you'd have the bonus of a health issue as well.
What you did on your television, you don't even realize it.
I'm going to take a shot in the dark and say it's a Sanyo.
No, I don't know who actually makes it.
It's some off-label thing that we got for cheap sale on.
Okay, good.
Fizo or something like that.
So maybe it is made by Sanyo.
I don't know.
But yeah, go ahead.
Well, what you found is when you turned it off and that black screen was there was without even realizing it.
These things now have gotten to where they're using subliminal programming.
Where let's say you sit down and watch the news.
I don't know which news.
It don't matter.
Well, first off, you've got several billion pixels.
You cannot use several billion pixels for one image.
So, and I can prove it.
If people want to, I mean, if they care enough, put the TV on The news right now.
Look at the newscaster in the eyes and walk up to the TV until you can see the two white dots in their eyes.
Those white dots there are meant to hold your attention.
So naturally, you're looking at the face.
And in the background, they will have some other pixels dedicated to basically ghost programming.
That is for the advertisers.
So you're fixated on watching that broadcaster.
And on your peripheral vision, you're catching whatever they're advertising.
Let's say hamburgers.
You sit there long enough, it's going to get into your subconscious.
The next thing you know, you're craving hamburgers.
Yeah.
That's why all those pixels are there.
It's like they live, right?
Yes.
Or you need your logic deterred something.
That's right.
Behind the news, it's just saying obey and comply.
Yeah.
And I'll tell you, I will tell you the funniest thing in the world to do.
And it's so simple.
Just mute the broadcaster where you can't hear them and watch them.
They look like the most ridiculous thing on the earth.
I'm serious.
Without that layered sound, you're going to be going, what in the world?
But when you combine it all together, it works.
It's addictive.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Yeah, there's a lot of.
I haven't gone back to the old, I haven't gone back to old Zenith TVs yet, but I wish I could.
Yeah, I mean, my big thing is, you know, just the on-off button.
You know, sometimes it's difficult to turn it on.
Sometimes it turns itself back on when you don't want it on, you know.
So ours does that as well.
Some ghosts in the machine for sure.
Well, maybe it knows best.
It's like David's getting addicted to this.
Let's turn it off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's one of the things.
Jack Lawson, for example, he's been putting together the Civil Defense Manual for quite some time.
And he always deliberately put it out as a two-volume paper because, again, you know, when it hits the fan, you're going to need to have that book that's there.
And other people that I've talked to that are about prepping and other things that they have computers that they have stored things on, and they've got it on, let's say, CDs or something like that, if it's really important and they want to have it.
And it's on an air-gapped computer that's not connected to the internet ever.
And so there's certain things like that that are important for people to do, I think.
That's one of the smartest things people.
I mean, I'm not saying preppers, but you know, what if we have a any incident hurricane?
Well, you don't have very many hurricanes in Tennessee, but you did have a flood and you're isolated for, I don't know, for several days, and you need knowledge that you've already downloaded.
I don't know, maybe medical knowledge, survival knowledge, whatever.
It's there on hand where you can't access it because it's sitting on YouTube or something, which is down.
Deep Space Survival Knowledge 00:04:59
Yeah, yeah.
But if you got it in a book, you got it.
Well, or the video, some people got to where they can't read anymore.
It's like, give them a video.
That's right.
Whatever it takes.
But, you know, that collection of knowledge is probably one of the smartest things a person can do.
Yes.
Yes, absolutely.
Well, there's some helpful hints for people.
It's always great talking to you.
Always interesting talking to you.
You're not doing cybersecurity anymore, right?
You want to, are you still doing any writing?
Yeah, I am.
I've redirected my focus to something that's called, oh, Lord.
It's called quantum levitation.
Quantum levitation.
Yep.
And it is in its infancy.
And if we can ever crack some codes on some materials, it is going to change the world.
Once again, here I am talking about changing the world and reverting back to old school stuff.
So go figure.
Yeah.
You can imagine, you can imagine freight trains being powered by like leaf blowers.
That's the energy it would take.
You have a thin line where it doesn't touch anything.
It applies to cars.
It applies to everything.
The technology's here, but a lot of the components aren't.
And it's still in its infancy.
But when that does hit, you're going to get more industry pushback, probably outlawed.
I mean, you've got, you know, the tiring industry is what, probably a trillion-dollar a year business.
Well, they are not going to like going the way of the horse and buggy and things like that.
And I'm not talking George Jetson stuff, but I'm talking where your car is traveling maybe an inch off the ground and it also is encapsulated where nothing can run into you.
It's magnetism.
It pushes back.
Negative pushes back from positive and that sort of thing.
That is interesting.
I was just looking at.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Well, go ahead.
I was just looking.
If you're going to do deep space.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Okay, go ahead.
If you're doing deep space, if you're doing deep space travel, you're going to have to have an artificial gravity.
You can't just let people float around, stuff float around in the vehicle for years because if they're unable to, I mean, they get the muscular or not, yeah, muscular deterioration, stuff like that.
What if they shoot for a planet that has time 10 gravitation?
They aren't even going to be able to walk.
Yeah.
So, you know, it applies to everything.
You could put knee pads and elbow pads and I guess a helmet on people that are prone to fall.
And they could fall all they want.
They'll never hit the floor.
And it's just, you know, it's just, it will rewrite the rules of the world.
And here I am saying, well, you know, I want to go back to 1960s technology.
We had it right first, but yet I'm doing this.
So go figure.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
You know, it's kind of interesting.
I just saw an article about how they're, you know, between Musk and Bezos, and they got their different ideas about what they want to do with space exploration.
But they're also talking about the same kind of approach that Gerard K. O'Neill was talking about in his book, High Frontiers, at the end of the 1970s.
And they're talking about doing Maglev launching of materials off the moon's surface.
So, yeah, there's a lot of things like that that are going to change things very, very rapidly.
And again, as we look at it, it's not just us going back and hanging on to the things that are familiar.
There is a lot of wisdom in terms of pulling back against some of these technological things.
Just because it's something new and just because it's some kind of a gee whiz technology thing doesn't necessarily mean that you want to do that, you know.
And I guess that's one of the things as engineers we look at and we always get caught up in a new way of doing things, but sometimes there's wisdom in some of the older things if you are thinking about the consequence of it.
It's always great talking to you, Gotri.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Oh, it's my pleasure, David, and I hope you're feeling better.
Yeah, a little bit, a little bit better.
Pulling Back Against Technology 00:02:26
Thank you so much.
And, you know, probably need one of those helmets and knee pads that you're talking about before too much longer.
Well, if we can ever get past this liquid nitrogen problem, you'll be the first on my list to get one.
Okay.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Have a good day.
Thank you again for talking to us, Gotri.
Always great talking to you.
My pleasure.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Well, that's it for our show today.
I just want to remind you, as I said at the beginning of the program, we've only got about a week left in the month, and we're not quite at the halfway mark.
You know, we hear in both Deuteronomy as well as in the New Testament, the phrase that I'm sure you've heard, don't muzzle the ox as he's treading out the grain.
Well, if I'm the ox, I guess what I'm trying to tread on and try to keep from being tread on us is the grain, the acronym of genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, and nanotech.
We have to keep an eye out for what these people are trying to do to us.
And if you would like to help us sound the alarm, we really would appreciate your support if you find the show to be valuable.
Thank you.
have a good weekend.
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.
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