 Our equipment, our software, 3D printing and CNC milling can take raw materials, blocks of metal, things in their primordial state and take them from nothing and turn them into guns. It might seem strange that talking to a guy who makes machines that manufacture untraceable ghost guns makes me more hopeful about the future. But that's exactly how I felt after our recent live stream with Cody Wilson, founder of Defense Distributed and creator of the first ever 3D printed gun, the Liberator. Let's jump into the internet here and let's have a party. Let's see if you can take these files off the internet. Wilson's Defense Distributed has a decade-long history of clashing with government authorities and quite often winning. Since 2013, the State Department tried forcing the company to stop hosting gun printing files on its online library DefCAD by accusing them of violating an arms export law. Defense Distributed filed a First and Second Amendment case against them and the government finally backed down in 2018. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, took aim at so-called ghost guns last year with a new rule that would have required gun components known as 80% lower receivers to bear the same engraved registration numbers as fully finished guns, which would have put most DIY kit sellers out of business. Defense Distributed promptly responded with the 0% receiver, a block of aluminum that their ghost gunner machine could fashion into a gun component, challenging the feds to regulate that. The ATF backed down from even publishing the 80% receiver rule. Not only is it a bad rule, but they disable themselves in federal court. They have no power right now to say what is and isn't a firearm. But what makes Wilson's project so vital is that it's about more than firearms. It's about demonstrating a method for securing liberty without asking permission. Or has he put it in a 2013 South by Southwest talk shortly following the launch of his liberator gun? Practical Anarchy. I'm interested in demonstrating practical anarchy. One, I think the web is an anarchy. I think the web is a successful anarchy. You can buy things on eBay. You can buy things on Amazon. So you don't miss commerce works. Crypto Commerce works. And these principles are bleeding back into the real world through technologies like 3D printing. Of course, the internet has changed since then. Big platforms have grown more sensorious, with YouTube removing the original liberator video. As well as everything from DIY gunbuilding videos to biohacking tutorials to disputes over pandemic policy. And the Twitter files have helped reveal the degree to which government agents have pressured platforms to remove speech. Nonetheless, Wilson thinks freedom will prevail online. I think there's lots of reason for optimism. I know everybody still wants the history to have a meaning and a direction, and that there should be some world state to satisfy us, and machines of loving grace will automate and give us luxury communist conditions. Do I really believe in that? No, I don't think it's possible. I just think it'll be a great mix. Maybe it really will be like science fiction, high-tech, low-life, incredible, vast, interesting reaches of technical progress with depressingly shallow and animal-like living conditions. I mean, maybe. I guess these are all questions of aesthetics, really, and aesthetics become more important than philosophy. I do think I still read the crypto-anarchist books, the pirate utopias. It's so breathtaking, the visions they had, and so much of it came true, and the biggest part of that is Bitcoin. The forces of extreme political centralization do remain a threat to our freedom, but major technological trends do seem to favor decentralization and uncensored ability in the long run, whether it's Cody Wilson's decentralizing guns, Bitcoin decentralizing money, or emerging social media platforms like Nostra, Mastodon, and Blue Sky decentralizing the architecture of the web and granting individual users more protection against the increasing political pressure to deplatform dissident speech. And as Wilson points out to us, the large language model AI chatbots created by well-funded companies like OpenAI and Google are now being open-sourced and may present yet another opportunity to disrupt an otherwise steady march towards authoritarianism. We've done AI experiments for years here. We did text models, text-to-speech, we've got our own chatbots and stuff, and if you are a breakaway startup, a company, you're interested in the post-political and you want to be commercial, I think you need AI, these things are very powerful tools, and there seems to be just almost a total alignment with using them in only one direction to support the message, you know, the narrative. So free the AI, yeah, let the AI be a free thinker. 30 billion parameter model LLM you can train on a laptop right now. I mean, just you lower all these things like every week you're seeing these innovations where actually we should be seeing all kinds of interesting technical developments from libertarians and so-called capitalists. Cody Wilson isn't a spotless hero or a personal role model, as he himself admits when discussing his guilty plea for injury to a minor after paying for sex with a woman he met on an adult hookup app whom he says he didn't realize was underage. I wouldn't choose not to make excuses or see myself as some kind of victim or something, so I will say, you know, Gracious Sail was finally completed my probation and my case was dismissed. If you want to do really interesting and cool things, you probably should be above reproach or at least attempting to be so that you don't frustrate your message or you don't complicate your symbolic point. So it was a big education. I'll say that. Wilson dubbed his first 3D gun the wiki weapon. His political hero Julian Assange also got caught up in a sex crimes case which led him to flee Sweden, seek asylum in London's Ecuadorian embassy and ultimately end up in a London prison where he lives to this day as he fights US extradition for a dubious espionage charge that he's always claimed is the real reason authorities wanted to detain him in Sweden. Assange, WikiLeaks, that was everything for me. He was defeating payments blockade. He was thumbing his nose at the World Hegemon and the State Department. Oh my God, how is he doing? The internet's actually fulfilling like a cyberpunk purpose. This is crazy. And I was like, whatever I'm doing is nothing. What he's doing, this, whatever this is. And so that's, I began to study the cypher punks and the literature of Julian Assange's movement moment and that's what put me on the path to what we did. We don't need to whitewash the personal lives or fully embrace the politics of complicated figures like Assange or Cody Wilson to recognize the fundamental importance of their shared mission to put vital information and tools in the hands of free and peaceful people. My gift is always like a defiance to power in the terms of power except for itself challenging power to be real or to immunize itself and saying like, I don't believe that you're real. I've just been trying to use Bojard's fatal strategies and theories of games and theories of seduction. I'm trying to infuse some of those rules into our projects and address a certain audience of power and invite that power to exhaust itself, et cetera. I could keep going all day. Hey, thanks for watching an excerpt from our conversation with Cody Wilson. You can watch the full conversation right here or another clip from that conversation right here and tune in next Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern for another Reason livestream.