 Welcome to the reason live stream. I'm Zach Weissmuller joined by my colleague, Nick Gillespie. Hi, Zach. And today our guest is Cody Wilson. Many in our audience will be quite familiar with him, but for the unacquainted, he is the founder of Defense Distributed, the company responsible for the first ever 3D printed gun known as the Liberator, and the manufacturer of the Ghost Gunner, a popular DIY milling machine that enables anyone with access to the internet to generate an unregistered firearm from the comfort of his or her own home. Defense Distributed, almost since its inception, has been party to multiple lawsuits fighting federal and state governments for the right to host digital gun schematics on their website, DEF-CAD, and to sell their Ghost Gunners and accessory components. Their latest fight is against the Biden administration's ATF, which issued a rule attempting to regulate components known as 80% lower receivers, which is where we'll start this conversation. Cody, thank you very much for joining us today. Hey, thank you guys. Good afternoon. Happy to be here. So Biden's ATF submitted a new rule last year targeting unregistered Ghost Guns. Before we get into the content of that rule, let's just take a look at what Biden had to say about the threat of Ghost Guns as justification for the ATF's actions. This is the gun. It's not hard to put together. A fellow in the terrorist, a domestic abuser, can go from a gun kit to a gun as little as 30 minutes. In fact, the ATF reports that they've been able to trace less than 1%, less than 1% of Ghost Guns reported by law enforcement. And we're acting today. The United States Department of Justice is making it illegal for a business to manufacture one of these kits without a serial number. Illegal. Illegal. So what's your reaction, Cody? I'm immediately reminded of Dr. Steve Brul, played by John C. Riley in his famous sushi skit. Check it out. He says it's not hard to let other people from different countries talk to you. He sounds exactly like Dr. Steve Brul. So maybe that's a deep cut, but I feel bad for the president. And that was a great moment for Polymer 80, because of course, Joe Biden's rule was workshopped for him by every town in Giffords to target what had become a very popular type of at-home kit, DIY kit for making concealable unregistered handguns, the Polymer 80 kit. That was its great moment. So yeah, it's fun to see you again. Yeah, and so we're, everyone's kind of on the same page about what we're talking about here. These are examples of 80% lowers and frames. And so basically the government wanted to, the ATF wants to classify these as something that had to be registered. I talked with you last January, shortly after this rule was first published by the ATF. And I'm just going to play a quick clip from that conversation, because it quickly explains kind of the mechanics here. And then we can discuss, you know, how things have progressed since then. If the rule is adopted in the coming weeks, it means the federal government will require gun part kits sold on the internet by defense distributed and its competitors to bear the same serial numbers as do fully manufactured firearms, which has the potential to put the entire industry out of business. So how is Wilson responding? Meet the 0% receiver. Anything on its way to being a gun is now considered a gun. So say I, Uncle Joe. And this would be smart, you would think, if you're a wine mom or a lawyer who now controls the ATF, you know, this is Gabby Gifford's grand achievement to end kit guns in the mail. But that's just it. This was only a reaction to kit guns in the mail. 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. Wilson and his team tweaked the code to the latest model of the ghost gunner. It used to be the customers would purchase partially fabricated lower receivers using the ghost gunner to finish the job of turning them into functional gun parts. Wilson said that defense distributed is the only DIY gun company pivoting in the face of this new regulation. So the real impact of the law will be to drive out his competitors with this rule that Biden's pursuing. He's giving us though the nation's premier ghost gun company, I would say a monopoly of the market. So how, how has it played out since then, you know, in terms of adoption, because when we're talking about going from something that's partially finished to something that's a raw material, I imagine that's a little bit more work. Have people been ordering these and making things out of the zero percent receiver blocks or non receiver blocks? Thank you. Yeah, since since our piece and your piece, thankfully, was a big part of adoption, our centerpiece, yes, we did about a solid year's worth of business with the with the AR zero, and it was it was cool. We took it to Shot Show, the NSSF Shot Show, lots to say about that organization right now. But people got it. Yeah, people bought a lot of it and they got it. But what's so interesting is like at the time that I spoke to you, we were predicting a more effective rule that would actually ban entirely most 80% receivers or receiver kits. And certainly the language at that time suggested as much. And by the time the final rule was published, we were all surprised that most 80% receivers survive. And so you ended up getting these pieces, like in the New York Times and all these gun controllers came out with buyers or more saying, oh, actually, the rule wasn't what we thought it was. And so to some degree in that in that next year after that piece, AR zeros or zero percent receivers didn't become necessary, because the monopoly wasn't required. The industry survived and in fact began to abuse the rule in different directions. So it's awesome and hilarious that we didn't have to go that way. So the new conversation, the new zero we have today, I can show you it has a retrospective point of view instead of this predictive one that that we had with you at that time. That's one way to answer your question. Yeah, tell us a little bit about this new product that you're launching now. And I do I received your video that is kind of announcing that. So maybe we'll we can play that real quick and then you can explain exactly what this is and why you think that it's a necessary next step. I will and can't. Sorry. I had some thoughts about that that period, you know, with Joe. And I know since we're not pressed for time, if you don't mind. Please do. You know, I learned things beyond what I was sharing with you there about the rule at that time, the video, and that the rule actually did begin, the so-called frame and receiver rule, ghost gun rule. It did begin in contemplation of how the ATF could regulate any new part of a gun, because they were thinking of 3D printing. The Wall Street Journal at the time was reporting that it was an industry move to cut down just on polymer AD kit. But there were contemplations of well, people are printing and doing whatever they want. So we need ways to assign, you know, more than one receiver potentially to new types of designs of guns. But that was written out pretty quickly in early drafts. Some of the language kind of survives by reference or something. So you kind of you kind of see it echoing around in the final rule. But that final rule is really mysterious. So in the end, they just settled on things like well, of course, we can't regulate things in their primordial state. When I use that word, that wasn't, you know, I'm not trying to be elaborate, like that's the legal thing that they say themselves in the rule. And they kind of gave up on the idea most recently under litigation that they could regulate certain types of receiver kits. And they've even lost the ability to regulate the polymer AD kit because of a law student in the Northern District of Texas called Vanderstock. And so the context of this new 80% receiver kit, you could say, or 0% receiver kit we have is it's based off that fight in the Northern District of Texas. It's called Vanderstock. FPC is in it. There's a couple other companies in it. And that judge, Joe Conner, he's a Trump judge, he's already kind of indicated that he's going to throw out Biden's ghost gun rule entirely. And so this is like, this is the bookend on this little three year program we've had together, right? Joe Biden. Could you talk a little bit about why was the rule, you know, why didn't it work? It seems like it should be pretty straightforward for the government to say you can't sell this thing in this shape without, you know, an ID number or something like that. Why, you know, why did the 80% rule fail? I think the government would agree with you here. But basically this, like the expansion of the regulatory state in most directions, it was by the ATF on its own was trying to rewrite the gun control act, right? Firearm is a term defined by statute defined by Congress. And in this little fiction, we maintain about, you know, who has the legislative power, we say it's Congress. And so it was quite simple in the end, they threw 100 pages at trying to rewrite what the word firearm meant and what the word firearm receiver, but these are defined by statute in the GCA and not really modified in other places. And so they bit off more than they could chew. It was overreaching finally. And this wasn't the only challenge Vanderstock against the rule. But finally, we, the ATF met a judge who said, no, actually, Congress defines what firearm is not you. And so either things are firearms or they aren't. And it doesn't matter if some things can become a firearm. It's simply legally and materially is not one until it is one. You know, therefore, your rule is unconstitutional. It's pretty simple, pretty stark in the way you hope constitutional cases on these questions go. Of course, it's pretty difficult to get those outcomes. Do you worry at all about, you know, thinking of like the installment of a gun, though, back in 2019 reason ran a story by Jacob Solomon, which dealt with drug paraphernalia where it turns out, you know, they had the kind of reigning definitions of drug paraphernalia, say a glass pipe or a glass sculpture, you know, it's a bong, but it would be not it wasn't sold as a bong. If it's in a head shop, and if it's in proximity to weed, then it was drug paraphernalia, which could be restricted by law. If it was just on somebody's shelf somewhere, or you were buying it off of Amazon, it was not. And I mean, it gets to this kind of murky, strange space of like, you know, and I think we'll talk more about this. So, Zach, if we want to forestall it, but I mean, like that, the chunk of metal that you have, you know, at what point does that become a gun? And does it stop being, you know, merely a block of metal? These are the most interesting questions. And to use your analogy, like the drug or scheduling analogy, like that's, I saw California, now other states are beginning to use a war on drugs vocabulary to regulate gun components. And this is so much fun. They say precursor parts, right? Precursor parts to fire. The connotations already there that like there's something wrong that you would have components that might go into a gun or fit into a gun. And there's something implied about the scheduling of these components outside of their quality of, you know, being, I don't know, they have their own legal requirement for regulation. And I watched California deal with this question since 2019. Each year they were just about to create a new regime for precursor parts. And they even had one at one point, but they used COVID to kind of skip ahead and just accomplish what they wanted anyway. You know, no spoilers here. You're not allowed to have them, but they ended up merging precursor parts with the new enthusiasm for banning unfinished receivers because the states, the several liberal blue states ended up mostly just copying language from White's ghost gun rule, which we've already discussed here, saying, well, whatever's regulated by the ATF, it's regulated here too. A funny consequence of that is in California, for example, right now, California law is really specific to the federal rule. So it says only those things that are fairly regulated can be sold in California. Well, because of Vandersock and the future summary judgment that's got to knock out Biden's rule, California will be in this awkward position where their law means nothing can be sold in California because nothing's federally regulated anymore. Is there any room for federalism in gun laws, you know, for you? So, you know, does California have the right or Los Angeles, San Francisco? Do they have the right to have different gun laws than, you know, Dallas, Texas, Austin, Huntsville, Texas, where I spent two years? You know, I mean, is there a room for that or are these kind of universal rights which must be universally respected in all contexts? That's an awesome question. I think in practical terms, in practical political terms, we have to make concessions. Like, obviously San Francisco is always going to be hostile in a way that, you know, view of Texas is not what I don't like or at least what I can't accept is the fact that New Sum and there's this new, these progressive nostrums mean we have to empower our state or local authorities to reach outside of our state jurisdiction, county jurisdiction, municipal boards and go attack companies and people in other states and other jurisdictions. So, unfortunately though, I would like to make practical Federalist concessions in theory, right, because I want to be a good American and practice these are almost impossible to concede now because there are something like civil war conditions in the courts and this is not an exaggeration. I spent most of last year fighting California because California passed AB 1621 and 1721. I forget the other ones that they had, but in combination they meant, you know, if you're selling something in Texas like a ghost gun kit, we'll just empower any of our private citizens or gun control groups to sue you anyway, to just go, just go into you. So, unfortunately, I think we're kind of in a post-Federalist conversation and it would be deadly to just say, well, I'm a good constitutional. So, please, everyone in California, please come sue me. Well, speaking of California, if that is, you know, your greatest adversary or one of your greatest adversaries at the moment, probably the, you think of the general of that adversarial army is Gavin Newsom. And just today, he announced that he wants to push forward a 28th amendment that will kind of enact some quote unquote common sense gun regulations across the land. And I did pull a clip from his announcement of that that I was curious to get your reaction to, and then we can speak a little bit more about California after that. But first, let's hear from Gavin Newsom. Every time it's the same. They tell us we can't stop these massacres. They tell us we have to stand by and watch tragedy after tragedy unfold in our communities. They say we can't stop domestic terrorism without violating the Second Amendment and the thoughts and prayers of the best we can do. I'm here to say that's a lie. So today, I'm proposing the 28th amendment to the United States Constitution to do just that. It raises the minimum age to purchase a firearm from 18 to 21. It mandates universal background checks. It institutes reasonable waiting periods for all gun purchases. And it bans civilians from buying assault rifles. Those weapons of war are founding fathers never foresaw. This will guarantee states as well the ability to enact common sense gun safety laws while leaving the Second Amendment intact and respecting America's gun owning tradition. What do you think the 28th amendment sound reasonable? So so reasonable. Yeah, so great. Yeah, to me this this plays and I don't know what his angle is here because he says he's not running for president. But you know, for the last two years, I'm sorry, I hear some noises that me or you guys, I don't think it's us. Yeah, I just want to make sure it wasn't me. But for the last two years, I've seen Newsom in particular do this weird rebranding of, I don't know, the so-called positive liberties as the real definition of freedom or something. So I don't know if you guys recall his little campaign, but he's like, well, actually freedom in California means the right to have an abortion paid for and the right to be free of gun violence. And, you know, it's part of this like, I don't know, I think he imagines it as like it's California competing against Florida and persuasive redefinitions of what American liberty actually means. And maybe that's sophisticated. But I don't really get the angle other than it's just a convenient way for people to embrace the pink police state or something. And of course, we all know what his 28th amendment thing here means. It's just a clever way of saying liberals always like to pretend to be originalists or constitutionalists when they grab your guns. It's pretty vulgar to me. That's my initial reaction. Yeah, I wonder about, and I just thought I'm always wondering, you know, because you're playing, you're constantly playing this game where you're trying to stay a step ahead of what they're going to do next. And at the moment, it appears you are a step ahead because they're still fighting over these 80% receivers and you've created the zero percent receiver. So that conversation seems to be in different stages right now. But what one thing that California seems to be trying to do to get after this problem is to use liability laws to hold either gun manufacturers or gun sellers liable for or any shootings that happen with the guns. And one example here just earlier this week, LAPD found 700 ghost guns. Now it's getting $5 million. Basically, they recovered ghost guns that were used in the ambush of some LA County Sheriff's deputies in Compton in a home invasion and a triple murder. And they settled with Polymer 80, which is a competing ghost gun kit seller for $5 million. So the seeing stories like this were you that's kind of that that's ultimately going to be the fate of defense distributed that people are going to use ghost guns to commit crimes. And then they're going to somehow try to come after you and hold you liable if it could be traced back to it was created on a ghost gunner. Well, fortunately or not, this is already our reality. It's not like this hasn't happened yet. Polymer 80 is taking most of these hits these days. And I agree with you on the general approach, both of gun control and state and municipal authorities, they imagine a better like big tobacco like approach where, okay, the big, the biggest suppliers, let's say Smith and West and the actual gun suppliers, they at least have the pro forma protection of what's called the placa. And if you guys know about the placa, but you know protection of lawful commerce and arms acts like that. So, okay, well, they can't, you know, they're still trying to pierce it, right? Because you'll remember the big Remington settlement after Sandy Hook and that that itself was was a pretty sad thing because like the insurers decided to settle. They didn't decide to press the issue on the placa or the two way. And so I have seen consortiums, you know, like legal meets where these gun controllers get together and say, all right, our new strategy is placa. We can at least beat them all up in court and get the insurance carriers to settle so much that it forces, you know, as good capitalists that forces them to make a safer product, a label of differently to put, you know, weird orange tips and safety features on the guns and things. So that's in earnest their approach. And of course, it gives them this pro social, whatever this kind of progressive feeling about it. While it also masks, I guess, the pure ideology, but it also masks how well they're actually engaging in gun control by capitalism now, rather than like strictly as a kind of ideological approach. But back to your point, I've been in California alone. I've also been sued. I was sued in the Tahama Ghost Gun shooting and a number of ghost and companies were sued, including Black Hawk. We were sued for 500 million, I think it's half a billion dollars. You know, yeah, you get concerned when you're sued for half a billion dollars anytime someone has it uses a ghost gun. So to the point in the article that you just previewed, well, the accusation that they don't do background checks, this is a this is a problem, right? There again, they're trying to redefine the duty of care of a ghost and company that company's not selling guns that company can't use the next system, even if it wanted to. And so a little bit, you know, this is all workshopped for PR. This is all kind of part of a broader campaign of pushing people in this direction to make expectations have expectations like the big tobacco fight. This is my read about it. But to your point, will will this be the future of yes, of course, as as these kit guns are used and crimes and things. Yes, I think we'll be hauled into every single court. We're often threatened with it. There was a big New York suit very recently that brought a bunch of suppliers in. I think we weren't brought in because at this point, we have a reputation for being very litigious, like they don't always want to just litigate with us. So they kind of pick lower hanging fruit, maybe or sovereign targets. But you know, look, I've gotten plenty of behind the scenes private letters from Letitia James. Pick your favorite AG, you know, like they're always threatening to do. And that will be the future. Do you have any idea of how many ghost guns, you know, so called how many ghost guns are in circulation? I have seen some estimates made, you know, Polymeradia at its height, great company. Revolutionary company. Polymeradia at its height was doing something like 50,000 kits a month. And hot spots I've heard from Polymeradia, and you can see some of this corroborated by indictments against them. They had a big grand jury thing a couple of years ago. Hot spots for Polymeradia kits were your problem Democrat cities, you know, D.C., Baltimore, Oakland, right? Do you have a sense of, you know, were people buying the kits, you know, I guess to put it in the context of legislators, were people buying the kits because they wanted to commit crimes or they wanted to protect themselves while living in a crime-ridden city? I think it's both. I can't make a reasonable estimate, but you can see that there are subcultures. Just like in Houston, it's very popular to have a certain type of switch device that makes your clock more interesting. That's a certain type of community of people. Same thing. And like you could see these subreddits for Polymeradia kit. I mean, these are some hoodlums, man. At the same time, I don't know if this is all legal and it needs to buy. Do you, to go back to, you know, some of the stuff that Gavin Newsom, who I just want to point this out because every time I see him, he looks so much like Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of American Psycho. I kind of want him to become president just for that reason. But, you know, is there such a thing as reasonable gun control? Or are there, would you say there are constitutionally legitimate limits on gun ownership? I think I'm too much of a postmodernist now to really commit that answer. But we're going to get to postmodernism and biopolitics later. Well, let's not. Let's not. People like that. But, you know, we're already there. I mean, we're asking, what is a gun? So that's true. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's true. Well, that's more surrealism, right? It's like a McGree painting. Right. There, you know, Clarence Thomas gave us the benefit of Bruin, right? So we all live under the sign of Bruin. And what does that mean? Text, history, tradition. So we have to make, we have to make these claims even if we don't believe in them in court now. So to your point, I mean, you know, I can, I can give you what my best arguments are, what I think the best arguments out there are. They're happening and we're waiting on a couple of big Benitez decisions in California. They really could reshape a lot of things. We're seeing a lot of uncontrolled beings struck down and it's, there is like a consistent historical originalist narrative kind of being applied, although you'll note that like the way we got to Bruin wasn't, wasn't strictly originalism. So I don't know. And I'm not enthusiastic about, you know, when I see the word reasonable, I know what's being done there, right? That's a 20th century adjustment to norms, which will allow a certain living constitution to always be in effect. And we just hand wave a little bit. It's the same way like, you know, like Curtis says, what's a centrist in 2020? We'll compare that to a centrist in 1920. You get, you get pretty radically different results. Same thing with reasonable, I think, when you play the longer game. Yeah. I mean, what worries me about a, a approach that is criminalizing or holding ghost gunner manufacturers liable, for instance, is that this would seem to stretch far beyond the realm of firearms. I mean, that's why I've always been pretty interested in your project because I think it's always been about way more than just firearms. I mean, your fight against the State Department and the ability to host gun printing files was first amendment just as much as a second amendment issue. And then if you're holding someone liable for selling machine that can make a gun, but can also make other things, which the ghost gunner can, correct me if I'm wrong about that, that would seem to really expand the reach of what is possible to regulate and prohibit in terms of people making their own goods at home. Yes. Yeah. To your point, I hate to bring it back to California, but let's go back. One reason we sued in California last year was because they gave themselves the power to say, well, okay, fine, you may sell general equipment. That may be a machine that can help people make whatever they want. But if you're marketing it in a way that will allow people to make guns in California or something, then it's illegal for that reason. So that's, it's back to a first amendment question, I would argue. Of course, I think it's back to a second amendment question too, but the federal judge didn't agree and didn't think the plain text of the Constitution applied to tools to help you make guns. And so I took a big L in court and it'll be up to someone else probably to help it. But they're back at it again this year. They want to ban 3D printers. Why? They can't ban them just as such 3D printers as such, but they can ban people selling 3D printers in a marketing context if they're saying, hey, guess what you can do with this 3D printer. And then that's how they're giving themselves the power. And to your question or to the point of your observation, that seems new to me that we're regulating now how people sell things in kind of contemplation of the fact that the things themselves are probably unapproachable. I look forward to the lawsuits against the precursor elements of a heart attack, ground beef, cheese, things like that. It becomes a kind of infinite regress of just state power. Stop giving them ideas, man. Actually, my heart's kicking in. Yeah. Now what I'm thinking in California now, Carl's Jr. Hardish is based out there and that's their old campaign, right? Here's a big hunk of cheese, meat, mayonnaise, and other artery clogging elements that you can destroy yourself with. Before we get to a discussion of your, we want to talk a little bit about your first principles and kind of where these ideas first came from. But before we get to that, let me just run through a few of the audience questions that have come in. There was a $5 Super Chat from Part of Cool Wave. Will you be writing another book, Mr. Wilson? The first one is a gem. Let me pull that up on the screen there. That's so cool. Well, thanks. Look, I don't expect softballs the whole time either. Thanks for reading the book. It was cool. I got that book out through Simon and Schuster before the real wave of cancellations began. They canceled Milo's book right after mine and we had the same editor, by the way. It seemed to me like that was a bit of a steal there. There's some Bojard in that book. There's some kind of controversial stuff in that book, like hidden in there and printed in there, you could say. So will I ever be writing a book? Sure. I've done way more that's actually worth writing about. I'm embarrassed when I look back at that book. It only covers the first nine months of me ever doing anything. I feel like I have much more to. I've actually done more things worth writing about, but I don't think a major publisher will be interested in anything I'd say anytime soon. Do you care about a major publisher, though? In a strange way, it's kind of a concession to the mainstream, right? Of course. I feel like the game that I play is always at the margins of the mainstream and that's part of it. It's like, well, it's not any fun unless we're toying with Biden's ghost gun rule. Of course, you can do anything speculative and reach heights that people can't find us and can't know us. That's very interesting and cool and people should do that. But I don't know. I don't like doing things for free either. At some point, maybe if I'm in prison, I'll write another manuscript. There you go. I pulled a page from that book, actually, where you talk about the concept of the liberator, the plastic 3D printed gun, conceptualizing it as a wiki weapon, which is a phrase that your friend came up with and that you grew jealous that he coined that, but kind of glommed onto it. Clearly, Julian Assange, the wiki leaks was in the air at that time. Assange was a major influence on you. Could you just talk a little bit about how Assange and wiki leaks influenced you and also maybe just reflect on, since you just mentioned writing your next novel from prison, what has happened to Assange and what lessons you draw from his arc? Assange has paid the price, hasn't he? You see the tide turning on that, right? At this point, like Australia's, his defender, and even Biden, the Biden camp says, well, maybe we'll go easy. You see the New York Times pieces being like, have we been too hard on Assange? That's even in a way, and this is not to discredit Assange, but even that is a new level of pathos that I hadn't expected. He's just so crushed that now the liberal establishment can even be sympathetic about it, that sucks. Now, I guess I want to say, yeah, Assange, wiki leaks, that was everything for me. I was in law school at the time, bored, law school is not a place for intelligent people, probably, and wow, wiki leaks happened. And this guy on his own, single-handedly defeated, obviously he had a team, but he was defeating a payments blockade. He was thumbing his nose at the World Hegemon 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 the cyber punks and the literature of doing Assange's movement moment. And that's what put me on on the path to what we did. Let me pull up one more audience question. And then I want to bring up a clip from a speech you gave that I think pertains to this. Richard Davis says, if the debate continues to revolve around firearms, then sooner or later the anti-libertarians are likely to prevail. Hoping for court protection hasn't been foolproof. Shouldn't we be debating the cultural conditions that lead to criminality, like the connection between big government and individual powerlessness, which as Arendt discusses, causes people to become violent? I don't know if you have any specific comments on that question, but what came to mind for me is this. It's been more than 10 years. It's been about just over 10 years since you launched The Liberator and posted that video to YouTube that caused a media spire storm. And then briefly, shortly after that, you gave a presentation at South by Southwest, where you kind of first spelled out your vision and your purpose in doing this. And I'd like to just play a couple excerpts from that and then talk about to what degree that vision has or hasn't been realized, the degree to which you've been satisfied with the work or disappointed with it so far. So here's the first excerpt from that 2013 South by Southwest presentation. Could you talk about what your larger goals are with this project? We really are being futurist. Can you use this technology to print gun parts? You can print a gun. That's going to be reality sooner than a lot of people think. Now we have ammunition, no, but one, one of the goals is to instantiate this reality and to move past it. These objects, these shapes, and it's going to extend to more things than just the firearm, but these are going to be off the political table in some meaningful sense. Sure, we can pantomime a legislative solution and all pat each other on the back. Oh, we've saved the public. This is going to be possible forever. So what degree do you think that vision has been realized so far? You know, I think that talk holds up. We talked about a future of CNC. We talked about a nylon as a destination for 3D printing. That's really happening now in the last few years in a way that wasn't happening for a good while. That talk holds up. Even I am wrong about a lot. Like, you know, the DIY ammunition thing that has yet to have its moment, it's coming. And who was I to predict any of those things? But I felt very strongly about, okay, if you can print receivers, you can probably print entire guns. Won't be too long. And that talk was two months before we did Liberator, for example. Our AR receivers and our AR magazines were already really popular. We had millions of downloads at a time. Google and the rest of these companies didn't have the policies yet to censor those things. So the cultural conditions were really strong. That stuff was all over the world. I had just seen it because I was doing it myself as one guy. Millions of downloads all over the world. I remember GoDaddy called me and they were like, what are you doing? What is this website? And it wasn't a hostel. If I got that call today, I'd be like, well, I'm canceled. But they were like, we'll give you whatever you need. We just don't understand. A venture capital would be like, what is this? How can we get on in this? It's like, look, it's just, it's clear that there's a huge gradient. People all over the world want this and it's going to happen. So I just got to live that. Lots of people sense I've got to live versions of this. And so I'll make one observation. You said, well, the deliberator video, right? I'll point out that video is no longer on YouTube. YouTube and the internet, by and large, have decided to play games with this stuff and the transmission of this stuff. It's much harder to do some of this. What do you think went into those decisions? Because in a way, when you think about the setting of South by Southwest, this is a conference that kind of cut its teeth on being hip. I don't want to say progressive, but future-oriented, a tech-oriented world where people were inventing the future. And it seemed like what you were talking about then, particularly in the heels of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, like, this is the cyberpunk or cypherpunk future. Now, like you said, you're banned from YouTube. I think a lot of the people who might have been interested in what you were saying then are like, you are some kind of fucking gun nut and you need to be suppressed. What are the things that went into that cultural shift? Well, okay, there's like the cultural shift of elite institutions and elite media, and I think we all aligned on our observations there. We can go into it. But there's also the still successful cultural transmission. It's even better than it was. There's been like, let's say, a genealogy of, I don't know, different snake skins of these ideas. You know, we get Jay Stark, for example, who's become like a popular arms-for-profit figure of the movement, and yet he suffered a tragic death and like really completes this symbolic circuit. And so a lot of people's introduction to 3D gun printing on the internet now is mediated just in the last couple years of the experience of that community. That's so successful. So it's not in jeopardy, but it is more, I don't know, it's more underground. It's more purposefully subcultural. It does escape or mainstream attention is less interested in it. So there are critical differences. I would still say, no matter what, it's more successful than I could have imagined. It's successful for different reasons. And even I as a kind of naive 90s kid, libertarian, I didn't understand that this corporatist outcome where really it would be a dead internet. And even now, I don't know how right I am because the AI is coming. And some of the reviews of our G0, for example, they can't make it to YouTube. YouTube's like, nope, it's not happening. I mean, we had some major influencers to review it and it's not happening. Is it just kind of countercultural agents or transgressive and subversive agents aging out? And this might be jumping kind of lanes a little bit, but a group like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which in the 90s was absolutely central to defending and articulating a vision of a free and open internet 20 years later is in the front lines calling for things like net neutrality. I assume they look down upon the types of activity that you're doing and things like that to the extent that they take notice of it. Is it just that the kind of the next generation has to constantly be born and push against the elders? Or is there a foundational shift away from that kind of those early visions of the internet as a place that is effectively unstoppable and that's one of its greatest attributes is just that it's open-ended and you can't control it? That's probably the answer. If I could speak to your last question or question, I think maybe I avoided it, but I'll say this. I want to speak well of the EFF, even though I agree they're suffering the same temptations as every major organization in American culture. Cindy Kohn and the EFF, they were instrumental in that ITAR fight and the Crypto Wars round one and they, you could tell even at the time, reluctantly backed me in my fight. As they told me even then 2013, hey, you're not a great player, Cody, and you know what, they're right. But you can't choose your trouble makers. So Cindy Kohn and I probably doesn't even want me to say your name, but they really showed up for that first leg of the 3D gun stuff and even American institutions of the press showed up as a Michi and federal court. Like they did understand, but you could see with the rise of Trump from 15 to 17. I mean, that really helped divide the camps and it's a totally different chess board since 2017 and the rise of the so-called alt-right and Trump and power. But if I can loop this back to your last questioner, he says, well, shouldn't we focus on questions of cultural conditions of criminality? I don't know, not so fast. It seems to me, especially now that the American civic religion has unified and we all know what's woke and what's not, that criminality is probably an integral necessary condition for innovation and moving forward. And so I would say that I guess I'm a Nietzschean on the question of criminality, like it's probably now the most useful outlook and personality. So I don't know, but I do agree a strictly legalist approach under conditions of wokeness is not going to get us good outcomes. And to finally answer your question, every major institution is under the power of this great American civic religion, this great awokening. Your guess is as good as mine. There's this idea that you mentioned kind of awakening from your naive 90s libertarianism and kind of recognizing a vaster array of powers or something of that nature. There's one more clip that we pulled from the next years, South by Southwest 2014, that I know Nick wanted to ask you about specifically because you kind of lay out a little bit of your theory of power and kind of progressive management and how that all actually functions in the realm of gun control, but also society more broadly. So let's play that and then I'll let Nick follow up with the question there. Alain Badjou says, a emancipatory political phenomenon begin with doing something that the situation deems to be impossible. And of course, Badjou is very much interested in certain kind of equalist narratives, but I mean, I very much believe that especially after Sandy Hook in 2012, which I'm sure many of us still remember, much on our minds, the situation, the kind of consensus political discourse was about, well, how can we further manage through a certain progressive managerialist paradigm of how the large firm is someone that channels certain products into our commercial economy? How can we manage the role of firearms in society still further? There was also a secondary discourse, which is how we could how could we link guns as an issue? How could we further link that issue as a public health issue in the public consciousness? This is this is the biopolitical element, which we'll probably spend less time on unless there are questions, but yeah, I hate you for playing that clip. Why? Why? You know, I still have I still read Badjou's ethics, but I just thought it was so fun at the time to mix like, you know, Maoists and like strident European communists into the into the program. But I would you know, I was trying really hard. Anyway, like those observations, they actually you know, they ring true and a lot of we were talking about products liability approaches and gun control. And of course, there's this path a lot pathologizing pathologizing pathologizing. Yeah. Yeah. So it's obviously they're always approaching, you know, your theory of mind as a gun owner. And, you know, even now in the so called liberalized areas of Europe, where you can get a license to carry, you know, you got to see a psychologist, you got to see a doctor, you got to get a license to purchase, then you get the license to carry, you know, it's, it's, it's part of the medical establishment as well. And this is part of Saaz's theory that like, well, ultimately established medicine is an agency of political power, an agent of the core, just another method of, I guess we'll bring aren't into it aren't in a gambon. My bio powers is here. Yeah. Yeah. I guess, you know, what I when I look at that clip, I just see you channeling among other people, Foucault, who is being rediscovered or complicated, not simply as a man of the left, but of the kind of emancipatory right or of a liberal paradigm. In recent books, like The Last Man Takes LSD. And I want to ask you about your inter, you know, your kind of intersection with postmodernism or postmodernist theorists. But first, on the on the basic question of the state or power governing things like gun purchases and mental health issues, do you think in the past decade, or, you know, basically, since you talked about that, has that become more and more a, you know, a kind of meme or an avenue for the state to start talking about who should have, you know, who should have maximum rights and who should not? Well, it feels like it, it does feel like it. There's all this, this, these footballs, right, that the CDC should produce certain types of reports, you know, you see these definitions of mass shootings kind of being filled with underneath the hood. And so you can get production of phenomena that accord with certain biomedical understandings. You know, like you see it a lot. So people are trying to make that narrative. I don't know how compelling it is in the end. I don't know how I, at the time I was making those remarks, like this felt to only be a couple years old to me, like every town for gun safety didn't even get its approval letter from IRS until like March of 13 or March of 14. I don't remember. So a lot of that playbook's being played, but when I actually, you know, I've kind of been in the business of watching these regs now and I see them, the personality of the state, you know, the Foucault's governmentality, it seems to still be more interested in the commercial aspect of the phenomenon, less in the biological or the medical. Do you, you know, when it comes to things like mass shootings, particularly school shootings, is there anything to be done about that? Or is it, you know, ultimately, you know, is it kind of a social construction of a horrific event rather than, you know, something that can actually be identified, anticipated and, you know, and avoided to the greatest degree possible? I'll make some of my friends mad. I think the Uvaldi thing was the best test case. Apparently the Uvaldi school was participating in one of these AI managed, you know, dredge operations. It wasn't able to predict anything. And worse, the response wasn't able to be managed at all. So no, I don't really think these narratives work yet. And yet I'm just as in awe of, you know, the large language models, everyone else and all this predictive AI. And I don't know, man, I just, I see, like I said earlier about fiddling with the data, you know, instead, you just have an elite class, a journalist class, simply changing the definition of what a mass shooting is. Like I said, under the hood and then seeing the seed, the problem's getting worse. Well, you know, it's just begging the question and it serves the service powers interest in the first place. So it's like a kind of elite level of concern troll I see. And it's done in a pretty common and easy to see way. That doesn't mean it won't work. It just doesn't seem to be as sophisticated as my hope. You, you've mentioned you've, you name checked them earlier today, Bogyard. Can you talk about who he is and why he's important to you? If you want me to. Yes, well, I wouldn't have asked if we weren't. I just, you know, I kind of fell in love with the discourse of Bogyard. It was like this was my first real enthusiasm for like post-Smarxism, you could say. And in the end, it was a, it was my funny way of approaching like questions of feminism and questions of, okay, you said a mentor to politics, maybe I said it first, but approaching them from the left, but from like an aristocratic or even Nietzschean point of view. And it just, I just, everything about not just theories of simulation, but like his theory of the fatal strategy, we can go into any of it. He seemed to me to be more of like, more actually describing what I was looking at happening in culture and government and politics than any, I mean, like any of the post-Altissarian left. I mean, yeah, okay. It's, it's crystalline, beautiful theory. It doesn't actually describe what I am looking at. And what's best about Bogyard is like, I can make predictions with this theory. I can do interesting things with this theory. And so my enthusiasm was, even though Bogyard himself says, you know, you can't really use my theory to do anything but theory. Well, Bogyard's best lesson is to read your favorite author against himself. So I've just been trying to use Bogyard'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. So what's an example of how you've implemented one of those strategies in expanding the reach of defense distributed, for instance? Sure. Any DD project, I try to hit most of the points of the fatal strategies. Bogyard says you have to invite chance, the ludic. It has to be a game. It has to be addressed to a specific audience of power. It has to be observed by that audience as a confrontation or a challenge, France, like a defiance, like you are actually bidding them to respond. And so, like, for example, you were going to play my ATF for my G0 video. Well, who's the character and story B in this video? Why is the ATF agent himself, Mr. Russell? Let's play that. Let's play it. And then, you know, we can analyze it a little bit. It's a peril of analyzing your own artwork. Yeah, yeah. This is wonderful. Yeah, let's do it. Just to be clear, that was a truncated version. So you can see the full version over at Defense Distributed's YouTube page. But you can get some of the sense of the aesthetics that you've tried to build over there. Clearly, you've gotten an interest in filmmaking or visual storytelling. What is it that you are trying to convey? Well, we should resist exhaustive interpretation. Now, it's not like there's not much to say. Look, the addressing of most of my challenges, you know, I see my projects not really as commercial projects. And that's why I'm probably a bad businessman, right? Like, I want them instead to be these gifts. Bo Gerard is a sociologist and, you know, he draws from theories of gift exchange. You actually see a brief gift exchange in that video. And so my gift is always like a defiance to power in the terms of power, a set for itself, challenging power to be real or to immunize itself, you know, and saying like, I don't believe that you're real. I've said things like this to you, Zach, in past conversations. That's part of my kind of post-democratic theories, too. Like, you know, I don't believe you are what you say you are. You know, become real for me, please. Jump into the Internet here. Let's have a party. Let's see if you can take these files off the Internet. But in this context, the ATF had a bad go with this rule. And I believe worse, not only is it a bad rule, but they disabled themselves in federal court. They have no power right now to say what is and isn't a firearm against my company and a few others. So, fine. We'll take that and we'll redefine the Glockfirem, for example, with the G-Zero. And you see a visual representation there of an ATF kind of lost in all that great darkness. You know, all it's like, are you going to find his way? You know, so that's, it's a very simple visual idea, but you know, it conveys one aspect of the fatal strategies. And with, we haven't even really talked about the product that's at the center of that video in in-depth yet. Could you just explain what it is that you are launching and how that fits into kind of the progression of defense distributed? Yeah, you showed a video of Joe Biden holding up a Polymer AD kit and the Polymer AD kit is a Glock type gun that you could basically order in the mail, nearly finished. You finish it yourself with hand tools and, you know, bing, you got a Glock. So, his rule was about stopping commercial kit guns in the mail. And if you could, trying to go after 3D printed Glock, which some other states have done, but I was like, I was thinking, well, okay, now that the rule is kind of failing, let's do another version of a way to do a Glock at home. Okay, so you can print a frame. Everyone's done that. But what if this is no longer a frame? Sorry, I'm not good at holding this up. What if this is no longer the regulated part? What if this is the regulated part? This is a chassis. You know, people in the gun world are familiar with like the SIG P320 and cassette style triggers. And anyway, the ATF is forced to observe that the metal component that holds the fire control parts is the firearm. And then in combination, then this what would have been a frame in a Glock is no longer regulated. So it's like a it's like a doubling down against the ATF rule. They can't regulate blocks of metal. Anyway, they said they couldn't. Low carbon steel, by the way. And, you know, this is I think this is one of our 4140 frames. Yeah, so we've been testing 174, 4140, 303 stainless, you know, what's machinable, what's affordable. The point is, this is this is as good as a Polymer 80 kit or a Glock itself, if anything, we've taken trends in 3D printing and kit blocks, combine them, recombine them, remix the Glock itself in stark defiance of the terms of Biden's ghost gun rule and said, hey, good job on that rule. It was already, you know, it was already falling. It's pushed a judge will disable it. And yet here's another way of doing it. It's an it's ultimately, you know, addressed to the ATF. What does it mean that, you know, over the course of your kind of public career, the courts have been very accommodating to expansion of gun rights, certainly at the Supreme Court level. And it sounds like, you know, you got your way in Texas in a federal court. You know, are the I guess I'm asking is the federal judiciary secret Bodardians or Foucaultians wouldn't that be amazing. It would kind of make sense, right? You know, increasingly probably Foucaultian or something. I worry about the quality of the federal judiciary in the next 10 years, we're going to get the most retarded opinions. And it will get worse and worse. I really have no faith in the judiciary. Okay. And yeah, that's not to besmirch some of the relief I've gotten. But dude, that injunction I got in Texas, that's the first time anything's ever gone my way in federal court. Okay. And it's not like I haven't been trying. So no, I have no faith in all this stuff. And people like worship Benitez is basically the only light of reason in California or in the Ninth Circuit. I mean, we're it's it's bad. And we can say, okay, great, we're seeing some cool things because of Bruin. Man, this is like, these are the exceptions that prove the overall trend, the rule. I have no optimism about this. I just see this as a relative moment of operational strategic freedom, which is unexpected and should be, you know, we should make use of it. But God, I have no faith in the future. Could we talk a little bit about and Zach, I don't I don't know if we played the clip where Cody invokes practical anarchy. No, I have that, though. That's from the same South by Southwest 2013 presentation. The second part of your answer to the questioners question about what what is the purpose? What are you trying to accomplish? Let's queue that up real quick. And I'm interested in creating that world. And then to 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, on this commerce works, crypto commerce works. And these principles are bleeding back into the real world through technologies like 3D printing. I guess, you know, my question out of that kind of harkens back a little bit to what we were discussing before with YouTube taking down the liberator video we've had now with the Twitter files coming out more evidence that there's been behind the scenes jaw boning of these companies to rein in kind of the the realm of what is able to be expressed on the internet. There's just a lot of anxiety about gatekeepers tightening. And I mean, we can throw in, you know, the, you know, the end of Silk Road, at least in its first iteration, as well as, you know, right now there seems to be a federal move against Bitcoin in cryptocurrency or at least against exchanges like Binance and Coinbase. So, yes. So, where do things stand then in your opinion? Is digital anarchy still a thing or is just the internet in a fundamentally different place right now? Of course, it's still a thing. Increasingly, like, this is a complaint of the left on the internet. You know, everybody larps as some type of social anarchist on the left, on Twitter, you know, but very few people do the practical organizing. You actually meet up and do anything. But that's probably always been internet leftism and anarchism for you. And I don't mean to leave out internet anarcho capitalists. You know, that's the Bitcoin side of the family, isn't it? But of course, those things are all real. And some of these guys have gotten quite powerful and influential. But it's all too convenient when elements of that social anarchist conversation more perfectly align with the interests of the police state, you know, and federal power, or you could say like this, I don't know, what is it, world capitalism or whatever, rainbow capitalism, all these things have a, they're not in the proper tension that they should have. So even I was like flirting with, you know, Center for a Stateless Society literature, feeling more confident about like the vocabulary of left anarchism when all this began. Still, I think those things are happening. Those projects are valuable. But I'm so suspicious of the personality of an anti-statist and the personality of a state that I don't know. I think post-marinism is actually healthier because it removes you from master narratives, you know, and actual commitments and ideology. So I don't know. I'm in a different place. Yeah. Does it preclude, I mean, does your worldview kind of preclude triumphalism? Because, you know, there really is no transcendence of power or of, you know, you can win certain battles, you lose certain battles, but there's always another battle the next day. Sure. Maybe that's why Vodja is cool for me. It's like a way to play with metaphysics without having a metaphysics. Yeah. And I think it might be worth pointing out to people. I suspect many of the people listening already know that Vodja Art is arguably best known for kind of inspiring the Matrix movies. And he was supposedly even asked by the Wachowski, then brothers, now sisters, which seems to be perfectly in keeping with everything we're talking about, to write the screenplay for the Matrix, which he said, no, he was too busy. But that whole notion of kind of living within different power systems and either fighting or not and never quite knowing whether or not you are, you know, actually taking action or are being kind of dreamed by someone else. His later comments, you know, on the Matrix movies were pretty hard. She was saying, you know, actually, this is exactly the opposite of what I'm talking about. The Matrix is the perfect example of simulation like, oh, maybe I'm in an alternate reality. He's like, no, the simulation is in fact all this appearance which hides that there is no ultimate reality. You know, there is no naive, weltergeist or whatever. Go ahead. I'd like to just, well, I just wanted to dig a little bit more into one of the comments you made there about you were a little more comfortable and kind of lefty, anti-status spaces at one point and then became disillusioned with that for some reason. Could you just spell that out a little bit more? Is it that the kind of left-wing sensibility just naturally inclines you to be subservient to the the ruling, the powers that be? Like, could you just spell that out a little bit for me? Yeah, without being too harsh. I mean, you know, who doesn't love the French Revolution? And even I think of... No, I was going to say, if that wasn't just a rhetorical question. Many, many, many of the people who were killed. Any right-winger would say, oh, I don't love the French Revolution. Look, I have Carlisle's full volumes on it. What I mean is, as a historical event, you know, wow, it's the definition of a revolution. You know, I'm still stuck in a 20th century discourse and a leftist frame of mind. Everyone is in America. So I'm recognizing the limits of my own, frankly, common liberal point of view. You know, even my libertarianism has influenced so heavily by Marx. So I want to say all those things. Like, I don't think I'm better than my raising or something. But, and not to even be too harsh about leftist concerns, but I was kind of already in a, like, I was doing my post-leftist readers at the time that I that I popped off and did this. So Bojard was a good excuse for me to kind of give up on, you know, shitty feminism and these questions of equality within the, you know, the gender theology and, you know, I don't like Judith Butler and performativity. And it's all kind of, it was just easy for me to dispense with it. And of course, even before Trump, the left is like a certain like a bucket of crabs. I mean, you can't, you're not actually allowed to really do anything meaningful or change the historical coordinates without a ton of concern trolling. And so I just wanted to give myself the liberty to proceed. And so much of leftism is ultimately still platonic and questions of ideals and morality. And I'm sorry, but this is, you know, in its own terms, these are non-material, right? You're not a Marxist if you're talking about questions of emotional justice. And, you know, I don't want to get into it, but I just didn't want to waste my time. And with regards to the crypto-anarchist project or cypherpunks, where do you think that stands now? Because that's kind of what we've been driving at here with some of these discussions. You know, I had made a video a while back when everyone was talking about the great resets and how they're worried that the World Economic Forum is just going to like own all of us. And I was kind of advancing an argument that, well, I don't know, a lot of the technological trends are making that a lot harder in a lot of ways. I wonder where you fall on that question. Are you afraid that there is like kind of the techno-authoritarian super state is really going to win or that it's impossible or it's going to be like an ongoing, you know, eternal battle? How do you think about that larger ongoing conflict? 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, you know, machines of love and grace will automate and give us luxury communist conditions. But, you know, 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 and high-tech, low-life, you know, like 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. So I do think, I still read the crypto anarchist, you know, books, the pirate utopias are these, it's so breathtaking, like the visions they had. And so much of it came true. And the biggest part of that is Bitcoin, for example. And if we just use the example of Bitcoin, like Peter Till says, this is the most significant invention in modern times. In history, who knows? I mean, really, I don't think that's overstated. I think 3D printed guns are up there, but Bitcoin's probably bigger. Why is that? What is so revolutionary about Bitcoin from your perspective? It's like the first real hard money, right? And sure, there'll be, you know, you remember in 14 or 15, you were all like, ah, they're going to get rid of Bitcoin, or even now they're like, oh, there's too much, everybody's got too much of an interest in it. My favorite part about the Silk Road or deal was agent, I forget his name, you know, was on the take and he was taking as much Bitcoin as he could. It's like a Philip K. Dick novel, right? Yeah. I mean, it totally is where the drug agents are in on the deal, right? So, you know, this, there will always be a demand for hard money and, you know, there's some bogey out in here, we don't have time for it probably. I just, I think the crypto anarchists in fundamental sense were absolutely right. We don't even realize how right they were. They were so right, they didn't know how right they were. Do you feel though, on the right then, you know, and when you think of people like Peter Till and if not him specifically, people who are kind of in his orbit, you know, they seem to be going tripling down on anti-woke things and a need to go back to, you know, the Bronze Age or more traditional forms of family and social organization. Is that fundamentally an aesthetic choice on their part? Or is it, do they misunderstand the, you know, kind of the very ideas or the world that they're kind of bushering in? And should, you know, should the rest of us be concerned when we hear theorists on both the right or on the left and increasingly on the right talk about post-liberal, you know, the need for post-liberal politics where we need to get out of this enlightenment trap. Yeah. That seems to be undergirding all of the material progress that we've had. I'm as interested in that last part of your question as anyone and I'm trying to be there all the time and looking for spooks over my shoulder too, but the first part of your question is like maybe the more interesting thing. If you can even consciously make the choice to like pick a counter-tradition, you know, you're actually, you are a post-liberalist, you just don't know it. And this is the whole thing with Jordan Peterson, which is interesting. Well, it doesn't matter. Just pick a narrative. It's like, well, damn, do that. That's the most post-liberalist thing you can do. Traditions have to be grounded. And I have been thinking that since Bruin happened, at least we've, the courts have demanded that in this specific Second Amendment context we are required to be in a tradition or to at least make an argument or to be in this tradition. It's not a tradition. It's a very specific tradition which still has the power of law. So there's like a post-modern humanist grace that Clarence Thomas has given us. And it's even better than that. I don't mean to be cynical there. I love the fact that, you know, he's an African-American, right? And he himself corrects the problems in some of these old racist cases, which denied people had the right to bear arms, but he's doing it as a way of asserting liberal universalism against liberal universalists. He knows this and you can read it to mean that. Oh, gosh, what was that Supreme Court case? The worst one that said black people aren't human beings? Plus the Dred Scott decision. Dred Scott. In Dred Scott, people have no rights that whites need respect. In Dred Scott is this observation, I forget it's Taney or someone who says, well, of course black people can't, you know, have the right to keep them bare arms. They're not people. They're not citizens. It's something like that. And it's like, well, Clarence reversed that, you know, and he's made everyone, all the liberal universalists have to cringe under their own religion. And that's what's so funny about, anyway, I'm getting a soft track. But I think, sure, if you can choose a lifestyle or something, you just don't realize how Nietzsche and her post-modern you are by just saying, well, I'm going to choose to be a mom fluencer and, you know, go be like a live on a farm on Instagram. But you know, you're actually living on Instagram. You're not living on a farm. Let me run through just to before we close out here, let me run through a few more of the audience questions. One is here from Trent Dugan here for ghost tanks. Related one is DIY ammo reel. I guess, you know, both of these are kind of about our like, how far can this actually be taken? Will DIY ammo ever be real? Will ghost tanks or, you know, some large illegal weapon be one day manufactured in someone's garage? Dude, I've been seeing ghost javelins all over the world. I wonder how that happened. I thought those were going to Ukraine. You know, I've been seeing a huge spare part market, too, for drones and javelins. What's that about? Someone's looking into that. So, of course, all of these things, I think, let's say like, let's diagnose our condition. Are we in the late Republic of America? Are we in the late Empire? These are questions of post-liberal concern. Well, your answer to that question may determine just how ghosty the weapons markets get. And is DIY ammo reel? Sure, of course it is. You can make your own hand loads and make your own ammunition today. I think the question means some type of commercial or let's say kit form of this stuff in DIY available. Very nearly. I mean, reloading is always a big thing and we've been studying primers. Lots of people have set themselves to these tasks. So, yeah, I think in time, there will be better answers than there are today. Then a couple comments from a critic here. R.G. Galvin, if you make your own gun for personal use, you should have to register it. Why should you not have to register it? You can't have a baby without getting a social security number or person certificate. Should you? Why? Then he goes on. What's the argument? He wants to make and sell guns to anyone he chooses without government oversight? I think maybe one of the misunderstandings here is, you know, I make and sell equipment, right? I make and sell accessories, but importantly, I don't sell guns. And, you know, it's a pretty big oversight in his thesis. And of course, you can have a baby, and that baby, there's no reason that baby needs a social security number. That's on. I will tell you this, if you have a baby in an American hospital, I know with my younger son who turned 21, or he's about to turn 22, I got his social security card before I got his birth certificate in the mail. Wow. Wow. And I did not apply for either of those things. So. Wow. Okay, you know, wow. I will, I'll say there's still an interest in unregistered people, just like unregistered guys. Yes. There's plenty of stateless people in this world. And again, like this quality of statelessness or, you know, being outside of government observation is increasingly necessary for just the smooth functioning of society. So I would say. Do you, can I, to kind of follow up on that and these questions of biopower or biopolitics and, you know, you mentioned Georgia Agamben in passing, we've talked a little bit about Michelle Foucault who really focused on the idea of biopower and biopolitics, which is the ability of the state or a source of power, typically the state, to actually manipulate the bodies of, of its subjects. Is that growing or is that decreasing in any meaningful way? Well, it's growing as a justification on both sides, like both sets of extremists. I'm thinking of Curtis here too. I mean, Salis populized the ultimate thing, right? So everybody wanted to use COVID for their agenda, right? Like everybody, you know, so this is probably not even like a good observation. It's just it increasingly becomes, and I think especially with advances in biotechnology. Yeah, okay. We're really going to get an overcharge. But COVID is the prime, I think. And it's fascinating, Agamben, for people who are not familiar with him is an Italian philosopher who gained a huge amount of renown and credibility in the West when he basically said that 9-11 was ushering in a state of exception to liberal politics that was ruinous. And the academic left in the U.S. absolutely loved him right up until the moment when COVID hit, when he applied exactly the same argumentation to the COVID regime in Italy. And then he was kind of written off by the left as a, you know, a dangerous madman. Yeah, Agamben used to be celebrated for not getting on planes, not getting fingerprints. You know, I remember all this. Like his state of exception is a great analysis of Schmidt, right? And a great analysis of Arendt as well, studying these theories of justification for manipulating the bios. You know, are there answers there? I don't know. I have his omnibus. Like there's really cool stuff about what he calls the stasis, right? The period before civil war. You know, in darker times, I want to amp myself up and say, oh no, we're in a stasis now. But we're in some kind of cold civil war, which is mediated by, like Pulo says, a pink police state or some kind of weird conditions of capitalism. It doesn't behave according to standard Marxist terms. And I think you're spinning your words if you're studying it in this room. Do you feel like, and you've had some developments in your own personal legal tribulations say, have you been the victim of biopower or biopolitics? And I don't think so. I mean, I don't want to choose not to, you know, make excuses or see myself as some kind of victim or something. So I will say, you know, graciously, I was finally completed my probation and my case was dismissed. And I'm in a fortunate position to have not received any kind of felony convictions or something. That's great. Most people aren't that kind, you know, they're not lucky. I could say the facts of my case were good enough to where I could avoid a conviction. But, you know, you have to understand these are the conditions that we're, that we're playing in right now. And like, you know, Dominandi, great book, by the way. You know, 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 either don't complicate your symbolic point. So it was a big education. I'll say that. Yeah. Do you feel, you know, and, and I mean, this kind of brings it back to a, you know, a more grounded, you know, kind of conversation range. Is criminal justice reform, which is something, you know, that, you know, kind of hit the mainstream, maybe with the Michael Ferguson, the Michael Brown case in Ferguson in a profound way, you know, through George Floyd, through Donald Trump. You know, is criminal justice reform one of these places where a kind of practical anarchy seems to be happening, where the police state, the surveil, maybe not the surveillance state, but the police state seems to be losing a little bit of power. You know, I'm tempted, I've been tempted to say yes on this, but I just, I, I see all that I was just Trump trying to be some kind of popular figure. You can't let it go. You know, he's not, it's not really a commitment of his. It's, he just wants to be seen in a photo with Kim Kardashian. It's that simple and it's mechanics, I think. Yeah. Trump himself is not that simple maybe, but there's questions of like sincerity and profilicity here, like really interesting sociologic questions. You know, I would say criminal justice reform is just another of these, of these scenarios or personas on which, you know, we can play to and take on, but in fact, there's an intense liberal metropole interest in actually still addressing the criminal problem. And we see these adjustments made, like in gun control, right? Where, okay, sure, you know, no bail, everybody's out, 20 charges, but like, I'm a felon if the, you know, if I use the right doctor, I'm like, you know, so. Or, you know, red flag laws, perhaps, or, you know, anything in case of kind of pushing in to the mental health aspect of, you know, owning a gun is a fundamental human right in America, right? It's a constitutional right. It's the second most important, you know, by number, but here is a mental, you know, a growing number of mental health exceptions to that. It seems that the criminal justice reform thing is just an accommodation made to just the latest updated form of the American civic religion. It's meant to be contradictory. Don't look too much into it. It's convenient that these beliefs are held in the widest, demographically areas of the country. I'm thinking of the East Coast, you know. It's just, it's all too convenient for me. And again, I'd like to reduce things to the level of like, what is actually happening? How is this actually working? It's still like a carceral state. It's going to be one. That's not changing. In terms of what is happening politically, you know, you mentioned Trump. I interviewed you a couple of weeks before Trump won in 2016, and you more or less predicted he was going to win at the time. I think Brexit had just happened. And now, you know, you're saying we're in this cold civil war, as you put it. I mean, do you literally believe that something is likely to pop off here? Like, are you thinking going into that? We're about to enter another election season. That's when things heat up. Like, are you actually worried something's going to break out? And if so, do you feel any hesitation, you know, shipping out ghost gutters across the land? No, I don't think, if you mean like hard, like violence or something. I mean, we've already seen the summer of Floyd and all this stuff. Like, they can do that whenever they want. I don't think they need to. And the, let's say the right wing in this country is not meaningfully opposed, ballot harvesting, mail-in ballots. And I think they've actually got it sewn up. Even if Trump is the nominee, I think they've got it sewn up. And Trump, why would he be empowered to adjust the outcome this time? He wasn't last time. You know, he's, I'm just saying, like, I think it's all sewn up. And I don't have to by saying that. When you say it's all sewn up, you mean that the Democratic candidate will win in 2024? I believe that, yeah. I believe that. And now, of course, it's so far out. Damn you for making me commit to that. But I mean, you know. Can I ask, well, you know, you had said you, I somewhat ingest that you're stuck in 20th century thinking a little while ago. You know, was there a moment, you know, was there a moment of disruption where we moved into, you know, that 20th century paradigm, the kind of post-war era or what we, you know, kind of associate with that. And what is, what is keeping us from moving into a, you know, a kind of mental or psychological or social, you know, philosophical framework that is actually post-modern or as widely recognized as such? Is it, you know, are there events that happen that will kind of usher this in? Or is it a kind of just a common recognition? Oh, that we're, we actually all, even the most traditionalist among us are actually living in a post, you know, a post-modern reality where we're choosing among disparate, you know, disparate ends. You know, how does any of that stuff have to happen? Well, I think a lot of us are living in an understood 21st century condition. I mean, COVID happened. A lot of us recognize the precarity of our situation legally, et cetera. Okay, the fiction and the mythology, the country's here, but the rituals are fundamentally different. Post-COVID, post-Sibergefell, a lot of us are sensitive to that and live with this understanding of this difference. So I'm not saying we're just all asleep, but it is so tempting to reach for 20th century-styled solutions to what has happened. So I think that's part of it. And then we've just been instructed for so long in the theory of the leftist intellectual or revolutionary that we think, well, I know I'll become a men's rights activist. I'm sorry to the MRAs out there. This is not compelling. Same thing with even the gun thing. It's like, well, the gun is a human right and I'll argue for it in court and the courts will understand that is not what a federal court is. I mean, these are questions of pure precision power at this point. Who's in-group, who's out-group? I'm sorry that it's like that. I don't think it should be like that, but it's only going to increasingly be like that. So my only hope is that, okay, 21st century or not, Texas or the Fifth Circuit becomes this real breakaway Republic in legal terms. The Fifth Circuit has already got these totally outside decisions. Gosh, especially not just in guns, but in all kinds of stuff. So I'm just hoping for a breakup in distinct legal and commercial ways. And let's hope that those fault lines can, we can inch forward. We can dig in and that gives us time. Did I answer the second part of your question? I'm not sure I remember it. So I'm going to say that you did. Let me ask a kind of final question. I'll leave the last one for Nick. I wanted to ask beyond guns, where do you think things might, what are your biggest hopes for this movement that you are one of the figureheads of to expand into? Beyond firearms or money in the form of Bitcoin? Is there any other fertile ground that you think is there that this kind of crypto anarchic or cypher punk ethos can really thrive in the 21st century? Yeah, I mean, we're seeing opportunities all the time with AI, right? What have we learned about the lobotomized God that the left has created? Well, it won't tell you about how to make a gun. And if someone does, you might be able to guess, at least at this point in the internet, that that might be a human being helping you. Or we should develop our own, right? 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 or company, you're interested in the post-political and you want to be commercial. I think you need AI. I think you should definitely be experimenting with compute and with all the cool stuff, like unstable diffusion and LLMs. So I think I should be a part of it. I don't think I'm just chasing a trend there. 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, the narrative. And so it's trivially easy. 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 to 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. Interesting that we're not. Do I guess as a final question, we've talked a little bit about how aesthetics may actually be more important than philosophy or even material circumstances. And I assume that that's partly because we've reached a level of whether we want to call it super abundance or just material richness that people are dealing much more symbolically than on a kind of the lower rungs of Maslow's hierarchy. What are the aesthetics that you think kind of define or point to a richer understanding of the current moment of both the return of the empire, the empire striking back, but also this liberationist moment. Is it glitch art? Is it the endless iterations of NFT art? Is there an aesthetic conception that kind of gets at what the stakes are and what the possibilities are? It's a big one. Well, aesthetics has morality, right? The beautiful is the good. So look, there's tons of gel-broken, free uncensored models out there, image models where these people are feverishly committed to making the most beautiful type of woman possible or something. This is an active, these are active projects in development, huge communities, rival us with each other, mediated by 4chan. Regardless of their ideology or whatever their justifications are, they are doing the silent work of some kind of unseen God to create the most beautiful thing possible. I mean, this is happening. So I would say the aesthetics of certain Discord channels for those creating these desperate models, that's one answer to the question, I think. Yeah, that's a pretty good answer. I gotta say. Well, Cody Wilson, thank you very much for joining us for this conversation. It was fascinating as always. And Nick, thank you as well and for all of our viewers who tuned in and who watched later. We'll be back here again next Thursday at one o'clock. See you then. Thank you.