WBD486 Audio Transcription

Free Speech & Printed Guns with Cody Wilson

Interview date: Friday 8th April

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Cody Wilson. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Cody Wilson is the founder and director of Defence Distributed and the face of 3D guns, and Jessica Solce is an acclaimed film-maker currently documenting his story. In this interview, we discuss the intersection of the right to bear arms and the right to freedom of speech.

“What’s a desperate decision that can actually start a symbolic chain reaction? And then how do I pursue that? How do I do something like an artistic act or a creative object that could be received by an audience as this kind of provocation to initiate some type of chain reaction?”

— Cody Wilson

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Bitcoin mining gets attacked because of the amount of energy it uses.  People consider it too much at a time of climate concern.  So, we want to tackle the topic, but we come from a position of, we do agree climate change is an issue, but we also think that if you try and move to renewables too fast, you have a risk to the energy grid and therefore a risk to civilisation.  So, like everything, we try and be balanced and through the middle, rather than just extreme one side or the other.

Cody Wilson: So, people must have used the example of the icepocalypse in Texas last year?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, there's a really interesting thing with that.  I always get this name wrong.  ERCOT, I got it right this time.  There's some work with Bitcoin miners where they're looking to use mining to stabilise the grid.

Jessica Solce: Are they doing that in Austin now?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, they are.  So, what they do, at certain times of the year, you can't store all energy, so it goes to waste.  So, if you make that energy available to the Bitcoin miners, they can be using that excess energy to mine Bitcoin.  And then at a time when there's an increased demand for energy, you can scale down the miners, so it makes the grid more stable and more profitable.  So, it's quite a cool thing.

Cody Wilson: And in West Texas, the first contracts came through allowing them, I forget what they call that, excess burn-off from oil extraction.

Peter McCormack: Oh, the flaring.

Cody Wilson: But I know they've done some of those first deals with miners out in West Texas now too.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's quite a big deal as well.  So, yeah, it's a huge topic, and we will talk to Alex Epstein, who believes climate change is happening, but it's not as extreme, and is concerned about moving away from fossil fuels too quickly.  And then on the flipside, I interviewed Katharine Hayhoe a few years ago, who's a climate scientist, who's very concerned about the speed of climate change.  So, we don't take an extreme position, but we try and walk the -- and if what we'll do today, the conversation with you, as a fair -- by the way, Hi Cody!

Cody Wilson: Hello.

Peter McCormack: Thanks for coming on the show.

Cody Wilson: Good morning.

Peter McCormack: This has been a while I've wanted to have you on.  And thank you, Jessica, for helping to make this happen.

Jessica Solce: You're welcome.  Thank you for having me.

Cody Wilson: You've tried very hard.  I should have apologised for last week, right, I couldn't make it.

Peter McCormack: It happens, it's not a problem.  I mean, we're here for the month, but I've wanted to talk to you for a while, and my experience of guns is limited.  I'm from the UK, we have no gun culture really.  We have some people who are hobbyist shooters.  There are very strict rules regarding how they keep guns.  I would have said five years ago, I was pretty much anti-gun, 100% behind UK policy; I got involved in Bitcoin, understood there's a strong gun culture link to Bitcoin and then, do you know Jameson Lopp?

Cody Wilson: Of course.

Peter McCormack: So, he was my third interview, and I came out to the US and I said, "Will you take me to shoot guns?" and he did.  It was an interesting experience.  It was like going bowling, but you're shooting guns, and I was amazed by the power.  But also, the whole experience of learning about gun safety was super-interesting.  So, my position of guns has evolved to, I don't want to change the laws in the UK, and if I came to America, not to say that I could, but I actually kind of enjoy the gun culture and I've been out shooting here in Texas a few times, and I think the rules in both countries are kind of suitable for both countries; does that make sense?

Cody Wilson: That sounds very reasonable.  I wish Prince Harry would say something like that.

Peter McCormack: But he wouldn't!

Cody Wilson: He gets on a podcast and bashes the First Amendment.  This sounds very gracious of you and accommodating to our gun culture, so thank you.

Peter McCormack: Well, no, it's just the experience of spending time with people -- it gets to that point where if you wanted to bring guns into the UK, that would be very difficult to shift the entire culture of a country to have guns as part of it.  We don't have a constitution like you have, we don't have that history.  So, that transition to guns would be very difficult, as would, in the US, a transition away from guns.  I just think different parts of the world have different cultures.

Cody Wilson: I don't think it's worth getting into the autism of it, but strictly speaking, our gun culture is born of English gun culture and militia culture.  You're the cradle for 800 years of what became the American gun culture.  It's just, we diverged pretty rapidly after the 18th century, I guess, once your Constitution became imperial and our Constitution kind of dwelled in this whiggish republican form for a couple of hundred years; we went in these very different directions, which I'm happy to talk about, probably not on your list today.

Peter McCormack: You can talk about that.

Cody Wilson: For the people at home, they're like, "Well, the UK doesn't have a gun culture".  The UK had an incredible gun culture.  All Anglo-American gun culture comes from the proud tradition of British anti-army ideology.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what, I'm going to be honest and embarrassed enough to say, I don't actually know anything about this! 

Jessica Solce: This is what he does best!

Peter McCormack: All I know is, you had a well-armed militia, you kicked us out and ever since, your tea has been shit!

Cody Wilson: Fair enough!  Oh, man, if we want to talk about the Revolution, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Let's talk about it.

Cody Wilson: Our militias in the colonial period were by royal charter, and part of us discovering our revolutionary conversation was, okay, the UK with this new imperial Constitution was treating us not like English citizens or subjects anymore, it was treating us like the Irish, or worse, like the Indians in India.  We were like, "Well, aren't we Englishman too?  Why aren't we not just represented, but why are they not renewing our militia charters?  And don't we, as Englishmen, since the Petition of Right and the settlement of 1688 and the English Bill of Rights, don't we have the right to keep and bear arms; it's in there, right?"

So this conversation leads Patrick Henry, George Mason, the Virginia delegation, these people to reassert these things which they thought they had already assumed as Englishman, by charter and royal privilege, and this period of benevolence in 1668 and royal, I don't know, negligence led to a conversation where we began to reject the 18th century Constitution of Great Britain, and we embraced a 100-year earlier whiggish country party interpretation of the gothic English Constitution.  And our Revolution, in a way, is a sense of righting what we thought the rights of Englishmen were in that century before the Revolution.

So, it's like we did a remix, a redo, on what we thought the rights of Englishmen were, and we wrote it down, and this affected the entire world and the system of written constitutions worldwide.

Peter McCormack: I knew nothing of this.

Cody Wilson: Well, specifically about militias.  I mean, we can go on and on, but English Republicanism is connected to the earliest republicanism, like in Machiavellian.  And of course, Machiavelli was all about, what's the best check on aristocratic and oligarchic power?  Individuals are freeholders owning arms, so it was a big part of English Republican ideology from the 16th century through the English Civil War, the new Model Army, Cromwell; this idea that somehow, the common man represented the popular will, especially when he was armed.

So, the English Settlement of Rights and so on, I don't mean to pretend to be a professor here or something, but the English Settlement of questions of divine right of kings or monarchical privilege versus parliament's privilege is a way of also deriving or defining what the rights of Englishmen were.  Their settlements stopped with an absolute parliament.  But in the American experience, our settlements stopped with something else.  We were like, "You know what, an absolute parliament is itself despotic", and we came up with this idea of federalism and state rights, and we settled the question just one more step away and we said, "The militia power doesn't lie with the legislature, it in fact lies with the states and the popular militias".  This kind of gave us what became the Second Amendment.

Peter McCormack: I know there are certain militias that exist within the US.  I've seen, I can't remember the story about -- I wasn't prepared that we were going to talk about this, but I remember a story about a particular place where there were access rights to a farm.

Danny Knowles: I think it was in Nevada, wasn't it?

Cody Wilson: Oh, the Bunkerville Rebellion?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Cody Wilson: Bundy, everybody knows about Bundy and the conflict with the feds.  I'll say this first and foremost.  So legally speaking, our militias have evolved in how our government understands them.  So, the unorganised militia of, say, the 18th and 19th century is a different beast than what we call the militia after the civil war and the rise of the National Guard; and now the federal power has two specific bands of people that it recognises as militia, which is more or less just a National Guard, like liberals will say. 

A lot of people will just assert themselves as state groups and say, "Well, we're the militia", and every now and then, a state government might recognise that, but usually they don't.  It's more like an appeal to tradition, when somebody like Bundy gets up and asks people to come on out.  He's appealing to the so-called unorganised militia.

Jessica Solce: More like a band of brothers.

Cody Wilson: Yeah, that was like a cultural moment, but Americans fell for it and the government fell for it, because we do have this tradition of an organised militia, or at least this mythical figure of the Minuteman resisting tyranny, or something.

Peter McCormack: And I've seen it before, instances where there's a group of people who will turn up to the local, correct me if I get this wrong, state building or capital building with their guns.

Cody Wilson: Yeah, you're thinking of Michigan and Whitmer and the early protests there maybe?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Cody Wilson: Yeah, this is common.  In fact, in the Texas state capital, you're allowed to show up armed.  A lot of people discovered during COVID, there weren't laws against these kinds of things.

Peter McCormack: So, do you believe in the US, you essentially almost have this decentralised militia now that, if it was ever required, would band together?  Or, does it need more organisation now?

Cody Wilson: I think there are two parts to your question.  So, I do think there is this disorganised, unorganised militia, maybe harder emphasis on disorganised.  But that's simply like the free citizens of the country who are allowed to keep and bear arms, they're not otherwise barred from that.  And they do, I think, in a constitutional sense, represent another structural power of government.  But the second part of your question is, would they show up?  I don't think we have the type of people who would meaningfully show up, or we would have seen greater action during COVID, I think.  That's my opinion.

Peter McCormack: Interesting.  Just to ensure you are part of this as well, Jessica --

Jessica Solce: It's okay, I'm just learning!

Peter McCormack: -- we'll come to the film and we'll make sure we talk to people about that.  But I gave my little speech intro of my view on guns.  What was your background, and has it changed during the process of making this film?

Jessica Solce: Well, I'm from Texas and I grew up actually shooting, doing everything with my father.  So to me, it was a cultural thing, it was something I did, it was a little bit social, learned how to operate guns.  I didn't get taught to be scared.  I moved to New York, there's no gun culture there, wasn't around it for a decade plus.

Peter McCormack: There's a small culture of people shooting each other in the head!

Jessica Solce: Oh, gosh, that's a different culture.  So, gang gun culture is another American culture of guns. 

Cody Wilson: That's a good point.  At some point, we should probably discuss the black tradition on arms, which is uniquely American and has its own 200-, 300-year history, but go ahead.

Jessica Solce: I think there's different cultures.  There's the family, there's the small town -- well, there's different types of gun culture in the United States; it's too big for one form.  And so, completely separated, suddenly I started making a first doc.  I didn't realise it was going to be about guns.  Within a month, I had met Cody.  This is 2013, so we're going on nine years almost.  And, he was part of my first documentary and all of a sudden, because we had so many things in the news, it was a real discussion of whether or not control was even efficacious, like what is this conversation on control; does it actually mean anything?  Is it just a political marketing tool, like Biden's last statement?  What was it, his tweet, he's going to take all assault rifles away?

Cody Wilson: Is that what he said?

Jessica Solce: Yeah, completely impossibility.

Cody Wilson: I don't follow his Twitter!

Jessica Solce: You're missing out.

Peter McCormack: Did you watch his State of the Union Address?

Cody Wilson: Sure.

Peter McCormack: Any standout moments for you?

Cody Wilson: Not really.  I guess mistaking Ukrainians for Iranians was a high point!  I feel bad for him, old man, you know, pushed beyond his limits.

Jessica Solce: So, I'm not a stranger to guns, but that was the first doc I actually put it in the sphere of the political, and when Cody jumps it into that world symbolically, suddenly it was no longer symbolic, it just kind of iterated out to where we are today.  So, yeah, I'm not against guns.  I think the Second Amendment is a very necessary and strong safety, and I think without arms, genocides happen.

Peter McCormack: We'll come back to that!

Jessica Solce: Okay.

Peter McCormack: That is a big topic.  Okay, so before we move onto some of the things I want to talk about, you mentioned black gun culture.  Can you explain to me what the difference is there?

Cody Wilson: Well, there really is a parallel, separate, and really almost antithetical black tradition in arms, that's how Johnson discusses it, in that black tradition of arms, like you would expect, especially in America, comes from a place of disempowerment, slavery, not really having a firm legal right to keep and bear. 

But what I find interesting, especially in the studies I've done in the last couple of years, rather than embrace the new mythology that the country was always racist, the Second Amendment was always racist, it was only for white people, what we find is Ida Wells and the early NAACP, Martin Luther King, all these people, they had a firm tradition in arms and self-defence and defending themselves against the private violence of, not just racists, but the state itself.  And most of the early gun control, or the gun control that we deal with in the courts comes from the post-Civil War reconstruction era, trying to dispossess the newly freed slaves with the Freedmen.

Then, when we look at the 39th Congress and people trying to build the rights for the Freedmen in the Fourteenth Amendment, and other innovations, it's very clear that the 39th Congress in its deliberations expected and understood more the privileges and immunities of US citizenship to be the right to keep and bear arms; that's very clearly in that communication and oftentimes, Freedmen's Bureaus in the south would write to the White House or to Congress and say, "Hey, we're being deprived of our Second Amendment".

So, that conversation in a way, in an individual sense, kind of begins with the depravations and injuries to Freedmen, to black people.  So, we can kind of thank them from the beginning for changing this collective militia-based understanding of the right, to this individual appellate way of appealing to power and thinking, "This is individual immunity".  So, just at the birth of the Fourteenth Amendment, we also have this individual understanding of the Second.  Of course, it took a couple of hundred years for the courts to thoroughly recognise it that way.

Peter McCormack: I've talked about it on the show a few times, because the majority of the audience is American, probably 80% of the people we interview are American, maybe higher, and a lot of time hear that as a British person coming here, I envy the fact that it is a republic.  In the UK, you can live wherever you want, all the rules are the same, there's no competition.  But also, we have no constitution, we have no protections.  I'm involved in a libel lawsuit for some tweets, so we don't have real, free speech in the UK, even as a journalist.  That's something I do envy, not so much the Second Amendment, but more because of what I said earlier.

But one of the things I found interesting coming back here is that, I find that on state level, especially when I come to somewhere like Texas, there's a real defence of the Constitution.  But as I observe externally, it always feels like the Constitution's under attack?

Cody Wilson: Yeah, well this is a common meta-narrative in American politics.  Someone's here to uphold the Constitution, they're here to destroy the Constitution.

Jessica Solce: I feel like it's kicked up in the last two years beyond anything though, or at least in the public sphere and space of Twitter and, I guess, the power of the individual to defame it.

Cody Wilson: Yeah, everything on social media becomes so toxic and ratcheted up.  I mean, I think that's as American a political conversation as possible, "Who are the defenders of the Constitution?  Who are its enemies?"  This is a way we do friend enemy in the US, we fetishise the document, we fetishise what it means.  Joe Biden's out there in the press right now saying, he's just nominated his new Supreme Court nominee, Jackson Ketanji Brown; I don't remember her name.  And he says, "I hope she finds something in the Ninth Amendment".

There's all these mythical appeals to the Constitution, "What will we find there?"  I don't know, it's just, for me, that's the foundation of how we do political discourse, or at least on TV.

Peter McCormack: What's the Ninth Amendment?  I only know the first two off by heart.  I think I know, I think, a bit about Four.

Cody Wilson: I think the Ninth is about unenumerated rights.  For example, the Ninth and Tenth are about those not reserved to the States or the people; the Ninth and Tenth are like that.  And I think it's a mistake on his part, but I think he believes, and a number of progressives believe that the right to abortion, for example, was heavily derived from the Ninth Amendment.  That's not really how it happened.  The court kind of found it the right to privacy and did some other things.

But anyway, liberals pretend, or they have their own pretence for how they're actually the defenders of the Constitution.  But I think conservatives in America have a more traditionally understood and convincing narrative for how, in fact, it's defenders.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well I've found that travelling a lot round the US.  I've been to about 14 states now.  I tend to find that blue states tend to be a little bit more European, and red states tend to be a little bit more traditional American, which is kind of obvious.  Going back to the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, you could interpret it broadly, but is that a good thing?

Cody Wilson: Well, I don't know.  There's the Second Amendment as we might wish it to be, and there's the Second Amendment as it actually exists now since 2008, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, and those are two different things.

Peter McCormack: I don't know the Supreme Court interpretation.  What does that say?

Cody Wilson: In a sense, the Second Amendment only really existed in the United States since 2008, in a decision called Heller vs DC and Scalia wrote that opinion and he established a test and he defined, with a lot of footnotes, what the Second Amendment means.  But Heller says the Second Amendment does give an individual the right to keep and bear arms, but it comes with a number of other pieces of baggage and tests.  And so, those arms are arms in common use, use is for lawful and traditional purposes, and it really allows states to make regulations and restrictions that are based on their historical restrictions and regulations.

It also defines it like innovations in gun technology and culture aren't really that possible, the state has the power to curtail them.  So, in the conversation of 3D-printed guns, it's not clear at all that the Second Amendment protects them, at least not yet.  If anything -- who said it?  I forget the professor, I really respect this professor.  At the moment, his name escapes me, but he's like, "Really, if the Second Amendment means anything right now, at its least it means you can have a handgun kept in a lockbox under your bed maybe that the government can tell you when to take it in and take it out".  That's kind of the most the Heller Second Amendment means.

Now obviously, there have been developments since then, but the court doesn't see fit to elaborate and expand the meaning yet.

Jessica Solce: Well, Heller was the only one who did modernise, right?

Cody Wilson: McDonald reinforced it against the states, so you can knock state restrictions down, but we're looking for New York Rifle & Pistol Association and these other cases to expand what you can do with this, so can I take it in my car?  Can I carry the gun outside of my home?  Heller confines the right to a private right with a certain type of common gun in the home.  It's a pretty cabined thing right now, and it's been that way for over ten years.

Jessica Solce: There are a lot of fights in New York now for people to get guns.  I guess we'll see how it plays out.  That would really change the social world of guns in New York City if it did happen.

Cody Wilson: I'm not trying to say something counterfactual.  I mean, the Second Amendment. as it exists as a creature in the laws, is kind of a tame thing.  But it's unique.  I don't think there's any other state, or sets of states outside of maybe, didn't the Czech Republic just do something?  There are very few countries that say, "Well, you really do have this right, you can have a gun".

Peter McCormack: Is it Switzerland?

Danny Knowles: I'm not sure.

Jessica Solce: Switzerland, they can have weapons.

Cody Wilson: They have a traditional militia purpose for keeping guns at home.  But I mean in the way that the Second Amendment is now defined in the United States, I think there's only one or two other countries that even have something similar legally.

Peter McCormack: Has that Second Amendment been tested more because of your work, what you've been doing?

Cody Wilson: Not yet.  I mean, it's being tested in its initial phases, where cities and states have begun to pass laws, which as far as I know they haven't enforced, saying like, "You can't make this" or, "You can't have this file" or, "You can't have this component".  These are new; these are new in the last four or five years, at their oldest.  I'm suing one of the oldest laws, this was passed in New Jersey in 2018 saying, "No one can even possess the files to a 3D-printed gun".  That seems to me to not even touch on the Second Amendment.  That seems to touch on the First.

Peter McCormack: You're suing the law?

Cody Wilson: I'm suing the State of New Jersey and the Attorney General and other people.  But I know as well, there are practical reasons.  Those laws are often passed just to attack me.

Jessica Solce: They specifically named Cody during the attack.  It wasn't just a 3D file, it's, "This man, Cody Wilson".  So, that's why he can sue.

Peter McCormack: Interesting.

Cody Wilson: We were given jurisdiction in the Fifth Circuit against New Jersey in this example, because they messed up and held a press conference and they were like, "Well, we've got to stop Cody Wilson's supporters somehow".  Sometimes you get lucky!

Jessica Solce: And they didn't go after anyone else, and that's been the funny thing, the ironic thing about this whole journey over the last nine years.  It's everywhere, this information is all over, and now there's even more groups that have spun up that have operating websites that are giving this information out.  But still, Cody and Defense Distributed is the only one that is still in the hot seat.

Peter McCormack: But that was similar if you go back to what happened to Ross Ulbricht.  He's in prison for the rest of his life, double life sentence plus 40 years, for creating a website.  We don't need to argue the ethics of that right now, but the guy who created the second website afterwards I think got five years. 

Cody Wilson: That's right.

Peter McCormack: I think one guy didn't even get any.  So, you're the example, they want to crush you to scare the others off.

Jessica Solce: For sure.

Cody Wilson: I think that's right.  And it makes perfect sense.  I'm not complaining about it, I like it, as long as I can handle it.  And when I can't handle it, I don't like it!

Peter McCormack: How many lawsuits do you have at the moment?

Cody Wilson: Five or six federal lawsuits.  We're co-defendants in a big state action too in California.  We're only being sued for $0.5 billion, it's no big deal.

Peter McCormack: Oh, a small one!

Cody Wilson: I think we'll be fine!  So, what gun controllers, if you want to call them that, have discovered is that it makes more sense just to attack from all angles at all levels, not just big cases with multiple states in federal court; that slows everything down.  So, we also get sued all the time by state cities, private parties.

Peter McCormack: And so, I mean I have a lawsuit at the moment and it's just one, but it's stressful.

Cody Wilson: Does it ruin your day?

Peter McCormack: It can do.  Some days it does, if you -- I can't talk about it too much, but certain things happen and it just puts me in a bad place for a day, and then I get to forget about it.  But it's hanging over me all the time.  But you're at the point now where it seems like, mine will end and life will move on; it feels like you're going to be in this for as long as you're doing this.  So, is it now just part of the process?

Cody Wilson: I think so.  Unfortunately, I think you can get used to almost any level of duress, pain and humiliation, so this is just a part of it now.  I try not to add more than one or two lawsuits a year!  So, we had one that I didn't like.  DEFCAD, our file-sharing site's being sued in the Southern District of New York.  That one felt gratuitous to me, but that's a gun control group attacking us on First Amendment and IP grounds, and that's already been a couple of hundred thousand that I didn't want to spend.  So, I do see that I'm not running as hard as I used to run, because it's like how many lawsuits can you carry at one time, right, this is insane?

Peter McCormack: They're expensive.

Cody Wilson: But luckily, like Jessica said, there's lots of communities who proceed pretty much uninterrupted, from what I see, so good.

Peter McCormack: Jessica, just explain the film to the people listening, what you've been working on and why you're here.  And thank you for making this happen, by the way!

Jessica Solce: You're welcome, it's fun!  I'll just give you a brief.  So, after my first film ended, got purchased, I was still very into this conversation and Cody's story and where this was going.  So in 2015, I picked my camera back up and Cody agreed to having me still film him.  I didn't know what that was going to mean, I obviously didn't know it was going to be seven years later; it's been seven years.

At that moment, there were a lot of lawsuits happening.  This was a very heavy lawsuit film, which story-wise is not so interesting.  But there's been a lot that's happened, and a lot of interesting things.  But in the world of 3D gun culture and what's happened in 2013, when it was a mischievous, symbolic, performance art piece and how that challenged the monopoly of violence.  But the other characters, if you want, that were in this world, they weren't really as abundantly creative and willing to be brave within the space.

When you jump to 2018/2019, certain players actually started playing, and they started understanding the game of the symbolic and the physical, and that leads us to people like J Stark, Rest in Peace, who created an FGC9 with the specific reasoning that he wanted people to have -- I mean, not necessarily Americans.  I think he would be very proud to see it in Myanmar right now. 

So, the film has been seven years of watching Cody Wilson, Defense Distributed, the events that have happened in between, and the people that have spun up in Cody's momentary absence, and what they made, and how this entire time, this challenge to the government has created this space for continuous lawsuits, continuous laws, but still no one can control this.  Because in the end, like Cody was saying earlier, they're fighting information and files.  No one's handing people guns, nobody's dealing with physical things, you can't give that over the internet.  This is the consequence of information online.  And how do you fight the distribution of knowledge?

Definitely in the last two years, a lot of people have been trying to fight the distribution of knowledge under the theme of misinformation, but it's impossible.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean look, a lot of super-interesting stuff to dig in there.  Just the short version, Cody, because you've probably done this a whole bunch of times; but just for the people listening who won't know everything, can you give us how you went from Cody, the guy who likes guns, to Cody, the printed gun guy; how did that happen, what was that transition?

Cody Wilson: Yeah, I can say in a few words.  I think I was never the guy who liked guns, and that was probably the best thing.

Peter McCormack: Oh, really?

Cody Wilson: Yeah.  I mean, I come from the South and everything, I certainly like the revolutionary ideology of the Minutemen and the things we talked about earlier.  I like guns in that respect, "Wow, the Second Amendment and its radical possibilities!"  But I was inspired while I was in law school.  It was 2011, I watched one man singlehandedly defeat the payments industry, the international set of world governments, and his name was Julian Assange.  This was Cablegate and I was like, "Oh my God!"  I didn't know what he believed, I didn't know what he was about, but I was like, if there's a future for the political on the internet, it's things like this.  How could we do Wikileaks for guns?  That's the advent of my company, Wikileaks for guns.

Peter McCormack: At the time, was the technology there?

Cody Wilson: Sure.  What I recognised is that it was already there.  We went to cncguns.com, we discovered, "There's all these blueprints already on the internet", not necessarily 3D-printed gun blueprints, but 3D printers themselves had just got to this moment, MakerBot was taking off, RepRap in the UK had a big reputation, Anderson had just published his book on The New Industrial Revolution and I was like, you know what, I don't think people were ready for that conversation, "Guns are downloadable".  It spills out this new kind of grammar.  And just like Jessica was saying, imagine a power which gives itself the right to regulate downloadable guns?  Can a power like that actually exist and what if we provoked it to try to exist?

Jessica Solce: And sometimes, this power doesn't even understand what it's dealing with.  If you go and see the little teaser that's going to be on my website, we have a senator that says, "You can go to Instagram and get an Instagun".  I mean, it's an amazing quote.  What is he even talking about?

Cody Wilson: It's cute, it's cute.

Jessica Solce: This entire time, everyone's been trying to understand and capture and control a thing that they can't even express or understand verbally.

Cody Wilson: I'll be more cynical though.  In 2018 is when we first -- we were just a couple of years ahead of this COVID lockdown and everything; I mean the digital lockdown, not the physical ones.  We've been early to deplatforming.  And so, when a senator says, "You can go to Instagram and get an Instagun", he's telling, "Hey, Facebook, Instagram, no one's going to be posting about this on your platform".  These politicians see these platforms as extensions of the progressive, new middle-class agenda.  They prefer to, like Assange had written in 2014 and after, they prefer to exercise their power, not through state organs now, but Google, Facebook.  That's how they see their privilege to regulate the internet.

So, I would say maybe there's more of that in there than you might think.  He's not just being dumb, although he's also being dumb!

Peter McCormack: Well, over the last two years, we've seen this massive increase in power to censor speech across social platforms, Google, Facebook, etc, but also financial censorship.  We saw it a small amount with the Canadian truckers trying to raise funds, and now we've seen an entire country be deplatformed off every major payment rail.  So, I think what you want is other people to realise that these things aren't good.  People are supporting it, not everyone, but realise these forms of censorship aren't good, because it shows how much power a small group of people can have if they don't like what you're saying.

Cody Wilson: At least COVID has exposed a wide group of people to this, and accusations of terrorism and thought crime.  It used to be I had to explain to my grandma, "Why do they call you a terrorist, Cody, with the gun thing?" and that's harder.

Peter McCormack: The most dangerous man in the world.

Cody Wilson: Right.  But now that everyone has been called a terrorist at one point or another for saying something about the vax, it's like, "All right, I think we kind of see where this is going".

Jessica Solce: In 2013 or 2014, Cody was like, "Now, everyone's going to be called an 'ist'.  In nine years, it's going to all be happening", and it actually did.

Cody Wilson: And look at Assange.  Assange was your canary, even before Snowden.  He's like, look, he gets completely deplatformed.  He gets kicked off Visa, Mastercard, right.

Peter McCormack: PayPal.

Cody Wilson: Everything.  You know, the only reason I did Bitcoin is because I saw Assange was doing Bitcoin and I had an article coming out.  It was the summer of 2012, it was going to be my first article, I think, in Forbes Magazine.  Wikiweapon, is what we called it before we had a name for what we were doing.  And I had a PayPal button on my website, and I think this was purely coincidental, but the night before the piece ran, I lost my PayPal account and I was like, "What am I going to do?  This thing's going to run tomorrow, I don't have time to set anything else up".  I put a Bitcoin button on my website, and that was the greatest decision I had ever made.

Peter McCormack: Is there a real symbiotic relationship between the gun work that you've done, the printed guns, and Bitcoin?

Cody Wilson: Well, I think so, yeah.  I don't know if you want me to really jump in?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Cody Wilson: Amir Taaki saw that I was doing Wiki Weapon, September 2012, and he was like, "Hey, I'm doing one of the first Bitcoin Conferences in Europe".

Peter McCormack: Is he the guy who went off to fight ISIS?

Cody Wilson: Yeah, so there's your gun relationship!  Amir saw it before I did.  He was like, "Look, I'm doing a Bitcoin Conference.  What you're doing is exactly what this is about", and he explained Satoshi to me and a lot of things that I hadn't really taken the time to -- maybe I'd heard about Bitcoin in college and I didn't take it seriously.  But like I said, I was starting to accept it, because it was the only Bitcoin that I had.  So, the Bitcoin forums found me, therefore Amir found me, he invited me to the Bitcoin Conference.

I met a lot of the earliest people in Bitcoin that year at that conference, and thereafter I had a pretty intimate relationship with the first big people in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Core.

Peter McCormack: Wow.  Okay, let's go back to this history piece, whereby you start with the printed guns, but it becomes really a company, Defense Distributed.  What was the transition?  Was that a tactical thing, or was it just an economic opportunity?

Cody Wilson: I would call it the necessity of anti-fragility.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Cody Wilson: Yeah, so when we were just putting gun files up on the internet, I had collected a number that were deplatformed at the time from other 3D websites, and so I had created a hub for people who were also meaning to do this work, and I'd created an IRC channel and forums and then we had had three or four files that we had developed on our own, AR-15 receiver, AR-15 magazines, things like this. 

Jessica Solce: That was the first iteration of DEFCAD.

Cody Wilson: Yeah, we called this website DEFCAD.  And in a sense, the history of our company and the legal disputes and everything after is really a history of this website and the governments of different stripes attempting to keep this website off the internet.  This is one way to retell the story. 

But when you get in trouble with the feds, and let's say the US State Department, the US State Department runs the world, and they shut me down quite effectively when I released Liberator about two days later.  They said, "Look, you've violated an untold number of export restrictions, laws.  Each one of these violations carries millions of dollars in fines, 20 years in prison".  They were like, "You're done".  They kind of suspended everything for me.  It was like 90 days of me being, "Well, I'm done.  Damn.  I didn't think I'd be done so --" I was 25 at this point.  I was going, "Well, it was a good run".

Then I decided very slowly I was like, "Maybe, if they're not going to do me tomorrow, I can get as big as my problem, bigger than my problem", but I needed to make money.  And that's when I first decided to make a commercial hardware company based on our principles, and to try to make enough money to sue the State Department and start the whole cycle over again, just maybe.

Jessica Solce: And that's where the film restarts in a way, in 2015.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Cody Wilson: Our first project was called Ghost Gunner, and that's how we became a company and how we became a profit centre.

Peter McCormack: But I would have thought a lot of people in this scenario, facing the feds, the State Department, millions of dollars in fines, potential jail time --

Cody Wilson: Absolutely, yeah.

Peter McCormack: -- would think, "Maybe this is the time to step back".  What was the, I hesitate to use the word "loophole", but --

Cody Wilson: That's the right question.

Peter McCormack: Okay, what had you spotted?

Cody Wilson: Well, it's not that I'd spotted anything.  I realised that this was a frontier, this was the grey.  This wasn't the black and, "You've messed up", the law didn't exist here.  This was something, even those State Department regulations they were using hadn't been updated since the 1980s.  They don't understand or interpret an internet to be existing.  So in fact, there were strong arguments that what we were doing, what we had done, was legal and what had been done against us was a depravation of our First Amendment; at least, there's that strong argument.

But to answer your question more directly, it's like when you're outside of the law and the law hasn't gotten there yet, you should find a certain confidence in that.  I think that's how Uber did what they did, they sidestepped the whole taxi thing and went to a place where the law didn't exist, and they were able to scale there.  I did the same thing, because it took states and the feds about five years to build a legal structure.  And in that time, I was able to scale to a large, multi-million dollar company.

Peter McCormack: Do you think, and I haven't really thought this through enough, because I've just come to it right now; but do you think if, say, Ross Ulbricht had been public, had created a website and made the money public, he might have had a defence for his?

Jessica Solce: He was dealing with something that was specifically known in this county as illegal, though.  I think that's the difference.

Cody Wilson: Look, Ross is a smart guy, but there's a way, if Ross was running, let's say, a classified system and the system was a bit of an agnostic marketplace, kind of like how OpenBazaar wanted to be, if you remember OpenBazaar?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I do, yeah.

Cody Wilson: There's a way that Ross could have at least argued, "Well, I'm not --", and I'm sure he did argue this, but unfortunately the investigation showed that he was a direct broker and facilitator.

Jessica Solce: Yeah, an administrator.

Cody Wilson: So, I think there's a way, but he was right there, he was touching that third rail.  At least in our case, we have the Second Amendment.  There's no, "Right to keep and bear drugs", do you know what I mean?  So, we at least have this argument that, okay, I mean you have the right and the information about guns, you clearly have the right to keep and bear these guns; probably there's a right in the middle meaning something like, you have a right to make the guns.  So, this is in territory where we know the state doesn't want us to be, but unfortunately they haven't figured out their own grammar for how to keep us out.

Jessica Solce: And it's super-nebulous as well, because you can get the technical data for the guns, sometimes from government agencies that you apply to, and a lot of the information that Cody posts or distributes, or other 3D teams, groups, it's just technical data.

Cody Wilson: The funniest stuff about some of these state laws now is that it's illegal to have the data and define it, or for anyone to distribute it.  But the biggest distributors of the information are the Army Publishing Directorate, or the Library of Congress, do you see what I'm saying?

Jessica Solce: You can find these things.

Cody Wilson: The US Government is the largest repository of this information, and it's all public because, of course, it was all developed with tax money.  Springfield Armory and these places, you just develop these interesting contradictions, and you push the system into what Baudrillard would call, "It's hyperlogic" and it's kind of its own problem.  It's tending itself towards suicide.  I'm kind of sitting over here just watching it do it.

Peter McCormack: And so, you've faced challenges from the federal government, but also individual states.  Have you actually been defended by any individual states?

Cody Wilson: Good question.  In a sense, when we say a state has defended you, usually what that means is they've shown up as an amicus, like in a federal suit, and they've written a brief saying, "We're in support of this [or] against this".  So, in some cases, yes, there have been coalitions of states just like, because America does this red team/blue team thing, so often in big, contentious constitutional matters, 20 red states will show up, or 30 blue states will show up, and they'll do this amicus thing.

So, every now and then when I get up the appellor level, some states will weigh in.  But it's not like they're really protecting me, in fact they don't want to be accused of that, I'm quite a toxic figure.  But they recognise, I think, some of the constitutional import of what we're doing, and they show up.

Peter McCormack: And for you doing this, you're obviously a character who challenges some people.  But for some people, you're a total hero; and for others, you're probably the Devil.

Cody Wilson: Yeah, absolutely villain, yeah.

Peter McCormack: What's it like being in that position?  Do you even think about it, or have you just had to build up this armoury?

Cody Wilson: Yeah, I used to think about it more, but I guess it's like -- I mean, I don't get protested.  It's not like what you'd think.  I don't think I'm a fixture of the cultural narrative.  I think even both sides probably would like to just pretend I don't exist and it's just better for everybody, it's better for me too.  So I've learned, every time I'm too seen in the mainstream, like there was a Trump tweet one time; anytime I'm too seen, it ruins my life, something bad happens, someone takes me out, cuts my knees out and it takes years to recover every single time, with the lawsuits and everything.

So, I have a post-traumatic relationship with my own success!  I like to not be too seen.  It's probably been two or three years since I've done a podcast or a talk on any level like yours, and it does make me nervous.

Peter McCormack: I appreciate that.

Jessica Solce: So, let's go!

Cody Wilson: Sort of sneak in the manipulative!

Peter McCormack: That's why you said no last time.  But no, I'm glad to do it.

Cody Wilson: But you're absolutely right, that is why I said no, and it wasn't any kind of slide. 

Peter McCormack: No, I understand.

Cody Wilson: It's just sometimes your wanted level's too high.  You've played Grand Theft Auto, you can't do it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but when I play Grand Theft Auto, I enjoy the six stars, because you want the SWOT teams coming after you and you want to evade them!

Cody Wilson: Well, when you're in Taiwan and US Marshalls and SWOT teams are literally coming after you, you're like, "Wow, playing life on legendary difficulty is exhausting", and you don't really enjoy it for very long.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's a different scenario.  Okay, so back to Defense Distributed, it's a business, it's a commercial enterprise, but I can't figure out whether, and obviously you're both, but are you an entrepreneur, or are you on a life mission which is defending a certain amount of rights?

Cody Wilson: Honestly, I'll tell you, I think it's neither.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Cody Wilson: I don't know that I'm an entrepreneur, because I'm not very good at business.  I try to get better, I think I'm better than I used to be, but for me everything begins with the symbolic layer of our culture, or you could say our sociology.  So, in Bitcoin and Austrian Economics, the favoured sociology of that type of businessperson, everything's reason-oriented, praxeology, what's my best decision.  Curtis calls it "pig philosophy".  Everything's based on these hedonic indicators and I'm going to make a good decision versus a bad trade-off.

I start with, what's the most eruptive, what's the most initiatory?  What challenges power?  What's exciting?  How do I align my fears and my hopes in one thing?  What's a desperate decision that can actually start a symbolic chain reaction, and then how do I pursue that, how do I do something, like an artistic act, or a created object, that could be received by an audience as this provocation to initiate some type of chain reaction?

Peter McCormack: So, you're an artist, a provocateur?

Cody Wilson: Yeah, it's probably art, right!  But I'm not so pretentious, it's mostly business now.  But everything, every product has to follow this strict set of rules.  It has to be an analogy for something, it has to introduce elements of randomness and ludic qualities, and it has to have its own logic and be understood as something else by a specific audience.  If it doesn't do those things, well then yes, just naked craftmanship, or something in that form.

Peter McCormack: Have you seen a change over these seven years; well, you must have seen some change?

Jessica Solce: Yes and no.  I mean, I absolutely think it's performance art; it's not just an art piece, it's performance art. 

Peter McCormack: Be unpretentious; we can claim it as, you just can't!

Cody Wilson: She's diminishing me!

Jessica Solce: No, I'm not.

Cody Wilson: Because it does the thing it says it's doing.

Jessica Solce: It's going to do it, yeah.

Cody Wilson: It does the thing, and it's nothing if it doesn't do the thing.

Jessica Solce: It forces the hand, or it forces the onlooker to deal with it.  That's why it's also performance art, it's just not something that's put on the wall and you can walk by it and ignore it.  It's a piece.  It's like Abramović cutting a star on her abdomen while sitting on ice in a room.  You can't ignore it, whether you like the woman or not.  This is a graphic and aggressive form that means to critique.  I think also, I saw it come first from a very mischievous place, not to overuse the idea of a troll, but a very mischievous kind of troll, but that knew exactly what it purported to want to do, which was to challenge.

Peter McCormack: But I think there's two types of troll.  There is vicious, unnecessary bully trolling, which we get a lot of; then, there is trolling which challenges people to think.

Jessica Solce: It's a challenge.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's a challenge.  And the challenge for me in such a scenario, with what you're doing and why I wanted to talk to you, is because the challenge isn't with regards to the US, that's not really what I'm thinking about.  It's, "Wow, this technology's fantastic for people in Myanmar right now, under attack from the government.  But shit, what does this mean if some kid in the UK gets access to this, where I live, where we don't have a gun culture?" and I'm weighing up that -- it's a bit like Bitcoin. 

Bitcoin can be used right now to raise money for the Ukrainian Army, and it can also be used right now by North Korea.  These situations, when you make these technologies openly available, it's available to everyone; what does it mean for both?  That makes you think about these things.

Jessica Solce: It's the same question, conversation, that has kicked up ever since 2012, right, "How do you differentiate between the usefulness of it and that one bad actor, or that one bad instant?" and you can't.  Just bring back up Silk Road, they really went with this moral attack at the end after they sentenced him by bringing up all the parents, and they created this kind of moral attack on him, "How could you?" 

Unfortunate things happen, but you can't denounce an entire, different kind of ethics.  And he was creating a different kind of way of looking at the distribution of drugs, like eBay but better, "We're going to offer it off the streets, whether you like it or not".  There was a beauty to it, there was an elegance.  So, in the same way, offering the ability for individuals to return to self-defence is going to have an opposite.  There's always going to be the negative and positive, but does the positive outweigh the situations?

Peter McCormack: I can give you a personal story on that Silk Road one, because it helps me understand how people manipulate people.  So, I was a Silk Road user at the time and I was essentially a cocaine addict, a regular user of cocaine.  I don't take any drugs now.

Cody Wilson: Besides that one.

Peter McCormack: Besides that one!  But at the time, I was in a bad way, and I ended up using the forums on the Silk Road that actually helped me realise my problem and deal with it.

Cody Wilson: Interesting.

Peter McCormack: The Drug Policy Alliance is very clear that the Silk Road reduced harm, reduced violence and reduced damage, because it was a better product, so there was less risk of contamination; there was less violence on the street, because it was packaged delivery; and the forums were there.  So, when they brought the, I think it was seven deaths associated with Silk Road, that was used for an emotional reaction, but wasn't objective in any way.

Cody Wilson: Yeah, they brought the parents in for the impact statement.

Jessica Solce: Yeah, I was sitting there.

Peter McCormack: Oh, you were there?  Oh, wow.  So, I can imagine there are very similar emotional examples that may, or could be, used against you.

Cody Wilson: You would think so.

Jessica Solce: They try.

Cody Wilson: But living in a world of printed guns for so long, almost a decade, there aren't really classic examples yet --

Jessica Solce: It's more done in questioning.

Cody Wilson: -- which is telling in its own way.

Peter McCormack: But it could happen, there could be a scenario where somebody does --

Cody Wilson: Well, let's say it will happen.

Peter McCormack: Okay, it will.

Cody Wilson: Let's say it will, but there are bigger differences between the Silk Road, I think, and our operation, probably first and foremost our philosophical principles, because it's code, began with the freedom of speech, like we discussed, and then it began with open-source software development principles.  So, it's more like books and bullets have their own destinies.  It's more like we create something and it's technological, it's software, it can exist on the internet in digitality, it can multiply endlessly.

So, it's not like we're a business establishing the quality of a product, although there's elements of that.  It's more like we're contributing to the total knowledge of society, and it just so happens that it's easy to make a gun, no matter what country you're in; it's easy to do.  That's something that governments can't easily deal with, and in fact from a materials point of view, you should look back and say, "What type of government is now allowed or not allowed, because of this state of technology?"

Carroll Quigley argued that democracy only became possible with the mass production of the rifle, for example.  Well, we're all comfortable with democracy and the mass production of the rifle, so what changes if the home production of the SNG is now a feature of the internet?  I don't know, but that's the exciting possibility, and that's the work that we're doing.

Peter McCormack: And, I guess this is an inevitability so you recognise this.  If it wasn't you, it would be somebody else, and if it wasn't somebody else, it would be another person.

Cody Wilson: It's been said a lot.  It's no doubt true.  We didn't invent 3D printers and we didn't invent the making of guns.  It's not really true that 3D-printed guns began with us, it's just that they began with us in this important dimension of marketing or information capitalism, where we put our own stamp on it and say, "This is like Wikileaks and you need to try and deal with it".

Jessica Solce: I mean, the first person was English, Luty?

Cody Wilson: Oh yeah, good point.  Philip Luty was doing this work in the 1990s and before, and he was an Englishman.

Jessica Solce: Yeah, quickly arrested.

Cody Wilson: As far as I know, he was publishing plans for STEN guns and things like that on the internet.

Peter McCormack: Well, I mean it's a lot different in the UK, we have tighter controls around this.  So, the way you prevent this in the UK, even in you have the ability to print one, ownership is -- there's a heavy penalty, what is it, like five to ten years in prison just for owning a gun or being found with a gun?

Cody Wilson: Yeah, I believe that.

Jessica Solce: He was very courageous in his own terms to do this and to dispense the knowledge of it.

Cody Wilson: But he had the same argument, he was like, "I'm not giving away guns, I'm giving away information, blueprints".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, this is where I get to a slightly different struggle with it, because I think it's a slightly different risk in the UK, because sometimes I have to look at net gain, net loss, and I don't think we -- so, I was speaking to one of my friends recently, he works for the Met police.  He's saying there's a scarcity of guns in the UK for criminal gangs.  So, what tends to happen is guns get loaned around the country, and when they eventually find a gun, they can associate all these different crimes around the country that it's been used with.  So, that scarcity is a problem, but the demand for guns is really at a criminal level, not at a personal defence level.

Cody Wilson: I believe that.

Peter McCormack: Therefore, the release of something in the UK would almost certainly only be used at a criminal level, because they've already decided they're willing to accept the risks, and that therefore supports crime without the other side of supporting defence, because we don't have defence laws.  So, it comes with a different moral question than, say, in the US where you have the culture.

Cody Wilson: I don't dispute it.  In fact, all evidence that I have from people in the UK too is that, "What has this changed?"  It's changed the criminal culture.  Now, often at drug busts, you'll see 3D printers seized.

Peter McCormack: Oh, is that happening?  So they are being used?

Cody Wilson: Absolutely, and special task forces are assigned to understand what they've been trying to make and who the person in the gang is who's the technology specialist; the same way that you see, like in Eastern Europe, there's drone specialists with organised crime down at the border like we have, the drug gangs have drone specialists.  These are features of the political limitations of your island kingdom!

Danny Knowles: If you tried to import gun culture to the UK -- it's like we're in Texas now, you go out, I reckon almost everyone you speak to has some history with guns and they've probably been taught how to shoot guns, taught safety.  But if you gave guns to people in the UK, they'd have no fucking idea what to do with them, and I think that would be a real challenge of trying to do it as well.  No one knows how to shoot a gun in the UK.

Peter McCormack: Where do you start?

Cody Wilson: But you're describing like an autoimmune disease from a social level, if you see what I'm saying.  It's like, "Well, okay, think of COVID.  It turns out we haven't been exposed to this so we'll die if we're exposed".  Then it's like, "But it's on the internet, I don't have control over that".  When I was stopped at Heathrow years ago, they were like, "Well, where are they; are they on you?" and I was like, "You're missing the point!"

Peter McCormack: If you were stopped at Heathrow, they would have had guns, those police.

Cody Wilson: I think they did, yeah.  I was interrogated for some time by some armed gentleman.

Peter McCormack: That's the place you tend to see guns in the UK, is airports.  They have big fucking guns.

Cody Wilson: It makes sense.  They want the world, and when I say "they", I mean the planners, the people who design our societies, and thank God they don't actually have the power they intend to have, but they want the whole world to be an airport, and then none of us will have a gun culture, and then none of us will know what to do.  And maybe you get the sense that that's what they want, and I'm not interested.

Danny Knowles: Australia has looser gun laws than the UK.

Jessica Solce: Do they really?

Cody Wilson: At least in, maybe not New South Wales, but what, Queensland?  I forget, but yeah, Western Australia's got a better gun situation than the UK.

Peter McCormack: Just to be fair, there will be people in Australia who, since guns were outlawed after, where was that attack in some harbour?  There was a guy --

Cody Wilson: That sounds right.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he killed like 30 people and they immediately outlawed guns.  There will be people on the left -- and I think people on the left deserve as much respect as on the right, because we all have an opinion -- will say Australia's become a safer place.  There will be other people who turn round and say, "Yeah, but the government's become authoritarian and the population doesn't have weapons to defend themselves". 

But when you also talk about, you don't really COVID-proof, you don't really have a well-armed militia, you have to say, "Well, what are the trade-offs?"  It's all about trade-offs.  Do we want a safe, centralised society, or do we want a more decentralised, personal responsibility society?  Different people want one and different people want the other.

Cody Wilson: Trade-offs is the conversation if you're an economist or a Marxist or an Austrian, or something, but this is a very narrow dimension of talking about life, I think.  And I know we're trying to talk about maybe political science or political economy, but that's not all there is to life.  Baudrillard, to me, one of my favourite quotes of his is, "There's something more to hope for in a regime that doesn't have control of information, doesn't have control of arms, something more possible".  Do you understand how this outside of the question of, "Well, what are our trade-offs?"

If you'll forgive me, that's an English way to look at the problem, and there are maybe other ways of living.

Peter McCormack: But that is it, it is an English way to look at the problem, and I am English.

Cody Wilson: "Cody, I am English!"

Peter McCormack: Well no, but I interviewed, I had a conversation with Marty Bent, who has a similar podcast, the other day and me and him both have Bitcoin podcasts, but we approach most topics from a different direction.  And, one of the things I was trying to get across is that we're just different in Europe.  We speak the same language, but we're actually very different.  If you changed our language, we would look very different.

We are, in Europe, I would say a lot more collectivist.  We have a universal healthcare which, at its top end, is not as good as top-end healthcare in the US.  But at the same time, everybody, whoever you are, if you have a heart attack, if you break your arm, you get immediately seen and there's no bill.  And some Americans I hear criticise that to me.  But honestly, if you had a referendum in the UK, "Do you want to get rid of the NHS?" I think it would be 90% probably want to keep it, I don't know anyone who's against it.  So, we just have this different, more collectivist culture.

Cody Wilson: Yeah, I think that's right.

Peter McCormack: Sometimes I question, the internet breaks down the barriers of international boundaries and cultures, but do we sometimes also have to respect that there just are different cultures?

Cody Wilson: If you want to jump in?

Jessica Solce: Sure, I mean yeah, I respect it, but so should American culture be respected, I suppose.

Cody Wilson: If you're saying that's like a limiting principle of our work, because there are other cultures, therefore we shouldn't publish open-source files on the internet, that's not going to limit me.

Peter McCormack: No, that's not what I'm getting at.  I'm saying there are net risks to this.  I see the upside for the US, but I see more of a downside, say, for the UK.  Do you feel a sense of responsibility in that, it's the topic wants to ask about, it's like exporting US gun culture to the rest of the world, to places that don't have it, because I don't know what you do on this; do you do safety?  Like, the Silk Road had its safety forums.

Cody Wilson: I take a global view, and I think its most radical possibilities are world-changing, enabling new types of politics.  But strictly speaking, I don't export to people, I only export to United States citizens and US persons.

Jessica Solce: You can't download on DEFCAD if you're not a US citizen.

Cody Wilson: Because of my years of litigation, which we've discussed, I'm actually the most upstream in the ecosystem, I'm very highly regulated.  So, only US persons, which is a set of people slightly larger than US citizens, can access our files at DEFCAD.  And that's, in fact, the only legal way to do it right now with the current fiction.  It's the other actors downstream of me who might --

Peter McCormack: Well, I was going to say, I can imagine when I get back home to the UK, if I want to find those files online, it won't take me too long.

Cody Wilson: 100%.  I mean, to answer your question another way, I'm not saying by disrespecting European norms that I'm trying to privilege American norms.  I'm not actually saying that this is a uniquely American thing, I just want to point that out.  But also, if Europe as a culture, as an idea, is dying, and it seems to me that it is, well that which is falling should be pushed.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm not really arguing against you, I'm more considering what the reactions would be, what the implications are.

Cody Wilson: I mean, what inventor of any technology holds off because he's like, "I don't know what's going to happen".  Technology happens and change happens, and then a bunch of nerds get together and write the history books and say, "This is why it happened".  But in fact, the events just come, and I'm not trying to say that it's my prerogative to change history, or whatever, but there's a certain necessity in equality of the event and its repetition, which is now endless, and there's nothing we can do to change it.

Peter McCormack: Like I said, an inevitability anyway.  So, where are you at with Ghost Gunner, and explain Ghost Gunner to people who are listening, because that was a real gamechanger, right?

Cody Wilson: Maybe.  Ghost Guns are a good example of this.  So, our enemy invents the term "ghost guns" through, "What's a good way to talk about homemade guns that scares people and helps us get a handle on this?"

Jessica Solce: Kevin De Leon.

Cody Wilson: Yeah, maybe it was workshopped in California by a guy like Kevin De Leon.  And they were like, "You know what?  Ghost guns, that's great, wow, that's really good".  So, we agree and amplify.  We take the symbolic content of that and then we try to actually create the world where there is such a thing as a ghost gun, and even thinking that the politicians themselves don't quite believe in it yet.  So, we created ghost gun kits and files and these things, and then a machine called the Ghost Gunner; we made it a verb, or something.  So, that's kind of that symbolic dimension I was talking about earlier, but it's important that the machine actually do the thing and give you the ghost gun parts. 

So, for let's say six or seven years, we've done different generations of this machine, which are in essence like they fit in the footprints of 3D printers.  Unlike 3D printers, they don't make the parts out of plastic, they drill, mill, fashion things from raw pieces of metal.  It turns out it's easy to make gun parts out of metal.

Peter McCormack: Can you make the whole gun?

Cody Wilson: It depends what you mean.  In general, that's not what our machines are bought for.  They're made for finishing parts that are already almost finished.  But most recently, in January, we revealed a new type of receiver that can be made completely from a raw piece of metal.  That's just the receiver, it's not the entire gun.

Peter McCormack: What is the receiver part?

Cody Wilson: In US gun culture, gun politics, at least federally, just the receivers of guns are treated as guns by the law.  So, all the other parts, unlike Europe again, all the other parts are just treated as so many components that are unregulated.

Jessica Solce: The receiver's the serialised part.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Cody Wilson: So, the one part in commerce in the law that's tracked, and when the police are like, "We can see where this gun went", we do the same thing down here with track and trace.  The receivers of handguns and long guns have a history in different people's tables.  

Peter McCormack: And do you agree that guns should have that?

Cody Wilson: Well, not out of hand, no, not as a starting position, but I agree that that's the situation.  It's been that way since 1968.

Peter McCormack: And do your machines have to print a serial?

Cody Wilson: No, that's why you buy the machine.  You buy the machine because okay, now I make the whole thing, and the features of the US law are, if you actually make the gun yourself, there's no requirement to put the serial on it.  That's what encourages people to invest in our equipment.

Peter McCormack: Interesting.

Jessica Solce: Before the ghost guns, you could always make guns for yourself at home, as long as you don't sell them.  Individual hobbyists, or whoever it is, can make guns for themselves, can make 100 guns for themselves.  As long as you don't sell them, it's legal.  A lot of people still don't understand that in the United States.  Whether you agree or disagree, you can make a gun for yourself.

Cody Wilson: Default assumptions of our gun culture are, "Where do I get the gun?  Well, I go and buy it like anything else", like some Chinese crap or something.  But actually, now that it's easier and has been just as a consequence of the digital revolution, now anyone can make a gun at home, actually it was always legal to do that.  And only just now, like I've said previously, in the last few years, have states and cities attempted to start doing something to get a handle on that.  Like I said, the law was never there.

Jessica Solce: That ghost gun word and feature has been so successful that even now, they're calling things that they just find, ghost guns, because it brings up this entire, you know, the terror of when they created the idea of assault weapons like, "What is this, this thing?"  It's been a very successful word or usage.

Peter McCormack: I feel like a while back, I saw a trailer for it that was almost an Apple trailer, not to insult it!

Cody Wilson: Yeah, I put an Apple computer in that trailer, and the little apple lit up and everything.

Peter McCormack: But where there bright, neon colours?

Cody Wilson: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I remember that!

Cody Wilson: Yeah, it was fun.  People were like, "Strangest Apple commercial ever"!  But that's an aspect of our dimension, right, because of course it's obscene to imagine one of these large companies doing something, like what they do with their type of marketing, with firearms; we recognise it's incompatible and not a part of Silicon Valley culture, or whatever the noblesse oblige, American Harvard, soviet complex…  So, it's funny to do it!  They have a little dancing girl jump around on a ghost gunner and stuff, just to pretend…

What I'd like to do next is a home assistant, like an Alexa or something, you know, be like, "Guru, help me make an AR-15", "You got it, buddy!" and we just know that Silicon Valley will never deliver that to us, so it's funny and contains its own cultural critique.

Peter McCormack: Do you know how much the software's being used, the files are being used? 

Cody Wilson: Yeah, we have estimates.  I mean, we download counters at the site, usage counters and things like that, on our site, and you simply get a sense of -- I mean, there are lots of businesses that have been built up that have a presence on Twitter and online that will sell you machined components to go into your 3D-printed build kit.  So, a ton of these, I mean I should name some, the FGC-9 kits, Are We Cool Yet? has a bunch of stuff, the ARC is a new gun with charging handles, and Riptide Rails, a lot of these kids have figured out how to commercialise too.  These are becoming more than just hobby enterprises, they're become quasi professional.

Peter McCormack: So, new businesses are being created off the back of this?

Cody Wilson: Yeah.

Jessica Solce: Some moneymaking and some not.

Cody Wilson: But you figure it out.  I think Riptide's making money, for example.

Jessica Solce: Well, they're selling actual rails.

Cody Wilson: There's 3dprintfreedom.com, there's weird places, and I don't know, they're figuring it out.  They'll sell you 3D printers, they'll sell you kits and specially machined components, and this is maybe too big a point to try to make quickly.  But in a sense, this technology restriction that these arch liberals are trying to enforce has an accidental mercantilist quality to not just preserve the skills of gun-making, but to develop cottage industry against the exact purposes of the regulation.  You begin to think, "Oh wow, where the law's grey and where technology is restricted, there's the saving power".

Peter McCormack: There is a real symmetry with Bitcoin there, in that the cat's out the bag, there has been these regulatory challenges, that regulation hasn't been able to keep up, there's hypocrisy within the regulations.  But also, there's these businesses, some businesses, some hobby projects that have cropped up, which are there to help people route around the regulations, or be prepared for a situation where the regulatory lens comes down quite hard on it.

Cody Wilson: I think so.

Jessica Solce: The type of person I think attracted to both types, Bitcoin or crypto and guns, is a very different type of person, I think, that law and government have to deal with now too.  They're engineers, they're absolute nerds in the best way, they're highly focused, and it's coupled with a passion and an ideology, for lack of a better word to say.  So, it's really an unbreakable structure.

Cody Wilson: I'm willing to take a cynical long-term view of it as well, but this is maybe its own success and it's independently of me.  You know how early Bitcoin -- I don't know how long you've been involved.

Peter McCormack: Well 2012, 2013 using the Silk Road, but then I didn't get into Bitcoin.  And then, end of 2016, 2017 back in.

Cody Wilson: Okay.  Well, especially from 2012 to 2014, the only people involved in Bitcoin were freaks and criminals, and totally just awful people, or absolute autists and to some degree, the autists have stuck around in large numbers, but we've seen how Karpelès and a lot of the charlatans get pushed out, and there are these new quasi professional types that come in.  And we've quoted institutional prestige and now we have real finance people with real degrees.  And okay, there's this stage of participation and I'll say that something like that will happen in our space.  It's been maybe slower, because it just started with a freak and a criminal.

Eventually, as these autists professionalise, and the best case scenario I have for myself is that they'll mythologise me into something, "Well, he was a good guy, he was an agorist and he wanted us all to make money", or something.  That's the best-case scenario.  Probably the most realistic scenario is I'll be forgotten like the early criminals of Bitcoin, and we'll always pretend this was a kind of anodyne, middle-class thing that we were doing.

Peter McCormack: Perhaps not, because --

Cody Wilson: Life is long.

Peter McCormack: -- you have to look at the people who have been forgotten about in Bitcoin, or whose reputation has changed.  It's usually because they moved on from Bitcoin to another cryptocurrency, which has its implications.

Cody Wilson: That's fair.

Peter McCormack: I don't see that happening.  I more wonder though, do you need more Cody Wilsons to take the pressure off you?

Cody Wilson: No.

Peter McCormack: You don't?

Cody Wilson: I don't think so.  I think where things have gotten, it's already at this atomic phase of the network, it's networks of networks now, it's lots of people working independently, commercially, successfully.  I don't think you need a figure like me to do anything really.  I think, at this point it's more man on a wire.  It's like, "Why is he still going?  Does he need to keep going?"

Jessica Solce: He's a bit of a buffer though.  I think the fact that you still exist and you're a target does keep people away from, should I name them?  From other people that are pushing things out there.

Cody Wilson: That's a fair point.

Peter McCormack: What was it Jeremy said earlier?  Jeremy, the thing about the car, come on the mic and say it.  Remember the thing about the car, the racing car?  Yeah, sorry.

Jeremy: How in drafting, like in racing, the leader who breaks the wind, and that makes it easier for everybody behind them.  So, it takes those people to go ahead and face the harder things to face, but everybody else is able to make it easier because of that.

Cody Wilson: That's fair.

Peter McCormack: We were saying it earlier, because there's a guy called Saifedean Ammous, who wrote a book called The Bitcoin Standard.  Me and him don't really agree on a lot and he is highly concerned about environmental alarmists.  I think he has a fair point, but I think he takes it to the very extreme of completely dismissing the reality of some of the science.  But he essentially is that windbreaker for all those other people behind him who want to hold those ideas.

I take the opposite position and say, "I think he's right about this, I think he's wrong about that", which pisses off all the more libertarian or right, conservative bitcoiners, but I break the wind for the people who are perhaps a little bit more left of centre.

Cody Wilson: Okay, I can say two concrete things about this.  I have in the past thought about myself as an umbrella or a lightning rod, while the groups were really nascent.  From 2013 to 2015, very little was happening and it felt fragile to me, and I was like, "Good that I'm still there in the fifth circuit trying to score a First Amendment thing".  From 2018, when I got in trouble, both legally and personally, it looked like my death, or whatever, actually inspired a lot more participation and I was like, "I probably don't even need to come back". 

But it just so happened that I maintained standing in our lawsuits and when these new laws come out, I'm one of the few people with the economic power, the market power and the legal standing to actually move the needle anywhere in the courts.  And I'm still cynical about the courts, I don't think I'll get great decisions, but just by holding the fight in the black letter in the process, which is a long process, especially the federal appellant process, just holding it there keeps things at this glacial pace, which prevents even the worst of the progressives from going off narrative and getting improvisational.  So, that gives the other people time.

Jessica Solce: And during that, there's all these other players that came about in 2018, 2019, 2020 that are creating and just putting it out there.

Peter McCormack: So, what's the end goal with this, Cody?  It feels like when we talked about that ongoing chat about the Constitution, that there's the defenders and there's the attackers.  It feels like this therefore will always be an issue, because there is always a gun rights issue in the US.  There are those who defend gun rights, and then there are those who want to restrict gun rights.  I interviewed, a couple of years back, Texas Gun Sense, because I wanted to understand their perspective.  It feels like as long as you want to do this, you're always going to be doing this, always in a fight.

Cody Wilson: That's a scary thought.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I was going to say, do you have a multidecade fight in you?

Cody Wilson: I don't know.  Every year, I think it's the last year.  You've definitely got that on camera!

Jessica Solce: A few times every year!

Peter McCormack: You'll never finish this film!

Jessica Solce: I know, I'm going to keep on getting it until I get financed!

Cody Wilson: And that's just it.  Every year, it's not like we have investors or anything, it's like, "How can we continue to be commercial?"  Then every year it's like, "What are the new lawsuits we'll be in?"  So, I don't actually expect that you can go another ten years, I don't really think that.  Although, I guess, Lindy effects, things like that, would suggest the longer you've been around, the longer you just stay around. 

It doesn't feel that way in the driver's seat to me, but if there's some end, it's -- okay, I can take an NRA Republican's point of view, although he doesn't know it's his point of view, which is that the NRA Republican is kicking around in the 1990s and 2000s thinking, "Well, if the Assault Weapons Bill will just expire, maybe we can acclimate people to the AR-15 and we'll slowly bring everybody on board".

I think bringing everybody on board is not the point, it's having everyone recognise, especially the left and the gun controllers, that the far side of this issue, the other end of the horseshoe, is not that everyone can have an AR-15, but maximum gun proliferation all over the world, through downloadable, completely liquid means, uh-oh, that changes their own positions and so, where the agenda of these people from the 1980s and 1990s was, "We're going to ban the Glock, we're going to ban the AR-15", they recognise this is hopeless and they can only fiddle with certain features of guns, let's say, or maybe spend all their time on this 3D element, and they left the barn door open for traditional ownership means.  By traditional, I mean commercial, so it's completely changed their coordinates.

Jessica Solce: While this whole conversation is going, in the last two years, people have bought more guns in the United States than ever.  So, it's not like this conversation about 3D and information and things being put on the internet, the actual purchasing of serialised guns in the United States is beyond.

Cody Wilson: And, we're winning too, because during COVID they're like, "Well, racists are downloading guns"!  I think we're winning.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  We have that, "The far right are using Bitcoin".

Cody Wilson: Yeah.  So, we're in that place which means we're kind of winning.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  A couple of things left I want to talk to you about.  I'm really interested in your ideas on governance.  We mentioned democracy earlier and I'm in this kind of lost place of agreeing entirely with the libertarians, but also a reluctant supporter of democracy, seeing its failings at the moment, but don't know where we go with this.  So, I'm not sure what fight is worth having.  I certainly think we should push towards more liberty, as government always continues to grow and get bigger, but I'm not an ancap, I'm not a full libertarian, and I'm lost in the place. 

The European in me is like, "Democracy, Churchill", and then when I come to America, I'm like, "Smaller government, liberty".

Cody Wilson: Yeah, I feel that.  I wouldn't start a fight with you about this.  I think your own feelings are mine.  We grew up in the commanding heights of a certain type of democratic form.  We're comfortable with the world order, the way we understood it for the last 20, 30 years.  And when I see the war in Russia, for example, I don't really see it as a threat to democracy like the western propaganda suggests.  I see it as a signal of the end of the global potential of this system to spread and control the markets of the world and the governments of the world.

I think, to chasten these democracies is a good thing, and then I think to think clearly is even better and to recognise that what we call these democracies is not apt.  They're really large-scale oligarchies, enforcing something like debt communism.  That's why we're in Bitcoin.  We all recognise that this is something almost worse than the Soviet situation, because it maintains these republican pronouns, but little else of substance.

Peter McCormack: I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying worse than Russia.

Cody Wilson: Really?

Peter McCormack: I always think, where would I want to live and therefore which is better and which is worse, and I do not want to live in Russia.  And that's why sometimes I laugh at libertarians who live in Sweden, complaining at me, when they live in one of the safest liberal democracies in the world.  And so far, I'm struggling to see any libertarian society outside of Somalia, which is used as an example and people laugh at it, but it is a real example. 

Everywhere, I've seen the breakdown in the Rule of Law leads to more harm in vulnerable groups, whether that's those who are physically challenged, whether it's those who are from a minority group, minority race, women; it always happens.  And then, when people get desperate, they get more violent, and I think there is a lot of good that's come out of democracy and the progress of civilisation.  I'm one of these people who measures civilisation on how well it looks after its most vulnerable groups.  And I think to want to burn that all down because some government's got a bit shit, I think is stupid.

So, when I look at Russia, I don't want to live there.  I love the UK and I love the US, and I've been to lots of places in South America and I don't want to live there.  So, I think the most western liberal democracies for me are the best places to live.

Cody Wilson: This is historically true, although if you look at 1950, if safety and security are your standards, it certainly seems that civilisation hasn't delivered a whole lot more safety and security in this country or others since that time.  And I wonder why that would be.

Peter McCormack: I mean, I don't know how you measure that, and whether that's actually true.

Cody Wilson: Well, draw a map and show me where it's safe for a white man to walk around with an iPad in his hand at night in 1950.  Then, redraw that map for me in 2020 and tell me there isn't a difference.

Peter McCormack: I mean, he wouldn't have had an iPad in 1950!

Cody Wilson: Let's play a game!

Peter McCormack: But it's a different world.  I'm not sure that's a fair comparison.

Cody Wilson: That's a copout, brother.

Peter McCormack: I'm not sure it is.

Cody Wilson: If safety and security are your standards, it certainly seems to me that there are fewer and fewer places where you can actually find that safety and security.

Peter McCormack: There's very few places that I would be nervous walking around late at night in the UK, very few places; some parts of London.  There's not a single place in the town I live, in Bedford, I would not walk around in, and perfectly comfortably.  I don't know about you, Danny, how you feel about the UK?  It's not many.

Danny Knowles: No, and the places where you wouldn't walk around, you kind of know them, but that's not an excuse.

Peter McCormack: But I see the question you're asking; it's like, why has it got less safe?

Cody Wilson: If your mark of the progress of civilisation is in fact those standards, then did you have progress in civilisation, real question?

Peter McCormack: Well, it depends what your measure is.

Cody Wilson: Well, you told me what your measure is.

Peter McCormack: No, one of my measures on progress of civilisation is how it looks after vulnerable groups.  I care about that, and it's very anti-libertarian, because I care about the fact that we -- I'm pro-regulation on certain regulations.  We have rules that protect vulnerable groups in the UK in certain situations.  Now, I think a lot of this stuff's gone too far now, but I think that is progress.

Cody Wilson: At some point, you'll recognise your own internal alienation.

Peter McCormack: Tell me where I'm wrong.

Cody Wilson: I'm not saying you're wrong.

Peter McCormack: Where you think I'm wrong.

Cody Wilson: One day, you might say, "Well, hold up, I feel like a vulnerable group at this point.  Where is the protection for me?"

Peter McCormack: I think I'm fairly protected.  I've travelled all around the world, I feel very safe and lucky to live in the UK, whilst at the same time I do despise a lot of our government.  But I think it's easy to criticise government, because they have a shit job to do with the worst pool of talent to do it with.

Cody Wilson: This is a valid position, but they often say, "You don't feel your chains until you try to move them".  So, I would encourage more contact with the state which your happy with.

Peter McCormack: Well, I felt them during COVID when I couldn't leave the country.  Danny especially felt it in Australia.  I'm aware of the risk, but --

Cody Wilson: I should say to them, neither of us -- we should feel lucky, because we're not at risk of a libertarian revolution breaking out.

Peter McCormack: Well, do you know what I've brought up in this podcast a bunch of times, I've said one of my things I'd like to see from the libertarians, because I fundamentally agree on paper what they say, almost entirely; where I disagree is the ones who refuse to engage in politics.  Because we have this, politics is a pull from the left to the right.  We swing one way, we swing another, that's just the way it is.  The pendulum always goes too far and you get that counterreaction.

If the libertarians were in government, especially if there was representative democracy, you could have that pull from big to small.  But without that, you go left to right, government getting bigger and bigger and bigger.  If the libertarians could pull it down and make government smaller, I think that would be one of the things that's really useful, those people who defend those basic rights.

Cody Wilson: I think we both probably realise that's not possible, and I don't believe that representative democracy has existed in this country, much less others, for a long time.

Peter McCormack: Sadly.

Cody Wilson: I'm not trying to be like -- I don't think that's a controversial statement.  So, I don't want to fight in Plato's Cave, or something, with these shadows, I don't think that's the world we live in.  Like I said, I think it uses republican pronouns, but there sure is a lot of censorship and restriction, and all this other stuff necessary to enforce this so-called democracy.  And I get the suspicion, when I hear State Department flags and all these other people talk about how we've got to preserve democracy over in Europe, I feel like you could understand it better if you just replaced the word "democracy" with "world dominion", "world domination". 

Oh, okay, it all makes sense to me now.  This is an imperial establishment with satellite and client state relationships, and it's enforced by a world system, derived after the Second World War by better, more competent politicians.  They're not more competent now.  The system itself, to me, seems not worth burning down.  But it can't keep going, giving itself these privileges.

Peter McCormack: How do we make it better?  That's where I don't know what to do.

Cody Wilson: How do we make it better?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Cody Wilson: You know the answer, you're in Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah okay, so we check and balance on the money.

Cody Wilson: That's a big one, don't you think?  I wouldn't even pretend that 3D-printed guns are on a level with Bitcoin.  Bitcoin's the most important innovation in hundreds of years.

Peter McCormack: I think alongside it here, the First and the Second Amendment work together, I think Bitcoin and printed guns here in the US, if you did have that organised militia, you could see the asymmetry.  I just don't see it maybe in our country.

Cody Wilson: There's a relatedness with the technology of the programmes, there's a relatedness, and it's maybe American libertarianism, like you were saying, and that's why your questions are good.  But I think Bitcoin is far and above more important for the world.  What we're doing with the gun thing is still in a dimension of critique and challenge, and it's at a symbolic level before it's at a truly practical, political level.

Peter McCormack: All right, I've got one more question, then I'm going to get you to talk about the film a bit more, drive some support for what you're doing, Jessica.  So, we had a discussion about the limitations of free speech, we were talking about it, and one of the ways that one of your defences, and correct me if I explain this in the wrong way, but is that essentially you're releasing code and code is speech, and therefore you defend this on the free speech level.  Something very similar that's been used for privacy, remind me?

Danny Knowles: Phil Zimmerman, PGP.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  It's been used with Bitcoin, Bitcoin is code, code is speech.  I did an interview with this guy called, Austin, do you know Austin Hill?

Cody Wilson: It sounds like I should.

Peter McCormack: He's an early Blockstream guy.  We did a topic called The Vulnerable World Hypothesis.  It's this expansion of technologies, AI, CRISPR, what are the other ones?  I've lost you in that moment!  These technologies that have been --

Cody Wilson: Technologies of this century, you're saying?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, newer technologies, and pointed to this point, the singularity, etc, and what does that mean for the world if code is speech?  I fully understand the defence, but we all got a bit jumpy when we got to CRISPR, because CRISPR, you have the ability to essentially print a virus that could wipe out significant parts of humanity.

Jessica Solce: It didn't seem like we needed CRISPR; we just did a pretty good job.

Peter McCormack: Well, we didn't do it.

Cody Wilson: CRISPR was probably involved!

Peter McCormack: But what I'm saying is, there's a significant risk to somebody having that technology at a psychopathic level to release something entirely dangerous for the whole world.  Should that be defended on the rights of free speech?

Cody Wilson: I think that's probably true, probably bioterror will be the thing this century.  Code was just the table setting for an age of bioweapons and bioterror.  That's likely, even.  And if it's not private actors, it will be state actors and proxy conflicts with state actors.  And, if they can get the hattrick of blaming private actors for this stuff and restricting that kind of code to themselves, they'll do it.  So, almost from a defensive point of view, I would say, "Well, don't give them the rhetorical, legal, constructive room to make those kinds of arguments, simply so they can't apply that type of thinking, that worst-case scenario, slippery slope, bioterror argument to the normal stuff, the other types of weapon".

I will give you an example from the previous century, the progressive case.  A magazine was publishing important plans for how to make a hydrogen bomb.  It went all the way to the Supreme Court.  They tried to block it, for what sounds like reasonable reasons.  We don't want anyone to know how to make -- can it really be that the First Amendment protects the plans for making hydrogen bombs?  In this case at least, the answer was yes.  And I don't see a principled reason, at least from the outside, to lay off.

Peter McCormack: What if there's a CRISPR Cody Wilson?

Cody Wilson: Almost surely, there will be.  There'll pretend that there is one.  I wonder then if there's a difference between the practicality like, okay, there's the code level of this stuff which surely is liquid and easy to get and it's probably harder to have a biolab than it is to have a bench grinder and a vice.

Peter McCormack: I'm not sure it's too hard.  I think it's harder, probably easier than constructing a hydrogen bomb and being able to deploy it.

Cody Wilson: Maybe.  These are questions I don't often think about.  Although, I knew one of the researchers at Harvard that was involved with some of the early CRISPR and xenotransplantation stuff.  Her estimates to me at the time were, if I wanted to get into this for my own rights, what if Cody Wilson wanted to be the CRISPR guy, she was like, "About $300,000 to set up the kind of lab that we have".  That's not so bad.

Peter McCormack: That's not unaffordable, especially if you bought Bitcoin six years ago.

Cody Wilson: Or were given lots of Bitcoin!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because my brother's a researcher on this and we spend a lot of time talking about these things, and we did the Vulnerable World Hypothesis.  And then we started to consider ways you deal with some of these vulnerable issues, and we often struggled to find a way that wasn't centralised.  But the centralisation comes with the risk that you're giving the power to the governments.

Cody Wilson: That's probably coming, like is the world going to be more centralised ahead?  It feels like it.

Jessica Solce: We're all going to be in the metaverse, nobody's going to care.  That's how it's going to go!

Cody Wilson: Maybe just because it's fashionable, there's more argument lately, in the last couple of years, about the pendulum swinging back and the internet re-decentralising and the multipolar world order, you know, the Chinese/Russian block flowering.  I don't know if I believe any of that, but the current conflicts do seem to suggest other blocks have to form.

Jessica Solce: I think that's hopeful actually for a return.

Cody Wilson: Maybe there's an internet where there's CRISPR and an internet without.  But yeah, in a global world, all you can say is, "Okay, more centralisation, a more fractured internet, it seems like that hurts everybody and everything to me", but maybe that's realistic.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well listen, thank you for this.  I know, as you said, you don't do a lot of interviews.

Cody Wilson: It's all good.

Peter McCormack: It's been on my radar for a few years.

Cody Wilson: My pleasure.

Peter McCormack: I always like things when I learn and actually from this, I want to go and read some of this early history stuff you started off with, it's fascinating.

Cody Wilson: I'd love to give you and your listeners recommendations.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, please do.

Cody Wilson: Bernard Bailyn, Edmund Morgan, esteemed scholars of the early revolution and the early Americans.  Pauline Maier for ratification of the Constitution.  Those are good places to start, but of course the primary sources are the best two, the writings of James Madison, his papers, George Mason, Patrick Henry of course, if you're into guns.  And then of course, there's a lot of literature about the Second Amendment, but I'll let you find that on your own.

Peter McCormack: Well, we'll put a bunch in the show notes.  But also, Jessica, you're making a film.  Please appeal, as you want, to the listeners.  This show might want to help and support you.

Jessica Solce: Sure, so making the film for seven years.  It's about Cody, it's about Defense Distributed.  It goes into all the 3D gun movement and figures that have popped up since 2018, 2019.  It's about, I guess, the art and the symbolic nature of it and the ethos behind it.  And it's a real, hopefully if it gets made, knock on wood, it's going to get made, a chronical and a lot of things that people haven't seen. 

I mean, I've been really on top of Cody these last years, letting me in, knocking and knocking, and he's given me his time.  So, there's lots of questions about certain times in history that's happened, that I think Cody has only told me about.  And of course, I was there in 2018, 2019, so there's new information as well.  So, I hope this is a good -- I mean, one thing about this is, I went to streaming right before COVID hit, and the response back was because this was on the wrong side of history.  So, movies are getting curated now for what they're attempting to even capture.

Peter McCormack: We spoke about this.  My comment to that was, how can you be on the wrong side of history before history's been made?

Cody Wilson: Awesome.

Jessica Solce: Or, why is history wrong?

Cody Wilson: Yeah, awesome.

Jessica Solce: How can history be wrong?  It's the wrong paradigm to even consider.

Peter McCormack: You're on the wrong side of the history they want to curate.

Jessica Solce: Exactly.  So, if you enjoy being on the wrong side of history, I am inviting everyone come and help me fund this film.  It's been seven years of me self-funding this, and we are ready to go into post-production.  I have a killer editor.  Come to my website, I have a four-minute tease up for you and you can donate.  And if you're interested in becoming more of a considerable player and executive producer, contact me.

Peter McCormack: So, you can donate, or you can invest as a producer.

Jessica Solce: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Can you donate in Bitcoin?

Jessica Solce: Yes. 

Peter McCormack: Is it ready?

Jessica Solce: I'll take Ethereum if you want!  If you give me cash, I'll take cash.

Peter McCormack: Okay, turn off the cameras, damn it!

Jessica Solce: If you want to knock on my door and give me cash, here's my address!

Peter McCormack: We, the show, will make a Bitcoin donation towards it.  We will put that out in the show notes, we'll put it out in the tweet, and we'll do everything we can to help try and promote and get this film made. 

Jessica Solce: Thank you.

Peter McCormack: I appreciate your time.  Cody, appreciate your time and I've really enjoyed this.

Cody Wilson: My pleasure.

Peter McCormack: Good luck with everything.

Jessica Solce: Thanks.

Cody Wilson: Thank you.