Preston Byrne on the UK Online Safety Act and Exported Censorship
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/tftc-uk-online-safety-act-censorship-preston-byrne
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/tftc-uk-online-safety-act-censorship-preston-byrne-transcript
Published: 2026-08-05
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
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[0:01] Marty Bent: Preston burnt. It's been too long. Welcome back.

[0:04] Preston Byrne: Hey, great to be here, great to see you.

[0:06] Marty Bent: It's great to see you too. mean, we've got a lot to talk about. What the hell is going on in Europe and the UK with speech?

[0:13] Preston Byrne: Yeah, they need to be put back in their box and they need to get back in their box, back in their kennel. yeah, we can talk about that at length.

[0:28] Marty Bent: Yeah, guess I think maybe the best jumping off point is 4chan in Ofcom. You're very intimately connected with that. You're representing 4chan. For those in the audience who may be unaware of what's happening, why don't we just start there and then we'll get into the broader topic of speech.

[0:36] Preston Byrne: Yeah. Sure. I think, I think, you know, as with all Bitcoin stories, you know, our story begins on the Isle of Yap. I've been active in cryptocurrency since 2013, mostly as a lawyer for crypto companies. I also had an early enterprise blockchain startup. We forked to ETHBOK2 and built really complicated financial services, automation, things on it, and that didn't succeed. So I went back into private practice. And one of the first things I did when I went back into private practice, because it had been

[1:00] Marty Bent: you

[1:23] Preston Byrne: a sort of long time interest in mind, was represent US companies that were focused on free speech. at the time, back in 2017-18, US companies that had free speech moderation policies were being targeted by the American government, right? And they were being targeted by American service providers. And it wasn't such a big problem that foreign governments weren't quite the problem they are now. But what has happened is, is that because the United States has this thing, right? The First Amendment, which protects speech here, and that includes the right The to host whatever you want, essentially, as long as it's legal. The right to publish software in the terms that you want.

[3:26] Preston Byrne: And, you know, that's, it's, it's a totally, it's, it's not lawless, right? They certainly obey American law, but compared to something like Facebook or X or Reddit or YouTube or any other mainstream social media platform, there's significantly less content moderation that occurs there. And so the UK targeted these companies and said, okay, well, listen, you guys are the worst of the worst from our perspective. You host speech and conduct that we would prefer not exist. And so when their censorship law came online. they started targeting these four companies, tiny, tiny, tiny companies. mean, at one point, you know, it's not that way anymore, but at one point, 4chan was described accurately as just a bunch of Mac minis running in a closet.

[5:17] Preston Byrne: The UK was essentially saying our rules, which are expressed to be applicable outside of the jurisdiction, they, you know, there's a language in the statute which says this is extra territorially applicable outside of the UK. Our rules get to govern what Americans do on American servers and you have to answer to us. And the principle of that, if we concede it, right, the first amendment ceases to exist effectively as, as, as something which exists online. And so these four clients decided to fight back, 4chan and Kiwi Farms in particular. decided to bring a lawsuit against Ofcom in the District of Columbia, which we brought in August.

[7:40] Preston Byrne: the but they have been fighting UK online safety Act style laws in accordance with their mandate. And recently, just this week, in fact, it's today's what today's the 19th of December. So on the 15th, they got an age verification mandate, which is very similar to the OSA struck down by a federal judge in Louisiana. Then on the 17th, so two days ago, they had another rule, which was a content mandate in the state of Arkansas, very similar to the UK online safety Act that was preliminarily enjoined. So they got an injunction temporary injunction in that case, which means it's very likely that they're going to get a permanent injunction and that law will be struck down.

[9:45] Preston Byrne: to him that, you know, we're not planning to implement the online safety act. And if you want to censor my client, word for word, essentially, said, you're going to have to land ground troops on the East Coast and seize their servers by force. And I don't to be blunt, I don't think the UK is prepared to do that at the present time. But essentially, that's that's it's been a long, long,

[9:58] Marty Bent: you

[10:04] Preston Byrne: fight and finally we're starting to see traction at the federal level in state legislatures and I'm very optimistic that over the course of the next year we're going to see meaningful legislative developments which will essentially redraw the rules of the internet in America's favor.

[10:21] Marty Bent: Well, first off, thank you for your service. It's incredibly important work because it seems existential. is the UK and Europe with their online safety act, are they essentially assuming that the US government should cooperate with them and fit the

[10:38] Preston Byrne: I think they're assuming that the US government doesn't have the capacity to respond to them. I don't think they're assuming that there will be cooperation. If the Biden administration had continued or if we were under a Harris administration, I think you would see, if not active cooperation, then you'd certainly see willful blindness to their activities and you wouldn't see any legislative or executive momentum to stop it. As was indeed the case under the Biden administration, they were serving notices. They were giving reciprocal treatment to notices that the Germans were serving on American citizens under the German censorship laws, something called the Network Enforcement Act or the NETSDG.

[12:13] Marty Bent: No, it does. And this goes far beyond just free speech, too, because I know in a lot of these, these acts from UK and European Union, European Parliament more broadly, they want to basically kill encryption to and then encryption introduces backdoors to any app that is allowing their users to use and then encryption to communicate with each other. And so I mean, this is not only an attack on free speech, also a surveillance mechanism on top of it. And it's pretty egregious.

[12:43] Preston Byrne: Mm-hmm. 100. Yeah, and mean, I think we've had those, we've had the encryption wars here in the United States for 30, 40 years as well, right? There have been attempts to break encryption at various times by various administrations. And there are always people, I guarantee you there are people within the current Trump administration who aren't fans of encryption, but ultimately we have a system. That system has constitutional guardrails and the job of the first amendment lawyer is to enforce those guardrails whenever possible, as robustly as possible, as quickly as possible to prevent. encroachment on Americans' individual rights. And so from, you know, from our point of view...

[14:23] Preston Byrne: that we would roll over when they decided to go after the First Amendment on a global basis. think they're qualitatively different rules. And so they should have expected a qualitatively different response. But their experience dealing with the Americans and internet, European internet regulation before, taught them that that wasn't something that we were going to do. And I think that that was a mistake.

[14:46] Marty Bent: Yeah. So bringing this back to 4chan and Kiwi, you guys sued in DC federal court on August 28th, alleging Ofcom's orders do not bind them in the United States, that the orders were not properly served. Interesting to learn more about how they were served. That any attempt by US court to enforce them would violate the first, fourth, and fifth amendments. So let's talk about how they were not properly served. And then.

[15:11] Preston Byrne: Yeah.

[15:12] Marty Bent: From there, what's happened since August 28th? What has the back and forth been like, if there has been any?

[15:17] Preston Byrne: Sure, we filed, Ofcom announced that they were going to fine 4chan £20,000 sterling on August 13th 14th. Two days later, Kiwi and 4chan through a press release that my law firm issued, announced their intention to file suit in DC. We then did file suit in DC on the 28th. when you've got an entity on the other side, which is... potentially, right, so they're arguing that there is sovereign instrumentality in the United Kingdom, which presents some interesting problems from a litigation standpoint, because they may benefit from sovereign immunity. Now, that's a live issue in the case. not going to go into that in too much depth, because we've yet to file our opposition, and they're going to file their reply.

[17:33] Preston Byrne: And that's really all we're asking for. We're not asking for damages. We're not asking for, you know, injunctions, various other things. We're just asking for confirmation. As a practical matter, we're asking for confirmation that these orders weren't validly served, which would then confirm the position that my clients aren't obliged to follow them. Now, in response to that, obviously very legally correct position, Ofcom responded by alleging that they are completely immune from suit, right? So there's no way that can sue them because they're saying that there is sovereign instrumentality in the United Kingdom. And the way that that works is we have a law called the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

[19:48] Preston Byrne: that. But one of the purposes of bringing the lawsuit was to demonstrate to Washington, which we have, I'm very confident we have done and I'm very confident the message has been heard, that American law currently disadvantages the American defender and massively advantages the foreign attacker. Because if the foreign attacker comes in, you have this enormous threshold issue to get over of sovereign immunity and that that limitation is self imposed. It's not imposed by foreign law. It's imposed by American domestic law. And so that's one of the reasons we brought the suit is to ensure that there's a record, a comprehensive documentary record showing that this is the case and to tell Washington, listen, this is the problem and this is exactly where you need to get involved and apply a fix because ultimately if it's federal legislation, you can pass all the state legislation you want as we are indeed trying to do with the Wyoming Granted Act, but the fix has to be at the federal level.

[21:02] Marty Bent: Something along the lines of the Granite Act.

[21:04] Preston Byrne: Ideally, I I have literally no idea what they're doing. I do know that I might have to get up for one second because we'll have to, yes, give me one second. Is that right? I just pop up.

[21:15] Marty Bent: Okay, yeah. you can use his likes but i don't think that anything

[22:06] Preston Byrne: newly clean dog. Good boy.

[22:08] Marty Bent: Hahaha

[22:10] Preston Byrne: All right, here you go, right? You want a treat? Here you go, here's your treat. All right, so we're back. Yeah, ideally, it's gonna be along the lines of the Granite Act. The federal government has definitely seen the Granite Act, including its most recent iterations, are currently non-public. But yeah, we'll see what they do. I'm optimistic that we're gonna see some action in the new year. But it really, I don't have a ton of visibility into that process because that's above, I'm a solo practitioner, working nights and weekends. from my house and so drafting federal legislation is a little bit above my pay grade.

[22:46] Marty Bent: But if it is aligned with what you presented in the granite, your proposal for the Granite Act, you describe it as mutually assured destruction, a system of mutually assured destruction.

[22:58] Preston Byrne: Yeah. Yeah, so if they fall, so what the Granite Act does, it has really two pieces, a shield and a sword. So the shield states that an entity operating in the United States, a foreign order, which is served on that entity, which would, if served by an American government entity, violate their constitutional rights, is not enforceable here, right? Which is already the position. But if you set it out in a statute and make it very clear, instead of responding to a foreign censor with a 20 page memo, what you do is you, which we have done, right? What you do is you respond to the foreign censor saying here's the statute go away right so please stop sending us stupid letters.

[24:42] Preston Byrne: it takes sovereign immunity away from that European censor with respect to that claim. So essentially, if you send a letter to an American citizen under this regime, the American citizen on receiving the letter will know that letter is not going to be, whatever that threat that letter contains, it's not going to be enforceable in the United States. And moreover, because they receive the letter, they now have a civil cause of action where they can bring it against the sovereign entity, the agency, and anyone working for the agency jointly and separately. And they can seek to make them liable for damages in an American court. And those damages would be then recoverable in principle against sovereign assets, custody to American banks.

[27:05] Preston Byrne: end largely and I think it will end more or less overnight. And then we will have a new operating system, legal operating system for the Internet. And it'll be really interesting to see what happens over the course of the next 30 years with the law like that in the books. So that's the objective is basically to prevent this from happening anymore because it's the threat. It's the intimidation. It's not necessarily the enforcement because Ofcom can enforce the orders here. We know that Ofcom knows that the UK knows that the US government knows that everybody knows it. But what happens is you go to a tech company, you talk to their highly risk-averse legal team that likes occasionally going to London for a conference or something like that, and you say, we're going to throw you in jail if you don't follow our rules. And guess what? They follow the rules. And their constitutional rights are limited as a result.

[27:50] Marty Bent: And I think one of the more important things to really dig into here is this is all rooted in poor free speech laws in the countries that are bringing these lawsuits against American companies. I think you're particularly well suited to critique British and the speech laws in the UK because you practiced over there. got you know that that system very well. I think this is something you've been highlighting Recently is the fact that the UK free speech framework is broken beyond repair. And so I think diving into what the landscape of free speech, if it even exists in the UK, looks like today, obviously, ton of headlines over the last year with British citizens going and put in prison for social media posts and other things.

[29:06] Preston Byrne: Free speech in the UK. I mean, it exists the way they define it, but it doesn't exist the way that Americans define it. There's an old joke about an American and a Russian having a drink together at a bar. And the American says to the Russians back during the Cold War, know, America is such a free country. I can walk right up to the gates of the White House and I can curse out and criticize the president of the United States right in front of the White House. And they can't do anything to me. And the Russian says, well, we have free speech, too. And the American says, really?

[30:49] Preston Byrne: Now, the criticism piece, right, is something where, again, regardless of who is in the White House, you can change the criticism all you want, but the identity of the target and the content of the speech doesn't change its nature, which is that it's critique or it's criticism. In the United Kingdom, however, they have rules, particularly on the internet, Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 is a good example, where grossly offensive speech is something which the state is permitted to intervene on. That is inherently a subjective judgment, whether something is grossly offensive or not. And if you then go and you ask a British judge, right, well, what's where's the line between offensive and grossly offensive?

[33:18] Preston Byrne: the substance of the idea that's being communicated. And you're punishing the person for the substance, right, rather than the nature of the speech itself. And so they don't really have our doctrine there. And the UK Online Safety Act requires American companies to remove speech, which is illegal there, which effectively ports their domestic speech regime as an internet regulatory regime, which obliges Americans to remove speech, which is illegal in the UK, but perfectly legal in the United States. And that is one of the incidentally, haven't even in the 4chan case, we haven't even reached that point in the analysis, right? Because they haven't rolled out and started seeking to enforce those content moderation rules.

[35:32] Preston Byrne: through the simple act of filing a lawsuit, which is published in the District of Columbia, which a lot of lawyers are going to read. And that's another part of the reason why we did it, right? So we have, you know, the hurdles that we have to get over on the sovereign immunity point, I'm not gonna beat around the bush, they are substantial. You we do have arguments, we will be making them, but the sovereign immunity's defense that they raised is a formidable one. Our point that we've been making to Washington is that when you have a coordinated global effort from 31 different sovereigns, 30 different countries, the member states of the EU, the United Kingdom, Australia, and there are some smaller entities that have similar rules that might want to try the same thing, New Zealand and Singapore in particular, and that are purporting to have extraterritorial effect in the United States.

[37:41] Marty Bent: Yeah. Well, you mentioned companies both large and small. And earlier you mentioned the fact that 4Cham was described as their servers being a bunch of Mac minis connected to each other in a closet. Obviously, Elon and X have been in the news in recent months because the European Parliament, I don't know if they sued them, they're simply finding them.

[38:01] Preston Byrne: find them. Yeah, the commission, European Commission, which is the executive branch agency of the European Union just issued a fine for violating their various rules. And that completely violates the First Amendment. It's not enforceable here.

[38:15] Marty Bent: So there's now, since X has business operations around the world, maybe servers and other places that doesn't instill, the First Amendment still protects them.

[38:24] Preston Byrne: It protects them in the United States and it certainly doesn't protect them in the EU, right? But the issue with the global companies that they have is they, so my clients, I have a very easy job, right? They're entirely US based. All of their assets are US Citus. All of their servers are in the United States. And so from our point of view, when you have that foreign intrusion, It's a very simple analysis, right? The analysis is no thanks, we're not doing this. You have no power here. Well, the company like X or Google or Facebook, they have very meaningful footprints outside of the United States.

[40:30] Preston Byrne: And so we are, you know, to a certain extent, we're in a privileged position because we're able to be the tip of the spear because we have these structure, you know, the operations of my clients are structured in such a way that it offers a very significant and meaningful defense to these foreign censorship attempts that a company like Google or Facebook is vulnerable to. So, you know, it's and it's it's a whole of because we're not doing this, you know, I am doing this just for my clients, right. But it just so happens that. the solution that would save my clients from this sort of thing would also save any other American company at the same time. So the entire tech industry will benefit if a law is enacted which protects these tiny American companies as we proposed it, because ultimately a law that protects a tiny American company should also protect a big one in exactly the same way that it protects the small one.

[41:22] Marty Bent: good to hear. It's so crazy that we've gotten to this point because it seems like in looking at this, it seems existential for free speech on the internet. And I think it's not going to go one of two ways. I think there's many ways it can go. Do you see the potential for bifurcation of the internet, particularly on the lines of free speech?

[41:44] Preston Byrne: I do, but I think if- What Grana is designed to do is it's designed to make the Europeans own the consequences of their censorship. So at the moment, the Europeans have sought to outsource censorship through they've introduced several layers of intermediation between themselves and the censorship by saying, well, we expect a tech company to comply with these duties. And if you don't comply with these duties require you right. It's a fact to commit acts of censorship in the European Union, in the UK and on your servers in the United States. If you don't comply with those duties, We won't necessarily order you to remove a particular piece of content, but we will find you to disincentivize you from disobeying us again or not carrying out those duties sufficiently well.

[43:24] Preston Byrne: out of your country and something the United States has no say over is whether you DNS block particular pieces of content or domains. So if you want to, if you really think censorship is that important, what you need to do is you need to do it yourself. You need to hire armies of state employed moderators. You need to troll the internet for content you disagree with. You need to block it. And when a user seeks to navigate to it, it won't get served. That is the type of censorship that we have no say over because it is purely domestic and it doesn't extend outside of your borders.

[45:42] Marty Bent: You

[45:54] Preston Byrne: memes to them and all the rest of it. But the humiliation is the point, right? We're sending them Pepe memes and we're sending them funny emails and we're not treating this seriously because they're not treating it seriously because they're not using international procedures to serve these notices. They're not bringing lawsuits in the United States as plaintiffs as we would expect to enforce their fines. They're just pretending that they can go do whatever they want in the UK and that whatever they do in the UK is going to have domestic effect in the US, which for any lawyer who has ever done anything cross-border ever, any lawyer who's done that will know, right?

[48:03] Preston Byrne: for ourselves. And ideally, right, by doing that, what we do is we raise the political temperature in the UK for law reform because people will navigate to something on their phone, it'll get intercepted, there will be mistakes, there will be errors, and they'll say, this is crazy, why can, you know, why in the United States am I allowed to have a phone? that doesn't do this, but in the UK I've got this nerf device that's run by the state and that calls home to the police anytime I decide to go look at a porn website. I think that that's where we're, but if the UK wants to do that, that is their decision, but we need them to be owning the political cost of it rather than imposing that cost on American citizens.

[48:43] Marty Bent: Yeah, I want to go down now is the NGO thing because we were in the United States TFTC this channel we were subject to this type of mechanism, the center for countering digital hate. They put us on a list of climate deniers because we've had client climate scientists who disagree with the mainstream mainstream idea behind cataclysmic

[48:53] Preston Byrne: Richie. They came after you?

[49:10] Marty Bent: climate change, so they put us on the list and they sent it to YouTube and they had algorithms that were scraping our transcripts and they highly recommended to YouTube that they demonetize the channel and take down our climate related content. I mean, point being is like this NGO sort of layered mechanism existed here in the United States too, not too long ago.

[49:32] Preston Byrne: I mean, you're allowed to advocate for censorship in the United States, right? That's something that you're permitted to do. But I think the problem with a group like CCDH is that they work hand in glove with the foreign regulators to censor American citizens, right? So they consult with groups, Ofcom and with the European Commission and groups like that. And they will doubtlessly be one of the entities that Ofcom listens to under the super complaints regime, where they're seeking to censor content in the United States. And so they're, you you can advocate for censorship There was actually a lawsuit over this. X sued CCDH and X lost the lawsuit because they said, listen, this is strategic lawsuit against public participation.

[51:52] Preston Byrne: tell the foreign states, hey, come after this particular company, right? We want that company taken out. com, right? And they said, well, it's content which is harmful for children, On gab. Well, gab is an 18 plus website, doesn't focus on children's content, doesn't permit adult content. And its content moderation policy is aligned with the First Amendment. The likelihood, right? Then it doesn't have any apps in app stores or anything like that. It's not widely used. That company was targeted for political reasons. because they host wrong thing, the UK state and that the NGOs who advise the British state don't like. And that is the function that they serve.

[53:59] Preston Byrne: the National Threat Operations Center because a post was reported by a user as potentially presenting a threat. The tip went to FBI Entoc at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night, 10 22 on the Saturday night. We get a phone call back from the National Threat Operations Center in West Virginia saying, hey, could you please send us the relevant data? We're on the job, right? So you have this, these companies are actually really responsible and they're actually very efficient at responding when it matters, which is when you actually have a crime being committed where they are not responsible, right? Is when they're hosting. wrong thing that the British state thinks is corrosive to British society, but which in the United States is constitutionally protected.

[56:08] Marty Bent: Yeah, I wear my CCDH being on that list as a badge of honor. I'm a new climate denier according to them. But again, thing of solutions, it would be ideal if we didn't have to do any of this and if these countries would just enact better free speech laws. Moving back to the UK, you have sort of presented a free speech law for the UK that

[56:14] Preston Byrne: You should. I have, yeah. Yes. So I'm pretty active in the UK free speech movement. I could have been a British citizen. My father was a British citizen. I elected not to do that because I kind of saw the way the wind was blowing at the relevant time. And I said, you know, I think having a British passport is really not in my interest. So maybe at some point I'll go back, you naturalize and become a citizen again or become a citizen for the first time. But in the meantime, you know, I enjoy the diplomatic and legal cover that the United States affords me.

[56:38] Marty Bent: could fix this problem. What's going on there?

[57:07] Preston Byrne: But I wrote something called the UK Free Speech Act in 2020, which essentially creates a First Amendment style principle. It's not the same. It's not coextensive. The language isn't the same. It's not designed to be as extensive because that's a different country with different rules and different practices. But essentially, it says that the First Amendment should apply to spoken or written expression. So you should be able to say anything and you should be able to write anything in accordance with other kinds of expressive conduct. We can leave that to one side. It's up to their courts to figure out whether they want to extend that principle that way or not.

[59:05] Preston Byrne: by more than one and fewer than three political organizations in the United Kingdom. And there are people within those organizations who are looking at it very seriously, not for immediate enactment, because the labor government is never going to do it because they don't believe in free speech. But after a general election, that is something which might be on the table as part of a great repeal bill and potentially doing a large scale reform of the UK's institutions and its laws to make the place freer, more competitive, and just generally nicer place to live. So, you know, that proposal is out there. It's being it's been chewed on by relevant people.

[1:01:16] Preston Byrne: I've been doing this, as I said, I've been a free speech activist for 15 years, and I've been pushing on the foreign free speech issue as a practitioner for 10. These fights are play out over decades, right? And so the objective that I have is not, you can't, how to put it, how to put this, when you're trying to steer a state in a particular direction, you cannot do it yourself to start. And you cannot do it at once. Right. So what we've seen with the federal response to what's going on with the foreign censorship, this has been a very, very, very, very, very long process involving a lot of different people in a lot of different places, both writers and journalists like Mike Benz and Mike Schellenberger, lawyers like myself and Ron Coleman, politicians and political activists throughout the federal system have been aware of this.

[1:03:32] Marty Bent: Is the political will there from the populace in the UK, particularly people fed up with this, or is there a lot of cognitive dissonance sort of just go along?

[1:03:42] Preston Byrne: I think that there's a lot of muddling along. I think that most people don't care enough because it doesn't affect them. The issue is, does it affect enough people? Does it affect a substantial enough minority of the population enough for that minority to exercise the political will to overcome the political apathy of the majority? And I think the answer to that question right now is yes. So you don't need to get free speech over the line in the UK. You do not need to have 90 % of the country turning into ardent First Amendment activists. You need about 50 to 60 % to not care.

[1:05:32] Marty Bent: Good. Because Matt, Matt O'Dell and I were joking about it yesterday on Rapid Hull recap. were highlighting Peter McCormick's nonviolent sort of opt out campaign that he's been on. if you go and read, he's trying, he's basically throwing his hands up and saying, isn't working. Like we need to protest peacefully and nonviolently to make a change here in the UK. And we were joking about how it was so obvious that he was self censoring himself.

[1:05:43] Preston Byrne: What's he been doing?

[1:06:02] Marty Bent: on the website.

[1:06:02] Preston Byrne: I think Peter's gonna be, I'm gonna put this on the record. I think Peter's gonna be prime minister one day. I actually think that one day he's gonna be prime minister. That's my most controversial English political opinion is I think one day he's just so, he's such a good guy, right? And he's such a good communicator.

[1:06:09] Marty Bent: You think so?

[1:06:28] Preston Byrne: I've known him for years and years when he was doing his own Bitcoin specific podcast before he became the UK's version of Joe Rogan. he's just such a good guy that like, he's the kind of person where you want to, where I'd like to be is in 15 years, right? Looking back and Peter's the prime minister because he's just such a good guy and he cares so much about the country. that for whatever reason circumstances and his and Peter collide and he winds up becoming PM. I think that that's my long shot for PM in 15 years. I think that he's actually gonna do it. That's my hunch.

[1:07:03] Marty Bent: I would love to see that. It's been incredible watching his progression. I mean, obviously, he's moved back to Bedford and really walking away from what Bitcoin did, launching the Peter McCormick show and really leaning into the political topics of the day over in the UK to try and make a difference. It's admirable at the very least, right? It's been fun to watch.

[1:07:27] Preston Byrne: Well, think he's learning. He's learning a lot about politics by keeping it hyper local on Bedford. Right. And so what he's doing, it's an interesting kind of exercise in, in teaching himself, right. Exactly what he's, what he's doing is he's mapping. the battle space. Right. So he's running into all of the craziness about how UK local government works and figuring out how everything's broken and how all their attitudes are attitudes of learned helplessness. So like Keir Starmer is the prime example. Parliament, in theory, legal theory, right, has absolute power to do whatever it wants. It could it could proclaim, right, by an act of parliament that the moon is made of cheese and that everyone has to refer to the moon being made of cheese.

[1:09:20] Preston Byrne: self-imposed barriers. And I think Peter's probably running into that, a lot of that, dealing with local councils where it's like, hey, there's a, you know, here's a problem downtown. There's a lot of crime. What do you want to do about it? And they're like, well, sorry, we can't, we can't do anything. So Peter goes and hires a private police force, right, to go and patrol the downtown and the problem goes away, right? Because he can see the problem clearly for what it is, understand what the solution is, deploy that solution at speed. And then the problem disappears, but the local governments just don't work that way.

[1:10:19] Marty Bent: Yeah, he's got a campaign right now to, again, it's funny, reading the website was a hoot because you could tell he was self-censoring to make sure he wasn't making the government mad.

[1:10:39] Preston Byrne: Yeah. Everybody over there does. They all do. that's if I were working over there now, I'm an English solicitor, right? I'm a lawyer over there. If I were over there now, I would not. I'm not flying over there now for context. I'm not flying over there because I'm afraid I'll be arrested the second or not arrested, but at least search the second I land. because my clients are conceivably criminal targets for the UK's online safety regime, right? And my computer conceivably, it doesn't, but conceivably it has relevant information. And so they could use counterterrorism laws, for example, to stop me when I enter the border, search my devices, detain me for 12 hours, and then put me on a plane and fly me back, straight back to New York.

[1:12:20] Marty Bent: Yeah, it's, that's what I wear. Cause I would like to actually go over to Peter's, conference next year, but he wrote this. I no longer consent the moral case for a peaceful revolution. he's got a whole website. Yeah. I think he's trying to make a movement out of it. so it's, it's interesting and it's funny that not funny. It's just crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. It's crazy how Peter ended up in this position too.

[1:12:42] Preston Byrne: It's sad. It's sad. Yeah. It's sad. I mean, he's a smart guy who cares. eventually, eventually what happens is if you care about the world, you get involved, right? And you get involved sometimes. Peter doesn't need to do this, right? He could keep running the podcast business, not have opinions, and probably make a lot more money than the trajectory that he seems to be hinting he might go down. But, know, that's what happens if you care, right? You eventually start making decisions that affect your ability to make money, right? But they are, you're not optimizing for money at that point, you're optimizing for outcomes. And I strongly suspect that Peter will wind up optimizing for outcomes rather than money. That's my, just knowing, you know, given the aggregate sum of every interaction of algorithm over 10 years, it seems logical and almost inevitable that he will do that. So, but we'll see.

[1:13:43] Marty Bent: Well, some people say real recognize real, it seems like you're real in this sense to where you've dedicated a lot of your life to pro bono work and the defense of free speech, particularly here in America and hopefully outside of our border. again, upload and smoke up your ass. Thank you for all the work you've been doing on that front. It's extremely important. These are existential. You There's less than a handful of us. That's my mic. Yeah. With that note, any calls to action to the audience? Anybody who's listening to this who's inspired, what can they do to get involved? Your formative shit poster, don't sell yourself short.

[1:22:47] Marty Bent: Alright, we're gonna win, freaks.