Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Secular Foxhole podcast. Today we have author Warren Fahy, and Warren is The New York Times bestselling author. He managed bookstore at age 19, was a movie and books database designer for five companies, helped coin the word mullet for the notorious hairstyle. Now inducted in the Oxford English Dictionary. That's pretty cool. The lead writer for Rockstar Games, Red Dead, Revolver, and wrote comedy for robots in Hong Kong.
Now that's even more interesting. How did you get that gig, Warren? Well, just by trying out for the gig. And it was a great company called, Welly Robotics and had tons of fun working for them. They just made toys and they were manufactured in mainland China, so they had offices in Hong Kong, and I would visit there and work with all the different robotics teams to create the dialogue trees for their robots. I see. Now you've written, I think, Magenta, which is probably our main focus today.
But you've written, I think, four novels, correct? Let me think five novels. I missed one. I'm sorry. Magenta, Magenta. It's written in the vein of Orwell's and what I think would be Ayn Rand's Anthem. What did you want to convey to the reader about your color coded control system or credit system? Is that what. Yeah. Well, I think that out of all my novels, the Kor is probably closer to Anthem, and then this would be closer to We the Living.
Probably it's just an advanced, totalitarian dictatorship in America. And so the entire technological Internet system and network has been completely taken over by the government. And people are assigned according to their journeys and the things that they say that are overheard by their devices. They are coated with a color that reflects how close to the ideal purple badge of citizens are and how far, much farther they drift from that.
Their ability to access various public services diminishes and doors of opportunity close the further they get away from the ideal political stance. Cancel culture, in other words. Sure. Yeah. Cancel culture and the social credit kind of system. So what inspired you to write that then? Were you just taking headlines and running with it or today's headline? It was almost kind of the opposite. I mean, I've been working on the book since I was myself 17. I wrote the first draft when I was 17.
I see. So that's quite decades ago. And all along I've been trying to stay ahead of the headlines. The headlines have been chasing this book all the way to the finish line. And it was very difficult to stay ahead of it because every time I would come up with some monstrous thing that society could do, society did it. So I had to keep pushing the goal posts further and further and further out to try and make this a cautionary tale that hadn't already happened.
So that was the difficulty to keep it from being overtaken by events. Yeah, I'm wondering, and this may or may not be related to the novel, just in general, do you think people are naturally gravitate to freedom or do they? Well, that's a really good philosophical question. I would say that the United States, America in general, post Enlightenment, was one of the very first civilizations that encouraged independent thinking.
Yes. So it used to be that it was cool to be the rebel in school, and it used to be you stand aside and that's the person who's really cool. Now it's cool to conform. And it's very much frowned on to be a rebel who doesn't conform. So that has shifted. And I think for the first time in American history, that's now becoming the case.
Whereas previously, America was the complete exception to the role of the society in human history in the sense that it was go out, innovate, be the first one with a new idea, become rich, go out there. The whole American culture was about that individualistic pursuit, and the rest of the world really was never that way. Yeah, I think well, we got a century and a half of hearing being bombarded with let the government take care of you or let it reach its climax, I guess. Sure.
And the verification of anyone who's hesitant to jump in and do what everyone else is doing. They are the scapegoat now. They're the reason everything's going wrong is that they're just not conforming with everyone else. But American culture. It's movies, it's music. Everything about it has been completely against that idea and has been rewarding the innovator and the unique individual who strikes out on his own in new directions which create progress for everyone that is being lost to people.
The kids aren't being taught that anymore, even in the United States. That's what the book is about. It's about a last loaner who ends up attracting other likeminded loaners from different parts of the school's social strata. They become a sort of triumvirate standing alone and against the current trends. Yeah. It's been two or three months since I finished the book. The general store owner, I'll call him he gives the books, the old dusty books to your hero. And heroine.
That was kind of a neat kept them fueled, if you will, spiritual. Yeah. He's a representative of the old immigrant America that came to the United States seeking freedom from the world that they had left behind. And that immigrant, that bourgeois business owner who repairs shoes, is that symbol of that America and who is remembering what America used to be and is passing that along to these kids. Yeah, that's a great section. One of the things that stood out to me, too.
And correct me if I copied this wrong, but I think that I'll say the evil character has quotes or I'll quote you, the vaccine is the disease unquote. So look at Covid. How did that happen? And is this what we're getting as shots? Is it actually a vaccine or what is it? Well, in the book, it's a literary device and it's not meant to specifically refer to any current events. But the idea of it of simply controlling people, medically or otherwise, is what's trying to be conveyed there.
That the blind obedience is a grave danger that people stop using their own autonomy over themselves is really the first and last battle when it's lost that's it at that point forward, you have no recourse.
So this last literary device in the novel of this device called free will, which is a literal object that has a switch on one side and that will confer the power to an individual to end this entire system and something that they built in as a backdoor to all of their global networks because they were idealistic teenagers themselves one day in the past.
Yeah, in the past, at least to me, that was a great contrast or plot twist, if you will, because you start the book with the two trillionaires, I guess they part their ways and then it goes into but frankly, is quite grim the story. But you're portraying what actually is grim in my mind or in my opinion, when you've got the boot on your neck, so to speak. Right. Well, Ayn Rand said she couldn't even imagine trying to write a romantic novel in the United States post 1970.
She looked around and said, I couldn't ride Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead or anything in this culture. And yeah, it was difficult to do. What you have to do is address the fact that the culture itself is poisoned and how do your heroes survive and even succeed in that kind of a culture? That's what the book is really about. Of course, you have to grapple with the depressing results of a society in which the individual continuously is subverted.
So that's what the book was really meant to do is to say to those teenagers who feel disaffected or who don't want to just simply comply and conform with all everyone else. There are certain independent minded people that this book is for it's for them, so that they can see, oh, I'm not crazy. I'm not nuts. I'm holding onto an ideal by continuing to have personal integrity and not just going along because everyone else is doing it. I have to use my own mind designed to agree.
And those individuals needed a book like this, I believe. And so I wrote it for them. And we'll see how many there are like that now out there that would enjoy this book. The world itself is competing with the book, obviously, because it's almost trying to be worse than the book right now. It's actually not funny. But yes, it's not funny. I mean, Covid came out and then all the ways that that was taken advantage of to strip people of their first and second and fourth amendment.
It just went on and on a wild pogrom against freedom and then also a giant campaign against individuals just simply wanting to use their own minds to agree or disagree that itself become a subject of vilification in the most profound way. And then the internet started censoring and canceling people. And because of what they said.
One of the things that got me in such a fix on Facebook was early on and I think in March 2 years ago, I just wrote one very simple scientific question, which was why are we quarantining the healthy? It has never been done before in history. And so as I was typing it, that sentence got circled in a red line and disappeared before I could post it. Holy cow. And I did it again. I Typed it again and it got circled again by red and disappeared. I couldn't even post it.
This was at the outset of when this was all happening. And then of course, when I wasn't able to write any replies, my letters of whatever I was typing would actually come out backwards. So I had to learn how to type backwards to put a reply in. And then it went on to the next step where all the letters just stacked up right on top of each other. And so it just would make a block of black after a whole sentence was Typed. And now, of course, I can't even type a single letter.
That's very troubling. Yeah. And I used to still be able to direct message, but I can't do that anymore either. So that just recently, I think in the last week or two they took that away. So I can't even reply to people who direct message me. Well, we have to look for alternatives to Facebook, obviously. Yeah, we do. And in Magenta, what I'm positing is that these groups are like Noah Rake are working with government. Right.
That's a key issue in the book is that they are working hand in glove with governments all over the world to provide exactly what they want and use social media as the tool of government. And yes, they're businessmen and yes, they're trillionaires. There's been a lot of inflation since now. And they are ostensibly entrepreneurs, but they're pretty much indistinguishable from government operators. Yeah. And of course capitalism is blamed for that instead of
what it actually is, which is fascism, of course. Yes. So that's just another way of blaming individualism, right? Capitalism is individualism. And so if they can attack that for everything, then they would constantly do that. But in this world, the government is quite happy to work with Noah Rake and previously with Sapphire Hunt as well, and using their great visionary technology to build chains around the human race that will last forever. Go ahead.
Yeah, well, I know that Ayn Rand was particularly disagreed with Orwell in the sense that she did not believe that a Communist or socialist or topdown dictatorship could ever allow for the technological innovations necessary to have such a controlled police state. She didn't believe that it was capable of providing that in Magenta. It's these entrepreneurs that are working for free countries that are relatively free, at least for them to be able to innovate and create new products.
And they're working with governments to bestow those tools on the governments that naturally wouldn't have come up with them themselves. That's what the Nazis did, obviously. Right.
They understood that if they let their entrepreneurs come up with all of the tools that they wanted, that was a much more efficient way of doing it, and that the communists would never get there because they destroyed their entrepreneurial infrastructure to such a degree by just simply employing communism and killing all the people who own the factories and knew how to run them.
That was destined to be a basket case society, whereas the fascist society says, no, let's leave the brilliant entrepreneurs in place and they will develop the weapons and the tools that we need. Right. Well, let us tell them what to do instead of them. Yeah, right. And the ones who don't want to do that, well, they're not going to succeed. We'll make sure they don't. You've seen all kinds of things. You now regularly see politicians come out and say, I think Rumble should be shut down. Right.
The Senator the other day came out and said that Rumble should be shut down if it's going to allow certain news to be shown on that network. So politicians have lost all scruples about saying how social media companies should run themselves. And that is a menacing thing. That means that there's going to be tax repercussions and regulatory repercussions if you're not playing along with what the government says. And that can be the
difference between succeeding and failing. Yes. At the same time, though, what I'll call positive currents in the culture or in society are hopefully gaining ground as the progress movement. And I think one of the good things that has come out of Covid is that parents have been exposed to the horrors that they're exposed to at school, at public schools. Yes, you're right. That's a very interesting blowback. I don't think that they anticipated it.
And there's a lot of great reasons to be hopeful that there will be the people having an awakening to what really has been going on and take back their freedom. I agree. A few moments ago you mentioned The Kor. One of your books is closer to Anthem. Can you send a standalone or is that part of a series? Yeah, it's a standalone. And The Kor is about the rarefication of concepts. And it was an idea that struck me as sort of the central, most primitive kind of mysticism, as being kind of Platonism.
In other words, we came up with words. And what is the problem of universals, as Plato dealt with and Aristotle and every philosopher has had to deal with is how do words connect to reality? How does the intellectual world connect to the physical world? And the only way I could express the idea I was thinking of was to tell a fable, a parable, a story. And that's the Kor. And it's about how, for instance, we come up with a word like the community or the collective, and there is no such thing.
That is a word that is a mental bucket in which we put all people present, future and fictitious into one word so that we can use it in our minds in an efficient way when we're talking about the human race. But we don't mean that there is this thing called the human race and that all of us need to sacrifice to it that's mystical Platonism by elevating an ideal or an abstraction above the actual reference that that abstraction is supposed to refer to. So we believe in humanity, right?
Well, that means we believe in human beings. But do we put humanity on a pedestal as this giant Platonic ideal? And then now all real human beings have to bow down to this concept, this word, it's just a mental convenience.
So that as sort of the most primitive collectivist and mystic idea of taking words and misconstruing them as being something in and of themselves being an actual reality, taking the word society or the collective or any group concept like that and making it more important than the individuals who comprise that abstractions meaning.
Now, talking about this in terms of in philosophical terms isn't very effective, but the Kor is written in almost monosyllabic language in order to break it down into the most simple demonstration of why that derails a human society, why that kind of thinking will ultimately enslave and destroy society. I see. So in that kind of way, it's kind of like anthem in the sense that it's a stripped down allegory. Okay, great. I'm putting that on my list. Yeah, it's a fun story.
Plus, it's just a lot of fun. Well, that's good. Now, I know that Fragment seems to be your most popular novel. Yes. Well, for years I've been writing these literary novels, and people kept saying, Why don't you just write something super commercial like Jurassic Park or something? And I thought I was working on things that are far more serious and important. But finally, one day I just said, I don't do that. Why shouldn't I? Right.
Because getting literary novels published is a very difficult thing to do. But why don't I just write something that's Super, super commercial and not toss that suggestion aside as though it's just beneath me? Right. And so I dug in, and it is a difficult thing to do. We can laugh it off as a serious literary author, but I have a lot of respect for Michael Crichton.
What he delivered something that was actually quite challenging to do, and it's interesting when I did do it and turned it in immediately, within four days of my agent sending the manuscript around, Random House had already offered me a million dollar deal. Oh my. And that was after 35 years of working and toiling in the vineyard as a literary author. When I flew to London, because the book was published in the UK by Harper Collins.
And I flew to London to meet them, my publishers, and they had a nice wine reception for me. And one woman came up and introduced herself and congratulated me and thanked me for writing Fragment. And she said, how did you do it? We get 3000 wannabe Michael Crichton manuscripts a year and they're all dreadful. And I said, Well, I have enormous respect for Mr. Crichton. I took it very seriously how he went about writing and creating a book like that.
And she nodded her head and she seemed to have tears in her eyes and she left. And then after the meeting, some people rushed up to us and they said, that was Michael Crichton's editor. Oh, my gosh. And he just died. So I met Michael Craig's editor on the day he died. So a lot of people immediately said, oh, well, you're pretty eager to fill Crichton's shoes. Of course, that was the last thing from my mind, of course, but a lot of people resent that. Oh, here he comes.
And then, of course, also, this was at a time when the Pirating problem was not taken seriously by publishers. So Fragment was pirated over 150,000 times. Oh, my. And of course, those were copies that anybody could send to anyone because they weren't copy protected. So millions of people could easily have gotten the book for free. Plus, the entire economy collapsed at the moment that the book was published. 20, 07.
2008 in there. Yeah. So fiction novels, actually, their sales levels dropped 40% across the board instantly. Nobody was buying novels. When everything had bottomed out, their stock portfolios had collapsed and so forth. So, yeah, it was just sort of a tragedy of errors, one thing after another. But yeah, I did get it published. It was published in 18 languages around the world and many people read it for free. Well, good for them, but yeah, not good for you.
Not good for me. Yes. Let's circle back. I got, I think, one more, hopefully a related question. Let's circle back around to Magenta. And as you explained, you've tried to keep ahead of world events. When you started this at a young age, this book, have you glanced at or read anything about the great Reset from this Klaus Schwab character? Yeah, I've seen that. And it's fascinating. He recently came out with a comment that was really eerie. He said that free will is destructive. Oh, really?
That was Klaus Schwab. And it almost seemed like he was aiming the comment directly at me or any free thinking individual then or any free thinking individual. But of course, the device that's literally called free will and Magenta is the thing that takes down the entire global tyranny. And so it's fascinating that he said that I am friends. I was friends, and I was befriended by Eduard Habsburg on Twitter. His Imperial Highness the Habsburg Prince. Really? Yeah.
His great great great grandfather was Mozart's patron. I see. And, yeah, he just really liked the book. And I know he's good friends with Klaus Schwab, and I had sent him an early copy of Magenta, which he sort of recoiled from. Warren, I can't read that book. I know what it's about. It's about social credit and all that. I know I prefer your biological thrillers, and that was before Covid and everything else.
But I got to the point where I was so badly shadow banned on Twitter that even though I don't know, a thousand people followed me or something, I had people writing to me saying, oh, dude, I can barely get to your Twitter feed. They've got you locked down really hard. So I just left Twitter. I was like, what's the point?
All right, I know that you and our good friends with one of our regular guests, James Valiant, and you've co written a book with him called Creating Christ, how the Romans Invented Christianity. That was also a long term project, if I remember correct. Yes, indeed. Yeah. I had just ridden the Kor. I guess it was like right around there when he came to me with these ideas after researching the New Testament, which had always been a subject of interest to James.
And he found the parallels between Josephus description of the destruction of the temple and Jesus prophecies of the same thing. And it occurred to him that both texts had been written concurrently at the same time after the Jewish war, during the reign of the Flavian emperors. And that set the fuse. And we started researching for the next 30 years. Yeah. One thing after another until finally we hit the ultimate.
I put one last spade to Earth, and there was the vein of gold in the symbolism that the Flavians and the Christians shared exactly in common with each other for three centuries. That really did put the final star on top of the Christmas tree. I guess that is a great story in itself. Martin, do you have anything to chime in on here? Yeah, I think we will do a follow up, Warren, because I try to be optimistic and realistic and objective.
So all the things that you have touched on here, I mean, both your victories, but also your challenges here we have a place, we have created a digital town hall where we could continue the conversation and also how you could support independent but also other content creators like yourself with Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin directly. So we will talk more about that in the near future, I think. Okay.
That sounds great because I see opportunities there, but also we see the challenges and see what's going on in the world. So I think that's for now and I must applaud your how should you say you're not giving up? You had this idea and perseverance. Yeah, perseverance. Thanks. And I found you when I searched on Amazon's Audible, I found Escape America. I wonder what is this book? And I search on your website. I couldn't find the title and then you responded that
this was, you could say, your first take on it. Yeah. That was a prototype of Magenta, I think. Keep up your good work and we will spread the good word and see how we could come back with new things in the future. Do you want to tell the listener, the nonconformist and the free thinking individual where I find you in cyberspace without Big Brother and others without any spoiler alert controlling the system here? Yes.
Well, you can see the only place on where I can go and I can freely say some things now and then is Free Atlantis.com. It is a social media site, and there's a lot of good people who tweet the equivalent of tweeting there. So that's Free Atlantis.com. And I'm listed there, and I actually get to say things there. I never heard of it. Yeah, we'll check it out. Now, do you have your own website and things like that, or do you want to talk? Yeah, there's WarrenFahy.com.
And there's also a website for Creating Christ, CreatingChrist.com. And I am listed at Goodreads and I'm technically on Gettr and a bunch of other different social media places, but I don't do much there. I lost my trust in the social media sites as far as how many of them turn out to be shaking the government's hand behind the scenes and censoring. And it turns out one after another is either threatened by some sort of infrastructure, some sort of like Amazon controls its platform or its base.
And then if they go astray they end up getting into trouble that way, or you find out that certain information is being shared and I'm just turned off to the whole thing. So Free Atlantis is the place that I go and they don't do that. And then hopefully that's we're going to see more options coming up in the future, because I think there is an excess away from these major sites that have been found to be to have their own agendas. And that's not what a
platform should be doing, obviously. Yeah. Well, again, I hope that we created our platform digital town hall. And also about this podcasting two point. Oh, that's very interesting with value for value model. So we'll come back to that in the near future, Warren. That's what Magenta is all about. It's about what that means to the human race. And we need to make decisions about it now before it becomes too powerful to break out of very true again.
There's also positive currency in the culture so once they organize I think we have a very, very good chance. Well, I think in a free market the bad guys have no chance. It's just a question of how corrupted is that free market and how heavy is the hand of government? Well, that is true too. Capitalism is hanging on by a thread capitalism means the separation of state and economics. Yes, that separation. We need to make that a much brighter defining dividing line. That's true.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, Warren Fahy, author of Magenta, Fragment and the Kor and others other great books has been our guest today and Warren, thanks for Manning the foxhole with us today. Well, thank you, Blair. Thank you, Martin. Thank you very much. All right, we have audience in downloads in 50 countries, Warren. So hopefully that will boost your sales. Oh, fantastic. That's great, seventy now. Thank you.
Okay, so we'll spread the good word so thanks again, Warren for taking your time and talk to you soon again. My pleasure. Look forward to it. All right, Warren. Hey, thanks again. Bye bye. Okay, bye bye. You.