The PayPal Presidency Part II: Building the “Dark” Technate with Iain Davis

Episode Transcript
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WW (00:18):
Hey there and welcome to Unlimited Hangout. I'm your
host. Whitney Webb. SinceTrump's 2024 election win, the
rise of a particular clique ofSilicon Valley CEOs and venture
capitalists has been quiteobvious, at least for anyone
paying attention. The core ofthis clique are the most
prominent members of the socalled PayPal Mafia, whose rise
to prominence in Silicon Valleywas inextricably linked to their

(00:41):
early executive roles at PayPal,the early FinTech leader that
quickly dollarized the internetin the name of creating a new
world currency, and consultedwith every American three letter
agency they could get a meetingwith prior to their launch, an
unlimited Hangouts, firstinstallment of this series
interrogating the politicalpower of the PayPal Mafia,
entitled The Pay Pal presidency,we examined this group's

(01:04):
ambitions for healthcare andbiotechnology and their efforts
to guide and arguably subvertthe Make America healthy again,
or Maha movement toward policiesand therapeutics that they
ostensibly opposed during theCOVID era. Today, we will be
examining the philosophies andpolitical theories that drive
the most prominent members ofthis so called mafia, namely

(01:25):
Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, andhow these are turning into
concrete US policies through theinfluence of Musk personally, as
well as Thiel proteges likecurrent vice president JD Vance.
Over the last six months, majorefforts in media, both
mainstream and allegedlyindependent, have sought to
portray these wealthybillionaires as the quote,
unquote counter elites, arguingthat they represent a major

(01:47):
challenge to the elites that hadrun things prior to the US 2024,
election, while these so calledcounter elites, led by the
PayPal Mafia, have sought toestablish themselves as
significantly different, Atleast in cultural terms, is anti
woke, for example, are therepolitical ambitions and
philosophies really functionallythat different from those of the

(02:08):
elites they have supposedlydeposed? Are Thiel and Musk
really libertarian leaning andliberty minded as they have
claimed? What motivates them andwhat would their ideal society
look like? It's important wefind out, because now more than
ever. Between their wealth andnow obvious political power,
they have the ability to shapeour political realities in
unprecedented ways. Joining meto discuss this and more is Iain

(02:31):
Davis. Iain is an independentinvestigative journalist,
contributor to UnlimitedHangout, and author of several
books. He is from the UK, andhis latest book is called the
Manchester attack. His recenttwo part series published at
Unlimited Hangout, the darkMaga, Gov Corp, technate, parts
one and two delve deep into thephilosophy behind these would be
technocrats, many of the membersof the PayPal Mafia and their

(02:54):
house, philosophers like CurtisYarvin and Nick Land. Thanks for
joining me today, Iain, andwelcome back to Unlimited
Hangout.

ID (03:01):
Thank you very much, Whitney, it's a pleasure to be
here.

WW (03:03):
Well, as I noted just a minute ago, since the last US
election, there's been a goodamount of spin claiming that the
oligarchs now lined up behindTrump and his vice president JD
Vance, are counter elites, andsomehow different from previous
elites who we have been toldhave now been cast out into the
shadows by American voters. Sowhat are your thoughts on this

(03:24):
narrative regarding the socalled counter elites?

ID (03:29):
Well, they're not counter elites. They're, I mean,
they're, they're oligarchs inthe, you know, the sense of, you
know, the real sense of theword, as in someone that's
converted immense wealth intopolitical power and authority.
That's clearly what they'redoing. So I think it's fair to
call them oligarchs, you know,and if we think about how, you
know, the kind of things thatthey're proposing in order to to

(03:52):
to move America forward and makeAmerica great again, and
certainly in doing so, obviouslythat has a massive impact around
the world. There is, there's,you know, it's the same kind of
agenda that we've that we'refamiliar with from, you know,
perhaps the other side of thecoin, you could say the the sort
of Swabian side of the side ofthe coin, in terms of, you know,

(04:17):
rolling out top down, controlledthings like technocracy, you
know, as an OP, I would say it'san operating system for a newly
proposed kind of privatizedmodel, model of government,
which is, which is pretty muchthe same as the kind of
oligarchy control mechanism thatthat that is on the other side

(04:41):
of the fence, you know, if wethink about perhaps, you know,
traditionally, people likeGeorge Soros and so forth, that
people are kind of very wary of,and I think, you know, in in
presenting themselves as thesekind of opponents to the kind of
overreach of. Kind of globalistoligarchy that American,

(05:02):
certainly Republican voters,were opposed to. And I think
that's probably how that they'vemanaged to kind of secure the
political authority within theTrump administration. To the
extent that they have, it'sprecisely because they are
supported by people who want toescape that kind of, what they

(05:23):
consider to be, you know,restricting, kind of globalist
overreach, that what they'vedone really is deliver exactly
that. Well, I say exactly thesame. I think it's fair to say
that what they're proposing interms of what I've called a we,
you know, we're going to go onto talk about something - The

(05:43):
Dark Enlightenment. And alsowe're going to talk about, you
know, that what technocracyreally means in proposing those
kind of systems, what they aresuggesting is arguably the worst
form of top down hierarchicalcontrol, oligarch control ever

(06:04):
envisaged. So So you know, tosay that people that you know,
obviously Republican voters,have voted in opposition to
that, what they've got is, is,is just about as bad as it could
be.

WW (06:19):
Yeah, I tend to agree with you on that, for sure. I really
see, like I said in the introjust a minute ago, the only
difference they seem to actuallyhave is just sort of the
cultural veneer they put overtheir ambitions, and they sort
of cloak themselves in this, youknow, we're anti woke and all of
these things, and that seems tobe the only really major

(06:40):
difference at a fundamentallevel, but I don't really think
it really means anything. Itsort of reminds me of how
Democrats and Republicans in theUnited States tend to
differentiate themselves largelyalong cultural issues, whether
that's abortion or gay rights.And you know, historically,
that's sort of been the main wayto successfully divide and

(07:03):
conquer, and now you're havingthat sort of play out again. But
you know, the exact nature ofthe culture issues has changed
slightly and focused sort of onthese DEI policies and other
things. And you know, when Trumpwas elected and these counter
elites had supposedly come in.You know, there were reports of

(07:24):
CEOs expressing relief, becausenow they can finally say
retarded at board meetingsagain. What a change. But as you
noted, a lot of the actualchange for the rest of us is it
going to be very significant interms of what this new supposed
new crop of elites really hasenvisioned for the United States

(07:48):
and more broadly the world. Soyou mentioned technocracy, of
course, and I think you knowmyself and others have mentioned
that word over the past fewmonths. Obviously yourself
included. And so I think maybeit's a good opportunity to sort
of maybe define what technocracyis, and some of the connections

(08:09):
of prominent figures today, likeElon Musk to this particular
ideology. So would you mindenlightening us, not not darkly
necessarily, but enlightening uswith, you know, some, maybe some
definitions there, yeah.

ID (08:27):
So first, I think it's important to point out that
these people are very much onboard with the idea of
technocracy. So we had a tweet.It was in october 2024, Jeff
Bezos, he posted to Musk, and hesaid, the network state for Mars
is being formed before our eyes,to which Musk replied, The Mars

(08:50):
technocracy. So in reference tothe network state, that was
comes out of a book the networkstate how to start a new country
by Balaji sriniva. Can'tpronounce the guy's name,
Srinivasan. And basicallythat's, that's we're seeing that

(09:12):
come through in policy, in theUS, in the form of, because
what, what Srinivasan was, wassuggesting was kind of zones of
no regulation whereentrepreneurs could,
particularly tech, tech,entrepreneurs would have a free
hand to do whatever they want inthese kind of an idea that has

(09:36):
become now within the Trumpadministration Freedom cities, I

WW (09:40):
sort of understand it as special economic zones on
steroids, where they wouldbasically have sovereign power,
and people that would live therewould enter into agreements with
the city as sort of like aprivate sector entity, and it
would have its own likecryptocurrency and things like
that.

ID (10:00):
Yeah. Yeah, so that's the idea of this, of this network
state, how to start a newcountry. That's, that's what he
was talking about. So, soobviously, in Musk's mind, that
means, you know, what would bethe the way that that would be
managed, and how would that, howwould that kind of
administrative zone work? Well,in obviously, Musk is saying a

(10:20):
technocracy. And he furtherwrote that, you know, I think
something that he published in2019, you know, he made a
comment where he said, we'reaccelerating starship
development to build the Martiantechnocracy. So he's always
there. He's spoken about,openly, spoke about how much he
wants to construct atechnocracy. But obviously, by

(10:41):
putting it in the context ofMars, you know, you're supposed
to think, well, he's not infavor of constructive one on
Earth. But obviously that thatis clearly what they are doing.
So I think the most peoplemisunderstand what technocracy
is. I think, you know, mostpeople, when you say the word
technocracy, they they equate itto what you could call kind of

(11:02):
technocratic governance. Sothis, this idea that that you
have experts that make policydecisions. So, for example, if
we think about what happenedduring COVID 19, you know,
you've got people like Fauci,who's a who's a quote expert in
medical matters. That's that isseen. And I think that's

(11:23):
important that the public areintroduced to this idea of
experts making decisions, andrather than, you know,
necessarily elected politicians.And when you speak to most
people about technocracy, ifthey've got any kind of concept
of what it is, that's normallywhat they what they think it is,
but technocracy is, is is muchmore than that. That is part of

(11:47):
it, but it's much more thanthat. It is a, it is a, a
system, like an operatingsystem, if you like, for the
complete re reconfiguration ofsociety. In fact, it does away
with society entirely, and whatit, what it creates instead? Is
it what it calls a socialmechanism, which, you know, it

(12:08):
came out of the out of theprogressive era. In the 1930s it
was a movement that was headedby people like Howard Scott,
other other people, you know,certainly are people with
oligarch interest. People likeBrzezinski and the Rockefellers
were looking at that idea. Andthe notion was that you would

(12:29):
break society apart completely.You would you would create a
social mechanism based on whatit called the sequence of
functions. So you have theeconomic function, the transport
function, the industrialfunction. This would be overseen
by a continental control. So itso you would do away with all
nation states. You would createsomething called a technate on a

(12:53):
on a continental scale, and thatwould be overseen by a tiny,
small group of people, no morethan 100 people, called called
continental control, and incharge of them, they would
appoint from within their ranksan overall CEO type King that

(13:14):
would be called the continentaldirector. So, but there's so the
level of the degree of socialcontrol and behavioral control
that is inherent to technocracyis unimaginable. Is it's not,
it's not something that mostpeople would could easily relate

(13:34):
to, because it is, it is, it ismore or less pretty unbelievable
that they they are talkingabout, they talk about us as
human animals to be programmedso that we can perform our
function. Are what where we go,what we do, what we eat, will be

(13:55):
entirely controlled by a newform of monetary system and
surveillance that monetarysystem would enable surveillance
now in the 1930s presenting thatpossible kind of the scale of
the bureaucracy suggested bythat was not workable in the
1930s when the originaltechnocrats and the 40s, and

(14:19):
shortly, You know, briefly inthe post war period, it wasn't a
feasible thing. How would youmanage a system like that on
even a national scale, if wejust think about the US, let
alone a continental scale? Butyou know, obviously oligarchs
were looking at that withinterest and thinking, well,
there may come a time, andcertainly burst in skis, the

(14:42):
Technotronic era was very muchtalking about the possibility of
this of technology enabling sucha kind of administrative system
to function. You know, they'vekept an eye on it. They've,
they've followed it. You know,five. With it over the years, I
would very much suggest that,you know, technocracy has been

(15:06):
trialed to a great extent inChina, and now they're, they're
proceeding to roll it outeverywhere, and obviously modern
computer technology AI inparticular, and if we combine
that with digital ID and digitalcurrency, then the possibility

(15:27):
of actually establishingtechnocracy is now, is it is now
a feasible, feasible prospect.And so it's no surprise really
that we've got key technocratslike and I think he is a key
technocrat Musk, you know, so,so influential now in a US

(15:50):
administration.

WW (15:52):
Well, I think it's, it might be fair to refer to him like as
probably the first more or lessformal technocrat at the
executive level in the UnitedStates, someone that's kind of
actively, actively taking thatrole, in the sense that his role
there is ostensibly to maximizeefficiency, which, as you noted

(16:12):
in your piece, this idea, thetechnocratic idea of the human
animal. The goal was to engineerthe behavior of the human
animals and the human animalmasses, I guess, to maximize
their efficiency. And ingeneral, you know, that is the
ostensible goal of this DOGEentity that he is heading and

(16:34):
obviously, you know, on ontothat effect, of course, I think
it's pretty clear that anycritic of of DOGE is immediately
being hit with claims like, Oh,you must like then and be
defending the corruption. It'sexposing, um, but frankly, you
know, in the case of, like, theUS, like, every time there's a
spending bill, those spendingbills are full of pork, right?

(16:57):
They're full of all of theserelatively openly corrupt and
ridiculous expenditures thatshouldn't be there. And it's
kind of been a known thing thathappened. So it would make sense
that there is sort of pork,quote, unquote, in the US
government at large that eithercame from those spending bills
or through those same types of,you know, I would say cronyist

(17:20):
policies. And that is what ElonMusk is exposing. And people are
focusing so much on the exposurethat they're not really looking
at what what is beingimplemented in its place or done
with the data that Musk now hasrelatively open access to, and

(17:41):
given that Musk in the PayPalMafia at large are very
intimately involved with masssurveillance infrastructure of
the United States, particularlyas it relates to the military
and national security agencies,that probably should be talked
about, and also the fact thatDOGE is Seeking to sort of
replace a lot of workers,because 10s and 1000s of workers

(18:04):
are being laid off, and a lot ofthe goal seems to be to replace
a lot of them, you know, with AIand and algorithms. But
ultimately, that has acentralizing power effect,
because whoever controls thosealgorithms, you know, it's not
would have the power of those10,000 those 20,000 people in
the organization employing it,right? Whoever develops and

(18:27):
maintains that algorithm kind ofhas more power, right? At least,
that's sort of how I see it. So,you know, a lot of things are
happening right now. Changes arehappening at the public policy
level, all under the name ofefficiency. And Elon Musk has
kind of made himself the theposter boy for this, if you

(18:49):
will. But I would argue thateven more important these days,
well, not necessarily moreimportant, but definitely
equally important to sort ofthis technocratic role that he's
now playing in the USgovernment, or in the Trump
administration, is also thesocial engineering taking place

(19:09):
on the large content platform Henow holds, which is now owned by
his AI company, which isinteresting, and you noted In
your PC and the technocracy canalso be defined briefly as the
science of social engineering.So we have the idea of
engineering human animals tomaximize their efficiency, that

(19:31):
they're programmable automatons.And so, you know, you can see
where the role of governmentwould be in a technocratic
system to do that programming.But obviously social engineering
is a key part of that, andbecause we don't quite live in a
technique dominated world, yet,those are kind of separate
spheres of of engineering. Soyeah,

ID (19:55):
I mean, I think if you, if you look at what the DOGE is,
um. You know, it is technocracypersonified, really, because the
note, as you quite rightly said,that the idea of technocracy,
and something that is common toboth technocracy and what we're
going to talk about the Neoreactionary movement, is this

(20:16):
idea that there's, there aretechnological solutions for all
problems. So all problems,social, political, economic,
there, there are technologicalsolutions, and that the only
thing that you need to do inorder to solve these kinds of
problems is apply the righttechnology or more technology,

(20:36):
tech, technological kind ofdecision making. And this kind
of very mechanistic, kind of AIcontrolled, computer controlled
decision making is elevated,well, is said to be elevated
above everything else. Soeverything else is done through,

(20:56):
you know, all decisions are madein a kind of dispassionate,
logical way, and that's the bestway forward for humanity, as
long as we obey the algorithms.So we just as long as we just
obey whatever the algorithmstell us, then in the in the
world of the of the technocratsand in the world of the Neo
reactionaries, will be, will beheading in the right, right

(21:20):
direction now the DOGE, and it'salready using AI to evaluate
people's performance, and Ican't remember who wrote about
it, but I've seen it. I think itmight. I can't remember where I
saw it, but it's been describedas post human, and that is
precisely what technocracy is.Technocracy, is post human, and

(21:43):
this notion of, you know,artificial intelligence, or, you
know, large language modules,actually, you know, anyway, I
think there's an argument to behad there that we're not, we're
nowhere near this suspectedsingularity that the technocrats
and the Neo reactionary?

WW (22:03):
Yeah, I absolutely agree. I've been saying that for years
myself, but continue,

ID (22:08):
yeah, well, I mean, we'll probably go but yeah, I mean
this, so this, this notion thatpeople's lives, you know, the
workers we're talking about, inthis case, across, you know,
quite a large swathe of theAmerican civil service, that
their their futures will bedetermined by, you know, in a

(22:28):
nanosecond, by a computer. Andthat will, that will be in that
that's, that's the decision, thedecisions made, so the on the
human element of that, you mean,obviously, that's, you know,
someone's job, someone's like,their livelihood, their housing,
their family, their you knowthat doesn't matter. AI has
determined you that you areinefficient, and therefore you

(22:52):
are gone. And that that is, thatis exactly the kind of model,
you know, if you boil it down toits, its to its to the nub of
it. That is exactly the kind ofidea that technocracy elevates
and venerates, and that's whattechnocrats venerate, and that's

(23:13):
what people like Musk venerate,and that's why, and that's why,
that is the world that they aretrying to construct for us. And,
you know, I mean, and I thinkthe DOGE is a very good example
of the kind of way that thisfuture society what it would
look, what it would look like ifwe allow it to be

WW (23:37):
installed, right? And I think also, too, you know, as it
relates to x, for reallyTwitter, in terms of what you
mentioned just a second agoabout this idea of people to
live in this system, would needto just obey the algorithm and
submit to the algorithm. Iobviously haven't been very
active on X lately, but I'veheard things from people that

(24:00):
have been and it's generally wasmy impression also before I, you
know, engaged with itsignificantly less that there
was a major effort to kind ofengineer that among a lot of ex
users, namely with the x ai,which now owns Twitter and is
Elon Musk new AI company, afterhe butted heads with the people

(24:21):
at open AI that he also helpedcreate. You know, this basically
asking Grok, the AI chat bot ofxAI, for its opinions on
everything. So, like, forexample, a person would tweet an
opinion or a story or somethinglike that, and immediately under
it, there are replies of peoplebeing like, well, this is what

(24:42):
Grok says, you know. Or, let meask Grok about this. Or, Oh,
you're criticizing Elon Musk.Well, this is what Grok says
about the thing you know. Andsort of, and I think chat GPT
obviously started that to asignificant degree, but I think
it's becoming. Uh, extremelynormalized now and then I was

(25:03):
also told, though I haven't seenit, that Twitter is just a wash
with these AI generated imagesfrom an open AI, you know,
Studio Ghibli engine. I guesswhere basically Studio Ghibli
being the Hayao Miyazaki filmstudio, famous for a lot of

(25:24):
prominent and frankly wonderfulcartoon movies, that people are
sort of animating themselves andother images sort of in that
style, and that x is just a washwith it. And I think it's quite
interesting how people are sortof being that there's this
normalization on x of AIgenerated art and AI generated

(25:49):
answers to things, and thatpeople are sort of, you know,
I've argued this before, anddoing so are slowly giving away
a lot of their their agency,whether It's, it's in terms of
critical thought, or alsocreativity in favor of AI, or
just, you know, algorithms ingeneral,

ID (26:09):
yeah, no, I've noticed that that's, that's very true. I
mean, people do say, you know,you post something and when you
don't have to go very far in adiscussion thread to see someone
saying, Well, this is what grogsaid, you know, and I, I mean, I
think, I think when, as with anytechnology, you know, there are,
there are potentially,potentially positive things
about AI. I mean, I'm not acomplete Luddite, suggesting

(26:32):
that, you know, that weshouldn't even bother seeing if
there are any advantages to it.And certainly, you know, if you
think about, you know, how wemight kind of design design
things, or design design, youknow, machines that we use and
that kind of thing, and how wemight analyze data and things
like that. Sure, what you know,you know, these large language

(26:54):
models are very, very might bevery useful, and other forms of
AI might be very useful. But onething somebody pointed out to me
on another platform, which Ifound very interesting, was when
we think about, you know, theconversations that we have on
social media about all kinds ofsubjects, anything. Think about
anything, these large languagemodels are hoovering up all that

(27:20):
data and analyzing it, you know,everything, I mean, I this was
in particularly in reference tosub stack. And people saying,
You do realize that all thesecomments that are being made on
sub stack are being fed in, fedinto these LLMs, and people are,
you know, and we are effectivelyteaching it. Now, one of the

(27:42):
interesting things so far I'venoticed with things like Grok is
that, if you put in thus far, ithas been quite magnanimous, if
you like, about some people thathave been castigated previously
as just out and out. You know,for example, conspiracy
theorists. Grok doesn't analyzesome of those people quite, you

(28:04):
know, people like myself andpeople like yourself. And you
know, it's quite, it comes backwith quite fair kind of reports
on us at the moment, but, but Ithink, I think the problem, the
problem is, obviously that it'snot some sort of self

(28:24):
perpetuating, random, justlogical process. It's got it's
the algorithms are programmed bypeople with agendas. So
ultimately, while it's currentlyin the process of just hoovering
up as much data as it possiblycan once it's completed that one

(28:46):
not that it could ever completethat process, but once that that
that those models have beenfirmly established, then if
people are Using those modelsinstead of thinking for
themselves. Then, obviously, bymanipulating those models, you

(29:06):
can social engineer on a scalethat, you know that that
previously, I would have, youknow, few previous generations
wouldn't have been able to evenenvisage, well,

WW (29:19):
a lot of what you just brought up. Iain reminds me of,
you know, this, this book thatI've referenced a few times and
actually written a piece aboutbefore that was authored by Eric
Schmidt and Henry Kissinger, whoare ostensibly part of the
elites that were deposed by thecounter elites. Because Schmidt,
you know, very tied up with theDemocrats, right? And then, of

(29:40):
course, Henry Kissinger, havingbeen a mentor to Cal Schwab,
Klaus Schwab and very, you know,aligned with the Rockefellers
and the trilaterals and all ofthat, right, supposedly so
different than than Musk andThiel and those people. But in
their book, they basically chartout. How this, you know, got

(30:01):
this rule of all aspects of ourlives by the algorithm will
happen. And they basically saythat they're that we're being so
dominated by AI already. And I,you know, they wrote this book,
I think, like four years agonow, but they were basically
saying that AI is, is shapingour preferences, telling us what
music to listen to, what thingsto read, things like that and

(30:25):
that soon, it will shape ourdecision making so much that
will become completely dependenton AI to make decisions, pretty
much, period. And they refer tothis ideas as cognitive
diminishment, that basicallywill be outsourcing more and
more of our of our agency andour cognitive function to AI,

(30:46):
then eventually we won't be ableto do those things without AI,
or we will forget how to do it.And the analogy I sort of use to
explain this to people is, youknow how you lose a lot of the
mental math ability if youbecome dependent on a calculator
or something like that. Thewhole idea, if you don't use it,
you lose it, kind of thing. Andso, you know, it inherently, you

(31:08):
know, we're, I think we're stillin this phase where it's still
novel, and people areexperimenting with it, you know,
AI and all of that. Butinherently, it's the slippery
slope. And this is outlined bythese elite thinkers, right,
that it's a slippery slope, andthat if we fall into that trap

(31:28):
of, oh, it's so convenient, I'mgonna just, you know, use Grok
all the time to analyze newsstories. For me, eventually you
might forget how to do thatwithout it, you know, over time.
And that's basically how thesefigures like Kissinger and
Schmidt chart out how we get tothis, the system of government,

(31:48):
governance by algorithm and insort of this control of society.
And another thing they bring upthat I think is interesting
that's related to what youmentioned earlier, is this idea
that government by algorithm andall of that will not necessarily
lead to a fairer society. Itwill lead to a stratified

(32:09):
society. And you made that pointin talking about, you know, the
continental directors being ontop of the masses of of human
human animals, as it were, andthey basically argue in their
book that it'll lead to this, asimilar stratification, I would
call it Neo feudalism, or havein the past, where basically you

(32:31):
have the people who areprogramming and maintaining the
AI and determining theparameters and objective
functions above everyone else,And then the masses are those
who are being enacted upon by AIbut can't understand what AI is
doing to them and how it'sengineering and shaping them,
meaning that the people that areprogramming the AI do know what

(32:52):
those effects are and wherepeople are being led.

ID (32:55):
Yeah, no, I agree with that, and I and I also going back to
something you said earlier, withregard to, you know, currently,
these LLM kind of things seem tobe building trust. I think
that's very much what, whatseems to be happening at the
moment. So, you know, that'swhile they're in the process of
gathering the data together toto, you know, to maximize the

(33:17):
efficiency of the model. Youknow, they're doing so in a way
that is enticing people todivulge as much information as
possible, which, of course, isthey would, wouldn't they? So,
so, yeah, and I think the ideathat in the future, the the risk
that we run, and certainly, whatthe, what the the technocrats

(33:38):
envisaged, is that society thatyou, that you outline there. I
mean, in technocracy, they do.It's a strange kind of concept
that they've got in there ofsomething called peck, peck
rights. This is so I'm goingback to technocracy Inc, the
1930s original iteration oftechnocracy, which was published

(34:01):
in its study course, which wasfully published, I think, in
1934 and they come up with thisnotion of Peck rights, because,
believe it or not, you know, andI've criticized them for what I
perceived to be their naivety.They were aiming for what they
thought would be a classlesssociety. But they also said

(34:22):
that, you know, in order for forthe spontaneous order that they
envisaged to emerge, it would beimportant that people acted in
keeping with their pet rights.Now they, they came up with this
idea after observing cow herdsand chicken chicken flocks, and
they noticed that, you know,some animals are naturally more

(34:43):
dominant than others, and itwasn't necessarily to do with
their physical strength oranything like that. They just
seem to be more dominant. Sothey they had just assumed that
that was the same in across theentirety of human culture and
society, and that we we should.Yeah, pretty much follow the
same kind of thing. And so whowould be those that were awarded

(35:06):
Peck rights? Well, that would bethe people that had full control
of resources. So the people thatwere in control of, you know,
oligarchs, basically, and peoplethat are in control of, you
know, the resources that we needto to live. Those were the
people that would have the peckrights. So while they were
envisaging what they werecalling a classless society, it

(35:30):
was, it was not classes at all.What, what they were talking
about was one mass class ofhuman humanity that they that
they refer to is the humananimals, the underclass, yeah,
one, one mass of us, andcontrolling every aspect of our

(35:50):
lives and controlling ourbehavior, you know, to maximize
our efficiency as A function,with this kind of super class.
Who? Who would, you know, makesure that society ran according
to their design? Now, you know,when you get people like Schmidt

(36:11):
and Kissinger writing Warning,warning us about, you know, the
potential for this kind ofdisastrous potential to emerge,
you then have to think, Well,yeah, but at the same time,
while warning us about thesethings, we are surging ahead in
creating precisely that system.Um, we're really pausing for

(36:36):
thought for a moment, certainly,certainly, you know, though
Thiel and Musk are, are racingahead with rolling out exactly
the kind of, you know, socialcontrol mechanisms that, on the
other hand, people like Schmidtand Kissinger have warned us
against, you know, and obviouslyEric Schmidt is very much

(36:58):
involved In in rolling out thatinfrastructure as well. Sure,
while it's, while it's nice,while it's very nice to be
warned about it, well, surelythat's a reason to stop and
think about it first then. Butno, what we're, what we're
actually getting, is it, youknow, is a, is a, an
acceleration towards, towardsthat, towards that, you know,

(37:21):
without, without anybody reallykind of stopping and thinking
about it.

WW (37:24):
Yeah, well, I think, you know, the Schmidt and kisser
book, they frame it as awarning, because they have to.
But if anyone's familiar withlike Henry Kissinger as a
figure, or Eric Schmidt, either,I mean, it's hard to look at it
as a warning, especially whenthey say that. You know, they're
basically like, all of this willeither happen, and this is the
society we'll have, and therewill be a new religion around

(37:46):
AI, or the other outcome is, isthat the current ruling elites
are deposed by a popularrevolution. And which one do you
think Schmidt and Kissingerprefer that? I think it's pretty
clear. And considering thatSchmidt is considered now
Kissinger's air. And Kissingerand Schmidt are major fixers at
builder, at the Bilderbergconference, where AI is

(38:08):
consistently a major topic. Onthe steering committee of
Bilderberg is Peter Thiel, aswell as his co founder of
Palantir, who still leads thecompany, Alex cart right which
is basically becoming a globaldigital brain, not just for the
national security state of theUS and the UK and the health
services of both the UK and theUS, but also much of corporate

(38:31):
America and Wall Street now, allusing Palantir AI products. So
quite interesting there. I don'treally think it's, it's a
warning, but I think you know,to release it publicly. It's
kind of a way to maybekarmically absolve themselves a
little bit, being like, well, wewarned the masses that this is
what was going to happen.

ID (38:52):
Oh, they have to tell us what that what they're doing,
don't they? Apparently? Yeah,

WW (38:56):
apparently. But they don't, um, I don't think they really
had any intention of stoppingit, considering, you know their
their history, and also, youknow, in the case of Eric
Schmidt, their current actionsas it relates to what they fund
and and finance and seek tobuild, quite frankly, definitely

(39:17):
problematic stuff. Well, we'vebeen talking about technocracy
for a while, and before we moveon to things like, you know,
Curtis Yarvin and the Cathedraland Nick Land's Dark
Enlightenment and all of that, Iwould like to touch on the idea
of the technate, which would bethe technocratic governance
system, and what that would sortof, what a world dominated by

(39:41):
technates would look like,ultimately, and you note, of
course, in your piece, andothers have noted as well, that
the technate model for theUnited States specifically
encompasses Greenland, which hasbecome a major focus of Trump
and JD Vance after the.Election. It was not a campaign
promise at all, make Greenlandgreat again, or anything like

(40:04):
that. Definitely something thatonly happened after really,
around inauguration time andsince then. So if you could
expound a little bit on what atechnique is and what the model
for technates are are, I thinkthat might be something kind of
illuminating as well.

ID (40:23):
Yeah, so a Tech Night is a continental system, so of social
engineering and behavioralcontrol with, as I said, was
saying earlier, with acontinental director sitting at
the top of it. So it's andcontinental control would only
be a very small number of peoplethat would, that would monitor,

(40:43):
surveil and distribute allresources across the technique
it would have its monetarysystem that would be centrally
controlled, or powerdistribution would be centrally
everything would be centrallycontrolled with the With the
continental control, this, this,you know, group that controls
everything. You know, in theoriginal idea of the technique

(41:08):
proposed, you know, as I said,in the 1930s mid 1930s there
would be no names of towns orcities or anything like that.
Everything would be designatedwith a grid reference, a map
grid reference. So you wouldlive in Sector four or sector
five. You know, this kind ofidea. Quite why. I don't know,

(41:28):
but, but, but interestingly, inthe original technocracy Inc
study course, they put a map onthe front. It was on the back
cover, I think they put a theyput a map on it, which was they
called the North American TechNight. And sure, it encompassed
Greenland and went all the waydown through Central America,
all the way down to NorthernVenezuela, right down into the

(41:52):
northern tip of South America.So and funnily enough, Trump
made, seemingly, you know, priorto his, I think just prior to
his inauguration, started makingthese statements about, you
know, building this NorthAmerican kind of power base that

(42:15):
would encompass, you know, mostof Central America. Well, all of
Central America, I think, andGreenland, and you know, that
had never really been mentionedbefore in terms of anything
like, you know, the NorthAmerican union, or anything like
that. Well, I feel

WW (42:29):
like Trump made it pretty clear early on that he was
interested in basically de factomerging Canada, Mexico and
Greenland with the UnitedStates. But I don't know if
beyond Mexico, he really spokeabout though. I think it is
worth pointing out that there isnow another Central American

(42:50):
country. El Salvador isbasically becoming an offshore
prison for the Trumpadministration, with a lot of
deportations, you know, or youknow, claims have been made that
eventually American citizencriminals could be sent there,
or people that are vandalizingTeslas or accused of that could
be sent to these El Salvadorianprisons and coordination with

(43:13):
the El Salvador government. Soit is very possible, and it's a
dollarized nation also, so ituses the US dollar, very
possible that it would expandbeyond, farther south than
Mexico, to be sure.

ID (43:27):
Well, I'll defer to you on that, Whitney, but I think he
did, but I but I may be right.You're probably right. You're
probably,

WW (43:34):
I guess, with Panama, he was, he was making overtures
about Panama. So I guess if youtake Mexico, you de facto own El
Salvador through dollarizationand this prison sharing thing.
And then you take the PanamaCanal, the area between Mexico
and El Salvador. And the PanamaCanal was quite small, and you'd
just be like, well, well, youmight as well take that too.

(43:55):
Yeah,

ID (43:56):
yeah. And I think the interesting thing is, is when,
when the original technocratsaid, drew this map. They didn't
really explain how that wouldhappen, you know, like, why
would all these countries justgo all right, we'll go along
with your crazy, hair brainedideas. I mean, I, I, you know,
that was never made clear. And Ithink, I think the the map that

(44:17):
was drawn, that was that wassent out, was so much like the
North American technate, interms of its appearance, its
appearance, that in terms ofwhat he was outlining, that to
me, that was a signal, you know,I felt that what that is is
really, it's almost like aninsider joke, you know, saying

(44:38):
that the technocrats we are incontrol. Now, really, you know,
I mean, it's, it's, you know,we've just drawn out for you the
North American Tech Night. Now,I think there's more to it, you
know. And as you quite rightlysaid, you know, if we look at
people like ourselves or andalso we look at the kind of the
some of the plans for Greenland,there is more to it than just
just signaling their intent. ButI think it's quite. Quite

(45:00):
notable that that that map wasdrawn out in the way that it
was. And I think also, you know,when we talk about what a
technique might be, I mean, oneof, one of the problems with
technocracy, as I alluded toearlier, was when it was
originally proposed, it couldn'thappen technologically. The
technology did not exist. Tomake it a realistic prospect,

(45:21):
the technology does exist todayto make this kind of top down
behavioral control system arealistic prospect. But
ironically, the nature of thecommunication technology that
enables that to happen, and thecomputing technology that
enables that to happen kind ofrenders the idea of a kind of of
a kind of geographical technateMove, really, because, because,

(45:48):
you know, by its nature, thiskind of technology is
transnational. So, you know, youcan control, you know, many,
many different regions in theworld and link them together and
communicate, you know, and havecentral control over them. That
doesn't, that doesn'tnecessarily mean it has to be

(46:08):
physical, you know. So, so thethings that would the way that a
technique could operate nowwould be very much, I suggest,
based on kind of control of wemight envisage, control of
certain markets, control ofcertain areas of industry,
control of certain politicalstructures. So, you know it that

(46:33):
can be done without,necessarily, you know, sending
troops over borders is what I'mtrying to say. Sure,

WW (46:41):
I think that's absolutely true. And I mean, like, if you
look at the case of just NorthAmerica and South America, you
know, in terms of just likeeither infrastructure of the
technology, like fiber opticcables and connectivity in that
sense, but also, you know, likethe biggest, I would argue, sort

(47:03):
of like the PayPal acquit. Well,it's really a branch of PayPal.
I would argue, Mercado Libre ispoised to basically take a
significant control over, overSouth America. You know, FinTech
already happening, and alreadyit's basically, it's basically
compared to, like the Amazon ofSouth America, and it pretty

(47:23):
much is, but they're making abig pay push into finance, into
the digital financialinfrastructure of the future,
with stable coins and crypto andall of that. And are, you know,
they're now tied up with thesatellite company that's also
linked to Howard lutnic andSteve Mnuchin and figures like
that, and kind of, you know,really expanding out, but they

(47:44):
ultimately tie back into PayPal.And used to be owned by or
PayPal used to own a majority oftheir stock and all of this
stuff, and came out of Stanford,I believe, and all sorts of
things. And is tied now to theMalay administration and all of
that, which is sort of yokingitself in some significant ways
to Trump, and also Elon Musk inBlackrock, among other entities.

(48:06):
So you know it, I mean, that'sjust one example. And then an
example you sort of bring up inthe series as well is how a lot
of these same entities havebasically de facto taken over
Ukraine. And as soon as peace isnegotiated, a post war Ukraine
will be run by essentially thosesame forces, us, big tech, a lot

(48:27):
of them tied up with either Muskor Thiel, and then also, you
know, Black Rock, JP Morgan, andyou know, banks and corporations
of that nature. So it becomesquite easy to see that now
these, these, you know, what,are becoming multinational
corporations, even if, in thecase of, you know, Palantir or

(48:49):
Anduril, they have very Americafirst PR are starting to sort of
tether together a lot ofdifferent countries. I guess you
could say, well, yeah,

ID (49:01):
and, I mean, that's another, I mean, talking about the kind
of bait and switch idea that wewere talking about earlier, then
obviously, that they've beenpresented through things like
Project 2025, they've beenpresenting this argument of
being anti elitist in manyrespects, or anti certainly, you
know, the certain control ofcertain American elites. But

(49:21):
when we think about the Bezosand Musk were talking about
building a network state, andwe're obviously referencing
srinivalaji...
We'll just call him Balaji. it'sfine.
obviously referencing his work.He, you know, envisages kind of

(49:46):
these freedom cities being kindof independent fiefdoms. And he
considers the US to be outdatedand obsolescent. So, so to think
that that you know that thistheir, their pro. American. I
think he's questionable. I thinkthere they are, pro oligarch

(50:08):
control, pro maximizing theirindependence in order to
accelerate towards, you know,the future that they've got in
their own minds.

WW (50:18):
Yeah, Balaji is an interesting character because
he's been saying a lot of stuffabout the turn of turning X
Twitter into, you know, afinancial system, which, of
course, Elon Musk's ambition isto basically make it the
American version of WeChat. Andhe says half of the financial
system. And the idea would be,you do your banking and your

(50:39):
shopping and all sorts of thingsthere. But Balaji not only
supports that model, but says itshould basically go a step, a
step further, and that peopleshould, you know, basically,
instead of like, necessarily,like a UBI or something like
that, they should monetize theircontent on, uh, you know, on X

(51:04):
or on on models like that. Um,in that, AI should create their
content for them. And he hadthis interesting tweet also,
where he said, In 2023 uh, AI isabout building a new god. In
crypto is about building a newstate, which is interesting in
the context of the whole networkstate idea that he sought to

(51:26):
develop. And I think ultimatelythe sales pitch for the technate
will come even though it's, asyou've noted, an extreme
centralization of power, it'salso, I think, not going to be
attractive to sell itspecifically to this libertarian
base, and under theselibertarian framed dialectics

(51:46):
that they're using as a greatercentralization of power, they
have to market it asdecentralized, don't they? And
so if you have a network ofthese freedom cities that then
knit themselves into the largestof all network states, you know,
into a technate Then, I mean,you could get to that system
that way, but have sort of whatthe public sees as these

(52:09):
decentralized patchwork of ofnetwork states. And I suspect
that's the case, because, as youand I have pointed out, for
example, in our joint work ondigital ID, and also, you know,
work on, you know, the fight thedigital finance of the future,
whether it's stable coins orCBDCs. Ultimately, the goal is

(52:33):
to have sort of a vendoragnostic system, right where you
have a patchwork of companies orvendors providing digital ID or
providing the programmable,surveillable money, whether it's
a stable coin or whatever, butultimately, the data harvested
from that would be harvested ina centralized way, and
ultimately centrally controlledat the highest level that isn't

(52:55):
necessarily visible to thePublic.

ID (52:59):
Yeah, no, absolutely. And when we think about things like
the Dark Enlightenment and whatCurtis Yavin has said about a
patchwork of realms, so the ideais that decentralization leads
to decent from these guysperspective. And I say guys,

(53:21):
because it is predominantly men,from their perspective,
decentralization is a processfor gathering data. So if you
decentralize everything from,you know, political systems to
economic systems to financialsystems, you decentralize it,

(53:44):
but as long as it, as long asthose, the data that is gathered
is interoperable. I It's in amachine readable format that can
be centrally collated. Then bydecentralizing, you can spread
this network out, you knowgeographically, or in terms of
you know, financially, orhowever you want to approach it,

(54:08):
you can spread this network out,and then the people, and even
you know to a certain extent,give people that are operating
in their relative realms orzones, give them autonomy. But
if you can then gather that datain a in a cohesive, single,
machine readable format, whichcan then be analyzed, which you

(54:28):
can then do at something like auniversal ledger, or, you know,
if we're talking about the, youknow, the World Bank have put
forward this idea for a globaldigital ID database, and ND40, I
think it's called, you know,that kind of idea. We're talking
about ideas here, rather thanpractical things that have

(54:51):
already been established. Butthis is clearly where the ideas
are going, you know, then, thenthat obviously what that does is
give you what. Harvard, McCallgov core control, or soft core
control, of a patchwork ofrealms. You You are able then to
manipulate each realm. And ifyou combine that with

(55:12):
technocracy that would done,that would be very much done
through the allocation ofresources, as you see fit, from
a kind of centralized powerbase. And that's, that's pretty
much the kind of in terms of howthey view decentral I mean, a
very good example of that wouldbe the C40 Cities Network. So

(55:34):
the C40 Cities Network is, youknow, which is, which is on the
other side, you know, when we'retalking about the kind of
juxtaposition between the rightside, if we use traditional
political kind of terms, theright and the left side of the
kind of oligarch, kind ofcontrol grid, the left side of
that, you know, the Schwabianside, if you like, they, they,

(55:58):
you know, like setting up thingslike C40 City Networks, which is
supposed to decentralize power.And we've seen across the world
the increasing power at alocalized level of city mayors
who are often members of thisC40 City Network, but then
they're all linked centrally to,you know, to gathering the data,

(56:20):
particularly from their fromtheir city, if you like, city
realms, so that that's whatthey've got in mind. They've got
this, this, this kind ofinteroperable web that they want
to, they want to roll out, whichwill seem like it's
decentralized, but will actuallybe gathering data from as many

(56:41):
sources as possible. Something Iwant

WW (56:43):
to add to that, since you're bringing up the idea of the
Unified ledger here, I mean,obviously that's going to be
some sort of blockchain ledger.It's quite clear. And there's
been signaling, of course, fromthis group, Musk included of
putting, for example, majoraspects of the US government on
blockchain. And it's very likelythat, you know that will

(57:03):
eventually happen at a muchlarger scale, and you could even
potentially have, you know, alldigital IDs, or, you know, all,
you know, financial transactionson the same blockchain, which is
something that actually LarryFink has openly expressed his
desire for, and says that, youknow, in the future, I think he
said this around the time thatBlackrock launched the Bitcoin

(57:23):
ETFs, there would be basically asingle, unified ledger on
blockchain for finance, andeverything would have its own ID
number or CUSIP, not just thepeople trading, but the things
they were transacting. And inthe in considering now that
they're trying to tokenize allof these real world assets,
including the natural world, youknow, all of that is going in

(57:46):
his vision will have, you know,these unique identifiers. And so
obviously this has the, as younoted, you know, there's the
data aspect to it, but there'salso another interesting wrinkle
to it too, where people are sortof selling it as this idea of
enabling it will enable extremetransparency and end crime. And

(58:08):
my colleague Mark Goodwin hashas raised some interesting
points about that. You know, ina recent interview he did with
Catherine Austin Fitz, basicallythis idea that, well, okay, if
you publish everything on aledger like that, you know
someone looking at a blockchainexplorer or something, you know
you can the data is there, and Iguess everyone can see it. But

(58:31):
if you don't have access to allof the data to connect these
anonymized identifiers or otheror other entered entities there,
you know all of these. I youknow, this mess of numbers isn't
going to make sense to thecommon person, is it? You would
have to have access to a litanyof other data, something like
Palantir, for example, in orderto really understand how the

(58:55):
money flows are connecting andintersecting, and where the
money's really going and what'sreally happening, right?

ID (59:01):
Yeah, yeah. And I guess if you use a permissioned ledger
rather than a permissionlessledger, if you use a
permissioned ledger, then youcontrol the permissions, don't
you? So, I mean, I wouldn't, Iwould have thought if you were
intent on moving money around. Imean, the the idea, for example,
in the UK, for the UK is kind ofroll out of its digital pound,

(59:23):
is that these payment intointerface providers pips that
they will agree to be, you know,to send data from commercial
banks and store it on theledger. And that will be
controlled through, you know,things like, know your customer
and so forth. But that will bevery much controlled by this, by
the central bank, and they willkind of decree the permission

(59:47):
rules. Well, that's those arethe permission rules that people
know about, that they're given,you know, you know, like
Barclays or whatever, are giventhose permission that those
permission algorithms. So what'sto stop them? And doling out
other permission algorithmswithout anybody knowing. I mean,
sure, you know, I mean the idea,I think that that the world, I

(01:00:10):
mean, it's the same, you know, Ifeel the same about digital ID,
and that, in fact, the wholekind of tokenization of
everything and moving everythinginto a digital, a digital
platform is it's like the thereare no rules that I mean so far,
it seems to me to be more likethe wild west than than all the

(01:00:31):
you know, the the mythical imageof the Wild West. It seems to be
more like that than than a kindof controlled environment where
everything, you know, I mean,the potential for abuse with
this kind of harvesting of dataon such a scale is magnified in

(01:00:51):
my view. I mean, I you know? Imean, I don't think that we are
heading towards something thatis safer and especially in terms
of criminality. I mean, I thinkwe're heading towards something
that looks quite a lot worse.

WW (01:01:03):
But I think the sales pitch is important because they want
to sell it as a better system.And that was true too when it
was more left leaningdialectics, you know, a fairer,
more sustainable world. And Ithink they also want to sell
that, you know, now that they'vesort of leaned more into the
right leaning dialectics, youknow, kind of want to sell that
same thing too, that it'll be abetter, more efficient, more

(01:01:26):
transparent system. And I thinkMark's point was that even if
it's a permissionless ledger,you know, it's not necessarily
the low hanging fruit of easytransparency that it's it's kind
of been framed as publicly but Ithink to your point, it's more
likely that ultimately you'regoing to have a mix of both
permissioned and permissionless,perhaps with the goal of making

(01:01:47):
people think that transparencyhas been maximized. But that
doesn't necessarily mean thatmoney laundering and other bad
financial practices will stop,especially when you consider
that our world and in ourgovernments and financial system
are run by people who have ahistory of shady financial
dealings and money launderingand other illicit activities.

(01:02:09):
It'll be money laundering forme, but not for thee. I think
will be the

ID (01:02:16):
outcome, yeah, I mean, I have to say, I haven't it isn't
even crossed my mind thatwhatever, whatever system that
we will, that we're headingtowards, will rule out the
possibility of, for example,selling drugs to buy weapons to
smuggle to, you know, proxyterrorist forces. I that I don't

(01:02:39):
ever envisage that happening.And I think if they were, if
there, if there was a systemcapable of doing that, they
wouldn't be rolling it out.

WW (01:02:46):
Yeah, well, I think the sales pitch is going to be that
it will stop those things.Because obviously, in this new
paradigm of programmable,surveillable money, a lot of
which this particular PayPalMafia is very intimately linked
to it's going to basicallyenable a major trade off between

(01:03:09):
liberty and security. You'regoing to be surrendering your
financial privacy entirely and alot of your financial freedom to
the system. So in order toconvince people to make that
trade off. Will be ending moneylaundering and crime and all
sorts of things, and thegovernment won't be stealing
your money anymore, like DOGE isdiscovering. You know, all of

(01:03:32):
these financial ills willmagically end if you start using
the programmable, surveillablemoney from the private sector
that we are now. You know,marketing is as better and not
like the cbdc at all, eventhough, functionally, it's
really not that different at theend of the day, in turn, from a
civil liberties perspective. So,

ID (01:03:54):
no, not at all. No, it's, it's, it's, it comes with all
the same. I mean, the the Trumpadministration's kind of
fondness for stable coins isnot, doesn't auger anything
better in terms of its potentialfor social and behavioral
control. I mean, you know,they're just as programmable as
a cbdc. So it doesn't, itdoesn't make any difference into

(01:04:18):
that, in that regard,

WW (01:04:19):
yeah. I mean, I don't know. I think people that seem to
think that it is different notonly ignore the fact that it's
what you said, just asprogrammable and surveillance,
but that also, Trump hashistorically been a slave to
Wall Street bankers. And that'strue from his first presidency.
It's true from his own history.When he was, you know, bailed
out by the Ross child bankinginterests in the early 90s. You

(01:04:43):
know, it's just been kind of arunning theme with him. And you
know, pardoning long notoriousWall Street criminals and white
collar criminals like MichaelMilken, among others. You know,
I mean, he seems to have an earfor for Wall Street and, you
know, people like his upper.National former money manager
and good friend, Larry Fink, forexample. But don't worry, Larry

(01:05:05):
Fink is a on the way out, guys,because the counter elites are
here anyway. Sorry, it's justsometimes it's just amazing to
see what narratives have managedto stick despite having no basis
in reality. In my opinion, yeah,

ID (01:05:25):
no. I mean, I think, I think, as well. I mean, you
know, something that we spokeabout earlier is, is, is this
idea of, of, you know, the kindof the Liberty minded oligarch
that the you know that they're,they're doing this to free us,
to free us up, and to free upchoice

WW (01:05:42):
benevolent benefactors. Yeah,

ID (01:05:45):
this, this notion, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, to a
certain extent, the things thatthe Republican voters were that
were angry about, you know, thiskind of overreach of what they
would consider wokeism, thiskind of sensor censorship and
shutdown, of freedom of speechand all this kind of thing, you

(01:06:07):
know, that is not inherent tokind of that that has been
thrown at and and considered tobe a consequence of
progressivism. It's you know,that this progressive thing is
tantamount to identity politics.It's all one thing, and it all
comes from that, which, ofcourse, it doesn't, you know, if

(01:06:30):
you think about what, you know,progressive kind of values are,
it's that is very much aboutsocial reform. So that's very
much about, you know, women'srights, it's about, it's about
gay rights. It's about, youknow, it's about, it's about
moving society forward in apositive way, the stuff that's
come with it, like the shutdownof freedom of speech, the the

(01:06:52):
censorship of people online,imprisoning people for making
comments online, that's gotnothing to do with progressive
Moors that, that is that hascome as a consequence of those
ideas being exploited by, Iwould say, rapacious oligarchs

(01:07:13):
and their network now, now, andgovernments obviously go along
with that. I mean, ultimately,it's implemented by governments,
and it's intimate. It'simplemented through policy and
legislation. But the thing thatpeople are railing against, you
know, certainly the Republicanvoters that supported, you know,
things like Project 2025, and soforth, that they they are

(01:07:38):
bridling against something thathas been imposed on them by one
set of oligarchs. And thesolution to that is to embrace
something which is beingproposed by the another set of
oligarchs. In this case, youknow, we will probably go on and
talk about this, this kind offeel, the philosophical

(01:07:58):
underpinning of all this. Inthis case, it's they're moving
towards a privatized form ofgovernment itself, so
government, government itself,will become, practically to all
intents and purposes, a private,privatized entity. Now that
isn't going to facilitate, Iwould, I would be very surprised

(01:08:21):
if that enables kind of moredeep rooted social problems,
like poverty, inequality ofopportunity, those kind of
things that people care about,the cost of living, that kind of
that kind of thing that there'snothing within that the move
Towards a privatized form ofgovernment that promises to do

(01:08:42):
anything about any of thoseissues. So it's not like that
they're finding solutions forwhat they perceive to be the the
kind of a mutated form ofprogressivism. It's, it's, it's,
they're not. They're just, youknow, being cajoled into
perceiving the threat in thoseterms, and it isn't, yeah,

WW (01:09:05):
well, I've always seen identity politics as sort of
this effort to mainly keeppeople that are on the people on
the left that are unhappy withthe left, to keep voting for the
establishment left. So insteadof talking about the real
policies, for example, in the USwith the Democrats, it's, oh,
this candidate is from thisminority and of this minority

(01:09:25):
religion, and has done, youknow, these things sort of in
that same you know, identity,labels and identifiers
ultimately, like, how many canyou stack this makes me more
diverse, and thus theimplication is, I will govern
better, but it prevents adiscussion on the policies
which, in the case of theDemocrats, are oftentimes really

(01:09:46):
not that different from policiespresented by Republicans. Right?
Yeah, no, absolutely, yeah. Andso in turn, this counter elite
group and and the politicianssort of under their influence.
Or affiliated with them, havefocused on that promotion of
diversity in our in our youknow, basically the focus is on

(01:10:10):
dismantling that now. Butultimately the include, the
effort to put push thisdiversity stuff to the forefront
was ultimately an effort todistract from the underlying
policies, and now, becausethey've erected all of this, you
know, the quote, unquoteestablishment left whatever has
erected all of thisdistractionary Diversity stuff
while implementing the, youknow, preventing discussion of

(01:10:32):
the real policies, you have theopposite side coming in and
focusing so much on dismantlingall of that diversity stuff, but
still no discussion of theunderlying policies. You know,
yeah,

ID (01:10:46):
you've said it better than me, actually, yeah, that's,
that's what I was trying to getat. I mean, that you've got a,
you've got an artificialconstruction of a problem which
doesn't really exist, and thenyou have a response to that
artificial construction of aproblem that doesn't really
exist because the underlyingproblems are the same problems
that they've always been andthey they primarily boil down to

(01:11:08):
the economic situation thatpeople find themselves in. So
you get health inequality, youget you get inequality of
opportunity. You getunemployment. You get, you know,
all poverty, all the all thethings that actually do affect
people, none of that ever thatdoesn't get addressed. And

(01:11:29):
there's, then, there's nothingin this platform that's coming
from, you know, Thiel and Muskand the Trump administration
that is likely to address any ofthat, either. And that's not me
saying that you know the otherside of the fence. I mean, you
know, certainly not in the UK,with the Labor government that
we've got at the moment, who aresupposedly, that's their their

(01:11:52):
forte. You know, they're doing,they're doing the opposite of,
of addressing those issues.They're making everything worse.
And it's even it seemsdeliberately so. So, you know, I
mean, I think that's the problemthat we have these kind of
political kind of to and froze,and people get very vexed about

(01:12:13):
about, you know, basicallyunimportant issues, whereas the
important things that we need toaddress are never addressed by
government, and they'recertainly not going to be
addressed by a newadministration that is that is
surging ahead with these prettycrazy ideas, I

WW (01:12:31):
would add too, that that outrage is is engineered by
these new media paradigms wehave too, and the focus is
continually made on theseissues, but not the broader
issues that actually have moreof a direct influence on our
lives, and the ones that are,you know, the source of outrage.
You know, anyway, I, in theinterest of time, since we've

(01:12:53):
talked about him a few times,I'd like to bring and, well,
them. I'd like to bring thediscussion now to Curtis Yarvin
and Nick Land, who, in theintroduction, I sort of
described as the housephilosophers of of this group,
and in the case of the PayPalMafia specifically, maybe Yarvin
is more more known forinfluencing their ideas and

(01:13:15):
being close to them, though,obviously Nick Land has had a
lot of influence on them aswell. And so you referred to
Nick Land, of course, for hiswork on the so called Dark
Enlightenment. And Curtis Yarvinmore famous for slogans like
retire all government employeesor rage and his ideas of the
cathedral. But of course, youbrought up in our discussion

(01:13:36):
thus far some of these otherterms that are Yarvin's, but are
less associated, perhaps, withhim publicly, I guess, like the
GOV Corp and the sovereign Corpand all of this. So what do you
make of Yarvin's and Land'scontributions to an influence on
the PayPal Mafia, and are theirideas as anti establishment as

(01:13:58):
their Proponents claim? No,

ID (01:14:00):
I mean, it's they cloak their their ideas in kind of
libertarian language. Butthere's nothing libertarian
about what they're proposing. Itlike technocracy. It is a, it is
an unbelievably autocratic, topdown system of control that
they're proposing. So back inthe mid 1990s you had this, this

(01:14:22):
place called the cyberneticsculture Research Unit at Warwick
University, where Nick Land wasworking out of and they were
looking, they were looking atSchumpeterian Creative
Destruction. So some Schumpeter,he kind of proposed this idea
that that there's a cyclical,there's a cyclical pattern

(01:14:44):
inherent to capitalism, wheretechnology means that new or
advances in economics anddifferent types of technology
mean that old markets aredestroyed by new ones and new
ones emerge. So, you know, goodexample would be the horse drawn
carriages destroyed by theinternal combustion engine. So

(01:15:06):
one market is. Destroyed a newone, a new one emerges. And
attached to those markets areoften significant economic and
financial interests. So this,this revolution of markets,
tends to also have an impact on,so you know, on society,
because, you know, and on, you'dhave to say, on oligarch

(01:15:28):
interests, because, becausecertain, certain players come to
the fore, and others and othersand others wane. But anyway,
they they were looking at thisthing at Warwick, University of
Schumpeterian's CreativeDestruction. With it the view
that we are rapidly approachingwhat they call the Technological

(01:15:50):
Singularity, which is the whichis the point at which technology
becomes self perpetuating, oryou've got aI designing better
AI, which, you know, they arguedhumanity at that point is lost,
because AI will ultimatelysupersede humanity, and will
will venture off into The cosmosand leave us behind, this, this,

(01:16:13):
this notion. So what theyproposed was a system that they
called Accelerate or an ideabased on those, based on those
called accelerationism, which isan extremely aggressive form of
startup investment andinnovation, and that one the
idea is just to use chapterscreative destruction to maximize

(01:16:35):
every opportunity from everycrisis that emerges, to break
apart the institutions ofcapitalism so that they can be
reformed into a better system ofcapitalism that will enable us
as a species to cope with thefourth, you know, the on the on
rushing singularity. So whatthey what that ultimately meant

(01:16:58):
was that they thought thatsociety should be broken apart
into what Curtis Yarvin called apatchwork of realms, and that
these patchwork of realms shouldbe overseen by sovereign
corporations or sove causebecause that, because the idea
of a CEO King managing a realmfreeing up in a would free up

(01:17:20):
innovation and enable the kindof accelerated development of
technology that we all have tohave to adopt in order to be
able to survive the inevitablesingularity. Then in 2012 Yarvin
wrote as this, this character,Mencius Moldbug. And then in and
that, that was happening kind ofin the in the first part of the

(01:17:43):
21st century, he he wrote fromabout 2007 onwards, I think, to
about 2010 2011 initially Landback in the UK, picked this up,
and he wrote something calledThe Dark Enlightenment, which
expanded on the ideas thatYarvin had presented as Mencius
Moldbug and those ideas, he kindof took those ideas and and took

(01:18:06):
them to even further extremes.Uh, he described in The Dark
Enlightenment that we have tomerge with technology in order
to survive. He said that once wewe are except that we need to be
technoplastic beings that couldbe programmed that will enable
us to, what he said, cross thebionic horizon. And that this

(01:18:29):
that and that once we've crossedthe bionic charisma, we will be
able to pay what he callssovereign rent, which we would
call tax. So sovereign rent.

WW (01:18:40):
It sounds so much nicer when it's sovereign rent, though,
doesn't it? You've soundsovereign? Yes,

ID (01:18:48):
yeah. So you're so but in all but, but in order for us to
do that, to this song, to paythis sovereign rent, because we
wouldn't be able to function ina post singularity world, we'd
just be like these useless kindof NPCs that didn't, didn't
know, could don't know anything,can't do anything. In order for
us to stay pace with it, withwith the singularity of the post

(01:19:10):
singularity world, basically wehave to be incorporated into it.
We have to become cyberneticorganisms. So this is, this is
his notion, and that, with thethat, therefore, what he, what
he further presented was thisidea of an overarching a bit

(01:19:33):
like, you know, there is a bigcrossover between technocracy
and this Neo reactionarymovements ideas. So instead of
having continental control, youwould have sovereign cause, CEOs
of sovereign cause, the kings oftheir realms. And then then that
would over be overseen by athing that Land called, Gov
core, which would be a kind of,if you like, a kind of corporate

(01:19:58):
government. I mean. That. And Ithink that the important one of
the difficulties we have intrying to kind of actually
understand these ideas is thatthey're talking about structures
creating new structures that wehaven't even we can't even
envisage. So one of the thingsthat you know, perhaps people
listening to this would like to,would like to try and envisage,

(01:20:19):
is there being no government,but there being a corporate
entity that oversees theadministration of every aspect
of your life, because, because,because that is what they are
suggesting, instead of a insteadof a political structure, it's a
corporate structure, becausethis would free up innovation.

(01:20:42):
So that's that is basically andPeter Thiel was cited by as very
influential by Land when hewrote The Dark Enlightenment, he
specifically cited Thiel. Thielis very closely associated with
Yarvin. Yarvin and Thiel watchedthe 2016 Trump election results

(01:21:05):
together. Yarvin calls Thielvery enlightened. And obviously
we're talking about the, youknow, something he's referencing
there The Dark Enlightenment. Sothis is what these people have
got in mind. And when weconsider, you know, the the the
way that they envisage rollingout AI controlled systems, and

(01:21:28):
then we combine that with theirquite clearly stated support for
the ideas of this, that thatthis kind of philosophy that's
been presented in The DarkEnlightenment. It's not very
edifying. Well, what, what, youknow, what they're doing, what
they're basically appear to bedoing, is constructing this

(01:21:52):
horrendous totalitarian controlsystem.

WW (01:21:55):
Yeah, you know, it's funny, because I don't want to sound at
the risk of, I'm a littleworried about sounding too
nerdy, but I have been playingthe remake of Final Fantasy
seven. And basically, in thatgame, there is a corporation
that runs every aspect ofpeople's lives and is pillaging

(01:22:16):
the planet to power its systemsand all of that. It's called the
Shinra corporation, but they'rethe bad guys in the movie or in
the game, you know. And it'samazing that people think that
this would be somehow a fairsystem if it was just a private
sector tyranny, as opposed to apublic sector tyranny as just

(01:22:38):
kind of impressive, really. AndI don't know it's amazing that
it's been so successful in sortof, I would argue, kind of
masquerading itself as sort ofthis, this fundamental change
from tyranny and departure fromtyranny, like, that's how a lot
of people are sort ofunderstanding these people now,

(01:23:01):
but really, it's really, youknow, as you noted, arguably
more entrenched even, because hesort of, you know, I know that
Yarvin sort of frames, you know,there's really no difference
between a CEO and a dictator.And ultimately, if you want to
put a CEO in charge ofeverything, or in the case of,
you know, the technicaltechnocracy Inc model a

(01:23:23):
continental director, you know,you're essentially saying that,
you know, they would rule as,as, as dictators, over over,
yeah.

ID (01:23:34):
I mean, one other thing. I mean, Yavin openly said that
Americans need to get over theirdictatorship phobia. And then, I
think, within a couple of weeksof him saying that, Thiel gave a
speech at Stanford, I thinkwhere he advocated, you know,
that dictatorship was, that wasthe right way to proceed with he

(01:23:56):
was talking about startups, youknow, you know, starting up new
new industry and starting up newcompanies. But nonetheless, he
said, you know that we that weneed to be dictators. You know
that need, there needs to be adictatorship in order for, for,
you know, a company for

Unknown (01:24:14):
innovation, Iain dictatorship, just cause
innovation,

WW (01:24:21):
of innovation. Every historical dictatorship, right?
I mean, that's the thing thatdefines them all, not extreme
oppression of the public orcensorship or tyranny, it's it's
innovation, right? Unless you'retalking about innovation in
tyranny, which then perhapsthat's true.

ID (01:24:40):
Yeah, yeah, they've been great for that. But, I mean, I
think, I think one of the thingsis, I mean, we are, you know,
I've written these two articles,and we're talking about all
these seemingly off the wall,weird, new ideas that are being,
that are being adopted by someof the most powerful people on
Earth. But it's not new, is it?It's just. Say it's the same old

(01:25:02):
idea. It's the same old ideathat a small group of people
should completely dominateeverybody else. Yes, yes. I
mean, I mean, it's as old. It'sas old as society itself. It's
not new,

WW (01:25:18):
you know, it's interesting to me when you consider too
that, you know, the PayPalMafia, right? My work has shown
and we've talked, we haven'ttalked that much in this
discussion about it, but thesecond part of your series does
touch on it that a lot of thesefigures, Musk and Thiel, in
particular, are joined at thehip with the national security
state. And, you know, thenational security state of the

(01:25:38):
US when it goes in at coupsanother country? What kind of
system of government does itinstall there? Does it tend to
be, you know, libertariangovernments? No, it tends to be
military dictatorships. So, youknow, obviously the, if you look
at the CIA, as I do, is sort ofa construct of, you know, Wall

(01:26:00):
Street bankers and organizedcrime who basically use, you
know, intelligence agencies astheir secret police force. As it
were, it would make sense thatthis is the kind of system they
would like to have now in theUnited States, after imposing
dictatorships around the world.But what's interesting, too, I
think about this in particular.And he brought it up with Nick

(01:26:23):
lands work. Is that the salespitch for creating this kind of
tyranny, or in technocracy, andwhat have you, or whatever you
want to call it, is this, thismanufactured urgency of we have
to do this because of theapproaching singularity, and
because of AI and because ofwhere technology is taking us.

(01:26:47):
And it kind of reminds me of thesame urgency that people on the
right don't like from the leftabout things like climate
change, for example, and how wehave to make all of these
changes because this terriblecatastrophe will happen, or this
terrible thing will happen, andso we have to be prepared, or
the whole species will be wipedout, and we have to change

(01:27:07):
everything about our lives. It'sreally dialectically quite
similar, isn't it?

ID (01:27:14):
Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, I think that's, you know, goes
basically that, you know, the, Ithink it's fair to say, is it
not that, you know, the the leftbroadly, are on board with
things like, you know, combatingclimate change and sustainable
development and you know thesethings, they think, Oh, well,

(01:27:36):
yeah, we do have to accept thiskind of technocracy that clearly
sustainable development goalsare, are engineering. You know,
that's the point of them. To alarge extent, they accept that.
The left accepts that because,because, you know, the climate
catastrophe, the impendingclimate catastrophe, the right

(01:28:01):
less so they're far moreskeptical. Conservatives in the
in in Europe and in the UK andRepublicans in the US are far
more skeptical. Don't kind ofsee this evidence as solid as as
the left claims. Realize what aterrible impact it's going to

(01:28:21):
have on the economy andthemselves and their lives. So
they reject it, but they arevery, very concerned about other
things, such as immigration,such as, you know, the, you
know, the cost of living, thatkind of thing that really
matters. So up steps the otherside of the oligarch coin, this

(01:28:42):
time represented by Thiel andMusk particularly. But there are
others and and to provide theright the Conservatives and the
and the Republicans to providethem an in to essentially
exactly the same thing, whichis, as I, you know, said

(01:29:02):
earlier, is not a new idea. It'sjust, it's just that we're
moving into a technological erathat really is, from you know, a
kind of dictator's point ofview, an amazing opportunity to
just really stamp down on us andcontrol everything we do. So

(01:29:23):
they've already got the left onboard. Now they need to get the
right on board. Hence Trump itenables, it enables that, that
bait and switch to take place.And that's, you know, I mean,
that's, that's the way I viewit. I don't, I don't, there is
no, I can't put a cigarettepaper between, between both
sides of the coin, they'reessentially going down the same

(01:29:46):
path, you

WW (01:29:47):
know? And this kind of reminds me some of what, some of
what you just brought up, of howfascinating it has been to watch
how Teslas, which werepreviously the car of liberals.
Very concerned about climatechange. Electric vehicles in the
US you know, are now beingprotected in the streets by gun

(01:30:08):
toting libertarians and Trumpsupporters are buying them in
mass. And you have like, youknow, the Trump himself, and
also Howard lutnic, basicallydoing sales pitches for Tesla
publicly while in public office,and now it's being sort of
framed as like the car of therights, which is interesting,

(01:30:28):
isn't it, because since thefuture, you know, outlined by
this technocratic model, and youknow, affiliated entities is
interested in an EV only cars,because, you know, Tesla, as as
Musk has pointed out, is not acar company, it's a software and
AI company. But really, Teslasare like surveillance machines,

(01:30:51):
and they can be remotely turnedoff. And if you are driving it
and the government decides youare naughty, they can just drive
your car against your will to apolice department or whatever,

ID (01:31:03):
or into a wall.

WW (01:31:05):
Yes, the Michael Hastings method, I guess so. It's not
necessarily better, but now it'sthe car of the right. And I
think, you know, I used to thinkbefore, when I saw a lot of this
stuff, you know, these shifts inthese engineering efforts to get
people on the right on boardwith a lot of these quote,
unquote, globalist policies thatthey used to hate and now are

(01:31:26):
being engineered to love underdifferent names. You know, 15
minute cities, Freedom cities,whatever you know, among other
examples that we've discussedtoday, not CBDCs, but but stable
coins. You know, I used towonder, how are they going to
sell Neuralink? And now I'mlike, Well, no, they're just
going to tell the conservativesthat they need a Neuralink to

(01:31:47):
own the libs, and then a bunchof them will just do it. Maybe
that's a little cynical, butit's starting to feel like the
social engineering stuff hasbeen, has been very successful
in getting people that wereagainst the so called Great
reset of the COVID era. Youknow, I think they did a good
job in sort of framing it, thatthe great reset was a communist

(01:32:09):
plot, and it was just KlausSchwab and a handful of other
people. And now that we've putnew faces in charge, you know,
it's even though people foryoung global leaders of the WEF
and whatever in our you know,Peter Thiel is on the building
Bilderberg steering committee.It's different now, and things
are fine, and it's not reallythe same policies. Yeah, because

(01:32:30):
people tend to focus so much onthe political personalities and
not the policies beingimplemented. Yeah,

ID (01:32:36):
no, absolutely. And one of the things that I thought was
very interesting, was it MarkAnderson? He from Anderson
Horowitz. He wrote this thingcalled the techno optimists
manifesto, in which he nowbearing in mind he has been he's

(01:32:58):
not officially linked to theDOGE, but he's been noted as a
key, a key influencer in inselecting staff or whatever he
was, an advisor, an advisor tothe Trump administration, who
appears to have been selectingpeople for all kinds of
positions and everything. Now inthe in the techno optimist

(01:33:19):
manifesto, he openly says, weare accelerationists now we is
obviously the network that he's,you know, he's tied to, and
accelerationists used in the waythat he used it. And everything,
everything that he's written inthe techno optimist manifesto

(01:33:39):
has come is pure. So the peoplethat are advocates of The Dark
Enlightenment would callthemselves Neo reactionaries.
And it is pure, Neo reactionaryDark Enlightenment stuff that
he's written there. And, youknow, they call AI their
Philosopher's Stone. They're,you know, they're elevating it,

(01:34:01):
already, elevating it to, youknow, mythical heights. And you
know that. So these people areundoubtedly pursuing this
twisted, I would say, ideology,it's influence on them is, is

(01:34:21):
obvious, and they are veryinfluential, I would say, in the
current US government. So, youknow, I mean, I think, I think
it's whatever Republican votershoped they would get. I mean, if
we, if we look at things like,you know, Trump's executive

(01:34:44):
orders, that that's, that's thatis purely feeding into what
these, this oligarch network,desire, you know, they're trying
to construct this technocraticgame. Core, privatized form of
government and and everythingthat that Trump has done,

(01:35:07):
really, all these, certainly hisexecutive orders, uh, pretty
much facilitates that. So or is,or is intended to facilitate
that. So, yeah, sure, whilepeople are focused on the DOGE,
you know, making its efficiencysavings, apparently, although
that, I think that remains to beseen, but, but while it's

(01:35:30):
supposedly making its efficiencysavings, as you said right at
the beginning of this, whatpeople aren't noticing is that
it is in it is deploying AI tomake decisions over people's
lives. That's what it's that'swhat it's also doing, and the
people that are behind it,particularly in this case, Musk,

(01:35:52):
that's what they that's the kindof society they are trying to
construct. But as we, as we alsosaid earlier, ultimately, the
idea that the fundamental ideathat underpins everything is
1000s of years old. It is abouttop down control, that's that's

(01:36:13):
what it's about.

WW (01:36:14):
Well, yeah, I think it's absolutely very old. It's like,
you know, the oligarch familiesare like, hey, remember in the
Middle Ages, when they were abunch of serfs and they were
ruled by kings, wasn't thatgreat? How do we go back to
that, but then prevent the serfsfrom ever rebelling again, kind
of thing. But, I mean, I don'tknow. We can't hate on them,
right? They're techno optimists.They're optimist Iain, are you

(01:36:37):
against optimism? Are you blackpilled. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's
kind of funny, but that's thebest pushback they have anymore,
is we'll

ID (01:36:47):
just call it optimism. When you read it, you'll be
terrified, but we'll call itoptimistic.

WW (01:36:57):
It's more like the would be, you know, robber barons of this
era that instead of oil barons,of course, they're they're data
barons. They're very optimisticabout the prospects of all of
this. Yeah

ID (01:37:10):
for themselves. Yeah. But to highlight the point that we were
just talking about, about yousaying that you know about how
that they're, they're cajolingpeople and getting people to go
along with it, with the with theother side of the, you know, the
Republic and the conservativeside of this agenda. In in the
techno optimist manifesto,Anderson says he lists a whole

(01:37:34):
load of things. I think he liststhe World Health Organization,
the World Economic Forum, uh,stake stakeholder capitalism,
and a whole, whole load ofthings that that he identifies
as the enemies, the enemies ofthe techno populists, of the

(01:37:54):
techno kings, which is how theysometimes refer themselves their
enemies. And then says because,you know, and then go ahead,
doesn't say it outright, but hekind of very, kind of firmly,
kind of infers it that they'reall rooted in communism. I
thought was like what we go backto, sort of McCarthyism now, is
this just kind of, that's

WW (01:38:15):
what happened during the COVID era. A lot of the figures
that were promoted very heavilyas as as the leaders, quote,
unquote, or thought leaders ofdissent during the COVID era. A
lot of them claimed that andignored the fact that the WEF is
of the global promoter, selfdescribed, of the public private

(01:38:36):
partnership,

Unknown (01:38:38):
yeah, and ignored

WW (01:38:39):
what stakeholder capitalism actually is and does. And it
basically became kind of thismccarthyist style thing, in a
sense. But again, it was aboutsort of creating this label,
sort of in the same line of whatwe talked about earlier with
identity politics and not reallyhaving people look at the
underlying policies, whichultimately, you know, of the

(01:39:02):
great reset in the West isdigital transformation in the
fourth industrial revolution,which is a merging of of our
biological and digital selves,which is essentially what this
group is also arguing for,right? And so again, it's like,
oh, well, we've defeated thecommunists. We're not
communists. We are somethingelse. But we're still going to

(01:39:25):
give you the Fourth IndustrialRevolution and all the policies
of the great reset. We're justgoing to use different sales
pitches for them, which is,ultimately, I think, where,
where we are in that sense,which is why I urge people all
the time to focus on the policyand not the political figure,
not the celebrity, not theidentity right of the identity

(01:39:48):
politics, or these, you know,these manufactured celebrities,
or, you know, front men thathave been, you know, are now the
richest men in the world, orwhatever. But focus on.
Policies, because you'll find alot of the policies are the
same, and someone like Elon Muskis now a hero among the
ostensible right, but he's amajor proponent of universal

(01:40:10):
basic income, of carbon pricing.You know a who's who of you know
great reset policies, but Iguess we're supposed to believe
it's it's different now, orhe'll frame it differently. And
you, you know, in your piece,gave this quote from Yarvin
about the humane alternative togenocide, and really, it could

(01:40:33):
have come out of any of theseNeo eugenicist groups affiliated
with the WEF. Or Yuval NoahHarari, you know, from the COVID
era, this idea of basicallyhaving people waxed in pods
instead of killing them. Theycan be in pods and be in virtual
worlds enjoying themselves, likethe metaverse or something like

(01:40:53):
that. But I guess in this case,it will be a corporation that
will put you in the pod and feedyou bugs, Freedom cicadas, and
you'll get your UBI Libertystipend. I don't know. I'm sure
they'll change the names of allof these things now that 15
minute cities are, are freedomcities, Freedom cities. And you

(01:41:14):
know, just have to cloak it theright way and sell it to them.
And, you know, and be like,well, get in the pod, and you'll
own the LIBS that way in yourpod. I don't know. I mean, a lot
of the policies they advocatefor really aren't different.
It's just the sales pitches andthe means to, you know, get
people to consent to them areand ultimately, again, it's just

(01:41:36):
like the COVID era, where somuch was invested in getting
people to consent to things andmanipulate them to consent to
things they otherwise want toconsent to. I would argue the
same thing is happening now.Yeah, absolutely.

ID (01:41:49):
And I think the interest, I mean, one of the things that the
quote, I just took a section outof that of that essay that he
wrote, the lead up to the quotethat I've that I've given,
because it does stand out in thein the in the piece he was
talking about converting us intobio fuel. Says, you know, the
the most useful thing that a lotof these people are any use for

(01:42:10):
is to be converted into biofuel. But we can't do that. I
mean, when he's talking aboutthese people, what he means, and
I think it's important tostress, this is us. That's who
he means. He means all of usthat we are not. We're not ready
for the the singularity. Yousee, we're not, we're not
equipped for it. So we'reuseless, in their view. So, so,

(01:42:35):
you know, the best thing for us,really, he argued in this piece
was that we should be turnedinto bio fuel. But then, but
then he said he was just joking.He was just, he was only joking
about that. So what he reallymeans is, and I'll, we'll quote
this, but it says our goal, inshort, is a humane alternative
to genocide. That is the idealsolution achieves the same

(01:42:57):
result as mass murder, theremoval of undesirable elements
from society, but without any ofthe moral stigma. So that so
Yarvin's main problem withgenocide is it's bad PR, that's,
that's his, that's his. Yes,that's, that's his. Problem with
it other really,

WW (01:43:18):
he's really, Yuval Noah Harari with mop hair. I feel
like the more I think about it,yeah,

ID (01:43:24):
so, so bearing in mind that this there's, you know, Thiel is
very close to Yarvin, you know,I mean, he's, you know, they've
spent a lot of time to together.Thiel has referenced him a
number of times. They share thesame shape, same ideas. So you
know, when you think that howinfluential he has become in the

(01:43:47):
current Trump administration andand his networks, you know
across I mean, look at look atthe conduct. Bear that in mind
what we've just heard Yavin sayand think about the conduct of
Palantir in Ukraine and thenIsrael. It seemed pretty clear.

(01:44:11):
And stab ruler perhaps wrote anexcellent piece about this. But
the Palantir, you know, usedUkraine as a as a test bed for
not just Palantir, you know,other open AI. And you know,
there were, there were a lot ofpeople involved, but they used

(01:44:32):
it as a test bed to develop AI,weapon development, targeting,
targeting and and things likethat. And then they, then they
were invited to really kind ofuse what they'd learnt in Israel
for, you know, a real genocide,so that they could partner with

(01:44:55):
the Israeli occupation forces toto commit a real genocide. Yeah.
So, so although, and then Ithink, a lot of times, and one
of the things that I've tried tofocus on in the pieces is the
use of language that thesepeople are using. They they
often, and, you know, do it in aflip and off hand joking manner.
You know, that's the way, that'sthe way they present their

(01:45:17):
ideas. Oh, it's all just alaugh, really. But when we see
the culmination of those ideas,as we've seen in Ukraine and
Gaza, it's not so funny afterall, is it?

WW (01:45:30):
No, not at all. And I think that's something that's been
overlooked entirely in talkingabout, you know, Palantir's
influence in the United States,for example, is that all of
these things are intended to beused domestically, and Palantir
is the repurposing of a programthat was created for that
purpose. And it's meant to be apre crime system, which is why

(01:45:51):
Palantir ever since, you know,it was originally total
information awareness andprivatized as Palantir, Palantir
has been at the forefront ofpredictive policing, as it's
called now, you know, throughoutthe United States, and I believe
beyond as well. And the idea,you know, is that the algorithm
determines if you may be guiltyof a crime in the future and

(01:46:12):
that you can be prosecuted,because the algorithm thinks you
might do something that youhaven't done yet, which is
obviously horrible anddystopian. But certainly shows
this whole idea of, well, youknow, could be used to
effectuate this, this idea that,you know, people, of the useless

(01:46:33):
eaters and all of that, becausea lot of the, for example, LAPD,
which used to use Palantir forpredictive policing, and then
moved to this other program, theprogram they use more, most
recently, called PredPol, wasfound to be half a percent
accurate, half a percent. Yeah,so that's like, infinitely worse
than a coin toss. It's basicallya way to go in a community and

(01:46:53):
send as many of the people thereto prison as possible. So if you
you know are Yarvin, and youwant to say who are
undesirables? Well, you know,undesirables are criminals,
right? Or perspective,criminals. And so if you have a
combination of these algorithms,especially when now you know the
algorithms have your socialmedia history, so anti semitism

(01:47:16):
is now, you know, hate speechunder Trump, whatever. Well, it
was before too, but they're sortof taking, using AI to kick
people, to deport people, andkick people out of college based
on what they've said about, youknow, Israel, or the Israel Gaza
war, more specifically, whathappens if, you know, they take
kick that up a notch and it canbecome a crime, or, you know, in

(01:47:37):
a pre crime paradigm, stayingthings like that is a precursor,
is an indicator that you maycommit an anti semitic act in
the future, or something likethat. That's where things get
absolutely bonkers, and it'scompletely insane. And I think
people just don't really realizethat. And you know, a lot of you
know, in my case, you know, I'veattempted to warn about Palantir

(01:47:59):
and Thiel, and then later JDVance as vice president, because
of his ties to, you know, Thieland Palantir and all of that,
you know, quite vocally, and Idon't, I don't know, it just
doesn't seem to resonate withpeople, with what Palantir is
meant to become, and now,because they are tied up so much
with the health system in the Usat HHS, and also, of course, in

(01:48:22):
the UK, with NHS, they haveaccess to mental health data.
And in the first Trumpadministration, they tried to
create a program called Safehomes, where AI would go through
your social media and determineif you're showing early warning
signs of neuropsychiatricviolence and should be, you
know, put on, placed under housearrest and things like that, you

(01:48:46):
know, preventatively and Trump,you know, framed it as part of
this thing, like we have to stopmass shootings before they can
happen in all of this. And it'sdefinitely not liberty minded,
to say the least, um, but woulddefinitely, you know, I could
see where that could easilyinterlink with some of these

(01:49:08):
viewpoints from yard and others,this idea of sort of putting
undesirables in the pod. Well,we won't kill the undesirables,
but we can put them under housearrest, and they can go and be
in the metaverse or whatever. Imean, I know that sounds really
dark, but unfortunately,Palantir and this whole system
being constructed that alsoincludes these AI, you know,

(01:49:31):
weapons and the generation of AIkill lists that are being used
to slaughter whole families inGaza. The fact that that has now
happened, and Palantir has nowenabled that, and that a
government is allowing that tohappen, and there is no
international condemnation oreffort to really prevent that

(01:49:52):
from continuing, shows that itwill continue to happen, and the
fact that Palantir was alwaysintended to be used domestically
in. Or against, you know,dissidents within the West via,
you know, its previousincarnations. You know, people
should be very, very aware of,of how of a slippery slope this

(01:50:12):
is, and how and how much thisparticular group should be,
certainly not cheerleaded. And Iguess let's put it that way.

ID (01:50:23):
Yeah. And I think you know, one thing that I sort of else
would sort of stress as well isthat this is a protect the
potential that they arepursuing, the potential of the
of the system that they aretrying to construct. When you go
all the way back to a guy calledFrederick Winslow Taylor, who

(01:50:45):
was the kind of, the initialkind of, I guess, kind of
driving force for the for thetechnocrats of the 1930s who
said the system must be firstso, so they're constructing this
system. And one of the questionsI ask in the articles is, if
it's not intended for thepurposes that we've just been

(01:51:08):
discussing, and we're alreadyseeing it being used for those
kinds of terrible reason,purposes, why are they building
it? Why are they constructing itin the manner that they are
constructing it, if they don'tintend to use it? And we know
that they do intend to use itbecause they're already using it

(01:51:29):
for, for that, for that kind ofinhumane, inhuman, just, you
know, terrible, terrible kind ofthings that they that they're
using this, this, these systemsfor. So, you know, another point
though, that I would point outis that it doesn't we don't have

(01:51:52):
to accept it. We just don't haveto accept it. We're not
compelled to go along with anyof this. We really aren't, but
we but unfortunately, I meanthat you know that's the way.
Certainly I would suggest thatthe propaganda has worked in the
US in this lead up to the recentelection. Is to convince people,

(01:52:13):
as you rightly said earlier, isto convince people to go along
with it, based on based on acomplete misapprehension. Of
what, of what is being proposed.You know, it's what is being
proposed is not what I wouldsuggest Republican voters
thought was being proposed. Itjust isn't.

WW (01:52:35):
Well, certainly not. And there's a lot of influencers
now, uh, trying to keep peoplein the pen being like, just give
it more time. Trump needs moretime. And I mean, people should
remember, we've heard thisbefore with Obama and Trump in
his first term, the trust theplan. I mean, they just
basically want you to sit andwait and do nothing and keep
giving your consent until whatthe system they're building has

(01:52:59):
been built. And exactly they'reManufacturing Consent for the
system. They've been verysuccessful in doing it, and a
lot of that is because of howsuccessfully they manipulate
media. And something I've saidfor a very long time, and it's
very true, is that the PayPalMafia fund a lot of independent

(01:53:20):
media voices in attempt to, evenif they don't overtly fund them,
they attempt to recruit them tospeak at private events that
involve the Thiel Foundation,for example. And I know that
personally because I wasextended an offer, even though I
had just written a book slammingPalantir in Peter too. No

(01:53:44):
thanks. But if I got an offerlike that, which, of course, I
did not even respond to, I'msure plenty of other people have
as well in independent media.And that doesn't, you know,
there's Thiel funding peopledirectly, like Tucker Carlson,
and also, you know, via rumble,for example, JD Vance is also a
shareholder in and a lot ofother examples. But if you look

(01:54:07):
at these big promoted voices andthe so called mainstream
alternative media, they're notcritical of Thiel and Musk and
they they're extremely boostedby the algorithm. At this point,
it should be abundantly obviousto people, and so they're using,
you know, those voices to keeppeople in the partisan box. Yes,
all of these things arehappening. They'll talk about

(01:54:28):
suppressed or controversialinformation, but their answer
is, sit and wait. Trump will fixit, or Robert F Kennedy, or any
of these other figures will fixit. And ultimately, it's up to
us to extricate ourselves fromthe system. Because whether it's
Trump or Thiel or Musk or anyoneelse like you said, the system
is it must be first, right? It'snot really about us, and so if

(01:54:50):
we don't want to live under thesystem, our best shot is to
extricate ourselves from it andbecome as independent of it as
possible. Because if we'redependent on it and consent to
become. And even more dependenton it, which is about to happen
over the next, you know, four tofive years or so, arguably less.
You know, it'll be much harderto extricate yourself from it in

(01:55:14):
the future. And you will, youknow, become a human animal to
be programmed by these people,which is what you know, the
effort ultimately is leading usto consent to so in the interest
of time. Iain, any lastthoughts, either on that or on
the topic of discussion atGeneral, yeah,

ID (01:55:29):
one thing, there's no doubt about the way they perceive us.
You know, the land spoke aboutour sovereignty should be
treated with that they've gotthis idea of auditing the
functions of society that's partof the Dark Enlightenment, and
they would audit everyone'ssovereignty and land. Said that

(01:55:52):
our sovereignty was so pitiful,so meaningless, that it should
be treated with derision so andI think that it's fair to say
that that is how we are seen.Certainly land referred to us as
the inarticulate pros. Javinthinks we ought to be waxed up
in a virtualized world like beesinside a honeycomb. If you know,

(01:56:15):
seen as genocide is bad. PR, youknow, feel calls us the
unthinking demos. These peopleare not our friends, and we need
to be very clear on that. Well,thanks

WW (01:56:31):
so much for your time. Iain, if you could let our viewer or
listeners know where to findyour work. Of course, I'm, as I
mentioned earlier, you're aregular contributor to Unlimited
Hangout. But of course, you haveyour own website. You have your
own books and and otherprojects. So if you could let
you know our listeners andsupporters know about that, it
would be greatly appreciated.Yeah,

ID (01:56:50):
you can find me at Iaindavis.com All one word. My
name's spelt with two I's. It'si-a-i-n davis.com Also I write
at Substack, which, again, isIainDavis.substack.com I also
fortunate that a number of myarticles are republished by the
offGuardian, which is a greatplace to go for a variety of a

(01:57:13):
lot of writers there that areproducing some good stuff at
offGuardian. I'm very fortunateto have my articles published by
yourself, Whitney, at UnlimitedHangout. I've also got some
articles published withGeopolitics & Empire. Yeah, my
book, my latest book is TheManchester Attack, and that is
freely available to subscribersto my website. And you can also

(01:57:35):
purchase a physical copy if youwant at my website.

WW (01:57:41):
Well, thanks so much, Iain, thanks so much for your work,
particularly on the elites nowcontrolling us Society, who are
obviously poised to have a majorinfluence well beyond the US
just because of the unipolarparadigm that has existed in the
post world war two era. And alsofor your work on a litany of

(01:58:02):
topics, there were other thingscovered in this series too that
I wish we had time to talkabout, like your work on
synthetic hegemonic currency,and how this is playing into the
new digital finance paradigmthat we are rapidly being herded
into, among other things. So Iwould definitely encourage
people to check out not justIain series for Unlimited
Hangout, but some of his pastwork on these issues as well

(01:58:24):
more relevant than ever. Andthank you to everyone for
listening and for especially tothe people that support this
podcast, and we'll catch you onthe next episode as we continue
our series on the PayPalPresidency.

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