Elon, Trump & The Elite’s Trap: A Hidden Agenda To Hijack Freedom & Collapse America | Whitney Webb

Trump has just come into office. Do we think or I should say do you think as we may see this differently, do you think that Trump is um somebody who has the elite view of like, "Hey, the right people are in power. Let's make these decisions for everybody else." Or do you believe he actually sits outside of that system and is actually trying to help the everyday person uh in the way that he presented himself while he was campaigning? Yeah, so as far as my perspective on Trump goes, it tends to do with the view it tends to revolve around the view that he is a businessman at heart and that the focus of his um political style, I guess, is deal-making. Um and you know, I wrote a lot um in my book about uh Trump's mentor uh Roy Cohn, who was um among other other things the general counsel to McCarthy uh during the McCarthy hearings. He was also, you know, a New York City lawyer uh that represented a lot of unsavory figures, including some uh tied to organized crime, and also had the ear of Ronald Reagan and top politicians in the United States and sort of bridged um a variety of worlds. And he uh very much essentially taught Trump the art of the deal, as it were. And you know, a lot of his close Cohn's close associates, uh like the Pope family, for example, uh were very politically connected, also connected to organized crime, arguably. Um but we're very much in the business of uh making backroom deals uh and that that's how, you know, power uh political power in the United States functions. Um and so, you know, fundamentally I think uh a lot of what um Trump likes to focus on and promote about his political style is um around negotiations, whether those are diplomatic negotiations or negotiations with businessmen that lead to uh big number investments he can tout to the public, which is, you know, I think part of the impetus behind his having the Project Stargate press conference, you know, at the White House on his first full day, you know, at at his second term. And I think that was all that's also kind of consistent with what we saw from Trump during his first term as well. So, when you're sort of focused on those metrics, I don't necessarily think that the focus is necessarily on how do I help how do I help everyday Joe? I'm sure that, you know, in his mind, well, I don't really necessarily want to speak for him, but if you're, you know, of the opinion that I'm going to tout this big multi-million dollar investment in US AI infrastructure for example, perhaps he view he views that as helpful for the American economy and thus helpful for the American people. And I think it is very likely that over the next four years there certainly will be some Americans that economically benefit, you know, from Trump's economic but I don't necessarily think that's going to be um everybody. And I think, you know, generally based on what we've seen so far, there's been a lot of courting of big tech executives and and a lot of talk about making the US the AI and crypto capital of the world. And how much of that is necessarily going to translate or trickle down to sort of refer to, you know, Reaganite economic terms, you know, to the everyday American public, it's really hard to know. But again, you know, I just want to go back to someone like Eric Schmidt, for example, who as I noted earlier had sort of an outsized role in developing the AI policy of the military intelligence community. He wrote a book called The Age of AI with a with Henry Kissinger and also, I believe, a professor from MIT who I'm sorry his name escapes me at the moment, but basically that book posited that essentially AI is going to make a two-tiered society. There's going to be the top tier of people who develop and maintain AI and set and determine what its objective functions are and then sort of a a second class who which we would assume is larger than the first class so they don't explicitly say that but who I AI acts upon and eventually that that group will lose the ability to to understand and be really be able to conceive of um how how AI is impacting their life impacting their lives and will develop some sort of dependency on AI for things like decision-making sort of leading to this phenomena that they refer to in the book is cognitive diminishment which I sort of see as this idea of you know we've all heard it before if you don't use it you lose it sort of the idea of like mental math you start using a calculator or a phone calculator or something like that and it becomes more difficult over time and eventually very difficult to be able to do mental math in your head when perhaps when you were in grade school it was much easier to do that because you were sort of you had to use that ability regularly and so they sort of they essentially argue that by not making those decisions and outsourcing that to AI this particular class will lose the ability to make those decisions over time and when you also have a factor in that there's a lot of effort to sort of outsource creativity art and music to artificial intelligence will that have an impact on people's ability to create and what sort of impact will this have on society and you know these are things that I think sort of get left out of the public discussion and I don't think they're really on someone like Trump's radar as a businessman he's focused on sort of the bottom line the number the success of the negotiation and how successful it it looks frankly whether it's to his base or to businessmen he wants to court or you know other people foreign leaders you know um and you know I I I I'll stop there I guess. No, that was great. So how do you feel when you hear about AI creating this two-tier system? I certainly don't think that's positive. I think it's sort of the technocratic model that we discussed earlier where you sort of have an elite class that sort of set the system that will micromanage the masses at the end of the day. I mean they don't explicitly say that in the book but if you're familiar with someone like Henry Kissinger for example and some of his controversial views on the masses and the public and some of his more infamous quotes, you know, I mean is that a system that he wants to happen? I don't really know. He's dead and so no one can ask him but I think it is kind of disturbing in a sense that someone that was known more infamous quotes? I'm not I'm not super familiar with Kissinger. I know who he is but I couldn't quote him. He created a national security memorandum for example that viewed people that live in the third world birth rates and and and you know in the global south as national security threats to the United States and wanted to implement policies to reduce their population size for example and sort of had what I would argue was a eugenicist bent to some of his policies and he was one of the mentors of course to people that have become infamous in recent years like the World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab and you know some of his more infamous quotes that he's known for referred to you know soldiers being you know pawns of foreign policy essentially sort of like you know people's lives are just you know pawns on a chessboard for the sort of the elite figures to move around you know for for their benefit. That's sort of the mentality as I see it. Um of someone like him but obviously he's been you know praised as a model statesman and all of this stuff and his uh, mentored Trump in his first administration, mentored Hillary Clinton, you know, people on both sides of the aisle. Um, and but I personally, you know, I think the more you look into someone like that and his connections with sort of dubious oligarchs like David Rockefeller going, you know, significantly back in time. You know, he's sort of someone that promotes this idea of of a global technocracy. Okay, so do you have the impulse to want to see AI slow down or stop? Well, I don't necessarily want to say that I'm like a Luddite and we and we should all go back to the Stone Age or things like this, but I think there needs to be like an actual public discussion on this, particularly on the fact that our out of control national security state and Silicon Valley are have essentially been fusing over the past few decades and what necessarily that means because a lot of people be, you know, will say stuff, well, it's AI in the private sector, but when that private sector company has multi-million dollars conflicts of interest with the national security state. I think that should, you know, be part of the discussion necessarily and I think also there needs to be a way to sort of know whether some of these algorithms are hyped or whether what the company says their accuracy is, for example, is actually accurate before decisions are made to outsource major decision-making whether at the government level or the local level or really on any level, you know, to an algorithm. So, you know, as an example during COVID-19, the governor of Rhode Island, Gina Raimondo, sort of gave a green light to this Israeli company called Diagnostic Robotics to use, you know, the health data in the state to predict COVID-19 outbreaks before they could happen. Right? And Gina Raimondo, by the way, became HIPAA laws? Well, I'm I'm sure a lot of those were sort of suspended under the emergency justification of COVID-19, but I'm not exactly familiar with the legal or potential legal snafus of that. Um at the time or maybe they justified it by alleged, you know, saying they they they sort of took anonymized the data. I don't really know. But the idea was to sort of use that data to identify local hotspots and predict outbreaks before they happen. And so obviously if, you know, the algorithm of this company predicts an outbreak, there would be sort of these localized lockdowns and people would lose their ability to engage in in-person commerce and freedom of movement and etc. So, you know, consequences that are pretty significant to the people living there. Um and when I reported on it at the time as I recall, but it's been a few years, but I do know that the algorithm per the company was under 80% accurate. I think it was somewhere in the 70s. And so that's the company, right? So, if it's not independently vetted, um and if this is sort of, you know, company PR um at the end of the day, is that overinflated? It's quite possible, right? And so what if the accuracy of that isn't really in the 70s, it's in the 60s or near the 50s? It's no better than a coin toss, right? Is it really worth putting that kind of power in the hand of an algorithm that isn't necessarily going to be more efficient and accurate, but all this hype that's been generated around AI as an industry suggests that that's sort of created this public perception that AI is inherently um smarter than human decision-makers and more efficient and more cost-effective, for example. Um I think these are kind of problematic scenarios that need to be considered, and I'm not trying to be a Debbie Downer or poo-poo on on innovation, but I think, you know, civil liberties do matter, and I think people need to be very mindful of that, especially considering again the Silicon Valley fusion with the national security state and the national security state's tendency to opportunistically whittle down American civil liberties for for benefit. Hm. It's a really interesting intersection that I clearly need to start thinking more about. The way that I would look at that, and this ties into uh something you mentioned earlier uh during the inauguration of Donald Trump, you had all these uh tech billionaires there by him, and it gave it certainly gave me like, "Ooh, this is why people are paranoid about oligarchy" vibes. Uh and I'm not super prone to that kind of thinking, so the fact that it hit me like that, I was like, "Okay, definitely it's good that people are being paranoid." Uh but the intersection feels like it's a very natural intersection to me. So, the reason that national security would be fusing with technology is that technology is going to be the front where these battles are fought. And so, anybody that's seen, you know, the however many thousands of drones uh that China can launch and get to, you know, dance like a dragon is very compelling. When you see it, it looks so cool. Uh and then you imagine, "Well, what happens when 10,000 drones like that are able to go over uh aircraft carrier, and each one drops a uh reasonable size payload that by itself would do next to nothing, but you drop 10,000 of those uh little somethings on that ship, and you turn it into Swiss cheese?" You realize, "Ooh, the way that we've been doing uh national defense is not going to work in a modern combat scenario." And so, it is going to be these tech guys that we're going to need, even if you just grant me that AI is going to get really good at hacking, which there was a recent uh announcement, I forget if it was from Deep Seek, uh I can't remember, but there was a company that was doing this where they wanted to see um how well their AI was at hacking, and it was unbelievably good. And so, they were doing it as a red team inside of a company, so they can say, "Okay, here's how we broke our own systems. Now we need a a team that can come in and shore these up." Uh but you're going to have to have that. Like if you are living in a world where one country has AI and another does not, uh the country without it will lose. And so to me this feels like an arms race we cannot afford to not engage in. Uh and so it just becomes a question of, all right, well, given the stakes, how do we actually navigate this? So I I would not want to pull apart the national security apparatus from uh the tech bros to be dismissive. Um so what do you do? I don't know if you want to stay in the lane of like I just want people looking at the right things or if you actually have an insight there, uh but I'd be very curious. Um you know, I do prefer to stay in in my lane as much as possible uh frankly. Um especially on sort of these uh sticky stickier issues, but I do have some opinions. So um first of all, um as I referred to earlier with the national submission uh commit national security commission on artificial intelligence and some of these FOIA documents that came out of there, there is the promotion of the idea that essentially the US needs to do what China has done and and replicate this civil-military fusion model in order to win the AI arms race. And sort of the argument inherent in that is that in order to beat China we must become China even more than China is. Um and and you know, a lot of the justifications um you know, around um China as an adversary are related to how uh China uh is not as um protective of civil liberties as the as the United States at least postures itself as being for example, and a major difference in the value system between the China between China and the United States. And so if you're willing to adopt exactly that model, civil-military fusion, in my opinion, is really not that different than um fascism at the end of the day. Um it's it's the corporatist model, and I don't think it's uh necessarily what what Americans want. Um and yeah, there is a trade-off, and I think people should consider it. Um but again, I'm not um in the business of telling people what to think, but what happens if we go so far out of a desperation to win an AI arms race with China, for example, uh that we completely surrender our the value system that supposedly makes us a freer, better society in the process, I think uh that is complicated. Um and I would also point to the fact that uh you know, transnational capital, a lot of that has enabled China's AI arms race. There is a lot of cross-pollination in these uh you know, Chinese government-adjacent tech corporations um and the United States. Uh you can look at people like Larry Fink, for example, um who definitely have a lot of ties at to Chinese industry, uh for example, and people like Steve Schwarzman, um quite similarly, very much uh tied there, who's, you know, head of Blackstone. And uh they're both very close personal friends of Donald Trump, and also, of course, Fink has ties to the Democrats um as well. Um and a lot of, you know, Henry Kissinger, who I mentioned earlier, a lot of top CCP officials have pictures of them with Henry Kissinger in their offices. They love the guy. Um and there was that effort, of course, to open up China uh to to commerce and uh partnerships with uh Western companies, for example, um you know, back several decades ago, and a lot of that involved um you know, uh US capital in in some firms, like Bechtel, for example, that were very much tied to the national security state of Ronald Reagan, for example. A lot of top people that served in his in top national security positions under him were involved in Bechtel, which was building a lot of the infrastructure that helped enable China to become uh this, you know, the power that it is. And why is that not being talked about? And I mean, this is really isn't exclusive uh to Democrats, either, though they often get rightly pointed out for having some conflicts of interest of this nature. Uh but someone like Howard Lutnick, for example, who was head of the transition team uh for Trump and his his uh incoming Secretary of Commerce, um has the same his his a company he runs um has the same uh tie, arguably a more direct tie, uh to a Chinese government-majority-owned uh financial entity that was a a big scandal for conservatives when Hunter Biden's Rosemont uh Seneca was also tied to it. But there's been no conservative uproar over this tie. Um and you have to kind of ask why that may be. And why you have a lot of um these big tech people, Elon Musk included, who has a major role in the national security state of the United States as one of the top contractors to Space Force in the Pentagon, for example, and Starlink. And all of these things um have, you know, through Tesla has a lot of ties to, you know, Chinese commerce and and tech giants that also have uh rather cozy relationships with the Chinese government as well. Why is that not being discussed as, you know, a potential national security risk if we do really need to become China to beat China? You see what I'm saying? Like, if it was really that was really the key driver of our issue, shouldn't we be scrutinizing uh the ties of these oligarchs to both China and uh you know, some of and our own national security state. And, you know, again, I think um if people are familiar with my books and my work, there is a scandal that really uh exposed a lot of this uh that happened uh during the Clinton administration and was not properly investigated at all. It's remembered as as Chinagate, and it was really a uh you know, sort of today is I would argue misremembered as a campaign finance scandal for the Clinton re-election campaign. But what was the scant what what was the alleged bribery of the Clinton re-election campaign meant to accomplish? And if you look at what these, you know, forces gained, what these what these figures gained by sort of, you know, for all intents and purposes bribing the Clinton uh re-election campaign, it was facilitating um exports of sensitive national security technology to China. Um and a lot of that was done through a company called Loral, uh which is uh since uh become, I think, part of Lockheed Martin. And um the guy that that ran Loral at the time, Bernard Schwartz, uh nothing ever happened to him at all, despite the fact that he uh helped pass uh very sensitive satellites and other military technology from the US, uh you know, directly to the Chinese military. Um and nothing was done about it, and he was actually a major backer of Biden in 2020. Why was that not covered? Don't you think conservatives should be all over that story? And um you know, again, this sort of um makes me concerned because I think there's not enough talk about um transnational capital in these types of situations. And there's a very urgent need to go back and re-examine a lot of the past scandals of our national security state. Chinagate specifically, because as I noted in my book, uh the the death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and a lot of people at the ITA department at Commerce, those were the most people targeted as this bribery scandal of Chinagate, because the Commerce Department oversees the export of sensitive technology to foreign powers, right? And um the fact that most of the employees that knew about that scandal were all essentially blown up in the same uh uh, know, aircraft accident, and that Ron Brown had a bullet hole in his head when his body was discovered in the plane. Why has that not been Well, it's true. You can look at the evidence. Um, and it's absolutely there. And, um, you know, why can't we examine this? And shouldn't it be disturbing that the incoming head of the Commerce Department has a direct tie to the Chinese government in the context of that type of scandal of China Gate and targeting the Commerce Department specifically? Is that Wilbur Ross or who are we talking about? Yes. Interesting. Okay, so, uh, yet again, Whitney Webb, you lay new things at my feet that I have not yet looked at. I love this. Okay, so, what Yeah, oh, and you do it well. What is your hypothesis on what's going on? Uh, very um, generous interpretation would be, well, this is globalism. This is people trying to, uh, make sure that there are good, um, relations with these incredibly important, um, uh, international players. And we for decades tried to make China an ally, uh, open it up so that we could invest there, that they could invest here. Um, and it's only crazy people like me, Tom Bilyeu, who are like, yo, we're in a cold war with China, and this is about to get really weird. Um, what do you think if that's the, uh, naive or overly optimistic view, what do you think is really going on? Is it just personal enrichment? Uh, and they don't care. Hey, if if I'm the Clintons and I have to give China our secrets, but it helps me stay in power, I'm going to do it. 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Go to opus.pro/clipanything and give it a try for free right now. That's opus.pro/clipanything. And now, let's get back to the show. Well, so I would argue that one of the reasons or what we can look to is sort of one of the markers of this whole trend beginning of this um sort of bleeding of national security state issues between countries when it really doesn't make any sense. An example I like to bring up is a man named Samuel Pisar. You may know him as the stepfather of Anthony Blinken. He was also um a prominent lawyer for big tech companies and a lot of other corporations. Uh also a very good friend and and and close uh relation to uh Robert Maxwell. Uh Ghislaine Maxwell's father. Um and he uh wrote a um was very active in uh what he said was sort of smoothing over relationships between East and West during the Cold War. Um but essentially what he did he said in testimony to the Congress in the early '70s is that there was the rise of what he called the trans-ideological corporation. Um where you essentially have um the uh capital you know the multinational corporations, many of them based in the West, uh making joint ventures with the communist-owned, state-owned enterprises in the east, uh Russia and China, and that these were essentially fusing uh to form an economic structure that was unaccountable to any uh government in the world. And when asked if this that he if he thought this development was a good thing, he essentially said, "Yes, it was." And that was back in the early uh 1970s, and uh nothing was really uh done about it. And you have to kind of ask why why is that? And it's kind of interesting, too, for those that subscribe to um, you know, the the thesis of someone like Carroll Quigley, um who wrote many decades ago about this idea of um the Round Table groups um and all of that, um you know, sort of Cecil coming from Cecil Rhodes and in Britain and efforts to sort of remake the British Empire at a global scale through covert means, you know, they essentially that thesis essentially argues about creating an unaccountable economic entity as the as the means to doing that. Um a blob, if you if you will, but that's probably the easiest way um to understand it. Um and essentially, I think what we have arrived at as a consequence of that type of um you know, uh behavior and and, you know, uh situation um is a situation where we essentially have the nation-states acting as enabling environments um for policies that are often drafted at the at, you know, the international level by think tanks, and I'm sure the most notorious of those are things like the World Economic Forum, but there's the Council on Foreign Relations, there's Chatham House, there's CSIS. I mean, there's a lot of these entities around. And, you know, oftentimes Congresspeople aren't really directly writing the policies they're voting on. They're handed laws, uh and a lot of sometimes those are developed from these think tanks, which are funded largely by, you know, multinational corporations and sometimes, you know, directly by big tech oligarchs like Bill Gates, for example. And those are sort of, you know, shopped not just, you know, in one country, but oftentimes in multiple countries. And so, you sort of get multiple countries agreeing to enact the same policy framework for a variety of things. You know, some people have argued that's why, you know, essentially globally there was sort of lockstep agreement about what policies to enact in the situation of COVID-19. And also why, you know, ostensible adversaries like Russia, China, the United States, most of the West all agree about the, you know, sustainable development goals of the United Nations, which if you actually look into the SDGs, a lot of it is about sort of pushing us into this fourth industrial revolution where life becomes increasingly digitized and increasingly surveillable. And really I would ultimately argue it's about the creation of of new markets at the end of the day. And a lot of the push for digital ID is in that, and that's why some have argued that this is sort of a policy that's being implemented globally. And it is true, you know, digital ID in particular, sort of, I think the first time most people heard about it might have been in COVID-19. But in the post-COVID era, digital ID has made, you know, has been popping up essentially in every country around the world. So has surveillable, programmable, and seizable money, whether in the form of CBDC or its private sector equivalent. And I think it's fair to say that, you know, in countries like United States um where they don't want to have a a CBDC, for example, private sector is going to produce it. And they've done that in many occasions to make it sort of, I think, more palatable you know, to a more liberty-minded public. It's not coming from the state, it's coming from the private sector. But ultimately, you know, the end result in the, you know, the policy is essentially um, the same. And so, you know, in a sense, yes, I I guess some would argue that that is, um, globalism in a nutshell. And technocracy, which I mentioned earlier, um, you know, it was an actual movement. And that particular movement, built around this organization called Technocracy Inc., which the Canadian branch of which, uh, was led by Elon Musk's grandfather, um, that argued for the creation of all these different unions around the world, these different technics, like a European Union, an African Union, a North American Union, etc. Um, and that the the goal was to sort of push that, some have argued, uh, via the idea of this multipolar world, um, where you're sort of ending the unipolar model, and I think that's, you know, essentially what what we, uh, what has happened, essentially. Okay, well, let me, uh, let me see if I can, um, boil this down, make sure I understand it. Uh, globalism, uh, is a much bigger move than certainly I would have thought, started much earlier than I would have thought, that has really fused governments together with these transnational corporations, um, that the play in this moment as you begin thinking about what is the end game reasoning for all of this, um, is to open new markets, to concentrate power in the hands of the elites, to, uh, really give people a way to control policy at the global level, but not having it be, um, championed by the governments, but instead be championed by the private sector, so it feels more palatable that it's coming from the individuals, uh, but ultimately much of this is happening out of sight, that we are not questioning many of the things that we should have. The scandals would bubble up, but they would never be pursued to their logical conclusions, so that we could end up connecting the dots, see who the finite group of players are that are really moving this forward. Um to that end, you said something that I saw in my research that I found very interesting, which is when thinking about Jeffrey Epstein, stop following the sex and start following the money. And that it is far more compelling what he did to prop up or collapse national currencies than the sex stuff. And that in fact, the sex stuff may be being used by the people involved as a way to distract you from the part that actually matters, which is the currency manipulations. Uh how did I get add to that also, since I brought up China Gate, that it appears that Epstein had some sort of role in that as well, because a lot of his visits to the Clinton White House in the mid-1990s were with a man named Mark Middleton, who was one of the key figures in the Clinton administration actively involved in China Gate um at that time. And at the time that was going on, um Leslie Wexner, who Jeffrey Epstein worked for during that time, uh essentially took over Southern Air Transport, which had previously been the CIA-owned airline, and was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. Um had previously been in Miami, and he brought it to Columbus, Ohio um to move cargo from uh Columbus, Ohio to uh China. And um there were Ohio law enforcement officials at the time that called it the Meyer Lansky run, because they felt like it was tied to some sort of organized criminal activity. And when you consider that there's also evidence that Epstein would have been involved with arms trafficking back in the '80s and maybe in the '70s to an extent as well. That certainly warrants investigation. I would believe and I think it's that's part of why when most people talk about the Epstein-Clinton relationship, they tend to avoid the Epstein-Clinton relationship when Clinton was in office and focus almost exclusively on when Clinton was out of office, i.e. you know, post-2000. And I think that is um problematic and really needs to be looked at, especially and again, you know, local Columbus police wrote a report linking Leslie Wexner to organized crime. And it was suppressed at the highest levels of the Columbus PD, but that was the opinion of investigators working on the murder of his tax attorney who was shot in broad daylight like shortly before he was supposed to testify to the IRS about tax evasion. Yeah. So again, there's really not a lot of interest in looking at major aspects of the Epstein case and so, you know, that's something I focused on in my book, obviously, but I think it's a very good example in part due to the enduring public interest in that case. I think it very effectively shows that there are certain places that despite the public interest, there are places most people will not go. in terms of trying to investigate what really happened there and get to the truth of the matter. And this takes me back to my point earlier that people cannot make informed decisions without being empowered with knowledge and that knowledge requires effective unbiased reporting and it requires transparency. And unfortunately, we have a major lack of both of those two things and I think part of that is unfortunately because there really aren't a lot of investigative journalists anymore and I think a lot of people in independent media, which is supposedly the new media now, are much more influenced by what, you know, gets clicks and the algorithm and they aren't following the stories that really matter cuz that's not necessarily where the money is or where the clout is. Yeah, there is there's certainly a fractal to open up there. I don't consider myself a journalist. I've no interest in becoming a journalist and I do like what new media brings, but I don't like that journalism itself has been relegated to such a small piece of the media landscape. So I hear you on that. I'm not trying to dump on the new media paradigm entirely, but I think there should be multiple types of journalists working in it and that there should be people that investigate and dig into these inconvenient facts and things like that and act as watchdogs and also people that help popularize content and are more focused on the algorithm and metrics because that is the reality of content distribution today. But I'm saying there's a noticeable dearth of one of those things and I think it would uh the public would be very well served by that changing. Yeah, no, agreed. Question is how you bring economics to it. Okay, so I'm always trying to build a mental model that allows me to predict the movements of the world. That might be an easy way or to at least understand how if I do XYZ thing, I'm going to get a certain outcome. For me to make sense of all the things that you're saying, I don't see a way to make it make sense without going oh, they actually don't they the elites, which I defined earlier, same definition applies here. The elites don't want or at a minimum don't care about a thriving middle class. Uh because if they're going to make globalism work in a populist moment, which is [ __ ] fascinating, uh that the game really becomes about um moving them doing a massive wealth transfer through means that I had never considered before. Uh because my thing is always like, well, hold on, these guys are going to realize that you need a thriving middle class, otherwise they come for your head. Uh but they don't come for your head if you keep them scared enough and you're providing the protection, and then you really can continue to hollow out the middle class and make a feudal a neo-feudal uh social structure, which seems crazy and impossible to believe. And admittedly, I'm I am more entertaining this line of thought that I am adopting it. Uh but if you are using technology as a way to surveil and suppress, then if you believe that that's an inevitability and a necessary way to stay safe in the new global stage, then uh a nice added benefit is that you can use it to create the panopticon. [ __ ] Uh it's very interesting. It's very scary, um but very interesting. Okay, there's another piece of this puzzle that I want to put on the table right now, because when I heard you say it, I was um I was shocked isn't the right word, but it's close enough. You said, this is going to be a paraphrase, but it'll get us very close, Solana meme coins and Tether are the new BCCI. Um I always think of the the transformation of money into the digital realm as a uh really positive thing, and that I get why people don't like um CBDCs, but I don't understand why people wouldn't like something like Tether. So, if you don't mind, explain to people what BCCI was and what you mean when you say that Solana, meme coins, and Tether are the new BCCI. Yeah. So, um BCCI was basically this uh bank that was set up as a publicly as a development bank. It was about essentially banking the unbanked uh in the global south. That was sort of the framing of it. Um but in reality, that bank had been set up by the CIA and it was involved in all sorts of things, including laundering profits for um arms trafficking, drug trafficking. It came um under scrutiny as part of the Iran-Contra scandal and of course it collapsed in 1991 and was the subject of a Senate report um that I would encourage people to read because it is really quite scandalous. Um and it also revealed that they were uh not only doing, you know, engaging in in brazen financial crimes on behalf of intelligence agencies all over the world and also drug cartels, um but they were also um engaged in the sex trafficking of minors, specifically uh to patronize uh the uh elite some elite families of the United Arab Emirates and were taking prepubescent children to be abused by these people. That is in the Senate report, so that's literally not a conspiracy theory. It It was written uh it's an official Senate report based on official evidence brought before the Senate, okay? So, it It's a very significant story. Almost Almost no one remembers it because it was essentially covered up by William Barr when he was attorney general the first time. Uh and he was also, of course, engaged in pardoning and sort of washing away related scandals to BCCI like the Promise Software scandal um of the same era and also Iran-Contra, all of that essentially happening um in 1991, so a lot of people don't uh remember that history, unfortunately. So, um, and looking at an entity um, like Tether, you know, I have argued in an a series I co-wrote with my colleague Mark Goodwin called the chain that you can find on my website Unlimited Hangout, um, that one of the co-founders of Tether and some of the other people involved in early Tether, um, appear to have significant intelligence ties. Some of them, like Brock Pierce, um, have ties to um, pedophilia scandals that happened in the early 2000s. Uh, Tether since then, um, has been sort of has come under fire for being not transparent um, about its reserves, among other things. And uh, it has also been memory-holed its role in the FTX scandal, uh, where you had Alameda Research uh, being very involved with, you know, the Tether supply and helping it maintain its peg, among other things. And if we of course know now that FTX was involved in all sorts of um, financial misconduct, for lack of a better word. it nicely. Yeah. Yes. And uh, you know, Solana, which has been responsible for these pump-and-dump meme coins, among other things, um, you know, was also very closely tied to Sam Bankman-Fried. He's been called one of the reasons, main reasons behind its rise in popularity, um, you know, for what it for what it since has become. And there's a short there's no shortage of examples of sort of pump-and-dump meme coins that have sort of robbed people of a lot of money. And what have those What has that money ultimately led to? And who was ultimately responsible for that pump-and-dump rug-pull wealth transfer, arguably, uh, type of operation. Uh, it definitely, um, would facilitate, um, this type of bad behavior that we know intelligence agencies have engaged in with the past, like the BCCI example. It would definitely facilitate that. And the fact that you have these types of connections there, um, you know, I think it's certainly uh, of examination and Tether notably has a lot of the same rhetoric that BCCI once used. The idea of, you know, banking the unbanked for example. But they're very willing to seize people's money on behalf of the US Treasury and Paolo Ardoino who is the head of Tether now has said that Tether is fully committed to expanding US dollar hegemony globally and has you know, on-boarded the FBI and Secret Service on that platform on on their platform. And that essentially makes it a uh digital arm you could argue of the US government. And when you take under when you also consider this military manual that was published by WikiLeaks um you know, well over a decade ago, you know, they referred to you know, basically the dollar and some of these style of financial institutions that help propagate it globally particularly in the global south as sort of weapons, financial weapons of US empire. And it's very possible and I think uh you know, I think an argument can clearly be made that Tether is sort of facilitating that specifically in economies that have become unstable or have very unstable currencies and some of that is partly due to US sanctions. Some of it is due to these entities that have been called financial weapons of US empire like the IMF and the World Bank. And then their currencies are unstable. They're they're covered in you know, they're in a in trapped in this debt slavery model which is a big reason for their in many cases for a lot of the economic instability and people are being on-boarded onto the digital dollar onto Tether as a way to be able to preserve their wealth but ultimately it's kind of a way to globalize the dollar and covertly dollarize the country without formally dollarizing it in the way that places like Ecuador and El Salvador were formally dollarized. Uh and if you consider the outsized role including in the digital asset space, you know, and and sort of its formation and the infrastructure for it of some of these currency speculators, um you know, and and the role of currency speculators in the past, you know, we can point to in the '90s, George Soros or arguably people like, you know, Jeffrey Epstein, if you're familiar with my work, having a role in, you know, crushing local currencies, if that were to happen today, and there's no reason to think that type of uh currency speculation, like, you know, Soros style in '92, for example, doesn't happen today. I'm I'm sure it it it does. Um then it the end result could easily be people just sort of onboarding uh to the dollar, particularly a form of the dollar that is surveillable, seizable, and and ultimately uh programmable. And those were the same concerns that a lot of Americans have had about central bank digital currencies. It's not necessarily that the money would be issued by the central bank because money is issued by the central bank now, right? It's about the concern that it presents to liberty because it's surveillable, programmable, and seizable. And um and I think Tether checks all of those boxes ultimately. And really any sort of digital dollar that the US ultimately approves, which is very likely in the Trump administration at his come his speech at the Bitcoin conference last year, um said no CBDCs, but was very bullish on stable coins, on dollar stable coins, which are a major purchaser of US Treasuries, for example, and help service the US debt. Um and if you combine that with a lot of his bullishness on on Bitcoin, the the talks of a strategic Bitcoin reserve, for example, I think it's very um possible that we could see this this type of um digital dollar paradigm that Tether really helped start um expand, and I don't think there's really a lot of discussions about whether this is good or what the potential origins or intentions of it were or still are because a lot of people that promote Tether have very rose-tinted glasses about it and parrot this idea of banking the unbanked and sort of ignore the FBI Secret Service connection, the fact that they've seized people's money when the US Treasury Department has asked them to do that even if they're not US citizens and and this type of stuff, you know, what does this ultimately mean? And I think people that are particularly in the Bitcoin space, which has often been sort of flooded at times with the opinion that Tether is a Bitcoin company should consider that especially when a lot of these a lot of the rhetoric and ideology around Bitcoin was about stopping the debt slavery system and the debt-based monetary system. Do do people really want to perpetuate that? And is it really conducive to financial freedom and banking the unbanked in a way that is good for liberty? What do you think would happen if the US did formalize a Bitcoin reserve and began purchasing that? Would that be good, bad, or indifferent for Bitcoin? Well, I think it depends on your perspective about Bitcoin. I think a lot of people have including in the Bitcoin space have become very obsessed with the number go up mentality and are not really interested in the ideology that helped popularize it among certain demographics. And personally, I think my interest in Bitcoin, it's the only cryptocurrency that I see as really having any any value. I mean, don't mean to swear, but everything else to me is pretty much a a shitcoin. But I um I would say that it really depends on where things go from here and the extreme interest of, you know, the traditional financial system and the US government, which the ideology of Bitcoin was opposed originally to working with those two entities and and sought to, you know, supplant them because, you know, they are bad. You know, that kind of is the original part of the original Bitcoin ethos that is being has been sort of shed in favor of of mass adoption and the idea that holders of Bitcoin will become extremely wealthy and and the concern and, you know, the idea about having freedom money um or privacy money and all of that has sort of definitely taken a back burner and and may disappear entirely from discord of the discourse and I I personally don't see that as positive. I think um if, you know, we're going to move into the digital money space and there's, you know, this push to eliminate cash, I think anonymity and privacy is important. The argument is that, well, bad people will use it to money launder and and all of this stuff. And sure that's true, but even if we go into a new digital system, I really doubt that the CIA and some of these other entities that engage in that same type of behavior will have to will be forced to stop, you know. I think it'll be money laundering for me and not for thee kind of thing. And also a lot of people that use those, you know, privacy enhancing protocols and and products aren't money launderers, they just don't like mass surveillance, which again was part of the, you know, early ideology common among people in the Bitcoin space. And so, you know, the idea that there was this that it was going to challenge fiat and bring more financial fairness to the world and our debt-based monetary system and put us on a hard money standard and all of this a lot of that has sort of gone out of the window and the idea of you know, Bitcoin a sort of use it as a new um, petrodollar analog. You want to play with Bitcoin, uh, you need dollars to get access to that to it essentially. You know, this is sort of the theory of of my colleague Mark Goodwin who wrote the Bitcoin dollar that I would really recommend for anyone that wants uh, uh, to see what's happening now having been written about like 3 years ago by somebody. You know, this is something that I think is very likely to happen. Um, and I think, you know, people that were that hold Bitcoin that care about that ethos still need to think about if their bags get pumped, what will they do with that money to preserve to preserve financial freedom because I don't think the US government or, you know, BlackRock or some of these other entities that have become very bullish on Bitcoin are interested in protecting privacy or having Bitcoin be used for freedom money necessarily, you know. And so I think that stuff personally to me matters and is one of the reasons that I've, you know, tried to speak to people in the Bitcoin space for some time um, because I think a lot of those people do care about the ethos, but I think there is sort of an effort to flood the zone with you well with with this idea that it doesn't matter anymore and that we should sort of, you know, surrender that ethos in favor of, you know, becoming extremely wealthy and that is going to be persuasive for a lot of people especially when we're potentially facing a debt crisis and in that economic downturn. And, you know, historically that type of, you know, drastic wealth increase for people uh, can be very persuasive in getting them to change their ideology. But I would argue that you know, the the direction the world is going, it's important to think about what we can do to preserve freedom. And, you know, if you're expecting to have a major increase in your ability to finance things, maybe consider financing things that help help ensure privacy and help ensure financial freedom and ensure that Bitcoin could become freedom money and not just a strategic asset for a few very powerful people, you know. Um, let me ask you. So, wrapping this up in a bow, we've got um, a lot happening in the world at the international level. There's a lot of optimism about Trump coming into office right now. As you look at his executive orders, what do they signal to you? Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, I've been working on wrapping up a piece. Um, so I haven't paid ultra close attention to the executive orders um, that he has put out. But so and I'm sorry I can't comment on those at this time. Um, but some of my reporting in the lead up to his um, inauguration and also during the campaign as it related to, you know, the Trump camp in particular, um, are some of his connections to these big tech figures that we talked about earlier. Um, whether it's Elon Musk or figures that are uh, you know, also part of the so-called PayPal mafia. Uh, you know, David Sacks being the crypto and AI czar for example. Um, and someone like J.D. Vance having relatively close proximity to Peter Thiel. Uh, someone at a top HHS position, Jim O'Neill, also very close to um, Peter Thiel who has I would argue wildly different views than Robert F. Kennedy who's supposed to lead HHS. Um, especially in terms of deregulation, biotech, and mRNA technology. You know, what are these things ultimately going to uh, result in and I would uh, you know, consider people to um, consider those connections and also consider um, that there's a a high likelihood just like in the first term that there will be a lot of um, you know, deregulation um, in the in over the next four years. And I'm sure a lot of people will be happy about that, but I think some people that voted for Trump may not be uh, particularly in the Make America Healthy Again movement where deregulation at the FDA for example could result in a flooding of the market with mRNA products which are very controversial with a significant segment of Trump's base for example or you know when Trump was in office the first time he deregulated biotech and agriculture um pretty significantly. A lot of people in that same Make America Healthy Again movement are not really into you know a proliferation of GMO crops in the food supply for example. And sort of finger them as a as a causative agent in the chronic disease epidemic that Maha that particular movement was really based around. Um and I would um you know I think a lot has been said by myself and also by others about sort of you know people have probably noticed Palantir's stock performance. I think it's very likely that over the next four years Palantir will become an even more important government contractor considering that a lot of people that are prominent Palantir investors or co-founders have attached themselves in various ways either to the Trump campaign as as donors or occupying important posts in the administration. So Palantir again is sort of the engine that a lot of this the surveillance state really runs on and I think people should really educate themselves about it especially if what I talked about earlier as it relates to predictive policing and predictive health and predicting pandemics before it happens and all of that is concerning to you. Um I mean again it's four years it's hard to know exactly exactly what's going to happen but I think these are pretty reliable markers we can we can look for and sort of this I think it's likely that there's going to be an increase in you know biometric digital ID. Trump has sort of marketed this as a way to stop mass migration. The dialectics are different but it's sort of a policy that's being marketed all over the world Um, on the country the sales pitch is different, but ultimately, um, that policy is being marketed and and the push into digital assets, I think is also happening, uh, globally. And I think Trump made it very clear, uh, that he, uh, was going to be very focused on that. And I don't think there's, uh, any reason to doubt that particular, um, promise. And as you look at the, um, tech people that Trump has amassed around him, do you think that, uh, they are better understood as oligarchs making a play to be as close to power as they can, or do you share some of the enthusiasm around these are the best operators of our generation here to help make the government more efficient? Yeah, I personally am of the view that they're oligarchs that are interested in king-making markets. I think that's particularly true of someone like David Sacks, who's going to be the crypto AI czar and doesn't have to div- divest from any of his, uh, you know, investments or other, you know, potential conflicts of interest with some of the firms that he'll be uh, involved in overseeing or deciding regulation on. And when you have that type of power, you can easily, uh, king-make and pick and choose companies, uh, that you want to see win, right? Um, and so um, you kind of have to wonder if this is really, um, going to be a free market type of situation as a lot of people would like it to be, um, because when you have that that type of centralized power sort of deciding who wins and who doesn't and you you know, having, um, only a, you know, Open AI and Oracle, for example, on this recent announcement, uh, those are very big companies. They're likely to only get, um, bigger should there be a more decentralized landscape in these industries that are so im- so important to foster competition, or are we getting close to a quasi, you know, uh, monopoly model on certain fields, um, of big tech? And I think, uh, that could be potentially problematic and something, uh, to look at, especially when you consider that there have been you know statements made by members of the quote-unquote PayPal mafia that uh free market competition is for losers and that companies should uh find a niche and and corner that market and essentially build a a monopoly or quasi monopoly. Um and some of those people um have done that in direct collaboration with uh the national security state as is the case of Palantir uh for example which was a you know created with CIA and In-Q-Tel's uh direct involvement um and has very significant CIA connections from its origins to now. So, if you're building a quasi monopoly and you don't like free market competition and you're going to partner um you know with the most you know most powerful and unaccountable parts of the state in that way, you know, what does that ultimately mean and is this you know going to be the free market utopia that we're being sold or you know is something else going to happen? We'll get back to the episode in just a moment, but first let's talk about future-proofing your business. As a business owner, you're constantly juggling a million things. Cash flow, inventory, hiring, scaling, all while trying to predict what's coming next which right about now is not easy. But you cannot build the future if you're stuck in the past, drowning in spreadsheets and manual processes. That's why over 41,000 businesses have turned to NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite brings everything. Accounting, financials, inventory, HR, all of it into one unified platform. 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Uh but essentially, it's not really surprising to me that there's being a big push into AI infrastructure. And this is something that's really been what I would argue a bipartisan push um that's been going on for some time starting with really the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence uh that was led by Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, who even though he's a Democratic donor, has been very active in this space and sort of has the same view um propagated by more Republican leaning uh big tech figures uh that the US needs to outcompete China in AI specifically. And some of the National Security Commission on AI um comments and presentations they gave that have since been released uh through a Freedom of Information Act requests essentially uh suggest that the roadmap to doing so um is to impose um lots of domestic surveillance and AI-powered surveillance technology um on the American public as a way to sort of leapfrog China uh because they argue that China has already done that and thus has a much larger user base and data set for all of these different AI technologies. And so, in order to um outdo them, we must uh drastically increase our user base of these AI technologies, which includes things uh they say like, you know um surveillance, as I mentioned earlier, facial recognition, expanding that, um expanding e-commerce, reducing in-person shopping, and really you know, uh uh other in-person activities including uh health care, in-person doctor visits moving to telemedicine as much as possible. And this was really um a big focus of that commission, which was the meeting of the national security state and the big tech industry um in the years prior to COVID-19 and a lot of that push into the digital realm uh was a it was a consequence of a lot of COVID-19 um era policies that helped sort of feed um that ambition, but I think with this goal to have an increased um you know, investment in AI infrastructure, uh we're likely to see that develop and it's not really surprising that you have Larry Ellison of Oracle involved. Um he's recently had uh comments about the need for things like digital ID um in the United States which which would be sort of a core foundational aspect of this type of uh wide-reaching uh AI system and also said that um you know, basically I'm paraphrasing here of course, but invasive AI surveillance systems on citizens will help them be on their best behavior, uh which is a rather Orwellian uh thing to say and sort of very much feeds into the um idea of the Panopticon where if someone is always being watched, the Panopticon, you know, uh is used in the context of surveillance a lot, but it was originally a model uh for a prison uh where prisoners are always being uh or under the impression they're always being watched, but they can't directly see the people watching them um and that this uh sort of induces obedience to be on their best behavior at all times. And I um you know, personally view that as kind of um a a very big and not necessarily positive trade-off uh between liberty and at least perceived security. And um I think uh people would do well to sort of um interrogate some of the consequences of handing such a big AI infrastructure project uh to companies that are run by uh individuals with those views in particular. Okay, uh there's two things I want to drill into. I've heard you say panopticon before, but I actually don't know what that means. What does that mean? Um, so as far as I'm aware, um, it was originally, uh, a design for a prison, as I mentioned a a second ago. Um, I believe it originated in Britain, and basically the idea was to sort of have a somewhat circular prison with the cells on the border, and there's a long, uh, you know, sort of obelisk-esque, uh, tower in the middle, um, where, uh, the guards are, and the windows are either tinted or constructed in such a way that the prisoners can't see the guards watching them, but the impression is created that they are always under watch, so as to induce obedience, because they're, you know, they could be being looked at all the time, but they don't really know. Um, so as far as I'm aware, that's the origin of the term. Okay, it's a stand-in for eternal surveillance. Uh, yeah, yeah, but as I said, originally it was a prison thing, but, you know, since then it's sort of been, uh, adapted, uh, to sort of refer to, you know, the same idea when applied to mass surveillance in the in the digital era, cuz obviously when this was developed, I forget if it was like the 18th or 19th century, obviously, uh, digital technology as it exists today, uh, wasn't around back then, but I think the idea persists and can arguably be scaled, uh, to really, uh, to levels that the original designers of the panopticon concepts, uh, probably couldn't even fathom back at the time. Okay, so, uh, then I I just breaking it down, pan, all over, optic, presumably, uh, sight. So, um, om- omniscient sight, basically, or omnipotent sight. Okay, cool, totally understand. Uh, now I have a feeling that as we talk today, that underlying the conversation that we're about to have is this idea of liberty versus security and the trade-off there. Um, if you were going to, um, plant a flag in your own life and give us a breakdown of how you see that trade-off. Is it 100% liberty and I don't care what that means for security or is it some kind of balance? Um well, it's hard I would rather start with a a paraphrase of a a rather well-known quote of Benjamin Franklin's which goes something along the lines of uh those who trade their liberty for security um you know, ultimately have neither of those things. And I think ultimately um what my views on that would be in an ideal world or different from what my views are on it as uh as it relates to uh the world we live in today. And I think there's a pretty um clear indication, particularly over the past 20-plus years, the post-9/11 era, uh that that that, you know, great surveillance powers, at least in the hands of the United States and most other governments in the world, frankly, um are routinely abused uh for the purpose of silencing dissent um and among other things that are not positive for liberty. And that you could argue that there are situations where insecurity is engineered in the public in order to uh facilitate people giving up their liberty or civil liberties in particular uh for what they perceive as an increased security or they're told is increased security. And I don't really think that's uh necessarily always um the case at the end of the day. And I think a lot of the mass surveillance uh system as it was designed in the immediate post-9/11 era uh was meant to uh rely a lot on sort of predictive paradigm. So, what do I mean by that? Essentially, things like uh what are now called predictive policing or predictive health, um you know, sort of the idea of uh you know, predictive policing I think is a rather uh polite way to say pre-crime. The idea that we can stop um you know, criminal activity or a terrorist attack before it happens uh by looking at certain uh data flows, for example. And the same uh was also posited in the post-9/11 era for stopping bioterror attacks before they happen and natural pandemics before they happen, uh which is also kind of a a sticky issue um as well because some of those proposals and their um sort of resurrections in the post uh COVID era um uh I think are a little uh dubious in a sense because um they they sort of posit uh creating interventions, health interventions, uh before symptoms even show up in a particular population based on uh certain markers identified in AI and in sewage water, for example, and things like that. So, you're really putting a lot of um a lot of trust um in in algorithms, and sometimes those algorithms are not as accurate as the company claims. And as far as I know, um a lot of those claims are not independently vetted. Um so, ultimately, it could um you know, lead to some unfortunate consequences, I think. Particularly if you're trying to prove in a pre-crime scenario that you weren't going to commit the crime, uh you're basically it's you versus the the algorithm, and who do you think um you know, the position of authorities is likely to to side with in those scenarios, you know? I think it's uh kind of kind of creates sticky situations. All right, that feels like a uh a a comment around the reality of this stuff. You said that there's a discrepancy between how you'd feel about it in an ideal world versus the world we actually live in. Uh so, the concerns around would this be um one, can it be trusted? Certainly a big question. Uh two, are there uh liberty um constraints that would become so problematic as to the cure being worse than the disease? So, those are the things that it sounds like you run into when you look at the reality of this stuff being deployed. Talk to me though about the ideal world. Is this stuff that you wish that we could deploy, but you just know in the hands of humans we can't trust it? Or even in an ideal world, um, your take would be very different? Well, I think in an ideal world this type of stuff to tackle crime and illness wouldn't really be necessary, quite frankly. Um, but I guess it depends on what your definition of the ideal world, um, is. And I guess sort of in the scenario is the government trustworthy? I guess in that scenario if it were provably trustworthy and we didn't have all these national security scandals of of uh, grave severity in many cases going back decades and decades and decades and no accountability for national security overreach over that time period as well, it would be easier perhaps to trust, uh, but, you know, um, I don't know. I Personally, I'm like a kind of a voluntaria, voluntarist. Like I just kind of prefer that people, uh, I mean, I don't like to make decisions for other people necessarily and I tend to sort of be a liberty maximalist. I think that sort of, um, you know, begets better outcomes in general. Um, and uh, I don't know. Again, it depends on what you sort of define as this as this ideal world. Um, and since a lot of my focus, uh, you know, as a as a writer and researcher, um, has sort of been on the national security state, you know, I uh, tend to think it's not appropriate to give them, uh, certainly not more power than they already have and I think there needs to be accountability, um, for what, you know, the overreaches that we know have happened and investigations and the ones we probably don't know about. Um, but I I really don't foresee there really being any transparency or change there, uh, even with the incoming administration. Okay, so it would the following assessment, obviously oversimplified, but just so I know if I'm on the right track with the way that you view the world. Is your take on the way the government works is they will spy on their citizens to gain control over their citizens? Period. I think that is a accurate representation of your base assumption. Is that true? I think it's close. I would also add that ultimately you have sort of you know, I sort of see the government as a public-private partnership. The public sector because of political donations among other things always very in tune to the concerns of the private sector and a lot of the most powerful players in the private sector and in the financial sector are very interested in sort of de-risking the world as much as possible and a lot of intelligence agencies sort of share that view and so I think a lot of this surveillance and this these predictive paradigms and all of that a lot of it sort of comes down from their perspective. I think to sort of de-risking the society and and markets as well. Okay, de-risking things doesn't sound immediately negative. Why is de-risking bad? Or why does it yield bad outcomes? So, you know, if you want to you know, take risk to zero that there will be crime in a particular area. The type of interventions you would have to impose would be pretty significant, right? It doesn't sound bad when you phrase it that way necessarily and that's why I was phrasing it that way cuz I think that's how these people in elite circles tend to think about it ultimately at the end of the day. And they don't really, you know, if you're the CIA for example, you don't really want to have to be more transparent and more accountable for things you have done in the past. I think that's been pretty clear with their their history as an as an agency. But they they'd be more interested in eliminating the risk for them that they would have to make those behavioral changes, I guess you could say as an agency. So, what would you do to prevent uh, that kind of risk from happening? Would you manipulate the public sphere in the public discussion around the CIA to make those things unpopular? Um, for example, you know, de-risking can take many forms, but I think these people uh, generally tend to think of things in tour in terms of risk to uh, the activities they're doing, especially those that tend to be gray area or, you know, potentially illegal. Okay, so one idea that I am growing in my conviction is driving a lot of the structure of the world. Is this idea that there are elites? They uh, are defined as people that are smarter and better educated than the masses, and they believe that decision-making should largely be in our hands. And the reason that is is because we will be able to take you to a better outcome. Um, I find that wildly problematic because I don't trust anybody to be right at that um, high degree uh, of percentage. I think people are wrong way more than they're right, and anybody that automatically trusts themselves to know what's best is inevitably going to run us off a cliff. That's my my default assumption about life. Um, do you share that or do you see this idea of the elites differently than I do? No, I think that's fair. I think concentrating power in that few hands, uh, especially in hands that have you know, capital so concentrated um, up there as well is uh, is increasingly problematic. You know, there's obviously the adage that, you know, absolute power absolutely corrupts, and I think that um, that history does tend to sort of show that, and I think um, you know, people particularly in the United States don't want a small uh, handful of the richest people in the world uh, controlling and micromanaging their lives um, you know, at at very minute scales, which is what you know, what some of these people propose uh to do as life becomes more digitalized and AI has a more prominent role in in people's lives and in society, you know, there exists that possibility to do that kind of mac mac micro-managing uh for people's lives and that sort of follows under the um umbrella of what has been referred to as technocracy, sort of this idea of elite experts uh governing and micro-managing society and sort of using that um as a replacement for representative democracy from a for example. And I think there are a good amount of people in in big tech that think they are uh better suited than elected leaders or the public um to uh lead direction lead people's lives and micro-manage people's lives in in particular uh directions and I certainly don't agree with that. As I said earlier, I personally would like people to be be empowered to make their own decisions and a lot of that is through um education and having the freedom to make those decisions and sometimes making your own decisions can lead to failure and maybe not the best outcomes, but I mean that's how people learn and adapt and evolve and I think it's um necessary for people to be able to do those things. I mean, you know, as a parent, it's important to uh you know, ensure that my kid has the freedom to, you know, not necessarily succeed all the time because you learn important lessons and you build character um from not getting things right on the first try and to have things micro-managed to prevent any sort of potential bad outcome, you know, I think could be problematic and also, you know, having these this small group decide what is a bad outcome versus a good outcome without input from the public, but having uh that sort of enacted and imposed on the public without their consent, you know, obviously I think there's um hugely significant problems there. Okay, but as a parent, I imagine that you do keep your child safe from the worst possible things that that may not be able to anticipate. Do you think that the government and or the elites, I don't know if you use those interchangeably or not, um should they be doing the same kind of thing, curbing liberty to some extent to make sure that we don't drive ourselves off a cliff? Well, I I think the necessary guard guardrails on perhaps on society, like don't murder someone for example, are already there. Do we really need new ones enforced by AI? Uh do we need to prevent uh crime before it happens and all of this stuff uh at the expense of um you know, being basically reneging on the entire constitutional right to privacy? You know, I don't really necessarily agree with that and I think people, if they want that kind of system, sure, opt into it. Allow the government into every aspect of uh your online and and private life, but I don't think people uh should be forced to do that if they don't consent um to that kind of system personally. I think it would be I think consent frankly uh matters and I think a lot of Americans uh agree with that viewpoint considering what we saw uh with backlash to you know, uh COVID-19 policies for example, where you know, consent uh was sort of uh coercively removed in the case of of mandates for example. Yes, but to your earlier point, one of the ways that they get people to agree is by potentially uh I I don't want to say whether anything up to this point has been manufactured, but certainly if you're running the playbook of okay, I really want people to adopt these policies, I just need to scare the life out of them. I need them to see how at risk they are and then it is that very thing that's going to get the consent. So, if we know that consent is achievable by people being scared sufficiently enough, um what do you do with that? It's people consenting, but is it people consenting to something that ultimately uh going back to Benjamin Franklin, they have traded that security for their liberty and even though that may save lives, it it is not a trade-off worth making. How do you think through that? Would you be screaming, "Guys, you you need to think through this problem better. You need to accept risk even when it's very large." or would you be like, "Well, as long as everybody's making their own decision, I'm fine." Well, I think people need to be empowered to make their own decisions. So, if you have a situation where people are manipu- you know, trying to manufacture consent through fear, um, you know, reporting on on, you know, the coercion involved there, um, and sort of elucidating the facts of the situation would empower people to make their own decisions. If people can be shown that there is sort of a fear element here and a a coercive and and manipula- manipulative element to it, you know, I'm sure the decisions they would take would be a little different. You know, the the utility of manufacturing consent via fear is that when people are afraid, they tend to not think critically and they tend to act impulsively and emo- emotionally. And, they tend to look for easy solutions. And so, if you have you've you've created fear in the public and then you offer a tailor-made solution, you know, you you can more easily get consent that way. But, if people are empowered to know that the situation has been manipulated to force that outcome, I'm sure a lot of them would make uh, different decisions and that that consent would not necessarily be there if they were aware of the manufactured nature of that situation. Ooh, time is certainly going to tell. Whitney, I enjoy every second that I get with you. Where can people follow you? Um, you can find all of my work at unlimitedhangout.com. Um, and I would encourage you to sign up to my newsletter if you're interested in following my work, um, because I am a big proponent of taking the social media big tech middleman out of content distribution as much as possible. If you want to keep using them, I'm not pooh-poohing that. Um, but I think, you know, I don't expect censorship to necessarily go away or dissipate. Sometimes the algorithm doesn't favor certain things. If you don't want an algorithm in the way of the content that you wish to follow, consider signing up directly to sites newsletters or looking into RSS feed readers for example where you can design your own news feed and not have the algorithm uh dictate what you see and and don't see. Um, so yeah, those would be um the places to follow me. I only have a Twitter account which is under my name and a Telegram uh channel that is the site uh the name of my website Unlimited Hangout. Uh if you see something that looks like me on Facebook or another site, I can guarantee you it's not me. I've had some uh issues with imposter accounts as I'm sure uh most people in this space have had at one time or another. So, thank you. Awesome. I love it. Well, again, thank you so much for joining me. And everybody out there, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. Why is this moment in American politics best understood not as right versus left, which is what I think most people think, but rather populist versus the establishment. The media has changed and that has led to the thinking changing in