Hey and welcome back to Unlimited Hangout. I'm your
host, Whitney Webb. During the 2024 US presidential campaign,
and in the early days of the second Trump administration, a
group of Silicon Valley oligarchs quietly rose off the
back of the faux populism of the Trump era Republican Party
clothed in anti woke rhetoric and sharp criticisms of the
previous administration, these tech multi millionaires and
billionaires skillfully portrayed themselves as anti
establishment, quote, unquote, counter elites who promised to
be against unpopular policies of the Biden administration. They
also claimed to be opposed to the designs of the oligarchs who
would become infamous in the COVID era among much of Trump's
base, particularly those tied to the World Economic Forum, and
it's now former chairman Klaus Schwab, as well as bad tech
billionaires like Microsoft co founder Bill Gates, these
supposed counter elites promoted themselves and their chosen
politicians, Donald Trump and his vice president, venture
capitalist JD Vance across prominent podcasts, several of
which had previously booked establishment COVID-19
narratives and developed audiences that at least a few
years ago had regarded politicians and oligarchs of
both political persuasions with suspicion, yet through their apt
rebranding, fueled by certain podcast social media platforms
and quote, unquote, alternative media influencers, this faction
of oligarchs has artfully persuaded an audience of would
be dissidents to come back to the fold, not the fold of the
elites they hated in the COVID era, but instead the fold of
these new counter elites. But who are these counter elites
really? And what do they actually believe? Surprisingly
few seem to know the answer, despite the viral and arguably
manufactured popularity of such figures. Disturbingly, what
these people seek is arguably an even more dystopian future than
the one envisioned by the elites they are ostensibly replacing.
Joining me to discuss this and more is Iain Davis, whose
forthcoming book, the technocratic dark state explores
these issues in great detail. Iain should be well known to
Unlimited Hangouts audience as he is now a longtime contributor
to Unlimited Hangout who has also been on this podcast more
than a few times. Iain should also be known for his work
published on off Guardian geopolitics and Empire and his
own website, Iaindavis.com as well as his new Substack. Iain
is also the author of two previous books, Pseudopandemic
and The Manchester Attack. Welcome back, Iain. It's my
pleasure to welcome you back on the podcast to discuss your
incredibly detailed and insightful new book.
Oh, thank you very much, Whitney, it's a pleasure to be
here. I'm very pleased that Papercut Publishing, your new
venture is publishing it. It's an honor.
Yes, I was going to bring that up towards the end, but
since you brought it up, I will make a point of mentioning that,
yes, Unlimited Hangout is working to bring you more
physical media than ever before, as the digital media space
becomes increasingly controlled and dominated by the very
beautiful we are talking about today. Iain so physical media
has never been more important. So we'll, of course, as I
believe I've teased previously, we'll be putting out a magazine
next year under the Papercut banner, as well as Iain's book,
which is available for pre-order right now, and hopefully a few
other books next year as well. So thanks for bringing that up.
So moving along, we'll get right into it then about the
technocratic dark state and what it portends. So as I noted in my
introduction, during the COVID era, there was obviously, you
know, this populist, you could say, anti elite backlash that
stewed during much of the COVID crisis, and somehow, you know,
maybe a year after COVID ostensibly ended, quote, unquote
or so, a lot of those would be dissidents were engineered into
a movement where its heroes are largely tech billionaires,
surveillance profiteers and transhumanists, even though
COVID era dissenters were largely against elite control,
mass surveillance, gene editing via coercion, transhumanism,
global government, etc. Yeah, and now they've been led to view
billionaires offering much of those same things, if not to in
an even more extreme degree, as the revolutionaries of their
choice. Let's dwell on that for a moment, shall we? Because it's
a truly extraordinary turn of events.
Yeah, it's quite remarkable, and that's one of the main
reasons that I wrote the book, because they appear to be
getting away with it at the moment. And, you know, I mean,
if we look at, I mean, another person that we might mention is
Mark Andreessen, who's a Partner in Andreessen Horowitz, who's
very much part of this same clique. I mean, broadly
speaking, we, you know, people might refer to them as the
PayPal Mafia or something like that, but there are other there
are, this is a much, yeah, there's a, there's a wider
network of people that they subscribe to this notion of, we
will probably get on to talk about the Neo reactionary
movement, but they're certainly part of that. And Andrew soon
is, is openly part of that, because he says that, you know,
quite openly stated when he wrote this thing called the
techno optimist manifesto, that that we are acceleration is,
which is a which is a pretty blatant acknowledgement of what
they believe in. But yeah, with regard to what you were just
saying in in the techno optimist manifesto, he listed a whole
load of ideas which he and people like Thiel and Musk and
Larry Ellison and so forth, kind of subscribe to that there are,
that they're opposed to ideas such as sustainable development,
that they're opposed to groups like the World Economic Forum.
And they very, they very much cast themselves, as you rightly
said, as these counter elites who were, who were bridling
against the overreach of globalism, and were fight
standing against this by liberating, in terms of, in
terms of an kind of an electoral platform, liberating American
innovation to stand against, you know, the communism of China,
and China's technological. So all these talking points which
appeal to a, you know, the small c conservative American voters
and the and the kind of Maga, Maga supporting American voters,
they hit all those talking points. But when you look at
what they've actually done, as you were again, you quite
rightly said, when you look at what they've done, it couldn't
be more on board with the broader globalist agenda. I
mean, for example, if we talk about sustainable development,
the notion of the notion of the 15 minute city. These this group
of people through as soon as Trump was was in office, as soon
as his executive orders started rolling out, he immediately
started talking about freedom, what he's calling freedom
cities. But this is just a re labeling of the kind of 15
minute city, Smart City, deregulated free zone, a lot of
people, I mean, and I, you know, as you know, I've written a
couple of pieces about special economic zones. So this is the
agenda that that, ordinarily we would say, well, that comes from
sustainable development. That's a sustainable development goal,
but they've managed to rebrand it as liberating American
innovation. But I mean, one of the points that I made in the
book, if you are on that kind of, how should we put it, that
kind of more World Economic Forum, kind of aligned, kind of
side of the of the of the of the kind of globalist agenda as we
hitherto understood it, there must be absolutely applauding
people like Borge Brende and Andre Hoffman and people like
that and Klaus Schwab, although I know he's stepped very much
stepped back from the weft now, but they, they must be looking
at what people this, this group of Neo reactionaries, are doing
and applauding because they are accelerating. And I mean that
both in the in the in the genuine sense of the word that
accelerate, accelerating, and we'll probably get to talk about
accelerationism. They are accelerating that agenda that
they're pushing it through, and they have the technological
capability to set about the infrastructure that would enable
things like SDG, 16.9 for example, the rollout of digital
air. Identity, these people are saying they are opposed to it,
and yet they could not be pushing it harder, but just,
they're just using, they're just using a different narrative to
justify it.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more with you, and obviously my own
research and investigations have led me essentially to that same
conclusion. So there's a lot of different places we could start
and specific examples where we could hammer down on this, but I
think a good one is also the subject of a two part series
that you recently did for Unlimited Hangout, which is the
idea of the the network state and whether that type of vision
that's widely promoted by this Neo reactionary tech crowd is
actually any different than the 15 minute city, or even the
ideas of global governance that are espoused by The UN
Sustainable Development Agenda, as well as groups like the World
Economic Forum, which people should know at this point are
relatively well intimately intertwined with the UN
Sustainable Development Agenda. But somehow it's, it's been
sold, as you know, the answer to a lot of our problems. And so
something before we get into the specifics of the network state
and all of that, something that's worth noting is that I
think one of the reasons these guys have been so successful in
their media blitz over the past couple of years is that they
have hit the notes of discontent with how the things are
currently or how the things were with the previous
administration. But of course, a lot of what they aim to
accomplish through acceleration ism in some of the things that
you brought up a moment ago is that they want to smash the
current order in order to replace it with what they
envision, what they envision. And obviously, in talking about
these people and what most people know about them, a lot of
the focus is on how what they think are is bad, as opposed to
what they think is a good replacement, right? So it's an
interesting tactic that has been very successful for them, but
you know, I've definitely seen it be very successful among
libertarian leaning types, the whole idea of the network state
as some sort of challenge to the UN or WEF vision of how cities
should be in the future. So could you explain a little bit
of where that term comes from, and how it is surprisingly
compatible with the UN in West vision for both smart cities and
global governance.
Yeah, so that. So the UN has got as part of its kind of
vision for a more sustainable development goal based future,
the UN has got a kind of push that it calls its New Urban
Agenda. And its new New Urban Agenda is essentially the
establishment of smart cities and the growth and proliferation
of smart cities around the world. That's basically,
basically what they're suggesting, they've got, they've
got, they're already moving towards, and have set up global
governance structures that are based around this idea of a
network of smart cities. So we already have, for example, the
global parliament of Mayors. Well, the, you know, this is,
these are, these are two, you know, obviously they are elected
officials of their cities, but they're not representatives of
the national government. They're representatives of the city in
which in which they were elected. And they're being given
formal global governance roles. They're they're being invited to
discuss the implementation of global governance initiatives.
So they're, they're implementing, they're directly
implementing global governance initiatives in their cities. You
know those, those we, some people may have heard of the C
40 Cities Network, for example. So these are mayors that are
focused on the implementation of global governance initiatives,
sustainable development. Now that they're doing that without
the you know, they're doing that without necessarily any kind of
national political debate, not that the national government
isn't equally on board with the same agenda. But nonetheless,
then they're not actually representing the nation state.
They're representing their city. And this is something that the
UN are very keen to push. Well equally the people that say they
are. In fact, I think Andreessen did say that one of the things
he was against was the United Nations. So, so equally, the
notion that the Neo reactionary movements kind of model of this
is what one of the quote, unquote thinkers behind, behind
it, a guy called Curtis Yarvin called A Patchwork of Realms.
And these realms would be led by a sovereign Corporation. And the
sovereign corporation would would have this, you know, kind
of oversight of what it was tantamount to a city state. This
would be, this would be based upon, very much, based upon
digital technology. It would be a centralized, controlled city,
state realm, ruled by a private corporation, which would offer
its residents who the Neo reactionaries don't even call
citizens. They call them customers. It would offer, it
would offer them a governance as a service. And as I said, as I
alluded to earlier, we're already seeing that idea
presented at a national, federal government level, in the US, in
terms of freedom cities. But that's that's also it's not just
in the US, it's everywhere. This is the same kind of thing is
happening in the UK and in the EU and everywhere else, and
certainly in Russia and China and so forth. It's the same kind
of, same kind of notion. But what the but what they they're
essentially offering, is the it's, it's in harmony with, you
know, the agenda that the global governance agenda. That is, that
the UN that the UN is pursuing, and I very much explore in the
book, you know, how the they've ingratiated themselves into that
network of, you know, global governance network. I mean, I
openly talk about an oligarch network, and they've ingratiated
themselves into that because, precisely because they are not
opposing it. They are, they're, they're, as I was saying
earlier, they are pushing this agenda forward, in fact, more
aggressively than probably even even, you know, the people that
are on that other side, the kind of weft side of vision, of the
of global governance could have hoped for. I mean, they really
are taking this forward in leaps and bounds. I mean, certainly if
we look at, for example, the rollout of digital identity, you
know this, the measures that have been taken in the US, and
we're seeing it in as again, we're not we're talking about
things that are happening globally. So this is happening
in the UK and the EU and so forth, that the measures that
they have taken in the US to forward this agenda is is far
more rapid and far more concentrated than I would have
said that any Incoming, incoming administration could have hoped
to achieve, were it not for the fact that this is being sold to
the people as as standing against the globalist overreach
that they resent, which is an A remarkable, a remarkable sleight
of hand, that, as I said, one at one of the reasons that I wrote
the book is because they appear to be getting away with it. So,
you know, it's very important that people understand what
they're doing, because it is and a thing that runs throughout,
throughout the book, is deception. So in the the network
state, the notion of the network state, the author of the network
state, which is a key, it's a really important part of of
their model of how they're going to construct this patchwork of
realms is, is that you they call it deterritorialization, you
know, we libertarians might call that decentralization. So the
decentralization of political authority through a network of
soft sovereign states, which, which then, bizarrely, is then,
once this network is created. So if we, you know, a good analogy
might be a network of smart cities once this, once this
network of smart cities is constructed, then that is re
centralized, or re territorialized under the
centralized authority of a founder or CEO, techno King, who
will, you know, everybody's everybody's assets and rights
and everything are on a unified ledger. So it's the it's the
total, it's the total antithesis of the libertarian concept of
decentralization. What? Which they are grandstanding on and
selling it to unfortunately. I mean, I agree with you, a lot of
a lot of libertarians have bought into this, and I think
they really need to look at the detail, because they're being
sold a pup.
I mean, ostensibly, you would think that most
libertarians today would want to maximize individual liberty. And
ultimately, what these people propose is the individual
liberty at the end of the day. And it's really remarkable that
they've gotten away with it. But then you have, you know, if you
look at how the media sphere, particularly among libertarian
leaning people has been the past. Through several years, you
have people like the libertarian comedian turned podcaster Dave
Smith, for example, going on Joe Rogan and referring to these
figures that we're talking about today as the quote, unquote, the
cool billionaires, right? Or the fact that the media and a lot of
these oligarchs themselves have claimed they're libertarian, and
they've also, for years, have sort of pegged themselves as
much as they possibly could to influence Bitcoiners back when,
you know, the Bitcoin community was largely libertarian leaning.
That's, of course, before the the rise of the suit pointer,
and how, you know, how that's changed since institutional
adoption and the Trump administration's embrace of
crypto really took off. Obviously, you know, mask off
there, but you know, you know, a decade or you know, even five
years ago, the culture of that group was notably different. And
you would have people like Balaji, the network state
author, be very prominent figures at these conferences,
sort of preaching as if they were libertarians. And the
desire of people to, you know, decentralize money, for example,
being like, yes, we're going to decentralize, and
decentralization is the answer. But only to leave out, of
course, that the plan is to decentralize and then recent
realize with a single central authority, arguably worse than
the current one, somehow that got left out of it. But they've
been very successful. And I think one of the reasons they've
been successful is, you know, of course, they like to use their
buzzwords of things like innovation and free market,
which, of course, I mean, anyone that's honest with themselves
will know that even though the US has promoted the importance
of the free market since, you know, most notably in the Reagan
era and beyond, the quote, unquote, free market in the US
is not actually a free market. It is crony capitalists that
benefits a small group of elites. And so when these people
are similarly talking about a free market, they are talking
about a crony capitalist, essentially, Neo feudal market
that's control. I mean, it's just, it's not free in the way
people that love the libertarians, for example, love
the free market. It's not that's not what they want, right?
Otherwise, it would be a bit, you know, the idea of the
network state, right? Would be a bit different, because, as
you've noted before, you know, the answer of the network state
is you don't like the government as a service or governance as a
service that we're offering you in our smart city? Well, you're
free to leave and choose another one, right? But you know, at the
end of the day, it's like choosing between Facebook and
Amazon and Google. You know, the choice at the end of the day is
largely cosmetic. They're all collaborators with the national
security state. They're run by transhumanist, crazy oligarch
billionaires and so how different is the choice really?
Yeah, I mean, if it was, I have to say, if it wasn't for
the fact that this is so so serious and so and so damaging
for humanity, it would be funny. I mean, I mean people like feel
of proselytized about, you know, the power of the free market and
simultaneously extolled the virtues of monopolies. So you
can't
he's also said the free market is for losers. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. So the freaking want to get rich build a monopoly,
and that's precisely what these people do. It's crony capitalism
benefiting a small group of the elites. And now these elites,
particularly the Neo reactionaries and these figures
we're talking about today, are also obsessed with genetic in
technological superiority. They are transhumanists and the
architect of the dark enlightenment, who Marc
Andreessen, is a big fan of Nick land, as you note in your book,
actually lauds the genetic superiority of the elites. And
if they're not currently genetic, genetically superior,
they will be imminently because of their dominance of genetic
engineering. Saying it's, yeah, insane. How is this the anti
elite revolution? I mean, it's just insane. Been able to sell
it so successfully as something
else, yeah, no, it's absolutely absurd. I mean, he
talks about he's got this concept of hyper racism and
what? What a trick. And I would say, I would say, this is a
trick. Is that they sometimes come up with, on the surface,
quite interesting and quite certainly provocative, but
nonetheless quite interesting arguments. And you kind of,
initially, you kind of think, well, yeah, that's, that's,
there's something in that. So, so he's within lands case, he
talks about hyper racism, which he which? He posits that that
you know that that people that are opposed to multiculturalism
have got a point, but they're naive because they, because
they, which, obviously having a point if you're opposed to
multiculturalism appear appeals to a large swathe of disaffected
kind of small c conservative voters. If you if you're opposed
to that, you're naive, because you're not recognizing the
pressing, imminent singularity, the point at which point at
which divergence doesn't really matter because, because
technology will far surpass our ability to adapt to it. So
you're not dealing with that issue. If you're, if you're
opposed, if you're a racist. He says you're not dealing with
that because you're not recognizing the reality of
what's coming. And equally, says, if you're if you're
opposed to racists, which is, I it's difficult to get your head
around this. But equally, he says, if you're opposed to
racists, you are also naive, because you're not recognizing
the impact that genetic enhancement will have on on
everybody of all of all different races, and that this
is the issue that we need to, that we need to focus on. Now,
initially, you kind of think, well, it might be, you know,
that's, that's a, it's a, it's an interesting argument to
posit. Let's look at that. But what it ultimately boils down
to, as you quite rightly said, is that he therefore asserts
that the only differentiation between human beings, and we've
heard this from other people, like like Kissinger, and that
the only, that the only difference between human beings
going forward into the fit in the future, are those that are
genetically engineered and enhanced, what he calls techno,
plastic beings, and the rest of us who will fall behind and lag
behind, like, you know, like, like, like, kind of troglodytes
that, you know, that we won't be able to cope with the
singularity, and therefore we need to be adapted so that we
can become better serving customers, so that we can pay
our sovereign rent to the sovereign. Yeah, tax.
Amazing libertarians like this so much. I mean, it's just
it should be studied for generations about how to get a
group of people cheerlead everything they are ostensibly
against.
Yeah, no, it's been, it's been absolutely amazing. I mean,
that's, you know, I when I That's why I wrote the book,
really. I mean, I looked at it and I just thought, I cannot
believe that they can be. I mean, the deception is so all
encompassing, everything is inverted. Everything is
inverted, so that everything they pretend to be is they're
not. They're the opposite of that. So for example, you know,
they talk about things like yarn talks about this notion of
orbital authority. So if we I mean, and this is another thing
that you need, that I've stressed in the book. You need
to pick apart their language, because they use a lot of
metaphor. Yarn constantly writes in or wrote and still does in
using metaphor. And you need to understand what that, what that,
what they're alluding to with those metaphors. So he talks
about orbital authority. So what he's talking about, he uses the
analogy of some sort of AI. He doesn't specify as AI, but, you
know, it's obvious what he's alluding to, some sort of space
weapon system that renders all conflict on Earth moot because
no one can initiate any kind of violent attack or assault, or,
you know, it, start a war, basically because orbital
authority will just, you know, destroy your army or your
weaponry or whatever your technology before you even are
able to launch any kind of war. So initially. You kind of think,
Oh, well, okay, what so? But then, then, then we get to the
part of, okay, so who is going to control the orbital
authority? Who? Who is going to actually be in charge of the
ability to destroy everything on earth at the flick of a switch,
on a whim. Who's going to be in charge of that? To which yarn
says, Has he is? He discussed this in his work about orbital
authority, that that's an interesting question, but it's
not something we need to worry about, because once we have
orbital authority, that will enable a network of city states,
what he calls Neo states to thrive. So that's all that
matters. Don't worry about the fact that that is under the
space lasers, yes, somebody or something, yeah.
Don't worry that all of that is happening under the most
despot, you know, despotic yoke of tyranny you could possibly
imagine. Just ignore that bit. Just be just be thankful that
you're allowed to live in your designated Smart City. I mean,
it is unreal that they're that they're they're posing as
libertarians. I, I, you know, it does at times make you laugh,
but the problem is, and this is what i This is the real issue.
And one thing that I mentioned in, I mentioned in the book,
it's not that they have these that people like land and yarn
and have these crazy ideas. It's not that that's not the problem.
You know, they're just, they're just, you know, pontificating
about ideology and sort of quasi
that they're creating the philosophy and the
underpinnings, the ideological underpinnings of the system
these people wanted anyway.
Yeah, yeah. They want it anyway. And that's something
else.
Yeah, that they're the salesman, yeah. And the problem?
The problem is, there are people like Thiel and Musk and
Larry Ellison and people like this that are implementing their
ideas. That's the problem,
yeah, because they have billions of dollars to implement
their ideas and now, because the government claims it's rubber
stamping innovation, which is basically letting these
billionaires do whatever they want. They can build it even
faster.
Yeah, yeah. And, I mean, you know, when we think about things
like, you know, the development and the money that is being put
in, and certainly by Musk into kind of orbital warfare, he
would be the orbital authority, SpaceX and its
partners. I mean, as of right now. I mean, who else is even
close?
Exactly, exactly, so, so, so, that's, that's what I mean.
I mean that although
it's a private company, Iain, it's, it's the the free
market forces ultimately control it, right?
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, that's, that's the thing I'm as
well. I mean, they call that, you constantly see, yeah, you
constantly see, in the media, them referred to as tech bros.
Like, it's, Hey, yeah, it's like, the cool tech bros. I
mean, that's like, you know, that's like calling Hitler,
yeah,
they paint them as, like, track bros, like they're a
fraternity. But you know, Freemasons are also a
fraternity, you know? Yeah? I mean, fraternities are just
harmless beard chuggers that you know,
referring to Hitler as the artist guy, you know, it's,
it's, it's, it's, yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's awful
what they're doing. I mean, you know, we're starting to see the
sharp end of that happening now. I mean, the technology that is
being rolled out around us now, these and this is happening in
partnership. I mean, a big, a big part of what I talk about as
well is that the, you know, obviously, in the US, the
situation is that the gut that the Trump administration is
utterly beholden to this, to this group. I mean, you know,
basically they put him in office so, so, you know, it's, well,
it's
not just that. I would argue it's not just that they put them
in office. I mean, I agree with you, they did, but also they are
the national security state. They run the national security
state. The national security state is a public, private
partnership dominated by its contractors. And its main
contractors are people like are run by people like Larry Ellison
and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It's funny. Apparently, some
journalist who recently attacked me, I won't bring up any names,
claimed that Peter Thiel has no actual role at Palantir, which
he COVID. Found it anymore, seemingly forgetting that he is
chairman of the board. Amazing how people can be. Just forget
major facts when incentives are in place. Yeah.
I mean, it's like saying that he's not a globalist when
he sits on the steering committee of the Bilderberg
Group. I mean, it's just like
the B and Bilderberg stands for based Iain, yeah, they're
all super cool based meme Lords that have been darkly
enlightened, and therefore we should know that they're much
better than Klaus Schwab, right?
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, and I think a big part of this as
well is to get the skeptical half of the of the population on
board with ideas that they are they are innately opposed to. So
if you think about the kind of, you know, I keep going back to
use the term, but it's reasonable one, the small c
conservative kind of perspective, who broadly are
very uncomfortable with with kind of big government and big
certainly globalist overreach, and don't like the idea of some
faceless bureaucrat sitting somewhere telling them what to
do in some office in another country, you know, from a UN,
you know, Secretariat or whatever, they're broadly
against the idea. So they are resistant to things like
sustainable development, innately, naturally resistant to
it. They don't they're not interested in it. They don't
like it. So how do you get them? I mean, if the people that think
that the planet is going to is on fire, they they have already
kind of bought into this kind of the the necessity for some sort
of massive, centralized bureaucracy to save us all from
CO two, they're already, they're already on board with that idea,
but, but who? How do you get all the people that aren't on board
with that idea to go along with it? Well, along come, along come
this gaggle of oligarchs and managing to repackage that
exactly the same centralized kind of digital control
mechanism and sell it to a different a different audience,
through through a new kind of and you have to say,
fundamentally, fundamentally deceptive narrative.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think another reason they've
been successful too, is that a lot of what they sell,
particularly in the Neo reactionary movement, and maybe
now's probably a good time to get into more general
definitions of it and what they believe in all of that. But as I
understand it, one of the main hallmarks of that ideology is
this belief in the need to completely privatize the state.
And so, for example, if you look at the WEF, you know, a lot of
people, I would argue, and I think at this point, looking
back, some of them were probably paid to make this argument that
the World Economic Forum is is a communist organization, when in
reality, it's a promoter of public private partnership, and
that a lot of the countries were told are quote, unquote
communist, or actually function a bit more like technocracy,
which is a different ideology. And in this context, you know
words matter, because by by making the WEF communist and
associating it purely with the left, it ignores the fact that
it's a public private partnership vehicle at a global
scale. And so, you know, traditionally right on the
ideological spectrum, most people consider that the left
wants a greater role for the public sector than the private
sector, and that the public sector keeps the excesses of the
private sector in check, right, and that the right favors
essentially the inverse, or the private sector is unburdened by
the public sector to innovate, etc, etc. So basically, during,
I would argue, during the COVID era, the World Economic Forum
and all of that, all this whole network that was behind a lot of
what you wrote about in pseudo pandemic were arguing for
greater power for the public sector to deal with crisis X, Y
and Z. Now the poly crisis, things of that nature, and for
those that rejected that vision, we're they are now being sold
this, which is a complete retreat into the private side of
the public private partnership.
Yeah, yeah. Fundamentally, that's what they're suggesting.
They're suggesting governance as a service run by sovereign
corporations so entirely. You know, Thiel quite famously said
that one of his objectives was to do away with politics in all
its forms. And.
Reward. Yeah. So the ideology, I would argue, of all
of these things, this shouldn't really be discussed in terms of
its left versus right. Um, they're the both sides in this
paradigm we're talking about are offering authoritarianism, um,
at the end of the day, and, uh, mass surveillance and the end
and death, not just of politics, as Thiel might put it, but also
the death of individual liberty and sovereignty. But really,
what it comes down to is, will it be an authoritarian public
sector doing everything, or will it be an authoritarian gov Corp,
or SOV Corp, a private corporation taking the role of
government like that's essentially the difference, as
it seems to be, in practical terms, which is honestly
cosmetic. I think,
yeah, no, it's absolutely cosmetic. Because, I mean, if
you think that you know, the notion of the public private
partnership is kind of the kind of expression of stakeholder
capitalism which is which is authoritarian and but
authoritarianism in the largely in the hands of the private
sector. And the same is true about the idea what the ideas
that have been promoted about the the Neo reactionaries are
promoting, but theirs is even more overt. Theirs is theirs is
that there should be no public sector. There would be no public
sector at all. So they're kind of just a king, just Yeah, yeah,
a monarch, a corporate monarch, who would, who would rule over,
over the city, state. I mean, that's, that's what they,
they're suggesting. But I mean, in a way, in it, kind of, in a
way, they've solved the kind of the Left, Right paradigm they
would argue, by making the private sector the public
sector. It's all one thing. It's just, it's just, they just
homogenized the whole thing and said, Oh well, it's all one
thing, all that really matters is that, you know, you've got
some rules to follow, and we'll set them, I think. No, sorry,
you carry on. Well, I was
just going to say, I think that's one of the reasons
they've been so successful, is that almost everyone in the
world today still operate, operates in the Old Left, Right
paradigm, whereas these people are operating in a completely
different paradigm, and they're the ones that are actually
setting policy right, there's a completely different ideological
system at work here that most people have no idea about, and
then these people sell their ideas Using the old paradigm
that no longer applies.
Basically, yeah, I mean, I mean, so land, Nick land, who,
he worked in this thing called the cybernetics culture Research
Unit at Warwick University. And they were kind of iconoclastic
scholars, and they and they were looking at how humanity would
cope with the singularity, which, and that's an assumption.
The Singularity Is the assumed point where technology outstrips
our ability to adapt to it. And you know very much I mean, Mark
Anderson, who's fully on board with this, says, I'm an
accelerationist, which is very much part of Neo reactionary
thinking that he considers. And he's not, obviously not alone in
this. He considers AI to be his philosophers, or the Neo
reactionaries, philosophers stone. So they also assume that
technology is the much like the, you know, if we talk about the
the the technocrats of the 1930s they see technology is the
solution to everything. Every human problem can be solved by
technology. They they believe now, or they say they believe
now. And Anderson, when he, when he listed his, his the things
that he opposed in the techno optimist manifesto included the
fact that saying things like China, the you know, China's
technological innovation, the World Economic Forum, the you
know, everything that he said, sustainable development, that
all these ideas were rooted in communism. So they're quite
happy to play the left, right kind of card, but at the same
time, they are working at a level where the only thing that
exists is the fusion between the public and the private that
they're not interested in, these divisions that we are given to
believe in. And you know, a lot of people are obsessed about
they have no interest in that, none. All they're interested in
is the fusion. And you have to say, really. The absorption of
the public sector by the private sector, which, of course, as the
tech bro CEO kings, they will lead, and they will dominate
with their monopolies. That's that's what their that's their,
that's what that it's not their game. That is what they are
doing. I mean, one of the things that I stress in the book, is
not that this is some kind of future, theoretical dystopia,
this, this is being constructed around us now. We can see the we
can see what companies like Palantir are doing in places
like Israel. We can see how they are operating. You know, you've
you, and you've done a lot of excellent work, which are also
included in the book about, you know, the origins of companies
like Palantir. I mean, they're, they're governments around the
world. For example, both the US government and the British
government have bought some software, important software
platform called Palantir Gotham. Now, one of the things that in
order for decentralized kind of digital systems, whether that's
decentralized currency or decentralized vendor agnostic
digital ID products, in order for them to be re centralized,
the very important concept to wrap your head around is
interoperability these various diff what, what the US
Administration called disparate databases or technological kind
of platforms need to be linked together? Well, Palantir and
Oracle. Oracle have got a thing called Golden Gate. Palantir
have got some software called Gotham. Is the arc, is the is
the software that makes interoperability real. It is the
software that achieves that interoperability. It can take
data from any source and convert it into a standardized machine,
exchangeable, readable format, so it so while they're they're
talking about calling something communist or calling something
they're opposed to globalism. They are putting in place. Now
governments have bought this. They've already bought it. They
are putting in place now the technology that will make the
ultimate form of globalism a reality true global governance
because, because they'll create what appears to be a
decentralized global network, quite obviously, a decentralized
global network of what look appear to be nodes on some sort
of unified ledger which will be rendered interoperable through
the technology that they're developing and putting into place.
I'm glad you brought up Larry Ellison and Oracle for a
second, because a lot of what you're discussing here is a very
old agenda. It very visibly can be traced back to the immediate
post 911 era in the US. So right after 911 Larry Ellison, of
course, agreeing with the CIA, which he used to work for, used
to work for, wrote an op ed in the New York Times, I believe,
basically saying that the only way to prevent terrorist attacks
of the future was to end the silo of of data between national
security and other government agencies, basically having mass
interoperability of the data that you can access all of the
data in one go, because data protection laws before 911
prevented that. This was, of course, also a goal of Palantir,
the restyled post 911 total Information Awareness Program
housed within the Pentagon at DARPA. And now that Larry
Ellison and Peter Thiel and these people have a significant
influence over the Trump administration, I believe it was
recently announced that those silos are about to be
eliminated, or imminently being eliminated, so that talent here
can more appropriately profile people, right? And this is very
problematic, because, of course, after the immediate post 911
era, we had the war of domestic terror, you know, being launched
in tandem with the war on domestic terror. And there's
only been little spurts of it, but really the spurts that have
happened, and what many people have argued have been, you know,
a mix of real and also false flag events to justify the
expansion of this infrastructure. You know, we now
have, you know, the Trump administration. They're separate
policies that seem to be separate from the tech bros, as
they're called, as you noted, doing things like like a general
US General recently said that if he was given a directive to
attack a domestic terror organization with military
force, he would do so. And. And then there's been this
normalization of having military in law enforcement roles
throughout various US cities. There's been kind of this
lawlessness with the rules of engagement of war abroad, sort
of a war, a return to the war of terrorism, where you can just
drone, bomb a boat and claim they were trafficking drugs. And
it's fine, without even having to have evidence of that, you
know. And so, you know, in the past, with like the Iraq war,
they had to, you know, have their the yellow cake and in
this tube, the Colin Powell, you know, test tube shaking thing
and that kind of fear mongering, even though they knew it was a
lie at the time, they still lied to people to justify it. I mean,
now the bar is even lower, but this type of stuff is meant to
go hand in hand with the stuff that these tech oligarchs are
building these surveillance systems. And there's no it's no
coincidence. I would argue that you have Larry Ellison saying
things like, soon, AI surveillance will make sure
citizens are on their best behavior, right? Because
otherwise, if you're doing naughty things, you know, they
could just say that you're linked to Antifa or some other
domestic terror organization, and they're developing now the
legal infrastructure to be able to kill with impunity. And the
way that you brought up that Palantir, for example, is
enabling the IDF to kill with impunity in Gaza, and this is
something that is clearly going to be global in scope if they
get away with it. And that brings me back to to the what we
brought up earlier, with the idea of the network state and
the patchwork of realms and the smart cities. And how, if you,
Oh, you don't like life in the smart city? Well, you can just
leave. It'll be hard to leave when these people who are also
trying to dominate autonomous warfare and autonomous drone
swarms everywhere have decided that there are these various No
Go Zones, or they've associated you with domestic terror
literature that you read online, or whatever, you know, any sort
of of, I mean, it's just, it's marriage, it's everything that
people were warning against in the post 911 era. And now some
of the biggest voices that dissented back in the decades
ago are now cheerleaders for this, basically. I mean, these
guys are Neo conservatives rebranded, but they're getting
away with so much more than the Neo cons, I think even could
have imagined in the early 2000s in the immediate post 911 area,
when they seem to have a bank blank slate to do whatever they
wanted at the time. I mean, now it's just the possibilities that
they have that they're bringing to the forefront are just, I
don't I don't even it leaves me speechless. It is, it is
staggering, and it is staggeringly bad. And what's
even more crazy is that a lot of the people that used to be
against this stuff cheerlead a lot of these figures that we're
talking about today, bringing this in so like Glenn Greenwald,
who was known for his reporting on the Snowden documents, right
again about mass surveillance, is cheerleading. JD Vance, big
fan of him, even though he is basically Peter Thiel's golf
glove at the end of the day. And, you know, Alex Jones, for
example. You know, railing about Posse Comitatus and how all the
neocons and all the bad stuff they're doing, you know,
cheerleaders for this stuff too. Recently, had a guest on his
show talking about how Venezuela's government needs to
be replaced with a technocracy with a biometric digital ID. I
mean, that is where we are right now. It is, it is a sight to
see.
Yeah, it's extremely alarming. I mean, you know, a
good example probably is, you know, obviously you've got
people commentators like that saying welcoming the idea of
regime change, you know, essentially getting rid of
governments and replacing them with techno crap, kind of AI
controlled technocracy, you know. And it's, it's, that's
pretty crazy stuff, but then you get that also, I mean, at least,
although it was a although it was a deception, at least there
was some sort of rational narrative for for the war on
terror. It was a it was a fake one. But if, if you thought it
was real, at least it made some kind of logical sense. You know,
just saying we're going to embargo all, all oil exports and
oil, all oil traffic to Venezuela because we claim that
we have rights to all the oil fields that to their oil fields
are just just, which is what Trump recently announced. I
mean, there's not even any attempt to make any kind of
cogent argument as to as to why that's why that's uh. A Well,
plausible, you know, this kind of is you don't have to
dispense, you can dispense with any kind of logical sense or
plausible argument, if you can just say, Well, you know, we're
in charge, and what are you going to do about it? Which is
basically the, basically the whole point of the networks
well, not the, necessarily the network state, but certainly the
Neo reactionary movement and certainly the dark
enlightenment, is exactly that you know that you you need some
strong, autocratic CEO monarch to just, just for society to
function. You know, otherwise, society is hobbled in it. You
know that they Curtis yarn spoke about this idea of domestic
which, what he meant was, you know, the people like us
insisting on this silly notion of democratic oversight,
whatever that might be, that's just ridiculous. We just brush
all that aside. We don't need any of that. I mean, land said
that our sovereignty should be treated with derision, so we are
not with this is another important concept to bear in
mind, that the mindset that these people have adopted is
that we are nothing. I mean, I can't it's it's everywhere in
every in all their ideology that they have taken on board. And I
might, and I agree a little bit with the comment you made
earlier, Whitney, I'm not sure, and that's something else I
explore in the book. Whether this is just convenient, whether
they actually believe in this kind of pseudo philosophical
garbage that is the dark and light and or whether it's just
convenient to use that as some sort of intellectual, fake
intellectual justification for getting what they want. But at
the end of the day, that doesn't really matter because, because,
because they are saying, openly, saying that they believe in this
stuff, and what that means is that they believe that the
private sector autocratic, centralized authority rules
unchallenged, And nobody has got any right to challenge it
because, because they know best, because our I mean, you can go
all the way back to people like Brzezinski and stuff making the
same argument, and that's something else that I point out
in the book, nothing. None of this is really new, but
nonetheless, it is now overt. They are, they are. They are
packaging this up and selling dictatorship openly as somehow
beneficial. I mean, something, something that yarn is infamous
for saying, is that dictatorship is good. Now, when he when he
said that, when he said that about two weeks after he'd said
that Thiel then gave, then gave a speech in which he reiterated
that point. Thiel was talking about it in the context of
global corporations, saying that it needs, they need to be
dictatorial for in a business sense, Yarvin was talking about
it in a sociopolitical sense. But clearly the you know,
they're absolutely on board with this idea that they have the
knowledge, the wherewithal, you know, the the the the necessary,
the necessary technological power, the necessary economic
and financial power to rule Absolutely, and that that
somehow is good for the rest of us. And it's that is seeping
into, as you were talking about earlier, as well, the, you know,
the decisions of the of the some of the decisions that the Trump
administration has made, that is seeping into the political
lexicon as well. You know, I can just completely ignore the US
Constitution and put troops on the streets, in in, in US
cities. I can do that because I am, I am the Supreme Leader. You
know, that's that. And people, as you rightly say, people are
on board with it. They're they think, oh yeah. Well, that's
quite Yeah, that's good. He's going to solve crime by by
completely ignoring the Constitution.
Well, divine right of techno kings. It has been a remarkable
sales campaign for it, and here we are, and it's crazy. And I
think one of the reasons people have you know, been so
susceptible to this is because there was a huge media campaign
that was launched on the back of discontent of the COVID era, and
it's been remarkably successful. And I think now the
proliferation of artificial intelligence. Intelligence on a
lot of these platforms. When we were all pushed into the digital
realm during the COVID era, they have now been heavily
inoculated. I guess you could say with artificial intelligence
accounts that are not real people that seem to be real,
deep fakes videos of people that aren't actually them. This has
actually happened to me. There is an AI version of me currently
loose on YouTube saying things I've never said. And I'm sure
it's happening to other people, if it's happening to me as well,
but the ultimate goal is that no one really knows what to think
about anything anymore. And so a lot of people who are unprepared
psychologically for the consequences of that, or rather
are completely unaware of them altogether, become extremely
more, even more malleable than ever in the context of these
platforms, and what has been a manufactured dependence on them
that really took off during the COVID era. And I would argue
that this has been the plan for some time. And it's funny,
because a lot of these people, and I'd like to talk about this
for a little bit, you know, like Peter Thiel and so, and you
know, people like Nick land too, and this idea of the coming
supremacy of AI via the singularity and all of that, a
lot of that is discussed by people like Henry Kissinger and
his successor, or self styled successor, the former Google CEO
Eric Schmidt. Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger wrote this book
about AI. Well, they wrote a couple books about AI, but
basically they argue and Kissinger in particular, which
is important, because Kissinger is pretty notorious for, you
know, orchestrating who's abroad with the CIA back when he was
Secretary of State, and being a major fixture at these globalist
confabs like Bilderberg and such in the in the years after, you
know, he Herald AI not as a tool of, you know, a lot of the
other, you know, utopian sounding rhetoric that often
gets thrown around by the tech Bros and these people. He
instead noted that it was its real promise. Wasn't a tool of
basically manipulating perception of the public, which
I think is absolutely true, and how they actually, you know,
kind of a quiet part, out loud admission about this kind of
stuff, and that basically, eventually people would not know
how to distinguish between what is real and what is fake, and
that they argue too, that AI, once the singularity comes
essentially, that the AI hallucinations, where AI like
returns a nonsensical response, are actually indications of
hidden realities that humans cannot perceive, and Therefore
we should trust these AI, you know, delusions as as hints of
hidden realities, and that we should join hands with AI and
journey into these new realities together. And basically,
something that I think is interesting here in the context
of of the Neo reactionary people, is this idea of AI in
the role of religion, and how a lot of these people in the Peter
Thiel network, the Thiel verse, have really been promoting sort
of this new version of Christianity. And I would like
you to talk about your chapter in the book about that. But
first, I want to add that recently, Joe Rogan was on not
his own podcast. It was another podcast, and he was promoting
the idea that the second coming of Christ would be that Jesus
would return as an AI, because a computer is a virgin mother, and
that we should, you know, essentially prepare ourselves
for some sort of AI Messiah. And Peter thiel's recent speech, or
group of speeches on the Antichrist, are about how the
Antichrist, in his view, will try and regulate AI, will
prevent innovation in AI, basically. So anyone that tries
to regulate AI is bad to Peter Thiel, basically. But the last
point I want to bring up in this, in this line of thinking,
you know, relevant data point is that Eric Schmidt and Henry
Kissinger argue in their book that the advent of all this AI
technology will either bring up revolution against the elites,
or it will create a new religion. And just recently,
Eric Schmidt said, I want it to be their religion. I mean,
obviously, because they don't want the elite order of which
they are a part to be dismantled. So it seems like we
are. Sort of being set up for something quite unusual,
especially when you consider that these Neo reactionary
oligarchs are so powerful and they they have this quasi
religious feeling about things like the singularity and
transhumanism. So what are your thoughts about all these various
related developments?
Well, yeah, I mean, certainly. I mean, the Neo
reactionaries want to decent, want to deterritorialize
everything and re-territorialize it in their own image. And that
includes Christianity, that includes, that includes faith
and and what they and Thiel's version of Christianity is
pretty bizarre, and, you know, and I'm certainly, no, I'm not
religious myself, and I'm certainly in no position to
question someone's faith. But, you know, I think it is fair
that fair to say that there are some basic, basic tenets of
Christian, Christianity that everybody recognizes, be they
Christian or not, or be they religious or not, and that is
compassion, love, kindness, these kind of the virtues that
we would that we would consider to be Christian. I mean even
that is even what the word means. To be Christian means
that you know to to be a selfless, a selfless person who
is compassionate and caring. Now, the version that that Thiel
has argued for, he wrote quite an influential kind of essay
called, I think it was called My Straussian Moment, or This
Straussian Moment where he where he spoke a lot about the
influence of, ironically, less about Strauss and more about the
ideas put forward by a close - initially, a teacher, a
professor of his and who became a friend of his, a French
theological thinker and philosopher, a guy called Rene
Girard, who spoke about this notion of one of the things that
is destroying the world is what he called mimesis, which is our
which is our kind of desire to emulate, to emulate others and
and therefore this boils down to Thiel concluding that that the
there are really only two commandments that are of any
value or not any value, but there Are two commandments that
are far more important than any of the others, and that include
and the two are that you should worship God and that you should
not covet so so the others, which are pretty important, you
know, I would have thought to both Christians and non
Christians alike, can be dispensed with as we as they try
to find what he called a third way between Armageddon, which he
considers to be the global global governance, and the
apocalypse, which is mimesis, US pursuing kind of consumerism to
the point where we destroy ourselves so and he argues that
our pursuit of mimic our mimetic desires, are the thing that are
driving us into the arms of the Antichrist, which he called
Armageddon, the coming of the Antichrist. He said that that
that was encapsulated in the concept of Armageddon. And
therefore, and that's global governance. And therefore we
need not, we don't need the wrong kind of global governance.
We need the right, we need the right kind of global governance
because we have to deal with the apocalypse, which is our, you
know, currently, our ability to have a reasonable standard of
living through kind of economic activity which is driving the
world to destruction. He says, Therefore, it is only right and
proper in order for us to avoid the tyranny of true hellish
global governance is the global governance needs to be managed
more appropriately, and that could best be done by innovators
and technological leaders are the people that are in the right
place at the right time to make the right decisions, namely him
and his network of Neo reactionary oligarch friends. So
that's that's pretty much you. His kind of view on
Christianity. He also, he also, he also has argued that because
we are in inherently violent, and I explore this in some depth
in the book, this is all around gerard's notion of a
foundational murder, but without getting into the deep weeds of
it, because, we are inherently violent, which God isn't? God
isn't inherently violent, but we are. There needs to be some kind
of management of our violence. Our violence needs to be
appropriately stewarded to ensure that we don't fall into
the trap of the Armageddon that we don't allow Satan to rule,
which is what he called global governance. So therefore the
responsible position is to get the balance right between just
the right level of killing and and and if you get that right,
if you just kill the right people, then that's, that's the
Christian thing to do, because then you're, then you're saving
humanity from itself. And I know this sounds utterly insane, and
it is, but that is basically his view on, you know that stem
stems from his reading of girardian mimetic desire and and
I, one of the points that I point out, and another point I
make in that particular chapter is, is, even if you're not
religious, you know it is, it is legitimate, I think, to
criticize hypocrisy. Now that to me to claim that you are a
Christian and then a shoe all Christian values that anybody
else could ever possibly recognize, I think, is
hypocritical. So so even though I have strayed into religion,
and I'm not a religious person myself, and even though I'm not
questioning his you know, he probably does think that he's
got Christian values, and it's not my place to question that. I
think I it is legitimate to question what appears to be
pretty obvious hypocrisy.
Yeah, I think it's definitely that, but I think it
also perhaps goes a bit further. I think at least the way things
are shaping up, it seems very likely to me that there's going
to be some sort of element that is religious in nature, or at
least pretends to be religious in nature, that is used as part
of this broader sales pitch, as I've been calling it in this
episode, to sort of justify the imposition of this patchwork of
realms, as we've been discussing this network state type of style
society, that is, you know, essentially what your book is
about, the technocratic dark state on a global scale. I think
it seems like there is an effort to develop some, some sort of
religious underpinning for, not necessarily, necessarily for
that itself, but for, you know, things like AI and some of the
technologies that will be fundamental to the functioning
of those states, yeah.
I mean, I think, I think, yeah, certainly, right. I mean,
there's a, there's a movement that is backed by the kind of
Neo, reactionary, kind of oligarchs in the US, called
Acts, Acts 17. There are who are, who are going around, kind
of trying to get the, get the, their version of the Christian
message out to, you know, the kind of Silicon Valley movers
and shakers and the business community. So they're definitely
trying to get people on board with this notion that, I mean, I
Trey Stevens, who is kind of, I forget that is it Andrew that
he's heavily invested in. I think it's,
yeah, Trey Stevens was a co founder of Andrew and he was
previously he's at Founders Fund, which is the Thiel VC
firm. He is on the board of card by 911 the company that Founders
Fund and Thiel colluded to invest in, along with Jeffrey
Epstein, that's the Israeli surveillance company taking over
911 call centers, or emergency call centers in the US. And I
believe before that was a Palantir, and before that worked
for a three letter agency, which he will not say what it was, but
usually when it's they admit it's a three letter agency, and
they won't tell you what the agency was. It's almost always
the CIA, because it's the most infamous one. So, yes, that
seems to be the Trey Stevens history as as I recall,
yeah, so Trey Stevens is kind of a formative member of
Acts 17. This, this, this Christian, Christian.
Yeah, I believe he and his wife created it together, if I'm
not speaking,
yeah, and. So his his argument is that venture
capitalism creates value, and that's all that matters, because
it creates value. So you're contributing something to you
know, obviously, if you thought that the idea of trickle down
economics was plausible, you are, you are creating value, and
that is essentially good. That is a Christian thing to do. And
so that's the so venture capitalism is good. It is
Christian. You know, it doesn't matter that the thing that
you're invested in is drone strikes on, you know, the
technical, the technological ability to kill people at a
distance using AI directed weaponry. That doesn't matter.
It because, not only doesn't that matter from this Christian
perspective, because, you know, some kind of level of management
of murder is required, it doesn't matter because you're
creating value. So as long as you're creating value. I mean,
what we're talking about is shareholder value. Obviously,
what you're doing is creating value, and that is the Christian
thing to do. Now, that is just, I can't so I mean, in a way,
this is, this is epitomizes what we've been talking about during
this during this conversation. It is so far removed from, you
know, and then this, you can say the same about the dark
enlightenment. And even you know, you could say the same
about technocracy. It is so far removed from our normal
appreciation of concepts that we thought we were, we were
familiar with that. We have to kind of rethink what these
people are talking about, because it's it's not, it's not
something that most of us would easily recognize, and they even
to the extent that it's that they, they use and have created
all kinds of new a new language, almost, you know, there's so
many, so much jargon that they use, and so many concepts that
hidden within other concepts. It's like an onion just peeling
back layers all the time that they're creating a language that
only they they can share. And when they talk about things like
Christianity. It is not what what most of us would perceive
as Christianity.
Think the goal is just to use the hijack, basically the
concept of what regular people have of Christianity,
particularly of practicing Christians, and then use that to
herd them into something else entirely. Basically, I mean,
that's what it seems like to me, but I want to pick up on what
you brought up about how Acts 17 in particular highlights and
makes essentially the primal point of Christianity being
about generating value, or shareholder value, it behooves
us, then to discuss how value will be generated in this new
system that they are proposing and which is quickly taking
shape, bringing us, of course, to the section of your book that
deals significantly with financial matters. And I
recently, I recently did a video for Solari report with my
colleague Mark Goodwin about the tokenization agenda in
particular, and how the role that will play in generating
value in the future to come and what it portends. So I'm not
sure where you'd like to start in that we have about 10 to 15
minutes to sort of get into that. Obviously, it's something
we could talk about for an entire podcast. Yeah.
I mean, essentially, I mean, if you think you know, again,
looking at the network state, which is it? Which is, which is
an expression of this, if this kind of Neo reactionary thinking
an attempt to make it a practical kind of model of it.
Balaji Sri lifts and says, All value goes digital, all value.
So what he means is everything. He means, all your assets would
be on the sovereign corporations unified ledger, the which almost
certainly would be a blockchain, or certainly some sort of
distributed ledger, technology ledger, all your rights, all
your contracts, all your all your assets, as in as in your
personal assets. So your your digital self, your
representation, at representation of yourself on
the ledger, a tokenized version of you will be on the ledger. So
all value goes digital, goes digital, and there is no value
up. Other than that which is expressed digitally. So unless
it is, unless it is represented in a tokenized form on the
unified ledger, he says it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist.
So everything that does exist has to be represented in a
tokenized form.
I'm taking this back to the Trey Stevens thing, then you are
a good Christian if you generate value. But also that value only
exists in the digital realm that you'll only be able to access if
you have digital ID, yes, and use digital programmable money
to you know, as part of generating that value, it's,
it's, it's speechless again, here I am speechless.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, I think so, if we look at this in
kind of what, what we might consider to be traditional
monetary terms and economic terms, clearly there is a
problem with the international monetary and financial system,
and that is the debt it I mean, even if, even if you think that
what we are told about economic the monetary system is genuine,
and there's a and I explore some of the reasons why even that is
questionable in the book, but if You assume things like GDP and
so forth are plausible, then there's obviously a massive
problem, something the current Canadian Prime Minister Mark
Carney called the destabilizing asymmetry at the heart of the
monetary system, and that's the debt, because it just looks
silly. I mean, the notion that, you know, GDP is probably, you
know, let's average it out 100 trillion per year. And the
global debt is acknowledged, debt is 320 trillion. And then
you add in things like the derivatives market, the nominal,
the nominal value of the derivatives market, which you
know you could argue is plausibly around one
quadrillion, then you're talking about a global debt that is 10
times, at least more than the size of the entire global
economy. Now obviously that is just on its face. That is a
ridiculous proposition. There isn't that much money on Earth.
If, if, if the money paradigm meant anything, if the monetary
system means anything, then, on its face, that is an absurd
proposition. Now, now that's a problem. If you're if your main
tool of control, which it has been for a long time, is your
endless expansion of the money supply. Because your endless
expansion of the money supply is creating the thing that is
ultimately the destabilizing asymmetry at the heart of your
system. So it has to end at some point. It is not. It is not
plausible. Now I I argue that it that, that the writing was on
the wall for that, and we saw that in the 2008 financial crash
at that point onwards, the notion of maintaining the
monetary system in its current in it, the fiat currency
monetary system was, it was a dead duck from that point
onwards. And we say that brings us forward to 2025 where they
are now in a position to put the fix in. So the the initial fix
for the short term problem, I argue, and I know people have
got a different view in it. Of course, there's nothing wrong
with that, but the short term fix it from the US perspective.
So let's, let's say that the the the $38 trillion debt or more
now, because I probably only looked at it a couple of weeks
ago, so it's probably a lot more than that. Now it's the stable
coins are an outlet to absorb that debt. They're backed by
Treasuries and other dollar backed instruments. So it's,
it's, they're a vehicle to absorb some of that debt. Now,
the projections for the global stable coin market, which were
enabled by the genius act, they that the kind of projection for
that, I think by 2030 is about 4 trillion. So that's 4 trillion
of US debt that can be that can be absorbed in the short term,
but that doesn't eat much into the current $38 trillion debt,
because that's projected to be something like 55 trillion by
2035, so there's still, you still got this debilizing
asymmetry problem. But if, but if, as has been now firmly
established, the Bank for International Settlements says
that tokenization that the reason that they want to put
everything onto a unified ledger. Which is what Sri nifsan
is talking about in the network state, is because that maximizes
the potential for tokenization. You can put everything onto this
digital all value goes digital. And when they mean all, they
mean all, like, yeah,
they do. And I don't think a lot of people grasp what that
means. And so, you know, in the video I did with Mark, I brought
up a company that he and I wrote about, I guess, last year,
called O.N.E. Amazon, which was a company created by the creator
of the ETF at Barclays, and then later became a Blackrock
executive who's now based in Dubai, creating the UAE CBDC,
among other claims to fame. And his other co founder is the
former board member of the Trump Media and Technology Group,
which is the truth social parent company. And together, they are
working to tokenize the entire Amazon rainforest for the
purpose of turning the Amazon rainforest into basically a debt
sink, in the same way that, like Bitcoin, is being treated as a
politically neutral reserve asset for as in, to be used as a
debt sink. Basically, they want to do the turn of the forest
because it's a finite size into a debt sink, just like Bitcoin
is also of you know, has finite issuance. After a certain point,
there's only going to be so many units of Bitcoin. So it has an
inherent degree of scarcity. So too does the natural world,
because you can't make more Earth, right? And so
essentially, this is a microcosm of what they hope to do. They
want to put every single you know, acre or hectare you know
of the Amazon rainforest on chain tokenized so that it's
tradable. As you know this, this scarce digital asset based on
something real or a real world asset, right? So a lot of the
tokenization buzz these days is about real world assets, right?
And what people don't realize is that it's not just, oh, they're
going to put a representation of it on chain in order to do so,
that asset must be under 24 hour invasive surveillance so that
you can prove that it represents what you say it represents. So
in order to do that, one, Amazon has partnered with this company
called SATA logic, tied to people like Howard lutnik, who's
running commerce for Trump, and also recently heavily invested
in by the US stable coin tether to create the internet of
forests, just like the internet of bodies. But it's, you know,
for the trees and the Amazon rain forest. And presumably they
will do this to every forest and every living thing, because if
you're trading it on chain, it must be under constant
surveillance, and that's something that I don't think
people have really grappled with. So what is it? What
happens then, when you know it's not just trees and little in
hectares or acres of forests that are being tokenized? What
if biodiversity data is something that's being traded
and tokenized, the animals and organisms would also have to be
tagged and tripped right? And so I think you can see that pretty
quickly this gets out of hand in terms of the mass surveillance
paradigm, and what happens when people are digitally as in the
network state only existing if they're existing and tokenized
versions on chain. Wire is, is also why all of this going on,
this simultaneous push into wearables and microchips and,
you know, transhumanist technology being sold as quote,
unquote healthcare, because that data is is also a value. And if
we're looking at this, you know, Acts 17, quote, unquote
Christian, we need to maximize value, because then we're like
better Christians or whatever. But, I mean, that's what they
want anyway. Regards, of the trace Stevens thing, you're only
a good customer, right of the GOV Corp, if you're maximizing
value for said gov Corp, and it's ruling techno King, right?
So the best way for you to be a good customer is to maximize the
amount of data that you produce that can then be tokenized and
traded on chain.
Yeah, exactly that. And, I mean, and you know, again, going
back to where we started at the beginning of this, about the
kind of, the deceptive element of that as well, is that much of
that value for, certainly for natural assets, that value comes
from, from them being what they call ecosystem service. Which
is, which really all that is, is the mechanism for putting a
price on what on what they're worth.
That's how we get, like the medieval air tax, yeah, things
like that. Yeah, yeah. It's libertarians bringing it to us,
right? But that
comes directly from, that comes directly from the very
foundational basis of sustainable development agenda
21 so agenda 21 is where they first started talking about
ecosystem services. And 30, best part of 35 years later, that is
being translated by people who say they are opposed to all such
things. It's being translated into tokenized assets. So, so
you know, the lineage is quite clear, that you can see that
there is no there is no opposition to the what a lot of
people are concerned about in terms of what we might call the
globalist agenda. This is about accelerating that agenda in the
in the genuine sense of using accelerationism, which is a big
part of Neo reactionary thinking, which means to destroy
old markets and create new ones through technological
innovation, such as tokenization. So the thing is,
they say these things and these concepts, like acceleration,
like accelerationism, which is what I've you know, just, just
described there. But the point that I try to stress in the book
that this is not empty rhetoric. They're doing it. They are doing
it. The tokenization of the Amazon rainforest being a
classic example, you know, the only, the only kind of
commercial value from a kind of, you know, maybe from a large
scale commercial value that that hitherto had was probably lumber
or clearing it for clearing it for Sawyer or something like
that, not anymore through through accelerationism, the
application of technology, in this case, digital technology
and tokenization, you destroy The value of that market and put
and create a new one, in this case, ecosystem services, that
that is the essence of acceleration ism, and that is
exactly what they are doing. They're doing it so, you know,
it's pointless. People, I think, saying, you know, this is all
kind of theoretical. This is theoretical kind of musing. It
isn't that they are putting and that goes back to the thing that
I was saying about the dark enlightenment, and people like
Yarvin, their ideas are off the charts wacky. But that doesn't
mean that there aren't people like Thiel, Musk, Lutnik,
Ellison, these people, they are putting them into practice. They
are, they are implementing them right now. And, you know, we
need to know about that, and that's why I wrote the book.
Yeah, absolutely. And it's not just that they're making
this infrastructure. They're also lording over a coming
economic crisis that will inevitably force us onto these
new systems if you want to try and preserve your wealth or have
any sort of you know, or participate in what you're you
know society as it exists now. I mean, they're definitely, I
think it's pretty clear trying to set us up for a series of
events whereby they will hurt us into their global, technocratic
dark state, if you will. Well, it's certainly dark to talk
about the technocratic dark state, but there are plenty of
things we can do to resist what's coming and prevent it
from being implemented. And I think it's should be quite clear
to people that the most important thing to do as soon as
possible is to educate people about what is, what they are
attempting to do, who these people really are in the power
they wield because they wouldn't have been investing so much
money and time to try and convince us and sell certain
segments of the population this vision through such deceptive
means, if they didn't need our consent, at least to some
degree. So I think it's a good time to talk about solutions,
Iain, if you would like to give us sort of your view on things
that we can do to resist the technocratic dark state sooner
rather than later.
Yeah, I think the most, most pressing thing is that we should
not comply. And that's not that doesn't that's not. A trite
thing. We really need to be aware of what we need to do not
to comply. Because unless we unless we are aware of how not
to comply, we've got no chance of doing it. I would encourage
everybody to consider that everything they are doing,
pretty much is about controlling us. So the question would be,
why? And the question and the answer to that is staring us in
the face. We are the people who can scupper their plans. So we
need to realize that we have agency in this, and the most,
probably the most powerful thing vote that we have is our
wallets, if we if we are conscious about how to resist
this and how we spend our money, where we spend our money, who
with if we refuse to adopt things like digital ID, which
isn't going to be easy, because, as something that I have pointed
out is that, you know, this infrastructure is already around
us. We are already using aspects of it, such as driving licenses
and bank cards and those kind of things. So, so what? But what we
can, what we can do from this point onwards, is minimize our
use of these control systems, but we but in order to be able
to do that, we need to know what they are. And that, again, is a
point. Is a point of the book, and we can do things like it,
you know, it is said ad nauseum, but it is true nonetheless. So
very simple things like getting rid of your smartphone. You
know, I know that for some people, that would be just like
unthinkable. But that is a very simple thing we can do to retard
the rollout of this system, using cash, you know, not, not
using things like your bank card unless you absolutely have no
alternative. You know, not using things like store loyalty cards,
being aware of how our data is gathered, who is gathering it,
and the mechanisms they're using to gather it. And they're not
not agreeing to go along with that. When they say, you know, I
mean, it's things like, if you have to hand over your data for
anything like your personal data for anything then, then, even if
that service is offered to you freely, it is not free. Nothing
is free. So, so you know, we just need to be aware of the
steps that we can do. And ultimately, what we need to do
is ensure that we have alternative, non digital,
probably, in the short term, non digital alternatives to manage
things like, you know, basic, basic trade in our communities.
We need that. That is the kind of thing that we're going to
have to do, because otherwise, you will the only other option
is compliance, and we can't, you know, comply our way out of
this. There's, there's no way of complying our way out of this.
So you know that that's the kind of thing that we need to do.
I, you know, people that have listened to me for a long
time will know that I echo a lot of those same solutions. It's
never been more important to starve them of your data. And it
really the smartphone is being framed as in most places, by the
way, essential for digital ID implementation, digital banking
implementations, pay with your face, technology, all of that,
if you are truly against this agenda and that you need to find
a way to get rid of your smartphone. I don't really care
how you do it. I don't care if you do it in six months or a
year from now or whatever, but you need to make a plan to get
rid of it, because if you do not want to comply and do not want
to be herded into this world, you have to say no to this
device specifically it has to go, and especially why we can
still get, you know, physical flip phones. Here in Chile, they
call them grandpa phones. And happy to be a grandpa phone
user. Hopefully more people will join in that regard, because a
lot of the bells and whistles, you know, for example, a lot of
stuff in Chile, doesn't you know, people demand WhatsApp and
all these other things you can have. If you have to have access
to that stuff, have a smartphone. You keep in a Farrar
day bag, and you pull it out maybe once a day to check on it.
We have to UN addict ourselves to the Doom scrolling and all of
this other stuff. It has to stop, and we have to get off of
a lot of these digital media platforms that are breaking
people's brains and degrading our attention span and our
cognition, especially with AI proliferating everywhere, which
is why Mark Goodwin. And and myself are working to bring
physical media to the forefront of Unlimited Hangout. Hopefully
other people will follow our example. And we can't really do
it, though, if consumers, the audience, right, don't also make
that commitment to honor physical media over digital
media as we, you know, move forward in our fight against
this incoming technocratic dark state, it's never been more
essential to invest for the good of your brain and for society in
the physical and I'm not just trying to show my own bags here
with physical media. You know, there's plenty of other people's
books and things that people can buy too, but it's good for your
brain to read a physical book you can hold and stop asking AI
to tell you if things are real. You know, I mean this, we have
to stop this. It is a slow creep by design, and the gradualism is
there to acclimate us to the quote, unquote, new normal that
they started to really roll out in force during the COVID era.
And we have to actively know that when we interact with these
things, and we have to fight against it and to touch on
something you brought up. Iain, the importance of physical
community is extreme. I can't stress it enough. You have to be
involved physically with your local community and local
people. You have to know your neighbors. You have to be
investing to some degree, and I don't necessarily mean with
money. I mean like with time, in food security, other things you
need to survive so you are as independent of these control
systems as possible, and it's a choice, and it's not easy.
They've intentionally made it so that the easy path is their
path, assuming we will all be lazy and that we will fulfill
what they think of us, that we are the unthinking demos, the,
you know, the useless eaters that we are like cattle and will
just be herded like livestock into these systems. If we want
individual sovereignty to continue to exist, we have to
exert it, and we have to exert it now.
Yeah, no, absolutely I couldn't. Couldn't support that
more. And one thing that people say, Oh, well, I'm not sure what
to do. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to proceed. I
think if you have basic principles, then you can quickly
adapt to things. So for example, if you if in order to buy
something or do something or join something or or be part of
something, you have to hand over your personal data, then don't
do it. So if that, if that means, you know, getting a store
card or whatever, don't do it. Don't hand over your personal
data, because and guard your personal data just as much as
anything else in your life that is precious to you, because it
is you what you are giving away. When you hand away your personal
data is yourself. You are handing over access to you, to
people that you probably never know and probably never meet,
and people who, ultimately, at the top of that food chain have
got, have got a dark agenda. So so, you know, I think that's
really important. So, you know, at that point, if you go into a
store, or you go in, you find yourself in a situation where
you have to hand over your personal data, don't do it. Now
that might come at a that might come at a cost to you in that
moment. You know, you might not be able to do the thing or have
the thing that you want in that moment, but in the long term,
you've made a very wise decision, and you will have just
identified something that you need to work around. So that
will enable you to think, right? Well, I'm not handing over my
personal data to do this thing or have this thing, so how am I
going to find an alternative for that. And it is by working our
way through the system in that way that we will collectively
come together, hopefully, and that's what mass non compliance
is all about. It's not about being living in splendid
isolation. It is about forming networks with people who are
encountering the same difficulties, because then we
can work together, and then we can support each other to work
around those problems, and we will work around them, but we,
but we have to do it together. You know, we need the support of
each other, and particularly we need support in our local
communities, forming networks in our local communities, so that,
you know, and I don't mean this in a dramatic sense, but so that
we can survive with a reasonable standard of living in in the
short term. Because, as I tried stress in the book, this stuff
is being put in place now, so we need to stand up to it now.
I. Mean, and it's that's never been more important, and
people need to start doing it actually now. And there's a
reason that they diverted so many people's attention to Trump
acting like he was going to magically fix everything for
like, the whole world about the stuff, making people think that
they don't need to do anything themselves. They can just sit
back and and wait for, you know, daddy Trump to do everything
that's gonna, you know, stop all the bad guys or whatever. I
mean, it's, it's, it's a comic book narrative that isn't real,
and we need to lean into what is real as much as possible and
build real things. So thanks so much, Iain, for your insights,
for your great work, and for your amazing new book that I am
honored to have helped help make reality. It is an extremely
important read. It is extremely timely, and I think everyone
should definitely make an effort to educate themselves about
these people, because, as you have pointed out many times,
they are extremely deceptive and close in. The key part of their
deception is all of this jargon that they cloak themselves with.
Learn what it means. Learn what these people are really doing.
And there's no better way to do that, for starters, than to get
your book. So Iain, where can people find your book and how
can they otherwise support your work?
Yeah, thanks very much. Whitney, yeah. It's, it's, it's
through your publishing house, which is Papercut Publishing.
It's also, if you go to the link, which is perhaps a little
bit easier to remember, all one word,
thetechnocraticdarkstate.com that will take you to Papercut
Publishing, where you can get get a copy of the book, or are
currently pre-order the book. It will be available and will be
distributed in 2026 and you can support my work at my website,
which is IainDavis com. You can also it's read my obviously,
read my pieces on Unlimited Hangout. You can also get me.
IainDavis.substack.com, and, you know, speaking of what, just
very quickly, I have just now started to encounter the impact
of the Online Safety Act in the UK on Substack. Now I have been
using Substack because, you know, it's just advantageous to
me, you know, in terms of getting readers and in terms of
a small amount of income that you get from from Substack. But
I am now required, or I'm not, not me personally, but I will be
soon, but certainly readers that want to comment or give me a
private message are now required to verify themselves, so so that
means handing over their biometric data and entering this
system. And I've urged all my readers not to do it. Don't do
it. I certainly won't be doing it. And when they come to the
content creators like me and ask me to verify myself, that will
be the end of my time on sub stack, I'm not doing it. So you
know, that means that we have, I'll have to find a workaround.
And that's exactly the point that I was making a moment ago. Yeah.
And I think it's not just going to be limited to Substack.
Obviously, it's coming to every major site, and so now is the
time to prepare. I mean, that is why Unlimited Hangout in
particular, is working on developing physical media that
way you can, you know, still get access to my work, to Iain's
work, Mark Goodwin's work, other people's work without having to
interact with these age verification systems, and you
can just have something that's real, physical and ultimately
uncensorable, especially in the age of AI powered mass
deception. So hopefully, people will, you know, agree with the
the reasoning behind that, and, you know, not comply with these
things. And I think, you know, for now, a lot of the a lot, is
going to be decided by what happens now if people are going
to comply with these things that aren't drastic. I mean, you what
you the example you brought up with sub stack, people that are
that are going to comply with that just so they can comment
and read messages, are losing the plot. That is something that
is easy to lose. It's different than, you know, losing your
livelihood, or not being able to work, or not being able to
drive, or something like that. And so if we can say no to those
things, why they're small, we have a better chance of avoiding
them entirely once they're bigger, with much bigger
consequences for our lives. So please say no to all this age
verification, digital ID, biometric stuff as it's
happening now and then. Hope. Hopefully, you know, we can
resist a lot of the stuff before it gets worse.
Now, yeah, I couldn't support your move in physical
medium or, I think, I think you've been very wise to do
that. And I, you know, and in the long term, we will, we will
find ways around this. And we may be, you know, they're,
they're already kind of things like quartal and these kind of
potential online solutions, but in the short term, you know, we
might have to dispense with pretty much a lot of the things
that we have been doing online. Now, I'm, I'm, I'm much older
than you. Whitney, you know, I'm 56 so I remember as a child not
having any of this. I remember when digital watches were
invented. Now, now my life without any of this was great. I
had a perfectly happy, enjoyable life without any of this digital
architecture, I didn't have any of it. None of us did, and we
and it wasn't some idyllic existence, but it wasn't
miserable. It wasn't awful. In fact, in many ways, it was
better. There was much more community then than there is
now, and so, so then we have got nothing to fear from just not
using these ridiculous digital systems that there's. We've got
nothing to fear from that. And and, you know, we can, we can
have a perfectly good, if not better, quality of life without
bothering with any of it. So, you know, I would just echo what
you've just said and urge people do not give away your precious
personal data. It is so important that you don't give
away access to your life. Don't do it
if you take anything away from this. In conclusion, your
choices really do matter. Think of them carefully. We'll leave
it at that. Thanks so much. Iain, thanks so much to everyone
that is listening. Hopefully, if you found this informative,
you'll share it far and wide. Special. Thank you to Unlimited
Hangout subscribers, and this will probably be the last
podcast from Unlimited Hangout for 2025 things have been a
little intense for me personally, so my output has
been a little lower than in past years, but that is about to
change. So please look forward to a jam packed 2026, full of
new and exciting things from Unlimited Hangout and some great
stories and some new great physical products. And with that
being said, thanks so much everyone and catch you all on
the Next episode. Have a great holiday season and Need You You