Shanley Lee (2:47)

Thank you, thank you for having me again.

Mia Wong (2:50)

I constantly have these moments where it's like oh great, I'm talking to people who are really cool and I really wish I was talking to them about literally anything else because oh my God, this stuff sucks. Like, please, please. Cause the end of this system so I could talk to people about things that are good instead of things that are nightmarish.

Shanley Lee (3:07)

Yes. My dream is to not wake up every single morning. The first thing I think about is venture capital. I think about it every second of every day and then that's what I go to sleep thinking about. And then that is also sometimes what I dream about, which is unfortunate.

Mia Wong (3:26)

You know, we've all been.

Shanley Lee (3:29)

Yeah, we've all been there.

Mia Wong (3:31)

Oh God. So speaking of things all being in places, look, they pay me the mediocre bucks. If you want better transitions, pay me more. But you know, let's get into what the network state actually is, because I think it's something that is not understood particularly well.

Shanley Lee (3:52)

Yes, 100%. So again, this kind of comes in where we're talking about last episode, that kind of people's ideas about what these projects are not necessarily like fully fully formed. And I think a lot of people think that the network state is just kind of like them going to do weird shit. Which. Yes, that's, that's part of it. But I think something that, you know, people don't really see is how, how many purposes that the Network State sites have for them. You know, the network state is basically creating zones around the world where they can execute their projects. So you know, some of these are more of the like ideological projects, like maybe like Craxis or something like that. But you also see network sites that are very focused on being like industrial centers, manufacturing centers, you know, biotech and startup development where they can get away from regulations, where they can sort of benefit from like co development on a campus. You know, you have sort of new city ideas like California Forever. You have network State sites that the only thing they're doing right now is they're registering startups to operate in different countries in favorable terms. You have a whole sort of bunch of different versions of this. So it's a very like extensible concept for them. I think some other, you know, interesting properties of the network state is that it can become like a point of sort of negotiation with the, with the host country. Like one of the points of network state is to open up a country to the crypto currency markets, to mining markets, to you know, just the different biotech markets. This is a way of them getting into a country like kind of on their own terms, which I think is a big, big function of it. A lot of it has to do with crypto adoption, because if they're going to make cryptocurrency work, they need it to be adopted around the world. And this is why Coinbase is making such extreme investments in the network state, because this is a way to also, you know, get crypto into all of these markets, start entering into trade with other nation states where the points of negotiation are around regulation, are around taxation, around access to, to land and minerals.

Mia Wong (6:46)

So can you describe kind of what does it look like inside one of these zones? Like, for example, like, how. How do these compare to, say, like a economic zone, which is the kind of models of this that we've had traditionally?

Shanley Lee (6:59)

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the network State is built using special economic zones, so it's really not functionally different on a lot of different levels. It's more about, like, who is using the special economic zone and what do they want to do with it. Yeah, and medical experimentation is actually a huge goal here because, you know, again, when we're talking about them getting into medical development, developing all of these biotech startups, they're facing existing monopolies in the US they're also facing the fda. The Network State book by Balaji Srinivasan, who's a Andreessen Horowitz, like, guy for life. Like, he's Andreessen Horowitz. One of the main motivations for the Network State is getting to a place where you can't have any medical regulations. And so in Honduras, they've been doing that. They've been doing unregulated clinical trials. The doctors in Honduras have been organizing to try to shut this down, and they haven't been able to. And they're going to have way worse problems now because Trump just installed a new president, installed a president there who is in support and is taking the steps to support this special economic zone called their za. But that's one of the big reasons that they're doing it. Their medical offering is profound. They're doing clinical trials, drug developments, activating clinical research sites. They're also involved in, like, insurance software, insurance marketplaces, ivf, longevity, anti aging, like, the whole thing. And this goes back to, like, when venture capital is entering a new market now, like, they come, like, locked and loaded with a full platform. And getting more accelerated clinical trials is something that is going to move their project forward significantly. Network State is a way to accomplish that.

Mia Wong (9:19)

So these sort of nodes that they're setting up of these Network State are places where they've been able to sort of carve out Special economic zone status. That means that the traditional sort of regulatory structure of the country simply does not apply. Yes, yeah, which is very, which is in a lot of ways. And this is like a special economic zone thing in general. It's like very sort of like fascist state of exception. We're like, oh yeah, no, we've just, you know, there's like a crisis and the crisis is that we can't do like human experimentation. And so we've now created this zone where just none of the laws apply. It's, it's like the kind of like evil mirror world universe version of like temporary autonomous zones, except it's like, what, what if we had a permanent zone of fascism where all the laws didn't apply and we could just do whatever we wanted 100%.

Shanley Lee (10:08)

It's also deeply concerning because the obsession with accelerating clinical innovation, drug innovation, like, whatever that is. Like at some point there is a, like what makes that stuff move the fastest. And it's human trials and human experiments and the more people that you can shove and the faster you can shove through medical development. And that's very concerning. So to me I see this as like a recipe for large scale medical abuse and disaster.

Mia Wong (10:43)

Oh yeah.

Shanley Lee (10:45)

So yeah, when you, when you look at them doing these unregulated and unethical medical experiments and trials in Honduras and then you see in this other part of the world, in different countries in Africa, that the Network C is also targeting that, you know, recently news came out about a very controversial and very unethical experiment in Guinea Buso to test the vaccine timing of hepatitis B on 14,000 infants. And the acting director of the CDC at the time that this was approved is Jim O'. Neill. And Jim O' Neill is from Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Mithril, and he is, he was also on the board of the Sea Steadying Institute, which is where a lot of this sort of Network State stuff does come from. So this is a recipe for like mass scale medical abuse. And even if you look at like what World Coin, which is Sam Altman's like eyeball scanning thing like that is a biotech thing like that starts to get into the, the realm of like medicine and stuff like that. So you see these sort of forces starting to converge in these areas. Like these are infants that they are doing these babies that they're doing these on. And at the same time in, in that same country, a extremely well established executive in the Network State is looking to build a Network State City. So you know, getting these sites in there, into different countries in Africa they can go after the precious minerals. They have a labor source there. They're already exploiting people there for the AI content, moderation and tagging and like all of that.

Mia Wong (12:48)

Yeah.

Shanley Lee (12:49)

With disastrous effects. You also have the really concerning factor of like so many people in the top of the venture capital like apparatus are South Africans. And when you just start to put all those pieces together, it's extremely worrying. One of the venture capital mining startups, because now they have multiple mining startups, discovered the largest discovery of copper in 10 years from computers in Berkeley and then they showed up in Zambia.

Mia Wong (13:24)

Oh God.

Shanley Lee (13:25)

To start extracting the copper. So you know, the network state opens up these countries to like this new era of like exploited labor, mineral harvesting, medical experiments and the network state gives them a way to get into a country and start exploiting the fuck out of it.

Mia Wong (13:49)

Yeah, it's corporate colonization.

Shanley Lee (13:50)

Yeah, period.

Mia Wong (13:52)

You know, it's a bunch of these people going like, oh, the problem with the East India Company was that they actually had to like run the country, which is really expensive. So what if instead of that we just took over like the nodes that we wanted to use and then use that to push everything sort of further instead of like building a giant army and marching through India.

Shanley Lee (14:11)

Yeah, 100%. And you know, the labor exploitation that is like developing some of the stuff that we're starting to see where like, you know, venture capital has a very close relationship with Bukele and El Salvador. Yeah, Bukele is sitting on a prison full of people that haven't had due process and he's now using them for free labor, slave labor.

Mia Wong (14:41)

This is the seacot person that you might remember. Like Trump had been deporting people here and this place is just unbelievably hideous abuses. Yeah, it's an entire facility that is just dedicated to like inflicting violence and suffering and humiliation on these people who have no trials, have no access to rights or legal system and it's just this like nightmare black hole.

Shanley Lee (15:07)

Yes.

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Shanley Lee (18:14)

You know there's always lots of factors involved when I talk about stuff like I'm talking about the venture capital aspect and there are other like Players involved. But one of the big things is like what happens when venture capital starts interacting with another country.

Mia Wong (18:33)

Yeah.

Shanley Lee (18:34)

And what we see in Latin America is that they make contact with Honduras, they set up a colony, they start terrorizing the people on the island, they become material actors in installing an illegitimate president with Trump's help. And then, you know, they make contact with El Salvador and El Salvador becomes quote, unquote bitcoin country and El Salvador becomes a prison state and like a slave labor state.

Mia Wong (19:07)

Yeah.

Shanley Lee (19:08)

In Argentina, same things. The venture capitalists backed Malay to the absolute hilt. Malay is now gutted. The government deregulated everything he is putting these terrible labor abuse policies through. So when venture capital contacts these countries, it is transforming them, it's changing them, it's changing their politicians, it's changing their policies, it's changing their land, it's changing their financial system. And that is really concerning. And one of the things about the venture capital model, this goes back to even just the fact that they have operated global IT systems. So they have servers everywhere in the world and all of the servers are exactly the same. And so when you look at what the network state is going to look like, it's going to be very similar. It's going to be the same thing everywhere. And those will be basically command and control nodes.

Mia Wong (20:08)

Yeah. And it seems like they've done a very, very good job of kind of either subverting or like allying with factions of the traditional sort of like right wing elite and then, you know, propelling them to power and then using their power and influence and the fact that they were able to get these people into power in the first place, to sort of set up zones of extraction for them and increase their power inside

Shanley Lee (20:34)

of these states a thousand percent. And you know, if you look at how much they've been able to compromise the American government.

Mia Wong (20:43)

Yeah.

Shanley Lee (20:44)

And then these countries do not have the wealth, the infrastructure of that, you know, anything like that. They're so vulnerable to this type of attack. So if in order to get its global projects done, Venture Capital needs to install favorable politicians all over the world. They're offering packages to all of those politicians, they're offering the money, the social media attention and platform that they can give them. They're giving them an economic policy that they can go forward and say, we're, we're going to turn this country into like a technology industry and we're going to bring all this foreign investment and blah, blah, blah. You know, they can really just like hand pick politicians and pretty easily like set them up with a guaranteed win. And over time, that's like a global tech fascist axis.

Mia Wong (21:43)

Yeah. And one of the things that we know about sort of the way that fascist state construction works is that if you're constructing, you've constructed a bunch of these nodes of this sort of this fascist network state. But fascist states always need to sort of create an enemy for themselves and that enemy has been China. So do you want to talk about the way that they've been seeing Belt and Road and how they've turned this into a civilizational conflict?

Shanley Lee (22:11)

100%. You know, if you listen to what venture capitalists say about who the enemy is, like, it is China. They talk literally constantly about China. Almost all of their startups in every single sector talk about China all of the time, but particularly in the weapons part of that. And the premise of their military build out. What they say is that this is about China and this is about fighting China and this is very serious to them. And the fundamental cause is like their technology competing with China's technology. And actually venture capitalists will admit that China has better technology than us and that they're ahead of us. So this is a crisis for them.

Mia Wong (23:00)

This is all in some sense very silly to me. The girl who studies China a lot, because it's like all the tighties tech people you're competing against like believe like 95% of the same shit you do. All of you could simply work together and make money forever, but instead you've decided to do this like. Oh God. This like unhinged genocidal military buildup because, like you needed a great enemy in order to like keep doing your fascist bullshit. Ugh, God.

Shanley Lee (23:30)

Yeah. And like the absolute worst case scenario for the world would probably be like the top technocratic elite from China and the top technocratic elite from the US deciding they were going to work together and just fucking literally everyone else in the world.

Mia Wong (23:47)

Yeah. And it's like, it's like they were like on the road to doing that. It was like, like this is like China WTO integration. Like this was a thing. This, this was like a version of history they could have had where it's like, yeah, congratulations, you've created like permanent technocratic rule. But like, no, no, it's. We want to fight each other for obscure and nebulous ideological reasons is to generate the sort of fear necessary to do their projects. It's just like, oh my God.

Shanley Lee (24:15)

Yeah, a thousand percent. It's very, it's very strange. But you know, like, Palmer Lucky who, you know, and Palmer Looky, like, people make fun of a lot of the tech people for being dumb. And like, Palmer Luckey is absolutely not dumb. He is a very, very smart person. And he's spending every single moment of every single day figuring out how to defeat China. And that's the case for his entire company. But this is an issue for them. It's shaping sort of the dialectic. And so within this, where is the network seeing this? Well, China's Belt and Road initiative is creating infrastructure projects and nation state alliances across Latin America and across Africa for China. And you see the network State really investing in Latin America and Africa as well. So certainly one way to conceptualize this is as the network state is a counter to Belt and Road and it is part of their cold war with China, which is playing out across all of these regions.

Mia Wong (25:29)

Yeah, and it's another thing where it's just like I have seen how both, how both of these groups treat the workers in Africa that they're employing. Like, both of you two believe the same shit. You're both fucking racist doing colonialism. But, like, you've decided to drag the entire fucking world into your. Like, oh, God. Okay, I'm going to, I'm going to tell one China racism story here because we've been getting an enormous amount of American racism. Like, like, this is, this is a country where like, like China is a country where like, you get soap ads, where, like, you have a black person and they, they like, rub their skin with soap and they, like, turn white. This is like the kind of racism you're dealing with. One of the big ecological moments in China was there's, there's a documentary called under the Dome. Sorry, we're getting a little bit of far afield here. But this, I think, matters a lot in terms of why this is happening. The CCP allowed this woman who'd been a state broadcaster, like a television personality, like, broadcaster for a long time. She had a kid, so she was taking time off. This is like the early 2000 and tens, the height of air pollution in China. And she does this giant documentary about air pollution. It's allowed to stay on the Internet for a couple of days before it's taken down. And one of the big points of this is that part of the reason that pollution is so bad is that there are all of these cars in China that don't meet Chinese emission standards are being sold to the Chinese market. And the reason they're producing these cars is that they specifically have an entire class of cars that are like, way, way, way more pollutant and shittier that they specifically designed to sell to Africa. Like, it's like that kind of like structure of racism. Right. And it's like, you know, like this sort of horror show of like watching these two just like different versions of this sort of like nightmare colonialism entity where, you know, like China is trying to find a way to reproduce its own capital as its growth rate like slows. And the network state people, you know, have also had this project of like, we want to sort of install our own version of fascism here. And they're just sort of like building these like parallel networks against each other. Just like, I don't know, it makes me so miserable that so many people are getting fucked by just like the global capitalist superpowers. And the way that like venture capital money has become a political force that can do their own unbelievably, like probably more hideously fucked versions of what Chinese capital has been able to do.

Shanley Lee (27:48)

Yeah, I think, you know, at the end of the day that's where, where we need to come back to is like, this is about capitalism. Like this is about colonialism. This is about like imperialism and like, yeah, we fight this at that level, at the level of structural analysis, of historical analysis, of like full analysis, of unflinching analysis. And that, that, that is the only way to get out of this situation that we're in.

Mia Wong (28:19)

Yeah. Is to understand what is actually happening at a structural level and understand the actual forces that are operating instead of the big flashy name people who the spotlight has been on.

Shanley Lee (28:34)

That is one of the few things that makes me excited about venture capital because like here is a lens where we can actually see capitalism in a live, moving, active, dynamic, destructive, very much visible. You can see this, you can see it happening. And that is like such an opportunity.

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Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com disclosures.

Shanley Lee (32:05)

To wrap up the network State stuff so you know a lot. A lot is is sort of sad about this being their own state, which it absolutely is. It leads to that. But once you add up these these pieces of them having land and them having cities and then their racism so they think that they're better than everyone and they're like misogyny and like their wealth and them being sort of in their own kind of category which also has all of the different sort of pieces of civilization. Like out of that they derive both an identity and like a drive for civilization building. And so one thing that people talk about a lot is eugenics and like eugenics beliefs sort of in the tech class, but we are so far beyond that and into an actual eugenics project where venture capitalists are encouraging the tech class to create more and more babies. They are creating a dizzying number of fertility startups, ivf, genetic screening, you know, engineering of the genome, like all of these different areas. And they see Israel as the example of that because the Israeli fertility rate is really high despite it being a technocratic. This is their words, not mine. Yeah, yeah, Just to be clear, this is what they say. They say Israel is aspirational because it's a technocratic state where they have a really high birth rate and that that is what they want to emulate, you know, through the network state. And they want to, you know, selectively breed and they want to use these technologies to breed and hyper breed. And one of the tech philosophers that should actually get way more attention than Curtis Yarvin, but doesn't is Nick Land. And Nick Land, basically. Yeah, But Nick Lands, one of his main thing is that a small elite will use eugenics technology to rapidly outpace the rest of the world to such an extent that it creates basically like a new species. And in that sense I see, you know, ideology being something that emerges out of all of this other things that they're doing. They do all of this crazy shit, they have all this economic stuff going on, you know, they have all this medical stuff going on. And then what comes out of that is this is our civilization. We are going to breed to populate this civilization and we are going to surpass the rest of humanity, which we loathe and which we see as lab rats and guinea pigs and vermin and scum.

Mia Wong (35:07)

Yeah. And it's the situation where like, like this is like a thing that a lot of like the worst right wingers have believed for a long time, but these people control vast sections of the global economy. And because they do that whatever like unhinged like racist eugenic breeding project thing they want to do, they could just do it because they have the capital to like actually create these things. It's like, well like obviously they're not going to be able to successfully like create a super race or whatever because like that's just genics doesn't work right. Like, but like it's, you know, but like it doesn't matter. They have achieved a level of power and a level of capital. Where like the actual quote behind the reality based community thing where from the Bush administration where like the thing that got into like the media was like calling liberals the reality based community. The actual quote is about how liberals observe reality and conservatives create it. And so they're trying to sort of just hammer reality into, into their preferred shape through this just combination of wealth and violence. And because of that. Yeah, they can just fucking do this. All of this like eugenic shit that people just talk about, they can just attempt to do it.

Shanley Lee (36:19)

Yeah. You know, it's. They're telling their workers to have more children. They're doing their own school programs, elite schools for these kids. They've talked about having their children being able to work at a startup by the age of 15.

Mia Wong (36:38)

Jesus Christ.

Shanley Lee (36:40)

Yeah, it's really wild. This is very much a reality. It's something that is already happening now. And so one of the main messages that I have for people is they are so much more advanced in these projects than anyone has awareness of. Things are way beyond the emergency moment and we need global response, and we need global emergency response and we need resistance. When venture capitalists show up to these areas, the people there don't know what's hitting them. And that's even true in the US where, where these venture capitalists came from. Like people did not know that they were about to take the presidency in other countries. They definitely don't know we need global defense from this. Yeah. Everywhere they fucking go, they should be met not only by people there who have been told and, and have the access to the information, but also to a global coalition that's ready to stand by. These are invasions of countries. These are invasions of sovereign nations and of communities. And that's what we need to fight back. And I think my research and other researchers and what's on DC info docs like leads to that conclusion of like, that is how we're going to have to fight this.

Mia Wong (38:00)

Yeah. And I think that's something that right now feels unimaginable. But also, unless you are really, really young, you have lived in a period where something like that existed. You know, to a large extent this is what the global justice movement was. It has a bunch of different names, but like the original anti globalization movements, like the one that was born out of the 90s, the one that was born out of the Zapatistas rebellion against nafta, like the Zapatistas Brought together hundreds and hundreds of groups from all over the world to these giant convergences. And they planned, like, an international strategy to resist these sort of these, like, free trade proposals. And, you know, were they able to, like, defeat capitalism and, like, retake the globe? No, but they were successful in killing basically all new free trade agreements, like, in. In the period after that. And this is where you get, like, the battle of Seattle and like, the whole giant, like, all the protests at all of the summits and like, Genoa, and like, this is the process that built the modern left. Right. Like, the. The modern American left comes out of Occupy, which is a bunch of the veterans of that movement, like, doing this.

Shanley Lee (39:10)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (39:11)

And. And. And like, you all, like, everyone listening to this, unless you were born in, like, the 2010s, have lived in a world where people did this. It's kind of a parallel movement. But one of the things that, like, happens in this period, in your lifetimes almost certainly is that a bunch of people, like, took the city of oaxaca in, like, 2006. We have taken major North American cities from them. In your lifetime. We can do this. We just have to be willing to work together and fight.

Shanley Lee (39:43)

Yes, 100%. And as much as I like, live in this issue and look at this, and I'm like, what the fuck are we gonna do? Like, it's over. It's over. Like, I also am like, this is a chance, because what's happening in venture capital is one of the fastest moving parts of capitalism, one of the most dynamic, one of the most powerful, one of them that has the most infrastructure. Like, yeah, what if we got all the computers back? Yeah, what if we could use the computers for, you know, this is a chance, and I think there's a possibility, and I hope to. To build a global resistance around this. And that's why I'm here, and that's why I say in this, because this fucking sucks. And there's not a lot of support. It's isolating. Da, da, da. But I think this is. I think this is a fight we can win if we're all willing to get on board about what is happening and do the work of building that. So I am. I'm excited for that. I think. I think it can happen.

Mia Wong (40:46)

So, yeah, and I think this is something that. It's really, really easy to look into the world in despair. And I think one of the things that helps with that is remembering that people have faced odds that were so much worse than this. Right. Like, if you look at, like, the origin of Pan Africanism. Right. And like, you look at like CLR James and a bunch of like his friends are like meeting in these rooms in like London and you know, they're looking out at it across entire continents that are colonized. And 15 to 20 years later, literally, like the people who are his friends who are there have liberated Africa. Right. Like, you know, we're talking about like this, this what looked like a. Just a group of just like random people facing within a completely impossible project of defeating colonialism. Suddenly, you know, again, like, like 20 years later, it's like Julius Nyerere is like running Tanzania.

Shanley Lee (41:40)

Yeah.

Mia Wong (41:41)

Right. And the, the, the odds that they faced are so much longer than the odds that we faced. And were they able to create exactly the world that they wanted? No. But the world that, that they left after them was one where entire continents were no longer literally directly ruled by colonizers.

Shanley Lee (42:06)

Yes.

Mia Wong (42:06)

And yeah, like that is probably the kind of response that this requires. But I don't know. People have done it before and it can be done again.

Shanley Lee (42:16)

It can be done again. And you know, if you people who are interested in that reach out and let like, let's get it moving because this is like, this is a chance. This is a chance and we need to take it. Because if, if we just let this go for an end, like today is our best chance of stopping it.

Mia Wong (42:39)

Yeah.

Shanley Lee (42:39)

You know, today is our best chance. So if we can hop on this and be professional in the sense of like being professional resistors and anti colonialists and anti FASC and take this as not just an ideological thing, but this is a tactical situation. We need to be figuring out strategies and tactics to take this down.

Mia Wong (43:05)

Yeah. And I think on that note, where can people go to find your work and find more information about this and start this process?

Shanley Lee (43:14)

Yeah, absolutely. VC Info Docs is at www.vcinfodocs.com. there's a contact email address on that page. Would love hear from you. We give presentations also or happy to just talk to any other organizers. And I am on social media, I'm on Blue sky and Twitter and I have a blog@shanley.com so any of those. But definitely want to hear from people who are serious about building a movement around this.

Mia Wong (43:49)

Yeah.

Shanley Lee (43:50)

And thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being my first podcast.

Mia Wong (43:58)

Thank you so much for doing this. And I don't know, I hope, I hope we can help contribute to the start of something that changes the state of things 100%.

Shanley Lee (44:10)

It could happen. Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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