Shane Lee (3:04)

Thank you so much for having me. This is actually the first podcast I've ever done, so thank you.

Mia Wong (3:14)

I feel very special.

Shane Lee (3:17)

So it's great. It's good to be here with you. Yeah.

Mia Wong (3:20)

Do you want to talk a little bit about your work and about your time confronting the sort of leviathan of venture capital?

Shane Lee (3:27)

Yeah, absolutely. So I actually used to work in the tech industry. It feels like a lifetime ago, but I remember when I first started encountering venture capital. Like, I knew in my body and my heart and my soul that something was terribly wrong with this situation. And so I started following that down, you know, over the course of years. And now I've been doing it for about 13 at different times. I've been more of an activist. I ran a tech critical magazine at one point, and now I really do a bunch of research and work with other researchers around the world to try to bring as much serious and material information about venture capital and what we're facing as possible and put it in people's hands who can do something about it.

Mia Wong (4:20)

Yeah. And those hands are, amazingly, you, the listener, you, dear listener, can be one of the people who helps end these people's reign over the world.

Shane Lee (4:29)

Absolutely.

Mia Wong (4:31)

So, all right. I think the place that we should start is, I think when people think about. And this is something that you have talked about, when people think about sort of venture capital and tech and the way that they're trying to take over the country, there is this myopic focus on Peter Thiel and Yarvin Curtis, because they are these sort of almost semi mythological at this point, figures who have a bunch of really, really unhinged beliefs and love talking about them constantly.

Shane Lee (5:03)

Yes, a hundred percent. It almost turns into a circus. Like, look at these freaks. Like, look at these, like, three freaks that then get sort of obsessively focused on. And Sam Altman is one of those. Peter Thiel is one of those. Curtis Yarvin is one of. And it kind of ends up being people are looking at this through the lens of individuals, through the lens of sort of these cults of personalities that are being created. They're relating to this issue through sort of like individual players in the environment. And that's actually very limiting when we're talking about a system that consists of trillions of dollars, hundreds of venture capital firms, thousands and thousands and thousands of startups, and all of the financial structures that are around them. So it has this effect of almost minimizing what's happening and also kind of diverting something so serious into something that is kind of like, well, we can just make fun of them and that's gonna do something, and that's activism. The reality is they think that we are lab rats.

Mia Wong (6:20)

Yeah.

Shane Lee (6:20)

They do not care what we think about them. So having this very, like, we're gonna call them stupid, we're gonna call them dumb, we're gonna make fun of them, we're gonna do whatever that becomes the dominant form of critique. And that takes us way off course of what's actually happening.

Mia Wong (6:40)

Yeah, it's like, it's a kind of like, great man theory of venture capital.

Shane Lee (6:44)

Yes. Yeah.

Mia Wong (6:45)

And this isn't a situation where it's like, you know, you're looking at like, Napoleon, history on horseback stuff and you're debating whether, okay, to what extent is this, like, the great man and to what extent this is like the structural forces of history. This is a situation where, like, we're looking at a structural force and everyone is, like, looking at the clown they've stuck on top of the structural force. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. We got to understand the actual structures here, which I think you've done maybe the best job I've ever seen. And actually looking at what we're dealing with, which is these networks of hundreds of venture capital firms and startups and, yeah. This entire sort of ecosystem that has become a sort of force of history.

Shane Lee (7:29)

Yes, 100%. And that's where the conversation needs to go is. Is towards, like, what are we actually dealing with? Like, what are we actually facing and what are the. The causes of that? So I always like to start with sort of talking about, you know, what are some of the core dynamics that are happening within venture capital? One of them is that venture capitalists act as a central coordinator of this giant machinery of startups and technological development and infrastructure. So one thing I often say is, like, you might be looking at like, 15 different startups, and that's all the same thing.

Mia Wong (8:16)

Yeah.

Shane Lee (8:16)

You're even looking at five different VC firms. That is all the same thing. It is our cartel that has a central financial backbone that is generating companies at an incredible speed with incredible efficiency. They are machines for turning out these startups, which they're then able to orchestrate to work together. And that becomes just a profound force and a very efficient force in changing the world, in interacting with the world. And as we increasingly see impacting geopolitics

Mia Wong (8:58)

so for people like me who are fortunate enough to not sort of live inside one of these people's center of power, which is, you know, like places like the Bay or like these. These places where these concentrations of tech capital have fundamentally reshaped the world to the extent that it feels just being in one of these places feels so different than being in a place that's not like a tech capital center. For those of us who, like, aren't living as much under the eye of the Panopticon, can you explain a little bit about what venture capital is, is?

Shane Lee (9:29)

Yes.

Mia Wong (9:30)

And then what the effect on sort of the tech sector that it's had has been?

Shane Lee (9:35)

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, venture capital, essentially what it does, it takes in capital from around the world. And one of the interesting things about venture capital is, like, we do not have a lot of visibility into where their money is coming from. We know some things about them, but we do not get a list of, like, here's everyone who's giving us money. Money. So we have all this money coming in. And then on the outside of that, weapons companies are coming out.

Mia Wong (10:09)

Yeah.

Shane Lee (10:10)

And crypto companies are coming out, and, you know, drone companies coming out. Nuclear energy companies are coming out. So you sort of have this, like. It's almost like a black box where unknown money goes in and then all of this shit comes out the other side. And that becomes really scary when you start to look at things like, we know that Israel is funding many venture capital firms in the US and those venture capital firms are turning out dozens and dozens of weapons companies.

Mia Wong (10:44)

Yeah.

Shane Lee (10:44)

And then those weapons companies are going to Israel and being used in the genocide. So you have these very sort of complex relationships going on between, like, the investors, between other nations and what venture capital is doing.

Mia Wong (11:02)

One of the things that this reminds me of is this is something we've talked about on this show to some extent, but one of the major forces that kind of reshaped the latter half of the 20th century was after the sort of oil shocks, where you have all of these countries, you have countries like Saudi Arabia, like the Gulf monarchies, who are very intimately tied to all of these venture capital firms, are suddenly just flush with oil money. And they have this problem, which is that, okay, we have all of these piles of money, but this money is capital. Right. And capital wants to be turned into more and increasing amounts of capital. But how do you do that? Where do you actually put this money in an economy where this is the context of the 70s, where output everywhere is decreasing and the returns on capital are falling and you know, the long range rate of returns collapsing. What do you do with it? And in the 70s, the thing that they did with it was they put it into like third world debt. And this is like why the term third world is a slur now when it used to be a political movement is that, you know, these countries took all of these, what were adjustable interest rate loans. And then when the interest rate went to like 200% or whatever, they got completely annihilated. And some of that capital went to weapons. Because weapons are, are a thing that you can put capital into that destroys capital. And also it lets, you know, it lets like Saudi, the Saudi like monarchy stay in power. But it's also a thing where like, you don't find a way to make money with that capital. You could just buy a bunch of like jet fighters in the US which do nothing, but you spent your money on something 100%.

Shane Lee (12:44)

And I think to, to that point, specifically Saudi Arabia, one of the main reasons what's happening in venture capital, because Saudi Arabia is trying to diversify its wealth outside of oil. And they want a globally competitive technology industry. So they're going to turn to the people who can give them that, and that is venture capital and that is tech companies in America. There's sort of this race happening all over the world of countries trying to make sure that they're able to compete or at least exist on the technological plane of what's being developed. And that makes venture capital almost like the crown jewel now that everyone is trying to get a hold of. So they, so now they have this, this huge leverage. And you hear them, they hang out with mbs, they sing the praises of mbs, you know, to the heavens. And they have done a lot of work to quote, unquote, repair the image of mbs, particularly after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, who was a huge major journalist. And for a time that cooled relations between Saudi Arabia and vendor capital, at least on the surface. Yeah, but they don't care about that stuff, you know.

Mia Wong (14:10)

Yeah. And you know, and I think the other part of that campaign too, and this is just one of my MIA on the soapbox things, is that the other thing they were trying to get everyone to forget about was the hideous, hideous war that all of the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, but also the UAE has a massive part in this, were fighting in Yemen where they, we literally don't know how many people they killed. Like they tried, they tried to do a starvation genocide of the whole country, because they couldn't win the war militarily. They were deploying Sudanese child soldiers as mercenaries who have been taken from the Jawala Deed, the group who's now like doing a genocide in Sudan. They're also people who did the genocide in Darfur back in the 2000s. Like, this is like the scale of atrocity that they're committing. You know, everyone's very focused on Chewal Khashoggi. And it's like, yeah, it's very, very bad obviously to like kill journalists and like cut them up with bone saw. But like, these are people who were doing airstrikes on school buses. These are people who were again deploying Sudanese, the child soldier on battlefields. And these people are going, no, fuck it. Not only are we going to rehabilitate their image, we're going to take their money and we're going to build them fucking weapons forever.

Shane Lee (15:20)

Yeah. You know, when you talk about like, what is a venture capitalist? And one of the things that they really do is they are like constructing entire markets. They're not just.

Mia Wong (15:30)

Yeah.

Shane Lee (15:31)

They're not just creating a startup, hoping it succeeds. And then the case of the military is, you know, people focus on Anduro. They have hundreds of weapons companies now. Hundreds of weapons companies. And they have the big prime companies like Anduro that are really like the power houses that are supposed to be like Lockheed and Raytheon, but they also have weapons part manufacturers. They have drone companies for like all layers of earth, sea, you know, air, everything like that. They're doing hypersonic missiles. They've advocated for a new Manhattan Project. They're working on developing weapons of mass destruction. So when venture capital is going into these spaces, like they are going in to win, they are going in with a fully envisioned picture of what the new age military looks like with AI technologies, with autonomous technologies, you know, with everything that they've been able to develop. And now they have a fully featured war platform that they have to try to get other countries to buy because it's ready.

Mia Wong (16:42)

Yeah.

Shane Lee (16:42)

So they need wars, which is extremely

Mia Wong (16:45)

bad news for everyone on Earth.

Shane Lee (16:48)

Everybody. Yes, everyone on earth. And you know, they have been so deeply complicit in the genocide of Palestinians, they are so incredibly enmeshed with Israel. Venture capitalists refer to Israel as a technocratic state and as sort of like the ideal state and a model for what they can be as a technocratic state. Because Israel, by proportion the share of tech GDP in Israel is actually twice as much as in the us.

Mia Wong (17:29)

Jesus.

Shane Lee (17:30)

And as parts of the Israeli economy have suffered as a result of the genocide. The tech industry is doing amazing. Yeah and venture capitalists are pouring money into it. And so you see that one of the immediate things that has come out of, you know, the Israel American VC relationship is the genocide and is the ongoing development of themselves and of Israel's a technocratic state. It's awful. Yeah, yeah.

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Mia Wong (20:47)

So I, I think I want to, to zoom out a little bit. We've, we've talked a bit about, you know, what these companies do. Do you want to talk about some of the major firms that are building all of these things and building all of these startups that people haven't heard about and need to know about?

Shane Lee (21:05)

Yeah, 100%. So people have heard about Andreessen Horowitz, but not enough about Andreessenhorst. Yeah, definitely not enough. If I had put a firm that is the most responsible for what's going on, it is definitely Andreessen Horowitz. One of the things that's happening in the venture capital market, why this is happening is because a small number of firms is forming a monopoly on venture capital. And Andreessen Horowitz is right there. And in fact, in 2025, Driessen Horowitz raised over 18% of all venture capital dollars. Just that one firm. Okay, so now you start adding that up. The other firms that they work most closely with and are working on the exact same things and fund the exact same startups. Founders Fund, Peter Thiel's firm is one of those. General Catalyst is another one that's very, very important. And General Catalyst looks a lot like Andreessen Horowitz. They are very close. And, and you see this throughout. Like you're like, you have different names on your offices, but y' all are the same thing. Sequoia is another big one. They were one of the early venture capital firms. They did not make their first defense investment until 2023, but they were founded in 1972. So this is an example of how a giant VC firm has really been yoked to an agenda that started in sort of these other like younger upstart players. And Andreessen Horowitz has talked about how ultimately venture capital will consist of four or five major firms and then basically no mid sized firms and then some sort of boutique firms that are a little bit more specialized. So in that, that kind of category, we have firms like Lux Capital, Lex Capitol is one of the most bloodthirsty, sociopathic, Zionist, weird biotech shit, weird weapons shit out and out, bloodthirsty extremists like just openly maybe one of the most in that sense, they're incredibly Zionist. And they are a relatively small firm, but they're able to be in the mix because they have this sociopathy, this bloodlust that you actually see across all of these firms is that like they're sort of like outright sadistic at a certain point. You know, Andreessen Horowitz actually hired Daniel Penny, who killed Jordan Neely, who was a 30 year old, you know, black homeless man. And this guy was not a venture capitalist. And Marc Andreessen hired him. There's a degradation in morality and there's sort of this like welling up in the venture capital space of this like extremely depraved, like anti morality where they hired this murderer.

Mia Wong (24:40)

Yeah.

Shane Lee (24:41)

You know, someone who killed a black man and made press releases about it. And they talk about what a great VC he is. And so they're immersed in this like, this like culture of sort of, of, of war and like genocide and like killing. So super disturbing. So any, any great things happening here?

Mia Wong (25:05)

Most powerful people in the world.

Shane Lee (25:09)

Yeah, really bad. It's a moral free fall for sure. So yeah, you have that type of stuff going on. But Lux Capital, we talked about that. You have Eric Schmidt, who's the Google CEO, he runs a number of smaller scale venture capital firms. And then you have some of the major crypto firms like Ribbit Capital, Paradigm, Blockchain Capital, and actually Blockchain Capital, which runs a crypto cartel, is an investor in Blue Sky.

Mia Wong (25:41)

Oh, fun.

Shane Lee (25:43)

Who thinks great. So everyone who's thinking that, you know, Blue sky is this wonderful alternative, like Blue sky is owned by venture capitalists who are running a crypto cartel. So those are some of those firms. And you know, you have Y Combinator, which is a smaller firm feeding in. Then you have some other kind of pieces outside that one that's super important is. And this is always tough for me to talk about because people look at you like you're a conspiracy theorist if you say anything about the CIA, even if it's 100% true. But the CIA made a venture capital firm many, many years ago. And that venture capital firm is called In Q Tel. And they have funded over 800 startups.

Mia Wong (26:35)

Amazing, incredible stuff. Also, the fact that they called it in Q Tel is just like, oh

Shane Lee (26:40)

my God, come on.

Mia Wong (26:43)

Like, yeah, we're just gonna put intel in the name of it, but we're gonna put it like in qtel because you. God, it's like cutesy spy.

Shane Lee (26:53)

Yes. It's totally wild. And I always tell this story, you know, I, I worked at startups in Silicon Valley. I worked in database startups, Internet infrastructure, APIs, like, you know, infrastructure service, stuff like that. I went to a big data conference and like maybe like 2012 or something like that. I want to say, I don't know for sure which one it was, but it was in New York. There was all, all of these companies there. One of the keynote speakers was the chief technology officer of the CIA.

Mia Wong (27:30)

Jesus Christ.

Shane Lee (27:32)

Yeah, so none of this has been a secret to people in the industry. The CIA operates openly in the industry. It invests openly in the industry.

Mia Wong (27:43)

Yeah.

Shane Lee (27:44)

But he got on stage and he said, our goal is to collect all of the data in the world and save it forever.

Mia Wong (27:54)

Yep.

Shane Lee (27:56)

And I looked around me to see if anyone else was, was. And this was months before the, the Snowden revelations.

Mia Wong (28:05)

Yeah.

Shane Lee (28:06)

So the CIA was openly admitting to all, you know, all of this stuff anyways. But point being, you know, and in Q Tel has been so key to this because they have brought all of the venture capital startups into the government, into intelligence, and into defense. From the CIA's perspective, this has also given them a revenue source and a way to operate outside of just the government budget. And we can go back to this when we're talking about the network state, because what the CIA is really good at is couping other countries. And now you see the network state down in Latin America trying to kill governments down there. So there's been an incredible fusion of this CIA with venture capital that has. Has transformed both of them. They are both changed by this.

Mia Wong (29:04)

Yeah, it's like, it's like tech is the new, like running opium out of like Vietnam or whatever. It's like we've replaced, we've replaced doing like really overt drug running to fuel our operations with, oh, hey, we can just get on stage and like talk to all of these venture capital ghouls and get a bunch of money that way for like whatever weird shit we want to be up to.

Shane Lee (29:28)

Yeah, it's. It's wild. So you have that. And then another piece of it is that venture capital has formed this incredibly close relationship with blackrock and Blackstone. So they have a traditional finance backing.

Mia Wong (29:45)

Can you explain for people who are not familiar what BlackRock and Blackstone are and that I can tell my completely deranged Blackstone story.

Shane Lee (29:55)

Okay, so yes, BlackRock is a giant, you know, financial beast. A monster monstrosity.

Mia Wong (30:06)

Yeah.

Shane Lee (30:06)

I don't have the most up to date numbers on how much money that they manage, but as of 2025, it was over $12 trillion and assets under management.

Mia Wong (30:21)

Jesus Christ.

Shane Lee (30:22)

So you are talking about a absolutely, you know, huge, huge financial entity. So they have been one of the first to really back venture capital in the traditional finance world in crypto. So they are the ones that started bringing to market the ETFs that made it easy to invest in, in bitcoin. They have ETFs that are, are trading. They also have one for Ethereum.

Mia Wong (30:53)

Can you explain what an ETF is?

Shane Lee (30:56)

Yes, what an ETF is. It's basically, you know, what it does for crypto is instead of having to buy and manage your own crypto assets, the financial institution basically takes on the administration and management of those underlying assets. So you know, for investors who don't want to be on Coinbase, you know, buying from these like sketchy companies, these were ways to make these assets available to the investment market and crypto really needed that and BlackRock came in to do that and they partnered with Coinbase and, and they partnered with other, you know, venture capital things. So they did the VCs a big solid there and then to our point like they are very invested with the Saudis as well. Partnered with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.

Mia Wong (32:02)

Yep.

Shane Lee (32:02)

You know the leading to weapons deals. They're also doing a bunch of data centers in the UK and they've been operating in Israel for a really long time. So that you know, this was a very natural partner I would say for venture capital. But it also gives venture capital a lot. Venture capital has gotten a lot out of this deal.

Mia Wong (32:32)

Yeah.

Shane Lee (32:32)

So you, you have that start to happen. One question I've always asked is like to crypto people who have said like this is the way around the banks and blah blah, blah. Well why is Wall street getting crypto before you?

Mia Wong (32:45)

Yeah, really truly not. It does not really seem to be doing that.

Shane Lee (32:51)

It's just the math is not mathy in here.

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Mia Wong (35:38)

One of the things I think is interesting about what you've done is talking about what the relationship between crypto and these venture capital firms is and what purpose crypto serves for them.

Shane Lee (35:47)

Yes.

Mia Wong (35:48)

Can you get into that?

Shane Lee (35:49)

Yeah. So crypto, one of my absolute favorite topics to talk about. There are a lot of ways of looking at this. One of the ones that I find most interesting is when the first sort of.com bubble happened and when they first started making absolute fuck tons of money. So they have tons of money coming in, they're making tons of money and they are putting that money in banks they don't own and financial infrastructure they don't own and they're paying a lot of taxes on it. So at some point the decision is made by that, like, why would you want to make so much money and then have that money going right out the door to a bunch of bankers who are going to take all your money. So at some point it occurs to them, all of this money that's transacting not just through us, but over the Internet overall is something we can make a ton of money on. And one, you know, one of Marc Andreessen's first things was trying to get Internet credit card payments working over the browser. And then you have PayPal. So at the point that they sort of were like, we're going to do our own financial infrastructure. Okay. Now they have a financial infrastructure that is literally in competition with the sovereign financial system of the United States of America. And this more than anything else, might be the source of the rupture between the American government and between venture capital. Because as soon as you start developing this ecosystem and people think that crypto is just like Bitcoin and like Dogecoin and like Ethereum. No, no, no, no. These people have a whole bunch of banks. They have banks, they're developing stock markets and stock exchanges. They have point of sale systems, they have betting markets.

Mia Wong (37:57)

Oh, God. Crypto betting markets.

Shane Lee (38:00)

Oh, yeah, they've got me. They have, you know, they have loans programs, they have savings, they have blah, blah, blah. Like, crypto is really a very fully featured financial system. And they need to get as much money out of the existing financial system moved into their financial system. So they are in this war essentially over that. And that's what we're looking at, is the global financial system being replaced with a financial system that is owning and controlled by venture capitalists. And that's, that's a profound thing that has, that has profound implications. We're going to talk about the network state more. But another reason why the network say has happened is because as the crypto market really kind of started to take off, they decided, we don't want to pay taxes on this. Yeah, we did this all by ourselves. And one of the things the network state is, it is a series of global tax shelters and tax evasion zones all over the world. Because they knew that they were striking gold and they wanted to make sure they get it out of having to pay it to the IRS and having to pay it to the people in this country and other countries.

Mia Wong (39:25)

Yeah. And then, you know, like, the more control you can get over, like, what there is of the American state, the more you can just be like, hey, look, we're just gonna not ever look into the fact that there's all this tax evasion shit going on can just like, like, use our control of, like, Vance and, you know, like, our control of the levers of the state to make sure that, like, we're just allowed to do this?

Shane Lee (39:47)

Yeah, 100%. You know, it also goes back to, like, what are the root sort of causes of. Of tech fascism or whatever you would like to call them? And one of the big reasons for that is because as venture capital itself is diversified and it's moving into finance, and it's moving into medicine, and it's moving into land, and it's moving into energy, there are existing monopolies in every single part of those markets that they have to fight in order to get into them. And they've openly talked about this. So when they're entering these markets, they're going to war with existing monopolies in order to create their own monopolies. And that's forced them to these really, like, sort of extreme and perverse strategies, like, we're gonna cure the U.S. government. Like, yeah,

Mia Wong (40:43)

God.

Shane Lee (40:44)

And they've been really successful at that. So they work hard. Everyone's like, they're lazy. They don't do anything. They're not smart. Blah, blah. I'm like, marc Andreessen works like the devil. He does not take a day off. He is not taking, unfortunately.

Mia Wong (41:00)

Wait. So the story here, I think, is one of these companies getting heavily invested into the defense sector, heavily invested into building their own sort of financial system, to some extent building links with the major financial powers that already exist, and to some extent combating the powers that they want that are monopolizing the places where they want to expand into. But there's also a global strategy here that's all kind of like a part of this larger plan. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that before we go much deeper into it next episode.

Shane Lee (41:41)

Yes, absolutely. So, you know, I think what we have talked about so far is really looking at, like, kind of root causes, dynamics, new markets they're going into. And the next sort of stage of thinking about that is like, what. What demands and what global program and strategy comes out of sort of their needs for capital, for returns, for expansion, for fighting monopolies, for tax evasion, everything like that. And what they've come up with and what we can already see is really like a global playbook for how they're going to do that. And this is about running everything in the world as venture capital firms and their startups, including the government. So what is happening in America is the venture capitalists are trying to replace the government with venture capital firms and their startups who are operating the state. That can be done everywhere. They want global deregulation, they want global suspension of taxes all over the world. They're going to bolster techno fascist aligned right wing politicians. We already see this with Bukele, with Milei. They're going to do the interference in elections, the lobbying, the bribery, social media manipulation, everything that they need to do to make sure they get politicians all over the place who are going to take their orders. As we discussed, like replacing the global economic system with the crypto financial system and then these mega projects, the data centers, the new cities in order to feed all of their data centers and all of their new factories and their new manufacturing. We're headed for a new age of resource extraction where they're literally already going all over the world with AI mining companies to find lithium uranium and cobalt. They need to rearm all of Europe, they need to recolonize Latin American Africa. They need to suppress leftism and communism globally. And you know, ultimately this all unfolds within a war with China because that's what's waiting for them at the end of this thing. And once you have all these things in place, you're looking at the rise of the techno fascist civilization which is the network state which we are going to talk about in our next episode. It sounds like.

Mia Wong (44:17)

Yep. So you could look forward to God, the global systemic tech fascist state tomorrow. Oh God. Okay, Chanley, where can people find your work and more information about this?

Shane Lee (44:39)

Yes, please check out the research site, it's vcinfo docs.com and like please help us get this information out there because people all over the world need to know stuff and to know what's hitting them, particularly as this affects other countries. And you know, we really need people who can activate around this information and make sure when we show up and we build our resistance that like that resistance is not designed take down Curtis Yarvin. It is designed to take down a capitalist system. It could happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.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 description. Thanks for listening.

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