#118 - Neema Parvini - Elites, Populism & The Illusion of Change

Summary

Podcast Summary

The Peter McCormack Show #118 – Neema Parvini: Elites, Populism & The Illusion of Change

Date: October 7, 2025
Guests: Peter McCormack (host) & Dr. Neema Parvini (author of "The Populist Delusion")

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Overview

This episode dives deep into elite theory, the nature of populism, and the persistent illusion of meaningful political change. Dr. Neema Parvini challenges conventional views about democracy, populist movements, and the forces shaping politics in the UK, the US, and globally. The conversation weaves together academic political theory, historical reflection, and sharp commentary on current events, media, and the psychology of modern life.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Nature of Democracy and the Ruling Class

• Illusion of Choice:

  • Parvini asserts that democracy is more an “illusion” than a genuine mistake, arguing it’s "an extremely effective strategy for ruling" by giving people the sense of agency and choice, when, in reality, nothing fundamental changes whatever the outcome ([02:22]).
  • Quote: "The genius of the system is that even after people see what we're about to talk about, even when they see the trick, it's got ways of reeling them back in and giving them new hope and new delusions to fall for." – Neema Parvini [03:15]
  • Populists like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump are described as part of the illusion—presented as threats, but ultimately not a problem for the real centers of power.

• Systemic Containment:

  • Political options that appear radical or oppositional are often tolerated or even seeded by elites, as long as they are contained and compliant ([05:38]).
  • Pro Wrestling Metaphor: The media “pushes” opposition figures like pro-wrestling heroes and villains to give the appearance of contest, but within a controlled narrative.

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2. Is It All Organic or Engineered?

• Organic Incentives vs. Behind-the-Scenes Control:
  • Peter pushes the idea that perhaps the system is simply the outcome of incentives—media, politicians, donors, and bureaucrats each pursuing their interests.
  • Parvini, drawing on elite theory, suggests it’s both: there are organic, bottom-up forces, but also top-down interventions by security services, NGOs, and state-connected actors, especially when a real threat emerges ([10:13], [15:01]).
  • Quote: "Power, real power wants to be seen. It can't help but show itself." – Neema Parvini [62:17]

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3. The Role of Media and Narrative Management

• Active Message Shaping:

  • Both discuss how state actors and NGOs actively script the public conversation, referencing everything from the vetting of candidates in populist parties to “nudge units” in the media, and even literal scripting of post-crisis narratives ([06:40], [15:01]).

• Tommy Robinson & Selective Outrage:

  • Illustration of how media frames far-right vs. far-left activism differently, often with evident double standards ([18:30]); e.g., BLM and Antifa were given state and media cover as “shock troops for what we used to call the regime” ([20:23]).

• Containment of Threats:

  • Genuine grassroots movements rarely scale without some form of elite co-option or intervention; the system is set up to prevent the emergence of truly uncontrolled, organized minorities ([23:40]).

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4. Elite Theory Explained ([68:23] – [77:24])

Key Thinkers and Concepts:

• Gaetano Mosca: Every society, regardless of structure, is divided into a ruling class (organized minority) and the ruled (disorganized mass).
• Vilfredo Pareto: Circulation of elites—foxes (ruling by cunning) and lions (ruling by force); history cycles between these archetypes.
• Robert Michels: "Iron law of oligarchy"—all organizations, including political parties, inevitably become oligarchies controlled by a select few.
• Burnham's Decisionism: Ultimately, power manifests in decisive action, especially visible in emergencies (e.g., executive orders, pandemic responses).

Quotes:

• "Once you understand elite theory, every system is basically the same, regardless of what it calls itself." – N. Parvini [75:02]
• "It's a soft dictatorship. Still a dictatorship. And who is the dictator is somewhat hidden and diffuse." – N. Parvini [75:28]
• "In this country, you're still getting Tony Blair." – N. Parvini on UK political stasis [27:47]

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5. Illusions of Populism and The Limits of Change

• Populist parties (e.g., Reform, Trump, Le Pen) are either purposely contained or captured through vetting, incentives, and eventual co-option. Even genuine-seeming radical change (e.g., the French, Russian Revolutions) led to more efficient centralization of power ([108:36]).
• Skepticism that any populist breakthrough is truly a break from elite consensus.
• Quote: "With every revolution that takes place in history, what actually happens is that the new revolutionary power centralizes power more efficiently than the old one." – N. Parvini [108:36]

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6. Billionaires, NGOs, and the Administrative State

• NGO Networks & Charity:

  • Speculation on how massive fortunes are funneled into foundations and NGOs that develop a power of their own, sometimes at odds with the original donor’s intent (e.g., Ford Foundation post-Henry Ford) ([34:25]).
  • Billionaires (Blair, Ellison, Gates, Musk) straddle both “globalist” and “nationalist” camps—a tension most visible regarding their support for Israel ([41:40], [43:20]).

• Managerialism and Systemic Inertia:

  • The managerial state is self-sustaining, resistant to ground-up or electoral change, and able to perpetuate itself via technocratic “solutions” (e.g., digital ID—long championed by Blair, now policy regardless of which party rules) ([29:40], [66:41]).

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7. Hopelessness, Hyperreality, and Real Community

• The Loss of Real Engagement:

  • Online activism is criticized as a containment strategy—providing the feeling of action without any real effect. Genuine, local organizing is slow, unglamorous, but potentially more meaningful ([92:31]).
  • The erosion of meaningful work, community, and shared values may explain widespread dissatisfaction despite technological “progress” ([98:38]).

• The Lure of Nostalgia:

  • Both discuss whether older forms of community (villages, towns) provided more happiness and meaning, even amid poverty ([102:03]).

• Quote: "Are people actually happiest in that mode where they're living in a little village where they have a purpose, where they have a place, where they have community, as opposed to the current era where people don't know their own neighbors..." – N. Parvini [98:38]

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8. Bitcoin, AI, and Utopian Counter-Elites

• Peter raises the idea that movements like Bitcoin offer an alternate form of power through decentralized control, but Parvini cautions that any real change would require organized action—not just technological innovation ([119:53], [120:36]).

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9. What Is To Be Done: Acting Realistically

• Both host and guest wrestle with the tension between realism and nihilism—whether personal and collective action matter in a system so robustly self-perpetuating.
• Hope is suggested in potential elite fracture (competing elite factions may open “little bits of freedom”) and the gradual possibility of a “revolution within the mind” ([61:58], [129:05]).

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• "Democracy is...an extremely effective strategy for ruling. For the ruling class, especially when you have this idea that there are two sides."
  – Neema Parvini [02:22]

• "Even after people see the trick, it’s got ways of reeling them back in and giving them new hope and new delusions to fall for."
  – Neema Parvini [03:15]

• "We’re just another flavor of the same thing."
  – N. Parvini, on political parties [78:12]

• "Mass and scale... require technical specialists, bureaucrats...to keep people kind of doing as they're meant to do."
  – N. Parvini [10:13]

• "There needs to be a true clearing out of the entire ruling class..."
  – N. Parvini [104:58]

• "What I will boil down to the whole bitcoin dream, sadly is, you and whose army. Ultimately, that's what it boils down to."
  – N. Parvini [119:53]

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Notable Moments

• Pro-wrestling analogy for contemporary politics ([05:38])
• Digression into the co-option and management of populist parties ([12:23], [13:39])
• Examples of coordinated media response post-crisis (the Southport protests: “every single front page all the same on the same day” – [15:01])
• Elite theory deep-dive with applied examples ([68:23]-[77:24])
• Reflections on lost meaning, nostalgia for village life ([98:38]-[104:34])
• Parvini’s upcoming book announcement: Applied Elite Theory ([134:03])
• White pill optimism in considering local conservative mavericks (Rupert Lowe) as true, uncapturable alternatives ([130:57]-[132:38])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Illusion of Political Change / Elite Theory Introduction: [00:00]-[10:00]
• Populism & Media Control: [12:00]-[20:00]
• Tommy Robinson, BLM, and Narrative Management: [17:48]-[24:44]
• Personal Experience with Surveillance & Alienation: [24:44]-[27:45]
• On the Nature and Capture of Populist Parties: [27:45]-[32:24]
• Elite Theory (Classical and Modern): [68:23]-[79:40]
• Revolutions and Elite Circulation: [108:36]-[113:25]
• Community, Meaning, Job Loss, and Nostalgia: [98:38]-[104:34]
• Bitcoin, AI, and New “Elite” Formation: [119:53]-[121:59]
• Media Incentives and Algorithmic Influence: [121:07]-[127:37]
• Reflections on Agency, Nihilism, and Hope: [127:37]-[134:03]

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Tone & Takeaways

The discussion is candid, at times cynical, but ultimately invites listeners to see beyond surface-level narratives—urging realism about the nature of power, skepticism about “new” populisms, and a search for meaning beyond the hyperreality of online politics.

Final Thought:
Change, if it comes, may not arrive at the ballot box but from a slow revolution in consciousness—and perhaps, as Parvini suggests, a rediscovery or reinvention of genuine community, meaning, and agency in a depersonalized, managed age.

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Next Steps:

• Check out Neema Parvini’s books: The Populist Delusion, Prophets of Doom, and soon, Applied Elite Theory.
• Further reading suggestions from the episode: Burnham, Pareto, Mosca, Michels, John Gray's False Dawn, Evola's Ride the Tiger.

For all who feel like “clowns in the clown show,” the episode says: you are not alone, and understanding is the first step toward any kind of meaningful change.

Transcript

[Nima Palvini]

The thing is, the truth is, once you get into. Once you understand elite theory, every system is basically the same, regardless of what it calls itself.

[Peter]

Right.

[Nima Palvini]

Okay. Now you can get harder managerial regimes and softer ones. Okay. I would say that our system is a kind of soft dictatorship.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Still a dictatorship. Right. And who is the dictator is somewhat hidden and diffuse. I think a lot of people feel that there needs to be a change.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

The big test for the current system is can it? This was the question that was asked of the Soviet Union when it needed to reform Gorbachev and it couldn't.

[Peter]

It couldn't.

[Nima Palvini]

No. It collapsed in on itself. Couldn't do it. This is the big question being asked of America, Britain and the west in general is can it? Can it? Are these systems now too big to actually be reformed in any real way?

[Peter]

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[Nima Palvini]

Good. Thanks for having me.

[Peter]

Hey, so I've been very excited about this, stumbled across your book. Somebody recommended it to me.

[Nima Palvini]

The.

[Peter]

The Populist Delusion, which I weirdly, I don't know if you know, there's a Spotify episode where it's two guys discussing the book chapter by chapter.

[Nima Palvini]

Right. Yeah, I think. I think I know who did that.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Okay.

[Peter]

But since then, I mean, it was a while ago I discovered your book and we're going on a journey trying to figure out what the fuck is going on in this country. But I've got. I've got. I've got a really interesting first question for you regarding democracy. A mistake, illusion or both?

[Nima Palvini]

Okay, a mistake and a loot. Well, it's definitely an illusion mistake is more of an interesting one because let's just describe it how it is. It's an extremely effective strategy for ruling. For the ruling class, especially when you have this idea that there are two sides. There are two different options and that you personally have a stake in who wins. And then depending on your vote, the fate of the country has changed, etc. And the system, I would say, goes to great lengths to keep this basic idea, this basic illusion going. And it has all sorts of strategies, containment I call it, in order to keep this basic idea going. And in a way, the genius of the system is that even after people see what we're about to talk about, even when they see the trick, it's got ways of reeling them back in and giving them new hope and new delusions to fall for. And I would include in this, sorry to say, what is called populism now, this idea that Nigel Farage and reform are some sort of threat to the system, for example, or even that Donald Trump in America now after 10 years, is still something that the ruling class in America have not come to peace with and that really, he's still railing against the actual power structures at this point. I think we've seen enough to know that even those are fictions basically, to reel you back in, to bring you back on various different reservations. Which is not to say that there are not genuine rival factions in the ruling class who back these various parties who have different interests. But it is still, I mean, does anybody really believe, as an example that we're going to. We're going to vote reform and within the space of a few years, Nigel Farage is going to dismantle the Blairite state?

[Peter]

I mean, I think a lot of people do believe that. I think that's the illusion.

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people do believe it or hope or hope. But. But, I mean, I, I don't believe it or. And I don't. I mean, I see. No, I don't even think that he'd be put in front of us as an option if some element of the permanent security state was not at peace with this idea. And in fact, you could argue that for the past year or so, ever since Keir Starmer came in, the media have actively been priming the idea of a Prime Minister Farage, probably for about a year now, if not more. I mean, he's kind of been normalized and pushed, much like how a pro wrestler is pushed in pro wrestling, you know, and just like in. I don't know if you're familiar with the world of pro wrestling at all.

[Peter]

We know it, don't we, Connor? We went. How old were you? Five, six. We saw John Cena.

[Nima Palvini]

You saw John Cena? Well, I mean, exactly. Like when John Cena first came in and was, he was pushed as a hero, as a man of the people type thing. Depending on which newspaper you read, Keir Starmer is currently the big heel, the villain who needs to be taken down. And you know, this is a, this is the basic frame that the system is kind of happy with. It's left versus right. It's Tory versus Labor or now it's labor versus Reform or even, even more farcical Ed Davy versus Nigel Farage. I mean it doesn't really matter how they want you focused on these sorts of, these sorts of fights. It's happy with those fights and I'd even go as far as to say that it's happy with what people have called the culture war.

[Peter]

Hold on though. But is this, is this an organic system? Is this just the way the incentives work or is there like a Vince McMahon in the background?

[Nima Palvini]

Well, I mean, so as I, I mean since I wrote Populist Delusion and we can get into some of those basic ideas of Elite Theory soon if you'd like, but since I have written that book and looked into it more and more and more, I've been really shocked by how little they have left to chance. Pretty much since probably since World War II. There's, I mean there are some mind blowing books I've read. There's one book called who Paid the Piper which, which basically shows how the CIA, which was, had a, had a little department being run by James Burnham himself who was the author of the Machiavellians and the Managerial Revolution which I talk about in Populist Delusion. He had an entire division devoted to funding different cultural projects, pushing different, I mean down to the level of reviews of particular historians in tiny little academic journals. And the story of that book is how the center left, the non communist left was basically invented by the fba, by the CIA, but also the post war center right was basically invented because the American state, if you want to put it that way, didn't want it being communist Soviet style. They didn't want the left being communist and they didn't want the right being Nazis or fascists or something like this. So they had to come up with these new options so you can actually watch them being created, funded. Another, another book I came across, I talked about this on a show with our McIntyre. There was a little, a little kind of shadow service that again worked for one of the arms of the security state that was set up basically to man manage the civil rights movement, to keep the civil rights movement being the Martin Luther King thing, not the Malcolm X thing, Rick Harban, to basically push it in a certain way to make sure. And even in kind of recent history in Britain, we've seen examples like, you know, for example, when there's a terrorist attack and, you know, you have grieving family, there's somebody sent by the security services to have a little word with them, to basically manage the message, a little nudge unit to make sure that it's. Look back in anger. Sorry, don't look back in anger. Candles, forgiveness. So basically, to set that narrative as to what happens after a big event.

[Peter]

Well, we just had that with Charlie Kirk's wife. Forgiving the killer in front of.

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah, I mean, so what I'm saying is, the more I've looked into it, the more I'm struck by how. How little I actually. I mean, in America, they talk about the paranoid style of politics, like Alex Jones, people like that conspiracy theory. But the more I've looked at it, it's like a kind of paranoid style of government where they really don't let anything to chance.

[Peter]

But again, is that just incentives?

[Nima Palvini]

Well, I mean.

[Peter]

Or is there a smoky room where a group of elite lizard people sit around and make decisions?

[Nima Palvini]

I mean, this is the thing. It's very hard for us on the outside to know what we can do that. What is interesting now in this moment is that they're increasingly just open about these things. They just publish them on the website, or there's a network of NGOs, for example, that writes these white papers that then get pushed up to the government, and they basically openly talk about what they're doing. I think language I saw on certain documents from the home office was like behavior. Behavior management. You know, they're trying to nudge you in a certain mode of thinking and a certain mode of being, which, I mean, it just. I mean, maybe. Maybe it's just a necessity for managing a mass state. Maybe, you know, they talk in elite theory about the problem of mass and scale, which then requires technical specialists, bureaucrats and so on to manage all of this and to keep people kind of doing as they're meant to do in that system. So maybe these things are just necessary. But they do go on. They do go on. So what I'm saying is the notion of that the system would not be all right with reform becoming the government is just. When you start looking at it is just farcical. For example, we happen to know that even before Reform got any MPs, they were vetting people out. You had my Buddy Carl Benjamin on a couple of weeks back. I mean, he runs that big show Lotus Eaters. Several of their hosts were set to be, you know, running for reform. They were told they couldn't be part of it because they were extreme or whatever. What was their extreme comments? Well, they were for mass deportations. It's funny because now, now, now that's.

[Peter]

Part of the policy.

[Nima Palvini]

Now reform are saying that. Yeah, but the key point is not what they're saying, but who is saying it, who is there? And they are happy with the people who are there. Right. They weren't happy with Rupert Lowe for some reason. Maybe he, maybe he was not non compliant. Maybe so. And he was very quickly pushed out of the party because they're preparing to be a compliant government, essentially.

[Peter]

Or I mean, I always find with these, these things that I can make a, an argument based on it being organic and incentives. And I can also then make the argument there's like people pulling the strings. And if there's people pulling the strings, I can make an argument the people pulling the strings are still, it's still organic. You know, whether it's, I mean, look to the US Whether it's Gates and Ellison and the Soros Foundation, I can see their incentives. I can see the incentives of the media. And so I, I usually come back to it. I think it's organic and incentives. But when people say they, I'm like, they who?

[Nima Palvini]

Why? Well, I mean, I mean, I mean, the thing is, is that you're right in a certain, to a certain extent, if you go down enough, you will get to human action.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

As Mises would say. Yeah, you'll get to an actual person with a set of motives and a set of incentives, as you say. And then you're thinking, well, okay, if this guy wants to do this, what should he, what should he do? Here's his budget and then you can work it out. And yeah, to a certain extent that is what is happening. But there is also, how can I say, there's people who they'll allow at the table and there are people who, who are allowed to play that game, if we put it that way. And there, and there are people who they're not happy with playing that game. And it's often difficult to figure out who they're happy with and who they're not. But I would say generally speaking, just being allowed into the media discourse is quite a good tell. Right. If the newspapers are full of it, if it's a household name, if it's been entered into the newspaper of record. Then it becomes like part of a story that there's like a family of faces that every person has. Everybody's heard of certain people, there are other people who nobody's heard of who don't get entered into that discourse. Do you understand what I'm saying?

[Peter]

Yeah. So does that come from intelligence services, really?

[Nima Palvini]

I mean, see that it's different. I'm not saying that every single thing that happened is as a result of intelligence services. I'm saying if it gets to a certain threat status to the system, they are there and they, and they will get involved. I mean, we saw pretty good example of when they got involved quite recently with the Southport situation. So I mean, you know what happened there? There was a few, there were a few people kicked up, kicked over a few bins. They were unhappy about what happened in South Pole. Starmer very quickly, you know, call them far right, put loads of people in jail in the space of a week, etc. But then people see these are things people don't remember. A set of dates were published about when they were going to be further protests, further action. And these were publicized by various different people, you know, and then what happened is that on those dates a bunch of anti racist protests took place instead. Counter protests. And then on that day, on that morning, every single newspaper in the country, whether it was the left wing ones, Guardian, you know, Independent, or the so called right wing ones, the Daily Mail, Sun Telegraph, they all ran basically the same front page that day. You can look it up. There's something you could look up. They all ran a front page saying, hate will not win. You know, the anti racist won this day. And that when you see every single front page all the same on the same day, is a pretty good indication that on that occasion they got involved.

[Peter]

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[Nima Palvini]

Yes.

[Peter]

Is he a problem for them then? Because he, he is part of the media. We see him, he is interviewed, but usually on the fringe. It was like someone like myself or trigonometry. But he can rally hundreds of thousands of people to come together and have a march yet the front page. So what disturbed me about that, we went, we. We went down to see what was about and we were backstage where they had funneled one group of people on the march to a dead end. If you imagine Whitehall three rows, I think it might have been horse guards. But you had the stage for the Free Speech March.

[Nima Palvini]

This was the Tommy rally a couple.

[Peter]

Of weeks back then there was a big gap with police cars and fences either side. And there was the counter protest. But there was a road that led to the middle where a bunch of the Tommy Robinson protesters went. They were funneled to a dead end. They couldn't hear the speeches. Kicked off a little bit. I mean, how many people you say, Connor? 30, 40 people maybe kicked off lobs and bottles wasn't good, but it's very minor. We didn't see anything else. Any other disturbances that day? Yes, some people were probably using the street as a toilet. They shouldn't. But it was generally really good spirit, well spirited. Daily Mail led with a video on the homepage. And so everybody just went, these are far right thugs, far right hooligans, fascists. But. But they didn't lead with anything like that when it was BLM protests which were also violent or pro Gaza. Yeah, Horse Gars Avenue. So they fed them all down there. But actually everyone else had come up Whitehall and, And that red dot was where. Just below that red dot is where it kicked off. But I was thinking at the time, I was thinking, hold on a second, I'm there, I'm not far right, I'm not a fascist. But I'd seen plenty of videos, I've seen so many videos on Twitter of violence at far left protests. I've seen plenty of antifa protests. BLM protests got violent, but they never lead with the violence in that scenario. And then I look at Tommy, obviously not a perfect character. And the amount of times he's been to prison, how he's put in solitary, now he's facing terrorism charges because he won't open his phone to them. Potentially prison again. I was like, is, is he, is he like a chink in the Matrix for them? Is he a problem?

[Nima Palvini]

Okay, so this is going to be quite, quite a kind of convoluted answer.

[Peter]

When it comes to this.

[Nima Palvini]

So on, on the, on the blm, on the Antifa front, I remember even at the time, Even back in 2020, when during the Summer of Love, I was saying, like, look, ever, because everybody was freaking out, saying, oh, this is it. This is the communist revolution, it's coming type thing. And I said, no, what BNM and Antifa are, are Counter Revolutionary Forces, shock troops for what we used to call the regime, okay, or what we might call now for one, one of these two power factions that are currently active and allied in politics. So they tacitly had state backing, at least for a period. Whether that still exists or not, I don't know. But certainly back in 2020, that was being pushed. It was being, it was. They were, they had cover from the media, the police were told to take a knee or to stand down. They, I mean, they were classically counter revolutionary forces or in some. I've been reading a book recently called what is a Counter Gang? Right? They were a counter gang, not an organic kind of street group. Clearly they were being backed and funded and organized possibly by, you know, organizations close to the Democrat Party, something like this, okay? And so you don't get something like that happening without some degree of organization and without some degree of backing and funding. Okay? Now this is where this may get a bit controversial when it comes to Tommy. He will also have certain backers, certain forces who are alive in politics behind him, who may have their own agenda, they may have their own set of objectives that they're trying to achieve. And I mean, I've talked about this recently. I would say this year there's been a very strong push from people in that sort of network to push this idea that we're heading towards a civil war. We're heading towards some sort of civil conflict. It's going to be, you know, country is so far gone, right? We're heading to some kind of crunch thing. And it's going to be, I don't know, who are the two sides? This is a question. I mean, implicitly, it's Tommy and the lads against, you know, Rainbow, Rainbow Coalition and maybe people who support Palestine, something like this. And so this is, I mean, this is where kind of being into elite theory as I am, I'm always looking, well, who is the Organized minority, who is act, where is that human action? What are their incentives? So you can say well on one hand, I mean we should probably define terms organic from the point of view that certain very rich people are trying to make things happen through funding various networks. We could say, well that is organic from the point of view of it's just a kind of bottom up thing. People are just in the pub and they've had enough and now, now they're going to start rising up type thing it which is often what people think about when they talk about bottom up. Right. That basically never, that really never happens. It's all. There's always somebody even, I mean even in the situation where group of lads are in the pub and they feel like they want to do something. Even in that small situation there's going to need to be somebody who takes the lead, somebody who starts to like make decisions. And even that small card rate could become a quote unquote organized minority if they actually got organized. But I would say a huge number of things in our system are geared towards not allow, not allowing that to happen. You know, if it scales up enough then the people we were talking about earlier will start to, you know, use tools, surveillance, infiltration, etc. So it's very hard to get away from it. It's very hard to get away from that.

[Peter]

You know I'm thinking, don't you Connor? So we had this weird incident the other day. So I mentioned I've put private security into my hometown and I've also interviewed some well known, potentially controversial people and if they track me and they see oh look, he's now talking to Nima and he's talking to Curtis Yar is Peter Threat, should he be on a list? But the other night I was in America, Connor text me. And a police car pulled into our driveway, then reversed out, pulled into our neighbor's driveway and started taking photos of our house. Now it was one in the morning so I phoned the police and they said, oh, there was an incident outside your house. They just want to get photographs of who's got cameras so they can kind of ask for it. And I kind of bought it. But you didn't buy it, do you? I don't buy it. He doesn't buy it. Why are they hiding around the corner? Yeah, why were they hiding around the corner? Yeah. Do you ever. So how do you wrestle with realism and what are kind of fringe ideas that you are fully convinced yourself that is true and this is actually how the world works with trying to communicate this with the normal world because that's why I struggle if I try and talk to say, my family, they think I'm a nutter. And I'm like, no, you're just in the matrix. You're not seeing for what's happened. So I'm 100% convinced I'm seeing the world. I'm seeing the world more realistically now. I'm starting to understand a bit more, be more pragmatic about it. But I feel like I'm in a minority and when I try and talk to people about it, I think I come across as a nutter.

[Nima Palvini]

Right.

[Peter]

Do you understand the dilemma?

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah, no, yeah, I do. I mean, I think one of the troubling things that you quickly get into is that the mass in every age, by which I mean most people are kind of happy there, they don't want to ask these questions. They don't want to really understand how things. Things work really. And I mean, when it comes to this, when it comes to what we to elite theory and the stuff I talk about in populist illusion, most people, if you just have an appointment with them, whatever, will be happy to say, well, yeah, the two parties are the same. You know, two cheeks are the same ass. You know, people say these sorts of things all the sort of time Michael.

[Peter]

Malice did it, you know Michael, Yeah, he was here a few years ago. He was here a few weeks ago and he said once you see it is just two rival gangs.

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah.

[Peter]

Competing for control of the country. Something like that, wasn't it? Kind of like he said, it becomes a lot easier to understand it.

[Nima Palvini]

And so. So people are kind of happy to go along with that. But then if you really mean it, like I really mean it, they're the same. Like no matter who you vote for, it can be Nigel, it can be Ed Davy, it can be Rishi Sunak, or I forget, who is the toy leader? Cami Bay. Yeah, I forget, I forget.

[Peter]

Soon to be generic.

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah, whoever, whoever it. In this country, you're still getting Tony Blair. I mean, let's face it, the permanent managerial state that has been set up in the country, you're going to get Tony Blair. And in the case of this government, it's quite literally Tony Blair and his institute who has been talking about digital ID for 20 years and now we're getting a digital ID.

[Peter]

And Cameron was very Tony Blair.

[Nima Palvini]

And Cameron was basically another version of Tony Blair. So, I mean, I've said so many times, the system was at its happiest in 2010 when it was Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and Cameron. I agree with Nick. And it's always trying to get back there to three different flavors of the same thing. But the system is clever enough that it doesn't. You can put different faces on it, you can paint it in different ways. So if it has to come with a populist face, so be it. And they'll bring it. They'll. They'll still do the things they want to do under a different, under a different lick of paint. I mean, you mentioned Larry Ellison earlier on. He's the number one funder of Tony Blair. Okay. He is also a very big funder of Donald Trump. He gave the speech on the day of the inauguration. He is the owner of Oracle. He has a vested interest in digital id. And in this, when you talk about matrix, the control grid, the digital control grid they want to make, he's just bought TikTok, okay? He is openly talk. He has talked again and again about what he wants to do.

[Peter]

They just put 100 million into OpenAI right now.

[Nima Palvini]

If they want to justify it in a left wing way, oh, we need this technology to keep out the far right. They'll do it that way. If they want to do it in a right wing way, oh, we look at what happened to Charlie Kirk, we need to do they Could I find an argument. It doesn't really matter. How are you going to sell it? They'll find a way to sell it. I mean, look at the digital id. They bring it in to stop illegal immigration. They're telling us, okay, that was the argument. But five years ago it was something to do with COVID remember? So what I'm saying is these things are going to happen regardless of who's in power, regardless of who we vote for. Because the system that we have is a kind of managerial bureaucracy with various different control grids on it. And it's like when we're talking about politics, culture war issues, this party or that party, it's just like the kind of froth on the top of your, on the top of your coffee. You're not getting to the actual structure, the power structure, or as they talk about in elite theory, the ruling class.

[Peter]

Is this the iron fist of the oligarchy?

[Nima Palvini]

This is the. Yeah, the iron law of oligarchy. And just to explain the iron law of oligarchy, somebody can get into politics and have all sorts of ideas about how they want to change the world. Yeah, it can be Donald Trump who had all sorts of ideas that he'd be talking about for Many, many years. Or it can be the aoc, who is a well known Democrat, came in bright, wide eyed, bushy tailed. But the system over time just to allow you into power, force you to make lots of different compromises until in the end, doesn't really matter what you'll say, you still end up doing what would have been done anyway, Maintaining the system and maintaining the system. And I mean in the case of America where they have very powerful lobby groups, literally in some cases, you know, voting the way they want on certain things. And when it comes to the, the aoc, she's in a Cortez. You know, she came in guns blazing saying oh, you know, she was going to be this radical. So on. It's been amazing to watch her get disciplined and ground down, kind of just turn into a little mini Nancy Pelosi. You know, she dutifully just votes the same way as the rest of the Democrats, even on things that she's meant to disagree with, like you know, funding Israel as an example.

[Peter]

Did you see, do you know Adam Friedman?

[Nima Palvini]

I, I've heard of him, yeah.

[Peter]

So I'll, I'll send it to you after this. He did an interview with Richie Torres and he, he was talking and Adam Friedman's a Jewish guy, he was talking about what's happened in Palestine. He was just saying, look, it's just as a human, it seems pretty bad. And Richie Torres is defending it and he was, and then he basically got to the roots of it. So you just support this because you took money off lobbyists and he got to the root of that. And so that makes me think, is the nature of this organic by virtue of how economics of big business work? Rich people get rich, they want to be even richer. Maybe they become a bit more narcissistic and think they should be shaping the world like Bill Gates does. So are they trying to shape the world by being rich? And are you trying to shape the world around their own wealth? And that's why I think perhaps this is why it is organic. But it's organic coming from the money rather than a group of people in a room, smoky room lizard people saying we need to control the people here. There. It's more about maintaining a system that benefits rich people.

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah, I mean you could say that a lot of the things that our governments do have a habit of then benefiting. Same gardra of billionaires as an example. Yeah, especially ones we own, big tech companies at the moment. At the moment. But it's a little bit more complicated because you then have to look at how that money is used and how it's administered. And this is, I mean, this is what James Burnham was talking about with, with the managerial revolution.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

And so I mean, it's the classic idea is the old fat cat tycoon, the industrialist who's independently wealthy and then spend his money on the Henry Ford say.

[Peter]

I was thinking Maxwell.

[Nima Palvini]

I'm thinking like a kind of an old fashioned, like 19th century industrialist type thing or someone like Henry Ford. But if you have a look at a lot of the very rich people now or the very powerful people now and look at how their money is actually managed and administered to some extent, there's a severance of ownership and control. Very good example is BlackRock. BlackRock has something like $10 trillion in assets. Everybody knows Larry Fink is the CEO, but that $10 trillion is not owned by Larry Fink. It is owned by millions of people who are part of pension funds and hedge funds and various other things. Independently wealthy people. I even found out my own pension is my name by BlackRock the other day. I didn't even know that I was reading the letter. I was like, oh, I don't remember signing up to this, but even my money is, it's somewhere there being managed by BlackRock. So the money, the ownership is dispersed, but the management of it is controlled. So you think, well, this is a kind of difference from classic Marxism where we have to look at ownership of the means of production and this is who controls society and then look at how that money is managed. Okay, this is, this is where a figure like Tony Blair is interesting, because when people like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison say, oh, we're giving lots of our money to charity. What's the charity then? Oh, there's Tony Blair Institute or okay, all right, that's interesting. Well, who are the other, who are the other charities? And then you look at all of the other charities and they're all affiliate partners of the Tony Blair Institute. There's a huge network of these NGOs. Those NGOs or think tanks or institutes, etcetera, then are tasked with helping to administer. So in one respect, these very rich people are furthering their agenda by funneling it into these sorts of things. But in another way, the NGO network kind of has a life of its own. And I mean, this is why I mentioned Henry Ford. Henry Ford set up something called the Ford foundation. And after he died, the Ford foundation became probably like the number one funder of left wing causes, social liberalism, lgbt, I mean, you name it. The Ford Foundation's got its arms in there. Elon Musk actually did everybody a favor when Hip. Remember when he showed everybody where USA goes and all these different foundations that were there. Well, I mean, that Ford foundation is so far away from actual real life Henry Ford. I mean, if you know anything about real life Henry Ford, he was not a liberal. He was not a. He was a social conservative who had his own ideas about things. But that's not how his fortune was spent after he died. So even, even now, even where you have these billionaires, the way the money trickles around and the way the money is spent is, is not. Jonas, what I'm saying, there's a kind of severance between ownership and control. So the managers, if you want to put it that way, are quite good at finding these pots of money that they can then do lots of things with or push lots of agendas with. And in a strange way, sometimes even the billionaires themselves can find themselves at odds with things that they, as a class, have funded, if that makes any sense. Um, so what was that kind of.

[Peter]

Bringing that back up? So Ellison pledged to donate 95% of his wealth as part of the Give him pledge in 2010. Since then, he's distanced himself from traditional nonprofits and says he's opting to give away wealth on his own terms. He founded the Elliston Institute of Technology, a for profit philanthropic organization at the University of Oxford.

[Nima Palvini]

Hmm.

[Peter]

Okay, thanks, Larry.

[Nima Palvini]

We have been seeing something interesting though, in the past five, 10 years, I would say, which is. So that's the way things were going with this money going into foundations and kind of being lost in this network of NGOs that has a kind of life of its own and actually an enormous amount of power in driving government policy and what we would call globalization and decisions being taken outside of the normal channels of democracy, I guess we'll put it that way. I would say in the past five years, 10 years, we've seen the return of like the big capital B billionaire, Elon Musk, probably the most emblematic example, who are trying to find these pockets of these ways of asserting their own power, seeing how much they can get done as independently wealthy guys. Larry Ellison, probably another good example. What's interesting there is them tracking to see how far they can get, how much space can they carve out for themselves. And well, this is still happening, so who knows?

[Peter]

Yeah, it is interesting that a lot of this wealth has gone towards more left wing ideas. Is that because that supports the idea? Like supports the globalist agenda and the globalist agenda is very good for the richest people to become richer.

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah, I mean, but I mean, I mean possibly if you, if you think about, you know, liberal values, they're all, they're all things that promote consumerism. Get people, you know, and the old, the old libertarian line was that, you know, money doesn't care what color you are, money doesn't care, you know, Greece all the same, it's all green. Right. So to an extent, you could say they push things that are beneficial, are going to keep on, keep people in this kind of neo, neoliberal system that we have. Keep it going.

[Peter]

Buy your iPhone, buy your Starbucks.

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah. Get excited for the next Nintendo Switch thing coming out, etc.

[Peter]

Sit at home, order your delivery. We've got the drivers come across.

[Nima Palvini]

Exactly. I would say though, and again, we can come back to Larry Ellison. One of the, one of the major Fisher points, I guess, or problems that has come is that in the middle of all of this globalizing world you have Israel who basically want to make a new empire in the Middle East. And a lot of, well, these wealthy individuals also support Israel. And when it comes to Ellison, he's also the number one funder of the idf. You know, this has come out in recent days.

[Peter]

Can you find that con?

[Nima Palvini]

Bill Ackman is another. Yeah, we know Bill Ackman is another one. We talked about Tommy. There's this chap Shillman who's been in the press all week, who's a major backer of Tommy as an example. So it's a little bit difficult to talk about liberal values and globalism and so on. If at the same time you have this pretty hardcore, some might say, even colonial project happening there that we're all meant to get behind, which goes at a, which basically goes against or is at odds with the values they've, you know, been pushing in the West. When I say they, I mean our governments, you know, these left wing NGOs, etc, all of the values that we've talked with that we were meant to hold sacred, basically you're thrown out when you start looking at that.

[Peter]

And we've. That's why we've had these big Gaza protests.

[Nima Palvini]

Right? I mean, exactly. I mean this is, I mean it's.

[Peter]

Like, what did, what do you, what do you expect people to do? When I see these complaints about all these university students protesting for Gaza, I'm like, they're young people, they're seeing people be killed. What do you expect them to do?

[Nima Palvini]

And yeah, I mean, this is one of the this is one of the great ironies in a way, which is that for the first time. Right. So for 10 years, the left were backing all these nonsense woke things. You know, whether it was BLM or trans or whatever. I mean, these were things that were deeply unpopular with most people that, you know, were really stretching it. And actually there was a huge backlash against those things for. Right. I would say. But now they've actually stumbled on something that's real.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

That's actually happening. Like, people are like, the images are on the news every day and now this is the moment where they're having all their funding pulled. This is the moment where it's interesting.

[Peter]

Because the Overton window has shifted quite significantly on Israel in the past few weeks. I mean, I think the trend's been happening. But do you want to bring that back up, Con? I just want to read that. This is interesting. So what's the title of the article? You scroll up a second. The report names six Jewish American billionaires quietly funding Israel's wars, occupying Palestine. A new report by the Jerusalem Post has identified six Jewish American billionaires who are quietly funding Israel's wartime and tech innovation, including the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Okay, so Jan Korn, Michael Dell, Bill Ackman, Mark Benioff, Larry Ellison and Michael Bloomberg. I mean, this is, this, this is, this whole situation is becoming a, a problem and a mess.

[Nima Palvini]

No, no, this is where we have to come back to what we're talking about earlier on with reform and even with Tommy. Okay. People have had enough of lots of things that are happening in this country and in America. Mass immigration woke stuff. People have had enough.

[Peter]

Crime, civil disobedience, crime. Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

You know, these are real issues. Okay. And so if you have a populist party, they're going to be popular because they're talking to actual concerns that people have got. My concern increasingly, especially as I've looked at how Trump has been since he's come back in Trump 2.0, is that these populist parties are almost like a kind of front for some other agenda. And when it comes to this issue, you can actually see it. So in the past week or so, couple of weeks, the UK recognized Palestine. Right. That happened. And so did Canada. Canada, France.

[Peter]

Yes.

[Nima Palvini]

And Australia, I think.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Nigel Farage came out straight away and said, oh, no, we're not, we're not going to do that. And I just seen just this morning, Richard Tice has been to Tel Aviv. Okay, so let's pretend.

[Peter]

Did he kiss the wall?

[Nima Palvini]

Let's just pretend that Reform, get in and then reverse that decision. Maybe that's what they're really there for. Do you understand what I mean? And all the rest of. And all the rest of it is window. Window dressing to get enough people to support them in order to, you know, have their hand on that lever. So, so this is, this may be happening at the same time. And it's just, I. I think at this moment, it's just good for people to be aware of what's happening.

[Peter]

Like, so it's fine, cut.

[Nima Palvini]

Your anger is real, your concerns are real. But is what being. Is the party that is being put in front of you real, or is it just using. Is it just sucking on those concerns almost like a vampire? And have they got some other. Some other thing they want to do? We actually saw the op. We actually saw the. An example from the other way. When Boris Johnson was the prime minister. Boris Johnson posed as a populist before he came in. And then when he was in power, didn't do. I mean, well, he. I mean, he, he locked us down.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

A dark cover of night. Brought in more immigrants than ever been seen before.

[Peter]

Had a few parties. By the way, this is the first time I've knocked a drink over in an interview and I've done it twice in one thing. It's hilarious.

[Nima Palvini]

So. So all I'm saying is that's an example of the. Of it happening from the globalist side. When Boris became Prime minister, he pretended to be a populist, but then he did very globalist things when he was actually in power. And you could say, well, with Trump or with Farage and increasingly with ones in Europe, what is their number one concern, and this is what I've talked about a lot, is that in elite theory, they talk about political formula. Top line. Let's say your political formula is Christ is king. Right. That's one political formula some people believe in Christ is king. If you were a monarch back in the day, it was like, Christ is king and I'm here as his representative on earth. Divine right. Yep. That can't brook an and. Right. So I am the king representing God on earth. Henry viii, Brekket and Thomas Cromwell. It doesn't work like that. Thomas Cromwell ends up going, if he starts being a problem to that. Now, in the, in the case of America, there are very like, the political formula was meant to be America first. That can't brook an end either. It can't be America first. And also this other country first has to just be America first. And this is my this is, I guess, a concern that a lot of people rightly have at the moment. If your top line issue is actually that little country in the Middle east, that's what they care about. All the other things are tradable. That one is non negotiable. And this is something that I've noticed again and again when I've looked at Trump is that promises made to his base whenever he does things that are really popular, it's a fudge, A judge knocks it down. It's not done properly, it's rushed, it's, you know, an executive order that can easily be overturned. It's not vote, it's not done through Congress. Right. That is, it's something that can be undone. It's a symbolic victory to get through this next news cycle.

[Peter]

Okay, but these cycles are getting quicker now.

[Nima Palvini]

And these cycles and Trump, I've said before, he's a Time Lord, the news cycles move so quickly. The things that happen, I mean, the Charlie Kirk thing was only what, like two weeks ago? It feels like it was months ago. Like I made a video last week about Charlie Kirk and it feels like it happened. That's how fast things happen in today's world. And with Trump, you know, I mean, do you remember when he had the bust up with Zelenskyy? That feels like it happened years ago.

[Peter]

It was only, well, he's now Team.

[Nima Palvini]

Ukraine and now he's Team Ukraine. Right. So what I'm saying is with a lot of things that people actually care about, his base care about, it's always this, it's always this big symbolic thing in the moment, right? People love it. Do you remember Liberation Day? What happened to that?

[Peter]

But going back to the point, I can make the argument that, I can make the alternative argument that Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize. Trump wants to be somebody who brings peace. He's tried to bring Russia to the table. Putin isn't playing the game, he's getting attacked for that. So now he's gone from defensive to attack dog on you, on Russia. You know that rather than somebody pulling.

[Nima Palvini]

Strings in the background, that would be, that would be more convincing if there was not. I mean, there's this, there's this guy called Brian Baletic who I watch sometimes. Don't know if you ever come across him. He's like a bald headed chapter. His channel is called New Atlas.

[Peter]

Oh, yeah, no, I do.

[Nima Palvini]

He makes the, he, he makes this point a lot. He said, look, they wrote their plan down years ago in a document from the Rand Institute, which he goes, I Need to follow it by the. By the letter. They had a division of labor plan where Europe is gonna look out, take care of Europe's gonna take care of Russia, while America pivots to look at China. Okay, so a lot of the rifts on Ukraine, let's say the rift between Trump and Keir Starmer as an example, according to Brian Bilechtic, is yet another Punch and Judy show. I. E. You're meant to kind of buy into all these narratives, but really the agenda stays exactly the same. The NATO plan for Ukraine, funding that fighting the Russians and so on doesn't change. It's just a way of selling it. Not only selling it to the American public, but selling it to the European public. Because, remember, in the European market, Trump is a heel. Trump is disliked by most Europeans, apparently.

[Peter]

I'm not convinced of that anymore.

[Nima Palvini]

I'm not convinced of that anymore either. But this is the idea, right? So how do you get, you know, your. Your blue hair to really, really want to be Team Ukraine even more? Well, you. You convince them that Trump is, you know, Trump is really against Zelensky or something. But as we've seen and see, this is what is really interesting to me. When people make predictions, you can then test them against what actually happens. And when it comes to this, Brian Baletic has been the only commentator who's consistently correctly called what transpired, which is now nine months in to Trump, and it's still basically the status quo.

[Peter]

Do we need to. For the listeners, do we need to plug any gaps on elite theory?

[Nima Palvini]

And I define it, we probably need to. Where I was going on the Trump. Sorry, where I was going on the Trump thing is what you notice. Okay? So all those things for the base, it's a fudge when it comes to things specifically to do with Israel or let's say speech codes and anti Semitism or something like this. It's done to the lesser. Those laws of every T crossed, every I dotted, completely funded properly. Okay. And I noticed this pattern a long time ago when Ron DeSantis passed something called the Stop Woke Act, Right? And at the same time, he passed an anti Semitism bill. The Stop Woke act was woolly. It was at all sort like a lawyer looking at it would be like, yeah, well, like you can argue every single one but the anti Semitism one. It was like, well, there's no ambiguity there. You absolutely know what? It's. It's kind of defined to the letter. And this is where I kind of worry sometimes whether a lot of the populism is a kind of smokescreen in front of some other agenda.

[Peter]

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[Nima Palvini]

Well, you see, this is where I genuinely think that there is a split in, in the elite between. Here's where it gets problematic for us.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

I don't think either of them like us that much like it doesn't. It's not like neither of these, neither of these sides are necessarily on your side, but I do think they have genuinely rival interests. Okay. Whereas one set of interests are. They want to make Israel an exception.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Okay. I mean we can maybe we can fill in some of these elite theory gaps, but the idea is, is that whoever is sovereign can make an exception. Right. There's a normal set of rules, but then those rules can be broken at any time by the sovereign. You can make some unprincipled exception for that, you know, because reasons and there's some that there's one of these sides who want Israel to be that exception to. I E. Okay, we've got this globalist world. We all, you know, it's this rainbow world where it's. We're getting our Deliveroos and watching our Netflix network. Watching our Netflix and, you know, I don't really mind what goes on in your bedroom. And, you know, I'm. It doesn't all the races of the world get on, etc. Okay.

[Peter]

Have you seen the camera on the new iPhone?

[Nima Palvini]

We all live in that world, okay, and have equality and all of the usual things. But there's an exception for this one state that gets to be. Well, as you've been seeing, okay, that's one side. On the other side, there is what I would call truly true globalists. People who, I mean, classically, you'd think of your Klaus Schwab or your World Economic Forums. And I actually think like Larry Fink and to an extent, Alison. And we talked about some people have a foot in both camps, but really, if you have a look at his agenda, it's really going to. It's really towards globalism. Tony Blair, who I've said, again, he's there in Gaza now, but he's a globalist, right? And so these people, they have. I mean, they want to build up the power of the un they want. They want transnational institutions, international law, all of these kind of bollocks. I mean, yeah, yeah, all. All of this. All of this stuff. But they want a kind of control grid world where we're all, you know, into these permanent transnational structures where there's a set of rules that we all have to follow. So you can see how the Israel thing at the moment is a problem for that globalist world and how, let's say you wanted to weaken the power of the UN or you wanted to, I don't know, get into a mindset where people no longer have a problem with what's happening there. Okay. You could then start to chip away at these things that, as you rightly said, many of them are bollocks. Right? But it's a different. You can see how if it's a different agenda. So that's what I think is happening at the moment, that you have these two powerful factions that are going at it. And in a way, this may not be that bad for the rest of us, because James Burnham said the best that we can hope for, us little people who aren't part of the ruling class, who aren't mega billionaires and so on. If you have powerful elite factions going at each other in a strange way, it opens up Little gaps. Little bits of freedom in the gaps. Right? I mean, you don't want to be caught in the crossfires, right, while it's going on, but it can open up these little pockets of freedom. So you could say, well, if you think about it, we're having freer and opener conversations today than we would have been five years ago or 10 years ago. Elon Musk, regardless of who he's working for now or what his agenda is, the fact that he's bought X does mean that we have a little bit more freedom. The fact that these two factions are going at it means that me and you can have this conversation. I think. I think, you know, see you in a jail cell, see who follows us home. Haven't been arrested yet, but you know what I mean? So he calls it managing the. You know, if the managers are busy managing each other, they've got less time to think about managing you. And so this may actually be not a bad scenario at the minute where there's this kind of quiet civil war going on between different elite factions. But that doesn't mean that you should necessarily get into bed and be the useful idiot for either one of these sides, I would say.

[Peter]

Is there a risk of connecting dots that seem linked, that aren't linked? How do you check yourself on this.

[Nima Palvini]

When you say connecting dots?

[Peter]

Well, so it's almost like you could look at any news event now and think, oh, that's because of this faction's doing this or that faction's doing this. And sometimes. Sometimes it is just organic.

[Nima Palvini]

All right, okay. Well, I mean, yeah, I would say. I mean, I. I have always been against something called capital C conspiracy, right? Where, you know, nothing, like, nothing happens really happens, or something like this, or there's a. There's a hidden hand behind all of the events that happen. I've never been one for that. Usually it's very visible what's happening, because as against conspiracy theory, power, real power wants to be seen. What I mean by that is it can't help but show itself. It can't help but be seen. Do you understand what I'm saying? So, I mean, at the moment, we're seeing Netanyahu everywhere, right? He's. He's coming out, so I'm doing podcasts. Pod, you know, he's. He's defending himself against all sorts of accusations and so on, right? But it's not like you don't have to draw to that many dots. They're literally. I mean, he's literally telling you, yes, We've just bought TikTok. Yes, I am talking to influencers because I want them to push our message.

[Peter]

Israel just bought ExpressVPN, an Israeli company. Eight VPNs are now owned by Israel Israeli companies.

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah, well, I did say that may have happened a while back, I think, but, yeah, I mean, what I'm saying is often you don't have to look that far because it's pretty ob. It's pretty obvious. One of the things I've done, one of the people I've been especially interested in is Tony Blair, who I mentioned a few times. He has his fingers in an awful lot of pies. Right. And I. In fact, I often marvel at just how many. Like how he can be in all these places at once. But his institute. When I first started talking about this Tony Blair five, six years ago, people used to ask me this all the time. Used to be like, oh, are you sure he's got that much power? You sure you're not just seeing this? Is this now it's mainstream now? Basically every single newspaper, every single day is saying, hold on a second. Is Tony Blair already running the country? Or how is everything that he wants to happen then ends up happening in four or five months? Okay? And this is not like this is pretty much every newspaper now left and right. There was an amazing bit on the Tony Blair Institute in the New Statesman just a couple of weeks back.

[Peter]

What was it saying?

[Nima Palvini]

Well, it was saying, what's it like inside there? You know, what are they up to? Why are they running the government? So what I'm saying is this stuff is out in the open, and it's not like you have to dive down that many rabbit holes to draw these lines because they're just there. They tell you it to your face. And, I mean, maybe it wasn't always like that, but in the current moment, it's just naked and out in the open.

[Peter]

So we're living in the world architected by Tony Blair.

[Nima Palvini]

Well, I don't know about the world. Certainly the country. I don't know about world. There must be some limit to his power. But in this country, it seems like. I mean. I mean, what happens is that he. His entity writes a lot of policy papers, proposals. Politicians are lazy. And when they need to have a solution to something, they're like, well, who's got all the different think tanks go? And Blair's like, well, look, here's the plan. I've already got it. You can get it off the shelf as a service, policy as a service, right? And it's there, ready to go because he's already thought about it and he's been thinking about it for. And he's got all the contact and he's got them all in place and that, that. I mean, I watched it happen numerous times during. During the Tory government. It was the Tory government, but it was still. They were getting the ideas from Tony Blair and his. You can, you can even see it. They publish it, let's say, in January, and it's government policy by September. I mean, I mean, in the case of digital id, couldn't be more blatant.

[Peter]

Oh, well, this is the most obvious one.

[Nima Palvini]

That's the most obvious one.

[Peter]

The most obvious one.

[Nima Palvini]

It's not just that. It's like. I mean, during COVID he. I mean, he was in. He was in charge of administering the COVID rollout not just for Britain, but like half of. Half of Africa.

[Peter]

This com. This talk of him administrative being the administrator for a Palestinian government in. I don't know, is it meant to be Gaza and the West Bank? I've got no idea. Yeah, feels very suspicious.

[Nima Palvini]

It's. I mean, if. Yeah, so.

[Peter]

So are you highly suspicious about what happened on October the seventh in that the most surveilled part of the world, which has a ring still around it.

[Nima Palvini]

See, this is where I don't get into actual conspiracy. Yes. I just look at. I just look at. What I try to look at is power players, their agendas, and then try to see what happened rather than trying to get into some of these questions of.

[Peter]

Well, this is where I saw the alignment with Curtis Yavin. Because I was away in the States and somebody, one of my friends recommended, said, watch the interview with Curtis Yavin, New York Times. So I did. Then I watched his Tucker Carlson one and then I listened to about 8 in 24 hours. But he talked about politics, like debate and politics is a waste of time. It's all power.

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Peter]

Yeah, it's all power. And so then I was like, huh, so what am I doing with my life? Like, caring, being involved. So let's. Let's plug these gaps on elite theory. Just so anyone listening just knows fully what you mean when you talk about elite theory.

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah. And I don't know if you want to like, edit this and put it at the start.

[Peter]

No, no, it's fine.

[Nima Palvini]

So Elite Theory, there was a set of thinkers in the late 19th century, early 20th century. One of them was a Italian called Giantano Mosca. Another one was Alfredo Pareto, who was also a famous economist. Yeah, I think he was Swiss but he was also Italian as well. It's like Swiss Italian.

[Peter]

The 8020 guy.

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah, the 8020 feared him from the 80 20. But he also wrote this massive book on sociology called the Mind Society. And then they. They had a kind of protege between them called Robert Michelles, who was German, Italian, who also wrote. So these three are what they call the classical elite theorists. And really what they were interested in was updating Machiavelli. You'll have heard of Nicola. So Machiavelli, he. He wanted to analyze power and politics and talk about the world as it really is, not as it ought to be, I. E. Stripped of all ideology, stripped of all idealism, just what is. And if you remember the book the Prince, it's very controversial because at that time there was a genre known as the mirror for princes, where various people would give advice to kings and. And the advice would be along the lines of, well, the most important thing, of course, is to be a mo. To be morally good, to be a good Christian, and things like that. Machiavelli comes along and he says, look, what if you were. If you were a king and you just lived up to the ideals of being a good Christian, you'd end up just being a dead king. If you actually want to be a good king, you need to be ruthless, you need to be cunning, you need to play the game. You need to consider how power actually works. And the rest is what people think of as Machiavelli. Incidentally, he wrote another book called the Discourses on Livy, where he basically comes out in defense of the Republic. He says the republic is a better way of government than the single monarch, the single prince. And some people say, well, okay, because of that, the Prince was just a satire or something. But actually, if you read Machiavelli properly, he's just as cynical, just as interested in power, as it really works in the Discourses as he is in the Prince. So I. He's the same in both books. But what these elite theorists sought to do was to update Machiavelli for now with more historical examples, with more data, with more. And to try to make that into a kind of science, into, like a political science. And so Mosca, he, In his book the Ruling Class, looks at lots of different historical examples, and he says every society ever, regardless of what it calls itself, whether it's a dictatorship or a monarchy or a republic or a democracy, is. You can see there's a ruling class and then there's the mass of the ruled. You have the rulers and the ruled the organized minority and the disorganized mass. Now, this sounds like a very straightforward observation, but then if you really. So lots of people would say, yeah, well, that's obvious. Obvious, right. But then when you really start taking that seriously, you end up with a kind of conversation that we've just been having for the past hour. Okay, the organized minority against the disorganized mass. So that's the basic idea of Moscow. Right. Then you have Pareto, who basically has a very similar idea, but he talks about how is it that you get a circulation of elites. How do you go from a situation where you have one ruling class to a different ruling class? And he has a quite a long and complicated answer to that question. He says there are different types of elites. You can have foxes who rule by cunning and persuasion and perception management, and you can have lions who rule by force. All our lives, we have been ruled by foxes. Our elites are foxes. Right, right. When Trump came in, it seemed that Trump might be a lion, or he's certainly closer to being a lion than a fox, which is why it was such a jolt. But still, I would argue that we're, you know, broadly speaking, the west is ruled by foxes. And in a way, the fox fears the lion. The fox dislikes the strongman leader. And all of the enemies of the west, whether it was, yeah, Stalin or Hitler or Saddam Hussein or, I mean, you name it. Think of any regime that. Or even now Putin or Putin or Xi. These are lion star leaders. It despises the lion. So what Pareto argues is that if foxes go too far, they will start promoting, they'll start weakening the system to the extent where the liar needs to come again, this is where you get the circulation of elites.

[Peter]

Hold on. But this is.

[Nima Palvini]

This is.

[Peter]

Feels like this is in line with what I was listening to Curtis Yarvin talk about where he's been saying, kind of democracy doesn't work. It allows bad ideas to happen and we should get over our aversion to dictators. And perhaps America needs a more monarch type and America needs to build an empire now. And it to. I think to most normal people, that sounds absolutely crazy, but that's in. That sounds like it's in line with what you're talking about.

[Nima Palvini]

Well, this would be a light. I mean, this would be, as Pareto would call a lion style.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Leadership. And so, I mean, the thing is, the truth is, once you get into. Once you understand elite theory, every system is basically the same, regardless of what it calls itself.

[Peter]

Right.

[Nima Palvini]

Okay, now you can get Harder managerial regimes and softer ones. Okay. I would say that our system is a kind of soft dictatorship.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Still a dictatorship. Right. And who is the dictator is somewhat hidden and diffuse. Okay. I mean, this was most visible during Joe Biden's presidency. Was Joe Biden really in charge of America?

[Peter]

I saw a great tweet that said, if. If the government can be ran by a guy with dementia, do we need a government at all?

[Nima Palvini]

Or now, like Starmer, does anybody really believe that he is the final guy who makes all the decisions in the country? So. But yet still, people recognize that our system right now in Britain has totalitarian elements. Right. It's got elements that we recognize as being a little bit dictatory.

[Peter]

So it's a totalitarian system with a.

[Nima Palvini]

Rotating dictator, or where the dictator is just not even visible. Whereas if you could say something about Putin's Russia, at least he's in charge.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

He's the actual. He. He is the actual final decision maker. Okay. So all I would say is that system is just a little bit more honest about itself, whereas in ours, it's. It's. They like to put a lot more smoke and mirrors in front of it. But really, the actual mechanisms of power don't really change, even if you change the label. And this is where, as we carry on going through the thinkers. So, Robert, Michelle has talked about the iron law of oligarchy. So that is basically what we were talking about earlier on, where it takes you so long to get a party up and running that by the time you are actually in power, it's been watered down sufficiently that you've actually become part of the system.

[Peter]

Reform.

[Nima Palvini]

Reform. Or, I mean, pretty good example is Le Pen.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Right. And I know, funny enough, Le Pen has actually been banned, isn't she? Or something.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

As things stand. But that party has been round long enough now that it's had a lot of the jagged edges kind of shaved off. Now, if you compare Le Pen to her dad, for example.

[Peter]

But is there an argument that. That they have to become popular enough to win enough of the vote, they have to water themselves down to appeal to a wide enough group of people? See, I can. This is where I make the counter argument.

[Nima Palvini]

Right, Yeah. I mean, you can.

[Peter]

You can make that argument, you naive little boy.

[Nima Palvini]

But I mean, there's more to it than simply the policy positions.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Okay. It's about technical specialists. They have to get on board. PR people, managers of various kinds. And once. Once they're up and running, and this is like a slick professional operation, they've basically already kind of just become just another part, just another party.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

So there's a way in which the. The system is very good at just transforming things into another flavor of itself.

[Peter]

To keep it going.

[Nima Palvini]

But then some of the other thinkers I look at in populist delusion show what I'm saying about every system in the end being what you might call absolutist or some form of totalitarianism. Power is always in the final analysis, what they call decisionist. Decisionism being somebody has to make a call and it has to be an executive decision made by somebody that cuts across the normal order of things. And you can always see this in action whenever there's an emergency.

[Peter]

We have a lot of those recently.

[Nima Palvini]

Okay, so like during COVID for example, all of the normal order of things was swept out the window. All the normal protocols writes blah, blah, blah, just swept out the window. We're doing this, there's an exception. And it was. So that decision was made. Or in America, the executive orders that the president has, he just kind of decrees it through executive order. They can make certain decisions through emergency, by emergency decree. And one of the things that I was shocked by when I was looking into this and I talk about in populist delusion is that certain emergencies have been on the books in America literally since World War I. There's an emergency decree that was set up by Woodrow Wilson in 1917, still on the book, still live. And then.

[Peter]

So you don't get your liberties back.

[Nima Palvini]

Right. I mean, or you could think about other things. Like the Patriot Act. Yeah, various other things like that. But the point is that real power has to function. This is to go back to what you're talking about with Curtis Yarvin, almost like a monarch, almost like an end. I mean, you Talked about Vince McMahon earlier on. Back in the day in pro wrestling, there was a. There was a. There was the wwf, right, but there was also wwe, right? There was the nwa.

[Peter]

Oh, right.

[Nima Palvini]

There was the National Wrestling alliance, which had a committee of all different promoters from around the country. And they had a cartel, basically, where if you were running Memphis, right, and another dude was running Texas, you wouldn't run shows in Texas and I wouldn't run. So they had an agreement not to run against each other. And also if you were the NWA promoter in Memphis, say nobody else could run a wrestling show in that town. Okay, it was old fashioned cartel, but they had a committee that had to make decisions on like who books the world champion and things like that. Vince McMahon, basically the dictator of WWF, he got to make all the decisions, okay? And they could have been teams, they could have been writing teams and so on. And very often Vince would say, no, scrap that. We're doing it this way. We're going to do that. We're going to do this. He was the final. He was basically a dictator. Dictator. And if you have a look at those two models, you hadn't even heard of the nwa. If you heard of wwe, it's because that method of decision making is the one that won out. And the rule by committee, all the different rules and regulations and so on, that didn't win out because they weren't able to agree on anything. They were trying to.

[Peter]

So that's the same as my home and every business I run.

[Nima Palvini]

Right? So almost every business has to have a final arbeiter, but also somebody who can come in and say, like, look, it doesn't matter what we usually do. We have to do this. Now. This is. This is. And this is what they call decisionism. And I guess what Curtis Yavin wants is somebody who can cut through all of the systems of checks and balances in bureaucracy that's built up over the years in managerial states. Now it's come to a point where if Donald Trump tries to do all sorts of things, as we talked about it, gets struck down by a judge or he can't get it through, there's red tape. And so it needs somebody to cut through it all. That's what he wants.

[Peter]

J.D. vance, maybe can you. Does being a realist make you a pessimist?

[Nima Palvini]

I mean, not. It doesn't have to, but it. But it. It does mean that you tend to be a little bit less hopeful. What I found in. In many years of looking at this now.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Is that people have got a bias towards wanting the next, the big savior to come.

[Peter]

Yes, of course.

[Nima Palvini]

People know things are shit and they want a hero to trust in. And I mean, we're talking about Yavin. One of Yavin's favorite writers is Thomas Carlyle, one of my favorite writers also. He wrote a book called On Heroes and Hero Worship, which is worth a look. So this is something that a lot of people want. They want a big great man to come. Caesar or somebody like this. Right. Or Napoleon or Mussolini or insert other strong men here. Throughout history, people do have a kind of gravitational pull towards this, but because of that, they want to believe that people are their guy. Whether it's Elon Musk or Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Tommy or. Or anyone else, they want to believe that there's someone there, Conor McGregor in Ireland. They're looking for that strong man and that hope, that kind of desire is a very strong thing to overcome for a lot of people. They want to be optimistic. Whereas me, looking at, just coldly looking at the power, as I often do, I often see a lot of these people are not going to be like, the big savior is not going to come from this current configuration or from this set of characters.

[Peter]

This show is sponsored by Gemini. We live in a really strange time with governments driving inflation with their reckless spending and endless money printing. There is a way out of this. There is a way to protect your money, and that is by stacking bitcoin. I've made loads of shows about bitcoin. You can go and research this, you can go and read the books, but the truth is, it is the hardest money ever created. If you are interested in protecting your financial future, it's time for you to get on the bitcoin train. I have. I've been stacking bitcoin personally and through my businesses since 2017. It's protected me, it's secured my family's future, and it also strengthens all of my businesses. So if you want to start stacking bitcoin, where do you do it? Well, for me is with Gemini. They're a fully licensed, full reserve exchange and custodian. So they give you a secure way for you to buy and own your bitcoin. There's no risks and no funny business. So if you're serious about stacking bitcoin the right way, head over to gemini.com, which is g-e m I n I dot com. So I said to you, this might become a therapy session. But so I, I've always. I want to be optimistic. I mean, I think it's shit in the uk and I love the uk. I do, I love it. I love our football, I love our sense of humor, I love the countryside. But I am sad by many things. I was listening to a podcast of yours earlier where you were talking about photos from like the 50s and 60s and things look great and you go to our high streets now and they're dirty and they're vape shops. And you're right, we have been sold a dream that is. It's not been a reality. Yes, we might have had some. Some form of tech utopia, but the reality is, is our high streets are dead. There's a lot of crime and antisocial behavior. I think there has been a feminism lie where, yeah, it's Been great. Some women has some incredible careers. It's great. They have choices, have a daughter. But I actually talked to my daughter a lot. I talked to her about it the other day, you know, I said, you know, you probably want to be meeting the guy, you want to settle down with her, have kids with your mid to late 20s, because otherwise it's going to get harder. But I think we spend a lot of time convince ourselves that things are better and they're not. And I mentioned this to Connor on the way because we watched a film, what was it called? Mid 90s. He watched his film Mid 90s. It's coming of age film. It's before the mobile phones. It was right in my era of skateboarding. You know, we'd meet on a Saturday, all our friends would get our skateboards, we'd go skateboarding all day and hang out, smoke a joint and go home. And it was brilliant. Honestly, it was such a. Probably one of the best periods of my life. Yeah, this one here and I remember it. Jonah Hill directed it. Yeah, Jonah Hill. Do you remember what you said to me? I just said, I've got a lot of envy for that childhood when it felt like there was a lot less problems in the world for kids. They just went out and caused havoc and there was no consequences, really. Well, news was 6 o'. Clock. That's when you didn't disturb dad because he was watching the news at 6 and that was it. We weren't all part of the political cycle like we are now, which is this 24 hour news bullshit. And it was, that was life and it was great. There was no mobile phones, there was no social media. We just hung out and it was cool. And then. And like you said back in the 50s, everything looked beautiful and nice and it's all just a bit crap now. And I don't even see how we get back there actually. I see it getting much worse and I see we've had this, I mean again, you talked about it, you talked about, I think it was during the Blair era, sending loads of people to university who shouldn't have gone to university. It's actually the real problem with that right now because people go to university and they can't get jobs. A lot of people go to university can't get jobs and AI is wiping jobs out. And I'm just looking going, this, yeah, it is, it's that. It's Wally or it's ready player one. And I'm just like, oh God, am I By making this podcast, I talk to people I'm really interested in, but I'm also hopeful it makes the world a better place. And I'm getting a little bit involved in local politics and I've got an interest in national politics. And I'm thinking I'm 40, 47 next month. Plenty of people die at 48 with a heart attack. Maybe I'll get to 70, maybe even with. Even if I lived old, I've got 10, 15 good years of playing tennis and hanging out. Like, am I just wasting my fucking time with this shit? And are we all wasting our time arguing on Facebook about stupid shit? Like, is it all just a waste of time and I should just travel the world, read books and drink nice coffee? Do you understand where I'm at?

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, absolutely you should do all those, those things. I love a flat white, as people know as well. Yeah. And I, I think you have to have those things in your life that give, give your life meaning. Right. For lack of a better. I'm not saying that flat white will give you meaning, but having hobbies and having other interests and other stuff that you do and coming to peace with the fact that there's a lot of stuff, there's a lot of things in this world that are outside of the remit of your control. As interesting as it is to study and talk about and as, as the country is at the moment, there is a limit to what any single person can do. So for your own well being and mental health, you have to have a good balance, otherwise this stuff will drive you crazy. It absolutely will.

[Peter]

My counterpoint to that though, is that if I don't vote, it doesn't change the election, but if there's mass apathy, it can change the results. So if we all become nihilistic and just don't care, do we get forced into a worse world? And is it the collective knowledge and experience and actions from us all that actually change things? So by being nihilistic and withdrawing, am I one small part of that cog that can go into a worse.

[Nima Palvini]

I mean, this is what I'm wrestling with. I mean, what I would say is I wouldn't stop. I mean, I wouldn't stop talking. I mean, obviously I don't stop talking about these things, but you have to have a balance because if you just go all in, I mean, to a certain extent, the Facebook conversation, the Twitter conversation, arguing about this or that, whatever the current thing is, Charlie Kirk, whatever does beyond a certain level become what they call hyper reality. And I don't know if you're familiar with Ted Kaczynski, the uni bomber, Baggie. He. He wrote this extraordinary piece which was published in all the papers. You know, don't condone anything that he did. Obviously.

[Peter]

The manifesto.

[Nima Palvini]

The manifesto, Right. But if you read it, he talks in there about surrogate activities that back when we were living in villages. Right. Life was small enough so that individuals could feel like they make a difference.

[Peter]

Yes.

[Nima Palvini]

To their actual community. They were actually involved in the decision making in their own community. But now because of mass and scale, because of the. The sheer size of governments and if you get, you know, how big America is, I mean, millions of people are quite far removed from being able to make a real difference on that sort of scale. So we seek instead surrogate activities. And increasingly, I think that online, online kind of politics, hashtag activism, Twitter, Facebook has strangely become its own containment mechanism. Let me put it a different way.

[Peter]

Yeah, I get it.

[Nima Palvini]

If everybody's always just talking about whatever's trending on Twitter, what they're not doing is organizing politically in the real. They're not really engaged in something real that's going to change anything. They're just kind of. It's just another. It becomes its own. Like a Nether watching Netflix if you want. Only you're talking about politics on social media with the difference that you feel like you made a difference. Now I've made my tweet and it's got 12,000 likes. I've made a difference. But of course you haven't. You have. I mean, you haven't made a difference. Doesn't mean Keir Starmer is ratioed every single day. Yes. Every tweet he makes, he's ratioed. But he's still bringing in digital id.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

And he doesn't care. So, I mean, I guess what I'm saying is people have to be aware of the limits of what online activity can do as well. And getting involved in actual politics at the local level can be quite boring. It's like cancel meetings and they're going to do the bins and all that sort of stuff. And in my experience, people don't really like. That's not exciting. It's not much less exciting than talking about whatever's trending on Twitter.

[Peter]

It has given me a bit of a, like, it's extended my sympathy to the left a little bit in that I would traditionally consider myself small C conservative. I mentioned you before we started. I've become a little bit more libertarian. I just dislike big government. But at the same time, if I'M defending libertarian ideas. I'm defending a billionaire class and I'm perhaps defending therefore the elite class. And maybe am I at all for defending that which we know is a group of people who got fabulously richer during COVID and since COVID and we do have. This is why I got into Bitcoin, because we have this financial system that seems to be architected perfectly to continually create serfs who, who work for the state which funnels money to the richest in society. And so then I do have these sympathies, but I'm like, well, I can't. I'm not a Marxist, so I get really confused with it all. And I'm like, what the am I meant, what am I meant to think, what I meant to do? I don't want to, I don't want to do someone's bidding.

[Nima Palvini]

Well, I mean, this is a thing, right? It's like, let's say you've paid for a service though. Let's say you've given X amount of your own money for something.

[Peter]

Yes.

[Nima Palvini]

Is that thing that you've paid for, are you working for it? Are you using it or is it using you? And what I, what I'd say in many of these cases is, is that there's a kind of strange mindset that a lot of people have found themselves in that these people that you are using, let's say the Trump administration, or you're using Elon Musk, or you're using whoever it is to get what you want. And I always say that the directionality is often the wrong, like they're going to use you to get what they want rather than vice versa. A very simple thing. But it's like, well, so that's all I would say when it comes to that. Yeah. I found myself, as time has gone on, sympathetic to the left, maybe putting it strong, but I've certainly found myself kind of pulled back towards some of these basic questions around capitalism and things like that. Recently I wrote a follow up to Populist Illusion, which is called the Prophets of Doom.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Which talks about progress, the idea of social capital, P progress. And basically says, well, I don't know, like, exactly as we were talking about doesn't feel like progress. You know, you'd go back to the 90s. I go back to the 90s in a heartbeat. I've said it many times. And then we look at, you know, stuff from the 50s and the 60s and we think, well, this was the kind of life that we were denied, you know, real communities. And so on and so forth. And one of the things I've often thought about is that do people. This is a very difficult conclusion to reach. But do a lot of people. So we're used to thinking of, well, well, at least we're not like medieval peasants. At least we've, you know, we've moved beyond all of that.

[Peter]

But have we?

[Nima Palvini]

I guess my real question is, are people actually happiest in that mode where they're living in a little village where they have a purpose, where they have a place, where they have community, as opposed to the current era where people don't know their own neighbors, where people are ram, where people have wedded to their mobile phones, nobody knows anybody. You don't have any stake even in, you know, I mean, I know you're trying to do stuff in your local community, but most people are kind of set adrift. So I do. I mean, coming back to Carlisle and some of the other things we've been talking about, I do wonder if there's something missing in the. In the kind of dream that we've been sold since Thatcher and Reagan and all of the other governments that we've had. The double liberalism of Clinton and Blair. Something seems to be missing from current modern life.

[Peter]

I went out to Malawi about a year, year and a half ago, and it's one of the 10 poorest countries in the world. And I was chatting to a guy there and he said, I just want to be clear, we're impoverished here. A lot of people are happy. We went up to a village, middle of nowhere. It's very simple life. People seem fairly happy. And what we have here in the UK is a lot of people who are actually living in poverty, no hope of escaping it. Costs for everything are getting pretty extreme, and I think it's fair to say it's extreme. Opportunities for youngsters seem to be disappearing. I can understand why some kids join gangs, don't like it. And I just wonder, you know, like when you self reflect, am I just playing this game? And naturally the best way is to just stop playing, put down the piece and go, I'm done. You know, are we in need of our own enlightenment? This dark. And perhaps it's a dark enlightenment, but like a realist enlightenment, Is this what we need as a nation? Because we're all fighting, does everyone need to just be sat down and say, hold on a second, who's winning here? None of us are winning. Like, none of us are winning. Well, I mean, some of us are, but like, generally speaking, yeah. Friends who've Got two. Like both your husband and wife are both working middle class jobs, got no money at the end of the month. You know, it's, it's like, what are we doing here?

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. If I had the, if I had the answers. Yeah, I, I don't know. I mean the, the best thing we can do is to kind of point out what we think is true and go to jail. Well, hopefully not, hopefully not that. But.

[Peter]

Is there historically been a better system, a way of doing things? Do you look to history at all? I mean, is it really that village time?

[Nima Palvini]

Well, I mean, maybe this is me being a romantic or whatever, but I often think about where, I mean, yeah, people were poorer, but they seem to, they just seem to be happier, were more content. They had a. I think people have a yearning for meaning and purpose and a lot of people now, I mean, it's not just about having a job. When I was listening to LBC this morning on the way here and the government was Talking about our 18 to 21 year olds were going to make sure they work, what does that actually mean? Like, oh, well, get and work in Tesco's or Sainsbury's. But this is not the sort, that's not the sort of work that we think of in the old, you know, it's not like doing something like a kind of blacksmith or a artisanal baker or something like this. There's a, there's a, there was a kind of, or even, or even like being back down the mines. These sorts of jobs people had, how can I put it? Like they were proud, they were proud of a kind of way of life wasn't just a job, it was a, it was a whole structure of things.

[Peter]

Well, as a kid, when they say, what do you want to be when you grow up? It's not a Tesco worker, it's not a barista at Costa.

[Nima Palvini]

So I think there's hopes and dreams. There's been this tendency for people just talk about jobs in the abstract, but I do think the type of work also, it's like conservatives especially think, well, any old job will do. But I'm less convinced that some of these like kind of, you know, service based jobs are not going to get you back to the kind of sense of meaning and purpose I was talking about in the old village. The trouble is in the, in the interest of realism, I can't think of any times really where things have kind of moved, moved back. That's not realistic either. Yeah, we're not Going to get. But I don't know if we're going to get back. Back to. You know, I like to talk about Trump done. You ever see that old show? It's like a little old village where they had a Trump done. Do you ever see it?

[Peter]

So hold on, wasn't that a village within a different show?

[Nima Palvini]

Well, I think there was. It was like Camberwick Green.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Trump done. And Quigley. I think it was. There was like three. Three different ones. And it's different. I mean this is the thing. I'm in my darker moments, right. I looked at the plans for the 15 minute villages, right. That they were, you know, that Clyde Schwarm.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

And I thought, you know, if they weren't evil, right. If these people weren't evil, I can see that they're actually moving towards something that people might actually like a 15 minute like fundamentally, if you take away the ideological aspect, what they're actually trying to recreate is something like that how do we do it in a way where it's not evil? And that's one of the biggest challenges at the moment is that I have said before, what we really need is just a clear out of the entire ruling like a. The true circulation of the current elite for a different set of people who have different ideas about the world. But you know, this is where we are at the minute. That's a pipe dream.

[Peter]

Well, my friends I built up over the last 10 years will say that will come from the world of bitcoin because you'll. I don't know if you've looked at bitcoin at all.

[Nima Palvini]

I'm aware of it.

[Peter]

Yeah. Okay. I mean just the, the basic thesis is that rather than having a monetary system controlled by these elites who can print as much as they want, distribute it to themselves, you kind of have a meritocracy of money in that it's. It's restricted limit on how many there are and that what you're doing is you're having a. As bitcoin grows and fiat money dies, you've got a transition of power because you've got a new set of people who own the assets. I think when there's a certain price, when bitcoin reaches it's something like I'm guessing, but say it's a million dollars per coin, that there are more bitcoin millionaires than fiat billionaires and they tend to have a different. Generally have a different worldview. More skeptical of the elites and more skeptical of government. And perhaps you can get that revolution there. I Also have another one where I think I have this hopium with AI's real hopium that it's going to destroy these. These are going to become unusable because we don't know what we're talking to. So we're just going to have to get rid of these and we go into this world of abundance where we actually get to sit back and think about what we want to be in the world. This is my hoping version, by the way. This is my hopium version. But I do feel like in talking to you that we are approaching some form of enlightenment or need of an enlightenment.

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah, well, I mean, there needs. I think a lot of people feel that there needs to be a change.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

The big test for the current system is can it. This was the question that was asked of the Soviet Union when it needed to reform Gorbachev. And it couldn't.

[Peter]

It couldn't.

[Nima Palvini]

No, it collapsed in on itself. It couldn't do it. And I mean, funny. Reform, right?

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

I know this is a big question being asked of America, Britain and the west in general is can it? Can it? Are these systems now too big to actually be reformed in any real way?

[Peter]

Is Malay. Another example in Argentina, he's trying to do something different and can't. And now he's.

[Nima Palvini]

I read this morning that the. He has to have a payload.

[Peter]

The biggest irony, yeah, I mean, he, he did also come out, I'll get that, get the quote wrong. But he said, you cannot rebuild a nation from the roof you've got to start from. And he said, like, this stuff will take a long time, but I also wonder if what comes with that bay allowed.

[Nima Palvini]

It's like, well, and this is, see this, this is where it's kind of depressed. Like there's one of the authors I talk about is called Bertrand the Juvenile, right. He wrote a book called On Power. And one of the most depressing conclusions that he comes to is that with every revolution that takes place in history, what actually happens is that the new revolutionary power centralizes power more efficiently than the old one. So that the true meaning of the French Revolution was a. Was a more efficient centralization than the old dynasty, right? So I, or I, I don't know if you look at the Russian, the Communist revolution, a more efficient centralization than the old tsars or even Cromwell in this country, or glorious revolution, more efficient centralization than the. Than the old, than the old Stewarts and tutors and so on and so forth. So this is one of the things that I, I mean, it could Go another. Another way. Right. We could have a revolution. We could have a revolution that ends up centralizing things even further or. Or end up with a system that's even more dictatorial than the one we have now.

[Peter]

Well, if America starts empire building and maybe does do what Curtis Yarvana says, that is going to be even more centralization of power.

[Nima Palvini]

Exactly. Or if it's. I mean, some of the people he's friendly with. Peter Thiel is another one of these billionaires, Palantir and so on. Right. But these are systems of greater centralization and greater control. So the upshot, and this is a kind of way of understanding things that is counterintuitive. I read this guy called John Gray before who used to be a libertarian, like in Thatcher era, but then he kind of turned on it. He wrote a book called False dawn, among others.

[Peter]

I'm writing a lot of books down. I also bought another book this morning because of you. Ride the Tiger, I think it was.

[Nima Palvini]

Called Ride the Tiger. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But in this book, False dawn, he says that the true meaning of Thatcher was actually a greater centralization of government control in this country, as against what he calls intermediary institutions, which were the old unions, the working men's clubs, which were actually like a buffer in between people and the state. If you actually think about what Thatcher did, is she used central government power to clear out that intermediate layer. So there was now no longer a buffer between the state and the people or the workers that way. Which. Which is a different understanding of Thatcher from the one you might get from libertarians. Right. And this is, this is something that is consistent with juvenile and something that I worry about that is we could get a revolution. We could get with. They could even be this takeover of based billionaires or whatever, and we end up with something even more centralized or even more totalizing than what we have now. So I.

[Peter]

Well, as Elon and Sam Altman and Zuckerberg compete on the AI front, that is a consolidation, centralization of power. If they achieve their goals of.

[Nima Palvini]

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, they literally as ownership of all the, all the knowledge in all the world. I don't know. You can't get more centralized.

[Peter]

I felt there's a. See, this is the thing. When you go into these things, what you've now said about Thatcher, it's like, okay, well, maybe I need to reconsider my whole theoretical framework about being a libertarian and being a conservative. Yeah, maybe the unions were a good thing. Maybe I'm going back. Like you go around in circles Sometimes.

[Nima Palvini]

This is the thing. And then, and then, and then I think about other things. I think, well, you know, I look at the state of things in despair, and I think, well, people are so far away from actually being organized, actually becoming a true counter elite to the current ruling class. And then I look back and think, well, look how organized the unions were in the 60s and 70s and the 80s. And they were absolutely, I mean, way more organized, for example, than Tommy and his lads. Yeah, way more organized than anybody I know. Way more organized than any kind of dissident group, left or right, that you can think of today. And yet they lost.

[Peter]

Unions are terrible for wealthy conservatives.

[Nima Palvini]

Of course they are, of course. I mean, because they're on the side of. They're on the side of labor and higher wages. You see, this is what, this is what else I've thought about, which is that if you think about the incentives of the employer as against the incentives of labor, I've often, in my darker moments again wondered if mass immigration has been a kind of punishment on the unions and on the old working class. Because if you have a massively increased labor pool, it's union busting, isn't it? You, you're basically just bringing in people from elsewhere or you outsource it, you outsource it over there. And this is something, I mean, if any libertarians watch this. I used to be one. I wrote, wrote a book on free market economics and Mises and Hayek and so on. Classic free trade theory. Ricardo talked about how there needs to be two things held constant for comparative advantage to work. You know, the classic example with, you know, wine to Portugal, is it. And that whole thing, if you read Ricardo, he holds labor and capital constant, I. E. He assumes that the amount of workers in England doesn't move and the amount of workers in Portugal stay constant and that the capital doesn't leave England and go to India or China or Mexico, that it. That it stays there and is, quote, reallocated to a more productive end and the labor is reallocated to more productive end. That's how the free trade theory works. But of course, those two constants don't hold in the real world. Capital is mobile and labor is mobile. So I mean, what I have thought, I mean, those are the four freedoms of the eu. Goods, capital, labor, forget what the fourth one is, services. So it strikes me that you need to hold at least one of those four constant, otherwise you don't have. I mean, we were talking about community. You don't have. I mean, if all of Them are mobile. You don't have anything. The government has to fix certain things down and say, this is sacred. We don't move this. I remember reading Roger Scruton years ago and him saying, well, look for some regulations, because if it was up to the free market, they'd stick a McDonald's on top of the Eiffel Tower or in the Champs Elysees or something. And the French government rightly say, yeah, you're not allowed to do that. Right. So there has to be some common sense when it comes to this. But I do, coming back, I do wonder about mass immigration, if you think about it in a class way. Well, the working class who are now called, quote, unquote, far right, right. I mean, they would have been in unions 30 years ago. It's the same people.

[Peter]

I want to talk to you about one of my sponsors, Incogni. And that means we're going to talk about the weird world of spam. And I don't just mean those spam emails that you get day after day from companies you never heard of and companies you've never signed up to. I'm also talking about those spam phone calls you get from those people who seem to know a little bit too much about you trying to get your bank details. It's all a bit creepy right now. This all comes from the world of data brokerage. There are companies out there collecting your data, building profiles and sending that data to anyone who wants it, which is why when one of those scammers phones you up, they seem to know everything about you. Now, I've tried, I've tried myself to get off these lists, try to get off the phone lists, try to get off the email list. I unsubscribe from every one of these emails that comes in. But this game of whack a mole, it just never ends. And so this is where Incogni comes in. They do all the hard work for you. They reach out to these companies and they will get you legally removed from these lists. And I know because last time they sponsored my show, I signed up and I didn't take the free option that they offered me. I wanted to pay for it. I wanted to see if you get value for money. And they removed me from 79 data broker lists. And so I've stayed on, I've stayed a subscriber and I have seen a massive decrease in the number of emails and phone calls I've been getting. So it's a great service. I recommend you check it out. If you're sick of this like I was. Please head over to incogni.com forward/peter and sign up. If you use the code Peter, you will get a lovely 60% discount. So that's incogni.com forward slash Peter. I really, I really think you should not. Because I think you should become a bitcoiner or buy bitcoin. I think you would find it really interesting and it's making me think about certain things that are happening in that world at the moment. So yeah, excuse me if I'm telling you things you already know. But like the, the, the, the foundational idea of bitcoin is decentralized. I can freely trade with you. There's no middleman who can stop me. It's a fixed limit money so it can't be inflated and it decentralizes power, blah blah blah. And, but I've also, there's been significant changes in the world of bitcoin over the last couple of years. There's one guy, a guy called Michael Saylor who had a company called Strategy Data company, feels like a palantir before a palantir and he's accumulated a lot of Bitcoin, over 1% of the supply. BlackRock have become involved and they've created ETFs. So now you buy the ETF, not the Bitcoin. And then there's talk within government of removing the right to self custody. They have prosecuted people who've run services where you can obfuscate some of your transactions. And so I, you know, every hat I can put a hat on that says bitcoin itself is another tool that was created for control or they've realized a threat and now they want to just control this as well. Because it does. Yeah. And, and then you say they've got their hands in everybody.

[Nima Palvini]

What I will boil down to the whole bitcoin dream, sadly is what it boils down to is you and whose army. That's what it ultimately, ultimately will get at. Are you going to take on the American army or the British army or whatever?

[Peter]

Well, can you, can you have a coup by bitcoiners become, is there enough of them become powerful enough? Like do I become a politician here and does my friend Freddie New become one? And then my friend Alan Farrington and then in government we've got maybe eight bitcoiners that become 1012. And it's a little bit utopian, but that's what a lot of bitcoiners would say is that's the world where we want to try and build.

[Nima Palvini]

I mean the Only flaw in the plan is, is if it's, if it's truly decentralized, if you wanted to do it, you'd have to be actually organ. You'd actually like, have to be organized like Lenin and the Bolsheviks or, or any other rev. You'd actually have to agree on strategy and ways forward. And, you know, maybe. Because if you just wait. If you just wait for it to happen bottom up, it's not going to happen. But it. If you were actually organized, then who knows? Stranger things have happened in history.

[Peter]

Well, this is something I will push Curtis on because he. He is a. He is a bitcoiner. Okay. Just one area we haven't gone into enough, and I do want to just get into with you before we finish, is we haven't taught enough about the media and the role of the media. I am particularly disappointed by them and highly skeptical of them. And I love doing this. Right now, I believe I'm not being controlled. I haven't had any knocks at my door yet. I haven't had anyone offer me some money to spin particular narratives. But, but I, I wonder how big a problem they have been and, and can that be broken down? Can we, can we get an enlightenment through a more decentralized media?

[Nima Palvini]

So I would say that over time, the story of social media, which is what this is, has been much like the bitcoin scenario where the powers that be. Because it's. It's like in every field, something takes off. It's the Wild west, cowboys and so on. And then power realizes it and regulation. Regulation starts catching up.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Or they start kind of wanting to control that as well.

[Peter]

Ofcom will come for us.

[Nima Palvini]

Right. And in this, in this space, I would say it took them a while, but at this point where we're 10, 15 years deep into people having these sorts of conversations online, there's. There's probably a lot more, how can I say, like, influence influencers who have taken money or pushing certain lines or, or just straight up working for certain people. There have been cases on both the left and the right, you know, and again, it can be different factions. It's not always the same people. It could be the Democrat Party, it could be Republicans, could be whoever, you know, foreign. Foreign governments. In many cases Russia, in some cases. These. These things have all come. Come out. They're documented. You can look at them. So that's one thing where they've kind of figured out, all right, well, social media is the thing now. So let's get our. Let's get our message in that space. Another one is more insidious, though, which is to what extent are people like us or anyone really who has like a news or a news adjacent podcast still downstream from actual media? And so often I've noticed, I mean, I very often noticed that whatever trends or whatever people talk about on their shows and so on increasingly is just kind of one click away from I. E. The. The impetus for people talking about it has come from the news in the first place.

[Peter]

Yeah. But there is an incentive model for that. So this is something we have to fight. So when we plan a show, say this one afterwards, and it goes onto YouTube, we have to decide the title and we have to decide the thumbnail titles. Now if you go into AI we plug in our transcript and we say, suggest some titles for YouTube. Who really controls the world. Yeah, it will say, yeah, it'll be who controls the World? Or, you know, whatever. Something like that. Something. And it tries to give you ones that it knows will work. You won't believe what Nima just exposed now. We tend to not get sucked in it too much. I would love to just release a show that just had Neymar Pavini and a picture of you. No. Is going to watch it. You might get 10,000 views. You get the, you know Faraz. Faraz, my dad. Yeah. So I think we were like his second ever podcast. We released a show with him that's like over 100,000 views in YouTube but completely outperformed what we expected. But that's down to the title.

[Nima Palvini]

I have a channel. I've got a machine. I call it the Slopinator.

[Peter]

The Slopinator? Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

I come up with my own title.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

And it gives it a score. It'd be like 48. Okay. I'll click the button, be like, you know, so and so, so and so Expose. And you just have to run with it because otherwise it's the difference between. So I absolutely understand the incentives behind the algorithm. This is the. This is what I'm getting at. Does it then become its own kind? I mean, in a way, it becomes its own little nudge mechanism or control creation. We're all being pushed along by the same algorithm.

[Peter]

But where I was going with this is like the, the. The incentives of the independent media aren't too far away from the mainstream media, especially if you need the money. We don't. We don't need the money. We're okay. We're in a good place here, so we can come do what the fuck we want. But if you're not, you Know if you need to get to a million views on your YouTube video because you need the three grand of ads, then Charlie Kirk is murdered. Assassinated. You've got to make your Charlie Kirk show. Covid happens. You've got to do your Covid shows. So if stuff is being pushed in the mainstream, well, that's what people are going to then be searching for and you've got to do it. And so I see what you're saying, but I think it's the incentives of the individual themselves. It's like, what are we meant to do to fight that?

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah. And. And this. This is it. This is it, though. It's like. Well, you kind of. We're so. We're trying in our small little way to show a bit of resistance to this massive machine that we're all part of. But it's got. This has got an extraordinary mechanism of just being able to contain and commodify every form of resistance and then sell it back to people. It's the shake of our T shirt again and again. Yeah, only. Only ones has got, you know, so it's. It's very hard. I don't know what to. And this is. And this is where I also have those moments where I was like, shall I just go and play my pickleball and drink my coffee and not worry about all this? Because this, it's so vast.

[Peter]

Well, it's more like, what. What's the point? You know, you really self reflect. You go, what is the point? Point? If I can't. If I can't make change and it's not making me happy and actually I'm potentially contributing to making it worse. I think about that a lot. Like screaming at people on Twitter, you socialists. Or calling everyone. I just disagree with a commie. I'm like, what am I doing? Part. Like you mentioned being part of the clown show. Like, am I just another clown in the clown show? Like, what's the fucking point?

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah, I mean, the thing is, I've been through all this as well.

[Peter]

Hold on, Connor, why are you laughing? It's very depressing, this, but also very true. And also, yes, you are a clown. But can it be the opposite? Could it not be depressing? Can it be enlightening? And actually you just free yourself of the chains, go and go and live a good life. You know, I can play tennis every day. Yeah, we can. But how do you get to that mind frame? Just get in the car on the way over this and go, I'm done. I mean, I still want to make a show, but maybe make more episodes like this, rather than getting some backbench Labor MP and discussing their, I don't know, reforms to employment laws. Because what's the point?

[Nima Palvini]

I mean, I mean, it's possible that over enough time, through enough of this kind of discourse and so on, that enough people may have a kind of revolution within. In the mind.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Because in a way, it has to happen there first, which is something I want to. I mean, I've talked about the Boomer truth regime in the past. I was. Big topic we can't really get into. But it, in a way, until people have had these internal revolutions within their own minds, it's going to be difficult to make bigger change in the real world. Because still, even in the current, even in the current discourse, the sorts of people who are thinking along the lines, I am or you are probably, like, very small even.

[Peter]

I think it's growing, though.

[Nima Palvini]

It's. It's growing, it's growing, but it's still relatively small. Like you said earlier on, you know, some people might think you. And think you're out of your tree.

[Peter]

Or something, but I, but I think, I think all the majority of the people are going to vote reform are, Are essentially adjacent to this. They just don't know it. Yeah, they don't know it, but they kind of like, they, they see it's all broken and not working. And so reform is like, oh, and I think if reform doesn't work, they're going to go, oh, none of this works.

[Nima Palvini]

Yeah. And in fact, I would probably guess that a lot of reform voters are probably more clued on than I typically give them credit for. Which is why, I mean, my great hope at the moment, the only hope I see on the horizon, there's a chap called Rupert Lowe who, I think.

[Peter]

You know Rupert, he's been in it twice. Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

I mean, Tories are in a terrible state. I couldn't even remember the name of.

[Peter]

Yeah.

[Nima Palvini]

Kemi Badenok earlier on. I think Gendrick is, is already a busted flush because he was the immigration minister during Boris wave. And, and, and he's got other comments that he's made in the past that in an actual campaign would slaughter him. Plus, he doesn't have the charisma. Right. Rupert Lowe, however, I see in him the sort of character who might be belligerent enough to do what is necessary. And if he was able somehow to take over the Tory party, and I've talked about this openly a number of times already, we've talked about this. If he, If Rupert Lowe was able to take over the rotting husk of the Conservatives and flank reform from. I guess from the right, you'd say, or from a. From his position. I reckon over the course of a campaign, a lot of those Reform voters would ditch Nigel and go for. If they truly believed that it was a Tory party in Rupert's image. I think. I think that that is something that could break. Could break the spell. Because I. I mean, truly in my hearts don't believe reform. I don't even believe they're a proper political party. I think they're a kind of like a media. A media outfit masquerading as a party. But I've seen enough from them to know that they're not serious. They're not. They're not truly prepared to do what needs to be done. Whereas Rupert might be. That's the. And that's the only. That's my. We should end on the white pill, I guess.

[Peter]

Yeah. Well, look, we've had the same conversation about Rupert. I don't think Rupert's the kind of person who can be captured. I think he's pretty based. I think he's a proper conservative. And restore for me is his advert. Come and get me. And with the Conservatives as broken as they are, I think. I don't disagree. I'm not sure if you can do it by 2029, but 2034, maybe. We will see. I really enjoyed this. I knew I would. I just knew this was going to be great. I'd love to do it again sometime in the future. I'd love to sit there with you and Curtis at some point. I think that would be fascinating.

[Nima Palvini]

But we'll be hearing and disagree on a lot as well.

[Peter]

Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure. But I was also. I was asking the AI this morning about the alignments, and they said there's certain things that you. I think directionally, you're looking in the same place.

[Nima Palvini]

That's right. Yeah. I would. I would agree. In the same ballpark, yeah.

[Peter]

Anyone listening? Please do go check out Nima Palvini's books. Populist Delusion Profits Doom. Any. Anything else you want to tell people about? I'm more than happy.

[Nima Palvini]

I think that it. It's not out yet, but in the coming months, I should have a new book out, which is called Applied Elite Theory, which is a collection elaborating on some of the stuff I talk about in those two books. So look out for it. It'll be. This is the first I'VE mentioned it anyway, so.

[Peter]

Amazing. Look, I really appreciate you and appreciate everything you've done, and. And I want to talk to you about Shakespeare next time we meet, so thank you. And thank you to everyone for listening.