← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
How The AI Elites Are Using AI to Track, Control, and Manipulate You | Whitney Webb PT 1
00:38:46
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If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off and Grainger is your trusted partner offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off and Grainger is your trusted partner offering the products you need, all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more, and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
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I'm Tom Bilyeu and this is Impact Theory. The last time Whitney Webb joined me, she absolutely blew my mind. Her ability to connect the dots between governments, corporations and the decisions being made behind closed doors by the elites left me stunned and with everything happening right now, I knew I had to bring her back. To look at this exact moment. Here's the deal. Governments and tech giants are making moves that will directly impact your freedom and privacy. AI driven surveillance is on the rise and big tech is working hand in hand with global power players, potentially reshaping how influence and control are going to work. That's why you guys are going to be blown away by this episode. We are talking about surveillance systems being built right here under our noses. Central bank, digital currencies quietly being rolled out. The role that the elites play and how the freaky it is and what it all means for choices you'll need to make in the near future. When you know what's happening, you can make smarter decisions and stay in control of your own life. So let's dive right into it. Without further ado, here's Whitney Webb. Trump has just come into office. Do we think, or I should say do you think as we may see this differently, do you think that Trump is somebody who has the elite view of like, hey, the right people are in power, let's make these decisions for everybody else? Or do you believe that he actually sits outside of that system and is actually trying to help the everyday person in the way that he presented himself while he was campaigning?
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Yeah. So as far as my perspective on Trump goes, it tends to do with the view, it tends to revolve around the view that he is a businessman at heart and that the focus of his political style, I guess, is deal making. And, you know, I wrote a lot in my book about Trump's mentor, Roy Cohn, who was, among other other things, the general counsel to McCarthy during the McCarthy hearings. He was also, you know, a New York City lawyer that represented a lot of unsavory figures, including some tied to organized crime, and also had the ear of Ronald Reagan and top politicians, the United States and sort of brid a variety of worlds. And he very much essentially taught Trump the art of the deal, as it were. And, you know, a lot of his close combs, close associates, like the Pope family, for example, were very politically connected, also connected to organized crime, arguably, but were very much in the business of making back room deals. And that that's how, you know, power, political power in the United States functions. And so, you know, fundamentally, I think a lot of what Trump likes to focus on and promote about his political style is around negotiations, whether those are diplomatic negotiations or negotiations with businessmen that lead to big number investments he can tout to the public, which is, you know, I think part of the impetus behind his having the Project Stargate press conference at the White House on his first full day at his second term. And I think that's also kind of consistent with what we saw from Trump during his first term as well. So when you're sort of focused on those metrics, I don't necessarily think that the focus is necessarily on how do I help everyday, Joe, I'm sure that in his mind, well, I don't really necessarily want to speak for him, but if you're of the opinion that I'm going to tout this big multimillion dollar investment in US AI infrastructure, for example, perhaps he views that as helpful for the American economy and thus helpful for the American people. And I think it is very likely that over the next four years, there certainly will be some Americans that economically benefit from Trump's economic policy. But I don't necessarily think that's going to be everybody. And I think generally, based on what we've seen so far, there's been a lot of courting of big tech executives and lot of talk about making the US the AI and crypto capital of the world. And how much of that is necessarily going to translate or trickle down to sort of refer to, you know, Reaganite economic terms, you know, to the everyday American public, It's really hard to know. But again, you know, I just Want to go back to someone like Eric Schmidt, for example, who, as I noted earlier, had sort of an outsized role in developing the AI policy of the military and intelligence community. He wrote a book called the Age of AI with a, with Henry Kissinger, and also, I believe, a professor from MIT who, I'm sorry, his name escapes me at the moment. But basically that book posited that essentially AI is going to make a two tiered society. There's going to be the top tier of people who develop and maintain AI and set and determine what its objective functions are, and then sort of a, a second class who, which we would assume is larger than the first class. So they don't explicitly say that, but who AI acts upon. And eventually that that group will lose the ability to understand and really be able to conceive of how AI is impacting their lives and will develop some sort of dependency on AI for things like decision making, sort of leading to this phenomena that they refer to in the book as cognitive diminishment, which I sort of see as this idea of, you know, we've all heard it before, if you don't use it, you lose it. Sort of the idea of like mental math. You start using a calculator or a phone calculator or something like that, and it becomes more difficult over time and eventually very difficult to be able to do mental math in your head. When, perhaps when you were in grade school, it was much easier to do that because you were sort of, you had to use that ability regularly. And so they sort of, they essentially argue that by not making those decisions and outsourcing that to AI, this particular class will lose the ability to make those decisions over time. And when you also factor in that there's a lot of effort to sort of outsource creativity, art and music to artificial intelligence. Will that have an impact on people's ability to create? And what sort of impact will this have on society? And, you know, these are things that I think sort of get left out of the public discussion. And I don't think they're really on someone like Trump's radar as a businessman. He's focused on sort of the bottom line, the number, the success of the negotiation and how successful it looks, frankly, whether it's to his base or to businessmen he wants to court or other people, foreign leaders, and I'll stop there, I guess.
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B
That was great. So how do you feel when you hear about AI creating this two tier system?
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Oh, I certainly don't think that's positive. I think it's sort of the technocratic model that we discussed earlier, where you have an elite class that sets, you know, the system that will micromanage the masses at the end of the day. I mean, they don't explicitly say that in the book, but if you're familiar with someone like Henry Kissinger, for example, and some of his more controversial views on, on the masses and the public and some of his more infamous quotes, you know, I mean, is that a system that he wants to happen? I don't really know. He's dead and so no one can ask him. But I think it is kind of disturbing in a sense that some are
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B
some of his more infamous quotes. I'm not, I'm not super familiar with Kisser. I know who he is, but I couldn't quote him.
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C
Well, he created a national security memorandum, for example, that viewed people that live in the third world birth rates and, and you know, in the Global south as national security threats to the United States and wanted to implement policies to reduce their population size, for example, and sort of had what I would argue is eugenicist bent to some of his policies. And he was one of the mentors, of course, to people that have become infamous in recent years like the World Economic Forum and cla Schwab. And you know, some of his more infamous quotes that he's known for refer to, you know, soldiers being, you know, pawns of foreign policy essentially sort of like, you know, people's lives are just, you know, pawns on a chessboard for the sort of the elite figures to move around, you know, for, for their benefit. That's sort of the mentality, as I see it, of someone like him. But obviously he's been, you know, praised as a model statesman and all of this stuff and has mentored Trump in his first administration, mentored Hillary Clinton, you know, people on both sides of the aisle. And. But I personally, you know, I think the more you look into someone like that and his connections with sort of dubious oligarchs like David Rockefeller going, you know, significantly back in time, you know, he's sort of someone that promotes this idea of, of a global technocracy.
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B
Okay, so do you have the impulse to want to see AI slow down or stop?
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C
Well, I don't necessarily want to say that I'm like a Luddite and we, and we should all go back to the Stone Age or things like this, but I think there needs to be like an actual public discussion on this, particularly on the fact that our out of control national security state in Silicon Valley have Essentially been fusing over the past few decades. And what necessarily that means, because a lot of people be, you know, will say stuff. Well, it's AI, the private sector. But when that private sector company has multimillion dollars conflicts of interest with the national security state, I think that should, you know, be part of the discussion necessarily. And I think also there needs to be a way to sort of know whether some of these algorithms are hyped or whether what the company says their accuracy is, for example, is actually accurate before decisions are made to outsource major decision making, whether at the government level or the local level or really on any level know, to an algorithm. So, you know, as an example, during COVID 19, the, the governor of Rhode Island, Gina Raimondo, sort of gave a green light to this Israeli company called Diagnostic Robotics to use, you know, the health data in the state to predict COVID 19 outbreaks before they could happen. Right. And Gina Raimondo, by the way, HIPAA laws, well, I'm, I'm sure a lot of those were sort of suspended under the emergency Whoa. Justification of COVID 19, but I'm not exactly familiar with the legal or potential legal snafus of that at the time. Or maybe they justified it by alleged, you know, saying they, they sort of took anonymity. The data, I don't really know, but the idea was to sort of use that data to identify local hotspots and predict outbreaks before they happen. And so obviously, if you know, the algorithm of this company predicts an outbreak, there would be sort of these localized lockdowns and people would lose their ability to engage in, in person, commerce and freedom of movement, et cetera. So, you know, consequences that are pretty significant to the people living there. And when I reported on at the time, as I recall, but it's been a few years. But I do know that the algorithm, per the company, was under 80% accurate. I think it was somewhere in the 70s. And so that's the company. Right. So if it's not independently vetted, and this is sort of, you know, company prior, at the end of the day, is that overinflated? It's quite possible. Right. And so what if the accuracy of that isn't really in the 70s, in the 60s or near the 50s, it's no better than a coin toss, right? Is it really worth putting that kind of power in the hand of an algorithm that isn't necessarily going to be more efficient and accurate? But all this hype that's been generated around AI as an industry suggests that has sort of created this public perception that AI is inherently smarter than human decision makers and more efficient and more cost effective, for example. I think these are kind of problematic scenarios that need to be considered. And I'm not trying to be a Debbie Downer or poo poo on, on innovation, but I think, you know, civil liberties do matter. And I think people need to be very mindful of that, especially considering, again, the Silicon Valley fusion with the national security state and the national security state's tendency to opportunistically whittle down American civil liberties for their benefit.
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B
It's a really interesting intersection that I clearly need to start thinking more about the way that I would look at that. And this ties into something you mentioned earlier. During the inauguration of Donald Trump, you had all these tech billionaires there by him, and it gave. It certainly gave me like, ooh, this is why people are paranoid about oligarchy vibes. And I'm not super prone to that kind of thinking. So the fact that it hit me like that, I was like, okay, definitely it's good that people are being paranoid. But the intersection feels like it's a very natural intersection to me. So the reason that national security would be fusing with technology is that technology is going to be the front where these battles are fought. And so anybody that's seen, you know, the however many thousands of drones that China can launch and get to, you know, dance like a dragon is very compelling. When you see it, it looks so cool. And then you imagine, well, what happens when 10,000 drones like that are able to go over aircraft carrier and each one drops a reasonable size payload that by itself would do next to nothing. But you drop 10,000 of those little somethings on that ship and you turn it into Swiss cheese, you realize, ooh, the way that we've been doing national defense is not going to work in a modern combat scenario. And so it is going to be these tech guys that we're going to need. Even if you just grant me that AI is going to get really good at hacking, which there was a recent announcement, I forget if it was from Deep Seek, I can't remember. But there was a company that was doing this where they wanted to see how well their AI was at hacking. And it was unbelievably good. And so they were doing it as a red team inside of a company. So they can say, okay, here's how we broke our own systems. Now we need a blue team that can come in and shore these up. But you're gonna have to have that, like, if you are living in a world where one country has AI and another does not, the country without it will lose. And so to me, this feels like an arms race we cannot afford to not engage in. And so it just becomes a question of, all right, well, given the stakes, how do we actually navigate this? So I, I would not want to pull apart the national security apparatus from the Tech Bros to be dismissive. So what do you do? I don't know if you want to stay in the lane of like, I just want people looking at the right things or if you actually have an insight there, but I'd be very curious. Hang tight. We're taking a short break, but when we come back, Whitney breaks down how AI and surveillance systems are directly impacting your life. With Verbo Care, help is always ready
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before, during, and after your stay. We've planned for the plot twists, so support is always available because a great trip starts with peace of mind.
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If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
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All right, we're back. Let's get into it. I would not want to pull apart the national security apparatus from the Tech Bros to be dismissive. So what do you do? I don't know if you want to stay in the lane of like, I just want people looking at the right things or if you actually have an insight. There's a. But I'd be very curious.
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C
You know, I do prefer to stay in. In my lane as much as possible, frankly, especially on sort of these sticky, stickier issues. But I do have some opinions. So first of all, as I referred to earlier with the national submission National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and some of these FOIA documents that came out of there, there is the promotion of the idea that essentially the US needs to do what China has done and replicate this civil military fusion model in order to win the air arms race. And sort of the argument inherent in that is that in order to beat China, we must become China even more than China is. And, you know, a lot of the justifications, you know, around China as an adversary are related to how China is not as protective of civil liberties. As the, as the United States at least postures itself as being, for example, and a major difference in the value system between the China, between China and the United States. And so if you're willing to adopt exactly that model, civil military fusion in my opinion is really not that different than fascism. At the end of the day. It's, it's the corporatist model and I don't think it's necessarily what, what Americans want. And yeah, there is a trade off and I think people should consider it. But again, I'm not in the business of telling people what to think. But what happens if we go so far out of a desperation to win an AI arms race with China, for example, that we completely surrender our, the value system that supposedly makes us a freer, better society in the process? I think that is complicated. And I would also point to the fact that, you know, transnational capital, a lot of that has enabled China's AI arms race. There is a lot of cross pollination in these, you know, Chinese government adjacent tech corporations and the United States. You can look at people like Larry Fink, for example, who definitely have a lot of eyes to Chinese industry, for example, and people like Steve Schwarzman quite similarly, very much tied there, who's, you know, head of Blackstone and they're both very close personal friends of Donald Trump. And also of course, Fink has ties to the Democrats as well. And a lot of, you know, Henry Kissinger, who I mentioned earlier, a lot of top CCP officials have pictures of them with Henry Kissinger in their offices. They love the guy. And there was that effort of course, to open up China to, to commerce and partnerships with Western companies, for example, you know, back several decades, decades ago. And a lot of that involved, you know, US Capital and in some firms like Bechtel, for example, that were very much tied to the national security state of Ronald Reagan, for example, a lot of top people that served in his and top national security positions under him were involved in Bechtel, which was building a lot of the infrastructure that helped enable China to become this, you know, the power that it is. And why is that not being talked about? And I mean this is really isn't exclusive to Democrats either, though they often get rightly pointed out for having some conflicts of interest of this nature. But someone like Howard Lutnick, for example, who was head of the transition team for Trump and as his incoming Secretary of Commerce, has the same, his, his company he runs has the same tie, arguably a more direct tie to a Chinese government majority owned financial entity that was a big scandal for conservatives when Hunter Biden's Rosemont Seneca was also tied to. But there's been no conservative uproar over this tie. And you have to kind of ask why that may be and why you have a lot of these big tech people, Elon Musk included, who has a major role in the national security state of the United States, is one of the top contractors to Space Force in the Pentagon, for example, and Starlink and all of these things through Tesla, has a lot of ties to Chinese commerce and in tech giants that also have rather cozy relationships with the Chinese government as well. Why is that not being discussed as, you know, a potential national security risk if we do really need to become China to beat China? You see what I'm saying? Like, if it was really, that was really the key driver of our issue, shouldn't we be scrutinizing the ties of these oligarchs to both China and, you know, some. And our own national security state? And you know, again, I think if people are familiar with my books and my work, there is a scandal that really exposed a lot of this that happened during the Clinton administration and was not properly investigated at all. It's remembered as, as Chinagate. And it was really of, you know, sort of today is, I would argue, misremembered as a campaign finance scandal for the Clinton reelection campaign. But what was the scan, what, what was the alleged bribery of the Clinton reelection campaign meant to accomplish? And if you look at what these, you know, forces gained, what these, what these figures gained by sort of, you know, for all intents and purposes, bribing the Clinton re election campaign, it was facilitating exports of sensitive national security technology to China. And a lot of that was done through a company called Laurel, which has since become, I think, part of Lockheed Martin. And the guy that, that ran Laurel at the time, Bernard Schwartz, nothing ever happened to him at all, despite the fact that he helped pass very sensitive satellites and other military technology from the U.S. you know, directly to the Chinese military and nothing was done about it. And he was actually a major backer of Biden in 2020. Why was that not covered? Don't you think conservatives should be all over that story? And you know, again, this sort of makes me concerned because I think there's not enough talk about transnational capital in these types of situations. And there's a very urgent need to go back and reexamine a lot of the past scandals of our national security state, Chinagate specifically, because as I note in my book, the Death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and a lot of people at the ITA Department of Commerce. Those were the most people targeted as this bribery scandal of China Gate because the Commerce Department oversees the export of sensitive technology to foreign powers. Right. And the fact that most of the employees that knew about that scandal were all essentially blown up in the same, you know, aircraft accident and that Ron Brown had a bullet hole in his head when his body was discovered in the plane, why has that not been. Well, it's true. You can look at the evidence and it's absolutely there. And, you know, why can't we examine this? And shouldn't it be disturbing that the incoming head of the Commerce Department has a direct tie to the Chinese government in the context of that type of scandal of China Gate and targeting the Commerce Department specifically?
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B
Is that Howard? Nick, who are we talking about?
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C
Yes.
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B
Interesting. Okay. So yet again, Whitney Webb, you lay new things at my feet that I have not yet looked at. I love this. This. Okay, so what? Yeah. Oh, and you do it well. What is your hypothesis on what's going on? Very generous interpretation would be. Well, this is globalism. This is people trying to make sure that there are good relations with these incredibly important international players. And we for decades tried to make, make China an ally, open it up so that we could invest there, that they could invest here. And it's only crazy people like me, Tom Bilyeu, who are like, yo, we're in a cold war with China, and this is about to get really weird. What do you think? If that's the naive or overly optimistic view, what do you think is really going on? Is it just personal enrichment and they don't care? Hey, if. If I'm the Clintons and I have to give China our secrets, but it helps me stay in power, I'm going
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C
to do it well. So I would argue that one of the reasons or what we can look to is sort of one of the markers of this whole trend beginning of this sort of bleeding of national security state issues between countries when it really doesn't make any sense. An example I like to bring up is a man named Samuel Psar. You may know him as the stepfather of Anthony Blinken. He was also a prominent lawyer for big tech companies and a lot of other corporations. Also a very good friend and in close relation to Robert Maxwell Ghisain, Maxwell's father, and he wrote a. Was very active in what he said was sort of smoothing over relationships between east and west during the Cold War. But essentially what he g. He said in testimony to Congress in the early 70s is that there was the rise of what he called the trans ideological corporation where you essentially have the capital, you know, the multinational corporations, many of them based in the west, making joint ventures with the communist owned state owned enterprises in the East, Russia and China. And that these were essentially fusing to form an economic structure that was unaccountable to any government in the world. And when asked if this, that he, if he thought this development was a good thing, he essentially said yes, it was. And that was back in the early 1970s and nothing was really done about it. And you have to kind of ask why, why is that? And it's kind of interesting too for those that subscribe to, you know, the, the thesis of someone like Carol Quigley who wrote many decades ago about this idea of the roundtable groups and all of that, you know, sort of Cecil coming from Cecil Rhodes and Britain and efforts to sort of remake the British Empire at a global scale through covert means. You know, they essentially, that thesis essentially argues about creating an unaccountable economic entity as the means to doing that. A blob if, if you will, that's probably the easiest way to understand it. And essentially I think what we have arrived at as a consequence of that type of, you know, behavior and you know, situation is a situation where we essentially have the nation states acting as enabling environments for policies that are often drafted at the, at, you know, the international level by think tanks. And I'm sure the most notorious of those are things like the World Economic Forum, but there's the Council on Foreign Relations, there's Chatham House, there's csis. I mean there's a lot of these entities around and you know, oftentimes Congress people aren't really directly writing the policies they're voting on. They're handed laws and a lot of, sometimes those are developed from these think tanks which are funded largely by, you know, multinational corporations and sometimes, you know, directly by big tech oligarchs like Bill Gates for example. And those are sort of, you know, shopped, not just, you know, in one country, but oftentimes in multiple countries. And so you sort of get multiple countries agreeing to enact the same policy framework for a variety of things. You know, some people have argued that's why, you know, essentially globally there was sort of lockstep agreement about what policies to enact in the situation of COVID 19 and also why, you know, ostensible adversaries like Russia, China, the United States, most of the west all agree about the, you know, sustainable development goals of the United nations, which if you actually look into the SDGs, a lot of it is about sort of pushing us into this fourth industrial revolution where life becomes increasingly digitized and increasingly surveillable. And really I would ultimately argue is about the creation of, of new markets at the end of the day. And a lot of the push for Digital ID is in that. And that's why some have argued that this is sort of a policy that's being implemented globally. And it is true. You know, Digital ID in particular sort of, I think the first time most people heard about it might have been in COVID 19, but in the post Covid era digital ID has made, you know, has been popping up essentially in every country around the world. So has surveillable, programmable and seizable money, whether in the form of CBDC or its private sector equivalents. And I think it's fair to say that, you know, in countries like United States, where they don't want to have a, a cbdc, for example, private sector is going to produce it and they've done that in many occasions or to make it sort of, I think more palatable, you know, to a more liberty minded public. It's not coming from the state, it's coming from the private sector. But ultimately, you know, the end result in the, you know, the policy is essentially the same. And so, you know, in a sense, yes, I guess some would argue that that is globalism in a nutshell. And Technocracy, which I mentioned earlier, you know, was an actual movement and that particular movement built around this organization called Technocracy Inc. Which the Canadian branch of which was led by Elon Musk's grandfather, that argued for the creation of all these different unions around the world, these different techniques like a European Union, an African Union, a North American Union, et cetera. And that the goal was to sort of push that, some have argued via the idea of this multipolar world where you sort of ending the unipolar model. And I think that's, you know, essentially what, what we, what has happened essentially.
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B
Okay, whoa, let me, let me see if I can boil this down, make sure I understand it. Stick around more with Whitney Webb after this. And we're back. Globalism is a much bigger move than certainly I would have thought started much earlier than I would have thought, that has really fused governments together with these transnational corporations. That the play in this moment, as you begin thinking about what is the end game reasoning for all of this, is to open new markets, to concentrate power in the hands of the elites to really give people a way to control policy at the global level, but not having it be championed by the governments, but instead be championed by the private sector. So it feels more palatable that it's coming from the individuals. But ultimately much of this is happening out of sight, that we are not questioning many of the things that we should have. The scandals would bubble up, but they would never be pursued to their logical conclusions. So that we could end up connecting the dots, see who the finite group of players are that are really moving this forward. To that end, you said something that I saw in my research that I found very interesting, which is when thinking about Jeffrey Epstein, stop following the sex and start following the money. And that it is far more compelling what he did to prop up or collapse national currencies than the sex stuff. And that in fact, the sex stuff may be being used by the people involved as a way to distract you from the part that actually matters, which is the currency manipulations.
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C
How did I. I would add to that also, since I brought up China Gate, that it appears that Epstein had some sort of role in that as well, because a lot of his visits to the Clinton White house in the mid-1990s were with a man named Mark Middleton, who was one of the key figures in the Clinton administration actively involved in China Gate at that time. And at the time that was going on, Leslie Wexner, who Jeffrey Epstein worked for during that time, essentially took over Southern Air Transport, which had previously been the CIA owned airline and was involved in the Iran Contra scandal of the 1980s, had previously been in Miami, and he brought it to Columbus, Ohio to move cargo from Columbus, Ohio to China. And there were Ohio law enforcement officials at the time that called it the Mayor Lansky run because they felt like it was tied to some sort of organized criminal activity. And when you consider that there's also evidence that Epstein hadn't been involved with arms trafficking back in the 80s and maybe in the 70s to an extent as well, that certainly warrants investigation, I would believe. And I think it's. That's part of why when most people talk about the Epstein Clinton relationship, they tend to avoid the Epstein Clinton relationship when Clinton was in office and focus almost excl. Almost exclusively on when Clinton was out of office. I, you know, post 2000. And I think that is problematic and really needs to be looked at especially. And again, you know, local Columbus police wrote a report linking Leslie Wexner to organized crime and it was suppressed at the highest levels of the Columbus pd. But that was the opinion of Investigators working on the murder of his tax attorney, who was shot in broad daylight, like shortly before he was supposed to testify to the IRS about tax evasion. So again, there's really not a lot of interest in looking at major aspects of the Epstein case. And so. So that's something I focused on in my book, obviously. But I think it's a very good example, in part due to the enduring public interest in that case. I think it very effectively shows that there are certain places that despite the public interest, there are places most people will not go in terms of trying to investigate what really happened there and get to the truth of the matter. This takes me back to my point earlier, that people cannot make informed decisions without being empowered with knowledge. And that knowledge requires effective, unbiased reporting and it requires transparency. And unfortunately, we have a major lack of both of those two things. And I think part of that is unfortunately, because there really aren't a lot of investigative journalists anymore. And I think a lot of people in independent media, which is supposedly the new media now, are much more influenced by what, you know, gets clicks and the algorithm than they are in following the stories that really matter, because that's not necessarily where the money is or where the cloud is.
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B
Yeah, there is. There's certainly a fractal to open up there. I don't consider myself a journalist. I have no interest in becoming a journalist. And I do like what new media brings, but I don't like that journalism itself has been relegated to such a small piece of the media landscape. So I hear you on that.
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C
Well, I'm not trying to dump on the new media paradigm entirely, but I think there should be multiple types of journalists working in it and that there should be people that investigate and dig into these inconvenient facts and things like that and act as watchdogs and also people that help popularize content and are more focused on the algorithm and metrics, because that is the reality of content distribution today. But I'm saying there's a noticeable dearth of one of those things. And I think it would. The public would be very well served by that changing.
- [38:03]
B
Yeah, no, agreed. Question is how you bring economics to it. Okay, so I'm always trying to build a mental model that allows me to predict the movements of the world. That might be an easy way or to at least understand how if I do XYZ thing, I'm going to get a certain outcome for me to make sense of all the things that you're saying. I don't see a way to make it make sense without going, oh, they actually don't they? The elites, which I defined earlier. Same definition applies here. The elites don't want or at a minimum don't care about a thriving middle class. Because if they're going to make globalism work in a populist moment, which is fascinating, that the game really becomes about moving them, doing a massive wealth transfer through means that I had never considered before because my thing is always like, well, hold on. These guys are going to realize that you need a thriving middle class, otherwise they come for your head. But they don't come for your head if you keep them scared enough and you're providing the protection. And then you really can continue to hollow out the middle class and make a feudal. A neo feudal social structure which seems crazy and impossible to believe. And admittedly I am more entertaining this line of thought than I am adopting it. But if you are using technology as a way to surveil and suppress, then if you believe that that's an inevitability and a necessary way to stay safe in the new global stage, then a nice added benefit is that you can use it to create the Panopticon. Fuck. It's very interesting. It's very scary, but very interesting. All right, that's part one with Whitney Webb in part two, we're diving into what this means for your personal freedom and the decisions you need to start making right now. Don't miss it. Till then, my friends, be the legendary.