Unlimited Hangout with Whitney Webb

Episode Title: The PayPal Presidency Part IV: Teaching Technocracy
Air Date: August 26, 2025
Host: Whitney Webb
Guest: John Klyczek (author of School World Order)

Episode Overview

This episode continues Whitney Webb’s ongoing series dissecting the "PayPal Presidency"—the term describing the outsized influence of the so-called PayPal Mafia and Silicon Valley elites in the Trump administration. This installment focuses on how these same networks are transforming the U.S. education system through technocratic reform: advancing school privatization (e.g., “school choice”), digitizing educational funding via fintech, embedding big tech surveillance into learning environments, and merging social credit and AI analytics with policy decisions. Guest John Klyczek draws on decades of research and teaching experience, including insights from his book School World Order and recent reporting for Unlimited Hangout, to trace the history and forecast the future of these developments.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Real Motives Behind "School Choice"

• Charter Schools & Vouchers: The so-called "school choice" movement, championed as a boon for parental control and student opportunities, originated from public-private partnerships that embed corporate, rather than civic, accountability in education.
  • Quote (John Klyczek):
    "It’s stakeholder capitalism for schools. It’s going to subsidize private companies with public tax dollars, and it’s also going to remove any sort of civil process." [05:00]
• Loss of Public Oversight: Both charter schools and new funding mechanisms (ESAs, vouchers, tax-credited scholarships) remove elected school board oversight, privatizing decision making and shielding providers from civic recourse.
• Impact on Disadvantaged Students:
  • “Most of [the voucher money] is going to go to EdTech products and services that can be serviced online right in their home. Right. So basically turning your home into the government school, because with that vouchers come the government regulations." [08:58]

2. Big Tech & Neoconservative Convergence in Education Reform

• Tech Industry, Think Tanks, and the State:

  • Silicon Valley VC firms (notably Andreessen Horowitz) and neoconservative think tanks (like the American Enterprise Institute, AEI) are tightly interlinked in shaping U.S. education reform, as highlighted by mutual involvement in Project 2025.
  • Quote (Whitney Webb):
    "Everything that they had tried to sell through the public sector during the COVID era, they were going to swirl it away and try and market it through the private sector and from the right instead of the left." [14:44]
  • Quote (John Klyczek):
    "The point is this digital wallet industry ... is all leaning towards either digital identity, AI, or blockchain platform. Eventually all this stuff is going to converge..." [36:59]

• Fintech & Digital Wallets: Companies like ClassWallet, Odyssey, Merit International, and Student First Technologies, often backed by globalist actors (WEF, Koch, Rothschild, Andreessen Horowitz, etc.), are now providing the infrastructure for distributing educational funds via digital wallets.

3. Datafication and Surveillance of Students

• AI/EdTech Integration:
  Adaptive learning platforms (e.g. Clever, Newton—funded by Peter Thiel), social-emotional analytics via wearables, and AI-driven behavioral conditioning are being embedded into the classroom—with little transparency or opt-out.
  • Quote (John Klyczek):
    “Basically, this is the modern digital version of B. F. Skinner’s teaching machine... using operant conditioning algorithms that basically trains and trains students for performative compliance.” [17:05]
• Wearables:
  Health and attention-tracking wearables, sometimes piloted with Gates Foundation funding, are on the rise and blur the lines between medical surveillance and education.
  • “Bill Gates ... funded a wearable that was being piloted in New York State for students where if they weren’t paying attention, it would give them a light shock. It’s like a shock collar basically, but it’s on your wrist or something like that.” [22:50]

4. AI & Crypto: The Building Blocks of a New Social Credit System

• AI-Driven Policy: Trump’s executive order “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth” is less about using AI for learning and more about training students for an AI-dominated economic future. Meanwhile, AI is centralizing and controlling education data.
  • Quote (John Klyczek):
    “All these different AI companies basically have the green light to share all this information. ... That personalized social credit profile is going to aggregate your HHS Dishman wearable data with your AI school choice voucher, FinTech EdTech data...” [29:48]
• Fintech as Social Engineering: Education funding increasingly routed through programmable stablecoins and digital IDs (as enabled by the Genius Act) allows for fine-grained control over what individuals can access or spend—a programmable token-based control system reminiscent of CBDCs.
  • Quote (Whitney Webb):
    “If they move to only fund these [education] wallets... with stablecoins... you’ll have to have a digital ID.” [33:38]
• Tokenized Human Capital:
  Social impact (pay for success) investing will quantify and commoditize student outcomes, allowing investors to bet on and profit from human life trajectories as tracked and nudged by AI.
  • “You’ll have these feudal big tech overlords that basically own these digital serfs on these blockchain digital wallets and they’ll be forced to go through their Skinnerian operant conditioning programs…” [44:21]

5. Repression of Dissent and Expansion of Predictive Policing

• Programmable/Seizable Funds:
  Anti-woke and anti-antisemitism campaigns justify new precedents in seizing or cutting educational funding—and, as payments become by design programmable and surveillable, this power becomes totalizing.
  • Quote (Whitney Webb):
    “It seems more likely than not that there’s also a precedent being set here where they could just turn off institutions’ money or also turn off... offending students’ money...” [57:27]
• Predictive Policing, Mental Health, and Surveillance:
  The merging of education, health, and law enforcement databases via AI, alongside predictive policing tools like Palantir, grants the state unprecedented power to surveil, preemptively categorize, and detain people (especially the marginalized or dissenters).
  • “If you get angry or have the wrong tone of voice... they just put you in a mental health facility and basically become a ward of the state...” [61:44]

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Skinnerian Operant Conditioning in EdTech:
  “It’s entirely Skinnerian... If you believe that humans are basically just little widgets in a supply chain, I guess that’s a great way to make things efficient. But if you believe that human beings are agents that have a soul or at least a consciousness, yeah, it’s pretty horrific.” —John Klyczek [24:12]

• On the Collaboration Between Big Tech and Old-School Neocons:
  “They’ve been fueling some of the culture wars that the neocons have propped up just as much as they’ve been funding this futurist arm of this pseudo-libertarian Cato arm of basically the right-wing establishment.” —John Klyczek [35:00]

• On the Endgame of AI & Control:
  “You don’t have to have anything plugged into you to have technology take over half your consciousness. All you got to do is outsource half of your thinking to generative AI.” —John Klyczek [82:48]

• On Emotional Bonding with AI:
  “I never really thought... people were going to have emotional attachments to these bots, which is frightening... This product that I just mentioned, Upswing... it’s advertising it to the teachers as if it’s a great thing that your student is going to have an emotional connection to a bot.” —John Klyczek [74:55]

Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:36: Introduction — The PayPal presidency and tech’s influence on education
• 02:53: History of school choice as corporate public-private partnership; the Charlotte Iserbyt story
• 07:06: The real options for disadvantaged students—EdTech surveillance at home
• 10:11: How Silicon Valley VCs and neocon think tanks are merging to finance and shape education reform
• 17:05: Adaptive learning, Skinnerian machines, and social-emotional data mining
• 22:50: Discussion about attention-monitoring wearables and behavioral conditioning
• 26:35: Trump’s AI executive order, the AFT-WEF partnership, and OpenAI in curriculum
• 29:48: Building the infrastructure of social credit: ID, Fintech, blockchain, and AI
• 41:37: Cardano, digital ID pilots in Ethiopia, and blockchain maturity in the Clarity Act
• 44:21: Securitization of human capital: "Owning" students’ future economic output
• 50:17: The Argentina beta-test: Millei’s Facebook/Meta education plan and its US parallels
• 57:27: Programmable money as a tool for repression and campus protest suppression
• 61:44: Predictive policing, AI-driven mental health screening, and criminalization by algorithm
• 66:00: Real-world example—AI replacing human tutors, blending academic and mental health data
• 72:37: The dangers of normalizing AI relationships for children—dependency and cognitive drain
• 82:48: Final warnings on the perils of integrating generative AI into daily cognitive and educational life

Thematic Takeaway

Through extensive technical detail and historical context, Webb and Klyczek paint a picture of a civilization shifting from democratic, civic-oriented education to a privatized technocracy: powered by financial engineers, AI overseers, and social credit metrics, with even children’s futures quantified and traded as assets. The revolution—the “school choice”/“parent empowerment”—is, in their analysis, mostly surface, masking an epochal consolidation of power by a tech-corporate elite fusing the state, finance, surveillance, and behavioral control. The educational reformation charted here is less about learning and more about total societal management—warranting wide and urgent public scrutiny.

Listen/Follow Links

• John Klyczek on X: @TaoistProfessor
• John's website: SchoolWorldOrder.info
• Book: School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education (Trying Day)
• Read John’s work: Unlimited Hangout

[End of Summary]