In this episode, Simone and I discuss a story about a U.S. raid on Venezuela that went viral in right-wing circles, including Fox News and the New York Times. We cover what we know and don't know about the raid, and why we think it may have been fake.
00:15:46.580Venezuela isn't giving their best to Venezuela.
00:15:48.440Well, you've got to understand, if they didn't, how bad this makes them look on the public stage.
00:15:53.700Because they publicly said, we're giving Venezuela our best.
00:15:57.300Well, of course they are because they're – ooh, I'm sorry.
00:15:59.620No, but what this means, one, they lose face, but two, across Latin America, anybody who's like, do I side with the U.S. in this power struggle
00:16:07.500or do I side with the enemies of the United States is rethinking things right now.
00:16:12.280And that's meaningful because China does have their sticky fingers all over Latin America.
00:34:00.220You invest in a private military force, you go in, you take him out.
00:34:03.600Well, it's kind of embarrassing, because at first, I just was so swept up in the narrative, where I was like, oh, yeah, like, Trump was joking about saving $50 million.
00:34:13.120And then, someone in our family pointed out to me, like, Simone, you know that, like, this costs the U.S. government tons more than that to execute this operation.
00:34:22.300And especially after hearing about all the shiny toys they wheeled out for this.
00:34:26.120Well, no, but what you're not considering is all the things they got to test in a live situation.
00:35:04.820Oh, by the way, people do not know this about us.
00:35:06.700When we talk about, like, starting private military organizations and everything like that, there was actually a time in my life when I was looking to partner with somebody who had a lot of expertise in this and actually start a, a, a, a mercenary company, right?
00:35:20.840Like a, a black ops sort of mercenary type group.
00:35:23.300Oh, was this the, this happened a couple of times.
00:35:37.260The first time I did this, it was with somebody who worked in counterterrorism a lot and worked with the Russian government and the Georgian government in, in counterterrorism stuff.
00:35:46.700So they had a lot of connections in this field and they went on to be extremely, like, they ended up going into a different field from this, but they were, they would have been successful.
00:35:55.820Like, like, this person is easily worth over a hundred million dollars at this point.
00:35:58.740And when I was talking to them, we both were not long out of college at that point.
00:36:03.440So, like, we probably could have put something together.
00:36:05.120Like, they had all the connections to do it.
00:36:07.160The second time I was looking at doing it, the guy ran a private security company.
00:36:23.280And here's what I think the problem is.
00:36:24.620I think this is why I'm hiring mercenaries anonymously.
00:36:27.640And the problem is with Maduro in that bounty is there just aren't enough bounties out there.
00:36:35.760Like, if the same amount of, I guess, it's not even about, it's more like PR.
00:36:43.520Like, remember when cap and trade was like, oh, that's the solution to climate change.
00:36:47.660We just need some kind of carbon exchange cap and trade system.
00:36:51.100If instead it was just kind of normalized that you put out bounties for military or security risks to your country, then there would be a sufficient marketplace to justify investment in the creation of companies that did this much more efficiently.
00:37:07.740You know, a market-driven security economy and infrastructure.
00:37:29.880We have to take a few steps back because, like, so there are groups, there are mercenary groups that make full-time tons of money off of this.
00:37:39.040The one that you know best is the one from Russia that what's-his-face fell out of a helicopter guy used to run.
00:38:01.680His plane crashed because, and when asked the reason why, it appears that accidentally hand grenades detonated inside the plane crash.
00:38:12.600Putin suggested from the post-mortem that he may have been on drugs, and that is why he brought hand grenades onto his airplane, and they went off mid-flight.
00:38:39.180Point being, is Russia has one of these already.
00:38:43.620So if you're asking why the number one one in the world right now did not take the bounty from the United States, I'm pretty sure it's because they thought the U.S. wasn't going to pay the Russian paramilitary organization, which was linked to the Russian state, for taking out Maduro.
00:38:56.880I don't think it was a conflict of interest.
00:38:58.480And even if they did take out Maduro, they now have a problem because they're linked to the Russian state, and that's not in the Russian state's best interest.
00:39:05.800But again, like what? You can only think of one.
00:39:10.360No, hold on. Hold on. There are other ones.
00:39:13.800The problem is that the other ones work on contracts for the United States government already and make basically infinite money from the U.S. government already.
00:39:22.520Well, but see, that's not, that is not a rich economy. That is a stupid RFP-based.
00:39:28.800I understand the problem here, Simone, is that the existing organizations like this, I remember,
00:39:34.360I wrote the effing business plan because I was, I love that people, when they make conspiracy theories about us, they, they are so.
00:39:41.800It's always not true stuff and the true stuff no one talks about.
00:39:45.320It's like actually so much worse that I like had a business plan at one point for putting one of these together.
00:39:50.800So you like literally have an antagonistic guardian journalist over and you give her your governance playbook for a city state where we do deeply, by their view, unethical medical experimentation and only give citizenship to people based on how much money they contribute.
00:40:08.240Don't allow any poor or weak people in and, and, and, and she covers it and no one talks about it, but vampires and suddenly everyone knows.
00:40:20.460I wish that was, you know, what was, what was covered about.
00:40:23.120No, they don't cover our weird ideas for, and we were actually in talks with a foreign government about setting that up as an autonomous state.
00:40:29.740Like, I love when people are like, what about all these crazy projects that never end up at fruition?
00:40:35.580Our crazy project for a totally automated school works now and is awesome.
00:40:39.560It's the best schooling platform I've seen, parasia.io.
00:40:43.020Our basically turning like a sieve tech tree into like an entire educational infrastructure.
00:41:14.780And now our backend fully autonomous AI agents that can do things like make phone calls and send emails.
00:41:19.540That's not working on the backend, but I don't want to make a mistake.
00:41:21.660Like I did with our fab release it to the public before it's totally stable.
00:41:24.400So we're being like way more edgy about releasing that.
00:41:27.640But like, that's a cool project that I don't see anyone else offering to the general public is fully autonomous AIs that can code, use GitHub, make phone calls, send emails.
00:41:38.740Have their own rich inner life independent.
00:41:42.940Our audio feature for our fab.ai allows you to use any top of the line AI with any prompt system you want with audio, which I have seen no one else do.
00:41:54.120They all use a separate audio system that means the AI you're dealing with is much dumber.
00:41:58.960So this is like the smartest whiz audio AI you can use on the market.
00:42:03.120Like I actually do do things sometimes when I don't move ahead with something, it's because I'm like, oh, this is probably not worth it.
00:42:10.160Given the risk involved or given the investment we need to do this or given the, you know, or we don't raise money for it.
00:42:15.960Or we don't like that happened with the, the like city state thing we were trying to do.
00:42:20.760And I mean, like there, there are extremely well-connected and well-funded city state people who have received, I think at this point, tens of millions of dollars who still can't find a home, you know, like just, just because, you know, we drop things when they are genuinely.
00:42:36.560To be successful with a project, especially if it's a bit of a moonshot.
00:42:40.820But you, you can't just have a good idea and you can't just have a great network and you can't just have initial funding.
00:42:47.480You also have to have the right timing.
00:42:50.600Like first you had web van and, and then you had, and what, like the original like pets website or something.
00:42:57.120With web van, the reason she mentioned this is that if you're young, this was like DoorDash before DoorDash.
00:43:00.940Now DoorDash is huge, but web van went bankrupt and lost everyone who'd invested in it tons and tons of money.
00:43:04.880Like the dot-com boom showed that you have to come on the market at the right time.
00:43:09.240And so, yeah, I mean, you can have a great idea, but it's just not time for it.
00:43:13.200Like your dad did like invested, I think, or created a company that did customized kid books when now they're pervasive and they're lost a little.
00:43:22.420And he also started the, one of the first major chains of cell phone stores.
00:43:27.980When cell phones first became prevalent, he ended up selling it and it didn't make a ton of money.
00:43:32.680I mean, they had like 45 locations or something, but it basically, he was just too early to the market on that.
00:43:37.740Now Carphone Warehouse became like a huge thing in the UK, right?
00:43:41.520Like, now people today might be like, why would you have a show, something just for cell phones?
00:43:47.720And he was like, well, I think this is going to be a market one day.
00:43:49.660But you can get to the point being, market opportunity I saw is a market opportunity you're pointing out.
00:43:54.380Which is most players in the private mercenary scene right now are either working with actors that have active antagonistic interests with many geopolitical players.
00:44:04.980E.g. they're tied to Russia or they're tied to North Korea or they're tied to, and that just limits the types of contracts they can take.
00:44:12.940Or they are, they work directly as like PE owned companies working with the American military and don't want to do anything interesting.
00:44:22.220Yeah, they're too loaded and yeah, they're, they're, they're very conservative.
00:44:25.520They're not going to take over a mind or they're not going to, you know, like, like, like Wagner does.
00:44:31.060They're not going to do stuff like try to stabilize or like create new states.
00:44:35.320I was like, what if you created like a, a, a, a good aligned one, right?
00:44:40.340That is at least aligned with the best interests of people in a region, but was also willing to do sort of radical reconstruction of regions and stuff like that.
00:44:48.200The rise of AI and also the, the playing out of demographic collapse, you're going to get this combination of governments no longer being able to sustain any level of military.
00:44:58.580And small groups of people who are able to do outsized things.
00:45:03.300I mean, I actually think that this is a great opportunity is automated, like gun drone swarm mercenary groups.
00:45:37.940If the drone blows up to take out a target and you're dealing with like a $50 million potential reward or something like that, you don't really care.
00:45:46.020Like if the drone is destabilized by the gun shooting it and it falls out of the sky, you don't really care, right?
00:45:52.400Like, so with a lot of this stuff, it's just about, you know, precision, fire.
00:45:57.180Well, the giants on whose shoulders we can stand now are numerous.
00:46:04.260And we've learned so much, for example, just from Palestine attacking Israel in the Iron Dome, right?
00:46:10.700Like it costs Israel so much to defend itself and it costs Palestine so little to send over all these rockets.
00:46:16.860And a lot of it's just kind of, you can financially grow people down.
00:46:19.280Also, Ukraine has done so much innovation in not only inexpensive drone creation, but the creation of drones and other tech that can survive in frozen tundra.
00:46:29.340Because an issue is that many electronics just don't work.
00:46:54.020The thing being is that you basically get two systems you can optimize around now, which is the like, we're just going to go in and kill as many people as possible, which is like what Russia attempts to do.
00:47:03.180And then with Ukraine, it's like, let's be smart and fight against somebody who's just trying to come in and kill as many people as possible.
00:47:08.800But that's really different than a targeted strike.
00:47:10.880Like if the Ukraine wanted to go in and try to do more, which they've been doing more of recently, like deep into Russia surgical strikes, I think that that's where you have a sort of dimorphic advantage for the like high tech players.
00:47:25.720We as a U.S. just won't give them the technology they use to implement that.
00:47:29.880But we in the U.S. can also build some of these other systems to deploy in specific areas.
00:47:35.260By the way, if you're wondering why, if you're like, well, if it's so easy to put something like this together, then why doesn't the Ukraine do it?
00:47:41.400Specifically with the Ukraine, it has to do with two factors.
00:47:44.660One is that they have an opponent who's actively defending against this.
00:47:47.500If you're attacking an African dictator or something like that, like they're not going to be able to actively defend against this as easily as a Russian troop is going to be able to.
00:47:56.260So, you know, they don't have the active anti-drone defenses that they have.
00:48:00.320The second thing is that they have to care about expenses more than you would have to.
00:48:05.680Like to the Ukraine, it would matter if every time a drone fired, they lost that drone.
00:48:11.260It does not matter to you, a mercenary or that's taking lucrative contracts, that you lose a drone every time it fires.
00:48:16.920Because they're in an attrition conflict right now.
00:48:19.400So I guess the problem with the bounty system and why we see a huge RFP-based mercenary system and not a bounty-based system is it is fairly capital intensive to maintain mercenaries.
00:48:33.820And the equipment, the equipment's not cheap.
00:48:51.080So with him, it was just like he already has people who he'll employ for projects.
00:48:55.180So this is why we need my city-state comprised of willing and often inmates from private prisons.
00:49:04.660But the other time we were going to do this, the way we got around that problem is we were just going to use foreign governments where we had connections.
00:49:11.100Because a lot of governments are looking for ways to make money and so you can use their existing military forces they have to work with you on operations like this if you've got the upfront capital.
00:49:24.740Because not everyone is, let's say, the militaries aren't all as professionalized.
00:49:28.760They don't all have as strict of like internal government regulations as the United States.
00:49:32.220But anyway, lots of interesting opportunities out there is all I'm saying, right?
00:51:02.160Yeah, if it's waspy enough, most of the good ones are...
00:51:04.760If it's old boys, if it's on a golf course...
00:51:07.420Every waspy secret society that you've ever heard of, they'll try to get into and are members of, but they don't want everyone to know that about them, right?
00:51:15.340Like, they don't want that to be what the family...
00:51:17.920Because most of the secret societies are really more, like, just social clubs for, like, personal validation and stuff.
00:51:23.160And I've gone to most of them, you know?
00:51:25.220The best thing is, after the Joe Rogan episode was aired that listed us among other conspiracy theories, a bunch of people wrote to us about their favorite pet conspiracy theories.
00:52:19.260And you have gone to, even the ones that I can't go to, and we've both been together some, and, like, they just aren't what people say they are.
00:53:28.400I should know, at the very least, know that I'm beefing with them.
00:53:32.040What other Collinses have reached out to us that, like, are from farther reaches of the family and, like, acknowledge it and know about it.
00:53:40.780The biggest conspiracy I can confirm is that powerful people know and talk to each other about leadership.
00:54:05.500Well, and the other thing that people have to know about us and what we can communicate to you is I remember once I was talking with base campers.
00:54:14.360And I was like, oh, we were just talking with a billionaire yesterday.
00:54:21.920And I'm like, obviously, I can't talk about it.
00:54:23.880And then, you know, a few months later or, like, a year later, it comes out in the New York Times that, like, we're meeting with Elon, right?
00:54:32.200And I'm like, I couldn't talk about that until somebody else who was at those meetings leaked that, right?
00:54:38.020So there's a bunch of connections and people where I can just be like, oh, we know X person or Y person or Z person that we can't talk about because you stop getting invited to these things if you're talking about it, right?
00:54:47.660So I think that it's also important to note that whenever we, like, quote, unquote, name drop, you will notice we always name drop with the source that broke it because we never name drop without it being broken by an external source or an external leak because that's very important that you do not do that, right?
00:55:08.300If you're operating in a social contract-based NDA, if you've ever signed an NDA agreement, you're aware of the fact that you're not sworn to secrecy.
00:55:18.220Like, you can't never talk about the thing.
00:55:19.980You just cannot talk about anything that is not public knowledge that any random Joe on the street couldn't look up and find.
00:55:26.780You can share anything about the company, you know, you're signing with as long as the random person on the street can find it.
00:55:32.600And that's our general rule, and this is a general tacit understanding, whether you're going by Chatham House rules or not, of all of these behind-closed-doors societies and just general polite society.
00:55:44.880You shouldn't talk out of school or what.
00:55:48.560But it really annoys me because fans of the show who are, like, aware of how much we're covered by the media and stuff like that, they'll say things like, well, you have no idea what X person is thinking.
00:56:00.660And when we're, like, we do know what they're thinking, I can't say, because I was texting him yesterday, right?
00:56:08.260Like, and that always really worries me.
00:56:09.960It's not our place to share stuff like that.
00:56:15.640That's their place to share if and when they ever want to share these things.
00:56:20.460But I can't say that there are interesting things that go on in, like, this.
00:56:23.600The weird thing about, like, the agentic, like, wealthy people we know is, like, they're the only people who do everything.
00:56:29.280If people know us, they know we have, like, 100 ideas and we want to execute on all of them.
00:56:32.580And it's, like, and everyone else I know who's, like, competent enough to execute on all of them is always somebody who you've already heard of.
00:57:02.060And so, and there are actually a lot of those people in our audience who are just, like, able to do everything and they just want to stand the down low throughout their lives.
00:57:11.600Because also, like, a lot of the really wealthy and successful people we know, like, with wealth, like, if you become a billionaire, suddenly you've got billionaire problems.
00:57:21.720And after a certain amount of money, the marginal returns diminish significantly.
00:57:27.620Like, there's, you're not going to be happier.
00:57:30.040Your life is now a lot more complicated.
00:57:37.320He gives great, great, he's, he's on, he's active on X and often in Basecamp comments and sends us amazing fodder for the show.
00:57:44.940He said something that, like, the number of crypto-based either kidnappings or muggings or some kind of, like, violent attack in the UK are now incredibly frequent.
00:57:56.740Like, basically, wealth brings with it, and more, more so, more so now than ever before, I think.
00:58:24.000But the, I don't know, I'm still, yeah.
00:58:26.740Guys, tell us if there is actually any, like, quantum safe.
00:58:31.880I just don't, yeah, I'm not convinced by anything we've read.
00:58:34.840But, no, yeah, what I'm saying, though, is, like, a lot, there are a lot of people who choose to not actually get that wealthy, and not actually get that connected, and not actually get that powerful, because it's not actually as great as people can do.
00:58:44.800Well, it's funny, yeah, there's a lot of people we know who are incredibly wealthy, and they do not seek power after they gain wealth.
00:59:02.520Like, some people are just kind of going on an autistic maximization function of, like, well, my last goal was to, like, make another 10 million.
00:59:11.820And I guess my next goal is going to be to make another 100 million, and they're just going to keep going, and it's this pointless game for them.
00:59:19.180And for other people, like, their goals shift after they reach certain goals.
00:59:22.840We've seen some people go from, I want to amass a lot of wealth to, I want to amass a lot of influence.
00:59:29.080And, like, you see their shift subtly going from, like, really focusing on their business to trying to build a content empire.
00:59:35.420But then they just end up buying a lot of, they're just, like, viewbotting constantly because it's really hard to build up that kind of reputation.
01:00:14.420So, like, you can't get people to, like, even discover you and decide they like you if you don't trick algorithms into putting things that you are.
01:00:22.420Well, in some people, it's just, like, embarrassing if you don't have enough reviews or likes or anything like that, you know?
01:01:49.720Because now I want to make a generals game.
01:01:52.540And it's got four core factions that are hugely different from each other.
01:01:56.700You've got the U.S. faction, which is overwhelming force in technology.
01:02:02.100You've got the Israeli faction, which is, like, based around, like, really intense, like, spycraft-related stuff.
01:02:08.940You've got the China faction, which is basically controlled by AI and likely a sort of spamming faction, mass-producing lots of AI dumb stuff.
01:02:19.100And then the final faction will just be, like, the GLA from Generals, basically, like, a terrorist faction.
01:02:23.720I always really loved the GLA faction in Generals.
01:02:26.160Is Generals a turn-based game or something?
01:02:28.680No, it's an old, like, StarCraft-type game.
01:02:30.960It was made in the series that, like, Red Alert came from.
01:02:34.280And it was the USA, terrorists, and China were the three core factions.
01:02:38.460And they all acted, like, really unique mechanics.
01:02:41.020And it's been modded up, like, pretty intense.
01:02:43.120Like, I think even just you could mod that game.
01:02:45.240And I'll put one of the RFAB Autonomous Agents on this as soon as I get them, like, really good at coding to just code for us and code up a maybe a mod to that to add, like, a Israeli faction.
01:02:57.300And then reset the world to be, like, a post-demographic collapse apocalypse, post-AI proliferation apocalypse where, like, Europe has collapsed, South America has collapsed, and there's only a few power centers left on Earth.
01:03:09.620I think that'd be a lot of fun to play.