In this episode of The Oren McIntyre Show, host Oren sits down with Matt from King Pilled to talk about the PayPal Mafia and the idea of a new set of elites that could replace our current political and economic elites.
00:01:50.160It's primarily a live stream show on YouTube, but we also upload to the audio podcasts.
00:01:55.560And I'm basically a longtime listener, first time caller here to the Oren McIntyre show.
00:02:00.840So your show and your guests and the stuff you've talked about has had a big influence on me and my own, I guess you'd say, ideological development, for lack of a better term.
00:02:09.300Coming from essentially like a Hoppian ANCAP and then ran face first into the events of 2020, both the early part of 2020 and then the later part of 2020.
00:02:19.920There's kind of two separate major events there that they really transformed the perspective for a lot of us.
00:02:26.420There was a lot of us within the libertarian sphere who had to come face to face with the realities of real politic and the insufficiency of libertarianism as a political ideology.
00:02:39.960So then there was a little, if we could exaggerate our influence a little bit here, there was a movement within the libertarian community.
00:02:50.420And a group of us who came to be known as post-libertarians ventured away from libertarian dogma.
00:02:56.720And for that, we were deemed heretics.
00:02:58.900And there was a little kerfuffle there for a little while.
00:03:01.260So Pete Quinonez was in the same circle, same time.
00:03:05.080So he's also been a big influence on me.
00:03:06.900So if you like Orange Show, if you like Pete Show, then you'll probably enjoy King Pilled as well.
00:03:10.780Well, like I said, this idea is really important.
00:03:13.400It was nice for you to go ahead and flesh out the idea of a counter-relief because we talk about it in the abstract so much.
00:03:19.920But it's great to have it laid out in a way that people can connect it to real events and understand what that might look like.
00:03:25.920So guys, we're going to dive into the PayPal Mafia.
00:03:31.100What kind of plans might they be making?
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00:04:47.880All right, Matt, so the PayPal mafia, if you Google this, it comes up, and you're not the first one to use this coinage.
00:04:55.760There have been New York Times articles and others where they go ahead and try to tie together all these kind of different Silicon Valley influencers, people who are big tech CEOs,
00:05:06.200but they're often including very liberal people, radically left-wing people, very progressive, who are on board with the regime.
00:05:13.940I think you're using the term in a very different way.
00:05:15.980So first, can we lay out what you mean when you talk about the PayPal mafia?
00:05:20.380Yeah, so this was actually something that was brought onto my radar by a good friend of mine, Jason, from the 2-Bit podcast.
00:05:26.960He and I were kind of looking into Vivek Ramaswamy, and a friend of ours had recommended that we pay more attention to this guy,
00:05:32.780and I kind of wrote him off as Republican Andrew Yang.
00:05:35.820But I decided to start listening to some of his long-form stuff.
00:05:39.040I thought, oh, this is interesting, a guy who's running for president, and he's going on all these really long-form podcasts.
00:05:43.120That's not the typical thing you see a presidential candidate do, but you could expect that this sort of thing would start to happen eventually.
00:05:50.080So I started listening to his long-form talks, and I realized very quickly, okay, this guy's not a vapid airhead like Andrew Yang.
00:05:59.040This guy's not just someone who's put out here just to deliver a message, just kind of an empty vessel.
00:06:06.420This guy's sharp, and he's the closest thing to a neoreactionary politician that I've ever heard in the rhetoric and stuff he's using.
00:06:12.740He's talking about the managerial class, explicitly referencing James Burnham and talking about things like circulation of the elites.
00:06:20.140If not directly, he very clearly has a deep understanding of them.
00:06:24.920So right around that same time, Jason had said he has a segment he does regularly called Friend or Fed,
00:06:32.900where you just pick someone, you use that person as a jumping-off point to discuss, is this person a friend or a Fed?
00:06:38.240And he said, I want to do a PayPal mafia, Friend or Fed.
00:06:42.320So there's this Wikipedia, go look at it.
00:06:44.380So I was aware of Peter Thiel, I was aware of Elon Musk, obviously, and I was aware of the PayPal phenomenon.
00:06:50.240I've kind of followed it for a while, and it's been there, something that's present in my mind.
00:06:54.980But I didn't realize that PayPal mafia actually was such a thing that there's a whole Wikipedia page for it
00:07:00.540that lists off every single person who was adjacent to or involved in the starting of PayPal.
00:07:07.260And so I just started reading through these different people, reading their biographies,
00:07:11.300looking at the companies that they've started, looking at the investment firms that they've worked with.
00:07:16.380And I started seeing the same names over and over again, which you might expect if you're starting with a group of people
00:07:21.580who are clustered around a specific organization, then it's not a surprise that they would continue to be cross-invested with one another.
00:07:28.340But that also doesn't diminish the significance of it, I think.
00:07:31.860Because this is now, you're starting to see a network of extremely wealthy people who are, you know, we live in a software world,
00:07:38.980we live in a digital world, and that's their specialty.
00:07:41.660They're the people who derive their wealth from the creation of and development and investment in the primary technologies that run our world today.
00:07:51.960So I just started to look at them and see all their different connections and realized that I was playing not even like six degrees,
00:08:00.120I was playing something like three degrees of Peter Thiel.
00:08:02.040Even the further out I would get from the original PayPal Mafia person, I would eventually get kind of going down the rabbit hole
00:08:09.600and I'd get connected to someone else that would circle back around to Peter Thiel again.
00:08:13.600So I've been aware of Peter Thiel, and obviously he has, it's well known that he's had like libertarian inclinations.
00:08:19.700What's most interesting to me about him is his understanding of Rene Girard.
00:08:23.700He was a direct student of Rene Girard, whose primary contribution was this idea of memetic theory.
00:08:29.820And essentially the way, just a quick and dirty with memetic theory is everybody, every one of us doesn't know what to desire.
00:08:38.320We allow the desires of others to inform our desires, which eventually creates rivalrous relationships where you have multiple people who all want the same thing.
00:08:47.860They all begin embodying the same thing, which is why conflict tends to arise among brothers versus like people who are completely distant from one another.
00:08:57.200The closer we are to one another, the more in conflict we become.
00:09:01.360And then there's this idea of modeling, where once you understand this nature of human beings, then you can provide models for them to inform their behavior.
00:09:10.780This is what the influencer culture is rooted in.
00:09:14.600So I had this understanding of Peter Thiel as a guy who is not just like some whatever, just whatever billionaire, if there could be such a thing.
00:09:21.820This is actually a very deep philosophical thinker who has his fingers in a whole bunch of different significant things.
00:09:29.400He's seen as he's referred to as the don of the PayPal mafia, but he also is within Silicon Valley, within the technocrat community.
00:09:37.500He's seen as a as really a model for them.
00:09:41.100So many of them model themselves after him.
00:09:43.220So where he's going, they're likely to follow.
00:09:45.780So I started going through just picking some of these significant guys and starting to read through their Twitter timeline, because most of them are on Twitter.
00:09:53.960Most of most of them are are pretty active.
00:09:57.800And I noticed there was a consistency in the things that they were talking about.
00:10:02.100These are guys who are are ostensibly lifetime Democrats.
00:10:06.680You know, they've gone to all the elite universities.
00:10:09.040They're they're creatures of the regime, essentially, as what you would expect.
00:10:13.960And but they're all very loudly countersignaling many of the key platform issues of the regime today.
00:10:21.540It's pretty undeniable that all of them are going to vote for Trump.
00:10:53.120Others are actually vocally supportive of that.
00:10:55.560So it's it should be clear that this PayPal mafia thing is not a coordinated dynamic that I'm watching.
00:11:01.720I'm seeing emergent patterns of patterns of behavior that are that are sprouting up from within the regime coalition.
00:11:09.980Because the regime is not a single monolithic entity.
00:11:12.760The regime is a coalition of different of different bodies that have different incentives, but they align along particular incentives.
00:11:19.700And the goal of the regime is to pursue its agenda while maintaining this coalition together.
00:11:27.220And what I'm perceiving happening is that coalition is beginning to fracture.
00:11:31.120So I want to look and see who are the most significant members of that coalition who are fracturing away and which direction are they fracturing toward?
00:11:41.300Because that's going to inform based on an understanding of elite theory.
00:11:44.200That's probably going to inform how this regime collapse and reformation ends up panning out.
00:11:49.700Yeah, I think a lot of times when people think of the circulation of elites from Pareto from elite theory, they think of an elite that is totally outside.
00:11:59.660It's totally or maybe they just, I don't know, pop up out of the rocks or something like that.
00:12:04.000That's that's where your elite, your counter late comes from.
00:12:07.320But of course, that's not what Pareto says at all.
00:12:09.320He specifically says that the circulation of elites is always going to leave a number of people who are part of the prior regime in charge.
00:12:20.440That there's always a civilizational continuity that runs through those continued interlinked elites.
00:12:27.160And so what you're seeing is usually not a complete displacement of the ruling class, but a significant, a more significant churn than you normally would.
00:12:37.720And that's what actually brings a shift in ideology or direction.
00:12:41.480The river will still stay in its bed to use Pareto's exact language.
00:12:45.540But the but the course of it might have changed slightly.
00:12:48.600The dynamics inside it have changed significantly.
00:12:51.420And so we're going to still see people who were involved prior.
00:12:56.400In the regime, but then with the new elites, but something important will have changed.
00:13:02.580And I think a lot of people look at Musk and they look at the and they look at other people involved and they say, oh, well, these guys, you know, they're already central to the regime.
00:13:10.900They already work with them. They're already plugged in. They're already creatures of the regime, as you say.
00:13:16.340And so there's nothing significant here. There's no real change because, you know, Elon Musk, you know, he survives on government contracts and all these things.
00:13:23.840But of course, this was true of Caesar, too, right?
00:13:27.000Like the like the people who were involved in that particular shift in elites were all already elites.
00:13:35.000They weren't just random guys off the street.
00:13:37.400They were already plugged into the way that power worked.
00:13:39.780They were simply denied access to many of the things that they wanted to do.
00:13:44.480And so I think that when you look at Musk and you look at this possible changeover, people need to realize it's not going to be all just a lot of guys you've never heard of who have no connections to the prior ruling class.
00:13:56.140But it's going to be guys inside the current ruling class who realize that it's sick, that it's dying, that there there's significant parts of what the regime believes in that are going to inhibit their ability to do what they want.
00:14:07.940And this is going to force them to take actions, just like Caesar was forced to take actions that he probably otherwise would not have taken if he simply had access to power in the way that he had desired in the first place.
00:14:19.320Right. Caesar wasn't an outsider until he was right.
00:14:23.220And then he he became the most important outsider there.
00:14:27.340But prior to that point, you might not have predicted that he was going to be an outsider.
00:14:31.860He would have looked like a key regime creature.
00:14:34.000This is something that I've thought for a while.
00:14:36.060You know, when when the Ron DeSantis phenomenon first started happening, everybody was pointing to, you know, how his his handlers or his, you know, what what have you behind him.
00:14:45.980I the people would say things like, well, he can't be same with Tucker Carlson.
00:14:51.160They'll say, well, these guys can't be some sort of counterforce to the regime because look how deeply embedded their life has been within the regime.
00:14:57.960And my counter to that has always been that's actually one of the strongest cases for them becoming that sort of figure.
00:15:04.940Now, I would say DeSantis pretty clearly is not the figure that a lot of people wanted him to be.
00:15:11.080And I think that that place is very valuable.
00:15:13.500But simply being an embedded part of the regime is actually that that's not an argument against the idea of a regime of a future regime outsider that actually motivates this type of regime change.
00:15:25.940It's actually one of the leading indicators of it.
00:15:30.500So I started going into this trying to figure out, OK, what are these guys talking about?
00:15:36.520What are they what are they what are they triangulating toward?
00:15:39.860And I've been trying to pick out the threads that I'm hearing from them, that particularly the things that that indicate them as diverging away from the regime talking points.
00:15:49.280I think we've kind of gotten a little numb to this with the way that I think there's been so much, quote unquote, waking up or noticing of these various apparatuses of the regime lately that especially those of our little circle of the Internet.
00:16:06.100I think we've become a little numb to the significance of people noticing the mechanisms of the regime prior to a few years ago.
00:16:15.280But now the idea of something like a deep state, the idea of compromised elections, potentially the idea of these sorts of things, people are beginning to talk about them and become concerned about them.
00:16:27.240It may be a problem that the regime can transmute into a new power grab, but I don't think that's that's clearly a settled issue.
00:16:35.020So the things the key things that these people are, are what if I could distill it down to something that captures all of it, it's that they see the American identity as a good and noble and aspirational thing.
00:16:51.400The there I think there's a lot of shallow sort of naive.
00:16:56.160They're still liberals fundamentally, so they still have this kind of shallow, naive view of politics.
00:17:00.840But they're beginning to move along this trajectory that a lot of us have taken that led us away from, you know, there's there's a good number of your audience.
00:17:09.980I know like who are like me, who are once upon a time kind of some variant of BoomerCon, and they've gone down the journey that's led them to where they are today.
00:17:17.460I'm seeing that same thing happening with guys who are billionaire tech founders and tech investors.
00:17:23.600Some of the names, the significant names here that people might know would be David Sachs, for example, or Chamath Palpatia.
00:17:35.280Could you connect those guys to their to their respective like companies or things that they're so that people have an idea of what they're involved in?
00:17:42.600Yeah. So David Sachs is one of the actual core members of the PayPal mafia.
00:17:48.560He's one of the first names listed on the Wikipedia page.
00:17:51.940He co-hosts a podcast called The All In Podcast, where Chamath Palpatia, who's a billionaire, like multi time investor.
00:17:58.900I know. I think he owns the Clippers and has a bunch of other investments.
00:18:02.320And then Jason Calacanis, and I can't remember who the fourth guy is, though that podcast there is like a it's like a Silicon Valley commentary podcast sort of.
00:18:14.420But they've become more and more focused on current events.
00:18:17.100And they're, for example, they're very big supporters of Vivek and the types of things he's talking about, the they're much more friendly toward MAGA.
00:18:26.620They're loudly countersignaling Biden and the the entire idea of the administrative state, which led me into another line of thought here, which is if we have this understanding of the regime fundamentally being like this this managerial regime,
00:18:39.900as Burnham described, that the functions of managerialism within the regime that populate this administrative state that facilitates all of the graft and all the corruption and essentially functions as a shadow government,
00:18:50.720while the rest of the main branches of government are just ceremonial.
00:18:55.340Who understands the deleterious effects of managerial bureaucracy better than the guys who've spent their entire careers building and growing and investing in tech companies?
00:19:07.340They have to deal with government regulators.
00:19:09.700They have to deal with HR departments.
00:19:11.760They have to deal with, you know, like labor laws and all these other sorts of bureaucratic interferences into their business.
00:19:20.860And after several after decades of this, a lot of them, I think, are just getting tired of it.
00:19:25.980And the DEI ESG thing was something that really was was was a was a bridge too far.
00:19:31.760They're like, no, like, like, honestly, we just want to build.
00:19:35.380We have all this this tech and stuff that we want to build and develop, and we want to be free to do that.
00:19:40.280So the whole kind of traditional American conservative message of of of freedom and the right of each individual to for self-determination.
00:19:49.880And we're all created equal and we don't need to we don't need to have there's there's counter signaling of the Civil Rights Act on all these sorts of things.
00:19:58.100This is this is the rumbling within the within a major segment of the elite class that I think was happening within our little corners of the Internet over the last five to 10 years.
00:20:09.260It's now reached up to that level and they're beginning to think and move in the same directions.
00:20:13.780Yeah, I think it's really important for people to understand the speed at which this is being adopted.
00:20:17.940And like you said, many people have marinated in this for so long that they don't take a big notice of the changes that are happening, but they are very significant.
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00:21:57.420So like you were saying, Matt, I think a lot of people take the developments that we're seeing for granted.
00:22:06.180I know I started really reading Moldbug, honestly, 2019 about.
00:22:12.600And I know some people have been reading them since like 2008.
00:22:15.900So they've been plugged into these criticisms for a long time.
00:22:19.800They're very aware of what's going on.
00:22:22.020And so watching these revelations kind of start working their way into the discourse of mainstream people, they just treat this as like, oh, yeah, finally glad you kind of came along and started figuring some of this out.
00:22:36.560And it's like, yeah, I understand why this is obvious to you in some ways.
00:22:40.460But I understand this is a revolution to a lot of people.
00:22:44.180You know, with the fact that kind of your average person has been exposed to terms like the managerial elite and the cathedral and things like this, that's actually a massive thing.
00:22:55.340And, yeah, not all of it translates one to one.
00:22:57.860But the fact that your grandpa might have seen Curtis Yarvin on Tucker Carlson is insane.
00:23:04.140Like that's try to explain that to anyone in 2010.
00:23:09.840And so this thing has been moving at lightning speed.
00:23:12.240Now, we know that Peter Thiel and Yarvin have direct connections.
00:23:15.940Many, many liberal publications have explained to him as the court philosopher of Peter Thiel in a very terrified manner.
00:23:25.680But the fact that he is making these rounds in much wider circles, much more important circles, is really important.
00:23:34.460And that influence can't be understated when we're looking at the possible transition that could be coming.
00:23:41.100Because I think you're right, and Moldbug in many ways did predict this with kind of the CEO king, that these would be the people that would have the most friction with the regime.
00:23:52.560Especially because they ran into, as you say, that DEI block, right?
00:23:57.460There's a lot of things that the government has required of these companies that is deleterious, that slows them down, creates a lot of friction, makes them inefficient.
00:24:07.800And that's frustrating for them in many ways.
00:24:10.660But this last one was like, no, you have to make the people in your business incompetent.
00:24:16.460You are trying to do highly specialized things that require a high degree of coordination.
00:24:26.500And we are going to directly make it illegal for you to function at that level.
00:24:31.000That's something that someone like Elon Musk, who's trying to land people on Mars, simply cannot abide by.
00:24:37.180And so they start running into, okay, even if we might not agree with the social conservatism of the average Trump voter or something like that, we recognize that what the left is doing is absolutely antithetical to us achieving our goals.
00:24:53.320So you talked about some of the people here, but what is it specifically you think about them that kind of brings them into conflict with the regime?
00:25:03.880And how do you think that'll cause a break?
00:25:05.680We know they're talking about these ideas now, but what could that do?
00:25:10.460Vivek, these others who are now seem connected, how could they start taking a more active role in the political landscape to change things?
00:25:22.420That's one of the best questions I've been asked.
00:25:24.880So I think where this starts really getting interesting is the overlap.
00:25:32.300I'm going to say some stuff that some of your audience is going to have a hard time believing and taking in, like over the cynicism.
00:25:39.160And I know this because I've been going through this process myself, but I just can't get around this.
00:25:44.140There's this thing called Project 2025, which is an initiative led by the Heritage Foundation and a whole bunch of other GOP NGOs and think tanks, et cetera, et cetera.
00:25:57.940I've been conditioned for a long time to be extremely skeptical and cynical of them.
00:26:03.440So I'm not even expecting there to be a lot out of this.
00:26:07.840But what I'm seeing is in the rhetoric that this Project 2025 organization is using, paired with their platform is almost identical with a lot of the stuff that Vivek is talking about, particularly with the focus on gutting the administrative state.
00:26:22.040And they're building a presidential administration academy where you have to go through.
00:26:27.420I have friends who are going through this right now where it's essentially like a almost like college level training on how to function on Capitol Hill, how to how to get bills passed, how to what agenda to pursue, how to manage the media.
00:26:39.720They're actually teaching future Republican politicians, ostensibly, how to deal with politics as it is and not how it should be.
00:26:48.860This isn't some, you know, kind of vapid, idealistic ramblings about the Constitution.
00:26:54.320This is this is real politic sort of stuff.
00:26:58.480So even if you discount from you apply the standard GOP discount and effectiveness to it, it's still a move in that direction.
00:27:05.700And I believe what's happening is that they're finding common cause with this this rising tech elite who are being emboldened now after spending years being really frustrated with being leveraged by the SEC and the FTC and and all these different three letter organizations after being leveraged into doing stuff they didn't want to do or they didn't really believe in.
00:27:29.840Now, as you say, this D.E.I.E.S.G. thing coming along is just a bridge too far and they're recognizing now that the two parties are not the same.
00:27:39.140They're they're recognizing the inner party, outer party dynamic here.
00:27:42.080And they what I what I could foresee happening is them essentially going into coming into common cause with Project 2025, which is allying themselves with Trump and saying we're going to put Trump in office with the mandate that he decimate the administrative state, get them out of our way and allow us to get back to work.
00:28:04.820I think this is the upshot as to how how effective it will be, how far they'll make it along that trajectory.
00:28:11.200There's a lot of different variables going on here.
00:28:13.740But these these are the ingredients of what I think a regime change operation would look like, where you have a core member of the regime coalition defect and align with their enemies sufficient that it can sway the balance of power, which puts the regime in a bind.
00:28:31.100Because, as you said, the thing that they are grinding against the most is the intentionally cultivated competency crisis.
00:28:41.660It's very hard to be a successful tech startup and to develop super sophisticated, complex systems when you're when you're being dragged down at the same time, when you're having to operate in really inefficient ways for completely arbitrary political reasons.
00:28:55.860So the regime has essentially been seeding this competency crisis as a way of expanding their power.
00:29:04.260But paradoxically, they're undermining the ability to maintain their own coalition and doing that because you've got people now who they want to see an adult in charge.
00:29:12.540They're tired of of this this this facade.
00:29:17.860So if that means we we need to throw our lot in with Trump and this mobilizing sort of new right coalition, then maybe that's what we need to do, because ultimately, I think these people don't want to govern.
00:29:30.900They're like, I want the government to do its job in its domain, and I want to be free to do what I want.
00:29:36.240So they got that all kind of Californian libertarian sentiment.
00:29:39.340So what they want is, is someone come to them and make them a good offer, say, hey, we're going to actually run this company, this country competently.
00:29:46.840We're going to run this country like a company.
00:29:49.400You know how companies are supposed to be run.
00:29:52.500You know what makes an efficient, effective startup.
00:29:57.500And in developing this coalition, I think that it puts the regime in a bind now, because I did a tweet thread the other day talking about how if you're if you're in the business of manufacturing black swan events to shake up the chessboard and scoop up more power, the more you employ that tool, the less effective it becomes.
00:30:22.180Now everybody is on black swan event alert.
00:30:24.840And for the people who are, oh, there's going to be a false flag.
00:30:28.980There's going to be some of these sorts of things.
00:30:31.340Having a false flag of some type or having some type of a black swan event that shows up like it like happened in 2020.
00:30:38.940That would be very convenient for the regime.
00:30:42.180And there's a lot of people who would be able to put that together very well.
00:30:45.000So there's a good chance that if you try to shake up the chessboard to scoop up more territory, you actually create an opportunity for your enemy from the regime perspective to scoop up more territory themselves by running and messaging on a platform of competence, of competent, stable leadership.
00:31:08.060One of the main disagreements I have with academic agent is I don't think these people are competent and he does.
00:31:13.940And so, you know, when you get into a lot of these rooms and I totally understand, I thought the same thing when I was looking at some of this from the outside.
00:31:25.040Everyone here has got to be in on it, right?
00:31:27.100Like everyone's got to understand the game, the mana party.
00:31:30.500You know, we all know where our bennies are coming from and everybody's kind of on board with this.
00:31:48.900But there are a lot of people who just genuinely did not understand how the game was really played, how power really worked.
00:31:56.400And we, you know, a lot of us, I'm with you.
00:31:59.180I'm one of those people who 2020 completely threw me out of my, you know, my kind of slumber and out of the matrix and red pilled me and woke me up and put me in an entirely different position.
00:32:11.120But we just kind of assume that happened to us and that that didn't happen to other people.
00:32:16.560And so we think that all these guys who are sitting in the GOP and just assumed that that was how power worked because they also went to civics class and they also got the same lecture about the Constitution.
00:32:27.740Didn't feel the same thing from the inside.
00:32:31.600And so, you know, when you talk to these guys, they know like something's up.
00:32:37.600Maybe they don't know exactly what it is.
00:32:54.840They pulled the levers of power and nothing moved.
00:32:57.740And maybe they were confused at first, but at some point, you know, they're bright enough to understand there should have been a linkage there and there isn't.
00:33:05.780And so that means something is desperately wrong.
00:33:08.660And so, you know, the Project 2025 is that attempt to say, OK, how does power really work?
00:33:16.240OK, it's not just enough to get voted into office.
00:33:18.920What does really taking power of this machine look like?
00:33:22.300What are the real structures that operate inside the United States and how do we get to those real levers of power, not just sit at the, you know, the desk of the presidential desk and article two and say, OK, I hit the button on the Constitution.
00:33:36.440Now everybody follows me like how does this really work?
00:33:40.980The left runs these stories about the dangerous plan that Donald Trump has to, like, actually be president this time around if he if he runs.
00:33:49.860And so there is a real concern that a effective plan could be put into place.
00:33:56.540And part of that would be a deployment of these different corporations, the different heads who really do want the the United States to run as a real country.
00:34:08.080They really want it to operate because one of the things that I hope a lot of people in the GOP learned and, you know, we will probably have to continue to explain to them.
00:34:17.460But but but but hopefully there's there are picking up and understanding that is that simply owning the government is not enough.
00:34:24.820You need to own part of the corporate apparatus.
00:34:27.380You need to own part of the media, the narrative structure.
00:34:30.020You need to be able to the banking, all of these things all have to move in your direction simultaneously.
00:34:35.620It's not enough to just go ahead and sit down at the desk.
00:34:40.860And the people who are looking at their corporations and saying, I can't run an effective corporation anymore.
00:34:47.240I can't. It's not just about making the money.
00:34:49.160I can't achieve the things that I want to achieve as a great man because I'm being held back by this, you know, this hairs of Bergeron system of tying weights to my ankles before I can even go ahead and get started on my project.
00:35:05.080They say, OK, I need to change things.
00:35:08.720And so, again, like you said, most of these guys are libertarian.
00:35:11.600They're liberals that these aren't arch reactionaries.
00:35:14.000They're they're not on board with whatever esoteric, you know, Carlisle and, you know, restoration you're attempting to put in here.
00:35:24.320But if they want a more competent government, they're going to have to invest in a system that looks very different from the one they have now.
00:35:31.240And that means that they are open to ways of thinking that may not even jive with some of their libertarian priors.
00:35:39.000But if it creates competence, they recognize at the end of the day, that's what really matters.
00:35:45.900I don't at the end of the day, I don't really care what's going on in someone's head.
00:35:49.580I care about what their incentives are and if their if their incentives align with me when I'm when I'm thinking in my power political terms like this.
00:35:56.680I don't need them to be my best friend.
00:35:59.320I just need them to be the enemy of my enemy.
00:36:01.700And they're vastly more powerful than I am or I ever will be.
00:36:05.560They have the capacity to project power if they choose to.
00:36:08.960And so I want to see which direction they're going to project power.
00:36:12.900And if they're going to project power in a way that beats back my enemies, that's going to open up doors for me to, you know, as you're developing this sort of cultural uprising phenomenon, you want to see opportunities where whether it's economically or politically or socially.
00:36:28.860If you if you if you can increase your own social mobility, build your own network, start developing new innovative strategies of existing in the blind spots of the regime, all these sorts of things.
00:36:40.460Having the the the the the ground in front of us cleared away, even if it's just picking up a couple of sticks.
00:36:46.860Well, that's better than it was before.
00:36:48.820This is and I think that there's the potential for significantly more than that.
00:36:52.440When you look at the the if you think of these guys as as being people who are experienced in relating to corporations and now beginning more and more to see the government like a corporation that's that's in dire straits.
00:37:08.000That's been taken over by hostile actors and weaponized against the rest of the people that it's supposed to serve.
00:37:14.640We're starting to see a model for exactly the sort of thing the Project 2025 people are talking about.
00:37:20.400Elon's takeover of Twitter is exactly this.
00:37:23.900He took it over and he slashed, what, 70 or 80 percent of the personnel, stripped it way down and got it running again properly.
00:37:32.500If you have if you have Elon backing Trump to be elected against these other people, then you're looking at four years where now Twitter is governed by sympathetic interests to the presidency.
00:37:44.300But the shoe is now on the other foot.
00:37:46.200So then another example of this is what has happened in Argentina with Malay and in even more so in El Salvador with Bukele and Bukele obviously has a lot of a lot of networks within the whole Bitcoin community, which overlaps directly with a lot of the VC extension from Peter Thiel community.
00:38:06.920Those connections are very tight and obviously whoever's backing Bukele is very powerful because they're able to allow him to do what he's able to do.
00:38:14.520He clearly has powerful friends and he came into office with a well with a detailed step by step plan of exactly how we're going to go about doing this.
00:38:23.660This wasn't flying by the seat of his pants.
00:38:25.820So it's pretty obvious to me that Bukele was picked by a group by a group of people and put in place to accomplish something there.
00:38:34.420And perhaps that something is create a Silicon Valley outside the borders of the United States where capital can flee to if the United States gets gets too far, too far gone.
00:38:47.740But I know that there's a there's the Charter Cities Institute, the Free Private Cities Foundation.
00:38:52.260These are extensions out of the old seasteading communities.
00:38:57.100Joe Lonsdale, who's one of the co-founders of Palantir and is the head of 8VC and is involved with Founders Fund as well.
00:39:05.500These are all like names like just write these names down and go read up on them.
00:39:08.560And Joe Lonsdale is the one who introduced Peter Thiel to Patrick Friedman, who was the and Joe Lonsdale was the chair of of the Seasteading Institute.
00:39:20.000And he now is he has a YouTube channel called American Optimist, where he interviews a lot of these different tech CEOs.
00:40:01.300This is the sort of return of that naive vision.
00:40:05.640But that's a naive vision that's being expressed by very wealthy, powerful, influential people.
00:40:10.220So I think that they're going to be able to make significant headway in that direction.
00:40:13.900And one other connection here as well.
00:40:17.260Curtis Yarvin went on Charlie Kirk's podcast in January.
00:40:22.180And they talked about precisely this phenomenon, that the way Yarvin made the case probably as best as he ever has, that to a boomer audience, that the path forward is installing a king, essentially.
00:40:39.600And I've never been a big Charlie Kirk fan.
00:40:43.020I've kind of seen him as sort of a meme.
00:40:46.360But I developed a whole new respect for him in that conversation.
00:40:50.300TPUSA is one of the major sponsors of Project 2025.
00:40:54.460And Charlie Kirk mentioned in that interview that he's been studying Machiavelli with Michael Anton.
00:41:01.000So this is not a sentence I expected to say even two years ago.
00:41:08.220And it just indicates to me that there's a lot of things developing in the background that are moving in a particular direction.
00:41:14.920I don't know how far they're going to make it that way, but they're definitely trending that way.
00:41:19.060Yeah, if you look at the kind of the speed run that some of the conservative political commentary it has had on many of these issues, and you're completely blackpilled, I don't know what to tell you guys.
00:41:32.080Like, a lot of people accuse me of being blackpilled, but I don't understand how you can look at the kind of connections people are making, the kind of things they're discussing,
00:41:41.460the things that are well inside parts of the conservative Overton window that would have just been insanely radical and gotten you fired a couple years ago for discussing.
00:41:51.460If you're looking at that stuff and you're seeing, you know, billionaires with massive power who are planning the next Trump administration who are going through all this and you're down in the dumps, I really don't know what to tell you.
00:42:04.980I want to get a little more into this specific Trump connection, what that might look like, and what kind of problems we might see also from the PayPal mafia.
00:42:14.360But before we do, guys, let me tell you about New Founding's Venture Fund.
00:42:17.820Hey, guys, I need to tell you about New Founding Venture Fund.
00:42:20.480Look, we all know that the current system, the current companies out there, the current institutions, they're old, sick, dying, they're sclerotic, they're lame.
00:42:28.380They can't produce anything of value, and that means that young, talented, innovative people are trying to break out, break free.
00:42:34.980That's bad news for the establishment, but it's good news for us because that means those people are going to go out and found new companies, create new technologies, and figure out a way forward for our country.
00:42:45.900If you're interested in being a part of that exciting new future, then you need to check out the Venture Fund.
00:42:49.920New Founding has rallied the founders who have massive visions for a better future and is investing in these companies through its Venture Fund.
00:42:57.340The companies they invest in are defined by a simple question.
00:43:00.540Does the country we want to live in need the company this person is building?
00:43:04.420Look, venture investing isn't for everyone, but if you're a serious, accredited investor who wants to see a more hopeful future for this country, go to newfounding.com slash Venture Fund and apply to be an investor.
00:43:20.460All right, so we've kind of talked about this, where this is going to make contact with Trump, understanding that Trump is the blunt instrument against the regime, even if they don't agree with a lot of what he might want.
00:43:34.160He's kind of the delivery vehicle for a lot of their policies that would allow them to fight against DEI and these other things that are inhibiting their ability to be efficient, to be excellent, to be productive and creative and achieve these goals.
00:43:49.880We know about the project 2025, you mentioned that several times, but recently Elon Musk had a direct meeting with Donald Trump, like we were talking about before we got on live.
00:44:03.220This was in person, which is significant.