They’re Not Even Hiding It - How The AI Elites Are Using AI to Track, Control, and Manipulate You | Whitney Webb PT 2

In this episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, we dive deep into a thought-provoking conversation with investigative journalist Whitney Webb. As Webb unwraps complex topics such as the intersection of national security, technology, and political influence, she offers a critical perspective on the dynamics shaping our world today. Tom and Whitney explore the roles of elites and technocrats, pondering the balance between liberty and security in a rapidly digitizing society. They discuss how globalism and economic strategies may be manipulating power structures, and delve into the implications of AI and surveillance on civil liberties. If you're curious about the underlying mechanics of political and technological developments and their impact on society, this episode is sure to provide eye-opening insights. SHOWNOTES 00:00 AI-Induced Cognitive Decline 08:09 Tech-Security Fusion: A Call for Debate 14:07 Critique of US-China AI Strategy 16:47 US-China Commerce and Political Ties 25:00 Think Tanks Influence Global Policies 30:32 Epstein's Role in China Gate 37:33 BCCI: Bank and Criminal Enterprise 42:33 Currency Instability and Digital Dollarization 46:02 Bitcoin's Ideological Shift Debate 55:10 Tech Oligarchs and Market Control 57:24 AI Infrastructure Drive Unveiled 01:04:29 Predictive Policing and AI Concerns 01:09:54 Elite Risk Aversion Strategies 01:16:39 Empowerment Against Fear and Manipulation 01:18:48 Beware of Imposter Accounts CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS: Range Rover: Range Rover: Explore the Range Rover Sport at https://landroverUSA.com https://landroverusa.com/ Audible: Sign up for a free 30 day trial at https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY https://audible.com/IMPACTTHEORY1 Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to https://www.vitalproteins.com https://www.vitalproteins.com/ and entering promo code IMPACT at check out. iTrust Capital: Use code IMPACT when you sign up and fund your account to get a $100 bonus at https://www.itrustcapital.com/tombilyeu NetSuite: Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at https://NetSuite.com/THEORY https://netsuite.com/THEORY ********************************************************************** What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** Join me live on myTwitch stream https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT atwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:apple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Welcome back to Impact Theory. This is part two with Whitney Webb, and we are breaking down all of how this impacts your freedom directly, as well as your privacy and your finances, and the steps you can take to stay ahead. So let's get right back into it.

• 1:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, there's another piece of this puzzle that I want to put on the table right now because when I heard you say it, I was

• 1:31Tom Bilyeu?

  "I was shocked" isn't the right word, but it's close enough. You said, this is going to be a paraphrase, but it'll get us very close. Solana, meme coins, and Tether are the new BCCI. I always think of the transformation of money into the digital realm as a really positive thing, and that I get why people don't like CBDCs. But I don't understand why people wouldn't like something like Tether. So if you don't mind, explain to people what BCCI was and what you mean when you say that Solana, meme coins, and Tether are the new BCCI.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so BCCI was basically this bank that was set up as a publicly as a development bank. It was about essentially banking the unbanked in the global south. That was sort of the framing of it. But in reality, that bank had been set up by the CIA and it was involved in all sorts of things, including laundering profits for arms trafficking, drug trafficking. It came under scrutiny as part of the Iran-Contra scandal and of course, it collapsed in 1991 and was the subject of a Senate report that I would encourage people to read because it is really quite scandalous. And it also revealed that they were not only doing, you know, engaging in brazen financial

• 3:01Speaker 01

  crimes on behalf of intelligence agencies all over the world and also drug cartels, but they were also engaged in the sex trafficking of minors specifically to patronize the elite, some elite families of the United Arab Emirates and were taking prepubescent children to be abused by these people. That is in the Senate report, so that's literally not a conspiracy theory. It was written, it's an official Senate report based on official evidence brought before the Senate. Okay, so it's a very significant story, almost no one remembers it because it was essentially covered up by William Barr when he was Attorney General the first time. And he was also, of course, engaged in pardoning and sort of washing away related scandals

• 3:44Speaker 01

  to BCCI like the promissoff war scandal of the same era and also Iran-Contra, all of that essentially happening in 1991. So a lot of people don't remember that history unfortunately, so. And looking at an entity like Tether, you know, I have argued in a series I co-wrote with my colleague Mark Goodwin called "The Chain" that you can find on my website, Unlimited Hangout, that one of the co-founders of Tether and some of the other people involved in early Tether appear to have significant intelligence ties, some of them like Brock Pierce have ties to pedophilia scandals that happened in the early 2000s.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Tether since then has been sort of, has come under fire for being not transparent about its reserves, among other things, and it has also been memory-holed its role in the FTX scandal, where you had Alameda Research being very involved with, you know, the Tether supply and helping it maintain its peg, among other things. And if we, of course, know now that FTX was involved in all sorts of financial misconduct, for lack of a better word.

• 4:55Tom Bilyeu?

  To put it nicely.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yes, and, you know, Solana, which has been responsible for these pump-and-dump meme coins, among other things, you know, was also very closely tied to Sam Bankman-Fried. He's been called one of the reasons, main reasons, behind its rise in popularity, you know, for what it, for what it since has become. And there's a short, there's no shortage of examples of sort of pump-and-dup meme coins that have sort of rugged people of a lot of money and what have the, what has that money ultimately led to and who was ultimately responsible for that pump-and-dump rug poor, wealth transfer, arguably, type of operation. It definitely would facilitate this type of bad behavior that we know intelligence

• 5:39Speaker 01

  agencies have engaged in with the past, like the BCCI example. It would definitely facilitate that. And the fact that you have these types of connections there, you know, I think is certainly worthy of examination. And Tether notably has a lot of the same rhetoric that BCCI wants to use, the idea of, you know, banking the unbanked, for example. But they're very willing to seize people's money on behalf of the US Treasury. And Palo Arduino, who is the head of Tether now, has said that Tether is fully committed to expanding US dollar hegemony globally and has, you know, on-boarded the FBI and Secret Service on that platform, on their platform. And that essentially makes it a...

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Digital arm, you could argue of the US government. And when you take under, um, when you also consider this military manual that was published by WikiLeaks, um, you know, well over a decade ago, you know, they referred to, um, you know, basically, uh, the dollar and some of these, uh, style of financial institutions, uh, that help propagate it globally, particularly in the global south, um, as sort of, uh, weapons, financial weapons of US empire. And, uh, it's very possible, and I think, uh, you know, I think an argument can clearly be made that Tether is sort of facilitating that, specifically in economies that have become unstable or have very unstable currencies, and some of that is partly due to US sanctions.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Some of it is due, uh, to these entities that have been called financial weapons of US empire, like the IMF and the World Bank. Um, and then their currencies are unstable, they're, they're covered in, you know, they're in a, in, trapped in this debt slavery model, um, which is a big reason for their, in many cases, for a lot of the economic instability and people are being on boarded onto the digital dollar, onto Tether, um, as a way to be able to preserve their wealth. But ultimately, it's kind of a way, um, to globalize the dollar and covertly dollarize a country without formally dollarizing it in the way that places like Ecuador and El Salvador were formally dollarized. Uh, and if you consider the outsized role, including in the digital asset space, you know,

• 7:53Speaker 01

  and, and sort of its formation and the infrastructure for it of some of these currency speculators, um, you know, and, and the role of currency speculators in the past, you know, we can point to in the nineties, George Soros or arguably people like, you know, Jeffrey Epstein, if you're familiar with my work, having a role in, you know, crushing local currencies. If that were to happen today, and there's no reason to think that type of, uh, currency speculation, like, you know, Soros' style in ninety-two, or for example, doesn't happen today, I'm, I'm sure it, it, it does, um, then it, the end result could easily be people just sort of onboarding, uh, to the dollar, particularly a form of the dollar that is surveilable, seizable, and, and ultimately, uh, programmable.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  And those were the same concerns that a lot of Americans have had about central bank digital currencies. It's not necessarily that the money would be issued by the central bank, because money is issued by the central bank now, right? It's about the concern that it presents to liberty because it's surveilable, programmable.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  And seizeable. And I think Tether checks all of those boxes ultimately. And really, any sort of digital dollar that the US ultimately approves, which is very likely in the Trump administration at his speech at the Bitcoin conference last year, said no CBDCs, but was very bullish on stable coins, on dollar stable coins, which are a major purchaser of US treasuries, for example, and help service the US debt. And if you combine that with a lot of his bullishness on Bitcoin, the talks of a strategic Bitcoin reserve, for example, I think it's very possible that we can see this type of

• 9:30Speaker 01

  digital dollar paradigm that Tether really helped start expand. And I don't think there's really a lot of discussions about whether this is good or what the potential origins or intentions of it were or still are, because a lot of people that promote Tether have very rose tinted glasses about it and parrot this idea of banking the unbanked and sort of ignore the FBI Secret Service connection, the fact that they've seized people's money when the US Treasury Department has asked them to do that, even if they're not US citizens. And this type of stuff, you know, what does this ultimately mean? And I think people that are particularly in the Bitcoin space, which has often been sort of flooded at times with the opinion that Tether is a Bitcoin company,

• 10:12Speaker 01

  should consider that, especially when a lot of the rhetoric and ideology around Bitcoin was about stopping the debt slavery system and the debt-based monetary system. Do people really want to perpetuate that? And is it really conducive to financial freedom and banking the unbanked in a way that is good for liberty?

• 10:35Tom Bilyeu?

  What do you think would happen if the US did formalize a Bitcoin reserve and began purchasing that? Would that be good, bad, or indifferent for Bitcoin?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Well, I think it depends on your perspective about Bitcoin. I think a lot of people have, including in the Bitcoin space, have become very obsessed with the number-go-up mentality and are not really interested in the ideology that helped popularize it among certain demographics. And personally, I think my interest in Bitcoin, it's the only cryptocurrency that I see as really having any value. I mean, don't mean to swear, but everything else to me is pretty much a shitcoin. But I would say that it really depends on where things go from here and the extreme

• 11:30Speaker 01

  interest of, you know, the traditional financial system and the US government, which the ideology of Bitcoin was opposed originally, to working with those two entities and sought to, you know, supplant them because, you know, they are bad. You know, that kind of is the original, part of the original Bitcoin ethos that is being, has been sort of shed in favor of mass adoption and the idea that holders of Bitcoin will become extremely wealthy and the concern, and, you know, the idea about having freedom money or privacy money and all of that has sort of definitely taken a back burner and may disappear entirely from discourse. And I personally don't see that as positive.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  I think if, you know, we're going to move into the digital money space and there's, you know, this push to eliminate cash, I think anonymity and privacy is important. The argument is that, well, bad people will use it to money launder and all of this stuff. And sure, that's true, but even if we go into a new digital system, I really doubt that the CIA and some of these other entities that engage in that same type of behavior will have to, will be forced to stop. You know, I think it'll be money laundering for me and not for thee kind of thing. And also, a lot of people that use those, you know, privacy-enhancing protocols and

• 12:54Speaker 01

  products aren't money launderers, they just don't like mass surveillance, which again was part of the, you know, early ideology common among people in the Bitcoin space. And so, you know, the idea that there was this, that it was going to challenge fiat and bring more financial fairness to the world and end our debt-based monetary system and put us on a hard money standard, and all of this, a lot of that has sort of gone out of the window and the idea of, you know, Bitcoin, sort of use it as a new petrodollar analog, you want to play with Bitcoin, you need dollars to get access to that, to it, essentially, you know, this is sort of the theory of my colleague Mark Goodwin, who

• 13:36Speaker 01

  wrote The Bitcoin Dollar, that I would really recommend for anyone that wants to see what's happening now, having been written about like three years ago by somebody. You know, this is something that I think is very likely to happen. And I think, you know, people that were, that hold Bitcoin, that care about that ethos still, need to think about if their bags get pumped, what will they do with that money to preserve financial freedom? Because I don't think the US government, or, you know, BlackRock, or some of these other entities that have become very bullish on Bitcoin are interested in protecting privacy or having Bitcoin be used for freedom money necessarily, you know. And so I think that

• 14:18Speaker 01

  stuff personally to me matters, and is one of the reasons that I've, you know, tried to speak to people in the Bitcoin space for some time, because I think a lot of those people do care about the ethos, but I think there is sort of an effort to flood the zone with, you will, with this idea that it doesn't matter anymore, and that we should sort of, you know, surrender that ethos in favor of, you know, becoming extremely wealthy. And that is going to be persuasive for a lot of people, especially when we're potentially facing a debt crisis and an economic downturn. And, you know, historically, that type of, you know, drastic wealth increase for people can be very persuasive in getting them to change their ideology. But I would argue that, you know, the direction the world is

• 15:02Speaker 01

  going, it's important to think about what we can do to preserve freedom. And, you know, if you're expecting to have a major increase in your ability to finance things, maybe consider financing things that help ensure privacy and help ensure financial freedom and ensure that Bitcoin could become freedom money and not just a strategic asset for a few very powerful people, you know.

• 15:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Let me ask you, so wrapping this up in a bow, we've got a lot happening in the world at the international level. There's a lot of optimism about Trump coming into office right now. As you look at his executive orders, what do they signal to you?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, I've been working on wrapping up a piece. So I haven't paid ultra close attention to the executive orders that he has put out. But so, and I'm sorry, I can't comment on those at this time. But some of my reporting in the lead up to his inauguration and also during the campaign, as it related to, you know, the Trump camp in particular, are some of his connections to these big tech figures that we talked about earlier, whether it's Elon Musk or figures that are, you know, also part of the so-called PayPal mafia. You know, David Sacks being the crypto NAI czar, for example, and someone like JD Vance having relatively close proximity to Peter Thiel, someone at a top HHS position, Jim O'Neill, also very close to Peter Thiel,

• 16:39Speaker 01

  who has, I would argue wildly different views than Robert F. Kennedy, who's supposed to lead HHS, especially in terms of deregulation, biotech and mRNA technology. You know, what are these things ultimately going to result in? And I would, you know, consider people to consider those connections and also consider that there's a high likelihood, just like in the first term, that there will be a lot of, you know, deregulation in the, in, over the next four years. And I'm sure a lot of people will be happy about that. But I think some people that voted for Trump may not be, particularly in the Make America Healthy Again movement, where deregulation at the FDA, for example, could result in a flooding of the market

• 17:22Speaker 01

  with mRNA products, which are very controversial with a significant segment of Trump's base, for example. Or, you know, when Trump was in office, the first time he deregulated biotech and agriculture pretty significantly, a lot of people in that same Make America Healthy Again movement are not really into, you know, a proliferation of GMO crops in the food supply, for example. And sort of finger them as a causative agent in the chronic disease epidemic that MACHA, that particular movement was really based around. And I would, you know, I think a lot has been said by myself and also by others about sort of, you know, people have probably noticed Palantir's stock performance.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  I think it's very likely that over the next four years, Palantir will become an even more important government contractor, considering that a lot of people that are prominent Palantir investors or co-founders have attached themselves in various ways, either to the Trump campaign as donors or occupying important posts in the administration. So Palantir, again, is sort of the engine that a lot of this, the surveillance state really runs on, and I think people should really educate themselves about it, especially if what I talked about earlier, as it relates to predictive policing and predictive health and predicting pandemics before it happens and all of that, is concerning to you.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  I mean, again, four years, it's hard to know exactly what's going to happen, but I think those are pretty reliable markers we can look for. And sort of this, I think it's likely that there's going to be an increase in, you know, biometric digital ID. Trump has sort of marketed this as a way to stop mass migration. The dialectics are different, but it's sort of a policy that's being marketed all over the world. Depending on the country, the sales pitch is different, but ultimately, that policy is being marketed and in the push into digital assets, I think is also happening globally. And I think Trump made it very clear that he was going to be very focused on that, and I don't think there's any reason to doubt that particular promise.

• 19:30Tom Bilyeu?

  And as you look at the tech people that Trump has amassed around him, do you think that they are better understood as oligarchs making a play to be as close to power as they can? Or do you share some of the enthusiasm around, these are the best operators of our generation here to help make the government more efficient? Taking a quick pause, but when we return, Whitney connects how big tech and governments are teaming up in ways that matter.

• 20:03Tom Bilyeu?

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• 20:48Tom Bilyeu?

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• 22:14Tom Bilyeu?

  We're back. Let's dive right in. And as you look at the tech people that Trump has amassed around him, do you think that they are better understood as oligarchs making a play to be as close to power as they can? Or do you share some of the enthusiasm around these are the best operators of our generation here to help make the government more efficient?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I personally am of the view that they're oligarchs that are interested in king making markets. I think that's particularly true of someone like David Sacks, who's going to be the crypto AI czar and doesn't have to divest from any of his, you know, investments or other, you know, potential conflicts of interest with some of the firms that he'll be involved in overseeing or deciding regulation on. And when you have that type of power, you can easily king make and pick and choose companies that you want to see win. Right? And so you kind of have to wonder if this is really going to be a free market type of situation as a lot of people would like it to be. Because when you have that, that type of centralized power sort of deciding who wins

• 23:22Speaker 01

  and who doesn't, and you know, having only a, you know, OpenAI and Oracle, for example, in this recent announcement, those are very big companies that are likely to only get bigger. Should there be a more decentralized landscape in these industries that are so, so important to foster competition? Or are we getting close to a quasi, you know, monopoly model in certain fields of big tech? And I think that could be potentially problematic and something to look at, especially when you consider that there have been, you know, statements made by members of the quote unquote PayPal mafia that a free market competition is for losers and that companies should find a niche and corner that market and essentially build a monopoly or quasi monopoly.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  And some of those people have done that in direct collaboration with the national security state, as is the case of Palantir, for example, which was, you know, created With CIA and Incutel's direct involvement and has very significant CIA connections from its origins to now. So if you're building a quasi-monopoly and you don't like free-market competition and you're going to partner with the most powerful and unaccountable parts of the state in that way, what does that ultimately mean? And is this going to be the free-market utopia that we're being sold? Or is something else going to happen?

• 24:43Tom Bilyeu?

  What was your initial reaction to the announcement of the $500 billion that are being invested into American AI infrastructure?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so unfortunately, I wasn't able to pay super close attention to the press conference that involved, of course, Sam Altman and Larry Ellison and my Yoshi son of SoftBank. But essentially, it's not really surprising to me that there's being a big push into AI infrastructure. And this is something that's really been, what I would argue, a bipartisan push that's been going on for some time, starting with really the National Security Commission, an artificial intelligence that was led by Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, who, even though he's a Democratic donor, has been very active in this space and sort of has the same view, propagated by more Republican-leaning big tech figures, that the US needs to outcompete

• 25:35Speaker 01

  China in AI specifically. And some of the National Security Commission on AI comments and presentations they gave that have since been released through Freedom of Information Act requests essentially suggest that the roadmap to doing so is to impose lots of domestic surveillance and AI-powered surveillance technology on the American public as a way to sort of leapfrog China, because they argue that China has already done that and thus has a much larger user base and data set for all of these different AI technologies. And so in order to outdo them, we must drastically increase our user base of these AI technologies, which includes things, they say, like, you know...

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Surveillance, as I mentioned earlier, facial recognition, expanding that, expanding e-commerce, reducing in-person shopping, and really, you know, other in-person activities, including healthcare, in-person doctor visits, moving to telemedicine as much as possible. And this was really a big focus of that commission, which was the meeting of the national security state and the big tech industry in the years prior to COVID-19. And a lot of that push into the digital realm was a consequence of a lot of COVID-19 era policies that's helped sort of feed that ambition. But I think with this goal to have an increased, you know, investment in AI infrastructure, we're likely to see that develop.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  And it's not really surprising that you have Larry Ellison of Oracle involved. He's recently had comments about the need for things like digital ID in the United States, which would be sort of a core foundational aspect of this type of wide-reaching AI system. And also said that, you know, basically, I'm paraphrasing here, of course, but invasive AI surveillance systems on citizens will help them be on their best behavior, which is a rather Orwellian thing to say and sort of very much feeds into the idea of the Panopticon, where if someone is always being watched, the Panopticon, you know, is used in the context of surveillance a lot. But it was originally a model for a prison, where prisoners are always being, or under the impression they're always being watched,

• 27:49Speaker 01

  but they can't directly see the people watching them. And that this sort of induces obedience to be on their best behavior at all times. And I, you know, personally view that as kind of a very big and not necessarily positive trade-off between liberty and at least perceived security. And I think people would do well to sort of interrogate some of the consequences of handing such a big AI infrastructure project to companies that are run by individuals with those views in particular.

• 28:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, there's two things I want to drill into. I've heard you say Panopticon before, but I actually don't know what that means. What does that mean?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  So as far as I'm aware, it was originally a design for a prison, as I mentioned a second ago. I believe it originated in Britain and basically the idea was to sort of have a somewhat circular prison with the cells on the border and there's a long, you know, sort of obelisk-esque tower in the middle where the guards are and the windows are either tinted or constructed in such a way that the prisoners can't see the guards watching them, but the impression is created that they are always under watch so as to induce obedience because they're, you know, they could be being looked at all the time, but they don't really know. So as far as I'm aware, that's the origin of the term.

• 29:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, it's a stand-in for eternal surveillance?

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but as I said originally, it was a prison thing, but you know, since then it's sort of been adapted to sort of refer to, you know, the same idea when applied to mass surveillance in the, in the digital era. Cause obviously when this was developed, I forget if it was like the 18th or 19th century, obviously, digital technology as it exists today wasn't around back then, but I think the idea persists and can arguably be scaled to really, to levels that the original designers of the Panopticon concepts probably couldn't even fathom back at the time.

• 29:50Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so then, just breaking it down, pan, all over, optic, presumably sight, so omniscient sight, basically, omnipotent sight. Okay, cool, totally understand. Now, I have a feeling that as we talk today, that underlying the conversation that we're about to have is this idea of liberty versus security and the trade-off there. If you were going to plant a flag in your own life and give us a breakdown of how you see that trade-off, is it 100% liberty and I don't care what that means for security, or is it some kind of balance?

• 30:31Speaker 01

  I would rather start with a paraphrase of a rather well-known quote of Benjamin Franklin's, which goes something along the lines of, "Those who trade their liberty for security, you know, ultimately have neither of those things." And I think ultimately, what my views on that would be in an ideal world are different from what my views are on it as it relates to the world we live in today. And I think there's a pretty clear indication, particularly over the past 20-plus years, the post-9/11 era, that, you know, great surveillance powers, at least in the hands of the United States and most other governments in the world frankly, are routinely abused

• 31:16Speaker 01

  for the purpose of silencing dissent, among other things that are not positive for liberty. And that you could argue that there are situations where insecurity is engineered in the public in order to facilitate people giving up their liberty or civil liberties in particular for what they perceive as increased security, or they're told as increased security. And I don't really think that's necessarily always the case at the end of the day. And I think a lot of the mass surveillance system, as it was designed in the immediate post-9/11 era, was meant to rely a lot on sort of predictive paradigms. So what do I mean by that?

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Essentially, things like what are now called predictive policing or predictive health, you know, sort of the idea of, you know, predictive policing, I think, is a rather polite way to say pre-crime. The idea that we can stop, you know, criminal activity or a terrorist attack before it happens by looking at certain data flows, for example. And the same was also posited in the post-9/11 era for stopping bioterror attacks before they happen and natural pandemics before they happen, which is also kind of a sticky issue as well, because some of those proposals and their sort of resurrections in the post-COVID era, I think, are a little...

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Dubious in a sense because they they sort of posit creating interventions, health interventions before symptoms even show up in a particular population based on certain markers identified in AI and sewage water, for example, and things like that. So you're really putting a lot of a lot of trust in in algorithms. And sometimes those algorithms are not as accurate as the company claims. And as far as I know, a lot of those claims are not independently vetted. So ultimately, it could, you know, lead to some unfortunate consequences, I think, particularly if you're trying to prove in a pre-crime scenario that you weren't going to commit the crime, you're basically it's

• 33:28Speaker 01

  you versus the the algorithm. And who do you think, you know, the position of authority is likely to to side with in those scenarios? You know, I think it's kind of kind of creates sticky situations.

• 33:40Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, that feels like a a comment around the reality of this stuff. You said that there's a discrepancy between how you'd feel about it in an ideal world versus the world we actually live in. So the concerns around would this be, one, can it be trusted? Certainly a big question. Two, are there liberty constraints that would become so problematic as to the cure being worse than the disease? So those are the things that it sounds like you run into when you look at the reality of this stuff being deployed. Talk to me, though, about the ideal world. Is this stuff that you wish that we could deploy, but you just know in the hands of humans, we can't trust it? Or even in an ideal world, your take would be very different?

• 34:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Taking a quick break, but after the break, Whitney Webb explains what central bank digital currencies mean for your financial freedom. Stay tuned. You're probably paying two salespeople to do one salesperson's job. That's where today's sponsor Pipe Drive comes in, an intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before every call, it pulls deal history. History and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After it, it drafts your CRM updates to review and approve. So there's less admin and more selling.

• 35:09Tom Bilyeu?

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• 35:39Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, we're back. Let's get into it. Talk to me, though, about the ideal world. Is this stuff that you wish that we could deploy, but you just know in the hands of humans, we can't trust it? Or even in an ideal world, your take would be very different?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think in an ideal world, this type of stuff to tackle crime and illness wouldn't really be necessary, quite frankly. But I guess it depends on what your definition of the ideal world is. And I guess sort of in the scenario, is the government trustworthy? I guess in that scenario, if it were provably trustworthy and we didn't have all these national security scandals of grave severity in many cases, going back decades and decades and decades and no accountability for national security overreach over that time period as well. It would be easier perhaps to trust, but you know, I don't know. Personally, I'm like a kind of a voluntariat, voluntarist.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Like I just kind of prefer that people, I don't like to make decisions for other people necessarily. And I tend to sort of be a liberty maximalist. I think that sort of, you know, begets better outcomes in general.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  And I don't know, again, it depends on what you sort of define as this, as this ideal world. And since a lot of my focus, you know, as a, as a writer and researcher has sort of been on the national security state, you know, I tend to think it's. Not appropriate to give them, certainly not more power than they already have. And I think there needs to be accountability for what, you know, the overreaches that we know have happened in investigations and the ones we probably don't know about. But I really don't foresee there really being any transparency or change there, even with the incoming administration.

• 37:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so would the following assessment, obviously oversimplified, but just so I know if I'm on the right track with the way that you view the world.

• 37:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Is your take on the way the government works is they will spy on their citizens to gain control over their citizens?

• 37:49Tom Bilyeu?

  Period. I think that is a

• 37:53Tom Bilyeu?

  accurate representation of your base assumption. Is that true?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  I think it's close. I would also add that ultimately you have sort of, you know, I sort of see the government as a public-private partnership. The public sector, because of political donations, among other things, is always very in tune to the concerns of the private sector. And a lot of the most powerful players in the private sector and in the financial sector are very interested in sort of de-risking the world as much as possible. And a lot of intelligence agencies sort of share that view. And so I think a lot of this surveillance and this, these predictive paradigms and all of that, a lot of it sort of comes down from their perspective, I think, to sort of de-risking

• 38:35Speaker 01

  the society and markets as well.

• 38:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, de-risking things doesn't sound immediately negative. Why is de-risking bad? Or why does it yield bad outcomes?

• 38:48Speaker 01

  So, you know, if you want to, you know, take risk to zero, that there will be crime in a particular area, the type of interventions you would have to impose would be pretty significant, right? It doesn't sound bad when you phrase it that way necessarily. And that's why I was phrasing it that way, because I think that's how these people in elite circles tend to think about it ultimately at the end of the day. And they don't really, you know, if you're a CIA, for example, you don't really want to have to be more transparent and more accountable. For things you have done in the past, I think that's been pretty clear with their their history as an as an agency, but they'd be more interested in eliminating the risk

• 39:30Speaker 01

  for them that they would have to make those behavioral changes, I guess you could say as an agency. So what would you do to prevent that kind of risk from happening? Would you manipulate the public sphere and the public discussion around the CIA to make those things unpopular? For example, you know, de-risking can take many forms, but I think these people generally tend to think of things in terms of risk to the activities they're doing, especially those that tend to be gray area or, you know, potentially illegal.

• 39:59Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so one idea that I am growing in my conviction is driving a lot of the structure of the world is this idea that there are elites. They are defined as people that are smarter and better educated than the masses, and they believe that decision-making should largely be in our hands. And the reason that is is because we will be able to take you to a better outcome. I find that wildly problematic, because I don't trust anybody to be right at that high degree of percentage. I think people are wrong way more than they're right, and anybody that automatically trusts themselves to know what's best is inevitably

• 40:41Tom Bilyeu?

  going to run us off a cliff. That's my my default assumption about life. Do you share that? Or do you see this idea of the elites differently than I do?

• 40:51Speaker 01

  No, I think that's fair. I think concentrating power in that few hands, especially in hands that have, you know, capitals so concentrated up there as well is increasingly problematic. You know, there's obviously the adage that, you know, absolute power absolutely corrupts. And I think that that history does tend to sort of show that. And I think, you know, people, particularly in the United States, don't want a small handful of the richest people in the world controlling and micromanaging their lives. You know, at very minute scales, which is what some of these people propose to do as life becomes more digitalized and AI has a more prominent role in people's lives

• 41:33Speaker 01

  and in society, you know, there exists that possibility to do that kind of micromanaging for people's lives and that sort of follows under the umbrella of what has been referred to as technocracy, sort of this idea of elite experts governing and micromanaging society and sort of using that as a replacement for representative democracy from, for example. And I think there are a good amount of people in big tech that think they are better suited than elected leaders or the public to lead people's lives and micromanage people's lives in particular directions. And I certainly don't agree with that. As I said earlier, I personally would like people to be empowered to make their own decisions and a lot of

• 42:18Speaker 01

  that is through education and having the freedom to make those decisions. And sometimes making your own decisions can lead to failure and maybe not the best outcomes, but I mean, that's how people learn and adapt and evolve. And I think it's necessary for people to be able to do those things. I mean, you know, as a parent, it's important to, you know, ensure that my kid has the freedom to, you know, not necessarily succeed all the time because you learn important lessons and you build character from not getting things right on the first try and to have things micromanaged to prevent any sort of potential bad outcome, you know, I think could be problematic. And also, you know, having these, this small group decide what is a bad outcome versus a good outcome without input from the public,

• 43:00Speaker 01

  but having that sort of enacted and imposed on the public without their consent, you know, obviously, I think there's hugely significant problems there.

• 43:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, but as a parent, I imagine that you do keep your child safe from the worst possible things that they may not be able to anticipate. Do you think that the government and/or the elites, I don't know if you use those interchangeably or not, should they be doing the same kind of thing, curbing liberty to some extent to make sure that we don't drive ourselves off a cliff?

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Well, I think the necessary guardrails and perhaps on society like don't murder someone, for example, are already there. Do we really need new ones enforced by AI? Do we need to prevent crime before it happens and all of this stuff at the expense of, you know, being why basically reneging on the entire constitutional right to privacy? You know, I don't really necessarily agree with that. And I think people, if they want that kind of system, sure, opt into it, allow the government into every aspect of your online and private life. But I don't think people should be forced to do that if they don't consent to that kind of system personally. I think it would be, I think consent frankly

• 44:14Speaker 01

  matters. And I think a lot of Americans agree with that viewpoint, considering what we saw with backlash to, you know, COVID-19 policies, for example, where, you know, consent was sort of coercively removed in the case of mandates, for example.

• 44:32Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, but to your earlier point, one of the ways that they get people to agree is by potentially, I don't want to say whether anything up till this point has been manufactured, but certainly if you're running the playbook of, okay, I really want people to adopt these policies, I just need to scare the life out of them. I need them to see how at risk they are. And then it is that very thing that's going to get the consent. So if we know the consent is achievable by people being scared sufficiently enough, what do you do with that? It's people consenting, but is it people consenting to something that ultimately, going back to

• 45:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Benjamin Franklin, they have traded that security for their liberty. And even though that may save lives, it is not a trade off worth making. How do you think through that? Would you be screaming, guys, you need to think through this problem better? You need to accept risk even when it's very large? Or would you be like, well, as long as everybody's making their own decision, I'm fine?

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Well, I think people need to be empowered to make their own decisions. So if you have a situation where people are, you know, trying to manufacture consent through fear, you know, reporting on, you know, the coercion involved there and sort of elucidating the facts of the situation would empower people to make their own decisions. If people can be shown that there is sort of a fear element here and a coercive and manipulative element to it, you know, I'm sure the decisions they would take would be a little different. You know, the utility of manufacturing consent via fear is that when people are afraid, they tend to not think critically and they tend to act impulsively and emotionally. And they tend to look for easy solutions.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  And so if you have, you've created fear in the public and then you offer a tailor-made solution, you know, you can more easily get consent that way. But if people are empowered to know that the situation has been manipulated to force that outcome, I'm sure a lot of them would make different decisions and that that consent would not necessarily be there if they were aware of the manufactured nature of that situation.

• 46:41Tom Bilyeu?

  Ooh, time is certainly going to tell. Whitney, I enjoy every second that I get with you. Where can people follow you?

• 46:48Speaker 01

  You can find all of my work at unlimitedhangout.com. And I would encourage you to sign up to my newsletter if you're interested in following my work, because I am a big proponent of taking the social media big tech middleman out of content distribution as much as possible. If you want to keep using them, I'm not poo-pooing that. But I think, you know, I don't expect censorship to necessarily go away or dissipate. Sometimes the algorithm doesn't favor certain things. If you don't want an algorithm in the way of the content that you wish to follow, consider signing up directly to sites newsletters or looking into RSS feed readers, for example, where you can design your own news feed and not have the algorithm dictate what you see and don't see.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  So, yeah, those would be the places to follow me. I only have a Twitter account, which is under my name, and a Telegram channel. That is the site, the name of my website, unlimitedhangout. If you see something that looks like me on Facebook or another site, I can guarantee you it's not me. I've had some issues with imposter accounts, as I'm sure most people in this space have had at one time or another, so. Thank you.

• 47:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Awesome. I love it. Well, again, thank you so much for joining me. And everybody out there, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

• 48:18Tom Bilyeu?

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