The Ricochet Podcast - The Controligarchs are Coming!

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

Once upon a time Americans could reliably count on reporters to follow the money to stay up on what the world's powerful players were up to. If you've ever despaired that those days are gone forever, we want to provide a bit of hope by introducing Seamus Bruner. We cover his new book Controligarchs. To be sure, the story is quite disconcerting, but the young Mr. Bruner is optimistic that we can win the fight against our age's "altruistic" masters of the universe. His thoroughly researched, readable deep dive into our 30 mega meddler billionaires is his latest effort to wake Americans up to the onslaught on our way of life.Ricochet's resident scholar Steve Hayward is in for James this week. He, Peter and Rob discuss this week's pitiful showing from the presidents of our elite colleges in front of Congress; and they chat on David Weiss' revised indictment of Hunter Biden.Sound clip from the open: Harvard President Claudine Gay and Rep. Elise Stefanik at the House Committee on Education and Labor hearing.

They may just say to me, you know what, we don't want your kind. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm Rob Long, joined by Peter Robinson and Steve Hayward. James Lyle is off this week. Our guest today is Seamus Bruner, who's written an amazing book about billionaires. Stay with us.

It's when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying. Does that speech not cross that barrier? Does that speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel? America is a nation that can be defined in a single word. I was going to put him in a... Excuse me. Hello and welcome to the Ricochet Podcast. This is episode number 669.

Every time I say that number, it's just astonishing. You can join us at Ricochet.com and be a part of the most stimulating conversation and community on the web. We hope you do go to Ricochet.com right now. But in the meantime, have a listen to us. I am Rob Long coming to you from New York City and joined as always by my Ricochet co-founder, Peter Robinson in Palo Alto. Peter, how are you? I'm extremely well, Rob. How are you? I'm doing great. And we are also joined by Ricochet's, I don't know, we could call you friend, Ricochet Adjunct Visiting Professor, Steve Hayward. Steve, you're somewhere kind of glamorous, right? Yeah, I'm in Central Coast of California. Although this week, I'm struggling to find my context, Rob. I've lost my context, and I can't find it anywhere.

So you brought it up. Let's start. Let's go. We'll go right at it. Presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, were somehow bested by Elise Stefanik in the House, which is kind of doubly, triply humiliating for them. And I was just going to ask you, so they couldn't answer a simple question, which seemed pretty obvious to the rest of us, right? Easy to answer. They kept saying it

to me, you know, whether they condemn a calling, whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates their own university speech standards. They couldn't answer that question. Now, my real question to you is this. The combined endowment figures for all three of those universities got to be $100 billion, right? Correct, correct. I'm not exaggerating. It's close to $100 billion.

You'd think they'd be better prepared you'd think they would have anticipated this question right they both all three of them look so terrified and stunned what's i mean well okay so i'll go next because Steve, having spent a great deal of time in academia in recent years, will actually have thought this through at a level of detail that I couldn't approach. On the one hand, I felt a certain sympathy for the three of them because they were all attempting to answer the question under First Amendment jurisprudence. They got hung up on that. And under the First Amendment, even calling for the genocide of an entire people is legal. Speech is legal until Oliver Wendell Holmes' old test, you get a clear and eminent danger, shouting fire in a crowded theater. But of course, that isn't really the relevant standard because all three of these institutions long, long ago tossed aside any attempt to live up to

the First Amendment or any rigorous attempt to incorporate First Amendment standards into the standards of their own universities. So, I may get this wrong in one detail or another, but you'll understand the general point I'm trying to make. At Harvard, if you misgender someone, that's a serious offense. At Penn, there are proceedings moving forward, I believe they're still underway, against Amy Waxman, a brilliant, published, widely published, widely respected teacher at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. And why is that? Because she has suggested certain things that we know to be statistically true, that there's a higher crime rate among African Americans, that young African

American males are more given to crime, they come from broken... All of this is, you're not allowed to say it, even though as far as I'm aware, no one has even alleged that Amy Waxman has said anything untrue. She's said things that make people extreme. And by the way, of course, all this is uncomfortable to hear. I'd rather not hear it. Even myself, I'd rather not hear it. But it's true. It's certainly covered by the First Amendment, but it's not covered by the University of Pennsylvania's own actual standards. So, Elise Stefanik asks a straightforward question. Don't come up here and try to pretend that you abide by the First Amendment when we know that you ceased doing that years and years ago. According to your own standards, are people

on your campus allowed to call for the genocide of the Jewish people, and of course, the answer should have been an immediate no. That would violate our standards. They could not bring themselves to say that, and that was just, I don't, so over to Steve, why were they trying to pretend, why were they attempting to wrap themselves in the First Amendment when all three of them absolutely had to know that they were going to run into trouble on this? Yeah, well, three points. One is the universities have been trying to navigate between academic freedom and the First Amendment and preserving safe spaces for all their protected classes.

And now that has all blown up in their face. They don't know what to do about it. Second, I'm quite sure that they had lawyers and pr people supplying them with talking points and all those people live in a campus bubble and did not realize by the way it wasn't just elise stefanik there was uh kevin kiley i think was the guy who said if i am a parent of a jewish uh prospective student can you assure them they'll be safe on campus they couldn't even answer that unequivocally, couldn't even give a generality about having a safe space. Here's my hypothesis about what's ultimately the problem here, and this will sound contradictory at first because it has two propositions. The first proposition is, and I think people will perceive this, and maybe not

the second one. The first one is, college administrators are terrified of the campus left, of their leftist faculty, of their leftist students. True, true. The second proposition takes a minute to understand how it squares with the first one, which is campus administrators, deans, department chairs, they actually don't take the left seriously. By that I don't mean they're not afraid of them. They don't take their ideas seriously. When you hear Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, or my Dean Chemerinsky say, I can't believe we're getting this anti-Semitism, Chemerinsky's phrase was, nothing has prepared me for the anti-Semitism that I'm seeing right now.

It's been there all along. But the point is, when they read some crazy, you know, the left wants ethnic studies, gender studies, they want colonial studies and all the intersectionality business. It's the easy, the path of least resistance, say, sure, go ahead and have a department, hire 20 crazy faculty in what they now call cluster hires around social justice. And now suddenly these people say, oh, actually, we really do mean it that we want Jews to die and for Israel to to cease to exist and the reason they're surprised is they all thought this was just fun and games we can do land acknowledgments right the land acknowledgments drive me crazy we acknowledge no one ever says let's give the land back under yale or berkeley

or harvard only israel has to give their land back that's what the the mob is demanding right so there's double standards galore and give back to whom, I wonder, though. That's the other question. Well, yes, of course. I mean, it's ridiculous stuff, but everybody, I mean, I've seen these land, a student will give a land acknowledgement and some professor or an administrator will go, thank you for that very profound statement. They don't mean that.

They know it's nonsense, but they go along with it. And now that they really mean it, they are powerless to say anything intelligible because they've been complicit. I mean, sorry, I'm sorry I'm ranting, but Larry Summers was… No, no, no, this is good ranting. This is the best explanation I've heard. Go right ahead. Well, Larry Summers has been, was president of Harvard. He did nothing to get in the way of this spreading cancer on the Harvard campus.

One more little detail, sorry. I file away job ads for department searching professors and i file away all the ones saying we want somebody by the way in english german literature all kinds of all the disciplines in the humanities and we want someone who will work in decolonialization and intersectionality now where the provosts you know the provosts at universities are supposed to be the quality control officers they ought to be no, you can't have that ad. Some of those ads, by the way, we want especially underrepresented minorities to apply for these positions. That comes right up to the water's edge of being an illegal ad under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

So the provost ought to be standing up and saying, no, you can't do this. But they don't couldn't i mean so right but just one moment i'm just to repeat to to build on peter's sympathy which i you know misplay sympathy but i'm really good at misplay sympathy yeah what if what if claudine gay had said the president of harvard university yes it does violate well then she's got to go and punish all those students like yeah what's a thousand of them 500 of them like in in a in a stroke of a pen one utterance that she's got to enforce the rules which she don't want to force that so she they're in a terrible position where they have to weasel word their way out of it in an incredibly dishonest way because you're exactly right you're to be honest means you're gonna like they're all gonna what are they all gonna go like

even today there was a student at NYU who tore down one of those posters and NYU said okay well you're out for till the till fall but of course that's a cascade of tragedies for this student because she's on financial aid and she has to leave the dorms and she has to do all this other stuff and she's on scholarship and all these things right which of course you think about before you violate university policy but at the same time most of those students had no idea that those policies applied to them, right? Like, these are just rules to keep you from wearing a sombrero at a Halloween party. I hadn't thought of this, but you being an old-time script writer,

you know exactly what would have come next. Elise Stefanik, you're exactly right. If Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, had said, yes, that does violate our standards, then Elisa Stefanik would have said, well, then, Dr. Gay, what disciplinary action have you taken against the 12 students who did a sit-in in your library? What disciplinary action have you taken against this outrage or this outrage or this outrage? And the answer, of course, would have been actually none. You're right. You're right.

Those women were in an impossible situation. It still surprises me that they seem so unprepared. Unprepared for that. And also, I mean, part of the problem is that we, I mean, I've been listening to this for the past three years. And one of the things I find ridiculous, ludicrous, but I've accepted that people believe is that speech is violence right speech is harmful so if that's the case then whatever your speech is you got to be careful um i don't approve of that i don't think that's right but if those are the rules those are the rules and then suddenly say well no no context is important oh no no no i actually, only if it becomes conduct. Well, I mean, that just sounds like we're turning the clock back because it's inconvenient now to have these standards.

Which, I mean, the other part of, I have to say, the other part of this for me is that I find all of this really glorious. I got to be honest. I'm enjoying every second of it. I mean, I am not a good person. I'm loving it. I'm loving it. I love watching them squirm. I love the weasel wordy backtracking the next day. I love all the anguish.

I love the fact that all the trustees are getting together saying, do we need to make a change here? I love all of this. This is like a Christmas present, a big, rich, delicious, gooey plum pudding. I mean, it's horrible that it's in this context, but I mean, I would be lying if I didn't tell you that I loved every minute of it. There's that great German word for this, right? Schadenfreude. We should have that with chocolate sauce and whipped cream on it with a cherry on top right now man uh oh let's just add this thought um you know i follow the public opinion polls on this in public regard for higher education has been slipping badly the last five to ten years it is polarized more republicans and democrats there used to be no gap between republicans and democrats in regard for universities and it was always very high now

it's split but it's even down among democrats and I'll bet the next survey taken that asks the question will show a discernible drop from the events of the last two months. One closing observation, almost even prediction, one suggestion, and the suggestion is keep your eyes on Penn in particular. Yeah. Penn has, for various historical reasons, has and especially has had and especially and does have an especially active and devoted Jewish contingent among its alumni. And one after another has gone public, put it in writing. This is not the way trustees, former alumni it's a big time big money alumni ordinarily behave ordinarily things are handled quietly they've gone public saying unless things change no more money from us and there's one man yesterday astonishing that he would had the

foresight to do this he gave penn a hundred million in stock, but in the fine print, reserved the right to cancel that stock, in effect, to take it back if Penn behaved in such a way as to reflect badly on the reputation of his own firm. And he has now written a letter to Penn, it's public, saying, unless President McGill goes, that $100 million gets canceled. Now, I have had some experience with trustees, and I can tell you that trustees become intensely uncomfortable with questions of equity and First Amendment versus this right and balance. They really, they don't want to, they don't feel they understand it. They don't. But money there i can guarantee that there have been phone calls among the trustees at penn saying is this lady really worth a hundred million dollars yeah what i mean

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retail business to the next level today that is shopify s-h-o-p-i-f-y dot com slash ricochet and we thank shopify for sponsoring the ricochet podcast especially now at big retail christmas season um we got a guest our next guest seamus bruner seamus bruner is the director of research at the government accountability institute he's the author of the recently published controligarchs exposing the billionaire class their secret deals and the globalist plot to dominate your life um seamus that sounds very left-wing. Seamus, if you're going to have trouble with any of the hosts on this show, it's going to be Rob.

Yeah. Just bat him back right now. I mean, I kind of know why I don't like billionaires, because they all tend to do exactly the same thing, and they complain a lot. But what's wrong with, what's a control-a-gark? That's a great question, and I wrote this book to appeal across the political spectrum. It's actually much more important than a political book. This is an existential book.

This is, the billionaires are not all, you know, not all billionaires. Most billionaires are quite good, and there's 3,000 billionaires. This is only about 30 of them. And there's nothing wrong with making money. I mean, we're capitalists, so there's 3,000 billionaires. This is only about 30 of them. And there's nothing wrong with making money. I mean, we're capitalists, so there's nothing wrong with making money, but it's what you do with that money. So I define a control-a-gark as a billionaire or bureaucrat

who is plotting and scheming to dominate every aspect of everyone's life. They want to control every industry from food to health, to information, I mean, critically information. And once they have control over things like the food sector or the information sector, the financial sector, they can turn the dials and pull the levers and nudge you in certain directions. And they really want to change your behavior. You see that with their control over the energy sector, actually. Banning gas stoves, banning gas vehicles, you know, banning cows. So, Seamus, you're not saying, this is not the old charge that used to

be leveled against John D. Rockefeller Sr., that he was using his money to corner markets and make even more money. He was using his money for profit. You're saying that there are 30 billionaires who are using their full, effectively, they're giving, well, explain this, but they're using their money for ideological purposes. I'm going to guess that one of the 30 you mentioned in your book is George Soros, for example. Give us two or three names. Yeah, so George Soros, of course, he gets his own chapter, and we talk about the open society mission and how he uses things like, I mean, who could be against an open society? It sounds lovely.

And who could be against things like a democracy initiative or democracy partners? But he really inverts the meaning of these words by buying off very small elections. I mean, we see it with the prosecutors and sowing chaos in our cities, opening the prisons. George Soros is sort of a special control agaric. But the other ones, I mean, you've got Bill Gates, of course, at the top there. And then all of the guys who go to the World Economic Forum and talk about things like going cashless or implementing digital IDs that are effectively going to be social credit scores. I mean, I thought the reason I wrote this book is because there's all these things that

sound like crazy conspiracy theories. And then you then you dig in and you see, well, actually, no, they do want to use a form of digital ID to track movements and track activities. And if you are going the wrong places, doing the wrong things, buying the wrong things, you'll get, you know, you'll have sort of this social credit score. We see it right now in Ireland. If you're attending protests or riots, whatever the case may be, they want to take away your right to free speech. And actually, they're talking about taking away the entitlements of these protesters, like taking away, you know, Europe's got more of a welfare

state, but they've got sort of basic universal basic incomes. They want to freeze their assets. You saw it in Canada with the truckers. They wanted to freeze the trucker protests assets. So the motivation here would be what? These are people who are already so rich that the usual motivation that still affects most of us, which is paying the mortgage, setting something aside for retirement, they blew past that ages and ages ago. The mere accumulation of money after a certain level becomes uninteresting to them. I'm trotting this out to see if you approve of this, if this is right. And so, all their gratification shifts from earning profits to doing good. And they define doing good as in one way or another manipulating

the way the rest of us live in the interest of George Soros as a particular and I think skewed sense of justice. Bill Gates is on and on about the planet and how we need to shift from eating beef to eating, I don't know what, grasshoppers or grass or something. Hugs, yeah, bugs. So, have I got that? These billionaires of whom the rest of us should be on red alert because in one way or another they're coming coming after us. To them, they're doing good. That's all they want to do with all their pile of money is to do good. Is that right?

Yeah, I mean, the chapter one is called The Good Club. They actually formed this club called The Good Club. That should be a big red flag right there. You'd think they could come up with something a little more creative. And so the first meeting of the Good Club was in May 2009. Bill Gates convened the meeting. It was at Rockefeller University in New York. George Soros was a co-sponsor. There were other billionaires there, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, among about 10 others. And so they get together in May 2009. The great intellects of our age. Yeah, right. The people who want to save the planet. It's a very ambitious goal. And so they get together and they say, well, Barack Obama's

just been elected. We've all spent an enormous amount of money and influence to get him there. It's also in kind of the tail end of the global financial crisis. So there's this populist resentment rising up amongst the people who've all been foreclosed upon. And these guys all made a boatload of money. People like Warren Buffett, BlackRock is a control-a-gark entity. And so they get together and they say, what should we spend all of our money on? We've got this great president who can do what we want. And they basically all unify around this cause of overpopulation. And you hear Bill Gates talk about it. and they basically all unify around this cause of overpopulation.

And you hear Bill Gates talk about it, and this is another one of those things that is conspiracy theorist fodder that I wanted to get to the bottom of, and overpopulation. So is the Earth overpopulated? I mean, that's a debate that we should be having. Some people say absolutely not. We've got plenty of space. Have you ever traveled by airplane over most countries…

And let me guess, they never say to each other, there are far too many billionaires. No, no, no. They all say there are far too many peasants. Exactly right. And so George Soros has got five kids, Ted Turner's got five or six kids. So actually, Ted Turner has proposed that entrepreneurial enterprising peasants could actually sell their fertility rights. I mean, it's a new thing I had never heard of, fertility rights. So if you're poor and you want to make some money, it's like a carbon offset, a child offset. You could sell it

to a billionaire who might want to have more than two. Okay, so these guys are lefty nuts, and the only reason that we pay attention to them should pay attention to them but we should is that they are so rich and so well connected in the technocracy that runs much of the country that they're coming after us and they can actually get okay now one more question before i toss it over to steve hayward and you don't know steve as well as I do, but I can tell from his eyes that he's desperate to get in here. So, are there any of these billionaires who are doing good? Are there any who are giving their fortunes to the charter school movement or to the founding of new churches? Are there any who are proceeding with a certain humility and actually giving their money away toward causes of which we might approve? Certainly. There are many, many good billionaires out there. This book isn't about them, but

and I don't want to carry it. That's the book that wouldn't sell. Right, right. One day. But no, the billionaires who fund causes like our own. So you can look those individuals up. They're great American patriots and the funders of charter schools especially. And I don't want to caricature these guys on the cover of the book. I mean, I certainly don't. I get deep into their history and kind of find out what makes them tick.

And Bill Gates, for example, he's rebranded as this philanthropist. So, not the guys in this book, they're not giving to those good causes. But they do, I'm sure, give to good causes. I mean, they give enormous sums of money. But if you were to look at a pie chart, it would be like the width of a paperclip on the pie chart. The money that they are spending, like Bill Gates, for example, he was never very charitable at all. I read his father's memoirs and accounts from his siblings and accounts from Microsoft employees while he had a much more active role in the company. By all accounts, he was brutal. I mean, his sister said he was, quote, nasty. His mother-

So this is John D. Rockefeller Sr. This is a man who was absolutely ruthless in acquiring his fortune, who's now rebranding himself as a man who gives dimes to children. Well, it's brilliant of you to bring up that comparison, and I get into it in the book. Brilliant is sort of what I do, Seamus, as Rob will tell you. Yeah, of course, that's his industry. Well, actually, it's fascinating that the Rockefellers and John Dee were a prototype, a control-a-gark prototype, where it was only after the Justice Department started looking into the practices of Standard Oil, or in Bill Gates's case, Microsoft, that they set up their foundations. And then they set up these foundations. In John Dee's case, starts giving dimes out. In Bill Gates's case, starts giving out million-dollar checks to

schools and libraries. Now, was he just trying to help the kids learn, or was he trying to implement things like social-emotional learning, this intentionally vague term that does away with arithmetic and science and math and puts in things like DEI into kids' brains. But it's more like brainwashing. But anyhow, Bill Gates, I mean, on his on her deathbed, his mother was pleading with him. You're now he's now the richest man. It's the mid 90s. And he's been the world's richest man for 20 of the last 30 years. She says, please, please give some of your money to charity. He still would not until he sets up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I mean, you should watch some of the antitrust depositions where they're

questioning Bill Gates about his practices. It's very Clintonian how he's like, I don't know what you mean by, you know, cut off the air supply to my competitors. But he sets up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, rebrands, becomes this great philanthropist. And since then, he's gotten into a lot of industries. Now Bill Gates, he's a farmer. He's a doctor. He's an educator. He's got a lot of hats that he wears.

And it's not a problem that he wants to invest. He kind of says, oh, I'm just investing in farmland to diversify my holdings. But what we found at the Government Accountability Institute is he's using the same tactic that Microsoft used. It was called embrace, extend, extinguish, where he enters an industry, extends his reach, and then works to extinguish and cut off the competition. Now, the way they're doing that to the farmers is with all these climate change regulations and emissions standards to save the planet, ostensibly. But I can tell you the fake meats that he invests in, Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, a lot of these lab-grown meats that are coming up, they're more energy intensive. I mean, nobody knows sustainability better than a farmer.

They go out of business if they don't treat the land and be good stewards of the soil. So these companies that are growing it in labs are much more emitting of what Bill Gates would call greenhouse gases. Yeah. Seamus, it's Steve Hayward out in California. By the way, there's something quaint. I'm glad you mentioned Bill. Farmer Steve, we call him. Well, I did grow grapes for a little while, once upon a time. It's funny that you would mention Bill Gates and the antitrust business, because this now is sort of ancient history. But what we were afraid of was, oh, my God, Internet Explorer might dominate the browser market.

Nowadays, this just shows you the problem with antitrust. But sort of go back, I started spending some time around Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, gosh, almost 30 years ago now, because I'm getting old. And there were two things that struck me. One was, especially in the case of Gates, like, why is the government coming after us? What did we do wrong? I mean, yeah, we're tough competitors, but they didn't get it. They didn't understand politics. Instead, the dominant mentality, and I know Peter probably sees this because he lives there, is your tech entrepreneurs don't understand politics. They don't understand why social problems aren't solved like engineering problems. They're actually social engineers. They don't realize that social engineering is a, you know,

for all kinds of reasons that we all know, is a ridiculous idea. They think they're smarter than we are because why shouldn't they think that? They made all this money and given us all this technological progress. And I think the apotheosis of this was seen a few months ago or i guess last year now with the downfall of sam bankman free now we follow all his crypto shenanigans but the part that arrested me and still does was the fascination with effective altruism yes and why were they going to be effective because they're smarter than the rest of us and no better the implicit implicit understanding of that, by the way, is that what the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation have been doing for decades was ineffective. I have to say, this is another moment of schadenfreude, which has sort of been a theme here today.

But so there's this hubris they have and that they're smarter than us. And that's what makes them dangerous. I mean, Carnegie, and here's the distinction. these guys want to change the world because they have a vision the older billionaires like carnegie they thought when carnegie's case he thought it was an obligation to give back on moral grounds right he thought if he died with any money at all he'd go to hell and the rockefellers it's a mixed bag but they want to do good. But no, this new class has got a completely different class of billionaire. By the way, that's why I love your title, Controligarch. I think that's absolutely perfect.

They don't see any reason why they shouldn't be in control deep down inside their contemptuous of democracy. Sorry, Seamus, this isn't really a question. It's a long rant, but I wonder if you could- It's a wonderful rant. You're nailing it, Steve. You're nailing it. Go on, continue.

No, no, I just, that's sort of my observation is this is a different class of philanthropy and quite sinister. Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. So there's this great MIT professor, Joseph Wiesenbaum, and he actually captures exactly what you just said by saying, I mean, they basically have a God complex. Why? Because they've built their own worlds, these digital worlds, things like Meta and Facebook and Microsoft. And they think because they can turn the dials and pull the levers in their own digital

worlds and get their intended results there and everything's perfect and to their liking, that they can export that ability to the real world. And that's the problem because they can't. You can't social engineer. All you can do is try to control people and americans we don't want to be controlled and that's one of the big problems i mean the number one goal of these control guards that just the people in this book not all billionaires obviously but just these guys is they want to transfer power from individuals and from even countries to international institutions, things like the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, institutions they control, supranational organizations. And so, I mean, that's how

George Soros sort of plays into this. He wants to abolish borders. I mean, a lot of the chaos that we're seeing in our lives now, from open borders to crime in our cities to even inflation, is really about weakening nations so that international institutions can swoop in and save the day. So, aside from buying your book, which, however, is not to be neglected, the name of the book is Controligarchs, and you can get it on Amazon or anywhere else that books are sold. Or any other monopolistic platform. Buy it from your local bookstore, please. Aside from buying your book, Seamus, what should we do? Is there scope somehow for a peasants' revolt?

Well, visionary, World Economic Forum visionary Yuval Noah Harari says, no, there's no hope. Abandon all hope, you peasants. The peasant revolts of previous centuries are impossible today. I think I have great hope. I think there's an awakening happening amongst the people. I mean, on the right, conservatives, the debate for at least 40 years has been, oh, tax cuts and regulation, that's our economic policy. And we're starting to realize that the big corporations do not have our best interests in mind. And so previously, one might defend corporations like Microsoft or Meta. No, the debate of the future, and we're starting to wake up to this, is over artificial intelligence,

which is going to bring about a, you're already hearing calls for a universal basic income, UBI and Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI chat, you know, off and on again, head of OpenAI chat GPT's maker. He says that UBI is coming because job losses are coming, big job losses. And it's going to hit the professional classes first. I mean, you may be listening and thinking, well, I'm safe from, you know, I use AI right now. Just know you are training your replacement. And so when everybody starts losing their jobs and you'll see more and more videos of people in their car crying about how they can't afford rent or

groceries and their tragic videos, the UBI will be pitched as the solution. Well, we can just give you a meager, you know, monthly check and you'll be fine. Sam Altman, by the way, saysBI will be pitched as the solution. Well, we can just give you a meager monthly check and you'll be fine. Sam Altman, by the way, says it will be a $13,500 check. But he already knows the figure. Yeah, he, oh, for all 250 million working Americans, it will be $13,500. And you may think, well, that ain't bad. I could make ends meet on $13,500 a month. No, no, no. It's $13,500 per year,

according to Sam Altman's manifesto about the coming AI revolutions. And so, do we back our own billionaires? Do we back the good billionaires? Is there any hope of a Godzilla versus King Kong? We've got Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and David Sachs and Joe Lonsdale. And in New York, there's Cliff Asness. I mean, there are Cliff Asness. I should finish pronouncing his name. There are good guy billionaires who seem, I won't say they're all spoiling. Elon Musk does seem to be a man who enjoys a fight. He's spoiling for a fight. But the people I just named are willing to fight. Do we just repose our hope in them and hope that Godzilla defeats King Kong?

Well, number one, we need to wake up and spread the word about what's coming and what these guys are up to before they close the loop and close the net around us. So that's the first thing, is you've got to be be aware, you got to have the facts, you got to be able to articulate these facts convincingly to your peers and your friends and your family and evangelize that we don't want to be controlled. Number two, yeah, there's a big imbalance between the George Soros ATM machine and the Silicon Valley elites, the guys in this book. I mean, they are spending enormous sums, and we have great funders on the right.

You mentioned them. And they're very generous. And study after study shows that conservatives are more generous than liberals. But there's an imbalance. There just is on funding causes on the right. And so, you know, not to say that they need to spend more, but they really do. And we may never match the George Soros ATM machine, but it's important that we try. One more question before I repose your final moments in the tender hands of Rob Long.

And here's the question. I'm very impressed. This isn't a question. I'm going to give a little speech myself here. But I'm tremendously impressed by you and the other people that Peter Schweitzer has gathered around himself in Florida, because what you are doing is something that used to be known as journalism. Your book is research. You've interviewed people. You've gone through documents. You have a thesis and you write a book about it. The institutions that are capable, the legacy institutions, the New York Times and on and on, that are capable of long-form journalism are garbage. They're just not doing real journalism. There are some exceptions, but only some exceptions. So just tell us very briefly about, tell us

who Peter Schweitzer is, tell us what you guys are up to. Peter Schweitzer Well, well, thank you so much. It's an honor to hear you say that, and I will pass along your kind words to Peter Schweitzer. He is an investigative legend for those who haven't heard of him. He is my personal hero and mentor. I've worked with him since 2011, so over a decade I've been working with Peter Schweitzer. I thought I wanted to go into politics, by the way. I studied poli-sci. I thought I might want to be a politician or something. Interning for Peter Schweitzer for six months disabused me of those notions, and I find it much more gratifying and helpful to be exposing the corruption.

So I've worked with him on the books Clinton Cash, Secret Empires, and I'm kind of the nerd that Schweitzer says, okay, now just go take 5,000 pages of Clinton Foundation 990 filings and make some sense of it. And so I follow the money as our motto. So I put everything into a spreadsheet. It's what I did for this book. I put all the figures into a spreadsheet and just start filtering and sorting and eventually something like a Uranium One speech where they're paying Bill Clinton $500,000 in Moscow will pop out.

But yeah, it's atrocious what the mainstream media has become, the legacy media, New York Times. And we're seeing a renaissance now. People like Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss and just like the sub stack has really done such wonders for investigative journalism. And so I think that's what gives me hope, really, is there are people out there who still are digging through the mountain of crap that is thrown at us. You get a FOIA request, either they give you nothing or they give you a mountain of nothing. And we're working on trying to use some of these AI tools that they're putting out to

expose the people who really want to control our lives. So I actually got Bing GPT. I was on the wait list and beta user for it. And it was amazing because I was searching Bing GPT for dirt on Bill Gates and it initially was turning up some great results. And within a month, it was like, why do you, it starts talking back to me saying, well, why do you think Bill Gates is an altruistic? I'm like, well, altruistic is kind of an interesting word. Like, how do you define altruistic, Mr. Bing or Mr. and Mrs. Bing? Hey, Seamus, you know, the other side, I hope this book sells and sells and sells. And I hope that by the time you're, let me see,

I'm going to guess you're 35 is still a few years away for you. I hope by the time you're 35, you're at least, you're on the way to becoming a Bill Gates of your own. No, no. Why would you wish that? The other side pays better. You're aware of that. Are you?

That's right. Yeah. We're, we're not in it for the money. This is a nonprofit. I, uh, okay.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Over to Rob. Huge mistake. so here's my real question i mean i you know i'm not really scared of people trying to control me i'm scared of people trying to make my life better and do good for me that the altruism that you said like that's what i'm scared of i'm scared of people thinking well you know what if we let you make

your own decisions they're gonna be messy and complicated and chaotic. You might make the wrong one. You know, we just went through two and a half years of that. That was essentially the subtitle of COVID-19. Do what we tell you to do, even if it's not really important or necessary, because we just we, we, it's to make life simpler. Um, and I think there's something attractive about that, not just for the billionaires, but for people, people acquiesce to this. People complain when the world isn't risk-free.

They complain when, well, I know I have to do this all by myself. They complain when there's no government or no official bureau or app to solve a problem i mean aren't i mean i i understand you're you're you're focusing on 30 billionaires who have billions of dollars but aren't we the problem the reason they have the reason they have power influence is because they're selling something that's very attractive to a whole lot of people no i mean you you that's exactly exactly right i mean i talk about it where it's like slipping into a warm bubble bath of tyranny i I mean, it's very easy. That's kind of one of the scary things about it. It's so convenient. And I do applaud them. Again, I said I don't want to caricature them in the book, and I didn't. I applaud them for a lot of the tools they've made that have made life easier, a lot of ways but what's coming down the pike with with the AI revolution and it's in a you know we don't need to be

scared of AI I mean I we knew we hopefully can use it for all good things but the the power that it has and this is the economic debate of the future over UBI and and whether people you know a lot of people think about that UBI is like oh well I'll just be able to finally take those guitar lessons and pick up painting and culinary classes. And it's just going to be lovely. And that's the thing. It's not going to be lovely. And working hard for a living is gratifying.

And trying to take that away from people is actually evil in a way, I think. But anyhow, you're right. I mean, we, not you and me on this podcast, but we as in the non-controligarchs are part of the problem because we saw it in the pandemic, how many people turned into Karens. And I mean, our own family members wouldn't let us into their houses without masks. And the masks became like a safety blanket. I mean, you still see people wearing masks just to- Yeah, I live in New York City. I see them all the time. Yeah. All the time. So that is a problem. And waking up, I mean, we can have convenience. I mean, we live at the greatest time in human history. I mean, it's amazing. Maybe 20 years ago might have been better, but in any case...

No, no, no. This is actually statistically the best time. It is. I mean, you can have a meal delivered to your door within a matter of minutes at the tap of a button. It's an incredible time to be alive. But we also do need to wake up and take some personal responsibility. I guess go outside and touch grass maybe once in a while. But we may end up like China, is all the warning is. The West may end up closer to a system like China. I mean, Klaus Schwab talks about stakeholder capitalism. Oh, it sounds so lovely. We've got all these stakeholders. They don't consider us stakeholders. We don't get a seat at the table, just like we didn't get a seat at the table during the pandemic. These problems, things like climate change, are too

big for the peasant class to understand. They need to be solved by global institutions. And everyone to a man in this book right down to bill gates and and and you know fauci they all praised china's response to covid and they said the ability of the ccp to they use euphemisms like mobilize resources or or or their quote efficiency or something and like we know what that's code word for it's code word for brutal authoritarianism where the people don't have a say and wrong and and pointless and and so all the people who like you know just kind of are slipping into this warm bubble bath of convenience uh they're they're not going to uh they're not going to like a system like that they're not going to like the facial recognition cameras they're not going to like the weekend driving privileges lost for disinformation and all of that so but it's hard to choose it's hard to choose the hard way

right i mean when i come home i'm traveling abroad and i can land in the airport and i sort of breeze through and i do um you know global entry i don't even show my passport i just look into the camera um yeah it's kind of great you know but i but i hear you okay the book is called control the garks exposing the billionaire class the secret deals and the globalist plot to dominate your life the author seamus bruner seamus thank you for joining us thank you guys so much this was this is a real pleasure seamus parody think in terms of parody i want you to infiltrate some parties at davos and do an update on Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic. All right, I'm going to make note of that.

I'll see what I can do. Tell Schweitzer whatever he has in mind for you, that's what I have in mind. Will you please? Yeah, if I end up in a Swiss prison, I'll thank you for that. Oh, that's even better. That's nice, by the way. Think of all the writing you could get done in prison. You could be in a lot worse places.

That's probably true. It's probably quite nice over there in prison think of all the toberon they deserve you great to have you all right all right take care guys bye well thank god i'm not a billionaire that's all i could say yeah exactly i'm all wait a minute if if you were rob you would be running the counter-offensive. You're insufficiently alarmed, Rob. You do know that people want to take your gas stove away from you. As a serious chef, those aren't fighting words.

In Santa Monica, where I used to live, I rented Santa Monica for many years before I moved to Venice, before I moved to New York. It was the early days. They put out an ordinance where every new toilet had to be a low flow toilet one of those toilets doesn't really work right and all these you know i mean

santa monica's filled people's republic of santa monica they call it all these millionaire billionaire environmentalists right they were all in favor of this but when they redid their houses for their millions of dollars they didn't want that so but in order to get the certificate of occupancy you gotta have an inspection that inspector is going to look and see make sure those toilets are like low flow toilets so what they would do is they would install the low flow toilets in all the bathrooms they get the inspection and then they would swap out the low flow toilets for the really really good ones the japanese ones that like basically are like niagara falls um and so i think at some point someone someone um estimated that there were 25

low flow toilets in the entire city of santa monica they just kept rotating from house to house to house to house um so i guess i guess the my only comfort i take from this um from the book and from from what seamus was saying was that the great news here is that the billionaires are almost always wrong. They almost always make terrible errors. They think they're so smart, even the ones that we might be sympathetic to. And they make these classic, classic blunders.

Sometimes it gets us all killed. Sometimes they lose a lot of money. Uh, sometimes nothing happens, but, um, this stuff never works. So,

um, so I guess that's what i'm comforting myself with but maybe i am insufficiently alarmed yeah they do a lot of great damage along the way though i mean you know one case in point just one is the ford foundation going back 50 years ago one of their biggest grant areas was overpopulation and they bankrolled international planned parenthood the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and led to some real horrors like you know forced sterilizations in india and such there's a great book on this called fatal misconception by a historian of columbia who's otherwise a liberal but it's very savage and by the way even the new york times now

says gosh just in the last month gosh maybe falling fertility is going to be a real problem for the next century. Right. Which, by the way, is like the universities. You know, Julian Simon, you know, Peter knows he was, you know, they were saying this 50, 40, 50 years ago. We have been saying, conservatives, about universities for the last 25 years. And, you know, boy, we have one after the other. We get to say, I told you so.

But there we are. Yeah. I told you so. That sounds, that's sort of weak sauce when everything's rubble, but you're right. I mean, that is, I do comfort myself that way. I was aware of Seamus and I was aware of his book. He's even better than I expected.

He's well-spoken. Yeah, I mean, he's well-spoken, he's hardworking. So I take, I really do take a lot of comfort. Rob and Steve, all three of us love good journalism, and all three of us are of an age so that we saw with our own eyes the journalism business model collapse. Just collapse. All three of us in one way or another, I mean, we've had this conversation over drinks how many times over the years? Where's the new business model going to come from? How can you save the New York Times? How can you revive the Washington Post? Well, here's where it comes from.

Peter Schweitzer's put together half a dozen really bright guys like Seamus in West Palm Beach, Florida, of all places. Barry Weiss is in Montecito with something called the Free Press Online. Shellenberger is up in San Francisco. Matt Taibbi, I don't even know where Matt Taibbi is. But Alex Berenson from his home in Rye, I think it is, someplace in upstate New York. Journalism, good journalism is beginning to get done. New institutions, new voices. I find that I have lived to hear the first shots of the counter-revolution.

That's the way I feel. That's actually, that's sort of optimistic, Peter. It's good for the holiday season. The paradox is brought to us by some billionaires who were otherwise a problem right i mean that's right the internet has lowered the barriers of entry to this which was a great yes that's true that is true but it is also the problem with billionaires is that they um or rich people in general is that uh it that it's just irresistible to resist the idea that I'm rich because I'm really smart. Yes.

And I figured it out and you didn't. And you know what? I'm really smart in this one area. I mean, you could say this about Elon Musk. Very, very brilliant guy, right? We're going to go to Mars because of Elon Musk. He built an electric car. Nobody said he could do that.

Then he comes head to head with an ad- ad supported media business and he's floundering um and he's pretending that it's someone else's fault whereas in fact he purchased an ad supported media business and now is complaining about the terms of that ad supported media business which is a little bit you know kind of like a comeuppance for somebody who's fairly arrogant but that's okay that's all right that's that is what the market is supposed to do um the problem really is when that these sort of uh when the comeuppance doesn't happen because they are not part of the market instead they're part of the regulatory system which doesn't ever have a comeuppance we don't we never lose regulations we never lose bureaus we never lose bureaus. We never lose people telling us

how many gallons are in our toilet tank. We only get more and more and more of them. And the solution isn't to replace those people with people who agree with me. The solution is to get rid of that altogether. Yeah, instead we get the opposite. For my entire adult life, you will hear Ralph Nader or some other person on the left say, regulation of X or Y has failed. Therefore, we need more and better regulation. I've never seen the right conclusion from this, right? That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Well, fellas, I mean, I don't even want to bring this up because I'm so exhausted by it. But it does seem that this is, am I right, this is the Hunter Biden endgame here?

That indictments that came back down yesterday are sort of that, I mean, isn't it all over? I think it's a very big deal. I think it's a very, very big deal and now means it cannot be avoided next year is also i you know i don't want to i'll put on a tiny tinfoil hat and say curious that this indictment was not issued until after the deadlines had passed for someone serious to file against joe biden for the democratic nomination i'll just put it that way there's all that we have that's good tit foil hatism i gotta like i like it i like we have if you look at um one of the debates i guess it was the first debate

between joe biden and donald trump biden says this is a close reconstruction if i'm not quoting exactly nobody made money on china the only person who made money on China was this guy, and he points at Trump. He was lying through his teeth. He was lying to the American people in an election year. That is a danger to democracy. And now we know he did it. No thanks to the mainstream media, but thanks to James Comer and some very dogged terribly uncool republicans in the house of representatives but uh and the yesterday biden's lawyers so he has he's being indicted for a tax evasion to the tune of $1.6 million, if I recall the figure. And Biden's lawyers had the effrontery to say that if his name was anything other than Biden, this case would never have been brought.

If his name was anything other than Biden, he'd be in prison right now. It's staggering. It is just staggering. Now, if you start thinking through the politics of this thing, what does it do? I mean, my fear is that it kind of numbs the entire electorate to serious criminal charges. Oh, well, it doesn't matter that Trump has been indicted by, because now Hunter Biden has been, these should be taken seriously. And my concern is that in some way, they may neutralize each other in practice, in the practice of practical politics. But it sure looks like, it sure feels like just a touch of justice.

Yeah, I'm not so sure about that, Peter. I mean, if you think back to Whitewater and the Clintons, complicated land deal they lost money on, and then ultimately the impeachment over a sex scandal, which people said, ew, but that doesn't really rise to the top. I think that this is such obvious self-dealing, such obvious influence peddling, that even an independent voter or someone who's not especially ideological is going to say, this really stinks and i don't like these people um that that that it does seem like classic

government influence peddling corruption plus tax evasion which is makes everybody mad um but what's interesting about it is the only reason we had to do to get away with it was pay his stinking taxes he could have kept millions of dollars yeah like i don't know if you've seen the itemization of what he spent his money on that's in the indictment it's really fun yeah hundreds of thousands of dollars on women i think that's the itemization the line item yeah um but we only recently have this sort of 56 or whatever it is 50 plus page indictment um is because the plea deal was thrown out in the summer yeah i mean this wasn't the stately pace of justice this was a weird unexpected judge tossing out a plea deal uh in august that ended up with the

same prosecutor coming back with this this this kind of the size of this indictment suggests that there had to have been something going on before that plea deal was thrown out because you don't go from a plea deal which is gonna be fine to suddenly this guy's gonna do time for four or five years right that's that's i mean i'm no lawyer we need john you here but that seems like a bizarre swing um from we're not going to touch him to actually we're going to throw the book at him that that's it that's an interesting story that i can't wait for to be told but probably won't be told for a few years but i'd love to know speaking of foyers i'd love to have that those conversations for you because that would be a really interesting story. But speaking of interesting stories, this story is coming to an end. Thank you, fellas, for joining

us. This podcast is brought to you by Shopify. Support them by supporting us, please. Go to rickshay.com slash join, become part of the last remaining sane sliver of the internet, we promise you. And if you can, take a five-minute, take a minute to leave a five-star review on apple podcast i know we keep saying that i know it's just people don't even hear it but it actually really really matters um it gets us up on the ai algorithm helps defeat the automatic brain that's trying to defeat us um and it's all and happy hanukkah um happy hanukkah today's the first day i started last night. I think last night was the first night. First night. First night was last night.

You're right. You're right. And Steve, thank you for joining us. Always a pleasure. See you on down the road. Next week, fellas. Next week, boys. Ricochet.

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