The SHOCKING Larry Fink Letters & Uncovered Hidden Rules Of Control | Neema Parvini

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We were talking with him and he's like, you gotta check out this guy's Neiman's videos. It's so philosophical. But what we were talking about in the kitchen, because obviously no one heard that, is how we're in this strange time where the paradigm of left and right has really flipped to like, hey, this is really up-down and a lot of what we're fighting over on the political spectrum is nothing but a distraction. Is that fair to say that's about where you're at? Yeah, I think so. I think that it always seems like they keep the positions that you want separated and on different sides. For example, if you're on the left, you can be against capitalism and you can be against wars, right? It could be like pro-Palestine or something like that. But it has to come packaged with a whole bunch of woke and LGBT stuff. And so it's kind of like packaged in such a way that it's going to put a lot of people off. I'll just put it that way because you may agree on a couple of these things. And then if you find yourself over on the right, you may, for example, have conservative social values or be against mass immigration, something like this. But then it has to come packaged with war stuff, forever wars, pro-market capitalist stuff, talking points. And I often think that if left to their own, like if we had an actual democracy, which we don't, and when I say we, I mean basically any country that calls itself a liberal democracy, we can get into that soon. I think that the public, certainly in Britain, but also probably here, would default to something that, broadly speaking, would be left economically and right on social. So I think that's a big issue. something like that but for some reason that option is never really put on the menu uh it's almost in fact it's they always keep and when i say they i mean yeah who's that the the let's just say the uh the kind of permanent power structure that we all find ourselves living under uh for some reason that option is seldom if ever put on the menu um and if it is it's not one that's going to get massive media play funding billionaire backers etc etc hey guys three quick things number one if you haven't subscribed please subscribe it's a huge huge help number two if you'd like to join my patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes you can join via the link in my description or in the pin comment below and number three if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make content from the show and make money you can join via the discord link in my description below um and when you get into the mechanisms of you know like let's just take one issue immigrant everybody talks about immigration all the time now you think well how can you really talk about mass immigration without talking about the incentives of you know big multinational corporations okay um but the people who let's just say on the right frequently then find themselves in bed with oh tech billionaires or people whose natural incentives are never going to lead you to a situation where you're going to who truly oppose legal mass immigration. So, you know, and that's a pretty good example of how democracy does not reflect the tastes of the people. In Britain, for example, since the early 1960s, the public has always been against, in the majority, against mass immigration, and yet government after government, left or right, Tory or Labour, persist in. How's that been allowed to go on for so long, if that's the case? Well, and this is really where you get to some of the principles of elite theory. And what you're talking about, the up versus the down, or the ruling class, you could say, and the quote-unquote people, or as I like to say, the organised minority and the disorganised mass. Um, and the, I mean, if we just stick with our issue, uh, on, on, on, uh, mass immigration, well, you'd think then the people who should find themselves in opposition to all of this sort of stuff would be the, the anti-capitalist side, which is meant to be the political left. And historically they were, the unions for obvious reasons had incentives to be against mass immigration because they were for the workers and for workers jobs and workers rights so historically they always opposed them you can actually see milton friedman arguing with union bosses in the 1980s over this um but somehow over time the left became obsessed with and i don't think it was an accident to be honest uh they became obsessed with what people call identity politics and what people call woke now and suddenly if you had an issue with mass immigration well that means you're a racist that means you're so in a strange way they end up doing the bidding of the very people they're meant to be be against yes in a sense because who actually benefits from cheap labor is the forces of capital right i mean i mean this much is should just be obvious to anyone who knows anything about economics um so so i feel like there's a there's a people are always kind of kept in a permanent state of being slightly confused right they may know what they you know think about certain issues but then they're pretty quickly shunted onto a whole set of propositions or things they have to believe uh to be on a side And then sooner or later you end up finding yourself, you know, people find themselves, well, because they've donned a MAGA cap, now you have to kind of back Trump over this unrelated thing or that unrelated thing or this other thing. And all of a sudden you're just a kind of cheerleader for a side as opposed to someone who's, you know, trying to make genuine political change in a direction that you want. What's the difference between that and a cult? And a cult? And a cult. Well, I mean, I would say it has cult-like aspects. One of the mechanisms, you know, people are ruled by emotion more than anything else. And, you know, years ago I was into a book called Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahn. I don't know if you and uh and also Jonathan Haidt Righteous Mind great book great great thinker as well and people tend to find themselves you know they feel the emotion first they feel the intuition first and then they confirm what they already think and then they tell themselves well I've reasoned myself into this position whereas in fact it's almost always a post-hoc justification for uh you know a position that you've felt when you've already kind of made your bed you know let's say you've picked a side let's say you've backed trump okay rather than admit well he tricked me or i fell for it people you know because that would cause cognitive dissonance That would cause you to have to, you know, admit that you'd got it wrong. So people tend to double down or triple down rather than face that kind of cognitive dissonance. And I saw it happen to lots of people. I mean, obviously, I'm over in London, so I watch America from afar. but i thought it was obvious pretty quickly uh that for example the second trump presidency was not going to deliver what people thought it was going to be when you say pretty quickly like right after he got in or when are you talking just just straight away uh when um when matt gates didn't get that. Which was pretty much like on day one. I was like, "Well, okay." Attorney general thing? Yeah. They said he'd done some sex thing or whatever. I mean, the reasons are never important. What's important is you're looking at the map, which faction in the coalition that was behind Trump is the one that seems to have functional power. And this was a kind of live question. I mean, I thought it was obvious even in the run-up. I was telling people, "Look, there's a lot of people who switch sides here since certain things happened in the world." What, like Mark Zuckerberg's going to wear a MAGA hat now? I mean, I could tell little subtle things like Bill Maher, for example, was having little digs on Trump. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I could tell little subtle things like Bill Maher, for example, was having and this is being set up by the media, if you know where to look, if you know how to pass the media, they kind of have a habit of priming the audience. Let's just put it that way of giving a tell. And there were all sorts of other things. What are some of those tells though? I'd love for you to take us back to March, April, June, even like pre-Butler 2024. What were some of those tells where you're like, ah, I see the wind shift in the media? Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things is what are they focusing on? What are they giving prominence to? One of the strange little media tricks is they ask questions in a headline and the answer to the question in the headline is almost always no. So let's say you had a headline saying, is Kamala Harris going to be the president? The answer is almost always no. There's a law for this. Okay. And then you have a look at the Trump headlines and it's, you know, they're not asking that question. It's more of like a statement or it's more of a, you know, is this Georgia mugshot going to, you know, it's just the way they frame certain things. You could tell that, or I could certainly tell that something had changed here. All the way through Biden's presidency, the media didn't criticize him at all. And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, now he's fallible. Now he's got cognitive problems. Well, George Clooney said it was okay. Oh, yeah. Right. Right. Or something. So there tends to be, they're never subtle. You know, I always say that, you know, they don't play 4D chess. They're just really quite blatant about it, you know. And, you know, just little things like Bill Maher. kind of having little digs and doing his usual thing you could kind of tell where it was going um and then you know when the assassination attempt happens it was like yes okay it's in it's in the bag but you you could also tell that the democrat party were like yeah we're probably taking the L on this one so they were kind of half-hearted like all sorts of people you know Josh Shapiro I remember is like I'm not going to be the I'm not going to be the VP and they were lukewarm so you could I think I think you could tell um and I I think the media in general um is a is a large part of where people kind of you know I said people are emotional and therefore when you're in a heightened emotional state or a constant low level of anxiety um you're easily manipulated as always please take one second to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already I really appreciate that also the like button's a big help and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below now nobody likes to think that they're easily manipulated but if you're in a heightened state of emotion people can kind of push your buttons in all sorts of different ways and also when you're in that state you want hope you want something to fight for you want to believe that there's a leader coming to save you which is really what Trump was for a lot of people um in a lot of the stuff I've read on media they talk about the pseudo reality that is created there's a guy called Walter Lippman writer in the 1920s and 30s who said look the average person basically doesn't know I mean if they were just going to go on the facts of their own life they're not going to know much about anything almost everything he knows about what's happening in the world comes from a newspaper or comes from something he's seen on TV yes like the pseudo reality there was a French uh think uh many years later called beau baudrillard who talked about hyperreality that we live in a constant state of kind of um thinking we care about stuff that we know but then the only thing the only reason that we know that is because we've seen it one of the things I always go back to is in the 90s uh when I was a teenager Princess Diana died yes okay I don't know if you have any of them the first thing I can remember fully in my life oh right well well there we go okay viscerally it's her life is one that I've really studied because of that because it's like you know it feels like tied to me in a strange way so if you if you if you weren't there it will be hard to understand just how much people cared about this yes okay I mean it was people were going out and buying literal armfuls of Elton John CDs crying you know because they believe that the princess of our heart as Tony Blair called called her has you know was no longer with us okay I mean this is this is someone who just like a year before was being like trashed in the tabloid press about other Affairs and all the rest of it but now candle in the wind right it was candle in the wind and this kind of weird hysteria that kind of swept over people and this you could say is a great example of hyperreality stuff that people think they care about mainly because it's been media generated and you could say with with her this was an entire media story from start to finish in fact her life and the way she died could even argue that you know this was just as a result of media the whole thing sure um so that wasn't an easy one to see what's more difficult to get people to see is that pretty much a lot of the things you think you care about have this quality uh if you really start to think about well how do you think that's going to help you and how do you think that 's going to help you and how do you know certain things happened what's the roots of it most of the time and you've traced it back and it'll be well you saw it on TV or you you kind of read it in a newspaper um you know one of the things I've often found I don't want to I'm not like having a go at boomers here okay but I you have a you have a free space to do right we love our boomers I'm not I'm not specifically having a go at uh boomers but in my experience you know people talk about like red pilling or people talk about you know getting people to see some aspect of the truth I'm sure a lot of people have had this experience with that generation who were really the first generation who lived completely plugged into TV okay yes and you think you've made progress and they're kind of with you and you've kind of got through to them and then you see them a week later and they've kind of it's almost like they've gone factory reset because they've seen they've seen something on TV or they were describing my dad right or there are some people who won't believe it until they've seen it on TV you know in our country it would be you know a BBC report it's not real until the BBC says say it's real okay uh you know here would be CNN or Fox depending on depending on who you're talking to um so you can kind of understand it with that that generation their reality is basically dictated by media and a lot of things are downstream from that now when the internet came along and when social media came along it was like for the first time ever there was a canton there was a space to have a countervailing narrative a way of saying things that weren't typically in the media approved narratives and you know 10 years ago that was exciting and that was you know a space for free thinkers and it felt like things were going to change as a result of it And I mentioned the red pill. Everybody thought they were leaving the matrix. They'd seen through it and they'd taken the red pill. What I think has happened over the past decade is that it's like, again, the powers that be, whatever you want to call them, kind of got wise to that game. But the space, the social media space, is not as free as it once was. It's now got a lot more money in it. It's got a lot more interest in it. It's got a lot more people who are. Are you ever shopping online and suddenly a discount that helps you save pops up? It makes your day, sometimes even your week. Want that feeling month after month? Well, new customers who save by switching their home and auto insurance to Progressive save hundreds. Cue your happy dance. Get your quote today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states. As wishlists grow, you know where to go. Head to Ulta Beauty. We have gifts they'll love from brands like Tate 01 and Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez. Shop beauty faves to give or keep from Shark Beauty, Sol de Janeiro. And more. Not sure what they want? You can't go wrong with Balmain, Clinique, or Redken. And don't forget to put yourself on the list. Book a salon moment or add a little more sparkle to your season. Shop holiday in-store or at Ulta.com. Ulta Beauty. You know, have backing and funding. So that's one side of it. Quick question on that. I just don't want to lose this point. It's interesting that you're saying that in 2026, where I agree we have a lot of problems on social media. I'm not discounting that. And certainly there's a lot of oddities. There's a lot of bad money there and political affiliations. However, it felt like it was way worse in 2022, 2021, 2023. And it's like we went way down. And if you started pure here, you went down to here. And now maybe at least it's here. Is that fair to say? Or would you disagree with that? Well, it depends what you're looking for. So, I mean, these are, and feel free to disagree, by the way, because obviously these are just my kind of take on things. I think at a certain point, social media companies and possibly even the security services thought this whole strategy of just banning people from social media or censoring has kind of backfired on us. Because what happened is that when people were banned from Twitter or when they were banned from YouTube, they kind of went underground. They went on to more difficult. Difficult platforms to monitor and more difficult platforms for, you know, the intelligence services to have a look at what people were saying or what they were up to. And also people felt like they were being denied a voice. So I think at some point a decision was made that actually the better thing to do is to have everybody on social media. That way we can see what they're saying. That way. That way we can actually, it's data. Let's face it, it's data. We can, do we want people off the grid or do we want people on the grid? And I think that it's better for them to have everybody on the grid. Also, you know, we were talking about containment. One of the great mechanisms of containment. Did we talk about the definition before camera? Maybe we haven't actually. Right. So on camera, we haven't talked about it. So if you would just define that and then we'll go through it. Okay. So typically if you're up against a big power structure, there are all sorts of ways to try to fight back against that. You want to have a resistance, which ironically is the great boomer narrative. You know, we're all, we all want to be Han Solo or Luke Skywalker fighting the empire. Okay. And we all think of ourselves as rebels, which is also paradoxically. The official ideology of our time is to be a rebel actually in a strange way. In a strange way. In a strange way, how we've all been conditioned to think by the very media we're talking about. So, you know, if you think historically, you think of revolution, you think of like Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrowing the czar, or you think of, you know, various other revolutions that have happened, Che Guevara or something like this. And these are the ways. The people imagine they're going to fight back, or you think of mass protest movement, you know, Martin Luther King, Gandhi or something like this, where we're going to do peaceful protests. We're going to make change from the bottom up and this is how we're going to fight back. Um, so containment is basically where you give people the feeling that they're part of some sort of resistance. There's some, they're, they're a dissident. There are. They're, they're a subversive, something like this, but actually the effort is contained by power. I it's really being controlled by power as either release or release mechanism, or, well, this is not really going to go anywhere. It does. It's not because ultimately people in power want to stay in power. So the end game for them is just maintaining themselves as a ruling class. Um, so what they don't want is a genuine movement that is going to overthrow them. So what better way to facilitate that by giving people these vents, probably the best example of containment I can ever think of, uh, is, you know, I mentioned Tony Blair in 2003, the Iraq war was very, very unpopular in the UK. Um, even at the very beginning, at the very beginning. Yeah. And there was a. March, uh, a protest in London, which is the, still the largest protest in over a million people marched against the Iraq war. Can we pull that up? Deep? That's crazy. A million people, a million people, the largest protest in British history. Wow. And it was, uh, you know, people like Jeremy Corbyn and they can see the largest protest of all time. It's like a fucking Superbowl parade for anti-war. Wow. No. Here's the question. What did that achieve? Not a goddamn thing, unfortunately. What did it achieve? Nothing. Yeah. Tony Blair still went to war and not only did he still go to war, he got reelected in 2005, which people seem to forget these days, and he got reelected easily and comfortably. Now imagine if Tony Blair, rather than letting that all play out, uh, just being like, right, roll out the tanks, fire on the crowd. That, I mean, then he would have had a problem on his hands, then it'd be like, okay, it's the people that, but he just let it play out. You're like, this is going to pass. It's like letting a child tire themselves out. Exactly. If they've, they've had their vent and if you were went on that war, uh, if you went on that March, sorry, the, the anti-war March, you would have felt good about yourself. I got to virtue signal for a while. I, I've done something, right? I've done something. Okay. And therefore you kind of. You get to have that warm, fuzzy feeling and the powers that be are like, okay, well, that was nothing. We still get, we, we're still basically going to do what we're going to do. We're not going to do anything about it. Um, sayonara. And a lot of, a lot of containment takes that kind of form, uh, where it's just like, and I think if you think about it, if somebody just vents and their anger on Twitter. Or an ex as it's known now, that's basically what's happening. They, well, okay. You've, you've run your mouth on there. If you go a bit too far, well, you know, in Britain, you can get arrested by the police. Uh, I forgot to say that earlier. You guys do have a different reality with that over there than here, as far as what your government can do on social media. So that does need to, that's a huge asterisk on my point I was making earlier. Yeah. But, but you can, you can still see why, I mean, even here in America, there's still a kind of. Uh, you know, deep state who are going to be keeping an eye on, and if you think about it, their eyes and ears, if they're what, if you, if you, everybody just broadcast and what they think on social media, then one, it's not going to, it's really not going to go anywhere further, just like that big March because it's venting. And if you're online, you're disparate, you're not actually organizing politically because this is, this is. Another one of the great things that, uh, I think needs to be understood is that podcasts and videos and tweets aren't politics. They are the simulacra of politics. It is right. It's not, it's not actually doing politics. Uh, even though it, even though you may be talking about political stuff, it actual politics is very different. I didn't involve it. Everyone always involves on the ground. Organization. So can you define for people out there who are unfamiliar with the simulacra term, do you define what you mean by that? Right. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's basically the hyper. reality that we were talking about already, or the pseudo reality. You're basically simulating the form of something without actually doing the thing itself. A few months ago, we had a prime minister in Britain called Keir Starmer. You may remember him. He's no longer the prime minister. Every time he tweeted, he was ratioed on Twitter. People felt really good telling the prime minister what they think of him and all the rest of it. I said, "Look, Keir Starmer doesn't care about being ratioed, but you feel good that you've had your say." You feel like you're doing politics. Yeah. But you're not actually. No part of that is actual real politics. It is literally just you saying something in a digital form. If ratios like that, even though I do agree with your point that it seems to be no matter what we get, we always get the same meal. If a ratio does things like that, symbols like that, do eventually lead to someone resigning from office. I'm not saying it's not going to happen. I'm not saying it's going to happen. But if it's one pebble in the pond that helps the ripple effect happen, then is that at least something, or it's still nothing to you? No, I think it's nothing, to be honest. The real reasons why Keir Starmer was ousted from office have basically nothing to do with him being ratioed. It was to do with really quite boring internal labor party politics and the fact that. Keir Starmer was out of office, and the fact that he had displeased the wrong people and had lost the backing of pretty much everyone. In the case of Starmer, he is an inept politician and not a people person, just didn't have the right tools for it. So they kind of switched him out for somebody else to change the script, because otherwise Labour were going to lose any election, now they've got this other guy in who's a friend of the working man and all the rest of it. And that's changed the momentum. So it was obvious that they've had to make some sort of change. But I would say it's got nothing to do with anything that happened on Twitter or social media. And yeah, this is one of the strange elements of social media. Because I think that now, everybody who's caught in that hyper-reality has entered into a new matrix, like I was saying earlier on. It's almost like. I don't know if you remember the matrix. Remember there was that guy, Cypher, who eats the tasty steak? It's like they've left one, and now they've gone into this other one where they believe something's happening. They believe. They've gone into this other one where they believe something's happening. They believe like. Here in America, it'll be like the Patriots, it'll be like MAGA. They really believe something's happening, or they really believe one version of events. Often, if you have a memory and you track all of the stuff they're talking about. Let's say you took a time machine and went back to a year ago or six months ago, see what people were talking about on their Twitter feeds. They've probably all forgotten about it. Whatever was important then is not important now. But it was to them at the time. Yes. In Britain, the British Patriots, which is a weird thing in itself because British people don't usually use that sort of language, but they've started to now, which in itself tells me something. I.e., it's come over from. I was going to say you guys were on the wrong side of that one. Right. It's come over from America. That's the language. Last year, there was this movement to put flags on, put the Union flag on lampposts. I don't know if you saw that story. I did not see that. So people were all around the country, they were climbing up lampposts and putting Union jacks on because it made them feel good, made them feel like we're going to win our country back, guys. I remember at the time I said, "Look, this is just not going to do anything." People said, "Oh, no. You don't understand. It's going to re-territorialize the country. There's going to be a civil war." It's going to be a civil war. It's going to be a civil war. There's going to be a civil war. None of this stuff is going to happen at all. You are living in a kind of imaginary world. Yeah. Now, I can go back and tell those same people a year later, "See what I told you guys?" And all they'll do is get angry because people don't like you pointing out that they're caught up in these narratives all the time. Because of course, they've moved on to the next thing. That's right. Or the next thing and the next thing. I feel like one of the great challenges at the moment is to get people who are caught up in these political bubbles. It's almost like they've made their political identity, which is fake because it's all this stuff we're talking about. It's just stuff that's online. It's not even real. They've made it their whole thing. They've made it their whole identity. It's religion. And it's become kind of quantifiable. It's quasi religious in nature. That's why I was asking you a little bit ago, what's the difference between what you were describing and a cult? I've talked with people in that chair who got sucked into the worst kind of cults ever. And I have tremendous empathy for it because I don't think any human being, you and me included, are infallible to that. I think if the right buttons were pushed in our environment and in our life just in the right direction, we could do that. And sometimes, when I look at politics in democracies around the world, and then I'll go compare it to cults that I've studied through people I've talked to, I'm like, very similar. Every party has their one fiery leader at a given time. They all have one or two major doorways that they creak open that most people are really pissed about. And then they slowly introduce all the other rooms in the house that most people have no idea what the fuck they're talking about, and yet they follow them to the gates of hell with it because of those psychological reasons you just laid out about being afraid to say I was wrong or going back off strong opinions and stuff. It's just, unfortunately, I don't mean to be cynical about it, it appears to be human nature when you study history. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, one of the dark thoughts I've had is that to go back to the matrix and energy, we all thought it was a good thing to take the red pill. We. Right, to see the truth. Hey guys, if you haven't already subscribed, please hit that subscribe button. It's a huge, huge help. Thank you. When I say we, I mean people on the internet, right? 10 years ago, all thought it was great, we're going to see the truth. We're going to deprogram our mind and all this sort of stuff. I've often thought, do you know what? For a lot of people, it may not be a good idea. And I've seen all sorts, I mean, there's one reaction, like I told you, the boomer who snaps back the week, a week later, because they happened to watch Fox again or whatever. There's another reaction that people have to quote unquote taking the red pill, which is basically to just completely go off the deep end. And I've seen, I mean, many people do that, especially boomers, but also younger people as well. When I say go off the deep end, I mean, okay, so there's a kind of sliding scale, right? You start to see the truth of things, but then there's only a couple of short steps to, I guess what you call like kind of a kook conspiracy stuff. Now, what I mean by that is, so basically when you start to see through these things, you start to realize that a lot of things that you were taught growing up by your school, by the media, weren't true. Yeah. And that we've been fed a lot of lies. And some people, when that happens, have what you might call an epistemological break, a kind of cognitive shattering. And it's like their truth that they believe is all shattered in a million pieces on the floor, something like that. And because of that, they come to question absolutely everything. Yes. And this is how you end up with people who are like, well, like dinosaurs aren't real or flat earth or whatever rabbit holes you want to get to. I feel like that's one trajectory people take, which in itself is kind of, so I always think, well, you kind of want to stay sane. Okay. When you quote unquote take the red pill, you want to stay sane. And so how do you stop yourself going there? Because if you question one thing, this thing's not This thing's not, you can see how it happens. It's like a domino effect. But then another way that people stay sane is what we've been talking about, i.e. to go into essentially a new goldfish bowl, a new matrix, a new cult, a new way of. And in exactly the same way that your 50 year TV watcher snaps back in a week, you can explain a lot of these things to, let's say, a patriot. Or, I mean, these people that we've picked, I've picked on the right today because they're kind of visible, but all of these people are on the left as well. There are equally, there's an exact parallel to this on the left of politics too. But in the exact same way, you could sit down with someone, you can get them to agree to this, that and the other. And then a week later, they've snapped back because they're hyper-realistic. They're mates. It's like, well, what can we do about this because it's, you know, if anybody's familiar with my work, populist illusion, elite theory and so on, I think people underestimate kind of what they're up against. You know, you read narratives of the past, you think, well, people will rise up. There's going to be a revolution. The people are waking up, all this sort of stuff. And I'm like. 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You underestimate just how many levers the people in power can pull and you also underestimate just how many layers of containment there are in the system and that the containment can go very far in both directions to the point where, you know, like just think about the absurdity of this, right? Imagine this from the perspective of 2015. That in 2026, I'd be sitting here and there'd be this kind of like communist guy running New York, this Mamdani guy and at the same time, the prime minister of Italy was sold in the media as being literally a fascist, right? Giorgio Maloney. And these two things now, but also these two figures, Mamdani and Maloney, are not in any way a threat to the system. They are like, they have not. They are not going to. They are going to change the fundamentals of the structure of things and that's kind of why they're all right with it. So, what I'm saying is the layer of containment can run the entire gamut from Mamdani to Maloney and it still doesn't really care and it still carries on. Okay. There's a noise point I want to ask about there, but while you're on like this containment and using actual examples of leaders, I think this is a good place to ask who, you know, in the words of Vito Corleone, control, who controls Depeze and Avante on a string? Because that's what you're describing. You're describing all of us, you, me, everyone out there listening as Depeze and Avante and there is, you know, some sort of small group that says cinema. Right. Yes. Well, that's a very good question. The first thing to say is that I think there is an identifiable ruling. Class. Identifiable. An identifiable ruling class. But this ruling class is actually much larger than you, than you might imagine. And it is managerial in nature. So, at some point, historically, societies became so complex, they call it mass and scale. They became so big. That it necessitated management, serious management and since about, let's say, the 1930s, 1940s, the United States, you know, since FDR, essentially, the United States has been recognizably a managerial regime. It's a soft managerial regime, okay, which I'll explain in a second. But. It means, it means basically that there's a rather large bureaucratic, permanent, what people today call the deep, the deep state, but it has, it has to have these things to function. Okay. I mean, imagine, imagine trying to run a country the size of America with something like a kind of a 17th century absolute monarchy. It'd be very difficult. One, for a start. One man, the king, would just not be able to, like, he'd need to have a massive, massive team behind him. Right. Or something that approaches the current, what people currently call. We kind of already fought a war over that. Back in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know. Exactly. My condolences. So, but the point is, is that if you, if you think about that moment, let's say of the Second World War, where it was America versus Germany. And also the Soviet Union, there was an article James Burnham, who I'm sure you've heard of. He wrote a book called The Manigero Revolution, and he, he also wrote a book called The Machiavellians. And he was my route into getting into elite, into elite theory. He's one of the elite theorists. James Burnham. James Burnham. Now, James Burnham pointed out in those books in the, in the forties that. We can recognize the USSR as a kind of totalitarian state. It's got a large bureaucracy. It's got a large identifiable ruling class who at that time was like, it was Stalin and the, and the kind of communist party. Right. And it was a hard managerial state that I, if you did something that displeased them, you probably have a machine gun in the back of your head. Okay. And also Nazi Germany at that time had a different type of managerial state, but it's still recognizably bureaucratic. And it was still, you know, we call it totalitarian. Okay. Because in both of those states, okay, Nazi Germany, you could only get somewhere if you were a Nazi. Okay. And in communist Russia, you could only get somewhere if you were a communist. That's right. Well, in, uh, the. In the USA, on the face of it, it's not like that. You have kind of freedom and you have kind of a plurality of opinions, but in actuality and it's real functioning in exactly the same way that they're not going to let a non-communist run the USSR or a non-Nazi run Nazi Germany in exactly the same way the people who were running the US are only going to allow them to set like, yes, you have to be a liberal Democrat, quote unquote, in order to see power. This is, I mean, and now I think people understand this more because we have cancel culture. You have, you know, a much more visible kind of, uh, selecting out of people who aren't allowed in for various, various different reasons. So. Uh, and the managerial class have identifiable characteristics. They are kind of have mobile, uh, they kind of don't have a connection to specific places such that you could kind of, they could operate in New York or London or Tokyo or LA, and it wouldn't make any difference because they are defined by their skillset. By their education and by their background, by their professional background, because they're, the key thing that they are looking to do is, is manage. And so the, if you're part of this managerial class, that also goes with a whole set of assumptions about the world and a whole kind of, uh, a worldview, you know, people by which, I mean, the people who are not part of the, you know, the people who are to be managed are not. So. So in the days of old, you could have had a king, you could have had a feudal aristocracy. The relationship between the rulers and the people was one of obligations. So if you were a king, you had to protect the people because that was your part of the bargain. Okay. And it was a kind of, they pay you taxes, they work for you, they work your land. And in exchange, you give them protection, both from external threats and you provide law and order. That was the basic bargain for almost all of history. And if you think about it, the, you know, I was saying about mass and scale, in the feudal times, if you were a feudal lord, let's say you had a, you know, baron of the manor, something like this, lord of the manor. You had a big estate, you had peasants working for you and so on and so forth. And those sorts of, even though it's not in our imagination, because there'd been great strains, I would say, to demonize the past in our era. If you were running one of those feudal estates, you had to be able to have a drink with the men in the local tavern. You had to look the people that you were ruling over in the eyes, face to face. Right. If me and you were talking now, they would have been that close. And in the extreme cases, they would have had to lead these men into war. So you can see that the connection between the feudal lord and even the peasant in that particular estate was close. Whereas the managerial class are separated from the people they rule over. They're rolling stones. They don't have a. Right. Exactly. By distance, by, you know, now by computer. By kind of computers and big structures that kind of mean that that drink that the feudal lord would have had with his men in the tavern just doesn't really happen. And in fact, the managerial class often sees the people rather than, you know, my men who I have obligations to, who may fight for me. Instead, the relationship is these people are a problem to be managed. They're a problem to be managed. Okay. They're in my way. Well, but also their preferences, their tastes, their, you know, I mean, it was pretty much summed up when Hillary Clinton said the basket of deplorables, right? It kind of did this, you know, she was like a pantsuited woman in a managerial outfit, basically saying that the people of America are a problem. Right. And that, you know, whatever. Their preferences are, we need to, we need to find a way of managing that out. And in the worst cases of nudging them in this way and that or, so you can see how the relationship has changed between the men, what we might call the managerial class and the quote unquote people. So to come back to your question about who is, who is the ruling class? Well. The managerial class is quite big. If you think about, you know, that is every, that is basically everyone from, you know, people who are in Washington and identifiable politicians and all of the people with clipboards behind them to at the kind of lowest rung. It could be the person in the lanyard running the local library because they have, if you think about it, they have allegiance to that, to that structure, to that, to that class, if that makes any sense. Yes. Now, we also mentioned billionaires earlier on, and this is where things get a little bit more complicated because one of James Burnham's insights was that the difference between classic capitalism, as we would think of it with the tycoon with his big top hat and the cigar and, you know, the guy you own the factories. So, or someone like Henry Ford. Sure. Okay. They had a lot of autonomy and power. Someone like Henry Ford was basically like a little dictator of his own empire. Or if you think of JP, JP Morgan, all these kind of classic tycoons, they had a lot of power. When, uh, the advent of what we're calling managerialism came about, there was a severance of ownership and control. So if you think about. Share shares. If you think about floating a company on the stock market and, uh, selling shares. So what do they call it? An IPO, IPO, IPO. When you be, when you become an IPO, if you think about it, the ownership of that company is now diffuse. Okay. That could be millions of shareholders. And even though that means that there could be people who own a 5% stake, a 10% stake, whatever, but they're still basically. You know, spread around a whole, uh, bunch of owners. So what happens? The Henry Ford, like the Ford family, let's say now do not have the same functional power over Ford motor company now as he would have enjoyed at the time. Right. I mean, I'll give you an example. Like Henry Ford is a good example because he famously just refused to hire accountants. He just didn't trust them. He didn't have any. So, so the Ford motor company just didn't have accountants until right now. Can you imagine the Ford company today saying like, oh, right. We're, we're not going to hire any MBAs or, uh, we're not. So I think there was another component there for him, but there were, I mean, he's a, he's a, he's a special case, but the, the point is, is that when you become an IPO, there's a whole set of governance over. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That comes in, and this is really the mechanism by which the managers can come in and take over. Yeah. Um, and so, you know, probably another, you know, to choose another guy who may have had edgy views from the early 20th century, Walt Disney. Okay. The difference between the Walt Disney company when it was Walt and when it was like Michael Eisner CEO, right. One of them is a visionary, he's an entrepreneur, he's a tycoon. Yeah. And the other one is, is, is a manager. So he has to answer to stakeholders, shareholders. Right. Yeah. So, so the, the severance of ownership and control is who has, who has control in this moment where, is it the share, is it the shareholders who have control? Well, on the face of it, they have the ownership, but actually the functional control is with the manager of the shares, the account manager. Yeah. And in our current, in our current system, a lot of account management is done, as you'll know, by companies like BlackRock. Okay. Yes. So. Because they pay into the system and they decide. They, they manage what, like $10 trillion of assets. And then they, but I'm saying they also then use their massive economies of scale to, you know, at the top layers of BlackRock, I think the CEOs and stuff like that, to then wield power in the political system and decide. be the kingmakers. This is who's running against who. Absolutely. So you can see how even. So this is an all around about way of saying that when we're talking about guys sitting around a table in a smoky room, the ruling class is more diffuse than that. And it does also have factions within it. But then within that, there are people who wield significant power. And I would say Black Rock is a pretty good. One of the things I got obsessed with doing was reading Larry Fink's letter to the CEOs. Every year he writes a letter to all the CEOs of all the companies. Now imagine Black Rock is a 5% shareholder in pretty much every company. Okay. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But if it's up again, generally, they'll be in the top bracket for most. That's a lot. Yeah. For most companies. Absolutely. And if it's not Black Rock, it'll be State Street or Vanguard, right? If you've looked at this. Now, if the market starts seeing movement, let's say Black Rock just had it in for Coca-Cola and really started selling their Coca-Cola shares, they could cause a lot of problems for Coca-Cola. So the point is when Larry Fink sends his letter to the CEOs, if he says something, you can bet all those CEOs could better take notice of what he's saying. And so it's not like he's a commissar in the USSR, but it is like you can kind of see where things might go by taking note of what somebody like him says. That's right. So for example, back in 2022, Yeah. Yeah. 2023, what he said in his letter to the CEOs is, "Look, this politics stuff, we better dial it down a little bit. People have had enough of woke and they're onto us on the, what's it called? The people have kind of taken note of this sort of stuff and it's causing a problem for us. The prisoners are revolting. Right. And so he said, "We better just get back to just making stuff for people." So I read this and said, "Look, in the next couple of years, they're going to put the woke away for a while." Because I read the letter and I thought, "Well, we're going to see a bit of a shift, a bit of a change in strategy from these people." Now what's interesting to me is it doesn't really matter how the messaging changes. So let's say it's Bud Light sold by a transsexual woman. Yeah. Didn't they have it, Dief, it was like Homo Estas or something during June? That was Chipotle. That was Chipotle. Right. Right. Or it could be, where the patriotic be at, with the stars and stripes hat and. We're doing it for the veterans or whatever, but the point is it doesn't matter what hat you put on it or what messaging it is, Larry Fink's still sitting there. Yes. And he doesn't really care which way it goes, because functionally, there's still a lot of power with somebody like that. Yes. Okay. So I would say that these are some of the nodes, you could say, or some of the factions in the identifiable ruling class that you can look towards. Now, they don't all agree on the same stuff, all the different factions in the ruling class. I would say there are genuinely disagreements they have over all sorts of things. I mean, affairs in the Middle East is a pretty easy example. Everybody can identify special interests in these sorts of areas. So the interesting thing is, well, what's the stuff they all agree on? Not the stuff they disagree on, what's the stuff they all agree on? And what is that in your estimation? Well, I would say that regardless of which faction it is, they all see the people as a problem to be managed. Yes. Thank you guys for checking out this clip. If you haven't already subscribed, please subscribe and hit the like button on this video. It is a huge, huge help. And if you'd like to check out this clip's full podcast episode, that link is in the description below or right here. And finally, you can follow me on Instagram and X by using the links in my description below. Then, sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at Progressive.com, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states. Head to Ulta Beauty. 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