April 6, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
15:31
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The news is so grim at this point that you almost don't want to turn on your phone in the morning. | ||
| It's just peace after unremitting peace suggesting that Western civilization is crumbling and collapsing all around us, followed by typically a summary piece confirming that in fact it is collapsing all around us. | ||
| So it is against that grim landscape that we read a piece the other day that was just the opposite. | ||
| It was... | ||
| And the thesis, essentially, is that people are starting to notice that things are amiss. | ||
| And the main thing that's amiss is the gap between the reality that they observe and the version of reality presented them by the government. | ||
| The media, the experts. | ||
| And this is good. | ||
| It is long overdue that people are starting to see glimpses of reality. | ||
| Here's a paragraph from the piece that kind of sums up the idea very nicely, and we're quoting. | ||
| The vibe shift I'm talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. | ||
| I'm talking about the feel you get when the walls of propaganda and bureaucracy start to move as you push. | ||
| The very visible dust kicked up in the air as experts and fact-checkers scrambled to hold on to decaying institutions. | ||
| The cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled. | ||
| As we said, so nicely expressed, beautifully written. | ||
| Santiago Pliego is the venture director at New Founding, and we're honored to have him join us now. | ||
| Thank you for joining us. | ||
| Thank you for writing this piece, which absolutely made my morning. | ||
| And it really was the one bright spot in my news consumption last week. | ||
| Why did you write this piece? | ||
| What moved you to do it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Why I wrote it is because I think a lot of people are noticing the life shift. | ||
| And I'd been kind of keeping tabs on it with my friends and my colleagues for, you know, let's say nine months or so. | ||
| A little bit over that, but especially in the last nine months, not a day goes by that we don't have a conversation or see something online or read a piece or see a crossover of people that we would have never expected to see kind of together. | ||
| And that would have been sort of inconceivable five years ago, even a year and a half ago. | ||
| And my friends and I sort of started to file this away in a mental folder called the Vive Shift. | ||
| And I think a lot of people are sensing that things are changing. | ||
| Sure, the stakes are high and getting higher. | ||
| I think the pressure will continue to come and will not relent. | ||
| But that's cost a lot of people, especially young people, young guys especially, to kind of wake up and decide that they're not going to go along with this anymore, that the world is built and designed in a certain way, and that they're ready to return to reality. | ||
| You said that People are coming together in unexpected ways. | ||
| I see that in my own life as I send warm text to Naomi Wolf, who I love. | ||
| I never thought I'd be doing that in this lifetime. | ||
| But tell us what you mean when you say that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so there's a pressure that is applied equally to groups of people, regardless of sort of the camp or the community you might be a part of. | |
| If you are a... | ||
| Normal family, you just want to send your kids to a school where they won't get fed, you know, ideology. | ||
| Or if you're building AI tools and don't want them to be regulated. | ||
| Or if you just want to be able to speak your mind. | ||
| Or if you want to be able to vote without interference or whatever. | ||
| All of those people are now facing the same pressure to decelerate, stagnate, to ossify into a bureaucratic monolith. | ||
| And so I think these groups, what's interesting about the Vive Shift, one of the interesting things about the Vive Shift is that all of these groups that were usually not used to working together or seeing each other as co-belligerents in a cultural fight are finding each other and are saying, hey, you have useful things that we can use over here and we have useful things and thoughts and ideas that you can use over here. | ||
| And that's creating this pressure, this monolithic pressure. | ||
| Bureaucratic pressure, top-down, across a variety of different groups and circles, whether you're in Silicon Valley or just a normal American family or in the Midwest or in you, it doesn't matter. | ||
| Everybody is facing this kind of existential pressure, and that's costing a lot of these groups to look for co-belligerents, to look for allies, and that's creating really interesting crossovers. | ||
| People that you would not think would be working together or reading each other or boosting each other's content. | ||
| Interacting with one another are all of a sudden coming together in ways that are exciting. | ||
| So that does seem like the threat. | ||
| I mean, if I'm the head bureaucrat trying to create this new system of mediocrity and stagnation with myself at the top, really as its sole beneficiary, the last thing I want is for the people I've worked so hard to divide to find each other and unite against me. | ||
| So what's the response going to be? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think the response is going to be increased pressure in some ways. | |
| And this is why I talk about this in the piece. | ||
| An important part of the VIVE shift, maybe not its sole cost, but certainly an important piece of the enabling of the VIVE shift was Elon Musk buying Twitter and turning it into X. It's hard to overstate without kind of sounding hyperbolic. | ||
| These groups that I'm talking about, disparate groups that are now finding themselves working together, were by design, algorithmically or otherwise, unable to find each other, even as early as 18 months ago. | ||
| And you couldn't talk online. | ||
| You couldn't find other people who thought like you or even wanted to ask the same questions as you. | ||
| And it made it very difficult, very isolating. | ||
| A very sort of isolating dynamic for people to be online and to find co-belligerents and others who share their mind, their values. | ||
| I think that pressure will continue to escalate, but Elon has kind of taken an important piece of the puzzle, of the bureaucrats puzzle out, completely toppled that sort of Jenga. | ||
| You know, tower. | ||
| And enabled for a new dynamic online for people to interact and meet each other in ways that really does threaten that monolithic power structure. | ||
| So you make it sound so simple, and maybe it is. | ||
| So all you needed to do as an individual was to notice the distance between what they were telling you and what was clearly true. | ||
| And then you just needed a place to talk to other people who'd notice the same thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There is something simple about it, yes. | |
| It's precisely because it was so simple that there was so much pressure exerted on certainly Twitter, but other tools that are still under the regime control. | ||
| And I think it's why Musk coming in, gutting 90% of X, and restoring it kind of in a path towards truth and a free speech, that... | ||
| A relatively simple act, it was not a simple act, it was a takeover, but a relatively simple singular act unlocks a mass amount of opportunity across communities, across people to communicate, interact, and organize, again, in ways that were just not allowed 18 months ago, algorithmically, policy-wise, or a variety of different other ways. | ||
| Well, and speaking of noticing things, why did you notice this or decide to focus on it when a lot of other noticers out there are wholly focused on the downside and on the destruction of the civilization, etc.? | ||
| But you saw light instead of darkness. | ||
| How and why? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The how and why is this is my job. | |
| This is what we do at New Founding. | ||
| I help the builders that want to build a positive alternative vision for the country. | ||
| These are people who are building new companies, new institutions, who want to work with each other, who want to craft a new path forward. | ||
| And we realized that, yes, as you said in the opening monologue, things are bleak, things are dark, increasingly pressure grows. | ||
| But we needed a positive vision. | ||
| And people are drawn to a positive vision. | ||
| It's important to know the stakes of the game. | ||
| It's important to know that things are challenging and difficult. | ||
| But people are drawn and rally around a positive vision. | ||
| And I started to notice, as my job as an investor backing different people and companies, I started to notice that young guys in particular were done pretending. | ||
| They were done pretending with kind of the lies of liberal modernity, and they were crafting or charting a different course. | ||
| These young guys in particular are building cool companies that we wanted to invest in or we were interacting with by virtue of the circles that I'm in, startups and such. | ||
| But there was something very distinct about this new kind of founder. | ||
| Your listeners or you, if I say, imagine a startup founder in the 2010s in Silicon Valley. | ||
| Well, you think of a geeky guy, maybe weighs 150 pounds, who's building some kind of productivity tool. | ||
| He lives in this sort of neutral world where he doesn't want to rock the boat. | ||
| Building, he thinks, is an apolitical endeavor. | ||
| And he wants to keep his head down because he wants to... | ||
| Go public at some point and make hundreds of millions of dollars. | ||
| So why rock the boat, right? | ||
| That's not the world we live in anymore. | ||
| And young guys, the young guys I'm seeing building very interesting companies, building incredible technologies, building new institutions, are guys who are explicitly pro-America, explicitly pro-family values, Christian, religious. | ||
| They're the opposite, the antithesis of the, again, the sort of picture of the 2010s startup Silicon Valley founder. | ||
| And that caught my eye. | ||
| I said, why is this happening? | ||
| Why is it that these young guys are taking very big swings? | ||
| The companies they're building are also not just productivity software or something to make your HR overlords more productive. | ||
| Building very difficult companies. | ||
| There's a friend of mine whose name is Augustus. | ||
| He's building a company called Rainmaker. | ||
| He sends drones up to the clouds and he's seeding clouds in California and other places where it doesn't usually rain to make it rain where it doesn't. | ||
| And we think, oh, the drought. | ||
| The drought in California can't be fixed. | ||
| It's just there to stay. | ||
| And Augustus is thinking, no, it's not there to stay. | ||
| Why can't we just will it differently? | ||
| Why can't we just disrupt that? | ||
| He's a young guy. | ||
| He's a Christian. | ||
| He has a particular vision about the world that he is excited to build and will into existence. | ||
| And so by virtue of spending time with these guys, and my job is to kind of pay attention to where the builders are going, I started to notice. | ||
| And what gives me hope is that I think, again, as the pressure increases, as the bureaucracy gets worse, as DEI and ESG and all this nonsense grows, the best people of our generation, those who are the most competent, the most courageous, the most ready to build, are ready to opt out of those monolithic systems and build a different future, a positive, exciting future. | ||
| And those are the people that I'm paying attention, and those are the people that I want to help. | ||
| So it sounds like you're in a good mood most days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, definitely in a good mood. | |
| And don't get me wrong, I know how it is out there. | ||
| But as I say in the piece, the Vive shift is looking at the world around us, refusing to take the black pill, and choosing to build instead. | ||
| That's an important piece of the Vive shift. | ||
| And yes, it puts me in a good mood when I see other guys building great, positive things. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| I mean, I have to say we're talking off-air. | ||
| I'm on the more anti-technology. | ||
| Ted Kaczynski wing of things. | ||
| But it was the technology that allowed me to read this. | ||
| And I think you were saying you put this up on a substack with no subscribers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No subscribers. | |
| Yeah, I pitched it to another publication, and they didn't have the bandwidth to run it. | ||
| So I literally just opened a new substack, hit publish. | ||
| I spent a couple of hours writing this piece. | ||
| I didn't want it to go to waste. | ||
| And then let it sit for a bit. | ||
| You reached out. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But yes, the point here with technology and how I see it being useful, again, generally, I'm cautious. | |
| I'm very excited about technology, but I do think there's a moral component. | ||
| I don't see technology or building companies as an apolitical or neutral endeavor. | ||
| I think there's nothing more political than building a large company or a disruptive technology. | ||
| But especially in times like this, where institutions that... | ||
| I mean, think about it this way. | ||
| Harvard has been around for, what, almost 400 years. | ||
| Google, almost a $2 trillion market cap. | ||
| Both seemingly institutions that are here to stay permanently, forever. | ||
| They're never going away, right? | ||
| And yet, in the last few months, Harvard has been toppling and shaking with the Claudine Gay and all the great work that Chris Ruffo did. | ||
| And then Google Gemini, or Google with the recent shenanigans with Google Gemini. | ||
| These, again, seemingly permanent, unmovable sort of institutions are now up for grabs. | ||
| And the spaces they dominate, I think, are up for grabs over the next decade, if not sooner. | ||
| And so the right guys building the right companies, the right guys building the right institutions, the right ambitious, excellent institutions, grounded in reality, the right technologies, can really disrupt that there's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity now. | ||
| To disrupt the status quo. | ||
| I think of technology as a non-coercive lever. | ||
| It's about building the future. | ||
| You have a vision of the future that you want to will into existence. | ||
| You get a bunch of guys together, you raise some capital and you say, let's build a different, better future. | ||
| And right now there are categories, critical categories in our society that are up for grabs and we want the right guys to build and disrupt those. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Well, thank you for reminding us of that, particularly those of us with dark Scandinavian souls, that not all is lost, and that God's at work too, and good things happen as well as bad, and the future is not settled. | ||
| So thank you, and your piece did all of that for me. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Great to meet you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Thank you for reading. | ||
| Great to meet you. | ||
| Free speech is bigger than any one person or any one organism. | ||
| Societies are defined by what they will not permit. |
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