Yes, a Cabal — But the Good Kind

Yes, a Cabal — But the Good Kind

An interview with Preston Drake III, a perfectly reasonable wealthy person who would like to clear a few things up.

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Q: There's been a lot of talk about global inequality, elite institutions, the concentration of wealth. You're in that category. What would you like people to understand?

First of all, I love planet Earth. Let's just start there. I love it. My family loves it. We spend a lot of time in it — the good parts, mostly, but still. Earth.

Second, I'm a good guy. I want to say that plainly because I think it gets lost. I'm a good guy. I have a wonderful family. We give to charity. My wife sits on the board of a foundation that does incredible work on — I want to say malaria? One of the tropical ones. I'd have to check.

And look, yes, the quarterly defense contracts came through and we had a strong year, and yes, some of that involved munitions that ended up in Gaza, and yes, some of those munitions ended up doing what munitions do. But I want people to remember something that nobody ever talks about: the children of Raytheon employees. Those kids have to eat too. Have you thought about them? Has anyone? I'm making sure they have healthy food on their tables. Organic, some of it. That's a form of humanitarianism that doesn't get acknowledged.

Q: Let's talk about Bilderberg.

Oh, Bilderberg's great. Lovely people. Wonderful food. You know what Bilderberg is? It's a networking event. That's it. That's all it is. I go every couple years. We talk about geopolitics, monetary policy, the challenges facing liberal democracy. We do not, contrary to what some podcasters believe, plan world events. We merely... discuss them. In advance. With the people who will later implement the outcomes we discussed.

But that's not planning. That's collaboration. There's a difference.

Q: Bohemian Grove?

Also great. Different vibe. More rustic. You're in redwoods, you're in a cabin, you're in flannel, there's a man in his seventies reciting poetry at a campfire. It's very unplugged.

Yes, there's a thing with the owl. I'm not going to explain the owl. If you weren't there, it won't make sense, and frankly if you were there it still doesn't make sense, but that's part of the charm. It's a tradition. Traditions don't need to make sense. That's what makes them traditions.

The Manhattan Project was substantially planned there, by the way. Nobody ever wants to talk about that part. It's like — guys, we invented the atomic bomb at the fancy camping retreat. That's a fun historical fact. Embrace it.

Q: The Rothschilds.

Look. I'm going to be honest. I barely know the Rothschilds. I've met a couple of them at things. They're fine. They're not running the world. If they were running the world, I'd be annoyed, because I thought we were running the world, and nobody told me they were.

The antisemitic version of the Rothschild conspiracy is embarrassing and bad and I want no part of it. The accurate version of the Rothschild story is that they were genuinely that powerful in the 1800s, they've been gradually diluted over 150 years of wars and market changes, and now they're just one rich family among many. I've got more money than most Rothschilds. Half the guys at my golf club do. It's not the flex it used to be.

The gold-price thing is my favorite. Yes, from 1919 to 2004, the London gold fix was literally held in the Rothschild office. A guy from Rothschild chaired the meeting. Twice a day. For 85 years. This was not a secret. This was printed in the Financial Times. The conspiracy theorists were 80% correct, they were just mad about the one thing that was actually happening in the open.

Rothschild withdrew in 2004. Now the price gets fixed by JPMorgan, HSBC, and some other banks, on an electronic platform. This is arguably worse — the old system had a chairman and a gavel, this one has an algorithm — but nobody makes memes about it because it's harder to draw.

Q: The CIA.

Long pause.

Yeah, okay, the CIA is a little bit of a problem.

I know we're supposed to say "great institution, vital to national security, the men and women who serve," and look, many of them are doing important work. I know some of them personally. Good people. Mostly.

But the documentary record on the CIA is genuinely rough. Let's just walk through the greatest hits.

They dosed Americans with LSD without consent for twenty years. They called it MKUltra. They destroyed the documentation before Congress could look at it. Nobody went to jail.

They spied on domestic political figures and journalists despite this being explicitly illegal under their own founding charter. Operation CHAOS. Operation MOCKINGBIRD. In the files.

They ran an airline in Vietnam that moved opium. The airline was called Air America. This sounds like a joke but it's not a joke, it's documented in Alfred McCoy's 1972 book which has held up for fifty years.

Iran-Contra: they sold weapons to Iran — the Iran we were officially against — to fund a war in Nicaragua that Congress had specifically prohibited funding. A few people were convicted. Most got pardoned.

Contra-cocaine: Gary Webb reported in 1996 that the CIA had tolerated, maybe assisted, cocaine trafficking into the United States by the Contras they were supporting. He got destroyed professionally by the major papers piling on. Then two years later the CIA's own Inspector General Frederick Hitz quietly confirmed most of Webb's reporting. Webb later died of "two self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head" in 2004. Two. I want to repeat that number. Two.

Coups: Iran '53, Guatemala '54, Congo '60, Chile '73, and I'm probably forgetting some. All officially acknowledged now. All were conspiracy theories when alleged. All correct.

So when someone says "the CIA is a rogue self-funding organization running drugs and overthrowing governments," I have to tell you, the answer isn't "no, that's crazy." The answer is "yes, demonstrably, for most of its history, and we don't really know about right now because they classify that part for fifty years."

But again — lovely people. Many of them.

Q: So if it's not a single cabal running things, what is it?

It's like 30,000 of us, globally. We all know each other. Or we know people who know each other. Our kids go to fourteen schools. We vacation in six places. We get divorced through the same four law firms. We invest through the same dozen banks.

We don't coordinate in a secret-handshake way. We just... have the same interests. Obviously. Why wouldn't we? We own similar things, we're affected by similar policies, we face similar tax situations, we want similar futures for our children. So when one of us favors something, it's usually because it's good for our class, and the rest of us favor it too, because it's also good for us. This isn't conspiracy. This is just — we're all sharks, and it's a pool, and we're doing shark stuff. You wouldn't call it a conspiracy when sharks eat fish. That's just what sharks do.

Q: Speaking of people being related to each other — the genealogists keep turning up that the Bushes, the Obamas, the Clintons, basically every family that's run the country in the last fifty years is technically distantly related. What do you make of that?

Oh God, the cousins thing. Sighs.

Look. Yes. Technically. George W. Bush and Barack Obama are like eleventh cousins. Obama and Dick Cheney are distantly related. Hillary is in there somewhere. FDR was related to basically everyone. Also the British royal family. Also, if you go back far enough, probably you.

It's a coincidence. It's literally a statistical coincidence. When you have a small founding population — a few hundred thousand early colonists — and you run the math out ten generations, everyone with deep American ancestry is technically related to everyone else with deep American ancestry. This is math. This is not meaningful. I don't know why people keep bringing it up.

Yes, all the presidents are cousins. Yes, all the presidents are cousins with most of the senators. Yes, the families that have been wealthy in America for three hundred years have intermarried with the other families that have been wealthy in America for three hundred years, and the children of that intermarriage keep ending up in positions of power, and if you graph it out it does look — I'll grant you — somewhat striking.

But it doesn't mean anything. It's just — you know, same schools, same summer places, same clubs, same debutante balls, same Skull and Bones tap classes, same beach in Maine, same everything, for eight generations. Of course we're all related. We keep marrying each other. What do you want?

The important thing is that this has no bearing on policy outcomes. These are independent political actors who just happen to share 0.3% of their DNA and all their childhood friendships and all their financial interests and all their in-laws. The idea that this constitutes some kind of class would be — well, it would be exactly what I've been telling you it isn't, so let's move on.

Q: What do you actually want? For the world, I mean.

For the world to continue being arranged the way it is currently arranged, with me on top of it.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

I know you want me to say something about sustainability or innovation or lifting people out of poverty, and I can say those things, I have talking points about them, my foundation has a whole website — but if you're asking what I want , structurally, operationally, as an actor in this system: I want the system to stay. Because the system works for me.

Q: What about the bottom 50%?

Oh, I love the bottom 50%. Wonderful people. Hard workers. I employ a lot of them.

Do I want to improve their lives? Sure. Within limits. I want them housed enough to show up for work, fed enough to be productive, educated enough to operate the machinery but not so educated they start asking questions about who owns the machinery. I want them anxious enough to be motivated but not desperate enough to get radicalized. I want them consuming enough to keep my companies profitable but not affluent enough to stop needing my companies.

This is a delicate balance. I think we've done a pretty good job managing it. Wage stagnation, rising healthcare costs, housing unaffordability, student debt — these look like problems if you're experiencing them, but from my end of the telescope, these are features. They keep the system running. A worker with no debt, affordable housing, universal healthcare, and free education is a worker who can tell me no. I do not want a workforce that can tell me no.

Q: And the culture war stuff? Identity politics, the endless fighting about pronouns and flags and statues?

Smiles warmly.

Oh, I think all of that is very important. People have strongly held beliefs and they should be free to argue about them.

And if — hypothetically, just spitballing here — those arguments happened to consume the political attention of the bottom 50% such that they never quite got around to organizing around their shared economic interests, well, that would be an unfortunate coincidence, wouldn't it?

But I'm sure it's just a coincidence. I'm sure the cable news networks I partially own aren't amplifying these fights for any particular reason. I'm sure the social media algorithms tuned by my peers aren't optimizing for outrage because outrage is economically productive. I'm sure all of this is just organic cultural evolution, and any resemblance to a deliberate strategy of divide-and-conquer is entirely accidental.

Q: Democracy?

Love it. Huge fan.

I mean, not actual democracy — that would produce different outcomes than I prefer, and polls consistently show the majority wants things like higher taxes on people like me, stronger labor protections, universal healthcare, all of which would be personally inconvenient. So we can't have that democracy.

But the version of democracy we do have — where you vote every few years for candidates pre-screened by campaign finance, on issues pre-framed by media I have stakes in, within policy ranges pre-limited by regulatory bodies staffed by people I've golfed with — I love that democracy. It's my favorite. It gives you all the sense of participation with none of the awkward structural change. Ten out of ten, would recommend.

Q: Surveillance and AI?

Very excited about this area. Lots of growth potential. The ability to monitor large populations, predict their behavior, and influence their attention at scale is — from an efficiency standpoint — remarkable. Historically you needed a secret police to accomplish a fraction of what a smartphone accomplishes voluntarily.

We're not using this for bad things, to be clear. We're using it to serve you better ads, recommend you more relevant content, and, sure, occasionally feed information to various government agencies who need it for reasons I don't ask about. But it's not a surveillance state. It's a convenience infrastructure. The surveillance is a side effect of the convenience. You chose this, by pressing "agree" on a 40-page document. That makes it consensual.

Q: You've described a class that's extracting enormous wealth from a majority population and calling it progress. At what point does this become evil?

Leans back.

See, this is where I have to push back a little, because I don't think "evil" is the right word. Evil is such a loaded term. It's unsophisticated. I prefer to think of what we do as operating within a complex structural arrangement. A system with path dependencies. An emergent institutional logic. There are many academic books about it. It's a nuanced situation.

Q: But if your neighbor individually did the things your class does collectively — caused specific families to become homeless for marginal profit, sold dangerous products to children, bought a senator to block healthcare for the dying, funded a coup in another country because the elected government was inconvenient — you'd call him a monster. You wouldn't hesitate.

That's different.

Q: Why?

Because he'd be one guy. When it's 30,000 of us, distributed across institutions, mediated through markets, reported in the Financial Times with neutral verbs — it's not the same thing. You can tell because the vocabulary is different. When I do it, it's "capital allocation." When he does it, it's "predatory behavior." See? Different.

Q: That sounds like the vocabulary is doing a lot of work.

The vocabulary is absolutely doing a lot of work. That's what sophisticated vocabulary is for . It's for describing things accurately while preventing people from drawing the conclusion the description supports. I think we do it beautifully. I'm very proud of the vocabulary.

If you insist on using unsophisticated words like "evil" — which, again, is embarrassing, nobody at Davos uses that word — then yes, technically, what my class does is evil. Evil at industrial scale, committed with full knowledge and the complete option to do otherwise, producing foreseeable suffering in billions of people for the benefit of a small class that has more than it could ever need.

But nobody says it like that. Because saying it like that is gauche. And we have a very well-developed system for making sure the people who could say it like that — the journalists, the academics, the politicians — have career incentives to not say it like that.

So it stays unspoken, and the vocabulary keeps doing its work, and the system keeps running, and I continue to be one of the good ones.

Q: Last question. Do you ever worry about this?

About what?

Q: About what happens when enough people figure it out.

Oh. That.

No, because we've got that covered too. Surveillance, fragmentation, debt, exhaustion, algorithmic attention capture, the option to relocate to a better jurisdiction if things get uncomfortable, private security, and — if all else fails — the long historical record that this kind of arrangement can persist for centuries as long as the bottom 50% stays tired enough and divided enough and distracted enough.

We've thought about it. We have contingency plans. Most of them involve you not organizing, which, based on the evidence, you're not going to.

Long pause. Warm smile.

Would you like another drink? I'm having another drink.

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The preceding is satire, sort of. It's the monologue a sufficiently self-aware member of the class would give if truth serum existed. Most of them wouldn't say it out loud because the vocabulary does its work. But the actions are exactly what the monologue describes, and the vocabulary is the only thing separating the two.