Radio Free Pizza

About Radio Free Pizza

Dispatches excavating deep trends in society, culture, politics, economics, & media, peppered with indie comics & novels. www.radiofreepizza.com (https://www.radiofreepizza.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Zaquerí Nioúel

Category

news · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

16 Apr 2023

Latest episode

30 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

86 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   30 Aug 2026

   The Rulers & Their Measures

   As much as she can, at least, Phoebe Gates has had a difficult summer: the twenty-three-year-old daughter of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (who leveraged his fortune into a Rockefeller-style philanthropic empire (https://zacharonipizza.substack.com/p/asking-for-seconds?utm_source=publication-search#:~:text=Klaus%20Schwab%20and%20Bill%20Gates%20(heads%20of%20Event%20201%2Dsponsoring%20organizations)) with extraordinary influence over public policy) and Melinda French Gates (who wisely divorced her husband for his connection (https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/03/melinda-gates-jeffrey-epstein-led-to-bill-gates-divorce-gayle-king-interview) to pedophile child-trafficker and likely intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein) helped co-found Phia, an artificial-intelligence shopping startup valued at roughly $185 million which (https://fortune.com/2026/08/12/phoebe-gates-phia/)Bloomberg (https://fortune.com/2026/08/12/phoebe-gates-phia/) reported in July (https://fortune.com/2026/08/12/phoebe-gates-phia/) had been engaging in “cookie stuffing”—automatically inserting its own affiliate-tracking information into online purchases it had not necessarily helped generate—to position itself for commissions that might otherwise have gone to the affiliate that actually referred the customer. Phia initially said the behavior resulted from a software bug it had discovered only after Bloomberg contacted the company, but a second investigation in August produced internal Slack messages and historical source code indicating that Gates, her co-founder Sophia Kianni, and others had known for months about features that automatically dropped cookies onto shoppers’ browsers. An internal dashboard reportedly included a switch labeled “enable coupon auto drop,” while Gates herself appeared in a December conversation concerning whether cookies were being set automatically across enough retailers for Phia to earn the commissions it expected. The reporting has attracted attention far beyond the ordinary embarrassment of a startup caught violating the rules of its affiliate partners not just because of Gates’s background, but because cookie stuffing of this general kind has previously been prosecuted by the federal government as wire fraud (https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdal/pr/cookie-stuffing-internet-fraud-schemer-pleads-guilty). In earlier cases, defendants who caused tracking cookies to be placed without legitimate referrals pleaded guilty under the federal wire-fraud statute (https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/laguna-niguel-man-pleads-guilty-defrauding-ebay), an offense carrying a maximum statutory penalty of twenty years in prison. No criminal charges have been filed against Gates or Kianni, and there is presently no public indication that either is the subject of a federal criminal investigation. But the difference between a clever mechanism for capturing revenue and a fraudulent one has suddenly become considerably more important to Phoebe Gates than it was a few months ago. The controversy arrived at an especially awkward moment in the construction of Gates’s public identity. The youngest of the Gates children, she grew up surrounded by technology, philanthropy, and extraordinary wealth, but arrived at Stanford University expecting to follow a rather different path, studying human biology, epidemiology, and health policy, with an eye toward public health or medicine. Instead, Gates completed her bachelor’s degree in three years (https://stanforddaily.com/2025/09/23/qa-sophia-kianni-and-phoebe-gates-reflect-on-their-time-at-stanford-and-co-founding-phia/) and emerged from Stanford as an entrepreneur determined, by her own account, to prove herself independently of her surname. She has spoken of wanting to build something “generational” and of having a “chip on [her] shoulder” (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gatess-youngest-daughter-says-133134749.html) about demonstrating that she could create a successful company without simply relying upon her parents’ fortune or connections: an amusing ambition, if indeed Microsoft’s early break, as former IBM executive Edward Andrus tells us (https://corbettreport.com/meetgates/), came after Bill Gates’s mother asked IBM’s then-chairman John Opel—with whom she served on the United Way board—to help her son. For somebody born into circumstances against which almost any ordinary achievement risks being measured, entrepreneurship offered an unusually legible measure of her own making: a company could acquire users, attract investors, raise money, and receive a valuation, producing numbers with which Gates might establish an accomplishment ostensibly distinct from the billions attached to her family name. Stanford, she has said, changed the direction of her life less through anything on her official transcript than through the people she met there and the confidence those relationships gave her to build something herself. What she built with her Stanford roommate Sophia Kianni was Phia, an artificial-intelligence shopping assistant conceived after the pair cycled through several less promising ideas—including, remarkably, a Bluetooth tampon (https://stanforddaily.com/2025/09/23/qa-sophia-kianni-and-phoebe-gates-reflect-on-their-time-at-stanford-and-co-founding-phia/)—and eventually settled upon a browser extension and app for comparing retail prices, finding secondhand alternatives, and locating discounts. The company launched publicly in 2025 and rose with the speed Silicon Valley has trained itself to recognize as evidence of destiny: an $8 million seed round was followed in January 2026 by another $35 million led by Notable Capital (https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/27/phoebe-gates-and-sophia-kiannis-phia-raises-35m-to-make-shopping-fun-again/), with Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures among its investors, and Phia reached a reported valuation of approximately $185 million (https://fortune.com/article/phoebe-gates-phia-shopping-app-cookie-stuffing/). By the measures routinely applied to young technology founders—capital raised, valuation achieved, investors attracted, growth promised—Gates was succeeding spectacularly. Then Bloomberg examined what was producing some of that growth. According to an internal analysis reviewed by the news organization, cookie stuffing accounted for approximately 51% of the merchandise value (https://fortune.com/2026/08/12/phoebe-gates-phia/) Phia claimed credit for generating in June, while average daily revenue fell from roughly $80,000 to between $10,000 and $28,000 after the disputed features were disabled in early July. Phia says that analysis was preliminary and methodologically incorrect, arguing that the revenue decline also reflected the simultaneous disabling of other monetization mechanisms, has begun reversing commissions associated with misattributed transactions and says it is hiring a head of compliance. Whatever ultimately becomes of the controversy, however, it gave a newly uncomfortable significance to another fact about Gates’s entrepreneurial education that had become public only two months before: while at Stanford, she had been selected to join a private seminar devoted to identifying unusually consequential young people (https://stanforddaily.com/2026/05/21/teaching-students-how-to-rule-world/) and teaching them how to understand—and act upon—the structures of incentives, institutions, and power around them. That seminar was called So You Think You Can Rule the World?, which its participants shortened the name to “Rule.” Unlisted in Stanford’s course catalog, it offered no university credit and had no enrollment code. Each winter quarter, twelve students—six men and six women—met once a week for ten weeks in Stanford’s Escondido Village Graduate Residence to discuss money, power, entrepreneurship, incentives and what constituted a worthwhile life. Participation required a referral from somebody already associated with the seminar, and students were encouraged not to disclose either their membership or even who had referred them. Its founder, Justin Lewis-Weber, told The Stanford Daily that the resulting secrecy was essentially accidental; several former participants described a rather more deliberate culture of discretion. In either case, the existence and inner workings of Rule remained largely outside public view until 2026. Lewis-Weber is himself a fairly concentrated specimen of the Stanford-Silicon Valley type. Raised in Southern California, he built and flew a helicopter at six, started an aerial-imaging company at twelve and, at seventeen, published a peer-reviewed paper (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/space.2015.0041) proposing the construction of self-replicating solar-power infrastructure on the Moon from lunar materials. At Stanford he studied aeronautics and astronautics, worked in the university’s intelligent-systems and space-exploration laboratories, and during his junior year began teaching Rule because, by his account, even Stanford had failed to introduce him to enough of the exceptional people around him. (Without digressing into diagnosis, we feel safe regarding Lewis-Weber himself as symptomatic of elite overproduction—which we’ve discussed (https://zacharonipizza.substack.com/p/workin-uberzeit?utm_source=publication-search#:~:text=elite%20overproduction%2C%20inspired%20by%20Nietzsche%E2%80%99s%20observation%20that%20the%20rich%20feel%20satisfaction%20with%20how%20their%20wealth%20distinguishes%20them%20from%20the%20poor) a couple (https://zacharonipizza.substack.com/p/tomorrows-history-today#:~:text=elite%20overproduction%20characteristic%20of%20ancient%20Rome%2C%20which%20pushed%20the%20empire%20out%20of%20its%20successful%20integrative%20phase) times before as an indicator of social disintegration—and as a member of the counter-elite, aspiring to the company of the powerful but not accepted into their ranks.) He later co-founded Assured, an insurance-technology company devoted to automating claims processing, but continued flying back to California to conduct his seminar after graduation. Rule, in other words, began less as a class in the conventional sense than as Lewis-Weber’s private attempt to locate, collect and connect students whom he believed likely to have an unusual impact upon the world. Its admissions procedure makes that purpose unusually explicit. Prospective members cannot simply apply; they must first be referred, after which Lewis-Weber subjects candidates to interviews that can begin the spring before the course and continue into the fall. In recent years those interviews have taken place in Palo Alto coffee shops, where he presses students repeatedly on their ambitions, purposes and assumptions: what makes life worthwhile, what they believe, what gets them out of bed, and what they would want to see when looking back upon their lives at eighty. Former candidates describe him responding to answer after answer with another “why,” sometimes for long enough to leave interviewees shaken; one reportedly left in tears, while others described the experience as unusually invigorating or even an awakening. Candidates are also asked to identify the most accomplished man and woman they know at Stanford, and Lewis-Weber evaluates the quality of those recommendations as part of their own candidacy. Rule is therefore taking measurements before it ever begins teaching. The interview process selects twelve students for the seminar according to Lewis-Weber’s estimate of what they might become while simultaneously expanding his map of the people at Stanford who might someday matter. Lewis-Weber openly selects the final cohort according to his judgment of its members’ projected influence. Former students told The Stanford Daily that during interviews he has pointed to the billions of dollars in net worth already accumulated by Rule alumni, although when asked to quantify the total he said he did not keep track. One alumnus described the seminar as a gathering of people with ambitious ideas about how the world should operate who were unwilling to wait their turn climbing established ladders. Another interpretation (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/theo-baker/how-to-rule-the-world-2/), from journalist Theo Baker, is less charitable: Lewis-Weber was networking with exceptionally ambitious teenagers whom he expected to become useful and powerful adults. Baker says Lewis-Weber once explained his original inspiration in still more striking terms: while at Stanford, he had concluded that the people who really understood how the world worked were “the literal children of billionaires,” and that learning their implicit lessons could unlock the potential of unusually capable people. Baker, who arrived at Stanford in 2022 as a seventeen-year-old aspiring technologist, was referred to Rule and interviewed by Lewis-Weber that November, during the same period in which Gates was participating, but he was not selected. What the successful applicants receive is not instruction in constitutional law, political philosophy or public administration so much as a collection of what virtually every participant interviewed by The Stanford Daily called “frameworks”: mental models for understanding the incentive structures underneath institutions and the strategic landscape on which ambitious actors operate. Lewis-Weber begins meetings with a short presentation and then moves into Socratic discussion. Students have studied prisoner’s dilemmas and other collective-action problems; readings reportedly include Peter Thiel and startup theorist Paul Graham. Nearly every former participant interviewed by the student newspaper independently mentioned “multipolar traps,” the idea popularized in Scott Alexander’s essay (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) “Meditations on Moloch” (2014): situations in which individually rational actors pursuing their own interests collectively create an outcome that is bad for everybody, as in the so-called tragedy of the commons or in the prisoner’s dilemma. Lewis-Weber describes the purpose of this exercise as learning to see the overall “chessboard” (https://stanforddaily.com/2026/05/21/teaching-students-how-to-rule-world/) on which people are playing. Rule, then, is concerned not merely with who might someday wield power, but with the measures available to them once they do: where incentives lie, which constraints are real, which are conventional, and what moves become possible once the board itself can be seen. Rule also incorporates guest speakers whose usefulness extends beyond the seminar itself. One is a startup lawyer whom Lewis-Weber reportedly encourages students to retain as a contact when forming their own companies. Another is Stanford lecturer Stan Christensen, a professional negotiator who has mediated conflicts involving more than seventy-five countries and teaches effective communication and negotiation. The discussions range from money and entrepreneurship to power and the meaning of a good life, and Lewis-Weber deliberately cultivates an environment in which prevailing assumptions can be challenged without much concern for ordinary campus sensitivities. Former students differ substantially over what this produces. Admirers describe a place where people escape Silicon Valley hype cycles long enough to identify genuinely important problems, decide which ones deserve their lives and think about how to generate compounding effects once they begin working on them. Critics describe almost the photographic negative of that ideal. One former student, identified pseudonymously by The Stanford Daily as Alex, said Rule taught participants how to understand and then “hack” bureaucratic and power structures in order to obtain the outcome they wanted. In her account, Lewis-Weber’s approach to entrepreneurship was unusually opportunistic: identify vulnerabilities, locate loopholes and exploit the structure as it actually exists, with ethical questions occupying a less central role than the ingenuity of the maneuver. Another student who interviewed for Rule described Lewis-Weber as embodying the cynical side of Silicon Valley—intellectual, intensely ambitious and more interested in profit and power than doing good. Baker’s account goes further still. He portrays Rule as something resembling “a Skull and Bones for the aspiring tech elite,” and reports a former student’s recollection that Lewis-Weber taught that people possessing unusually high “agency” could extract substantial value from the people around them. A source interviewed by Fortune after Phia’s scandal said someone they knew had subsequently used techniques learned in Rule to deceive venture capitalists, although the source offered no details by which that allegation could independently be evaluated. On this account, Rule’s “frameworks” are something more than ways of understanding the world: they are measures to be taken against it. Lewis-Weber and several former participants reject the sinister interpretation. To them, Rule is less a school for Machiavellians than an intellectual and social accelerator: a place where unusually driven young people can examine structures of power honestly, challenge one another’s assumptions and meet peers who may remain consequential to their lives for decades. And on that last point, at least, the seminar appears remarkably successful. Alumni have founded companies together, worked together, undertaken research projects together, dated and married one another. Lewis-Weber hosts reunions at his Bay Area home and remains available as a mentor; one alumnus recalled taking long walks with him while confronting major decisions. Lewis-Weber himself calls what he has built a “search algorithm across the social graph”—a mechanism for discovering exceptional people through other exceptional people and then causing relationships among them to compound. Even by its defenders’ description, therefore, Rule does more than discuss power. It creates a network designed to magnify the future power of the people it has already chosen as worthy of inclusion. Phoebe Gates appears to have understood that mechanism perfectly well. The Stanford Daily reported that she has used the Rule network to recruit for Phia, while Gates herself has said more broadly that what transformed her at Stanford was not its official classes but “the people I met and the connections I made.” Those connections, she said in 2025, gave her the confidence to become an entrepreneur when she had never intended to start a business. The most unusual of those connections remained largely invisible outside Stanford until Theo Baker published How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University (https://www.amazon.com/How-Rule-World-Education-University/dp/0593832833) on 19 May of this year. Baker had taken the title from the seminar that rejected him. Two days later, The Stanford Daily published a detailed investigation naming Lewis-Weber, describing Rule’s admissions process and curriculum, and identifying Gates among its alumni. Only afterward, when Bloomberg exposed Phia’s disputed affiliate-marketing practices in July and produced internal company communications in August, did the story acquire the irresistible national headline: Bill Gates’s daughter had attended a secret Stanford seminar about manipulating incentive structures, locating vulnerabilities in systems and ruling the world—and then built a $185 million company accused of exploiting an obscure vulnerability in the rules governing online commerce. There is no evidence yet that Rule taught Gates to stuff cookies, nor that anything which occurred in the seminar caused Phia’s conduct. But by then the class itself had become interesting for reasons far larger than Gates herself, because Rule was not merely teaching a dozen Stanford students how power works: it was measuring them for power, connecting those who passed the measure, and furnishing them with measures by which to act once they acquired it. The more interesting question, therefore, is not whether Gates learned one particular trick there, but what Rule’s existence tells us about the people who expect to rule, the standards by which they recognize one another, and the means through which they intend to make their influence felt. One attempt to take that larger measure of power has occupied independent journalist and documentary filmmaker Derrick Broze (https://www.derrickbroze.com/about-me/) for most of the last decade. Broze is an activist, author, broadcaster and founder of The Conscious Resistance Network (https://theconsciousresistance.com/), the independent-media project established in 2013 around an avowedly anti-authoritarian mixture of investigative journalism, agorism, decentralization and what he calls “holistic activism.” His reporting has ranged from police surveillance and the 2016 Standing Rock protests in South Dakota to technocracy, intelligence agencies, Jeffrey Epstein and elite networks, while his activism has included the Houston Free Thinkers (https://muckrack.com/derek-broze/bio), the decentralized Freedom Cell Network, and unsuccessful campaigns for mayor of Houston in 2019 and 2023 (https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/houston-mayor-candidate-derrick-broze-18338873.php). Broze makes no pretense of approaching these subjects from ideological neutrality: his stated objective is to reduce the power of governments and corporations over individual life while encouraging people to construct voluntary, decentralized alternatives outside the institutions he investigates. Radio Free Pizza readers have encountered Broze before: one of our 2024 dispatches (https://zacharonipizza.substack.com/p/the-horrible-rumors-about-comet-ping#:~:text=in%20light%20of%20the%20findings%20of%20journalist%20Derrick%20Broze%20of%20The%20Conscious%20Resistance%20Network) discusses his first feature-length documentary, the 2019 Who Will Find What the Finders Hide? (https://theconsciousresistance.com/thefinders/) (2019), researched, written and narrated by Broze and produced and edited by Jeremy Martin. The film investigated the bizarre and still-contested history of the Finders (https://theconsciousresistance.com/the-finders-archive/), the Washington-area alternative-living group whose members became the subject of a 1987 child-abuse investigation and later allegations concerning intelligence connections and government interference with that investigation. Broze has continued pursuing the subject since the film’s release, publishing his underlying archive of source material in 2021 and a new documentary addendum (https://theconsciousresistance.com/thefinders-addendum/) in 2025; appropriately enough for where we are headed, that later investigation was ultimately incorporated into the fifteenth chapter of a much larger project. That project is The Pyramid of Power (https://thepyramidofpower.net/) (2021–’26), a documentary series that grew out of a two-and-a-half-hour presentation Broze carried through 54 American cities during his 2018 Liberate Your Mind tour. Dissatisfied with trying to compress his argument into a single lecture, Broze spent 2019 and 2020 (https://thepyramidofpower.net/about/) expanding it into what he originally imagined as ten documentary installments (https://theconsciousresistance.com/the-pop/): ten became twelve, then sixteen, and finally seventeen chapters, with the concluding chapter itself divided into two volumes (https://theconsciousresistance.com/thepop-chapter17-volume2/). Broze researched, scripted and narrated the entire series, working first with editors Jeremy Martin and Becca Godwin and later with Sisyphus Jones. Beginning with four episodes released in May 2021, The Pyramid of Power works its way through education, establishment media, Big Tech, Hollywood and the military-intelligence apparatus, wireless technology, oil, pharmaceuticals, food, prisons, philanthropic foundations, intelligence agencies, banking, technocracy, false-flag attacks, sexual-abuse networks, religion and secret societies before attempting, in its enormous final chapter, to identify what Broze believes lies at the top of the structure. The second volume of that conclusion was finally released on 9 March, completing a project that had consumed roughly five years. The conceit is contained in the title. Broze does not argue merely that isolated industries contain corruption or that particular governments sometimes abuse their authority. Rather, The Pyramid of Power represents his attempt to assemble those subjects into a single map (https://theconsciousresistance.com/the-pyramid-of-power/): to identify the institutions through which political, economic, technological, cultural and ultimately ideological power accumulates; to trace the people and organizations connecting one layer to another; and, finally, to ask whether anything coherent can be said about who—or what—occupies the pyramid’s summit. Broze also insists throughout that diagnosis without escape is insufficient. Every investigation belongs to a larger political philosophy in which centralized power is answered by local independence, voluntary association, mutual aid and parallel institutions. Thus the series presents itself simultaneously as an anatomy of systems Broze believes constrain human freedom and as an argument for withdrawing our participation from them. So, which system do you think he talks about first? If you guessed education, I owe you a Coke: Broze begins The Pyramid of Power at what he regards as one of the earliest and most consequential points at which institutional power encounters the individual: the classroom. The first chapter, “Big Education” (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-1-big-education/), asks whether compulsory schooling merely educates children within an existing society, or whether it also helps produce the sort of people that society—and the institutions governing it—requires. To make the case, Broze begins centuries before the contemporary American public-school system, tracing the history of mandatory education through ancient and early-modern precedents before concentrating on the eighteenth-century Prussian model that would exert an enormous influence upon educational reformers elsewhere in Europe and the United States. Broze’s case turns principally on the development and export of the Prussian model. Although compulsory education had much older precedents, he treats Prussia’s eighteenth-century system as the decisive ancestor of modern mass schooling because it combined mandatory attendance with direct state oversight, taxation and enforcement. A 1794 decree explicitly defined schools and universities as state institutions charged with instructing the young and authorized punishment of parents who failed to keep their children enrolled. Broze follows that model into the United States through Horace Mann and the nineteenth-century common-school movement, then turns to the extraordinary influence exercised by private wealth over the emerging system. John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board and Andrew Carnegie’s educational foundations become central characters in his account: institutions through which industrial fortunes could help determine not merely how schools were funded, but what education ought to produce. Broze lingers especially over the words of Rockefeller adviser Frederick T. Gates, who imagined a population yielding “with perfect docility to our molding hand” and explicitly disclaimed any ambition to turn ordinary children into philosophers, scientists, artists, doctors or statesmen. For Broze, such language captures the fundamental danger of centralized education: whoever possesses the means to organize schooling also acquires a powerful means of defining the limits of aspiration, acceptable knowledge, and social possibility. From there, “Big Education” brings the argument forward through critics including former New York City teacher John Taylor Gatto, former Education Department adviser Charlotte Iserbyt and investigative journalist Daniel Golden. Gatto accused compulsory schooling of replacing critical thought with fragmented information, constant supervision and dependence upon institutional approval; Iserbyt argued that successive educational reforms weakened parental influence while encouraging conformity to state priorities; and Golden documented the extent to which American universities have been used by the CIA, FBI and foreign intelligence services for recruitment and other operations. Broze therefore portrays education as serving several functions at once: instruction, socialization, surveillance, ideological formation and the identification of promising young people for powerful institutions. His answer is characteristically decentralist. Rather than reform centralized schooling from the top down, he advocates homeschooling, unschooling, online education, cooperative learning pods and the small voluntary networks he calls Freedom Cells, arguing that parents and communities should reclaim as much responsibility as possible for determining what children learn, from whom they learn it and what sort of adults that education is intended to produce. The second chapter, “Big Media” (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-2-establishment-media/), moves from the institutions that shape what people learn to those that shape what they believe is happening in the world. Broze begins with media consolidation, arguing that the shrinking number of corporations controlling television networks, newspapers, film studios, radio stations and major digital properties creates obvious opportunities for owners, advertisers and investors to narrow the range of acceptable opinion. From there he turns to the historical record of intelligence-community involvement in journalism, drawing on the Church Committee, Carl Bernstein’s 1977 reporting on CIA relationships with major news organizations, and later disclosures concerning covert propaganda and online influence operations. Broze frames these examples through the “propaganda model” associated with Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky: the idea that mass media need not operate through explicit censorship when ownership, financing, sourcing, institutional relationships and professional incentives already tend to filter what reaches the public. He then extends the argument into the digital era, contending that independent media initially weakened the old gatekeepers only for Google, Facebook, YouTube and other centralized platforms to become new ones, capable of suppressing, labeling or algorithmically burying dissident material. His proposed remedy again follows the larger philosophy of the series: decentralize, diversify one’s information sources and financially support genuinely independent journalists and platforms rather than entrusting a small number of corporations, billionaires or intelligence-linked institutions with deciding what the public gets to see. If “Big Media” concerns who gets to tell the story, its successor asks who owns the machinery through which nearly every story now reaches us. In “Big Tech” (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-3-big-tech/), Broze turns to Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and the aforementioned Microsoft—companies whose market dominance extends far beyond social media into search, operating systems, cloud computing, digital advertising, mapping, messaging, e-commerce and artificial intelligence. His argument is that the familiar garage-to-global-empire mythology obscures a much older and deeper relationship between Silicon Valley, the Pentagon and the intelligence community. Drawing heavily on Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley, Broze traces the modern internet back to ARPANET and DARPA, emphasizes CIA- and NSA-linked research that helped support early work by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and points to In-Q-Tel and other government-backed efforts to develop technologies capable of organizing, tracking and analyzing enormous quantities of human data. From there, Broze argues that the useful distinction between private corporation and surveillance state becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. He highlights DARPA’s abandoned LifeLog project—which aimed to create a searchable digital record of a person’s movements, communications, relationships and habits—and notes the much-discussed coincidence that its cancellation was announced on 4 February 2004, the same day Facebook launched. He then follows the growth of private surveillance through Amazon’s Rekognition facial-recognition system and Ring cameras, Edward Snowden’s disclosures concerning British intelligence efforts to manipulate social-media discourse through fake personas and “persuasive communications,” and partnerships between platforms such as Facebook and organizations including the Atlantic Council. These companies know where people go, what they search for, whom they speak with, what they purchase, and what they believe; those companies have therefore acquired powers over the population that earlier governments could scarcely have imagined—and governments have repeatedly sought access to precisely those capabilities. Microsoft, of course, is not incidental to Broze’s “Big Tech”, but one of the central firms whose enormous reach he treats as part of the emerging infrastructure of technological power, making Phoebe Gates the daughter not merely of a famously wealthy entrepreneur but of the co-founder of one of the institutions Broze places squarely inside his pyramid. Yet Broze’s concern is larger than any one family or company: he argues instead that the same firms offering communication, convenience and entertainment have become indispensable intermediaries between individuals and the digital world, while simultaneously collecting data, cooperating with states and exercising growing authority over what speech and information can circulate through their systems. His solution remains the same one offered throughout The Pyramid of Power: reduce dependence upon centralized institutions by abandoning dominant platforms where practical, adopting privacy-oriented and decentralized alternatives, and refusing to exchange ever more autonomy for technological convenience. Hollywood, in Broze’s telling, is where institutional power learns to entertain. “The Hollywood Intelligence Complex” (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-4-the-hollywood-intelligence-complex/) traces the long relationship between the film industry and the U.S. military and intelligence services, from the Office of War Information reviewing more than 1,600 scripts during World War II to the Pentagon’s postwar entertainment-liaison offices and the CIA’s eventual creation of its own Hollywood office. Drawing heavily on Tom Secker and Matthew Alford’s National Security Cinema and Tricia Jenkins’s The CIA in Hollywood, Broze argues that government assistance—access to bases, aircraft, equipment, personnel and technical advisers—has repeatedly come with influence over scripts and portrayals, touching productions from The Green Berets and Top Gun to Transformers, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. His larger point is less that every military-friendly movie is centrally dictated propaganda than that film and television are unusually powerful tools for shaping public memory, institutional legitimacy and assumptions about who the heroes are, especially when viewers are unaware that government agencies participated in constructing the story. (There is a striking 2026 coda to that chapter. Larry Ellison, whose Oracle fortune makes him one of the archetypal Big Tech billionaires whom Broze discusses, has become a major financial force behind his son David Ellison’s expansion into Hollywood. Skydance completed its $8.4 billion combination (https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/paramount-closes-8-billion-merger-with-skydance-after-settling-60-minutes-2025-08-07/) with Paramount in August 2025; SEC filings now identify Larry and David Ellison collectively as Paramount’s controlling stockholder, with entities controlled by the family indirectly holding about 77.5% (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2041610/000204161026000054/psky-20260630.htm) of its voting Class A shares. David Ellison serves as Paramount’s chairman and CEO, and the company is now pursuing an approximately $110–111 billion acquisition (https://www.paramount.com/press/paramount-enhances-its-superior-30-per-share-all-cash-offer-for-warner-bros-discovery-and-provides-update-on-regulatory-progress) of Warner Bros. Discovery—a deal currently facing an antitrust lawsuit (https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/california-cancels-talks-with-paramount-over-warner-bros-merger-nyt-reports-2026-08-24/) from California and eleven other states. Larry Ellison has personally guaranteed tens of billions of dollars of the financing. In other words, while Broze’s chapter examines an older Hollywood nexus of studios, state agencies and military power, the industry is presently undergoing another convergence: immense Silicon Valley wealth moving directly into control of some of the most consequential film, television and news properties in the world.) From there, the pyramid leaves the screen and enters the air. In “Big Wireless” (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-5-big-wireless/), the opening chapter of the second season, Broze turns from media and information systems to the telecommunications infrastructure itself, using the 5G rollout as a case study in what he sees as regulatory capture. Drawing on his earlier documentary The 5G Trojan Horse, he surveys disputed research on the biological effects of radio-frequency radiation, the National Toxicology Program’s findings in rodents, and the lack of industry-funded independent research on 5G highlighted at a Senate hearing, before concentrating on the relationship between wireless companies, the Federal Communications Commission and the CTIA lobbying association. The core of the chapter is less the unresolved health debate than Broze’s argument that the institutions charged with evaluating those risks are compromised by revolving-door employment, industry lobbying and outdated regulatory standards; he points in particular to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Norm Alster’s Captured Agency report, and researchers who alleged pressure after producing unwelcome findings. Broze ultimately presents “Big Wireless” as another example of the pattern The Pyramid of Power is constructing piece by piece: concentrated corporate interests, regulators and media organizations reinforcing one another while ordinary people are left with limited ability to evaluate—or opt out of—the technologies being built around them. The next chapter brings the pyramid back to an older dynasty—and then forward again to the Gates family. In “The Oligarchy” (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-6-the-oligarchy/), Broze traces the modern petroleum industry through John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, emphasizing the monopoly’s use of railroad rebates, political influence, espionage and aggressive consolidation before its nominal breakup in 1911 produced companies that eventually became ExxonMobil, Chevron, portions of BP, and others. He widens the story to include the Rothschilds, Royal Dutch Shell, and oil’s role in geopolitics, war and transportation, before arguing that the industry has repeatedly adapted to threats rather than surrendered power. That argument carries him into the present, where he portrays climate politics itself as another arena in which established fortunes can reposition themselves. Here Bill Gates reappears directly: Broze highlights Gates’s financial support for solar-radiation-management research, his investments connected to Canadian National Railway and fossil-fuel transport, and Microsoft’s business relationships with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP. The chapter’s recurring contention is therefore that yesterday’s “oilgarchy” did not disappear when Standard Oil was broken up—or even when climate change became politically dominant—but learned to preserve wealth and influence by changing the measures through which energy, technology and environmental policy are managed. Next, Broze’s “Big Pharma & the Medical Cartel” (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-7-big-pharma-the-medical-cartel/) argues that modern health care was shaped by the same philanthropic-industrial forces he previously identified in education, tracing the standardization of American medicine through the American Medical Association, the Carnegie-funded Flexner Report, Rockefeller institutions and their support for medical schools, research centers and allopathic practice. He presents this history as a narrowing of acceptable medicine around petroleum-derived pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and centralized credentialing, then extends the pattern into the present through pharmaceutical corporations, regulatory agencies and public-health institutions he regards as vulnerable to the same revolving-door and funding pressures described in earlier chapters. The Gates connection is explicit: Broze convincingly displays Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation as heirs to (or, better, mimes of) the Rockefeller model of philanthropic influence, emphasizing Gates’s funding relationships with the World Health Organization, Johns Hopkins, the Wellcome Trust, and other global-health bodies, and argues that the 2020–’23 coronavirus pandemic response demonstrated how a private billionaire foundation could acquire extraordinary influence over international health priorities without exercising formal governmental authority. Unlike the previous chapter, however, there is no meaningful Microsoft-specific thread here: Broze’s focus is Gates’s philanthropic and global-health network rather than the company through which his fortune originated. The second season closes by moving from what goes into the body as medicine to what goes into it as food. In “Food as a Weapon” (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-8-food-as-a-weapon/), Broze diagnoses modern industrial agriculture as another increasingly concentrated system, tracing today’s seed, pesticide and livestock industries back through the Rockefeller- and Ford-backed Green Revolution and then into the genetically engineered “Gene Revolution”. He describes the strategies of Monsanto/Bayer, pesticide controversies, conflicts of interest in agricultural research and regulation, and the recurring role of philanthropic foundations (including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) in financing agricultural biotechnology and development programs. Broze then widens the argument from corporate concentration to geopolitical leverage, citing Henry Kissinger’s 1974 NSSM 200 memorandum (https://warwicks.com/book/9781646793617) and its discussion of food aid, population policy and U.S. strategic interests, before returning to the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2020 Reset the Table initiative as evidence that institutions partly responsible for constructing the industrial food system now present themselves as architects of its replacement. Next, the pyramid becomes most literal: with people placed behind walls. In “The Prison Industrial Complex” (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-9-the-prison-industrial-complex/), Broze disectx a web of prisons, police, courts, probation and parole systems, bail, immigration detention agents, contractors, and prison-labor complexes whose financial incentives can turn incarceration itself into an industry. He traces that system from post-Civil War convict leasing through the War on Drugs, mandatory sentencing and the school-to-prison pipeline, while also noting competing explanations for mass incarceration—including John Pfaff’s argument that violent-crime prosecutions and the largely overlooked power of local prosecutors matter more than drug offenses alone. Among the corporations Broze identifies as benefiting from this complex is Microsoft, a connection that extends beyond a passing investment-screening designation: Microsoft today explicitly markets Azure and other government-cloud products to police, courts and corrections agencies for criminal-justice data, investigations, evidence management, case processing, “offender management” and institutional operations, and it has long promoted CJIS-compliant systems capable of supporting biometrics, jail and court management and law-enforcement analytics. The chapter is also unusually personal for Broze, who recounts his own drug addiction, felony conviction and eighteen months of incarceration before describing the difficulties of housing, employment, probation and stigma after release; his proposed alternatives range from sentencing and drug-policy reform to rehabilitation-focused systems and, for some advocates, prison abolition itself. By the tenth chapter, the pyramid has reached the institutions whose power is easiest to mistake for benevolence. In “The Foundations” (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-10-the-foundations-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/), Broze examines the nonprofit-industrial complex: the network of foundations, NGOs, think tanks and charities through which wealthy donors and governments can shape activism, education, public health and foreign policy while operating under the language of philanthropy. He revisits the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Gates foundations as examples of private fortunes translated into durable institutional influence, then broadens the history through the Walsh, Cox, and Reece investigations into tax-exempt foundations and their concentration of social and political power. From there he turns to organizations such as U.S.A.I.D. and the National Endowment for Democracy, which he presents as overt successors to activities once conducted covertly by intelligence agencies, before introducing the account of Carroll Quigley—whom longtime Radio Free Pizza gourmets may recall from a May 2024 dispatch (https://zacharonipizza.substack.com/p/split-value-circuits?utm_source=publication-search#:~:text=Carroll%20Quigley%E2%80%94historian%20at%20Georgetown%20University%20and%20mentor%20to%20Bill%20Clinton)—of the Round Table network and institutions including Chatham House, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rhodes Scholarship system. The Gates Foundation is especially important here because Broze treats it not as an isolated philanthropic enterprise but as the contemporary continuation of a model already established by Rockefeller and Carnegie: immense private wealth converted into influence over institutions that set public priorities. Money, in Broze’s pyramid, is the connective tissue. “The Banking Cartel & the Future of Money” (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-11-the-foundations-non-profit-industrial-complex/) traces banking from early merchant finance through the rise of the Rothschild dynasty, the creation of the Federal Reserve after the Jekyll Island meeting (which we discussed in an October 2024 dispatch (https://zacharonipizza.substack.com/p/split-value-circuits?utm_source=publication-search#:~:text=The%20Creature%20from%20Jekyll%20Island%20(1994)%2C%20the%20seminal%20text%20on%20the%20subject%2C%20who%20describes%20how%20these%20financiers%20concocted%20their%20scheme%20in%20anticipation%20of%20impending%20legislation%20to%20regulate%20their%20industry%20and%20decided%20to%20lead%20the%20call%20for%20reform%20themselves)), and the expansion of central banking through institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Bank for International Settlements. Broze’s central argument is that banking power extends far beyond lending: by controlling credit, money creation, debt and access to capital, financial institutions can shape governments, wars, development policy and the behavior of ordinary people. He closes by looking forward to social-impact finance, ESG investing, and especially central-bank digital currencies (https://zacharonipizza.substack.com/p/all-that-glitters-is-not-gold?utm_source=publication-search#:~:text=Central%20Bank%20Digital%20Currencies%20(CBDCs)) as the next stage of financial control, because programmable digital money could allow authorities to monitor transactions and potentially determine how currency may be used. His proposed counterweight is financial decentralization through credit unions, divestment from major banks, precious metals, privacy-focused cryptocurrencies and community-created exchange systems. Thereafter the series enters the world of institutions designed to operate beyond public sight (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-12-the-crimes-of-the-intelligence-community/) as Broze surveys the development of British, American, Soviet/Russian, Israeli and Chinese intelligence services, emphasizing their documented histories of propaganda, surveillance, coups, assassinations, torture and covert warfare—from the Church Committee’s revelations about the CIA and NSA through Operation Condor, the Phoenix Program, and post-September-2001 black sites. Particular attention goes (quite deservedly) to Israel’s intelligence-to-technology pipeline: Unit 8200, Talpiot, and Unit 81 train highly skilled recruits who frequently migrate into cybersecurity and technology companies, carrying relationships formed inside the intelligence apparatus into the private sector. Microsoft enters this story through the broader overlap between American surveillance and commercial technology. Broze points to NSA relationships with Israeli-linked surveillance contractors Verint and Narus and places Microsoft among the major technology companies swept into intelligence collection; subsequent Snowden disclosures independently established that Microsoft services were included in the NSA’s PRISM collection program, although early reports suggesting the NSA possessed unrestricted direct access to company servers were disputed and revised, and Microsoft later strengthened encryption specifically to frustrate unauthorized NSA interception. Broze ultimately presents the international intelligence system as another largely hidden layer connecting governments, military power, media and increasingly the digital infrastructure on which ordinary life depends. As Broze approaches the upper levels of the pyramid, he turns from institutions to the philosophy he believes increasingly organizes them. “The Technocratic State” (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-13-the-technocratic-state/) traces the idea from Howard Scott and the 1930s Technocracy movement—which envisioned engineers and technical experts replacing politicians, markets and individual choice with centralized scientific management—through Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “technetronic” society and into today’s world of digital surveillance, algorithmic governance, smart cities, carbon tracking and centralized data systems. Broze identifies the modern heirs of this tradition among the technology elite, explicitly naming Bill Gates and Microsoft alongside figures such as Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk: Microsoft’s software, cloud infrastructure, and data systems place the company inside the technological architecture on which governments, corporations and increasingly everyday life depend, while Gates’s wealth has allowed him to extend influence beyond Microsoft into global health, climate policy and technological interventions such as geoengineering research. Broze connects this emerging technocratic order to institutions including the United Nations and World Economic Forum (WEF), arguing that programs built around digital identification, ubiquitous monitoring, automated decision-making and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” reproduce the original technocratic ambition to manage society through data and technical expertise. His answer is not merely political opposition but practical exit: reducing dependence upon dominant technology platforms and constructing parallel systems for food, education, money and community outside the increasingly integrated digital infrastructure. Rather than adding another institution to the pyramid, “The False Flag Deception” (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-14-the-false-flag-deception/) examines one of the methods Broze believes powerful institutions have repeatedly used to manufacture public consent for their initiatives: attacks staged, manipulated or deliberately misrepresented in order to blame an enemy and generate public fear. He moves from documented proposals such as Operation Northwoods and the history of Operation Gladio (which our October 2023 dispatch (https://zacharonipizza.substack.com/p/dividing-from-the-right?utm_source=publication-search#:~:text=Operation%20Gladio%20established%20a%20NATO%2Dsponsored%2C%20anti%2Dcommunist%20network%20after%20World%20War%20II) connects to the current war in Ukraine) to more disputed cases including Pearl Harbor, and the Oklahoma City bombing, and the World Trade Center, before concentrating on the 2018 chemical-weapons allegations in Douma, Syria. There Broze highlights testimony challenging the official account, leaked OPCW materials and objections from inspectors who argued that the organization’s published conclusions did not accurately reflect evidence gathered by its investigative team. Across these examples, his larger concern is the political sequence that follows traumatic events: fear, a rapidly consolidated official narrative, media reinforcement and new wars or restrictions on civil liberties. His prescription is disciplined skepticism—question official accounts without automatically embracing every alternative theory, allow evidence to emerge, and resist allowing fear to substitute for investigation. The next chapter (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-15-the-pedo-class/) turns to one of the darkest subjects in Broze’s investigation: the abuse of children and the institutions that can conceal it. He begins with the Finders, the obscure Washington-area group that became the subject of a 1987 child-abuse investigation, revisiting police reports, Customs documents and later FBI releases that raised unresolved questions about sexual abuse, trafficking allegations and possible intelligence connections. The case is especially important to Broze because it grew into his first feature-length documentary, Who Will Find What the Finders Hide?, (which Radio Free Pizza discussed in 2024 (https://zacharonipizza.substack.com/p/the-horrible-rumors-about-comet-ping#:~:text=the%20findings%20of%20journalist%20Derrick%20Broze%20of%20The%20Conscious%20Resistance%20Network), and) which later became part of The Pyramid of Power itself. From there he examines a more recent Utah investigation into allegations of ritualized child sexual abuse, before widening the lens to documented abuse scandals within major religious institutions, including the Catholic Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormon Church, and the Southern Baptist Convention. The chapter’s central concern is not that every allegation belongs to a single hidden conspiracy, but that powerful institutions have repeatedly demonstrated an ability to protect offenders, suppress scrutiny and leave victims carrying the consequences. Near the summit of the pyramid, Broze turns from institutions to the belief systems, loyalties, and rituals (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-16-religion-secret-societies/) that can bind powerful people together across formal political and religious boundaries. He traces the long history of organized religion as both a source of meaning and a recurring instrument of persecution, war and social control, while also noting that officially atheist states have committed comparable abuses against religious believers. From there, the chapter moves into the world of secret societies and elite fraternities—Freemasonry, Skull and Bones and, perhaps most visibly, the Bohemian Club—where politicians, intelligence officials, industrialists and other influential figures have historically gathered outside public view. Devoting particular attention to Bohemian Grove and its documented “Cremation of Care” ceremony, Broze presents it not as proof of any single hidden theology but as an unusually vivid example of powerful people maintaining private rituals and associations largely unknown to the public they govern. His broader argument is that institutional labels—Christian, Muslim, Jewish, secular, left or right—may reveal less about the exercise of power than the private networks and loyalties connecting influential people behind them. The Pyramid of Power’s two (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-17-volume-1-the-top-of-the-pyramid/)-part conclusion (https://thepyramidofpower.net/chapter-17-volume-2-the-top-of-the-pyramid/) finally returns to the question toward which the preceding sixteen chapters have been building: if the institutions Broze has examined repeatedly overlap—education, media, technology, medicine, agriculture, finance, intelligence, philanthropy, religion and the rest—who, or what, sits above them? By this point his answer is no longer that these are merely isolated cases of corruption. Wealthy families, corporations, foundations, intelligence agencies, financial institutions and policy organizations repeatedly share personnel, money, relationships and objectives. The more difficult question is whether those connections eventually terminate in a single inner circle or whether the pyramid is something more complicated than a conventional chain of command. Broze begins with what can be established most readily. Peter Dale Scott’s conception of the “deep state,” unlike the partisan meaning the term acquired under Donald Trump, describes networks extending beyond formal government into intelligence, finance, oil, private power and criminal or covert activity. BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street offer another visible concentration of influence: enormous pools of privately managed capital coupled with direct relationships to governments and the corporations in which they invest. But neither the bureaucratic deep state nor the Big Three satisfies Broze as a final explanation. They appear instead as important components of a larger system in which state and private power continually intersect. The same pattern emerges in the WEF, Bilderberg Group, and Trilateral Commission. Broze traces the WEF through Klaus Schwab’s formative relationship with Henry Kissinger (which we covered here (https://zacharonipizza.substack.com/p/digital-society-admin-guide?utm_source=publication-search#:~:text=His%20studies%20for%20the%20latter%20involved%20instruction%20under%20Heinz%20%E2%80%9CHenry%E2%80%9D%20Kissinger) in December 2023) and examines its Great Reset and Fourth Industrial Revolution as expressions of the technocratic model explored earlier in the series. The Gates Foundation reappears here through its partnership with Johns Hopkins and the WEF in the October 2019 Event 201 coronavirus-pandemic exercise, placing Gates philanthropy inside precisely the kind of public-private policy network under examination. Bilderberg provides an even clearer example of elite coordination: political leaders, financiers, intelligence figures, media executives and corporate chiefs meeting privately across national and institutional boundaries. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s membership on Bilderberg’s Steering Committee is especially significant within the architecture Broze has assembled, placing the head of one of the world’s dominant technology companies directly inside a forum connecting technology, finance, media and geopolitics. The Trilateral Commission, created by David Rockefeller with Zbigniew Brzezinski, similarly brought together influential figures from North America, Western Europe and Japan and supplied an extraordinary number of personnel to subsequent governments. Yet none of these organizations appears to Broze to be the summit. Instead, the aforementioned Quigley’s history of the Round Table Groups supplies the model that most closely resembles what the series has uncovered. Quigley, who was personally sympathetic to many of their internationalist objectives and had access to their records, described an Anglo-American network descending from Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Milner and their associates and operating through overlapping inner and outer circles. More public institutions such as Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations could therefore coexist with smaller, less visible centers of coordination. Broze does not establish an uninterrupted organizational chain from Rhodes to every contemporary institution in the series, but the Round Table model gives him a way to understand why the same financiers, politicians, foundations, corporations and policy organizations repeatedly appear together without requiring one organization to command all the others. From that comparatively well-documented terrain, the conclusion deliberately moves into more uncertain territory. The alleged “Committee of 300” illustrates the problem. Walther Rathenau’s 1909 observation that a few hundred interconnected men guided Europe’s economic affairs was originally a criticism of oligarchical nepotism, but later writers transformed it into theories of a secret governing committee. Arthur Cherep-Spiridovich recast the idea in explicitly antisemitic terms, while John Coleman later claimed—without independently verifiable documentation—that a formal body of approximately three hundred “Olympians” stood above organizations such as Bilderberg, the CFR, Trilateral Commission and Club of Rome. The structure resembles the overlapping institutional network documented elsewhere in the series, though the existence of Coleman’s specific governing committee does not rest on comparable evidence. That distinction becomes essential as Broze takes up theories concerning Zionism, Freemasonry, the Jesuits and the Illuminati. He explicitly separates Jewish ancestry and Judaism from political Zionism and the Israeli state, rejecting the idea that Jews constitute a monolithic conspiratorial class. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, historically central to such claims, is treated as the forgery it is, its passages having been substantially plagiarized from Maurice Joly’s nineteenth-century satire against Napoleon III. At the same time, Broze argues that the existence of antisemitic mythology should not prevent examination of actual political networks: Rothschild support for historical Zionism, modern pro-Israel lobbying, the unusually close U.S.-Israeli relationship and particular influential individuals and organizations are matters that can be investigated without converting Jewish ancestry into a theory of collective responsibility. Freemasonry presents a similar mixture of documented influence and much broader claims. Masons have undeniably occupied important positions in governments, revolutions and elite institutions throughout modern history, including numerous American presidents and founding figures. There is likewise historical evidence that Adam Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati sought to expand through Masonic lodges before the organization was suppressed in the 1780s. What becomes much harder to demonstrate is that Freemasonry itself operated as a unified command structure behind those political events, or that the historical Illuminati survived intact and secretly governs contemporary institutions. “Illuminati,” by the end of Broze’s survey, functions more convincingly as a cultural shorthand for a hidden ruling class than as the demonstrated name of one. The Jesuits generate the mirror image of the same problem. Their global educational reach, political relationships and long history are real; so too were the repeated expulsions and suppression they experienced as governments grew suspicious of their influence. But the literature purporting to expose a secret Jesuit program for world domination—including versions of the Monita Secreta and alleged secret oaths—has a far less secure provenance. Catholic writers accused Masons of subverting Christianity and monarchy; Masonic writers accused Jesuits of infiltration; others accused Jewish financiers of manipulating both. Rather than resolving this centuries-old exchange by selecting one faction as the hidden master, the conclusion increasingly suggests that these accounts may reveal competing networks struggling for influence while simultaneously reflecting the prejudices and political commitments of their authors. Broze carries the same inquiry backward into European aristocracy. The historical “Black Nobility” consisted of papal-aligned Roman aristocratic families, while older Venetian, Genoese and European dynasties undeniably accumulated vast wealth, land and political relationships across centuries. This possibility adds an important generational dimension to the series: power does not necessarily begin with modern billionaires such as Bill Gates, Larry Fink or Klaus Schwab, because fortunes, institutions and social networks can be transmitted through families for centuries. But again, the evidence supports the existence and historical importance of aristocratic dynasties more strongly than it supports a single coordinated “Black Nobility” directing contemporary global affairs. At the outer edge of the inquiry, Broze turns openly from political history to spiritual and metaphysical explanations. Former Church of Satan member Mark Passio identifies “dark occultists” as the highest human layer of the pyramid and speculates that even they may answer to nonhuman forces. David Icke describes the ultimate source in terms of an inverted or psychopathic consciousness operating beyond ordinary human perception, while Catherine Austin Fitts’s “Mr. Global” refers more cautiously to a secret governance system involving finance, classified technology and intergenerational capital, while leaving open questions concerning nonhuman or “breakaway” civilizations. Adam Green rejects these occult explanations and instead locates the danger in messianic religious ideas themselves. Broze does not collapse these radically different interpretations into established fact; their disagreement ultimately becomes part of the conclusion. That disagreement produces the series’ most important answer. Richard Grove describes a “pyramid without a capstone”: numerous powerful groups and individuals cooperating where their interests align, competing elsewhere and collectively narrowing the choices available to everyone below them. Historian Richard Spence reaches a similar conclusion, suggesting that several elite factions may simultaneously seek greater control without any one faction becoming absolute master. G. Edward Griffin and James Corbett move the answer from organizations to ideology. Griffin calls the underlying principle collectivism; Corbett identifies the deeper problem as centralization—the belief that a small number of people should legitimately possess enormous authority over everyone else. Remove particular rulers while preserving that assumption and there will always be replacements waiting to occupy the same positions. Larken Rose carries the argument to its logical endpoint: the pyramid ultimately receives its power from the people beneath it. Intelligence agencies, financial institutions, politicians and private organizations can exercise authority only because large numbers of people continue to recognize institutions of rule as legitimate, finance them, depend upon them and obey them. From this perspective, the question, “Who is at the top?” becomes less important than the system that continually manufactures a top. Broze therefore ends the five-year investigation without naming one ethnicity, family, secret society or committee as the undisputed ruler of the world. He concludes instead that overlapping networks of intelligence agencies, financial institutions, foundations, NGOs, corporations, political organizations, technological elites and private policy groups do coordinate in ways that frequently escape meaningful democratic scrutiny, while the evidence becomes progressively less certain as claims move toward a single hidden committee, ancient secret order or metaphysical controller. The pyramid may contain powerful inner circles without possessing one final boardroom in which every decision is made. That’s also why the series ends where it does politically: if the problem were simply BlackRock, Bilderberg, Zionists, Freemasons, Jesuits or any other particular faction, replacing or destroying that faction might conceivably dismantle the pyramid. If the deeper mechanism is centralized power and dependency, another group would simply occupy the vacant summit. Broze instead returns to the principle that has accompanied the investigation from the beginning: Exit and Build. Reduce dependence upon centralized food, financial, educational and technological systems; protect privacy; resist compulsory digital identification and surveillance; use local and alternative economic arrangements where practical; build community networks and institutions capable of functioning outside dominant systems; and resist coercive policies rather than merely waiting for electoral politics to correct them. The conclusion thus turns the pyramid upside-down. A series that begins by searching for the people powerful enough to control society ends by asking what makes society controllable in the first place. Whether the hidden inner circle consists of one faction, many competing factions or no fixed organization at all, Broze’s answer is ultimately the same: concentrated power survives through concentrated dependency. The practical opposite of the pyramid is therefore not a better capstone, but no capstone at all—a dispersal of authority into individuals, families, and communities capable of governing more of their own lives. Which brings us back, finally, to Phoebe Gates and the peculiar little seminar at Stanford where this investigation began. The Rule seminar she attended provides a remarkably compact illustration of the world Broze has spent five years mapping: ambitious people are identified early, measured for their potential influence, introduced to one another, taught to see the incentive structures beneath institutions and encouraged to carry those relationships forward as their power compounds. Broze’s final answer is that there may be no single throne at the top of that world, only overlapping circles of wealth, institutions, ideology and dependency continually reproducing the conditions in which some people acquire extraordinary power over others. Rule asks who might become one of those people and equips them with measures for navigating the board. The Pyramid of Power asks who built the board, who benefits from its rules, and whether the rest of us must continue playing by them. Perhaps that’s the most useful measure of the rulers after all: not merely identifying who possesses power, but asking how that power was accumulated, through which networks and institutions it operates, what incentives guide its use, and, above all, how much authority over our own lives we are willing to surrender to it. Radio Free Pizza is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Radio Free Pizza at www.radiofreepizza.com/subscribe (https://www.radiofreepizza.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   29 Jul 2026

   Hot War Summer

   Yesterday, 28 July, U.S. President Donald Trump received two foreign leaders at the White House (https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/28/trump-zelensky-netanyahu-white-house-russia-ukraine-patriots-iran-war-nuclear/): Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose war against the Russian Federation the U.S. president had promised to end almost immediately upon returning to office, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on whose behalf the U.S. president had started a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran five months earlier to the day. Both had come to Washington with the nominal purpose of attending the funeral for Senator Lindsey Graham, the late South Carolina Republican whose political career demonstrated an almost inexhaustible enthusiasm for American military adventurism, for which reason Graham had been in Washington both one of Israel’s most dependable supporters and, more recently, among Ukraine’s most reliable advocates. There, the two met in person for the first time in three years (https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-and-zelensky-speak-in-person-for-first-time-in-3-years-at-graham-funeral/). But whether because of scheduling conflicts or their basic priorities, each would first meet with Trump. With Zelensky surely knowing he would attend the funeral once he learned of Graham’s death—from a sudden aortic tear (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/sen-lindsey-grahams-sudden-death-spurs-false-claims) following his return from his tenth official visit to Ukraine, or perhaps days earlier in Kiev due to covert foreign action, if you’re inclined to entertain alternatives (https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2026/07/14/conspiracists-question-known-facts-around-grahams-death-after-ukraine-trip/)—the Ukrainian president announced just three days prior (https://www.iranintl.com/en/202607251446#:~:text=Earlier%20Saturday%2C%20Zelenskyy%20said%20Ukrainian%20forces%20had%20achieved%20%E2%80%9Cvery%20strong%20results%E2%80%9D%20with%20long%2Drange%20attacks%20in%20the%20Caspian%20Sea.) what he called “very strong results” from Ukrainian long-range operations against a Russian warship and vessels allegedly involved in transporting military cargo connected to Iran, with Ukraine having long treated the Caspian Sea as one of its foe’s supply corridors, striking ships and port infrastructure that Kiev said had carried ammunition, drone components, and other military equipment. The Islamic Republic subsequently confirmed that an Iranian commercial vessel had been hit during the latest operation, which killed one sailor and injured another, though it had not been publicly established that the Iranian vessel had been carrying military matériel or that Ukraine had deliberately selected it as a target. Tehran summoned the Ukrainian chargé d’affaires, condemned the strike as hostile and criminal, and accused Kiev of attempting to expand the war between Russia and Ukraine—since, after all, it’s difficult to imagine a more literal representation of merging wars than an Iranian sailor killed in the Caspian Sea during a Ukrainian operation against the logistical relationship between Tehran and Moscow. Kiev later told Iran that the vessel had been struck unintentionally and that Ukraine did not seek escalation with Tehran. Still, they didn’t need to wait long to see more evidence for it: later that same day, Zelensky echoed American accusations dating to 6 March (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/russia-gave-iran-information-that-can-help-tehran-hit-u-s-military-targets-ap-sources-say) that Russia had supplied Iran with information that could help Tehran strike American warships, aircraft, and other military assets in the region, and promised to provide partner governments with intelligence allegedly showing that Russia had helped Iran prepare attacks against American military facilities and regional states, with four bases in Bahrain, Jordan, and Kuwait having fallen within the area of interest for Russian satellites on 19 and 20 July alone. Accordingly, he argued that the timing of the surveillance corresponded closely enough with Iranian attacks to suggest that Moscow was assisting both target preparation and post-strike assessment, though of course he didn’t release the satellite evidence: neither did Ukraine provide any for its April claims (https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-892256) that Russia had provided Iran with military targets in Israel. Still, what had begun as anonymous American officials describing Russian information that might help Iran attack American assets had become a far more specific Ukrainian account of Russian satellites observing particular bases before Iranian strikes, then returning afterward to assess the damage. Such accusations may have been topics of discussion in Zelensky’s meeting with Trump before the funeral, but it was closed to the press. Afterward, the Ukrainian president said they had discussed licenses permitting Ukraine to produce interceptor missiles for the American-made Patriot air-defense system. Trump had already agreed in principle to license Patriot production, but a license was not a missile—the interceptors were expensive, complicated, and slow to manufacture, while Ukraine required them immediately to defend its cities from Russian attacks—and, accordingly, Zelensky met later that day with representatives of Lockheed Martin to discuss joint production and the exchange of military technology. Though Ukraine had entered the war as one of the world’s most dependent recipients of military assistance, its president now presents the country as a manufacturing partner, technological laboratory, intelligence source, and exporter of battlefield knowledge. No doubt Graham watched proudly. Then it was Netanyahu’s turn (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4k2z8z45ro#:~:text=Shortly%20after%20Zelensky%20left%20on%20Tuesday%2C%20Netanyahu%20arrived%20at%20the%20White%20House%20for%20talks%20that%20were%20expected%20to%20focus%20heavily%20on%20the%20conflict%20in%20Iran.). The Israeli prime minister came seeking to ensure that Trump remained committed to the war against Iran and, in particular, to preventing Tehran from rebuilding or advancing its alleged nuclear program. Their meeting followed signs of friction: Trump had complained that Netanyahu was publicizing intelligence and planned talking points in an apparent effort to keep the U.S. involved. Meanwhile, the same air-defense shortage pressing upon Ukraine had become part of the military arithmetic of the American and Israeli campaign against Iran. American forces and their regional partners were defending installations, cities, shipping routes, and oil infrastructure against missiles and Iranian-designed drones—the same family of drones that Russia had spent years launching against Ukraine, for which reason the country has been helping the U.S. and its vassals among the Gulf monarchies counter Iranian drones since at least April (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/10/zelenskyy-says-ukrainian-interceptors-downed-iran-drones-in-the-middle-east) (around which time it also offered to help open the Strait of Hormuz (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/russia-did-this-in-the-black-sea-ukraine-offers-help-to-reopen-hormuz/)), and with its assistance reportedly requested less than a week after the war began (https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-asks-ukraine-for-assistance-in-shooting-down-iranian-shahed-drones-in-middle-east/). That, of course, gives strong ground to the Islamic Republic’s accusation that Ukraine struck its cargo vessel in the Caspian Sea in an effort to merge its own war against Russia with the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran. Some might even say the latter incentivizes them to do so: though conflict in the Middle East has increased demand for American air-defense weapons—and therefore diminished what can be supplied to Ukraine—now, with the prospect a license to produce Patriot missiles, Kiev could start manufacturing the same weapons to help itself, Washington, and Tel Aviv alike. Where now two wars compete for American weapons, Ukrainian manufacturing could soon help supply the common market. The White House pronounced both meetings “positive and productive.” The diplomatic language made the afternoon sound orderly: Zelensky discussed Patriots and peace, while Netanyahu discussed Iran and partnership. The first meeting concerned Eastern Europe, and the second concerned the Middle East: the two fronts open today in the long campaign of Western imperialism’s (https://zacharonipizza.substack.com/p/rubicon-ferries?r=15nwyh&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true#:~:text=Western%20imperialism%E2%80%94emerging,dividing%20the%20spoils.)thalassocracies (https://zacharonipizza.substack.com/p/rubicon-ferries?r=15nwyh&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true#:~:text=Western%20imperialism%E2%80%94emerging,dividing%20the%20spoils.) to conquer the tellurocracies of Eurasia. But the gap between them has been shrinking since less than a week after the war against Iran began, and seems now little more than the spare time between their meetings. So, Zelensky and Netanyahu arrived in Washington on the same day, each carrying a different portion of the same problem. One wanted weapons for the war Trump had promised to end, and the other wanted continued support for the war Trump had helped begin. Not coincidentally, they visited in the heat of a Washington summer for the funeral of a senator who had done so much to prepare the U.S. to support them both indefinitely. Maybe you’ve noticed in the past decade that you know summer has arrived when social-media users begin announcing which particular variety of summer they intend to have. Hot girl summer (https://www.buzzfeed.com/thebeanmagazine/hot-girl-summer-quiz), brat summer (https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/music/article/not-another-brat-summer-charli-xcx-steps-into-a-new-grittier-era-with-her-guitar-heavy-album-music-fashion-film-out-today-205252044.html), feral girl summer (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/feral-girl-summer-creator-meme-1369450/), or whatever else the fashion industry seeks to promote: the season has in recent years become less a period of the year than an identity package, a temporary permission structure under which one may behave recklessly and spend money one does not have. (So much, in other words, like the American military.) Thus, in honor of the late statesman who brought these two fronts even closer together, Senator Lindsey Graham—though not for his inveterate warmongering, but instead for the #LadyGraham (https://x.com/hashtag/LadyGraham?src=hashtag_click)hashtag alleging his closeted homosexuality—we here at Radio Free Pizza would like to say to you all (a little late in the season, but nonetheless), “Welcome to hot war summer.” Radio Free Pizza is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Radio Free Pizza at www.radiofreepizza.com/subscribe (https://www.radiofreepizza.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   28 Jun 2026

   Ceasefire with Bombs to Follow

   Since Friday, we’ve been dumbfounded to have learned that “the Lebanese Republic” is the formal name for the government of Lebanon (https://openfactbook.org/countries/lebanon/), after it and the State of Israel signed a “framework agreement” (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-drops-leaflets-over-south-lebanon-town-ordering-residents-leave-2026-06-26/) on 26 June 2026 in Washington, D.C. Not for the immediate or unconditional withdrawal of Israel Defense Forces from their occupation in Lebanon, but for an eventual end to the state of war (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/lebanons-deal-with-israel-requires-hezbollah-to-disarm-that-might-be-difficult) that has existed between these governments since 1948. But the mechanism is conditional: Israeli forces will withdraw from Lebanon only if Hezbollah disarms. The plan begins with two unspecified “pilot zones,” where Israel would pull back and the Lebanese army would assume security responsibility. Future withdrawals would depend on additional agreed pilot zones. A security annex reportedly details Lebanese army deployments and Israeli redeployments, but that annex has not been made public. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed the agreement as a way to keep the IDF in southern Lebanon until Hezbollah and other armed groups are disarmed and until Israel no longer faces a threat from Lebanon. Israel’s defense minister said the military has been told to prepare for an extended stay, reinforcing the idea that withdrawal is not immediate or guaranteed. Hezbollah leader Naim Kassem rejected the deal as nonexistent from Hezbollah’s perspective, calling it a “humiliation” and warning that linking Israeli withdrawal to Hezbollah’s disarmament is dangerous. Hezbollah official Hassan Fadlallah warned that the agreement could lead to civil war because Hezbollah will not surrender its weapons and would resist Lebanese army measures against it. Hezbollah supporters protested in Beirut after the deal was announced. Obviously the deal remains fragile, as 2026 has taught us about “ceasefires”: previous agreements between Lebanon and Israel during the latest war were not implemented on the ground. Israeli strikes continued after the signing, including a reported drone strike near Nabatiyeh. More than 4,000 people in Lebanon have reportedly been killed since the Iran war began. Some might feel tempted to see the signature itself as the event: Israel and Lebanon at the same table. Israel and Lebanon in the same sentence without the immediate accompaniment of artillery. Israel and Lebanon joined by the words “framework agreement,” “future peace,” “normalization,” “territorial integrity,” “sovereignty,” etc. But skeptics would naturally warn that these fine words won’t necessarily survive contact with reality. Indeed, Lebanese-American journalist Rania Khalek offers (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-drops-leaflets-over-south-lebanon-town-ordering-residents-leave-2026-06-26/) a more sobering interpretation: the framework doesn’t represent a sovereignty breakthrough but a mandate for internal war dressed in the language of sovereignty. Because the agreement does not simply imagine the Lebanese state restoring authority over the south after Israel withdraws, but instead makes Israeli withdrawal contingent on the Lebanese Armed Forces first disarming Hezbollah and dismantling its infrastructure (with “verified disarmament” assessed under a U.S.-managed process), Khalek argues that the Lebanese government has effectively joined Washington and Tel Aviv in declaring war on a massive segment of Lebanon’s own population. For her, therefore, the question isn’t whether an impossible diplomatic configuration has appeared that can maintain this framework going forward, but whether in fact one has appeared that will make the lives of Lebanese civilians more difficult. In other words, the sequencing matters: if Israel’s occupation of Lebanese territory is illegal, then Israeli withdrawal should not depend on whether Hezbollah exists, whether Hezbollah disarms, whether Lebanon satisfies American benchmarks, whether Marco Rubio is pleased with the quarterly performance review, or whether the empire has decided that the national nervous system of Lebanon has become sufficiently obedient to be permitted reconstruction. Occupation is not supposed to become lawful until the occupied party gets its domestic politics in order. Yet this, Khalek argues, is precisely the inversion at the heart of the framework. Israel’s withdrawal becomes the prize Lebanon may receive after it proves itself willing and able to wage an internal campaign against the force that emerged, in the first place, from resistance to Israeli occupation. Reconstruction aid and the return of displaced civilians become conditioned on successful disarmament. Lebanese sovereignty becomes something Lebanon must earn by subordinating itself to a U.S.-Israeli security architecture. The government’s monopoly on force becomes not the ordinary attribute of a functioning state, but the euphemism through which a weak, fractured, externally pressured state is invited to attempt the one thing most likely to fracture it further. Similarly, Usama Makdisi understands (https://makdisi.substack.com/p/the-morning-after-the-lebanonagreement)the Lebanon-Israel framework agreement not as a restoration of Lebanese sovereignty but as another episode in Lebanon’s long history as a stage for imperial politics. Since the nineteenth century, Lebanon has been both central and peripheral to great-power rivalry: a place where local politics are repeatedly entangled with imperial projects. The earlier European-Ottoman struggle helped produce Lebanon’s modern “culture of sectarianism,” and Makdisi sees the current moment as a continuation of that pattern, now under a U.S.-Israeli project that is trying to recover through Lebanon what it failed to achieve in the war with Iran. He persuasively emphasizes the contradiction between how Lebanese officials and Israel describe the agreement. Lebanon’s president and prime minister present it as a step toward restoring the sovereignty of the Lebanese Republic in the south. Netanyahu, by contrast, celebrates it because Israel is not required to withdraw immediately; instead, the burden falls on the weak Lebanese army to disarm Hezbollah while Israel remains in occupation. For Makdisi too, that sequencing exposes the agreement’s real nature: after months of Israeli assault on Lebanon’s Shia population, mass displacement, attacks on journalists and paramedics, and thousands killed or wounded, the agreement preserves Israeli power while calling Lebanese submission “sovereignty.” Against the backdrop of southern Lebanon under Israeli occupation, Makdisi argues that the agreement effectively validates Israel’s campaign and gives it leverage over whether displaced Lebanese civilians can return home. He also cites Trita Parsi’s view (https://x.com/tparsi/status/2070899074329399770) that the deal undercuts the U.S.-Iran MOU: the former now allows the conflict to continue until Hezbollah has been disarmed, while the latter called for a comprehensive regional ceasefire including Lebanon. Makdisi also compares the agreement to the May 1983 Lebanon-Israel agreement, signed after Israel’s 1982 invasion by a weak, pro-American Lebanese government, widely seen as illegitimate because Israel still occupied large parts of Lebanon and annulled after the 1984 uprising against the U.S.-backed government. To his analysis, the current agreement may face a similar legitimacy crisis, and in that sense raises the same warning as Khalek of the risks that the Lebanese people will now face from their own government. Those, of course, come on top of the risks that they will continue facing from the State of Israel, which he argues has two models for Lebanon: the “West Bank” model, in which a weak local authority performs security functions on Israel’s behalf while Israel continues domination and annexation; or the “Gaza” model, meaning destruction, ethnic cleansing, and obliteration. Lebanese fantasies of being separate from the Palestinian fate, he says, are ahistorical, warning that geography and geopolitics keep binding Lebanon’s future to Palestine’s. Therefore, while some may hail the agreement as peace or sovereignty out of exhaustion, hope, naiveté, or self-delusion, one may safely say that Makdisi warns them against betting on it. Thus, the consequences of the agreement signed last Friday depend almost entirely on sequencing. If Israel withdraws and Lebanon then rebuilds state authority in the south, one kind of future becomes imaginable. If Lebanon must first disarm Hezbollah under American supervision while Israel remains in occupation, another kind of future becomes likely: not peace, but the Lebanese state being pressured to internalize Israel’s war through confrontation with a mass Shia political-military movement rooted in decades of war, occupation, and displacement. Diplomatic language can soften the prospect. “Sovereignty” and “state authority” both sound clean, but not “civil war”: call it “disarmament of non-state armed groups” instead. Therefore, the agreement hides the potential trap of converting the Israeli occupation into a procedural norm, and of outsourcing of Israeli security to a Lebanese state too weak to perform the task without breaking itself—in other words, of formalizing ahead of schedule the Lebanese Republic’s position as a vassal. Certainly, taking orders from Washington and Tel Aviv about which domestic faction must be broken before Lebanese civilians can return to their homes sounds quite different from acting as a sovereign state. Perhaps some pessimists on the possibility of peace would dismiss the agreement as meaningless. For them, however, there’s enough meaning in it to estimate that the prospect of peace in southern Lebanon has only become more distant. Meaningless agreements do not cause Hezbollah’s leadership to denounce them as humiliation, Israeli leaders to celebrate them as achievement, and Lebanese officials to call them sovereignty—even if the answers to “sovereignty for whom” and “under whose supervision” remain open to debate. Of course, those aren’t secondary questions: they are the agreement. If it leads to Israeli withdrawal, civilian return, reconstruction, and a durable reduction in violence, then that will be worth saying. If it instead produces extended occupation through Lebanon’s imposed internal fracture, that too will be worth saying. But in the meantime, we must wait to test these peace processes, security assurances, and sovereignty claims against their outcomes. The paperwork has been signed, and now reality gets the deciding vote. Radio Free Pizza is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Radio Free Pizza at www.radiofreepizza.com/subscribe (https://www.radiofreepizza.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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