Renan Santos — How We Built the Mission Party

Renan Santos tells how he built the Free Brazil Movement and worked out the doctrine, mobilized it into Brazil’s Mission Party, and how the lessons of building an outsider movement apply in America and around the world.

---

Transcript

Intro (00:00)

Wolf: Welcome. So we’re here in Brazil again, this time at the Mission Party headquarters with presidential candidate Renan Santos. Welcome, Renan.

Renan: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure for me to be in your show, let’s say, meanwhile in my own scenario where I make my live streams, but it’s fun.

Wolf: Yeah. It’s fun. A little crossover here. So I met Renan last year, I guess. You came to one of our parties—in San Francisco after we—

Renan: It was really nice.

Wolf: We—

Renan: Really nice barbecue.

Wolf: Yeah, it was good. So, yeah, we got interested because the Mission Party is very small, but growing, and very interesting. It’s building a vertically integrated political party in Brazil that’s very youth-oriented, it’s very positive, and has a lot of intellectual depth and a lot of street presence. And so I like that combination. It was really cool.

And so I came down in November, saw the launch of the political party itself. It’s a very new political party. And it was the most glorious thing I’d ever seen. That’s what I said—at the time. I was convinced this thing’s inevitable.

It’s going to happen eventually. And so I wanted to come down here to Brazil again for the presidential campaign, which has just concluded. The votes have not come in yet. So we’re right between the campaigning has ended, but the votes have not come in. So the audience will know more about what happened than we do.

Renan: Yeah, we’re in a little purgatory right now.

Wolf: Yeah. We’re in purgatory. Exactly. But, yeah, I wanted to sit down with Renan and get a bit of flavor on this thing for the American audience. Our students in America, we want to know, how do we fix America?

So I think how do we fix Brazil is a good example. It’s a good prototype of it because I think you’ve got a great program here. So I think one place to start that would be edifying for everyone is just to give us an overview of the Mission Party and your plan to fix Brazil. Just how are we going to do it?

Renan: Well, the Mission Party was the culmination of a process where we understood, as a political movement, I come from a political movement I created 12 years ago called Free Brazil Movement, where we understood that the next step would be institutionalize ourselves—so we would be part of the so-called system—to reform it from inside. In Brazil, it’s really hard to open up a political party. It’s very difficult. You need a lot of money. And actually, it’s funny because we have lots of political parties.

It was easy to open up a party in the ‘80s. For an American audience to understand, Brazil was under a military regime in the ‘80s. So when they opened the system, they were like, “Oh, we should have 100 parties.” So it was easy. And then all the parties, they start to have funding from the government, state funding for their operation.

So they said, “No. Let’s close the gates.” So in the 2000s, they made a new legislation that made it almost impossible. And after the 2010s, it was probably impossible. So we overcame all this difficulty through use of the technology and use of our following, a very strong following among youngsters, especially young males, who were following, helping the movement.

So if we were a normal political group, we would spend, let’s say, in dollars, around $15 million to create or buy a party because people buy parties here—even though it’s illegal. So we couldn’t do it by normal ways, so we put a lot of effort on technology. And it cost for us, let’s say, in dollars, $1 million to make it, by selling this yellow book, selling T-shirts, selling products, and also middle-class people donating for us. We never had a major donator. There’s no super PAC in Brazil or—something like that.

So, we understood that we should not change ourselves on a quantitative way, but qualitative way. That worm must become the butterfly somehow. And why become the butterfly? Because we must have a very ambitious program focusing on how to change very obvious problems that we have as a country that we don’t see as problems anymore. The most obvious one, and I saw people from abroad talking about it, is the favela.

Favelaization (04:36)

Renan: When people from abroad look at Brazil, they think about football, favela, which are those slums, and Amazon rainforest, and football, some beaches. But the favelas are part of our own identity because people think that favelas are a source of culture, as if it was good. The culture that comes from favela mostly is very bad. And there’s violence, there’s gangs, and when we start to talk about defavelization Brazil, it was not only about the favelas itself, as a infrastructure problem, a housing problem, but about the idea that Brazil is favelizing itself. Having a culture that’s not focusing on excellence, but focusing on, “Okay, let’s survive and try to be happy with the resources we have in hands.”

And that became a motto for how a Brazilian should be like. And when people talk about the third-worldification of America, Brazilification of America, in the end, we are talking about favelization of American mind. So in the end what you guys call in America the Brazilification—is what we’re trying to Brazilify in Brazil. So there’s this sense in Brazil that things never happen and that we cannot change Brazil, even though we are the country of the future. Because there was this idea that Brazil would be a place where, let’s say, West and the Global South, they get together and merge and create a new tropical and exciting civilization.

There was an Austrian writer called Stefan Zweig who wrote about it. But we never made it. We never made it. And we have glimpses of what could be. Like for example, the best parts of Rio de Janeiro or Brazil in the ‘50s, some areas of Brazil in the ‘50s, they were like the best of a mix of West and tropical, and this mix of sex, beauty, sun—and a good way of living.

So it was possible to conceal these kind of different energies, but we never made it all again. And right now, we’re in a bad situation. So, the Mission Party focus on this defavelization of our minds, focus on a very pragmatical program, in terms of fiscal reforms. Also about productivity. Brazilians are very low in terms of productivity, so we are losing space in the international supply chain, industrial chain.

The small towns in Brazil, they have almost no economical activity. They live on their money from the government. So it’s a problem because the numbers of towns that relies on budget from the federal government is going up, and people are relying on food stamps more and more. And there’s this leftist party, the Workers’ Party, who’s in charge for decades. So they’re making it easier to get more food stamps, so people vote for them, and at the same time they are not able to emancipate themselves.

So we created a program to solve all those problems. People from abroad talk about our reforms in terms of how to destroy the cartels. But this is like the top of the iceberg of—a much more ambitious program. Because actually, it’s easy to destroy the cartels. People never had proper political will to change it.

But the other issues in Brazil, which is a civilizational issue, they are the goals that we focus here on “The Yellow Book.” And our party has a goal that in 30 years, we need to make Brazil one of the top five countries in the world. That’s where we belong. We should be on a place, besides India, China, United States, Russia. India, China, Brazil?

Yeah, and Brazil, yeah, as the countries that define what the world should be. And I mean, I don’t want to sound rude to, I don’t know, British people or Germans because they are great people, but we have 200 million people. We have a land full of natural resources. We have millions of very capable people living here that with the correct legal system and the correct culture, they can provide good companies, good technology. We have very capable people.

So for sure we can do it, but why we never try it? And most of it, why we never want it? We never want it to be one of the top countries. So we create a program based on the idea that we must be one of the top five countries in the world in 30 years, and this is a mission. That’s why the name of the party is a mission.

So I don’t know if it was clear, but the idea behind it was like that, a set of reforms to make Brazil a powerful country. And only the idea that we can become a powerful country is already revolutionary for us. Because Brazilians are so negative about our future and about ourselves that people, they were mocking me on TV like, “How come you believe it?” Even journalists, serious journalists, they really don’t believe we can do it.

Writing the Yellow Book (09:40)

Wolf: Mm-hmm. And that’s where your slogan, the future is glorious—comes from. And so this book is actually one of the more interesting aspects of the party, especially from an American political perspective. It’s people mouth off on TV, and then they get elected and they do some things. But what you guys are doing is much more like a real traditional political party in that you have a program that’s well thought out.

You have a 30-year plan to fix the country, make it into a great country, and all that substance, all that depth is in “The Yellow Book.” How did you guys put this thing together? I understand you had many different people study all the little issues and brought in a lot of experts to figure out what actually needs to be done and come up with a coherent program.

Renan: Well, that’s a very complicated answer because I don’t know, I can come up with a short answer, or I can tell the story behind the answer.

Wolf: Let’s do a bit of both.

Renan: Okay. Well, the short answer will be, yeah, we were able to create new thinkers and specialists in some areas, and study the idea of what is Brazil right now and what are our real issues, and come up with local solutions and solutions from abroad. But the big story is like this. We resented when we were in the Free Brazil movement. We were created in 2014.

That’s why our number in Brazil is 14. Also, it’s my birthday, so it’s—a coincidence. But we were created in ‘14, and we were able to blend, by those times, some libertarian ideas that were coming from America—to American institutes in Brazil, with some weird conservative ideas from a thinker called Olavo de Carvalho, who were very present on the Brazilian debate. We merged, but we were never, in the beginning, able to create our own thought. So we had a political movement that destroyed the Dilma Rousseff government.

We put down government in ‘15, ‘16. We created the language, the aesthetics of the Brazilian right by those times. That they were kind of kidnapped by Bolsonaro after a while, and he became the president in ‘18. So we created the movement that in the end, became what right now is Bolsonaro and his family. The use of the Brazilian football T-shirt on demonstrations, which was all of like we started the use of some fonts on the typing fonts.

The way of what we call the political meme, the political card, the way how to make a live stream. We started it all. But we resented it on the fact that we were not selling our own ideas because when we were bringing libertarian ideas to Brazilian problems, we said, “This, it’s not working.” We are not, for example, American. The idea of when we study the book, “Democracy in America.”

And we understand the way Americans see their own emancipation and how they interact themselves in a small town in America. How they develop the citizenship, how they understand their own citizenship, and how they cooperate is completely different from us. So the libertarian ideas doesn’t work here. And we understood it from the beginning. And when we start to elect our first boys, we understood it’s not going to work.

And also a very neoliberal idea like, “Oh, let’s privatize everything.” Now, it’s not work. It’s not going to work. In the northeast of Brazil, we need the state. The state must be present.

And you know when someone’s very poor, for let’s say a family that in the 19th century, they were all enslaved, and also some families that were part of a regime where they were working as almost slaves for a farmer in the northeast of Brazil. These people doesn’t understand the idea of agency because they were treated as animals for most of their times. So we cannot imagine that the invisible hand of the market is going to work and someone’s going to make a startup out of nothing. These people doesn’t even see the value of education because their parents never were treated as someone who’s going to have proper education. So the state must be there to be helpful and to bring some civilizational background and put them on a new position where they are proper citizens.

And this is the main problem in the poorest areas of Brazil. So we understood it. We start to abandon this neoliberal or neo-con ideas. We said, “This is bullshit. Let’s not going to use it anymore.”

But we were still a movement, and we were not able to put this idea to work by electing candidates in other political parties that would see our ideas as exotic. This is not convenient or why those guys are talking about it. So we understood that we need to have a political structure, a very old-fashioned political structure with a program, and the program must be like a bible. People are like, “Oh, I follow the program.” So we created an academy of new leaders we call the MBL Academy.

In this academy, we divided the curriculum, let’s say, with the training in three branches. The speaker, the thinker, and the leader. So the leader was from the House of Sparta, the thinker from the House of Alexandria, and the speaker from the House of Athens. We created something funny also to play because some people just like Harry Potter. So you belong to a house.

So I’m the House of Sparta, and I belong to the House of Sparta. I’m a leader. I’m not a speaker. And the candidates are the speakers. The thinkers are the ones who create a program.

And the leaders, they manage how to deal with the problems of leading a political group, and they are on the background organizing things. So we have a specific training for each one of these characteristics, and people choose where they belong. So the House of Sparta had a mission. They had to create a party. So the guys who are proper leaders, they say, “We need to create a party. You are the guys who are going to organize the groups across the country to organize the structure to collect signatures to make a party.”

The House of Athens, which is from the speakers, let’s say, you’re going to create our candidates. So this house train people to be candidates. And Alexandria, you’re going to create a yellow book. So we start to get the best students and put together some well-established Brazilian thinkers who likes our ideas. We had a set of values that we were defending, saying, “Apart from having these values as a basis, let’s check everything. Let’s bring ideas from China. Let’s bring ideas that are happening in India, in America, Estonia, in Portugal. Let’s see what’s going on. Let’s tropicalize it. Let’s identify Brazilian characteristics where these ideas can work or cannot work, and let’s create a very original program, and let’s bring very talented young people to be part of it, and let’s discuss it.”

So we spent two years and a half with thousands of people. There’s the people who are studying healthcare. There’s people studying foreign policy, economics. And we’re discussing and we published six books. The six books of the yellow book, they were white books.

I think they are here. They are called the yellow book, but they were white. Why we never painted it yellow? Because they were the discussions, so they’re contradictory. We are fighting inside like, “Yeah, this work in the next book. No, no, this can’t work.”

And then after a while, when the party was ready, and I was a candidate, let’s now organize what should be our program. Then it became the first yellow book, and then it became yellow. Now the cover of it is yellow. It consolidated what we thought as this is the program to reach this goal of Brazil as a political power in 30 years. And before we publish it, we got our best speakers, and we start to organize debates against our competitors on the left and the right to check the ideas and to see weaknesses.

Let’s put it to combat. Ideas must be put into combat. People should discuss it. And we start to see, wow, this is very consistent and even intelligent right-wingers or intelligent left-wingers, they were very curious about it, and they were, “Oh, I agree with you on this point. No, I agree with you on that point.”

Especially smart leftists, they didn’t understand. How come you guys made it? Because it’s not about right-wing. Actually, I don’t care about this thing about being right-wing or left-wing or a centrist anymore. I think it’s about, we have a problem.

I don’t know how I call this problem. I just call it Yellow Book.

The origins of the movement (18:46)

Wolf: Mm-hmm. So I guess I’m curious about the rest of the movement as well. The Yellow Book is just one small part. You’ve got this huge kind of activist movement that can mobilize thousands of people in some cities. We were out yesterday marching through São Paulo, thousands of people there to see you speak.

We’ve just been doing this campaign. You’ve had a very impressive showing in terms of the ability to put people on the streets, the ability to kind of drive aesthetics and oratory and so on, and the dedication from the candidates and so on. I’d like to dig more into just how you built all that. How does it work? What is this type of organization that you have?

And where did it come from?

Renan: The party, we talk a lot about the party.

But the party is just like, imagine you’re a warrior. The party, for me, is just the armor. The warrior is the movement. So we have many different parties in Brazil, but what matters is the movement behind the party. In Brazil, we have big political parties which don’t have any proper idea.

They don’t create imagination of a different Brazil. They have nothing. They’re just a bureaucratic structure where people run for a position, just it. So what makes us different is the movement. So to understand it, I was always leader of groups.

So it’s about the group, about the people. So there’s these different people who created our group, so it’s important to bring who we are so we can understand how we made it. Is it helpful?

Wolf: Yeah. Yeah, everything.

Renan: So for example, the group was created by me, my brother, Alexander, a very smart Japanese boy called Kim Kataguiri, a musician called Pedro. We are the main creators of the group, let’s say it. And me, I was a very shy boy from a normal middle-class family from Brazil with Italian-Portuguese background, living in São Paulo, which is the biggest town in Brazil, and was always a very good student. Shy but ambitious, which is weird in Brazil. In America—I think it’s a good point, but here you cannot be ambitious if you are shy.

Because it’s a very extroverted country. And so I was always leader of group, but not leading by being charismatic, but by having different ideas. And I entered in the best law school in Brazil, which is called São Francisco. The rally organizer on last Sunday, yesterday—Last Saturday was there in front of our old building. And there is a very competitive place.

In this law school, Brazil had 13 presidents coming from that—law school. And when I was there in 2003, and the political competition was huge, it was like, “Wow.” “I love it.” So I started to organize my own political party there. So I started to organize myself through the lens of a boy who were on a leftist campus, let’s say.

And I understood the way the left was organizing themselves, so organize a non-leftist party in this university with a leftist structure—using also entertainment as part of it. So I started it more than 20 years ago in university—when I was very young, and the party I created won eight elections on the campus, on the law school campus.

Wolf: Was this like student council kind of stuff?

Renan: Yes, which was the most important student council in Brazil. Many presidents came from this student council. It’s like very talented people came from there. Every time I see someone who was part of this student council in a government, like as a governor, as a minister, a secretary. We even had a kind of Skull and Bones come from this group called Burschenschaft.

It’s a long story, very interesting one. But I want to compete against them there, so I learned a lot from leftist movements in terms of organization. I left the law school, became a businessman. So when I went back to politics, I had all of it in mind—plus new ideas, plus experience, my being older. And I met a musician called Pedro, who made lots of success in England and Europe.

He played in many festivals in America. He played in Coachella—Burning Man, and he was making a mix of trap, electronic music with Brazilian funk. You should interview this guy. He’s the most interesting guy in our group. And we put together new aesthetics for right, and a model for organization.

So I blended things from him and from me. And when we put it together, we had a big cause to fight for, which was the fall of Dilma Rousseff government—the leftist government from Dilma. And when we understood how to organize people to make demonstrations and establish branches around the country—and it became easier and easier because we start to use also social media to become the leaders of the process. And all those small branches we had in the country that should organize the rallies against Dilma Rousseff, they were following the ideas that we were showing firstly on Facebook, then after that, on YouTube. So, it was easy in the beginning to organize a movement because everyone was anti-Lula, anti-Dilma by ‘14, ‘15, ‘16, ‘17, ‘18.

Starting over as opposition to Bolsonaro (24:37)

Renan: But our group had our proper test when in 2019, Bolsonaro became the president, and we decided that we should be opposition because he was doing, sorry, shit all the way. It’s very complicated for American audience because from right-wingers in America, they think Bolsonaro is like a base. No, he’s the worst thing that could happen. He’s horrible. He’s a very low IQ, weak man.

He’s weak and low IQ at the same time. And his lineage, his sons are all the same. Very stupid. So they destroy a political movement in Brazil that was growing, that could become something really interesting. And he allied himself with the so-called big center, which is like the old-fashioned establishment politics in Brazil, and he lost to Lula in the end in 2022.

But when we became opposition to Bolsonaro on the right-wing, we got destroyed. Our followers, they took our funding. They stopped donating, buying our products. They stopped watching us on YouTube. And we got destroyed.

We became a 10th of what we were. On all the instruments you could measure, like following, audience, events, money, we got destroyed. And then it’s where we became what we really are today because everyone was giving up, and I was like, “No.” Me and Kim, Kim was a congressman in Brazil. “Let’s lead a right-wing opposition to this asshole.”

And we lost all our Boomer followers because they were like, “You’re betraying Bolsonaro. You’re enemy. Oh, you’re Judas.” I was like, “Yeah, that’s why I like it.” Yeah, I remember one of my idols is Bob Dylan, and he was changing himself all the time.

And when he started using electric guitar they call him Judas.

Wolf: That was a scandal, yeah.

Renan: Yes. “Oh, what an absurd.” And I felt like that. Like, “What? What you’re doing?”

Say, “Yeah. I’ll do the opposition. I don’t give a shit. And I will not end up with MBL.” So we kept MBL alive.

And we start to raise a new awareness and create a new movement only of young people because the Boomers there were hating us. So it was like all the Boomers with Bolsonaro against a new generation of people that were like, “Okay, we have no money. We are young. We are fucked. And we dislike Bolsonarism, and we dislike the left. So what can we create?”

So, okay, we have a blank sheet, so we can create something from scratch. So we were able by the fact that we destroy everything we had, like when you have nothing to lose, you can do everything, anything you want. Because we had nothing to lose. So let’s start from scratch, and let’s not care about anything. Let’s make something new.

And we started this academy. We started to create new kind of leadership, a new political discourse. So it’s a process that we start to grow from zero, and it gave us a soul. This is the most important part. When we started as anti-leftist movement, we had a body but not a soul.

When we start to fight Bolsonaro, we had a soul, like the idea of a struggle, we against the world, we against everyone, and we got prosecuted. They tried to close the movement. Bolsonaro tried to put my family in jail. We had lots of problems, but we always kept fighting. And we were kept fighting, but as we were not focusing on quantity, I don’t care if you’re a Boomer following me, don’t follow me.

I don’t want you. But on quality, we start to call our enemies for debates all the time. “No, I will show you you’re stupid.” So there was this image that, okay, we don’t like those guys from MBL, but they are smart. They are the best, even though they are bad.

They said they are bad, they are mean people, but they are smart. The Boomers were seeing it.

But the young people, they didn’t see. They see like all those guys are struggling against everyone. And we were, like in Brazil, it’s very common to be on a corruption scandal. Everyone. All the time.

We are never on a corruption scandal. So people are like, “Fuck! These guys, they cannot exist.” It’s impossible to exist someone who’s not on a political scandal or who’s not stupid, who’s not making populist shit on TV. So who are those guys?

So we became generational, let’s say phenomenon. And when we create the party, people from our generation start to say, “Okay, this is the project of our generation.” So I think it’s a nice overview to understand that to create this organization, you must have a struggle in the middle. I couldn’t make the party if I didn’t get destroyed by 2019. I was a bigger movement in 2016 than I was in 2020, 2021.

But I was weaker, which is weird. For example, let’s say in America, maybe everyone’s kind of afraid to be against Trump or against the MAGA movement and create something that’s not a democratic initiative. Maybe you lose everything. But maybe it can work. To be generational, you must break the rules or break the standards that everyone works.

And that’s what we are doing. I don’t know where we’re going to reach, but I’m sure that we are growing up with our audience, our followers, and our Generation, let’s say.

Campaigning as an outsider (30:23)

Wolf: Mm-hmm. Well, you’ve just finished the campaign with that organization you’ve built. I was out there at the rallies. It’s got young people, extremely dedicated, lot of physicality to it, the chanting, the singing, a lot of energy people are pouring into it, and yeah, it’s all more or less all young people. It was a great energy.

Why don’t you tell us a bit about the campaign itself? You went around on the bus, like a big bus tour all over the country—visited and had rallies in every city it seems like. And how did that go? How do you feel now that the campaign is finished, how do you feel you did—overall?

Renan: Every campaign everywhere is a meat grinder. And this campaign, especially in Brazil, as the third-party candidate start winning other countries. For example, Petro in Colombia made a red alert for our establishment here. People were very afraid of this third-party candidate, let’s say this—this outsider that comes and start to grow in the polls. And so the campaign was designed to help the people with money, and I’m not acting as a victimist or full of conspiracy, it’s just facts.

Brazilian, all the big parties, they have lots of money. As long as you elect lots of congressmen, you have more money. I come from a new party. I have zero money come from the government. So I had to use donations.

The Bolsonaro party had one billion reais from the government. In dollars, I’d say $200 million, plus the money that they collect from businessmen and stuff. And Workers’ Party also, they had around $200 million to spend, and other parties, they have their own budgets. So I couldn’t use social media. They blocked the use of the algorithm of social media in Brazil.

Wolf: Like you couldn’t go viral anymore?

Renan: Exactly, so I stopped going viral by August when the proper campaign started. I was the candidate that was growing faster—during this year. I was the candidate that on TV and on podcast, I was having the biggest audience, and I was growing, growing, growing. On Polymarket, I reached 15% by June or July. I was growing, growing, growing, growing.

It was very similar phenomenon that was happening in Colombia, but then they closed the algorithm. They started not inviting me for debates. Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, who are leading, they start to boycott all the debates so people wouldn’t watch a debate. And in the end of August, a Supreme Court judge just put out the register of my candidature, so I couldn’t use social media, I couldn’t be on TV, I couldn’t be interviewed.

Wolf: This is when they tried to shut you down as a campaign? Yeah.

Renan: Why I’m bringing it, because it was a meat grinder. I couldn’t do anything, and then there’s this volume of money and volume of structure. In Brazil, for example, if you are in favor of Lula and you are a mayor of a town, the federal government gives you money so you can make campaign, kind of legal, for Lula in this town. And they put the people that works for this city, the public workers, to work for the campaign, obligatory. So multiplied for, I don’t know, 3,000 towns—billions of reais, billions of our currency in money spread around.

So there’s a whole structure. And also the people, especially poor people that don’t have a proper curiosity for new ideas, let’s say. They are stuck on watching football or watching soap operas or I don’t know, following football players. They only could just hear me through TV. And I had no space on TV debates because they had to cancel the debates because Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro said, “I’m not going to debate if Renan’s going.”

So it was like I was blocked.

Wolf: They shut you out.

Renan: Exactly. And so what I decided, from end of last year until June, I crossed the country through car. By car. Used a car and was visiting town by town, town by town, meeting people. And after they put out my campaign, I said, “No, I will have a bus. I will stop flying. I will cross the country with a bus.”

A 1979 bus, very old-fashioned bus. And let’s see what happens. So I put all my candidates that wanted to go with me. I made a live stream. I stay alive for 24 hours a day.

And stopping three or four towns every day, organizing rallies, and putting people in the streets, making parties at night, destroying my body because you can imagine—every speech I give in those rallies are one-hour speech. I don’t read anything. I don’t prepare. I just go with the heart. Blah, blah, blah.

Wolf: Yeah. No, it’s great stuff.

Renan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. I don’t want to brag myself. I think I’m a good speaker.

Wolf: Good boy. You certainly got a lot of practice at this campaign.

Renan: Yeah. So it’s very intense. Your mind gets broken. Because after a while you get really, really tired. You don’t sleep properly.

You don’t eat properly. You get stressed. But it was very beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I could do because for these young people who were following us, that was the most romantic adventure they could have. And this is on a country where politics is pretty dirty.

It was so dissonant. So different. What the hell is going on? That even the young left in Brazil, they were in love with our campaign. They were saying, “Look, we should be just like those guys.”

And people by aesthetics, by vibes, they were jumping from a leftist campaign or leftist—support to support our group. And also some agenda we have in terms of sovereignty. They start, “Oh, those guys are against China or United States taking care of our natural resources, the rare earths. So let’s support those guys.” So we start to create something very new from scratch.

So I’m very happy with the campaign, even though this was a meat grinder. But to be very optimistic, not about me and Brazil, but about people who likes what we are doing as an example. In other democracies and other countries where people—we have a lot of problem with illiteracy in Brazil. We have people that are not following the news. It’s a very poor country.

Bringing the vanguard movement to America (37:26)

Renan: Yeah. Brazil is very poor. On a more well-developed country, this strategy we’re making would develop itself much, much faster. Actually—

Wolf: You think so

Renan: we are a vanguard movement on a country that is backwards. So I’m sure what we are doing, the playbook of what we’re doing to—Even Argentina or Chile or Mexico or southern European countries, some Arab countries, or some Turkey, it could work and go faster, much faster. In America, for sure.

Wolf: Yeah, that’s what I’m very interested in talking about. That’s the center of really why we’re here. I got inspired by what you guys are doing, and I thought, “Wow, we need something like that in America.” We’ve got this sclerotic, corrupt establishment. Our own equivalent of the senile, corrupt left and the senile, corrupt right.

And the young people can see these incredible problems in America, and it’s been very hard to break out from under the ideological suppression, the total institutional suppression of this stuff, and operating under everything requires the boomer figurehead. You’re always operating under these hostile institutions in a way. And so you guys are starting to provide something of an example that we can break out. And so that’s why I’m here. It’s like, what can we learn from Mission Party, from Renan, about how do we do this in America?

And so let’s start talking about that. What would this look like if we were to bring this kind of mission-style approach to America? We’ve been having a few conversations about this. Obviously, you need the platform. You need to put together our yellow book, adapt this kind of thinking to the problems of America.

You need some kind of initial political project just to start getting something rolling. You need the influencers and the organization and the style of organizing, the kind of chanting and the singing, and I don’t know. There’s all these different elements. I’d love to hear your thoughts on kind of—you’ve spent a bit of time in America, how could we apply this in America? What does it look like?

Renan: First of all, from conversations I had with American friends, even friends from Europe, you should not have a proper plan. What I mean having a proper plan is I never planned the thing. For example, I never imagined that by fighting Bolsonaro, I would destroy everything, and it would give me some sort of freedom that would sound romantic, and people would follow me because it’s idealistic and romantic and kind of heroic. And that gave us the confidence to let’s start everything from scratch. We never had funding to do it, and every time I talk with smart people from abroad, people want to do it on a smart way.

Like planning, find the funding structure, creating some goals. And every political movement in story kind of—we have a joke in Brazil that sometimes you need to fix the flat tire with the car on movement. Okay? So it’s like you need to go in the way, and you create your thesis, your theories, and you adapt yourself on the way. So it’s a living animal.

Movement is a living animal. Must be a living animal. You must have a very loyal group of people who really believe on it, who would devote their lives on it. I will devote my life on it myself. I don’t have a proper personal life.

My brother has a family and kids. Other guys in the group have, but I spend all my time on it, and I don’t know why I do it. I feel happy by doing it. And you guys need to find crazy people that understand that they have a mission and a vision of something very different for America, let’s say. And be able to try different things.

And why I’m telling you this because if you plan something, sometimes it doesn’t work. And you break your face against the wall. You say, “Okay, let’s give up.” And that’s when you cannot give up. So in the beginning, you must find a core, a group of people that really want to do it for life.

Loyalty and the core team (42:02)

Renan: I think it’s the hardest thing. A core group of sometimes four, five, six people who you can trust your life on it. I will give the level of trust I have. I don’t take care of my bank account. my brother take care for me because I don’t think about my personal life.

Sometimes I merge with the movement. I’m talking about this level of—dedicating yourself to the cause. If Kim Kataguiri, our congressman gives a speech somewhere, I don’t care about what he’s saying because I trust totally that he understand the plan. There’s this kind of people you must have by your side that you trust completely, because in the end, it’s loyalties. The loyalty and trust is the common thing.

There’s some sort of family you must create around you. And I don’t know if it’s pretty, let’s say, pretty Latin to talk about it in those terms because sometimes you guys from north, let’s say—you are more objective and impersonal. Even though the best experience you guys had in history were about creating loyal groups. So—

Wolf: Yeah. I think the same logic applies. It might be for American culture, it takes slightly different form, slightly different cultural touch points for it, but absolutely, I think that shared dedication to a mission—the absolute trust in each other, that’s essential wherever you go, right?

Renan: Yeah. And this is very important because sometimes the plan is not going to work. Lots of times the plan’s not going to work. I created many initiatives on MBL that were a big fail in the middle of the way. Total—fail.

And then when you reach the goal, it’s like you really explode. It works pretty well.

Wolf: Something works, yeah.

Renan: Yeah. So what I think, a core, a group of very intelligent and dedicated people, some of these people will be more like internal leadership, and some of them will be more external leadership. It’s obvious. Have a vision, a program, and you understand that this program will change through time. And be open to stay in the shadows some time, to organize leaderships that will be the face of it in many different area, because national coverage of a movement is very important.

I prefer to only talk with young people, but I talk to young people, but I’m across the whole country, I have leadership in all the states of Brazil, in all the medium, small towns, than to talk with everyone but be only in the center south of Brazil, let’s say. It’s better to be everywhere because you understand the different aspects of the country on it. Smart use of technology. Complete loyalty to the group and the idea of the group. So the group, the party, the movement comes first—and the personality comes after it.

So never be personalistic. I will give an example of it. I’m the president of the party. I don’t care if I’m the president. I’m a natural leadership—so I don’t need the position of being president, institutional position.

But I don’t want to be the candidate. I was a candidate because people said, “You must be the candidate.” And I said, “Okay, you guys want it, so, okay. I’m going as a candidate.” But all I’m doing is to reinforce the Yellow Book, reinforce the party, so new leadership will appear, and I don’t know who’s going to be the next candidate one day.

Why politicians shouldn’t lead the party (45:58)

Renan: Even though I understand that being charismatic and being a good leader would accelerate the process. Having this kind of tri-functional system of hiring and training people. On politics, there’s these three kind of people. You always must have all them, the intellectual, the leader, and the speaker.

Wolf: The candidate.

Renan: The candidate, let’s say. Because when I say speaker, but sometimes he’s not a candidate, but he’s very important in public debate.

Wolf: The rhetorical person. Okay.

Renan: For example, there was a guy in our group who’s, Arthur, he lost his political rights, let’s say, because of a very funny struggle in Ukraine. But he’s on the public debate. He’s taking part in discussion. So you must train people and understand that you should never leave the leadership of the group over the candidate. The candidate is never the leader.

Candidate can’t lead. The big problem is when you let the candidate lead the process. Or the thinker must always be the proper leader. And this is a vision that all the parties everywhere makes a mistake.

Wolf: Can you explain that more? What are these exact roles, and why can’t it be the speakers and politicians, I guess, who are in charge?

Renan: Because most of the time they submit the whole structure to their own personal projects of power. So they destroy the natural function of the structure on their egoistic will. And even when they are good people, sometimes people start to work on their own interests, and they start to forget what made the group a group. And intellectuals as well. They are even more complicated sometimes.

So there’s a sort of human material that I call the natural leadership, creative leadership, or leadership based on example. They are the most difficult ones to find, but they are the most important ones. And it’s hard to train them, it’s hard to identify them, but they are the ones that makes the group. They create the cohesion of the group. They make the group—stand together and make the principles being they assure the group that the principles of the group will be followed by the candidate, and that sometimes the thinkers will not come with their vanity and implode the project by imposing their vision when the vision is not sometimes necessary in some circumstances.

Wolf: Right, or they go down rabbit holes.

Renan: Yes. And that is common. So must always be the leaders and this is a lesson we learned from time to time. For example, we created a state branch of a group in a very important state in the south of Brazil. And there was this guy who was a leader and a candidate, and he submitted the whole process to his will, and he betrayed us in the end.

It got destroyed so suddenly. We need to start from scratch in that state. But when we leave the leadership to people who are not candidate, it works. Works a lot. The best ones are the ones who are able to be the three characteristics, the three types in one.

I see myself as kind of part of it. I kind of write it, I’m a natural leader in the group, and I’m a good speaker. It’s very hard to find, but they are the ones who have a special license. And we have some of them who are able to be this kind of personality. But somehow never let candidates lead groups, only if they’re very, very special.

This is very, very important. Very. Candidates must submit their will to the group. When he wins a position, like someone wins for a state congressman, a state deputy, or federal congressman, his cabinet, his position belongs to the project not to his own will. And we have had very important cases.

This is very important that happened in Paraná last year. Paraná is a state in the south of Brazil. We elected a boy who was not right, but he was a good candidate. He was a good speaker, not a good leader. All his cabinet was made of very young, very talented boys that were planning to have the best city councilor in Brazil as this boy.

They start to file new projects of law. They were fighting the way they were taking care of people who live in the streets. They were solving proper problems coming with technology, but this guy was only, “Oh, I want to be famous because I want to get elected for congressman in Brazil in the next election.” “So I want to record videos and get famous.”

Wolf: The career politician.

Renan: Yes. So he started to submit the group to his will. The group created a riot against him. They told him, “We are kicking this guy out of the movement.” And some of them, their first jobs were working in this cabinet.

And we are living in a poor country like Brazil. So they lost their jobs. They got problems. They had to go back to their own small towns out of Curitiba, which is the capital of Paraná. But they kept following the group, and they said, “This guy is out of the movement, and we’re going to destroy his political career.”

His political career right now is destroyed. So he lost the group. So the group said, “Your position submits itself to the group, not the group to yourself.” So it became the standard. So we were showing to the other political groups, “Look, things here works on a different way.”

The candidate is only the candidate. The candidate’s not bigger than the group.

Wolf: The candidate is just the face, the spokesman.

Renan: Exactly. Exactly. And he can’t be much more than that, only if he has special talents. Kim Kataguiri. He’s a very high IQ boy that we have in our group.

He’s a genius. He works a lot. He’s a guy who gives his life for the movement, just like me. He will be a presidential candidate for our group within some years, for sure. And he’s brilliant.

And he’s a guy that, okay, he’s running for congressman all again for the third time. And it’s different, the political system that we have in Brazil from America. So it’s a, we call proportional open list. So, many guys from our party get elected in the same state by number of votes that they have on the list. So Kim should ask the voters to vote for him, but he wants to elect other people from our party.

So we go to our rallies, and he ask the people to vote for other guys from our party and not for him, so he could share his votes with other people from the movement. He said, “I don’t need to have 1 million votes. I can get elected with 200,000, so let’s vote for other guys.” So it’s not normal. We don’t see it.

So it give us also, an authority for him, a moral authority as, “Oh, look, we should be like him.” So all the other boys want to be congressmen in Brazil. They say, “I want to be a Kim Kataguiri. I want to serve the group just like Kim does.” This kind of example keeps the structure alive because the easiest thing is let the bad side of ambition takes over, takes control of the group, and the group becomes a collective of personal projects.

And it can’t be like that. Bolsonarism is a collective of personal projects that anchor themselves on the surname Bolsonaro. So they get elected by, “I am a soldier of Bolsonaro.” But everyone has its own political project, and they are enemies. It’s not actually a group.

Building a proper political party (54:05)

Renan: So they’re not a group. They don’t have a platform, they don’t have a program. They just say, “We hate the left, and we love Bolsonaro.” So that’s why even though they can win elections, they do nothing. So they’re able to win election, but when they are in the cabinet, they don’t do anything.

And, well, I think it’s good to win elections, but it’s very bad to build a country. Sometimes I think it happens with the MAGA movement. I’m not a specialist in American politics, but sometimes people feel—frustrated that nothing happens in the end. And sometimes you see just stupid people getting elected, and they’re just like, “Oh, make America great again.” And—

Wolf: Yeah, and it’s just that personal loyalty to Trump is kind of the only—principle of the organization.

Renan: Yeah. And in the end, we must have some people pledge allegiance—to a approach, to idea, to a dream. And which is like we didn’t invent it. The left is doing it for more than 100 years. So why not copy it if it properly works?

The Workers’ Party in Brazil is the most important party in the story of Brazil. I studied their story from back to back. I know all their leaders. I understood everything I read. I read all their books.

I tried to understand everything they were doing. When they were beginning, actually, they were the dream of the Brazilian boomer. The dream of the Brazilian boomer was, oh, Brazil is very unequal, and we’re living under a military dictatorship. Let’s bring democracy, and let’s make the country more equal. That was the idea.

And they were socialists. They hate America. There were all the other things—that are natural to a leftist movement, but they were the project of a generation. So if you were a young boomer by the ‘70s and in beginning of the ‘80s, you should belong to Worker Party, and was nice to be part of the Workers’ Party. Middle-class people were defending the Workers’ Party.

They had Lula, for sure, but they have a plethora of cool leaders across the country. All the artists started defending them. And, well, when they start winning proper federal elections in 2002, they are in charge until now. And they only lost the power once when we put them out by impeachment, not by election. We put Dilma Rousseff out.

So it was my group who made a small gap, let’s say, on this lineage of—Workers’ Party governments.

Wolf: Was that where Bolsonaro came from, or was it—yeah, okay.

Renan: Because we organized—

Wolf: He came from that gap

Renan: the impeachment. The Workers’ Party, they were out of government. And we also helped put Lula in jail because we organized the riots that helped give authority to this legal operation that put Lula in jail. So Lula was out of the game. People did find themselves as right-wingers, and the streets were yellow, not red anymore.

So it came a guy that became the leader of the process. That was Bolsonaro. He won the elections. But he stay on term for four years, and here was Lula, and he was back. And Lula is the—Probably he’s going to win this election.

So the Workers’ Party was an experience that you can understand how a proper party can work, even in a country like Brazil. And they were very intellectually sophisticated. One of the best writers in terms of Brazilian political structure, they were founders of this Workers’ Party. So when we started writing our book, we said, look, our enemy, they had a hell of great thinkers and writers working for them, and we even used some material from them. There’s two writers, one who, Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda, another called Raimundo Faoro.

They were very internationally sophisticated. Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda is one of the best political and sociological writers, and readers of Weber, and he understood Brazilian soul a lot. So, and he was founder of the Workers’ Party, so I should respect him, for sure. And why not create this kind of structure for us, a classical party?

Wolf: Right. And that’s what you call this thing, a classical party. And that’s kind of what I’m recognizing, right? Is like old school political party, like a proper political party, a serious organization that’s internally organized, vertically integrated with the goal of governing the country. It’s not just, oh, it’s some association of people trying to get elected within this or that—position for their own political career or whatever.

Renan: Exactly. Every mandate from every leader that get elected belongs to a bigger plan. So if someone get elected as city councilor, this position belongs to a bigger plan.

Wolf: Yeah, and so that’s—

Renan: Everything’s connected

Wolf: that’s kind of the discipline you apply to the politicians. Their job is get elected and then carry out the program of the party, right? And then the job of the intellectuals has been produce the platform, right? Work on the stuff, produce the platform, and produce, I assume, the propaganda that you put out in Valete Magazine and—other, just the live streams and so on. And then you have these, House Sparta, the organizers themselves—who you say are like the real organizational power backbone of the movement—who they’re not the faces of the movement, but they have the—the organizational power, and they dedicate themselves to—the movement—as such.

So can you tell me a little bit more about how that works? Like, how are they organized? What are they doing? I guess, just give us a bit more flavor on kind of—

Renan: For sure

Wolf: how do you actually get those guys in motion?

Renan: For example, the ones who take cares of the branches of the movement—and from the party nowadays are always Spartans. And so every year, we organize conferences on each state. So all those conferences are organized by those Spartans. So they have the technology of how to organize an event, how to sell the tickets, how to put people in the event, how to talk to the press, how to organize the live stream, how to take care of the local leaders, how to spread new branches around, how to avoid traitors or unfaithful people, let’s say, to invade organization. how to fund themselves.

They are the backbone, the proper backbone of the structure. They are very loyal, and they used to be accepted as the moral authority of the group. They are very, very, very important, and they are the ones who are solving things. Meanwhile, the speaker, let’s say the candidate, is blah, blah, blah. And sometimes we cannot create a mess by making them become bureaucracy because leadership is different from bureaucracy.

Keeping the buraucrats from taking over (1:01:18)

Renan: Because sometimes political parties are destroyed by the internal bureaucracy. It’s the critics that Trotsky had for Stalin and the communist revolution in Russia because it all became bureaucracy, and it was bureaucracy being bureaucracy all the time.

Wolf: How do you avoid that?

Renan: By being very idealistic and bringing non... How can I say? This kind of leader is also idealistic leader—so he cannot be totally pragmatic by organizing our group. So if we defend some sort of ideas who are not properly popular, but we must defend it, this leader is the one who’s going to try to implement it, even though it’s more difficult. The bureaucracy thinks about the benefits that as a bureaucratic person you can have, so they adapt themselves to the system and become bureaucracy.

So they want to make things easy and have their own positions. That’s what bureaucrats do this. And for us, it can’t be like that. So we are always pushing this kind of leader with those innovations we have in terms of scores, in terms of proposition, new kind of leadership, new national position. Because sometimes I come up with discussing against what’s mainstream on the right.

And then this local is like, “Oh, Renan is going to destroy my new election because this position he’s defending is very unpopular where I live.” For example, we do not defend raising the payment of the food stamp that we have in Brazil—called Bolsa Família. So a leader in the northeast of Brazil, if he was a bureaucrat, he would say, “Renan, you’re destroying our planning.” But they are not. They are like, “We must find a way.”

So they must be very idealistic, and they should kick the bureaucracy out of the thing because there’s people who want to just have a career, stay on a cabinet of a candidate, and have a life there. These are the ones who we should avoid. But a proper leader, that’s why they are a leader, not a bureaucrat. For example, they watch my livestream every day. They read “The Valete” magazine.

They know what we’re discussing. So they understand that, okay, we are going this way, and I need to implement it on my way of the group in this area, and it used to work. So that’s why they are very rare people. They’re not easy to find. It’s not easy to find this kind of leadership.

Wolf: And how do you identify those people? Identifying that difference between the bureaucrat and the idealistic leader, I imagine, and people can kind of decay maybe even, or at least I might imagine that people would decay. They come in, they look like an idealistic leader. You put them in this position, and they start to get lazy, or they turn into a bureaucrat or something. How do you deal with that?

Is it like higher levels of the party come in and review what they’re doing?

Renan: Actually—

Wolf: What’s the actual system of discipline there?

Renan: Actually, it’s very easy because as we have elections, a bureaucrat, he’s always afraid to lose his job. So when he gets together with the candidate and they start to not follow the instructions of the group, but they start do what would earn more votes, we can identify it easily. It’s very easy to identify—

Wolf: Because—

Renan: who are doing it. And even the other guys, other leaders around him start to, “Renan, look, something weird is going on.” People start to identify who’s going to betray us, and so there’s this moral pressure over these people, and usually the local branches uses to expel these people, naturally. But when they are on a cabinet, on a position of a congressman who got elected, it’s very easy to see. We see in the work of the congressman, we see on the way they’re talking, we see in the way they vote, we see in the complaining of the locals.

For example, we have lots of militants, lots of followers who—they are volunteers, they are working. So they can see someone who’s not a volunteer anymore, who’s building a career, and these kind of people start to avoid having conversation with the volunteers because the volunteers start to become a problem for these kind of people because they are idealistical. They are there—because of the ideas. So when we start to see that it start to have this, they are detaching from the volunteers—from the supporters, okay, they are become bureaucracy.

Wolf: Right. I get it.

Renan: This is the sophisticated thing in terms of how to manage these things. So the state leaders of the party and the movement, they are very able in all this. We have lots of experience on how to identify when we start to have this problem. But it happens all the time. We don’t have a proper formula to avoid—because especially try to imagine sometimes a poor group of boys get elected and it’s their first job working on cabinet and electing a leader, and they start to get famous.

People start to recognize them on the streets. And people, “Oh, oh, oh.” So it’s a problem. Some of them will corrupt themselves in this process. We elected some boys in 2024—lots of boys all around the country I’ll give an example.

The boy who’s filming us, I don’t know if he understand English, but he was working on a cabinet of a guy who betrayed us. That guy became a bureaucratic—betrayer. And the team, the staff, start to identify everything, all this playbook of a Judas. And they were telling us in São Paulo—and then we prepared the way to expel him and keep the team back. So more and more we should train the people.

The talent pipeline (1:07:15)

Renan: We should understand that we cannot put very young people on cabinets or on bureaucratic positions because sometimes their first jobs, or sometimes they don’t have money, so they start to rely on it to survive. But this is mostly a problem in a very poor country like Brazil. It’s a very poor country. And we are a group that we have people from the elite and people who are very poor. We find very talented poor people—poor boys and girls who start to organize themselves, and they win election.

But then just by having a job, their living standards change it. And it’s problematic. So this is a problem we have to deal. But I think it’s much more a Brazilian local problem than anything else.

Wolf: Yeah, in some ways, it seems like Brazil has more problems in these areas, but also maybe less problems in some other ways. In America, I know one of the things that is sort of a constant frustration of idealistic political groups is all the talented people have enormous options, right? They can go work in industry and make enormous amounts of money. Anyone with a bit of talent, they don’t want to struggle in politics, this kind of losing over and over, which is kind of like your way of doing it. Losing until you win, right?

Politics, I think, is a little slower than business and industry. You’re more confused, and you spend more time struggling. And that’s not attractive, right? That people don’t—want to deal with that. I wonder if there’s hidden challenges that you’re not seeing in other countries.

Renan: Well, maybe things here are—they are complicated as well, but on the opposite way. By, as we don’t have much opportunity here—people cannot be trying a lot as well. Because people don’t have much opportunity, so they must find a job so they are not able even to survive. There’s this—negative thing. One of the problems we have is the person who lose one or twice, then I can’t live like that because I won’t have money—

Wolf: Especially in Brazil

Renan: especially in small towns, in poorest areas of Brazil. So in the end, I think there must be a set of crazy people who really believe in the project, who really believe in this idea, and that wants to put their names on history. What moves me is one day people will study what we did and what we organized to make Brazil a very important country. So one day people will, I don’t know, “Oh, Renan was really cool. Renan did what should be done.”

Yeah. So for me, I think there’s people who are like that. For me, it’s better than money. It’s much better than money.

Europeans make those jokes about Americans as like, “Oh, Americans just want to work and have money.” I don’t think Americans are. They’re much more idealistic than almost any country in the world. Americans are a pretty formal people. So I think there’s people who understand that putting their names on history is much more important than anything else, and give this contribution, especially to a country which is so special as America.

It will be a privilege. So just by being part of it, some people will be happy. For example, by being a leader in this group, I dedicated myself to it. My personal pleasures, I like steaks, I like music, I like reading, I like going out with my friends, I like spending some time with my family. I don’t need much more than that.

Because on the rest of my time, I’m contributing to something that’s so big, that it’s bigger than any company that I would open up. And I think there’s people in America, for sure, who thinks like that—and who would dedicate themselves to this goal. And actually, if they are smart, they will succeed. For sure they will succeed. So you guys need to find this kind of people, very special group of people, and things will happen, for sure.

I think it will. I’m very optimistic about it. And more than that, it will be easier in America than here. I’m pretty sure.

Wolf: You think so? Yeah.

Renan: I’m pretty sure. Because here we have other kind of problem. We are a vanguard movement, in terms of organization, technology, everything—on a point of view, on a country that’s very backwards. Very backwards. People are still selling their votes for politicians in Brazil.

A politician can buy votes—in Brazil, illegally, but they’re doing it on scale of millions. Millions of people are getting bought today—to vote. So it’s very primitive yet. So we’re like building, I don’t know, a SpaceX in Congo. That’s how sometimes we feel about our project.

But we are Brazilians. We should do it. For us, it’s very nice that a project like that was born in Brazil. We are happy. But it would work much faster in a more well-developed country for sure, and pretty sure

Going from ideology to institutions (1:12:51)

Wolf: Interesting. Well then, I guess the most immediate problem facing us in America is that kind of cold start program, right? I think we have a network of very smart, idealistic people. You’ve met a bunch of them. We’ve got a bunch of them here today.

Some of them came down with me, some of them came down through other friends of the party. But, and then back in America, part of the whole point of this project, The Students, is we’re gathering those people. The Students, who are they? They’re the people who do the reading, who are idealistic, who want to save America, right? Who want to save, and beyond America, our civilization.

So it’s like we are gathering that, but there’s this cold start problem of, okay, we’ve got people somewhat. We’ve got a network. Bringing it to that level of, and now you’ve got the academy, and the party, and the program, and the candidates, and all this. And so I’m very curious, I guess, just more information on that, how you started the academy. What were things like at that time?

This was during your movement, kind of starting to get frustrated with lack of having your own ideas. It’s a little bit of a different problem than we have in America. I think in America, our network at least, is very much like the intellectuals. We’ve got the intellectuals networked and thinking, doing a lot of things. Some of them are publishing, some of them are not.

But we don’t have the movement, right? We don’t have the street presence and so on. So it’s a little bit different, but it seems like there’s still this kind of going from this inchoate initial set of assets to the more complete beast. That’s kind of this problem that we have to overcome. So, and maybe it is that academy.

I talked to, I can’t pronounce his name. It’s all his Brazilian sounds. Guilherme Freire.

Renan: Ah, Guilherme.

Wolf: Yeah. He runs this training program. And so we’re talking to him thinking like, “Oh, should we do something like that?” And maybe this academy is one possible version of it. You said you had your students, they come to you, and they pay a little bit to the party to be educated into these the three houses, the way of operating.

But when you started that, there wasn’t much there. There was just, I guess, the movement that wasn’t as organized. What was that first class like? How did you come up with that idea of the academy? What was on offer—right at first, right?

You don’t have this political thing where you can just slot them in. You don’t. Or I don’t know what you had at the time. What exactly were they being trained for, I guess, is the question. Why was it valuable to those first students?

Renan: Great. Well, I could never plan the academy—if I didn’t have a proper experience understanding this trifunctional way of doing politics. And how I learned it, by experience. I understood that when I created the movement, we had some people who were more intellectuals, and they are a special set of people. I was a leadership.

My brother as well. And we had Kim, Arthur, and other people who were candidates. And when we started to grow, we realized we started to clusterize ourselves in a group of leaders who had some understanding of how to organize things. People who are candidates, so they start to organize themselves and discuss about how to debate, how to understand how it works, a political proposition, how to talk to people in the streets. And the thinkers who are discussing things all the time.

Wolf: How to fix Brazil.

Renan: Yes. And I realized, I was saying, “Look, there’s always these three kind of people.” And I said, “If we want to create our own following and our group with its own identity, we must create people with this kind of profile and train them on a specific program.” It’s very different from what Guilherme Freire is doing because he’s making intellectual, some sort of religious philosophical movement, with no specific political goal, let’s say—or no upfront.

Wolf: And it’s very much based in the business elite and—so on.

Renan: As if he is colonizing the elite.

But politically, I don’t know if he wants to be practical. That’s not what he wants, or at least that’s what he doesn’t show as something he wants. We are very straight to the point. It’s very political, and we really need to trust in this academy because we only will hire people from the academy. So it must work.

You can only hire people for the cabinet of, or elected people, that were part of the academy. Or our candidates must be part of the academy. You cannot run a branch of the party, of the movement, if you’re not from the academy. So if you want to grow in our structure, you must pass through the academy. And so I created it in the end of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, so it had to be online because people couldn’t make gatherings and stuff.

So we created these three different graduations, let’s say, the Sparta, Athens, and Alexandria. And we had, in the first year, 1,000 students, and we started to make them organize themselves in their own states and towns. So they were spread around the country, so they started to organize themselves, and they had just like there was an anime called “Naruto” where people had teams. I’m team number seven, team number three. So we created, “I’m the team dragon. I’m the team the snake.”

We started creating the name of the teams, so they had to identify themselves as teams, and all the teams must have a Spartan, a guy from Alexandria, and someone from Athens. And look, you organize yourselves. You organize yourselves, learn how to deal with the problems, the competitions.

Wolf: Were the teams scoped to particular areas? Like—this is in your town. You’ve got a—Spartan, an Athenian, and an Alexandrian.

Renan: And you need to organize. We give them missions, like, “Oh, you need to for example, I think you must publish an article in your local newspaper. We’ll not help you solve it.

Wolf: Yeah. Figure it out.

Renan: Figure out how to do it. You guys must file a bill of law on your city council. Fix it. Find a way. We’re not going to help.

We gave classes on how to do it. You guys have a problem, go and fix it. Because in the end, people need to get out of their houses and start doing things. And so one of those guys start to organize demonstrations in the city councils against corruption in this town, and they will start to be on the press, in the local press. So their group, they start, “Wow, we are doing it.”

So they start to feel that they are useful. So they start to feel as one, as a group. They start to create a bond, a loyalty among this group, and they start to feel like, “Oh, we are changing things in our town.” So it was nice. After a while, we start to improve some aspects here and there.

So sometimes people self-identify as a leader, but they are not. Most of the people try to define themselves as thinkers because they are like, “Oh, I’m intelligent.” But they are not, so they cannot be. So we start to identify who they are during the process. So we came up with a common set of classes, and then they—

Wolf: They specialize yeah.

Renan: So we learned in the middle of the way, because as we hire those people after it—we want them to be good. So must be good because we’re going to use it. So if it’s not working, we’re not going to use those people. So on the part, when we start to create a party, we had to create hundreds of teams of people collecting signatures on the streets to have the party. We have to collect around 800,000 signatures.

And so they would go to all the bureaucracy, and we could have the 600,000 needed to have a party. So we put all these Spartans to organize it, and most of them succeeded very well. But some of them not, and some thinkers became good leaders. So we start to say, “Oh, okay, this guy is not a proper Spartan, he’s just a bureaucratic guy,” or, “He’s just someone who doing some sort of gossip politics, creating problems with other people. He’s not a proper motivator.”

Like someone who makes people wake up on the morning, “Go collect signature. Everyone must find 50 signatures today in the same...”

The process of creation of the party was the time that we, okay, the academy worked, and the other moment was, okay, the yellow book worked. So what we need to improve is the creation of candidates. I think we had lots of problems, especially loyalty problems, and how to identify that someone that can be popular and win an election is someone truthful. So we changed the way we work in this election. We’re focusing much more on people who are very loyal and that link themselves into the party, so people voting this person because this person belongs to the party.

Wolf: Because they’re in MBL, yeah.

Renan: Yes. So we are changing it. And then we go to detail. We prefer politics that works better to YouTube than people who works better on Instagram. You can rely more on people that creates content on YouTube than on Instagram.

Yeah.

Wolf: What is that? Is that because it’s just more intellectual or?

Renan: Yeah, because when you produce content on YouTube, and it’s a video of 20 minutes, 15 minutes, or a live stream—you create a proper bond with your followers. And you cannot discard them easily. And when you use Instagram or TikTok, you start with a set of followers, we say a bubble with a group of followers, and then you can betray your group and change to another like this. Also, the content is much more shallow—on Instagram.

Wolf: Necessarily, yeah.

Renan: Yes. So they start to use only tactics, very smart strategy to get following, but not properly converting into our set of ideas. So you cannot trust that much in people.

Wolf: Because you need them to educate the audience, not just to—get attention.

Renan: Exactly. Because we need to convert their voters into the party voters. Because what happened to us, a guy started our structure, then he say, “Oh, there’s the Bolsonaro voters. So why I don’t use these people as a stepping stone?” Not Missão party—but the MBL as a stepping stone, and after that, I jump to Bolsonarism.

And these people are doing it by Instagram and TikTok or Facebook. And the one who would rely on YouTube, they are part of a bigger community. And so people from YouTube are better, let’s say.

Now we go into the detail. So there’s this funnel of conversion—where Instagram and TikTok, they are the mouth of the funnel. And YouTube is in the middle. And I belong to a group, chat groups on WhatsApp, where discuss with your followers is the ending, and having personal meetings is like, okay, this is the core. So you should use all the social media as a funnel, a process of collecting these people, because people will have different layers of attention or belonging.

And people who follow you on Instagram, they like you, they can vote for you. But sometimes they don’t understand What’s your proper project? They sometimes just like your charisma. Want you to be there, understand your project. And we need to make this funnel works all the time.

All the time. So it’s a process. And a proper, big politician, and I am understanding this in this election, must be able to do all the process. So I—I get legitimacy and authority by writing parts of the yellow book, by organizing live stream, and now creating content on Instagram and TikTok. Or giving speeches in public or being on TV, and be able to fight against journalists, and they were very aggressive against me, so was like, I can be a total, let’s say, a total politician.

So the best ones must be good on everything. They must be leaders, they must be intellectually—sophisticated, and they must be popular. This is very hard, but that’s when you okay, you became the total politician. That’s what we try to create. The best ones must be like that.

The best ones are the guys who are able to have these characteristics. And it’s very cool when we identify sometimes, like a 17 years old boy or girl with those characteristics. We get really happy. There was a girl called, she’s a candidate, I hope she wins the election, called Ana Hering.

Wolf: Yeah, Ana.

Renan: She just left her job. She was working for General Waters. And she was a lawyer, said, “Now I want to live my life. I want to work with those boys,” because she used to watch us on live stream. She came here and said, “I want to work on anything. I can clean.”

“No, no. Let’s work on the live stream.” And she start to become a leadership. She start to create good videos. She writes pretty well.

We said, “Cool.” Ana, if Ana keeps working, studying, and become leader, she will be a very strong leadership. Amanda, who is the coordinator of my campaign, Amanda is not into being intellectual. She doesn’t like it. But she’s a great leader and a great content creator.

So she has two of the three aspects. Kim, he has the three of them. So when you start to identify, say, “Wow, this is good.” And they are the best ones. When the person have these three aspects inside of them, they are totally loyal.

They understand that it’s like a long-term project. They are the best ones, but they are so difficult to find. So difficult. They’re so difficult.

Wolf: So one final question before we wrap this up. I understand you are starting now to think about expanding even beyond Brazil. You were talking about Portugal, launching a branch of the party in Portugal. We’ve obviously been talking about America a little bit, if there’s any kind of traction there or parallel movement, things you want to help. I really do see this as a prototype of something that can happen almost across our—civilization, right?

Like Europe, America, South America, maybe even beyond. And I think now also out of the campaign period, you’re in this longer sort of groundwork period for the next round, right? And you’ll get your algorithmic virality back. But also it’s no longer—

Renan: Thank God

Future plans (1:28:49)

Wolf: it’s no longer just about the immediate, like elect the candidate, it’s about building the movement in a more comprehensive way. So I’m curious to just hear more about your future plans, kind of beyond Brazil and in Brazil, kind of strengthening the movement—thickening the movement.

Renan: Yeah. I was running elections with a party that had only 10 months of life. Which is like nothing. There was not structure on, even on institutional terms.

Like we didn’t have any money. We get all the students from our academy in all the states saying, “Look, almost all of you are candidates right now.” “What?” “Yeah, learn how to be candidate.” So we started training.

We didn’t rely on bringing already established politicians to our structure. So we said, “No, we must be pure, and we must win by being ourselves.” And it’s very good because people feel really much more motivated on building something from scratch. Everyone sees their own contribution in it. So, in the end of this election, I will see the size that we come out of the election, even though it was a meat grinder, especially for a newcomer as—us.

So, we’re going to see the size we have. And I need to create structure because for sure we’ll have more cabinets. For sure, we’ll have more money. For sure, people will start to identify us as a power source, so more money will flow. The press will treat us much more seriously, much more.

So I will be able to open up thousands of branches of the movement and the party, and I will structure more info products, more products, invest more on the entertainment plus cultural movement. So, “Valete” is the magazine we have. It’s also a publishing company. And we will start to organize a record company, a label—with artists. And as we have the artists and we have the audience, we organize the parties as well.

So we learn how to organize the parties using the branches.

Wolf: This is the other kind of party. The fun kind.

Renan: Yeah. The wee party. And everything comes together because now we know how not only to organize parties and conferences, but it’s also we organize brands of clothing. We sell lots of clothes from the party, from the movement, from the magazine. And we start to sell material from the bands, from the artists.

So this is an important thing that will create this, let’s say, this social glue that puts everything together. It’s a social glue that will put everything together. And Politically, I will keep trying to push myself into a natural national leadership, even though I don’t want to impose myself as a candidate for 2030. The group decide. If it’s me, it’s me.

If it’s not me, I will be on the back office helping. That’s what I’ve been doing for years, and I love to do it. Less pressure, but lots of work on my part, in the end. So, for me, it’s fine. And internationally, I want to be very helpful because I really believe we are doing something that is very special.

I don’t mean I’m special or Kim is special, but I mean that the circumstances in Brazil, with the fact that we somehow are talented, let’s say, made us build something very unique. I think the circumstances made us create it. So I think we can share it and organize it internationally, especially imagine that it must be generational. I think there’s a generational issue. It’s a problem for me here.

I think it’s a problem for you guys in America. It’s a very special problem for Europeans. A really special problem for them. And everywhere it’s a problem, and we must solve it. We must create strategies.

And the idea of the party, the idea of the social glue that connects everyone, the idea of the movement, these technologies of how to deal with the tri-functional structure, everything, how to fund yourself without relying on big guys with big money, because big guys with big money want to have big opinions over your projects. It’s always like that. And during the campaign, it happened to me. I was visiting the biggest businessman in Brazil, and they were full of ideas. I was like, “I don’t want your ideas. Thank you very much. This is my idea. We were working on it for years, and now you have your own idea.”

Because, I don’t know how is it in America, but here the elites, they are shallow, but they want to show off. So it’s very cool when they show off that they have ideas, they have institutes. I think it’s like that in America as well, for sure. So sometimes they want to steal what you’re doing and make it part of their own system of charisma, let’s say. And I don’t rely.

I don’t like to. So I always put myself out of it. So I need to rely on middle class and young people donating for it create our own products. Because when people with money start to put money on it, unless they are very cool people who really believe on the project, they want to have opinions, and sometimes the opinions they have, they are shit.

Wolf: Yeah, or at least, or contradictory, or they don’t fit into the whole that you guys have created.

Renan: And the best rich guys we found are the guys who were watching us on livestreams or watching what we are doing, saying, “Look, I will give you money. I really believe on what you guys are doing.” So we’re starting to have these guys. But in general, they are sons of rich people. Not the proper rich people.

The sons of the Brazilian elites, they all vote for me. There’s one thing, there’s the Brazilian MIT called ITA. Which was founded actually based on MIT, with MIT professors. They are the ones making the airplanes that we produce in Brazil, the Embraer, which pretty bizarrely, we have a very sophisticated airplane industry because of this ITA. And they made a simulation of election, and I won with 80% of the votes.

Wolf: That’s crazy.

Renan: So smart people and young, talented people, the young elites, they are ours already. So for us, it’s a matter of time.

Wolf: The next generation of elites is with you.

Renan: Exactly. So let’s not stress. Let’s be more Brazilian on this. Let’s relax. Let’s drink a beer.

Let’s have fun with the small victories on the way. Understanding that with time, future will be ours. And if it’s ours, it’s glorious. That’s it. And I understand that there’s this mindset, this winner-loser mindset in America that does not fit in this kind of project.

But if you want to have this project, you must change it. It’s a mindset that must change. And all the rest, come on, you’re Americans. You guys can do everything. You guys are very smart, hardworking, trustworthy people.

You can do everything. I’m sure you’ll find much more talented people than me to do it and advance it. I’m pretty sure.

Wolf: Amazing. The future is glorious.

Renan: Yes. I’m pretty sure of it.

Wolf: All right. Excellent. Thank you so much, Renan.

Renan: Thank you very much.