Global Meet-Up #2 (Los Angeles): The “End of the World” US Tour

What I want to do today is basically provide a framework for understanding how we got to this point and where we're going.

First impressions of Los Angeles

To start, I want to tell you my first impressions of Los Angeles. It's my first time here, and Theo Von invited me to be on this podcast. I came in Wednesday, and they put me in West Hollywood, a very nice place, a really beautiful hotel.

I enjoy walking around the city to get a sense of the culture. I was walking around the Sunset Boulevard area, and the residential area is just beautiful. I'm just admiring the houses, the sunlight, the beauty of it all, and then I see, right in the middle of the pavement, a pile of dog shit. I obviously walk around it. It takes me a couple of minutes before I realize it probably didn't come from a dog.

That's my first impression of LA, unfortunately.

Then my next impression of LA is I went to breakfast, and I went to the cheapest place I could find. I paid $17 for avocado on toast. $17 on avocado on toast. I was like, “There better be cocaine in this thing.” Unfortunately, there wasn't.

I've been walking around the city. There's really a lot of homeless people. There's a lot of drug addicts. The impression that I've developed these past three days is America is suffering from imperial exhaustion. It's an empire really in decline. It's exhausted.

When I was in China, I would just hear Americans talk great things about China. I live in China, and I see all the problems. I really didn't understand why Americans thought China was great until I came here and see the world from your perspective. Honestly, from your perspective, everything is great.

Bretton Woods and the US dollar system

Let me give some historical background as to how we got to this point. The year is 1944, and America is about to win this war against Japan and Germany. They organize the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire, and the idea is to establish the US dollar as a world reserve currency.

The logic of this is very simple. In World War II, America had to build a lot of factories to supply armaments for its war machine. Now that the war is coming to an end, what do you do with these factories? The answer is you turn these factories from manufacturing munitions and weapons to manufacturing TVs, cars for the global market.

The problem is the entire world is destroyed because of World War II. What America did was lend the world the money in order to buy cars and washing machines and television sets. This became the basis for Pax Americana as well as the US dollar system.

Because America was lending so much money to Europe and to Japan, it needed collateral for this financing, and this collateral, of course, was gold. The agreement was that US dollars would always be pegged to gold. We call this a gold standard, and it worked great for the first 10, 20 years because it allowed the average American middle-class person to live like a Roman emperor.

If you were a white male in the 1950s, you were in paradise. You had maybe a factory job, but with that factory job, you could have your wife work at home. You could raise three kids and have them all go to college. You could go on vacation twice a year. You had two cars. It really was the best life.

Unfortunately, America started to waste a lot of this, what we call exorbitant privilege, the right to print US dollars. America started to do stupid things, like, for example, the war in Vietnam, the space race, the Great Society. At this point, the world recognized that maybe America is spending too much money.

At the same time, the rest of the world is catching up to America industrially. Germany and Japan were devastated in the war, but they're working really hard, and now their industrial capacity is surpassing that of the United States. What's happened is America went from a creditor nation to a debtor nation. That's bad because you owe everyone gold, and there's not enough gold in the world to pay off the debt.

What happens is in 1971, Richard Nixon declares, “Remember how in 1944 we agreed that US dollars would be pegged to gold? The gold standard? Well, forget about it. From now on, the US dollar, it's all free-floating. It's just fiat currency. We will not give you gold for US dollars.”

Now this creates a crisis of confidence, and to resolve this crisis of confidence, Nixon does two things. He visits Saudi Arabia and agrees to get them to sell oil only in US dollars. We call this the petrodollar. The other thing that he does is he goes to China and gets China to start to liberalize its economy, to start working in the United States. Basically, what China does is use its cheap labor in order to manufacture goods for the global economy and sell its cheap labor in US dollars.

These two things, what happened in the Middle East and what happened in East Asia, now become the new framework for the global economy. The idea is that the Middle East will sell its oil to East Asia so that Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China could then make manufactured goods to sell the world. All this is being facilitated in US dollars. All this money, because it's being facilitated in US dollars, goes back to America.

Because of this global system, America now has to shift from a manufacturing power to a financial power in order to process all this trade. This has led to the financialization, the hollowing out of the American manufacturing sector. This has led to tremendous problems in American society.

For one thing, it's led to tremendous inequality. Another thing is that America now is forced to provide security guarantees for the entire world, so its military is overextended. This is what is called imperial overstretch. Another thing that happens is there's so much power in the financial sector that it leads to corruption.

This is what obviously led to the 2008 subprime crisis because you got these Wall Street banks out of control, and they were all engaged in speculation. They didn't really care because they knew that, no matter what happened, the government would pick up the tab at the end of the day. They engaged in all this reckless behavior, and this has led to the world that we live in today.

Obama was elected in 2008 to fix these issues, to represent the working class. But he didn't do that. That's why in 2016 we got Donald Trump, who promised to build a wall to stop illegal immigration. He also promised to basically prevent the world from taking advantage of America. This has led to the Trump years.

Signs of imperial decline

This system was fundamentally unstable, but at the same time there was no alternative. This system kept on going, but there were all these signs that the system would eventually break down. One of the first major signs was Brexit. Another major sign was the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

The major sign that the system basically is now in its twilight, or is about to collapse, is the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. This was beyond the imagination of many American leaders because they grew up in a time when American power was ascendant. The idea that Russia, which is a gas station with nukes, is able to defy the American order, that sent shock waves around Europe and the United States.

What's even worse is that the sanctions that America imposed on Russia backfired. As you remember, the Americans and Europeans froze about $300 billion in Russian assets around the world. They also kicked Russia off the SWIFT system, and they imposed all these sanctions on Russia. Rather than hurt the Russian economy, what it did was destroy the credibility of the Western financial system.

Now countries like China are like, “Wait a minute here. If the United States can just freeze our assets for no reason, then we should not buy that many US assets.” Now you see this massive shift from buying US Treasuries, which was previously considered the best investment, to now buying gold. This puts additional pressure on the US financial system.

This war in Ukraine, it's a test of the credibility of Pax Americana. Because Russia is a nuclear power, there's really not much you can do about Russia. You can support Ukraine all you want, but eventually Ukraine is going to get exhausted.

You can make the argument that Trump started this war in Iran in order to reestablish the credibility of Pax Americana: that, ultimately, at the end of the day, the US military is the greatest military in the world, invincible. Obviously, we know what happened. This is not true. The US military, it's very corrupt. It's overextended. It's not very strategic. It's very bureaucratic.

Now, basically, the United States is losing this war in Iran, which is causing even more strain on the American political system. What's happening, and this is the most important thing, is a domino effect is being created where this global economic system created by the Americans is now under strain on multiple nodes.

The big thing to watch now is Japan because, as you know from the news, the Japanese currency, the yen, is collapsing against the US dollar. This is a really bad sign. Why? Because Japan and the Middle East provide a lot of liquidity for the global economy, which basically means that this liquidity buys up US Treasuries, which allows the US economy to continue to be a Ponzi scheme.

Once the Middle East and Japan are no longer able to buy US Treasuries, if they're not able to invest in the US economy, then the AI bubble collapses, the private credit bubble collapses. We don't know what will happen because this is a systems collapse.

What's happening in Japan is crucial. That's why, for the first time in a few decades, the United States has intervened to save a foreign currency. It's not a lot of intervention to save the US dollar, but this is the first time in 30 years the United States has intervened on behalf of a foreign economy.

Some of you may remember, a few days ago, Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, had a picture. He was writing on a notebook, “Japanese yen, $5 to $10 billion.” People understood this as propaganda, where Scott Bessent is trying to reassure investors that the US Treasury will come in and save the Japanese yen.

View the visual: Scott Bessent's notebook with a to-do item to buy $5–10 billion worth of Japanese yen.

It's also a sign of desperation, meaning there are really that many tools that the US Treasury has to stop the global economy from collapsing. It's engaging in optics. It's trying to engage in propaganda. It's trying to use these tricks to trick you into thinking everything is fine when really we're only a few months away from total system collapse.

This total system collapse, what does it look like? It looks like stock market collapse, financial collapse in the United States. The AI bubble, the private credit bubble, it's all being propped up by liquidity from around the world. This liquidity dries up, the US economy collapses. It also means famine in Africa and other places. It means, ultimately, the merging of the war in Ukraine and Iran, which will lead ultimately to World War III.

I already think we are in World War III, but you can make the argument that we're still in a regional conflict. We've reached a point of imperial exhaustion, meaning that the system the United States created in 1944 has reached its last legs.

Right now, the people in charge, these imperial bureaucrats, they themselves are exhausted. They have no ideas. They have no imagination. They're just trying to use as many tricks as possible to maintain this very unstable system. The more desperate they get, the more anxious they get, the more unstable the system becomes.

The causes of imperial decline

Is this preordained or a series of political accidents?

Question:

One of the things that I always wonder about is how much of what we're seeing now is preordained versus a series of political accidents, like Trump getting elected the first time, Brexit. It feels as though we were almost two elections away from avoiding all of this. But when I watch your lectures, I feel like this was almost preplanned, preordained.

Answer:

I would say we are in an age of imperial decline. If you look at history, empires decline for very much the same reasons, and the pattern of decline is very similar. I will say there are three major causes of American imperial decline.

The first is financialization. Thomas Piketty talks about this in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, where, as capitalism progresses, eventually you reach a point where it's much more lucrative to do financial speculation than it is to do real wealth creation.

Let's just imagine you're an entrepreneur, and you work really hard, like Ally, and you create a lot of wealth. You hire a lot of people, and now you have a lot of savings. What you do with these savings is you invest in other enterprises. You engage in financial speculation, and what you realize is, “Wow, financial speculation is a lot more profitable than real wealth creation, like opening a business.”

This is just how capitalism works. Thomas shows that, over time, just the logic of capitalism, because it is really the consolidation of capital in the hands of really smart investors, then stock market speculation will be a lot more lucrative than real wealth creation.

The example he gives is, on average, if you put your money in the stock market, you might get 5% returns. If you open a restaurant or open a factory, you might get a 2% return a year. Eventually, you reach a point where, “I'm not going to go open a restaurant or start a business. I'll just spend my money in the stock market.” That's where we are today. It's much more lucrative to go play the stock market or cryptocurrency than it is to open a factory. That's number one.

Number two is you also have the bureaucratization of society, meaning that these bureaucracies that were meant to coordinate and centralize resources become bigger and bigger over time until they become parasites.

The classic example is our universities. If you go to a university in the 1950s, it was really about making sure the professors could teach well and do research. Administrators were just professors who volunteered four years of their time. Professors would become university president for four years, then return to teaching and research. That was true for most administrative faculties.

Now the administration of universities is a full-time bureaucracy. Quite honestly, there's more of them than there are professors. Because there's so many of them, they're always causing problems in order to justify their existence. That's why we have DEI and political correctness and student-centered learning, because they want the students to complain in order to justify their existence.

That's why it's almost impossible as a professor to teach, because if a student complains, a dean's going to come to you and spend the next few months investigating the complaint, even though the complaint may be completely warrantless.

There's a huge problem in universities. A lot of the reason why is bureaucracies expand because bureaucrats have children, and they need to put their children somewhere. It's often in the bureaucracy. That's why bureaucracies expand over time. This, again, is a pretty consistent pattern in human history.

The third thing that's driving all this is the idea of elite overproduction. There's a civil war going on between the Wall Street financial elite, which has controlled America since the Clinton–Obama years, and now you have the Silicon Valley tech oligarchs who are trying to wrest control over policymaking in Washington, DC.

In 2008, because the financial elite were able to control Washington, DC, they could force a bailout. Now what Sam Altman and other techs want to do is basically get Trump to nationalize data centers so the cost of AI shifts to the government. Basically, government subsidies for Sam Altman and his brethren.

That is why empires decline over time, these three reasons. You have financialization, bureaucratization, and then you also have elite overproduction.

Now, it does seem there is some coordination going on. The reason why is these secret societies, because they practice the occult, they have an understanding of tens of thousands of years of human history. They understand the broad scope, the broad pattern of human history, and so they're able to anticipate events.

Not only do they do that, but what they recognize is, “We can't control the course of human events, but by working together, we can accelerate the course of human events.” Why is that important? Because we stand to make a lot of money doing this. The financial system will collapse, but if we can control when it will collapse, we will make all the money. It's going to collapse sooner or later, but if we're able to pick the right time when it collapses, then we will make a killing.

That's why they're so interested in astrology and eschatology and all these things. In many ways, it does seem coordinated, but we have to remember that these people are first and foremost accelerationists. They cannot change the course of events, but they can accelerate the course of events.

We're already seeing this where you look at the Trump years, and this past year he's done what many presidents will do in about 10 years. We are seeing so much change these past few months. The reason why is we are really at the end of empire. What they're trying to do is they're trying to accelerate the collapse of empire and then basically create the conditions for a new empire to arise, whether it be in Israel or Argentina or China. They're trying to accelerate events so as to maximize their profit.

Is this a regression to a historical mean?

Question:

From 1944 until recently, we had a world order: liberalism, neoliberalism. Now we are staring down the barrel of a new world order that is much more uncertain, much more dangerous, and definitely much more unequal. Are we just experiencing a regression to a historical mean, which is, this is the law of the jungle? That's what most of human history has been. We had 70 years of prosperity. That's just really a blip. Or is it the opposite? Is actually the historical mean prosperity, collaboration, globalism, and we're actually entering an aberration?

Answer:

One text that a lot of these tech oligarchs obsess over is Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. The idea of the Foundation series is this is an empire, and it's been around for 10,000 years, but it's in decline. This decline will last thousands of years, the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages means a time of tremendous human suffering.

What they're trying to do in the Foundation is trying to shorten the lifespan of the Dark Ages and create an empire as soon as possible in order to reduce human suffering. Believe it or not, a lot of these people, people like Peter Thiel, especially Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, they see the ultimate purpose is to prevent humanity from entering the Dark Ages.

Because if you know any history, you know that whenever there's decline, what happens now is the Dark Ages. Just 100 years of complete and utter chaos. Think of the fall of the Roman Empire. Think of the Bronze Age collapse. They understand that imperial decline, imperial collapse, just means tremendous human suffering, the complete breakdown of civilization, just the most abhorrent behavior.

They're thinking to themselves, “How do we prevent that from happening?” That's what they see their mission as. That's why they're so obsessed with data centers and AI and going to Mars, because they believe that technology could be a loophole in the grand course of human rise and decline, the grand story of human rise and decline. Can we create technology so that we can skip from empire to the next stage of human evolution? That's what they believe.

Spirituality, family, and purpose

How can young people avoid nihilism?

Question:

I see a lot of young people in this crowd, and I'd like to think I'm still young, and I am scared. When I watch your videos and I look at the state of the world, it seems pretty dark. But I know that you've spoken to this, and I would love to see your advice for young people, I guess, to avoid them falling into nihilism, which I suppose is its own psyop. We don't want to feel learned helplessness. We want to feel like we can do something about the future. I'd love to hear your take or your advice for young people going into this new paradigm in the world.

Answer:

I think a lot of the fear and anxiety comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of our nature, where we came from, what we're doing here, where we're going. If you study the occult, if you read the Divine Comedy, if you read the great books, what you recognize is that, first and foremost, we are spiritual beings. We are pure consciousness, and we are constantly connected to the divine. Our consciousness exists in infinite dimensions, and there's a beauty, there's a real power that is inherent in us.

But we have fallen asleep. We have been blinded, and we have been tricked into believing that, no, we are just a body, a husk. This husk is all that we have, so we must cherish it. Once it dies, then we die with it. We've forgotten where we came from, and it's because we've forgotten, and they've been able to trick us. That's the source of our anxiety. That's the source of our fear.

My advice is to reclaim your heritage. We're not husks. We're not just these monkeys here to fornicate and pass on our genes to other generations. We are divine spiritual beings that are part of the great consciousness we can call God. God is in us, and we are in God, and we're here to experience things that we couldn't experience in other dimensions.

I would say the most important thing we can experience here that we can't experience anywhere else is the idea of family. Having someone you truly love and then together raising a family, and then loving your children and seeing them grow old. If you read Homer, what the Odyssey tells us is that is the greatest joy, the greatest purpose of being alive, of being human: to love your family.

I'm not sure if you've seen Christopher Nolan's film. I have not seen it, but reading the Odyssey, I will tell you that that's a special theme of Homer. Remember, Odysseus goes to the Trojan War seeking fame and glory. Like Achilles, they all go to the Trojan War seeking fame and glory and prestige. What they recognize is, no, what really matters at the end of the day is family. Having someone who believes in you, having someone who loves you, that's the real purpose of being here.

We have to, as a species, as a people, read the great books, appreciate their meaning because they are really channeling the divine in their text, and then reclaim our heritage as spiritual beings. Once we do that, then this marks a new age in humanity, and everything that's happening will be nothing in the grand scheme of things.

We have not really at all manifested our true power. Imagine a world in which we are fully conscious of our divine heritage, and we are pursuing our purpose, our telos in life. I think that sort of world would be a magical world full of powers we could never previously imagine. There are some occultists who believe that we've created this world before. It's called Atlantis.

What we humans are capable of doing is beyond our imagination. I know this world looks impressive. We have airplanes. We have the internet. But that's just because we put our minds to it. That's just because we want to create this world. Imagine if we want to create a world in which there is peace and prosperity, in which the human spirit is free to fully roam the universe. Then I think that world will be even more magnificent.

Is the most critical war an internal war?

Question from Josh:

In my opinion, the most critical war in the world is not an external physical war like those in Ukraine, Israel, and Iran. It's an internal war within each one of us between materiality and spirituality. Do you feel like it's more of an internal war?

Answer:

If you look at all the major religions, whether it's Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, they all say the same thing, which is we ourselves, our consciousness, are a fractal of the universe. We're always connected to the universe, and the universe is always within us. We're just a reflection of the universe. What happens inside of us is reflected throughout the universe.

I know this is hard to imagine, but all these people, all these different religions working in different cultures, different times, they say the same thing. They emphasize the same point. The point is the real battle between heaven and hell is the battle within us. The moment we choose to do good, the world will be a better place. The moment we choose to do evil, the world will be a worse place.

The classic example that I use is the Iliad by Homer, where Achilles, by the end of the Iliad, has done all these demonic things. He caused the death of his best friend Patroclus. He killed Hector and is constantly mutilating his body, and he's doing so in front of his parents, Priam and Hecuba. He's causing all this tragedy and pain throughout the story.

The Iliad ends with Hector's father, Priam, forgiving Achilles, sneaking into Achilles' tent, kissing the hand of the demon who killed his son, and humbling himself before Achilles. That act, it sounds so insignificant, but it changes the entire course of the universe.

Not only because, one, it allows Achilles to forgive himself. It allows him to redeem himself from all his evil, and it causes a reconciliation between Achilles and Priam so that they leave as good friends. But this idea, this story, it's captured by Homer and internalized in the Iliad so that when we read it, it becomes part of us as well.

You're like, “Well, but that's because someone was there to record it.” The universe is recording every single thing we do, and it's remembering everything that we do. Imagine where you forgive an enemy, and it's only the two of you who experience this. But the universe sees this, and the universe records it. Then what the universe does is it implants this memory into our imagination so that one of us, like Homer, could write about it, and then it becomes part of the universal consciousness.

The universe is almost magical in this way. We can choose to do good. We can choose to do evil. We have to remember everything we do will have an impact in the universe.

Immanuel Kant talks about this, and he says it is a categorical imperative. The negative categorical imperative is, everything you do, imagine that whatever you do, everyone in the universe does at the same time. If you laugh, if you smile, everyone in the universe laughs and smiles with you. If you get angry, everyone gets angry with you.

Ask yourself, what kind of world do you want to live in? Then just be that world, and the world will become it.

Why will Christians triumph over people with progressive secular values?

Question from Jessica:

Why will Christians triumph over people with progressive secular values, I suppose in the US?

Answer:

That's a really good question. Right now in the United States, the professional managerial class, and I imagine there's a lot of us in this group, I'm also part of the PMC, as is Ally, we're ascendant. We went to the best schools. We work really hard, really smart. We're very cosmopolitan, open-minded. We're constantly learning. We know how to get things done.

This has led to a great deal of inequality. It's led to a lot of stagnancy. The professional managerial class, the meritocracy, represents the pinnacle of Enlightenment philosophy. In the 18th century, when Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant were writing, they were really hoping for a world like this, a world in which we've transcended religion, race, and culture.

The problem, though, is even though, in many ways, the world we're living in marks the height of human civilization, people are really unhappy. People feel really depressed. People feel lonely. People feel meaningless. People are very, very nihilistic.

I think the reason why is we are first and foremost spiritual beings, and Enlightenment philosophy negates that. The meritocracy negates that. It wants us to first and foremost focus on our material needs because Enlightenment thinking, what it does is it prioritizes human reason above human emotion. In fact, it sees human emotion almost as an enemy.

I think that, yeah, maybe for the first 100 years, 20 years, that was great because it's led to a lot of progress. But at the same time, it's denying our true nature. If we deny our true nature, we can never be happy.

I think that eventually, and I think we're already seeing it, you're going to have a huge backlash towards religion. The problem is that organized religion can be just as problematic as the world we live in. Think of the Catholic Church during the medieval ages.

We have to abandon our focus on materialism and embrace our spirituality. The problem is how to do so in a way that maintains our individuality. That's a real challenge ahead.

Economic collapse and meritocracy

How are you personally preparing for economic collapse?

Question from Raider:

Predicting economic collapse in just a few months is pretty serious. How do you find yourself personally preparing for this outcome?

Answer:

First of all, I think our economy has already collapsed. You just look at how the economy is structured. The idea that you're paying $17 for avocado toast, that's just absurd. If you're a young entrepreneur, try hiring other young people to do work for you. Good luck with that, guys.

I think we've already collapsed, and they're just hiding this from us. I think it's just narrative control. Remember, back in the Biden years, it's clear that the American economy was in recession. What did they do? They changed the definition of recession. Janet Yellen was just like, “Well, no, we're actually not in recession,” even though, actually, technically, the United States was in recession.

We're in a period of imperial decline, which means basically exhaustion, which basically means that rather than trying to do a good job, the bureaucrats in Washington, DC, are using either fraud or force to maintain the illusion of control.

First of all, I would say the economy collapsed a long, long time ago, maybe even around 2009, 2010, because the fundamental roots of economic misery were not addressed. In 2008, 2009, the correct strategy would have been to save the homeowners. If that were the decision of Washington, DC, we would be in a different world.

If you save the homeowners, then people would have real wealth, and they would want to protect this wealth, so they would work hard. Instead, they chose to save the people who caused the collapse in the first place. These people should have gone to jail. A lot of things they did were clearly criminal, like calling an elderly person who was handicapped and tricking him or her into signing a mortgage he or she couldn't afford. That's clearly criminal. That's clearly fraud.

They got away with it. I think that we are in economic collapse, and now it's really about what do we do next?

Was the decision to let them get away with it pure corruption?

Question:

Was that decision to let them get away with it just pure corruption? The fact that they were buddies at Princeton, Yale, whether it's the chair of the Fed versus Obama or whoever? Was it just because they're all part of the same secret societies and clubs, or was there a deeper reason for that forgiveness? Because in Iceland they jailed them.

Answer:

It's a meritocracy. The most obvious society today is the meritocracy. These are people who went to the best schools, and they're friends. The thing about going to a place like Yale and Harvard is there are absolutely no consequences.

Let me tell you a story of me at Yale. I go to Yale, and every freshman is offered a job where you do nothing, and you get paid a lot of money. Most people pick working in a library. What happens is you literally go to the library, and you sit there for four hours, and you do your homework, and you get paid to do that. Yale is like a welfare state, guys. It's like the biggest socialist system in the world.

I took advantage of this system by working multiple jobs. This is what I literally did. I got a job in the library. You just go and clock in. Then I got a job working for the AV center, the audiovisual center, because in the evening a professor might show a film. Your job was to go and show the film and then take the VHS cassette out of the recorder. Very simple thing.

Then I also did something called 2-WALK, which is you just walk a female student across the street. I did all three jobs at once. Most of the time it worked out well, but one evening while I was doing 2-WALK, I went in to open the projector. I turn it on, then I left to do my 2-WALK. I come back an hour later, and the professor is freaking out because she's like, “This projector isn't working.”

I'm like, “What do you want me to do about it? Go fix it yourself.”

It's like, “You're the one who's supposed to fix this for us.”

“I don't know how to fix this. I was never trained.”

She was so pissed. I didn't care at all. I was like, “Well, too bad, man.” She got pissed, so pissed that she wrote a letter to the president of Yale complaining about me.

My boss, who's head of the AV center, calls me into the office, and he's like, “This professor says that you were an asshole, and she wrote a letter to the president of Yale University complaining about you. But I'm sure you have your story. I want to hear both sides.”

I was like, “There really isn't another side to this story, man. There just isn't. Sorry, I can't even bother to explain to you what happened.”

Then he's like, “Well, then you're fired.”

“I don't care.”

That's it, guys. That's Yale. If you go to a place like Yale, you do the dumbest stuff ever, and you're never punished for this. Imagine what happens if you go work for Wall Street, and then you go work for Washington, DC. It's the same mentality, man. You do the dumbest thing, and you're never punished because you're part of the elite.

You are the chosen. You are what Plato calls the philosopher king. You were selected based on your merit. You're just superior to everyone else, and therefore you should never have to suffer consequences for anything. That's the world we live in.

You go to Washington, DC, you meet these bureaucrats, guys, they're not smarter than you are. They're just more privileged. They have a sense of self-entitlement. You go to Wall Street, they really are not smart. It's just they went to the right schools, they knew the right people, but they think they're smarter than we are. Therefore, they do more stupid things than we do.

Reply:

It's tribalism in many ways. It's privilege. It's class. It's privilege. These are the Brahmin class.

The Middle East and balance of power

What does the Saudi Arabia–Pakistan–Turkey defense agreement mean?

Question from Archer:

What do you think about Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey creating their own security alliance, and how would that impact the clash between Israel and Turkey this year?

Answer:

That's a great question. Yes. This is a huge development where Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan have signed a mutual defense treaty, and this expands the alliance between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Remember, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact a couple of years ago.

This is interesting because Turkey and Israel have been butting heads for the past few months, and Saudi Arabia is now being attacked by the Houthis. Saudi Arabia is planning an offensive against the Houthis.

Here's what I read. There may be a dozen possible interpretations, but my understanding is this. Ultimately, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, they're all American vassal states. If you go to the National Defense Strategy of the Pentagon, the strategy is very simple. We, the United States, are going to retreat or withdraw from being Pax Americana, basically the last guarantor of global security.

What that means is we have to defend every region, every nation, and screw that because it's too expensive, it's too hard. Instead, we're going to use balance of power. We're going to create situations where nation-states balance each other out.

The idea is that in Europe, NATO will balance out Russia. In East Asia, Japan will balance out China. In the Middle East, the GCC and Israel will balance out Iran. They're trying to create balance of power.

I see a lot of things that are happening as part of this larger strategy. The alliance between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, that's one aspect of the strategy. But also, if you've been following the news, I think Kuwait and Bahrain have agreed to buy 5,000 Patriot missiles from the United States. What's happening is that the United States is offloading the defense obligation to these nations. That's what's happening.

I think in the short term this alliance means a multinational coalition against the Houthis. The Houthis are a huge problem for Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia cannot defend themselves against the Houthis, so they're trying to bring in Turkey.

This conflict between Turkey and Israel, it's all theater. Just ask yourself where Israel gets its oil. The answer is Turkey. As long as Turkey is providing oil to Israel, they're not going to go to war.

All this is basically heralding Pax Judaica. It's all part of the transition from Pax Americana to Pax Judaica in the Middle East.

How do the GCC, the US, and the Houthis fit into the larger picture?

Question:

Just as a follow-up from that, when America and Israel attacked Iran, it really proved that those GCC nations were really just vassals for the US Empire. How does their relationship, the US and the Gulf countries, and the issue of the Houthis all factor in the larger picture, for example in this agreement, and also just the battle against the Houthis and Pax Judaica?

Answer:

The GCC was created out of the petrodollar system. The petrodollar system was great for the GCC because now they could sell their oil all around the world and not have to provide for their own defense. This is what's led to the rise of the GCC.

They were able to economically progress very, very quickly, but it's all unstable because what do you do about Iran? The United States was like, “Don't worry, we'll deal with Iran.” Really, if that's the case, then what the United States should have done, and what I think a lot of people wanted to do, is basically prop up Iraq.

Does that make sense? You want to protect the GCC. It's a vital part of your petrodollar system. You prop up Iraq as a counterbalance to Iran because Iran is not part of your global economy. You bring Iraq into your global economy, and then you create balance of power between Iraq and Iran, and then you limit Israel.

As an empire, this is how you should behave, balance of power. Rather than invade Iraq, you economically develop Iraq. During the Clinton years, that was actually the agreement. People forget this, but during the Clinton years, there was almost a side deal between Saddam Hussein and Bill Clinton where these American companies would go into Iraq and get the oil for really, really cheap.

It was a great deal for the United States, and it made a lot of geopolitical sense because now, with an emergent Iraq, you can now balance out Iran. The thing you don't want to do, the last thing you ever want to do, is go invade Iraq because then you create a huge problem with Iran. Now Iran is a regional superpower. The last thing you would ever do is go invade Iraq as an empire.

You're like, “Well, why did they invade Iraq then?” The answer is something called the Clean Break memo of 1996. Clean Break memo. The idea of the Clean Break memo is to create Israel as a regional hegemon. Rather than create balance of power in the Middle East with Pax Americana in charge, you have Israel emerge as the regional superpower.

It's called the Clean Break memo. There's exactly one page. It was written by a few people, but two of the most prominent were Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.

Why is this important? Because Richard Perle and Douglas Feith wrote the memo for Netanyahu in 1996 because he was a new prime minister, and he promised a clean break from the Oslo peace process.

The Oslo peace process was about creating regional stability. It was about creating balance of power. It was about bringing peace to the Middle East so that they could trade together under American protection. Clean Break was saying, “Screw that. Screw the peace process. Israel will now dominate the Middle East by regime change in Iraq and regime change in Syria.” That's what the Clean Break memo called for.

The two authors, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, then went on to work in the Defense Department. Then with Paul Wolfowitz, the three, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, became the chief architects of the Iraq War.

Here's another really funny thing about these two guys. Since the 1970s, the FBI and the CIA suspected them of being Israeli assets. Somehow, in the 1970s, they were flagged as Israeli assets. They're working as congressional staffers at this point. Somehow, despite being flagged as Israeli assets, they climbed the Washington bureaucracy to the highest levels, and together they were able to launch a war against Iraq.

Again, this war makes no sense from an imperial perspective. That is the most retarded thing you can do from an American perspective, and they still did it.

Also remember, at this time, after 9/11, there was a conversation between Amy Goodman and Wesley Clark. Have you guys seen this conversation? Amy Goodman and Wesley Clark.

Basically, Amy Goodman's like:

Why are we going into Iraq?

Wesley Clark's like:

No, actually, Amy, we're not just going to Iraq. We're also going to go into Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Somalia, Sudan. In five years, we're going to destroy the entire Middle East.

Amy Goodman's like:

Why would we do that?

He's like:

I don't know. We don't know.

If you actually read the Clean Break memo, it tells you why. The purpose is to create Israel as a regional power.

Unless you appreciate that the entire intention all along was to create Pax Judaica, it's really hard to understand what's going on in the Middle East. Why did the United States invade Iran? We don't know. Even today, no one's explained why the United States had to go bomb Iran. Why is this war continuing?

Clearly, the United States cannot defeat Iran in a war. Clearly, this is having massive strain on the global economy. Why hasn't the United States sued for peace?

From an American imperial perspective, none of this makes any sense. The only explanation we have is the Clean Break memo of 1986. If you actually go read it and you analyze what's happened the past 20 years, it all lines up. What they proposed in 1986 is what the American Empire has been doing for the past 20 years.

Points of convergence

How is a plan kept alive for 30 years?

Question:

How do we keep the thread for 30 years? Is it like a relay? People passing the baton, people retire, people die in this world. Are these architects still with us? Obviously, Netanyahu is, but how do they keep this plan alive for this long?

Answer:

If you just look at points of convergence, that'll give you the answer. Let me give you some certain points of convergence.

These three people, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, in the 1970s, they were working for a US senator called Henry “Scoop” Jackson. He's very famous because, first of all, he's a very powerful senator, but also he's considered a Cold Warrior, meaning he wanted America to win the Cold War.

It's interesting because there's something that he was obsessed about. He was obsessed about forcing the Soviet Union to allow Jews to immigrate to Israel. That was his big thing. He really cared about that. That's kind of weird. You're a US senator, and your passion, your life mission, is to force the Soviet Union to allow Jews the freedom to immigrate to Israel. Why do you care?

They interviewed Henry Jackson. He's like:

It's because of this. It's because, first of all, I was in Nuremberg as a prosecutor, and I felt sorry for the Jews because of what happened to them in the labor camps. Also, my mother was a widow, and she worked as a house cleaner for Jews, and the Jews were really nice to her. She, in her will, wrote that I must now look after the Jews.

He's like:

I've always had lots of Jewish friends.

It's just really weird. Someone he was really close with is a man named Rebbe Schneerson. Rebbe Schneerson is head of something called Chabad-Lubavitch. Just remember the name Rebbe Schneerson, Chabad-Lubavitch. That's one point of convergence.

These three guys who orchestrated the Iraq War, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, all worked for Henry Jackson, who was obsessed with forcing the Soviet Union to allow Jews to immigrate to Israel. Rebbe Schneerson was friends with Henry Jackson. That's one point of convergence.

Another point of convergence is Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview, said:

My parents had three daughters before they had me, and they really wanted a son, so they went to see Rebbe Schneerson. Rebbe Schneerson gave a blessing to my parents to have a son. Then, after this blessing happened, they had me.

Now you hear the story, and again, guys, you can fact-check this. You can, on your phone, just Google this, and these are the exact words from Mark Zuckerberg. You hear the story, it's like, “That doesn't mean anything.” Actually, if you read the Bible, it means a lot. If you know the Bible, it's actually telling you a lot.

Remember, there are three instances. There are actually a lot of instances, but there are three major instances where parents really wanted a son, so they begged God for a son.

The first instance, of course, is Abraham and Sarah. Sarah couldn't conceive, but then God blessed them and gave them Isaac. Then what did Abraham do? Abraham tried to sacrifice Isaac to God, and God had to send an angel to stop Abraham from doing so. The idea here is if God blesses you with a son, that son belongs to God, not to you.

Then you have the story of Samuel, who's a major prophet. Samuel's parents couldn't conceive either, so they went to the head priest, Eli, and said, “Could you please help us?” Eli says, “God will give you a child, but this child will now be God's servant.” That becomes Samuel, and Samuel is a prophet who anoints David as a king of the Israelites. Again, if you know the Bible, this is all pretty basic stuff.

The last is John the Baptist, whose father was the high priest. They begged God, and then God says, “We'll give you a son, but this son, his mission is to announce the coming of the Messiah.”

Mark Zuckerberg, when he tells you the story, you think it doesn't mean anything, but it actually means a lot. If you know the Bible, it's coded language, guys.

Now, why is this interesting? Because Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, and he became a billionaire. You're like, “Good for him.” Look, guys, it's not that simple.

I went to Yale in 1995. The first thing that happened when you get into the Yale campus is they give you something called Facebook. The Facebook is the pictures and personal information of the entire freshman class. We were obsessed with it because you're horny teenagers. What do you do? You go over, and you look for really hot guys and girls. That's all we ever cared about through the entire year.

Imagine the potential if you were able to digitize this and allow these people to interact with each other. You couldn't do that because privacy issues. Privacy issues. If you're a really hot girl, you don't want guys randomly messaging you on a digital service, so the university would not allow you to do that.

Why would Harvard let Mark Zuckerberg do that? Not only that, but Harvard allowed Mark Zuckerberg to connect the Harvard Facebook with other universities. Imagine the potential. If you're at UMass Amherst or Boston College, you can now meet really hot Harvard girls and guys. Why would Harvard do that?

There's a reason why. No, this is not the reason why, but there's a connection here. Freshman year, Mark Zuckerberg was a member of Harvard Chabad. Harvard Chabad was started in 1987, and it's part of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Remember, it was Rebbe Schneerson who blessed Mark Zuckerberg.

Also members of Harvard Chabad were Natalie Portman and Jared Kushner. The faculty advisor for Harvard Chabad was Alan Dershowitz. Also, one of the major patrons of Harvard Chabad was Larry Summers, then president of Harvard University. Larry Summers, Alan Dershowitz, Natalie Portman, Jared Kushner were friends with Mark Zuckerberg.

Again, I don't know what's going on. I'm just trying to draw these points of convergence. “Huh, that's interesting.”

Another point of convergence is 2016. Donald Trump is running for president. Who's running Donald Trump's social media campaign? Jared Kushner. Who's head of Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg. Guys, you guys remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016, where somehow they're able to access 50 million Facebook users' metadata, and they're able to design targeted advertising to sway their political opinion?

Mark Zuckerberg would apologize, like, “I'm really sorry.” But again, a really strange connection where Harvard allows Mark Zuckerberg to create Facebook and become a billionaire. Jared Kushner is head of Trump's social media outreach, and Mark's head of Facebook. Really strange coincidence. I don't know what's happening. These are just points of convergence.

One final point of convergence. There's billions of points of convergence around this guy, Rebbe, but here's one final point of convergence. Benjamin Netanyahu, in the 1980s, he is Israel's UN ambassador, and he's running for politics. He goes to Rebbe Schneerson and says, “Will you give me your blessing?” Rebbe Schneerson is like, “Yes, I will give you my blessing.”

At this time, there's other people who ask for his blessing. At this time, there are two people who go to Rebbe Schneerson, and they're about to get married, and so they ask for his blessing. Guys, this is on YouTube. These two people are Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.

Who are these two people? The ones who financed, bankrolled Netanyahu's political career in Israel. Who else did Sheldon Adelson bankroll? Donald Trump. In 2016, 2020, Sheldon was the major donor to Donald Trump's campaign. These are all points of convergence. Make what you will of it.

One final point is there's a video on YouTube of Netanyahu in 1991 going to Rebbe Schneerson. There's a lot of meetings between the two, and in this meeting, Rebbe Schneerson asks Netanyahu a question. The question is this:

When is the Messiah coming?

Netanyahu is like:

Soon.

Rebbe Schneerson is like:

Let's hurry it up, guys. Let's hurry it up.

The guy, Schneerson, dies in 1994. He's dead. Chabad-Lubavitch, it's part of the Hasidic Jewish system. The thing about Judaism is it's all family dynasties. If you're a rabbi, your son inherits it. If you don't have a son, then you adopt a son, and he inherits it. The point is you have to pass it on to someone; otherwise, the dynasty dies out.

Guys, go to the Chabad-Lubavitch website. There is no leader now. You ask who is Rebbe Schneerson, and they will tell you he is the seventh and final Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch. What the hell is that? Final Rebbe. What does that mean?

You can speculate. What they're really saying is the Messiah is coming. That's why he's the final. You don't need a Rebbe. The Messiah is coming.

Free spirituality and the Monad

How should people with a mystic or Platonic view build community?

Question:

In your lectures, you talk about how, in the coming years, religiosity will increase. In the case of America, a rise in Christianity will be almost necessary for people to come together and survive what's coming. How should people, or groups of people, that believe in a more mystic or Platonic view of the world, maybe also in line with thinkers like Kant or Hegel or even Dante, how should one move if one holds these beliefs as opposed to a more fundamentalist Christianity? How should one go about community building in this case?

Answer:

That's a great question, and you're absolutely right. In the future, the struggle is no longer between materialism and spirituality. It's really one between organized religion and free spirituality. I'm not a big fan of organized religion, so I really do hope free spirituality wins out.

I think the way that it will win out is if we get as many people as possible to engage in deep spiritual practice. Then what will happen is that the more you engage in deep spiritual practice, the more people will congregate towards you, because that's how the universe works. The universe is first and foremost consciousness, and like attracts like.

If you are engaged in deep spiritual practice, then others will come to you, and you'll be able to move towards others. But also, the people around you will be influenced by your deep spiritual practice, even though they themselves may not know it. The trick is to engage in spiritual alchemy, to transform yourself in a way that allows others to come to you.

What is your relationship with God, and how do you view this world?

Question:

In some of your lectures or podcasts, I've heard you stating you don't believe in God. But then, most recently in the Solomon podcast, you were saying when you were wandering around in the snow, cold, you got a sign from God to keep it pushing and keep thriving.

My question is, if you're comfortable sharing, what is your relationship with God or the Monad? How do you see this fabric of reality? Do you have a more Gnostic kind of, “This world was made by a demiurge, and I need to go past that”? Or do you mind expanding on your relationship with God and how you view this world?

Answer:

I'm a product of meritocracy, and I've been indoctrinated to believe that the world is material. For the longest time, I resisted or had contempt for the idea of God, and that made me a very unhappy person, a very depressed person.

It was not obvious to me then, but looking back at my life, I recognize that by denying my own divine consciousness, by denying my own spirituality, I made myself a very unhappy person, because it's not denying who you are.

Recently, I have discovered God. But the way I define God is going to be different from how others define God because I see God as the universe, the Monad. Both the being and the becoming, the nothing and the everything. I see myself as part of God, but God is in me.

What I've really come to terms with these past few months is I'm almost now a messenger for the Monad, or a spark. This is something that I wouldn't have come to terms with maybe a year ago or two years ago, because I really prize my own individuality. I want my freedom. I don't want to be a messenger for any force.

But given the fact that my rise on social media has been spectacular, given the fact that I've been able to impact or influence so many people, and given the fact that we're sitting here in this room, and so many of you have come a long way to be here, I can't explain it except that this is the will of the universe, that this is the cosmic force that has brought us together. I believe that there's a plan, there's an intention at work.

On the question of the demiurge, I don't go into that because I don't think the Bible is a work of God. The Divine Comedy, Homer, the Iliad, that's a work of God, but the Bible, it's a collection of texts that have been plagiarized. If you take it literally, then that gets you into a lot of trouble.

I think the demiurge is an explanation or attempt to reconcile a lot of the contradictions in the Bible. But I don't buy into the Bible in the first place, so I don't accept the existence of the demiurge. I don't really accept the existence of Satan. I don't think there's evil in the world. I think the evil is the things that we imagine to explain certain things that we do.

But I think the Monad, the universe, is all-forgiving. It's all love. It's all generous. We have complete agency to create the world that we want with our imagination. Now this leads to a lot of problems, as we can see from the world that we live in, but it also gives me tremendous hope.

How do you retain so much information?

Follow-up question:

How are you able to retain so much information if we're talking about, right now, maybe esoteric or religious things, and then all of a sudden we talk about geopolitics? How are you able to bring authors, dates, years so quickly off the top of your head?

Answer:

Something that I do that's very important, and something that you're taught not to do in school, and almost you're made not able to use it, is something called the memory palace system.

The idea of the memory palace system is, rather than focus on the facts, focus on the story, the grand structure. Don't worry also if this grand structure is factually correct or not, but try to construct the paradigm, try to construct the narrative. Then what you do is organize the facts to fit the narrative.

If you do it that way, it's actually pretty easy to remember the facts. But if you insist on just memorizing the facts for themselves, then it's very hard to remember the facts. But also, it confuses you.

That's the system that we have today. Academics, scholars, universities are just completely useless because they're too focused on the facts and not enough on the whole picture, on the whole story. When I do research, I'm interested in the story. I'm interested in how does one thing lead to the next, and I'm not focused on the facts themselves. When you do that, then the facts begin to congregate naturally in a place that is pretty easy to remember.

What is the difference between the soul and the spirit?

Question:

I wanted to go to a related question on spirituality. In the Odyssey, you talked about the soul, the spirit, and the mind, when they're all disconnected, such as Penelope with Telemachus and Odysseus, how when they're all disconnected, it led to depression or paralyzation of all three people in it.

I just wanted clarification on what the difference you meant between the soul and the spirit was, because I felt those were very similar or the same, I guess.

Answer:

I think the best way to understand this is our consciousness exists on infinite dimensions, and it's really where do we put our focus? If you just put your focus on the body, that could come at the detriment of the soul and the spirit.

Imagine the soul is maybe the astral body, the spirit is the connection to the universe. You're a happy person when all three align together. All three align together when you focus on your love and your purpose. That's the idea.

Yale, depression, and liberation

How did you move from your darkest years to love and family?

Question:

You often talk about your years in between Yale and getting a family as some of your hardest years, your darkest years. I think often you've used the word depression and similar things. I know amongst that you mentioned that a desire for creating a family, unconditional love, some of the top concepts in the Divine Comedy, were what allowed you to basically manifest and attract that.

My question is, was there a switch? What happened? How did you get from that deep darkness to the next step of desire for unconditional love and family, to then actually be able to physically obtain that? Or was it time that went by?

Answer:

Looking back, I think a lot of the issue is I went to Yale, and Yale is an MKUltra system. What I mean by that is Yale takes young, sensitive people and puts them in an environment that is very high pressure. It's traumatic, and this is intentional because if that's the case, you can implant certain ideologies, certain values into this person. This becomes so subconscious that it almost consumes the entire soul of this person.

One of the really repugnant values of a place like Yale is achievement at all costs. You could be a millionaire, but that's not enough. You have to be a billionaire. You constantly have to rise and rise, and there's really no purpose in that. That's why we live in such a shallow, vacuous society.

Think of someone like Obama. Barack Obama, I think, is one of the best examples of where the meritocracy has failed society because he had the talent to become president, but he didn't know why he wanted to become president. What are you trying to do? What's your purpose? But the meritocracy doesn't care, and all it cares about is achievement.

I struggled because that MKUltra programming and my soul were in conflict with each other. I wanted to achieve, but not at the cost of my soul. I floundered through society. I was talented, I was very smart, but I didn't want to make the sacrifices necessary in order to truly succeed.

For example, when I was working for the United Nations in Afghanistan, it was pretty easy to make a lot of money. But I knew that you were stealing from poor Afghans because that international aid money was directed at feeding them. Instead, we international civil servants were taking this money and going to five-star restaurants, eating sushi in Kabul. They literally flew in sushi into Kabul when you have a nation of starving people. It's just the most retarded thing. I lasted a few months, and I had to quit.

I worked as a journalist, and if you want to succeed as a journalist, you have to write things that sell, and I don't want to do that. I want to write things that were truthful. There's this conflict between my MKUltra programming and my soul, and I made a decision that I needed to get rid of this MKUltra programming.

I spent years just engaging in activities that really liberated myself from MKUltra programming. One of these things, and it's really interesting, is stand-up comedy. Stand-up comedy. If you actually get in front of a stage, and you learn to tell jokes, because jokes are really about exposing yourself, proving you're vulnerable, that really begins to disrupt your MKUltra programming.

Is there any successful comedian who's an Ivy League graduate?

Audience reply:

Conan O'Brien?

Answer:

Is he a good comic?

Audience reply:

Yeah.

Answer:

But I'm saying these military colleges, technical colleges, and Ivy League are not the same thing. The Ivy League, the way that they do humanities education, it really does brainwash you in a certain way.

I would say stand-up comedy. I would say also things like Brazilian jiu-jitsu, because the thing about Brazilian jiu-jitsu is that it really humbles you. It really grounds you. Skydiving. But also moving yourself out of your comfort zone is something that really will help you liberate your soul.

The midterms and the Iran war

Will a ground invasion happen before or after the midterms?

Question:

I have a geopolitics question. I want to hear your perspectives on the outcome of the coming November midterm election, and when would the ground invasion of Iran by either Israel or America happen? Given the low approval rating, would Trump try to switch the whole game before the election by just invading, or will he just wait out until whatever the outcome comes out? Would he pursue the final, I guess, battle after the election?

Answer:

I don't think the midterm elections matter. I know it's a strange thing, but I don't think they actually matter in the grand scheme of things. It's possible Democrats take the House, but they won't take the Senate. It's also possible the Democrats start impeachment hearings against Trump, but all this is theater.

All this is just to cover your ass, because the thing they don't want to happen is a vote on the war. Go back to 2003, the Iraq War. Congress approved of the war. Congress authorized the war, and it really destroyed many political careers because you are now on the record supporting the war.

They all support the war, so they don't want to be in that situation again. They don't want to be in a situation where they are supporting the war, but at the same time they're stuck with the war. I think that it's possible that the Democrats win, but it'll just be theater. It won't really matter for the war.

The ground invasion, I think it's already happening. I think you already have special forces on the ground. You also have Mossad on the ground, and I think that the ground invasion will happen after the midterms.

Right now they're looking at inserting special forces into Pickaxe Mountain or taking over one of the islands, but no matter what happens, it's going to be pretty stupid. I've sort of given up on trying to figure out what's happening because, no matter what I come up with, they do something even more stupid than I could possibly imagine.

This war is just a complete dumpster fire. If you told me a year ago Trump would just be TACOing every week, on Friday it's like, “I'm going to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.” On Monday it's like, “You know what? We're friends.” This is so stupid.

Is Trump manipulating the stock market?

Follow-up question:

But is he manipulating the stock market? Is that why he's doing it? That's the theory, that he's just playing the markets by making these announcements and then retracting them.

Answer:

Certainly, people are benefiting from this. But I think Trump, they say it's chaos magic. Chaos magic, which is, how do you get the American people to tolerate a war that is extremely unpopular, that has no purpose, and which is hurting America very badly? You distract them.

It's almost like chaos magic. Just the idea that there are no protests on the streets, and the Democratic Party is not coming out and saying this war is stupid. The level of opposition in 2003 was intense. If you go back to 2003, tens of thousands of people marching on the streets, protests everywhere. Nothing today. You have nothing today, even though this war is much more detrimental to the world than the Iraq War.

Reply:

People like Tucker Carlson look back and go, “I was for the Iraq War. Now I regret that,” or, “I was always against the Iraq War.” I just don't think that's going to happen in 20 years about the Iran war, that people will say, “I took a stand against the Iran war when it was happening.” It doesn't seem, to your point, that people are doing that.

Answer:

People have blocked it out of their minds. It's really strange. This is one of the most consequential wars in our lifetimes, and people are not processing it. That's Trump's chaos magic.

Education and the Ivy League

What advice would you give someone entering Yale?

Question:

For me personally, your lectures have really helped me to have a different perspective towards the study of history. I come from a background where higher education was looked down on very severely, critical thinking. Recently, I just got admitted to an Ivy League institution, and obviously, going from knowing nothing about the world into an opportunity to engage with the world more thoroughly, from what you have said here today, specifically the things that you've discussed occurring at Yale—by the way, I got into Yale, ironically—my question is, what advice would you give for someone like me and my circumstances to guard against, as well as what things would you advise for me to preserve as I engage in elite academia?

Answer:

I have three children, and none of them speak English. It's kind of weird. My son Chris, who's eight, he's with me, and we're going around the United States. This is our first stop, but we're going to New York next week. He doesn't speak English.

That's kind of weird because in China every parent wants their child to learn English, and I speak English. Why am I not teaching my child English? Not only that, but we don't even want our children in school.

Having gone to Yale and having worked in education for all my life, my conclusion is school makes you stupid. The more school you do, the more stupid you become. This is weird, so let me explain what I mean.

What I mean is I think that, left to our own devices, we're pretty smart because we're intuitive. We have a connection to the Monad. We have a connection to the divine. Left to our own devices, we can learn anything. We can be anyone, be anything. We are unlimited potential, left to our own devices.

When we go to school, the point of school is not education. It is indoctrination, and they are trying to make you think in a very rigid way. If you don't do what they tell you, they literally drug you up. They literally do that. They force boys to take Ritalin.

It's so absurd. Now, if you, just as a young boy or a young girl, raise your hand, ask a question, the teacher thinks you're disruptive, sends you to a psychiatrist who then prescribes Ritalin. It's completely out of control.

The meritocracy is a filtration system. Anyone with any curiosity, anyone with any sense of rebellion, is filtered out of the system. Those who go to the Ivy League are those who are the most willing to please authority, the most willing to be co-opted by the system.

You go to the Ivy League, and for those four years, it is just mesmerizing: the wealth at Yale, the prestige, the limitless opportunities. It's almost disorientating, and it's designed that way because it's meant to traumatize you so that they can implant certain ideas into you, and then they have you controlled.

Think of Barack Obama in 2008. He promised hope and change, and he promised a revolution of sorts. He had this huge movement behind him. He comes into office, and what he does is he appoints into office Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Bob Rubin, the people who caused this mess in the first place.

Why did he do that? It's just his programming. He can't perceive a world in which the Ivy Leaguers are not in charge. He thinks it is right and proper that only Harvard and Yale people control the world, even though the evidence suggests they are incompetent. He can't perceive that.

A place like Yale, Harvard, it's really a cave. Plato's cave. It's a cave. It teaches you the beauty, the seductiveness of the illusion, but it's all just an illusion. I don't want any of my kids to go to the Ivy League. I don't want any of my kids even to go to school. I just want them to be spirits. I just want them to be people who are connected to the divine.

My advice to you is, how do you avoid the trap? The answer is, the moment they accept you, you're kind of trapped. Because think of all the hurdles you have to go through to apply to Yale. It's a really cumbersome process. It's probably the most complicated application process you'll ever have in your life.

The idea that you've sunk so much into it, and you're like, “I now know Yale is terrible. I won't go to Yale,” it's not going to happen. Your mind is like, “I know Yale is terrible, but I'll be the exception. I'll go to Yale, and I'll escape the MKUltra programming they have ready for me. I'm the exception.”

Honestly, if I had to go back in time at age 18, knowing what Yale is, I would have still gone to Yale. But I would also know I've got 10, 20 years of endless suffering ahead of me. Because having the Yale education and then trying to remove the MKUltra programming from my system, it really benefited me in the end. It really freed me.

I think it was a worthwhile process. It's just really painful, and I don't want my children to go through that process.

The gold standard and money

Would reconnecting the dollar to gold fix the financial system?

Question:

I had a geopolitical question about something you said earlier. I didn't quite understand when you were talking about how, I think you said in 1971, they chose to separate the US dollar from gold, and how that led to the problems that we have now because they tied it to the oil and the manufacturing in China and stuff.

Does that mean that if they change it to where the dollar is connected to gold again, or some other mineral or metal, would that fix things in the financial part?

Answer:

That's a great question. The problem is the Eurodollar system. The Eurodollar system, all it means is US dollars that are outside the US economy and are in the global economy. There are certain problems with this system.

Number one is we have no idea how much Eurodollar there is, but it's probably a lot. Number one. Number two is a lot of these Eurodollars, again, US dollars outside the US economy, are counterfeit. They're fake.

How do you build a system that reestablishes the gold standard? The answer is you can't because you don't know how many US dollars are actually floating around. The only solution then is to, at the end of the day, burn down the US economy. That's literally what they have planned.

I want us to be clear about what money is. If I'm the elite, what I want to do is basically make you work for me. For example, I want to build a house, but I'm too lazy. I don't want to build a house myself. What do I do? I get others to work for me. To solve this problem, historically, there have been different solutions.

The first solution, of course, is slavery. I just go and say, “If you don't work for me, I'll come kill you.” But a better solution is to use money. I give you money, and then you come work for me. It's the same system because what I'm doing is I'm extracting your energy.

Money is a mechanism to extract your energy. The reason why you agree to your energy being extracted is you can then take this money I've given you and extract the energy of other people as well. Does that make sense? You're like, “Now I want to buy a boat, so I need someone to go build me a boat. I'll give that person money to build a boat.”

This entire system works as long as we believe this money has value. But imagine the amount of US dollars being printed today. It's obscene. That's why you have $17 avocado toast. When you have $17 avocado toast, it probably tells you the money isn't worth that much. Also, the idea that SpaceX is worth $220. That's just stupid.

We've reached a system where we don't see any value in US dollars anymore. That's why young people refuse to work. They understand this. Why am I going to work hard for $50,000 a year when that doesn't get me anything? How much is a house? $2 million? How long do I have to work to get a house?

The only way out of this is to destroy the US economy. Imagine the Great Depression, 1929 stock market collapse. Then you have a Great Depression where people are unemployed. They have no money, and then they beg to be sent to war. They beg. They beg to work in a factory.

But to get to that point, you need people to suffer for 10 years. That's the plan because the entire point is not to give you money. The point is to make you want to work hard.

What I want to do today is basically provide a framework for understanding how we got to this point and where we're going.

First impressions of Los Angeles

To start, I want to tell you my first impressions of Los Angeles. It's my first time here, and Theo Von invited me to be on this podcast. I came in Wednesday, and they put me in West Hollywood, a very nice place, a really beautiful hotel.

I enjoy walking around the city to get a sense of the culture. I was walking around the Sunset Boulevard area, and the residential area is just beautiful. I'm just admiring the houses, the sunlight, the beauty of it all, and then I see, right in the middle of the pavement, a pile of dog shit. I obviously walk around it. It takes me a couple of minutes before I realize it probably didn't come from a dog.

That's my first impression of LA, unfortunately.

Then my next impression of LA is I went to breakfast, and I went to the cheapest place I could find. I paid $17 for avocado on toast. $17 on avocado on toast. I was like, “There better be cocaine in this thing.” Unfortunately, there wasn't.

I've been walking around the city. There's really a lot of homeless people. There's a lot of drug addicts. The impression that I've developed these past three days is America is suffering from imperial exhaustion. It's an empire really in decline. It's exhausted.

When I was in China, I would just hear Americans talk great things about China. I live in China, and I see all the problems. I really didn't understand why Americans thought China was great until I came here and see the world from your perspective. Honestly, from your perspective, everything is great.

Bretton Woods and the US dollar system

Let me give some historical background as to how we got to this point. The year is 1944, and America is about to win this war against Japan and Germany. They organize the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire, and the idea is to establish the US dollar as a world reserve currency.

The logic of this is very simple. In World War II, America had to build a lot of factories to supply armaments for its war machine. Now that the war is coming to an end, what do you do with these factories? The answer is you turn these factories from manufacturing munitions and weapons to manufacturing TVs, cars for the global market.

The problem is the entire world is destroyed because of World War II. What America did was lend the world the money in order to buy cars and washing machines and television sets. This became the basis for Pax Americana as well as the US dollar system.

Because America was lending so much money to Europe and to Japan, it needed collateral for this financing, and this collateral, of course, was gold. The agreement was that US dollars would always be pegged to gold. We call this a gold standard, and it worked great for the first 10, 20 years because it allowed the average American middle-class person to live like a Roman emperor.

If you were a white male in the 1950s, you were in paradise. You had maybe a factory job, but with that factory job, you could have your wife work at home. You could raise three kids and have them all go to college. You could go on vacation twice a year. You had two cars. It really was the best life.

Unfortunately, America started to waste a lot of this, what we call exorbitant privilege, the right to print US dollars. America started to do stupid things, like, for example, the war in Vietnam, the space race, the Great Society. At this point, the world recognized that maybe America is spending too much money.

At the same time, the rest of the world is catching up to America industrially. Germany and Japan were devastated in the war, but they're working really hard, and now their industrial capacity is surpassing that of the United States. What's happened is America went from a creditor nation to a debtor nation. That's bad because you owe everyone gold, and there's not enough gold in the world to pay off the debt.

What happens is in 1971, Richard Nixon declares, “Remember how in 1944 we agreed that US dollars would be pegged to gold? The gold standard? Well, forget about it. From now on, the US dollar, it's all free-floating. It's just fiat currency. We will not give you gold for US dollars.”

Now this creates a crisis of confidence, and to resolve this crisis of confidence, Nixon does two things. He visits Saudi Arabia and agrees to get them to sell oil only in US dollars. We call this the petrodollar. The other thing that he does is he goes to China and gets China to start to liberalize its economy, to start working in the United States. Basically, what China does is use its cheap labor in order to manufacture goods for the global economy and sell its cheap labor in US dollars.

These two things, what happened in the Middle East and what happened in East Asia, now become the new framework for the global economy. The idea is that the Middle East will sell its oil to East Asia so that Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China could then make manufactured goods to sell the world. All this is being facilitated in US dollars. All this money, because it's being facilitated in US dollars, goes back to America.

Because of this global system, America now has to shift from a manufacturing power to a financial power in order to process all this trade. This has led to the financialization, the hollowing out of the American manufacturing sector. This has led to tremendous problems in American society.

For one thing, it's led to tremendous inequality. Another thing is that America now is forced to provide security guarantees for the entire world, so its military is overextended. This is what is called imperial overstretch. Another thing that happens is there's so much power in the financial sector that it leads to corruption.

This is what obviously led to the 2008 subprime crisis because you got these Wall Street banks out of control, and they were all engaged in speculation. They didn't really care because they knew that, no matter what happened, the government would pick up the tab at the end of the day. They engaged in all this reckless behavior, and this has led to the world that we live in today.

Obama was elected in 2008 to fix these issues, to represent the working class. But he didn't do that. That's why in 2016 we got Donald Trump, who promised to build a wall to stop illegal immigration. He also promised to basically prevent the world from taking advantage of America. This has led to the Trump years.

Signs of imperial decline

This system was fundamentally unstable, but at the same time there was no alternative. This system kept on going, but there were all these signs that the system would eventually break down. One of the first major signs was Brexit. Another major sign was the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

The major sign that the system basically is now in its twilight, or is about to collapse, is the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. This was beyond the imagination of many American leaders because they grew up in a time when American power was ascendant. The idea that Russia, which is a gas station with nukes, is able to defy the American order, that sent shock waves around Europe and the United States.

What's even worse is that the sanctions that America imposed on Russia backfired. As you remember, the Americans and Europeans froze about $300 billion in Russian assets around the world. They also kicked Russia off the SWIFT system, and they imposed all these sanctions on Russia. Rather than hurt the Russian economy, what it did was destroy the credibility of the Western financial system.

Now countries like China are like, “Wait a minute here. If the United States can just freeze our assets for no reason, then we should not buy that many US assets.” Now you see this massive shift from buying US Treasuries, which was previously considered the best investment, to now buying gold. This puts additional pressure on the US financial system.

This war in Ukraine, it's a test of the credibility of Pax Americana. Because Russia is a nuclear power, there's really not much you can do about Russia. You can support Ukraine all you want, but eventually Ukraine is going to get exhausted.

You can make the argument that Trump started this war in Iran in order to reestablish the credibility of Pax Americana: that, ultimately, at the end of the day, the US military is the greatest military in the world, invincible. Obviously, we know what happened. This is not true. The US military, it's very corrupt. It's overextended. It's not very strategic. It's very bureaucratic.

Now, basically, the United States is losing this war in Iran, which is causing even more strain on the American political system. What's happening, and this is the most important thing, is a domino effect is being created where this global economic system created by the Americans is now under strain on multiple nodes.

The big thing to watch now is Japan because, as you know from the news, the Japanese currency, the yen, is collapsing against the US dollar. This is a really bad sign. Why? Because Japan and the Middle East provide a lot of liquidity for the global economy, which basically means that this liquidity buys up US Treasuries, which allows the US economy to continue to be a Ponzi scheme.

Once the Middle East and Japan are no longer able to buy US Treasuries, if they're not able to invest in the US economy, then the AI bubble collapses, the private credit bubble collapses. We don't know what will happen because this is a systems collapse.

What's happening in Japan is crucial. That's why, for the first time in a few decades, the United States has intervened to save a foreign currency. It's not a lot of intervention to save the US dollar, but this is the first time in 30 years the United States has intervened on behalf of a foreign economy.

Some of you may remember, a few days ago, Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, had a picture. He was writing on a notebook, “Japanese yen, $5 to $10 billion.” People understood this as propaganda, where Scott Bessent is trying to reassure investors that the US Treasury will come in and save the Japanese yen.

It's also a sign of desperation, meaning there are really that many tools that the US Treasury has to stop the global economy from collapsing. It's engaging in optics. It's trying to engage in propaganda. It's trying to use these tricks to trick you into thinking everything is fine when really we're only a few months away from total system collapse.

This total system collapse, what does it look like? It looks like stock market collapse, financial collapse in the United States. The AI bubble, the private credit bubble, it's all being propped up by liquidity from around the world. This liquidity dries up, the US economy collapses. It also means famine in Africa and other places. It means, ultimately, the merging of the war in Ukraine and Iran, which will lead ultimately to World War III.

I already think we are in World War III, but you can make the argument that we're still in a regional conflict. We've reached a point of imperial exhaustion, meaning that the system the United States created in 1944 has reached its last legs.

Right now, the people in charge, these imperial bureaucrats, they themselves are exhausted. They have no ideas. They have no imagination. They're just trying to use as many tricks as possible to maintain this very unstable system. The more desperate they get, the more anxious they get, the more unstable the system becomes.

The causes of imperial decline

Is this preordained or a series of political accidents?

Question:

One of the things that I always wonder about is how much of what we're seeing now is preordained versus a series of political accidents, like Trump getting elected the first time, Brexit. It feels as though we were almost two elections away from avoiding all of this. But when I watch your lectures, I feel like this was almost preplanned, preordained.

Answer:

I would say we are in an age of imperial decline. If you look at history, empires decline for very much the same reasons, and the pattern of decline is very similar. I will say there are three major causes of American imperial decline.

The first is financialization. Thomas Piketty talks about this in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, where, as capitalism progresses, eventually you reach a point where it's much more lucrative to do financial speculation than it is to do real wealth creation.

Let's just imagine you're an entrepreneur, and you work really hard, like Ally, and you create a lot of wealth. You hire a lot of people, and now you have a lot of savings. What you do with these savings is you invest in other enterprises. You engage in financial speculation, and what you realize is, “Wow, financial speculation is a lot more profitable than real wealth creation, like opening a business.”

This is just how capitalism works. Thomas shows that, over time, just the logic of capitalism, because it is really the consolidation of capital in the hands of really smart investors, then stock market speculation will be a lot more lucrative than real wealth creation.

The example he gives is, on average, if you put your money in the stock market, you might get 5% returns. If you open a restaurant or open a factory, you might get a 2% return a year. Eventually, you reach a point where, “I'm not going to go open a restaurant or start a business. I'll just spend my money in the stock market.” That's where we are today. It's much more lucrative to go play the stock market or cryptocurrency than it is to open a factory. That's number one.

Number two is you also have the bureaucratization of society, meaning that these bureaucracies that were meant to coordinate and centralize resources become bigger and bigger over time until they become parasites.

The classic example is our universities. If you go to a university in the 1950s, it was really about making sure the professors could teach well and do research. Administrators were just professors who volunteered four years of their time. Professors would become university president for four years, then return to teaching and research. That was true for most administrative faculties.

Now the administration of universities is a full-time bureaucracy. Quite honestly, there's more of them than there are professors. Because there's so many of them, they're always causing problems in order to justify their existence. That's why we have DEI and political correctness and student-centered learning, because they want the students to complain in order to justify their existence.

That's why it's almost impossible as a professor to teach, because if a student complains, a dean's going to come to you and spend the next few months investigating the complaint, even though the complaint may be completely warrantless.

There's a huge problem in universities. A lot of the reason why is bureaucracies expand because bureaucrats have children, and they need to put their children somewhere. It's often in the bureaucracy. That's why bureaucracies expand over time. This, again, is a pretty consistent pattern in human history.

The third thing that's driving all this is the idea of elite overproduction. There's a civil war going on between the Wall Street financial elite, which has controlled America since the Clinton–Obama years, and now you have the Silicon Valley tech oligarchs who are trying to wrest control over policymaking in Washington, DC.

In 2008, because the financial elite were able to control Washington, DC, they could force a bailout. Now what Sam Altman and other techs want to do is basically get Trump to nationalize data centers so the cost of AI shifts to the government. Basically, government subsidies for Sam Altman and his brethren.

That is why empires decline over time, these three reasons. You have financialization, bureaucratization, and then you also have elite overproduction.

Now, it does seem there is some coordination going on. The reason why is these secret societies, because they practice the occult, they have an understanding of tens of thousands of years of human history. They understand the broad scope, the broad pattern of human history, and so they're able to anticipate events.

Not only do they do that, but what they recognize is, “We can't control the course of human events, but by working together, we can accelerate the course of human events.” Why is that important? Because we stand to make a lot of money doing this. The financial system will collapse, but if we can control when it will collapse, we will make all the money. It's going to collapse sooner or later, but if we're able to pick the right time when it collapses, then we will make a killing.

That's why they're so interested in astrology and eschatology and all these things. In many ways, it does seem coordinated, but we have to remember that these people are first and foremost accelerationists. They cannot change the course of events, but they can accelerate the course of events.

We're already seeing this where you look at the Trump years, and this past year he's done what many presidents will do in about 10 years. We are seeing so much change these past few months. The reason why is we are really at the end of empire. What they're trying to do is they're trying to accelerate the collapse of empire and then basically create the conditions for a new empire to arise, whether it be in Israel or Argentina or China. They're trying to accelerate events so as to maximize their profit.

Is this a regression to a historical mean?

Question:

From 1944 until recently, we had a world order: liberalism, neoliberalism. Now we are staring down the barrel of a new world order that is much more uncertain, much more dangerous, and definitely much more unequal. Are we just experiencing a regression to a historical mean, which is, this is the law of the jungle? That's what most of human history has been. We had 70 years of prosperity. That's just really a blip. Or is it the opposite? Is actually the historical mean prosperity, collaboration, globalism, and we're actually entering an aberration?

Answer:

One text that a lot of these tech oligarchs obsess over is Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. The idea of the Foundation series is this is an empire, and it's been around for 10,000 years, but it's in decline. This decline will last thousands of years, the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages means a time of tremendous human suffering.

What they're trying to do in the Foundation is trying to shorten the lifespan of the Dark Ages and create an empire as soon as possible in order to reduce human suffering. Believe it or not, a lot of these people, people like Peter Thiel, especially Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, they see the ultimate purpose is to prevent humanity from entering the Dark Ages.

Because if you know any history, you know that whenever there's decline, what happens now is the Dark Ages. Just 100 years of complete and utter chaos. Think of the fall of the Roman Empire. Think of the Bronze Age collapse. They understand that imperial decline, imperial collapse, just means tremendous human suffering, the complete breakdown of civilization, just the most abhorrent behavior.

They're thinking to themselves, “How do we prevent that from happening?” That's what they see their mission as. That's why they're so obsessed with data centers and AI and going to Mars, because they believe that technology could be a loophole in the grand course of human rise and decline, the grand story of human rise and decline. Can we create technology so that we can skip from empire to the next stage of human evolution? That's what they believe.

Spirituality, family, and purpose

How can young people avoid nihilism?

Question:

I see a lot of young people in this crowd, and I'd like to think I'm still young, and I am scared. When I watch your videos and I look at the state of the world, it seems pretty dark. But I know that you've spoken to this, and I would love to see your advice for young people, I guess, to avoid them falling into nihilism, which I suppose is its own psyop. We don't want to feel learned helplessness. We want to feel like we can do something about the future. I'd love to hear your take or your advice for young people going into this new paradigm in the world.

Answer:

I think a lot of the fear and anxiety comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of our nature, where we came from, what we're doing here, where we're going. If you study the occult, if you read the Divine Comedy, if you read the great books, what you recognize is that, first and foremost, we are spiritual beings. We are pure consciousness, and we are constantly connected to the divine. Our consciousness exists in infinite dimensions, and there's a beauty, there's a real power that is inherent in us.

But we have fallen asleep. We have been blinded, and we have been tricked into believing that, no, we are just a body, a husk. This husk is all that we have, so we must cherish it. Once it dies, then we die with it. We've forgotten where we came from, and it's because we've forgotten, and they've been able to trick us. That's the source of our anxiety. That's the source of our fear.

My advice is to reclaim your heritage. We're not husks. We're not just these monkeys here to fornicate and pass on our genes to other generations. We are divine spiritual beings that are part of the great consciousness we can call God. God is in us, and we are in God, and we're here to experience things that we couldn't experience in other dimensions.

I would say the most important thing we can experience here that we can't experience anywhere else is the idea of family. Having someone you truly love and then together raising a family, and then loving your children and seeing them grow old. If you read Homer, what the Odyssey tells us is that is the greatest joy, the greatest purpose of being alive, of being human: to love your family.

I'm not sure if you've seen Christopher Nolan's film. I have not seen it, but reading the Odyssey, I will tell you that that's a special theme of Homer. Remember, Odysseus goes to the Trojan War seeking fame and glory. Like Achilles, they all go to the Trojan War seeking fame and glory and prestige. What they recognize is, no, what really matters at the end of the day is family. Having someone who believes in you, having someone who loves you, that's the real purpose of being here.

We have to, as a species, as a people, read the great books, appreciate their meaning because they are really channeling the divine in their text, and then reclaim our heritage as spiritual beings. Once we do that, then this marks a new age in humanity, and everything that's happening will be nothing in the grand scheme of things.

We have not really at all manifested our true power. Imagine a world in which we are fully conscious of our divine heritage, and we are pursuing our purpose, our telos in life. I think that sort of world would be a magical world full of powers we could never previously imagine. There are some occultists who believe that we've created this world before. It's called Atlantis.

What we humans are capable of doing is beyond our imagination. I know this world looks impressive. We have airplanes. We have the internet. But that's just because we put our minds to it. That's just because we want to create this world. Imagine if we want to create a world in which there is peace and prosperity, in which the human spirit is free to fully roam the universe. Then I think that world will be even more magnificent.

Is the most critical war an internal war?

Question from Josh:

In my opinion, the most critical war in the world is not an external physical war like those in Ukraine, Israel, and Iran. It's an internal war within each one of us between materiality and spirituality. Do you feel like it's more of an internal war?

Answer:

If you look at all the major religions, whether it's Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, they all say the same thing, which is we ourselves, our consciousness, are a fractal of the universe. We're always connected to the universe, and the universe is always within us. We're just a reflection of the universe. What happens inside of us is reflected throughout the universe.

I know this is hard to imagine, but all these people, all these different religions working in different cultures, different times, they say the same thing. They emphasize the same point. The point is the real battle between heaven and hell is the battle within us. The moment we choose to do good, the world will be a better place. The moment we choose to do evil, the world will be a worse place.

The classic example that I use is the Iliad by Homer, where Achilles, by the end of the Iliad, has done all these demonic things. He caused the death of his best friend Patroclus. He killed Hector and is constantly mutilating his body, and he's doing so in front of his parents, Priam and Hecuba. He's causing all this tragedy and pain throughout the story.

The Iliad ends with Hector's father, Priam, forgiving Achilles, sneaking into Achilles' tent, kissing the hand of the demon who killed his son, and humbling himself before Achilles. That act, it sounds so insignificant, but it changes the entire course of the universe.

Not only because, one, it allows Achilles to forgive himself. It allows him to redeem himself from all his evil, and it causes a reconciliation between Achilles and Priam so that they leave as good friends. But this idea, this story, it's captured by Homer and internalized in the Iliad so that when we read it, it becomes part of us as well.

You're like, “Well, but that's because someone was there to record it.” The universe is recording every single thing we do, and it's remembering everything that we do. Imagine where you forgive an enemy, and it's only the two of you who experience this. But the universe sees this, and the universe records it. Then what the universe does is it implants this memory into our imagination so that one of us, like Homer, could write about it, and then it becomes part of the universal consciousness.

The universe is almost magical in this way. We can choose to do good. We can choose to do evil. We have to remember everything we do will have an impact in the universe.

Immanuel Kant talks about this, and he says it is a categorical imperative. The negative categorical imperative is, everything you do, imagine that whatever you do, everyone in the universe does at the same time. If you laugh, if you smile, everyone in the universe laughs and smiles with you. If you get angry, everyone gets angry with you.

Ask yourself, what kind of world do you want to live in? Then just be that world, and the world will become it.

Why will Christians triumph over people with progressive secular values?

Question from Jessica:

Why will Christians triumph over people with progressive secular values, I suppose in the US?

Answer:

That's a really good question. Right now in the United States, the professional managerial class, and I imagine there's a lot of us in this group, I'm also part of the PMC, as is Ally, we're ascendant. We went to the best schools. We work really hard, really smart. We're very cosmopolitan, open-minded. We're constantly learning. We know how to get things done.

This has led to a great deal of inequality. It's led to a lot of stagnancy. The professional managerial class, the meritocracy, represents the pinnacle of Enlightenment philosophy. In the 18th century, when Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant were writing, they were really hoping for a world like this, a world in which we've transcended religion, race, and culture.

The problem, though, is even though, in many ways, the world we're living in marks the height of human civilization, people are really unhappy. People feel really depressed. People feel lonely. People feel meaningless. People are very, very nihilistic.

I think the reason why is we are first and foremost spiritual beings, and Enlightenment philosophy negates that. The meritocracy negates that. It wants us to first and foremost focus on our material needs because Enlightenment thinking, what it does is it prioritizes human reason above human emotion. In fact, it sees human emotion almost as an enemy.

I think that, yeah, maybe for the first 100 years, 20 years, that was great because it's led to a lot of progress. But at the same time, it's denying our true nature. If we deny our true nature, we can never be happy.

I think that eventually, and I think we're already seeing it, you're going to have a huge backlash towards religion. The problem is that organized religion can be just as problematic as the world we live in. Think of the Catholic Church during the medieval ages.

We have to abandon our focus on materialism and embrace our spirituality. The problem is how to do so in a way that maintains our individuality. That's a real challenge ahead.

Economic collapse and meritocracy

How are you personally preparing for economic collapse?

Question from Raider:

Predicting economic collapse in just a few months is pretty serious. How do you find yourself personally preparing for this outcome?

Answer:

First of all, I think our economy has already collapsed. You just look at how the economy is structured. The idea that you're paying $17 for avocado toast, that's just absurd. If you're a young entrepreneur, try hiring other young people to do work for you. Good luck with that, guys.

I think we've already collapsed, and they're just hiding this from us. I think it's just narrative control. Remember, back in the Biden years, it's clear that the American economy was in recession. What did they do? They changed the definition of recession. Janet Yellen was just like, “Well, no, we're actually not in recession,” even though, actually, technically, the United States was in recession.

We're in a period of imperial decline, which means basically exhaustion, which basically means that rather than trying to do a good job, the bureaucrats in Washington, DC, are using either fraud or force to maintain the illusion of control.

First of all, I would say the economy collapsed a long, long time ago, maybe even around 2009, 2010, because the fundamental roots of economic misery were not addressed. In 2008, 2009, the correct strategy would have been to save the homeowners. If that were the decision of Washington, DC, we would be in a different world.

If you save the homeowners, then people would have real wealth, and they would want to protect this wealth, so they would work hard. Instead, they chose to save the people who caused the collapse in the first place. These people should have gone to jail. A lot of things they did were clearly criminal, like calling an elderly person who was handicapped and tricking him or her into signing a mortgage he or she couldn't afford. That's clearly criminal. That's clearly fraud.

They got away with it. I think that we are in economic collapse, and now it's really about what do we do next?

Was the decision to let them get away with it pure corruption?

Question:

Was that decision to let them get away with it just pure corruption? The fact that they were buddies at Princeton, Yale, whether it's the chair of the Fed versus Obama or whoever? Was it just because they're all part of the same secret societies and clubs, or was there a deeper reason for that forgiveness? Because in Iceland they jailed them.

Answer:

It's a meritocracy. The most obvious society today is the meritocracy. These are people who went to the best schools, and they're friends. The thing about going to a place like Yale and Harvard is there are absolutely no consequences.

Let me tell you a story of me at Yale. I go to Yale, and every freshman is offered a job where you do nothing, and you get paid a lot of money. Most people pick working in a library. What happens is you literally go to the library, and you sit there for four hours, and you do your homework, and you get paid to do that. Yale is like a welfare state, guys. It's like the biggest socialist system in the world.

I took advantage of this system by working multiple jobs. This is what I literally did. I got a job in the library. You just go and clock in. Then I got a job working for the AV center, the audiovisual center, because in the evening a professor might show a film. Your job was to go and show the film and then take the VHS cassette out of the recorder. Very simple thing.

Then I also did something called 2-WALK, which is you just walk a female student across the street. I did all three jobs at once. Most of the time it worked out well, but one evening while I was doing 2-WALK, I went in to open the projector. I turn it on, then I left to do my 2-WALK. I come back an hour later, and the professor is freaking out because she's like, “This projector isn't working.”

I'm like, “What do you want me to do about it? Go fix it yourself.”

It's like, “You're the one who's supposed to fix this for us.”

“I don't know how to fix this. I was never trained.”

She was so pissed. I didn't care at all. I was like, “Well, too bad, man.” She got pissed, so pissed that she wrote a letter to the president of Yale complaining about me.

My boss, who's head of the AV center, calls me into the office, and he's like, “This professor says that you were an asshole, and she wrote a letter to the president of Yale University complaining about you. But I'm sure you have your story. I want to hear both sides.”

I was like, “There really isn't another side to this story, man. There just isn't. Sorry, I can't even bother to explain to you what happened.”

Then he's like, “Well, then you're fired.”

“I don't care.”

That's it, guys. That's Yale. If you go to a place like Yale, you do the dumbest stuff ever, and you're never punished for this. Imagine what happens if you go work for Wall Street, and then you go work for Washington, DC. It's the same mentality, man. You do the dumbest thing, and you're never punished because you're part of the elite.

You are the chosen. You are what Plato calls the philosopher king. You were selected based on your merit. You're just superior to everyone else, and therefore you should never have to suffer consequences for anything. That's the world we live in.

You go to Washington, DC, you meet these bureaucrats, guys, they're not smarter than you are. They're just more privileged. They have a sense of self-entitlement. You go to Wall Street, they really are not smart. It's just they went to the right schools, they knew the right people, but they think they're smarter than we are. Therefore, they do more stupid things than we do.

Reply:

It's tribalism in many ways. It's privilege. It's class. It's privilege. These are the Brahmin class.

The Middle East and balance of power

What does the Saudi Arabia–Pakistan–Turkey defense agreement mean?

Question from Archer:

What do you think about Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey creating their own security alliance, and how would that impact the clash between Israel and Turkey this year?

Answer:

That's a great question. Yes. This is a huge development where Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan have signed a mutual defense treaty, and this expands the alliance between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Remember, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact a couple of years ago.

This is interesting because Turkey and Israel have been butting heads for the past few months, and Saudi Arabia is now being attacked by the Houthis. Saudi Arabia is planning an offensive against the Houthis.

Here's what I read. There may be a dozen possible interpretations, but my understanding is this. Ultimately, Turkey, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, they're all American vassal states. If you go to the National Defense Strategy of the Pentagon, the strategy is very simple. We, the United States, are going to retreat or withdraw from being Pax Americana, basically the last guarantor of global security.

What that means is we have to defend every region, every nation, and screw that because it's too expensive, it's too hard. Instead, we're going to use balance of power. We're going to create situations where nation-states balance each other out.

The idea is that in Europe, NATO will balance out Russia. In East Asia, Japan will balance out China. In the Middle East, the GCC and Israel will balance out Iran. They're trying to create balance of power.

I see a lot of things that are happening as part of this larger strategy. The alliance between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, that's one aspect of the strategy. But also, if you've been following the news, I think Kuwait and Bahrain have agreed to buy 5,000 Patriot missiles from the United States. What's happening is that the United States is offloading the defense obligation to these nations. That's what's happening.

I think in the short term this alliance means a multinational coalition against the Houthis. The Houthis are a huge problem for Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia cannot defend themselves against the Houthis, so they're trying to bring in Turkey.

This conflict between Turkey and Israel, it's all theater. Just ask yourself where Israel gets its oil. The answer is Turkey. As long as Turkey is providing oil to Israel, they're not going to go to war.

All this is basically heralding Pax Judaica. It's all part of the transition from Pax Americana to Pax Judaica in the Middle East.

How do the GCC, the US, and the Houthis fit into the larger picture?

Question:

Just as a follow-up from that, when America and Israel attacked Iran, it really proved that those GCC nations were really just vassals for the US Empire. How does their relationship, the US and the Gulf countries, and the issue of the Houthis all factor in the larger picture, for example in this agreement, and also just the battle against the Houthis and Pax Judaica?

Answer:

The GCC was created out of the petrodollar system. The petrodollar system was great for the GCC because now they could sell their oil all around the world and not have to provide for their own defense. This is what's led to the rise of the GCC.

They were able to economically progress very, very quickly, but it's all unstable because what do you do about Iran? The United States was like, “Don't worry, we'll deal with Iran.” Really, if that's the case, then what the United States should have done, and what I think a lot of people wanted to do, is basically prop up Iraq.

Does that make sense? You want to protect the GCC. It's a vital part of your petrodollar system. You prop up Iraq as a counterbalance to Iran because Iran is not part of your global economy. You bring Iraq into your global economy, and then you create balance of power between Iraq and Iran, and then you limit Israel.

As an empire, this is how you should behave, balance of power. Rather than invade Iraq, you economically develop Iraq. During the Clinton years, that was actually the agreement. People forget this, but during the Clinton years, there was almost a side deal between Saddam Hussein and Bill Clinton where these American companies would go into Iraq and get the oil for really, really cheap.

It was a great deal for the United States, and it made a lot of geopolitical sense because now, with an emergent Iraq, you can now balance out Iran. The thing you don't want to do, the last thing you ever want to do, is go invade Iraq because then you create a huge problem with Iran. Now Iran is a regional superpower. The last thing you would ever do is go invade Iraq as an empire.

You're like, “Well, why did they invade Iraq then?” The answer is something called the Clean Break memo of 1996. Clean Break memo. The idea of the Clean Break memo is to create Israel as a regional hegemon. Rather than create balance of power in the Middle East with Pax Americana in charge, you have Israel emerge as the regional superpower.

It's called the Clean Break memo. There's exactly one page. It was written by a few people, but two of the most prominent were Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.

Why is this important? Because Richard Perle and Douglas Feith wrote the memo for Netanyahu in 1996 because he was a new prime minister, and he promised a clean break from the Oslo peace process.

The Oslo peace process was about creating regional stability. It was about creating balance of power. It was about bringing peace to the Middle East so that they could trade together under American protection. Clean Break was saying, “Screw that. Screw the peace process. Israel will now dominate the Middle East by regime change in Iraq and regime change in Syria.” That's what the Clean Break memo called for.

The two authors, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, then went on to work in the Defense Department. Then with Paul Wolfowitz, the three, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, became the chief architects of the Iraq War.

Here's another really funny thing about these two guys. Since the 1970s, the FBI and the CIA suspected them of being Israeli assets. Somehow, in the 1970s, they were flagged as Israeli assets. They're working as congressional staffers at this point. Somehow, despite being flagged as Israeli assets, they climbed the Washington bureaucracy to the highest levels, and together they were able to launch a war against Iraq.

Again, this war makes no sense from an imperial perspective. That is the most retarded thing you can do from an American perspective, and they still did it.

Also remember, at this time, after 9/11, there was a conversation between Amy Goodman and Wesley Clark. Have you guys seen this conversation? Amy Goodman and Wesley Clark.

Basically, Amy Goodman's like:

Why are we going into Iraq?

Wesley Clark's like:

No, actually, Amy, we're not just going to Iraq. We're also going to go into Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Somalia, Sudan. In five years, we're going to destroy the entire Middle East.

Amy Goodman's like:

Why would we do that?

He's like:

I don't know. We don't know.

If you actually read the Clean Break memo, it tells you why. The purpose is to create Israel as a regional power.

Unless you appreciate that the entire intention all along was to create Pax Judaica, it's really hard to understand what's going on in the Middle East. Why did the United States invade Iran? We don't know. Even today, no one's explained why the United States had to go bomb Iran. Why is this war continuing?

Clearly, the United States cannot defeat Iran in a war. Clearly, this is having massive strain on the global economy. Why hasn't the United States sued for peace?

From an American imperial perspective, none of this makes any sense. The only explanation we have is the Clean Break memo of 1986. If you actually go read it and you analyze what's happened the past 20 years, it all lines up. What they proposed in 1986 is what the American Empire has been doing for the past 20 years.

Points of convergence

How is a plan kept alive for 30 years?

Question:

How do we keep the thread for 30 years? Is it like a relay? People passing the baton, people retire, people die in this world. Are these architects still with us? Obviously, Netanyahu is, but how do they keep this plan alive for this long?

Answer:

If you just look at points of convergence, that'll give you the answer. Let me give you some certain points of convergence.

These three people, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, in the 1970s, they were working for a US senator called Henry “Scoop” Jackson. He's very famous because, first of all, he's a very powerful senator, but also he's considered a Cold Warrior, meaning he wanted America to win the Cold War.

It's interesting because there's something that he was obsessed about. He was obsessed about forcing the Soviet Union to allow Jews to immigrate to Israel. That was his big thing. He really cared about that. That's kind of weird. You're a US senator, and your passion, your life mission, is to force the Soviet Union to allow Jews the freedom to immigrate to Israel. Why do you care?

They interviewed Henry Jackson. He's like:

It's because of this. It's because, first of all, I was in Nuremberg as a prosecutor, and I felt sorry for the Jews because of what happened to them in the labor camps. Also, my mother was a widow, and she worked as a house cleaner for Jews, and the Jews were really nice to her. She, in her will, wrote that I must now look after the Jews.

He's like:

I've always had lots of Jewish friends.

It's just really weird. Someone he was really close with is a man named Rebbe Schneerson. Rebbe Schneerson is head of something called Chabad-Lubavitch. Just remember the name Rebbe Schneerson, Chabad-Lubavitch. That's one point of convergence.

These three guys who orchestrated the Iraq War, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, all worked for Henry Jackson, who was obsessed with forcing the Soviet Union to allow Jews to immigrate to Israel. Rebbe Schneerson was friends with Henry Jackson. That's one point of convergence.

Another point of convergence is Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview, said:

My parents had three daughters before they had me, and they really wanted a son, so they went to see Rebbe Schneerson. Rebbe Schneerson gave a blessing to my parents to have a son. Then, after this blessing happened, they had me.

Now you hear the story, and again, guys, you can fact-check this. You can, on your phone, just Google this, and these are the exact words from Mark Zuckerberg. You hear the story, it's like, “That doesn't mean anything.” Actually, if you read the Bible, it means a lot. If you know the Bible, it's actually telling you a lot.

Remember, there are three instances. There are actually a lot of instances, but there are three major instances where parents really wanted a son, so they begged God for a son.

The first instance, of course, is Abraham and Sarah. Sarah couldn't conceive, but then God blessed them and gave them Isaac. Then what did Abraham do? Abraham tried to sacrifice Isaac to God, and God had to send an angel to stop Abraham from doing so. The idea here is if God blesses you with a son, that son belongs to God, not to you.

Then you have the story of Samuel, who's a major prophet. Samuel's parents couldn't conceive either, so they went to the head priest, Eli, and said, “Could you please help us?” Eli says, “God will give you a child, but this child will now be God's servant.” That becomes Samuel, and Samuel is a prophet who anoints David as a king of the Israelites. Again, if you know the Bible, this is all pretty basic stuff.

The last is John the Baptist, whose father was the high priest. They begged God, and then God says, “We'll give you a son, but this son, his mission is to announce the coming of the Messiah.”

Mark Zuckerberg, when he tells you the story, you think it doesn't mean anything, but it actually means a lot. If you know the Bible, it's coded language, guys.

Now, why is this interesting? Because Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, and he became a billionaire. You're like, “Good for him.” Look, guys, it's not that simple.

I went to Yale in 1995. The first thing that happened when you get into the Yale campus is they give you something called Facebook. The Facebook is the pictures and personal information of the entire freshman class. We were obsessed with it because you're horny teenagers. What do you do? You go over, and you look for really hot guys and girls. That's all we ever cared about through the entire year.

Imagine the potential if you were able to digitize this and allow these people to interact with each other. You couldn't do that because privacy issues. Privacy issues. If you're a really hot girl, you don't want guys randomly messaging you on a digital service, so the university would not allow you to do that.

Why would Harvard let Mark Zuckerberg do that? Not only that, but Harvard allowed Mark Zuckerberg to connect the Harvard Facebook with other universities. Imagine the potential. If you're at UMass Amherst or Boston College, you can now meet really hot Harvard girls and guys. Why would Harvard do that?

There's a reason why. No, this is not the reason why, but there's a connection here. Freshman year, Mark Zuckerberg was a member of Harvard Chabad. Harvard Chabad was started in 1987, and it's part of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Remember, it was Rebbe Schneerson who blessed Mark Zuckerberg.

Also members of Harvard Chabad were Natalie Portman and Jared Kushner. The faculty advisor for Harvard Chabad was Alan Dershowitz. Also, one of the major patrons of Harvard Chabad was Larry Summers, then president of Harvard University. Larry Summers, Alan Dershowitz, Natalie Portman, Jared Kushner were friends with Mark Zuckerberg.

Again, I don't know what's going on. I'm just trying to draw these points of convergence. “Huh, that's interesting.”

Another point of convergence is 2016. Donald Trump is running for president. Who's running Donald Trump's social media campaign? Jared Kushner. Who's head of Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg. Guys, you guys remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016, where somehow they're able to access 50 million Facebook users' metadata, and they're able to design targeted advertising to sway their political opinion?

Mark Zuckerberg would apologize, like, “I'm really sorry.” But again, a really strange connection where Harvard allows Mark Zuckerberg to create Facebook and become a billionaire. Jared Kushner is head of Trump's social media outreach, and Mark's head of Facebook. Really strange coincidence. I don't know what's happening. These are just points of convergence.

One final point of convergence. There's billions of points of convergence around this guy, Rebbe, but here's one final point of convergence. Benjamin Netanyahu, in the 1980s, he is Israel's UN ambassador, and he's running for politics. He goes to Rebbe Schneerson and says, “Will you give me your blessing?” Rebbe Schneerson is like, “Yes, I will give you my blessing.”

At this time, there's other people who ask for his blessing. At this time, there are two people who go to Rebbe Schneerson, and they're about to get married, and so they ask for his blessing. Guys, this is on YouTube. These two people are Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.

Who are these two people? The ones who financed, bankrolled Netanyahu's political career in Israel. Who else did Sheldon Adelson bankroll? Donald Trump. In 2016, 2020, Sheldon was the major donor to Donald Trump's campaign. These are all points of convergence. Make what you will of it.

One final point is there's a video on YouTube of Netanyahu in 1991 going to Rebbe Schneerson. There's a lot of meetings between the two, and in this meeting, Rebbe Schneerson asks Netanyahu a question. The question is this:

When is the Messiah coming?

Netanyahu is like:

Soon.

Rebbe Schneerson is like:

Let's hurry it up, guys. Let's hurry it up.

The guy, Schneerson, dies in 1994. He's dead. Chabad-Lubavitch, it's part of the Hasidic Jewish system. The thing about Judaism is it's all family dynasties. If you're a rabbi, your son inherits it. If you don't have a son, then you adopt a son, and he inherits it. The point is you have to pass it on to someone; otherwise, the dynasty dies out.

Guys, go to the Chabad-Lubavitch website. There is no leader now. You ask who is Rebbe Schneerson, and they will tell you he is the seventh and final Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch. What the hell is that? Final Rebbe. What does that mean?

You can speculate. What they're really saying is the Messiah is coming. That's why he's the final. You don't need a Rebbe. The Messiah is coming.

Free spirituality and the Monad

How should people with a mystic or Platonic view build community?

Question:

In your lectures, you talk about how, in the coming years, religiosity will increase. In the case of America, a rise in Christianity will be almost necessary for people to come together and survive what's coming. How should people, or groups of people, that believe in a more mystic or Platonic view of the world, maybe also in line with thinkers like Kant or Hegel or even Dante, how should one move if one holds these beliefs as opposed to a more fundamentalist Christianity? How should one go about community building in this case?

Answer:

That's a great question, and you're absolutely right. In the future, the struggle is no longer between materialism and spirituality. It's really one between organized religion and free spirituality. I'm not a big fan of organized religion, so I really do hope free spirituality wins out.

I think the way that it will win out is if we get as many people as possible to engage in deep spiritual practice. Then what will happen is that the more you engage in deep spiritual practice, the more people will congregate towards you, because that's how the universe works. The universe is first and foremost consciousness, and like attracts like.

If you are engaged in deep spiritual practice, then others will come to you, and you'll be able to move towards others. But also, the people around you will be influenced by your deep spiritual practice, even though they themselves may not know it. The trick is to engage in spiritual alchemy, to transform yourself in a way that allows others to come to you.

What is your relationship with God, and how do you view this world?

Question:

In some of your lectures or podcasts, I've heard you stating you don't believe in God. But then, most recently in the Solomon podcast, you were saying when you were wandering around in the snow, cold, you got a sign from God to keep it pushing and keep thriving.

My question is, if you're comfortable sharing, what is your relationship with God or the Monad? How do you see this fabric of reality? Do you have a more Gnostic kind of, “This world was made by a demiurge, and I need to go past that”? Or do you mind expanding on your relationship with God and how you view this world?

Answer:

I'm a product of meritocracy, and I've been indoctrinated to believe that the world is material. For the longest time, I resisted or had contempt for the idea of God, and that made me a very unhappy person, a very depressed person.

It was not obvious to me then, but looking back at my life, I recognize that by denying my own divine consciousness, by denying my own spirituality, I made myself a very unhappy person, because it's not denying who you are.

Recently, I have discovered God. But the way I define God is going to be different from how others define God because I see God as the universe, the Monad. Both the being and the becoming, the nothing and the everything. I see myself as part of God, but God is in me.

What I've really come to terms with these past few months is I'm almost now a messenger for the Monad, or a spark. This is something that I wouldn't have come to terms with maybe a year ago or two years ago, because I really prize my own individuality. I want my freedom. I don't want to be a messenger for any force.

But given the fact that my rise on social media has been spectacular, given the fact that I've been able to impact or influence so many people, and given the fact that we're sitting here in this room, and so many of you have come a long way to be here, I can't explain it except that this is the will of the universe, that this is the cosmic force that has brought us together. I believe that there's a plan, there's an intention at work.

On the question of the demiurge, I don't go into that because I don't think the Bible is a work of God. The Divine Comedy, Homer, the Iliad, that's a work of God, but the Bible, it's a collection of texts that have been plagiarized. If you take it literally, then that gets you into a lot of trouble.

I think the demiurge is an explanation or attempt to reconcile a lot of the contradictions in the Bible. But I don't buy into the Bible in the first place, so I don't accept the existence of the demiurge. I don't really accept the existence of Satan. I don't think there's evil in the world. I think the evil is the things that we imagine to explain certain things that we do.

But I think the Monad, the universe, is all-forgiving. It's all love. It's all generous. We have complete agency to create the world that we want with our imagination. Now this leads to a lot of problems, as we can see from the world that we live in, but it also gives me tremendous hope.

How do you retain so much information?

Follow-up question:

How are you able to retain so much information if we're talking about, right now, maybe esoteric or religious things, and then all of a sudden we talk about geopolitics? How are you able to bring authors, dates, years so quickly off the top of your head?

Answer:

Something that I do that's very important, and something that you're taught not to do in school, and almost you're made not able to use it, is something called the memory palace system.

The idea of the memory palace system is, rather than focus on the facts, focus on the story, the grand structure. Don't worry also if this grand structure is factually correct or not, but try to construct the paradigm, try to construct the narrative. Then what you do is organize the facts to fit the narrative.

If you do it that way, it's actually pretty easy to remember the facts. But if you insist on just memorizing the facts for themselves, then it's very hard to remember the facts. But also, it confuses you.

That's the system that we have today. Academics, scholars, universities are just completely useless because they're too focused on the facts and not enough on the whole picture, on the whole story. When I do research, I'm interested in the story. I'm interested in how does one thing lead to the next, and I'm not focused on the facts themselves. When you do that, then the facts begin to congregate naturally in a place that is pretty easy to remember.

What is the difference between the soul and the spirit?

Question:

I wanted to go to a related question on spirituality. In the Odyssey, you talked about the soul, the spirit, and the mind, when they're all disconnected, such as Penelope with Telemachus and Odysseus, how when they're all disconnected, it led to depression or paralyzation of all three people in it.

I just wanted clarification on what the difference you meant between the soul and the spirit was, because I felt those were very similar or the same, I guess.

Answer:

I think the best way to understand this is our consciousness exists on infinite dimensions, and it's really where do we put our focus? If you just put your focus on the body, that could come at the detriment of the soul and the spirit.

Imagine the soul is maybe the astral body, the spirit is the connection to the universe. You're a happy person when all three align together. All three align together when you focus on your love and your purpose. That's the idea.

Yale, depression, and liberation

How did you move from your darkest years to love and family?

Question:

You often talk about your years in between Yale and getting a family as some of your hardest years, your darkest years. I think often you've used the word depression and similar things. I know amongst that you mentioned that a desire for creating a family, unconditional love, some of the top concepts in the Divine Comedy, were what allowed you to basically manifest and attract that.

My question is, was there a switch? What happened? How did you get from that deep darkness to the next step of desire for unconditional love and family, to then actually be able to physically obtain that? Or was it time that went by?

Answer:

Looking back, I think a lot of the issue is I went to Yale, and Yale is an MKUltra system. What I mean by that is Yale takes young, sensitive people and puts them in an environment that is very high pressure. It's traumatic, and this is intentional because if that's the case, you can implant certain ideologies, certain values into this person. This becomes so subconscious that it almost consumes the entire soul of this person.

One of the really repugnant values of a place like Yale is achievement at all costs. You could be a millionaire, but that's not enough. You have to be a billionaire. You constantly have to rise and rise, and there's really no purpose in that. That's why we live in such a shallow, vacuous society.

Think of someone like Obama. Barack Obama, I think, is one of the best examples of where the meritocracy has failed society because he had the talent to become president, but he didn't know why he wanted to become president. What are you trying to do? What's your purpose? But the meritocracy doesn't care, and all it cares about is achievement.

I struggled because that MKUltra programming and my soul were in conflict with each other. I wanted to achieve, but not at the cost of my soul. I floundered through society. I was talented, I was very smart, but I didn't want to make the sacrifices necessary in order to truly succeed.

For example, when I was working for the United Nations in Afghanistan, it was pretty easy to make a lot of money. But I knew that you were stealing from poor Afghans because that international aid money was directed at feeding them. Instead, we international civil servants were taking this money and going to five-star restaurants, eating sushi in Kabul. They literally flew in sushi into Kabul when you have a nation of starving people. It's just the most retarded thing. I lasted a few months, and I had to quit.

I worked as a journalist, and if you want to succeed as a journalist, you have to write things that sell, and I don't want to do that. I want to write things that were truthful. There's this conflict between my MKUltra programming and my soul, and I made a decision that I needed to get rid of this MKUltra programming.

I spent years just engaging in activities that really liberated myself from MKUltra programming. One of these things, and it's really interesting, is stand-up comedy. Stand-up comedy. If you actually get in front of a stage, and you learn to tell jokes, because jokes are really about exposing yourself, proving you're vulnerable, that really begins to disrupt your MKUltra programming.

Is there any successful comedian who's an Ivy League graduate?

Audience reply:

Conan O'Brien?

Answer:

Is he a good comic?

Audience reply:

Yeah.

Answer:

But I'm saying these military colleges, technical colleges, and Ivy League are not the same thing. The Ivy League, the way that they do humanities education, it really does brainwash you in a certain way.

I would say stand-up comedy. I would say also things like Brazilian jiu-jitsu, because the thing about Brazilian jiu-jitsu is that it really humbles you. It really grounds you. Skydiving. But also moving yourself out of your comfort zone is something that really will help you liberate your soul.

The midterms and the Iran war

Will a ground invasion happen before or after the midterms?

Question:

I have a geopolitics question. I want to hear your perspectives on the outcome of the coming November midterm election, and when would the ground invasion of Iran by either Israel or America happen? Given the low approval rating, would Trump try to switch the whole game before the election by just invading, or will he just wait out until whatever the outcome comes out? Would he pursue the final, I guess, battle after the election?

Answer:

I don't think the midterm elections matter. I know it's a strange thing, but I don't think they actually matter in the grand scheme of things. It's possible Democrats take the House, but they won't take the Senate. It's also possible the Democrats start impeachment hearings against Trump, but all this is theater.

All this is just to cover your ass, because the thing they don't want to happen is a vote on the war. Go back to 2003, the Iraq War. Congress approved of the war. Congress authorized the war, and it really destroyed many political careers because you are now on the record supporting the war.

They all support the war, so they don't want to be in that situation again. They don't want to be in a situation where they are supporting the war, but at the same time they're stuck with the war. I think that it's possible that the Democrats win, but it'll just be theater. It won't really matter for the war.

The ground invasion, I think it's already happening. I think you already have special forces on the ground. You also have Mossad on the ground, and I think that the ground invasion will happen after the midterms.

Right now they're looking at inserting special forces into Pickaxe Mountain or taking over one of the islands, but no matter what happens, it's going to be pretty stupid. I've sort of given up on trying to figure out what's happening because, no matter what I come up with, they do something even more stupid than I could possibly imagine.

This war is just a complete dumpster fire. If you told me a year ago Trump would just be TACOing every week, on Friday it's like, “I'm going to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.” On Monday it's like, “You know what? We're friends.” This is so stupid.

Is Trump manipulating the stock market?

Follow-up question:

But is he manipulating the stock market? Is that why he's doing it? That's the theory, that he's just playing the markets by making these announcements and then retracting them.

Answer:

Certainly, people are benefiting from this. But I think Trump, they say it's chaos magic. Chaos magic, which is, how do you get the American people to tolerate a war that is extremely unpopular, that has no purpose, and which is hurting America very badly? You distract them.

It's almost like chaos magic. Just the idea that there are no protests on the streets, and the Democratic Party is not coming out and saying this war is stupid. The level of opposition in 2003 was intense. If you go back to 2003, tens of thousands of people marching on the streets, protests everywhere. Nothing today. You have nothing today, even though this war is much more detrimental to the world than the Iraq War.

Reply:

People like Tucker Carlson look back and go, “I was for the Iraq War. Now I regret that,” or, “I was always against the Iraq War.” I just don't think that's going to happen in 20 years about the Iran war, that people will say, “I took a stand against the Iran war when it was happening.” It doesn't seem, to your point, that people are doing that.

Answer:

People have blocked it out of their minds. It's really strange. This is one of the most consequential wars in our lifetimes, and people are not processing it. That's Trump's chaos magic.

Education and the Ivy League

What advice would you give someone entering Yale?

Question:

For me personally, your lectures have really helped me to have a different perspective towards the study of history. I come from a background where higher education was looked down on very severely, critical thinking. Recently, I just got admitted to an Ivy League institution, and obviously, going from knowing nothing about the world into an opportunity to engage with the world more thoroughly, from what you have said here today, specifically the things that you've discussed occurring at Yale—by the way, I got into Yale, ironically—my question is, what advice would you give for someone like me and my circumstances to guard against, as well as what things would you advise for me to preserve as I engage in elite academia?

Answer:

I have three children, and none of them speak English. It's kind of weird. My son Chris, who's eight, he's with me, and we're going around the United States. This is our first stop, but we're going to New York next week. He doesn't speak English.

That's kind of weird because in China every parent wants their child to learn English, and I speak English. Why am I not teaching my child English? Not only that, but we don't even want our children in school.

Having gone to Yale and having worked in education for all my life, my conclusion is school makes you stupid. The more school you do, the more stupid you become. This is weird, so let me explain what I mean.

What I mean is I think that, left to our own devices, we're pretty smart because we're intuitive. We have a connection to the Monad. We have a connection to the divine. Left to our own devices, we can learn anything. We can be anyone, be anything. We are unlimited potential, left to our own devices.

When we go to school, the point of school is not education. It is indoctrination, and they are trying to make you think in a very rigid way. If you don't do what they tell you, they literally drug you up. They literally do that. They force boys to take Ritalin.

It's so absurd. Now, if you, just as a young boy or a young girl, raise your hand, ask a question, the teacher thinks you're disruptive, sends you to a psychiatrist who then prescribes Ritalin. It's completely out of control.

The meritocracy is a filtration system. Anyone with any curiosity, anyone with any sense of rebellion, is filtered out of the system. Those who go to the Ivy League are those who are the most willing to please authority, the most willing to be co-opted by the system.

You go to the Ivy League, and for those four years, it is just mesmerizing: the wealth at Yale, the prestige, the limitless opportunities. It's almost disorientating, and it's designed that way because it's meant to traumatize you so that they can implant certain ideas into you, and then they have you controlled.

Think of Barack Obama in 2008. He promised hope and change, and he promised a revolution of sorts. He had this huge movement behind him. He comes into office, and what he does is he appoints into office Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Bob Rubin, the people who caused this mess in the first place.

Why did he do that? It's just his programming. He can't perceive a world in which the Ivy Leaguers are not in charge. He thinks it is right and proper that only Harvard and Yale people control the world, even though the evidence suggests they are incompetent. He can't perceive that.

A place like Yale, Harvard, it's really a cave. Plato's cave. It's a cave. It teaches you the beauty, the seductiveness of the illusion, but it's all just an illusion. I don't want any of my kids to go to the Ivy League. I don't want any of my kids even to go to school. I just want them to be spirits. I just want them to be people who are connected to the divine.

My advice to you is, how do you avoid the trap? The answer is, the moment they accept you, you're kind of trapped. Because think of all the hurdles you have to go through to apply to Yale. It's a really cumbersome process. It's probably the most complicated application process you'll ever have in your life.

The idea that you've sunk so much into it, and you're like, “I now know Yale is terrible. I won't go to Yale,” it's not going to happen. Your mind is like, “I know Yale is terrible, but I'll be the exception. I'll go to Yale, and I'll escape the MKUltra programming they have ready for me. I'm the exception.”

Honestly, if I had to go back in time at age 18, knowing what Yale is, I would have still gone to Yale. But I would also know I've got 10, 20 years of endless suffering ahead of me. Because having the Yale education and then trying to remove the MKUltra programming from my system, it really benefited me in the end. It really freed me.

I think it was a worthwhile process. It's just really painful, and I don't want my children to go through that process.

The gold standard and money

Would reconnecting the dollar to gold fix the financial system?

Question:

I had a geopolitical question about something you said earlier. I didn't quite understand when you were talking about how, I think you said in 1971, they chose to separate the US dollar from gold, and how that led to the problems that we have now because they tied it to the oil and the manufacturing in China and stuff.

Does that mean that if they change it to where the dollar is connected to gold again, or some other mineral or metal, would that fix things in the financial part?

Answer:

That's a great question. The problem is the Eurodollar system. The Eurodollar system, all it means is US dollars that are outside the US economy and are in the global economy. There are certain problems with this system.

Number one is we have no idea how much Eurodollar there is, but it's probably a lot. Number one. Number two is a lot of these Eurodollars, again, US dollars outside the US economy, are counterfeit. They're fake.

How do you build a system that reestablishes the gold standard? The answer is you can't because you don't know how many US dollars are actually floating around. The only solution then is to, at the end of the day, burn down the US economy. That's literally what they have planned.

I want us to be clear about what money is. If I'm the elite, what I want to do is basically make you work for me. For example, I want to build a house, but I'm too lazy. I don't want to build a house myself. What do I do? I get others to work for me. To solve this problem, historically, there have been different solutions.

The first solution, of course, is slavery. I just go and say, “If you don't work for me, I'll come kill you.” But a better solution is to use money. I give you money, and then you come work for me. It's the same system because what I'm doing is I'm extracting your energy.

Money is a mechanism to extract your energy. The reason why you agree to your energy being extracted is you can then take this money I've given you and extract the energy of other people as well. Does that make sense? You're like, “Now I want to buy a boat, so I need someone to go build me a boat. I'll give that person money to build a boat.”

This entire system works as long as we believe this money has value. But imagine the amount of US dollars being printed today. It's obscene. That's why you have $17 avocado toast. When you have $17 avocado toast, it probably tells you the money isn't worth that much. Also, the idea that SpaceX is worth $220. That's just stupid.

We've reached a system where we don't see any value in US dollars anymore. That's why young people refuse to work. They understand this. Why am I going to work hard for $50,000 a year when that doesn't get me anything? How much is a house? $2 million? How long do I have to work to get a house?

The only way out of this is to destroy the US economy. Imagine the Great Depression, 1929 stock market collapse. Then you have a Great Depression where people are unemployed. They have no money, and then they beg to be sent to war. They beg. They beg to work in a factory.

But to get to that point, you need people to suffer for 10 years. That's the plan because the entire point is not to give you money. The point is to make you want to work hard.