 On this episode of Skeptico, a show about being naive. My father's no different than any other powerful man. Any man who's responsible for other people. Like a senator or president. You know how naive you sound. Senators and presidents don't have men killed. Who's being naive, Kay? And how to train yourself not to be. I have a very demanding meta-philosophy. So ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and then politics. And it's not enough for the concepts that you develop to cut across all of these domains. They have to also be somehow consistent with one another. I mean, your ethics and politics has to follow from your ontology and epistemology. Otherwise, you will have certain naive commitments that go unquestioned. That first clip was, of course, from the godfather. And the second was from today's guest, Dr. Jason Giorgiani. This was a real paradigm-shattering interview for me, as it kind of made me wonder what it would really be like to play the 5-D chess of geopolitics on the big board. I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Skeptico, where we explore controversial science and spirituality, with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Cares. And today, we're joined by somebody I'm really, really excited to have on the show. Dr. Jason Riza Giorgiani is somebody I've known about for a long time. And it's really just an oversight, because I've wanted to speak to him for the longest time. And then Chester from Skeptico said, hey, you really got to talk to this guy. And I'm like, darn it, you're right. I so want to. So this is going to be fantastic. I'm so looking forward to this. Jason is just a brilliant intellectual, a brilliant philosopher, lauded by, you know, all the most respected people in our little corner of the world here in Skeptico. The likes of thinking allow Jeffrey Mishlove, who's been on the show, who's kind of cancel cultured me because of Pizza Gate, but that's okay. We might even talk about how we cancel cultured Jason lauded by Jeffrey Kreipel, been on the show many times and has become kind of this shining star inside of this, again, corner of the world of the intersection of UFOs and parapsychology and alternative spirituality, but he's Rice University. He's very, very mainstream in that respect, but out there pushing the edge. So Jason was held in just the highest regard by these folks and many other intellectuals. You know, you'd have to read in his latest book, Promethean Pirate, which is a fantastic read. You can find it on Amazon, along with so many of his other amazing books. I'll share the screen now for a second, Jason, just so we can go through and look at some of those books. So again, we probably won't have a chance to talk about a lot of these, but they're amazing. So in the email exchange that I had with Jason though, I came to the conclusion that, you know, we can't really get to any of that stuff. We can't really get to the meat of this philosopher and his thinking and his radical but well conceived ideas about UFOs, about what it means to be a philosopher, what it means to be politically and spiritually engaged in our culture, all these terrific things. We can't get to any of that stuff without talking about. Well, somebody somebody in the CIA, let me know that that's what they call it. It's an image cheapening operation. Yes, an image cheapening operation. And that's where we have to begin because otherwise any interview with Jason really unless you're just going to jump kind of right into it. You know, like my friend at and by McGill does. If you're not going to do that if you're really going to try and reach somewhat of a mainstream audience the first thing on their mind is going to be. Yeah, but isn't that the guy who, and then they're going to fill in the blank and in this case the blank is all right. Is he some kind of neo Nazi is the anti Semitic. Is he all these things is he a war monger, all these things. So, right out front, I think we have to tackle that in a very direct way so you got to tell the story man you're the only one who can who can tell the story you've done it beautifully in print the accurate but it's it's yours to tell. All right Alex, at least give me some angle of approach here okay and I will try to be as concise as possible and then you can draw me out on specific points where we could get into more detail because obviously this is a it's a long and sorted saga so and the devil is often in the details. But give me some angle of approach, and, and then I'll give you, you know, the most concise summary that I can, and we'll take it from there. You know the phrase that that captivated me. And again I don't know I think it's going to take a while to get there is this idea that you are in Iranian American, you're looking at what's happened in Iran and the complexity of it as is that a false flag operation by the CIA to kind of counter block Russia. That is way out there, but that has to be kind of considered what does it really mean to install a fundamentalist Muslim regime. What are you trying to do when you do that what are you doing if you allow that what are you doing now if you resist it. What is Israel think about that, but here's the phrase that caught my attention, the Thomas Jefferson of the next Iran. So you are this leading bright star intellectual. You see as many Iranian Americans do the potential, the necessity, the ultimate reality that this thing has to change in Iran it's just so fake so phony so such a betrayal of the Persian people that it just can't last. And you're going it's going to change, and I'm somebody who can help in that process be one of the change agents. I think that's the angle because that's the only way I understand how you got drawn into some of the crap that you got drawn into that you should have sidestepped anyone's looking at this and going Jason. You should have seen this you should have sidestepped this. Yeah, good angle approach okay so look here was the situation. I had published Prometheus and Atlas, and I believe February of 2016. As you suggested in your introduction, it was widely held as the most significant work in parapsychology perhaps in decades. It's of course a work of philosophy. I was coming from out of philosophy but as a philosopher I was looking at the whole history of data in parapsychology and advancing some rather revolutionary theses that had a bearing on the potential of parapsychology to recognize the sciences in general, and to restructure what we even conceive up as the practice of science to point towards a kind of post paradigmatic vision for doing science where theories are understood as models rather than as mirrors of some objective reality. This was very well received. It won the 2016 Book Award of Parapsychological Association. At that time I was basically, you know, meteorically frankly rising star in the field was introduced to everybody. So there's a review of that book on the inside dust jacket from from Jeffrey Kreipel, who by the way, sat on my dissertation committee to approve the dissertation version of the book that eventually became Prometheus and Atlas. And then there was a review from Jeffrey Michelin as well in any case, I was doing these interviews I was in the parapsychology circuit, and Prometheus and Atlas also toward the end, address the UFO subject, which then later I went on to write this. I told him about, you know, closer encounters is really like basically encyclopedic treatment of all of the various theses in in the domain of closer encounters research of close encounters research. And in close encounters I kind of come up with a meta hypothesis that synthesizes various partly divergent theories, but I had already hinted at that toward the end of Prometheus and Atlas. And so here I am, you know, connected and say alternative science scene. And quite an important scene. I mean, we can't diminish it too much because it's not just like this narrow niche of parapsychology. I mean, Jeffrey Kreipel is a major, a major figure in this alternative shaping kind of thing. And, you know, what's happening with the whole UFO thing or is about to happen with the whole UFO thing and the disclosure and the rollout in the New York Times. I mean, a lot of this stuff is said in place, where these guys who you're talking to are no longer off in the corner doing their thing, they're being pushed onto the main stage, as you are being pushed onto the main stage. Would you, am I am I going too far with that? Or is that the feeling you had at the time? I don't think you're even going far enough to be quite honest with you. I think that it's the most important scene in the world. And that what was done and now, you know, it'll require laying all of this out for people to appreciate, you know, what I'm about to say right now, it's going to seem a little bit out of left field. But in essence, I think what was done is that certain people in intelligence and with corporate connections saw that I was about to be the figure at the nexus of consciousness studies and ufology. And they intervene to make sure that that wouldn't happen so that the conversation could be contained within certain parameters. And so anyway, to take us back to the timeline here, February 2016 this book came out between February and say May of 2016 I became this rising star in this, in this area of parapsychology and ufology and the convergences between them. And then I believe it was when I went to London at the end of the spring of 2016 to actually give a talk about Prometheus and Atlas at the Society for Psychological Research. I was invited for kind of book launch at the Society for Psychological Research in London in late spring 2016. And I met a guy there who belonged to an organization called Iranian Renaissance. Now I have to back up here and say that during the 2009 to 2010 uprising in Iran known as the green movement. I was a human rights activist. I was the New York chapter director of an organization called Iran crime watch. And my task in New York was to lobby the Security Council members of the United Nations to impose sanctions on regime officials that were responsible for the brutal crackdown on the uprising of the Iranian people. So I had had this background in human rights activism and the promotion of let's say, you know, the cause of liberty in Iran. Okay. And I met this guy in London who was a member of this 501 C3 cultural organization, informally known as Iranian Renaissance formerly called the Persian Renaissance Foundation and long story short he brought me into this organization. Okay. Now, very quickly, I moved to the highest level and to the inner circle of this organization Iranian Renaissance to the point where I mean to be honest. I hate to have been put in a position where I have to reveal these things but the fact of the matter is that I was part of a secret triumvirate in that organization. Okay, publicly it was a cultural organization 501 C3 privately. It was probably the most significant political organization in opposition to the Islamic Republic, because as a cultural organization it did not have its own party politics. It was trying to bring together a fairly wide ranging coalition of let's say, more nationalist oriented political groups who are opposed to the Islamic Republic. Listen, I don't want to get too off target and digress too much. But you do, I think, have to give people the normies because I'm a normie until I dug into this. An understanding of what that means, what Iranian Persian resistance movement means in this context of, you know, when the whole thing just happened recently with Iran. The latest thing where they killed that woman because she wasn't wearing the burqa and don't tell me it's not a burqa I know it's not a burqa wasn't wearing it tight enough and they're doing this unbelievable crackdown that if we step back and look at it. It's from an ordinary kind of what we consider to be rights and values that are fundamental to Western society we just wouldn't live with for a day, and yet we all seem to kind of turn and look the other way. But for people who are Iranian descent and particularly people who are connected as you are to the tradition of of the Persian culture. This has been, I mean, you can't even begin to say it's like an affront because it's just been and it does tie back to this potential thing that the whole thing was kind of an orchestrated political play from the beginning so you have to somehow help us understand to what extent that might be real and how that's playing into you year after year as you see this kind of show go on in Iran. So, look, in the West we measure dates from the time of Christ for better or for worse right 2000 years right. It's 2023 Iran has just 2000 years of history before Islam. Before the advent of Islam and the Arab conquest of Iran Iran already had 2000 years of history and by the way, the Iranians never called Iran Persia, that was the name that the Greeks gave to Iran because the capital district was called Parsa, or this in Greek and so like the way we refer to Russia as Moscow and news reports Moscow said such and such that stuck in the West but Iranians always called Iran Iran, it's a middle Persian contraction of the old Persian word Ariana. So land of the Arians, Ariana or Iran. Anyway, the country has 2000 years of history just before Islam. And so this Iranian Renaissance organization or Persian Renaissance Foundation, their task was to try to bring about a kind of Gucci style Renaissance in Iran that would draw from the ancient Persian culture, right as part of not just a political revolution, but a cultural revolution from out of repressive Islamic theocracy. And so, with that kind of, you know, cultural outlook with that kind of more long term deeper vision of change in Iran. That group was aiming to bring together a whole coalition of political parties which by the way, we succeeded in doing. In the summer of 2017, we brought together groups that are monarchists that want to return of the modernity albeit a constitutional modernity and groups that are for a secular Republic now to put this in context for your listeners or viewers. One thing about Mohammed Mossad was a democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1951, who from 1951 to 1953 drove the shawl out of Iran, and basically took steps towards creating a secular Republic in the country. So there has been four decades as, you know, vehemently as everyone in the opposition opposes the Islamic Republic, there has been a deep divide between the supporters of Mohammed Mossad that those who want a secular Republic in Iran and people who want a restoration of constitutional modernity, this is a big divide. And it's one of the reasons why the opposition could never get together to overthrow the Islamic Republic. We were the first people who by the summer of 2017 brought together the Mossad death camp, the secular Republicans and the constitutional monarchists. At the same time, Jason, you got to be looking over your shoulder, no doubt, because the shawl was our guy, our guy being he was the CIA guy, he was going to run his thing. And then there is this thing floating out there that the shawl is kind of deposed by the Muslim Republic kind of is that possibly a false flag on our part to kind of make a block move for the Russians, because this is 3d chess. And unless we're willing to kind of engage at that level, speculate, whether we agree with it or not, what we're not really going to get there so you're there you're doing this cultural thing, but you're totally looking over your shoulder looking at how to play the 3d chess political game because that's what's going to happen here and now in the 21st century right. More like 5d so you know I'm going to try to keep it simple at the outset then we can get into some of the more convoluted dimensions of this but point being, I wound up in the innermost circle of this organization that's trying to create this broad coalition right and we were developing a plan for regime change in Iran and it was a, it was a very how can I put this ruthlessly pragmatic plan. Okay, because there's things about people who just shout oh democracy, you know, freedom they don't understand the complexity of the situation here. Okay, this is a country that has yes a Persian majority, but it has all kinds of ethnic minorities, which have now been agitated for decades by agencies like the CIA, the Mossad, British intelligence to try to balkanize Iran and rape and loot the country for its resources. And so you just you can have a chaotic free for all revolution in that country and expect that Iran is going to emerge as a cohesive entity on the other side of that. And what we wanted to try to do was to bring about a military coup inside of Iran, which would be first an officer's coup that gets rid of all the people in the IRGC the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who are loyal to the Islamists and then would under conditions of security and public safety shepherd a transition out of the Islamic Republic toward a more, you know, authentically Iranian government. Okay, so we have this plan, and I was approached in the of 2016 at the beginning of this process and at the time when I wound up in the inner circle of this organization, I was approached by this British gentleman who, frankly, his initial messages to me sounded insane. And there was a very bad grammar and whatever I mean. So I dismissed him together with I don't know 100 other nutcases who were writing to me at the time. Once I was doing these interviews on parapsychology and ufology and so forth. Until one day I got a message from him saying, we have an initial initial messages all had to do with UFOs and kind of paranormal subjects right, but then I get this message from him that says, we have a an intelligence agency called jellyfish, and we're able to broadcast the message of the Iranian Renaissance into the Islamic Republic. And so I Google this jellyfish was this business chip. And it turns out it was the salvage intelligence director to black water. Now most of your listeners probably know what black water was right after black water the mercenary force, the US basically used to govern large parts of the world. After the disaster they had in salooja and Eric Prince basically the head of black water was effectively exiled from the United States. When black water dissolved. This guy Michael Bagley salvage the intelligence director and this character Jonathan in London told me that Michael worked with him I got the impression frankly over time it became clear to me that Michael actually worked for him. They had this intelligence agency, which supposedly had a broadcast facility in Croatia that through some kind of satellite uplink or whatever was able to break the filters of the Islamic Republic. And they were offering to take our running Renaissance content and bombard Iran with it. Okay. And so I looked up jellyfish and it looked legit wired and mother Jones and all these people had done stories on it. So I said fine with one phone call I'm going to find out whether this guy, this British guy is a nut chaser really he has these connections and so I called Michael Bagley and he picked up the phone and we had a very nice conversation it was expecting my call. And long story short we set up lunch meetings and so forth. And so I got involved with this guy and more importantly, I got my Iranian Renaissance colleagues involved with these characters, because they were offering to facilitate our attempts at regime change in Iran. And so anyway, long story short, I got involved with these people and a plan emerged that had to do with the publisher of Prometheus and Atlas, because you see. By the way, I was told before October of 2016 that Donald Trump was going to win the election. Before he won the election I was told he was going to win the election. And with Trump coming in with Steve Bannon at that time in such a prominent position of influence next to him. I decided that I should make an approach to Steve Bannon, because Steve Bannon was an avid reader of books published by my publisher, my publisher Arctos was also the publisher is is to this day also the publisher of Alexander Dugan's books in English translation, and have a variety of other books that Steve Bannon is interested in from sort of new right traditionalist authors. Anyway, the idea was that through my connection with Arctos, I would reach Steve Bannon and then influence Bannon on Iran policy. That was the idea. And in order to facilitate this. It was proposed that I take Arctos and fuse it with two other right wing institutions, something called red ice radio and television, which by the way used to be a paranormal broadcaster they had nothing to do with right wing politics. Time out time out because here's where the thing starts sliding off the rails. So, Heinrich from red ice, right. I mean, I know who he is. I've listened to him for a long time. He used to be like Art Bell back in the day used to be like Art Bell. Yeah, and he would occasionally kind of slip into this, you know, kind of holo hoaxer kind of nonsense, but you could kind of forgive it because it was a very small part of the content and Haitian it would be open to research even if it's wacky research and yeah and all sorts of wacky stuff turns out to be real and stuff like that. But I mean, at this point now, I mean he is full, full, full on beyond Nazi holo hoaxer kind of thing. So are you saying I haven't spoken to him for four years so I have no idea. I mean, it's the great one is how he refers to Hitler. He regularly has on people who are just, you know, the whole whole hoaxer thing really, I guess it really tweaks me a little bit because it's anti intellectual anti history. It seems like an op to me because it's just I can tell you it's not an op. I knew him quite well. And the more important point is that when I knew him back then he wasn't like that. Okay, so we got to remember this is 2016 and if you go back and you look at what Red Ice was putting out in 2016, he had only just barely started to turn in a kind of right wing political direction. Most of his shows up to that point had been basically, you know, co extensive with coast to coast content. It was about 911 it was about Federal Reserve was about very edgy stuff but kind of in that contained. A lot of shows a lot of paranormal shows and so right anyway, the other important thing that because before people think like what the hell were you thinking George on the other the other important thing they need to keep in mind is that as I got involved with these intelligence people and as also the Iranian Renaissance began to make its own assessments of the strategic situation. One thing that became perfectly clear to us in the run up to the 2016 election in November is that Hillary Clinton had as part of her agenda. Not just regime change in Iran through foreign intervention, but the Balkanization of Iran. Hillary Clinton was connected to the House of Saud through some people very close to her particular there was this one woman who was a very rather direct military between her and the House of Saud, and her agenda coming in. Listen, she talked about warmongers. Okay, this woman voted for the intervention in Iraq. Based on the live at Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. She's one of the most hawkish politicians in the United States. And we had good intelligence that Hillary's agenda was going to be to have a foreign military intervention in Iran with the aim of Balkanizing the country and looting its resources. And in Europe. There was a Islamist terrorist Maoist organization called Mojahedinah how organization Mko or sometimes it's abbreviated M E K that are opposed to the Islamic Republic, but they're a basically they're a cult and they decided with Saddam Hussein during the Iran Iraq war. And then when we went into Iraq they wound up being pushed into Europe. And they have a huge lobby in Europe, and all the left wing politicians in Europe are in their pocket. And by the way, they also had a number of prominent American congressmen in their pocket. Okay, so so we're looking at the scene in Europe and we see the left wing in Europe, these socialist groups, communism, they're all in with this Islamist Maoist terrorist organization. That's their vision of regime change in Iran. Then we're looking at Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in the US and okay they want to Balkanize Iran. And so we should, you know, the only choice is Trump and the people around Trump. And at least they understand the idea of a nation. And, you know, on account of their populism, they might be sympathetic to keeping Iran as a cohesive nation. So the idea was I have to get to Steve Bannon and influence Iran on influence Trump on Iran policy. So this is kind of the strange bedfellows kind of thing that is a reality that is just a reality and I love the way that you you play it out because it helps. Because Steve Bannon, you know, turns out to be the coke, meth, porn house guy in Florida and all that stuff, which I don't know what you do with it, but it's real. And that turns out to be our COVID president, which is real. That's who he was. I don't know if he was selected for that but he certainly raised his hand when the plan was laid out. And then you got, and then you got Hillary, who is the the pizza gate. Hillary, I mean there isn't there is an evil kind of another level other Jason conversation about what does it mean to want to connect with other forces and have those forces aid you and kind of stuff. Again, we can't that's the, the layer and the complexity of this that really gets interesting, but we can't get there, because I really appreciate how you're breaking this down. In terms of you walking through this history, what it's like for you that what your goal is here is these frickin Iranian people who are there, like, you can hear them screaming, help us help us help us. That's what you're trying to do. And Trump seems like a reasonable way to go about that. Initially, he did. Yes, later I actually turned against them very severely but initially that's what we were thinking. And so I brought together this organization now there's another motivation that I had which I have to confess here, which is without which the story doesn't make a great deal of sense. And that's that I have for many years, many years before this before even 2016. And those who are closest to me, people who are my closest friends know this I discussed this with them going way back to, I don't know, 2010 or even earlier than that that I've had for years of vision. A nightmarish vision of a return of fascism to the Western world, in particular. You know, I mean that's a whole complicated discussion we could have what's relevant for the moment is simply that I had this precognitive. It wasn't just a project of analysis it was also quite vivid precognitive vision that there is going to be this resurgence of fascism. And people like Mussolini and Hitler are going to be reevaluated as historical figures and things are going to be so dark in the West that, you know, our notion of history will have been revised okay, and so I had this vision and part of what I was trying to do in the way I wrote Prometheus and Atlas I wrote it very subtly was it's quite an esoteric book, it has esoteric dimensions to it. And part of what I was trying to do was to hack that narrative and recode it. Okay, to offer up an archetype around which the West could be restructured that will be much more progressive, and that would promote liberty and the freedom of the individual, as opposed to the direction that I thought things were going to go in. So you got to give a thumbnail sketch of that, and it can get really deep, really quickly. But I think you have to, again, give people the technology Prometheus, Atlas, who they are, but more importantly, it is so immediate it's so present with everything we see you know we've been talking about the great reset economic forum and you know one of my tip my questions to you is, is that another CIA Kissinger make America great. Let's defend the US currency thing, or is it this next level Promethean totalitarian technocratic dystopia kind of thing and we don't know how to solve this, but what you so brilliantly kind of sketched out. And in a, like you said, in a very subtle way but not so subtle way in Prometheus and Atlas, give folks a little bit more of how that connects to what has happened since that time. Okay, I mean that's, I know, I know, I know, in a nutshell, and Jason, in the context of this story, you're doing a awesome job of kind of helping us understand how you wound up where you wound up. My vision of what was going to happen which I wanted to avert is that the West was going to be pushed in the direction of a neo feudal agrarian traditionalist society and by traditionalist I mean xenophobic Luddite, opposed to women's rights, and so on and so forth. So winding the clock back by not just decades centuries in terms of values, right. Okay, so again, pardon me for interrupting but I want to break it down because I listened to your stuff. And it's so dense. I think we need to break that feudal you alone nothing and you will be happy. That's about as feudal as you can get universal basic income. That's about as feudal as you can get the traditionalist part. The Islamic Republic, obviously is traditionalist, but how else do we get in our current state of affairs do we get to the traditionalist part of that. And then we go through the promotion of the unity of all of the regressive religious and cultural forces in the world. There is this discourse of perennial philosophy, Sophia Parenis that basically stipulates that there is a unity of all the quote great world religions on quote, and they always argue that that unity is on the orthodox elements of those traditions, so that what I saw taking place and which which I think has begun to take place is a kind of coordination between let's say conservative Catholics in Europe, the Catholics who reject the last Vatican Council Islamic fundamentalists particularly the Shiites Hindu nationalists in India. So a kind of alliance of regressive forces for the sake of promoting a kind of anti technology view of the world that strips us of individual liberties and winds and clockback in terms of kind of social progress that's taken place in the West over the past two centuries. This is what I saw was going to happen without some kind of intervention. And could we throw in the pot this kind of secular atheistic wokeness without really any kind of mindfulness to what that means, because it again it has that universality that that kind of appeals in some vague way. It's the dialectic Alex at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist this has been set up. They are using the soulless materialist mechanistic transhumanist worldview in order to catalyze a reactionary traditionalist neo feudal response, and it's the tactic between these two forces that's going to produce the totalitarian political system of the future. That's what I saw happening and so what I was attempting to do in Prometheus and Atlas was to because see what they've done is they created a false binary it's a false alternative. And that's how psyops work. And so what I was trying to do was to articulate a different vision of the human relationship to technological science, one that is not mechanistic and reductionist, and one that actually identifies the essence of technological science as an archetypal or course, namely the archetype of Prometheus. And at the same time that archetype of Prometheus offers us a spirituality that's about as diametrically opposite to regressive traditionalism as you can imagine I mean Prometheus is the, I don't want to say God because of course he was a Titan, but he's the deity of the counter tradition. I mean he is Prometheus is the ultimate symbol of rebellion against tyrannical overlords, and a sort of divine inspiration for human self determination, and for us claiming our own destiny and our own highest potential. So I was trying to articulate this vision of our relationship to technological science, and a vision for a new spirituality that went back to the roots of the West, in order to propose a different basis for a cohesive reorganization of western civilization a basis that would be, you know, very different from the direction of pushing things in, and that could act as an alternative right well enough in advance of the impending catastrophe that I saw on the horizon. And so people need to keep this in mind as well like I've got this Iranian Renaissance thing going on, but also in the back of my mind is the collapse of the west is coming, and this is being engineered and we need a new model for western civilization. So when I agreed to be this figure to bring together these disparate organizations into a into a single quote unquote alt right group. It was with the idea that I was infiltrating an organization that eventually would call us anyhow, and that I was going to use that influence that I had at the nexus of this organization to push things in a completely different direction than the track that they were already headed down. Okay, but Jason here here's, here's kind of a hard part right. This is from a direct quote from the book really it's slightly paraphrased but I think you'll find it you correct it if you need to. My aim as CEO of the alt right movement was to make it cohesive and organized enough to redirect its trajectory away from white nationalism European ethnocentrism. That's right. Now, that's on one hand. Not a good idea. Right. I mean, not. I mean, I'm getting all the things you're saying, but as a pragmatic, you know, how the game is played by these chess. Really, you're going to. I'll tell you why really, I'll tell you why really. Marinetti. Philip Potamaso Marinetti FT Marinetti was a very close collaborator beneath a Mussolini back in the 19 teens. When Mussolini was still making a transition from being an anarchist. It was an anarchist who by the way was convinced by his Jewish mistress to become a fascist. Anyway, before Mussolini wound up there, he was close collaborators with Marinetti. And, you know, there are a lot of ideas in Marinetti that I agree with. I mean, I don't agree with going into the friggin you fits in museum and sledgehammering all the great, you know, classical and Renaissance sculptures because he thought they were holding Italy back from development. I don't agree with that. But there's a lot in the spirit of Marinetti that I identify with. And so there was a moment in time when we could have had a different Benito Mussolini, a Mussolini that wouldn't have fallen under the influence of Hitler and we would have had a very different kind of Italy emerge from out of that. Okay. So he has to look at these moments of opportunity and history. And now when people look at somebody like Richard Spencer whatever they see him as this cardboard cut out caricature of a white nationalist. When I knew him back in the fall of 2016. He wasn't there at all yet ideologically he had tremendous ideological plasticity. And so he was very open to going in various directions depending on how much funding was available. Okay, and, you know, Richard Spencer later wound up endorsing Joe Biden and rejecting white nationalism. So we saw how firm his ideology was, and I saw that there was an opportunity to bring together a group of people and redirect their trajectory contingent on funding that had been promised to me directly to become the CEO and chairman of this organization and to have operational control over it. Where things went sideways is when the funding never came through. And so they had a set they had me set up this organization with these business partners, and then left me in the house without this funding. And so I over time, throughout the course of 2017 through the spring basically of 2017, lost control of this organization, and my partners started to make, you know, increasingly rash decisions, and basically articulate an outcast populist agenda that ultimately, you know, I wasn't able to endorse, and I resigned in protest from the organization. But one of the reasons why it took so long for me to do that is that, frankly, I was repeatedly played by these people who said, they did things like put a nearly $1 billion oil contract in front of me for believe it or not the reconstruction of the Venezuelan national oil industry. This was in spring of 2017, months before any of the protests against Maduro. As you see that unfold, then you're like, this is legitimate. Listen, they came to me and they said, we're going to overthrow the government of Venezuela. And by the way, I had no problem with it. I had no problem in my conscience with participating in that because that government of Venezuela in 2009 2010 when I was a human rights activist, that government of Venezuela said that the whole thing was a CIA color revolution the Iranian people deserve to be beaten down by the Islamic Republic. So frankly, I had an axe to grind against the government of Venezuela. I said, Oh, great, you want to overthrow the government of Venezuela? Fine. And I took this contract they gave me to an petroleum engineer who worked at one of the largest oil companies in the world. And the idea was that if they accepted to do this project, the commission that we would get for closing this contract would be more than enough to cover for the funding that had been promised for the oil rights corporation, but wasn't delivered. Okay. And so these little things along the way and putting kind of you're not a wealthy guy. I mean, you're you're a professor at a Jersey Institute of Technology. And you're playing in this in this game as well as you can. But they have an unbelievable black water. I love in the book where you kind of explain what black water, you know, what that means in terms of oil and water kind of thing. And that that anyone who knows history knows that these corporate intelligence agencies were really the precursor to all the intelligence agencies and that they still go on. They're still a huge part of this network of things going on. So the fact that your assertion or your speculation that you were played in a very organized systematic way in a playbook that's well worn, because they know how to do it. It makes a lot of sense to me. Now let me add Alex, they didn't just play on my concern for Iran. They played also on my deep interest in the UFO phenomenon and basically alternative science research at one point. This character in London introduced me to a former NASA JPL engineer who had schematics for a retrofitting of supposedly the Glocka the Nazi bell from the 1940s, which is a mercury thorium generator. It basically counter rotates mercury and thorium to produce zero point energy and a local gravitational field. And, you know, in the 1940s, everything was larger, you know, the power generation devices were larger, you know, electronic circuits were larger and so forth. And so basically the idea was that now this type of device could be dramatically scaled down to where you could fit it inside of a car or inside of a boat. And, by the way, they were really underlining sea based applications of this. And so this guy had these schematics. And the gentleman in London, Jonathan, had noticed that I had befriended Jacques Valais. By that time I had already had dinner with Valais at his home in San Francisco. And so he said to me, take this engineer, Randall, this NASA former NASA JPL engineer, to Jacques Valais. And so people know, most people know this, but Jacques Valais is not only kind of this brilliant computer scientist, this ufologist who's kind of well known and his books are just seminal books. But he's also a venture capitalist. He's done a lot of VC deals in Silicon Valley. So this is not like out in left field here. I just took the words out of my mouth. That's that's exactly what I was going to say was that not just in his capacity as a UFO researcher as a venture capitalist. They wanted him to look at this project and to see whether he could raise capital in Silicon Valley. And so I took Randall to Jacques and there was this meeting at the Fairmont Hotel. And I had email exchanges with Jacques before this where I said to him, listen, these people have been telling me all kinds of stories for months. I think they're digging me around. And I really don't trust these people and I, you know, I had read messengers of deception Jacques Valais book messengers of deception which is all about like quasi corporate crime syndicate organizations and cults manipulating the UFO phenomenon for various shady purposes. And I specifically said to Jacques Valais, I would like you to give me your private opinion of these people. Because if you think that it's one of those types of con jobs that you covered in messengers of deception I'm going to cut these people off altogether I've really had enough of them. And we should add we should just throw on the table Jason is that kind of the flip side of that is true as well as far as we know. And that's that there's some incredibly brilliant breakthrough technology that is derailed sidetracked and you know run through the ring or the playbook as well. So, you in this situation, you have reason to be unsure of which way to turn right. I mean, it's crazy stuff doesn't happen in this field. Oh, yeah. Listen, being con artists and criminals is not mutually exclusive of coming up with breakthrough technology. Okay. And to be perfectly honest with you. What I was thinking, which I didn't tell any of these people is that if this turns out to be the bell or whatever some, you know, mercury thorium, you know, anti gravity device, I'm going to steal this thing and give it to Iran to the future government of Iran. To be quite honest with you I was thinking that in the back of my mind is that it's worth it alone to find out if this thing works because if it does I'm going to take these blueprints, and I'm going to give them to the future governments of Iran. Anyway, I just can't help but energetic one more thing. Another way of thinking about this from your grander understanding of the Promethean Atlas kind of thing is that free energy is probably the best chance we have of really destabilizing the power structure we have. Right. So that's would be in the back of my mind is like, I don't care who gets it first. The fact that the genius let out of the bottle gives us a chance for a different kind of reset in terms of redefining some of those power structures at a fundamental way that kind of you can't think of anything else that does. That's right and you know when I say Iran it wasn't out of you know some just sentimental personal my personal heritage or whatever. It's because and this is a whole other conversation we can have another time. I wrote a tome about Iran's history Iranian Leviathan. If you look at the scope of Iranian history, you could see how if there were a total reorganization of socio political power in that country. The country could act as a kind of David versus the Goliath of tyranny in the world. And I was thinking if a reset like that is going to take place in Iran. It could be an optimal place to introduce free energy technology. Anyway, so I'm thinking these things and I take this engineer to meet with me at the Fairmont Hotel on uphill in San Francisco. And anyway, we had a whole conversation about that thing and of course of which, you know, valet said among other things, do you have a patent on this, because as a venture capitalist, I'm not comfortable looking at this, unless you have a patent on it, you know, I mean I could be having a therapist here like next week with somebody else and it could like just slip out of my tongue that this and that element of your design and you know, and the guy said to him the engineer said no I don't have a patent on it because we didn't come up with this, we're basically just redesigning an existing system. Anyway, we had this conversation, and I was supposed to meet with ballet again privately for him to give me his impressions of, you know, the engineer and Jacques had some kind of ear surgery some some medical issue. And so that meeting was sadly canceled. Now, I'm in San Francisco to meet with Jacques ballet, and I'm contacted by a Persian billionaire who used to be a nanotech innovator. And he says, and this is a very dramatic series of events. So, two weeks earlier, I was in Los Angeles in August of 2017. And I was the keynote speaker, introducing that coalition I had mentioned earlier of Iranian political parties. I was the person who was chosen to introduce it in the English language to the international media, and that speech exists I can send it to you. If you want to I don't know intercut a clip or two from it. And so here I am with these Iranian political parties around me that have been bickering for 40 years. And we finally unified them in a coalition and I'm helping to introduce this thing. The day that that happened my partners were making the mess in Charlottesville. I wasn't present why because I was the speaker at this Iranian coalition thing. And so immediately after that happened I resigned from the all right corporation, I didn't even call my partners, I just publicly resigned in protest. And then I go to Jacques ballet to introduce this engineer to Jacques ballet. And while I'm there, I get a call from this person now tech guy back in Los Angeles, who wants me to fly back to Los Angeles to come meet with him. To discuss some things which he didn't tell me what he wanted to discuss. And I thought maybe he wants me to teach him thing, you know, he had hired me at one point to basically teach him about the gaffas of Zarathustra ancient Persian philosophy. And I had also taught him, I've given him let's say some, how do you want to put it, tutored him on the subject of the history of philosophy and science. Okay. And so I thought this was going to be the nature of the conversation. And I come back to LA to meet with this guy and for a day or two at his office he bullshits me about the history of philosophy and whatever. And then he says, okay, no, come down to business to truth is the reason why I brought you here is because I have information that there are people planning a regime change in Iran, like by means of foreign military intervention. And it's important to note in this regard that at a certain juncture. John Bolton was brought into the Trump administration and I had always been vociferously opposed to John Bolton. He was lobbied by those Islamist Maoist terrorist creeps that I told you had influence in Europe. And he was in with the wrong elements in Israel and always, you know, was in favor of bombing Iran into democracy right which which I have always been vehemently opposed to. And so so now the Trump administration was shifting in this wrong direction because we were not able to influence their policy, the way you know we had wanted to. And he this guy tells me this nano tech, you know, billionaire Persian guy tells me I haven't you know he's obviously very well connected okay and US political arena. And he said I have information that there's going to be this attempt at a regime change in Iran, and we shouldn't allow what happened in Iraq to happen in Iran, where a bunch of foreigners come and write a constitution for us. Somebody should write a constitution in advance for Iran. And the idea was that it should enshrine. I don't want to even say Zoroastrian principles but principles true to the teaching of Zarathustra without using any religious language, in other words, just the way that the founders of the United States frame the Constitution in a manner that reflected thinking, but without using any specifically ideological language, such a constitution should be framed for Iran that in a functional way incorporates these principles that are true to Iran's philosophical heritage. And he chose me as a person to write this and he was going to back it financially not just, you know, the time and energy to come up with this constitution and the research that will be required. You know, 10 different constitutions of different countries in front of me anyway. And, but he was going to also make the introductions that would be needed in order to feel this as a viable proposal for a future Iranian constitution. So, meeting with Jacques Valais, literally a week later this meeting with this Persian nanotech innovator, I'm about to start working on a future constitution of Iran. One month later I'm defamed in the New York Times. One month after this. Exactly. So, I mean, do the math. Well, there's a couple of ways to do the math, really, because the other way to do the math is they had set the trap pretty well, you know, so when they chose to spring it really doesn't matter at that point they have you kind of boxed in and a number of different ways there. So, I guess the question would be, how do you feel about that, the timing of that, the way that was done, how it was done, the recording, the whole thing. I think that they had. Okay, so I have to back up here. Now, I don't need any more legal issues, you know, so let me let me couch this in these terms. I was told by the fellow in London. Who turned out to be, and I didn't know this one I got involved with him but later it turned out he was a British intelligence operative, MI6. And you gotta tell the story because it's an interesting spy craft. It's not even spy craft. It's just incredible, but he invites you to do this major presentation. And then he very conveniently doesn't show up. He does kind of a classic rug pull. And the person he introduces you to at the time is an Antifa guy that you don't know that at the time. I mean, there's so many things that are kind of a key part of your story of I want to say I was going to say verifiable. I can't verify them, but you've verified them that kind of does help people understand again this spy crafts spy versus spy kind of aspect of this. Yeah, this is all in my book Promethean pirate and also in the second chapter of my book uber man uber man is kind of science fiction but the second chapter of uber man is basically a an un embroidered account of this series of events. And again it's it's you know it's reiterated in Promethean pirate. But my point was this, this fellow in my six who was running jellyfish, Michael Bagley was the front man, working the jellyfish office in Washington, really jellyfish was being run by someone who was a British intelligence operative. This points back to what Carol quickly called the Anglo American establishment that there is a secret stranglehold of a certain British elite over the United States that persist to this day. In any case, this fellow told me that the organization that sent the Antifa youth to secretly record me in a pub in the shadow of the Empire State Building, and then make word salad out of the recording, take a two hour recording splice and I sentences and half sentences of it to defame me in this video that he then gave to the New York Times. The fellow in London told me that the organization that that Antifa youth was working for is a front for British intelligence for my five initially domestic British intelligence, but then potentially to move over to my six because that group hope not hate. Now I believe has an office in the United States as well, which would then change the jurisdiction from my five to my six. In any case, he told me after I was defamed and I grabbed this collar and basically was like, listen, you know, you're responsible for this situation that you know I was put in. He said, well, yeah, I mean, you know that organization is a front for British intelligence and whatever. So, so they made this recording. And I think, I think it was the early summer of 2017 maybe it was June something like that. I believe that they would have held on to that recording. For a long time, had I not resigned from the alt right corporation, and had I not been put in a position where I was about to write the Constitution of Iran. They used it only because I was no longer a valuable asset to them. And they couldn't allow me to redefine myself on the other side of the trap that they tried to lay for me. But that makes a lot of sense because they had compromised you in a very kind of ordinary old fashioned way, you know, not any kind of lurid sexual kind of stuff any illegal misconduct. They had just kind of compromised you with your position, if you will, but they usually that currency is spent very, very carefully. So I think your, your speculation there would seem to have have some weight to it right because otherwise play that card, they would have looked for you to run that out. The fish to take the bait and run it out to see before they really reel it in. Absolutely they wanted me to continue being a business partner of Spencer and you know these alt right characters and whatever and. But I mean I don't know what they were thinking as if I would sit there and watch the shit show at Charlottesville and continue to be associated with these people you know. But I do think that the issue with the writing the Constitution of Iran that was very significant in terms of their decision of when to try to burn me. And it's significant because what wound up happening after I resigned from the alt right corporation. And then after I was defamed in the New York Times and Newsweek and, you know, NBC and the intercept and all these publications. What happened even after that was that my role in the Iranian Renaissance became even more prominent. Because, look, I was removed from my teaching responsibilities as a result of this. And so I had a lot more time on my hands. My work with the Iran Renaissance kind of became full time work. And by the winter of 2017 2018 we had a plan for regime change in Iran. And, frankly, there was some level of involvement from the Iranian Renaissance, implementing that massive uprising that took place in the winter of 2017 December 2017 into January of 2018. It was an attempt at a kind of a coup against the Islamic Republic. And there's a number of reasons why that failed, which I don't know whether they're relevant or not to get into. But my point is this that with the kind of foresight that these people have in their project of analysis that these people in intelligence. They could have seen that coming. They could have seen, okay, there's going to be this moment in Iran. And if we let this guy write this Constitution, there will be a situation in which it could be fielded as amplifies his power. Yeah. And that's why they burned me when they did. So the last thing that I think the piece of this story that I really want to make sure we get in there is Jeffrey Mishlove and Jeff Kreipel, because no one both through this show multiple times. And on both of them, the relationships kind of started out one way and kind of turned into something else. But what you put your finger on in the book, Promethean Pirate is really important, I think for people to understand. And that is to understand the intellectual headspace that these guys have worked themselves into and each one of them is different, but each one of them are somewhat the same. And don't know how this fits into your overall understanding of this cultural battle that we're in. And I want to understand that. And I'd love to have you back on to kind of have that next level discussion. But the whole wokeness thing, and it's beyond wokeness, it's the willful ignorance thing. It's the naivete. You can't even say naivete doesn't even begin to describe it. So Kreipel, not so much Kreipel kind of is savvy enough to know that, you know, where he can step and where he can't step. But underneath that is very, very much a value system that is completely in line with what I'm saying. And Mishlove, on the other hand, is just, he just doesn't seem that bright to me. I mean, he's just, you know, I mean, but the damage that they do, and the people that they represent do has to be kind of put into perspective, which you do beautifully in the book. So maybe sketch that out. We got to, we got to talk about it. Listen, I don't want to sit here and trash Jeffrey Mishlove and Jeffrey Kreipel, look after all Jeffrey Kreipel was on my dissertation committee. You know, he was a quite a helpful person in my early years of involvement with the parapsychological and, you know, you followed your community. And Jeffrey Mishlove, I did 37 interviews with Jeffrey Mishlove. He was a close friend of mine. He scrubbed them all. He scrubbed, you're the most popular test on the new thinking louder. Literally, he went and he unlisted, he unlisted 37 interviews that I did with him over the course of five years, where I flew first to Las Vegas, and then to Albuquerque and spent countless hours, by the way, preparing him for these interviews. I would sit there with him and prepare him for these interviews for an hour or so before each one. And that's a lot of time and energy. And he basically scrubbed all of that. Okay. Now, why did he do that. And why did Jeff Kreipel basically cut me off, you could say. Because after what happened to me, where my academic career was destroyed. And we're ultimately and this is a long story. Okay, that, again, I don't think we can get into all the details of it here but as my work with the Iranian Renaissance progressed. Because we didn't have the kind of funding that I had been promised to pursue a more independent path. My associates got too close to alphabet agencies from my taste and I started to see a situation where I was working with people who were consulting for the CIA, I'm talking about in the Iranian opposition. Okay, and, and so I left the running opposition as well. For that reason, see. And so I was in a situation where I'm no longer. Working with anybody more over opportunities have been closed off to me. So what did I do I took an independent path. I framed my philosophical project as something called Prometheus and I attempted to start building an institution based on it. Where I wouldn't have to compromise my integrity and my values. Okay, it would be my project. And in the beginning in July of 2020, I came out and declared this movement with a manifesto. And on the first line of the manifesto is this is a declaration of war. And I go on to make it clear that what I mean by that is that it's a declaration of the kind of revolutionary war that let's say the founders of the United States fought against the British Empire. My vision of the struggle of Prometheus is the vision of a David at war with Goliath. Okay, so I'm not a pacifist. I think that change often has to come by means of violent struggle. And that that's how we've gained a lot of the most progressive advancements throughout the course of human history. The spirit in which I launched Prometheus and what wound up happening is that first Jeffrey, I don't know what order really it happened in but both of them wound up basically turning on me, because they were, how can I put it, scandalized by this militant discourse. I can see it slightly differently in that I'm so glad you covered this in the book because what you, the Mishlove's counter, you know, his explanation for why I'm excommunicating from Jason is so revealing so revealing you could watch hundreds and hundreds. Listen, he defends the Federal Reserve. He says that they're good people. They're conscientious. They're looking out for us. He says the United States government is not hiding anything from the people. There are no conspiracies. They've been totally transparent on UFOs and another subject. They're telling us the truth about UFOs as they learn them. And he laughs into the camera as he says he used to be anti-establishment back in the days of the Vietnam War, but these days he tends to trust the establishment. Well, excuse me, Jeffrey, but you know, did you not realize that the same people who drop napalm on Vietnamese children, the same people who ran the Rand Corporation and Dow Chemical are the people responsible for what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last few years. It's the same military industrial corporate complex. So, so basically this guy wound up revealing that he's very much for the establishment and part of the establishment. And I'm sorry to say the same is true of Jeffrey Kreipel and I laid this out in Promethean Pirate that Kreipel now effectively is running Esalen. And Esalen is part and parcel of this savvy Silicon Valley corporate intelligence complex. I mean, like Burning Man, for example, is the most infiltrated surveilled event by intelligence agencies that there is in the country. Okay, FBI, COINTELPRO people are crawling all over Burning Man. The largest encampment at Burning Man is the Plyagon fielded by the Pentagon. Okay, and so there and all these billionaires of Google and other corporations that show up there are totally involved in shaping the discourse of the so-called human potential movement that Esalen is at the center of. And so what wound up happened and if you look at Kreipel's latest book on the superhumanities, you see that he has swallowed lock, stock and barrel be cultural relativist identity politics discourse. How could he not? How could he not? Once you swim in those waters, once you make that intellectual compromise, then you can't, you know, wouldn't talk about for a while here is this idea and it's stunning to me because, you know, I started out kind of on the the spiritual path through science on this show and that's follow the data wherever it leads. Why are these phony scientists disguised as atheists and the Sam Harris's and the Dawkins? Why are they ignoring science and why are they not being straight up? Isn't that how we're supposed to do it? But that led me to conspiracy and that led me to. And what I don't understand about Mishlove, Kreipel and the like is they seem to be completely blind to this incredible naivete, you know, about deception and these willful blindness. It's willful blindness. It is willful blindness, but I can't quite wrap my head around it because there's a certain mind control aspect of it. You know, when like Mishlove's thing, I always point this out. It's so baby step kind of thing, but like Mishlove's talking about the JFK assassination. I don't believe a conspiracy theory is like the JFK and such. I know that's really old, but I just want to say, you know, 1978, they had a Senate Select Committee on assassinations and the finding of that committee was conspiracy. So, you know, I know you've been kind of mind controlled into thinking that, you know, conspiracy theory, which is a CIA invented term doesn't kind of exist. But I don't know how you're really functioning in this larger intellectual pool or cesspool, whatever it is that we're swimming in, if you don't have some kind of grip on this stuff. And that's, that's what I think you reveal, but I guess I'd spin it a little bit differently that if they can't understand jellyfish, you know, and it's not, it's one thing to say, oh, you're full of shit, Jason, it didn't happen that way. Fine. Okay, that's one. Neither of them doubted a word I said about how things happen. That wasn't the issue at all. So how do you make that, that intellectual temporary blindness to say therefore I will, I will look away. That's a lame ass question. Here's the real question. How do you understand that this is going to tee up and follow on interview we're going to do. But how do you understand that within the larger, larger intellectual framework that you were, you were laying out there, which I, by the way, don't totally agree with and have some interesting data points that I want to discuss with you. But you get my question, right? Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't entirely agree with myself a lot of the time. So I mean, that's the nature of being a thinker. But no, I get your question. I think the answer is really dark. And it has to do with money. And the worst thing that Michelov said in his explanations of why he canceled is that he said that George Johnny doesn't really consider the power of finance, and that maybe commerce time where commerce trumps ethos, or maybe commerce is an ethos. This is the problem here. Okay, because what I am most opposed to is the view that everyone can be bought and everything can be traded. And that's the jellyfish worldview. So in a perverse irony, this guy is ultimately siding with the people who defamed me and destroyed my career. And by believing that all ideological conflicts, all sources of spiritual struggle can ultimately be liquidated through the lubricant of commerce. And interestingly enough, shortly after he canceled me, Jeffrey cry Jeffrey Cripal shared a committee that awarded Jeffrey Michelov with half a million dollars of prize money from Bob Bigelow, and Jeffrey Michelov, by the way, had the courtesy to email me telling me how I screwed myself out of a lot of that money that he would have shared with me, which I thought was particularly lacking in grace considering my situation. In any case, how ironic that after commerce is an ethos, and I don't understand that that everything can ultimately be resolved by money. And then Cripal winds up being the judge on a committee that awards Michelov, who by the way already is a multimillionaire with half a million dollars of Bob Bigelow's prize money. I'll take it back just to a little bit of a historical context because, you know, this he's talking about China right now, and he's because this is roll the clock back. So this is back when these people are jumping out of the factory and they have nets down below, you know, because as long as they keep putting those iPhones together, that's okay. And maybe we can sleep at night with the thought that, well, it's better than they're at least a little bit capitalist, maybe they have a little bit more freedom than they did before. So maybe the great dollar is kind of working its magic through the whole thing. So that's the context that he's saying it in. And it's interesting. I think now because the tables have shifted a little bit just like, you know, Putin was world economic forum global leader and now not so much that's gruff in the internet. China was a friend now. No, you can't buy the AI chips because those might be strategically important. You know, maybe there'll be a South China war. Again, if you're if you're in that mindset, then these things can kind of slip past you in a way that you just can't think deeply about and that's what strikes me with that commerce as the lubricant for morality really because that's because that's what we're talking about. You're talking about morality, a spiritually based foundation for understanding the world that has to be out the window if you say commerce trumps it. I mean, the random thought but would you like to expound on that a little bit? No, that's exactly it. Look, you know, I have been vehemently opposed to China for years because not because I have anything against Chinese people as a racer ethnicity. You know, the Dow to Qing was my favorite book when I was in my, you know, early 20s late late teens, early 20s. I've been opposed to, by the way, the Taoists have been persecuted in China going back thousands of years, and the Chan Chinese Buddhists as well. So, look, my problem with China has to do with the fact that they are the model for the totalitarian technocratic economic system of the future, and they're the vehicle by means of which this system is going to be imposed in the world. The test site. Yeah, the test site. I've been ringing the alarm bell on that for years. And there's a lot of things about this that could be said, which I don't know. I mean, I even in Promethean pirate, I didn't mention some of them. I mean, look, his adopted son was raised in China. There are other factors here, okay, where this man is not thinking clearly on top of which he claims to be a pacifist. See, these are the things that really rub me the wrong way. If you are like a practitioner of Patanjali system of yoga, and, you know, you're a Samkhaya Hindu, and on the basis of this deep metaphysical worldview, you're a consistent pacifist. Fine, I have a philosophical disagreement with you, or let's say you're a Theravada Buddhist. And on that basis, you're a consistent pacifist. No problem. We can have a philosophical argument about that. But when you claim you're a pacifist, and you have giant campaign contributions to Hillary Clinton, right, who is an actual warmonger, responsible for attempted regime change in Libya that, you know, catalyzed a civil war with who knows how many thousands of Libyans have been killed at this point, responsible for, you know, the what was it 15 years ago, I don't know, over a decade occupation of Iraq, and the starvation of all these Iraqi children, when you give huge campaign contributions to candidates that are fielded by the military industrial complex of the United States and then you want to say, you're a pacifist and I'm a warmonger. Well, frankly, that makes you a hypocrite is what it makes you. So, look, that's what happened with Michelot. I think that I was canceled ultimately by his hypocrisy, not on the basis of any principal pacifism. I think you're canceled by his naivete. I mean, I think unless you're able to. And that's what I guess we're saying and I'm putting forth, you know, that's why I think what you laid out here is so important, because unless someone can process what you're saying not agree with what you're saying, but process what you're saying as the kind of next level of how this game is being played. And the next level in a way that is going to surprise people if they think it through, because they go, Well, wait a minute, this guy isn't like some political figurehead, this guy isn't some labor leader or some, you know, he's an intellectual. That's what he does. Why is he being manipulated played in so, so hard. I mean, he played hard in this thing. And I think that's really, really important. And if these other guys were talking about I'm not putting them down. Jeff Kripel seems like a terrific guy to me and every time I've talked to him. But if they're not getting this, then they're just not in the conversation. The conversation is just going to go on and they're just going to be at a different level with it and which is where they're at. There's a new responsibility that comes with being an intellectual. If you read my work beginning with Prometheus and Atlas, going forward, my views are actually if they're to be categorized at all on the extent political spectrum, they're very far to the left. I mean, I like to think of myself as an upwinger, rather than the left winger or right winger. This was a term coined by this Iranian futurist FMS van Diary in the 1970s. He wrote this book called upwingers. And so my views obviously, you know, for my views of how society should ideally be reorganized sociopolitically, don't fit the binary of the left right paradigm at all. But if you were to force them into that, they certainly wouldn't be right wing. I mean, I have like no right wing political views at all when it comes to, you know, how society should be organized. So it's a real travesty. What's been done. The only thing that people could identify in my thinking that maybe someone might argue aligns with the right is that I've advanced a very rigorous critique of democracy. I'm not for democracy. Okay, in the way that Plato wasn't for democracy in the way that the founders of the United States considered democracy a tyranny of the majority, as much as I'm an advocate for individual liberty, I'm opposed to democracy which I consider mobocracy. Okay, but I don't even see that as particularly right wing because look, I mean Stalin wasn't for democracy either. There have been just as many authoritarian left wing movements that have taken power in the world as authoritarian right wing movements. And so the fact that I've somehow been characterized as some right wing thinker is ludicrous. You know what maybe that brings us to a way to to wrap this up by kind of going back to the beginning of Promethean pirate your latest book. And that's that you talk about the philosopher, and you talk about how the true philosopher is a rare breed. And I love how you broaden what we need to understand the role of the philosopher to the spiritual to the political to the activist to all these aspects, which are just the exact opposite of where they've taken philosophy which is such a dorky kind of, you know, mathematical logical system chakras as a philosopher about what it means to you to be a philosopher. And something called meta philosophy meta philosophy is your understanding or definition of what counts for philosophy in the first place right what makes a philosopher. And I have a very demanding meta philosophy, which I lay out in Promethean pirate. I think the criterion, the criterion for being a philosopher is very high. And let me explain why that criterion I set in Promethean pirate is not arbitrary. So, so what I say is that to be a philosopher, you have to either discover or develop concepts in all the domains of philosophical thought, which extend from metaphysics or probably better called ontology. In other words, an understanding of the nature of reality epistemology or the theory of knowledge. And then ethics, which is related to aesthetics because aesthetics as a branch of philosophy that has to do with perception and judgment of things that aren't purely mathematical or scientific is very bound up with ethics and I would even argue that if you go back in you look at like, say, Aristotle's Nikomachian ethics, Aristotle's criterion for the good is ultimately aesthetic. And then you see this again very much in Nietzsche. So, ontology epistemology ethics aesthetics and then politics. And it's not enough for the concepts that you develop to cut across all of these domains. They have to also be somehow consistent with one another. I mean, your ethics and politics has to follow from your ontology and epistemology. So, it's not enough that let's say, known Shomsky who did serious work in epistemology, or Bertrand Russell, who was a serious metaphysician and epistemologist also happened, the two of them also happened to be political activists and Russell Big, let's say, peace movement protest leader, and then, you know, Shomsky of course with his kind of anarchist opposition to the corporate military industrial complex. They don't have a political philosophy that follows from their ontology and epistemology. They happen to also be political activists. So, by my criterion they're not philosophers. Whereas let's say somebody like Ayn Rand, whatever you might think of her, okay, whether you agree or disagree with her, and I have big problems with various aspects of her thinking. But she developed an internally consistent and cohesive metaphysics epistemology ethics aesthetics and politics. Okay, and that's the work of a philosopher. Now why is it important, why is it important to have that kind of sort of coherent and integral thinking. It's important because otherwise, and this goes back to our discussion about Mishlove and Krypo, otherwise, you will have certain naive commitments that go unquestioned, you will have a politics that you naively subscribe to that you haven't dared to question. Very politically savvy but you may be a materialist ontologically or epistemologically, right, until and unless you're willing to question all assumptions in all areas of human endeavor. And then, and then after you've questioned them develop some new concepts, having to do with them. You're not working as a philosopher, a philosopher has to challenge all presuppositions preconceptions and cannot have any naive commitments to anything, which is why philosophers have been persecuted and martyred throughout the course of history, because they're dangerous, they're questioning everything within themselves, and then, in a way that destabilizes society by extension of that is dangerous. Okay, from Pythagoras who had his schools burned down onto the martyrdom of Socrates and Giordano Bruno, you know becoming a human torch in a public square in Rome. It's all having to do with the duty of the philosopher to question in every domain of human existence and enterprise, and to break new ground, right, in developing concepts that have to deal with these areas of human life. That was beautifully said. And I think anyone who hears that can understand how relevant it is today in a world that has taken the mind control game that's been going on throughout history and just upscaled it with the technology and what the technology is hinting towards is a dramatic increase in that. So I think, would you go that far as to say that this is also maybe the first line of defense against that kind of mind control, mind manipulation. Of course, absolutely. And again, that's why philosophers have been so badly persecuted, because they're the ones who call bullshit on systems of mind control and social engineering. It's been terrific having you on. Again, folks, Jason Giordani, you can find all those books on Amazon and on his website, JasonrizaGiordani.com will have a link to it. Love to have you back a lot to still all the other good stuff lies beyond this. And we'd love to have you back to talk about it. It will be my absolute pleasure, Alex. It's been great. And let's please keep in touch. Thanks again to Dr. Giordani for joining me today on Skeptico. The one question I tee up from this interview. And it's the one that I really wrestle with is, what would you do in his situation? What would you do if you felt like your people, a whole country had been kind of overrun, but the really crazy totalitarian regime, and you felt you had an obligation to change it? What would you do? What would you not do? I don't know. It's a tough one. So let me know your thoughts until next time. Take care and bye for now.