American Thought Leaders - Exposing the ‘Controligarchs’ With Seamus Bruner

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2“The human rights abuses and the crackdowns on dissent and all of the terrible things that you see in China? Our elites love those things.”In this episode, I sit down with Seamus Bruner, co-author of “Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life.”“The [World Economic Forum] members control more than the entire GDP of the United States, more than the GDP of China,” says Mr. Bruner. “So, they're more powerful, economically speaking, than pretty much any country in the world.”Mr. Bruner breaks down the American billionaires at the heart of the swamp, and separates fact from fiction as to how much money and control globalist oligarchs really wield.“OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which is making these technologies—I don't think it's a coincidence that they are funding study after study on universal basic income. And a universal basic income, I mean, do people think that they’re going to get a UBI of a million dollars a year and get to live the lifestyle of the very wealthy? No. It’s going to be approximately $20 to $30,000 a year,” says Mr. Bruner. “There won’t be a way to climb up. What America is so loved and cherished for is the ability to climb the ranks and build a life for yourself. It will be this more impoverished class.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The human rights abuses and the crackdowns on dissent and all of the terrible things that you see in China, our elites love those things. In this episode, I sit down with Seamus Bruner, co-author of Controligarchs, exposing the billionaire class, their secret deals, and the globalist plot to dominate your life. The WEF members control more than the entire GDP of the United States, more than the GDP of China, so they're more powerful economically speaking than pretty much any country in

the world. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, I don't think it's a coincidence that they are funding study after study on universal basic income. And a universal basic income, it's going to be approximately twenty to thirty thousand dollars a year, will be this more impoverished class. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse. The Fed raised rates for the fifth time this year, and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is telling Americans to brace themselves for potentially more pain ahead. But there is one way to hedge against inflation.

American Hartford Gold makes it simple and easy to diversify your savings and retirement accounts with physical gold and silver. With one short phone call, they can have physical gold and silver delivered right to your door or inside your IRA or 401k. American Hartford Gold is one of the highest rated firms in the country, with an A-plus rating with a Better Business Bureau and thousands of satisfied clients. If you call them right now, they'll give you up to $2,500 of free silver and a free safe on qualifying orders. Call 855-862-3377. That's 855-862-3377. Or text American to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377. Or text American to 65532. Seamus Bruner, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. It's always a pleasure to be with you, Jan.

It's been a few years since we talked about Fallout, your book with John Solomon, and you've come up with something. You know, when I first read the title, I thought to myself, I don't even know if I want to know. It dwells into the realm of what many of us believed, even go back five or 10 years, would be complete conspiracy theories. Except I'm very familiar with your work. And I know that you're extremely meticulous and everything you do is deeply supported. So before we continue, how did you get into all this? I mean, because this isn't your first rodeo, but this is maybe the first rodeo of this scale, right?

Yeah, so I studied political science in college. I'm sort of ashamed to admit I thought I wanted to maybe go into politics or possibly even lobbying. I'm less ashamed about the politics, more about the lobbying. I studied Mandarin in college, thought I might want to be a lobbyist for China. That's how naive I was. I was like, oh, that seems like a profitable endeavor. And then I volunteered for this gentleman named Peter Schweitzer, who I know your viewers are probably familiar with Schweitzer.

And it was just one book with Peter Schweitzer titled Throw Them All Out that disabused me of all notions of being a lobbyist or in politics. And I just found it is so much more fun to follow the money and expose the corruption because I've always been passionate about exposing government corruption. And so I think eight books with Peter Schweitzer later here. I mean, the Clinton Cash book was one of my favorites of his. Working on that book, exposing the Biden ties to China. We found the Bohai Harvest billion-dollar private equity deal. We really blew the lid off

of the Ukraine Burisma story. That would be in the book Secret Empires. I wrote my first book, Compromised, How Money and Politics Drive FBI Corruption, when I got to the end of several Schweitzer books and thought, how on earth is this allowed to go on? And time after time, we found that the Department of Justice, the FBI were sort of the beating heart of the so-called swamp. And when we saw conflict of interest waivers granted to Hillary Clinton, her queen for a day, immunity protections when her aides were testifying, we found that the DOJ was a big problem. So I wrote that book and I got hooked up with John Solomon for Fallout, Nuclear Bribes, Russian Spies and the Washington Lies that Enriched the Clinton and Biden Dynasties. That was a really

eye-opening book. That was before Russia invaded Ukraine, and we essentially predicted that if the policies of appeasement from the Obama administration were not rapidly reversed, things like the Russian reset, the Uranium One deal, there were other deals that we gave to Russia in 2009, 2010, then there would be a big conflict and sure enough. Well, let me just touch on that for one moment. Well, you argue that the policies of appeasement are actually what led Russia to do what it's doing. People on the conservative side will say, well, just give them Ukraine and it'll be fine. It's actually all our fault.

It's just because we're aggressors with NATO and so forth that they're doing that. So we might as well just give them Ukraine. It'll be great. We'll be friends again. Yeah. Right? I mean, appeasement never works with strongmen. Like, you know, they just take more and more and more.

So that has been shown time and again. You don't... peace through strength, I think, as Ronald Reagan and other great men have said. Right. That's interesting because it's not necessarily obvious to everyone. It's certainly obvious to the Poles and the Czechs, who I was speaking with recently, the National Security Advisor and so forth, but not necessarily to Americans, or at least some Americans. So I guess I want to know, who are the Controligarchs? Well, the Controligarchs are a group of billionaires, but they're not like your average billionaire. There's

over 3,000 billionaires in the world, but this is really a group of maybe 20 to 30 sort of thought leaders, globalist thought leaders, not American thought leaders. These are globalist thought leaders. And they have this vision for the future that is not something you want to be a part of, but I don't think you're going to have a choice. I often say on the show that the pandemic was the largest upward transfer of wealth in history. And you can actually qualify this for me, so please do that. Well, the characters in this book, that's right.

It absolutely was. The middle and lower classes lost more than $1 trillion, and the billionaire class added several trillion to their personal net worths. The characters in this book were, I totaled it all up, they were approximately $659 billion is how much they were worth in 2019. These are men like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, even Elon Musk makes an appearance. By the end of the pandemic, or when I stopped tracking it, because you have to put an end date, I put that in 2022, it was over $1.25 trillion personal net worth. And that's just, nobody can even fathom $1.2 trillion. How did you pick the 20 or 30 people that you mentioned out of this larger group? Well, I started with the Forbes list of billionaires and started at the top. And so

you, of course, have Elon Musk at the top on and off with Bernard Arnault, the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, and went down from there. And of course, Mark Zuckerberg is right up there. Jeff Bezos is right up there. And this was not supposed to be some anti-capitalist screed, of course. I mean, I'm a fan of capitalism. But these guys are not like your average capitalists. And Klaus Schwab features prominently in the book. We are unable to find precisely how much Klaus Schwab is worth, but we know that he has a palatial estate beside the World Economic Forum in Davos. And he's coined this term, I'm sure you've heard of it, stakeholder

capitalism, which is not at all like free market capitalism. And it's much closer to state-run capitalism like they have in China. Well, of course, we've been covering these issues quite a bit. We have Roman Balmakov's recent documentary. We have The Shadow State, another documentary, The Eye. But you kind of bring in a whole bunch of relationships of people who aren't, some of them are control oligarchs, some of whom are not, and you trace it back. So what did you find? Well, I studied the previous billionaires and oligarchs in American history and, of course, the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and came across the Rockefellers. And this book came out of the pandemic. And so I had heard of the Rockefeller

Foundation. I'd heard a lot about Bill Gates and the vaccines and all of these things. And a lot of it just sounded like conspiracy theory. And so I thought to myself, well, I'm going to get to the bottom of this. I'm going to see what the Rockefeller Foundation is about. I'm going to see what Bill Gates's apparent obsession with vaccines and global health is. Is he really just this really kind philanthropist who wants to save the world from disease and death. It didn't really jive with the stated warnings of Bill Gates that were overpopulated. I was wondering how could saving more lives lessen the threat of overpopulation. And you see the conspiracy theories so-called about that, trying to depopulate the planet. So I just wanted

to get to the bottom of that. And it really all started with the Rockefellers and the Rockefeller Foundation. That's over 100 years ago, pushing 150 years ago, that John D. Rockefeller made the first billion-dollar fortune in America. Okay. And so, well, tell me about the Rockefeller Foundation and what its mandate has been, I guess. Well, so John D. Sr., he went by Sr., John D. Sr., he was the best oil man in history. Nobody could get oil out of the ground better than he could. Nobody could develop uses for the various byproducts of petroleum. And so he was just an expert in that. He had a son, John D. Jr. And I've read through all the biographies that are quoted extensively in the book, the ones that were given great access to the Rockefeller archives and to the family.

And John D. Jr. really struggled, as a lot of children of enormously wealthy people do, where how could I ever fill these shoes? The Rockefellers had this advisor, Frederick Gates, no relation to Bill Gates, and Frederick Gates warned that your money is growing too fast. You have to find ways to get rid of it or else it's going to swallow you up. And so John D. Jr. became really the great philanthropist of the family. But the things that he started pouring money into were maybe not so great. And they were really prototypes for Bill Gates.

I mean, there's some great overlap in what the Rockefeller Foundation of today is doing with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They partner on a lot of initiatives, including just last week there was this digital ID initiative sponsored by the United Nations that they partnered on. And so I went through every single, and it is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of 990 filings, the IRS nonprofit annual reports, and crunched the numbers and found that the Rockefeller Foundation has been investing in global health for about a century. They set up the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1904. They began studying vaccines. I was like, oh, this is an interesting coincidence,

studying viruses. And they learned, the Rockefellers learned, that having these global health programs gives you a lot of power around the world. If you go into an African nation and you claim that you can cure malaria, they will turn over essentially the keys to the kingdom. And so this is where this model, the Controligarch model, was born, where you do good and you do well. And, you know, Standard Oil would then go and extract resources from the countries that had the diseases and made them much more rich. And you kind of see that with Bill Gates today. And of course, a trillion has four commas and a billion has three commas. And it's very hard to read these things. You have to kind of one, two, three, okay, that's a billion. The wealth transfer remains ongoing. It is happening in the form of inflation,

where just unfathomable sums have been printed, which dilutes our dollar. It doubles your cost of groceries in some cases. It doubles the cost that you are paying. And where did that money go? I mean, we've seen that much of it was fraudulently taken from the public coffers via the, whether it's the CARES Act or the other legislation. The Biden administration signed this Inflation Reduction Act, which is very, you know, prominently featured in the book. And how much money from that is right now going into a lot of these green tech companies that benefit the bottom line of the characters in this book. The wealth transfer remains ongoing because the investments of these control-a-garks into

these green companies, now they of course often sell their stake before the company goes belly up. But the money from the taxpayers goes into the company, that increases the characters' bottom line. And then our value is diluted when money is printed to also capitalize these companies. So you're losing money in two different ways there. So explain to me exactly how this inflation actually benefits.

Because you dedicate quite a bit of time in here. But just broadly speaking, it's not necessarily obvious. Aren't they losing money as well? Because the value of those dollars is going down. So how is inflation actually a benefit for the, let's call it the 1% or the 0.1%. So when the Inflation Reduction Act, or I should say inappropriately titled, sets aside $400 billion to invest into green companies, that money, those green companies go and say, oh, well, we need a couple million dollars, $10 million.

One of Bill Gates' companies, TerraPower, has gotten $100 million in taxpayer funding. And I call it welfare for the oligarchs. It's corporate welfare that increases the value of their investments. They subsidize any losses and all of the profits are then privatized. It's a really remarkable thing that I talk about in the book. So if I get this straight, you're not saying that the inflation itself is making the money. It's sort of the activity around the inflation or in these laws that's doing it. Yeah, Milton Friedman said there's only one thing that causes inflation, and that is the government printing, increasing the money supply. So when the government allots hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions of dollars, and we get a $1,600 check, but many of these green companies get million-dollar checks, multi-million-dollar checks.

And then those green companies either grow in value and increase the holdings of their investors, such as Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos is heavily invested in these same kind of technologies like Rivian. And George Soros actually is invested in Rivian. And so where do they actually see the returns on that? Well, George Soros dumps his Rivian stock shortly. So Rivian announced, okay, so Rivian, this electric vehicle company, announces that we have received taxpayer fundings to bring a new electric vehicle to market. Investors put their money in when the stock is low,

the stock raises, and every announcement of more funding from the government raises the stock. Oh, the government is invested in this product, the value goes up. And then when there are signs of maybe this isn't going to be a great investment, the investors will sell, capitalize on those gains. And the taxpayer funding, by the way, never gets refunded. And so that's how we lose. Our money is devalued. It is invested into a company. And if the company wins, the profits from that

are put into the pockets of their investors. And if the company folds, it's... If there's a common theme that I see through control-a-garcs, for example, it's, you know, there's a lot more going on than meets the eye, always. And this is actually, this is what fuels, people will call it the conspiracy theories. But in a lot of cases, it's a lot simpler, as you're already alluding to. It just could have to do with money and control, right? But so tell me about that. Well, so with Clinton Cash, and this is one of the main reasons I loved that project so much, and I was younger then, and given the sort of intern work of crunching the numbers, I was good with

spreadsheets and kind of digging into the weeds. And so Peter told me, well, why don't you go through the Clinton Foundation documents, the 990s and total up how much the Clintons got? It always starts with kind of a really basic question. How much did they make and what did they get paid for? And so I went line by line through these IRS filings and the speech payments from Bill Clinton. I put them all into a spreadsheet. I called it the Clinton Cash Trail because we're following the money here. And that method has just paid dividends. I mean, I build a cash trail for every investigation we go on, whether it's with Burisma and the payments that Hunter Biden received or the some $31 million that the Biden family received from the highest levels of Chinese Communist

Party intelligence. You just put the payments into a spreadsheet, you total them up, and it's hard, but it's actually simpler than it sounds. So I did that with the Controlligarchs. I started with net worths and just calculating how much money did they make over the course of the pandemic. In many cases they doubled up or near doubled up. Mark Zuckerberg for example in 2019 was worth about 68 billion with a b dollars. And I just checked earlier today, he's close to $119 billion. So that is quite a large jump. And then Elon Musk was probably one of the largest jumps. I mean, he's anywhere from $200 to $250 billion.

He was down near $20 billion before the pandemic. Now, it's not directly because of the pandemic, but various factors. I mean, in the case of Facebook, everybody was locked at home and Facebook saw 2 billion people. And it was never that way. Facebook never had 2 billion people on their app every single day. But during the pandemic, it shot up to about 2 billion. That drives the ad revenue and drives the growth of the company. And then that's the bottom line of the owner. So that was the beginning thesis is these guys have done very well throughout the pandemic. There seems to be a

lot of conspiracy theories and depopulation stuff going on with Bill Gates. I'd love to separate the fact from the fiction. Well, right. Well, no, so exactly. I mean, this is what I'd like to kind of tackle here. For example, we know Amazon did really well during the pandemic for obvious reasons, right? And frankly, a lot of big business did very well during the pandemic. A lot of small business was decimated because of the way the rules were constructed. One of the things that people wonder about is the decisions that were made were unarguably terrible for society. And the question is, some people say, well, this is all kind of an arrangement by these incredibly affluent people

to give themselves more wealth and more control. And other people say, well, this is just really gross incompetence and hubris that can control, can yield these kinds of results. And we just decided to kind of ignore the underlying actual science and the voices of reason. Where do you land on that? I don't think they're that stupid. I don't think Bill Gates is too stupid to know that masks don't work. I think most people realize that you're breathing in out of a mask and it's winter and you see your breath coming out. Of course, like Dr. Fauci said, maybe a droplet here or there. But I mean, the lockdowns and then you just look at China's zero COVID policy, which they praised. I mean,

they say that China is being very effective. It had no effect, really, and it was totally tyrannical. And then you see the censorship that comes out of the misinformation of the pandemic. It is entirely too convenient. So I don't have him saying that, well, we're doing this for control. But when Klaus Schwab says that the pandemic presents this great opportunity for a reset of capitalism, and then he says, we'll build back in a greener way, you sit and you think, now what does COVID have to do with green energy? And so, you know, is Bill Gates ignoring the underlying science because of, you know, some, you know, I'm not sure, but... Deeply held belief. I mean, that we see that a lot, right? Like you just think that, you know, the world works a particular way and you want to make sure that everyone does it right and they don't have it right. And so maybe we need to encourage them to understand things correctly

because it's not necessarily entirely cynical, even though it might be incredibly financially beneficial. I guess that's what I'm saying. Right. So there's a professor at MIT, Joseph Wiesenbaum, who has this great quote, and you just reminded me of it, where he talks about the Silicon Valley guys, people like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, who have got their start designing programs and writing software code and building worlds on the computer.

And they were essentially the gods of the worlds they constructed. They would fine tune and tinker with the code here, and it would produce a certain result within their system. But they have now tried to take that ability from the software world and exert it in the real world, where if they just turn the dials and, oh, if everybody were to just give up meat with no idea what the ripple effects might be. The meat is a great example where it's like they're about to slaughter tens of thousands of cows in Ireland because ostensibly methane is going to end the planet, at least in the words of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So it's stuff like that.

It might be hubris. It may just be hubris. But it does happen to benefit their bottom line. So the subtitle of Roman Balmakov's new film is, of course, Will You Eat the Bugs? They believe it's an actual solution to the climate crisis. Where do you land on this? Well, they're incredibly nutritious. And they don't produce any methane,

so bugs are actually a very green food source. No, in seriousness, the largest edible insect farm in the world is going online in December, this December. And so 100,000 metric tons of edible mealworm powder will be shipped all over the world. Bill Gates, of course, is a major investor in several insect-based protein companies, Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg. They're all investing in this food. So why would they do that if that's not on the agenda? Well, so let's switch gears a little bit, okay? You've looked into forays

into communist China by the American oligarchs, so to speak, long before I was even fully aware of it. So tell me about that. Yeah, that's right. So in fact, part of this project grew out of Peter Schweitzer's last two books, Red Handed being one of them, How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win. And the thesis is that, you know, the elites in America, whether it's on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley or in Washington, sort of look the other way on the human rights abuses and the, you know, authoritarian style of its communist government. And they just see China as this big money-making opportunity. And that is certainly true. They've gotten very wealthy. Companies like Amazon selling Chinese-made goods

by and large. And so, yeah, there's certainly the profit motive in doing business with China. But it was during the pandemic that they were praising China's response to the pandemic. And anybody could see that China's response to the pandemic. And anybody could see that China's response to the pandemic, not only did it not cure COVID in any way, it was extremely destructive. And it just so happened to put a lot of money in the people who were pushing this policy's pockets. I mean, it's just that's that's just entirely too convenient. And so from that, I went back and I said, well, how long have they, people like Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab, who is very complimentary of China. When did Klaus Schwab first start

loving China? Well, he goes back to the 70s. And I then thought, well, why don't I find out like when these characters started loving China? And with Rockefeller, I was stunned to find that Standard Oil first sold its first kerosene products in China in 1879. That's roughly 50, 70 years before the Chinese Communist Party was even founded. I was like, man, so they've, the Rockefellers and Standard Oil have been doing business with China ever since through the formation of the Chinese Communist Party. And then you get to the World Economic Forum and they boast very proudly on their website how economists from Davos and from the West went to China and helped Deng Xiaoping with the reforms that opened up. Henry Kissinger, of course, was instrumental in opening up relations with China.

And so it started to look more and more like that China was this hybrid model of communism and capitalism was coaxed and helped along by Western economists who now, like Klaus Schwab, want to form a very similar system that he calls stakeholder capitalism. And it has the elements of censorship and dissent and cracking down on dissent. It is a government that is watching you everywhere you go with the digital ID. And ultimately, in the endgame chapter, I can say the endgame chapter is CCP-style social credit score system, where if you post the wrong thing online, you know, demerits. Just last week, Congress passed a kill switch for every new vehicle after 2026. The government needs to be able to shut your car down. I mean, for national security reasons, ostensibly, but it's not exactly clear why you would need to be able to shut someone's car down. It sounds like something that China would want to be able to do. And so time and again, you see the human rights abuses and the crackdowns on dissent and all of the terrible things that you

see in China. Our elites love those things. They praise the crackdowns. And so I show in the book that they're not, you know, we say China's our adversary in America, or maybe they're our competitor in America. China's not the adversary of Silicon Valley. China's not Wall Street, Silicon Valley. It's really their partner. I've often said that I'm becoming more and more of a free speech absolutist, right? And then I thought, well, that's not exactly true. I've been actually studying the I'm becoming more and more of a free speech absolutist. And then I thought, well, that's not exactly true. I've been actually studying the First Amendment, what it means, what is protected speech.

And I realized the First Amendment is actually a lot more than speech. It's freedom of conscience or freedom of religion, but actually really freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, and freedom of press. And these are actually, to me, the core human rights. When I see that being abridged, that's what I realized. I'm just sharing with you a little bit of my thinking. When I'm seeing that being abridged, that means everything's going to be abridged. That's been my rough... I think you're absolutely right about that. And I think the pandemic showed that those rights were obliterated, whether it was the freedom of

association, people were arrested, pastors were arrested for holding church services. Of course, your freedom of speech, and that violates freedom of religion too, but your freedom of speech was curtailed if you questioned the so-called science. And these are very these are core principles of America that were just in the you know, with a wave of a wand essentially done away with. And what Control Guards, the book really shows is that a lot of people think, oh, well, the pandemic is over. Why would you know, I've read, you know, about the pandemic and it's over. It's like, no, the pandemic was a blueprint for the future. And you see that with just an, you know, there will be crisis after crisis after crisis and climate change. You know,

Klaus Schwab is the one who built the bridge from the pandemic to climate change. He says that we have to rebuild in a greener way. And so questioning climate change is, you know, you're called the denier, of course. And then they're using climate change in the same way that they used COVID to change our behavior, change our way of life. Gavin Newsom in California has announced that they'll be banning gas vehicles. You see that in Europe, they're banning certain types of fertilizers. This is why the Dutch farmers were protesting. And it's effectively a takeover of the industries that run our lives from energy. I mean, energy

touches on everything. Health, food, information, of course. I mean, information is possibly the most critical industry that should not be tightly controlled. As you said, you're a free speech absolutist. If you can't freely share information, as the big tech platforms are always trying to clamp down on, in concert with the government, you're totally in the dark and you've lost everything. Just a quick comment. I can't help but think about Elon Musk, right, because you mentioned him as one of these characters, yet his position on a number of these issues at least seems to be very different, like free speech and so forth. Why do you include him?

Well, I applaud Elon Musk and all he's done with Twitter and just being one of the lone dissenting billionaires out there who's using his wealth to help the people share information on X, formerly Twitter. He certainly is a climate change true believer. I mean, he built his fortune on Tesla, which is an electric vehicle company. And this is one of those kind of ironic things about, you know, there's tons and tons of research and studies that show that electric vehicles are, at the end of the day, just as polluting as gas-powered vehicles, from the pit mining of the lithium to the entire production of the batteries. That requires a ton of energy.

So I don't put Elon fully in the control-a-gark camp. He's mentioned in the book some of the initiatives he funds. I sort of trace back his techno... He's got a technocrat streak, a technocratic streak, which his grandfather was really the godfather of technocracy in Canada. And technocracy holds that the elites, the engineers, the scientists are much better at making decisions than the people. It's an inherently undemocratic system, technocracy is. And you see that Elon has this technocratic streak where, you know, with

the Neuralink is one of the things that we get into in the book and its ambitions seem slightly dystopian with, you know, psychic text messaging or whatever they're trying to work on. Well, I mean, dystopian, but people with all disabilities, you can imagine, like, you know, incredible breakthroughs. I mean, realistically, right, with exactly this technology, you have people learning how to speak, you know, just using their thoughts through these interfaces or being able to speak again. You know, there's many, many, let's say, benevolent examples of the use of these technologies. Yeah, those are the thin edge of the wedge, the thin side where, yeah, who could be against a paraplegic person receiving the ability to walk?

But that is not the end goal of technologies like Neuralink. And there's a company, BlackRock Neurotech which is putting microchips in brains. Elon Musk when he describes Neuralink the things that he appears most excited about are the uploading, you know, he's claimed to upload his brain to the cloud. Ultimately these tech guys they have this ambition to live forever. They all speak about it, that mRNA technology is something that can really extend life. I don't know if you've come across any

of this World Economic Forum visionary. You all know Harari's writings or teachings. Of course. Harari says that it's going to be a new class, a cast system. Not everybody's going to be able to get the bio upgrades and the live forever microchip type thing. It's going to create a class that can have that and a class that cannot have that. And maybe a class that doesn't want to have it. I might add, right? Yes, of course, a class that doesn't want to have it, too. So as long as it's an option, then that's no problem. But with AI, we don't really seem to have a voice in how fast this technology is speeding up.

It doesn't seem like there's even time to have a conversation about it. And study after study shows that the AI revolution, while amazing, you could find a cure to a disease, but what if the result is 40% of the U.S. workforce cannot find a job and is just relegated to welfare and poverty? And OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which is making these technologies, I don't think it's a coincidence that they are funding study after study on universal basic income. And a universal basic income, I mean, do people think that they're going to get a UBI of a million dollars a year and get to live the lifestyle of the very wealthy. No, it's going to be approximately $20,000 to $30,000 a year.

And there won't be a way to climb up like what America is so loved and cherished for is the ability to climb the ranks and build a life for yourself. It will be this more impoverished class. This is being sold as just inevitable, so you have to come up with a solution. I mean, that's how I understand it. Inevitable, and nobody gets a vote. And that's one of the things the book really gets into is, I've tracked the politicians for over a decade,

but the thing about politicians is they are elected and therefore they're accountable to their voters. None of the people in this book were elected. Klaus Schwab wasn't elected. Bill Gates hasn't been elected as the leader of public health. He kind of just assumed that role because of the amount of wealth he's accumulated. So if they're not elected, then they're not accountable. And you can't really have a society that the leaders of which are not held accountable. So you've mentioned the World Economic Forum a number of times, and Klaus Schwab, of course. I've heard a wide range of ideas about what this is and how much influence it truly has. What did you find?

Likewise. Everybody by now has heard of the World Economic Forum or Davos. And like you, I heard a range of things that sounded like conspiracy theories. And so, again, followed the money. I decided to add up the market capitalization of the World Economic Forum members and found that just the top 25 members, and this would be companies like Amazon and Alphabet and Facebook, 25 members are worth $10 trillion. Now that doesn't include BlackRock, which is the largest asset manager in the world and central to a lot of the World Economic Forum initiatives. BlackRock has approximately $10 trillion under management.

You add in State Street and Vanguard, the other largest asset managers. It puts the value of the companies that are sponsors of Davos, that fund Davos, where their leaders, people like Larry Fink, the CEO and chairman of BlackRock, are on the board of Davos, of WEF. Over $20 trillion now. The WEF members control more than the entire GDP of the United States, more than the GDP of China. Those are the top, obviously, GDPs in the world. So they're more powerful economically speaking than pretty much any country in the world. And so I thought, I mean, what, you know, Davos only popped up on the radar a few years ago. Well, it actually has been around since the 1970s, or just after Klaus Schwab left Harvard. He was a pupil of Henry Kissinger when Kissinger was at Harvard.

He goes and sets up this European Management Symposium. That becomes the World Economic Forum. But then I found these connections, these abiding connections, to an organization called the Club of Rome. There is a famous book that the Club of Rome sponsored called The Limits to Growth. And The Limits to Growth really precedes global warming, global cooling, certainly before climate change. And The Limits to Growth says that there's a finite number of resources. Everybody's heard this.

There's a finite number of resources on planet Earth. And if we continue growing at the rate we're growing, the Earth is going, you know, we're all going to run out of resources and we're all going to die. And it was really the Malthusian point of view, which is we're running out of resources and therefore people need to sacrifice. Well, it's also very advantageous to the people who subscribe to its view. And it's been adapted over time. I mean, just if you were to, like I did for this book, if you go read every Club of Rome report dating back to limits to growth, they always amend it. And so you can actually see this progression from overpopulation to global cooling, to global warming, to the holes in the ozone layer.

And finally, we arrived at climate change, which is perfect because whether the temperatures go up or down, whether there's more storms one year or less, whether there's droughts, it's always attributed to climate change. And that gets back to the thing I said about it being unfalsifiable, is no matter what the climate does, it's human-caused. And so there's one particular Club of Rome report that it states that, I mean, I'll sum it up in just a short quote, the enemy of humanity is humanity itself. We went looking for a common enemy that could unite all nations, and we found that overpopulation at the time would unite all nations, and the enemy of humanity is humanity itself.

That organization was the beginning of the World Economic Forum. The World Economic Forum and the Club of Rome co-sponsored events. The leaders of each other's organizations would go be the keynote speaker. And so there's this deep relationship between an organization that's founded on overpopulation and the organization that's now leading the climate change debates. And of course, the United Nations is a frequent partner of the World Economic Forum, is a frequent partner of Bill and Melinda Gates. I mean, it sounds, of course, kooky, but you go look at their websites that they certainly do have an agenda.

It's called the Agenda 2030. The digital ID just is going to roll out in 50 countries within five years, according to the United Nations and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And, yeah, crises equal opportunities in the world of Klaus Schwab and these types. I always try to leave a little bit of time to talk about possible solutions, right? So what do people like you and I do? Well, we need to spread the word. We need to, I mean, it's so important. Shows like yours and organizations like the Government Accountability Institute,

it's so important for us to put the information out in succinct ways. I mean, we're talking thousands and thousands of pages that one has to read. Nobody has time to do that. And so the step one is to read the information, share the information, share documentaries like Romans. I mean, that was a fantastic documentary. Share the Epoch Times. Share our work. Read this book.

Because information is the first step. I mean, you need to see the playbook that these individuals who want to reshape all of society have put out there very publicly. But it's also in hard-to-find places. In terms of your health, you need to be very conscious of what you're eating, what you're funding, what you're putting in your body and what you're putting in your mind in terms of the information. And apps like, let's say, TikTok or Instagram, you need to be watching what your children are watching, making sure that they're not consuming things like this, so you really need to take more responsibility over your life and the life of your family members. Make sure that they're not just kind of slipping into the dystopian present. The hard thing about all of this is that they make it very convenient. These control-o-garks make it very convenient.

I mean, Mark Zuckerberg is working very hard on this metaverse. It hasn't really taken off yet, but also Microsoft is working on this augmented reality, and of course Apple is working on its Vision Pro. We haven't yet seen what the long-term effects are of living in cyberspace and just living on your devices, but we're starting to see that, and it does not look good. You're basically saying go back to basics.

That's exactly right, yeah, go back to basics. And I think we see that. We see that, you know, cravings for authenticity, cravings for the real world, not AI and not living on the computer. And any time you just go outside and spend a good amount of time outside, you very often feel better. Well, Seamus Bruner, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thanks, Jan.

Thank you all for joining Seamus Bruner and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.