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Why hasn’t the Iran war caused a global depression? The stock market just hit record highs, crypto is holding steady, and all the “smartest” investors are wrong.

WTF is going on?

Newsflash: It’s about gas.
The global energy market is being cornered.

In 90 days, the United States executed the most synchronized energy takeover in modern history and almost nobody has noticed, except now you and that crazy dude down the street who keeps mumbling about 5G and cloud seeding.

Even the smartest people in the room missed the move.

The U.S. is not just defending the old petrodollar system, but building a broader energy hegemony around dollar-denominated dependence. The real strategy in Iran was to eliminate or weaken major non-U.S. energy supply chains so allies and customers would have fewer alternatives outside the dollar system.

So they MUST buy O&G from the U.S.

Here are a few unspoken ways everything is about to change.

1. The US Is Now a Pirate State, Not An Empire

The U.S. regime is becoming increasingly lawless to the point it’s become a pirate state, something the founders specifically mentioned in the Constitution that they opposed.

Europe was the first major step. The Ukraine war created the political cover for sanctions that sharply reduced Europe’s access to Russian pipeline gas, and the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline made that break effectively permanent.

We’re the USA. We just do shit.

If it wasn’t the U.S. who blew up Nord Stream, it was a surrogate of the U.S.

All of this forced Europe to replace Russian gas with U.S. LNG.

Europe stopped being a buyer with multiple options and became a dependent market, purchasing essential energy in U.S. dollars. So the “upgrade” is not just oil anymore. It’s a system where U.S. influence is reinforced through natural gas exports, energy logistics, and control over which supply routes remain viable.

And this isn’t just a Trump thing.

This was part of a larger, coordinated sequence over several years, not a set of random geopolitical events. In that framework, the U.S. used conflict, sanctions, and disrupted rival infrastructure to consolidate a new form of dominance: not merely the old petrodollar tied to crude oil, but a broader dollar-based energy order centered on U.S. LNG, Gas, and AI, and constrained energy alternatives.

In this new system U.S. dominance is enforced not just through crude oil but through the systematic destruction of every pipeline, port, and trade route that doesn’t run through American hands.

2. What if Kamala Harris Were President?

Left or right, both sides just worship power.

Had the US invaded Iran under Madam President Kamala Harris, leftists would be gloating, while Lindsey Graham and right-wingers would be denouncing interventionism.

Principles are dead, no one even cares about the events themselves or that they play out the same regardless of who we vote for, all that seems to matter is “our side” “winning.”

Sorry if we ever gave you hope.

All that’s left for us in America is to play pirate state.

3. Warren Buffett Doesn’t Have The Edge He Used To

I used to follow Warren Buffett religiously. He still has some of the best investing maxims, like: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”

But Buffett doesn’t have the edge that he used to. Some of these older investors still don’t fully understand the clown world where stocks only go up.

Exhibit A was when Warren Buffett panic sold the bottom of the airline stocks in the COVID era. His return in the last 10 years is 12% and the S&P 500 is 15%.

The point is, yes, stocks will eventually come crashing down.

We’ve kicked the inflation can down the road since 2008.

But this is clown world now. Governments have decided the global economy cannot be allowed to crash—because if it does, it takes everything down with it. So assets keep rising. And they'll keep rising. Not because the fundamentals are sound, but because the alternative is unthinkable.

The mother of all crashes isn’t going to come. Not yet.

4. The Petrodollar Had a Vulnerability. They Fixed It.

The old petrodollar was fragile because it depended on the Middle East. Every time someone shut the Strait of Hormuz or a Saudi prince got moody, the dollar wobbled. Washington’s entire monetary architecture rested on the cooperation of ME governments it didn’t fully control.

The fix was elegant and sociopathic: become the world’s largest producer of oil, gas, and refined products, then physically destroy the competition so there’s nobody left to buy from.

Before 2022, the U.S. supplied 9% of Europe’s energy. Today, it’s their number one source of coal, oil, and LNG.

When Condoleezza Rice said Europe should “depend” on American energy, she meant it literally. She also spent a decade on Chevron’s board. Chevron named an oil tanker after her. These people are not subtle.

5. Iran Was the Trigger. Qatar Was the Real Target.

The Iran war gave Washington the political cover to finish what Ukraine started.

Within the first week of Operation Epic Fury, Qatar declared force majeure on its LNG exports. By March 18, retaliatory strikes hit Ras Laffan, the largest natural gas facility on Earth. In nine days, America’s two biggest LNG competitors, Qatar and Australia (hit by a conveniently timed cyclone), were both knocked offline.

LNG prices spiked everywhere except America. That’s not a glitch. That’s the product working as designed.

The same day Qatar’s LNG went offline, the European Union’s ban on Russian spot gas took effect. The date had been publicly known for months. If you needed gas and your Qatari supplier was incapacitated and Russian spot purchases were now illegal, there was exactly one place left to buy: the United States, at whatever price they felt like charging.

I spent the last year covering the Middle East from inside it. The pattern was visible from Beirut. Every escalation, every “retaliatory strike,” every diplomatic failure happened to coincide with something that benefits the US or Israel.

6. Venezuela, Russia, Iran: Three Suppliers, One Target

China gets roughly a third of its oil from Venezuela, Russia, and Iran. The U.S. targeted all three simultaneously.

Venezuela was first. A naval blockade disguised as a narcotics operation. The kidnapping of Maduro. Seizure of the world’s largest oil reserves. Chevron now decides which tankers enter and exit.

Russia was next. Operation Arctic Sentry, NATO hunting Russian tankers from the Baltic to the Arctic to the Indian Ocean. Forty percent of Russia’s seaborne oil export capacity disabled in March alone. The sharpest production cut in six years.

Iran completed the triangle. Sixty percent of Iran’s oil exports go to China. With Venezuela seized and Russian shipments under attack, Iran became Beijing’s lifeline. So Washington bombed it.

China’s LNG imports hit an eight-year low. Natural gas imports plummeted 16.3% from February to March. The pipelines are running at full capacity. The drop is entirely from the blockade.

Trump bragged that the U.S. now controls 62% of the world’s oil. He said this at the “Board of Peace” summit, which is the kind of dark comedy that writes itself.

7. The Cascade: Energy to Industry to Capital to Dollar

The strategy works like a domino chain. Make energy expensive everywhere except America. Force companies to choose between closing or relocating to the U.S. Collect the capital flight. Reinforce the dollar.

It’s already working. Net capital flows into the U.S. swung $209.5 billion in a single month, from a $25 billion deficit in January to a $184.5 billion surplus in February. Private foreign investors poured $166.5 billion in. Total U.S. exports hit a record $314.8 billion in February, driven almost entirely by energy. SWIFT dollar transactions hit 51.1%, a record.

The deindustrialization of Europe that began during Ukraine is accelerating. German steel, French glass, now broader manufacturing. Companies don’t relocate because they love America. They relocate because Washington made it physically impossible to operate anywhere else at a competitive energy cost.

The Petrogas-dollar doesn’t need cooperation from OPEC or Gulf monarchies. It doesn’t need military bases in the Middle East. It needs two things: enough domestic production to weather the chaos, and enough naval power to ensure the chaos only happens to everyone else.

The U.S. has both. The Maritime Action Plan published in February 2026 mandates that a growing percentage of strategic cargo, including LNG, be carried on U.S.-built vessels. Trump fired his Secretary of the Navy for not building the fleet fast enough. And the protection racket is now official: the U.S. Navy offers to escort commercial ships for a “very reasonable price” through the same waters it made dangerous.

The empire didn’t decline. It upgraded. Or downgraded? It evolved! And the people paying for the upgrade are middle class and everyone who isn’t American.

Shoutout to journalist Richard Mendhurst for tremendous research around this story.

Richard Medhurst’s Newsletter

How the US Pulled off an Armed Robbery of the World's Energy Supply and Created the Petrogas-Dollar

It’s tempting to believe that the US war machine is finished. Militarily, Iran have indeed dealt the US their worst humiliation in modern history — one I covered in clinical detail…

Read more

4 months ago · 1333 likes · 273 comments · Richard Medhurst

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In a recent interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro for *The New York Times*, Tucker Carlson stated that spending time with Donald Trump feels like being under a literal spell.

He describes the experience as having a “supernatural component” that influences those in the president's orbit.

Does Tucker think Trump is like Dio Brando or something?

Is this why witches failed to stop Donald Trump’s return? '

Trump has an elite force of trained magick practitioners shielding him from any supernatural threat.

If Tucker just said Trump was a conman, one that actually many people saw through, then he'd have to admit that he, Tucker Carlson, was personally an idiot.

He was a sucker, duped by a liar. This has obvious implications for whether people should bother listening to him in the future.

But if Trump were a secret wizard or something, well then that's much more understandable. Who can stand up to a secret wizard?! Tucker is still trustworthy, you see; he was just put under a spell. Buy his merch.

How dumb are these people?

Here are three ways to watch out against this fraudster:

1. Which Alex Jones Am I? Take The Online Quiz

Jimmy Dore is liberal Alex Jones.

Tucker Carlson is the Republican version.

Candace Owens is Black female Alex Jones.

Russel Brand is British Alex Jones.

Theo Von is funny Alex Jones.

Tim Dillon is chubby gay Alex Jones, which just means Alex Jones 2x.

James Li is Asian Alex Jones

Shit, you know what’s missing? The Black male Alex Jones.

I really gotta step my game up in 2026.

In stand-up, they say a great comedian spawns children—imitators. Alex Jones did that. He was genuinely original even if you don’t agree with him.

Alex spawned a whole industry after his market share shrank from the billion-dollar lawsuit and a few really bad decisions. He has, outside Tim Dillon and Von, a naked passion that made him the face of the “conspiracy” industry.

As Aristotle said: “The soul never thinks without an image, and passion is the genesis of all great thought."

Or Kierkegaard: “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”

I have no idea who or what Tucker Carlson actually believes in. He hated Trump, then loved him, now seems to hate him again. The only consistent passion is views, engagement, and staying relevant. Which leads us to the next point.

2. Tucker Always Hated Trump

Tucker Carlson recently told Trump to his face: “Netanyahu hates you. Rupert Murdoch despises you. Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin—they all hate you. The people pushing you into this [Iran] war want to destroy you. On behalf of Israel.”

And Trump’s response? “Yeah, I know.”

Trump is used to everyone hating him, his VP, even his friends and family. It's his default for everyone so this type of argument doesn't work against him.

Also, Tucker himself hates Trump; it was revealed in 2023 in text messages from a Fox News lawsuit. One of the messages was "I hate him [Trump] passionately."

He also called him demonic.

Trump probably doesn’t care what Carlson says because Tucker himself is a liar — he’s just a liar who feels his lies are nobler than Ben Shapiro or Mark Levin. You almost have to give it to Trump for not giving a damn.

Tucker couldn’t even admit to the New York Times that he questioned whether Donald Trump is the antichrist.

Presented with his own line, Tucker’s reaction is pure Bill Clinton parody:

I actually did not say, “Could this be the Antichrist?”

But he did. On his own show. He added he doesn’t really understand what the Antichrist is. It’s theological gaslighting: deny the quote, then retreat into faux‑humility about doctrine. Suddenly this guy who has spent years sermonizing about spiritual warfare on cable TV turns into a shy altar boy who just remembered he skipped catechism.

3. Lastly, A Note on Scammers and Conmen

Plenty of highly intelligent people fall for conmen. It happens all the time and it only becomes obvious after the con.

That’s why they are so successful, well, the good ones at least.

Why does Tucker have to be 100% in or out for his support of Trump? None of it feels organic or like the maturity of a serious thinker. Americans are deeply uncentered and traumatized people. I had high hopes for Trump, too, after the entire system was weaponized against him for four years.

I was wrong.

But I don’t hate Trump.

I’m still glad he’s president in a lot of ways — more corruption is being exposed than ever would have been under Harris, and the common American is more awake than they’ve been in a long time. (just please no WW3)

The harsh truth is that Trump is actually a really obvious conman.

That doesn't mean you couldn't have voted for him on the gamble that he might have still fulfilled some of your policy preferences. But lots of people like Tucker Carlson were sitting right next to Trump and enthusiastically declared that he was a genius and a revolutionary. So yes, when you fall for the obvious, actually patterned conman like that, you become the kind of liar and dishonest media broker Tucker has become. I don’t trust him one bit.

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It’s depressing watching the oldest cities on earth get bombed to smithereens by Trump and the Israelis.

It feels like watching Satan stub out a cigarette on the Mona Lisa.

One random alleyway in Byblos has more value in human memory and identity than the Statue of Liberty—and I love me some French architecture.

I’m already thinking about going back.

Before I do, here’s what I saw—four Lebanese cities that hold the whole human story, all of it now disappearing under airstrikes.

• Byblos

• Tyre

• Mar Mikhael

• Dahieh

These are the strikes just outside Tyre, filmed right before I left:

My heart hurts for the Lebanese people who have to endure.

When you have depression, just hang out with Lebanese people. Even in their sadness they will make you happier

Stay strong habeebi.

Byblos: The Oldest City On Earth

When I was in jail in Lebanon, the guards still found time to lecture me about Phoenicians and ancient cities:

“Do you have any fucking clue how old Tyre and Byblos are?” my jailor, a portly man smoking American Spirits, asked. “The land of Canaan has continuous habitation going back around 10,000 BCE.”

He’s right.

Byblos is one of the oldest cities on Earth—forty minutes outside Beirut, in a country the size of Rhode Island; it’s the Hellenized ideal of beauty.

Ancient Lebanon wasn’t an empire in the traditional sense but a network of independent city-states (Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, later Carthage) bound together by shared language, religion, and above all the sea.

While the Greeks called them “Phoinikes” (“purple people”) because of their murex dye, they also called themselves something closer to “Canaanites.”

A few things about Byblos that fried my brain:

THE ALPHABET: The letters you’re reading right now trace back to Phoenician scribes more than anyone else. The Greeks didn’t just conjure an alphabet; they lifted the Phoenician consonant script and added vowels. Without Phoenician traders, there’s no Latin alphabet, no modern scripts, no modern world.

MARITIME SUPREMACY: The Phoenicians were master shipbuilders. Their biremes and triremes influenced naval design for centuries. Rome had no navy before it went to war with Carthage.

COLONIES AND TRADE: Carthage gets all the attention, but the Phoenician trading network stretched everywhere: Cadiz, Ibiza, Malta, Sardinia. They weren’t just merchants of luxury goods (glass, purple dye, cedar wood), but cultural middlemen who spread technology, religion, and language.

RELIGION: For better or worse, Phoenician gods—Baal, Astarte, Melqart—shaped Mediterranean cults for centuries after.

Tyre: A Lebanese City Bombarded by Israel

Byblos is the museum piece; Tyre is the one they left outside, unprotected.

It’s a UNESCO site pressed right up against the Israeli border—heavily Muslim, heavily Hezbollah. You can stand on the beach in Tyre and see Israel across the water.

You’re walking on stones Alexander the Great bled on 2,400 years ago, while a kid on a scooter blasts K-pop Demon Hunters past you.

The sea is Tyre’s real cathedral: fishermen gut their catch on Roman columns, and kids cannonball off ruins older than most countries.

Today, the city is getting bombed back into the Stone Age.

As a mother living in the area told the NYT: “I can’t endure this,” she cried, her voice trailing off. “Two of my sons, two, two, two.”

Mar Mikhael: Beirut’s ‘Brooklyn’

I lived in Mar Mikhael, a prominent Christian neighborhood, for a month and a half. It's a little slice of Brooklyn dropped into the Middle East.

Huge party scene, openly gay bars—more gay clubs in a fifty-meter radius than in Bushwick. Lebanon is over 30% Christian, which makes it the most tolerant country in the region by a wide margin.

You walk past a bakery selling manoushe next to a cocktail bar that looks like an Apple store for Molly. Half the buildings are still cracked open from the port blast—an explosion that happened six years ago —but every gap has a cool coffee shop, tattoo studio, or a kid selling vintage sunglasses off a folding table.

You wouldn’t think you were in the same country as the bombed buildings of Tyre.

At night the sidewalks liquefy—French, Arabic, and English blur into one long drunk sentence. You’ll see a banker in a 3‑piece suit sharing a cigarette with a 19‑year‑old DJ who lives with his parents and makes techno on a stolen laptop.

Like every neighborhood in Lebanon, Mar Mikhael took a beating during the civil war from 1975 to 1990. It sat near the front lines.

One pastor I interviewed survived a car bombing there, on the same streets where people drink and dance now. It's fun clubs today. It wasn't always that way.

Dahieh: Cross The Wrong Street, End In Jail

This is how small Lebanon is. You can walk an hour from Mar Mikhael—kids DJing on MacBooks, joints in the stairwells—straight into Dahieh, the neighborhood where I got arrested and jailed for three days.

I crossed that invisible line, snapping pictures like a clueless American, and within minutes I was in the back of a car with four guys and their M16S.

My contact chewed me out later for forgetting where I was. Fair point.

As a New Yorker fresh off a year in Japan, I’m wired to walk cities for hours; it’s how I learn them.Mar Mikhael lets you forget you’re in a war zone—it feels safe, almost European.

Dahieh snaps that illusion in half. You’re in the Middle East.

Crossing the wrong street here can put you in the back of a Toyota with four men and M16s.

Dahieh is where Israel vaporized Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s god-king and Khamenei acolyte. It’s where Hezbollah keeps its fighters.

Right now, it’s being bombed into dust.

Lebanon Is Too Beautiful To Burn

21 “Then Jesus went out from there and departed to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 And behold, a woman of Canaan came from that region and cried out to Him, saying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David! My daughter is severely demon-possessed.”

28 “Then Jesus answered and said to her, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be to you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.”

All you have to do is set foot on Lebanese land and you will instantly fall in love with it. It is magnetic.

It’s Shakespearean in the old‑fashioned sense: comedy, tragedy, prophecy, and romance all stacked on top of each other, played out in a country the size of a fingernail.

I don’t know how this story ends.

Maybe the shells stop falling. Maybe they don’t. But if there’s any hope left on this cracked little stage, it’s in the way Lebanese people keep showing up for each other—sharing generators, splitting bread, opening bars in ruined streets like defiant middle fingers to Babylon.

My heart hurts for them, and still, selfishly, I want to go back.

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Anyone else realize that we are in the climax of the new world order takeover? Think about it.

2025: “Our world leaders are pedophiles.”

2026: “Our world leaders are cannibal pedophiles.” And by the end of 2027, you will not be able to tell whether our leaders are real or artificial intelligence.

A welcome change. That’s not my prediction, but Ari Abelson, co-founder of Open Origins, a media authenticity company whose entire business exists because AI-generated faces, voices, and videos are advancing faster than the human brain can keep up.

He didn't say the pedophile part. I added that. But given Pam Bondi is out of office… well, you know. Here’s what Ari thinks:

“By the end of this year, and certainly heading into 2027, I believe humans will essentially lose the ability to reliably tell the difference between AI-generated media and real human content.” —Ari Abelson / Co-Founder, Open Origins

I sat down with Abelson and Dr. Mathilde Pavis, Open Origins’ head of legal who previously worked with Eleven Labs when it was still a baby startup, to talk about where AI is actually heading and what jobs will exist by 2030.

Lawyers. The AI Lawsuits Are Coming

There are currently 52 active lawsuits in the UK alone over AI training data and copyright. Fifty-two. And that’s one country, covering one legal issue.

“You should expect more litigation. This is fairly normal for new technology. We had the same with peer-to-peer file sharing, Napster, Grokster.” —Dr. Pavis / Head of Legal, Open Origins

Each AI lawsuit takes two to five years to settle. Multiply that across every jurisdiction on Earth and you see the window: this is when the money gets made. Before the rules exist. Before the bubble pops.

AI compliance law is becoming its own discipline. It’s a standalone field with its own case law, regulatory landscape, and career path. If you’re in law school right now and you’re not studying this intersection, you’re preparing for a world that won’t exist by the time you pass the bar.

The People Who Prove Things Are Real

Most people already can’t tell the difference. between real and AI. I’m convinced they’re waiting until deep fakes get just a little bit better before releasing the Epstein files so they can simply claim it’s all AI

All those photos and videos of Trump and Epstein are AI deep fakes (obviously).

Here’s the job category nobody saw coming: verification.

When every image, video, and voice clip on the internet could be synthetic, the most valuable skill isn’t creating content. It’s proving content is authentic. Open Origins exists for exactly this reason, building systems that verify whether media was captured by a human camera or generated by a machine.

“AI itself isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s a neutral tool. The problem is that we currently lack reliable systems for distinguishing authentic content from synthetic content.”—Ari Abelson / Co-Founder, Open Origins

Who would have predicted a massive war in europe and AI shit from a 2010s perspective? AI startups were there, but they seemed more like research projects than a massive market that would make Nvidia explode beyond any reasonable explanation and become the #1 company in the USA.

Journalism needs this verification. Courts need this. Insurance companies, governments, and every platform with a trust problem needs this. The entire post-truth internet needs someone who can point at a video and say with certainty: this is real, or this isn’t.

Content authentication is about to become as essential as cybersecurity. And right now, almost nobody is trained in it.

AI Cloning Will Be a $30Bn Industry

The following is a conversation with Adolf Hitler, the Führer of Germany. It was one of the most moving conversations and experiences of my life. Allow me here to say a few words about it. Please skip ahead straight to our conversation, if you like. Adolf Hitler’s life story is incredible. He rose from poverty to lead a Reich of 70 million people into the biggest war of our times, where he won multiple epic-scale battles. As a leader, he fought for ideas that unite his nation of Germany.

Our thanks to ElevenLabs and a great team of translators, we do our best to bring the Führer’s voice to life with AI voice cloning in English.

… jokes aside, the strangest job to emerge from my interview was cloning.

Cloning a digital copy of a person was always easy; the hard parts were the idiosyncrasies, like their voice, writing style, and microactions.

Today, that’s becoming easier to replicate, and last month I wrote that most corporate jobs are actively cloning employees without their explicit consent.

Negotiating the legal terms of your digital clone will become a new industry.

Dr. Pavis spends a significant portion of her practice advising people on cloning contracts. Companies want to clone employees’ voices and faces for training videos, customer service, multilingual announcements, and financial services. The default contract language they offer is almost always the same: we own your clone forever, in all media, known now or in the future.

“You’re kind of handing over the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom being you and your voice and your face. And that can be a really risky transaction.”—Dr. Pavi / Head of Legal, Open Origins

Grand View Research predicts AI cloning (voice, video, deepfakes combined) will be worth $20-25 billion by 2030.

If you don’t negotiate the terms of your digital self, someone else will own it.

The Deepfake Police (Yes, That’s a Real Job Now)

Dr. Pavis broke down the emerging legal framework around deepfakes and it reads like a new branch of law enforcement is being built from scratch.

The UK is introducing legislation that makes it a criminal offense not just to create malicious deepfakes, but to build the technology specifically designed for that purpose. The EU requires large platforms to actively moderate and remove deepfake content. And the country with the strongest protections against digital cloning and deepfake misuse?

China. I didn’t see that coming either.

“Both the US and China are doing very fine as far as AI innovation is going. That’s where the argument that regulation kills innovation doesn’t really track in practice.”—Dr. Pavi / Head of Legal, Open Origins

Someone has to enforce these laws. Someone has to investigate deepfake cases across international borders. Someone has to build the moderation systems that platforms are now legally required to operate.

The digital police will be just as important as the real ones by 2030.

The Pattern That Connects All of This (WEF 2030 Prediction)

According to the World Economic Forum, by 2030, “You will own nothing and be happy” as a debt slave who rents EVERYTHING and be under surveillance 24/7 with a social credit score tied to you and live in a cashless CBDC UBI society.

You will be given, let’s say, 1000 Fed coins each month via UBI that can only be used on certain food items and if you don’t use them all in that month (which you will if you wish to just barely survive), then the next month your account will reset to 1000 Fed coin tokens. Therefore, you will have zero chance of building wealth.

That’s, more or less, in their own words.

Many of the jobs that survive AI aren’t the ones that compete with it. They’re the ones that exist in a rapprochement with it.

Every technology that disrupts an industry creates a shadow industry around trust, verification, regulation, and dispute resolution. The internet created cybersecurity. Social media created content moderation. Crypto created compliance.

I'm still going to create at my own pace—and the true creatives will ostensibly survive this—but let's be honest: there could exist a world where people who take AI seriously are going to lap the rest of us like Kenyans racing your average white guy. It won't even be close. I’m aware and I hope others are as well.

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In 1957, Carl Gustav Jung asked the only question about artificial intelligence that actually matters:

“One shudders at the stupendous possibilities of science and technics. Quite another question begins to loom up: Who is applying this technical skill? In whose hands does this power lie?” — Carl Jung

That’s a Swiss psychiatrist writing decades before the internet existed, asking the same question Congress fumbled through in 2023.

Jung said a “myth” is popular wisdom personified in our stories.

He never saw a computer. He never typed a prompt. But he described the collective unconscious as a vast repository of archetypes, myths, and shared psychic patterns that no single human authored but all humans inherited.

An LLM trained on the entirety of human text is, functionally, the first technological object that fits that description. Here’s what that means.

ChatGPT Was Trained on Every Myth Humanity Ever Wrote

Jung’s most famous idea is the collective unconscious: a vast repository of archetypes, myths, and shared psychic patterns that no single human authored but all humans inherited.

• The Hero.

• The Shadow.

• The Trickster.

• The Persona (aka the social mask).

All of these are Universal patterns encoded in every culture’s stories, dreams, and religions since the beginning of recorded thought.

Now consider what a large language model actually is. It contains every myth, every archetype, every pattern of human storytelling ever recorded — aggregated, searchable, and generative.

When you prompt Midjourney with “The Shadow Archetype,” the system synthesizes billions of artistic works into a visual interpretation that no single human created but that humans universally recognize.

It’s the collective unconscious made literal.

A 2026 ResearchGate paper by M. J. Oliveira D. at Flinders University takes it further, arguing that in the digital age, the persona and shadow don’t just live inside individuals. They’ve become features of entire platforms. The polished feed is the persona.

The trolling, the pile-ons, the cruelty that appears when people feel anonymous? That’s the shadow. And AI is trained on all of it.

Researchers at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan built a prototype called “SelfJourneon” that integrates AI with Tarot’s archetypal grammar, drawing from Jungian psychology and Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.

Their conclusion was that large language models, when designed for symbolic participation, may serve as vessels for collective unconscious material, transforming AI into a mythopoetic guide for introspection.

Someone actually built the thing Jung theorized about. In 2026.

Silicon Valley Scraped the Human Psyche for Training Data

Here’s where Jung stops being interesting and starts being alarming.

“Technology is based on a specifically rationalistic differentiation of consciousness which tends to repress all irrational psychic factors.” — Carl Jung

Silicon Valley is built by math people. Coders. Engineers. Optimization specialists. People who are brilliant at building systems and almost constitutionally incapable of understanding what those systems contain at the mythological level.

As physicist John Vervake has said, science has an ontology for everything except the actual scientist doing the work.

Jung borrowed a word for this problem: humanitas. It refers to mental cultivation, wisdom, the kind of training that produces people who believe their work is rooted in an ethic. The Latin virtues Jung valued (caritas, prudentia, humilitas) are precisely the traits most AI founders lack.

Recently, an ex-Google employee leaked an executive directive to “turbocharge” AI by cutting “nanny products” such as AI safety guardrails for its products.

In a 2025 internal memo, co-founder Sergey Brin urged AI teams to work 60+ hour weeks, test ideas faster, eliminate slowing processes, and stop “building nanny products” that over-protect users.

“To worship collective ideals and work with the big organizations is spectacularly meritorious, but they nevertheless dig the grave for the individual.” — Carl Jung

The people who digitized the collective unconscious didn’t study it. They scraped it for training data.

Carl Jung: The AI Anxiety You Feel Isn’t About Jobs

The anxiety most people feel about AI isn’t really about job loss. It’s not about cheating on homework, deepfakes, or misinformation. Those are symptoms. The disease is something Jung diagnosed 75 years ago.

“At the bottom of all these problems lies the development of science and technology, which has destroyed man’s metaphysical foundation. Technology and ‘social welfare’ provide nothing to overcome our spiritual stagnation.”

 — Carl Jung

I’m not a professional Jungian. But I’d guess he’d say something like everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.

As Tony Montana once said: In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get the women.

Maybe replace “power” with “fulfillment” and “women” with “a wife,” and Jung would approve.

Jung’s Fix for the AI Age

Carl Jung wasn’t just a diagnostician. He offered a way out.

“People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea. They shake off the fetters and allow nature to touch them. Walking in the woods, lying on the grass, taking a bath in the sea, are from the outside; entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again.” — Carl Jung

That was written in 1929. It reads like a prescription for 2026.

The monks I interviewed in Lebanon don’t use electricity. They sleep on wood and read the Bible more than they drink water.

The Europeans I met while traveling sit in cafés for hours reading and drinking coffee. The Japanese practice hara hachi bu, eating until they’re 80% full. None of these people are optimizing. All of them seem to have something the AI discourse is desperately missing.

Jung said that psychology emerged onto the world stage when it did for a reason. And while the modern practice of psychology has been corrupted, there is still truth to that.

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There’s a spot in Lebanon, high above the Bekaa Valley, where a man was blown off a cliff by a wind gust. Just gone.

Standing at the edge, my brain went full psychedelic, and a thought hit me clean.

Life is too short to live like a slave.

You wake up tomorrow. Same commute. Same job you hate. Same paycheck you need. And then it’s gone—everything—just like it was for this guy. No warning.

Meanwhile, with a toxic job, your mental and maybe your physical health are deteriorating over time, and you end up looking like Danny DeVito by 35.

Just brush your teeth 58,000 times before it’s all over. Many such cases.

True and lasting happiness, Eudaimonia, can only be found in a state of meaning. I’ve spent months thinking about this. Here’s what I wish I knew earlier.

Psychologists say leaving a toxic job can repair your nervous system faster than therapy

Psychologists have measured that chronic workplace stress jacks your cortisol, fries your nervous system, and keeps you in a low-grade state of emergency.

The same studies show that if you leave the job, the body will start to recalibrate.

My co-worker died a few years ago from job stress.

He was drinking hard in Baltimore, trying to metabolize our intense 9-5 financial job. While he was drunk, he stumbled onto a highway, and a car hit him going 80 miles per hour.

For some reason, I think this happens more with men than women.

Please do not stay with a toxic boss.

It is difficult to make money on your own these days.

But I think above all you should strive for stable ground—some financial leverage—and you'd be surprised how often employers give you what you want. That’s what your 9-5 job is good for.

The Greek guy who got fired and didn’t flinch

While traveling through Lebanon, I met a Greek guy named Thanos, roughly my age. He had that jubilant Greek energy, as if the whole world owed him a favor.

We got to talking and I found out he’d been fired two weeks earlier.

He didn’t care. Not in a performative way. Not in a “I’m pretending this doesn’t hurt” way. He genuinely did not give a f*ck.

I admire Europeans for this and wish Americans understood this more:

• He still enjoys life despite being more broke than you’d expect

• He shrugged off standards for himself of needing to be in the financial 1% because all it’s doing is wasting precious years of life

• He’s not entirely obsessed with numbers going up in his portfolio, which, for many of us, is becoming pathetic at this point.

Most Europeans I meet abroad invest in languages, cultures, learning about new technologies—they care about money but don’t let it eat them alive. The Brits are the exception—or maybe they’re the origin. Hard to tell where it all started.

The disturbing (and surprising) wisdom of the Ecclesiastes

“He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity.”

— Ecclesiastes 5:10

Ecclesiastes is the most honest book ever written about wealth. A king who had everything and denied himself nothing looked at the sum of his work and called it meaningless.

I think about that a lot.

The purpose of money is not to accumulate money.

The purpose of money is to buy freedom.

Freedom to spend your time the way you want. Freedom to not worry about rent. Freedom to say no to work that drains your soul and to be generous with the people you love.

A 9-5 job is a tool. Investing is a tool. Starting a business is one of the greatest tools. But it’s still a means to an end. And the end is not a number on a screen. The end is the life you build when you’re not staring at these numbers.

Go outside. Go to church. Thank God you’re alive.

The Economy broke in 2008 and nobody fixed it

One last point: the country never recovered from 2008.

It was the final death knell for the “good old America” as we knew it

Go to college, get a degree, get a job, buy a home, you’re set. Millennials were the last generation that believed it. They watched it implode in real time.

2026 isn’t a crisis. It’s a daily demoralization campaign.

Nobody has faith in the system. Everyone knows college is a risky gamble. Employers will tell you AI took your job like they’re reading the weather. The economy runs on glib extraction.

This isn’t doomerism. It’s clarity. The world is moving fast and weird, and the only sane response is to give yourself the bandwidth to move with it.

The ledge, the Greek, and the point

I think about the man who got blown off the cliff in Lebanon. I think about the Greek guy laughing two weeks after losing his job. I think about the version of myself who sat in a Baltimore office, wondering how close I’d come to ending up the same way after one too many drinks

Time is your only non-renewable resource.

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn argued, prioritizing personal comfort and safety is a mistake, as we don’t know if man evolved with the purpose of “safety.”

I’m not telling anyone to quit their job tomorrow.

I’m saying the system that made the 9-to-5 a rational choice has quietly made it an irrational one, and most people haven’t updated their mental models yet.

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Here’s a stat that got buried this year: Gen Z men want to be fathers. Not reluctantly. Not theoretically. More than 60% are enthusiastic about parenthood.

They’re talking about hands-on parenting, showing up, being present—while also, paradoxically, drifting toward traditional gender roles in other surveys.

And what about Gen Z women?

Shh. Let’s not ruin it for anyone.

The thing is, Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, are approaching 30. I don’t think that they’re (we’re) in a position to still act like kids.

Yet one in ten Gen Zers has had a baby by age 23. For millennials at the same age, it was one in four.

The headlines frame this as a crisis. A demographic emergency. A generation that “can’t grow up.” The UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies published the numbers and within 48 hours every major outlet was running variations of the same panicked story: young people aren’t hitting milestones, birth rates are collapsing, civilization is in trouble.

Here’s the part nobody put in the headline: 61% of Gen Z says they want children in the future. The desire isn’t gone.

Why Every Zoomer Thinks 25 Lasts Forever

There’s a delusion common to Zoomers—I’m one of them, born ‘97, the oldest we get—that 25 will last forever. That age happens to other people.

What nobody tells you until you’re there is that 30 doesn’t feel like a different person. You’re still you. Just 25 with a 30-year-old body, wondering when the adult version is supposed to show up. It doesn’t. You’re it.

But let me defend my people for a second—Gen Z has potential, more than Boomers suggest. And also: every generation acts like this.

To a 20-year-old. Everyone from 40 to 100 is the same kind of “old”

Time is a hard concept for younger people; when you’re 20, turning 40 is quite literally a lifetime away.

The rub is that, for some reason, normies in general (not just young people) seem to think that you are multiple different people throughout life. That there are more or less arbitrary stages in life where you stop being who you were before and become someone completely different instead.

In reality, you're pretty much the same person throughout life after the age of maybe 25, and the only thing that really changes is experience and options.

Only smarter people can see this pattern.

Speaking as the oldest Zoomer: most of us get it now. If you're not serious about life at this point, the window is closing. Floor it while there's still road.

It's Not Just the Money. It's That the Village Is Gone

The average cost of childcare in the U.S. now rivals or exceeds one parent’s entire take-home pay. A family where both parents work and one earns a median salary is effectively paying their entire income to have someone else watch their child while they earn the money to pay for that care. Read that sentence twice. It doesn’t get less absurd.

“Buying a house or getting a job out of university are things you categorically have to think about. How can you even factor a child into that equation?”

Susie, 24 / The Times

But while economics is the obvious answer, there's a deeper one nobody talks about: the village is gone.

The U.S. is built on radical individualism. “Every man for himself” isn’t a bug, it’s the national operating system. And over the past 30 years, the infrastructure of communal support that once made raising children survivable has been systematically dismantled.

We’re more isolated than any generation in history:

• Order food to your door without speaking to anyone

• Work remotely for good money without ever meeting your team

• Live somewhere for years without learning a neighbor’s name

• Go months without a conversation you didn’t schedule

Extended families live in different states. Churches and community organizations have shrunk. Yet, it’s also why Gen Z is rushing back to churches in droves.

However, the rest of that is not how humans are supposed to raise children.

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Remember when Trump said tariffs would bring in so much money we could get rid of the income tax?

Or that they would bring manufacturing back to America?

Or, “because you’d be in jail.”

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Then came February 20, 2026.

In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court found that Trump’s broad emergency tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were unlawful, blowing open a refund fight worth roughly $175 billion.

That is one of the biggest forced givebacks in modern economic history, born of money the government was never legally entitled to take.

Here is the part that should make your eye twitch: Americans paid 96% of the tariff burden as prices climbed, according to new research from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

So after all the chest-thumping, what was the prize? Here is the short version.

You Paid $175 Billion in Illegal Tariffs. Here’s Exactly What You Got Back (Spoiler: Jack)

So what did the American public get for underwriting this whole tariff circus?

• Sky-high prices for normal people

• Tax cuts for the rich

• Total tariff fail

• War in Iran

In other words, you get nothing. Good day, sir.

For years, tariffs were sold with the same tin-pot promise: the foreigners would pay. China would pay. Some faceless enemy would eat the cost and America would collect the spoils.

The numbers now cut through that story like a hot knife through butter.

A Kiel Institute study tracking more than 25 million shipment records and nearly $4 trillion in imports found foreign exporters absorbed about 4 percent of the tariff burden. The other 96 percent landed here, on U.S. buyers.

Tariffs were marketed as a weapon against foreign producers.

In practice, this thing worked like a smoke alarm wired to a toaster. I was willing, against my better instincts, to entertain the possibility that Trump had some silver lining for the chaos. I mean, is anyone in this administration professional? But there was no grand strategy. Just bluster, improvisation.

Useful line to remember:

Small Businesses Got Screwed: $55 Billion Stolen While Big Corps Line Up for Refunds

The story gets uglier at street level. Reuters reports that small businesses make up roughly 97 percent of U.S. importers and paid about $55 billion of the illegal tariffs.

These are backpack makers, clothing brands, shop owners, people already getting worked over by freight costs, shrinking margins, and the petty bureaucratic violence of doing business in America.

Now they are told the money may be recoverable. In theory. In practice, many will never chase it down.

It’s like living in San Francisco, ordering Uber Eats, and finding out some fentanyl zombie stole your dinner off the stoop before you made it downstairs. You stare at the empty porch, do the math, and just eat the $25.

Now multiply that by 100.

Bloomberg found that FedEx, Costco, and other large firms have the legal muscle to sue, while smaller businesses are forced to decide whether chasing their money through the courts is worth the cost, the time, and the slow psychic rot.

The small operator gets handed a legal labyrinth and told, in effect, good luck pal.

Washington’s Delay Game Is Costing You $23 Million a Day in Interest

The state has one final joke for the crowd. Delay.

The Cato Institute estimates that each month the government delays refunds adds about $700 million in interest to the final bill, or roughly $23 million per day.

CBS carried the same warning in less explicit language: dragging out repayment does not reduce the cost. It fattens it.

Taxpayers are not just stuck cleaning up the original wreck. They are now underwriting the government’s delay too.

And Washington knows perfectly well the apparatus is jammed. That is why Senate Democrats introduced the Tariff Refund Act of 2026, a bill that would require Customs and Border Protection to refund illegal IEEPA tariffs with interest within 180 days and prioritize small businesses. Legislation like that is not born from sudden virtue.

It appears when the failure gets so naked that even Congress has to put on a small show of recognition.

Congrats: Nintendo & FedEx Get Their Money Back (You Get the Bill)

Pitches tied to tariff-refund rights brought fresh scrutiny to Cantor Fitzgerald, the same firm tied to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, though Cantor says it never executed any such trades.

The larger point is simpler: a side market now exists, and whenever legal chaos turns into a financial product, the little guy is almost never the one holding the bag.

Nintendo has already sued for a full refund with interest. FedEx and Costco are in the scrum. More than 2,000 cases have been filed, and Customs is still building the refund system, which may take weeks and depends on importers being set up for electronic repayment. This is a fucking stampede.

The Refunds Are Real — But Your Inflated Prices and Dead Businesses Are Permanent

Even if every lawful refund goes out, the deeper harm is already baked in.

• Prices were raised.

• Supply chains were rerouted.

• Some businesses closed.

• Consumers paid more and will not be made whole.

That is the point worth underlining in red ink.

This story is useful because it strips the whole apparatus down to the studs. The government took money it was not entitled to take. The public ate most of the cost. Corporations lined up for reimbursement. Small businesses and consumers got left in the old American vise between fighting on principle or just chopping it up to more bullshit we put up with day after day.

This is what a rigged system looks like when the lights are on.

If you’re not subscribed yet, now’s the time. Wednesday posts are free. Friday posts (including the full breakdown of the 2026 recession-proof investment strategy) are for paid members. Both will make you dangerous.

I met an American in Vietnam running five remote jobs at once. He’s a cocky bastard and fully aware of it. His income is north of $3k a day. He automates deliverables with AI, ghosts standup calls, and describes interviewing as a process you “lie, cheat, and steal” your way through.

No guilt. No hesitation. The r/overemployed community—430,000 members deep using AI to game work—treats guys like him as folk heroes.

On the same day, two of my friends are back on DoorDash.

One has a philosophy degree. The other studied finance. Neither expected to be calculating whether a $7 delivery tip covers their gas.

I hate the guy making $3k a day with that smug look on his face. But he’s the future. People who game the system, feel nothing about it, and use AI to print money while everyone else fights over scraps.

What follows is the playbook—the exact tools, the psychology, and what it means for everyone still playing by the old rules

The Subreddit That Turned Employment Into a Heist Film

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For the last year I’ve been living out of a backpack across East Asia and Europe—Tokyo, Saigon, Beirut during a war. The kind of places where your morning coffee comes with a side of “maybe I should text my mom.”

I told myself I was finding stories. Mostly I was finding excuses. Running is easier than writing. I’m done running

I’m back. And I have a lot to tell you.

What’s Changed

I’m based in East Asia now — permanently. Not as a tourist. Not as a digital nomad collecting temple selfies.

I came here as a reporter because the stories that will define the next decade aren’t happening in Washington or Brussels. They’re here:

• The US-Iran collision reshaping global energy.

• The shifting world order I watched firsthand from a detention room in Southern Beirut.

• China’s slow-motion war against Japan and the rest of East Asia. Gen Z quietly relocating from the US to Asia. India ascending while nobody in the West updates their mental map.

And nobody is covering it properly. Not the way it needs to be covered—first-person, boots on the ground, actually-went-there journalism. The kind that used to matter before every outlet fired their reporters—myself included— and replaced them with ChatGPT summaries of Reuters feeds. Now you get aggregation all the way down. Nobody’s in the room anymore.

That’s where I come in.

The New Schedule

Starting this week, Yard Couch runs on a real schedule:

Wednesday — free deep dives.

Friday — paid, behind-the-scenes, too spicy for free.

Daily — TikTok and YouTube Shorts.

No Monday. No Tuesday. No daily spam. Quality over quantity. You’ll hear from me twice a week, and both times it’ll be worth opening.

The Big Announcement: Two Books, Rewritten for 2026

Some of you bought my books — “Gold 2.0” and” Mind and Muscle” — back when they first came out. Thank you. Genuinely.

But here’s the honest truth: those books are outdated.

Gold 2.0 was written before FTX collapsed, before Bitcoin ETFs got approved, before a sitting president created a theoretical Strategic Bitcoin Reserve—and before Donald Judas Trump rugpulled his own voters with a memecoin, which somehow wasn’t the weirdest thing that happened to crypto last year

So I rewrote the whole thing. Not an update — a rewrite. Twenty-one chapters. New sections on DCA strategies that actually work, what crypto is actually worth buying in 2026 (ETF vs. direct vs. DeFi), the business cycle and why a recession is probably coming in 2027, crypto taxes under the new IRS rules, and a full chapter called “What I Got Wrong” — because intellectual honesty is more interesting than pretending I called everything.

Gold 2.0: 2026 Edition drops next month.

And here’s the deal for you: the ebook will be $0.99 for the first two weeks after launch. That’s not a gimmick. I need honest reviews from real readers, and you — the people who’ve been here — are the ones I trust to leave them. After the launch window, the price goes up.

My first book “Mind and Muscle” gets the same treatment — fully rewritten with 2024-2026 research, new chapters on GLP-1 drugs, the gut-brain axis, and everything I’ve learned from running ultramarathons in three countries. That one’s coming a few weeks after Gold 2.0.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll get early access to select chapters before either book hits Amazon. Consider it a thank-you for keeping the lights on while I was figuring my life out while wandering the world.

What to Expect Going Forward

Yard Couch has always been about one thing: the evolution and demise of worldly systems. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that I’m closer to the fault lines now.

Here’s what I’m working on:

• Original reporting from East Asia—not takes on takes

• The Iran war and the global order—I was in Lebanon for it

• Gen Z’s economic and social crisis — from the dating collapse to the job market to the quiet nihilism nobody wants to name.

• AI eating everything — jobs, media, truth itself. I was laid off by AI. I have some feelings about this.

• Crypto and macro — not moon-boy content. The structural, systems-level analysis of why Bitcoin matters and when it doesn’t.

• Philosophy and hidden history — the weird stuff. The stuff that keeps me up at night and makes you text your friends “you need to read this.”

One Last Thing

I missed this. The writing. The readers. The 2 AM feeling in a Vietnamese apartment that something you made might actually land.

I’m not going to promise I’ll post every day or that I’ll never miss a deadline. But if I do you’ll be updated on everything via Notes or X. I’m going to promise that when I do publish, it’ll be the best thing in your inbox that week.

Welcome back. Hit reply and tell me what to cover first

— Isaiah

If you’re not subscribed yet, now’s the time. Wednesday posts are free. Friday posts are for paid members. Both are worth your time.

Last year I got arrested in Lebanon on suspicion of being an Israeli spy.

Sitting in that smoky interrogation room, one fluorescent light buzzing like it was also under interrogation. My phone confiscated. My camera dismantled. The questions came in Arabic first, then English when they realized I wasn’t following, which probably didn’t help the “not a spy” argument.

The only thought my brain produced was: “Damn, I wish I were one of the Trump kids and could call him to get me out of here.”

I voted for him. Most Gen Z men I knew did too. The one who didn’t was Nick Fuentes (who turned on him), which tells you something about where we’re at.

I saw:

• Pundits: Joe Rogan, Dave Smith, Glenn Greenwald, support Trump

• Finance and Tech: Large swaths of companies I interviewed support him

• Gen Z: Especially men who no longer felt represented by Dems (and still don’t, to be fair)

The Democrats handed Trump the election by running a president who visibly deteriorated on live television and then pretending no one noticed.

And Trump’s ticket read like a coalition of the politically homeless—RFK Jr., Tulsi, Gaetz, libertarians who hadn’t had a home in years. Kamala wasn’t the answer. She was a “Yaas Queen” Hail Mary thrown by a party that had already fumbled the game with the economy and Israel-Palestine war.

Well, here we are. War with Iran. Would any of us (or you) do it again?

Would I Vote For Donald Trump Again? No

But I wouldn’t have voted for Kamala either.

America is so screwed, man. Politically speaking. Maybe the country can last like this for another 250 years. Maybe we all turn a blind eye. Maybe you make your money, clock in, clock out, die on schedule with a 401k that almost covered retirement. Fine.

But the people running the thing? Max corruption. Fully saturated. There’s no room left on the hard drive for more grift—they’d have to delete some old scandals just to fit the new ones.

This is where being American gets uncomfortable. My dad gave me the speech when I was a kid—the one about people dying for your right to vote, about civic duty, about how it all matters.

And I believed it. But here’s the thing: it’s wrong. Or at least it stopped being right somewhere along the way. Plato called democracy the second-worst form of government, behind only tyranny. Twenty-four centuries later, we’re proving his thesis in real time. The vote doesn’t matter. The choices are pre-selected. You’re picking between two doors that lead to the same room.

You can do more than vote.

Writing an article about why the system is corrupt reaches more people than your ballot ever will.

Making a video, building something, going to church, helping your family, making money—all of it moves the needle more than standing in line at a middle school gymnasium to pick between two pre-approved options.

Even local elections feel absurd now. I’m writing this from Vietnam, working for a UK company, paying taxes to the US federal government. What exactly is my Colorado governor going to do for me? Negotiate the price of apples? More marijuana? I’m a global creature filing paperwork for a state I haven’t seen in six months.

Voting doesn’t matter when there is a uniparty that will do things regardless of who’s president (we would have struck Iran with Kamala, too).

It’s bleak to arrive at this conclusion but the map is the map.

Let AI fold your laundry while you figure out which passport to collect next.

And the reason none of this voting theater matters is playing out right now in the Middle East with the bombing of Iran. Because while we were arguing about ballots, the checklist was still being checked:

The Question That Has Driven 77 Years of Middle Eastern History

In 1948, Israel declared independence. The UN partition plan was supposed to create two states out of the former British mandate of Palestine: a Jewish state and an Arab state. Israel seized territory beyond the partition lines and in response, every major Arab country declared war on Israel.

Egypt. Syria. Jordan. Iraq. Saudi Arabia. All of them.

This created the central question that has driven every major event in the Middle East for the past 77 years:

How does Israel survive in a region where every neighbor wants it destroyed?

Israel determined that the only way to be safe is to neutralize every country that has ever been at war with it or supported its adversaries. Not some of them. All of them.

Here is the checklist as it stands today:

• Egypt. Peace treaty signed 1979. Receives billions in US military aid. Pacified.

• Jordan. Peace treaty signed 1994. Receives US military aid. Pacified.

• Iraq. United States invades in 2003. Government overthrown. Country destabilized.

• Syria. Civil war begins 2011, fueled by Israel, Turkey, and the United States. Assad eventually ousted in December. New government favorable to Israel.

• Lebanon. Israel invades in 1978 and again in the 1980s, attempts to split the country along ethnic lines. Currently in effective civil war. Israel actively at war with Hezbollah.

• Libya. Civil war. Destabilized.

• Sudan. Civil war. Destabilized.

• Somalia. Civil war. Destabilized.

• Yemen. Civil war. Destabilized.

• Bahrain, UAE, Morocco. Peace treaties signed through the Abraham Accords.

• Saudi Arabia. Actively negotiating a peace treaty.

• Afghanistan. Government overthrown.

• Iran. The last country standing.

Every single country that ever opposed Israel has been pacified through peace treaties, overthrown through regime change, or destabilized through civil war. Iran is the only major adversary left on the board.

That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a checklist with dates.

Bombing Iran Sounds Simple Until You Count to 90 Million

There is a fantasy circulating in Washington that the Iran problem can be solved the way Iraq was solved: overwhelming airpower, destroy the military infrastructure, watch the regime collapse.

Last year, Tucker Carlson asked Senator Ted Cruz how many people live in Iran and dismissed it as trivia. It is not trivia. It is the entire problem.

Iran has 90 million people. A million soldiers. A landmass three times the size of Iraq. And it is governed not by corrupt plutocrats looking for an exit, but by a revolutionary theocracy with an eschatological worldview and a paramilitary vanguard that believes its role is cosmic.

The worst-case scenario is that this is not Venezuela. You cannot bomb this country into compliance and expect the regime to negotiate over brunch.

Chaos breaks out. Borders destabilize. People rush to stores. The economy collapses. Critical infrastructure fails. Public services disappear. Looting. Displacement. The bottom falls out.

And into that vacuum steps the remnant of the Iranian security forces. Because in the absence of order, the only institution capable of providing it is the one with guns.

There is one scenario where this doesn’t end in catastrophe: Khamenei is dead, large populations of Iranians wanted him out, and a new leader may step in who is willing to work with Israel and the Trump admin. This campaign could be won with very minimal loss (if any) of American lives.

But if you stand on principles, we should be opposed to conflicts like this.

It’s more in Israel’s interest than America’s. And the last time we fought a war for someone else’s checklist, it cost us twenty years and a trillion dollars in Iraq.

It goes without saying: Iran is the last country standing for a reason. And the people who think they can finish the checklist with bombs have not thought past the first 48 hours.

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At the Munich Security Conference last week, something happened that does not normally happen in diplomacy: three major world leaders said the same thing, unprompted, within hours of each other.

1. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz: “The world order as it has stood for decades no longer exists. We are in a period of great power politics.”

2. France’s President Emmanuel Macron: “Europe’s old security structures tied to the previous world order don’t exist. Europe must prepare for war.”

3. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “We are in a new geopolitics era because the old world is gone.”

Germany, France, and America don’t agree on much. But when all three declare the rules-based international order dead on the same day, that’s a boldfaced declaration.

Into that wreckage, Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, wrote his best article in decades predicting where the economy is heading. There’s only one way to get rich from here, and he’s not being subtle about it.

Ray Dalio: The New World Order Doesn’t Need Humans Anymore

Dalio’s breakdown is clinical and brutal: roughly 3 million people — the top 1% — are driving American innovation in AI and technology, with another 5–10% holding the structure up beneath them.

Everyone else is falling behind, with the bottom 60% reading at or below a sixth-grade level. In a knowledge economy, that’s a permanent exclusion. Dalio calls it “extreme dependency.”

Essentially, he calls this moment the “Big Cycle,” a framework he laid out in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order:

“The cycle tracks roughly 150 years of oscillation between order and chaos, moving through six stages from post-war consolidation to peak prosperity to overextension to, eventually, great disorder.”

Dalio says we are now in Stage 6: the period where wealth inequality is getting out of control, there are no enforceable rules, power might replace law, and countries will continue to clash.

“When individual countries have more power than collectives like the UN, those countries determine outcomes.” — Ray Dalio

The problem with Dalio’s predictions — same problem with “Big Short” investor Michael Burry — is they’re right, just never on schedule. He’s warned about this before. The difference now is we’re closer than we’ve ever been to the thing he’s describing.

Start training now so that when the world order collapses, you can form a gang of raiders.

Joking. Partially. The more useful question: what do you own when the world order is this fragile?

What Ray Dalio Is Actually Telling You to Buy (and Why It’s Not Bitcoin)

Dalio’s advice during Stage 6 environments is historically consistent and blunt: sell debt, buy gold.

Gold is Dalio’s anchor asset because it has no counterparty risk. No government can print more of it; no sanctions can freeze it. When international trust collapses and fiat currencies get weaponized, gold becomes the default settlement layer between nations.

Central banks globally have been purchasing over 1,000 tonnes annually since 2022. That is not a coincidence. That is preparation. Central banks are stockpiling gold at the fastest pace in decades.

Dalio has acknowledged Bitcoin’s existence but has never given it a full-throated endorsement like gold. He has called it “one hell of an invention” and admitted to holding some, but his concern is that governments will regulate or restrict it precisely when you need it most.

What do you think? (especially with Epstein-Bitcoin files)

Besides gold, here is what historically performs during the kind of environment Dalio is describing:

• Commodities (energy, agriculture, metals): Wars and trade conflicts disrupt supply chains. Oil, natural gas, wheat, copper, and critical minerals all appreciate when global trade fractures. The countries that produce these become powerful. The countries that depend on imports become vulnerable.

• Defense and aerospace stocks: Military spending is accelerating globally. Germany and Japan just announced a massive defense budget expansion. History really does repeat, huh? Every NATO country is increasing spend. This sector performs whether there is war or just the sustained threat of war.

• AI and compute infrastructure: Dalio’s framework identifies technology wars as already active. The US-China semiconductor conflict is an arms race by another name. Companies building AI infrastructure, chips, data centers, and energy to power them are positioned at the center of the most important geopolitical competition of the decade.

• Bitcoin (with caveats): Scarce, decentralized, no counterparty risk if held properly. Performs well in currency debasement environments. The risk is how will BTC react in a real global crisis?

• Non-dollar-denominated assets: If the dollar’s share of global reserves continues declining from 65% toward 50% or lower, assets denominated in other currencies or in hard commodities become a hedge against dollar debasement. Diversification away from a single currency is a bet on math.

The common thread across all of these: they are real, scarce, or essential.

“Stage 6” for Whom, Exactly?

So in Dalio’s framework, if the post-1945 order is collapsing, who is this “Stage 6” for exactly?

The “rules-based order” was never a global peace. It was Pax-Americana that extended to Europe, maintained by projecting disorder outward.

The Cold War was cold in Washington and Moscow. It was extremely hot in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Guatemala, Afghanistan, and dozens of other countries that served as chessboards for great power competition.

When Western leaders stand at a podium in Munich and say “the old order is gone,” what they mean is: the disorder that we used to export has arrived at our door.

Dalio identifies five types of war between nations:

• trade and economic wars

• technology wars

• geopolitical wars

• capital wars

• military wars. He assesses that the first four are all active right now. The fifth, military war, is at “highest risk.”

The escalation pattern is historically consistent. Before all-out wars are declared, there is typically about a decade of economic, technological, and capital conflict where rival powers test each other’s limits.

The 1930s followed this exact trajectory. Tariffs first. Then asset freezes. Then embargoes. Then Pearl Harbor.

Today, the US and China are engaged in all four pre-military war categories simultaneously. The most potentially explosive flashpoint is Taiwan, where both parties have roughly comparable military capabilities and irreconcilable, existential differences, which Dalio identifies as the precise conditions under which wars become unavoidable.

“The two things about war that one can be most confident in are that it won’t go as planned and that it will be far worse than imagined.” — Ray Dalio

The 1930s Playbook Is Running Again. The Script Has Not Changed.

In 1941, the US froze Japanese assets and embargoed oil, cutting off 80% of Japan’s supply. Japan chose to attack rather than submit. The decision was economically rational from their perspective, which is the terrifying part.

Today, the US has frozen Russian assets, sanctioned Chinese tech firms, restricted semiconductor exports, and is engaged in a tariff war with most of the developing world simultaneously. The question is not whether this pattern rhymes with the 1930s. It is whether anyone in power has read enough history to recognize we’re on the edge of major change.

They must have.

Washington can’t be that stupid.

I’m guessing it’s why Marco Rubio said the quiet part out loud.

The old world is not gone. It just stopped pretending.

Ever since I was a child it was my dream to become a financial advisor. Unfortunately, it never came true. Therefore, I am not a financial advisor; you should do your own research and not just listen to random people on the internet. Nothing contained in this publication should be construed as investment advice.

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In early February 2026, the DOJ released what it called “the Epstein files.” Six million pages of emails, flight logs, financial records, and correspondence spanning decades.

Everyone including Les Wexner of Victoria’s Secret fame, Noam Chomsky, Alec Baldwin, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Donald Trump, Naomi Campbell, Prince Andrew, Michael Saylor, David Blaine & David Copperfield (yes, for real), Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Joan Rivers, Steve Bannon, Henry Kissinger, Chris Tucker, Elie Wiesel (yes, that Elie Wiesel), and even Malcolm freaking Gladwell are all mentioned.

Nobody has been brought to justice. Epstein apparently trafficked to no one.

Within 72 hours, anonymous researchers, journalists, and extremely online people had surfaced emails that connected Jeffrey Epstein to sitting politicians, intelligence agencies, billionaires, crypto founders, and at least one conversation about Middle Eastern terror groups that reads like a classified briefing.

Here is the timeline of what we know, what has been confirmed, and what the people in power are desperately trying to make you forget.

Early February: The Emails Surface and the Internet Loses Its Mind

The first wave of revelations came fast. Epstein’s personal email, jeevacation@gmail.com, turned out to be a Rosetta Stone of elite correspondence. The man was emailing everyone: Billionaires, academics, politicians, intelligence-adjacent figures, all in a casual tone and first-name basis.

As comedian Tim Dillon put it, “No media is covering this. Shame on them, by the way. Shame on them. No media covers this. They’re covering parts of it and they’re dancing around everything.”

One of the first emails to go viral was Epstein writing to Noam Chomsky, the famed MIT linguist, joking about Donald Trump:

In another email Epstein joked that Trump has written three books. Which makes him one of the few people in the world who has “written more books than he has read.”

Funny line. Terrifying context. A convicted sex offender was casually roasting a future president in private correspondence with one of America’s most respected intellectuals. And Chomsky was writing back.

The Email That Made 191,000 People Bookmark a Tweet

Then came the email that nobody could joke about.

A document surfaced describing a child who said Jesus made her feel safe. According to the email, her abusers dressed up as Jesus while they assaulted and murdered her.

I have covered dark stories. This one made me close my laptop and read my bible.

The engagement numbers on that tweet tell you everything. 191,000 likes. 38,000 retweets. 20,000 bookmarks. People were not scrolling past this. They were saving it. Archiving it. Refusing to let it disappear into the feed.

Epstein, Tom Pritzker, and a Casual Email About ISIS Being an Intelligence Asset

On September 5, 2016, Epstein emailed Tom Pritzker, billionaire heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune. The email reads like a briefing no civilian should have access to:

“Turkey gives Nusra a heads up on Iraqi recruits. Slaughter. Russia gives Erdogan a heads up on coup. US gives a pass on ISIS to Palmyra. Assad has no support, so will stay. Nuclear base in Turkey. Soviet defense in Iran. Saudi in Yemen. Egypt about to lose all financial support. Jordan has 1M refugees. As does Lebanon.”

Epstein then added: “Nusra, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Jaba, Hamas, the leaders all prefer Donald wild.”

Pritzker responded: “They know Hillary.”

8.6 million views. 116,000 likes. Because the implication is staggering: a convicted sex trafficker had real-time intelligence-level knowledge of Middle Eastern terror networks and was discussing it casually with a billionaire over email.

If you've read Whitney Webb, none of this should surprise you. She broke much of this years ago in One Nation Under Blackmail (both volumes, but especially Vol. 2), documenting that Epstein's operation was state-sponsored through both US and Israeli intelligence. Webb's central thesis is that Epstein was not a lone predator who got lucky with rich friends. He was an intelligence asset running a sexual blackmail operation on behalf of a network that spans organized crime, spy agencies, and the highest levels of American government.

This is the email that reignited the “Epstein was intelligence” theory harder than anything before it.

The Shipping Futures Email and the Line Nobody Can Unsee

Another Epstein email, this one to Roger Schank, contained a passage about financial markets that included the lines: “This is the way the Jew makes money” and “let the goyim deal in the real world.”

If the media won’t touch the other parts forget about this. The email was discussing shipping futures and how financial speculation allowed certain groups to profit while others bore the physical risk. Whatever your interpretation of the language, the email’s existence in Epstein’s own words, sent from his own account, is now part of the public record.

Michael Saylor Was Too Weird Even for Epstein’s Publicist

In a twist that somehow manages to be both funny and somewhat edifying for Bitcoin holders, Epstein’s personal publicist Peggy Siegel was found to have written about Michael Saylor, the MicroStrategy CEO and Bitcoin maximalist who has become one of crypto’s most prominent figures.

Siegel’s assessment of Saylor, paraphrased: “He’s so creepy I don’t even know if I can take his money. I don’t even know how to blackmail him. He has no personality and doesn’t understand social behavior.”

The internet’s conclusion: Michael Saylor was saved by his autism:

This matters beyond the joke. Epstein’s network operated on leverage and blackmail.

You don’t have to be the director of the FBI to see that Epstein is trafficking women to clients, not to himself, like FBI director Kash Patel claimed in 2025.

Many online are calling Kash a big fat liar. He’s a liar and he should resign and step down because he’s lying. Why is he lying?

If Saylor was too socially impenetrable to be compromised, it raises the question of how many others were not.

The 4Chan Prison Guard Was Real. His Name Is Roberto Grijalva.

On August 10, 2019, the morning of Epstein’s reported death, an anonymous poster on 4Chan claimed to be a prison officer at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. The post described Epstein being taken from his cell in a medical wheelchair the night before, an unauthorized trip van arriving, and guards who did not sign in or record a plate number.

For six years, this post was treated as anonymous internet conspiracy.

The Epstein files confirmed the poster’s identity: Roberto Grijalva, an officer at the MCC. The SDNY opened a Grand Jury proceeding and subpoenaed 4Chan, Apple, AT&T, and Citibank to identify him. His name appeared unredacted in the Citibank subpoena response, matching the same Roberto Grijalva whose statements were included in the prison’s investigation into Epstein’s death.

All of this means it could be real; Epstein could be alive.

The anonymous 4Chan post from August 10, 2019 is now a verified eyewitness account from an MCC prison officer claiming Epstein was removed from the facility before his reported suicide. Read that again.

Les Wexner: The Billionaire Who Gave Epstein Everything and Got Away Clean

No Epstein timeline is complete without Leslie Wexner, the founder of Victoria’s Secret and the man who arguably made Epstein possible.

Wexner sold Epstein his Manhattan mansion for $1. Gave him a private plane that became the Lolita Express. Handed him power of attorney over all his finances. By 1995, Epstein controlled the Wexner Foundation, the Wexner Heritage Foundation, and Wexner’s property portfolio.

“There’s no question that Epstein could not have done what he did without the support of people that provided him money.” — David Boies, attorney for Epstein victims including Virginia Roberts Giuffre

Palm Beach police, during Epstein’s first arrest in 2006, asked him directly: “You developed a sexual relationship with Leslie Wexner at some point in time, is that true?” Epstein’s response: an icy, deadpanned “No.”

Wexner is a free man today. The Wall Street Journal ran a puff piece portraying him as Epstein’s victim. Nicholas Fuentes summarized what millions are feeling:

“Howard Lutnick needs to be fired. Les Wexner needs to be indicted. And the DOJ needs to unredact and release every single one of the 6 million Epstein files and investigate everybody who is implicated. This isn’t going away.”

Pam Bondi’s Hearing: “The Dow Is Over 50,000 Dollars!”

On February 12, 2026, Attorney General Pam Bondi testified before Congress about the Epstein files. She was asked direct questions about the investigation’s progress, about the names in the files, about what the DOJ intends to do with six million pages of evidence documenting a global sex trafficking operation connected to the highest levels of power.

Her response was to pivot to the stock market.

“The Dow is over 50,000 dollars! I don’t know why you’re laughing. You’re a great stock trader as I hear, Raskin. The Dow is over 50,000 right now. The S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. That’s what we should be talking about.”

One, the Dow is measured in points, not dollars. Something someone corrected me on in college. Two, it is no longer above 50,000 dollars (points!).

Children were trafficked. Emails prove connections to intelligence agencies and terror networks. A prison guard’s eyewitness account of Epstein’s removal has been verified. And the Attorney General of the United States wants to talk about the Nasdaq.

Why did President Donald Trump and Bondi call the Epstein files a “hoax”?

Thomas Massie Walked Out of a Classified Room and Said Six Names Are Being Hidden

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie grilled Bondi during the hearing so effectively that clips of her unraveling under his questioning went viral within hours.

But the real bombshell came when Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna both exited a classified review of the unredacted Epstein files and said the same thing: names are being deliberately hidden.

• “What I saw that bothered me were the names of at least six men that have been redacted that are likely incriminated by their inclusion in these files. It took some digging to find them.” — Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)

• “There are six men, some of them with their photographs, that have been redacted. And there’s no explanation why those people were redacted.” — Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA)

A Republican and a Democrat walked out of the same room and said the same thing. That almost never happens. Six men. Photographs included. Redacted without explanation, and both parties agree the names are being protected.

The obvious question: protected by whom?

Trump’s response to all of this was telling.

Trump’s Response: “Nobody Cared About Epstein When He Was Alive”

Hours after Bondi’s hearing, Trump posted on Truth Social. The statement, reposted by his Rapid Response account, read in part:

“Nobody cared about Epstein when he was alive, they only cared about him when they thought he could create Political Harm to a very popular President.”

The post then pivoted to attacking Thomas Massie, referencing transgender athletes, and praising Republican poll numbers. No mention of the victims. No mention of the files. No mention of Les Wexner, Tom Pritzker, or any of the names surfacing in the documents.

Trump wants the Epstein files gone. Kash Patel and Bondi want them gone.

Dan Bongino Quit After 292 Days and Called You Blackpilled

Meanwhile, Dan Bongino, who was appointed to a senior role in the Epstein investigation, left after 292 days without a single arrest. He then appeared on Fox News to take a victory lap and call critics “blackpilled.”

No arrests. Lied about Epstein. Quit. Calls you the problem. Takes a victory lap.

The Bitcoin Connection Nobody Wants to Talk About

Buried in the files is a detail that should terrify the crypto world. Epstein’s personal logs list “satoshi (bitcoin)” as a guest for a UN Climate Week event, alongside Larry Summers and Peter Thiel. Emails attributed to Epstein claim he discussed Sharia-compliant digital currencies with BTC founders in 2016.

• 74.79% of Bitcoin core development and code was committed after Epstein took over his de facto senior management role as benefactor.

• Meanwhile, he donated to MIT staff and blockchain devs who knew the money was dirty. They hid his name from internal logs and referred to him as “Voldemort.”

• Epstein hosted Brock Pierce, the Tether co-founder, for private strategy sessions. As many as three of five Bitcoin core developers were in contact with Epstein since at least 2015.

BThis does not mean Bitcoin is compromised. But who, or what group or entity, created Bitcoin in the first place?

This Is Not Going Away

Is this the biggest scandal in American history?

A deeper question: what the hell do many in the ruling class believe in?

Are they Luciferians? Luciferianism focuses on self-deification. I am God. To quote Tim Dillon again, “These people don’t believe there’s any moral code outside what they can get away with.”

These six million files just exposed clandestine connections to intelligence services, terror organizations, billionaire dynasties, crypto founders, and sitting politicians. A verified eyewitness account of Epstein being removed from prison before his death. An Attorney General who responded to questions about child trafficking by citing the Dow Jones. A bipartisan pair of congressmen confirming six names are being deliberately hidden. And a former president calling the whole thing a distraction.

The names are in the files. The emails are real. The internet is not forgetting.

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You told an entire generation to stop approaching people and this is what happened.

There is a particular kind of dark comedy in watching an entire generation invent a meme name for the act of dating someone who is nice to them.

“Shrekking” is the latest viral dating trend floating through Gen Z’s collective consciousness. The premise is to intentionally date someone you consider less conventionally attractive than yourself, on the theory that this “down-leveling” will produce a partner who is more grateful, more attentive, more secure.

A partner who treats you better because, presumably, they know the deal.

The name comes from Shrek. The ogre. The swamp guy. The implication is fucked up, yet that’s where we’re at.

And I just remembered something. I remember a period around the 2010s when the cultural messaging could not have been louder or clearer: women generally did not want to be approached. Not at work. Not at the gym. Not running errands. Not anywhere. The mandate was simple. Do not make anyone uncomfortable.

Full stop.

So here we are.

The “Don’t Talk to Me” Decade Built a Generation That Can’t Connect

What happens when you spend ten years telling people that initiating romantic interest in public is somewhere between rude and predatory? You get a generation where 75% of young adults are not in a hurry to find a partner and 45% say they don’t feel ready for a relationship at all.

• You get 67% of Hinge users requesting sober dates, not because they have a drinking problem, but because they are anxious about human connection.

• You get “pre-qualifying.” Nearly half of daters now raise non-negotiables like faith, finances, and family goals before a second drink arrives.

• 86% confirm these dealbreakers within a few dates.

What we’re seeing is ten years of hookup culture and hedonism ending. Love and God are back. The shift happened fast and nobody saw it coming.

If dating is a stock market, we’re at the bottom for Gen Z.

But who knows, it could be like Bitcoin and keep crashing.

We’re also seeing everything in dating funneled into apps and algorithms. 60% of Gen Z aged 18 to 22 now use AI as a “virtual second opinion” for dating advice, profiles, and compatibility checks.

We replaced the nervous hello at a coffee shop with a language model.

Is Shrekking Cringe OR Based? Your Looks Don’t Matter Anymore

Let’s be honest about what Shrekking actually is.

Strip away the TikTok framing and the swamp jokes, and it is straightforward: people are so burned out on volatile, high-stakes, anxiety-producing relationships that they are consciously choosing stability.

The data backs this up. The broader Gen Z shift toward “6-7” partners, people who offer peace, predictability, and emotional steadiness over the chaos of chasing a “10/10,” runs parallel to Shrekking.

It’s sterile as hell—reducing everything to glib nihilistic frameworks, yet this is where Gen Z is at. The system is buck broken.

“Many Gen Z daters are shifting away from high-passion, volatile partners, opting instead for those who offer stability, peace, and predictability.”

— Hinge, 2026 Dating Trends Report

56% more Gen Zers believe in doing personal growth work, therapy included, before entering a relationship compared to older generations.

Sexual activity among younger cohorts continues to decline. 72% entered 2026 with a “clean slate” mentality.

This is a generation that watched their parents’ marriages implode and decided the whole system needed a firmware update. The problem is they named the update after a cartoon ogre.

The Part Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Here is the uncomfortable truth. If you are selecting a partner specifically because you believe they are less attractive than you, and therefore more likely to be loyal or grateful, you have not escaped toxic relationship dynamics.

You have just inverted them.

The premise of Shrekking contains a power imbalance baked into its DNA.

What’s the old saying…

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”—The Who

It assumes the “less attractive” partner will be appreciative enough to compensate for the gap. It assumes the Shrecker holds leverage. That is not emotional maturity.—and I think we have a long way to go.

And yet.

I get it. Values-first relationships are progress, even if the memes are harsh. A generation raised on “approaching women is toxic masculinity,” and upside-down morality is finally clawing out of the muck.

Getting closer to God, one confused step at a time.

Gen Z Didn’t Kill Dating. The Rest of Us Just Watched It Happen.

Roughly 6 in 10 Gen Z men and women agree that dating responsibilities and costs should be shared equally. They are more intentional. More sober. More cautious. 63% are actively looking to fill the “loneliness gap.”

They didn’t invent the problem. They inherited a social landscape where:

• Approaching strangers became socially risky

• Third places evaporated

• Digital communication replaced physical presence

• The algorithm became the matchmaker

Shrekking is not a revolution. It is not even particularly new. People have always dated for security over chemistry. The only thing that changed is that a generation raised on irony and meme culture decided to give it a name.

The quiet part being: a lot of people gave up on finding someone who is both attractive to them and treats them well. So they picked one.

Next step is finding someone at a library, a farmers market, or a church.

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Davos 2026 was perfect. Every panel, every speech, every backroom deal—flawless execution of the destruction of the old world order.

It reminded me of U.S. security policymakers Elbridge Colby and Dr. A. Wess Mitchell’s 2025 think tank paper, The Marathon Initiative, where they argue the U.S. can not stomach a protracted war in different parts of the world to uphold the current world order.

As they write: “The past two National Defense Strategies made clear that the U.S. is prepared to militarily confront only one major adversary, and that it should be China. And to do that, it needs to find ways of reducing U.S. commitments in Europe and the Middle East.”

This is why globalism is dying.

It’s why gold and silver keep hitting record highs.

It’s why the dollar is losing its reserve currency status.

You just sleepwalked into the new world order.

Globalism worked because it was essentially Pax Americana. It ensured relative peace, prosperity and stability of the world since the Cold War.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work and instead created the conditions for predators to thrive. Turns out when you reduce people to ‘consumers’ and strip all sense of religion and meaning from their lives, they’ll desperately follow whoever promises to restore it, even malicious actors who act as saviours.

Here are 7 takeaways from Davos and how the erosion of globalism will affect you:

1. China is The New US

Canadian PM Mark Carney casually dropped a speech calling the U.S. the next USSR.

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. Canada joined American-created institutions, they praised its principles; they benefited from its predictability.

They knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. Also, trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and they knew that international law applied with varied rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This bargain no longer works.

Even if Trump is out in 2028, who’s to say another American leader doesn’t bully Canada and the EU down the road?

Everything is changing. We might even see countries pivot towards China.

2. Should You Buy Gold and Silver? (Spoilers: Yes)

The gold price gained more market cap in one day than Bitcoin’s entire market cap. I cannot imagine how smug gold bug Peter Schiff is right now.

Ray Dalio, Schiff, they were all right… America is a multi-century pump-and-dump. It’s why gold and silver are at all-time highs.

Current and historic money-printing destroys economies, causes recession, war, and destruction—yet like a San Francisco dopefiend, we can’t get off the stuff.

I wouldn’t buy precious metals at the top, but like Bitcoin, I expect them to continue growing as globalism dies and money printing continues.

Follow gold bug Michael Oliver () for insights.

3. Economies Don’t Actually Need To Suck

The golden rule is to believe economists who say you have until around 2030 to accumulate assets before things get out of control.

It isn’t because of AI.

It isn’t because Trump is insane or Xi killed his top general (real by the way).

It’s money printing and debt debasement.

When they print money they don’t give it to you, as you probably have noticed. They give it to large banks and institutions that are pretty downright evil.

So now, after 5% ‘inflation’, which is 1984-newspeak for “the bank printed a shitton of money and gave it to slimy fuckers,” the bankers have 5% more money and you have 5% less in purchasing power. Do this each year and it adds up fast.

While inflation might have some reasonable basis in a monetary system (at levels low enough where it won’t matter for private savings like 1 or 2%), it’s not what we’re seeing. Plus it’s never going to happen because that would be in the common interest, which the central bank does not care for.

Economies don’t actually need to suck, San Franciscans don’t need to be addicted to dope, and we don’t have to kill all the elephants. But for some reason, the latter two are commonly accepted but the former one isn’t.

4. America Is Still An Empire

Carney and the wider EU representatives at Davos hate the idea of a modern-day empire because a true independent superpower has no need or reason to bow to anyone else.

That’s Trump in a nutshell. Love him or hate him.

In fact, the EU is not screaming and crying about Russia and China because neither are truly independent. They still rely on outside sources to get things done; they still need other countries to live. America does not.

Globalism wants a world on life support. It can’t work anymore.

It’s a Tower of Babel.

Now you understand why Trump is dismantling NATO along with the EU & the UN. He’s speeding up the process.

5. Will Bitcoin Die Or Continue?

How will Bitcoin ‘comeback’?

This will sound trite, banal, and honestly downright lame but Bitcoin is still the soundest money ever conceived, the best available financial instrument, and the greatest and best performing asset of all time.

Bitcoin is the best decentralized unit of account that cannot be replicated again, and it is engineered to challenge central banking debt-based fiat currencies. It’s backed by energy and social incentives, and that’s better than anything out there.

Meanwhile, if you are a crypto holder, gold’s run-up should unironically make you feel so much more bullish about the potential gains of crypto. Wealth is suddenly and desperately trying to save itself with whatever alternatives there are.

6. Trump On The US Dollar

Important. Write this down. At some point, it’s going be explained to Trump that the only way out of the debt trap is to reneg on the debt. And they will tell him the damage it will do to the world, holding dollars and dollar debt.

Basically, the U.S. owes so much money it can’t pay it back without destroying the economy, so someone’s going to tell Trump the only option is to just... not pay. When that happens, every country and person holding dollars or U.S. debt gets wiped out overnight.

“President Trump’s lack of predictability and the huge US debt mean the dollar is not as safe as it used to be,” - Chris Weafer of Macro-Advisory.

Militarily, it will be fine because nobody can touch the U.S., and that, while painful, the U.S. will recover first and strongest.

But Trump could be the one to set up a new world order and reset (or rug) the dollar as he did with Trump coin and Melania coin.

It’s beginning to dawn on dollar and dollar debt holders that the more they dump, the more it will accelerate his decision.

7. Europe

I’m beginning to think that Europe should just federalize and create the first European Reich.

In fact, that’s the path that Europe will take after Davos:

• EU will invest heavily in “digital sovereignty.”

• They will develop a “EuroStack” for independent cloud and AI infrastructure

• May try to stop ‘outsourcing” its military going forward

Globalism isn’t sustainable and the EU and metals are screaming it loudly.

Maybe we’ll return to that Star Trek utopia one day, but it’s not right now.

Are people who believe in conspiracy theories factually dumber than people who don’t?

Conspiracies exist, but the problem is that conspiracy theorists like Candace Owens or Ian Carroll will often take them and extrapolate them to a ridiculous degree. And when they’re presented with any amount of criticism they fall back on “hurr durr” so you believe everything the government tells you?

Before Covid-19 and Trump broke these people’s brains, conspiracy theorists thought:

1. Government and elites do a lot of things we don’t know about

2. We don’t have enough information to fully understand what they do

3. And, as a bonus, not everything they do is aimed at our benefit

If you don’t believe in 1-2, you must be a megalomaniac, and if you don’t believe in 3, you must be an extremely good-natured and naive person.

So here are 4 proven conspiracies that I believe will give you more insight into how the world works, not induce further information and sensory overload:

1. The Franklin Scandal: Real Life Kubrick?

The Franklin Scandal confirms one of two possibilities: the Devil is real, or there are people committed enough to drag him into existence.

Exposed by UK journalist Nick Bryant, the Franklin Scandal detonated in Omaha, Nebraska in 1988, when the failure of Franklin Credit Union—run by Republican power player Lawrence King—revealed something far worse than embezzlement.

It showed what Stanley Kubrick made a movie about in Eyes Wide Shut:

King had been moving street kids, foster kids, children from Boys Town, and shuttled them to parties where Nebraska’s elite and visitors from Washington could do what they wanted.

The testimonies came from kids like Paul Bonacci and Alisha Owen, who described being flown to parties, passed around, raped, filmed and forced into rituals. King wasn’t some lone pervert but was connected, protected, and was moving through Republican fundraisers and given White House tours. Sound like anyone?

My favorite quote from Bryant’s book is from former CIA director William Colby advising his friend Senator John DeCamp, urging him to quit his investigations into the Franklin child abuse affair:

“What you have to understand, John, is that sometimes there are forces and events too big, too powerful, with so much at stake for other people or institutions, that you cannot do anything about them, no matter how evil or wrong they are and no matter how dedicated or sincere you are or how much evidence you have. This is simply one of the hard facts of life you have to face.”—William Colby

A grand jury—led by a man who’d later face his own abuse allegations—called the abuse a “carefully crafted hoax” and indicted Owen for perjury.

Bonacci ended up in prison. The lead investigator, Gary Caradori, died when his plane exploded mid-flight after telling his son he’d found the evidence that would break everything open. Witnesses recanted under pressure or disappeared.

The darkest allegations went beyond sex trafficking into territory that reads like ritual horror. Bonacci described being flown to Northern California in July 1984 and forced at gunpoint to participate in what he called a snuff film—the sexual assault and murder of a young boy among massive trees, filmed by hooded figures.

2. Project Stargate (*remote views morrowind*)

Above is a declassified CIA document where they interviewed a psychic with the intention of proving his BS. What happened next was surprising.

Essentially, the CIA gave the person a sealed envelope with the location of Mars and the timeframe of 1 million years BC (so basically a million years ago), hoping to show the psychic is a fraud because he’ll describe earthlike features, get the time wrong and so on. He instead describes humanoid figures on a rocky, desert-like region with technology of some kind.

He was right, without looking. They call this “remote viewing".

Taking a skeptical viewpoint, how does one explain this? Why would the CIA interview a psychic? Why would they ask such intricate questions if not for prior knowledge about such things?

Why is this not talked about publicly?

All of this was part of the CIA’s Project Stargate, a 20-year program using ESP to gather intel and stay ahead in the Cold War. It’s the stuff that is fictionalized in Men Who Stare at Goats. Look up Ed May, Joe McMoneagle, and Ingo Swann. The program was ostensibly discontinued in the mid-90’, while some believe that it was ramped up. It may continue out of parapsychology labs at Stanford and UVA

I wonder if ESP really is an innate talent in all people or only some of us?

3. The Limited Hangout

Can someone send me the clip of Tucker squealing, “So what if my dad was in the CIA!?”

Carlson is part of what’s called a “Limited Hangout”. The CIA invented the term and both political machines run it daily. You cover up the truth with a second story or person that appears to undermine the official narrative but actually reinforces it.

The Feds know some shit is too hot to leave alone so they use figureheads like Tucker to cover it, but curate the message in a way that isn’t damaging.

So instead of “Epstein runs a private island designed to manufacture blackmail on US politicians on behalf of a foreign government,” it becomes “Epstein is a pedophile.”

Learn what a limited hangout is and don’t get your hopes up for anything to change outside your own sphere of influence. They’re going to tease you and titillate you until you’ve finally had your fill. Then the hangout will be over, the media coverage will stop, and you will be expected to pretend that none of it ever happened, just like you did with Snowden, just like you did with Assange.

4. The Knights Templar and Other Secret Societies

The Knights Templar started in 1119 as nine French knights protecting Christian pilgrims on the roads to Jerusalem. Within a decade they had papal backing, and by the mid-12th century they controlled castles, farms, vineyards, and entire territories across Europe and the Middle East.

They built Europe’s first large-scale banking system and became a state within a state, paying no taxes while accumulating massive wealth. Then King Philip IV of France, drowning in debt from wars against England and Flanders, much of it owed directly to the Templars, made his move, exterminating all of them in the 14th century.

I’m not sure if the Templars continued—some say they did through the Freemasons—but the historical record is clear: secret societies wielding immense financial and political power have existed, been acknowledged by popes and kings, and shaped nations. Yet today’s mainstream media treats the suggestion of organized power operating outside public view as crackpot.

Here are some other recent secret societies influencing us:

• The Fabian Society: the first version of the WEF, ran by eugenicists H.G. Wells and Sydney Webb. They argued for universalism and globalism in the early 20th century.

• The Ordo Templi Orientis: a German secret society run by Aleister Crowley in the 20th century to find spiritual enlightenment through magick and ritual sacrifice. OTO is so influential that it was the main antagonist in The DaVinci Code for allegedly hiding the truth about Christianity.

• Skull & Bones: military version of the masons, lineage-wise. The famous "TIME" Magazine was founded by two Skull and Bones members and the name "TIME.” George Bush, another member, called the wars in the Middle East another “Crusade.”

That’s all I got. 2026 planning to be much more active here and on Medium and Substack. Stay tuned.

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When did you finally accept that crypto is officially dead? No more hype, no more jpeg monkeys, no more pumps, no more dumps, no more nothing except eternal bears and crab.

Open criminals have completely captured the market and crypto is effectively dead, both as a financial instrument and an ideal.

This is the final phase of capitalism.

All of the wealth has been accrued.

There’s nothing for you to speculate on.

Looking back on it, crypto was great training wheels. It taught me how to navigate and exploit volatile markets.

It allowed me to outperform Warren Buffett and Nancy Pelosi.

Now, obviously, if you’re a long-time fan of mine, you know I’m being a bit facetious. Crypto isn’t totally dead and there is one crypto I still hold. And stuff like BTC still has a place in the world. But the rules have changed.

Here’s what you need to know going into 2026:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

Greetings, “Yard Cough”. Cryptocurrency is doing TREMENDOUSLY well, folks — absolutely the safest in the world. Some say it becomes EVEN SAFER when you say “THANK YOU,” in the comments, which, by the way, many people are saying to me already. Incredible results. Nobody protects crypto like I do! - Donald Trump

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

We’re destroying ourselves at an unprecedented rate because we elected career criminals and fraudsters.

B-but Donald Judas Trump, enemy of mankind, would never do such a thing!

Well, as you know, I voted for Trump in 2024 because he was the anti-establishment candidate in a time when the establishment had failed the people.

And now Trump is fully a part of the establishment, as shown by his redactions of the Epstein files, and his inaction/incompetence/ “professional courtesy” he’s giving to all the Deep Staters that aren’t getting arrested.

Regarding crypto, it’s an even bigger mess:

The Trump meme coin is the clearest example of rug-pulling your voters.

Launched days before inauguration, the official Trump coin spiked to $45.57 and a $9Bn valuation as insiders held roughly 80% of the supply. Today it trades near $5.60, down about 88%.

Now Trump and Melania are being sued for orchestrating pump-and-dumps.

Another facet of the lawsuit is against World Liberty Financial, the Trump-family DeFi project. The report claims WLFI’s token surged in near-lockstep with federal rollbacks, including lighter SEC oversight, the sudden dismantling of the DOJ’s NCET unit, and a clear shift in crypto enforcement.

So simple really.

This is why crypto now feels dead. It was exciting before millions got scammed by a sitting president.

If you want one more of Trump’s insanity, check this:

If You Didn’t Sell Your Crypto and Put The Money Into AI Already…

Five years into crypto only one thing is true: those who bought solid, boring coins and held are now rich or at least very well off.

Those who chased leverage, memes and altcoin 100x are dead. Especially those who used leverage.

I’m pushing 30 and only now came to this realization.

I’m committed to buying and holding crypto for the foreseeable future and never touching leverage or even trading again.

So here’s what I’m holding heading into 2026:

• Zcash: Zcash heading into 2026 feels like one of those ideas that arrives early, gets ignored, then suddenly makes sense all at once. At its core, Zcash fixes Bitcoin’s biggest lie: that it’s “private.” Zcash uses zk-SNARKs (zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge), which let you prove a transaction is valid without revealing who sent it, who received it, or how much. In a world drifting toward financial surveillance, compliance drag-nets, and AI-powered chain analysis, Zcash is thriving and up 720.6% on the year. Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum, has repeatedly praised zk-SNARKs as one of the most important breakthroughs in cryptography and borrowed the tech directly into Ethereum’s roadmap. Longing zec is literally the only play in crypto rn.

• What Every Entrepreneur is Investing In: I recently interviewed Trump advisor and serial entrepreneur Mitch Francis for IBT and he said the AI supercycle is the event everyone is waiting for. AI heading into 2026 feels less like a “sector” and more like a black swan swallowing every other market. Some stocks I’m invested in are 1)AMD, which is still massively underappreciated relative to its role in inference, data centers, and open AI stacks, especially as customers look for Nvidia alternatives. 2)Broadcom is another sleeper, supplying custom AI accelerators and networking silicon for hyperscalers who don’t want to be hostage to one chipmaker. And then there’s 3)ASML, the most boring-looking monopoly on Earth, quietly controlling the machines required to build advanced chips at all.

• Silver: I know it’s being posted a lot, but the supply for silver has been so tight for so long—and it takes so long to get a new supply out of the ground—that if enough people pile in, this thing would go from 2 digits to 4 digits. It’s what I’m watching over gold.

Crypto is Dead. Time to Buy Crypto

The only time I feel stressed is when I’m in dangerous parts of the Middle East or when I look at my crypto portfolio.

That shouldn’t be a thing.

Grassroots mass adoption for crypto hasn’t happened, but crypto is about to get mass adopted by the banks. See pic.

According to the banks themselves, they’re waiting for more legal clarity, which means they’re waiting for the Clarity Act, which is expected to be signed into law in 2026.

But for now, the majority of crypto is in its death throes.

Hype from the most bullish narrative imaginable has not been allowed to build organically.

We are in 1995-1998 age of the internet in crypto. We had thousands of websites back then, and this is before .com crash, and before 4-5 large billion-dollar companies appeared and took the majority of the market.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix.

So, in a year or 2 there will be largest cryptos that are already here that will likely take the largest digital finance markets. But most will die.

Boomer pearl-clutching is dead after the Nick Fuentes-Piers Morgan interview.

Here’s what Piers Morgan said to the “Gen Z David Duke” of the 21st century:

• So you’re a racist

• So you’re a misogynist

• So you’re a virgin

• So you’re a white supremacist

• So you’re a Holocaust denier

• So you’re a Hitler fan

• So you’re a Stalin fan

• So you’re an evil bad man who doesn’t care about me gassed mum and dad

And all Fuentes said is “Yes.”

Nobody cares. Gen Z doesn’t care. This is what’s coming like it or not.

As of 2025, Gen Zers with student loans owe more than roughly $21,000 on average, and total personal debt averages around $34,000 per person — even without mortgages.

Roughly half of Gen Z adults have never had sex, based on reports.

So why would we care about the negative labels of the world that is broken, one that the devil is in charge of? That’s Fuentes’s line of thinking.

That might sound irrelevant, but trust me, it is the point. The Boomer and even Millennial generations are so out of touch and think that if you’re a virgin past 15 and didn’t sneak out of your parents’ house to get drunk then there is something mentally wrong with you.

What a spiritually bankrupt existence!

Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and JD Vance won’t matter in the end. Here’s why Nick Fuentes is the future, like him or not.

Nobody Wants to Be Lectured to in 2025

The Fuentes phenomenon only makes sense if you accept a basic premise: people aren’t watching the same content the same way anymore.

One older audience sees:

• an extremist

• a provocateur

• a figure who should be removed from public life

Another sees:

• someone who clearly isn’t afraid

• someone unfiltered by HR language

• someone who thinks labels don’t matter at all and the substance of terms like “racist,” “misogyny,” or “antisemite” should be discussed instead.

Here’s what’s more important than being called a “racist” or “virgin”: the intellectual curiosity to justify why that position is the correct one, let alone hear someone affirm the opposite.

I imagine Boomers who didn’t actually watch the interview, but only saw a clip where Nick admitted he’s racist and a virgin, thought they didn’t need to see any more, it’s over, nobody could possibly come back from that.

They don’t even realize the hits didn’t land at all.

So they stand there, like a deer in the headlights, when asked:

1. why is it bad to be a virgin in the first place?

2. Or what led a figure like Hitler to become the leader of Germany?

Dan Carlin of Hardcore History likes to remind people that history doesn’t care about your discomfort. Sooner or later, even Hitler gets the full examination — strengths, failures,the casus belli of WW2, all of it. We’ve already done this with Caesar, Napoleon, Genghis Khan. If you told the people living under them that we’d someday study these men with cold detachment, they’d think we were insane.

Calling Hitler the devil is lazy shorthand. He was monstrous, but the real devil makes him look small. Evil has a deeper source than any one man, even the worst of them.

We lived in a protected story. That story is now dead.

The Crisis of Young Men

I spent Easter in England this year, and across Europe churches were packed in record numbers no one expected. Hedonism is dying; people feel emptied out and adrift.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth about the Christian Bible: it’s a deeply politically incorrect book:

• it lays out a hierarchy between men and women

• there’s a chosen people and an exclusion towards many groups of Gentiles

• there’s incest, murder, near-filicide, war, genocide, and many crimes against humanity.

I read somewhere once that the Bible and Shakespeare have the most honest stories about humanity because they aren’t afraid to offend.

Does this mean that what Nick Fuentes advocates for is the gospel truth?

No. But he pushes further than Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, or the late Charlie Kirk. He walks straight into the topics most people only whisper about with close friends—race, prejudice, the ugly corners of history we pretend aren’t there—and says them out loud.

As it stands the world is in an ugly place:

• Your average American male in 2025 is chronically single. Incels aren’t even a minority group anymore.

• Almost 70% of young men are single.

• Suicide ranks second as the leading cause of death among males under 45.

• Modern dating is a bitch.

If we aren’t willing to face the darkness that decades of hedonism and spiritual betrayal brought us, we will never change as a society.

Nick Fuentes is The Future For Young Men

I’m sorry to the many of you who will read this and be upset.

But all of this is happening; we can’t turn away. A friend in Lebanon warned me that a spiritual reckoning is coming, and I believe him. The ground is shifting.

Fuentes is one of the accelerants driving everything toward its climax.

Have you seen Instagram and Twitter lately? It’s full of Nick Fuentes, Gypsycrusader (a much more hardened racist), anti-Israel videos, memes where the punchline is “nigger”, conspiracies about Epstein and 9/11, etc.

The floodgates for people seeking the truth, even in darkness, have opened.

Fuentes is a John the Baptist-like figure for this.

Let me leave you with a warning: the anti-narrative cuts both ways. Fuentes tells his young men not to choose violence, and good on him, but the way people talk about these issues makes that outcome a real possibility.

We’re entering a world where every topic gets dragged into the light, and the old labels—racist, antisemite, misogynist—won’t stop the conversation anymore.

People want the whole truth now, not the sanitized version. Whether we can handle it is another story.

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Epstein killed himself.

The leaked files mean nothing.

America’s economy has never been stronger.

Prices are falling.

And the world is peaceful … Am I missing anything here?

During the 2024 election campaign, Trump pledged to release all Epstein‑related files; once elected, he abruptly claimed the scandal was a “Democrat hoax.”

It’s like JFK. You won’t get anything until everyone involved is 5 years dead.

I’ve been following Epstein since 2020 when acclaimed and highly underrated journalist Whitney Webb released her two-part book “One Nation Under Blackmail” detailing the US government’s involvement with organized crime from Operation Underworld during WW2 to Jeffrey Epstein today.

She’s been posting steady updates on the Epstein–Trump connection over at Unlimited Hangout, but the material is dense enough to turn you into a schizophrenic. So here’s the stripped-down version: the ten biggest revelations about Trump, Epstein, the alleged government pedophiles, and what the new files are about to crack open:

1. Flavio Briatore – “Italy’s Donald Trump” – as a missing piece in the cover‑up

Whitney’s July 2025 article shows that Italian tycoon Flavio Briatore – dubbed Italy’s Donald Trump – belongs to the same organized‑crime and intelligence network that helped Epstein rise.

Moreover, Epstein’s butler Alfredo Rodriguez—who died suspiciously— reportedly considered Briatore and Trump material witnesses to Epstein’s crimes:

• Briatore introduced supermodel Naomi Campbell to Epstein; she later appeared in Epstein’s “black book,” and both she and other models were handled by Leslie Wexner’s Victoria’s Secret
  • Trump and Briatore met in the late 1980s, socialized with Tom Barrack and Roy Cohn, and were linked to black‑mail operations run from the Plaza Hotel

• Briatore remained a close supporter and helped create the Italian version of The Apprentice.
  

2. Bill Gates

Bill visited Epstein multiple times and flew on his private plane at least once after knowing he was a convicted pedophile.

Beginning in 2011 Gates met with Epstein at least three times at his Manhattan mansion, at least once staying late into the night (I wonder if they had a pillow fight?), once at a Ted Talk, and another at a World Economic Forum meeting, according to documents reviewed by Rolling Stone.

So why’s Bill not in an Abu Ghraib-style prison camp?

Maybe Bill Gates is innocent in the pedophilia aspect of all this but he nevertheless partnered with a pedophile who Cindy McCain, the wife of former senator John McCain, once stated “we all knew what he [Epstein] was doing,” and added that authorities were “afraid” to apprehend him.

3. Paolo Zampolli’s rise from modeling mogul to UN envoy

Whitney Webb’s August 2025 piece profiles Paolo Zampolli, another Trump confidant. Zampolli built his modelling agency with backing from former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi and married his wife soon after she flew on Epstein’s plane as a teen.

• He left modelling to work for Trump and later became a UN “Global Partnerships” envoy, collaborating with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s madam, on the TerraMar project for UN Sustainable Development Goal 14.

• Zampolli pushed citizenship‑by‑investment schemes and was entangled in UN financing scandals; he even was the first to propose turning Gaza into a “Riviera” resort.

• He also introduced Trump to Melania

4. The modelling pipeline into the Epstein network

Both Briatore and Zampolli were protégés of John Casablancas, whose Elite Model Management supplied underage girls to Epstein.

This is the point of the article where I once again ask, WHY IS NO ONE BESIDES GHISLAINE IN JAIL FOR THIS SHIT?!?

Naomi Campbell, Ivanka Trump and other models passed through this pipeline, and Epstein once tried to buy the Elite company, according to Whitney Webb.

Webb underscores that the modelling industry, dominated by Casablancas and Wexner, functioned as a recruitment vehicle for Epstein’s sex‑trafficking operation.

5. Why you should never shop at Victoria’s Secret again

Epstein —who looked exactly like I guy I met in Lebanon, so much so when we were 1-on-1, I thought he was going to kill me— had many powerful friends who either knew what he was doing or willingly turned a blind eye to it.

Another of those people is Leslie Wexner, the mogul who built Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Bath & Body Works retail empires.

No one had more skin in the game than Leslie Wexner.

Wexner gave everything over to Jeffrey Epstein. He sold him his Manhattan mansion for $1, gave him a private plane (what became the “Lolita Express”), handed him power of attorney over his finances, and at one point they were even neighbors.

By 1995 Epstein controlled:

• Wexner Foundation

• Wexner Heritage Foundation

• Wexner’s Property … this man should be in jail

6. Donald Trump

Jeffrey Epstein had 14 phone numbers connected to Trump in his contacts.

Shiiit. Who has 14 different phone numbers?

In 2002 Trump described Epstein as a “terrific guy,” adding, “he is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

You really can’t make this shit up when it comes to Trump.

The controversy here is that despite there apparently being so much to use against his enemies in the Epstein files, at least we thought, Trump is refusing to touch and instead calling it a “hoax”. Very suspicious.

Few possibilities in my mind:

• Trump is retarded (given)

• Trump is protecting Israel because Webb and others have proven that Epstein worked with Israeli and US intelligence

• Trump is protecting his friends that are pedos (possible)

• Trump is protecting himself

• Trump is 4D chessing his opponents into releasing the files (unlikely given #1)

7. Tech oligarchs, transhumanism and the “Stargate” project

Unlimited Hangout’s recent November 2025 article Cold Harbor: Eugenics, Epstein and Big Tech, uses a cache of Epstein emails to show his fascination with transhumanist “neo‑eugenics.”

Additionally, the piece notes that the Stargate project to build massive data‑farm infrastructures — now spearheaded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Oracle’s Larry Ellison — stems from Epstein’s push to aggregate data for AI models.

Now that Trump is all chummy with Altman and Ellison, it places him squarely with the transhumanist elite that Epstein admired.

8. Mega Group philanthropy, AIPAC and Israeli intelligence

The July 2024 Unlimited Hangout report, The Chain of Custody, explains who the “Mega Group” is. Essentially, it’s a secretive circle of ultra-wealthy, mostly US-Israeli-aligned businessmen, including Les Wexner, the Bronfmans, Michael Steinhardt, Charles Schusterman and others.

Under Epstein, the Wexner Foundation collaborates with the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders program and is closely tied to AIPAC.

You know, AIPAC, the group actively censoring Americans.

9. Reid Hoffman and the PayPal Mafia’s Epstein ties

Webb has revealed that LinkedIn co‑founder Reid Hoffman was one of Epstein’s closest Silicon Valley connections and later failed to disclose flights on Epstein’s plane, visits to his Caribbean island and an overnight stay at his Manhattan townhouse.

Other PayPal Mafia figures connected to Epstein include Peter Thiel (whose Founders Fund co‑invested with Epstein in Israeli company Carbyne) and possibly Elon Musk.

10. Cover‑up allegations involving Kash Patel and Dan Bongino

The FBI would never lie to the public… right?

FBI Director Kash Patel, who once promised he’d demolish the FBI building and build a Deep State Museum, is so bad at bullshitting that he makes Aziz Ansari from Parks and Rec look like the Pope.

Here’s what we know:

• A September 2025 House Judiciary Committee hearing alleged that FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino were withholding Epstein‑related records to protect Trump and his associates.

• Ranking Member Jamie Raskin said Patel refused to answer whether Trump appears in the files; he also blocked subpoenas for bank CEOs and Treasury officials, claiming court orders prevented him from releasing names.

• The release notes that Patel admitted the files weren’t released “because of who’s on that list,” suggesting current US Congress is implicated.

Left, right, or whatever’s in between, aren’t we all getting completely fed up with these people pissing in our faces and telling us it’s raining?

We’re only scratching the surface…

Epstein went to the Clinton White House 17 times  and, in a story way stranger than that, Epstein had an oil painting of Bill Clinton in Hillary’s dress (lounging on a chair in the Oval Office) hanging up in his Manhattan townhouse. Nightmares. Nightmares forever:

So many names.

So many pedophiles.

We didn’t even get to the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Prince Andrew, Woody Allen (surprised?), Kevin Spacey (surprised, again?), Joan Rivers, Steve Bannon and Henry Kissinger.

In closing, Donald Trump could certainly give strong evidence that he isn’t a pedo and wasn’t involved with Epstein by releasing the full documentation today… so why isn’t he doing that?

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“Hi, could I get $20 on pump 3?”

*Zoomer stare…*

“Ummm.. hello?”

So, there’s this new phenomenon going around called “zoomer stare” that Boomers claim to be encountering in the wild.

‘Zommer stare’ is what happens when you forget how to socialize in a room full of adults, and, to be fair to my gen, we’ve been through a lot:

• Covid

• Multiple “once in a generation” economic crises

• The collapse of the family

• The collapse of dating

• Most are trapped in Klarna debt for financing McDonald’s, while boomers and the government call them lazy and do nothing but shit talk them

• Literally watching western civilization come crashing down all around them

Some will say Zoomers need to experience a “real tragedy” like a famine or trench warfare to grow up. For all we know those things are coming.

But today I want to focus on dating: It DOESN’T EXIST.

63% of Gen Z are single according to Pew Research, and a more recent study from Rasmussen Reports shows more than 1-in-3 men have given up entirely.

All of this makes me wonder if dating even makes sense anymore? And why is it that anyone over 40 years-old doesn’t seem to care?

As The Hill summarized two years ago while exploring the dating crisis: “Most young men are single. Most young women are not. Men in their 20s are more likely than women in their 20s to be romantically uninvolved, sexually dormant, friendless and lonely.”

Yet the dating crisis goes way deeper than “only men” —is any of this fixable?

1. “Conservative Men Are Repulsive"

Women would rather stay single than ever date a chud, according to two separate studies.

Urban Dictionary describes a Chud as “a conservative republican. someone who [according to them] is either racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, fascist.”

Before you commit to anyone for a future, you have to make sure your values align. That is universal advice for all people.

It’s nice to have companionship; no man is an island. But values are above all. It’s what I’ve learned dating someone here in Japan:

• Do our religious beliefs align?

• What are our political views?

• And can she love a man who eats convenience-store fried chicken at 2am?

A recent NBC poll shows Gen Z men and women drifting farther apart than any other age group in ideology. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 53% of women identify as Democrats, while only 35% of men do. On the other side, 38% of young men lean Republican, compared to just 20% of young women.

This is why more and more occidentals are moving to places like China, Vietnam, or Japan (LOL) where politics is less divisive.

The West is over-politicized to the point where it’s hard to say if we’re even a society anymore.

Here’s a quote from that study from a leftist woman I found pertinent:

Quoted from that article: “I do believe that everybody has, deep down inside them, a controversial take,” she told researchers. “This man [I was on a date with], he first was like, ‘I don’t have any.’ And I was like, ‘That’s not true. Tell me what comes to mind.’

Oversocialized people tend to be left-wing, and women are more social than men. Also, there’s economic self-interest, since Western women united under leftist movements in the 20th century.

But here’s where I want to give women a break.

I write from the perspective of men, after all.

We all know there’s a legitimate reason to be frustrated about the male-female dynamic, but some of these guys lack serious self-reflection and personal responsibility.

There’s a plethora of men today complaining about things and it never going beyond bitching about problems they’ve often caused. It’s a pity party.

The loneliness epidemic with men, a good chunk of the time, is because the aforementioned male is busted in the head from pornography, lack of purpose, or distance from God and women can see this a mile away, especially when they have more options in 2025.

2. Men Are Going Into Debt For Dates

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” — Romans 12:2

I want to quickly cover one more thing: Money. According to Investopedia, the average American now spends $2,279 a year on dates, with each one running about $168. Eating out alone has climbed nearly 30% in price since COVID — turning dinner into a luxury some are quietly opting out of.

Don’t follow the ways of the world.

Buy a coffee on a date instead.

My parents’ first date was at a McDonald’s in Times Square. No champagne, no skyline views — just fries and the crackheads of New York.

Today, that kind of simplicity feels extinct. Everyone wants to stage their love life like an Instagram ad. Don’t. Save the grand gestures for when it means something. My last date in Japan cost 1,500 yen — about ten bucks — for two books and a pair of green teas. It was perfect.

Here’s a story I found online of a guy who regrets spending too much dating:

“How the fuck are men affording to date? This shit is crazy.

I’ve been on 8 dates so far this month and i’m down $1.3k. These girls are always asking for steak houses like ruth chris or an upscale restaurant like pappadeaux.

I’ve only gotten to home base like once but most of these girls just eat for a bit, pack up their food and leave.”

Go to coffee instead.

Final Thought

Political divide and generally lack of financial success is causing less dating, sex and marriage for Gen Z, yet I’m optimistic.

Sure, the population’s collapsing like a sinkhole. But it won’t stay that way forever. For now, dating doesn’t really exist in 2025; it’s basically a drive-through hedonistic ritual created to make us all miserable. Unsubscribe.

(not to the Substack tho)